'LE' Smogn invttonl Gam Thred (Mafia Wins)

1

I think it's really amusing to think that at one point I used to find wallposters really obnoxious and the "place" (because it's not really a place hah!) where you would find mafia because I felt that it was so easy to low effort and write a lot. I'd like to think that when NOCs first started on smogon, a lot of the gameplay was fairly organic in the sense that people didn't follow a strict way to play. I want to think that there was just a natural tend to want to write a lot because hey that's the format! You have all this space and time so why not use a lot of words to get a point across. Fast forward a couple years and now things have flipped - you have a lot posts, a lot of pages, and at least for me, a lot of difficulty in following the discussion. note to self: discuss down the line how this makes things difficult for me and the way I play This is not something that is "Bad" or "Good" it just is and maybe we/you/I don't like it but perhaps it was naive for me or anyone to think that it would stay the same. People change and thus communities change. Ultimately it doesn't really matter except for how I feel about it (cue: grumpy old man). I guess what really matters is can we even play a game of mafia which for now the answer is yes but even that is kinda ehh. anyways. back on track.

Was it really ever like that though? By "it" meaning is there actually a difference between wallposting (eg this) and not wallposting or as I put it, spaming (eg the rest of the thread) Tangential, I know, but that's the way it's going to be. Anyways my thought here is that it's way easier to low effort say "words" but make lots of posts that say little about the game and give little to interact with. I guess in a way spamming posts is like wallposting because you do end up taking a lot of space. but the worst part of it (for me at least) is that you lack all those words to pick at and really think about and are left with simply space (literally just the empty space between posts). There's nothing there to think about or analyze. I suppose I should make clear that I'm getting at the style of "x, y, z is mafia" etc. I think it's easy to figure out what I'm talking about from there. (yes i plan to say more). Is it weird to say that I miss the days where maybe I posted twice a day and a lot only when it was urgent? Is that something we should think about? In the current "meta" whatever you may think that is but what I take to be how people play mafia on smogon in the present is frequency of posting more important that the actually words you move from your brain to the page? I do wonder if that is the case, or should be the case. (this paragraph is probably the most relevant to what I'm getting to eventually maybe)

Sometimes then I wonder naturally if this is just me out of touch with mafia meta? The days where I played games on different sites are definitively over so obviously my own experience is not representative. You could go into whether or not the difference is actually "the days where I was Good at Mafia" but that gets into the UncleSam territory of "NOC is all luck" IMHO which I don't really want to talk about (although I do kind of want to talk about).

(aside: my experience being representative is unimportant on the whole because I'm talking about my own reality here. My own experiences shape how I read/view/write/play mafia, so how others view mafia changing is not so important to me at least. I'm writing this not to talk about general mafia "meta" or trends but in the way I/the self that I present experience how mafia is played. This is less useful on the whole because who cares what I have to say? Well, the answer to that is obvious. You care about what I say because 1. there's something about me that makes my opinion important, which is the obvious "who cares" or I offer up 2. you care because you need to figure out my alignment for this game. heh. although i suppose you say to me "I don't care what you say, play the game this way or you get lynched." That is undesirable but is something I'd rather not think about especially when there is some time) Moving on.

There's definitely a very real argument that I am just out of "touch" because I don't experience mafia as much as I could. You don't need me to tell you that mafia on Smogon and the way mafia has developed on smogon is different from the way mafia has been played at mafiascum or mafia universe (or name your random forum), let alone the entirety of the internet. I don't think there's anything wrong with that per se, it just means that you shouldn't take my word to be a kind of objectivity (not like anyone was doing that anyways). Really I guess this just goes into the above. You're reading this not because you really care (or maybe you do and yay!) but because you need to think about my alignment and think about what I'm saying and what I say about my alignment. So I guess my argument in response to this is that my words matter because that's how I want to present myself in this game (or maybe forever who knows) so you need to pay attention this because how else can you win the game?

Getting back to how people, the overall point isn't that there's a right kind of way to play mafia. I hate that. I hate it when people imply that or make fun of/criticize of people trying new things, new styles, etc. sometimes it doesn't work out and that's ok. I hate how sometimes people attach almost a life/death significance to mafia games. I think I have been (still am?) guilty of feeling this way. Obviously it's cool to be competitive and want to win and try your best, but mafia isn't so serious that you need to go all out playing the same way every time. Not only is mafia not that important, that would also just be incredibly boring. I think it's a real achievement just to get people to play to try things to engage to experiment to discuss to dream to be creative etc. This goes for all types of "mafia" (mostly OC may it rest in peace) and honestly I think you could say maybe it should be the same in life. Something for especially me to think about. Lol.

