A memes to an end(Meme Mafia: Game Over)

[Asuka Langley]

And this just keeps getting uglier. I'm going to step out now before I take it too far, hard and fast and turn the game into more regrets. Me getting more frustrated is just going to make it worse for everyone.

[Hunter Sopko]

As a note, I was Combo Breaker. To those who may not know me, I'm not really like that. If it was not AnonyMeme Bastard Modfia, I probably wouldn't have done it. At all times I acted with the full support of the mod, and constantly checked with him to see if I was going over the line. I didn't really mean to break the topic for any of the players, and at the time it seemed that no one was really having a problem loading the topic (at least, among the players still alive). I would have (and did, on one occasion) gone back and fix things that were giving people problems.

That said, I won't apologize outside of that. I stand by my play. Good for scum, bad for play? Thats the point! It's not my job to make things easy for town. It's my job to make things HARDER for town. If you're gonna play, play to win.

I can understand Advice Dog's frustration though. It had to be rough on town watching them grasp defeat from certain victory. And I'm proud to say I was a part of the reason that happened.

And that's the really frustrating thing. I felt that by my death the game had already been handed on a silver platter to town by scum. There was so, so much breathing room and plenty to verify and track and narrow down and so much scum movement to work with, but you managed to spend the time on the pettiest and daftest of possibilities without seeing the important simple things and letting an easy scum pair just whistle their way out of the hot spot (I really don't know how CATS seemed to garner so little attention after he spent the entire game playing the same trick over and over). No, I don't think it could have likely been done without at least one mislynch (and I believe only I had the player-meta to clear XBox 360), but by day 5 it felt so very, very clear (and the leather jacket being on Hijack meant that you could have set up day 6 to be really simple, because he wouldn't have been able to use it). Surely CATS's soft claim made it really, really obvious if you hadn't worked it out already?

I'll admit I didn't play that great (aside from being a REALLY effective troll), but AYB and Touhou played their parts perfectly. The simple tricks work the best. Town DID grasp defeat from the jaws of certain victory, I'll agree.

There are some things I shook my head at though. Like getting called scummy for saying role speculation in Day 1 was stupid. That was just... yeaaaaah. Just as a note to people: I might have been scum this game, but I would have said this as town too. Role speculation in day 1 IS stupid.

Kinda glad my pushing to nightkill 2G1C Night 2 didn't go through now. It's countered though by convincing the rest of scum out of nightkilling Shana.

My top 5 personal favorite trolling moments, in no particular order:
The History of Monorail Cats
CSI Advice Dog
Derp Marquee
Ronald McDonald Crucified
Waldorf and Statler

Honorable mention to Principal Vernon though. I apologize for that last one to 2G1C. It was too tempting to pass up.

[Yakumo]

I'm saying it was a good idea and you're bitching about nothing because even as a good idea there were ways around it.  I know you're frustrated but it is just a game in the end, you aren't REALLY dead, so maybe you should just chill a bit.

[Li Syaoran]

Yes, standard scum play on being hit by a cop is to play stone cold dead.

This is also moronic Scumplay. What he did was optimal, as it effectively shut down discussion for most of D3.

Also, to repeat what Yakumo said, as I've been saying this in IRC as well, you can turn off displaying images in the browser settings very quickly and easily, and once you've done that, anything that C-C-C-C did lost any and all annoyance capability. Heck, he managed to crash FF for me a couple times (I think I might have accidentally found a bug in Gecko's image rendering routines thanks to this), but then I just realised "derp let's turn off images" and yeah.

Also, some of the images were hilarious. I just about lost it at all of Wall'o'Derps, Wall'o'Psyduckrolls, The History of the Monorail Cat, Advice Dog YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH and Ronaldjesus.

[Hunter Sopko]

Yeah. Yakko's got it. Town COULD have ended it at any time. They chose not to. In fact, not lynching me ended up being the worst thing they could have done because it ended up with everyone divulging their roles and turning a rather difficult night for scum into something much, much easier to figure out. If I'd ended up with my self-hammer working, none of that would have been out and town would have been much better off.

Still glad I got to hammer myself in the end.

[Hunter Sopko]

Also, to repeat what Yakumo said, as I've been saying this in IRC as well, you can turn off displaying images in the browser settings very quickly and easily, and once you've done that, anything that C-C-C-C did lost any and all annoyance capability. Heck, he managed to crash FF for me a couple times (I think I might have accidentally found a bug in Gecko's image rendering routines thanks to this), but then I just realised "derp let's turn off images" and yeah.

