The Syndicate

Hi guys

I just wanted to stop by, say hello, and let you all know that the 2015 Mafia Championship Finale Game has officially begun!

Link to game thread: http://www.mafiauniverse.net/threads/26 ... hip-Finale

70 representatives from 70 different communities have battled it out since April, and now it's time to crown the ultimate winner -- the internet's reigning forum mafia champion.

I hope you'll enjoy the read, and I hope I'll see your community represented again in season 3. OR, even better, I hope I'll see you for any other upcoming fun cross-community events - we're gonna do a Hydra game where players can sign up in pairs, which should be a ton of fun

In case you're interested in talking with others about the game (or if you just want to shoot the breeze with other mafia enthusiasts), we are a horde of 110+ people on Skype spectating the game. Add me, if you'd like an invite: thingyman

Thanks for playing TH! I'm very happy that you did and that The Syndicate was represented

Text, so no worries :P

Haha, Turnip Head will be playing in Game 3:

GAME 3 (APRIL 27TH)
Adaham (TaleWorlds)
Askthepizzaguy (The Org)
Azrael (MTG Salvation)
Banks (DailyMafia)
confuse rei (DuelistGroundz)
coolkid (MafiaManiac)
madsmk (PokerNet)
mr.capps (Something Awful)
q_q (PokkeriProd)
runwithfire (EpicMafia)
Turnip Head (The Syndicate)
WolfPrinceKiba (Naruto Forums)
Yates (Dragonmount)

Game 1 of the second season of the Mafia Championship has started: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/59/pu ... a-1523482/

If you'd like to spectate the game, feel free to add me on Skype and I'll invite you to the spectator chat: thingyman

The chat attracted more than a 100 people last time from all the various communities and was a ton of fun. Most importantly, it is a great opportunity for networking and creating connections with other communities as evidenced by the fact that it led to a bunch of crossover games the first time around. You should pop in and say hello

LINE-UP
Bubbles (NinSheetMusic)
CPHoya (Super Mafia All Stars)
fontisian (Dark Lord Potter)
Guild (Talking Time)
Harb (Play Diplomacy)
itisally (The Grey Labyrinth)
NeilOnnsu (Art of Problem Solving)
Paperblade (Serenes Forest)
TheDarkestLight (SC2 Mafia)
Timewave (Atheist Foundation of Australia)
VikeStep (Feed the Beast)
Vytron (xkcd)
Zack (CivFanatics)

Get hyped!

Congratulations Turnip Head. I'm sure you'll do great!

Info incoming.

Epignosis wrote:Do you have a big thingy, man?

Haha

My name has evolved over the years. Started as Thing, then Thingy, but that was too short, so Thingyman. And now MrThingyman. I'm not sure I can add more to it.

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Thingyman wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Thingyman wrote:
On our site we don't have such a rule - we believe that the players themselves should know what they're getting into if they're playing a game hosted by an inexperienced mod. Plus, in reality, it's never a big deal, because mods usually ask other mods to look their setups over anyway to make sure it's okay.

I agree completely with this.

Here we also have a Mod on Duty function to help the host (what otherwise you and other sites would call the mod) deal with conflicts, usually of a personal nature, in an arbitration fashion. But the host has full authority over constructing and running the game. Hosts can have co-hosts as well, which has been a really good way to give new hosts experience without the trial by fire of hosting alone. I'm not sure how frequent that is on other sites though.

I think it's somewhat rare. But it's super common on our site. I think it's probably been years since we had a Mish-Mash (that's what we call our big "role madness" games with a bunch of different roles) with 40+ players that wasn't hosted by several people.

Good to know. I am super excited for this Championship, but equally so for the prospect of cross-site games. I know we would absolutely love to have any number of "new" players here, especially very active ones; also, I know there would be some folks, myself included, who would love to play some games elsewhere.

Stay tuned for the biggest mafia game ever; 200+ people :P

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Thingyman wrote:

Metalmarsh89 wrote:

G-Man wrote:Wow, the sheer size of some of those Mafia communities is intimidating.

