HELP

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HELP

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Thu Nov 30, 2017 7:42 pm

Post by UC Voyager »

my town game sucks ass.
i mean, i have one good town game where i did good, but i generally fail. I don't know what i do to be scummy. If anyone could give me pointers to help me improve. i would really like it! im tired of being lynched day one a lot. it gets annoying.

my scum game is fine for the most part. I just suck as town
so...i don't get enough sleep
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Thu Nov 30, 2017 11:04 pm

Post by Espeonage »

In the past when I have seen what separates a good townie from a great townie, it is that they stop looking for scummy actions and start looking for scummy mentalities.
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 4:42 am

Post by Thestatusquo »

this is going to be pretty blunt, if you don't want blunt advice I'll suggest you not read it.

If your scum game is fine its likely because your town game is so bad that no one ever expects anything of you. Being terrible overall often results in a decent scum game because you become a known village idiot type player and attacking you is seen as opportunistic.

At that point any gains you make as a town player will be lost win % on your scum game.

What I'm trying to say to you is likely your scum game is not fine. Likely you need to work to improve both aspects of your game (this is certainly true of what I've seen of you) and not allow decent results to make you think that the process is similarly decent, rather than asking yourself the reasons.

As for town game, my experience playing with you and reading some of your games, showcases a fundamental lack of understanding about mafia. You have zero awareness of why people do things. You have zero awareness of the motivations around posts. You have zero awareness of what things make someone more likely to be scum or town. You need to take some time and read some games and really start to dig down into the WHY behind peoples actions. You need to start to look at each post someone makes and ask "Why did they make this post. What is this post trying to accomplish?" I think this is part of the problem with your posting style in general, btw. You do not seem to understand that this is how one gets reads and also how other players get reads on you, so when you post something like "LOL PAGETOP" as 90% of your content, it leads to frustration from the other players in the game, along with that dichotomy I mentioned earlier where your scum game is passable BECAUSE your town game is so bad.

The way to start doing this is simply post less. I know this is a controversial opinion on this site now, but if you are not trying to accomplish a specific goal when you post, DONT POST. Read the thread instead. In order to start seeing what other players are trying to do when you look at post you should be trying to think what the likely outcome of that post is. What will this post cause to occur? Then start thinking about who that will benefit. If you do this, you will start to see patterns in the things people post in a game. You will start to notice across your games that scum players tend to be trying to make the same sorts of things happen across games.

Here is a series of posts I made at you in a recent game we played together:
In post 68, Thestatusquo wrote:Hey UC, you have several posts and all of them are useless. How about you start playing the game.
In post 74, Thestatusquo wrote:If RVS is a stage of random low information posting, and town benefits from more information and less random posting, why do you think that attempting to "leave RVS" is anti-town?

More to the point, would you describe what I am doing right now as "attempting to leave RVS"? If not, why? What do you think my motivations are right now? If so, why aren't I also reading as scum to you?
In post 83, Thestatusquo wrote:Ok, so if both teams want to leave RVS (something I don't agree with, and actually wrote a whole article about, but thats neither here nor there) why do you think that derpy pushing to leave RVS is scummy?

For the second question I guess I'll go down a level further: How do we leave RVS? How do we go from a position of low information to a position of high information?
These quotes both illustrate what I'm talking about above, that you don't understand motivation in the game, and also reveal a lot of things you COULD have been using to read people in that game. While it is true that once someone starts actively bragging about the townie things they are doing they become less likely to be a townie thing (since scum has motivation to be seen as townie), this is a good example of looking deeper into motivations of posts. In that game players were actively attempting to push the game out of RVS by creating information by attacking and posting reads and starting wagons. These are generally townie behaviors in my book, because the town is advantaged by information and the scum are disadvantaged by information. Therefore town has incentive to create information and scum do not. Are all players who do this going to be town? No. Scum know what town motivations are and attempt to fake them all the time, but your job is to find who is being genuine and who is not. Mafia is also a game of probabilities. I thought you were likely to be scum that game, and you were not. I was wrong. But good scumhunting is going to be wrong sometimes, because only scum have certainty of information.

Anyway, hope you got something from that.
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 6:01 am

Post by Something_Smart »

This was a problem I used to have. I got mislynched all the time, and like TSQ said I thought my scumgame was good but it was only good relative to my towngame. As my towngame has improved, my scumgame suffered a corresponding blow.

I don't know if the reasons for it are the same, but TSQ has a point in that newer town players sometimes fixate on things that look superficially bad rather than delving deeper into motivation.

This is something that comes with practice and it's not easy. Though I am better at it than I was, I'm still not very good at it. I'm not a very emotional person, and I work much better with logic and evidence than with motivation. But the key was when I recognized that and changed my playstyle in accordance.

Essentially, I stopped prioritizing forming reads. Instead, I focused on asking questions, making observations, and facilitating discussion (all things I am good at) to help other town players form better reads.

The biggest consequence of this is that I became MUCH better at making my town wincon apparent, and I stopped getting mislynched. I removed my often wrong reads from consideration while removing myself from the lynchpool.

I don't know if this advice will be at all applicable to you, as everyone's situation is different. But if your case is similar to mine, then posting less may not help. I used to post long thought-out posts, but since I've changed my playstyle I've been posting way more frequent and shorter posts since I just post questions and comments whenever they occur to me.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 7:07 am

Post by Srceenplay »

In post 0, UC Voyager wrote:my scum game is fine for the most part. I just suck as town
Then play town as you do scum
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 7:40 am

Post by UC Voyager »

In post 4, Srceenplay wrote:
In post 0, UC Voyager wrote:my scum game is fine for the most part. I just suck as town
Then play town as you do scum
Well then in would get townies lynched a lot.

