Long term health of mafiascum

[Shadoweh]

Before advertising something we should have the thing we're advertising, is what I'm saying. Right now skype mafia, irc mafia, even sitechat mafia isn't an official part of Mofiascum.net.

[Mina]

If my friends play newbies, they can only play one game at a time. The current setup, with 6 power roles to explain at once, demands players learn more than many other common setups. As executed, the Newbie section does not train new members, but weeds them out. It is a holding pen.

For the record, I agree with this. (Great post.) Ideally, I would like to start sending out zoraster-style surveys to newbies who've just completed games.

Obvious caveat: the tiny pool of newbies who 1) complete a game, and 2) are invested enough to fill out the survey would self-select to be those who can handle convoluted roles. (PMing flakers to ask what turned them away from the site would obviously get an abysmal response rate.) But it's always experienced players bickering in MD over what

we

think is best for new players.

[Mina]

More on topic, there are some checks and balances to mafiascum that I'm quite attached to. I like that we're attracting a more serious clientele, and would not want to lower our standards too much just to appeal to some nebulous idea of WEB 2.0 HIP TWEETING MILLENNIALS. But I'm an old lady who loves forums.

That said, looking at the site's structure and reevaluating things we take for granted would be a good idea.

I don't agree with chamber on abolishing queues. Right now, the playerbase isn't large enough to sate all the potential mods. So having a free-for-all either means the site will be oversaturated with games waiting to fill, making it even

harder

for first-time mods to run games, or we cap the number of games running at a time...which is basically just a more disorganized version of the queue system. I don't really see the advantage.

I hate Web 2.0 sites like twitter and tumblr, find streamed video games dull, don't like the dark skin, and use sepia religiously, so my opinion on the rest of this discussion is irrelevant. But I support making site chat/Skype Mafia/streaming a more active part of the site. What about a separate subforum or queue for non-forum Mafia games? Also, implementing this.

[Muffin]

Everyone here dismissing "web 2.0" as a fad need to go do some reading. Some of these design trends are very functional. PHPbb is notorious for having terrible design. Look at all the extraneous cruft on the page. "Who is online" and "Administrative team" links. Three separate links to UCP, Inbox, and "view my posts" which really should all be on a sub-page or in a collapsing menu. The FAQ link is actually a link to "rarely asked questions". There's a text-size widget when every modern browser has a zoom function built in.

Now compare to something like a blog post on medium.com which emphasizes the content: https://medium.com/@timo.loescher/my-ex ... e3df46dcad

It's easy to read. It's simple and there are no extraneous UI elements. The elements that are present deserve to be there.

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.

i sort of agree that an irc thing would be better since it would enable direct use without requiring navigation to ms.net
but we'd need to integrate that into the site as well ofc

Agree. The site chat just doesn't really feel solid, and teeny little tabs at the bottom of the screen make for pretty bad UX in my opinion. It really only serves to clutter up the page, and IRC has the advantage of being usable from multiple platforms (including mobile) without requiring you to keep your browser open. I've been using IRC since the 90s, and it's an excellent protocol with many many many excellent clients available on every major computing platform. If an IRC server happens I will gladly help set it up and run it.

[Psyche]

Everyone here dismissing "web 2.0" as a fad need to go do some reading. Some of these design trends are very functional. PHPbb is notorious for having terrible design. Look at all the extraneous cruft on the page. "Who is online" and "Administrative team" links. Three separate links to UCP, Inbox, and "view my posts" which really should all be on a sub-page or in a collapsing menu. The FAQ link is actually a link to "rarely asked questions". There's a text-size widget when every modern browser has a zoom function built in.

hehe

[chamber]

i sort of agree that an irc thing would be better since it would enable direct use without requiring navigation to ms.net
but we'd need to integrate that into the site as well ofc

Forcing navigation to MS.net is the point.

[xRECKONERx]

I agree with Muffin

[FakedBlogger]

If you want to attract more loyal users to play forum mafia here you need to find ways to make the players look good/cool/awesome. If I were you I'd start by implementing a 24/7 radio station that airs the audio posts of an ongoing audio mafia game live as they get uploaded (+background music of the player's choosing), and otherwise plays only songs that have something to do with mafia in some way or another. Ask someone with a golden voice like Yabbaguy to do a show from time to time; and a band tryout would be nice.

