We've already said we welcome suggestions and that the rules weren't clear enough and failed in many respects.
I just don't get what you get out of relitigating and scrutinizing every single mod action and trying to force me to defend them after we've already admitted we made mistakes and we'll try to do better next time.
If you want to talk about whether this thing or that thing should be allowed, that's a fine thing to debate. If you want to talk about specific changes to the rules you think would improve them, that's fine too. But I'm not going to justify every mod action that happened, especially after we've already all agreed some of it shouldn't have.
But I have a problem with the way you're framing double standards, because you're essentially arguing that issuing modkilleds once you run out of replacements is also a double standard that unfairly harms the team of the player that replaced out later. Double standards can only apply when all circumstances, including available replacements, are extremely similar if not identical. Just my two cents.
As far as Nancy specifically goes, I categorically deny your version of events. She would not have been replaced even if we already had someone queued to take the slot who was caught up in the game, and that is a fact. It's a sad fact, because she shouldn't have been given so much V/LA in the first place, but that's the way it is, and that's how it happened.
Dude, no one, literally no one is saying the lurking was acceptable. Merely that the rules do not allow a no notice modkill until the player has been prodded repeatedly. That is *literally* the only thing being said.
Your complaints have been heard and we'd like to discuss alterations to the rules that would help instead of going around in circles about whose interpretation is more correct. Moderator always gets the final word on rules interpretations, and we tried to interpret them as fairly as we could. If you don't want to talk about solutions and are trying to get us to say we're terrible people for being human and making mistakes or something, you've gotten as good as you're going to get on that front. We've clearly and plainly admitted that mistakes were made and we'll try to do better next time.
What do you actually want out of this if not that? I even apologized several posts ago that the lurking impacted your enjoyment and I got condescended to about how you need to teach me why lurkers are bad.
Teams *were* responsible for their replacements. You'd know, we told your team to source a replacement when you requested. If they couldn't find one we attempted to force replace and/or modkill.
You were never told modkills were being ignored, unless that happened in a DM with Eco that I'm not privy to. We said it was "on the table but trying to be avoided at all costs." That isn't in any way shape or form a statement that a modkill would never happen. It was a statement saying we were trying to avoid one but that it may be necessary.
Nacho missed one prod and returned before his second prod would have been issued, and had dozens of posts prior to that.
I'm done talking about this, we're just going in circles because you refuse to accept that the rules were inadequate and blame us even though we followed them. There's very little room for interpretation in "repeated prodding may lead to force replacement or modkills with no notice."
I guess you could argue we should have overridden the rules and modkilled people out of a sense of "fairness" to the other players. I think that's what you're really trying to say, that we should have ignored the rules and modkilled the slots for having low post counts.
But I don't want to permit mods to modkill people for reasons like "I didn't like the amount of content they produced even though they were following the activity guidelines I had in the rules for my game." We shouldn't have mods unilaterally choosing to modkill players for stuff that isn't a rules violation.
And it certainly isn't the way I would ever moderate a game. It isn't fair or just to modkill people on the fly with no warning for stuff that doesn't break the rules. I set up the rules and enforce them to the best of my ability, and if the rules don't create the kind of game I want to see, I'll change them for the next game. That is fundamentally more fair than pulling a Vader on the whole playerlist.
So, yeah, I guess. If you're trying to argue for more tyrannical mods, who ignore the rules to punish players you perceive as being a problem, you're not going make much headway. Because I disagree with that notion on such a fundamental level that we're never going to see eye to eye.
I mean, re: the Nancy thing, we couldn't possibly have known whether Ghost Town had a replacement without asking them to replace her because they're from off site. We absolutely *could* have asked them to replace her if we had wanted to, the only thing we couldn't do is saddle them with someone from MTGS as a replacement.
We *didn't* do that due to some extenuating circumstances on Nancy's end and because we believed that she was communicating with us in good faith and would resume posting at a reasonable rate when she returned from V/LA.
I've gone back through both your team chat and our DMs and don't see where either myself or Eco said we weren't replacing Nancy *because* we didn't want to modkill her. If Eco said that in a DM to you, I suppose it might be true, but that wasn't the impression I had and I would have lobbied against it. Or I hope I would've, anyway, again, hard to tell months after the fact knowing what I know now. As far as replacements go, I don't think you guys are getting it still.
The way we had to do replacements for the event necessitated extended periods without someone in the slot.
Step 1: If someone doesn't post for 72 hours, they are prodded via Discord and/or MTGS PM.
Step 2: If they do not respond to the prod and do not post content during the next 72 hours, we ask the team to begin looking for a replacement in lieu of prodding twice consecutively and started asking around for an MTGS player who might be willing to work with unfamiliar players as a force replacement.
Step 3: If they have not responded to the prod and have not posted during the next 72 hour period, we replaced in the team replacement, otherwise we performed the force replacement. When we ran out of replacements we would have had to issue modkills.
If someone responds to the prod at any point before the 3rd prod would have been issued, they're permitted to remain in the slot with various promises to not need prodded again if they missed more than one prod.
Once they've been issued three official prods they're out on their ass regardless.
