Is anyone ever going to organize a The Mole game on here

For large social games such as Survivor where the primary mechanic is social interaction.
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Is anyone ever going to organize a The Mole game on here

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 4:27 am

Post by Harambey180 »

Cuz then I'd like to help with ideas. Got loads of 'em.
Taking a quick look over this forum, it's been like 4 YEARS since the last The Mole game on here.
I really hope that someone that is already allowed to moderate games (I'm not) is willing to or planning on organizing such a Social Game on here. Just a shout from me that I really want to help those ppl.
But honestly we really need to organize one. 4 years, the next one is from 6 years ago.
And looking at it quickly it also looks like a The Mole game never even made it to the end here... :igmeou:
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 4:33 am

Post by Xalxe »

Not that this disproves your point, but: viewtopic.php?f=63&t=71171
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 4:48 am

Post by Harambey180 »

Yeah but still, that one didn't finish Xalxe if I'm correct.
None of them did.
I want to help n make sure that there's gonna be a The Mole game that works successfully and gets finished.
I think I got some great ideas to make it work.
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 6:06 am

Post by KittyMo »

I have a fair amount of task ideas drafted for an 8-10 player low-twist mole game that I just transferred into a Private Topic and would be happy to work with co-mods on. I do not personally meet eligibility requirements for Large Social Game modding, but I'm not sure that's an actual requirement for Mole games specifically.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 6:32 am

Post by Harambey180 »

In post 3, KittyMo wrote:I have a fair amount of task ideas drafted for an 8-10 player low-twist mole game that I just transferred into a Private Topic and would be happy to work with co-mods on. I do not personally meet eligibility requirements for Large Social Game modding, but I'm not sure that's an actual requirement for Mole games specifically.
Yeah I'd like to see what kinds of things you're thinking of.

Wouldn't it be a good idea if we gather all the people that are thinking about contributing to The Mole forum games? Then we all could make genius ideas for The Mole games.

Also I'd say short ones - let's say 5, 6, 7 players - are more fun, when you do them frequently even more fun. Like a series. And then people can earn points based on how well they did in one event. And like at the end of the year you get a reward for it - like a nomination, don't know the extent of which it is possible.
But mainly, we should gather The Mole forum game enthusiasts.
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:08 am

Post by xofelf »

There is one mole game that finished that I know of: viewtopic.php?f=121&t=18735
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:16 am

Post by Shadoweh »

In post 3, KittyMo wrote:I have a fair amount of task ideas drafted for an 8-10 player low-twist mole game that I just transferred into a Private Topic and would be happy to work with co-mods on. I do not personally meet eligibility requirements for Large Social Game modding, but I'm not sure that's an actual requirement for Mole games specifically.
You haven't been a site member for 3 months? :o I kind of think the requirement for two other mods might have made a Mole game complete if it was fulfilled..
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:17 am

Post by Harambey180 »

In post 5, xofelf wrote:There is one mole game that finished that I know of: viewtopic.php?f=121&t=18735
Wow that's actually really superb! Me sob irl that it's the only one that was finished... though I gotta say with a quick look at it, it was a masterpiece.
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:25 am

Post by Ether »

Hi! I'm typing this here, but we talked in SiteChat. I was Telephone Cat.

All of the Mole games run in the past few years, to my knowledge, have been abandoned.
(Blackberry's Toadstool Traitor series has the most famous completed mole games on the site. They had activity problems too, but I think those were mod-side.)
This isn't the only site I've seen that pattern on. I like The Mole and I've thought about running one too, but there are a lot of issues that make running one a lot trickier than something like Survivor.

Winning The Mole on the show isn't binary; you have to weigh getting to the end vs. actually getting decent money for winning. On forums, the prize is imaginary, so lots of people will just ignore it entirely and blatantly shit on everything to maximize their chances of getting to the end. And yeah, if you want to only let in people who'll cooperate, then that's your prerogative, but it's sacrificing a major facet of the show*.

So generally you want to make the win condition binary somehow, and then find an incentive for people to work together anyway even though most of them will lose. Usually that means putting in a way for the mole to win if the pot is too low. The trouble is that deciding what's "too low" is kind of hard. Setting the bar is easy when the players are competing against each other, they're doing it for you. In The Mole, you need to figure it out yourself.

Activity's also an issue. Survivor votes out inactive players who can't defend themselves; The Mole doesn't really stop them from coasting as long as they're still handing in their quizzes. And The Mole challenges tend to require all hands on deck--the show can't go on without them so well. Vetting the playerlist helps, but you don't really get failsafes if people flake anyway.

So yeah...I think the issues with The Mole are kind of built into the framework of the game. There are ways to get around some of them, kind of, but they're awkward, and mods need to keep all of that stuff in mind or the game will fail. Sorry for the wall.

