Team Mafia 2015 Winners: Young and Beautiful

[Psyche]

that is gross ut wash your hands

[Tammy]

I don't mean to pick on you Tammy but it's extremely discouraging to continue to see comments about how my team doesn't deserve the win because we didn't try hard enough or didn't work together as a team enough or aren't good enough players because that's all insulting and not true. I gave it my all for the game I played and I know my teammates did too. And we worked hard on this whether it translated well or not.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound insulting to you or anyone else, and maybe my frustrations with things that had nothing to do with mafia yesterday impacted my response and made it seem like I'm mad that you guys won. I don't think you're bad players at all. I don't know much about psyche or wgeurts, but I very much like playing with you and espeonage. Maybe I'm unfairly extending psyche and espionage's not doing stuff in their games to you guys; I didn't read all the games, as I myself was a terrible teammate this go around due to being busy.

I also in part feel bad because our mistake in the normal cost two other teams the win, and when I look at that game - as it's the one I spent the most time with as the rest of us died so early - Pieguy put her heart and soul in that game, and I feel bad that our mistake cost that team the possible win. (and when I compared it to things like espeonage not wanting to boon singer because he thought she was scum even after she vigged titus because he clearly wasn't reading, it bums me out more.) But that really is just one instance and I don't know how the rest of your team played, and I don't know what the other team was like that was up for a win if we had gotten it right in the normal.

Congratulations on your win, and I'm sorry for being grumpy.

[Titus]

There are teams with longer PTs, but it's not like Young and Beautiful did nothing: they had 30 pages worth of posts, which is 2 fewer than The Cockettes, 2 more than Indecisive (which were the other two teams that had a chance of winning going into MN's lylo).

Blue, Meth, Blade had 50 pages, which is the most.

Is anyone surprised by this?

[Psyche]

sometimes when you make a big effort to do everything you end up doing very little

[Untrod Tripod]

that is gross ut wash your hands

you're not my mom

[xRECKONERx]

our PT was long but mostly spam

[xRECKONERx]

also REALLY disappointed we didn't get to do our plan

our plan was that all four of us were going to start singing Katy Perry's "Firework" in tandem across all four games

but then we forgot so UT was like "we need a case on gamma" and we were like "firework"?

then he started it too early so I panicked and rushed out the best case I could before he finished

[Untrod Tripod]

I regret nothing

[shos]

Our PT had LOADS of content of all games lol
I loved working with my team. This was great.

[SleepyKrew]

Oh shit yeah the firework case was awesome

[Untrod Tripod]

except it was wrong, but you know

style over substance

[SleepyKrew]

I regret nothing

[Untrod Tripod]

shh I'm busy being trash

[pirate mollie]

congratulations young and beautiful!

[quadz08]

For what it's worth - I enjoyed moderating for Team Mafia this year, and I think it's a fun thing the community does, but I don't think I'll be participating in the future again. This has solidified my previous opinion that determining a "best player" or "best team of players" is functionally impossible by any objective standard, and I'm not particularly interested in being involved in debates about how best to perform an impossible task. I am also not interested in being involved in a subjective effort for the same (hence my never having participated in the Scummies committee).

Congratulations to the winners, and <3 to everyone who participated, particularly my fellow mods.

[Nexus]

The way people have reacted is the worst bit about this.

The games themselves were fun, though.

[Untrod Tripod]

The games themselves were fun, though.

the large theme was many things

fun was not necessarily one of them

[Nexus]

By the games.

I meant my game.

I didn't read any of the others.

[Save The Dragons]

From the standpoint of the mini normal, I feel some of the town performed better than some of the scum so rewarding the scum for winning isn't necessarily rewarding the best play (no offense to anyone in the game, but I don't think everyone contributed equally to their side winning).

One thing that might be a little more fair is to have the mods rank each player based on contribution to their wincon and then find the team with the lowest score. That could be pretty subjective though, and hard to do.

I also personally don't see why Psyche can't join in on the benefits of his team's win. With those two rulings, basically you're telling me next time in team mafia if life gets too hectic I should just prod dodge and hope my side wins the game. The downside being there's only 4 slots so don't give him the slot but you could still give him the banner, in my opinion.

I haven't read most of the other games so I'm not commenting for or against Y and B's win; I'm not trying to cheapen that nor do I think that my team (no offense, but partially due to me anyway) would win in any sort of re-tabulation.

