The Third Dynasty of Misty
March 30 - May 3, 2023
Contents
Ascension Address
Hey! All of ya! Hello and welcome! As you may already know, that black hole had finally evaporated from that place, which means that construction for the city of our dreams has finally begun again! Now you might be wondering why you were brought in so late. There’s uh, one small problem that cropped up. Someone was an absolute incompetence and blew up half of our construction materials. Supply chain issues caused by major parts of Asia no longer existing mean that we won’t be getting any replacements soon, so we kind of have to make do with what we have. That’s why you’re here! Your job is to take all the non-essential building stuff from the lower floors and hand them right back to the workers. They won’t suspect a thing, and we might be able to stretch our last few resources far enough to complete the city! Any questions?
Okay, I guess you could call this “pulling a Jenga”, but don’t let the workers know about that. Or any of this, really.
Dynasty theme: Jenga. Repeal all dynastic rules. Set the player synonym to Engineer and the emperor synonym to City Architect. Set the gamestate tracking page to be “Construction Site”.
Players
The following players were active at the beginning of this Dynasty: Brendan*, Habanero, jjm3x3, JonathanDark, Josh*, Kevan*, lendunistus, Misty*, Pokes*, Raven1207, redtara*, SingularByte*, Trapdoorspyder*
The following players were active at the end of this Dynasty:
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
- (This list of significant dynastic events is currently incomplete.)
Endgame
At around the midway point of the dynasty, Josh made use of a scam that gave him an essentially infinite number of Safety Checks (SCs). As up until recently at that point Safety Checks had been used to lock access to the dynasty's central mechanics, he made a Call for Judgment proposing to award himself Victory on the basis that he had cornered the game, similar to Brendan's successful argument in The First Dynasty of Habanero. Unlike that argument, however, this one failed, and the other players began to pivot the ruleset to work around the existence of Josh's SC hoard.
Brendan proposed a revised victory mechanism (around collecting a resource called Expertise) which was still susceptible to manipulation based on the expenditure of SCs, and as Josh still had a massive reserve of these his Expertise collection capabilities quickly appeared to outstrip those of his rivals, unless they could organise to vote through Review Boards to gain millions of SCs for themselves. Proposals passed to strengthen or undermine Josh's position: Kevan sped up Review Boards, JonathanDark changed the Review Board payout without anyone realising during voting that this would reducing them from several million to a few dozen, and Kevan reversed that.
While players could achieve a majority on some votes to amend mechanics, the number of present-but-inactive players meant that Review Boards were timing out (requiring a quorum within 48 hours) and active players founds themselves struggling to catch up to Josh on SCs. This left Josh in a defensive but still dominant position.
When Kevan proposed to play the game out if three players should pass a million safety checks, Josh criticised the hostility of the proposal, and it failed with most players expressing no opinion.
Ascension
It came to light, almost incidentally, that most of the major variables of the dynasty were orphaned, so a CfJ was made to fix this. While it was pending, it was realised that several players would be able to lock down the game (making all further build actions impossible) as soon as the CfJ passed and the game came back online. Some players also felt that the Build action was impossible to perform due to the way its Response Format was defined, which would also need to be patched.
The House of Cards CfJ instead proposed to end the dynasty there, locking down the game and allowing players to discuss a victory "chop". A quorum supported it and public discussion began around The Bargaining Table.
This conversation went on for a couple of days, with several players making chop proposals to vote on. Discussion in the chop proposals continued in a markedly negative tone. The Emperor also made a "Failed Ultimatum" proposal to put the game into a metadynasty.
A few hours after that, Bucky unidled for the first time in the dynasty, prompting Benbot to do the same. Bucky announced on Discord that it was time to reveal that they believed the disabling of the gamestate for the chop proposal to be a "stick of dynamite" (apparently reasoning that a blank gamestate meant that every player now had equal status for any chop), and that it was "too bad Josh and Kevan are asleep already". Bucky cast a vote for a metadynasty and a vote against every chop, as did Benbot. Misty discussed the push for a metadynasty on the Discord with Redtara, Bucky, Benbot and some still-idle players, Misty pointing out to one of them that "there's nothing stopping you from unidling now and voting".
Within an hour, Misty had vetoed all of the chop proposals and left their own metadynasty proposal standing.
Twenty hours later, the metadynasty proposal had quorum: Benbot, Bucky, Redtara, JonathanDark, Josh, Misty and Taiga were in favour of the dynasty ending in this way; Brendan and Kevan were not; Habanero, Jjm3x3, Summai and Titanic had not yet voted either way.
Coda
Following the enactment of the metadynasty proposal, there was some disagreement on whether the proposal explicitly ended the Third Dynasty of Misty, since it did not say to explicitly end the current dynasty. But it was noted that most metadynasty proposals had failed to say this either, historically, and a vote concluded that this dynasty had indeed ended.
Misty and Benbot took no actions during the metadynasty and timed out after the first seven days of it.
Commentary
It remains my belief that the protracted attempt to undermine the legitimacy of my gamestate position both prior to and during the chop discussions directly led to the outcome. While I do think that the actions of Misty raise questions related to the limits of Imperial overreach, and that Bucky and Benbot both acted poorly to force the outcome of the dynasty from an idle position, I do think that Kevan and others should consider the extent to which the ends of bringing in a leader justify the means, and whether they could have elected to have taken a less aggressively targeted approach that respected the gamestate more and left less room for an essentially nihilist faction to hijack the game. Josh (talk) 19:26, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
- In retrospect I could have played the chop better by making a different opening offer - starting by presenting the situation as a 50/50 Josh/somebody stalemate left me nowhere else to go when you dismissed that premise out of hand. I decided to make the call to play hardball as well, and just to stick with that to see where it fell, with the full expectation that a majority might agree I was being unreasonable and reject my angle entirely and/or cut me out of it for impertinence. A game of negotiation! I put a lot of thought into it and wasn't impressed that Misty - having agreed to a chop endgame and watching a couple of days of negotiations - held a midnight council of idle players who agreed that it didn't matter and should all be vetoed.
- I haven't drawn any firm conclusions about the throughline of why it all happened, not least because nobody has really said why they did what they did. The pugnacious tone of the public negotiations may well have intimidated newer players into keeping out of the discussion until eventually required to cast a vote (which Misty denied them the chance to do), but there was also the fact that the chop negotiations had broken out into vote-buying before any discussions had really started. I can see why an idle player might be tempted to wake up if chop proposals have started giving out 1% slivers - I would have expected the group to round on that and put a stop to it, if they'd had time. I was also keeping out of the vote-buying myself, and trying not to be too visibly annoyed by it, aware that the moral high ground might become obvious to the group and pay off in my favour. A game of negotiation!
- For the earlier events, your "a cohort of other players, led by Kevan" writeup above seems a bit strong. This was the classic Josh-Kevan standoff where one of us is pointing at the other saying "but can't you see they're about to win!", and the player base seems broadly uninterested. I was making proposals to pivot the ruleset, I hope on the fair side of the "I would not object to an equivalent proposal against me" Munchkin line, but I didn't ever have a cohort going, or even a single spear-carrier. (I did spend some time trying to negotiate an exchange of favours with JonathanDark, even pressuring them with deadlines, all of which failed - I couldn't tell if they were being generally cagey, or if they'd already signed a heavily binding agreement with you that limited their options when interacting with others.) --Kevan (talk) 18:17, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
