Scummies Ideas, Suggestions and Comments Thread

[Nachomamma8]

...what?

[Nachomamma8]

i think that i read something that said that team awards were eliminated to make the scummies more legitimate, and think that i will probably reread in the morning when i can parse things better because that's the type of thing that's too ridiculous to be true

[Nachomamma8]

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.

The two significant points seem to be these:

-It's hard for town players to team up; true cohesion between town players rarely exist.
-It's unfair for undeserving players who got carried to win an award, and it's more likely for players who got carried to exist in a "best town".

The first part I absolutely agree with; it's much harder to have good cohesion as town than it is as scum because you can't truly trust one another, but I'd also argue that the cohesion is much more valuable/impressive. It's harder to judge, sure, but there are times when a town team is dragged by one player's excellent play and everyone else just sort of follows, and there are times when the town win is more a result of a group of players using each other as sounding boards, pushing different reads at different times.

The second part seems like a weird concern. Yes, there are undeserving players who get the award when they didn't actively contribute to the town win, but not every single town player will contribute to a town win even in an amazing game because that's not how playing town works. When a movie wins "Best Picture", people who didn't contribute positively to the creation of the movie can still say that they worked on a "Best Picture" winning movie and it's not a huge deal. I also think that most people involved in the game knows who deserves the "Best Town Win" banner and who doesn't; the only time I ever saw anyone touting a best town performance they didn't deserve seriously was Metal Sonic.

In my previous skimming (didn't read the whole thread, don't have time to finish but wanted to write something within a month), I also noticed an argument that Paragon already rewarded good town cohesion, which I don't think is a very good one because it's recognizing an individual and not a group of players. Yes, great people don't build themselves and blah blah blah, but an individual reward recognizes an individual.

I think a lot of the other changes are strong - I disagree with the removal of Best Scum Group for along the same lines I disagree with the removal of Best Town Group, but I think cutting out the dying Professor Mafia was an excellent move, changing Best Replacement also great along similar lines, swapping Don Corelone to single game is a great idea that I'm surprised didn't happen earlier, etc. I didn't mean to make this an afterthought but have to leave and am hoping that half-baked thoughts make me more likely to return in a near future than empty promises will.

[Nachomamma8]

But by its nature, working as a group is written into scum roles, whereas it's NOT possible to achieve that in every town -- the entire idea of mafia is "a team of informed individuals" versus "a majority of uninformed individuals". Town teams are a collection of individuals, and yes, sometimes they can come together / work together and truly make a cohesive performance, but playing well as town is not something that should be viewed in isolation. I stated elsewhere in this thread that consistency is one of the most important factors in town play, so awarding a single game performance is something we want to avoid, and it's something we would have to do if we gave out a town team award.

So the point where it isn't possible to work together in every town is something I'd like to highlight - I think this point alone is why that cohesion should be celebrated when it does come together against all odds. I agree that consistency is one of the most important factors in a Paragon award, but I fail to see where it's an important quality in a Best Town award. Why can't we award a town for a single game performance? We're awarding Don Corelone for a single game performance even though one of the most important qualities of a good scum player is also consistency; you're not a good scum player if you only win one game because people can't read you. You're a good scum player if you constantly stay ahead of the curve and are able to make people townread you for different reasons after you've already fooled them one way or another.

This isn't winning "best picture", and it doesn't really translate. The Best Picture award is given to the producers of the film, not the entire cast and crew, and the producers are directly responsible for the film's quality. Someone claiming, "I worked on a Best Picture nominee!" is more similar to someone saying, "I played in a game that had a Best Town nominee!" which is acceptable, as both are functionally meaningless. We're also not really concerned with the people in the game knowing who "deserves" it and who doesn't -- the Scummies are a sitewide recognition of achievement.

You are absolutely correct that my metaphor was terrible; I don't really know about the production of movies and the award and what that entails, just made the comparison because scummies oscars etc. The intention behind the comparison was that in order for a movie (a town performance) to be great, it usually requires a lot of great acting, casting, directing, composing, etc., but not all elements have to be perfect (sometimes movies succeed, and are great, despite of clunky elements).

I don't think that it's for the health of the Scummies not to recognize times where a majority of a town truly comes together and collaborates and coalesces in a way that is strange and unusual and not even supposed to happen just because a couple of townies ran contrary to that hive-mind or didn't contribute in a significant way.

See: argument about consistency. If players come together, great, fantastic -- that's one example of exhibiting one characteristic of good town play. If they carry that across multiple games, they deserve the nomination. If multiple people on those "teams" carry it across multiple games, they all deserve to get nominated individually. We cut dead awards to stop giving out participation trophies, and best town team is ACTUALLY LITERALLY giving out participation awards.

