I won't pretend to know what the deal was with Nancy, but it taking a literal week of complete inactivity AFTER her stated V/LA for her to be modkilled AND Gemma bringing it up in the main game thread were both really bad.
Fun event ^^
Liked playing with different people.
I think I enjoy hydra'ing more though, simply because I did not have time to look at other games until after I died.
(etc.)
~~~
I don't really know where else to pose this question, but in a situation like in Game 2 where scum shot their own buddy to gain a clear, is there a way for town to overcome that? How would they?
I feel bad for the ending of that game because I encouraged Shinichi to go after Manasi. I was more worried about him becoming the mislynch because I thought the game was locked. Even without his snapvoting, would the end result be different?
Also, I am just curious in general how to overcome these mechanical disadvantages ^^
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When the point of no return appears, it is already behind you.
Not much you can do about scum seeing an opportunity for towncred and yoinking it.
Only way to double check is to see if your other townreads hold up.
And ask yourself (yourself, not publicly where it’s bound to get WIFOM’d) “why is the hard cleared person still alive?” Sometimes it’s for the wifom, but always got to check.
RE: Nancy. Nancy asked for a week of V/LA (some of which was during Night) which was borderline but not unreasonable, before asking to increase it to a full 15 days. I didn't explicitly permit this, but to my regret I didn't deny it either. Ultimately I didn't think that someone would genuinely be completely absent for very nearly an entire game Day: turns out I was wrong, but by the time I realised this reality I figured she was close enough to being back to not need a replacement. This sadly escalated when it was revealed that Nancy (while still on V/LA but in a some less limited part of it) had been actively playing on MafiaScum, while having issues (only some of which were technical) accessing MTGS - at this point I considered it unacceptable to have been completely uncommunicative for so long (both in terms of playing the game and interacting with me, the mod) while apparently having enough access/availability to play on another site, regardless of the reasons why. Especially since (correctly or incorrectly) there was an obvious alignment-related reason for it. I therefore modkill Nancy. In retrospect, I take a lot of responsibility for it escalating to that - she should have been immediately replaced after requesting so long a V/La period, but I also think that if you know you're going to be totally unable to play for a long period of time you should voluntarily replace out instead of just ghosting. Nancy has her own version of events if she cares to post them, but they're not really that different.
Gemma's modkill was 100% justified, even if it was unfortunate given their mostly positive level of activity and engagement. The severity of the out-of-game information used, the affect it would have had on reads on Gemma, and the explicit mentioning of ongoing games on other sites even after the thread had been warned about it was simply not acceptable. If Gemma had privately messaged me with the information she found rather than posted it in the thread, she would not have been modkilled, and would have been thanked for her vigilance and discretion.
RE: Player numbers. I think we ultimately made eight replacements, which at 22% of 36 players is a pretty reasonable rate (2.6 players in a 12-man game, 3.5 in a 16-player game). Certainly more could have been made, but even then it wasn't an outrageous amount of replacements required, and most of them were handled pretty well with teams finding their own. Nonetheless, future team events should probably have a deeper replacement pool (e.g. every team has to provide a nominated sub), perhaps at the cost of smaller games. I also think future events will require some vetting of player reliability: in our excitement to hit 12-player games, we let in a lot of unknowns and higher-risk flakers which backfired. MafiaScum's team event was only open to players who had history and good standing on MS, and I now very much understand why.
Also the Team Discord chats are about to be publicised, so go check those out!
You've sidestepped the entire issue at large though.
The moderation of this game in regards to player activity was a joke.
Game 2 had a slot that had posted ZERO content all of day one and was going to get another replacement for the game. The fact that you are unwilling to acknowledge or engage on this point is pretty *****ty. The Nancy part is just the pinnacle of this bad moderation. I mentioned it day one of that V/LA that that shouldn't be allowed. And I all I got was you arguing against it because replacements couldn't be found and you didn't have the guts to modkill.
Your version of the story is accurate to the point of generality of the events, but ignores your own underlying principles which is a wrong way to moderate. The fact that you are unwilling to acknowledge this makes me question your moderation going further.
You can not moderate games in terms of balance. Doing so is poor modding.
This was an awesome concept and I was really excited to be a part of it. But I had no stomach for the game. I was over committed and did not have time to give to the event. It was also unfortunate that a huge part of my excitement for the event was the actual team aspect of it and by real life events both of my original teammates had to replace out. This led to a very disjointed team experience (I still feel bad that I gave 7Hawk nothing but I barely had anything for my own game) and we basically gave each other no support until Hunger joined and started hero efforting in game 1. At that point I'd scum claimed, felt guilty about my effort, had a bit more time, felt inspired by his WIM, and tried to help him a little.
Anyway my lack of effort was particularly unfair to Osie and Marko who have both been very gracious about it. Osie in particular started off with tons of effort and I can see the way my dead weight dragged him down. Which sucks because before this I'd always prided myself on being a reliable player who was always going to at least give a solid effort.
Enough apologies.
@Vez I'll join the chorus of people saying your play wasn't great. While you shouldn't let yourself get mislynched and I actually don't always hate fakeclaims, vigs are a horrid fakeclaim in general. In this game in particular you can see how it impacted Newcomb's play. He knew there wasn't killing power for town beyond his ability and had you as hard unaligned with scum. While giving scum a vig shot is absolutely disastrous I can absolutely follow his line of play and the way it stemmed in part from your fake claim. And outside of that this was the absolute best case scenario for a vig fake claim and it bought you a phase?
@RE on that same issue when an extra kill doesn't target a claimed vig and they're not claiming the shot it should always set off alarm bells. There is almost no circumstance where a player with a vig shot shouldn't just shoot someone else who claimed vig.
You can not moderate games in terms of balance. Doing so is poor modding.
I frankly do not agree, although you are welcome to your opinion. I would prefer if you didn't present them with so much vitriol.
I'd prefer it if you respected players time and energy in ways to not make them feel as though their efforts were not in vain. What you have essentially done is made it clear that when ever you moderate players should game the replacements of the game because they will be done with balance in mind and not with individual player behavior in mind. In essence you are encouraging players gaming the moderation.
The fact that you refuse to acknowledge that not having a slot post for entire day phase due to replacements is inherently bad makes me question my very sanity. I do not understand how you can come to such a conclusion. The fact that you will not even back up this questionable at best moderation decision is troubling to me. It represents that you know I am right, or are unable to back up your own thoughts yet will stick to this form of moderation just because.
Player enjoyment in a game should come first, and I do not understand how you can justify player enjoyment when there are slots with essentially less than the advertised amount of players due to your own cowardice from taking the responsible approach and mod killing them.
You asked for suggestions, and yet really what you wanted was nothing of the kind since you are not interested in discussing it further. What you essentially wanted with that comment is how you moderate games. You want everyone to curtail to each other while nothing gets done.
So congratulations on the games concluding, I can't imagine anything that could have possibly improved them or the player experience.
Edit:
To explain this even further, in game 2 there were two slots that hadn't posted more than 5 posts each by the end of day two and none of the posts from either spot accounted for any content. Because of the moderation we were forced into lynching one of the slots blindly because they hadn't posted content. We guessed wrong, and consequently lost the game because of it. This moderation decision heavily favored the mafia team and I am baffled to how a moderator and a member of the council could think that this is acceptable. Add on to that what I see as the moderator knowing that this is wrong and refusing to back it up and dodging any discussion about it instead resorting to Ad Hom attacks is just embarrassing to me.
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.
I have to agree with DV here even though I think he should tone down this argument.
This wasn't a one-off game. It was a team game supposed to be very competitive. The mods shouldn't even have bothered with replacements. Only the teams should.
I consider that people who post are more important for game integrity than lurkers. Beeboy should have absolutely been modkilled. The team got one player who didn't post anything, and then got beeboy who again didn't post anything. That is the fault of the team and a modkill was expected.
I won't even enter the argument of how someone thought a 15 day V/LA was acceptable.
And just as a personal preference, I'd rather have people modkilled until we reach LyLo on day 1 than have to play with lurkers.
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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?
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?
What remedy are you asking for, exactly?
I wasn't in that game, but I would have been fine with the latter.
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.
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.
Modkill and start the night immediately for all I care. Also I'm going to check up on the claims you made about content, because I literally remember nothing from that slot.
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Transcend has two posts. A prododge and a post that might have been written in another language. That is not content. He even tried voting nacho, but put the wrong tags and didn't come back to fix it.
