Newbie 2084: Signs [game over!]

[Prism]

The meta point is that all of the behaviors you scumread were trivially checked for playstyle vs. alignment by hitting a link. You did not do so.

I'm not really interested in re-litigating our half of it. I think our flips confirm the good faith of our perspectives.

As an observer for Day 2 on I resent greatly the idea that Cape did not try and that the most salient takeaway from the game is that he fucked up. Criticism for voting wrong and voting early is valid, but he absolutely tried harder than you and I, and he was far from the only reason this game was lost.

[Meuh]

GG everyone! Wouldn’t have limmed correctly either, this was a tough scenario

Great to meet you all and I hope we can play again

[StrangeMatter]

Coming back to this but I think Prism looking at the dead thread that you overestimated what we were actually capable of and doing. In a lot of the plays we just kind of said what we wanted to do beforehand to make everything stick then just kind of somewhat discussed. Most of the ones we actually planned failed pretty spectacularly.

[Prism]

Most of the dead thread I thought it was Meg/ProHawk, and analyzing from that perspective, so I was absolutely way the fuck off base!

[catboi]

I would not blame Cape for voting the way he did based on the events of the previous day. Scum positioned themselves to set up a winning gamestate that day. It happens.

[RH9]

Well done, StrangeMatter! You fooled everybody.
Well done, Town for trying your best!

[RH9]

At least now I have some idea of StrangeMatter's scumgame.

[Cape90]

You know first game on here. I'll consider this a learning experience. And extend apologies to ProHawk and the rest of town

[ProHawk]

It was a good game. My playstyle makes it difficult to not scum-read me, I still haven't really learned how to buck it.

Thanks for playing!

[fferyllt]

You know first game on here. I'll consider this a learning experience. And extend apologies to ProHawk and the rest of town

I thought you really towned it up this game. As a spectator I had a townread on you on Day 1, and nothing later in the game ever shook it. As a player, my perspective might have been different. Playing means loss of objectivity, but also means gain of investment, and both can affect reads accuracy for better or worse.

One thing I like to suggest town players who make it to elo thinking about is: Why am I here? In this game, as is often the case in small games, the players in elo are here because night kills had to focus on cleared or nearly cleared players. Think about what attributes of your play made you more likely to help scum win than earlier kills (unless the players who died were universal town reads or obvious PRs). It may not get you to the right answer, but it can help you see the game from a different perspective than the one you've built up over the course of a few weeks.

Prohawk, I never got over your day 1 play in this game! I'm not sure I would have made the right choice in elo, though by nature I would have used up the clock angsting over it.

[MegAzumarill]

Ggwp all

[Prism]

Individualized feedback, meant to be constructive and just random small things I noticed. Note that if this seems overly picky, you probably did a good job and that was all I could find!

Feel free to yeet these out the window if you disagree-you saw how bad my own play was!

Spoiler: StrangeMatter

Congratulations! I obviously guessed wrong, and I think there are several things you did well here. Letting us risk a no elim is #1, waiting for town to mess up in Elo #2. It's easy to panic as scum, such as when you were both at risk Day 2, but generally you can just wait for town to make errors. Correctly capitalizing on mistakes by myself, ProHawk, and Cape was very good.

I have two points of feedback. First, I think you could have been more proactive with and indepth with reads Day 1. You frequently asked questions but had minimal followup, and some demonstration of deeper thinking is honestly free and goes a long way. I also think that waiting for deadline wound up bringing so, so much more attention to yourself than just hammering one slot and letting us push another slot the next day would have.

Second, I think you should have been more proactive Day 2 in helping steer a vote. You/Meg were both on the chopping block, and while the scum PT wasn't released, it was honestly a miracle that you dodged being voted out Day 2 and require a lot of heavy lifting on Meg (...and, unfortunately, Greeting's) part to avoid. You didn't have that many votes on you but you were a consensus and uncontroversial

second choice

, and the second someone realizes that and starts a wagon you risked having the game slip out of your control entirely. I think going to bat a bit harder would have thrown a wrench into this and made it easier to get a wagon on someone like Greeting or ProHawk through.

