Wheel of Fortune Mini Mafia - Page 59

The town play on the whole was pretty average. It was the standard town comprised of a few dedicated players who stepped their game up and then a bunch of sheep who basically did nothing all game. Notably, I was really impressed with Radfield, Snarfs, Bluelightz, and Toad/sandro; these four players comprised almost half of the town and all of its power roles. All of the scum were caught between them, but unfortunately they did not have the clout to push those reads to fruition. Of course, you can even argue that the reads themselves don't matter but the convincing of the sheep does.

On day 1 the no lynch was required because the game started out incredibly slowly. Prior to the game I talked to marvellosity about a slow day 1 in a different game and I made the argument that if day 1 is slow, then the players who believe they cannot make a good day 1 read will have poor day 2 reads and arguably even day 3 or day 4 reads as well. I argued that the players who give up on scumhunting because day 1 reads are poor will never have good reads.

Was I correct? I think so; the players who were relatively inactive or didn't really bother to scumhunt day 1 were continually useless beyond day 1. In fact, almost all of them were either mislynched or lived until endgame. Some might argue "but my reads are bad!" but scumhunting goes beyond just having reads. It goes toward establishing yourself as town, something that sometimes has to be done very obviously in order for other townies to not focus you as a lynch target. This goes toward players such as MrZentor, who chose to either not really play or play completely anti-town for whatever reason they may have rationalized. Indeed anyone should realize that if you troll, mislead, or confuse town (such as by voting yourself) you will become the center of (lynch) attention much sooner than later.

I'll give you some examples: from my past games, the only times I have trolled for extended periods of time with no real change in play were when I was scum. All the other times, if I have ever trolled/brought attention to myself it was either a gambit or out of exasperation with the game. Since then I've realized that gambiting is to be used rarely and that it often doesn't work as town. Voting yourself, for example, is a stupid way to establish yourself as town because anyone can do it (any scum with balls will do it) and it doesn't reveal anything about your alignment. It doesn't further discussion; it in fact impedes it, and it doesn't help find scum; it goes against it.

Examples:

In LoTR I pretended to only be interested in the ring for the first 24 hours of the day. In the second half of the day I basically attacked anyone who unreasonably focused on me solely because of that. My target of the day was DrH, who ended up being mafia godfather (and I was shot n1). I was town.

In Storm I was mafia and saw that if I was loud enough, and because town was not playing well, I could just scream and yell and troll all I wanted about players' misplays that I could get any lynch I wanted. In that game I would estimate over half my posts were either useless one liners or gifs/jokes/troll posts. Yet, my team managed to get 3 lynches straight on townies; what does that tell you? I was under a lot of attention the entire time as well, because my play was borderline suicidal. Town caught on after lynching my scumbuddy (and even early game because of my disruption I was suspected) That game taught me that playing in that manner may be good if you want to gather the sheep, but often they'll only be willing to go for other disruptive people. For the most part that means they'll kill the loudest townies for a few days before realizing the error in their ways.

There wasn't a huge deal of it this game, but there was some. In semi-open setups where you know all the possible roles but not the possible combinations, it can be dangerous to assume certain things about the number or types of roles present.

The only thing that really stood out was Radfield's claim about the one shot cop being unique. It was true to the extent that it is really rare in my generator for there to be multiple one shot cops, since there would need to be several Cs rolled for that to happen. However he was incorrect that it was impossible, and that's because I've changed the setup from the original C9++.

Indeed the mafia team was GF/goon/goon, which doesn't even exist in the original setup randomizer.

As I've changed the randomizer to fit TL balance better, there are possibilities for claim situations to exist that may put town in a weird situation. The RNG didn't favor that this game, but it's possible in future setups that may happen.

There was also some discussion about masons, which was used to help shed the light on some players' alignments (based on their opinions on masons in the game) good use of that discussion.

Very good game on your part. There is only one thing I would have not done if I were you, and that would have been to check Ace.

I would have checked any player other than the hydra and Ace, because the hydra was a likely shot (like you were) and because Ace was a likely frame target. Now, there was no framer in the game, so you merely got unlucky, but in that position if the mafia have a framer you have to consider who the most likely target will be.

