Datisi's University [dead/spec PT]

[Datisi]

many times

[Aristeia]

hehe sorry for insulting you furtive :>

[furtiveglance]

Spoiler: Correct answer

Oh, it's mr wheme park claiming to be the same flavour dannflor fakeclaimed

wait what...

[furtiveglance]

hehe sorry for insulting you furtive :>

I didn't notice

[furtiveglance]

We could have played better for sure, but a lot of town NAs went against us. Not just Dannflor getting checked with all our points, but the RC check on Ranger, the Mason finders confirming each other without ever using their ability, we shot the bottom of a confirmation chain and they flipped 3p with 2 elims the next day....

What a nightmare.

[furtiveglance]

If only we'd eliminated Ranger over CCS on D2.

[RH9]

Wait.
Town is going to win this.

[Dannflor]

I think games with a lot of mechanics demand more from scumplay than just "be townier than the lowest common denominator." I think, for instance, even though I was generally town read my play here simply wasn't that great considering the environment I was in. A better scum player than me actively plays to not get checked and therefore does not die with all the banked SPR. A better scum player than me uses my town cred more effectively to either out investigatives or push miselims that disrupt the building town core. At the very least, I could have anticipated the odds of getting mechanically guiltied at some point and played to give my scum team a ton of town cred if I did flip - which was something I recognized I should be doing by the second day but didn't have the know-how to effectively pull it off.

So, I mean, yeah you can argue the way this played out was unlucky for the scum team or that the setup swung heavily in town's favor due to the nature of how the night actions played out. But based on what I can see of the setup now I don't think this was actually unbalanced or anything. I think we, the scum team, just failed to effectively play to our outs, and combined with the way the setup swung it just looks like we suddenly got crushed. But like, me getting guiltied by Andres doesn't matter if I'm better at distancing, hitting Enchant doesn't matter if the two scummiest slots even before mass claim are scum.

[jjh927]

Interesting that you'd go in that direction, Dannflor, given I'd say you were the practical reason I couldn't get any eliminations through on day 1. And eliminating scum on day 1 is a core facet of my town strategy

Reality is that the scumteam needs to be robust. As an individual you can't work with everyone, and you will end up being suspicious to the people you don't work with. That group will often contain some mechanical threats. Your team as a whole needs to be able to play the odds for that, not you specifically. Sure, there is always more you could have done- but you were basically the only scum player with significant thread influence and you used it effectively.

Like, look at my week 1 readslist

Spoiler:

Town

Aristeia

Dannflor

ina marija
Dusa
GuiltyLion
NorwegianboyEE

Fire Assassin

Also town probably

Ranger
Osuka
camelCasedSnivy
RCEnigma
Sail
KatyKimFanClub
Doctor Drew

There is no null tier


Scum??

furtiveglance

Andresvmb

Titus
Whemestar

How come I didn't get any of the eliminations I wanted? Because you basically led the voting block that consisted of most of my core townreads. And it's not a total coincidence that Andres, being the one town I misplaced, was the dude who guiltied you. Basically, he was in a different sphere of influence from the one you had to operate in to prevent your buddies getting killed. Partly due to him falling behind, because that made it unclear what box he was gonna fall into. Had it not gone like it did, Andres could have been a viable mislim at some point.


But yeah, night actions are informed by dayplay. The only night action that was particularly bad for scum was Andres shooting Dannflor. Everything else was either an inevitable outcome of setup or, in the case of the enchant kill, an avoidable mistake by the scumteam

[furtiveglance]

Cmon JJH.

Enchant was being confirmed by a player who was being confirmed.

That's just smart play from Ranger.

[Enchant]

One mafia friend told me once.


Finding mafia is easy. Harder is staying on course and convincing everyone else.

You can be right, but most likely you die and goldfish memory kicks on.

[jjh927]

You believed word for word the most likely player to lie about mechanics in the game and let that inform your kill for the night

[Ausuka]

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

[Ausuka]

If you have one player who's carrying the team and you also choose to give all your powers to that player, and then that player gets investigated, I don't think town winning is an unreasonable outcome there

[furtiveglance]

It was still unlucky

[jjh927]

Spoiler: Poirotposting

[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.

[Dannflor]

Interesting that you'd go in that direction, Dannflor, given I'd say you were the practical reason I couldn't get any eliminations through on day 1. And eliminating scum on day 1 is a core facet of my town strategy

I mean, I do think I played well D1 in terms of playing to a scum agenda. And night killing you N1 was I think the objectively best kill due to your excellent reads. And, to be clear, I'm not like fishing for compliments on my scum game by being down on myself here. I just am very critical because I'm very competitive and I think this loss was avoidable if I play D2 and onwards differently.

If you have one player who's carrying the team and you also choose to give all your powers to that player, and then that player gets investigated, I don't think town winning is an unreasonable outcome there

And while you can complain this was unlucky and it probably was, it also should just be like expected to happen. Like, the fact that I held all the powers and then didn't especially play around a possible guilty made the impact of an "unlucky" event like the guilty much higher than it would've been.

If you put an elite scum player like LLD, Flavor Leaf, MariaR, RC, etc. in my place here on D2 then scum wins a lot more of the time, because they just have a better understanding of how to do that.

Anyway, this is just my own self reflection and trying not to plateau by blaming this game on dumb luck or the setup. The setup actually looks quite balanced. I think I just don't really have enough experience playing with and around mech as scum and that ended up contributing to what is looking like a loss.

[Enchant]

There's only counter to be guiltied and it to be liked by wielder of PR. And even then it's not guarantee.

[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.

[Dannflor]

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%

[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.

[Dannflor]

it's possible my sample size is limited as i tend to only look at this site

but northsidegal, who won paragon and is widely regarded as one of the best town players ever on this site, has a 70% winrate as town over 50 games

radiantcowbells, who i don't think anyone would dispute as an excellent scum player, played nearly 30 scum games over a 2 year period and lost 1 game

i am talking about the very very upper echelon of players but these numbers have certainly been proven possible