this is gonna be a long post so buckle in folks
So the major debate about village leaders seems to be a point about macro strategy vs. individual player engagement, and I think our response to this strategy ultimately comes down to which we value more.
On the one hand, from a purely strategic standpoint, it's a good system. It adds an interesting dynamic to villages that allows them to actually compete with mafia teams during the night phase, which opens up a lot more design options for prospective hosts. We can create roles that are almost entirely useless outside of being village leaders, and it's just fine. We can introduce roles designed entirely to circumvent the system, and that's great too.
On the other hand, I do think we have to care about individual players, especially since lately there's been such a focus on growing the community (and I think Metagame Mafia has been a great first step, but we need to keep the momentum going or we're going to fall back into the same rut). If a player feels like they have no agency, they're going to have less fun, and are going to be less likely to play in future games. Obviously, that's no good.
To be honest, I don't think we should be trying to eliminate village leaders - mostly because I don't think we can without abolishing OC entirely. As long as outside contact is enabled, people are going to try to step up and collect claims, regardless of how unfavorable it is for them to do so; honestly, I think village leaders in unfavorable conditions are even worse than usual, because then even the ones who are supposed to be participating aren't really having any fun. We play games here, guys. Fun is the goal.
I think the best way to progress is to try to give villagers more agency. The more interesting we can make their roles, the more they're going to be involved. Can we completely abolish boring roles? No, because then villages would probably be too strong and games would become imbalanced. And of course some people are going to idle no matter how Unique and Fun their role is. However, if we take steps to make villagers more active and engaged, we won't have to try to completely eliminate any single style of play, because the game will diversify on its own.
Anyways, enough about game design. Let's talk about the forum itself. This is already pretty similar to the original intent of this thread so I didn't really feel like making a new one for this.
Basically, it's not just the newbie guide - pretty much all of our forum intro stuff is outdated, and there's a LOT of stuff we could stand to improve. Here's some things I think we need to do:
Make aska's thread more of a "how to mafia" thing, and create a proper intro thread
I realize that mafia is our main area of expertise, but aska's thread literally ONLY covers mafia. If we turn his thread into a mafia-specific guide and create a more basic catch-all intro thread, we can serve a dual purpose: aska's guide will be able to go more in-depth and better inform newbies on the intracacies of Smogon mafia, while the more generic intro will serve as a good hub for info on all things Circus-related as well as boost visibility for our non-mafia communities. Which brings me to...
Increased visibility for non-mafia communities
Roleplaying is still huge and the #flamel community deserves to be mentioned in whatever intro we come up with. I also still have #thegame regged and would be absolutely down to revive the Diplomacy community if there's enough interest - in fact, I'm planning on getting a game going later this summer. The point is, mafia isn't the only thing we have here and we shouldn't give that impression.
Increased visibility for IRC and PS
#circus is mentioned once briefly in aska's thread and nowhere in Mekkah's. PS and #flamel aren't mentioned at all. Whatever hub we go with needs to have all of these in one easy-to-find location so that newbies can actually figure out where the hell we do most of our game-playing.
General updates to the Circus Rules thread
-remove the "which grew too big and too serious for Firebot" thing, most users nowadays (myself included) weren't around for the mafia-on-Firebot days
-in rule 5 under "pregame", the phrase "if applicable to your game level" hasn't made sense since we abolished beginner/standard/expert and should be deleted
-maybe readd billy/shade as listed mods since billy's been modding again as of late and shade's expressed interest in becoming more active. Up to them though.
-Calling the blacklist a list of people who are "really bad at mafia" is super insular and could be offputting to some hapless newbie who reads it and becomes terrified of screwing up and getting blacklisted. We should probably just say something along the lines of "The blacklist is a list of malicious rulebreakers and/or repeated idlers" or something along those lines. Could we still blacklist someone for being procks-level bad? Maybe. But I don't think we should advertise it as such.
Update the description of OSI
Nothing major, but Mekkah's guidelines post should probably mention that this is also where we do most meta-discussion about the forum, since that's largely what it's become as of late.
Mention ASB somewhere maybe?
Are they blanketed under us? I don't even know, it shows up like that on the forum listing. At the very least some clarification on that situation would be nice.
