Playing to win

[RadiantCowbells]

I've had this in my head for a while and have elected to finish it since I'm not sleeping anyway at this point and leave it as my final word to the site.

Playing To Win:

This is not a guide to playing the game of Mafia per se, and you may find it useful for a wide variety of forms of competition. There isn’t going to be anything in here about how to detect scum as town, nor how to manipulate town as scum. This is also unlikely to interest you if you do not put a great deal of weight on improving as a player in mafia. There are plenty of guides out there on how to do those things, and there are many people who consider themselves extremely competent at one or the other who would be happy to help you out. Most of these people will give you well intentioned advice with few to none setting out to manipulate you but at the end of the day you are going to have a pile of advice that all contradicts itself. Even ‘good’ players advice will contradict each other. But that statement begs the question from which I want to start this article, what exactly does it mean to be a ‘good’ player?

If this were for example Chess, the answer would be considered obvious. Each match has a winner and a loser and the winner gains the elo that the loser loses with rates differing based on how much they had previously won and loss before. But in the end it all comes down to wins and losses. League of legends works the same way. Winner gains elo and ranks, loser loses elo and ranks. Sports tournaments are handled slightly differently, where the team that wins the most* (oversimplification but not important) time versus the other teams is considered the winner of that tournament. Winners are assumed to be better than losers. This standard is considered universally applicable except on Mafiascum historically arguments based on winrate are more likely to elicit groans than nods. In some of the older scummies judging threads it was made clear that arguments to winrate were not wanted in terms of determining who warranted body of work award for scum & town play.

The human mind is extremely good at self deception and that is going to be a major theme in this guide. We mentally fudge the game in our mind where we had accurate reads on scum despite scum winning, while not assigning ourselves similar penalties in the game where we defended scum to the end. In our mind that salient game where we weren’t listened to by the town after we correctly caught scum and were nightkilled stands testament that we deserved that win, while we see nothing wrong with the fact that townies lost in the game where we removed the obstacles to our win condition from the game. That level of subjectivity lets us mentally put our proficiency at the game wherever we wish in a fuzzy range so that we don’t have to ask ourselves difficult questions. Social deduction unlike Chess gives us lots of outs to make excuses for ourselves, and also makes it a lot harder to see where we are going wrong or right.

I propose instead that, given a large enough sample size, winrate is in fact an accurate heuristic for judging performance against other members of a community, a statement that would be exceedingly noncontroversial were it not made about mafia. On one hand each individual does have only a limited amount of control over the games. But the same is true of league of legends. To be clear, I have not played League in a very long time but I think it is a solid comparison that is relevant to the audience of this guide. Nightkilling does remove a townies’ voice for the duration of the game, but then again so does getting chain ganked in League of Legends. That elo and rank are not a reasonably accurate metric of performance with a sufficient sample size is not a position taken seriously in league outside of by a rather sizable contingent of low elo players who complain of being stuck in “ELO hell” and complain for various reasons that their winrate isn’t tracking their performance. It is generally accepted by league of legends players that these people are delusional and speaking as someone who was near the top of Masters back when I played I was easily capable of troll picking mid lanes like AP Nasus in Gold and having a near 100% winrate. Based on the trajectory of my own town winrate steadily, linearly increasing it should be abundantly clear that 2019 Paragon me placed into my 2015 games would win a much larger percentage of them. Northsidegal placed into the position of a 45% town winrate player would not have a 45% winrate in all the same games that player played, and no one would dispute that.

When we think from this point of view, our original question starts having a clear answer. A good player is one that makes actions that lead towards their team winning more of the time. A bad player is a player that is less likely to make those actions and makes actions that lead to their losing more of the time. Any individual game’s win or loss comes down to a myriad of factors but better players make better decisions over a larger sample size of games and as a result win more of those games. The correct action to take in any individual game, then, becomes the one that is most likely to lead your team to victory. Whether you had scum correctly pinned but couldn’t eliminate them is irrelevant. Another name for the ‘best player in a losing team’ is loser. I don’t say this to discredit people who have given valiant defeats while their team thwarted them. Better players are more likely to be these people who are doing their best and failing to save their team. But in the end the objective, the way to play ‘good’ in a game is to win it and the way to determine which actions are better and worse is by how they interact with your odds of winning.

