Forgot one last thing.

Mumble, as for the Senetors and the Reps. I think one body of reps will be hard to manage, but two would definetly be pushing it. I think that each "influencial" empire should be able to choose a "leader" in the Council. This person would act as a general moderator, and will also be responsible for making tough decision when things get touchy. They will be like the inner circle of the Council. But, that could be seen as a concentration of power, and we dont want to raise eyebrows or discourage the less active Empires. We will have to tread carefully with this one.

Here is where we may run into trouble. We want everyone to have a say. How is that going to be represented? I have an idea, not sure how good it will be, but it is an idea none the less.

1. An Empire must have X members before they can be represented by an Ambassador within the counsel, or must have posted X amount of points as an Empire.

2. An Empire has a single Ambassador who will vote on "bills" brought before the council.

3. An Empire who does not met the criteria to have an Ambassador may have a representative. These Representatives can align themselves to an Empire who does have an Ambassador. For every X amount of representatives aligned with said Empire, the Empire has another vote.

Example, the Diplos have 1 Ambassador and 3 Representatives from other Empires aligned with them. During a vote, the Ambassador has 1 vote for his Empire, they vote yes. 2 of the 3 Representatives from the aligned Empires do not like the proposition, therefore the second vote must be no. A more official and defined capacity can be dictated at a later date. (It would be beneficial to the Aligned Empires to participate in forum discussions both on the official site as well as the Empires forums) In turn creating more participation all the way around.

4. All non - sanctioned, active players are free to choose a single Ambassador to represent them. I would suggest they create a thread here on these forums and direct others to it.

5. All Empires who do not meet the criteria to have there own Ambassador may either follow the non - sanctioned Ambassador, or elect a representative from their Empire and form an "Alliance" with an Empire who has an Ambassador. Choice would be theirs.

This would give everyone an opportunity for a single vote.

OK, that's the Idea. Like it? Hate it?

Just an idea Sorry it was so long.

you are going to end up with 2 votes identical for the same Empire.

Not totally true but possibly. Each empire doesn’t necessarily have a homogenous opinion. Two representatives from an empire may very well express this.

We could make this extremely complicated if we really wanted to

Please don’t. We need to use the KISS principle here. In my opinion it’s already starting to get out of hand. This is evidenced by the fact that folks are having to write too many posts that are too large and need to be broken into two pieces.

When we get to the point of having to break our posts into three pieces then we’ve gone too far. I’ve already had to start generating these posts in Word and cutting and pasting them into multiple posts. This is at least the third post I felt obligated to write that’s into my second page of the Word Doc and will have taken me close to an hour to write by the time I’m done, and this is to decide nothing of substance, just discussing procedural crap.

I envision a few meetings with a few decisions as to how to set up the AltMeta followed by great long periods of inactivity. It seems that some people view this as a political future. If you want the job of being one of these representatives you should be automatically excluded.

BTW Quixen, the complexity rant wasn't particularly addressed towards you. You just happened to provide a good segue into the topic. But in my mind it's a very real danger. I think if this is set up so that the reps actually do represent large groups of metaverse players, and you require a significant majority of them to agree, then you're pretty much guaranteed to have a popular decision. TheGreatEmperor is correct in saying you need to have some things in writing, but it’s so easy to go the way of over-legislation. I think this constitution will be a good test. Let’s see how much in-fighting and grief occurs over getting what should be a simple thing accepted.

May I ask what is going to be done to represent everyone else?

As far as anything I've seen, there've been no other empires to speak up and say “what about us”, so that leaves unaligned players. I would like to include "unaligned" representatives ASAP. I suggested that we include two right from the start. TheGreatEmperor voiced some concern about that. I don't remember precisely what the concern was but I kind of agree that trying to deal with that along with getting approval from the 4 empires we have, along with ratifying our constitution, along with selecting reps from each empire, is not something we have to do instantly.

We could as easily (probably easier) wait until the council is formed and deal with how to get unaligned reps as one of the first orders of business. You may be very well correct about the numbers. Actually that brings up a good point. Another first order of business for the council would be to come up with some method of doing a metaverse census. But I truly think we need to avoid something like we need 1 rep for every 25 (or whatever) players or some such rule. It’s not a bad thing to use as a guideline but as a rule, it would be quite a pain. People do come and go quite frequently here. I want to avoid thrashing around trying to religiously match the numbers of reps and players. I would really hate to get involved with what could become metaverse gerrymandering.

How will everyone who wants a say, get one?

