Introduction
This is the postgame for "Here we go again... AGAIN", better known as bassgame 3. Before reading any further, I highly recommend skimming through the following:
Spreadsheet
Tasks Brainstorming Doc
Postgame for Previous Game
For those of you who have been living under a rock, the format of this game is a series of challenges (referred to as “tasks” in homage to the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter) in which the players are progressively eliminated until only one is left standing, who is rewarded with a secret prize. On the other hand, the rest of the players are given progressively worse punishments depending on how far they make it in the competition. As this was the third time I have hosted such a game, I was initially on the fence about adding punishments to this particular iteration as I knew it would be a turn off for some prospective players. I decided to add them back in at the last minute after much demand. This is not a game for casual players in the least, and I realized how foolish I was for worrying about it even slightly. No cowards are allowed after all! Unfortunately this did have some consequences, namely that a few more well known mafia players declined to participate (I won’t name names) and the turn out was also a bit smaller than I had hoped as a result of this. The final player list was:
1. Steven Snype
2. Eagle4
3. zorbees
4. kingofmars
5. Celever
6. Walrein
7. Acklow
8. Pidge
9. askaninjask
10. jumpluff
11. billymills
12. FireMage
13. Ditto
14. LightWolf
15. Ace Emerald
16. PokeguyNXB
17. Woodchuck
18. Da Letter El
As for why I decided to host a game in this style for the third time, it was mainly because I still felt regretful about abandoning my previous game towards the end. I also knew that quite a few of you really enjoyed my previous games, so I was sure that I would have a decent amount of interest if I were to host another one. I also haven’t been very active on the forums until recently due to being very busy with grad school, but luckily I have a much more flexible schedule now that most of my required coursework is finished. Since it has been about two years since I have hosted the previous game, I figured the time was right to host at least one more, this time to completion.
Designing The Tasks
Of course, I have always felt that the very idea of splitting my game up into bite-size pieces is what made it interesting for most people. This is much easier said than done though. A big mafia game with 40 or more players is probably more difficult to host mechanically speaking, but coming up with creative ideas for each individual task is also very challenging. This is especially true in the case of balance, which is unfortunately the main thing that went wrong with the final task of my previous game, which ended up dragging on in a seemingly unbreakable stalemate. An important component in designing each task is that each one should be more difficult and complex than the last. Because the second to last task in that game was extremely well received, I assumed that a lot of people had very high expectations for the final task. I feel that I ended up going too far as a result of this mind set, so I was much more conservative in how I designed each task this time around. Overall, I think my tasks were very successful in this regard as I did manage to complete this game in a satisfactory manner, but I also believe that this gave me less liberty to be creative, making this game feel rather bland at some points. You can readily see this from looking at the tasks doc I posted a bit earlier. It has lots of interesting unused ideas.
Game Synopsis
Now I will go ahead and summarize how the game progressed from my point of view. Keep in mind that as a host I only have a limited amount of knowledge about the game and what each of the players were thinking at various points, so I will leave it up to them to tell their own side of the story.
The Zeroth Task: The Trial of Reading Comprehension
As tradition dictates, elimination is possible even during the sign-ups. I do this primarily to emphasize how vitally important of a skill reading comprehension is in my game due to the ambiguous nature of the tasks. Therefore being able to read and follow simple directions is a mandatory prerequisite for entry into my game. In an ideal world, I would not expect anyone with the courage to play to actually fail, but alas Walrein proved me wrong in spectacular fashion last time. This time, two people ended up failing: Ullar and s_aman. For this, they were given a rather light signature change as their punishment. This was also done to set a precedent for the other players in regards to not only the type of punishments they could expect, but also that I would make them progressively more harsh with each task.
The First Task: The Custom Win Condition Quiz
The first task of this game also followed tradition in that it was a quiz. I have always liked doing quizzes first since they are very simple but provide just enough challenge and force the players to start collaborating, as your goal is never to blindly get the highest score using your knowledge. This quiz was no exception in that this time everyone had to shoot for a unique ranking in their score, but I had mixed feelings about it. For one thing, it was a considerably more complicated win condition compared to the previous sets of quiz related tasks I had done to the point of me almost not wanting to make this the first task. However, I later realized that it would still accomplish my primary goal of forcing the players to work together to win, since diplomacy is an important component in many games in Circus Maximus in general, and my game was no exception. Answering the questions correctly though was also part of the challenge, and while not hugely important, does make these quiz type tasks more fun.
Most players were very intimidated at first due to the rules that appeared to be quite complex on the surface. However, it didn’t take long for them to realize that there were really two optimal strategies: Score a 0 or a 20 on your first attempt. Because it was impossible to score any lower than 0 or higher than 20, you had a surefire way of determining your target rank if you knew how many other people had the same score as you.
Unfortunately I realized that there were two major flaws to the design of this task though: First, it was perfectly possible for your fate to be in the hands of another player due the fact that you alone cannot decide your rank. Secondly, I would eliminate players in previous quiz related tasks based on the time of their submission, which resulted in perfectly fine players getting eliminated unjustly. I know they say “the early bird gets the worm”, but I have come to understand that rewarding anyone who plays well this early in the game was more important. For this reason, I made it possible to advance to the next task as long as each player scored close enough to their target rank. This led to most of the players working together to guarantee their survival, which I actually kind of liked since it reminded me of a lynch in Fire Emblem Mafia II in which everyone needed at least one vote on them to remain unharmed. However, this also meant that attempting to stab someone would lead to your own destruction, so I could understandably see why some people didn’t like this particular task.
