Planned Changes: Newbie Game Deadlines

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Post Post #3 (isolation #0) » Wed Jun 27, 2018 6:16 am

Post by mastina »

This change will make me entirely unable to play Newbie games, for the reasoning that I am always V/LA over weekends (instantly eating up 2-4 days), in addition to having frequent "busy weeks" where I am severely restricted off of real life. When I have a deadline longer than a week, this is never a problem, because I have the extra time beit before or after the busy time to either do prep-work or 'catch up', as it were.

I think a time of seven days is just arbitrarily setting it to be one week, but that if a shorter deadline is required, 8-10 days is better. (Yes, I realize an eighth day doesn't seem like much of a difference; what does an extra 24 hours give? Well the answer is, in fact...quite a lot. I can comfortably play in a game with an 8-day deadline, but 7 days is not enough time for me to play well, least of all in a newbie game which demands a higher quality of play.)

As BulletNLynchproof mentioned, this is also not the site standard, not even remotely close to it. 14 days is the most common metric, but the second-most-common metric is 10 days, and thus an 8-10 day deadline is more in line with site norms than a 7-day deadline; almost no mods at all actually run one-week-deadline games. (They
exist
, but so do mods that run Blitz games--in that they exist in theory but in practice are few and far between.)

While I know this change caters to newbies, my concern is that the tradeoff is too high; it will lead to a couple of nasty side-effects.

One, the quality of play in newbies is likely to drop--if not from newbies themselves, then from veteran players who need/are used to the extra time. Many ICs are going to find themselves suddenly having it be ten times harder to do their job. Even SEs who have been around long enough are going to struggle; with this change, their play is going to be notably lower than it should be given the game type. (In a newbie, we are meant to show off the best of mafiascum play, and the best of mafiascum play does not work well on a tight budget.)

That, not going into how some people who would otherwise gladly IC/SE, with this change, will instead of going in and performing poorly, opt to simply not IC/SE at all because they know the above would happen if they did. (Such as myself.) Leading to less ICs/SEs signing up.

Two, while initial newbie retention rate may be higher, this change I'd expect would simply shift when the newbies flake--instead of flaking when they are playing the newbie game, they flake once they try out a different game type and find out that literally the entirety of our site uses an entirely different format than the newbie games. If newbie games are meant to introduce newbies to site norms, that'd be the literal opposite of the intended goal.
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Post Post #43 (isolation #1) » Wed Jun 27, 2018 8:15 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 4, Nexus wrote:I can't find the last time you played a newbie game.
I play in newbie games whenever I'm not busy modding games. (I can only do one of the two at a time, not both, because both are equivalent in the amount of required time/effort invested.) I've been modding more recently, but I still have been playing them with plans to play more of them in the future.
In post 7, skitter30 wrote:maybe make weekends count as 24 hours? (which i suppose is equivalent to having an 8-day-long phase tho)
This would actually work for me!
In post 7, skitter30 wrote:10 days for day1, and 7 days for later days would be cool too.
Given that this actually
is
a site standard, it would also be fairly viable, too. Doesn't solve the "encounter a bad week" problem altogether, but vastly mitigates it.
In post 8, Nexus wrote:To clarify - days should not begin until the full player list has posted. Then the first day should be 10 days or so, and then get shorter as time goes on.
That's not how it currently works (the confirmation phase in newbies happens with a locked thread--confirmation is done via PM; by the time the thread has opened, day has already started), but this idea also has strong merit to it.
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Post Post #44 (isolation #2) » Wed Jun 27, 2018 8:32 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 24, T-Bone wrote:If newbies think that deadlines are too long, and are not sticking around as a result...then who exactly are we catering to as a site?
In general, older individuals, who
do
stick around.

mafiascum is, to my knowledge, the only site which caters to the crowd of individuals with those particular habits: having real-life obligations such as full-time jobs, families to look after, finances to take care of, etc.; not being able to read too much content in a limited timeframe. (I know that, personally, I have an endurance limit of 20 pages/24 hours. If a game produces more than that amount, I simply can't keep up with it and my performance suffers as a result.)

