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[ToonyMan]

If you want an example of how well PoE can work, there you go.

I feel bad about the jeekaka mislynch (very unlucky night actions caused paranoia about this), however it was pretty clean otherwise since jeekaka flipping town all but confirmed who the two remaining mafia were.

[notquitethere]

Yes, there was a clear POE with that game at the end

[Jim Groovester]

Good game, ToonyMan, I was impressed.

[Vector]

Nice. I hope the judges advance ya, but regardless, thank you for repping B12!!

[ToonyMan]

I was ranked 4th, which seems to be a Bay12 tradition. I think I have a good chance of being in a Semifinals game.

Also, I will be on the Game 1 podcast tomorrow at 3:30pm EDT. We'll probably talk about Game 2 as well which has just wrapped up.

This Sunday, June 13th at 3:30 PM EDT, myself, my cohost @Pawn Lelouch, and a panel of guests from Game 1 ( @Chiken, @Holyflare, @itslevi, @jeekaka, @ToonyMan, and @ZFR) will be talking about the Championships, doing a postmortem on Game 1, and just generally having a good time. We won't be discussing ongoing games, obviously, but anything else is fair game!

The stream will be here: https://www.twitch.tv/pawnlelouch

Hope to see everyone there! If it's anything like last year, I expect it to be a damn good time.

[Magma Mater]

Congrats on advancing Toony!

Unfortunately I was passed over. The jury didn't like my controversial posting style I guess. 

[ToonyMan]

Congrats on advancing Toony!

Thanks, I wouldn't say I've advanced though. I've been picked as a backup sub from Game 1. I don't think it's likely I play in semis, but it's possible.

I think my playstyle is polarizing so I'm not too surprised players have mixed feelings about it. I'm quite happy with my Day 3 performance so I'll just be proud of that.

Unfortunately I was passed over. The jury didn't like my controversial posting style I guess. 

What really? I had no idea you were playing in qualifiers, who were you?

[Magma Mater]

URISTTHEDEVASTATOR

[ToonyMan]

No way.

What a plot twist. The Urist name makes it so obvious now in hindsight.

Here are some of my personal observations:

1. Most of the games were dominated by mafia performances, with two or three mafia alive for game end. I wasn't impressed by a lot of townplay but there were some players I liked. I would have valued town players that mafia were scared of the most here (besides just being PR). After considering the mafia themselves of course, since they did win most games.

2. Only two games had a town win, Game 1 and Game 2. I'm fine with the Game 2 picks, but I'm disappointed in the lack of town representation from Game 1, which had the strongest town win in qualifiers with a lot of town players showing strong reasoning skills: Marl, Jeekaka, ZFR, and KoD.

EDIT:
I want to illustrate this out a bit more.

3. Game 5 was a mafia sweep, a complete crush that had two well playing - but highly linked together - scum, Pawn and JPIC. The third mafia was Toganim and personally they were the hardest mafia for me to identify. Pawn and Cuthalion (a town player who was killed early) were voted by the in-game players to advance to Semis, which is fine. You could argue Pawn was the best mafia and Cuth was the best town so seems fair enough.

Now for the jury advances they decide on Chris, JPIC, Gorf, and Silver. That's JPIC and three more town players that go straight to Semis. I won't single out any of the town players, but I think advancements here should have been JPIC and one or maybe two more town at most. I do agree with at least two of the town choices here, but I am surprised how many town players were chosen to directly advance here from what I read of the game.

Moving on, for subs four out of nine of the players were more players from Game 5: c4e5g3d5, Hornet, SuperJack, and Toganim. Again, I agree with the Toganim choice as personally I would have rated them the highest of the three mafia in that game, but even more town from Game 5 as subs? I don't understand the processing here, it was a curb stomp game. I understand the jury want to judge players on how likely they think they could win games from skillful play, correct? While it's true you could have strong town players in a mafia curb stomp, I would not have seven town players as advancement names in a game that was entirely controlled by the three mafia.

