Scummies Ideas, Suggestions and Comments Thread

[Scummies]

This thread has been created to allow community members to make suggestions, discuss ideas, and to comment on the current Scummies procedures.

Please keep it civil. This is for productive discussion, not snarky takedowns.

Understand that while we certainly value input, ultimately the Scummies Steering Committee has to make the call that it believes is in the best interest of the Scummies and MS. It is not a democracy.

If you don't wish to be included in the Ceremonies, please PM this account.

This thread is not for nominations. Go here to make a nomination of a player.

[IceGuy]

Thanks!

My thoughts:

The Best Role Claim award should be brought back because role claiming is an integral part of the game and concentrates a bunch of skill and fortune in one action. A good role claim can win you the game; a bad role claim can cost you the game. Alternatively, there could be some kind of "Daring Advance" award, honoring a risky and unusual gambit that turned out great.

On the other hand, the Smooth Operator should go. To me, it looks more like an award given to a mod who just does what a mod is supposed to do; providing vote counts, looking for replacements of the like. That award could be given to a number of good mods, and I don't think there needs to be an award to honor doing one's job. It's a bit like a "Didn't Flake" award for players.

With Best Newbie and Most Improved consolidated into Rising Star, and the site getting bigger and bigger, I can imagine Scummies being "shared", i.e. given to several people in categories such as Rising Star, Paragon and Don Corleone. Rising Star could be expanded to be a general award encompassing playing, modding and discussion, instead of just playing.

Some kind of Body of Work award should be given to a player who was not Scummies good in an individual category, but very good over several categories (such as being a good scum catcher, manipulator, setup designer and MD contributor).

[Ythan]

I got my eye on this.

[zoraster]

I don't think Best Role Claim is likely to come back. It's such a specific award that focuses on one very narrow element of playing when we don't do the same for other actions that are equally as worthy, it doesn't get much nomination love, it's extreeeemly context specific (whether someone wins the award or not depends heavily upon game elements), and it may negatively influence game behavior (though I doubt this).

That said, we are looking into adding an award that captures some of what we like about Best Role Claim: namely that it recognizes good play in an individual thread that doesn't require being good year round. We're still discussing what the best way to implement this is, however.

Best Gambit has been suggested before, but it's just not a good award. While I don't really believe Best Role Claim causes bad behavior, Best Gambit may well do so.

I understand your concern with Smooth Operator. That's one of the reasons we've made a few changes to the award. First, we changed the name it's being called in the award to Excellent Moderation. This isn't a true change as it's always been its "official" name, but I think that puts a broader look at moderation policies. Second, we changed it to a body of work award. While doing good vote counts, etc. in any individual game isn't all that special, being a consistently good moderator who acts swiftly, fairly, etc. is something we should want to celebrate.

I don't think we'll do shared scummies except where it makes sense. This is an awards show, not a participation trophy.

I see why you suggest the body of work award that you do (sort of a best rounded player), but I don't think it's a practical idea, and I like that we recognize the very different functions that scum and town players do.

[IceGuy]

I don't think Best Role Claim is likely to come back. It's such a specific award that focuses on one very narrow element of playing when we don't do the same for other actions that are equally as worthy,

As I said, a role claim is a special action in the way it exerts a much bigger influence on the game than any other action. When a game makes a 180, there is almost always a role claim or a results claim involved.

it doesn't get much nomination love, it's extreeeemly context specific (whether someone wins the award or not depends heavily upon game elements), and it may negatively influence game behavior (though I doubt this).

That said, we are looking into adding an award that captures some of what we like about Best Role Claim: namely that it recognizes good play in an individual thread that doesn't require being good year round. We're still discussing what the best way to implement this is, however.

Best Gambit has been suggested before, but it's just not a good award. While I don't really believe Best Role Claim causes bad behavior, Best Gambit may well do so.

That holds for a bunch of awards; as of now, we have five categories without nominations and seven with just one, every award depends heavily on game elements, other players and the like, and I don't think "playing for the Scummies" is a real problem. Otherwise every Theme game would be full of odd roles to be taken into consideration for the "Best Role" award.

