Can't say I've ever done a phone interview, on second thought.
How do those normally go?
It's mostly like a normal interview, except it's on a phone. Just remember to sound confident and coherent, and it'll all be fine. Congrats on the interview by the way, looks like a pretty sweet festival.
Apparently we will be writing a script, essentially.
Exactly. These sorts of things seem like they'd only really be entertaining in person, fairly off the cuff and with alcohol involved. Like an after dinner speech, but aimed at a particular person (like someone retiring from a company or whatever).
Cool with Stormblind's thread title. I'll make a new thread in the next few days.
:/ on the clan contest though, I think it's a silly idea and I don't see exactly how you can roast someone (who is a rather srs wizard dragon) in text. I am not very familiar with the execution of a roast though, so I could be missing the mark.
I'm going to get it eventually, but I'm not willing to plunk down full price on most PC games (with about the only exception being Dark Souls, which I bought during the first week it went up on Steam). Prices for downloads go down too quickly for me to consider it a good deal.
I often feel similar, but Bioshock Infinite is so good that it's easily worth the price. I guess it helped that my pre order also involved the original Bioshock, XCOM and TF2 hats.
@Eco: Sadly, some of the players who were in that game said it was one of their favorites...and 'derf because it's a bastard game'. It actually served a purpose, though - it was interesting to see everyone reluctant to vote ANYBODY so as to not oust themselves and accidentally kill their buddies in the process. Maybe it's a sign that townies should be more cautious instead of overextending themselves.
There's no accounting for taste I guess. If townies get any more cautious, games will take even longer than they already do. Generally speaking, intentionally slowing a game down and introducing paranoia is a bad thing. This applies to all games, not just Mafia.
If you want a better implementation of that, try Space Monkey Mafia, where all the townies recieve flavour that makes them sound like a traitor, and the Mafia know it. RafK ran it as "Manipulator Mafia".
ZDS: To clarify, you are suggesting that nervousness etc as shown by player B isn't a scumtell? Because I think that it makes logical sense that a player (particluarly one new to the mafia alignment) is more likely to makes jokes, appear nervous and oversue smilies and so forth.
Now, in forcing me to think about it, the theory behind the tell is much more conventional wisdom rather than demonstrated trends (which is also the case for most tells), and there is a convincing case to be made that townies can easily be nervous, overuse in-jokes and inquire about something they don't understand. Logically then, it implies that it's more of a newb tell and therefore not conclusive.
I think it's good enough for post 20, but is not exactly a slam-dunk. I certainly don't see how you can say player B is town for it, and he clearly is fishing for A's role.
On your second point, I don't entriely agree. Certainly, one should be aware that you can't solely rely on "what would I do?" (Which I fell afoul of in Ataghan trying to work out why DV had been added to the network) because everyone does think differently, but looking at the situation from another perspective is an immensely helpful tool.
For example, if there's a claimed vig and you're wondering if he could be a serial killer, you can look at this targets and say "if I were in his position, would I have killed them as a SK? Or would there have been better targets?"
I guess the problem arises when you look at something like answers or reactions, and attack someone for not precisely matching your own, because there's a much variety in words/phrasing. I know I try not to ask questions "for reactions" unless I can broadly plan out how I'd expect someone of a particular alignment to react, but I find it difficult to actually pin something down that isn't WIFOM or too narrow, so I don't usually bother.
So, I guess my point is that putting yourself in somone's shoes can hlpe you think about a situation from another angle ("What would I have done here as scum? Is what they did a reasonable option? Can I find a motivation if I pretend to be them?"), but if you expect everyone to play exactly like you (in answers to questions or plays where they've done something sub-optimal that you think is obviously the wrong play) then you're right, you can't rely on your own thoguth process being universal.
To try and repurpose your ending setence, I think it's ok to look for people who act like you would act when scum (because they are exhibiting a scum mentality), but not useful to look like people not acting like you would as town (because people play differently). It looks self contradictory, but I think it makes sense.
I don't get the point of setups like that. Why not make it 9 town, 1 SK and 2 Mafia? If you have 9 Mafia who don't know who each other are (and don't win when they have a mjaority apparently), then they're basically townies anyway. Maybe they get to make a badly informed collective vig shot, but they're still basically a "town" faction. It's also not the first "loads of Mafia with a few townies" game I've seen, and I just don't get it. It'd be interesting as a corruption if the Mafia faction didn't play exactly like any normal Town with sime extra killing ablity. It's barely functionally different to putting the town names in red and the mafia in blue.
You can say "derf it's a bastard game", but no-one actually enjoys bastard games apart from the mod and particularly sadistic specators.
If you're going to play a stupid mini setup, just use Lost Mafia. 1 townie, 2 Mafia, 9 Serial Killers. At least everyone (apart from the townie) knows where they stand.
What does surprise me is to see most of you interpreted B's casualness as reverse psychology. It's the very beginning of the game, his mood is very light, what reason is there to think he is hiding something?
