Wait, the site actually moved? I thought they pulled a just kidding on that and left everything in place. What's the story?
Yeah all the admins and most of the mods left to set up a new site when the site almost closed; Shadow's in charge of admin stuff now iirc (though many of their accounts still have permissions it looks like?)
bobthefunny is another admin actually around. Not sure how many others are actually a thing.
I wonder if the problem lies in the distribution of responsibility - at the moment, game hosts are the people most responsible for calling out and addressing negative behaviour (flaming/trolling/playing against win conditions/lurking/etc) and they are also responsible to handing out punishments of stern talking tos, replacements, or modkills. The problem lies that the game host also bears the latgest burden of dealing with those punishments in having to find replacements or deal with thei game becoming unbalanced by a modkill. This leads those game hosts to err on the side of caution and be conservative with punishments, which leads to inconsistency and line-toeing.
A way this could be remedied would be to try and reduce the responsibility of game hosts - for example, if we could foster a culture of reporting posts that cointain flaming then we could instate a rule that says "if you get an infraction for flaming, you must be replaced". While that approach would be more rigid, it would see much more consistent reactions from hosts - as can be seen in other forum wide rules like posting role PMs, which hosts know (usually) means mandatory modkill. This would, of course, put the burden of deciding "sufficient flaming" onto the shoulders of the forum mods, but they are a) more trained in making that call and b) don't suffer the conlfict of interest around finding replacements/destabilising the game that a game host has.
As an aside, I understand mods not wanting to red text offending posts, but some form of engagement would be required to make reporting feel more impactful. Perhaps something like a summary every month of mod activity (X posts were reported, Y warnings and Z infractions were handed out), just to provide something tangible to indicate that mods are reading reports.
Alternatively (or even additionally!) the council could be more of a first port of call for contentious behaviour. If standard procedure is for a host to raise grey-area behaviour with the council and they make a decision (involving but not driven by the host) that results in a judgement of "force replace or not", then the host again bears less responsibility for resolving the punishment and the council take any flak. This could be facilitiated with a formal inbox, discord channel, or designated "host manager" council member. I think a lot of the time hosts don't contact the council until things have already escalated, and even when they do, the council resolves things in a very ad-hoc way. A more formal process (even if it didn't have rigid guidelines) would hopefully make things more streamlined and consistent.
Punishing lurking is more difficult because that is ultimately up to the game host. But I think a strong start is to examine what level of activity we really do expect - as Silver stresses, 1 post every 48 or 72 hours is really not actually enough. In parallel, any kind of system to encourage replacements would help bolster any kind of enforcement overhaul. Auto-ins are no longer sufficient incentive, so how can we encourage more people to replace into games?
Overall, I think part of the issue is that game hosts are responsible for identifying unwanted behaviour, handing out punishment, and dealing with negative consequences of that punishment. This understandably leads to reluctance to commit in the hope that saying "cool it guys" will stop it. Splitting that responsibility burden with other parties who have experience and have volunteered to shoulder occasionally being the "bad guys" in controversial decisions should at least make punishments come earlier in the process and more consistently.
You can do it MU/MAL style and have a GM who is not only the reviewer but also watches over the game for moderation (and backup hosting) reasons.
I've also been kicking around setting up some kind of inbox for players to escalate issues directly to the Council if they aren't satisfied with the way a host is handling a game. Could probably set up something on Discord easier than anything directly on-site (which would either involve software changes or council members logging into another mutual account to check reports), but I haven't even figured out if it's technically feasible yet let alone discussed with the other Councilors if this is something they would support.
Feyd could setup a zone ala EDH Primer Committee for the Mafia Council, in which you have mod level powers and everyone else can only see their own threads.
Okay let's use DBS as an example: in ZE it's debateable to whether or not she broke rules or not.
Using the example of DBS, which looks worse for long-term MTGS community health?
Dawning getting modkilled or asked to replace out in ZE for actively negatively contributing to the players' enjoyment.
