Hi hi everyone, and welcome to another MafiEra season review, where we discuss events that happened in the past few months, and look back on recent games.
As always, we thank all this season's gamerunners and users who in one way or another helped making these games happen!
As a reminder, the games we had this season were:
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1. Something happened a few times during this season that we think could be addressed: backseat modding.
In more than one game:
• Players and spectators took upon themselves to try and police the tone of ongoing discussions in a game thread;
• Living players sent messages to gamerunners asking them to take their side on an argument, and/or to send warnings to the other players in that argument;
• More recently, gamerunner-restricted commands were used by others without approval, forcing us to manually restart the vote tool so it could work correctly.
We know that in most of the situations above, these users just wanted to help the gamerunner and the community they're a part of, but ultimately that interferes with the job that the gamerunner and the others in the modchat should do; that's what they're there for, to moderate the game. And with the specific gamerunner guidelines in place now (which exist, among other reasons, to maintain the vote tool so Fireblend doesn't have to be online and ready to fix it at all times), leaving moderation to the group of people assigned to that game is more important than ever.
If you think something should be done regarding an ongoing game, please contact the gamerunner and/or the modchat privately instead of doing it yourself, and trust them to do their job and manage their games. And when talking with them, don't order them to do something, but merely suggest them how to handle a problem.
2. Lack of interest in adopting games. Since that program started, none of the listed games were taken by someone to be run, and the "Adopt a Design" thread hasn't received a single post. And we'd like to know if people aren't interested in the idea in the first place, or if there is a problem in the messaging that could be fixed to make those games more attractive to people. Have you thought about adopting a game? If so, why haven't you, and if not, why not?
3. Lack of interest in designing games. In the last trimester of 2017, when we were still settling in on the new forum and trying to find each other, 3 games were pitched to the Review Team and started being worked on.
During the first trimester of 2018 we saw a surge of new users, and many of those wanted to make their own game; because of that, 7 games were pitched during that period.
As time went on, the number of new designs per trimester diminished further and further, to the point that in the last trimester of 2018 only 1 game was sent for review, and in this year's first trimester, again only 1 game was being worked on.
If this rate keeps up, we will not have enough games to be run until the end of the year, and that's worrisome.
We can plug the gaps by running Minis indefinitely, or even better having some games adopted (see the point above), but ideally we'd like to have unique games being created continuously, and by a larger set of people willing to run games than we currently have.
If you have never hosted a game in our community please consider doing so, and if you only did it once, please give it another shot now that you know how things happen in the background. It's thanks to many people that we keep building and taking care of our community, but this place only works as long as we have games to be played.
If you think you might be interested in running a game eventually: what would help you? What resources and support do you need that you think are missing?
4. After a brief discussion in the OT we started moving away from the usage of the word "lynch" and encouraging alternatives instead. How is that going?
5. We debuted and began testing a new priority system that measures game play over time. The new system was discussed heavily in our OT and there are a few specific posts that may help outline the system (the discussion is all around them if you want to revisit that):
https://www.resetera.com/posts/19794870
https://www.resetera.com/posts/19853871
We conducted a survey on priority and Dr. Monkey will post anonymized concerns from that as a reply here. The idea of point decay was raised and generally considered a good addition; Monkey will post a follow-up on that, too.
One thing we should do is hammer out an official definition of a Mini game to avoid any future confusion. For our purposes in Scheduling (and in working to design this system), we consider a Mini any game with a pre-set system - either a generator or standardized set up. Mini games do not have to go through review because they are already balanced because they come from something standard.
The question of whether 999 Mafia should count for priority due to length of time it ran - as in, should we change this system? - should probably be addressed here. Or rather - should any game have to run for X length of time in order to count for priority? Or should we continue with the current measure, which classifies any Mafia game that is reviewed as part of the priority system?
6. This is a topic brought up in multiple seasonal reviews in the past, but as new users join the community and players host games for the first time, learning how things work in the background, it's worth addressing it again:
During this season, a few players indicated some discomfort with in-game attitudes. How can we all best address differences in what people think is and isn't appropriate behavior within the rules? How do we measure aggression?
As always, we thank all this season's gamerunners and users who in one way or another helped making these games happen!
