Board 8 > If anyone was wondering about my mafia championship qualifier game

(+) Yeah! (+)

Sorry I don't intend to come off as rude in this case, but it just seems as though you're bashing your head against a wall intent on being derisive without any legitimate point that hasn't already been observed (by me no less)

So it's kinda exhausting

turbopuns3 posted...

Para I have a couple questions I'd like your perspective on if you're still reading.

1) what did Gorf do well? Here's a list of things I can't give him any credit for, so I'm wondering what he possibly does get credit for:

-having any impact
-catching any wolves
-lynching any wolves
-convincing anyone of anything
-getting people to realize he's town
-using a role well
-voting / being present while he's up for lynch

2) If the game was played out the same except instead of Silver as scum, it was one of BJ/AP/Chingles/etc. - in other words if day 1 was a mislynch - does Thunal still get first place?

I'm asking these questions to better inform my perspective for a private conversation I was having with someone else in the game.

Yo. I'm not Para, but I have thoughts. You may or may not recognize me.

A few things.

Voting isn't to determine the MVP, as I'm sure you've been told plenty. Voting isn't even to determine who played the best. Voting is to determine who's the best player.

I look at your play. I look at Gorf's play. I ask myself, "In a random game of mafia, which of these approaches is more likely to produce good results?"

Gorf was playing like an open book in a way that basically guarantees him strong townreads in any half decent list. You were on track to get treated as a VI all game by your fifth post. Plenty a town won't even find you as town if you play like that, no matter how objectively towny you are.

Docking someone's play for being busy during one specific EoD is both an unfair assessment of that player's play and a sign of a flaw in your own play if you genuinely think it's reasonable to expect that.

Diplomatic play isn't just useful for persuasion. If the game's environment is more diplomatic, town is more likely to towntell. Diplomacy doesn't just help you push your reads. Diplomacy helps everyone else push their reads too. If the game's environment is diplomatic, people can more easily correct you when you're wrong, and vice versa, because it's easier to realize when someone else has a point. The fact that it's easier to tell what points are good or bad vastly mitigates the "but this helps wolves push reads too" risks of this strategy. These things are often even more important than accuracy.

I appreciate your attitude of keeping it about the game and your opinions without demanding justice or anything. You seem to come off as much saltier than you actually are.

c4e5g3d5 posted...

Voting isn't to determine the MVP, as I'm sure you've been told plenty. Voting isn't even to determine who played the best. Voting is to determine who's the best player.

I feel like this is kind of a cop out, and if it's how things work then it should be re-evaluated.

Otherwise if you had a Michael Jordan-esque mafia player you would by definition have to rate them the highest no matter how they performed. Because it is common knowledge that they are the best player.

Your follow up point about Gorf's "open book" playstyle is a more reasonably approach to have, and you could argue that this constituted "playing the best" within the game.

But the way you phrased it makes it sounds like your knowledge of who the best player is all that matters for the vote regardless of individual performance. idk

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Forceful_Dragon posted...

I feel like this is kind of a cop out, and if it's how things work then it should be re-evaluated.

Otherwise if you had a Michael Jordan-esque mafia player you would by definition have to rate them the highest no matter how they performed. Because it is common knowledge that they are the best player.

Your follow up point about Gorf's "open book" playstyle is a more reasonably approach to have, and you could argue that this constituted "playing the best" within the game.

But the way you phrased it makes it sounds like your knowledge of who the best player is all that matters for the vote regardless of individual performance. idk

It's about who showed that they are the best player in the game. Not based on outside knowledge.

It's basically not being strictly results based. What we have preached here for over a decade now

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Dels posted...

It's about who showed that they are the best player in the game. Not based on outside knowledge.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

It's basically not being strictly results based. What we have preached here for over a decade now

I can agree with both of these. The phrasing from the other guy made it confusing, in particular this bit:

c4e5g3d5 posted...

Voting isn't even to determine who played the best.

