Mini 2206 - Deja Vu: Perpetual MELO IV - END!

[Prism]

1. Tweet's posting was absolutely bonkers, this bat is on steroids. Successfully indentified A) Who the scum were individually B) Why they were the scum collectively and what motivated moves & why C) Exactly why everyone else was town

Absolutely ridiculous

2. Skitter put on a masterpiece despite the Day 2 mistake

3. While Skitter played incredibly and the best of the scumteam my vote for MVP is the Miltank Man. Scumteam on the ropes Day 3 and he swoops in from the grave to roll notscience one last time for good measure. Absolutely tapdanced on this town day after day

[Prism]

Day 3 mistake with not pushing me for the win*

Sometimes playing it safe is playing it risky

[Prism]

i'm glad I was right about prism tho

this was ironic because everyone flipped what was in range and what was not

Iceland had incredibly similar narrative & posting to my cerebral stepback as ffery can testify

[Prism]

2. Skitter put on a masterpiece despite the Day 2 mistake

Day2 or day3

Day 3 mistake with not pushing me for the win*

Sometimes playing it safe is playing it risky

Yeah my bad am in a Zoom meeting

[Prism]

You posted the edit link for the dead PT ffery

[Prism]

Tweetie u were amazing

Pedit sorry

Dead PT was hilarious because people didn't think it was a mistake and I was like "Eh I think it was but I understand why, and I'm not gonna split hairs for 99% win vs. 97%" thinking it wouldn't matter in the end

Cue roided up bat

[Prism]

Yeah I’m really mad about peta that’s my biggest mistake

I pushed you from voting me tho

Idk

Shits annoying

Moment of Brilliance is more fitting since Paragon is a body of work

[Prism]

Idk why my phone random quotes sorry

[Prism]

Might just put in the Isis rule about being able to place a game-ending hammer on a teammate's behalf

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That was about MT, the quote was an accidental phonequote

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I just died laughing where of all things to win the game off of after an exquisite showing from skitter

It was Miltank Man to the rescue once more

[Prism]

You posted the edit link for the dead PT ffery

fixed! Sometimes I c/p before the page fully refreshes

is it tho

[Prism]

Literally Skitter was an artist but she was not the MVP, NM stared death in the face, told notscience and Kismet "If I just sit and do nothing you're going to shit your own pants, I don't have to do anything. Watch." and was successful

And then Day 4 his heavenly ghost picks up the crestfallen scumteam and gently carries them away to his bovine paradise

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Also I forcereplaced myself because of what I said about unwnd, that wasn't anything to do with anyone else in the game or their posting ftr

[Prism]

Prism your hyping up of me in the dead chat + other commentary makes me feel a lot better ty for that, it was a really enjoyable read

peta too and everyone in there that was awesome haha

im still kind of cooling down mmjhnnmhk

Really awesome game i really enjoyed playing w/ everyone and reading thru it all

absolutely fuckin roided up bat

muscles made of pure brain tissue walking around flexing on nerds

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like being real skitter's play is obviously the one to be celebrated but at this point i'm a dedicated not_mafia simp account

[Prism]

Spoiler:

if peta iso convinces me of anything it's just that VFT is town

I love you, peta

2 minutes before this I DM'd him highlighting how well this post aged lmfao

[Prism]

wait he used the gif twice

that one also aged well

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my expectation for this game:


the reality:

this was also a golden peta post

[Prism]

Easily the single best town performance I have seen in 11 years of playing, absolutely insane. There's being right, there's being right for the right reasons, and then there's being right on literally everything and in every possible path to get there for which any single one would have sufficed.

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I spent a lot of time discussing it with peta after my replaceout. It's a counterfactual so we'll never really know, but I was surprised to have my opinion that your play was actually

riskier

rather than

safer

somewhat validated, even if it took another player to punish it rather than myself.

ie.

Sometimes

it is safer to put your own credibility on the line rather than assume it'll be there later

It's the fact that it was a debatable strategic decision, and not something bland and straightforward like "____ should have posted more wtf", that made it interesting to talk about imo

[Prism]

And I think the fact so many players agreed with you, and it took MT to highlight why it was a misstep, suggests how difficult making the right call there was, and again you were deciding between something like a 99% win (not even confirmed!) vs. a 97%. Even if I'm right that it was 99%, it's not a big deal.

[Prism]

I think with bork so solidly on your side, and the others still uncertain but willing to follow bork, you could have easily gotten it through. From my perspective at the time, I saw this as significantly safer than holding off even if both were almost certainly wins. I held this perspective before MT, but I agree that MT was a one-in-a-million replacement and was very surprised to see it

actually

punished.

[Prism]

"Significantly safer" is a stretch, but enough that in your position I would have 100% chosen to go straight for the kill.

