yay! ty pitch

So in other words, the solution to the problem results in smaller games?

Kind of hard for the mods to be begging for the last 15 slots to get filled but also kick out a bunch of the players who have already signed up.

Whenever I've made a comment on not wanting to play huge games because of the absurd time commitment, everyone replies that no one is actually expected to read all of the thread, you're not supposed to take the game seriously, and you're ok as long as you show up for ITAs and make some sort of effort to figure out the right person to shoot. So if people are upset at chronic lack of participation in these games, it seems like the first thing to do would be to rethink their purpose and the way that they are marketed. You can't make every single game the biggest and baddest event of the year and also expect to only get quality signups.

While everything you said is completely right, soah, understand that the people that are getting bitched about here are people who really don't even meet that minimal amount of participation.

I don't want to get drawn into a deep debate on the issue since I don't even play in those games, but if you set extremely low expectations of people, there will inevitably be people who do even worse. When game mods make it clear in the signup thread that they are going to run a high-quality game and expect high-quality participation from the players (for example Viking Village 3, the WSOWW), you get good participation from everyone. But quantity and quality are contradictory goals. You can't address problems at one end without sacrificing something on the other. To that extent, it's fallacious to separate "they don't care" from "the games are too big". When players feel that the purpose of their presence is to drive up the player count (or to give it enough players so that it runs at all), and when they have little power to affect the outcome of the game, you will have players who don't care.

'results in' has a much different effect than 'creating' in this context - in a better way.

creating a smaller game won't fix the problem. If a mod creates a 40 player game instead of a 60 player game, he'll still have the same 5 undesireable players in, and 20 others don't get to play or sub or whatever.

if the mod instead looks at his 60 signups and boots 5 players that he doesn't expect will actually participate at the level he wants, then this resulting 55 player game will probably be much better than the previous 40 man example. So yes, this results in a smaller game, but not as small as creating a smaller game (as intended by chrisv), and with better participation quality despite the larger size.

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your other point essentially agrees with me, mods already have the power and authority to enact this sort of thing, ie participation expectations, but they generally don't, either because the want sheer numbers and don't care about activity, or because they don't want to be mean.

If they actually thought about it, I'm sure that even mods aiming for massive games would prefer 100 active players than 100 active players + 15 dregs. so i think the not wanting to be mean is the bigger reason this happens, as opposed to reaching certain size.

I don't read every signup thread so my perception may not fully reflect reality, but it seems like I see an awful lot of "guys, I designed 60 awesome roles, it'd really hurt the game to cut anything out, come on we need more players!" So designing smaller games is indeed the solution to this problem. It's generally a lot easier to accommodate extra players than it is to shrink a game.

your solution assumes that the last signups are the undesireable ones. this is not generally the case.

You seem to be thinking that mods get 50 signups by active players, beg to get up to 60, and its 6 of those last 10 that slank. That's not the case. The first 50 signups have 4 slankers in it already, and the last 10 that got begged for are 8 regular players plus 2 slankers, where late signups are slightly above average for slankers, but its not entirely located there.

So designing a smaller game and not begging for signups doesn't get rid of most slankers who sign up throughout, not all at the end.

I'm not assuming that at all. When game mods are struggling to fill their roleset, they don't ever have any realistic option to exclude anyone who has signed up. This is something that is known or assumed by almost everyone in advance. One of the simplest ways to combat this is to design the game for fewer players so that you have more flexibility. Beggars can't be choosers, etc.

You're clearly right that the larger games require more players (ldo), and that means you have to expand the bounds of acceptability of the player pool. And you're clearly right that mods need to take that into account when designing games.

None of that, of course, should excuse people who sign up for games and then don't participate AT ALL. Those people would be better served to just not waste everyone's time, and if the mod needs to change their game as a result of those people not being available, then so be it.

