Mastin Rambling: A Plea

History

Original Publication: July 18, 2013 by Mastin2

Original Thread.

Introduction

Fair warning for people expecting this to be up to the standards of other articles, this will probably not meet your expectations; it was deliberately designed to be different from my previous threads this year. It has a specific (rather than general) target audience, and is not succinct. (It's called a ramble for good reason.) This is a plea, and as a plea, it is deeply personal in tone, and quite verbose as a result.

The Article

Ever since I joined the site in 2008, I've played in ~150 games, between alts, hydras, and my two main accounts. Throughout my experience, I've found that historically, there's been a single problem dominating all of my games, and in fact having affected the entire site as a whole. More than any other thing, what I've found most damaging in my time is arrogance.

It may be pointless to try and get arrogant people to stop being arrogant, but I have to try, for the sake of the site. It's something far too commonly plaguing games. And it makes a lot of sense as to why. A lot of active mafiascum players are in their youth, and most youths display an unhealthy amount of overconfidence in themselves. And then there's the fact that the internet offers a level of anonymity, allowing them to act as they please, not realizing the consequences their actions bring. But I'm not going to go into the details of why the arrogance is present; we all know it is.

And if there's one thing on this site that I'd love to see change, it'd be that. If nothing else, if everything remained the same, the one thing I'd want gone would be that destructive perspective and the things (such as emotions) directly tied to it. It's something I've seen time and time again destroy games, but its influence goes beyond games themselves; it extends to the very site as a whole.

There are quite a number of people who see MS.net (and not unjustifiably so!) as elitist. "Learn to play our way, or GTFO." is the stereotypical attitude that newbies seem to have of mafiascum's style of play. Yes, this has some basis in fact; we encourage people to become familiar with the site before they offer an alternative perspective. But it's massively played up because of that arrogance, and (to be blunt) a lot of people are kinda dicks when explaining this.

But it's more than that. I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I'm willing to bet a fair number of bans stem from arrogance. It can start out innocently enough, two people disagreeing with one another, but then the debate gets heated. Ultimately, neither backs down from their viewpoint, and certain forbidden (or, at least, heavily discouraged) words are used. BAM, a ban. And arrogant individuals make it worse by trying to get around the ban, wanting to continue the fight.

To give some other examples, in that same heated debate, maybe one side makes a reference to an ongoing game, where similar issues are encountered. Or maybe, in the heated debate, a player PMs another player about things the player shouldn't be discussing. Or--here's one that used to be common!--a player gloats to a dead player, or worse, a dead player gloats to a living one.

Obviously, all of these behaviors are being cracked down on by the moderation team, who're doing their best to weed them out. But they exist, and I largely attribute it to arrogance and the surrounding emotions. Not realizing that there are consequences to your actions is a fundamental warning sign of that arrogance. And I've seen worse than that. Entire friendships have been destroyed by arrogance, where neither side is willing to put aside their argument and continue the fight beyond the point of rationality.

Yet the worst experience I've had with arrogance is that of my own. So let me give a fairly brief history of my 150 games, and how negatively they have influenced my life, YEARS after they were originally completed.

To start off...why is it, do you think, that I have a reputation for verbosity? ("Uhh...*points to the long-winded nature of this post*...Because you are?" Well, yes, I am. :P But why is my verbosity so well-known, whereas the verbosity of others has fallen into obscurity?) The answer isn't that I'm more verbose than any other player, that I've been around for longer than any other verbose player, or anything of the sort. (Even though those are all, largely, true, they at best only contribute to it; they didn't cause it.)

The reason people know Mastin is 'synonymous' with walling is because in my arrogant youth, I WANTED to be known for it. And I still carry it around with me to this day. That decision I made years ago had the consequence of permanently altering people's perspective to me, so that even after switching accounts, it still haunts me to this day.

What decision was that? In my arrogant youth, I made the decision that any attention was good attention. Any fame to be earned would be fame all the same. Even if the fame was infamy. So I didn't care that I was getting attention for a highly-negative aspect of my play. In my arrogance, I ENJOYED it. Heck, I purposefully played it up. I made people think I was a more notorious waller than I already was by bragging about it (again, in arrogance), and I took less and less care in conciseness, instead purposefully making them longer and longer.

