Mini 1398 - Game Over!

[Alduskkel]

Post-Game Thoughts

Well, the Mafia kind of imploded in this game. It would have literally been a PERFECT town win if absta had only killed iamausername Night 1 instead of Disturbed_One. Speaking of which, here are the Night Actions:

Night 1
absta101 kills Disturbed_One (successful)
Bacde kills Jabberwock (unsuccessful)
ICEninja protects Jabberwock (successful)

Night 2
absta101 kills iamausername (successful)
iamausername kills ICEninja (successful)
ICEninja protects Nachomamma8 (no effect)

Shamrock would have been up for replacement less than 6 hours after he was lynched. He never picked up his prod, either. Game could have gone a lot differently if he had been replaced. He was scummy in his own right, however.

Bacde's claim was kind of ridiculous. If I hadn't included a Doctor though, it might have let him live to the Day before lylo, considering how ballsy it was. In hindsight, claiming VT and taking the lynch would have been best -- let Shamrock be replaced with someone who will steer the lynch elsewhere.

iamausername didn't play badly but he didn't play very townily either -- he did get vigged, after all. Winning was always going to be difficult for him after the Shamrock lynch.

ICEninja sent me this in his protection PM on night 2:

Is it sad that town as lynched scum 2 days in a row, and it was still sub-optimal play of me? Haha!

I wanted to reply, but I didn't want to interfere in any way with the game. So I just wrote down my response in Word, to be posted now:

I don't know what exactly was "optimal" play for you. Giving the town closure on Bacde isn't a bad thing, but it'll be difficult to see the effects of that, since it's all subjective and we have no alternative universe where you didn't claim to compare it to.

Anyway, this was a pretty interesting game to mod. Setup didn't play too much of a role, but that's fine, that just means that the Day game prevailed.

Feel free to comment on my modding and the setup. This was the first setup I actually designed myself, so any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks for playing! My congratulations to the Town and my condolences to the Mafia.

[Tierce]

(01:26:56) Tierce: You know what I've realized? ICEninja's vig rationale. And it could work. Imagine Bacde tried to kill us last Night

[Night 1]

. He would have been tracked to us, which makes a BG-protection claim on us pretty handy. ICEninja saved our life and Disturbed was vigged.
(01:27:25) Empire: I will be very sad if Disturbed was vigged
(01:28:05) Tierce: Yeah, but it does make more sense than scum kill.

Happy Wondercritter is happy. Also, I have a large Jabberwock plush. We'll see about getting a photo of it to celebrate this game.

[Alduskkel]

Ha, if I had included a Tracker or a Watcher that would have worked out hilariously. From the Mafia QT, though, you can see that such a result would have been completely accidental. I think they were just hoping that I hadn't included a protective role at all.

[Alduskkel]

good work absta
sorry for suspecting you

Little confused by this, considering I hadn't yet revealed absta101 to be a Vigilante. What exactly did he do that was good work (that warranted being specifically referred to)?

[Nachomamma8]

I figured he was vig for his chit chat with jabberwock at the end of the day yesterday after I saw the night's results.

[Tierce]

then if i'm still alive in the morning i'm going to propose that everyone agrees that Jabberwock is town and that obviously there is a vig around and therefore we should just lynch and vig people until Jabberwock and the vig are the only two left alive and town wins

and hope i can kill the vig before they kill me

and bluff my way through SEVERAL DAYS WITH JABBERWOCK RIGHT THERE, ACTUALLY PAYING ATTENTION TO MY SCUMMY POSTS

(^w^)

[jmo16mla]

Yayyyy!

I was actually ready to defend my townieness after Robs case on me, regarding me and bacades interaction after he flipped scum.

I admit, i kinda lurked through this game. Ive never played in a game this big and it was kinda hard to read everyone. My finals didnt really help much either.

I'm glad I was right about Iam though. Like I said. For him to agree with a couple cases the way he did, it just felt off to me considering they were bad cases and that he has played quite a number of games.

Finally, a win!

[Bacde]

Sorry to my team! This was my first time playing as scum on forum mafia--I learned a lot and am ready for the next time I play! I hope you guys had a great time easily finding us

[Bacde]

BTW I am pretty much the reason that my team lost. Not that everyone didn't already know that though.

