MTG Salvation

So, state of the mafia commmunity.

It's seemed for a while like we're in a slow decline. We've tried a number of tinkering things to try and address that, some special events. Switched to rolling queues, tweaked game sizes.

Which of those changes are working well for people, which aren't, and what else should we be thinking about as options? Are we being affected by broader trends affecting mafia, broader trends affecting magic the gathering sites generally, or this site in particular? Thoughts, solutions, gripes?

Personally, I wonder if it isn't a combination of rolling signups 1) that don't hugely appeal to people are kind of sitting around and going stale, limiting our volume. Used to be, there was competition to get into a signups when they opened. Now, it's like...well, here's my one menu option, same one that's been around for like six weeks. The people who were interested and regularly checking in, have seen it every time they clicked to check on the site. They obviously haven't joined and signed up and been tremendously interested, because the signups are still open. Do we really need to keep signups open until they fill? Most of our regular attendees are going to check in at least once a couple weeks, so if it hasn't filled by that point, I don't see the point in leaving it open longer than that. But I know my own history of clicking on the thread has declined precipitously, because at this point I'm kind of specific in what games I join, and now they come around even more infrequently than they used to. And oh look, every time I check, it's that same game that I already made a decision whether to join or not. Nothing new, just a long wait. I think there also used to be a psychological effect, in terms of "If I don't sign up for this game immediately, I'm going to lose my chance to play a game, therefore refresh often and /in immediately!" That's no longer working for us.

Kind of wondering if the rolling signup experiment has been a disaster.

Also, I think one of our strengths has been running the kinds of games that you don't see on other sites, so the more we limit ourselves on that, the more we lose our old, jaded veterans to atrophy and/or fail to distinguish ourselves and compete effectively against other mafia sites. FTQ/PCQ obviously helps with that, but it's like a shot of adrenaline a few times a year. Not enough.

Also, demographic trends in terms of a lot of magic players are reaching a different life phase, more mature, less time, more kids.

Also, our recruitment has kind of dropped off a cliff it seems. We had what, one person post in the new player contact thread in 4 months? I'm worried that the rolling signups being open so long and languishing also makes us look like dry, dusty and dysfunctional. If it takes that long for games to fill, who the hell is going to be interested in putting their hat in the ring?

Based on the numbers I put together in 2016 and conversations with admins and some people from MU:
-MTGS user numbers as a whole more or less recovered from the Curse takeover in about a year, whereas the Mafia sub-forums have continued to languish. Not sure on the MTGS user numbers at the moment, but forums in general are suffering stiff competition from reddit.
-Mafia forums seem to be doing just fine: MU is very active, although I think MafiaScum is having some issues (but that's heavily cultural in that they have MTGS deadlines with MU-level activity which is causing absolutely massive games filled with low-content posts). MTGS is very much struggling to recruit from MU because despite our imaginative and usually well balanced games, the deadline length is something people really don't want to endure - MTGS is very unusual in the aspect of our deadlines.

So I don't think our decline is necessarily a consequence of a decline in general mafia interest, forum use, or MTGS itself. MTGS is doubtless no longer at the height of popularity it once was, but it is still proportionately far better off than our subforum.

On the rolling sign ups, I think it definitely has some of the drawbacks you mentioned: games can take a while to start, and people might just stop checking back if the same game stays open for too long. But if we are going to shelve games that don't fire within a time period, we have to be very sure that we are ok with abandoning our historical "everyone gets a go" policy, and also avoiding disincentivising people from making games because they think "what's the point of all the effort if it won't even get played?". We would also need a lot more games in the queues or the faster turnaround will stall out quickly. But at least the shorter queues make it easier for someone to have a game fail to fire and then make changes and get another shot.

An alternative might be having a rolling queue for each game type - at least then a stagnating game only blocks one queue as opposed to all of them, and it would allow us to more easily gauge what the popular game types are. I know the Player Contact List sort of fulfills this function, but it doesn't really in practice. Downside would be a lot of sticky posts (maybe a subforum for them with a BIG OBVIOUS THREAD pointing at them?).

Eco, Shadowcrys, Bur & I discussed this briefly yesterday, and I think we (well, they) had some good ideas we can discuss at length in the near future.

I like the idea of rolling queues for each game type.

How do other forums/sites go about recruiting? I'd think there has to be a way to actively go out and increase our numbers.

I don't have a firm grasp on how this community is run, but as someone who just came here, I thought my point of view might be relevant. I have played a few games of Mafia on other sites, but decided I would probably enjoy a smaller, more welcoming, and less rigid place to play. I had heard good things about your forum, but on arrival the place seems a little lifeless.

I think the suggestion about changing to a rolling queue per game type my be helpful, but then again I don't really know what mix of games you typically run. Recruitment and retention seem to be the biggest issues from an outsiders perspective, but I have no suggestions for how to fix that. I get the impression there isn't any deadline for a game sign-up to fill, what is the benefit of this?

Quote from Azrael »

Also, I think one of our strengths has been running the kinds of games that you don't see on other sites, so the more we limit ourselves on that, the more we lose our old, jaded veterans to atrophy and/or fail to distinguish ourselves and compete effectively against other mafia sites. FTQ/PCQ obviously helps with that, but it's like a shot of adrenaline a few times a year. Not enough.

I agree on that being one of your community's strengths, at least from what I have heard, and is one of the reasons that drew me here. In fact, I would seriously consider making creativity the focus of your entire strategy. If you can build a larger niche for yourselves through innovation, you can begin to set this place apart from the alternatives and possibly bring in some fresh blood.

I may be nitpicking at this point, but your pinned help/info threads don't look consistently maintained, which is counterproductive and contributes to your image as a ghost town.

I could definitely see cutting down/consolidating our pinnned info threads.

Rolling signups for each game type is definitely a workable option I might be in favor of.

There is another possible alternative that crossed my mind, that I've yet to see on any other site.

Essentially, we could schedule certain game types to occur at a definite date/time throughout the year.

