History

## The Spark

MSDB was inspired by the ever-growing, massively independent, and self-improving *Town of Salem: Anticipation.* The server’s core concept of running a game like Town of Salem on discord while still remaining fun to play was a note taken.

“So I had basically started out on a random Town of Salem discord and I had looked through some of their channels and found another server called Town of Salem: Anticipation. The server sold itself to be a ToS community server but with playability in the server itself. I was completely sold with the idea alone and was not let down when entering. I had only really played like two games before I had mentioned to one of the staff that I was thinking about making some roles for their server. Within a week or so, I had created a few core concepts on a google doc. It was only a matter of time before the Saboteur was created. Just a bit of a conclusion here, I actually spent an entire day trying to figure out how to spell sabotager.” - (Vincent Does Things)

## MSDB 0.0

The base of the game used “points” to determine the fates of all players. Saboteurs (or sabotagers as they used to be called) would *sabotage* other player’s points. This would reduce their point score by 1. If any player had a -3, they were abruptly kicked from the game. Later, the supporter would be created. The supporter would add 1 point to a user. This was MSDB at its absolute infancy.

## MSDB 0.1 → 0.16

   Some extra roles were created such as the investigator and the defender. They both would detect any mischievous behavior and protect the users against the evil doers.

   The point system was slightly less prevalent and had become a bit less of an active key of the game and more of just an obstacle for the saboteur. It wasn’t long before the point system was removed entirely.

   Way more roles had been added after the point system had gone for good. The data breachers including more roles than just the Saboteur. Neutral roles were later added for more conflict. And the administrator was also added.

## MSDB 1.0

   It was only now that the Master Server Data Breach discord was created. An initial spike of users joined the server to get an idea of what the server was about. Users were required to *sign in* by direct messaging the owner and getting a user ID. Although MSDB had become, at least, mostly functional, there were no games ever hosted on this discord. Because of a large activity drop and a solid 3 months of dead silence, the server was deleted.

Later, another server was created essentially doing the same thing. However, there were enough users to get 2 test games finished. After initial excitement as to the potential of MSDB, **a lot** of work was then put into creating more roles. More and more users began to join as friends invited other friends and server partnerships helped sponsor the server some extra members.

phases would last only one day. The 3 segments, of a phase, would divide the day into 3 equally spaced segments, which would allow each phase its own chunk of time and would keep things simple and precise. This was later seen to be massively ineffective due to how users would have to wake up at bad times or would have to wait extended periods of time for the next segment of a phase. It was somehow slow, boring, and exhausting all at once. It only became more complicated when users from different time zones entered the server and schedules would have to be adjusted. Eventually, games didn’t have a schedule at all and would wait for as long as it took for everyone to respond (which led to games lasting over 2 weeks in extreme cases).

After the winter season had ended, MSDB became quiet. Almost all activity had ceased despite the addition of UnbelievaBoat and a few extra roles. The server had entered its first sleep period (a short period of inactivity caused by external matters such as school, work, family, etc.) and remained this way until mid November.

## Season 1

   Although season 1 had technically started very late in the year, the logs for season 1 started a few games prior to the sleep period. A bunch of new concepts were added to both the server and to the ingame roles.

The server had scrapped its older system of achievements (which were stored externally and required intensive indexing and organizing) and instead used the **Roles Won** achievements. These achievements were given to users who had won a game of MSDB playing a specific role. There were other achievements that would be given in the event a player managed to get all roles in a faction.

Season 1 only had 2 games according to the revival of MSDB. However, if looked at by the logs of MSDB there were 5 games in season 1.

MSDB *did* use a schedule for games in the past (season 0 - the experimental period).

## Season 2

This was the season that finally introduced ELO. This was a playerskill measurement that has players exchange points essentially. The basics are that you gain more ELO for winning as harder roles, winning against tougher opponents, and achieve harder goals with your team.

Additionally this was the first season to provide for multiple hosts given the increased number of players.