Mini normal 1823 dead thread

[Zyf]

Town is basically random guessing it seems. Also I'm fine w openly spoiling at this point it's MYLO and no one has been super interested in flowing along unspoiled.

HOW THE FUCK DO THEY NOT KNOW MY GOD

[mhsmith0]

The team as a whole isn't obvious but Sonia openly scum-hammered a pr, had a ridiculous fake claim and non-sensical use of it, and has just generally been off. Her not getting vigged was sub-optimal and surviving the game would just be lol town.

[gerryoat]

This town is literally garbage. You'd think they'd sheep the person who plays with sonia the most.

[mhsmith0]

I bet no one will bother looking at Sonia's d2 posts to see if what she said was at all consistent w an inno on xk.

[Zyf]

I bet no one will bother looking at Sonia's d2 posts to see if what she said was at all consistent w an inno on xk.

nope
because this town is fucking stupid and inactive
GOD DAMN
like I'm not even watching the game it's disgusting how wrecked they are at this point
and the sad part is that I was 2/4 on the scum and with what sonia did i would have definitely fucked sonia up too
aka I would have won the game
FML

[mastin2]

And btw, Zyf, don't feel bad about scum reading me. I was performing the Slayer's Gambit but it didn't work out like I really wanted.

While Slayer (the player the gambit is named for) beat me to it, as a former user of the gambit I can tell you: the problem with the gambit is always exactly that--you never get the information you were hoping for.

What differentiates scum taking advantage of you from town going after someone they see as justifiably scummy?
Furthermore, what differentiates you being town using the gambit from you being scum using the excuse of the gambit to justify bad play?

If you don't have the skills necessary to discern the first, the gambit is useless. Even if you DO, then you absolutely

require

the charisma to convince the town that

not only

are you not scum, BUT ALSO that you are not OMGUSing with regards to your suspects that jump on you. You need to be able to explain to them that those players are scum because of these key factors, these key differences, you have picked up on.

In short: to pull the gambit off and have it actually work, what you need is the ability to see something only a small fraction of users can see in the first place, and THEN you need to have the language skills necessary to show this to users who

can't

see it. And as you might be able to guess, virtually nobody possesses both.

[mhsmith0]

The town isn't really doing the things it needs in order to win. Post game probably everyone blames texcat but honestly this was a collective failure. Wolves had a great day one but I think after that point it was more town failure than wolf success.

[mhsmith0]

Btw, as so wine who recently had a game long tunnel on someone else who was trying the gambit (among other issues) I can tell you that this is HARD to tell accurately.

[mastin2]

(God, for someone who stopped playing mafia and is out of touch with the current meta, I seem to still be good at giving lectures like this. I'd IC if not for the fact that ICing requires me to play the game in the first place, and that it's an obligation to teach rather than a pastime. The difference there being important: teaching obligations I almost never complete, but pastime teachings I almost always do. But I digress. My point is, it seems like a lot of newer players are forgetting the lessons that once were commonplace to the point where my teachings which used to not be needed because every player knew them already now sound actually

competent

because the new wave of players astonishingly don't. Some of these are dated, some of these are jokes, but others still hold true. I can tell you which are which if you ask.)

[Zyf]

The town isn't really doing the things it needs in order to win. Post game probably everyone blames texcat but honestly this was a collective failure. Wolves had a great day one but I think after that point it was more town failure than wolf success.

^^^^
btw has everyone read spoilers?
just wondering

[Saru]

And btw, Zyf, don't feel bad about scum reading me. I was performing the Slayer's Gambit but it didn't work out like I really wanted.

While Slayer (the player the gambit is named for) beat me to it, as a former user of the gambit I can tell you: the problem with the gambit is always exactly that--you never get the information you were hoping for.

What differentiates scum taking advantage of you from town going after someone they see as justifiably scummy?
Furthermore, what differentiates you being town using the gambit from you being scum using the excuse of the gambit to justify bad play?

If you don't have the skills necessary to discern the first, the gambit is useless. Even if you DO, then you absolutely

require

the charisma to convince the town that

not only

are you not scum, BUT ALSO that you are not OMGUSing with regards to your suspects that jump on you. You need to be able to explain to them that those players are scum because of these key factors, these key differences, you have picked up on.

