Editing Round 9/History (section)

=== Late Introduction of Victory Conditions ===

Now let's discuss what Round 9 absolutely failed at. We did not provide a victory condition to work towards. It's important that nomic games have victory conditions early because they lend the players a sense of direction. Without a victory condition for Round 9, each player had their own goals that they were working toward. Wotton and Nyhilo collected ducks. Trungle and moonroof collected quacks. Most of us were just along for the ride. Once we'd gotten far enough along, however, it became hard to care about the game where there was no goal. It would be hard to add one at that phase, too. Everyone had been amassing resources for so long that setting a goal would probably favor one person over the others. In absence of productive things to do, some of us turned to scamming the ruleset, an attitude that ended up killing the game. Nyhilo made a valiant attempt to introduce a victory condition, but it never came to fruition (see {{Heading|The Duck Old One Endgame (6 Mar 2021-28 Apr 2021)}}) due to these and other factors. If it had come out sooner, perhaps it could have changed the way the round progressed.

I occasionally find myself drawn to one of the most ironic parts of this story wherein one of the greatest ills of the game was bundled with something that may have cured those ills. Proposal 1, the proposal that introduced the idea of ducks in the first place actually included a win condition: owning half of all ducks (Everythings, 3 Jan 2021; see {{Heading|The First Day (3 Jan 2021)}}). When it was reproposed as Proposal 🦆, that section was absent (Trungle, 3 Jan 2021). Needless to say, the round would have played out completely differently had Trungle included the bit about the victory condition in his version. If there had been a win condition from the start, then we would have no cause to scam the ruleset so much in March and April. Perhaps the game wouldn't have even gone on long enough for that to happen.