I recall checking out a few of the big ones years ago when I was on LP, TP, and STV. I got scared away by all the tiers and rating systems some use. Can't remember which one it was but at least one of them required you to play in so many games before you could move into more complex games and another one required you to win so many games as civ and as baddie before you could even host a game. I like hosting more than playing, so...

I like to think that TP, RM, and now The Syndicate are nice little niche locales where people like to create intricate and fun-themed games. A plain Jane game has its place every now an again but it would need a good story building with the simple events to keep things captivating for me.

Mafiascum does that. Their community is so big, the won't allow new players to hop into complex games. They must play "qualifiers" first.

That goes for the hosts too. Hosts cannot host any big, complex games until they've "paid their dues" hosting small, vanilla games with new players.

On our site we don't have such a rule - we believe that the players themselves should know what they're getting into if they're playing a game hosted by an inexperienced mod. Plus, in reality, it's never a big deal, because mods usually ask other mods to look their setups over anyway to make sure it's okay.

I agree completely with this.

Here we also have a Mod on Duty function to help the host (what otherwise you and other sites would call the mod) deal with conflicts, usually of a personal nature, in an arbitration fashion. But the host has full authority over constructing and running the game. Hosts can have co-hosts as well, which has been a really good way to give new hosts experience without the trial by fire of hosting alone. I'm not sure how frequent that is on other sites though.

I think it's somewhat rare. But it's super common on our site. I think it's probably been years since we had a Mish-Mash (that's what we call our big "role madness" games with a bunch of different roles) with 40+ players that wasn't hosted by several people.

Metalmarsh89 wrote:

G-Man wrote:Wow, the sheer size of some of those Mafia communities is intimidating.

I recall checking out a few of the big ones years ago when I was on LP, TP, and STV. I got scared away by all the tiers and rating systems some use. Can't remember which one it was but at least one of them required you to play in so many games before you could move into more complex games and another one required you to win so many games as civ and as baddie before you could even host a game. I like hosting more than playing, so...

I like to think that TP, RM, and now The Syndicate are nice little niche locales where people like to create intricate and fun-themed games. A plain Jane game has its place every now an again but it would need a good story building with the simple events to keep things captivating for me.

Mafiascum does that. Their community is so big, the won't allow new players to hop into complex games. They must play "qualifiers" first.

That goes for the hosts too. Hosts cannot host any big, complex games until they've "paid their dues" hosting small, vanilla games with new players.

On our site we don't have such a rule - we believe that the players themselves should know what they're getting into if they're playing a game hosted by an inexperienced mod. Plus, in reality, it's never a big deal, because mods usually ask other mods to look their setups over anyway to make sure it's okay.

G-Man wrote:Wow, the sheer size of some of those Mafia communities is intimidating.

I recall checking out a few of the big ones years ago when I was on LP, TP, and STV. I got scared away by all the tiers and rating systems some use. Can't remember which one it was but at least one of them required you to play in so many games before you could move into more complex games and another one required you to win so many games as civ and as baddie before you could even host a game. I like hosting more than playing, so...

I like to think that TP, RM, and now The Syndicate are nice little niche locales where people like to create intricate and fun-themed games. A plain Jane game has its place every now an again but it would need a good story building with the simple events to keep things captivating for me.

Out of curiosity, what do all these stand for? :P

Made wrote:Omg, we could have a thread watch thread!!!!

Regarding this, I ask that the participating sites refrain from openly speculating on roles and such in places where your representative's competitors could see it if they wanted to. You could openly discuss and laugh at and comment on general matters that don't revolve around giving and expressing reads on the game without any issue though, of course.

We will have a Skype spectator chat that everyone is invited to join (and where you should feel more than free to discuss reads). It was a lot of fun in season 1. We had more than a hundred people at one point.

Black Rock wrote:I play games at Kongregate but never went to the forums.