Beeboy is a little better. 5 posts. 3 are prododges, 1 is a vote with a line of unspecified information ("scum might be in the lurkers")
I am both sick and 5 pages in.
I am going to maybe read more tonight or on my break at work tomorrow, I find mafia games are hard to initially get into and I need to get the ball rolling which I am having trouble doing while sick.
I think early on Nacho is coming off as both subtly defensive and kinda just awkward.
I am going to quote the posts that make me feel this way once I catch up but I'd rather fully read the game before I spend time making cases.
Post #56 in particular is one I really didn't like coming from him.
I kinda think that Tom and Shinichi are town but thats more of a gut read then anything else :/
This post is the only one with real content. From an entire slot.
Also the fact that we lynched him has no barring on the modkill or not. I don't want people to get modkilled. I don't like it, but force-replacements should have been prompt and if the team doesn't find a replacements nuke the slot.
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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 just gonna throw this out here, modkills should be a rare last resort solution. Lurking sucks, but it’s our job as players to deal with it when it falls within the rules. Should the rules be more stringent? Maybe. But they weren’t, and they were pretty standard fare for mtgs games. Day 1 should virtually never have a modkill of any slot; exceptions being game breaking play or something similar that damages the slot and requires it to be removed.
Continuing to insist that modkills should be more prevalent will ultimately lead to games that aren’t fun and don’t actually count as Mafia. I call bull crap on the idea that you guys are okay with a day one LyLo, and if you truly prefer that, I’m thankful that you seem to be in the minority, because that doesn’t sound fun and would deincentivize joining games here. Game health does matter, it directly impacts how fun a game is.
I don’t agree that everything done by the mods was done to perfection, but Silver and eco have adequately hilighted the shortcomings; they are aware of mistakes made and timing that could have been better.
I’m just gonna throw this out here, modkills should be a rare last resort solution. Lurking sucks, but it’s our job as players to deal with it when it falls within the rules. Should the rules be more stringent? Maybe. But they weren’t, and they were pretty standard fare for mtgs games. Day 1 should virtually never have a modkill of any slot; exceptions being game breaking play or something similar that damages the slot and requires it to be removed.
Continuing to insist that modkills should be more prevalent will ultimately lead to games that aren’t fun and don’t actually count as Mafia. I call bull crap on the idea that you guys are okay with a day one LyLo, and if you truly prefer that, I’m thankful that you seem to be in the minority, because that doesn’t sound fun and would deincentivize joining games here. Game health does matter, it directly impacts how fun a game is.
I don’t agree that everything done by the mods was done to perfection, but Silver and eco have adequately hilighted the shortcomings; they are aware of mistakes made and timing that could have been better.
That's fundamentally what we are arguing though. You've skipped past the hard point that Eco and Silver are ignoring.
How is it fun to have a game that doesn't have people playing in it? Answer: It isn't.
That's my issue here. We had multiple slots in my game not playing the game. We were largely forced into a blind 50/50 because we correctly deduced that at least one of the scum was in the two lurker slots, and we didn't want to save them for later in the game. Which is the only correct play here. It sucks that we got the 50/50 wrong. It sucks that there were slots that had zero content posts.
It further sucks that the moderation team and you seem to think that is fun to play with.
I don't disagree that it shouldn't be a last resort. I think that replacing the slots once was fine. I still think that this was a team game and that any attempt to congratulate winners, specifically when the team benefited from this is highly questionable. Like you were scum in your game and you heavily benefited from someone who I would say was cheating. My game got ruined day one by the lurking, its why I left. I wasn't having fun, and the moderation wasn't going to do anything to make it fun. You're skipping past my entire point.
It isn't fun to play with lurkers. It isn't fun to have to wait till day 3 of content posting for a scum lurker to finally start posting. It isn't fair either. This is directly against game balance.
I fundamentally agree with the last resort comment. Modkills should always be last resort. I understand mod making mistakes about not prodding, **** I've done that. What I don't understand, is how in a game like this moderation thinks its OK for multiple players to have not PLAYED A WHOLE DAY OF THE GAME. That's a modkill period. I don't see any way for someone to argue against that at all. That isn't game balanced, it isn't fair, and it isn't fun to play with.
Silver you are horribly misrepresenting what was said and why Beeboy was lynched.
We lynched him because it was made clear that he only might be lynched if ANOTHER replacement couldn't be found. Players felt forced into lynching him go back and read the thread, or I can provide quotes if you need me to. This moderation put players in a position where they had to lynch into the 50/50 and for you to deny so seems questionable to me.
Also please don't insult me with saying that the beeboy slot posted some content and that it might not have been much.
Trancends two posts were
A prod dodge and a "My team said vote here"
Beeboy posted like two content pieces and they were pretty pathetic.
Its like you're trying to minimize how bad this actually was. Fact, it was bad. Fact, players lynched him because we were told a modkill might or might not happen. Fact, this shouldn't happen.
And for anyone wondering where my vitriol comes from its because I told Cantrip this stuff, and his response was "I don't give a **** if you are having fun." Yet you all want to talk about fun games. I told Cantrip "hey that Nancy thing shouldn't happen." I was ignored. I plead the case furthers to others. I was ignored. Then when you guys get your hand caught in the god damn cookie jar. Suddenly its like "Oh our bad".
Also silver, I can provide screen shots of you telling me that it was unilaterally cantrip making some of these decisions. I'm not sure where that's coming from now that it wasn't unilateral cantrip.
@DV: I was primarily speaking to Vez's most recent posts and Osie's agreement; but yeah, it sucks with how thing happened. Specifically my game, saying we benefitted from someone exploiting the lurking/VLA policy is basically the opposite of what happened; as far as I am concerned, Nancy's actions (regardless of reason or legitimacy) ruined my game and wrecked what should have been a winnable game. I'm not happy that she didn't post, I'm not thrilled she wasn't replaced, but I can follow the logic of how it got there with reasonable moderating. Would I have made the same decisions? I don't know. But I don't think anyone here is saying "this behavior is okay," so much as saying, "the circumstances here were not cut and dry and we made the calls we made for a reason." Maybe that's me giving too much credit, maybe I'm giving too much benefit of the doubt; but I fundamentally think the mods of this event had the collective best interests of the players in mind. Even (for the sake of argument) granting the premise that there were bad moderation done on the whole, I don't think it's fair to attribute any of it to malice.
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.
@Shadow you're right. I think that was cheap shot by me. I just have a lot of disdain for that players behavior. I'd categorize it as cheating and screwing their team over at the same time.
Silver, I think you're right to an extent. My problem and my primary concern is that Eco doesn't seem concerned at all with how this turned out. You know I've ignored the whole Nachomama disappearing for 5 days too, and the whole "Game health not replaced" argument just offends me.
My point is this. Game 2 had three mafia all of which who lurked. Nacho posted significant content, I'm willing to let it slide. But, when you have another slot that literally never posted, and the manasi slot was pretty lurky too it starts unfair. Mafia is a game of deduction and when I'm rating people based on scuminess and then I have slots that are not giving me anything to work with it feels cheap. I didn't finish the game, but if I had I'd feel cheated. I don't think the mafia deserved that win. I think a lot of the moderator decisions heavily favored them. You keep saying game balance, but what you're fundamentally avoiding is that you ****ed the town over. You made it way harder for the town to win. I understand some of what you are saying on strict plus minus system when comparing roles.
But mafia isn't just that. Its player skill. We don't average teams out, because that's some of the fun. Sometimes a player makes a *****ty decision that costs their team the game. I don't really see lurking as being that much different. I understand that real life takes over and accommodations should be made. I get that. I agree with that. I don't agree with allowing for a slot to basically go through limbo, because each replacement doesn't play. At some point, enough should be enough. I think the whole Beeboy thing would be different to me, if the slot was replaced it made content for half the day, then it needed to be replaced again. That seems reasonable. It seems unreasonable to require players to play with a slot that simply isn't playing. Its rude to require me to play with that. That isn't fun.
I think Transparency needed to be had. There was a lot of waiting around. I had made comments about the lurking in my game. I was told they were being addressed but not how. Then with the result that was given I was just totally unhappy. I don't think the way that it was moderated was fair. I think Eco spent time being myopic on posts that only the strictest readings of the rules would be infringing. For example, I was told not to call players bad, when I made a comment about me thinking newcomb wasn't good, but seeing that I was wrong. Under no thought should this have been read as being an insult, but Eco wanted to take a stand. Meanwhile, Tom quite literally bullied Shinichi and he didn't say anything about it until I brought it to his attention.