Next I'd announce an official mafiascum instasynch.com channel for people from the community to watch mafia-related movies together while attracting fans of the genre, leading them indirectly to the site.

Last but not least I'd ponder the mechanics of the game and what makes it fun and challenging to come up with a hybrid form between forum mafia and mmorpg that lasts something like 1 year/game. It would have to be dynamic in a way that favors the individual to choose strategically whether to be part of organized crime, law enforcement or be a neutral citizen to maximize one's success and gameplay in a way subjected to evolutionary laws to assure an axiomatic balance.

[wgeurts]

Sounds like you'd need to employ proffesionals for that.

[BBmolla]

Last but not least I'd ponder the mechanics of the game and what makes it fun and challenging to come up with a hybrid form between forum mafia and mmorpg that lasts something like 1 year/game. It would have to be dynamic in a way that favors the individual to choose strategically whether to be part of organized crime, law enforcement or be a neutral citizen to maximize one's success and gameplay in a way subjected to evolutionary laws to assure an axiomatic balance.

No.

I always thought it was weird people weren't playing audio mafia on the radio show though.

You can also easily have audience participation, have the thread, and for each day have people submit who they think the scum are. For each time you mention the correct scum, you gain a point.

Whoever gets the most points gets a shoutout/tops the leaderboard whatever.

Example:
"Day 1
Scum are BBmolla and Doofus"

"Day 2
Scum are Stupefy and Poopsikins"

"Day 3
Scum is Poopsikins (I never would have guessed Sneaky Bastard was scum wtf)"

If the scumteam was Sneaky Bastard and Poopsikins, I'd get 2 points.

Shooting out ideas.

[Muffin]

i sort of agree that an irc thing would be better since it would enable direct use without requiring navigation to ms.net
but we'd need to integrate that into the site as well ofc

Forcing navigation to MS.net is the point.

Isn't building a healthy community the point? Pageviews themselves are not really an important metric, and quite frankly it's just a really poor user experience to have to keep a browser tab open if you want to stay on chat IMHO. IRC is similarly much more suited to chat-mafia than the current iteration of site chat. It has better and more finely-grained permissions when users make their own channels, and using eggdrops or services it can be easily extended by regular users on a per-channel basis without requiring MS.net developer time.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, actually.

[Phoenicks]

Epicmafia is trash, there is currently no where to play chat mafia games with any reasonable balance. I think MS filling that void could bring in a lot of users.

In it's current form, the chat isn't really a good way for mafia games imo.

I used to play epicmafia quite seriously and agree with you: there are no good chat-based communities anymore. Epicmafia is rotting. Town of Salem, though new, is a horrendously bloated beta. (The designers put more effort into letting you design your avatar and your avatar's house than game mechanics.) IRC mafias work, but only among friends. That scales poorly.

If hosts chat games with poor mechanics, those chat games will fail the site. How long are phases? Epicmafia averages ~2 minutes before locking votes in but doesn't automatically skip to the next phase. Town of Salem has a 30-second silent nightflip, a 30-second discussion period, and a 30-second voting period (yes really). How do you vote? Epicmafia, my majority, Town of Salem, by plurality, then a final lynch / don't lynch vote. How do you start a game? Town of Salem lets you organize friends and then join strangers, but leaves setup creation a random player, who can be voted out. (Imagine how America governed by presidental elections every 5 minutes.) Epicmafia lets you make a room and put it on the market, but you can't reliably join friends with strangers. Private Messages, whispers, roles, etc.?

Chat-based games are a Wild West. Standardizing them to match our ideas of Normal games would require tremendous debate.

I personally find the modding requirements here insulting. I've been playing for years and run multiple successful games offsite. If I wanted to run a game here it would need to be either sanitized of all fun and run by a committee or

picked by Llamafluff

a small selection of Open setups. Also it would take.. how many months to actually be run, and be required to be how many months long? I'm not interested enough in earning my Mafia Mod (TM) stripes to do that.

It's funny that the Micro Queue is such an innovation here to be honest, because it plays out the way mafia is played everywhere else. Quick, small, not needing as much time investment. I look at joining a non-Micro game right now and wow, it would cut into my Christmas holiday. Who has time for that for a forum-game?

Agreed completely.

I think this stems from site expectations: long games are standard here. Mafiascum has the longest deadlines of anywhere I know. (This includes sites with games of 40+ players (~5 days) and role madness of 25+ (~24 hours).) Since games last weeks, they need to be well-modded, which takes more rigmarole. High demands require high standards.