For instance, mini game X will start on August 1st, 2018. But signups are accepted immediately, starting three to six months or even twelve months in advance. No limits on the number of /ins, because you're going to have an enhanced number of dropouts, and there would a confirmation stage (and last-chance /in and signup stage) that works on a first come first serve basis. The advantage would be that you could plan the schedule out in advance, and allow people to clear time in their schedules, have something to look forward to, and give people the chance to sign up way in advance. You know exactly when the marquee games are coming up, can better gauge interest. And it ensures new players know exactly when a newbie friendly game is about to fire, also, without having to hope they randomly stumble in at the right moment.

Better yet, it allows us to more accurately gauge the most popular games/ game types by seeing who is signing up for what, and how many. That would allow us to make changes to the schedule on the fly to accommodate certain game types that increase in popularity, and to fully meet game demand. It also allows us to do things like feature newb games or short deadline games from time to time, without dedicating an entire rolling queue to those. And we prevent bottlenecks in the process if a game people aren't interested in comes up, because we could swap it out if it doesn't have enough interest by the time it was originally slated to run.

If host X falls through, next person on the queue subs in.

For example:

We determine that PCQs/FTQs are the most popular game type. We schedule four per year. One every three months. More, if we get enough suitable submissions. Potentially, if people just keep overflowing on signing up for these, and hosts give us more setups to work with to meet the rising demand, you could maybe double that, and like Oblivion suggested, become a focal point for creative mafia designs and innovation. We've got tons of creative hosts both past and present - we may just need to give them encouragement to unleash themselves more often. Personally, if I knew that I could design a game and run it without having to wait for months and months for my turn at a PCQ/FTQ to come up, I might just put some extra effort into churning out some of the ideas I've got kicking around in my head.

We determine that micros are the second most popular game type. We schedule eight per year, fire one about every six weeks.

Team Minis we fire four per year.

Regular minis four per year.

Two specialties per year.

Normals, two per year.

Mafia in real time on the discord, X per year.

Mod mafia, one per year.

Clan mafia, one per year.

48 hr. deadline mafia, one or two per year.

Invitational mafia, two per year.

Crosstown mafia, one per year.

Pick Some Other forum to do a forum vs. forum mafia mingle game to help with recruitment - 4x per year (or maybe combine this with something like the invitational or FTQs)

Discord/email/social media could potentially be something we'd also want to utilize more heavily if we switched to a system of this type. If you're waiting that long before a game starts, you'd want some extra ways to poke people and remind them that their game is ready to fire.

EDIT:

So, for the threads to be stickied/consolidated.

I'm thinking with the above described system, you could probably mash together new player welcome thread, player signups, replacement thread, and the hosting thread into one all purpose stop. That would be a huge cleanup.

We can unlink the mafia clan thread link that's in our sub also, since that was moved to the discord. Just mention it in the omnibus thread, or channel that into the council thread too, for people who don't have the discord.

You could unsticky signup threads too, since they won't be as critical under the system. That leaves us with council thread, omnibus thread, and...that's it. Super clean and slimmed down.

We don't really have new players that are "New players" from what I've seen recently.

I've probabally got some more thoughts on some of our problems. It'll take a while to figure it out. However, I think Azreal's proposed signup solves some of it.

No, we don't get a ton of "brand new to Mafia" players, but we do get some crossover from e.g. MafiaScum and MafiaUniverse when interesting things they don't have on their homesite come up. If we want to attract players from other sites we have to give them something besides Normals and Minis; not least because Curse is pretty bad software for Mafia so we need some kind of incentive to overcome that. Especially for MU regulars. (Curse isn't the worst by any stretch, but it's not really "good" either.)

Hope my previous post didn't come across more harshly than intended.

I think scheduling games in advance has all of the benefits of rolling queues by type and then some.

Consolidating the pinned threads would be a good start, but I actually meant that they didn't seem to be updated with much frequency. For example, Basic games seems to have been changed to Normal games at some point, but are still referred to in multiple places as Basics (unless I'm missing something).

Basics do still exist, but we don't really have a basic "queue" we just open sign ups for them when we go recruiting for new-to-mafia players or if it looks like there's interest.

Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that, since it's hard to gauge interest in basics without having basic sign ups.

I think the original plan was to use the Player Contact List as a rolling sign up for Basic games, and once we had enough players /in there we would fire one, but that hasn't actually led to any basics firing since the thread opened -- I think we got one or two basics out of it but that's all.

Edit: and while I can't speak for everyone and I'm not really in a position of authority other than being a forum regular / game host, I wasn't offended by your comment at all. It's a problem we've sort of been chewing on for a while and an outsider's perspective is pretty valuable.

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

No, we don't get a ton of "brand new to Mafia" players, but we do get some crossover from e.g. MafiaScum and MafiaUniverse when interesting things they don't have on their homesite come up. If we want to attract players from other sites we have to give them something besides Normals and Minis; not least because Curse is pretty bad software for Mafia so we need some kind of incentive to overcome that. Especially for MU regulars. (Curse isn't the worst by any stretch, but it's not really "good" either.)

And MyAnimeList...

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@Azrael:

Right now the similarly sized but slightly smaller mafia community over at MAL has its game queue partially kept up by yours truly and our own Prophylaxis.

We have 5 lists, Basic (Small: Basic + Normal), Normal (Large: Normal + Specialty), Micro, Mini, and Other.

Our plan was a monthly quota and then just splitting large (Normal queue) and small (Everything else) games and alternating in firing large, small, large, small. I think on the scale here, you probably want to go monthly as well, but probably more small games to the number of large games. Because while the large games do draw in people, they also take more attention and, well, more people, which means a lower number of signups or replacements in the smaller games.

By the way, I've been running Discord Live Mafia semi-regularly since the end of last year. I'd be totally down to run more with communities other than MAL.

~~~

I think a big thing for us is advertisement. When we do advertise, we draw in much more people. We can see that with the success of the team games. But we need to actually do it. Inviting in people from Mafia Universe and Mafia Scum, while it will change our playerbase and comes with inherent upsides and downsides, will overall help in increasing overall community size. In that vein, games on platforms other than the site such as cross-site games and Discord games have a lot of potential to them.

