The Syndicate

Epignosis wrote: ↑Fri Mar 30, 2018 7:03 pm Sounds like a one hit wonder boy band from the 1990s.

My favorite of your music-related remarks is still when you called the keyboards in Merriweather Post Pavilion softcore porn or whatever.

S~V~S wrote: ↑Fri Mar 30, 2018 3:41 pm

M Plus 7 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 29, 2018 4:52 pm Welcome, Avito!

M Plus 7?

You rang?

Welcome, Avito!

reywaS!! So glad to see you back.

Hope things are going better these days.

Lunalee wrote: ↑Sun Feb 04, 2018 10:29 pm Hello! I'm Lunalee. I just made an account a few days ago, and haven't "officially" introduced myself yet. I'm @speedchuck 's wife, and after seeing the amusement he gets out of online mafia, finally decided to give it a shot. I enjoy playing mafia-type games (One-Night Werewolf, The Resistance, etc.) in person, so I'm looking forward to playing more online and getting to know you people!

Welcome to The Syndicate, Lunalee!

Glad to see I didn't scare you off earlier.

Welcome, PTB!

Hello, Mesk! Welcome to the site!!

Hope you enjoy it here.

Welcome to The Syndicate, K-Ness!

Hope you enjoy it here.

malakim2099 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 12, 2017 9:30 am Wow, I think my intro post got eaten during the Sitequake of 2017.

I'm from HCRealms, I have been playing for over a decade, and I'm always mafia.

Seriously, we ran the numbers and I'm two standard deviations more likely to be Mafia in a game over there. So of course my first game here in the Side Mission? Mafia.

Also helped JJJ run the Mass Effect mafia. Looking forward to participating in more games.

Hey malakim! Happy to have you here.

I feel your pain; I was mafia 9 out of my first 10 games, and I had various long periods of time where I kept rolling mafia a ridiculously high amount of the time. Seems I might be finally over that, but it's done lasting damage to a lot of players' willingness to trust me. At least you made a win out of your first mafia experience here.

juliets wrote: ↑Thu Aug 31, 2017 6:40 am

Epignosis wrote: ↑Thu Aug 31, 2017 12:01 am I really, really miss Flyin' High. Somebody bring her back to us.

So do I. I don't know what happened to her, she was applying for a new job maybe she just is too busy with that to play. I sent her a PM in the hopes that it triggers her email telling her how much we miss her and happy birthday.

That's a great idea. I've reached out to FH briefly a couple times since she's been gone but haven't heard from her in a long while now. Would be amazing to see her back.

It's so bittersweet to look at the member list. So many amazing people that are a part of our community that have come from so many different avenues -- the LP/TP/RM/STV crowd, the PA/Shred crowd, RYM, HCR, RL friends of myself or any other members, and so many places. It's awesome to think how many have been retained and how we all have melded together into this now what I could only really call a TS community because of how varied everyone's background is. So many of my best friends are here. But then there are many people who have come and gone who I definitely miss and would love to see come back as well.

Yeah, we actually started talking when I was hosting Classic Rock Mafia on The Piano (RIP) back in January of 2012. Honestly it's still amazing to think about it -- I spent my spring break to visit her two months later and the rest is history.

Spacedaisy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 31, 2017 12:51 pm We did! He was hosting, I was a player. We had played together before but I didn't take notice of him before that. In fact I had hosted him in one of my games before and had watched in amusement as he had imploded his entire civilian team. It was quite funny and a little tragic. Lol

Oh god, that game. I haven't changed one bit.

NewTraditionalist wrote: ↑Wed Aug 30, 2017 12:23 pm ref'd by MP who my wife and I have gamed with IRL a few times.

dunya wrote: ↑Tue Aug 29, 2017 3:47 pm very cool reading some intros here and some history of this place.

i think it was MP who linked me to sign up a few years back through our RYM mafia gaming period where there was going to be a game between two sites (I didn't join, RL issues prevented me unfortunately).

was chatting with jay a few weeks ago (love him, old friend) and got talking about mafia somehow and how I missed playing with him so he said HEY there's a SF game that's about to start so...here I am. Was really nice to see Sloonei here too, who is also an old friend.

