Quote:
Originally Posted by Fat Acklow
Also can we all agree that part of the reason the large majority of the Smogon Mafia playerbase fell out was because of League of Legends? I mean, can we?
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LoL was really the final nail in the coffin for mafia. I got into it when I was hosting the dreaded crime BIGS and honestly after some factions just idled and had to have certain members subbed 3 times while others complained to no end and only like 2 were actually content I just stopped caring. League was a lot more fun, less stressful and just newer and fresher. It's not why I lost interest in mafia entirely, but, it was the new thing and a good 'excuse' to ditch mafia when it was already growing stale, tired and repetitive.
I take full responsibility for many of the scrub multifaction games, though at a time when everyone was sick of 2v1 and 2 village games were shaping up horribly imo, in my defense, trying a host of crazy multifaction games is certainly not a crime. Unfortunately I think I single-handedly proved why multifaction is also sort of a bad design that grows stale fast or is incredibly hard to balance. Well not rly the other multifaction games were all like identical to each other or also poorly balanced mine are just notable for being a series of "did u actually think this through."
Probably the funnest game was Red Panda since it allowed people to choose their own poison - nobody could claim any faction was given better roles or had a better focus (information factions blow btw pls never again) etc etc because they picked their own. I think this sole aspect is of intrigue and could be considered again in more detail, perhaps with a more in depth buying system a la Mekkah's work in FE2 with the weapons.
I'd been saying this for way longer than I needed to when it still wasn't being enforced but we NEEDED to have smaller games. The playerbase simply was not there anymore and idling was killing every game that was still being hosted.
I will someday soon post my postgames for whatever games have yet to be posted.. I think MAGMAfia did get posted, not sure, Snype was being super lazy with his portion (no offense), but Red Panda and the apology for April Fools Joke BIGS (it was a somewhat designed game but also mostly made up on the fly) turning out way worse than I had expected. I MUST PROTEST and say that if two of the factions hadn't just endlessly idled and not cooperated, it would have gone a lot better. Yes, the Sea Creatures arguably did have the best roles but they were also the most active faction with the most members next to the Pink who, as it turned out, couldn't actually execute the plans I had for their combination roles. It just so happened the SC were enemies of the Pink and were able to find out more of their enemies faster to sweep the game.
However, I do have AQUANAFIA, a smaller, much more reasonably-sized 1 village 2 mafia game in the works. Pluff was supposed to cohost but that was ages ago, if she still wants to, I'll deploy it. No weird tricks this time, just straight up old school mafia. That is, if Google Docs didn't change and act like all my spreads and docs were gone zzz.
Stuff for Mafia 2013:
-Smaller games
-Only 2 standards at max at one time, or 1 standard 1 beginner
-Better outreach to try and bring new players in, and thus simpler concepts in beginners and standards
-More people with an interest in helping/hosting beginners - even acting as a mentor like we did in Beginner SANDS which I honestly think was one of the best-executed beginners we've had due to that feature
-No expert/big at the same time and only 1 small (pref beginner) game running alongside a big, otherwise we stretch ourselves too thin
If we can improve the attentiveness of our playerbase, erase the idling (the early SANDS games did indeed help erase the idling problems which is what they were designed to do, like their formats or not, they found a solution to idling which is to have the most direct impact on your own WC), gain some more new players to replace the older ones and get successful games going then we could increase the # of players and standards etc again, but for now, we need to just work at establishing some fun, interesting but still basic 2v1s at all.