It's really strange. Back on OJ, in the early days especially, the success line of a game was generally if it reached 1000 posts. These games also often lasted around a month. Obviously some games went for 2000+ but they were not all that common. Nowadays, if a game hasn't reached 1000 posts within a week it can be considered a flop, and often games reach 10,000 posts. It's a very different game to how I started, to be honest, in some ways for the better, in others for the worse. I think, aside from general activity, Mafia is a lot more appealing to a wider range of players here. Back then, as the whole Boys v Girls thing got me thinking about this, the gender divide had maybe between 1-3 girls for every 12 guys, if that. Now we could probably say roughly 40-50% of the playerbase are girls. Also, like Soul touched on earlier, we used to flame the fuck out of each other in games. Not so much between Soul and myself, though we've certainly had our moments, and OJ was generally always on the nicer end, but it was really quite normal to be aggressive to one another. All this now is for the better, of course.
In terms of worse, I think some of the logic and reasoning in the game has been lost. This isn't so much a general thing, but for instance I think I'm a worse player now than I was back then, because with the pace of games there is just less time to sit down and properly case someone or go wallie to wallie with them. I've been trying to lean more back into that style but it's difficult. This isn't to suggest something silly like "the quality has gone down!", but the speed and volume of the games makes it difficult to play it the same way. To speak for myself, as a player I never used to have to lean on gut feelings or reading the language of posts, and I used to adopt a playstyle that allowed me to hide my tone because I couldn't fake it well. So playing more in this last year, I've had to strengthen or use those aspects of Mafia far more than typical, and it's been pretty useful, especially in regards to faking tone. It's an interesting challenge, anyhow.
In terms of worse, I think some of the logic and reasoning in the game has been lost. This isn't so much a general thing, but for instance I think I'm a worse player now than I was back then, because with the pace of games there is just less time to sit down and properly case someone or go wallie to wallie with them. I've been trying to lean more back into that style but it's difficult. This isn't to suggest something silly like "the quality has gone down!", but the speed and volume of the games makes it difficult to play it the same way. To speak for myself, as a player I never used to have to lean on gut feelings or reading the language of posts, and I used to adopt a playstyle that allowed me to hide my tone because I couldn't fake it well. So playing more in this last year, I've had to strengthen or use those aspects of Mafia far more than typical, and it's been pretty useful, especially in regards to faking tone. It's an interesting challenge, anyhow.
