In post 21, mastina wrote:Towns who pull impressive posts/gambits which basically singlehandedly change the course of the game and lead to a town win where before the game was headed towards a scum win? If I recall correctly, that had a Scummie too, but it was rolled into Kodak Moment. This is not a humorous moment, and yet it is also part of the award now.
Scum who manage to turn the game from a town win into a scum win from a single post would theoretically be included in the above, too.
Tangent to this, btw. A common manifestation of this is, obviously, a replacement who changes the course of the game. We used to have a 'Best Replacement' Scummie which got dropped.
On the one hand, I can understand the reasons for having dropped it (I can't quite vocalize this but I do understand the decision and why it was made), but on the other hand, I feel like the existence of that Scummie was a way to encourage players to replace in and try their utmost.
For instance, a replacement replacing into a slot which is screwed, managing to salvage it, or even replacing into a slot which is guaranteed to lose and yet being a good sport and trying their damnedest to still win in spite of it being literally impossible to do so. That kind of attitude is the sort of one I'd want encouraged in replacements. Where someone replacing in gives their all and manages to make the most of a slot, regardless of circumstances surrounding it.
Yet as things are now, aside from players/the moderator in postgame showering the player with praise, that type of performance would go entirely unnoted. Nobody would think anything of it in any future time/event, aside from perhaps the moderator/players encountering said player at a later date and remembering their performance.
Scummies serve the base purpose to award people who were deemed to be outstanding in some way, e.g. an outstanding moderator, an outstanding scum player, an outstanding town player, a player who had an outstanding moment in a game. (This is probably not the best of wording, but you get the idea. Their description on the wiki is, "The Scummies is an annual event run by volunteers on MafiaScum which awards Scummers of exceptional talent, luck, or misfortune." and this is what I am talking about them being, essentially.)
But I also feel that--whether they are meant to serve this purpose or not--the Scummies serve to be an inspiration, specifically, as an example encouraging the behaviors we as the community on mafiascum, decide we most want to encourage players to be. Paragon inspires players to be the best town player; Don Corelone inspires players to be the best scum player; Modfather inspires mods to be the best moderator; other modding awards inspire people to be creative and innovative when designing their setup; Kodak moment inspires people to be memorable.
And beyond that, by awarding it to a specific person, we are stating, more or less, whether we intend to or not: "Go look at what this person has done. And that is the quality you should aspire to have".
Are Scummies meant to act that way? No, not really. But I know that when I was a newer player, that's the perspective I took on them. And over the years, I have seen many generations of newer players ALSO view them that way. Players who have passing familiarity with the Scummies more or less have that mindset, "Oh, this is what's the best in that way", and in theory serve to inspire them to be of that quality.
So I feel like having more Scummies covering different aspects of the site/game currently uncovered by the Scummies would help to serve as a method of revitalizing mafiascum. "Best Replacement" being a theoretical example of one such Scummie we could use to hypothetically help inspire people to replace more often and to deliver a higher-quality performance when replacing.
