I'm working on an updated, MTGS-centric Flash tutorial for new players in the community. The goal is to be a one-stop shop for rules, roles, hosting, and strategy on MTGS. Part of this project is doing artwork; I need simplistic characters, background settings, and possibly interfaces and menu items. If this is something that interests you, please send me a PM and I can give you details.
Thanks everyone! I'm happy to help grow our community into the most attractive and feature rich Mafia experience on the web. If you have any ideas on how to make the subforum better, don't hesitate to PM me!
After playing with nested quotes for awhile, their usefulness seems more limited than I assumed. If other players would rather not have them, then that's probably okay. What I would rather have is the option to build my own nested quotes while not having them on automatically. That way I can chain up the relevant discussion without so much unnecessary fat.
I was still under the impression that Iso would PM me when a signup went up while I was on the list, not the game host. However, hosts should be responsible for PMing for replacements. Maybe that's where the disconnect happened.
I haven't officially announced this yet, but I'm retiring from playing at the end of my participation in Cyberspace Mafia. I plan to devote all of my Mafia-related time to becoming a better host and getting really involved with the reviewing, hosting, and queue side of things on this site (and of course to designing my own setups.) I feel that my long experience as a host and player and my strong convictions will be a benefit to the council and the community as a whole.
TBH, this is only going to distance yourself from what it is like to play Mafia. It's like a chef who doesn't taste his own food. You are also removing yet another player from the base that newbies could learn from.
It may be a time constraint for you, and I understand that, but don't expect it to make your games better or your reviews more nuanced.
I'll also say that as a player it's totally cool to see a council member in your game. It changes the dynamic of the game and feels like you are playing with the pros. I find myself more active in games with a council member participating.
The decision to call time on playing Mafia and the decision to make myself available for the Mafia Council are not related. I would've quit at the end of Cyberspace Mafia if atlseal had not announced his retirement. It's a decision I reached months ago and is not some kind of ploy to make me a better candidate for selection. To be quite honest, I am insulted that you would attempt to insinuate such in this post, and will now ask you to retract that.
I wasn't referring to you in that post; I was addressing Drey's argument that choosing between partially active zindabad and not active zindabad is problematic. It wasn't meant as a jab toward you; sorry I wasn't more clear.
What I really wanted to hear was a response to my point about distancing yourself from the players. Don't you think that, over time, you'd lose touch with what it's like to actually play the game?
@Zion I understand and agree with you, but what would you prefer? Zinda not playing, reviewing or hosting, or Zinda not doing anything? I don't think he will resume playing no matter what we do or ask him (but maybe in the future?), but I'm very happy that he continues with us in any way as possible.
Isn't that kind of like saying "if I don't get it my way, then I'm taking my ball and going home"? I don't think keeping your own activity level hostage is the way to get a council position.
You shouldn't need to change your activity at all to get on the council. You're either a perfect fit or you're not. An attempt to fit the mold is an admission that you don't belong there naturally.
I haven't officially announced this yet, but I'm retiring from playing at the end of my participation in Cyberspace Mafia. I plan to devote all of my Mafia-related time to becoming a better host and getting really involved with the reviewing, hosting, and queue side of things on this site (and of course to designing my own setups.) I feel that my long experience as a host and player and my strong convictions will be a benefit to the council and the community as a whole.
TBH, this is only going to distance yourself from what it is like to play Mafia. It's like a chef who doesn't taste his own food. You are also removing yet another player from the base that newbies could learn from.
It may be a time constraint for you, and I understand that, but don't expect it to make your games better or your reviews more nuanced.
I'll also say that as a player it's totally cool to see a council member in your game. It changes the dynamic of the game and feels like you are playing with the pros. I find myself more active in games with a council member participating.
What were some of the outlier setups you were interested in testing? Two-mafia? What else? Would it make sense to use preexisting games to stress-test those?
Alternately, should we put it up to a league vote which types of outlier setups they may or may not want to see within the league?
We do have pre-existing games ready to go for testing. And yes, the setups should be voted on within a pool of more traditional-leaning games just in case there's something about an outlier setup players really don't want to play. There can always be a player/host campaign for one or another setup within the voting discussion.
As mentioned in the latest voting thread, I could definitely get behind folding the last games of the league season into a PCQ format. Letting the league players decide what they want the last game of the season to be, and how much complexity is best, seems like the best way to handle it. My main concern with higher complexity games was that there would be complaining after-the-fact about the selection, balance, and fairness, but that concern is probably alleviated if it's a player-selected game.
