I realize
that this likely won't matter considering the two games I'm in will be my last two games on site (as far as my intentions are concerned), but I had a few thoughts that some people might see and agree with, and maybe this is for the better. Sometimes a little bit of feedback is helpful. I'd like to preface this, however, with the disclaimer that some people might feel offended or even disagree with me to the point at which they feel the need to write some strongly worded message discussing how little of a human being I am and how much I deserve to die. If you feel that way, or if you feel you might feel that way, I recommend not reading this post, because it will likely get your undergarments all wadded up and that's just a waste of energy for both you and me. That said, if this opening paragraph makes you angry, feel free to report any and all posts I make - A site ban would be a good excuse to not have to finish the two mafia games I'm currently in and be over with this already. Kidding. Kind of.This post was made from memory and is quite possibly entirely incorrect.
I've been playing mafia
on site on and off under different (known) accounts. My first account was Tr1ckster, who I played as in 2014 with people such as Nachomomma88, Moonlight, and other names that became more recognizable as time went on, but weren't particularly at the time. Randomidget was in my first newbie game, either on this account or the other one. I was very bad back then. I wasn't the worst mafia player in the game, but I very likely would have been if site culture then had been similar to the way it is now. I was reckless, uncomposed, and provocative (which was only somewhat good), but I told myself and others that the way I played was intentional, because I had justified it to myself in my head. I thought I was pretty darn great and that people should just get over the way I play because I was some sort of prodigy that was changing the way mafia was played. I thought that because my posting was somewhat spammy (it was nowhere near as spammy as mafia play is in general now, but that's due to a technological and cultural shift that I'll get into more later) that I was the only player in the game that actually cared. I was wrong. I was unnecessarily aggressive, I didn't understand what differentiated a scum player from a town player, I just went after things that I didn't like and called them scum because that made sense to me. I had the attention span of a squirrel on crack and the memory of a goldfish with amnesia. I was terrible.In 2016, I came
back to the site as Extrapolated Eagle. My play here was also very bad. I remember one specific game - YCBA IV - was particularly bad. I remembered it as the game where I just should have fixed my play. I remembered it with silver linings on a pedestal, as a good game that all future games should mimic. About six months ago
I went back and re-skimmed that game. I was wrong. So yes, in that game, I did argue back and forth with TSO. In that game, I did successfully pull a gambit. And I did catch Elyse as scum and push her as such. But other than her, my reads were bad. I committed many of the crimes I now condemn. I self-voted and asked to be lynched. I was emotionally volatile. I let other players drive me to the edge. While I started out with good play (the reason I was right on Elyse), I confirmation biased myself into reading other players very poorly. I was argumentative with TSO in ways that I probably could have just calmed down and talked to him. I raged about the game afterwards with Elyse and others, taking away from their win. I acted childishly and inappropriately. It was hard for me to read and accept that, because I hadn't remembered that game as that poorly when I came back. Now I'm here again.
Now I'm about to leave for the final time. What's different? Well, I'll get into the meat of the post before I talk about me any more.Let's start with mafia.
Reminder that this is all based off my memory and could be completely wrong.
I think the cell phone revolutionized mafia for better or for worse. In 2014, spam posting your train of thought like I did was unheard of. Most players got on the site and posted once, maybe twice a day, with exceptions made for weekends. Staying online to get a response from the person you were angry with was silly, because players played from many different time zones, and almost everyone played from their computer, so posts were longer, made more carefully, and there was more time between responses. You often couldn't know if anyone else would respond, so staying online and waiting for someone could easily turn out to be a waste of your time. Besides, it usually took 30+ minutes to write a response anyways. So the distance between posts was greater, which meant people who played were forced into having more patience (and I think people with less patience just didn't really start, or they started and quickly replaced out). Games were slower, responses were slower, fights were less intense over minute misunderstandings, because players had time to sit and think about what they were writing, and it was often an entire day before they responded, so they also had much more time to cool down. It was so much more efficient to just understand what your rival was saying the first time than it was to skim his posts and write a half-developed response based on what you thought he meant.
Now, players just spam whatever they want whenever they want. Players who post at reasonable intervals are called lurkers and get run over by spastic morons who just post the first thought to come to mind when they see another player's post without really knowing anything about what the intention behind it is. The average player is like worse version of me in 2014, only worse because we are enabled by cell phones to be self-centered close-minded assholes who only read what we want to read when we want to read it. Mafia isn't mafia anymore. It's attention-seeking glory whores throwing half-chewed reads at a wall and hoping they hit gold over the guy next to them, because if they don't one-up everyone in the game, they don't fit the glorified vision of themselves they have in their head. And when we feel insecure about the reads we just threw against a wall, we start calling our strong town reads scum on the off chance we were wrong about them the whole time so we can get that sweet sweet glory gold at the end of the game. It's smashing someone else's head in because they called you out on playing pretty darn poorly and you're pissed because you know you're the best mafia player in the game, just no one has recognized you yet. It's chickens pecking at penguins for being flightless birds, and sometimes it's even children putting their hands in a fire and blaming their parents because the fire is hot. The attention span and self awareness in some players is disgustingly lacking, and I'll admit I've committed an embarrassing number of these crimes. There is just so much going on here, I probably even forgot to mention a few things, but I feel like it's all enabled by site culture. I'll talk about that a little later.
Outside of mafia, site culture seems pretty cancerous to me right now. I was gonna just stay out of the whole politics discussion, but it's become very apparent that there is a large bias in one direction as far as politics are concerned. My advice to people here: Don't bring it up. Don't discuss it. There are a lot of very vocal very toxic very close-minded people on this site that generally agree with what appears to be the political leaning of the moderation team because they're enabled and ignored for their crimes. Trying to have an open and honest discussion in public here is an exercise in masochism. I've seen it happen multiple times, it's just not good. Just in general, in life, though, what I've learned is that most people don't care about your opinion unless they know you anyways. Most discussions worth having are better had in private or between friends. Just don't share your political views and you'll be fine.
Continued later.
I really like you.
I enjoy socially interacting with people with a common goal and competition, and as soon as I started to read things on a gamestate level, and accept that everything is just a series of plays, everything got better. To be fair, I went through a lot as a person in general the past 4 years, and grew up in the real world, and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t transfer to Mafiascum. I’m still me, and I wouldn’t act that way to people in real life, so why would I here? I don’t mind some friendly arguing, or even some rough competition here and there. I think it’s okay for people to boast about their achievements on site. It is exactly that, achievements. I’m very play orientated nowadays, and I don’t think the correct way to play mafia is black and white. Everyone has different play styles, they should play up their strengths and weakness. I want people to 1-up me. I essentially beg for it. It brings out good competition. At my 5th scum victory in this calendar year, I set a goal for myself to achieve 10 scum victories in the year of 2019, and I worked hard for that, and was super proud to get it. I played a lot of games to make sure somewhere down the line, I’d have the scum games. Not everyone has time for that, obviously. I’m on my phone a lot. I brag, but I’ll brag for other people too. 