[Magma Mater]

Yeah, I don't think the system they have is designed very well if the intent is to assess skill. DuckQueen was robbed in g2, for example; she was hard bussed by a partner who wasn't reading scum chat, then got randomly chosen as the d1 lynch thanks to a 3-way tie. It's probably obvious from the way I played that I don't have any respect for the MU championships, and the purely-subjective insular rating system they use is a large part of that.

[Magma Mater]

One of the tier 2 subs from g2 voted wrong on every single day except for final 3. And he only voted right on that last day because the last scum voted him first. You must have played pretty badly to be put on the same level as that guy LOL

[EuchreJack]

My thoughts on Toonyman's analysis and Magma Mater's response regarding the MU system:

Hm, do I smell a popularity contest? 

[ToonyMan]

I believe real consideration is made and I don't envy ranking about 130 players, however I don't understand the metrics the players value beyond the public statement:

Hi everyone. We're the jury.

We'll keep this brief. Over the last few months we have followed live, reviewed, discussed, reviewed again, debated, and reviewed again again the ten qualifier games for Season 8. We believe that we have produced an array of advancements and possible substitutions that is a fair reflection of the performances we observed. Let it be known that these choices were not easy at all, and that a great many candidates warranted our consideration even among those who will not be named today. Ours is a jury of a very diverse array of strategies, philosophies, and preferences for Mafia gameplay, and that means no single element of play dictated our selections. We believe the players we have selected all showed us *something*: that is, they displayed some concrete talent for Mafia play that we believe would promote winning games the most consistently. Those talents are numerous and not always directly related.

Those who are named today to advance or serve as a substitute: congratulations and well done. Those who are not named: please hold your head high and know that these were all difficult choices. Take pride that your community selected you and you alone to be their champion this season. You've already proven much.

Thanks to the organizers, players, and spectators for making this another competitive, enriched, and enjoyable tournament experience. We're looking forward to the semifinals and the finale.

Hype. You can tell we're excited because we said "hype". Hype.

For example, accuracy of reads seems to be valued. Relm, a player that appeared to be well liked and was killed early on in their game, had all three mafia in their top town reads and I think that has to be the main reason they weren't considered. This shows at least that it is not simply a "popularity contest", or at least, not for everyone. It's difficult to infer and unlike the in-game votes there are no numbers to even look at.

[Magma Mater]

My thoughts on Toonyman's analysis and Magma Mater's response regarding the MU system:

Hm, do I smell a popularity contest? 

I don't think it's a popularity contest. I do think they choose based more on their feelings for a person's play, rather than data. I think they value intangible qualities over tangible ones. Sportsmanship is certainly treasured dearly; I think that anyone who failed to show a certain level of respect to their fellow players was disqualified on that basis.

For me, the worst part is the lack of transparency. Not because I fear corruption, but because I value continuous improvement. Nobody knows why they were passed over. They can't know what they did wrong, or how they can improve their play in the future. Nobody knows why they were chosen, or what they did correctly to gain the jury's attention. It's a little sad to me, because it would be a great opportunity for people to share ideas about the game, about what makes good town play or good scum play. But the organizers don't value those things, they don't care whether anyone takes the tournament as a learning experience, so the chance is squandered.

Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that the primary objective of the championships is to drive fringe communities to their software, have them use the mafia bot, then go back "home" and say "hey this site is great, let's pay MU to become a subcommunity of theirs so that we can use their software."

[4maskwolf]

I'm not sure communities pay to be partner communities, though I'm not sure much about the process period despite having been around since the beginning, but as far as I'm aware the site is paid for entirely through patreon (there was actually a thing about that recently where the admin essentially went around canvassing for donations because there wasn't enough to cover the site's costs). The championships are a big draw for new players in the community, though, you can trace a lot of players back to having participated in some championship or another (and most of the others come from mafia communities that are now dead/shut down like ToS FM).

I will say that insular mafia communities (like Bay12) are at a fundamental disadvantage during the selection process because we tend to develop our own internal meta and ways of playing that tend to be looked poorly on by more orthodox mafia communities.