Big Mafia Mafia 3 - Game Over, Big City + A Fairy + Ditto Win!

Sam,

I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that you put into this game. It was clear you put a lot of time into this and your creativity very much shined through. It is not easy to host a game as complex as this.

Winning is cool but I have realized that these games are more about the journey, as cliche as that is. There will always be mistakes, things that could've or should've be done better, but IMO you clearly succeeded in creating a game that challenged everyone and that people cared about a lot.

It is always nice to recapture some of the joy of the old Smogon that has kept me tied to a silly Pokemon forum for the better part of my life. Thank you for hosting and I hope we can continue this trend of games for a little while longer.
 
I already said most of the things I wanted to during the post game call, really. There were many design and balancing elements that I found a little frustrating and I would have personally done differently, but I don't really feel the need to adress them in detail here once more. It was definitely a very interesting game, I hadn't played either MM2 or one of Samuel's other games (other than his very first like 15 years ago), so a lot of the concepts and mechanics at play here (like goon squad or the myriad of comeback mechanics) were completley new me.

Running everything with Yeti and bluedoom was very stressful because the psycho lurking among the millers and the constant threat of recruits made it hard to trust anybody else, but I had a lot of fun theorizing and strategizing despite all of it, even if paranoia made all of us randomly wake up at 4 am most nights. I wish we could have gotten people like DLE, William, Mekkah, and DLE on board earlier, but the risk was just too high given that they could be recruited at any time. Talking to LN throughout the early game and going through the song and dance of keeping each other guessing about how much we really believe what the other party is saying while talking about the game was pretty fun in the early on, as well. I was glad that I died at the same time as Yeti and never ended up having to run the village by myself, though, that would have been a lot of pressure without her. After our death when everything opened up with Pidge and the Summoning Circle and it became obvious that both recruits were used, I was able to relax a bit and had a lot more fun. It was nice to strategize and vent about the game with everyone else and not only the three of us, I've never been in a village channel that was crowded with almost everyone on the faction and our group of people was a lot of fun to work with.

The endgame confrontation between Bass and the village was both tense and exciting as well as frustrating at the same time. Bass was an interesting enemy to play against and a tough negotiator, but he was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place after he left us no choice but to strip all three layers of his LPV, so there was not much he could do despite him playing very well all game. I don't really know what he could have done differently, tbh. In the end, it came down to an eleventh hour deus ex busdriver and a series of coinflips (props to bluedoom for calling all of them correctly!), which is a little anticlimatic, but the friends and enemies we might along the way made it worth it. It was nice getting to know people like bluedoom, Blazade and Pidge who I didn't know before and also fun to reconnect with a lot of people I hadn't really talked to in well over a decade like Yeti and the rest of the Summong Circle crew as well as LN and Bass on the enemy side. During the game itself, I was pretty frustrated a lot of the time but looking back on it, it was a really exciting couple of weeks. We might have gotten a little frustrated, salty and heated at various points during the game, but that's just what this game is sometimes. Thanks to Samuel for setting it up, to Bass and the Cartel for giving us an exciting competition and to everyone else that played for making it exciting until the very end.
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
Steadfast chat was a nice place to plan with bluedoom and dak, just 3 people chillin trying to figure out the best actions to disrupt scum and protect town. I'm glad bluedoom was able to be involved with the leading process and the action-deciding (bless the game-winning drive on NH), even though in Sam's ideal world he would've been perpetually on the outside of town lol. I did have fun planning with them even if we were all constantly paranoid someone wasn't town early (bluedoom literally copped Cartel n0 and dak "lol my jailkeeper on the final steadfast mysteriously failed the night she died!" high quality sheeting choices).

My inability to really enjoy the game stemmed more from how much time I knew it was going to take away from other interests and the workload of talking to everyone, getting results, giving actions... the list just kept going on. Perhaps I internalize the responsibility too much but it felt like it would be 'my fault' if town got moled, or I sheeted a mole, or I came up with subpar actions, so I just didn't really have fun playing under all that pressure. And maybe it was self-inflicted because in 2024 people wouldn't roast a leader for getting duped like we did a decade ago, idk. But the environment of "one of these cops is def a mole" and "these inspect results are dubiously-clearing, they may not be Cartel but they could still be psycho" and "oh yeah at least one villager will be ripped away from you so careful who you sheet!" just isn't really enjoyable for me and the social elements of mafia that I enjoy. I feel bad keeping people in the dark who would otherwise want to be involved. I knew I couldn't keep the town info all to myself (or not have people who would shut down LN if he tried to step up after my death) but I definitely cried once or twice out of frustration of not being sure if I was doing the right thing and sheeting the right people or if I'd screwed over town by trusting in the steadfast text cleaning method.