Player wise, the biggest highlight of this task to me was the dispute between Da Letter El and LightWolf. Basically, DLE had already submitted a score of 12 on his final submission, but LW later claimed he would score a 12. This led to a rather amusing game of chicken between the two players, since I would give a special advantage in the next task to the players who submitted earliest. Since both LW and DLE met that particular threshold, the person that changed their score would lose their chance at obtaining the bonus if they changed their score. Both players acted very stubborn and refused to change their scores which resulted in them having in nonzero deviations, losing their chance at obtaining the bonus. Under normal circumstances, they would have been eliminated at this point along with a few other players, but as a host I made a subjective judgment in allowing them to advance anyway if they obeyed a minor punishment. Many people thought that this particular move was too generous, but I thought these players played well enough to the point where it would have been a shame to eliminate them right here. The only players that I actually eliminated and punished were FireMage, who seemingly ragequit smogon (and therefore my game) halfway, and Eagle4 who made it clear many times that he had no idea what he was doing. His apology essay had a rather amusing hidden insult towards me.
The Second Task: The Minesweeper Ripoff Auction Extravaganza
This is one of those tasks that I actually didn’t put that much thought into, yet ended up being much more well received and interesting than I expected. Basically, this task was a mock game of minesweeper where the players had to instead bid on specific squares before they would have the rights to flip them over, and to make things interesting I gave each of the players info regarding the location of one mine, two if they got the bonus in the previous task which I mentioned earlier. There was an element of risk vs reward in this task in the sense that squares surrounded by more mines yielded a higher amount of coins (points). I also gave players the option to check the total number of coins and mines in a given row or column if they paid a little extra money. This particular idea was actually based off of the Voltorb Flip minigame in Heart Gold & Soul Silver, which I had recently replayed at the time.
Now onto the task itself. The first player to step up and propose an interesting strategy this time was askaninjask. Believing that every player’s knowledge regarding the location of one mine to be a key asset, aska attempted to forge a very large alliance of players in hopes that he would have info about as many mines as possible, minimizing the risk of finding more mines when flipping over a random square. Of course, there were two key flaws with this strategy, one being that some players would certainly refuse to cooperate (namely jumpluff, billymills, and LightWolf) and the other being that it was very prone to moling. Steven Snype did just that and joined aska’s alliance solely for the purpose of obtaining more info for his real allies, DLE and Pidge. He also cooperated with billy’s alliance to obtain the locations of nearly all of the mines very early in the task. Since the members of aska’s alliance publicly revealed their bids to each other, Snype and his allies were able to put most of them in a very bad position after the first bidding phase. What truly amazed me was that nobody seemed suspicious of Snype when he revealed that all of his bids were successful, and how unsurprisingly he, billy, and DLE were far ahead of nearly everyone else. Meanwhile, aska flipped over a mine and ended up in a terrible position and basically gave up afterwards.
All else being equal, virtually everyone in aska’s alliance would have lost at this point, but a few other players made some terrible mistakes of their own. zorbees, who admittedly was going through some real life issues at this point, was playing the game solo and got caught lying in the previous task to billy’s alliance regarding his quiz score. He also ended up flipping some mines very early on. Woodchuck also wasn’t particularly loyal to any alliance and failed to bid optimally, resulting in him having an excessive amount of money but not enough coins near the end before he eventually blew himself up. Finally, Ditto wrongly assumed that everyone would be given extra money at the start of each new bidding phase so he spent all of his money on his first set of bids, leaving him unable to do anything for the rest of the task. This example goes to show important it is to ask me questions if you are unsure about any aspect of the rules, and to not jump to assumptions!
Also, this particular task was my favorite punishment wise since Acklow and Ditto hated it so much to the point where the latter put a timer in his signature expressing “How long I hate Bass for”. Also, the fact that several users would post in mafia threads with their new minesweeper avatars led to a lot of hilarious confusion during Lord of the Rings Mafia. All in all, the punishments ended up being just as successful as the task itself, which I was quite pleased with.
The Third Task: Bid Mafia Part I
In contrast to the previous task, I spent a lot of time designing this one yet it didn’t end up being that interesting in practice. The idea of making one of the later tasks a separate mafia game entirely has always been somewhat intriguing to me, and since the concept of auctioning as worked so well in previous tasks (ie minesweeper in this game or the item boxes in the previous one), I thought extending that concept to an FFA game where the roles are what the players had to bid on would have a lot of potential. I still do even now, but in practice there were a few problems that I didn’t really expect to happen. The biggest one was allowing five people to advance when there were ten players total, meaning that the most optimal strategy by far was to make a five man alliance. UncleSam did point this out to me in a separate conversation, but at that point an alliance had already formed, and given what happened in my previous game I did not like the idea of changing the rules too radically in the middle of the task.
However, I also partially blame the players for this, since I still believe that the tasks are ultimately what you make of them. Specifically, I am referring to billymills, jumpluff, and LightWolf, who did not feel like extensively cooperating with Pokeguy and Celever, nor managing to convince Ace Emerald and kingofmars to work with them instead of Snype, who they still didn’t realize was the one who was moling them in the previous task. It was massively disappointing since billy and jumpluff were among the best players in my previous games and have both realized the importance of adding extra people to their alliance for strategy purposes back then (see the third task in my first game for example). jumpluff later told me that they were hoping to reach the final task with a three-man alliance from the start, but admitted that their mindset was flawed for this task. Still, I do think that I should have either changed the rules so that only three or four players would advance to the next task, or save bid mafia for the last task altogether.
