The Root of Toxicity in Mafia Games

[RadiantCowbells]

disagree

the toxicity in league comes from immaturity certainly given that toxicity actively hinders your ability to win games

the toxicity in mafia is a result of a game where there are advantages to being toxic.

[RadiantCowbells]

Toxic play in mafia gets reinforced with townreads, sheeping, and removed pressure and that makes the behavior more likely to recur

Toxic play in league is only reinforced internally rather than externally

[RadiantCowbells]

The good thing is that it only works so many times as scum; once you become known for being shitty as scum you stop getting TR for it

It works a lot better if you have a meta of only being toxic as town because then it effectively becomes a trust tell that doesn't violate any rules

[RadiantCowbells]

like if you only get riled up enough as town to be really nasty then it clears you and it's not exactly 'trying to maintain a meta' it's just it is what it is and no one is going to encourage you to act awfully as scum in the interest of fairness

I think the rules on toxicity should be a lot tighter than they currently are. I think most toxicity in mafia happens because it gets results and a solid 10-15% of games are won or lost by a race to the bottom with whichever faction is willing to play dirtier taking the win.

[RadiantCowbells]

I don't agree but I think that my ideal of what the limits should be includes stuff that you aren't even considering

[RadiantCowbells]

that is at Nancy

[RadiantCowbells]

I prefer to come in, make meaningful but vague we overarching statements that give no one any specific ideas for policy changes or what I don't like, then I get to have a superiority complex and complain for years instead of enacting meaningful change and not being able to complain anymore.

[RadiantCowbells]

(an example of something I think should be banned is threats of blacklist in mafia games. Blacklisting someone outside of game should be fine but using it as a tool to beat people with should not.)

[RadiantCowbells]

Just because you think someone's scum doesn't mean you dislike the person and doesn't mean you'd want to never play with them again.

[RadiantCowbells]

Like

Fuck you if you think I'm scum you're not honestly trying to read me so I'm never going to play with you again

[RadiantCowbells]

I would also add pl ing any player who tries to prove their alignment based on whether or not they pick up their role pm. Like that 100% would get you banned on MU. Similar to saying what town vs. scum!you would do wrt replace outs. As in the trust tell thread:

It's already against the rules though.

It doesn't need a policy lynch

[RadiantCowbells]

What if I policy Lynch a certain set of players on the basis that said group is always decently likely to be scum and I also want to discourage scum from making those moves in future games

[RadiantCowbells]

I have a policy of PLing anyone who hard defends scum bc I think it's just correct play and I don't think that's solely because I'm playing to future wincondition

I think giving scum the ability to defend each other and get away with it is bad for town and removing town that have really bad reads increases towns unity and chance of winning anyway

[RadiantCowbells]

I have a policy of PLing anyone who hard defends scum bc I think it's just correct play and I don't think that's solely because I'm playing to future wincondition

I think giving scum the ability to defend each other and get away with it is bad for town and removing town that have really bad reads increases towns unity and chance of winning anyway

Would this not leave you super exposed to bussing over a prolonged period?

Depends

This only works if town continue to incorrectly hard defend scum in my games while scum bus

I certainly do not go after potential bussers after scum lunches before clearing the people trying to prevent the scum lynch

[RadiantCowbells]

Realistically I think that it's not hard as town to basically never hard defend scum, or to do so so rarely that taking 1 policy lynch is not a problem. Generally if a player is repeatedly falling on the wrong side of that they self select themselves out of my games anyway.

[RadiantCowbells]

It's worth noting that what I consider hard defending to be is a lot stricter than most people would; I'm not gonna PL someone for saying that scum might be town but if someone is hard pushing a counterwagon and trying to convince correct scum voters to unvote they should die always.

[RadiantCowbells]

Arguably innoing said players is shitty for the gamestate because now your clear is someone who has bad reads. You don't want them innoed you want them dead.

[RadiantCowbells]

I saw too many games in my younger days where I correctly lynched scum and called the other scum but I left the townie with shit reads alive and they managed to prevent scum from being lynched. It's an odd thing in mafia that bad town are much better at helping scum win than almost any scum players.

[RadiantCowbells]

And bad isn't just having bad reads. A lot of people have bad reads but aren't spectacularly anti-town to live. It's the ones with bad reads and a great deal of unneeded self confidence who will completely derail the town to lynch their pet reads that lose their town games game after game holding on to their memory of the 1 time they did it and were right that I'm referring to.

[RadiantCowbells]

The easiest way to be bad is to think that you're better than you are.
The easiest way to be good is to keep your ability in perspective.

[RadiantCowbells]

If I underrate myself will I lose a bunch?

Yes, you will.

[RadiantCowbells]

It's absolutely true. Over or underrating the correctness of your reads vs everyone elses hurts your winrate. Idk how you would argue that.

[RadiantCowbells]

I don't know an objective way to do that.

I know last time I checked 68% or something of lynches in phases where I was alive were scum.

[RadiantCowbells]

Also what about the fact that read accuracy can sometimes vary wildly from game-to-game but when you’re in a game where it’s off it can be too far in before you have enough information to realise that?

