pls tweaks the EM

Last touched by Saltbearer's greasy brain 8/22/16.



★ SETUPS AND SETUP CREATION



- Show recent rounds on setup pages, and/or maybe a few preserved sticky rounds showing how they can be played strategically or present interesting scenarios. The site already tracks games for play counts, why not show a few links?

- Allow setups with certain roles to be excluded from search results.

- Game creation options I'd like to see include…
- - disabling whisper leaks
- - assigning a private, but democratic meeting to members of an alignment in place of a role
- - assigning an item to a role n1, or to x of y roles
- - adding a game title to a particular instance of an already-created setup - yes I know emjack can do this but I'm on mobile 24/7 and can't use add-ons. Why not make it native?
- - putting alert boxes, or just server messages, at the top of the pregame chat, with important setup-specific gameplay info. Submitted like strats with the most voted used?

Anything to spur creativity and understanding.

- It's not entirely clear how things like Dawn and Sunset actually affect gameplay until you see them in action. Clarify in hover text.

- Add hover text to roles on setup pages.

- Fill in red mafia's missing hover text and don't just let them disappear when you filter roles.

- Provide a search box for anon decks.

- Let people properly save as many setups as they want and give refunds to those who bought extra slots, or change the premium benefit to unlimited slots. Why is there such a limitation on what I see as an integral feature? Is there any real point for the artificial scarcity aside from creating an incentive to buy tokens? I've had to toss out several decent setups even after buying extra slots, and I've only really been active for a few months, while some of you guys have been here creating setups since the founding. I'm starting to just throw setups together and Favorite them if they turn out to be fun, which is basically the same thing anyway except without convenient at-a-glance info like titles and roles present. After glancing at a few profiles just now it seems these also cap at 20. Ugh. It doesn't seem like these random setups ever expire since entering random IDs brings them right up, so space doesn't seem to be an issue. If profile clutter is any excuse, just make them paginated like Friends. There's no friend limit, is there? Of course you'd only limit the stuff actually directly related to playing the game the site is centered around, discouraging people from taking more of an interest in trying out a broad range of its variants.

Meanwhile, suggestions for new roles go nowhere, yet seem to be unlimited.



★ ROLE BEHAVIORS



- Lyncher should receive a target Day 1, not Night 1. Would this break any setups, or would it just help people who get to play this role also get a chance to act upon their special win condition?

- The Virgin's sacrifice message needs to show up only upon lynching. The message appearing upon a shooting, combined with a random nk or doc save and the general inaccuracy of some role descriptions, had me confused and balancing setups around behavior that doesn't exist.

- Roles that select from the dead should not be able to see through the Disguiser's disguise just by looking at the list of dead players.

- Forger's will replacements should have a 100% success rate.



★ GENERAL GAMEPLAY



- Tick the boxes in unranked games automatically so we don't have to wait longer for someone to veg just because it slipped the host's mind. Everyone asks for them to be ticked all the time anyway.

- Fix the long-standing bug where suicides break votes and prevent phases from ending. Searching tells me it's plagued the game for years. This is reeeeeally high priority, isn't it? Suicides and vegging break Disguiser too, with the phantom player identity hovering in the graveyard.

- Add timestamps to votes, kicks (anonymous? still anonymous upon review?), and server messages.

- Turn the music up to deafeningly high levels and take away the mute option.



★ LOBBY



- Show a few more games per page in the lobby to help less-familiar setups fill. 12 is really kind of a small number given how quickly games can be created and filled at peak hours. And then there's the occasional pointfarm spam…

- Bump a game to the top if someone who hasn't previously joined it joins it, and/or if it's been five minutes since the last bump upon someone joining.

- Reprioritize the sections in the Main Lobby sidebar. Currently we have…

User stats > Description > Featured Setups > Recent forum topics > Minimal inconspicuous chatbox with no history that's barely used, which even lobby comments move faster than > Competitive setups > Silly poll > Stickied topics, yeah stuck all the way down here > Stickied setups > In-game activity showing normal run-of-the-mill game actions that typically happen in games happening in games > Games friends are in > Site announcements > Setups you explicitly like

And when you click a game a friend is in, it opens an info box way up near the top. Off-screen.