As for how the actual task played out, there isn’t much to say really. Snype, DLE, and Pidge managed to convince Ace and kom to work with them, and their newly formed five-man team commenced a one-sided massacre on all of the other players, who were fragmented at best. DLE was secretly considering to betray Snype using Celever, but I don’t know the details on that. He will have to comment on that himself.
The punishment also had a mixed reception. While reading and writing a poem takes some effort, the punishment is over with much sooner compared to changing your avatar, a punishment which would have been very brutal for jumpluff had she not been able to record her poem. billy and Celever also didn’t seem to mind their avatars too much, which is certainly disappointing for me given that I went through the trouble of making them myself. Oh well :(
The Fourth Task: Bid Mafia Part II
Now this is where things get controversial. At this point I was heavily involved in Lord of the Rings mafia, and if you were in that game you might remember that I made a few fuck ups that were in fact related to the stress of hosting this game at the same time. Thus I decided that I would put this game on a brief hiatus until I was done with LOTR mafia. However, my decision to make the fourth task a continuation of Bid Mafia was decided earlier. As I said previously, allowing five people to advance was the biggest reason that the previous task was so one sided, and so a lot of potential was not realized with bid mafia. Continuing bid mafia where everyone left off may have sensible from this perspective, but I will acknowledge that this did come at the cost of making the game feel less creative. Still, I was mostly satisfied with how things played out.
I am also proud of how I presented the fourth task in the form of a riddle, which was an element that I wanted to bring back from my first game. Surprisingly, kom and Ace Emerald were among the first to figure it out, while Snype struggled greatly. The answer to the riddle was actually none other than the url name for bid mafia, which was “gamblingisgoodkids”.
While I think the overall play in this task was satisfactory, I actually don’t have a whole lot of things to say about it. Snype was at this point starting to get busy with school starting so I do feel he wasn’t able to put in as much effort into this task as he could have, but he still played fairly admirably at this point. However, DLE found a convenient opportunity to kill him off and after doing so, dominated with his superior finances and negotiation skills. Eventually, it came down to him and Ace who quite honestly put in the least amount of effort of the final five remaining players, and at this point I had realized there was some luck in determining the outcome of the game. Basically, the final cycle of this task was sort of like RPS in terms of what roles they would bid on. Nevertheless, DLE was favored since he had a lot more money and he also did an excellent job in grasping what Ace was most likely to do. Specifically, he knew that Ace was unlikely to bid on the hitman, which meant that Safeguard and Silencer was the best possible combination he could bid on. Because his intuition was correct, DLE emerged as the victor of the task, which was well deserved in my opinion.
Finally I do regret not being able to come up with a more creative punishment for the losers this time, since I ended up just making it a combination of most of the previous punishments but for a longer duration. However it was more than humiliating enough, and I must thank my good pal Grumbler (Rocket Grunt) for posting the original picture in a Minecraft skype call. It was absolutely brilliant.
The Final Task: An Amazing Battle of Wills and Wits
This idea was also based off of tradition in that the winner had to complete one more additional task to get the secret prize. Instead of solving just one riddle though, they had to defeat yours truly in a Pokemon battle! Originally, I was planning on making the final task a serious game in which I would be flagrantly cheating and make it DLE’s job to figure out how. This felt too complicated to me though, so I settled with a trollgame more or less. This was also a means of paying homage to my own past on the CAP Server back in Gen IV in which there were regularly mini-tournaments where the winner had to battle the host afterwards to achieve true fame and glory. If DLE could not beat me, then he had no business winning the secret prize and a terrible punishment would have awaited him. In a sense, I tried to view my game in a literary sense, and it seemed very fitting to make myself the final boss given how many people I have humiliated with my punishments. A hero vanquishing a terrible monster in an uphill battle with the cheering of his fallen comrades is a classic plot point.
And indeed, that is just what happened. While neither DLE nor I have played Pokemon at all in several years (or maybe at all in DLE’s case, I am not sure), I did end up making a Baton Pass team, which many of the spectators immediately frowned upon. As the battle progressed, it seemed very obvious that I would win against DLE until I revealed that the main sweeper on my team was none other than… Magikarp. Pidge totally saw this coming though, so props to him for that. Anyway, my Magikarp was unable to inflict any damage even with all the boosts passed on to it, so DLE managed to win. He did disconnect, but it was safe to call that game in DLE’s favor anyway.
And now we get to the secret prize. I thought making the secret prize something as lame as a trophy would not cut it this time, and I also wanted to find a way to apologize to the people I punished as well as atone for the fact that I put the game on hold for as long as I did. So I figured a custom punishment for myself was the most fitting reward that I could give to DLE for winning. As we speak, it seems he is still discussing the details with all of the other players who were eliminated. I do not fear for what’s in store for me though as I am not a coward!
Player Assessment
In this section I will now evaluate each player. I hope that what follows does not offend anyone. Do let me know if there are any inaccuracies in my assessment since as a host my knowledge of each player and the reasoning for their actions is limited. I will not include the players who failed at the sign-ups.
Eliminated after the 1st Task
Eliminated after the 2nd Task
Eliminated after the 3rd Task
Eliminated after the 4th Task
The Winner
Overall
Best Player: Da Letter El (Honorable mention to Steven Snype)
Worst Player: FireMage (Honorable mention to Eagle4)
Best Troll: Woodchuck (Honorable mention to LightWolf)
Biggest Coward: Acklow
Closing Thoughts
Overall I am pleased that I have managed to end this game on a good note. While I do think some of the tasks felt rather bland and I wasn’t as creative with the punishments as I was in the previous game, I am happy that I managed to complete this game. I would like to thank everyone again that had the courage to play. And as always, a big fuck you is in order to the weenies and cowards to refused to play.
