The Ninth Metadynasty
26 May - 12 August 2020
Contents
Metadynasty Declaration
I, Tantusar, as an Administrator of BlogNomic, have been directed by my Enactment of the Proposal The “Table Flip” Endgame [No Victory] to declare a Metadynasty. This Metadynasty will begin immediately, with no theme.
Players
The following players were active at the start of the Dynasty:
ais523, ayesdeeef, Clucky*, Darknight*, derrick*, The Duke of Waltham, Josh*, Kevan*, pokes*, Publius Scribonius Scholasticus, Tantusar*, Trigon
The following players were active at the end of the Dynasty: Bais, Cuddlebeam, Darknight*, derrick*, Josh*, Jumble, Kevan*, pokes*, Publius Scribonius Scholasticus, Raven1207, Zyborg
- (admins in bold and * throughout)
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
Dynastic Rules
Proposals that significantly impacted the Dynastic Rules.
- Spin The Wheel was the first accepted proposal after the declaration of the Metadynasty. It defined the Wheel, a game object consisting of various Segments, each of which had an effect. As a daily action, players could "spin" the wheel, choosing a random segment which would award all players who had selected that segment as their Wager.
- Multi-bets built upon this idea by allowing Amnesiacs' wagers to include multiple segments.
- Global Shares added another attribute to Segments: Global Effect. Whereas the Payout of a Segment would be applied individually to each player whose Wager included the Segment, the Global Effect would be applied only once and could affect anything in the game.
- Spin Doctors changed the spin time from midnight to a random hour
- Locking In allowed players to announce that they would no longer be changing their bet
- Yoink! defined Power and Defences, later renamed to Annoyingness and Focus
- Spare Segments defined a set of Segments which currently weren't on the Wheel
- Gamblers Conspicuous renamed the players from Amnesiacs to Gamblers
- Shifting to a Higher Gear accelerated the game clock
- The Rake crowned an occasional round winner, resetting scores and giving them a Plaque
- The Big Wheel limited the maximum Segments on the Wheel to 8; The Governor later gave a lower bound of 4
- Bringing it Back allowed players to spend Annoyingness to push Segments onto the Wheel
- Side Hustles allowed players to spend Annoyingness to trigger Segment effects directly
- Best Before gave players time to react to each other's actions, with some limits
- High Stakes Gambling added a second Wheel with Winner Medallion prizes. This was almost immediately simplified to placing bets on the Segments which weren't on the Wheel.
- Pachinko Prizes allowed points to be cashed in for Medallions.
- House of Plaques made Plaques more attainable
- Switchback explicitly regarded the Second Switch dynasty as a test
- Pioneer Plaque defined a victory condition: have three Plaques
- Three The Hard Way merged Medallions into Plaques
- The Cage limited interruptions when a player was due a Plaque
- Fermat's Wager proposed to end the game
Segments
Proposals that created, modified, or deleted segments. When the name of a segment is not specified below, that segment's name is the word in the proposal's title.
- Spin The Wheel added the first five segments alongside the creation of the Wheel.
- Nutmeg's Your Man randomized the Segment names, keeping true to the previously stated desires for random word generation to take a part in the dynasty. The names given were: Numbness, Rimless, Upturned, Laziness and Manatee.
- 26421 false added a segment that would change its Payout to that of a random other segment whenever spun.
- 53623 shaft added a segment with no Payout and no Global Effect.
- 46366 random added a segment that would apply the Payout of another random segment to each winner and that would apply a random segment's Global Effect.
- 63556 unearned added a segment that lowered points by making each player's points equal to 2*sqrt(|points|), a function that gradually gets smaller than its input. This was later amended to just halving.
- 62366 tiptop reduced the score of the leading player
- 22544 delta generated Annoyingness
- 11613 anatomist detached untargetted Segments from the Wheel
- 14231 bronco paid out a lot of points while zeroing a random player who had bet on it
- 51445 repossesses copied other players' scores
- 44146 payroll gave everyone 3 points
- 36462 majority paid out if a majority had bet on it
- 55114 slobbery blanked Wagers
- 52246 rimmed affected the existing Rimless Segment
- 23633 dolphin zeroed all Annoyingness
- 61426 sweat reduced points for overuse
Core Rules
All proposals passed during this dynasty that made changes to the Core, Special Case, and Appendix rules.
