I think having a bot would be cool if only for playing simple mafia games (that don't require a human host as it does in the Mafia room). Maybe having other games like poker, spades, other games that could be put on a bot would be nice too at least for having stuff happen in the channel. Ofc someone would need to code a bot like that...
I agree with billy on this (although I think it's way too early to deem anything a "failure") in that I'm not sure what people are waiting for. If people would rather play games such as the current one on IRC, that's fine. But it doesn't exactly make our subforum more appealing for anyone who doesn't really know what mafia if we just have a channel where there's a link to the game thread but nothing else going on. I'm not exactly sure that a whole ton of people are just going to sign up for this big game. Wouldn't it make sense to ease people into smogmafia, ie through smaller games that show people what we're about etc etc? I think it would be much better if someone hosted a simple 1v2 or even a 1v1 with showdown being the primary channel. At the moment, there's really nothing to advertise about our channel because there's nothing going on there and thus there's no reason for anyone to be idling in the channel at all. At the very least people talking about the current game in PS shows that we're doing something. It might be too late at this point for walrein's game, but if we want to use PS to try and expand the playerbase, we need to host games that focus on PS as the primary method of communication.
Showdown also takes literally zero effort to open up lol. It's really not that hard to idle in both, but I guess that's a personal preference sort of thing..