The Root of Toxicity in Mafia Games

[Nancy Drew 39]

I think it’s a learning curve. It’s not easy to remain chill when you’re being wrongly sr but I’ve found that once you learn how to do that, it can really help you to grow as a person, because you will experience not necessarily comparable but heated conflicts outside of games and it can eventually train you to handle those kinds of situations better.

Beyond that, it’s just basic respect for your fellow humans and insisting on civility pretty much.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Mafia was a game that was meant to be played rl not on an online forum

I’ve never done that but I’ve played a chat version of it, which was fun, 100% non-toxic but lacked the fascinating complexity of forum mafia.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

Nah because then you get warned, people hate your guts and want to blacklist you.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

Like?

The closest I’ve come to a pl in a game was this guy who made it blatantly clear he intended to prod dodge the entire game and never vote until he got lynched because he refused to replace out, eventhough he clearly had 0 intention of playing.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

that is at Nancy

Are you planning to elaborate?

[Nancy Drew 39]

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.

Alright, gotcha.

[Nancy Drew 39]

(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.)

People could still find their way around that unfortunately by just saying they don’t want to play with player X ever again, which isn’t technically the same but close enough but yeah, mods should take a harsher line on that because it obviously involves outside influences.


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:

Okay: I have/haven’t ever replaced out/failed to pick up prods as x alignment.

Not Okay: I would NEVER replace out/fail to pick up prods as x alignment.

[Nancy Drew 39]

(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.)

Threatening people with a lot of things is p toxic, IMO. It also doesn't necessarily make sense - if someone doesn't wanna stop doing something just because you say stop, why would they want to do it to avoid being on your black list?

People might do it for a cheap townread and it usually is done by town but scum!Maria did that to RC in MG. It might be hard to totally regulate that though.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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.

Another thing should not be tolerated. Persival literally threatened me with a temp ban in a game, eventhough I didn’t break any rules, so that should never be allowed. He wasn’t the mod btw.

[Nancy Drew 39]

i think calling yourself obvtown is pretty toxic lets ban that too no kap

Ha ha ha ha ha, very funny.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Do not bring outside influences into the game - this includes

threats

, bribes, wagers, promises, "trust tells", alliances, etc. Using knowledge from previous games is perfectly acceptable, but try not to carry grudges

from one game to another.

The idea that threatening to blacklist someone is not good mafia is already in the spirit of how people want games to be a approached. It just an enforcement/drawing a line in the sand issue on preventing the behavior, keeping it from being rewarded, etc.

Bribes: How would that work exactly? I’ll pay you to unvote me?

[Nancy Drew 39]

I don't understand why people call themselves obvtown

I would be down to policy lynch everyone who calls themselves obvtown

If you are truly obvtown

Why would you need to comment upon that, it should be unnecessary

Like those radio ads where they are selling something and they say they are absolutely certain they do not have enough inventory for all the people who will call to order the product

Because sometimes it’s actually necessary to point that out, that’s why.

[Nancy Drew 39]

I'm obvtown

VOTE: chennisden

Die Scum!

[Nancy Drew 39]

I don't understand why people call themselves obvtown

I would be down to policy lynch everyone who calls themselves obvtown

If you are truly obvtown

Why would you need to comment upon that, it should be unnecessary

Like those radio ads where they are selling something and they say they are absolutely certain they do not have enough inventory for all the people who will call to order the product

Because sometimes it’s actually necessary to point that out, that’s why.

if it is

you're not obvtown

Well, like in Newsroom for example, I think I was bleeding obvtown in that but not everyone could see it, so I had to keep pointing that out until they finally listened, which they eventually did.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

Well, I think that’s too arbitrary. Like I had to fight you on bleeding obvtown Sakura in BP, for example.

[Nancy Drew 39]

grayer area because you can make a good argument for why it's the best way to win the current game

and then it just also has the side effect of potentially affecting future games

I feel like when it's more about the future games with less care about the current game is when it becomes problematic. Like with your policy I'm sure you make an exception every now and then if you happen to be hard town reading a player who hard defends scum. Or if there was literally an innocent on the player in question, to take it to an extreme example, you wouldn't lynch them either.

+1

I was mislynched in a game at LYLO MU, for doing that and town lost because they couldn’t tell that my play outside of that, made 0 sense as scum.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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.

Why not? Why can’t town be fooled? It’s happened to me more than I’d care to admit.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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.

I agree with this, keeping one’s ego in check can mean a win or loss for whatever alignment you are.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

Experience and self-awareness affect that a lot.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

Can someone please tell me what EV means? Kthanx

[Nancy Drew 39]

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.

I think the word toxic starts to lose its meaning when it's applied to "this playstyle that rubs me the wrong way" versus like

actual toxic behavior towards other people

I think it can depend on the specific playstyle. I’ve encountered ones that were definitely toxic. Toxic scum is the absolute worst though.

