bofh already went over the theory and whatnot. I don't get why he wrote up a guide to playing scum when one for town would have been way better 
Because at the time Scum had a series of games in which they were sucking, and I am far, far better at playing Scum than I am at playing Town. My Town game has since then improved (that document was written nearly a whole year ago), but it's
still far behind my Scum game in terms of skill. Anyway.
That being said, I am in the middle of writing an analogous document for Town strategy/play. It really aggravates me that 95% of what I am writing in it is literally either just basic common sense, or something that Town here really should have seen as it's the reason they've been chronically losing games here for the past year or so and not to mention something that I've been yelling at them over since approximately January, but yeah. If it will finally get people to listen, then that's great. And if not, then I always have the DL to play mafia at, and they're actually, y'know, competent at this game.
Anyway, onto discussion/analysis of the current game:
First off, I apologise to everyone. I didn't
deserve the D2 lynch. More to the point, after I had shown up and started contributing, had I finally followed through and made a proper case on someone (and it likely would have been Kefit now that I think about it, principally over the piss-poor reasoning of "well Carth is totally Scum because he managed to direct Town down a direction of lurkerhaet", which is piss-poor reasoning due to the fact that before said post TOWN HAD NO DIRECTION WHATSOEVER. Anyway.) I could have turned the game around, especially considering I had largely gotten the bandwagon off me and the last remaining relevant person on my bandwagon, i.e. Carth, would have moved off it as well (especially had I gone after Kefit before him, and if I had gone after, I would have completely agreed with him).
Instead, I had realised that if I simply went straight back to lurking, this would instead give credence to Carth's case on me (i.e. I really was only showing up due to moderator pokes and then saying the bare minimum to get any bandwagons off of me), and even if it didn't, either Town Apathy would force a vote for me as I had the most votes out of anyone still, or I would simply be modkilled at the end of the day for inactivity, and thus I wouldn't have to deal with this game that at this point was so painful and aggravating that I could barely force myself to read through a single page thereof, and having a role that (at the time) was completely worthless but had it not been for (what I thought at the time to be) a fairly stupid restriction, incredibly useful, didn't help.
And thus I basically let myself get lynched. I am not even remotely proud of this move on my part. In fact, I'm still mad at myself over it, considering just how many times I've bitched at people that "if you don't want to play the game, don't /in!". Quite honestly, I deserve several bad things said against me - what I did was incredibly selfish, and accelerated Town's loss when I could have seriously turned things around for them instead.
That being said, Town played absolutely atrociously. Some things stand out:
- Guys, Zent is Town. He is playing
terribly. Like, blatantly awfully. If he were Scum, he had buddies. This means one of two things: either they would force him to run ANY AND EVERY POST HE ATTEMPTED TO MAKE BY THEM, and correct it before approving it being posted, or they would turbobus him as not only would he give them absolutely
MASSIVE amounts of TowniePoints(TM), but he was also potentially a HUGE liability in terms of his level of play - he could inadvertently link himself to a buddy and then that buddy could potentially go down with him, which would be far more terrible for Scum than just losing Zent. Seriously. Remember wrathie in GWU Mafia - he played equally terribly if not even worse. And by LYLO, both Affinity and u? had (correctly) ID'd him as Town for pretty much the above reason.
- Trying to attack me for what I did at the end of D1 is utterly moronic. Most of my reasoning can be found in my argument with UK, but in the interest of not
torturing everyoneforcing everyone to read through that mess, I will restate it in a nice, succint fashion: Scum want to get Townies lynched, and not attract attention to themselves. Both Zak and Zent were wagons which were pathetically easy to jump onto, as evidenced by K4U's L-1 vote for Zak that iirc only myself and Kilga actually ever wound up bringing up. Given that I had my choice of "delicious Townie" or "delicious Townie" to lynch, then I am
not going to awkwardly try to claim that I will lynch someone, then not do so, leaving my vote sitting on a third person who had no chances of being lynched. It fails both the first and the second goal of Scumplay - it attracts a lot of undue attention onto me, and it makes lynching Townies harder because now they have one less Scum vote on them. In short, it is absolutely moronic as a Scumplay, and thus not one any even semi-competent Scum would make - it's just dumb. Which is not to say that this absolves me from
being Scum, just that it
isn't a Scumtell.- K4U, Kefit and Furienify were all Obvscum and I'm severely disappointed that none of Town picked up on them until it's too late. I'm also extremely aggravated that everyone is stating that they really should have seen K4U and Kefit, and only those two, when
Furienify was more Obvscum than both of them combined, and considering that K4U played lurkerscum to levels only comparable to my early play on this site, and Kefit made the most terrible case against anyone that I've seen in awhile (that some of you even bought! Shame on you, seriously.), that's saying something, but look at this: D2 he was totally worthless, and D1 he said a lot of words but virtually no content. And really, the fact that he started the Zent wagon was irrelevant: not only was it done very shortly after the jokevote phase ended, but
starting a wagon is only a good defence against being Scum if the wagon is on A Scum., and even then it's not perfect, because lol bussing. It showed Town that he had An opinion, A Single One, but even that one was so insignificant that it could safely be ignored in terms of his contributions, especially considering
just how many posts he had made since then. Lurking is Scummy - in fact, ScummiEST behaviour, to quote InSovietAlex. However, Active Lurking is even Scummier, because while Lurking has excuses (RL, computer exploded/internet is down, power outage due to squirrel treating a pair of electrical wires as food, etc), Active Lurking has literally no excuse, because not only does it show that you are saying nothing and thus we cannot glean anything off you that can be used to determine alignment, but it shows us that you have no excuse for not doing this, as you have more than enough time to make not just one, but SEVERAL posts in the game per day that are utterly devoid of any useful content.
