How does Scatterhome self-govern without a permanent government?

Aurelius

I just put up a bunch of info about how Scatterhome self-governs and how that system evolved from the rule-of-the-jungle of the past.

It's all here on the second half of this page: https://www.starmourn.com/scatterhome/

WyldeKarde

I am really excited about this system of government -- Scatterhome is developing into something I could definitely spend time with.

Are calls going to be mainly targeted at specific player characters or can you target calls at things like factories or refineries? I am thinking more along the lines of cartels targeting the market for certain goods in an area of Scatterhome.

Tecton

WyldeKarde said:

I am really excited about this system of government -- Scatterhome is developing into something I could definitely spend time with.

Are calls going to be mainly targeted at specific player characters or can you target calls at things like factories or refineries? I am thinking more along the lines of cartels targeting the market for certain goods in an area of Scatterhome.

Just specific player characters for now!

Qitorien

Absolutely love this. I was leaning toward Scatterhome anyway and this clinches it. Even while I say that, though, I'd love to see how the other governments work. I get the idea that they are more standard with tiers of government. Is that accurate?

Also, typo alert ^.^

Inexorably, over time, the gang composition of Scatterhome consisted of only two major gangs – the , and a few minor ones that were barely hanging on. The two majors – Haven’s Children and the Ishbi Yardies – were gearing up for the war everyone could see coming, and when it began, it was bloody.

After the first "gangs" " - the , and a few minor ones" doesn't make sense. I'm guessing the two major gangs listed below were once listed in that spot. That's 6 sections down from the subtitle "How Did Scatterhome's Governmental system Evolve?"

Also in the section after "muirder" should be "murder."

Sairys

Just the first things that come to mind.

Would the goal be to make influence gain roughly equivalent for PVPers and non-PVPers? Also, would there be an upper limit on influence, like a cap or diminishing returns?

Tecton

Sairys said:

Just the first things that come to mind.

Would the goal be to make influence gain roughly equivalent for PVPers and non-PVPers? Also, would there be an upper limit on influence, like a cap or diminishing returns?

The goal is to try and make multiple viable avenues of obtaining influence. Naturally, there's some crossover there, particularly things like Cosmpiercers, that contain elements of PVE and PVP, depending if there are players there defending it!

There's a cap on influence, and your influence decays slowly every day.

Villanox

So even though I'm not gonna be in scatterhome, would participating in sector wide events to protect scatterhome, thinking like helping fighting back the Ishavana or other world event kinda stuff, give you permanent influence? 

Aurelius

There's no such thing as permanent influence - influence will constantly decay!

Villanox

Is there a way to stop a small group of people from controlling the majority of the influence and stripping influence from or kicking anyone who gets enough influence to challenge their monopoly on votes? It seems like a very easy system to exploit.

Quean

Villanox said:

Is there a way to stop a small group of people from controlling the majority of the influence and stripping influence from or kicking anyone who gets enough influence to challenge their monopoly on votes? It seems like a very easy system to exploit.

I don't think that this system is that easy to exploit. Remember how influence is gained: automatically, by doing things that benefit the whole community. This means that yes, a Call can be made to punish someone with losing some of it, but it can be regained with donations, quests and PvP. This is exactly what I like about it - your voting power is ultimately in your own hands :-)

Villanox

Quean said:

Villanox said:

Is there a way to stop a small group of people from controlling the majority of the influence and stripping influence from or kicking anyone who gets enough influence to challenge their monopoly on votes? It seems like a very easy system to exploit.

I don't think that this system is that easy to exploit. Remember how influence is gained: automatically, by doing things that benefit the whole community. This means that yes, a Call can be made to punish someone with losing some of it, but it can be regained with donations, quests and PvP. This is exactly what I like about it - your voting power is ultimately in your own hands :-)

Not really. Yeah you can work up your influence but the votes could still be dominated by a few people.

Ikchor

The solution is simple: be one of those few people.

