[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/ext/alfredoramos/seometadata/event/listener.php on line 114: Undefined array key 10829780 [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/ext/alfredoramos/seometadata/event/listener.php on line 114: Trying to access array offset on value of type null Scummies Nominations 2019 - Mafiascum.net
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Post #263 (isolation #1) » Mon Jun 17, 2019 1:53 pm
Postby Ankamius »
In post 261, Jingle wrote:Scumteam Goodfellas in BooneyToonz XI maybe? RAS was part of it in a hydra, but maybe we should just remove him from the nom and let the rest of the team stand on their own merit.
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Post #325 (isolation #3) » Wed Jun 19, 2019 1:45 pm
Postby Ankamius »
nth newsroom
being invited into that masonry was a pleasant surprise and it really stands out as an experience in my mind even if the game... was basically over by that point.
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Post #572 (isolation #5) » Fri Nov 22, 2019 11:23 pm
Postby Ankamius »
Paragon of Mafia Hunters
11/23
Ankamius
skitter30
N/A
Skitter is a player who is already known for being strong as both alignments, but she's turned the dial up significantly for her townplay this year. Despite her ability to play scum to a fairly high level, she's able to become obvtown in a lot of her games; even in games where she isn't obvtown, she is remarkably difficult to mislynch to a stage where she will eventually
become
obvtown. She consistently is able to have a markedly positive impact on her games with her style of engagement and pressing people for their thoughts, so it's very hard to call her death crippling for town when she gets nightkilled since her style creates enough workable information for everybody else to follow in her footsteps. As for reads? Well,
First, she eventually reached a solve of five slots, of which four were the scumteam, on day one before any of the townsidedness of the swing in the setup happened. Second, she replaced in with her only two scumreads being the scumteam, and consistently held them as scumreads up until the end of Day 1, where one of them claimed Jailkeeper and the other was jailkept by her for the rest of the game. Third. skitter had 2/4 scum in her PoE, but the two scum she had in her PoE were slots she was explicitly scumreading, one of which being her top lynch by a mile. Then, later in the game, she correctly lynched the two scum outside of it while helping keep town sane while the game was crumbling around them. Fourth, the only thing keeping skitter from hardcarrying the game was the unfortunate lynch of the only town within her PoE, which boosted her paranoia enough for it to have an ultimately negative impact. However, I will note that a significant reason that paranoia existed in the first place because of how her slot was treated by that slot. I expect the vast majority of town would have reacted similarly and it's hard to call that a knock against her read strength.
It's quite clear just from these games that her reads trend towards well above average when she is allowed any room to maneuver and build her reads the way that she goes about it. I've only ever seen her lose as town when other slots make the game nearly impossible for anybody to play or carry in (or she ends up dying very early in the game), and she consistently has a strong positive impact in games where that never comes to pass. She is also incredibly difficult to lynch, and has the ability to maintain enough pressure on the scumteam that they have to play around her and her ability to prompt the other town, which helps create enough workable information to be able to solve the game with or without her presence. I have not seen a single other player on the site demonstrate all these traits consistently throughout the year, so I think it's clear and deserving that skitter30 is a contender of Paragon for 2019.
Starry Night is an entry in FakeGod's Dance Game series, a set of games where players form partnerships that live and die together. However, thanks to a small mechanic added in that allows any player to forcibly remove themselves and their partner from the game, dance games tend to be total chaos with the game depending more on whether town can leave on their scum partners faster than they can fall apart and lose themselves the game.
However, Starry Night was different. The game, while chaotic as this setup tends to go, was a lot more grounded in playing like a mafia game rather than a typical dance game. It played at a breakneck speed and ballooned into a behemoth, hitting nearly 200 pages over its 10 day run. Only two pairings left the dance all game, both of which were in the second half. This by itself is impressive considering that most dance games played rarely ever make it to a lynch at all, but it really showed that even with how much tension there was in the game, the town faction was more focused on winning rather than forcing their own hand. This reflects in the fact that even the least active players was averaging more than 10 posts a day in their time within the game, with overall activity and interest across the entire playerlist being impressively high.
Throughout all of this, FakeGod was always there when he was needed, allowing the momentum to continue when otherwise it would have likely stopped and devolved into a standard leavefest that these setups tend to devolve into. He kept up with the chaos and gave updates, flips, and vote counts consistently when we needed them. FakeGod's modding quality isn't unknown on the site, but this performance isn't to be undervalued in how the game shaped up in the end.
This isn't necessarily scummy worthy by itself, however. The one final piece that makes it stand out in my mind is that despite the town faction having its most major disadvantage nullified, it was always anyone's game up until the very end. The final remaining scum played so well that the only real suspicion against them was paranoia, and even the dead thread was almost entirely convinced that they were town. The only reason they lost was because town held back from taking action until it was very obvious that one of the other pairings was an all town pairing.
Ultimately, I think this game is worthy of a scummy nomination by a combination of the relative activity and interest of the playerlist in the outcome of the game, the temptation and relative ease of being able to derail the game into a giant mess being denied, the game not having a clear winning side until the very end, and the quality of modding behind it.
This game was a complete and utter stomp, but the game was significantly shifted due to the performance of these three specific players.
First of all, Skitter30 leveraged her IC role to bait one of the scum into essentially outing themselves to her, and later on was able to get a nearly perfect reads list, only having a single incorrect read. Notably, this was all on the very first day of a game with 16 other players present, and the subsequent pressure of her phenomenal reads combined with her confirmed town status put the scumteam in such an unfavorable position that multiple scum succumbed to it and effectively outed themselves entirely within the game thread. This basically secured the win by itself, although how long it would take would be up for debate after her predictable demise on N1.
Secondly, after the first two scum were killed, Creature managed to hit a guilty with his Disloyal Fruit Vendor role on the third. That scum was on the chopping block on day three, but was able to pull out a claim that had enough members of the town hesitant to lynch them that it wasn't assuredly going to happen that day. Without outing his role or giving any indication that he had a guilty at all, Creature helped swing the momentum back towards lynching that scum, allowing for the third scum lynch in a row while also allowing him the possibility of keeping the guilty train going. With a role that loses all effectiveness when it is known, this is strong PR play that takes advantage of the dwindling PoE to allow town to have an even bigger stranglehold on the game with a role that is relatively weak compared to the rest of the ones town were given in this setup.
Finally, the nail in the coffin that allowed town to have the game completely won was Saudade's Loyal Neighborizer. Despite a significantly dwindling PoE and a role that benefits greatly from confirming as many town as possible, he didn't miss a single recruit across the three nights that were available. Although it's hardly impressive to have successfully recruited an outed mason, both his other recruits were slots that were under the microscope in the shortening list of suspects. He was able to keep himself alive and protected despite his strong obvtown status and consistently strong reads, and his influence despite his role played a significant part in ensuring that the scum lynches that happened did happen.
Overall, despite the setup already being in town's favor, the consistently strong PR play by key town members pushed this setup to looking unacceptably broken from the scum side. The sheer amount of confirmed town gained from the Loyal Neighborizer, the timely guilty from the Disloyal Fruit Vendor, and the pressure gained from Skitter gaining the IC role sealed the coffin on the scumteam far beyond what would have been necessary to win convincingly. It's very rare to see a stomp of this magnitude come from this level of PR play across so many different players, so it's appropriate for the players with the most impressive PR performances to be nominated.