There are various reasons for me writing this post.
The first is that I'm considering playing a game of mafia again, after a 2 year break. I took that break after I noticed that I had overcommitted, and didn't have the time available that I needed to play in the game I was in. My available time still isn't great though, so I would like to make sure that I can commit the time that games require.
A second reason is that I searched mafia discussion for the reason why current games reach such higher postcounts then they did in the past, and that as a result of that search, I found the Mafia Game Posting Frequency Discussion. A recurring point of discussion in that topic was the disagreement between users saying (my paraphrasing) "I'm trying to be active, but I can't keep up with the post counts of some games" and those claiming "those postcounts are part of the current meta, if you can't deal with them, you shouldn't be playing mafia". I noticed that "what kind of time investment should be enough to play mafia on this site" was never explicitly discussed.
So I would like to open discussion on what kind of commitment a player makes when they join a game of mafia.
The following is a list of questions that can function as a starter for discussion.
- What are the things that a player should be doing for you to say that a player is playing the game? (to what extend should they read the thread, what kind of quality of posting do you expect, what quantity of posting do you expect, how aware should they be about what's going on, how much do you expect them to think about the game, etcetera)
- What are the things that a player should be doing for you to say that a player is playing the game well?
- How much time would you expect a player to spend on each of the points above?
- How would you expect that time to be distributed throughout a week?
- To what extend do the answers to these questions differ between individual games?
- Is there a difference between what you would like the site to require, versus what games on this site actually require?