Site Meta Thread

[mhsmith0]

I don't buy that in order to play a game on this site you have to be nearly constantly online. It should be a site where you can spend a few hours after work, or between classes, or things like that and be able to keep up with the game.

One hour a day on a game should be more than enough. One hour a day on all games combined honestly shouldn't really be considered that terrible, though if you do that you should really be at <=3 games IMO.

[Alisaes French Maid]

Legit I have met so many players who have amazing reads.
But they use the same shit tells that don't work for them over and over on other reads and if they just tried to adapt they would be good.

But since they don't there reads will always be 1/2 or lower since they continue to use faulty tells riding on the high of the times when they got lucky.

[Alisaes French Maid]

Like in the end sometimes it's the person who got lyncheds fault but every time you mislynch someone you should be stopping and thinking about why that was and trying to learn better for next time.
I find there's a lot of people willing to just write off the fact that they're mislynching people left right and center and who barely even try to learn from it or improve and that's how your ability stagnates.

You can blame other people for what went wrong but in the end the only person you can change is you.

And tonereads are fine. There's not 1 way of playing mafia Lycanfire

Weird how RC, Elli and Smith the strong mafia players are the ones with the good mentalities on how to improve and the bad ones are saying otherwise

[Lil Uzi Vert]

Biggest thing for me is ego and “me first attitude”.

Don’t get the sense that most people are really interested in playing mafia here so much as having shouting circles insisting that they're "more right”.

[Alisaes French Maid]

Anyway I agree with you RC sorry if I gave another impression.

[RadiantCowbells]

I don't buy that in order to play a game on this site you have to be nearly constantly online. It should be a site where you can spend a few hours after work, or between classes, or things like that and be able to keep up with the game.

One hour a day on a game should be more than enough. One hour a day on all games combined honestly shouldn't really be considered that terrible, though if you do that you should really be at <=3 games IMO.

People want different things. I think that MS should focus on trying to offer a playing experience for everyone.

[Lil Uzi Vert]

The reason towns struggle:

1) Overconfidence in reads

2) People think non scummy things are scummy

This is literally it

Who disagrees with this

Meh.
For number 2 it goes both ways.
If you're scumread when you're town by another town player both players have room for improvement.

Yeah I’m consistently scum read as town and town read as scum despite not doing anything drastically different but I know I need to improve.

Oh yeah


People don’t use meta

People are OPPOSED to meta


That’s a huge reason why towns lose here

No joke
It really is

Hard to use meta correctly and certain players you just can’t meta.

[Ellibereth]

I mean I understand the qualms of the whole geriatric crew and am an absolute supporter of that sort of game being a consistent thing.

But blaming losses hyperposters and "bullshit" in a nongeriatric game because you consequently can't keep up is silly. Someone could argue just as easily the blame lies on the person that's unable to keep up. It doesn't just go in one direction.

It doesn't fully work both ways though.

If half of the game is making twenty posts a day (good content or nothing), and the other half cant reach that (work, school, etc) the people posting have a decision to make

1) Post less in order to allow the rest of the game to contribute
2) Continue posting while knowing that they are impacting the ability of players to contribute to the game.

You can argue that by intentionally hyper posting knowing that a portion of the game is unable to be effective due to it is in itself an anti-town action as you immediately cripple the amount of information that you get from a few players by your own choice. There is a difference between a lurker and a player who only has a few hours a day to play. Its a bit of hyperbole, but it would be like having a PR which allows you to limit the amount of posts someone could make to a detrimental point, and then arguing that its something that helps the town to use it on a random player.

I don't buy that in order to play a game on this site you have to be nearly constantly online. It should be a site where you can spend a few hours after work, or between classes, or things like that and be able to keep up with the game.

Yeah you're right.

I mean the argument a hyperposter could make there is "the way I'm playing is going to turn out to be so positive that it cancels out the negative for you being unable to read everything" just like the argument from your side is "it's worth it for you to change how you post in a way that potentially is more uncomfortable to you so I can read the game and be more effective".

