Site Meta Thread

[RadiantCowbells]

A large amount of players on the site at the moment good, "good" and bad all think that when they get mislynched it is due to awful towns and when they get awful reads it is also due to bad towns the latter kinda bothers me more. "I thought the scum player was scum but the town player was so fucking bad I had no choice" is a really awful excuse for losing a game. Yes there are cases of awful towns screwing over individual players but even then there are moments in games when you need to unify the town and lead lynches onto scum by yourself and if you can't do that then you should work on improving your game in that regard.

As a result of this blame everyone else mentality where you can never take blame yourself people never adapt game by game and never improve at mafia which is just shit.

I think the correct angle is to always take the approach that lynches are the fault of whoever voted.

It puts the responsibility in the most useful place for learning to improve imo.

[RadiantCowbells]

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

[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.

[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

[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.

[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

[RadiantCowbells]

Playing to win is only enforced in the loosest sense.

[RadiantCowbells]

Okay so you know for a fact that you are town

that leaves 9 possible town picks and 3 possible scum picks to a total of 12 picks

so 9/12 of people are town
3/12 of people are scum.

I think you're mixing up the math and doing 6 town 3 scum

[RadiantCowbells]

It's worth pointing out that your actual winrate on mafiascum specifically which is what's relevant given the amount of noise that other sites add is 50%.

Not to say that you're bad because having a 50% town winrate actually places you significantly above average in the current meta, but winrate is also queue dependent and being 0/5 in mini normals suggests that you're getting a lot of your wins in queues that are more favoured to town. I have a 58% town winrate on mafiascum and a 50% winrate in that queue, for example, and I largely avoid theme games where town winrates are the highest on the site.

Not to fail to give credit where credit is due because again being 50% puts you above a lot of people.

[RadiantCowbells]

Also I think that it's less content and amount of it you produce and more that you're resistant to town getting set in its ways and you stubbornly bring up whatever direction you're currently in. And yeah that gets you mislynched but I think it helps prevent town from getting complacent which is one of the big killers of towns imo. Being rarely NKed wouldn't hurt you either.

[RadiantCowbells]

I don't think they are mutually exclusive: but I think that the specifically status quo upsetting way that you tend to play is more important than the content that you provide.
I think in a large part we can be thinking of the same thing but posting it differently because obviously when you post something new that goes against town that's posting content.
But there's a lot of people that post content who sort of follow the grain of the game in a bad way.

I mean I can say a lot about why I think that I'm good but I'm not sure who that benefits here.

The people who think that I'm bad and that my playstyle is an affront to mafia as a game already know the general gist and still feel that way. The fact that I get lynched virtually never as town despite being one of the most paranoia inducing scum players, the fact that I can near 100% of the time lynch exactly who I want to lynch no matter their status in town, the fact that I super consistently read a lot of lynchbaity players that others can't all help, but I think that the people who think I'm good already know that and the people who don't won't care.

[RadiantCowbells]

I don't think there's a single answer. In terms of a single, universally adoptable answer I would say that mafia is two parts understanding other people and eight parts understanding yourself.

There's an extent to which 'I can only follow my own reads!' is a ubiquitous thought process but it's also sort of wrong. If you know that you have inconsistent reads you shouldn't be playing chicken with town to force your hands. After every game people should be going back and looking through what worked and what didn't, both so that they can improve their reads in the future but also so they can understand what sorts of triggers are how consistent. You should know more than just that you're scumreading someone, you should know that you're scumreading someone based on X and this has been Y accurate in the past, and if its something you're consistent at you should double down on it and if not and you don't get support quickly, then you should let it go. You don't get better at mafia without trying to rigorously improve yourself. The most important part of any mafia game is postgame when you go back and analyze the game flow and what impact you had on it.