I used to play this game over a decade ago and really loved it. It was a really active community back then so some of the issues I see now just weren't possible back then.
I got back into playing it recently and I am seeing a lot of behaviors that seem like gamethrowing or cheating to me or at the very least, seem unfair. I haven't saved any replays of it yet and I have a feeling they will tone it down a bit when they see me in games as they are now aware that I'm looking for it as I've brought it to their attention, but...
The gist of it seems to be we have a few popular people, the "leaders", who have communities that they are good friends with. The mafia community as a whole is small enough that the majority of games these days feature the same 20-30 people throughout different times of the day. These "leaders" use the same in-game name in every game so their supporters recognize them. Oftentimes their supporters use similar names themselves so they can identify each other.
The problem manifests in the way they support each other, going so far as to vote/play against their own roles.
I've been in games where half of the people are all friends and vote together with their "leader". In hindsight one can realize that these games are often decided by night 2 and even with solid information and proven roles, people ignored it to support their friends.
My response is often to try to get the "leader" killed early, but this is a form of game throwing if not appropriate for my role and I really hate doing that (fighting fire with fire, I suppose). This also doesn't really help that much if all the other supporters are similar names because they can still identify eachother.
The only other option is to just... not play. There aren't enough people playing to support more than one lobby at a time so it's not like I can just play in a different lobby. When these "leaders" are on, there just isn't an option to play fairly.
This seems to be very much against the spirit of the game and I am not sure if this is distinctly cheating but, it makes the game unenjoyable to play. I am curious what the larger community and moderator staff feel about this behavior.
Is this just allowed and expected at this point in time? It seems to me a hard thing to counteract, without a good solution.