> - What is your general view of advertising Agora? It seems like a good idea.
> - Where is it appropriate to advertise Agora? What kind of fora? Any > specific sites? Anywhere where there are lots of people who would enjoy playing Agora. I don't know where such people are. > - What kind of things would you say in a message to possible recruits? Not sure. Agora's pretty complicated. Currently, it seems like most of our appeal is in "pure nomic fun": memorizing mechanics, figuring out how they apply in various situations (and how to convince others you're right), and figuring out how to make them work in your favor. I imagine most people don't find "pure nomic fun" all that fun. > - Why is Agora so terrible at gaining new players? And why is Agora so > terrible at retaining players? We have a really huge ruleset-length-to-gameplay ratio. The ruleset is really, really long, and a lot of it is really dense in jargon. In order to understand Rule 2401 "Registration Yaks", you have to know what "Registrar", "Yak Master", "Budget Switch", "first-class person", "register", "impel", "Yak", "first-class player", "active", "Agoran decision", "announce", and "CAN" mean. Some rules, despite seeming pretty fundamental, are also pretty vacuous (Rule 2125 "Regulation Regulations", Rule 1586 "Definition and Continuity of Entities", Rule 217 "Interpreting the Rules", Rule 105 "Rule Changes"). Rules like this are useful in figuring out edge cases, but they're totally unimportant the rest of the time. They're sort of like the Magic: The Gathering Comprehensive Rules: useful for reference, but a bad way to actually learn what Agora is all about. And what is Agora all about, anyway? Our Victory Conditions are kind of bare. They are: * Paradox. Satisfiable only by noticing a flaw in the rules; you can't really work toward it. * Proximation. Cannot be satisfied. * Shouri. Satisfiable through a simple and rather boring mini-game that's almost completely detached from the rest of Agora. * Influence. Satisfiable by submitting a bunch of proposals that pass. * Kangaroo. Satisfiable through bribery and luck. * Clout. Not feasible to satisfy. So there's only one victory condition that can really be worked toward that doesn't involve passing proposals, and it's only a tiny corner of the ruleset. The vast majority of Agora serves no purpose that's obvious to a newcomer. > - What can Agora do to improve its record at both of the above? Create an official glossary and make someone responsible for keeping it up to date. Compile the rules defining the core fun stuff (perhaps just a summary version, perhaps not) into a "here's what you need to know to play" document; rules that do nothing but clarify corner cases should be left out of this document. Create more pieces of fun and interesting gameplay, and less "pure nomic fun". Oh, and also publish reports online in a prominent place. Probably make all the Agoran sites subdomains of agoranomic.org, in order to make them seem more like a single site rather than a collection of unrelated sites. > - Would you support defining an FAQ document in the rules, to be > tracked by some officer, which would be sent to each new player? Yeah, that's probably a good idea. > - What about a newbie friendly ruleset format, with the rules defining > gameplay at the start and abstract definitions further back? (Take a > look at this http://agora.qoid.us/alr.txt) Mm, that doesn't seem as useful as one would hope. Rule 869 "How to Join and Leave Agora", despite being something any newbie would want to know about, still uses lots of terms that a newbie would not be familiar with: "switch", "registrar", "first-class person", "CAN", "publish", "second-class person", "Agoran Consent", "by announcement". A "newbie-readable" summary of Rule 869 might look like this: Every person is either Registered (a player) or Unregistered (not a player). Initially, everyone is Unregistered. "To be registered" means "to become a player" and "to be deregistered" means "to cease to be a player". Anyone can register by posting a message asking to become a player to the appropriate forum. Anyone can deregister by posting a message stating that they deregister. > - What would you think of a newbie "tutorial" system? E.g. The > Promotor helps each new player write a proposal, the Assessor > encourages them to vote, etc. within the first month of them > registering. I don't think tutoring would work well over a mailing list, since the turnaround time for responses is so long. You might as well just have a document on the Web about how to write a proposal, and another document about how to vote, and so on, and just point newbies at these. > - What about a "mentor" system, where each newbie is assigned an Elder > to show them the ropes? The mentor could get an economic bonus for > each month the newbie is still an active player. Same as above. > - Do you have any more suggestions or comments about recruiting and > retaining new players? Nope. Lemme sorta sum up, though: create a glossary, create summarized versions of important rules, create interesting gameplay that isn't just "pure nomic fun". —Machiavelli
