My Final Thoughts On The Game
Just some general stuff, that sums up the last bits of everything.
So, as many of you know, this game spent a long time in limbo. Kill fire first came up with the basic idea for the game almost 2 years ago, when the Mafia Queue was first coming into existence. He asked me for help, because he said he couldn't come up with any ideas of his own, so I helped. We never really did much work on it for a while aside from a basic outline of what we wanted the game to look like: A bunch of BLU players, with a couple of RED Spies. We thought of a few obvious roles, like a BLU Medic Doctor, and a BLU Sniper Vigilante. Aside from that, not much. The fluidity of the Mafia Queue didn't do much to encourage us to make the game, any more than it could get me to make Star Wars Mafia II. Last Fall, when the Queue finally got a set time-line, we got more motivated, but not much. Around then we made a list of role ideas, that had about half of the roles we ended up putting into the game and a few we didn't. We came up with the idea for the item-driven abilites, the Hit Points System, and the way the lynches worked, and the rest of the basic game mechanics. Finally, a few months ago, a rash of mafia games that died in sign-ups occured and suddenly we were up soon. We started putting more serious work into it right around the time Jarrema's dead-in-sign-ups large mafia game started accepting sign-ups, and created the basic outline for all of the roles and all of the game mechanics. We created things like the Cloaking, and the Sandvich, and the numbers of classes, and the idea of the GREEN Spy, then the Spycrab. We started running out of ideas, but at first it looked like we would have trouble getting a large number of players.
Then we opened sign-ups, and suddenly a ton showed up. Plenty more appeared when I started sending Mass-PM's. We got to around 38, and put the last few finishing touches on it. The sudden sign-ups may have contributed to a few of the lazy roles we made, in a hurry to just get something. We really should have started making bits of the game a long time ago.
So then the game started, and I think I've already said most of what I can say about the playing of the game. It all came together about as well as it could be hoped. There were plenty of things that screwed up some of the game balance, though. The players like CivCube and mgsmuhammad that acted so weird that it got them killed and threw all the innocents off, for instance. Or the inactivity of important players like Skwink and DarthAutoMayor, or early death of other important players like Backwards Logic and CivGeneral. 4 of the most basic and common innocent power roles are the Roleblocker, the Cop, the Vigilante, and the Doctor. The Doctor used his ability twice, the Vigilante disappeared for a few days, and the Cop died early while scanning 2 Millers, and the Roleblocker died on Night 2. Not exactly the best way things could turn out for the innocents. Then there's the Bus Driver, who used his ability twice, then was replaced by someone who used it 4 times, and 3 of those times something stopped him. Or the Mafia Tracker, who was replaced twice. I could go on and on about important roles either being inactive or dying early in the game, or even the not powerful but just plain interesting roles, like MartinLuther, Earthling, and Mergle, and all of this was to the benefit of the RED Spies and robbiecon. The Innocents lynch choices didn't turn out too great either. It bears repeating: There were only two lynches of non-townies, and that was only because of DaveShack's scans and classical and robbiecon's bussing. Even with the RED Team being oversized, that's still not a very good townie performance. You probably should have gotten more than that by random chance, if nothing else.
Not to say the REDs were great. Yes, an SK mafia infiltrator is a difficult role to deal with. You guys still had a massive team and ample hints that something was afoul in the state of robbiecon. BSmith, classical, and Double A acted really obvious, and that mechaerik avoided a lynch is a testament to the town's lack of scumdar in this game. As to DarthAutoMayor, I replaced him twice. Enough Said. DarthNader and Buddhafish- you two played a great game, especially for two people who have never been mafia before (You haven't, right?). You two probably have a much better case than classical for complaining about robbiecon, who just played a better game than everyone.
Still, I can see where classical's complaints are coming from. If we were to run a game like this again, I'd say a couple of changes would be to shrink the RED Team, but to make the GREEN's actions more obvious. That being said, if we ran this game again, you'd all expect there to be a Serial Killer infiltrating the mafia, so I'm not sure how well that would work.
Another possible change: The lynch. The damage mechanic worked well, but as the non-lynch on Day 11 showed, we probably switched the way it worked too late. Maybe we should have included an intermediate level between the way it worked at the beginning and the way it worked at the end, when the players got down below 20ish, changing the votes to something like 75 for First Place, 30 for Second, and none for Third, or something like that. Maybe messed around with the damage totals a bit. Because honestly, the lack of double lynches sucked, and the non-lynch due to not enough for voters also sucked.
We probably also should have been a bit tougher with the WoG to get the ever-lingering inactives like Joecoolyo out sooner, and also because the complaint that robbiecon just barely avoided it until the end is a reasonable complaint. There was nothing really wrong with robbiecon's strategy, but I can see why some people disagree with it.
All in all, despite the flaws, I'd say it was a pretty good game. As we said at the beginning, a lot of the things we thought up of were experimental, and we weren't sure they'd all turn out how we hoped they would. Though most did, there are still a few mistakes we see that we made, and lessons that we can learn, and everyone can learn, for the future. I know I would certainly love to see a lynch mechanic that can cause things to happen to people who don't get the most votes in the future, maybe in a way similar to what we did here, or maybe in some other way. I would love to see someone take something from this game and do something totally new and more awesome with it.
Well, I'd say that's about it. I can't really think of anything more I want to say about this game.
), killing Double A (his call for double lynch early on looked suspicious). I targeted Jarema based on the same logic (and I would do it again, early double lynchs should help scums far more than the town). 
), but couldn't target him before I left.