These players are not, inherently, by definition the same as Geriatric players, but there IS a fair amount of overlap in that this is a service only mafiascum has to offer--'younger' players, so to speak, can find shorter games anywhere.

Basically, in my experience, anecdotal evidence is that mafiascum's target demographic is simply a different userbase than other mafia sites; said target demographic is less-numerous, because there's a whole lot more teenagers using the internet for forum gaming than adults, and thus, we have less people sign up and stay because they're not part of the target demographic.

I do think that newbie games should serve as a bit of a gateway drug into mafiascum--introduce the people who are outside the target demographic yet more numerous (that is, teenagers) to the site in a way where it appeals to them, but I also think that it should be handled with care. We want the quality of play in Newbie games to remain the same (or better); we want the quantity of SEs/ICs to remain the same (or improve); we want the newbies who play in Newbies to venture out into other game types and not suddenly feel like everything they were learning in Newbies was a lie compared to the site proper.

Weekends counting as 24 hours, D1 being 10 days, 8 days instead of 7 days, days not starting until all players have posted, and similar ideas are all compromises I feel would help us have the best of both worlds.
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Post Post #103 (isolation #3) » Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:19 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 48, T-Bone wrote:You...have played mafia on this site recently right? (I know mastina has)
Like, these comments hearken back to 2008, not 2018. Our games are MASSIVE now. People post and post and post and post. If you are a player who can only post once a day, then our games aren't for you, not with 3 week deadlines, not with 3 day deadlines.
And in my experience from actually playing games--which as you yourself noted, I am in fact actually doing--I hard, HARD disagree with this.

People don't actually post and post and post and post and post. I have that 20 pages/day limitation, but in 80% of my games, I don't reach it. 80% of the time, I am fine. 80% of the time, I can play and function in my games just perfectly well and fine. And those 80% of the games I don't imagine are exceptions to the rule. Either I have gotten very, very, very, VERY lucky, or it's not nearly as bad as you seem to think it is, as a whole.

Yes, if you compare thread sizes of games in 2018 to those of 2008, the game thread size will unmistakenly be larger--however, I'm fairly certain from what I've seen that in the last little while (a year, two years, maybe even three years), the size of games has actually been going
back down
rather than up. Or at the very least...has stagnated, such that you see more consistent game lengths that are usually around the same level rather than each game being progressively larger than the last in number of posts.

A mini game seems to last somewhere in the range of ~75 pages, give or take 50. A large game seems to last somewhere in the range of ~175 pages, give or take 50. Normals are usually shorter than these numbers; themes are right around these or slightly higher. Those numbers are usually manageable, because they aren't produced in a short duration of time; these game lengths are generated over the course of weeks, even months, and thus the pages/day rate for them is like a few pages per day.
In post 48, T-Bone wrote:The idea that shortening deadlines are going to make games unplayable for people who want slower experiences is ludicrous...because games are unplayable for those players in the current meta!
Except I am telling you
as a player who is actually actively playing in games right now
that no, that's not the case; games are currently playable, but only BECAUSE of that extra time.

Focusing it all into a much shorter duration would be overwhelming, but it doesn't happen.

...Well. 80% of the time, it doesn't happen, anyway.
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Post Post #106 (isolation #4) » Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:29 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 51, xRECKONERx wrote:As a grumpy old-timer myself, to me, it seems like... the younger generation of players prefer faster games, so by not adopting, we'll just die off eventually.
My opinion is different--the younger generation of players is...inherently,
younger
. And when they get older, they'll want a place that adapts to their changed needs. mafiascum offers that because mafiascum offers a place where people who have the responsibilities associated with adulthood still have the capacity to play.

I can actually sum up my viewpoint with this:
By adapting not to what the current generation is
right now
, but what the current generation
will need
, mafiascum will have long-term longevity.


The current generation with their standards
right now
has a dime a dozen in terms of sites they can choose from to offer them the playstyle they prefer at the moment--but when they age, where will they find a playstyle suited for their more (so to speak) "mature" life? For their more responsible life? mafiascum, as it is right now, offers that to them.

