Introduction
Alrighty then, let’s get started. You are currently reading the postgame for “a cereal murder that shoots people with cheerios”. I am sure the first thought on many people’s minds is, “Wow, it went on for this long? Indeed, I started this on March 29th, 2012, so in other words I had been hosting it for nearly five months. Had I not made the decision to end the game prematurely, who knows how much longer it would have lasted. Unfortunately, due to real life obligations (research and soon graduate school), coupled with a lack of motivation to update something that was growing stale in my spare time, this was the inevitable conclusion. While this was unfortunate, I do not wish to present a gloomy postgame. A little while ago, I made a post stating that having a timely and substantial postgame analysis is essential. Although the result in the end was not desirable, there was still a lot of stuff about this game that was worth writing about, so I am going to do just that.
Forward: Inspiration, and a comparison to the predecessor
Before I get into the specifics of this game, I will briefly discuss the main inspiration for its creation. To some extent, I have already described this in my postgame for the non anonymous game hosted inside an anonymous game, othwerise known as the predecessor to this game. If you haven’t read that and aren’t about to start, then I will summarize the key points: That game started off as a joke that I came up with after randomly talking to Gmax because NPL was a boring game that encouraged the players to be utter cowards, and the non players to be trolls. In any case, I did not originally intend to play it straight. I continued on with it and actually hosted it to completion because the people that played it seemed to enjoy it. The remaining question then is why I started this game right afterwards. To summarize it in one sentence, my intention was to make cereal a “legit” version of its predecessor in NPL. That is, it would feature the same structure of tasks and elimination, but it would also feature more players, significantly more complex tasks, and of course the trademark punishments, in order to motivate the players to be active (and give the cowards who chose to just watch some entertainment). But the real motivation behind hosting this, besides the mere fact that billymills really wanted me to, was that I wanted to host something original in a forum filled with stale mafia games. In particular, my goal was to make an intellectually stimulating game of wits and tactics that appealed to the veterans. Nevertheless, the overriding theme was that anyone with the courage to risk getting punished would be eligible to play, and in that respect, I don’t think this game could have been more successful.
Finally, I would also like to elaborate on the overall philosophy in my game design. I touched upon this somewhat in my posts during the third task, but I will summarize it again here. Basically, my goal was to make the game as dynamic as possible. Unlike mafia, where almost every design decision is pretty much made well in advance of the actual game, much of what transpired in cereal was made on the fly. In fact, I designed each of the tasks while the previous ones were running (eg, the fourth task was made while the third task was running). More importantly though, this also meant that if I felt there were significant flaws with some of the tasks themselves (eg. the third task, and later the final trial of the fifth task), I could simply just make some changes (after discussing them with the players) and resume the game. Therein lies the benefits of having separate tasks instead of one cohesive game archetype. Lastly though, it allowed cereal to ultimately become a game that players would choose to make of it. As a host, I was most interested in seeing what crazy schemes some of the players could come up with when a limited set of rules are presented to them. With the exception of the third task, I was also pleased with this aspect of game.
Prologue: Weeding out the cowards one paragraph at a time
Now let’s discuss the actual competition, shall we? We’ll begin our discussion with the preliminary task of course, which were the signups in of itself. Unlike a mafia game, where there are a limited number of slots available, anyone that signed up to play was eligible, as long as they followed a few simple instructions. While this was yet another advantage of dynamic game design, it also tested two essential skills that were needed in every task that would follow: The ability to read directions carefully, which are essential to formulating strategies or even finding loopholes to exploit, and courage, which was accepting your punishment if you failed to do the former. Amusingly enough, only one individual actually showed such heinous cowardice, in a rather amusing fashion I might add. This user was Walrein, who after realizing that his initial sign up post did not correctly conform to the standards outlined in my instructions, blatantly deleted it and posted a new one that did. However I made my instructions also ambiguous enough not to say that this was a punishable offense, but that in general you had only one chance to give me a good first impression. Because he failed to do so and acted in a most cowardly manner, I gave him a punishment that was as humiliating as possible: To don an embarrassing avatar personally made by me in paint as a symbol of shame until the game ended. This punishment was made worse by two other factors: That Walrein played in my previous competition but lost due to bad luck essentially, and that this game went on for a whopping five months. Consider my choice to end it prematurely as an act of mercy towards you if you want, because you can finally get rid of it for something else, unless you have, dare I consider, grown to like it!? In any case, in doing this I also made the nature of the punishments clear and that trying to avoid them when you deserve them would only make your fate worse.
Chapter 1: The middle quiz
Finally, we move on to the discussion of the actual tasks themselves. My analysis will not include a restatement of the rules or objectives of each task, for that I suggest you search for those posts individually in the original game thread.
