Time to doom forever my chance of becoming Demi-Pharoah. :-) [Note: Now that i've been bumped from what may be the last DP round i must admit that my enthusiasm for completing this has gone down by an order of magnitude, but now it's a matter of pride. So keep reading and see what bloody-mindedness can do for a writer. :-) ]
The office of the Demi-Pharoah was intended, i believe (and i have had some corroboration on this) to be the head of a player-initiated government. This government would come in to existance as the pressures of over-population caused more frequent confrontations which would be solved, or at least managed, by drawing lines in the sand and chopping Egypt into smaller, more manageable pieces. Each piece would have as its head an elected official who could slay miscreants. I will not go into the other laws and customs that would have to come into place, but suffice it to say i believe such an arrangement could be set up and would be workable.
However, because the game ended up drastically under-subscribed, there is no population pressure. There are, in fact, vast tracts of empty inhabitable land. Some of the Paths are in trouble because there aren't enough people participating. In short, the main reason for having a Demi-Pharoah at all didn't happen. And there is no other known reason, doom-sayers and breast-beaters aside.
But what about The Ban? And what, then, are the qualities of a good Demi-Pharoah?
For those of you who may be new to Egypt, The Ban is the ability to remove a *player character* from the game, more or less permanently. At the moment only MissBarbara and Asylum know exactly how it works (and, like so many things in this Live Beta we call a game, it was bugged out of the gate) but it involves hunting the PC down and clicking on him/her. The account continues to function and the player can start a new character, but the old one is gone, along with all accumulated skills and Tests passed.
(I say "more or less permanently" because we in Egypt have another charming institution, the legal system. It is conceivable that the banned individual could be brought back to full glory as the result of a Law, especially if passed by an overwhelming majority of the citizens to redress a perceived evil deed. I don't know what Teppy may or may not have promised in this regard.)
Each Demi-Pharoah has the ability to Ban seven PCs. The Ban doesn't work on other DPs, GMs, and possibly Pharoah. It has been likened to a gun with seven bullets, or a killer rabbit that can bite off seven heads and then dies. (I'm lying: the Ban has never been compared to a killer rabbit. :-) It's a very big hammer indeed, and it scared the bejesus out of Egypt when Teppy first announced it Way Back When. In fact many candidates campaigned, and at least one won election on the platform of, "I will never use the Ban under any circumstances."
Let's examine what the Ban can and can't do.
As people have already figured out, the Ban can't really correct anti-social behavior. It works on the PC but not the account, so there is nothing to keep the griefer from creating a new character and resuming his/her activities. It does deprive someone of all guild affiliations and building ownership, but they can mostly be reclaimed if the person was "unjustly" Banned. Further, the same thing can be accomplished by kicking him/her out of the guild(s) in the first place, without needing to resort to anything that drastic. One's reputation is everything in Egypt, and a pariah will languish and, at the very least, be much less effective.
(Having said all that, i must also allow that there are some people who just might be better off shot. While Banning a griefer would not necessarily prevent the behavior from continuing, it does send a definite message which all but the most depraved would receive. That sort of personality would have more fun ganking newbies in some other game, and in my limited experience they have figured this out.)
The other thing the Ban does do is wipe out all Tests passed. On the face of it this is bad for Egypt as a whole, removing a resource for the Big Test. This aspect has bugged me from the start, and no matter how hard i think about it i can't come up with anything positive to say about it. This is a loss for the game, plain and simple
A word or two on what the Ban "might be intended for", that is, whether there is some planned future situation that will "require" a Ban to deal with it. My feelings on this are that one could certainly design a scenario which would require quicker action than is possible with a Law (leaving aside the, um, unpredictable time periods that elapse between a Petition being submitted and it appearing for vote, and between the passage into Law and implementation.) However such things are just speculation.
What i really want to talk about, and what i'm just going to launch in to because i can't be bothered at the moment to come up with a smooth transition, is what makes a good DP, and how anyone can possibly decide.
Basing your DP vote on pledges to behave a certain way in certain hypothetical situations seems to me to be bad for everyone. The DP makes a blind promise, and if a situation comes up that is even remotely similar a certain class of people expect the DP to behave a certain way. Inevitably the real situation (for values of "real" that take into account the fact that this is only a game) varies in some important detail from the situation that was the basis for the promise. Besides trying to figure out what the "right" thing is to do, the DP is also burdened by having to figure out what is expected, and by whom, and whether it matters.
This can lead to one of two situations: the DP acts "according to the pledge" and pisses off the people who think the DP is a gutless coward hiding behind a rule rather than exercising judgement and is never to be trusted again, or acts "contrary to the pledge" and pisses off the people who now believe that the DP is a gutless liar who is never to be trusted again. There will be a segment of hand-wringers who bemoan the tragedy of the situation but don't actually contribute anything constructive, and of course the vast majority who are either not paying attention or don't care, or both. I'm not denying that it is good theater, but is that the true role of the DP? Tragic anti-hero? Oddly enough, i think this might be true.