This does not preclude taking other metrics of performance into consideration. For example, if two players with the exact same winrate as town exist and one is horrible at explaining their reads and tends to get miselimed while the other is charming and charismatic, the first one is likely to be the superior scumhunter by virtue of their lack of other skills. But if two players have equal scum winrate and one of them tends to get elimed midway through the games and the other tends to endgame, that is not in any way an assertion that the survivor is a better player. One game that has always stuck with me in terms of how I mentally model scum play is this one. MariaR spent the entire early game not distancing excessively but establishing interaction patterns that felt normal with her scumteam. Her scumteam played generally well but a few people, most notably Titus, had caught the entire scumteam together as a bloc barring her with her seen as not!paired with the team. In response to this she reined in her play, playing less accurately and more scummy, and in doing so allowed her teammates to have her limmed giving her team, effectively, no real way to lose the game. Looking at individual play it’s not immediately obvious that she gave the strongest performance as opposed to Drealmerz or Vecna who endgamed, but when you consider her scum winrate over a long period of time it is a lot more obvious that across games she is consistently doing a lot to give her teams higher odds of winning If you want to improve at the game, it follows that you should also focus less on flashy things like solo endgames and heroic catches and just do what puts your team closer to winning. A simple, yet incredibly complicated concept.

[RadiantCowbells]

Escaping your Illusions:

How good of a player are you? Take your last fifteen town games and figure out your winrate in them and your last ten or so scum games (if you have that many, but again this kind of thing is reliant on numbers). That’s your answer.

I realize that most readers are going to read that and face an immediate mental rebellion. Even I as I advocate it admit that it doesn’t really feel good to me, mentally. But having had to deal with and grow past my own illusions I understand that that is the part of me that above all else is afraid. And that fear is not something exclusive to bad or mediocre players, everyone is on some level reluctant to judge themselves. The idea that in 2015 despite me having maintained a below 50% winrate as town I was actually a good town player and I just kept getting unlucky / my townies were to blame was a very convincing one and I really just wasn’t willing to believe that it was a direct result of my performance. In my head were all the times that I caught scum and was ignored, or caught scum and herod the game. Less salient are the games my toxicity was so disruptive to town that no one cared about winning anymore and scum coasted to a loss, or the ones where I was just dead wrong on things, or even the ones which are the hardest to face: the ones where you did well but weren’t good enough. With the benefit of a lot of security in my social deduction skill it’s intuitive for me now that my not good enough self in 2015 could have done things better and if replaced by a version of me from a later year probably would have clinched out some of those wins. But it’s very alluring for people in the present, including me, to get sort of stuck on these sorts of games. I played so well and I didn’t win and if my team was better or if I was better I’d have won. We often tell ourselves no one could have won the game from our position. But if you get some distance and think through that in the vast majority of cases this simply isn’t true. I would say it’s just factually true that there does not exist a game that isn’t utterly broken to the point of it not being a winrate issue anymore that none of the paragons in site history, put into a specific slot, could have won from the beginning. Even in those games we played well, we need to focus on what we did wrong and what we could have done better. These games need to teach us and propel us forward, not hamstring us and impede our learning by convincing ourselves that we are already good enough. Until Northsidegal showed what could be done without relying on a computer aid to scumhunt I was stuck believing that I was already good enough and stagnated. Nothing changed except the belief that I wanted to do better and the belief that I -could- do better. We won or lost some number of games and need to seek to win more games in the future. In the end, that’s all that’s important- doing better this time than we did last time.

Something that you see quite frequently is people saying that they don’t do X. Whether they are lying about it is not really important here. What matters here is the idea that you choose to or not to do something. Let’s take bussing for example, because it’s a rather common claim for a player to make to say that they don’t bus. Most of the people who say this do in fact bus on occasion which makes it just empty bluster, but let’s consider examples where they truly don’t bus. I’m going to make a comparison to chess in terms of queen trading. It is also somewhat of a common claim for poor players to make that they don’t queen trade. This claim can be rephrased in the much less complimentary light that, when queen trading is the most advantageous to play the position, I will handicap myself. This also invites their opponent to create situations where the best move from their side is to trade queens and this gives them another opportunity to claim an advantage over the player. It’s no different in mafia. Everything that you refuse to do is a handicap that you are giving yourself. Your opponents are willing to use appeals to emotion and you can lose to them if you aren’t able to contest them effectively. Choosing not to bus gives townies a massive advantage against your scum winrate by being able to very effectively process of eliminate you by you bussing or not bussing. If your counterargument is that you don’t know how to bus or AtE, well, it’s not really all that different from not knowing how to play a board with the queens removed. Other players in the game will use your handicaps against you as a tool to increase their winrate at the expense of your winrate. You need to learn to do these things. Of course, some people choose to intentionally sabotage one of their alignments for the other, but that’s clearly not healthy for winrate and is outside the scope of this guide as a result.