Kongregate and Penny Arcade are the only two communities from season 1 that I will not be inviting back. Their participation levels are a joke :P

Canucklehead wrote:I'm on Board Game Geek all the time browsing/reading ratings/trying to get good enough at board games to beat my damn gloaty BF. Had no idea they played mafia there! Will definitely have to look into it. I bet they're good!

BoardGameGeek actually has one of the biggest communities out there. It's one of the Big Five: mafiascum, EpicMafia, Two Plus Two, BoardGameGeek and Something Awful. These sites have all had more than a thousand players and all still have a large active community to this day. BGG indeed have very good players - they and Two Plus Two each managed to get 5+ representatives into the finale the first season (because first season had 2-3 reps from most of the Big Ones in most of the qualifying games). Of course, they're both used to the activity and pace that this series presents.

MovingPictures07 wrote:Also, regarding the time requirement, it appears the Final game last year ended with slightly over 12,000 posts. I think this is more tangible for us than the 500 posts per day number.

That's more than any game I've seen here, at LP, TP, RM, or anywhere that I've personally played since 2010.

I think it's definitely a good exercise for anyone who is thinking about playing to quickly check out any of the previous games, but particularly that one. It's pretty interesting!

It should be said, though, that last season featured 25 players per game rather than 13, so it won't be quite that insane this year :P

Metalmarsh89 wrote:I can do 500 posts of content per 24 hours in a themed large game no problem, but for a 12 player vanilla game, I don't know. Especially back-to-back-to-back-to-back-etc. of such games.

To be clear, you would be playing in just one of them. And then maybe one more, if you qualify for the finale.

Also, 13* :P

Hi guys

Roxy told me about your site and I was very intrigued. I hope that it's okay for me to post this here.

Invitation to The Mafia Championship Season 2

In 2013-2014 I hosted a Mafia Championship that featured more than 100 different players from more than 45 different mafia communities. Each community chose their best player to represent them and they battled it out. The best players from the initial games advanced to a finale game where an ultimate winner was decided. The event was endorsed and supported by the creator of mafia himself (Dmitry Davidoff) who even offered to have a private chat with the ultimate winner. Overall it was a huge success and spawned many cross-over games between sites.

I am hoping that you guys will want to participate in season 2

If you are interested, I need one representative to play on behalf of The Syndicate. How you decide this representative is completely up to you.

Now, this part is important: You should of course be aiming to send one of your best players. But more important than that, that person needs to be able to participate adequately in terms of activity. Be prepared for up towards 500 posts per 24 hours during the early stages of the game. More on the game format below.

The current plan for season 2

• 65 different communities will be represented.
• 1 player per community for the entire season (preferably).
• 5 qualifying games will be played with 13 players each.
• 2 players advance to the finale from each game based on post-game votes.
• 3 additional players are granted wildcard spots.

Game setup

The game will have a very basic mafia setup: 3 mafia members, 9 vanilla townies and 1 cop. The cop starts the game with a random vanilla townie peek. Roles revealed upon death.

Some communities are not very used to playing basic setups like this, but for the first season, we utilized a setup with a good share of power roles, so this time around we are trying something new. For season 3 we will switch it up again.

Days will last 36 hours and nights 12 hours, meaning 48 hours (2 days) per game day. With one exception: The weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) will be one game day (so day will be 60 hours and night 12 hours on weekends). This means the game will last a maximum of 2 weeks.

Timeline

There will be 5 games in April and May. The first game is set to start April 6th. I would send out a Doodle to all the participants and they can then mark off which start date would suit them the best. Expect the finale to be played in June or July.

Also, it is a priority to ensure as much as possible that all the players in any given game has no prior history of playing with each other to ensure a level playing field, but I cannot 100 % guarantee that this won’t happen.

Links to season 1

Qualifying game #1: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/59/pu ... d-1368321/

Qualifying game #2: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/59/pu ... d-1381100/

Qualifying game #3: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/59/pu ... d-1428519/

Qualifying game #4: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/59/pu ... d-1439835/

Finale game: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/59/pu ... d-1489540/