In almost 100% of situations if there is a framer in the game I would argue that he would target Ace.

If Ace is town, then the framer benefits by making Ace look like scum; scary thing for town to deal with. DT will be inclined to check Ace, gets back guilty result = easy town kill.

If Ace is scum, framer's on his team, makes him look innocent = you get the idea.

Thus no matter what result you get on Ace it tells you absolutely nothing. This may not be true with any other player, since Ace is usually considered the best mafia player on the forum. However, even most newer scumteams would tend to shoot Ace at least by n3 with this playerbase (if he were town) because he is more "known" than anyone else.

In those types of situations I would choose someone who is more likely to live longer than anyone else and is very unlikely to be a target for framers. That's basically anyone other than sandro/Toad and Ace. VE would have been a great check, as would have been Bluelightz, phagga, prplhz, Forumite. If I were in Radfield's position I probably would've checked VE, because he's a harder player to read. Sandro commented that he might choose someone like Bluelightz over Ace. That's a pretty good check as well because Bluelightz is unlikely to get shot.

Other than that, I would say Radfield easily played the best out of all the townies in the game for one singular reason: he chose to not believe his check and instead tended toward his analysis. While the check itself may not have been the best decision, the amount of confidence it takes to ignore your own green check on someone to call them scum is a trait very few players have. Most players would go out of their way to believe their check over their brain, and it would cost them a lot more than simply a few hours of confusion.

Very commendable effort; sadly, town did not listen to you.

I have not much to say here other than you had good reads, but you chose to reveal all of them very early (allowing scum to manipulate you) and you had no confidence/clout (and that's probably justified in different ways; regardless in the future perhaps you can take Radfield's advice to every game you play)

great improvement, but I think you should keep your reads to yourself more and develop them so that scum cannot lead you to lynching the town on your list of nulls.

Great shot on VE; it would have been even better to shoot Ace but that would have required omniscience in order to ignore the fear of shooting the guy with a green check on him. I think ultimately you made the right decision given the knowledge you possessed. If you had the balls to shoot Ace though, I would have been quite surprised.

Sadly I expected you to push Ace harder after VE died. I think it was a mistake on your part not to do that, and instead to focus on prplhz. Prplhz played very poorly this game, but I think if you had gone back and reread Radfield's posts you would have seen that prplhz was not the correct target to be pushing.

I think you need a break from mafia or just need to reevaluate some things you were thinking. I know MrZentor really pissed you off, and that's understandable, but I think a break from the thread for a while might have given you a clearer head. I know what it's like to deal with stupid/frustrating townies, and often times you just want to kill them all. In minis and in setups without double lynches or mass killing mechanics though, it's not the greatest idea in the world IMO. It might work in a setup like Steamship where you can literally just kill everyone who is stupid, but in a normal setup like this the game comes down to finer details than just "kill everyone who is antitown". Sadly the most antitown players are often town players themselves.

With this said, it was clear that you were unsure of what to do when phagga gave up on the game. Partly that's on him, but it's also on you for confusing yourself. Scum don't have an incentive to sacrifice themselves in that situation. In fact, most of the time if they were in that situation they would say absolutely nothing, or if they were good, they would defend themselves and pretend to be town down to the last second. Very rarely do scum do such things like give up last minute and hammer themselves.

All I really have to say is that I'll be watching your next games and if you continue to play like you did in this one I'll probably exclude you from future setups. I hate doing that, but honestly I actually received complaints (yes, plural) that went to the level of "please modkill me because I don't want to play with this guy anymore." I don't really know what you wanted to accomplish with what you were doing but to most people it didn't look like you were playing to your wincondition. It wasn't even like you were frustrated or you had any particular reason to do what you did. You just seemed to decide to do it and clearly the other players (specifically town players) didn't like it; so why did you continue to do it? From a common sense perspective it made absolutely no sense and you were a significant factor in the town's loss. I would have much rather given your spot to almost anyone else who wanted to sign up but couldn't because you signed up before they could.

you should probably scumhunt next time.

