On Thu, 2014-08-28 at 09:12 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > On Thu, 28 Aug 2014, Alex Smith wrote: > > 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. > > Having done a few rounds over the years with you on this, I now believe > that you can stop at your #1 issue. You need players willing to officiate > before, not after game mechanics, rules reform, or anything else. > In other words, active officering attracts good play, but even good > gameplay does not (generally) attract officers, at least when you're > trying to bootstrap something. > > If there is an officer ready to run with gameplay, it works as long > as the officer keeps up. E.g. with BobTHJ, or the recent example of > my imaginary numbers (weren't the best rules by far, but they worked as > long as I was cheerleading and updating it, as soon as I stopped, > no more gameplay). > > Now we all play for our own "reasons" and have our favorite styles, but > unless we're willing to put those aside for a officer gruntwork, > those discussions aren't going very far. > > So if you get 2-3 people who actually say "we're willing to hold the > core offices and be consistent and timely about it", then you've got a > game. Unless you've got those 2-3 people going into this discussion > (do you?), and they follow through for a few months at least, the rules > themselves don't matter so much.
I think I agree with you. I don't think it's completely impossible to adapt player attitudes towards officeholding (I held onto Notary much longer than I would have done otherwise purely to get the Long Service award). However, it /is/ impossible to get someone to do the officeholding jobs if they don't have time to do them (e.g. I currently have Internet access sufficiently rarely that I've needed to make extra journeys purely for the purpose of travelling to an access point to do the Referee's report). So there needs to be a minimum base of players in order for any other changes to be able to have any effect. However, we still need to be able to compensate for a lack of potential officers. The only alternatives I can see are rules changes to reduce officer burden, and attracting new players. For instance, some offices could be mostly automated; in fact, under the current rules, the MfGNPE could be entirely, 100% automated (as the office neither involves any subjectivity, nor the ability to understand English). We could perhaps create a new class of automated players specifically for the purpose of doing this sort of job. In an emergency, it would be possible to automate certain other offices too, with rules changes to make them easier to automate (e.g. we could require votes to be made in a particular machine-readable format, and automate Assessor). Perhaps we need to abolish some offices, too; the problem is that the only ones that are really dispensable are also relatively easy to hold. We could possibly look at a more radical change, too, such as a Blognomic-style model where the gamestate record is centralised and the equivalent of "by announcement" is editing a change onto the gamestate directly (thus making it impossible to perform an action without updating the gamestate). Of course, this has plenty of problems of its own. Attracting new players is also important if we have a deficiency of current players with the ability to hold offices. I know the "wait for someone new to register so that they can sort it out" approach has been needed for CFJs in the past (because all the existing players were barred for various reasons); perhaps we need it for officers right now. I think vibrant gameplay may be important to be able to hold the engagement of new players when they join, though; or at least, rules complicated enough that they have something to do. I remember when coppro joined (possibly the most recent first registration that lead to a really successful Agoran career); a few days after joining, e was already planning a scam (one which e got a win from, in fact). In a ruleset with only 75 rules, there's very little in the way of hooks for new players to start with. -- ais523
