RE: This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff
03-15-2013, 03:59 AM
Mechanics, yeah, and also just based on my own play experience.
I've never played the internet version, just the real people version, and we generally didn't have all the wacky extra roles. So maybe those things make it make more sense. It always seemed to me, however, that the mafia's best strategy is to choose randomly, so as to not give any information to the other players. At that point, the other players have no information and are essentially also just picking randomly. So I don't see vote analysis as actually being all that useful. And I thought setup was intentionally random?
Also, if someone says "I'm the detective or whatever, and I say it's that guy!" the question of whether he actually is or he's lying just seems really uninteresting to me. Again, no real basis for anyone to reach a conclusion. Maybe he's telling the truth, maybe he's a mafia, maybe he's an innocent just trying to save his own skin. Maybe he really did figure out it was 'that guy', maybe he has other motives, maybe he's just screwing around. Who knows? Too much noise, no way to filter it out and get any signal.
Maybe there's some interesting emergent mob psychology stuff that can happen, I don't know. I've never seen that occur, really.
Aaaaaand, well, it occurs to me that maybe there's a read-body-language element that happens if you play face-to-face? But I don't see that working out very well over the internet.
I'd be happy to be demonstrated wrong. I'm in Schazer's thingy, so maybe I'll find out! And as I said, it seems like an amusing activity. Just not much of what I'd call an actual game.
I've never played the internet version, just the real people version, and we generally didn't have all the wacky extra roles. So maybe those things make it make more sense. It always seemed to me, however, that the mafia's best strategy is to choose randomly, so as to not give any information to the other players. At that point, the other players have no information and are essentially also just picking randomly. So I don't see vote analysis as actually being all that useful. And I thought setup was intentionally random?
Also, if someone says "I'm the detective or whatever, and I say it's that guy!" the question of whether he actually is or he's lying just seems really uninteresting to me. Again, no real basis for anyone to reach a conclusion. Maybe he's telling the truth, maybe he's a mafia, maybe he's an innocent just trying to save his own skin. Maybe he really did figure out it was 'that guy', maybe he has other motives, maybe he's just screwing around. Who knows? Too much noise, no way to filter it out and get any signal.
Maybe there's some interesting emergent mob psychology stuff that can happen, I don't know. I've never seen that occur, really.
Aaaaaand, well, it occurs to me that maybe there's a read-body-language element that happens if you play face-to-face? But I don't see that working out very well over the internet.
I'd be happy to be demonstrated wrong. I'm in Schazer's thingy, so maybe I'll find out! And as I said, it seems like an amusing activity. Just not much of what I'd call an actual game.