Undertale Mafia: Friends & Corpses [GAME OVER]

[JaeReed]

Sorry Skull.

[Skullduggery]

It's fine.

[MathBlade]

GG. Thanks Skull.

If my questions were annoying I am sorry.

Just proud I caught Maxous. We may have lost but I am slowly improving.

[BigYoshiFan]

Good game everyone. Thank you Skull!

[Giovanni il Pellegrino]

The timing of Maxous' lynch was one of the worst things to happen to the then still unformed Gaster's Followers faction. Seriously, he was lynched at the worst possible moment.

[Nahdia]

Hey look I was right about everything.

[Nahdia]

Like, EVERYTHING. all my initial assumptions about how the game was set up once gaster was lynched were correct.

[MathBlade]

Like, EVERYTHING. all my initial assumptions about how the game was set up once gaster was lynched were correct.

Yep.

If only we had synergized afterward. I was gold preMaxous and sucked after his lynch.
You were gold afterward.

[BigYoshiFan]

I got played so badly. XD

"He's taking it seriously?"
Yes, yes I am. *facepalm*

[Nahdia]

Ah well. Mech knowledge only gets you so far. I was pisspoor at three actually finding scum part. Pleased to see I was right on ank though.

Thanks for modding skull. It was certainly an innovative setup.

[Nahdia]

The* actual

My phone keeps correcting the to three. Annoying as heck yo.

Gg wp all.

[Maxous]

Giovanni with the god-tier scumwork

[Andrius]

I apologized to Skulldugg after the fiasco, but I'm sorry to the players who had the misfortune of playing this game with me. I was an ass, and this game was the first sobering moment in recent memory when someone took the time to go 'You know, you're being an ass and this is not acceptable'. I'm sorry I became that guy in this game and wish I had seen myself out sooner.

The Vote to Draw was bad and that might have been avoided had we had a discussion on its intended usage instead of LETS JUST BE DONE WITH THIS.

When I talked about replacing out if Narna flipped town it was more of a 'If he is town then my reads are useless and I will gladly walk so you get someone competent in here'. Because my reads were clearly atrocious five days into a game without a scumflip, or so I thought. I didn't mean it in a vengeful way like SCREW THIS IF NARNA FLIPS TOWN, more of a 'If he's town then I am useless'.

I respect Skullduggery's decision as a moderator because making tough calls like this one are difficult and something you don't want to have to do as a mod. What's done is done though.

Sorry to everyone whose experience I made worse.
Had an enjoyable time as neighbors with Fire and Titus.
Sly, you are a man among men and a joy to play with.

-A

[Maxous]

I got played so badly. XD

"He's taking it seriously?"
Yes, yes I am. *facepalm*

Sorry Yoshi!

but yeah, that turned out kinda funny in the end.

mod gave me too many toys

[Ankamius]

I'm sorry guys, I needed to step up big time this game and just... didn't. I'll have more to say after I'm in a position to.

[JaeReed]

I'm sorry too, this game was in the bag and I let one nightkill wipe away everything previously.

I'm sorry Math for lynching you and supporting the lynch on you. It was an incredibly bad play on my part and you were right in the fact that I was trying to make you scum so that I felt ok with it because you were pushing on Ank. Sorry =(

[MathBlade]

I'm sorry too, this game was in the bag and I let one nightkill wipe away everything previously.

I'm sorry Math for lynching you and supporting the lynch on you. It was an incredibly bad play on my part and you were right in the fact that I was trying to make you scum so that I felt ok with it because you were pushing on Ank. Sorry =(

Meh I was trying to lynch town. Just didn't know Ank was and didn't have the knowledge Max also killed:

[JaeReed]

Still no excuse for trying to find a way to make you scum despite all my prior knowledge of you pointing to town I'm sorry if I got heated at times too. I do actually like playing with you.

[callforjudgement]

I'm not convinced this game is actually Mafia. Not only did it not have any groupscum at the start of the game, it's possible that there could have been no groupscum all game. This entirely removes one of the main scumhunting tools that town has, hunting for interactions. (There were some much more minor issues involved here along similar lines; for example, we correctly figured out that scum had access to the neighbourhood, but because it was read access and wasn't mentioned in any of our roles that there was a hidden scum access to the neighbourhood, it lead us to hunt in the wrong direction.)

The size of the scumteam scaling based on how long the game had lasted is one of the facts about the setup I'd missed (I knew I'd missed

something

; the setup was clearly implausibly badly designed if you take everything at face value, and I knew the game would be better than that). The major problem I see with this is that it makes the entire game before Gaster's lynch entirely pointless; if the game's designed to produce balanced team sizes given any timing for the lynch, town aren't rewarded for finding scum early, nor penalised for finding scum late. (Thought experiment: if town mislynches repeatedly, leaving just 3 players alive including Gaster at the end, they still have a 33% chance to win. Assuming the global roleblock was fired at some point, that means town have a 33% chance to win even after 10 mislynches. Or 20 no-lynches.) Likewise, because there weren't any other scum prior to the Gaster lynch, anything that happened beforehand is pointless for scumhunting.

