Long term health of mafiascum

[xRECKONERx]

Uhhh I missed this but damn that mockup on the last page looks amazing

[fferyllt]

#borkgame

this needs to be a thing.

Also not going to get my feelings hurt for making the same suggestion pages ago and nobody noticed. :/

(well maybe a little)

[quadz08]

Ooh. That's a really good idea, actually.

I'll talk to the other listmods backstage and see how they feel about trying to do that on a semi-regular basis. I may try to just do it myself, but I can't promise I'll be up-to-date all the time.

[Majiffy]

Uhhh I missed this but damn that mockup on the last page looks amazing

Thanks for mentioning! I missed it too. And it definitely does.

[Riddleton]

#hashtags are awful

[Flubbernugget]

Not if you use them as intended

[esuriospiritus]

TIGER ATTACK plushies

oh my god, yes please. I'd buy multiples and hide them around the apartment so I can annoy the shit out of Pie with them.

(I only just found this thread; I may have more useful thoughts when I'm caught up and sure no one else has beaten me to it)

[HorseDetective]

I think I'm probably one of the posters talked about here in that I have had accounts in the past, now abandoned because I can't remember passwords/emails for them, which participated in one game or half a game and then dropped out. I like the atmosphere here, but I felt the major problem was speed and hierarchy: it takes an immensely long time to enter a game here, it takes a long time for the game to start, a day runs for

two weeks

, which is the longest I've ever known in any mafia community and can become intolerably boring on occasion, and so on. The hierarchy point is the restrictions which are put on creating games. I came here because I played Mafia on other forums, enjoyed it, and looked for a more focused community; but then I find it easier to participate in and create my own Mafia games in the forums I started in! I get that there's a trade-off between Wild Wild West style of everyone being able to do everything and the quality dropping versus a relative guarantee of quality mafia games, but if you are looking for membership, I think the rules have been excessively tightened to the point they are really hurting you. All of this might not actually be the case as of this post; it's my experience from probably about a year ago now, but I was just thinking of rejoining and saw this and thought I'd put in my 2p. Make games shorter and give people more control over the games they actually want to play and more people will stick around.

I just wanted to come back to this, because nobody really touched on it - particularly the issue of game length. Just to reiterate, from my experience as a newbie it is by far and away the number one issue with playing on this site. Suppose that a newbie game lasts until day 4 - town lynch, town lynch, scum lynch, scum lynch, as an example. That game can run to about 9 weeks if people take the full days and nights available to make decisions - that's

over two months

. Think how much of a commitment you are asking from a new player in advance: despite not really knowing whether they will like the site or the community, you're telling them that the basic level of entry takes them over 2 months to get through.

Not only will many people just not consider it all, it also dramatically increases the chances people will drop out - firstly just because they might not be having fun but feel like they don't want to move outside of newbies without experience and so just drop out of mafia altogether, but secondly because it's

boring

. This is particularly relevant when MafiaScum's closest competitors are EpicMafia and Town of Salem. Yes, I know the quality on these sites is pretty low, but they do have a higher userbase and set the "minimum standard" for a lot of mafia players. Both are built for ~20 minute coffee break games. This is not to say you can't extend on that; the very fact someone has looked for a forum to play mafia in means they are probably more interested in long-form games, but the sheer size of the jump from 5 minute days to 2 week days is gargantuan.

Even if we assume that there's little overlap between chat mafia and forum mafia communities, which I think is unlikely, and suppose MafiaScum draws people entirely from other forums where people play mafia, nobody else uses the 2 week standard. I play mafia on at least 3 other communities fairly regularly. A week-long day is considered pretty damn long in some of those communities, with many using 3 RL days: 1 mafia day and 1 RL day: 1 mafia night. People will probably feel okay to committing to stretching to week-long days; that way you can sell the vast majority of games as finishing inside a month, and you still have extended deadlines that allow for this site's higher quality. But beyond that and you are pushing yourselves bizarrely far beyond where the entire rest of the internet mafia community is that.

EDIT: As a comparison, by far the most common deadline arrangement I see is 5 RL days:1 mafia day and 2 RL days:1 mafia night. This allows for one day/night cycle to be conducted within a week, and is probably the standard on every other site I visit.

[quadz08]

That gap didn't happen intentionally - it grew organically within this site, whereas it did not elsewhere (for whatever reason). I am not interested in a top-down alteration of site culture of that magnitude, nor do I think it would provide a benefit to the existing users of the site, who are the first priority. And only changing newbie deadlines defeats the purpose of a newbie game.

[HorseDetective]

That gap didn't happen intentionally - it grew organically within this site, whereas it did not elsewhere (for whatever reason). I am not interested in a top-down alteration of site culture of that magnitude, nor do I think it would provide a benefit to the existing users of the site, who are the first priority. And only changing newbie deadlines defeats the purpose of a newbie game.

I'm not suggesting that this deadline be enforced site-wide. What I think would be the best policy is to allow site liberalism, where the person/people who makes a set-up and decides to run it also gets to decide the dead-line length. Alongside this, newbie games would be changed to week long affairs. Even if you changed newbie games only, I still think that's preferable to not doing so. Once someone has reached the end of their first "long-form" game, even if long-form here means only a week, and enjoyed it, they'll probably more willing to commit to future games even if those games are longer - heck, they may even be looking forward to longer games at that point. Going from 3:1 to 7:1 to 14:1 is a lot easier than jumping straight from 3:1 to 14:1. It's not like the actual nuts and bolts of how to play differ between 7:1 and 14:1, it's just the former demands so much more from people it seems unreasonable to make it the entrance level. They can learn everything they need to function on other set-ups regardless of length from week-long games, so it still fills the "useful-for-newbies" criteria.

