…touché.
It’s hard to distinguish this kind of thing when you can spam emotional posts which are obviously meant to deter people from voting you but you can just tell people “please don’t read into it i’m just venting about how frustrating the game is” which bypasses this. It’s far safer to just disallow excessive emotion to avoid loopholes
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I disagree that it bypasses this. “Please don’t read into my emotional venting” is not a valid request, you can’t request people to not try to play towards their win condition by not analysing what you’re choosing to post in a game of mafia. If somebody makes that request you’re not obliged to agree to it or agree to find it reasonable
“Instead of telling me to not read into it, how about you don’t post this in the first place” is a valid reply imo
I believe FoL already has a rule against excessive emotional posting, let me check
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Oh you were replying to this
This is just a definitional argument, for me. About how we use words. Non-AtE emotional posting can also be discomforting of course and ought to be restrained
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Yes we have a rule on this already
Rule 18 from Forum Rules: Refrain from excessive use of appeals to emotion (ATE).
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I think there is a degree of miscommunication, constantly, around this subject, due to mixup of phrases. If everyone stopped using the phrase “AtE” and started using the phrase “emotional posting” I think some situations with miscommunication could be avoided
For example:
A person could be crashing out hard. People could feel uncomfortable, and tell them “please stop AtEing”. The person could reply “I’m not trying to appeal to anyone, I’m just frustrated about X subject”. The people asking to stop AtEing could feel frustrated, because from their PoV, the other person is continuing to deliberately do what they were just asked not to do.
It is possible for everyone in this interaction to be sincere and acting in good faith, because the person crashing out thinks they are asked to stop trying to specifically appeal to people to persuade them, and they could legitimately not be doing that. It could potentially not be clearly communicated that the request is to stop posting so much emotional stuff in general
Proper communication is one of the most difficult things to achieve
I personally don’t use the phrase AtE as a blanket phrase for any and all emotional posting
Flattery is a form of AtE 
(going by the non-forum-mafia definition)
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So anyway. Excessive uses are already moderated by mods. Im suggesting we as community go stricter on that for less excessive uses. Like, discourage moderate uses. Policied by players themselves, not mods. Keep light uses it’s okay, but maybe don’t fully ignore them either and do a gentle reminder for light uses. Subjective of course, how to categorize intensity
When I look back, my favorite game of mafia was a game on MU many years ago where multiple people crossed multiple lines, and I went God mode. It’s funny but also a little sad how normalized is this in Forum Mafia. Like, it’s kinda normalized that you are expected to endure discomfort because you suspect a person of being mafia. This shouldn’t be the norm, we shouldn’t normalize this
I’ve never been super bothered by AtE I just feel bad for the person whose crashing out tbh
Also don’t think it’s even that good a strategy cuz it can get short term townread for sure but then when I am between two people on who to vote I usually just vote the one who brings worse vibes
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I mean it can be improved for sure but let’s not act that we’re in an AtE epidemic and state of crisis most people are pretty chill and get emotional sometimes when they’re invested but that’s life
@Anonygoose you genuinely have one of the best vibes of anyone ive ever played mafia with
It’s always a blast playing w you, regardless of our alignments
I’ve said this before but when I see you on a playerlist, my probability of signing up goes up massively
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survivorship bias - you dont see a lot of people vocally voicing discomfort because the more common reaction is simply leaving the forum / leaving mafia / taking a break from mafia
If the level of emotion and such invoked here were present in the average game on the forum I’d leave and not come back
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The place where I started out was very big on “never make anybody feel uncomfortable, if somebody says they’re uncomfortable with being cased then stop casing them, you can still vote them but you shouldn’t talk about it”. I was not comfortable with these norms! And violating them (the violation was literally “kept saying that somebody was wolfy and we should vote for them”, in the most neutral possible way I could) got me, like, openly denounced by a bunch of people and had somebody in modchats of unrelated mafia communities saying I was dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed in.
Having to navigate any situation where I have to choose between doing [the thing I think is optimal in mafia] and [not making people IRL upset and uncomfortable] is weird for me. I always feel like I could misjudge where the line is and end up in that situation again. And obviously I do have to get over myself when it comes to that kind of fear, not everywhere is where I started out, but I think a lot of people feel a milder version of it.
You can’t ban any kind of emotion expression from mafia games, obviously, but I think even just expressing emotions that you’re “not trying to use to appeal to anybody” creates that kind of tension and discomfort. I think that people should not mention emotions if it would put other people in the game in a really awkward position. Even if it’s honest! Even if they say “I don’t mean to AtE” or don’t seem to expect argumentative benefit from it!
If somebody says “sorry this game is making me cry IRL/want to quit mafia/etc.” they are automatically making it weird for other people, forcing them to push past, like, making somebody actually upset to continue playing the game. And, sure, it is part of the game to an extent, but I think it should be policy to try to minimize the amount you force other people to do that.
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Champs SFs made me very upset and had me crying IRL on multiple occasions, for several reasons, mostly relating to the way outside stress interacted with playing a mafia game where lots of people were watching. I did not mention this in the game when it happened. When I became extremely upset I closed the thread and stopped posting. I’m not always great at doing this, but I think it is what I should do, and it’s a standard I hold for other people as well.
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heavily agreed with everything posted above
the common counter argument to this is “im just a human and i have emotions” or something to the like of “god forbid im not a machine and i act like a human in a game of mafia” which is just a strawman
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Also to be clear I think a lot of what tutuu means by “emotional posting” is still disallowed by the AtE rules
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yeah these are pretty nice and encompassing rules. i just went on a tangent arguing definitions just for the sake of word usage
I did feel I have sparked a shouting match and they are in the right telling me that’s a bit too much, they should know by now that I am not the type to lolcat after somehow ‘caught’
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