(NSFW) Mini 1882 - TPTG Mafia 1.5: The Fappening (NoWins)

[podoboq]

I miss Gork. He was literally my only strong town read in this entire game.

I'm still furious about dramonic.

[podoboq]

First thing's first: I'm glad that I was a part of this game. Especially as an experiment, it was interesting, and incredibly thought provoking.

This game wasn't enjoyable, though. It was incredibly frustrating throughout, and it's hard to nail down exactly why. I think the mechanics were conceptually fantastic. I don't think the mechanic of "last man without a partner dies" is inherently flawed, and I think it adds a wrinkle to the game that can be fun to play with. If the goal was to create a game with a vast amount of private topics and secret information shared between small groups, I don't think this game succeeded at that, and I don't think it's a very attainable goal. I recently ran a game built on the same hopes, and the private threads were just ignored entirely by a large number of the players, and when used at all were not used to great effect. I obviously haven't seen all the private topics in this game, but I imagine it had a similar fate.

I think the biggest problem with the game mechanically was how little control we had as individuals. I shouldn't be limited to how many times I can say no to a person. If Jaqen is cornered, confirmed scum, it shouldn't be a challenge to kill him. We had a situation were players could legitimately scum claim, and those players seemed to still feel some security that they couldn't be lynched. That, to me, seems unacceptable. The base mechanic of pairing with other players wasn't the problem. It's the way it was implemented. One specific intricacy I had a major issue with is that only 24 hours would be given for a player to deny a partnership, even though in normal games, activity is only checked for a player every 48 hours. So while a player is inactive, even on V/LA, someone can snipe them up into bed and protect themselves, and town had no recourse. If they were the last pair of the day, this isn't addressed by letting players break up existing relationships, because the second that pair is accepted, the day ends. I don't have all the solutions for how to fix this game, obviously, but my point is that I DO NOT think the lynch mechanic was inherently flawed.

Part of me wants to blame the direction this game took on the scum team, for abusing the flaws in these mechanics in a way that was completely unfun and made it impossible for the town to play a real game. This would be unfair, though, because as far as I can tell, they were playing to their win condition appropriately. If being flagrant lurkscum works in a game where policy lynching is essentially impossible, then it's not exactly wrong of someone to be flagrant lurkscum.

Part of me wants to put the blame on the moderators, but that's also not completely fair. As a moderator myself, I have a lot of respect for trying something incredibly far outside of the box, and when there is a serious and easy to address issue in balance, moderators should be able to address it directly, and that should be understood and respected by the players. It appeared that respect was not shown to the moderators, and that's incredibly disappointing.

I think the onus of the blame really falls on the players who did not take this game seriously. More than most other games, inactive or completely oblivious town play was an almost insurmountable liability, and we had a number of players who refused multiple times to attempt to understand the basic rules of the game. Say what you want about low activity, I at least expect players to understand the fundamentals of the game we're playing. They were non entities, and could be taken advantage of by scum in ways that other games simply don't allow. I don't know how to justify that.

I can't entirely blame scum for playing along to this attitude, because for scum, it is likely playing to your wincondition appropriately. Playing to your wincondition in this way, however, seems to me to be lazy, and it fundamentally destroyed the game. The purpose of a game is to be fun, and I doubt that the decision to forego playing the game entirely made the game a fun experience for anybody involved, including the people attempting to win by doing so.


I'll withhold judgement for now on the decision to have this game end in a draw, as I do not know the nature of the moderator error that resulted in the decision, but needless to say it's incredibly disappointing to hear this result after it appears that we had the entire scum team figured out early.


In the case that any of this comes across as unkind or unfair, I apologize for the impact, but I will not apologize for the sentiment. There were elements of this game that were flawed, and I think that's completely understandable and excusable. I do, however, believe that some of the play exhibited was unsporting, and disrespectful to the players, the moderators, and the game of mafia itself.

