Mafiascum.net

Yes, most competition wins are questionable. But so are the Olympic Games, the Football World Cup, the Formula1, whatever. Someone or a team wins in the end, and it depends on many things. Small decisions, current concentration, whatever. But does it mean that all the others were bad? Of course not. Germany won the FootBall World Cup last year and it's clear that they were the best. (Not only because I'm a fan, lol.) Four years before, Spain won. Were they the best team? Who knows? They were good but so were quite a couple of other teams. (They were surely better than Germany, unfortunately.) Eight years before, Italy. Wellshyt. I don't think they deserved it at all, but they still won.

Does it have to do anything with Mafia?
A lot.
It's about plenty of things. Let me name you some.

IRL issues. Something terrible/tiring/important/etc. happens and you lose focus or you have to replace out. Even a bad day could lead to a horrible post and bang, you're history.

Focus. Just as the previous. Everyone is dedicated to win but what if someone reads and posts less for a time because of being busy, whereas someone else has an unexpected free evening to play?

Scumteams. Some players can work together as a scumteam like a dream, while others simply "don't feel each other", even if each of them are good at being scum... normally.

Meta, previous experience, whatever. Eg. one single player posting "I know him/her well and that's his/her townplay", convincing others ...and a scum gets a couple of Days. Or a town gets mislynched.

Role distrubution. Wellshyt. Gods be merciful to the town if I draw town-Vig. ^_^ In other words: what if that PR had gone to someone else...?

Butterflies. Not only lucky events like pressurizing a scum early-Day1 or Nightkilling a PR Night1. It's more. Someone is spared at Night because he/she's misreading the whole game... but then a team member dies in another game, starts reading and guesses the obvtown-looking scum right...

I think Trojan's analogy about Bridge nails it. (I used to play Bridge a lot long ago.) 689.

Also, I'm unwilling to feel bad just because we won.
Mostly because I think if another team had won, some players would be upset about it too. Maybe other players, but the story would be the same.
(Plus, something else. We'd known the rules before Team Mafia started. I know it's easy to say but I wouldn't be upset if anyone else had won. Even if I know that it annoys a couple of players now. To tell the truth, I was just as annoyed when I saw the results of the Setup Competition. A 4th place for Matrix 14?! But I'd worked a lot on it! After getting known the details via PM I understood that I had missed the rules for getting points. Eigh, "Originality" had a score too, aaaand Matrix 14 is everything but original, lol.)

Could we have a "more objective" system. Well yes........ if there were, say, 3 games for each player, detailed scoring for team efforts, spectacular actions, remaining members of a team, blah, blah. It would be horrible to handle it and there might be other issues, I suppose.

Nevertheless, I learnt a lot from my game and from the games I read too, and I think this is true for many of us.

Even if I arrived later, I read everything carefully. (Actually that wasn't a lie. I was catching up with my game, with the Team QT and with the rules at the same time.)

(1) The skeleton of the system is superb! 6 games, 4 for each teams.

The Large is obvious. I'd prefer something less complicated. (It took ages to understand the mechanics when I started reading it, although I'm not the smartest one on the field...)

I'm not sure whether the White Flag is the most suitable for an Open, I'd choose something else.
The Normal/Closed and the Theme are both great. (I especially enjoyed the Theme flavour!)
The Vanilla Nightless is a bit questionable. Maybe it was in because of containing 12 players but eh. (Especially since there were two Vanilla games.) It could be replaced with a "Special Open". I mean a Setup designed especially for the Team Mafia, but it works as an open: all roles and mechanics are known pre-game. Or... there may be a Bastard – and by this, I mean a lot of unusual roles, but still a balanced game. Or a U-Pick?
I know nothing about Twin Trap (I didn't read that at all) but a Micro is a need, I suppose.


(2) The token system / balance issues.

Using tokens for getting into games is great.

Using them for getting a certain alignment seems to be a bit icky.
4 games were won by the town and 2 by the scums, which is not an entirely imbalanced result. Still, games might be a very little bit scumsided, though. Only because of the following: as Team Mafia progresses, more and more players start focusing on the ongoing games. Normally, only the players are there to spot a scumslip or a blatant contradiction. But, in the end there are a lot of players vulture-ing around very few games. So, scums need to fight an uphill battle because of this. And we all know that town may miss obvious slips and things like those sometimes...

Maybe an alignment token system combined with a PR system could be useful (after getting the alignment you can spend some tokens on getting PRs). Although there are players (including me) who actually like being Vanilla Townie, and it may be a bit complicated too. So maybe this part could be left out.


(3) Replacement issues.

Maybe some of you might think that I shouldn't talk about this as a replacement, but excuse me, I still have thoughts.

First of all. Psyche, don't take it as an offence, but I don't think players replacing out should get any prize. If it ever happened, that would create a terrible practice.
Imagine this situation: I draw scum, screw everything up on Page3 or so, and I replace out because of "erm, IRL issues, sorry everyone". My replacement turns the tide and it's a scum win. Frankly, would I deserve anything for that? (Beside a pooping pigeon?) Generally speaking, if this could happen, everyone who f-cked up the game would leave because it would be a winning strategy. That would mean even more replacements.

However, making the teams find replacements causes a bit of chaos (who arrives and when?), and... unpredictable events. As it was pointed out by someone before (sorry, I don't remember!), it's terrible for the scum if a lurky-unfocused-whatever player leaves and an enthousiastic, dig-up-everything player replaces in. And it's another factor hindering the scums...

In my opinion, a replacement pool could be created alongside with the games going on. The list would be public (just as in any of the queue threads), so everyone could see who are on the list.
And at this point it forks.
– either the team could choose anyone from the list (but they must choose from the list!)
– or each player willing to replace in gets some tokens and they could put them on the teams they prefer. Whenever someone leaves, the player with the most token on the team in need of a replacement gets in. (If it's a draw, randomized.)
The latter one may cause some issues near to end. Everyone would eagerly join a team close to win. But, replacement lists could be closed earlier.

(4) Winning, ending.

I don't think we could have a better winning condition than the amount of won games.
However, there might be additional prizes for
– the best scum
– the best town
– the best teamwork
– and maybe the best replacement?

Also, and it has nothing to do with Team Mafia, but there should be an annual Leonardo DiCaprio prize too, for the player who got the most nomination in a year without getting anything.