The Root of Toxicity in Mafia Games

[popsofctown]

"It's teamwork + you don't know who your teammates are!" sounds like it should be a mitigating factor, but when I think about it more, I don't think it is? If I have a correct solve in a 10:3 I have to cooperate with the same number of "teammates" as a micro.

I think the issue is that it's a teamgame where subjective assessments of how well other players are playing are adjacent or sometime even directly relevant to strategizing for the game itself.

Like if you think about how toxic League was before and after the ability to use four types of pings.

After four types of pings if you want someone to gank the enemy midlaner you are laning against, you ping "assist me here" or "attack here" or whatever. Adding subjective commentary requires you to further divert yourself from actually playing the game.

Before the four types of pings, if the ping would be contextually ambiguous, you had to change the keyboard to the chatbox either way. And you would say, "kill the player indicated by the ping". And while you were there anyway if you were not-great you would say "because he's hard to deal with, mostly because you fed him a kill 4 minutes ago and now he has an early Rod of Ages".

The parallel in mafia would be to naked vote someone. You won't win the social deduction game well enough with naked voting though. So we are "stuck with old pings". "VOTE: popsofctown because her motivation on the Alisae mislynch day 1 was scum aligned. I'm town and was practically the only one not on that wagon so that kind of suggests you all are gullible tbh." (the second sentence isn't actually necessary to effectuate the popslynch, but it has become an adjacent topic.) You have to socially interact and get, at a minimum, adjacent to these issues. So there's a high likelihood for the game to get toxic.

[popsofctown]

Almost wonder if this is just a product of the inherent lack of information town is given. The lynch is generally a bad tool to get information, and can only be done so many times per game. The only way of getting information on a player is either to remove them, or to have players claim that they have mechanical information on them from another source. As well, the lynch requires a majority of players to do anything, reducing the ability for any individual to carry.

You see the evolutions of mafia meant to be played in small groups and they all have large-impact, public mechanics, usually with semi-ambiguous information on multiple players, several times in a game. Small Mafia setups just don't have that. Players can try to make small setups with multiple scum that have sorts of public information throughout the game, but it will always be little because of the inherent need to kill people to get information.

These same evolutions would also put spotlights on players, giving them elevated power to exercise their reads. These two things combined allows for a lot more information on a lot less players, and a lot more individual importance.

The question I'm proposing is if More public info + More individual ability to carry = more gameplay? and to do that, removing the need to kill people to gain information about them.

As you hinted the game can tolerate very little mechanics of "add information without killing anybody" without becoming imbalanced against the scum.

There are some setups where players are selected to be nominated for not being not likely to be scum instead of killing them which you might think would be less toxic but I've seen it be toxic anyway.

[popsofctown]

Vig is a brilliant antitoxicity role.
A player can become very angry about getting misvigged.

But you've hidden them away in the dead thread, now.

[popsofctown]

I think WotM and WotC should take the place of policy lynches

[popsofctown]

I've seen policy lynches for lurkers, I don't think I've ever seen a policy lynch for a toxic player in all my years.
I can't understand the logic in that. Toxicity doesn't actually hurt town win % that much. If a player is so toxic that you would want to lynch them even if they were Innocent Child, then you should probably ask the mod to force replace them, and if you can't manage that then well like you would have to be force replaced for playing against wincon apparently you want to lynch the IC.

I'm guessing the main point of disagreement is "toxicity doesn't actually hurt town win % that much".
It sucks an egg, but I think it doesn't actually lose the game for town. A highly inactive game is far harder for town to win than a toxic one.

[popsofctown]

If you can't convince people to do a normal lynch on a toxic player shouldn't a policy lynch on that player be even harder?

Which is why I'm saying

Just slip a vig in

Vig's the best role in mafia anyway

don't @ me

[popsofctown]

I mean maybe do as I do not as I say...
Menalque was almost-force-replace toxic in autumnal mafia and probably if I thought through whether he could afford to do that as scum it'd be town indicative
I kinda deliberately like didn't want to think through that angle and reward that kind of behavior and deliberately tried not to think about it
Ended up mislynching him

[popsofctown]

The good thing is that it only works so many times as scum; once you become known for being shitty as scum you stop getting TR for it

It works a lot better if you have a meta of only being toxic as town because then it effectively becomes a trust tell that doesn't violate any rules

like if you only get riled up enough as town to be really nasty then it clears you and it's not exactly 'trying to maintain a meta' it's just it is what it is and no one is going to encourage you to act awfully as scum in the interest of fairness

I think the rules on toxicity should be a lot tighter than they currently are. I think most toxicity in mafia happens because it gets results and a solid 10-15% of games are won or lost by a race to the bottom with whichever faction is willing to play dirtier taking the win.

I have to agree with the point you're making here. Especially as someone who finds forum mafia more "meaningful" than face to face mafia, it seems really unpalatable to be able to bring a mechanic that seems to have the same flavor back into the game.

[popsofctown]

Do not bring outside influences into the game - this includes

threats

, bribes, wagers, promises, "trust tells", alliances, etc. Using knowledge from previous games is perfectly acceptable, but try not to carry grudges

from one game to another.

The idea that threatening to blacklist someone is not good mafia is already in the spirit of how people want games to be a approached. It just an enforcement/drawing a line in the sand issue on preventing the behavior, keeping it from being rewarded, etc.

