Woof. I mean...

Thanks for hosting, Xhin. I think I mentioned it during one of the rounds, but I personally found it hard to keep people straight with all the names being themed as they were. In my head they were all Rush songs, but which one? Was I the only one who had problems with that?

It was weird at first, but they grew on me. Going to miss Cinderella Man.....

We knew the game would be close to over if we didn't hit the cop on the night before his eventual reveal. You can argue on whether or not the town was overpowered, but if the cop had died that night the mafia would have been on a rout. As I said in the mafia thread, could have gone both ways.

Down the stretch the only way to win was to hope Trees would try to be slick with his security guard moves and not save Anthem.

Wish I could have bee more productive while I was alive, but my internet has been very termprmantal this month. My death was really a blessing in disguise.

And my name is "Passage to Bangkok", not "Passage to Bang Cock". I am NOT a gay stripper! ;)

Woohoo! Go team!

Bubba, why you keep beating me up :'(

I don't want to come across as a dick to Xhin, but as this was my first game back in a while and it was an attempt to revive mafia, I think I should be honest and help the game move forward in a constructive way.

First, as I already mentioned in one of the day rounds, I was not okay with the host killing rules. I thought the rules as they were written before the game were not great in the first place, but if those were the rules, they should have been enforced. Otherwise, why have them? I understand that punishing someone who wasn't trying to do anything nefarious isn't very fun, but people who don't play can seriously hurt the game. There's very little incentive for the mafia to post when there are no host killing rules, and if a third of the players aren't posting, it discourages everyone else from posting because none of us have much to go on.

This is part of why I stopped playing, by the way. I put a lot of effort into each game when I play. I totally understand and appreciate that not every one has the time or energy to post as much as I do, and that's fine, but it's not fun at all when games grind to a halt because no one is participating. Thankfully, that didn't *really* happen in this game, but I definitely felt like it was on the brink of death at certain points. IMO, everyone should be required to post at least one meaningful thing each day round, or they're out. You can possibly give one day round grace forgiveness period or something, but any more than that and there's no reason to have the rule at all.

This definitely isn't Xhin's fault, but I will repeat that it is kind of absurd that we've been doing this for years and we still don't have any kind of consistent host killing rule that every host knows about and are willing to enforce. Xhin shouldn't have to invent his own host killing rules, we should have standardized rules that apply to every game from now until forever.

Second, I wasn't a fan of the way the roles were set up. Many mafia games seem to be "well, the game starts off in favor of the Town/Mafia, BUT if the Town/Mafia manage to kill this particular role, then it will flip and the other side will have a huge advantage." Which is what this felt like. We should definitely strive to avoid this. If a role feels that it gives one side too much power, we shouldn't try to balance it by over powering the other side, we just shouldn't have that role. It's difficult to know how new roles will affect the game, but this game was advertised as being more vanilla, so why wasn't it? Cop, Doctor, Vigilante, Kingpin. Maybe throw in a Journalist if you really want to spice things up. I've been an advocate for the host advertising what the game will be like during the sign up process, and Xhin did that, but imo we didn't get the game that was advertised.

Third, I did actually kind of like the anonymous names. I went into it expecting to hate it, but it definitely grew on me. The only thing I have to add I think is that, if we continue to use this format in the future, we should continue using the Rush song names. Like, I was Spirit of Radio this game, but next game I might be YYZ or Jacob's Ladder or whoever. Maybe people disagree? I only say this because I felt COMPLETELY lost at the beginning of the game because it was difficult to just remember names (I don't know anything about Rush), let alone what weird actions certain names might have done. I feel like having a consistent pool of names that we use each time might help alleviate this.

Finally, the game was super slow. I've never hosted a game, so I have no idea how much work is involved in hosting on top of whatever much more important IRL work Xhin might have, but if this was the game to get people back into mafia, it needed to not be plagued by slow updates. It was advertised as having 48 hour day rounds, which I thought was a great change from the standard 72 hour day rounds, but we ended up having 48 hour (possibly longer sometimes?) night rounds. Probably more than anything, this contributes to people not participating, and it can easily kill individual games as well as mafia as a whole.

