Okay we might be hitting that post count limit because I am immediately disregarding my own fucking stance of only engaging if I feel I have to or if directly asked to directly do so.
In post 298, Frogsterking wrote:I don't know mastina well enough to know if they are unwilling to learn from past mistakes.
I do learn! But I don't have eidetic memory. Simply put, I haven't played with you enough to have a good foundation for you. A single, minor, past mistake that was mostly not notable in part for how shortly it lasted, ain't gonna magically make me able to know you.
I was dayvigged early into TFT uPick and while I thought you scum even from the grave initially, my stance there shifted and was ultimately irrelevant given you died shortly after me anyway.
I didn't get a chance to properly have a wrong push on you. And I learn from
pushes
I perform, not from reads made from a distance. While I was keeping up with TFT from the dead, and trying to solve up to a point, my lack of ability to actually push/engage the town/etc. means that simply put: I have no memory of what happened that game. (I have shit memory on the best of days tbh.)
It's only when I have something very strong happen that things become memorable. Memorably getting a read wrong, memorably getting a read right, both of those I remember and learn from and my mistakes are learned from those.
But simply put:
You were forgettable.
You aren't nearly as memorable as you seem to think you are.
Maybe you can become so, but so far, you hadn't been.
You're not the only one who can link to mafia theory, mate.
Take a look at here and see how many of those I wrote.
And how many I wrote on townplay.
It's a lot of them.
Now, granted.
I've always been insistent on "do as I say, not as I do"; if I listened to all of my own MD advice I'd be a far better player than I actually am.
It's hard for me to actually do the things I say you should do as town, so I can't pull them off.
Also granted!
The articles are all fairly old--while I say they are largely timeless, not all of their advice is applicable. Much of it is cyclical, depending on the current town meta. And there's some that's just outright outdated. Plus, many were poorly written, with a few that are memes, and the ideas behind them were never properly fleshed out.
And, granted!
My philosophy as a player has shifted a lot;
my current philosophy is the philosophy of the "push strongly, and never stop pushing"--I never wrote my article on this, but it is essentially what I call "the ideal of mastina", which is the idea that by me being me, making exaggerated pushes of high strength and pushing them hard, it is pro-town even, or arguably especially, when I am wrong, because those engagements generate content that make it harder for the scum to win the game.
That short-term, you might get TvT fights and even eliminate town who arguably should not have been eliminated, but that the process of the hard push still guides the game in a direction that is highly, innately, pro-town. That, counterintuitive as it seems, all those strong TvT pushes actually make it easier for the town to win, because when handled appropriately, it allows for the town to form proper information networks where the revelation of the alignments involved in certain areas basically blows the entire game wide open. Where once one or two key players have their alignment revealed, the previous hard pushes spew the entire game's players' alignments.
That philosophy is one which, objectively, is inferior to a more objective/reasonable/logical approach.
But, somehow, it still produces good results. Even--and arguably,
especially
when I am wrong--the strong pushes I make can help make the town at some point just
click
, in ways that make it hard for scum to win.
It might seem arrogant to say that a strong wrong push from me helps the town more than a more reserved right push would--but I strongly and firmly believe that, by and large, it DOES. I am okay with being the player with the worst reads in the game; I am okay with, in spite of having terrible reads, believing that my reads are great and pushing off of that. I am okay with not getting the credit for what I did; I am okay with players believing that the town won in spite of me, not because of me.
But, while the town might think that my strong pushes on town mean that they won in spite of me not because of me, I genuinely believe that those wrong pushes actually ARE vital to the town's wins in those games. It is usually not in the most obvious of ways. For instance, in Datisi's cafe I was wrong on basically everything. But I still feel my pushes were vital to the town's win there. Ydrasse became conftown by guiltying Titus in a way she could not have achieved otherwise.
I managed to force fireisredsir to lock in a claim that eventually got him killed by the serial killer--he very much didn't want to make that claim, but felt forced into making it off of my push that I had a guilty on him. And it got him killed, which in turn eliminated the last groupscum from the game, making furtiveglance be boxed in.
I managed to get nightkilled by fireisredsir, and the nightkill on me looked like it was made by furtiveglance, which helped get furtiveglance eliminated in the end.
And beyond that, Dannflor was one of the final candidates for being a final scum, but I feel like Dannflor was seen as more town in part because of the way he had handled things the entire game, which I was a significant contribution to; Dannflor was forced to put up with my bullshit, and the way that Dannflor dealt with my bullshit didn't just spew him as not groupscum but also spewed him as being just town.
