lol

Yes, because you automatically win as town cannot lynch scum in a 2:2 situation, even if they know exactly who's scum and who's not.

So right when night 1 started I thought "I'll send in an investigation on Isa for now but I'll probably change it before the night ends." Jorster responded right away with the result and that kind of annoyed me because I planned on likely changing it later on. What I also got out of it was that there was no role blocker in the game because my action came back right away. Now I see there is. So what if Quirvy role blocked me and you'd already sent me my result Jorster? Also this looks pretty town sided.

Yeah, he did end up roleblocking you. It was my mistake, but I guess it didn't really matter because Isa died anyway

Actually this setup HEAVILY favors scum.

In a 9p game, it's sort of balanced having Doc, Cop (or some other decently strong PRs, like a Tracker or JOAT) and a Roleblocker. There's two mislynches and two powerroles, but Mafia has a roleblocker to mess with what town has.

In a 7p game, there's just ONE mislynch before LyLo strikes. This means ONE night to gather results. Mafia has a 2/3 chance to hit a power role during N1 with their roleblock (assuming a VT is killed - if you kill a PR, even better), so in 2/3 of the cases there's effectively just one power role in play for all of the nights leading up to LyLo, and he only gets one shot.

This setup might have been balanced if mafia had no additional abilities whatsoever, but adding a roleblocker gave Mafia a heavy advantage - and it showed, as they blocked the cop 100% of the nights. =p

Post of the game right here.

I'll add thoughts soon.

Also about this...

Teo joined and the game started less than an hour afterwards.
BAD MOD.

Teo had obviously not read up upon the previous day, which is absolutely crucial - even more so when you're a power role.
I suspect that Teo didn't submit anything at all, either because he didn't care or didn't find it important, but yeah. Town was gimped BADLY by Teo choosing not to cooperate with town, but he wasn't helped by the mod not extending the night by two days, which should have happened.

I asked if he was ok to start, he said yes

Just because you added that parenthesis...

I'd investigate Thomas in a heartbeat, with Yimmy a close second. Entering N1, my main suspect had just died an untimely death, and I had started it all by accident. I didn't really think that the lynch would happen...but alas. There was no need to suspect the ones on the wagon, I thought, instead I'd go for my secondary target, being Thomas (who had not impressed me with his play). The alternative was to investigate Yimmy, so that I'd know whether or not to lynch the guy that tossed things on the wall randomly and hoped something would stick. It was never an option for me to investigate my two biggest town reads, who of course both turned out to be scum.

I tip my hat to both Quirvy and especially Soccerboy who both played an excellent game as Mafia. Soccerboy had me fooled entirely, and while I was suspicious of Quirvy during early D2, that quickly faded with his case on Teo (although it was an easy one, someone had to make it - I am just disappointed it wasn't a townie...).

Don't make the players the bad guy. Everyone wants to start the game - by asking a newcomer this, you'll just give him the chance to become the guy that made everyone wait an extra two days.

I take it Teo didn't submit an action either - but I'm not even sure he knew that he could.

Also I am not sure if anyone caught this, but I did, and it told me that Yimmy was 100% not scum with Teo:

Don't talk about the game outside of the areas given to you!

Before I give an overall summation of my thoughts, I'll respond to a few posts:

But you don't know that, what happens if it's 2:2 at night, the mafia kill gets roleblocked and a jack of all trades nightkills a mafia? This is why I still maintained townness even after we got Teo lynched.

At the start of Day 2, I figured, "now that Isa is gone, the best player is Thomas, so all I have to do is convince Yimmy that he's scum", which isn't that hard based on the fact that Yimmy was already suspicious of him. But when soccer posted his suspicions he was going in a totally different direction so I had to drop hopes of lynching Thomas. So yes, I didn't play as well early on in day 2, mainly because I figured that I didn't have to play as well. If you were still alive, no chance I do the "the list was cut in half" thing. I realized it was a weak argument, but I thought maybe I could fool Teo/Yimmy.

Fun fact: we could have gotten Thomas lynched very early in this game. Me and soccer were online at the same time for like 45 minutes while Thomas had a vote on him. If soccer had voted for Thomas, too, I would have immediately hammered and said something like "good going, guys" to group soccer with Yimmy and paint them both as clueless towns who accidentally got Thomas lynched immediately, just in case someone had the ability to nightkill. But soccer never pulled the trigger, and I didn't want to risk voting for Thomas in case Soccer wouldn't follow through. It also wouldn't seem right for me to do something that foolish, where I feel like soccer putting Thomas at L-1 so early by accident is more believable.

