MTG Salvation

So, it sounds like a number of people won't want to check multiple sites. But provided we still have some number of games that would continue to fire on MTGS itself, would that really be a problem? We'd have some different groupings going on, but I'd much prefer that to losing long-time players like Cyan and Kpaca altogether.

Personally, if anyone cares, I gave up playing here because of RL constraints, but also because of a trend in the playerbase that I did not care for: away from a serious atmosphere of analysis to one of spammy joke posts and other reddit and 4chan style "internet banter." The place has become much more cliquish since I started here lo so many years ago and that's a big turn-off. I can't be the only one feeling this way - granted, the forum software is pretty terrible too, but we could've made that work if the games and (maybe, more importantly) the people playing them had been more enjoyable.

For me, trying to advertise off-site games on MTGS would make it even more plain that the community here is dead and that off-site groups are just trying to capitalize on the site's remaining popularity to get players for their irrelevant (to me) forums. If we're trying to keep this community alive, and not someone else's, that's a bad idea. Not that I have any better ones. Just giving you my opinion for whatever that's worth.

EDIT: I've beaten this point to death before, but I think the establishment of the mafia league is the root of this subforum's malaise. Cutting actual games and running league games that were usually substandard and included an arbitrary point system was the first step towards sucking the fun out of mafia on this site.

I agree with Zinda's point on League games. For me personally, I have zero interest in playing those games and the general attitude they foster isn't something I'm interested in.

Quote from zindabad »

Personally, if anyone cares, I gave up playing here because of RL constraints, but also because of a trend in the playerbase that I did not care for: away from a serious atmosphere of analysis to one of spammy joke posts and other reddit and 4chan style "internet banter." The place has become much more cliquish since I started here lo so many years ago and that's a big turn-off. I can't be the only one feeling this way - granted, the forum software is pretty terrible too, but we could've made that work if the games and (maybe, more importantly) the people playing them had been more enjoyable.

Wheat feels that people are taking the game too seriously now - you feel they aren't taking the game seriously enough.

Is it really that the attitudes of the people have changed, or are we all just getting older, less energetic, and missing familiar faces?

I feel a little bit like we're behaving like octogenarians complaining about the world changing around us. And it's not so much that the people living in the world have changed all that much- it's that our lives, and the web of relationships that supported it, bound it, gave it meaning, have dwindled around us and many of us haven't the drive or energy to replace them any longer.

There are so many older players that I miss having around. Arimnaes. Fadeblue. Puzzle. Cropcircles. Loran16. Rafaelk. Pale Mage. Mandershex. DYH and Axel are still around, but only so much. So many more. I miss those guys. And the forum's not really the same without them. But - that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the people who are here now. And life does go on.

Quote from zindabad »

For me, trying to advertise off-site games on MTGS would make it even more plain that the community here is dead and that off-site groups are just trying to capitalize on the site's remaining popularity to get players for their irrelevant (to me) forums. If we're trying to keep this community alive, and not someone else's, that's a bad idea. Not that I have any better ones. Just giving you my opinion for whatever that's worth.

My concern is sustaining this community, not goodgamery or DTR's. If you doubt my motives, I would consider that good grounds for termination of my council membership. And you are free to make that case, if you wish.

Addendum:

To be clear, I don't think a failure to address this problem will mean the collapse of MTGS mafia. We're not facing any imminent crisis.

But we have seen a number of people who've mentioned that they hate the software, and quietly dialed back their participation. Some have left altogether, some just stop by intermittently. We've gone from having about 60+ active game slots running at all times to more like 30-40. It's not the end of the world, but it's a significant step backward. We last had those levels in...I want to say 2007. We could keep going on that, and we'll probably rebuild our numbers in time with measures such as rolling signups, and I suspect the league has helped also (I don't keep very close tabs on it lately, and I do hear grumblings from time to time, but despite some flaws it's seemed to be a successful and popular program. But if it's leading to toxicity issues...that's a serious problem that does need to be addressed. Is that a widespread sentiment?).

I actually think we may have more new players joining us these days than we have in a long time. But, retention of older players and considering steps to keep some of our older players in contact are also pretty important. I don't want to lose our core membership without a fight.

There is really no denying the fact that this software is 100% miserable for the game of mafia. Moving here had no upsides and multiple downsides.

There is also no denying that Curse does not care, and probably shouldn't. They tolerate sub-forums like this because it doesn't hurt them to do so. But we're not bringing them any revenue. If anything, I would say that the average mafia player is less likely to ever click on an ad than the typical forum-goer. Suffice to say, if we informed them tomorrow that our entire group was moving off-site, they wouldn't care, nor would they have reason to.