We had some unfortunate situations residing in grey areas like Cantrip, who was responding to prods but unable to produce content, and Nancy who took extended V/LA then extended it again, but generally speaking the above is what was supposed to happen.
I don't think 24 hours is a reasonable amount of team to expect a team to source a replacement. That means the team immediately receives the replacement request from us, messages a bunch of people instantly, and gets responses back without any questions about the game being asked, selects a replacement, gets the replacement to make a Twitch/MTGS account if necessary, and gets us the account name of the replacement, all in single day.
In fact I'd be willing to bet that most of you, including me, have left a slot unreplaced for longer than 24 hours when the actual replacement list was empty for a game you modded while you mentioned people in #lonely-hearts and posted to the replacement request thread hoping for a response.
And the system above is pretty much exactly what Osie is asking for except with shorter prod periods, 48 instead of 72.
If you think shortening the prod period is enough, that's certainly something that can/could happen for the next one, but even with 48 hour prods in a two week phase you'll end up with the potential for lurkers 7-8 posting every day and never getting prodded.
Prodding cannot solve the lurker problem, it can only remind people the game exists. And even that it does imperfectly because it relies on the prodded player checking Discord or MTGS but not actually posting.
If you just think the problem is that people are just forgetting about the game and that habitual forgettors need replaced sooner, that's fine. But there's been a real focus on people with low post counts in the feedback I'm getting and shorter prod periods don't really increase post counts.
I think most of us can agree that 7 posts in one day isn't acceptable, either (unless they are extremely long, detailed essays, but no one wants to read those, either, so).
But *strictly* speaking the rules permit this and the offending player will not even be prodded.
That's why I think we need to overhaul activity requirements rather than just shorten prod lengths or something.
Stop saying modkill on the slot was imminent. From a player perspective it appeared that he was going to be replaced again. Go read the thread instead of just looking at the VC and saying he got lynched.
It *was* imminent. Not when you replaced out, no, it wasn't, but when he was lynched? It absolutely was. The game as a whole hard lynched him from 3 votes after we said we would modkill him at the start of Day 2 at the latest. There was a conscious choice on the part of every single player in that game to not try to derail the wagon and either allow a potential replacement to post for the slot or allow the modkill to happen.
Its just don't ******* feed me the line "Game health" when we had slots with only 8 posts by the end of day 2. That isn't fair and that isn't fun. And Eco saying that he doesn't agree with me on that but providing no reasons is my point. Its just insulting to the players. You don't value or time or effort and he's right I won't play in a game of his again, because he truthfully doesn't care about the players.
Literally no one is saying that games containing multiple slots with 8 posts are fun. I challenge you to quote where Eco said that because I am 110% sure he never did. And all three of us absolutely do value the time and effort players spend(t) playing the game.
But it was fair. It was equal, proper enforcement of the rules as written and read and agreed to by every single player when they signed up. Two prods is not repeated prodding. A 24 or 48 hour extension would not have permitted any replacement - who, other than Hawk, weren't even in place at the time you replaced out - to catch up and produce what you would consider "acceptable content." Anything more than that was out of the question for a no-notice extension, especially considering there were guest players who had been told that phases would last two weeks.
Alright, I've put some more thought into it and its hard for me to say exactly what the exact rule should look like.
Principally, I don't think the 3 day rule should really be changed. Unless the games were of shorter day length then I might require more activity. Part of me wants to combine a post minimum with the day rule. You can post every three days, but you need a minimum of X posts. But then that runs into short day phases etc as problems. Should a player be punished for posting and the day ending within 1 IRL day because everyone agreed to lynch one player? Probably not. Its hard. Maybe it needs to be prorated.
It isn't just hard. We don't have the tools to enforce this with our current forum software, either.
I think the one easy fix is that I think that the 3 days + 3 day prods needs to be changed. I think 3 days then prodded but then only 2 days, then replaced. If a replacement can't be found then mod kill. I think we should start looking for replacements on the prod time not on the 2 days out from the original prod.
Look, I get that people get busy. I'm more than willing to work with someone that pops into the thread and says "I can't post for 5 days". That's fine. But making players responsible is key here. If you can't be bothered to pop in once in 5 days and say "Something came up" then I don't see why we shouldn't be replacing.
So, you want people replaced or modkilled immediately if they fail to respond to their first prod within 48 hours? That doesn't seem a bit draconian to you?
Additionally, I think mods just need to come to terms to with the fact that mod kills might happen, and that's that. As I said a player might be really bad at the game and cost their team the win, this is the same thing. Its player interaction. Its not fair to the team to have either of these situations. Yet, it needs to be done.
We understand as moderators that modkills are unavoidable in some situations and were absolutely prepared to exercise this power. We, in fact, did issue two modkills and were fully prepared to modkill beeboy after a suitable length of time was given to Lethargy to find a replacement.
One of the things that I realized I forgot to mention and part of the reason why I'm so bitter about the Nancy decision is that the reasoning given to me was that you guys didn't want to force the replacement because you knew you had no replacements so you would have to modkill.
This is at its core unacceptable to me.
The rest of this post has been snipped because I've already acknowledged and responded to literally everything said here except the Nancy stuff, to which my only reply would be "No, we wouldn't have instantly replaced her when she asked for V/LA if we had available replacements, that's a ridiculous idea, or at least I hope we wouldn't have, it's hard to tell months after the fact."
