I am going to push back on things here and emphasise that, like, the way hydras in non-hydra games are generally being used on this site by everyone except me and Zug, i.e. specifically lilith is specifically as a disability accessibility tool - if you have a health condition where you are frequently struck from the sky for a couple days at unpredictable intervals, it is hard to sign up for mafia games alone because you risk having a flare-up and ending up lowpostig for a few days, which is no fun for anybody involved.
Hydras are a genuine accessibility tool here - if you pair up with somebody who also tends to have similar issues, then you can both actually play mafia when you couldnāt otherwise. I think itās disconnected from the reality of the situation to talk about the hydras currently being utilised in non-hydra games on FoL as 1. taking up spots on slow-filling signups when these hydras are composed of people who wouldnāt be playing alone, and 2. being impossible to argue with and having too much threadpull when, like, Eve, lilith and pandoraās hydra, has played 3 games, in which they lost as wolf in 2 and got misexecuted as town in the latter.
This is not a situation where an unfair advantage is being created! An unfair disadvantage is created by āhaving certain chronic illnesses in a mafia gameā and the hydras in question are rectifying it. Theyāre not super high-activity slots, theyāre not impossible to read, theyāre not consistently able to out-argue everybody in the thread, they are just, for the most part, a normal damn player.
Obviously, there are exceptions here - itās perfectly fine to not want to play with hydras, there are some messy angleshooting scenarios that can be unfun to play against, and the solution to that problem is to not play games with hydras in them,. Itās perfectly fine to not want hydras in your game youāre hosting, the solution to that problem is to ban hydras on your own hosting level.
But I donāt think itās fair to spread, like, false information about how hydras are being utilised on this site, I think itās rude to somebody who couldnāt play mafia without them, and I think itās rude to sign up for a mafia game with somebody you donāt want to play with and then insist on using game mechanics to push them out of the game solely because you donāt want to play with them. Donāt sign up. Itād be rude to do that to an individual person, itās rude to do that to somebody who canāt play without hydras.
(Obviously, @YBW I know you donāt play mafia much here anymore and maybe did not know this. This is why I have written a post clarifying it.)
