@Brankl ... let's look at the problem of lurking in its totality in this game, though. Did teacon get lynched? No, obviously not. Did he lurk? Yes, obviously. It was a clever ploy, and it worked out. However, look at the bigger picture. We lynched guak and Vecna based almost exclusively on not their ineptitude or scumminess but on the fact that they simply weren't playing the same game that we all were. We lynched Vashta at least partly based on his lurking but initially put him under suspicion exclusively because he was lurking, and though we largely - incorrectly - ignored EOD1, we still got him because he lurked. Guak's lynch would have been even more decisive had Prado not begun to tunnel on Jamie toward the end of the day, but regardless, that lynch was 3/4 town, the only scum player left being teacon. You could also throw Moscow in this group to a degree though I would argue that he was lynched almost exclusively because brainbomb fake claimed and did so early. I think brainbomb would have flipped D1 had he not done that.
In the midst of these lynches, town lynched a number of talkers - you (Brankl), gold, and Maniac. So not only did we lynch lurkers and do so in dramatic fashion compared to games past where lurking was left for a PR that we lost N1 to deal with, but we did so in the midst of some pretty solid scumhunting. In that regard, the town moderated themselves quite well, prioritizing punishing lurkers and doing so forcefully despite getting it "wrong" on a number of prior occasions but also scumhunting and catching most of the other members of the mafia team, who, as it turned out, were two lurkers and two big talkers. I think we played this one excellently in that regard and I hope that, since we all acknowledge lurking will probably become even more of a scum model than it already is, that executing a gameplan to take out lurkers in the midst of regular play also becomes a town model for taking down scum teams.
As for the problem itself, yes, we have lurkers. Guak and Vecna did basically nothing in this game, the former having many, many days to participate and flatly refusing to do so. Vash is gonna lurk every game, just like he "lurks" in his diplomacy games. It's just how he rolls, I guess. Others may be busy and yet some more may simply be "busy," adding to the total of lurkers we have in each game, and that's fairly unavoidable. Rather than asking the GMs to babysit and track posts (which, believe me, as the first GM to raise the bar to five significant posts per day to avoid a modkill, I can tell you that counting posts is a fucking drag and takes a lot of time), we should ask these players that are busy to simply not play. People who know ahead of time that, regardless of their role, are simply not going to be able to play shouldn't play. Simple.
Given that we have ND and Chaqa, who has consistently pulled the crappy cop-out line of "well lurking is part of the game" on me whenever I criticize lurkers, as our upcoming GMs, I really don't think this is the point in time to try and convince our next GMs to take lurking into their own hands. It's not gonna happen unless they have a pretty substantial change of heart.
To Maniac's point, this was the longest mafia game ever. This was also one of the busiest ever in that we had quite a bit of excitement on days 1 and 2 (and maybe beyond, though I obviously paid less attention after I died) and some decent posting on the last few days even though teacon and DL weren't active. I don't think that asking people to post with semi-regularity would make a game 400+ pages long; rather, that's quite hyperbolic and unrealistic. It may add a few posts a day, which, in total, may result in a few pages more a game. Still, as far as excitement goes, this game was fun despite (finally) the lack of incessant and obnoxiously overpowered PRs that make us vanilla folk sit on our asses and wait for someone else to do the job for us and lurkers didn't take away from that because of how well town did at going after them, sans one - who happened to be the one we needed to catch the most.
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