Spoiler: Meuh

I loved, loved, loved your reads wall. I had you as hard town from that point on and basically never doubted it from there-I also thought, like marcistar, your comments/interventions with me/ProHawk oozed town in intention. I hope you keep making these, even though it also puts more pressure on you to deliver as scum!

I think your biggest mistake was similar to Greeting's. Greeting selfvoting was a bad move, and unfortunately you needed to catch it rather than just trust they knew what they were doing. Voting out an uncc'd PR in an open setup is always going to be a bad move. Scum fishing for a cc is simply the price for a 1 for 1 trade and you should accept it gladly, throwing away an elim AND losing marcistar a day early was disastrous. You should have been the one to refuse to let Greeting go off the ledge.

Spoiler: Cape90

My spirit animal, god bless you, channeled me from the grave for better and for worse. I generally have very little to critique here; I saw exactly what you saw in Meg/ProHawk and I think it's to Meg's credit for handling their interactions so well. I don't even know what constructive criticism to give you, honestly-I would have and did make the same mistake. I would say going to bat harder Day 2 was the best bet, and while I couldn't find a way to work constructively with ProHawk, perhaps you could have with time. Maybe taking it one scum at a time would have gone further.

In general, I'm just sorry that it didn't work out in your (our) favor. It happens, and you will get more chances.

Spoiler: Greeting

I think I've covered the majority of the constructive criticism in the dead PT, so I'll truncate it. I liked your reads and thinking a lot Day 2, very well thought out, and was very pleased to see it, but I also think that my (and your) miss on the scumteam emphasizes just how important that extra elim was for town to have. StrangeMatter was one of your next choices, and we would have had the chance at them! Your play and process is solid qualitatively, but I think a solid mechanic foundation

complements

that in a way that I don't think has quite clicked yet. Sometimes they're in opposition, but this game they went hand in hand!

Spoiler: AsuStuckey

I did not forget about you! It sounds like you got overwhelmed with the pace and intensity of the game, and I feel that I am probably the main culprit here. I'm sorry that you didn't stick it out-it would have been exciting to play with you, and I hope you try again another time.

Spoiler: ProHawk

I think there are a lot of takeaways from the nitty gritty of our fight, but I think we can skip them and focus on the bigger picture. I think the biggest miss was on Cape Day 2, the push that they were bussing really didn't make a lot of sense I think. Forcing the vote in 5 way ELO is generally just a bad play, throwing it away for free, and I think taking it one at a time (same issue was Cape) probably would have gone further. Pushing Meg as scum but not just...voting Meg, instead being very open to voting Cape "because they're bussing Meg", made it look like

you

were the one bussing.

I have to go to dinner, will do marcistar/MegAzumarill afterwards.

[Meuh]

Individualized feedback, meant to be constructive and just random small things I noticed. Note that if this seems overly picky, you probably did a good job and that was all I could find!

Feel free to yeet these out the window if you disagree-you saw how bad my own play was!

Meuh

I loved, loved, loved your reads wall. I had you as hard town from that point on and basically never doubted it from there-I also thought, like marcistar, your comments/interventions with me/ProHawk oozed town in intention. I hope you keep making these, even though it also puts more pressure on you to deliver as scum!

I think your biggest mistake was similar to Greeting's. Greeting selfvoting was a bad move, and unfortunately you needed to catch it rather than just trust they knew what they were doing. Voting out an uncc'd PR in an open setup is always going to be a bad move. Scum fishing for a cc is simply the price for a 1 for 1 trade and you should accept it gladly, throwing away an elim AND losing marcistar a day early was disastrous. You should have been the one to refuse to let Greeting go off the ledge.

Ty for the feedback!

