Demogame Concerns - Citizen discussion encouraged

As of now, it seems the demogame is becoming one convuluted mess. Dozens of posts to read, mismatched rules, miscommunications, and tons of rules - some of which are unclear.

So, feel free to post any problems you've had or encountered. Here's some of mine.

Before the May 29th Turn Chat, I had posted in a poll about pre-turn chats being completed earlier. I read this just before I went to sleep (in my time zone, it was getting late). I woke up the next morning, expecting to make some suggestions/instructions for the Trade Department, not knowing that Donsig had played the preturn at around 10:00 my time. (at which, I was helping family members with their computer inquiries). I also had to work the previous night, so I didn't have any time to see what I could do with the trade. So, I post the turn chat instructions, expecting that's what's going to be in the game. As it turned out, I was the designated player for that night. Luckily, I found out about it before I started any of my trades, (I had no prior knownledge of a game being played) - and that's where the chaos ensued.

As you can see, I didn't even have a chance to look at the threads. There's dozens (an estimated 70) posts per day. It would take forever just to find them with the current forum setup. Those are hours on end that you would normally be spending doing real life stuff. (school, work, etc.)

I would suggest that there be a demogame announcement thread (sticky) that whenever a major gameplay-changing decision is made, it should be posted there.

Since this was a poll, it could have closed during the night, when I was sleeping. You can see a potential problem here: Person A makes a poll, Person B sees it, but doesn't realize that it's closing soon (is there something that says when the polls close?). Person B has something to do (work, sleep, school, etc.), and expects to post whatever game-related post they want to make. Only, the poll changed it, and Person A already made changes that would affect person B's changes. (which could mean hours of wasted effort - that would run into real life schedules)

Another issue I just thought of:

Timezones.

I think everyone's starting to assume that we all sit at our computers reloading the forum every minute or so, just waiting for a message. Someone in Belguim writing at 8:00AM there time, would be 1:00 AM, my time, I believe. If there was to be a debate (i.e., that person wrote it), it would be atleast 8-10 hours before I replied. This doesn't take into account the fact that I might be working all day, and can't post until 6:30 PM (after my dinner) - 30 minutes before chat time. That would give me 30 minutes to find a post that I never knew existed. (out of a good, maybe 50-70 posts). I also only have a 56/7K modem, not an ISDN line, or cable, like some people. So, it takes MUCH longer for me to load the pages and read them.

I would agree with and sympathise greatly with everything Chieftess said.
Although not much affects my little niche in this game, I can see all the points she made. My RL time constraints prevent me from attempting to run for any position until mid-July. My RL work is seasonal so I am ok after the season is up. Before then, not much time. However the position like Cheiftess described is something I have experienced where the only time I ever was in the forums was to update the History Department.

I would add that uniformity is a small issue with me. Have a thread somewhere that the mods control and it lists where things like turn chats, saved games, citizen polls, off-topic (within the demo game), department Q's etc go would be nice IMHO.

1) Here's one thing I find making the forums hard to navigate at the moment: too many sticky threads! Do we need "Even-more-sticky threads?

2) I feel that with the current rise in membership and surge in the number of posts, no citizen should be required or expected to read all posts. The demogame post count is now over 7000, more than half of the strategy forum post count of 12000! The demogame has been in existance for all of 2 months compared to a much longer time frame of the strategy forum and keeping up with the strategy forum is hard enough. Citizens, and especially officials should be expected to read certain threads especially those for gameplay communications but not the entire demogame forum. It is not only an inefficient use of time, but is becoming simply impossible due to real-life committments.

3) There are so many polls and discussions going on at the same time that I know I could contribute to if given more time to think and type the reply, but simply don't have the time to due to the sheer volume and speed of the events. We need a better and simpler system to allow officials to make decisions rapidly while being crystal clear about the rules, who is doing what and who is supposed to do whatever. I would be surprised if more than a handful of people now actually understand fully how the constitution works due to the many changes happening now.

Not to gripe, but the demogame is becoming like a huge train which has lost its brakes. There needs to be a better system to know where to find something one is looking for.

maybe we just made it too complicated. what do we need a government for?
my proposal would be:
no government. all is run with citizen polls. just a dedicated player is voted for. and it is played with a chat.
how can this work?
citizen groups can find themselves, which take care of special parts of our empire (domestic military ..., like the government now). they work out poll-proposals for the whole citizenry (and plans). the citizenry then polls which way to go.
no government is needed.
this is what we cant implement during the game, though. but maybe in the next game. a kind of ctp2-stile virtual democraty ;-)
what do people have if they dont own an official position? the honour! the honour of having a made a good plan. and maybe they even get an award therefore!