If players come together and demonstrate qualities of townplay that compliment one another, than that's more than just one example of good town play. It means that several players are demonstrating a bunch of good qualities of town play at once and they are pushing towards a common goal instead of clashing together. Saying that recognizing it isn't important because it lacks consistency doesn't make sense to me when you are recognizing good scum play that isn't consistent.

I absolutely agree with you that cutting out dead awards is a much-needed move, and I truly believe the work you've done with that is great. I just don't think that Best Town Group was ever a dead award.

[Nachomamma8]

and now that i'm reading the thread,

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

this was great

[Nachomamma8]

We are simply saying and acknowledging that in a lot of games "cohesion" is usually achieved by the leadership of a few key members of town (or deceitful scum) rather than the entire cooperation of the entire town. That is the main reason we are scrapping the award; it was given to a whole team where only ~50% of said team deserved the reward for their efforts, and, honestly, the townies responsible for the win might very well be eligible for nomination for the Best Mafia Catcher award anyways.

I encourage you to make a case for as to why the 4 lurkers or one sentence shit posters in your game deserve to relish in the same amount of recognition for the achievements and leadership of a handful to half a dozen solid townspeople. I know cases and examples can be made for games where full cohesion is more or less achieved across the majority of the towns but is there really going to be enough games every year of that caliber to warrant keeping the award around? Probably not.

There are games where the town dominates the scum because there is one (maybe two) players that have great reads and are charismatic and speak well and get along well with others and people follow those reads. These are games that are currently recognized: these players are Paragons. There are also games where half a dozen townies are active, contributing, actually talking out reads and processing events: these games are Best Town games. I think that these games are very rare, yes. I think that some players who are in that town don't deserve that, yes. I don't think that preventing an undeserving award is a fair exchange for a truly amazing performance not getting recognized in the way it should.

The main counterargument to this seems to be that the town players who deserve it should just be nominated for Paragon, which I think is missing the point. I don't think that these Best Town performances, even if the people involved aren't Paragon material because they aren't as strong elsewhere, are "flukes" and thus unworthy of recognition; just because people aren't on all the time don't mean that they lack experiences and games that aren't great, which, again, is a fact that is recognized in the Don Corelone award so why not here?

[Nachomamma8]

And if I read and thought before I posted, I would have posted this and none of anything else because these seem to be the points that matter (but correct me if I'm wrong!):

We're awarding very specific people for very specific accomplishments, and that will by and large affect their value/weight/opinion in games moving forward, just like an actor winning an Oscar will usually lead to higher billing in movies in the future.

This reads like your goal for the Scummies is, ultimately, to give people reputation. You want Scummies to be something that is more respected, sought after more. I agree that cutting the Best Town award does that. I want the Scummies to recognize truly great games and great players, and I want them to showcase them. I want people who have never played mafia on our site to read the Scummies and see what we are capable of as a site. I think that taking away "Best Town Award" hurts that. I don't think that it's been hurting as an award; I think the Best Town awards given to games over the past several years have been town performances that truly deserved it.

I think the bigger thing that was hurting the Scummies reputation-wise was the participation awards, where the players or games recognized were not exceptional or worthy in showcase in any way; a great example of that was the Best IC awards. Thor and I got the award because... we were the only people that IC'd. Were we great, amazing, exceptional? No. We were there. I don't think Best Town suffered as an award like that, which is why it's a mistake cutting it out.

We also think CONSISTENCY is important for a town play award -- and that's only something attainable across multiple performances.

I don't at all view this as a strong point. From an outsider's perspective, it looks like consistency was made the most important of any town-related award, and I don't understand why, hence sort of flailing to figure it out.

You are correct that people are right sometimes and wrong sometimes but these awards aren't being given out to townies because "they were right that one time"; these awards are being given out to towns because of more factors than just "7/10 townies had good reads". Sometimes people are

really really

on and sometimes they aren't; that doesn't mean that the game they had when they were on wasn't great and worthy of celebration. I guess the biggest concern is that without consistency the award could be given to a town performance that was one-dimensional, but I don't understand why that same standard isn't applied to scum games because I don't think consistency is any less important for scum than town. Sometimes, people townread you for stupid reasons. Sometimes, you win a game because you just became brave enough to post as scum. Sometimes, the people who believe you are the people with the most sway in the game. I would argue that you have more control over more factors as scum thus consistency would be more important for town, not less, but again, generally rambling because I don't understand this particular point.

[Nachomamma8]

I think the point, mollie, is that you keep making arguments in favor of teamwork being considered for scummies. Reck is saying it is considered. But what you're REALLY after is you want TEAMS to be considered for scummies.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's meaningless that I hear "scum team" quite a bit, but I rarely hear "Town Team" but rather just "Town."

