Long term health of mafiascum

[HorseDetective]

I think I'm probably one of the posters talked about here in that I have had accounts in the past, now abandoned because I can't remember passwords/emails for them, which participated in one game or half a game and then dropped out. I like the atmosphere here, but I felt the major problem was speed and hierarchy: it takes an immensely long time to enter a game here, it takes a long time for the game to start, a day runs for

two weeks

, which is the longest I've ever known in any mafia community and can become intolerably boring on occasion, and so on. The hierarchy point is the restrictions which are put on creating games. I came here because I played Mafia on other forums, enjoyed it, and looked for a more focused community; but then I find it easier to participate in and create my own Mafia games in the forums I started in! I get that there's a trade-off between Wild Wild West style of everyone being able to do everything and the quality dropping versus a relative guarantee of quality mafia games, but if you are looking for membership, I think the rules have been excessively tightened to the point they are really hurting you. All of this might not actually be the case as of this post; it's my experience from probably about a year ago now, but I was just thinking of rejoining and saw this and thought I'd put in my 2p. Make games shorter and give people more control over the games they actually want to play and more people will stick around.

EDIT: Oh, and I think I first looked at this site in like 2010(?) (Yes, I'm a habitual lurker and lapser) so maybe I didn't think of it as much, but the forums are really ugly. It looks like an amateur operation instead of a site which puts out some really interesting posts about how to play Mafia.

EDIT2: I made a super quick mock=up of a 'modern' MafiaScum, using the NeoGAF forums as a base and then adapting because I think they provide a particularly good example of a well-run community with an attractive website. There is also a white theme, but I used the dark because I'm cool like that:



If you just focus on chamber's post, as I didn't alter the others, I think it seems a lot more clean and accessible. I would have liked to have used Helvetica rather than Arial as the font but I'm laptop only not PC atm and don't have Helvetica currently on my ,laptop.

[HorseDetective]

I do think you have to be careful insofar as that those themes, while a step up, are quite... generic and might be a turn-off in that they don't initially look distinctive and professional. They would be a good start to modify, though.

I'm also not convinced that forum design is 100% the main problem; the others I mentioned would be bigger issues for me even if forum design is one.

[HorseDetective]

That's actually quite nice, conceptually.

Edit: Chamber, literally everyone one of those is several dozen times better than what we have now.

It's not as easy as 'ok we are using this now', it would be actual work to implement many of these (and anytime a style mentions not needing coding to make changes I want to run).

If I have to do actual work I'd rather end up with something I like rather than something that's better than what we have.

yeah, from my experience in web-site design the last sentence there is 100% true. Trialling mock-ups before change is waaay better than leaping in.

[HorseDetective]

Wide initially looked really bad, but it has two formats: Side Menu with Two Side Widgets and Header with Footer Widgets (see: http://themesteam.com/wide/demo/ ). Side Menu is the hideous one, but Header with Footer is actually really quite appealing and mobile friendly. I could do a mock-up using it if you wanted.

[HorseDetective]

I think I'm probably one of the posters talked about here in that I have had accounts in the past, now abandoned because I can't remember passwords/emails for them, which participated in one game or half a game and then dropped out. I like the atmosphere here, but I felt the major problem was speed and hierarchy: it takes an immensely long time to enter a game here, it takes a long time for the game to start, a day runs for

two weeks

, which is the longest I've ever known in any mafia community and can become intolerably boring on occasion, and so on. The hierarchy point is the restrictions which are put on creating games. I came here because I played Mafia on other forums, enjoyed it, and looked for a more focused community; but then I find it easier to participate in and create my own Mafia games in the forums I started in! I get that there's a trade-off between Wild Wild West style of everyone being able to do everything and the quality dropping versus a relative guarantee of quality mafia games, but if you are looking for membership, I think the rules have been excessively tightened to the point they are really hurting you. All of this might not actually be the case as of this post; it's my experience from probably about a year ago now, but I was just thinking of rejoining and saw this and thought I'd put in my 2p. Make games shorter and give people more control over the games they actually want to play and more people will stick around.

