On Wed, 2013-06-19 at 14:05 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > > rather what makes a particular > > system stable enough to make it last that long. Does Agora simply create > > new > > things that interest it and repeal things that bore it, or is there > > something > > deeper there? > > It's a mystery for me. I don't know what made the first Cards successful > and the second one die. Dunno why some economic system worked and some > didn't. Proposal manipulation to more chambers than 1 or 2 seems to always > flounder. Dunno why!
I've been meaning to write a big post about this for a while. I'm a bit too tired/distracted with other things for a big post right now, but here's a small one: Basically, what I'm trying to do in Agora is to win. (Mostly, because Agora's victory conditions are generally designed to make that a fun and difficult thing to aim for; at times when it isn't, I don't find winning particularly interesting. More generally, I also don't particularly care about what in-game awards I might get for winning, although I will use them to help me win again.) More specifically, there are times when I'm actively trying to win, and times when I'm just coasting (like at the moment), hardly paying attention or responding to things. If I'm actively trying to win, it's because a) I'm not busy with other things, and b) I've seen a means by which victory might be reasonably possible, whether it's a scam, or something purely economic like points accumulation, or something in between (like my win by Clout). So in order for an economy to interest me, it has to provide something I need. Day-to-day benefits like the ability to submit proposals, or extra votes, aren't something I care about enough to actually use them. (I pretty much only submit a proposal if I think it'll genuinely help Agora; sometimes I'll submit one as part of a scam, but almost exclusively, I believe that the proposal will be genuinely helpful apart from the fact that it contains a scam. There are only a very few exceptions to this, such as Open It Up. As a result, I normally don't care much whether proposals I submit ever get distributed.) The upshot of this mostly is that I hardly use any currency that might exist, and accumulate enough of it incidentally that I can pay for anything I'm actually interested in paying for. The exception is currencies that a) can be accumulated indefinitely, with no taxation; b) can be cashed in for a win. I've got several wins via currencies that work like that, and such currencies give me an actual reason to play the economy. For other currencies, though, if b) isn't true, those currencies normally don't help me win in ways I care about, and if a) isn't true, then I have no incentive to start accumulating them until I have a use for them in mind. At the moment, our currencies are Yaks and VCs. Yaks have quarterly taxation; as such, I'm not going to bother accumulating them unless I think I'm likely to use them for something this quarter, or maybe next quarter. And at the moment, I don't think I am. (Especially because there's nothing much to spend them on right now.) Meanwhile, VCs all reset whenever anyone's voting limit becomes high enough. It /is/ possible to get a win via VCs (although we should reintroduce a Clout rule so that it can be done via a method less disruptive than knocking everyone else's voting limit down to 0 then distributing a dictatorship/win proposal), but would require an implausibly large number of VCs. If they could be accumulated indefinitely, that would give me an incentive to try to get that many VCs; notably, I don't think I'd win a race if it came down to a race, so I wouldn't bother unless other players accomplishing a Clout win wasn't mutually exclusive with me winning. (In fact, under the current ruleset, sniping a Clout win, winning alongside the previous victor, is actually easier than performing one, except in certain combinations involving dictatorships and a bribed Assessor.) There's also DVLOP wins, but that's a pure race, and again one that I don't think I can win. (Remember, again, that I don't particularly care about the side effects; having a higher voting limit doesn't really appeal to me, and in fact I rarely vote. It's perhaps for the best that I'm inactive, to avoid inflating quorum.) I'm not sure how typical or atypical I am of Agoran players, but it seems reasonable that there are other people with similar mindsets to me. I know that economies with no reset buttons and lifetime accumulation are often considered unfair, but if an economy isn't of that form, players like me are unlikely to participate. (As a nice example: the AAA had lifetime accumulation, no reset upon one player winning via the AAA (via conversion to points; the points were rest, but not the AAA assets), and no taxation, so it was pretty much the perfect example of things that people like me were likely to play. The result was, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the AAA ended up dominating the Agoran economy, to the extent that pretty much the entire active playerbase ended up feeling pressured into playing it in order to have a chance at competing in the Agoran economy at large. Notes had similar properties, and also had several players actively participating in them.) -- ais523