To a certain extent it would depend on who player B is. A newer player is much mroe likely to nervously apply jokes and fish while saying "you don't have to tell me I'd just like to know..." But in any case, I think two strikes in a short space count against him heavily. Since the player in question was inexperienced and had recently returned to the game, I can see an argument for "nervous townie" too.
Isn't that just how mafia works? -D1, you usually have about a 1/4 chance of getting it right, just at random.
-Hmm... or maybe we should run scumless mafia games occasionally, just to keep people on their toes? How would that even work?
Yeah, but the GF game is about reads, not necessarily finding the scum. There usually is odds of 1/3 to find scum, but working under the assumption of "one of them must be scum" is flawed when we're dealing with a subset of a game. Especially when that subset is usually "something interesting happened here are reactions" rather than a random sample.
I'm pretty sure someone has seriously floated the idea of a scumless game to me. It took more persuading than it should have to convince them it was a terrible idea.
Hey that's not fair Iso; someone has to be scum in the Godfather game! That's like running a Mafia game with nothing but townies.
Although I guess this is tongue in cheek, I don't agree. If someone is always scum, then you might not learn that much since there'll probably be the 1/3 chance of getting it right.
I think it's interesting that we all shared similar opinions, but were wrong. I wouldn't have been surprised to see wagons form based on reasoning similar to ours. Although, if most people put down "not enough info" you probably need a bit more to make the game more interesting.
On a slightly different note, I've been trying to edit my signature but doing so will force me to remove my "hey there!" smiley (because the forum software no longer handles gifs in signatures). It is a leftover from a forum we created in high school with a bunch of friends to pretend we were rebellious. We would threaten to blast out country music during recess, we studied tree shrimps, and we even had the rivalry with the school's newspaper team (they would try to guess our real identities, and we would laugh are asses off at how off base they were despite us and them being friends). In a way this was my first experience with Mafia. I don't want the smiley to go. But there are modifications I want to make to my signature. This is such an inconvenience.
It's a shame when relics have to disappear. My Sig banner broke when I changed my Axelrod quote and I couldn't get it to work. It was old and irrelevent (and possibly too large), but it was a reminder of when I first joined, and someone made a cool deck out of it once.
The only real alternative would be to make more blog posts and aggressively referring to it. Sucks though.
Mentoring is when you play and receive advice from a more experienced player in a QT.
Shadowing is when the more experienced player plays and you can ask him questions in a QT.
I feel like I should give this a try because I'm apparently quite good, but it's more that actually writing down my thought processes would probably be incredibly helpful. Do you have an example you can share with us?
***
I don't really think there's enough to go on here. I'm fairly suspicous of B because he's forcing some humour and then says "But seriously, you're not gonna tell us why, are you...? I don't mind either way." which is a second strike of fishing. A is marginally more likely to be town since scum don't usually have plans which say "everyone target me", but 20 posts into the game it's not likely to be a well thought out or likely to be accepted plan. Could argue that C is being bloodthirsty since the only options he presents are "do you want to vote or daykill him?" but that's reading a lot into the comment.
I'd probably vote/question B, but overall this exchange right at the start of the game isn't particularly telling. I certainly wouldn't be calling anyone town.
I never really watched Happy Tree Friends, but I had a similar experience with the Sitckdeath website (which was a series of flash videos of stick figures being murdered). It had just lost all humour, and the awful writing and repetitive jokes was starkly apparent.
I don't know. In my limited experience Linux requires some knowledge of computer programming, which incidentally is what limits my experience with Linux. And besides, what do I gain? (I don't really care if I can't play Audiosurf)
Learn programming!
It's a valuable and highly employable skill that isn't that difficult to pick up if you have a logical brain.
It's mostly like a normal interview, except it's on a phone. Just remember to sound confident and coherent, and it'll all be fine. Congrats on the interview by the way, looks like a pretty sweet festival.
Eco is also very busy at work making deadlines. I will make a new thread this weekend at the latest.
Please host another game and don't disappear half way through. Brittania was awesome until it died
Exactly. These sorts of things seem like they'd only really be entertaining in person, fairly off the cuff and with alcohol involved. Like an after dinner speech, but aimed at a particular person (like someone retiring from a company or whatever).
:/ on the clan contest though, I think it's a silly idea and I don't see exactly how you can roast someone (who is a rather srs wizard dragon) in text. I am not very familiar with the execution of a roast though, so I could be missing the mark.
ZeDorkWhatIsthatMonsterThingAndWhatIsItAboutToEat?
Incidentally, TheFoofish has renamed herself KittyCupCake. I don't think anyone else has really changed.
I often feel similar, but Bioshock Infinite is so good that it's easily worth the price. I guess it helped that my pre order also involved the original Bioshock, XCOM and TF2 hats.
There's no accounting for taste I guess. If townies get any more cautious, games will take even longer than they already do. Generally speaking, intentionally slowing a game down and introducing paranoia is a bad thing. This applies to all games, not just Mafia.
