Stargate SG1 - game thread

[Linus]

As I said in the zombie board, it gets frustrating when literally anything you post - as well as if you don't post - is considered a "scum tell."

Personally, I find your participation very frustrating not because I think you give off spurious scum tells, but you because you practically never give off town tells. When I ask myself questions such as "Would MattShizzle's contributions be hard for him to fake as scum?" the answer is practically always "No!" on the basis that they are so minimalistic.

[charlou]

As I said in the zombie board, it gets frustrating when literally anything you post - as well as if you don't post - is considered a "scum tell."

Personally, I find your participation very frustrating not because I think you give off spurious scum tells, but you because you practically never give off town tells. When I ask myself questions such as "Would MattShizzle's contributions be hard for him to fake as scum?" the answer is practically always "No!" on the basis that they are so minimalistic.

In other words .. .post more Matt ... and fear not .. ratz mafia isn't the tribulation it is at TR.

Really, please stop trying to pattern match. Raven is good at it. Not too many others are to be frank. Focus on solid tells.

Quite agree with the many folks who try to pattern match. I think that pattern matching is an advanced technique that many players aren't terribly good at because it takes a particular person to be effective, and its not easily taught. Folks should focus on objective scum tells until their games get solid.

I'm a bit skeptical about the usefulness of simple, depersonalized ("objective") scum tells such as reverse cheerleading, revenge voting, etc. They are among the easiest things to argue about in the game thread, but they don't seem to me to be the most informative in terms of alignment. Do you really rely on such tells as much as your game thread posts suggests?

Both the TR and Ratz communities have very heterogenous communities in that expectations of others' play is very personalized (e.g. some players get away with 2 posts/day, others don't; some players get away with being very inattentive, others don't; etc.) in a way that I think forces reliance on personalized "tells". The closest I've come to depersonalized inferences are probably looking back at the end-of-day vote counts from previous days (day 1 non-voters here at Ratz are annoying confounders, though) and the 2nd closest would be interaction reads of player pairs that I take to decrease the odds for some of scum-scum, scum-town, town-scum, town-town.

The closest I came to depersonalised game play was my first game at the mafiascum site ... a combination of noob induction by fire and .. well that's about it really .. hmmm .. should go back there for a game some time. ...

[oblivion]

yeah I agree re completely depersonalized tells.

My game started kind of from the opposite corner, though. Luis Garcia thought I nearly ruined TR mafia for a few months, because people somehow interpreted what I was doing as "everything is a tell, therefore nothing is a tell". tell-based mafia wasn't happening at all there for a while, and town sucked.

I describe what I do as "relative tells". It's part pattern matching, and it's part tell-based, but not really objective tells. It's a cumulative thing. Over the course of the game, players do stuff that is objectively pro-town or pro-scum. but there is also a lot of stuff that may look one or the other at first blush, but as the game progresses and you learn more, you can see how that action appears in the light of an uninformed player or an informed one.

In this endgame, I thought charlou had an excellent suggestion, going back and re-reading the previous two days thinking of each player as scum and as town and seeing how their actions hold up from those perspectives. That's kind of what I do, but it's on the fly and sketchy. Doing it again occasionally especially near endgame will sometimes either solidify my suspicions or make me realize I'm on the wrong track.

[oblivion]

I tend to forget about the vengeful townie role, and I'm way more likely to go with a bomb, whether self-aware or not. The vengeful townie, instead of killing either the person to kill them (NK, or hammer) or randomly killing someone on their bandwagon, gets to decide who to kill, which I think makes the role more interesting to play. It's also a town special that doesn't want to out - and doesn't want to survive too long. I hope Feck and Mantis enjoyed the role and I'd like to see vengeful townies turn up more often in game designs, including mine.

[Linus]

I tend to forget about the vengeful townie role, and I'm way more likely to go with a bomb, whether self-aware or not. The vengeful townie, instead of killing either the person to kill them (NK, or hammer) or randomly killing someone on their bandwagon, gets to decide who to kill, which I think makes the role more interesting to play. It's also a town special that doesn't want to out - and doesn't want to survive too long. I hope Feck and Mantis enjoyed the role and I'd like to see vengeful townies turn up more often in game designs, including mine.

Yeah, it seems like a nice alternative to a vig in games that are big enough to need extra kills. I like that it doesn't give town a semi-cleared/cleared player.

