On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 4:44 PM James Cook <jc...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote: > Did shortages make the gameplay worse? I worry they might discourage > new players, or encourage people to submit big proposals combining > unrelated things. Shortages do sound fun, though. > > In the spirit of markets, it might be fun to limit proposals by having > a limited number of proposal tokens sold off every quarter, like a > reverse of the quarterly cheque buy-backs.
That was what the system was; the number of total proposal tokens in circulation was the same as the number of players, and the only way to get them was via monthly auctions. The officer-in-charge could control currency flow by choosing the # to auction, but that global limit kept the flow low. Later we had a deck-building game with a finite deck, one of the "base" cards was a proposal token card, and similarly low numbers were available for the draw. For new players in particular (new = first 90 days or something), we had a bonus which was "if your proposal is adopted, you get your token back". This actually gave new players a getting-started advantage, because they could offer to use their token on a proposal in exchange for some other thing, then get the token back. You also had genuinely worthwhile officer advantages - if you're holding an office because you "like to play and be useful", you're probably also the type who likes proposing things, so an extra proposal per month or whatever actually felt like a valuable and concrete thank-you. It didn't feel limiting in a bad way at the time (to me anyway) - people tended to collect omnibus "bugfix" proposals that fixed lots of little errors at once, but didn't tend to jam big concepts together (because it wasn't worth the risk of voting down once concept because the other one was unpopular). I think it also made people more patient to play with whatever the current subgame was rather than spend a lot of time proposing changes. I think the big problem that built up was voting tokens, not proposal tokens. Those weren't spent, they gave permanent voting strength boosts to whomever held them - and people held onto them, they were really expensive when they were auctioned, and new players were stuck at lower voting levels indefinitely. -G. > What other shortages has Agora had in the past? CFJs? Voting? Tradable > blot-expunging tokens would probably be an even worse idea than > putting a price on voting, but oops, too late, I guess I just > suggested that. > > -- > - Falsifian