Either argument can be true depending on the specific case. I think we intuitively think the hyper-poster lowering their volume is the more polite and expedeint thing to do because we feel like it wouldn't signifigantly impact their happiness level and that its fairly easy to do(we're not asking them to chop off an arm!). But who knows, maybe posting less is hard for certain people and would actually ruin their day. In the end of the day if they don't feel like posting less there's nothing you can really do once the game starts.

I agree with you that you should not have to be constantly online. There's the garuanteed geriatric set for that if you want to read everything. And even for "spam heavy games" I think there are techniques to be effective while only using an hour or so a day. Reading everything isn't absolutely required. It's just an adjustment. (One I had to make coming back to this site!)

[Creature]

Not blaming someone for being mislynched is more of a "you should adapt yourself to others, not others themselves to you"

[RadiantCowbells]

Not blaming someone for being mislynched is more of a "you should adapt yourself to others, not others themselves to you"

It's more than that though

I remember once I was watching my brother play akali mid, and he was like 4-1 killing his lane every once in a while but his bottom lane was like 0-9 or something
and he was like yeah this is the reason I'm (dont remember elo anymore), I always end up with terrible teams
well sure yes your team was objectively bad. some players are objectively worse at towntelling than others. but if I was in that game at that elo it wouldn't have mattered if bot lane was feeding

you can blame others or you can try to improve yourself so that it doesn't matter anymore, and only one of them is a direct link to increasing your personal success
and this isn't even like that where they're directly hurting the team necessarily, they're just different and you have to adjust to the difference. not expect them to conform to you.
I feel like arguments where people say everyone should play like 'x' are people implicitly acknowledging that they can't read people who don't think like them and that's not a good thing

[Ellibereth]

Biggest thing for me is ego and “me first attitude”.

Don’t get the sense that most people are really interested in playing mafia here so much as having shouting circles insisting that they're "more right”.

and the (unfortunate?) adjustment a player could potentially have to make is if they think all the loud people's reads are wrong and that there own are correct would be to shout even LOUDER. And a lot of us are bad at knowing when we're more likely to be wrong than someone else so the cycle goes on.

[mhsmith0]

Weird how RC, Elli and Smith the strong mafia players are the ones with the good mentalities on how to improve and the bad ones are saying otherwise

You only call me strong because I never rand wolf on MS

[mhsmith0]

you can blame others or you can try to improve yourself so that it doesn't matter anymore, and only one of them is a direct link to increasing your personal success

I mean I'm a master at blaming others and my town win rate is stuck around 50%

[Ellibereth]

I should have confidence on a subject I know well.

It's called taking a stand on something. Opposed to being unclear about my motives.

My viewpoint is "this concept can lead you to better evidence but offer nothing worthwhile to yourself or town". If you dispute that by genuinely believing that solving slots isn't in your interest, or that vague reads on players is okay, then keep these posts in mind the next time you find yourself in a situation like this in a game.

I've usually felt that the more I learn about something, the more I become aware that I still don't know a lot about that thing. That's applied to mafia as well.

My dispute is that I could feel that it could offer something worthwhile and that convincing evidence sometimes isn't the most important thing in the world. I'm also not sure what game situation you're describing.

[LlamaFluff]

Oh yeah


People don’t use meta

People are OPPOSED to meta


That’s a huge reason why towns lose here

No joke
It really is

Hard to use meta correctly and certain players you just can’t meta.

Right. Meta is something that to me sets two baselines for players

1) What I can expect from someone on a basic skill and logic set. Essentially how strong of a player they are, how likely they are to try and gambit, how likely are they to commit common scum tells as town, etc.
2) What I can expect from someone activity wise. Enough to have an idea of if they are suddenly way more or less active which may relate to the game in some way.

Very strong meta tells beyond that are rare to exist with any sort of consistency. There have only been a few players I think can be read near perfectly through a few meta tells. Most of the time meta is knowing enough about a player to be able to identify an irregularity in play, not "X always does Y as alignment Z". Its more of "X has never done Y before, I should dig into that". An example could be something like "Player X almost always attack a player when they bring self-meta into a game as a defense. Player Y just brought self-meta into the game as a defense but Player X ignored it. Why?"

