Long term health of mafiascum

[AnonymousGhost]

You misunderstand me, not points for the whole site, just for a single queue. The fun no stakes games need to still exist, but there should be a next step for those who want it.

50%+ of the playerbase will likely ignore the queue, but it’d help with retention I think because will have a stake in the points.

Ah. Thanks for explaining. Yes, that makes sense.

[Porochaz]

Points lead to elitism, elitism leads to class wars, class wars lead to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads somewhere...

[Flubbernugget]

Mathdino I envy the hell out of your leadership skills

[Iconeum]

I'm new to this site, but I was familiar with mafia before I joined. I can imagine if you don't know a thing about mafia, that you simply won't stick around.
You make an account, browse for 30 minutes, find the Newbie Kew, sign up for a game.
An hour later you come back and see nothing has started. You ask when games tend to start and are answered: give it a week. A week! That just doesn't fit in the timeframe people have these days. New players would come here looking for a game to play now, not in a week.
Once your game(s) get going, there is plenty to do but you need players to stick around until then.

I believe this explains the popular rise from other games like ToS, in comparison to Mafiascum. This site is a real investment of time, and you need to have patience.

The Newbie Kew itself is great. The system of mixing experience with newbs is good. The experienced players add structure to the game, giving new players a good understanding of what to expect outside in the other Kews.
A more detailed and extensive review of the newbie players after a game is the one thing I would change there.

Just felt like responding to this

[Kison]

I think this is a great discussion to have. It's a topic I've recently been honing in on & working to make improvements towards.

It's difficult to pinpoint any one thing as a cause for the slowdown. My theory is it's a combination of:
1) More people use mobile devices. The site itself is not very mobile-friendly from a UI perspective & forum mafia is not easily played on a phone.
2) Alternatives. For the longest time, we were the goto place for forum mafia. Even though other communities played the game, it wasn't their niche. We've fallen behind a bit here with other sites offering better game automation.
3) SEO - it's not as strong as it once was. This is likely due to the first two points as well as Wiki falling out of date. Out of date info means fewer people link to us. Fewer people linking to us means lower search rankings.

There's a whole slew of things we can do to make improvements:
1) We need to upgrade the board. We're currently on a very-outdated 3.0.x version of phpBB. Upgrading to 3.2.x gives us a nice mobile responsive layout out of the box & allows us to make modifications much more easily.
2) Automating the queues to some extent - makes it easier to see what's coming up & allows us to begin tracking some stats, and also opens the door for...
3) Moderator tools. Even if we merely automated vote counts, the gameplay experience is greatly improved & eases the burden on the supply-strained moderator pool.

Just getting those 3 things done will put us in a much better place.

Beyond that, there are a lot of other things we can do:
- Fix up the home page. I've been watching things like a hawk lately, and a lot of people drop off either right there, or on the

how to join

graphic. I say put the info from the graphic right onto the home page.
- Fix up the Wiki. T-Bone has recently taken point on this, so

feel free to lend a hand

.
- Automated PM to new users explaining what to do. We lose a lot of people right after they activate their account. I have no proof for why, but my suspicion is they're overwhelmed with what to do next.
- Email/PM users who don't return after X days. This could just help retain people who have forgotten about us.
- Better social presence. We've had next to nothing here up to now. We've recently started ramping up our

Twitter

&

Facebook

accounts. Again, keeps people engaged if they don't visit the site for a while.
- Email newsletters: Maybe every 1-3 months. Keeps people engaged.

Longer term goals: Our main offering here is forum mafia, but if we expand to other areas, it gives us a new pool of players to tap into:
- Implosion had the idea of building a "xylbot" type tool right into sitechat, allowing people to play games in there. I think this is a great "low hanging fruit" project we can tackle relatively easily.
- Other realtime app - building an app out on an entirely different part of the website.

Anyways, that's just what's been going through my head for the past month or so on this topic & the path I think we need to take. But obviously I've been in the trenches so it's great to see what other people view as problem areas.

