As I said to osie, I don't believe policy lynching is anywhere even close to being akin to slurring or cryptoclaims or what have you. If you're not enjoying someone's presence in a game, you do something about it - either by complaining to the host, or by lynching the player. That said, I think complaining to the host should probably be the reasonable first step in that chain of events, which I believe osie is pushing to become an official rule, here.
Hard agree that it is extremely different from cryptoclaims, etc., but what is the host going to do? I guess we can just add a bit to the board rules that says "if you have a problem with a player, you should contact the host and report their posts if they're flaming or trolling." but expecting modkills against other players for lynching you because of actions you took within the game is... well, I'm not going to force a host to modkill for breaking that rule, I guess is what I'm saying, and I'm not going to ban lynches due to post restrictions or discussion of post restrictions the same way discussions about replacements are banned because they are not even remotely the same thing.
As I said to osie, I don't believe policy lynching is anywhere even close to being akin to slurring or cryptoclaims or what have you. If you're not enjoying someone's presence in a game, you do something about it - either by complaining to the host, or by lynching the player. That said, I think complaining to the host should probably be the reasonable first step in that chain of events, which I believe osie is pushing to become an official rule, here.
Hard agree that it is extremely different from cryptoclaims, etc., but what is the host going to do? I guess we can just add a bit to the board rules that says "if you have a problem with a player, you should contact the host and report their posts if they're flaming or trolling." but expecting modkills against other players for lynching you because of actions you took within the game is... well, I'm not going to force a host to modkill for breaking that rule, I guess is what I'm saying, and I'm not going to ban lynches due to post restrictions or discussion of post restrictions the same way discussions about replacements are banned because they are not even remotely the same thing.
Post restrictions are a different topic. Could you stay on topic of lynching regardless of alignment, please?
I mean, there's a bit at the end about post restrictions but that's definitely not the only thing I was referring to, it was just the most... obvious example of a reason why someone would lynch a player for reasons other than alignment. Another is to avoid a no lynch -- I've probably actively helped hang at least a dozen players when I thought they were town just to not "waste" a day and move the game forward. I've also dug in my heels and refused to vote for players I think are town, and they usually end up in the noose regardless because of other players wanting to avoid that.
I'm 100% okay with adding a rule to the board-wide rules that says "If you have a problem with a player, your first course of action should be to contact the game host, and if they are flaming, trolling, or spamming, please report the offending posts so a board moderator can handle it."
But I'm not going to ask, let alone force, a host to modkill players if they choose to remove a player they feel is problematic or damaging the game by hanging them. If the player isn't correcting their behavior in the face of over the half the players in it asking them to stop because they are making the game unenjoyable, then threatening them to, they probably aren't going to listen to the host, either.
I'd rather ban Post Restrictions than force players to play with a player that is post restricting.
You have to take a step back and think about what this is.
Players express they don't like X behavior. I really don't care if its PR, toxicity, Gif posting.
Player Y continues to do so against all other players expressed wishes.
Players go to mod.
Mod has to ????
Either
A) Mod replaces the player doing X behavior, because clearly the player doing X behavior isn't going to stop.
BUT that player isn't really breaking any rules. So, that doesn't seem fair.
B) Mod replaces the rest of the game. Yeah, just no.
C) Mod does nothing so players lynch them because they don't want to deal with it.
Really what you are trying to do is enforce having fun. Player Z doesn't like player D for posting in Gifs. Player Z is the only player in the game that has a problem with it. Should player D be forced to stop? I'd say no.
Six players have a problem with player D in a 16 person game. They are a minority. Should player D be forced to stop?
At the end of the day you have to recognize something.
Players made it clear to you they did not like you posting in PR. You made the active decision to tell an entire game to go **** themselves by continuing to post that way. The only thing that would have happened here is that if players were forced to talk to a moderator first, the moderator would have told you to stop or be replaced out.
Players solved it by lynching you. You didn't respect peoples opinions and you decided to continue the way YOU wanted to play.
Like what can you possibly see as a way out of this? I see no way in which the moderation comes out in your favor in scum loves the king.
I mean, there's a bit at the end about post restrictions but that's definitely not the only thing I was referring to, it was just the most... obvious example of a reason why someone would lynch a player for reasons other than alignment. Another is to avoid a no lynch -- I've probably actively helped hang at least a dozen players when I thought they were town just to not "waste" a day and move the game forward. I've also dug in my heels and refused to vote for players I think are town, and they usually end up in the noose regardless because of other players wanting to avoid that.
I'm 100% okay with adding a rule to the board-wide rules that says "If you have a problem with a player, your first course of action should be to contact the game host, and if they are flaming, trolling, or spamming, please report the offending posts so a board moderator can handle it."
But I'm not going to ask, let alone force, a host to modkill players if they choose to remove a player they feel is problematic or damaging the game by hanging them. If the player isn't correcting their behavior in the face of over the half the players in it asking them to stop because they are making the game unenjoyable, then threatening them to, they probably aren't going to listen to the host, either.
/barn
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@DV: I think I made the exact same argument to osie - that if people are lynching him for reasons that aren't related to his alignment, he is obviously doing something they did not like and that he should probably not do that in the future, as if a group of people deem you disruptive or unenjoyable enough to remove you from their immediate area at the risk of losing several months' worth of emotional or mental investment, well...that says a lot.
I don't think that osie's rule suggestion is an easy one to enforce, as players can just easily say, "Well, he was obfuscating the game, so I thought he was scum," rather than "I lynched him because he was being disruptive to the game's health/integrity." While yes, it makes sense to say to the host, "Hey, I asked Dudeguy to stop duding up the thread, but he won't stop," at some point, you have to examine yourself and ask, "Am I the problem?" If you're threatening to take your ball and go home because people won't let you play the way you want at the detriment of their enjoyment of the game, do you really want to be that guy rather than to take a moment of introspection?
I don't necessarily think "no posting restrictions" is easy to enforce, either, but may possibly be easier than the alternative suggestion. However, that removes the fun of roleplaying your role, or things like spidertom, lolcatsGuardman, or any of the other delightful and memorable moments to that effect that we've come to appreciate over the years of playing together as a community.
I don't really see this conversation going towards implementation of a new rule surrounding these circumstances, as these are all things that the playerbase has been accountable for over the years.
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
I mean, there's a bit at the end about post restrictions but that's definitely not the only thing I was referring to, it was just the most... obvious example of a reason why someone would lynch a player for reasons other than alignment. Another is to avoid a no lynch -- I've probably actively helped hang at least a dozen players when I thought they were town just to not "waste" a day and move the game forward. I've also dug in my heels and refused to vote for players I think are town, and they usually end up in the noose regardless because of other players wanting to avoid that.
I'm 100% okay with adding a rule to the board-wide rules that says "If you have a problem with a player, your first course of action should be to contact the game host, and if they are flaming, trolling, or spamming, please report the offending posts so a board moderator can handle it."
But I'm not going to ask, let alone force, a host to modkill players if they choose to remove a player they feel is problematic or damaging the game by hanging them. If the player isn't correcting their behavior in the face of over the half the players in it asking them to stop because they are making the game unenjoyable, then threatening them to, they probably aren't going to listen to the host, either.
Dawning could have been lynched in Zero Escaped regardless of alignment, and there were no post restrictions going on there.
I'd rather ban Post Restrictions than force players to play with a player that is post restricting.
You have to take a step back and think about what this is.
Players express they don't like X behavior. I really don't care if its PR, toxicity, Gif posting.
Player Y continues to do so against all other players expressed wishes.
Players go to mod.
Mod has to ????
Either
A) Mod replaces the player doing X behavior, because clearly the player doing X behavior isn't going to stop.
BUT that player isn't really breaking any rules. So, that doesn't seem fair.
B) Mod replaces the rest of the game. Yeah, just no.
C) Mod does nothing so players lynch them because they don't want to deal with it.
Really what you are trying to do is enforce having fun. Player Z doesn't like player D for posting in Gifs. Player Z is the only player in the game that has a problem with it. Should player D be forced to stop? I'd say no.
Six players have a problem with player D in a 16 person game. They are a minority. Should player D be forced to stop?
At the end of the day you have to recognize something.
Players made it clear to you they did not like you posting in PR. You made the active decision to tell an entire game to go **** themselves by continuing to post that way. The only thing that would have happened here is that if players were forced to talk to a moderator first, the moderator would have told you to stop or be replaced out.
Players solved it by lynching you. You didn't respect peoples opinions and you decided to continue the way YOU wanted to play.
Like what can you possibly see as a way out of this? I see no way in which the moderation comes out in your favor in scum loves the king.
SLTK is not the topic of discussion. It's lynching regardless of alignment.
But if you want to discuss SLTK, I'm fine with doing that as long as it isn't conflated with another topic.
I'd rather ban Post Restrictions than force players to play with a player that is post restricting.
You have to take a step back and think about what this is.
Players express they don't like X behavior. I really don't care if its PR, toxicity, Gif posting.
Player Y continues to do so against all other players expressed wishes.
Players go to mod.
Mod has to ????
Either
A) Mod replaces the player doing X behavior, because clearly the player doing X behavior isn't going to stop.
BUT that player isn't really breaking any rules. So, that doesn't seem fair.
B) Mod replaces the rest of the game. Yeah, just no.
C) Mod does nothing so players lynch them because they don't want to deal with it.
Really what you are trying to do is enforce having fun. Player Z doesn't like player D for posting in Gifs. Player Z is the only player in the game that has a problem with it. Should player D be forced to stop? I'd say no.
Six players have a problem with player D in a 16 person game. They are a minority. Should player D be forced to stop?
At the end of the day you have to recognize something.
Players made it clear to you they did not like you posting in PR. You made the active decision to tell an entire game to go **** themselves by continuing to post that way. The only thing that would have happened here is that if players were forced to talk to a moderator first, the moderator would have told you to stop or be replaced out.
Players solved it by lynching you. You didn't respect peoples opinions and you decided to continue the way YOU wanted to play.