This is the postgame for "Here we go again... AGAIN", better known as bassgame 3. Before reading any further, I highly recommend skimming through the following:
Spreadsheet
Tasks Brainstorming Doc
Postgame for Previous Game
For those of you who have been living under a rock, the format of this game is a series of challenges (referred to as “tasks” in homage to the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter) in which the players are progressively eliminated until only one is left standing, who is rewarded with a secret prize. On the other hand, the rest of the players are given progressively worse punishments depending on how far they make it in the competition. As this was the third time I have hosted such a game, I was initially on the fence about adding punishments to this particular iteration as I knew it would be a turn off for some prospective players. I decided to add them back in at the last minute after much demand. This is not a game for casual players in the least, and I realized how foolish I was for worrying about it even slightly. No cowards are allowed after all! Unfortunately this did have some consequences, namely that a few more well known mafia players declined to participate (I won’t name names) and the turn out was also a bit smaller than I had hoped as a result of this. The final player list was:
1. Steven Snype
2. Eagle4
3. zorbees
4. kingofmars
5. Celever
6. Walrein
7. Acklow
8. Pidge
9. askaninjask
10. jumpluff
11. billymills
12. FireMage
13. Ditto
14. LightWolf
15. Ace Emerald
16. PokeguyNXB
17. Woodchuck
18. Da Letter El
As for why I decided to host a game in this style for the third time, it was mainly because I still felt regretful about abandoning my previous game towards the end. I also knew that quite a few of you really enjoyed my previous games, so I was sure that I would have a decent amount of interest if I were to host another one. I also haven’t been very active on the forums until recently due to being very busy with grad school, but luckily I have a much more flexible schedule now that most of my required coursework is finished. Since it has been about two years since I have hosted the previous game, I figured the time was right to host at least one more, this time to completion.
Designing The Tasks
Of course, I have always felt that the very idea of splitting my game up into bite-size pieces is what made it interesting for most people. This is much easier said than done though. A big mafia game with 40 or more players is probably more difficult to host mechanically speaking, but coming up with creative ideas for each individual task is also very challenging. This is especially true in the case of balance, which is unfortunately the main thing that went wrong with the final task of my previous game, which ended up dragging on in a seemingly unbreakable stalemate. An important component in designing each task is that each one should be more difficult and complex than the last. Because the second to last task in that game was extremely well received, I assumed that a lot of people had very high expectations for the final task. I feel that I ended up going too far as a result of this mind set, so I was much more conservative in how I designed each task this time around. Overall, I think my tasks were very successful in this regard as I did manage to complete this game in a satisfactory manner, but I also believe that this gave me less liberty to be creative, making this game feel rather bland at some points. You can readily see this from looking at the tasks doc I posted a bit earlier. It has lots of interesting unused ideas.
Game Synopsis
Now I will go ahead and summarize how the game progressed from my point of view. Keep in mind that as a host I only have a limited amount of knowledge about the game and what each of the players were thinking at various points, so I will leave it up to them to tell their own side of the story.
The Zeroth Task: The Trial of Reading Comprehension
As tradition dictates, elimination is possible even during the sign-ups. I do this primarily to emphasize how vitally important of a skill reading comprehension is in my game due to the ambiguous nature of the tasks. Therefore being able to read and follow simple directions is a mandatory prerequisite for entry into my game. In an ideal world, I would not expect anyone with the courage to play to actually fail, but alas Walrein proved me wrong in spectacular fashion last time. This time, two people ended up failing: Ullar and s_aman. For this, they were given a rather light signature change as their punishment. This was also done to set a precedent for the other players in regards to not only the type of punishments they could expect, but also that I would make them progressively more harsh with each task.
The First Task: The Custom Win Condition Quiz
The first task of this game also followed tradition in that it was a quiz. I have always liked doing quizzes first since they are very simple but provide just enough challenge and force the players to start collaborating, as your goal is never to blindly get the highest score using your knowledge. This quiz was no exception in that this time everyone had to shoot for a unique ranking in their score, but I had mixed feelings about it. For one thing, it was a considerably more complicated win condition compared to the previous sets of quiz related tasks I had done to the point of me almost not wanting to make this the first task. However, I later realized that it would still accomplish my primary goal of forcing the players to work together to win, since diplomacy is an important component in many games in Circus Maximus in general, and my game was no exception. Answering the questions correctly though was also part of the challenge, and while not hugely important, does make these quiz type tasks more fun.
Most players were very intimidated at first due to the rules that appeared to be quite complex on the surface. However, it didn’t take long for them to realize that there were really two optimal strategies: Score a 0 or a 20 on your first attempt. Because it was impossible to score any lower than 0 or higher than 20, you had a surefire way of determining your target rank if you knew how many other people had the same score as you.
Unfortunately I realized that there were two major flaws to the design of this task though: First, it was perfectly possible for your fate to be in the hands of another player due the fact that you alone cannot decide your rank. Secondly, I would eliminate players in previous quiz related tasks based on the time of their submission, which resulted in perfectly fine players getting eliminated unjustly. I know they say “the early bird gets the worm”, but I have come to understand that rewarding anyone who plays well this early in the game was more important. For this reason, I made it possible to advance to the next task as long as each player scored close enough to their target rank. This led to most of the players working together to guarantee their survival, which I actually kind of liked since it reminded me of a lynch in Fire Emblem Mafia II in which everyone needed at least one vote on them to remain unharmed. However, this also meant that attempting to stab someone would lead to your own destruction, so I could understandably see why some people didn’t like this particular task.
