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On June 29 2010 21:07 Korynne wrote:
I hate it when people tell me I'm saying something that's "obviously scummy." It's not like scum and town have different goals in the thread in terms of appearing scummy. Like it's never, oh, you're not contributing positively or something, it's just like omg that one thing you said that's such a scum tell.
So how are you meant to find scum if you're not going to analyse posts and see whether or not they seem scummy?
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On June 29 2010 21:07 Korynne wrote:
I hate it when people tell me I'm saying something that's "obviously scummy." It's not like scum and town have different goals in the thread in terms of appearing scummy. Like it's never, oh, you're not contributing positively or something, it's just like omg that one thing you said that's such a scum tell.
not as bad as someone being like 'god i feel you're scum' and that's all they keep saying and trying to get people to vote for you as opposed to logical reasoning or anything concrete
i guess the hardest distinction people have is telling between bad town and bad scum and then next average town and good scum
the first is a verrry hard one for some
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On July 12 2010 12:44 youngminii wrote:Show nested quote +On June 29 2010 21:07 Korynne wrote:
I hate it when people tell me I'm saying something that's "obviously scummy." It's not like scum and town have different goals in the thread in terms of appearing scummy. Like it's never, oh, you're not contributing positively or something, it's just like omg that one thing you said that's such a scum tell. So how are you meant to find scum if you're not going to analyse posts and see whether or not they seem scummy?
The word "scummy" is just a bad descriptor. You need to spend more time looking past the words and figuring out the objectives of a player's posts.
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On June 30 2010 09:37 Qatol wrote:
Great thread idea, but I think you missed one of the most important features: communication with your fellow mafiosos. You are on a team together, it is a team win or loss. You should be talking together as a team to help out everyone. Far too often I see teams of mafia who let everyone just post on their own, and that inevitably leads to slipups, usually with either the most prominent/ active players, or the most inexperienced ones. However, it is really important for everyone to put aside their egos and just talk to each other. Make sure you are all on the same page.
You beat me to it qatol. the most effective mafia teams i have played on are the ones that regularly chat in IRC/msn and post in a private forum. TL PM's simply are not an effective form of communication, end of story - only use them if your comrades are offline and you need something answered, like "is this post o.k.," or "what if we hit X."
The point about egos is also important. Two incidents I remember in particular, one as mafia one as town: (1) citizen refused to talk with us because he didn't get the GF role; we lost & (2) Chezinu didn't like his mafia team and refused to talk to them; they lost. There are some people here who I suspect may not be able to shelve the ego, though no names shall be uttered 
I'm not sure if any mafia team i've played on has had every one of the players actively communicating, but i think the players that communicate are the ones that live longer.
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On July 13 2010 09:04 iNfuNdiBuLuM wrote:Show nested quote +On June 30 2010 09:37 Qatol wrote:
Great thread idea, but I think you missed one of the most important features: communication with your fellow mafiosos. You are on a team together, it is a team win or loss. You should be talking together as a team to help out everyone. Far too often I see teams of mafia who let everyone just post on their own, and that inevitably leads to slipups, usually with either the most prominent/ active players, or the most inexperienced ones. However, it is really important for everyone to put aside their egos and just talk to each other. Make sure you are all on the same page. You beat me to it qatol. the most effective mafia teams i have played on are the ones that regularly chat in IRC/msn and post in a private forum. TL PM's simply are not an effective form of communication, end of story - only use them if your comrades are offline and you need something answered, like "is this post o.k.," or "what if we hit X." The point about egos is also important. Two incidents I remember in particular, one as mafia one as town: (1) citizen refused to talk with us because he didn't get the GF role; we lost & (2) Chezinu didn't like his mafia team and refused to talk to them; they lost. There are some people here who I suspect may not be able to shelve the ego, though no names shall be uttered I'm not sure if any mafia team i've played on has had every one of the players actively communicating, but i think the players that communicate are the ones that live longer.
Sadly, holdouts happen. When I was mafia, semioldguy didn't communicate very much at all. However, mafias were larger back then, so it didn't matter quite so much. With the size of games these days, you basically need every member to be on board with the strategy or your chances of winning go down dramatically.
