Long term health of mafiascum

[GuyInFreezer]

Thoughts on just making mafblack default?

I don't like it. I think it's ugly and cold, with too much grey, and occasionally too high contrast (e.g. everything below 'who is online' on the front page, and coloured mod names, and scum/town colours in dead player lists in games.)

I think it would look a lot nicer if you imbued some red/dark red tones. The furthest I ever got working towards that was this. It was never shown outside of the Art forum, though, and UberNinja started making his own dark theme, so I lost interest after a while. I think it still looks pretty decent, especially as modern UI design trends more and more towards a typography-oriented, flat-colour approach.

I do agree that adding colors is much better than greyscale. When I first rolled an idea about it I did consider black/red and black/yellow tone but ultimately I went with greyscale for soft colors and simplicity because I thought the colors shouldn't be distracting people from reading posts. The grey color were cautiously picked for the best text visibility with most colors visible. (Emphasis on "most.")

[GuyInFreezer]

I feel like if sitechat is gonna have a mafiabot in it, we might as well create our own irc server and put a bot there.
Also if the site skin structure is being redesigned, it would be cool to have an index page announcing games in signup.

[GuyInFreezer]

Merge the chatroom tab and the list of online tab imo.
Because that way we can keep track on who is in which mafia room without much effort.

[GuyInFreezer]

Not exactly like this
but you get the idea.

[GuyInFreezer]

Even with the design above it can work with how sitechat already works.
Minimized tabs shrink anyway, no?

[GuyInFreezer]

Something like this.

[GuyInFreezer]

Also if we're getting an irc server make sure a post # restriction (Mafia Goon status will be enough) so the spambot doesn't spam up the irc chat.

[GuyInFreezer]

I HIGHLY doubt that site design as anything to do with this site going down hill but more advertising seems like a good idea.

^

IMO problem is the quality of games declining severely, but there's not much that can be done to fix that, mafia isn't a game where you can roll out a patch to fix meta.

The only way to fix meta is to break it.

[GuyInFreezer]

Also I think if we're incorporating a proper chat mafia to this site, we'll have to decide if the chat mafia is gonna be a minor feature or treat it equally as a forum mafia in terms of importance.

[GuyInFreezer]

Because whether if chat mafia is major or not it's gonna split the playerbase. There will be people who only visits ms for chat mafia and previous forum mafia player converting to chat mafia only player.

[GuyInFreezer]

Imo, keeping stats is dangerous due to the vagaries of game balance.

Players already feel cheated if they lost because they believe other team is too strong, it will be worse if losing becomes a mark on their permanent record.

I would also anticipate far more strategic replacing out, and replacing out is already something that happens too often.

Aka epicmafia suicide rate

[GuyInFreezer]

I would also anticipate far more strategic replacing out, and replacing out is already something that happens too often.

This is something we can handle.

1.) Who says replacing out has to void the game from your record? If it's going to create problems, then maybe it shouldn't.

2.) Alternatively, track players' replace-out rates as well. If you start to abuse it, good luck getting into games.

That's what epicmafia did.
I remember it not helping.

[GuyInFreezer]

As tedious as it is, I actually enjoy doing votecounts and moderating manually though.

P-Edit: keeping stats for normal games only is a great idea actually. It also helps with normal games filling more.

[GuyInFreezer]

If zora is talking about a site chat the vote tag already exists.
(VOTE: tag)

[GuyInFreezer]

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?

[GuyInFreezer]

I know my username but I'm not frozen

yet

[GuyInFreezer]

Mafiascum - now hosting one month ultimate werewolf

[GuyInFreezer]

osmosis would prevail

RIP #sixprizes #osu!mafia

[GuyInFreezer]

The difference of EM Sandbox/Town of Salem/every mafia app ever between mafiascum/EM comp is that the former are more of "fun" oriented and the latter is more of "competition" oriented.
There will always be more casual players than "professional" players when it comes to gaming of any sort and simpler fun oriented games will be more likely to gain an attraction of the casual players.

I personally believe that's why EM is so attractive for someone who wants to try out mafia games. Sandbox is there for fun oriented games and comp is there for competition oriented games, with training lobby as a "tutorial" games.

Looking at our structures, we do have a newbie games for a tutorial games.
Now the rest of the queue. Can they be separated as fun oriented or competition oriented?

I guess Normals/Opens should go into competition oriented games and Micro/Themes should go into fun oriented games.
But in reality, that's not true in this site. Every games in this site can be easily turn into overly-competitive games which a casual players hates and fears.

I think this is where we should focus our attention on: How can we make our games more fun-oriented? Or at least, how can we provide players a fun-oriented games that doesn't go full overly-competitive games with a flip of a switch?

(Oh btw, "Annual Mafia Competition for Fun" isn't it. It makes everything worse.)