Among others.
Could the town have still won without all of that? Well, being honest with myself: yeah, probably. These things might've still happened without my strong wrong pushes. But we can never really know what would have happened without the strong pushes, what we know is what happened with the strong pushes and the town won that game with those things being contributing factors to it. The town from there will probably say it was in spite of me not because of me and that I am delusional for saying what I did helped them win. And I am okay with that, because I am at peace with the flaws behind my chosen current philosophy of play.
I will always need to acknowledge all the areas I fuck up in. I make it a point to, unless I am explaining this philosophy like I am right now, not actually claim credit for the things, even if I feel like credit should be given for the effect I have on games. I am a facilitator of activity. I am an amplifier of activity.
Games are more active with me in them, than with me not in them. (Most of the record-breaking games have me in them, and that is not a coincidence.) In spite of me never being the top poster in them! I'm usually barely in the top-50%, in the ~25-33% range. There's like 5-8 players whose activity exceeds mine in games. Yet every game in which I die in, there is an IMMEDIATE drop in activity the next phase. Literally every single game I am in.
I don't think that's coincidence. You'd expect drops in activity when there are less players alive in any game, but in games I am in where I live, game activity really
does
seem to mostly stay constant in spite of the dwindling number of living players--until the phase I die. After which, it plummets off a cliff. And I don't think it's arrogance to say that's a direct result of my presence in the game and the affect having me around and pushing has on player activity. I make people post more, I make them engage more, just by living to the mastina ideal.
I'm aware it won't be appreciated by the players. I'm aware they see me as annoying, frustrating, and anti-town. Delusional. Arrogant. I am aware they think I deserve no credit for their wins, that they believe the town won in spite of me. I am aware I need to constantly acknowledge all of my fuckups and that I have very little in the way of tangible definitive proof that demonstrates that I did actually help the town. The only way there would ever be proof of me being right would be if we could view alternative realities where I didn't do what I did and see how the town fared in those games compared to the one in our reality. Since that's impossible, my value to towns is speculative. I speculate it is tangibly a notably good thing, just not a thing I can point to being good. So I recognize that others who believe my speculation to be wrong, will think that I am less than worthless. That my prior articles had a superior playstyle, that what I was doing in the old days was more effective and that the current mastina is just trash that drags games down.
But I stick by my beliefs in the philosophy of conviction. I have conviction in my conviction.
ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY,
You can link to your own MD theory, but so can I.
On D1, especially this early, there
is
no established townbloc to be paranoid of. There IS no establishment of how the town are acting and how the scum are acting. There isn't any idea of what the town are doing and what the scum are doing. So there is no reason to not speak openly about your thoughts.
If this were D3 and the town was doing well and you were a large contributing factor to that, Frogsterking, you would be quite correct; saying "I think Frogsterking is bussing" would be actively harmful to the game.
But it is not D3 with the town doing well.
It is D1 with the game still early.
And,
You explicitly pivoted
away
from Flavia.
You pivoted away from voting the read that I think is right,
Onto a read that is more of a tossup and a less surefire thing that I currently lean town on (albeit weakly so).
Objectively, why
shouldn't
I think your Flavia push was distancing?
You literally wrote up a case for why Flavia is scum, and
abandoned
the case to chase after Passenger instead.
Your entire argument would be valid if you were still actively pushing Flavia, but you are actively pushing AWAY from Flavia.
That means that, actually, yes.
You DO look like scum distancing.
In post 298, Frogsterking wrote:Yes mastina, gogo, get that scummy frog. If I post a case it's because I'm bussing and know it will make me look good, if I don't post a case it's because I'm scum who hasn't thought about my reads. Excellent deductions.
This would be valid if you actually stuck to Flavia and/or we were later into the game.
But to reiterate.
We are in the early stages of D1.
And you pivoted away from the Flavia case you wrote.
Why shouldn't I, with my suspicion of Flavia, think that you writing a good case on Flavia and then discarding it when Flavia is gaining momentum to push elsewhere, is you distancing Flavia but avoiding committing to the hard bus?
What makes that be an unreasonable and paranoia-based conclusion? That you know your alignment and know it's not true?
Well newsflash, I don't, so I am going to call it like I see it.
Could you be town who simply decided to focus elsewhere?
Well, yes!
But there's no reason for you to get over-defensive about the callout which, contrary to your assertions, is actually a perfectly reasonable one to make in this gamestate.
-mastina
(gotta go, I know there's more recent posts but I wasn't meant to make even this one but I couldn't not comment on it, sorry)