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Yeah just a little sloppy language there tbh

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Yeah, it can be tricky to define. The big thing is that it's not about results in one game; it's about how well you think doing all the same things again would work in general. This puts extra emphasis on things like displaying game knowledge and analytical process. Voting by reputation though? Oh god no.

I get the results based thinking and I feel it's used to leverage a double standard moreso than it is actually relevant to my play in champs.

If the day 1 lynch in SF1 was wrong, and Thunal just mischopped and died, do you think she'd still be voted #1 there?

My early play, while unorthodox compared to others, proved effective in outing scum early in the game in both of my champs games. Seriously, same approach by me, same reaction from scum, almost down to they used the same phrasing and everything. This happened before I went in on Silver and he broke down so much that the rest of town found him.

You say I was on my way to being read as VI by my fifth post - serious question, does that imply I'm being village read? I don't actually know when you say VI if that could be a scum read still.

My day 2 play is overlooked as being skillful basically because of my attitude. People didn't look beneath the surface and see the actual intent and results.

I'm not bothered by it in the least at this point but I do think people are lying to themselves a wee bit.

What would work "in general" sounds like exactly the mindset that has people overly pushing bucket strategy

Seems like you'd have a self fulfilling prophecy too often if that mindset is too prevalent. If there's a way to play a game that "should work" it is then determined that it "did work" even if maybe it actually didn't and should not have in the situation.

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And it's not like, "how dare you miss EOD, trash player"

No, it's just on a list of checkboxes of good things done, being there isn't checked. So I mentioned it with the rest.

Like diplomacy isn't universally the best play. If judges are thinking that I definitely don't respect the judges either-- it speaks to conceit (I know what works and if you aren't doing that you're bad at the game) more than objective assessment of what occurred in a game.

That's simply not something you can consider a universal truth and while no doubt it has its place, with many towns it's absolutely best to ruffle feathers.

If you can shake out scumtells from other people by rocking the boat a bit it's often more valuable than making everyone sing kumbaya as not only will it shake out a scum player but it will also bring forth a ton of useful discourse as people react or don't react to the tell. Overly diplomatic play is dangerous too as it's much easier for scum to keep up a facade when everything is low pressure.

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c4e5g3d5 posted...

I look at your play. I look at Gorf's play. I ask myself, "In a random game of mafia, which of these approaches is more likely to produce good results?"

Gorf was playing like an open book in a way that basically guarantees him strong townreads in any half decent list. You were on track to get treated as a VI all game by your fifth post. Plenty a town won't even find you as town if you play like that, no matter how objectively towny you are.

I guess I just have to ask myself - hypothetically, how many games in a row would I need to catch a scum and get them lynched day 1 before my approach "counts" as good even if I occasionally miss.

People locked me town because I was a force of nature in removing scum day 1. I think there is legitimacy in that. You can say it's results based so that you can still vote for the player who was nicer to you, but at what point does it get recognized as actual skill?

If the consensus opinion is truly "gorf wasn't town read but should have been most of the time, and turbo was town read but shouldn't have been most of the time" then I'll just lol my way right on by and let y'all keep thinking that. Seems like mental gymnastics to justify a particular outcome to me.

Beakerjoe was suspicious of Ephemera all game. What led to him finding them as town? It was my push on AP. Did anyone recognize that? Any credit due to me for creating that?

Beakerjoe also found Billy as a wolf for how he followed me onto BJ. So my push on BJ also created a good result for other town players. Any credit due for that?

Day 4 people in town were listening to me and being persuaded by my push on gorf. They didn't have to agree just because I was outed PR by that point. Any credit for leading town and getting them to consolidate on a vote before EOD? Guess not, since I was wrong on gorf? Results based maybe?

I could keep going. Just lots of stuff getting ignored due to my attitude.

