Demogame Concerns - Citizen discussion encouraged

[Cyc]

Links are a good idea, Dis, but i feel they should be used only to point towards discussions BASED on the proposal and polls BASED on the proposals. The proposals themselves should be transferred to the thread. Too many times we've seen links that take you to a citizens group or investigation when it was supposed to take you to a discussion or a poll. Discussion and poll links in the Proposal Thread would be minor errors, but proposal links that don't work would be major errors in this thread. I see your point but think that too many links are a bad thing. And the reason I capitalized the word BASED above is because we've seen too many binding polls that are substantiated by discussion concerning a totally different matter. The discussion threads and the polls should have the same title in the heading.

So I guess what I'm saying is anyone could read the proposals without having to read through an index or click to another thread. They wouldn't necessarily have to check out the links to other discussions or polls either, if they just wanted to read or confirm/verify a single proposal. The proposals are there to read without any extra effort and the links are inserted for support documentation.

 

[disorganizer]

thats exactly what i meant with "short description". a kind of shortened version of the proposal will be in the index-post, and a "long version" of it will be in the discussion-thread.

 

[Plexus]

kinda off topic:

Dis, your mailbox is full and I need to send you something.

 

[disorganizer]

well. its empty again, but how do i know if its full? i didnt see a notification.

 

[Plexus]

did you check your e-mail? it is supposed to tell you when it is full.

 

[Cyc]

Dis - short is a relative term. What you think is a decent length may be miniscule to others. Ask any woman about the word. The full proposal being copied and pasted into the thread is a lot easier than writing another blurb summarizing it.

 

[disorganizer]

but a thread with 10 posts spread ofer 10 pages because each proposal is so long is a pain to read. citizens want a short overview of whats going on. to much reading in the summary will render it useless.
for the writer of a proposal, it should be no problem to do a short summary (how long should we max it?). there need not be all decision point in there, because they are still in the disc-thread. for example: the foreign policy discussion summary should only contain the sentence "restructuring of our foreign policy-which neighbors do we like?" (or something else).
if someone wants to lengthen it, he/she/it can, but this should not be the norm.

 

[eyrei]

I am once again concerned that the turn chats, in their current manifestation are making the game less democratic, and effectively taking away the decision making power of the citizens. This is not to say that turn chats cannot be democratic. Rather, the problem is caused partially by insufficient instructions from all departments (I do include myself in this) and by what I perceive as a rush to complete turns of the game. Personally, I feel no rush whatsoever, and would prefer we play fewer turns. What sometimes happens, is that a relatively major decision arises, that was not forseen by the government. Rather than stopping to consult the citizenry and debate on the forums, there is a push to continue playing, as too few turns have been played.

I wish to open this topic again for discussion, but do not wish to fill the forums with only my opinions on the topic. If someone else sees that there is much room for improvement here, please open a thread for this discussion.

 

[disorganizer]

i see it. i also see this rush. every1 complains about chats taking too long, but on the other side they also complain if we only make 5 turns in a important chat.
but dont make donsigs last one an example. (all comments to this in the investigation).
is there much to improve? give me an idea of how. i have none. we could deny any votes in there, but this would be awful if only minor decissions will bring the chat to halt.
our major problem really is the lack of discipline in our government. maybe we should even cut down on rules drastically and run without rules? just some basics vague ones? we could even run without government though, but this would be another discussion (we can start it though... if someone wants... start... i will be there!).

 

[Cyc]

There's nothing like an old anarchist, because most of them die young. If you can figure out how to run this game with out a government Dis, please tell me.

With the duration of the turns elongating and the complexity of the decisions in each, turn chats will become marathon events. It only makes sense at this stage of the game to consider some measure that would alleviate the duldrums of one of these marathons. Maybe as the game years are 5 per turn, we could move to seven turn chats, and when the game years went to 2 per turn we could move to fivr turn chats. Although I would suggest that if we do reduce the amount of turns per turnchat in the future that the pre-turn or 0-turn be done as a chat opener. Not only does the pre-turn stir up unity and cohesiveness, but if we shorten the turn amounts, the pre-turn will add a little extra content or wieght to each chat.

Personally, I love attending chats, and would not mind marathons, as long as they are not stagnant all the time. But I think turn trimming might be in our furture.

 

[donsig]

Pre-turn will not enliven the chat since pre-turn is boring. Even more so now that most build queues are already in the game. Pre-turn is time consuming to do though and I have been starting them before the turn chat in an effort to shorten the tim e we spend in the turn chat. Taking notes for the summary is time consuming as is reporting what is happening. During peace there is not much to report. We build stuff, upgrade units and build rails now.

 

[disorganizer]

So where is the problem then? We could play any number of turns we like. Why does still every1 stick to the 10 turns per chat?
If we like to play 1 per chat, we can do so, if we like 100 per chat, we could also.

 

[eyrei]

Originally posted by disorganizer
So where is the problem then? We could play any number of turns we like. Why does still every1 stick to the 10 turns per chat?
If we like to play 1 per chat, we can do so, if we like 100 per chat, we could also.

I agree.

 

[donsig]

Originally posted by disorganizer
So where is the problem then? We could play any number of turns we like. Why does still every1 stick to the 10 turns per chat?
If we like to play 1 per chat, we can do so, if we like 100 per chat, we could also.

I guess the problem is that *we* have to figure out who *we* is! Some want to play many turns, some a few. Since we do not agree then how do we decide? How to we decide when to end a turn chat? Obviously we do not agree on this either (and do have a problem somewhere) since we have investigation #6.

 

[Chieftess]

1 per chat? That would take FOREVER!
There's 540 turns in the game...
That'd be 5 years!

 

[disorganizer]

so where is the problem? we could get 7 chats a week, each for 1 hour. every day another citizen plays
no more problems

 

[donsig]

Originally posted by disorganizer
so where is the problem? we could get 7 chats a week, each for 1 hour. every day another citizen plays
no more problems

Wouldn't that cut down significantly on the time we have to talk about policy making?

 

[Immortal]

dis, that would be extremely difficult to make fluid

 

[disorganizer]

if we plan 7 turns in advance we could have 7 days for planning ;-)

HEY. it was just a joke with the 1.

 

[Immortal]

oh okay