This is the point where I intentionally/unintentionally (or rather, try not to but probably do so anyways) play the "I've been on break and haven't touched this game as a player in nearly 9 months. I'm rusty!" card. I'm...going to try my damnedest to not play that card (even though it's empirically true; I only really came back because the first time I decided to click on my link to MS coincided with Bulb's Ikaruga game finally going into sign-ups, and prior to that there was a 5-6 month span from early-mid January to Jun where I pretty much never visited the site once).
That being said, making use of the early game in Mafia is not my strong suit. RVS is a bit too disjointed for me and it's very easy to apply the reason of nonsensicalness to everything you do as a potential smokescreen for scummy behavior that would be caught and questioned within 2-3 posts were it, say, D4 on page 50 (not to say that applies here, but I hope you get what I mean). I work better when the game is at a point where...well, it's a little hard to explain, but it's basically the point where I can begin to somewhat apply a logical argument to things. "Player X did Y because of Z reasons." "Player A voted B because of C reaction". I can see those arguments, I can look back at the thread, and I can understand how somebody did something and thus agree or disagree with it. Granted, I'd probably agree more that disagree if the pure logic behind it was good without looking deeper into how it's presented and whatnot, but that's something I need to work on both in-game and in RL, but yeah. Ideally that'd probably be around page 15 at the earliest, page...oh, 20/25 at the latest, though it may have to be at page 10, even, depending on how fast RVS can be considered "over" and how soon it goes from harping about supposed reasons in RVS to discussion on actual game-relevant topics that either come from RVS or from new points raised. My content from pages 1-5 or 6 (or 7) may not be overly useful because at that point I'm not at a position where I can reliably extract information and then present my views correctly. Or because I simply can't express the way I feel because I know what it feels like to me but I don't know how to put it into words that others will understand. Or simply because the way I play is probably too outdated and I'm ashamedly slow at picking up the new way of doing things.
This also ties into my new aversion to larges, both because D1's tend to get really inflated and because the sheer number of posters is so high that I get clogged with
pages
of stuff I have to readthrough due to my schedule (working from 8-9 in the morning to 2 or 4 in the afternoon, maybe an hour or two at home for lunch and spare time, then a 30 min. drive to Columbia, then I'm either going directly to class or I'm lucky to be having 7:45 classes like I have this term, then another 30 min. drive back, and then I'm trying to cram in some last-minute stuff before I try to go to bed at 11 which almost never happens and I get sidetracked and stay up till midnight. Yeah, I have consistency issues <_<). This in turn leads to me either skimming a large portion of that, and thus potentially missing an important event such as a claim or the start of relevant discussion, or I have to do what I'm (most embarrassingly, really) (in)famous for: Wallposts with lots of quotes, exacerbated by my tendency to try and find something to talk about in every post I see because I try to work from where I left off to where everyone is, and I don't often know what exactly is the most pressing topic so I gotta comment on
most
all of it. Might be a bad habit I do, but I'd also like to honestly avoid trying to sound like I'm parroting somebody if I happen to voice an opinion that's almost the exact same as what someone else says in page 7 of my catchup when I'm on page 2.
The fact of the matter is, I have a
lot
of baggage from when I first stopped playing that I may not have completely rid myself of now that I'm tentatively re-entering the pool of players. This game is really a bit of a learning game for me because I want to try to be some of the things that Mastin has posted about because I understand that she makes a whole lot of sense and I want to be a similar kind of person. That may take me forever, but I'm going to try regardless.
...That took longer than I thought to write (though lifting my hands from the keys to start articulating via my hands to people who can't see that
anyways
doesn't help), but the TL;DR version if you REALLY just want the essence of this (even though I think you should read it all anyways) is:
I'm going to get there. And even if I don't this game, it'll be experience for me next time. My early game isn't the best, and even if I try to truss it as better than it is I think even I realize that I'm only fooling myself and not everyone else.
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