Noticed that everyone's nice which is new for me when venturing into a new online community, more so in a competition. Where are all the snarky meanspirited snobs

So glad to have you here!

Hope you like it and stick around.

gfishfunk wrote:Good to know.

I rarely fight dirty, but I'm not super clean.

Sounds like you'll fit in well around here.

gfishfunk wrote:Thanks. I was thinking of stealing someone's avatar midgame to create confusion. I'd that frowned upon here?

It probably would be, yeah, if the joke outran its 15 seconds of fame.

gfishfunk wrote:Hello. I'm new here. I'm not new to mafia.

I've run games and made some brilliant plays before. I've also lost horribly and made blatant wire with the best of them.

I enjoy things sometimes and other times I don't.

Historically, I've been very active as a poster, but real life has forced me to allow my playstyle. I rarely take hints well because I never get them.

Also, this all sounds too much like me.

Welcome to The Syndicate, gfishfunk!!!!

I see ColonialBob has recently signed up too. Welcome to him as well! So glad to see you folks over here from HCR already.

Don't hesitate to let any of us know what questions you may have about how things run around these parts.

As I said in the Phenon sign-ups thread, welcome, Fred! We're glad to have you here.

Hope you enjoy it, and don't be afraid to ask whatever questions come to mind.

Hello, Doober! Wow, it's been ages. Hope you've been doing well!

So good to see you again.

TheFloyd73 wrote:I suppose I didn't introduce myself here the first time, so I guess I can make a second impression.

Hello, I'm Floyd, and I made fool out of myself during the Talking Heads game.

Good to see you, Floyd, welcome back!

Sloonei wrote:Butts. I was looking forward to some long cons in that game. MP and I will do our darndest to represent the Syndicate well, or die trying!

Are You New? Welcome! You have taken then first step in becoming a member of HCRealms.com, The HeroClix Community! Before we can give you full access of the site; drop into New Member Forum and introduce yourself! Once we've determined that you're a real, live, person (or zombie), we'll grant you access to the full site automatically. BTW, don't post links ... the system will think you're a SpamBot and automatically ban you. Thanks!

Jackofhearts2005 wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Sloonei wrote:I'm getting in the Christmas spirit with the HeroClickers.

I'm still awaiting activation, but whenever I get activated I'm totally signing up.

That message is kinda misleading. They really should change it.

The steps are
1) Register
2) Post something without a link to the new player forum
3) Get autoconfirmed/banned

Oh, okay! Thanks for clarifying that. I figured it was similar to this site where the admin activates every new member.

Golden wrote:

juliets wrote:Leave it to LC to get banned with his first post.

Legitimately amazing!

He has a knack. It's like a callback.

It is pretty funny.

Sloonei wrote:I'm getting in the Christmas spirit with the HeroClickers.

I'm still awaiting activation, but whenever I get activated I'm totally signing up.

Jackofhearts2005 wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote: Sounds like you'll fit in real well around here then.

That's my hope.

Went ahead and signed up for a game.

There is a Christmas game open on the realms that could use some more players if anyone wants to try something different and try to siphon off a couple more players for the Syndicate.

http://www.hcrealms.com/forum/showthread.php?t=569190

Sweet! I'll register and try this out myself if anyone besides Mr. Ban over there wants to join us.

Jackofhearts2005 wrote:Heh. The vague awareness of Mafiascum as the only other online mafia site and that it is an unpleasant place to play mirrors our awareness exactly pre tournament.

HCRealms also rarely has vanilla roles but our roles are generally not revealed at all except in name only through nightkills/lynches and then in full at the end of the game. Having setup knowledge is usually reserved for specific mafia variants like Texas Justice or One Night Ultimate Mafia. Should be interesting trying out a home brew game with an open setup.