Because that's what Eco thinks a good game is, **** the people he doesn't like and let others do what they want.
Also who cares about players time and investment, that doesn't matter.
For what ever my faults are I think moderators should look at things objectively. I think I succeed in doing that. I don't feel that Eco's and the moderation staff was objective. I don't think that it promoted a "Fun" game. And it bothers me that Eco asked for this thread when he clearly has no intention of changing anything about anything. It makes me question how I can have faith in his moderation going further.
To go further, Eco made this comment.
take a lot of responsibility for it escalating to that - she should have been immediately replaced after requesting so long a V/La period, but I also think that if you know you're going to be totally unable to play for a long period of time you should voluntarily replace out instead of just ghosting.
This comment bothers me. Yes, the player is not being responsible for their actions. But this is what moderators do. They moderate. With no objective other than to apply the rules that they have written as fairly as they can. You shouldn't be trying to use the harshest interpretation on some players and the least on others. The end result should always be the same.
With these games, I think the end result might have been the same. But the problem is that one side benefited from it and the other side didn't. The lurking hurt the town. Its not my fault that those players chose to do so, yet I am not put at a disadvantage because they chose to do so. That isn't good game health. That isn't good moderation.
Essentially what was done wasn't fair. Eco's response to that? "I disagree". He can't even articulate more than that as a council member, as the game host of this game. Simply put I don't feel like any change will happen.
Silver I think you've raised great points. I think transparency is key first and foremost. I also think there should be a "Ramping up" mechanic. For example, I think its fair to prod a player, give them three days and prod again for like another two. If that player comes back the prod range reduces to two and one etc. Something like that. People get busy, I understand that. I just think that with what happened specifically my game is unacceptable. Mods make mistakes, I get that. Essentially what I'm looking for is ownership of those mistakes and discussion on how this shouldn't happen in future games. Or at least how we can help prevent it in future games.
TL,DR
It bothers me that we are talking about game balance in strictly terms of point structure. Mafia is a game that involves players as well, and those players heavily dictate the game. Game health should include how fun a game is. Which would include a game with multiple lurkers making it unfun.
I feel like Ego is largely waiving away these concerns and is unwilling to even consider he is wrong. Nancy is a prime example since I campaigned pretty heavily against that and was ignored. Only after being caught with his hand in the cookie jar did he admit wrong doing.
Fundamentally I'm unsure of what the correct answer is to this problem. I think that the current solution is bad. Mafia is a social game at its core.
If this was a co-op game I don't think this would be nearly as big of a deal. But it isn't its a versus game, and having players not playing that I am playing against, and specifically need to figure out if I am playing against makes it unfun.
To clarify really what I mean by objective behavior. Since it just occurred to me.
I feel that the moderation was going. "Wow" this really hurts the mafia. Which it did, but this is player behavior not game mechanics. I don't really know any other way to explain that.
If a player is being toxic, you don't go "Wow modkilling them will hurt X team" you just get rid of them.
My point is thus. You've done your best to balance the game. If you feel game things are unbalanced maybe change them. But the rest of this is a result of player actions. You can't make a bad player good. And yeah having a lurker on your team modkilled sucks. But having a bad player on there also sucks.
I think you have to distance yourself and say "Is this players play being egregious." Nothing should be factored into the players alignment. I get the whole argument about what do when not that bad.
But at the bare minimum as in the case of both cantrips slot and beeboys slot at the end of the day neither player had played day one. And that should just be a get the **** out of here moment.
DV, I am not engaging with you because I don't think it is productive. I've listened to enough of your complaints and tried to have a reasonable dialogue over the past few months and I'm frankly sick of it. I don't think the issues with lurking and moderation were nearly as bad as you're making out, nor that it was significantly worse than a regular game. Obviously it wasn't perfect and with the benefit of hindsight different, better decisions could have been made. I know I need to be clearer about what is and is not acceptable for V/LA, both in terms of length and expected level of communication during. I know I need to know more about off-site players before I let them take part in these games in case they are habitual flakers. I know that the current prod/replace/modkill system we have in place doesn't appear to be fulfilling its purpose and requires some kind of overhaul. I know that maybe I need to be less lenient on players who are usually valuable members of a game but also have a habit of disappearing, and to be more assertive rather than permissive when someone isn't sure they can continue but also doesn't want to explicitly ask to replace out. I know a lot more about running a team mafia event than I did a few months ago, and I also know that this was the only way to gain that knowledge.
There are lots of lessons to be learnt, but I'm just not interested in discussing them with someone who thinks that repeatedly dismissing my and my moderating team's efforts as a "joke" or calling me a "coward" counts as "constructive criticism". If you don't agree with my moderating style you are more than welcome to not play in my games, and if you want you can run your own team event or something if you'd like to know how easy it is.
@Shadow: While I agree that modkills should be last resort, I think "as a last resort" is not well defined. I just finished modding a 16 player normal game elsewhere in which there were 4 replacements before I ran out of replacement options and had to modkill two players for inactivity. I stand by that decision and would stand by a similar decision here if it came down to it. Heck, a similar decision was floated in Arkham at one point in which we considered modkills for 3 players at once.
We need to be realistic about lurking being bad behavior.
DV, I am not engaging with you because I don't think it is productive. I've listened to enough of your complaints and tried to have a reasonable dialogue over the past few months and I'm frankly sick of it. I don't think the issues with lurking and moderation were nearly as bad as you're making out, nor that it was significantly worse than a regular game. Obviously it wasn't perfect and with the benefit of hindsight different, better decisions could have been made. I know I need to be clearer about what is and is not acceptable for V/LA, both in terms of length and expected level of communication during. I know I need to know more about off-site players before I let them take part in these games in case they are habitual flakers. I know that the current prod/replace/modkill system we have in place doesn't appear to be fulfilling its purpose and requires some kind of overhaul. I know that maybe I need to be less lenient on players who are usually valuable members of a game but also have a habit of disappearing, and to be more assertive rather than permissive when someone isn't sure they can continue but also doesn't want to explicitly ask to replace out. I know a lot more about running a team mafia event than I did a few months ago, and I also know that this was the only way to gain that knowledge.
There are lots of lessons to be learnt, but I'm just not interested in discussing them with someone who thinks that repeatedly dismissing my and my moderating team's efforts as a "joke" or calling me a "coward" counts as "constructive criticism". If you don't agree with my moderating style you are more than welcome to not play in my games, and if you want you can run your own team event or something if you'd like to know how easy it is.
Personally, this is what I was looking for. As long as you recognize that things need to change, then I'm happy. Really.
It hasn't appeared to me that you have been interested in changing things, I'm glad to be wrong about that.
As to the rest of this. You don't like me I get that. But don't represent us as having talked for the past months. We haven't spoken to each other in over two months. We talked about this issue for very little before that. Most of our conversation involved an entirely different situation which the rest of the council took an entirely different approach than you did. And, you and I both know that equality is now key. Glad to see I was right on that part.
I've run more complicated games than you have. Nothing about this is complicated at all. Please don't act like this was hard. You made 3 basic games sent role pms out and then monitored three games. But you didn't do it alone you had two other mods moderating as well. So please. Don't go "This was hard".
You're right I'm rude. However there is plenty of great points in there that you refuse to engage with because you're offended. Pretty petty if you ask me.
In Arkham I god damn missed prodding Dota for like over a week. I just didn't notice he hadn't posted. That was pretty god damn abysmal modding. However that's a bad mistake on my end. A really bad mistake. However, I didn't make an active decision I just ****ed up.
Its why I'm not harming on the beeboy prod thing. Its bad. But mistakes happen. Clarity would have been key there. Knowing that X happened and Y was going to happen would have helped.
However, allowing a player to V/LA for an entire day phase(And prior to that hadn't posted for like half a day phase). That's a joke. You made an active decision to do so. Like you want me to be nice and call that bad or a poor decision. But its way worse than that. And I'm sorry you're offended on some regard, but at the same time it was a joke. You ****ed up. You ****ed up bad. Really bad.
You made a bad mistake, and I feel that you tried to minimize it by placing blame on Nancy. Was nancy's behavior terrible? Yes. But you are the mod. Coward might not have been the right word. But maybe meek is. It was a meek decision. Instead of enforcing game health, you just let her do that. Something is wrong when that happens. Really really wrong, because I can't imagine any other mod allowing that to happen.
Silver said you guys allowed it because you didn't have a replacement for her. That's really wrong man. Just wrong.