If we want to revitalize mafia, in the future we need consistent rules, balanced roles, and faster games, or I think eventually no one will want to play.

Same, even though it worked to my advantage :)



Indeed. There were several rounds that went beyond the 48 hours with no response from Xhin to say "round will end late". At least one of them went two entire days with no response from Xhin, yet he was on the site replying to other posts so he could've spared a minute to just say he didn't have time to update the round.



I also feel there was a lot of inconsistency with rules and roles and also the wording of stuff. For example:



Nowhere does it mention that this will also disable a power role. Yet that is exactly what it did. I understand WHY it did (because you changed their role to Beat Up and that then prevent access to their role thread) but you should've specified this was a part of being beat up OR changed how you handle being beat up.

There was also this in the Security Guard thread:



This caused confusion on one day round when Trees (Jo Nathan) believed he had actually prevented a beating on himself and at the time I was like "How can he have gotten that wrong" but now reading it I completely see how he got confused by it. You literally used the words "saved yourself".

I'm all for wording things funnily, but there should always be a very clear version of it afterwards. Like adding "P.S. No one targeted you" at the end would've cleared that up.




AAAAALSO! An issue I have had with Mafia games the last several times I have played is that the focus on story often makes it difficult to work out WTF actually happened. I do enjoy some of the story fluff people add at the start of Day and Night rounds but there really needs to be a simplified "This person died" summary. This wasn't always an issue, but a couple of times this game it wasn't really clear what had happened and in some previous games it has been a huge issue.

Also @Mafia players. What you should've done when I revealed was try to kill me and beat up the security guard (or the other way around). Without the doctor, that would've ensured one of us would've died. Had it been the Guard, you could've just then killed me after that.

I was surprised you didn't do this.

That was discussed in the mafia thread, but we ended up gambling after Trees and chalking up another 100% kill in one night. Should have gone that way in hindsight.

Kudos to you on the self check. You got some great results too. We were doomed as soon as you revealed.

The most unfair part of this game was that Redack was cop. Tough luck for the Mafia haha

I'm not a fan of the random names actually although I'll keep playing if we use them. I also agree with Bandit that if we keep using them there should be a standard set of names to use, although if we switched now it wouldn't be bad. Maybe just standard names like "Jim" "Steve" "Bob" etc.

I only say this because I felt COMPLETELY lost at the beginning of the game because it was difficult to just remember names (I don't know anything about Rush), let alone what weird actions certain names might have done. I feel like having a consistent pool of names that we use each time might help alleviate this.

To add to what Bandit said, I really loved the anonymous names. It was refreshing not to have to defend the mere fact that you were still alive on round 3.

But it definitely made it harder for me to follow the game in the early rounds. There were so many people and so many unfamiliar names that I couldn't really keep track of who said what.

I can't recall if this has been suggested before, but I think some kind of 'journal' feature would be really useful if we keep using the anonymous names. Something where we can make 'notes' about people and view them at any time. Or maybe a few 'tag post' type buttons that flag them (without hiding them, of course) certain colors depending on context. I could hit a 'suspicious' button so that when I'm looking over things later there will be yellow-colored posts that stand out, or something.

I also feel there was a lot of inconsistency with rules and roles and also the wording of stuff.

To echo Moonray's sentiment, I was pretty annoyed that I lost access to my thread the night I should have gotten a solid Watcher result to point the town to victory. Ultimately wasn't necessary for a win, but it should have been made clear from the start.

This was my first thought as well, but I decided it was a bad idea for a couple of reasons:

1. We were in enough trouble by that point that I thought we needed to get a bit lucky and hit both kills every night to have a chance to win. I didn't think we could win if we took the conservative route and guaranteed only getting one kill.

