Blacklist seems incredibly extreme. Is there any reason you aren't starting with probation, if anything?
He did this in multiple games. Had it just been my game, I'd have started with a motion for probation. This goes a bit beyond though & shows a lack of desire to actually interact and play the game in a civil manner. The stuff he was doing was downright toxic & I'd prefer that not to have a chance to happen again.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
Reiterating here for the Council's attention: I'd like to request a blacklist for TappingStones.
I had to disqualify him from ST:MU4 for severe unsporting conduct after he'd repeatedly trolled his way into three infractions and a forum suspension. He was also modkilled in Mind Screw for similar behavior. This kind of disruption can ruin games & I think the Council should consider stopping it from happening again.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
I'd run the advertising by their Mods first, of course, and would recommend possibly naming it something different and changing the flavor so that people who Google the name for whatever reason don't find the old game thread.
Of course I'd run it past their mods first. I actually want a similar name (Star Trek: Myriad Universes XL), since it'll be a sequel/expansion to an older game. If I do start design on this, quite a bit will be changed, so that the original game thread can serve as advertising for the flavor depth without giving much of anything useful away. The broad strokes will be there, in kind of an alternate reality of an alternate multiverse flavor variant, but Teia and I would make sure that it's so different that relying on the original game for play advice would yield nothing useful.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
I think advertising in general is a good idea. I also have no problem with anyone using anything I've put on this site to write flavor for future games - so long as I get a token "inspired by" credit or something, I have no qualms with anyone appropriating my work and putting their own spin on it, editing canon, etc. I'm just happy so long as something cool comes of it.
The biggest limitation at this point seems to be people who can and want to write that much flavor. I know from having seen the pieces that Az at one point was working on blowing the story in Inheritance out into a whole arc, which would be cool to see, but that was years ago, and I suspect he just doesn't have the time to work out all the requisite elements. The same thing happened with the follow-up to Ozone Underground, trying to put a capper on the David Klein story (and that's not even mentioning the fact that I never even finished some of the role PMs in OU).
The Asphodel Meadows (and to a lesser extent, word-count wise, the rest of my games) was largely fortuitous, because I was a lazy high school/college student with a lot of time on my hands for producing literary whirligigs. Even if I didn't have my own offline writing to work on, I just don't have the time for that sort of thing anymore, and I'm definitely not the only one. It's one thing to sell the site on its reputation, another to sell it on its potential.
One idea would be to try to break the work up into pieces - get four or five co-mods/co-writers to segment the work of one really big project, whether based on an existing IP or just on the writers' reputations. Give the people on MU lots of links to what's come before to try to draw them in. But I don't know who'd be crazy enough to sign up for that job, either.
Another thought that I had was updating/adjusting some of our older material for other sites and using that to bring new players into our community by running one-off games on those other sites and letting their players experience our unique flavor of Mafia without leaving home, then leaving them with a "this was one of our greatest hits, join up on MTGS to see the current games in these series." One good example would be SomethingAwful, which has a number of former MTGS players and somehow manages to fill 24 player games in a day or two; if we can recruit some of that player base, things would get much more interesting.
I'm seriously considering doing an XL version of MU2 to bring it up to 25 or so players and running it over there after MU4 is done. Any thoughts on whether this might be a good play?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
I'm not saying continuing a series is a bad thing, and there are plenty of plus sides. There just aren't enough differences with any other FTQ to deserve a different queue. That doesn't mean I would be anything other than pleased to see more sequels in the FTQ.
I'm not sure that we're talking about a new queue, in so much as we may be talking about material that we feature on MU for recruitment and/or cross-town purposes.
Annorax is proposing a new queue, which I'm disagreeing with. I agree with you that sequels make for good games, although it might be a bit speculative to suggest that non-MTGSers will feel more invested in a sequel they never saw the first one of than any other game. But who knows, it might encourage them to go read the original. Definitely an avenue worth exploring (Cyberspace 2: This Time With Fixed Mechanics)
The actual form doesn't have to be a new queue, so much as I think we need to leverage the material we have into a marketing tool. If they read the original, like what they see, and then see part 2, or 5 or whatever is next up in whatever queue, they'll stick around. The form doesn't matter so much as harnessing the design space the older material left open & marketing that experience to new players.
In the end, it doesn't matter if it's a separate queue or just an emphasis on developing existing material into new and interesting FTQ games to give MU players, etc a reason to stick around. We're not actively working at bringing new players in currently, and that has to change if we want to reverse the damage the community took from the transition to Cobalt.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
But that's exactly what the FTQ is for, yours just limits it to sequels or reboots of a previous game. As you've noticed, there's literally nothing stopping someone running multiple games in a series, and at a PCQ/FTQ that can even give them an edge, but the games are not sufficiently different to come anywhere close to meriting their own queue.
