Mini Normal Stats Update

[implosion]

Thanks for doing this again, Hoopla. I enjoyed looking at the stats last time as well.

I agree with you in general. I also have felt for a while that people tend to call setups more townsided than they are. I'm curious what you think about weak PRs in terms of balancing (since your guidelines never suggest any), and where you draw the cutoff in your guidelines for what a weak, middling or strong town PR is. There has definitely been a trend towards both having generally weaker town PRs in mini normals, and weakening those that have been used (most notably, it seems like the trio of gunsmith + x-shot-vig + mafia doctor, three roles which all make sense together which I've seen in at least one game and I think has been in others, makes the stereotypically pretty strong gunsmith somewhat weak - in fact just looking at some recent completed games the second game I looked at had this trio as well).

It sort of feels like a couple of weak town PRs should be about as strong as a single stronger one, but if there are too many then it sort of becomes a stoofer's-third-law grayzone, particularly depending on what the site meta around mini normal setup design is like.

[implosion]

PS if 11v2 mountainous is "disastrously scum-sided" then lol towns. 11v2 mountainous should be balanced AT WORST. I'm sorry but it's outright pathetic for towns to get pwned in setups where wolves need FIVE mislynches to just TWO correct lynches to win.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light .

We come to this point often in discussions about balance. People make claims about what town SHOULD be able to do, with nothing but their intuition to back it up. But mods should be working in the real world, and even if you say that town is universally "dumb" (a premise that I don't necessarily agree with), you should be balancing the game to account for that. Balancing toward some ideal in your head that's never going to exist is not balancing at all.

Bless this post.

Mafia is a damn hard game. We all know that EVs don't actually equate to real-world win rates, but I've always sort of looked at them as balanced out by two competing forces: the scum advantage and the town advantage. The scum have plenty of advantages: they have numbers that they can rely on, so that they can push lynches through; they have the luxury of being able to push whoever they want, etc. The town's only advantage over the winrate that they would get by actioning randomly and following EVs is scumhunting. And scumhunting, while the core of mafia, is really, really hard. Especially so on, of all settings, a forum. I think forum mafia, and even MORE especially forum mafia in the context of very long deadlines, is probably the most difficult medium to find scum in. In face to face, you can see gestures, you can see facial expressions and body language, you can see immediate reactions to things. In IRC-based media you don't have access to all of that but you can still see people immediately reacting to things. Everything happens quickly enough that everything is fresh in peoples' minds. On a forum, while the town also gets to reason out whatever they want, the scum have the luxury of all the time in the world that they want to consider exactly how they can approach a game to look as town as possible. Criticizing towns for winning below EV with all of those scum advantages is, like zoraster said, just playing up an ideal that has no grounding in reality, specifically the ideal that scumhunting isn't

that

hard to get right. Of course 90% of this paragraph is speculation so /rant.