I understand your concern with Smooth Operator. That's one of the reasons we've made a few changes to the award. First, we changed the name it's being called in the award to Excellent Moderation. This isn't a true change as it's always been its "official" name, but I think that puts a broader look at moderation policies. Second, we changed it to a body of work award. While doing good vote counts, etc. in any individual game isn't all that special, being a consistently good moderator who acts swiftly, fairly, etc. is something we should want to celebrate.

It's not something we should celebrate. It's something we should expect.

I don't think we'll do shared scummies except where it makes sense. This is an awards show, not a participation trophy.

I'm thinking of cases where there are two people equally worthy of the award.

For instance, I could imagine two players in the Rising Star award category:
- A newbie playing very good in four or five games.
- A formerly mostly unknown player becomes a good and prolific player, a star mod, and a frequent and constructive contributor to discussion.

I see why you suggest the body of work award that you do (sort of a best rounded player), but I don't think it's a practical idea, and I like that we recognize the very different functions that scum and town players do.

Why wouldn't that be a practical idea? I agree it's a little more work to judge because you need to consider their entire oeuvre, but I don't see it as an unsolvable problem.

[chamber]

I was throwing around the idea of merit based achievements instead of the classical way scummies are handled with someone over aim the other day. The entire process for awarding them atm seems flawed because I think judges are rarely as invested as they'd need to be to make strong choices, and the nomination process requires you actually get nominated for a given award. Examples of achievements being something like winning > x% of your town games, winning > y% of your scum games, never getting mislynched as town, never getting lynched as mafia, being in a game where you were only on scum lynches. I'm sure you guys can think of more. The idea would be objective awards that could be handed out to any number of people.

Issues with this are the current method of display of scummies, and actually tracking it all, but hopefully that would be worked out on the backed of the site by next year (which if I understand correctly is what you are taking suggestions for?)

[quadz08]

Ok let's try this once more.

I think the reasons people like Best/Funniest Role Claim is because it is a non-serious award.

It is just there for the lolz of it all, most of the time.

We need more lolz awards, not less, IMO. Mafia is all srsbsns on this site, and that's fine. I like it that way, for the most part. However, there's no reason we can't celebrate the stuff that isn't that way. Funniest role claim was a superb way to do that. Even if we just do a "Funniest Post in a Mafia Game" award (which is broader than Role Claim) I think it would be good. We need a solid mix of serious "you dun good" awards and chilled-out/not that big of a deal/look back on the funtimes awards.

I think that the community as a whole likes the scummies because they are fun. Not because everyone gets all worked up about wanting to win one, or anything like that, but because they're fun. Let's have our awards reflect that.

P-EDIT: Chamber, I think it's not a bad idea to do some awards like that, but not all (naturally).

[IceGuy]

I was throwing around the idea of merit based achievements instead of the classical way scummies are handled with someone over aim the other day. The entire process for awarding them atm seems flawed because I think judges are rarely as invested as they'd need to be to make strong choices, and the nomination process requires you actually get nominated for a given award. Examples of achievements being something like winning > x% of your town games, winning > y% of your scum games, never getting mislynched as town, never getting lynched as mafia, being in a game where you were only on scum lynches. I'm sure you guys can think of more. The idea would be objective awards that could be handed out to any number of people.

The problem is that this kind of awards would lead to bad incentives, such as not joining a game when you're above your win rate or never got lynched, not replacing into "doomed" slots, getting modkilled or vigkilled instead of lynched, not getting on wagons after you've been on scum lynches, and so on.

It's also an entirely different beast whether you've only been on scum lynches in a 5p vengeful or in a 25 player Large Theme.

[chamber]

I was throwing around the idea of merit based achievements instead of the classical way scummies are handled with someone over aim the other day. The entire process for awarding them atm seems flawed because I think judges are rarely as invested as they'd need to be to make strong choices, and the nomination process requires you actually get nominated for a given award. Examples of achievements being something like winning > x% of your town games, winning > y% of your scum games, never getting mislynched as town, never getting lynched as mafia, being in a game where you were only on scum lynches. I'm sure you guys can think of more. The idea would be objective awards that could be handed out to any number of people.

