Editing Round 9/History (section)

=== Pacing ===

Let's start by discussing what Round 9 did well. In the author's opinion, the pacing of a Nomic game can be tricky to get right. People have a lot going on in their lives and many of us can't check in with the frequency that some games require. BlogNomic is a fast-paced game with lots of moving parts. You have to check in nearly every day during the most active spells. It can take tens of minutes each day you check in to get your bearings, strategize, and do everything that you want to do. 

Agora is at the other end of the spectrum. Rarely do you have to worry about an action that is to be taken more frequently than weekly. This comes at the cost of speed. It takes a long time to see the fruits of your efforts in Agora, and that is a deterrent for many.

With Round 9, we wanted to create a game somewhere in the middle of BlogNomic and Agora Nomic in this respect. The idea of Voting Periods arose and ended up being very popular (see {{Heading|Voting periods}}). Every action in Round 9 ended up aligned to voting periods. Proposals were passed at the end of the next voting period. You could feed someone's duck once per voting period. You could send your duck out scouting once per voting period and retrieve it during the next voting period. It led to a structure where players only had to check in twice a week to be completely caught up with the game. This schedule really worked for lots of people, so much so that it was adopted for [[Round 10]]. I would not be surprised if we keep reusing it for rounds to come.

This all notwithstanding, the idea of urgent proposals turned the tables back to the side of immediacy a little bit (see {{Heading|Urgency}}), circumventing the issue of the game being unplayable for two voting periods in a row as we twiddled our thumbs waiting for a hotfix to pass. I opine that they enhanced the semiweekly structure even though they did not fit perfectly into it.