[Nachomamma8]

I think Jabberwock might be the reason your team lost. I thought you did an excellent job deflecting my pressure; I was pretty sure I had you pegged as scum for a while, but you stubbornly calling me scum for forever was giving me doubt until Jabber replaced in and renewed the fire. But then you claimed bodyguard, threw me off again, and I wasn't really much use after that.

[Bacde]

Jabberwock definitely intimidated me. Thats probably part of the reason I panicked.

[Tierce]

Not really, Bacde. It wasn't a bad claim; any claim that has the potential to be believed and/or draw out actual PRs may be worth a shot, if you are doomed anyway. Where it comes to team play/connections, the major red flag was the hop onto Shamrock, because it didn't make sense for Bacde-Town to single out one person out of the lurker set. Shamrock and iaaun were scummy by themselves without a lot of incriminating connections, so don't feel too bad about it.

As for being intimidated, well, we are an adorable critter with a Santa hat. We just so happen to like ketchup and you were

right there

.


Our hydra played well and this was a great experience (and damn, it feels good to lynch scum off correct reads). The vast majority of the posts were mine, since Empire was busy, but we kept discussing things between us.

We were

not

planning to replace into the Dire_Drenz slot--we loathe playing scum, so we were waiting for a slot on which we had a Townread to replace out. Alduskkel misunderstood our "we're interested in your game, are hydras allowed?" PMs and ended up sending us an unexpected role PM. Thank goodness no one who replaced out was scum. >.>


Rob's cases were bad. :/ Don't try to

portray behavior as scummy

, try to

figure out if motivations are scummy

. It's a world of difference in the quality of your scumhunting

and

how your cases are perceived. You don't want to play

just

to look Town, but you'll want to make sure your case doesn't read like a case that would be made by scum.

I'm happy that I correctly pinned jmo as someone who was overwhelmed by the game. Been there. It takes some practice--if a 13p game is too much for you, try smaller games from the Open queue or stick with Micros for a while. It's better than trying to wade through 13 players + replacements, and you'll eventually get the hang of it.

[jmo16mla]

Bacade i was really suspicious of your constant interaction and buddying with me. Any time i said something, it felt like you always replied. then if someone questioned my towniness, you would back me up.

Was that a plan of yours? or did it just happen?

edit: Tierce, I usually just stick with micros but I'd give a Mini a try. I'l definitely continue playing.

[Rob14]

I was next to useless in this game, and I think it was because I replaced in. For right now, I don't think I'm good at doing that. Even without replacing in, I'm a stubborn person. When I'm there from the start, though, people can tell me when my ideas are stupid right when they're starting so that I can look in other directions. Without being here for people to critique my reads, I developed reads and started thinking that my scum reads were looking scummy no matter what they posted. Since I did this all at once with no feedback (catching up at night), no one was around to tell me I was seeing things that weren't there. I didn't even realize how retarded my catch-up post was until people started saying that a lot of it was just me calling people scum and not pointing anything out to support it. Many times, when I looked back at the posts I thought were super-scummy, I didn't see anything scummy in those posts at all and was confused how my tunneling self had in the first place.

tl;dr: I'm a stubborn asshole and it makes me bad at replacing into games. At least for now. I'll work on it.

P-edit: @Tierce - I don't understand that distinction. My thinking is that anything that has a town motivation has a scum motivation (i.e. to look like town), so I guess I don't see how you can extract the two. Care to explain that a bit more?

[Bacde]

Bacade i was really suspicious of your constant interaction and buddying with me. Any time i said something, it felt like you always replied. then if someone questioned my towniness, you would back me up.

Was that a plan of yours? or did it just happen?

edit: Tierce, I usually just stick with micros but I'd give a Mini a try. I'l definitely continue playing.

definitely just sorta happened and was not a plan. I really had to back up my not setting up for mislynches with the jmo/disturbed interaction

[Tierce]

P-edit: @Tierce - I don't understand that distinction. My thinking is that anything that has a town motivation has a scum motivation (i.e. to look like town), so I guess I don't see how you can extract the two. Care to explain that a bit more?

