(October) Alexander489 and micromorphic Interviews
Nov 1, 2023 20:43:18 GMT
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Post by Snaq ◢ ◤ on Nov 1, 2023 20:43:18 GMT
(by Snaq ◢ ◤ )
Alexander489 and micromorphic
Hi! Would you like to introduce yourself?
HELLO. I am Alexander489! On PS I’m known as various things including Alexander489, Alx, Alexa, and simply just Alex. I’m one of the current Room Owner’s of the mafia room and have been for about a year now. I officially started playing regularly in october 2018 but had joined the room a few times dating back to 2017.
Outside of mafia you can find me in the Sports room, especially during NFL games. Outside of PS I’m currently a Programmer after recently graduating from college with a computer science degree. In my free time you can probably find me playing various video games or watching youtube/sports.
Sure! I'm micro and I've been a member of the Mafia community since May of 2019 and I have been a room owner since 2022
How did you find PS! Mafia?
I first joined PS in early 2016, but started off originally in the trivia room. Slowly migrated to other rooms such as survivor / gc. Survivor was definitely my main and where I met a lot of my early ps friends, toni being one of them. Toni asked me a couple times to come check out the mafia room but the thought of being banned if I talked was kinda off putting, I don’t really know why I never stuck around. Later in early October 2018 I was talking to OM and he said he was playing mafia official, and I thought what the hell ill give it a try. I was an avid town of salem player which helped make the transition to mafia pretty seamless. I instantly was hooked and the rest is history.
My friend and I were surfing through rooms on PS for stuff to do and we came across the mafia room. We tried a couple games (cheated too oops) and I decided to stick around and play more
What was PS! Mafia like when you joined?
It was very competitive. Officials would be stacked with highly talented players (very competitive ones too). You’d have officials with like OM, motogp, kaif, spiderz, quax, darnell, hawkie, neo, and many others. It was pretty insane. I miss it a lot. I think that era of mafia was probably peak. Might be biased there though. I remember there was a voice contest right around the time I was joining which was fun to participate in even if I didn’t win. The staff was pretty dope as well, got to grow close to a lot of them
I think eventually all of the players who brought that competitive energy and talent started to slowly quit playing and move on to dif stuff. Lot of the mafia players transition into EiMM, which they are able to excel at as well. There was a bit of a resurgence in these competitive games in ~2020 which was pretty fun. We also just recently had PSMPL which brought back a lot of those same players. I think mafia is still pretty competitive and I think officials can still get that intense competition feel but I don’t think it rivals what it was back in 2018
Mafia took me a VERY long time to understand, so most of that time was kinda just a blur to me but I remember constantly being overwhelmed by high PL games
Mafia definitely became more fun after I understood it. Some of the users I remember being very active were Schia, CA, quax, cl, angel, meower, tb2, gnatboy, yash, and more. It was a lot of the same people but I had a blast
I feel like the room is different now in terms of overall toxicity. Back then, we were ripping into each other all the time and it wasn't very pretty to watch
What are some of your favorite themes?
Two of my favorites happen to be two of my own in Fruitful Village and Cult-Shot. As far as themes I didn’t make I enjoy playing KAT, modexe, deathnommy, classic, fire and ice, and greater idea. I might have missed some but those are always fun.