A final illusion that many people have pertains to how we go back on our old games. If I ask you how you did in your last game as town, I bet that the first thing that you think of is read accuracy. If I ask you how you did in your last game as scum, I bet that the first thing that you think of is others’ read accuracy on you. And these are fine things to focus on, your success in these things absolutely is going to increase your chances of winning the game. But the importance of both of these things is dramatically overemphasized in site culture. It becomes very easy for us to miss the fact that, for example, we contributed to our team losing by having a toxic 1v1 that demotivated the game. It’s easy for us to miss the fact that we lost the game as scum despite being generally townread because we got process of eliminated because we made no effort to disrupt town getting together. It’s easy for us to miss the fact that if we had been a better support for teammates that had good reads while we were wrong we could have won. It’s easy for us to miss the fact that something as simple as flipping the order of eliminations could have netted us a win as scum. There’s so many little things that we could have done differently and until you start mentally modelling games from a coherent path to victory basis it becomes easy for us to miss stuff that we could have done differently. If a hero superstar townie decided to vote for a scumbag, a lazy townie who thinks that the hero superstar townie is probably town and doesn’t really care beyond that votes for that scumbag with them, and a third townie hates the wagon but knows that those two aren’t both scum and that gives them just enough votes to lim scum in 5p LyLo, whose vote contributed the most towards the lim?

[RadiantCowbells]

Playing for Winrate:

This section will be mildly controversial in terms of the behaviour that it advocates, but I believe that any intelligent person who gives my stance on this a fair shot will eventually come to my side. There’s a term in called games called playing to your outs. You are in a disadvantageous position, your opponent is highly likely to win the game on the next move, and your own options are limited. Inexperienced players will surrender the game or just make whatever seems, broadly speaking, like the best move. Skilled players will do none of that and instead see the game in terms of winrate. If I make one move, then my opponent draws X card which I know isn’t in his hand out of Y possible cards from the top of the deck and I draw A, B, or C out of D possible cards, then I win. Or, if I make a different move, I lose to a specific card which may be either be in his hand of size G, or if he draws that 1 card from his deck of size Y, but win the game with any potential draw on the next turn. Contingent on your reads of the cards the opponent is holding, you can calculate exactly which option gives you more chance of winning and by doing so maximize your chances of winning the game from the position that you find yourself in. This also isn’t necessarily restricted to positions when you’re behind; every choice that you make for something is a choice against something else. From very early in the game in mafia it’s very hard to see anything from a probabilistic basis; we simply don’t have enough information to make accurate judgement calls.

As the game goes on, however, if we have an accurate perception of the likeliness of certain things*, we can make a clear mathematical judgement of whether making a play A or B is better. Say we are in a lylo position and the other two players have crossvoted and we are a townie. Our optimal play becomes to lim the person who we think has highest odds of being scum, which is a fairly straightforward decision to make. This decision is far murkier when we have to consider other peoples’ votes. Something that I adopted in my latest years and made a massive impact on my late game performance was to not necessarily vote or push on the person I thought had the highest chance of being scum in LyLo. If we think that we can bait the person we think is more likely to be scum into voting the other town, that can give more winrate if we are uncertain who the person we think is town is likely to vote. Unfortunately sometimes there is not a clear answer that lets us vote the person we think is most likely to be scum. If there is a person we think is 60% likely to be scum but is also, if town, 70% likely to see our side and there is a person that has the balance of 40% scum likeliness but is only 25% likely to see our side then we have two choices in a game where it is highly likely that the first vote will be either on us or by us. We can take 40% * 70 % = 28% winrate or we can take 60% * 25% = 15% winrate. Obviously neither of these are great choices, but there is a significantly better option here! If you free yourself of the notion that there is some special sanctity to reads over other measures of determining votes, you can almost double your winrate in this scenario.
 
