Site Meta Thread

[Alisaes French Maid]

There's no mafia "sandbox" or "practice" mode

I disagree the Normal and Open games are basically a practice mode.

[LlamaFluff]

There's no mafia "sandbox" or "practice" mode

I disagree the Normal and Open games are basically a practice mode.

Not practice mode but a more climate controlled environment. You cant be surprised by a mod throwing in a "lol wut is that" role for fun, its cut and dry mafia with less variance.

[Alisae]

Because towns have been steadily spoonfed more and more town power and less power on scumteams to make up for the fact that 90% of newer players come from sites where Gameplan 1 is "follow the PR" and Gameplan 2 is nonexistent so they have no idea what the fuck to do

/thread

If you think the mentality has to do with role and not play then you're part of the problem.

--

It's not even that players are easily manipulable, it's that players are so close-minded.

I'm close-minded...
I lynch scum...
Theres a difference?

--

Civilization mafia didn't result in a town loss because of spam, it resulted in a town loss because of the close-mindedness. The spam was the consequence of the close-mindedness because we had to shout pages to make a single soul listen.

Okay
here is what happened in civ mafia.
We were organized D1.
But then ABR decided "Fuck you" and the town then proceeded to implode on itself.

--

2) People think non scummy things are scummy

Specifically this

Yeah lmfao

--

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

Yeah and these fucks

Eh, they can be useful.

Almost everyone tool is useful in some context.

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.

aka my friends make fun of me for being "toneread"

--

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

Yeah to the first part.
And tonereads are bullshit ty.

--

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

I'm a strong player
I don't think my mentality in this post is good

[Alisae]

Also people think meta is trash for some reason

Spoiler: Wanna know a cool fact that will improve your play by 10%?

it isn't

[mhsmith0]

Also people think meta is trash for some reason

Spoiler: Wanna know a cool fact that will improve your play by 10%?

it isn't

Like most things in mafia, meta is a tool that can be useful but is often used badly by people, thus discrediting its efficacy substantially. See also: tone, vca, gambiting, etc etc etc

[Alisaes French Maid]

The tone in that post by post analysis is pretty scummy.

I think your issues with tone come from people tone reading you for having "bad" tone which I agree is cancer.
With a proper understanding of how someone plays it's fine, it's just most people don't use it properly.
Kinda like VCA how it's fine but 95% of people mess it up.

[mastina]

"It's not my fault I misread them, they were playing like scum."

This is, by far, one of the biggest problems. When I get a scumread wrong, I do not do this (unless I am scumread for having been wrong, in which case I explain WHY I was reading their play as scum, but that is still me explaining why I got the read wrong; I may word it as "they were playing AS I EXPECTED scum to play" but I don't say "they were playing like scum" and I fully acknowledge I was wrong), and will take full responsibility for having been at fault for my actions on the player. (I mean I might say I'm not sorry when frankly I'm not sorry, but I can be not-sorry while still admitting that yes I was wrong regardless.)

Sometimes, sure. Yeah. You need to defend yourself when you were wrong. If people scumread you for a wrong read, then to some extent you will need to provide a defense of some kind wherein you acknowledge you got things wrong and you explain your process by which you got what you did get things wrong--yet people seem to think "I wasn't wrong, they were just playing like scum" is doing this; it is not. "They were playing like I expected scum to play because of these factors I found to be indicative of scum, but I was wrong" is more what I mean.

[Lycanfire]

Meta is underused and a valuable tool, but requires effort to make a push based on it. People can shrug off weak accusations.

I think it is rarely made the main component in a case because

1) you likely caught onto something sooner which led to the dive in the first place or
2) people can spoil their meta, actively subvert it, claim all sorts of influence in any game if the parameters are narrow enough.

For instance mhsmith0 once caught me based on a combination of meta and tone, but did not make his case solely based in either. I don't think his meta dive on me was unprompted. I was playing a poor scumgame, making critical errors like throwing my partner to the town day 1 while attempting to get compensation for it, to having a potential ML town up, shooting another on the idea of being either cop or investigation recipient, all while angling myself in every situation to look better from every outcome. A big mistake I made was worrying too much about wagons and potential PoE which I made no secret in the game and wolf PT. While my motives for all of these errors or outcomes were unclear mhsmith0 landed a clincher that was a better solution than explaining any of the above- and it was powerful, because I could push back on any other issue, but his case was so good the town would never trust me over another slot.

