Mafia Feedback

[Armhulen]

Post feedback you have on mafia ghost minigame here.

[cacogen]

i love mafia

[mindstormy]

I think mafia in general is bad for SS13. It removes folks from the ghost pool which can influence a round to some degree based on mid-round antag spawns and what not. If people want to play this just spin it up on another server and have a mafia only server. It just feels so out of place being a ghost role thing. Or better yet, coordinate your metagang on discord and go play on https://www.epicmafia.com or something where there is much better ux for playing this style of game.

[trollbreeder]

From what i've seen, it's good and it makes deadchat less salty because the ghosts have something to do that isn't AFK all day.

[Nabski]

I die every time night/round one.

One time the traitors teamed up and said "don't kill gene", so I didn't instantly die, that game was fun as a result.

One time I was a traitor, but we still lost.

One time I was still alive after the fifth round and people said "Oh gene is still alive he must be the antagonist" and then I died.

Please remove players ability to vote for me thank you.

[Armhulen]

I die every time night/round one.

One time the traitors teamed up and said "don't kill gene", so I didn't instantly die, that game was fun as a result.

One time I was a traitor, but we still lost.

One time I was still alive after the fifth round and people said "Oh gene is still alive he must be the antagonist" and then I died.

Please remove players ability to vote for me thank you.

whenever i tell people i made the game, i get lynched if it's day phase or if that's over i get killed. lol! you can switch your character preferences and reload ghost character to randomname though, if that helps. i know some people need it!

[SkeletalElite]

If you abstain on a clown vote that ends up guilty, you should be susceptible to dying, only innocent votes should be protected.

There needs to be a way to easily fake notes without opening a notepad window or similar, either that or you shouldn't be able to copy your notes, since it makes it very easy for roles like doctor or detective to prove themselves.

[Armhulen]

If you abstain on a clown vote that ends up guilty, you should be susceptible to dying, only innocent votes should be protected.

There needs to be a way to easily fake notes without opening a notepad window or similar, either that or you shouldn't be able to copy your notes, since it makes it very easy for roles like doctor or detective to prove themselves.

As for the clown situation, I'm going to be making people who abstain an announcement as well as a specific button you can press. Currently you can't really cancel your vote on something, and that's kinda sour.

Notes... gee, i'm not sure on really how to approach this well. Maybe I'll add some example messages detectives get on the wiki for the moment, but i'm just kinda hoping people get better at faking so I don't have to fix that arguably difficult issue.

[Armhulen]

I think mafia in general is bad for SS13. It removes folks from the ghost pool which can influence a round to some degree based on mid-round antag spawns and what not. If people want to play this just spin it up on another server and have a mafia only server. It just feels so out of place being a ghost role thing. Or better yet, coordinate your metagang on discord and go play on https://www.epicmafia.com or something where there is much better ux for playing this style of game.

I also wanted to respond to this as leaving it just kinda sitting there felt wrong. Personally, I feel like mafia is the perfect game for deadchat if there really is no way to get back into the round for a good while or massive amounts of bodies are made early on. CTF encourages rejoining, and repeatedly playing until the match is over to where another starts. It discourages rejoining the round. Mafia on the other hand has been made to be casualized and fully detach you of duties the moment you are dead. Because it requires you to consciously sign up again, permanently removes you from the minigame, and has a lot of people end up dead again, it works great to provide entertainment while not sabotaging the ghost pool.

As for the mafia server, I talked to a few people higher up on it and it's possible... if requiring a lot of code refactoring. I'm kinda iffy on it though since then it will be directly compared to epicmafia as being a straight up worse verison, no longer requiring the no-dead-interaction and casualization requirement. That also opens up a lot of administrative issues (game throwing?) so just know we've considered it

As for the metagang coordination I actually think playing epicmafia with a full lobby of people from ss13 would be kinda neat as a one off thing i'm not interested in HOSTING that kind of thing, but i'd join if someone is

[Kel]

mechanics gamemode itself could benefit from:
cleaner note system. copying and pasting is really obtuse in ss13 sometimes and this has gotten me lynched already once due to having to manually rewrite my own notes as MD. personally i would like to see an "announce laws" style system, where your notes have several lines that you can edit and then press to announce them

a better UI. the current UI is a really compact for no good reason, and the player list is pretty godawful in terms of readability. its kind of a bitch to count the remaining players in the UI thanks to nothing is segmented and the DEAD text is 10 thousand lightyears away from their name. better visual elements in general would make it so much nicer to look at in general.

a HUD. everyone in mafia should just straight up get a HUD of what role they are via icon and any (known) teammates. psychologist / hop (and any future reveal jobs) reveals could also benefit from the system. theres no intuitive way to know what outfit correlates to what until you simply just know. most outfits are self explanatory for the time being but i dont think thoughtfeeders even have a different outfit than normal changelings, which is a incredibly niche but critical thing to differentiate the futher the game gets expanded upon.

some level of spam checker. i get that is charming that the clown can literally annoy his way to a victory, but plenty of people are ready and willing to entirely drown out chat with emotes and spam, which makes reading claims and reports a massive pain in the ass. things just get lost in the tide of autism. this is a community problem but im still going to cross my fingers and hope.

balance changes i believe would help the game:
longer timers on gallows. this is compounded with how hard it is wrangle your own notes, but the timer is so short when you're on the chopping block that you pretty much have to instantly claim and have your notes prepared to actually give people enough time to think about it or counterclaim.

a role to threaten night visitors (aka a veteran analogue). atm due to no wills and no (public) death reveal, night killing is entirely a thoughtless and risk-free procedure. if a "veteran" existed autistic evils would get punished for metagrudging literally every game once in awhile. a lack of "veteran" also means town night visitors feel a lot more powerful than they should be. some level of reworking would have to be done so that they don't instantly win every time the evils land on them.

