On Improving In Mafia

[RadiantCowbells]

I'll just say that I don't agree with a lot of stuff in here.

Even just the premise that "site meta is going downhill" when town are performing better and better and winning more and more games.

[RadiantCowbells]

Factually untrue given that the normal setups are if anything less townsided than they've been over the last few years, the newbie setup is significantly better for scum than M6, and yet...

If you want to claim that the meta is devolving find concrete indicators of meta quality and establish their rate of change over time, don't just assert it because you feel like its true

I've literally been hearing this claim made since 2013 and towns are by any objective indicator I can come up with better right now than they have been any point during that time

[RadiantCowbells]

i mean

creature and nsg had a day when they were considered to basically trust tell as scum

creature won 2 scum play scummies

i don't necessarily disagree that it's something to have a philosophical issue with but i don't think the issue has gotten worse

if anything i think the issue is the opposite... a lot of the times towns just roflstomp so hard that the wins feel cheap

[RadiantCowbells]

i really don't think creature can be considered to be doing anything in the realm of trust telling at all

and the effect that you're seeing is moreso that people need to be better at scum than they needed to be in the past to have any chance whatsoever in lobbies where town isn't selfdestructing

like the definition of creature trust telling was him literally 0 posting until he flies in saying "how can we solve this game game is hard"

creature posts a lot now and pushes coherent teams. i don't think any of the scum players you're thinking of don't do that. that used to not be part of the bare minimum to not be treated as a slot that trust tells itself clear. even on MU there are a lot of slots that don't do even that.

but i really don't want to take over Ank's thread, I just wanted to say my bit then peace out, so I won't respond further.

[RadiantCowbells]

Is it worth arguing about? If you think site skill level is the highest it's ever been, you could still want it to rise even higher.

I'm not sure it's definitely the case that mafia is funner if site skill level is higher, but it might be specifically true for the experiences of players who are strong at the game.

I feel like town have been playing better lately, to be fair. However, I have rolled scum like 15+ times in the past year, give me a break with these rolls, guys.

Creature just abused everyone’s meta of him that they started talking to him about, which he should have. He used to get hard hard hard meta’d.

ok but

it doesnt help people get better when people are making posts like this extolling the virtues of a dead meta where towns were objectively worse at this game

look at some of my scum games in 2015 and tell me you think i go undefeated playing like that in 2019

[RadiantCowbells]

giving guides to improving is great and the meta has a LOT of problems but the claim that i keep hearing that towns are terrible nowadays when even top tier scum players like maria and FL are losing a lot of games now when they never used to is purely fictional and i have been hearing the same circlejerk for the last five years and people really need to start thinking critically about that claim. there are a lot of metrics that you can use to judge it as true or false and not one that i have looked at suggests towns are not improving dramatically

[RadiantCowbells]

i think towns are a little worse than maybe like 2018 but not like ~significantly~ so

i am not sure of the truth of this claim because i didnt see nearly as many total town blowouts in 2018 nor across as diverse a selection of players
but shoshin irrelephant nsg etc all had insane years in 2018 and played a lot of games
what sets 2019 apart to me is the skill floor is a lot higher than it used to be, even lobbies that arent the absolute strongest usually are a lot more cohesive than their counterparts in the past

[RadiantCowbells]

1. The peak of townplay has gotten better, but this has also coincided with a shift of what is deemed to be 'acceptable' in games, for lack of better ways to put it. It means that generally, people are better at reading or playing around weaker players and/or players that don't put more than the barebones amount of work into the game. This directly helps reinforce that players that do not wish to put in that effort do not have to put in that effort, and so they do not improve at the game in ways that they would have before. Since they aren't willing to put in that effort, they are more likely to follow those that are. This increases the likelihood of those with the highest impact and 'skill' having control over the game, but it also doesn't reflect on a town's skill more than it does a single player's skill.

i... really feel like this is the exact opposite of true given my memories of 2016 where games were filled with people who would just shitpost until someone decided to play town leader and then followed their town leader
but i think you are possibly referring to a time before that and given comments ive heard about missing policy lynching you may be right!
my outlook on it though is that people who arent as super directed about things are the glue that keeps town together and that when people talk about *high caliber playerlists* being awful they usually mean when everyone really wants to do their thing as opposed to it being the quality of players

i definitely think that true lurkers are a real problem and they can fuck off but over time those true lurkers are more and more likely to be scum

[RadiantCowbells]

2. The standards for players considered to be strong at town are much higher now than they used to me.

is this poorly phrased or do you mean it as is

[RadiantCowbells]

I call old towns better because they simply had to be. There was less of a cushion in PRs in a lot of games and there were more strong scum players. It's rather disturbing to have this reputation for strong scum play when I only ever got the impression that I got the advantage in games because towns destroyed themselves and i just happen to be half decent at amplifying that. That's not strong scum play, that's abusing weak town play.

Look Alyssa

What quantifiable evidence do you have that old towns were better besides wanting it to be that way? Because I back when I was invested did a lot of research and between old high end players being somewhere between mediocre to awful on returning and modern towns just performing better in terms of lynch rates and 'top tier' performance I don't think there's any evidence that old towns were better and at least 5 different metrics under which you can claim no, modern towns are better.

Your own personal performance I will leave as it is but your winrate was never an impressive scum winrate: plenty of top historical scum players had ridiculously high winrates because scum players as an individual disproportionately are capable of winning games alone.