This is hard to organize in a way that makes everyone happy I'm sure, but it's just all over the place. It has no flow. Various categories of setups and things that directly concern your personal user experience are slapped on in an unintuitive sequence. Maybe it could be modular, with a customizable order? Undoubtedly, some people prefer variety in adjacent sections.

My preference would be…

Description > Announcements > Chat > Stats > Friends playing > Game activity… if not done away with > Favorite setups > Featured setups > Stickied setups > Competitive setups > Stickied topics > Recent topics > Poll



★ INFORMATION



- Make noob guides more comprehensive and accessible/shoved in new players' faces, explaining vegging, hovering over roles in-game, as close to all the shorthand as possible, etc.

- Edit role descriptions for yet more clarity and consistency. A few things I've taken note of:

- - Periods end lines in some descriptions, not in others.
- - Tinkerer and Civilian are missing the "Sided with the village." line.
- - Why does Illusionist's description specify that it CAN attend meetings? At one point I glanced at the description for a quick refresh and assumed it couldn't because I saw "mafia meetings", which is usually preceded by "Does not attend". Also says "Sided with Mafia" [sic], eeeEeEEeeEwWww.
- - Consigliere "does not attend meetings"… until its conversion - which is not just its apparent alignment, but a conversion to a nilla.
- - It is unclear to just about everyone, even (perhaps especially) to those who use it, that the Ventriloquist sends fake messages to the chat and not fake whispers.
- - Due to the word "shot", it is unclear that the Bleeder does not immediately die, but begins to bleed if nightkilled.
- - Due to me being a moron, it was unclear to me that the Vigilante will not die IN PLACE of the mafia's kill target. So add the word "too" to "If visiting the same person as mafia, the Vigilante dies.". Come to think of it, while I'm being pedantic, do normally non-killing mafia visits kill the Vig? Probably not. Make it "If killing the same person as mafia during the night, the Vigilante dies too." Also at least keep the "the"s consistent within the same description. "If shot by the mafia, THE Vigilante fails to kill."



- Fix the date sorting in the role lists.

- Clarify that custom death messages, for yourself and, I assume, for created roles, will fill in the role name after the player's (Name).

- Let people know that the shiny "create a role you can use" thing on the Buy page is currently more or less a broken waste of tokens.

- There needs to be better documentation of everything in general, really. "Learn" is such a misleading tab. How many people still don't know you can change the icons beside names to suspected roles? I learned it from seeing a guy do it in a YouTube video and some players with a decent chunk of game time learned it from a lobby comment a while ago. And the entire custom role thing is kind of a mystery to anyone who hasn't just tried it.



★ REVIEWING



- Allow users to review main lobby games without logging in. Maybe with a code or something. I want a convenient way to show people what games of Mafia actually look like.

- Allow users to review ranked games from the get-go.

- Allow users to review games while in active games.

^ I'm guessing these would require a complete rebuild of the game archival system. So be it eh?

- Make it clear how people appeared at certain times along with what roles they actually were. Millers…

- Gray out, rather than white out, the meetings of players who died shortly thereafter. They're kept in the voting log, which is unticked by default and not so easy to understand at a glance. There must be a way to gray them out like sui names.

- Let people save notable unranked games with tokens.

- Don't let top-rated competitive game histories expire.



★ IUNNO WHERE THESE BELONG EXACTLY



- Make post formatting consistent sitewide. What's with that weird code in profile descriptions that isn't an [img] tag?

- Allow more than 8 favorite roles. There's nearly 150 and they appear as a line of 5 and a line of 3. PERHAPS 10 WOULD BE GOOD. FOR TWO LINES OF 5. YOU KNOW?

- Consistently recognize when someone is still "in" a game that just ended so they can click Leave without having to try to enter another game first and save the second that it takes for a game to refill so they're not locked out.



This site would feel so much nicer if even the smaller issues, at least, would keep getting chipped away at.