The Syndicate

Soneji wrote:Even we're locked out of the topic now Ika, its lost to the abyss. We won though, aren't you happy?

ehhh, not entirely. while i did break a lot of old meta as silver metnioned. i feel like the win was very...... underwhelming?

a lto of the town got focused in itself when silver was the only oen to really say "hey stop the T v T and focus lurkers"

its very much my thinking as well, when theres a lot fo "1v1" going on i will more then not go and say "hey lets do something else"

as for the fuz bus, it was my full intention to have him offed in attempts for town cred as saw, it got me like 3 more days. if i was lynched, i could easily see fuzz off next

that being said clearing prsioner now

Considering how much more focused pressure happened after the Prisoner arrived and the masterful bus Epi and I pulled, I don't think I could say this was an underwhelming win. Maybe from your perspective as you've been dead for quite awhile.

This game was really draining on me. I'm used to 24/24 with no talking at night. 48/24 with night posting is a killer, though I think it while generally pro-town is also somewhat pro-mafia as town loses it focus.

Soneji wrote:Considering how much more focused pressure happened after the Prisoner arrived and the masterful bus Epi and I pulled, I don't think I could say this was an underwhelming win. Maybe from your perspective as you've been dead for quite awhile.

This game was really draining on me. I'm used to 24/24 with no talking at night. 48/24 with night posting is a killer, though I think it while generally pro-town is also somewhat pro-mafia as town loses it focus.

I didnt see the rest of it after my arrest. i think we all did well overall but i feel like it (FMPOV) was a lot of jsut town eating itself

oh one final thing, when people complain about a game or a mechanic and how it was imbalanced or unfair, just look at my sig and remember that host cant jsut go "ok change" we have to abide by what we made

ika wrote:

Soneji wrote:Considering how much more focused pressure happened after the Prisoner arrived and the masterful bus Epi and I pulled, I don't think I could say this was an underwhelming win. Maybe from your perspective as you've been dead for quite awhile.

This game was really draining on me. I'm used to 24/24 with no talking at night. 48/24 with night posting is a killer, though I think it while generally pro-town is also somewhat pro-mafia as town loses it focus.

I didnt see the rest of it after my arrest. i think we all did well overall but i feel like it (FMPOV) was a lot of jsut town eating itself

Can't argue against that.

Epignosis wrote:

Sloonei wrote:

MovingPictures07 wrote:

Epignosis wrote:This was my first time being bad in a long ass while. Felt good.

Sometimes.

You really kicked ass. You and Soneji were the MVPs for sure.

Speaking of which, I'm still amazed that Soneji's double arrest succeeded so many times despite being mathematically improbable.

You are a frightening ass civilian to go up against.

You and 3J both on the same page the whole game? I doubted our chance of success many many many times.

Thanks! That's fine praise coming from you, I appreciate it. And it's good to know Epi is scared of me.

I also had to laugh a bit at the end when every page was just me and jay going back and forth. I felt a little bad for everyone else in the game.

Prisoner 509378 wrote:

Prisoner 958153 wrote:This thought just occurred to me:

Can someone explain how Dom survived the lynch on Day 11? I see nothing in the roles that would lead to a baddie being given lynch immunity. This tells me that it could either be a undisclosed game mechanic, or be a result of the hosts one-use powers they used way back at the beginning of the game. With this in mind, how feasible is it to suggest that Turnip may also have benefitted from this protection? With all this on the table, I still think chaindeath is more likely to be a policeman.

We still don't know how Dom survived that lynch. There had to be some kind of secret mechanic or role ability in motion, but the details elude us and probably will until endgame. We could certainly tinfoil Turnip Head as being the same story, but I don't think it would be wise. We do know after all the dons have to be alive, and it makes no sense for Soneji, chaindeath, or I to be dons.

Plus Soneji is conceding.

Beautifully played Soneji and all of the cops. If it weren't for process of elimination and role assignments, this scenario may never have arrived. There's not much a baddie team can do about that.

This post though. Soneji wasn't conceding at all

My supreme confidence should have tipped people in that I might know something that they do not. There is rarely a situation where I would concede.

Soneji wrote:My supreme confidence should have tipped people in that I might know something that they do not. There is rarely a situation where I would concede.

At the time I was assuming there was no possible way we could lose, so your apparent concession made perfect sense. Even when I saw the game had ended, my first thought was that you had officially conceded.

But wow, this game was nuts. I've never seen such a rollercoaster mafia game. My mood went from through the roof to way down in the dumps, and then back through the roof again when SVS killed Dom. Then a crushing unforeseen defeat.

I didn't really think he was conceding. I was just being provocative. I said the same thing about Epi earlier in the game.