Really? See, this is why I kept asking you guys about it. If you'd told me you were having problems loading the topic then I probably would have toned it down. Oh well. No use crying over spilt milk.

[Princess Leia]

I guess it's a question of where you draw the line between inside and outside the game; any good scum action will and should annoy town players on some level. Personally I thought it was fine (but I also thought the appropriate town response was to post any utterly vital role results and then lynch ASAP rather than trying to have a proper discussion, which would have meant it had much less impact. I could easily be wrong), but I can understand disagreeing.
Even if it's fine by most players, it might be better to avoid it if it severely annoys a minority (I don't think anyone's claiming it made the game enormously better for them, are they?)

[Asuka Langley]

And all I'm saying is that playing like a dick is no way to play a social game. I accept the flavour and that you wouldn't do it otherwise or in other games, but I disagree with this building train of opinions that it's okay to be quite such a nuisance in the pursuit of victory. That's why it doesn't happen otherwise.

[Alice Margatroid]

The B-B-B-B-BROWSER BREAKER spam didn't give my computer any problems.

I'm refraining from commenting on that whole issue because I don't feel my position allows me to (and because I can see both sides of the argument as a result).

I will say that Derpscroll almost made me fall out of my chair.

[Hunter Sopko]

I guess it's a question of where you draw the line between inside and outside the game; any good scum action will and should annoy town players on some level. Personally I thought it was fine (but I also thought the appropriate town response was to post any utterly vital role results and then lynch ASAP rather than trying to have a proper discussion, which would have meant it had much less impact. I could easily be wrong), but I can understand disagreeing.
Even if it's fine by most players, it might be better to avoid it if it severely annoys a minority (I don't think anyone's claiming it made the game enormously better for them, are they?)

Fair enough, but the whole thing was a clusterfuck from the beginning, which I'll go over just so people can get an idea of where it came from. The reason it was shitty at the start and gradually more clever/funnier was because I originally was intending to use it to quick-hammer myself, as my role restriction stated that posting twice in a row would result in a modvote for me. I didn't put a lot of thought into it for this reason. I was just gonna quickhammer, I didn't plan on doing it the entire day.

However, I didn't read my role PM all the way. I didn't notice that it would only result in a MAX of 1 modvote and missed the chance for self-voting for the hammer. This bummed me out in a way that you could not understand, because it was just another example of the bad luck, inattentiveness and general stupidity that's been plaguing me lately.

Then while trying to figure out what to do it just dawned on me to troll. Troll like I never had before. And if I was going to do it, go all the way with it, because any less would just not make it worth it. It took a bit to really find the groove, but think it was around this one where I really hit my stride.

And all I'm saying is that playing like a dick is no way to play a social game. I accept the flavour and that you wouldn't do it otherwise or in other games, but I disagree with this building train of opinions that it's okay to be quite such a nuisance in the pursuit of victory. That's why it doesn't happen otherwise.

If town won, I was prepared for all the lourding it over my head that would have resulted about "Town winning despite mass annoyances". Social games are still games. We're still playing to win. It's not like I was cheating or anything, I just used a less than acceptable way to try to win.

[Asuka Langley]

If I'm going to try and get this back on tracks, then here are a few things I'd be interested in knowing:

What actually happened night 1? I mean, with Dawg dying and all.

General inquiry into the powers that we never got to see, as much as that was always going to follow. As my role name implied, I was completely vanilla except from the night talking ability. I'd gone into it assuming that Insomniac was going to be a catch all for everyone who didn't otherwise get a role (from the popularity of Hero mafia), and as a smokescreen for an actual power role and/or scum or something, so was really surprised it was just me in the end.

Likewise post restrictions. Didn't follow what was happening to Duck Roll v2 all of the time, and Zerg seems to have had a post disappear right at the start.

!Cake: were you just a survivor with a kill attached? I forget if that's standard SK territory or if they actually need to properly end game it. Not that you were really SK anyway. Sounds like you were planning on winning with town if possible?

What did everyone else think of the jacket? I'm trying to weigh it up in my head, and I'm falling towards it being too strong. Scum just had to keep on killing the person who had it (good catch on catching on to that while it was still with Commie).

Commie, what was up with you in general? I mean, actual plans and so on. You kept on stepping up as time went on.

And yeah, general shout out again to 2g1c for almost bringing the pieces back together again.

[Roukanken]

!Cake: were you just a survivor with a kill attached? I forget if that's standard SK territory or if they actually need to properly end game it. Not that you were really SK anyway. Sounds like you were planning on winning with town if possible?