*It is really important for us to go back and reexamine all the assumptions we made doing this after the game because most people will have consistent cognitive biases one way or the other. Are we consistently over or under evaluating probabilities of good / bad things? Start correcting. You’re not likely to have clear percentiles in practice, but there will often come up times in games where you understand intuitively that you are super unlikely to get one player to vote with you and the other will probably vote with you. You should vote wherever you get the highest winrate.

There’s also much smaller aspects to the game that we can try to estimate probabilities on. If we are a player with an approximately 50% winrate as town that has a strong read on someone and a player with a significantly higher winrate as town (that isn’t solely attributable to factors beyond read accuracy: and yes there are a lot of players with mediocre reads that are strong town performers) has a strong read on someone as well and we know that they are town, their read is more likely to be correct than ours. If as scum we are 100% screwed if we make the obvious play of taking the mislim that the game has put before us, then it’s time to do literally anything else for whatever winrate it provides. On one hand bussing a buddy reduces the amount of scum that town must successfully lim but on the other hand if bussing a partner today gives them 100% chance of going down and you will then have 40% chance of going down tomorrow versus them going down 70% of the time today with no bus and you going down 70% of the time tomorrow, you gain 9% winrate by bussing. No one will tell you these numbers in game but we have to intuitively get the best guesses we can get and act on them and reevaluate mistakes that we make. In the most-likely-to-get-me-flamed example that I am providing, say you have a player that you have literally no capability of reading and have at best a 5% chance of getting them limmed if you go all in on them. It is a really poor move winrate wise to go after that person if you can’t find a way to get that 5% up AND aren’t incredibly sure that the other players are town. It would in fact be the opposite of a high winrate move to start the game by tunneling them when the other players already know that you’re tunneling them for reasons unrelated to their actual probability of being scum and thus that 5% is more like a 2%. Yet the vast majority of top scum players in the vast majority of games experience stuff like this game after game, because many players are stuck on their intuitive fear of the player and aren't approaching the matter rationally.

[RadiantCowbells]

Focusing on Learning

Unlike the rest of this guide this will focus directly on things like read accuracy and other more first order methods of improvement. As I said however this isn’t a guide that’s going to tell you to do xyz to find scum and play better as scum. This is about how you interpret and evolve from your own play.

While to me the best player is the one that has the highest consistent winrate across both alignments, the trait that I most mentally associate with a player being ‘bad’ isn’t their winrate at some arbitrary point. After all people start at different times and at different points and there are very few people who are capable of just showing up and being a strong performer and even in the most notable example of a player showing up and immediately performing at a top level she struggled to continue to grow and improve from there. There are people that I see who make the same mistakes in the same ways in 2022 as they did when I first saw them play games however long ago I first encountered them. Generally, this comes not from a conscious decision not to care about improvement, and often even people who really don’t care about mentally focusing on improving gradually improve over time, but from a failure to recognize the behaviors in question in mistakes. This is the most damaging trap of all to fall into. It is extremely difficult in mafia to take a loss and determine which actions were actually errors versus which didn’t work out in the game. For example if you had a scumread based on something that is 50% accurate (which by the way is a significantly more accurate scumread than the majority people on the site have ever had), flipped someone and they flipped town, you didn’t necessarily make an error. If you limmed scum for reasons that aren’t scum indicative, you didn’t necessarily play correctly. But these situations are very different to learn from.

