The Mafia Championship Season 4: You're Invited!

[MSG]

from on Vimeo.

this explains a great deal

[Imp]

Cool, that one's got subtitles.

[Thingyman]

Random thought I had for how to do voting differently. Might be a terrible idea, but I'd like to hear your input:

Upon being eliminated from the game, a player is asked to send me their votes ASAP. They will not be invited into the spectator chat before sending me their votes.

The big obvious downside is: Most players will not have an entire game from which to judge the other players.

The upsides are: They are casting their votes while they have the game and its players fresh in mind, it will reduce the bias there is against players who die early in the game, they won't be influenced by spectator chat's opinions, and they won't be influenced by players' alignments/results in the game as much (i.e. they'll better be able to say "I think this player seems like the best player in general from how they're playing" without being biased by their alignment or how accurate their reads ended up being).

Again, probably a bad idea, but just spitballing. I'm open to the idea of changing it up. I think the banning players from spec chat alone is worth discussing and I'll bring up that idea, but I do fear it might meet some resistance as it's a very anti-fun rule. Like that's probably the main thing that creates bonds - eliminated players immediately being connected with players from many other communities, rather than being "isolated" and probably not bothering to get to know anyone else after the game is completed and they're finally able to enter spectator chat.

[spruce]

More power to you, Thingy. I've found Discord spectator chat - chat on an entirely different site - to be a total disaster. For one thing there aren't adequate safe-guards as to who has access to the chat and I'm sure there's some degree of spectating by some who ought not to be there, always has been. Use of Discord is not a thing that should change though, as the MU community relies so heavily on it for a variety of purpose. As it's a connectivity thing you've found as productive as the MU site itself, I'm not sure limiting dead players access for purposes of voting decisions is all that useful toward a fairer assessment or selection process. And I agree that all player voting should be reserved until after a game.

Personally, as to bonding, perhaps I'm a minority among players as one who actually visits and joins the homesites of fellow players after the championship games. If that cross-reach among communities is sought, I've seen several players call for championship reunion games, though that too may be difficult to coordinate, especially given how much substitution has taken place overall.

I'd wish there was a way to greatly reduce substitutions, or a way to do that differently. If there is already a collective substitution pool separate from commenting spectators, maybe that's a way to go - players committed as subs per game as maybe a site guild of subs, like moderators, since the whole site is dedicated to the game of mafia.

Back to voting or a best-player selection process. One of the determinations mentioned specifically from my season 2 championship game was the elimination of advancing our cop from that game due to inside information 'the board' had regarding how that role was played. If there's going to be adequate evaluation of a player then it does need to be from someone having that sort of access and even access to a player's intent on how they've intended to play a game. In other words, if a game is played solely to determine who's playing it best, a judge of that sort of thing would ideally benefit from knowing all aspects of what's actually going on throughout a game - including things like behind the scenes issues where no less than 6 players from my most recent championship appearance wanted to withdraw, including a player who was advanced, and why that is. Not saying it took place, but if players breaking the rules to advance their personal agenda of advancing over other players are not withdrawn or disqualified then surely the only way to gain a fair appraisal of who should be advanced is through immediate discontinuing and a rerolling of the game. If that's deemed too much trouble, then yeah, results are bound to be skewed from just one game, as they likely are anyway. The community would likely keep their present "there's always next time" attitude, unless the championship structure is significantly changed to more of a tournament model.

I think ultimately what the championship has suffered from is a severely narrow view of both what makes for ideal play and pre-established game favourites among players 'expected' to advance. Aspects of inculcating the greater variety of player-excellence models across the variety of types of play at different sites, as well as perhaps including more anonymity and less side-line influence may help.

The problem early on in seasons was not that there was a board of experts making the determinations but that they tended to choose players known to them as of a reputation for playing well, over and against individual game performance.

[divagreen]

ty thingy and ty grit

I am glad we are having this discussion because I believe in your vision, thingy.

I think that what seems to be missing with evaluating who shld and shldn't advance is the focus on the players' thought processes and whether it can be consistently applied.

I think the votes shld still take place when the game is over. I also thinkn that there shld be a 24 hour cool down period to make them, mebbe.

