On Flaking and Slanking

Game Discussion
#1

(Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion as a community member, not an official mod statement)

Hey y’all,

I might not be playing as much lately, but I still follow a lot of games - partly for mod stuff, and partly cuz I just enjoy watching them. Something I’ve been noticing a lot more lately is a trend of low-posting, low-efforting, and replacing out - which, honestly, makes things incredibly unfun.

This post isn’t to call out any individual person - it’s a site-wide issue that I don’t think can’t be fixed with just warnings, prods, and blacklists. I know that life happens sometimes and emergencies come up, and this post isn’t about that - it’s about the cultural shift towards thinking that not putting in effort is okay.

When even a few people don’t post, or replace out of the game, the people who are trying to play end up with very little content to post about and very little ability to solve those quiet slots. The game becomes unfun, WIM drops, and pretty soon everyone ends up lowposting, because even the most active players can only do so much if there’s nothing to work with. That isn’t fun for anyone!

And just to be clear, not slanking or flaking doesn’t mean you have to hyperpost or write huge walls. It doesn’t mean you have to put your entire heart and soul into solving the game or owning the village, it just means showing up, contributing, and trying to win.

If you already know you’re likely to be super busy, maybe stop yourself from signing up until you know you’ll have time to play. If you do join, and you end up busy, that isn’t an excuse to just leave the game or stop playing. You still need to try. If you don’t feel like playing anymore because someone scumread you for a shitty reason, or because your scummate decided to selfvote, that isn’t an excuse to leave the game or stop playing. You still need to try.

I know we aren’t a super competitive site, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to have better quality games where everyone respects each other’s time and effort. So if you sign up for a game, please, please play it.


TL;DR:

  • Low-posting or replacing out hurts the experience for everyone.
  • You don’t have to put in a huge amount of effort in every single game - you just need to show up, contribute, and try to win.
  • If there’s a decent possibility you’ll be busy during a game, either don’t sign up, or prepare for that possibility and continue to participate regardless.
  • Games don’t have to be competitive, but we can still aim for quality and respect everyone’s time and effort. Slanking and flaking are unfair to the people who do want to play.
  • Please play the games you sign up for.
16 Likes
#2

If vulgard saw this post he would think im trolling

We rly did a 180 lol

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#3

This reminds me of my favorite George Orwell book

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#4

I am specifically calling out @katze

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#5

/in

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#6

Hear hear! Couldn’t agree more Chloe.

1 Like
#7

Hmm. I feel conflicted about this for reasons that seem to go beyond pedantry or self-defensiveness but I can’t really specify why. (I do think people not being readable is bad)

I think

  1. there’s a conflation between posting & effort/readability. (General issue I have with post minima also)
  2. It assumes there is always something to post about, even in a thread with a lot of posts.
  3. As somebody who is often very pessimistic, it seems irrational to force somebody who believes they are inevitably soon to be hanged to try to prevent that, as either alignment, especially when it is often draining… (Yes wolves can sometimes pull this off, yes town can solve but the likelihood of being listened to is extremely low)
  4. This is the most likely to just be me, but there is pressure to read most of the thread at some point in order to post well, which can be a daunting task at times and does not seem like an always fulfillable expectation.
5 Likes
#8

tbh i think this has been an issue on the site for a while, but its still good to see it being talked about now

these are good points, but I don’t think these expectations are necessairly true (like #2 for example, i odn’t think theres a huge expectation to post if the thread is fairly fluffy, and that in it of itself can be a thing to analyze!)

there are def times ive lacked WiM. and i’ve joined games before thinking i would play more than I actually did and i didn’t play to what I expected of myself
but generally when I think of flanking/slanking, i think of people who a. abandon the game or b. put literally MINIMAL effort in the game. like people who are making posts just to meet post min, and those posts themselves don’t have much substance to actually read a player for, leading to a difficult situation with that slot

like, if the post min is 5, and you post 5 times but every post is a wallpost analyzing a ton of stuff, i think thats completely acceptable!

if the post min is 5 and your 5 posts are “this post is kinda sus” “:wowee:” “fluff post” “fluff post” “why are people voting me” then like. tbh thats kinda on you, whatever alignment you’re playing :joy_wolf:

6 Likes
#9

I on the whole agree ~in general

i know im probably a bit subtweeted here but like even tho i posted overall less than the host in PMUpick ~95% were readable content that meaningfully advanced my objective or related to thread state.

if the town is eating itself i’m going to avoid posting as wolf so the town keeps eating itself im not going to prevent them from making a mistake toooo much

also agree with Soweli’s points weh said a lot of what i generally think

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#10

i dont think it assumes there is something to post about, sometimes there is no content, it asks people to please generate content. you can’t win if you don’t at least try. you don’t need to always be passive. it doesnt read to me as trying to force you to high effort defend yourself when being hanged, i think its very reasonable to dip if you are frustrated as long as you just put the bare minimum. chloe’s post is asking for the bare minimum - hit the minimum post count (5 or 10 or whatever) and at least try. its all very cold takes, its the bare minimum to have functioning mafia games. i dont think you need to read every post in the thread before you post, not all posts are worth spending time reading, ability to not clog the thread and bore your teammates is a skill