~~~

At some point we have to address an elephant in the room - Iso is still the only real friendly face on senior site staff, or at least the only one we can trust to be looking out for Mafia to a degree that it'll come before senior staff hatred of non-Magic themed sections or biases against our specific semi-related community and members within. This creates some pretty serious issues when moderation style here would contradict greatly with site moderation. At the moment, not as often a problem, but when it is, it tends to be pretty bad for morale (E.g. (Paraphrasing) "Why the heck is this site mod who doesn't play mafia poking their head in and warning us? This site sucks. Players are more concerned about warnings from the nazi site mods than they are of getting lynched."). Any discussion of this is better off on Discord most likely though.

~~~

I think if we can organize, get our name out there once more, bring back some of the solid older players (*cough* *cough*), and keep a steady stream of full games going, we can get back to a happy bustling state of affairs.

~~~

P.S. Hey Azrael, are you on Discord regularly? I was just wondering what the best way to contact you for reviewing and otherwise is.

PM is still best for me, I'm never on discord.

Your point regarding the site staff is well-taken, given our 13-year tradition of negotiation on that point.

I do like the idea of advertising/recruiting more from other sites using marquee setups.

Perhaps we do another design drive meant to generate games for precisely that purpose. *strokes chin thoughtfully*

Stickies
Definitely could consolidate these, I think even right now we could:

• Unsticky the Theory & Discussion thread.
• Combine the Replacement and Player Contact list thread (Discord is a more active place for replacements, and announcements of games tbh)
• Create a new (locked) thread under the banner of "Resources" which includes the general rules, information for new players, our articles, and the Vote Counter

This would take us to the Council thread, a PCL/Replacements thread, Hosting/queues thread, Resources thread, and the open sign ups.

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Staff
I think saying Iso is our only hope is a bit disingenuous consider admins Cythare and Wildfire are both pretty familiar with Mafia, and we have our local mod Bur, plus other faces on staff like ExpiredRascals. But obviously I don't know what goes on behind closed doors, and I can only hope that if this discussion was actually serious then the MTGS staff would involve the Mafia community at large.

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Game Scheduling

I really don't think this is a good idea. Fundamentally, I don't think the solution to "our sign ups take too long" is "ok, let's make the sign up period longer". While it'd be nice to know when a game will fire when you sign up, I think it is impractical to ask people to commit X months in advance, and you will have many problems with people forgetting/no longer being available but not outing/mods not being ready or falling through leaving people effectively signed up for a game they don't want to play, or even people waiting months and months only to get randomed out. The significantly simply solution to knowing when a game would start would just be a hard cap on sign up length.

I also think that scheduling when games will fire is a very difficult process: game length is variable, which means it will be very difficult to gauge how many people will actually be available to play when a game fires, and I think it will be very difficult to avoid periods where either a game could fire but isn't (because some people are free but the fire date hasn't hit), or the inverse and overlaps of games that strain the playerbase. Basically, I don't think you can reliably predict when a game should fire, and I think the resulting scheduling issues would cause more harm than good - it reduces flexibility in a system that leans quite heavily on the ability to look at what games are actually ready to fire and the availability of the player base to put a finger in the air and pick a game to open.

I think scheduled games would be an excellent idea for a very small forum that struggled to get enough players for a single game, so as to coordinate the few members it has to get something off the ground, but we are some distance from being in that position.


I think ultimately what we want to always have some sort of sign ups open and for games to fire quickly. Perhaps the problem is we do not have the numbers to support this policy: when we hit current capacity we either have signups which take a long time to fill (usually requiring an ongoing game to end), or we just have no sign ups open at all (and then people just walk away because there's nothing going on). This is sort of the problem the PCL was supposed to fix, but it clearly hasn't. Scheduling games would partially fix this by ensuring that games fired at regular known intervals, so that people when to come around, but at the cost of flexibility and being worse at responding to demand or playerbase utilisation. Deadlines on signups would at least force the next game to refresh until it hit one that was exiting enough to bump demand up to actually fire, but risks skipping over games simply because the playerbase is at capacity (which I think is what has happened to Osie's Micro - people are occupied with the team games and Shadow's Normal, so demand for any new game is low).

One possible solution to some of those issues is that people who can't commit that far in advance, simply see where they're at when the last chance confirmation& final /in thread goes up.

Host availability, however, could be a definite headache. We'd need to start being real sticklers as far as making sure someone has a setup in hand when they sign up for a queue, AND a backup mod in place to run it, if they abscond.

Essentially, you'd have two or three changes from the regime we had in place before the switch to a rolling queue.
1. People know when the signup thread will be going up.
2. They have the option, but not the requirement, to sign up early to signal interest and possibly help us game-plan changes to the schedule.
3. We gain far more flexibility in how often certain game types are run.

I'd support those proposed changes on the consolidation.

But ultimately that's just taking our current system and leaving sign ups open for even longer, albeit with a hard cut off date. We already have the PCL for signalling interest far in advance, and it sees very little usage. I also definitely don't think it gives us more flexibility - we have to commit to a game X months before it runs, as opposed to the current system which allows us to essentially pick whatever game we think would work best (at the cost of less notice).

We also don't want it to make it more difficult to host games (e.g. requiring backup mods and setups finished fat in advance), as we have few enough games to run as it is.

Quote from Ecophagy »

I really don't think this is a good idea. Fundamentally, I don't think the solution to "our sign ups take too long" is "ok, let's make the sign up period longer". While it'd be nice to know when a game will fire when you sign up, I think it is impractical to ask people to commit X months in advance, and you will have many problems with people forgetting/no longer being available but not outing/mods not being ready or falling through leaving people effectively signed up for a game they don't want to play, or even people waiting months and months only to get randomed out. The significantly simply solution to knowing when a game would start would just be a hard cap on sign up length.

LOL what you mean like how our current FTQ system works?

I think part of the problem is that nobody is interested in playing a mini right now.

