Suggestions for New Game Norms

Which Ideas do you approve of?

  • Approve of Limited OC/RIP Village Leaders only

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Approve of Unicycle only

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Approve of Limited OC only

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Approve of RIP Village Leaders only

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    11

UncleSam

Leading this village
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
Ok so there have been some questions raised, both publicly and in IS, about Circus. One response in particular stuck out to me from the IS thread:
If you would like a serious post from an ex-player:
I stopped playing because around my end of playing time it was mostly multifaction popularity contests, and I wasn't into that. Being on IRC every hour seemed like a requirement. Even if this is no longer the case I just lost interest and don't want to jump back in.
I've had this thought myself, as have several others. Basically it boils down to what I'm going to call activity creep. Players have gradually felt pressure to be online more and more often lest they miss something important, thus resulting in weeks of effort going down the drain.

So I'm going to suggest something very simple: have very specific windows of time dedicated to the game, and everything outside of that is limited to team communication.

People don't want to have to be online all day just to talk to that one straggler who doesn't care. People don't want to invest countless hours into mafia games in general. So why not take the pressure off of everyone?

This idea could take many forms. Principally, how I would implement it is 'In-thread and PM communication ONLY, with upper limits on both posts and PMs sent each cycle'. I don't want to see thousand-post days any more than the next person, and thinking about how to maximize communication would add an interesting gameplay element while also reducing the pressure to be continuously active on the playerbase.

IRC contact could be similarly limited, perhaps to very specific fixed times that would be publicly announced before players signed up. It would be cool to have a mafia cycle that lasted for one frenetic hour and which you could then sit back and relax from for a few days while thinking about the next cycle, rather than a monotonous looming game that consumes your life for weeks on end (or which you ignore, much to your teammates' chagrin). I'm going to call this 'Limited OC'.

Another suggestion I'm going to make it going to the Unicycle format as a new norm. For those who don't know what that is, refer to this game for a good summary. Basically, Unicycle cuts the amount of time a game is going to run in half by collapsing the day and night cycles into one, which is huge for maintaining activity throughout the game. If a game consisted of 6-8 different sessions consisting of 1-2 hours each over the course of ~2 weeks, with the opportunity to plan strategy semi-privately outside of that without feeling pressured to constantly be online, then it would allow players who just want to play the game to not invest a huge amount of time and still feel like they aren't getting swept away by the players who are_always_online. Similarly, it would help ease the pressure on those players from having to constantly be available. I'm calling this, obviously, 'Unicycle'.

One last suggestion I'm going to make is that we ban claiming of any kind. I'm as much of a fan of hard-and-fast role strategy as anyone, but when only 1-2 people are involved in planning the game gets old for everyone else quite quickly. I'm going to call this 'RIP Village Leaders'.

Obviously these don't need to be universal, but I think we should consider adopted some/all of these are new 'game norms' which are assumed unless specifically stated otherwise (sort of like how no kills/claiming on N0 is as of now).

I'd like opinions on which, if any, of these suggestions people approve of.
 

