Over the past several games, there have been issues with OGI / Angleshooting and other types of behavior. We have gotten several new players and we want to keep this momentum going. That said, if we want to keep expanding, then I do believe some of our norms need to change epecially with OGI / Angleshooting as this has been a big point of criticism from newer players as well as myself.
As most of you all know my modding philosophy, especially with mafia, tends to be more on the stringent side. When it comes to modding a mafia game, there is nothing I care about more than game integrity. In order to grow our mafia community I believe our site meta needs to change slightly.
OGI / Out of Game Information
TLDR: no one should ever post anything that isn't about the game that a second player could reasonably make an alignment read based on. Period.
OGI is extremely disruptive to a mafia game because it gives another player an unfair advantage and ultimately will harm the reputation of our site as our site grows and more outside people look into our games and consider joining.
Sometimes OGI reads are bound to happen. This is inevitable. What is preventable is presenting those OGI reads to the thread. Instead of stating “I think player x is town because of an OGI issues” it is better to try and fabricate or find an in-game reason to support that read.
Examples of what I think are acceptable:
- Player x is posting a lot in mason / neighbor chat but can’t be bothered to post in the thread and wasn’t around to lynch in EOD. This gives me scummy vibes
- Meta (obviously): Player x tends to do y as scum and he’s doing y in this game; ergo, he is probably scum.
Examples of what I think is not acceptable
- I have an OGI read that player x is {alignment}
- Mentioning things happening in unrelated discord, debates, or forums (ie “Kohai is acting drunk in this game but just wrote a coherent debate argument”, “Player x is talking a lot in our discord but is avoiding posting in this game.”)
Angleshooting
Angleshooting is something I find to be even worse than OGI. Angleshooting is defined as doing things, or applying rules, in ways that they were not intended in order to gain an advantage. OGI is one example of angelshooting, but I’ve seen far worse things than that such as players directly quoting their win condition or editing and deleting their posts. In my opinion, this is never acceptable.
Conclusion
Compared to other mafia spaces, our site has a unique meta. In many ways I think our meta is better, but in many ways it is worse. If we want to grow our community then eliminating, or at least significantly reducing, OGI and angleshooting is paramount to improving the health of our community.
That said, every game mod has the power to create and enforce their own rule set as they see fit. On our site, mafia has always been its own self-contained section with unique rulesets.
Note: As long as I’ve been around the moderator team has never made an action based on something that happened in a mafia game. Unless there is some form of extreme rule violation that happens in a game I intend on keeping it that way.