A Few Final Thoughts

[popsofctown]

The first physical cell phone appeared at X date or whatever but like the way people have shifted their daily lives/habits around them has been a slower process I think there is some relevance to what impact they may have on site behavior.

Definitely think if you get all the way to Amishy conclusions that a technology is doing active damage by making its benefits available you're probably wrong.

[Gamma Emerald]

I really doubt cell/smart phones are the reason people are more spammy now, because like they didn’t become a thing only in 2014 or so, they were around for a fair period before then.

Also I would like to praise Flavor’s post

but it was mostly flip phones back then iirc

Was it? I was given a flip phone when I was 13 and it felt like I was an oddball because I had one

[Ramcius]

It was way before 2014, when smart phones became a common thing, but my guess would be that internet accessibility on phones were pretty limited back in the day

[Enter]

Definitely think if you get all the way to Amishy conclusions that a technology is doing active damage by making its benefits available you're probably wrong.

That's definitely one of the more intentionally harmful ways to phrase it. You have something against me?

[popsofctown]

I used wording that harsh because I don't see that as the position you're actually taking.
I don't think you're actually posting in site ideas saying the site would get better if kison would please add some code that keeps people from logging into the site from phones.
If that is actually how you feel I would still disagree but I would be more careful about my choice of words to not be rude, I will be mean to hypothetical people not real people.

[Enter]

I used wording that harsh because I don't see that as the position you're actually taking.
I don't think you're actually posting in site ideas saying the site would get better if kison would please add some code that keeps people from logging into the site from phones.
If that is actually how you feel I would still disagree but I would be more careful about my choice of words to not be rude, I will be mean to hypothetical people not real people.

Oh, I see. Yeah that's not what I'm saying.

[Gamma Emerald]

It was way before 2014, when smart phones became a common thing, but my guess would be that internet accessibility on phones were pretty limited back in the day

This is a valid point.

[Ankamius]

I used to be emotionally volatile and think of myself as a prodigy like 4 years ago onsite, but then I started treating the game itself with respect because at the end of the day, I love mafia. :lol: 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.

I want someone else to have a year like that. I want someone to top my year.

A lot of people like to yell and shade me, but I never shade back, at least not in a bad way. I’ll sass people up. I like to think I’m pretty friendly, and the more people on site who value the plays I feel can help work towards the sportsmanship side of things as well.

Basically, value your play, respect the plays of others, be willing to reevaluate reads. I even started correctly reading people better because I figured out they were scum because I town read them, so self awareness is key.

Realize it’s okay to have incorrect reads. Odds are the scum team was making a play specifically so it would happen.

If you’re battling against an Ivysaur in Super Smash Bros, respect its ability to completely control you in the air, and don’t jump into them.

This post by FL is pretty accurate and mirrors my own views of the game pretty closely.

The single biggest evolution in my gameplay since I first played over a decade ago was when I realized that the game is simply not as simple as town trying to find and eliminate scum before they lose the majority. The game is actually incredibly complex, with a lot of variance based on the playerlist of the game and the personalities involved, the setup and the roles in play, who gets power roles and how it affects their play, and even which set of players get set up as the scumteam together. This is even ignoring the idea of replacements.

There are patterns, yes, and the game can be manipulated to give yourself much better odds of winning if you play your cards correctly, but there is still always going to be that level of variance that can potentially destroy your carefully laid plans and gambits and leave you with a loss that you had every right to win otherwise. That's really just part of the game that has to be accepted, because any more than that would require the game to be played by predictable machines that can remove that variance entirely.

This is the biggest reason why I base my entire playstyle less around concrete ideas like gunning for my strongest scumreads or playing around potential mechanical outplays and more play to reduce the potential of variance as much as possible. I've found over time that in a significant amount of my games, it's actually quite predictable how the game will end even with very little information about player's alignments and the setup just by how the game is playing out; there's several patterns that generally pop up early in a game that I've suspected for a while are significant indicators of how a game will end. It's actually incredibly fascinating to me and it's the single biggest reason why I keep coming back to mafia despite how unbelievably toxic the game is to my mental state and personality. I do think that this is a mystery that

can

be solved, and therefore heavily suspect that the skill ceiling of mafia is significantly higher than what anybody on this site (or from what few other places I've been able to lurk at, ANY site) has been able to reach, but I don't have the willpower or mental fortitude to make that leap into solving it myself. At least, not until I've personally matured enough emotionally to be able to handle it at that level.