(I do have the suspicion that mhsmith and I played in the mid-late 00s on a different website. Bugger.)

[Transcend]

Because mafia is a game of luck

[mastina]

Another thing I think is a problem:
People don't seem to realize that most aspects of the game are circumstantial, not universal.

Scumtells are tells which are MORE LIKELY to come from scum, not guaranteed to come from scum. A scumtell not being right can be grounds to revisit whether said tell is actually accurate, but it could simply be it simply didn't apply in the context it was used.

Towntells are tells which are MORE LIKELY to come from town, not guaranteed to come from town. A towntell not being right can be grounds to revisit whether said tell is actually accurate, but it could simply be it simply didn't apply in the context it was used.

VCA is a tool which if used right once does not guarantee being right in the future; VCA is a tool which if used wrong once does not mean that VCA in general is trash, just that particular usage of it was incorrect.

Meta is a tool which if used right once does not guarantee being right in the future; meta is a tool which if used wrong once does not mean that meta in general is trash, just that particular usage of it was incorrect.

And so on and so forth.

Now, granted.
YES.
There are some things which never cease to be right (not very many tho), and some things which never cease to be wrong. Meta off of a single game is an easy go-to example of something nigh-guaranteed to be wrong.

So a common trend is, "There's no universal way to do it right, but many universal ways to do it WRONG".

In every game, critical analysis needs to be applied to the tool being used, regardless of what said tool is, to judge whether it is appropriate to use in the way you wish to use it. Obviously, we're human--we make mistakes, so we can misjudge which tools to use when. That's okay, we recognize the fault and try to improve our accuracy by refining what tools we use, when.

...The problem comes in that most players

don't actually do this

. They seem to assume that a tell is universal, and if it is shown not to be, "that doesn't count!" is their excuse, blaming it on anyone except them for their tell not working. They seem to assume VCA will always work, or will always not work. They seem to assume meta will always work, or will always not work. They seem to assume there's only one "right" way to do VCA. They seem to assume there's only one way to use meta. When the truth is, they are nuanced things, with different usages in different situations.

Tools are tools, in that there are right times to use them and wrong times to use them, and separately, there are right times to use them one way and wrong times to use them that one way, and then there are right times to use them this DIFFERENT WAY and wrong times to use them that different way, and so on and so forth. There's no universal method or approach guaranteed to work. Players need to have adaptability and judge every situation by the circumstances. And most...don't.

Plus, even among those who try, there's a difference between trying and succeeding. I TRY. I'd be the first to admit I am really really really bad at actually succeeding. I know all of the above to be true, and I try to apply it in games wherein I try to use the tools I judge to be the most appropriate in the most appropriate way, but I am often wrong. I recognize being wrong, but recognizing being wrong is in of itself not enough to start being right. It's just the first step.

So even among those who DO know that things are circumstantial. There's no guarantee that knowledge in of itself is enough to grant success.

[Ellibereth]

My main usage of meta is that I think that people have a bunch of unconcious hard-data tells scattered across their games. I use some primitive programs to help me find them.

[Ellibereth]

Lycan, would it blow your mind if I thought that pushes with weak/few to no accusations/reasons that the author believes is untrue are often as or more effective as ones with a case and real reasons?
If I'm able to get someone lynched with either one (and thats very often the case), I would choose the former option almost every time.

[Lycanfire]

Weak cases are usually symptomatic of a TvT or SvS. Succeeding with lynching bait isn't anything to be proud of.

[mhsmith0]

(I do have the suspicion that mhsmith and I played in the mid-late 00s on a different website. Bugger.)

Fwiw it wouldn’t have been mafia, my first ever internet mafia game was in early 2016. Either that or I have much larger problems w split personality disorder than originally thought

[Lycanfire]

Apparently there is more than one mafia player in Arizona that writes like you, with an obsession with mafia setups. Medicine has come a long way.

[mhsmith0]

Because mafia is a game of luck

Self-proclaimed unluckiest player ever to play mafia, at your service

[Alisae]

Because mafia is a game of luck

Self-proclaimed unluckiest player ever to play mafia, at your service

my newbie game winrate is a lot worse then yours this year

[Ellibereth]

Weak cases are usually symptomatic of a TvT or SvS. Succeeding with lynching bait isn't anything to be proud of.

I think you're mixing up two things.

Having good reads

and

choosing whether to state reasons in thread at all and choosing whether to be honest with ones reasoning

are two different things.

It sounds like me that you're used to people that have bad reads and also choose not to state their reasons or lie in thread.

