Let's Discuss the Hyperpost Meta

[Prism]

I've written previously in some scattered postgames about hyperposting meta, ways to counter it as scum, and hope for long-term shift in trends to adjust to something more sustainable.

Spoiler: Qualitative meta comments

Essentially, I think that the current hyperposting meta, which was considered heavily townsided in 2020, has some fatal flaws that are ripe for exploitation as scum. I've laid down a few blueprint games for how to defeat it proactively, and I know others have, such as the one referenced in the OP where a more passive scumteam simply let town eat itself alive. Several others spring to mind, and these are only games I've been involved in. There are surely many other ideas and implementations.

Longterm, I hoped that town meta would shift back to something more retro. While a dichotomy ignoring a middling approach is not the most accurate picture, it is convenient to think of play as being either "fast" or "slow". The "fast" play favors, as both alignments, players molded in the fires of chat mafia (ie. EM players) and successful adapters. I think the counter is "playing slow"-focused on slow but deep thoughts and collated points, focusing on progressions, and extracting deeper commitments.

As an additional note, hyperposting doesn't pose any issues in chat/blitz games, where it's understood that your full attention will be devoted to the game for an hour, but for games over several real-life days balancing becomes very problematic.

While some players will (and already have!) utilize the advantage of slower styles of play, and I don't disagree with qualitative suggestions to both improve individual play and quality of life, I am no longer optimistic that playstyle trends alone will shift the meta to a slower pace.

Increasingly, I think of hyperposting in terms of cooperative games, and more specifically hyperposting as something incentivized for every individual poster but bad for the collective. I've thought about what kind of game lines up best-at times framing it as a unilateralist's curse and at others a stag hunt. I think there are framings for both that makes sense. In the end, though, I think the closest is the good old fashioned prisoner's dilemma. Regardless of what every other player is doing, choosing to hyperpost is rarely, if

ever

, an option that will leave you worse off, and the only wiggle room is really that the iterations of games played can be considered unknown but capped.

Right now, I think the best answer to this is moderators capping posts.

I suspect both forms-capping the collective and capping the individual-work, but I have a preference. The collective cap, like that used by penguin alien & Cabd in recent games, keeps the tragedy of the commons cooperation problem that capping is intended to mitigate to begin with, but presents it in a more explicit and limited form that gives the game a lot of agency. Attention space, accessibility, and management of them are crucial parts of the game that would suck to lose almost entirely. That said, capping the individual and treating each as an island is my favored approach right now. Leave it up to them to make judicious use of their designated allotment of posts, with a timer resetting either on dayphases or a set number of hours, eg. 24. The voice is intended to be the primary tool, but players will almost always choose to quiet or silence others if given agency to do so (eg. doubling the post count of another player in a collective cap)

[Prism]

I do want to make clear I'm not trying to prescribe a one-size fits all solution so people Play Mafia The Way I Want Them To.

Fundamentally I don't think there's anything "wrong" with hyperposting, but it requires asking a lot of very hard questions, like "Who is my game targeted towards, and who is it ill-suited for?" I'm not trying to prescribe a solution to get people to play better mafia, but people on this website

do

seem to value things like longer deadlines and slower play than other websites. We could have one month deadlines if we wanted slower, we could have 24 hour deadlines if we wanted faster.

I think moderators being more proactive in cultivating the sort of pace & accessibility they would like to see goes a long way, with players signing on if that vision interests them. Cabd & PA's collective caps yielded some (I think) good results. For my run of the smaller Guardians of the Fortress, I was very intentional in selecting my prod timer+deadlines to encourage something fast paced, and I again think it turned out well. I am likely to run slower-paced games in the future.

[Prism]

Replying to some of the substantive points. Strongly on board that any caps should be objective and applied without subjective judgment except in initial setup, ie. the actual criterion/limits.

What should be the collective or individual cap?

It depends on what the moderator (and players who sign up for the game) want and are interested in. There is no set number and hyperposting is relative to the pace of the other players. For example, I think 25 posts/24 hours is a very realistic goal for most players but will cause moments of discomfort, but you could do 50, or 125 for an entire day if you want a faster pace, or 10 if you would like slower. No-cap games are still perfectly acceptable, too!

But I want to post more because someone else said X!

If it's an individual cap, too bad, you should have saved your posts! If it's a collective cap, perhaps it's strategic and unfortunate for you, but it's town's collective failure if something important goes unaddressed that day!

People ignore just a single wallpost. Nobody will listen to me if there's a cap and I can't spam the game.

People accommodate to the amount of content in front of them. Nobody listens to your wall because it's buried in 30 pages of one liners. When those one liners suddenly become sparse, people

will

read the content available. Even if they don't, there is equality: you are free to use the same amount of posts as anyone else to make your point, be it one or five. If the

only

way you feel heard is to spam even when no other player is, congratulations, you are the problem!

Well I don't want to be capped, period.

Sign up for games with no cap or very high caps. Run games with no cap or very high caps.

[Prism]

Completely agree that any caps should be known in signups. For my part, when I am speaking of "what players want", I am referring to their sign up being a yes/no vote on the restriction.