Fruitful Village I made when I was new to the mafia room for the voice contest. I didn’t make it past the theme round sadly but I got pretty far for being new. It’s a simple idea but works well and it’s pretty fun. Cult-Shot was a CS idea I had of a spin off of Cult Vengeful. Funny enough when I ran it the cult was new and claimed their role and it was ruined. I turned it into an OS and people seem to like it for how simple it is. KAT is my favorite big PL setup, I like the mechanics of it and the balanced multiball rolelist. I have pretty good memories playing that and certain games I’ve played. Modexe and deathnommy are probably my two favorite vanilla-esque themes both due to their mechanics. modexe it’s always fun to play around the corrupt and analyze gunshots. Deathnommy narrows down the voting pool each day based on the previous voted players nomination list which is always p entertaining and fun. It makes you think about which of the 3 options is the best choice when presented with them. Classic is what I usually answer when asked my favorite theme. I just like the simplicity of it and the default feel of it. You can’t go wrong with a game of classic. Higher PL are a bit iffy but lower PL are always fun. Some people don’t like FNI but I think it’s a nice change of pace theme to play. Fairly minimal in terms of PRs but the mechanics are unique in a way that makes the theme stand out. I like the symmetry of the multiball. GI is probably the best idea no matter how many copies of it get made. I love the rolelist and the idea of picking between 2 roles. Any theme where you can have an influence on what you are is a +
My favorite theme is Deathnommy cuz I like creating towncores. I'm also a fan of most semi oses
What do you pay attention to when creating a theme?
Fruitful village was so long ago now but I wanted to center the theme around my favorite role, Fruit Vendor. On its own fruit vendor might not do much but I wanted to make it so when it fruits someone something happens depending on who you fruit. I had to keep in mind the voice contest submission rules as well as balance. I added a hidden backup fruit vendor to help balance the game in case the fruit vendor dies early and it becomes basically vanilla. Hungry townie mirrored by a hungry mafia goon makes it so you really do need to be careful who you fruit. The theme isn’t hosted much anymore and I would probably make some changes if I were to remake it but for being new in the room I quite like it.
For Cult-Shot I got the idea when I wanted to host a short PL cult theme. Cult Vengeful exists but it has its flaws. I tried to fix them when I created my CS. When it was ruined by scum claiming I was pretty upset but realized this would go great as an OS. I had to make some mechanic decisions like what happens when cult / vig interact in certain scenarios or whether a vigilante culted keeps their gun. In the end it ended up really balanced when you calculate the EVs.
What is your playstyle like?
I’m really not sure how to describe my playstyle. I definitely play differently than I did when I was actually playing/tryharding for officials. Nowadays I’m more relaxed and passive but occasionally will shift gears and tryhard. I have always really been partial to using playermeta to analyze a players behaviors and look for clues on if they are acting different than normal or do something different than they would if they were a different faction. It’s always been my style of play. I used to hate playing as scum/mafia, and still would probably always pick town in idea. Nowadays I prefer being mafia and am probably better at it anyway.
I was more aggressive, better at scumhunting. More in tune with the playerbase to be able to pmeta. Id say I was definitely a better player back then but it’s exhausting to put that much intense focus/effort into a game everyday.
I usually look for motivation for actions and their interactions with flipped scum. In larger games, scum tend to be more passive in nightless nilla themes too
For motivations, I mean like what they vote people for (rvs, wagoning, solid reasoning) & being proactive with their actions. For interactions, I'm looking for if they actively pushed a scum member or if they just wagoned on LHF and passively watched them die
There's more I look for but I tend to look for these first
I like to be proactive and ask questions whether I'm town or scum. As town, most of those questions will be productive and as scum, most of them are just fillery
What are some of your favorite roles to play as?
As far as roles go I like ones that are fun. Vigilante is always fun to play as you get to put the fate of someone in your own hands. Any strong power role where you don’t need to rely on anyone else or town is always a +. My favorite role however is Fruit Vendor. There’s always been something about it. I think it’s probably the meme nature of it or the fact it doesn’t really do anything in most themes. Really stood out to me. I’ve tried to campaign it for best role many years.
I like playing anything that can kill someone, especially publicly and during the day because it's funny
What are you proud to have done in PS! Mafia?
As a reg/player I’m pretty proud of my awards / official stats but I wouldn’t say that defines my mafia career or impact I had on the room. As staff I’ve helped with organizing numerous events and leading some. I was a big part in making sure mafia room awards didn’t die that one year staff was lacking (not just because I wanted to win stuff). I think looking back on what I’ve done in PS Maf and the impact I ha: the majority of it is as staff even though that’s probably a shorter part of my time in mafia so far. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be a part of the room or staff at least, but it’ll always be nice to look back and see that I made a difference in making mafia what it is today.