Pretty solid play for you guys overall, though on day 1 with a stronger town I'm pretty sure one of Forumite/VE would have died. I was actually surprised with the amount of solid analysis coming in, but with the level of inactivity no one in town was comfortable enough with any sort of lynch. If there was one, and MrZentor wasn't incompetent, I would have imagined it would have been VE to die first.

I went into n1 thinking that, and imagined that Radfield would check VE given that he suspected him early on. There would have been no real way for you guys to stop that. However Radfield chose to check Ace, and that went very well for you all (for a time).

Ace made very good efforts in leading the scumteam and quelling relatively inane notions about taking heat and suspicions. As I would expect Ace would say himself, it often doesn't matter if one or two people find you suspicious. It matters if they have the clout and the votes (or the gun) to kill you, and so if it's only a soft suspicion or a single vote it's often not even worth responding to. Certainly Ace's own situation proved that very well; despite being suspected at different times throughout the game by several different people, Ace for the most part simply brushed off all suspicions and cleverly put the suspicion onto townies who were far more likely to be lynched. Indeed, the assured no-lynches helped a lot in that town simply did not generate and process the information required to actually kill the scum.

When, as scum, you focus too much on the "what" and not on the "why" or "how" (for example, if you focus too much on a vote instead of perhaps focusing on the reasoning for that vote or how it came about) you can end up screwing yourself in a situation when not much pressure is actually on you. New scum do it a lot when they start panicking and scumslipping in their posts because a single person has found them suspicious. Usually in a game at some point early on literally everyone will be suspected by at least one other person for some reason or another. It's just the way the game works; some suspicions stick and most of them do not. As scum it's your goal to make it so that these suspicions roll off you as they would roll off any half decent townie.

Ultimately it's when you realize this that you realize that playing scum is almost literally no different than playing town. The only difference is that you have a slight knowledge advantage (which you can hide) and you want to lynch townies and not scum. This doesn't mean you have to be voting on successful town lynches; you can even cause town to lynch each other without ever even voting for the lynched townie, or only voting them after the lynch is secured. This type of play might be a little harder to do, since you have to hone your specific play toward one player as opposed to naturally tending toward one as you would as town, but it's not much different.

I think you played relatively well, but your cases seemed very very forced. Indeed on day 1 despite the fact that there was almost no activity you were suspected by several players based on how they didn't really believe your Zentor case (IIRC). In addition, in the scum QT you seemed very fearful about players suspecting you and about townies finding you. When you have this fear it appears in your posts one way or another.

Usually if you just quell that fear and post as you would normally most of your problems disappear. I would argue again and again that in a more active and productive town day 1 you and VE would have been at the top of the list for lynching. No one could really foresee that everyone would just sit around and do nothing, but in a different situation it is certainly possible that the same result may not have happened.

Now, one can argue that because town was inactive you all behaved in certain ways, and that's certainly an acceptable explanation (though at that point on day 1 I don't think you could have foreseen that)

you probably know what you did well, and certainly if town had played differently you would have probably adapted your play to fit. I do think though, that the best chance for your lynch was between d2 and d3. I'm curious to see what would have happened if Radfield didn't have that green check, but we'll never know. (particularly as Snarfs cited the green check as being the primary factor in not shooting you; he sent you as the shot until the last minute)

The one thing I think you could have done differently was be more aware of your own play and the play of the town players around you.

Almost everyone in town had some sort of suspicion about you because you were very inactive compared to your usual town standards. I think you perhaps were a little bit timid when it came to posting and you took a bullet from Snarfs because (I'm pretty sure) of the discord between your general town pro-activeness and your total apathy this game.

For the most part, ignore big plays like bussing and connections between players and just take it simply; play like you would as town and you won't get shot. Well, as long as everyone's not a vig you probably won't get shot. I don't offer you a money-back guarantee.

Laying low is usually okay for most scum but when you're known to be in-your-face as town it makes no sense to suddenly change your style just because your alignment has changed.

:p