Mafiascum.net

I was scum with pooky in a recent game and we had an argument about how much effort to put into playing scum. Pooky said that I should try to chill and have fun because I'd be less nervous and I'd be less likely to burn out. I felt that I could enjoy the game while high efforting and trying to be more chill wouldn't necessarily help with the burnout problem. I guess I'm looking for advice on how to burn out less, is rationing your effort useful or is it just maintaining the right mindset?

I am definitely not the one to weigh in on that since I burn myself to a crisp almost every single game I play but maybe Skitter or peta would have thoughts. peta been nolifing it for years like a champ np

i think putting psychological pressure on yourself to perform can lead to added stress which affects your performance negatively, because if posting feels stressful you aren't going to want to post. that was basically what happened to me in mini normal 2180, then iconeum was like "just have fun" i kind of got into a groove from there, things started going right for us, cakez got yeeted, it was great. of course it's more easy to have fun when you're on a roll

i'm competitive as hell and want to win but i think looking at the game from a perspective where it's something you enjoy, rather than, like, something you have to work at is helpful

In post 4321, Infinity 324 wrote:Yes good points

Putting your all into something and losing and still enjoying it is something that requires a lot of mental fortitude though, and it's not something I'm generally able to do. I came pretty close in this game though, which I consider a success at least.

you just have to learn to enjoy losing, misery is beautiful sometimes

I think for me at least a lot of my stress did indeed used to come from not enjoying the alignment, but i now do kinda get a kick out of fooling people or like running the game behind the scenes. It's *fun* to hang out and shoot the shit with people while lowkey manipulating them for my own dastardly ends

For me at least, tho, doing that does require more mental energy than townposting, and on a given night i can only dedicate so much mental energy to it before i start to flag

I also feel a very intense pressure that scum teammates almost expect me to carry and that if i dont i'm like responsible for the loss. This isn't something i worry abt in towngames, i almost care more abt getting the solve right than winning.

For me at least, some things that help lower the stress are:
- trying to not care as much abt winning and losing as a be all end all, and recognizing that if you try and had fun *its ok to lose*

- in a similar vein (and like what unwnd said) being willing to try different tactics out and experiment even if you dont get the outcome you were wishing for

- not feeling like you need to respond to everything (this one took me a very long time to recognize). Like coming back to 12 pages of mt being right was a bit scary, and responding to all of it was daunting, so i just decided not to

-related, its sometimes just easier to ignore inconvenient posts and just kinda riff on what's going on in realtime. While hyperposting is hard to combat as scum one advantage that does come out of it is that people sometimes literally forget things that happened like 10 pages ago. If you just address it it resurfaces, but if you ignore it its possible people will have forgotten abt it entirely

- this is more of a skill but one that i think is very useful to develop if you can: knowing where the votes are (and who's liable to vote where) - you can kinda start predicting how things will play out, and outcomes start becoming less pf a surprise, so ypu can kinda prepare yourseld mentally for likely outcomes, and how you might respond to them. Like if its 5way elo and town-A wont vote town-B but might vote town-C and B will vote C then you as scum know to win you need to make C your flip of choice and that's the trajectory u need to have.

- i'm a big fan of planning in general; if i have a rough sense for how the game is gonna go its easier to start setting up the trajectories that you need. Mom was going to flip at some point as i knew she wasnt gonna be endgame scum, so i started laying down those seeds very early. And things are just less of a surprise so you have a bit more time to like ~mentally acclimate~ to certain ideas

- recognizing that even if someone caught you *it functionally doesnt matter if they dont have the votes* this removes so much stress lol

Idk these are just some thoughts that come to mind, i hope this helps a bit.

In post 4325, Infinity 324 wrote:I was scum with pooky in a recent game and we had an argument about how much effort to put into playing scum. Pooky said that I should try to chill and have fun because I'd be less nervous and I'd be less likely to burn out. I felt that I could enjoy the game while high efforting and trying to be more chill wouldn't necessarily help with the burnout problem. I guess I'm looking for advice on how to burn out less, is rationing your effort useful or is it just maintaining the right mindset?

I think for me its both. As scum there's only so much time i can put in on one day, but having the right mindset helps too.

In post 4319, unwnd wrote:I think people should learn to scrap more if they're not trying to produce the same effects. Literally at this point just try something and if it doesn't work out oh well. I feel scum aren't like, getting experience over time. I'm scum and I'm gonna probably not have fun boo hoo then they take nothing out of it until they get town.

Also this ^
Its ok to try something and see how it turns out

A couple of the most valuable insights i have for playing scum happened when i was backed in a corner and was like welp i gotta try - it might work it might not but if i do nothing i know i'm gonna lose

Subject: Newbie 1951 (Day 4)

skitter30 wrote:oh i'm p sure it didn't, and i could tell, which is why i didn't bother answering it because i don't think any of it changed his opinion either way, which made your argument irrelevant if you couldn't communicate it to the person who was deciding

it was still v insightful

This was a relevation at the time.

Pops wrote up a whole thing in elo explaining why i was scum but emps, the townie who ultimately held hanmer, didnt really care abt it, which made me realize i didnt actually have to go all in and defend myself because that's not what the tipping point was

Iirc i gave a perfunctory response but like nothing more because it didnt actually matter, and getting bogged down would have been detrimental - i prior to that would have felt like i needed to respond point by point.

But i was in a pickle and it made me realize i actually didnt have to, so i didnt.

