This week we show the lifecycle of a motion with an example where we create a payout for another user.
You can find the full issue of the development log here.
So - my only feedback (so far) about this (much needed and helpful) development is that I have concerns about how many motions would be required to maintain one of the major worlds. Prom, Umbra, Monty, etc. If every single popi supplier needs individual motions for every single payment or contract they ever get involved with, that can become excessive for the dozen(s) of different items these worlds need. I worry that if there are dozens of motions per week this would lead to decision or notification fatigue among those in parliament. Or imagine you need to do a big planetary project, do you now need to vote for every single material purchase from a supplier? Not just one vote on approving the building.
If this were the case I would like to see some sort of grouping, batching or less intensive way to manage this.
P.S sidenote; I sort of just realized that LEAD has been working really well lately. Every time I’ve gone to use it, it loads, instantly. It was really flakey at first and failed to load a lot of the time, but it’s been really good lately. So whatever changes you made improved the stability of that system a ton.
We are aware of this problem and one solution we discussed are upkeep contracts. The idea is to have a contract that basically has one or more contract conditions that say “Provide upkeep for infrastructure x for y days above z%”. So the contract is not about individual upkeep items but rather about the service of providing upkeep.
This kind of contract will not make it into the first politics release though.
If a player stops playing or COLIQs during that period of time, how much is the planetary account out?
Players are unreliable enough as it is (note that we’re generally very reliable, but one messed up shipment to unwind / roll back can be a mess). The current governor system gives a single point of responsibility and accounting. I have concerns about distributing that out to a wider body without the necessary checks to clawback funds.
I am concerned that if a player accepts such a contract and then goes idle, the ability for the planetary accountants to recover funds or get a positive balance needed for it to continue to operate may be impacted.
The tangent is that this can have far reaching impacts. A planet with 50 bases on it is a mild inconvenience to a few reasonably established players. If this was to happen on Promitor or Montem, this could impact hundreds of players - many of which are still in the “new player” mindset / growth phases.
The metric that I would look at is “if this contract is held by someone who drops out of the game for a week or month, how many people does this impact and for how long?” If its more than 50 people or longer than a week, some ways to “break glass” and fix things is needed.
Verdant’s COGC is about 250k / week. Having a contract breech for someone to fill it for a week or month is a sizeable amount of funds that isn’t easily written off.
That are some interesting questions. The way we imagine the system right now is, that the player responsible for providing the upkeep materials is not the only one who can do so. A government can create multiple contracts for the same upkeep that either overlap entirely or partly. That can solve the problem of missing upkeep materials.
Of course when a player stops holding up their side of the contract the government can run into a cash flow problem. There are two basic cases: the player coliq’d, or the player went afk.
In the COLIQ case we could implement a proper liquidation process, where the assets of the company are sold on the markets and the money is used to pay the creditors.
In the afk case, the government is out of luck. We don’t have any meaningful way to return the money in a timely way.
In both cases the contracts could have a deposit condition where the player providing the upkeep service would have to put some money into escrow until the job is done. If the contract fails, the government would keep the money, if successful the money would be paid back. This is essentially the same mechanism that we discussed with custom contracts in general with all its pros and cons.
Another interesting option that came up during our discussions is to allow governments to accept loan contracts to fix a cash flow problem. We could use the existing custom contract system for that.
Alternatively we could make slight adjustments and call it government bonds 
As it is, the problem of a player disappearing after getting paid but not delivering on a government contract is no different from the current situation where an individual governor collects taxes then disappears from the game. In either case, the result is the same - other players on the planet have to kick in to make up for the missing upkeep.
One benefit of the new system is that (at least on larger planets where the parliament is more than 1 person) planetary programs can still be run.