Now that we have a candles/contests system, I'd really like to set up some gameplay, but have had trouble finding something with the right properties.
I feel like the secret to making online nomic gameplay work is to have something you can play in bursts, regardless of whether or not the other players are doing anything – when you feel ready to make a move, you can spend as much time as you like trying to plan out the perfect thing to do, then do it, and get rewarded appropriately – and when you don't, it's OK to not do anything and your situation won't be substantially hurt. That's one reason why I prefer Agoran win conditions to be noncompetitive (i.e. aiming to fulfil the win condition for yourself neither helps nor hurts other players' attempts to go for the same win condition), in that it means you don't need to spend constant effort to prevent the other players outcompeting you. Agora has historically done this pretty well with its core rules-and- proposals gameplay; in particular, achieving a win by scam or paradox is generally a case of carefully studying the ruleset to look for loopholes that might be exploitable, which is something that you can do in your own time. Recently, the pace of play has been dropping, and I think that might substantially be caused by a lack of churn in the ruleset; our rules changes tend to be better-written nowadays than they used to be, and more carefully considered than they used to be, and the number of loopholes is dropping due to a combination of new proposals not implementing many, and old loopholes being fixed after being used. (Have there been any scam or paradox wins, i.e. exploits of missing cases in the rules, since those from CFJs 4075 and 4076 in spring 2024? The relevant message for those is <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-business@agoranomic.org/msg46405.html>.) What about contests? The most successful Agoran contests historically seem to have been ones that work similar to proposal voting, in that you get a batch of things to do every week, and can focus on them at any point during the week without any advantage or disadvantage based on timing. That isn't quite as good as being able to wait as long as you like – in particular, the AAA (which was at its heart a weekly grind) was a bit too grindy to be really enjoyable, and was as successful as it was basically because the Agoran economy ended up being based around it. It's interesting to note that BF Joust, which started as a "play once a week" Agoran contest, didn't do particularly well at Agora, but eventually became very successful offsite as a "play when you want" contest at <http://zem.fi/bfjoust/> (although there were also rules changes that made it more strategic). And of course, the most successful "Agoran" contest ever was the Fantasy Rules Committee (which IIRC started in Agora's predecessor Nomic World), which did give an advantage for being able to post every week, but where it was quite plausible to just drop in to an arbitrary round and potentially win it. The basic problem is how to replicate that sort of scenario with new gameplay. I don't like contests where you have to participate continuously in order to have any chance; I've seen that tried at other nomics and it generally results in all but a few invested players dropping out altogether (or worse, players dropping out because they're less invested than the other players already there, which eventually means that you end up without a competition as the bar to stay in gets higher and higher). Instead, you would need something where players can spend a long time working out an interesting play on their own, and it's hard to get a contest ruleset to a level of complexity that makes that interesting without discouraging people from joining in. As such, I think that probably the contest would have to start initially simple, but get more complex as a result of players making moves within it. (Almost every round of the FRC is, of course, of that form; the most successful contest I ever made (outside Agora) was also of that form: <https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/102370/?answertab=createdasc>.) Unfortunately, I don't currently have any concrete ideas good enough to actually make a contest based on these principles, but I thought I'd throw the principles out there in case somebody else does. -- ais523