As a reminder, the games we had this season were:
- The Mansion, by Brazil
- Simon Says, by Pedro
- 999, by Faddy
- Grand Mini Mafia V, by Fireblend and Stuart444
- Maple Street, by Dr. Monkey
- House of Horrors, by Natiko
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1. Something happened a few times during this season that we think could be addressed: backseat modding.
In more than one game:
• Players and spectators took upon themselves to try and police the tone of ongoing discussions in a game thread;
• Living players sent messages to gamerunners asking them to take their side on an argument, and/or to send warnings to the other players in that argument;
• More recently, gamerunner-restricted commands were used by others without approval, forcing us to manually restart the vote tool so it could work correctly.
We know that in most of the situations above, these users just wanted to help the gamerunner and the community they're a part of, but ultimately that interferes with the job that the gamerunner and the others in the modchat should do; that's what they're there for, to moderate the game. And with the specific gamerunner guidelines in place now (which exist, among other reasons, to maintain the vote tool so Fireblend doesn't have to be online and ready to fix it at all times), leaving moderation to the group of people assigned to that game is more important than ever.
If you think something should be done regarding an ongoing game, please contact the gamerunner and/or the modchat privately instead of doing it yourself, and trust them to do their job and manage their games. And when talking with them, don't order them to do something, but merely suggest them how to handle a problem.
2. Lack of interest in adopting games. Since that program started, none of the listed games were taken by someone to be run, and the "Adopt a Design" thread hasn't received a single post. And we'd like to know if people aren't interested in the idea in the first place, or if there is a problem in the messaging that could be fixed to make those games more attractive to people. Have you thought about adopting a game? If so, why haven't you, and if not, why not?
3. Lack of interest in designing games. In the last trimester of 2017, when we were still settling in on the new forum and trying to find each other, 3 games were pitched to the Review Team and started being worked on.
During the first trimester of 2018 we saw a surge of new users, and many of those wanted to make their own game; because of that, 7 games were pitched during that period.
As time went on, the number of new designs per trimester diminished further and further, to the point that in the last trimester of 2018 only 1 game was sent for review, and in this year's first trimester, again only 1 game was being worked on.
If this rate keeps up, we will not have enough games to be run until the end of the year, and that's worrisome.
We can plug the gaps by running Minis indefinitely, or even better having some games adopted (see the point above), but ideally we'd like to have unique games being created continuously, and by a larger set of people willing to run games than we currently have.
If you have never hosted a game in our community please consider doing so, and if you only did it once, please give it another shot now that you know how things happen in the background. It's thanks to many people that we keep building and taking care of our community, but this place only works as long as we have games to be played.
If you think you might be interested in running a game eventually: what would help you? What resources and support do you need that you think are missing?
4. After a brief discussion in the OT we started moving away from the usage of the word "lynch" and encouraging alternatives instead. How is that going?
5. We debuted and began testing a new priority system that measures game play over time. The new system was discussed heavily in our OT and there are a few specific posts that may help outline the system (the discussion is all around them if you want to revisit that):
https://www.resetera.com/posts/19794870
https://www.resetera.com/posts/19853871
We conducted a survey on priority and Dr. Monkey will post anonymized concerns from that as a reply here. The idea of point decay was raised and generally considered a good addition; Monkey will post a follow-up on that, too.
One thing we should do is hammer out an official definition of a Mini game to avoid any future confusion. For our purposes in Scheduling (and in working to design this system), we consider a Mini any game with a pre-set system - either a generator or standardized set up. Mini games do not have to go through review because they are already balanced because they come from something standard.
The question of whether 999 Mafia should count for priority due to length of time it ran - as in, should we change this system? - should probably be addressed here. Or rather - should any game have to run for X length of time in order to count for priority? Or should we continue with the current measure, which classifies any Mafia game that is reviewed as part of the priority system?
6. This is a topic brought up in multiple seasonal reviews in the past, but as new users join the community and players host games for the first time, learning how things work in the background, it's worth addressing it again:
During this season, a few players indicated some discomfort with in-game attitudes. How can we all best address differences in what people think is and isn't appropriate behavior within the rules? How do we measure aggression?