In short: to pull the gambit off and have it actually work, what you need is the ability to see something only a small fraction of users can see in the first place, and THEN you need to have the language skills necessary to show this to users who

can't

see it. And as you might be able to guess, virtually nobody possesses both.

Yeah, I figured all this out afterwards. I guess I just wanted to spice up my VT role pm lol. I was legit disheartened when I found out I was VT because I love being scum and HATE being town with a passion. To not only be town but be a vanilla version, I wanted to cry. I'm a selfish little bastard.

By the way, I'm happy you replied to me, because I'm a huge fan by the way of your academy and some of the stuff you've written in the wiki. While I don't follow everything word for word and don't always agree, I just love reading over it when I feel like I'm in a ditch as town(which I am 99.9% of the time) to make myself feel better lmfao. You might not think your lectures mean anything, but trust me, there are people like me who are reading them and appreciating them for what they are, so thanks for that!

[Zyf]

Mafia Psychology: Identifying the difference between scummy town and actual scum

by Mastin2

Spoiler: Part 1

The key isn't to look at actions.
Scum do town stuff a lot, and only rarely do scum stuff.
Town to scum stuff all the time, and only a fraction of the time can you see them do townposting that makes you think they are assuredly town.

Actions, in short, are useless: they're first-level play, so to speak.

Mafia is, at its core, a game of psychology. It is not a game with mathematical answers. You can game setups by using math, sure: crunch the numbers, find the probabilities, figure out which claims are more likely, and whatnot, but that only applies to PR claims when they pop up. So, the ability to use hard-defined limits in a game is incredibly-limited. It has its place, but usually is not what you need.

What you need is to look behind the action. What is the player going through? If the player is compromised in some fashion, their play is going to be erratic. This applies regardless of the three types: emotional, physical, or mental. If someone is mentally compromised, what that basically means is that they are barely functioning. If someone is physically compromised, it means that something in real-life is preventing them from being able to give something the same level of critical thought that they normally would. If someone is emotionally compromised, they are in a state where regardless of their alignment they are going to have some severe mood swings.

Now, there's an art to reading those things. First is to check sitewide activity: are those things influencing everywhere, or just one place? Now, this is NOT a check to see if they're lying. Nobody ever lies about being compromised and if you so much as think as much you're probably a worse scumbag than any of the scum players. This is a check to see how their compromised state affects them elsewhere. If, across all games, you see the exact same pattern emerging, then the chances are, the compromised state cannot be read as alignment-indicative. If, across all games, you see the same pattern, but there are little oddities here and there, reading it MAY be possible, but is an advanced-level skill. If, across all games, you see vastly different responses, then this is not necessarily a sign that you can read their compromised state...but what it DOES tell you, is this vital piece of information:
How they are compromised IS in fact influenced by the situation at hand. This is not necessarily alignment-indicative; two town games can have vastly different circumstances which lead to different effects. Same for two scum games. A town game might look identical to a scum game as well if the circumstances within that game are similar enough.

But, while not alignment-indicative, it tells you that you can prod and poke the player in question and figure out what lies beneath, even in their compromised state, and that you can find useful info there. This is where checking other games stops being useful (you can't exactly meta from ongoing games anyway), but if you've gotten this far, they've served their purpose: they tell you what to look for.

Now that you know what the player has gone through, the next step is to look at how it has influenced them in the current game with the current circumstances. Read not what they are doing, but why they are doing it: is the action born of a scum player pushing a clear agenda, or is the action scattered, without a clear, defined pattern? Scum can obfuscate stupidity all they want, but when they do so, they still are pushing for a specific cause, a specific reason. Town, on the other hand, when erratic...will not have a clear idea of what they are aiming for.

Furthermore, there's a difference between town contradictions and scum contradictions, and contradictions that are just the player not remembering. Town contradictions spawn from poor memory: they push for something, forget about it, and then later, push something else which contradicts what they said before. Scum contradictions spawn from a changed agenda. They push for something, and then, when it is convenient for them to push for something else, they start pushing there instead. This difference is hard to pick up, but vital. Then there are contradictions that exist purely because the passage of time is a harsh mistress. In these cases, the only alignment-indicative things are hard facts which contradict things. "I investigated this player N2"-->"I got no result N2" would be an example (albeit unlikely and extreme) of a scum contradiction.