Just as in the previous incarnation, I started things off with a quiz. The format was virtually the same, but the win condition was reversed in that the middle 50% of scorers would win, not the top / bottom 25%. Because of this, there was no loophole that allowed the players to win instantly (eg. answering nothing for all of them in the previous quiz). From the get go, most of the players had to make alliances to win. The most amusing thing that happened was LightWolf, one of the strongest players, actually scored too low despite being in an alliance, because he read one of the questions too literally and therefore chose to answer a more difficult question incorrectly as a result. Other than the fact that having to ask for your scores in the thread being a strategic element, there was nothing too interesting about this task. The only people that really failed were those that were a bit slow on submitting their answers. These people were primarily the ones I expected to lose in the beginning anyway, with the exception of shade who did really well in the previous competition. I was a little disappointed by that.
Chapter 2: Off to the races!
Now we get to the more exciting part of the competition. I really liked the premise in that you bet on a race that you and all the other players were trying to fix from the very beginning. Once again, this task emphasized the importance of alliances. Basically though, a few players thought it was a good idea to simply buy nothing and then try to bet on the right horse while having more wealth. However, Fishin issued a plea to all of the alliances to exclude these players from the informed party (eg, knowing which horses were fed the most). These were also the players that lost in the end. Nevertheless, a few of these people realized that their only chance of winning was simply guessing and hoping they would get lucky, and a few of them did! I was not pleased with this outcome, so this would lead to the next task...
Also once again, I would like to give a shout out to Fishin for coming up with the awesome names for the horses.
Chapter 3: The timebombs of unfairness
Ah, the third task. Amazingly, this was the only task that I had really thought about well in advance of its inception. I initially decided not to use it because ultimately it was unfair in that the individuals who started with the bombs would have a large disadvantage. Since several users (but not all) ended up getting this far from luck, I thought this was an appropriate way to handicap them. However there were two issues that I had with this task. The first was sort of due to a loophole. Earlier, I discussed how I wanted this game to be dynamic and give a lot of choices available to the players under a given ruleset. However I was disappointed by the choices of pretty much every group of players besides billymills et. al, who were the only ones who didn’t follow Ditto’s call for everyone to just idle and let the four people who started with the bombs lose. Ironically, this wasn’t even Ditto’s intention. I was hoping that more players would pass and strategically block, as well as attempt to make some negotiations. This forced me to intervene for the first time and actually change the rules of a task while it was still running. The other big problem was the fact that two out of the four players with the bombs (porygon3, EARTHWORM) played well enough in that they really didn’t deserve to have them. Thankfully, due to their alliance connections, they were able to get rid of them. However, this was at the expense of Ace Emerald, who I felt didn’t really do anything wrong except not having the right friends. If there was anyone who was unjustly screwed over by this task, it would be him. Overall, this was a controversial task, but I think it served the purpose it intended well enough, aside from those two things.
Chapter 4: Keys and auctions
At last, we get to my favorite part of the competition. This task was probably the most well received, and to think I came up with the idea while I was half asleep back of a radar truck! My main inspiration was simply the desire to design something that incorporated auctions and monetary information trading. Honestly, this task was the epitome of cereal itself without being too complex. In fact, I would say that in the future no task should be more complex than this one, and that is precisely the problem that I had with the final task, but I will explain that later. Anyway the premise for this one was pretty similar to the third task of the previous competition, if you think about it, only there are much more possibilities. This was also the first point in the game where many of the players started to become more independent, and became willing to backstab their allies if it meant winning outright. Several players even attempted to infiltrate multiple alliances at once for their own benefit, but their attempts were only moderately successful at best, and outright failures at worst. The two major alliances at this point though, were a coalition primarily lead by billymills and zorbees, and another one completely dominated by EARTHWORM.
One notable aspect of this task was the amount of work it was to host: While I thought the design was solid, I had to be on at every moment to middleman all of the information trading between players to prevent cheating, as one of the mechanics in this task was the buying and selling of information. To say that getting highlighted 19948543 times a day by EARTHWORM was a bitch was no exaggeration. But hey, I can’t fault him. Unfortunately for him though, thanks to the superior networking capabilities of billymills and some bad luck, EARTHWORM ended up losing spectacularly in the end. StevenSnype, a member of his alliance, survived in his place but had to leave on a trip so he took his punishment like a man. With that, the four remaining players were Fishin (who after having one of his plans fail miserably ended up surviving because he was useful to billymills), zorbees, billymills, and Pidge.
Chapter 5: The marathon, part I
We are almost done! Truthfully, as a host I was already worn out from the demanding responsibilities of the previous task, but given the high expectations of some of the players (billymills), I worked hard to deliver something very ambitious. And on paper at least, it certainly was. The final task was really just four separate tasks in of themselves! However, I also made it this way so that other people that were too cowardly to sign up in the beginning or got eliminated earlier due to unfortunate circumstances another chance to play. However, my main intention for doing this was to test the finalists’ ability to lead an entire team of players. In this respect, I don’t think the final task was successful because many of these recruited players weren’t really forced to do anything. Part of this was due to the underlying philosophy of the game which I have mentioned to death by now: The game was what each player would choose to make of it. Some of these players were more active and actually contributed to strategy discussions, but by and large most of them just idled and waited for the leaders to bark orders. This phenomena is not just restricted to this ask though, it is regrettably becoming a trend I am seeing more commonly in mafia games too. But that’s enough ranting for now.
