Mafiascum.net

btw mastin, since you're walling and all, i'm just going to ramble on a bit and hopefully relate it to my thoughts on this game in some way

for the past... month or so, i guess, but mostly for the past week, i've just had a complete lack of motivation for doing anything even slightly mafia-related. i come onto the site thinking, "OK, today is the day i do stuff in games i'm in!" and then open the game threads and just feel the energy draining out of me. i don't know what exactly it is, because it's not like the playerlists are making it unfun and i just, in general, don't sign up to games i don't think will be fun in some way, but i'm feeling really, really burnt out lately. i just don't really give a shit about posting in mafia games. i think part of it, arrogant as it may sound, is that i'm not finding it as challenging as i used to. i don't struggle to avoid being lynched, if i want my scum reads lynched i will get them lynched, and in general i'm more accurate than not and i'm about as decent as any other player when it comes to finding scum, so i can't really recall any games where my reads have been so far off base that i felt i was playing badly.

i mean, in recent memory (since returning from hiatus last year) i've been lynched twice, i think? once as town in a mylo situation where nacho and i were bumping heads due to faulty speculation and not really considering all the evidence properly, and once as scum where i was intentionally playing like a lurksack in an attempt to emulate certain aspects of my town play to fuck with meta players, which eventually backfired when i misstepped. apart from that, town or scum, i've had no real difficulty avoiding being lynched. the closest i ever came to being lynched was that paranoia game that you killed me N1, but even then i successfully derailed the wagon on myself onto a scum player, and my reads were decent (including calling greyice for third party, though he wasn't _exactly_ a lyncher, he was just third party temporarily helping scum). i also think the issue is further compacted when i play with certain players; e.g. when i play with you and i'm town, i find it hard to keep up motivation levels because i know you'll eventually town read me regardless of your alignment which brings out a lot of bad habits in my play. i am the type of person who will procrastinate with stuff if i think i can get away with it, and i am the type of person to get lazy if i have no immediate goal to work towards. and when the goal of being town enough that i'm not going to be lynched has been achieved, i tend to lose focus in games and not give as much of a shit, i think.

another part of it is that the way i've been approaching games lately has been deviating more and more from how i used to play the game, or at least that's what i think. not so much in playstyle, i guess (though i think my playstyle has had some minor and major changes in the past... year or so) but more with how i find scum. i dunno what it is, but i feel i used to be a lot more accurate in getting reads based on reading into motivations and thinking about stuff like that and i don't do that as much anymore. or at least i've noticed times where i look back at things that happened in a game and try to think about where i went wrong in certain reads and why i didn't see motivations for certain actions that, in hindsight, should have been really obvious. i've been reading over games a bit today and yesterday. some of my past games, some games i'm not in, some games that are ongoing. i was reading a newbie game where thor gave some endgame commentary with advice on how someone could have changed their play in the game to potentially turn what was a loss into a win. and the advice was basically, in simple terms, try to figure out who truly believes what they're saying. and this is something that i kinda try to do but don't really do as much anymore. which sucks because i kinda wanna get back to my roots and return to the style of scum hunting i used to employ. and this couple with my bad habit of slacking off when i think i can get away with it is making me feel a bit apathetic towards mafia lately. or at least this is as best an explanation for my current slump in motivation as i can think of.

anyway, how that all relates to here and this game is i've essentially decided to think about this game in simple terms. i am looking over stuff that's happened in this game and thinking about it in the most basic of basic ways: who looks like they believe what they're saying?

and so i'm looking back at certain things that despfish has said and thinking about it in this way and i don't really see them a scum. the vezok push, which i think i talked about at some point earlier in the game, is one of the primary things i'm thinking about here because i don't think that looked like scum ISOing a player and looking for holes in the claim (in the first place, what scum actually does that if they know a claim to be legitimate?) - i think that was a case of despfish truly believing they were on to something there. i'm looking at other stuff they're saying to, from simple stuff like "lol at anyone who thinks there's a chance i'm scum" and variants of this, which i know are not beyond the realm of possibility for scum players (and i know desp is probably capable of writing statements like that as scum) but the way it's coming across in this game looks like someone who believes what they're writing. comments about his flavour and how it relates to this game (including the avon VT stuff and the wallace traitor stuff) also look like they come from someone who really believes what they're writing. and there was one other thing i wanted to mention here but i forgot in the midst of writing this rambling.

on the other hand, you have AD, with his miller claim, which came from suggesting there was a cop in the setup multiple times and while i think initially he might have believed that the setup would have a cop (or investigative role similar to the cop, like a gunsmith), i don't really believe he believes what he's been writing about it. especially to the point of suggesting a town miller was put in as a counter for a scum cop. what i think was happening in this game is AD was crumbing miller because it was win/win for him. either there is a cop and he can point back to all those crumbs if he ever got investigated (crumbs that only started everyone had posted late D2, because not everyone had posted by the end of D1) or there isn't one and no loss, he can just claim miller (and because site meta as it is now is something along the lines of "millers are town!" this works well for someone going for this angle). i also think his play in general comes across as someone who doesn't really believe anything he's writing. his pushes this game have had a lack of conviction. the only scum lynch he pushed this game was a traitor that it's unlikely the scum team knew was a traitor. he had minimal interactions with skot (essentially never mentioning him until the hammer on him after the watcher stuff + claim). after skot, it was basically "titus and/or muffin scum" and it doesn't really look like he actually cares about figuring anything out here. (also, looking back at the way he hammered titus is reminding me of the way he hammered aronis in kotor in that it felt really rushed)

so i'm kinda interested in what you actually think makes MC more likely scum than AD because i'm not really seeing it

also we have a little under the week until the deadline and i wanna hash things out with you sooner rather than later because i'm guessing you probably won't live to see tomorrow regardless of the outcome of today's lynch and this game is a graveyard at the moment