Player wise, the biggest highlight of this task to me was the dispute between Da Letter El and LightWolf. Basically, DLE had already submitted a score of 12 on his final submission, but LW later claimed he would score a 12. This led to a rather amusing game of chicken between the two players, since I would give a special advantage in the next task to the players who submitted earliest. Since both LW and DLE met that particular threshold, the person that changed their score would lose their chance at obtaining the bonus if they changed their score. Both players acted very stubborn and refused to change their scores which resulted in them having in nonzero deviations, losing their chance at obtaining the bonus. Under normal circumstances, they would have been eliminated at this point along with a few other players, but as a host I made a subjective judgment in allowing them to advance anyway if they obeyed a minor punishment. Many people thought that this particular move was too generous, but I thought these players played well enough to the point where it would have been a shame to eliminate them right here. The only players that I actually eliminated and punished were FireMage, who seemingly ragequit smogon (and therefore my game) halfway, and Eagle4 who made it clear many times that he had no idea what he was doing. His apology essay had a rather amusing hidden insult towards me.
The Second Task: The Minesweeper Ripoff Auction Extravaganza
This is one of those tasks that I actually didn’t put that much thought into, yet ended up being much more well received and interesting than I expected. Basically, this task was a mock game of minesweeper where the players had to instead bid on specific squares before they would have the rights to flip them over, and to make things interesting I gave each of the players info regarding the location of one mine, two if they got the bonus in the previous task which I mentioned earlier. There was an element of risk vs reward in this task in the sense that squares surrounded by more mines yielded a higher amount of coins (points). I also gave players the option to check the total number of coins and mines in a given row or column if they paid a little extra money. This particular idea was actually based off of the Voltorb Flip minigame in Heart Gold & Soul Silver, which I had recently replayed at the time.
Now onto the task itself. The first player to step up and propose an interesting strategy this time was askaninjask. Believing that every player’s knowledge regarding the location of one mine to be a key asset, aska attempted to forge a very large alliance of players in hopes that he would have info about as many mines as possible, minimizing the risk of finding more mines when flipping over a random square. Of course, there were two key flaws with this strategy, one being that some players would certainly refuse to cooperate (namely jumpluff, billymills, and LightWolf) and the other being that it was very prone to moling. Steven Snype did just that and joined aska’s alliance solely for the purpose of obtaining more info for his real allies, DLE and Pidge. He also cooperated with billy’s alliance to obtain the locations of nearly all of the mines very early in the task. Since the members of aska’s alliance publicly revealed their bids to each other, Snype and his allies were able to put most of them in a very bad position after the first bidding phase. What truly amazed me was that nobody seemed suspicious of Snype when he revealed that all of his bids were successful, and how unsurprisingly he, billy, and DLE were far ahead of nearly everyone else. Meanwhile, aska flipped over a mine and ended up in a terrible position and basically gave up afterwards.
All else being equal, virtually everyone in aska’s alliance would have lost at this point, but a few other players made some terrible mistakes of their own. zorbees, who admittedly was going through some real life issues at this point, was playing the game solo and got caught lying in the previous task to billy’s alliance regarding his quiz score. He also ended up flipping some mines very early on. Woodchuck also wasn’t particularly loyal to any alliance and failed to bid optimally, resulting in him having an excessive amount of money but not enough coins near the end before he eventually blew himself up. Finally, Ditto wrongly assumed that everyone would be given extra money at the start of each new bidding phase so he spent all of his money on his first set of bids, leaving him unable to do anything for the rest of the task. This example goes to show important it is to ask me questions if you are unsure about any aspect of the rules, and to not jump to assumptions!
Also, this particular task was my favorite punishment wise since Acklow and Ditto hated it so much to the point where the latter put a timer in his signature expressing “How long I hate Bass for”. Also, the fact that several users would post in mafia threads with their new minesweeper avatars led to a lot of hilarious confusion during Lord of the Rings Mafia. All in all, the punishments ended up being just as successful as the task itself, which I was quite pleased with.
The Third Task: Bid Mafia Part I
In contrast to the previous task, I spent a lot of time designing this one yet it didn’t end up being that interesting in practice. The idea of making one of the later tasks a separate mafia game entirely has always been somewhat intriguing to me, and since the concept of auctioning as worked so well in previous tasks (ie minesweeper in this game or the item boxes in the previous one), I thought extending that concept to an FFA game where the roles are what the players had to bid on would have a lot of potential. I still do even now, but in practice there were a few problems that I didn’t really expect to happen. The biggest one was allowing five people to advance when there were ten players total, meaning that the most optimal strategy by far was to make a five man alliance. UncleSam did point this out to me in a separate conversation, but at that point an alliance had already formed, and given what happened in my previous game I did not like the idea of changing the rules too radically in the middle of the task.
