Yeah, I mean maybe it was unfair because they were two different offenses but I think the punishment was perfectly acceptable given those are the two sorta major rules of NOC. Did the hosting leave a lot to be desired? I mean yeah, obviously, things could have been handled much more constructively, but I do think the given punishment was the correct call in a game that was run, well, inconsistently to put it nicely.
Gale getting modkilled screwed us pretty badly, though.
The setup itself works, it's been tested many times with varying winners (town wins a decent amount), but perhaps it's just something that doesn't mix well with the players on the site. No idea, since it could've been a completely different game without the modkill.
Yeah not arguing the first sentence considering gale did kinda shoot himself/village in the foot.
But otherwise, yeah the setup "works,"and I guess is balanced considering that you get varying winners. Doesn't mean it's a good setup. A coinflip is also balanced but I wouldn't want to flip a coin against someone as a game. It's not a site issue, it's more of the fact that the setup is poor in terms of empowering players. You either a. play perfectly (which is pretty hard!) or b. hope for xfire/no xfire depending on your alignment in order to win. There's really no middle ground. I don't think games that are balanced by punishing the teams that do well are particularly fun to play, nor a good test of "skill."
Obviously in mafia there will always be a luck factor. I just think that 2 mafia NOC in a small setup with limited power-roles makes the game too reliant on whether or not crossfire happens. 2 mafia I think (or I guess two nightkills) is much better when the game is larger simply because there are more opportunities to recover from things like crossfire that means that instead of hoping for a crossfire to occur, players can actually play the game and influence what happens through things like the lynch. That to me is what a good NOC game looks like. One where the village's fate isn't decided by who the mafia kills, but by who they lynch in the day.
On a different topic, idling isn't a smogon-exclusive issue. It happens literally anywhere you play mafia (which is why things like subs exist). Like I said above, having two mafia didn't really lend itself to encouraging people to be active. I thought the activity after all the "big players" died was really good which is promising imo given all the circumstances that kinda brought this game down. I think it should be clear by now that there's at the very least a small minority of players who embrace NOC and more who can play (see the Fallout NOC, previous NOCs etc). With a game that has maybe a more "interesting" setup or at least a more engaging one, I very much believe that people will be less likely to idle/more likely to have subs willing to play. Combine that with reasonable deadlines, I think future NOC games can learn from this and provide games that make scumhunting easier. Will they necessarily remove idlers? Probably not. But they will definitely trim idlers from like half the game to 1 or 2 players.