Like what can you possibly see as a way out of this? I see no way in which the moderation comes out in your favor in scum loves the king.
SLTK is not the topic of discussion. It's lynching regardless of alignment.
But if you want to discuss SLTK, I'm fine with doing that as long as it isn't conflated with another topic.
I fail to see how any rule in place would ever stop any problem as you are suggesting it is.
I'm using that as an example.
What you are asking the moderator to do is something moderators should never do. Which is pick a side.
I don't think that osie's rule suggestion is an easy one to enforce, as players can just easily say, "Well, he was obfuscating the game, so I thought he was scum," rather than "I lynched him because he was being disruptive to the game's health/integrity." While yes, it makes sense to say to the host, "Hey, I asked Dudeguy to stop duding up the thread, but he won't stop,"
at some point, you have to examine yourself and ask, "Am I the problem?" If you're threatening to take your ball and go home because people won't let you play the way you want at the detriment of their enjoyment of the game, do you really want to be that guy rather than to take a moment of introspection?
Excuse me? Someone used the fact that I had expressed disapproval for lynching regardless of alignment to try to angleshoot me into replacing out of a currently ongoing game. You're condoning that now?
%%%
As I said earlier, I don't care about Scum Love the King. It was a dumb thing to happen in a game, but it's so far from the point that it's just intentionally taking the thread on tangents to talk about this proposal in the context of that game, and intentionally strawmanning my point. I'm not talking in the context of that game as of a while ago.
I also don't care if posting restrictions are banned. That means nothing to me.
I'm asking for consistency to new players. If we're a community that is okay with players openly saying they will lynch regardless of alignment, we should say so.
The problem is people start to get confirmation bias. In Zero escape I wanted DBS to not be in the game and that bled into my reads. In retrospect I can see my scum read of her didn't make a ton of sense but at the time I believed it. Should I not have been allowed to make that push?
In Scum Love the King I ended up with a real scum you on you Osie. Did that come from my annoyance at the soundcloud gimmick? I'm not sure. Should I not have been allowed to push you because I'd expressed annoyance? Was my push wrong because it started it's life as an annoyance push? I'm not sure.
Should Shadow not be allowed to vote people for self voting?
I'm not really asking these rhetorically, I don't know the answer to all of them. I know DBS and Osie had bad experiences in the relevant games and I regret that but I'm not sure how a rule against annoyance votes is going to improve those experiences.
I fail to see how any rule in place would ever stop any problem as you are suggesting it is.
I'm using that as an example.
What you are asking the moderator to do is something moderators should never do. Which is pick a side.
I mean, it's no more arbitrary and unenforceable as a rule not allowing use of out-of-game knowledge while generating one's reads.
Two examples:
1. A player on some other sites did a study of hundreds of players and found
that for a large chunk of players relative game activity had significant correlation with alignment. Given an arbitrarily player with no other information it's valid as a better than random scum tell (though keep in mind 30% is already often better than random). Like all other things mafia it's obviously more meaningful when you check it on an individual basis and you'll often find more interesting things that you can read from with time data, it just turned out that the multiple game thing was a simple concept that's better than rand on a wide range of ppl.
That player expressed
MafiaScum ended up explicitly allowing cross-activity mentions partially because I made it obvious to a bunch of people it was effective [...] Else the amount of "I think they're scummy for reasons I can't say" would have gotten absurd.
2. Meta-reading. I shouldn't need to say more here.
I'm asking for consistency to new players. If we're a community that is okay with players openly saying they will lynch regardless of alignment, we should say so.
The thing is I don't have a consistent answer to this. Going back to Shadow as an example I think he should be allowed to do the voting over self voting. While he's uncaring about the individual alignment he thinks it's the best way to be able to solve a game over all (forcing everyone to play to their win con and avoiding allowing AtE's to fool people). What about people not having an opinion on a D1 wagon voting to avoid their not being a majority at end of day? I also think that should be allowed. Voting as a "I don't want to play with this player"? I don't like that but if a person is in the game with a player they don't want to play with but are also unwilling to replace out they'll probably start confirmation biasing reasons to vote them. I know because I've been there. I didn't actively think I was doing it in the moment, but I was.
I'm not sure how a rule against annoyance votes is going to improve those experiences.
How many times have you heard someone say "If you're annoyed at the game take a step back." to anybody, for that matter?
We essentially already have rules against lynching for non-alignment reasons, they just haven't been interpreted as such.
If you're referring to the ones you listed (cyrpto-claims, slurs, discussion of mod-kills) aren't primarily focused on that though. The first and third are ensuring game integrity. The second is pretty much already covered by site rules but merited extra mention.
I agree that making the community a more welcoming place is a good goal I just don't want to make a rule that curbs acceptable in game behavior (see the ensuring a flip D1 example).
If you want to alter the rule to make it a pure "no annoyance votes" as opposed to "no voting if you don't think it's in line with your win con" I think that's a reasonable rule but I don't think it solves any problems. It shifts the conflict point from in thread votes to players saying to the mod "I don't want to play with this make them stop, replace me, or replace them." Which is improved but not by a ton.
I don't know how to handle it as a mod/player/whatever if I have multiple players who aren't able to coexist but no rules have yet been broken.
@DV: I would have readily accepted being modkilled in Scum Love the King.
Fine lets institute the rule, so I can get plenty of slots mod killed for their refusal to play the game or a myriad of other reasons.
I wasn't town in scum love the king so I can not say how I would have acted. But, I might have pushed you for obfuscating yourself with a PR. That's sort of a player alignment read, but its also not at the same time.
I'm really not sure what your problem is with what happened.
You pushed a gimick and players didn't like it so they lynched you. You called them out for game throwing and flipping a coin. But, I think that's decently hypocritical and as your scum buddy in that game I'm a little frustrated with that. You equally threw the game by standing by a gimick that you knew was throwing the game. You got yourself lynched, and in a way that was because you wanted to play a certain way.
I'm just not sure what your issue is with this. I think you have a point that if Tom was to pull a similar gimick he would probabally be fine. I agree with you on that.
But, I don't remotely see how this solves or alleviates a problem. With the other rule I personally think its stupid. I've always felt that some of that OoG information should be allowed. A player is known to lurk to replacement if they are scum(A la creature style). I'm not sure why I'm not supposed to use that information. Additionally, in a certain game that player has some personal issues and says so and they replace out because of that. Normally, I would lynch that player for lurking, but in this case there is some OoG information telling me that maybe that isn't a correct read.
Take the Gemma case in the team game. Gemma correctly use the information about Nancy Drew to nail them as scum. And from what I know from conversations I've had, Nancy was 100% cheating. Yet she got punished for that.
So, lets go back to the issue at hand lynching without an alignment purpose. Let's talk about Ruma. Ruma is lynched typically, because people can't figure out their alignment. Ruma lurks, and trolls. I believe that players lynch Ruma for mixed motives. They lynch him partially because of his indeterminable alignment, but also because they are mad at him for lurking and trolling. With your rule what do?
At the end of the day I just don't see how a rule like this solves anything. If anything its going to create more animosity. Most game moderators on this site will not enforce this rule or will not replace a player out, for these reasons. And players being told they have no recourse at all seems not only bastard to me, but also a recipe for a more toxic environment.
I think that's a reasonable rule but I don't think it solves any problems. It shifts the conflict point from in thread votes to players saying to the mod "I don't want to play with this make them stop, replace me, or replace them." Which is improved but not by a ton.
I don't know how to handle it as a mod/player/whatever if I have multiple players who aren't able to coexist but no rules have yet been broken.
I'd readily agree with that being a reasonable rule. And that's a vast improvement in my book over issues crowding up the thread, which usually inflates arguments, as has happened in the case of DV multiple times.
The host/etc mediates and talks to the players as necessary. Just as would be the case in any other situation hampering the health of the game.
It's not hard to conceptualize, IMO, there's just a lot of grey area no matter what.
As for posts about game integrity, most of the rules that we use there are strict but incredibly vague in theory and rarely enforced in practice.
Excuse me? Someone used the fact that I had expressed disapproval for lynching regardless of alignment to try to angleshoot me into replacing out of a currently ongoing game. You're condoning that now?
No, that sounds like bullying and the only encouragement that people should be receiving to replace out is if the player clearly doesn't have time for the game, or if the mental/emotional health of the player is being compromised by the game. That is an entirely different matter from "I'm going to try to policy lynch you because I don't like how you play the game".
Wrath_of_DoG attempted to lynch me in every single game we played in together past a certain point, simply because he didn't like me as a Mafia player. I didn't complain a single time. I tried to reason with him and talk to him about it, but he shut down all forms of communication regarding the matter. Instead of stooping to his level or being rude about it, I simply outplayed him and got him counter-lynched or Vigged in response to his antagonism.
There are alternative solutions.
Edit: Such as requesting the host and/or Council look into the player in question. Not just suggesting we let that go untouched.
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
But, I don't remotely see how this solves or alleviates a problem. With the other rule I personally think its stupid. I've always felt that some of that OoG information should be allowed. A player is known to lurk to replacement if they are scum(A la creature style). I'm not sure why I'm not supposed to use that information. Additionally, in a certain game that player has some personal issues and says so and they replace out because of that. Normally, I would lynch that player for lurking, but in this case there is some OoG information telling me that maybe that isn't a correct read.
Take the Gemma case in the team game. Gemma correctly use the information about Nancy Drew to nail them as scum. And from what I know from conversations I've had, Nancy was 100% cheating. Yet she got punished for that.
Yeah, the OoG information elements are frustrating as heck. It's really actively difficult to not let something OoG influence your reads once you hear about it, such as the multi-game activity tell that I mentioned above.
So, lets go back to the issue at hand lynching without an alignment purpose. Let's talk about Ruma. Ruma is lynched typically, because people can't figure out their alignment. Ruma lurks, and trolls. I believe that players lynch Ruma for mixed motives. They lynch him partially because of his indeterminable alignment, but also because they are mad at him for lurking and trolling. With your rule what do?
