Btw, my name doesn't get capitalized. Lowercase "n" every time. I don't know, one of my quirks? I've been correcting people on that since pretty much right from the start, when I joined MS a little over 3 months ago (it seems like so much longer). I didn't have any forum mafia experience before that but I'd played on EM for a few weeks and really took a liking to the game, except the atmosphere there just didn't connect with me and I wanted something a little more competitive. Found MS. I seemed to take naturally to the game, though, I don't know what that is, and I learned a lot very fast. That was thanks in large part to the supporting cast that I had (and still have) backing me up along the way. Pine has been the centerpiece of my time here, and I call him Senpine for a reason. But to be completely honest most of my learning happened outside of class time, so to speak, while reading through old games of various MS users who I felt had the most to teach me. So I had to take most of what I know for myself, which is really how I've operated all through life, so nothing new to me. (Ever heard the phrase "no free handouts"?) I think that's why I place such emphasis on teaching in newbies, though. And it's also why great IC's like Pine are so important. So many IC's don't take up that responsibility the way he does (granted, his activity this game so far hasn't made that a reality, but when he's his active self what you get is something that you'll struggle to find elsewhere).
Like, I had really poor fundamentals in my game because there was very little that I'd been actively taught by anyone except Pine and JaeReed (another good IC). You do get pieces of feedback here and there from other players (if you haven't yet, go read the dead thread of the newbie that Pine linked to), and those are golden, but for the most part you don't get much of anything and you have to feel your own way and grapple in the dark with your development as a player of mafia. One of the biggest flaws of my towngame was that I lacked confidence. Even when I felt that something was right, all it ever took was for someone to tell me I was wrong, or for people to not back up me and validate me, and I would assume that I had missed the mark and would abandon it. My current idea about why I lacked confidence is partly the way that I'd been burned by tunnels and conf!bias in the past (read Pine's caveat to my comment wrt not tunneling, it's important: not tunneling is a simplistic approach to the matter, what you need most is to recognize when you're in a bad tunnel and learn how to pull yourself out) and partly due to just believing I wasn't any good and thereby wasn't likely to hit in the mark in the first place. I don't think the latter was true, fwiw. While I was never much more than a decent player with potential to be good, I wasn't bad. But I did lack confidence, and that really undermined my game in a kind of "fatal flaw" sort of way. So I think if there's anything I can hopefully instill in the newbies here, it's confidence. Never be
over-confidence
, to the point that you are no longer checking yourself, but believe in yourself and don't let self-doubt cave at your ability to close.
Another major flaw in my towngame was laziness, and this is probably one of the most common flaws you'll find. Instead of really reasoning out all my reads and going through every scenario, taking myself step by step through thought processes and taking everything I could into consideration, I would just skip half the steps and jump to conclusions and not really bother to consider half of what I'd missed along the way. That was just a direct path to bad reads and sloppy play. Conf!bias really reared its head for me a lot of the time because of this. I would latch on to one or two details and take them for a ride and it would be a while, often too late, before I realized what had happened. This happened enough times that it eroded my confidence, and it could have been avoided just by being more circumspect by how I went about my business. The issue with lapsing into lazy reasoning is that it becomes increasingly hard to course correct and get back into being thorough and demanding of yourself the further you fall away from that. If you're lucky, one wrong flip (a scumread flipping Town) can jolt you out of that and wake you up, but even then it may only do so partially and it's up to you to take initiative and reset yourself properly, and even if you
do
it may very well still be too late in the game to fix what you broke. In the best of worlds, you and your fellow Townies are all reevaluating yourselves and each other in a critical way to keep all of you from lapsing into the kind of lazy mentality that loses most games for Town. Unfortunately, in most cases, Town simply doesn't rise to this challenge and ends up eating itself alive, resulting in a Town loss far more than a scum win.
Probably caring about not only the outcome but also the process is what underpins all of this though. I think there are a lot of players, particularly those from sites like EM, who don't have any great drive to win their games, and have even less drive to follow the process and really delve into gameplay. They're happy coasting or doing the bare minimum to get by and if they end up winning the game that's great, if they end up losing then fine, move on to a new game. I think there's a difference between wanting to win and wanting to win while doing your best, and having both at the same time is absolutely essential. You need the drive to win at your best. I was going to write, "and put yourself on the line to do so", but then I realize that's what caused me to give up playing, so I wouldn't advise doing that. Don't put yourself on the line. But
do
try the fuck out of your games. I actually never particularly minded losing games, to be entirely honest, but I absolutely minded the fuck out of not giving my best, and I think it's the latter that really drove me to want to win more than the actual desire to win. Sometimes that drive is totally absent. Sometimes it comes and goes over the course of a game. Sometimes other players drive you into apathy. When it happened to me I always felt like shit afterwards and wondered why I had even been playing. I think that's a healthy sense of responsibility to have. Better if you can avoid it altogether, though.
I don't really know why I wrote all of this but apparently I got really carried away so I guess I should probably spoiler the lot of it and expect that no one could possibly bother to read it. I guess I'm feeling sentimental about my time on MS and about the people who I've had the good fortune of meeting since I came here. There are a lot of people here with huge measures of generosity and for whatever reason the ones I've encountered have all shown me the kindness of extending that generosity my way. Okay yeah I clearly need to just stop typing at this point because I am rambling in the worst way, sorry.
