practice and play lots of mafia. surprisingly, if you spend enough time doing something you improve. If you wanna get good at guitar play guitar, if you wanna get good at golf, play golf, if you wanna get good at mafia, play mafia.
One of the biggest mistakes I see in comp players is focus on fossing people for being "all over the place." Mafia usually has a game plan; a strategy in mind, and will often stick to a fos or rationalize a change in fos, while one word may change town's opinion and they'll get called flaky. Honestly, it could go either way.
I would disagree that town is consistent. Often as town I change my mind, as do others. "Tunnelling" is often a null tell, and only bad town do that, IMO. Yes they are consistent in such a way that they don't contradict themselves (usually), but they can change their minds.
deletedabout 9 years
3. townies omgus
it's a game of ego. again like appeal to emotion and tryharding to invest more of urself in the game: this game is really a game of being less wrong. most people play this like the social game they play real life to be in fact. nobody's calling lies in real life, they're just pandering to them mostly, dancing around them. it doesn't matter if a person is lying or not, only what effect they can have on ur life. as such then perhaps, townies will omgus lol. well, they'll omgus anyway because they can't read, and they're literally the only one they're certain of being town, so voting them EVER is the most anti-town thing u can do in their books. plus all the less wrong stuff. and then mafia on the other hand are playing the opposite.they'll probably actually townread u if u fos them, like ingratiating themselves to u. they'll try to pocket u. rare mafia will actually push back on u, because it's mostly a loss for them. u roll town, they're found out. like in real life, the person who knows ur dirty little secret gets vindicated. etc. etc. etc.
4. reactance (psychology)
this is just really cool and handy if u can get used to working it. it's the same thing as pressure, only sort of leaving room for rebellion. mostly u can use it to steer the clear's hammers. he wont hammer u because ur tryharding, but he doesn't trust u so much that he's going to let u dictate all his hammers. he'll hammer ur townread as a proxy check of u
and so on, and so on, and so on (i literally spammed all this, but there's some good stuff in there i think)
deletedabout 9 years
2. townies tunnel, mafia rationalise
town are trying to build a picture of what's going on. they will be consistent. everything will have relevance to earlier reads. they're building the whole lot from the ground up. they'll tunnel. mafia, on the other hand, are just trying to get town lynched. nothing sticks in their head, there's no real feelings about anything, there's nothing really being built. they'll just pick lynches they think they can get done. they'll move from target to target, completely forgetting about their previous foses. a lot of the time they'll mess up their numbers outing bs reads on some number of people, giving no explanation or having given no prior hint of someone being left out who appears to have been left out. they'll scumread two people where there are 3 mafia, then say 'oh, ya, and this other guy is scum too' - a partner they'd been pretending didn't exist more or less. townies do none of this. they never forget anyone. they might lock in on someone, but they're never going to come with those sort of bs 'and this guy, ya' reads
deletedabout 9 years
i'll give u all some first principles right here:
1. this game is about pressure.
hardly anyone can actually read, and even when they can read they're still gonna feel pressure, so apply pressure. pressure exists very simply in a bunch of things. even just appearing 'pro-town' or whatever and ur up against an isp'er. the clear is going to hammer the isp'er because the clear has no real read on u only that u invested a lot of urself into the game and basically he's hammering based on who he's going to p*ss off more. same thing with appeal to emotion. u layer the idea that it would be dumb to hammer u on hammering u, not so dumb on hammering the other guy; if that comes off convincing the clear hammers the other guy, again basically just playing for the only thing he really can play for because he can't read - after game perceptions of him by others. etc. etc. etc. never say u don't care, it's literally giving clears a free pass to hammer u. never be first to vote in 3-way with one clear where clear's hammering between u and some other dude. and so on.
yep, orlyfan's idea of a forum for game analysis is easily the best idea out of this thread, and probably the only practical one.
deletedabout 9 years
The biggest aspect is honestly time, and a little bit of dedication to wanting to get better, because if you just sit around and don't try, you'll never get the hang of it. Eventually you'll think it's boring and won't give it another shot.
as long as you really want to improve, you will. when i first started out i was struggling to maintain a 45% win ratio, but just playing the game for long enough made a huge difference. i was pretty terrible until around 15,000-20,000 points because i didn't really care, but i started to learn the game better, and more importantly learn who was good at the game and tried to play with/emulate those players.
playing with good players is a huge step to improving. if you're going to only play with new players in fancy pants, you'll obviously stagnate, because you'll have no one to learn from. it's pretty important to know what to look for in terms of improving, though. find some players you respect, play with them, and analyze their reads so you know how they get them and you can try to do the same.
if you want to improve as mafia, i'd work on trying to come up with believable reads. i think that as long as you can make good reads and back them up, you'll be null to everyone else at the least, as long as there isn't a huge contrast between your mafia and town play.
I think too one of the issues that Tarantino is missing is that there were way more mentees that simply wanted to learn how to play the basics and learn setup mechs, so most of is focused our efforts on that baseline mentorship. I had some ambitious projects to create full setup strategy guides too but again limited time and interest to contribute made it fall by the wayside.
Tarantinos view is much more high level and was a small percentage of what the program actually did. I think what he's saying is good and I think that it would be successful but I don't think it's fair to say the mentoring program was a failure when it was majorly more casual and for true beginners than high level comp play
Some good points brought up about mentoring. I really like the idea of forums for people to go through and get their games analyzed. This sort of one off approach I think is better suited since it is less formal and more people who wouldn't necessarily get permission to have a hat would be able to impart their knowledge.
The mentoring system has a number of issues, but I always found it hard to find mentees who cared enough to want to seriously invest time in the site and get better. Sweeper and sigma both asked me for analyses of their games at various points but it was pretty sporadic overall. Lots of mentees dropped immediately and the program became more about managing who was cool enough to be a mentor and who got new mentees. The administrative stuff clogged everything up.
I think if you are really serious about getting better, you'll play a ton and ask better and more seasoned people to review your games and provide insight. you'll post and ask for tips. Ultimately, there isn't a panacea to make you better at mafia, but you have to have a desire to get better and be willing to totally blow for a while.
I always loved the idea of mentoring and was happy to contribute to making the program more relevant over a year ago but it was difficult to sustain positive momentum with inconsistent interest
You don't need to get better. The game doesn't reward you for being better. Currently all you need to know is the roles and you can just do whatever you want from there.