Yes, and it was literally as I advertised it. Offer someone a gift at night, they accept it they die, if not nothing, blah blah blah.

I was intending to win with Town, mainly because I assumed after the roleclaim clusterfuck D3 it was gonna be pretty easy. Thennn things sorta went to shit and I decided I'd go with anything that came my way.

EDIT: Pretty sure scum set themselves up to hit 2g1c N5, so I was fine anyway.

[Alice Margatroid]

I will ALSO say that, despite everything that happened Night 2/Day 3 and the rage that was going on at that time for having my first two days' play get thrown away so easily, I had fun playing this game. It didn't matter if it was being the best townie I could on the first two days or bullshitting up a storm on the last two, I had just as much fun with each and would have accepted a loss had that happened, because hey, roles are a part of the game, too. Day 3 was very aggravating, yes, but it helped a lot when I decided to just...well.



I hope I was not the only one that enjoyed playing this game, ignoring aggravation with the town loss or rage at Soppy for trolling.

Xanth: We killed Tom because the way he played D1 suggested a meaningful power role. As the game wore on we assumed he had a protective role (especially since you actually died).

We were also hoping his death would create a giant WIFOM cloud around Soppy's head, though that was mostly my idea. For all the good that line of thinking did us in the end.

[Yakumo]

I don't know most of the restrictions, but my understanding of the Zerg thing was that Andy posted with his own account and not the Rush, and then deleted the post himself.

[Yoshiken]

For Zerg's ability, amongst other stuff, my post-death convo with Gate:

[22:25] <Yoshiken> Can I just say:
[22:25] <Yoshiken> AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH.
[22:25] <Gatewalker> hahahaha
[22:25] <Gatewalker> ;_;
[22:25] <Yoshiken> I should have stuck with it. ><;
[22:26] <Gatewalker> You were up against Kilga there, man. He's good.
[22:27] <Yoshiken> Heh. I figured whoever it was was a good player either way, just.. damn. Should've known not to trust his reaction to me calling him out on targeting Cake.
[22:28] <Yoshiken> Oh yeah, if I can ask now, what -is- Skindancer or whatever Zerg's role was? XD
[22:30] <Gatewalker> If he was the hammering vote on someone, he stole thier power for one night.
[22:30] <Gatewalker> Also a miller
[22:37] <Yoshiken> So.. is AYB or Xbox the last one? (don't tell me it's Bel Air please i am going to kill things if it is yup yup)
[22:37] <Gatewalker> It is indeed one of Base and Box
[22:37] <Yoshiken> Phew. I'd go with AYB then.

I'd already guessed Kilga by this point anyways, so... yeah, that clears the Skindancer thing.

[Alice Margatroid]

Andy posted with AndrewRogue instead of Zerg Rush, yes. I felt terrible that my post naming him wasn't deleted after his post was.

Speaking of, I have gone this long without mentioning that I absolutely loved Andy's D1 RP and was sad when people started telling him to knock it off. Alex's RP was great as well. Scumchat topic has said something about not killing either of them because they're too amusing since about the middle of Day 1.

Really, RPing fell off the table from most people far too quickly for my tastes. I'm glad Xanth at least kept the ADogs coming.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

* Jo'ou Ranbu waves. Milhouse here!

And well, I had fun playing the game. Also found Soppy's trollery hilarious - although the images didn't -need- to be that huge. Day 3, the only reason I came to watch was for the macrospam, because the whole thing devolved into such a complete trainwreck.

And sorry about the whole dumping day 2 on you guys - optimally, I was perfectly safe until day 3 at least, but I would be completely absent from that point on, and I didn't want to be essentially a mafia ghost at that juncture. Regardless.

[Asuka Langley]

Well, it's kind of hard with meme mafia for the most part, because there's little to nothing to role play for most memes. When I was applying for the game I sat and down and thought what meme could be used in the long run, not which one I liked most. Not much of a fan of most of the advice dog and related stuff, personally, but it could be mutated to fit the game pretty well (and no, I was never planning on swapping to any advice dog variants). I think Demotivational Posters would have been my first choice for being a bit more flexible, but must have already long since gone.

Which relates to my other thing about anonymous mafia games: they're nice and all, but they're really, really hard to read in retrospect. Look back any further than the current one and you'll find it really irritating to keep track of who's who on account of the accounts changing from game to game. Not that I'm saying new accounts should be generated each time (ignoring the practical nuisances, it would reduce tension in hindsight as you could use post count to guess when someone was about to die). But yeah, I'm a big fan of making a big imprint, and while awesome RP would be the ideal for people to strive for, my cheap way of marking my presence has been the picture route, making it easy to track at least Samurai Jack, Beatrice and Advice Dog, and I recall at least Gumshoe, Weasel Squad and now Touhou Hijack doing similar for other people.