In the true essence of clarity I looked, eco and I didn't discuss nancy at all. So my memory is just wrong on that. Or if we did I never actually used nancy's name.
My issue is this Eco, you say that the problems are not as bad as I construe them to be. But offer nothing in support of that statement.
My data to prove myself being right is the following.
Cantripmancer/7hawk77 slot played in the game for two game days, had a total of 8 posts.
Transcend/Beeboy played in the game for one game day had a total of 7 posts.
If you are really going to tell me how that is fair, or good game health please explain. I'd love an explanation. Tell me how I'm wrong on this.
DV I don't know what you want wrt to Nancy. 115 is Eco saying he was wrong and regretting not actively denying the V/LA request. Yes he shares the blame with Nancy but he takes blame for allowing it.
Quote from Eco »
but to my regret I didn't deny it either.
In retrospect, I take a lot of responsibility for it escalating to that - she should have been immediately replaced after requesting so long a V/La period
Yes he places blame on Nancy as well, but Nancy deserves some too. I agree with you the 14 day v/la request is unreasonable, but Eco admits he messed up by not emphatically denying it.
As for the slot on my team the mods were in a bad position because all 3 of our slots were non-responsive and the mods found a replacement for us. To my understanding Hawk actually attempted to play but died very shortly after replacing in. That may not be accurate based on what happened. I did not read this game. But to the best of my knowledge both Cantrip and Hawk made a genuine effort to play and were unable to contribute fully. And the mods attempted to be understanding around this.
And I don't think anyone is arguing that level of lurking is good for game health. As Silver and I believe Eco have said it isn't, and the rules in place for the event made it hard to enforce beyond what they did so they are looking at more stringent rules for posting content going forward.
If you wanted it to be an immediate mod kill instead of replace that's an argument to have, but I think if upon the request if Eco had said to the team you have 48 hours to find a replacement or we mod kill that would have been acceptable.
I want to propose a change to the rules of team mafia going forward. I think this whole problem appeared because some players, me included, expected a competitive game and instead we got a lurker fest.
The way I think it should work is that each player gets a maximum of two prods (maybe one refreshes each day). After the third prod you get force-replaced in the following way. Your team has 24 hours to find a replacement. If they don't the moderator can decide if they want to get a replacement for the slot or simply modkill them. This should also happen in a 48 hour window at worst. The second replacements from a team instantly negates the point they could've won.
And as a last remark: Eco is being disingenuous about the number of replacements, because you had people like nancy who didn't get replaced, but were 15 days away or people like hawk and beeboy who replaced a slot and should have been replaced again.
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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.
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.
I'm running off, but yeah I agree those solutions are hard too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A. You are not treating players equally.
Basically, if Nancy was to do this behavior early you would have replaced immediately because you would have had replacements. However, she did it later so you let her walk over you and the rules. This isn't acceptable. The message is to players "Don't break rules early, but if you break them late we are so weak willed we will let you do this." This isn't fair nor is it equal.
B. "Game Health"
This is other part of the disagreement.
The entire premise of the moderators decision is that modkills would have unfairly burdened one team. To which I reply and?
You guys wouldn't have hesitated for a moment to modkill someone for toxic behavior. I or hope you wouldn't have. Why? Because that directly impacts peoples enjoyment of the game.
This is the exact same thing. It isn't fun to play with empty seats. Specifically in a game where I need to be able to figure out if they are friend or foe. These decisions heavily benefit the mafia team for the following reasons.
1. Mafia already know who is friend and foe.
2. Mafia benefit from the town having to spend lynches/kills on these empty chairs.
3. Mafia benefit from less voices/less interaction in the game.
Frankly I can't believe I have to educate a moderation team on why lurkers benefit mafia, and on why these decisions benefit the mafia. It baffles me that silver keeps saying that we lynched one of the lurkers anyways. Because the town had to.
A modkill for the beeboy slot, while on the table, is trying to be avoided at all costs. It will come no later than start of Day 2.
That's the literal quote from Gan. Before that this was the following.
Quote from 864 »
A modkill for the beeboy slot, while on the table, is trying to be avoided at all costs. It will come no later than start of Day 2.
Quote from 935 »
7hawk77 is replacing Cantripmancer. Let's give them a warm welcome!
Nachomamma8, after discussing it with the other mods, will not be force replaced at this point, for the health of the game.
beeboy's post is being considered a prod dodge, and the search for a replacement is ongoing.
At this point, no extensions are in order.
Its clear you guys never had any intention of mod killing the slot. I find it ******* offensive that you claim otherwise. Silver you and I had a longer conversation in which you told me that while it might have been discussed closed doors the decision was made for god knows what reason to keep the players in the dark. There is no way that players possibly thought or expected the modkill to happen with this behavior from the moderation staff. So, they correctly started shooting these players down by lynching them. I don't understand why anyone would think this is acceptable, there is a reason I call this moderation a joke. Its not hard to communicate with players about what is going on.
Nothing about this was complicated. Nothing that happened in this game was particularly difficult to handle. Nothing about running this game was hard. And if you can't figure out about why I'm hitting this. Its because it was insinuated to me that this was hard and I don't know what I'm talking about. I do know. I've dealt with these decisions in a game that's complexity make this game look like a kitty pool to me. All you guys had to do was run Vote Counts and deal with player behavior. You fundamentally managed to fail in one of those aspects at least partially. You didn't communicate with players, in that aspect either and it forced them into making a bad decision that you are now lording over their heads.
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.
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.
Full stop, this kind of statement is unacceptable. You have whatever gripe you want about what went down, but flat out saying that Eco, who has demonstrated on countless occasions commitment to this playerbase, doesn't care about players is wrong, and betrays a bitter mindset. There is obviously discussion to be had, but you lose any high ground or indeed any ground to stand on with this line of thinking. You don't have to like Eco, or anyone, but you do not get to come in here and attack anyone like that when it's so clearly untrue.
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.
First I want to say that I don't agree with how DV is handling the situation. It is unnecessarily hostile, but his arguments are good.
These two quotes are complete opposites. Greater or equal to is not the same as lower or equal to.
Also I want people replaced if they don't respond to their first prod in 24 hours. 6 days for force replacements is absurd. Considering 2 weeks deadline a slot could post 3 post and still be in the game by day 3. That is absolutely not ok.
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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.
First I want to say that I don't agree with how DV is handling the situation. It is unnecessarily hostile, but his arguments are good.
These two quotes are complete opposites. Greater or equal to is not the same as lower or equal to.
Also I want people replaced if they don't respond to their first prod in 24 hours. 6 days for force replacements is absurd. Considering 2 weeks deadline a slot could post 3 post and still be in the game by day 3. That is absolutely not ok.
"A modkill...will come no later than start of day 2"
Literally the slot was not going to be in day 2. That is the definition of "imminent" from that stage in the game.
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.
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?
48 hours of not posting, prod, then if no response or content post in 48 hours, replace/modkill. That's exactly what I have gone off of in every game I've moderated, and if anything I've considered making it stricter.
Lurking into replacement is bad behavior. I don't agree with how DV is going about this or even all of his points. But saying "we need to allow people 144 hours of not posting before we consider replacement?" That's lunacy.
48 hours of not posting (excepting , prod, then if no response or content post in 48 hours, replace/modkill. That's exactly what I have gone off of in every game I've moderated, and if anything I've considered making it stricter.
I'd think that replace/modkill after 24 hours after prod would be fine (total of 72 hours with no communication), but would also recommend adding something along the lines of:
"V/LA requests of up to 72 hours may be made, but replacement/modkill may occur without additional warning if no post is made within 24 hours of that V/LA ending." I only say this because I spend a lot of my weekends away from any kind of device/connectivity, and sometimes it's not *just* Saturday and Sunday. That would, of course, need to be adjusted for shorter phase games/shorter phases.
You said that the reason you didn't force a replacement of Nancy was because you knew you didn't have replacements so it would result in a modkill.
I'm not saying that the slot should have been modkilled immediately on the V/LA. I'm saying that the moderators didn't push it because you knew that if you started the proceedings they would end up in a modkill. And you guys viewed that as being "Bad Game Health". I'm saying that's cheap. That's why I take such an issue with Eco's post blaming Nancy. You guys knew. You ******* knew. And the only reason you didn't do it was because of some sort of dumb idea of game health.
That's not fair.
Shadow's probabally right on some of what he said for me to really explain what I mean I need to think of what way is the clearest way to explain my problem with the overall moderation and why I feel that it doesn't really take into consideration the players.
