Geriatric Ruleset Discussion Thread

[Mathdino]

That is not a thing I actually said but it does seem like a thing I agree with

Solution: decrease the stigma against actually policy lynching people

Day 1s don't need to be as chaotic or long as they are

Years ago people would just realise someone is being hilariously anti town and just speedlynch them, d1 over in 10 pages

Geriatric ruleset combined with current site meta won't bring back The Olden Days unless people are willing to play like The Olden Days

[Mathdino]

#goodposting

What happens if the anti-town player is a town Doctor? Do you PL them to advance day play or suffer a decrease in day play for the chance that night play is improved? You've obviously "taught" them to stop their bad behavior, if your PL goes through. Whether or not they stop their behavior is up to them.

I mean, ideally they'd stop being anti-town before being run up. It's rare that policy lynches actually go through. But policyvoting and policypressure are totally valid reasons to push people I think.

Since MS emphasizes Day play over Night play, I'm surprised that more people aren't willing to lynch an anti town PR that's showing no intentions of fixing their play style.

Before I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Policy Lynch, I tried to frame anti-town lynches as "utility" lynches. That is, their death has town utility, and if they have a certain likelihood of being scum (say even half of the random chance), their flip has a fair chance of being useful.

There's 0 town utility in lynching a confirmed townie though. If someone claims Doctor in an open, or otherwise becomes confirmed town, even if they're complete dead weight, lynching them doesn't help town at all. I can think of super extreme circumstances where someone could have a TON of anti-town utility even as confirmed town (such as a vig promising to shoot obvtown) and THAT might be deserving of policy lynching, but I don't think anyone's gone that far.

Policy lynches are about making a statement.

Something I learned from modding; you should have some type of mechanism that punish the town if they don't lynch. Somewhat similarly, if you advocate to PL someone for shit play and it's within the realms of cite meta, then there's your punishment. No mechanic needed. People learn that if they play like shit, town won't put up with their shit.

There already is that mechanic. It's called "town is at a disadvantage when there are even numbers". That said, I think MS and MU are really the only place that realise that.

Interesting... Should pushing a policy lynch be NAI? Should joining a policy lynch be AI? Probably not. IMO it's probably a circumstances thing, more than a blanket statement thing.

So, I guess the question is; how do you decrease the stigma that is associated with PLing someone?

I don't believe in prescriptive vs descriptive scumhunting. It's not a case of whether policy lynching SHOULD be AI. If you want to talk about scumhunting theory, it's a case of whether it is or it isn't. That depends on the player. I've pushed a policy vote on someone in almost every game I've ever been in since hiatus, and won a nightless micro by just policy lynching my buddy off the bat. It's NAI to the extent that scum can do pro-town things or things that their townselves would do for towncred.

However, what I've seen a lot of is people basically pushing for counter policy lynches on the people proposing the policy lynches in the first place, sometimes justifying it with "only scum policy lynch" (something that's evidently not true). THAT's probably a thing they should stop doing, unless the player advocating policy lynches is basically doing nothing else pro-town. But it goes without saying that policy lynching shouldn't replace scumhunting.

You decrease the stigma by arguing for it and sticking to your guns I think, up until better lynches present themselves. I rarely ACTUALLY end up policy lynching players, and have lynched actual scum more often than random.

As long as the message is sent and received though, that's the important bit to changing site meta.

[Mathdino]

Yet another geriatric town lost due to lurkers and out of practice towns
How many would you consider a trend

[Mathdino]

I thought a big setback to the Open 715 Town was the fact that no one stopped to reevaluate from their death tunnels i.e. Fitz on QM, Alchemist on Fitz, and MoI on Fitz.

all of these townies are relatively inexperienced with the current site meta

[Mathdino]

By allowing people to go three days without posting probably affected the game. I don't know if Geriatrics - as a whole - follow this pattern.

Edit: Nope.

Button man's is the only Geriatric Game so far to allow players to go three days without posting. All the rest follow the 48 hour pattern.

reckoner's game also followed that rule
he was pretty vigilant though

buttonmen's game took a super long time to start and had a massively delayed hammer at one point :/

[Mathdino]

none of the scum were lurkers

LaL would've lost

D1. no one voted, someone claimed scum, got policy wagoned with 0 counterwagons and self-hammered
D2. not really sure what happened here
D3. lynched lynchbait who was relatively inactive
D4. town crossvote between an active lurker and someone who helped drive yesterday's lynch

[Mathdino]

Wait wat
People express naked support all the time in MD

[Mathdino]

i for one have a massive article typed up that will definitively hurt my scumgame once published

[Mathdino]

You're already practically creature - can't hurt that much.

i mean the fact that you find me incredibly easy to read doesn't mean everyone else does

i play to win as scum and i'd like to think i have good high level strategy

i just don't roll scum enough to be practiced "in the field" so to speak

Edit: to be clear it will hurt my scumgame by (hopefully) making enough town players better at a specific thing

[Mathdino]

Being towny is possibly the least important scum skill

i know you didn't mean this literally but i'm going to choose to take it literally just in order to name less important scum skills:

- having good reads

- writing good cases

- formatting reads lists

- ability to count

- programming

[Mathdino]

- programming

Someone with enough time and resources that's sufficiently clever could make that the second most important scum skill.
Right under having money.

tfw someone's so bad at coding that they fucked up the bbcode in their post amirite

VOTE: Ellibereth

scum trash

[Mathdino]

okay but guys

why don't we just simulate all the players of a mafia game

and then program a neural net to play against a billion different simulations of MS players in a billion games to determine what the best strategies are for not getting lynched

it's simple

Edit: i disagree that writing good cases is as important as people think it is considering cases are mostly trash on the whole. but that's probably just me and my POV.

[Mathdino]

do you guys wanna know what the single most important aspect of winning scumgames is?

convincing everyone to run and join games with the geriatric ruleset.

[Mathdino]

can't lose scumgames if towns are incapable of winning

[Mathdino]

I can see geriatric working if the mod selectively chooses inned players they think will make the game enjoyable.

there are a lot of players that you think will make the game enjoyable who come back after a couple years

and everyone's like holy shit [x] is back, this is gonna be TIGHT

and more people join the game in anticipation

and then they all flake/lurk/don't put their heart in it, because they remember that they didn't quit mafia because of spamposters

they quit mafia because they found better things to do with their time.

[Mathdino]

I disagree that putting the majority of town power in the hands of the few will majorly change mafia for the better

If I was on track to winning a game solely by sheeping your reads, ellibereth, I think I would just replace out

It's not the same game

[Mathdino]

The current not good status quo is fundamentally linked to the decline of forums and MSs inability to keep up imo

[Mathdino]

i should note that there are a few players that i would consider the "perfect-world" geriatric player

Kmd4390 is a major example

to summarise:

- due to real life, he literally can't keep up with too much posting since it takes that much longer to read the game

- despite real life, he still checks in whenever he can and puts thought/effort into his play

- he never replaces out or lurks out, and there's never the sense that he's dead weight

appealing to players like Kmd is the stated goal of the geriatric ruleset, and i think that goal is a noble one

the problem is that in reality, it appeals to players who shouldn't really be playing mafia anymore anyway

there aren't many players like kmd and there certainly aren't enough kmds to fill a geriatric game

[Mathdino]

i would consider AGhost to be another Kmd

what i mean by "shouldn't be playing mafia anymore" is "their heart isn't really in the game of mafia and they think that getting rid of the newfangled spamposters will make mafia what it once was to them"

or they think that geriatric games will be easier

AGhost and Kmd are some of the highest effort players i've ever seen despite the fact that they're less active/online than average