I liked playing scum when I first joined, but now that I have been on site, I much prefer to be Town.
so...i don't get enough sleep
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 7:57 am

Post by Micc »

I’ve always felt like people sometimes fall into the pitfall of playing too many games at once. If you’re in five games you’re going to end up doing a fifth of the analysis that you could be doing when playing in one. Playing well as Town starts with having good reads, having good reads starts with doing the things Shae mentioned, and doing those things starts with actually having the time to do them.

I don’t know that this is necessary something that is affecting you, but I think it’s good advice that I don’t see offered as often as it probably should be. If you find yourself wanting to queue for another game, first ask yourself if you’re time wouldn’t be better spent thinking more about the games you’re already playing.
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 8:12 am

Post by Thestatusquo »

In post 4, Srceenplay wrote:
In post 0, UC Voyager wrote:my scum game is fine for the most part. I just suck as town
Then play town as you do scum
this seems like aggressively unhelpful advice.
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 8:34 am

Post by UC Voyager »

In post 6, Micc wrote:I’ve always felt like people sometimes fall into the pitfall of playing too many games at once. If you’re in five games you’re going to end up doing a fifth of the analysis that you could be doing when playing in one. Playing well as Town starts with having good reads, having good reads starts with doing the things Shae mentioned, and doing those things starts with actually having the time to do them.

I don’t know that this is necessary something that is affecting you, but I think it’s good advice that I don’t see offered as often as it probably should be. If you find yourself wanting to queue for another game, first ask yourself if you’re time wouldn’t be better spent thinking more about the games you’re already playing.
Yes. I agree. When I was only in two games, one of which being hero we deserve. I was a universal town read and I didn't even need to claim PR.
so...i don't get enough sleep
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 11:38 am

Post by beeboy »

Something i have noticed is you tend to join a lot of games and spread yourself thin at times which can harm your play overall.

Edit: people have already touched on this oops
ah yes, beeboy style reads;
if this person flips town, then i'll townread them. - Nahdia
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Fri Dec 01, 2017 11:04 pm

Post by Toto »

What Shea said.

But to try to simplify it.

Your main job as town (and scum) is to not get lynched. Focus on this first.

The reason you get lynched a lot is because your reads look superficial because they are a little bit naive sometimes. (I think this could be age related), so in some way I think you are lacking a little bit of emotional intellingence ( maturity ). But that doesnt mean you should give up.

Maybe include this information at the start of your games so people know how to read you better. (I think you are actually easy to read now).

Try to get in other peoples shoes. This is the hard part. Try to think why they do the things they do as scum but realize they are most likely town. When you lynch someone it must feel like a big weight on you. If you feel too confident (>50%) you are probably confbiased. Think again if that person would do everything they did as town. The answwer is probably yes. People are not perfect. They are not logical and do weird shit all the time.

Ask people questions, try to clarify why they did what they did. Try to find who is town first before you find who is scum. It doesnt matter if your reads suck you need to convince everyone you are town and are honestly trying your best to find scum.

Once you get good at not getting lynched get good at finding scum. Gl
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Sat Dec 02, 2017 10:49 am

Post by Toto »

Oh and yeah,

You give up too easily,

When you are about to get lynched do not go gentle into the night.
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Sat Dec 02, 2017 11:01 am

Post by UC Voyager »

Ok. What kinds of questions should I ask?
so...i don't get enough sleep
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Post Post #13 (ISO) » Sat Dec 02, 2017 11:15 am

Post by Espeonage »

When you are on the verge of being misslynched, do everything you can to differentiate the scum on the wagon with the town on the wagon.

Use your unique position to ask pertinent scummy difficult to ask questions so that when you flip people know they came from town.

I used to have a terrible town game. And then I just would flat out refuse to tiebreak universally tiebreak people and would hammer them and always ask why they were thinking or doing things.

A townie should not be afraid of dying, a townie should be afraid of dying for nothing.

As for HOW to read motivations she's hit it on the head with asking why people posted the way they did. I'll see if I can find examples.

EDIT: Ok so I knew I had a perfect example of what to do if you're going to die. If you can get through this game viewtopic.php?f=84&t=63992 is a great example of me appearing scummy to half the player list but then breaking the game completely by dying. I played badly early and made enemies was wagoned the entirety of day 1. Died N1 bc of setup, which meant that people were able to tell I was town and use that to kill the 'better' mafia player which ruined the newbie scum. The point here is that you want to make it so that you flipping town gives the rest of the town something. It means that people can trust you.

I am not a good player though, so I would be loathe to try and tell you to play like me because I am not a good example. However that game is a good example of how to use dying to your advantage if you are a regular mislynch target.

Working on getting you some good stuff on how to actually get good reads.
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Post Post #14 (ISO) » Sat Dec 02, 2017 2:03 pm

Post by Toto »

In post 12, UC Voyager wrote:Ok. What kinds of questions should I ask?
You need to figure out if someone is really scumhunting or pretending to be scumhunting so ask people to explain their reads and their actions and try to guess if they are town or scum.


Basically try to find what everyone’s reads are
and then try to figure out wheather they believe their own reads
Ask them how they arrived at the conclusion and try to see if it sounds believable
If you disagree with them tell them why you disagree and see how they react
Ask them to explain everything until you understand their motivations

If you believe them sheep them if not vote them but dont lynch them unless you are confident or you have no choice
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