Infodumping is one of the main things I dislike about that community and there has been heavy resistance to restricting roleclaims. The plethora of powers has lead to an attitude of "waiting for info" or "pressure votes" that get removed when someone name claims. I'm okay with a couple townies being able to self confirm with name claims but I've also played games where the theme and player count were so restrictive that there was no room at all for false claims and any townie could self confirm. That's not much of a game, IMO, and it's frustrating that some players have no idea what to do without roleclaiming or a cop to follow.

Sounds like you'll fit in real well around here then.

Long Con wrote:Well, it's good to be back. Maybe I'll just take summer off for the most part, since that's the time that is hardest to commit to Mafia for me.

And welcome jackofhearts2005... and thanks for the history of your name. Have you ever considered just being Jack of Hearts?

It's good to have you back!

I know the feeling; although I've been here all year and relatively active, I haven't been able to commit nearly as much time here as I'd like for most of the year until the last couple of weeks. It's been real nice being able to finally do so.

Long Con wrote:I'm an old LP member. This is my first game. Ikkl Genius brought it to us, and we basically developed the game in more and more radical ways, completely unaware of the larger Mafia community that existed. Except for a vague awareness of mafiascum, which, it was generally agreed and taken on faith, was an unpleasant place to play.

Yeah, 2016 was a little quieter around here... do you think it will pick up again?

I think so, for sure. This year has been quieter in general than I was expecting given all that momentum we seemed to have in 2015, but based on my observations, results from the survey we send out a couple of months ago, and just talking with folks, I'm thinking what's most likely contributed to that is we just saw the biggest chunk of our 'core' base of players going on some sort of hiatus during 2016 than we ever had previously.

However, the last month or so especially, it seems evident that activity has started picking up again, and some players have been around again after being absent or semi-absent. You, me, Golden, etc. are all here more than we were for a while before, and I'd say based on the rate that games have been filling up we're definitely on an upswing, which is oddly timed because historically this is always the toughest time of the year for us (and summer was usually the best).

I also know there are things in the works behind the scenes; as much as possible we're trying to plan things for the future here to continually make this place more appealing, and the feedback we got from the survey was immensely helpful in spurring a lot of conversation we've been having among the admin/mod team the last couple of months. In addition, now that I temporarily have some more time I'm trying to revamp the scout team so we can find a real solid community to reach out to and try and partner with (though it seems Jackofhearts might have done that some of that work for us already ), etc. I've been also trying to recruit new folks and old timers as much as I can, and I know I'm not the only one.

Jackofhearts2005 wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:You said you played in the mafia championship with Sloonei; what community are you from?

I've played on HCRealms.com for about ten years, now. It's not entirely dead but the player base and participation rate have shrunk.

There was a time when a new mod could run a game with an obscure theme and get 35 sign ups. Now, I see experienced mods struggle to fill 14 player games and even games with only 7 players end up with 1 or 2 only posting once or twice.

Some of my favorite games were the massive off the wall games we used to play. Like a guy ran a Crisis on Infinite Earths mafia (any comic book fans in the house?) where some 40ish players were divided across 5 game threads, one for each Earth. You could only use abilities on people at your Earth and if less than 3 players were on a given Earth, the thread was closed and those players were instantly killed and their character names hidden. The big scum boss got more powerful as these threads were destroyed.

Anyway, you just can't do that kind of thing on HCRealms anymore. I look at the Flash and BSG games and it reminded me of our old epic games I enjoyed so much.



I noticed a couple things that look different from what I'm used to. Some games don't let you change your vote? Is roleclaiming usually not allowed? You vote on the thread and in polls? Dead players can chat on thread to a degree?

Wow, nice, you've been playing a while.

That's a real shame. It's never fun with mafia communities take a dive like that. Many of us here have experienced a similar situation. I was introduced to mafia on Lostpedia in 2010 (I'm actually a newbie still if we're talking just LP-based players around here) and a good chunk of the players here migrated from that site and a couple of mafia-only sister sites (The Piano and RevolutionMafia) after participation at those places gradually died away. While those sites were active though, I introduced mafia to another forum I had frequented much longer (ProgArchives) since none of them had played it before and I really fell in love with the game. Unfortunately, that forum is incredibly difficult to host mafia on (PM restrictions among other things) and many of the people I knew for a while gradually drifted away from frequenting it too often, and I stopped frequenting it myself as well, so mafia died off after I hosted two games since no one else picked up the torch.

