Post by Snaq ◢ ◤ on Jul 1, 2023 0:00:37 GMT
(Interviewed by Snaquaza)
Mafia Championships Roundtable Discussion
Fenrir Aesir, ForgotToFlush, Schiavetto & Spiderz
Fenrir Aesir, ForgotToFlush, Schiavetto & Spiderz
The Mafia Championships are hosted annually on Mafia Universe, and feature over 100 competing communities. This is a roundtable discussion featuring some of Pokemon Showdown's past representatives at the event, and their experiences of playing.
What was your experience playing in the Mafia Championships? How did you like it?
I'm FTF and I represented PS! in Season 6 (2019) and the theme was Role Madness.
Overall it was a good experience! I played the qualifer game, made it to wildcards but didn't make it to the finale. At the time it was pretty easy to not be that proud of my performance given the result but looking back I think it was an important step for me as a player.
I also subbed into Season 7 and that one went a little less pleasant. I spent the whole day trying to figure out why the towncore didn't make sense and got voted out before I could come to a conclusion. Wolves stomped easily.
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I'm Schiavetto/Schia and I repped PS Maf for Season 7, (S7G10, Theme: JOAT^2) as well as repping popular PS retirement community EiMMpire for Season 9 (S9G7 & S9SF2, Theme: Mountainous) - had a lot of fun for sure, though the two experiences were definitely unique.
For starters, I had to sub out of my S7 quals game due to a family emergency - it was pretty demoralizing at the time having to bow out before even getting my feet wet, but blessedly Flush was able to step in. In retrospect though, I'm actually regular I got to go through the process - in a roundabout way the experience encouraged me to team up with Flush for MU's Hydra event that same year, and now I'm regularly involved in games in both communities, with plenty of news connections made along the way.
When I returned for S9 under EiMMpire's flag, things were much more successful - in part, I think, because I saw it as an opportunity to make up for the first go-round. I had early pressure on all three wolves in my quals game, bagged town a D1 wolf flip, and got killed N1 - and jury advanced - for my efforts. The semifinal was much more intense, one of those rosters where no matter who rolled wolf, they were up for a hell of a fight--so of course I randed scum, ha. My partners were good sports, and things were bleak at some moments, but we played the long game: through some pretty hard distancing (spotify playlists and a slideshow presentation were involved) we were able to send our no posting partner to lylo, where he took the W. Ultimately none of us made it to finals, but it was a wild ride for sure.
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I'm Fenrir
I represented Pokemon Showdown in 2018 (Season 5, where the theme was Mountainous/Vanilla). I think like FtF, I'd consider it an important step for me as a player. I was in a qualifier game and ended up, if I remember, dying in activity before getting voted out Day 3. It was my first real experience with a high-volume game, so keeping up was the big struggle. It did become my introduction to Mafia Universe, where I improved a lot as a player over time and god to meet some very cool people.
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Hey I'm Spiderz and I repped PS for season 8 and season 9, played in both qualifiers. I didn't make it past round 1 both times unfortunately. I think my experience is a little bit unique compared others since I was used to the MU intensity beforehand as I had played quite a few games on MU. I think that for me these two games pointed out to me my major flaws as a player and what I needed to improve and work on to play better. The season 8 game was not fun for me as I had to deal with a lot of afk's and low effort town and ended up town reading the only active players at the time despite me scum reading them initially. It was very hard to progress my reads and form them because of the thread atmosphere. My season 9 game was pretty demoralizing initially as I had felt like I lost the game for town in VOLO. This time I feel like my mistake was not re-evaluating my reads in volo harder and that taught me a lot about my tendencies TR for the wrong reasons. Overall though despite both games being huge losses I had a lot of fun during the my season 9 game and really enjoyed the competitiveness of it all.
How is a Mafia Championship game different from the average game you played?
A big part of it I think is just the different home communities everyone's repping. Champs brings in folks with all kinds of mafia backgrounds - some chat based, some forum based, some more aggro and fast paced, some more laid back... Best case scenario, the qualifier games can be like a melting pot. More often though, overcoming culture clash is one of town's first priorities -- adapting to people'sdifferent read styles, figuring out if a behavior is actually scummy, or if it's just part of how someone is.