And that is the only way I would ever bother with moving somewhere else..if the entire sub-forum did too. And I hate the idea of everyone moving to another established site, because they're going to have their own policies and tendencies that we would have to adhere to. Like, if my choices were A)move to mafiascum or B)never look at another mafia post in my life, I would quickly take option B and never think twice about it.

Also, I think that WG and Zinda are both right. I don't think that people are really taking the game 'too seriously', they are just getting too emotionally vested in it, while at the same time, they are making all kinds of nonsense posts that never contribute anything to the actual game. I would love to see both of these behaviors stop.

Quote from Cyan »

There is really no denying the fact that this software is 100% miserable for the game of mafia. Moving here had no upsides and multiple downsides.

There is also no denying that Curse does not care, and probably shouldn't. They tolerate sub-forums like this because it doesn't hurt them to do so. But we're not bringing them any revenue. If anything, I would say that the average mafia player is less likely to ever click on an ad than the typical forum-goer. Suffice to say, if we informed them tomorrow that our entire group was moving off-site, they wouldn't care, nor would they have reason to.

And that is the only way I would ever bother with moving somewhere else..if the entire sub-forum did too. And I hate the idea of everyone moving to another established site, because they're going to have their own policies and tendencies that we would have to adhere to. Like, if my choices were A)move to mafiascum or B)never look at another mafia post in my life, I would quickly take option B and never think twice about it.

They actually do care; while I don't have a set timeline for it yet, a mobile version of Cobalt is in the works & should be entering testing sometime soon. What other problems are we having? If it's anything that we can work on, I'd like to get a set of requests put together so that we can resolve the issues.

I think one of the biggest issues is not having a full page preview dedicated to making larger posts.

This text box is pretty small, at least compared to the size of posts we often see in Mafia.

Ah! Cool, thanks for pointing that out.

(Still can't do it on mobile, though :p)

That said, I think the other biggest issue is mobile browsing.

That aside, I can't see anything else that would be terribly obnoxious for Mafia, unless Asenion or Cyan had something in particular that they wanted to air grievances about?

The biggest pain is that multiple quotes get stuck to each other imo. That is a pain on a computer and makes phone playing impossible.

When on the comp I typically put quotes in a Notepad doc.

Phone I just try not to post.

Quote from Rhand »

The biggest pain is that multiple quotes get stuck to each other imo. That is a pain on a computer and makes phone playing impossible.

Agreed. The nested quote system is time consuming to edit/play with

Quote from Rhand »

The biggest pain is that multiple quotes get stuck to each other imo. That is a pain on a computer and makes phone playing impossible.

Ah yes, that is a hassle when you want to respond to one fragment of a post on your phone and holding down "backspace" until it wraps up is just annoying. I can't think of any intuitive fixes to this, though.

I would love for the multi-reply to separate the quotes with a line break. Much easier than trying to find the exact spot myself.

I still think IRC is the best way to play mafia.

Yes, the forum software sucks. I hate how quotes get stuck to each other so you have to hunt where your quotes break up. Is it that hard to add a line break?

I have a dream, that one day, it will no longer be a hassle to play mafia. Someone will make a program, or an app, or a game, that you boot up and log in, and join instantaneous mafia games. This will catapult mafia into massive popularity. Something built solely for the purpose of playing mafia and doing it really well.

A)You can only view 20 or whatever posts per page. This is like viewing the internet in 1999.
B)Preview Post does not refresh the page.
C)Multi-quoting, as stated.

Mostly, I'm like Killjoy these days. I write everything in notepad, manually sorting out the different areas that I want to copy/paste, etc. As petulant as it sounds, I don't really want to have to put extra effort into my casual no prize internet word based game.

a. Should I take a PPP poll in our sub and see who wants altered pageview privileges? Or would that be asking too much?

b. The tl;dr version is so that if we're about to post and someone says something relevant before we are able to make our post, instead of having to make another post immediately after to address it (or opening another tab just for the purpose of seeing if someone else posted before we finished), that would allow us to see the relevant post and not waste time or resources. It's strictly convenience.

c. I thought we took linebreaks out because it was making the quotes appear in a random order? If you can reinstate it, that'd be great.

Setting posts per page to a higher number would be terrific, either on an ad hoc basis or as an across the board option. I think the majority of us had our settings set to the prior maximum, at 90 posts per page, prior to the software change-over. I certainly wouldn't turn up my nose at viewing at 90 ppp again, and I imagine a lot of other users outside of mafia wouldn't mind it either. It's a little bit like having to page through a newspaper looking for where the rest of a story is tucked away. You know where to find it, it's not tremendously hard to flip the pages, but it's preferable to read on seamlessly without interruptions.