Dawning getting ***** on by the MTGS community to the degree that she was put up for probation and left the community after it was clear that she wasn't wanted here, and then on top of that, due to negative experiences primarily in Zero Escape, people from another community of which she and others in that game are a part of are still regularly ***** on, despite some of those players and others from that community continuing to contribute to this site.
I guess here's another Osie rant. I'm so tired of being the guy to bring up issues here. I make this message as a MAL Mafia Society admin first, and an MTGS Mafia player second.
You know what's not such a great feeling? Being a leader of a community that's ***** on regularly by a multitude of people in my home community. Having to, as a leader of that other community, go to multiple people and try to convince them that despite their negative experience with several members of my home site, it's not a bad site to play on. Regularly recruiting people from that community to play here, only to be told pretty much to **** off most of the time when I invite people the other way.
With the welcome exceptions of Cantripmancer, Rhand, DV, almost kpaca, maybe Silver (according to Grapefruit, and possibly before my time), nobody from MTGS who wasn't already playing on MAL before me has played on MAL since I joined that community. I'm not counting Discord-based voice chat games in making that list.
Cantrip and DV have both expressed enjoyment and some openness to later playing more games on the site. Rhand had a concern about apathy in context of the game he was in, which he expressed also applies to MTGS.
For comparison, AlbertinoDias, ScarletCelestial, Shinichi, Lastwhisper, Shattiel, Rumanshi, Killmatronix (kinda), Beeboy, RE1031, Fuwa, DawningBlueSky, roz_the_eevee, yurkin, and Karote are all from MAL.
The phase length difference is a significant element, but a large number of our regular players, especially amongst those that ***** on MAL a lot, are those who play on other sites with short phase lengths, a lot.
I'm not going to go into detail, but there was a similar moment about people from other sites that was cut from the podcast because I personally called it out for being unwelcoming.
Council members both current and former have talked about wanting to bring more people in and retain people. Maybe the fact that people in this community, from the bottom to the top, ***** on others so regularly is a significant factor to why this community doesn't retain them.
I semi-recently advertised MTGS to a few people. Quoting (with a few words of paraphrasing to kinda unify the comments):
MTGS - "MTGS is known for longer phases. A lot of the players there are experienced, established players, many of whom have also played a lot on other sites in addition to MTGS. People like interesting setups much more than just running games for the sake of it."
That's kinda cold. But that is a normal advertisement for MTGS, and I certainly wasn't intending it to be cold in context.
For comparison...
MAL - "Mafia Society is a friendly and social Mafia group. There are some skilled and likely familiar players there, and the games range into some more experimental ideas. The regular players are mainly united through enjoyment of anime, but it's a mafia group first and everyone is welcome."
Why is MTGS so unwelcoming? Is that the kind of image the community wants to project?
I'm asking for consistency to new players. If we're a community that is okay with players openly saying they will lynch regardless of alignment, we should say so.
The thing is I don't have a consistent answer to this. Going back to Shadow as an example I think he should be allowed to do the voting over self voting. While he's uncaring about the individual alignment he thinks it's the best way to be able to solve a game over all (forcing everyone to play to their win con and avoiding allowing AtE's to fool people). What about people not having an opinion on a D1 wagon voting to avoid their not being a majority at end of day? I also think that should be allowed. Voting as a "I don't want to play with this player"? I don't like that but if a person is in the game with a player they don't want to play with but are also unwilling to replace out they'll probably start confirmation biasing reasons to vote them. I know because I've been there. I didn't actively think I was doing it in the moment, but I was.
And I don't know what the answer to that is.
The way Shadow's policy on lynching self-voters is considered, it's not actually clear that he's considered if the statistics on this site recently support his point. I don't have enough time personally to do this, but I was involved in a majority of the games this last year, and if I recall correctly, the overwhelming majority of self-votes were from town rather than scum. Not that it's a town tell. No, it's absolutely reasonable to consider it a scum tell.
As for conf!bias, I mean, meta-reading is conf!bias incarnate, and despite a rule that explicitly bans meta-reading by definition, nobody on this site has or likely ever will be warned for meta-reading another player. I think we can all agree that would be ridiculous.