Acklow

I am always tired. Don't bother me.
Don't hate, but my biggest issue with mafia for the longest time has been the amount of activity necessary to be put in. I hated having to log onto IRC only to be bombarded with 2 or 3 pms by users saying that they have no time and I have no time and that claims needed to be done ASAP or smth like that. Likewise, hosting is 10x more taxing because "you have to be online!!!" - obligation thing. I would be more apt to come back to a game if it were not nearly activity intense. That's why I was always for having longer cycles in the first place (maybe an update once a week from the host or smth like that). Not saying that is how all games need to be or that it applies to everyone, but it's something I'd be more comfortable with if I were to personally get back into mafia.
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
Re: village leaders... I actually think the village falls apart without them/a competent one, or stands a much higher chance of it. Perhaps American schools just aren't teaching critical thinking these days but a good, deductive village leader who KNOWS how to organize and assign role actions is important to the uninformed majority's success. Otherwise it's very difficult for the protective roles to know WHO to target. Are they hitting someone of value? Or are they saving a scum? Or messing up village plans? Which I think is the big difference in our NOC vs OC games, is that NOCs have way more vanillas who don't have roles so the lack of a leader/organization is fine, but all those vanillas roles also get lambasted as 'boring' or uninteractive because of the lack of night roles. Which is why the OC games skew so night role-heavy, people disengage when they're vanilla or a passive role. It's something I saw time and time again in the MAG series and why I began phasing out pure-nilla roles on the village in exchange for some goony role... like the post restrictor. Useless but it does something.
I don't want to say too much about my current game but... the day one mislynch was terrible mismanagement by AG, the village leader. It was even THE EXACT SAME ROLE that was mislynched BEFORE. A village leader needs to be more effective than to mislynch one of its own roles like that. To AG's credit, he was very good about getting his desired actions out to people and as there were no guessing games by the villagers on "who target" they got their actions in quickly and I've updated early since. I shouldn't say too much more I guess but the leader does serve some purposes but needs to be effective and analytical.

However claiming is... tricky. There have been games when the leader, often Sam, doesn't believe host fake claims. WTF can the host even DO about that? "I would've totally put this role on the village if it had more room" yet some convoluted logic allows the village leader to call it out as a fake. It's setting the mafia up to fail even when the host tries to help them. If safe claims aren't actually safe, what can we do about that? They also required the host to provide an example PM and role PMs that didn't stray from that, or if they did were intentional decoys to try and get a mislynch as part of the game balance, and the host to probably write all the fake claims, or at least revise all of them. Some people in my games have written their own fakes and sent them to me to be revised and there were critical errors in them (I don't swear so tossing f bombs into your fake is a surefire way to be not-village) yet I also wonder if the village leader would even have noticed or pieced that together.

Re: specific windows... I think this might disincentivize people to play if they have an unconducive timezone/schedule to the window. Players like LightWolf and I think Gale aren't in the US. Even the East vs West coasts can have different times that would work... personally I couldn't do before 10pm EST on two days of the week due to my internship but others I couldn't do after 7pm EST due to my classes. So could I not play because I would miss 2 of the activity windows in the weekday? I just think it's going to be a huge problem trying to find a time when the majority/all of the game can absolutely be on. You'll still have people whose schedules don't allow them to be awake or not working or not in class at 5pm EST so if the window is 3-7pm EST and they're busy that whole time, are they disadvantaged at playing the game? What do they lose by not being on at that time? What do others gain by being on at that time? How many activity windows can you reasonably miss and not suffer?

This was the problem with RTM and why we never REALLY got them going except sometimes in #fluodome. People couldn't dedicate an uninterrupted hour to playing, so the game would get delayed and drag out, and then people would need to sub out because they'd go afk/leave before the game ended, and blah blah... I'm just not sure such mandated, structured activity times are going to be feasible for Smogon. It's not at all the same as mafia irl when you're all at a party together, we have such a range of timezones and schedules which is why the forum and IRC use at your leisure have been boons to allowing people to play.

A lot of people just want to play mafia 'casual' like and some do want to dedicate more time... to seriously reading every NOC post, constructing elaborate connections charts and posting tl;drs. Some people take that too far and turn it anti-fun, which is the problem with the narcissistic village leader who pesters everyone for a claim and results and PM instantaneously, because the leader believes everyone should work on their time and there is absolutely no irl/otherwise excuse for not kowtowing immediately to their demands. Any mafia who doesn't have their fake ready is immediately suspect and this burdens the host with being constantly available to craft the fakes... or the mafia has to use a poor fake.

