On Sun, 2018-09-30 at 23:10 -0700, Aris Merchant wrote: > Okay, poll for everyone: > > 1. Have you ever been involved in the economy because it was required > to take main game actions?
Yes, most notably in the more recent Cards era (it was also in theory necessary at some points in the Notes era, but mostly for expunging, and I try not to break the rules in the first place). Note that in all these eras the economy had some level of "basic salary" that meant that it was almost impossible to not have enough economic strength to take main game actions, so long as you didn't take them overly frequently. That's a status which we should probably maintain. > 2. If so, did you enjoy it? It didn't meaningfully interfere with my own actions. I enjoyed the way that I could exploit the economy to screw up /other players'/ actions. I also found that the reduction in spam (and spam-based scams) that comes with needing to think about your actions made the game more enjoyable. > 3. Do you think that the game is better with or without this kind of > fees? The main drawback of this sort of fee is that it reduces the incentive to submit bugfix proposals or to fix rules which really need changing, as you have an economic advantage for making someone else do it instead. Once that problem can be worked around, I think they make the game better, as they increase the opportunities that players have to interact with each other. One of the hearts of nomic is doing clever things with the proposal system (and in some nomics the CFJ system); I once arranged a win at BlogNomic via using a variety of scams to prevent any fix proposals passing to an unbalanced rule that allowed for a quick victory. If you have a very fair proposal system (i.e. free pending, voting not tied to the economy, no Assessor shenanigans), then this side of nomic gameplay doesn't really exist. As soon as you start tying core game mechanics to the economy, that allows players to use the economy to manipulate the core game mechanics, and that's one of the big strengths of nomic. -- ais523
