Has mafia become less fun?

[TEOL]

Ah hell with it, I'll post the conclusion as soon as Photobucket starts working again and save the fun but unimportant stuff for later.

If nothing else it might shut up SDM and TEOL.

Nothing will shut us up.

[Maxx]

Not even this picture of a dirigible?

[Guest Owned by Quickquid]

In the meantime, another top ten!

EWB's 10 Smallest Mafia Games

1) MPH's Lucky Seven Mafia (7 players)

2) Ego's EWB Newbie Mafia (8 players)

3) MPH's Perfect Ten Mafia (10 players)

4) (tie) Rider's Newbie Mafia, pizzamonkey's Open Setup Mafia (11 players)

6) (tie) Sousa's Civil War Mafia, Split's Dragon Ball Z Mafia, Josh's 12 Angry Men Mafia, TEOL's Traditional Mafia V, Split's Mage Wars Mafia 1.5, Essa's Movie Monster Mafia, -A-'s Newbie Mafia II, SDM's The Thing Mafia, C-MIL's Asylum, Cloudy's Watchmen Mafia, naiwf's Boondocks Mafia, wrathofcarnage's Stephen King's It Mafia, Essa's Movie Monster Mafia II, MEG's Pitchfork Mafia, TEOL's Greatest Philosophers Mafia, TEOL's Traditional Mafia VI, C-MIL's Axe Cop Mafia, Zan's lol, mafia, C-MIL's The Room Mafia, C-MIL's Frisky Dingo Mafia, Ego's The Phantom Mafia, Rider's Dungeons and Dragons Mafia (12 players)

[Your Mom]

I dont have fun with mafia anymore but I'm not sure that means it's not as fun. I just dont think it's for me anymore. Maybe someday but when I just started to find it more frustrating than anything I knew it was time to quit for a while.

[TEOL]

In the meantime, another top ten!

EWB's 10 Smallest Mafia Games

1) MPH's Lucky Seven Mafia (7 players)

2) Ego's EWB Newbie Mafia (8 players)

3) MPH's Perfect Ten Mafia (10 players)

4) (tie) Rider's Newbie Mafia, pizzamonkey's Open Setup Mafia (11 players)

6) (tie) Sousa's Civil War Mafia, Split's Dragon Ball Z Mafia, Josh's 12 Angry Men Mafia, TEOL's Traditional Mafia V, Split's Mage Wars Mafia 1.5, Essa's Movie Monster Mafia, -A-'s Newbie Mafia II, SDM's The Thing Mafia, C-MIL's Asylum, Cloudy's Watchmen Mafia, naiwf's Boondocks Mafia, wrathofcarnage's Stephen King's It Mafia, Essa's Movie Monster Mafia II, MEG's Pitchfork Mafia, TEOL's Greatest Philosophers Mafia, TEOL's Traditional Mafia VI, C-MIL's Axe Cop Mafia, Zan's lol, mafia, C-MIL's The Room Mafia, C-MIL's Frisky Dingo Mafia, Ego's The Phantom Mafia, Rider's Dungeons and Dragons Mafia (12 players)

brb, running dethy

[Guest Owned by Quickquid]

(Some of the images might not load properly because of Photobucket issues. Whatever. They'll show up eventually.)

So there's a metric called "days per player", or DPP.

If a 20-player game lasts 20 days, that's one DPP. If the same game lasts 30 days, that's 1.5 DPP.

A DPP is basically a measure of how long an average player is expected to carry the game. So if you're the average player and you're in that 20-player, 20-day game, you're responsible for one day of the whole game. In the 30-day game, you're responsible for 1.5 days.

The idea, as I see it, is that mafia is more fun when games aren't dragging on. So the lower the DPP, the quicker the game is moving.

Here's every game in the Mafia Cube, chronologically, and where they fit on the DPP scale:

As you can see, DPP has gone up fairly steadily over time, meaning each player has individually been responsible for more and more of the game.

"But MPH!" you might say. "Just look at that graph! Clearly games like Anime Mafia V (the really high point near the end) are skewing the data!"

Nope. If you just take the average DPP for each year since 2005, here's what you get:

And Anime Mafia V actually counts in the 2011 numbers there.

The average DPP for a game in 2012 is well over 3. And I think we can all agree that very few people are making three days' worth of contributions to mafia games these days.

So what's causing the rise in DPP and decline in fun in mafia games (aside from Summers)?

Well, here's a graph looking at posts per day in mafia games.

And here's the same data as yearly averages:

So 2009 was a nice bit of bounceback, but other than that, activity in mafia games has clearly been going downhill steadily over time. Games in 2005 averaged one post every 27 minutes. Games in 2012 are averaging one post every 100 minutes.

When you're getting posts about a quarter as often as you did in the early days, of course games are going to seem less fun.

This is obviously only a starting point. It doesn't tell us if the problem is players not checking in often enough, players afraid of discussing things, or what. It also doesn't give us a solution.

But hey, something to think about.

Edited September 3, 2012 by Owned by Quickquid

[Summers]

what a shock.

i've got an idea.

jump off a bridge.