What has worked for me is to put plays and reads into certain boxes and categories. Someone does X, I feel Y about it and it follows a pattern. I have a mental catalogue of similar reads that I’ve had in the past and periodically I go back and check all the incidences where such a thing came up and find out how accurate it has been in the past. Depending on how proficient of a player you are and how much ‘more’ winrate you need to accrue to be improving you can accept different qualities of reads. For example if you are hovering around 50% winrate and you have a scumread that has been 45% accurate in the past, you are highly likely to give your team winrate relative to other actions by pushing that person. On the other hand I’ve had people that I’ve estimated at over 50% scum and outright refused to vote them because it would either hurt too much if the lim was wrong or I just didn’t give my team enough winrate with the push. This may not be the best way for you to keep track of things but that’s not what’s important, what’s important is that you keep track of whether what you’re doing works. This also applies to strategies as scum as well, and if you can accurately compare things across games you can very quickly get a sense of what works and doesn’t. My explosive start as a scum player in 2015 actually made it very hard to improve as a scum player because I wasn’t really able to receive feedback besides “things are working” but once I started losing games as scum in 2016 once my town game had advanced enough to stop shielding my scum game I very quickly adapted to the mistakes I was making. You also aren’t solely able to learn from yourself. Most people struggle to give feedback on others’ play that is actually useful for them but in terms of seeing what works and what doesn’t analyzing games that came before you is really helpful. This game remains a very useful way to understand how to focus on winning the endgame as opposed to making a short sighted plan to make it through the day as scum. I’m not exactly keen on making a judgement on which games are good to read and which games aren’t but every game is full of lessons to be learned if you’re willing to take the time to learn them.

Most importantly if you find yourself stagnating you need to take a long hard look and try to understand what isn’t working for you. Find the things that are consistently causing problems and hurting your teams chances of winning games and work on them. Never become overly attached to any idea, if it ceases to be useful to you then dump it. The flipside of this is to be careful to not discard correct ideas. If you have a scumread that’s 50% accurate you can still get four town in a row. That’s life. So in the end unless you’re one of the very few mafia prodigies the only way to learn is to put yourself out there, play games, make mistakes, learn from them, and try again the next game. But that reflection period is so, so incredibly important. It is theoretically possible that you can come away from a loss, or even a win and think that there is nothing you could or should have done better. But if you’re not an extremely good player then that’s simply not true. You just aren’t seeing what you did wrong. And it takes time to reflect to find these things and do better. You should always go back to your finished games to figure out what you did well and poorly and try to adapt in the future.

[RadiantCowbells]

Subject: Newbie 1335:Laundry Hoax 2013 -Game Over

Hope it helps.
Though really my best advice is to find what's comfortable and works for you. I've seen a lot of great players and very few of them have identical styles - a lot of this game is about finding your own vibe. My advice is really just rough concepts of things I do and why i think they're useful, feel free to cherry pick as you will.

There is a very conscious reason I have chosen to give no actual play advice in this thread. You aren't me. You aren't anyone else. The best version of your mafia self is not going to be derived from following directly in someone else's footsteps.
Don't take this the wrong way. Failing to learn from others is not the way. But not everyone is meant to play the game the same way and as I mentioned before, there are a lot of very good players whose strength isn't reads. I'd single out Nachomamma8 as a player that, while he did have above reads, primarily helped town by being a beacon of unity that the game can rally around.
Some people have better townreads, some people have better scumreads, some people are good at breaking up strife in the town, some people are good at endgaming as scum, some people are good at knocking out a bunch of townies on their way out as scum.

While I have a 2013 join date I didn't really start being a player until 2015 which is now 7 years ago. In my mind's eye I don't think I ever stopped being the plucky underdog that I never actually was.
But as a town player I didn't start off very good. I had a sub 50% winrate in 2015, which moved to slightly above 50% in 2016, which reached 58% in 2017, which exceeded 60% in 2018, and ended 2019 with over 3/4 of my town games won and 81.6% overall.
All it really came down to was that when I made mistakes I beat myself up about it until I stopped making those mistakes, and even though I started off making ridiculous amounts of mistakes eventually it's easy to eventually start running low on mistakes to actually make.
What I'm really trying to say is that

anyone

can become a really strong mafia player. Pine once described me as the person who was really not talented at martial arts but had practiced the one punch so many times that they became unstoppable with it. And I had a massive problem with my ego telling me that I was already good enough below 50%, at low 50s, at 57.57 that held me back.
Fundamentally I think it's still possible for someone to become considerably better than I or any of the other best players to this point have been. If you take the time to learn from your mistakes and figure out which parts of your intuition are right and wrong it's possible to do incredible things in mafia. You just need to see it as something worth committing to.