"Scum Team" comes up with 36736 matches. "Mafia Team" 3500. "Town Team" only 766.

But people are also playing in hydrae far more often than they were before, which I think is because people are trying to explore their personal connections to other players more; people are trying to gain greater understanding of each other and play as a team in a way that isn't usually possible in town roles.

[Nachomamma8]

I dunno, I mean, this is a really cool thing that I think people volunteer [a lot of] their time doing and try to keep everyone happy with the results that plenty of people will inevitably be upset with in some way or another. Changes happen; if they don't work, they don't work and it may or may not go back to the old standard. I think the SSC has done a lot for the site in the name of entertainment/often petty acknowledgement so whatever works, works.

Thanks for all your hard work, guys. <3

Part of figuring out why they work or don't work is talking it out, which is my intention now.
I am not meaning to demean the effort that's been put into them recently; the entire reason I am currently posting in this thread (I very rarely post in threads that aren't mafia threads) is because there's an energy behind the Scummies that's been lacking in recent years and I'm excited by that. I agree with the majority of the changes, but I don't believe they're perfect and I'm doing my best to explain why. I don't mean to be harsh or mean or negative (although my first couple of my posts in this thread were dickish and I'm sorry for that because I think they set a future tone), I just want to offer another perspective.

[Nachomamma8]

oh and scum win newbie games all the time after daytalk because TEAMWORK MAKES DREAMWORK and daytalk inspired more TEAMWORK

scummies need to celebrate dream work guys
they need to

[Nachomamma8]

could you tone down the sarcasm if you're trying to make a lucid point?

That wasn't meant to be sarcasm re: your point, that was just a standalone joke.

[Nachomamma8]

I mean, this may be the case. But it seems to only reinforce what I'm saying, which is that viewing town as a "team" is misleading. People may want to achieve some level of team mentality, leading to hydras and the like, but that's because it's lacking in the fundamental way that mafia works.

I think that the reason "mafia" and "team" are more closely correlated is because mafia get a PM that says: "you are mafia. you are on a team. here are your teammates." whereas town says "you are town. kill bad guys.", but I don't think that doesn't mean that teamwork doesn't exist in town games and isn't an integral or recognizable part of them. A lot of playing town is figuring out who to trust because they seem A) like they are presenting good points in a game with very little hard evidence and B) because they seem town. When a core of town players both trust each other (townread each other enough to not murder each other) AND think that they are competent which means they are factoring other players reads into their own instead of convincing them, towns that deserve Best Town are created, and I don't think that it's misleading to call those players a Team.

[Nachomamma8]

Well I'm just having trouble understanding what your point is in reference to the scummies.

The only serious point in that very not serious post was that there is some strange voodoo magic power in teamwork, which is not a point that I find particularly important, and not one that I'm serious about presenting because no matter how I try to phrase it I sound like a character on Sesame Street. I made that post because I tried many times to phrase the point "Teamwork is Important!" and couldn't take myself seriously any of those times, and so didn't.

[Nachomamma8]

[Nachomamma8]

No.

[Nachomamma8]

I'm seeing some sentiment of people feeling the judges have made some REALLY weird, wacky calls--they don't understand what made the judges decide to make their selection. This isn't exactly something the ceremony itself gives; the most you typically get is a quote either from the game itself or from a nominator of the award about why it deserved nomination. That's...not exactly the most informative of processes. Seeing the actual judging after it has been done in a greater capacity would allow users to go, "Ohhhhh! That makes sense, now!", or at the very least, make it more tangible what their disagreements are.

One good criticism that I think you bring up here is that the ceremony could do a better of establishing the "this is what the award is about, this is why this person won" dynamic. I think that releasing judge PTs after the fact is probably not the best solution to the problem you outline here, though.

This would also offer the judges a form of critique--with it all behind closed doors, who can tell the judges how to improve? Only those with access. And I'm sure that any judge who is worthy of being a judge holds interest in how to do their job better, and would love the feedback. But how can general users provide that feedback if they can't actually see what the process was? It's near-impossible.

In the current system, there are already dissenting opinions; judges already criticize/offer feedback to each other, the SSC is in a position to criticize/offer feedback to judges, etc. A judge who wants to improve already has plenty of resources to do so, and a general user who earnestly wants to improve the judging system specifically needs to be a judge. I also don't feel like it's fair to say that someone isn't worthy of being a judge unless they want more feedback than they want already because most of the responses aren't feedback; they're people lashing out from a place to hurt and the making the entire process transparent seems likely to exacerbate that pretty significantly. I'd have more faith that we'd be able to cultivate a healthy atmosphere of constructive criticism --> self-improvement if we already had an atmosphere like that post-Scummies, but we don't and so it's probably more prudent to assume that it won't magically appear if we invite the potential for more drama.

