Long term health of mafiascum

[fferyllt]

Reck, do you have suggestions on what else to broadcast on the twitter account? All the skittles have access, but I tend to make most of the posts since I'm the most active twitter-person among the mod team.

What about a summary of games going into sign-ups? It seems like what many are here for is to play games, and finding new games to play is entirely a pull process right now.

[fferyllt]

I did advertising through google adwords a while ago with my own money as a test case, spending about 20 bucks. I think unless and until the site gets somewhat monetized (even lightly) that it's difficult to maintain an advertising presence though.

fwiw I'm all for statistics being automated, even if it was a simple "enter who is mafia, town, and third party and who won" for each game, then having a player's profile show win, loss records for each type. The issue is I'm not sure who's going to code that, and getting universal adoption would require some concerted effort beyond just the coding.

This is the sort of thing that as a game mod I'd want to adopt because I think players would want to play in games they know would be reflected in their stats, which would make my games more attractive

If it could be bundled with something that makes part of the gruntwork of modding easier, I'd adopt it wholeheartedly. A game table with players/replacements, maybe, if the tables were accessible to a votecounter like Thesp coded.

[fferyllt]

#borkgame

this needs to be a thing.

Also not going to get my feelings hurt for making the same suggestion pages ago and nobody noticed. :/

(well maybe a little)

[fferyllt]

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?

I think it's because despite the latitude, most mods set 2 week deadlines. And I think the newbie games are in part supposed to let new members/players figure out if they will like playing at MS. You kinda have to be able to adjust to 2 week deadlines currently if you like playing here.

I learned mafia and played mafia for several years on forums with 12-24 hour game days. It was a huge adjustment, but I like longer deadlines now that I'm used to them (though I think in some ways my play has suffered).

On the other hand, the mafiascum wiki was one of the links I was sent to in my first mafia game in 2008. I didn't join MS until a couple years ago even though I used the wiki constantly and played and modded mafia on 3-4 other sites. I was a mafia evangelist in the wilderness of sorts!

The near-default silver phpbb skin turned me off, as did phpbb as a platform, which is a large part of why it was 4 years after learning about mafiascum before I registered.

I didn't realize how many extremely helpful-for-mafia modifications had been made to this site until I was finally playing my first game here in 2013.

[fferyllt]

we don't really have an established base to kick it off.

I'm not sure this is true. There's a decent sized minority of players who come from a shorter-game background.

I think there would be some factors that might not be obvious from the start though. For instance, sites I've seen that run shorter games usually have a majority-or-plurality end-of-day thing, so that somebody gets lynched at deadline if majority doesn't happen earlier. no-lynch is never a default - players vote for it explicitly. And some ignore majority and lynch whoever has the most votes when nightfall occurs, no matter how many players (or none) who were pushed to a majority of votes prior to that.

That affects player strategies in all sorts of ways.

Anyway, there are probably ways to find out whether there's enough player/mod interest to consider a trial run of a short-game queue.

I'd be willing to work on this and play/mod games like this if you determine there is enough interest for a trial.

[fferyllt]

It was a collective you.

I don't know how you introduce it as a semi-regular offering without setting up a new queue.

It could be added as an additional stream to an existing queue, similar to how micro normals are handled in the micro queue, but it would be extra work on somebody, as opposed to an extra somebody to handle new work.

[fferyllt]

Zor, I'd like to talk to you about attempting a game or two in the large theme queue, but I won't have time to put much thought into it until after the New Year.

[fferyllt]

Sure, I'm always happy to chat, though I'm not the best true reviewer for games at the moment. But any general listmod stuff i'm almost always up to talk about.

I'd need to start with some thoughts and discussion about how short-deadline games would fit into a queue that's designed for slower-paced games.

[fferyllt]

Sure, I'm always happy to chat, though I'm not the best true reviewer for games at the moment. But any general listmod stuff i'm almost always up to talk about.

I'd need to start with some thoughts and discussion about how short-deadline games would fit into a queue that's designed for slower-paced games.

Sure, but I don't really see any hang ups. The biggest is if you think quick games are supposed to be more shoddily made (or to be more generous: swiftly assembled) and all the requirements are a bit onerous.

It's things like the level of WOTM that would be needed to prevent a game from cratering under the common level of replace-outs/flakes in the first week of a typical large theme game. Gameflaking at MS is something really phenomenal compared to other places I've played.

The other thing to consider is that mods of very quick games have to be VERY on point. Updating a vote count once a day probably is insufficient.

Modding a fast paced game requires the mod to make as much or more commitment to being there in the moment as is required of players.

[fferyllt]

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.

Well, I'm picturing running a 72 hour day/24-48 hour night game early next year, and to try to prototype how that sort of timing/commitment would work here. That's 24 hours longer than the longest game days I generally played elsewhere. And I think the 48 hour night will be an opportunity for a breather for players as much as anything.

For me, planning/modding a game with 1 week days vs 2 weeks days really isn't that groundbreaking a difference, and I think the days would probably drag out due to having to add hours to the calendar for replacements.

[fferyllt]

What kind of micro games weren't filling? Was there a long run of very similar games? Sometimes that queue is greatxxx idea as far as the eye can see.

[fferyllt]

Play mafia on other forums. casually mention MS occasionally. Or even that you play elsewhere without dropping names. In one of my first games at MS a player casually mentioned he played on another site without even a forum name drop. I was impressed with his play in that game, so I followed it up and eventually played a few games on the other site. And then was invited to play at a 3rd site. If MS didn't keep me more than busy enough I'd play on both of those sites more often.

I think if I were traveling from a site with fewer ongoing games to a site with tons of them, osmosis would prevail.