Even there, you need player psychology: dig into the player's history. Are they someone who works off of memory a lot? Or are they someone who religiously checks their results to ensure accuracy? If the former, then ask yourself: how important was the piece of information to the person giving it? Was it just something that they saw and then wrote off, or was it something absolutely vital to them? This makes the difference between derptown and derpscum: derptown may forget small pieces of information that they wrote off and misremember the details until they check. Derpscum are more likely to forget larger details that were key events in the game.

But even there, you need to be careful. Scum tend to be more meticulous about the details, whereas town are more reckless. The above will catch more reckless scum and help clear more idiotic town, but what you need to be aware of is the other side: if you've got a player whose psychology is meticulous attention to detail, then as scum, their story is going to be flawless, or near-flawless. If that same player has a story that has some issues, then ironically enough, it's more likely for them to be town. What you need there is to look at their presented argument from THEIR point of view: in both cases, they should be presenting something they think is a flawless argument. As scum, because they designed it without any holes, and as town, because they know they are town and therefore they KNOW their argument is real by default. So, when examining the arguments, the one which has a few holes that the player making it won't see is more likely to be town than the one which has no holes.

This, because the scum player's argument isn't made from their perspective. They're making an argument to fool other players, so they are thinking like those other players and trying to present facts in a favorable light to those other players; the town player's argument is made from their perspective, because they are presenting the facts as they know them.

I realize this is complex, and highly circumstantial. Following the above, I'm basically telling you to half of the time side with the flawed argument, and the other half of the time, side with the less-flawed argument. But that's the thing about mafia: it's not universal. There IS no universal procedure. You need to adapt. You need to be able to identify what you're up against, and then from this profile, figure out what the most likely options are.

When it comes to the higher-level players, they do this instinctively. For instance, I've played enough games that I can flash-profile a player just on a few select details. If I have previous game experience with them, I'll have a better profile on them (this is the CORRECT way to use meta, where you're doing it to establish a profile on them rather than as an analytical facts-of-them approach that so many flawed meta users try), but I can do it even without that prior-game experience. What kind of avatar they have, what kind of sig they have, the way they speak, and most importantly, what they say and when.

That tells me what they are, and once I know what they are, I have a fair idea of what they're doing, which is why I'm able to call out players as "town" or "scum" so early-on with seemingly no evidence at all: because in their actions which THEY think are meaningless, I've assigned meaning to.

tl;dr:
Don't use meta to establish facts. "They do this as town, but this as scum." That is wrong. That is thinking of the game in terms of math, in terms of statistics.
Use meta to establish profiles. "They think like this." That's thinking of the game in terms of psychology.

Spoiler: Further Reading

Some further reading:
this post of mine is focused on me, but it actually covers a lot of the above, and can be turned into some general practices in psychological profiling and reading of players.

To wit,
Town players don't know what's going on, whereas scum players (barring multiball and even then) do.
Town players' actions will generally show some consistent trends, but the most consistent trend of all is how they'll lack clear consistency: they'll have patterns here and there, but for the most part, they'll be prodding around everywhere. This is because

every

town player, universally, has their own method of throwing mud on the wall and seeing what sticks, but they have no idea what will or won't stick.

Scum players' actions will occasionally have inconsistencies, but the most consistent trend will be how they'll lack inconsistency. Some scum players will have wild contradictions here and there, but for the most part, their reads will evolve in a suspiciously-consistent, suspiciously-logical, suspiciously-perfect way, with no leap in logic at all. Of course, player psychology comes into play here. There's a difference between someone like fferyllt giving reads and someone like Titus giving reads and someone like MS Marangal giving reads and Malakittens giving reads and me giving reads and, say, Klingoncelt giving reads. Some are methodical even as town. But this is a helpful general pointer, to look at how smooth the transitions are.

To put it in math terms: Think of reads in term of a graph, on which you're mapping their progression. If you see a dead-straight line in a reads trajectory (as in, you draw a perfect line, and it matches perfectly), it should raise a red flag. If you try to draw a straight line and you see all these points EVERYWHERE that are off the line, it might raise a red flag. (In short, either your line is off, or theirs is.) If you draw a line, and there are small points that diverge up and down from the line, you've got a more natural reads progression, because in real-life, statistics are used in that manner: they'll show general progressions, general trends, a general prediction, but the data for the actual event won't line up perfectly. Just close, with the occasional extreme deviant off of unforeseeable divergences.