And thank you for coming by. We know we're not a huge segment of the population here, but it's very much appreciated that you're willing to implement some changes to help resolve some of these issues.

I remembered another thing - when you link to a post in a thread, the hyperlink redirects to the OP if the thread title changes.

As far as PPP goes, we could set the Mafia default to around 50 and offer people (such as myself) who don't want such a high number of PPP to opt out of that. Anyone object?

I'll take as many PPP as I can. 25 is just too low, for sure. A solid 100 would be great I think.

I'd be fine with adjusting Mafia PPP to a poll-determined setting.

As for the Preview Post refresh issue, a full refresh is necessary because of the possibility that your post may need to be changed to respond to newer posts that have gone up while you were writing your post. Editing posts in a Mafia game is a modkill-worthy & sometimes probation-worthy offense, so I can see why most players would be asking for that first and foremost. Could we perhaps have something set up to have Preview refresh the page ONLY in Mafia so that we're not having so many requests to redownload the page on the rest of the site?

Quote from Iso »

I remembered another thing - when you link to a post in a thread, the hyperlink redirects to the OP if the thread title changes.

Just tried this one and it has been fixed, the link to the posts in question is maintained even if you change the thread title.

For an opt out on the increased post count per page that currently isn't possible as we would be setting the post count on the forum setup page on the Admin control panel.

To give the users the ability to override that would need some level rebuilding so would need to go into new request with Curse and then into their development queue.

Okay, so I guess the easiest solution for the time being would be to grant specific users PPP override at their request?

Quote from Iso »

Okay, so I guess the easiest solution for the time being would be to grant specific users PPP override at their request?

Again not with out altering the code Cobalt sits on. At the moment there is no scope for allowing people to override what is set up in the admin control panel for a forum.

Whilst we accept that under current constraints we are not going to get a one size fits all number of posts per page atleast with a poll we can work out what the majority would like and change it to that.

Blegh, sounds like something I won't like.

But, if it's what the masses want...

The masses are salivating.

RE: The options Azrael brought up in #8362, I sincerely doubt #2 is at all possible. It might just be feasible to somehow stay under Curse and connected to MTGS but on a separate board with settings more to our liking, but even that seems pretty far-fetched.

We could, potentially, look at this board essentially being a big redirect elsewhere. This would require Curse's blessing to maintain a presence here, since to entirely migrate would almost certainly destroy the playerbase: I'm sure that virtually all of our players (including myself) come from regular MTGS users who wonder what this "mafia" board is all about. I would be equally loath to attempt to integrate into any existing communities, as we would lose our MTGS identity. Mafiascum is simply too large, and other MTG based boards are very small and have overlap with MTGS anyway whilst also possessing a different ethos. Since the main focus is to maintain our identity and metagame whilst also encouraging growth of player numbers I consider emigrating to be a very risky solution.

Fortunately, it seems that the bulk of the issues are related to the forum software and I am incredibly happy to see moslter here, engaging with us and seeking solutions to our issues. I am hopeful that we can work together with Curse to fix any problems that affect our enjoyment of the game, even though we are a relatively small community. As long as we can work together to fix things, I see no reason to consider emigrating away from MTGS.

***

In terms of PPP, I tended to use 50, since that made it easy to work out what page a specific post number would be on. We managed pretty well when 40ppp was the max a while back as well. If you fear your posts getting eaten, you could use something like Lazarus to avoid it. I'm sure other similar things exist.

Quote from Azrael »

The masses are salivating.

/salivate

Here's an issue we can tackle on our own. Secretary Killjoy has informed me that there are a dearth of available setups for the new rolling signup system. Apparently, we're filling games faster than we can design new setups these days. The mini and specialty queues should be rolling non-stop under the current system, but neither is ready.

The FTQ was recently fired in part to alleviate this issue, but filled up VERY rapidly. So, I think we need some additional measures.

It's been a while since we fired a PCQ, so that could be one possibility. But, again, it's more of a temporary stop-gap.

Thinking long-term, it's pretty critical that we have at least one signup thread up at all times, especially for the sake of newbies. Every time a new player stops by and doesn't see a place to sign up, we're turning people away. We can't afford that. And we're probably also under-utilizing our veterans because of this issue as well.