Congrats cops! You played a great game!

MP & Daisy thanks! And a quick question, had I not changed my kill the night I killed Dom, had I left it on Soneji, would things have been different?

And yes Quin, I will add whichever statement JJJ likes to my Sig

And I guessed Bea, Rico & JJJ for sure during the first prison break.

It would have made a difference in the night arrest choice between Nero and TH. That may have given town the win, depending on if Epi could get a mislynch on chaindeath or Nero.

As soon as MP told me I had a kill, I said, Kill Soneji, I was so sure you were bad and you were snowing Sloonei, like Epi had snowed me. Then when TH said what he said about Dom, I switched it since my confidence was shot after being so wrong on Quin & Scotty, and I seemed to be the only one who suspected you.

When I got to come back as a prisoner, I spent most of my time reading back. I was so pleased you both were bad! But in retrospect, I should have stuck to my gut read on you, but hey, whatever. You played a beautiful game, for sure.

And Typhoony, I can't believe neither of us thought to discuss Ninjas & Pirates. I guessed Ninjas. Was that right?

Also,lulz at the capo crew challenges being not known to the Don. I was sure we were suspecting him or something that he wanted to shut us up when we got the 3 post challenge, ha ha. Doh.

Sloonei wrote:

Soneji wrote:My supreme confidence should have tipped people in that I might know something that they do not. There is rarely a situation where I would concede.

At the time I was assuming there was no possible way we could lose, so your apparent concession made perfect sense. Even when I saw the game had ended, my first thought was that you had officially conceded.

Had this been a standard setup, there would have been no way we could win. I am of the opinion that Mafia should not end in process of elimination. Bad guys should be able to deceive to win rather than be outed due to mechanics at endgame. My very first civilian win occurred because I was virtually kill-proof, and because I kept a spreadsheet (a real one ) noting who could and could not be a killer. Due to the rules and mechanics, this made it a cinch to figure out logically who the last killer was. It was an excellent logic puzzle, but it made it impossible for the last killer to convince anyone to lynch anybody else.

Fortunately, a mechanic I was most leery of coming into this turned out to be our greatest boon. With no focus on eliminating opposing Dons, however, we kept telling ourselves, "The Dons are still alive, the Dons are still alive." I would have assumed that the Capo & Crew, when given a kill, would have tried to work out who the opposing Don was. That's why I thought Dom got popped- he survived a lynch, Capo & Crew got a kill and bam.

I even told MP that, on paper, this was the most difficult setup I've ever seen for mafia to win:

-Two all-but invincible roles with BTSC (Dons)
-A way to clear those Dons in the thread (Traitors)
-Two sets of BTSC trios (Capo & Crew)
-Potential additional BTSC (Lovers)
-Four civilian ninjas (Hitmen and Capo & Crew)
-Two civilians with built-in auto-protects (Stool Pigeons)
-A mass resurrection that includes a number of non-players and in which a civilian-friendly independent (3J of all people) stays permanently (Prison Break)
-And then a second (!) mass resurrection.

So I was pleased that not only were we able to last as long as we did, but that we could reach a point where, even if the rest of our team got lynched one phase after the next, we were in a position to win by sheer attrition.

Thanks fr the game, MP and Daisy! My sock account is cleaned out and the password reset.

At an early stage of the game, our crew got intel for completing our mission that Golden was a member of the Daisy Mafia. So I start target painting him hard, lol. But other than that, I think we were all more fixated on eliminating you cops than each other. I killed Dom becasue my Don thought he was bad. From a long view strategic viewpoint, killing der Sloonei might have been smarter, but I thought the baddies would win before we got to that stage if we started killing each other intentionally.

And regardless of mechanics, game play is what wins game. Your team played to win, Epi.

I will go clear out 607001 now.

Thanks for the game! Sorry I sucked this game. Replacing in is harder than I remember.


Congrats, fellow winners!

You didn't even mention the hardest part of the set-up, that being our low numbers. Mafia is usually one-third or one-fourth of the total players, in this game we had one-fifth the total players.

I seem to have the most success as mafia when its I and another top tier player in charge of a mixed group that mostly lay low.

In my experience, town-to-mafia ratios tends to be best in the 4-1 or 7-2 range, which is closer to one fifth. This can vary by setup type, but only in rare circumstance have I seen a truly balanced game at 3-1 (the champs tourney setup of Season 2 being a valid example).

On NF where I play the games with the one-third ratio are role madness games of 30+, most of the time with two(on rare occasions three) mafia teams. So if 30 players there would be ten mafia, five on each team(potentially 6-4 or even 7-3). Its balanced as well as RM can be and as I have learned from my interactions with those from other sites, what they consider role madness is tame compared to the beast it has become on NF. We love it though.