People not participating fundamentally unbalances games, because slacking wolves are no big deal (their NAs can be proxied, they can be told who to vote for, etc), but slacking villagers can't. And the problem is worse the larger the game you have. (Regarding this, I wonder how terrible it would really be to force wolves to submit their own NAs -- free to consult of course but if they don't do it themselves, it doesn't happen. I suspect that if you made nights a bit longer to compensate it would solve this problem reasonably well.)

actually slanking wolves is a way bigger problem

I'm pretty sure I strongly disagree.. but, humor me. How so?

there are way fewer wolves than villagers. also each wolf on average has stronger powers than each villager does and slankers theoretically get lunched so the wolf vig or angel slanking is really bad

I disagree, though my perspective is from a vanilla perspective so it may not apply universally. A lazy, basically nonparticipating wolf is still a wolf, someone who needs to be lynched for the other side to win and whose very existence enhances his team's ability to perform it's fundamental action, the night kill, provided at least one wolf is participating actively. Even if he is lynched, that lynch takes a day of the village's time, and saves other wolves for that one day; meanwhile the village still needs to find just as many active wolves. A wolf team is considerably better off with an incremental nonparticipating wolf than with no wolf at all.

A lazy, nonparticipating villager is nothing but dead weight once power villagers are dead and there is no chance he'll be night killed, and pretty close to dead weight before that. The opposing team will never nightkill him and therefore his team must absorb the loss of one of its only weapons — a lynch — or risk letting him go to f3 and therefore in effect flip the game. A village is not noticeably better off with an incremental nonparticipating villager — in practice, the villager will usually be lynched, which actually hurts his team relative to his never having existed at all.

this whole thing doesn't make sense

villagers still need majority to lynch wolves just like wolves need a wolf to make NKs. If you're going to make an argument it should be that villagers need to lynch x wolves and wolves usually need to lynch x+1 villagers.

ime, any extra time added to a game will favor the villagers way more often than it will favor the wolves. How does a wolf getting lynched ever save them a day? I don't think there's any merit to what you're saying here.

disagree

you're saying they're noticeably better off but not really giving any reasons why. a lazy wolf is just as much dead weight as a lazy villager. lazy wolves are lynched just as often as lazy villagers.

villagers have existential value. Its that they give the village majority so that the wolves cant just eat them all.

yes, but what about slanking neutrals?

atakdog is obviously right in this instance because he's purely looking at it from the outside, in game-weight terms. aksdal is right that slanking wolves are worse because they are ****ing infuriating for the rest of their team and especially in vanillas, they are proportionally more painful to have on your team.

I suppose it also is more annoying with a lazy wolf because that player's teammates KNOW they have a teammate who isn't trying. With a villager, none of his teammates know for sure that their team is bring dragged down.

optimal

Remember your wolf team in Pinocchio/alice?

Thanks, I'd managed to repress that until just now.

I think that was mostly an extreme example of a ****ty rand wherein you had a bunch of slanking wolves and basically no slanking villagers (wherein I define "slanking" poorly as "basically risking nonparticipation modkills"). In situations like that, sure, is problem for wolf team.

In your more typical situation where you have half a dozen slanking villagers and a couple slanking wolves, it's entirely too easy for the wolves to both make optimum use of their slankers night actions, and for them to drive the narrative to get the slanking villagers and/or unimportant wolves killed first if they want to (because, well, the villagers are quite literally guessing).

Also (and this is potentially contradictory, except it isn't), in a large mishmash where you have 20% of the thread paying no attention whatsoever, its far, FAR too easy for wolves to, if they desire, create an endgame wherein the only remaining villagers are the ones who have been paying no attention whatsoever (see, e.g.: Anniversary). Because, you know, they have perfect info.

Village slankers are a problem for the reason DWetzel alludes to - that they're a double edged problem. Slanker wolves are just a risk to die. Slanker villagers are a problem no matter what you do with them. Either you lynch them, in which case they eat a lynch, which is a huge problem. Or you don't, in which case wolves leave them to contest endgame and they have no idea what is going on and **** it up.

I'm going to interpret the silence on this topic and subsequent grievance chatter itt to mean that this is cool and plan accordingly.

Theme will be Stanley Kubrick films.

the OP doesn't bode well for mishmash slots at the moment. i also requested a mash slot for the future and haven't heard back. i assume its added to the list and hopefully in the meantime i can run a v+ (crossing fingers!). i dont anticipate a mash slot coming available before the new year

(unless people drop out, hyachachacha!)

slankers discussion is ripe for the grievance thread too, iykwim