[Firebringer]

Biggest thing for me is ego and “me first attitude”.

Don’t get the sense that most people are really interested in playing mafia here so much as having shouting circles insisting that they're "more right”.

Yeah I want to be more right than everyone else

[smilefires]

Weird how RC, Elli and Smith the strong mafia players are the ones with the good mentalities on how to improve and the bad ones are saying otherwise

You only call me strong because I never rand wolf on MS

I swear someone needs to unbreak random.org so it can't tell what site you're playing on.

---

Also, explaining your own reads helps tons with reading your own posts (or notes) later. After a game, too, you can self-eval by going back and colorizing your reads, and perhaps you realize some indicator is not working out as reliably as you'd like, and adjust accordingly.

Meta's a nice enough baseline but "strong" meta is probably often misused. Ideally those types of tells are hard to escape if they're truly indicative of anything.

[Espeonage]

On the subject of meta / town losses / examples of good townplay / goalposts

Dear Prof. mhsmith0
What do I do if I get "toneread" as scum in all of my towngames when I am really obvtown and have good reads?

Thanks, Alisae

Tonereads are awful

Time reads are among the most consistently useful reads there are.

And your response is typical of the biggest problem, which I feel I can comment on considering I'm recently back from a two year hiatus.

Y'all don't know what the fuck you are doing. People are reading stuff and flat out drawing the wrong conclusions. You read town tone as scum. You read scum motivation as town trying to shake things up.

Like go back to the basics. I'll give you some tips.

Being wrong is a towntell. Pushing misslynches consistently isn't.
Lying is bad when done regularly. Lying is only good if it is going to pay off in almost every situation.
Gambits are bullshit. Only do it if you can close to assure it will work otherwise it will ruin a game. Or if there is little opportunity cost.
Listen to people, you ain't shit until you've proven it.

[Espeonage]

Oh and don't use a technique until you know how to use it.

And admit that you're Shit when you're Shit.

[Espeonage]

Tone reading is good if you have meta to actually make sense out of it.
Tone reading without meta is kinda garbo tbh.

Like the entire purpose of a tone read is you need meta to know what there tone is supposed to usually be like but most people just use it as a charisma read. Don't think it's fair to shit on tone reads because of that.

This is categorically incorrect.

Meta is why people that think they can tone read actually can't.

[Alisaes French Maid]

This is categorically incorrect.

Meta is why people that think they can tone read actually can't.

I disagree you can't reliably tone read someone without any meta because this isn't real life and a lot is lost between IRL mafia and forum mafia it's really hard to determine if someone is disingenuous based on the words they use while typing alone.

For example some people can just be annoyed irl, someone may have just walked home in the rain, someone may have just got into a fight irl or someone may jut not like someone in the game.
There isn't really such a thing as "good" or "bad" tone and I feel like general tone reads are just kind of shit.

And I really disagree that meta doesn't help you tone read people post and think in different ways that reflects on there writing when they are different alignments if you actually know what you are looking for. I agree some people just try and force tone reads and don't actually know what they are looking for but that's different.


Although a lot of this depends on how broad we are willing to go with what "tone" is, like for example I don't consider a scum player posturing to be a tone issue and you don't really need meta to figure out if someone is posturing.

[RadiantCowbells]

If your tone read is 'oh this player isnt playing like she did in single sample size last game where she was town!' then that's not a tone read.

[Alisaes French Maid]

I am not saying that's a tone read.

[RadiantCowbells]

I'm not saying anyone is, I'm just bringing that up because I see a lot of people do sample size 1 tone reads and it's just halsdghasdfklj

[Ellibereth]

Oh and don't use a technique until you know how to use it.

I disagree with this. I think people should feel comfortable experimenting with things even if they're not sure if it works or not. There's no mafia "sandbox" or "practice" mode to do that in so the only way to test ideas is in actual games.