On Sat, 2025-01-11 at 13:15 -0500, Janet Cobb via agora-discussion wrote: > When we've considered this before (e.g. for coins, before boatloads were > invented), people had written a bunch of contracts that would not handle > assets being destroyed out from under them (their internal state > wouldn't match their actual holdings). If we allow contracts to hold > stamps without having a *current* proposal or system for revoking stamps > from them, people are likely to do the same thing again, and we won't be > able to add anything like that later.
Can't you just do it anyway, and then have fun figuring out how to fix the contracts? Admittedly, Agora's historical processes for "this contract went wrong, we should try to find a fair way of fixing it" generally didn't work, but that just means that trying to find one that does work might be an interesting project. In a way, it feels like one of the reasons why Agora is quieter nowadays than it used to be is that the rules are too robust, and we've fixed too many loopholes, meaning that we're running low on "messing with the rules"-type gameplay. Interesting examples of that still come up from time to time (e.g. ce n'est pas le message de qenya), but back when I first started playing Agora you could just decide you were going to have some fun and check random rules until you found one you could poke a loophole in. Nowadays, the rules don't really change often enough to find one that hasn't already been thoroughly debugged. I think that might also have a bit of a chilling effect on creating new gameplay; when the existing rules are already very robust and people have a lot of examples of what good rules look like, it raises the bar for what's reasonable with a new rule, and also means that if we're doing something we haven't done before it's likely to be very buggy. That generally results in subgames getting abandoned because we spend all our effort trying to work through the rules issues and that means there isn't enough effort left over to bringing the gameplay to a level that's fun enough to sustain the subgame. In turn, that's lead to a large graveyard of "we've tried this and it didn't work" gameplay ideas. As such, something having failed in the past probably isn't a strong reason to not try again. (There are plenty of ideas at Agora that worked, were repealed and brought back, and didn't work the second time, or vice versa. Contests and Promises both come to mind; both mechanics had an era where they worked fine and were interesting and an era where they were mostly ignored. I've seen something similar happen in other nomics, where they tried identical gameplay multiple times and it was successful some times and unsuccessful other times.) -- ais523
