MafiEra Season 24 Review |OT| Every game going forward will be a Hydra game

Chuggernaut

HONK HONK MF
It’s the end of the season, you know what that means. That’s right, it’s review time yet again! It’s been a pretty interesting season for game design with Bear running what I believe is this community's very first Hydra game so that’s cool.

Going to be a bit different this season because we don’t really have anything in terms of rule changes. We tried out a couple of new rules last season, and we feel like they’ve gone over pretty smoothly since we’ve implemented them, but please let us know if you have any feedback on those. Last game aside, we’ve seen a lot of improvement on the hostility front and we would just like to thank all of y’all for your part in that. So we’ve been struggling on one specific thing this season and that is having enough players to fill games.

Our very own MrHedin made this very nice survey which most of you kindly filled out, and you can find the results of that here.

Based on these results we’ve decided to use this next season as a test period to try to play in other spots aside from ResetERA and hopefully use that to grow the community more. So in addition to running two of this next season's games on Era we will be running two on our satellite forum OuterMafia as well as running one game on MafiaUniverse.

For those who don’t know, MafiaUniverse is a forum where the main focus is Mafia. They host the yearly champs game where we’ve had players like Maol, Monkey, and Hedin represent us, and they also have a spot for other communities to set up a space there. Ours isn’t quite up yet, but when it will, it’ll be available here. When this game does run, we’re going to open signups to MafiaUniverse as a whole but we would like to use this game to see if this is something we would want to do more of in the future, so we’re going to have signups open here first, and we would like to see signups be mostly Era members, so if you’re curious please go poke around and make an account.

There hasn’t been much reviewing in the first post of this review thread so if you feel like there’s something that you wanted to bring up about this season please let us know, and if you have any questions about any of this at all, feel free to ask.

And now, a look toward the future.

This season we will be investigating a small town in the great state of Washington, bullying some nerd with a football head in *checks notes* not New York? Are you sure? We’ll also be trying to figure out who’s been doing a series of brutal killings of breakfast foods, struggling not to get our strings cut, and debating if we want to believe all of this.
 

Hedin

Oops, All Scum!
Staff member
Thank you everyone who filled out the survey. We will likely do one annually that may cover some of the same topics just so we can see trends but also have some new questions as well.
 

EvilChameleon

Are you scum?
Very excited to see what games you folks have in store for here in OuterMafia. Playing Love Boat got me reinvigorated to play some mafia from time to time, and I'll do my best to sign up for any games hosted here.
 

Donnie

Mafia, pocketed, or dead N1
Who do I need to talk to about rolling town next season? Surely there's somewhere I can make a deposit...
 

lokiduck

Awww yiss mothafuckin' breadcrumbs
I think this would also be a good time to say... The games this season are pretty dang cool... not that I would know tho.

:spy:
 

Hawthorn

I'll explain my reasons later
Amazing season. I got to be on staff this season and really enjoyed getting to see how much work people put into keeping these games running. I love this community & really hope it continues.

An issue I'd really like to talk about this review thread is retention/recruitment

There's no hiding the fact that our community is shrinking. We struggle to fill the player list even with smaller games. If we want to continue (and I so hope we do) we need to find ways to both retain the players that we have and recruit more players.

Some possible ideas are:
  • Step up recruitment on ResetEra by advertising in more mafia-unrelated threads
  • Recruit from bigger online mafia communities, such as the ultimate big city to our quirky small town, Mafia Universe
  • Recruit from among our friends, families, coworkers, and enemies, elsewhere online or in RL
  • Run smaller games so that they are easier to fill
  • Have longer waiting periods between games to decrease burnout and make it easier for people to play more games
  • Continue our attempts to be civil and run fun games in order to retain our existing players
  • Curate upcoming games to be popular to our players. I suggest that everyone have a look at Hedin's presentation of his survey results for some ideas of what this could look like.
We've already implemented some of these ideas, such as waiting a bit longer between games. And this season we will be taking the big step of piling into the tour :bus:for a trip to Mafia Universe for a special vacation/networking trip. They are going to be pretty impressed by our lovingly handcrafted games that we bring all the way from the workshop in the village. But I would also love to hear more ideas and brainstorming about how we can keep going.

One thing I'd really like to say is that I think we need to not have the expectation that signing up for a game means prioritizing it as the #1 activity in your life 24/7. The rules do not state that players need to be present for day start/end, that they need to respond to messages within a certain time frame, or that they need to make more than ten posts. We've gotten better about criticizing each other for playing at more relaxed speeds, but I also think we need to have less unrealistic expectations of ourselves. If the expectation is that signing up for a game means devoting yourself to it above all else, we will just never have enough people sign up for games.

I personally have much less time than I did in 2020, but this community is very important to me, and I'm still not tired of online mafia, I want more! And I have to say this season's games look pretty great.
 

FateShirou

ain't no law when you're drinking the claw
I got nothing to add
people need to relax a little when playing
we arnt going to complete in the mafia olympics tbh
just have fun

just want to say the costume game was kinda like how i imagine an acid trip to me
I still have no clue what happen in that game
sheeeeeesh
I would like to play another hydra game but not costume haha
 

Hedin

Oops, All Scum!
Staff member
I got nothing to add
people need to relax a little when playing
we arnt going to complete in the mafia olympics tbh
just have fun

just want to say the costume game was kinda like how i imagine an acid trip to me
I still have no clue what happen in that game
sheeeeeesh
I would like to play another hydra game but not costume haha
You could do non costumed partied Hydras, the posting account would be HedinFate for example.
 

FateShirou

ain't no law when you're drinking the claw
You could do non costumed partied Hydras, the posting account would be HedinFate for example.
yea that'd be fun, take shifts posting
sheeeeeeesh
what an idea
get one of your lackeys to work on this
 

Fanto

Confirmed Town
Not much to add really, other than being excited to host not one, but two games next season!
 

Hedin

Oops, All Scum!
Staff member
I am eager to see how people will like MU. Their board has some getting used to but they have some legitimately good tools for players and it appears for game runners as well.

I totally understand some of the concerns regarding different cultures. Most of the high intensity posting and playing comes from champs and while those same players are around normally it's not to that high degree usually. There will be some terminology differences but that will more of a different dialect to deal with rather than having to learn a whole new language. But most importantly it's still going to be our community and our games when we do play over there. We will have a degree of control with signups (the exact degree will be determined when we actually setup the first game) and the intention will be that games will consist of a majority of our community, supplemented by others there when we need the numbers.
 

Vincent Alexander

My best friend is a monkey
Just saying thanks to all the gamerunners and folks who put games together. And for Hedin putting together that survey. I thoroughly enjoyed reading!
 
Maybe I'll play a game this season. I'm glad that the rules on attendance are more relaxed since I'm not sure how much time I'll actually have to play a game. But I'll give it a honest try.
 

Verelios

Were-elios
I dunno how people would feel about a gimmick game that dealt with over/under post limits. I'd like to say more than 10 no more than 30 a phase. Could be something to get into for minis.
 
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