Because I wanted that reputation--I wanted a name which mafiascum would never forget. I wanted to be someone who could never be forgotten. I certainly succeeded; nobody forgets a Mastin game. But I did it horrifically so, in that the memories attached to said games are rarely pleasant ones. And years after my original blunder (it's been four years since I wrecked havoc as the Unabridged Mastin), people still remember the old arrogant me.

And it all began innocently enough. Rewinding the clock a bit, going back to the beginning of my career, the warning signs were present even in the post-game of my first game, Newbie 688, where I asked if there was any credit that I could take from having my side win even if I was no longer in the game. I wanted to be recognized, in my arrogance, despite not deserving it. And from there, things only spiraled downwards.

In my first true games (735 and 742), I was not bad. I was relatively humble (being a newbie and all), so I was quite aware I wasn't going to be perfect. I had a good head, however, and that's where things began to get messy. As a cop in both games, I managed to (both times) get a guilty, and also be hot on the trail of the second scum. As you can probably imagine...that boosted my confidence quite a bit. I was right! I was a good scumhunter!

...Unfortunately, it did so too much. It continued into my next town game, Newbie 763, where once again, I got one scum immediately. (But, critically, was half-off, unlike the previous times where I was dead-on.) And in Mini 760, where I had two scum in my sights. So clearly, I had the elements of a competent scumhunter. Clearly, I had a fair idea of what was town and what was scum even back then.

...But the further games dragged on, the farther and father away I got from being able to do this, as I let the arrogance get to my head. As time went on, it got progressively worse and worse. My accuracy plummeted, and I began to think I could do more than I actually could, and I began to think I was more valuable than I was, and that I was better than people said I was, and that walling was not as destructive as people claimed it was.

And slowly but surely, it destroyed me. I stretched myself further and further, until ultimately, it overwhelmed me, broke me, and left me utterly destroyed as a person. MS.net helped to wreck my life, both online and in person, because I let that power get to my head. People blacklisted me, never wanting to play with me again, and quite justifiably so. (I wouldn't want to play with Mastin as I was, either.) In my arrogance, I had become a plague to the site, and I had been in enough games where my influence actually stuck.

And the site was worse off because of it. It'd be impossible to confirm for sure, but I firmly believe personally that my insistence on walling helped raise the site's tolerance to wall wars, and that has taken YEARS to finally begin to die down again. I single-handedly left a long-lasting change in site meta which made games worse for the wear. So my arrogance didn't just ruin the games I was in (and believe me, it did! Search for the later games in 2009 that I played in, and you'll see it); it wrecked the site as it was and opened the door to tactics being tolerated that otherwise would never have flied.

(...Okay, so it might be a bit arrogant to give myself that much credit for altering the site meta. It's fully possible it was shifting anyways, but even if so, I was a player who helped it shift, and an INFLUENTIAL player at that--my influence, of course, being highly negative.)

It took me a full year to come back. I flaked around, oh, October or November of 2009. A year later, I finally had managed to reconstruct my life to the point where I could maybe play again. I began the very slow path to rebuilding my career--at first, as Mastin, but I still felt that name to be tainted, so ultimately I switched to mastin2, a name I wanted to keep pure. (Contrary to popular belief, I am not playing on mastin2 because I lost a gambit. I had always intended the switch, and that game gave me a convenient opportunity to do so, giving me the resolution to leave my tainted history in the past. In theory, at least.)

I was humble, and as a result, things went well. I was like a newbie again, refreshed, recharged, and ready to rebuild. But I got careless. I got reckless. Arrogance isn't something you can just randomly decide one day to discard, and have it be gone for good. You have to constantly be on the lookout for warning signs that it's seeping in. When the power got to my head (again), I made the exact same mistake I had made as Mastin, tainting the name mastin2 with Neruzian Era Large and Tricycle Mafia, the cumulative effect of which nearly traumatized me into retirement once more as I realized what the overconfidence had done to my play, and to the site once again.

Ultimately, I stuck around, but it's a battle I've had to consistently fight ever since then. Sometimes, it goes well. Most of my more successful games are the ones where I was humble, and gave an accurate value to my reads. (That being, I'm no scumhunting god, but I often have a unique perspective which allows me to have a better-than-average rate of catching scum.) But I've had slip-ups. My worst games have been the ones where I refused to acknowledge I could be wrong, and it bit me in the ass.