I guess some part of it is that you can't reward what you don't see

If you told most players in SF1, and most people in spec chat, that the things you did intentionally drew out these effects you're describing, and it wasn't just you screwing around and these things happening concurrently, they'd mostly say "dafuq"

Much less vote for it

If you're assuming a coincidence when something good happens as a result of a play you don't like by default you're already judging with a flawed outlook

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Coincidence is the default assumption. I mean, if Turbo had gone "ha now billy's jumping on beaker opportunistically" at that exact moment to push that vote through then yeah that's causation (I didn't read this part of the game to know whether that happened or not). If not, there's no way to tell he intentionally got that result, and you can't deduce skill.

Coincidence being the default assumption is conceit if you've got even a loose connection to cause and effect. Most things are not coincidence just in general.

"I don't understand why that worked-- he must have got lucky!" or maybe he is just playing a style of mafia you're not familiar with

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c4e5g3d5 posted...

I guess some part of it is that you can't reward what you don't see

If you told most players in SF1, and most people in spec chat, that the things you did intentionally drew out these effects you're describing, and it wasn't just you screwing around and these things happening concurrently, they'd mostly say "dafuq"

Much less vote for it

To be clear, it's not like I knew "if I push AP EOD3, then scum will shoot off to create an opportunity for mislynch, which will lead BJ to finding Ephemera as town"

I'm not clairvoyant to such a degree

More like, creating waves in the game - particularly during a point where town is complacent on a mislynch - can just be inherently good. Create the waves, then assess and ride the waves and see where it leads. Most of the game were sitting on their thumbs.

But yeah, the fact that your response to me pointing this out is "dafuq" says a lot about why I didn't bother arguing my case in spec chat. The community there just can't or won't see what I'm talking about mostly, somewhat because the style is so different and somewhat because they just want to collectively hivemind me out of relevance.

Voxx smh-ing me in chat for "not claiming" despite being unclear on whether I'd get to shoot again if I got blocked is a good example of this.

1) I felt it was pretty clear I was the PR I mean, come on. Scum knew day 1.

2) Walk me through the actual realistic worst-case if I do get blocked N2 and I'll point out how it's not actually detrimental.

Just wanted to take a shot at me, I think.

Oh yeah, Silver saying I pressure "random" people, shew that one was rich haha.

I just want to share this one with the community here. I was pretty satisfied with this one. This is within the first 500 posts of Day 1, pointing out the exact way scum is inclined to react to a town making screwball reads/votes early



It's the kind of thing I just expect to be rejected by the MU community as "you got lucky whatever" but it's like do you see the same thing I see.

When I saw Silver make that "this is interesting" post, my ears perked up and I'm like, oh I've got one here. From that point forward, me tilting into Silver was not OMGUS like some people want to dismiss it as. It's me deliberately leaning into a confident read to draw out poor reactions from a scum who hasn't stabilized themselves in the game yet.

Then later you see Thunal noticing "hey Silver's reactions to Turbo are actually quite scummy"

Soneji gets on board too

Silver ends up with 9 votes. Became so obvious that he got greater than majority day 1.

But I pressured him "randomly" and had nothing on him

c4e5g3d5 posted...

Yo. I'm not Para, but I have thoughts. You may or may not recognize me.

A few things.

Voting isn't to determine the MVP, as I'm sure you've been told plenty. Voting isn't even to determine who played the best. Voting is to determine who's the best player.

I look at your play. I look at Gorf's play. I ask myself, "In a random game of mafia, which of these approaches is more likely to produce good results?"

Gorf was playing like an open book in a way that basically guarantees him strong townreads in any half decent list. You were on track to get treated as a VI all game by your fifth post. Plenty a town won't even find you as town if you play like that, no matter how objectively towny you are.

Docking someone's play for being busy during one specific EoD is both an unfair assessment of that player's play and a sign of a flaw in your own play if you genuinely think it's reasonable to expect that.

