I don't think this theme is going to pass Mafia QC, so I'm just submitting it here to fuel some ideas for theme makers. I present you Super Sayan Popularity (or simply Popularity 2): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10065307/Mafia/Popularity2.js It has the same premise as the first Popularity (vote for whoever you like during the night and day), but with one important difference: When someone wins, they leave the game, but the other players remaing until only one is left. This is possible by having killmsgs saying that player won, while winmsgs says that players are not popular enough. Some of the code was remade to reduce the roles duplicates and to adjust the "leave the game after winning" part. Also, Vote Snipe is enabled. Same for Silent Vote, making things even more interesting (no more bandwagon).
Of course! MA vote is worth more lol Well, they won't win, since that player won't receive a "You won" message.
This is absolutely no mafia. It has absolutely no strategy. I like this kind of strange themes :P Maybe you could give a initial poison to all the 0 votes and clear poison when converted, and then giving them another poison count. This way, only the real populars will stay on the game, so, they will win, in fact. I think that this is not enough for it to pass QC... but this is an idea.
I liked the original Popularity better :(. This one is just going to be a stallfest, and the mechanic is only superficially similar. The losers here technically win, thematically speaking. Li's idea is pretty good for making games move faster, but I still like the auto win when you get enough votes you had in the original.
I would love the initialPoison idea if I could set a different message for when someone dies from that (not poisonDeadMessage, the message that is broadcast). This way I could set a "You didn't get any votes in a long time, so you lose!" rule. Yeah, from the standard mafia point of view, they would win. But the message broadcast to everyone would be "You lose". And we know people care more about that message than to their performance during the game. To be honest I don't even plan on submitting this to QC. What I wanted was to share some ideas. BTW, this "First to die wins, survivors lose" mechanic was thought when I was looking at Tesla's Evolution Game theme. It could be applied to those kinds of themes (although I doubt it will get actually good).
What I meant to say is that people would die if not popular. They LOSE. Not that win but lose thing that Tesla said. I'm not sure of what would be done at the voting phase... maybe call the votes at night the goods and the ones during the day bads? And then you could use the auto win for the most voted. And also: only 5 votes to win in big games is too few, isn't it?