NOT adding a jailor. fuck this role. it always fucking causes balance issues in every mafia set it exists in. this shit is always either entirely useless or ass blastingly overpowered.

[Armhulen]

Thank you for your feedback, if you could give me a mockup of how the mafia ui SHOULD look like i can recreate that.

also, i'm going to implement pretty much everything you said, it's all sane and very reasonable.

[Stickymayhem]

Actually a mafia only server would be really cool.

Initially sure it'd just be mafia but worse, but then we could expand on it. Maybe instead of being locked in rooms everyone can walk around, and we have a lot of space themed assets already so it could be like a big space station.

But I guess people need stuff to do if they're not the bad guys, so maybe we could have tasks that they have to do. Stuff like making sure the space station has power, or maybe like making food for the other people, and everyone needs to eat occasionally, which brings people together for opportunities for the traitors to kill people.

That's a thought actually, instead of nightly voting on who dies, the traitors could get special weapons to used to physically kill people, or maybe they can set up traps like bombs.

At this point it's not really mafia anymore so it probably needs a new name

how about Galaxy Base: Traitor Facility?

[Tlaltecuhtli]

give more fluff to maps so people has something to do at night other than slapping and clapping (and notes)

[Tarchonvaagh]

Lower the pop requirement to 10 ghosts, imo its gonna work better that way

[Kel]

current mockup:

Spoiler:

design goals:
- make the UI much more centralized. all the critical information & interactable buttons are aligned more towards the center of the window.
- use space more efficiently. previously, the player list was gargantuan & also didnt use 70% of the space it took up.
- easier readability. it's arguable that i achieved this, but that was the intent behind making dead player's names red and separating all the names and roles with line separators.
- add a way to teach players what their icons and uniforms look like. just did this because why not, i think uniform clarity is critical when psychologist reveals ONLY reveal their uniform without publicly announcing their role. who expects assistants to be in rainbow jumpsuits instead of grey ones?

current grievances/self-identified issues:
- UI is still too big for the default window size. this only applies if the admin panel exists or notes get too long, however.
- overabundance of line separators. probably would be better to just make the alternating backround colors more visible and apply the to role list.
- role list is probably too big now. i personally prefer all the roles to be listed out one by one. it's admittedly space inefficient but there was nothing small enough/vertically adjustable enough to fit the empty space.
- role list being perfectly aligned with the player list might make it appear that its a list of people who have X role. yeah this is just bad new player design im sorry i fucked up i dont know how to fix it without reverting back to the super empty space small role list.
- im aware that the line separators are not actually perfectly spaced. unfortunately the player list is just not perfectly spaced in general, and im not sure why. i simply matched them up to the alternating backround colors.


personally i would remove notes entirely and put them in their own game panel, as they are the largest variable when it comes to size, a resource you much check on multiple times, and eventually may become editable if it becomes a last will system. but for now I left it in the mock up because its pretty easy to just... delete the notes and push the admin debug section upwards (which isnt even ever visible to non admins).
i removed the individual ? prompts for every role in favor of a ? prompt on the roles section in general. ideally this would simply bring up a window that explains every role's function as opposed to having to click them one at a time.

[Armhulen]

The role list lining up with the player count is kind of a big problem for people getting confused on if those are people's roles but otherwise very good

[Kel]

my problem with the "assistant x3" style of role list is that if we ever reach a point where we can have 12 different roles in 1 game... the role list is going to end up looking nearly like that a lot of the time anyway. the only other option is to do the exact thing I wanted to avoid by stuffing it onto the bottom of the window. nearly every role would get buried off screen, requiring you to resize the window or scroll down to see the full role list. the live version of the UI already faces this issue unless the roles that game happen to lack any variation, but it only becomes worse as more roles get added.

[Armhulen]

So, maybe a section of the player list shows their real role if they were revealed in the game, so it doesn't confuse. Or a really big ass bar. Or some very descriptive title

[Kel]

your first idea is probably the cleanest one, and there should plenty of room still on the player list to fit it in.
also had the idea of coloring the text of the roles
green = crew
red = lings
grey (or unique colors for individual roles, like pink for the clown) = neutrals


edit: alternatively, the role list could be reworked in a sense and instead shows something like the following (drawing from the roles that were used in the mockup)
Assistant
Assistant
Assistant
Crew Investigator
Crew Investigator
Crew Investigator
Crew Investigator
Crew Support
Crew Support
Neutral Killer
Neutral Killer
Neutral Killer

[cacogen]

I haven't gotten to play it due to it never filling, just like EM. Add BGO and we'll never have to play SS13 again.