Long term health of mafiascum

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Post Post #729 (isolation #0) » Sat Mar 31, 2018 3:30 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

Part of the reason I don't play as much any more is because I fear too much of the playerbase
isn't
playing to win.

Using incivility, etc., as tactics isn't fun to play with, and I'd prefer people wouldn't (I don't, or at least try not to). But not putting in effort is even less fun, and tends to drive away the people who would put in effort.
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Post Post #775 (isolation #1) » Sat Apr 07, 2018 12:33 am

Post by callforjudgement »

Hmm, if we're talking about site appearance features, what about something that visually merges double-posts UI-wise (i.e. you get a post-number-and-date heading for each post, but the username, avatar, etc. only appears once)? That'd help prevent spamposters using up so much vertical space, making the thread less daunting to read.
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Post Post #826 (isolation #2) » Fri Apr 13, 2018 6:35 am

Post by callforjudgement »

Arguably the existence of a ranked queue will make the others seem less competitive. That's probably a good thing, as many newer players are scared to play anything but Newbies. (That's the reason the rules are designed so that your third game has to be played outside the Newbie Queue, to give players experience of what at least one other queue is like.)
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Post Post #832 (isolation #3) » Fri Apr 13, 2018 11:42 am

Post by callforjudgement »

Just to make it even more complicated: unbalanced towns are better in Nightless than they are in Day Start (where scum can kill the best townies early). So not only do you have to work out how much advantage/disadvantage towns get from being unbalanced, you also have to take the nature of the setup into account too.
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Post Post #944 (isolation #4) » Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:58 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

I can confirm that as a moderator, it's quite common to have players who don't understand anything about the game they're playing in.

My confirmation procedures sometimes end up very complex just to ensure that the players are aware of what's going on. Sometimes you have to come up with unusual vote count formats and the like, too.

So running a Blitz is always going to be difficult, because how can you make sure that people realise the deadlines are fast during signups? Apparently just
saying
that the deadlines are fast isn't enough. Perhaps you have to PM everyone who signs up individually?
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Post Post #949 (isolation #5) » Tue Jun 26, 2018 7:17 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

That's actually not as bad as I feared it would be.

It strikes me that much of the potential problem is likely to be players who disagree with each other about what the site should be like, and driving each other away from games as a result. The fewer people who are here, the less picky you can afford to be about who you play with / which games you join, and thus there's likely to be a point beneath which the rate at which people leave accelerates.

On another subject, the number of mods seems anecdotally to be dropping faster than the number of players, which is weird and not what I'd have predicted. It may be that players are getting pickier about moderators, meaning that more games are failing to fill and thus making the queues cycle faster. I know that as a moderator, anything more complex than an Open or Normal is proving nearly impossible to design; it feels like it takes months to get a Theme up to a standard where I'm happy running it (and thus this hasn't really happened for anything larger than a Micro). That feels like effort I don't necessarily want to put in if there's a nontrivial chance that the game will be ruined early on by a player who isn't taking it seriously or who misreads their role PM.
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Post Post #959 (isolation #6) » Wed Jun 27, 2018 9:03 am

Post by callforjudgement »

In post 955, zoraster wrote:Unless we're talking about open games, the games in blitzes still need to be designed. Although I suppose for something short like that you could come up with some sort of formula to randomize the game and because it doesn't last as long if a few games are unbalanced or broken it's not as large a deal.

But I absolutely think that automating large portions of the moderation process, those that people typically don't really enjoy (vote counts, prods), is good.

The biggest issue I see about automation is that it's probably harder to automate replacements, particularly before we have automatic sign ups.
Even if each game still requires a human moderator, automating much of the busywork would make it easier by allowing a moderator with less free time to do the job,

I can't get to the site every day, so if I'm moderating, that means that the deadlines need to be long enough that a random delay in a vote count or a flip or a night end or the like won't be disruptive. (Either that or I need a co-mod.) So I couldn't plausibly moderate a Blitz by myself.

If setup design is a problem, we can work around that by a) expanding our catalogue of Opens still further and b) making more use of the NRG's predesigned setup queue (e.g. by allowing Theme mods to take a setup from there and fit a theme around it). Designing a really good setup with unusual mechanics can take months to years, but just quickly designing a reasonable normalish Closed game that doesn't stray too far from established norms can be fairly easy.
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Post Post #1034 (isolation #7) » Sun Jul 01, 2018 5:42 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

In post 1027, zoraster wrote:top down player-focus is a good idea IF that doesn't decrease the number of moderators we have. With new, user-friendly tools, I think that's a place we can get to. But as it stands, the more restrictions we put on what mods can do, the fewer people are likely to mod. It's also worth pointing out that at least for returning players, mod excitement does play a role in player engagement.
I'm not sure this is true. Placing restrictions on moderators may actually
increase
the number of moderators, because I have a suspicion that many players who want to mod games aren't doing so because of a shortage of ideas / not knowing what would fill.
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