The Root of Toxicity in Mafia Games

[Psyche]

It's really not at all optimally designed for cultivating relationships; I hope everyone can at least agree on that.

[Psyche]

my response to everything youve said here OP, is: why you here then?

it's a really fascinating game

[Psyche]

it's probably because alisae is a toxic person let's not pretend

[Psyche]

you started a thread here on mafiascum.net in its mafia discussion subforum to announce and argue that the game is unfun and intrinsically toxic

[Psyche]

there's no informed minority vs uninformed majority dynamic at all

[Psyche]

a good bit of the toxicity in team games comes from not being singularly responsible for all of your own wins and losses
of course it's not the only factor; there's a lot of toxicity in even 1v1 games
still - probably less, though?

[Psyche]

imo policy lynches are almost always against wincon within the context of their specific game

[Psyche]

if you wouldn't have done it without the motive to serve your future win conditions, imo it's against the spirit of the game to do it

[Psyche]

itd be doable if games were shorter and more frequent but in our context it just wouldn't mean anything

if we were doing chat mafia games for instance...

[Psyche]

i think winrates are fine! why can't we be happy with winrates
yeah people can fluke good winrates, but not over large samples
and if it's small samples, no good evaluative metric is possible
yall make this so complicated

[Psyche]

because then ppl have to admit rc is good at mafia

vry fair

[Psyche]

the dream would be to track smaller scale but still concrete stuff than win/lose so people have clearer feedback on skills they can improve on or are good at and maybe on a larger scale get a better idea of what makes someone good at mafia

with the right codebase, we could track wagon participation and outcomes across many games and measure individual differences in who and how often they start or join wagons, the outcomes of wagons they participate in or lead (do they result in bandwagoning? lynches? scum or town lynches?), and so on
can also track thread activity (posts per day, words per day, etc), amount of mentions by other players, how often they are the focus of wagons themselves, god i could go on forever
we might even be able to track sentiment about the player by other players in the game, though the nature of the game complicates this (say you like playing w a dude but also repeatedly say you want them lynched? is that gonna be read as positive or negative sentiment?)
parallels for scum also exist too (bussing? do they make mislynches happen? are they good at finding and killing PRs at night?)

can even identify stats with traits like "charisma", "accuracy", "engagement", etc to give everything verve/clarity

some people will seem to score favorably on just about everything tracked this way and still have worse W/L, but you'll know their strengths and weaknesses all the same

oh if only i had the time

[Psyche]

I WILL MAKE THE TIME

[Psyche]

it just feels so disingenuous and fake sometimes

[Psyche]

i see the same factor driving toxicity in league of legends games. just as there's less toxicity in mafia marathons, there's less toxicity in lol arams.
when a game is long and it's difficult to come back from deficits, a teammate's mistake can lock you into a hell of suffering that lasts until the game is over
when a game is short or mistakes are easy to come back from, a teammate's mistakes can be inconvenient but don't affect you as much. it's a lot easier to let it go.