Speaking of which, this is a PM I sent to Jorster:

I still stand by this. Isa, you should not have been posting on this topic after you were dead. The topic needed to be revived, but that was Jorster's job, not yours. You should have sent him a PM urging him to prod everyone rather than take the matter into your own hands.

Yeah, I shouldn't have done that. I agree that it was wrong, but I was frustrated by the slow pace and didn't want to go through the mod when I could just post myself. But, again, it was wrong.

Not only is it a bad argument, but it's scummy. Don't try that on mafiascum.

For now I'm just gonna say soccerboy didn't play as well as Isa says he did. If you look at this from my point of view, he was defending me and buddying me for no reason at all and I would have lynched him for that. I wanted to lynch him and was reluctant to lynch Teo but I didn't think all town would be here or be able to agree on lynching soccerboy so I kind of gave up on this game before it ended. Another problem with soccerboy was that he was on for an hour before confirming his role and I didn't buy that he had a question about his role (role PMs were clear). It did cross my mind at some point that it was scum not confirming right away to keep pre game discussion going but that was hard to prove because I didn't know if there was actually day talk and it's not the strongest argument.

Quirvy is brave for calling Isa a douchebag as scum. But what Isa did is something that is pretty common on mafiascum (and I actually did it once in a game here). It's just the way Isa pulled that off on here. I wasn't a fan of Isa posting when dead (though "bah" posts are usually permitted on mafiascum) and he wouldn't have done that on mafiascum but he likes to bend the rules here. Maybe Jorster would have deleted that posts if he could have, but Livio was against giving the mafia mod the ability to delete posts so he could only edit it. The mafia mod should at least be able to delete posts made within the last 24 hours though because things do happen.

May write more later.

But that's just the thing; I knew that the remaining town were not very good, so I figured, "the only person remaining who's smart enough to call me out for this is Thomas, and he's the one I'm trying to convince others to lynch so I can afford to try this". I'd never try that on mafiascum because I'd know better. The whole reason to nightkill Isa was so that I could have more leeway. Also worth mentioning that I didn't intend for it to be taken as a primary argument against you. It was more of an observation to compliment the already existing argument for Thomas as scum.

So to summarize, I agree that it was a scummy argument, but I didn't think that Yimmy/Teo would think it was all that scummy so I went with it anyways.

I agree with you in that Isa is giving soccer too much credit. I'll address that later in my post addressing each player.

Well, the thing is I didn't know what Isa was doing. After knowing and understanding what he was doing, I think it was the right thing, but at the time I thought he was acting pretty douchebaggy, specifically trying to pressure Yimmy into voting for soccer. I'm still not a huge fan of that.  But the calling me and soccer as scum without presenting any reason, I don't have a problem with. But at the time I did very much take issue with what he was doing. I was a little bit hesitant to post that, specifically I thought calling him a douchebag might have been a little bit too extreme, but there wasn't a good alternative word, and I felt if I called him anything else my post would lose some of its impact. I also reasoned that it wasn't that big a deal since people have used that term on the interguild before.

Part of my approach was to act very honest so that it wouldn't sound like I was hiding anything. Like when I said that I didn't actually care that much about the 3 days of inactivity. Was a little bit worried about how that would be received.

I wasn't on when Teo replaced in but if I knew this (someone may have mentioned it in the thread though) or at least saw the replacement happen in real time, I probably would have put that slot as town right there for no night extension.

I had Yimmy as town for quite a while, btw. Some people thought he was scum for the hammer on D1 but I've seen it on mafiascum and the people who do that usually are town. Scum are actually careful enough not to do that because they don't want to. They worry about that because it would bring attention to them. I played in a game on mafiascum where a guy did that as town, twice in one game, and town still won that game. That wasn't the only reason I had Yimmy as town though. He was just a VI, I guess. And Yimmy, you seemed to think I wanted to lynch you but I didn't so I don't know where you got that from. Me questioning does not mean I wanna lynch you. And to think, only a few posts before that I clearly said I wanted to lynch soccerboy.