Yikes, I'm confused.

I thought that I'd stop by here for the first time to take a peek at the Civ3 Demo game and see what's been happening. For those who don't know (likely pretty much everyone), I'm currently the president for the Civ2 Demo game. I was very interested to see how this game was faring and how the mechanisms would be different from Civ2.

First thing: I am having serious difficulty in finding turn summaries. I'm now assuming that a chat log is printed from turn chats, but they seem difficult to find and even more so to follow. I'm very familiar with the CFC forums, the game of Civ3 and the usual process of a Demo game, but I have to admit to being a bit stumped.

This leads to my being on topic - or at least near it . I can sympathize with the fact that more and more players will undoubtedly create more and more "noise". A double-edged sword, I guess, as you'd like to attract more players but at the same time wish for greater simplicity.

With simplicity in mind, I'm of the opinion that ending the government and allowing citizens' posts to rule would make things more disorganized (and I DO like your screen name, disorganizer ) Perhaps I'm being a bit too naive, shortsighted, or this has been tried and it failed, but why not restrict game-decision thread discussions to those in the respective positions.

For example, allow the ministers to download the game and then the military minister would then post a thread "Shall we attack the ____ 1236" - putting the very specific thread AND the game date involved. Perhaps another thread entitled "Shall we move some riflemen to _____ 1236".

I know that citizen threads are nice, but if they should wish there to be a discussion or poll on turn matters, they should then PM their "representative" as it were to get them to post this. In this way, if a citizen felt that there should be a discussion on attacking a civ, that person should PM the military advisor and ask him to post on this. They could always write a "letter to the editor" as well with your newspaper.

In this way, all citizens would know that specific, turn related items would be tied to the threads started by the ministers. Non-turn related threads could be started by citizens at any time - war church, newspapers, whatever. They would be interesting reading for those who wish to do so, but those who are looking to enter discussions on turn events would know exactly where to go. In the Civ2 game, we do this efficiently, and I know it's a simpler game, but I think it could apply. Before we did this, we would have polls and discussions where some would post a poll that we should have a poll on something. It was counterproductive.

In this manner as well, the president could just look to the relevant threads and follow the mandates that are decided upon. Again, our game is a bit simpler in this regard, but I think it could apply to yours.

You elect your leaders with the thought in mind that they should be able to lead discussions and bring up all salient points necessary. This "centralizing" of threads will also put more and more stock into the election process as the person you vote for will be a true leader in instituting policy discussions. In fact, we've even found it better for a specific leader to voice his/her ideas on topics at hand, and only go about posting polls if there's a great deal of dissent. Given the myriad of choices regarding decisions in Civ3 compared to Civ2, I'm not sure this would work specifically. Yet, I think that having your elected leaders lead all turn-related discussions will help to simplify some things.

And why no turn summaries? Do you all go by the chats? Turn summaries can be fun - you should look into doing these.

Originally posted by disorganizer
maybe we just made it too complicated. what do we need a government for?
my proposal would be:
no government. all is run with citizen polls. just a dedicated player is voted for. and it is played with a chat.
how can this work?
citizen groups can find themselves, which take care of special parts of our empire (domestic military ..., like the government now). they work out poll-proposals for the whole citizenry (and plans). the citizenry then polls which way to go.
no government is needed.
this is what we cant implement during the game, though. but maybe in the next game. a kind of ctp2-stile virtual democraty ;-)
what do people have if they dont own an official position? the honour! the honour of having a made a good plan. and maybe they even get an award therefore!

Click to expand...

Don't think that's such a good idea, Dis... too much scope for certain tasks to go undone while others are done by two or more people. I think it's better to have certain people who have sole responsibility for carrying out certain task. And can you imagine the chaos of having a discussion and vote for every single build queue, for example? To be honest I think we need a balance between government and private citizens, since both over-powered and non-existent government forms would make the game less enjoyable. And that surely is the point, right?

Edit: Beaten to the punch again, lol... I really must learn to type faster...

Originally posted by Kev
Yikes, I'm confused.

...

And why no turn summaries? Do you all go by the chats? Turn summaries can be fun - you should look into doing these.

Click to expand...

This is the closest we've come to turn summaries.