Ftr, I don’t consider RC’s playstyle to be toxic or I wouldn’t play with him.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Once Dannflor only put kittens in the VC once per day phase instead of twice per day phase and it was super toxic

I have him blacklisted now

[Nancy Drew 39]

Spoiler: :(

VC 1.BLACKLIST

Dannflor (1): popsofctown

Not Voting:

Dannflor

With 2 alive, 1 to make Dannflor sad

Deadline: (expired on 2020-02-23 00:36:42)

Awwwe

[Nancy Drew 39]

You also hard fought me on both SS and Volpe

That wasn’t my point, that my reads are better than yours, my point was that if you arbitrarily lynch anyone who hard defends scum and ignore absolutely anything that points to them being obvtown (not saying you’re actually doing this btw), then you risk bleeding obvtown Sakura type mislynches.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Then you need to defend your townreads a lot less

No. My townread accuracy rate is actually pretty high - higher than average in fact. That’s why I tend to prefer townblocking to scumhunting early game.

That’s how I won YGM, by eventually figuring out that everyone else was townier than Kokichi, with more than a little help, of course.

However, I did correctly nail both scum in Newsroom. I nailed one in the room odds but I didn’t try hard enough to convince people and everyone kept arguing with me that Persival was town, when I correctly identified him as obvscum right out of the gate.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

I wasn’t arguing otherwise. My point is you should only rely on that as a way of sorting. if you have nothing else to go on.

[Nancy Drew 39]

ND you also prevented the SS lynch D1 on newsroom.

No I didn’t. I was responsible for both him and Lion getting lynched.

This isn’t funny RC.

[Nancy Drew 39]

It's not above average vs not above average

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

That is clearly not the case with me, thankfully.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

I correctly solved the game by correctly identifying scum!GL then later figuring out that SS was his obvious buddy and yes, your early reads definitely helped with that. I always give credit where credit is due.

[Nancy Drew 39]

No. My townread accuracy rate is actually pretty high - higher than average in fact. That’s why I tend to prefer townblocking to scumhunting early game.

an orphan dies every time someone uses this fallacy

What “fallacy”?

[Nancy Drew 39]

No. My townread accuracy rate is actually pretty high - higher than average in fact. That’s why I tend to prefer townblocking to scumhunting early game.

an orphan dies every time someone uses this fallacy

What “fallacy”?

You think townblocking can’t be a valuable tool? Why not? I’m far better at correctly identifying town than scum, especially in early game.

[Nancy Drew 39]

No. My townread accuracy rate is actually pretty high - higher than average in fact. That’s why I tend to prefer townblocking to scumhunting early game.

an orphan dies every time someone uses this fallacy

What “fallacy”?

"town read rate higher than scum read rate"
"town read rate higher than average"
"town read rate really high!"

Yeah, that happens to be true, your point?

[Nancy Drew 39]

No. My townread accuracy rate is actually pretty high - higher than average in fact. That’s why I tend to prefer townblocking to scumhunting early game.

an orphan dies every time someone uses this fallacy

What “fallacy”?

You think townblocking can’t be a valuable tool? Why not? I’m far better at correctly identifying town than scum, especially in early game.

I think the fallacy is that you know you identify town correctly more often than scum, and you suppose that means your town reads rate is better than your scum reads rate. The error is that there are more town than scum in a game, so your higher correct town reads rate is not statistically significant.

Oh okay, yeah that makes sense. However it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m more often than not right and I’m actually not terrible at catching scum either like in Newsroom and The Room Odds have shown, I would probably catch a lot more if I trusted my initial reads more often/allowed myself to be influenced less by others and doubt myself. For example, in SC 1, I scumlocked tw, pretty much right out of the gate for his really suspicious push on me but then he pocketed me D2 and I ignored my initial strong sr on him.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

I don’t make my reads by using conventional wisdom, that’s why they tend to be in general, better than average.

[Nancy Drew 39]

But scumreading pisses off people, so that's toxic too

Mafia is toxic.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

I don’t make my reads by using conventional wisdom, that’s why they tend to be in general, better than average.

Do you mean better than average as in "better than number of scum divided by total number of players", or better than average as in you think you are better than most other players?

That isn’t what I said. I said better than “average”, which /= “better than most”.

I think I look for things that most people ignore so yes, I do trust my reads for those reasons.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Better than average means nothing, it's either 90-95% accuracy on your townreads or not. It's easy to fall into "I'm good at townreading people", when default value is 75% considering scum : town ratio on average is 3 : 1

Agree to disagree on that. I’d say closer to 75% but higher on certain players. I do better when I can use meta because then you don’t wrongly read playstyle.

[Nancy Drew 39]

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

I don’t make my reads by using conventional wisdom, that’s why they tend to be in general, better than average.