2. Helius was the Kingpin and the only one that hadn't had any real suspicion on him at that point, and if the Security Guard intercepted any of our targets Helius would be silenced for one round. It'd be way too easy to figure him out by that point and I believed he'd probably have to be the last Mafia standing if we were to win at all.

Ultimately a calculated risk that didn't pay off.

I had fun with this game, even if I had difficulty posting in the main thread as I didn't want to give away my identity. Definitely agree that the power roles were a bit too swingy and ill-defined, and the Mafia side didn't feel like it had much power to it at all (though we could have won pretty easily had we not fallen for Anthem's self-investigation). I think limitations of power roles, particularly protection roles, is pretty important. I liked the swapped names--I think they made the early rounds pretty slow as we had even less to go on than normal, but once the game started to settle in it became a lot more interesting.

Maybe a shaman that can't reveal that they're a shaman, or a tracker that has the kingpin-type weakness.

I think the Shaman is a fundamentally broken role that shouldn't return in its current form.

Making a case against a random target presents too many problems. It's basically better for the town that you DON'T play your role, because playing your role has a good chance at getting innocent people killed.

Worse yet, if you can't reveal then when people start saying "Why were you so sure X was guilty?", you can't really mount a good defense. So not only is it possible that you kill an innocent, you also might get lynched.

And for what, a single night as a Watcher where you have a pretty good chance of getting no info? Better to play your role as a townie and not go for the target unless you think they're guilty.

Then you have the issues with what actually constitutes the shaman convincing people to vote for someone vs them just voting...

Yea looking back through your thread I couldn't believe how lucky I was with the timing on that self investigation. I'd thought about it for round 1 but figured it might seem too obvious, so left it for round 2.

That makes sense on the kill front. Kings/Helius never really grabbed my attention so I couldn't really say when I might've investigated him, the only reason I did was because he got coma'd.

Also I obviously liked the anonymous names because it meant I survived until the end!

I would like to host the next game pl0x

Sorry about all the tree puns, everyone. I guess I deserve a sumac in the face for that.

I have been busy IRL so I wasn't able to participate as much as I would have liked. I thought I was going to be able to participate quite a bit, but I couldn't. :(

I knew Cinderella Man was Mafia....

Since I was the first one taken out (so much for the anonymous names) I didn't really get much time to enjoy the game.

Oh well maybe next time.

The random names are fine, but the Rush song titles may have been a bit to complex. Try to stick with one word names, and it will be easier to follow.

Video Games character names are cool.

Yeah, I like the idea of video game characters too.

Same.

Sorry about all the tree puns, everyone. I guess I deserve a sumac in the face for that.

Yup.

Also maybe it's because I wasn't playing but I thought having two killing and two saving roles made the game super interesting. At least to watch. I might be in the minority in this one though :P also yeah it would be silly to have that every game though

It's not so much that I have more free time as much as I've mastered time management.

Fine with me.

Sure, why not.

Do eeet

Just want to point this out to any Mafia players who might have missed it;
http://www.gtx0.com/view.php?post=101736
If Ghow is selected, we ALL need to support him!

I have no problem with him hosting.

I would suggest that before a new game start date is picked that we wait until Growlithe sees how much free time he's going to have if he is also going to be our rep in this Mafia Championship thing.

I am good with that. He is one of the most active users.

No issues here.

I have a problem with him hosting... The fact it's taking forever! Down with the oppressive Ghowilo regime.

But seriously what's with the delay?

Agree. I t would be nice to get a update every 6 months or so.

I want to do it as soon as possible, concerning getting this up and running, Xhin said, "Well, I'm fucked"

He also said he was going to make a progress tracker for it but hasn't given me the link yet. Like you, I would like to get this ball rolling, but I have no power to do anything at the moment.

Down with the oppressive Ghowilo regime!

If you want to host it, go ahead.

Okay now that I can do some things I'll have the sign up thread up soonish. I just have to figure out how to actually post it.