I don't need you to tell me lurking is bad for the game, D_V. None of us do. And quoting where Dan said we would modkill him at the start of Day 2 then trying to twist it to say we weren't ever going to modkill him is pretty disingenuous. Lethargy had only had 24 hours to find a replacement at that point. That isn't a suitable length of time to message people and get a response.
If you want to talk about policies we can implement that would be better than prods and ways we can improve the activity requirements, I'm an open and willing ear, but I'm done discussing the moderation of the games. I've talked about it to death and you've descended to condescension and insults.
I won't accept that you think Hawk should've been replaced or modkilled.
He replaced in on the last day of the phase and Day 2 ended before there was even a single prod period.
If anyone is being disingenuous here it's you guys by acting like Hawk should've made a billion posts during the 72 hours of posting he had available.
Would it have been better if he had made a couple of posts on Day 2? Yes, absolutely. But Day 2 was like 48 hours long. He might not have even known Night was over at that rate.
He wasn't ever even in prod range.
Would it have been better if Cantrip had posted? Yeah, but he was unexpectedly unable to participate and vocalized that he wanted to try to play through it. We gave him a couple of prod periods of no posting then made his team replace him.
And far as that suggestion, I don't actually think that fixes anything.
Even by your new rule Beeboy was still on his second prod.
He should have been issued his third prod on the 29th, Lethargy would've had until the 30th to replace him if we had been prompt, as it was we asked them to replace him on the 30th immediately in lieu of issuing the third prod... which is pretty much the guidelines for your fix. They would've had until the 31st to replace him, while we would've given them until the end of the night phase, but he was lynched on the 31st anyway after we said a modkill for the slot was imminent.
See what I mean?
72 hour prods are simply not sufficient to spur the activity levels you guys expected while 48 hour prods are too short for some players who absolutely do participate in a way most of us find acceptable, like Rhand. Or even me. Sometimes I take a 48 hour break from the thread. Sometimes people can't post on weekends. Etc.
But they're too long to enforce the activity level you think is reasonable. 72 hour prods means I can post nothing for the first 3 days of the game, make one post, then not post for another 3 days, make another post, etc. etc. and never be prodded. Ever. I am fully within my rights and the activity guidelines as long as I post within 72 hours of my last post, and could end each phase with less than 7 posts. And, again, be fully within the activity guidelines.
This is clearly unacceptable, but it is permitted because of the structure of prods and the period allotted to post without running afoul of them. Including your fix.
We either need a complete overhaul of the way we track activity, by instituting post minimums and maximums or something else.
Or we need to shrink the player count of games and force replace within 24 hours of missing their second prod, not third.
Or we need to design games to take extra kills into account, either by baking in an additional mislynch with a way for wolves to get an extra kill if the modkill isn't necessary or hits a wolf. Or using activity vigilantes. Etc. etc.
Or or, we can shorten prod lengths to 24-48 hours and go back to the days of yore when modkills fell from the sky like rain drops and landed on people for mild rules infractions, which will either create a situation where people just don't sign up for games if they don't have time to post literally every day or will drive players off site where modkills are less common.
Or or, we can make "activity" a nebulous, subjective thing and just tell mods to modkill slots for not actively participating without actually codifying what that means in the rules like we do for angleshooting.
But no "fix" that is still based on 72 hour prods is going to create the activity level you're looking for. It literally cannot.
No, D_V. My input was always heard even if it was sometimes overruled. There's some stuff I would've done differently, sure. If I had been modding alone, I might've used greater transparency when issuing prods by saying what would happen to specific slots if they missed their next prod. But I have an issue with your interpretation of the rules and your belief that they weren't appropriately enforced because I absolutely think they were.
And I'm not minimizing anything. I'm simply saying that what would've been a no-notice modkill was not an appropriate remedy at any point in the lifetime of the Transcend/Beeboy slot. The slot didn't post enough content. We get that. I get that. But the rules didn't require a lot of content, either, and the logistics of replacements in this format meant we couldn't know in advance whether Lethargy had another replacement available from their home site or not. Transcend replaced out relatively promptly. We wanted to give Lethargy the 48-72 hours to find a replacement that we gave every team that needed to find one.
I'm sorry you felt the game was completely ruined by a few players not posting, but I genuinely feel we handled the situation the best way we could without reneging on the contract everyone agreed to when they signed up. Which was, to reiterate, that no notice modkills were a potential remedy for repeated prodding. Not that they would be used to kill slots that didn't produce enough "content," but that they would potentially be used as a remedy for players who required repeated prodding.
Beeboy should've been prodded promptly on the 24th. That is absolutely, categorically our fault. At the time we actually prodded him, we had confidence that he would begin posting again. He was prodded on the 26th then failed to respond to the prod within the 72 hour window for his next prod. At which point we explicitly said we were forcing Lethargy to replace him and assessing the need for modkills. A modkill was always on the table and the game was told 14 hours before the lynch that he would be modkilled no later than the Start of Day 2. While that isn't a lot of time, we had already stated modkills were being assessed and he was only at L-4 in a 12 player game. Just about any lynch would've been viable due to the instituted deadline lynch rules.