One option we may need is to kick our people on the mini and specialty lists into gear, with a deadline. If none of the people on the list are ready to run in a week's time, we open it up to the forum at large. I know of several setups from the latest FTQ round that are very close to completion, so we DO have hosts who are ready to run, if we allow them to bypass our currently-dysfunctional queue system.

The other issue we may need to consider is wiping everyone from the queue who can't get a game designed within a month's time, and then requiring people to complete setups before joining the queue. In the past, this was something we rejected as too much of a deterrent to getting people to host. However, it's been challenging for our secretaries to corral hosts into actually doing what they initially signed up to do in a timely manner, and has involved a lot of skipping over people and other administrative hijinks. At the point that we aren't able to get new players because our queue system is breaking down, I think we may need to do some substantial tinkering.

If we instead decide that we like things how they are now, we could authorize multiple FTQ and PCQ games to run concurrently for the short-term, and light a fire under the hosts currently on the lists to get their butts in gear. Not my favorite solution, as I think a number of people would be disappointed in not having the chance to play in each game due to commitments to other games. But if the worst problem we have to worry about is that other people get into those games instead, possibly entirely new people, or the signups take a bit longer to fire than usual, that seems pretty ok.

I could have a Star Trek MU4 done in a few days if we want that. My Little Pony MU is also a possibility; I laid flavor groundwork for that in STMU3.

Per the hosting thread OP, hosts should already have a completed setup when they sign up on the hosting list. Why have the Secretaries not been enforcing this rule? This was an issue when I was Secretary and we rectified the problem by adding that requirement and dropping hosts that did not have completed setups after 2 weeka of either no response or no completion. The time on the list is allocated for reviewing purposes - namely, if you are on the waiting list, your setup either needs to be on its way to review or already reviewed. I can not express how irresponsible it is to have let this become an issue again after our previous system was implemented effectively.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but even in spite of my insane IRL schedule + playing in multiple games at a time (up to 10 at one point, across several sites) I managed to run a very tight ship on the Secretarial duties. As such, I have very high standards as to how the position should be handled, particularly moreso now that I am a Council member and am directly responsible for the health of our community.

I have always been in favor of running the FTQ and PCQ simultaneously, with the PCQ being a vote taken on setups that are in the queue already (with hosting limits set, of course, so that certain popular hosts do not always get bumped ahead in the queue).

If there are any questions or suggestions, feel free to run them by us.

This must have begun months ago, if no one on the current list is capable of running. I didn't instruct Killjoy to enforce the rule when he asked what his duties as secretary were, so that's my fault. But I suspect we might have had problems prior to his tenure.

Or, it may simply be a case of the setups being air quotes "complete" when submitted. There have been a number of games I've worked on where I became dissatisfied with my initial plans and more or less scrapped them completely, even following completed review processes.

I made a long post but then realized I wasn't really saying anything. But I don't want to just not post it, so I spoiled it.

Thanks for taking the time to work with us and accommodate us how you can, Curse Guys. It is very much appreciated, especially considering that you're doing so literally just to be nice to us. I'm thrilled with all of this.

I like the idea of 100ppp, but 50 is acceptable too.

I don't know what to suggest as far as 'need more ready setups'. That seems like a great problem to have, but it's still understandably a problem.

Quote from Iso »

Per the hosting thread OP, hosts should already have a completed setup when they sign up on the hosting list. Why have the Secretaries not been enforcing this rule? This was an issue when I was Secretary and we rectified the problem by adding that requirement and dropping hosts that did not have completed setups after 2 weeka of either no response or no completion. The time on the list is allocated for reviewing purposes - namely, if you are on the waiting list, your setup either needs to be on its way to review or already reviewed. I can not express how irresponsible it is to have let this become an issue again after our previous system was implemented effectively.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but even in spite of my insane IRL schedule + playing in multiple games at a time (up to 10 at one point, across several sites) I managed to run a very tight ship on the Secretarial duties. As such, I have very high standards as to how the position should be handled, particularly moreso now that I am a Council member and am directly responsible for the health of our community.

I have always been in favor of running the FTQ and PCQ simultaneously, with the PCQ being a vote taken on setups that are in the queue already (with hosting limits set, of course, so that certain popular hosts do not always get bumped ahead in the queue).

If there are any questions or suggestions, feel free to run them by us.

I never knew that was a rule, so theres that.

I do think it may need to be reinstated. Then I wouldn't have to ask people multiple times if setups are done. So, yay less work for me.
I can't think of a better way to go about this unless we somehow have a faster review process to get people out of review as quickly as possible. Although that doesn't help with flavor.

Although, for the most part all people need to do is flavor right now, or they don't want to run right away. Looking through my messages, I may have found some signups that could go up.