Diplomatic play isn't just useful for persuasion. If the game's environment is more diplomatic, town is more likely to towntell. Diplomacy doesn't just help you push your reads. Diplomacy helps everyone else push their reads too. If the game's environment is diplomatic, people can more easily correct you when you're wrong, and vice versa, because it's easier to realize when someone else has a point. The fact that it's easier to tell what points are good or bad vastly mitigates the "but this helps wolves push reads too" risks of this strategy. These things are often even more important than accuracy.

I appreciate your attitude of keeping it about the game and your opinions without demanding justice or anything. You seem to come off as much saltier than you actually are.

Like, okay I am bordering on getting too caught up in this stuff again but honestly.

Strip down what you've said here.

You are seriously saying the best thing Gorf did was play in a way that would get him townread...in a game where he got mislynched day 4.

Like, that's all you've got? Your greatest supporting argument to suggest gorf played well relies on strongly implying the player list was worse than "half decent"

Step back and take a fair assessment of that point of view.

I had a funny realization after sleeping on this stuff again.

c4e5g3d5 posted...

You were on track to get treated as a VI all game by your fifth post. Plenty a town won't even find you as town if you play like that, no matter how objectively towny you are.

^

I just double checked. I didn't get voted one time in the entire game except by the scum who counter-voted me.

lol

Literally not even one town player voted me at any point for all of day 1.

And you're standing on the ground of "a hypothetical town might not have townread you"

Like, there's "being strictly results based" and there's...having common sense.

Every single player in the game townread me and you just insist it was for invalid reasons, I guess?

I think that illustrates pretty clearly there's severe bias at play here regarding wanting to vote for your preferred playstyle and preferred player. Of course this one user doesn't necessarily represent the community as a whole but I mean come on.

Turbo: wait people vote based on who they like more?

Guy with a gun behind him: always have

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it's extra funny because in this situation I'm both the person who realizes the vote was based on popularity and the person who had the gun

Clarification, VI's are townies that everyone ignores.

Saying your play getting you townread in this game is a counterargument when you came immediately off of another game where you played the same way and got vigged is a good demonstration of the point you're missing. Emphasizing that you advanced from the game where you got poor results but not from the game where you got good results is a good deminstration of the point you're missing.

With a lot of these examples you're raising it does start separating purely from skill and going into the "display" part of "display of skill". Did you convince anyone through your play that these good things wouldn't happen if you weren't in the game? No. Did Thunal? Yes. Call it an unfair metric if you want, but again, you can't reward what you can't see. It doesn't matter how much you out Silver if you make everyone think you're still pushing him for your original "screwball reads". (It also makes you less likely to convince people if that's still why people think you're pushing him, and if you had made it more clear that your earlier content was just to poke around, you might not have needed Thunal's help with Silver.)

I did not play the same way in both games. That's a pretty unfair summational statement. Why can I say that? Because I had a different role. In SF1 I had a PR claim in my pocket and that goes into my approach. Being townread on page 2 wasn't exactly a concern of mine.

It's also a bit disingenuous to point out I was vigged and act like that's equivalent to getting voted out by the town. Come on, JKBear was not exactly an outstanding player in that game. Yes some people voted me but the situation was entirely different.

I'm not missing any point. I get the point and I scoff at it. You can say I didn't "display" the skill and my counter to that is here you are putting on a blindfold in order to avoid having to perceive the skill. When I point out that based on SF1 itself your arguments hold no water, you turn to a separate game and my comments here on a completely different website.

It's so silly to me to act like the only way to judge my play is to invent a hypothetical town in your mind and cut/paste my exact behavior into that game that you made up. It's like the classic argument of saying a wolf didn't play great because spec chat was onto them but town wasn't. Fooling viewers and hypothetical towns isn't in the job description. Just like me being townread by hypothetical towns wasn't in the job description for SF1.

Like, they lynched a doctor claim over me, my dude.

If anything, if my play between the two games WAS the same and there's any validity at all to the idea that SF player lists are better mafia players overall than quals player lists, the only logical conclusion would be that better mafia players townread me where worse mafia players might not.

