Hmmm what’s missing from this? Oh yeah 4Head.
Wait that’s what happened? That makes me feel super bad.
Actually this is coming from someone who hasn’t owned man’s best friend.
Modnotes
The setup seemed fine to me. I was concerned at first when I saw the rand because I thought it was slightly townsided but Leafia survived long enough, Wisdom stayed afloat and Marl GOATed. The main mechanical controversy was probably the way that votes at EoD1 were handled. Arete had previously always ruled it as votes being valid if posted before threadlock. However, the thread does not lock at the exact time specified, instead it locks at seemingly any random second of the specified minute. This ended up ruining the wolves’ plan to give Marl cred by making it seem like wolves were scared of his ability – they didn’t consider it worth “using” the ability shot on that day because it would tie Marl/Babel together and Babel wouldn’t be villagery or active enough to endgame. I think there ought to be some sort of standardization to prevent this happening again – i.e. ruling that votes do not count at XX:00 regardless of what second the thread locks on.
Players seemed confused on how the truth/deception lists worked and this led to a lot of jumping through hoops to justify worlds where Wisdom and Marl were town. Wisdom should have seen Leafia. I think I saw the idea that deception lists roleblock the most scumread person, and this explained why Leafia wasn’t seen. This not only assumes that deception lists work that way (which there was no evidence of) but also that Leafia was the most included person. In a different respect, a lot of players were trying to find worlds where Marl could be town and Wisdom could be a wolf. Leafia very blatantly TMI’ed that she would be surviving the tie, and while people did pick up on this, instead of assuming that Marl’s ability was fake (or reversed) people jumped through hoops to say there was some form of redacted/global mafia ability which specifically countered Marl’s role. This was a game where the mechanics ended up becoming arguably more important than social reads, and while oftentimes it’s dangerous to rely solely on mechanics, I feel as though they weren’t treated with… sincerity? I don’t really know the correct word here, but people seemed to be making contrived mechanical worlds which fit their social read of Marl town, rather than taking the problem as a suggestion to reconsider their read on Marl.
There were the classic instances of Leafia TMI this game, which were probably the main social tool town had to solve this game. People did evaluate the spew, however not to the full extent– Leafia went so far as to claim to Proph in the stump chat that Marl’s ability could be the reverse of what he claimed (it was), and when Proph asked why would Babel have tried to snipe in that case, Leafia couldn’t come up with a good answer. I will add the link to the stump chat in the post with the dvc link so you can take a look for yourselves, but Proph pointed out the key part here Mafia: Trials and Tribulations [Thread 1 - DO NOT POST] - #8923 by Prophylaxis
The AtE was pretty bad on Day 3, but both were quickly resolved. This partly ties into the spam culture that felt exacerbated this game. Prophy’s linking of the Vulgard article summed it up pretty well. People were incessantly spamming every thought that they had, impulsively reacting to micro posts, spouting changing worldviews every 5 minutes and possible teams. Some players (both town and wolves) were using points like “I’m never a wolf here” and spamming ineffective threats as a means to avoid the elimination. None of this stuff is conducive to a productive threadstate (or wincon, for wolves), and instead serves to make the game unreadable and makes people less likely to backread. Backreading was the tool village had to win this game – that isn’t to say that they didn’t backread, and see the Leafia spew I was talking about – rather they did not evaluate how each player ended up at their worldviews and if their reads made sense for them to have. It’s worth citing the LyLo as a good example - Litten was letting realtime interactions affect his reads and ended up townreading Marl and Wisdom for “feeling the same as him” and “feeling too uninformed” respectively. This is more relevant for the first point, but town and wolves have more or less the same wincon in this situation, so solving from the posts made on that day wasn’t of much use.
Town made some pretty good mechanical plays this game. Millium got the save N1, Atlas got the save on Millium N3 (though I am unsure as to why he didn’t backup immediately on N2 – both the BG and Loverizer were great options and Loverizer would have confirmed him unless people considered the possibility of a mafia role which could backup town roles). Proph’s track on Chloe ended up having way more of an impact later in the game, and I think this gave the lylo a pretty interesting twist. Wolves… had some pretty poor mech this game. They rolecopped Litten despite him claiming the list checker which they knew existed. They attacked Millium even though Atlas claimed he was going to defend Millium that night, and Atlas would have been a near essential mislynch at that point (and probably would have been required had Chloe not been replaced). They also rolecopped Chloe on two separate nights (judging by Wisdom’s reaction to the second being “oh, rolecop?” and them not including Chloe in the mass anticlaim roleblock, I am just assuming they forgot they rolecopped her already). Similarly, they did not roleblock Chloe despite seeing her hidden ability, which had the potential to redcheck either of Marl/Wisdom had they been targeted.
As someone who had TMI from the start of the game, it’s ?probably? bad form to criticize the mislynches, but the Eliza mislynch was… seriously questionable. I am not sure why people considered the possibility that Babel outted themselves only to try and kill another wolf. Babel was KP, yes, but voting in the last second and going against the plan of tying the wagons still outted themselves, and would have probably got them killed the next day. This was the same day where Litten had a brief epiphany of Marl being a wolf, but other than Eliza it seemed most players didn’t entertain the validity of such a world - rather they continued spamming their own worldviews. This lack of discussion meant no one was really there to sanity check Litten’s thoughts and reinforce/disprove them, and so he quickly lost confidence.
Minor point on avatar changes midgame. Just… don’t do it, please. Frostwolf changed his avatar to his flavor midgame, and we couldn’t exactly ask him to change it back as this would only exacerbate the problem. When Marl changed his flavor to Apollo Justice, Frost commented that he assumed Marl was claiming this as his flavor. Avatar changes midgame, especially when the flavor is either that of the game or related to the game, just cause a lot of gross interactions- so please just avoid them in future. I do not think there is a rule against it, but for the relevant persons consider this a plea that one is made.
Thanks for playing
Also the other hosts were great but I totally carried
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wrong
arctic v
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no no he’s got a point
Ugh I’ll need an early night sleep.
it works perfectly though!
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high level wolves tend to explode when you suddenly leap at them without warning
it didnt work for marl
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i didn’t throttle marl
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that’s cuz we didn’t leap at him enough
just give it a couple misexecutions I’m sure it will work
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Italy I’m looking forward to ur new play style
in FAM when i concluded kat was a wolf because there were too many town lynches he exploded into like three different trademark wolf maneuvers and it nearly fucked them over
okay tbh not backreading wasn’t the main reason village lost but it tied into it
the main reason town lost was because they were jumping through loops to make the mechanics work to fit their social reads
if they re-evaluated their social reads in light of the mech conflicts (which backreading would have been useful for, rather than spamming) they could have won
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:shrug: Some people have different tastes? 
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You waited this long just to say this huh
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Nah I was reading the talk about subs vs modkills vs the host just telling people not to be snozzpoggles towards each other… (In addition to the MU version once @Wisdom mentioned it) and then vanity searched since I reviewed this game and found that Marl post.
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you were right actually
the best op of the season wasn’t the spy x family op
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