That's my opinion as well; it's important to keep in mind that these activities are for the players. Voting is an important part of the League game selecting process because it encourages activity and promotes a significant increase of involvement with games. We also have a direct incentive for not dropping out of games by penalizing it, so we get better quality games overall. The micro had no replacement requests, which (even though it's a small game) I think is a good sign that we're headed in the right direction.
Our basic gauge of complexity seems to be conveying enough information for the players to make an informed selection. If not, we're open to new ways of relaying setup info without being a giant spoiler. To me it's comparable to your favorite FPS map-selection voting process.
You'd probably want to adopt the practice of letting the hosts pitch their own setups, take submissions from hosts year-round for that slot, and avoid judge recommendations in future rounds (before anyone starts complaining about "favoritism!").
The recommendation tool is something we use that shows what we think would be great to see run. We've used it to direct players to what we want to test against the rubric, not as some blessing of favoritism. We most likely won't need it once we're done testing because any setup will be as good as any other under a stressed final rubric.
2nd Point. What's the plan for the next several games of the beta, and when is it slated to conclude? With this third game? From here on out, it seems like we're probably in good shape to start transitioning to the normal queue as the feeder setup for the league, since we've got a couple setups prepped up in the pipes to hold us for a while?
On the other hand, I am a bit concerned that people are going to drag their feet about reworking their setups under the new guidelines, and that we may need to expect a significant number of drop-outs through the transition period. Open to suggestions on how to handle that.
We have a pool of games that we'd like to run, but we didn't want to exceed 3 more games. Among this pool are a possible selection of non-traditional setups that should run before the rubric becomes finalized simply because they are useful for calibration. Ending the beta phase prematurely will no doubt lead to a fragile rubric in official League seasons.
Feet-dragging is definitely happening. For right now, we can just wait. There's still some open contentions that need to be resolved before we move forward. Dropping non-respondent or non-compliant hosts have always been a policy in the past so I don't see an issue there. It might be a good thing.
Third point. We've been talking a lot about an overburdened playerbase, but there are a *lot* of names currently on the player contact list. Is it possible that when we've had problems filling games, it's been more a problem of not having the right games available? Should we consider changing things up?
If we had the judging manpower, which I'm concerned that we probably don't at the moment, I would advocate running an additional league mini slot year-round. I've yet to see any of our mini-size games have trouble filling up, they're a good fit for busy schedules, and it seemed like O2TR was a really popular format that a lot of people would like to see run on a regular basis. But again, that depends on finding enough administrative manpower to sustain running two league games at a time. Could we recruit additional people to make that a feasible option, or is it feasible as is?
Thoughts on all the above?
Two League games, as proposed, is an intriguing proposition. It might even be possible to have two lists for winners; one for small games and another for large games. I also like not having to rely on replacements. It may put unnecessary activity stress on the large League games though, and I really like using it as a tool to keep the League moving despite a lull in activity in the playerbase. So I'm torn on this idea.
I think you're missing the issue. Most of the Judges like playing in FTQs and we wouldn't be able to play in them if we were reviewing them, you dig? Plus most FTQ games are simply not suited for League scoring - innovation vs. classic - AND there are the time lapse issues. That would basically stall the season out when our goal is to simply present the players with an awesome season endgame. Being as it would be of (likely) Specialty-complexity, meaning it would be reasonably popular, as well as hand-crafted for the League, I see no reason why we couldn't open up the PCQ for that one extra game per season. I don't think playerbase strain would be an issue, given that all sorts of vets come out of the woodworks for Specialties/FTQs. What do you think? It could be a sort of community-building exercise.
I don't see why all judges would need to check a game for suitability. For an FTQ, you'd need some, sure, but not all of them. The judges could post guidelines somewhere of "how to make your game work for the league", and then you'd only need a small number of eyes to check that a game fits.
Such a checklist would make it easier for hosts to design games to fit into the League, regardless of their complexity, which only makes it more likely that you can have a high-complexity game in the season.
Without guidelines for how to fit a high complexity game into the League, I struggle to see how most FTQs don't fit, but you expect to easily produce a Specialty that does, so an insight into the decision making process can only be beneficial.
You might notice that PCQ's have been run incredibly infrequently because we generally speaking cannot sustain them. Relying on vets coming out of the woodwork to avoid player strain is unsustainable, especially since if the game is specifically for the League, vets who play one game a year are unlikely to sign up (and if they do, present the judges with the awkward decision between well-known vet A and league player B playing).