[wgeurts]

I think I said it a while back but I'm not sure, but generally I really agree that a lot needs to update and change. I love this site and the community it has raised, but it isn't any longer -the- place to go for mafia. As I've said before other sites boasts features and novelties we currently lack. Automated/assisted modding, better interface and overall look, automatic votecounts, the list goes on.

[Psyche]

should also really underline that point about wait times made earlier by many people

[Psyche]

anyway i have most of the parts ready for a particular approach to the automod stuff you're interested in
but it's still a little mysterious what the site will be like after it's upgraded, so i've moved on to other things for the moment
but it's a guarantee that we can achieve much of what sites like mafiauniverse offer

[Kison]

I'm happy to look at what you have & work with you to integrate it into the site if you think it'll work. I think we need to get to a point where we're not relying on 3rd party tools that scrape the board, but instead build them right into the site.

[Raskolnikov]

Might it be worth the tradeoff if newbies filled more like regular games (no SE limit, maybe still parcel out ICs though) and so filled faster and fired more frequently? There would be less newbies per game, but is that even a bad thing really for teaching? As long as you make it clear to people play nice and engage with the newbies and not just engage with the people they know.

[Psyche]

the enemy of the good

[Flubbernugget]

Is the site's source on any sort of a public git/svn/etc repository? I've always wanted to take a look out of morbid curiosity

[GreyICE]

Zoroaster, maybe this is unfair: I get the feeling you don't want to make any changes, and won't hear any arguments in favor of them.

not in the least. I'm pretty receptive to changes, but I'm not receptive to "let's just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" because we also have to consider maintaining our present state as well as grow future ms members. Any change needs to be pretty well thought through.

[Kison]

Is the site's source on any sort of a public git/svn/etc repository? I've always wanted to take a look out of morbid curiosity

Yeah, everything is here: https://github.com/mafiascum

You can see the existing code as well as everything we've done towards the upgrade.

[BBmolla]

2) Automating the queues to some extent - makes it easier to see what's coming up & allows us to begin tracking some stats, and also opens the door for...
3) Moderator tools. Even if we merely automated vote counts, the gameplay experience is greatly improved & eases the burden on the supply-strained moderator pool.

I think these two should be the focus.

[Vaxkiller]

- Figure out why EpicMafia and Town of Salem draw people (conclusion was that they're both more fun-oriented than competition-oriented)

Not sure if this helps but I figured I'd tell my own story how I got here. I played 2 or 3 mafia style games on a non-mafia site (it was a forum for Team Fortress 2). I really loved playing those games so I decided to search out another place to play them. The 2 sites I found and signed up for were MafiaScum and EpicMafia. For the life of me I could not figure out how to join a game of mafia on Epic mafia, but was able to very easily here (there are directions, and the forum is setup in a way that makes sense). I recently signed up for Town Of Salem to check it out and ALMOST ran out of there with my head spinning. While it was easy enough to get started, the default forum settings are INCREDIBLY off-putting. The avatars and signatures are all different sizes, some of them being so enormous, any time that user made a post it took up the entire page! I was able to turn both of those off in the settings, but I really like looking at an avatar to help put a face to the name.

In short I would love an update, but there are some things I would not want changed about mafiascum.

[mith]

- Figure out why EpicMafia and Town of Salem draw people (conclusion was that they're both more fun-oriented than competition-oriented)

Not sure if this helps but I figured I'd tell my own story how I got here. I played 2 or 3 mafia style games on a non-mafia site (it was a forum for Team Fortress 2). I really loved playing those games so I decided to search out another place to play them. The 2 sites I found and signed up for were MafiaScum and EpicMafia. For the life of me I could not figure out how to join a game of mafia on Epic mafia, but was able to very easily here (there are directions, and the forum is setup in a way that makes sense). I recently signed up for Town Of Salem to check it out and ALMOST ran out of there with my head spinning. While it was easy enough to get started, the default forum settings are INCREDIBLY off-putting. The avatars and signatures are all different sizes, some of them being so enormous, any time that user made a post it took up the entire page! I was able to turn both of those off in the settings, but I really like looking at an avatar to help put a face to the name.

