In my opinion, we should lower the required amount of minimum plays for competitive setups.

I've tried to get more setups plays through my weekly setup feature but it hasn't really worked at all (betmen's setup "Are You The Bad Man?" has had 3 plays since being featured and my setup "Watch Yourself V3" had I think 4 or 5 in a week); nothing new gets 200 plays (unless it's quick, easy, and has a gun--in other words, not great for competitive anyway), people in red hearts just like playing G&H, FP, Reverse, JFK. Most red heart players like playing the same things (nothing wrong with that, FTR). For something normally designed for competitive play to get 200 plays in red hearts can take months.

The point payouts of a setup deter from 60/60 when a setup reaches 50 plays. This sample size is fine. I don't know who exactly decided it should be 200, but that's way too many; you're never going to get more than one or two new setups played in gold hearts over a long period of time having that number in place. There's a reason the payouts change at 50 plays and not 200--for almost 10 years 50 plays was the recommended sample and was okay, and there was no minimum number required to have your setup in Competitive. For over 250 rounds of competitive mafia, this was fine. Many setups were comped with 0 plays and were fine as well (off the top of my head--Cry N' Oh, SDS w/ML and no Whispers, O2R, STBS, GAI, KWTH 2.0, TSIB). And if a setup got skewed too far one way or another, it was simply decomped. If it only became skewed later in the round (Days 5-10) then you removed it then. If there weren't that many plays in it (<20), it doesn't matter (you could even refund the few if you wanted), and if there were a lot... well I don't believe this has ever happened.

Setup testing is obviously a great thing to do but you can tell with your eyes how a setup is going to be sometimes. For example, Johneh tried making a setup https://epicmafia.com/setup/1486164 but I recognized right away that town can just Massclaim D1 for a pretty easy game most of the time, and Johneh is working on balancing it now. We didn't need to play the setup 200 times to figure that out.

I can understand the reasoning behind making the rule and this isn't directed at anybody in particular, but it deters anything new from being comped; it does the opposite of what it wishes to achieve in some ways (i.e. having new setups in competitive)

Kindly post below what you think the minimum number should be if you selected "Yes, lower it to (some other number, incl. 0)" in the poll so that we know what you think is a good number. Personally, I think 0 is fine. There's a round moderator for a reason, and they're not alone. They can be helped by fellow moderators and the community. We're all mafia players after all.