Anyway, now for things directed at specific people:
NeoSerela: IF IT IS LYLO, YOU DO NOT VOTE UNTIL EITHER THE TOWN HAS MADE A FINAL DECISION THAT AT LEAST THE MAJORITY HAVE AGREED UPON AND HAVE DECIDED TO FINALLY PLACE THEIR VOTES, OR IF THE DEADLINE IS SO CLOSE THAT YOU ARE FORCED TO VOTE, NO MATTER HOW GREAT AN INDIVIDUAL'S TRANSGRESSIONS MAY BE AT THIS TIME IN YOUR EYES. Seriously.Roukanken: shut the fuck up, stop whining, give yourself a good, solid kick in the arse, and actually improve yourself. You
are capable of playing this game at a high level, I've even SEEN you play this game at a high level as Town multiple times so far now, so quit whining, quit making up cheap/worthless excuses, quit being a lazy asswipe and
improve your play. I KNOW you can do this, so seriously, just do it. You know what is wrong with your play as Town, you know how to fix it, the only thing left now is to fix it. So just fix it! Seriously.
UK: Oh boy. There will be a full separate discussion with you over several issues later, after Myself/Kilga/Edible/Pesco finish deliberating on some things, but could you
please stop attempting to brag about what you would have/should have done when you really didn't actually do anything? I'm surprised it took you until the NK to note that Kefit and K4U were likely Scum - and attempting to glean into from NKs and solely NKs *is* a pile of WIFOM simply because quite often Scum really can get away with NKing via RNG on this site and
still win! (I would know, I've done that multiple times as Scum on this site by now :V)
Zent: If you're always going to play
this horribly, don't join another mafia game. Not saying that you shouldn't at all, but you really need to have your playstyle improve by several orders of magnitude, and rapidly, because as it stands, the only player worse than you that this site has seen (outside of The Game That Does Not Exist, of course), is wrathie. And wrathie is, to put it succintly, erm...wrathie. So yeah. Play at that level seriously is nothing more than a distraction to Town, and I had actually attempted to vig you D2 before getting clarification on my role that the whole Obvtown dealie was not just flavour but rather an explicit game mechanic. Oh well.
Edible: 4 Scum in a game this size is seriously imbalanced - it should have been 3,
especially given MoTK Town's level of ""skill"". That being said, apart from that, the setup *was* quite balanced, and I actually quite like the mechanics of my role, even though they were quite aggravating yesterday. So yeah, the setup wasn't a total failure, just needed one less Scum in it
Also, you need to post moar voetcounts so that Kilga/Zakeri/etc don't have to do it for you.
Kefit: LALu is not a crapshoot. Specifically, it wouldn't have even applied to me had I not given up and continued playing the game after delurking, because that is the difference: I explicitly delurked (as I now had time for the game) and then had said things of value, whereas you and K4U had both kept up the same low level of activity throughout all of D2, and said only either garbage or painfully bad cases and nonsense when you did actually wind up posting anything. That being said, you didn't play terribly for your first game as Scum in 6 years, so don't be too hard on yourself.
h_w: Considering both myself and Pesco think you deserve the Town MVP to some extent (in actuality, Town MVP is either Kilga or Carth, and both deserve it, really) when you were Scum, you played quite well. Hope to see you in more games on this site.
Kilga: You deserve a lot of praise for sticking around in this game not only after you had died, but even after the game became nearly unplayable around the middle of D2. Seriously. That and for the fantastic postgame content~
Carthrat: Again - you made some critical errors in your play (and you were dead-on correct in what they were when I talked to you in PM), but other than that your logic was, as a general rule, sound, and you were probably one of if not THE most competent players in this game. So yeah. Don't be too hard on yourself.
Also, you similarly deserve praise for the fantastic postgame content~
Kitten4U: Thanks for everything.
To end this poast, I am going to say that I am going to give MoTK Mafia one more chance. One more. That is it. If the next game winds up being a repeat of this one, I am going to leave it forever, and I am sticking to that. I really like this place, it was where I first started playing internet forum mafia, and where most of my accomplishments and...shall we say, "sillier" exploits are. That being said, it has stopped being fun at all for me as both Town AND Scum, and I don't have time to waste these days given my typical academic schedule, so if it's going to take up time AND not even be remotely fun, then yeah, I'm seriously just not even going to bother with playing on this site anymore.
