So I just woke up and heard about this. It sounds horrible. (No offense.) Now we're going to have to sit through a load of not so good themes if people who don't know they're not good vote for them. ;_; And I have the horrible feeling this is going to bias against SSBB+ :c Also, @ whoever said it should be as the game is being joined, ABSOLUTELY NOT. Otherwise people would get stuck in that MLP theme trying to get FF etc. -_-
On the contrary, Cake. Only the most played themes get started, the problem here is that other themes rarely get a chance. When I typed /playedgames earlier, there was 3 SSBB/SSBB+, 2 FFs, 2 Mythology, 1 Zelda and 1 Default, with only Caterpie standing out of those popular themes. And the idea was "auto-join for people who voted on the selected theme". And there's always /unjoin.
If you mean the ones BebbZ told me about, they were all SSBB, not +, and none of them got enough people. This seems bad for SSBB+. Plus people are starting Dreams and I didn't fix it yet. But in all seriousness, I really dislike this voting. I mean, if it were a once every however many games thing, I think I'd be alright, but it isn't so :/ Also, it WAS join as the voting happens: This = absolute no. Otherwise I'll have to play the MLP theme. -_-
After watching this develop throughout the day, I can safely say that I don't think this is going to work. Even with the addition of a couple of random voting options, what we've effectively done is made starting a game into choosing the most popular of five themes. If the goal of this was to promote underplayed themes, I just can't see it working. And because people stick so heavily to the themes they like, introducing a new theme will be nigh impossible under this system. There's been plenty of good suggestions as to how we can alter this, but honestly, I doubt much will change~. Right now, all we've got is an extra 30 seconds before a popular theme is chosen. I think that the previous system worked fine, and gave an acceptable amount of exposure to themes other than the ones most often played. I don't think the new voting system solves much of anything at all~.
Goal was to prevent the theme spam – there was no break between games previously, and everybody raced to get to choose the next theme. Right now, it seems that only the themes people want to play are getting played. (the random thing added a bit more variation to it) Why it is bad to play themes that players want to play?
Problem is new themes never get a chance. People have no idea what it's like, so they won't vote for it and because they never vote for it, they never get to find out what it's like. I mean themes that are well-known that aren't getting played... well maybe people don't like it as much? But my issue is with newer themes.
Perhaps a randomiser, with a higher chance of more popular themes appering (as long as all bad themes are disabled)
Well my opinion is pretty simple, i dislike this voting thing. I have tried it for 2 days now, and personally i agree with most of post that have been made, with this voting phase you can expect that well known themes like myth, SSBB, Pokemon II, Zelda and a few other will get started. If a new theme get loaded nobody will play, as off the fact, people always has to vote for popular themes, newer themes will never have a chance of getting played now because of this. Personally i suggest that you remove this voting "thing", as i will mostly just mean that new themes will NEVER have a chance of getting started.
To make things worse, I saw a theme that was started 3 games ago appear again as a voting option. If themes like Myth/FF/SSBB repeat like this, absolutely no other theme will ever be started. With the way this voting is working, we could remove almost all themes because they simply won't be started anymore. I'll repeat my previous suggestion: Make the Voting System an option that can be temporarily enabled/disabled by MAs, so they can change the system when they notice some spammers are monopolizing the theme choices.
Make voting default option and give MAs the ability to start games manually, bypassing the vote. This way, most people play the theme they want to, and if someone has a specific reason for wanting to play a certain theme (say, it's new or changed and they want to test it out and see if it's fun or not) they can ask one of the MAs to start it for them. This gets around both the problem of a random troll starting a shit theme that nobody wants to play and the unintended consequence of it being harder to get a game going if you want try something new out. This way, most of the time, the themes that people actually want to play are played, but new themes still have a shot at being tested. Also, possibly let people submit votes and then choose a random person's choice to start instead of just automatically choosing the majority. That way, while there's still a higher chance of getting the theme that most people want to play started, it avoids the problem of having a tyranny of the majority, where 40% of the people who want to play a specific theme outvote the other 60% that want to play other things. It also means that there's still a chance that a newer, less well-known theme will be started if that person can get at least some support from the other people in #Mafia Channel.