48 hours of not posting (excepting , prod, then if no response or content post in 48 hours, replace/modkill. That's exactly what I have gone off of in every game I've moderated, and if anything I've considered making it stricter.
I'd think that replace/modkill after 24 hours after prod would be fine (total of 72 hours with no communication), but would also recommend adding something along the lines of:
"V/LA requests of up to 72 hours may be made, but replacement/modkill may occur without additional warning if no post is made within 24 hours of that V/LA ending." I only say this because I spend a lot of my weekends away from any kind of device/connectivity, and sometimes it's not *just* Saturday and Sunday. That would, of course, need to be adjusted for shorter phase games/shorter phases.
Yeah, I'm pretty lenient with VLA as long as it's no longer than a week, with 2 week day phases. And as you are aware, if someone knows they'll be VLA regularly on certain days of the week, I'm fine with that being automatic. But it's all about communication. If someone doesn't talk to me, I have very little sympathy.
Alright, I'm going to pull back a little on the anger. I had someone talk to me out of thread and it sort of disproved some of what I thought happened thses games.
A quick explanation of what I saw, I knew that a few players specifically had been getting warnings in this game for things that I didn't feel crossed the line or were anywhere close. It felt to me as though Eco was specifically targeting those players, because other players were making far worse comments and not getting warnings. I saw a couple posts that I felt were cruel specifically the post Tom said about Shinichi and him laughing and making fun of him in team chat. That's just wrong.
I felt as though Eco let it slide because he doesn't think highly of Shinichi. Someone else that I don't think Eco dislikes also told me that they got a few warnings for silly reasons too. So, I guess the posts I saw got missed. It still feels a little strange to me, that those posts could be missed, but hey I guess I'm wrong.
This compounded to me with this lurking issue for me. Since it seemed pretty bad to me to be so focused on player behavior, but not player lurking. I still feel like there is a little too much focus on that, but not nearly as egregious as I thought it was.
That's what I get for going off half cocked. Oh well, not like it changes anyone's opinion of me anyways, just reinforcing my *****ty behavior. 10/10
So, I'm somewhat sorry Eco, not fully because I still think you're trying to scapegoat and minimize poor mod decisions. But, I took it too far.
I really want to hear from Newcomb about his play in my game, because his attitude of "Hollier than thou" has felt incredibly unfun to play against and I kinda want to listen how things went from his perspective, because a discussion in a mafia game tends to be more abbrasive than in the post-game world.
how dare you, i am ******* delightful
Seriously though, if you have something specific you want to ask me, feel free. Pretty much all my thoughts on the game are in the game thread + team chat though.
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 concede these rules can't deal with them in a way that I'd like them to.
However, this is why I suggested rolling replacements. Osie's right if you can't contact me in three day's my sympathy is pretty low. I think I'd say 5 days is reasonable total. Three days with no posts, two more to contact me but during those two days I'm looking for a replacement with one waiting and ready to go by the end of those two days optimally. Then replace that player.
At day six the player is just out period. I might not modkill the slot, but their ass it out. If that player comes back during the 5 days then they get to play again, but its the DV special. You get one time for that. After that its three days and you're out. If you can't get on disc or PM me on forums in three days then my sympathy is gone.
If someone has issues I don't mind working with them. This might change in extreme lylo situations, but on the whole I think that's reasonable.
Maybe Osie's way works too, but I think 48 might be a little too aggressive for the first requirement. Not the second prod though.
If a player can't remember a game exists for three days then... Yeah prods are sort of a strange thing.
I think the rules are antiquated is part of the problem. These are remnants from much longer day phases. We keep upping our day timers nowadays, and our prods now need to keep up with that.
It sucks because my system proposed still has a slot not playing the game for half a day phase in a two week phase. Its even worse if they disappear after three days.
I think at that point depending in the situation and the amount of players that might need replacing extensions are in order. And we had that discussion and I understand why you didn't want to have discussions.
Here's the rub though. We had roughly 25% of our player base not there. Nacho, Cantrip and Beeboy were gone. Prods were slow, and on top of that Nacho was allowed to disappear for 5 or 6 days. On top of that communication with players was incredibly bad, and the only reason you guys mentioned that Beeboy might be modkilled was because I replaced out and others were also showing some disgruntlement. You seem to be glossing over the fact that mods really made this situation bad with communication and how it was treated. You also seem to be twisting events into being as favorable as they were for the moderators. Moderators decisions really hurt the town in this game, and you seem to be unwilling to admit that. I don't know why.
A different situation with one player, I don't know if I'd have nearly the outcry I did. But with zero communication coming from moderators. The moderators telling me multiple times that modkills would be ignored at all costs.
Primarily, I don't think moderators should find replacements at all in this game type. I think teams should be responsible. Its a hey you have 48 hours to find a replacement for your teammate that you vouched for. Otherwise its going to cost you. Which is really how the rules read anyways. And that's my last complaint. You keep saying that the rules were not made to deal with this, but they were. Somewhere the moderator team made the decision to not enforce them that way. You enforced them in the loosest way possible(Which was my whole complaint about the flame rules since I felt you enforced them the strictest way possible). Which I still feel is slightly the case, just it was a lot more even then I thought. And that's the problem to me. The rules could have worked had they been enforced in a reasonable manner. But moderators decided to take the most interpretive reading of the rules and used the grey area to make it even more extensive.
Which is why I'm on a campaign to remove some of that. Its silly that this happened at all.
For the game I mentioned earlier that was off-site, it was 96/24 phases, and I halved the prod lengths. Players were expected to post once every 24 hours or let me know that they couldn't. Obviously that's not realistic here, but I do feel that expecting people to post once every 48 hours or go VLA is, and that VLA periods should never be more than half the day phase. I'd even be fine with expecting more than 1 content post every 48 hours, which I've been considering. If you are online and engaged with the game, you should be able to make multiple game-relevant posts, no?
2 seems like a reasonable expectation, though obviously we could mess with the times and numbers at the same time to be stricter without being draconian (e.g. 2 posts every 36 hours by itself, or 3 posts every 72 hours in addition to 1 post every 48).
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.
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Liked playing with different people.
I think I enjoy hydra'ing more though, simply because I did not have time to look at other games until after I died.
(etc.)
~~~
I don't really know where else to pose this question, but in a situation like in Game 2 where scum shot their own buddy to gain a clear, is there a way for town to overcome that? How would they?
I feel bad for the ending of that game because I encouraged Shinichi to go after Manasi. I was more worried about him becoming the mislynch because I thought the game was locked. Even without his snapvoting, would the end result be different?
Also, I am just curious in general how to overcome these mechanical disadvantages ^^
Only way to double check is to see if your other townreads hold up.
Gemma's modkill was 100% justified, even if it was unfortunate given their mostly positive level of activity and engagement. The severity of the out-of-game information used, the affect it would have had on reads on Gemma, and the explicit mentioning of ongoing games on other sites even after the thread had been warned about it was simply not acceptable. If Gemma had privately messaged me with the information she found rather than posted it in the thread, she would not have been modkilled, and would have been thanked for her vigilance and discretion.
RE: Player numbers. I think we ultimately made eight replacements, which at 22% of 36 players is a pretty reasonable rate (2.6 players in a 12-man game, 3.5 in a 16-player game). Certainly more could have been made, but even then it wasn't an outrageous amount of replacements required, and most of them were handled pretty well with teams finding their own. Nonetheless, future team events should probably have a deeper replacement pool (e.g. every team has to provide a nominated sub), perhaps at the cost of smaller games. I also think future events will require some vetting of player reliability: in our excitement to hit 12-player games, we let in a lot of unknowns and higher-risk flakers which backfired. MafiaScum's team event was only open to players who had history and good standing on MS, and I now very much understand why.
Also the Team Discord chats are about to be publicised, so go check those out!
The moderation of this game in regards to player activity was a joke.
Game 2 had a slot that had posted ZERO content all of day one and was going to get another replacement for the game. The fact that you are unwilling to acknowledge or engage on this point is pretty *****ty. The Nancy part is just the pinnacle of this bad moderation. I mentioned it day one of that V/LA that that shouldn't be allowed. And I all I got was you arguing against it because replacements couldn't be found and you didn't have the guts to modkill.
Your version of the story is accurate to the point of generality of the events, but ignores your own underlying principles which is a wrong way to moderate. The fact that you are unwilling to acknowledge this makes me question your moderation going further.
You can not moderate games in terms of balance. Doing so is poor modding.