Yeah that's an important difference. I "grew up" in RYM's mafia community, where 95% of the games feature a single mafia team.

JaggedJimmyJay wrote:In my experience, town-to-mafia ratios tends to be best in the 4-1 or 7-2 range, which is closer to one fifth. This can vary by setup type, but only in rare circumstance have I seen a truly balanced game at 3-1 (the champs tourney setup of Season 2 being a valid example).

I believe this is the very first time a mafia team of size greater than 4 has won a game on the Syndicate.

Congrats you guys!!

Well not you Jay. You weren't part of them. :P

But Soneji and company.

Dom wrote:Thanks for the game! Sorry I sucked this game. Replacing in is harder than I remember.


Congrats, fellow winners!

You didn't suck, you replaced into the most difficult and unfortunate position in a mafia game. We essentially knew you were bad before you subbed in.

Cool ending to this game. Nice to see Soneji urbstomping it, I've been hoping to see him being active in a Syndicate game for a long time. Hope you play more games here, I think you can add a lot to this site. And nice to see EPi as scum again, I guess I should have trusted that idea that he was being too pacific to be civ Epi.

This game was fun at start, but then it became ridiculously stressful. I was going through a taxing moment in real life (preparing for a very difficult exam which I'm still not sure whether I passed or not), and all that emotion combined to the regular stress from mafia games burned me out pretty quickly. It started with the CFD thing, and then when the prisoners came in and I started because accused by people I didn't even know, I blew up and let people lynch me with no defense. I'm still feeling burn out from mafia as a whole after this game.

I have to say, that Prisoner mechanic is really creative, but the whole "introduce 15 new players in the game and give them vote power" can be somewhat unfair to players who have spent 5 cycles trying to build trust and now suddenly lose it. Of course that could also happen to mafia but... I guess I'm not fond of the concept too much, it just feels cheap.

Thanks for the game though Daisy and MP, you guys did an outstanding job at designing game of this length and complexity, and dealing with all the people (like me) wanting to quit it. And I apologize for some of the rants and agressive posts I made, in case that bothered someone.

Prisoner 319159 wrote:To allude to DDL, if a player is acting too scummy to be scum, he is probably scum *cough ika*

The same thing applied to Sig though, and I think I used the same sentence while talking about him at some point. There is no easy way out for this.

Quin wrote:I got to the roles and I am absolutely kicking myself. I thought my lover must have died at the beginning because in 9 days we never found eachother, shiiiit.

I'll catch up with everything after lunch.

Its unbelieveable. Good game though Thanks MP and Daisy for hosting. This has been the best game I have had here so far

I sucked though. Chaindeath was town after all

Metalmarsh89 wrote:Well not you Jay. You weren't part of them. :P

From about Days 6 through 9 I might as well have been.

Nerolunar wrote:

Quin wrote:I got to the roles and I am absolutely kicking myself. I thought my lover must have died at the beginning because in 9 days we never found eachother, shiiiit.

I'll catch up with everything after lunch.

Its unbelieveable. Good game though Thanks MP and Daisy for hosting. This has been the best game I have had here so far

I sucked though. Chaindeath was town after all

The most fitting scenario would have been you and chaindeath as the lovers.

Sloonei wrote:

Nerolunar wrote:

Quin wrote:I got to the roles and I am absolutely kicking myself. I thought my lover must have died at the beginning because in 9 days we never found eachother, shiiiit.

I'll catch up with everything after lunch.

Its unbelieveable. Good game though Thanks MP and Daisy for hosting. This has been the best game I have had here so far

I sucked though. Chaindeath was town after all

The most fitting scenario would have been you and chaindeath as the lovers.

I would have to take a long break from mafia if that was the case.

Sloonei wrote:

Dom wrote:Thanks for the game! Sorry I sucked this game. Replacing in is harder than I remember.


Congrats, fellow winners!

You didn't suck, you replaced into the most difficult and unfortunate position in a mafia game. We essentially knew you were bad before you subbed in.

Thank you. Not sure I deserve it, but thank you.

Soneji-I'd like to publicly thank you for your kind comments in scum chat. Before anyone complains, I only got access out of concern for ika and only temporarily. I understand why it wasn't released and I thank the hosts for their consideration of ika and your kind comments as well.

Silverwolf wrote:Soneji-I'd like to publicly thank you for your kind comments in scum chat. Before anyone complains, I only got access out of concern for ika and only temporarily. I understand why it wasn't released and I thank the hosts for their consideration of ika and your kind comments as well.

