Why do hydras traditionally get out of thread discussion?

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Forcing hydras to only communicate in thread would be asinine. Hydras in my experience generally have a pro-town effect, IE: a town hydra is better than it would be and a scum hydra is worse. Making them communicate only in thread would more or less negate the first aspect, but exaggerate the second to beyond ridiculous.

Its my opinion that this better/worse factor is fairly minor though, and made up for by the fun factor, after all, at the end of the day we play for fun right?

[chamber]

Added bureaucracy to posts can severely impact how much control over the game flow you have, on the other hand you could dominate it by both posting without consulting, but then you only hurt the town by being incoherent(as town) and are obvious (as scum). If you take the time to strike a good balance you end up with a role that is slightly better as town imo, and slightly worse as scum, as I've already said. And non-terrible players don't get caught for the type of scum slip you are describing.

[chamber]

I don't consider myself terrible, but past evidence has shown that I'm more or less burnt out of normal mafia, and will flake unless I'm hydrad with someone I like to make the experience more enjoyable. Never going in has it been as a crutch or to gain some sort of advantage.

Edit: This also shows you think you are above hydraing, which to me suggests you never have. Thought experiments are fine and all but try and get some actual experience before talking about how it plays.

[chamber]

trololol its against the rules isn't actually an argument.

[chamber]

I can't be guaranteed a hydra-less game. I don't know there's no hydras until after the game is full and not even then.

This is the real 'problem' here. There's a legitimate difference of opinion about hydras, so mods need to start being explicit about whether they will allow hydras.

We can just add a [hydra] tag and... oh wait everyone hated my system nvm .

[chamber]

More difficult, fair, don't know what you are actually asking, respectively.

[chamber]

More difficult, fair, don't know what you are actually asking, respectively.

Do you think that it would be harder for a hydra under those circumstances to be an active and productive member of the town?

TBM stole my thunder, but how much 2 people differ in opinion determines both how much they'd gain from the hydra, and how much time they need to put in to the actual hydra aspect to get anywhere. This effect would be mutiplied making it more likely harder to communicate in a hydra inside a hydra but it would still be possible for them to be active and productive. (time zones would need to match damn well)

[chamber]

More difficult, fair, don't know what you are actually asking, respectively.

Do you think that it would be harder for a hydra under those circumstances to be an active and productive member of the town?

TBM stole my thunder, but how much 2 people differ in opinion determines both how much they'd gain from the hydra, and how much time they need to put in to the actual hydra aspect to get anywhere. This effect would be mutiplied making it more likely harder to communicate in a hydra inside a hydra but it would still be possible for them to be active and productive. (time zones would need to match damn well)

Actually got the answer I was looking for.

So, we can conclude that

depending on how close the people in the hydra think (so not based on their individual skill so to speak) determines how well the hydra will do

. So we can say that hydra strength has little to do with individual skill and is therefore is too variable to make any logical conclusion of its advantages/disadvantages. From this we can go two paths, play it safe and disallow hydras outside of hydra games, or say "since a lot of hydras are fine, and it has been going on for a long time, it can stay". Both are easy to argue for in such a way that you can't be proven wrong, so it is pure preference of the playerbase and moreso mith at this point.

Needless to say I'm voting to keep hydras in hydra games.

...?

I think you missed my point. How good the hydra is in the end is self balancing. Extremely similar people don't gain an appreciable advantage in thread, but also have to spend little time out of thread, extremely different people potentially can reach a very large advantage, but to do so need to spend more time arguing with each other, and less time in thread/reviewing posts ect. If one had infinite time I could see your point making sense, with extremely different hydras being too strong, but I still disagree with it mattering, mafias already a game between unevenly skilled players.

Now, individual skill DOES matter, but that will just bring the skill level of the hydra up to the high end player. A weak player could potentially gain a huge % this way, but I doubt theyd be playing appreciably better than the good players %.

[chamber]

Also I don't understand how a QT is unproductive, whats wrong with QTs?

QT communication is incredibly ineffective compared to IM communication or RL communication. I've hydrad with lots of different people (though less than faraday) and always used IMs. I even use IMs when mafia/masons/neighbours/team mafia if allowed, and just copy it into the QT.