Of course, you're obviously within your rights to maintain the two-week requirement and favour the existing user-base, the caveat of that is simply that it hurts the ability to create a next generation of users that this thread was concerned about. There is probably always going to be a trade-off there.

[zoraster]

mods, particularly in theme games, have lots of lattitude for deadlines. People are definitely allowed to run 1 day deadline games as a theme game if they want

[HorseDetective]

mods, particularly in theme games, have lots of lattitude for deadlines. People are definitely allowed to run 1 day deadline games as a theme game if they want

That's nice to know. If this is the case, then, why is the newbie format set at what is (presumably) basically the longest possible length used in the community?

[zoraster]

it's not. it's set at what is probably the median deadline. and historically that's fairly short (3 weeks, 1 month and unlimited were used in the past). The deadline has shifted down from the default 3 weeks that it used to be, in fact.

[HorseDetective]

Really!? Wow, that's... definitely very long. Fair enough. I just say this because I'm probably your key demographic - not in a boastful way, I mean, I've just played a fair bit of forum mafia before, am relatively keen on it, and have gone so far as to Google for other communities and ended up finding this place and making (several accounts), so I'm representative of the most targetable slice of the population - and what killed it for me every time was having to wait so long for everything to happen.

[fferyllt]

mods, particularly in theme games, have lots of lattitude for deadlines. People are definitely allowed to run 1 day deadline games as a theme game if they want

That's nice to know. If this is the case, then, why is the newbie format set at what is (presumably) basically the longest possible length used in the community?

I think it's because despite the latitude, most mods set 2 week deadlines. And I think the newbie games are in part supposed to let new members/players figure out if they will like playing at MS. You kinda have to be able to adjust to 2 week deadlines currently if you like playing here.

I learned mafia and played mafia for several years on forums with 12-24 hour game days. It was a huge adjustment, but I like longer deadlines now that I'm used to them (though I think in some ways my play has suffered).

On the other hand, the mafiascum wiki was one of the links I was sent to in my first mafia game in 2008. I didn't join MS until a couple years ago even though I used the wiki constantly and played and modded mafia on 3-4 other sites. I was a mafia evangelist in the wilderness of sorts!

The near-default silver phpbb skin turned me off, as did phpbb as a platform, which is a large part of why it was 4 years after learning about mafiascum before I registered.

I didn't realize how many extremely helpful-for-mafia modifications had been made to this site until I was finally playing my first game here in 2013.

[HorseDetective]

Yeah, I found this place via the wiki as well, back in uh... I think 2010ish was the very first time I became aware of this site's existence. I don't really see the wiki linked to in many other sites these days, though, certainly not as much as it used to be - not entirely sure why (possibly something to do with not being very high on the search results now?). And yeah, the adjustment was, or I guess for me,

is

really big. I'm sure I might like longer deadlines if I acclimatized to them, but there's no real middle-ground to acclimatize in if you see what I mean - I have to throw myself in at the deep end and that is off-putting to me.

The forums are not very nice looking, yes.

EDIT: The ISO button is amazing, though. Massive credit to whoever came up with that one.

[chamber]

I definitely remember some multi-month days back when. I don't know how people get anything done in less than 2 weeks.

[saulres]

I definitely remember some multi-month days back when. I don't know how people get anything done in less than 2 weeks.

Were the town win rates higher back then?

[chamber]

I think they were worse in mini normals if you look at statistics, but it's been a while since I have. I also don' think the stats have ever been compiled for larges.

[HorseDetective]

In my experience, increasing deadlines favours scum. I think this is because people have an odd tendency to second-guess themselves over time; either that or they get called out for tunneling. This used to be gospel amongst some of the mafia communities I was in, particularly xkcd's mafia community (http://forums.xkcd.com/viewforum.php?f=53).

EDIT: Although obviously my experience is restricted to shorter formats, so my "long" is not for you guys,

[chamber]

I think we've run stats on that too and the actual answer was somewhere in the middle.

[chamber]

I mean I wouldn't be surprised if towns have an advantage at extremely fast games where mafia are forced to think on their feet and everyone is active, but once you get past that point, game days being too short to the detriment of the town is a real thing.

[HorseDetective]

I guess this is just strong divergence in meta, then. As I said, most other communities consider a week quite a long time and certainly not anywhere near preventing town discussion at all at all. Having said that, maybe smaller communities are capable of sustaining greater activity? When it's a group of 15ish people or whatever who all know each other very well and are a community for reasons other than just the game, the amount of time they dedicate towards that community (including the game) might be higher, so you might get more posts-per-hour? I'm not sure.

[GuyInFreezer]

I guess this is just strong divergence in meta, then. As I said, most other communities consider a week quite a long time and certainly not anywhere near preventing town discussion at all at all. Having said that, maybe smaller communities are capable of sustaining greater activity? When it's a group of 15ish people or whatever who all know each other very well and are a community for reasons other than just the game, the amount of time they dedicate towards that community (including the game) might be higher, so you might get more posts-per-hour? I'm not sure.

How are the # of players there compared to this site?

[chamber]

I guess this is just strong divergence in meta, then. As I said, most other communities consider a week quite a long time and certainly not anywhere near preventing town discussion at all at all. Having said that, maybe smaller communities are capable of sustaining greater activity? When it's a group of 15ish people or whatever who all know each other very well and are a community for reasons other than just the game, the amount of time they dedicate towards that community (including the game) might be higher, so you might get more posts-per-hour? I'm not sure.

It's a function of the age of the community as well(as in age of individual members). Most of us can't devote a full week to playing a game of mafia. You may look at our 2 month commitments as too long, but I look at a week commitment of having to be super active as more insane.