I think role PMs went from being mini-stories and fun flavor elements to the game to being this looming, nagging thing you have to give to the leader when they spam your PM or you'll be suspected, you won't get on the sheet, you'll get targeted with random crap and lynched. My flavor has gotten progressively shorter each game... it used to be fun to tl;dr about the roles and the game dynamics and all the little world setups for the conflict. But then it got annoying to have two paragraphs of flavor per PM to write initially and then write again 8x or so for each mafia's fake. So then it was one paragraph. Then three sentences. Then two. Now one. Because one and a choppy action line are easier to churn out. There's not much reward for dedicated labor to the art of a role PM anymore. It just means the mafia will struggle to write fakes on their own so you'll have to do them.

I remember we used to include the role pics in the role PMs when they went out. Then that got abused somehow, the pics for fakes weren't in albums hosts created for the actual pics, the pics were uploaded after the game began and thus couldn't have been in starting PMs, blah blah. So they would only get posted upon death.

Someone always complains about bs hax, how could you give us this role why does it suck why is our team so awful why did you design the role this way why does the mafia have this that's so OP blah blah blah. We've taken the fun out of mafia. And I mean we used to have a LOT of people who would tryhard. But the tryharding on the players and hosts' parts felt worth it.

Newbies who don't understand our meta get lynched D1 because they do noobtown behaviors and can't defend themselves yet. However somehow people don't learn scummy noobtown moves often mean actualtown and mislynch anyway. I think finding a way to not overwhelm newbies with this burden of knowledge on how to survive and also not being idiots who lynch for 'scum' behavior like bandwagoning on someone who doesn't yet know HOW shady we find bandwagoning are important tickets to building up new players.
 

Ampharos

tag walls, punch fascists
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
Limited OC is an intriguing idea, and one that I think would definitely make the game more accessible to newcomers. I remember two games in particular (Adventure Games and the original Magmafia) in which the obligation to be always online impacted my real life interactions with family significantly, given that one took place at Thanksgiving and the other at Christmas/New Years. Granted I tend to obsess about these sorts of things a lot more than the average person, but the pressure is definitely there, and implementing limited OC would be an interesting way to combat this. That being said, however, I still think that certain games (read: FFAs) need to retain the standard OC format so that we see the same quality of play.

Unicycle is absolutely a fantastic idea for any OC game (the Wayne Bradiest games have used this to great effect, ignoring that one time I made lynch priority super weird LOL). I think any format other than NOC (for obvious reasons) can benefit from Unicycle, and gradually phasing it into OC games is probably for the best. The only potential issue I can think of is that it further distances our OC games from traditional "mafia", which IMO is another thing that makes it hard for newbies to get into Smafia, but in this case the benefits outweigh the downsides.

Banning claims is... not a good idea. Yes, the village leader system is incredibly abusable; yes, it leads to one or two people playing the game for the village while the rest tune in once every 48 hours. The problem, however, is that Smogon mafia players are fucking dumb. Villages just do not win without someone collecting claims. It just doesn't happen. If we ban claiming, I think we're gonna see the same sorts of problems that we see in our NOC games, where the mafia curbstomps unless the village has 4x the numbers, which I think we can all agree is not something we want.

I still think the solution to the village leader issue lies in game design. We've tried implementing designs that encourage group play and discourage leadership before - to mixed success, obviously (RIP Turnip), but the foundation is there. Banning claiming altogether just seems... drastic.

also I agree with literally every word Yeti said regarding Role PMs holy shit

edit: i also think we should use aliases more just because nametargeting fucking sucks
 
Most games typically have strict lynch deadlines, and potentially have important results immediately following night phases, which makes for 2 effective activity windows each cycle. I've already suggested making these extremely regular (high emphasis on predictable updates, no extensions etc.) and possibly extending cycle length. But the more important thing here is that the game benefits if everyone is on IRC already. I've already phased out IRC because 90% of the time there is absolutely no discussion at all. There's simply no reason to check it 90% of the time. It's far easier to be active if you can be active passively, which is what smogon mafia was about for the longest time. This probably means migrating the basic structure on which the games are built.
 