Mekkah messaged me on N0 and asked if I thought the police had any connection to the mayor and I said "I can think of one thing" (the steadfast text) and was somewhat surprised when the mayor never responded to my post seeking people with the steadfast text... only to learn he and Amy both became illiterate for about 24 hours and missed it lmao. In the end I feel vindicated I was correct the steadfast text was the commissioner-mayor connection. I know Sam says he would've put the text into the OP so it couldn't be used to clean people and form a mole-proof sheetholder circle but I really don't know how town would've ever overcome that trust deficit. As we saw this game almost every vig/unlocked vig was just hooked until they died lategame, zorbees got 2 shots off before Bass drove him to let him get 1 in an attempt to negotiate for his own life, and TAS used his JOAT kill, and that was it? Two judge kills worked because it was impossible to know who was carrying the kill via inspect (and the scum did hook one of the kill carriers, just on the wrong night) and one goon was executed, but otherwise I am not really sure how town would've successfully gotten their lategame kp to work due to the unlimited hooks of the Cartel. If you presume that Cartel moling town ensures the Boss/Capo will live long enough to recruit over 50% of the goons and unlock goon multitargeting then you have to assume the Cartel will always have the ability to hook every village kp and that the lone town SG (I know Martin/Blazade/backups could situationally SG but lbr those would probably die before lategame too) is almost certain to never sniff endgame in a moled town situation. One of the mimics taking SG is an option but not one I think town ever commits to before it's too late (or the mole gets them to absorb something bad). This is one of those aspects that I think Sam came close to presenting an interesting dynamic on, but he rushed the game out a little too quickly and he could've used more time to refine it and really chart out endgame scenarios and the full consequences of giving the Cartel essentially unlimited hook power that both doesn't scale linearly to the village's power loss and never loses access like lynching the mafia hooker would accomplish.

I think Summoning Circle was an extremely unorthodox turn of events for a big village but was definitely the most enjoyable part of the game. ~50% of the living village was in one server together with the sheet open, and everyone in the server was town. It's even more rare that the village can essentially submit communal actions and everyone can go "yeah I'm ok with someone picking for me" and fully trust it, since all the scum were known and uncontested. It's probably more fun than your average villager would have in any other big, especially for how early the Circle began and brought everyone in, but it took a lot of 4am cold sweat wakeups from the steadfast squad to get there lol. I was definitely pleased that the living villagers could all get in and be involved, and communicate with the deads for as long as Pidge lived.

My conclusion on the 'amorphous blob' mafia archetype that Sam used here is that hosts looking to use a mana pool format or similar for their mafia should consider the frustration level the village can encounter when trying to defeat it. No matter how many you lynch/vig, they never lost access to anything except the 1x recruit and goon promotion, and even at that point, killing inner circle led to less strength loss than killing a promoted goon did. The reward for the village to finally getting a kill to work was very low, and the knowledge that "my roles are bleeding out and the wolf is stealing them while the stupid mafia never loses their 10x hook" is going to erode town WIM. I know that Sam foresaw this to some degree and gave us the last stand mechanics like the MAYORIZZLER but every single other perk was countered by a 3 point hook (last commissioner gaining access to the others' roles including the vig, street justice, commissioner's team-wide rogue, the unlocking vigs) except the mayor perk. I think he misjudged how unsatisfying it might feel to have these perks unlock and know that you'll never successfully use them because the Cartel was already mass-hooking you. The only reason bus driver was even a game-winning play is because it interacted with hook in an unorthodox way that spawned an Office thread about the role's power level. I have a feeling that the blob structure would work better in multifaction than village vs mafia, where the power scaling could feel less imbalanced as the village bleeds out. In this game, it didn't feel like there was enough reward for town for killing any single Cartel, and the Cartel were not remotely punished for open gooning by being depleted of strength. 14/17 did not claim, 1 claimed a modified recruitable Goon, 1 was a built-in mole, so 12 of those didn't even try to. The 3 who did got got by Sam messing up his own PM format lol. They hovered within 5 strength of their starting pool of 29 for most of the game until we burned through all the wolf's LPVs and could refocus on them. I know the Cartel feels like they didn't know what to claim or how to fake anything on N0 so ease of "the blob" having claimable, provable roles should also be considered by hosts looking to use the blob system.

