Scummies Ideas, Suggestions and Comments Thread

[BBmolla]

how would you draw the line of how new a newbie of the month has to be?

Up to you idk, three months?

[Psyche]

i dunno
newbs can be
petty

[BBmolla]

I would argue experienced players are way more petty.

[Firebringer]

I would argue experienced players are way more petty.

I would argue anyone can be petty

[Plotinus]

maybe since it'd be moderators/ICs they should only nominate someone who played in a newbie slot in that game (someone who was playing for the first/second time)

It'd be hard to pick just one, though. In the game I ICed back in July/August, both herrcombs and pantherpunt did exceptionally well in their first game.

[wgeurts]

I think we should add an award for "best bastard game", currently these games have a pretty darn hard time of winning any awards although they can be some of the most fun and memorable games out there.

To start off the current awards they could possibly get from most likely to least.

• Best mutation - This is a possibility but honestly this award is for a part of a game and not a game as a whole like the other two awards:
  
• Best setup - Though bastard games have a larger chance of winning this than game of the year it's still more likely to go to a well-formed themed game of some sort. For those that say a bastard game is just a bad theme game those that enjoy them would disagree, there's a difference between a bad and good bastard game and certain people enjoy them a lot. There just another type of game.
  
• Game of the year - Bastard games will never win this, due to their nature their unbalancedness, wackyness and just general abnormality it's really unlikely they could ever win this award. Town and scum may play well but the insane roles/mechanics also play a large role so that and the balance factor are usually tremendously low.

I'd suggest some extra award specifically for them, some games I'd nominate that come to mind are some of varsoon's games.

This post probably sucks as I made it on the metro using my phone but my intentions are clear.

[Psyche]

but wouldn't an award like that lead to the production of a higher volume of bastard games

[wgeurts]

but wouldn't an award like that lead to the production of a higher volume of bastard games

Which would be bad because?
People will play what they like so it shouldn't be too bad as supply/demand, as well as there being more bastard games lowers your chance of winning the award due to there being more options and a higher chance of better ones than yours.

[xRECKONERx]

I think we should add an award for "best bastard game", currently these games have a pretty darn hard time of winning any awards although they can be some of the most fun and memorable games out there.

I think setting stringent qualifiers for what qualifies as bastard or not is a really bad idea because the only thing we currently officially delineate between is "normal" and "not normal". What makes a game bastard? Where's the line between bastard and role madness? Should we then form a distinction between "role madness" and "theme but not role madness or bastard" as well? What about theme games that are otherwise normal but just have flavor?

Best mutation - This is a possibility but honestly this award is for a part of a game and not a game as a whole like the other two awards

I dunno, I think there's plenty of rolemadness type stuff that has been nominated in the past? And if a bastard game isn't doing anything new or exciting, then like, they shouldn't win this award. This is for new stuff.

Best setup - Though bastard games have a larger chance of winning this than game of the year it's still more likely to go to a well-formed themed game of some sort. For those that say a bastard game is just a bad theme game those that enjoy them would disagree, there's a difference between a bad and good bastard game and certain people enjoy them a lot. There just another type of game.

I don't think bastard games are unqualified to win this award, it's just really hard to do well. If a truly awe-inspiring, stand-out bastard game comes along (like the early Mind Screws) then I think they stand a good chance to win the award. Winning best setup requires a really great grasp on design from the mod -- bastard games SHOULDN'T win that often, because they're a genre that is hard to do in a truly great manner. Creating a category where only bastard games are eligible means we're basically giving them a pity award.

Game of the year - Bastard games will never win this, due to their nature their unbalancedness, wackyness and just general abnormality it's really unlikely they could ever win this award. Town and scum may play well but the insane roles/mechanics also play a large role so that and the balance factor are usually tremendously low.

I think there are plenty of times when a bastard game could win GOTY over a theme game, but again, they're very hard to do well, and if we want a game to represent the best of the best from that year, it's very hard to argue that a bastard game should be the de facto touchstone for all games that year.


I guess really, I just don't like breaking down award categories even further. There's a lot I could dive into here about bastard games and

why

they aren't usually considered to be "great" mafia games (partially because they rarely resemble actual mafia), but really this comes down to an unnecessary stratification of an already stratified award structure. I think the Scummies Steering Committee should be working to cut down even more categories and streamline the process instead of adding in very narrow categories because everyone needs a participation trophy.

[zakk]

Better yet still might be to reward them with something thats even more responsive, like a merit based micro badge system.

This sounds great tbh

[zakk]

What if we did a "Newbies of the Month" sort of thing where moderators/IC submit new players who they think excelled in a game and deserve some recognition.

