Personally, I have always felt that breeding competition is the best way to ensure a game’s long-term success through player retention. Games such as Rainbow Six: Siege would have died long ago if not for dedicated players pushing the boundaries of the game’s meta and keeping a competitive spirit alive within the community. In Siege’s case in particular, their dedicated community was met with dedicated developers who together pulled the game back from the brink of death to become one of today’s largest first-person shooters with a continuously growing playerbase that is many times larger than it was at launch.
This same competitive spirit has managed to keep Town of Salem relevant, despite a painfully slow update cycle that sees balance changes every couple months and new roles around once a year. Many players stuck around for so long because of the game’s Ranked mode, and many still play it to this very day. Without Ranked, ToS would likely have been a flash-in-the-pan browser game instead of the veritable juggernaut it has become in the real-time Mafia space.
The ability for players to compete with others of the same general skill level and vie to improve can often be paramount to the experience of playing a game. Without a competitive mode, it is likely that many of the industry’s giants wouldn’t still be here today. Sure, things like Overwatch might survive based purely on fun throwaway matches, but massive games like CounterStrike: Global Offensive would have surely been surpassed by more modern takes on their formula if not for competition drawing players back to improve.
However, dedicating your game’s identity to a competitive mode can have its downfalls. As you have noted, the community of a game can suffer if players become over-competitive, and although this can be helped through dedicated and active moderation of your playerbase, I will admit that those with absolutely no drive whatsoever to improve as players can feel swarmed by those who become angry if they aren’t winning. And while this is unfortunate, I would argue that, in general, many games stand to gain more through breeding competition than leaving it out.
Throne of Lies is not one of those games.
The issues are foundational; conversions in a game of Mafia are notoriously hard to balance and almost always end up extremely overpowered or entirely useless. Even though ToL manages to mostly dodge this issue from being built from the ground up for conversions, the other issues conversion games are plagued with are still present, and will only be exacerbated in a competitive environment.
Have you ever been leading the town, finding multiple evil classes and leading the Blue Dragon to victory, just to be converted by the last remaining Cultist before being executed and losing the game to an unstoppable show of force you yourself orchestrated? If so, you’re already familiar with the single largest issue conversions will cause in a competitive environment (excepting problems relating to balance). Being able to completely change teams partway through a match will render any attempt at rating player skill borderline meaningless. A player solidly leading the BD may be converted and lose, and an inept player actively harming the BD may be converted and win. Despite neither of these players remotely deserving their outcome, the game’s conversion mechanic will see this happen decently often, especially since good players are also good conversion targets.
Side note: Although there may be requests for a ranking system based on player actions rather than wins and losses to help overcome this issue, this remains a poor solution at best. Overwatch is the only large game in recent memory to attempt such a system, and they have been constantly plagued with issues regarding how many skill points are given out to whom and for what. They also recently announced that matches between their most competitive players (Diamond and up) will move to a different system based on wins and losses over what the algorithm decides is “skill”, so I think it’s fair to say that it’s essentially a failed experiment whose only real value is keeping decent healers out of Elo hell.
In addition, several other balance issues stand in the way of making a truly competitive mode. If players start to hone their skill at finding scum, classes like the Fool (and, to a lesser extent, the Scorned) stand in direct conflict with the goals of the player. If you are able to figure out that somebody probably isn’t BD through what they are saying, and you execute them and were correct, you should be rewarded for your good play. The Fool instead punishes this deduction, turning what should be optimal play (finding and executing scum) into a mistake. Mechanics such as these should never be included in a Ranked setting, as they punish good players and allow bad ones the crutch of acting like a Fool if they aren’t skilled enough to act like BD.
Throne of Lies also has another reason to avoid competitive modes entirely: the core gameplay is fun and varied enough to keep players around without requiring such a mode. Although the genre isn’t for everybody, ToL allows players to take the game at their own pace and improve on their own time. By being a more casual playing experience, the issues discussed above may actually help ToL survive. Removed from a ranking system, conversions and crazy roles can be interesting and entertaining enough to ensure that no two games are the same and no single strategy can be relied on, and you never know what is going to happen when you queue up next. The introduction of two antagonists, randomly selected between, also boost’s ToL’s impressive variety even farther. Few games can match the pure web of possibilities ToL brings to the table.
On top of this, the developers have chosen to make community input a large part of their decision making. This allows players to truly feel like they are part of the game as a whole rather than just part of their individual matches. This simply wouldn’t be possible if balance decisions had to cater to high-skilled and knowledgeable players over everybody else. And while I may not personally appreciate every decision made to appease the crowd rather than improve the game, I will admit that a large part of ToL’s charm comes from the investment casual players are allowed to have in the direction imperium42 takes the game (a factor that may just be enough to replace the desire to keep playing that a competitive mode is normally required to supply).
With all of these foundational issues, I simply cannot recommend that Throne of Lies join the ranks of games with a competitive gamemode. Although it would be possible to accomplish such a task, in this case the many varied drawbacks far outweigh any benefits it would gain. Throne of Lies is already varied enough to retain players, and the attempt to make such a non-competitive game functional in that space would either end horribly or become a massive sinkhole of time and resources to completely change or overhaul key game systems specifically so people like me can have a bit more fun competing. All in all, I just don’t find it worth it at all, and I can only hope that the developers agree with people like you and me.