Clearly I don't think that this is the only problem. But our FTQ/Specialty system to me would optimally run with a game opening around January then another one opening 3 months later, then another 3 months later and so on and so forth. If we want to have rolling ques for both mini's and normals this seems fine to me, but it shouldn't be limited to just one game type being rolled out.

Quote from Ecophagy »

But ultimately that's just taking our current system and leaving sign ups open for even longer, albeit with a hard cut off date. We already have the PCL for signalling interest far in advance, and it sees very little usage. I also definitely don't think it gives us more flexibility - we have to commit to a game X months before it runs, as opposed to the current system which allows us to essentially pick whatever game we think would work best (at the cost of less notice).

We also don't want it to make it more difficult to host games (e.g. requiring backup mods and setups finished fat in advance), as we have few enough games to run as it is.

How are we using the PCL to signal interest at all? Currently its who is interested in hosting games signs up and then hosts the game and we wait till it fills. That isn't signaling interest at all other than hosts interesting in hosting. If we want it to signal interest then it should have some set time where sign ups just end and we move on.

I also don't think we are condemning a game to death if it doesn't fire that host could easily put it up again later. But really there should be two separate ques one for micros/minis and one for normal games.

Quote from D_V »

How are we using the PCL to signal interest at all? Currently its who is interested in hosting games signs up and then hosts the game and we wait till it fills. That isn't signaling interest at all other than hosts interesting in hosting. If we want it to signal interest then it should have some set time where sign ups just end and we move on.

He means this thread:

https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/community-forums/mafia/731287-player-contact-list-all-game-types-and-new-player

The way it was supposed to work is people tell us what kinds of games they're looking for in that thread and we can gauge interest that way / fire basics when there's demand for them, but no one ever posts there lol.

The other thing that needs to be asked is what is our retention rate of newly joining players is. Shadow mentions that we have a lot of new players on this site, but I've seen a lot of new players in pretty much every specialty game we have run, and I think our retention of those players is abysmal.

I think some of our problems have to due player lurking which needs to be addressed. MTGS is currently developing the similar problems to other sites. We are starting to have some players have MU levels of content per day phase and others barely posting at all. Some of these players are then deterred from posting from the sheer amount of posts in game. This is an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. Additionally we have been too lax with replacing those that are not posting on MTGS. I think some of this becomes that we burn through our replacements and then are hesitant to modkill/replace others when we run out of replacements. However this has developed into a "Don't be a problem first" sort of mentality. Additionally, there are some players that are habitually a problem in game.

My solution to this problem is to put a strike system into our prod system and just forcibly replace someone or mod kill after a certain amount of prods. I'd say three is a good number.

Overall, I'd also encourage us to have standardized hosting rules as well since we sorely need them on this site.

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

Quote from D_V »

How are we using the PCL to signal interest at all? Currently its who is interested in hosting games signs up and then hosts the game and we wait till it fills. That isn't signaling interest at all other than hosts interesting in hosting. If we want it to signal interest then it should have some set time where sign ups just end and we move on.

He means this thread:

https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/community-forums/mafia/731287-player-contact-list-all-game-types-and-new-player

The way it was supposed to work is people tell us what kinds of games they're looking for in that thread and we can gauge interest that way / fire basics when there's demand for them, but no one ever posts there lol.

Right but its really just a "Contact me when game is being hosted". That's it. Its not gauging interest.

We need to gauge interest of our active player base along with new players. We are not doing this at all.

It seems really silly to say we are gauging interest when we seem to not be doing that at all.

I mean, having a list of players that know we exist and what types of games they're seeking is one way of gauging interest. I'm not really sure how else you *could* gauge interest without conducting some kind of poll, which would really just produce the same data but as an aggregate data set instead of individual data points.

Our retention rate for new players does seem to be rather poor overall, but really we don't see new players that often I don't think. We get one or two new faces when an FTQ game fires and they stick around for a few games before vanishing.

I'm not sure whether that's due to some of the apparent increase in toxicity/grossness/aggressiveness or lurking or just that they don't like our phase lengths, etc. or what. If we had email addresses and such we could possibly contact them to ask why they didn't sign up for another game, I suppose, but they'd have to volunteer those of course.

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

I mean, having a list of players that know we exist and what types of games they're seeking is one way of gauging interest. I'm not really sure how else you *could* gauge interest without conducting some kind of poll, which would really just produce the same data but as an aggregate data set instead of individual data points.

Our retention rate for new players does seem to be rather poor overall, but really we don't see new players that often I don't think. We get one or two new faces when an FTQ game fires and they stick around for a few games before vanishing.

I'm not sure whether that's due to some of the apparent increase in toxicity/grossness/aggressiveness or lurking or just that they don't like our phase lengths, etc. or what. If we had email addresses and such we could possibly contact them to ask why they didn't sign up for another game, I suppose, but they'd have to volunteer those of course.

Yeah I'd say our phases are too long. I'm really warming up to one week or week and a half phases.

In regards to the toxicity and the lurking problem, this is why I'm a fan of standardized rules that would be applied equally to players. There seems to be a lot of games recently where we are applying standards wildly differently to players. This is unacceptable and is partially to blame for the issue. Things like this worry me, and with them largely being against MTGS guidelines and what I assume or players expect.

Quote from D_V »

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

I mean, having a list of players that know we exist and what types of games they're seeking is one way of gauging interest. I'm not really sure how else you *could* gauge interest without conducting some kind of poll, which would really just produce the same data but as an aggregate data set instead of individual data points.

Our retention rate for new players does seem to be rather poor overall, but really we don't see new players that often I don't think. We get one or two new faces when an FTQ game fires and they stick around for a few games before vanishing.

I'm not sure whether that's due to some of the apparent increase in toxicity/grossness/aggressiveness or lurking or just that they don't like our phase lengths, etc. or what. If we had email addresses and such we could possibly contact them to ask why they didn't sign up for another game, I suppose, but they'd have to volunteer those of course.

Yeah I'd say our phases are too long. I'm really warming up to one week or week and a half phases.

