Ruleset proposal: Shortened D1

[Beefster]

A handful of players (notably Havo) have expressed disinterest with long first days and I think it would be interesting to experiment with having Day 1 last 3-7 real days, but keep the deadlines the same for subsequent days.

Discuss.

[mutantdevle]

I come from a site that was entirely blitz games. Eg. every day phase was 72 hours long. For a while, the site meta was that day 1 was only ever 24 or 48 hours long and there was no lynch on day 1. I have no idea why that was the case but it was unpopular and hence mods stopped doing that. Now the day 1s are 72 hours like the rest of the days and you can still lynch. I'm not sure how much of a factor not being able to lynch was, but day 1 was unpopular on the site and I do think it was partially due to the shorter length. It makes sense though, day 1 was reserved for RVS with no lynch taking place so, naturally, the day would be shorter. I don't see why having shorter day 1s here would make much sense on this site though. Day 1 isn't too different from the rest of the days aside from 24-48 hours or so being given to RVS and a lack of information.

Personally, I do think mods could take some more consideration into the length of day 1 though. If your setup is designed so that the town is supposed to learn more and more as the game progresses then a shorter day 1 so that they can reach that stage quicker could be welcomed. However, if town is unlikely to learn much then I don't think shorter day 1s are necessary. I think known setups should stick to how they are now, but themed games could probably benefit from shorter day 1s depending on how the game is designed.

[Katyusha]

just learn how to make the most out of your d1s

i love good d1s theyre probably the most fun of mafia

[Alisae]

I hate 12/12 deadlines beause I sleep through them.
I'll play 24/12 or 36/12 or 48/12 but not 12/12

[Beefster]

I come from a site that was entirely blitz games. Eg. every day phase was 72 hours long. For a while, the site meta was that day 1 was only ever 24 or 48 hours long and there was no lynch on day 1. I have no idea why that was the case but it was unpopular and hence mods stopped doing that. Now the day 1s are 72 hours like the rest of the days and you can still lynch. I'm not sure how much of a factor not being able to lynch was, but day 1 was unpopular on the site and I do think it was partially due to the shorter length. It makes sense though, day 1 was reserved for RVS with no lynch taking place so, naturally, the day would be shorter. I don't see why having shorter day 1s here would make much sense on this site though. Day 1 isn't too different from the rest of the days aside from 24-48 hours or so being given to RVS and a lack of information.

Personally, I do think mods could take some more consideration into the length of day 1 though. If your setup is designed so that the town is supposed to learn more and more as the game progresses then a shorter day 1 so that they can reach that stage quicker could be welcomed. However, if town is unlikely to learn much then I don't think shorter day 1s are necessary. I think known setups should stick to how they are now, but themed games could probably benefit from shorter day 1s depending on how the game is designed.

I suspect those no lynch problems on D1 had more to do with days being too short and not because they were shorter than the others. It's impossible to get much done in 24 hours. That's like 10 pages of content, tops.

[Gamma Emerald]

yeah my homesite al;so has a tendency to no lynch d1 but that's due to a crippling over-reliance on nightplay

[mutantdevle]

It's impossible to get much done in 24 hours. That's like 10 pages of content, tops.

Lol, 10 pages of content for day 1 would be a bloody miracle for those forums. Typically, each day would last 3-5 pages. It was a very laid back forum and full of lurkers, I moved to this forum because the other one didn't take the game too seriously (since it wasn't a mafia forum).

And the no lynching wasn't decided by the players, it was a game mechanic that voting was disabled day 1.

[Gamma Emerald]

It's impossible to get much done in 24 hours. That's like 10 pages of content, tops.

Lol, 10 pages of content for day 1 would be a bloody miracle for those forums. Typically, each day would last 3-5 pages. It was a very laid back forum and full of lurkers, I moved to this forum because the other one didn't take the game too seriously (since it wasn't a mafia forum).

