KatiyaKramer wrote:First let me state that I have been a long time player for Town of Salem. I have not been as active on the forums until after the Spy changes that occurred unannounced.
I have been an on/off juror for Trial System because I want to help keep this game clean of toxicity. I have stood it out and supported the game and community after the botters, after the breach, and I have defended you guys on here, and on Discord from people who have expressed frustration towards your team. I have also made my own fair share of critical comments over how things are run, but I believe 99% of your community has done so at this point.
But considering what is occurring here recently, I feel the need to be a bit more vocal than I have in the past.
Censoring your own community for critques is not the way to go, especially when the critiques given to you aren't even toxic compared to the abuse you have all taken in the past.
There are many reasons why the game is struggling as it is at the moment, and that is a severe lack of knowledge and understanding of your community, your playerbase, and your own game itself. Yesterday, Trial was given a new set of rules to judge reports with, rules that you wrote yourselves. In them, it shows just how in touch you are with your community. One glance through the forums would show that players leaving the game while alive has been a major issue for months and months, and your playerbase is screaming for more things to be done. What do you guys do? Remove the leaving category and tell jurors and judges to only guilty if the leaver in question specifically states in the chat that they are intentionally leaving. You have, by that change, made the leaving issue much worse, as anyone who dislikes their role will leave on a moments notice and get away with it as long as they don't say a thing.
You have severely laxed the rules for gamethrowing, removing rules like "No defense in jail or on the stand is throwing" or "Repeated strategies that have a high failure rate and continuing to use them with that knowledge is throwing (Syanna rule)". Taking away those rules really make it seem like your team does not know your game at all, and that you think it's still the same game it was in 2014, when you were doing your very first kickstarter.
Well, guess what? It's not the same. The players have evolved, strategies have changed. The core mechanics may be the same, but the play styles have shifted big time.
Allow me to walk you though a logical scenario regarding one of those gamethrowing rules you removed:
A townie is voted up to the stand, and they are asked to give a defense. Regardless if they were voted up via VFR or through an accusation, they refuse to give a defense and either remain silent or make a comment like "THis is dumb, get me down from here!". Refusing to give a defense is going to make that player, regardless of their role or how they were voted up, suspicious in the eyes of the rest of the players. They will think, "They won't defend, they are guilty!" One of three things are most likely to happen in this scenario. A: The townie is lynched. It is revealed that they are town, and the town has lost a member of their own team and a day of lynching, therefore their chances of winning have been lowered drastically. B: Townie is spared the lynch, but jailed that night and executed. Not only is town down a member, the jailor has lost their executions, damaging town's chances of winning even more. C: Townie is spared, but a vigilante takes matters into own hands and kills them that night. Now there is a dead town member, and another is going to kill themselves that next night. 2 townies in one blow, all due to a refusal to defend. If you really think that this doesn't harm the game at all, and these actions are not gamethrowing, you do not know how your playerbase thinks.
Now, there is one good way of fixing this apparent lack of knowledge about your game and community. Better communication. You need to get more involved in your game and your community. Now I know that whenever you try and reach out to your community for suggestions, you get bombarded by people trying to force their views of the game on you. I also know that whenever you make a change, you tend to get bombarded by people screaming at you for making a change they did not approve of. It’s a vicious cycle, but it needs to stop before the game dies.
I also understand that your team is small. And most of it is working on Unity. But would it really hurt to spend a small period of time every day reading through your forums, learning more about your community and your game through them? I get that is what Shape is for, but I feel like the rest of the team needs to do a little bit of research into your own community to get to know it better.
Understanding your community better and communicating with them more is the fix of the issues. Silencing criticisms and critiques is running away from the issues, and it only makes things worse for yourselves and for the community, and in the end, could damage or destroy the future of the game.
None of us are asking for you all to spend half of your day listening to us, but just a little bit of communication could save your game in the long run. Just a little bit could help you understand how your game has changed in the last 4+ years and how you still have a passionate community who still wants to support you in the end. Stop silencing and censoring people. Listen to us. Learn from us.
Let us help you save this game so we can continue to enjoy it for many years yet.
and this over here, no matter how true that is: Spoiler:
chubby is a nerd