Wrath_of_DoG attempted to lynch me in every single game we played in together past a certain point, simply because he didn't like me as a Mafia player. I didn't complain a single time. I tried to reason with him and talk to him about it, but he shut down all forms of communication regarding the matter. Instead of stooping to his level or being rude about it, I simply outplayed him and got him counter-lynched or Vigged in response to his antagonism.
There are alternative solutions.
I'm not convinced that suggesting that players should just ignore toxicity and, implicitly, that there shouldn't be rules in place to avoid it, is actually a good idea for the long-term health of the community.
But, I don't remotely see how this solves or alleviates a problem. With the other rule I personally think its stupid. I've always felt that some of that OoG information should be allowed. A player is known to lurk to replacement if they are scum(A la creature style). I'm not sure why I'm not supposed to use that information. Additionally, in a certain game that player has some personal issues and says so and they replace out because of that. Normally, I would lynch that player for lurking, but in this case there is some OoG information telling me that maybe that isn't a correct read.
Take the Gemma case in the team game. Gemma correctly use the information about Nancy Drew to nail them as scum. And from what I know from conversations I've had, Nancy was 100% cheating. Yet she got punished for that.
Yeah, the OoG information elements are frustrating as heck. It's really actively difficult to not let something OoG influence your reads once you hear about it, such as the multi-game activity tell that I mentioned above.
So, lets go back to the issue at hand lynching without an alignment purpose. Let's talk about Ruma. Ruma is lynched typically, because people can't figure out their alignment. Ruma lurks, and trolls. I believe that players lynch Ruma for mixed motives. They lynch him partially because of his indeterminable alignment, but also because they are mad at him for lurking and trolling. With your rule what do?
The example is kinda flawed both because lurking is a bigger tell, usually scum, for Ruma, and a player seemingly trolling is a behavioral tell for scum in general, and for Ruma is mostly NAI, actually. I've seen several people on and off this site talk about always lynching Tom first every game for a similar reason, actually.
At the end of the day I just don't see how a rule like this solves anything. If anything its going to create more animosity. Most game moderators on this site will not enforce this rule or will not replace a player out, for these reasons. And players being told they have no recourse at all seems not only bastard to me, but also a recipe for a more toxic environment.
I mean, most game hosts on this site won't replace or modkill anyways until something forces their hand.
Grapefruit's point on annoyance votes is a good one. You bring things up with the host first. Heck, for all you know, what you are annoyed about is due to something entirely unrelated to the game.
I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, even recently, but I have been of the strong belief for months that telling another player in-thread that they are obnoxious, toxic, or that they deserve a modkill/non-alignment-based-lynch/etc is toxic itself and detrimental to game and community health. And I at least have warned players to not suggest that in thread.
I think that's a reasonable rule but I don't think it solves any problems. It shifts the conflict point from in thread votes to players saying to the mod "I don't want to play with this make them stop, replace me, or replace them." Which is improved but not by a ton.
I don't know how to handle it as a mod/player/whatever if I have multiple players who aren't able to coexist but no rules have yet been broken.
I'd readily agree with that being a reasonable rule. And that's a vast improvement in my book over issues crowding up the thread, which usually inflates arguments, as has happened in the case of DV multiple times.
The host/etc mediates and talks to the players as necessary. Just as would be the case in any other situation hampering the health of the game.
It's not hard to conceptualize, IMO, there's just a lot of grey area no matter what.
As for posts about game integrity, most of the rules that we use there are strict but incredibly vague in theory and rarely enforced in practice.
I fail to see how any rule in place would ever stop any problem as you are suggesting it is.
I'm using that as an example.
What you are asking the moderator to do is something moderators should never do. Which is pick a side.
I mean, it's no more arbitrary and unenforceable as a rule not allowing use of out-of-game knowledge while generating one's reads.
