Talk:The Ninth Metadynasty
Trigon
2 June 2020
Gamestate:
This dynasty is shaping out to be really interesting. The theme had to grow on its own, and I'm not sure it's even fully developed yet. So far, it's a pretty generic casino theme with the added twist of random name generation. I haven't been super active in this dynasty so far, but as of today I'm hoping to change that.
This dynasty is based mainly on the periodic spinning of a wheel. There are some interesting design notes about the way this is implemented. First, each segment's effects are generally contained in its definition in the Wheel wikipage. As an effect, the dynastic rules are remarkably short and will probably continue to be pretty short as it's just a basic backend to get the Wheel to work.
Second, since the effects of segments are arbitrary lists of actions, the person spinning the wheel has the unenviable task of dealing with whatever that segment mandates. There are some proposals right now that would make existence pain for these people. I, naturally, voted for all of them. In a week or two I'll be talking about the pure chaos that ensues.
Now, I feel I should bring this up: dynasties with a lot of randomness are polarizing. Either they are unfair to everyone and this makes people mad and makes them ragequit or they are unfair to everyone and everyone loves them anyway. I think this is an example of a randomness-focused dynasty gone right. The whole game down to the names of things are based on randomness, so players don't feel cheated when all their planning and strategy goes to waste because of RNG since there isn't really that much strategy to mess up.
I don't know if anything I typed in that last paragraph was correct or insightful at all, so please feel free to add to these comments. Thanks! --Trigon (talk) 06:56, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
6 June 2020
I'm checking in again. It's only been a few days since my last entry, but a lot has happened. There have been almost two dozen blog posts, most of which are proposals, one of which is a paragraphs-long explanation of a single wheel spin, and two of which are CfJs created in response to that explanation. We're currently at 13 players. There's daily activity on the Slack server. This is probably the most consistently busy I've ever seen BlogNomic. All because of a bunch of surreal gamblers crowded around a nonsense wheel.
Anyway, the dynasty has changed a good deal since the last post. There are more unique and complicated segments and some new mechanics including Annoyingness and Spare Segments. The dynasty is rapidly growing. That's great!
But I'm a bit concerned as well. See, my biggest fear at this point is that our ambitions are outgrowing the time we have left for this dynasty. Yes, we have exciting new mechanics, but these new mechanics haven't been explored to their full potential. The dynasty will likely end before we have the opportunity to do so. 75thtrombone has stated that if all goes smoothly, we'll have WordPress running on or a bit after June 15 (see this post for details about the Second Switch). I hope that this dynasty will be able to run alongside WordPress and reach a natural conclusion because I really want to see it developed more.
That out of the way, let's talk about the infamous Random Spin.
There is a segment on the wheel called "Random" which was supposed to apply to each winner a random segment's payout once. But due to its wording, pokes actually postulated that it should apply to each player once for everyone whose wager included the segment. This sparked a long conversation about the legal aspects of this spin.
This dynasty has become one of my favorites and is definitely one of the most engaging I've participated in. It's not that complicated since the ruleset is still very small, even with newly-introduced mechanics. The amount of attention required is very low (all you have to do is change your wager once and wait for riches), but play can be strategic as well (changing your wager once every 13-48 hours is wise). And at the end of the day, it's hard to hold grudges since much of the determination is completely random. Good luck to all! --Trigon (talk) 01:22, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
12 June 2020
Checking in a third time. A lot has happened in the past week. Not in the way that the proposal queue was full all the time like a couple weeks ago. It was more like a bunch of action happened and we had to figure out just how to handle it.
The most interesting thing that happened this week was Jumble winning. I was feeling really good about the way things were shaping out after the Random Roll, but everything changed a couple spins later. Jumble, in a bizarre move just a few hours before the wheel spin, changed their wager to Manatee five times (see this revision). By some coincidence, Manatee was spun (see this revision) and Jumble's score jumped to 42 points.
This naturally made the game very unbalanced. It was unreasonable for anyone to attempt to catch up to them. Fortunately, Kevan jumped in with this brilliant proposal which would reset everyones' points every time a player's score was high enough. This separates the game into a bunch of sub-rounds where risk-taking is encouraged. There's not a use for them, but I'm a huge fan of the mechanic.
Anyway, the board was recently swept, and we are now in the second sub-round. And man, we're all in a pickle. Everyone who has been playing actively has been losing tons of money. The highest score is literally zero and it's because some people have not changed their wagers. I'm having a great time nonetheless.
There's been a lot of discussion on Slack about the second switch metadynasty. 75th Trombone supposedly has a good idea for it. I might have to quit one of the nomics I'm currently playing to be able to join another one, though. I think that's the real tragedy of the day.
Anyway, I guess that's all I'm going to say for now. Until next week! --Trigon (talk) 03:26, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