Unlike most people I was always more motivated by negative energy than positive energy. Fear of failure is a really powerful motivator. Looking back I would absolutely not advise people to approach mafia in the same way but when you're 20 you see the world differently than when you're 27.
Regardless of what was good and bad this was a huge part of my life for a very long time and it's hard to even think that me even playing mafia came about solely because a group of people I was playing league with were like hey let's play starcraft mafia and I had nothing else to do so I joined in.
In the end with the benefit of hindsight I treasure the fact that I was on the top ten most favorited player back when KittyMo did GTKAS for 3 years in a row and the people I played all those games with more than I care that I eventually got paragon. And I think that is not a lesson to brush aside.

My discord is RadiantCowbells#0970 if anyone wants to talk to me about anything mafia related, if old friends want to reconnect, or really anything. Thanks for reading!

[Irrelephant11]

Good points, interesting examples. I (like many) have lost to your scumgame and while it wasn't my favorite mafia game ever (obviously... I lost) I of course have to give you your flowers. You were (are) a very good mafia player, RadiantCowbells! Sorry to hear you're leaving the site.

[NorwegianboyEE]

Interesting read.
The main point seems to be: "Make mistakes, but try to learn from those mistakes instead of brushing them off"?

[Somnus]

How do I get a green role PM though?

[Enchant]

Guide is unclear, lost in pregame.

[Irrelephant11]

Interesting read.
The main point seems to be: "Make mistakes, but try to learn from those mistakes instead of brushing them off"?

I'd say that's one of two main points I got from it. The other being "everyone talks about a few parts of playing mafia (having good reads, getting townread as scum) when there’s lots of value in parts of the game that go ignored (keeping town motivation high, being a team player, playing the long game as scum, etc)"

[Aristeia]

This was interesting to read.

Not sure if you have read this book but might be worthwhile for you if you have not:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Jou ... 0743277465

I think failure is probably one of the best ways to learn and learning is actually more important than win rate - some things you just can't take with you.

[Umlaut]

It's interesting how much resistance there is to accepting that the thing a "skilled player" is supposed to be skilled at is

winning the game.

This denial seems to happen in most fields of competition, particularly in the absence of a formal ranking system.

The world's greatest outfielder can't win a baseball game all alone if the rest of his team isn't any good. But what makes him the world's greatest outfielder is precisely that the team has a higher chance of winning than if anyone else were put in his place.

[RadiantCowbells]

Good points, interesting examples. I (like many) have lost to your scumgame and while it wasn't my favorite mafia game ever (obviously... I lost) I of course have to give you your flowers. You were (are) a very good mafia player, RadiantCowbells! Sorry to hear you're leaving the site.

To be clear I haven't really been around for quite a long time. This isn't really going to reflect a change in my presence in the site which has been minimal. I've asked Zoraster to ban me for another year but I figured I'd drop this first.

Interesting read.
The main point seems to be: "Make mistakes, but try to learn from those mistakes instead of brushing them off"?

This is definitely the most important thing to take away. Our egos are extremely good at giving us excuses to avoid learning from our mistakes.

How do I get a green role PM though?

Sounds like skill issue, I recommend you git gud scrub.

Interesting read.
The main point seems to be: "Make mistakes, but try to learn from those mistakes instead of brushing them off"?

I'd say that's one of two main points I got from it. The other being "everyone talks about a few parts of playing mafia (having good reads, getting townread as scum) when there’s lots of value in parts of the game that go ignored (keeping town motivation high, being a team player, playing the long game as scum, etc)"

Yup.

Everyone hypes the scum slot that went undetected the whole game only taking pro-town positions and never actively helping their team win while the slot that actually directed the mislims onto all the town slots gets called obvious scum in postgame even though they pushed all the mislims for their team.
Everyone hypes the person that called The Scum and never succeeded in getting them limmed while the person that got nightkilled because scum feared their proficiency and ability to actually direct the lim onto them more.
There's a game that always stuck in my mind where Nachomamma8 was unforgivably mislimmed despite the fact that town unity was nonexistent and we would have never secured either of the scum lims had they not been in the game.
I think that there was a meta shift at some point around 2017 where everyone stopped having any appreciation for slots that didn't independently try to play carry roles in games and started systematically eliminating people who did that even though these people at an extreme ratio ended up being town.
Not everyone needs to chain read the game, develop reads on every slot, and dramatically deathtunnel their strongest scumread. If everyone does that every game, every game is going to be shit and no one is going to enjoy it.
There was once a saying that mafia games consisting only of high tier players suck, which really isn't true, it's just that people had this misconception that the 'high tier players' were high tier because they were aggressive and individualistic even if their winrates weren't necessarily that good.
Like there are a