-What if instead of RIP Village leaders we just have really role heavy NOC games. You can still claim, but every claim would have to be public. A good example that I read recently is this MafiaScum game, where everyone has a power and a superpower:

http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=17257

People have identities and decisions to make, and information can eventually be collected, but is necessarily publicly organized. You'd have to resort to scumhunting for a little while which is less desirable here, but something like "no claiming" makes it incredibly difficult to share results which to me is incredibly restrictive.

-Limited OC in the form of IRC makes a lot of sense but limiting posting in threads and PMs intuitively reads as dangerous to me. Seems like that will cause bullshit like people being too afraid to advance the early game for fear of making too many bad posts, or scum running out their limit only to have their hands tied making it difficult to read them. Tryhards just post longer tldrs and get antsier when they're not read.
 

UncleSam

Leading this village
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
I actually like mills' idea of strict deadlines - while it sucks to have a teammate not send in an action, it sucks more for the game as a whole if it gets slowed down, leading to more idling etc. etc.

Limited OC on reflection is a cool idea for an individual game, but limiting posting in the thread is probably not a great idea as a new forum-wide norm. People often don't mind checking the thread regularly for a game they are playing.

I do have a suggestion for how to deal with the 'always being on IRC pressure' issue: only allow private communication via forum PMs. In other words, have game-sanctioned public chat areas (these could be either a general forum channel on IRC such as #circus, a PS room dedicated to forum mafia, or both), and so allow people to communicate with others in real time without requiring anyone to wait around for any other particular user to hop online.

Does anyone like this idea who didn't like Limited OC? Do people prefer this idea to OC?
 

shade

be sharp, say nowt
is a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Smogon Discord Contributor Alumnus
i think saying where you are and where you aren't allowed to talk will just constrict mafia further, we should be allowing all methods of outside communication (in non-NOC games ofc) to open mafia up to everyone. only allowing private communication via forum pms just adds an unnecessary and pretty much unpoliceable rule to mafia. in order to gain new users we should promote conversation about smogon mafia (both in game and casual) on every possible medium in order to reach all types of player bases. every mafia should just promote #smogon as the channel, because it is really disheartening to join a mafia channel and like 3 ppl are in it. #smogon isn't too active that we would be derailing it and it would certainly bring some fresh blood on to irc and mafia.

i think we need a back to basics game if anyone is willing to host one. simple 2 v 1, simple roles and simple tactics. promote it to new players and people who haven't played a lot (old players shouldn't really join), suggest that talking on irc is probably a good idea and then lets see what they come up with. the best way to get new people in to mafia is with accessible and playable games from the off, not limiting conversation & limiting the rules. have standard rules, simple roles and new players and lets see what they come up with.
 

UncleSam

Leading this village
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
I agree that a back to basics game would be a good idea, but I'm not sure how it addresses the problems being raised by people quitting mafia (problems which I know that I and several others agree with). In other words, while I'm certainly not opposed to allowing unrestricted communication for any given game, it seems to me that adding pseudo requirements hurts new users more than it helps them in many cases.

However, there's no reason we can't try both.
 
The solution to village leader games already exists, it's NOC mafia. The problem with outside communication mafias is that there is a clear dominant strategy of aggregating information to one individual, who makes decisions regarding actions that will maximize the information received which will clear/mark as scum the most players. Obviously, factors such as copy/pasting Role PMs makes facilitating such a strategy much easier, but even barring that, there's really no situation in which a village doesn't want to do that as long as private conversations are allowed. Personally, I'm not convinced that the problem with smogmafia is the activity requirement, I feel like it's more of the fact that people don't know what to do, and there's a sense that with a village leader, you don't really need to do anything, which as has been established before, is boring. I agree though that maybe if a time was designated where the majority of people could be on (eg around deadlines and what not), perhaps that would make the IRC requirement a little less cumbersome. I don't think it has to be a requirement, but at the very least it could be encouraged for the players to try and be on around that designated time.

