Mafia Game Code: M Season Feedback Thread

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Feedback Thread
Greetings everyone, Code M has just come to a close. As such its time for the tried and true act of giving our feedback on the game.
Please do so below!

[King V]

This is the first game I've played in a long time, so I might be a bit rusty, but here goes.

Pros
The Plot Content - I guess this is how players felt in S Fate or DICE, there was a lot to explore and investigate. This is a major upside on my part, since I do like exploring and finding plot details. I could see there was a lot of effort put into making the map and all of the hidden locations. Everything made sense (mostly) for where it was located and what happened.

Freedom of Actions - In the game itself I felt like I could do anything as long as it was realistically possible, and found a near unlimited supply of things I wanted to do. Making traps, lobbing rocks at people, creating bullets, etc. It just felt like this game gave you a lot of options.

Puzzles - I liked how the puzzles were woven into the story, and how you had to go through a series of steps as well as gather relevant information to solve them. I might be biased since I found almost all of the puzzles and solved quite a few of them, but overall this was a pro for me.

Cons
Plot Relevance - This might be bias again, but it seemed like most of the puzzles led to different endings for solving each one. This might be fine since it gives players more ending options, but when I stumble upon a puzzle and try to crack it for 2 days straight only to find that it has no relevance whatsoever to the goal I'm pursuing, I get a bit annoyed at all of the effort I had wasted. I think it would be better to lessen the number of potential endings and make the puzzles more relevant to the overall plot.

The Map Size - This is a big one. While I do enjoy walking through rooms with actual content that give interesting plot information and contain hints to puzzles, it seemed like there were 10 times more rooms that were just completely useless. The amount of random forests bogged up the map and made it difficult to reach certain areas, so when I did find relevant information I had to travel all the way over to the other side of the map to apply the information. It was just painful in general to move through so many useless rooms.

Murders without Trials - I had to play the roll of Detective and Executioner for every single murder in the game due to my Clear Condition, so I am obviously very biased here. There was no motivation for anyone to cover up their murder, since there would be no consequences for killing. This resulted in a large quantity of very poor murders, all of which I solved extremely easily. Afterwards, I had to chase people across the entire map to kill them for my Clear Condition, most of whom just ran at the first sight of me. The large map, combined with huge quantity of murders made completing my Clear Condition extremely infuriating.

Player Balance - I didn't feel this one as heavily as the rest, since I had a wide variety of weapons at my disposal which made up for any power inbalances, but I did feel like the clear conditions and PDA functions were not very balanced in terms of difficulty and usage. I thought PDA functions were simply a minor perk though, so I ignored that, but when it came to Clear Conditions, some people were very clearly ahead of others.

Overall
I felt like my Clear Condition didn't mesh well with the mechanics of this game at all. Especially revival, which made murdering lose a lot of value among players, and made my Clear Condition annoying as hell. Otherwise, I think this game was overall fairly average. A lot of plot content, lots of murdering, but the map simply made things too difficult to enjoy thoroughly. I would say that if this game had been held on a normal-sized map, it would have been much, much better.

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

I just wrote up the huge feedback wall I normally do and I still could add more. Honestly its so negative and aggressive I am not going to post it. 
Sova, if you want to read it anyway, ask me and I will pm it to you on the site.

[Ryohei Sasagawa[Hero]]

CC- I am going to say I rather enjoyed having a clear goal to reach as it gave me something to do to strive for instead of feeling like I was wasting my time floundering about the place in the previous season (DICE). The fact that some contradicted was also good I think as they gave you the suspense that your possible allies may have contradicting CC.

Map-it was interesting walking through this desolate landscape and the wild animals were a bit lacking but it felt real down to earth, the houses were quite deserted and seemed to want to tell a story.

Murder-Well it was so very easy to do especially to AFK people, no trial, just doing it.

The Map Size - This is a big one. I dislike having such large maps because I find them quite tiresome to traverse and look for information it became quite apparent that plot was probably in the buildings not the forest. I had trouble with my CC here as I had no idea if the AFkers would be out in the woods are hanging out in the houses or actually hiding in trees. I found myself having to ask if anyone was here as no markers meant Sova would have to tell me if any players were in the square with OP AFK actions, the overwhelming size left much to be desired...I may be mildly biased as my preferred max map size would be season Fate if I was to say one. 

Chips and Item Capsules- now there were chips for cool items an even OP items were available but to actual find one felt quite hard I must say, I mean just randomly spewing I want to look for chips in general seemed the best way to find chips. There was a severe lack of desire to look for chips as your CC felt more important and throwing precious time away to look felt like such a waste. These Item Capsules didn't even guarantee something good like my autograph but you could have gotten garbage like infinite eggs. so they were more con then pro. I suspect these were also to counteract the low weapon availability on the map in general cause the bottom half was severally lacking but it should be noted the mansion was an arsenal.