Oh, another thing with soccerboy that I forgot to mention before, is that he just wasn't scum hunting. He would make posts like this one that don't help find scum. So soccerboy, don't get the wrong idea from Isa. Avoid doing what I've mentioned as mafia (or as town).

But that wasn't very smart because it's not like you were in a position where everyone thought you were town (Isa got Yimmy to realize he shouldn't follow you in case you're scum). So if I had actually cared more about this game and pushed for your lynch for that, soccerboy would have probably felt obligated to vote you because he pointed it out to everyone at first and Yimmy is pretty easy to convince so he may have joined as well despite seeing me as scum. Did you actually think Yimmy's reasons for me being scum were legitimate?

I didn't care much about the game at that time, either, so I was fine with that.

But the thing is that Yimmy trusted me more than you. I was mostly banking on me being able to win Yimmy over. You, Thomas, have trouble getting people to follow your arguments, because you don't actually provide reasoning (I expand on this later in this post), so I wasn't too worried about your ability to win Yimmy over.

Actually, to clarify for those who won't read what I said in the chatbox, upon reflection, I think I was more doing that in hopes that soccer would follow my argument and vote for you so that I could hammer. Yimmy was already voting for you, I didn't really need to win him over anymore. It was more so that it wouldn't look as bad if Soccer voted for you. But I think I told him in the quicktopic that we shouldn't be solely banking on a double-hammer, in case of a dangerous power role (although I remember trying to make it clear that he could start a double hammer if he wanted, it was just that it would look really bad for me if I was the one to put Thomas at L-1 [because I should know better], but it was more believable if soccer was the one to do that), so he decided to play on rather than risk the double hammer. In fact, he decided to go against me and call me scum. When I saw that post, I was like, "aw man, I've got to actually play through the whole day?"

And don't say "If I cared about this game more." If you really thought I was scum that much, and it was a case of you not caring about the game, then why did you say that I was probably town at the end of the game? To me, that sounds like a cop-out. "I missed out on an opportunity. It's because I didn't care that much." And for that matter, I could also say, "If I cared about this game more I wouldn't have made that argument to begin with." The whole reason I did it was because I was hoping to get a quick lynch that way we could end the game and I wouldn't have to deal with this stuff anymore. In fact I think you might agree that my argument was "careless"



Anyways.

My thoughts on this game. From the very start I was not looking forward to this because I got assigned a mafia role, and I preferred being town and hunting for mafia, rather than being mafia and pretending to hunt mafia. (Of course I'd only played 2 games and was never mafia before). That said, I'm glad I was mafia in this game because everyone played so badly that it would have been really hard to win this game as a town. As I said to Jorster in a day 1 PM:

Soccerboy played a little better at times, but overall I still didn't think that he played that great, and I could have made a pretty good argument for him as scum. But I could also be biased since I knew from the very start that he was mafia. And also, I actually thought Thomas did okay Day 2. He was easily the best player Day 2. If you were attentive, Post-Isa day 1, I tended to be very agreeable towards Isa, often citing him/his opinions in my arguments. Late Day 2, I sort of acted like an ally to Thomas, making my posts directed towards him rather than Yimmy/soccer/teo. This is because at those times, those were the only people who seemed reasonable. Everyone else was someone I felt was someone who could easily get themselves lynched.

So onto the individual players:
Isa - while you played, you were easily the best player. Your initial reads on me and soccer were spot-on. We weren't really communicating with eachother in game, because I think we weren't really sure how to act because we never talked with eachother in the mafia topic (I didn't know I could post there pregame). You single-handedly got us out of the RVS, you contributed to the scumhunt more than any other person, and for the most part your reads made sense. Day 1, though, I thought you overlooked soccerboy after he responded; I didn't think his response was all that convincing.