I frankly do not agree, although you are welcome to your opinion. I would prefer if you didn't present them with so much vitriol.
Anyway my lack of effort was particularly unfair to Osie and Marko who have both been very gracious about it. Osie in particular started off with tons of effort and I can see the way my dead weight dragged him down. Which sucks because before this I'd always prided myself on being a reliable player who was always going to at least give a solid effort.
Enough apologies.
@Vez I'll join the chorus of people saying your play wasn't great. While you shouldn't let yourself get mislynched and I actually don't always hate fakeclaims, vigs are a horrid fakeclaim in general. In this game in particular you can see how it impacted Newcomb's play. He knew there wasn't killing power for town beyond his ability and had you as hard unaligned with scum. While giving scum a vig shot is absolutely disastrous I can absolutely follow his line of play and the way it stemmed in part from your fake claim. And outside of that this was the absolute best case scenario for a vig fake claim and it bought you a phase?
@RE on that same issue when an extra kill doesn't target a claimed vig and they're not claiming the shot it should always set off alarm bells. There is almost no circumstance where a player with a vig shot shouldn't just shoot someone else who claimed vig.
I'd prefer it if you respected players time and energy in ways to not make them feel as though their efforts were not in vain. What you have essentially done is made it clear that when ever you moderate players should game the replacements of the game because they will be done with balance in mind and not with individual player behavior in mind. In essence you are encouraging players gaming the moderation.
The fact that you refuse to acknowledge that not having a slot post for entire day phase due to replacements is inherently bad makes me question my very sanity. I do not understand how you can come to such a conclusion. The fact that you will not even back up this questionable at best moderation decision is troubling to me. It represents that you know I am right, or are unable to back up your own thoughts yet will stick to this form of moderation just because.
Player enjoyment in a game should come first, and I do not understand how you can justify player enjoyment when there are slots with essentially less than the advertised amount of players due to your own cowardice from taking the responsible approach and mod killing them.
You asked for suggestions, and yet really what you wanted was nothing of the kind since you are not interested in discussing it further. What you essentially wanted with that comment is how you moderate games. You want everyone to curtail to each other while nothing gets done.
So congratulations on the games concluding, I can't imagine anything that could have possibly improved them or the player experience.
Edit:
To explain this even further, in game 2 there were two slots that hadn't posted more than 5 posts each by the end of day two and none of the posts from either spot accounted for any content. Because of the moderation we were forced into lynching one of the slots blindly because they hadn't posted content. We guessed wrong, and consequently lost the game because of it. This moderation decision heavily favored the mafia team and I am baffled to how a moderator and a member of the council could think that this is acceptable. Add on to that what I see as the moderator knowing that this is wrong and refusing to back it up and dodging any discussion about it instead resorting to Ad Hom attacks is just embarrassing to me.
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.
This wasn't a one-off game. It was a team game supposed to be very competitive. The mods shouldn't even have bothered with replacements. Only the teams should.
I consider that people who post are more important for game integrity than lurkers. Beeboy should have absolutely been modkilled. The team got one player who didn't post anything, and then got beeboy who again didn't post anything. That is the fault of the team and a modkill was expected.
I won't even enter the argument of how someone thought a 15 day V/LA was acceptable.
And just as a personal preference, I'd rather have people modkilled until we reach LyLo on day 1 than have to play with lurkers.
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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?
I wasn't in that game, but I would have been fine with the latter.
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.
Modkill and start the night immediately for all I care. Also I'm going to check up on the claims you made about content, because I literally remember nothing from that slot.
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Transcend has two posts. A prododge and a post that might have been written in another language. That is not content. He even tried voting nacho, but put the wrong tags and didn't come back to fix it.
Beeboy is a little better. 5 posts. 3 are prododges, 1 is a vote with a line of unspecified information ("scum might be in the lurkers")
This post is the only one with real content. From an entire slot.
Also the fact that we lynched him has no barring on the modkill or not. I don't want people to get modkilled. I don't like it, but force-replacements should have been prompt and if the team doesn't find a replacements nuke the slot.
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Check out the Shop Thread
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?
Continuing to insist that modkills should be more prevalent will ultimately lead to games that aren’t fun and don’t actually count as Mafia. I call bull crap on the idea that you guys are okay with a day one LyLo, and if you truly prefer that, I’m thankful that you seem to be in the minority, because that doesn’t sound fun and would deincentivize joining games here. Game health does matter, it directly impacts how fun a game is.
I don’t agree that everything done by the mods was done to perfection, but Silver and eco have adequately hilighted the shortcomings; they are aware of mistakes made and timing that could have been better.
That's fundamentally what we are arguing though. You've skipped past the hard point that Eco and Silver are ignoring.
How is it fun to have a game that doesn't have people playing in it? Answer: It isn't.
That's my issue here. We had multiple slots in my game not playing the game. We were largely forced into a blind 50/50 because we correctly deduced that at least one of the scum was in the two lurker slots, and we didn't want to save them for later in the game. Which is the only correct play here. It sucks that we got the 50/50 wrong. It sucks that there were slots that had zero content posts.
It further sucks that the moderation team and you seem to think that is fun to play with.
I don't disagree that it shouldn't be a last resort. I think that replacing the slots once was fine. I still think that this was a team game and that any attempt to congratulate winners, specifically when the team benefited from this is highly questionable. Like you were scum in your game and you heavily benefited from someone who I would say was cheating. My game got ruined day one by the lurking, its why I left. I wasn't having fun, and the moderation wasn't going to do anything to make it fun. You're skipping past my entire point.
It isn't fun to play with lurkers. It isn't fun to have to wait till day 3 of content posting for a scum lurker to finally start posting. It isn't fair either. This is directly against game balance.
I fundamentally agree with the last resort comment. Modkills should always be last resort. I understand mod making mistakes about not prodding, **** I've done that. What I don't understand, is how in a game like this moderation thinks its OK for multiple players to have not PLAYED A WHOLE DAY OF THE GAME. That's a modkill period. I don't see any way for someone to argue against that at all. That isn't game balanced, it isn't fair, and it isn't fun to play with.
We lynched him because it was made clear that he only might be lynched if ANOTHER replacement couldn't be found. Players felt forced into lynching him go back and read the thread, or I can provide quotes if you need me to. This moderation put players in a position where they had to lynch into the 50/50 and for you to deny so seems questionable to me.
Also please don't insult me with saying that the beeboy slot posted some content and that it might not have been much.
Trancends two posts were
A prod dodge and a "My team said vote here"
Beeboy posted like two content pieces and they were pretty pathetic.
Its like you're trying to minimize how bad this actually was. Fact, it was bad. Fact, players lynched him because we were told a modkill might or might not happen. Fact, this shouldn't happen.
And for anyone wondering where my vitriol comes from its because I told Cantrip this stuff, and his response was "I don't give a **** if you are having fun." Yet you all want to talk about fun games. I told Cantrip "hey that Nancy thing shouldn't happen." I was ignored. I plead the case furthers to others. I was ignored. Then when you guys get your hand caught in the god damn cookie jar. Suddenly its like "Oh our bad".
Also silver, I can provide screen shots of you telling me that it was unilaterally cantrip making some of these decisions. I'm not sure where that's coming from now that it wasn't unilateral cantrip.
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.
Silver, I think you're right to an extent. My problem and my primary concern is that Eco doesn't seem concerned at all with how this turned out. You know I've ignored the whole Nachomama disappearing for 5 days too, and the whole "Game health not replaced" argument just offends me.
My point is this. Game 2 had three mafia all of which who lurked. Nacho posted significant content, I'm willing to let it slide. But, when you have another slot that literally never posted, and the manasi slot was pretty lurky too it starts unfair. Mafia is a game of deduction and when I'm rating people based on scuminess and then I have slots that are not giving me anything to work with it feels cheap. I didn't finish the game, but if I had I'd feel cheated. I don't think the mafia deserved that win. I think a lot of the moderator decisions heavily favored them. You keep saying game balance, but what you're fundamentally avoiding is that you ****ed the town over. You made it way harder for the town to win. I understand some of what you are saying on strict plus minus system when comparing roles.
But mafia isn't just that. Its player skill. We don't average teams out, because that's some of the fun. Sometimes a player makes a *****ty decision that costs their team the game. I don't really see lurking as being that much different. I understand that real life takes over and accommodations should be made. I get that. I agree with that. I don't agree with allowing for a slot to basically go through limbo, because each replacement doesn't play. At some point, enough should be enough. I think the whole Beeboy thing would be different to me, if the slot was replaced it made content for half the day, then it needed to be replaced again. That seems reasonable. It seems unreasonable to require players to play with a slot that simply isn't playing. Its rude to require me to play with that. That isn't fun.
