Commonly Asked Questions on Mafia Theory

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Post Post #201 (isolation #0) » Tue Jan 15, 2019 1:04 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

In post 195, BuJaber wrote:To use your example, how would Ellibereth win as scum?
by zero posting in the game topic and getting carried by smith, of course :P :good:
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Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #203 (isolation #1) » Tue Jan 15, 2019 1:05 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

In post 188, northsidegal wrote:
In post 183, Persivul wrote:
In post 177, naturalbreadcrumbs wrote:In a Mountainous set-up, is it really possible for Town players, through only experience and skill, to raise the chances of a correct lynch above random selection?
D1 - no.

After that, if VCA and NKA are properly applied - yes.
i fundamentally disagree with everyone who espouses the "day ones are useless" philosophy. reading people based on their play really doesn't change at all day to day, and that's not something that you can ever just ignore.
I have been part of town sweeps. It is entirely possible to achieve wolf lynches on d1, sometimes even without much in the way of bussing! If you believe it can happen, you can make it happen.
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Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #204 (isolation #2) » Tue Jan 15, 2019 1:07 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

A short list of things you can do as town to make the odds of a wolf lynch >>>rand:

1) Identify and drive wagons on wolfy players
2) Develop a *RELIABLE* town core (if your town core is a bunch of wolfs, lolu)
3) Find the easy/lazy mislynch du jour, prevent their lynch, see what happens
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http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Mhsmith0
Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #205 (isolation #3) » Tue Jan 15, 2019 1:09 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

In post 201, mhsmith0 wrote:
In post 195, BuJaber wrote:To use your example, how would Ellibereth win as scum?
by zero posting in the game topic and getting carried by smith, of course :P :good:
A more serious answer to the question is that a high rep town player, when randing wolf, will probably be forced to bus at some point, barring a pretty lol tier willage or extremely careful planning of interactions and night kills (in order to CREATE an lol tier willage by murdering off the people capable of catching him in the first place).

(also anon games can help with this too *shrugs*)
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http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Mhsmith0
Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #207 (isolation #4) » Tue Jan 15, 2019 1:28 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

In post 180, OkaPoka wrote:I think the more experienced the playerlist, the more likely that town lynches town from personal experience.

Personally, I believe that there is a higher peak to playing scum than playing town, if that makes any sense. Like there is a limit to how good you can get at being able to look at anyone and just knowing they are scum (barring meta) while playing scum, there is no real limit. Scum players, especially in no investigative pr setups, are just afforded much more freedom so given enough time, they could probably create an effective persona that is essentially unlynchable. A big part of playing scum in a normal game is both getting townread while not drawing night actions, but when you don't have to care about the latter, then all you have to do is get solidly townread which isn't too hard if you put enough effort into it.

When the playerlist overall is less experienced, I think that town is more favored than scum. It takes a lot more training to be good at deception versus seeing someone be awkward and realizing they don't fit in. We've been training our entire lives to lie and tell if someone else is lying, but keeping up a lie for months is really hard without at least some experience.

But your mileage may vary and this is just all speaking from personal experience.
I actually disagree with this a bit.

At the lowest levels, I think you're correct, in that really bad scum play loses games easier than really bad town play, and the relative gain from improving scum play is >>> the gain from improving town play.

But I think that it's actually really hard to become townread as scum in a really high level game; if, say, >=75% of the town is quality (which is actually VERY hard to make happen sometimes), then it becomes actually kind of easy to establish a pretty good POE and force scum to bus or out themselves with their pushes, or to establish a thread environment that's just an overall nightmare to wolf in because people are accurately finding each other and making/enforcing standards around what people are saying/doing that takes the air out of the kind of space for BS that wolves tend to need to thrive.
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Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #215 (isolation #5) » Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:11 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

In post 212, Nancy Drew 39 wrote:
In post 204, mhsmith0 wrote:A short list of things you can do as town to make the odds of a wolf lynch >>>rand:

1) Identify and drive wagons on wolfy players
2) Develop a *RELIABLE* town core (if your town core is a bunch of wolfs, lolu)
3) Find the easy/lazy mislynch du jour, prevent their lynch, see what happens
When you find them, how do you convince town that they’re Lhfs and not wolves? Town more often than not, fails miserably in differentiating the mislynchbaity lhfs from scum. They all too frequently misunderstand that lynchbaity lhf play, usually comes from town, way more than scum.
Figure out the case on the LHF, and effectively argue against the case
Find the skeeziest looking vote on the LHF and vote that person
See if there are people alive who are sitting back and lurking out the phase with the easy mislynch
Meta the LHF, try and find AI tells in their town vs scum game, point out (obv only if true) how they're playing more like their town game than scum game
etc

I think it's easy for people to shrug and walk down the easiest path when left to their own devices, but if you make it difficult to just shrug and lazy lynch whoever is the worst (or, sometimes, lowest rep) player in the game, then you can see what shakes out from that. Sometimes you can see legitimately useful AI tells (in either direction) when the easy lynch becomes hard because there's actual resistance to it.

PS It really does help a lot if you can find someone interacting with the wagon in a particularly suspicious manner and focus the attention that way. Of course, sometimes you're stuck in a game with ONLY LHF's and in that case, it's simply your lot in life to suffer :P
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http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Mhsmith0
Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #216 (isolation #6) » Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:17 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

In post 211, RadiantCowbells wrote:I'm saying that MU players tend to systematically lynch the lower charisma players by writing them off as POE lynches that should happen at some point. You'll pretty much never see a D1 lynch on a well connected player on MU ime.
FWIW I think that almost everywhere people tend to systematically lynch the lower charisma players. I think in MU games (in my limited experience, since I usually just rand wolf over there and it turns out when smith rands wolf there's an even easier path for town to take than just mislynching some random LHF :P ) there's a bit more explicit work in terms of trying to construct a town block and develop a reasonable towncore, and then the LHF types are just part of the remainder.

I think there's also probably a bit more hesitation to take really aggressive lynches on talented players, since if you're wrong you've lost a pretty useful asset. I'm not sure if that's overall good or bad, but I do think there's at least some logic to it, even if it can be annoying for everyone else (speaking as a pretty non-connected person I'm kind of neutral on it fwiw :P )
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Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #220 (isolation #7) » Mon Feb 11, 2019 5:52 am

Post by mhsmith0 »

typically a traitor would depart from the game the moment the rest of his team dies, although different sites might do it differently. I'd run a multiball large normal a couple years ago where there was a blue mafia traitor who'd suicide as soon as his teammates were eliminated (but red mafia still could win at that point)
I've ALSO seen games where traitor can inherit the kill AS WELL AS GAMES where the traitor CANNOT inherit the kill but just sticks around and turns it into a scum win if he's ever in the final 2 where the other one is town
so it really depends on game design, but "cannot inherit kill and suicides when his teammates are all dead" is the most common approach.
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http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Mhsmith0
Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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