That's why I presented a challenge to the players who have the more recentish joindates of, say, 2018 to keep playing mafia as they see fit, over the course of five or so years...and to reflect on their preferred style five years from now in contrast to their preferred style right now.

Obviously, that is a challenge which cannot be fulfilled for another five years--but I genuinely think my point can and will be proven if given that time, and that their future selves will vouch for my present viewpoint, or something close enough to it.
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Post Post #108 (isolation #5) » Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:42 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 58, AnonymousGhost wrote:
In post 56, Zachrulez wrote:They're not going to jump the rest of the way up. They are the site's future moderators. They'll be the ones running 7 day games. If you're looking to cater to them you might as well just go all the way to blitz deadlines.
Not to point out the obvious, but... The newbies that stick around, and
I mean stick around for the years to come
, will age and become the adults we are now with busy lives, jobs, families, college, and whatnot - if they're not doing it already.
This was the point I was getting at.

I don't believe that catering completely to what the newbies want RIGHT NOW is, in of itself, going to be helpful for the site's long-term longevity. If we do, then what happens when their needs change? They'll leave the site because it was suited for their old self, but not their newer self.

mafiascum, as it currently is, however, provides an environment which is suited towards what their future selves will be, and thus, when they age, they'll stay around, because it's suited towards their current needs. And once that massive paradigm shift has happened in their needs, it's usually a one-time deal of sorts; while their lives will continue to change throughout their lives, these changes will be far more minor than the initial changes which adulthood brought on. And thus, once members, they are likely to stay members for a long time, if not life. Giving longevity.

Keeping members around not for a few years, but for life, is what I feel like the end goal should be.

Now, that does mean you still
need
the newbies to come in in the first place. They need to stick around in the first place for long enough where when they are adults they realize that mafiascum is a place well-suited to their life. And for that to happen, to some extent, yes, catering to what they need right now is necessary.

But I believe there's a fine balance between the two. Pushing too far to catering to what newbies want
in the now
is shooting them in the foot for long-term longevity because it will cause them to not stay around when they get older.

That's why the proposed middle-ground options are so appealing to me. Treating weekends as a single day, waiting for every player to post before starting day, D1 being ten days with future days being 7, all of these give newbies their faster-deadlined games they demand (catering to the newbies), while giving them a gateway into their future and showing them how they can still do this same thing years down the road.
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Post Post #112 (isolation #6) » Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:29 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 105, chamber wrote:Why are you assuming the same amount would be produced in a shorter time window?
Literally hundreds of games and years of experience across all game types?

Marathon games, for instance, are usually of a much smaller size (you rarely see one which is above micro-size, yet alone above mini-size), but the length of their games are loosely comparable to those of games with equal numbers of players--except, their content is generated over the course of seconds and minutes, maaaaaybe hours. They may be a little bit shorter overall, but they're pages upon pages, in minutes.

That's probably not the best example, but I can think of many others. Such as how whenever moderators implement a previously-nonexistent deadline or shorten an existing deadline, activity in a game suddenly has a sharp uptake. (This is not something done fairly often in the current site meta, but was commonplace back in the day.) It's everywhere.

Longer deadlines might produce a slightly longer thread overall when the game is eventually finished--but that longer length was generated over a much greater period of time, meaning the page per day ratio was significantly lower.

I'm sure this could have hard data rather than anecdotal evidence gathered for it, too. Just track when a moderator declares a game starting and when a moderator declares a game over, the number of posts between the two, and the number of days between the two, and the length of their deadlines; that gives the relevant data points.
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Post Post #113 (isolation #7) » Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:31 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 109, Alisae wrote:They won’t care about the game by then because they would have moved onto bigger and better thing
If that's the case then the site would be fucked no matter what, then, wouldn't it?

The whole idea is to make it so that they
do
care about the game in the future. Because if no matter what we do, five years from now they don't care...well then no matter what we do five years from now the site is dead. So the ASSUMPTION is that we want to do something that makes it so that five years from now they
do
care.
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Post Post #115 (isolation #8) » Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:34 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 111, TheButtonmen wrote:i think if we try to steal em or town of salems shtick we die because theyre better at it then us

bend with the change sure but dont break what ms is because thats just a losing proposition as you dont outcompete the competitors in a very crowded market and lose the niche player base you formally got to monopolize
This was also my point.