I think Transparency needed to be had. There was a lot of waiting around. I had made comments about the lurking in my game. I was told they were being addressed but not how. Then with the result that was given I was just totally unhappy. I don't think the way that it was moderated was fair. I think Eco spent time being myopic on posts that only the strictest readings of the rules would be infringing. For example, I was told not to call players bad, when I made a comment about me thinking newcomb wasn't good, but seeing that I was wrong. Under no thought should this have been read as being an insult, but Eco wanted to take a stand. Meanwhile, Tom quite literally bullied Shinichi and he didn't say anything about it until I brought it to his attention.
Because that's what Eco thinks a good game is, **** the people he doesn't like and let others do what they want.
Also who cares about players time and investment, that doesn't matter.
For what ever my faults are I think moderators should look at things objectively. I think I succeed in doing that. I don't feel that Eco's and the moderation staff was objective. I don't think that it promoted a "Fun" game. And it bothers me that Eco asked for this thread when he clearly has no intention of changing anything about anything. It makes me question how I can have faith in his moderation going further.
To go further, Eco made this comment.
This comment bothers me. Yes, the player is not being responsible for their actions. But this is what moderators do. They moderate. With no objective other than to apply the rules that they have written as fairly as they can. You shouldn't be trying to use the harshest interpretation on some players and the least on others. The end result should always be the same.
With these games, I think the end result might have been the same. But the problem is that one side benefited from it and the other side didn't. The lurking hurt the town. Its not my fault that those players chose to do so, yet I am not put at a disadvantage because they chose to do so. That isn't good game health. That isn't good moderation.
Essentially what was done wasn't fair. Eco's response to that? "I disagree". He can't even articulate more than that as a council member, as the game host of this game. Simply put I don't feel like any change will happen.
Silver I think you've raised great points. I think transparency is key first and foremost. I also think there should be a "Ramping up" mechanic. For example, I think its fair to prod a player, give them three days and prod again for like another two. If that player comes back the prod range reduces to two and one etc. Something like that. People get busy, I understand that. I just think that with what happened specifically my game is unacceptable. Mods make mistakes, I get that. Essentially what I'm looking for is ownership of those mistakes and discussion on how this shouldn't happen in future games. Or at least how we can help prevent it in future games.
TL,DR
It bothers me that we are talking about game balance in strictly terms of point structure. Mafia is a game that involves players as well, and those players heavily dictate the game. Game health should include how fun a game is. Which would include a game with multiple lurkers making it unfun.
I feel like Ego is largely waiving away these concerns and is unwilling to even consider he is wrong. Nancy is a prime example since I campaigned pretty heavily against that and was ignored. Only after being caught with his hand in the cookie jar did he admit wrong doing.
Fundamentally I'm unsure of what the correct answer is to this problem. I think that the current solution is bad. Mafia is a social game at its core.
If this was a co-op game I don't think this would be nearly as big of a deal. But it isn't its a versus game, and having players not playing that I am playing against, and specifically need to figure out if I am playing against makes it unfun.
I feel that the moderation was going. "Wow" this really hurts the mafia. Which it did, but this is player behavior not game mechanics. I don't really know any other way to explain that.
If a player is being toxic, you don't go "Wow modkilling them will hurt X team" you just get rid of them.
My point is thus. You've done your best to balance the game. If you feel game things are unbalanced maybe change them. But the rest of this is a result of player actions. You can't make a bad player good. And yeah having a lurker on your team modkilled sucks. But having a bad player on there also sucks.
I think you have to distance yourself and say "Is this players play being egregious." Nothing should be factored into the players alignment. I get the whole argument about what do when not that bad.
But at the bare minimum as in the case of both cantrips slot and beeboys slot at the end of the day neither player had played day one. And that should just be a get the **** out of here moment.
There are lots of lessons to be learnt, but I'm just not interested in discussing them with someone who thinks that repeatedly dismissing my and my moderating team's efforts as a "joke" or calling me a "coward" counts as "constructive criticism". If you don't agree with my moderating style you are more than welcome to not play in my games, and if you want you can run your own team event or something if you'd like to know how easy it is.
We need to be realistic about lurking being bad behavior.
Personally, this is what I was looking for. As long as you recognize that things need to change, then I'm happy. Really.
It hasn't appeared to me that you have been interested in changing things, I'm glad to be wrong about that.
As to the rest of this. You don't like me I get that. But don't represent us as having talked for the past months. We haven't spoken to each other in over two months. We talked about this issue for very little before that. Most of our conversation involved an entirely different situation which the rest of the council took an entirely different approach than you did. And, you and I both know that equality is now key. Glad to see I was right on that part.
I've run more complicated games than you have. Nothing about this is complicated at all. Please don't act like this was hard. You made 3 basic games sent role pms out and then monitored three games. But you didn't do it alone you had two other mods moderating as well. So please. Don't go "This was hard".
You're right I'm rude. However there is plenty of great points in there that you refuse to engage with because you're offended. Pretty petty if you ask me.
I'm glad to see change is coming.
In Arkham I god damn missed prodding Dota for like over a week. I just didn't notice he hadn't posted. That was pretty god damn abysmal modding. However that's a bad mistake on my end. A really bad mistake. However, I didn't make an active decision I just ****ed up.
Its why I'm not harming on the beeboy prod thing. Its bad. But mistakes happen. Clarity would have been key there. Knowing that X happened and Y was going to happen would have helped.
However, allowing a player to V/LA for an entire day phase(And prior to that hadn't posted for like half a day phase). That's a joke. You made an active decision to do so. Like you want me to be nice and call that bad or a poor decision. But its way worse than that. And I'm sorry you're offended on some regard, but at the same time it was a joke. You ****ed up. You ****ed up bad. Really bad.
You made a bad mistake, and I feel that you tried to minimize it by placing blame on Nancy. Was nancy's behavior terrible? Yes. But you are the mod. Coward might not have been the right word. But maybe meek is. It was a meek decision. Instead of enforcing game health, you just let her do that. Something is wrong when that happens. Really really wrong, because I can't imagine any other mod allowing that to happen.
Silver said you guys allowed it because you didn't have a replacement for her. That's really wrong man. Just wrong.
In the true essence of clarity I looked, eco and I didn't discuss nancy at all. So my memory is just wrong on that. Or if we did I never actually used nancy's name.
My issue is this Eco, you say that the problems are not as bad as I construe them to be. But offer nothing in support of that statement.
My data to prove myself being right is the following.
Cantripmancer/7hawk77 slot played in the game for two game days, had a total of 8 posts.
Transcend/Beeboy played in the game for one game day had a total of 7 posts.
If you are really going to tell me how that is fair, or good game health please explain. I'd love an explanation. Tell me how I'm wrong on this.
Yes he places blame on Nancy as well, but Nancy deserves some too. I agree with you the 14 day v/la request is unreasonable, but Eco admits he messed up by not emphatically denying it.
As for the slot on my team the mods were in a bad position because all 3 of our slots were non-responsive and the mods found a replacement for us. To my understanding Hawk actually attempted to play but died very shortly after replacing in. That may not be accurate based on what happened. I did not read this game. But to the best of my knowledge both Cantrip and Hawk made a genuine effort to play and were unable to contribute fully. And the mods attempted to be understanding around this.
And I don't think anyone is arguing that level of lurking is good for game health. As Silver and I believe Eco have said it isn't, and the rules in place for the event made it hard to enforce beyond what they did so they are looking at more stringent rules for posting content going forward.
The way I think it should work is that each player gets a maximum of two prods (maybe one refreshes each day). After the third prod you get force-replaced in the following way. Your team has 24 hours to find a replacement. If they don't the moderator can decide if they want to get a replacement for the slot or simply modkill them. This should also happen in a 48 hour window at worst. The second replacements from a team instantly negates the point they could've won.
And as a last remark: Eco is being disingenuous about the number of replacements, because you had people like nancy who didn't get replaced, but were 15 days away or people like hawk and beeboy who replaced a slot and should have been replaced again.
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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.
I'm running off, but yeah I agree those solutions are hard too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A. You are not treating players equally.
Basically, if Nancy was to do this behavior early you would have replaced immediately because you would have had replacements. However, she did it later so you let her walk over you and the rules. This isn't acceptable. The message is to players "Don't break rules early, but if you break them late we are so weak willed we will let you do this." This isn't fair nor is it equal.