Again very subjective and focusing on such a tiny error, if it's even an error at all, would be to miss the point of how well you played and controlled the game as a whole. It's interesting but I don't want to lose sight of the bigger picture.

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NM feeling like Steph Curry with the back-to-back Perpetual Melo MVP awards

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I find it pretty balanced. Scum should be always be scared to lose for qualitative reasons and what makes this setup stressful comes from people not knowing how to play aggressively team-oriented over the more self-centered style typical in site meta.

Daytalk isn't necessary but a quickhammer in Elo mechanic is imo. Setting up bizarre codes and staring at clocks/hoping your partner is awake at 3am their time is less a test of skill and more a mechanical nuisance.

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I think town is stronger right now for meta reasons evolving from the demonstrated strength of hyperposting, and how innately difficult it is to fake as scum, rather than for mechanical reasons. I think dialing back will help scum out but the source of dismay doesn't tend to be mechanical. I get that there is an argument that mechanically stacking the deck has led to the demotivation. I don't really agree.

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I'm a lot more interested in limits on an individual's # of posts in a day. I'm less interested in the shared page cap.

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(I also think this game serves a good example; scum struggled with motivation throughout despite having very experienced players. There was zero fear of mechanical autoloss, stacked decks, etc. Some of this can be attributed to lack of daytalk, some of it could hypothetically be this residual dismay after being wronged by the NRG, but a lot more of it came from the sheer amount of emotional energy required to keep up with the town players in the game, who would dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to real-time interactions for hours at a time.)

[Prism]

I try to have "office hours" in my games and intentional down times. I think the biggest help in not contributing to thread bloat is just not feeling like I need to respond to EVERYTHING.

In terms of how scum fight that, I think it comes down to a couple things. Probably most important is to play the social game well. And maintaining a town activity meta that works when scum probably helps. (I wouldn't know...:/)

Take advantage of blatant town mistakes.

(Here to here) Use realtime interactions to play out an evolution planned a week in advance using observations made on Day 1.

Or invent a narrative/progression on the fly based off what you're seeing with an endgoal in mind.

Leverage realtime interactions in order to focus attention in places advantageous to yourself and divert from problematic areas.

Intentionally and immediately demoralize players the second they show up to shut them out of the game...and more, if you feel it's not in poor taste.

Combine this with larger narrative arcs over time making use of your town meta to paint a convincing emotional picture. I'm not going to link you that one, but the bit about you was only a tiny part of the much larger picture.

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I realize actually doing those things is easier said than done but players have a lot more leeway as scum than they realize, don't understand when something is free, and have way too little confidence (justified and unjustified) in their fundamentals.

For hyperposters specifically, anyone who has played any amount of chat mafia has the ability to sit there for an hour and pour their heart out, and if players aren't going to slow down and think things through deeply and independently (the counter to my suggestions) they can and should be punished for it by funneling them towards deadends and abusing attention space & morale to maximum effect.

[Prism]

Sorry, I know I link too much from Iceland on account of its recency and the convenience of the annotations, fundamentally it was overkill in a Newbie game as opposed to something more stacked/experienced, but the majority of those will work on virtually any table in MS, ex. The Thaw was very stacked and while Scumsman was probably going to end in a loss there were interesting moments to it. Attention space comes into play for hydras as well.

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I guess I'm biased since I put up a very strict wall between mafia and my broader social life for anyone not named petapan. It makes it a lot easier to focus only on winning the game and playing the best I can.

[Prism]

One day petapan and I will marry purely for tax purposes and so I can inherit all his shit when he dies. At that point we will be the ultimate married mafia powercouple.

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I am definitely not the one to weigh in on that since I burn myself to a crisp almost every single game I play but maybe Skitter or peta would have thoughts. peta been nolifing it for years like a champ np

[Prism]

I think this game fits with that to an extent but not because of how the general trend manifested in the scumplayers so much as how it manifested in the townplayers. For instance, bork being basically cleared from early D1, infinity being very difficult to lim, salsa being considered out of scumrange immediately. Like I think you run into a major problem that unless you have a decent number of town players who are considered close in the respective strength of their town/scumgame you have a lot of people who become de facto clears even without mechanical clears.

I would note that the same happens in more mech-heavy games, and I consider it a problem.

I have long thought mafia is not a game suited for competitive play simply because

de facto

truthtelling is a dominant strategy.

[Prism]

As an interesting snapshot/curiosity, here are my notes from my readthrough of the first few pages of the game.

[Prism]

It is actually painful to see how attuned I was to how off skitter/mena interactions were and how bad the DC slot was individually only to go "Well it's probably not skitter/Mena so it's just weird haha moving on"

[Prism]

prism i think you enjoy the suffering <3

Not at all wrong