The example is kinda flawed both because lurking is a bigger tell, usually scum, for Ruma, and a player seemingly trolling is a behavioral tell for scum in general, and for Ruma is mostly NAI, actually. I've seen several people on and off this site talk about always lynching Tom first every game for a similar reason, actually.
At the end of the day I just don't see how a rule like this solves anything. If anything its going to create more animosity. Most game moderators on this site will not enforce this rule or will not replace a player out, for these reasons. And players being told they have no recourse at all seems not only bastard to me, but also a recipe for a more toxic environment.
I mean, most game hosts on this site won't replace or modkill anyways until something forces their hand.
Grapefruit's point on annoyance votes is a good one. You bring things up with the host first. Heck, for all you know, what you are annoyed about is due to something entirely unrelated to the game.
I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, even recently, but I have been of the strong belief for months that telling another player in-thread that they are obnoxious, toxic, or that they deserve a modkill/non-alignment-based-lynch/etc is toxic itself and detrimental to game and community health. And I at least have warned players to not suggest that in thread.
Wrath_of_DoG attempted to lynch me in every single game we played in together past a certain point, simply because he didn't like me as a Mafia player. I didn't complain a single time. I tried to reason with him and talk to him about it, but he shut down all forms of communication regarding the matter. Instead of stooping to his level or being rude about it, I simply outplayed him and got him counter-lynched or Vigged in response to his antagonism.
There are alternative solutions.
I'm not convinced that suggesting that players should just ignore toxicity and, implicitly, that there shouldn't be rules in place to avoid it, is actually a good idea for the long-term health of the community.
I'd readily agree with that being a reasonable rule. And that's a vast improvement in my book over issues crowding up the thread, which usually inflates arguments, as has happened in the case of DV multiple times.
The host/etc mediates and talks to the players as necessary. Just as would be the case in any other situation hampering the health of the game.
Okay let's use DBS as an example: in ZE it's debateable to whether or not she broke rules or not. My replies to her definitely did. This additional rule against annoyance voting just means I broke an additional clear rule as opposed to the multiple sportsmanship and good faith rules. Maybe because it's a clear line I'm punished, but most of votes at least had surface level in game reasoning so I probably don't get punished by this rule.
My point isn't that my behavior is okay, my point is I think the focus is better spent trying to encourage and foster positive behavior than to make rules against corner cases of unpleasant behavior that are already largely covered by the various "be good to each other" and "play to the spirit of the game rules"
It's not hard to conceptualize, IMO, there's just a lot of grey area no matter what.
As for posts about game integrity, most of the rules that we use there are strict but incredibly vague in theory and rarely enforced in practice.
I don't think most of the game integrity rules are vague, for example the rules about sharing your pm in various ways are incredibly specific. And fortunately rarely enforced as most people who sign up are agreeing to that part of the social contract. The key is that people have differing tolerance levels and don't always agree on interpretations of the finer points of that contract (see my thin skin compared and lesser tolerance to rudeness/flaming than DV or Iso).
I'm asking for consistency to new players. If we're a community that is okay with players openly saying they will lynch regardless of alignment, we should say so.
The thing is I don't have a consistent answer to this. Going back to Shadow as an example I think he should be allowed to do the voting over self voting. While he's uncaring about the individual alignment he thinks it's the best way to be able to solve a game over all (forcing everyone to play to their win con and avoiding allowing AtE's to fool people). What about people not having an opinion on a D1 wagon voting to avoid their not being a majority at end of day? I also think that should be allowed. Voting as a "I don't want to play with this player"? I don't like that but if a person is in the game with a player they don't want to play with but are also unwilling to replace out they'll probably start confirmation biasing reasons to vote them. I know because I've been there. I didn't actively think I was doing it in the moment, but I was.
And I don't know what the answer to that is.
The way Shadow's policy on lynching self-voters is considered, it's not actually clear that he's considered if the statistics on this site recently support his point. I don't have enough time personally to do this, but I was involved in a majority of the games this last year, and if I recall correctly, the overwhelming majority of self-votes were from town rather than scum. Not that it's a town tell. No, it's absolutely reasonable to consider it a scum tell.
As for conf!bias, I mean, meta-reading is conf!bias incarnate, and despite a rule that explicitly bans meta-reading by definition, nobody on this site has or likely ever will be warned for meta-reading another player. I think we can all agree that would be ridiculous.
I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, even recently, but I have been of the strong belief for months that telling another player in-thread that they are obnoxious, toxic, or that they deserve a modkill/non-alignment-based-lynch/etc is toxic itself and detrimental to game and community health. And I at least have warned players to not suggest that in thread.
I agree on this part.
I need to think some more on this. The more I push back, the less crazy I think your suggestion is.
We should foster good game environments. Perhaps we shouldn't force players to legislate their feelings in game and when game hosting we as moderators should moderate.
Okay let's use DBS as an example: in ZE it's debateable to whether or not she broke rules or not.
Using the example of DBS, which looks worse for long-term MTGS community health?
Dawning getting modkilled or asked to replace out in ZE for actively negatively contributing to the players' enjoyment.
Dawning getting ***** on by the MTGS community to the degree that she was put up for probation and left the community after it was clear that she wasn't wanted here, and then on top of that, due to negative experiences primarily in Zero Escape, people from another community of which she and others in that game are a part of are still regularly ***** on, despite some of those players and others from that community continuing to contribute to this site.
I guess here's another Osie rant. I'm so tired of being the guy to bring up issues here. I make this message as a MAL Mafia Society admin first, and an MTGS Mafia player second.
You know what's not such a great feeling? Being a leader of a community that's ***** on regularly by a multitude of people in my home community. Having to, as a leader of that other community, go to multiple people and try to convince them that despite their negative experience with several members of my home site, it's not a bad site to play on. Regularly recruiting people from that community to play here, only to be told pretty much to **** off most of the time when I invite people the other way.
With the welcome exceptions of Cantripmancer, Rhand, DV, almost kpaca, maybe Silver (according to Grapefruit, and possibly before my time), nobody from MTGS who wasn't already playing on MAL before me has played on MAL since I joined that community. I'm not counting Discord-based voice chat games in making that list.
Cantrip and DV have both expressed enjoyment and some openness to later playing more games on the site. Rhand had a concern about apathy in context of the game he was in, which he expressed also applies to MTGS.
For comparison, AlbertinoDias, ScarletCelestial, Shinichi, Lastwhisper, Shattiel, Rumanshi, Killmatronix (kinda), Beeboy, RE1031, Fuwa, DawningBlueSky, roz_the_eevee, yurkin, and Karote are all from MAL.
The phase length difference is a significant element, but a large number of our regular players, especially amongst those that ***** on MAL a lot, are those who play on other sites with short phase lengths, a lot.
I'm not going to go into detail, but there was a similar moment about people from other sites that was cut from the podcast because I personally called it out for being unwelcoming.
Council members both current and former have talked about wanting to bring more people in and retain people. Maybe the fact that people in this community, from the bottom to the top, ***** on others so regularly is a significant factor to why this community doesn't retain them.
I semi-recently advertised MTGS to a few people. Quoting (with a few words of paraphrasing to kinda unify the comments):
MTGS - "MTGS is known for longer phases. A lot of the players there are experienced, established players, many of whom have also played a lot on other sites in addition to MTGS. People like interesting setups much more than just running games for the sake of it."
That's kinda cold. But that is a normal advertisement for MTGS, and I certainly wasn't intending it to be cold in context.
For comparison...
MAL - "Mafia Society is a friendly and social Mafia group. There are some skilled and likely familiar players there, and the games range into some more experimental ideas. The regular players are mainly united through enjoyment of anime, but it's a mafia group first and everyone is welcome."
Why is MTGS so unwelcoming? Is that the kind of image the community wants to project?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't play outside of MTGS because I'm just uncomfortable playing anywhere else. Aside from one game on Guardman's site back when that was a thing (which was exclusively MTGS members) I've never played outside here.
It's not that MAL is unwelcoming... I'm just a "stays in his comfort zone" kinda guy.
KoolKoal: Feel free to take this with a grain of salt since self meta isn't particularly helpful, but I think I get scumread mostly for style over substance, but also for a certain lack of substance over style. It's not so much what I AM posting most of the time (though sometimes that can seem bad) but what I'm NOT posting. I've been told I come to non-obvious conclusions a lot, so when I post, quite a bit of the time there's jumps in logic that people can't follow and they think that's scummy. I get that accusation about a lot of questions I ask specifically. People call them "busy work" when the questions are legit etc.
As far as things to ignore, I can't think of anything. I would suggest you focus less on what I'm doing and more on how I'm doing it. That's probably more likely to be accurate. Like I've just said, what I do tends to come off a little weird, but if you look for how I do it, mindset comes into play and maybe you figure out something useful.
I think banning "lynching regardless of alignment" is not feasible and doesn't actually do what you want it to do, Osie.
The first problem is that "lynching" is not, strictly speaking, a game action that players can take. Players only cast votes.
You could forbid hammering "regardless of alignment", but that doesn't address many situations - if threshold is 7 and the first 6 votes were "regardless of alignment" votes and the last one was a scum read, I don't think that satisfies Osie's concern.
You could forbid voting "regardless of alignment", but that is quite wide and would forbid several actions taken in Mafia games right now:
RVS voting by definition doesn't care about alignment.
Any form of joking vote.
Most forms of pressure vote.
Direct vote-based mechanics (in complex power role games, "who you voted for" is sometimes relevant).
And there's still a problem with indirect mechanical effects. Simple example: We know there's exactly one cop in the game, X and Y both claim it. A player has no read on either and decides to just vote X, knowing the flip will solve it either way.
Further, this all only really applies to town players. Scum by definition are not trying to figure out alignments. A rule that only applies one way has all kinds of angle-shooty possibilities that are unfortunate.
