MTG Salvation

If you're not going to claim vanilla as scum, then what are you going to do when you get run up in future games once we have the anti-trust tell rules?

Claim a power role or intentionally not claim? Claim vanilla as both alignments, or keep claiming vanilla as town?

Petitioning the council for the complete banning of trust tells.

Classification of a trust tell is a particular characteristic that a player performs to prove that they are town, when they do it as town and do not do it as scum.

Punishment is modkill/probation list.

Quote from Iso »

Regarding trust tells: Am I allowed to vote people for voting me after I've claimed VT for the reason of them pushing me when I know they know I'm town at that point? Because I don't think I know how to argue that without pulling the trust tell into it, but it's still an entirely legitimate reason to be scumreading somebody as it's an in-game reaction to something I've done that pertains to my meta.

You should start claiming VT as scum so that people don't clear you for claiming vanilla. This situation shouldn't really even exist, as it's super duper angleshooty.

Quote from shadowlancerx »

How does an Invitational work exactly? Is it kind of like an all star game basically?

I make a list of the players who have played in the last year. We all vote as to who will be in the game. The top 12 players will be contacted and play a game with each other.

You can read the last one here.

Alright, three people commenting is pretty good.

I'll put up the thread after I'm done with FNM.

In addition, Eco and I were talking about possibly hosting a 2016 MTGS Mafia Invitational. Would there be any interest in another Invitational being run?

A couple of things I want to bring up:

1) Should the set-up be "normal" or something a little more complex? I was thinking of something along the lines of MTGS Mafia Redux 2 for the complexity level, but I'm not sure if we can get people on the level of Xyre to design games any more.

2) I'm thinking about giving a two-week period where I take everyone who has played in the last year and putting a poll up for 12 players - the same way it worked last time. Should I try a different approach?

3) How long should the deadlines be? I'm thinking 2-3 weeks with 48 hour Nights.

4) Was there anything from the first MTGS Invitational that you guys didn't like, and would like me to change?

I don't know what you have behind the scenes but the game feels incredibly town-sided.

As ZDS said when you floated the game in the Invitational spectator QT, having universal private communication between all players gives a massive advantage to the town. The town can claim to each other in private, pass results onto each other, group-scumhunt, have a bunch of neighbor chats between townies, etc. Of course you can make the argument that the scum can infiltrate these, but it's a lot more work as scum to involve yourself into these group chats and appear that you're actively solving the game when you're doing it. Being involved in more chats just gives more opportunities to slip up or make a mistake somewhere, whereas for townies it'll be natural. I would imagine it would make the main game thread very frustrating to take part in.

In addition, the "unlimited number of additional, non voting player slots who can choose their alignment" seems potentially dangerous as well, since the scum there won't really have much incentive to actually play the game other than "spread disinformation and try to make the scum team win". Plus I can name a number of very talented analysts whom, as town, can solve the game pretty well from a spectator's standpoint.

It's possible that the universal private communication makes the second point moot, or that the town doesn't utilize behavioral analysis effectively and gets distracted by the mechanics (hi Mind Screw!), but just by looking at the mechanics the game would be pretty difficult to watch or play if you aren't part of any of these secret chats.

It's up for the hosts to determine deadlines. I used a two week deadline for Ace Attorney and it worked wonderfully.

You should check out the Standard Games over at MafiaUniverse - they have open setups which might be your cup of tea.

Specialties/FTQ are likely to contain neutrals, and there is only one Normal on the hosting list which I have no idea contains one, so yeah.

If we brought back Basics, they won't contain neutrals.

The thing is, I want to fix the problem where we have sign ups open for weeks/months at a time. I think that it seriously impedes the playerbase when this happens and makes less games run overall, when the opposite should be happening.

On another note: Can we please make not reading your role PM a blacklistable offiense (or formally state it out)? I think it pretty clearly goes against the spirit of the game.

Quote from Ecophagy »

So do we think it would be a good idea for Star Trek to close signups until Mind Screw finishes and open up signups for a Mini instead, with apologies to Annorax.

If we do this, I'd be more inclined to run a Micro instead, since we already have a Mini running.

Quote from Ecophagy »

am completely on board with the idea of running 1 Specialty and 1 Normal at a time, and X Minis and X Micros.

