Best Replacement
Best Inexperience-Challenged Player-for this one, I'm thinking more along the lines of who teaches the best and not the IC the plays the best.
Best Contribution to Mafia Discussion
Best Performance: Scum Group
Best Performance: Pro-Town Team
Most Enjoyable player
should come back
Of all tyrannies,a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
In post 51, Nero Cain wrote:Best Inexperience-Challenged Player-for this one, I'm thinking more along the lines of who teaches the best and not the IC the plays the best.
Best Contribution to Mafia Discussion
Merge these too and even then its probably not an award that would get a lot of nominations.
There should probably be a best town preformance for an individual player in an individual game.
Paragon being body of work kinda sucks in my opinion.
I think that would be a pretty popular category that would apply to a lot of games and that's something the scummies need a reason for people to talk about them.
(I do think there is room for a different winner compared to paragon as well)
ah yes, beeboy style reads;
if this person flips town, then i'll townread them. - Nahdia
As someone that flaked from judging. Judging requires a hell of a lot of reading and to do it effectively requires a heap more time than a few games. For me to judge properly, I would have had to stop playing for two weeks.
In post 26, Faraday wrote:i think you're assuming that there were always more volunteers than people selected, that was definitely not the case.
No, I'm stating that you'd get more volunteers if
-More people knew HOW to volunteer, and
-More people knew they COULD volunteer.
Neither of which, people are well aware of. The process for volunteering is not widely known/very public.
Making a year-round easily accessible place for this information to be found (for instance, having a blurb about volunteering to judge in the Scummies thread itself as a possibility) would be a start--
...And so too would, when judges are needed the most, a global announcement asking for them.
No fucking shit you're not going to get a large number of volunteers if people don't know how to volunteer or if they are legally even able to volunteer. (I knew that when I volunteered, I wasn't even sure I legally could do the job thanks to a combination of me having nominated someone in almost every category and/or having been nominated in categories leaving no Scummie where I was neither. The answer was, obviously, that I could in fact volunteer, but I didn't KNOW I could and the first indication I could was when I was accepted into the judging group.)
This is objectively wrong. The amount of people that will wander in to the judging subforum then immediately walk out will be immense.
There is an issue where not enough games are being nommed and those that are nommed are not games worth being nommed.
Really, if you want the scummies to be better than you need to fix that games have been going downhill in quality, and that no one cares enough to nom, or even really knows that scummies are a thing.
MS used to be more crude, but also much less toxic.
idk from reading much older games, a lot of currently high EV tactics were sorely underdeveloped by both alignments
- VCA
- tonereading
- meta/soulreading
- charisma
think of chess or sport meta. capablanca NEVER beats carlsen. jesse owens NEVER beats usain bolt. MJ... RARELY beats lebron in a 1 on 1.
knowledge base, strategy, and training naturally improve over time with an expanding playerbase. MS is not, however, expanding. lack of influx of new talent combined with the older players phasing out of their prime is leaving a scarred site
THAT SAID i think 2014 was probably peak mafiascum in that the players from that year in their prime likely beat any other year
"I just want to play mafia, not Economics Wonderland." - cytheflyguy
I think it comes down to an unwillingness to have your reads ever locked in. And to scrutinise new evidence as harshly as old. I see many people throwing around lock town reads on people who they have meta on and should read, and then they just leave that person in the sorted basket without ever relooking at stuff or messing around with their reads.
There so few clutch 180 reads in my experience as there used to be.
But as for an enjoyment standpoint. People take losing a lot more seriously now. They see it is a personal affront if they lost, especially if they died early or had accurate reads when really they likely died because they had good reads or were left alive with accurate reads because they had the charisma and sway of a wind-vane made of concrete.
People just seemed nicer, they played hard to win, and if they didn't they debriefed on why, had a discussion on some what ifs that were geared toward social aspects like convincing people at the right times rather than saying people should have been convinced.
mafia was treated as a team game, which funnily enough is what it is.
In post 22, Faraday wrote:the biggest problem with the scummies has always been a lack of volunteers to judge who then follow through and judge properly.i haven't been on the scummies steering commitee in years, there were years none of us wanted to judge the games - to try and bring new perspectives but we could never find sufficent amount of judges.
As a two-time judge, this is the first hurdle.
If you want scummies, you need judges, and judges must read dozens of games (in their entirety is debatable but if you want accuracy you must) and then come to a consensus. It can be a lot of reading especially when there's a dozen nominations for every award some years. Its not as bad as 2011-2012 where every game was 100+ pages but its still a ton of work that people who aren't involved in the Scummies Process take for granted.
If you want a ceremony, you need writers, and its all good to get people from one year to sign up, but getting them to show up again after a whole year for writing is difficult since a lot happens in one year and people (like myself) have basically moved on and don't participate in MS culture anymore.
"This is the true face of a man who plays paladin."
Best Replacement
Best Inexperience-Challenged Player-for this one, I'm thinking more along the lines of who teaches the best and not the IC the plays the best.
Best Contribution to Mafia Discussion
Best Performance: Scum Group
Best Performance: Pro-Town Team
Most Enjoyable player
should come back
In post 29, Faraday wrote:w/r/t the actual awards themselves, yeah they need work too.
i always liked most enjoyable player as an award for showcasing something other than actual "technical skill" - making games fun should be something awarded too. similarly i thought best town/best scum performance should have been left there and awarded if a scum team or town performed particularly well.
"The same people are being nominated for these awards year after year, so we're going to drop them".
Not joking.
other than you try harding for professor mafia...
I'm not sure how
Best Replacement
Best Performance: Scum Group
Best Performance: Pro-Town Team
Best Inexperience-Challenged Player
Best replacement maybe since its a solo award and theoretically a skilled player could win it over and over again.
Maybe best IC if there's a particularly good teacher.
Most Enjoyable player is a popularity award so I could see that one repeating.
Of all tyrannies,a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
I volunteered to judge but I haven't heard shit from the mod team and I would think that the mod team would be heavily involved in judging anyways.
Of all tyrannies,a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
There's a lot that I want to see changed, and I am a huge fan of adding back a lot of the old awards, but I think that it fundamentally has to start with a reset on most of the SSC members
I think that some of the changes being adopted but the group continuing to be run as is is a dead end. I'm wary of diluting my message by talking too much about changes in this thread because this ending with a Zoraster post saying that they're taking the ideas that they liked and maybe switching out one member of the SSC and scrapping the stuff they don't like and continuing to largely run it as is is probably the worst case outcome here.
2019 stats: Town WR 76.7%, overall WR 81.667%, 1 scum defeat involving a major mod error in lylo vs 8 scum wins.
