So I have been thinking about this a bit lately, some of the trouble I see lately is the setups we have been playing. A lot are what I consider...Experimental. We don't play that many really normal games of mafia on our site. Which, although I personally don't like them. I think we should play them more just to master the basics.
So what I am talking about here is adopting a system where setups have to be approved to be either:
A) Standard
or
B) Experimental
Throughout the season we would go between the two types of games (Experimental and Standard) and run them every other essentially. I would suggest new players play the standard to get the flow of the games, and even average players to improve the fundamentals of the game before jumping into the more wild Experimental games.
Let me go into the difference between these two:
So a Standard game, would essentially have no "special" mechanics. They would go by a traditional format of games. For example, a 13 player game, maybe 2-3 TPR and 3 Mafia. The role list would be more heavily scrutinized into what is standard or what isn't. Such as No Day role mechanics, Example DayVig. These games would be more scrutinized for Balance.
Experimental is the opposite and how setups are mostly done currently. They can be role madness, they can have lots of special mechanics, they can be weird. They can have any roles in them, and while they are reviewed and judged, players should know walking into them that they are inherently swingy and not the most balanced games in the world.
I think this would be good for our site to distinguish between the two and run games between the two and split the season 50/50 for these. This is because: Improve players fundamentals of the game, and give variety in games