I love our long deadlines. Without them, we'd rely less on logic, lying, and listening than on cops and doctors.

I do think queue overhaul is a serious option. I think getting rid of queues, making threads with tags like [mini],[large] or [micro], [theme], [heavy mechanics] w/e. And then listmods just need to approve the creation of a thread, let the free market decide who's games fill. Maybe limit certain tags to certain amounts of experience. Perhaps limit -too- many games of the same type from going into signups at once. Perhaps allow vetted off site experience. The list mods job could move to doing that from maintaining the queue.

Pretending mith approves, I don't think destroying the queue would work. The chaos of destroying the queue for a market would undermine all of mafiascum's system. Markets work well, but privatizations are notoriously difficult. It would be too easy to have a surfeit of hosts. If Newbie games are a public service, what would happen to them after ditching the queue? If they stayed as-is, would they be overwhelmed by the competition with other games?

For the record, I agree with this. (Great post.) Ideally, I would like to start sending out zoraster-style surveys to newbies who've just completed games.

Obvious caveat: the tiny pool of newbies who 1) complete a game, and 2) are invested enough to fill out the survey would self-select to be those who can handle convoluted roles. (PMing flakers to ask what turned them away from the site would obviously get an abysmal response rate.) But it's always experienced players bickering in MD over what

we

think is best for new players.

I like this idea. However: a lot of what's up for discussion is material newbies aren't familiar with. "Were there too many roles to learn?" and "Were phases too long?" might work. "Did you like the setup" will get vague answers from people who haven't experienced many setups.

More on topic, there are some checks and balances to mafiascum that I'm quite attached to. I like that we're attracting a more serious clientele, and would not want to lower our standards too much just to appeal to some nebulous idea of WEB 2.0 HIP TWEETING MILLENNIALS. But I'm an old lady who loves forums.

I really agree with this. At every level mafiascum chooses quality over quantity. I'd rather be on the internet's best mafia site than the internet's largest. (The best option would be to not have to choose.)

[BBmolla]

Chat-based games are a Wild West. Standardizing them to match our ideas of Normal games would require tremendous debate.

?

How so it seems pretty straight forward. Just implement common forum mechanics into chat mafia. Obviously different times and such.

[BBmolla]

I really agree with this. At every level mafiascum chooses quality over quantity. I'd rather be on the internet's best mafia site than the internet's largest. (The best option would be to not have to choose.)

There's a point where growth stops so much that you know 75% of the players in every game.

And I believe we're at that point.

[Muffin]

How so it seems pretty straight forward. Just implement common forum mechanics into chat mafia. Obviously different times and such.

+1

It would not be super hard to make a syntax where players can define new roles and have a bot run the game and handle voting/deadlines automatically. For Normal games in particular it wouldn't necessarily require a human moderator at all.

[chamber]

i sort of agree that an irc thing would be better since it would enable direct use without requiring navigation to ms.net
but we'd need to integrate that into the site as well ofc

Forcing navigation to MS.net is the point.

Isn't building a healthy community the point? Pageviews themselves are not really an important metric, and quite frankly it's just a really poor user experience to have to keep a browser tab open if you want to stay on chat IMHO. IRC is similarly much more suited to chat-mafia than the current iteration of site chat. It has better and more finely-grained permissions when users make their own channels, and using eggdrops or services it can be easily extended by regular users on a per-channel basis without requiring MS.net developer time.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, actually.

It's not about page views. It's about those communities -not- being MS. Any sub community like that turns into its own thing given time.

[chamber]

If you want to attract more loyal users to play forum mafia here you need to find ways to make the players look good/cool/awesome. If I were you I'd start by implementing a 24/7 radio station that airs the audio posts of an ongoing audio mafia game live as they get uploaded (+background music of the player's choosing), and otherwise plays only songs that have something to do with mafia in some way or another. Ask someone with a golden voice like Yabbaguy to do a show from time to time; and a band tryout would be nice.

Next I'd announce an official mafiascum instasynch.com channel for people from the community to watch mafia-related movies together while attracting fans of the genre, leading them indirectly to the site.

Last but not least I'd ponder the mechanics of the game and what makes it fun and challenging to come up with a hybrid form between forum mafia and mmorpg that lasts something like 1 year/game. It would have to be dynamic in a way that favors the individual to choose strategically whether to be part of organized crime, law enforcement or be a neutral citizen to maximize one's success and gameplay in a way subjected to evolutionary laws to assure an axiomatic balance.

