I don't think a restriction on complexity for new hosts makes sense. You can't truly learn how to balance complex games without designing and running complex games and making mistakes in the process. My first game, Hollywood Mafia, had a lot of wacky stuff and probably wasn't that well balanced, but that would have been the case even if I had already run a basic.
Now, what running a basic will teach you is how to deal with the logistics of actually running the game. For that reason, restricting the size of a new host's first game might have some merit.
It's been done: MTGS Mafia Redux, arimnaes' game from a long time ago, which was all about old games and jokes (and is famous for Az's goofy "smilie restriction").
I'm actually working on a sequel to that game right now myself.
I was about to say, "Hey, that wasn't that long ago!" Then I checked the date, and damn, that was over five years ago.
Opinion: Spamming, even on the order of a dozen consecutive posts, is not grounds for this type of punishment. It's a violation of a forum rule rather than a mafia rule, so it should be answered with warnings and infractions rather than probation/blacklisting.
Quote from atlseal »
I know I specifically communicated with Seppel as to whether there was a potential legitimate reason for DRey to be posting like he did, and Seppel came back and confirmed that there was. If this was any other game where that wasn't a mechanic, DRey would have been dealt with as appropriate, but you cannot ask he be carded over something that Seppel setup.
The precedent is not necessarily one-sided, but Azrael was warned for spamming in World Domination Mafia 2 even though his role could potentially benefit from it, and I believe I eventually started handing out warnings and infractions in Inheritance Mafia when people were spamming to try to get the highest post count. However, I appreciate that it's tricky and subject to determine at what point you cross the line from "this is the setup designer's fault for incentivizing this behavior" to "this is the player's fault for choosing to play the role this way."
Also, FWIW, DRey did not throw the game for the town in Mean Girls Mafia. He made some really unfortunate plays that ultimately got him mislynched, but it wasn't calculated sabotage on his part. Messing up and getting lynched is something that happens to multiple townies in virtually every game; it's not a grounds for punishment.
Yep, it's one of the only tactics to ever be banned outright, because there's simply no way for the setup to balance against it or for the scum to tactically counter it. It basically forces all the scum to lock in their claims up front without outing any town roles in exchange - a mass claim that's all benefit and no cost to the town.
On some occasions you will get a townie or two who inadvertently reveal their roles by insufficiently obfuscating them in their acronyms, and maybe once in a dozen games you would get a scum brilliant enough to construct an acronym that can represent multiple roles and still sound legitimate. Other than that, it's basically foolproof.
Quote from Macius »
So, lets say my role says "you are a 10 headed goat monkey" then saying something like "y3 a3 a1 10 h6 g4 m6" would be a crypto-claim. probably a horrible one of it is, but I have 213 pages to read for the info im looking for and want to see if I have a good concept of it.
Giving the number of letters on a per word basis would generally make it too easy to decipher. If I was claiming cop, for instance, I might go for something like "So it turns out I possess the capacity to learn if people are on the side of justice or not once during each game night," which would encode to "SITOIPTCTLIPAOTSOJONODEGN - 95 characters."
I believe it was invented by Alx2 in View Askew Mafia.
I'm not getting heavily into this discussion, because I don't feel I have been sufficiently aware of the general goings-on around the forum recently to have an informed opinion on the leadership or personal character of rian as an administrator (though we have worked together in the past and I have not had any bad experiences with him.)
All I will say is that I have the utmost respect for Azrael and I reject out of hand any notion of him having an ulterior motive or an axe to grind. Disagree with him if you will, challenge his facts or his reasoning if you think they're in error, but in the 6+ years over which I've interacted with him, I have never known him to argue in bad faith.
I dunno - I've always found it easier to play as scum because I guess I just have the kind of mind that enjoys being a villain.
Too true. One of the greatest pleasures of playing as scum is seeing a post by a townie where they call you likely town and/or agree with a lot of your ideas. I love to sit back and say "Yessssss! Dance, my puppets!"
Oh, interesting. It doesn't completely prevent you from seeing their posts, though, it just makes them collapsed by default. A person could achieve the same effect by just consciously skipping over your posts when reading the thread. So I don't really see a need to legislate, here.
I too was unaware of the existence of an ignore feature. You know mafiascum uses different forum software from MTGS, right? Maybe there's one on their forum and the player in question just assumed there was one here as well.
I feel obligated to point out that just because "Manders was secretly behind this modkill" makes a convenient narrative doesn't mean that it's true.
In particular, Cyan, I'm really not happy that you're treating tordeck as a stooge who escapes culpability only because he didn't have the presence of mind to make his own decision. Frankly I think that's even more insulting than your portrayal of Manders as the evil vizier whispering poison into his ear.
I don't have any knowledge of how the discussion between tordeck, Manders, and red_0mega went, but neither do you. Considering that, I think you're being about an order of magnitude more confrontational than is warranted.
One point that you should consider, though, tordeck, is that if you wanted to get multiple outside opinions on the situation, you would have done better to pick people who were more likely to actually have differing views. It sounds like you were already leaning to the side of modkilling poggydude, so you probably should have talked to at least one person known for being lenient so that you could better consider the other side of the argument.
I agree with Az that some of what's been said here is little harsh on tordeck. I may disagree with his decision, but even so, I wouldn't contend that it was obviously wrong or totally without justification.
Even though the actual incident which got poggydude modkilled seems like an insufficient offense to me when taken by itself, the fact that he had already been warned once for skirting the rule means he was treading on thin ice. He could have been more careful than he was.