I will just conclude with a preview? I think apricity said fairly recently (meaning a recent game which ofc means like 4 months ago. lol) that he doesn't reveal the reasoning with his reads because then they don't work anymore. I find this a very interesting concept that I want to explore, maybe debunk, and decide how I feel about and how it fits in with this larger trend I've identified (which, if it isn't obvious, is the desire to spam posts. quality vs quantity. I don't really think nor do I want to turn this into something so simplisitic as that but I guess when it boils down to it that's what it is). What I've tried to make clear in any case is that this is something that you should care about because it affects how we play the game and probably more important you is how I play the game where the game is more importantly "this game".

I'm going to bed it's past my bedtime.
 
JALMONT said:
1

I think it's really amusing to think that at one point I used to find wallposters really obnoxious and the "place" (because it's not really a place hah!) where you would find mafia because I felt that it was so easy to low effort and write a lot. I'd like to think that when NOCs first started on smogon, a lot of the gameplay was fairly organic in the sense that people didn't follow a strict way to play. I want to think that there was just a natural tend to want to write a lot because hey that's the format! You have all this space and time so why not use a lot of words to get a point across. Fast forward a couple years and now things have flipped - you have a lot posts, a lot of pages, and at least for me, a lot of difficulty in following the discussion. note to self: discuss down the line how this makes things difficult for me and the way I play This is not something that is "Bad" or "Good" it just is and maybe we/you/I don't like it but perhaps it was naive for me or anyone to think that it would stay the same. People change and thus communities change. Ultimately it doesn't really matter except for how I feel about it (cue: grumpy old man). I guess what really matters is can we even play a game of mafia which for now the answer is yes but even that is kinda ehh. anyways. back on track.

Was it really ever like that though? By "it" meaning is there actually a difference between wallposting (eg this) and not wallposting or as I put it, spaming (eg the rest of the thread) Tangential, I know, but that's the way it's going to be. Anyways my thought here is that it's way easier to low effort say "words" but make lots of posts that say little about the game and give little to interact with. I guess in a way spamming posts is like wallposting because you do end up taking a lot of space. but the worst part of it (for me at least) is that you lack all those words to pick at and really think about and are left with simply space (literally just the empty space between posts). There's nothing there to think about or analyze. I suppose I should make clear that I'm getting at the style of "x, y, z is mafia" etc. I think it's easy to figure out what I'm talking about from there. (yes i plan to say more). Is it weird to say that I miss the days where maybe I posted twice a day and a lot only when it was urgent? Is that something we should think about? In the current "meta" whatever you may think that is but what I take to be how people play mafia on smogon in the present is frequency of posting more important that the actually words you move from your brain to the page? I do wonder if that is the case, or should be the case. (this paragraph is probably the most relevant to what I'm getting to eventually maybe)

Sometimes then I wonder naturally if this is just me out of touch with mafia meta? The days where I played games on different sites are definitively over so obviously my own experience is not representative. You could go into whether or not the difference is actually "the days where I was Good at Mafia" but that gets into the UncleSam territory of "NOC is all luck" IMHO which I don't really want to talk about (although I do kind of want to talk about).

(aside: my experience being representative is unimportant on the whole because I'm talking about my own reality here. My own experiences shape how I read/view/write/play mafia, so how others view mafia changing is not so important to me at least. I'm writing this not to talk about general mafia "meta" or trends but in the way I/the self that I present experience how mafia is played. This is less useful on the whole because who cares what I have to say? Well, the answer to that is obvious. You care about what I say because 1. there's something about me that makes my opinion important, which is the obvious "who cares" or I offer up 2. you care because you need to figure out my alignment for this game. heh. although i suppose you say to me "I don't care what you say, play the game this way or you get lynched." That is undesirable but is something I'd rather not think about especially when there is some time) Moving on.

There's definitely a very real argument that I am just out of "touch" because I don't experience mafia as much as I could. You don't need me to tell you that mafia on Smogon and the way mafia has developed on smogon is different from the way mafia has been played at mafiascum or mafia universe (or name your random forum), let alone the entirety of the internet. I don't think there's anything wrong with that per se, it just means that you shouldn't take my word to be a kind of objectivity (not like anyone was doing that anyways). Really I guess this just goes into the above. You're reading this not because you really care (or maybe you do and yay!) but because you need to think about my alignment and think about what I'm saying and what I say about my alignment. So I guess my argument in response to this is that my words matter because that's how I want to present myself in this game (or maybe forever who knows) so you need to pay attention this because how else can you win the game?

