The Mafia Discussion Thread

[oldskool]

People just don't want to die, and the best way to do that regardless of which alignment you end up with is to sit there and do as little as possible. I don't know why this is or when it started, but all of a sudden people are really hesitant to debate anything; mainly because, as others have said, disagreements always, always break down into "town vs mafia" because it's just not possible for two town members to have different opinions on anything.

[Hajjhowe]

Maybe people are just getting better at playing as mafia than they are playing as town? It seems like the Mafia's are always getting more sophisticated plans and tactics while the Town's haven't evolved much strategy. Perhaps all these games have just made it a lot easier for people to play as mafia because, well, it IS a lot easier to play as mafia.

[oldskool]

Hells yeah, defense is way easier to play than offense.

See Greatest WCW Mafia for how the Wolfpac stays completely invisible until WFS outs Marcos, and then see how we have to rabidly defend ourselves the remainder of the game. Mafia can play invisibly, the town can't.

Mafia get to strategize in secret their every move; for the town to strategize anything they have to announce it to the entire game.

Mafia knows exactly who to target, who to defend and who to pursue during lynches because they know who's in their group; town has to deduce who's only pretending to play town.

[-A-]

And added to that, we play in a way that's advantageous to the mafia. We allow people to stay quiet and contribute nothing, we get frustrated if a day period goes on longer than a couple of days and we never have more than a handful of people actively getting involved in-thread.

[The Mask of Norro]

Honestly, I thought Webcom III had a damn good town. They operated well together for the most part, the crucial townies used their roles efficiently and it benefited for the town in a huge way. You had GoGo get the CTS role and actually use it really, really damn well by balancing out his meditations and his duels so he'd have a longer reign in the game to collect information. You had De take what was basically a vanilla townie with lynch protection role and turn himself into a power player for the town by working as hard as he could to out potential threats. You had L.C.S. using his roleblock ability very, very nicely, you had TSSTB sacrifice a guaranteed win just so he could develop L.C.S.'s role, you had LittleDaniel fingering almost the entire scum population through his actions, you had SplitSecond get a highly incompetent investigator role and somehow find a way to make it pretty useful... and the list goes on.

They worked really, really well together, and even when the odds seemed stacked against them they managed to pull through in a mix of luck and skill. Sunday Strip was revealed right off but it took over half the game before Gamers United was revealed as the second threat. Then you wound up with remnants from both groups lurking in the town, plus oldskool who very, very nearly overthrew the town at the very end.

I'm actually pretty proud of Webcom III's structure. I think I found a good balance for that particular game in the end, much better than the two games before it anyway.

As for EWB towns... while I admit that most do indeed suck these days, I'm still not too thrilled over RW being offed in Final Fantasy Mafia and immediately going "OH GOD THE TOWN SUCKS HERE JUST FUCKING LOSE ALREADY" over it. It's like I said in there, yes RW could have defended himself but let's look at everything that happened: an investigation wields results that point to RW being the role he appeared to be roleposting as earlier on. If he came back in to defend himself, it could have easily been brushed aside as a fake claim given to him.

At the time, we had no better leads, a random bandwagon would have been the other general option, and actual discussion, though it may have pulled more info to the surface, would ultimately delay the inevitable. Evidence was practically piled against RW there, and while I can't say it was the best move for the town to make as a whole, I can say that declaring the town a failure over one lynch on day two of the game, when all the evidence the town had at the time was pointing to the player they lynched being scum, comes off as somewhat bitter moreso than an actual judgment call.

Edited February 9, 2009 by The Mask of Norro

[-A-]

Yeah, but it's madness to lynch someone when they haven't even had a chance to post. Even if there's nothing they can say to defend themselves. What if RW had come in and said "Look, I'm getting lynched and I understand that because I'd do the same in your position. But I'm town and I'm an investigator and last night I got Slogger as town - at least you can use that info after I'm dead." We probably still would have lynched him, but at least when we discovered he was town we'd know what he was saying was true. There's no point cutting off a potential source of information.

[The Mask of Norro]

But then therein lies the dilemma: we now have a confirmed townie, which means the mob targets them during the night and we lose what could be a potentially good town role. An investigator who reveals any townies upon their death at the beginning of the game is doing the wrong thing, honestly :\

But that's just one scenario, I know there could be several others, the fact still is that yes, having RW come in to post may have brought to light some more information, but it's doubtful it would have stopped the lynch on him, and if anything some of the information he could have given could have just as easily been as beneficial as it could have been detrimental to the town.

[oldskool]

Games are too fucking big. There, I said it. When you have 30+ in a game, it's way too easy for 4-5 people to do enough talking to make the other 25 not want to say anything, and it's way too easy to slip through the cracks in a game that size as even inactivity can be explained away with "I didn't feel like reading 10 pages of the same 5 people blathering on".

As a result I am seriously considering breaking Punch Out Mafia into 2 Small games.

[The Mask of Norro]

Larger games are a fine line to tread, honestly. Webcom's have worked fairly well, MythMaf drug on, and others that have attempted it have had varying success.