Overall I think Sam presented a lot of interesting design choices in this game, some of which were positive expansions on old dynamics like having several related villagers like the loader/vig, DNA analyst/jailer to semi-clean each other, town-friendly neutral being able to message the commissioner - if anything I might recommend the other connected roles be able to send anonymous messages to each other so they can find someone they can essentially know is town, in the game design where the steadfast text is public and avoiding moles is more difficult. There are other places where I think he fell short and into some of his old habits (his towns have not won prior to this game and his postgames often featured similar complaints of out-of-balance wolves and a difficulty to involve town and have fun) that make him a stronger multifaction designer than village vs mafia designer. While this game probably played out as he 'hoped' in that it became a 1v1v1 multifaction negotiating gambit, I think this ultimately feels unrewarding for villagers, especially the leaders, who preserved their information and efficiently found scum aliases. I think it SHOULD have been more of a stomp than it was based on the Cartel's failure to fakeclaim or mole into the village successfully. This is a host design philosophy difference between Sam and several others in the community - is a better game one where the stronger-played side wins easily/the team that messes up simply loses, or is a better game one where each team can claw its way back into it and the power shifts multiple times a game? I would also recommend future hosts slow down their game development and PM writing process. It shouldn't be SO obvious which roles are "the host's babies" from the quality of the role PM, as it was here. I disagree that "these roles were psychomillers so they were supposed to be suspicious" is a justification for the obvious effort discrepancy between even other psychomiller roles (Backup guy vs Banker for example). Just something for hosts to pay attention to and slow down on. Some of the roles being wolf expansion packs is also a feelsbad for the villager. Like Hydro was better off teamkilled than being recruited by one of the other teams and sunny would've been better off using the redirect pointlessly on D1 or D2 so it couldn't be used against town (or with the redirect being on the mayor, like Sam suggested).

tl;dr thanks to Sam for hosting and everyone for playing. It was a dynamic game for sure.
 

ariariadne

formerly Reinfleche
if i have one slightly more serious thing to add, especially with the comments about the miller text in the first ~15 minutes of postgame and that sam said he would definitely change it in the future (i will admit i have not listened to the entire thing yet, boy that's a lot of audio), i believe no mafia game has ever been made better or more interesting by being able to directly quote host communications, especially role PMs. several people commented that i had the best fake claim of any mafia member, helped by the fact that i collaborated with both charlie and unclesam to get it submitted in the shortest amount of time possible, but yeti said she would never have believed it long-term because of improper formatting even though sam wrote it himself, which also tripped up a few other cartel members. (she also said that she wouldn't have believed it failed on florida, even though that would have actually been true, but that's an aside, and came a few phases after my initial claim).

from where i stand, i just don't think that playing "gotcha" with that type of thing is something i personally think is very interesting to fake as anti-town or comb through as actual town, and i think that proper role usage or scumtells (like the people who basically didn't claim at all or did so way too late) is the type of skill to catch scum (and conversely, playing into the right narratives when you're lying) that makes me enjoy playing mafia. none of this is even going into the psychopath miller text being impossible for anyone on the cartel to fake, especially when people could hint to the contents of their role PMs on N0 even when actual role PM quoting wasn't allowed, which pretty much defeats the purpose of making it off limits in the first place

otherwise, well, as i said- i had fun. i think this game was not without flaws but what game isn't, and it was overall pretty interesting. thanks to sam for hosting and thanks to everyone i spoke to during the game, which admittedly wasn't too many people because i was intentionally trying to keep on the down-low as our designated tailored player for several phases, but the cartel chat was a good time. we had a super doomer attitude around when i got jailed and then died and then i didn't keep up super well for input afterwards, but i enjoyed watching the rest of the team more in the know find a way to almost make a comeback. see y'all whenever i next play, maybe i will even avoid dying a little early as a treat!
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
That's a fair point ria, WHY wouldn't I have ever believed you that Florida didn't kill Texas, even though it didn't?

Part of that was the Cartel open gooning and Florida being one of the unknown but non-Inner Circle aliases. I think by the time I told you to kill it, Bass has inspected it and it showed up mysteriously in my inbox as a goon, so I knew it was probably someone who claimed to DLE and imo it had very high equity of being one of the more-trusted early goons who would be given the squad target of Texas. So if your own team doesn't fall for the sting operation your fake isn't as easily caught out because in theory I don't have that knowledge that "Florida got got N0 lol" - now maybe I give you a goon that BT matched to Texas and we play that role a little differently if your initial claim isn't caught out by having the same flaw as Tommy and Flanders' (two suspicious individuals) and then you're caught because a goon BT matched you say you can't kill. As it is I think you're totally justified to feel cheesed when you did have the best fakeclaim (still think the role name was bad but Sam is about to drive 6 hours to lecture me on the Dark Knight's greatness if I continue) and yours didn't have the same delayed-protect-onto-important-town dynamic as Tommy/Flanders' did. If anyone has a cause to claim copy-pasting is terrible it's you, 100%.