In regards to the toxicity and the lurking problem, this is why I'm a fan of standardized rules that would be applied equally to players. There seems to be a lot of games recently where we are applying standards wildly differently to players. This is unacceptable and is partially to blame for the issue. Things like this worry me, and with them largely being against MTGS guidelines and what I assume or players expect.

I see where you are coming from, but if I didn't have the power to make my own decisions on warnings and modkills as a host to a point of any standard lower than my own, I wouldn't host here. I have a low tolerance for toxicity in my games. If I'm told I have to give someone a warning rather than a forced replacement or modkill who, say, calls another player a racist slur, there's no way in hell I am going along with that.

Quote from osieorb18 »

Quote from D_V »

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

I mean, having a list of players that know we exist and what types of games they're seeking is one way of gauging interest. I'm not really sure how else you *could* gauge interest without conducting some kind of poll, which would really just produce the same data but as an aggregate data set instead of individual data points.

Our retention rate for new players does seem to be rather poor overall, but really we don't see new players that often I don't think. We get one or two new faces when an FTQ game fires and they stick around for a few games before vanishing.

I'm not sure whether that's due to some of the apparent increase in toxicity/grossness/aggressiveness or lurking or just that they don't like our phase lengths, etc. or what. If we had email addresses and such we could possibly contact them to ask why they didn't sign up for another game, I suppose, but they'd have to volunteer those of course.

Yeah I'd say our phases are too long. I'm really warming up to one week or week and a half phases.

In regards to the toxicity and the lurking problem, this is why I'm a fan of standardized rules that would be applied equally to players. There seems to be a lot of games recently where we are applying standards wildly differently to players. This is unacceptable and is partially to blame for the issue. Things like this worry me, and with them largely being against MTGS guidelines and what I assume or players expect.

I see where you are coming from, but if I didn't have the power to make my own decisions on warnings and modkills as a host to a point of any standard lower than my own, I wouldn't host here. I have a low tolerance for toxicity in my games. If I'm told I have to give someone a warning rather than a forced replacement or modkill who, say, calls another player a racist slur, there's no way in hell I am going along with that.

I mean most of those are flame warnings on MTGS as well. I'm not saying that a scale system for everything is needed. But it is sorely needed to deal with the "Gray area" that exists. If we want to draw lines in the sand and say you do X, you get modkilled or replaced I'm totally fine with that. As long as when ANY player crosses that line they all get the same treatment it seems totally fine to me.

Quote from D_V »

Yeah I'd say our phases are too long. I'm really warming up to one week or week and a half phases.

I've spoken with Eco at some length about phase lengths pretty recently. On the one hand, one week phases are going to be too fast for some of our established players to be able to play often; it's just barely long enough for me, for example, and I definitely prefer 2 week phases because I don't really have time to engage with the game the way I like to otherwise (well, without actually eating, breathing, and sleeping Mafia for the duration of the game). Players like Rhand won't be able to, either, because they sometimes have stuff come up where they can't post for a few days in a row and that's over half of the phase at that point.

On the other, of course, there's a lot air in the middle of our day phases where people coast and don't really actually play much which contributes to the feeling of the game being stagnant or dead; most of the activity is concentrated at the beginning 2-3 days and the final 1-2 days of the phase.

There are a few ways to change that; we can set post minimums + limits that expire every 48 or 72 hours, say, 1 minimum and 5 maximum per 24 hours in the posting period (so, 2 or 3 minimum and 10 or 15 maximum). It's really heavy handed and I'd rather not do it this way, but it is one way.

We could simply shorten prod lengths to 24 hours so everyone has to post at least once per day. This hurts the players that can't post every day consistently but at least allows them to be V/LA for a few days in a row without missing the whole phase.

A better solution would be to incentivize players to actually post during the middle of the day by giving them something to actually talk about; Eco floated a sort of transferable vote lynch instead of the first past the post gets majority lynched system we have now, so every few days you would eliminate some players from the lynch pool (there would have to be some way of reintroducing them, perhaps keep some kind of hard lynch in the game but allow plurality/soft lynching for instant run off candidates). As game hosts we can build game mechanics and set pieces like the Arkham Auction House that activate during the day phase. etc. Most of these are limited to FTQ submissions and Specialty-level minis, unfortunately, but it's something we can be aware of as set up designers.

There's also been a move towards laziness/procrastinating when it comes to lynching over the last year or so, where people just put off wagoning players until the last 24 hours of the phase then scramble to get literally anyone lynched. I think a simple move to plurality lynches will help the "Chinese fire drill" problem but it won't actually remove or reduce the air in the middle of the phase and maybe it even just leads to less activity at the end of the phase (though whether scrambling for any available lynch is game activity we want to promote anyway is debatable of course).

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

Quote from D_V »

Yeah I'd say our phases are too long. I'm really warming up to one week or week and a half phases.

I've spoken with Eco at some length about phase lengths pretty recently. On the one hand, one week phases are going to be too fast for some of our established players to be able to play often; it's just barely long enough for me, for example, and I definitely prefer 2 week phases because I don't really have time to engage with the game the way I like to otherwise (well, without actually eating, breathing, and sleeping Mafia for the duration of the game). Players like Rhand won't be able to, either, because they sometimes have stuff come up where they can't post for a few days in a row and that's over half of the phase at that point.

On the other, of course, there's a lot air in the middle of our day phases where people coast and don't really actually play much which contributes to the feeling of the game being stagnant or dead; most of the activity is concentrated at the beginning 2-3 days and the final 1-2 days of the phase.

There are a few ways to change that; we can set post minimums + limits that expire every 48 or 72 hours, say, 1 minimum and 5 maximum per 24 hours in the posting period (so, 2 or 3 minimum and 10 or 15 maximum). It's really heavy handed and I'd rather not do it this way, but it is one way.

We could simply shorten prod lengths to 24 hours so everyone has to post at least once per day. This hurts the players that can't post every day consistently but at least allows them to be V/LA for a few days in a row without missing the whole phase.