I just wanted to come back to this, because nobody really touched on it - particularly the issue of game length. Just to reiterate, from my experience as a newbie it is by far and away the number one issue with playing on this site. Suppose that a newbie game lasts until day 4 - town lynch, town lynch, scum lynch, scum lynch, as an example. That game can run to about 9 weeks if people take the full days and nights available to make decisions - that's

over two months

. Think how much of a commitment you are asking from a new player in advance: despite not really knowing whether they will like the site or the community, you're telling them that the basic level of entry takes them over 2 months to get through.

Not only will many people just not consider it all, it also dramatically increases the chances people will drop out - firstly just because they might not be having fun but feel like they don't want to move outside of newbies without experience and so just drop out of mafia altogether, but secondly because it's

boring

. This is particularly relevant when MafiaScum's closest competitors are EpicMafia and Town of Salem. Yes, I know the quality on these sites is pretty low, but they do have a higher userbase and set the "minimum standard" for a lot of mafia players. Both are built for ~20 minute coffee break games. This is not to say you can't extend on that; the very fact someone has looked for a forum to play mafia in means they are probably more interested in long-form games, but the sheer size of the jump from 5 minute days to 2 week days is gargantuan.

Even if we assume that there's little overlap between chat mafia and forum mafia communities, which I think is unlikely, and suppose MafiaScum draws people entirely from other forums where people play mafia, nobody else uses the 2 week standard. I play mafia on at least 3 other communities fairly regularly. A week-long day is considered pretty damn long in some of those communities, with many using 3 RL days: 1 mafia day and 1 RL day: 1 mafia night. People will probably feel okay to committing to stretching to week-long days; that way you can sell the vast majority of games as finishing inside a month, and you still have extended deadlines that allow for this site's higher quality. But beyond that and you are pushing yourselves bizarrely far beyond where the entire rest of the internet mafia community is that.

EDIT: As a comparison, by far the most common deadline arrangement I see is 5 RL days:1 mafia day and 2 RL days:1 mafia night. This allows for one day/night cycle to be conducted within a week, and is probably the standard on every other site I visit.

[HorseDetective]

That gap didn't happen intentionally - it grew organically within this site, whereas it did not elsewhere (for whatever reason). I am not interested in a top-down alteration of site culture of that magnitude, nor do I think it would provide a benefit to the existing users of the site, who are the first priority. And only changing newbie deadlines defeats the purpose of a newbie game.

I'm not suggesting that this deadline be enforced site-wide. What I think would be the best policy is to allow site liberalism, where the person/people who makes a set-up and decides to run it also gets to decide the dead-line length. Alongside this, newbie games would be changed to week long affairs. Even if you changed newbie games only, I still think that's preferable to not doing so. Once someone has reached the end of their first "long-form" game, even if long-form here means only a week, and enjoyed it, they'll probably more willing to commit to future games even if those games are longer - heck, they may even be looking forward to longer games at that point. Going from 3:1 to 7:1 to 14:1 is a lot easier than jumping straight from 3:1 to 14:1. It's not like the actual nuts and bolts of how to play differ between 7:1 and 14:1, it's just the former demands so much more from people it seems unreasonable to make it the entrance level. They can learn everything they need to function on other set-ups regardless of length from week-long games, so it still fills the "useful-for-newbies" criteria.

Of course, you're obviously within your rights to maintain the two-week requirement and favour the existing user-base, the caveat of that is simply that it hurts the ability to create a next generation of users that this thread was concerned about. There is probably always going to be a trade-off there.

[HorseDetective]

mods, particularly in theme games, have lots of lattitude for deadlines. People are definitely allowed to run 1 day deadline games as a theme game if they want

That's nice to know. If this is the case, then, why is the newbie format set at what is (presumably) basically the longest possible length used in the community?

[HorseDetective]

Really!? Wow, that's... definitely very long. Fair enough. I just say this because I'm probably your key demographic - not in a boastful way, I mean, I've just played a fair bit of forum mafia before, am relatively keen on it, and have gone so far as to Google for other communities and ended up finding this place and making (several accounts), so I'm representative of the most targetable slice of the population - and what killed it for me every time was having to wait so long for everything to happen.