I think the main reason turn summaries haven't been done recently is that the turn chats have taken about five hours to do. No one has had any energy left I think. We have been putting alot of effort into reducing the turn chat time while at the same time ensuring that the decisions implemented during game play reflect the wishes of our citizens. In the beginning of this game our President held the turn chats very late in his time zone and I think he also had no energy for big summaries. Also, trying to hold a turn chat every two days propelled us into the issues of the next round leaving any thoughts of a summary behind.

The last turn chat was only about three hours and we hope to do better than that in the future. As a veteran of a few Civ 3 succession games I am looking forward to writing turn summaries in my term. Stay tuned.

i also think a mixture of both government-forms would be best. i think the game now is sometimes to centralized, separating the citizens from government too much (as brought to us by asking leaving citizens).
i also hope we will do turn-summaries soon, as so proposed in the turn-thread proposal which will hopefully soon be implemented. together with the forum reorganization this will lead to a better information-organization, where we have all information about a turn in ONE thread, and not split over dozens.
@kev: you see we already noticed the problem you mention: information is hiding from us in the forums. i hope you will provide further input here, as our game is still in the learning-phase.

How confusing would it be if all the turn proposals were in 1 thread? I think it would help reduce clutter. And it might encourage each department to get a proposal in, because it would be easier to see who is missing

I can see there might be many arguments for one thread, but I think it might be still very readable. It would give everyone 1 thread to check for what will be happening next.

This can be something we just try. Not necessarily a constitutional or rule change.

chiefpaco, are you suggesting a turn proposal thread similar to our turn chat instructions thread? Would it be an information only thread with one post by each department leader and governor? Would each post have links back to the revevent discussions of each proposal? If so, it doesn't sound like a bad idea.

donsig, chiefpaco: read the cabinet decision-vote for the constitutional ammendment made by shaitan and me. thats exactly what we propose, except that all other info (saves, logs, summary) would also be in there, so this would not only be the central information thread for the government, but also for the citizenry.

EDIT:
cabinet vote with all relevant info is here.

There should be an archive for the old messages (especially turn chat info). After 24 hours or so, it could be sent to the archives to reduce clutter.

Originally posted by disorganizer
donsig, chiefpaco: read the cabinet decision-vote for the constitutional ammendment made by shaitan and me. thats exactly what we propose, except that all other info (saves, logs, summary) would also be in there, so this would not only be the central information thread for the government, but also for the citizenry.

EDIT:
cabinet vote with all relevant info is here.

Click to expand...

disorganizer, the proposed amendment does not include provisions for department proposals. It does include a post from each department for turn chat instructions.

It would be possible to include them formally at a later date but then the thread would encounter problems. We'd want the first post, then porposals, then instructions then saves, summary, etc. Any department wanting to post instructions would have to wait untill all the proposals are posted otherwise instructions would get jumbled in with proposals. We have a trun instructions thread so we don't have to go searching all over for everything we need. The proposal as it is leaves that feature intact and I would rather not jeopardize it.
We could also let departmetns post proposals in their one post and then edit the post into instructions when the time comes. This also has problems though. What if a proposal is entered in the turn thread and the citizens reject all or part of it but the proposal doesn't get edited? I think there might be a tendency to go ahead and implement the proposal just because it is in the turn thread. I also do not like the idea of the proposals being edited out. We need them on record.

For the reasons listed above I am against including department proposals in the turn threads. I also think chiefpaco's idea is a good one because it could be placed in the citizen' sub forum, which is the appropriate place for such proposals. The thread could have a set format. I'd suggest a copy of the previous turn's summary along with the most recent save (or link to said save if we use the new upload feature). If we could get all departments to then make one post that includes their respective proposals we could then open the thread for citizen discussion. The may have the added benefit of generating a discussion with a more wholistic or nationalistic character.

Donsig. If we could get the Leaders to adhere to the requirement of posting to this thread the morning after each chat, this would be a great idea. It would present a continuous "big picture" with which the common citizen could compare new proposals and questions. That is, if I'm reading this right, and I hope I am.
If the Leaders began to "stray" from this requirement would it have the same effect? Possibly. But maybe the discussions this thread would spawn would make people demand a response from the Leader whose input they were missing.Hmmmmm
This reminds me of the long term planning thought that was passed around earlier. Only on a shorter term with more detail. Am I reading this wrong?

