Guys, listen, I think you have forgotten something.
You have forgotten to enjoy this game and made it into something it's not. Mafia is not a good competitive game. It's not good at proving skill in this format, either, but that being said, most of you who trophy are very, very skillful.
We all get that. We are proud of your intellect and your ability to persuade.
But let's just be honest: most of you rig games now because guess what, that's what has always been done. Friends have always thrown for friends, and it's been that way since Day 1, to be honest.
What's changed is the way you conceal it, or the methodology, or just the attitude towards it.
Moving forward, I'm going to ask that the staff begins to allow friend meta, coding to friends, etc., so forth. Stop trying to catch cheaters.
We need to wane back on the report system entirely. People were always misbehaving, and they will continue to find a way to do so. Hateful remarks aside, which should be dealt with, the report system has done more harm than good to this site.
And at the core of the issue is cheating. Cheating used to just be in the game's chat. We had conversations that had implications, leading to rolesharing, teaming, etc. Now you guys are so shady about it and you always do it outside of the game, in another chat. What you've done with this process is remove the more freestyle conversation, the party element of Epicmafia.
The report system's penalizations, starting out incredibly strict, gradually diminished in strength on the broad range of what was considered inappropriate gameplay. However, the damage has been done, and the reality is that the gameplay has suffered from people's playing around the rules.
Because that's what people do on the internet. They skirt the rules, because they can online. That's what makes it fun. And unfortunately, when the game we're playing suddenly requires you to take that fun conversation outside of the game, then we're not really having a conversation at all, are we? We're just rehearsing roles, filling in mechanical duties, sheeping clears, and systemizing the setup's variation on Mafia.
And this, this my friends, is what has happened to EM. This restrictive environment has not helped cultivate the game, and unfortunately, as necessary as it was at the point of its implementation, it only has shrunk the site, rather than retain the playerbase (admittedly it did so for a time).
Again, the reality of the long-term effects of the Report System has been a culture of moving the conversation outside of the game, and so as a player that tries to only speak inside the game, I can tell you, it's just not the same anymore. It used to be quite something else. Much more diverse, and not even close to this formulaic, guided gameplay.
Anyway, this is my little recommendation. Take it if you want. I think the site would be better off just silently acknowledging and accepting that people will always cheat in the game if they can, and let us all just enjoy that amusing experience. Because that's what a social psychological game is: amusing and experimental - not routine and competitive.
Cheers,
Vex/Derpachu/Vash/Orly/MMLM/et al
tl;dr, let cheating happen, it is literally a part of the game, so it will always happen somehow, and memes prosper. harambe smiles down on us
also unban everyone. seriously.
