Re: DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
Top-posting because I'm not really replying to anything in particular. I personally really enjoyed the idea of PAoaM, though I think I was starting to lose interest in Agora in general around the time it was being played. I don't exactly remember. Either way, I think it's a cool idea and should be revisited in some form the future, perhaps. I like the idea of doing board-gamey things in Agora. On 6/23/2020 3:41 AM, Reuben Staley via agora-discussion wrote: On 2020-06-22 18:14, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion wrote: It's generally agreed that the PAoaM economic model didn't work out. I take slight issue with the way this is phrased. I would say that the model itself is not flawed, but the implementation. I can easily see an economy based on going places and building things on a limited map working out. Short history lesson since not everyone remembers PAoaM: the 2018 version of the Arcadia minigame was copied and modified from a version from 2002 which seems to have lasted about a year. I cannot say how active it was or whether it flopped at the end as much as PAoaM did (it seems like at the end interest just fizzled out), but it seems to have worked for longer than PAoaM with much less bickering over how broken it was. What was the problem? Why did PAoaM fail? PAoaM was first protoed in November 2017. It spent about 5 months in proto Hell before finally being passed in March 2018. Hooray! Let's play! But whoops, lots of the rules did not get reenacted. Let's take a month to fix that. Okay, it's now April. Can we play now? Kinda. It looks like auctions aren't working like we thought. Okay, let's just patch that up. As far as I remember, there were always little issues that we had to patch up. People somehow were still excited in March. But in May? Well, not as much. We always assumed we could just keep patching until everything worked. But there were always little things that never got brought up because we weren't playing with them. That was one problem. Anyway, let's continue with the narrative. Alright, it's a little later in April; let's play! But wait, these resources that I'm gaining don't do much. They're tied into the other main systems of the game, but I can just wait until I gain more free resources at the beginning of some cycle. So there's no real need to interact with the map. Guess I'll just make a coin factory so that I can get a win in a couple of years! That was the second problem: like with all Agoran economies, the resources tied into the main game. But they had no alternate purposes. In Arcadia, players had to get land and build facilities on it, then get more land and build second-level facilities to process the resources produced by the first-level facilities. Then they had to manually collect from them each week. All for what? A couple more proposals or CFJ calls per week? That's not worth it to any reasonable person. As I have already stated, coins were the only thing one could really count on to be potentially worth it in the long run. Sets works better here. The different types of cards and products obviously tie into the main game as did the resources in PAoaM. But it's much less intensive a process. For one, players already get a few cards each reset. More cards are created by sane processes and distributed at regular intervals. If you want to do more legislative stuff than one pend, you only need to find someone else who's willing to help. You don't have to create a pipeline yourself or find someone who's heavily invested in that pipeline. Just someone who happens to be aiming for a different type of card or a mutually-beneficial contract. Even if Contracts had been more highly utilized back when Arcadia happened, I don't think it would have fixed the towering walls to progress for the uninitiated Arcadian. If you are just beginning, you own no pipeline. If you want to get more paper to help you legislate more, you have to ask someone with a paper pipeline to help you out when you have basically nothing to give in return. Imagine joining a game of Monopoly with the starting amount of resources and being expected to keep up with all the players. Also, the only properties that are open are a couple light blue ones and a brown since the ones that people actually land are already bought and have hotels. In this situation, you will be screwed over by everyone and you can't do anything. Sets again functions better here because each individual card has real value. Everyone gets cards so everyone has a fair shot. And eventually everything will be reset anyway, so you are on even better footing when that happens. I have no idea how well I articulated my thoughts. I was basically writing my long-suppressed thoughts about Arcadia down as I remembered them. If I think of anything else I'll continue this thread tomorrow. -- ATMunn friendly neighborhood notary here :)
Re: DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
On 2020-06-23 01:41, Reuben Staley wrote: That was the second problem: like with all Agoran economies, the resources tied into the main game. But they had no alternate purposes. Addendum 3: I brought up alternate purposes for assets but did not expound at all. I think alternate purposes for the currencies would have made the currencies (and the pipelines to invest in their creation (and trading)) more valuable. For example, take the following rough proto: "Players can pay 25 paper, 25 metal, and 25 cloth to Erect a Monument. When a player does so, e wins the game." If we had an expensive way to spend our refined assets, I think it would have made things better. This could even turn into another Reset Economy in the vein of Sets, where the board is cleared and everyone starts anew. I have begun to really appreciate the merits of Reset Economies. -- Trigon I LOVE SPAGHETTI transfer Jason one coin nch was here I hereby don't... trust... the dragon... don't... trust... the dragon... Do not Construe Jason's message with subject TRIGON as extending this