I think what you want is more like "don't use OOG preference to determine votes." That's more feasible, though you'll still run into confirmation bias. On the one hand, if A doesn't like B, or doesn't like B's playstyle, it's very easy for A to convince themselves that B must be scum.
All rules necessarily have false positives and false negatives, of course, but they're worth considering.
If we want to make hosts specify that the correct course of action when faced with toxicity and trolling is to report the posts and contact the host rather than stooping to the other player's level (which, to be clear, is already a site rule!) I'm okay with making that rule more visible and explicit.
But I don't think it's even possible to outright ban voting for people to remove them from the game even if you think they aren't a wolf. It would just create vocabulary gymnastics to dance around why you're actually voting for someone or force someone to misrepresent their read when hammering a player they think is town to advance the game, etc.
Edit: Also, to be clear, no, I've never played on MAL. I've only played games here and on DarkLordPotter and MafiaUniverse (very occasionally) because I can't stand the extremely short phase lengths used by most mafia sites. I'd only consider playing turbos and Long Phase Light games on MU, and DLP usually has 4/1 or 4/2 phases.
Edit again: I've played some 72/24 games in the past and they're just too fast for me. Even DLP's phases are, which is why I don't /in there very often. I'm much more comfortable with 5/2+ and could only even consider something faster than 4+ if my schedule was completely clear (which it nearly never is).
I do think the cross pollination between here and MAL has been a good thing for us overall, and I'm sorry if you don't feel the same way from the MAL side but most* a lot of our players here are in the same boat I am and just can't play MAL games because of the faster phases. If you know of specific players that have literally told you to "**** off" when you invited them to a game, you can send their names to me on Discord or via PM and I'll try to have a chat with them about being better community representatives, but if people are just turning you down because of the phase lengths I don't think that's a rejection of the community or players you have at MAL.
*We don't actually have that many players playing on fast phase sites, to my knowledge. Tom is pretty much the main one, I think, the others are players who only drop in unannounced very occasionally (like Newcomb, Voxx, GJ, etc.) and who primarily play on those other sites now (or came from them originally).
As someone who's played over 100 Mafia games across 10+ different sites, players are often unwelcome to playstyles that don't fit within their meta and perceive these behaviors as scummy. In addition to this, when players seem uncooperative to other people's scumhunting tactics, or generally refuse to reach the logical conclusion in the face of plenty of evidence indicative of that truth, it comes across as either deliberately obtuse, or scummy. All of these can be extremely frustrating facets of player behavior to deal with, and that frustration can easily get ramped up to an 11 if the player performing those behaviors seems unrepentant or even trolly about it, after initial frustration has been expressed. Given that I have seen these behaviors in a number of MAL players, it makes perfect sense to me that we have a culture clash. MTGS Mafia players, as a whole, tend to take the game a lot more seriously/use much heavier analysis than a lot of other sites, and to not feel like someone else is carrying their weight in a Mafia game - a team game - can make people angry. When you're on the receiving end of that sort of ire on a regular basis, playing a game you've played perhaps dozens of times, and doing what you normally do during that game, it is also frustrating, because why should you have to change what's worked for you so many times before just because you're rubbing a few people the wrong way? Additionally, MTGS (and MTGS Mafia) as a whole has pretty strict flaming rules and the like, a lot of which I see far more leeway on in other site rules.
I'm not excusing the behavior of people who have been unwelcome to our visiting players from other sites; rather, I'm just saying I completely understand the frustration on both ends, and why perhaps players like DBS and LW feel unwelcome in our games. It's a failure to adapt on both ends because we have a really hardcore Mafia culture.
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
To be clear, it wasn't that I felt unwelcomed, I was still a relatively new player to mafia, and I took a break off this site to get better at my play, I spent many days and hours reading games, posts, and documents, to get better at mafis
On the terms of policy lynching, "I will Lynch you every game regardless of your alignment", is overall just poor and unfriendly behavior... Though if you change the statement to, I would Lynch X this game regardless of his alignment because of how he is playing, that's fair game, and it's more of just a statement then an actual thing, because I doubt anyone would would actually vote like that. Policy lynching is wrong on a macro level, but not so much on a micro level, that's my conclusion
Excuse me? Someone used the fact that I had expressed disapproval for lynching regardless of alignment to try to angleshoot me into replacing out of a currently ongoing game. You're condoning that now?
No, that sounds like bullying and the only encouragement that people should be receiving to replace out is if the player clearly doesn't have time for the game, or if the mental/emotional health of the player is being compromised by the game. That is an entirely different matter from "I'm going to try to policy lynch you because I don't like how you play the game".
Wrath_of_DoG attempted to lynch me in every single game we played in together past a certain point, simply because he didn't like me as a Mafia player. I didn't complain a single time. I tried to reason with him and talk to him about it, but he shut down all forms of communication regarding the matter. Instead of stooping to his level or being rude about it, I simply outplayed him and got him counter-lynched or Vigged in response to his antagonism.
There are alternative solutions.
Edit: Such as requesting the host and/or Council look into the player in question. Not just suggesting we let that go untouched.
I've been putting some thought into this.
Osie asked why we have issues. This example by Iso is why. Its habitual, this isn't the only instance of this happening on this site. If I was a mod of any of the games that this happened, I would have immediately given WoD a warning and if it persisted force replaced them out or mod killed them. At that point I'd have moved for the probation or blacklisting after the game ended.
Osie's point is that we shouldn't allow these things to exist as moderators, and that we should do more to foster a positive game environment. Making it King of the Flies and forcing players to deal with it on their own is unproductive.
Its also a little ridiculous that this comment can be made and everyone glosses over it and I guess it isn't a big deal to them. That probabally speaks to how much of an issue this can be on this site.
I wouldn't say it's being glossed over, exactly, but I'm not sure what is to be gained by relitigating something that happened years ago.
I haven't seen an instance of that specific behavior as long as I've been here, and the one time it was actually threatened to my knowledge the player was blacklisted for six months and left the board entirely. That wasn't the only thing they had done, of course, the player in question had established a pattern of poor behavior in previous games and that threat was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back, as I recall.
The player in question, of course, was Tappingstones, and he was threatening me. So I know what this is like and what it's all about, okay?
If there's a player threatening to lynch someone else regardless of their alignment in every game forever, please, please point them out to me so I can handle it.
But the thing is, is, this already falls under our poor sportsmanship rule. If you have some ideas for more explicit phrasing than we currently have, I'm all ears, but most of the stuff people are claiming are good reasons to outright ban voting for someone regardless of their alignment fall under poor sportsmanship already, and the proposed rule change disallows voting for town reads to move the game forward among other things I believe are acceptable play (i.e. they are not game throwing or poor sportsmanship).
Yeah I'm just kind of out of juice. It's frustrating that people are/were okay with an environment like that but we don't seem to have any direction on how to improve it. And while there have been lot's of idea's floated none of them have seemed to gain traction or have support from forum leadership.
The only consensus seems to be we need to enforce the rules we have rather than just letting people stay in their habits, but I haven't seen any discussion about how to do that.
Another thing that probably bears mentioning on an unrelated subject is that Osie was our currently most prolific reviewer. I know we still have plenty of people to review games but there might be a slight shortage/constraint of players because he was reviewing a ton and playing only a small subset.
The thing is that flaming, trolling, etc. aren't the domain of game hosts. If someone is doing that, you press the report button and a forum mod will deal with it.
Angle shooting, poor sportsmanship that doesn't rise to the level of flaming (like threatening to lynch someone in every game forever or threatening to avoid them in future games in the middle of an ongoing game, etc.), out of game information being used in game, game rule violations, etc. are game host business and could/should be escalated to the Council afterwards. Part of the problem is that lots of people disagree as to what level of discourse is "poor sportsmanship" and what level is just "playing the game" and I'm not sure there's a solution that would keep all the parties involved "happy". One person's under-moderation is another person's over-moderation and all that.
We can definitely add a "you should contact the game host if you have problems with a player, if they are flaming or trolling please use the report button" rule, but I don't want to strictly / stringently enforce it with modkills, probation, etc. unless people are flaming or resorting to actual poor sportsmanship in return.
I've also been kicking around setting up some kind of inbox for players to escalate issues directly to the Council if they aren't satisfied with the way a host is handling a game. Could probably set up something on Discord easier than anything directly on-site (which would either involve software changes or council members logging into another mutual account to check reports), but I haven't even figured out if it's technically feasible yet let alone discussed with the other Councilors if this is something they would support.
I guess my main question here is (1) if this is even possible, is it something we want / would use, and (2) is this a sufficient response to what is going on right now? Also (3) if anyone actually wants this what do they feel is the difference between that and just PMing a Councilor directly? I've spoken to Osie about the games he's currently reviewing; to my knowledge he's agreed to finish those. Anyone who needs a reviewer in the future can contact me directly or post in #lonelyhearts, I don't have much time for playing at the moment anyway.
...while there have been lot's of idea's floated none of them have seemed to gain traction or have support from forum leadership
While I’ve been more of an observer than participant in the conversation here, I wanted to specifically address this.
We care. We care a great deal about the state of our sub forum, our playerbase, and everything that is impacted by this, big and small. Every single council member included, but specifically, if silver and I didn’t care, we wouldn’t have applied for this position.
We have had a lot of back room discussion about what’s been said here, and we encourage everyone who has something they’d like to bring up, to voice their thoughts. I guarantee we won’t make everyone happy, but we will strive to make this place continue to improve and be something special that we all can celebrate as a community.
I've also been kicking around setting up some kind of inbox for players to escalate issues directly to the Council if they aren't satisfied with the way a host is handling a game. Could probably set up something on Discord easier than anything directly on-site (which would either involve software changes or council members logging into another mutual account to check reports), but I haven't even figured out if it's technically feasible yet let alone discussed with the other Councilors if this is something they would support.
Feyd could setup a zone ala EDH Primer Committee for the Mafia Council, in which you have mod level powers and everyone else can only see their own threads.