And the no lynching wasn't decided by the players, it was a game mechanic that voting was disabled day 1.

lmao if there's no voting the phase is really goddamn pointless

[mastina]

Traditionally, mafiascum had no deadlines. Deadlines were only slowly implemented into games to force players into action. At first, only when things had stalled. (This is why you could have games last for months, even years!) Then, at some point, they were codified to exist from the onset...yet when they did, they were long. We're talking, 21 days, long. This was not some extreme; this was the site standard. (Which I still use in most of my games because I am an old fogy.)

When deadlines eventually got shortened to be more in the range of 14 days, and sometimes even shortened to 10 days, often there would be rules that would allow for extensions on D1 and no other day, or D1 would be longer, e.g. 21-day D1 with 14 days otherwise; 14-day D1 with 10 days otherwise. Yet another way of implementing this is games where the deadline is based on players alive; as an example, deadline = number of players alive + 2 would give 5-day deadlines in 3p lylo, 7-day deadlines in 5p lylo, and 15-day deadlines on D1 of a mini.

There's good reason for this. That reason is simple. Mafiascum has always been about emphasizing the dayplay. The game has never been about the night actions. Power roles are a necessary evil, but they come second to an emphasis on strong dayplay as the core mechanic for towns.

The more time a town has available in the day, the more capable they are of utilizing their day to scumhunt. The reason why D1 is traditionally the longest of the days should then be self-evident--on future days, you have more information to work with, from the nightkill (because NKA should be done even though it isn't) to the lynch (the flip gives info regardless of what it was, VCA can be done, and more competent players know to not ignore the reads of lynched town altogether and check to see if what they said had any validity).

The further into the game you go, the more information you have, and the more a pattern will emerge. Assuming your game is reasonably low on replacements, the scumteam's nightkills will share the same modus operandi; the same players will look town and look scum off of the general trends. So the town needs less time overall to analyze the game. Inversely, when the town LACKS this information, they need every tool they've got. There's no cop head start. There's no N0 nightkill anymore. Those are things which may have once been common, yet which fell out of favor in favor of daystarts. And when you start in the day, you start with literally nothing.

So a need exists for extra time...because D1 is not a Random Lynching Phase; it has a Random Voting Stage. The two on other sites are often synonymous; on mafiascum, they are critically NOT. (Barring lolhammering a lolwagon resulting in a speedlynch which I mean I guess it could happen it just doesn't. Except when it does.)

Often the players complaining about deadlines being too long come from it from the wrong mindset. They often come from sites which have short Blitz deadlines that feature plurality rather than majority lynching mechanics. This leads to a common assumption:
The deadline MUST be (almost) reached. As in, if you have a 21-day deadline, you have to use 20-21 days of that deadline. They think that's too long, so they complain, not bothering to think that you can lynch much sooner than that.

They're not used to it, because it's different, and they complain, saying their way is better. But their way is not the way we play; we play games slower because it is our preferred way of playing things. mafiascum players are, by and large, older than the players who play mafia on other sites. (Some mafiascum players quite literally have been playing mafia since before new scummers were even born. The site is almost 16 years old now. How many scummers do we have that're 13-15 years old? In the 2016-2018 range, quite a large number I'd wager! Now imagine someone that has been playing mafia since before you were even born, and how old they'd have to be given that they started when they were anywhere from 13-18 typically. Quite literally our eldest members could have been teenagers when signing up and yet be approaching middle-aged now.)

We have jobs, we have lives, we simply can't check the site more than once or twice a day typically. Shorter deadlines work well if you have nothing better to do in your life than play mafia...but most of our userbase does have better things to do in our lives than play mafia. And because mafiascum has those longer deadlines, it's one of the few places we can play comfortably.

tl;dr version:
D1 being the longest is a combination of mafiascum having been born from serious (rather than casual) mafia play emphasizing dayplay over night actions, site conventions at the time (mafiascum literally invented online mafia play and at the time online mafia play was invented deadlines didn't exist and thus deadlines didn't get implemented until much later), and the simple fact that as the userbase aged, they gained responsibilities in the meatworld necessitating a greater duration of time available.

