even mild disagreement or emotion can be considered abuse
cop sanities are considered "bastard," even if the player isn't told they're sane
players rely endlessly on meta and quickly "confirm" one another "as town," thus reducing the lynch options to POE
hydra use is rampant, resulting in less players queuing for a single slot, instead using two, three, even four players to take one slot instead of those players finding another game
To be more serious, my theory is that what happened is that many of the weirder/more experimental games moved from Mini Theme to Micro. This meant that more games total were being run due to the smaller playerlists, and thus that a greater supply of moderators was needed than before. Many of these experimental Micros had trouble filling (players generally seem reluctant to join a Micro without some sort of firm clue as to what it involves, perhaps due to being burnt in the past, and for a while there was a relatively small set of people who played in most Micros as a result). The consequence was that mod churn became even faster, especially in the Micro queue, and it actually ran out of moderators recently. (Meanwhile, if you place an Open or Normal in the Micro queue, or a popular Theme, it fills quite quickly, so there's player demand there.)
The decline of Large Themes is a little harder to explain, but it may be just that they take a lot of effort to run and moderators aren't willing to put in the effort for that. (From my point of view, I kind-of want to run a Large Theme sometime, but I've literally spent months working on it, am still not happy with where it is at the moment, and it's unlikely to be anything particularly special even if it does happen; this is arguably the amount of effort it takes even to run a mediocre, average Large Theme.)
I'm pretty familiar with the situation with Godfathers, though. What happened is that moderators became increasingly reluctant to put them in games (at least partly because Cop has been falling out of favour as a role for a while), with the result that when you did put a Godfather in a game, most of the time it did nothing and sometimes it won scum the game randomly (because it was generally correct play for town to dismiss the possibility). Godfather's a role that either has to be used frequently, or not at all, in order to function correctly, and site meta fell on the "not at all" side.
@kuribo: It's far from unheard of for a mod to tell someone that they're a Cop of unknown sanity, and list all the possible sanities and what their game effect would be. That's not considered bastard (although on the other hand it necessarily creates modWIFOM, and modWIFOM is a hard thing to balance around as it's hard to predict how the player will react). Actually, I'd argue that one of the main limitations on setup design nowadays is that players expect games to be at least relatively balanced, which means they have to be reviewed, which means that it's hard to use a role that's a pain to review correctly.
even mild disagreement or emotion can be considered abuse
cop sanities are considered "bastard," even if the player isn't told they're sane
players rely endlessly on meta and quickly "confirm" one another "as town," thus reducing the lynch options to POE
hydra use is rampant, resulting in less players queuing for a single slot, instead using two, three, even four players to take one slot instead of those players finding another game
it is the darkest timeline, my old friend
Everything you say makes me hurt in the face behind my face doom style.
Hydras, meta and feeling shields? Jesus. The SDC falls away to hugglekisses?
We could use a BaM ruleset game or two around here...
I'm working on a remix of my Duel Mechanic. I can't decide on a flavor I love yet (although, oddly enough, I'm leaning towards POWERFUL WIZARDS). I'd love to do BaM mechanics again but I'm reaallly worried about availability. I need my parser which is broken as shit to work to clean up that administrative side of things or my old vote counter at least.
Maybe its time for some counter culture. Bring back the beasts
There's nothing that says that a fake can't beat the real thing.
You must not imagine that for beings like you and us there can be laughter. The low men laugh, and we envy them. But for us, the higher ones, there is no laughter, only an unending vigil, purely serious, stretching on into the night.