[Jaguar]

EpicMafia was a brilliant idea. Hosting games of online mafia in a minimalist setting with a plethora of in-game role options made the game grow rapidly. I joined in 2009, my original account being around user 14,000. Back then, the game was still excellent. You had a generally intelligent player base, the game's structure was still being discovered, and Fancy Pants did not exist. There were great players; SaintsDynasty, Effulgence, ZEEnon, Balthazar, LOLUMAD, eritas. I could go on but you get the idea. I had joined just around when some of the older legends had quit - people like PublicEnemy, and KindaIWantTo - but a lot of great players had stuck around. I remember being excited to play the game. To discover how the roles worked, to test new setups. Back then, the game was largely about faking reports quickly, meta reading, and plain scumhunting.

How things have changed. The current meta is to rely almost exclusively on game mechanics. Red heart games are generally played as Fancy Pants, a setup I've grown to enjoy but is undisputably unbalanced in favor of town. These games are quick and painless, but easy to win for any competent player as the tables are generally filled with the unexperienced. As a result, win percentages in the status quo are extremely slanted. I doubt the current % win HoF leader, Flex, would have been able to achieve anywhere close to a 79% win rate in the old days, though the feat is still something to respect.

Competitive games, on the other hand, are filled with egos. This is unsurprising, given the success they've achieved through Fancy Pants. The difference though, is that these egos are incompetent. I'm looking at you soda/Beam. While their understanding of game mechanics is worthy of praise, they are unable to understand reaction tests, town fake claims, and more unorthodox ways of play. Competitive play in the status quo is a joke. It is more about who you know rather than how you play. Given that a small subset of the population trophy runs consistently, these individuals meta read each other exclusively to the detriment of others. In a time where the community was small enough to support and explore the intricacies of meta play, this might have been a good thing. Unfortunately, the current system where unorthodox play is left at the behest of an inconsistent moderation team is nowhere near as structurally sufficient. These newer "good" players tunnel and do not understand the concept of reading for reaction. They blindly believe in themselves instead of attempting to legitimately scumhunt, as these tactics were enough to fuel their previous successes in Fancy Pants and similar mechanics-focused setups.

I would like to comment more on the moderation team, but I fear that I will be censored as is their due. Thus, I will just say this; introducing moderators into EpicMafia was simultaneously the worst and laziest decision made by lucidrains in his tenure as the creator of this site. Empowering anonymous individuals to provide judgement onto others without sufficient due process is a terrible idea.

The new wave of EpicMafia players is both exciting and disheartening. Whenever I get in table with new players, I'm happy to see their fascination with the game, as I once was, but disheartened by the prospect that they too will turn into the incompetent hypocrites that populate competitive lobbies.

I will continue to play this game until it bores me, as it has done before. To the newer players: it used to be better. Way better.