7 Likes
#11

i think its reasonable to expect for mafia players to think “i will attempt to proactively push my win condition” when they choose to sign up for games. the game just doesnt work otherwise. doesn’t need to be constant, it doesn’t need to be at 100% power, just the mindset when signing up needs to be “i will try to win” instead of “im here to chill and passively react to what ppl are saying”. cookie thread better suited for that purpose, and also a very fun activity

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#12

can 100% agree
its fun to talk about out of game stuff, and meme, and all that but that needs to be in addition to like, playing the game, with that taking priority

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#13

inherently it’s not, like, immoral to take it easy and mess around sometimes in a mafia game. chloe’s post isn’t discussing the topic on a micro scale, it’s on a macro scale - FoL mafia culture has shifted into low efforting, it’s the standard, it’s just not really easy to solve and play. a lot of players who generally tryhard just aren’t playing anymore due to this. it’s an attempt to salvage the culture. people make up the culture after all. if the site culture was generally more competitive she wouldn’t be making this post, it wouldn’t be needed

8 Likes
#14

I do agree with each of the individual points here (to varying degrees), but I don’t think it follows that it’s fine not to meet postmin - meeting postmin is way less effort than you are making it out to be IMO

That said:

I think this in particular raises an interesting issue (entirely separate from flaking/slanking)

Because its true that when townies are getting misexed with ~no hope of getting out of it, no one ~ever listens to their reads afterwards. Now, admittedly, there are a lot of times when they haven’t put that much time into solving while their fate is sealed (because as you said, they ~never get listened to), but then that further hurts the chances of townies in a similar position being listened to in the future

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#15

aye yeah seems to be self fulfilling

townies wont post because they feel like they’re doomed and they wont be listened to even after their flip which means they cant look townie which means town wont move the hang and so on and so on

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#16

I don’t think it follows that it’s fine to not meet postmin, as it is an agreement made between the player & host and such; It’s far from a perfect way of enforcing activity but there aren’t real alternatives; but chloe’s post seemed targetted to a nebulous space not entirely consisting of people not meeting post minimum

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#17
  1. is true, but that doesn’t corrilate to just not showing up to playing a game. I think posting like, 60-70 times doesn’t take up much of your time and still translates to a more playable game.
  2. if theirs nothing to post about, make something up to post about. games have to start somewhere. this isnt asking you to just start spamming, its asking you to play the game
  3. well if u dont try to prevent it you arent playing the game. you can give up, just still try to make readable posts and solve
  4. i mean i never read the thread well /shrug. you can post without reading the thread idrk what to say to this
#18

i mean this post doesnt say like “you have to TRYHARD and 300 post EVERY DAY” its just ‘play the game you signed up for’ i guess and i feel as though thats a pretty like, standard thing to ask? if you dont have time to dedicate, if you dont want to make readable content, then just dont post.

its not like their has to be posts every 3s either, you can let thread simmer for a bit. yuo can have hours without posts and for it to still be a healthy gamestate, just play the game

1 Like
#19

in my experience a lot of times when a villager is executed it’s because their reads are, in the thread’s point of view, poorly reasoned

which isn’t to say poorly reasoned reads can’t be correct but its kind of a two-way street, it comes from a lack of cooperation, which imo is the biggest issue with villages on this site - most villagers are incapable of working with each other instead of just hard pushing their own reads

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#20

I… disagree?

admittedly i wasn’t as detailed as i should have been, because this really entails several seperate cases, the main two that i can think of are:

  1. (recent) posts just aren’t readable. I think this is a gray area in that it is theoretically possible to start generating content from here, but not necessarily achievable (to a certain standard) from every player.

  2. Nothing has come up that challenges your established worldview, you have laid out your own arguments to what you beleive is a suitable extent and have no open disputes to these.

I think it is quite foolish to say that any hang is preventable, especially when there are, for example, not only a strong clear town voice pushing you, but you are also aware that there is a faction of players who would probably like for you to be voted out. If a player’s goal is to make decisions that they believe will advance their win condition, yet they do not believe that any decisions they make would advance their win condition more than others, they are under no responsibility to make any particular choice, which includes making any degree of trying to be readable and solve. You can personally believe that a player made the wrong call about their slot being doomed; or that players are generally prone to being wrong about this & thus should over time learn not to.

I agree, it’s just that the standards of ‘play the game you signed up for’ seem to be tied to “make more posts” which i really don’t think they ought to be?

side tangent idea that i'm not really sure how it fits in (and it delves more into theory) but it feels relevant

I think a lot of not-real-timing can end up just being bad whether it’s delivered in wallposts or individual smaller posts in that they are just not as easy to engage with (and they tend to lack a specific audience), especially all at once, which kind of encourages either making fewer posts to only get your most relevant poitns across, realtiming, or spreading your points across time.

(I would also appreciate it if chloe came back & elaborated on some things)

2 Likes