Anyway, congrats on the win. Thanks for modding my game, Nexus, thanks zoraster, thanks mods. Team mafia was fun

[Shinobi]

I could have replaced in for the winners. Bleh.

[pirate mollie]

I don't feel like this win was subjective in any way and I don't particularly get the butthurt surrounding the winners.

some players played outstanding for their teams and there is no denying that.

some teams were a million times more cohesive than others and probs worked better as a unit than the other teams.

wguerts played his little heart out in the nightless game.

tboner was pretty town until he got apathetic and then was pretty town. AND WAS TOWN.

espo

tried

even tho he was knocked off course by a couple of things.

anen left a trail that led to ces and ces cldn't work his way out of it.

I don't feel bad losing to them.

I don't feel like any1 else shld either.

isn't post game supposed to be where we all get along?

can we plz get back to looking at the more important things like reggie and emp spent tokens on rolling town and somehow managed not to only to play outstanding scumgames?

or how ut was obvscum regardless of his role pm?

or how psyche wants the spoils even tho he replaced out?

THESE ARE IMPORTANT THINGS PPLE

[Aneninen]

Yet again, thanks everyone for modding and playing! And thanks for the greetings too.

I'll write a long post about my thoughts, so it's spoilered.

Spoiler: As for winning...

Yes, most competition wins are questionable. But so are the Olympic Games, the Football World Cup, the Formula1, whatever. Someone or a team wins in the end, and it depends on many things. Small decisions, current concentration, whatever. But does it mean that all the others were bad? Of course not. Germany won the FootBall World Cup last year and it's clear that they were the best. (Not only because I'm a fan, lol.) Four years before, Spain won. Were they the best team? Who knows? They were good but so were quite a couple of other teams. (They were surely better than Germany, unfortunately.) Eight years before, Italy. Wellshyt. I don't think they deserved it at all, but they still won.

Does it have to do anything with Mafia?
A lot.
It's about plenty of things. Let me name you some.

IRL issues. Something terrible/tiring/important/etc. happens and you lose focus or you have to replace out. Even a bad day could lead to a horrible post and bang, you're history.

Focus. Just as the previous. Everyone is dedicated to win but what if someone reads and posts less for a time because of being busy, whereas someone else has an unexpected free evening to play?

Scumteams. Some players can work together as a scumteam like a dream, while others simply "don't feel each other", even if each of them are good at being scum... normally.

Meta, previous experience, whatever. Eg. one single player posting "I know him/her well and that's his/her townplay", convincing others ...and a scum gets a couple of Days. Or a town gets mislynched.

Role distrubution. Wellshyt. Gods be merciful to the town if I draw town-Vig. ^_^ In other words: what if that PR had gone to someone else...?

Butterflies. Not only lucky events like pressurizing a scum early-Day1 or Nightkilling a PR Night1. It's more. Someone is spared at Night because he/she's misreading the whole game... but then a team member dies in another game, starts reading and guesses the obvtown-looking scum right...

I think Trojan's analogy about Bridge nails it. (I used to play Bridge a lot long ago.) 689.

Also, I'm unwilling to feel bad just because we won.
Mostly because I think if another team had won, some players would be upset about it too. Maybe other players, but the story would be the same.
(Plus, something else. We'd known the rules before Team Mafia started. I know it's easy to say but I wouldn't be upset if anyone else had won. Even if I know that it annoys a couple of players now. To tell the truth, I was just as annoyed when I saw the results of the Setup Competition. A 4th place for Matrix 14?! But I'd worked a lot on it! After getting known the details via PM I understood that I had missed the rules for getting points. Eigh, "Originality" had a score too, aaaand Matrix 14 is everything but original, lol.)

Could we have a "more objective" system. Well yes........ if there were, say, 3 games for each player, detailed scoring for team efforts, spectacular actions, remaining members of a team, blah, blah. It would be horrible to handle it and there might be other issues, I suppose.

Nevertheless, I learnt a lot from my game and from the games I read too, and I think this is true for many of us.

Spoiler: As for the mechanics...

Even if I arrived later, I read everything carefully. (Actually that wasn't a lie. I was catching up with my game, with the Team QT and with the rules at the same time.)

(1) The skeleton of the system is superb! 6 games, 4 for each teams.

The Large is obvious. I'd prefer something less complicated. (It took ages to understand the mechanics when I started reading it, although I'm not the smartest one on the field...)

