(May) Interviews: HoeenHero and wob

[Snaq ◢ ◤]

(Interviewed by Snaquaza)
HOEENHERO   and   WOB

Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed! Would you like to introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm HoeenHero, I was a Mafia Room Owner rom 2018 to 2020 alongside Snaquaza, Darnell, and Jumbowhales. I currently run Pokemon Showdown as one of the administrators focusing my time on the development side of things while also helping with site policy at times.
(I swear it doesn't feel like it was 18-20, it feels like it was 15-17, but I checked modlog)

Hey my name is wob, originally I used to go by DeathByWobbuffet. I joined PS! back in 2016 and hung out in a few different rooms but mafia was definitely where I spent the most time. I was a mod on and off for a few years until I quit in 2019.

Could you sketch your contributions to the room for us?

A little of everything really, anywhere I've been able to help and have had the time to I've helped with. For example the initial version of the help ticket system PS uses was written by me. This wasn't just a technical task where I wrote code, to do it right alot of discussions had to be done and policy written about the new system so it could operate correctly. Some of the other big things I've implemented include Dynamax for gen 8, various other new generation implementations (learnsets, moves, abilities, etc for Gens 8/9), and of course the mafia plugin for the server!
oh and lots of bug fixes, it feels like half my time doing PS stuff is fixing bugs.

How did you get into the PS Mafia room?

I got into it after hearing about it in the text quest room (now battledome) in 2015 I think, I tried a game out and enjoyed it so I kept playing. Never played nearly as much as a number of regular players in the room do, but I played plenty still.

I used to play a lot of werewolf (essentially a themed version of mafia) on a few different irc chat rooms back in the day. There was only a classic-type setup and we usually didn't get too many players but it was a lot of fun. Around the same time I got into battling on PS with some friends and when I discovered the mafia chatroom I got pretty instantly hooked.

What was the room like when you joined?
Honestly I don't remember exactly, but I know it wasn't too different from what it is now in structure. Both the good and bad things about the room have continued forward over the years. Back then though the room used a bot called MafiaRoomBot to run games, it would have commands to allow the host to do things like voice the host, set modchat for night, track deadlines, and other small conveniences. Games were still mostly manually hosted and there was much more to juggle back then as a host than there is now.

some of the good things were that there are players who are good at the game and are willing to teach others. Playing with them can make games enjoyable and you can learn from them even if you lose. The bad is honestly the toxicity of the room. Some players will just become, well jerks, when they lose or someone doesn't do what they want/expect. Actions like getting mad at and yelling at players for making the wrong decision in LYLO (or whatever its called now), being (imo unnecessarily) rude to other players in game, and just overall being a bad presence. These players really can drain the life from the room. I really wish I had hammered down on this more during my time running the room and just banned some people for long periods of time. But its tricky to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable within in a game in some of these areas.

I remember there was a very strong community when I joined the room, we had a big surge in players and pretty often peak hour games would get split in two because there was so many people. Shortly after the discord got created and the forums got revived, and that came with all kinds of different drama but overall it was a lot of fun and I met some really cool people here. Seems like activity maybe isn't quite as high these days which is a shame.

The other big difference was that we didn't have the script at the time, we just had Mafia Room Bot / Lynch-E, which pretty much was just there for counting votes. And sometimes it would be down so you would have to host completely manually. I definitely think the script is an improvement in terms of making things easier for hosts but I do kinda miss the chaos of trying to keep track of actions and roles in larger setups back when we just had the bot.

Also there's a lot of themes that were played a lot back then but fell off. I think Dethy is banned now or something but we used to play it all the time during dead hours. I get why because it was honestly pretty dumb and unbalanced but I kinda enjoyed the calculation aspect of it. I was really into crazier / more unpredictable setups as well so I also miss some of the user created themes like the smash bros one and explorers haven. And I feel like people were more creative with their closed setups back then - those were often pretty unbalanced too but they were always interesting to play at least.

Do you remember what the Werewolf setup was like?
Yeah it was similar to classic with Villagers, Werewolves (Mafia), and a Seer (Cop). But I remember there was also a couple other random roles they would add in bigger setups that you wouldn't see in classic Mafia. There was often a Traitor who was town but would turn wolf if all of them died. And I also remember this role called the Harlot that was kinda like a Jailkeeper but not really. They couldn't be killed directly if they were visiting someone else, but if the person they were visiting was killed they died too.

What were your favorite themes?

Esun was a ton of fun, with everything happening during the day it added a sense of timing to everything that could really mix things up. Someone about to say something important? bang, dead. Loved both playing and hosting that. GI can be a ton of fun too just due to all the options, it just takes a while to setup. Classic is a theme I enjoy as well due to its simpler nature while also not being pure analysis of how people are playing. I personally prefer it when games come down to logical deduction of things rather than "hes sus get him!".

