Laws to Live With

The first ballot of Telling 6 just started today.

In ATITD, one of the more curious things you can do to affect the game is to propose laws that get voted on by citizens (players), the winning one then gets coded in by Teppy.

The sheer innovativeness of this concept is often ruined by human nature in practice.

•  People are lazy to create laws, that involves a lot of thinking and writing and care to avoid loopholes that can be exploited by an evil Teppy, similar to how a GM will deliberately misinterpret someone's "wish" in D&D. 

•  People are frightened of such potential to alter the game they already like (for the worse if the coder is feeling mean) and thus vote "No" on many things, causing about 90% of the laws to not pass.

•  Teppy can tech veto any law or portion thereof that is too hard to code (and does so with a fairly depressing frequency.)

• And even if both the people and Teppy are in agreement that a law should pass, RL being RL and good intentions and all that, it may take the length of the Telling before a passed law gets implemented (aka coded.)

Still, there is one law that is often passed without failure at the start of every Tale. That is the DPA, or the Departed Persons Act.

One of the problems of sandboxes wherein you create your own stuff and buildings and landmarks is the frustrating fact of player attrition and limited resources/lebensraum. This is most observable in Wurm Online, which does not have such an act, where you end up wandering a graveyard of a landscape of gutted, rotting buildings of people who have long since lost interest in the game, being unable to find room to put up your own stuff and having no rights or privileges to affect the existing buildings except to squat like hobos in the empty shells, making use of their public furnaces and anvils and stuff. All the desirable spaces near good resources are long gone. This, of course, does not make a new player want to stick around either.

A Tale in the Desert solves this with the DPA. A player that has gone unpaid or quit for a length of time waives his right to his stuff. Any other player can come down and claim it or tear it up.

There are, as all human laws go, still flaws with this. While it is very nice for new players to get a boost by stumbling across someone's abandoned compound and taking advantage of the resources therein, it is more often the case that the building will get claimed by a power player or guild watching quit players' belongings like vultures, ready to lap them up the instant the clock ticks over.

There is also little to no incentive for a quit player to return once the time limit is up, since he or she very well knows that all his stuff will be gone. Scooped up and assimilated by a hungry horde. The retorting argument is of course, then one should very well not quit and keep paying Teppy the sub fee, and everything will be kept for you the same as before. Most other MMOs though keep your characters and belongings on deep freeze and don't give them away.

On the opposing hand, I can also understand the situation where a newbie or a guy you know won't be staying long comes by and sets up shop in a distressingly close distance away, forming a visual eyesore that plagues you and your OCDness every time you log in or wander by.

(While most players on ATITD now know to give people a decent amount of space to act as their territory, I ran into a subset of this when some player came by and set up an Empty Hand Puzzle next to mine, except she didn't seem to know how to rotate or reposition the EHP, so creating this weird hole in the ground that sunk my puzzle, and looked ugly as hell. I was /this/ close to chatting her and begging her to reposition the goddamn thing, but I thwapped my OCD in favor being nice and have rationalized it away as helping to draw attention to my puzzle in a long string of identical looking EHPs.)

In cases like those, you would be LOOKING forward to the DPA time limit, so that you could do something about the freaking eyesore.

Thing is, a lot of the old veterans have entitlement issues and anything that isn't theirs is a freaking eyesore. :)

One of the things which I feel is the biggest crying shame about DPA and its variants is the removal of a player's legacy and effect on an existing Tale. A clean Egypt is a sterile one, whereas an Egypt that has many buildings and items to look at is an interesting one.

But what can one do? If you have a variant of the law that just makes things claimable (but not tearable down) or public use (without again being able to tear down), there is still the potential for eregious eyesore to turn up in a place most unwanted. So you have to be able to tear down something eventually. But if you can tear it down, people go after it like vultures.

This Tale, there are three variants of the DPA law proposed by different parties, which posits the interesting choice to the players: when is a good time limit that balances both stances above?

In previous Tellings, the time limit was 60 days. This was felt to err on the safe side, a player gone for two months, well, is not too likely to come back, whereas for financial reasons, players might have to skip a month of paying for ATITD. On the negative side, if you're waiting for the chance to tear down or claim someone's stuff, 60 days is an eon to wait.

We have a 60 day option this time around. We also have a 40 day option, as well as a 14 day one.

It should be interesting to see which option the majority of the playerbase prefers. Will it be human nature to go for the lesser evil and pick the 60 day option for self-preservation's sake? Will having three choices make it more likely that people will vote yes to one of them, instead of no, if there was only one DPA choice?