lot

of people that were historically in their time seen as great players that never performed especially well and to my subjective opinion never did anything particularly exceptional in games, and there are also a

lot

of people that were way better than they were perceived in their time.
I think that I was semi pigeonholed into it by meta carrying forward as well as my level of scum proficiency making me hard to work with in general but I would say I am an extreme outlier where most of the actual top townies by WR are easy to get along with in games.
Not most,

ALL

of the top scum by WR on this site aren't people who sit in people's townreads list and don't do anything with it. They're people who play proactively and use the towncred that they accrue to push their teams wincondition and are often nullread at best.
And yet systematically the people that are seen as 'good players' and get postgame compliments in the popular consensus are the people who either play aggro town carry role as town or sit in people's townreads for periods of time as scum.
While I would say most of the absolute best townies play town carry to some extent and e.g. Nacho who I've already singled out is perfectly capable of playing that role I'd say that sitting in townreads without doing anything with it is outright poor play and that many great townies aren't most comfortable in that role.

This was interesting to read.

Not sure if you have read this book but might be worthwhile for you if you have not:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Jou ... 0743277465

I think failure is probably one of the best ways to learn and learning is actually more important than win rate - some things you just can't take with you.

I'd say it looks interesting!

It's interesting how much resistance there is to accepting that the thing a "skilled player" is supposed to be skilled at is

winning the game.

This denial seems to happen in most fields of competition, particularly in the absence of a formal ranking system.

The world's greatest outfielder can't win a baseball game all alone if the rest of his team isn't any good. But what makes him the world's greatest outfielder is precisely that the team has a higher chance of winning than if anyone else were put in his place.

I'll give a final thought on why I emphasized winrate so much. It is true that judging yourself

solely

by winrate is oversimplified. An ELO system + tracking average winrates of queues and setups would be a significant step up in terms of determing performance but that's unlikely to happen.
But it's more than good enough as a starting point and the flaws in that approach don't approach the flaws in how things are currently viewed; humans are incredibly good at lying to themselves and convincing ourselves that we, and our friends, are way better than is objectively true at things.
We'll then turn around and dismiss the accomplishments of those that we don't respect by focusing on the aspects of them that we dislike and coming up with excuses both for their successes and for our own performance not being as good as we feel that it ought to be.
As an example of that latter category from my own point of view I'll single out Flavor Leaf. I had a personal dislike for him and for a very long time brushed off the fact that his scum winrate was extremely high. Even if I were to read his games I would mentally focus everything I thought he did wrong rather than right.
From that point of view it becomes very easy to dismiss his accomplishments as "oh, he just joins games with people who simp for him, highly overrated, just does cringe gambits." It wasn't actually until I was judging Scummies the year that he won that I feel that I gained a true appreciation for some of his games.

We all have our own inherent biases. Our perceptions are fallible and it's easy for us to be led astray by subjectivity and emotions if we don't focus on measurable metrics.
I feel like it would be doing the history of this website a disservice to not say that a significant part of the pushback against winrate as a metric for determining skill is more accurately pushback against certain players that started in 2016-2017 but following up on that would not be worthwhile for a modern audience imo

[Firebringer]

How good of a player are you?

Average to below.
if i were to sum up things on getting better it would be :
1) connect with players more (understand flaws/strengths in which you know the audience better for convincing or taking down)
2) be more friendly (people less likely to want to yeet u if ur lovable)
3) exactly as RC says know ur limits/weaknesses better than others. Which is hard cause we deceive ourselves more than anyone else.

Also i suck at all 3 of these.

So i will be joining RC masterclass

[NorwegianboyEE]

Last time i checked my winrate i was shocked at how shit t was. Maybe i’m slightly better or worse now, it’s long time since i checked.
So i got no illusions of being awesome.