Let’s discuss the actual task. The first three trials themselves, in my opinion, were a success. My aim was to make them simple enough for everyone to enjoy but also require the same time of strategy and politics as in the previous tasks. I especially liked the first trial, which was the quiz, as zorbees and his team especially impressed me with their ability to predict the responses of the other players.
Chapter 6: The marathon, part II
Finally, we are now at the final trial of the final task of the competition, and the moment where my morale as a host started to fall apart. I promised to make something that was as “epic” and “complex” as an individual game in Circus Maximus, and I did just that. But honestly I think it was too complex for its own good, and it was made worse by the fact that its experimental nature made it difficult to balance. Basically though, the idea behind this final trial was to force the players to combine all of the skills they have gained in the other tasks, which were to negotiate with other players as well as concocting original strategies. It was also meant to put team loyalty to the test as the other players were allowed to betray their team. This is also the part of the trial that I believe was the most flawed in that while there were several incentives for the players to jump ship in the form of punishments, the rules made doing so very risky and generally difficult to pull off. Only one or two players even considered doing it throughout the trial, one of which was only doing it just for the hell of it (Layell).
In conjunction with this, the other biggest problem of this trial was that completely eliminating a team was almost impossible. This was due to how easy it was to defend the vaults once all of the buzzwords were known, as even without recruiting other players, the base income of each team was enough to reasonably afford protection each night. To remedy this problem, I considered implementing a “patch”, which would have changed the rules so that a hooker type action would stop vault protection if a team predicted it successfully, as well as a cap on recruits as that was also starting to get kind of ridiculous.
While I do think there were some positive aspects of the last trial, I think I will end my discussion here and save the additional details for the player analyses below.
Epilogue: What if?
Naturally, by ending the game prematurely, several questions have been left unanswered, so I will go ahead and address them.
Q: What was the final punishment?
A: Post a video of themself picking their nose.
Q: What about the secret prize?
A: I will award it to the four players who made it to the final task (Fishin, zorbees, billymills, Pidge) at a later date.
Q: Will anyone be punished?
A: No. While I do think several people should be punished for their particularly poor performance in the final trial, I will not do so as it wouldn’t be fair to the potential winning team.
Q: What was the purpose of those essays we had to write?
A: Good question! The first one about the lord’s wife was mostly just a fun thing I came up with because frankly I wanted to force the recruited players to get off their butt and do something. I did want to make the players think that there was some hidden purpose behind it even though there wasn’t so the game could be potentially more interesting. The only real relationship it had to the task was that it would have granted Fishin’s team (the ones that completed their submissions first) a slight advantage in the following trading period, which was that they would be allowed to execute one additional trading period action (ie recruit 2 people instead of 1). On the other hand, the second essay did have a game related purpose. I would have instructed each player who submitted an essay to “try” to pair up with one other unpaired player that answered with a different response from their own. In reality, almost every player picked free food, so finding someone that picked free travel would have been very difficult. Basically, I was hoping to set up an elaborate troll when you could simply say that you couldn’t find another player to pair up and fulfill the requirement of “trying”.
Q: Who would have won if the game continued?
A: It is difficult to say. After all, when I ended the game, it was sort of in a “stalemate”, but the new patch and a plan by billymills to fracture zorbees’ team could have potentially changed things. Basically, I think it would have been between billymills and Pidge, with billymills coming out slightly on top due to his ability to devise innovative strategies. However, I have played many games with him so I am biased in that regard, as Pidge could have very well come out on top with a unique strategy of his own.
Appendix: Analysis of notable players
In this section, I will briefly discuss how the game went for the notable players. Admittedly “notable” is kind of subjective, but I don’t want to give any space for the players that mostly did nothing as there were quite a few of those in the earlier tasks. Please do not take any of this wrong way, as I plan on being quite blunt.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I do think it is a shame that I chose to end this early and thus cannot deliver the final punishment. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun hosting this game. Ideally, I would like to host another one of these now that I have analyzed the flaws of this game in detail, but I probably cannot do so until at least next January as I will be done applying to graduate school by then.
I would like to thank everyone that had the courage to play and accept their punishments. I would especially like to thank Fishin, zorbees, billymills, Pidge, and all of their teammates for putting up with the final task. Lastly though, this postgame would not be complete without a fuck you to the cowards who read this thread but didn't have the balls to sign up. And Walrein, for being a coward regardless. That is all. Thanks for reading.
Alrighty then, let’s get started. You are currently reading the postgame for “a cereal murder that shoots people with cheerios”. I am sure the first thought on many people’s minds is, “Wow, it went on for this long? Indeed, I started this on March 29th, 2012, so in other words I had been hosting it for nearly five months. Had I not made the decision to end the game prematurely, who knows how much longer it would have lasted. Unfortunately, due to real life obligations (research and soon graduate school), coupled with a lack of motivation to update something that was growing stale in my spare time, this was the inevitable conclusion. While this was unfortunate, I do not wish to present a gloomy postgame. A little while ago, I made a post stating that having a timely and substantial postgame analysis is essential. Although the result in the end was not desirable, there was still a lot of stuff about this game that was worth writing about, so I am going to do just that.