I'm sure there are people who've gone for the ideal and made all of their posts readily identifiable from role play alone, but oddly enough the only one who comes to mind is both instances of the Prinny Squad, because 'dood' is such a nice and easy identifier. Probably likewise Zerg Rush in this game, assuming that he spammed 'kekekekeke' everywhere.

(taking that to its logical extreme, I suppose everyone could identify their posts with archival in mind by starting all of them with their name, but this seems to rather miss the point)

Edit: oh, yeah, Yoshiken. Forgot about you as Poster for the picture people list about, as obvious as it should have been. Oops.

[Yoshiken]

Okay, can't sleep, so back again. I tried to include a demotivator in every post - no particular post restriction, just felt like it. That said, I started linking them instead of using img tags after I was accused of being high-profile low-content. Also missed one or two near the end, generally due to tiredness.
Oh, and because I feel I should: the majority of my demotivators came from motifake.com and demotywatory.com. The rest were either a basic Google search (which generally led to wordpress) or badly made by me.

And, since I skimmed over it in-game, I'll repeat now:

[Dhyerwolf]

I'll agree that Combo Breaker day 3 was hilarious, but I can certainly understand that if anyone had a shitty net connection as I do on occasion, they would have wanted to throttle him.

[SnowFire]

Combo Breaker's last day play would have been unacceptable in any other mafia game, but this being the Meme Mafia made it a funny and flavor-fitting move, from this spectator's viewpoint.

EDIT: Spamspamspam is not a valid tactic to adopt into other mafia games, that's just being a dick. Just, yeah, flavor is perfect for it here.

This.  In a normal game I agree it would be anti-fun, but this was a game of memes INTERNET TROLLS use.  Trolling is just flavorful roleplay here.  I must admit, Sopko definitely threw himself into it with greater abandon than expected, but can't fault him too much.  Wall of derps FTW.

Tues Mar 9 2010 2:17pm [2:17pm] *SnowFire* May have been for the best anyway, woulda been tough for scum to recover from NK N1 + lynch D2.
Tues Mar 9 2010 2:17pm [2:17pm] *SnowFire* Although I will say there is a certain liberation from knowing you're getting lynched Day 3.  You can just troll town!
Tues Mar 9 2010 2:17pm [2:17pm] *SpectralSoppy* Like I'm posting Day 3
Tues Mar 9 2010 2:18pm [2:18pm] *SnowFire* You can at least post hilarious pictures of cats or something.
Tues Mar 9 2010 2:18pm [2:18pm] *SpectralSoppy* I think I'll just keep posting C-C-COMBO BREAKER!
Tues Mar 9 2010 2:19pm [2:19pm] *SnowFire* That works, too.

Milhouse / D2 madness: Well, I don't want to criticize him too much as he said in his final post that he was stressed out, but I agree with Xanth that a softclaim would have been perfect.  The Cassandra was not allowed to *roleclaim* in anyway, but nothing stopped him from revealing the *results* of an investigation.  This could be as simple as "C-C-C-Combo Breaker is scum, I bet my life on it, lynch ME if you don't believe me to see me flip townie" to full-on sarcastic "analysis" of posts.  i.e. role speculation is legit from normal players, so is post analysis, so paste an image of Sherlock Holmes and "analyze" a CCCOMBO joke-vote to see all the tell-tale signs of the rolecop/roleblocker combination and evil syndrome and declare you were perfectly serious.  I think Gatewalker would be hard pressed to modkill over that, since suspiciously strange/bad play isn't really the same as a roleclaim if everyone else does the work to figure out what Cassanda's been smoking and why she's analyzing jokevotes.

There's also the fact that the CCCCOmbo train was still winning at the time, though maybe time considerations factored in - it was technically a tie but Soviet's vote was on someone else and surely would have moved to CCCCombo by the end.  The 2 scum dead on Day 2 option would have surely led to a runaway victory for town.  Anyway, it was almost all townies who started getting cold feet about CCCCombo's lynch, which did swing things toward scum later.

All Your Base: Was surprised that AYB didn't...  well.  I won't spoil yet but I figured that once LYLO was announced he'd stir the pot a bit.  