However, I also partially blame the players for this, since I still believe that the tasks are ultimately what you make of them. Specifically, I am referring to billymills, jumpluff, and LightWolf, who did not feel like extensively cooperating with Pokeguy and Celever, nor managing to convince Ace Emerald and kingofmars to work with them instead of Snype, who they still didn’t realize was the one who was moling them in the previous task. It was massively disappointing since billy and jumpluff were among the best players in my previous games and have both realized the importance of adding extra people to their alliance for strategy purposes back then (see the third task in my first game for example). jumpluff later told me that they were hoping to reach the final task with a three-man alliance from the start, but admitted that their mindset was flawed for this task. Still, I do think that I should have either changed the rules so that only three or four players would advance to the next task, or save bid mafia for the last task altogether.
As for how the actual task played out, there isn’t much to say really. Snype, DLE, and Pidge managed to convince Ace and kom to work with them, and their newly formed five-man team commenced a one-sided massacre on all of the other players, who were fragmented at best. DLE was secretly considering to betray Snype using Celever, but I don’t know the details on that. He will have to comment on that himself.
The punishment also had a mixed reception. While reading and writing a poem takes some effort, the punishment is over with much sooner compared to changing your avatar, a punishment which would have been very brutal for jumpluff had she not been able to record her poem. billy and Celever also didn’t seem to mind their avatars too much, which is certainly disappointing for me given that I went through the trouble of making them myself. Oh well :(
The Fourth Task: Bid Mafia Part II
Now this is where things get controversial. At this point I was heavily involved in Lord of the Rings mafia, and if you were in that game you might remember that I made a few fuck ups that were in fact related to the stress of hosting this game at the same time. Thus I decided that I would put this game on a brief hiatus until I was done with LOTR mafia. However, my decision to make the fourth task a continuation of Bid Mafia was decided earlier. As I said previously, allowing five people to advance was the biggest reason that the previous task was so one sided, and so a lot of potential was not realized with bid mafia. Continuing bid mafia where everyone left off may have sensible from this perspective, but I will acknowledge that this did come at the cost of making the game feel less creative. Still, I was mostly satisfied with how things played out.
I am also proud of how I presented the fourth task in the form of a riddle, which was an element that I wanted to bring back from my first game. Surprisingly, kom and Ace Emerald were among the first to figure it out, while Snype struggled greatly. The answer to the riddle was actually none other than the url name for bid mafia, which was “gamblingisgoodkids”.
While I think the overall play in this task was satisfactory, I actually don’t have a whole lot of things to say about it. Snype was at this point starting to get busy with school starting so I do feel he wasn’t able to put in as much effort into this task as he could have, but he still played fairly admirably at this point. However, DLE found a convenient opportunity to kill him off and after doing so, dominated with his superior finances and negotiation skills. Eventually, it came down to him and Ace who quite honestly put in the least amount of effort of the final five remaining players, and at this point I had realized there was some luck in determining the outcome of the game. Basically, the final cycle of this task was sort of like RPS in terms of what roles they would bid on. Nevertheless, DLE was favored since he had a lot more money and he also did an excellent job in grasping what Ace was most likely to do. Specifically, he knew that Ace was unlikely to bid on the hitman, which meant that Safeguard and Silencer was the best possible combination he could bid on. Because his intuition was correct, DLE emerged as the victor of the task, which was well deserved in my opinion.
Finally I do regret not being able to come up with a more creative punishment for the losers this time, since I ended up just making it a combination of most of the previous punishments but for a longer duration. However it was more than humiliating enough, and I must thank my good pal Grumbler (Rocket Grunt) for posting the original picture in a Minecraft skype call. It was absolutely brilliant.
The Final Task: An Amazing Battle of Wills and Wits
This idea was also based off of tradition in that the winner had to complete one more additional task to get the secret prize. Instead of solving just one riddle though, they had to defeat yours truly in a Pokemon battle! Originally, I was planning on making the final task a serious game in which I would be flagrantly cheating and make it DLE’s job to figure out how. This felt too complicated to me though, so I settled with a trollgame more or less. This was also a means of paying homage to my own past on the CAP Server back in Gen IV in which there were regularly mini-tournaments where the winner had to battle the host afterwards to achieve true fame and glory. If DLE could not beat me, then he had no business winning the secret prize and a terrible punishment would have awaited him. In a sense, I tried to view my game in a literary sense, and it seemed very fitting to make myself the final boss given how many people I have humiliated with my punishments. A hero vanquishing a terrible monster in an uphill battle with the cheering of his fallen comrades is a classic plot point.
And indeed, that is just what happened. While neither DLE nor I have played Pokemon at all in several years (or maybe at all in DLE’s case, I am not sure), I did end up making a Baton Pass team, which many of the spectators immediately frowned upon. As the battle progressed, it seemed very obvious that I would win against DLE until I revealed that the main sweeper on my team was none other than… Magikarp. Pidge totally saw this coming though, so props to him for that. Anyway, my Magikarp was unable to inflict any damage even with all the boosts passed on to it, so DLE managed to win. He did disconnect, but it was safe to call that game in DLE’s favor anyway.
And now we get to the secret prize. I thought making the secret prize something as lame as a trophy would not cut it this time, and I also wanted to find a way to apologize to the people I punished as well as atone for the fact that I put the game on hold for as long as I did. So I figured a custom punishment for myself was the most fitting reward that I could give to DLE for winning. As we speak, it seems he is still discussing the details with all of the other players who were eliminated. I do not fear for what’s in store for me though as I am not a coward!
Player Assessment
In this section I will now evaluate each player. I hope that what follows does not offend anyone. Do let me know if there are any inaccuracies in my assessment since as a host my knowledge of each player and the reasoning for their actions is limited. I will not include the players who failed at the sign-ups.