Do you mean better than average as in "better than number of scum divided by total number of players", or better than average as in you think you are better than most other players?

That isn’t what I said. I said better than “average”, which /= “better than most”.

I think I look for things that most people ignore so yes, I do trust my reads for those reasons.

pops: "do you read town better than you read scum or do you read town better than most other town players read town?"
Nancy: "no."

That isn’t what I said. I said my reads are better than “average” = better then many.

I don’t know why you’re trying to split hairs here with semantics?

[Nancy Drew 39]

That isn’t what I said. I said my reads are better than “average” = better then many.

I don’t know why you’re trying to split hairs here with semantics?

i'm not splitting hairs with semantics

she didn't ask you a yes or no question

but you answered

witha "no"

lol

No, I answered with better than average, which is also many. Saying most would be inaccurate and arrogant, while better than average/many is both accurate and not arrogant.

I’m not going to lie and deny the truth, I 100% stand by this.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Better than average means nothing, it's either 90-95% accuracy on your townreads or not. It's easy to fall into "I'm good at townreading people", when default value is 75% considering scum : town ratio on average is 3 : 1

Agree to disagree on that. I’d say closer to 75% but higher on certain players. I do better when I can use meta because then you don’t wrongly read playstyle.

You have 75% chance to hit town, when picking random person D1 in most games, so 75% accuracy is same as picking random person and saying it's town. Better less townreads, but confident ones than having bunch of townreads with low accuracy

Yeah, I do see your point and I’m not denying it but I have found in a lot of games, I correctly tr players others wrongly sr.

[Nancy Drew 39]

No, I answered with better than average, which is also many. Saying most would be inaccurate and arrogant, while better than average/many is both accurate and not arrogant.

I’m not going to lie and deny the truth, I 100% stand by this.

...

whatever nancy

You’re misinterpreting my post like I said something I didn’t, so I’m just clarifying that.

[Nancy Drew 39]

No, I answered with better than average, which is also many. Saying most would be inaccurate and arrogant, while better than average/many is both accurate and not arrogant.

I’m not going to lie and deny the truth, I 100% stand by this.

...

whatever nancy

You’re misinterpreting my post like I said something I didn’t, so I’m just clarifying that.

no

Yes.

[Nancy Drew 39]

No, I answered with better than average, which is also many. Saying most would be inaccurate and arrogant, while better than average/many is both accurate and not arrogant.

I’m not going to lie and deny the truth, I 100% stand by this.

...

whatever nancy

You’re misinterpreting my post like I said something I didn’t, so I’m just clarifying that.

no

Yes.

no, nancy, you misinterpreted something someone else said

I said my reads were better than average or many. That isn’t a “no”.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Maybe?

[Nancy Drew 39]

When most have bad reads, being better than most isn't much, tbh

I will give you a piece of advice - do not try read everyone, it's okay to have null reads. If you not sure about your read, just say it, not force your read. Personally I feel like I make most mistakes, when I try force reads as opposed to reads that comes naturally to me

+1

I think that’s great advice, thanks. Yeah, sometimes I get asked to make a readslists when I either don’t have or have very few reads. So, I absolutely hate to be asked that. Asking me for reads, fine but I only like to make readslists when I want to and if I do what I’m asked when I’m not ready to make one, it usually gets shit on, so I’ve actually found it’s better to outright refuse than make a readslist you don’t feel at all confident on.

I think being honest about that is best because people can usually read sincerity.

[Nancy Drew 39]

When most have bad reads, being better than most isn't much, tbh

I will give you a piece of advice - do not try read everyone, it's okay to have null reads. If you not sure about your read, just say it, not force your read. Personally I feel like I make most mistakes, when I try force reads as opposed to reads that comes naturally to me

+1

I think that’s great advice, thanks. Yeah, sometimes I get asked to make a readslists when I either don’t have or have very few reads. So, I absolutely hate to be asked that. Asking me for reads, fine but I only like to make readslists when I want to and if I do what I’m asked when I’m not ready to make one, it usually gets shit on, so I’ve actually found it’s better to outright refuse than make a readslist you don’t feel at all confident on.

I think being honest about that is best because people can usually read sincerity.

Problem with readlists is that someone taught people that scum have hard time faking reads, ofc I love this dynamic as a scum, cause I just need throw out some readlist that is similar to most townies readlists and I can sit comfy for a while

In an aborted scumgame of mine, I was ask for one and immediately got tr because of it.