I generally prefer closed or semi-closed type setups because I like the strategy of trying to figure out what role someone might have gotten, how a night might have played out like it did, or how the setup could have been balanced. My favorite theme overall would probably be Greater Idea. I feel like a lot of idea setups get a bad reputation because people would make their own and just fill the lists with super broken roles without any consideration for balance - we even had to delete a bunch of them at one point because of that I think. I feel like GI is perfect because it still has that chaos of having lots of different roles and factions potentially in the game while still being relatively easy to balance and not having any insanely broken combinations. It was always super cool as both a player and host to see how all the roles would interact and watch people theorize on who might've rolled what. I liked Snaq's Idea as well a lot when that came out for similar reasons.

Do you have any tips for creating interesting Closed Setups?

Adding less popular / less conventional roles to your closed setup is a pretty good way of doing it. I would pretty often go and find one or two really weird roles from Mafiascum or some other source and see if I could balance a setup around it. Like one time I managed to work this one into a closed setup and it was a lot of fun seeing how it got used and how people reacted to it wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=The_Flying_Pumpkin_That_Shoots_Laser_Beams_Out_Of_Its_Ass

You can also could toy with the mechanics of the game itself and balance a setup around that - making voting work in a different way, making night work in a different way, etc. Or you can do something like UPick, even giving the players a bit of input into how the setup gets made. There's a lot of room for experimentation when it comes to closed setups.

Are there any themes you remember that are not played much anymore?
There was this older theme called Voodoo where scum would set some kind of secret code word that causes town to die if they say it, and so they would have to try to bait them into using the word before town caught onto who was scum. I think it ended up getting banned, probably rightfully so, but it was fun every once in a while. Honestly I haven't played in the room in a bit so not sure if these are still played or not but I also always liked some of the smaller multiball themes that usually came with a twist of some kind. Stuff like Neighbours Dilemma and Friends and Enemies.

What were your favorite roles?

I usually either want to stay out of the spotlight, or lead things depending on how things go. So supporting roles are a lot of fun for me. Tracker/watcher allows me to effectively tripwire people and verify what they are doing is true and can be useful even if I check the wrong person. Jailkeeper is very useful too for similar reasons but you have to be more careful with it.

And my favourite role is the Treestump because its always sick to get killed and still be able to just fuck around in chat lol.
Are there any further fun ones you remember that aren't played much anymore?

How would you play if you were a supporting role?
Taking watcher as an example, I can pick someone to watch and see who visited them that night. In GI where I saw this role often, you don't know what roles are in play. If I watch A and B visits A, it can mean a wide variety of thing. If A dies, maybe they were scum, or maybe not especially if multiple people visited them. If they don't die, it often means they are clean, but not always with roles like Mafia PL existing. I then can take this information and watch what other people are saying to figure out what happened. Like if B claims they are cop and inspected D last night, that means they are lying as I got them targeting A.
My playstyle as mentioned is more of a wait and see kind of playstyle, then when I have something solid I'll come forward and lead the push if needed or work with the leader to get it done

How would you avoid being suspicious when you are not being very forward?
Being totally silent is a bad idea, engage in the conversation and offer suggestions as to what may be happening or ask questions if you don't understand. You can be a part of the conversation without leading it. Questions are especially useful as they get responses which can generate information that you can use.

Do you think the way people played the game changed while you were in the room?
I don't particularly remember any large noticable changes. We did make efforts to remove bad users/punish them which helped to some extent, as mentioned previously I feel like I didn't do enough though.

What were your favorite events?
The 70 player forum survivor game I hosted with you was definitely a highlight. Still not sure how we pulled that off lol - one of the most stressful months of my life. Turned out pretty sick though and it was great to watch how all the dynamics played out from a host perspective.

Also organizing the Ultimate Gaming Months with all the other games rooms was always fun - there'd always be a huge influx of new players around then as well which was cool.

Were there any highlights of the Survivor you'd like to mention?
The most challenging part was probably the early stages of the game when there were still lots of people left and we hadn't really figured out how to do things yet. I reckon in the first week I was spending at least like 8+ hours a day just figuring out challenge results, counting votes etc. It got a lot easier and also a lot more interesting to watch as time went on because only the more serious players were able to stick around. I think the biggest highlight for me was probably all the twists we planned throughout the game - stuff like doing double votes for certain councils so multiple people got voted out, and doing tribe swaps to break up longstanding alliances. It was always funny watching people's reactions to the twists when we dropped them and seeing how they were able to adapt.