[Gamma Emerald]

I consider myself semi-competent but I had a recent offsite towngame where I basically contributed absolute Jack to the eventual town win. So I think raw winrate is not a fair heuristic to competency. The biggest impact I can really claim that winning outcome was I put a scum in a position to “prove” themselves town, they didn’t take it, and that was kinda the nail in their coffin. But while I created that opportunity, it was someone else who picked up the scent for real, so I don’t really feel the credit should go to me.

[RadiantCowbells]

I consider myself semi-competent but I had a recent offsite towngame where I basically contributed absolute Jack to the eventual town win. So I think raw winrate is not a fair heuristic to competency. The biggest impact I can really claim that winning outcome was I put a scum in a position to “prove” themselves town, they didn’t take it, and that was kinda the nail in their coffin. But while I created that opportunity, it was someone else who picked up the scent for real, so I don’t really feel the credit should go to me.

An exceptionally skilled player would also have won that game.

Even amazing players get carried sometimes.

There's some percentage of games that nearly any player would win and some that nearly any would lose. Skill is reflected in the games that are in between those two points. You won that game undeservedly and by the same token there's games you've lost undeservedly. As sample size increases, in a 50% winrate meta you'll approach an equal number of undeserved wins and losses.

[joqiza]

I agree with the arguments made, though I personally think the objective function should be weighted towards scum games. This is really just a point of semantics but I figured I'd mention it. A player who has played 11 games: 8 as town, 3 as scum, and won all 8 town games but lost all 3 scum games, could be considered as having a 50% "adjusted" winrate rather than a flat 72.72%. I think this seems preferable because a purely rational agent maximizing a flat winrate might be incentivized to sacrifice their scum games to benefit their town games, due to the higher proportion of the latter. That is assuming an environment where people track meta/polarization, but I think that's a realistic assumption to make.

[RadiantCowbells]

Ellibereth (2017 Paragon) said the same thing. I think it's actually a fairly reasonable take, but I won't be the person to push it because it would seem to come from self interest

[Ircher]

Or just keep separate ratings for town/scum.

[Somnus]

Everyone hypes the scum slot that went undetected the whole game only taking pro-town positions and never actively helping their team win while the slot that actually directed the mislims onto all the town slots gets called obvious scum in postgame even though they pushed all the mislims for their team.
Everyone hypes the person that called The Scum and never succeeded in getting them limmed while the person that got nightkilled because scum feared their proficiency and ability to actually direct the lim onto them more.

Along these lines, post-game in virtually every game I've seen where mafia wins, there's always a town player or two who are there to heal their broken ego and not much more. There is a lot of mental gymnastics and not much self-reflection that takes place post-game oftentimes. I think ego holds a lot of people back from analyzing both the good things and the bad things they did throughout the game, and some players just don't want to take an honest look at their play. "I suspected the person who ended up mafia at one point in the game. I did my part. YOU all lost the game by not listening to me." To me, that's someone who has already plateaued. Below is the reaction I always envision that they're hoping that they get:

[Somnus]

Or just keep separate ratings for town/scum.

This ^

There's so many people on this site who downright hate playing as Mafia and only want to play as Town every game. There's plenty of really good town players who have this mentality, but to me, it means you're only good at/enjoy half of the game of Mafia.

Not that I expect the site to ever put a heavy emphasis on W/L record, but there's plenty of people who are really good at town who both hate and aren't very good at playing as mafia.

[RadiantCowbells]

It's a serious problem but believe it or not it's actually less severe of a problem on this site than anywhere else because this site has had far more top tier scum players as a proportion of users that perform far better than anywhere else that I've seen.

[Nancy Drew 39]

How good of a player are you?

Average to below.
if i were to sum up things on getting better it would be :
1) connect with players more (understand flaws/strengths in which you know the audience better for convincing or taking down)
2) be more friendly (people less likely to want to yeet u if ur lovable)
3) exactly as RC says know ur limits/weaknesses better than others. Which is hard cause we deceive ourselves more than anyone else.

Also i suck at all 3 of these.

So i will be joining RC masterclass

I’m trying super hard to work on 2. What I will say is to really know me is to love me.

[NotAJumbleOfNumbers]

How good of a player are you?

So incompetent that I can't even finish most games. Really, though, that was likely because I was swept up in this whole 'you have to have good reads to be good at mafia' thing when I straight up couldn't make reads. Turns out that's not true.