At which point was it appropriate to issue the slot a modkill according to the rules?
Should we have modkilled him immediately when he failed to respond to his second prod even though the rules clearly say that no notice mod kills are only appropriate if a player requires repeated prodding?
Should we have modkilled him immediately rather than using the less game-damaging option of force replacement, which is an equally valid remedy for the situation according to the rules?
Or, to restate, are you making the argument that two prods is the same thing as "repeated prodding"?
The rules simply didn't enforce the activity levels you wanted them to and, frankly, they were never meant to. I understand where you got the impression you did, but the point of prods is to remind players that the game exists, not enforce activity levels. Clearly this is no longer sufficient and we need real activity rules.
We've had long conversations about what to do about it in the mod chat. Some of that spilled over into the conversation we had in the Mafia Council thread. Your complaints have been heard and will be taken into consideration in every one of my future games, at least, and based on the conversations I've had with Eco he's also keen to try stuff to keep games moving and minimize the impact of lurkers. One of those ideas is to reduce game sizes so we have a deeper pool of replacements. Which Eco already said.
I literally spent like an hour combing the thread last night to make that post with the spoilers in it. Transcend's post with the nonworking vote counts as content and most of Beeboy's posts on the 26th count, as well. The bar for content is that it contains a vote or any commentary on the game state, it doesn't have a length requirement or anything like that. "Contains content" is a super low bar to clear.
Which goes back to you (and D_V) having different interpretations of what "content" means. In this case, the guidance is that "catching up" does not count as content, which, again, is a very low bar to clear.
Please go back to my first response to D_V in this thread, open the spoilers, and read the timelines I posted. Those contain my interpretation of events as a member of the moderation team.
And it actually has everything to do with him not being modkilled because he was hard lynched from L-4 after we told you he would be modkilled.
Again, and I'm getting tired of repeating this, Beeboy missed his second prod with 2 days left in the phase.
Should we have only given Lethargy 24 hours to find a replacement?
Is two prods "repeated"?
How is a modkill with a jump to night different in literally any way from lynching him? We could have done this thing. It would have changed nothing so this argument is meaningless.
Yes, it sucks the slot didn't post much in aggregate and didn't produce much content when it did post.
But at which point in my spoilered timeline does it seem reasonable, to you, to have modkilled him, in accordance with the rules that require repeated prods before no notice mod kills?
I'm 99% sure neither D_V nor Vezok would have considered a 24-48 hour extension reasonable, by my memory of the team char conversations that happened around that time.
And quite honestly, I agree, an extension that short is pointless. Longer than that is too long. Ultimately, they should've lynched someone else and allowed us to replace or modkill him at start of day 2.
He wasn't technically even in force replace range by the rules as written unless you claim 2 prods is the same as repeated. That's the crux of the issue here.
Beeboy would have been modkilled if a replacement hadn't been found, it isn't our fault he was lynched anyway.
Both players who occupied that slot posted content. They didn't post *much* content, clearly, but I enumerated the events pretty clearly in the spoilers.
Should we have pre-emptively modkilled him after the second prod to prevent his lynch and extended the day instead, leaving either players who normally play 72/24 phases at the longest stuck in a 3 week hell after we told them two week deadlines, or only given you 24-48 hours to find another lynch?
At which point, specifically, should we have issued modkills?
Transcend made a post with content on the day of game start, July 18th, then asked to be replaced on the 20th. He was well within his prod range.
He was replaced within 24 hours of this request, by his team, on the 21st.
His replacement, beeboy, made a contentless post on the 22nd and was prodded on the 26th. This was, admittedly, slow modding on our part, but we can't modkill him because we forgot to prod him on the 24th when he should have been.
Beeboy made a series of real posts on the 26th, then should have been prodded with his second prod on the 29th. This prod was delivered on the 30th, and we attempted to force replace him after he failed to respond to this second prod. He attempted a prod dodge, which was denied, and after we told you he would be modkilled at the start of Day 2 at the latest if a replacement wasn't found he was lynched anyway which made the point moot.
When, exactly, should we have modkilled Beeboy? After we forgot to prod him on the 24th instead of prodding him on the 26th? Immediately when he failed to respond to his second prod on the 29th instead of telling Lethargy to look for a replacement? Is that fair to the other players on Team Lethargy? Is it fair to him when he'd only been prodded once before this and the rules clearly state that, quote, "repeated prodded will lead to replacement or modkill without warning - at a penalty to your team."? Because honestly, the phrasing of the rule begs two questions. (1) Should the moderator really be expected to jump straight to mod kills even though force replacement is an equally valid remedy for repeated prods and has lower game impact? and (2) How many prods is "repeated"? Is it two? I'd probably argue that a player hasn't been repeatedly prodded until they've been prodded three times, myself. And Beeboy was only prodded twice. Transcend wasn't prodded at all!
Cantrip posted with relative frequency until he encountered some life issues on the 20th; his last post with content was on the 19th and he informed us he may need to replace out. He attempted to post on the 23rd and asked us to not replace him out until he knew if he could play or not. We gave him ~one week of psuedo-V/LA then made the decision to force replace him on the 28th after he failed to post in the intervening period (from the 26th to the 28th).
