The G.O.A.T

[mith]

I don't recall BoP being much of a problem. I've probably gotten a few "Vote: mith teehee" votes, but no one determined to actually decide to lynch me that early and stick with it no matter what (arguments coming from that place would be too easy to rip apart, I think). Probably some sheeping, sure. Probably some extra scrutiny. I dunno. I play infrequently enough that no one really knows what to expect from me at the start, and carefully enough (as either alignment) that I don't tend to get flash mobbed (at any point in the game, but especially early; it's been a very long time since I was lynched outside of an endgame, and that includes FTF plays).

[Kmd4390]

I thought you were scum the one time we played but I was wrong.

[chamber]

I know internet stranger was a god of his time, but when he came back in 2010 or w/e it was, he seemed really quite bad in comparison. I remember one particular moment when I was scum with him, he did something. I was like, welp, that's going to get you lynched, he brushed it off, then it later got him lynched. Makes me wonder how much of being good is meta, and/or if time hasn't just made the whole site better.

Here's the thing, and it explains why people see DGB, Fate, IS, and others as "used to be good:"


Site meta is a living, breathing thing. You can either adapt or fall by the wayside. The tricky thing is adapting in the first place: it's not easily done. And further, the more prolific you are, the more people distrust you as town or pick up individual tics. Or maybe you have a harder time judging the game state under current meta. So, you decline, just as an aging athlete would. Some players are truly timeless, but those are rare nuggets and maybe even impossible to find.

Mafiascum is like a river: you can never cross a river twice, because by the time you come back, either you've changed or the river has.

In IS's case I'm much more likely to believe what mith says than your explanation here. I feel like, even when a good player has an off game, I'd still typically recognize them as a good player if it went for a long time, maybe not great, but a game isn't really a single event. There are lots of events. IS didn't seem remotely good when he came back. Maybe he was good at even deceiving his scum partners. On the other hand, I think DGB's always worked best when people didn't understand what she was doing, and has become too much of a known quantity, and I haven't seen fate play recently to comment on his play. If what you said was true, all old timers would be seen as has bins.

[pirate mollie]

I don't want to be the greatest of all time. I just want to be better than I was in the previous game.

[kuribo]

I just want to slay the last two of my white whales

After that I'll have achieved everything I want to do on this site

[Gamma Emerald]

I'm like Meta Knight: I want to beat the strongest player.

[Vi]

And that's the problem, isn't it?

Mafia is a team game, and you don't get to choose the teams!

In any given game with a certain player, you only get like a 1/3 chance to "beat" them. And it's not just you and them anyway; unrelated stuff happens (NKs) that can stop your Fated Duel.

[mith]

I thought you were scum the one time we played but I was wrong.

And also bad at math and football prognostication, as I recall...

[Zyf]

I cba with trying to be the GOAT
i just want to reach the rank of JOAT

and/or maintain above 20% participation in all of my full games
which I seem to be doing rather well
XD

[Zyf]

for the most part I do not recognize the names being thrown out (what a surprise) but I have to say that thor is obnoxious for me to read.
like I can't comfortably tell their alignment without a flip of some sort

I mean that doesn't inherently make you a good player because if your reads aren't that consistent then you're in bad shape as town
or maybe I just suck at this game

iunno at this point

[Raskolnikov]

that's genius, zyf
"greatest" doesn't necessarily imply being a god
one can be the greatest ever of all time in terms of volume and win through an alternative interpretation

[Killthestory]

I don't want to be the greatest of all time. I just want to be better than I was in the previous game.

Improvement is key, and there's a lot of ways to go about it.

[SpyreX]

Kuribo what are your whales left I'll help you slay them.

Is bop less of a thing these days? I'm not showing up on anyone's goat list but even at my level i would gnash at getting that every game

[Kmd4390]

I thought you were scum the one time we played but I was wrong.

And also bad at math and football prognostication, as I recall...

Huh? Those are two of the things I'm best at.

[pirate mollie]

And that's the problem, isn't it?

Mafia is a team game, and you don't get to choose the teams!

In any given game with a certain player, you only get like a 1/3 chance to "beat" them. And it's not just you and them anyway; unrelated stuff happens (NKs) that can stop your Fated Duel.

I think you really touched on it when you said that 1 of the biggest obstacles that town faces is competing egos. I wld amend the wording of this to "competing agendas" cos you can have a town herd of egotistical players but still reach some sort of common conclusion and just bicker about how you got there in the first place or who did it first and still lynch scum.

do you think that the ability to work with other pple is an experience or mebbe confidence gap? or do you think it is something else? in the spirit of transparent processing I have some ideas but they are not super fleshed out. I was wondering about your insight on this tho.

sometimes I think mafia is the art of creative storytelling I swear.

[Zyf]

Kuribo what are your whales left I'll help you slay them.

Is bop less of a thing these days? I'm not showing up on anyone's goat list but even at my level i would gnash at getting that every game

The first time unclarified alts were ever useful
Lmao

[kuribo]

Kuribo what are your whales left I'll help you slay them.

Is bop less of a thing these days? I'm not showing up on anyone's goat list but even at my level i would gnash at getting that every game

1) Be opposite alignment to CKD and correctly lynch him (or NK him I GUESS but lynching Scum-CKD would be sweetest)

2) win a Scummy. On this one ive come to the conclusion that moderating is my best bet.

[mastin2]

I don't want to be the greatest of all time. I just want to be better than I was in the previous game.

Frankly I think the idea of being the best ever is impossible, so this is indeed one of my primary goals in a game: be better than I was, and demonstrate consistently, "that's not what I can do, THIS is what I can do", with 'that' being a past game people try to hang on me, and THIS being the current game where I do better.

sometimes I think mafia is the art of creative storytelling I swear.