Go through the Mafia Discussion forums. Read articles by established players. Town and scum have different goals, and therefore will have different motivations. Yes, scum want to look Town, but they also need to push mislynches through sooner or later, or they need to bus their buddies convincingly. Town will push mislynches accidentally, but scum (at least outside of multiball)

know

when they are pushing a mislynch. You shouldn't go after someone because you think (or have proof) that their reads are wrong--but you should put yourself in their place and think if their reads make

sense

from a Town perspective.

This is one of the reasons that meta is so useful. Not to go "this player is playing differently from game A and he was Town there, therefore he must be scum here!", but to get inside the player's head and learn how they think. To understand what kind of reads they usually have as Town and as scum, how they rationalize events, how they act. You need to learn their playstyle, and know what is alignment-null instead of alignment-relevant--it varies from person to person. Empire and I are both very grounded on logic and meta; if we are pushing cases on gut alone, something is off--you'd need to figure out

what

and, most importantly,

why

it is off. That

why

is the

motivation

part.

Going through an ISO and dissecting it post by post to call out scummy

behavior

won't get you scum lynches, at least more often than random. Scum know how to

behave

like Town--after all, they have more information than you do. (Yes, they might slip, but Town will also unknowingly 'scum-slip' because they usually have no idea what they are doing.) When you say "I'm going to make a case on X", you're already going in with a preconceived notion that X is scum without combing for motivation.

In short, when you are trying to read someone's alignment, one of the best ways of doing it (in my opinion, obviously) is to gather information about that person and then go through their posts (never forget to check their play in context; ISOs are not enough because they strip away everything else that is happening around a person and that they may be willfully ignoring). Do their reads make sense from an uninformed Town point of view? Does their reasoning match their mindset? Do their reads and votes flow naturally at each point in the game, or are there awkward jumps that don't seem to match their expressed train of thought? Do they look like they are behaving in an opportunistic way that does not match their playstyle elsewhere? Are they arguing to figure out alignments, or are they just making noise for the sake of it?

No method is flawless, and some people

will

have scummy playstyles. For example: in my opinion, MagnaofIllusion and Thor665 are infamous for arguing pointlessly; a 'pointless argument' is defined here as 'an argument you don't drop even after you have reached a conclusion on that person's alignment'. This is why you should have a variety of questions you ask yourself when reading someone--those I listed on the previous paragraph should help you start; a little practice and knowledge of your fellow players goes a long way when learning to read alignments.

Read finished games without checking the alignments on the first post beforehand. Those are great for training. Yes, it's a lot of work, but no one said that being Town is a cakewalk.

[ICEninja]

Well, OK cool. I felt it in my gut that we had a vig, but that's exactly why I wanted to lynch Bacde's partner and let the vig deal with Bacde tonight.

I must admit I felt a little miffed that town decided to lynch Bacde haha! I wanted to be on the wagon that took him down.

Anyways some thoughts on the game:
-Tierce hydras win games. Especially when the doctor saves them N1
-Bacde's claim was great, TBH. The fact that you claimed bodyguard and NOT doctor prevented me from forcing the lynch down your throat day 1, as I had to really mull it over before coming to the conclusion that you couldn't possibly be a real bodyguard. The reasons I presented in my case against you were genuinely valid reasons why it was a perfectly fine claim for you to make in playing to your win condition. In your situation I would have personally claimed cop (and you would have gotten lucky, too, being that no cop would have CCed you, and you could have lived longer, especially since there scum didn't kill day 2 and the vig claim would have made it believable that scum attempted to kill you but didn't).
-Shamrock being scum was a little lucky for us, but the case on him was fairly solid. Had he been replaced out, this game would have certainly gone differently. Bacde would have still been on the chopping block, but a solid replacement would have done wonders for the scum team.
-I had no scum read on iam. Pity for you I was the doctor and absta was the vig, I would have absolutely killed Melmond. I still feel my case against Melmond was pretty good, actually, even after knowing I was wrong.
-The modding was great. I gave Alduskkel a golden star for how promptly he issued prods and replaced inactives. 10/10 would play in his game again.
-The setup seems slightly 90% balanced with a slight benefit to scum (though VERY slight), as they have the nice option to bus the shit out of their enabler and gain a shred of town cred (not much, but something) while disabling a town PR.
-The setup feels a little boring, though. Doctor is my least favorite roll ever (encourages lurking, which you will never ever see me do unless I'm genuinely too busy to be playing mafia), and 2 of the other non-basic roles had no active night action. Not that this is a terrible thing, but the game is for the most part heavy on the goons vs VTs and is largely won or lost by the day game with a little swing from the vig.
-I feel satisfied with my play. I got so many town reads so I started throwing out cases left and right and went guns blazing in hopes that I would get a few people calling me scum to survive the night.