Hawk replaced in on the 31st, less than 72 hours later, posted on the 1st which was the day of the lynch, and then there was Night until the 5th. He should've been prodded on the 8th, but there was a majority lynch on the 7th which was before the prod limit. He was promptly shot by his wolf partner with a vig shot invention.
When should we have modkilled Cantrip or Hawk? Should we not have given Cantrip psuedo-V/LA until the 26th and just modkilled him without even prodding him? When he missed his first "official" prod on what should have been the 29th? When Hawk didn't post during the 48 hour Day 2?Listen. I get it. Playing with lurkers is frustrating and you expected everyone to be super active and for us to enforce the rules super strictly. The actual problem is that the rules weren't set up to meet your expectations. Not that your expectations were unreasonable, they just didn't match ours. To meet your expectations we would have needed either minimum post counts (20-30 posts per phaseish) or much shorter prods on the order of 24 hours or something.
Eco didn't unilaterally decide most of this stuff; he had ultimate decision making authority, but the three of us together had long discussions and weighed the pros and cons of each action before we made a decision. Could the rules have been more clear? Yes, they absolutely could have. They could have explicitly said "after your third missed prod" instead of "repeated prodding." They could have said "we will attempt to force replace before using modkills" instead of "you will be force replaced or modkilled without warning".
They didn't explicitly say that even though that's the way we interpreted and applied them. But I'm not convinced that your interpretation, which requires the mod to jump to modkills on the second prod on a player, is a better reading of the rules as written than ours, which uses the remedy least damaging to the game's integrity first and is one of the allowed remedies.As an aside, it's hilarious you're accusing Eco of ad hominem when he simply asked you to express your opinions more politely. He wasn't dismissing your argument because "insert insult/personality trait here"; he isn't dismissing you at all, frankly, just saying he wishes you'd use less vitriol when expressing yourself. That isn't an attack on you. And I'm not attacking you either!
I just think you had really different expectations than we had; we wanted, ultimately, to run the most fun, cleanest set of games we could, and we believed that instant mod kills for missing two prods would have made the experience worse than it already was. There's not really any effective way to handle lurkers in any Mafia format. Mod kills punish the lurker but risk ending the game instantly, which isn't fun or interesting for anyone and often leaves a bad taste in people's mouths because of the way the game ended. Allowing them to lurk presents its own problems, but to some extent that's why the game has baked in mislynches. The best way to handle them, obviously, is to replace them when possible. Which we tried to do in the most fair manner we could according to the rules we posted that everyone agreed to when they signed up. If anyone had said they had some life stuff come up and needed a few days of V/LA to figure out if they could continue playing or not, they would have gotten the time they needed. Same as Cantrip did.
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I just don't get what you get out of relitigating and scrutinizing every single mod action and trying to force me to defend them after we've already admitted we made mistakes and we'll try to do better next time.
If you want to talk about whether this thing or that thing should be allowed, that's a fine thing to debate. If you want to talk about specific changes to the rules you think would improve them, that's fine too. But I'm not going to justify every mod action that happened, especially after we've already all agreed some of it shouldn't have.
But I have a problem with the way you're framing double standards, because you're essentially arguing that issuing modkilleds once you run out of replacements is also a double standard that unfairly harms the team of the player that replaced out later. Double standards can only apply when all circumstances, including available replacements, are extremely similar if not identical. Just my two cents.
As far as Nancy specifically goes, I categorically deny your version of events. She would not have been replaced even if we already had someone queued to take the slot who was caught up in the game, and that is a fact. It's a sad fact, because she shouldn't have been given so much V/LA in the first place, but that's the way it is, and that's how it happened.
Edit: accidentally words
Your complaints have been heard and we'd like to discuss alterations to the rules that would help instead of going around in circles about whose interpretation is more correct. Moderator always gets the final word on rules interpretations, and we tried to interpret them as fairly as we could. If you don't want to talk about solutions and are trying to get us to say we're terrible people for being human and making mistakes or something, you've gotten as good as you're going to get on that front. We've clearly and plainly admitted that mistakes were made and we'll try to do better next time.
What do you actually want out of this if not that? I even apologized several posts ago that the lurking impacted your enjoyment and I got condescended to about how you need to teach me why lurkers are bad.
What do you want?
You were never told modkills were being ignored, unless that happened in a DM with Eco that I'm not privy to. We said it was "on the table but trying to be avoided at all costs." That isn't in any way shape or form a statement that a modkill would never happen. It was a statement saying we were trying to avoid one but that it may be necessary.
Nacho missed one prod and returned before his second prod would have been issued, and had dozens of posts prior to that.
I'm done talking about this, we're just going in circles because you refuse to accept that the rules were inadequate and blame us even though we followed them. There's very little room for interpretation in "repeated prodding may lead to force replacement or modkills with no notice."
I guess you could argue we should have overridden the rules and modkilled people out of a sense of "fairness" to the other players. I think that's what you're really trying to say, that we should have ignored the rules and modkilled the slots for having low post counts.