Two examples:
1. A player on some other sites did a study of hundreds of players and found
that for a large chunk of players relative game activity had significant correlation with alignment. Given an arbitrarily player with no other information it's valid as a better than random scum tell (though keep in mind 30% is already often better than random). Like all other things mafia it's obviously more meaningful when you check it on an individual basis and you'll often find more interesting things that you can read from with time data, it just turned out that the multiple game thing was a simple concept that's better than rand on a wide range of ppl.
That player expressed
MafiaScum ended up explicitly allowing cross-activity mentions partially because I made it obvious to a bunch of people it was effective [...] Else the amount of "I think they're scummy for reasons I can't say" would have gotten absurd.
2. Meta-reading. I shouldn't need to say more here.
I don't think that osie's rule suggestion is an easy one to enforce, as players can just easily say, "Well, he was obfuscating the game, so I thought he was scum," rather than "I lynched him because he was being disruptive to the game's health/integrity." While yes, it makes sense to say to the host, "Hey, I asked Dudeguy to stop duding up the thread, but he won't stop,"
at some point, you have to examine yourself and ask, "Am I the problem?" If you're threatening to take your ball and go home because people won't let you play the way you want at the detriment of their enjoyment of the game, do you really want to be that guy rather than to take a moment of introspection?
Excuse me? Someone used the fact that I had expressed disapproval for lynching regardless of alignment to try to angleshoot me into replacing out of a currently ongoing game. You're condoning that now?
%%%
As I said earlier, I don't care about Scum Love the King. It was a dumb thing to happen in a game, but it's so far from the point that it's just intentionally taking the thread on tangents to talk about this proposal in the context of that game, and intentionally strawmanning my point. I'm not talking in the context of that game as of a while ago.
I also don't care if posting restrictions are banned. That means nothing to me.
I'm asking for consistency to new players. If we're a community that is okay with players openly saying they will lynch regardless of alignment, we should say so.
bobthefunny is another admin actually around. Not sure how many others are actually a thing.
Almost the entire staff and at least about half the userbase switched to another site.
Nah, they did move, so this site is slowly dying, but the mafia section will probably exist for some time.
As far as I know?
You can do it MU/MAL style and have a GM who is not only the reviewer but also watches over the game for moderation (and backup hosting) reasons.
Feyd could setup a zone ala EDH Primer Committee for the Mafia Council, in which you have mod level powers and everyone else can only see their own threads.
Using the example of DBS, which looks worse for long-term MTGS community health?
I guess here's another Osie rant. I'm so tired of being the guy to bring up issues here. I make this message as a MAL Mafia Society admin first, and an MTGS Mafia player second.
You know what's not such a great feeling? Being a leader of a community that's ***** on regularly by a multitude of people in my home community. Having to, as a leader of that other community, go to multiple people and try to convince them that despite their negative experience with several members of my home site, it's not a bad site to play on. Regularly recruiting people from that community to play here, only to be told pretty much to **** off most of the time when I invite people the other way.
With the welcome exceptions of Cantripmancer, Rhand, DV, almost kpaca, maybe Silver (according to Grapefruit, and possibly before my time), nobody from MTGS who wasn't already playing on MAL before me has played on MAL since I joined that community. I'm not counting Discord-based voice chat games in making that list.
Cantrip and DV have both expressed enjoyment and some openness to later playing more games on the site. Rhand had a concern about apathy in context of the game he was in, which he expressed also applies to MTGS.
For comparison, AlbertinoDias, ScarletCelestial, Shinichi, Lastwhisper, Shattiel, Rumanshi, Killmatronix (kinda), Beeboy, RE1031, Fuwa, DawningBlueSky, roz_the_eevee, yurkin, and Karote are all from MAL.
The phase length difference is a significant element, but a large number of our regular players, especially amongst those that ***** on MAL a lot, are those who play on other sites with short phase lengths, a lot.
I'm not going to go into detail, but there was a similar moment about people from other sites that was cut from the podcast because I personally called it out for being unwelcoming.
Council members both current and former have talked about wanting to bring more people in and retain people. Maybe the fact that people in this community, from the bottom to the top, ***** on others so regularly is a significant factor to why this community doesn't retain them.