A better solution would be to incentivize players to actually post during the middle of the day by giving them something to actually talk about; Eco floated a sort of transferable vote lynch instead of the first past the post gets majority lynched system we have now, so every few days you would eliminate some players from the lynch pool (there would have to be some way of reintroducing them, perhaps keep some kind of hard lynch in the game but allow plurality/soft lynching for instant run off candidates). As game hosts we can build game mechanics and set pieces like the Arkham Auction House that activate during the day phase. etc. Most of these are limited to FTQ submissions and Specialty-level minis, unfortunately, but it's something we can be aware of as set up designers.

There's also been a move towards laziness/procrastinating when it comes to lynching over the last year or so, where people just put off wagoning players until the last 24 hours of the phase then scramble to get literally anyone lynched. I think a simple move to plurality lynches will help the "Chinese fire drill" problem but it won't actually remove or reduce the air in the middle of the phase and maybe it even just leads to less activity at the end of the phase (though whether scrambling for any available lynch is game activity we want to promote anyway is debatable of course).

Plurality lynch without also having majority Lynch is really cancerous in a skilled playgroup, though, since vote pressure vanishes and all you have is badgering people, which polarizes into aggressiveness and lurking even more. It's to the degree that in a certain more casual group, lurking is one of the highest tells of scum, and I would expect that would only make things worse here.

In regards to phase lengths, I was very busy with school and now even more so with work (roughly 11 hours a day on average) and I still found time for a 72/24 game. I think if anything it felt lower pressure in some regards, since with the longer day phase you pretty much have to post at least a couple times every 24 hours or be left behind. I've been playing catch-up a lot in my longer games and it hurts my play drastically. Obviously I'm not going to speak for everyone, but I'd be surprised if I don't have one of the moderately busier schedules now out of regular players given that I work in the restaurant industry. And that's not to mention social interaction or health concerns.

I think if we're stricter about activity and push for slightly shorter phase lengths (7-10 days), while it may hurt in the short term, it'll greatly help in the long run.

I mean, yeah, we leave maj/hard lynch on and just have a deadline plurality lynch instead of no lynch, I meant. We could also do soft/hard lynch like they do at Dark Lord Potter with a reduced deadline lynch threshold, maybe?

I don't think shortening deadlines is a good answer here. If people are spamming the thread or trying to post too much maybe we do need post limits like MU does for their light games. That would extend the early day discussion into the middle of the day and create less catch up work for people who can't live in the thread.

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

I mean, yeah, we leave maj/hard lynch on and just have a deadline plurality lynch instead of no lynch, I meant. We could also do soft/hard lynch like they do at Dark Lord Potter with a reduced deadline lynch threshold, maybe?

I don't think shortening deadlines is a good answer here. If people are spamming the thread or trying to post too much maybe we do need post limits like MU does for their light games. That would extend the early day discussion into the middle of the day and create less catch up work for people who can't live in the thread.

You yourself have said it too though. This isn't strictly to combat spam. Its to incentivize more active play. If people are not using the day phase during the middle then whats the point?

Well, post limits would force the super active players to post in the middle of the phase because they can't just post all of their thoughts in a flurry of posts at the beginning of the phase and then coast until it's time to lynch

To be clear, I'm advocating *both*. I think there is a problem where the middle of the phases are being under-utilized and also that there is a problem where some people are being forced out of games because the sheer number of posts being made at the beginning makes them not want to catch up.

Forcing people to post 3 times in a 72 hour period *and* placing a limit of 15 posts in that same period accomplishes both the "increase activity by inactive players" and the "reduce the amount of thread dominance by a handful of players making the low posters not want to catch up" problems. It triples the number of expected posts per prod period and reduce the number of posts in the thread overall.

Actually, to be super clear, this is a really heavy handed approach I would rather not use, but I don't think your criticism of it is correct. The criticisms I would make are: it increases mod workload by a ton, stifles some players we don't currently feel are problematic like tomsloger because they contribute to a lot of the length of games, and reduces the amount of memeing (which could be good or bad, really).

I think any prod period should be based on 48 hours or less.

I don't think that's going to be acceptable to many of our regulars.

Maybe 48 hours is fine but 24 is too much. The whole reason a lot of us play here instead of on MU or elsewhere is because we don't *have* to log in and play every day.

I can honestly, sincerely say that if we as a group move to 24 hour prods the only reason I'd have for staying is that I think you're a cool group of people I don't want to lose contact with (well, and specialties). I'd be much, much happier playing light games on MU if I have to post every day anyway.

Edit: Actually, I'm confused. You just said you had a problem with the amount of content being produced because it made you not want to catch up and your proposed solution is to... increase activity requirements?

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

I don't think that's going to be acceptable to many of our regulars.

Maybe 48 hours is fine but 24 is too much. The whole reason a lot of us play here instead of on MU or elsewhere is because we don't *have* to log in and play every day.

I can honestly, sincerely say that if we as a group move to 24 hour prods the only reason I'd have for staying is that I think you're a cool group of people I don't want to lose contact with (well, and specialties). I'd be much, much happier playing light games on MU if I have to post every day anyway.

Edit: Actually, I'm confused. You just said you had a problem with the amount of content being produced because it made you not want to catch up and your proposed solution is to... increase activity requirements?

No, I like your balancing both idea. Maximum and minimum. I just think the timing shouldn't be based on anything larger than 48 hours, since at that point people should realistically be going V/LA.

I think if someone goes absent for, say, 48 hours then posts several times in the next 24 that should be fine? But maybe 3 posts is too little, maybe we want 5 posts. Or maybe we just need a strict "if you're prodded once and miss / underpost another activity deadline you're out." But that's (1) still almost half the phase for a 12/2 phase and (2) still feels unnecessarily harsh, but maybe part of that feeling harsh is that people just aren't announcing their V/LA properly and we just need to get them to do that? I dunno.

What about serial V/LAs? Isn't that going to be the next problem probably? Maybe burn that bridge if/when we get to it.

Edit: actually, would be best if we could do some kind of content requirement other than posting so someone could just, like, post one big wall every other day if they wanted to maybe, but that'd maybe be too subjective based on what each mod thinks is "enough content."