[Guest Owned by Quickquid]

what a shock he isn't interested in anything other than what people are saying about him.

[Summers]

you realise there's no point me reading it until you can make the graphs work?

why reference a graph you can't even show people properly?

[MalaCloudy Black]

It's me, it's me

it's DPP

[Your Mom]

That was a really long way to go to get to "people dont post as much anymore". I admire the work that went into it but I'm pretty sure it's not going to help.

[Jimmy]

People should play mafia because they enjoy it, not for the sake of it. Too many people seem to sign up when they have no real committment to play the game. I think people play out of obligation, which kills a game in the long run. Stick to playing one game at a time, or 2 max, and things will probably get better.

[Gazz]

I find games are made more fun if MPH is lynched at the end of every dayphase, regardless of whether he is already dead.

[Dingle]

People should play mafia because they enjoy it, not for the sake of it. Too many people seem to sign up when they have no real committment to play the game. I think people play out of obligation, which kills a game in the long run. Stick to playing one game at a time, or 2 max, and things will probably get better.

I find myself in a catch-22 with this. I play more games, because the time it takes people to complete a phase means I'll be bored waiting around >_>.

[Guest Owned by Quickquid]

That was a really long way to go to get to "people dont post as much anymore". I admire the work that went into it but I'm pretty sure it's not going to help.

Yeah, admittedly it was a bit of a letdown. But I'm still glad to know there does seem to be actual reason to think mafia is getting less fun and we're not just all imagining it.

And I completely agree with Split. Used to be only Ace signed up for every game, now it's this entire cast of characters that knows more or less what to expect from each other. Maybe that's part of the problem.

[Summers]

yr images managed to work for a second, so i got lucky and managed to see yr point.

sadly the most interesting part was - in fact - the mention of me. so i shouldn't have bothered to give it proper time.

but i did. so i looked over yr charts, spreadsheets and graphs. and i ran some calculations.

i crunched some numbers and checked some formulas. and i did it.

i found out the reason mafia is less fun:

but anyway. you gave us nothing new. we knew everything you babbled about. games take longer to complete. the problem isn't beautiful people like me. it's the amount of people who join up and lurk. you like to accuse me of it, but i end up posting more than most in every game i'm in. you'll no doubt bring up the "quality" of my posts, but i contribute, i play and i do it my way. the problem is people that don't. jouzy is right, i like to be in more than one game because i know one is always going to stagnate and drag and it gets boring.

i don't think the problem is the same people joining game after game. we have a group of people who play the game, of course they'll be the ones signing up, i think the problem is the people that don't care. whenever mafia started here it was new, and it was exciting. look at RP diaries. we had so many, so many different types and they were all fantastic in the beginning. and then they died. why? because people spent years doing it, lost a bit of the love for it and carried on doing it just because. when an RP diary sign up thread was posted people thought "eh, why not?" whereas they used to think "yes! awesome, i can't wait". it's the same with mafia games now.

lack of activity should be punished with a next game suspension or something. lurking as a tactic is one thing, but complete lack of activity is what stalls and ruins games.

[Dingle]

Yeah, when I run my mafia soon, I will be incredibly harsh on lurkers and not allow people who generally lurk to play the game in the first place. I'll check what they did in previous games, and if they posted (quantity, not quality, as the latter can only be gained by playing) then they're free to enter. I worried that it might seem pretentious, as if I'm setting my game up to be 'better' than some people and don't want it to come across that way. But I can only imagine how frustrating it is for a game runner to spend hours of their time designing a game that, in the end, a bunch of people just lurk through and ruin by not actually playing.

[naiwf]

Here's the problem in the shortest way I can phrase it. The players who drive activity get killed almost immediately. Players who don't drive activity last until the end of the game. Mafia has turned into preseason (American) football, and no one likes preseason (American) football.

[Guest Owned by Quickquid]

More trivia!

EWB's 10 Highest Postcount Mafia Games

1) RW's WWF 1992 Mafia (1899 posts)

2) RW's WWE Mafia (1768 posts)

3) Ruki's Final Fantasy Mafia (1698 posts)

4) MPH's EWB Mafia (1554 posts)

5) Zan's Mafia V (1544 posts)

6) Josh's You Pick Mafia II (1467 posts)

7) Zan's Inquisition Mafia (1444 posts)

8) MPH's McDonald's Mafia (1443 posts)

9) Jam's WWE Mafia II (1391 posts)

10) RW's WWF 1999 Mafia (1287 posts)

Futuramafia misses by one post!

EWB's 10 Lowest Postcount Mafia Games

1) C-MIL's Zodiac Mafia (94 posts)

2) (tie) MPH's Lucky Seven Mafia, RW's CSI Mafia (100 posts)

4) Mick's Ah-Nold Mafia (124 posts)

5) Plubby's Witches 2 Mafia (129 posts)

6) TEOL's Traditional Mafia VI (136 posts)

7) (tie) C-MIL's WCW Mafia II, Cloudy's Watchmen Mafia (147 posts)

9) Rider's Strip Mafia (159 posts)

10) MPH's Perfect Ten Mafia (170 posts)

[Dingle]

Personally I don't like any American Football, so yeah.