Fair, you should never let one person decide everything. Which is… kind of my issue here? In these types of Quests, one person tends to emerge as the main vote-maker and others just go with it because it is easier. Again, my issue is more about vagueness about choices- I would label "huge number without easy distinguish" as being part of that.
Though I have also observed that people will be weirdly indifferent about admitting they have a problem. I literally dealt with a community that seemed to all hate me, but they couldn't be bothered to literally admit that when I pointed out nobody else was complaining.
Again, I really don't think most people are deliberately picking fun/interesting Personal Actions. I deal with a Spider-Man quest where everyone just ignores trying to meet with Daredevil despite that obviously sounding cool. Sure, different Quest, but I've already seen examples of people being too indifferent to admit their feelings.
I would like to clarify that the issues of the many, many actions in the action phase being difficult to parse and consider every option, the difficulty of planning and the implementation of personal actions as of now to be distinctly different potential problems. As such I'm a little confused with what you are trying to argue here.
Yes one person does tend to emerge as the main vote-maker in this kind of quest, that's true. What does it have to do with personal actions or action clutter? I've already taken steps to combat this to some degree at some points like with approval voting during the hero phase, but as you can tell there are people who don't like that all that much as steps taken to prevent vote hegemony tend to disrupt the capability of planning as well. Admittedly the system I have in place to prevent one person from taking complete control doesn't really work to prevent one person from becoming the loudest voice and being able to rally others around them. The only way I could conceivably come up with a system that prevents one person from being the main vote-maker is if I denied people who lead the charge in previous votes from being able to vote in the next one. Such a system is unfun, unfair and actively poisonous to a quest's community. I will not be implementing anything like it and though you may not like it, there likely will be a main vote-maker for this quest on most issues.
That being said this quest is pretty good at preventing one person from taking complete control over it for its entire lifespan. Ukranian Ranger, Simon_Jester, Torgamous, Jonasquinn, Sirrocco, Zale and more have all actively been "the main vote-maker" (albeit to differing degrees) at some point in the quest and none of them have succeeded in controlling everything or been able to decide everything for more than a portion of this quest's lifetime and they almost always faced some degree of opposition (granted the opposition usually didn't win but there has always been contention). You may not have ever succeeded in being "the main vote-maker" of a vote in this quest but I guarantee you that none of the people whom I would consider having been a "main vote-maker" ever felt fully in control and never managed to completely dominate the quest for very long.
There is a discussion to be had over how bandwagoning impacts voting in games like this and how it and reputation generation can lead to certain figures becoming dominant over time within a quest but I don't feel it's particularly salient or relevant to the discussion of potential problems with personal actions.
I don't mean to sound rude but a lot of what you're talking about sounds like you bringing in your own biases into the quest because you're not getting what you want and it's paralleled other situations you've been in before. I've seen no indication that people in this thread secretly hate you or that people have been deliberately ignoring cool options because they can't admit to their real feelings. I think there is some degree of people trying to pick practical options but there are also people who just think other options are more fun and interesting than the ones you personally like most. While working on the box-opening robot hasn't ever won in the personal action phase as far as I remember, I do remember that it has been voted for and been close to winning multiple times in the past before. There are people who at some point or another have wanted it and participate in this quest.
I cannot guarantee that the box opening robot upgrade action will be taken, I'm the QM and I want to interfere with voting as little as possible. Your proposed system change (making the benefits of taking certain personal actions more obvious and clear) will not make people more likely to take it (if anything I believe it would make them less likely) and it would make it harder for you to go for a wild and out there pick as people would begin to heavily strategize around it.
If you want something try to cut a deal with the other people in the thread instead of trying to overhaul mechanics so you can argue for what you think the action will get you in order to appeal to people's desire to succeed in the game.