Hearing the reason for sivlerwolf as well i can understand why it wasnt revealed, i had a full mental breakdown in there, i do not mind if it was revealed but i beilve i said it earlier, when i made that scum post blaming silver i broke down cus it was so much a "not me" post to make to her. even now i am still upset at it. i ended up lashing out at epi and ohter for it too.

Like i said, if i ever make thta kind of post to silver its 100% scum. its not like me to use emotional manipulation to my advantage town or scum most time.

S~V~S wrote:Congrats cops! You played a great game!

MP & Daisy thanks! And a quick question, had I not changed my kill the night I killed Dom, had I left it on Soneji, would things have been different?

And yes Quin, I will add whichever statement JJJ likes to my Sig

And I guessed Bea, Rico & JJJ for sure during the first prison break.

Yep, I remember Golden calling me weird names like G-Man or MacBaddie, to which your reacted with an "oh you silly" or something.

Dom wrote:Thanks for the game! Sorry I sucked this game. Replacing in is harder than I remember.

Congrats, fellow winners!

Dombaddie trainride knows no end!

Silverwolf wrote:Soneji-I'd like to publicly thank you for your kind comments in scum chat. Before anyone complains, I only got access out of concern for ika and only temporarily. I understand why it wasn't released and I thank the hosts for their consideration of ika and your kind comments as well.

Yes well, don't spread it around too much, it will hurt my cold, detached image I have in games.

I reached out to Ika earlier privately but as the game was still going on I didn't feel it appropriate to send that PM to you as well.

Hope to play with you two in the future.

S~V~S wrote:Congrats cops! You played a great game!

MP & Daisy thanks! And a quick question, had I not changed my kill the night I killed Dom, had I left it on Soneji, would things have been different?

And yes Quin, I will add whichever statement JJJ likes to my Sig

And I guessed Bea, Rico & JJJ for sure during the first prison break.

It's hard to say for sure, but I was a bit like NOOOO!! when you moved it, lol, because although Dom was still a cop, Soneji had the more powerful role and people were town-reading him more. It was a good move though and kept alive the remote chance that the baddies could be blocked from winning.

That said, it was still a case of too little too late, since Sloonei still would have likely sockblocked my team from winning, and vice versa with Turnip Head.

Soneji wrote:It would have made a difference in the night arrest choice between Nero and TH. That may have given town the win, depending on if Epi could get a mislynch on chaindeath or Nero.

Indeed, this is true! It would have been a matter of those nasty Dons though. We designed them to be invincible for the dual nature of them being a huge asset but also a huge risk to keeping either team from winning at endgame.

It's funny though, neither Daisy nor I really thought we'd get to this scenario. We just assumed you all would have time to Don-hunt, but you mislynched too many times to shift the focus away from the cops. It is what it is.

There will be a sequel, so maybe things will go differently then.

Dom wrote:Thanks for the game! Sorry I sucked this game. Replacing in is harder than I remember.


Congrats, fellow winners!

Seriously, I can't thank all of the replacements enough. This game ended up being more active in posts by far than Daisy and I anticipated, and I really had to twist some arms to get folks to replace in, but I'm so glad that you all did. It helped out enormously.

Dragon D. Luffy wrote:Cool ending to this game. Nice to see Soneji urbstomping it, I've been hoping to see him being active in a Syndicate game for a long time. Hope you play more games here, I think you can add a lot to this site. And nice to see EPi as scum again, I guess I should have trusted that idea that he was being too pacific to be civ Epi.

This game was fun at start, but then it became ridiculously stressful. I was going through a taxing moment in real life (preparing for a very difficult exam which I'm still not sure whether I passed or not), and all that emotion combined to the regular stress from mafia games burned me out pretty quickly. It started with the CFD thing, and then when the prisoners came in and I started because accused by people I didn't even know, I blew up and let people lynch me with no defense. I'm still feeling burn out from mafia as a whole after this game.

I have to say, that Prisoner mechanic is really creative, but the whole "introduce 15 new players in the game and give them vote power" can be somewhat unfair to players who have spent 5 cycles trying to build trust and now suddenly lose it. Of course that could also happen to mafia but... I guess I'm not fond of the concept too much, it just feels cheap.

Thanks for the game though Daisy and MP, you guys did an outstanding job at designing game of this length and complexity, and dealing with all the people (like me) wanting to quit it. And I apologize for some of the rants and agressive posts I made, in case that bothered someone.

Prisoner 319159 wrote:To allude to DDL, if a player is acting too scummy to be scum, he is probably scum *cough ika*

The same thing applied to Sig though, and I think I used the same sentence while talking about him at some point. There is no easy way out for this.

