Soren said:Good game scum, while I would have liked town to win as that is my alignment, scum pulled off a perfect scum game and they definitely deserve the applause for that. Penta especially who pulled off that cop claim that completely fooled town and for his incredibly convincing town act.
Certain things lead to the downfall of town in this game and for me its important to reflect on them and understand what went wrong in order to help me avoid it in the future. Even though I'm nearing 3 years of experience with playing mafia constantly, there is always something new to learn in the game because setups are constantly evolving and also players are infinitely interesting to play with, with so much different behavior yet to explore.
Back to my reflection on the game, the sonatta mislynch should have been avoided, or at least I think so. I think that sonatta flailed around too much to be scum, but when someone is like that, it is very tempting to just lynch them so I kinda saw it coming. Sonatta tricking penta to vote so that he could hammer gave penta the advantage to act dramatically against it and granted him subconscious town cred.
Rosie killing denja was unlucky for town, even more so when the only two people that flavor claimed were rosie's targets. Random shenanigans with setups that comes every once in a while~
Town was not prepared for penta's cop claim as that easily elevated him to the status of "confirmed town", along with his convincing town act, penta easily inserted himself into town as deep wolf. And to be honest, if I was still in the game I would have fallen for this act and wouldn't have been able to lynch him. But as a spectator, I gained a different view and from hearing the opinion of others better at reading penta, it helped me identify certain things that gave him away. So this taught me to never be too confident about a town read and constantly look for the flaws and cracks that reveals scum intentions. That's the only way to catch someone that's pulling off a perfect scum game, because after all, there is no such thing as perfection.
I wasn't really sure what the whole suspicion on kit was as I mostly skim read but I think the focus on that amongst some other things, prevented town from looking objectively, especially during lylo, and considering the entire town as a whole and who the final scum were. Personally, I think lord_sithis has been rather underwhelming this game but was able to coast along the game while avoiding any real suspicion while town had already mislynched 3 times. So what I think should be learnt from this is that players like these needs to be categorized and classed together with other similar players (like what logic does), and then pick out the one that is the most scummy. But that is also easier said than done, if lord and 0x40 were classed together during day 1, I think 0x40 would still have gotten lynched.
Regardless of the loss, it has been a fun and also incredibly informative game too. I see perfect scum games like this where I am town as a wake up call that I can do better, I just gotta look harder and see what is not seen, uncover the truth, and when I cultivate my skills to a certain level, no scum shall remain hidden in plain sight.