I know if I was a new player to the site and I recieved a message that was like "Congrats! You're a Newbie of the Month! See more here: thread link" it'd be very rewarding to me as a new player and I'd feel more likely to stay.

I could try spearhead something like that if there was interest.

I would also support this endeavour

[Scummies]

We’re happy to announce the upcoming changes to the Scummies for 2016! Below, you’ll find a collection of the awards, along with their descriptions:

Spoiler: Awards

BODY OF WORK AWARDS

Best Mafia Catcher

: Also known as the Paragon of Mafia Hunters, this award is given to the single town player who, across all of their games for the year, exhibited the best ability for nailing those dirty scumbags and bringing the bad guys to justice while playing as a pro-town role.

Rising Star

: This award is given to the player that is a rising star in the game of mafia, showing great promise to join the elite echelon of mafia players. This award replaces both the Best Newbie award and Most Improved Player awards, and judges may consider elements of both those previous awards in deciding this award.

Excellent Moderation

: Also known as the “The Modfather” Award. This award is given to the moderator who, over the course of the past year, exemplifies the best qualities of a moderator in the operation of the game, including but not limited to quality and frequency of vote counts, organization of the game, dealing with issues that arise, keeping players active, and so forth. Judges may consider how challenging the games a moderator ran were, but they shall not penalize a moderator for only running more basic games. A mod must run at least 3 games to completion in the calendar year to be considered for this award.

SINGLE GAME - PLAYER

Most Cunning Manipulator

: Also known as the “Don Corleone” Award. Awarded to the player who has the strongest single game performance as mafia. In rare cases, where a player feels an entire scumteam gelled to create a strong cohesive scum performance, multiple members of a team may be nominated.

Best Performance Third Party

: Also known as the “Hannibal Lecter” Award. Awarded to the player or players that performed the most impressively in winning their game as a third party.

Most Memorable Event

: Also known as the “Kodak Moment” Award. Awarded to the player or players who were involved in the most memorable event in a game of mafia. Fake claims, funny claims, awesome exchanges, etc. may all be considered for this award

SINGLE GAME - MODERATOR

Best Setup

: Also known as the “Rube Goldberg” Award. Given to the moderator who designed the best setup. Judges may consider the roles involved in a game, how those roles interacted, how balanced a setup was, whether it furthered any particular theme, how the setup interacts with a mechanic, or any other factors the judges deem relevant. This award is distinct, however, from the “Best Mechanic” award in that it does not consider how good or bad any change to the basic way a Mafia game is played.

Best Flavor Text

: Also known as the “Paperback Writer” Award. Given to the moderator who wrote the most compelling flavor text. Judges should consider the flavor text of all parts of the game, including Role PMs and Day/Night scenes. Where appropriate, Judges may consider how well the flavor works with the announced theme.

Best Mechanic/Mutation

: Also known as the "Mad Scientist” Award. Given to the moderator who figured out the most compelling way to change the basic mechanics of the game of mafia, and/or created the most compelling new role or adaptation to increase player enjoyment. Judges shall consider both the basic idea behind the game as well as how well it was executed, and the uniqueness and quality of the role/adaptation.

SITE AWARDS

Game of the Year

: Also known as the “Player’s Choice” Award. This award is given to the moderator of a game. It is given in recognition of the overall excellence of a game. The Game of the Year award is a "catch all" award for the best overall game throughout the entire year, considering all aspects of the game from moderator quality, to the excellent design and composition of the game, to the performance and cohesion of the playerlist. A Game of the Year is meant to be the game that we can all point to later and say "This game was the best game the site could offer that year in terms of Design, Playerlist, and moderating capability." This is a PUBLIC VOTE.

Behind the Scenes

: Also known as the “Name Should Be In Orange.” This award is given by mith/Thesp/zoraster to the community member or members who have best helped in the operation of the site.

Outstanding Mish Mash Game

&

Outstanding Social Game

&

Outstanding Mish Mash User

: Awarded by the Mish Mash Janitor and their assembled panel of judges.

There are a lot of changes coming your way this year, and we want to help shine some light on those changes and the reasoning behind them.

---

WHY'D YOU CUT MY FAVORITE AWARD?

There are certainly a lot of awards going away this year, and we know not all the changes will be immediately kosher with everyone. Here's a quick breakdown of each removal.

Best Replacement

: Instead of giving out a subjectively judged award for Best Replacement, we felt that replacing should simply be done if someone wants to help out. However, we are happy to announce that the staff will begin giving out "Replacement Hero" pins to users who replace into games and complete X number of games in a calendar year. These "pins" will be small JPG bars that'd go above Scummies banners or below titles in your user profile to show that you've pitched in and helped out a mod in need. The exact number of games needed for this pin is still being determined, but expect more updates on the Replacement Hero pins from zoraster in the near future!