I lost anyways for other reasons but like learning that i think waa a big boost to my scumgame even tho kinda ignoring it felt chancy in the moment

Also a lot of people put pressure on themselves to look like they're playing their towngame, when i think that's probably the wrong thing to emphasize: you should look townie and try to keep yourself out of the flippool. That doesnt mean u need to replicate ur towngame

Like i can point to several diatinctions between this game and my typical towngame but the fact that i wasnt playing to my typical towngame didnt matter because you guys, in this circumstance, thought i was being townie anyways

I think this would be fun to play with geriatric restrictions.

hyper posting is very broken in the current meta

Reading this postgame makes me realize how little I think about mafia compared to other players...

In post 4335, SirCakez wrote:Reading this postgame makes me realize how little I think about mafia compared to other players...

Probably a good thing tbh

Also, thank you all for the feedback, I’m thinking I prob will try to develop the ideas further and post something in mafdisc

I think one interesting thing is that the hyper posting thing ties back to some degree into my argument — I think it’s easier to hyperpost when you’re enjoying things more and that’s not the cause in and of itself for why people don’t like scum. I thought prism’s points were interesting about why he disagrees, but I think the root reason may tie back into what I’m thinking of, or basically that even in games where you’re never going to lose mechanically you still have the consequences of that extending from people generally having played games like that a lot and having had the desire to play scum squeezed out of them. I think this game fits with that to an extent but not because of how the general trend manifested in the scumplayers so much as how it manifested in the townplayers. For instance, bork being basically cleared from early D1, infinity being very difficult to lim, salsa being considered out of scumrange immediately. Like I think you run into a major problem that unless you have a decent number of town players who are considered close in the respective strength of their town/scumgame you have a lot of people who become de facto clears even without mechanical clears. Not sure if I’m explaining this well, but I’ll get into it more in the bigger post to follow

In post 4336, Menalque wrote:

In post 4335, SirCakez wrote:Reading this postgame makes me realize how little I think about mafia compared to other players...

Probably a good thing tbh

^

In post 4337, Menalque wrote:Also, thank you all for the feedback, I’m thinking I prob will try to develop the ideas further and post something in mafdisc

I think one interesting thing is that the hyper posting thing ties back to some degree into my argument — I think it’s easier to hyperpost when you’re enjoying things more and that’s not the cause in and of itself for why people don’t like scum. I thought prism’s points were interesting about why he disagrees, but I think the root reason may tie back into what I’m thinking of, or basically that even in games where you’re never going to lose mechanically you still have the consequences of that extending from people generally having played games like that a lot and having had the desire to play scum squeezed out of them. I think this game fits with that to an extent but not because of how the general trend manifested in the scumplayers so much as how it manifested in the townplayers. For instance, bork being basically cleared from early D1, infinity being very difficult to lim, salsa being considered out of scumrange immediately. Like I think you run into a major problem that unless you have a decent number of town players who are considered close in the respective strength of their town/scumgame you have a lot of people who become de facto clears even without mechanical clears. Not sure if I’m explaining this well, but I’ll get into it more in the bigger post to follow

Players with divergent scum/town metas are de-facto ICs that can throw game balance off when the setup is very vanilla and make it very difficult to get the mis-elims you need to win.

In post 4337, Menalque wrote:I think this game fits with that to an extent but not because of how the general trend manifested in the scumplayers so much as how it manifested in the townplayers. For instance, bork being basically cleared from early D1, infinity being very difficult to lim, salsa being considered out of scumrange immediately. Like I think you run into a major problem that unless you have a decent number of town players who are considered close in the respective strength of their town/scumgame you have a lot of people who become de facto clears even without mechanical clears.

I would note that the same happens in more mech-heavy games, and I consider it a problem.

I have long thought mafia is not a game suited for competitive play simply because truthtelling is a dominant strategy.

In post 4254, Menalque wrote:

In post 4252, fferyllt wrote:

In post 4226, Menalque wrote:@ffery, what was the other theme with the VC photos? I didn't figure it out

Day 1 was sort of light-hearted deja-vu related images.

Day 2 was Deja Vu quotes (mostly humorous or ironic)

Day 3 was Deja Vu poetry and art

Day 4 was "fine art" titled "Deja Vu"

If there had been a day 5, it would have been music and cinema that is Deja Vu themed.

When I was putting together the Day 3 VC flavor, I found a poem that I thought would be perfect if Mafia won the game, so I included it in the final flip.

oohhhhhhhh okay

I was thinking it was more like you were telling a story from what you'd hinted but I couldn't tell like what direction the VC imagery was going in or what point it was trying to make, it being different themes on deja vu on different days makes so much more sense lol

I often do tell stories with imagery when I mod games. I didn't find a good hook for that sort of thing in this game.

There is one critique I have of your modding actually, ffery

Just occurred to me

listening...er, reading.

You make the competition for pagetops between your players entirely meaningless. Like what’s the point when the best you’re going to manage is second best? Really removed that part of a mafia game for me tbh

In post 4345, Menalque wrote:You make the competition for pagetops between your players entirely meaningless. Like what’s the point when the best you’re going to manage is second best? Really removed that part of a mafia game for me tbh

noted!

I don't compete for every page top, though. I just like 1 or 2 per day for vote counts. And if the thread isn't moving fast enough, I don't wait for a page top.

(Not sure if you’re also joking around with me but to be clear that was very much Not A Serious Critique and I really enjoyed ur modding! Those pagetops were won fair and square)

It is actually painful to see how attuned I was to how off skitter/mena interactions were and how bad the DC slot was individually only to go "Well it's probably not skitter/Mena so it's just weird haha moving on"