Aurelius

Villanox said:

Is there a way to stop a small group of people from controlling the majority of the influence and stripping influence from or kicking anyone who gets enough influence to challenge their monopoly on votes? It seems like a very easy system to exploit.

That could happen, but that can also just as easily happen in our standard voting-based systems in our other games. Were people to operate that way, basically screwing the entire civilization over by kicking almost everyone out, they'd probably find that the NPC citizens revolt and throw them out or something similar. 

Sairys

It's probably easier for it to happen in the elected official system tbh.
Like you're probably not going go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning kicked out of Scatterhome without any communication beyond the system messages.

Xiru

So this puts me back at square one with regards to deciding between the Ascendancy and Scatterhome. Gee, thanks.






(No really, thank you, I love you.)

Maygon

This makes the choice of choosing Scatterhome even that more exciting... I can't wait to see how this plays out with the player base. Wonder if we will have any present day gangs pop up. 

Indi

Aetolia tried to deal with people getting friends that don't play much to log in and vote during elections/referendums, by implementing a voting power thing tied to activity. Basically hours played each week, over a regular number of weeks.

It had limited success - characters just idled in havens anyway, easily keeping max voting power without actively doing anything at all in game.

I like this concept - tying it to effort rather than time. I'm sure there'll be some teething problems, but it sounds like fun to me.

Sairys

Having read over the different government styles, I'm more concerned about the Dominion than Scatterhome.
I feel like the concerns about people being kicked out or other power abuses seem more likely to happen there with one person in charge.

Devina

Power abuse can happen anywhere, with or without one person in charge; I think it would be difficult to abuse power for long in the Dominion, because someone would have to kick out every last person who was a threat -- which would be all of the people who actually benefit the Dominion.

I guess if you had a set group of friends you talked to outside of Starmourn, in the Real World, it could be an issue. But the only way an abuse of power will run extremely rampant is if it's a very lowly populated Dominion, I think.

Sairys

Devina said:

Power abuse can happen anywhere, with or without one person in charge; I think it would be difficult to abuse power for long in the Dominion, because someone would have to kick out every last person who was a threat -- which would be all of the people who actually benefit the Dominion.

I guess if you had a set group of friends you talked to outside of Starmourn, in the Real World, it could be an issue. But the only way an abuse of power will run extremely rampant is if it's a very lowly populated Dominion, I think.

Yep, it can and has happened in settings with more than one person in charge, it's just significantly easier when there is only one person in charge.
It also doesn't really need to be for long, if they're stepping down they can boot people they don't like as their last act with likely minimal consequences, and let's hope that the election ousting protections are in.

Also, from experience in IREs, you don't really need to kick everyone opposing you out, just enough of the right ones.

Also OOC clans and, more recently, discord groups are pretty prevalent. They provide benefits such as ease of discussing mechanics that are awkward to talk about IC or co-ordination of things for the game, I've got one that is also used for batphoning. These do result in ooc friendships over time and can lead to issues ic.

Devina

I'm more concerned about the Ascendancy, myself. I've seen a group of individuals dominate an organization's leadership and then run it into the ground; there's no 'if you do stuff for the Ascendancy, you get more votes' there, just one vote per person, so a strongly settled group can screw it up.

(Batphoning is also bad.)

Sairys

If influence is mostly a more active form of vote-weight, you can probably expect a settled group would be capping themselves out, particularly given the stuff that's listed for raising influence.

With that in mind, a settled group in the Ascendancy would need to maintain a broader support base as everyone always has "max influence", while in the Dominion you could probably just focus on a sufficient section of the active players.


Also, because it's bringing it to mind. Preferential voting would be really neat as it would limit vote splitting. 

Traveler

Sairys said:

Also, because it's bringing it to mind. Preferential voting would be really neat as it would limit vote splitting. 