There's also just a LOT of posts to read lol. Everyone's trying to put out their best performance, and for a lot of folks that means spending a lot of time in thread. Even with postcaps, it can be challenging keeping up with the pace of the thread if you're not prepared for such high activity.
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For one thing, activity is through the roof. Like easily exponentially higher than the average PS forum game, and even a step above the average MU game, which is already a lot.
Also the quality of reps you get varies a lot. Some people get sent because their communities had literally nobody else that wanted to go. For others they're competing year round to get selected and are playing with the explicit purpose of winning the whole thing. It becomes especially drastic when you end up in wildcards and then all of a sudden you're realizing that anyone playing has the chance to win it all.
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Who’s going to bring up 1610
1-The activity. The length of the average champs game Day 1 eclipses the length of the entirety of most forum games on PS by a lot. The result is a more intensive game where everyone is continually producing new content to analyze, but it can also be overwhelming if you’re unprepared.
2-Like a few others have said, you also get a variety of playstyles and the first hurdle (for both factions imo) is to get used to this. I’ll add that when signing up, or at least when I signed up, there’s a questionnaire you fill including things like how aggressive a playstyle you’re used to and what type of deadlines you’d prefer, and there’s an effort to group together individuals with similar preferences. It’s not perfect of course, but it exists.
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most would probably point to the activity differences but something that always stood out to me were the different play styles from people that would clash with each other, like schia said, I'd find myself trying to be extra thorough to explain my thought process at every corner as to not take for granted what people from my home community would understand instantly. While the pace is different, as it never dies down, I don't think it's that much of a difference compared to our average active ps mafia forum game.
Did you play differently than in other Mafia games. If yes, how?
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I wouldn't say I played differently, I think the main thing is that I tried my best to play 100 the entire game, I tried my best to not be lazy, and I put more responsibility on myself to win the game for town. I think that lead me to some oversight and make choices that would "make sense" as opposed to what I actually felt if that makes sense.
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In my qualifier it definitely felt like i went above what I usually do in games, but I think that's because the situation demanded it. Town was in dire straits so I threw myself at a wall trying to solve the game, and it involved a lot more thorough work than I usually do. MU also has a lot of tools that help facilitate this, and I found myself going through a lot of retrospective vcs and multi-ISOS
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I like to think my quals game was pretty on-brand? I like to lean into the social parts of the game on D1, which ime can smooth over a lot of the murkier parts of the game (culture clash with unknown players, personal disagreements as the game gets more intense later on, etc.) since you have a lot more impressions of folks to work with. Lots of one-off pokes at people, or tongue-in-cheek comments thrown in between more serious reads - I think a little goes a long way to make folks readable later on, and I do think having a kind of conversational attitude toward the game made it easier to notice when that first wolf was having trouble. I don't like to go out of my way to hyperpost, which I think threw some people for a loop in an environment where that's expected, but I think I made up for it a lot with conviction/attitude.
As for semis, SF3 again was a pretty rough roster - town was always going to be a juggernaut regardless of rand, it was more a matter of which wolves could go deep in that environment. I had to adapt my playstyle a lot not just due to the village I was up against, but also due to IRL constraints on time in thread in a playerlist that was already much more predisposed to postcapping, with a wolfteam that was.... not lol. So Psycho (an awesome dude) and I essentially played to die in our first two days. He spent his dayplay trying to look as unpartnered from me as possible, and I spent mine trying to do the same with Chilly, who uh... had yet to post. I'm known for being on the flashier side with my legacies/readslists as it is (makes them more memorable, which is the biggest problem towns tend to have with legacy reads) so I kind of hail mary'd and dropped a slideshow burying our third (Chilly) along with the villager best positioned to be a supposed deepwolf in a team of me + Psycho: www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/37105-Season-9-Semifinal-3-The-Adventure-of-the-Seven-Eight-MIners-Mafia-Championship?p=6276255&viewfull=1#post6276255
I think nowadays some of the newer PSers might find my wolfplay here a lot more recognizable, but I think one thing that stands out about the Champs format is how much it emphasizes flexibility. Like Derz said, it kind of pushes you to be at the top of your game, even if that means taking risks.
also #fuck12, i'd take the warn again
www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/37105-Season-9-Semifinal-3-The-Adventure-of-the-Seven-Eight-MIners-Mafia-Championship?p=6276260&viewfull=1#post6276260 s/o to Koba
Did you learn anything from your Championships game? If so, what did you learn?