Professor Mafia

: Simply put, Mafiascum is not in the same place it was when the Scummies were determined. A decade ago, lengthy treatises and theory essays were commonplace in Mafia Discussion because the game was still in its internet infancy. In the past few years -- even after merging this award with Best IC -- we have struggled to even find one or two nominees for this category. We feel mafia theory and discussion is pretty well established at this point and there's not much more to "reward" here, so the award is going away.

Funniest / Most Enjoyable Player

: This award was too subjective and wound up being either "nobody gets nominated", or "nominate your friends". There's not a very good way to objectively list criteria for this. When we removed Most Enjoyable Game a couple years ago, it was for a similar reason. Judging this award feels like a crapshoot -- what I find funny, you might not. Who I find enjoyable, you may find obnoxious. The next time you would nominate someone for this award, shoot them a PM instead and let them know how much you appreciate them!

Best Pro-Town Team

: Yeeeesh. We tried to find a way to make this one work, but it feels rather wrong. In mafia, there's really no "cohesion" among town -- with no information, there's no way for people to reliably "team up". In theory, this award was a counter balance to the Best Pro-Scum Team award. In practice, this wound up being given to a town team where about 50% of the team (or less) really deserved the award, while everyone else got carried. Having that many banners floating around for what basically amounts to "congratulations on getting a town role PM while X, Y, and Z were your alignment" devalues the Scummies all around, so the award has got to go.

Best Scum Group

: We'll go into detail on this a little later, but the changes coming to Don Corleone make this category pretty redundant.

Community Contributor

: Dan Harmon, we hardly knew ye. This award was introduced to try and reward OOC/community-based contributions to the website, but with each passing year, "outstanding" contributions became slimmer and slimmer. The award was not even given out last year, and for the most part, feels a little too narrow for the Scummies. It also reflects poorly to reward "real life" connections/accomplishments like hosting meets with subjective judgement behind the scenes, so only a few years after its test run was introduced, we're calling the experiment a failure and closing shop.

---

WHAT ALL IS CHANGING IN THE REMAINING AWARDS?

I'm so glad you asked!

Excellent Moderation

: We feel too many moderators are being nominated for this for simply doing what a good mod should do-- they're keeping up with votecounts and prods in a timely manner and being obedient to their own deadlines. We are implement a

three game minimum

to be eligible for this award. If someone wins Excellent Moderation, they should feel like a "must-play" moderator. Their flavor, their setups, their role PMs, their

everything

should coalesce to make them "THE" mod to play under for that year, and it's hard to judge that quality if they only run one or two games. This will ensure the nitpicky aspect of the award is limited and instead focuses on the bigger picture behind what makes a mod "great".

Most Cunning Manipulator

: *gasp* It's changing! For the first time, Don Corleone will be given for a

single game performance

instead of a body of work. Someone winning for pulling the wool over everyone's eyes in every game in a given year is rather rare -- eventually, people wise up to how good someone was. This change means we'll have a much narrower view of good or bad scum play and will make the judging process easier. Plus, it'll be a lot easier for a mafioso who loses but puts on a great performance to take home the award when we're not having to check every last minute detail in every game played in order to give someone the advantage. It's no longer about winrates and lynchrates -- it's about gambits, subtlety, masterful manipulation, patience, and, well, damn good scum play. The removal of Best Scum Group also means this is the catch-all scum play award -- you can nominate a group, a single person, or anything in between. It's one game, one award, one focus.

Game of the Year

: We like most of the changes to the Game of the Year category, but in practice, there are still some issues with judging such a category. That's why we are making the Game of The Year the "Player's Choice" award -- that is, the general public will be voting on this award, and not the Scummies judges. This is for the players, the fanboys, the mods, the spectators -- this is for those crazy moments you talk about at meets YEARS after the game completed. How can a small group of judges possibly understand all of that? Now, you get a direct preferential vote on the Game of the Year nominees, so the award truly is the players' choice.

---

These changes will cut down on the judging workload -- they'll go from judging 16 categories, to judging 9. The decrease in overall banners floating around will hopefully add positive value to the Scummies, where in recent years they have felt rather disappointing and nominations have been lacking. We're also bringing some changes to the nomination process soon! Self-nominations will not be allowed, but "seconds" on the nominations will no longer be required, and we're going to streamline the entire nomination process using Google Forms to clear out the jumbled mess that is the Scummies nomination thread each year.