Forward: Inspiration, and a comparison to the predecessor
Before I get into the specifics of this game, I will briefly discuss the main inspiration for its creation. To some extent, I have already described this in my postgame for the non anonymous game hosted inside an anonymous game, othwerise known as the predecessor to this game. If you haven’t read that and aren’t about to start, then I will summarize the key points: That game started off as a joke that I came up with after randomly talking to Gmax because NPL was a boring game that encouraged the players to be utter cowards, and the non players to be trolls. In any case, I did not originally intend to play it straight. I continued on with it and actually hosted it to completion because the people that played it seemed to enjoy it. The remaining question then is why I started this game right afterwards. To summarize it in one sentence, my intention was to make cereal a “legit” version of its predecessor in NPL. That is, it would feature the same structure of tasks and elimination, but it would also feature more players, significantly more complex tasks, and of course the trademark punishments, in order to motivate the players to be active (and give the cowards who chose to just watch some entertainment). But the real motivation behind hosting this, besides the mere fact that billymills really wanted me to, was that I wanted to host something original in a forum filled with stale mafia games. In particular, my goal was to make an intellectually stimulating game of wits and tactics that appealed to the veterans. Nevertheless, the overriding theme was that anyone with the courage to risk getting punished would be eligible to play, and in that respect, I don’t think this game could have been more successful.
Finally, I would also like to elaborate on the overall philosophy in my game design. I touched upon this somewhat in my posts during the third task, but I will summarize it again here. Basically, my goal was to make the game as dynamic as possible. Unlike mafia, where almost every design decision is pretty much made well in advance of the actual game, much of what transpired in cereal was made on the fly. In fact, I designed each of the tasks while the previous ones were running (eg, the fourth task was made while the third task was running). More importantly though, this also meant that if I felt there were significant flaws with some of the tasks themselves (eg. the third task, and later the final trial of the fifth task), I could simply just make some changes (after discussing them with the players) and resume the game. Therein lies the benefits of having separate tasks instead of one cohesive game archetype. Lastly though, it allowed cereal to ultimately become a game that players would choose to make of it. As a host, I was most interested in seeing what crazy schemes some of the players could come up with when a limited set of rules are presented to them. With the exception of the third task, I was also pleased with this aspect of game.
Prologue: Weeding out the cowards one paragraph at a time
Now let’s discuss the actual competition, shall we? We’ll begin our discussion with the preliminary task of course, which were the signups in of itself. Unlike a mafia game, where there are a limited number of slots available, anyone that signed up to play was eligible, as long as they followed a few simple instructions. While this was yet another advantage of dynamic game design, it also tested two essential skills that were needed in every task that would follow: The ability to read directions carefully, which are essential to formulating strategies or even finding loopholes to exploit, and courage, which was accepting your punishment if you failed to do the former. Amusingly enough, only one individual actually showed such heinous cowardice, in a rather amusing fashion I might add. This user was Walrein, who after realizing that his initial sign up post did not correctly conform to the standards outlined in my instructions, blatantly deleted it and posted a new one that did. However I made my instructions also ambiguous enough not to say that this was a punishable offense, but that in general you had only one chance to give me a good first impression. Because he failed to do so and acted in a most cowardly manner, I gave him a punishment that was as humiliating as possible: To don an embarrassing avatar personally made by me in paint as a symbol of shame until the game ended. This punishment was made worse by two other factors: That Walrein played in my previous competition but lost due to bad luck essentially, and that this game went on for a whopping five months. Consider my choice to end it prematurely as an act of mercy towards you if you want, because you can finally get rid of it for something else, unless you have, dare I consider, grown to like it!? In any case, in doing this I also made the nature of the punishments clear and that trying to avoid them when you deserve them would only make your fate worse.
Chapter 1: The middle quiz
Finally, we move on to the discussion of the actual tasks themselves. My analysis will not include a restatement of the rules or objectives of each task, for that I suggest you search for those posts individually in the original game thread.
Just as in the previous incarnation, I started things off with a quiz. The format was virtually the same, but the win condition was reversed in that the middle 50% of scorers would win, not the top / bottom 25%. Because of this, there was no loophole that allowed the players to win instantly (eg. answering nothing for all of them in the previous quiz). From the get go, most of the players had to make alliances to win. The most amusing thing that happened was LightWolf, one of the strongest players, actually scored too low despite being in an alliance, because he read one of the questions too literally and therefore chose to answer a more difficult question incorrectly as a result. Other than the fact that having to ask for your scores in the thread being a strategic element, there was nothing too interesting about this task. The only people that really failed were those that were a bit slow on submitting their answers. These people were primarily the ones I expected to lose in the beginning anyway, with the exception of shade who did really well in the previous competition. I was a little disappointed by that.
Chapter 2: Off to the races!