I'm not sure whether the White Flag is the most suitable for an Open, I'd choose something else.
The Normal/Closed and the Theme are both great. (I especially enjoyed the Theme flavour!)
The Vanilla Nightless is a bit questionable. Maybe it was in because of containing 12 players but eh. (Especially since there were two Vanilla games.) It could be replaced with a "Special Open". I mean a Setup designed especially for the Team Mafia, but it works as an open: all roles and mechanics are known pre-game. Or... there may be a Bastard – and by this, I mean a lot of unusual roles, but still a balanced game. Or a U-Pick?
I know nothing about Twin Trap (I didn't read that at all) but a Micro is a need, I suppose.


(2) The token system / balance issues.

Using tokens for getting into games is great.

Using them for getting a certain alignment seems to be a bit icky.
4 games were won by the town and 2 by the scums, which is not an entirely imbalanced result. Still, games might be a very little bit scumsided, though. Only because of the following: as Team Mafia progresses, more and more players start focusing on the ongoing games. Normally, only the players are there to spot a scumslip or a blatant contradiction. But, in the end there are a lot of players vulture-ing around very few games. So, scums need to fight an uphill battle because of this. And we all know that town may miss obvious slips and things like those sometimes...

Maybe an alignment token system combined with a PR system could be useful (after getting the alignment you can spend some tokens on getting PRs). Although there are players (including me) who actually like being Vanilla Townie, and it may be a bit complicated too. So maybe this part could be left out.


(3) Replacement issues.

Maybe some of you might think that I shouldn't talk about this as a replacement, but excuse me, I still have thoughts.

First of all. Psyche, don't take it as an offence, but I don't think players replacing out should get any prize. If it ever happened, that would create a terrible practice.
Imagine this situation: I draw scum, screw everything up on Page3 or so, and I replace out because of "erm, IRL issues, sorry everyone". My replacement turns the tide and it's a scum win. Frankly, would I deserve anything for that? (Beside a pooping pigeon?) Generally speaking, if this could happen, everyone who f-cked up the game would leave because it would be a winning strategy. That would mean even more replacements.

However, making the teams find replacements causes a bit of chaos (who arrives and when?), and... unpredictable events. As it was pointed out by someone before (sorry, I don't remember!), it's terrible for the scum if a lurky-unfocused-whatever player leaves and an enthousiastic, dig-up-everything player replaces in. And it's another factor hindering the scums...

In my opinion, a replacement pool could be created alongside with the games going on. The list would be public (just as in any of the queue threads), so everyone could see who are on the list.
And at this point it forks.
– either the team could choose anyone from the list (but they must choose from the list!)
– or each player willing to replace in gets some tokens and they could put them on the teams they prefer. Whenever someone leaves, the player with the most token on the team in need of a replacement gets in. (If it's a draw, randomized.)
The latter one may cause some issues near to end. Everyone would eagerly join a team close to win. But, replacement lists could be closed earlier.

(4) Winning, ending.

I don't think we could have a better winning condition than the amount of won games.
However, there might be additional prizes for
– the best scum
– the best town
– the best teamwork
– and maybe the best replacement?

Also, and it has nothing to do with Team Mafia, but there should be an annual Leonardo DiCaprio prize too, for the player who got the most nomination in a year without getting anything.

Thanks for reading!

[vezokpiraka]

I don't know guys.

I feel like I've won my game and bbmolla won his game.

Sonic tried his best in the nightless and it was really close, but ooba and mollie were A++ replacements.

Shos tried his best in mod error, but GI decided he didn't really want to play.

[zoraster]

I don't think I'll do game/side selection in the same manner next time. What it improved in achieving certain design goals, it made worse by increasing how complicated it was.

Anyway, to those saying they'll play (or not play) next year, it won't be until 2017 earliest (honestly, I thought the 3 year turnaround was pretty good, but 2 years might be good too). I think people's stamina and interest for this type of thing is reduced if it's done too often, not to mention this is a pretty big undertaking for me, and it means that for about 6 months I don't get to run any other games that I want to run.

[Untrod Tripod]

I don't think I'll do game/side selection in the same manner next time. What it improved in achieving certain design goals, it made worse by increasing how complicated it was.

you could just assign 4 games/roles to a team and let them assign amongst themselves

isn't that what it was last time?