I was just confused about “its why game design by democracy doesn’t work”… I mean sure, it doesn’t, but why is that the conclusion from this?
We agree that the players voting on the poll literally don’t even know why they’re voting on what they’re voting on, yes?
Then can we actually say the results of the poll have any value?
Some of the value of this answer is probably “Priestess you should write finally a guide about the basics of social deduction and how it can be used in tol” 
That actually sounds like an interesting idea
But only after you’re recovered 
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For example
And I know you don’t care about ToS but humor me for a second here
There is a Town role in ToS called “Spy”
The Spy could, at one point in the past, read all of the chat between the members of the Mafia, completely preventing them from communicating, as well as reading all whispers between players, meaning that it could instantly confirm itself as Spy by reading a whisper and repeating what it said. These abilities persisted after its death, and due to a role that can talk with dead players (Medium) and a role that can revive dead players (Retributionist), the Mafia could pretty much never actually talk, coordinate, or strategize whatsoever.
To anyone who had ever played any other form of text-based social deduction game, this was obviously having a huge negative impact on the game, as scum were forced to act independently rather than as a team, and in a game that was already heavily town-sided, the Spy pushed it over the breaking point.
So, after many requests from their higher-ranked players and community members with more experience in the genre, the developers thought the best idea was to conduct a poll. Thus, with literally zero context or explanation, they posted this question:
As you can see, they got an overwhelming “no”. This to a role that dwarfs the power of everything in ToL, despite existing in the lower-powered ToS.
Many of the responses were along the lines of
- no
- it isn’t OP Mafia never says anything useful that Spy can read
- NO thats why they are spy duh
and there was next to nobody able to back up a “no” vote with reasoning that held under scrutiny. They just had no idea what the alternative was, and with the devs just asking “hey should we remove this thing”, most people were just like “no” without a second thought.
At the end of the day, despite the community being extremely in favor of not changing the Spy, the devs ended up deciding to remove its ability to read the Mafia chat a few months later, because they understood the issues with the role. This meant that, rather than just making a change, they now had to deal with people complaining that “but the Spy poll had 80% no why are you doing it anyways” for a good while before people actually started to understand how much better the game was without it.
In short, most people don’t really understand game design, and the large majority of your audience will not really understand the broader context beyond what they find amusing in the moment. So you have to be incredibly careful with any official polls, lest you end up making a decision anyways that now looks like you’re ignoring your base, even if that decision is the right one.
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aka why Camp Cadaver is inferior and Tormental was always fooling himself
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That’s why you have to be really really careful when you write the text for a poll. 
The original text of this current poll is
" Which one of you would be interested in longer phase times (e.g. Day is three times as long) in exchange for less or weaker mechanical confirmation within the game?"
Anyone who knows what FM is instinctively knows what this means, but most of the tol players just don’t understand the intention of this suggestion. They think its about “give the players more time to read the chat/think about your night actions/coordinate at night”… and think “but the current time is 100% enough to deliver most information, and tbh night is a little bit boring”
So well, downvoting this still makes sense since they are really not interested in longer phase times but for the completely wrong reasons
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It probably affected only higher rankings really negatively in that game since most players from What i’ve Seen dont play really seriously/competetive
It actually affects everyone negatively, really
Newbies in particular were hit HARD
Randing scum as a newbie and being completely unable to ask for help was bad
Being immediately outed whenever you said anything in scum chat until you learned to disguise yourself was a slap in the face to new players
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The first time that i played vampire i outted my scumteam to the vamp hunter cause i didn’t know it could read chat
I imagine a few games were ruined by that
I disagree with this I dont see it
I dont know but wasnt there a classic mode already at that time?
Also obv there wouldnt be lots of that level fresh players in the forum