Your secret role submission was excellent, as well as your game activity, but I knew you really had RL dump on you in the end there. I can relate so much. Don't sweat it, it happens to all of us. You really played a good game while you could, especially in terms of effort, and I personally am not upset or bothered by the way you went out, even though I knew that level-headed DDL would have perhaps been better for my team's chances.

Spacedaisy wrote:I apologize that the prison breakout mechanic felt cheap, but you weren't aware of the fact that they were competing for a rez. They basically had to act in such a way to convince you all of their value to you, so it would never have been in their best interest to just do what they wanted and rule the thread for a day. One of the prisoners suggested it a couple times but everyone else dismissed it out of hand because they knew it would undermine what they were trying to do. Anyway, the whole independent prisoners mechanic got added like two weeks before game start. Sorry if any of you hated it, but I was really enjoying seeing it play out. There are things I would adjust should I ever use this kind of mechanic again though. But overall I was happy with it.

Indeed! We actually hadn't planned that mechanic at all from the beginning; Daisy had a moment of brilliance a few weeks before the game's inception, and I told her that there was no way we could pass this up. It took some adjustments to the roles and a ton of pre-game time that I'm not accustomed to, but we made sure to have all the kinks addressed well before the game began, at least I had hoped. It was definitely an experimental mechanic that I think neither of us plans on using again (at least in its current state -- I'm not a host that likes to repeat full game mechanics), but it was neat to see it play out, and I'm tickled pink that especially our independent prisoners enjoyed it so much. Every single person I asked to be an independent prisoner said yes, so we had more than we were anticipating, but it was exciting.

Also Epi, you list the four civ ninjas as a handicap for the baddies, but it made it much, much harder for the civ ninjas to land a kill. The fact you only saw one Hitman land a kill the whole game should speak to the fact it was balanced, or even possibly imbalanced in the favor of the cops. I don't mean to diminish your win, you guys deserved it. However, the reason it felt so imbalanced to you is because the civs played it as if it were a standard setup rather than strategically balancing going after people they suspect were bad and people who they believed were on the other team. You guys won despite that so it makes your win that much more significant.

Linki: my husband just used the phrase "tickled pink" in casual conversation...

Awwwwww good guy Soneji. This is the kinda fucking level of humanity I LOVE about this site.



I feel like I learned a lot about a bunch of players in this game, but as the people behind the sock. Like, you play insanity games with 50 people on other sites and you get to know them as players and their special quirks and stylings, but it's only a facade. I feel like the games here are personable to a fault- yes we lie and have to create an image to advance our particular win goal, but I feel like a human being's personality and character shine through on this site more than any other.

I'm glad to get to know everyone and find it an honor that for the majority of people, this game is an extension of ourselves and at the end of the day we're a community that supports each other.

Spacedaisy wrote:Also Epi, you list the four civ ninjas as a handicap for the baddies, but it made it much, much harder for the civ ninjas to land a kill. The fact you only saw one Hitman land a kill the whole game should speak to the fact it was balanced, or even possibly imbalanced in the favor of the cops. I don't mean to diminish your win, you guys deserved it. However, the reason it felt so imbalanced to you is because the civs played it as if it were a standard setup rather than strategically balancing going after people they suspect were bad and people who they believed were on the other team. You guys won despite that so it makes your win that much more significant.

Linki: my husband just used the phrase "tickled pink" in casual conversation...

+1

Also, you know that's right.

Scotty wrote:Awwwwww good guy Soneji. This is the kinda fucking level of humanity I LOVE about this site.



I feel like I learned a lot about a bunch of players in this game, but as the people behind the sock. Like, you play insanity games with 50 people on other sites and you get to know them as players and their special quirks and stylings, but it's only a facade. I feel like the games here are personable to a fault- yes we lie and have to create an image to advance our particular win goal, but I feel like a human being's personality and character shine through on this site more than any other.

I'm glad to get to know everyone and find it an honor that for the majority of people, this game is an extension of ourselves and at the end of the day we're a community that supports each other.

Scotty wrote:Awwwwww good guy Soneji. This is the kinda fucking level of humanity I LOVE about this site.



I feel like I learned a lot about a bunch of players in this game, but as the people behind the sock. Like, you play insanity games with 50 people on other sites and you get to know them as players and their special quirks and stylings, but it's only a facade. I feel like the games here are personable to a fault- yes we lie and have to create an image to advance our particular win goal, but I feel like a human being's personality and character shine through on this site more than any other.

I'm glad to get to know everyone and find it an honor that for the majority of people, this game is an extension of ourselves and at the end of the day we're a community that supports each other.

This made me happier than any mafia win or successful hosting experience I could ever have!