Does anyone have a wolfchat invite I can use on my alt, the original expired
Also I still haven’t forgotten about writing a retrospective in this game, expect it in the next couple of days hopefully.
RE: The VT allegations, I literally do not play differently as PR vs VT, I don’t give a shit, maybe if I was every-night vig or cop or whatever I’d consider it but having good reads and moving the game forward is way more valuable to me than deliberately sabotaging my own play just so I can get hard read as PR and die
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for the most part the way i learned the game was that you should not play differently as a pr and just try to be effective during the day, because if you make your pr play notably different it becomes readable by others. these days i’m more open to playing strategically but not to the point you’re hamstringing your own play.
this game, i obviously died for a reason but trying to hide as bodyguard never really crossed my mind, dying in place of someone with a stronger role is the whole point of the role
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Frieren Mafia Gameplay Thoughts
Sorry that this is coming a couple of weeks late, got busy and needed some time to gather thoughts and refresh my memory of the micro that happened in this game.
In this post I will go day-by-day on my thoughts on the actual gameplay and trying to award town/wolf MVPs respectively. I know for players it’s fairly rare nowadays to get thoughts from an outside perspective on how they played. Back when I was still learning the game and hungry to get better, I got this type of feedback from spectators/mods and it really helped me level up my game, so I want to offer a bit of my time here.
For starters, when I randed this game, I thought it was going to be quite close. tutuu just had a really sterling wolf performance I believe in Mafia Champs last year, and Hippo completely fooled me as a wolf in Fortress of Lunacy. snow was a wildcard, though I’ve certainly seen newb wolves pull out strong performances in their first wolf games before. And I haven’t seen Willow wolf in years but I know she’s been around the community for a crazy long time so she was certainly no slouch. The town looked pretty stacked though, especially with both of the hydra slots (melatonin and Eve), catbae, and May randing village. And I haven’t seen diafiasco or soweli play before, but I was extremely impressed by both of their play this game. So yeah, heavy hitters on both sides.
Day 1
I was saying this in spectator chat, but I think Day 1/2 might be some of the best played days I’ve seen played by town on this website. The wolves started off on the backfoot and the game looked like it would be a complete town sweep early on. The reason for this I think was that
- Most townies in the game were active analyzers, which made it easy for them to recognize each other as town and clear themselves
- With the exception of tutuu, the wolves found it difficult to wrest thread control away from the townies, and people were suspicious of tutuu right off the bat (I think soweli and catbae were immediately distrustful of him when he entered thread)
tutuu did have a bunch of activity early on in Day 1 where he did try to work his magic, get involved in the thread and get townread; Eve was able to see past his deception here though and get a townread from catbae due to it. jason did “something weird” to try and read gummy which caused him to townread the gummy slot and for most players to townread his slot.
For the most part, Day 1 played out in my opinion kind of like how it should ideally would in a idyllic mafia world: Townies were on similar wavelengths and the wolves didn’t have the thread presence to infiltrate, and when they did try to enter the thread they got called out and wagonned for being unnatural, like how Hippo entered the thread mid-Day 1. His response to being pressured was saying that he was not acting like his recent wolfgames, which… wasn’t super convincing to the rest of the town.
(Also aside if all of the active players start posting decently accurate readslists towards the end of D1, which is what happened in this game it feels super cooked as mafia)
Day ends, Hippo jokes about claiming mason with his wolfbuddies but actually does it to an afk villager (beancat), the town actually gets split on voting him with carbonated, but the two hydras move back to Hippo and he gets executed.
I feel like if wolves had a little more control of the gamestate they could have pooled together an execution on carbonated, which would have been very huge as it would have allowed them to execute the Desperado for free. To be fair, the Desperado did not end up making a huge impact on the game in the end, and yes, it would probably lead to several chain-executions of wolves down the line, but I think the wolves couldn’t get any real bus/clearing value out of the Hippo wagon anyways since everyone was suspecting him, and out of the various town power roles I still think that the Desperado could be of the strongest ones if used properly.
Day 2
I think when D2 started people were quick to accept catbae’s legacy as ~mostly consensus and really started to PoE the remaining wolves, definitely aided by carbonated’s desperado shot on Eve (which not only “cleared” Eve, but also cleared a PoE slot so that people could focus on snow/Willow/tutuu). I thought that jason’s post 2928 where he compares tutuu’s ISO from Champs to the one in this game was quite good, and I think this definitely contributed to all three wolves being wagonned near the end of today here.
I think this day was probably the worst for mafia since all three wolves were wagonned, and in particular snow could have definitely survived longer or lingered longer in the null pile if this playerlist was a little different.