Now we get to the more exciting part of the competition. I really liked the premise in that you bet on a race that you and all the other players were trying to fix from the very beginning. Once again, this task emphasized the importance of alliances. Basically though, a few players thought it was a good idea to simply buy nothing and then try to bet on the right horse while having more wealth. However, Fishin issued a plea to all of the alliances to exclude these players from the informed party (eg, knowing which horses were fed the most). These were also the players that lost in the end. Nevertheless, a few of these people realized that their only chance of winning was simply guessing and hoping they would get lucky, and a few of them did! I was not pleased with this outcome, so this would lead to the next task...
Also once again, I would like to give a shout out to Fishin for coming up with the awesome names for the horses.
Chapter 3: The timebombs of unfairness
Ah, the third task. Amazingly, this was the only task that I had really thought about well in advance of its inception. I initially decided not to use it because ultimately it was unfair in that the individuals who started with the bombs would have a large disadvantage. Since several users (but not all) ended up getting this far from luck, I thought this was an appropriate way to handicap them. However there were two issues that I had with this task. The first was sort of due to a loophole. Earlier, I discussed how I wanted this game to be dynamic and give a lot of choices available to the players under a given ruleset. However I was disappointed by the choices of pretty much every group of players besides billymills et. al, who were the only ones who didn’t follow Ditto’s call for everyone to just idle and let the four people who started with the bombs lose. Ironically, this wasn’t even Ditto’s intention. I was hoping that more players would pass and strategically block, as well as attempt to make some negotiations. This forced me to intervene for the first time and actually change the rules of a task while it was still running. The other big problem was the fact that two out of the four players with the bombs (porygon3, EARTHWORM) played well enough in that they really didn’t deserve to have them. Thankfully, due to their alliance connections, they were able to get rid of them. However, this was at the expense of Ace Emerald, who I felt didn’t really do anything wrong except not having the right friends. If there was anyone who was unjustly screwed over by this task, it would be him. Overall, this was a controversial task, but I think it served the purpose it intended well enough, aside from those two things.
Chapter 4: Keys and auctions
At last, we get to my favorite part of the competition. This task was probably the most well received, and to think I came up with the idea while I was half asleep back of a radar truck! My main inspiration was simply the desire to design something that incorporated auctions and monetary information trading. Honestly, this task was the epitome of cereal itself without being too complex. In fact, I would say that in the future no task should be more complex than this one, and that is precisely the problem that I had with the final task, but I will explain that later. Anyway the premise for this one was pretty similar to the third task of the previous competition, if you think about it, only there are much more possibilities. This was also the first point in the game where many of the players started to become more independent, and became willing to backstab their allies if it meant winning outright. Several players even attempted to infiltrate multiple alliances at once for their own benefit, but their attempts were only moderately successful at best, and outright failures at worst. The two major alliances at this point though, were a coalition primarily lead by billymills and zorbees, and another one completely dominated by EARTHWORM.
One notable aspect of this task was the amount of work it was to host: While I thought the design was solid, I had to be on at every moment to middleman all of the information trading between players to prevent cheating, as one of the mechanics in this task was the buying and selling of information. To say that getting highlighted 19948543 times a day by EARTHWORM was a bitch was no exaggeration. But hey, I can’t fault him. Unfortunately for him though, thanks to the superior networking capabilities of billymills and some bad luck, EARTHWORM ended up losing spectacularly in the end. StevenSnype, a member of his alliance, survived in his place but had to leave on a trip so he took his punishment like a man. With that, the four remaining players were Fishin (who after having one of his plans fail miserably ended up surviving because he was useful to billymills), zorbees, billymills, and Pidge.
Chapter 5: The marathon, part I
We are almost done! Truthfully, as a host I was already worn out from the demanding responsibilities of the previous task, but given the high expectations of some of the players (billymills), I worked hard to deliver something very ambitious. And on paper at least, it certainly was. The final task was really just four separate tasks in of themselves! However, I also made it this way so that other people that were too cowardly to sign up in the beginning or got eliminated earlier due to unfortunate circumstances another chance to play. However, my main intention for doing this was to test the finalists’ ability to lead an entire team of players. In this respect, I don’t think the final task was successful because many of these recruited players weren’t really forced to do anything. Part of this was due to the underlying philosophy of the game which I have mentioned to death by now: The game was what each player would choose to make of it. Some of these players were more active and actually contributed to strategy discussions, but by and large most of them just idled and waited for the leaders to bark orders. This phenomena is not just restricted to this ask though, it is regrettably becoming a trend I am seeing more commonly in mafia games too. But that’s enough ranting for now.
Let’s discuss the actual task. The first three trials themselves, in my opinion, were a success. My aim was to make them simple enough for everyone to enjoy but also require the same time of strategy and politics as in the previous tasks. I especially liked the first trial, which was the quiz, as zorbees and his team especially impressed me with their ability to predict the responses of the other players.
Chapter 6: The marathon, part II
Finally, we are now at the final trial of the final task of the competition, and the moment where my morale as a host started to fall apart. I promised to make something that was as “epic” and “complex” as an individual game in Circus Maximus, and I did just that. But honestly I think it was too complex for its own good, and it was made worse by the fact that its experimental nature made it difficult to balance. Basically though, the idea behind this final trial was to force the players to combine all of the skills they have gained in the other tasks, which were to negotiate with other players as well as concocting original strategies. It was also meant to put team loyalty to the test as the other players were allowed to betray their team. This is also the part of the trial that I believe was the most flawed in that while there were several incentives for the players to jump ship in the form of punishments, the rules made doing so very risky and generally difficult to pull off. Only one or two players even considered doing it throughout the trial, one of which was only doing it just for the hell of it (Layell).