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Felt like my qualifier definitely reinforced the need for town to be on the same page, and what good consensus looks like. A lot of slots were LHF/inactive and it made it difficult to solve around those slots. There's so much value to be had in participation and towntelling.
On the flipside, my wildcard game was definitely a lesson in having to be on all the time as wolf. It's an unprecedented level of commitment given the level of competition. One of my wolf partners very famously accused someone within the game of running some sort of sub-group within the game (??) using hidden messaging. They died shortly after the accusation was made but I still think it's somewhat inspirational to be that deep within the trenches of wolfplay.
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For my quals game, I think the big one was just kind of affirming how important it is to have conviction as town. Some very vocal townies were having second thoughts EOD1 and there was a very real chance that folks we would've missed that first wolf if we hadn't made a fuss about seeing it through.
For semis, I think my first takeaway is similar to Flush's - wolfing in a champs setting requires a lot, and getting everyone on the same page early on can do a lot in the longrun. A good village is coordinated and proactive, and as a wolf it's important to be able to outpace that - we were playing from behind, and I can p much guarantee that if Psycho and I hadn't planned for the reality that winning might not necessarily mean surviving, things head south a lot more quickly.
On the other side of the coin, it was absolutely insane watching town devour itself after going from two solid wolf lunches right into the gruesome chain of mislims that would lose them the game. People gave Chilly a lot of crap for minposting the way he did, but seeing town get carried away with egos and tunnelvision, losing that early momentum and the cohesion that came with it, I think he absolutely made the right play to just keep staying in the background. Cohesion is crucial as town, and as a wolf, it's your job to be attuned to that: disrupt it when it's there, and exploit it when it's missing.
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Absolutely yeah, I went into a deep dive breaking down both my champs games and essentially where I went wrong but personally it isn't specific for champs, every forum game I've played till the end I've done a game review going through the general game state. A lot of that learning for me comes from specifically trying to understand how I read all scum players and trying understand their behaviors to recognize it later on, I feel like this is especially important postgame because otherwise I dont think I would be able to understand my past mistakes and errors.
Would you want to partake in the Championships again. Why (not)?
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Yeah for sure, but it's definitely conditional on me "feeling" ready. For my initial Champs run, i was playing constantly half a year in advance leading up to it. It allowed me to hit a level of consistency and continued improvement and allowed me to show out in qualifiers. Given how infrequently I play now relative to then, I'd definitely have to ramp up a great deal to feel like I'm ready to play at a high level.
Also, it'd depend on the setup a bit. The setup for my year was so ill-received that they fundamentally changed their design philosophies and tournament structure for the championship moving forward. To explain succinctly: Power roles were not assigned via alignment, so you could have games where mafia randomly receives the best roles, taking them off the table for town. My qualifier saw the mafia receive both a vig shot and an alignment cop, which are very easy to abuse.
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I'd be game, yeah. I think my thing has always been more about schedule/workload, so it'd definitely depend on how much time I could commit - which is always dicey. The game quality and the community behind it all really does make it worth it though - high investment, high reward.
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Yep. In fact make sure to support me this upcoming season and rep ps . The reason is that I just enjoy mafia, realistically champs / non champs, I'd still be game to play and also the fact that its a competition definitely drives me harder as I love winning and competition. I also do feel like I want to prove myself more in the MU community as more then just a good deep wolf so that's 100% a part of it.
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I'd have to have literally nothing else going on, and I don't know when the chance for that would happen. I do want to get back into playing more Mafia and recently finished a game on MU, so at the very least games there may be in the cards for the future.