*And at that point, you could just run a cooperative challenge that isn't the Mole? Like, you talked about lower player sizes. So why not just put 3-6 players together with one of them as a saboteur and run them through a bunch of challenges with no quizzes eliminations at all? Then tally up their successes, make everyone agree on a ranking of who's most likely to be the mole, and decide whether they all won or lost based on those two conditions. I'm just spitballing here, but honestly this feels way easier to run than The Mole. Hell, someone poke me about this after Team Mafia.
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:29 am

Post by Harambey180 »

In post 8, Ether wrote:Hi! I'm typing this here, but we talked in SiteChat. I was Telephone Cat.

All of the Mole games run in the past few years, to my knowledge, have been abandoned.
(Blackberry's Toadstool Traitor series has the most famous completed mole games on the site. They had activity problems too, but I think those were mod-side.)
This isn't the only site I've seen that pattern on. I like The Mole and I've thought about running one too, but there are a lot of issues that make running one a lot trickier than something like Survivor.

Winning The Mole on the show isn't binary; you have to weigh getting to the end vs. actually getting decent money for winning. On forums, the prize is imaginary, so lots of people will just ignore it entirely and blatantly shit on everything to maximize their chances of getting to the end. And yeah, if you want to only let in people who'll cooperate, then that's your prerogative, but it's sacrificing a major facet of the show*.

So generally you want to make the win condition binary somehow, and then find an incentive for people to work together anyway even though most of them will lose. Usually that means putting in a way for the mole to win if the pot is too low. The trouble is that deciding what's "too low" is kind of hard. Setting the bar is easy when the players are competing against each other, they're doing it for you. In The Mole, you need to figure it out yourself.

Activity's also an issue. Survivor votes out inactive players who can't defend themselves; The Mole doesn't really stop them from coasting as long as they're still handing in their quizzes. And The Mole challenges tend to require all hands on deck--the show can't go on without them so well. Vetting the playerlist helps, but you don't really get failsafes if people flake anyway.

So yeah...I think the issues with The Mole are kind of built into the framework of the game. There are ways to get around some of them, kind of, but they're awkward, and mods need to keep all of that stuff in mind or the game will fail. Sorry for the wall.

*And at that point, you could just run a cooperative challenge that isn't the Mole? Like, you talked about lower player sizes. So why not just put 3-6 players together with one of them as a saboteur and run them through a bunch of challenges with no quizzes eliminations at all? Then tally up their successes, make everyone agree on a ranking of who's most likely to be the mole, and decide whether they all won or lost based on those two conditions. I'm just spitballing here, but honestly this feels way easier to run than The Mole. Hell, someone poke me about this after Team Mafia.
I'm working this out.

You could have a series of The Mole stagings, like a couple in a year.
A participant gets points based on how far they came in one staging, and also for how well they did in challenges, and also for how well they did at finding the Mole.
The mole automatically gets points at the start for being the mole, and can also get points based on how well he did at sabotaging and making sure at any challenge that the max. amount of gettable points won't be earned.

And then at the end of the year, the one who is highest on the rankings will get a nomination on this forum and everyone will know about it. Then it's also for the target to be first on the rankings.
And for the fun of course.

Heck yeah it's for the fun. If all participants just realized this and nothing would go wrong.
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:33 am

Post by Ether »

Harambey wrote:and also for how well they did in challenges,
Elaborate on this?
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:34 am

Post by McMenno »

In post 9, Harambey180 wrote:Heck yeah it's for the fun. If all participants just realized this and nothing would go wrong.
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:39 am

Post by Harambey180 »

In post 10, Ether wrote:
Harambey wrote:and also for how well they did in challenges,
Elaborate on this?
Well in challenges where you are able to earn points or money...
They can get points for the rankings based on how much they earned for the pot maybe?
That could motivate them to not be a dick during the challenges. I think that a shoutout all over the forum can be enough motivation?
But honestly there's no real thing that will motivate them enough.
Hopefully there's more than one person (being me) that actually would play the game reasonable. There's gotta be 10 ppl that won't be trolls in The Mole forum games, at least not if they're like The Mole-fans themselves. I guess they wouldn't.
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Post Post #13 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:48 am

Post by Ether »

Individuals aren't really supposed to carry Mole challenges, though; it's supposed to be cooperative. And on top of making some kinds of challenges impossible, it throws in incentives to sabotage
other
people's scores as long as it doesn't hurt yours. You can complain about people playing the game wrong, but it really does boil down to bad incentives. Vetting is just a band-aid.

You could weight the leaderboard so that games that earned more total money are worth more, I guess.
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Post Post #14 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:00 am

Post by Harambey180 »

In post 13, Ether wrote:Individuals aren't really supposed to carry Mole challenges, though; it's supposed to be cooperative. And on top of making some kinds of challenges impossible, it throws in incentives to sabotage
other
people's scores as long as it doesn't hurt yours. You can complain about people playing the game wrong, but it really does boil down to bad incentives. Vetting is just a band-aid.

You could weight the leaderboard so that games that earned more total money are worth more, I guess.
Please don't tell me all people on the internet are so selfish.
No way there aren't less than 10 people that want to play such games realistically and rationally and not as selfish as you describe.
All we gotta do is find those people and play the game.
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Post Post #15 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:03 am

Post by Ether »

They totally do exist.