So when the Lostpedia-affiliated communities were struggling to fill games, much in the way that you describe actually (I remember our community's peak time when 30-40 player games filling in a few days on The Piano, and we've never quite matched that here even), I formed this site to try to bring together as many folks as I could from the LP-based community which had already established a solid mafia base and a bunch of mafia newbies from the PA community, along with as many other contacts from my RL that I could convince to try it out.

Since then we've had waves of activity, but finding out about the Mafia Championship last year was simultaneously a boon, as well as feeling like an isolated mafia planet and suddenly realizing there's an entire universe full of so many other mafia planets out there. It really opened up my eyes. 2015 was probably our best year yet, and I along with a few other solid members here specifically reached out to RateYourMusic and played a bunch of games over there. Their community is now defunct as well since RYM OT got shut down, so while some folks tried to keep it alive through a new forum (PWYW), it hasn't really been sustaining itself. We already had a couple of RYM folks migrate here before all of that happened because we hosted a crossover event with them last year (Talking Heads game), so we have some RYM folks now here too.

So we've been through one big merger of two communities, and more recently, one small migration.

To answer your questions, those are all habits that developed back in the Lostpedia days, and I for one never even knew there were other ways to play other than what we all had experimented with (because we love doing that around here) until playing on RYM and checking out and talking to other communities at the Championship this year and last year. So I would say the following attributes are all still typical, but we've gradually introduced other approaches around here after being introduced to them:

- Games historically featured non-changeable votes, but this tradition is the one that seems least pervasive anymore... I'd say it's a 50/50 shot these days. Depends entirely on which host you play with probably.

- At the Lostpedia-based communities, games were pretty much always open setup role madness; many games featuring role secrets and crazy role/game mechanics, back in those days it was odd if hosts had vanilla roles in their setups. Nonetheless, however, things turned sour in some early LP games because of mass role claiming and outing, so a bunch of the players decided it would be better to institute a no claiming or dumping information rule, and that rule stayed in tact for quite a while. It was pretty well established when I joined LP mafia in 2010 so I never knew anything different until being exposed to other sites. Since the beginning of last year, as a host I've been experimenting with closed setups and allowing infodumping, and other hosts have started doing that more and more as well. So I'd say open setup role madness with no claiming or dumping is still typical, but the games here are gradually becoming more diverse.

- Regarding voting, again just what many of the LP folks are used to, we always had polls at LP, RM, and TP, so we always voted via poll where it would also track the order of your vote and such, and we've become spoiled by it. :P Typically it's suggested to describe your vote in the game thread as well, but as long as you cast your vote in the poll, it's not necessary to say anything about it (generally frowned upon not to though).

- Dead players chatting in the thread is another way I've noticed we're different than the vast majority of sites (and again, it's an LP thing), but the huge caveat is that they are in no way allowed to say anything that can be construed as on topic, so it's usually pretty limited.

Let us know whatever other questions you have!

And I'm really looking forward to playing a game with you too, as I'm sure others are as well.

You said you played in the mafia championship with Sloonei; what community are you from?

Jackofhearts2005 wrote:'Lo, ladies and gents.

Sloonei recommended this site to me after he kicked my tail in the big inter-website mafia tournament thingie.

Currently reading through last year's Flash mafia and Battlestar Galactica mafia. Liking what I'm seeing so far.

Hello, Jackofhearts2005! We're glad to see you here.

Welcome to The Syndicate!

Cryptonic wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:Nice, that's awesome! What's the community?

Good to hear. Hope you enjoy playing here whenever you get around to it!

The community is Sc2Mafia, which is a community based around the Starcraft 2 Arcade mod for Mafia.

Thanks I'm sure I will

Oh I know sc2! I may even have an account there though I may not. I know I've at least checked it out before. Cool beans.

