Mafia Game Posting Frequency Discussion

[Annadog40]

Does this forum have line breaks?
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Like that? Cause that could help readability if posts are merged?

[Plotinus]

Code: Select all

[line]100[/line]
like this
[line]50[/line]

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like this

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[Annadog40]

Yah, though it doesn't show up well on Mafia Black.

[Plotinus]

True. It would be nice if on mafia black it were grey.

[Creature]

I'm more likely to read 25 posts in a row by the same user than all these posts glued together in a single wall.

[Kmd4390]

Does this forum have line breaks?
___________________________________
Like that? Cause that could help readability if posts are merged?

I'll usually do that if I'm talking to one person for multiple quotes/paragraphs and have more thoughts on the game outside of that discussion.

[Human Sequencer]

Spoiler tags are good.

Most of the players don't bother reading what's inside a spoiler.

lol

[Gamma Emerald]

Yah, though it doesn't show up well on Mafia Black.

Fine for me

[mykonian]

I'm more likely to read 25 posts in a row by the same user than all these posts glued together in a single wall.

well yes, they would be your own posts.

For the rest of us those are just unhinged thoughts which weren't given enough time. The choice isnt spam or wall. It's spam or actually ordering your thoughts to present them in a readable manner. How many times do the multiposts say the same thing where the second is just a clarification of the previous? How many times is it just the snap reaction to a post you just read?

When looking through iso's of Civ, it was amazing how much some people posted, and how little they managed to say with it.

[Human Sequencer]

For the rest of us those are just unhinged thoughts which weren't given enough time. The choice isnt spam or wall. It's spam or actually ordering your thoughts to present them in a readable manner. How many times do the multiposts say the same thing where the second is just a clarification of the previous? How many times is it just the snap reaction to a post you just read?

this insight is absolute

[Alisae]

For the rest of us those are just unhinged thoughts which weren't given enough time. The choice isnt spam or wall. It's spam or actually ordering your thoughts to present them in a readable manner. How many times do the multiposts say the same thing where the second is just a clarification of the previous? How many times is it just the snap reaction to a post you just read?

As a result, you also don't look town if you can't keep your thoughts straight.
This is probably one of my bigger problems in mafia games, and why I have an alt dedicated to a playstyle where I lurk and post as little as I can but try to say as much as I want/need to say.

[Flubbernugget]

I'm only on page 9 of this thread but I have one major thought: It's too easy to quote things on this site and what should have been a quick reference ends up being the majority of what's on the page. The reference itself also isn't useful if the quote and original post are too far away from each other. I think the mobile posting and reading on this site accentuates the issue, because the quote feature was designed with the real estate of a computer in mind and not a phone.

I typically do 5+ posts with 1 quote + 1 comment. A lot of wall posts end up being quote comment, quote comment all copy pasted together into one post. People hate both of these things, and the quotes are the common variable between them.

This issue cascades at an exponential rate because of how quotes on this site are recursive.

[Flubbernugget]

Finished page 12.

I'm curious as to what an official mafia scum game posting style guide would look like.

[AxleGreaser]

Conclusion

I think it's safe to say that we have a much higher frequency of posting than we used to.

You are probably right.
but the data didn't quite show that.

Hypothesis not ruled out.
In the past everyone playing tended to be from similar time zones, and talk interactively. That would take the same number of posts and frequency and basically everything and interleave them more.

I notice that hypothesis as if I get on and play, and happen to be posting in the dead zone that day then I always multipost.
Even if spend an hour constructing a wall full of quotes

Once upon a time, long posts with many, many quotes were the norm.

and then post it. non one pasted between that post and the previous one.

other numbers such as average time between posts, and number of posts, and ??? post length, number of quotes. Hell you could even feed the English into an reading age algorithm and find out that changed too.

gut feel
You are probably right. Stuff changed.

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The thing is... these multiposts are more symptomatic than the actual problem. If it's just two guys going back and forth posting whatever strikes them for 8 pages without anyone else comes in, the game's probably suffered anyway even without multiposts.

This..... all the this.

multiposting is IMO the wrong metric.
cant comment for mobile people. (as formatting matters more to them.)
using a monitor
If you break your post with with lines (as i did above) or separate posts, the separate posts have more fluff but clearer delineation. Its not dissimilar to full stops and paragraphs. Some break sizes are appropriate for two thoughts in the same lump. The next gap size up from paragraph is either formatting (line. boxes spoiler, ... ) or post boundary.

If you meet your friends at bus stop. person 1 yadda / person 2 yidda / person 1 yodda / is a normal discourse pattern. One big wall post hogs the social spotlight bus, and is uh uh.

If with a coworker you are arguing the merits of an approach to problem, then speaking long enough to make substantive point, is whats required.

Epic Mafia (note that to the best of my recollection)
What mafia scum was when I first read it.

TLDR: I am pretty sure multiposting and complaints about it. (stem from intolerance of time zone issues described above) or are the tip of the iceberg of a content related style change not a formatting one.

[AxleGreaser]

I'm in favor of posting small amounts of content often, instead of one big post every once in a while. makes it much easier to read.

Multiposts are bad, but manyposts are good, they just don't have to be beneath each other.

so you are offering to get up at your 4am to interactively post if i am online during the dead zone. (US 4-6am) (Europe late evening) Au Saturday lunch time.

please note the example.. .this post really does not belong in the same post as the previous

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spoiler whereas this point does.