Yeah, I'd have to agree that this was a pretty bad modkill. The rule against PM quoting is there so that players can't use exact wording and/or style to try to assert that what they're posting must be from a genuine PM. It doesn't seem that poggydude ever did that, or that the other players thought that was the point he was trying to argue. It's neither necessary nor useful to enforce the rule to a level of stringency where you're basically telling your players, "if you want to discuss your ability results, fine, but you'd better run them through a thesaurus first."
It was the modkill itself that "confirmed" his ability results were genuine, so I'd say your intervention here ran directly counter to the purpose you were trying to achieve. It's only worth shooting yourself in the foot like that if the player in question is flagrantly violating the rules, whereas this was not so clear cut.
That being said, it was your call to make and you made it. While I would certainly encourage game mods to seek advice from experienced sources like the council if they're unsure of what action to take, they should never feel that their decisions are subject to outside approval from such people.
I would argue that "scum have more reason to lie than townies, therefore lynch all liars" and "scum are usually the first to mention neutrals or multiple scum teams, therefore lynch the first player to do that" are not truly policy lynches. In both those cases, you're lynching the player because they've done something that you think makes them likely to be scum.
To me, a policy lynch is when your reason for lynching the player is not "you did X, scum usually do X, so you're probably scum" but rather "you did X, we cannot allow people to be rewarded for doing X, so we're lynching you regardless of what it says about your alignment."
So the classic example I would use would be Lynch All Lurkers rather than Lynch All Liars. The correlation between lurking and being scum is much weaker than the correlation between lying and being scum, almost to the point of being nonexistent. But Lynch All Lurkers used to have quite a passionate following simply because people wanted to discourage lurking in all cases.
This has renewed my determination to finish my setup.
Eh, sorry, I guess this is off topic for the council thread.
BUT STILL ERMAHGERD
Now, what running a basic will teach you is how to deal with the logistics of actually running the game. For that reason, restricting the size of a new host's first game might have some merit.
I was about to say, "Hey, that wasn't that long ago!" Then I checked the date, and damn, that was over five years ago.
Time keeps on slippin'.
The precedent is not necessarily one-sided, but Azrael was warned for spamming in World Domination Mafia 2 even though his role could potentially benefit from it, and I believe I eventually started handing out warnings and infractions in Inheritance Mafia when people were spamming to try to get the highest post count. However, I appreciate that it's tricky and subject to determine at what point you cross the line from "this is the setup designer's fault for incentivizing this behavior" to "this is the player's fault for choosing to play the role this way."
Also, FWIW, DRey did not throw the game for the town in Mean Girls Mafia. He made some really unfortunate plays that ultimately got him mislynched, but it wasn't calculated sabotage on his part. Messing up and getting lynched is something that happens to multiple townies in virtually every game; it's not a grounds for punishment.
On some occasions you will get a townie or two who inadvertently reveal their roles by insufficiently obfuscating them in their acronyms, and maybe once in a dozen games you would get a scum brilliant enough to construct an acronym that can represent multiple roles and still sound legitimate. Other than that, it's basically foolproof.
Giving the number of letters on a per word basis would generally make it too easy to decipher. If I was claiming cop, for instance, I might go for something like "So it turns out I possess the capacity to learn if people are on the side of justice or not once during each game night," which would encode to "SITOIPTCTLIPAOTSOJONODEGN - 95 characters."
I believe it was invented by Alx2 in View Askew Mafia.
All I will say is that I have the utmost respect for Azrael and I reject out of hand any notion of him having an ulterior motive or an axe to grind. Disagree with him if you will, challenge his facts or his reasoning if you think they're in error, but in the 6+ years over which I've interacted with him, I have never known him to argue in bad faith.
(Except as mafia. :))
Too true. One of the greatest pleasures of playing as scum is seeing a post by a townie where they call you likely town and/or agree with a lot of your ideas. I love to sit back and say "Yessssss! Dance, my puppets!"
No, Wuffles. BELIEVE IN YOU, WHO BELIEVES IN YOURSELF!
(Also, wow, relevant avatar at last.)
In particular, Cyan, I'm really not happy that you're treating tordeck as a stooge who escapes culpability only because he didn't have the presence of mind to make his own decision. Frankly I think that's even more insulting than your portrayal of Manders as the evil vizier whispering poison into his ear.
I don't have any knowledge of how the discussion between tordeck, Manders, and red_0mega went, but neither do you. Considering that, I think you're being about an order of magnitude more confrontational than is warranted.
One point that you should consider, though, tordeck, is that if you wanted to get multiple outside opinions on the situation, you would have done better to pick people who were more likely to actually have differing views. It sounds like you were already leaning to the side of modkilling poggydude, so you probably should have talked to at least one person known for being lenient so that you could better consider the other side of the argument.
Even though the actual incident which got poggydude modkilled seems like an insufficient offense to me when taken by itself, the fact that he had already been warned once for skirting the rule means he was treading on thin ice. He could have been more careful than he was.
It was the modkill itself that "confirmed" his ability results were genuine, so I'd say your intervention here ran directly counter to the purpose you were trying to achieve. It's only worth shooting yourself in the foot like that if the player in question is flagrantly violating the rules, whereas this was not so clear cut.
That being said, it was your call to make and you made it. While I would certainly encourage game mods to seek advice from experienced sources like the council if they're unsure of what action to take, they should never feel that their decisions are subject to outside approval from such people.
To me, a policy lynch is when your reason for lynching the player is not "you did X, scum usually do X, so you're probably scum" but rather "you did X, we cannot allow people to be rewarded for doing X, so we're lynching you regardless of what it says about your alignment."
So the classic example I would use would be Lynch All Lurkers rather than Lynch All Liars. The correlation between lurking and being scum is much weaker than the correlation between lying and being scum, almost to the point of being nonexistent. But Lynch All Lurkers used to have quite a passionate following simply because people wanted to discourage lurking in all cases.