I feel like this game is a mess, and most of it is on my shoulders. It's posts like this one:
That make me want to just quit this game and call in a sub, but that's what I did last time, and I don't want to do it again. I'm doing my best to stay in the game, to contribute, to have fun, to make friends. But if I get posts like this, I just become unmotivated to post. If you would like me to contribute and help, act like I'm a dog. You wouldn't slap a dog for not fetching. When he would fetch, you would give him attention and praise him. It's a little thing called positive reinforcement. It's been proven to work better than punishing people who don't do what you want I understand that you're frustrated and everything, but please do not personally attack me. It will only make me play worse. I know this post has nothing of real value in terms of the game, but it's something I needed to get off of my chest.
I worked in behavioral science for a decade. (I just deleted a big paragraph about my work credentials, but it's a waste of time and will just sound like bragging....)
I'd say if anyone wants to know if I've been patient with you and done my best to lead in a positive way, they can go read the atrociously short Turing 1v1 game "we" just finished today. I did
everything I could to coach you through playing that game. You didn't need encouragement. You didn't respond to any of coaching. You were just unwilling to play, and posted 1 sentence over the final THREE DAYS of a 1 v 1 game.
I want D-Games to have lots of players, and if you're interested in these games, then that's great, but if you're going to sign up and just waste people's time like you did in the Turing game or like you have been in this one, then you have to be able to predict that it's going to be frustrating for the rest of us to deal with. We've communicated expectations about frequency of posting. We've given positive examples for you to follow.
Even when we bicker at each other, at least it's usually about the game and clever little lies we're playing. That's supposed to happen. But when people simply don't show up to play, I'd rather see a blacklist so we can actually fill our games with active players only and at least get the experience we signed up for. I don't play in full-size games very often any more, and it's frustrating to me to come specifically because someone I previously played with asked for me to join, only to have the game devolve so quickly into what it has.
When the game rules say that a player has to post at least once every 24 hours, that isn't setting a goal. That's setting a floor. This game is meant to be interactive. If we each showed up once per day, burped out what we thought of the last 24 hours of posts, and then left until tomorrow's time to post again, we'd barely have a game to play at all, and none of us would be doing this. The exciting stuff is when you have 5 or 6 or 7 people in the thread at once all making posts on top of each other, and lots of cross talk and opinions and disagreements and all of that. Solving that excitement is why many of us play.
So.
Yes, you've been attacked. Not because you're a bad person. I don't know you. For all I know, you're my wife trolling me on her iPad as I type this, just to ask me why I'm up so late and who I'm talking to.
You're being attacked because
despite my efforts (and the efforts of others) to show you how to play and to try to convince you to be present in the game, you've been a non-player. A spectator. And we're stuck deciding whether to lynch someone we think is scummy or to policy lynch you for being inactive. If you're town and we policy lynch you toDay, that's almost a guarantee that town loses. The entire fate of the game that 12 people signed up for and a mod planned and worked on can be decided just by your behavior. You have to own that. Laundry didn't make this game thinking "Boy, I hope that half the players barely post. I hope that they are making policy lynches for inactivity 2 Days into my game..." No mod wishes for that. They want to see every lynch be about the interaction between players, not the distinct lack thereof.
I'm done now. I wall of text every once in a while. I'm not going to talk directly to you about this any more. I've said what I believe, and I am tired of spending time on it.
If you want to participate, just keep doing what you've done in the last 90 minutes. Be a presence. Make your presence known. Everything will be fine.