Essentially, the game is built on a fairly simple premise that hides a lot of the complexity and variance that lurks beneath the surface, and it can get incredibly difficult to see it as such. There is no such thing as a game where everybody did not make some kind of mistake (except for oddball situations like a replacement coming in and getting lynched before they can even post)... or more realistically a

lot

of them. The level of variance in every game is so astronomically high that it's literally impossible for it not to be the case. There's always a read you should've been able to get, a clue you should've been able to pick up on, a better target you could've used with your power role, another post you could've made to avoid a nightkill, etc.

The toxicity, ego, and closed-mindedness essentially comes from not seeing those mistakes, which is a significant reason why the mafia side of the community gets so toxic a lot of the time in games. The result of this toxicity, ego, and closed-mindedness is that people are less likely to come together and

find

these mistakes, which doesn't help the problem either. I don't think it's a coincidence that the quality of play on this site has been decreasing the past several years, and I don't think the quality of play will improve until this is addressed and the meta shifts to account for it. Mafia isn't a game that can be reliably won with raw skill alone, you have to be able to work within a team and each member's own particular strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and biases. Communication and teamwork creates more reliable victories for both alignments, and the majority of the playerbase don't truly work towards that goal. In the end, it's much healthier for everybody involved to play that way as well.

But that's my own general thoughts on it. I hope I was able to describe them clearly enough.

[RadiantCowbells]

Honestly I take the opposite view; this hyper focus on individuals and their strengths and weaknesses and personal journeys and whatever is the reason town play isn't that good.

[RadiantCowbells]

I would never have won a dozen consecutive scum games just starting out if I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants; I saw LLD and Thor665 play scum very early in my career and learned a lot from their approaches that I internalized into my own play. My town play was also heavily influenced by Thor665 as well even though I believe I have mostly deviated from what I originally learned from him. I don't think it's coincidental either that Northsidegal who put herself together as an insanely strong townie very quickly was also spending a lot of time talking to and learning from strong town players (not referring to myself either) that came before her. There's this attitude that everyone has to make their own mistakes to learn from them and improve. If we let every player in every town have wrong reads and lunch them so they can improve town are just going to lose and no one's really going to learn anything. Towns run into the same systematic errors over and over again and most players are too myopic to look at the bigger picture and wonder where these losses come from and how to avoid them. Sheeping strong townies shouldn't mean not learning anything from the game, it should mean learning from why lynch X player vs Y player and why it was correct in that situation. If mafia isn't fun for you unless you're going off of your own reads then that to me is the failure of town as teams, not "failing to account for everyone as an individual and trying to find our own special path to endgame as a team".

[RadiantCowbells]

You learn a lot more from winning as town because you can see how town correctly found scum whereas if town just flailed all game it's very difficult to see what individuals could have done better.

I also don't think I could have had the jump in town performance I'd had if I didn't see NSG last year consistently have townreads that I didn't have and try to figure out how she got them and learn to have them for myself.

No one's alone in the quest to get better and if you don't try to figure out how the people who had correct reads that you didn't had those reads then you're not going to learn to get better because if there's one thing I've seen on MS it's that players who see progress as solely an individual thing and don't try to learn from others never end up getting better.

[RadiantCowbells]

You can learn solely from your own experiences

Or you can aggregate the knowledge of the successes and failures of everyone around you and improve dozens of times faster at the cost of maybe not having all the individuality you crave.

It's your choice, really.

[popsofctown]

I only feel like a tenth of my games are toxic.
I don't think I have a thick skin.
Am I the toxic one?

[Ankamius]

There are patterns, yes, and the game can be manipulated to give yourself much better odds of winning if you play your cards correctly, but there is still always going to be that level of variance that can potentially destroy your carefully laid plans and gambits and leave you with a loss that you had every right to win otherwise. That's really just part of the game that has to be accepted, because any more than that would require the game to be played by predictable machines that can remove that variance entirely.

[Ankamius]

I mean, essentially RC, we just have very different experiences and views on the game.

I'll just leave it at that and acknowledging that my attempt to play more in your style did increase my read strength for the duration that I was employing it.

[chennisden]

Ok

But you guys are all ignoring the real issue, Ivysaur actually sucks in the air, Pokemon Trainer is worthless, and you should totally spam aerials against it

[Dunnstral]

I only feel like a tenth of my games are toxic.
I don't think I have a thick skin.
Am I the toxic one?

No