Guide on how to host a game
The one in the rules ends with "begin hosting your game". But how does one go about hosting a circus game? I know Mekkah(?) wrote a Smog article on that ages ago so at the bare minimum we could link that somewhere, but a more mordernized guide might be in order (and as one of the more prolific hosts I'd be more than willing to write it)
On postgames
That's still a forum tag, right? We should probably explain what the hell that is somewhere. The fact that me/Sam are doing one for Metagame will probably help.
OPTIONAL AND WE SHOULD PROBABLY DISCUSS THIS IN DEPTH: Revert back to just being Circus Maximus
I realize I was 100% on board with the name change whenever we did that whole business, but the non-circus users I've spoken to have reacted pretty negatively to it, and I can see why. Basically their arguments were that it makes us seem sort of pretentious and overly-tryhardy (which we kinda are but we don't need newcomers to know that lol) and that if we want to elaborate on the specifics of the forum we should just use the subtitle rather than including the subtitle in the actual forum title.
So yeah. Doing some of the above, I think, would go a long way in helping people not be confused by this forum.
The intro/hub that I mentioned could swipe something similar to the intro sentence in the current Rules thread and then just go on to explain what all we do here. The following is one I came up with real quick, and could probably use some editing, but I think something similar to it would be good.
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<fancy header maybe? if we make a cool one for the PS room we could swipe that>
Hello, Smogon! Welcome to Circus Maximus! Now, you may be wondering: "what the hell is a Circus Maximus?" Well, my hypothetical friend, that's an excellent question! Here you'll find:
-Mafia (the party game) - but not like you're used to! Check out this thread [link to aska's thread] for more info.
-Tabletop RPGs - mostly Pathfinder, but other systems certainly aren't out of the question. For more info, look here [link to PFS thread maybe? or make a thread about circus tabletop?]
-Diplomacy - everyone's favorite board game about backstabbing your friends!
-Tournaments (not for Pokemon, obviously) - for video games such as League of Legends or Mario Kart, or for classic games such as Chess, or for card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh!
-and much much more!
To overgeneralize things, we specialize in forum games. Not stuff like "do x to the poster above/below you" - stuff like that goes in Firebot. This is more a place for strategy games. Most of our "unique" games are spinoffs of our mafia variant and use similar mechanics, but anything with strategy to it is fair game.
So how does one get involved? It's easy! Any thread that contains "signups" in the title is a game that's currently accepting player signups. Just post "in" in that thread, and you've signed up! Once signups close, the thread for the game itself will be posted. You'll usually receive a PM if you got in, but even if you didn't, check the thread, because the playerlist will always be in the OP. After that, play the game and have fun!
Looking to chat with the community? We've got a couple of hangouts:
-The unlisted room "Circus Maximus" on Pokemon Showdown and the channel #circus on the synIRC network are general hubs for the forum as a whole.
-#flamel on synIRC is Circus's tabletop headquarters
-#thegame on synIRC is the go-to channel for all things diplomacy
-many games make their own IRC channels as well, usually listed in the OP of both the signup thread and the actual game thread.
So where does one go from here? The next best thread to read is probably the Rules [link Mekkah's thread] - it's a bit dry, but it's necessary, and highly informative as well! If you're looking to play mafia, this thread [link aska's thread again] is incredibly useful. And if you'd like to start running games yourself, check out this [link to host guide if we do one] handy guide.
Have fun, and may the odds be ever in your favor!
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That's not a perfect intro by any means, but it's a good jumping-off point. If we decide to repurpose aska's thread it'll probably need rewrites beyond what I proposed in this thread's OP, and I'd be willing to write/cowrite a hosting guide as well, but I'll save that for another night.
gonna tag
billymills shade UncleSam zorbees LightWolf Da Letter El Yeti vonFiedler as circus badgeholders as well as
Agape since from what I can tell he basically runs the tabletop community these days. I figure it's MOST important that you guys see this since it involves thread stickying and other mod-type stuff, and I need Agape/von's input on tabletop stuff since I'm barely involved with it, but if you're not one of these people that doesn't mean I don't want your input - in fact, far from it. Everyone with a vested interest in circus who has an opinion on what I've posted should give their feedback because leaving the future of an entire community in my hands is probably a bad idea LOL