> On Sep 23, 2017, at 4:26 PM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > > > > On Sat, 23 Sep 2017, Owen Jacobson wrote: >> As for the gerontocracy argument: Money is an inherently gerontocratic >> system. >> It abstracts value from labor in a way that allows arbitrary allocation. > > Ok, I've been mulling this over for the past week or so, and some broad > thoughts. > > I think we should step away from thinking of this in terms of Economies and > think of it in terms of Game Design.
Shinies have already been a spectacular success at incentivizing adding to the Story of Agora, per nichdel’s essay last year. > On the supply side, what we have is classic exponential asset growth. Base > assets let you get things which then let your assets grow faster (I'm > particularly thinking of the recent Agoraculture here). This can be very > fun - the fun part of the grind games is when your properties start *really* > producing. But the problem is that it leads to early determination of > winners versus losers, and if the game lasts too long, it's a frustrating > slog for the losers. In a game with no fixed end (e.g. real life), this is > the gerontocracy. > > It's greatly exacerbated by the fact that distribution of valuable assets > is via Auction. Auctions are inherently exponential (a slight lead in > your base asset leads to you winning a big valuable asset). Moreover, > right now, the auction properties are far too rare, so you have to compete > directly with the gerontocracy to buy in. My main reason to hoard right now > is to have any chance in an auction. I’d be open to replacing the Estate auction with a lottery of players with the fewest number of Estates, or a straight lottery. My original intention was specifically to create a high-value item, so that shinies would return to Agora somewhat regularly, but tying it to Voting Strength seems to have made Estates “too good to use,” and I expect that once all five are auctioned off, the only time they’ll go back to Agora to be auctioned again will be due to deregistrations. Agoraculture aggravates this by allowing Estates to produce a steady income so long as players are willing to buy Comestibles. (Separately, I suspect that the Voting Strength effects of Comestibles are going to be… interesting. babelian did something smart by giving them a best-before date, which should limit the carnage.) The last round of randomness framework work you did is more than sufficient to support a lottery, and while I _dislike_ nondeterministic play, I think it’s probably an improvement over a straight auction. Even if we had an effective way for players to form a cartel - which we don’t, writing the appropriate Organization is significantly too hard, and setting up an Agency with the right properties requires trusting someone with the giant pot of Shinies, and the resulting Estate, to a degree that’s probably impractical - what we’d probably end up with is a cartel of gerontocrats, or a classic capitalist oligarchy. > I think the solution is some minimum income, and drastically reducing the > buy-in difficulties for auctions (I'd do that through increased land). I picked five estates when I believed that estates would cycle back to Agora somewhat regularly, but that hasn’t happened. If we keep auctions, I’d be in favour of a multi-part fix: * Create significantly more estates - maybe another five, maybe another ten. * Significantly shorten the auction period. Three days should be sufficient. Add some timing-scam padding to ensure that it’s not two days of silence followed by a late-night flurry of messages. * Auction an estate off weekly to get them into circulation faster. > On the spending side: quite frankly, we don't have enough diversity of > things that actually buy game advantage to be worth spending on. We need > to add different pathways to accumulation and specialization. If you’ll humour adding steps for steps’ sakes, the “farm switch” system suggests a system of land improvements. We could bring back medals, but create a production chain for them: * An estate with an improvement cannot be cashed in for voting strength. Removing or replacing an improvement costs shinies and requires a notice period/only becomes possible some time after the estate was last improved. * An estate with no improvements can be cashed in for voting strength. * An estate with a Farm produces Comestibles, as under Agoraculture. * An estate with a Mine produces Minerals. * An estate with a Refinery consumes Minerals and produces Ingots, and pollutes the estate when it does so. * An estate with a Mint consumes Ingots and produces Medals, and pollutes the estate when it does so. * An estate with a Recycler can be tapped to remove pollution from an estate, on a cooldown. * An improvement on a polluted estate is non-functional. * Destroying N owned medals grants a victory. * If more than N estates are polluted at any one time, all owners lose, and all Estates are cleared and returned to Agora. (Yes, even the non-polluted ones.) Tinkering with the ratios of minerals to ingots to medals, and the cooldowns on recyclers, could create some interesting gameplay opportunities: does it make more sense to stockpile each step, and turn over your Estates as needed to produce the next thing, or can you win faster by paying someone to make Ingots for you? And will they screw you over by allowing their estates to become polluted, costing you your estates? Or can you negotiate for someone to take out the trash? I’m not married to this exact system, but I agree that we haven’t got enough to _do_ with Shinies. Adding texture to Estates seems like an obvious direction to go in. > The total portfolio of things to buy should have a unified game balance and > different pathways to riches/success, and not just be a grab bag of random > investment instruments (e.g. stamps, bonds, whatever). Given that we already have problems with wealth capture (cough), I suspect that the _last_ thing we need right now is profit-centric investment systems. -o
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