In conjunction with this, the other biggest problem of this trial was that completely eliminating a team was almost impossible. This was due to how easy it was to defend the vaults once all of the buzzwords were known, as even without recruiting other players, the base income of each team was enough to reasonably afford protection each night. To remedy this problem, I considered implementing a “patch”, which would have changed the rules so that a hooker type action would stop vault protection if a team predicted it successfully, as well as a cap on recruits as that was also starting to get kind of ridiculous.
While I do think there were some positive aspects of the last trial, I think I will end my discussion here and save the additional details for the player analyses below.
Epilogue: What if?
Naturally, by ending the game prematurely, several questions have been left unanswered, so I will go ahead and address them.
Q: What was the final punishment?
A: Post a video of themself picking their nose.
Q: What about the secret prize?
A: I will award it to the four players who made it to the final task (Fishin, zorbees, billymills, Pidge) at a later date.
Q: Will anyone be punished?
A: No. While I do think several people should be punished for their particularly poor performance in the final trial, I will not do so as it wouldn’t be fair to the potential winning team.
Q: What was the purpose of those essays we had to write?
A: Good question! The first one about the lord’s wife was mostly just a fun thing I came up with because frankly I wanted to force the recruited players to get off their butt and do something. I did want to make the players think that there was some hidden purpose behind it even though there wasn’t so the game could be potentially more interesting. The only real relationship it had to the task was that it would have granted Fishin’s team (the ones that completed their submissions first) a slight advantage in the following trading period, which was that they would be allowed to execute one additional trading period action (ie recruit 2 people instead of 1). On the other hand, the second essay did have a game related purpose. I would have instructed each player who submitted an essay to “try” to pair up with one other unpaired player that answered with a different response from their own. In reality, almost every player picked free food, so finding someone that picked free travel would have been very difficult. Basically, I was hoping to set up an elaborate troll when you could simply say that you couldn’t find another player to pair up and fulfill the requirement of “trying”.
Q: Who would have won if the game continued?
A: It is difficult to say. After all, when I ended the game, it was sort of in a “stalemate”, but the new patch and a plan by billymills to fracture zorbees’ team could have potentially changed things. Basically, I think it would have been between billymills and Pidge, with billymills coming out slightly on top due to his ability to devise innovative strategies. However, I have played many games with him so I am biased in that regard, as Pidge could have very well come out on top with a unique strategy of his own.
Appendix: Analysis of notable players
In this section, I will briefly discuss how the game went for the notable players. Admittedly “notable” is kind of subjective, but I don’t want to give any space for the players that mostly did nothing as there were quite a few of those in the earlier tasks. Please do not take any of this wrong way, as I plan on being quite blunt.
I think I have pretty much covered what needed to be said. Even though his punishment is now over, he is still an S-class coward in my book. I would normally apologize for unintentionally making the game go on too long and extending his punishment, but even though he did try to come back as a member of Pidge’s team, I think he deserved every bit of it, and his futile complaints about it just made me laugh. I mean no disrespect, but I think what happened here was a shining example of what these punishments were all about.
The paranoid man. LightWolf is a man with a history of being overly paranoid about unlikely scenarios in mafia games, but arguably no players are better than him when it comes to concocting schemes, not even billymills. This is why I was disappointed to see him succumb to paranoia so early in the game even though he was allied with billymills. However, he took his defeat gracefully and continued to consult with me about the game, giving me advice on how to handle certain situations in the tasks as well as giving me potential ideas to work with. He also expressed his desire to get another chance somehow, and this is what inspired me to make the final task a team game. He then suggested the possibility of making each of the players have separate win conditions that may require them to betray their team, but in the end I chose not to to do this. Looking back, I think this was a mistake as it would actually add a real challenge to the final task and force the players to do something.
Man, to think that he would disappoint me not only once, but twice? He was one of the players who made the questionable decision to not buy any food in the second task and was forcibly excluded from the victory party as a result. Not only that, but he didn’t really try to correctly guess the correct horse to bet on despite the fact that a few other players in the same situation as him did just that. I have a long history with Gmax and mafia games and I probably think more highly of his skill than anyone else. Admittedly, I shouldn’t be talking right now as his reasoning for his poor performance was real life commitments, so I suppose it couldn’t be helped. Still, I wish I could have seen a final task pitting LightWolf, Gmax, EARTHWORM, and billymills against each other. Now that would make any game great.
He was one of the players who managed to correctly guess one of the horses correctly as I mentioned in the analysis for Gmax. However, I was openly clear that I did not like how certain players would continue to advance due to luck, so I made the third task particularly unfair to him, and truly give him another chance if he was able to survive it. Unfortunately, he didn’t deliver and was ultimately eliminated. He did complain about the unfairness, but I can’t accept such an excuse when both porygon3 and EARTHWORM were able to escape a similar situation. But at least he came back in the final task to assist billymills.
