I think the group consensus was further to the 'This sure was a thing. Never run it again' side of the spectrum.

 

Real talk though, if anyone wants to run/knows of jester games, I'm in.
And will always claim jester.

 

I may still need a substitute for my Final Fantasy XII game that I'm running over on GTF.

If anyone is interested, please let me know ASAP!

 

Thoughts from a mafia championship

​

Back at the beginning of April, we were contacted by Thingyman to participate in Season 3 of the Mafia Championship. This was our second year sending someone - last year's entrant, fontisian, was N1'd as town in her qualifying game, picked for the wildcard game, and won it as mafia to advance to the finals in one of the best solo mafia wins I've ever seen. She was unable to play in the finale due to RL scheduling.

So it's over. The finale ended this morning, and I want to talk about it for a bit. I have two main things - one, my impressions of the champs series as a whole, and two, my personal experience with it.

If you're just interested in the results, like, "okay but how did you perform representing us?", the tl:dr version is:

The games this year were run off a 17 person matrix setup, with 8 qualifying games where the players vote, postgame, for two people to advance to the finals. The finals runs the same setup, so the final slot (8x2 = 16) is determined with a wildcard game. The judges, who consist of former championship finalists, pick 17 people who played in those 8 qualifying games who did not advance who they felt were the best players, using whatever metric they chose.

Those 17 players play in a wildcard game. At the conclusion of that game, the players vote for one person to take the 17th and final slot in the finale.

Game 7 - rolled VT, got roflstomped by mafia, who swept. Probably the worst game I've ever had in terms of reads accuracy. The game was a dumpster fire of culture clash, apathetic town, and a few very special town who were such a stunning combination of tone-deaf, unreasonable, and wrong that it was almost beautiful.

Despite the brutal loss, the judges selected me to play in the wildcard game.

Wildcard game - Rolled VT. I was shot N2, and town won on D6. This was one of the most fun games I've ever played, and definitely up there in terms of the best personal games I've played in terms of having an impact on the game. I led a scum lynch D1, was universally townread, made a late push D2 on another scum (Jan, who'd subbed into a tough spot), and had both remaining scum in my PoE when I was shot that night.

The players in that game voted me to advance and I took the 17th slot in the finale.

Finale game - Rolled VT. This game ended this morning, and it was pretty much a town blowout. Scum got pretty well fucked by a combination of a replace out, unlucky night actions, and a concrete townblock. I endgamed along with about 8348382 other town. We mislynched D1, but there was a blocked kill N2 and we chain-lynched scum D2, D3, D4, and D5 to win it.

This ended up being what I'd consider to be a standard game from me. I was universally townread and never seriously pushed on, I had mostly good reads that I spent too long waffling about, was dead-set on a scum from page 1 on but didn't want to kill him because I'm a huge softie, and spent a good portion of the later game thinking one scum was very town. All in all, a lot like Mini Mafia 7, really.

The voting for the finale hasn't been posted yet, but I don't expect to place in the top 4. I played a solid game, but town really steamrolled and I don't think I particularly did anything to stand out, other than being my usual unlynchable self.

So, all in all, I'm very pleased with my performance. I'm extremely happy I got another shot in the wildcard game. My qualifying game was just, exhausting on multiple levels and honestly made me hate mafia for a couple weeks. Getting to play with the quality of players I played with in the wildcard / finale games was like night and day.

So yeah that wasn't really tl;dr. Oops?

___

Here's what I wanted to talk about. The first thing is kind of like, "here's what I think people need to know if they want to play next year." Because this is a seasonal thing, we'll be asked to send someone next year, and fonti and I are both ineligible, as we both made it to the finals.

The second part is kind of like, "here's what I learned about myself as a mafia player."

___

PART I: What you should know going into the series

1. It's a heavy time investment. If you want to actually make an impact, playing in one of these games pretty much has to be your full-time hobby while it's going on. Who knows what Season 4 will bring in terms of changes to the structure, but I can't imagine them going past 72/24 phases, and the wildcard and finals games will probably always be 36/12.

In my estimation, to play well in these games, you need to be able to put in about four hours a day, every day. Since the phases are short, the actual games are short, but during the wildcard and finale games, I basically got up, caught up on the overnight posts, tried to post something coherent, left for work, tried to peek at the thread a bit on my phone when I could, get home, shower, eat, read posts, make posts, go to bed, repeat.

I'm not trying to scare anyone off here. You could conceivably get away with less actual time invested. You're only required to make 10 posts per phase. I only had about 150 total posts in the wildcard game. But, like. 70% of those posts were at least a couple long paragraphs, and I was shot N2, so...