- Term Limits fixed the Emperor/Player flavor text a bit by requiring that the new Emperor's choice of names for said terms be undefined in the rest of the ruleset.
- Coping with changing definitions fixed the reoccurring problem of the value of variables becoming invalid due to the rules changing by having all invalid values change to the default value for that variable.
- What's in a Name? clarified that when proposals are mentioned by name, this is taken to mean "the most recently posted proposal of that name which pre-dates the first proposal"
- Eye of the Upholder established the "uphold" keyword, after some mistakes on the Wheel had to be retroactively patched
Ascension
A proposal was made to end the game with a weighted die roll that was presented as being equivalent to playing out the existing wheel-spin game until somebody attained 3 Plaques (Pokes and Kevan already having 2 each, and Jumble 1). Kevan won the roll.
Commentary
Trigon
My commentary throughout this metadynasty can be found on its talk page.
Cuddlebeam
The dynasty is nearing its end and with the cat out of the bag of what I was doing, I'll give this a go.
I started out really, really late. Shortly after I joined, two players had 2 Plaques, one off from winning, and I had none. So I aimed for a Pool - yet again! I keep on doing this shit, but there's a reason for it. I feel like dividing the game into the three win types really helps me quickly analyze what course of action I should take to win, even if its just these three pretty straightforwards options (or at least get some profit, like a mantle %):
- Conventional Win?: I'm too far behind, not viable.
- Scam Win?: Nothing good I can really grip onto in the dynastic ruleset. After three months and some change, it's just around 1k words! Very few chances for something to slip through. I couldn't find anything worth the bother.
- Pooling Win / Mantle %: There are two ways for players to influence other player's gamestate and actions: imitating someone else's bets so that they can't earn a Plaque unless you concede it to them, and Distractions. So I went with this.
By imitating Wagers, I had in mind to put a "bridge toll" sort of thing for the lead player to reach their win and between pokes and Kevan, Kevan seemed the most likely to achieve victory to me because of their greater experience and play vigor. So I imitated them. Knowing that Kevan often uses Proposals for their own gain which could try to pluck me out like the parasitic tick I was and that pokes has been warm to collaboration with me before, I allied with him for the mutual goal of keeping me imitating Kevan and help a bit with the votes: he gained because we might not reach an agreement and Kevan would be locked from winning until then, I gained because we might reach an agreement and I get my profit - both of these require me to stay imitating Kevan. So, yeah. Kevan did eventually make a Proposal to get me off him as expected, and while it was easy to bring up a fair argument as to why that Proposal wasn't particularly appealing to the rest of the audience (because it locks them out of playing a good portion of the game, which isn't the funnest thing), I believe that having pokes appear with the support vote helped at least a bit especially because of how bandwagony voting tends to be (I bandwagon quite a bit too admittedly, often in this dynasty out of laziness and to get Proposals out of the queue).
I didn't expect Kevan and pokes (and me) to end up so neck-and-neck in points here, but going for a Distraction attack seemed like a good option to go for to tiebreak the two leaders. I wasn't committed to any of the two yet (even if I was allied with pokes to fend off Kevan's usual Proposal plays, it was already explicit that I may end up making Kevan win), so I negotiated a bit with the two, and ended up going with pokes, and Distracted Kevan a bunch.
And I missed all 3 of my Distractions. 12.5% chance of this absolute worst case scenario for my Distractions. Ugh, lol. -------17:41, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Cuddlebeam (talk)
Kevan
That was interesting for making the core mechanic explicitly random from the start, and the idea that it was possible to propose a selfishly useful Wheel Segment in the hope it would get spun while it was still of any use to you, but I think we lost our way when we added a bunch of "at any time" mechanics which took the game back to faster-trigger-wins timing races, which we ultimately seemed unwilling to step away from (I assume because the lagging players felt that it was all they had left, and enough leading players were relying on those lagging players kingmaking them). The other problem of strategy-stealing was also apparently unremovable through lack of incentives to.
This was another lesson in why Metadynasties are a bad idea. When the test run for the Second Switch started to blur the status of this dynasty (were we playing to win, or just messing around before being switched off?), there was no Emperor to stand up and either make an announcement, or act as ambassador to the Second Switch players and sort something out. --Kevan (talk) 15:33, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
