Scummies Nomination Thread 2017

[Ellibereth]

Hi guys.
Thanks for the support.

On phone now but this is my only other completed town game since coming back: viewtopic.php?f=56&t=73385.

Unfortunately rolled scum in the other two...

[Ellibereth]

Kilos was a lot more of a group effort. Kagami/chess/hito were all great.

[Ellibereth]

Hi guys.
Thanks for the support.

On phone now but this is my only other completed town game since coming back: viewtopic.php?f=56&t=73385.

Unfortunately rolled scum in the other two...

besides RVS Bulba

Elli literally only voted scum players

nah, got jebaited by desperado

[Ellibereth]

I nominated

Chara

for

Rising Star

. Nomination text copied in full below.

----------------------------------------

Note: Chara used to play under the account Not Chara and uses the latter account in some of the cited games.

I am nominating Chara because of their townplay. I have little experience with their scumplay. However, I feel like the following positive sides of their townplay are 1) the most important elements of good townplay and 2) increasingly rare among players on site.

Chara is obvtown in the vast majority of their town games and is almost never a distraction to the town solving-process. They are, consequently, never mislynched. They are often an integral part of the town-solving block. Their reads are sufficiently good to win the game and they are occasionally the one pushing correct lynches. Even when they are wrong, they don't cause the town to implode on itself.

Citations:

Inception Mafia: viewtopic.php?f=94&t=71602. They were obvtown. They were an integral part of the town block, keeping town together and organizing complex mechanics. Please note that this game was played across multiple threads. You can find them by looking through the topics of the mod.

DBZ Mafia: viewtopic.php?f=54&t=71107. They were also obvtown. Their reads were average, but they were good enough that when working with the rest of the town, they got the win.

Beneath the Mask: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=73578. They were one of the few obvtowns through positive play in a very chaotic and unstable town. They were not a distraction at all unlike the vast majority of the game. Their read accuracy didn't matter because they sheeped their way to a crushing town victory.

Perpetual Mylo: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=73659. They were obvtown in another rather toxic environment. Reads were sufficiently good to win a close game in the end.

[Ellibereth]

Perpetual Mylo: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=73659. They were obvtown in another rather toxic environment.

Proof you didn't read the game

Pretty sure you were the only one not townreading them D3 and onwards

[Ellibereth]

ehh they're fundamentally different.

[Ellibereth]

Eh I feel like it kinda goes into the pro-town part but shrug

I mean the definition of pro-town is to do things that help lead to town winning. How pretty the method is doesn't really matter.

What you described with getting people to work together is one possible way but there are a lot of others - some that may even run opposite of it.

(Like you only need a majority to get a lynch, if you can map a win where you are getting that majority it doesn't matter what the rest of the crowd are doing).

[Ellibereth]

LUV that literally used to be an award they got rid of

Are you talking about the best town scummy?

That's not exactly what LUV is describing but yeah - there used to be a scummy for the town that worked together best in a game.

[Ellibereth]

How well a scum team played or the setup can factor greatly

I agree with this - I'm not an expert on judging scum play though.

But those things don’t take away from making players better or pushing team work

To the former: obviously! But it's kinda hard to tell how well a player played when you're beating someone worse. Like me and Magnus Carlsen's games might even seem similar if we're both playing someone really really really bad at chess.

And yeah - teamwork is important. But what type of teamwork is appropriate for a game I think really depends on the playerlist and the game state.

Sometimes it's better to just force everyone in line even if they're unhappy about it and makes a "bad environment", other times it's better to have everyone cooperate and work together, there are other cases but my point is that I think which option is "best" is really case by case.

[Ellibereth]

Paragon is the town one.

I think there should be a scum one too yeah - the argument against is it's unfair because some people don't roll scum enough blahblah but I think that's silly. There's always some luck involved in life. The other factor might be that they don't want only a few noms that are all bad? But I think just giving the award to noone should be fine in that case too.

^^^ These are conjectures, haven't actually talked to anyone involved.

[Ellibereth]

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.

[Ellibereth]

That was far too many serious posts without some memery from me feelsbadman.

[Ellibereth]

LUV that literally used to be an award they got rid of

Are you talking about the best town scummy?

That's not exactly what LUV is describing but yeah - there used to be a scummy for the town that worked together best in a game.

No the teacher one

I might be blind, is it here? viewtopic.php?f=5&t=21324

EDIT: Yeah there's an IC one. No general teacher one though I think.

[Ellibereth]

Yeah there’s none of that. Just what is considered optimal or most favorable and then whatever deviates from that norm.

Think it’s all player specific though. Meaning like if we had some way of knowing what each of us are good at as each alignment, we know whether one of us played an awful game, just okay, or a really good game.

I mean what is considered optimal or most favorable is already unclear and pretty heavily debated I think? I think if you asked a bunch of us to the list the top n players at some specific skill on site we'd all end up with drastically different lists.

I mean like anything else there's probably a wide skill range across the site, but it's hard for someone to tell the difference between some one better than them vs. A LOT better than (replacing better with worse there probably holds true too) and I think most of us just have vague notions of us being roughly better at some vague thing than the average playerlist they're in (or something along those lines).

[Ellibereth]

That was far too many serious posts without some memery from me feelsbadman.

That's because you overdosed on meme'ing in discord wolf chat in our last game together

MORALSUPPORTBERETH

[Ellibereth]

r.e. smith's list.

Looks roughly good? Only skimmed. I might add or takeaway a thing or two but yeah syre.

I think what's missing is something about the relative importance of those skills. Another extreme chess example - you can be a strategic monster but if you miss 1 or 2 move tactics you're going to lose a lot more games than if you can calculate tactics but suck strategically. I have my own thoughts on this mafia-wise but I'm not sure if they're right.

For example I think general scumread accuracy + charisma is near the bottom of important townskills for most people to have while I think a healthy amount of people would probably have it near the top?

[Ellibereth]

Yeah, see, I disagree with like at least half of those? And it's hard to judge which of us is right.

[Ellibereth]

I mean the problem with that is there's no skill metric for ourselves or the opposition.

Someone who can win every game in bronze isn't good at league yeah?

That could be happening to us, we'd just have little to no idea.

[Ellibereth]

I don't think thats true.

[Ellibereth]

Oh I haven't really been talking about the scummies.

Main thesis is that lack of any sort of consensus on relative skill level, on what skills are important, and what examples of good and bad usage of said skills are, are a big part of what keeps players from improving.

blahblahblah wrong thread, but I'm lazy and the conversation was relevant.

[Ellibereth]

Not particularily sure how the judging process works but I can't imagine it would be any other way than a group of people (not sure how they're selected either) talking about and judging people based on their personal metrics of whats good and bad.

[Ellibereth]

Honestly - after most losses - there's probably some set of things any individual player could have done differently that would have flipped the result to a win. If the interest is in getting better that's probably the best mindset to have, and I think that the statement is generally true.

[Ellibereth]

I mean it clearly isn't obvious...

[Ellibereth]

I mean it clearly isn't obvious...

Fuck off Elli

Bitch

[Ellibereth]

I have never beat RadiantCowbells at mafia.

[Ellibereth]

what time zone midnight does last nom have to be in by

[Ellibereth]

Rope
Lots and lots and lots of rope