[popsofctown]

(an example of something I think should be banned is threats of blacklist in mafia games. Blacklisting someone outside of game should be fine but using it as a tool to beat people with should not.)

Threatening people with a lot of things is p toxic, IMO. It also doesn't necessarily make sense - if someone doesn't wanna stop doing something just because you say stop, why would they want to do it to avoid being on your black list?

People might do it for a cheap townread and it usually is done by town but scum!Maria did that to RC in MG. It might be hard to totally regulate that though.

lol
wait maria did taht

never really talked to/played with her, but i always got the impression she was a nice and at least somewhat reasonable person

wow that's like a next level shitty thing to do, i would expect shit like that from like TSE or other players i've encountered recently, but definitely not a skittle , lol

She announced a matter-of-fact blacklisting, I don't think she threatened to blacklist contingent on RC's future behavior, which would be much worse. I don't think she did it to get townread, I think she was actually very angry.
I guess it's mafia and maybe I was being fooled and I'm getting wolfed even after the game is over as a little vanilla townie and all that but I don't want to believe bad things about MariaR :/

[popsofctown]

I don't understand why people call themselves obvtown

I would be down to policy lynch everyone who calls themselves obvtown

If you are truly obvtown

Why would you need to comment upon that, it should be unnecessary

Like those radio ads where they are selling something and they say they are absolutely certain they do not have enough inventory for all the people who will call to order the product

[popsofctown]

Do not bring outside influences into the game - this includes

threats

, bribes, wagers, promises, "trust tells", alliances, etc. Using knowledge from previous games is perfectly acceptable, but try not to carry grudges

from one game to another.

The idea that threatening to blacklist someone is not good mafia is already in the spirit of how people want games to be a approached. It just an enforcement/drawing a line in the sand issue on preventing the behavior, keeping it from being rewarded, etc.

Bribes: How would that work exactly? I’ll pay you to unvote me?

I'll gift you Assassin's Creed on steam if you vig popsofctown.

Since my avatar annoys you I'll change it forever if you give me my preferred lynch today and it flips town.

There's some plausible-ish stuff that people would do if they didn't naturally know it was wrong/see the rule and know it was wrong.

[popsofctown]

If I underrate myself will I lose a bunch?

[popsofctown]

Unexpected

[popsofctown]

I don't track my read rate because I'm afraid of either developing an ego or inferiority complex that would hurt my winrate

[popsofctown]

Also what about the fact that read accuracy can sometimes vary wildly from game-to-game but when you’re in a game where it’s off it can be too far in before you have enough information to realise that?

I think that most people's scumreads % likely to be accurate is fairly consistent even if that means that it looks from an outside perspective like they have good games and bad games.

Even if it was inconsistent it wouldn't matter odds are odds. If Barry bonds strikes out his first two at bats you don't substitute him out. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

[popsofctown]

I think RC is probably overall generally a toxic sort of player, I just expect him to prefer strategies that allow his SpDef or Def tanks to present a threat without channeling their poor Atk or SpAtk. I might be wrong though, he might be the sort to Choice Band to get Scizor's Bullet Punch as jacked as it goes and roll with it.

[popsofctown]

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

[popsofctown]

It's only been four minutes but somehow he is whitelisted

[popsofctown]

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

[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

[popsofctown]

I am the root of toxicity

Also I am the source of all townreads on scum

[popsofctown]

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.

an orphan dies every time someone uses this fallacy

What “fallacy”?

You think townblocking can’t be a valuable tool? Why not? I’m far better at correctly identifying town than scum, especially in early game.

I think the fallacy is that you know you identify town correctly more often than scum, and you suppose that means your town reads rate is better than your scum reads rate. The error is that there are more town than scum in a game, so your higher correct town reads rate is not statistically significant.

yeah maybe that thinking is a little off but there are certain types of reads that are better y'know. Like I have really weak reads day 1 but I am a lategame carry, in LyLo my reads are 50% accurate even though scum are only about 22% of the playerlist!

[popsofctown]

Just FTR the times I'm criticizing ND for aren't the same as saying she's always bad or is bad in general, just that conventional wisdom on 'townreads' is wrong

I don’t make my reads by using conventional wisdom, that’s why they tend to be in general, better than average.

Do you mean better than average as in "better than number of scum divided by total number of players", or better than average as in you think you are better than most other players?

[popsofctown]

Getting scumread by town as town isn't toxicity

[popsofctown]

Are there sites with ranked mafia??

[popsofctown]

The sample size for forum mafia is too low so if you assess how good people are you have to make some subjective assessments about the way players played rather than plugging their win/loss record into a formula.

[popsofctown]

Hypothesis: toxicity increases exponentially when the response to not knowing how to handle someone is defaulting to a SR instead of a TR/sort later mentality

I did this in the game you modded

I never played with skitter or pops before and I didnt find they play style to radiate town anywhere near as much as everyone else in the thread so I was hella confused and it really drove me to scum read skitter in particular which probably came across toxically (or at least I felt it did) (hurrah for making up words!)

In the end it turned out that penguin fake claim was just causing friction amongst the town and because I wanted to deal with that weird roles by lynching a PR earlier than anyone else - that was probably one of the root causes of that episode

So sorry pops and skitter:D

Hypothesis, there are toxic players, and self-aware players concerned they are being toxic, and no overlap between these two groups.

[popsofctown]

Um I saw quite some toxic last marathon weekend