In post 199, LuckyLuciano wrote:I've only done a brief skim, but there are two topics I want to immediately address, and I will go back through and answer some of the smaller things.
(1) Lucky not wanting to scumhunt prior to all of the players being in the game.
Yeah, and I'm probably not going to scumhunt after all of the players are int he game either. It's not how I intend to play the game. My first game on mafiascum,
Newbie 1988, came after a multiyear hiatus from mafia offsite. Titus was in that game. I ended up figuring out the game at the end, but not before I confbias tunneled nearly every single town in the game. I thought a lot about what went wrong that game, and how my play that game was different from my old town games before. The main difference I found was that I focused more on building town blocks before to minimize my tendency to be paranoid of people and assume everyone has an ulterior motive. My solve of that game game when I stopped looking for reasons people are scum and started looking for reasons people are town. My town play in
Newbie 1995 is notably different than my town play in Newbie 1988 because it is a direct response to the flaws I saw in my play in 1988. I took this a step further after the game by observing
Newbie 1998. The idea was I could put myself in a situation where it is not possible for me to pursue scumreads, as I wasn't in the game, making it easier to focus on townreads. I solved the game very early in my
PT through PoE. The next game I played where I focused really hard on implementing this strategy was
Newbie 2002. I made two pushes that entire game. The first was a reaction test which I explained throughout the game helped me develop strong townreads and limit my solve to 3 players on day 1. The second push was the only actual push that wasn't justified as "mafia by PoE", i.e. the only active push onto one of the 3 players in my PoE. It happened to be on the only town player in my PoE. While we won the game easily, and I had a correct solve early Day 1, it was further proof to myself that when I scumhunt, I confbias hella hard and even when I'm picking between 2 scum and a town to case, it's easy for me to zone in on the townie and convince myself they are scum.
That doesn't mean I won't call out things that I find scummy. If something pings me, I note it. I just prefer to build a town block because I'm better at that, mostly via being really, really bad when I confbias tunnel. Examples where I confbias tunnel and it's bad for town include,
Newbie 1988,
Newbie 1996 (I actually had a correct PoE early, and then let myself get so annoyed with a player that I pushed them so hard it derailed the entire game), and
Micro 938 (I went into 5p LYLO knowing with pretty high certainty at least 1 of the mafia and planned to wait until 3p LYLO to finish the solve, but let another player's weird behavior throw me into a confbias tunnel that prevented me from even considering the second player, Umlaut, as scum).
It's kinda funny really, I sniped this game in the signups after Titus signed up, because she was largely the reason I didn't straight leave the site after how poorly I performed in my first game here. I literally cased every single townie in the game at some point. Now she's conftown and isn't going to be leading with reads so I don't get to interact with her how I wanted to. That is to say, I was excited to play with her now that my strategy revolves more around cooperative play than trying to solo carry the game, and she's in a position to observe an give her thoughts at EoD rather than actively work with players as they develop reads.
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Change of plans. I cut the second topic I wanted to discuss and pasted it into a word doc to bring up at a later time, I've realized it has more value discussing later. I'll be back in a few hours to address other topics that popped up while I was gone.