@Shadow I wasn't trying to imply that anyone on council doesn't care. I was more just explaining my current apathy relative to how fired up about this I was a week ago.
I'm out of suggestions and answers and felt like I should reply to DV because he was right but I'm also stumped.
I've also been kicking around setting up some kind of inbox for players to escalate issues directly to the Council if they aren't satisfied with the way a host is handling a game. Could probably set up something on Discord easier than anything directly on-site (which would either involve software changes or council members logging into another mutual account to check reports), but I haven't even figured out if it's technically feasible yet let alone discussed with the other Councilors if this is something they would support.
Feyd could setup a zone ala EDH Primer Committee for the Mafia Council, in which you have mod level powers and everyone else can only see their own threads.
I suppose something like that could work, and I could probably set up a Discord channel with similar functionality, but the question remains: would we even use it, and how is it materially different than PMing a Councilor so they can bring it up with the others, and is this even sufficient? I suppose it would make player complaints easier to track over time since they'd all be collected in one place rather than buried in someone's inbox, at least.
I wonder if the problem lies in the distribution of responsibility - at the moment, game hosts are the people most responsible for calling out and addressing negative behaviour (flaming/trolling/playing against win conditions/lurking/etc) and they are also responsible to handing out punishments of stern talking tos, replacements, or modkills. The problem lies that the game host also bears the latgest burden of dealing with those punishments in having to find replacements or deal with thei game becoming unbalanced by a modkill. This leads those game hosts to err on the side of caution and be conservative with punishments, which leads to inconsistency and line-toeing.
A way this could be remedied would be to try and reduce the responsibility of game hosts - for example, if we could foster a culture of reporting posts that cointain flaming then we could instate a rule that says "if you get an infraction for flaming, you must be replaced". While that approach would be more rigid, it would see much more consistent reactions from hosts - as can be seen in other forum wide rules like posting role PMs, which hosts know (usually) means mandatory modkill. This would, of course, put the burden of deciding "sufficient flaming" onto the shoulders of the forum mods, but they are a) more trained in making that call and b) don't suffer the conlfict of interest around finding replacements/destabilising the game that a game host has.
As an aside, I understand mods not wanting to red text offending posts, but some form of engagement would be required to make reporting feel more impactful. Perhaps something like a summary every month of mod activity (X posts were reported, Y warnings and Z infractions were handed out), just to provide something tangible to indicate that mods are reading reports.
Alternatively (or even additionally!) the council could be more of a first port of call for contentious behaviour. If standard procedure is for a host to raise grey-area behaviour with the council and they make a decision (involving but not driven by the host) that results in a judgement of "force replace or not", then the host again bears less responsibility for resolving the punishment and the council take any flak. This could be facilitiated with a formal inbox, discord channel, or designated "host manager" council member. I think a lot of the time hosts don't contact the council until things have already escalated, and even when they do, the council resolves things in a very ad-hoc way. A more formal process (even if it didn't have rigid guidelines) would hopefully make things more streamlined and consistent.
Punishing lurking is more difficult because that is ultimately up to the game host. But I think a strong start is to examine what level of activity we really do expect - as Silver stresses, 1 post every 48 or 72 hours is really not actually enough. In parallel, any kind of system to encourage replacements would help bolster any kind of enforcement overhaul. Auto-ins are no longer sufficient incentive, so how can we encourage more people to replace into games?
Overall, I think part of the issue is that game hosts are responsible for identifying unwanted behaviour, handing out punishment, and dealing with negative consequences of that punishment. This understandably leads to reluctance to commit in the hope that saying "cool it guys" will stop it. Splitting that responsibility burden with other parties who have experience and have volunteered to shoulder occasionally being the "bad guys" in controversial decisions should at least make punishments come earlier in the process and more consistently.
For the sake of transparency, I want to go ahead and announce that the council has formally set a minimum year long, strict probation with D_V. We ask that any players and hosts who see any sort of behavior that is less than ideal, please immediately contact one of the council and we will review and take action as needed. Thank you. If you have any questions, please let us know.
I wonder if the problem lies in the distribution of responsibility - at the moment, game hosts are the people most responsible for calling out and addressing negative behaviour (flaming/trolling/playing against win conditions/lurking/etc) and they are also responsible to handing out punishments of stern talking tos, replacements, or modkills. The problem lies that the game host also bears the latgest burden of dealing with those punishments in having to find replacements or deal with thei game becoming unbalanced by a modkill. This leads those game hosts to err on the side of caution and be conservative with punishments, which leads to inconsistency and line-toeing.
A way this could be remedied would be to try and reduce the responsibility of game hosts - for example, if we could foster a culture of reporting posts that cointain flaming then we could instate a rule that says "if you get an infraction for flaming, you must be replaced". While that approach would be more rigid, it would see much more consistent reactions from hosts - as can be seen in other forum wide rules like posting role PMs, which hosts know (usually) means mandatory modkill. This would, of course, put the burden of deciding "sufficient flaming" onto the shoulders of the forum mods, but they are a) more trained in making that call and b) don't suffer the conflict of interest around finding replacements/destabilising the game that a game host has.
This seems like a good idea to me. At least until we get to a place where we're happy that sort of zero tolerance policy that is actively encouraging players to use the appropriate channels is a reasonable decision.
I'm also in favor of some sort of formalized way to contact the council privately. I've messaged individual members before but I don't think I've ever contacted all the members at once. Having a way to reach them about ongoing games would be welcome (though that could run into issues when members are playing in the game in question).
Problem with lynching regardless of alignment: What if you think a person, irrespective of alignment, is the best lynch choice for that day because their flip will tell you the most about the game?
That's a perfectly valid in-game reason to lynch someone irrespective of alignment.
I'd concur that game hosts will need to continue to be the first line of defense against these behaviors. If that falls through, the correct procedure has been to contact the council as well.
But I also think we could do more to set the tone for our playerbase, by coming up with a set of expectations for what we consider to be good sportsmanship, and recommending that our game hosts adopt said guidelines in their OPs.
For example:
MTGS Sportsmanship Guidelines
Mafia, like any other game, is fundamentally about having fun with another group of human beings. Part of that fun comes from good, clean competition, but everyone should bear in mind that at the end of the day, no one (hopefully) is actually dying, and it's a social game. We like to encourage our players to think about how to play the game that not only allows them to enjoy themselves, but that doesn't interfere with others' enjoyment of the game, either. Flaming, insulting others, intentionally seeking to tilt other players, going out of your way to be annoying - all of these things will get in the way of what we're all here to do. To have fun, enjoy one another's company, and be a happy, welcoming community. We don't expect everyone to be robots, but we do hope that everyone will bear in mind this is something people do for enjoyment, to respect one another, and not to let things get out of hand while you're ruthlessly forming mobs to murder one another. So remember, keep your murder mobs pleasant, courteous, and cheerful, and have a nice day!
I wonder if the problem lies in the distribution of responsibility - at the moment, game hosts are the people most responsible for calling out and addressing negative behaviour (flaming/trolling/playing against win conditions/lurking/etc) and they are also responsible to handing out punishments of stern talking tos, replacements, or modkills. The problem lies that the game host also bears the latgest burden of dealing with those punishments in having to find replacements or deal with thei game becoming unbalanced by a modkill. This leads those game hosts to err on the side of caution and be conservative with punishments, which leads to inconsistency and line-toeing.
A way this could be remedied would be to try and reduce the responsibility of game hosts - for example, if we could foster a culture of reporting posts that cointain flaming then we could instate a rule that says "if you get an infraction for flaming, you must be replaced". While that approach would be more rigid, it would see much more consistent reactions from hosts - as can be seen in other forum wide rules like posting role PMs, which hosts know (usually) means mandatory modkill. This would, of course, put the burden of deciding "sufficient flaming" onto the shoulders of the forum mods, but they are a) more trained in making that call and b) don't suffer the conlfict of interest around finding replacements/destabilising the game that a game host has.
As an aside, I understand mods not wanting to red text offending posts, but some form of engagement would be required to make reporting feel more impactful. Perhaps something like a summary every month of mod activity (X posts were reported, Y warnings and Z infractions were handed out), just to provide something tangible to indicate that mods are reading reports.
Alternatively (or even additionally!) the council could be more of a first port of call for contentious behaviour. If standard procedure is for a host to raise grey-area behaviour with the council and they make a decision (involving but not driven by the host) that results in a judgement of "force replace or not", then the host again bears less responsibility for resolving the punishment and the council take any flak. This could be facilitiated with a formal inbox, discord channel, or designated "host manager" council member. I think a lot of the time hosts don't contact the council until things have already escalated, and even when they do, the council resolves things in a very ad-hoc way. A more formal process (even if it didn't have rigid guidelines) would hopefully make things more streamlined and consistent.
Punishing lurking is more difficult because that is ultimately up to the game host. But I think a strong start is to examine what level of activity we really do expect - as Silver stresses, 1 post every 48 or 72 hours is really not actually enough. In parallel, any kind of system to encourage replacements would help bolster any kind of enforcement overhaul. Auto-ins are no longer sufficient incentive, so how can we encourage more people to replace into games?
Overall, I think part of the issue is that game hosts are responsible for identifying unwanted behaviour, handing out punishment, and dealing with negative consequences of that punishment. This understandably leads to reluctance to commit in the hope that saying "cool it guys" will stop it. Splitting that responsibility burden with other parties who have experience and have volunteered to shoulder occasionally being the "bad guys" in controversial decisions should at least make punishments come earlier in the process and more consistently.
You can do it MU/MAL style and have a GM who is not only the reviewer but also watches over the game for moderation (and backup hosting) reasons.
I've also been kicking around setting up some kind of inbox for players to escalate issues directly to the Council if they aren't satisfied with the way a host is handling a game. Could probably set up something on Discord easier than anything directly on-site (which would either involve software changes or council members logging into another mutual account to check reports), but I haven't even figured out if it's technically feasible yet let alone discussed with the other Councilors if this is something they would support.