[podoboq]

OK, so if this was such a big deal, that the game had to be called off entirely and end in a draw because of it, why was it not resolved at this point:

get kinky wit Gork

^ placeholding request only, pending resolution

Gork should be in the failed column, Jaqen almost definitely sent a PM to the mod saying so, and this request is only intended in the case that there was some unexplained change of the rules. That's essentially clarified in game. So why not say "whoopsie daisy, gork should be in the failed column, Jaqen's request is rewound because it was made before this correction was applied," everything is hunky dory?

Jaqen still almost definitely gets cucked that day, the scum team loses normally, and we don't have this weird asterisk that we later decide invalidates the justified town win?

[podoboq]

except if kuroi/snarky break up their partnership. and then all of a sudden jaqen can partner them when there's under 24 hours left and there's no time left for anyone else to partner. 3 dead town. scum wins. it's a limitation of the setup but it would result in a scum win.

If the rules weren't abusable in this respect, I trust that our moderators would have given us the win that's justified. Since they are this abusable, I trust that the moderators would have drawn the game in the case that scum did appropriately break them.

So yeah, I'll accept the draw, but it's still fundamentally incredibly disappointing that this couldn't be resolved in a way that was

"fair"

to everyone involved.

[podoboq]

I was converted last night to the scum team.

Oh, yeah, now that the game is over and what I'm saying can no longer be misinterpreted as gameplay, this is explicitly breaking the site-wide rule to "play to your win condition."

[podoboq]

Sometimes playing with a variety of people means you need to be able to parse when people are clearly joking.

The scum team had one player who fake claimed day cop, spoke in the third person, and scumclaimed so that he could insult the moderators and their game inside the game thread, one player who continually pretended to not understand the same one rule over-and-over again, and one player who was completely absent. Then we have a town player who explicitly refuses to read the rules at all, literally never once took a single game action, and in one of the most tense moments in the game claims to have been converted to the scum team.

Enough stupid stuff had happened in this game that nothing was clearly a joke any more. Scum was openly saying things which could not feasibly be true coming from any sane human, so when a member of town does the same thing, and the joke is an explicit scum claim, yeah, it's not really acceptable to me.

Like, I'm not gonna call it cheating, because cheating requires you to

intentionally

break the rules, but it's absolutely breaking the rules.

[podoboq]

I was converted to the scum team.

We're not playing a game any more, so your joke no longer severely hurts your team's ability to win the game, so that's cool.

[podoboq]

Sometimes town fakeclaim. Sometimes town lurks. Sometimes town does stupid as shit stuff with roles. You can call it bad play all you want, but joking like fire was here is not something that should be punished by the moderator.

The disconnect is that it wasn't taken as a joke (at least by me). My problem was if it was a SERIOUS scum claim made as town, not a simple joke.

As a joke, I think it was inappropriate at the least, but as a moderator I wouldn't intervene or take any punitive action beyond potentially disallowing the player from entering some games I run in the future.

[podoboq]

I felt like Kuroi and Snarky were super obvious after they spent all of day 1 calling each other scum and then paired up.

They were. And Jaqen was almost more clearly scum after his claimed results ended up being false. If the town team can know for certain who the scum team is, and still not wrangle together a lynch on them because of the game mechanics, you can't argue the game is unfairly town-sided.

[podoboq]

Joke can go awry.

It doesn't help that Firebringer only referred to it as a joke almost a day after the original comment had been made. Also, context matters.

[podoboq]

I'm sorry and no disrespect to anyone, but I worked my ass off from the moment I entered the game to set this up, and set up it was.

But that only would have worked because Gork made a huge mistake that you couldn't play toward or generate, and town couldn't really play

around

. If he hadn't made that mistake, you would have lost every time. The number of things that have to go right for you to get the win in this way seemed incredibly slim, and not exactly fun at that.

I'm not saying it wasn't a win you were angling toward, or that it wasn't how your team planned to win the game. I just think it's disappointing that you decided

that

was a better way to play mafia than trying to look like town and convincing us to turn on eachother. You turned this game into not-mafia, and I don't think it's fair to place that blame on the moderators.

[podoboq]

This time I actually reached my one goal in this game

How depressing that you were only able to accomplish that through an oversight in the setup rather than actual good scumplay.