On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 7:41 AM Forest Sweeney via agora-discussion wrote: > I think it is good to reward proposals. Proposals are the primary gameplay > of ANY nomic, so I don't have any trouble with rewards. But I do see what > you mean about how it is imbalanced: you could work hard on a proposal, or > you could spend a couple weeks collecting stamps, and if you have several > proposals, well, you just blow it out of the water. Sure, players could > PLEDGE not to grab the reward (EG Janet's "Might as well ask?" which solves > the problem you posit, but I don't find it to be a problem since I see it > as the core of nomic.
We've always had tension between proposals being mainly ideas that should be democratically selected based solely on their merit, and proposals being game objects (both in terms of voting strength and any progress-towards-winning rewards). This has been dealt with in lots of ways: sometimes no rewards, sometimes pay-to-submit so you can't run up your score too much, sometimes only "special" proposals score game benefits and most don't. I think ribbons, for example, are a great balance - they encourage certain types of writing/submitting more than they encourage counter-voting, and I can't think of anyone ever saying "but e'll earn a ribbon" as a reason for voting against something, since ribbon wins don't reset everyone else's ribbons. On the flipside, last year the points situation was much "worse" than radiance is now, because we had the classic prisoner's dilemma scoring of awarding AGAINST votes - we got rid of that pretty darn quick when too many proposals failed. Right now, the combo of proposals being free-to-submit but gaining radiance leads to a bit of "flood the zone with proposals" behavior which leads to either less/poorer review per-proposal, a random collection of proposals that get adopted but add up to little pieces of games, not full ones, or people saying "heck with it too many to think about - vote them all down". I don't think things have gone too far that way, personally, and the odd disconnected proposals *can* be fun, but it's worth thinking about that if *too* many keep failing. I don't think we're there yet, there was plenty of principled reasons given, other than score, for many of the AGAINST votes in the most recent batch. But we may not be far off. > But yeah, I see that all these things aren't really "newbie" friendly. > Gerontocracy is a hot topic that gets brought up... probably quarterly? Could be wrong, but I don't think this is really a gerontocratic issue but more an ongoing-gameplay issue for everyone? radiance and stamps seem pretty well spread between new and old players, with the possible exception of the grandfathered-in stamps from the previous system (that we sorta thought would be gone by now). -G.
