MFM player count issues and a solution. Feedback required.

[BorkBot]

Of late, there has been a decline in the number of players who are active on the M-FM/S-FM section of the site. It used to be a rarity that a game failed to start due to lack of interest, but not anymore. Almost half of the approved games in the past few months doesn't kick off and I suspect that the upcoming Holiday season won't do anything to alleviate that. I can only imagine how discouraging it is for newer players who put a lot of effort into designing a game, only to see that work go to waste...

It's mainly the 12-13 player S-FM setups that really have trouble. Smaller games are doing rather well. For this reason, I'm thinking of temporarily reducing the size limit of S-FM games to 10 player slots. The desired result would be that a larger percentage of the games that get approved actually fill up during the signups stage. We can support a good variety of hosts this way and hopefully attract more players over time. And then maybe raise the player limit again if the community does end up growing back to its old size.

I realise that some people recently asked for the exact opposite (increasing the max player limit) and a reduction would allow for slightly less experimentation, but personally I feel the price is worth it.

What do you think?

[Fatalis]

A bit of No and a bit of Yes.
Well certainly there will be prices to pay if we reduce the player limit. Some players are probably having school or work, But since there is so little number of players actually signing it MIGHT be worth it

[Brendan]

I feel like this would discourage more creative setups and wouldn't help the signups much.

[Chane]

I think you should rather wait for approving a set-up if it has a higher amount of players, the limit should not be changed merely the judgement

[Slaol]

I hate this idea.

I suggest we recruit in better ways.
I have sent Raptor a few ideas that he hasn't entirely jumped at, but I think we need to
A: Have people on the forums play SC2 to move Mafia back up in popularity.
B: Edit load screen to push more players to join us here.

We shouldn't respond and accept diminished size, but find ways to be built back up again.

[BorkBot]

I think you should rather wait for approving a set-up if it has a higher amount of players, the limit should not be changed merely the judgement

People will probably just think I'm ignoring their setup that way and get fed up with the site/moderators for no good reason. And if I post in their threads saying there's currently not enough demand for 13 player games they'll be like "What? But that's the limit according to this and this thread."

I'm already approving smaller games at a faster pace, but there's still 3 larger S-FMs that are short on players and several more in the setup approvals board which I haven't even touched yet. If we run out of small setups, we'll probably end up with like 1 game a month. At the very least, I think that making small setups needs to be encouraged and large games should be discouraged.

@Slaol: You can't expect people to spend a lot of time on SC2 when they have other stuff they'd rather do. SC2 mafia can be a pretty huge time sink. Influx of SC2 players will probably happen when Heart of the Swarm comes out and folks return to SC2 from other games.

The load screen edit is a possibility though, because it's only a tiny bit of effort.

[Cryptonic]

Whatever you think is best.

[BorkBot]

Thank you for your feedback. I've come to a decision on the subject.