If you are going to troll at least do it on your main.

[Majiffy]

Couple of things I'd identify, apologize if this is echoing others;
1) People don't "do" forums much anymore. People want instantaneous; one of the big draws for EpicMafia was the fact that it was real-time chat-based.

2) Seems to me that the first graph illustrates a potentially un-natural "boom", and the resulting drop down establishes a return to normal, healthy growth. A decline in and of itself is not necessarily a decline, per se. Check the history of stocks that have had un-natural booms.

3) Mafia-type live games seem to be growing amongst at least my generation (mid 20s). Particularly One Night Werewolf. If people have a local community to play face-to-face, they aren't going to seek online outlets very often.

None of these seem to be faults of MS or how it is run. It's just nature and the resulting environment.

[Majiffy]

Also regarding outside communities, it seems to me that - at least in my own admittedly limited experience - most sites have a "small" group of players that occasionally host games, whilst there are "roaming" members that will play games on numerous sites that keep all of these mafia communities churning. Of the three off-sites that I play on, a good 50% of the players on each site are on all three and play consistently in every game hosted, whilst each site also has it's own domestic players that stick primarily to the one site.

Edit, afterthought: Also, a lot of the complaints I've heard from these players in regards to playing here are the length in delays from signups to gamestarts, and the length of the games in and of themselves. Many of these players prefer to play games that are done within the course of a week.

[chamber]

Many of these players prefer to play games that are done within the course of a week.

Games that fast can't be supported with the current queue system. We funnel players into a limited number of games so they need to offer a relatively homogenous experience for their queue. Sub-segmenting by another factor is just silly though. If we aim to be inclusive of games like that, I don't think the solution is a 'fast' queue, but reworking the whole system. (not that I think it will happen).

[Muffin]

It's not about page views. It's about those communities -not- being MS. Any sub community like that turns into its own thing given time.

1. Only because they do not come under the current definition of MS. If the definition of what constitutes MS changed to include chat mafia, then they would be part of it.
   
2. It wouldn't necessarily be a sub community. It's easy to integrate IRC into a web page for those who like to do it from in-browser, and the web clients are reasonably full-featured.

Honestly this just sounds like "Not-Invented-Here" Syndrome.

[chamber]

It's not about page views. It's about those communities -not- being MS. Any sub community like that turns into its own thing given time.

1. Only because they do not come under the current definition of MS. If the definition of what constitutes MS changed to include chat mafia, then they would be part of it.
   
2. It wouldn't necessarily be a sub community. It's easy to integrate IRC into a web page for those who like to do it from in-browser, and the web clients are reasonably full-featured.

Honestly this just sounds like "Not-Invented-Here" Syndrome.

When the current chat was made, it was a conscious decision to make our own protocol rather than adapt an existing one.

Things like scumchat or skypechat are facsimile's of the MS community. They started here but they aren't directly tied to MS. In the past I've gone extended periods away from MS but still kept in some touch with scumchat.

[Majiffy]

Many of these players prefer to play games that are done within the course of a week.

Games that fast can't be supported with the current queue system. We funnel players into a limited number of games so they need to offer a relatively homogenous experience for their queue. Sub-segmenting by another factor is just silly though. If we aim to be inclusive of games like that, I don't think the solution is a 'fast' queue, but reworking the whole system. (not that I think it will happen).

I don't disagree. I actually prefer the slower games. I'm just stating the things I've heard.

[Marquis]

forum needs more bubblys

[Muffin]

When the current chat was made, it was a conscious decision to make our own protocol rather than adapt an existing one.

Okay, and I understand that you or others might not want to part with the code you spent time on.

But

if

chat-mafia is going to become a thing here, then it seems much better from the user's perspective, and by that I mean better for the community and its health, to use a chat that doesn't depend on

1. You having enough time to develop the thing to the point that it's usable for chat mafia
   
2. You having enough time to fix inevitable bugs in a timely manner
   
3. Having a browser always open

and is extensible, scalable, etc.

Having an "official mafiascum.net IRC server" would not take serious server resources. You're looking at less than a thousand users, and it would certainly require less server time than constant database writes/fetches when live games are run on the forum. You can make it irc.mafiascum.net and it would be super official, and definitely "part of MS".