I could see us loosening restrictions on the number of lists hosts can be on at the same time. Annorax has suggested that we potentially create exceptions to the "two reviewer" rule as well.

I'm not certain about dropping the two-reviewer requirement, unless we hear from a lot of people saying that that's causing a bottleneck. It does a lot to improve game quality, I suspect.

Council?

I vote to keep the two reviewer rule.

Absolutely no to dropping the 2-reviewer requirement. That was another change implemented when I was Secretary, because one set of eyes more often than not turned out to not be enough. Ultimately, my changes to the wueue structure make it more difficult for people to sign up to run games, but that is by design and I feel that it had ultimately increased the quality of games we've seen pushed through the queue over the past few years because we're effectively filtering out people who are sort of on the "eh I guess it would maybe be kind of cool to host? I might give it a shot?" side of the spectrum and might leave gaps in their setups. This also makes the Secretary's job 100 times easier so he doesn't have to frantically PM people 7 names down on the list to see if their setup is ready to run, which was something I frequently encountered when I was Secretary. This basically streamlines the Secretary process and, while it takes a bit longer/more effort on behalf of the host, it's what's most fair for everyone. The players who really want to host will get the chance to and the players who sort of want to host are motivated to put their game through the full creation/review process so that they're ready when their time comes.

I strongly suggest reinforcing the "completed setup" host rule, and recommend we start putting more players through reviewer qualification. I've reviewed a large number of games - most of which I feel turned out very successfully - and would be glad to set some players up through a mock review process to approve them.

Absolutely in favor of increasing allowed hosting slots per host. Always have been. Can we implement that immediately?

Az? Your thoughts?

I am absolutely in favour of keeping the two reviewers system, and I (and I'm sure many others) am happy to not only review games, but also to act as a second reviewer behind a someone who is inexperienced at reviewing, to both help them gain experience and catch any misses. I recall Kill-Joy sending a message out to existing reviewers, did that get filtered through to a list somewhere? I'd also approve of a more formalised reviewer approval process, so if anyone has any setups which would be worth reviewing (either real games or artificial made for this exercise) they should put them forward.

Azrael, if our queues are running dry I don't quite understand how running FTQ or PCQ games would help. If anything, these pull games away from the regular queues, and if we've reached a point where a game could be placed almost at the top of a queue, it seems silly to utilise systems that bypasses the queue. Certainly with the case of Specialties, almost any game in contention for the FTQ/PCQ will be eligible for the Specialty queue. With respect to Minis, if we're absolutely desperate, I don't see a reason why we can't run a Basic (or similarly low complexity game) as a Mini. Yes, it won't have the level of complexity one might expect from a Mini, but it's still a game of Mafia, and Basic games are intended to be balanced and focused on raw skill rather than night actions.

I could see the allowing of raising the number of lists a host could be on. Not all the way to all lists, but to any 2 lists. If we do this, however, I would very much want to see hosts strictly only joining a list with a mostly finished game (i.e. in stages of review, which could be confirmed by said reviewer). In addition, I'd want to avoid a host running two games at once, or even particularly close to each other unless absolutely necessary.

Done. Any two lists.

Iso, if you want to take point on vetting and adding more reviewers, that'd be fine by me.

Can one of the mods edit the hosting list appropriately? I'm getting an error message about non-latin unicode characters. -Az

I agree with everything eco just said. I would like to add that it may be good to have a formal metric such as "after hosting a game, a host can't host another game until at least N other hosts have hosted," where N would be some number that gives enough of a buffer. Probably increasing as you host (so like, host a game. 3 games later you can host again. then you have to wait 5, etc.)

Quote from Megiddo »

I agree with everything eco just said. I would like to add that it may be good to have a formal metric such as "after hosting a game, a host can't host another game until at least N other hosts have hosted," where N would be some number that gives enough of a buffer. Probably increasing as you host (so like, host a game. 3 games later you can host again. then you have to wait 5, etc.)

I still got it.

I don't think a hard limit is necessary. It seems fairly straightforward to take a case-by-case basis and just say "hey you hosted a game pretty recently, let the next guy have a go".

That's fine I suppose. Secretary just needs to stay up on that.

Agreed. Exercise of judgment on the behalf of the Secretary. Should be simple.

( )

In that case, I'm totally joining the Normal queue to host my first League game!

@Az: PM me what you need fixed and I'll get to it when I'm home.

This made me realize something: I never made Teletubbies mafia, nor any of the other interesting ideas I had here and there over the ages.

Perhaps I'll not completely exit mafia and just change my role in the subforum instead.