Eliminated after the 1st Task
Not much to say here. He idled during the first submission round in the very first task. Then he “rage quit” smogon shortly afterwards, and decided to leave my game. I honestly do not really know the circumstances that led to it since I do not know him too well, but I have zero tolerance for quitting. As a result, he got a nasty Mr. Ragequit avatar as his punishment.
Rating: 0/10
Rating: 0/10
Eagle4 literally, in his words, had absolutely no idea what he was doing and seemed to not know his target rank, let alone how to optimally find it. As a result of how the task was designed, he would have gotten Celever and Ace Emerald eliminated too had I not been lenient with my subjective intervention. I’d normally give him a bit more slack given that he had little experience with my previous games, but other people in a similar position fared much better than him at this point in the game. He also did give me a rather amusing “apology” which contained a hidden message calling me a tyrant. Music to my ears.
Rating: 1/10
Rating: 1/10
Eliminated after the 2nd Task
Acklow played alright during the first task and actually was among the few to get the bonus, but he was among the first to forget to send his actions. He joined aska’s alliance but contributed very little beyond the information he was given at the start of the task regarding the location of a mine. After the first cycle went badly for his team, he basically did nothing afterwards, seemingly content to lose. He was in a fairly bad position, but if he tried a little harder he might have actually been able to get enough coins to ensure his survival. He also tried to avoid his punishment by pixelating his avatar like a coward. Unacceptable!
Rating: 2/10
Rating: 2/10
Like Acklow, Walrein was a loyal member of aska’s alliance in the second task. He only managed to obtain one coin after the first unraveling phase so he wasn’t able to advance. I was a little disappointed by this since I was expecting him to get much further into this game than the last one, but I guess you can’t always control real life circumstances.
Rating: 4/10
Rating: 4/10
Ditto has a rather colorful history with my games, being that he had a penchant for carefully utilizing loopholes in the rules for each task in such a way that he could advance with minimal effort. Unfortunately for him this was not the case in this game as he made several major mistakes along the way. In the first task he got an improper score on his third attempt despite aska’s post being above him (although you could argue that aska should have changed his score instead). He made a much more critical misplay in the second task when he assumed that I would be awarding more money to each player at the start of each cycle, which resulted in him wasting all of his money during the first bidding phase. He also did not realize that he would not maintain ownership of his squares after each cycle, something which he was angry with me for not explicitly stating since every other player had asked me about it. In hindsight, I probably should have done so though I don’t think it would have helped Ditto’s case. Since he prizes his avatar, he was among the hardest hit by the punishment. At least he didn’t act cowardly about it though!
Rating: 3/10
Rating: 3/10
Woodchuck was another newcomer, and I was fairly impressed by his play in the first task where he immediately grasped the importance of collaboration. Unfortunately he didn’t seem to pick a more permanent alliance to stick with by the time the second task came around, and he ended up bidding sub-optimally. At least he went out in a manly fashion though through unraveling two mines. Oh, and this particular post of his was absolutely hilarious.
Rating: 4/10
Rating: 4/10
Poor aska, the amount of effort and interest he had put into this game was commendable. Unfortunately his strategy of forming a massive alliance ended up backfiring spectacularly since Snype intended to mole him from the start. Still, I do think he should have at least made it to the third task since pretty much everyone else in his alliance (except kom) more or less contributed nothing. Unfortunately he had the worst luck among the people in his alliance in that he unraveled two mines, ironically enough.
Rating: 6/10
Rating: 6/10
zorbees was one of the finalists in my previous game, so I had very high expectations of him. Sadly his play was quite disappointing. He was seemingly content to play the game solo, and then lied to jumpluff and billy about his quiz score in the first task for apparently no reason. Afterwards he recklessly unraveled his squares despite not having any info about them and hit a mine. I do understand that he was having some major real life issues at the time (see Everybody Votes Mafia) and he did make a valiant attempt to recover later on in the task, but unfortunately it was too little too late for him.
Rating: 4/10
Rating: 4/10
Eliminated after the 3rd Task
Poor Celever, used and abused. He (she?) played fairly well in the first and second tasks in that he managed to obtain just enough info to ensure his survival. His reliance on others proved to be in the downfall in his third task, where he was shamelessly used by Snype and DLE’s alliance. DLE had considered working with him independently to backstab Snype, but sadly that never panned out.
Rating: 5/10
Rating: 5/10
I would put this guy in a similar boat to Celever. He managed to make it fairly far into the game due to the info given to him by others, but he never took the initiative to create or join an established alliance. However, he has played this game (and practically many other mafia games) on a tablet, which is one of the reasons that he seems to be “inactive”. Unfortunate, but at the same time, I have to commend this young Canadian for his courage!
Rating: 4/10
Rating: 4/10
LightWolf has a notorious reputation on these forums for being both paranoid and difficult to negotiate with, but he is also a fairly competent strategist for this reason. In this game the results were mixed. On one hand he managed to answer his quiz corrections correctly on his first attempt and was quickly able to figure out his target rank through his alliance with billymills. Unfortunately he was unreasonably stubborn with DLE regarding his final submission score as I have already discussed (although he did claim his score publicly unlike DLE), so I gave him an additional light punishment. In the second task, he also made some rather humorous, albeit pointless bids in increments of pi. In reality though, his bids were suboptimal and I am not really sure if he would have made it beyond the second task if it weren’t for billymills. He got eliminated in the third task when Snype and DLE’s five-man team brutally massacred him, billy, and jumpluff.