By simply speaking up as you and TheGreatEmperor and many others have done throughout this thread and other related threads that have sprouted up. I doubt we would have council deliberations in a vacuum; we would probably have open threads to discuss possible actions that everyone would be free to comment on. The only thing will be when it comes time to vote only the reps will do so. Even so, I think the internal council votes should be made on a public thread for all to see.

Well, at least I kept this response to a single post.

Actually, I wish G.W. Swicord would comment on this directly. I think he's reluctant to comment since he's yet to post a metaverse game, but I think with his political science background he could provide some realistic guidence.

More individual and group competition medals might help as well. It true that metals are nothing more than little trinkets on your post, but there is still some sense of accomplishment (and lets not discuss the real importance of computer games on the grand scale of things )...For instance:

1st, 2nd, 3rd and top 10 highest scoring game medals for each map/difficulty size.

1st, 2nd, 3rd and top 10 highest scoring metaverse score in total for each difficulty level. (same as what you get when you go to the metaverse and sort by difficulty)

1st, 2nd, 3rd and top 10 highest scoring metaverse game period. (This is what I was doing with my recent 500K game, even with no medal for it...)

This would offer up more challenges. So rather than trying to be top of the metaverse, you could decide to try for the top scoring tiny/tough game, etc. I think this would also help offer up something for the new player. I simply don't have any interest in playing games on easier settings at this point and would take myself out of the competition for the lower level difficulty games, helping make them available for the new player. I suspect most of the established players would follow a similar pattern. This would also be something where a computer could easily assign the metals to the appropriate players. I think this would effectively give us player brackets...
Where as I agree with most of your comments, I don't think the established players should be penalised..
It is not their fault that they bought the game six months before someone else - I am a new player but I do respect the fact that others have played for a LOT longer - you can see from the rankings...
What we need is MORE players of all diffs.....

What we need is MORE players of all diffs.....

Yep. That's true. The scoring method should also be such that new players can reasonably compete with long term players, but that long term players shouldn't be penalized either. It will be a balancing act that's sure to not be perfect, but perfection isn't required, only improvement is required. And improvement, in my opinion, is defined by the level of interest and participation in the metaverse by the general GC2 population.

i will open up a thread for discussion today. The writting should occur sometimes mid-week of next week. Unless, a replacement or better individual is choosen.

Looks to be a good start. Open up the thread and I'm sure there will be plenty of good input. In some sense with the contribution of many it may effectively write itself. In the end perhaps an editor is more what it will need than a writer.

G.W. Swicord again comes to mind.

Yes, lets keep the constitution simple, so everyone can understand it.

Definetly, we are trying to build a better Metaverse, not change the world.

I am thinking you all are discussing forming the council

No, you we're right the first time. I've no interest in setting up a committee to discuss the setting up of a committee. We are talking about setting a metaverse council to actually try to do something. That’s not to say there won’t be some of what you’re talking about though. The council should and will evolve over time.

For example, at the moment the four founding empires are the best and most reasonable surrogate for all metaverse players. But once established, the council should seek to represent *all* metaverse players. If the council is successful in this then clearly the council is a better representation of all metaverse players than the founding empires are, but we have to start from someplace. If we tried to have an open vote of all metaverse players it would just be chaos. I don't believe that anything could ever get accomplished that way. Hope this makes some vague kind of sense.

Second I agree and disagree with this statement.

You're right on both counts here.

we need to set some countermeasures

I don't believe we need any countermeasures against bad behavior. Public opinion will be counter measure enough. If representatives let power (as if this is any great amount of power) go to their heads and end up doing things counter to the general interest, the council will quickly find itself ignored and most likely ridiculed.

The idea that we need to provide a system of checks and balances, while in some sense an altruistic thing to do, will in this case simply lead us down a rat hole of ridiculous rules covering god knows what with exceptions needed for this, that and the other thing. If in the end you can't trust your reps then the whole thing is doomed anyway. I don't want to doom it right out of the gate by trying to legislate all behavior.

I don't really think that this is your intent, and I don’t want to discourage your participation and contribution, but most of your arguments so far have seemed to have this effect.

I am not saying there will be power, but a false sense of it would probably be generated by those that are ambitious. Hopefully this wont happen. But, yes i am getting quite ahead of myself, and i agree that over complecating things will just lead to more problems than solutions.

Just another update from the HCH. Elections have started! We have five candidates, so we should start getting an idea of which two members will come from the HCH. We have also so far had 100% support for the Council. I'll continue to update as things develop.

AlexAtticus