I'm proud of the UGO's I've been a part of. Those took a LOT of work and I'm happy to see new faces in the room and everything run smoothly
Too much time and effort from our staff team went into UGO. It's always hard to find a time to start doing everything as well. We need to decide how to separate our events & what order to put them in to ensure everything gets done in time. We also take a look into what we did last year and reflect on how we can encourage more traffic into our room
I remember discussing adding ugo points for regular games. Earning points 3 times per day in our room didn't encourage much all day traffic so we thought of a way to add points for all of our games. we had dead hours during UGO because people would just go to other game rooms, including our regs
What is being staff / Room Owner like? Is it as you expected?
I wanna say no, but in reality I don’t really have any idea what my initial expectations were. I wasn’t always the biggest fan of staff in every room and often disagreed with a lot of their decisions. I think the more I got accustomed to being a part of the culture of a room the more I began to grow an appreciation for everything staff does. I was voice for quite a while but didn’t really have the same understanding as when you get staff. Room Owner is especially unique in the fact you can really run the room in the way you want. You call the shots and can run whatever events / stuff you want. It’s not at easy as it looks or feels but I think it’s worth it in the end. Seeing everyone in the room enjoying themselves doing something you put together is always a good feeling. Im really happy with the staff team right now and the culture me micro and spiderz have grown here the last year or more.
I feel like we all get along great and work together really well. We mesh together as a team well and come up with new ideas and discuss things like a real team should. We are all close friends I feel like too. It’s easy to get along with everyone and everyone is super chill. It’s nice to be able to banter and make jokes with your staff mates. Everyone is super great when it comes to staffing the room as well. We have quite a bit of new staff but they’ve done extremely well adjusting and becoming an integral part of the team
Being a RO was more work than I'd thought it be but SL is less than I thought. That might be a result of how SLs currently function, though
As a RO, I kinda just make sure everything functions properly and that we get stuff done behind the scenes. For a while I've been on LOA though so I haven't done it in a bit. As for SL, rn it's mostly a responsive role so we're on standby a lot
How has PS! Mafia impacted you?
Mafia has been a big part of my life the last 5 years. I’ve met so many friends through PS and mafia specifically. I have so many memories and amazing moments from my time in the room.
Mafia has taught me how to be a good leader and how to not be a dick
What memories of PS! Mafia do you cherish?
Big events stick out in my mind like UGO/UGM, THT, Voice contest, PSMPL, summer circuits, MCDs. Mafia room award memories are always bittersweet. I cherish all the funny games or moments we’ve had playing and all the friends I’ve made along the way.
One specific memory that stands out from a game is where I was the last mafia in modexe and won vs so many town. It was an insane clutch moment. There are some other playing moments that stick out as well like leaderboard competitions with people or going up against good players especially in volo as scum.
I treasure a lot of the mini games we play, like the Jackbox, Skribbl, Secret Hitler, TOS, etc
Is there anyone you'd like to give a shoutout?
There are so many people who have made an impact in my time in mafia. There are honestly way too many to name but I can try and name some. Please don’t be offended if I do not mention you! I’m doing this off the top of my head and obviously can’t list everyone.
zorquax, clc, toni, vigvig, abdel, ayia, OM, micro, spiderz, snaq, clouds, mmib, PTSD, Arsenal, Ivan, Winsy
I obviously couldn’t mention everyone but so many of you have made a huge impact on my life. I am grateful for each and everyone of you ❤️
Yes I give a shoutout to Alexander for all the time I've spent talking with him. I have a ton of friends on Mafia (too many to list) and I'd like to give them a shoutout too for being with me throughout all these years. Y'all are awesome
Do you have any final words?
