Your chime is very welcome, mister(?) random nobody.
I also (personally) like tight-knit communities over giant Mafia factories, and as I understand it (someone correct me if I'm wrong) the plan is to remain that. We would be a small island inside a much larger archipel, with players coming and going as they please.
Our issue is not how many games we are running at once, it's the dwindling of our community. MTGS is a dead site (most members moved to "MTG Nexus"), we barely ever get truly new players (only travellers like you who come from another community), old players come and go. Other than Cantripmancer's game which is an exception, games take months to fill up.
No matter how tight-knit the community, if it can only rely on travellers to grow and on veterans staying to not dwindle, it's going to slowly die. I have seen it happen to completion elsewhere, and it is currently happening here.
So we are moving to essentially become the new blood we lack.
---
As for where, my vote goes to Mafia Collosseum over Mafia Universe since we were invited by Osie, who is very active here behind the scenes and knows our needs / preferences well.
I don't know what options we have other than these two (or going to nexus and having secret games, through PMs and user profiles :-p )
We simply do not have the active player base to fire games; even discord activity has noticeably decreased in the last few months.
Discord activity decreases because games take forever to start here. And it's probable that the more they do, then the less often people check the forum or Discord, and we run into a vicious cycle.
--
What we need to keep the community going is easy to say but not as easy to do. We need actual new blood. Not (only) players invited from other communities. These players can help fill up games (see: over half the playerbase in Voldemort), but if they don't stay and don't get involved with our community, then all they do is artifically inflate our ranks.
The MTGS Mafia community started small then grew thanks to people coming from the rest of the site, trying a game out of curiosity / boredom / already knowing Mafia and perhaps staying. Since MTGS is dying and most subforums are deserted, the natural influx of newcomers has stopped and instead nearly all the "new" players are "mercenaries" from other places.
If you remove these mercenaries, you are left with a dwindling "old guard" increasingly made of people who only play occasionally and at a slow pace. Eventually enough of the old guard will have moved on that the community won't be able to function with or without outside players. There's no point for them to come here if they can run the exact same games with the exact same people in their original communities. We have already reached the point where we badly need outside players just to run a small game.
Things will not get better with time. Fiddling with deadlines will have absolutely no long term effect. I have seen that movie already. It has a sad ending.
1
I also (personally) like tight-knit communities over giant Mafia factories, and as I understand it (someone correct me if I'm wrong) the plan is to remain that. We would be a small island inside a much larger archipel, with players coming and going as they please.
Our issue is not how many games we are running at once, it's the dwindling of our community. MTGS is a dead site (most members moved to "MTG Nexus"), we barely ever get truly new players (only travellers like you who come from another community), old players come and go. Other than Cantripmancer's game which is an exception, games take months to fill up.
No matter how tight-knit the community, if it can only rely on travellers to grow and on veterans staying to not dwindle, it's going to slowly die. I have seen it happen to completion elsewhere, and it is currently happening here.
So we are moving to essentially become the new blood we lack.
---
As for where, my vote goes to Mafia Collosseum over Mafia Universe since we were invited by Osie, who is very active here behind the scenes and knows our needs / preferences well.
I don't know what options we have other than these two (or going to nexus and having secret games, through PMs and user profiles :-p )
1
Discord activity decreases because games take forever to start here. And it's probable that the more they do, then the less often people check the forum or Discord, and we run into a vicious cycle.
--
What we need to keep the community going is easy to say but not as easy to do. We need actual new blood. Not (only) players invited from other communities. These players can help fill up games (see: over half the playerbase in Voldemort), but if they don't stay and don't get involved with our community, then all they do is artifically inflate our ranks.
The MTGS Mafia community started small then grew thanks to people coming from the rest of the site, trying a game out of curiosity / boredom / already knowing Mafia and perhaps staying. Since MTGS is dying and most subforums are deserted, the natural influx of newcomers has stopped and instead nearly all the "new" players are "mercenaries" from other places.
If you remove these mercenaries, you are left with a dwindling "old guard" increasingly made of people who only play occasionally and at a slow pace. Eventually enough of the old guard will have moved on that the community won't be able to function with or without outside players. There's no point for them to come here if they can run the exact same games with the exact same people in their original communities. We have already reached the point where we badly need outside players just to run a small game.
Things will not get better with time. Fiddling with deadlines will have absolutely no long term effect. I have seen that movie already. It has a sad ending.