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So, apparently, in the business of stock market - monkeys throwing random darts outperform the biggest brains in the business because everyone tries to outsmart everyone and so nothing is predictable.
https://youtu.be/_vdB7gphtyo
The best way to make money in that business is to teach or manage others for a fee. :laugh:
I just wonder.
If you had a FM game full with highly experienced veteran players. Could it be the same? Random?
That monkey analogy in my opening post was a bit outplaced, as it's the no brain index funds that outperform the experts. Sounded cooler though. :P
So you use like random.org to pick a lynch and everybody has to follow it? Then you’d get the theoretical win percentages @Marshmallow Marshall
I think the takeaway from that video is kind of how I try to play mafia. At a certain point, gut reads are going to be your best bet, because everyone is playing as optimally as they can in an "expert" game.
I expected more resistance than agreement tbh.Quote:
Originally Posted by Voss
Because I felt like all it takes for a player to have a bias and think something like "the best players win!" is to have just 1 game where they felt that they outplayed the rest. Similarly to how I expect a poker player, after having one good day, can think for life that poker can make them rich and not see the bigger picture.
My idea was that FM results are potentially more random than players would be willing to accept?Quote:
Originally Posted by aamirus
Like, I think that if you studied a lot about FM, your overall win percentage in the long run would go up by like let's say 5%. For example, can't master the game and get from 40% to 70% or something like that.
But yeah, the thing is that most players will are not experts. So maybe it's not like that in actual practice and we can get experts that win everyone? Not sure..
You touch a very interesting point here. That exact situation applies to games (and communities) where WIFOM is applied over the healthy amount. When one player sometimes fakeclaims (soft claiming that is easily detectable by mafia to get killed as citizen) as town to shield real power roles and that it works well, it's a good play. If everyone does that, it's just a big mess, and the "monkeys" are better.Quote:
Originally Posted by OzyWho
If everyone is highly experienced, which is extremely rare and probably happens only on the MU Championship's finale, there is a part of randomness, like in every game. The difference is that tells become much more subtle. However, strategies like town hunting (instead of scum hunting) can greatly help reduce randomness of outcome; Mafia is not an exact science, but it definetly isn't all about randomness.
You said that someone couldn't get from 40 % to 70 % winrate by studying the game a lot, but I completely disagree with that : a player with enough strenght of the "pillars of Mafia" (obvtownness, charisma, towncoring correctly, accuracy of scumreads) can carry a town. Similarly, a very good scum player who plays like a townie can completely outplay a town by managing to get in the town core. Proof is that some players are considered better than some other players and have a better winrate than them.
You are right that not everything is mathematic and infaillible, but there is still a big part of control over the game that comes the the different players' skills.
I agree, sometimes what I consider to be "dumb" plays can actually win my team the game. Part of what makes Mafia so interesting for me is that it's quite tricky to make the best decision every time since the games are so unpredictable. And obviously my definition of a "stupid" play is biased, there are different playing styles and that's what makes this game so compelling UWU.
I can't recall exactly where I heard this, but there's this fascinating story I remember reading about one site that had a forum tool that allowed you to generate "provably random" information. i.e. they had a forum command like /randomnumber that when entered would spit out a random number.
When it became clear in one setup that town naturally performed worse than random after playing 10s of games, something quite perverse happened. One influential town player was able to coax the other players into lynching using the forum RNG tool (because opposing the strategy was literally anti-town).
It's a fascinating scenario because it demonstrates how, if a playerbase reaches a certain level of self-awareness, or is permitted to converge to a certain cultural context, players may be forced to adopt a meta so destructive it nullifies the entire game.
They fixed the issue by simply removing the forum tool. Players could still freely claim they were lynching by RNG, but the inability to confirm whether they were truly using RNG allowed order to return to the game.