So you CAN run a shorter-day deadline.
There's just reasons we don't.

[northsidegal]

Shorter deadlines work well if you have nothing better to do in your life than play mafia...but most of our userbase does have better things to do in our lives than play mafia.

[AnonymousGhost]

I come from a site that was entirely blitz games. Eg. every day phase was 72 hours long.

Same.

...except for the fact that the 'day' phases ranged from 20 to 44 hours long.

We were a pretty D1 lynch happy bunch though.

But the lynch was almost always a shit lynch... ergo, we lynched someone who we didn't think was scum, but rather going to be a problem with LyLo.

MS has now spoiled me with 2 week long day phases.

And I love them for it~ :3

That's like 10 pages of content, tops.

Fuck me. I wish that was true for games like this.

[AnonymousGhost]

A handful of players (notably Havo) have expressed disinterest with long first days and I think it would be interesting to experiment with having Day 1 last 3-7 real days, but keep the deadlines the same for subsequent days.

Discuss.

Honestly, having a shorter D1 deadline but a normal 2 week deadline for the rest of the game can go either way.

It's either going to generate a lot of good D1 content due to the shorter deadline or it's going to fop.

It's more of a case-by-case scenario based on the players - and their schedules - within the game and the frequency of their game relevant posts.

[Mulch]

“Mafiascum is about emphasizing day play”

What a load of horseshit from a site that stuffs their towns with more power roles than any other site I’ve ever seen

[Mulch]

Day 1 are critical to solving games and are criminally misused by the entire mafiascum player base, a factor that undoubtedly contributes to the shit town winrate.

You don’t need to lynch scum for it to be productive.

[mastina]

“Mafiascum is about emphasizing day play”
What a load of horseshit from a site that stuffs their towns with more power roles than any other site I’ve ever seen

Outside the specific queues of Normal/Newbie and to some lesser extent Open, hey you're on your own, rules go out the window with theme games nowadays by and large (theme game has become

almost

synonymous with role madness) as themes are more art than game proper.

But inside those queues: absolutely, yes. Dayplay is emphasized. We do not however run near-mountainous games because while dayplay is emphasized, what's also emphasized is the innate natural gifts of mafia players. Specifically their nightkill, and how it is disproportionately powerful. To put it another way--TOWNS emphasize dayplay, SCUM emphasize nightplay. And because scum's emphasis is on nightplay, they are able to dismantle towns if towns don't have good dayplay to counter.

Towns absolutely require an inherent level of power in the online forum environment with slower deadlines because that type of environment has something which is the best friend to scum: giving players the chance to think about what they say and robbing players of body language cues such as facial expression makes the game significantly harder on the town because scum have a chance to perfect what they say.

Another way of thinking about it--if you emphasize dayplay, then the town should be proactive with the mafia's nightkill as reactive. However, if you fail to emphasize dayplay, then the mafia's nightkill becomes proactive in driving the game, whereas the town's lynch is pushed to being reactive responding to the death.

Longer deadlines give gifts to both alignments along these lines. To scum, they give the gift of time to compose their thoughts and create plausible explanations for their actions. To town, they give the gift of time to analyze the thoughts of others and determine which of the explanations for actions are least likely to be true. These two are loosely meant to counterbalance one another.

However, there's a curveball.

In the natural equilibrium, the scum have a greater ease in the online environment performing at a level >= statistical probabilities for their faction. They have dominance over one inherent half of the game (night), and thus the only way they are at a disadvantage is if they have absolutely zero control over the other half of the game (day). Since it only takes a scumteam of moderate competency to have some control over the day (even if they don't fully control it), combined with control over the night, they hold the advantage over the town.

Power roles are the countering balance to this innate aspect. They give the town an equivalent control of the night as scum has control over the day, loosely speaking. Scum still control the night, just as town still control the day. But power roles allow for the chance town can control the night, just as scum by virtue of their nature are allowed the chance to control the day.