So this post is gonna be very self-centered: I’m just reflecting on the way I played this game and overall, feel free to skip it over, it’s a post more for myself than for anyone else

For the mistake part, I definitely agree on that, the hammer on Greeting will be a learning experience.
I think it actually came down more to the mentality I had going into it than the actual logic which I used to hammer Greeting; which was bad, but honestly the hammer was more emotional than logical, I don’t think I would’ve done it under different circumstances.

Little rant about my mentality in mafia, it’s not necessarily interesting to anyone other than me but hey I’m reflecting on it so I’m posting it :

Spoiler:

I randomly hit these low points during games (especially near the end of the day) that make me feel like I’m completely wrong about everything and that I’m an idiot. Definitely sucks to have in a game where I’m trying to be right.
It basically causes a few things:
-I start seeing every option as a bad one, every flip as one that would be a townie.
-Because of that, my mentality shifts to picking the least bad option instead of the best one, if that makes any sense?
-Because of my lack of confidence in myself, I start just wanting to follow what others are telling me.

I hit those points both near the end of day 1 and day 2.
On day 1 since I started seeing everyone as a townie, the slot that had said the least sounded like the easiest one to be scum. It’s very poor logic but that played a role in me pushing for Cabd.

On day 2, it was more obvious. Me being easily influenced by others just culminated in the hammer, there was no way I wouldn’t hammer Greeting with both Meg and Greeting telling me to do it. I was 100% expecting whoever I would vote for to be town, so while I did notice scummy things about the way Greeting played near EOD, I was still 100% expecting him to flip cop there.

Anyways my mentality and occasional lack of confidence is to me my biggest weakness (in my town play as least) since my very first game so it’s something I’ll be working on!

And thanks for the compliment on the reads wall! I put a lot of work into it! (A bit over 2 hours I think? Which is a little embarrassing )
Honestly my main issue regarding that is following up with similar posts in later days, because it feels like there’s too much to tackle. I could make a second wall that simply expands on the first, but the issue is that my perspective changes over time, so simply assuming all my reads from day 1 carry over isn’t great. Plus there’s deaths to take into account.
I’ve done walls on specific players in later days in a past game and I think that worked fairly well, although I don’t think it’s as great for my personal perspective on the game. Since I ISOd literally everyone in my wall, I was able to get a better picture of the overall game, not just of a few players. I think ISOing specific players would work best after a scum flip, so you could simply focus on interactions between the dead mafia and the players still alive.

Oh and I definitely am setting myself up for an uphill battle when I play scum…

I’ve managed to play all 4 of my townie games while staying townread by a large part of the town and never getting real momentum to be limmed, which I think is great when it comes to my townie games, but I have no clue how to play scum. My one scum game ended up with me slipping on day 1 and getting limmed LMAO
Suppose I might just be a bad mafia member for a while, but there’s always gonna be room to improve so hey! It’s fine.


If there’s any criticism I have for you Prism, it’s just to not do whatever that argument with ProHawk was, especially not in a newbie game
Honestly that whole thing took a major toll on my motivation to play, and it’s a huge blur in my mind at this point. It was a lot of repetitive posts with points I didn’t fully absorb the information from and it kept dragging on. I think it’s something I have to work on and improve engaging with arguments that I don’t fully understand and keeping my motivation up. However, there’s probably something to be said on the way you two handled that? I don’t have any ground to stand on though, I’m just a poor little newbie who hammered an unCCd cop

[Prism]

Wrapping up..

Spoiler: marcistar

As I said on Day 1, loved everything about your start this game-the intentionality in putting yourself out there with a read that might be wrong, and leveraging that for reads and reactions out of others. You are developing into a stellar player, and I think the only point of feedback I have is something that you're already aware of: the level of activity afterwards. (I think the argument between myself and ProHawk likely sucked the air out of the room-but Day 2 on that was off the table)

Spoiler: Meg

I think I went indepth plenty on what you did right. I loved everything about your play Day 2 on. I still think the start this game was a bit shaky, and the progression around the end of the Day 1 wagons was underexplained and not too believable. This is really nitpicking, because everything I felt made you "obvious" wound up serving a very useful purpose (ex. Shaky reasoning on ProHawk implicated ProHawk after your flip), and I think that tradeoff wound up being well worth it.