Feyd could setup a zone ala EDH Primer Committee for the Mafia Council, in which you have mod level powers and everyone else can only see their own threads.
Can confirm that this is likely feasible on the technical end of things.
For the sake of transparency, I want to go ahead and announce that the council has formally set a minimum year long, strict probation with D_V. We ask that any players and hosts who see any sort of behavior that is less than ideal, please immediately contact one of the council and we will review and take action as needed. Thank you. If you have any questions, please let us know.
@Bur: Please update the hosting thread probation list with this.
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@Eco: I'm not opposed to Mods giving a monthly report on reports/cards activity, but I might have to be prompted and reminded to do this as if it's only a monthly thing, I'm likely to forget that it needs to be done.
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
I've noticed that TappingStones is not currently on the Blacklist or Probation list. I was under the impression that he was to be added?
Also, I think we could afford to clean up the replacement/modkill/probation list a bit and remove mentions of people who haven't played Mafia on here in over 2-3 years. Council, thoughts?
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
I've noticed that TappingStones is not currently on the Blacklist or Probation list. I was under the impression that he was to be added?
IIRC we were discussing whether or not to formally blacklist him when he announced his intention to leave the forum and never return. Since he's been true to his word, we never needed to actually add him to either list.
With regards to the Probation/Blacklist (and maybe replacements/modkill list?) in general: I think cleaning it up would be good for enforcing player behaviors, as a much more compact list allows hosts to look over things more easily, and make a more educated decision in a succint manner. I mean, who really cares that AbbeyGargoyle replaced out of a game one time 12 years ago (or whatever), for example? They don't play Mafia any more, and most people here didn't even know that person existed, let alone played here, at some point.
Just a suggestion, based on the whole "people don't really pay attention to the list, so it's not really serving its purpose" thing.
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
TappingStones was actually on the blacklist but the list specified he was banned for 12 months, so I removed him when I added DV's probation since the terms of his ban have long since elapsed.
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Hard agree that it is extremely different from cryptoclaims, etc., but what is the host going to do? I guess we can just add a bit to the board rules that says "if you have a problem with a player, you should contact the host and report their posts if they're flaming or trolling." but expecting modkills against other players for lynching you because of actions you took within the game is... well, I'm not going to force a host to modkill for breaking that rule, I guess is what I'm saying, and I'm not going to ban lynches due to post restrictions or discussion of post restrictions the same way discussions about replacements are banned because they are not even remotely the same thing.
Post restrictions are a different topic. Could you stay on topic of lynching regardless of alignment, please?
I'm 100% okay with adding a rule to the board-wide rules that says "If you have a problem with a player, your first course of action should be to contact the game host, and if they are flaming, trolling, or spamming, please report the offending posts so a board moderator can handle it."
But I'm not going to ask, let alone force, a host to modkill players if they choose to remove a player they feel is problematic or damaging the game by hanging them. If the player isn't correcting their behavior in the face of over the half the players in it asking them to stop because they are making the game unenjoyable, then threatening them to, they probably aren't going to listen to the host, either.
I'd rather ban Post Restrictions than force players to play with a player that is post restricting.
You have to take a step back and think about what this is.
Players express they don't like X behavior. I really don't care if its PR, toxicity, Gif posting.
Player Y continues to do so against all other players expressed wishes.
Players go to mod.
Mod has to ????
Either
A) Mod replaces the player doing X behavior, because clearly the player doing X behavior isn't going to stop.
BUT that player isn't really breaking any rules. So, that doesn't seem fair.
B) Mod replaces the rest of the game. Yeah, just no.
C) Mod does nothing so players lynch them because they don't want to deal with it.
Really what you are trying to do is enforce having fun. Player Z doesn't like player D for posting in Gifs. Player Z is the only player in the game that has a problem with it. Should player D be forced to stop? I'd say no.
Six players have a problem with player D in a 16 person game. They are a minority. Should player D be forced to stop?
At the end of the day you have to recognize something.
Players made it clear to you they did not like you posting in PR. You made the active decision to tell an entire game to go **** themselves by continuing to post that way. The only thing that would have happened here is that if players were forced to talk to a moderator first, the moderator would have told you to stop or be replaced out.
Players solved it by lynching you. You didn't respect peoples opinions and you decided to continue the way YOU wanted to play.
Like what can you possibly see as a way out of this? I see no way in which the moderation comes out in your favor in scum loves the king.
/barn
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@DV: I think I made the exact same argument to osie - that if people are lynching him for reasons that aren't related to his alignment, he is obviously doing something they did not like and that he should probably not do that in the future, as if a group of people deem you disruptive or unenjoyable enough to remove you from their immediate area at the risk of losing several months' worth of emotional or mental investment, well...that says a lot.
I don't think that osie's rule suggestion is an easy one to enforce, as players can just easily say, "Well, he was obfuscating the game, so I thought he was scum," rather than "I lynched him because he was being disruptive to the game's health/integrity." While yes, it makes sense to say to the host, "Hey, I asked Dudeguy to stop duding up the thread, but he won't stop," at some point, you have to examine yourself and ask, "Am I the problem?" If you're threatening to take your ball and go home because people won't let you play the way you want at the detriment of their enjoyment of the game, do you really want to be that guy rather than to take a moment of introspection?
I don't necessarily think "no posting restrictions" is easy to enforce, either, but may possibly be easier than the alternative suggestion. However, that removes the fun of roleplaying your role, or things like spidertom, lolcatsGuardman, or any of the other delightful and memorable moments to that effect that we've come to appreciate over the years of playing together as a community.
I don't really see this conversation going towards implementation of a new rule surrounding these circumstances, as these are all things that the playerbase has been accountable for over the years.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
Dawning could have been lynched in Zero Escaped regardless of alignment, and there were no post restrictions going on there.
SLTK is not the topic of discussion. It's lynching regardless of alignment.
But if you want to discuss SLTK, I'm fine with doing that as long as it isn't conflated with another topic.
I'm using that as an example.
What you are asking the moderator to do is something moderators should never do. Which is pick a side.
Excuse me? Someone used the fact that I had expressed disapproval for lynching regardless of alignment to try to angleshoot me into replacing out of a currently ongoing game. You're condoning that now?
%%%
As I said earlier, I don't care about Scum Love the King. It was a dumb thing to happen in a game, but it's so far from the point that it's just intentionally taking the thread on tangents to talk about this proposal in the context of that game, and intentionally strawmanning my point. I'm not talking in the context of that game as of a while ago.
I also don't care if posting restrictions are banned. That means nothing to me.
I'm asking for consistency to new players. If we're a community that is okay with players openly saying they will lynch regardless of alignment, we should say so.
In Scum Love the King I ended up with a real scum you on you Osie. Did that come from my annoyance at the soundcloud gimmick? I'm not sure. Should I not have been allowed to push you because I'd expressed annoyance? Was my push wrong because it started it's life as an annoyance push? I'm not sure.
Should Shadow not be allowed to vote people for self voting?
I'm not really asking these rhetorically, I don't know the answer to all of them. I know DBS and Osie had bad experiences in the relevant games and I regret that but I'm not sure how a rule against annoyance votes is going to improve those experiences.
I mean, it's no more arbitrary and unenforceable as a rule not allowing use of out-of-game knowledge while generating one's reads.
Two examples:
1. A player on some other sites did a study of hundreds of players and found
That player expressed
2. Meta-reading. I shouldn't need to say more here.
How many times have you heard someone say "If you're annoyed at the game take a step back." to anybody, for that matter?
We essentially already have rules against lynching for non-alignment reasons, they just haven't been interpreted as such.
The thing is I don't have a consistent answer to this. Going back to Shadow as an example I think he should be allowed to do the voting over self voting. While he's uncaring about the individual alignment he thinks it's the best way to be able to solve a game over all (forcing everyone to play to their win con and avoiding allowing AtE's to fool people). What about people not having an opinion on a D1 wagon voting to avoid their not being a majority at end of day? I also think that should be allowed. Voting as a "I don't want to play with this player"? I don't like that but if a person is in the game with a player they don't want to play with but are also unwilling to replace out they'll probably start confirmation biasing reasons to vote them. I know because I've been there. I didn't actively think I was doing it in the moment, but I was.
And I don't know what the answer to that is.
If you're referring to the ones you listed (cyrpto-claims, slurs, discussion of mod-kills) aren't primarily focused on that though. The first and third are ensuring game integrity. The second is pretty much already covered by site rules but merited extra mention.
I agree that making the community a more welcoming place is a good goal I just don't want to make a rule that curbs acceptable in game behavior (see the ensuring a flip D1 example).
If you want to alter the rule to make it a pure "no annoyance votes" as opposed to "no voting if you don't think it's in line with your win con" I think that's a reasonable rule but I don't think it solves any problems. It shifts the conflict point from in thread votes to players saying to the mod "I don't want to play with this make them stop, replace me, or replace them." Which is improved but not by a ton.
I don't know how to handle it as a mod/player/whatever if I have multiple players who aren't able to coexist but no rules have yet been broken.
Fine lets institute the rule, so I can get plenty of slots mod killed for their refusal to play the game or a myriad of other reasons.
I wasn't town in scum love the king so I can not say how I would have acted. But, I might have pushed you for obfuscating yourself with a PR. That's sort of a player alignment read, but its also not at the same time.
I'm really not sure what your problem is with what happened.
You pushed a gimick and players didn't like it so they lynched you. You called them out for game throwing and flipping a coin. But, I think that's decently hypocritical and as your scum buddy in that game I'm a little frustrated with that. You equally threw the game by standing by a gimick that you knew was throwing the game. You got yourself lynched, and in a way that was because you wanted to play a certain way.
I'm just not sure what your issue is with this. I think you have a point that if Tom was to pull a similar gimick he would probabally be fine. I agree with you on that.