I think that most people's scumreads % likely to be accurate is fairly consistent even if that means that it looks from an outside perspective like they have good games and bad games.

[RadiantCowbells]

Also maximum consecutive town lynches while I was alive (only counting my main) is 1, unless you count nomination when I literally couldn't lynch scum (which I don't)

[RadiantCowbells]

Even if it was inconsistent it wouldn't matter odds are odds. If Barry bonds strikes out his first two at bats you don't substitute him out. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works

Correct, but individual players often have a tendency to misunderstand how that probability works and think that they have 'good games' where they play better than 'bad games' when most of the variation is simply that they are a % likely to scumread scum and sometimes that hits and sometimes that misses.

[RadiantCowbells]

Yeah what I’m trying to say is that if the average is that someone identifies 2/3 scum in minis, but that’s from some games where they get 0 or 1, others where they full solve, and others still where they get 2/3, why should their reads be trusted if you don’t know if in that particular game they’re in a game where they’re likely to full solve or likely to get 0/3?

Do you have an alternative way of solving the game that is going to have a higher EV?

[RadiantCowbells]

No, you don't know.

But if your EV of hunting scum is average (1/3 in mini) and someone elses is 2/3 outside of the way your own personal feelings about ~your reads~ get in the way why would you go with 1/3 over 2/3

[RadiantCowbells]

Also, if we take you specifically as an example RC, how should you be played around as town in your own opinion?

Should you just always be BoP’d the day before lylo if you haven’t lynched scum by that point? Likewise, if you do lynch scum and then don’t die to a NK, should you always be PL’d on the basis that “correct” play from scum would be to NK you?

NB: I understand if you don’t wanna answer these questions because you think it would hurt your game

I think that if you don't actually learn to read me on a probability basis it's always a negative equity play to go after me because if I'm scum you won't kill me whereas if I'm town you probably will.

But people won't take that answer so I would say you should lynch me if I'm leading lynches and scum aren't dying. That does mean that in order for this to work you have to actively work with me, unlike most people who try to BoP me who don't lynch my scumreads then call me scum because the people that I didn't want to lynch were town.

[RadiantCowbells]

If you're referring to me specifically there's really no comparable situations because I haven't struck out twice in a row in a game.

If there existed a player who was very streaky in games and was either dead right or dead wrong then yes if they mislynches twice you should ignore them but that player doesn't really exist as far as I know. The closest to fitting in that category are people like Titus who are dead wrong way more often than right.

[RadiantCowbells]

This is a huge derail lets talk about literally anything else.

[RadiantCowbells]

Depends what you mean by that.

By efforting by not hard defending scum in certain ways yes.

But someone isn't responsible if everyone scumreads them when they were legitimately trying and had good reads.

[RadiantCowbells]

Do you think win/loss records and the quantification of “good play” leads to more toxicity?

I think to truly answer this question you need to define what is toxicity. Is toxicity being right/wrong, or is it a personality clash? I personally think toxicity has a bit of being right/wrong, but in general weighs more heavily on being a personality issue.

Depends how you define toxicity

I think a decent minority of MS thinks that my general playstyle is toxic just for being what it is without me having to say a word against anyone in the game.

In that sense, sure. In traditional sense, no.

[RadiantCowbells]

You also hard fought me on both SS and Volpe

[RadiantCowbells]

Then you need to defend your townreads a lot less

[RadiantCowbells]

I think the idea is that a successful hard defense of scum sets town winrate to 0% and mislynching obvtown doesn't.

Ding ding ding

[RadiantCowbells]

The most common paths to scum wins that I see in games are one where a significant faction of town scumread each scum but at least one scum had at least a few townies who hard townread them and defend them, and in the end town lynches people no one really thinks is going to flip scum as a compromise because the people hard defending wear out the people with correct scumreads until they give up on that read.

See: Shoshin, Volpe, but this is actually more common in games without me because I have no issues brute forcing a scum lynch over the objections of whichever townie hard defends them

[RadiantCowbells]

Like sometimes scum just goat and get utr but that's pretty rare (15-20% of scum wins) whereas all scum in PoE but one or a few townies refuse to let at least one scum die constitutes like 50% or so of scum wins.

[RadiantCowbells]

ND you also prevented the SS lynch D1 on newsroom.

[RadiantCowbells]

It's not above average vs not above average

If more than 1/10 of your townreads are scum your townreads are worthless

[RadiantCowbells]

Oh my god

You changed your mind later in the game sure but I went war mode with SS on D1 and you hard defended him and I gave up on the game

[RadiantCowbells]

Just FTR the times I'm criticizing ND for aren't the same as saying she's always bad or is bad in general, just that conventional wisdom on 'townreads' is wrong

[RadiantCowbells]

Not toxic but definitely bad for town winrates

[RadiantCowbells]

Maybe?

[RadiantCowbells]

I don't think it's generally hard to determine who is and isn't competent at mafia if you're not trying to determine who is better between players of similar skill levels.

[RadiantCowbells]

thinking...