What are some of your favorite things you were part of in the Mafia room?
I enjoyed hosting alot of games, those were a different kind of challenge than playing. I mentioned I liked to figure out and solve logical problems in games, creating the mafia plugin was a giant logical problem that required the collaboration of the players and staff to identify how it should work and then test and implement it. I remember everyone being very impressed when the first game was run, even though it was still buggy.

Its been so long that I don't remember specific games, but I fondly remember the launch of the new script system, being given the lifetime achievement award, and just in general remembering the fun of hosting and playing games has stuck with me.

There was lots but off the top of my head:

• When all the staff made a secret betting ring where we would draft teams of people in the room and get points based on how many officials they won. It eventually got shut down lol because it seemed like a bit of a conflict of interest. But I managed to find the old spreadsheet if anyone's curious docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KprZQKsGq_NFSiu80Wung3D2-Cfmrj8W-MCgPX-jWJY/edit?usp=sharing
• When I pretended to be a new player just to troll fenrir (who was hosting) and ended up winning a game of Forest Fire because people thought I was too dumb to be scum. ps-mafia.proboards.com/post/22498/thread
• The first rankdown you hosted ps-mafia.proboards.com/thread/581/rankdown-25.
• Staying up all night one UGM trying to write a script for a new players workshop. We ended up getting like 50 people sign up for the game afterwards which was crazy.

What makes a good host?
When your hosting you need to carefully consider every action you take. At night this means double checking everything before posting results, during the day this means things like talking as little as possible, anything you say could accidentally leak something. Also being consistent (7 mintues per day or w/e) but flexible for reasonable situations too.

The best hosts will ensure they have the time to run the game even if it goes long, take the time to properly set the game up (talk to the players, decide a theme, etc), and do what they can to help during the game (explain things when its a specific neutral question, preferably when directly asked). Being a great host requires knowledge about how things work, but don't be afraid to ask for help instead when you don't. After all, you won't know everything.

What kind of policy changes were you part of?
Just the implementation of the current script system instead of manual hosting. Its been a long time so I don't really remember alot of the policy stuff I did but I know we had extensive talks about toxicity in the room.

I mostly remember alot of arguments from the users that were punished when we started cracking down on bad behavior. Some of these users are still blacklisted from the room to this day, a few of them are permabanned from the site because they basically went crazy after getting banned from mafia and turned the situation into one where global staff had to step in.

I think the game can just bring out the worst in some people. We've all probably gotten upset at a multiplayer game before, its how we handle it thats important. Getting mad at your teammates/opponents and yelling at them is a horrible idea.

How do you handle a problematic user?
when it comes to handles users who are being problematic: Its best to try and communicate with them. Talk to them, work out their thoughts with them if they want, explain to them why you see, let them explain their point of view and try to reconsile things for the betterment of everyone.

How do you avoid becoming a problematic user?
The question of course is vauge, but in general this just means trying to not let things get too heated on their parts in games mostly. Of course this is mafia, theres going to be arguments and big finger pointing accusation moments and thats fine. But things don't ever need to devolve into personal attacks, or name calling. Things especially need to be chill post game, its ok to critique things after the fact but if your calling someone an idiot or yelling about how something was obvious you might be going overboard.

How has Mafia impacted you?
It had a big impact for sure - I wasted a lot of time in this room back in the day hahaha. Probably the biggest thing was that it got me into strategy games in general. I don't really play mafia itself too much anymore but I have been playing chess for a while and gotten somewhat decent at it. I've also started playing a bit of poker recently which is pretty fun and requires a lot of the same skills as mafia (mostly reading people).

Is there anyone who you'd like to give a shoutout?
All the staff from my time in the room did a lot to keep the room running smoothly, thank you for everything you did. Snaq (hi) always had tons of great ideas for themes, events, and games that brought life to the room, jumbowhales/peach was a massive help on the technical front and with running the room in general so thank you again for everything you have done!

Honestly there's too many and I definitely feel like I'd end up forgetting a bunch of people lol. Definitely appreciate everyone I've met in this room over the years though even if I don't keep in touch with too many anymore. I guess if I had to give a shoutout to one person it would be Zorquax for consistently being the funniest person in the room.

Do you have any final words?
snaq is trying to kill me based on that question

I'm glad I spent a few good years in the mafia room playing, hosting, and staffing. While I have minimal time for showdown nowadays and none for mafia really, I'll still always remember my time there as a good one. Keep striving to improve the game itself and its players. Also Snaquaza is the mafia he tried to kill me last night, vote him out!

Thanks for reaching out and thanks Snaq and Flush for doing these interviews - I enjoyed going through and reading the other ones you did as well. I'm playing in a forum game right now and i've been playing occasionally in the room as well lately so hopefully I'll see you all around 🙂