B. "Game Health"
This is other part of the disagreement.
The entire premise of the moderators decision is that modkills would have unfairly burdened one team. To which I reply and?
You guys wouldn't have hesitated for a moment to modkill someone for toxic behavior. I or hope you wouldn't have. Why? Because that directly impacts peoples enjoyment of the game.
This is the exact same thing. It isn't fun to play with empty seats. Specifically in a game where I need to be able to figure out if they are friend or foe. These decisions heavily benefit the mafia team for the following reasons.
1. Mafia already know who is friend and foe.
2. Mafia benefit from the town having to spend lynches/kills on these empty chairs.
3. Mafia benefit from less voices/less interaction in the game.
Frankly I can't believe I have to educate a moderation team on why lurkers benefit mafia, and on why these decisions benefit the mafia. It baffles me that silver keeps saying that we lynched one of the lurkers anyways. Because the town had to.
That's the literal quote from Gan. Before that this was the following.
Its clear you guys never had any intention of mod killing the slot. I find it ******* offensive that you claim otherwise. Silver you and I had a longer conversation in which you told me that while it might have been discussed closed doors the decision was made for god knows what reason to keep the players in the dark. There is no way that players possibly thought or expected the modkill to happen with this behavior from the moderation staff. So, they correctly started shooting these players down by lynching them. I don't understand why anyone would think this is acceptable, there is a reason I call this moderation a joke. Its not hard to communicate with players about what is going on.
Nothing about this was complicated. Nothing that happened in this game was particularly difficult to handle. Nothing about running this game was hard. And if you can't figure out about why I'm hitting this. Its because it was insinuated to me that this was hard and I don't know what I'm talking about. I do know. I've dealt with these decisions in a game that's complexity make this game look like a kitty pool to me. All you guys had to do was run Vote Counts and deal with player behavior. You fundamentally managed to fail in one of those aspects at least partially. You didn't communicate with players, in that aspect either and it forced them into making a bad decision that you are now lording over their heads.
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.
First I want to say that I don't agree with how DV is handling the situation. It is unnecessarily hostile, but his arguments are good.
These two quotes are complete opposites. Greater or equal to is not the same as lower or equal to.
Also I want people replaced if they don't respond to their first prod in 24 hours. 6 days for force replacements is absurd. Considering 2 weeks deadline a slot could post 3 post and still be in the game by day 3. That is absolutely not ok.
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Literally the slot was not going to be in day 2. That is the definition of "imminent" from that stage in the game.
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.
48 hours of not posting, prod, then if no response or content post in 48 hours, replace/modkill. That's exactly what I have gone off of in every game I've moderated, and if anything I've considered making it stricter.
Lurking into replacement is bad behavior. I don't agree with how DV is going about this or even all of his points. But saying "we need to allow people 144 hours of not posting before we consider replacement?" That's lunacy.
"V/LA requests of up to 72 hours may be made, but replacement/modkill may occur without additional warning if no post is made within 24 hours of that V/LA ending." I only say this because I spend a lot of my weekends away from any kind of device/connectivity, and sometimes it's not *just* Saturday and Sunday. That would, of course, need to be adjusted for shorter phase games/shorter phases.
You said that the reason you didn't force a replacement of Nancy was because you knew you didn't have replacements so it would result in a modkill.
I'm not saying that the slot should have been modkilled immediately on the V/LA. I'm saying that the moderators didn't push it because you knew that if you started the proceedings they would end up in a modkill. And you guys viewed that as being "Bad Game Health". I'm saying that's cheap. That's why I take such an issue with Eco's post blaming Nancy. You guys knew. You ******* knew. And the only reason you didn't do it was because of some sort of dumb idea of game health.
That's not fair.
Shadow's probabally right on some of what he said for me to really explain what I mean I need to think of what way is the clearest way to explain my problem with the overall moderation and why I feel that it doesn't really take into consideration the players.
Yeah, I'm pretty lenient with VLA as long as it's no longer than a week, with 2 week day phases. And as you are aware, if someone knows they'll be VLA regularly on certain days of the week, I'm fine with that being automatic. But it's all about communication. If someone doesn't talk to me, I have very little sympathy.
A quick explanation of what I saw, I knew that a few players specifically had been getting warnings in this game for things that I didn't feel crossed the line or were anywhere close. It felt to me as though Eco was specifically targeting those players, because other players were making far worse comments and not getting warnings. I saw a couple posts that I felt were cruel specifically the post Tom said about Shinichi and him laughing and making fun of him in team chat. That's just wrong.
I felt as though Eco let it slide because he doesn't think highly of Shinichi. Someone else that I don't think Eco dislikes also told me that they got a few warnings for silly reasons too. So, I guess the posts I saw got missed. It still feels a little strange to me, that those posts could be missed, but hey I guess I'm wrong.
This compounded to me with this lurking issue for me. Since it seemed pretty bad to me to be so focused on player behavior, but not player lurking. I still feel like there is a little too much focus on that, but not nearly as egregious as I thought it was.
That's what I get for going off half cocked. Oh well, not like it changes anyone's opinion of me anyways, just reinforcing my *****ty behavior. 10/10
So, I'm somewhat sorry Eco, not fully because I still think you're trying to scapegoat and minimize poor mod decisions. But, I took it too far.
how dare you, i am ******* delightful
Seriously though, if you have something specific you want to ask me, feel free. Pretty much all my thoughts on the game are in the game thread + team chat though.
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 concede these rules can't deal with them in a way that I'd like them to.
However, this is why I suggested rolling replacements. Osie's right if you can't contact me in three day's my sympathy is pretty low. I think I'd say 5 days is reasonable total. Three days with no posts, two more to contact me but during those two days I'm looking for a replacement with one waiting and ready to go by the end of those two days optimally. Then replace that player.
At day six the player is just out period. I might not modkill the slot, but their ass it out. If that player comes back during the 5 days then they get to play again, but its the DV special. You get one time for that. After that its three days and you're out. If you can't get on disc or PM me on forums in three days then my sympathy is gone.
If someone has issues I don't mind working with them. This might change in extreme lylo situations, but on the whole I think that's reasonable.
Maybe Osie's way works too, but I think 48 might be a little too aggressive for the first requirement. Not the second prod though.
If a player can't remember a game exists for three days then... Yeah prods are sort of a strange thing.
I think the rules are antiquated is part of the problem. These are remnants from much longer day phases. We keep upping our day timers nowadays, and our prods now need to keep up with that.
It sucks because my system proposed still has a slot not playing the game for half a day phase in a two week phase. Its even worse if they disappear after three days.
I think at that point depending in the situation and the amount of players that might need replacing extensions are in order. And we had that discussion and I understand why you didn't want to have discussions.
Here's the rub though. We had roughly 25% of our player base not there. Nacho, Cantrip and Beeboy were gone. Prods were slow, and on top of that Nacho was allowed to disappear for 5 or 6 days. On top of that communication with players was incredibly bad, and the only reason you guys mentioned that Beeboy might be modkilled was because I replaced out and others were also showing some disgruntlement. You seem to be glossing over the fact that mods really made this situation bad with communication and how it was treated. You also seem to be twisting events into being as favorable as they were for the moderators. Moderators decisions really hurt the town in this game, and you seem to be unwilling to admit that. I don't know why.
A different situation with one player, I don't know if I'd have nearly the outcry I did. But with zero communication coming from moderators. The moderators telling me multiple times that modkills would be ignored at all costs.
Primarily, I don't think moderators should find replacements at all in this game type. I think teams should be responsible. Its a hey you have 48 hours to find a replacement for your teammate that you vouched for. Otherwise its going to cost you. Which is really how the rules read anyways. And that's my last complaint. You keep saying that the rules were not made to deal with this, but they were. Somewhere the moderator team made the decision to not enforce them that way. You enforced them in the loosest way possible(Which was my whole complaint about the flame rules since I felt you enforced them the strictest way possible). Which I still feel is slightly the case, just it was a lot more even then I thought. And that's the problem to me. The rules could have worked had they been enforced in a reasonable manner. But moderators decided to take the most interpretive reading of the rules and used the grey area to make it even more extensive.
Which is why I'm on a campaign to remove some of that. Its silly that this happened at all.
2 seems like a reasonable expectation, though obviously we could mess with the times and numbers at the same time to be stricter without being draconian (e.g. 2 posts every 36 hours by itself, or 3 posts every 72 hours in addition to 1 post every 48).
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.