On Mon, 2009-11-09 at 10:53 -0800, Kerim Aydin wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Nov 2009, comex wrote:
> > Proposal: Citrine Card Repeal (AI=2)
>
> Hey hey hey, the previous citrine repeals were more than just cards!
> Not gonna get my vote on some without the whole...
>
> Also, just a reflection. When we wrote the great repeals, we wrote it
> because "the gameplay is slowing. It must be too complicated. Let's
> repeal a lot of the ruleset to attract more players." As it turned out,
> the six months *after* the repeal was the slowest time in the current
> archives. Whether this was because there wasn't anything to do in the
> simple ruleset, or whether the recovery was just lagging the small
> ruleset stimulus package, I dunno.
Time to reflect on this again. November 2009 was a time of widespread
belief that the game was stalling, potentially stopping. It had pagesful
of messages every day, but the economy was collapsing over its own
administrative weight; BobTHJ had automated most of the economy, but
eventually given up trying to keep it up with changes in the ruleset.
There are 153 rules in November 2009's FLR. Mass repeals had happened by
March 2010, leaving 127 rules.
So what happened six months later? In August 2010, things were beginning
to get back on track, although they had definitely been lagging earlier
in 2010; e.g. May had a few days with no messages at all, or just a
couple. (Sadly, the MoGNPE didn't exist back then; that office is mostly
useful for easy reference to historical data.)
On 13 Jul 2014, Henri wrote:
> Concluding Analysis:
> --------------------
>
> As seen in the above data, both the Weekly GNP and Monthly GNP of Agora are
> predicted to drop in the next week and the next month, respectively, and both
> the Weekly GNP and Monthly GNP are predicted to drop below the historic
> averages. Furthermore, the overall trend of GNP over the past year has shown
> a dramatic 58.4% decrease in the Agoran GNP. As shown by this week's GNP
> Evaluation, drastic steps must be taken by the Agoran citizens in order to
> reverse this shrinking GNP and the imminent death of Agora Nomic.
More recently, of course, activity has been much lower than either time,
with some mostly dead *weeks*, rather than just days, and players
deregistering out of boredom or business or workload. The FLR hasn't
been published since May, when it had 68 rules; and has only been
published four times in almost a year (the fifth most recent was
September 2013). (Luckily, there are several more recent /SLR/s, but
this missing monthly duty is making historical exploration much harder
for my currently-offline self. I count 75 rules in the most recent SLR,
but I may have miscounted.)
So Rulekeepor, I guess this is your warning to publish the FLR for this
month.
More importantly, though, I suspect there may be a connection between
the lack of rules and lack of activity. I haven't checked for a
correlation, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't exist. Of course,
correlation does not necessarily imply a causation in either direction;
I know we have a tendency to mass-repeal rules in response to flagging
activity, but it never seems to help (and the message I'm quoting is an
indication that the fact that it never seems to help has been
long-recognised). And I suspect the reason that it never helps is that
fewer rules mean fewer things to do.
I play Agora for the ability to build up an economic base, and for
interesting CFJs to judge, and for the thrill of the scam (from either
direction). All those activities are harder with a smaller ruleset.
Other players play Agora for other reasons, many of which are different
from mine. But those reasons likely also suffer from a lack of rules to
support them, and if you want to accommodate the diverging desires of
all the players simultaneously, you need a very large ruleset, and
perhaps a large contract ecosystem too, so that everyone has something
to do. (I remember the players who only participated in Agora to keep up
with one contest. Contests died out eventually, though, and experiences
in multiple nomics make me suspect it would be foolhardy to resurrect
them in that form.)
Also, a theory: even a minimal Agoran ruleset is sufficiently scary that
adding more rules does not increase the extent to which new players are
deterred. (Especially because multiple prospective Agoran players have
apparently been under the misapprehension that the highest ID number
among the rules is the number of rules in existence, a misapprehension
that means the ruleset looks equally scary no matter how long it is.)
Anyway, I think the minimum required for Agora to function correctly
(beyond the simple fact of being a nomic) is:
* Enough of an officer force to correctly track the gamestate.
This is often a problem in practice, both in high-traffic and in
low-traffic times. If the number of players willing/able to act
as officers dips too low, we may have to look into automating it
even though that causes many problems. Perhaps we could take
actions by machine-readable announcement and get officerbots to
parse the resulting email, for instance.
* A rule turnover high enough that some nontrivial proportion of
the rules are likely to contain major bugs, at any given point
in time. Adding buggy rules intentionally has traditionally been
quite rare, and I expect it to stay rare; it's hard to pull off
(IIRC I've only managed it twice; once it backfired, and once I
was unable to exploit the resulting issue for other reasons; and
I'm probably the player most likely to try). However, adding
buggy rules accidentally is pretty common. Generally this
happens when people are repeatedly messing around with a new
concept (Contracts, Promises, a new economy, etc.). This is
responsible for much of the activity immediately before the
recent slump; many players feel that the signature rule was
obviously terrible, yet even for a short and simple rule that
doesn't do much, we got quite a bit of mileage out of it.
* An economy that can function as the game within its own right;
for many players, the major day-to-day activity has historically
been trying to improve their economic position. This is what
drove the gameplay a little earlier this year, when there was
jostling to get points from proposals, but that only works as
long as enough players are seriously trying, and it died out too
quickly (Scorekeepor delinquency hasn't helped).
Currently, we don't have 1), we don't have 2), and we don't have 3).
"Imminent death of Agora Nomic" is something I am really genuinely
scared by in the current situation. Especially because my recent bedtime
reading choice, old Agora archives, has really put into context how much
I used to enjoy playing, and how much potential this nomic has as a
game. Taking over the "constantly coming out of a slump" mantle from B
is a dubious honour at best, and right now, it doesn't even feel like
that's happening.
Perhaps some time in the future, probably when I have Internet access,
I'll go check the historical situation (I know Henri was planning to,
but after the recent mass resignation, I'm guessing e's too busy), and
write a proper thesis about correlations between various nomic
statistics (GNP, ruleset length, CFJ rate, proposal rate, win
frequency...), with an attempt to explain what's going on and draw
conclusions. Probably also mark major changes in economic systems and
voting systems on the resulting graphs, to see if anything obvious leaps
out.
--
ais523