But I don't want to permit mods to modkill people for reasons like "I didn't like the amount of content they produced even though they were following the activity guidelines I had in the rules for my game." We shouldn't have mods unilaterally choosing to modkill players for stuff that isn't a rules violation.
And it certainly isn't the way I would ever moderate a game. It isn't fair or just to modkill people on the fly with no warning for stuff that doesn't break the rules. I set up the rules and enforce them to the best of my ability, and if the rules don't create the kind of game I want to see, I'll change them for the next game. That is fundamentally more fair than pulling a Vader on the whole playerlist.
So, yeah, I guess. If you're trying to argue for more tyrannical mods, who ignore the rules to punish players you perceive as being a problem, you're not going make much headway. Because I disagree with that notion on such a fundamental level that we're never going to see eye to eye.
We *didn't* do that due to some extenuating circumstances on Nancy's end and because we believed that she was communicating with us in good faith and would resume posting at a reasonable rate when she returned from V/LA.
I've gone back through both your team chat and our DMs and don't see where either myself or Eco said we weren't replacing Nancy *because* we didn't want to modkill her. If Eco said that in a DM to you, I suppose it might be true, but that wasn't the impression I had and I would have lobbied against it. Or I hope I would've, anyway, again, hard to tell months after the fact knowing what I know now.
As far as replacements go, I don't think you guys are getting it still.
The way we had to do replacements for the event necessitated extended periods without someone in the slot.
Step 1: If someone doesn't post for 72 hours, they are prodded via Discord and/or MTGS PM.
Step 2: If they do not respond to the prod and do not post content during the next 72 hours, we ask the team to begin looking for a replacement in lieu of prodding twice consecutively and started asking around for an MTGS player who might be willing to work with unfamiliar players as a force replacement.
Step 3: If they have not responded to the prod and have not posted during the next 72 hour period, we replaced in the team replacement, otherwise we performed the force replacement. When we ran out of replacements we would have had to issue modkills.
If someone responds to the prod at any point before the 3rd prod would have been issued, they're permitted to remain in the slot with various promises to not need prodded again if they missed more than one prod.
Once they've been issued three official prods they're out on their ass regardless.
We had some unfortunate situations residing in grey areas like Cantrip, who was responding to prods but unable to produce content, and Nancy who took extended V/LA then extended it again, but generally speaking the above is what was supposed to happen.
I don't think 24 hours is a reasonable amount of team to expect a team to source a replacement. That means the team immediately receives the replacement request from us, messages a bunch of people instantly, and gets responses back without any questions about the game being asked, selects a replacement, gets the replacement to make a Twitch/MTGS account if necessary, and gets us the account name of the replacement, all in single day.
In fact I'd be willing to bet that most of you, including me, have left a slot unreplaced for longer than 24 hours when the actual replacement list was empty for a game you modded while you mentioned people in #lonely-hearts and posted to the replacement request thread hoping for a response.
And the system above is pretty much exactly what Osie is asking for except with shorter prod periods, 48 instead of 72.
If you think shortening the prod period is enough, that's certainly something that can/could happen for the next one, but even with 48 hour prods in a two week phase you'll end up with the potential for lurkers 7-8 posting every day and never getting prodded.
Prodding cannot solve the lurker problem, it can only remind people the game exists. And even that it does imperfectly because it relies on the prodded player checking Discord or MTGS but not actually posting.
If you just think the problem is that people are just forgetting about the game and that habitual forgettors need replaced sooner, that's fine. But there's been a real focus on people with low post counts in the feedback I'm getting and shorter prod periods don't really increase post counts.
But *strictly* speaking the rules permit this and the offending player will not even be prodded.
That's why I think we need to overhaul activity requirements rather than just shorten prod lengths or something.
Literally no one is saying that games containing multiple slots with 8 posts are fun. I challenge you to quote where Eco said that because I am 110% sure he never did. And all three of us absolutely do value the time and effort players spend(t) playing the game.
But it was fair. It was equal, proper enforcement of the rules as written and read and agreed to by every single player when they signed up. Two prods is not repeated prodding. A 24 or 48 hour extension would not have permitted any replacement - who, other than Hawk, weren't even in place at the time you replaced out - to catch up and produce what you would consider "acceptable content." Anything more than that was out of the question for a no-notice extension, especially considering there were guest players who had been told that phases would last two weeks.
It isn't just hard. We don't have the tools to enforce this with our current forum software, either.
So, you want people replaced or modkilled immediately if they fail to respond to their first prod within 48 hours? That doesn't seem a bit draconian to you?
We understand as moderators that modkills are unavoidable in some situations and were absolutely prepared to exercise this power. We, in fact, did issue two modkills and were fully prepared to modkill beeboy after a suitable length of time was given to Lethargy to find a replacement.
The rest of this post has been snipped because I've already acknowledged and responded to literally everything said here except the Nancy stuff, to which my only reply would be "No, we wouldn't have instantly replaced her when she asked for V/LA if we had available replacements, that's a ridiculous idea, or at least I hope we wouldn't have, it's hard to tell months after the fact."
