DO NOT READ THIS THREAD IF YOU ARE IN THE GAME.
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OK, so feel free to discuss the game here, but if you are spoiled, do not mention any “spoiled” info.
This thread is purely for discussing, critiquing, predicting, and having fun for those not currently in the Wild West Mafia game.
Anyone want to sign-up to be a sub? I could use a few. :)**
I’d rather be spoiled. can you arrange that?
Scuba has learned!
I think it’ll be a long time before anyone can successfully make the “but there must be X mafia” argument again.
I agree with NAF’s sentiment concerning an active Vig. The Town needs to keep a stiff upper lip and be prepared to take losses for the good of the many.
I’m happy to see the players are at least making noises against editing. Post editing can permit secret communication between players, with proper timing. I’d prefer to avoid such gimmickry.
Yes I have, you Scummy MacScu–
Oh right, that game ended. Well played, old boy.
You made an excellent abuse of logic in that game. Or more likely, we the Town abused logic and handed Scum the win. As I recall, Chronos was the first to embrace the faulty logic that doomed us at the end.
I’ll be very wary of relying on the mod’s fairness in SS Insipid.
It’s like the old saying, generals are always prepared to fight the last war.
The whole editing thing shouldn’t be an issue at all, since it can be solved so simply and easily by Town just not editing in the first place. If you don’t want Scum jumping on easy procedural bandwagons, then don’t edit.
And on the topic of voluntary vigs, NAF is wrong. The lynch on Day 1, despite probably hitting a Townie, is acceptable, since it generates a lot of information, not just the alignment of the corpse, but also all of the votes cast and the reasons justifying them. Vig hits, on the other hand, don’t leave a paper trail. If, as is likely, the Vig hits a Townie, then Town hasn’t gained anything at all: It does almost no good to learn someone was a Townie after the fact. And the business about giving Town a target-rich environment is complete bull: That’s the sort of thing you joke about when you know you’re really in a bad position, not actually something to be desired if it’s avoidable.
Well, since I haven’t got a chance to read the spoiler thread yet (I’ve only read the last game), I’ll go ahead and comment here.
I thought the last time I heard from NAF, he didn’t think a first day vig kill was a good idea. Am I wrong?
You may be right. I recently did a detailed analysis in the current off-board game Undying War before I died. I think I convinced him there that an active Vig is a net positive to the Town in a typical game. I can cross-post the argument here, if there’s interest.
You can be sure I think I’m being fair, but I balance games differently than most designers do. (I don’t use a point system, but instead look for can’t-fail strategies.)
Well, others came to the conclusion before me that we probably had four Scum, but I might have been the first to treat it as a certainty. Still, even if it wasn’t certain, I think it was a good enough bet to justify voting based on it. I think we were pretty much sunk as soon as we had the tiebreaker-- If we had known that Diver (or Jimmy, if the tie had gone the other way) was innocent, then we’d have been forced off the four-Scum idea. And yes, we all knew that ties would be bad, but we didn’t know it’d be that bad.
Fellow observers, I’ve got an idea for a visual aid to assist me in keeping things straight for these Mafia games and I wanted to get your input. I’m more of a visual kind of guy and it’s hard for me at times to take all this linear textual data and parse it into something I can use. I’m also more of a big picture kind of guy than a minutiae guy. So I’ve got this idea for creating a matrix representing relationships between players. If you’ve ever played Civilization, it would be similar to the graphical representation of the diplomatic relationships between civilizataions. See an example here
What I envision would be a circular matrix listing all the players at the start of the game. As the game progresses, I would draw in color coded lines representing different types of interactions. For instance, if Player A votes for Player B (even if the vote doesn’t stay there for long) there would be a thin red line drawn between the two. More votes makes the line thicker indicating a stronger relation. I need help thinking of the types of interactions that can occur and how to group them together into a meaningful matrix.
On first thought, I would group together voting, smudging or FOSing a player. Another group might include defending a player, voting to save a player from lynch. I might consider another group for agreeing with an argument AND one for disagreeing, but those could also be integrated into the other group. I’m drawing a blank on other meaningful interactions.
I would hope that over time, meaningful patterns might emerge. For instance, it may become apparently that Player A and Player C have had virtually NO interactions together. This might mean they are scum or a mason group trying to avoid any connections.
Thoughts?
An interesting idea, certainly: When I play Civ, I know that I often look for clear “sides” in that spiderweb, based on who’s at war with whom and the like, and it does usually shake out into two pretty clear sides. But I fear that in a typical game, you’d start off with too many players to be able to make any sense of it: The eight nations in a typical Civ game looks to me to be stretching the graph to its limit, much less 17 or 18.
Still, couldn’t hurt to try it. You would also want to distinguish interactions based on (claimed) certainty from the others, like “I’m a detective and I know from my investigations that USCDiver is Town” is a lot more meaningful than “I think that USCDiver is doing a good job of hunting Scum, so I think he’s probably Town”. You might also want to include some indication of direction: Even if I say I’m sure you’re Town, you might not be sure I’m Town.
True, but as the game progresses, some players will be eliminated, making their involvement less important and the strengths of their connections will be minimal. Especially those killed in the early game.
I think confirmation would be handled separately than the interactions, except in the case of a player defending another. I’d probably color code the players’ names to indicated which side they belong to (after confirmation/death) and which side I ‘think’ they belong to. Good point about the directionality of the information stream. Directional indication could be very important, although the relationship itself is probably more important in the big scheme of things. I’m not sure how I’d implement directionality, maybe an arrow on either end of the line with the size used to indicate strength of the interaction, instead of the line thickness itself.
Back to the Game:
Has Mahaloth said anything about Scum being able to discuss strategy off board during the Day? I know in many of the other games I’ve played, that has been expressly prohibited and it makes a big difference. Scum will have to plan strategy before Dawn and think on their feet if the situation changes.
It also means a Day 1 start means the Scum haven’t had any chance to talk or discuss their roles or general strategy. In this game it doesn’t seem to apply though, since we had a Night 0 and presumably scum could converse then.
Can I ask what PIS stands for? It keeps coming up in reference to that one comment of Tom Scud’s.
Perfect Information Syndrome. It happens when a players knows more than a vanilla townie should know and they make a slip in a post that indicates such. PIS can occur in Scum, Masons, Detectives etc.
Man, I hope Meeko doesn’t have a power role again. He really needs to go away sooner rather than later in these games.
Hrm. I understand everyone’s frustration with meeko. Honestly, just reading along I’m feeling it too but it doesn’t seem in the spirit of the game to ask for him to be subbed out if he doesn’t want to be.
Yes, he’s difficult to understand and disruptive but he’s at least trying to play the game as best he can (as far as I can tell). It seems like they’re punishing him for being bad at mafia and well… how’s he supposed to improve if they won’t let him play?
That’s the problem though. It’s not just that he’s bad at Mafia, he’s distracting to Town and clearly helped Scum to victory in the two games he’s played in. And there hasn’t been any improvement in his play.
Eh, it’s Mafia. Dealing with players who play differently than you is part of the game. If you think someone is scum, vote for them and try to get others to vote them. Requesting that the moderator sub out someone who’s actively playing is simply rude.
Of course, I’d be voting for Meeko. peekercpa and I used to clash over similar issues. I believe players intentionally playing in an anti-Town manner need to be lynched, if only to make it harder for scum.
