Scummies Ideas, Suggestions and Comments Thread

[Venmar]

I would help, but I don't think my type of writing fits with the type you guys do for the ceremony.

Plus I guess it's too late to apply anyways.

[Venmar]

A generic "best hydra player(s)" actually sounds like a decent award. It can be given to the hydra of two players that worked together the most to help achieve their win-con. Two people that cooperated the whole game and presented good results, such as lynching scum or protecting other town players, or as scum successfully being manipulative, etc. With any luck, an award like this might even encourage people to stop making garbage hydras and actually try?

Modding hydras I think wouldn't be included and can just keep being considered for best mod anyways.

[Venmar]

I think the main problem with a hydr award would be that very few hydras get used more than once or twice so there wouldn't be much to choose from.

It still makes them eligible? We have single game awards for a reason, for single game occurrences, and Cabd gave some examples of hydras that have become mains or simple used often. I mean, again, the award itself helps motivate players to actually make good hydras like I said and avoid what you just mentioned, in a way.

I actually think, considering how popular and big Hydras have become, an award for them seems even more interesting and appropriate.

[Venmar]

I received a random hope in this award, so i'll try to answer Agar's question the best I can.

- Hydra play varies greatly in terms of style. Some hydrae let one head handle the thread posting and simply converse amongst themselves in their QT/domain of choice. Others will let all heads post in thread. Some barely communicate (hydra-bickering is simultaneously hilarious and infuriating) and just post in thread whatever the hell they feel like.

The award (by my definition) would make hydras that are 1 person dependent un-qualified, as I said the award would go to the hydra that WORKED the best, where BOTH players contributed to their slots success in a game. I think the basis behind my suggestion is that it rewards hydra's for being true, actual hydras of two people working together. I think the idea behind one of the people posting and the other helping is generally acceptable since the person posting seems to be posting the agreement between them, so it still resembles them working together.

- How do you compare the cohesiveness of a hydra of two people vs. a hydra of three or more (Copper comes to mind as a hydra that I feel had at least 4 heads, although I could be wrong)?

I would imagine the cohesiveness of a hydra with more than two people is generally hard to come up with simply because most people who make hydras that large don't really intend to play seriously or cohesively to begin with. If a hydra does seem to be able to surface as a good one, consisting of say 3 or 4 heads, then it would be debatable I think. In general, the award might be well off to be limited to just 2-headed hydras simple because any hydra's larger seem to get out of hand and stop staying in the expectations of the award. (Thought I could in theory see 3-headed hydras qualify?)

- Not sure how prevalent they are, but secret hydrae - how do you judge how well they worked together? They're not going to give up their QTs, (nor might non-secret hydrae, for that matter) so how do you judge whether it was cohesive or if one head just took over, which is something we see quite often in non-secret hydrae.

Secret Hydra's wouldn't qualify since they wouldn't be willing to prove their legibility, plain and simple I think. I personally don't like people who do secret hydra's since it's inconvenient for the mod and everyone else.

- Alignment differences - a hydra that draws scum and a hydra that draws town can be a cohesive unit in two very different ways. How do you compare the two? There's a reason we have Paragon and Don Corleone, and the Best Town and Best Scumgroup scummies, and it's because the alignments require vastly different play styles.

Well my suggestion of course, was just a suggestion. Should it ACTUALLY be considered to be made into an actual award, we would obviously have to split it in two, into a "Best Town-Performance Hydra", and a "Best Scum-Performance Hydra", with a possible third "Best Third-Party Hydra".

I realize that hydras would be hard to judge since quite a bit of them are 1-sided, and some people can abuse this just for a nomination, and I realize that generating three new awards is tiresome, but it's a valid possibility that acknowledges the new popularity and trend of hydras, and eliminates any current problems of hydras being nominated for OTHER awards.

[Venmar]

Yeah, but of course the three way split is always an option if needed for future years.

[Venmar]

Copper is a 4 headed hydra?

Best Hydra should be a body of work award, no specific alignment awards.

Well I still think plays between alignments does differ and has different outcomes, but best hydra can be a body of work award for the first year, and then we can split it if needed. As long as its made

[Venmar]

Mechanic/Mutation went to a Mini Theme this year (Mind Reader)

[Venmar]

I don't really think splitting Large Games from Smaller games for Best Setup and Best Mechanic is really necessary? If we do that, we might as well also make one for Micros and Normal games and then it gets out of hand if you keep splitting it.

[Venmar]

No.

[Venmar]

Why not split the judges up then?
Make more judges in essence

Judges can judge 1-3 categories but not all.
Splits the workload, possibly gives more eyes on the games in question.

The committee has been struggling with the problem of Judging and judges for

years

now. Trust me, you're not having a eureka moment presenting us with ideas we haven't considered or thought of. The problem is never with how we distribute judges, how many we take on, what we expect from them, or what we want them to do. The problem is judge

apathy.

[Venmar]

Then I encourage you to remain apathetic if you have nothing else constructive to say.