I don't know what I can say that will convince you here. You seem to be arguing that I can't trust anyone but you because they're not picking the options you know are obviously the coolest and the best and the fact that no one is speaking up about the problem you've observed means they all hate you and other people are controlling everything unfairly. Like how am I supposed to respond to this? Declare that you're correct and that the silent majority is in full support of your proposed changes despite having no evidence for it (and some evidence to the contrary)? Am I supposed to agree with you that people aren't picking what they want all the time and instead are nothing but game-bots when what little evidence I have suggests otherwise? Am I supposed to tell you that your previous experiences have no bearing on this situation? I don't really know how to respond to this without potentially insulting someone.
Think over how much of this is personal bias coming into play. If you are in the minority on an issue and you lose the vote fair and square than I'm unable and unwilling to rig things to help you get what you want. Other people have voted for the box opening robot upgrades before and people have voted for things they think would be fun or cool or interesting to read about.
I don't want to silence you or anything like that but I very much want to drop this conversation when you are the sole rallying point and are unintentionally implying everyone else in the thread is both lying and out to get you. Take some time to think over how you want to phrase things and what you want to communicate to me and then come back when you have thought it over a bit.
Eh, I don't think you're taking in hero selection. I pick my specific actions around the idea that certain heroes will go into certain places. Even the disruption of 3-4 actions can make the hero phase much more difficult to plan out and make us more likely to fail actions. If a set of actions rely on a certain set of heroes to be realistically passed and than another action that demands those heroes gets passed through you've fucked yourself. All it takes is 1 action to cause that type of disruption.
This comes down to how harshly I view the failure system in quest. All it takes is failing by more than 10 for the system to really hurt you. Depending on the action, it could even than take multiple actions in the future to recover from. There are some actions we can never allow to fail by more than 10 or we have the potential to get super fucked. Cold Engine and the Kryptonite Power Plant is two examples from this turn. This makes it really bad to fail and a really good idea to make sure you can at least get a bare success on all the actions you take. Which brings me to the disruption 3-4 actions can cause in a larger plan for a turn if it splits demand for heroes.
I'm somewhat taking in hero selection into account. I'm assuming that you'll be able to place at least 10 units where you want them to go in the initial plan and saying that's good enough. Furthermore it's difficult to say that there is a failure of this kind of planning when I haven't seen it for the most part. Like I'll have to double check but when was the last time someone ever bothered to tell the thread "Hey here are the actions I want to take and the heroes I want to assign to them" during the action phase? As far as I can tell most people don't do that and when there's no communication of course it won't succeed since the people screwing you over can't instantly understand what you are going for.
I will say that there is some measure of fair critique here in that the action phase and its approval vote are genuinely problematic for perfect plans but it is something you can and have worked around to varying degrees. Again I think the problem is less "the system is unfair and prevents this" so much as "the system does nothing to force cohesion and so people who disagree with you can cause problems for you".
I could merge the action phase and the hero vote into one big plan vote but I feel like the element of adaptation would be lost and a lot of the risk-reward when picking certain options is made a lot less interesting. I do think you may have a point with failure being too harsh but I personally don't think it's particularly egregious to require plans to have some degree of flexibility in them.
In plan voting if you've got a solid vote block behind you, you can completely shut out everyone else in the quest and don't ever have to consider any concerns besides those of your own group. With the way things are set up you are forced to talk and compromise with people and discuss things or else compensate for them in other ways.
I think even with hero selection being taken into consideration the fact of the matter is people who put up loose plans tend to get what they want more often than not. I'm admittedly not the one making the plans so I don't know how wildly your initial ideas end up varying from the final result but I do think that the chaotic elements add to the quest as opposed to detract from it because it prevents things from ever becoming too rigid or controlled while still allowing you to effectively accomplish most of the tasks you want to on any given turn.
I will look into the balancing of failures for options as your concerns about them being too punishing may very well be right and if so then that is problematic. I'm probably not going to change the approval voting elements of the quest as those are a central fiat to this quest (and as someone who has been burned badly by quests that are solely plan-based I want to make this quest more capable of giving the underdogs some power) but I am going to look into potentially making things less punishing to make taking risks more acceptable. Keep in mind that such a balance overhaul would have a not insignificant effect on many things (if I make changes to failures there likely will also be changes to successes).