Rating: 6/10
Rating: 6/10
Like LightWolf, jumpluff actually didn’t do a whole lot for her team after the first task as billy did most of the work. She certainly played well during the first task by helping her team quickly figure out the right answers and she managed to reclaim her role as the spokesperson for her alliance as in my first game. After that though she went through some real life problems but thankfully was courageous enough to not quit the game. She actually purchased a square with a mine under it during the second task and was very close to unraveling it, but thanks to billy’s help she was spared, and amazingly had one of the highest scores at the end of the second task. She met her downfall in the third task when she rather proudly decided that she would not ally with Celever or Pokeguy from the very start. Needless to say it did not take long for Snype and DLE to eliminate her.
Rating: 6/10
Rating: 6/10
Although billy did not get as far nor played as well as I expected him to, he was still among the best players in this game. He practically carried his team to victory in the second task thanks to his partnership with DLE, who had information on many of the squares thanks to Snype’s successfully moling aska’s alliance. He more or less carried his team for most of the game. Things went much more poorly for him in the third task due to his alliance’s refusal to vet additional members, as well as not exposing to Ace and kom that Snype was tricking them in the previous task (though I am not sure if billy was aware of this himself). However, he certainly did not give up in the end, and had Ace been just a little bit lazier, he might have actually had a chance at making a comeback. Oh well.
Rating: 8/10
Rating: 8/10
Eliminated after the 4th Task
There is absolutely no question that Ace got much farther than he should have. Since he played fairly decently in my previous game, I expected a little more from him, but ultimately his existence generally served little more as fodder. In the second task he was part of aska’s alliance but was easily the luckiest player in terms of his squares, being able to unravel just enough coins to ensure his survival. Afterwards, Snype and DLE shamelessly vetted him into their alliance for the purpose of eliminating billymills and company. Since he randomly disappeared in the middle of the third task, Snype and DLE were thinking about ditching him for billymills. Ace was able to return in the last second to prevent this from happening and managed to make it to the fourth task. By this point, he was a bit more punctual about sending his actions and actually did a decent job overall, managing to nearly defeat DLE in the final cycles of the task but was ultimately out-predicted by him.
Rating: 6/10
Rating: 6/10
As one of the four finalists in my previous game, Pidge more or less met my expectations. Though not very outspoken, he is still a very competent player when the time calls for it. In this game though, I’d say that DLE and Snype probably did the lions share of the work in his alliance, but there were still no real noticeable flaws in his play. During the fourth task he was actually in the best possible position money wise, but unfortunately Snype managed to outbid him for the thief role and then targeted him with it the following night. It was his only major mistake this entire game, but it was a costly one, no pun intended. He was lynched by Ace shortly afterwards.
Rating: 7/10
Rating: 7/10
Here is a player that has honestly come a long way. kingofmars played fairly well for most of the game, and was the other half of the brains in aska’s alliance during the first two tasks. However, he never seemed to figure out that Snype was the one responsible for dismantling aska’s alliance in the second task, and happily continued to be his ally in the third task despite this. Realizing his position in the fourth task, he forged a partnership with Ace Emerald, but Snype and Pidge ganged up on him with their superior roles. He was able to survive a bit longer though as attention began to be shifted on to Snype, but his remaining alias was killed by DLE as soon as he had the chance.
Rating: 7/10
Rating: 7/10
Snype is another player who I’d consider to have come a long way, although his excellent play this game is not surprising given his performance in my previous game. While he was already working with askaninjask in the first task, he had planned on working with DLE and Pidge from the start, and his opportunity to capitalize on this had come in the second task when aska happily shared a lot of information with him, including the bids of each member of his alliance. As a result, he and DLE were able to find the locations of most of the mines in record time (though for some reason forgot H2 despite it being marked on aska’s sheet) and also snagged the best squares early on. In the third task he was also the chief person responsible for organizing an incredibly one-sided massacre on billy, jumpluff, and LW. However, the timing of the fourth task was not optimal for him due to school starting for him, though he still did the best he could given the circumstances. While he successfully managed to backstab Pidge after their onslaught against kom, he was quickly eliminated by DLE who had managed to remain untouched at that point.
Rating: 9/10
Rating: 9/10
The Winner
Let’s be clear here: DLE definitely deserved his win, though this was actually not something I expected given his mediocre play in my previous game. In the first task he also got into a rather pointless dispute with LightWolf regarding his score. Though the bonus was kind of useful, he had needlessly risked elimination. Thankfully he got his act together in the second task and managed to establish a partnership with billymills, securing them both the location of practically all of the mines. Unsurprisingly he had the highest number of coins after the second task and easily obtained the bonus. In the third task he kept in touch with Celever, helping his team eliminate him later although he was initially planning on working with him to backstab Ace. In the fourth task I can comfortably say that he played the best as he managed to keep himself out of the initial conflict between the other four players, and managed to successfully eliminate his only real threat (Snype) fairly early. After a tense final evening, DLE was able to secure his victory. Congratulations!
Rating: 10/10
Rating: 10/10
Overall
Best Player: Da Letter El (Honorable mention to Steven Snype)
Worst Player: FireMage (Honorable mention to Eagle4)
Best Troll: Woodchuck (Honorable mention to LightWolf)
Biggest Coward: Acklow
Closing Thoughts
Overall I am pleased that I have managed to end this game on a good note. While I do think some of the tasks felt rather bland and I wasn’t as creative with the punishments as I was in the previous game, I am happy that I managed to complete this game. I would like to thank everyone again that had the courage to play. And as always, a big fuck you is in order to the weenies and cowards to refused to play.
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