Newbie 2051: Iceland! - End!

[Prism]

I'm glad everyone enjoyed my play, and I was more than happy to get to share it.

Again, for the town, if the other comments from 3rd parties do not make this clear: You did not play poorly, and you did not get steamrolled. You pushed me to a limit I-and the moderators/specators-never in a million years would have expected in a Newbie game. I might have been the better player today strictly in terms of outcomes, but I had 10 years on all of you. I do not have confidence the same will be true a year from now, and as I said I am not at all looking forward to our rematch. You are all quite talented, I'm thankful you pushed me this far, and I hope you continue to play, get stronger, and most importantly: have fun!

I think that wraps up most of my comments, but I could honestly talk about this game all week-Absolutely reach out if you have any questions or want to discuss it further, either inthread or via PM!

[Prism]

Where is mine? And ffery's?

You two had one job between the both of you and made me do it, hell no.

(Joking, I tried to get one of them to do the N2 nightkill as there were no power roles to track/block/etc. remaining)

[Fredrick A Campbell]

Individualized feedback, I'm sorry but it's not quite as indepth as I would like at points/have the backlinks but I need to head out and want to post these while it's still fresh. I would recommend checking the notes PT/searching variants of your name there to find specific examples of how I exploited the things I talk about.

Specific feedback:

Spoiler: flow trap

I do think being more open would have gone a long way, especially early days. Your pairings and wall were brilliant, and your reads were good (esp. on Salsabil imo, that was legitimately a great progression) but actively dialoguing with quiet, floo, etc. much earlier on would have gone a long way. By playing more closed, I was often able to leverage my appeals to you as “freebies”: +town posts that didn’t put myself or the scumteam at any risk at all. Imagine if you had, say, worked with quiet on a Spartan vote or been able to sell that more effectively Day 2. I think Day 3 specifically, you could have engineered a bit more from both quiet and floo. Your off the cuff style was a strength, and I chose not to push you this game, but you do need to be careful that you’re not making the kind of contradictions I pointed out near the end of Day 2.

Spoiler: Fairyprincess69

You ruined my life, I have virtually no words for you. You didn’t really play enough to have me give a ton of feedback but I think your reads were great, maybe a bit too caught up in my tone/emotional side. You pushing Spartan more would have outright won the game, but just the vulnerabilities you showed by pushing the slot were nearly enough to sink it. Easiest fearkill of my life.

Spoiler: Floo

he most glaring issue, as you’ve identified, is motivation and posting. Your team needed you Day 3, not to necessarily no-life it like I did, but to be engaged and dialoguing with them.

You knew I was mafia, so there was little point talking to me.

My perception was that you were in your own head about where you went wrong/how you got put into such a bind, which is understandable, but you had to push through that. You have good analysis, but you need to dialogue more readily and not selectively ignore things. I exploited this relentlessly this game and others will do the same. Finally, I think you had the right idea in going after me/Spartan specifically! This is extremely tough to do but you found it. Lastly, this one is more minor, I do think you could have sharpened your points against me a bit-had I responded, I think you would have found they shot you in the foot. That said, you were under a ton of pressure by this time, and making sure you got me exactly right was a very small worry in comparison

Spoiler: Enchant

Never selfvote as town unless you gain a concrete mechanical advantage for doing so. Never think of yourself as valueless or “bound to be voted later.”

Spoiler: Salsabil

In general, you were a pleasure to play with, and I found flow trap similarly abrasive as times. Simultaneously, floo/flow trap were right that your reaction was throwing gas on the fire. It’s on you to successfully link up as town, and sometimes that means really, REALLY going out of your way to accommodate people you entirely disagree with.