Thomas - I thought you played better day 2 than day 1, but overall your big problem is your lack of communication. You have good instincts and reads, but the problem is that you don't get them out. You think that Isa was right and that me and soccer are scumteam. Great, but why? You're not going to get anyone on your side unless you start making well reasoned arguments for why people are scum. Big time and the end of day 2. You wanted soccerboy lynched, and you really felt you were right that he was scum, but you never stated any reasons for why he was scum. You just said something like "Soccer feels like such scum". There was a case to be made for soccer being mafia, but you didn't bother making it. Had you made it, I would have been put in a really uncomfortable position



Soccer - To me, the mafia partner, it felt like for most of day 1 you were practically ignoring my existence. Then when I added you as a suspect towards the end of day one, it seemed like you read my post as "Oh, we should suspect eachother to put distance between ourselves", because from that point on there were at least 2 times (one immediately after) where it sounded like you thought that I was your main suspect, which would have been fine by me, except that for the most part your reasoning seemed pretty bad to me. The two specific paragraphs I'm referring to:
The "you were trying to take you and flashmarsh off the radar" argument was so bad I was shocked that nobody else bothered to retort. I was never on the radar to begin with, and Flashmarsh was listed as my main suspect at the end of the post you were referring to.

My list cut in half thing was very flawed, but not because of what you immediately said (what I highlighted). Flashmarsh was voted off because of Yimmy, but Thomas was trying hard to get rid of him, specifically by trying to get him lynched without even letting him roleclaim. The bigger reason my list cut in half argument was really flawed was because:
1. Practically everyone supported lynchinig flashmarsh
2. Practically everyone would night kill Isa as mafia

My big knock on soccer's play is that he didn't seem to be actively contributing to the scumhunt. Like Isa said before, he was the fluffmeister or whatever. Soccer, you were posting way too much about non-scumhunting stuff. Dedicating a post to discouraging people from throwing out votes on Day 2, even after I had already asked jorster to clarify the deadline on day 1, you felt it necessary to repeat my message. Discussing the setup with Thomas on Day 2/asking him to clarify the difference between mylo and lylo. Giving Yimmy advice on how to play better. It's not like there are bad things to do, but the amount of these posts to scumhunting posts seemed very disproportionate. For a good example of what I'm talking about, once there was only 2 days left and as Thomas pointed out we needed to start looking for who to lynch, your only 2 posts:

Instead of suggesting someone to lynch, you just tried to correct Yimmy's play. Posting fluff in a critical part of the game = bad. I think Isa is more impressed with your play than he should be. That said, you still did a better job than the remaining players.

Also, you totally disappeared at the end of the game, when you should have been trying to help me push for a Teo lynch. Maybe that was out of your control, but supposedly you were online after my "Vote: Teo" post, and you didn't say anything.



I started this out by addressing people in order of how well they played, but I'm not sure that there's any way to rank the remaining players, so I'll just address them in alphabetical order.

atvelonis - You didn't even show up. f- 0/10




Flashmarsh - You gave up on yourself too early. When people start calling for you to be lynched, you need to come out and defend yourself. Not addressing criticisms of your play will only get you lynched. If you had responded to soccer by just saying "yeah, sorry I missed those posts by thomas and didn't know he hadn't actually come online", you would have been in a much better position. You'll get nowhere ignoring your mistakes and hoping that they'll disappear on their own.

Soccer actually made a pretty good observation about you; pretty much every post you made was bashing other players. And sometimes you had thoughts that might have been good, but you never really went all the way through with them, sort of the same problem I see with Thomas:
How is his long post entirely useless?
What about his statement about Isa makes him sound like mafia to you? These are things you need to expand on next time.

I will say, though, as far as reading material goes, I liked your posts the most. I thought your posting style was funny and I enjoyed your posts, even if they were really bad. I'd +1 you for your "f- 0/10 scumlord atvelonis" post if I still could. I dunno, I guess I just thought that your over the top and blunt nature was really funny. Wasn't very pro-town, but at least I thought it was funny. If we could have a mafia game comprised of 13 of you, I would definitely follow that game.



Teo - I do wonder if the language barrier played a role here. I can't really give much advice for how to improve since you said so little. Like I said, the vote on soccer didn't make any sense at all to me. You should have retracted the vote, since we were 2 votes away from a lynch and there are 2 mafia. Even if you didn't participate in Day 1, you should have been able to look at what happened and come up with thoughts from it. Not having anything to say with all that happened on day 1 made you a very easy target.



Yimmy - you just felt very inexperienced. You didn't really know what was going on but I can't particularly blame you for that. It's tough to give you specific advice on how to improve your play because you were kind of just all over the place. I feel like "get more experience about how the game works" is for now the best I can say. But also, perhaps you need to think more independently. You voting for Isa early on was independent, but even the reasons you gave then seemed to come from other people's posts. I got the impression that you weren't making your arguments based on your own observations, but rather by reading other people's arguments and deciding what you think based on what they said about the other people.