It is! That's why I'm as good a player as I am. Writing narratives as scum, discovering narratives written as town (scumhunting) and then retelling them to others (convincing them).

Is bop less of a thing these days?

It exists, but it has an upside: if someone expects you to be competent, all you have to do is shove it in their face and scream, "YES! I

AM

COMPETENT! AND YOU'RE DISAGREEING WITH ME. I WONDER WHAT THAT SAYS ABOUT

YOU

?!?"

Works every time.

[Zyf]

Is bop less of a thing these days?

It exists, but it has an upside: if someone expects you to be competent, all you have to do is shove it in their face and scream, "YES! I

AM

COMPETENT! AND YOU'RE DISAGREEING WITH ME. I WONDER WHAT THAT SAYS ABOUT

YOU

?!?"

Works every time.

protips with mastin
noted for when i finally learn to git gud

[Vi]

Kuribo what are your whales left I'll help you slay them.

Is bop less of a thing these days? I'm not showing up on anyone's goat list but even at my level i would gnash at getting that every game

But SpaiSpai I would much rather be in a game with you than many if not most of the people mentioned here. I think the vast majority of people who have played with you would agree. How well you play - which I'll vouch is likely at least above average from my scanty memory - is honestly less important.

@mollie let me figure out which words to use and I'll get back to you because there's a bit to unpack and I'd like to give the short non-ranty version

Pedit at some point I'm just going to stop correcting autocorrect and autocomplete and see if it makes my posts any less coherent

[mith]

I thought you were scum the one time we played but I was wrong.

And also bad at math and football prognostication, as I recall...

Huh? Those are two of the things I'm best at.

You introduced a football analogy to attack a point I was making... here's a snip of it:

So if the Packers only have a 45% chance, would you be willing to bet against them based on that fact even though they have the best chance to win? I sure as hell wouldn't. The Lions and Bears being in the division doesn't mean shit because they don't win shit.

You argued that you shouldn't take an even money bet against the Packers if they had a 45% chance of winning... and then the Bears won the division that year.

(Though to be fair, the Packers did go on to win the Super Bowl. And also to be fair, I was going after zoraster with the point you were making the analogy against, and zoraster wasn't scum.)

You happened to be attacking me with this right around the time I was going through all sorts of nonsense with my PhD defense, so it really stuck. (But I also have a good memory for odd events in online games that happened years ago, for whatever reason.)

[Kmd4390]

Lol yeah I barely remember that.

[SpyreX]

Kuribo what are your whales left I'll help you slay them.

Is bop less of a thing these days? I'm not showing up on anyone's goat list but even at my level i would gnash at getting that every game

1) Be opposite alignment to CKD and correctly lynch him (or NK him I GUESS but lynching Scum-CKD would be sweetest)

2) win a Scummy. On this one ive come to the conclusion that moderating is my best bet.

If only there was some thread you were invited to to help with #2....

[kuribo]

Oh fuck


Sorry brosinski I completely forgot

[Vi]

Kuribo what are your whales left I'll help you slay them.

SPYREX, PRINCE OF WHALES

I think you really touched on it when you said that 1 of the biggest obstacles that town faces is competing egos. I wld amend the wording of this to "competing agendas" cos you can have a town herd of egotistical players but still reach some sort of common conclusion and just bicker about how you got there in the first place or who did it first and still lynch scum.

do you think that the ability to work with other pple is an experience or mebbe confidence gap? or do you think it is something else? in the spirit of transparent processing I have some ideas but they are not super fleshed out. I was wondering about your insight on this tho.

sometimes I think mafia is the art of creative storytelling I swear.

I think being able to work with people is close to a skill that's required in Mafia; the skill that's actually required is

being able to influence others to do your will

. "Working with people" has this nice cooperative ring to it that doesn't really match what, say, the SCREAMING DEATH CLAN did. And, speaking as someone who made a huge effort to work with people in my last few games (i.e. work toward a common conclusion) and got repeatedly torched for it, going pure social harmony seems to fail much more often than it succeeds.

Regardless, the ability to influence others breaks down hard when everyone has their own ideas of who's scum and won't bend from them. My last game was like seven people who were like this, and the time before that I had to deal with someone who thought he had role information on me (he very much did not but he was a fscking dumbass), and the time before that it was like four Townies in a row who decided "welp Vi is scum because <incoherent Goofball nonsense> <beard > <lol Cyan just picks someone and tunnels on them, looks like ur screwed m8> <whatever else>" and all the scum had to do was act kind of nonchalant and even outstandingly reasonable as they also voted me. I don't want to say it's impossible to influence these people, but it's beyond dozens of pages of my best efforts - whether the people I'm trying to influence are actively suspecting me or not.

Whining aside, what I'm getting at is that the ability to work with other people is partly a skill to learn on your part but entirely dependent on the other person being willing to work with you. It's not an experience or confidence gap except insofar as you have to have the experience to know that working together is necessary and they need to have the healthy

lack

of confidence in their own reads to alter them.

I acknowledge that this post makes it look like I'm completely blameless and that the problems are all other peoples' fault. That is, of course, not the case (maybe I could have found nicer words to call Goofball and Thor's posts illogical on a level I hadn't seen throughout my career, idk) but even after adjusting for that I'm having difficulty coming to any other conclusion.


Side note since I don't have anyplace else to put it: I've noticed that I have a habit of defending people I think are Town, or otherwise getting undeserved hate. Not just in Mafia games, either. I've been wrong so much more often than I've been correct on these calls that I'mma stoppan that.

Post-edit: gfd I need to do something else before I stew on this all day this is why I don't play Mafia