JoeSapphire: who's tasked with hosting mafia #13?
I have a MOST TANTALISING scenario in my mind
bazilisek: #11 has been going for almost five months.
(I have a delicious setup in my head myself, but I really don't want to waste it.)
You might try posting on another forum. For instance mafiascum.net does offer a newbie forum, iirc. Yes, it would be better to do it here... but the games there are much faster paced. We are talking weeks long, instead of months. I don't have an account there, I have only lurked and read a bunch of the games over the years, so I don't know how long it would take to fill up a game there. I just know that I have rarely, if ever, seen a game die from inactivity there.
TwilightBard: As far as deadlines...I agree to the need, and the idea of flexable deadlines is nice...don't want to touch too much on stuff since I'm still in game...but yeah...
bazilisek: I think the deadlines in #12 were/are fairly strict, but the game is still moving along at a glacial pace most of the time. Also, if I made them any more brutal, I'd be handing victory over to the mafia (which almost happened in #5, if you remember; it was only the jester/godfather that prevented a smooth scum win).
This is the trouble with deadlines. I believe they are a necessary evil, but they do tend to help scum more often than town. Mainly because being inactive is one of the safest things for scum to do, and mandatory deadlines help this, imho.
I suspect all the replacements in recent games is a strong contributing factor to some folks losing interest. Replacements can be a good stop-gap, but too many and the game gets very hard to play, regardless of faction; it is hard to get reads on people if they are changing personalities as the game progresses. The trouble is that there are really only three solutions to inactive players: replace, modkill, or ignore. Each can disrupt and imbalance a game in different ways, and none is much better than any other on average.