On Fri, 2023-05-19 at 09:59 -0700, Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion wrote: > On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 9:50 AM ais523 via agora-discussion > <[email protected]> wrote: > > I sometimes feel like half my arguing at Agora is dedicated to trying > > to persuade people not to repeal the economy. > > > > It rarely works, and the consequence is that most of the time we don't > > have a functional economy. (Having a history of the economy being > > repealed is *also* a problem because it makes it harder to get a new > > economy off the ground – why invest if you think that everything is > > likely going to end up repealed again in the future?) > > Define "works"? tbh, I mostly prefer the periods with no/very limited > economies, because I like the various different subgames on their own, > and whenever we have a "full" economy, then subgame wins become far > too transactional and full of contracts/meta-subgame deals to be very > playable as a standalone competition.
"Works" as in inspiring either a replacement economy, or some other sort of replacement gameplay. What normally happens is that there are a few half-hearted attempts to create something new that don't go anywhere, and then the lists fall mostly silent for a few months. Meta-subgame deals don't necessarily require an economy to happen, just two or more subgames. (See, e.g., snail and Murphy trading a stone win for a horse win – as far as I can tell, that transaction didn't involve the economy at all.) The real fix for those, based on experience at other nomics, is to either design the subgame in a way that makes it hard for that sort of deal to have any influence on the subgame, or to create a rule banning players from cooperation for a subgame win. They also don't necessarily seem to happen even when there are lots of subgames and a strong economy (e.g. in the AAA era, the *other*, non- AAA, subgames basically got to run autonomously and I don't recall anyone trying to buy or sell advantages in them; and trading subgame- defined assets seems to have been the intended gameplay of the AAA). (Another interesting data point: Promises were originally partially intended as a method of letting people mint their own currency, backed by things like officer perks. This use never caught on, however, even though there have been times where it could have served as a replacement for a repealed economy. One of the things that I'm hoping for with my Raybots proto is that we end up with tradeable Promises backed by Raybot actions rather than player actions; because Raybots have a limited lifespan, we'd have a currency that naturally decays over time, and because they don't create ongoing obligations on any of the human players, there would likely be less aversion to creating them.) -- ais523
