On Thu, 5 Jul 2012, ais523 wrote:
> I had more fun
> back in the era of Infinitely Accumulable Currency, and we haven't tried
> anything even remotely similar since
Yes, let's do it again!
> Yet, I acknowledge the intrinsic unfairness to
> new players that such a system can bring (it never stopped /me/ when I
> was new, although it took several months to catch up).
New player award ~ 2 months accumulation.
> Our more recent systems tended to have a decay on the order of a week
> (rubles, etc) or month (Caste). A month is quite a short time in Agora;
I think Caste worked a bit better because while movements were once a
month, the movements weren't a full reset but just up-or-down (i.e.
you could position yourself longer-term). At a rough guess, I'd call this
a "quarterly" scale game. IMO, over the years, "quarterly" is a good time
scale for political system turnover (i.e. that's about the right number of
distributions) but that's orthogonal to the time scale of any particular
type of game/win condition we're playing. I think a long game is good.
> It wouldn't replace the current economy, which works fine
> day-to-day, even if it is a bit boring; quick decay is probably better
> for that sort of thing.
A basic way of earning the long-term currency could be to trade in X
rubles. Basically "free" in that the rubles would decay anyway, but
requiring an active announcement/participation or choice (if there are
multiple options).
> Then once a year, we
> reset the whole thing to 0 and give rewards for people who did well
> (should definitely be wins involved somehow, might be better if it's for
> "anyone who did well enough" rather than "highest score", and perhaps a
> patent title for the overall high scorer).
I think a "once a year" win is a good time scale. Maybe a compromise is
"top N" get a named award? (The "anyone who does well enough" could end
up as "everyone"). One of the reasons I disliked the more recent Points
is that it was *too* egalitarian in that it didn't reset when someone won.
> Is this an interesting enough basic system that I should try to work out
> the details? (Nor would it replace Promises, which are an
> awesome background currency to have around, and get more interesting the
> more things they have to interact with.)
I think we should have enough complexity in currency to encourage trades.
To do this, trades need to be win/win, which means multiple routes to
victory. I wonder - we haven't really tried this - if there's a way to
manage "secret" victory conditions. Anyone ever played Careers? It
works like:
1. 3 types of accumulatable currency (x,y,z). IMO, more (notes,
ribbons) is too complicated to watch others' strategies.
2. Everyone chooses a secret win formula:
"I win if I get at least 3x + 27y + 30z", to be a valid formula
the coefficients have to add to 60.
3. Different mechanisms for earning x,y,z, but a priori, one isn't
rarer/harder than others. Rareness comes from chosen paths.
Only real challenge is how to save/store/confirm secret formulas.
Maybe reasonable is Player publishes a Hash (only allowed to change
that once in a rare while), recordkeepor tracks hashes.
-G.