The

other

major problem with the mechanic is the same problem that 2:11 mountainous has; the expected behaviour is to see mislynch after mislynch and town doesn't lose much from it, but they're very demoralising (both for town because they aren't making any progress in the game and aren't revealing any connections that might make scumhunting possible, and for scum because they're doing as well as possible and yet the parts of the game that really influence the result haven't happened yet). Several players doubted the existence of scum, and I think that's entirely understandable given that a) it was a 21:0:1 setup and b) it has Undertale flavour (which strongly suggests considering the absence of scum at least as a possibility). If I were reviewing the setup, I'd have flagged this up as something that's very likely to make players unhappy (and as it happens, it did make players unhappy).

So all in all, I'm not that happy with the setup here. I guess Skullduggery put the idea behind the setup fairly well: "I tried to create a game that would challenge players to think and play differently, move out of their comfort zones, and try to figure out the game from a different point of view than what they're accustomed to." Well, the fact that most setups are built along similar lines is not necessarily due to a lack of creativity, but because there are reasons behind the choices. We repeatedly shoot down setups in Open Setup Discussion for not having a scumteam (with the normal shorthand phrase for this being "not Mafia"). I'd say that a game which eliminates two of the main scumhunting tools (interactions between players, and postings from earlier Days) has a pretty high chance of just not being a Mafia game (and if you encourage the town to treat it as one it's no surprise they'll be frustrated). Sure, the game requires players to play differently, but a) there's no information that they should, and b) they don't really have much to go on (except night actions). FWIW, no-lynching 20 times in a row might even be optimal strategy in this setup (you catch the killer via night actions then don't lynch them until the last moment; this isn't quite a 100% town victory but it has to be close), but there isn't a reference frame that most players have that could even consider them to realise that that might be the right idea, and I don't consider that a shortcoming in the player.

Incidentally, it says quite a bit that out of the four players I read as scum over the course of the game (both watching it, and after replacing in), three of them were the three scum who existed in the game (sorry MathBlade for misreading you), and yet I feel like my scumhunting was terrible this game; every single player I caught, in retrospect my reason for catching them couldn't possibly have been correct. I had a strong read on Maxous as

group

scum (he wasn't), based on the way he claimed Survivor and on the fact that I felt the gamestate was most plausibly explained by a buddy covering for him with night actions. I thought the way SirCakez used night actions was implausible for a townie, but he was town at the time. I thought Gio had overclaimed, but the claim was entirely truthful. 3 out of 4 seems unlikely to be coincidence, and yet I still feel dissatisfied with the way my play turned out.

In terms of what happened with BYF, this is either a huge (if fairly amusing) failure of reading comprehension from BYF for not noticing the indicators in the PM that it wasn't modconfirmed information, or a failure of the mod to send unconfirmed information in a way that isn't clearly marked as unconfirmed. I'm guessing the former, but either way am both somewhat confused and somewhat amused as to how it happened. (For people who missed it, BYF genuinely seems to have believed he was scum, on the basis of a message sent by Maxous, and was possibly more surprised at his Townflip than anyone else.)

(BTW, for anyone reading the last few posts in the dead thread, Math was almost correct and I knew it; I'd figured out the "Ank is a Miller and Gio will die by killing them" combination myself. However, the possibility was there that scum was reading the dead thread, and I could see no way for this information to help town, so I just blatantly lied about it.)

[callforjudgement]

BTW, because this game doesn't meet the definition of Game Mechanics in the wiki (specifically, "The game is comprised of factions, including Mafia, Town, and/or somewhat predictable third parties."), I don't think it qualifies for the longest-games leaderboard. (Chess Mafia was disqualified on the same basis.)

[MathBlade]

Still no excuse for trying to find a way to make you scum despite all my prior knowledge of you pointing to town I'm sorry if I got heated at times too. I do actually like playing with you.

It happens. We just didn't know the setup.

<3

So yeah. I am proud I caught the only scum after that my play took a nose dive to crapsville.

Nice to know my reasons for townreading Gio and Cakez were good. I.e. They wouldn't sell out Maxous if they were scum.

[MathBlade]

BTW, because this game doesn't meet the definition of Game Mechanics in the wiki (specifically, "The game is comprised of factions, including Mafia, Town, and/or somewhat predictable third parties."), I don't think it qualifies for the longest-games leaderboard. (Chess Mafia was disqualified on the same basis.)

I think it does.

1 faction of 1.
1 faction of 21.

Two factions.
Just not numbers we are used to.

It made me think Ank SK but IMHO it was Mafia.

[callforjudgement]

See the second half of the sentence. I don't think Maxous qualifies as any of Mafia, Town, or a somewhat predictable third party, so there aren't enough "normalish" factions listed there.

[Narna]

"Whoops I hid behind scum and they noticed me! Quick, time to pop cyanide!"

Gotcha Skull!!

[Leonshade]

Thanks, Skull.

Congrats to the scumteam. Maxous had me fooled all the way up to my death, props to Math for catching him.