The Root of Toxicity in Mafia Games

[Nancy Drew 39]

Realistically I think that it's not hard as town to basically never hard defend scum, or to do so so rarely that taking 1 policy lynch is not a problem. Generally if a player is repeatedly falling on the wrong side of that they self select themselves out of my games anyway.

Why not? Why can’t town be fooled? It’s happened to me more than I’d care to admit.

[RadiantCowbells]

Then you need to defend your townreads a lot less

[Nancy Drew 39]

The easiest way to be bad is to think that you're better than you are.
The easiest way to be good is to keep your ability in perspective.

I agree with this, keeping one’s ego in check can mean a win or loss for whatever alignment you are.

[Nancy Drew 39]

It's absolutely true. Over or underrating the correctness of your reads vs everyone elses hurts your winrate. Idk how you would argue that.

Experience and self-awareness affect that a lot.

[Nancy Drew 39]

No, you don't know.

But if your EV of hunting scum is average (1/3 in mini) and someone elses is 2/3 outside of the way your own personal feelings about ~your reads~ get in the way why would you go with 1/3 over 2/3

Can someone please tell me what EV means? Kthanx

[Nancy Drew 39]

Do you think win/loss records and the quantification of “good play” leads to more toxicity?

I think to truly answer this question you need to define what is toxicity. Is toxicity being right/wrong, or is it a personality clash? I personally think toxicity has a bit of being right/wrong, but in general weighs more heavily on being a personality issue.

Depends how you define toxicity

I think a decent minority of MS thinks that my general playstyle is toxic just for being what it is without me having to say a word against anyone in the game.

In that sense, sure. In traditional sense, no.

I think the word toxic starts to lose its meaning when it's applied to "this playstyle that rubs me the wrong way" versus like

actual toxic behavior towards other people

I think it can depend on the specific playstyle. I’ve encountered ones that were definitely toxic. Toxic scum is the absolute worst though.

Ftr, I don’t consider RC’s playstyle to be toxic or I wouldn’t play with him.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Once Dannflor only put kittens in the VC once per day phase instead of twice per day phase and it was super toxic

I have him blacklisted now

[Nancy Drew 39]

Spoiler: :(

VC 1.BLACKLIST

Dannflor (1): popsofctown

Not Voting:

Dannflor

With 2 alive, 1 to make Dannflor sad

Deadline: (expired on 2020-02-23 00:36:42)

Awwwe

[Nancy Drew 39]

You also hard fought me on both SS and Volpe

That wasn’t my point, that my reads are better than yours, my point was that if you arbitrarily lynch anyone who hard defends scum and ignore absolutely anything that points to them being obvtown (not saying you’re actually doing this btw), then you risk bleeding obvtown Sakura type mislynches.

[popsofctown]

I think the idea is that a successful hard defense of scum sets town winrate to 0% and mislynching obvtown doesn't.

[RadiantCowbells]

I think the idea is that a successful hard defense of scum sets town winrate to 0% and mislynching obvtown doesn't.

Ding ding ding

[RadiantCowbells]

The most common paths to scum wins that I see in games are one where a significant faction of town scumread each scum but at least one scum had at least a few townies who hard townread them and defend them, and in the end town lynches people no one really thinks is going to flip scum as a compromise because the people hard defending wear out the people with correct scumreads until they give up on that read.

See: Shoshin, Volpe, but this is actually more common in games without me because I have no issues brute forcing a scum lynch over the objections of whichever townie hard defends them

[RadiantCowbells]

Like sometimes scum just goat and get utr but that's pretty rare (15-20% of scum wins) whereas all scum in PoE but one or a few townies refuse to let at least one scum die constitutes like 50% or so of scum wins.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Then you need to defend your townreads a lot less

No. My townread accuracy rate is actually pretty high - higher than average in fact. That’s why I tend to prefer townblocking to scumhunting early game.

That’s how I won YGM, by eventually figuring out that everyone else was townier than Kokichi, with more than a little help, of course.

However, I did correctly nail both scum in Newsroom. I nailed one in the room odds but I didn’t try hard enough to convince people and everyone kept arguing with me that Persival was town, when I correctly identified him as obvscum right out of the gate.

[RadiantCowbells]

ND you also prevented the SS lynch D1 on newsroom.

[Nancy Drew 39]

I think the idea is that a successful hard defense of scum sets town winrate to 0% and mislynching obvtown doesn't.

Ding ding ding

I wasn’t arguing otherwise. My point is you should only rely on that as a way of sorting. if you have nothing else to go on.

[RadiantCowbells]

It's not above average vs not above average

If more than 1/10 of your townreads are scum your townreads are worthless

[Nancy Drew 39]

ND you also prevented the SS lynch D1 on newsroom.

No I didn’t. I was responsible for both him and Lion getting lynched.

This isn’t funny RC.

[Nancy Drew 39]

It's not above average vs not above average

If more than 1/10 of your townreads are scum your townreads are worthless

That is clearly not the case with me, thankfully.

[OkaPoka]

UR MOTHER WAS A MURLOC

[popsofctown]

No, you don't know.

But if your EV of hunting scum is average (1/3 in mini) and someone elses is 2/3 outside of the way your own personal feelings about ~your reads~ get in the way why would you go with 1/3 over 2/3

Can someone please tell me what EV means? Kthanx

So you know, EV stands for "Expected Value". It represents the average "value" of something with uncertain/unpredictable outcomes, like a lottery ticket or a pair of hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk.
In some contexts it's necessary to multiply by the level of benefit to get the correct average expected value, if it costs ten dollars to enter a tournament and first place gets a hundred dollars, and second through fourth place gets twenty dollars, when you calculate the Expected Value you have to use math to represent the 20$ being more likely to be achievable and also the 100$ being the greater reward. In Mafia EVs you generally can either win the game or lose the game and that's it so the "Value" part of the term is slightly out of place, the values are just "yes you won" or "no you didn't", but it's still good terminology because it's helpful to draw parallels to other games.

[popsofctown]

OkaPoka smells like a Leper Gnome

[OkaPoka]

OkaPoka smells like a Leper Gnome

root of toxicity /thread

[RadiantCowbells]

Oh my god

You changed your mind later in the game sure but I went war mode with SS on D1 and you hard defended him and I gave up on the game

[popsofctown]

I am the root of toxicity

Also I am the source of all townreads on scum