One of the most honorable players in the competition, if there ever was one. His play was solid in the first two tasks, and established allies in billymills, zorbees, and porygon3. However, when billymills found out about EARTHWORM’s dilemma of holding a bomb, he decided to help EARTHWORM escape elimination at Ace Emerald’s expense. I guess ultimately it was due to his unlucky positioning on the playerlist, but ironically enough EARTHWORM also fell to bad luck in the following task. Finally, I appreciated him for taking his punishment like a man, despite his situation. I don’t know if he is still active in Circus, but if I ever played a mafia game with him I would be more than happy to have him on my team.
No player caused me more frustration than Ditto, solely because he was able to get as far as he did without really exerting any effort. He does possess a notable skill in finding odd loopholes in my rules that allow him to do so, and he did so quite often in the previous competition. However, in this case his attempt at doing so would, though unintentionally, unjustly screw over EARTHWORM and porygon3. Though I did acknowledge that the third task and the entire competition would be unfair, I also wanted to give the players with bombs an opportunity to find a way out if they put the effort in, so I was forced to change the rules of the task to give them a chance to do so. Even more ironically, he was also the least likely player to have a bomb in the first place due to his positioning on the playerlist! Thankfully though, the fourth task (for the most part) successfully distinguished the motivated and the lazy players, so it was no surprise that Ditto would lose then.
He played fairly well, though unremarkably in the first three tasks. He did have a bomb in the third task but thanks to his connections with billymills he was able to survive. Regrettably though much of his play was characterized by an over dependence on his alliance, and as a result he failed to move on past the fourth task when players like billymills and EARTHWORM were being extremely active in comparison. He didn’t have a mic, so he couldn’t show us a recording of his attempts at singing the classics like forks, EARTHWORM, or StevenSnype. Instead I stated that he had to write an essay on why he should buy a mic but he never did, so technically he should be a blacklisted player until he does so. But I haven’t seen him around lately, so I doubt he cares.
Forks! He hasn’t ventured much into the mafia community since Simpsons Mafia, but I guess we are good friends so he actually joined my game after I advertised it on #smogcraft. And he actually got much farther than I expected! Yes, I ultimately wanted him to play so I could hand him a humiliating punishment, I will admit it. In the end, that is precisely what happened as after spending far too much money during the bidding phases, he was soundly eliminated in the fourth task and had to sing the classics. I have talked to him on skype before and know what his voice sounds like, so I knew how it would sound. I also linked his recording directly in the #smogcraft topic so that everyone would know his shame. Good courage though!
Snype was another surprisingly solid player. We were playing some shitty ass mafia game at the same time while running this competition, so we actually talked a lot. Where I thought he really shined though was in the fourth task. Certainly, it is true that he allied with EARTHWORM and his success was partially due to all of the effort he put in. However, while EARTHWORM did intend to have his entire alliance make it to the final task, Snype also acted independently and made his own trades. That is not to say that he betrayed EARTHWORM, but if it ensured his own survival I am sure he would have been willing to do so. Needless to say, he played really well and honestly deserved to be in the final task. Unfortunately, he couldn’t due to real life circumstances, but like Ace Emerald he accepted his punishment, despite its severity, with grace and maturity.
The slimy Adam Nelson is another person that I have played many mafia games with, and I am sure that nobody would disagree with me that he can be a frustrating guy to deal with. Indeed, as far as how demanding the players were, nobody was more so than EARTHWORM as he kept me on constantly during the fourth task to arrange 385719 trades. In the end though, I can’t really fault him for it as he played the best out of all the players in the fourth task, in my opinion. In contrast to billy’s alliance which was rather fragmented and self-centered, EARTHWORM genuinely wanted his team to win, though in doing so he was overwhelmingly dominant in that he devised most of the strategies for Snype and Pidge, two players that were already solid enough on their own. Some could argue that this was bad play and could leave him open to betrayal, and it did, but that was not the reason he lost. Essentially, billymills, seeing him as his biggest threat in the competition, came up with a clutch scheme which would involve giving Fishin a chance to survive at the expense of either Snype or EARTHWORM by randomly guessing their keys and buying them during the last bidding phase. Luck was not on EARTHWORM’s side as Fishin literally bought the correct keys to EARTHWORM’s box, and as a result he was eliminated empty handed after maintaining a solid lead, though Pidge (the least active member of his alliance) moved on. In my opinion, it really is a shame that he did not make it, as much as I hate to admit it.