Jorster - It's been said before, but you didn't do a spectacular job of hosting. I honestly wasn't a big fan of the flavor, but that might just because of the way that everyone spoke, and because I said "gee-willickers". I agree with others that you should have made it more clear to Teo that he needed to read up on day 1 (or have followed day 1 previously) to gain context (although I'm not totally sure if you did make this clear or not). Giving Thomas the results of his investigation early was a HUGE mistake, and you're lucky that he targeted the person who got night killed. You ALWAYS wait until after all night actions are submitted before you let people know the results of their night actions. And you should have also probably waited for every member to confirm before starting the game, that way we wouldn't have had Isa missing for a good chunk of day 1, and atvelonis gone for all of it. I also would have used less vanilla roles if I were you, but I don't know much about setting up the roles in mafia games.

But you at least tried so I don't want to be too hard on you. It wasn't great, but I think this was the first time a non-mod hosted a mafia game, and it's not like you're a high-reputation member hosting it, like Yaya, Thomas or imtimi, so I'm not surprised at all that there were bumps in the road. So +1 to you.

(Okay, so imtimi might not be high reputation member, but he's very well experienced with mafia, and he mature to a certain extent, once you get past the part of him that likes messing with everyone.)


Once RVS ended, I never experienced the "It's hard scumhunting when you know who the scum are" thing I referenced. Everyone played so badly that it was incredibly easy to find targets. My ranking of the players, in order lynchability (who would be easiest/hardest to make a case for lynching):

1. Teo
2. Flashmarsh
3. Soccerboy
4. Thomas
5. Yimmy
6. Isa

You mean you don't say Gee-Willikers in real life? My life is a lie.

But seriously, thanks for the constructive criticism, as It helps me as a host. I tried to make the flavor kind of light hearted, and not too serious.

Oh, and I'd also like to thank everyone for playing!

Here's my reason for thinking Soccerboy played great: He played EXACTLY as he has done every time he's town.

Every single game, Soccerboy starts out by posting fluff and meaningless stuff. It's anti-town, yes, but he does it as town. It's similar to how Thomas asks "Hey what alignment are you?" - it doesn't help anyone (except maybe himself, but I digress), but he does it as town all the time. Soccerboy was cautios, didn't use his vote at all, posted his thoughts when asked...everything was very similar to how he behaves as town. In a vacuum, no, his play was not great - I'd say Quirvy played a better game in that sense. However, what made me impress was his ability to flawlessly mimic his play as town when playing as scum. I'm not sure if he did it intentionally or not, but nevertheless, I was impressed.


Also Quirvy, Intimi =/= Snipereborn

Thanks for modding. It wasn't perfect but you know that, and it was fun, and I'm in for another game if people are willing.

i'll probably fail just as bad, but i'll do another game

If that's Soccer acting like town, what's soccer acting like mafia?

And I had forgotten about sniper. I only saw him play in 1 game and he got killed Night 1. You're right, though, he's the logical 3rd person to list. But I still think imtimi would make a good host, if it wasn't for the fact that he's absolutely not trustworthy.

I think the big problem with interguild mafia games is that there are a lot of players who aren't good, which makes it really hard for the town to hunt for scum, because a lot of innocent people look very much like scum (in this game, flashmarsh, Teo, and even you, Thomas) (And I sort of thought the same thing you did, Isa; looking at it logically, it looked a lot like Thomas was partner-in-crime with Teo), and if there's someone like me, Isa, Jellsprout or sniper, they're going to take advantage of those people, whereas it'll be near-impossible to get a lynch out on someone like Isa, jellsprout, sniper, unless they mess up big time or get investigated. We don't have enough good players to form an all-good-players game, so maybe it would be interesting to get a bunch of inexperienced players together and see how a game between all of them goes. But generally speaking, in a the typical setup, I feel like if someone like Isa or jell is mafia, chances are the only way the town is going to win is if the detective catches them.

I've played in 3 mafia games, and managed to live through each one. I think I'll retire before the game gets me killed.

w00t you didn't think i was mafia