Team Mafia 2020

[momo]

I really feel like this should be a thing.

Anyone interested in making this happen?

[the worst]

sure

[Flavor Leaf]

I talked about trying to make this happen a little while back, then I did the Boon Wars.

I’ll be a support in helping, but someone else gotta chairperson it.

[Oversoul]

Isn’t Team Mafia every three years, not two?

[Flavor Leaf]

I think it’s basically when the community wants to put in the effort to making it happen.

[Oversoul]

That is a fair assertion. I just remember that many people who participated in the first two Team Mafia events (2011 & 2012) did not like the fact that the events were so close to one another temporally. I think moving the next event to 2021 upholds the special feeling of community involvement that the creators originally intended for the event.

Plus I like patterns. 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2021 feels so much better than the alternative. We could even do something special for the "10th anniversary" in 2021.

[momo]

I feel like 1 year is too short but three years is too long. Also 2020 is a pretty special year?

I’m fine chairing. It’ll be fun, even if it is a lot of work.

Since we have the time, anyone interested in modding?

[Oversoul]

What is special about 2020?

[Alisae]

I think it’s basically when the community wants to put in the effort to making it happen.

basically this

--

I feel like 1 year is too short but three years is too long. Also 2020 is a pretty special year?

I’m fine chairing. It’ll be fun, even if it is a lot of work.

Since we have the time, anyone interested in modding?

I would actively avoid the event if you were hosting it and encourage others to do the same
just saying

--

What is special about 2020?

thats when the apocalypse happens

[momo]

I think it’s basically when the community wants to put in the effort to making it happen.

basically this

--

I feel like 1 year is too short but three years is too long. Also 2020 is a pretty special year?

I’m fine chairing. It’ll be fun, even if it is a lot of work.

Since we have the time, anyone interested in modding?

I would actively avoid the event if you were hosting it and encourage others to do the same
just saying

--

What is special about 2020?

thats when the apocalypse happens

Then someone else can chair. It’s not a big deal.

You take this little feud way more seriously than I do.

[Alisae]

the open you modded was fucking awful so I wouldn't trust you to mod or run anything

[Alisae]

also as someone who actually was a mod for Team Mafia
having been on elli's mod team well um
how do I put this

You don't want to run team mafia?

[Nexus]

Yeah I was a mod for team mafia a few years ago and it was not a pleasant experience. I mean, I got the mini normal which is objectively the worst game anyway but even so

[Gamma Emerald]

That is a fair assertion. I just remember that many people who participated in the first two Team Mafia events (2011 & 2012) did not like the fact that the events were so close to one another temporally. I think moving the next event to 2021 upholds the special feeling of community involvement that the creators originally intended for the event.

Plus I like patterns. 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2021 feels so much better than the alternative. We could even do something special for the "10th anniversary" in 2021.

Wasn't there one in 2016? Either I'd be interested if it happens but I guess there's decent reason to wait

[Gamma Emerald]

I wouldn't mind one in 2020, specifically because 2 years after that is 2022, the 20 year anniversary of the site

[Oversoul]

Alisae & Nexus,

What was bad about modding for Team Mafia?

[Ether]

Did you see how many people got banned or permabanned for Team Mafia 2018? And so so so many people fucked up the "don't talk about the other games; don't quote timestamps" rules and the scum got so mad every time we didn't modkill someone for it. Mod enforcement for those fuckups was wildly inconsistent and in some cases just plain weird, but there were so many gray areas where all the answers were shitty. Everything about it was such a nightmare.

Ellibereth tried not to get his hands dirty with abusive behavior and let the site mods deal with it instead, but, um, there was a lot of abusive behavior and it got kind of miserable to watch in places. In the end, he's the one who gets to have his face on what rules Team Mafia enforced, which ones it ignored, and which ones it made kind of bizarre calls on. I agree that momo would not be a person I would trust with that job.

[momo]

Did you see how many people got banned or permabanned for Team Mafia 2018? And so so so many people fucked up the "don't talk about the other games; don't quote timestamps" rules and the scum got so mad every time we didn't modkill someone for it. Mod enforcement for those fuckups was wildly inconsistent and in some cases just plain weird, but there were so many gray areas where all the answers were shitty. Everything about it was such a nightmare.

Ellibereth tried not to get his hands dirty with abusive behavior and let the site mods deal with it instead, but, um, there was a lot of abusive behavior and it got kind of miserable to watch in places. In the end, he's the one who gets to have his face on what rules Team Mafia enforced, which ones it ignored, and which ones it made kind of bizarre calls on. I agree that momo would not be a person I would trust with that job.

