Mafiascum.net

In post 922, T-Bone wrote:It's a mod-supply issue. If more mods wanted to run them, they'd be more visible.

If you're active in moderating and you want to see more blitz games... RUN THEM! It definitely won't hurt the cause.

The last time I modded a blitz game half the players apparently didn't even notice it was a blitz game despite the word Blitz being in the game title, and this has turned me off from wanting to run another one

I think the problem is that we have steadily fewer people on the site.

I am not sure what can be done to combat that. Perhaps others would know more.

From a players perspective, I've found the quality of games grow steadily unenjoyable over the past few years. Playing mafia here went from a fun experience to often times unpleasant, which is obviously not desired in a recreational activity. I'll join games with playerlists like Fate's upcoming game, or FG modded games, but that's about it.

Perhaps if we cloned FG or made him mod overtime, his games are always fun. Other than that, no idea what can be done about site culture of oversensitivity and spam.

I'd run more games if there were players who want to play, but it feels like it takes longer and longer to fill every time I start a new game.

It's quite distressing.

In post 928, Katsuki wrote:From a players perspective, I've found the quality of games grow steadily unenjoyable over the past few years. Playing mafia here went from a fun experience to often times unpleasant, which is obviously not desired in a recreational activity. I'll join games with playerlists like Fate's upcoming game, or FG modded games, but that's about it.

Perhaps if we cloned FG or made him mod overtime, his games are always fun. Other than that, no idea what can be done about site culture of oversensitivity and spam.

I don't think that's the issue. As much as I agree about disliking the current meta, the trend of lost players existed in 2014 when me and kison made those first graphs. It's not a new issue at all.

How do the graphs look now?

I've seen some data, but it was much more comprehensive and not a graph in the same way those were. I think kison has posted some stats in here. I'm not sure what else he wants public specifically.

Looks like he only posted SEO stuff. Would need to ask him for specifics, intution without seeing it graphically is, not as bad as if you made a linear regression based on those 2 graphs in the op, but still trending down.

In post 930, chamber wrote:

In post 928, Katsuki wrote:From a players perspective, I've found the quality of games grow steadily unenjoyable over the past few years. Playing mafia here went from a fun experience to often times unpleasant, which is obviously not desired in a recreational activity. I'll join games with playerlists like Fate's upcoming game, or FG modded games, but that's about it.

Perhaps if we cloned FG or made him mod overtime, his games are always fun. Other than that, no idea what can be done about site culture of oversensitivity and spam.

I don't think that's the issue. As much as I agree about disliking the current meta, the trend of lost players existed in 2014 when me and kison made those first graphs. It's not a new issue at all.

I recall commenting on it back then. My issues with site meta started around 2015ish.

The biggest damage to playerbase levels feels like the tigers attack in 2012 tbh.

In post 929, FakeGod wrote:I'd run more games if there were players who want to play, but it feels like it takes longer and longer to fill every time I start a new game.

It's quite distressing.

You keep running dances instead of Alice games.

Because people want to play dances!

No one consistently runs Blitz games so they don’t exist.

Like you are lieing to yourself and to the person you are talking to if you are saying people run blitz games cause they don’t.

It doesn’t matter if they did in -insert timeframe here-
What matters if they do now and they don’t.

who are you talking to

Mastina

In post 926, KittyMo wrote:The last time I modded a blitz game half the players apparently didn't even notice it was a blitz game despite the word Blitz being in the game title, and this has turned me off from wanting to run another one

If players aren't paying enough attention to know what the deadline structure is for a game, there's likely to be a lot of other things about the game they're also not aware of. It's really amazing on a site where reading is tech in the games... people aren't reading the ruleset of the game... or even the description of the game.

In post 929, FakeGod wrote:I'd run more games if there were players who want to play, but it feels like it takes longer and longer to fill every time I start a new game.

It's quite distressing.

I mean your dance games fill very quickly right? and you've definitely had a good track record on other games quality wise.
Is there some weird reason people don't join FG games?

Haha, I wish it were just my games.

If you look at how long it takes a Large Theme to fill nowadays, they can take a long time.

Many mods give up and pull the games before they fill, which is something you basically never saw in 2014-2015.

I can confirm that as a moderator, it's quite common to have players who don't understand anything about the game they're playing in.

My confirmation procedures sometimes end up very complex just to ensure that the players are aware of what's going on. Sometimes you have to come up with unusual vote count formats and the like, too.

So running a Blitz is always going to be difficult, because how can you make sure that people realise the deadlines are fast during signups? Apparently just that the deadlines are fast isn't enough. Perhaps you have to PM everyone who signs up individually?

I was incredibly lazy with labeling and making it look pretty, but here is an updateo n the two graphs from the OP.

Unique Non-alt Non-spam Posters Per month:


Registered Non-alt Non-spam with at least 1 post:

In case anyone is confused where the above came from, I provided the data, so it is accurate.

That doesn't look good.

Is there any way we can reverse this trend?

Flip it upside down?

That's actually not as bad as I feared it would be.

It strikes me that much of the potential problem is likely to be players who disagree with each other about what the site should be like, and driving each other away from games as a result. The fewer people who are here, the less picky you can afford to be about who you play with / which games you join, and thus there's likely to be a point beneath which the rate at which people leave accelerates.

On another subject, the number of mods seems anecdotally to be dropping faster than the number of players, which is weird and not what I'd have predicted. It may be that players are getting pickier about moderators, meaning that more games are failing to fill and thus making the queues cycle faster. I know that as a moderator, anything more complex than an Open or Normal is proving nearly impossible to design; it feels like it takes months to get a Theme up to a standard where I'm happy running it (and thus this hasn't really happened for anything larger than a Micro). That feels like effort I don't necessarily want to put in if there's a nontrivial chance that the game will be ruined early on by a player who isn't taking it seriously or who misreads their role PM.