Thank you Snaq and Flush for everything you guys do in terms of the forums. And thank you snaq for putting together these newsletter interviews ❤️
i hc townie
Alexander489 and micromorphic
Hi! Would you like to introduce yourself?
HELLO. I am Alexander489! On PS I’m known as various things including Alexander489, Alx, Alexa, and simply just Alex. I’m one of the current Room Owner’s of the mafia room and have been for about a year now. I officially started playing regularly in october 2018 but had joined the room a few times dating back to 2017.
Outside of mafia you can find me in the Sports room, especially during NFL games. Outside of PS I’m currently a Programmer after recently graduating from college with a computer science degree. In my free time you can probably find me playing various video games or watching youtube/sports.
Sure! I'm micro and I've been a member of the Mafia community since May of 2019 and I have been a room owner since 2022
How did you find PS! Mafia?
I first joined PS in early 2016, but started off originally in the trivia room. Slowly migrated to other rooms such as survivor / gc. Survivor was definitely my main and where I met a lot of my early ps friends, toni being one of them. Toni asked me a couple times to come check out the mafia room but the thought of being banned if I talked was kinda off putting, I don’t really know why I never stuck around. Later in early October 2018 I was talking to OM and he said he was playing mafia official, and I thought what the hell ill give it a try. I was an avid town of salem player which helped make the transition to mafia pretty seamless. I instantly was hooked and the rest is history.
My friend and I were surfing through rooms on PS for stuff to do and we came across the mafia room. We tried a couple games (cheated too oops) and I decided to stick around and play more
What was PS! Mafia like when you joined?
It was very competitive. Officials would be stacked with highly talented players (very competitive ones too). You’d have officials with like OM, motogp, kaif, spiderz, quax, darnell, hawkie, neo, and many others. It was pretty insane. I miss it a lot. I think that era of mafia was probably peak. Might be biased there though. I remember there was a voice contest right around the time I was joining which was fun to participate in even if I didn’t win. The staff was pretty dope as well, got to grow close to a lot of them
I think eventually all of the players who brought that competitive energy and talent started to slowly quit playing and move on to dif stuff. Lot of the mafia players transition into EiMM, which they are able to excel at as well. There was a bit of a resurgence in these competitive games in ~2020 which was pretty fun. We also just recently had PSMPL which brought back a lot of those same players. I think mafia is still pretty competitive and I think officials can still get that intense competition feel but I don’t think it rivals what it was back in 2018
Mafia took me a VERY long time to understand, so most of that time was kinda just a blur to me but I remember constantly being overwhelmed by high PL games
Mafia definitely became more fun after I understood it. Some of the users I remember being very active were Schia, CA, quax, cl, angel, meower, tb2, gnatboy, yash, and more. It was a lot of the same people but I had a blast
I feel like the room is different now in terms of overall toxicity. Back then, we were ripping into each other all the time and it wasn't very pretty to watch
What are some of your favorite themes?
Two of my favorites happen to be two of my own in Fruitful Village and Cult-Shot. As far as themes I didn’t make I enjoy playing KAT, modexe, deathnommy, classic, fire and ice, and greater idea. I might have missed some but those are always fun.
Fruitful Village I made when I was new to the mafia room for the voice contest. I didn’t make it past the theme round sadly but I got pretty far for being new. It’s a simple idea but works well and it’s pretty fun. Cult-Shot was a CS idea I had of a spin off of Cult Vengeful. Funny enough when I ran it the cult was new and claimed their role and it was ruined. I turned it into an OS and people seem to like it for how simple it is. KAT is my favorite big PL setup, I like the mechanics of it and the balanced multiball rolelist. I have pretty good memories playing that and certain games I’ve played. Modexe and deathnommy are probably my two favorite vanilla-esque themes both due to their mechanics. modexe it’s always fun to play around the corrupt and analyze gunshots. Deathnommy narrows down the voting pool each day based on the previous voted players nomination list which is always p entertaining and fun. It makes you think about which of the 3 options is the best choice when presented with them. Classic is what I usually answer when asked my favorite theme. I just like the simplicity of it and the default feel of it. You can’t go wrong with a game of classic. Higher PL are a bit iffy but lower PL are always fun. Some people don’t like FNI but I think it’s a nice change of pace theme to play. Fairly minimal in terms of PRs but the mechanics are unique in a way that makes the theme stand out. I like the symmetry of the multiball. GI is probably the best idea no matter how many copies of it get made. I love the rolelist and the idea of picking between 2 roles. Any theme where you can have an influence on what you are is a +
My favorite theme is Deathnommy cuz I like creating towncores. I'm also a fan of most semi oses
What do you pay attention to when creating a theme?
