In an effort not to hijack the Pokémon Mafia game thread with this discussion, I am deciding to give this topic it's own thread here. I think it might be a good idea for us to come up with a mafia "best practices" list of sorts that we expect all players to abide by in our mafia games.
There is nothing more frustrating to active players or mods than watching players sign up for games only to largely go MIA for the duration of the game.
This point was raised again in the Pokémon game thread and it is one that we have sort of been discussing off and on over the last year:
Just to be clear this isn't targeting anybody in particular or even this game in particular, it's a general statement for playing mafia as a whole. I honestly don't get how lurking, doing absolutely nothing but the bare minimum and baselessly pointing fingers when you actually do post, makes people 'more likely town'. If you refuse to play this game properly and only post minimally with absolute zero effort, then I don't see how you qualify more as town than as scum. I think it was pretty clear why TW in particular made this minimal post rule: so people actually play this game. If you honestly only think to do the bare minimum every single in game day, than why even bother playing at all. It's lazy, it's selfish and it's ultimately detrimental to town more than to scum. I agree with the sentiment that if we don't want this to be the standard every single game, we need to either vote off Rafay every D1 or mods need to stop letting him play in their games. What's stopping all of us just do to the same? Post 3 times with no contribution what so ever, people think you're 'more likely town', mafia probably wins most of the times, but at least you made it to the next day. Repeat and profit, whatever that looks like.
Sorry for the rant, but this is honestly getting ridiculous
I concocted the "3-Post Active Participation Rule" several games ago as a way to hopefully combat this issue and it has helped but only marginally. The minimum post requirement of 3 posts was my way of attempting to force participants to actually participate (a crazy idea I know) while simultaneously not burdening them too much with a large daily post requirement. Perhaps the 3 post minimum was set too low though. One would think that if someone signs up to play a mafia game that they would actually play the mafia game. This is not to discount the validity of anyone's individual playstyle per se as each player clearly has their own style. But the question is begged -- why sign up to play if you aren't going to actually play the game? How are you possibly having fun playing that way? It's not really fair to everyone who is actively playing the game that they get lynched/killed for actively contributing when there are players who are intentionally left alive or forgotten just because they post once every 6-7 days. It is also unfair to the game mods who spend a lot of time setting up and running a game that they think people will enjoy only to watch several players barely contribute to the end product.
Imagine how great these games would be if 15 people signed up for a game and all 15 people actively participated. There would never be any more mafia team discussions of "let's kill this one person because they are clearly active and leading the town" or any town discussions of "let's lynch this person because he is a lurker and even if he's a townie he isn't helpful and won't help when needed".
How do we as a mafia community want to handle this moving forward? Should there be stricter post requirements? Should we do something else? Any suggestions?