It's full of sequels and reboots, but that's the idea: we have metric tons of strong designs and strong stories that we can revive as a recruiting mechanism. This queue wouldn't be for us (well, maybe for the designers who want to go back to the well), it'd be for the players on MU, etc that we want over here. I want to take some of these players from other sites who read our games, see we've had some great games over the years, and go back to wherever they play now and turn them into active players on MTGS. I think a queue designed to let them experience the same kinds of great, unique to MTGS games we have would be a hell of a marketing tool to convert those browsers into active players.
The community's been shrinking for a while now & I think this has the potential to get a lot of fresh blood and new perspectives into our community.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
Kind of, but more focused on ongoing narrative. We have proven serialized games and serialized stories. We have one-off games that could be developed into serialized stories. I'm thinking of a queue that focuses on that, running alongside the FTQ. I'm thinking of a queue we can really sell to players to get them talking on other sites & bringing players in. I'm thinking of a queue that banks on what we're really good at & focuses it on growing our community.
FTQ gets the new, great ideas. This queue would build on the ones that have the popularity and design space to be built into more than one game. It'd be a queue for sequels and reboots so that they're running as often as possible and bringing players in from outside to experience what we've all experienced makes MTGS mafia unique.
I think it's an essential part of building an experience; after all, have you really experienced our flavor of Mafia if you haven't played a Star Trek: Myriad Universes game (hate tooting my own horn, but if people are still signing up for the series four games in, I have to be doing something right), Cyan's Impossible Mafia, any of Seppel's games, or any of the dozens of other games we've had that ooze innovation and creativity? Creative setups are something we're really, really good at, and that's something that I think needs to be more accessible to new players, especially experienced ones coming from other sites.
We've got a lot of creativity, we're not doing much to get the word out about it & bring players in, and I think this queue can do exactly that.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
An ironic problem with deadlines is some town will procrastinate on lynching if the deadline is too far away, which often leads sudden wagon-shifts at the last moment and someone getting lynched out of the blue & with little discussion to support that lynch.
About queues, diversity is good. Some players enjoy good old Mafia, some players enjoy mind-****ery, some players enjoy switching between the two. If we only have good old Mafia or only have mind-****ery, many players will get bored and/or leave. With an all-PCQ system, I'm afraid a plurality of players will end up pushing away whichever type of game they like the least, and as a consequence gradually push away the players who don't agree with that group.
@TappingStones: Stay tuned for my upcoming game!
My expectation is that we'll bounce between the various game types much more fluidly. Mind Screw falling out of fashion? Ok, let's do something a little less bastard-y. Large game hasn't fired in a while? Ok, let's give that one a shot.
I think half the problem with the basics and the current normal games is that they just. don't. change. Eventually that gets stale, and you need to switch things up.
I'm thinking another potential solution would be to add a new queue for games like that that runs independent of the size-based queues. I'm thinking "Signature" as a working title.
We've had a number of games and series go off over the years that for the most part were Specialty games, the kind of games that tend to be remembered for complexity and innovative mechanics that wouldn't generally fit in amongst the new queue designs. These games tend to bring new players into the site (hell, look at the four players we gained from NGA just for Star Trek MU4.) I'd like to propose a queue for these series and updates/reimaginings of older notable games; this might need to start as a queue of just stuff like my MU series, Mind Screw, and games like those, but could expand to be kind of a Greatest Hits of MTGS queue. Keeping these types of games running (without clogging up the existing queues with reboots) could prove to be an ongoing attraction for new players that'd expand our community. I'm imagining this as a queue where we'd want the games to ideally be in the 14-15 player range so that games aren't taking a month to fill.
Thoughts? Am I just totally insane here?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
18 players isn't strictly a maximum cap, it's just very strongly recommended, particularly for new(er) mods who don't necessarily have the pull and experience to fill and moderate a larger game.
This. It takes either a really good mod (like Seppel) or a *****ty mod with a very fun, flavorful setup (me) to pull in more than 20 these days. I'd say it's not likely for a Normal or something with less involved flavor to get more than 18 players now.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
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?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
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.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
They don't have any onsite recorded history of it, but given the relative difficulty of filling a game, I felt that it might be worthwhile to take some action to ensure that it doesn't happen again. People who disappear take up slots that could've been given to active players at the beginning of the game.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey all... I'm retired, not dead. Check out what I'm doing these days (and beg me to come back if you want):
He did this in multiple games. Had it just been my game, I'd have started with a motion for probation. This goes a bit beyond though & shows a lack of desire to actually interact and play the game in a civil manner. The stuff he was doing was downright toxic & I'd prefer that not to have a chance to happen again.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
Reiterating here for the Council's attention: I'd like to request a blacklist for TappingStones.
