I don't think it's about playstyle and I don't think it's about "wanting to win at any cost", whatever that is supposed to mean. It's a time-intensive game and the nature of it means that more often than not you'll end up frustrated either due to not being listened to or paranoia that you see as excessive, and so on. The game is also pretty competitive and it's obviously disheartening to have invested a lot of time and energy into something and to lose especially if you happened to play well through it.
That being said, we should probably move away from this idea that "I play to have fun, you play for ego/to win etc" which is a sentiment that seems to be creeping. It's important to remember that everyone has different ideas of what is fun. Some people like to use Mafia to chat with people, some people like to use it to debate without the consequences of debating real-life topics, others like to test reactions and lean into the psychological aspect of the game. As long as you're not actively sabotaging the game then it's all valid.
Disagreements and arguments are going to happen. It's a game where you can other people liars and that naturally will result in tension and nobody really likes to feel nitpicked and cross-examined. So it's important to try and keep what happens in the game, within the game.
I don't think having special "ranked" games will help anything. People should be allowed to be as competitive as they want, as long as there is an effort to play the game then it should even be encouraged. In terms of "punishing" players that don't even try to play, it's a fine line. If you pull them too quick then you set a standard where no one will be able to play in 6 months, and obviously if you enable it other players get frustrated. I think to say there are no attempts to try and resolve this is blatantly untrue - we've literally just seen a player get permanently banned from playing here.
Players leave and go all the time. No one likes to see it, but it's a perfectly natural thing. Everyone has their own reasons, and if it's no longer enjoyable then of course the obvious thing to do would be to stop playing. I think acting as if it's some kind of death knell though is misleading - we've just had a game where there were over 50 players playing, and managed over 45k posts which breaks just about every activity record this place, the other place and OJ ever had, and some are acting as if the community is in shambles. "In shambles" should be reserved for the likes of my home site OPB, where before it closed went almost a year with no Mafia and when it did have a game it was a struggle to get 5 players together - on a site that once could fill 30 player games on the regular.
If there is one more thing I would add to this, it's the "standards" we seem to have for what constitutes as "active". On the aforementioned OPB, a game with 1k-2k posts was considered a rampant success. Here, a game with that amount might be considered inactive and slow. I don't think that's very fair - everyone likes to post at different rates and making 100 posts in 24 hours shouldn't be the expectation or the minimum standard. That's not to say that those who do make 100+ posts in a Day Phase should be shamed for it either - both camps are entitled to play however they want. There will obviously be some concessions here and the trend is that those who like to post fewer times are often drowned out more easily, but that's just the way it goes. I just believe we could with less of dragging the more inactive players when by no means are they actually "inactive".
That's basically all I can think of to say on this. The TL;DR is that accepting how other people approach it goes both ways - playing "quirky" doesn't mean you're the only one who knows how to have fun, and activity "standards" are getting a bit silly. That is all.
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