Getting back to how people, the overall point isn't that there's a right kind of way to play mafia. I hate that. I hate it when people imply that or make fun of/criticize of people trying new things, new styles, etc. sometimes it doesn't work out and that's ok. I hate how sometimes people attach almost a life/death significance to mafia games. I think I have been (still am?) guilty of feeling this way. Obviously it's cool to be competitive and want to win and try your best, but mafia isn't so serious that you need to go all out playing the same way every time. Not only is mafia not that important, that would also just be incredibly boring. I think it's a real achievement just to get people to play to try things to engage to experiment to discuss to dream to be creative etc. This goes for all types of "mafia" (mostly OC may it rest in peace) and honestly I think you could say maybe it should be the same in life. Something for especially me to think about. Lol.

I will just conclude with a preview? I think apricity said fairly recently (meaning a recent game which ofc means like 4 months ago. lol) that he doesn't reveal the reasoning with his reads because then they don't work anymore. I find this a very interesting concept that I want to explore, maybe debunk, and decide how I feel about and how it fits in with this larger trend I've identified (which, if it isn't obvious, is the desire to spam posts. quality vs quantity. I don't really think nor do I want to turn this into something so simplisitic as that but I guess when it boils down to it that's what it is). What I've tried to make clear in any case is that this is something that you should care about because it affects how we play the game and probably more important you is how I play the game where the game is more importantly "this game".

I'm going to bed it's past my bedtime.
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your 43 mins late with the 5 page essay i asked dle to do
 
i skimmed through JALMONTs post and really felt the message it send and now want to wallpost to help the site culture out but thats not important to the rest of the game so im going to say it breaks town for now because it literally said nothing about game state ala apathetic jalmont
 
Da Letter El said:
Because after hosting your scum game I now actually have a sense of what it looks like instead of having only seen town games and being weirded out by a major tone shift
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i suppose that makes sense; i was just confused because in first matrix you kneejerk hard scumread me and didnt know if you had the same thought process here wrt my slot
then i'll leave you to that then
what's your read on OM room?
 
Nuxl said:
i skimmed through JALMONTs post and really felt the message it send and now want to wallpost to help the site culture out but thats not important to the rest of the game so im going to say it breaks town for now because it literally said nothing about game state ala apathetic jalmont
Click to expand...

it's not about "site culture" in the sense that it should motivate you to do "something" (although I for one would not complain if you say, hosted an OC game). I think it's just more about my observations of how I see people play mafia on Smogon (emphasis there because that's what I care about and because I'm not claiming to speak about mafia in general). I think ultimately where I'm going with this is that I want to talk about how me and my playstyle struggle in this "meta" and how I (obviously) don't like that. I don't want to make excuses but yeah I guess I'm making excuses. I don't want to come off as lazy, but yeah I'm basically disguising my laziness.

Whether or not the question of how we (on Smogon) play should change is not really something that is decided. Either others change (not so likely) or people (me) adapt. What happens is up in the air but if I were to bet I would bet a lot of money on the latter.

And then partly I just have a weird sense of humor and think that doing this is highly amusing to me. I need some hobbies. Or need to go meet some girls. Probably both.
 
Nuxl said:
yes. how familiar are you with yeti's/MS's meta btw(and i suppose any reads you may have on them atm)
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Really? I’m guessing probably between like pages 5 and like 14 because I was busy getting assreamed in pathfinder

My yeti ms reads are both like...people I read over time because they’re good enough at faking tone in bursts that you kind of need to push lots of different buttons over a period of time, or push one big button really really hard and refuse to stop pushing it.

Yeti tends to flip the fuck out and omgus anyone that scumreads her as town. No ones done that yet and I don’t have a better way to read her than unlocking rage yeti. I don’t have the energy to pursue a yelling match yet to get any real read there.

Ms as town he’ll get really mad if he has a read that he is convinced to his core is right and no one else follows. As scum there is always some agenda present because the dude loves to scheme. I think ms should be in the d1 lynchpool so far; man is calling me out for being iDLE when I’m like actually posting and shit like what. Actually as scum would he really poke a bear. Yeah he probably would. Like ms hasn’t shared any real reads or done any substantive pushes and put his heart behind something to get any sort of sense of where his sort of source of inspiration is coming from or whatever, so I just leanscum on whatever floaty bullshit he’s done so far
 
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