Town players, generally, don't think they need allies, so will be more likely to alienate a player; scum players, generally, will be catering to specific town players in order to get their aid. However, town players do seek allies, and scum do alienate players, it's just you need to look at the how and the why: a town player seeking an ally is doing so because they have conviction: "Dude. That player is scum. DUDE. TRUST ME. THAT PLAYER IS SCUM. Jesus, dude, how many times do I have to tell you! Please, help me. That player is scum. Work with me, you idiot." A scum player seeking an ally is doing so because they want to form a long-term plan.

A town player antagonizing someone is doing so because they don't care. A scum player antagonizing a player is doing so to strategically cut ties to that player: attempt to make their conflict look Town-town, attempt to paint the other player as scum, a self-defense mechanism to not look bad themselves, stuff like that. They are antagonizing a player to intentionally build frustration levels, because frustration levels allow scum to manipulate emotions better.

Looking for who wants to find scum, versus who wants to just lynch a player, is a good helpful pointer to. Town hold interest in lynching scum, specifically, and only scum. Scum hold interest in lynching, period, just as long as it ends the day and gets the game into the night where they hold control. Related, who is trying to look town? Town players shouldn't be trying to look town; they should be trying to find scum. A player trying to look town is trying to avoid the noose, something which has a far more scum-oriented mindset.

You also have to look for who is defending who, and why, and just as importantly: when a player

isn't

being defended. Scum have other scum, who unless they have bad chemistry, will usually hold some reluctance to bus. They'll maybe decide to hard-bus, or even cross-bus eventually, but prior to the decision to bus, they will likely not have decided to go for it. So, if a player is being attacked and has no defenders, or virtually no defenders, there's a fair chance that scum are taking advantage of a town player that is a weak link, or decided to bus a scum player they decided was a weak link. In either case, there's scum on the wagon most likely.

It all boils down, however, to the term I coined:
Situational Awareness.
Above all my other skills, that's my greatest asset.
Knowing the players, knowing the circumstances behind those players (for instance, what games have they recently finished, especially with me?), and knowing the game.

It became instinctive to me, second-nature, but it took me years of playing mafia and thinking along those lines before I had it down.
It also took me a lot of getting familiarity with the current mafiascum playerbase: I knew about 70% of the players I was playing with from recent games, and of the 30%, knew about 40% just from games too old to be entirely reliable.

Good read
Will probably bookmark this tbh XD

^this right here is legit bookmarked for me

[Antihero]

Town is basically random guessing it seems.

ok so now are you getting an appreciation for why we move towards what you call "townsided" in balancing the setup...?

[Antihero]

What differentiates scum taking advantage of you from town going after someone they see as justifiably scummy?

nothing. and what makes slayers gambit especially destructive is that you're a lot more likely to frustrate a good scumhunter, turn them off to the game, and make them apathetic

in all my time here, i have not once seen scum caught and lynched using slayer's gambit.

[Saru]

At the start of the game when I got cop I knew I was gonna have to play different because I've never flipped PR before I normally try to be more calm and relaxed and take a back seat but I felt like if I did that I'd get a giant scum shot in the face I made sure to overreact to a few posts but I didn't back down from any lynch mostly because I felt it was better to just play with me being alive I was quite sure about a DW/Transcend/Ved team because it made the most sense with all the WKing and early pushes that were going on so when Ttanscend flipped town I wanted to check on someone I felt made a lot of sense/seemed like a good enough player to out smart me (in comes xkf) coming into day 2 I wanted Gerry lynched because we were the only one who could see Transcends meta and he didn't stop it so that seemed like it screamed scum to me and the more he said "This is your fault not mine!" The more okay I was with the vote because one thing Gerry likes to do as scum is WIFOM and shift blame both 2 things he does a lot of time I didn't expect him to be a pr with him saying he'd self vote or not claiming pr when he asked in fact I prob would have still hammered him regardless I feel controlled and that everything is just going off scum lead (prob Tiershift with the strange thinking) The bottom line is my scum play is a lot more laid back and focused trying to stay in the shadows not so up front I can say I didn't have reason to claim pr as scum or I would have outted a guilty because mylo but that's all wifom along with saying I wouldn't lead on my best friends as scum

What I can say is I don't regret any of my play because I felt I was right everytime and if being scummy is being wrong so be it I'm not the only one in the wrong because everyone else voted in the bw's also

Final call: Dw/Tier/Ved

Not a single period. Why do people type like this?

