BTW whose idea was it that paying agora for proposals and cfjs would cost LESS when agora had LESS money? Can we like insta-fix that?
On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 2:56 PM, Owen Jacobson <o...@grimoire.ca> wrote: > >> 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 > -- >From V.J. Rada