I don't need you to tell me lurking is bad for the game, D_V. None of us do. And quoting where Dan said we would modkill him at the start of Day 2 then trying to twist it to say we weren't ever going to modkill him is pretty disingenuous. Lethargy had only had 24 hours to find a replacement at that point. That isn't a suitable length of time to message people and get a response.
If you want to talk about policies we can implement that would be better than prods and ways we can improve the activity requirements, I'm an open and willing ear, but I'm done discussing the moderation of the games. I've talked about it to death and you've descended to condescension and insults.
He replaced in on the last day of the phase and Day 2 ended before there was even a single prod period.
If anyone is being disingenuous here it's you guys by acting like Hawk should've made a billion posts during the 72 hours of posting he had available.
Would it have been better if he had made a couple of posts on Day 2? Yes, absolutely. But Day 2 was like 48 hours long. He might not have even known Night was over at that rate.
He wasn't ever even in prod range.
Would it have been better if Cantrip had posted? Yeah, but he was unexpectedly unable to participate and vocalized that he wanted to try to play through it. We gave him a couple of prod periods of no posting then made his team replace him.
And far as that suggestion, I don't actually think that fixes anything.
Even by your new rule Beeboy was still on his second prod.
He should have been issued his third prod on the 29th, Lethargy would've had until the 30th to replace him if we had been prompt, as it was we asked them to replace him on the 30th immediately in lieu of issuing the third prod... which is pretty much the guidelines for your fix. They would've had until the 31st to replace him, while we would've given them until the end of the night phase, but he was lynched on the 31st anyway after we said a modkill for the slot was imminent.
See what I mean?
72 hour prods are simply not sufficient to spur the activity levels you guys expected while 48 hour prods are too short for some players who absolutely do participate in a way most of us find acceptable, like Rhand. Or even me. Sometimes I take a 48 hour break from the thread. Sometimes people can't post on weekends. Etc.
But they're too long to enforce the activity level you think is reasonable. 72 hour prods means I can post nothing for the first 3 days of the game, make one post, then not post for another 3 days, make another post, etc. etc. and never be prodded. Ever. I am fully within my rights and the activity guidelines as long as I post within 72 hours of my last post, and could end each phase with less than 7 posts. And, again, be fully within the activity guidelines.
This is clearly unacceptable, but it is permitted because of the structure of prods and the period allotted to post without running afoul of them. Including your fix.
We either need a complete overhaul of the way we track activity, by instituting post minimums and maximums or something else.
Or we need to shrink the player count of games and force replace within 24 hours of missing their second prod, not third.
Or we need to design games to take extra kills into account, either by baking in an additional mislynch with a way for wolves to get an extra kill if the modkill isn't necessary or hits a wolf. Or using activity vigilantes. Etc. etc.
Or or, we can shorten prod lengths to 24-48 hours and go back to the days of yore when modkills fell from the sky like rain drops and landed on people for mild rules infractions, which will either create a situation where people just don't sign up for games if they don't have time to post literally every day or will drive players off site where modkills are less common.
Or or, we can make "activity" a nebulous, subjective thing and just tell mods to modkill slots for not actively participating without actually codifying what that means in the rules like we do for angleshooting.
But no "fix" that is still based on 72 hour prods is going to create the activity level you're looking for. It literally cannot.
And I'm not minimizing anything. I'm simply saying that what would've been a no-notice modkill was not an appropriate remedy at any point in the lifetime of the Transcend/Beeboy slot. The slot didn't post enough content. We get that. I get that. But the rules didn't require a lot of content, either, and the logistics of replacements in this format meant we couldn't know in advance whether Lethargy had another replacement available from their home site or not. Transcend replaced out relatively promptly. We wanted to give Lethargy the 48-72 hours to find a replacement that we gave every team that needed to find one.
I'm sorry you felt the game was completely ruined by a few players not posting, but I genuinely feel we handled the situation the best way we could without reneging on the contract everyone agreed to when they signed up. Which was, to reiterate, that no notice modkills were a potential remedy for repeated prodding. Not that they would be used to kill slots that didn't produce enough "content," but that they would potentially be used as a remedy for players who required repeated prodding.
Beeboy should've been prodded promptly on the 24th. That is absolutely, categorically our fault. At the time we actually prodded him, we had confidence that he would begin posting again. He was prodded on the 26th then failed to respond to the prod within the 72 hour window for his next prod. At which point we explicitly said we were forcing Lethargy to replace him and assessing the need for modkills. A modkill was always on the table and the game was told 14 hours before the lynch that he would be modkilled no later than the Start of Day 2. While that isn't a lot of time, we had already stated modkills were being assessed and he was only at L-4 in a 12 player game. Just about any lynch would've been viable due to the instituted deadline lynch rules.
At which point was it appropriate to issue the slot a modkill according to the rules?
Should we have modkilled him immediately when he failed to respond to his second prod even though the rules clearly say that no notice mod kills are only appropriate if a player requires repeated prodding?
Should we have modkilled him immediately rather than using the less game-damaging option of force replacement, which is an equally valid remedy for the situation according to the rules?
Or, to restate, are you making the argument that two prods is the same thing as "repeated prodding"?
The rules simply didn't enforce the activity levels you wanted them to and, frankly, they were never meant to. I understand where you got the impression you did, but the point of prods is to remind players that the game exists, not enforce activity levels. Clearly this is no longer sufficient and we need real activity rules.