[mhsmith0]

Interestingly, in a recent game it was the town who jumped all over the slayer while 2/3 wolves defended him and the third was relatively late to the party on pushing him.

[mhsmith0]

Town is basically random guessing it seems.

ok so now are you getting an appreciation for why we move towards what you call "townsided" in balancing the setup...?

I guess but it's not something to be happy about. Hell, I just finished, like an hour ago, a 10v3 with:

Town
3 shot doc
2 shot odd night tracker
2 shot even night watcher
7 VT's

Wolves
Full daychat
Full roleblocker
1x strongman
1x ninja

And we (town) won on day 4 with the only actual helpful action from a PR a N3 track of the last wolf (titus also self-cleared as watcher so that helped a bit too). So, like, I dunno. I just look at a setup like this and think there are a lot of cheap ways for the town to win, and I'd feel really annoyed playing it as a wolf if the town was able to grab a cheap win from it. Just my $0.02 though. I could see running this one without the strongman I guess, but I'd instead have made it full day talk (announced) then, in part because playing without day talk is LAME (like, the whole fun part of being a wolf is team chemistry, so why WOULDN'T you want to have day talk in your game?)

[mhsmith0]

Also:

Vig BP Tracker Doctor?
What the weak as fk town is this

^^ That is NOT the language of someone who is about to counter-claim. Bitching about the setup like that is VT or wolf pretending to be VT. In like zero worlds is that what the secret PR says in that spot at that time.

[mhsmith0]

That said, solid props to Sonia and Vedith for very well done theater that IMO makes it EXTREMELY difficult to realize that they're both wolves.

[mhsmith0]

See

vedith and sonia aren't both scum, I bet my precious fedora on that.
If vedith is scum in vedith/sonia that means that xkyfu is town which still makes mimi scum.

for an example of this success. This is extremely well done scum theater that isn't awkward or obvious, has been invested in since way back in day one, and is legitimately difficult to figure out. On the one hand town has lost this, but on the other hand, that was something active and effective the wolves did to (almost certainly) pull out the win, even though a sweep is pretty unlikely.

[Zyf]

i don't want to post here anymore either

this town has given me brain cancer

good fucking job to the scum

[mhsmith0]

presumably sonia will strongman dwlee and tex will vig mimi, putting town into explicit LYLO, which I'd guess they then lose. would be interesting if tex decided to go off script and vig sonia or BS but I doubt she'll do it.

[mhsmith0]

Please give a warm welcome to vedith!

[mhsmith0]

Currently the mafia is using the 1x strongman on texcat. Either they realized texcat shot dwlee N1 or that's odd in most respects. Like, they know there's no town tracker or RB, so why use the strongman there, and on tex instead of dwlee? Ultimately I think sonia needs to either "guilty" a different player (the current plan) or argue that tex is a SK so town should lynch tex.

PS None of the players here really know me, but I HATE cop roles and have openly said as much in a number of different places. So the odds of me making a game with a cop role in it are basically zero. The reviewers actually noted that there might be a fake cop claim that gets outed because I hate cop roles and wouldn't have put it into this game.

[Vedith]

Thanks for the game mhsmith, was a fun game and at least enjoyed the discussion in PT more than in game.

presumably sonia will strongman dwlee and tex will vig mimi, putting town into explicit LYLO, which I'd guess they then lose. would be interesting if tex decided to go off script and vig sonia or BS but I doubt she'll do it.

Spoiler:

Killing Dwlee over Tex leaves the Vig alive though so mis lynching tomorrow isn't as crucial.
Tomorrow, if done as planned it should be Dwlee, Sonia, Blackstar, Xky and Tiershift.

With a fake guilty on Tier either Dwlee leads a lynch on Sonia, or they all accept. High risk, high reward. ^^