[Mirhawk]

Well that turned out pretty good. Afraid I didn't contribute too much but that turned out to unimportant in the long run. I've never seen a innocent child in a game before so I wasn't really sure what to do with it. I figured Just to keep it under wraps for as long as possible and use it to provide a confirmed townie in the endgame.

I wasn't very surprised by bacde's flip. Though I have to say I was taken off guard by how quickly his wagon piled up. Pretty much three hours first vote to last vote.

I really didn't think iamausername was scum though. I initially thought his points were kinda strange, but then someone said that was normal for him and I'm afraid I accepted that at face value.

Props to Jabberwock, that was well played. ICE and abasta did nicely with their PR's as well.

[Mirhawk]

As a side note I don't think that the bodyguard claim was a very good one to make. It was unconventional and by virtue of that alone was able to survive one further day. But it also pretty much comes with a built in deadline for your death. I think it would have been a better claim for say the enabler. That way you still get to take down a PR with you when you are eventually lynched.

[Tierce]

Shamrock

has

been online. Maybe not in the last 48 hours, but I know he was online in time to watch our Post 307. That was L-1, and he didn't see fit to post anything afterward.

I found it weird that nobody called me out on this. I am probably one of the few people that had proof Shamrock had been online, but I wouldn't have been able to justify this at the time.

What happened is that, after post 307, Shamrock sent Sixty a PM confirmation for his ehobanowoof role PM. I couldn't have provided this evidence because that game was still ongoing, but he had necessarily been online to do so. Then he didn't pick up the Day Start or the Death PMs, which told me he had siteflaked, but that didn't excuse not participating in this game at L-1 if he were Town.

[Alduskkel]

Happy scumday, Ice.

IIRC I intended the Doctor to potentially counter one of the two kills. Essentially, both townish town and townish scum (if the Vigilante randomly suspects them) are rewarded. The setup was potentially a bit kill happy, so I figured throwing in a protective role would be good.

As for the setup being kind of "vanilla" well I don't see that as a bad thing. Games don't need to be busy with power roles.

[ICEninja]

Thank you! =D

Don't worry I totally see the logic of everything. I just hate being the doctor LOL had I been any other role I would have loved this setup.

And I had a great time stomping scum (sorry guys!) all the same.

[Cheery Dog]

I think it was an interesting setup, and from two recent normals they did have body guards, I thought body guard must have been am in thing, though I did only know about one of then when bacde claimed.

I didn't really se iama as that individually scummy, but I did see association tells, as highlighted when I voted him.

@rob, that's pretty much why when I replaced in I didn't comment on stuff.
I think your ny 159 cases you made were better than here, but then I think I actually only paid attention to part of those where where there was scum motivation.

More scum deaths than town deaths always makes me happy. (though I'm sad that one out the dead town was caused by town, but I can't really fault that as if I was the vig my shot probably would have gone there)

[Empire]

Thanks for letting us replace in Alduskkel! Had a great time hydra'ing with you, Tierce, though I wish I hadn't been as busy with final exams and stuff so I'd post more but it was a blast bouncing ideas off you.

I came into this day ready with a set of townreads that should never be lynched:

TOWN (S->W):

ICEninja, Mirhawk, Nacho, Cheery Dog, jmo, absta

Would have left a pool of {Rob13, Melmond, iamausername}. Scumread after iaaun after his Mirhawk case because I felt a lot of elements to it were reaching but it wasn't a particularly strong lean. Might have gone for Melmond today but Tierce and I were talking about how Bacde's last actions were WIFOM meant to incriminate Melmond as his partner soooo...

All in all, fun game.

[Melmond]

GG guys
Didn't even go into day 3