Do you disagree with that?

I think I can settle on a compromise of, people aren't necessarily consciously /aware/ in an immediate way that they're just voting for the person playing the way they prefer, but that there's still a very real bias to overlook the actual impact a player had if they rubbed you the wrong way. The end result in terms of how the votes fall is the same, it's just calling it something different. I can accept it's not deliberate spite voting (except in the case of a couple wolves it very well may have been.)

I don't have anything against you here. If anything you're my favorite for actually coming here and letting me talk about it.

c4e5g3d5 posted...

Saying your play getting you townread in this game is a counterargument when you came immediately off of another game where you played the same way and got vigged is a good demonstration of the point you're missing.

Like this is just using a broom the size of a mountain to sweep stuff under the rug in an invalid way.

Emphasizing that you advanced from the game where you got poor results but not from the game where you got good results is a good deminstration of the point you're missing.

And this is just failing to perceive my sense of humor in the irony of it. Literally got vigged as town then vigged a wolf. It's just funny no matter what so I'm gonna point it out. I'm not really /emphasizing/ it, but it is LHF for someone to argue against me to be fair.

Final Thoughts, For Real (For Real):

Your stance on why my play wasn't good sounds an awful lot like this: "Why yes, 11 out of 11 town players believe Turbo's play was towny, however I've decided that none of these 11 players were playing in the way a truly skilled player ought to, therefore Turbo's play was actually not towny because I don't think it was, and hypothetical elite players agree with me."

And, similarly, "Why yes, few players in this game saw any reason to believe Gorf was town. However, if these players had been playing in the way truly skilled players ought to play, they would have town read him."

And like, it's borderline vomit inducing how conceited that sounds.

5 of those 11 town players I mentioned are about to play in the Mafia Universe Championships final. How many tiers above these players exist in terms of skill and how many players consistently play at those tiers? I mean I get that the champs pool is not a sample of the utmost elite players by definition but like...what higher skill are you appealing to here? It seems like a stretch to say these players aren't good enough to have valid reasons for making reads.

If you think my play wasn't towny, but 11 of 11 town think it was, then maybe you should be asking yourself "what am I missing that's working for him here" rather than to turn up your nose and go "wow, buncha scrubs".

If it was a more discrete behavior like the vig shot, ok I can understand not putting much weight on it because it's reasonable to think an individual such as myself might have made a last minute change to the decision and got lucky. But when the town has unanimous agreement against you...buddy...those are some powerful blinders you're wearing to maintain your point of view.

Furthermore, your point about my play is extremely stunted and short-sighted and seems to willfully ignore evidence from later in the game that blatantly contradicts it. I was "well on my way to being VI by my fifth post" well guess what my dude, I ultimately wasn't labeled as VI. In fact I was leading the town in the mid-late game. That's a fact! Are you just judging my whole game based on the first 12 hours?

"Playing in a way that gets you labeled as VI" is such a fluid thing. What do I mean by that...like, "claiming VT then rescinding and claiming doctor" is a concrete "play". You can look at a bunch of mafia games and clearly and objectively identify which players displayed that behavior and which players did not. "Being on your way to being labeled as VI" is more like, a subjective interpretation of my personality that one cannot hope to consistently identify from one game to the next. Like, if you made all MU archived games available to 100 people, and said OK go label the games where someone claimed VT then claimed doctor...you'd have a pretty darn good consensus on which games qualify. If you told those 100 people to identify games where someone was VI...nothing remotely close to as solid of a consensus.

Furthermore, I object to the sheer weight you are placing on simply being town read as worthy of advancing. I asked you what else did Gorf display as skill and you offered nothing. Nobody has offered anything.