In short I would love an update, but there are some things I would not want changed about mafiascum.

Some people like the crazy image filled signatures and wacky avatars. I do not, and have always pushed against the site creeping in that direction, so it's good to see that pay off in at least one case.

2) Automating the queues to some extent - makes it easier to see what's coming up & allows us to begin tracking some stats, and also opens the door for...
3) Moderator tools. Even if we merely automated vote counts, the gameplay experience is greatly improved & eases the burden on the supply-strained moderator pool.

I think these two should be the focus.

I am *hoping* to start working on game automation in the near future. (Granted, I've been saying that for 16+ years...) Hopefully I can chip away at it before baby #2 arrives.

[tn5421]

I would support a modest size increase for our avatars. Absolutely no bigger than 150x150, preferably to 128x128.

[Gamma Emerald]

I would support a modest size increase for our avatars. Absolutely no bigger than 150x150, preferably to 128x128.

indeed, it's hard finding them on GIS

[mastina]

I would support a modest size increase for our avatars. Absolutely no bigger than 150x150, preferably to 128x128.

At the very least I'd increase the height (100) to match the width (120), because there are plenty of avatars which fit as perfectly squared off, or fit slightly better when taller, but which run afoul of this and thus are forced to be either not used or decreased in size.

[tn5421]

I would support a modest size increase for our avatars. Absolutely no bigger than 150x150, preferably to 128x128.

At the very least I'd increase the height (100) to match the width (120), because there are plenty of avatars which fit as perfectly squared off, or fit slightly better when taller, but which run afoul of this and thus are forced to be either not used or decreased in size.

I suggested 128x128 because it was the de-facto internet standard for a long time, and therefore infinitely easier for find avatars for by looking.

[BBmolla]

Okay I came up with how to save the site

So we know our influx of people is decent but we have poor retention rates. People don't care about staying, and why should they? Mafiascum prides itself on its focus on dayplay but doesn't offer any long lasting recognition for good dayplay except, like, the scummies, which only one person wins each year and as threads in MD will show you currently nobody cares about. So here's the plan:

First things first we get automated mods. This step will take forever but I think its crucial to the future of MS. It is important to also have regular player mods as I feel part of our charm at MS comes from our creativity (See: Any Magua setup.)

Second, we add a ranked queue. This allows players who take mafia a bit more seriously to play with others who do so as well. Impose harsher punishments on flaking and such in this queue as well as use the automated mods for stat tracking which can be seen on players profiles. Each ranked queue game will randomly choose a setup from a giant list of setups created by the NRG. I'm talking like 1000 setups per game size. A points system in place can reward a player each month/every couple months for being the top ranked player, or we could even just have a leaderboard.

Third, players have a customizable "portrait" that is posted when lynched or killed in a ranked game. This portrait can be found on the profile, but other than that has absolutely no other affect. And by "customizable" I mean like gaia online kind of shit, where you can get hats and clothes or whatever to make the guy your own. I want to reiterate that besides the ranked queue, nobody will be bothered or forced to see or deal with these portraits. And if a player doesn't care, they can obviously just use the default portrait.

Fourth, we charge very small micro transactions for various different items to show off your e-penis. This money will go straight towards our financials which could use some help.

newbie124,

Vanilla Townie

, was killed night 1.

mafianalbeedscum69,

Mafia Goon

, was killed night 1.

I don't know how to do any of this in a practical way but if I had to dream up an scenario it'd look like this. The rest of the site besides this would remain as it is.

[Lycanfire]

i'd pay at least $10 for double eye patches

[Alisae]

I rather have a bunch of open setups that work extremely well for the purpose and can be reused multiple times over NRG making way too many fucking setups

Also side note good job with those portraits lmao

[BBmolla]

that's fine too