Double edit: also I still don't really like how heavy handed this is, enforcing post requirements like these is going to be a nightmare for game hosts and will probably push prolific posters to other sites.

Yeah, not really a solution that will hit everyone though. The prolific posters want a minimum and no maximum. The less prolific want a hard cap and a reasonable minimum.

A sweet spot of what though? We don't use our two weeks at all. Most of the mid game is just a lull right now. Can we point to ANY game recently that has used the two weeks efficiently? Most of the time it seems that our games are > Flurry of activity during opening days > A long lull in activity where very little is actually done or said > flurry of activity around deadline.

I'd like to /barn shadow.

Also I think maybe the FTQ is a little restrictive / time consuming and maybe we should just move back to having the specialty queue instead; we're having trouble keeping the other queues filled but the FTQ threads usually get like 6-7 submissions and rejecting all but three of them seems silly in light of that. It's possible we have a population of players that prefers specialty level games (me, Az to some extent, etc.) that is mostly untapped because we only fire two FTQ games a year or so. This year we've fired Arkham and we'll maaaybe get to another one once the current FTQ submissions are over? But basically we could fire extra specialties in place of normals or minis when those queues are empty if we had a specialty queue, which we can't do when there's only three games in the FTQ because the process of adding games to it takes so long.

We could just make the FTQ process the process for getting added to the Specialty queue if we wanted, and just have rolling FTQ submissions instead of waiting for all of the FTQ games to end before opening submissions again too. Just kind of spit balling because I'd like to see more specialty-level games, I guess, considering they're my preferred game type and they're what mostly sets us apart from the other sites.

Quote from shadowlancerx »

Yes...like several of them. Zero Escape had new posts constantly; Arkham had new posts all the time, and several others had a reasonable amount of posting happening during the mid game. I think a flurry of activity near the deadline doesn’t mean that lower but consistent activity during the rest of the week is not activity.

This seems a bit disingenuous though since people were constantly complaining about the lengths of the two examples you provided, and they were two of the larger games in this forum's history.

Quote from Silvercrys3467 »

I'd like to /barn shadow.

Also I think maybe the FTQ is a little restrictive / time consuming and maybe we should just move back to having the specialty queue instead; we're having trouble keeping the other queues filled but the FTQ threads usually get like 6-7 submissions and rejecting all but three of them seems silly in light of that. It's possible we have a population of players that prefers specialty level games (me, Az to some extent, etc.) that is mostly untapped because we only fire two FTQ games a year or so. This year we've fired Arkham and we'll maaaybe get to another one once the current FTQ submissions are over? But basically we could fire extra specialties in place of normals or minis when those queues are empty if we had a specialty queue, which we can't do when there's only three games in the FTQ because the process of adding games to it takes so long.

We could just make the FTQ process the process for getting added to the Specialty queue if we wanted, and just have rolling FTQ submissions instead of waiting for all of the FTQ games to end before opening submissions again too. Just kind of spit balling because I'd like to see more specialty-level games, I guess, considering they're my preferred game type and they're what mostly sets us apart from the other sites.

Which is why I'm proposing we start hosting one at least every 3 months. If we move to this system basically one should be starting when another one is close to ending. We have plenty of dead players just waiting for another game to start. This is why I find the "We are gauging player interest" comment to be such a big problem. Because we are not. I'm very very sure that most player interest interest is in specialty games. We should be firing more of these not less. However we still need some sort of quality control for these games.

I'm in favor of bringing back rolling queues for every game type we run.

I'm also in favor of trying to flex creativity with regards to game types created, though I sense that creates a divide in our playerbase as a lot of people in recent years have favored more elegant, simplistic games. That said, I agree that a lot of the charm of MTGS Mafia was related to the diverse cadre of games that we ran, and I definitely feel like some of my own interest in playing has waned partially due to the lack of innovation.

With regards to the stickies, I've been in favor of merging them to some degree for years, now, but the last time I brought it up, it was said that we couldn't condense it any further. I think I suggested the change of combining the Replacement Request and Player Contact List threads a long while back but it was shot down for not being intuitive enough for newer players, or something like that. That said, I'd be happy to clear out the posts from both threads and mash them together.

I think a specific game schedule runs into a lot of issues - who makes these games? How do we incentivize and ensure that we have games made to fit that schedule, when we can barely keep the hosting queues filled? What happens when we don't actually launch those games due to lack of interested players? Overall, this creates a lot of unnecessary work for the Secretary, IMO. Also, what Eco said.

I definitely agree with what D_V said, in that I've noticed a lot of activity/replacement issues on the site over the past few years.

-

With regards to activity and reaching lynches, what if we reduce a player's lynch threshold by the number of living players who have not posted in a game within 72 hours so as to not hedge the lynch on their presence?

I'm 100% against lowering deadlines to 1 week and will never be able to play another game here again if we do that.

I like the "post why you're not joining the game" thing, but making it mandatory will probably be a chore for a lot of people, and we won't really have a way to accurately gauge who's actually viewing the subforum and who's just not posting. That was one thing that was really crippling to analytics when it came to the Curse merger.

-

I'm not totally against reinstating the Specialty queue. The reason it was initially abandoned was threefold:

1. Power creep between Normals and Specialty. There was a lot of uncertainty and overlap in games that we felt would either be a Normal, a Specialty, or vice-versa. This caused a lot of confusion and bad blood for people who maybe wanted something more complex or less complex than what they ended up getting.

2. Hype. We wanted to reinstate the FTQ and make it a regular thing so that players could be more excited about the games that were upcoming, both by getting involved and competing for the right to run their games, and to see what innovation came out of the woodworks.

3. Queue length. We needed people to continue churning out games of higher complexity but the queues were not filling.

With that in mind, I actually think the PCQ was better at drawing in game designers and players, alike, and that perhaps we should consider revisiting that avenue?

-

One last thing: We should probably formalize a reviewer-anointing process so that in the event that we do see an influx of games as a result of some changes we make, that we have adequate manpower to make sure those games aren't a bust.