We'd also like to thank Faraday for his years of help on the Scummies Steering Committee. He played a huge role in shaping the Scummies for the past six years and helped make some of our ceremonies truly memorable. He stepped down late in the year and his loss will definitely impact the SSC, but we're happy to have had him on board for so long.

On that note, xRECKONERx is rejoining the Scummies Steering Committee in order to help out again after stepping down early in the Summer. We're glad to have him back on board in the wake of Faraday's resignation.

---

As always, the ideas thread is open and the SSC will be around to respond to any questions or comments you might have. Here's to a great 2016!

MUCH LOVE,
The Scummies Steering Committee

Untrod Tripod	Cephrir	Venmar	xRECKONERx

[Psyche]

man

[shos]

okaaaaaaaaaay

[Davsto]

[Firebringer]

All mafia awards are subjective as hell...I don't understand reason for taking them out for being "Subjective" lol.

You guys are hilarious.

[Firebringer]

Best Replacement: Instead of giving out a subjectively judged award for Best Replacement, we felt that replacing should simply be done if someone wants to help out. However, we are happy to announce that the staff will begin giving out "Replacement Hero" pins to users who replace into games and complete X number of games in a calendar year. These "pins" will be small JPG bars that'd go above Scummies banners or below titles in your user profile to show that you've pitched in and helped out a mod in need. The exact number of games needed for this pin is still being determined, but expect more updates on the Replacement Hero pins from zoraster in the near future!

So now it is a little "participating medal? lol.
I don't even want it now.

[Untrod Tripod]

All mafia awards are subjective as hell...I don't understand reason for taking them out for being "Subjective" lol.

You guys are hilarious.

you should nominate us for funniest poster

oh wait

[Firebringer]

you should nominate us for funniest poster

oh wait

I would nominate you guys for best scummy staff for 2016, but I think that might be subjective...
We should probably take that out.

[Psyche]

i don't really like the changes
i feel like it makes the scummies more one-dimensional
the main reason i don't complain more is because i blame myself for not taking over this site when i had the chance

[Untrod Tripod]

you should nominate us for funniest poster

oh wait

I would nominate you guys for best scummy staff for 2016, but I think that might be subjective...
We should probably take that out.

you're right. I'll present that to the committee and get back to you.

[xRECKONERx]

All mafia awards are subjective as hell...I don't understand reason for taking them out for being "Subjective" lol.

You guys are hilarious.

The main issue isn't necessarily the subjectivity, but that the criteria for the award is too subjective.

For example: whether you prefer a flashy scum gambit or a quiet subtle scum game is up to personal opinion, but there are definitive criteria with which you can judge someone's scum play. Did they successfully manipulate town? Did they save their buddies or strategically bus them? Etc. Compare that to something like "funniest player" -- what's funny? What qualifies as comedic or enjoyable to one person is going to WILDLY differ person to person, and it usually results in people kinda half-assing the judging and shrugging it off, or arguing why cursing is or isn't funny/offensive/etc.

[Firebringer]

All mafia awards are subjective as hell...I don't understand reason for taking them out for being "Subjective" lol.

You guys are hilarious.

The main issue isn't necessarily the subjectivity, but that the criteria for the award is too subjective.

For example: whether you prefer a flashy scum gambit or a quiet subtle scum game is up to personal opinion, but there are definitive criteria with which you can judge someone's scum play. Did they successfully manipulate town? Did they save their buddies or strategically bus them? Etc. Compare that to something like "funniest player" -- what's funny? What qualifies as comedic or enjoyable to one person is going to WILDLY differ person to person, and it usually results in people kinda half-assing the judging and shrugging it off, or arguing why cursing is or isn't funny/offensive/etc.

I am calling bs.

Heres why:
Theres several things subjective on the manipulation part, did they manipulate due to their role claim in the setup? Did they manipulate because the town were being ridiculously bad? or easily sheeped them? Did they manipulate because of happy coincidences, perhaps clears with actions that shouldn't have cleared them?

Lots of stuff happen in the game. You can have a dumbass town members and you luck out by completely being dominant voice as nobody takes any effort to look through your bs.

So how do these factors go into judgement?
1) Setup
2) Player base
3) Night Actions

Unless every game is same, you have to be subjective and allow much leeway into setup accounting for manipulation. Some setups its easier to manipulate town than others, by design. Player base can't be accounted for that much unless you have same players each and every game, so thats hard to neutralize to be "objective". Night actions can be semi random, if a player has a Innocent on a player they should have a guilty for insance (like a GF), then how does that factor into a game where someone was attempting to manipulate but failed due to a Guilty on them?

[N]

rabble

[Firebringer]

rabble

rabble