When I first started playing and voting in Achaea, I thought to myself, "This is a MUD and we can do whatever we want - why don't we have a better voting system?" Like I'm sure there's reasons and it's more complicated than it may seem on surface, but it's worth consideration. Particularly to address the problem of splitting votes. I have definitely seen someone win solely because of split votes.

Devina

Everyone has max voting weight, sure, but they still only get a 1:1 ratio on votes per person. So if you have a group of 20 people who all always support their 21st friend, that's a consistent 21 votes for that person, whereas in the Dominion, anyone has a chance to also cap themselves out and be a contender (especially if it fluctates easily, like it supposedly will in Scatterhome).

I'm excited to see the different politics in action, I'm just a naturally pessimistic person.

Malash

Worst comes to worst, there's always the torches-and-pitchforks solution.

zacc

Will Scatterhome be more of a rogue's haven, a loose-knit org, rather than a "traditional" structured IRE city? If more city-like, will players be given the option to renounce their affiliation/membership and truly go rogue?

Tecton

zacc said:

Will Scatterhome be more of a rogue's haven, a loose-knit org, rather than a "traditional" structured IRE city? If more city-like, will players be given the option to renounce their affiliation/membership and truly go rogue?

You certainly can chose to forgo factional membership, you will lose out on a bunch of system (like Cosmpiercers and more) that tie into factional allegiance though!

Malash

What happens if a bunch of rogues capture a cosmpiercer?

Sairys

Traveler said:

Sairys said:

Also, because it's bringing it to mind. Preferential voting would be really neat as it would limit vote splitting. 

When I first started playing and voting in Achaea, I thought to myself, "This is a MUD and we can do whatever we want - why don't we have a better voting system?" Like I'm sure there's reasons and it's more complicated than it may seem on surface, but it's worth consideration. Particularly to address the problem of splitting votes. I have definitely seen someone win solely because of split votes.

Yeah, one of the more glaring issues in an iron realm for me was a referendum which had options for like.... "yes and x", "yes and y", "yes and z", and "no" with the yes options getting a clear majority of the vote and the no option winning.

Devina said:

Everyone has max voting weight, sure, but they still only get a 1:1 ratio on votes per person. So if you have a group of 20 people who all always support their 21st friend, that's a consistent 21 votes for that person, whereas in the Dominion, anyone has a chance to also cap themselves out and be a contender (especially if it fluctates easily, like it supposedly will in Scatterhome).

I'm excited to see the different politics in action, I'm just a naturally pessimistic person.

But in the Dominion and Scatterhome you would expect that a settled group would be consistently doing all of the activities that would give them influence. (this is an assumption based on personal experience elsewhere)
On top of that, given that bribery was listed as an option, if someone is a little low and they want to ensure they're maxed out for an important vote they can throw money at that problem (which their friends could lend them if necessary).

Using your example, assuming the voting pool is 40 (for the 21 majority) and if the average vote weight for an org is around 50% of max but an active settled groups average is 90%, then you only need 15 people rather than 21. Mostly because in theory, anyone below max could also be considered to have less than one vote.

I don't have an issue with active players having greater influence, but also, realistically, these systems can give an active minority power over a less active majority.

Aurelius

Malash said:

What happens if a bunch of rogues capture a cosmpiercer?

You can't as you have no military with which to lead to do that.

Indi

Traveler said:

When I first started playing and voting in Achaea, I thought to myself, "This is a MUD and we can do whatever we want - why don't we have a better voting system?" Like I'm sure there's reasons and it's more complicated than it may seem on surface, but it's worth consideration

My understanding, and this is based on a faint memory I have of an article or conversation with Matt M. in the early 2000s (who I believe studied political science?) where he explained that the org political systems were intentionally 'flawed' to encourage and facilitate another level of conflict in the game.

Sure, there have been times when that hasn't been fun, but the same can be said of every conflict system, whether pvp, social or whatever - I've generally found over the years that it's been more fun than not, which would make it a success.

Matt of course might chime in and say that my memory is wrong and that I must have been tripping back then, in which case I apologise.