Player Balance-all right I must say I realize that this wasn't a major issue gear wise like most MMO activty or hours spent in the game gets you gear so we can forget how hard it was to get weapons and clap for sea at finding good loot. The pda functions now those were not balanced in the least I found them quite unbalanced but then again I used mine quite frequently and from my understanding others had strict requirements. I also think skill is a thing here being placed in a fight for the first time I noticed how much gear affected your chances of winning. If anything I found Erika's skill the most OP in the game if I was lead to believe correctly she was buffed when fighting murderers so this left me quite deflated when I came into contact with her. 


inactives- now were hitting the meat here this is in now way Sova's fault but with no attempt to solve this problem the CC imbalance was left as it was. I don't think I was too messed up by the inactive people as I would say I was semi-active if anything. I think that this game would have either been more of a nightmare for sea with more people murders would be rampent and sea's CC would go unfulfilled but because the inactivity left the death count much lower than I think sova expected sea's CC became manageable. 

Time limit- I suppose this was suppose to allow people who had harder CCs to have a chance to finish them in comparison to people whose were rather simple to just needed to work for it. I think to be honest that due to inactivity this time limit was just not a good call but that being said I think that it probably was needed in the long run. There were CC that required the game to end to see if it was completed or not so that being said it was a necessary evil lets put it that way.

Overall- now to sum it up I rather enjoyed mafia code: M despite being semi-active because of school this being said I would definitely play again but I would have preferred the two suits hearts and spades to have known of each other at the beginning of the game I mean its called Mafia Game right well hearts and spade mafias the neutrals could be like there to prevent each side from knowing who the enemy is completely. This way I believe that how Sova had wanted cooperation would have been a thing but with everyone being left to their own devices we could only hope that we weren't talking to the "enemy" an opposite suit that is...much like the mob mentality of Town of Salem we just didn't know who to trust. I am actually cut in half about this point because the suspense of not knowing your friends from your enemy would be gone and that is a major factor of fun in these sort of games.

[Satori]

Satori here with my feedback on Mafia Game: Code M ^_^

Plot and References - Although I wasn't actively pursuing plot, I did find a few interesting references which I appreciated more since I'm one of the few people here who get them like the whole town being based on MG4 (Which was one Sova's previous game), Baal's grave, Sin's chair, Ted the fly and the Axanael (Which was supposedly a player's CW in MG8) which was pretty neat at least for me though others would not get them since they don't have any knowledge of Sova's previous games.

Clear Conditions - The CCs are what really got me excited about this game having prior knowledge of Killer Queen (Which was the VN this game from based from) since they don't always involve murder or solving the plot like most MMGs do and forces players to apply different strategies to achieve them. Though I was really disappointed when I got my 1st CC which I had to make the Spades people fulfill their CCs not only because it didn't suit my character but the fact that if one of them were afk then I'd be screwed and about half the players were inactive that time which increased the chances either one of them could be Spades. At first I thought I was surely gonna lose and was even desperately trying to find other means to win. But then when 2nd phase came, I was actually sort of relieved since my new CC was to make all the Hearts people fail their CC and the inactivity would have actually worked in my favor that I thought I could win even without doing anything at all. In the end though, I still failed my CC and died (All thanks to a certain Ghost...>_>). Though I didn't have much of an issue with CCs in general but I feel some CCs like mine relied on too many specific people doing certain things and its extremely difficult to keep track of all them to ensure they do what you expect them to do. The size of the map didn't help either in tracking those players and only added to the difficulty. Then there's also the possibility of your targets being among the afk people as I mentioned earlier which you may be screwed.

PDA Functions - My PDA function was niche at best but directly helped me in achieving my CC though I feel its kinda under powered compared to the other functions. I would also like to comment on how I got a completely useless spam mail function from an IC after searching through A MOUNTAIN of corpses for a single chip to obtain that feature...(Which I didn't really mind much but still all that effort for nothing! T_T)

Memory Chips and Item Capsules - Finding memory chips and ICs were pretty neat since you could get cool and useful stuff from then. Though in my case. I was only able to find 2 chips which didn't give me any awesome weapons and in fact, one of them gave me a useless PDA function...>_>

Puzzles - Can't say much about this since I barely did any puzzles though I do kinda feel the puzzles were heavily skewed towards Sea's favor (No offense) since he's like the only one among us who could solve them and gave him a huge advantage over everyone else.

Map - Not sure what to say about this one but I guess I would agree with Sea that most of the rooms were useless and didn't have actual content and also movement was pretty bothersome though not as much. In my opinion though, I think applying Zircon's movement system would have been better for this game since you don't have to keep posting indicators in every step you make.

Inactivity - This is probably one of my biggest complaints of this game and made it less exciting for me especially those who didn't do anything in the game AT ALL. Though I can't really blame them for having a life or just don't have the will to play but in a game where some people may have CCs that rely on specific people, their inactivity would screwed others (Well except in my case where the inactivity of certain members did actually help me). No offense to the inactive people but if you think you cannot actively play the game then you should have informed the host beforehand or simply not applied at all.

Overall - I enjoyed the game and I must say it was quite a ride although it could have been way better if the map wasn't too big, CCs and function were more balance and if more players were active. Still I would definitely play something like this again if I had the chance. ^_^