Known and Unknown hosts, the effects

Talking about big vs small hosts and the effects

In a lobby, you will often have only the known hosts getting players and being able to run games, while unknown hosts aren’t joined regardless of their setup quality. This of course is not always true, but tends to happen often. Why?

Firstly, known hosts are known for a reason; they host often with setups that are fun. If a player has consistently good setups, then there’s no reason to join them over a smaller host who will likely have a setup of more varying quality. This leads to the known host being able to run more games to sift through and find more good setups, which makes the loop continue
Solution? Probably some way to have the knowledge and setups gained by the known hosts more easily accessed by the unknown hosts, either through a wiki, a doc, a guide, or similar. This doesn’t solve the issue alone but it can help.

Secondly, known hosts are more likely to fill faster. This leads to people joining them more, because they think the game will start quickly compared to an unknown host’s game.
Solution? I’ll try to address this later

Third, big hosts get a lot of spectators who just want to be in the biggest game, watching and waiting.
Solution? Have more games that are worth watching and playing. How one does this i will try to answer later

Finally, known hosts get more people, which allows them to have bigger games. Bigger games are easier and lower-effort, so people will want to play them over a smaller game. I say this because in a smaller game, you have to actively participate and discuss for the entirely of the day. In a bigger game, there are more people do discuss with early-game to fill a convo, and more things to talk about late-game
Solution?
The solution to 2 and 4 is ultimately to make smaller games fill faster and more fun/easy to pick up as to make them actual competition to the big games

How? I’m glad you asked. For a game to be easier to play, it needs to have stuff get done faster, and have more mechanical stuff to base reads off of. For it to be more fun, it should be able to feel just as unique as a large game.

That’s right, I’m suggesting closed setups and majority instant lynch :)
With closed setups, the smaller games can be more fun due to how closed setups make the reading of players much more reliant on things other than the roles themselves, because only the host knows what roles are in the setup
With Majority instant lynch, it is both much easier to get the game moving and lynching people, but also each vote carries much more mechanical significance that can be scrutinized. Each Villager and mafia member has more power over the game, so each decision is more important.

Of course, this alone does not address the issue of unknown hosts being less popular, but it does give you a reason to join a smaller game, because they will be more fun.
This would hopefully also make the spectator issue less of a thing, because these smaller games are now equally interesting to watch as the big ones, because of them being more intense and mysterious.

In conclusion, I’m a broken record, asking for the same features repeatedly.