My claim is that people with good reads may (and often do) choose not to state their reasons or lie in thread OVER writing out a strong case and discussing their real reasons, because they believe the former is more effective in a lot of scenarios.

[Lycanfire]

The only way to win in Road to Rome is to join a different queue.

[mastina]

Also, further caveat to the above which echoes already-existing sentiment in the thread:
There's a third axis to tools.
I already talked above about knowing when to use, and NOT to use, a tool, depending on the circumstances.
I already talked above about knowing which method to use, and which method NOT to use, for a tool, depending on the circumstances.

The third axis is of course the innate natural talents and skills of the player who wishes to use the tool in the first place. Recognizing that there are strengths and weaknesses to what you can and can't do.

Some players are more suited for using certain scumhunting tools than other players.
First you need to be able to recognize what tools you can use reasonably well and which tools you can't use so well. From there, you can apply the above two, recognizing what times to use the tools and recognizing what method to use for those tools.

But from there, you need to then acknowledge

other players

, who know which tools THEY are good at using.
You need to not dismiss their methods just because they are different from yours.

You may feel that they are less accurate than you are; this is fine. If you feel they are less accurate than you are, then guide them to your viewpoint by exploring their methodology--let them explain their tool and how they are using it, and after they have done so, you give them pointers on how you feel that tool could be improved, or how that tool you feel is less accurate than it would be normally, so that they should explore other tools in their arsenal, more or less. Play to their strengths while playing to your own.

Since, just because a tool doesn't work for you doesn't mean it doesn't work for them. And if you try to prove to them that their tool doesn't work...then you're gonna fail. Instead of saying the method doesn't work, it needs to be shown why you feel a different method will be more accurate in the CURRENT situation. Not in general, just for the current circumstances, why their tool with that method isn't as accurate as it normally would be.

This is the best way to ensure cooperation and only a handful of players aren't absolute shit at this, which is why towns suck so much.

Engagement is how good towns win. They engage each other, and

keep

the engagement going. They don't break it off. Now, sometimes, this engagement can be negative, even hostile. That's not inherently a bad thing even if it is less-than-ideal. The important aspect is to keep the conversation going and to not cut it off, since the moment the exchanging of ideas stops, or even stoops to the levels of "You're wrong!" "No YOU'RE wrong", the chances of reconciliation and cooperation for the town have plummeted.

[mhsmith0]

The only way to win in Road to Rome is to join a different queue.

2-1 record as town IC

[Ellibereth]

I'm copying this over from the other thread.

I actually talked to some people about this recently.

A pretty big problem with mafia as whole is that there's very little consensus on what "good" or "bad" play is. Like for a lot of things there are people objectively better at some things than other but the lack of metric for it makes it hard to get a sense of whats actually "good" and "bad".

See Chess, Starcraft, League, Sports, (any other game) Players- there are Heros to emulate and almost everyone agrees they're good and that they're good at particular things. We don't have anything close to that. When I first started I found a few people I thought was good and read a shitton of their games and tried to emulate them. Some stuff stuck and some didn't. Some of things I was copying I now think aren't that good, others I think are but I'm just not good at.

But yeah - it would ideally be easier to have visible improvement lines, goalposts, and models but that would require some sort of consensus on a bunch of stuff that would be tough.

And yeah, the various disagreements floating around in this thread on some very fundamental stuff shows why its hard to get that consensus.

[Ellibereth]

In terms of good teamwork.

I think

everyone working together to solve a game

vs.

everyone finding someone to sheep, and that someone solves the game

are both equally good cases of teamwork.

The latter option is often more realstic and easier to achieve so I think it's a better starting point.

[Espeonage]

Also people think meta is trash for some reason

Spoiler: Wanna know a cool fact that will improve your play by 10%?

it isn't

It is. There are people on this site that will analyse their posts in excruciating detail to see what words, sentence length, post length, spread of topic, and lines of questioning to see what they do naturally as either alignment. And then they will draft their posts multiple times until it perfectly represents their town meta specifically to fuck with meta tells.

I know this because I have seen it happen. Muffin comes to mind as someone that does this.

Meta is fucking useless and I retain the right to policy lynch people who try to use it as a basis for argument. Meta has some limited uses to back up an otherwise metaless argument, but outside of that, utterly useless.

[Espeonage]

There is only one reliable way to read people. And that is through motivation. And you read motivation by using all scumhunting tools at your disposal to build a picture of why people would do something.