Spoiler: an example of blah blah

I don't think it's really a quoting issue. I think it's a "oh I said something"

no you didnt

yes I did look I can prove it

I don't think it's really a quoting issue. I think it's a "oh I said something"

no but thats not substantive

of course its not substantive i only said I said something.
yes I did look I can prove it. LookI will even highlight the soemthing in red.

I don't think it's really a quoting issue. I think it's a "oh I said

something

"

You however have not said something.

Ok fair enough I had not said that, and you had, but I didnt say nothing, .... ;? .... before just now when i did.

and totally forgot to add this important point!

and yes i can >>make up<< a reason(excuse) for doing that ...
but you have a win con, and if you doing what you do shits up the place so that other people on your town team, cant do what they do, then its a net loss.
(yes scum shitting up the thread is pro their win con, so go scum shit posters)

And if people dont do that when town, then scum cant when scum.
And yes if you do it just little bit when town scum have the perhaps harder task of doing it just abot when scum but not too much or too little(tight)
but see point above, if that then impacts other players and hurts their game its net loss.

and then finally the next strategy. Oh axles got point. lets shit up the thread by whining about people shitting up the thread and ....
Just fucking no....

and yes it is the nature of the game that anything i describe can be gamed. Whats needed is good intent and self awareness..

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All the this.

...The people who look at Fate forget that though. They copied his technique's appearance without copying the underlying methodology. And that's where things went wrong. Fate had depth. Fate had meaning. Fate may have started a trend, but he actually knew what he was doing when he was using it. The people following his style, by and large, did not. They saw flashy play and thought, "ooh, this looks like a good idea!" and tried it themselves, only to find it less successful than Fate because they simply didn't understand that Fate was more than the sum of his parts. You can't copy what he did, because what he did had nuances to it which were something you had to personally experience to appreciate.

I dont recall reading Fate games, seems I might have something >>interesting<< to do.

[AxleGreaser]

I once had a discussion with the then normal listmod about how you coul kill a town as scum through dragging them into pointless 1v1's which you would totally get away with because people have a habit of putting them aside for now or treating them as coinflips. Just get the right person slightly annoyed and you get them to lose the game for town for you. The thread gets bloated, the rest of the town cant be bothered to actually create reads, and it's a walk in the park. That person thought that was utterly immoral, why would you kill a game like that?

This is town doing it on themselves. If I were scum in a game, I'd spampost.

I do feel the policy lynch should be returned. Things got a lot worse when policy lynches for 1) being a jerk and 2) tunneling on a read no one else wants and ignoring the rest of the game suddenly stopped being things. This allows scum to be jerks and make noise rather than play.

If people policy lynched such behavior.....

If you dont do that as town (knowingly tanking your town game and town team :/ )
You could probably expect to get caught when you only do it as scum.
if you are that conscious of how bad it is for town if you are scum, why do it as town.

An intellectual challenge in mafia is to find way to lay as scum, that works for you but mimics your best town game.

The downside with the whole policy lynch schtick. Is when the game then becomes about the popular kid. or staying out of the way of the loudest meanest policy lynch kid.

mafias hard.

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Addendum: woot triple post in the dead zone. Even when i went back and edited extra sections into each one.

[Ranmaru]

I multi-post but that does not mean I desire to multi-post more than I want to win. I do it purposely for conciseness. Yet thing is how can I be active and concise at the same time??? (Also the "I forgot I wanted to say just one more thing so I will do so) It seems for me to remain concise I must lurk more and become less visible.

[Psyche]

shouldn't be anything wrong w multiposts per se they're just distributed wallposts
the problem is still wallposts!

[Ranmaru]

I agree. Walls kill towns and kill the motivation to read. At least if there are too many.

[Wake1]

Personally, I prefer being brief, to the point, and semi-occasional with posting.

In this meta that gets you lynched, because to some activity = Towny.

[yessiree]

For people that have difficulty controlling the frequency with which they post, to the point where a spam posting style is developed

consider sending an email/message to yourself with what you had intended to post, every time you find yourself in that situation, rather than posting directly in the game thread

sometimes the urge for an immediate and short reply can be satisfied just by the recognition of having a record of it somewhere

[LicketyQuickety]

Was going to make a thread about this very topic when I came to the mafia discussion subforum.

I would be willing to put restrictions on how often people can post in the next game I mod as a guinea pig. Its not a for sure thing (I have to talk to my co-mod about it), but I will def make them aware of what I am considering. I was thinking no more than 3 posts in an hour, does that sound reasonable? Naturally, someone

could

burn up all three posts that hour by triple posting, but I think that is ok.

[LicketyQuickety]

Ah...

And it wouldn't really be an LQ opinion without some sort of hair brained idea.

What if Town loses if the game reaches 100 pages?

[Plotinus]

What if the deadline was "The day will end when there is a majority lynch, with a no lynch if two weeks passes without a majority, or with a plurality lynch at the top of page (number_of_players * 2) (oldest wagon gets priority)."

So in a 13 player game you have 26 pages then whichever wagon is the biggest goes through. The game would reach a maximum of 26 + 22 + 18 + 14 + 10 + 6 = 96 pages.

[davesaz]

Missed this discussion when it first came up because I so rarely look anywhere else but in the games I'm playing in. I can't afford to read all 22 pages so will just drop my opinion in there.

IMO the real problem is posts which have absolutely no relationship to the game itself, aka spam. I'm not gonna go look up examples but there are times it seems to me that we often get a straight page of people chatting about non game related topics, or making jokes, just repeating the same thing, or whatever. There are even people who make comments in the post about posting to beat the record.

Do something about the spam by having a standard that there has to be more new game related content in a post than other, and I think this problem resolves itself.