The last day: I have to wonder why there wasn't more suspicion over Touhou surviving so long with a power role.  Kilga did a good job at throwing suspicion elsewhere, and 2g1c was correct in that it was technically possible for all of Cake / Demotivate / Touhou to all be town...  but at the very least he should have been under HUEG suspicion.  If someone claims a power role, sure, leave 'em alive for awhile, but when it comes to LYLO and they're still alive, it's okay to wonder a bit *why* and do some fabled nightkill speculation.  Town Tracker would be pretty gutsy for scum to leave alive, and Touhou's claim of tracking XBox nowhere is an uneasy fit with "TownTouhou / ScumBox."  Sure, maybe XBox went on the kill and ??? mysterious Bus Driver switched the Box and someone else...  but continuing to use Bus Driver once a town tracker has claimed would be *really* gutsy.  Seeing someone target two people is basically a dead giveaway at that point, and the gain is practically a coinflip.  So yeah, puzzled that town didn't bring this up more.

That also makes me wonder why more people weren't advocating no lynch the last day, despite it being a valid vote this game.  Sure once XBox claimed doublevoter that was out of the picture - potential scumTouhou grabs the doublevote, then scum does a 3-vote quick hammer with 5 memes around.  But everyone else didn't know that!  Give TownTouhou another shot at tracking a kill, and/or getting killed herself.  Maybe Touhou makes it easy by spotting / claiming to spot a kill, or Touhou gets cleared by death.

Doublevoters: Not much to say but compliments to Soviet Russia and XBox in the discipline in not using doublevoter at all.  That's one of those powers that's only really helpful to town in LYLO and there's definitely no need to let scum know about it.

Advice Dog: Not much to say, but definitely nice job leading town while you were alive.  And I hadn't heard of Robot Unicorns before, either.  The pictures were pretty hilarious, though if I had to single out one...

Seems scum liked the last half of that bit of advice, too!

[metroid composite]

Speaking of role play, who was soviet?  Easily the most entertaining player to read.

[Kitten4u]

Which relates to my other thing about anonymous mafia games: they're nice and all, but they're really, really hard to read in retrospect. Look back any further than the current one and you'll find it really irritating to keep track of who's who on account of the accounts changing from game to game.

I wasn't going to say anything because I didn't play, but I may be able to help with this.

I wrote a thing in GameMaker for school that was meant to be a tutorial on how to play Mafia.  What I did was I took an actual game, transcribed it into my game and then posted commentary on it (it's not done, so I'm not going to post it yet).  Anyway, I could easily transcribe all of the anonymafier games into something like that and preserve them that way, or I could upload the engine and let someone else go through the amount of tedium it takes to do that.   I would need help figuring out who everyone is in the past games though and how to preserve certain things because I can't (or rather don't) use quotes in my program amoung other things.

So yeah, if people are interested in me doing that then uh contact me and stuff.  I'm occasionally lurking on IRC as Kitten4u.  A better way to contact me would be MSN (kitten4u@adelphia.net)

[Kilgamayan]

Russia was Alex.

Snowfire reminded me of the one thing I thought really should have been used against me: since people were so enamored with the Bus Driver possibility, why did no one question Yoshi getting redirected away from acting on me? Yoshi had only claimed watching power, so why would scum think he'd watch me and redirect him elsewhere? This should have dissuaded the Bus Driver idea more than anything else.

bofh talked about not doing his thing in scumchat, but I'll let him address it here too.

[Helga Pataki]

Ahahahahaha. Ah well.

Advice Dogbrit: I gave up because A) One week is too long for even LYLO, and B) Bel-Air's modkill. Not having the buffer lynch just made me go "........ screw it. Let's try this. I have to go with the two I read as the worst right now." This being said we wouldn't have had the buffer lynch anyway, jacket to XBOX = three votes to scum at LYLO = gg anyway.

XBOX: You seriously, totally, completely read like scum to me and I still have no regrets on pushing the lynch. Pushing the role logic so hard in a role madness game made me immediately "...o.O" when I caught on to what you had actually been doing all game, and being willing to simplify it so bad on, say, the -masons-, while trying to figure out arguments against -me-, made me just convinced you were scum with one of them (Astley, since you dropped multiple "He reads town to me" comments) attempting to drop someone close to confirmed town via the actual role actions that had been performed.

I felt like -shit- all game (even day 5) due to being very sick/crummy (though not flu - when my actual ID comes out, it'll be obvious), and mainly put in the effort day 5 because I decided it wasn't fair to Advice Dogbrit to just give in without giving it one full, honest shot. Sorry it didn't go so well. Maybe next time, though I think it's time for another long mafia hiatus for me.