The problem is that this kind of awards would lead to bad incentives, such as not joining a game when you're above your win rate or never got lynched, not replacing into "doomed" slots, getting modkilled or vigkilled instead of lynched, not getting on wagons after you've been on scum lynches, and so on.

It's also an entirely different beast whether you've only been on scum lynches in a 5p vengeful or in a 25 player Large Theme.

I'm not too worried about negative incentives, people should play mafia to play mafia, the awards should be secondary. We can set guidlines for different ones , like it needing to be a large game for the only scum lynches award, and you needing to have been in at least 10 games as a given alignment for the > x% win rate ones.


edit: even if we only switch to doing most of the awards like this and still left some classic ones, it would allow the msot invested judges to be concentrated and actually do a good job.

[IceGuy]

I'm not too worried about negative incentives, people should play mafia to play mafia, the awards should be secondary.

What people should do and what people do are often two different things.

I'd consider such awards borderline to outside game influences, and they're banned for a reason.

[zoraster]

I was throwing around the idea of merit based achievements instead of the classical way scummies are handled with someone over aim the other day. The entire process for awarding them atm seems flawed because I think judges are rarely as invested as they'd need to be to make strong choices, and the nomination process requires you actually get nominated for a given award. Examples of achievements being something like winning > x% of your town games, winning > y% of your scum games, never getting mislynched as town, never getting lynched as mafia, being in a game where you were only on scum lynches. I'm sure you guys can think of more. The idea would be objective awards that could be handed out to any number of people.

Issues with this are the current method of display of scummies, and actually tracking it all, but hopefully that would be worked out on the backed of the site by next year (which if I understand correctly is what you are taking suggestions for?)

This would make our site into a very statistics based entity. It'd probably also mean we start to do things like ranked/unranked games (or else have conversations about whether we count normals differently than themes, etc), etc. That's not to totally dismiss the idea, but it's something that until now we as a community have resisted a great deal.

Frankly it's out of the pervue of the scummies steering committee as well. Personally, my reaction is extremely negative to it. But I don't feel that my position on the SSC gives me any more authority to judge the validity of this suggestion any more than any other individual community member.

[chamber]

I'm not too worried about negative incentives, people should play mafia to play mafia, the awards should be secondary.

What people should do and what people do are often two different things.

I'd consider such awards borderline to outside game influences, and they're banned for a reason.

Surely these awards are less of an outside influence than the best claim and best gambit awards you were recently championing?

[zoraster]

I actually agree with Ice, chamber. Scummies are pretty far removed. While best Gambit might cause a player to gambit when he would not, instituting statistics and the like WOULD mean that people would start to make different choices in what games they play, who they play against, etc.

The entire history of ranked online gaming stands attests to this.

[zoraster]

By the way, chamber. That's not meant to mean that I don't support having some tracking mechanisms in place.

[IceGuy]

Surely these awards are less of an outside influence than the best claim and best gambit awards you were recently championing?

The main difference is that you can't rules lawyer the Scummies judges. If you do something that technically makes you eligible for the award, but was actually bad play, you simply won't be awarded a Scummy. Also, even if you fulfill all requirements, technical and unwritten, you're not guaranteed to win a Scummy. You need to be better than everyone else to win the Scummy, not just good enough.

Nobody intentionally loses a game or makes a bad play to possibly get nominated, possibly get seconded, and possibly get picked out from a bunch of other contenders to win a Scummy. Some people would do that if they're guaranteed the award.

(Also, the best claim/gambit award would only impact a rather small area of play. When there is an award for "not getting lynched", have fun trying to get a replacement for a slot that's at L-1. It's already hard enough without an incentive to not replace in.)

[chamber]

If its out of your hands, thats fine. I mostly wanted to get the idea out there, because I do think its a good one. Subjectivity and apathy make the current scummies often meaningless imo.

I already make choices about what games to play in and who to play against based on other factors, this would just be altering the metric (and probably not altering the metric at all in my case but ~). I don't see an issue with that. The potential issues would be someone playing differently within a game, and awards can be tailored to minimize that, I suspect best role claim and best gambit would have far greater impact than any I suggested would. But they aren't actually scummies anymore so using that as a counter point is probably not worthwhile.

preview:
Backend tracking is already being worked on, to some degree, on and off. This would be more of an incentive to actually finish it.