What do we have, unique to us, that they don't?

When you get down to it, longer deadlines really are pretty much the only thing.

We don't have a better site; we're technologically backwards.
We don't have better game types.
We don't have more diverse game types.
We don't have games more focused on dayplay. (Though this is the closest we have to one, many other sites have this and our focus on it has decayed and continues to decay.)
What does that leave us with?

Longer deadlines are what is unique about mafiascum. You don't outcompete other sites by mimicking what they do; you outcompete other sites by giving something they don't.
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Post Post #116 (isolation #9) » Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:38 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 114, chamber wrote:
In post 112, mastina wrote:I'm sure this could have hard data rather than anecdotal evidence gathered for it, too. Just track when a moderator declares a game starting and when a moderator declares a game over, the number of posts between the two, and the number of days between the two, and the length of their deadlines; that gives the relevant data points.
You can't assert something and expect others to gather the data to prove it for you.
My stance already has backing: my experience. I don't need the data points. I'm confident that's what the data will show. A correlation to lower posts per day and longer deadlines.

Not only does it match my experience, it also matches logic, when you think about basic psychology.

If you have more time to accomplish a task, you are inclined to take that time; if you have less time to accomplish a task, you are more inclined to rush it. If you assume the task requires the same amount of large effort no matter what (that is, it won't be less effort if you rush it; it won't be more effort if you take your time; it won't be more effort if you rush it; it won't be less effort if you take your time)--and this is not an unreasonable assumption because the game of mafia is incredibly complex to handle--then that leads to more posts per day in a shorter-deadline game than in a longer-deadline game.
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Post Post #139 (isolation #10) » Sun Jul 01, 2018 12:55 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 118, chamber wrote:
In post 116, mastina wrote:If you assume the task requires the same amount of effort no matter what
Weren't you just talking about how games took significantly less posts in the far past earlier? I think that disproves this point.
I don't see how, when I also specified (albeit indirectly) that the amount of time/effort needed in a game has increased over the years--just having more or less leveled out more recently.

A game in 2018 takes a significantly much longer time/effort than a game in 2008, but not much more time/effort (if any) than a game from 2015.

That having been said, 36-hour prod timers for Newbie games is something I can potentially get behind.
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Post Post #172 (isolation #11) » Sat Jul 14, 2018 5:23 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 169, Pulsaris wrote:Why do the people here don't want to play newbie games? Is that because they don't want to play with any newbie at all, or because they don't want to play a game with a majority of newbies?
Neither, and this assumption is a terrible one to make. People don't avoid things out of hatred (...
mostly
); they avoid things out of other reasons.
I love playing newbies.
But I self-enforce sets of standards for myself.

Even as just a SE, even not as a proper IC, I am a widely-established site member--while I don't intentionally give off the impression, whether I want to or not, I have a way of representing establishment at mafiascum. (Now, I'd be the first to argue I shouldn't, so if you think that I shouldn't...you won't hear me argue; I agree! But it's not something I control.)

As such, when people see me play a game, all the disclaimers in the world do no good. I can tell them "I'm not a typical player", "I'm quirky", that I'm unique, and so on and so forth endlessly--but ultimately, in spite of all my messages to them that I'm not the norm, I'm still treated as if I were the norm.

So if I am treated as the norm in a newbie game no matter how much I protest, then I need to be held to the standard of the norm. I need to be able to present a certain level of skill--something incredibly difficult to consistently do. I
can
do it...but it requires the attention level of, as a rough estimate, three games. (Which is about the level of investment I rate modding as being.)

Since my game limit is fairly low. If I am playing in a newbie game, I can't also be modding and I can't also be in like five, eight different games. I have to be in just the newbie game and maybe one or two others, tops. Because playing a newbie game is a commitment. If I played one right now, I wouldn't be able to give it that commitment.
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Post Post #173 (isolation #12) » Sat Jul 14, 2018 5:33 pm

Post by mastina »

For the record,
In post 171, Umlaut wrote:I would probably queue up for even more newbie games if there were more variety in the setups (instead of using the same variable-open setup all the time).
I've been a long-time advocate of this, but it's a difficult change to implement.

