On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 3:51 PM ais523 via agora-discussion < agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2023-03-26 at 13:18 -0700, Yachay Wayllukuq via agora- > discussion wrote: > > On Sunday, March 26, 2023, Forest Sweeney via agora-business < > > agora-busin...@agoranomic.org> wrote: > > > (I remember joining in the middle of a race and decided not to > > > play for this race, which... is still the current race. > > > I also would like everyone to consider repealing racing in general, > > > as I don't see many players taking weekly race actions other > > > than ais523 and snail... > > > but that is a separate story.) > > > } > > > > I'd be in favor of repealing horses. > > I've thought for a while (since it was originally being proposed!) that > the horse minigame doesn't really work. Hooves are more relevant now > than they were originally, but still don't have much effect in practice > – they serve as a limit on grinding dollaries but that's about it. > There aren't very many possible strategies and some are clearly better > than others. And when a player falls behind, it's fairly clear that > they have no chance to win and no real reason to continue competing > (dollaries, hooves, helmets, jerseys etc. are pretty much worthless if > you have no chance to win the current race). > > The entire racing system seems to have originally been balanced around > the "increase or decrease a specified Running horse's Race Position by > 2, by paying 3 hooves" action (in the original version of the rule, > this was the only time at which hooves became relevant at all). > However, players have been reluctant to take that action at all – a > major reason seems to be that the action is inefficient in terms of > benefiting the player performing it, so the only reason to take it is > if some other player is paying you to take it. And the problem with > *that* is that the reward for winning the horse minigame is small > enough that there's very little reason to spend assets, favours, etc. > that might be useful elsewhere in the game on winning the horse > minigame. (A horse race takes ages – several months – and the rewards > for winning it are pretty small.) > I tried to combat this by increasing the reward, and there were also discussions of making the races faster when we were talking about introducing weird horses on the discord. If there were more people playing the subgame, it might be easier to see exactly where it is lacking, but right now I'm not sure there's any way to know which parts exactly need to change. I think I'd rather see an upheaval of the core concepts of the horse rules than just repealing it. Maybe remove hooves. I was thinking there would be a lot more use for them, as players not actively participating in the subgame could use them to help or hinder horses since they build up over time, and you'd want to cash they in somehow before the race ends and destroys them. But it seems like that kind of teamwork isn't happening, which makes sense given agora's inclination for individual strategies over collusion. So hooves are just a technicality right now, with niche uses. R. Lee mentioned it was "the best minigame" e'd ever seen, so i'm wondering what that's about. Maybe the mechanics seem more interesting than they actually are. Maybe it fails because the timescale makes it hard to get invested, and that's hard to see from just reading the rules. As this is a nomic, though, I'd really like to see the game fixed. Potential proposal ideas: [ Reduce the race position requirement to cross the finish line from 16 to 10. This may be too low, but i think it's better to find out faster. A quicker subgame means less time where there are players that feel like they can't win it. Get rid of the weekly gain of hooves. This would make getting jerseys and helmets a more deliberate choice, as you'd need to invest a weekly action into getting a hoof. This gets rid of the slow gaining of hooves for everyone, which is fine since nobody was really using them. Change the welcome package to include "10 dollaries if the race has not started anew since the grantee last registered", and no hooves if the automatic hoof gain is removed. Make it award a win (or 100/N radiance, rounded down, in the case of an N-way tie). This would give the game a lot more weight, and hopefully encourage players to care more about the game and its inner workings, so we can refine it more. ] These may not be enough to fix the subgame, and I encourage those that care to suggest changes they think would work. Or reasons why the above changes wouldn't work. And i'm not above just abandoning the subgame if people just don't like it, I'd rather play a game people enjoy. :) Also I feel like there's a lot of empty space in Agora right now where more gameplay could go. Stamps, Dreams, Horses, and Stones all feel like little snacks that get refreshed at the end of every week, I feel like we could have 10 of those and still be able to handle more. A more "main" kind of game would nice too. Something that doesn't take a ton of officer work but has depth, utilizing the strengths of the medium we're in. We have tabled actions, agoran decisions, and assets to work with, among other things. And whatever we need we can add. Any of the current subgames could probably become "main" ones if we tried, but a new game with a more "main game" feel would probably be better. There are also several exploits. snail and I have both been exploiting > the race rules continuously for several weeks (interestingly, with very > little overlap in which exploits we're using). The fact that there's > been very little discussion about fixing them – or indeed, people even > acknowledging that that's what's happening – probably means that > there's little engagement with the horse minigame as a whole. > To be fair, I don't know what you mean here, and I'm the one that probably knows the horse rules best. I feel like the exploits you mention are just how the rules work, and are intended to work, and that may be why nobody is mentioning them. But engagement is still low, yes. -- snail