But the next question you need to ask yourself is: if what you want is selfless cooperation at all times, is The Mole still the best format for it?
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Post Post #16 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:39 am

Post by CuddlyCaucasian »

I have an idea! I have an idea!

Run two concurrent games of The Mole, each with 10 players. Both games have the exact same challenges, typical mole stuff, with one mole in each game. Everything plays out as normal, with one player "winning" each game. However, the ultimate victor of the game is the winner of the game that accumulated a bigger prize pot. Obviously neither game will ever be given any indication of how much money the other game is making.

This doesn't exactly solve the problem of the Mole needing motivation to tank challenges and also to avoid being detected though. A way to get around this is to have the following conditions for Mole victory: 1) be part of the game with the lower cumulative prize pot at the end, and 2) on the final question of the Mole quiz (Who is the Mole?), never be unanimously picked by everyone else as the Mole before final three.

So essentially, it's possible to have either one of two winners, depending on whether the more effective Mole is also able to go undetected.
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Post Post #17 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 10:33 am

Post by pickemgenius »

ive got like 50%+ of an irl mole game written.

theres also a dude on fb that runs mole games pretty consistently(for cash as well.) I had a great time with that a few years ago.
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Post Post #18 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 10:38 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

I really like CC's idea.
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Post Post #19 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 12:55 pm

Post by Fluminator »

Yes! Two 10 player mole games side by side is the way to go. CC has the right idea!

I had a draft a few years ago on an old computer that used this setup. (I lost it when my computer died but I didn't fully complete it anyway because planning good mole challenges are hard)
Some of the challenges had the two games directly compete though. (I think the first one was a variation of two rooms in a boom where people weren't even aware which games contained which people).

I'd 100% sign up for it if something like it happened though.
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Post Post #20 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:56 pm

Post by Ether »

It'd be interesting to see one of those! People have talked about parallel mole games, but I don't know of anyone actually trying it, on-site or off.

I have scattered notes for one too. It's just, like...it was a really stupidly ambitious game, and the split town meant it had 24 players, and with The Mole's track record of getting abandoned, I kind of chickened out. x_x
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Post Post #21 (ISO) » Tue Feb 06, 2018 3:11 pm

Post by KittyMo »

In post 16, CuddlyCaucasian wrote:I have an idea! I have an idea!

Run two concurrent games of The Mole, each with 10 players. Both games have the exact same challenges, typical mole stuff, with one mole in each game. Everything plays out as normal, with one player "winning" each game. However, the ultimate victor of the game is the winner of the game that accumulated a bigger prize pot. Obviously neither game will ever be given any indication of how much money the other game is making.

This doesn't exactly solve the problem of the Mole needing motivation to tank challenges and also to avoid being detected though. A way to get around this is to have the following conditions for Mole victory: 1) be part of the game with the lower cumulative prize pot at the end, and 2) on the final question of the Mole quiz (Who is the Mole?), never be unanimously picked by everyone else as the Mole before final three.

So essentially, it's possible to have either one of two winners, depending on whether the more effective Mole is also able to go undetected.
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Post Post #22 (ISO) » Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:02 am

Post by Harambey180 »

In post 16, CuddlyCaucasian wrote:I have an idea! I have an idea!

Run two concurrent games of The Mole, each with 10 players. Both games have the exact same challenges, typical mole stuff, with one mole in each game. Everything plays out as normal, with one player "winning" each game. However, the ultimate victor of the game is the winner of the game that accumulated a bigger prize pot. Obviously neither game will ever be given any indication of how much money the other game is making.

This doesn't exactly solve the problem of the Mole needing motivation to tank challenges and also to avoid being detected though. A way to get around this is to have the following conditions for Mole victory: 1) be part of the game with the lower cumulative prize pot at the end, and 2) on the final question of the Mole quiz (Who is the Mole?), never be unanimously picked by everyone else as the Mole before final three.

So essentially, it's possible to have either one of two winners, depending on whether the more effective Mole is also able to go undetected.
I'm trying to work out something that has two games running at once.
It'd be something like 6 or 7 players.
And when both games reach 4 players, then they are going to do a combined challenge. So with 8 players of which 2 Moles.
I probably will discuss this with KittyMo cuz I'm in a PT with him about The Mole.
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Post Post #23 (ISO) » Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:47 am

Post by pablito »

I played a concurrent mole game with two sides. Got to the end on the losing team and lost. It's not a bad mechanic. Combining games and eliminating moles though is not usually good. I've seen that before and not so fair for one side.
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Post Post #24 (ISO) » Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:10 am

Post by Harambey180 »

In post 23, pablito wrote:I played a concurrent mole game with two sides. Got to the end on the losing team and lost. It's not a bad mechanic. Combining games and eliminating moles though is not usually good. I've seen that before and not so fair for one side.
But if both games have, like, 1 Mole and 3 contestants, they could do one combined task right? Just one, that's oughta be possible.
Also, especially in the Dutch version, with TV shows there's always a group of people that are like 'WHEN WILL THERE BE TWO MOLES??'
So then here there would be one task with two moles in it.
It's not that bad though. And the money earned in the task will count to both games individually. It is a possibility I almost know.
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