(Side comment: pledging to only use the Ban if the people vote to use it seems pointless. Just pass a Law banning the person in question directly and cut out the middleman. It's more effective, too, because there is no question of playing tag.)
Then there are people who pledge only to use their judgement. These loons are, of course, unelectable because nobody trusts anyone else's word or judgement these days, or at least not many. We live in a world of signed contracts and lawyers. There was a Cartouche round where people were printing out screenshots of "signed" chat windows for goodness sake. That degenerated into one of the most acrimonious brawls i've ever seen. This is one of several ways that Egypt models Real Life, to its detriment as a game.
So what's a body to do? In my opinion, how much you care should depend on how much you care about fulfilling the Stranger's Challenge. If you don't care about the Challenge, then who, or even whether, there is a DP simply doesn't matter. This outlook has a certain appealing Zen-like quality, because it turns out that you can in fact pass a lot of Tests even if you don't care about Tests. But if you don't care about accumulating them you can't care about losing them either. Still, you can have a whole lot of fun even if you never pass a single Test; the people of Egypt are, by and large, really pretty amazing.
If you do care about the Challenge then it becomes tricker. I've stated my belief that, in Test terms, the Ban is purely destructive, removing resources with no compensation. That being the case you may well want someone who has pledged to never use the Ban. At the very least you need to pick the person who dislikes it the most among all the candidates.
Trickiest of all is the belief that the Ban must be good for something, even though no one has come up with a situation that isn't handled just as well or better by a Law. (Final digression: the DP has to think in terms of all of Egypt. Individual rights need to be balanced against "the good of society". If a situation imperils all of Egypt, then action is required. If it just imperils a few, however unfair it might be, then it might be better to let the (much slower) Law work its course.) For this you need a person that you both trust and that you think has good judgement. Further, having voted for them (assuming you did) you need to be willing to back whatever decision they make, because that's *why* you voted for them.
(Final final digression. (so i lied. so sue me. :-) If the DPs are ever called upon to use their powers, they are in fact hosed in terms of public opinion. Regardless of what position they campaigned on people will project on them their image of what a DP should be. Each person's image is different. No one can possibly meet all those expectations.)
With all that said why did (do?) i want the job? First and foremost, i would like to pass the Test and move closer to becoming an Oracle. Sadly for my ambitions, i would do so appealing to the loon faction i mentioned in that i won't promise to either use or withhold a Ban. I believe that each situation would be unique and require information-gathering and analysis before a reasoned decision could be made. Having said that, i will guarantee my place in the Halls of the Hated, and guarantee some theater for the populace, by being willing to speculate on what i might do in certain situations. I would only do so with the caveat that i stated above, that is, that each situation is different and that circumstances can change the meaning of actions. No one would remember this, though, if it ever came time for a ruling, thus assuring plenty of entertainment for the masses.
I also wandered about Egypt supplying survey data or answering open Pulses. Unfortunately i didn't keep notes on this, so i don't know whose Pulses i either supplied data for or answered, but the general experience gave me some idea of what i liked and didn't like in terms of questions.
Charging forward, i come up with 7 questions and kick the Pulse into survey mode. My guildmate informs me that my Pulse is hopelessly boring. :-) Ah, well, that's life. I'll be lucky if 50 people wander by before the Telling ends in any case. However it appears that the Pulse is working, and the only penalty for fooling around with it is that now i can't add my input in Survey mode, so i need 50 whole people instead of 49.
Logged the Pulse on the Tests page. Awaiting the thundering hoards. :-)
I worded two of the questions ambiguously and i'm going to get two kinds of answers for them. However it seems that it's only slightly ambiguous so i should get enough of one type of answer to be worthwhile. Also it looks like some people skipped some of the questions, possibly accidentally. Also, it appears that the Pulse is remembering the fact that i answered a survey even though i wiped out the questions afterwards and therefore lost all the data. I'd speculate that if i wiped out all the questions again the Pulse would still remember that 7 people had been by. It might be possible to have 49 people come by, wipe out and redo the questions, have one more person come by and then open the Pulse with the data from 1 question.
There isn't any good way to deal with this problem that doesn't lend itself to "gaming", and we all know that the developers would rather die than open anything up to gaming, so Pulse builders are stuck with whatever they set up initially with no way to wipe out a bad start short of salvaging the Pulse and rebuilding it. As long as people understand that there isn't any reason for complaint. I'd recommend to any potential Pulse builders that you bounce your questions off a sampling of guildmates and neighbors to get a feel for the sorts of questions that work and those that don't. The only option you have is to wipe out a question completely once you go into Survey mode.
I should back up at this juncture and explain what i had in mind when i set this up. However, my first couple of attempts were pretty incoherant, so i'm going to have to put that off until a later time.