I had to disqualify him from ST:MU4 for severe unsporting conduct after he'd repeatedly trolled his way into three infractions and a forum suspension. He was also modkilled in Mind Screw for similar behavior. This kind of disruption can ruin games & I think the Council should consider stopping it from happening again.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
Of course I'd run it past their mods first. I actually want a similar name (Star Trek: Myriad Universes XL), since it'll be a sequel/expansion to an older game. If I do start design on this, quite a bit will be changed, so that the original game thread can serve as advertising for the flavor depth without giving much of anything useful away. The broad strokes will be there, in kind of an alternate reality of an alternate multiverse flavor variant, but Teia and I would make sure that it's so different that relying on the original game for play advice would yield nothing useful.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
Another thought that I had was updating/adjusting some of our older material for other sites and using that to bring new players into our community by running one-off games on those other sites and letting their players experience our unique flavor of Mafia without leaving home, then leaving them with a "this was one of our greatest hits, join up on MTGS to see the current games in these series." One good example would be SomethingAwful, which has a number of former MTGS players and somehow manages to fill 24 player games in a day or two; if we can recruit some of that player base, things would get much more interesting.
I'm seriously considering doing an XL version of MU2 to bring it up to 25 or so players and running it over there after MU4 is done. Any thoughts on whether this might be a good play?
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
The actual form doesn't have to be a new queue, so much as I think we need to leverage the material we have into a marketing tool. If they read the original, like what they see, and then see part 2, or 5 or whatever is next up in whatever queue, they'll stick around. The form doesn't matter so much as harnessing the design space the older material left open & marketing that experience to new players.
In the end, it doesn't matter if it's a separate queue or just an emphasis on developing existing material into new and interesting FTQ games to give MU players, etc a reason to stick around. We're not actively working at bringing new players in currently, and that has to change if we want to reverse the damage the community took from the transition to Cobalt.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
It's full of sequels and reboots, but that's the idea: we have metric tons of strong designs and strong stories that we can revive as a recruiting mechanism. This queue wouldn't be for us (well, maybe for the designers who want to go back to the well), it'd be for the players on MU, etc that we want over here. I want to take some of these players from other sites who read our games, see we've had some great games over the years, and go back to wherever they play now and turn them into active players on MTGS. I think a queue designed to let them experience the same kinds of great, unique to MTGS games we have would be a hell of a marketing tool to convert those browsers into active players.
The community's been shrinking for a while now & I think this has the potential to get a lot of fresh blood and new perspectives into our community.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
Kind of, but more focused on ongoing narrative. We have proven serialized games and serialized stories. We have one-off games that could be developed into serialized stories. I'm thinking of a queue that focuses on that, running alongside the FTQ. I'm thinking of a queue we can really sell to players to get them talking on other sites & bringing players in. I'm thinking of a queue that banks on what we're really good at & focuses it on growing our community.
FTQ gets the new, great ideas. This queue would build on the ones that have the popularity and design space to be built into more than one game. It'd be a queue for sequels and reboots so that they're running as often as possible and bringing players in from outside to experience what we've all experienced makes MTGS mafia unique.
I think it's an essential part of building an experience; after all, have you really experienced our flavor of Mafia if you haven't played a Star Trek: Myriad Universes game (hate tooting my own horn, but if people are still signing up for the series four games in, I have to be doing something right), Cyan's Impossible Mafia, any of Seppel's games, or any of the dozens of other games we've had that ooze innovation and creativity? Creative setups are something we're really, really good at, and that's something that I think needs to be more accessible to new players, especially experienced ones coming from other sites.
We've got a lot of creativity, we're not doing much to get the word out about it & bring players in, and I think this queue can do exactly that.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
I'm thinking another potential solution would be to add a new queue for games like that that runs independent of the size-based queues. I'm thinking "Signature" as a working title.
We've had a number of games and series go off over the years that for the most part were Specialty games, the kind of games that tend to be remembered for complexity and innovative mechanics that wouldn't generally fit in amongst the new queue designs. These games tend to bring new players into the site (hell, look at the four players we gained from NGA just for Star Trek MU4.) I'd like to propose a queue for these series and updates/reimaginings of older notable games; this might need to start as a queue of just stuff like my MU series, Mind Screw, and games like those, but could expand to be kind of a Greatest Hits of MTGS queue. Keeping these types of games running (without clogging up the existing queues with reboots) could prove to be an ongoing attraction for new players that'd expand our community. I'm imagining this as a queue where we'd want the games to ideally be in the 14-15 player range so that games aren't taking a month to fill.
Thoughts? Am I just totally insane here?
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
This. It takes either a really good mod (like Seppel) or a *****ty mod with a very fun, flavorful setup (me) to pull in more than 20 these days. I'd say it's not likely for a Normal or something with less involved flavor to get more than 18 players now.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
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?
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
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.
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)