But, I don't remotely see how this solves or alleviates a problem. With the other rule I personally think its stupid. I've always felt that some of that OoG information should be allowed. A player is known to lurk to replacement if they are scum(A la creature style). I'm not sure why I'm not supposed to use that information. Additionally, in a certain game that player has some personal issues and says so and they replace out because of that. Normally, I would lynch that player for lurking, but in this case there is some OoG information telling me that maybe that isn't a correct read.
Take the Gemma case in the team game. Gemma correctly use the information about Nancy Drew to nail them as scum. And from what I know from conversations I've had, Nancy was 100% cheating. Yet she got punished for that.
So, lets go back to the issue at hand lynching without an alignment purpose. Let's talk about Ruma. Ruma is lynched typically, because people can't figure out their alignment. Ruma lurks, and trolls. I believe that players lynch Ruma for mixed motives. They lynch him partially because of his indeterminable alignment, but also because they are mad at him for lurking and trolling. With your rule what do?
At the end of the day I just don't see how a rule like this solves anything. If anything its going to create more animosity. Most game moderators on this site will not enforce this rule or will not replace a player out, for these reasons. And players being told they have no recourse at all seems not only bastard to me, but also a recipe for a more toxic environment.
I'd readily agree with that being a reasonable rule. And that's a vast improvement in my book over issues crowding up the thread, which usually inflates arguments, as has happened in the case of DV multiple times.
The host/etc mediates and talks to the players as necessary. Just as would be the case in any other situation hampering the health of the game.
It's not hard to conceptualize, IMO, there's just a lot of grey area no matter what.
As for posts about game integrity, most of the rules that we use there are strict but incredibly vague in theory and rarely enforced in practice.
No, that sounds like bullying and the only encouragement that people should be receiving to replace out is if the player clearly doesn't have time for the game, or if the mental/emotional health of the player is being compromised by the game. That is an entirely different matter from "I'm going to try to policy lynch you because I don't like how you play the game".
Wrath_of_DoG attempted to lynch me in every single game we played in together past a certain point, simply because he didn't like me as a Mafia player. I didn't complain a single time. I tried to reason with him and talk to him about it, but he shut down all forms of communication regarding the matter. Instead of stooping to his level or being rude about it, I simply outplayed him and got him counter-lynched or Vigged in response to his antagonism.
There are alternative solutions.
Edit: Such as requesting the host and/or Council look into the player in question. Not just suggesting we let that go untouched.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
Yeah, the OoG information elements are frustrating as heck. It's really actively difficult to not let something OoG influence your reads once you hear about it, such as the multi-game activity tell that I mentioned above.
The example is kinda flawed both because lurking is a bigger tell, usually scum, for Ruma, and a player seemingly trolling is a behavioral tell for scum in general, and for Ruma is mostly NAI, actually. I've seen several people on and off this site talk about always lynching Tom first every game for a similar reason, actually.
I mean, most game hosts on this site won't replace or modkill anyways until something forces their hand.
Grapefruit's point on annoyance votes is a good one. You bring things up with the host first. Heck, for all you know, what you are annoyed about is due to something entirely unrelated to the game.
I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, even recently, but I have been of the strong belief for months that telling another player in-thread that they are obnoxious, toxic, or that they deserve a modkill/non-alignment-based-lynch/etc is toxic itself and detrimental to game and community health. And I at least have warned players to not suggest that in thread.
I'm not convinced that suggesting that players should just ignore toxicity and, implicitly, that there shouldn't be rules in place to avoid it, is actually a good idea for the long-term health of the community.
Okay let's use DBS as an example: in ZE it's debateable to whether or not she broke rules or not. My replies to her definitely did. This additional rule against annoyance voting just means I broke an additional clear rule as opposed to the multiple sportsmanship and good faith rules. Maybe because it's a clear line I'm punished, but most of votes at least had surface level in game reasoning so I probably don't get punished by this rule.
My point isn't that my behavior is okay, my point is I think the focus is better spent trying to encourage and foster positive behavior than to make rules against corner cases of unpleasant behavior that are already largely covered by the various "be good to each other" and "play to the spirit of the game rules"
I don't think most of the game integrity rules are vague, for example the rules about sharing your pm in various ways are incredibly specific. And fortunately rarely enforced as most people who sign up are agreeing to that part of the social contract. The key is that people have differing tolerance levels and don't always agree on interpretations of the finer points of that contract (see my thin skin compared and lesser tolerance to rudeness/flaming than DV or Iso).
The way Shadow's policy on lynching self-voters is considered, it's not actually clear that he's considered if the statistics on this site recently support his point. I don't have enough time personally to do this, but I was involved in a majority of the games this last year, and if I recall correctly, the overwhelming majority of self-votes were from town rather than scum. Not that it's a town tell. No, it's absolutely reasonable to consider it a scum tell.
As for conf!bias, I mean, meta-reading is conf!bias incarnate, and despite a rule that explicitly bans meta-reading by definition, nobody on this site has or likely ever will be warned for meta-reading another player. I think we can all agree that would be ridiculous.
I agree on this part.
I need to think some more on this. The more I push back, the less crazy I think your suggestion is.
We should foster good game environments. Perhaps we shouldn't force players to legislate their feelings in game and when game hosting we as moderators should moderate.
Using the example of DBS, which looks worse for long-term MTGS community health?
I guess here's another Osie rant. I'm so tired of being the guy to bring up issues here. I make this message as a MAL Mafia Society admin first, and an MTGS Mafia player second.
You know what's not such a great feeling? Being a leader of a community that's ***** on regularly by a multitude of people in my home community. Having to, as a leader of that other community, go to multiple people and try to convince them that despite their negative experience with several members of my home site, it's not a bad site to play on. Regularly recruiting people from that community to play here, only to be told pretty much to **** off most of the time when I invite people the other way.
With the welcome exceptions of Cantripmancer, Rhand, DV, almost kpaca, maybe Silver (according to Grapefruit, and possibly before my time), nobody from MTGS who wasn't already playing on MAL before me has played on MAL since I joined that community. I'm not counting Discord-based voice chat games in making that list.
Cantrip and DV have both expressed enjoyment and some openness to later playing more games on the site. Rhand had a concern about apathy in context of the game he was in, which he expressed also applies to MTGS.
For comparison, AlbertinoDias, ScarletCelestial, Shinichi, Lastwhisper, Shattiel, Rumanshi, Killmatronix (kinda), Beeboy, RE1031, Fuwa, DawningBlueSky, roz_the_eevee, yurkin, and Karote are all from MAL.
The phase length difference is a significant element, but a large number of our regular players, especially amongst those that ***** on MAL a lot, are those who play on other sites with short phase lengths, a lot.
I'm not going to go into detail, but there was a similar moment about people from other sites that was cut from the podcast because I personally called it out for being unwelcoming.
Council members both current and former have talked about wanting to bring more people in and retain people. Maybe the fact that people in this community, from the bottom to the top, ***** on others so regularly is a significant factor to why this community doesn't retain them.
I semi-recently advertised MTGS to a few people. Quoting (with a few words of paraphrasing to kinda unify the comments):
MTGS - "MTGS is known for longer phases. A lot of the players there are experienced, established players, many of whom have also played a lot on other sites in addition to MTGS. People like interesting setups much more than just running games for the sake of it."
That's kinda cold. But that is a normal advertisement for MTGS, and I certainly wasn't intending it to be cold in context.
For comparison...
MAL - "Mafia Society is a friendly and social Mafia group. There are some skilled and likely familiar players there, and the games range into some more experimental ideas. The regular players are mainly united through enjoyment of anime, but it's a mafia group first and everyone is welcome."
Why is MTGS so unwelcoming? Is that the kind of image the community wants to project?
It's not that MAL is unwelcoming... I'm just a "stays in his comfort zone" kinda guy.
The first problem is that "lynching" is not, strictly speaking, a game action that players can take. Players only cast votes.
You could forbid hammering "regardless of alignment", but that doesn't address many situations - if threshold is 7 and the first 6 votes were "regardless of alignment" votes and the last one was a scum read, I don't think that satisfies Osie's concern.
You could forbid voting "regardless of alignment", but that is quite wide and would forbid several actions taken in Mafia games right now:
And there's still a problem with indirect mechanical effects. Simple example: We know there's exactly one cop in the game, X and Y both claim it. A player has no read on either and decides to just vote X, knowing the flip will solve it either way.
Further, this all only really applies to town players. Scum by definition are not trying to figure out alignments. A rule that only applies one way has all kinds of angle-shooty possibilities that are unfortunate.
I think what you want is more like "don't use OOG preference to determine votes." That's more feasible, though you'll still run into confirmation bias. On the one hand, if A doesn't like B, or doesn't like B's playstyle, it's very easy for A to convince themselves that B must be scum.
All rules necessarily have false positives and false negatives, of course, but they're worth considering.
If we want to make hosts specify that the correct course of action when faced with toxicity and trolling is to report the posts and contact the host rather than stooping to the other player's level (which, to be clear, is already a site rule!) I'm okay with making that rule more visible and explicit.
But I don't think it's even possible to outright ban voting for people to remove them from the game even if you think they aren't a wolf. It would just create vocabulary gymnastics to dance around why you're actually voting for someone or force someone to misrepresent their read when hammering a player they think is town to advance the game, etc.
Edit: Also, to be clear, no, I've never played on MAL. I've only played games here and on DarkLordPotter and MafiaUniverse (very occasionally) because I can't stand the extremely short phase lengths used by most mafia sites. I'd only consider playing turbos and Long Phase Light games on MU, and DLP usually has 4/1 or 4/2 phases.
Edit again: I've played some 72/24 games in the past and they're just too fast for me. Even DLP's phases are, which is why I don't /in there very often. I'm much more comfortable with 5/2+ and could only even consider something faster than 4+ if my schedule was completely clear (which it nearly never is).