Another caveat of the teamwork element is that mafia members can't be afraid to die if it advances the goals of the team as a whole. I think mafia members are just too afraid to die in general, which probably comes from the "I got a really cool role and don't want to be eliminated from the game" syndrome. When I played as mafia, the reason I came out and started taunting the thread was because Camlito came out of nowhere and nailed like 3 mafia through clues. So we decided to sacrifice me to distract the town. A reverse example that comes to mind is MBH selling out Caller to buy himself another cycle even though Caller wasn't really on anybody's radar at all and MBH was under serious heat. This was a pretty major turning point in the game for that mafia, as the mafia pretty much fell apart after Caller died.
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On July 13 2010 09:04 iNfuNdiBuLuM wrote:
(2) Chezinu didn't like his mafia team and refused to talk to them; they lost.
I thought I didn't like them because they weren't talking to me, except Judge talked to me but he ended up dying earlier. So now you know when I say I don't like them - it's just me complaining since they aren't talking to me. Just look at all my games, I do this as town as well when the person I usually pm stops talking to me, I go to the thread and complain.
Ex: I'm going insane because no one is talking to me. RoL isn't talking to me. Bill Murray is playing solo... Pyrr is playing solo... etc I do this a lot.
Yeah, but I agree communication is very important. I think it is one of the biggest factors that determines if mafia win or not. Everytime I won as mafia we had good communication. Being busy in RL has major impacts in this game, especially when it comes to communication between allies whether your on a mafia team, stuck with someone in a melee, or paired with a lover or mason.
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This doesn't always need to be discussed but as your Scum team is formed you should have an idea about what each member is capable of doing. Here are some qualities that make for a good scum team:
players are good at debating
chaotic players that aren't obvious
obvious scum to the point of destroying the entire game (the easiest to lynch but the hardest to find a trail after they die)
disruptive posters
players that incite anger and emotion
quiet/lurking players that avoid the modkill threshhold
shadowing players (more on this later)
There are probably more characteristics that make good scum but these are the essential strengths. Note that while it is obvious that something like being a disruptive lurking poster should get you lynched it's HOW you do it that earns a win. By the end of this article you'll see how.
In repeated games people tend to have a "stable" personality. Note most of the "types" do not help the town much if they are green/red.
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I think the best mafia team I played on was the first time I was mafia, the Plexa's summer edition.
Communication:
We had a Forum, thanks to motbob for setting it up:
http://allredhere.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=mafia
AND
We had IRC, we used this I believe:
http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=#ESPORTSMAFIA triumph
So we had quick short communication of our though via IRC (good for brainstorming plans, discussing reads on people, team bonding, and last minute vote swapping) and we had the forum to finalize our plans (who we plan to lynch/hit).
Player Variety:
1. motbob - forum creator, good martyr, good IRC buddy, overall good communicator -- a pretty well rounded player.
2. ecomania - good martyr and great IRC buddy
3. chaoser - very good martyr that set suspicion upon townies that supported him. Good IRC
4. TruthBringer - He died early.. I didn't get to know him.. 
5. Chezinu - GF, hit list sender - hides in the shadows b/c GF can't die. Note: the best disguise for GF varies per game. If people just played a game where GF lurked - you might want to be more active. Activity depends on town's reaction and how much fun you want to have.
6. Scamp - He was the bomb! Inactive at first, but he came back in time to make an explosive impact for our team.
7. Pyrr - good infiltrator, he didn't communicate with the rest of us as much. I think it helped his cover that he didn't talk to us as much. Pyrr did do a good job of dropping in and telling us important information he discovered, which helped us greatly when forming hit list. Especially, end game when Pyrr was almost in total control of the game. For infiltrator, communication with mafia members isn't as important early game, but informing teammates about discovered blue roles is important. Whether you snipe these blue roles or let them stay so that they trust your infiltrator in hopes of gaining more information needs to be discussed.
As Qatol mentioned, mafia people need to be willing to die. You need to know that just because you die, doesn't make you a bad player. It is how you die that makes you a bad player. Our martyrs that game created chaos before they died and brought us time by vote swaying (This was when KP was affected by number as mafia players -- this is a good reason some mafia don't want to die, but they need to know some sacrifices are beneficial). Our martyrs gave town little information, there deaths actually aided us by opening up opportunities for our infiltrator to accuse certain people, especially those who supported our mafia brethren. Pyrr did a great job analyzing votes in mafia favor and quoting dead people to aid in lynching other townies.