Basically my point is that while it would be nice to have a high complexity game as a Season finale, it is reasonably infeasible to set aside either an FTQ slot or a PCQ for a 20-something player Specialty game. It should, however, be easily possible to have a Specialty level game in a season by coordinating with hosts and helping their games conform, perticlarly by publishing a set of guidelines to make games "League friendly". This will allow wackier games to count for the League, further increasing the game pool, while also not adding any extra stress on the playerbase whatsoever. The only downside is that it's not a "grand finale", which is a shame but not really significant. If we see the demand for games increase as the League fuses with the Normal queue, then we can consider PCQs for both the League AND in general. One step at a time.
There's no way to run even remotely "wacky" games under the current rubric without unbalancing it. We're going to need to test those first before we're confident enough that FTQ games could be scored fairly.
A checklist may be easy to do. I don't have a problem with setting some design guidelines.
I do not expect a high dropout rate from the Normal queue as things are reworked. DRey and DYH will probably move over to Specialty, Wrath_of_Dog has not replied to me, and I'm talking to Zionite (I will reply eventually, I promise!) Everyone else already fits the new guidelines.
Yeah, you're all talk.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I can patch that fairly easily.
I wasn't referring to you in that post; I was addressing Drey's argument that choosing between partially active zindabad and not active zindabad is problematic. It wasn't meant as a jab toward you; sorry I wasn't more clear.
What I really wanted to hear was a response to my point about distancing yourself from the players. Don't you think that, over time, you'd lose touch with what it's like to actually play the game?
Isn't that kind of like saying "if I don't get it my way, then I'm taking my ball and going home"? I don't think keeping your own activity level hostage is the way to get a council position.
You shouldn't need to change your activity at all to get on the council. You're either a perfect fit or you're not. An attempt to fit the mold is an admission that you don't belong there naturally.
TBH, this is only going to distance yourself from what it is like to play Mafia. It's like a chef who doesn't taste his own food. You are also removing yet another player from the base that newbies could learn from.
It may be a time constraint for you, and I understand that, but don't expect it to make your games better or your reviews more nuanced.
I'll also say that as a player it's totally cool to see a council member in your game. It changes the dynamic of the game and feels like you are playing with the pros. I find myself more active in games with a council member participating.
We do have pre-existing games ready to go for testing. And yes, the setups should be voted on within a pool of more traditional-leaning games just in case there's something about an outlier setup players really don't want to play. There can always be a player/host campaign for one or another setup within the voting discussion.
Drat, "Chimes" kind of grew on me. Like each member was a Chime and together they make music.
That's my opinion as well; it's important to keep in mind that these activities are for the players. Voting is an important part of the League game selecting process because it encourages activity and promotes a significant increase of involvement with games. We also have a direct incentive for not dropping out of games by penalizing it, so we get better quality games overall. The micro had no replacement requests, which (even though it's a small game) I think is a good sign that we're headed in the right direction.
Our basic gauge of complexity seems to be conveying enough information for the players to make an informed selection. If not, we're open to new ways of relaying setup info without being a giant spoiler. To me it's comparable to your favorite FPS map-selection voting process.
The recommendation tool is something we use that shows what we think would be great to see run. We've used it to direct players to what we want to test against the rubric, not as some blessing of favoritism. We most likely won't need it once we're done testing because any setup will be as good as any other under a stressed final rubric.
We have a pool of games that we'd like to run, but we didn't want to exceed 3 more games. Among this pool are a possible selection of non-traditional setups that should run before the rubric becomes finalized simply because they are useful for calibration. Ending the beta phase prematurely will no doubt lead to a fragile rubric in official League seasons.
Feet-dragging is definitely happening. For right now, we can just wait. There's still some open contentions that need to be resolved before we move forward. Dropping non-respondent or non-compliant hosts have always been a policy in the past so I don't see an issue there. It might be a good thing.
Two League games, as proposed, is an intriguing proposition. It might even be possible to have two lists for winners; one for small games and another for large games. I also like not having to rely on replacements. It may put unnecessary activity stress on the large League games though, and I really like using it as a tool to keep the League moving despite a lull in activity in the playerbase. So I'm torn on this idea.
There's no way to run even remotely "wacky" games under the current rubric without unbalancing it. We're going to need to test those first before we're confident enough that FTQ games could be scored fairly.
A checklist may be easy to do. I don't have a problem with setting some design guidelines.
Yeah, you're all talk.