UncleSam
Leading this village
Ok so there have been some questions raised, both publicly and in IS, about Circus. One response in particular stuck out to me from the IS thread:
So I'm going to suggest something very simple: have very specific windows of time dedicated to the game, and everything outside of that is limited to team communication.
People don't want to have to be online all day just to talk to that one straggler who doesn't care. People don't want to invest countless hours into mafia games in general. So why not take the pressure off of everyone?
This idea could take many forms. Principally, how I would implement it is 'In-thread and PM communication ONLY, with upper limits on both posts and PMs sent each cycle'. I don't want to see thousand-post days any more than the next person, and thinking about how to maximize communication would add an interesting gameplay element while also reducing the pressure to be continuously active on the playerbase.
IRC contact could be similarly limited, perhaps to very specific fixed times that would be publicly announced before players signed up. It would be cool to have a mafia cycle that lasted for one frenetic hour and which you could then sit back and relax from for a few days while thinking about the next cycle, rather than a monotonous looming game that consumes your life for weeks on end (or which you ignore, much to your teammates' chagrin). I'm going to call this 'Limited OC'.
Another suggestion I'm going to make it going to the Unicycle format as a new norm. For those who don't know what that is, refer to this game for a good summary. Basically, Unicycle cuts the amount of time a game is going to run in half by collapsing the day and night cycles into one, which is huge for maintaining activity throughout the game. If a game consisted of 6-8 different sessions consisting of 1-2 hours each over the course of ~2 weeks, with the opportunity to plan strategy semi-privately outside of that without feeling pressured to constantly be online, then it would allow players who just want to play the game to not invest a huge amount of time and still feel like they aren't getting swept away by the players who are_always_online. Similarly, it would help ease the pressure on those players from having to constantly be available. I'm calling this, obviously, 'Unicycle'.
One last suggestion I'm going to make is that we ban claiming of any kind. I'm as much of a fan of hard-and-fast role strategy as anyone, but when only 1-2 people are involved in planning the game gets old for everyone else quite quickly. I'm going to call this 'RIP Village Leaders'.
Obviously these don't need to be universal, but I think we should consider adopted some/all of these are new 'game norms' which are assumed unless specifically stated otherwise (sort of like how no kills/claiming on N0 is as of now).
I'd like opinions on which, if any, of these suggestions people approve of.
I've had this thought myself, as have several others. Basically it boils down to what I'm going to call activity creep. Players have gradually felt pressure to be online more and more often lest they miss something important, thus resulting in weeks of effort going down the drain.If you would like a serious post from an ex-player:
I stopped playing because around my end of playing time it was mostly multifaction popularity contests, and I wasn't into that. Being on IRC every hour seemed like a requirement. Even if this is no longer the case I just lost interest and don't want to jump back in.
So I'm going to suggest something very simple: have very specific windows of time dedicated to the game, and everything outside of that is limited to team communication.
People don't want to have to be online all day just to talk to that one straggler who doesn't care. People don't want to invest countless hours into mafia games in general. So why not take the pressure off of everyone?
This idea could take many forms. Principally, how I would implement it is 'In-thread and PM communication ONLY, with upper limits on both posts and PMs sent each cycle'. I don't want to see thousand-post days any more than the next person, and thinking about how to maximize communication would add an interesting gameplay element while also reducing the pressure to be continuously active on the playerbase.
IRC contact could be similarly limited, perhaps to very specific fixed times that would be publicly announced before players signed up. It would be cool to have a mafia cycle that lasted for one frenetic hour and which you could then sit back and relax from for a few days while thinking about the next cycle, rather than a monotonous looming game that consumes your life for weeks on end (or which you ignore, much to your teammates' chagrin). I'm going to call this 'Limited OC'.
Another suggestion I'm going to make it going to the Unicycle format as a new norm. For those who don't know what that is, refer to this game for a good summary. Basically, Unicycle cuts the amount of time a game is going to run in half by collapsing the day and night cycles into one, which is huge for maintaining activity throughout the game. If a game consisted of 6-8 different sessions consisting of 1-2 hours each over the course of ~2 weeks, with the opportunity to plan strategy semi-privately outside of that without feeling pressured to constantly be online, then it would allow players who just want to play the game to not invest a huge amount of time and still feel like they aren't getting swept away by the players who are_always_online. Similarly, it would help ease the pressure on those players from having to constantly be available. I'm calling this, obviously, 'Unicycle'.
One last suggestion I'm going to make is that we ban claiming of any kind. I'm as much of a fan of hard-and-fast role strategy as anyone, but when only 1-2 people are involved in planning the game gets old for everyone else quite quickly. I'm going to call this 'RIP Village Leaders'.
Obviously these don't need to be universal, but I think we should consider adopted some/all of these are new 'game norms' which are assumed unless specifically stated otherwise (sort of like how no kills/claiming on N0 is as of now).
I'd like opinions on which, if any, of these suggestions people approve of.