Cabot mentioned mafia specific bumps as a means of combatting mafia inactivity. I'm cautious about any rules that treat mafia fundamentally differently; simply because they end up being used as meta and you'll have "you're mafia because you were away half a day not a whole day!" posts. In general I'm not really sure how much we can do about absentee mafia; sometimes people just go inactive.
On activity elsewhere on the site being used in play, I absolutely and totally agree that this should be policed more thoroughly by the moderators. Sometimes people want to GAF for non-mafia reasons, it's not very fun if people are policing your for that when you genuinely also have life restrictions that stop you from 100% mafia participating but give you enough time to make small comments in other threads. Moderators can mod-kill people for breaking rules, and people need to be reminded of this when they have done so and then dealt with if appropriate.
I do want to avoid modkills *for inactivity* in the future; but I'm probably a stick-in-the-mud about it. I might leave this up to individual moderators in the future. Nevertheless, as we pick up as a community and become more active, we get more dropouts; that's just the nature of things. As such, I want to keep a larger pool of replacements this season.
On the holiday season, we can always take a slight break based on consensus. I don't think we need to worry about it too much.
With respect to preferences, I think we're a large enough community that we can sustain providing for multiple player styles, and I do think it will be useful for newbie retention to cater to people like that. Obviously we can't guarantee it, but allowing people to give preferences for e.g. normal vs. bastard. I'll also allow swapping, as long as it is a) before role PMs, and b) between newbie-newbie pairs or veteran-veteran pairs.
With win conditions changing halfway through, I want to make clear this is something that should never happen even in bastard games. It fundamentally undermines the nature of a game if nobody can have reasonable confidence in why they play the way they do. I'd like all reviewers to very carefully check win conditions in the future and that they cover all scenarios so we don't go through that again. Same with leaking alignments - that's happened multiple seasons and games now, so moderators really need to step up on this one.
I do think we need to focus on balance. Some of the S3 games needed a little work in this department. I think some moderators are very keen to try crazy, but crazy is difficult, because crazy and unbalanced will often be less fun even to people who like crazy than vanilla and unbalanced. I can't really do anything about this ruleswise, but just generally I would encourage all game designers to read my game design document and think very carefully about their setup.
Newbie games don't work as well as newbie-veteran mixed. Trust me, I have a lot of experience in mafia communities.
They end up like GAF Season 1 (although IMO that was *well* above the bar for normal newbie games anyway, so well done all our vets!), which was very quiet and very passive, and where the mafia really, really struggled - even one experienced mafia on the theam makes a big impact. A good mix of new and old leads to something more like S2 as a starting point, which I think is a good place to be. I think having an ONUW newbie game with maybe just one or two vets, while waiting for signups to close, is a great idea just to familiarize them.
SalvaPot mentioned having "Godfathers" in another game. I'm very unsure to negative about this as I think it influences play too much. People will be e.g. harsher on new players with Godfathers renowned for being particularly good players, for example, or judge newbies on whether they match their Godfather's town/mafia style. It's also just a super powerful role in general to be able to get feedback from an outside source on how your appear in a game which is about being judged by other people. You're essentially making every newbie a mason - that's not something to do easily. However, kind words and hugs (sans advice) from people in *other games* are always very nice and good.
In terms of game priority, I'm pretty willing to do it as (sum of total alive days in last season games + last season side-games). More alive days = lower priority. Nobody has a problem with this, right? It seems the least complicated that takes in the most important metric - how much you actually got to play.
RE: dead thread I actually like them being spoilers as then you get people cheering particular players on and whatnot. I get really bored in non-spoiler dead threads because you essentially do the same speculating you did while alive but with no consequences. Nevertheless, this seems to be a minority view, so spoiler-free it is. As for separated dead threads, I'm ruling that one out. Based on the evidence, they'd populate too slowly to be worth it.
Seance/resurrection roles are actually considered top level bastard, Sorian (anything that fundamentally breaks core/reliable mafia rules is bastard, and dead people being dead is like one of the core-est rules you can get), and personally I would essentially never use it, but if people want to use them that's another good reason for spoiler free. I would say that if you have a resurrection/seance role and a dead thread, everyone needs to be notified of this IN THE DEAD THREAD, or otherwise they might not expect it and talk about stuff they wouldn't. I have a fun idea for dead threads which I will reveal later, though...
I do want to figure out a more formal structure for .5 games, though, if only to help newer players and streamline the community. Does anyone have any suggestions on this?
(i went out and bought some parts to fix my keyboard just for you guys).