Has mafia become less fun?

[Summers]

fucking ace.

[naiwf]

Who plays for points/rankings? I don't think I've ever seen that.

I stopped playing a long time ago, but I know that there were times where I had mafia teammates who weren't willing to just eat a lynch because they wanted to survive longer and instead ended up exposing the whole team. Mafias would routinely stall the game to deadline hell rather than just lose when they got caught out there. The same thing happened where vanilla townies who weren't even that active wouldn't just take the loss, and ended up making it much easier for the town to lose because power roles would speak up and give themselves up. My whole strategy always hinged around my team winning. I didn't care if I made it to the end, but it's hard to play that way when someone won't post unless you mention them by name and they're determined to be the person who has to win or lose a game they haven't paid much, if any, attention to.

[Jimmy]

I haven't seen much of that, so I'm thankful. That's a very, very sad way to play the game.

[TEOL]

I believe that started once people started playing for points/rankings. No one was ever willing to sacrifice themselves after that.

I felt like it was there before even that. The list didn't help, because with only a few games running at a time, if people were only in one, they could rationalise keeping themselves alive at the expense of their teammates by saying that if they died they wouldn't be able to play until the next game came along.

[Pesci]

See I thought people started off only playing for themselves. There was a real "I won!" or "I lost!" culture around here depending entirely on whether you managed to survive or not. I think maybe our play as a whole peaked in 2008, which was just a fantastic year for Mafia. I didn't notice a change when the survival rankings came out. Like, at all. Maybe after a little while it accentuated, but I'd have no idea about that. I definitely think there's a problem with people lurking so they survive longer, but I don't think the points have anything to do with it. Or at least they didn't up until I stopped playing regularly.

[naiwf]

See I thought people started off only playing for themselves. There was a real "I won!" or "I lost!" culture around here depending entirely on whether you managed to survive or not.

Perhaps that's a better way of phrasing my point. I definitely felt like some players didn't truly consider it a win unless they were alive at the end, and some of those players wouldn't post anything until their names came up for a lynch/modkill for inactivity. Once that mindset bled into the games, it was almost impossible to play a team game as a townie.

[Jimmy]

I wouldn't consider that 'I won' if I were killed on night one and my team went onto win, but I see where you're coming from.

[Dingle]

I wouldn't consider that 'I won' if I were killed on night one and my team went onto win, but I see where you're coming from.

Yeahh, although I'd go so far as to say I don't feel like I've won as town unless I've aided in capturing scum. Otherwise I'm just an extra body. But I do like to think that, if it came to it, I'd sacrifice myself for the town. Don't think I've ever been in that situation though.

[Pizza]

It's a rare situation where getting yourself lynched as town helps the town. I think it's happened to me once, with 4 players left. I think of sacrificing as more having an obligation to play hard with a weak role to try to draw the scums kill rather than sitting back and letting them pick the power roles off.

[Jimmy]

if I'm ever the town bomb, I'll happily sacrafice myself. I remember one game Norro was don, and I just kept being a bit of a dick to him so he'd kill me, which he did and I took out a mafia player.

[TEOL]

I think the bigger problem was the number of people who'd sign up to several games, look at the roles they got in those games, and then only play in the one they got the most interesting role in. There were times when I'd see people very active in one thread and barely active in others, and then afterwards you'd find out the roles they'd had were 'vanilla townie', 'minor/unpopular character from show game was based on' and 'mafia don'. So yeah, I think a better definition of 'sacrificing' would be committing yourself to a game and playing it out rather than going 'oh I don't have a power role, I might as well not bother'.

[Nick Adams]

Well, I know that sometimes dying as a townie is useful. In Mafia Cubed, somebody (can't remember who, I know Zan explained it at the end) had put a bomb on me for the phase in question. I was a Jack of All Trades, but I had no control of the roles I would get, so it was sort of a coin flip. I had realized that the bomb was probably a suicide bomb, so I waited for the entire day phase until I could figure out exactly who was scum. I voted for Bigal, and KABOOM. I went up in a huge burst of doom, Bigal died too, and what did you know, he was scum.

It was glorious.

Actually, my two best games as a townie wound up with me dying from a bomb. Stupid, eh?