Boosting in-game activity: difficulties and solutions

[popsofctown]

I don't like the angle of adding a "vig the lurker mechanic" into games. To me it seems like you want to modkill people for low activity and you're shirking the responsibility for taking that drastic step onto the players. You can't really say "it's going to be baked into the balance of the game". Is it going to be a system that players can use to help their faction win? Then it won't improve activity levels, it will only be used to help their faction win, towns will shoot wallposting scums.
Is it going to be a system carefully designed so it's too hard to leverage it for a factional win? Well then, it's going to kill players, removing them from the game, independent of their alignment, voting record, or stances. It's essentially a modkill. The only difference is you're having the players manage it. Which, like asking for volunteers to post votecounts, is just not as good as modding your game yourself.

I am not taking the position that a modkill is too drastic a step to improve activity levels, I am just equating these two things. Prevailing popular sentiment is that a modkill is too drastic a step, though, with force-replace being more controversial.

I think it's better to focus on ways to incentivize low-activity posters to post, and ways to prevent low-activity players from entering your games in the first place. Focusing on mechanics the entire town uses together publically could be a good way to foster activity, as seen in a lot of open setups people kick around. Traditional PRs and VTs setups risk making a lazy player a VT and doubling their laziness. If powerful PRs that make them want to play like a survivor aren't even worse.. I can't decide.

Preventing low-activity players from entering games in the first place is controversial and high risk high reward and has been discussed before and I can appreciate by talking about baking things into the setup you're trying to get an end run around that angle. But I really think it would end up being a reflavored modkill, and the ranking seems pretty obviously "I'm not gonna let you /in >>>> I'm going to force replace you >>>>> modkilling your slot"

There's also the concept of instituting a maximum number of games a player can play, to discourage people from spreading themselves too thin. People don't want it queue-wide but an individual mod could adopt it if they really wanted to. "You can't /in to my game if you are already in N other games. If I notice you join other games before you die in the game and reach N, I will modkill you." There's definitely reasons to be against that, some players play lots of games and handle them all.

And to reiterate, game activity is important, and if you wanted to just modkill people for being low activity in your games, like, you can do it. I would recommend giving the PRs backups in such a game. It's heavyhanded and draconian and some people might not want to join that game, but some people would.

[popsofctown]

Well the problem is that it's not optimal play to lynch a NAI player if there is a scummy player in the thread.

Policy lynching NAI players is playing to your wincon if no one in the thread has scumtelled, then it becomes arguably optimal, other players will become more readable on future days and the NAI player will not. But if someone has scumtelled you can't policy lynch without violating a common rule most mods post, "play to win the game".

For some players policy lynching won't cause an adaptation because the reason they are adopting the NAI playstyle is because they don't care that much about winning. Causing them to not win is not the right stick. You need a carrot. Or a blacklist.

[popsofctown]

if theres a player thats statistically proven to be unreadable, its actually optimal to never lynch them

: t h i n k I n g :

If you townread everyone else in the thread, don't you PoE lynch them?