Cryptonic wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Cryptonic wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Cryptonic wrote:Hello everyone

First time caller, long time listener

Hey there! Welcome to The Syndicate!

Thank you only took me 3 years to make my first post, my therapist is going to be so proud of my breakthrough

Better late than never, right?

By the way, if you don't mind answering, have you played mafia/werewolf elsewhere or would this be your first time?

Ya I have played and hosted mafia many many times. I'm actually an Administrator on another small Mafia-dedicated site. I thought I'd relog onto this community, maybe play a few games and see what positive things could be taken back to our community. Always been a huge fan of the game layout on this site.

Nice, that's awesome! What's the community?

Good to hear. Hope you enjoy playing here whenever you get around to it!

Cryptonic wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Cryptonic wrote:Hello everyone

First time caller, long time listener

Hey there! Welcome to The Syndicate!

Thank you only took me 3 years to make my first post, my therapist is going to be so proud of my breakthrough

Better late than never, right?

By the way, if you don't mind answering, have you played mafia/werewolf elsewhere or would this be your first time?

Cryptonic wrote:Hello everyone

First time caller, long time listener

Hey there! Welcome to The Syndicate!

notsawyer540 wrote:I have no idea what you people are talking about. I'm definitely not that other guy. Who I'm not.

Oh yes, of course, strike what I said. I'm a liar after all.

Yeah, I was talking to sawyer540 on Facebook and told him about mafia here and he said it sounded fun, so now he's here.

notsawyer540 wrote:Sup? Ya'll might confuse me with that other guy, but I guarantee I am not him.

Good to see you, stranger!

Welcome to The Syndicate!

Welcome, Dunny!! Hope you enjoy it here.

I recall your name vaguely; I was at RevolutionMafia as well but played more often at Lostpedia and The Piano. Not sure we interacted much. Good to see you nonetheless!

Welcome to The Syndicate, Jan!!

Hope you enjoy it here.

Hey, TNPLH! Good to see you again.

Welcome to The Syndicate, Zeus!

leetic wrote:Hello, I'm leetic, also known as PaulTheProtist, Bandido Bandera, Diabolical Technician, and a slew of other names. I'm a Spanish-speaking mafia player from the community known as Bulbagarden (where I am a moderator) and I've been playing for a few months now. I live in the Pennsylvania Coal Region and I like playing fighting and strategy video games. Pleased to meet you!

Welcome to The Syndicate, glad you've come over!

Hope you enjoy it here!

rabbit8 wrote:Hum, still bitches....

Oh god, it's you.

Dex wrote:

Illyria wrote:

fingersplints wrote:I'm late to the party

Illyria wrote:I have to assume that there are only a handful of people who remember me here, so hey there.

But holy shit!!! Illy!!!! <3

Welcome everyone else

SPLINTS!!!!!!!!!

Why, hello Your Majesty. Fancy meeting you here!

Hello, stranger! You should rejoin the mafia fold one of these days.

Epignosis wrote:

Golden wrote:

Goldy wrote:Heyo there! My name is Goldy. I like anime, video games and mafia for sure. Looking forward to play mafia with you guys xD

Hello there Goldy. I am Golden. We can be buddies if you like, but man are we going to confuse people when we play the same mafia game

I'm sure only one of you is a coward.

Exactly! We'll just call Goldy by his name and Golden "The Coward". That solves the confusion right there.

Ambray wrote:After the reunion posts on FB from LP'ers, going back to the OT on LP and then logging on to RM the other day (still arcade champ ) I have been feeling super nostalgic recently.
I have been stalking some of these boards the past couple of weeks as there have been some exciting things happening that make their way over to IRC too.
I see this board tonight and nostalgic feelings all over again.

Hello, Ambray! I still have difficulty calling you that instead of SoFi. Hope to see you around more soon!

Hello, Goldy! Welcome to The Syndicate!!

Inawordyes wrote:Hi, I'm IAWY. I like computers, video games and enacting crazy plans.

Hey there, IAWY!