Hydras in mini normals

[mykonian]

In the games I have played with hydras, I have seen a lot of hesitance to lynch a hydra. Because 'what if they are town, that's multiple protown reads!" or something like that. Also depending on who is in the hydra sometimes they get treated as gospel and no one challenges them. If my experience is representative of site meta as a whole, site meta needs to change.

It's harder to put a case on two people as well. One can make up for the other etc. Also, hydra tend to get going slowly, because they have discuss reads etc and come to some kind of consensus. So why not wait a day??? I think your experience is about right. Part of it is also inherent with hydra's. It's not the site meta that's wrong. They try to win within the rules of the game. If the best play is to wait with lynching hydrae, you do.

[mykonian]

at who's expense?

Idk, it took some time for me to come to a conclusion on hydra's, but I don't think I like hydra's in games. Personally in games I've got trouble dealing with them, but that shouldn't be the argument.

I get that people have fun playing together with someone they like. I just don't know if it's worth the trouble this causes on games now and then. That starts with hydra's slowing the game down because they have to find a time to talk to the other head, in thread dissonance, generally the near immunity to meta tells as their motivations are obscured. Hydra's change the game quite fundamentaly, as already some complaints in this thread showed.

Is it so much more fun to play on one slot in stead of two together in one game, that the rest of the game has to deal with the fact that you can communicate outside the thread while the rest can't?

[mykonian]

no need to make that set in stone. More experienced mods will now and then make games that people ask for. The more people that ask for no-hydra games, the more they'll come up. MD is a nice forum to voice such an opinion.

This is a different for mini normal mods though. More often then not, they'll be first time mods. It's unfair to ask from them to make such game-decisions based on what they know of MS. If you want hydras to disappear from mini normals, you probably need to organise that from top down. But for large normals, that's a bit too big a measure, I'd say. You could let sitemeta do that for you.

[mykonian]

while I agree that pure town vs. mafia is the most enjoyable fun-wise I think SKs are good for increasing the speed of the game.

I know people do this and it feels terrible. It's probably something for another md thread though, but putting a role in it to make the game less about the people talking during the day, just to shorten the total game length has to be a bad idea. You as a mod get to decide on the game's size. You created your own problem (the game is going to be too long) and decide to solve it by adding another random factor into the game.

I personally don't want to use SK's, but people like to play them so if you want to mod with them, put it in because someone is going to like it and the rest of the players are going to like to hunt it. Don't put it in to shorten the game. Yes, there's a difference. In the latter case the SK is added as an afterthought, in the first case you are building a game to allow people to have fun with an sk that you put in at the start of the process.