[Nancy Drew 39]

I’m glad I can finally talk about this now. I just finished a game where I was death tunnelled in such a way, it felt almost like gaslighting. Shockingly enough, it came from town so it only RESEMBLED it but it seriously messed with my head to the point, I wanted to replace out, in order to not have to interact with this person and had I not been in a hydra, I probably would have. Because I experienced it as so toxic att, it was seriously messing with my head, to the point that it even affected me outside of the game. I was temporarily doubting and questioning myself about absolutely everything, I was seriously that confused as a direct result of it.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Getting scumread by town as town isn't toxicity

Getting scumread by town as town isn't toxicity

+1

That isn’t what I said at all. I said, It felt exactly like gaslighting, the way it happened. And I mean, EXACTLY.

[Nancy Drew 39]

getting scumread by town as town is why mafia is kinda fun

It’s not fun, when the person doing it is acting like scum trying to gaslight you.

[Nancy Drew 39]

mafia is designed around not being entirely sure who is on your side and trying to reach a common goal despite that

and any list of however many people will have vastly different personalities, some of which will naturally clash over time

yeah that's a recipe for toxicity if I've ever seen one!

I’ve never played League which was mentioned but I also think experience contributes to less toxic play. I have heard it from multiple people that they used to handle being wrongly sr, really really badly and they felt so bad about their reactions, that they consciously went about changing them and succeeded.

[Nancy Drew 39]

People get more toxic over time in league

Why do you think that is?

[Nancy Drew 39]

because the game is designed around specifically pulling everybody towards having a 50% win rate, which has the extra side effect of making it take longer to shift what level of play that you're being exposed to every game

it's very easy to hit the point where you don't feel like you're improving at all even if you are

plus the dunning-kruger effect

That last sentence is rude, but I like it

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

[Nancy Drew 39]

because the game is designed around specifically pulling everybody towards having a 50% win rate, which has the extra side effect of making it take longer to shift what level of play that you're being exposed to every game

it's very easy to hit the point where you don't feel like you're improving at all even if you are

plus the dunning-kruger effect

That last sentence is rude, but I like it

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

I'm well aware what Dunning-Kruger effect is

Your point?

[Nancy Drew 39]

There were two parts to that, the second was that smart people undervalue their own capabilities and over value others but you’re right, pretty sure Ank meant the former.

I also think it’s fair to say that you need a bit of an ego to play mafia in general and apparently an even bigger one, to play league.

[Nancy Drew 39]

There were two parts to that, the second was that smart people undervalue their own capabilities and over value others but you’re right, pretty sure Ank meant the former.

I also think it’s fair to say that you need a bit of an ego to play mafia in general and apparently an even bigger one, to play league.

People don't get toxic, when they undervalue themselves, so that part isn't really relevant. Ego is integral part of Dunning-Kruger effect - it's natural to have bigger ego, when you think really good about yourself and really bad about others, ofc it goes backwards too, your ego is lower, if you undervalue yourself

I agree there is no connection between having a lower ego and toxicity but I think that the obvious conclusion of the D-K effect would seem to be that one’s ego has a direct effect on accurate assessments. If you have a big ego, you are more likely to trust bad reads than if you have a low one. If you have a lower ego, you would be more likely to mistrust good reads but the real issue is whether of not one’s opinion of one’s play/reads etc. is based on actual evidence or just wishful thinking. If player X has over an 80% accuracy rate of nailing scum for example, than a “big ego” would then be justified but otoh, if you lack complete trust in your play/reads, being town in any game would be painful. Iow, how does one even begin to play mafia without some sort of larger ego?

[Nancy Drew 39]

Disagree with you on that. In The Room Odds, I correctly nailed Persivul as scum right out of the gate but was unable to convince anyone of that, so we ultimately lost.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Disagree with you on that. In The Room Odds, I correctly nailed Persivul as scum right out of the gate but was unable to convince anyone of that, so we ultimately lost.

I dunno with what you disagree tbh. Being confident in your scumreads doesn't make everyone magically to trust you. All I say is if you say something like " I think X is scum and we should lynch them", people won't listen you ever, but dropping "I think" part and feigning confidence might work sometimes, when you have doubts

Yeah, people don’t like making decisions, so they are wont to sheep the confident player who assumes responsibility.

Like if you say, “I think X could be scum but I’m unsure”, then good luck with that.

[Nancy Drew 39]

If there was ranked mafia this game would be very toxic too

This is the reason I haven't signed up for some other mafia sites.

There are some sites where it’s actually the mods who are toxic. They abuse their powers to power trip and unfairly influence games.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Whenever people lack complete empathy and think the world revolves around them. That’s the difference between ego and insanity.

[Nancy Drew 39]

it just feels so disingenuous and fake sometimes

After MBoS, eventhough we won, I wanted to say to scum, something along the lines of “how do you sleep at night?”. Fortunately, I thought better of it and thankfully now, at least have one less out of a gazillion stupid things to apologize for.

[Nancy Drew 39]

I find that games that have a dynamic that puts the emphasis on town hunting > scum hunting, to generally be less toxic in general.