[HorseDetective]

Yeah, I found this place via the wiki as well, back in uh... I think 2010ish was the very first time I became aware of this site's existence. I don't really see the wiki linked to in many other sites these days, though, certainly not as much as it used to be - not entirely sure why (possibly something to do with not being very high on the search results now?). And yeah, the adjustment was, or I guess for me,

is

really big. I'm sure I might like longer deadlines if I acclimatized to them, but there's no real middle-ground to acclimatize in if you see what I mean - I have to throw myself in at the deep end and that is off-putting to me.

The forums are not very nice looking, yes.

EDIT: The ISO button is amazing, though. Massive credit to whoever came up with that one.

[HorseDetective]

In my experience, increasing deadlines favours scum. I think this is because people have an odd tendency to second-guess themselves over time; either that or they get called out for tunneling. This used to be gospel amongst some of the mafia communities I was in, particularly xkcd's mafia community (http://forums.xkcd.com/viewforum.php?f=53).

EDIT: Although obviously my experience is restricted to shorter formats, so my "long" is not for you guys,

[HorseDetective]

I guess this is just strong divergence in meta, then. As I said, most other communities consider a week quite a long time and certainly not anywhere near preventing town discussion at all at all. Having said that, maybe smaller communities are capable of sustaining greater activity? When it's a group of 15ish people or whatever who all know each other very well and are a community for reasons other than just the game, the amount of time they dedicate towards that community (including the game) might be higher, so you might get more posts-per-hour? I'm not sure.

[HorseDetective]

I guess this is just strong divergence in meta, then. As I said, most other communities consider a week quite a long time and certainly not anywhere near preventing town discussion at all at all. Having said that, maybe smaller communities are capable of sustaining greater activity? When it's a group of 15ish people or whatever who all know each other very well and are a community for reasons other than just the game, the amount of time they dedicate towards that community (including the game) might be higher, so you might get more posts-per-hour? I'm not sure.

How are the # of players there compared to this site?

Varies by community. Smogon has, I'd guesstimate, around ~100 active mafia players with maybe ~50 strong regulars. XKCD has around ~80 active mafia players and around ~40 strong regulars. The other communities are smaller - ranging between ~30 active to ~10 active.

EDIT: Actually, Smogon is probably bigger than that even. Up to ~70 regulars might not be a bad guess. It hosts both chat and forum mafia, though, so the forum mafia component is probably closer the ~50 mark.

[HorseDetective]

mods, particularly in theme games, have lots of lattitude for deadlines. People are definitely allowed to run 1 day deadline games as a theme game if they want

This would be a niche game on site. It would be marketed "one day phases!" This would not attract new players in the least.

Obviously the players coming in will change if the players we have change. We can't change our players by talking about it. Hosts will not, individually, decide to dramatically change tastes by hosting shorter deadlines in a big enough shift to affect the kinds of games we offer. We can only change the site top-down here.

Almost every newbie or discontented player surveyed here has complained about our phase length. Why isn't there interest in offering a separate queue for shorter games? Until you offer something like that, marketing, design, and SEO will only make a marginal difference.

I like this post and am not surprised by the commonalities in complaints mentioned. The thing I want to stress is that this can't be marketed as "hey look, we're doing some strange 1-day thing, isn't this unusual?". If you wanted to seriously trial it, it couldn't be marketed as "one day phases". It needs to be marketed as a purely ordinary game, which just happens to have (for example) 7:1 days and 2:1 nights. That's not "really short"; that's going to be long for most people transitioned from other communities. I don't think you'd need a separate queue, either. I don't immediately see what would be wrong with just running a few Newbie Games straight away with this format; the best way might to be to offer sign-ups for two Newbie Games at the same time, one with 7:1 and one with the traditional 14:1, and let newbies choose which one they preferred - I don't think this is significantly more work but from what I remember and I quick observation shows me, this site often has multiple newbie games starting almost concurrently anyway. Also, which one new players would prefer to participate in itself might be a useful test.