Spoiler: Quiet

Your weakness is experience, and in lacking several parts of the toolkit that simply comes with time. I do think my progressions were worth looking more into, esp. on Spartan. It is easy to look at yourself and think this game was won if you didn’t fall for the pocket. You fell for the pocket because I was absolutely relentless and obsessive with developing it, and this is time, effort, and public content that is more up to other town to punish. I think you had the right idea with how much you tried to work with floo Day 3. And floo was wrong imo, you were not some lapdog, here’s a quote from the wall I typed up:

“Respectfully, while I know this is quiet's to deal with, for quiet: You are not my lapdog. You turned the read I had on your slot around. You worked through the read on me on your own, and your vote is your own. You have real agency and have worked to solve the game all day, and have not been mindlessly following me, even at the cost of being wrong Day 2. And being wrong sucks, but it's the only way to improve. If you respect me and take parts of my game as your own as you continue to develop, that's amazing and an honor. The entire reason you play Newbies is to pass the baton off like that.”

While this was meant to solidify the townread, you had the hardest job in the entire town minus maybe floo, and it is largely true. It is easy to say "Fuck quiet for getting pocketed" when you're not the one being specifically targeted day after day after day.

Spoiler: Esotericzoomer

Unfortunately, being aware of what is generally +town means that you can fake it, and I think the most important concept here is “range”. Inexperienced players do traditionally scummy things a lot, experienced players know how to leverage traditionally town behaviors for themselves as town. The behavior itself matters a lot less than the player making it. The flow trap post was simply “free”, it posed no danger to me as scum, and it wasn’t even my intent to get

that

townread by it.

Spoiler: Frederick

You’re too caught up in semantics and being perfectly logically consistent. You need to make more room for plausible connections and make a more active effort at both understanding what the other players are getting at, and to be wrong in your own guesses/assertive in working with imperfect information.

Spoiler: Safebet

In the event you come back, I think you needed to be a bit more comparative in your treatment of players and answer more of the specific questions towards you, but generally I didn’t have as good of a chance to feel you out as I did the others.

Thanks for the feedback. The mafia team played very well in my opinion.

[Enchant]

Never selfvote as town unless you gain a concrete mechanical advantage for doing so. Never think of yourself as valueless or “bound to be voted later.”

I had concrete mechanical advantage for doing so.

[quiet]

Enchant, did you follow the game? Do you feel like your elimination day1 made things easier or harder for town?

From my perspective as town, your positioning basically made me write off anything that happened that day as NAI, and it made sorting considerably harder on me. I’d really like to encourage you not to do that in the future, and wonder what your mechanical reason for taking that like was; from my perspective, I’d much rather see you miselimed later/even that day when you are fighting against it with everything you have and forcing Mafia to step up and vote you/push at you/drive a miselim than do what you did and have town implode and give no information.

While you might have get you got a mechanical advantage, I really feel like I had a pretty large disadvantage as a result of how that day happened. It killed all conversation on other slots, gave everyone airtight reasons to vote you, etc etc.

Do you feel differently? I don’t mean to pile on or anything, I actually enjoyed playing with you, it’s just the only mechanical benefit I can see is setting yourself up for future games, which doesn’t super feel like playing to your win condition. I guess I want to understand better.

[Salsabil Faria]

Congrats

Prism

,

Spartan117

!

You guys really deserve to win

[Salsabil Faria]

Salsabil's got lost in Enchant's spoiler

Spoiler: Salsabil

In general, you were a pleasure to play with, and I found flow trap similarly abrasive as times. Simultaneously, floo/flow trap were right that your reaction was throwing gas on the fire. It’s on you to successfully link up as town, and sometimes that means really, REALLY going out of your way to accommodate people you entirely disagree with.

Thank you so much, I'll keep that in my mind.

[flow trap]

Day 1 of this game had about the same amount of posts as an average newbie game

[WhemeStar]

I will take 1/2

[WhemeStar]

Well played prism I am policy lynching you in future games if you don’t get scum day 1.

[Enchant]

Enchant, did you follow the game? Do you feel like your elimination day1 made things easier or harder for town?

Easier.