I support this. With how long Mind Screw and GoldenEye took to fill, I don't think the playerbase can handle a third large game ongoing, while Minis and Micros seem to be firing pretty regularly (Off the Grid filled up in a Day, Twinborn in a week-ish).

Thanks for all of your guys's responses.

Quote from Ecophagy »

1) The obvious flaw is that running smaller games alongside signups for larger games risks making the larger games fill even slower as Micros siphon off players. The playerbase at the moment is very small, which makes it not very surprising when large games take a while to fill, but Micros are so small and seem to be almost exclusively played by experienced players that I don't think they'd add much other than just scratching an itch. I think signups could be handled better though: Golden Eye mostly took so long to fill because two other large games (Mind Screw and Ace Attorney) were ongoing and were still heavily populated. It would have been sensible for a smaller game to post signups instead, since there's no way we could support three simultaneous large games. The other solution is for people to make smaller large games (certainly GoldenEye's 16 is a good place to start), so they take less time to fill.

What are your thoughts, then, on a rule that a large game can't post signups until one of the two large games ends? I don't think MTGS has the playerbase to support three simultaneous large games running at a time, and all of the signup stalls that have been happening recently have been due to a third large game posting signups when two are already running.

Quote from Ecophagy »

That being said, I could be persuaded to allow Micros to fire more frequently, but I don't really see how it helps do anything other than let people scratch an itch while risking making Large games take even longer to fire.

Larger games take nearly a month to fill up (GoldenEye and Mind Screw have, at least) and Star Trek is approaching the two week mark. I was thinking - since a Micro usually starts and ends within a week or less, it shouldn't affect large game signups, right?

Quote from Ecophagy »

This is, however, a question for you moderators. I don't even know what the official forum policy on multiple consecutive posts is.

The rules just say "don't consecutively multipost" but with mafia it's much more lax.

Quote from Iso »

We can't let smaller game sign-ups run at the same time as larger because every time we have, they've taken players from the larger games, which stalls the queues from progressing and prevents hosts from having their fair shot at hosting. Additionally, have you seen the queue recently? We can't fire games off willy-nilly when we don't have games to fire off, to begin with.

How do you propose we fix the problem of having one large game in signups for weeks at a time, then? You might not really see it as a problem, per se, but I think that it makes our community sluggish and makes smaller games bottlenecked by these larger ones.

Some things I've been ruminating about and would like the Council to respond/other users:

1. Should we move the Micro queue to a separate sign-ups queue? The reason why I would like to do this is because we have these large games that take forever to fill, and it's really annoying to see sign-ups stall because of this. For example, Mind Screw Salvation and GoldenEye both took one month for the game to fill, and I think that running some Micros on the side while we wait for the big games to fill up could help keep the players engaged, since Micros typically don't last very long. This quote encapsulates what I'm thinking perfectly:

Quote from zindabad »

So if I understand correctly, one has to wait for this game's one-month-long signups to finish before another game starts signups?

2. Could we be more relaxed in enforcing the "no quintiple posting" etc rule? This is something that annoys me because in every other mafia site I've played at, posting four/five/six times when you're trying to catch up is perfectly normal - it helps with the readability of your posts, rather than turning your post into a morass of multiquotes and line breaks. Obviously if someone flies off the handles and posts 19+ times in a row (*cough* mastin *cough*) we should infract them, but for smaller scale incidents like these I don't really see the point in carding others for spam.

I'd love the input of the community on this, I think these are two small changes that can improve the quality of the subforum.

I highly recommend for anyone interested in mafia game design or interested in reviewing games to check out Eco's Reviewing Mafia Games article, if you haven't looked at it already. It has a lot of "checklists" that I go through when I review games, and has some basic design philosophies that I think are essential to craft good mafia games.

I'd also recommend people check out the articles list in general (once again, if you haven't read them already). Some of them are a bit old and advanced, but the information is still relevant.

I'll go ahead and delete the original posts and add the Google Docs articles to the OP.

EDIT: Done, along with a general cleanup of that thread. Revamped the reviewers list as well - if anyone would like to become a reviewer, please post here along with the games you've reviewed.