Day 3/4
This is where the town went off the rails a bit, executing melatonin and jason I think due to paranoia (and also bc May’s track result was misleading). I feel like in most gamestates this would actually be a fine approach since it’s pretty rare that the entirety of the wolfteam gets PoE’d in the early days, and I do think that reaching a bit out of the outer boundaries of the PoE to make sure your assumptions are being checked in case someone is having a good wolf game is a smart thing to do, and the town was definitely ahead enough where they could check those assumptions. I feel a bit bad for melatonin and jason because they were definitely having good games that got derailed here because of May’s misleading track result, but tutuu did take advantage of the fact that his turbo-bus on Hippo and snow allowed him to secure two mis-executions that the wolves desperately needed.
Day 5/6/7/8
The rest of the game played out pretty elementary. Dia refocused on tutuu D5 which I thought was very good and got the town essentially back on track after two mis-executions, to which it was now final 7 and they had three mis-executions to find the last wolf, Willow. AngryFrog outs at this point, clearing himself, Chomps, and Leafia. I do think this was the play of the game and I would have awarded Frog the MVP had he not championed a terrible mis-execution on Eve. I think the town simply over-thought things at this point, imagining weird worlds where the wolves had a dayvig and killed carbonated before she shot since she didn’t explicitly state that she was going to shoot Eve. I do understand that the actual chain of events that happened D2 looked a little strange (it’s weird for a desperado shot that backfires to have the text “A shot rings out!”) but the game should have been mechanically locked from his POV at that point and executing Eve gave Willow a slim shot at victory that became less and less slim as the days went on.
I was surprised that Frost was executed over Willow on the second to last day but luckily Chomps clutched it up in f3 and didn’t overthink it. I do think there was a potential path for Willow at the end there, but it was very narrow and without seeing the thought processes involved it’s hard for me to fully comment.
For MVPs, this might come off as a bit unexpected but would like to give diafiasco the town MVP status, with honorable mentions to May (for correctly tracking tutuu N2 even though he got punished for it), AngryFrog (for holstering the two inno checks on Leafia and Chomps, which definitely secured the victory for town), catbae (for having very accurate reads D1 and striking the fear of god into the scumteam, so much so they had a #get-catbae-banned channel in wolfchat) as well as soweli (replaced in early and had very strong dayplay).
The reason why dia edges the rest of them out slightly in my mind is in addition to clearing himself early through strong dayplay, he took a role that imo is a little hard to use/maximize (his 1x untargetable role) and soaked up a critical N2 kill, which not only forced mafia to kill him twice but also gave the town a critical extra mis-execution which they definitely needed to catch Willow in the end. On Day 5 he put the town back on track after two mis-executions on jason and melatonin, which I think the combination out of all of these factors edges him out over the others for me.
For the mafia MVP, would give it to Willow with a HM to tutuu for definitely carrying the team the early days and trying his best to create wolf threadpull when most of the wolves were lurking early. But Willow took tutuu’s legacy and ran with it the best she could, almost chaining mis-executions on Eve (who was cleared due to carbonated’s desperado shot) and Frostwolf. I really do believe that if AngryFrog did not clear Chomps and Leafia the town would have not gotten it at the end there, which is just crazy thinking about how ahead the town was in the early days.
And that’s it for me. Thank you all for being part of this game, and I’d like to give special thanks to those players who replaced in - Chomps and soweli. I’d also like to thank my reviewer and co-host once again, Luka and Ash, and I hope that you will all join me for my next game, which will likely be Oshi no Ko Mafia (still designing, likely gonna try to run it near the end of the year).
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hahahahahaha
but /srs i do think this game taught me a valuable lesson about playing to my strengths
(which are mechanical play)
all of my pushes on kiiruma & (to an extent) frost were based upon an analysis of why snow would claim the target they did
of course, i knew the reason why (not thinking very hard about it) but i didn’t accept that as an answer publicly and figured that the wolves must have coordinated something to help a wolf
in the end i didn’t get kiiruma out, but i am proud of my maneuvering into a “frost TMI” accuastion and around the claim in general
and i aided the eve push by pushing the idea that a dayvig was at all possible
if i was town i would never have believed the dayvig thing but since i was wolf i was able to suggest it was possible & therefore that eve was not clear, which proved very valuable
i made very few actual reads this game but i played to my strengths & still provided value which i think is a very good thing for me to do in the future
admittedly it is harder as town but coordinating other aspects are also quite good for me as town so
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fwiw, having experimented with postcount limits on games i’ve run elsewhere, it’s surprisingly hard to implement in a game without the automated features of MU - if playrs have to manually track any numbers themselves, they will end up self-limiting despite not being anywhere close to a cap, and setting a global limit often feels like it’s mainly putting a punishment on the game’s top poster, and it also creates issues with being able to play around deadlines effectively. (i also think discourse, as a message board format, is absolute hell to backread on and can contribute to feeling overwhelming. nothing that can be done as a host about that, players just need to adjust their mindset learn to be able to post without having read everything.)
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