Although Fishin was without a doubt the least remarkable player who managed to survive up until the final task, there are many things about him that I can discuss. In the early stages of the competition, I think he was one of the strongest players, as he was heavily involved in all of the strategy sessions in his alliances, particularly in the second task. His play began to falter in the fourth task, where he came up with an overly ambitious scheme in which he would try to get himself involved with all of the alliances and doublecross them for his own benefit. Unfortunately, he was publicly caught lying to EARTHWORM very early, and as a result he had difficulty finding partners to trade information with. Either that or he just stopped caring after his blunder. Regardless, he was able to make it to the final task only because he proved to be useful in billy’s plan to eliminate members of EARTHWORM’s alliance, which resulted in EARTHWORM’s elimination when he didn’t deserve it. Indeed, it was certainly beneficial to billymills as Fishin would be much less of a threat, and this was definitely so in the final task. Due to his apathy, Fishin was undoubtedly the worst player at managing his team, even though it consisted of the bright minds of Paperblade, His Excellency dak, and EARTHWORM. He did not try hard enough to make sure that he knew the night results of his team (although partially, my lord dak messed up at one point himself). As a result, Pidge was able to quickly obtain all of his buzzwords early in the trial, and his team was kept alive for such a long time ultimately because his existence was a useful buffer for billymills. Even then, he didn’t really attempt to recover in the face of adversity and thus failed to capitalize on many opportunities given to him, for instance using his money to recruit more players like the other factions. There was one exception to this though, as his team was the first to submit their responses to me for the knight essay. Perhaps he didn’t do so because it was one of the terms for the protection given to him by billymills, but even then I think this was a grave mistake. If he had just not given up after making his mistakes, I think he would have done alright.
Nobody asked me more questions about the game than zorbees. Not even billymills. However, this was certainly a good habit to get into, so I don’t think it is an understatement to say that zorbees deserved to get as far as he did. He, along with billymills, played a large role in orchestrating the first four tasks for their alliance. In the beginning of the fourth task, his team was also the strongest in part because everyone on it was actively involved in the strategy talk. When the final trial began, however, he ironically misinterpreted the rules and chose not to buy any stock, which was a pretty crucial mistake. By no means was it a game ending mistake though, as he smartly recruited as many people to his team as he could to boost his income. I could argue that his team management skills were questionable as both Itchni and possibly Layell were planning on betraying him, but other than that there was nothing seriously wrong with his play. Then again, neither was the case for billymills and Pidge, so that is why I ultimately think his odds of winning were lower than theirs. But make no mistake, he definitely deserved to be in the final task. Since Layell never sent in his action to move stuff from the vault on Day 8, it is possible that he was simply trying to mislead billymills, though as of this post I am not sure.
The only player who joined the game during the final task to be considered “notable”. This was because he joined with the intention to betray whatever team recruited him right from the start, or so he said. He missed some opportunities to do so in the beginning, but another one arose later in the game after contact with billymills. The plan was for him and Itchni to remove 50% of the vault’s contents and give the money to Fatecrashers so that zorbees would redirect his protection to him instead of the vault. However, for whatever reason Itchni did but he didn’t, so the plan kind of failed. I still do not know if Layell simply forgot or if it was intentional. It is for this reason that I can’t really say for sure who would have won the game, though based on my knowledge, Layell most likely forgot to send me a Day 8 PM.
The blacksheep of the group, that is for sure. I never expected him to get as far as he did, but there weren’t really any notable flaws with his play. I would say that in the first four tasks, it was merely solid, and simply followed the flow of his alliances. Furthermore, he shocked me and many others by choosing to recruit relatively weak players to his team in the very beginning. However, I think this strategy worked out very well for him. While weak on paper, no team was nearly as organized as his, as they were the ones who most consistently sent their PMs to me on time. The team members themselves contributed very little, in fact Pidge’s team was the only one that didn’t have an IRC channel. This also worked out for him though, as he still made sure he knew all of the night results of his team members and with his bold, yet successful attempt to weaken Fishin early, he ensured their loyalty to him. Overall I was very impressed, though I don’t know if he would have been able to overcome billymills.
I saved the best for last, obviously. It goes without saying that billymills was the best player overall in cereal even though he didn’t officially win. Given his history in the previous competition and mafia in general, this was really not a surprise. billy’s play was not merely solid, but pretty much phenomenal for almost all of the tasks. I supposed he faltered a little bit in the first three trials of the final task and his plan to eliminate zorbees in the fourth trial would have failed due to Layell idling during the previous day. But even then, I cannot deny that he made the most attempts to come up with interesting strategies for each task, as well as not neglecting the diplomatic aspect of the competition. I won’t go into too much detail about his strategies as many of them were already mentioned in other parts of this postgame previously. Strangely enough, he thought I was inactive towards the end for mysterious reasons, but he finally believed me after I showed him a copy of a soon to be published research paper that I coauthored. Overall, if there is any shame in ending this competition prematurely, it is not being able to see what actions billymills would have done from here.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I do think it is a shame that I chose to end this early and thus cannot deliver the final punishment. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun hosting this game. Ideally, I would like to host another one of these now that I have analyzed the flaws of this game in detail, but I probably cannot do so until at least next January as I will be done applying to graduate school by then.
I would like to thank everyone that had the courage to play and accept their punishments. I would especially like to thank Fishin, zorbees, billymills, Pidge, and all of their teammates for putting up with the final task. Lastly though, this postgame would not be complete without a fuck you to the cowards who read this thread but didn't have the balls to sign up. And Walrein, for being a coward regardless. That is all. Thanks for reading.