If you want a better implementation of that, try Space Monkey Mafia, where all the townies recieve flavour that makes them sound like a traitor, and the Mafia know it. RafK ran it as "Manipulator Mafia".
ZDS: To clarify, you are suggesting that nervousness etc as shown by player B isn't a scumtell? Because I think that it makes logical sense that a player (particluarly one new to the mafia alignment) is more likely to makes jokes, appear nervous and oversue smilies and so forth.
Now, in forcing me to think about it, the theory behind the tell is much more conventional wisdom rather than demonstrated trends (which is also the case for most tells), and there is a convincing case to be made that townies can easily be nervous, overuse in-jokes and inquire about something they don't understand. Logically then, it implies that it's more of a newb tell and therefore not conclusive.
I think it's good enough for post 20, but is not exactly a slam-dunk. I certainly don't see how you can say player B is town for it, and he clearly is fishing for A's role.
On your second point, I don't entriely agree. Certainly, one should be aware that you can't solely rely on "what would I do?" (Which I fell afoul of in Ataghan trying to work out why DV had been added to the network) because everyone does think differently, but looking at the situation from another perspective is an immensely helpful tool.
For example, if there's a claimed vig and you're wondering if he could be a serial killer, you can look at this targets and say "if I were in his position, would I have killed them as a SK? Or would there have been better targets?"
I guess the problem arises when you look at something like answers or reactions, and attack someone for not precisely matching your own, because there's a much variety in words/phrasing. I know I try not to ask questions "for reactions" unless I can broadly plan out how I'd expect someone of a particular alignment to react, but I find it difficult to actually pin something down that isn't WIFOM or too narrow, so I don't usually bother.
So, I guess my point is that putting yourself in somone's shoes can hlpe you think about a situation from another angle ("What would I have done here as scum? Is what they did a reasonable option? Can I find a motivation if I pretend to be them?"), but if you expect everyone to play exactly like you (in answers to questions or plays where they've done something sub-optimal that you think is obviously the wrong play) then you're right, you can't rely on your own thoguth process being universal.
To try and repurpose your ending setence, I think it's ok to look for people who act like you would act when scum (because they are exhibiting a scum mentality), but not useful to look like people not acting like you would as town (because people play differently). It looks self contradictory, but I think it makes sense.
You can say "derf it's a bastard game", but no-one actually enjoys bastard games apart from the mod and particularly sadistic specators.
If you're going to play a stupid mini setup, just use Lost Mafia. 1 townie, 2 Mafia, 9 Serial Killers. At least everyone (apart from the townie) knows where they stand.
To a certain extent it would depend on who player B is. A newer player is much mroe likely to nervously apply jokes and fish while saying "you don't have to tell me I'd just like to know..." But in any case, I think two strikes in a short space count against him heavily. Since the player in question was inexperienced and had recently returned to the game, I can see an argument for "nervous townie" too.
Yeah, but the GF game is about reads, not necessarily finding the scum. There usually is odds of 1/3 to find scum, but working under the assumption of "one of them must be scum" is flawed when we're dealing with a subset of a game. Especially when that subset is usually "something interesting happened here are reactions" rather than a random sample.
I'm pretty sure someone has seriously floated the idea of a scumless game to me. It took more persuading than it should have to convince them it was a terrible idea.
Although I guess this is tongue in cheek, I don't agree. If someone is always scum, then you might not learn that much since there'll probably be the 1/3 chance of getting it right.
I think it's interesting that we all shared similar opinions, but were wrong. I wouldn't have been surprised to see wagons form based on reasoning similar to ours. Although, if most people put down "not enough info" you probably need a bit more to make the game more interesting.
It's a shame when relics have to disappear. My Sig banner broke when I changed my Axelrod quote and I couldn't get it to work. It was old and irrelevent (and possibly too large), but it was a reminder of when I first joined, and someone made a cool deck out of it once.
The only real alternative would be to make more blog posts and aggressively referring to it. Sucks though.
I feel like I should give this a try because I'm apparently quite good, but it's more that actually writing down my thought processes would probably be incredibly helpful. Do you have an example you can share with us?
***
I don't really think there's enough to go on here. I'm fairly suspicous of B because he's forcing some humour and then says "But seriously, you're not gonna tell us why, are you...? I don't mind either way." which is a second strike of fishing. A is marginally more likely to be town since scum don't usually have plans which say "everyone target me", but 20 posts into the game it's not likely to be a well thought out or likely to be accepted plan. Could argue that C is being bloodthirsty since the only options he presents are "do you want to vote or daykill him?" but that's reading a lot into the comment.
I'd probably vote/question B, but overall this exchange right at the start of the game isn't particularly telling. I certainly wouldn't be calling anyone town.
I never really watched Happy Tree Friends, but I had a similar experience with the Sitckdeath website (which was a series of flash videos of stick figures being murdered). It had just lost all humour, and the awful writing and repetitive jokes was starkly apparent.
Learn programming!
It's a valuable and highly employable skill that isn't that difficult to pick up if you have a logical brain.