^that is genius. Make it so it is randomly selected form one of the votes so it isn't just majority. I would still prefer the old system to anything involving voting though.
This. BUT. I wouldn't like the random selection. It'd be even worse. ;_; Seriously. If Pokemon II and the MLP theme were candidates, and Pokemon II got 14 votes and MLP 1, and MLP got chosen by it...that would be completely unfair. :/
^ although it does rarely cause lols long story short, I wanted Dreams started because it got an update, and Pokemon II was one of the choices. Awkward.
Here's an example Say we have a car. This car gets 10 MPG, but everyone uses it. Everyone loves this car. A new car comes out that's 30 mpg, but the guy who made the car didn't advertise it enough so the people have to use it to be able to like it This new car is obviously better, but people don't know that, since the only use the old car. Not saying all new themes are better than old ones, btw EDIT - I like my new avatar anyway
Lets recap: this system was not successful;makes me not want to play mafia, not new-player friendly, brings no significant benefits, doesnt allow new themes to become popular, kills default even more, Makes the classics even more common, wastes 30 secs a pop, ruins themes fun every once in a while such as vepix, and not oddball-theme liker friendly. I will be honest here, this ruins my entertainment. The starting rule? Frustrating but fine, ill live with it. This ruins mafia completely and if it continues, i predict that there will be a gigantic decrease in how long mafia players stay. The old system fixes all problems i listed. And heres my thoughts on the classics: Confusing for newbies, dominates the mafia channel, overrated, not that much better than new themes, some OP roles, not much more strategy than new themes. The idea COULD be viable if the popularity for those decreased. My suggestion: Delete classics for a month and reinstall them once the 4 weeks are over. Then, once the people are more exposed to default and the new themes, it COULD be ok. However for now: just, doesnt make anything better, only worse. @Greenwater10: No. Wait until you actually play it, or you dont want to try new themws >.<
If this goes on for a third day, I think this new system is here to stay, despite on the majority disapproval's of it. However, there is one question I have. Why was this system implemented in the first place? Water. never gave us a clear reason why we made it.
It was implemented to try to prevent the fact that the only way to get a theme started was by watching the channel and spamming /start. The ONLY thing I did was make this thread to gauge user opinions on the new system and to help weigh it's pros and cons so that each system brought. It's only been two days. Believe it or not most of the people "running" mafia actually want to see it improved just like you. As for the new system itself, atm I'm looking at started games and there have been 8 different themes started in the last 10 games, with default and FF being the two that were played twice. Obviously that's a fairly small sample so take that with a grain of salt. However if you look at the mafia stats then you see that the top 7 themes (including default) were being played more than 2/3 (67.19%) of the time anyway so I'm not really sure the whole "obscure themes won't get started" argument is as valid as a lot of you make it out to be. On a purely emotional level I don't really like the new system for most the reasons that have already been pointed out. But I also don't feel like there is a significant difference in the themes that are getting started which is something that a lot of you disagree about.
I am willing to remove the system given it couple of more days. The thing is about improving mafia, if this doesn't improve it then meh, we need to do it some other way. I could decrease the actual joining time to 40 seconds, and voting time to 20 seconds so the whole signups process would still take only one minute if people have a problem with longer join-up phase. I always though that every phase in our mafia is too fast, starting from very quick days and signups phases. Night justifies its length; but it could even be over as soon as everybody has send in their commands.
^yes please. Personally I always liked how mafia is fast-paced on the server but opinions and all that.
The voting phase is now with the joining up phase, including the border at the start of the voting phase. It only takes one minute.