We've had long conversations about what to do about it in the mod chat. Some of that spilled over into the conversation we had in the Mafia Council thread. Your complaints have been heard and will be taken into consideration in every one of my future games, at least, and based on the conversations I've had with Eco he's also keen to try stuff to keep games moving and minimize the impact of lurkers. One of those ideas is to reduce game sizes so we have a deeper pool of replacements. Which Eco already said.
Which goes back to you (and D_V) having different interpretations of what "content" means. In this case, the guidance is that "catching up" does not count as content, which, again, is a very low bar to clear.
Please go back to my first response to D_V in this thread, open the spoilers, and read the timelines I posted. Those contain my interpretation of events as a member of the moderation team.
And it actually has everything to do with him not being modkilled because he was hard lynched from L-4 after we told you he would be modkilled.
Again, and I'm getting tired of repeating this, Beeboy missed his second prod with 2 days left in the phase.
Should we have only given Lethargy 24 hours to find a replacement?
Is two prods "repeated"?
How is a modkill with a jump to night different in literally any way from lynching him? We could have done this thing. It would have changed nothing so this argument is meaningless.
Yes, it sucks the slot didn't post much in aggregate and didn't produce much content when it did post.
But at which point in my spoilered timeline does it seem reasonable, to you, to have modkilled him, in accordance with the rules that require repeated prods before no notice mod kills?
And quite honestly, I agree, an extension that short is pointless. Longer than that is too long. Ultimately, they should've lynched someone else and allowed us to replace or modkill him at start of day 2.
He wasn't technically even in force replace range by the rules as written unless you claim 2 prods is the same as repeated. That's the crux of the issue here.
Both players who occupied that slot posted content. They didn't post *much* content, clearly, but I enumerated the events pretty clearly in the spoilers.
Should we have pre-emptively modkilled him after the second prod to prevent his lynch and extended the day instead, leaving either players who normally play 72/24 phases at the longest stuck in a 3 week hell after we told them two week deadlines, or only given you 24-48 hours to find another lynch?
What remedy are you asking for, exactly?
He was replaced within 24 hours of this request, by his team, on the 21st.
His replacement, beeboy, made a contentless post on the 22nd and was prodded on the 26th. This was, admittedly, slow modding on our part, but we can't modkill him because we forgot to prod him on the 24th when he should have been.
Beeboy made a series of real posts on the 26th, then should have been prodded with his second prod on the 29th. This prod was delivered on the 30th, and we attempted to force replace him after he failed to respond to this second prod. He attempted a prod dodge, which was denied, and after we told you he would be modkilled at the start of Day 2 at the latest if a replacement wasn't found he was lynched anyway which made the point moot.
Hawk replaced in on the 31st, less than 72 hours later, posted on the 1st which was the day of the lynch, and then there was Night until the 5th. He should've been prodded on the 8th, but there was a majority lynch on the 7th which was before the prod limit. He was promptly shot by his wolf partner with a vig shot invention.
Listen. I get it. Playing with lurkers is frustrating and you expected everyone to be super active and for us to enforce the rules super strictly. The actual problem is that the rules weren't set up to meet your expectations. Not that your expectations were unreasonable, they just didn't match ours. To meet your expectations we would have needed either minimum post counts (20-30 posts per phaseish) or much shorter prods on the order of 24 hours or something.
Eco didn't unilaterally decide most of this stuff; he had ultimate decision making authority, but the three of us together had long discussions and weighed the pros and cons of each action before we made a decision. Could the rules have been more clear? Yes, they absolutely could have. They could have explicitly said "after your third missed prod" instead of "repeated prodding." They could have said "we will attempt to force replace before using modkills" instead of "you will be force replaced or modkilled without warning".
They didn't explicitly say that even though that's the way we interpreted and applied them. But I'm not convinced that your interpretation, which requires the mod to jump to modkills on the second prod on a player, is a better reading of the rules as written than ours, which uses the remedy least damaging to the game's integrity first and is one of the allowed remedies.
As an aside, it's hilarious you're accusing Eco of ad hominem when he simply asked you to express your opinions more politely. He wasn't dismissing your argument because "insert insult/personality trait here"; he isn't dismissing you at all, frankly, just saying he wishes you'd use less vitriol when expressing yourself. That isn't an attack on you. And I'm not attacking you either!
I just think you had really different expectations than we had; we wanted, ultimately, to run the most fun, cleanest set of games we could, and we believed that instant mod kills for missing two prods would have made the experience worse than it already was. There's not really any effective way to handle lurkers in any Mafia format. Mod kills punish the lurker but risk ending the game instantly, which isn't fun or interesting for anyone and often leaves a bad taste in people's mouths because of the way the game ended. Allowing them to lurk presents its own problems, but to some extent that's why the game has baked in mislynches. The best way to handle them, obviously, is to replace them when possible. Which we tried to do in the most fair manner we could according to the rules we posted that everyone agreed to when they signed up. If anyone had said they had some life stuff come up and needed a few days of V/LA to figure out if they could continue playing or not, they would have gotten the time they needed. Same as Cantrip did.
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