Datisi's University [dead/spec PT]

[Prism]

I know Datisi likes fanfic but does Datisi know that shipping two real people is cringe

for my 15th birthday i got a fanfic that two of my friends wrote about me and some randomass dude from our class. in the fanfic i went full yandere mode, killed the entirety of our class (including the other dude that everyone shipper the randomass dude with) and ended up with randomass dude in the end. i fucking loved it

for one of those friends's 15th birthday (or 16th? who knows) me and the other friend wrote a fanfic of our highschool being turned into a dictatorship by our history professor who then decided to make our class compete in a hunger games-sytle battle royale. the friend for whom that fanfic was ended up placing 2nd, killed by the dude that we shipped him (in a sort of homoerotic scene) with who ended up winning and becoming the dictator's right hand

for the winner's 17th birthday, me and the dude for whom the last fanfic was for made a fanfic that we then turned into a visual novel with 10 different endings. one of the endings featured the two aforementioned guys (that we were shipping together) ending up kind of together but then killing themselves to escape the ship. there was also one short ship scene between the main villain of the VN and one of his minions (our ex-classmate and our current classmate)

for my... 18th? birthday, the three friends mentioned here got together and filmed a short romantic??? video between the two guys we shipped, and edited it and set it over the lana del ray song brooklyn baby as my birthday present

needless to say... no. i don't know that.

Spoiler:

[Prism]

This is maybe slightly tangential but I think mechanics helping town and hurting scum is actively good and not a flaw. Like as a scumteam you gotta deal with clears and guilties

This is the foundational principle of designing mafia games. Without it we'd be running 19-2 mountainous games all day.

[Prism]

Granted you do get some sick twisted exceptions who reject this principle. Datisi, whose brain is like a Rube Goldberg machine made out of hungry rats and gorilla glue, may dabble in the occasional subversion, but usually he stays the course.

[Prism]

I get the perception and drive to better yourself by seeking feedback at every turn, but one of the unfortunate things about mafia is the limited agency. Usually, getting townread by some players means behaving in ways that others will scumread, and the trade-off is a value judgment.

Before its demise, EM was useful as a way to sketch outer limits over large numbers of games. The upper-bound on scum win % was about a 70% winrate, and that was achieved by dodging mechanically unpredictable setups like the plague, which also usually meant playing 55-60% baseline scumwin setups. Mafia is not just bad at consistently rewarding the best players, it is absolutely horrific at it. Perhaps a lot of the fun comes from that difficulty of getting clear feedback.

[Prism]

(That number was also an extreme outlier for several reasons: usually the best player onsite had somewhere between a 57-64% scumwin rate depending on their expertise and setup taste)

[Prism]

i think scum get a lot more agency than individual townies in most games

I would expect an elite town player to win about 75% of their games

I would expect an elite scum player to win close to 100%

Empirically this absolutely does not check out, but it is a useful fiction for driving improvement.

[Prism]

I did decide to look out of curiosity at one player who had substantial overlap on EM and MS, which is Regfan, former paragon and probably the EM GOAT.

His wiki lists a 72% townwin from 2010-2017, whereas his town winrate on EM was usually in the low 60s, so perhaps you could say the forum format is better at rewarding good players, but I suspect the low sample size plays much more of a role here.

[Prism]

MS-EM also poses a great difficulty for cross-comparison in that the in-practice EV for setups on EM was publicly known and extremely robust because there were often 10,000+ games of a single open setup. This is not at all the case on MS, which is closed playground of swingsets. Whether this cuts in favor of the reliability of results for players like RC or against is unknown to me.

[Prism]

Either way the best players usually didn't get to those high win rates by saying "I had little to no meaningful agency to change the result", so you are at least right in approach!

[Prism]

The issue is that is not theoretically possible in many setups unless you extend it to being able to fully control reads over other players.

You can be universally townread, but you will be put into mechanical autoloss with some regularity in all but the most mechanically barebones setups.

[Prism]

(And this is in fact the case in the majority of setups on MS. I mentioned earlier that the 70% scumwin upper bound on EM was accomplished in part because the player picked played almost exclusively setups where the chance of mechanical autoloss was near-zero, so the expectation of 100% win in mountainous does track reality to some extent.)

[Prism]

such a path doesn't exist for town so someone who has mastered the art of making themselves unlimmable will inevitably have a higher winrate as scum

Also it's true that you can't singlehandedly win the game this way as town, but reducing the rate you are miselimmed is the single easiest way to skyrocket your win %!

Which, when combined with the rate of rolling town, is a huge part of why

de facto

trust telling is such a troublesome strategy

[Prism]

Also while I'm really the only one who cares about the EM-MS cross comparison, one of the biggest things MS has that EM didn't for player agency to is that MS doesn't have a Night 0.

For example, one of the most friendly setups for a scum player trying to maximize their rate of solo carrying had a 1/8 chance they would be a mechanically guaranteed Day 1 elimination. Not the best result!

MS has no night zero, and thus your day play always factors into the mechanical decisions that are made.

[Prism]

Okay no one cares but I have to correct the above, the mechanical worst case in the described EM setup was the player is mechanically flipped Day 1 1/56th of the time, much more favorable than 1/8th

[Prism]

What's the rule on no killing in 4p, or is there a mechanical reason that will not happen this game? Forcing a kill on an unclear in 4 way bumps the town win % up to 55%.