It would be great if department leaders could have proposals up the morning after the turn chat but I hesitate to try to make that a requirement. I also wonder if each department should be making proposals or just presenting what they think are the issues faced by their particular department along with the relevant game info. A perfect example of what I'm thinking of here is the trade department and which posts the possible trades that could be made for the coming turn chat. FA has also posted a similar thread for upcoming treaties. In these instances the information is presented to our citizens for them to discuss which is what we all want. The merit of chiefpaco's suggestion is that all this info comes together in one thread (maybe a sticky).

We could start with an informal set of rules. The designated player could start the *proposal* thread for then next turn when he (or she ) posts the game turn summary. We could gice department leaders 24 hours before we *open* the thread to anyone's comments. If a department hasn't checked in by then the first *open* post will probably be asking where the missing department is! Since all departments have deputies we have two people from each that could post the proper info. I would also include governors in this thread. They could either post proposed build queues or just highlight certain cites that they feel need attention.

Yeah, I guess we have 2 issues from one idea. How things always multiply...

- 1 thread to contain all the proposals/plans for next thread. This way, citizens do not need to track down all the threads for next turn. Off-track discussions may continue in another thread or refer to a separate poll.
- Getting the Leaders to post their proposals the next day so sufficient time may be given for opposition/support.

I would first like to see how it works without any restrictions on time or person. The fewer rules we have on anything, the better, IMHO.

I think it will be easier to find for citizens. Another immediate benefit I see is squeezing what was probably 20 posts over 3 threads into 1, thereby reducing overall forum clutter. I think we can follow 1 thread as long as everyone stays clear as to what they are debating.

While some things in the game are very democratic, some feel to me somewhat autocratic. I hope this proposal helps. I also never considered that it might help gain perspective on national issues, but that would be a pleasant effect.

Anyone who thinks that "one thread for each topic, please, for the love of..." please speak up or we might get carried away with this

Many of the issues brought up here have been or are being addressed. The turn chat instruction thread reform will help enormously. The poll reform dictates that pollers post the close time of the poll. Leaders posting links to their discussions, proposals and polls in the departmental thread (as Donsig and I have been doing and others are starting to do) will keep the citizens informed so they don't have to hunt for threads. The Forum realignment will also do much to organize and solve the "massive sticky posts" problem. There are others that have solutions either being implemented now or waiting for implementation of an already approved solution but I've lost them in the volume of this thread. I'll have to come back and review these posts when I've got a bit more time.

Donsig - I agree that simple rules and procedures don't need to be in the Constitution. Right now our Constitution is more than just a constitution though. It's the sum total of rules and regulations for the game. Once we've realigned the Constitution to a more workable format (current discussion) we'll be able to approach this more realistically. For the time being I'd like to keep on as we have been so we don't end up with an even more confusing document.

I think each department should have their own proposal discussion threads. If these are combined into one thread you'll have 6 (or more) discussions in a single thread. When this happens the most important or contentious topic gets addressed and the rest are generally ignored. If the department leaders link to these threads from their department threads there won't be a problem with citizens finding them. As they'll be unsticky they'll fall away and there won't be a clutter problem.

I would just like to quickly point out that having one thread where all departmental proposals are located does not mean we can't have each proposal in a thread of its own as well. This may mean some duplication is involved with extra work for the leaders. This is not necessarily a *let's do it this way and ONLY this way* idea. This is another reason I'd like to avoid putting this kind of stuff in the constitution. We don't need *rules* for how we present proposals. Constitutionalizing things like this tend to set them in stone stifle new ideas.

The Leaders already have one place to post proposals. Their Department threads are their basic "home field". It's were they make their stand. With a simple copy and paste to the Main Proposal thread, where one could go to see different proposals at once, all Leaders could have a combined "press conference". Not in the respect of reporting the events that have happened (although they could be referenced), but what the Leaders proposed future actions and deals and whatever are at that time.

Once the Leaders (and public) got a sense of where the other Leaders were headed, the proposals could start to mesh. If not we have discussions and polls.

And I agree that we should stop changing the constitution constantly. Let's start grouping the changes into a separate "amendmants" thread until we can get a better grasp of what are laws, what are rules, and what goes into the constitution. We don't need to change the Constitution everytime there is a blue light special. Let's start working on the reform of our change process.

what about a kind of "index thread" for each mid-turn (time between turn-chats) of all proposals? there will be normal discussion threads in the citizen forums about the proposals, but the central index-thread will hold an index with links (to discussion(s) or poll(s)) and a short description along with the initiator of the proposal. the status of the proposal should also be indicated in the post, as there should be "discussion, poll and conclusion". if we got an result for the proposal, this result may also be stated there.