[fairyprincess69]

damn the way you hyped me up prism makes me wish i put more effort in now sorry i couldn't be a more worthy adversary!

as immense as prism was, that play by spartan at the end of day 2 there really sealed the win for scum, because i was very ok with chopping him up till that point. that made me do a 180 and focus on flow/fred, which i knew was never going to be the maf team, but i just couldn't get a doggone read on anyone!

town don't have to feel disappointed about that loss. i don't think anything other than a very strong and coordinated town team could have caught prism there, and other things didn't go our way like enchant claiming goon and cop dying. i wish i had played since the start; i don't think i will replace into games of that length since i prefer to build up reads organically.

lesson for me is definitely trust and look into my instincts more - i knew there were aspects of prism's play i didn't like; i didn't see floo scum really at all, brushing over the townreads on salsa/eso too much, but i just didn't have the confidence in myself to challenge more. that locktown was definitely based on prism's raw emotive power, which jesus christ is a scary skill. the whole ffery narrative felt farfetched but you were able to back it up and convey it so seamlessly. i really felt like you believed you're an anime protagonist with a point to prove LOL. and as you mentioned in your notes, switching from diplomatic to terse - i remember feeling that so palpably, how you were getting annoyed at me for not seeing your read but also wanting to remain calm and how that fits perfectly with your narrative of an obsessive player that can singlehandedly ruin games and your wish to rectify that

god DAMN dude. i dunno how im gonna trust anyone again after this.

[fferyllt]

the whole ffery narrative felt farfetched but you were able to back it up and convey it so seamlessly.

As far as I can tell, it's all real, and definitely all based on actual game events and conversations.

I think Prism is way too hard on himself about the Dystopia game. he was a scary-good town player then, and he's way beyond scary as a scum player now! I still look forward to playing a game where we're both on point and 100% and I sure hope we're on the same team when it happens.

[Prism]

I had concrete mechanical advantage for doing so.

I suspect the other townsmembers preferred

potentially

the extra elimination elsewhere with more of a fight, over being

guaranteed

to waste it with less of a fight.

Speaking bluntly from a scum standpoint, your play around the selfhammer/mafia claim Day 1 made the game significantly easier. That said, what you take from the game and what you do with the feedback is up to you.

[Prism]

damn the way you hyped me up prism makes me wish i put more effort in now sorry i couldn't be a more worthy adversary!

Oh, don't be sorry. The effort you put in was enough. In fact, I'd actually appreciate it if you used less next time, a lot less.

as immense as prism was, that play by spartan at the end of day 2 there really sealed the win for scum, because i was very ok with chopping him up till that point. that made me do a 180 and focus on flow/fred, which i knew was never going to be the maf team, but i just couldn't get a doggone read on anyone!

Thank you for this, again I do not think people understand just how

insanely clutch

Spartan was at several points throughout the game. His last-second entry at the End of Day 2 was insanely strong. For as much as I tried to make this game bulletproof starting mid-Day 2, I failed and it was up to Spartan to fill in the gaps. I said it best in my Notes PT day 3: Spartan is a god

[Prism]

Feel free to never replace into a town slot where I'm scum again, if you really want to do me a favor

(Kidding-thanks for being an important part of what made this game so fun and challenging to play)

[WhemeStar]

Prism you would be fun to play with

[Prism]

the whole ffery narrative felt farfetched but you were able to back it up and convey it so seamlessly. i really felt like you believed you're an anime protagonist with a point to prove LOL. and as you mentioned in your notes, switching from diplomatic to terse - i remember feeling that so palpably, how you were getting annoyed at me for not seeing your read but also wanting to remain calm and how that fits perfectly with your narrative of an obsessive player that can singlehandedly ruin games and your wish to rectify that

I'll get to the ffery part in a second, but addressing the emotive side first.

I'm a very obsessive, intense, and emotive player as town, as Dystopia showed (and another game that I never had to link, Chara's Folly). Fortunately, if I'm a delusional idiot as town, I can pretend to be one as scum. Some of this is very tightly tied to the current site town meta, which puts a heavy emphasis on hyperposting and emotional interaction. I've been eager to show the limitations of this thinking. Faking the emotive aspects is step one, but there are much more venomous ways to punish this playstyle. Using this game as a blueprint, you can see how I used that focus on off-the-cuff, realtime dialogue to prevent players from taking deeper dives and to control exactly where their attention was directed, at times to obscure Spartan and at others to just straight up send them down deadends to waste time.