I don't think any awards I suggested would cause people to intentionally lose games and frankly it was a list i made off the to pof my head it can be worked out later.

This is a fair enough point, but you could simply apply a rule like awards are only for games you start in. Allowing people to replace in for the 'unranked' effect zor was talking about. This could increase the replacement pool by abusing the motivation of people who care enough to not join games regularly to protect their achievement.

[IceGuy]

This is a fair enough point, but you could simply apply a rule like awards are only for games you start in.

In this case, people will not play (or play under an alt) if they haven't been lynched.

All in all, I simply see no point in those awards, and a bunch of disadvantages.

[chamber]

This is a fair enough point, but you could simply apply a rule like awards are only for games you start in.

In this case, people will not play (or play under an alt) if they haven't been lynched.

All in all, I simply see no point in those awards, and a bunch of disadvantages.

Alts are tracked on the backend, so thats easily subverted. You can have a minimum number of games player to get the achievement. If people care enough to not play (I don't think they will) then they can not play.

Your last points lack of specificity makes it hard to answer. The point is to reward good play in an objective way. Be specific with disadvatages I'll continue to show that you are wrong.

[IceGuy]

The point is to reward good play in an objective way.

You're not rewarding "good play in an objective way", because that's impossible. You're giving out objective achievements which are somehow related to good play - some more, some less.

Be specific with disadvatages I'll continue to show that you are wrong.

You're not showing I'm wrong, you're just claiming I'm wrong.

You're saying you want good play to be rewarded, implying those rewards will be sought after by players, yet claim players will not try to actively get those awards.

[Amrun]

I would like the best role claim back. It's fun - it's fun to judge, and it's fun to read about it. I have not seen ANY good reason why it should go.

Just because we don't have an award for EVERY area of play is no reason not to have an award for ONE area of play that the userbase likes and appreciates.

[CrashTextDummie]

To me, the beauty of Best Role Claim is that it awards awesome play that is uniquely accessible to people that weren't in the game. You can read the last 10 posts of Hoopla's PGO/Vengeful Townie game for example and immediately recognize why the play was so incredible. I don't think there's any other award in the whole ceremony that this applies to. If I want to check out why the Paragon got his award, I have to slog through whole games at a time. Only Best Role Claim has this "wow"-factor. It's the only award that interests me enough to actually check out any nomination that turns up.

I disagree that claiming is too narrow of an element of play, and I also don't think it's comparable to any other specific element of play like "best use of a power role". Best Role Claim awards people who think outside the box, i.e. what has been given to them by their role PM, who find creative solutions to their given problem, who come up with something that would not have occurred to the vast majority of players. It's a true skill and an important one at that. Besides, they're memorable: Some role claims (both Funny and Best) are the stuff of legends. I don't think you can say the same about "the guy who investigated all the scum as cop and lead the town to victory"

I don't get why a low number of nominations is a point against the award. The SSC apparently interprets it as a lack of interest, when to me it's much more likely the case that people aren't wowed by just any fake claim. And I'd think an award that doesn't eat up an inordinate amount of judging time is a good thing.

At least you've recognized that the complete lack of single game solo award is an issue. But I really don't understand why you're looking for a new one when the existing ones were perfectly fine.

[Amrun]

^ Second this entirely.

[xRECKONERx]

I would be okay with something like "Best Single Game Performance" to really highlight someone's roleclaim if they did well, or some kind of "this one awesome event/funny sequence of events" award to make up for it. I do think claiming is too narrow, and if we're going to have an award for claiming, we'd need to take a look at breaking down "good play" into several different minutiae and do a lot of things.

[UberNinja]

I think it should be brought back.

[Faraday]

Oh we've been thinking of maybe a 'Funny thing' type award instead of funniest roleclaims (that could include but not be limited to roleclaims)

It has the positives of funniest role claim without limiting it as much.


I also expect someone to bring up Losing Cause. No.

I don't really like the idea of Sharing Scummies as a rule - there could be exceptions but for the most part I guess the judges should make a decision.