Then i got involved with the Lake of Reeds megalopolis. This wasn't exactly Architecture, i told myself, i was helping with a public works project that would help all of Egypt. Yeah, that was it. Not Architecture at all.
So i planed 20,000 boards, donated a couple hundred thousand bricks, used up all our lapis (40 or 50) looking (unsuccessfully) for a Unity cut, humped paint from one end of Egypt to the other, stirred cement, busted rocks by hand, and generally behaved, well, like an Architect. The interesting thing that i found was that it was fun, but not because i was making all that stuff (though that does have its satisfaction). It brought me in contact with a lot of interesting people that i hadn't up until that time had a chance to meet (or rather, whom i'd had the chance to meet but hadn't taken the opportunity.) As usual with the game, it was the community that made things worth doing.
So i dusted off the set of Octec crystals that i'd been sitting on since last summer, and made a statue. (Possibly amusing sidelight: for most of the game, that is, until i actually built the thing in March, i thought that the dead guy was named "Octet", like an 8-part musical piece. When one of my guildmates pointed out my error, i almost bet her that i had the right spelling. Good thing that i checked first.) I poked around and discovered that i could build an 18-cubit marble obelisk in Southern Egypt and pass the test, so i did, learning a lot about raising rabbits in the process.
Now i'm working on a pyramid. I guess i've turned into a loon. :-)
The pyramid is done now. All told it took about four weeks, give or take, from when i tapped the first rod to when i consecrated it. I had a help from my guildmates MacPhisto and Nephte, and others, especially with finding blocks and making the gearboxes for the two automatons, but i have to claim most of the effort for building it. That doesn't count the time i spent beforehand making glass rods, with all that entails. The automatons made it all possible, of course. Without them i would have gone mad (not that anyone would have been able to tell :-) with all the pushing. It also allowed me to build my pyramid on a grassy plain, just because i could.
The automatons are a bit fussy to work with. They run on Angel Stone, which my guildmates were kind enough to make for me. I tried to hack the fuel depletion algorithm by removing the stones whenever i stopped the machine, but there appears to be some sort of metering attached to the machine itself. On the other hand i'm completely mystified as to what the algorithm might be. I was making runs back and forth between the block field and my construction site. I could make three or four complete runs on the same stones, pulling them out and replacing them at each end of the trip. Then the machine would eat two stones in one round trip. Then it would run for awhile longer. It seemed to eat stones faster if i turned it more, but the effect was never clear. It was very mysterious, and i eventually gave up trying to figure it out. I moved the first two-thirds of the blocks with one machine, and then built the second one, which really sped up the last third. All told i used about 20 stones.
The other annoying bit about the automaton is turning it. The center of motion is about one-and-a-half grid points *behind* the machine. So if you want to turn at a certain point (i ended up marking my paths with bonfires) you have to drive the machine past that point before changing direction. Then the machine rotates as if it were sitting on the edge of a turntable (you are all old enough to know what a record player is, yes? :-). If you're in the middle of the desert it doesn't matter, but i was navigating around hills and sand dunes.
One other tip: you need to be standing near the block that you want to load, that is, it's possible to have a block in range of the automaton but not be able to load it because you are not standing close enough to the block itself. And don't get me started on where the block ends up when you unload it. The answer: some random location in the general vicinity of the back of the machine. Several times i drove the machine into the middle of the construction site but the block got unloaded too far away to load into the pyramid. Very annoying. One more random note: if the machine runs into something it can't cross it just stops and ceases to consume fuel.
But that's all behind me. I've got a nice little 55-block pyramid on a grassy plain. Now i'm working on cutting all the Queen's Tombs for a Set's Ladder.
Start with 30 wood, 20 limestone, and 18 water in jugs. Build a 10-wood fire and light it off. When it gets down to 0 wood, add all the limestone and 1 more wood. When that wood disappears, add one more wood. You should now have 18 wood and 18 water in jugs.
Now you start a two-phase cycle. When the 1 wood disappears add 2 water and 1 wood to the fire. When that wood disappears, add another wood. That's it. Repeat this until you run out of wood. When the fire burns down you should have 10 lime and 8 charcoal.
I will note in passing that there is no theoretical reason why one couldn't throw in more limestone and run the fire for longer with more wood and more water. I do 20 at a time because my head explodes if it try to run it longer, but there is no reason why you couldn't throw in 100 limestone and feed it with 100 wood and 98 water. This would get you 50 lime after about 17 minutes of fussing. What i do is run two fires at once and end up with 20 lime after about 4 minutes.
Update: My semi-guildmate Nephte has figured out a simpler and more productive variant. Start with 30 wood, 20 limestone, and 19 water in jugs. Build an 11-wood fire. Add all the limestone when the fire gets to 1 wood. Then add 1 wood and 1 water each time the fire drops to 0 wood. You end up with the same 10 lime but with 13 charcoal, and you're doing the same thing each time so there is less to keep track of. She has successfully run 4 of them at once, but YMMV.