Hearing about it, I wouldn’t trust me either. I can barely figure out how to best enforce rules in a normal game.

[Ellibereth]

I still stand by every call the team made r.e. enforcement during the event (including when we chose to outsource to the site staff). The team worked very hard. We put everything together before the event in less than 2 weeks and during the event we reached out and talked privately to all parties involved in pending decisions, analyzed a bunch of information that isn't available to a spectator/player (e.g. who had seen a particular post, context provided in private discord servers, etc.), and had passionate debates on the best way forward.

It's the nature of these things that people will disagree (justifiably so!) over the final call - there are a ton of angles, metrics and values you can choose to go with that lead to very different results, and at the end of the day you have to choose one. Jingle in particular worked tirelessly with me on making sure our choice of values had internal consistency. If you get negatively affected by some set of people being very unhappy over the decisions you made, running this sort of thing probably isn't for you!

For whoever's thinking about running this next I encourage you to not look at it pessimistically - there's a lot to learn from the previous runs about things you can implement to mitigate the behaviors that ended up being negative and to amplify the parts that people loved. We tried a lot of experimental things based both on what had happened years prior and the responses to surveys/questions we sent out to the player base - some turned out great, some turned out horrible - but that's how things improve. One piece of advice I would give is to keep a clear eye on your expected set of players - we were less prophylactic about mitigating certain behaviors than we should have been because we didn't account for how the player base changed in certain ways. Good luck!

[Alisae]

Did you see how many people got banned or permabanned for Team Mafia 2018? And so so so many people fucked up the "don't talk about the other games; don't quote timestamps" rules and the scum got so mad every time we didn't modkill someone for it. Mod enforcement for those fuckups was wildly inconsistent and in some cases just plain weird, but there were so many gray areas where all the answers were shitty. Everything about it was such a nightmare.

Ellibereth tried not to get his hands dirty with abusive behavior and let the site mods deal with it instead, but, um, there was a lot of abusive behavior and it got kind of miserable to watch in places. In the end, he's the one who gets to have his face on what rules Team Mafia enforced, which ones it ignored, and which ones it made kind of bizarre calls on. I agree that momo would not be a person I would trust with that job.

I’m happy that my game was somehow the first to finish and had no issues.

[Zachrulez]

That is a fair assertion. I just remember that many people who participated in the first two Team Mafia events (2011 & 2012) did not like the fact that the events were so close to one another temporally. I think moving the next event to 2021 upholds the special feeling of community involvement that the creators originally intended for the event.

Plus I like patterns. 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2021 feels so much better than the alternative. We could even do something special for the "10th anniversary" in 2021.

I think Zoraster really needs to run it for it to live up to what people really want it to be.

I'm not sure even that would be enough to get me out of retirement either. I've been gone so long that I imagine I'm WAY out of touch with the current player base and meta.

[Nexus]

Alisae & Nexus,

What was bad about modding for Team Mafia?

Take the arsehole behaviour of normal mafia games.

Ramp it up by twenty.

Add in some insane lurking behaviour.

[Oversoul]

What about instead of running all the games mostly concurrently you stagger them? The event would last longer, but I think it would be easier on all of the players and especially the mods. There wouldn’t be any ongoing games rule violations and the volume/workload would be much less.

Alisae & Nexus,

What was bad about modding for Team Mafia?

Take the arsehole behaviour of normal mafia games.

Ramp it up by twenty.

Add in some insane lurking behaviour.

Lurking behavior can me more than just lurking...?

[Ether]

I don't think Ellibereth running the game over zoraster made 2018 any less legitimate, that's stupid. Even if some of the things we tried in 2018 seem like bad ideas (like having five games of fifteen players each and allowing people to pick their game after seeing roles), a lot of those choices were what people said they wanted in a survey. The decision to let the site mods decide what was abuse might have saved headaches and might have made them worse, but nobody forced us to do it that way. (We were, however, expected to let in anybody who wanted to play with no regard to blacklists, which probably did not make things better.)

Staggering games out to the point where they're one at a time sounds kind of extreme!

[Oversoul]

Why would it be extreme? It seems like the majority of your problems stem from ongoing games that then exacerbate preexisting personality problems. The games could have quicker deadlines which would help reduce the overall time commitment that may be unappealing to players.

There are other potential solutions like slightly scumsiding the setups to combat the inherent townsided nature of the event itself.