[oblivion]

One other thing...the bodyguard role. When Charlou posted a link to the mafiascum wiki for that role and I read it my reaction was "what...the...fuck". the role description has changed a lot. I went back and looked at the history, and found that the wiki article had undergone a major rewrite in 2009. I don't like the random aspects that can be added to that role, but otherwise I've used it as a single-shot protector, a protector who dies in place of the intended kill, and as a personally assigned protector to another role, as well as the same type of protector as a doctor. I was really surprised to read that this version of bodyguard has "fallen into disuse". Maybe it has at mafiascum. But, it's alive and well in other venues that play mafia.

I think this is the second time that I've learned that a role I sometimes use has been redefined at mafiascum.net. 'm not going to check with them every time I design a game, so I suggest using a grain of salt regarding their write-ups. Or maybe have a look at the history page for a role you're checking on, too.

[Linus]

The closest I came to depersonalised game play was my first game at the mafiascum site ... a combination of noob induction by fire and .. well that's about it really .. hmmm .. should go back there for a game some time. ...

Sorry to go off-topic but how was play at the Mafiascum site compared to TR/Ratz?

[amok]

Quite a few things surprised me in the game.

RC being Scum, of course (I forgot that keyboard remark - ha!). I was convinced by his being against the voting strategy for my night kills. It made sense because it did allow Scum to plan their own actions around that. I felt I had to do it, though, because Town would have no reason to trust me otherwise.

I'm also still surprised he could do two actions on the night Ksen and Higgs were killed.

Also that Zigmen and Ksen didn't drop clues trying to find one another. I wouldn't have had that self-control, to be honest.

My lynch was correct. I'd have voted Charlou (or maybe Diva) the last day, too, so the outcome would have been the same.

Thanks again for the game, Oblivion. I apologize for being rude to Bilirubin.

[charlou]

Well, amok, after the previous game I was under the misapprehension that you were teh zen example of mafia mastery ...

... kinda happy that delusion was dragged, kicking and screaming, to its rightful demise.

[oblivion]

Amok, you weren't rude.

A long time ago, I remember a player assumed that a scum special wouldn't be able to make kills as well as do their other special action. I've never played a game where scum players were under such a restriction. Is that how it works at ratskep?

[amok]

Amok, you weren't rude.

A long time ago, I remember a player assumed that a scum special wouldn't be able to make kills as well as do their other special action. I've never played a game where scum players were under such a restriction. Is that how it works at ratskep?

As far as I know, but I might just be assuming. In the last game I played there I was Scum (and ironically a Bus Driver!), and we could chose one or the other for our night actions. But that might just have been that particular game. I can't recall if there were other games when a last surviving Scum also had another ability.

[MattShizzle]

Isn't mafiascum really stupid? Like they actually use things like "3rd on a vote" as scum tells?

[charlou]

The closest I came to depersonalised game play was my first game at the mafiascum site ... a combination of noob induction by fire and .. well that's about it really .. hmmm .. should go back there for a game some time. ...

Sorry to go off-topic but how was play at the Mafiascum site compared to TR/Ratz?

I was curious about the new mafia here at ratz and was interested in playing, but could not get what it was about ... my biggest issue was 'where the fuck is the game board' ... I read game posts, but wondered where this game players were talking about was actually being played ... I couldn't grasp that the posts I was reading WAS the game

... so I asked and someone gave me the mafiascum link ... I had a bit of a look around ... got the impression that it caters for various levels of mafia experience, including coaching new players in simply designed vanilla games, playing with other newcomers and a few more experienced players who were there to provide in game support and guidance to the noobs . .. I played my first mafia game there ... and while I'm recounting this, it again occurs to me how useful that game was, in terms of the way the few experienced players pushed me hard, while responding to basic questions from me in a way that made me question every move I made ... one player in particular was a no holds barred kinda player, and he rode me hard hehehe ... I have thick internet skin in general and that game certainly drew on that, while at the same time shoring it up.

How does that compare to TR and to ratz ... I don't know ... I've played mafia at five sites, and they're all very different due to various factors which I'm sure I don't need to spell out to you guys ... it's kinda subjective, yet we all know and appreciate that the diversity is there

[oblivion]

Amok, the one piece of advice I'd like to give you about a town-compatible indie role is this:

don't subordinate your judgement to town if you think town is on the wrong track. I don't think it was ever an issue in this game, but it is something to keep in mind.

In my first indie role, at endgame I chose my night action based on what I thought town wanted me to do. that made me too predictable to scum and scum won. Ironically, so did I, though I had been working as hard as I could for a town win the whole game. my final night action was sacrificial. I would have lost if town had won.

anyway, something to keep in mind.

[charlou]

from a town perspective, killing bilirubin was not a good call. That's an example of why trolley tracking, and not using your own judgement once you've decided which side you're going to align with and going by some kinda consensus scheme is not ideal.

I plan to keep this in mind if I'm ever in similar SK shoes