So there's clear benefits on all ends to this, and I can't really see a downside to this. It'd basically be like releasing a mod PT after the conclusion of a game: by doing so, the mod shows their process, and lets users know what happened and why, opening themselves up to feedback on how to improve their modding process.

Don't think this is a good comparison; the gap between a moderator and a judge is large enough where I think your point is mostly lost here. Moderators not only aren't obligated to rank their players in term of how well they thought that they played, but it's also a much smaller sample; it's a hell of a lot easier to move past a game than it is to move past an entire year.

[Nachomamma8]

Anything said in private you fear being released is...something which shouldn't be said at all? I mean, that seems kind-of self-explanatory.

This isn't really true.

For one, we're not talking about harsh words here, we're just talking about words. Keeping the judging system anonymous allows the judges to make the decision they feel is best, without worrying about the general user's opinions. This is the strongest way to go about it.

For example, let's say that Titus and RC are in the running for Most Cunning Manipulator. Mathblade is a judge. Mathblade knows that Titus dislikes RC as a person, but they also feel like RC played an objectively better game. With a public process, the choice Mathblade makes every time is Titus because at the end of the day the Scummies is not something that is worth risking a personal relationship over. This is what we're trying to avoid.

Secondly, I don't think the situation is as simple as you're laying it out to be; sometimes blame is easily assigned, sometimes it isn't. Just because you can say "this person is being unreasonable" or "this person is wrong" doesn't mean that it's worth it to open both sides up to being hurt, if that makes sense.

[Nachomamma8]

If I knew what warranted the award better on PREVIOUS years, that would allow me to better deem as a nominator who I think is worthy of an award and how to write a nomination for said person.

But I think that this takes away from the nomination process, not adds to it.
Nominators shouldn't be nominating someone because they think "oh, based on the criteria for the award, I think this player has a strong chance of winning!". Nominators should be nominating someone because they think someone did something that's fucking sweet and deserves recognition; if judges disagree, whatever, no big deal.

Moderators for games tend to open themselves up to criticism. They willingly put their necks out on the line, asking for feedback so that they can improve.

Why would judging be any different?

Moderators put themselves on the line for criticism for 30 people at most.
The job of a moderator is to 1) make sure that a game runs smoothly, 2) make sure that a game is balanced, 3) make sure that the flavor was cool.
This is a job that is far less likely to piss people off than someone who is supposed to determine that this person who had a really good year played better than that person.

[Nachomamma8]

I know dozens, even hundreds, of scummers who view them that way--I don't think I am alone in my belief of what they stand for. They are a statement of our elite, of our best. By inherent nature of that, by inherently BEING our best, they are beacons of what to strive for, and as a result...they are a self-improvement metric.

The Scummies are something to strive for, absolutely. They're not a good basis to use as a self-improvement metric, and what you are doing loses a lot of its meaning if you're doing it just so you can win a Scummy.

[Nachomamma8]

For instance, body of work awards require me to essentially use "third person meta" on a player, which I am notoriously bad at; single-game awards require me to read literally every aspect and every nuance of every game nominated and to give a hierarchy to them, which I am also notoriously bad at. Practice for this is reading games I am not actually a player in...but often, I find myself failing to meet my self-imposed minimums in that regard. (Namely, not actually reading said game I'm not in.)

There's a good chance that you're being too hard on yourself here; the most important skill in being a judge is seeing who is playing a good game. You aren't making a unilateral decision; most reasonable points of view end up adding to the process in the end.

If you feel it's something you would ignore, or simply couldn't handle the time commitment, that's understandable, but it's something you care deeply about and thus I don't really see that happening.

[Nachomamma8]

Nobody who is qualified to judge the scummies but hasn't should be complaining about the scummies process works.

I don't think that judging the scummies is a prerequisite for commenting on the process. If that was the case, this thread wouldn't exist.

[Nachomamma8]

I think you'll see an improvement in general advertisement this year - one of the things that has been brought up in ceremony talk and one thing that I support wholeheartedly is better advertising and starting soon (after the new year) we'll start trying to talk about it more and draw people in and get #hype.

If you want to generate interest, there are two great ways to do so - the first is to get involved with the actual Scummies side (judging, writing), but the second and equally effective part is by nominating good play when you see it, talking about why you think it's good play, encouraging others to do the same.

[Nachomamma8]

Writing or judging?

[Nachomamma8]

If you're interested in writing then you can talk to me.
If you're interested in judging then I'd recommend talking to Zor/UT/Reck.