On Thu, 5 Jul 2012, ais523 wrote: > I had more fun > back in the era of Infinitely Accumulable Currency, and we haven't tried > anything even remotely similar since
Yes, let's do it again! > Yet, I acknowledge the intrinsic unfairness to > new players that such a system can bring (it never stopped /me/ when I > was new, although it took several months to catch up). New player award ~ 2 months accumulation. > Our more recent systems tended to have a decay on the order of a week > (rubles, etc) or month (Caste). A month is quite a short time in Agora; I think Caste worked a bit better because while movements were once a month, the movements weren't a full reset but just up-or-down (i.e. you could position yourself longer-term). At a rough guess, I'd call this a "quarterly" scale game. IMO, over the years, "quarterly" is a good time scale for political system turnover (i.e. that's about the right number of distributions) but that's orthogonal to the time scale of any particular type of game/win condition we're playing. I think a long game is good. > It wouldn't replace the current economy, which works fine > day-to-day, even if it is a bit boring; quick decay is probably better > for that sort of thing. A basic way of earning the long-term currency could be to trade in X rubles. Basically "free" in that the rubles would decay anyway, but requiring an active announcement/participation or choice (if there are multiple options). > Then once a year, we > reset the whole thing to 0 and give rewards for people who did well > (should definitely be wins involved somehow, might be better if it's for > "anyone who did well enough" rather than "highest score", and perhaps a > patent title for the overall high scorer). I think a "once a year" win is a good time scale. Maybe a compromise is "top N" get a named award? (The "anyone who does well enough" could end up as "everyone"). One of the reasons I disliked the more recent Points is that it was *too* egalitarian in that it didn't reset when someone won. > Is this an interesting enough basic system that I should try to work out > the details? (Nor would it replace Promises, which are an > awesome background currency to have around, and get more interesting the > more things they have to interact with.) I think we should have enough complexity in currency to encourage trades. To do this, trades need to be win/win, which means multiple routes to victory. I wonder - we haven't really tried this - if there's a way to manage "secret" victory conditions. Anyone ever played Careers? It works like: 1. 3 types of accumulatable currency (x,y,z). IMO, more (notes, ribbons) is too complicated to watch others' strategies. 2. Everyone chooses a secret win formula: "I win if I get at least 3x + 27y + 30z", to be a valid formula the coefficients have to add to 60. 3. Different mechanisms for earning x,y,z, but a priori, one isn't rarer/harder than others. Rareness comes from chosen paths. Only real challenge is how to save/store/confirm secret formulas. Maybe reasonable is Player publishes a Hash (only allowed to change that once in a rare while), recordkeepor tracks hashes. -G.