hello gamers,

billstickers here with the first Actual Serious Thread of my life. i've been mulling this idea for a while now and would like some feedback. it seems like most of the things we actually bother talking about as issues w/ this site are only addressed when something goes wrong; this isn't one of those cases. this is an attempt to streamline the competition and make life easier and more rewarding for both players and moderators.

current competitive system:

• 5 gold hearts per day, gold hearts cap at 10
• round ends once someone crosses the 2000 point threshhold (8-13 days)
• ties extend the round 1 day

proposed change:

• joining the competition grants a player 50 gold hearts

• round lasts 10 days; top 3 scores at the end of the 10 day period are your trophy winners

• ties are the same i guess idk what to do with them

why its good for the site as a whole

• normalization of the round time and point structure lend more credibility to the competition. no longer will we refer to rounds as "that time soben closed the round in 7 days" or "that time turquoise took 12 days to win gold on reverse mafia". also, we can actually judge trophy performances against one another because everyone will have to play the same amount of games

• empirical ways to judge setups. is this the third time in a row that SnL was comped and someone won with a winrate over 80%? maybe this is a town pointfarm after all

why it's good for runners:

• flexibility with regard to when/how frequently hearts must be played. running is a significant time investment and this would allow players to organize their run around their actual lives. i think we've all been in situations in which we were out of it and didn't want to play hearts, or were running hot and would have happily reeled off 10 or 12 games in a row.

• the option to more selectively choose tables due to the lack of pressure to play x amount of games per day

• players that run on multiple accounts can more accurately gauge how well they're doing and choose which account to push forward for the run. rather than attempting to read the round based on how people are doing on day 3 or 4, players enter the competition with the specific finite knowledge of when the round will end and roughly how well they'll have to do

• there's been a lot of talk about Manhunt recently, what with a lot of last round's runners switching over to Manhunt on the last day to try and catch up in points. this would alleviate if not entirely eradicate that issue by removing most of the scenarios in which someone looks at the leaderboard and says "i have one heart and sidekick is 90 points ahead of me, i need a solo killer win"

• players can still play their 5 hearts a day, exactly as they do now, if they so choose. proponents of the current system don't have to change anything they do

• ability to mitigate your personal stress levels by playing all your hearts early if you so choose

why it's good for casual players

• you aren't limited by the daily heart limit. i know i'm speaking for myself and a few others when i say it sucks that sometimes you can't play mafia for 4-5 days due to real life commitments but are capped at 10 gold heart games the day you want to start playing again

• encouragement for new/casual runners: maybe you're just some dude who just wants to play some mafia and realize you're 20-7 on day 4. why not go for the trophy? maybe you had to work all week and played 8 hours on a saturday and won 70% of your games. why not go for the trophy?

• you can actually play mafia w/ your friends when you feel like it instead of being constrained by some competinerd schedule

why its good for moderators

• no more last-day-of-round crunch. no more (or at the very least, a lot less) runners freaking out at you over skype and PMs on the last day of the round as they try to get refunds before they run out of time. no more excessive last day scrounging. no more headaches

• no need to pause the round every time there's a cheating accusation; just freeze the account(s) in question. no need to waste everyone's time unless someone only decides to cheat on the last day.

• easier to spot suspicious accounts and winrates. more people are gonna take notice of a guy going 17/20 than a guy going 4/5 4 days in a row with the same players. theoretically, games involving the same players would cluster together more, seeing as it takes two people to cheat and theoretically cheaters also have time constraints. this is mostly conjecture on my part but i think it would make cheating stand out more.

• should spread the overall report burden more evenly through the round, although again, also conjecture

arguments against that i've thought of

• people would probably buy less alts or something so lucid would lose money

• reactionary internet libertarians will blame every bad game they have on vancy because he changed something instead of leaving it the same

• itd be a lot easier to play with the same people regularly and "meta abuse" - personally, i don't think there's validity to this, because people already do that and all this change would do is make it a bit easier on their schedules, but seeing as playing with the same people constantly isn't against the rules i think it's kind of moot

• if someone straight up crushes a round and is sitting at 43-7 on day 5 people might lose incentive to play the last few days of the round - the rare scenario in which this format prolongs the round instead of shortening it. i think the good outweighs the bad here, as it's worth going 10 days instead of 9 once every dozen rounds in exchange for no more 13 day jan 2.0 miseryfests

i would really appreciate some constructive feedback here; i know this isn't anywhere near a hot-button issue but i think it's in all of our best interests to always be on the lookout for ways to improve the site. thanks for your time!!!