As far as I can tell, it's all real [the ffery narrative], and definitely all based on actual game events and conversations.

People seem to be really interested in my fferyllt narrative/how it was created, so I'll trace through that a bit.

For the fferyllt narrative, what made it so venomous was that it was backed up by real events, but fundamentally untrue. Crafting the narrative was an evolving process, but first it might be more useful to highlight how much of it was true.

-Dystopia was a very influential game for me, and absolutely spurred stylistic changes.
-fferyllt annoyed me with their expectations in illicit. Dystopia wasn't a highlight for me, but I really just hate that shit period.

That's about it. No offense to ffery at all-the same would be true for anyone else-but I don't really care what she thinks of my play or my playstyle. I play the game to challenge myself, but I really don't put much value on the opinion of third parties.

So for how it was developed, I've been eager to burn the obsessive/emotive tell for awhile now. Many players thought I wasn't capable of faking it because I rolled town several times in a row. As the origin of that style, Dystopia was always going to be a part of that. The second I replaced in, I realized I could go further and draw an explicit parallel between the two games on the basis of Dystopia being a Newbie, modded by ffery, and showing similar behavior as that I planned. That was basically the extent of ffery's involvement at first.

Driving one night, I realized I could add a much more fiercely emotive edge with the phrase "This is personal to me." Again, still only thinking of parallels to Dystopia. This set the cogs turning, and as I was thinking over ways to strengthen the "personal" claim, I realized there was this record of ffery expecting a style I wasn't willing to play, and a bit of annoyance on my end in response. There's no written record of me not caring, and my interactions with ffery were at least vaguely friendly afterwards, so I was confident this would work.

And so the mod vs. Prism narrative was fashioned. Suddenly, ffery was my best friend, godmother of my child, here's memes about her and me jokingly responding to her flavor about her getting coal, and I had something to prove to her...and the rest is history.

[Prism]

I think Prism is way too hard on himself about the Dystopia game. he was a scary-good town player then, and he's way beyond scary as a scum player now!

Dystopia was definitely not all my fault, but there's just no other way to treat your losses if you're serious about improving. Elbirn/Mulch played poorly, but I didn't do enough to win, and fundamentally I care a lot more about that than anything they did/didn't do.

I'm actually a rather atrocious town player by W/L record-something like 4-10 on MS...As for my scum play, well, I warned you. I just haven't rolled scum in awhile other than the snoozefest Scumsman game and altslipping in FGO.

[Prism]

Prism you would be fun to play with

I don't know if you've forgotten, but you played in the referenced Dystopia!

[Prism]

One more thing I forgot to mention was that selling the ffery/meta narratives as legitimate required me to

not go out of my way to explain them

. I needed to lay the foundations, and explain a little bit if necessary to understand my tonal shift, but really put off explaining in full until much later. I really wanted another town-or Spartan-to do the meta case, and it was important that my speech/explanation on ffery come naturally and ideally after a bit of prodding. Had it not been noticed or town dropped it, I might have gone out of my way to work it in somehow, but fortunately others kept referencing it.

I was very intentional about holding off-I had one post that was like "I don't think the ffery stuff is the concern right now"-to quiet, until the timing was right to really sell the legitimacy.

Finally, last ~12 hours of the game, quiet just happened to bring it up again in a paranoid context? Perfect!

[WhemeStar]

Prism you would be fun to play with

I don't know if you've forgotten, but you played in the referenced Dystopia!

I 100% have forgotten.

[WhemeStar]

Oh I just looked at the game and I remember it. Sad we lost.

[Fredrick A Campbell]

Anyone wants to play this game?

[fferyllt]

Had to come post this!