Re: DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
On 2020-06-23 01:41, Reuben Staley wrote: Even if Contracts had been more highly utilized back when Arcadia happened, I don't think it would have fixed the towering walls to progress for the uninitiated Arcadian. If you are just beginning, you own no pipeline. If you want to get more paper to help you legislate more, you have to ask someone with a paper pipeline to help you out when you have basically nothing to give in return. Imagine joining a game of Monopoly with the starting amount of resources and being expected to keep up with all the players. Also, the only properties that are open are a couple light blue ones and a brown since the ones that people actually land are already bought and have hotels. In this situation, you will be screwed over by everyone and you can't do anything. Sorry, but I've got another quick thing to add. It's worth noting that Arcadia 2018 didn't even reach a point where this was a real issue for new players, not really. These paragraphs are just my conjecture of a likely reality based on patterns apparent in the Arcadia rules. That being said, though, I do think this is the most probable reality if Arcadia had survived through the bugs and initial balancing issues. -- Trigon I LOVE SPAGHETTI transfer Jason one coin nch was here I hereby don't... trust... the dragon... don't... trust... the dragon... Do not Construe Jason's message with subject TRIGON as extending this
Re: DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
On 2020-06-23 01:41, Reuben Staley wrote: I have no idea how well I articulated my thoughts. I was basically writing my long-suppressed thoughts about Arcadia down as I remembered them. If I think of anything else I'll continue this thread tomorrow. Quick addendum: the second part all about balance is why I think some kind of iterative design in a limited scope like a contract or on a different platform would be valuable for an Arcadia-like minigame. with lots of short rounds. After each we review the round and how balanced it was, adjusting the rules as necessary, then start another round. After this testing we would be able to write some real rules for longer rounds that could be realistically implemented in the main game with slower pace to match Agora's temperament. I made a proto-Contract that would allow us to test such a design a long time ago, but it never got much traction. -- Trigon I LOVE SPAGHETTI transfer Jason one coin nch was here I hereby don't... trust... the dragon... don't... trust... the dragon... Do not Construe Jason's message with subject TRIGON as extending this
Re: DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
On 2020-06-22 18:14, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion wrote: It's generally agreed that the PAoaM economic model didn't work out. I take slight issue with the way this is phrased. I would say that the model itself is not flawed, but the implementation. I can easily see an economy based on going places and building things on a limited map working out. Short history lesson since not everyone remembers PAoaM: the 2018 version of the Arcadia minigame was copied and modified from a version from 2002 which seems to have lasted about a year. I cannot say how active it was or whether it flopped at the end as much as PAoaM did (it seems like at the end interest just fizzled out), but it seems to have worked for longer than PAoaM with much less bickering over how broken it was. What was the problem? Why did PAoaM fail? PAoaM was first protoed in November 2017. It spent about 5 months in proto Hell before finally being passed in March 2018. Hooray! Let's play! But whoops, lots of the rules did not get reenacted. Let's take a month to fix that. Okay, it's now April. Can we play now? Kinda. It looks like auctions aren't working like we thought. Okay, let's just patch that up. As far as I remember, there were always little issues that we had to patch up. People somehow were still excited in March. But in May? Well, not as much. We always assumed we could just keep patching until everything worked. But there were always little things that never got brought up because we weren't playing with them. That was one problem. Anyway, let's continue with the narrative. Alright, it's a little later in April; let's play! But wait, these resources that I'm gaining don't do much. They're tied into the other main systems of the game, but I can just wait until I gain more free resources at the beginning of some cycle. So there's no real need to interact with the map. Guess I'll just make a coin factory so that I can get a win in a couple of years! That was the second problem: like with all Agoran economies, the resources tied into the main game. But they had no alternate purposes. In Arcadia, players had to get land and build facilities on it, then get more land and build second-level facilities to process the resources produced by the first-level facilities. Then they had to manually collect from them each week. All for what? A couple more proposals or CFJ calls per week? That's not worth it to any reasonable person. As I have already stated, coins were the only thing one could really count on to be potentially worth it in the long run. Sets works better here. The different types of cards and products obviously tie into the main