I did think the fakehammer was a very nice stylistic touch to get townread if Greeting was a VT, but I think it backfired when Greeting claimed cop, both because it made you less likely to be a PR and more likely that Greeting's claim was legitimate. It should have been very difficult for you to cc at that point if needed.

Finally, I am very appreciate of the comments, dead PT discussion, and the feedback from Meuh.

This Newbie was a great source of joy for me, and I am deeply grateful that I got to play with all of you. Thank you all for playing with me, and I hope you had as much fun as I did.

[Greeting]

Thanks for your feedback,

Prism

.

But maybe calm down first please. You're clearly getting worked up and incredibly emotionally involved. Happens to all of us, and I've also been guilty of that. Not that I'm gaslighting you, but when we let emotions take over, logic and observation comes second.

Looks like I inadvertently predicted my own downfall. Posting this, little did I know,

I

would ultimately be the drama.

[Greeting]

I don’t really have much to say, to be fair the heated argument in the Dead Thread wore me out. But I can say that after Meuh hammered me and I found out that ProHawk wasn’t the second scum, I heavily suspected her due to their obvious „alliance” with MegAzumarill and the hammer itself.

[Greeting]

I almost forgot. Hopefully, after redactions, my notes PT will be published soon. Yes, this was real and I relied on it extensively when I still was in the game. The reason for me asking for one was... because I was Town Cop and I quickly figured out that I needed to keep tabs on everyone to make the best possible choices for investigation.

[Prism]

Hilariously, in my last game the Town Cop, RH9, also had a notes PT. This was part of why I pulled back at the end of Day 1.

It is also worth noting that I was able to pin down the near-exact timestamp of the time the linked private post was made, with a minute as the margin of error. This was at a time I thought it unlikely Datisi was online, and thought it was the scum PT accordingly.

I was barred by Datisi from speaking about the timestamp and its implications during the game, and understandably so.

[Prism]

(It was very reasonable for Datisi to be awake at the time it was made, but he had no public posts around that time, which is why I suspected it was a scum post within the thread)

[Greeting]

Regardless of whatever was the time I made the post with my reads, I think it would have been unlikely for any game host to intervene. It was my mistake and my job to answer for it and Datisi would have been in the wrong if they tried to clean up the mess. In my PT, it was clearly stated not to copy directly from it, a rule which I treated too lightly.

[RH9]

Hilariously, in my last game the Town Cop, RH9, also had a notes PT.

I only had one post there and that was the results of my investigations.

[Datisi]

everything should be public now.

with regards to the pt thing, fact that the post will link to the notes thread if you quote it from there is a somewhat well known thing, but it's unreasonable to assume that newcomers to the site would know about it. in my future newbie games, i will definitely point it out.

i was unsure on how to react when prism asked me on whether she can talk about the link and the timestamp, i hope my decision didn't end up causing the game further damage.

[Prism]

I do not think it did. I wound up not have much trouble making my point, and it was irrelevant by end of day. It was arguably arbitrary but I would say zero damage happened.

[Prism]

Very amused by the scum PT, and I always love to see a functional team succeed!

Reasonable concerns Day 1/2, good if scattered ideas Day 2, and finally a clear understanding of what was needed to win on Days 3/4 and how to get it. Excellent work.

[ProHawk]

I think there are a lot of takeaways from the nitty gritty of our fight, but I think we can skip them and focus on the bigger picture. I think the biggest miss was on Cape Day 2, the push that they were bussing really didn't make a lot of sense I think. Forcing the vote in 5 way ELO is generally just a bad play, throwing it away for free, and I think taking it one at a time (same issue was Cape) probably would have gone further. Pushing Meg as scum but not just...voting Meg, instead being very open to voting Cape "because they're bussing Meg", made it look like you were the one bussing.

Agreed.

MegAzu did a good job of shifting my focus. Thank you for the feedback.