Constantly, I have to remind myself: I am not a scumhunting god. Nobody is, and I often teach this to others. There are consequences to actions, even if they are not immediately obvious. What you do could be harmless, but it can also be incredibly destructive.

Even if it doesn't affect others (it often does), even if it's localized to a single game (it almost never is), even if it's something which only affects you (it rarely does)...arrogance has that deeply, DEEPLY damaging influence on people.

It tears a rift between you and others. It can help to sabotage your reads in a game, as you progressively lose respect you thought you had earned. People who had once supported you progressively turn against you.

As a whole, the site does have hope. The moderation team has begun to crack down on consequences of arrogance, as mentioned above, and not wanting to be punished, people are slowly moving away from that behavior. The site meta as a whole is slowly, slowly beginning to recover from the arrogant tactics of the past few years that used to dominate games, as people are beginning to realize how negatively they influence the game.

But it's a process which is all too slow. And you need to know that your arrogance isn't a sign of strength; it's a fatal flaw that'll progressively become a stronger weakness of yours.

Obviously, you'll laugh off my opinion. "Ha! That's how things went down for YOU; I'm better than that, and won't let it happen to ME!" Think about the arrogance inherent in that comment, though. Yes, it can, and yes, it will. I thought the same. I didn't think it could happen to me. I thought I was better than everyone else, I thought that I was immune to this happening to me. I took a "screw you guys, I'll do things my way" perspective, despite multiple warnings about the path I was walking being a dark one. Despite people telling me their first-hand experience, I laughed it off and their words of wisdom were lost on me.

Yet here I am, with the ghosts of my past still haunting me. Nobody's immune. Not even you. So please...tread carefully. Accept the blame for your actions. It's never entirely the other person's/people's fault. Often-times, you are largely responsible for the blame. (You are not immune to making mistakes! Recognize you make them! Acknowledge that you have weaknesses.) How much is a subject best left undebated, but you have to acknowledge that you can do better, that your play CAN improve. That you didn't affect things as positively as necessary.

If you don't recognize this, then eventually, it'll come back to destroy you. It could take weeks, it could take months, heck, it could even take years, but eventually, the consequences of your actions WILL build up. And I've seen plenty of people who were arrogant like me, leave the site either willingly or forcibly, because they couldn't control their arrogance.

Arrogance is something we'll never be able to get rid of. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to limit it.

Believe me. You won't just be a better player if you manage to limit (or even harvest productively) your arrogance. You'll be a better person in general if you can recognize this sin and be able to manage it.

Be careful. Try being humble a little, even if you think it's a stupid idea. You'll be surprised at the results.

Put conscious effort into trying to be a better player and better person--it can make the difference between success and failure in the long-run.

Followthrough

There are certain arrogant behaviors which can be beneficial. It's a very fine line to walk, which is why I recommend not being arrogant at all, but it is possible, albeit very hard to pull off. The first way arrogance can be beneficial is because arrogance has a close tie to confidence. Ideally, in a mafia game, you want to actually show confidence, and it's a great way to get people to follow you. Confidence and arrogance are two separate concepts, mind you, but the line between them is often blurred.

Arrogance which you manage to downplay, therefore, can appear to be simple confidence. People don't want to follow arrogant players, but they will follow confident players. You may be arrogant, but if you can make it APPEAR as if you're not, then your "air of confidence" will allow others to sheep you.

The second way arrogance can be beneficial is if it's part of your "charm" as a player. In essence, you're a lovable bastard despite (or perhaps because of) your arrogance. :P You may be arrogant, but people don't care that you're arrogant, because playing with you is just too damn fun; the experience is enjoyable for them. Most players with reputations for arrogance actually do this in their various different ways, being hypnotic enough that you can't help but have fun (even if they're a bit annoying).

To put it simply--non-destructive (and even beneficial) arrogance is arrogance which is not detrimental to enjoying the experience of the game, and even the site. That's an example of arrogance harvested, to enhance the site. Arrogance hindering the game is the hurtful type. But again--tread carefully! It's a fine line to walk, and far, FAR too many people cross it and end up negatively influencing things.

The main tip I have is to know your audience--what's hilarious to some will invoke a "Dude, NOT funny" from others, so know what and where you are, so to speak.