Sam says this was a high-info game but ria being disbelieved is kind of contrary to that. The info roles, unreliable as they were, didn't have much to do with solving for town.
  • The open gooning letting us alias claim to have like 10+ aliases that simply couldn't claim themselves as a pool to kill through
  • Two neutrals being caught out (LN as well, his scum equity skyrocketed when BT failed a sample on him but succeeded the rest of his actions) by random abilities failing on them. FAIRY was the one who failed on Kansas (someone else did, too) which led to Celever dying over her in the lynch that day because we thought it had godfather equity and was being perma-SGed
  • The miller bois all having provable roles except for Bass, and technically Mekkah because it took us a while to actually mayorize someone
  • Several aliases were confirmed Cartel by the town persuader, which was certainly meant to be a suspicious role because it was a miller boi but because it didn't vote D1 or D2 it was essentially cleaned since "no scum would ever idle like that lmao," and I doubt persuader was supposed to be used as an infallible inspector lol
  • Nobody understood how LightWolf interacted with other roles until Bass was already essentially known but he was like the only role capable of breaking the wolf's immunity to info - without knowing how the journalist works nobody can trust that "Mass is the Psychopath" is truer than any other miller boi copping Psycho. Paparazzi was the OP one but again nobody could be sure until it worked, so I don't think we utilized it in a timely manner
  • The sheet was held by people with the steadfast text in a way Sam didn't expect it to be used to clear people, IE bluedoom/the countermole never should've even sniffed steadfast squad but he was there since it was founded
  • The N1'd inspector actually got more inspects off in death being used by Bass to find a couple of the open gooners lmao
None of those were really using info roles to clean people yet we blew through the aliases to form our scumpool anyway. Just goes to show even your best-laid plans turn out upside down sometimes lol
 

ariariadne

formerly Reinfleche
to be clear i'm not annoyed that you didn't believe me about florida, because from your perspective it looked pretty bullshit, but that definitely didn't help my case with the wording issue already having been a snag before. i don't quite remember if we were aware you knew florida was specifically a goon or not at the time (evidently you did)

also i was a fan of the vengeance as a role name. i love the dark knight, ask SB. about it. although i will admit i didn't propose that as the exact name (it was Night Vengeful, which was very mechanically oriented, i had no actual flipped villagers to base it off of when i was writing my fake)
 

Da Letter El

Officially internet famous
is a Community Leader Alumnus
I didn't really expect moling to go as well as it did lol. i just asked two people to lie for me to give me some extra credibility, and i risked virtually nothing. Even the worst case scenario of "i ask a mafia for help and they know i'm lying" literally happened and it still didn't matter, although it helped that i pretty specifically framed the pitch to jalmont as "please vouch for me it will be funny."

I figured worst case it at least slows down the goon claim chain and gums up the mafia's N0, when I'm reasonably confident that it's just going to be a matter of "he said she said", or at least forces the mafia to provide additional information/claims to bully me in some manner out of getting anything.

Obviously the jig wasn't going to last very long; I can't know what actions got sent out to what aliases. A couple people gave me track info before alias, and for those people I could try to lie and say that "goon actions target usernames" but outside of randomly guessing people's aliases (I tried guessing Piuchester's alias was Colorado on a whim, but he 15 minutes later asked publicly in the server for sb's discord name, so was pretty obvious I guessed wrong) I didn't have much extended counterplay.

The sheer luck of having said "proven track record" prior to sb breadcrumbing tracks was extremely funny but certainly unintentional.

I wish I went out of my way to convince more villagers to fake claim goon, as well as possibly having one or two blended in to my list of "good claims" to provide some credibility, but I think given how n0/d1 went on the village in giving reasonable amounts of info to LN (and Bass, honestly), there may have really only been like 5ish players who even had that as a somewhat believable option, and I'm not sure how I would have best gone about setting them up to do so, but doing so would have definitely been helpful.

I felt like once Summoning Circle hit that village on the whole played really well to our outs and I was really glad to be part of it.

Thanks to yeti and dak for suffering through the roughest parts of the game for us to put us in a winning position. We don't win without you both sacrificing much more sanity than I ended up having to, and Ox Bellows doesn't even start with that much sanity to begin with...

Special thanks to tas for being my sidekick in claims. I was glad to have someone else to spill info to since I wasn't totally sure of what to make of the ln/yeti situation until a day or two later, and I had little doubt you were town from our talks. I wouldn't have been nearly as successful as I was with receiving claims if you weren't there vouching on D1.

Good shit to the villagers who carried on and got us the win after I went.

I've said this multiple times but thanks sam for hosting this game; it was clearly a well thought out game and I had a lot of fun.
 

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