Personally, I think the way to getting more people to play is to foster a sense of community through avenues such as #fluo mafia and RTMs. Unfortunately, I think that's a little harder to do considering that Pokemon Showdown provides a much easier alternative to play instant mafia without having to get on IRC. Maybe one thing we could consider is to create (idk if we can do this?) a forum mafia channel or whatever on PS, and try to do more forum mafia things there. That way, it's more likely that new people will notice that we exist and people will be more willing to try out smogmafia.

Oh, and I also think that more "experimental" games such as zorbees' current game are also good sorts of games to host since interest in them expands beyond mafia. That's not really an answer to the question at hand, but I just wanted to add that hosting those sort of games never hurts.
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
how access PS ?

it's the new shoddy or w/e isn't it for mons battling? the only reason i'm not there lurking is I haven't battled mons for years so I have no clue how to get there LMAO I'm not opposed to chilling with those guys and seeing their meta and trying to get involved with their playerbase I just find IRC much more convenient for me, personally, since I've been using it since the release of D/P for mons communities.
 
how access PS ?

it's the new shoddy or w/e isn't it for mons battling? the only reason i'm not there lurking is I haven't battled mons for years so I have no clue how to get there LMAO I'm not opposed to chilling with those guys and seeing their meta and trying to get involved with their playerbase I just find IRC much more convenient for me, personally, since I've been using it since the release of D/P for mons communities.
The main draw to PS is that it's browser-based so you just hop on and you're there. A lot simpler then having to set up IRC and it would be way more likely for a random person to find a game/circus channel and discover mafia then finding this subforum or happening on an IRC channel. The more I think about it, the more I really like the idea, considering that it 1. makes it less of a hassle to be active since a lot of people already go to PS to play mons and w/e and 2. more likely for new users to discover forum maf just from random browsing especially compared to how things stand now

ofc there already is a mafia community, but i don't think it would hurt to have a separate channel for discussing forum mafia stuff considering that i think they usually have games going on regularly and it would be rude to interrupt that? not sure tho since i don't spend time there so someone else would have to elaborate on that
 
so there are two questions here:

-how to revive the mafia community (by catering to old players)
-how to revive the mafia community (by bringing in new players)

the answers to which are vastly different: see sam's approach vs shade's (respectively)

new players are typically younger and have more free time, because they're at school or college. they can spare to be super competitive and waste a bunch of free time playing mafia, and they'll probably have a blast doing so.

old players don't have that time anymore, or they're burned out from playing the same thing without the social draw the game once had (too much competitiveness isn't good), or both. imo the best way to possibly pull off a game with older players is to try and liken it to meet ups IRL; have a mafia 'event' every week or two where players pledge to 'make it', have a few hours long IRC session where a lot of planning and diplomacy happens, and then the phase ends and players wait anxiously for the next meet. that's the idea i had a few days ago and i see echoes of it in this thread. "what if someone can't make it?" is the big problem, but it can't be helped in real life either. you can't have everything.

an aside: hosting games should be a passion project with plenty of heart and flavor. i too hate the barebones games. it feels like they have a higher chance of being forgettable.

an aside II: i don't know squat about the PS community, but i am aware there's a PS community, and they're probably in better shape than ours. maybe we should integrate over there or something.
 
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Tangentially related to "strict deadlines": Strict deadlines shouldn't imply short deadlines. Even with outside communication, it's sometimes difficult to get information to another team member and back across timezones with deadlines under 36h.
 

LightWolf

lightwoof
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
I feel in every way or form Unicycle just puts needed activity way up by condensing all the action, people are punished for being in off timezones or simply having a busy day.

Frankly I do not really like any of the suggestions, and prefer what Yeti did in ALLCAPS, people can't paste shit so it removes the stupid role PM combing I'd have had to go through and allows hosts to put back old levels of flavour into the games which started dying as more and more people were asking for the host to provide them with fake flavour(which is quite painful to keep consistent if you do paragraphs of shit, good god, and old shit had MORE). shade is p much on the money, people were flocking at simpler times, bring back Zelda and Apoc times, where balance was probs off but fuck were those games not entertaining to play and read(curse you zelda, I was a month of being in you(lol puns))
 

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