Making a Change to Racing+

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Making a Change to Racing+
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The Racing+ mod (and the Jud6s mod before it) are created by Zamiel for the purposes of speedrunning and racing. Subsequently, the changes in the Racing+ mod are a rough combination of what Zamiel thinks is best and a distillation of what the the speedrunning/racing community wants.

Occasionally, a community member may not like a particular feature or attribute of Racing+. One good thing about Racing+ is that almost anything in the mod can be up for debate or be changed. However, getting a change into Racing+ is not easy (and this is by design).

The following is the policy to get something changed in Racing+:

1) Write up a detailed description of the change that you propose on Pastebin.com (or a similar website). Include the scope of the change, the pros of changing it, and the cons of changing it.
2a) Send the Pastebin to Zamiel. If it sounds like a good change, and it is minor and/or non-controversial, then it will be implemented in the next patch.
2b) If it sounds like a major change or something that is likely to be contentious, then you will need to gather support for your idea. (Whether a change is considered minor or major is up to Zamiel's discretion.)
3) Privately message active speedrunners/racers and convince them to support your change. (Do NOT publicly blast the Discord server with an @everyone.)
4) Edit your Pastebin with the names of the speedrunners/racers that agree with your change.
5) Once you have gathered 20 "signatures", send the Pastebin to Zamiel.
6) The change will now go up for an official vote, which means that a new channel will be created in the Discord server, an @everyone announcement will be made in the #announcements channel, and 2 weeks will be given for all active speedrunners/racers to respond. If the vote gets 66% or more of the vote, then the change will be implemented in the next patch.





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Why is this policy in place?
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(This is an excerpt from a discussion on Discord in 2017.)

REX - 05/14/2017
voting with emojis is a great idea
features of R+ should be up for voting more often

Zamiel - 05/14/2017
any feature of R+ can be up for a vote. but the onus is on you, not me. the policy i currently have in place is that if you gather a petition of 20 active racers that support a proposed change, then that change can go up for an official vote.

REX - 05/14/2017
20 racers is a fuckton

Zamiel - 05/14/2017
@REX 37 people voted in the mimic chest change, so around 20 people is a good number as a baseline for an contentious issue.

REX - 05/14/2017
in bavaria, 2 out of ~10 mil have to sign something for it to be publicly voted, that's 20% not 50%
and even then just the most relevant things get publicly voted

Zamiel - 05/14/2017
Bavaria is an okay analogy. But I think a better analogy is the Constitution of the United States. In order to amend the constitution, it requires two thirds of both federal legislatures AND two thirds of all of the state legislatures. So why is it two thirds instead of fifty one percent? The reason is that power flips between the Republicans and the Democrats in a cyclical manner. Imagine that when Republicans get into power, then they use their new majority to amend the constitution, and the entire law of the land radically shifts. Then, 4 to 8 years later, when Democrats get a majority, they use that majority to re-amend the constitution back to the way it was. In this way, the system becomes volatile in an undesirable way.

How does this relate to Racing+? People put a lot of hours into the mod practicing and getting used to the mechanics. Assume a hypothetical in which a new mechanic is decided with 51% of the vote. And after that, 5 people "retire" by stop playing the game. Now, a new vote is called and another patch is needed to satiate this new majority. And then, after that patch, 5 new people join the community, and yet another vote is called and another patch is needed. On the scale from being set in stone to having wild fluctuations, I'd like to stay closer to the conservative end of that spectrum. Subsequently, I'd desire a number higher than 51% and something closer to 66%.

But of course, that's only the first half of the argument. Bavaria also fails as an analogy because Racing+ is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship that puts a high priority on what most of the people playing the mod want. If 66% of people voted to remove Mom's Knife from the game, I wouldn't do that, because I have a vision for what I want the mod to be, and removing the knife doesn't fall into that vision.

By now, hopefully I've convinced you that affecting change should be difficult, not easy. You're proposing a casual voting system using silly emoticons in which a ton of work has to be done to verify that duplicate votes are not cast and that the people voting are actual speedrunners who actually have Racing+ races played over the past 30 days. Again, the onus of work should be on YOU, not on me. Don't be lazy.

thisguyisbarry - 05/15/2017
@Zamiel Having a minimum quota of people is perfectly fine for a vote, but to initiate the vote in the first place twenty people is more than half of the people who voted for the first vote of 37 people (or 39?).
How many people does it require for an amendment to be proposed, and then carried on to vote in the example you gave? I assure you it's a lower number. If you want to require votes to be a super-majority, then that would require 66%, but initiating a vote in the first place is another thing altogether. If I need to get over 50% to sign a petition, and 50% is then required to pass, why even bother with a vote. It's already decided and would just be a formality.

Zamiel - 05/15/2017
@thisguyisbarry If you think that some specific number less than 20 might be better, I'm open to that.

More generally though, understand that I intentionally don't want voting to be easy to initiate. Why?
If you take a look at the state government of California, one interesting feature is that it only takes 5% of the population to initiate an election referendum option (365,880 people as of 2014).

This may sound like a very democratic (and good!) way to do things. But what ends up happening is that every time it comes for people to vote for Congress/Senate, there are 10+ miscellaneous issues tacked on to the ballot. And the general population isn't informed on any of these issues. In fact, there are so many that it quickly becomes impossible to research them all, nor is it actually worth peoples time to even be concerned with them. So sometimes very silly things get voted in because people don't fully understand what they are even voting on.

How does this relate to Racing+? Well, I don't want people to have to vote in a poll every single day (or even every single week) on some new topic of discussion. It's cumbersome and its a ridiculous ask from Racing+ users. Encouraging (or forcing) people to constantly vote in polls doesn't make sense when 90% of Racing+ users (as a rough estimate) do not actually care about the minutiae of individual bug fixes. Voting should be infrequent and only when there is a strong likelihood of the vote resulting in an actual change (as opposed to the vote resulting in the status quo). As you may imagine, the best way to accomplish that is to have it "already decided" as you put it.

But even that description is overblown. Different people care about different issues. Just because you gather a list of 20 people who support your change does not in any way guarantee that the vote is already decided. But what it does do is guarantee that:

1) You are willing to take the issue seriously, rather than spitball ideas in a Discord channel and see if it sticks with the Racing+ community with 0 effort on your part.
2) You have strong community backing in that you actually have a dialog with many, many people (who will tell you to fuck off if you idea sucks).

This system acts as an important buffer. It weeds out bad ideas WITHOUT bothering the entire Racing+ community to have to vote them down in cumbersome polls. And it weeds out complainers who just like to complain.