In both the finale and the wildcard, there were ~1,000 posts in the first 24 hours. The finale and the wildcard were kind of separate beasts, but even in the qualifying games there was a lot of volume. The games averaged maybe 4,000-4,500 posts over the course of the game, and the games averaged maybe 1.5 weeks duration. I'm pulling those numbers out of my ass, but they should be relatively close.

My point is, you need to be able to handle post volume. You need to be able to have a conceptual view of the gamestate where you can't just scroll back over 250 posts and re-read the whole thing in an hour.

2. The atmosphere. So, there's the volume. There's also the fact that you're rolling into an environment with (probably) drastically, drastically different ideas about good play, how to scumhunt, how to treat PRs, how to push on people, etc. You might roll into a game with someone from a community where they play almost nothing but role-madness mashes, or a community that plays video mafia, or a community that plays primarily Town of Salem (extreme example.)

Everyone's a fish out of water - to an extent. MU didn't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, the community there has its own links, its own history. The original two Mafia Championships were hosted on 2+2's Puzzles and Games forum, and there's some deep meta ties / playerbase connections there. So you'll both run into people who seem to have an established meta / "this is how the game is played" relationship with each other, and players who seems to be completely on their own little island with an approach to the game that you, nor anyone else in that game, can make heads or tails of.

Players will really run the gamut. I ran into incredibly rigid, mechanical players who seemed to only be able to process a single interpretation of the gamestate at a time, or rigid players who found value in discussing every single nuance of a possible PR situation, when there was really only one reasonable interpretation of it. I ran into people who hated walls of text, who didn't like "analysis nerds", who relied purely on tone / gut reads. I ran into people who hated CFDs (extreme wagon movement with ~10 minutes left in the day) with a burning passion, and people who swore CFDs gave valuable information.

Basically, you should expect to encounter people whose basic valuation of the various aspects of mafia are different than yours.

The qualifying games and the wildcard/finale are very, very different animals. Playstyle differences are still a Thing, but no one in those games got there by being impossible to work with. Generally, the people in those games are going to be very good, very assured in what they're doing, and very competitive.

...

If all of that sounds like I'm trying to scare you off, I'm really not. The hosts do a pretty amazing job of keeping things running smoothly, the games are relatively non-toxic, and the series itself is a pretty awesome way to meet new mafia players and learn more about other communities.

Just... you get out of it what you put into it, and you won't get much out of it at all if you're not willing to really invest in the games.

PART II: What I learned about myself as a mafia player

1. I'm very, very good at being townread. I sort of already knew this, but confirmed it in this series since I was exposing myself to a bunch of different viewpoints. I was only ever pushed on, seriously, two or three times over three games. I don't think I was ever voted for, ever, outside of joke/RVS votes.

This is a strength of mine. In all three games, scumchat was aware, on D1, that they were never getting me lynched, ever. The combination of me being engaged, and my ability to articulate my thought process, makes me tough to kill. Even in Game 7, afer I led the charge on like three mislynches in a row, Stanari said this about me:

2. I waffle too much. A lot of the players I ran into that I really admired had a way of... focusing onto one thing and not letting go until they got resolution. I think this is a weakness in my game; I don't really do that. I get ideas, I muse, I ponder. A bulldog mentality can backfire, sure, and being willing to re-evaluate on reads is good, but doubt just for the sake of "I'm not 100% sure" isn't productive.

3. I'm a fair-weather fan.

This is kind of a big one. Basically, I find it hard to keep caring about games where my side is losing. It's a nasty habit, for sure. But in Game 7 we mislynched D1, whatever. But we mislynched D2 this guy who couldn't even be bothered to show up, and it was just... I felt surly, salty, lashing out. Blaming that guy for not caring. All the things that were really deflecting from the real issue: I don't like losing.

It's definitely something I need to watch out for, in the future. Because I want to be the kind of player who could dig deep and turn around a bad situation.

In the wildcard game I played with Sunbae, one of the best wolves I've ever seen. He took a hero Vig shot to the dome N3, and it broke the game wide open. After the game he was just... such an incredibly class act. He cared about the game, he wanted to win, but he was so gracious in defeat, so obviously still enjoying himself, that I was blown away. I wish I could have that... equanimity. Maybe it's an experience thing. I still take every loss personally because I feel like it makes me a bad player. This guy took a loss in the best way possible: like it meant something to him, he'd wanted to win, but the loss said nothing about his skill or competence, it was just... a loss. Shit happens. And that's such a tough line to walk.