Fruitful village was so long ago now but I wanted to center the theme around my favorite role, Fruit Vendor. On its own fruit vendor might not do much but I wanted to make it so when it fruits someone something happens depending on who you fruit. I had to keep in mind the voice contest submission rules as well as balance. I added a hidden backup fruit vendor to help balance the game in case the fruit vendor dies early and it becomes basically vanilla. Hungry townie mirrored by a hungry mafia goon makes it so you really do need to be careful who you fruit. The theme isn’t hosted much anymore and I would probably make some changes if I were to remake it but for being new in the room I quite like it.
For Cult-Shot I got the idea when I wanted to host a short PL cult theme. Cult Vengeful exists but it has its flaws. I tried to fix them when I created my CS. When it was ruined by scum claiming I was pretty upset but realized this would go great as an OS. I had to make some mechanic decisions like what happens when cult / vig interact in certain scenarios or whether a vigilante culted keeps their gun. In the end it ended up really balanced when you calculate the EVs.
What is your playstyle like?
I’m really not sure how to describe my playstyle. I definitely play differently than I did when I was actually playing/tryharding for officials. Nowadays I’m more relaxed and passive but occasionally will shift gears and tryhard. I have always really been partial to using playermeta to analyze a players behaviors and look for clues on if they are acting different than normal or do something different than they would if they were a different faction. It’s always been my style of play. I used to hate playing as scum/mafia, and still would probably always pick town in idea. Nowadays I prefer being mafia and am probably better at it anyway.
I was more aggressive, better at scumhunting. More in tune with the playerbase to be able to pmeta. Id say I was definitely a better player back then but it’s exhausting to put that much intense focus/effort into a game everyday.
I usually look for motivation for actions and their interactions with flipped scum. In larger games, scum tend to be more passive in nightless nilla themes too
For motivations, I mean like what they vote people for (rvs, wagoning, solid reasoning) & being proactive with their actions. For interactions, I'm looking for if they actively pushed a scum member or if they just wagoned on LHF and passively watched them die
There's more I look for but I tend to look for these first
I like to be proactive and ask questions whether I'm town or scum. As town, most of those questions will be productive and as scum, most of them are just fillery
What are some of your favorite roles to play as?
As far as roles go I like ones that are fun. Vigilante is always fun to play as you get to put the fate of someone in your own hands. Any strong power role where you don’t need to rely on anyone else or town is always a +. My favorite role however is Fruit Vendor. There’s always been something about it. I think it’s probably the meme nature of it or the fact it doesn’t really do anything in most themes. Really stood out to me. I’ve tried to campaign it for best role many years.
I like playing anything that can kill someone, especially publicly and during the day because it's funny
What are you proud to have done in PS! Mafia?
As a reg/player I’m pretty proud of my awards / official stats but I wouldn’t say that defines my mafia career or impact I had on the room. As staff I’ve helped with organizing numerous events and leading some. I was a big part in making sure mafia room awards didn’t die that one year staff was lacking (not just because I wanted to win stuff). I think looking back on what I’ve done in PS Maf and the impact I ha: the majority of it is as staff even though that’s probably a shorter part of my time in mafia so far. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be a part of the room or staff at least, but it’ll always be nice to look back and see that I made a difference in making mafia what it is today.
