Long term health of mafiascum

[Shadoweh]

I personally find the modding requirements here insulting. I've been playing for years and run multiple successful games offsite. If I wanted to run a game here it would need to be either sanitized of all fun and run by a committee or

picked by Llamafluff

a small selection of Open setups. Also it would take.. how many months to actually be run, and be required to be how many months long? I'm not interested enough in earning my Mafia Mod (TM) stripes to do that.

It's funny that the Micro Queue is such an innovation here to be honest, because it plays out the way mafia is played everywhere else. Quick, small, not needing as much time investment. I look at joining a non-Micro game right now and wow, it would cut into my Christmas holiday. Who has time for that for a forum-game?

I don't think livestreaming would help, because it would be false advertising. Here's some face to face mafia! Wasn't that a great party game? Now go sign up and in a week you can post once a day for three months! Mafiascum the forum is never going to be a F2F mafia site.

EpicMafia is automated to run quick chat based games. I'm talking automation that tracks games you're in, let's the mod designate what factions won, tracks statistics, provides a summary of what alignments or roles you draw most often, success rates as various alignments or roles, etc

I agree that would be interesting, but unless it looks exceptionally shiny I don't think that's going to get new people in the door. The people who care about that sort of thing are generally well-established (and create vanity pages on the wiki) and aren't likely to quit because it's

not

there. Like, if you had a 100% win rate or only ever drew Town once that would be something really cool that you could show your friends, but statistically speaking most people aren't going to get that.

I think you are super wrong about who cares about their success rates. If you've played less games, doesn't it make sense that you care more about those individual games? It's not a 100% win-rate that matters, it's linking and sharing experiences even if you lost. Creating a wiki-stat page and manually updating it after every game is too much effort for a scorecard, if they were made automatically more people would know about and use them. (I mean, we don't even have a 'these people are currently playing in a mafia game RIGHT NOW' board to show just how many people are playing at a given time.)

[Shadoweh]

Before advertising something we should have the thing we're advertising, is what I'm saying. Right now skype mafia, irc mafia, even sitechat mafia isn't an official part of Mofiascum.net.

[Shadoweh]

It's funny that the Micro Queue is such an innovation here to be honest, because it plays out the way mafia is played everywhere else. Quick, small, not needing as much time investment. I look at joining a non-Micro game right now and wow, it would cut into my Christmas holiday. Who has time for that for a forum-game?

Agreed completely.

I think this stems from site expectations: long games are standard here. Mafiascum has the longest deadlines of anywhere I know. (This includes sites with games of 40+ players (~5 days) and role madness of 25+ (~24 hours).) Since games last weeks, they need to be well-modded, which takes more rigmarole. High demands require high standards.

I love our long deadlines. Without them, we'd rely less on logic, lying, and listening than on cops and doctors.

I don't think we agree at all actually. You say logic, lying and listening, I say apathy and a playerbase that votes and ends games because fuckit we've been playing forever let's just get it over with. Games do not last weeks. They last Months. What I should have said was if I look into joining a Large right now, it would cut into my plans for

Febuary

. In my personal and doubtlessly unpopular opinion I don't think a game day should be longer then 1 week, maximum. There is such a thing as just too damn long.

[Shadoweh]

In my personal and doubtlessly unpopular opinion I don't think a game day should be longer then 1 week, maximum.

It's ok for you to hold that opinion. I was just in a game with 8 day Days, and I felt I couldn't do anything in so little time. Making the game signup and creation system more flexible so that it can handle a wider variety of games is key to solving your issue I think. I'm the only one that's actually proposed any sort of change though, do you have any ideas?

From what I understand, the reason moderators here run longer games is because games have always been long here. I'm not sure changing how the queue system works would change what people think the base length of a game should be, rather then Mafiascum Official (tm) guidelines changing. Right now Newbies have to be run with two week deadlines, so the first experience in theory people have with this site is a month to two month long game. (with exceptions obviously for more likely to quickhammer..)

I am simply suggesting mods run shorter deadline games more often as a community. The good side of this is it seems deadlines do keep getting shorter here over time?

[Shadoweh]

I think it's worth pointing out that PLAYERS are in control of the timing too. If players want to end a day every 36 hours they can.

You have to think poorly of your own ability to scumhunt if you stop trying to convince people and compromise after 2 days if you still have 12 days left

Re: Zoraster, See above quote from Bob as to why that's an unfair statement. There's a mentality here about using every precious moment to the fullest among the players that already play here. I suspect the idea that if you're given that much time you HAVE to use it is a psychological thing. It would take a new player of immense Fate-like screaming charismatic proportions to have an effect on the trend. More likely newbie will be forced to suck it up and will either conform or go home.

Related, saying that the people who stay here get used to and learn to appreciate the deadlines as proof that they work is biased. Of course they acclimate to the deadlines. They're the ones that stayed. You're not going to hear much from the ones who didn't.