On Wed, 2025-01-01 at 21:19 -0500, Mischief via agora-discussion wrote: > On 1/1/25 9:04 PM, Janet Cobb via agora-discussion wrote: > > > I mean, that's certainly better, but I guess I was imagining some form > > of skill being required. These were pitched as minigames or small > > tournaments. I'll think about it, I guess (and it's moot if nobody else > > would object anyway). > > I do have additional ideas queued up along those lines, such as a card > collecting game that involves secret information (and hopefully I can > finally tie something into the much-underutilized "by commitment" > mechanism in the rules). > > The Backroom Casino is meant as an initial test, which could continue > beyond the short term depending on ongoing interest. If there are > unforeseen problems, I'd rather stumble into them in a relatively simple > game than have folks invest weeks into something more elaborate that > crashes.
I'm worried that that the existence of a simple random game would have a chilling effect on the creation of more skill-based games; players have to choose where to spend their candles, and if a game with no skill exists, then players will only spend them on skill-based games if they suspect they are more skilful than the other players in the skill- based games, which likely means that those games won't get enough players. That said, it might make sense to do something like the AAA (which was a somewhat random and not particularly skilful game which defined a lot of assets, with AAA assets eventually becoming a backbone of the Agoran economy). It's been so long since the days of the AAA that we could probably do it again with only minimal changes, because almost all current players weren't there the first time. (It wouldn't surprise me if it didn't do very well, though – the original didn't originally look very interesting, but eventually everyone got caught up in it because it was necessary to participate in the economy, and there's no guarantee that the same phenomenon would happen again. Perhaps it'd make sense to come up with similar properties but more skill-based rules.) -- ais523