The first obstacle is over the moral debate on whether we should, because there
is
an argument to be had to the benefits of uniformity, that a universal setup is something which allows newbies to learn the same across all games. Which is a valid argument!

Personally, I feel the value in variety to setups would outweigh the value in uniformity, because there are
more
benefits to variety in setups (just different ones), ranging from increasing interest in them so we have more SEs/ICs, making newbie players not be bored as easily by monotony, and serving as a much better representative of site culture allowing for newbies to be able to handle multiple different types of scenarios once leaving the queue rather than just the one they were trained for. (More or less.) Among many others.

But even if you agree with that, that variety is better than monotony...actually
implementing
it is...
...Challenging, to say the least.

Each and every setup run needs to be about the same level of balanced.
Most setups if not all of them should be variable semi-opens. Which take time to design, and even longer to verify the balance of. (Especially when you have a divided community on what constitutes balanced.)
Endless number of setups have been made, but run in only small quantities; we lack the amount of hard data on them to make conclusions on whether they're firmly balanced.
Every past newbie setup has stopped being used due to HAVING the hard data...telling us the setup was imbalanced.
Even if we get to the point where we have the data necessary to call it balanced...some setups which may be balanced outside of the newbie queue may be imbalanced inside of it for whatever reason.

This isn't even nearly a complete list of the obstacles we'd face in implementing variety in setups.

So, the idea is one I'd love to have be reality, I just don't actually know how we'd manage the feat.
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Post Post #179 (isolation #13) » Mon Jul 16, 2018 9:31 am

Post by mastina »

In post 175, Pulsaris wrote:Well, you have said the answer yourself. There's no mafia setup in the world that is objectively balanced. Isn't some degree of balance enough?
Actually, what I said is that we have a divided community on what is balanced.
It's not that we don't have an objective standard of balance.

The problem is, we have
two
objective standards of balance.
While the two are not necessarily INHERENTLY mutually exclusive (if a setup fails balance by both metrics, it needs to be tossed out/redesigned; if a setup is close to or at balanced by both metrics, then it is automatically one of the best setups we have designed), they tend to have a very large conflict between the two.

And this divide is a divide between balancing between what the theoretical practice for roles is, and what the actual reality of those roles is. (The latter has a tendency to create setups which by the former are townsided; the former has a tendency to create setups which by the latter are scumsided.)

A go-to example is miller. In theory, miller is a negative utility role, serving as a false guilty to a cop and being a player who can never be cleared as town. (Unless you have a rolecop, but that's a different matter altogether.) In practice, miller serves as an automatically-claimed role that is usually treated as a Named Townie: a player slightly more likely to be town, but not proven to be town, and is thus a fluff/filler role that doesn't really add or detract to the setup in a significant way.

Another aspect of this is how the mafia nightkill is handled. Theoretical practice for the nightkill is usually just to use random numbers to determine the chances of roles that die. In practice, the mafia nightkill is a tool MUCH stronger than random chance would indicate, so by theory the mafia nightkill tends to be underestimated; by practice, it tends to be evaluated as holding a much greater weight (and if anything, may be overestimated as a result).

Now magnify those differences in balance standards across every single role and how they interact, and you can see the trouble.

That having been said
, you're correct.
"Some measure of balance" being 'good enough' is exactly the sort of metric we should be aiming for.
Normals have a 60% cutoff rate. That is, a town can have a 60% chance of winning, versus scum having a 40% winning, at maximum;
The scum can have a 60% chance of winning, versus town having a 40% chance of winning, at maximum.

So, we have a balance metric which you can state is, 50%, give or take 10%.

That seems like a fairly good number to use.

A setup which has a 60% town winrate might not be
ideal
, but it'd be
close enough
that I wouldn't disqualify it.
Similarly so for a setup with a 60% mafia winrate. (Though this has a tendency to be...quite brutal for newbies, so it certainly wouldn't be the best.)
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