[HorseDetective]

We aren't looking to replace the normal speed that we play at, if anything we are looking to supplement it. The normal speed of play on MS is the newbie game speed, so the newbie games should stay that speed, offering a space for faster paced games (as in 3:1 and 1:1) is something to consider, but it would be marketed as such. Perhaps over time if that section of things grew sufficiently, newbie games could follow suit.

I feel strongly like that's getting things the wrong way round. Newbies will play newbie games first because they are newbies. Like, I probably wouldn't touch a Micro Game that had 7:1 days until I'd completed a Newbie game, because I'd feel like Newbie games are where I should go first and just part of easing my way into the community. At the point Newbie games are 14:1 are at least double if not more the length of any other game I've encountered, I probably never do a Newbie and never end up exploring other parts of the site [I mean, that's what actually did happen to me, from experience - I've never really dared venture into the Micro Queues]. I also think that the end goal is not "replacing the normal speed"; it's recognizing that mafiascum's normal speed is a hell of a lot slower than the normal speed of every other community; that this is intimidating to newer players; and that an intermediate 'bridge' would be useful - and heavy emphasis on the word bridge there. My immediate intuition is that if you cut the length of newbie games, people wouldn't then want to cut the length of

all

other games; it's that newbies would participate in say, 7:1 days, which are longer than what they normally come from, realize a) that longer days are actually kind of cool and b) they can totally play at the level and want more, and then move on to longer days like the current site standard of 14:1. The aim is to provide them (us) with some sort of way to get over the speed gap between where we come from and this place here - move from our standard to yours via way of a middle ground.

EDIT: obviously though, it'd be worth collecting more data. I did like the idea someone mentioned earlier about polling newbies/dissatisfied players - I may have lapsed from a few games, but if it was a relatively short SurveyMonkey thing or some such, I'd definitely have filled out a poll regardless. I think you could raise a nice bit of data without being intimidating that way. Then you can ignore my personal anecdotes when it turns out the real demand is for year-long days.

[HorseDetective]

It's always been slower, and we've always dealt with new players complaining -- many of whom go on to appreciate the slower pace. I think you have to understand that while newbie games are important for getting players to stick around, they're even more important to introducing new players to the way Mafiascum plays mafia (there is some question as to whether the semi-open nature does this, but little question that 2 weeks is more indicative of the experience than 1 week).

I also question whether really short newbie games really achieves what you think. One of the benefits of the longer games is that players who do newbie games are checking the site for longer. In that time, new players are more likely to venture outside of the newbie game, whereas providing a close and quick end goal may limit the newbie experience to just that game. The goal is integration, not just attraction.

As just an aside that has nothing to do with the quality of your ideas: could i interest you in a couple of paragraph breaks, Horse?

Genuine question, and I guess this is aimed at maybe fferyllt who has the experience from both, but is playing 1-week days significantly different to playing 2-week days? Intuitively, they don't seem worlds apart to me. I don't feel like if I played a 1 week game then a 2 week one I'd be unable to participate or have no idea what was going on. Surely the way Mafiascum plays is more dependent on site meta than deadline structure? and if so, can't site meta be learnt in 1 week days?

I guess I just don't agree with your second paragraph; although it's an empirical claim that could be easily tested and I could probably be proven wrong fairly easily: my guess is that (most) newbies will not feel comfortable moving outside into other games queues until they've at least finished or got relatively far into their first newbie game. It's certainly how I felt, and I don't feel like this is a particularly facet of my personality/attributes alone. If you want to integrate people, getting them through one finished game with less chance of drop-outs and at a reasonably good pace so they can move on to the rest of the site sooner seems like a draw.

Apologies, I have terrible tendency to drop paragraph breaks when I'm sort of thinking aloud - I type my thought process as it occurs, leading to rather rambling posts. I'll attempt to clear up afterwards more thoroughly. Also, just to stress, I'm not being super insistent on this or anything; I just thought you might appreciate my view as a, uh, 'failed' newbie. If it's out of the question, then I'm pretty happy just to discuss other things which probably also had marginal impacts, like site design.

[HorseDetective]

Just as a heads up, I'm more than willing to work on an updated theme based on mafblack for this forum. I've been knocking a few ideas around in photoshop and can post a few.