I think instead of having what the evaluation is now in its current form "don't vote for the player who won or had the biggest impact, vote instead the player you want on your team", have it process focused/centered with a criteria for what good town play and good scum play looks like.

a criteria that mebbe looks like this:

town

did the player work well with their team?

what is their voting history?

when did they die/get lynched?

what impact did they have on the game? (I believe that this is still important and shld be included)

how were their reads? how good were they at explaining them?

how well did they communicate their process for their actions in the game?

scum

did they avoid detection?

what effect did the nks have on the game and how were they decided?

did they manage to survive?

how well did they communicate their processes in their scum pt?

I am sure that these can be worded in a way that is much clearer by some1 who is much more articulate than I am.and of course there is more to add to it. there are a lot of pple who like words on MU as long as the outline is simple and concise.

I think this criteria will not only be helpful to the players when judging their peers, it may also provide a clear understanding of how THEY will judged. I also think overall this will improve the quality of the games too. pple are more apt to do their best when they understand how they will be judged and what the expectations are for the player. again the focus shld to be on the player's thought process and not entirely on the the result, but both shld be counted.

I think the criteria shld be different for scum and town. their win conditions are different; scum have to try to survive in order to win but town doesn't need to, they just need to eliminate scum. it is an entirely different set of skills for each.

there are gonna be clashes in playstyles. I think that is unavoidable. pple strongly apply the meta their homesite. but with an outline that takes in consideration a rather universal approach to standards of play, it will be a solid foundation, even if pple will have their own separate processes for their approaches. hopefully it will allow for more productive post discussions instead of playing the blame game.

I think spec chat and dead players shld not share a chatroom while there is an ongoing game.

before the wc game was finished 2 players said in spec chat that I manipulated the game with the cheating accusations. it was then quoted the post where I told dlgn to not judge me by my emotional nature, judge me by what I do. it was never clearly said what I did in spec chat, just that some1 said "x is what happened and diva is bad and shldn't advance". then about 4 pple jumped in and asked what happened. some1 brought up the cheating accusation on grit and that I must have led it.

I think the end result was that I accused dlgn of cheating or something lol. like some pple actually believe this.

I think the dead players need to be separated and asked to honour it and not go and create other chatrooms. it will be an honour bound system and some pple might break it, but I don't see a way how to keep it from happening if that is what pple want to do.

the spec chat as it stands now seems rather poisonous and I watched this happen in nearly every game. so its not like I am alone.

I think what is lacking with the champs rn is objectivity. mebbe create a team to brainstorm ways for this to happen.

thats just my 2 cents. I hope this helps.

I have some other things that I wld like to say about the dlgn/grit situ but I am saving it for post champs cos I think it wld be more productive to settle that with the pple directly involved.

also, I love your announcement trolling and I hope that you keep that.

[Thingyman]

Quick Mafia Championship Update

For those who didn't follow the Mafia Championship to the end, Dels from GameFAQs ended up winning the fourth season. He will be receiving a winner's certificate signed by Dmitry Davidoff, the creator of Mafia.

Hydra Event 2017 - Interested?

As some of you may recall, last year 220 players from dozens of different communities participated in the first ever cross-community Hydra Event. It was a big success and people have been wanting another one, so... It's finally here!

If you don't know what "hydra" means, it's when two people share the same account (two heads). So the concept is that each participating community can send multiple hydras if they want, each consisting of two players, which tends to make the game more fun in addition to making it easier to be active since two players are playing on the same account.

Sign-ups will be open for next couple of weeks.

If you'd like to play, just find a partner and lemme know either here or in the thread below.

More info here: http://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/...dra-Event-2017

[Magicziggy]

Mafia was created on MR in 1979. Davidoff is a phony
Also the true meaning of a hydra is many heads.
Being purists, MR hydras have a minimum of four heads.
We'll be sending our best and brightest hydras

[Majiffy]

Comin' over here, filling our game threads with insightful posts...

[Majiffy]

We should send one MR Hydra and all get a writeboard for all of us

[Timewave]

Originally Posted by Majiffy

We should send one MR Hydra and all get a writeboard for all of us

This sounds like MR town.
That'll go well.

[Majiffy]

As long as I'm not playing

[rachmarie]

Typical MR mafia game with Jiffy

He ins the game

Roles go out,


Game starts...

No Jiffy yet...

I text him to remind him hes in a game LOL

Jiffy posts