On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Alex Smith <ais...@bham.ac.uk> wrote: > 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:
I should write a longer "rebuttal" (not really a rebuttal, but an explanation of how my preferred type of gameplay is almost the complete opposite), but here's a very short one: I don't care about winning, at least the way wins usually work in Agora. Most "accumulation" wins (as opposed to wins such as paradoxes which somewhat cheapen the whole concept) are only achieved after many months of sustained, slow effort, such that at any particular moment there doesn't usually feel like much of a competition, and if someone falls behind they will either have to invest extraordinary effort into catching up or wait a long time for a reset. To me this is the opposite of what makes nomic fun: if there is going to be some sort of race to a high score, it should happen over 1-2 months so that it actually feels like a race, or at least there should be periods towards the end of quick competitive gameplay. I am also bad at such slow accumulation - which is part of the reason I don't like it, but since games are supposed to be fun, the reverse is true too (I'm bad at it because it's not interesting), leading to a negative feedback cycle for me. Ribbons epitomize this for me (plus a lot of them are fairly random), which is why I haven't bothered to award myself any, and I similarly disliked Notes for the very long term passive accumulation. I was okay with the AAA (albeit mostly too lazy to play, but I participated in other ways, such as making a bank) because of the relatively quick and skill-requiring rewards, and the large amount of related gameplay it inspired by providing a multitude of useful assets at a time when contracts needed things to trade for, but I don't remember particularly caring about the ability to win with them. In lieu of winning, voting manipulation isn't great, but it's at least a long-term sort of advantage that sometimes matters, and I liked the recurring attention requirement and corresponding large short-term benefit that came with Caste. Distribution fees suck. For me, I would suggest maybe just making wins faster, but then again, I'm already active, ais523 is not, and that doesn't seem like it would correspond much to ais523's desired type of gameplay :)