And of course, it is much more fair if the person who's willing to spam /start MLP five times a second for a minute before the game ends gets to force the entire channel to play that theme...? Would it be more fair if that one person got to start MLP once every six games because they were willing to spam a lot more than everyone else? (or god forbid, they got a few other people to join in spamming other unpopular themes...) The entire point of the random voting is that if 95% of people want to play a certain theme and 5% of people want to start another, then there's a 95% chance for the most popular theme to start and a 5% chance that the other random theme will start. That seems perfectly reasonable and fair to me. RE: Thrighdragon. tl;dr your post is complete bullshit. (responses in bold)
...wait, so we get stuck in a theme if we voted?! Also, @ Nicehat: 1. I don't think I know any MLPstarters who are good spammers. 2. 5 times a second will get them overactive. 3. It was fine before, why is it not now? MLP didn't get started that often, nor did many other 'bad' themes, and we still managed to get new themes. Whilst now, I can't get a test run of Dreams in without a ton of support to check for anything I overlooked like Gastly/Haunter being able to teampoison and having a longer poison than they should. 4. I've said this before and I will say this again, ??? was horrible. Rayquaza knows how that got started. Plus I'm still mad about it not having a description that explained what it was like, as if I had known I wouldn't have joined. So...:/ tl;dr everything was fine before why change it
You auto-join only if you voted for the chosen theme. If you didn't, you have to /join manually. And we still have /unjoin. I still think the voting could be the standard if it's nicely tweaked, but the way it is now is too annoying. I always hated excessive repetition in themes regardless of the start system, so the old system annoyed at that times when Code Lyoko, TWEWY or even SSBB was started every 5 games, while this new system annoy me because still allow domination by a few themes (I even saw FF started again after only 2 games). And please, all this discussion about "spam start can lead to people starting bad themes" is stupid. If they are bad, they shoulnd't have been approved, so stop blaming the Start System for that. The real problem here is the same themes repeated over and over giving no chance chance to potential good themes that people are unwilling to even try before labeling them as bad. Also, 2 issues with the voting system: 1. Lots of players don't vote on a theme because they think it's good. They vote either because everyone is voting for it or merely by curiosity over its name. I'd suggest having summaries for the possible candidates when a voting starts, but there's no theme to read them. 2. It's possible for a recently played theme to appear again as a random option for voting. I already saw that happening twice (FF after 2 games and Caterpie after 3. In the case of FF, the theme got started again). My suggestion if the Voting System is to be kept: Increase cooldown for repeated themes (6~8 would be enough), make this cooldown work properly and decrease amount of options (from 5 to 4) so the theme suggested by the starter gets more attention.
More realisation: If the voting and the joining are the same time, what about the summaries? D: (I haven't looked yet, I only just got inside and I need to do some stuff which should be quick but might not because cold hands...)
Making it so only MAs can start the theme they want would just lead to them getting PMed all the time, and will definitely result in me mafiabanning people who keep PMing me to start the theme they want.
Yeah that happened to me when I spammed as Themis in myth lol. Other than random not being random enough voting is fine. I think the issue at the moment is people just don't like change. Xp
Let's get rid of the voting thing because no one ever fucking reads and I said in the main chat that you can use /starttheme to bypass the votes and everyone does the voting.
So what? This doesn't prevent you from using /starttheme. If other players are using the Voting (either because don't know /starttheme or because they want) is not a problem anymore now that Voting is optional. You don't like the voting? It's simple, don't use it. It's stupid to complain after you got the option you wanted back.
The voting system isn't actually that bad. However, in its current state, it warrants way too much repetition of popular themes. That's not a reason to throw out all of Lamp's hard work, but I think some simple changes would fix it. All we need is to prevent the popular theme from showing up for 5 rounds or so after it's played once. That way, we can still play the popular themes, but not have them once every 3 rounds. Also, make default a random option as well, don't put it in there while it takes up space and no one wants to play it. EDIT: Oh, you can bypass it now? Never mind then, it's perfect.
I think to start a theme it should just be /start [themename] again and to start a vote make it /start vote (unless someone makes a theme called "vote"...) Since some people still aren't aware of /starttheme, and it would be more consistent another way..
I really like this, way better than the "let's die early and try and start the next theme first" However, some of the newer themes don't really get noticed and maybe there should be a "wild card" force theme start every 5 games or so?
Well the fact you can just type /starttheme [themename] is pretty good, the voting may stay if it want too now.
I'd rather keep the commands as they are now. No one seems to really mind voting when it does appear (though I would still like to see voting improved a bit) anymore and people manage to use /starttheme fine as well.