The presence of power roles does not change the focus of the game. It preserves it. Having roles does not mean emphasis cannot be placed on dayplay. Having roles is meant to give a way for dayplay to be meaningful. The day becomes the most critical stage of the game. The results of the game are determined not at night, but at day. Thus, it is what we emphasize. A scumteam in order to win cannot rely solely on nightplay with power roles present in the game to win; they need dayplay. A town cannot win the game solely on nightplay by using their power roles (at least in any reasonably balanced game that is); they need dayplay skill to maximize their chances of victory.

I think that last paragraph says it better than the rest combined. So tl;dr version:
Power roles don't diminish from emphasizing dayplay; they allow for the preservation of the emphasis, giving greater meaning to it. Because they counter the scum's nightplay dominance, they increase the importance of influencing and/or controlling the day. By forcing the scum to have a need for good dayplay (because nightplay alone can't carry), the game is forced to another level of skill and emphasis on scumhunting or faking it.

You don’t need to lynch scum for it to be productive.

Incidentally lynching scum D1 is often a great way for towns to lose. Lynching town is something which isn't exactly encouraged nor should it be the goal and there are certainly plenty of atrocious D1 mislynches that cost the town the game, sure, especially when paired with the nightkill. But strictly speaking, lynching town is not some inherent evil. It furthers the scum wincon to a greater degree than it furthers the town wincon, but under specific circumstances, it can be better for the long-term success of the town to eat the loss and recover after the nightkill.

Properly utilized, a town flip can help unify the town in lynching scum; (im)properly utilized, a scum flip can help ensure that the town remains divided on all future days.

[Agent Sparkles]

TL;DR version: No.

[yessiree]

Day 1 are critical to solving games and are criminally misused by the entire mafiascum player base, a factor that undoubtedly contributes to the shit town winrate.

You don’t need to lynch scum for it to be productive.

a crime so serious the entire mafiascum player base should be put in jail!

[callforjudgement]

I think that for a long time, the standard was "D1 can be stretched out to 21 days if the players are active and it seems necessary, but mods will advertise a shorter deadline to try to stop things stalling".

When I mod Micros, I tend to use an explicit deadline extension mechanic nowadays, where deadlines are initially short but anyone can extend them (with some cost for doing so, typically just a limited number of shots). Players are reluctant to extend the deadline unless they need to, so the deadline always

looks

short, helping to inspire action, but there's enough time available if it's needed. (Additionally, the fact that someone has to actually go and post

Extend deadline

, bumping the thread in the process, makes it hard for it to stay inactive for long periods). I don't think a mechanic like this is as necessary in larger games, although it would likely still work.

By the way, mastina, my standard sort of game to mod is near-mountainous (or at least symmetrical, i.e. every player either has the same role or has the ability to plausibly fake it). Although a day/night balance is needed, I typically produce that via reducing the scum's capabilities during the Night in order to help balance things out, rather than increasing the town's.

[AnonymousGhost]

@Call

Interesting. I checked out some of your micros and saw your mechanic - 1 Shot Deadline Extension - and it's a neat mechanic.

[Alisae]

Or just be smart and run plurality with your short deadlines!!!!!!!

[Gamma Emerald]

Or just be smart and run plurality with your short deadlines!!!!!!!

That defeats the purpose tho

[mastina]

By the way, mastina, my standard sort of game to mod is near-mountainous (or at least symmetrical, i.e. every player either has the same role or has the ability to plausibly fake it). Although a day/night balance is needed, I typically produce that via reducing the scum's capabilities during the Night in order to help balance things out, rather than increasing the town's.

Your approach is also one I consider to both be one of the best on-site and yet shamefully one of the rarest on site as you are in fact one of the only mods to do it that way.

[GuyInFreezer]

And really, most of the time the days after D1 end quicker anyway.