I'm proud of the UGO's I've been a part of. Those took a LOT of work and I'm happy to see new faces in the room and everything run smoothly
Too much time and effort from our staff team went into UGO. It's always hard to find a time to start doing everything as well. We need to decide how to separate our events & what order to put them in to ensure everything gets done in time. We also take a look into what we did last year and reflect on how we can encourage more traffic into our room
I remember discussing adding ugo points for regular games. Earning points 3 times per day in our room didn't encourage much all day traffic so we thought of a way to add points for all of our games. we had dead hours during UGO because people would just go to other game rooms, including our regs
What is being staff / Room Owner like? Is it as you expected?
I wanna say no, but in reality I don’t really have any idea what my initial expectations were. I wasn’t always the biggest fan of staff in every room and often disagreed with a lot of their decisions. I think the more I got accustomed to being a part of the culture of a room the more I began to grow an appreciation for everything staff does. I was voice for quite a while but didn’t really have the same understanding as when you get staff. Room Owner is especially unique in the fact you can really run the room in the way you want. You call the shots and can run whatever events / stuff you want. It’s not at easy as it looks or feels but I think it’s worth it in the end. Seeing everyone in the room enjoying themselves doing something you put together is always a good feeling. Im really happy with the staff team right now and the culture me micro and spiderz have grown here the last year or more.
I feel like we all get along great and work together really well. We mesh together as a team well and come up with new ideas and discuss things like a real team should. We are all close friends I feel like too. It’s easy to get along with everyone and everyone is super chill. It’s nice to be able to banter and make jokes with your staff mates. Everyone is super great when it comes to staffing the room as well. We have quite a bit of new staff but they’ve done extremely well adjusting and becoming an integral part of the team
Being a RO was more work than I'd thought it be but SL is less than I thought. That might be a result of how SLs currently function, though
As a RO, I kinda just make sure everything functions properly and that we get stuff done behind the scenes. For a while I've been on LOA though so I haven't done it in a bit. As for SL, rn it's mostly a responsive role so we're on standby a lot
How has PS! Mafia impacted you?
Mafia has been a big part of my life the last 5 years. I’ve met so many friends through PS and mafia specifically. I have so many memories and amazing moments from my time in the room.
Mafia has taught me how to be a good leader and how to not be a dick
What memories of PS! Mafia do you cherish?
Big events stick out in my mind like UGO/UGM, THT, Voice contest, PSMPL, summer circuits, MCDs. Mafia room award memories are always bittersweet. I cherish all the funny games or moments we’ve had playing and all the friends I’ve made along the way.
One specific memory that stands out from a game is where I was the last mafia in modexe and won vs so many town. It was an insane clutch moment. There are some other playing moments that stick out as well like leaderboard competitions with people or going up against good players especially in volo as scum.
I treasure a lot of the mini games we play, like the Jackbox, Skribbl, Secret Hitler, TOS, etc
Is there anyone you'd like to give a shoutout?
There are so many people who have made an impact in my time in mafia. There are honestly way too many to name but I can try and name some. Please don’t be offended if I do not mention you! I’m doing this off the top of my head and obviously can’t list everyone.
zorquax, clc, toni, vigvig, abdel, ayia, OM, micro, spiderz, snaq, clouds, mmib, PTSD, Arsenal, Ivan, Winsy
I obviously couldn’t mention everyone but so many of you have made a huge impact on my life. I am grateful for each and everyone of you ❤️
Yes I give a shoutout to Alexander for all the time I've spent talking with him. I have a ton of friends on Mafia (too many to list) and I'd like to give them a shoutout too for being with me throughout all these years. Y'all are awesome
Do you have any final words?
Thank you Snaq and Flush for everything you guys do in terms of the forums. And thank you snaq for putting together these newsletter interviews ❤️
i hc townie