I'm semi-retired in a few ways, this being one of them, and would rather not be the one to take the mantle on this. Do we have any volunteers?

Alright, I've merged the Player Contact List and Replacement Request threads, as well as cleaned up the OPs and the remaining posts in the threads in question. Additionally, I unpinned the redirect to the clan thread that is now defunct in favor of the Discord. Where should we put info for accessing said Discord, so that newer people to our area can join in on our discussions?

Quote from Iso »

Alright, I've merged the Player Contact List and Replacement Request threads, as well as cleaned up the OPs and the remaining posts in the threads in question. Additionally, I unpinned the redirect to the clan thread that is now defunct in favor of the Discord. Where should we put info for accessing said Discord, so that newer people to our area can join in on our discussions?

New players' thread?

Quote from Iso »

One last thing: We should probably formalize a reviewer-anointing process so that in the event that we do see an influx of games as a result of some changes we make, that we have adequate manpower to make sure those games aren't a bust.

I'm semi-retired in a few ways, this being one of them, and would rather not be the one to take the mantle on this. Do we have any volunteers?

Quote from osieorb18 »

Quote from Iso »

Alright, I've merged the Player Contact List and Replacement Request threads, as well as cleaned up the OPs and the remaining posts in the threads in question. Additionally, I unpinned the redirect to the clan thread that is now defunct in favor of the Discord. Where should we put info for accessing said Discord, so that newer people to our area can join in on our discussions?

New players' thread?

Not a bad idea. I'll ask Bur to update it with that info.

Quote from osieorb18 »

Quote from Iso »

One last thing: We should probably formalize a reviewer-anointing process so that in the event that we do see an influx of games as a result of some changes we make, that we have adequate manpower to make sure those games aren't a bust.

I'm semi-retired in a few ways, this being one of them, and would rather not be the one to take the mantle on this. Do we have any volunteers?

I don't think I'm really opposed to this.

I think Bur makes a very salient point: any changes we might make to the queue system are somewhat moot unless we can also refill them.

With regards to activity, I think there are multiple factors compounding to produce our current situation.

• Meta - Taking cues from other sites, people are now used to deadline scrambles to produce lynches (which is made worse by our majority lynch requirement as opposed to plurality), and the hyper-activity used to on other sites can make it difficult for MTGS regulars to stay caught up, and for everyone to cope with the inflated post count.
• Incentives - We are lacking in incentives to smooth out activity or end the day before the deadline. There are no real arguments for ending Day early that are effective, and the deadline is the only driver to compromise and settle on a lynch. These both lead to the most active parts of play clustering around the deadline with the rest of the Day spent on vanity wagons or just waiting for CFDs.
• Enforcement Mechanisms - Probably the most important point, I think our enforcement mechanisms are insufficient.
• One post every 72/48 hours isn't really a reasonable level of activity (7-4.6 posts in a two week game Day is really not enough). Prods as a mechanism worked fine when it was to remind people that a game existed or to limit the length of break people could take, but players sticking to the letter of the law are not really participating enough.
• Modkills/replacements are challenging for mods to use: we don't have many people available for replacement (long gone are the days of overfull signups), and modkills can have a huge and unfair-feeling impact on a game. This leads to people not being punished as frequently or consistently as we might like, which means they're not dissuaded.
• In a similar vein, the smaller playerbase means that the probation list goes pretty much unused because mods need warm bodies to fire their games and don't (rightly or wrongly) feel like they can be too picky about players. Similarly restrictions like "one game at a time for chronic lurkers" isn't much of a restriction when we only run a couple of games at once most of the time.

So I think the problems with activity are a result of the smaller playerbase both allowing lurkers into games more frequently as well as making them more challenging to punish, while we also lack incentives to drive even participation throughout the Day and as modern metas drive activity to concentrate on the end of Day.

Solutions

Well, obvious solutions would be things like more strictly enforcing replacements/the probation list, or even baking modkills into games by default despite how challenging these might be (very). If done as a concerted effort (and people really made an effort to be available to replace) and the forum was ok with maybe firing games less often in exchange for better playerbases then it could have a real impact. However, enforcement isn't the only (or best?) solution - I think we need to try and restructure our incentives to participate evenly throughout the Day and avoid deadline scrambles. We could do this by having slightly shorter deadlines with unused time carried over to the next Day (to incentivise ending the Day early), or by mandating more posts during the prod period (5, say) - or even a cap on posts for each prod period to reduce spam.

I even consider a more complex approach where each few days the votecount is taken and people at the bottom are removed from the pool - this forces the possible lynches to reduce over time so the deadline scramble is at least between a couple of choices rather than the whole playerlist, and prevents people spending all Day on one-man vanity wagons. There's obviously issues (especially how to allow people to be re-added to the pool after being removed, and how much it changes the game from traditional Mafia), but maybe something more radical is needed to keep activity consistent throughout our long phases.

We could even offer actual rewards for things like hosting, or replacing in, or not getting prodded, or for being voted sporting/fun to play with. Every time you perform the desired action, you get entered into a draw and at the end of the year we give someone Curse Premium, or $20, or we interview them, or we let them play a game while being mentored by someone highly respected, or they get to design a game with someone highly respected, or they get auto-in to an invitational, or the nearest council member buys them a beer. There are lots of possibilities.

I'm glad Bur and Eco are echoing my concerns about the queue being filled.

I also agree, Eco, that activity isn't what it should be - you have a handful of players who post entirely too frequently, and a handful of players that post not nearly enough.

I think we should encourage upcoming hosts to manage player posting fairly strictly so that we can see what systems do and don't work.

Queues will fill rapidly enough, if it's a game people are interested in.

I think it may be a good experiment to create a schedule for at least certain game types. That gives people a date to put on their calendar rather than check in daily, so we'll be able to capture those players, and gives us the capacity to run things outside the queues. As is, it's incredibly frustrating seeing a game you don't want to join fill up glacially slowly, with no other options in the wings to kickstart that process. We cannot continue with that system. We cannot let the interest level in one game, dictate the interest level in mafia for the entire subforum, for months on end. We won't survive.