In my opinion the two are not mutually exclusive, they are complimentary parts of a single whole. Meta-based profiling is a far richer and more useful method than your initial paragraph suggests. I think of a player's game history as being the domain that the specific game variable fall with. If his history is sparse, either from only playing in one game at a time, or because he is new, then you do not have anywhere enough information to help you. This was a limitation for me for a while, until I began to understand that a specific player's history can be supplemented with an understanding of similar player's history. Fortunately, there aren't that many truly separate personality types or playstyles, and most mafia players don't seem very unique at all if you've read enough games, so a tell from one player can often map to another player if the two are similar enough. Combining the play histories of similar players into overlapping areas of archetypical meta can yield a more robust domain to analyze the specific game variables for one player in one game. I think of it as adding color to a black and white drawing. With a full meta on a single player, informed and reenforced by existing metas on similar players, subliminal things start to stand out, but it takes solid judgement and informed intuition to separate the signal from the noise. I often state that there is no such thing as an accurate universal scumtell, but there is such a thing as a tell that is accurate for players of a certain playstyle if you are rigorous enough to accurately determine their playstyle (and a single ongoing game certainly isn't a large enough dataset) and map their game specific variables within that playstyle. All of this is very fuzzy since play-styles aren't separate and distinct sets, more like general regions that are mapped by six or seven axis.Albert B. Rampage wrote:Metagame
Metagame can be bended, altered, or face-lifted beyond recognition. As far as scumhunting goes, it's even less relevant than a secondhand opinion since you don't gain any new information about what player x thinks about player y. And it takes ten times the research. The dynamic nature of a mafia playstyle and its constant evolution through acquired experience cannot be held to a mold indefinitely, unless the player is intentionally perpetuating his metagame.
Archetype Assessment
Archetype Assessment is the counterpoint to metagame and what I personally use. From the data of the ongoing game, I loosely classify each player along the following points:
Anyhow, that is my take.
It takes far more than 10 times the research. Much more. I'm not the kind of person who would waste thousands of hours of my life on refining a process that doesn't work.And it takes ten times the research.
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This extends to my overall view of the concept of metagame itself. Although it is a powerful persuasion tool against the unwashed masses, it is fundamentally a fallacy. Don't let it impair your judgment, as it is the easiest thing to change in a playstyle, especially after someone points it out to you, which will always happen since this is mafia and players will post cases.
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Great article, solid format, and very articulate. I wish more people tried to write these.