I know a lot of people want to play the infiltrator role because this person usually gets all the attention post-game, which is well deserved because it takes talent. But people also need to realize that the martyrs served well in their death to aid the scum cause. If you are a new player and are on a mafia team, infiltrator would actually be a good role to play. New players might think they need more experience before making risky moves, but it is the new players that can pulls these moves off the best.
Hit list:
Day 1: Random
Day 2: blue sniping started
Other Days: continued blue sniping and those who were were on the right trail.
Creating a good hit list, requires good communication between your team. For instance, you don't want to kill someone you think you could probably get lynched - except for cases where it was an accident and it totally messes with town and causes chaos and demotivation because town realizes how clueless they are and know that mafia is taunting them. Aside from those cases, the majority of your hits should be thought out. Make sure you get as much input from each mafia member. Some may know/think of things, you didn't consider.
PS: I was just going to make a brief comment about how we had both a forum and IRC in that game, but ended up writing a lot more.. From now on, I think I'm going to try and establish communication within my mafia team because it is always a good investment.
Edit: Also note that having a mafia forum helps a lot for people who are busy with school, work, or live in a different time zone.
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I entirely agree with the need for a forum. IRC-only can easily splinter the team.
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On July 13 2010 23:45 citi.zen wrote:
I entirely agree with the need for a forum. IRC-only can easily splinter the team.
You can make up for not having a forum if you have someone super SUPER active who can relay everything to everyone. We did not have a forum. However, it was a pretty large strain and I agree a forum helps that a lot.
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See: LTT or a mafia team large enough to constantly have 5-8 people in IRC at all times.
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I guess I just don't see the downside to a forum over IRC, unless you are really paranoid about a security leak. It's more structured and facilitates better discussion, in addition to allowing people to contribute/get up to speed whenever they can, as Chez said.
Anyway... this is really nit-picking & ultimately up to each team.
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On July 14 2010 09:19 L wrote:
See: LTT and a mafia team large enough to constantly have 5-8 people in IRC at all times.
Fixed.
On July 14 2010 10:30 citi.zen wrote:
I guess I just don't see the downside to a forum over IRC, unless you are really paranoid about a security leak. It's more structured and facilitates better discussion, in addition to allowing people to contribute/get up to speed whenever they can, as Chez said.
Anyway... this is really nit-picking & ultimately up to each team.
I think it's mostly just a tendency to not use IRC as much as you should if you have a forum. Also, you need someone on the team who knows how to set it up. Regardless, I agree that this is just nitpicking.
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FREEAGLELAND26781 Posts
Pure IRC doesn't work too well. I've sat in with even some of the smaller recent mafia teams, and there's usually half the members missing, plus you lose out on everything that was discussed. On the other hands, forum boards can be slightly slow, but at least you keep track of all your information. Yeah, a mix is probably the best--IRC for quick planning and speedy reactions to take advantage or prevent disadvantages, and forums for keeping check of your "longer-term" strategies that span a few days.
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Pure forum isnt too hot either, when HALF YOUR TEAM GOES MIA, and ignores your brilliant ideas...
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should write a guide on how to be town instead
being mafia isn't hard
being (good) town is frigging impossible
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I have serious issues playing town, I've been green most of my games and other than talking a lot and random logical things I don't really know what to do. xD
I guess I'll need to learn to read people and stuffs.
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On July 17 2010 04:43 Korynne wrote:
I have serious issues playing town, I've been green most of my games and other than talking a lot and random logical things I don't really know what to do. xD
I guess I'll need to learn to read people and stuffs.
You were fine in the game I played with you. You seemed very innocent most of the game until you went MIA randomly after a while. Just contribute and keep the conversation going and you're doing okay. Learning to read people is icing.
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This got stickied? No wonder I couldn't find it..
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FREEAGLELAND26781 Posts
They'll never catch me as scum!
Because I'll never play as scum!
Also because I don't play.
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EPT