___

So this post got huge. Props to anyone who read the whole thing.
Thingyman you might be kinda interested in it, maybe.

Overall, this was a really fun, really rewarding event that took up a huge amount of my time but was mostly worth it.

I'm proud to have repped DLP and the fact that fonti and I made it to the finale is a trend I'd love to see continue next year.

To that end, if anyone has any questions about the champs series, hit me up.

Oh, and people should check out MU itself. The site has next-level tools for playing mafia. I'm going to find it reeeeeally hard to go back to normal forum mafia without automated votecounts, multi-ISOs, colored post bookmarks, no-reload refresh replies, and like seven other things.

And with that...

Who's got next game?

 

Get Eido to represent DLP next time the series rolls around and we'll be 3/3 in making it to the finale.

Either way, I was very, very impressed by your play in the series, Newcomb, and wish someday my play will be as strong as yours and Eido's. It's absolutely amazing how much progress you've made in a year, from mafia newbie to veteran. I loved reading the Wildcard Game and the Finale Game, and I kind of cringed audibly as the beautiful trainwreck of Game 7 came to an end. I was still very happy with you clinching the wildcard spot, though, and your performance in both the wildcard and the finale games were spectacular. I even thought your Game 7 performance was really good, and kind of unavoidable with all the lurkers and such plaguing the game, but your process was strong even though you guys mislynched 4 Days in a row.

Here's to more mafia with you, Newcomb!

 

Yeah, I'll do my best to free up schedule to play next season, unless someone else really wants the spot.

Well done Newcomb, though I've obviously said as much to you already.

Good play, never pressured, generally accurate.

Except g7, but meh. Some of the players in that were spirit crushing, yes.

 

Good read, Newcomb. Thanks again for participating, it was truly a pleasure to have you be part of the season

"fonti and I are both ineligible, as we both made it to the finals."

Actually, since fontisian didn't end up playing in the finale, she could play again, if that was decided.

 

i would have loved to see scum!newcomb. curious if you would have been as townread or dead in the water compared to your towngames.

But then again .. i just haven't seen your scumgame in ages (that mime game does not count) ... roll more scum.

 

Yeah if you don't count the mimegame the last scumgame I played here was WH5 me/fonti/Menace team and the Town Ultimate Plan Of Suicide.

I'd kind of like to roll scum again at some point just to confirm my fears that my towngame is so much better at this point than my scumgame that I'm just going to be...glaringly obvious at all times.

 

Ah, the Town Plan of Suicide. Good times.

 

I just wanna point out that shooting Sunbae (or JAN) wasn't a Hero Vig shot. Shooting into the counterwagon of a lynched scum PR is never a HERO VIG shot, it's common sense. It should have happened N2 instead of N3.

 

Shooting someone who's widely townread is always a hero shot. You certainly take a consumate level of shit if you're wrong.

 

All quiet out here...

Should I host a small game/witch hunt? Are people enjoying the *hopefully temporary* peace? Should I be eating and/or holding some form of citrus fruit while posting on DLP?

All questions that I would love the answer to.

 

Can't speak for anyone else, but I needed some time off after the Champs game. I'm pretty ready to play again.

Currently FantasyStrike is shutting down / moving to a space that won't have mafia, and we had the idea to host a "Forum Apocalypse" game where the forum getting nuked is a mechanic in the game - no deadlines, but if the forum is shut down before the mafia are dead, mafia wins.

FS and DLP share a playerbase, so that's kinda "next game" for some % of the folks here. Probably firing in a month or so?

Mafia Universe is also doing a cross-community hydra event; multiple games, multiple types of games firing over the next few months, tooooooons of communities. Eido and I are signed up as a team; I believe fonti and Jan are teaming up as well. Looks like it'll be a lot of fun.

As to a game here, I'd almost certainly play if it fired pretty soon (don't want to overlap with either of the above).

---------- Post automerged at 12:18 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:14 AM ----------

For interested parties:

FS game: http://www.fantasystrike.com/forums/index.php?threads/forum-apocalypse-mafia.12754/

MU hydra event: http://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/3597-Hydra-Event-2016

 

I thought kai is running the next game.

Witchunt - Love & War ?

 

^I'm new to this, how do I sign up? And when?

 

We'll have a game up as soon as we figure out who's modding. There will be a thread labeled "Signups."

 

I like the new avatar fontisian, though it's really strange to me from how much I expect your old one now

If @Kai_DASH or anyone else doesn't speak up in a day or two, I'll make a signup thread and we can go from there.

If anyone has a preference for game type lemme know (leaning towards witch hunt rn)

 

KaiDASH

Love and War, yeah or nah?