game as did the resources in PAoaM. But it's much less intensive a process. For one, players already get a few cards each reset. More cards are created by sane processes and distributed at regular intervals. If you want to do more legislative stuff than one pend, you only need to find someone else who's willing to help. You don't have to create a pipeline yourself or find someone who's heavily invested in that pipeline. Just someone who happens to be aiming for a different type of card or a mutually-beneficial contract. Even if Contracts had been more highly utilized back when Arcadia happened, I don't think it would have fixed the towering walls to progress for the uninitiated Arcadian. If you are just beginning, you own no pipeline. If you want to get more paper to help you legislate more, you have to ask someone with a paper pipeline to help you out when you have basically nothing to give in return. Imagine joining a game of Monopoly with the starting amount of resources and being expected to keep up with all the players. Also, the only properties that are open are a couple light blue ones and a brown since the ones that people actually land are already bought and have hotels. In this situation, you will be screwed over by everyone and you can't do anything. Sets again functions better here because each individual card has real value. Everyone gets cards so everyone has a fair shot. And eventually everything will be reset anyway, so you are on even better footing when that happens. I have no idea how well I articulated my thoughts. I was basically writing my long-suppressed thoughts about Arcadia down as I remembered them. If I think of anything else I'll continue this thread tomorrow. -- Trigon I LOVE SPAGHETTI transfer Jason one coin nch was here I hereby don't... trust... the dragon... don't... trust... the dragon... Do not Construe Jason's message with subject TRIGON as extending this
Re: DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
On Tue, 23 Jun 2020 at 00:15, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion wrote: > It's generally agreed that the PAoaM economic model didn't work out. Unlike > the shinies economy, which is generally agreed to have suffered from > unpredictable boom bust cycles that were more annoying than anything else, > I don't know any consensus about why it failed. And unlike Politics, which > was IMO an excellent system that failed almost entirely due to simple > disinterest, in PAoaM's case I think there was a problem in the economy > itself. What was the problem? Why did PAoaM fail? > > I'm thinking about future possible economies, which I may discuss further > on the Discord. Nothing near term (we have sets right now), just things we > can transition to when we get bored of this economic model. Not knowing why > PAoaM failed makes it hard to avoid the same fate. > > -Aris What's PAoaM? I'm looking forward to nch's Economics thesis, if e is still working on it! - Falsifian
Re: DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
On 6/22/2020 5:14 PM, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion wrote: > It's generally agreed that the PAoaM economic model didn't work out. Unlike > the shinies economy, which is generally agreed to have suffered from > unpredictable boom bust cycles that were more annoying than anything else, > I don't know any consensus about why it failed. And unlike Politics, which > was IMO an excellent system that failed almost entirely due to simple > disinterest, in PAoaM's case I think there was a problem in the economy > itself. What was the problem? Why did PAoaM fail? First, I wouldn't call it a fail - it was a lot of fun while it ran. I think it was on the verge of hitting that sweet-spot in engine building games where things are humming along and everyone's competitively producing and enjoying it even if some people are producing faster. But it had a fatal link in having no end goal. We kept saying "we'll figure out where it's all going" but didn't quite. The only way we made a goal was for it to pay out coins (is that when we added the coin win?), but when coin factories got going it was a big unbalanced positive feedback loop. Then that was corrected hard (by removing coin factories), leaving no real goal. And that was just kind of when we said "eh we've been tweaking this too long, time to give up." Also, um, I kinda remember the auction rules being problematic? Someone should have fixed those. I'm trying to remember if we had an oversupply of paper - I genuinely don't remember ever feeling short when it came to pending. There really were quite a few good bits. > I'm thinking about future possible economies, which I may discuss further > on the Discord. Nothing near term (we have sets right now), just things we > can transition to when we get bored of this economic model. Not knowing why > PAoaM failed makes it hard to avoid the same fate. > > -Aris >
DIS: Why did PAoaM fail?
It's generally agreed that the PAoaM economic model didn't work out. Unlike the shinies economy, which is generally agreed to have suffered from unpredictable boom bust cycles that were more annoying than anything else, I don't know any consensus about why it failed. And unlike Politics, which was IMO an excellent system that failed almost entirely due to simple disinterest, in PAoaM's case I think there was a problem in the economy itself. What was the problem? Why did PAoaM fail? I'm thinking about future possible economies, which I may discuss further on the Discord. Nothing near term (we have sets right now), just things we can transition to when we get bored of this economic model. Not knowing why PAoaM failed makes it hard to avoid the same fate. -Aris