[Venmar]

In mafia, there's really no "cohesion" among town -- with no information, there's no way for people to reliably "team up".

this statement is such complete and utter bullshit I am not sure why you made it in the first place.

but by all means bring mafia back to the dark ages where town wins by accident. cos that is what that statement is encouraging.

what you are stating is that town are too stupid to find their own teammates and that any effort for self-improvement is futile.

uninformed majority will nearly ALWAYS have a hard time finding each other, that is why they shld be acknowledged when they actually DO.

We are not taking away the Best Town award to strip the possibility of acknowledging the uninformed majority's ability to work together and win, nor are we saying town is too dumb or wins by accident, you are simple interpreting what Reckful has said the wrong way. We are simply saying and acknowledging that in a lot of games "cohesion" is usually achieved by the leadership of a few key members of town (or deceitful scum) rather than the entire cooperation of the entire town. That is the main reason we are scrapping the award; it was given to a whole team where only ~50% of said team deserved the reward for their efforts, and, honestly, the townies responsible for the win might very well be eligible for nomination for the Best Mafia Catcher award anyways.

I encourage you to make a case for as to why the 4 lurkers or one sentence shit posters in your game deserve to relish in the same amount of recognition for the achievements and leadership of a handful to half a dozen solid townspeople. I know cases and examples can be made for games where full cohesion is more or less achieved across the majority of the towns but is there really going to be enough games

every year

of that caliber to warrant keeping the award around? Probably not.

[Venmar]

then why not punish the lurkers.

I have been wanting this since forever.

sometimes good town play is to FOLLOW. I suppose the same cld be said for scum but for different reasons.

Because the point of the Scummies to is to give recognition and reward to players who have distinguished themselves throughout the year. It is not the Scummies job to punish or give recognition to players who have had poor or lackluster performances; we don't have a Scummy for "The Worst Mafia Performance" for a very good reason. We can't fix the fact that lurking and bad play is a fact of mafia games, so one of the things we can do is no longer give recognition to it.

[Venmar]

I don't think people go out of their way to try to win awards on this site because people could have have a great performance or mod a great game and they could go unrecognized; in my experience a lot of people involved in these games don't care enough to nominate others, don't even know about the scummies, or it doesn't occur to them to do so. If someone takes their time to nominate someone, there's a chance it's because the nominee is well known or the person nominating is a friend of the nominee so idk, it does feel like a popularity contest at times.

[Venmar]

We consider a lot of things, though a solution to something like that, not that i'm aware of. We unfortunately cannot have someone (or a team of people) look over every single finished game to see (objectively) if anyone was deserving of an award because that's a lot of to ask of someone or even a small group of people, so we just have to continue to hope that people nominate fairly and people recognize others for things they deserve to be nominated for regardless of the nominee's standing or reputation. Judging nominations themselves however is fair and objective and definitely not a popularity contest, so at least on that front we are covered.

[Venmar]

I meant that the Judges themselves try to approach the process objectively. Whether or not the awards themselves are or aren't objective is a whole different subject/beast, and some of our changes this year are aimed at addressing that actually!

[Venmar]

Them attempting to approach it objectively doesn't make it objective. People are very easily biased.

-shrug- Let me know when you figure out the solution to fixing normal human behaviour.

[Venmar]

We don't pretend it doesn't exist. I don't know what to tell you, the Committee in general is outspoken about the Judging process as a whole and combating bias and friends is something we have done our best to do when possible.

[Venmar]

Thanx

[Venmar]

The Scummy Steering Group reserves the right to exercises total dictatorial power and control the lives of its subordinates. That is all.

[Venmar]

I'm just going to chime in for a second:

I believe: the people who dislike the removal of "Best Town Team" seem to think that the removal of that award means that townies working together will somehow be devalued or ignored. That is not the case,

and if it winds up being the case, we can reassess

.

Reck makes a valid point here that I think should be acknowledged; we as the SSC have continually made changes to the Scummies more or less every single year. We constantly assess and re-assess awards to see if they're worth removing, improving/re-defining, or if we should add new awards (like when we added the Game of the Year Award). By the end of the year, we will assess 2016 and decide if removing Best Town Team was the right way to go. If not, we'll consider bringing the award back. The past couple of years have been characterised by the SSC trimming an award or two every year; I think with proper reflection certain awards can be brought back if an re-assessment warrants it.

Something I don't get honestly is using "The past few years noone has qualified for this award" as reason to remove it. Like, then an award can exist but just not be given every year. That's like commonplace for a lot of awards. It makes it even more meaningful when it is given.

For the record I have always been one of the few on the committee who has been against trimming awards just because they are under-nominated or just for the sake of making judging easier; HOWEVER, I agree now in hindsight that trimming the awards that have gone was a good quality of life improvement now in the long tun. Certain awards that we trimmed long time ago, like the award for the best fakeclaim, for example, was a good change since I hope everybody today can agree that was a bit of a silly award. Certain other awards down the road however we can eventually decide might be worth bringing back, only time will tell.