On Tue, 2017-09-26 at 00:56 -0400, Owen Jacobson wrote: > 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.
Temporary voting power boosters are pretty weird; they're almost useless in 99% of circumstances (because most players don't strongly feel about whether a particular proposal passes, and if they do, they can normally just convince other players to vote with them unless some other player feels equally strongly in the other direction). The exception is pure scam/economic proposals that are intended to benefit the proposer and nobody else but maybe some co-conspirators, but those are very rare. They also tend to lead, unfortunately, to dictatorship scams if anyone finds a way to farm arbitrary numbers of them in finite time, something that's happened at least once in the past (it's why there's a large number of contracts with numerical names deregistered in a Writ of FAGE, and which still show in the Registrar's Report). (Admittedly, my favourite piece of Agoran gameplay was when I was out of ideas for ways to win and just proposed one of those things on the spur of the moment with no preparation. I actually managed to get it through, too, with a series of bribes to other players for their votes, and exploiting flawed wording and ambiguities in some of the conditional votes that players attempted. Apart from me, G. came out best from it as e gave me a very clear and unambiguous offer for eir votes at a fair exchange rate, and thus it was one of the few offers I accepted. Still, it's worth noting that there was *not*, as far as I remember, a way to instantly boost voting power at the time.) Anyway, this normally means that temporary voting power boosts at Agora are undervalued / treated as almost worthless unless someone manages to accumulate enough of them to force a proposal through. Limiting the number of Estates in existence to 5 was enough to effectively prevent that, so Estates were treated as low-value (and as was seen, didn't go very far at auction). My bid for an Estate was mostly speculation on its future value (especially with Agoraculture); I had no plans to spend it, because spending it doesn't really produce a useful effect. I have no idea why the bidding for the Estate after that ended up in the stratosphere, but suspect that it was mostly just CuddleBeam being CuddleBeam. -- ais523