It's difficult because you have to find ways to make people want to get involved while not overpowering anyone to where the sides become unbalance. It's possible, but it is difficult, yeah.

[-A-]

The thing with the big games is that's it's all about the endgame. The first couple of days are a total drag, the middle game is basically a case of a few people dominating conversation, but then when endgame comes you've got loads of information to sift through and you can have your fun. With small games, the first day's still a write-off, but you can actually keep almost everyone involved in the middle game and endgame is always fun.

[TEOL]

But then therein lies the dilemma: we now have a confirmed townie, which means the mob targets them during the night and we lose what could be a potentially good town role. An investigator who reveals any townies upon their death at the beginning of the game is doing the wrong thing, honestly :\

An investigator who reveals any results, town or mafia, at the beginning of the game is doing the wrong thing, as I apparently haven't said enough times now.

[-A-]

Even if you're about to die on Day 1? Say you're in exactly the position I outlined above - you've been investigated as a feasible scum character that you've unfortunately been roleposting in a similar fashion to. You're a few votes away from being lynched, but you investigated Slogger last night and found him to be town. What do you do? If you reveal your result then maybe the mafia will night-kill Slogger. If you don't reveal your result, they'll night-kill Pesci or GoGo or someone.

[The Mask of Norro]

But that brings into the question: what if Slogger is the doctor? Then, not only does the town lose an investigator, but they also lose the doctor.

Players who are better at mafia games more often don't necessarily give more value to the town than players who've stumbled along the way many times. Those stumblers are still bound to get a good role every now and then, and if the investigator outs them as a townie and the mob decides to take out the one confirmed townie that the town has, and that townie turns out to be very important to the town, then the investigator has made a mistake.

[-A-]

But what if the other person the mafia decide to kill (Pesci or GoGo, in my example) is the doctor and you've just saved him? You have no reason to suspect that any one person is more or less likely to be the doctor - the mafia get a kill regardless, there's no difference in probability, so you don't need to take that into account. The investigator is gone already either way, so you can remove that from your thinking.

If you're in a game where there are multiple mafias, then maybe you'd prefer to slightly increase the chances of them cross-killing (by not revealing information) but in a single-mafia game it makes no difference and all you can go on is player skill. A townie is going to die either way and you have a way of affecting who it might be. All being well, everyone has an even chance of having a good role, so 'he could have a good/bad role' isn't something you need to consider. All you can make a judgement on is relative worth to the town.

[The Mask of Norro]

But, even that being said, it's still the investigator putting the fate of another townie in his own hands. At this point, IF that townie is worthless, then great, the mob wastes a kill to take down a confirmed townie and the investigator/doctor/what have you lives another night. If the townie is not, then it could easily set the town back quite considerably, especially if it's earlier into the game.

Again, there are numerous ways that these scenarios can go, but it all comes back to the investigator further endangering a fellow town member. The mob is more likely to kill a confirmed townie so they can create confusion among the town, and unless there are better leads for the mob to follow (i.e. other power roles reveal themselves), most of the time they'll go for the guy that the town can now count on being clean.

At most, they might wait a night in case a protector might be on that townie, but otherwise that person's now in their sights when before he or she might not have been. Really, this whole argument is based on hypothesis, like "well if it was this way then ___" or "but if it's this way then ___", which basically means this is going to go 'round in circles

[Your Mom]

I try to read this kind of stuff to improve my game a bit, but this just gives me a headache

[oldskool]

tl;dr: If you're an investigator and about to be lynched, and you can out a townie you've investigated, only do so if you're a) sure the townie is expendable, or b) sure there is a protector townie out there to cover your/his ass.

Entirely unrelated aside: Punch Out Mafia is now broken into a 12-player Mike Tyson's Punchout Mafia, and a 17-player Super Punch Out Mafia. This leaves me with 3 games (including the KotH experiment game) I could have on the list, but I have no idea which one to actually have RW put on the list. Somebody needs to assist me in the matter, as I don't think a poll thread is applicable to determine whether to be #15 on the medium list or #7 on the small list.

Edited February 9, 2009 by oldskool

[TEOL]

The thing with the big games is that's it's all about the endgame. The first couple of days are a total drag, the middle game is basically a case of a few people dominating conversation, but then when endgame comes you've got loads of information to sift through and you can have your fun. With small games, the first day's still a write-off, but you can actually keep almost everyone involved in the middle game and endgame is always fun.

Saying 'you have to get to the end in order to have fun' isn't exactly helping the survival vs. victory debate.

[-A-]

I'm sure it won't, but it's the truth. The best way to solve the problem of people coasting would be for everyone to accept pressure votes rather than saying 'LOL, DO YOU THINK THEY'RE JUST GOING TO SAY THEY'RE MAFIA?' It's a more effective way to improve the games if we make the early game more active rather than deluding ourselves into thinking that as things stand the first few days are great fun. They aren't.

Oldskool - just run them both simultaneously like MPH did with Avengers. As long as no-one's playing in both games it should be OK.

[oldskool]

There's a list now, I can't hog two spots at once