Give me something to clearly put Gorf above Ephemera. Give me something to clearly put Gorf above AngryPotato. Give me something to clearly put Gorf above Chingles. Heck, give me something to concretely put Gorf above Hornet (not Sara). All of these players displayed ability to be townread better than Gorf displayed ability to be townread. I can't help but think you're using "don't be results based" as a shield to hide your bias if you can't justify why any of these players who literally displayed more competence at the ONE thing you're evaluating skill on didn't get more votes.

It seems like you MUST be relying on outside knowledge of Gorf unrelated to this game to defend him because you offer nothing to justify it. His 1 column he did well in (not actually did well but hypothetically did well in your head canon) he's been outperformed in by multiple other players who didn't get as many votes.

I also scoff at your apparent inability (or unwillingness) to recognize that had town reacted differently to my play, then maybe, just maybe, I would have done something a little different. Softened up on the bucket strat thing. Or actually claimed. Or looked elsewhere other than Silver, etc. It's gross how you're like "well I can't logically deduce what you would have done differently, I can only judge based on what you display" - this seems like a contradiction to the fact you can seemingly have no trouble imagining what other, hypothetical players would have done in your made up game that isn't real. You account for behaviors of other fictional players that weren't exposed to me in order to judge against me, but can't account for hypothetical behaviors from me because I didn't explicitly display those behaviors in game.

Everything about what you have presented here seems to come from a perspective of "hey, gorf advanced and earned it, now go justify that" rather than "let's take an unbiased look at what happened, and see if we arrive at the same conclusion based on real events".

I'll close with this, a bit of self-awareness. I have a long history of being very abrasive and obtuse (often deliberately) as a mafia player. I know full well that my personality and posting style cause others to misunderstand me and walk away with misguided impressions of me. And that's talking about people in my home community here. So...I get it. It's not /surprising/ to me that MU players don't see past my personality to recognize what levers I'm pulling, especially when I'm intentionally being coy about claiming my role and etc. But, one thing I've kinda picked up over the years of mafia is sometimes it's more effective to sit back and watch someone confidently lean into something they're wrong about, and gently deflect all their points until they look around and realize they're out of ammo and haven't gained an inch of ground, as opposed to full tilt out the gate blasting them with all the reasons they're wrong.

I hope you can see my perspective on this, but if not, no harm done and we're all just in the same place we started anyway.

Yeah it sounds horrible. I think I'd be day 1 lynched every day there due to not drinking the kool aid.

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to be fair to MU I wouldn't recommend myself as a reviewer of the site or the community LOL

I'm saving this thread for a few reasons:

1) I'm on vacation so "lol life"

2) I'm mildly disappointed that Chris and Dels haven't offered thoughts

3) ????

I didn't really do more than skim most of the topic, but a lot of the posts seemed to be trying to beam yourself up for good play in what ended up being a horrendous loss for your team.

Whether that is an accurate summation of the game or not, I don't know. Just seems to be basically the entire flow of this topic.

Hope you had fun playing with them, buddy. Better luck next time on lynching the scummies! = )

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And now I'm closing the topic because last night's decision wasn't made for the best of reasons.

Gg all, Corrik I have no clue why you attempted to summarize the events of the thread without reading it. You failed but better luck next time I guess?

Wait can TCs not close threads any more lol

Well that's embarrassing

Okay back to vacation

I thought you could as long as it hasn't been posted in within the past hour, so by posting in it to say you were closing it you removed the option.
And by my explaining the rules to you the option is removed again for the next hour.
And if you respond to me to acknowledge what i said...

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Forceful_Dragon posted...

I thought you could as long as it hasn't been posted in within the past hour, so by posting in it to say you were closing it you removed the option.
And by my explaining the rules to you the option is removed again for the next hour.
And if you respond to me to acknowledge what i said...

Interesting

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turbopuns3 posted...

2) I'm mildly disappointed that Chris and Dels haven't offered thoughts

sorry, i didn't follow the game closely enough to comment anything more and honestly i just don't have the mental space to think about this in-depth atm

Don't close it, let it live for years.

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