Dies to Removal

One thing I've been thinking is that maybe this site is better prepared to play shorter games. I'm thinking week long deadlines max for each Day (maybe a bit longer for Day 1). Reduces the stress of arguing for days on end and lessens the amount of reading required to do actual analysis (something that people seem reluctant to do at times).

On the other hand, some players seem to only want to post every other day, making it tough to hold to a strict deadline like that. I don't know what the answer is. Maybe mafia's just dead. Seems like half the players in this game didn't really want to play.

I think that having shorter/smaller games is the answer, but being up front about it is key. We need to tell players not to get involved if they're only going to post every other day. We need people who are willing to post at least once a day. That will go a long way to making the games more enjoyable for everyone playing. Then, when everyone's having fun and not bitching about lurkers and not being able to get votes because no one's actually playing, it will begin to attract more players from the rest of the forums.

I had fun with it. even though real life happened.

Like, I don't think I could have done anything differently...I can't assume that my lie detector is being tampered with. I'm still upset that kpaca and az forced me to claim when I repeatedly said it did the town no good. Without that information, LMD would not have known to target me

I do agree that people were a wee bit too bullish in the game and this hurt town.

I disliked Az the day whe lynched ham, and I disliked imopen2 the day we lynched Az. It was all WIFOM, listen to the cop, and as Stardust pointed out, lines were drawn in the sand that precluded us from examining further scenarios.

GG. I definitely don't blame anyone for my mislynch, that was a tough situation with a lot of unknown variables in play. We could only speculate about what was really going on there, and taking us both out wasn't a bad call given the available info. I really enjoyed the mechanics of the game, and they also wound up being very decisive, and pretty well balanced. Nice work, Stardust.

Lurking and full participation are definitely a couple areas we'll need solutions to. Lord McD did a terrific job of capitalizing on a lurky town meta, just blending into the back ground noise, only losing due to good ability-usage by the town, rather than any behavioral mistakes or clues that he made. Major props there.

I do wish the town had more interest in trying to learn and do more behavioral analysis, researching, and taking public stances. We were wide open to LMD's lurker strategy, and while both the town and Stardust made repeated efforts to prod people into posting more, we just didn't have enough people yet who wanted to really dive all the way in and sink their teeth into the game. Mojo/CK was almost mislynched based purely on our activity problems. That was definitely my achilles heel, here. I just couldn't generate enough data to clear or analyze people effectively, apart from D1.

If folks are interested, I'd be happy to write up an expansion on some of my old articles dealing with behavioral analysis, and what to look for. If people have a better idea of what to talk about, and what to look for, maybe it'll be easier to have better conversations about tells and behavioral analysis, and it won't be so much a few of us standing in a room looking at one another, crickets chirping. There's a lot of different ways and styles to go about it, different from my own, but at the very least I could provide a starting point and a vocabulary for people to start developing their own methods.

Yeah, that would be a nice thing to have. Hell we could even make it a frontpage article for all I know

Tangential question:

Is this a setup that could be run again? Half of the fun (and most of the frustration) was not knowing what the mafia could do. Would running it again later make this setup better or worse? I'm sure there are things Stardust could do to change up the townie list so we wouldn't know which characters to expect.

If I ran something like this again I would rework the scum team entirely. Specializations would have to change and there might even be some non-builders on the town side.

Was it really that much fun that you'd like to play again? I mean, I'm glad you liked it, but there are other setups I have built too.

I really did enjoy this, even though my master plan was foiled in the end. I really felt like I could have a major impact on the game and that my individual decisions were important. The setup was beautiful for that and I loved the flavor that everything had. I would totally play this again if I got the chance.

I can't really believe two of us came up with the bomb vest idea and that we both survived until the end. That might be something that you have to rework as far as a timeline to complete.

Tangential question:

Is this a setup that could be run again? Half of the fun (and most of the frustration) was not knowing what the mafia could do. Would running it again later make this setup better or worse? I'm sure there are things Stardust could do to change up the townie list so we wouldn't know which characters to expect.

basically what stardust said, knowing what we know now about the setup, it wouldn't be too hard to break the game open