I do think the cross pollination between here and MAL has been a good thing for us overall, and I'm sorry if you don't feel the same way from the MAL side but
most* a lot of our players here are in the same boat I am and just can't play MAL games because of the faster phases. If you know of specific players that have literally told you to "**** off" when you invited them to a game, you can send their names to me on Discord or via PM and I'll try to have a chat with them about being better community representatives, but if people are just turning you down because of the phase lengths I don't think that's a rejection of the community or players you have at MAL.*We don't actually have that many players playing on fast phase sites, to my knowledge. Tom is pretty much the main one, I think, the others are players who only drop in unannounced very occasionally (like Newcomb, Voxx, GJ, etc.) and who primarily play on those other sites now (or came from them originally).
I'm not excusing the behavior of people who have been unwelcome to our visiting players from other sites; rather, I'm just saying I completely understand the frustration on both ends, and why perhaps players like DBS and LW feel unwelcome in our games. It's a failure to adapt on both ends because we have a really hardcore Mafia culture.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
I've been putting some thought into this.
Osie asked why we have issues. This example by Iso is why. Its habitual, this isn't the only instance of this happening on this site. If I was a mod of any of the games that this happened, I would have immediately given WoD a warning and if it persisted force replaced them out or mod killed them. At that point I'd have moved for the probation or blacklisting after the game ended.
Osie's point is that we shouldn't allow these things to exist as moderators, and that we should do more to foster a positive game environment. Making it King of the Flies and forcing players to deal with it on their own is unproductive.
Its also a little ridiculous that this comment can be made and everyone glosses over it and I guess it isn't a big deal to them. That probabally speaks to how much of an issue this can be on this site.
I haven't seen an instance of that specific behavior as long as I've been here, and the one time it was actually threatened to my knowledge the player was blacklisted for six months and left the board entirely. That wasn't the only thing they had done, of course, the player in question had established a pattern of poor behavior in previous games and that threat was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back, as I recall.
The player in question, of course, was Tappingstones, and he was threatening me. So I know what this is like and what it's all about, okay?
If there's a player threatening to lynch someone else regardless of their alignment in every game forever, please, please point them out to me so I can handle it.
But the thing is, is, this already falls under our poor sportsmanship rule. If you have some ideas for more explicit phrasing than we currently have, I'm all ears, but most of the stuff people are claiming are good reasons to outright ban voting for someone regardless of their alignment fall under poor sportsmanship already, and the proposed rule change disallows voting for town reads to move the game forward among other things I believe are acceptable play (i.e. they are not game throwing or poor sportsmanship).
The only consensus seems to be we need to enforce the rules we have rather than just letting people stay in their habits, but I haven't seen any discussion about how to do that.
Another thing that probably bears mentioning on an unrelated subject is that Osie was our currently most prolific reviewer. I know we still have plenty of people to review games but there might be a slight shortage/constraint of players because he was reviewing a ton and playing only a small subset.
Angle shooting, poor sportsmanship that doesn't rise to the level of flaming (like threatening to lynch someone in every game forever or threatening to avoid them in future games in the middle of an ongoing game, etc.), out of game information being used in game, game rule violations, etc. are game host business and could/should be escalated to the Council afterwards. Part of the problem is that lots of people disagree as to what level of discourse is "poor sportsmanship" and what level is just "playing the game" and I'm not sure there's a solution that would keep all the parties involved "happy". One person's under-moderation is another person's over-moderation and all that.
We can definitely add a "you should contact the game host if you have problems with a player, if they are flaming or trolling please use the report button" rule, but I don't want to strictly / stringently enforce it with modkills, probation, etc. unless people are flaming or resorting to actual poor sportsmanship in return.
I've also been kicking around setting up some kind of inbox for players to escalate issues directly to the Council if they aren't satisfied with the way a host is handling a game. Could probably set up something on Discord easier than anything directly on-site (which would either involve software changes or council members logging into another mutual account to check reports), but I haven't even figured out if it's technically feasible yet let alone discussed with the other Councilors if this is something they would support.
I guess my main question here is (1) if this is even possible, is it something we want / would use, and (2) is this a sufficient response to what is going on right now? Also (3) if anyone actually wants this what do they feel is the difference between that and just PMing a Councilor directly?
I've spoken to Osie about the games he's currently reviewing; to my knowledge he's agreed to finish those. Anyone who needs a reviewer in the future can contact me directly or post in #lonelyhearts, I don't have much time for playing at the moment anyway.
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StaffWe care. We care a great deal about the state of our sub forum, our playerbase, and everything that is impacted by this, big and small. Every single council member included, but specifically, if silver and I didn’t care, we wouldn’t have applied for this position.
We have had a lot of back room discussion about what’s been said here, and we encourage everyone who has something they’d like to bring up, to voice their thoughts. I guarantee we won’t make everyone happy, but we will strive to make this place continue to improve and be something special that we all can celebrate as a community.
Feyd could setup a zone ala EDH Primer Committee for the Mafia Council, in which you have mod level powers and everyone else can only see their own threads.
I'm out of suggestions and answers and felt like I should reply to DV because he was right but I'm also stumped.
A way this could be remedied would be to try and reduce the responsibility of game hosts - for example, if we could foster a culture of reporting posts that cointain flaming then we could instate a rule that says "if you get an infraction for flaming, you must be replaced". While that approach would be more rigid, it would see much more consistent reactions from hosts - as can be seen in other forum wide rules like posting role PMs, which hosts know (usually) means mandatory modkill. This would, of course, put the burden of deciding "sufficient flaming" onto the shoulders of the forum mods, but they are a) more trained in making that call and b) don't suffer the conlfict of interest around finding replacements/destabilising the game that a game host has.
As an aside, I understand mods not wanting to red text offending posts, but some form of engagement would be required to make reporting feel more impactful. Perhaps something like a summary every month of mod activity (X posts were reported, Y warnings and Z infractions were handed out), just to provide something tangible to indicate that mods are reading reports.
Alternatively (or even additionally!) the council could be more of a first port of call for contentious behaviour. If standard procedure is for a host to raise grey-area behaviour with the council and they make a decision (involving but not driven by the host) that results in a judgement of "force replace or not", then the host again bears less responsibility for resolving the punishment and the council take any flak. This could be facilitiated with a formal inbox, discord channel, or designated "host manager" council member. I think a lot of the time hosts don't contact the council until things have already escalated, and even when they do, the council resolves things in a very ad-hoc way. A more formal process (even if it didn't have rigid guidelines) would hopefully make things more streamlined and consistent.
Punishing lurking is more difficult because that is ultimately up to the game host. But I think a strong start is to examine what level of activity we really do expect - as Silver stresses, 1 post every 48 or 72 hours is really not actually enough. In parallel, any kind of system to encourage replacements would help bolster any kind of enforcement overhaul. Auto-ins are no longer sufficient incentive, so how can we encourage more people to replace into games?
Overall, I think part of the issue is that game hosts are responsible for identifying unwanted behaviour, handing out punishment, and dealing with negative consequences of that punishment. This understandably leads to reluctance to commit in the hope that saying "cool it guys" will stop it. Splitting that responsibility burden with other parties who have experience and have volunteered to shoulder occasionally being the "bad guys" in controversial decisions should at least make punishments come earlier in the process and more consistently.
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StaffThis seems like a good idea to me. At least until we get to a place where we're happy that sort of zero tolerance policy that is actively encouraging players to use the appropriate channels is a reasonable decision.
I'm also in favor of some sort of formalized way to contact the council privately. I've messaged individual members before but I don't think I've ever contacted all the members at once. Having a way to reach them about ongoing games would be welcome (though that could run into issues when members are playing in the game in question).
That's a perfectly valid in-game reason to lynch someone irrespective of alignment.
But I also think we could do more to set the tone for our playerbase, by coming up with a set of expectations for what we consider to be good sportsmanship, and recommending that our game hosts adopt said guidelines in their OPs.
For example:
MTGS Sportsmanship Guidelines
Mafia, like any other game, is fundamentally about having fun with another group of human beings. Part of that fun comes from good, clean competition, but everyone should bear in mind that at the end of the day, no one (hopefully) is actually dying, and it's a social game. We like to encourage our players to think about how to play the game that not only allows them to enjoy themselves, but that doesn't interfere with others' enjoyment of the game, either. Flaming, insulting others, intentionally seeking to tilt other players, going out of your way to be annoying - all of these things will get in the way of what we're all here to do. To have fun, enjoy one another's company, and be a happy, welcoming community. We don't expect everyone to be robots, but we do hope that everyone will bear in mind this is something people do for enjoyment, to respect one another, and not to let things get out of hand while you're ruthlessly forming mobs to murder one another. So remember, keep your murder mobs pleasant, courteous, and cheerful, and have a nice day!
You can do it MU/MAL style and have a GM who is not only the reviewer but also watches over the game for moderation (and backup hosting) reasons.
Can confirm that this is likely feasible on the technical end of things.
@Bur: Please update the hosting thread probation list with this.
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@Eco: I'm not opposed to Mods giving a monthly report on reports/cards activity, but I might have to be prompted and reminded to do this as if it's only a monthly thing, I'm likely to forget that it needs to be done.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
I've noticed that TappingStones is not currently on the Blacklist or Probation list. I was under the impression that he was to be added?
Also, I think we could afford to clean up the replacement/modkill/probation list a bit and remove mentions of people who haven't played Mafia on here in over 2-3 years. Council, thoughts?
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
IIRC we were discussing whether or not to formally blacklist him when he announced his intention to leave the forum and never return. Since he's been true to his word, we never needed to actually add him to either list.
With regards to the Probation/Blacklist (and maybe replacements/modkill list?) in general: I think cleaning it up would be good for enforcing player behaviors, as a much more compact list allows hosts to look over things more easily, and make a more educated decision in a succint manner. I mean, who really cares that AbbeyGargoyle replaced out of a game one time 12 years ago (or whatever), for example? They don't play Mafia any more, and most people here didn't even know that person existed, let alone played here, at some point.
Just a suggestion, based on the whole "people don't really pay attention to the list, so it's not really serving its purpose" thing.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
I'm for the cleanup.