I semi-recently advertised MTGS to a few people. Quoting (with a few words of paraphrasing to kinda unify the comments):
MTGS - "MTGS is known for longer phases. A lot of the players there are experienced, established players, many of whom have also played a lot on other sites in addition to MTGS. People like interesting setups much more than just running games for the sake of it."
That's kinda cold. But that is a normal advertisement for MTGS, and I certainly wasn't intending it to be cold in context.
For comparison...
MAL - "Mafia Society is a friendly and social Mafia group. There are some skilled and likely familiar players there, and the games range into some more experimental ideas. The regular players are mainly united through enjoyment of anime, but it's a mafia group first and everyone is welcome."
Why is MTGS so unwelcoming? Is that the kind of image the community wants to project?
The way Shadow's policy on lynching self-voters is considered, it's not actually clear that he's considered if the statistics on this site recently support his point. I don't have enough time personally to do this, but I was involved in a majority of the games this last year, and if I recall correctly, the overwhelming majority of self-votes were from town rather than scum. Not that it's a town tell. No, it's absolutely reasonable to consider it a scum tell.
As for conf!bias, I mean, meta-reading is conf!bias incarnate, and despite a rule that explicitly bans meta-reading by definition, nobody on this site has or likely ever will be warned for meta-reading another player. I think we can all agree that would be ridiculous.
I'm not convinced that suggesting that players should just ignore toxicity and, implicitly, that there shouldn't be rules in place to avoid it, is actually a good idea for the long-term health of the community.
Yeah, the OoG information elements are frustrating as heck. It's really actively difficult to not let something OoG influence your reads once you hear about it, such as the multi-game activity tell that I mentioned above.
The example is kinda flawed both because lurking is a bigger tell, usually scum, for Ruma, and a player seemingly trolling is a behavioral tell for scum in general, and for Ruma is mostly NAI, actually. I've seen several people on and off this site talk about always lynching Tom first every game for a similar reason, actually.
I mean, most game hosts on this site won't replace or modkill anyways until something forces their hand.
Grapefruit's point on annoyance votes is a good one. You bring things up with the host first. Heck, for all you know, what you are annoyed about is due to something entirely unrelated to the game.
I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, even recently, but I have been of the strong belief for months that telling another player in-thread that they are obnoxious, toxic, or that they deserve a modkill/non-alignment-based-lynch/etc is toxic itself and detrimental to game and community health. And I at least have warned players to not suggest that in thread.
I'd readily agree with that being a reasonable rule. And that's a vast improvement in my book over issues crowding up the thread, which usually inflates arguments, as has happened in the case of DV multiple times.
The host/etc mediates and talks to the players as necessary. Just as would be the case in any other situation hampering the health of the game.
It's not hard to conceptualize, IMO, there's just a lot of grey area no matter what.
As for posts about game integrity, most of the rules that we use there are strict but incredibly vague in theory and rarely enforced in practice.
How many times have you heard someone say "If you're annoyed at the game take a step back." to anybody, for that matter?
We essentially already have rules against lynching for non-alignment reasons, they just haven't been interpreted as such.
I mean, it's no more arbitrary and unenforceable as a rule not allowing use of out-of-game knowledge while generating one's reads.
Two examples:
1. A player on some other sites did a study of hundreds of players and found
That player expressed
2. Meta-reading. I shouldn't need to say more here.
Excuse me? Someone used the fact that I had expressed disapproval for lynching regardless of alignment to try to angleshoot me into replacing out of a currently ongoing game. You're condoning that now?
%%%
As I said earlier, I don't care about Scum Love the King. It was a dumb thing to happen in a game, but it's so far from the point that it's just intentionally taking the thread on tangents to talk about this proposal in the context of that game, and intentionally strawmanning my point. I'm not talking in the context of that game as of a while ago.
I also don't care if posting restrictions are banned. That means nothing to me.
I'm asking for consistency to new players. If we're a community that is okay with players openly saying they will lynch regardless of alignment, we should say so.