Mini Normal Stats Update

[zMuffinMan]

I also have felt for a while that people tend to call setups more townsided than they are.

most people don't have the faintest clue how to balance a game

these stats are not particularly surprising

people need to consider how incredibly scum-sided a 10:3 mountainous game actually is and then consider that adding pretty much any two town power roles and no scum power is just going to make it less scum-sided but still probably scum-sided

[zMuffinMan]

excessive swing is less fun than an imbalance

how does adding rather powerful roles (like roleblocker or <insert pretty much any unrestricted-via-modifiers role here>) reduce the swing?

theoretically setups should be aiming to have very low power (using modifiers or weaker roles altogether) distributed among more town players (such that any one town player dying isn't going to swing the game massively) and IF scum power is required, use the same principle

[zMuffinMan]

right, but it looks like callforjudgment was implying that one of the reasons scum gets so much power is because normal reviewers have to deal with swing as well as balance (otherwise, i don't really know what the point of bringing up swing was)

but this doesn't make a lot of sense...

especially in a normal game, if you're looking at town's power and you're worried about the game potentially ending day two then the more sensible approach would be to... reduce or change town's power, not add more scum power

that also solves the other problem he mentions about too much power concentrated in 1-2 players

[zMuffinMan]

the mentality in that last paragraph is why scum keep getting buffs

ps: 11:2 mountainous isn't "disastrously" scum sided; it's just like 60-40

10:3 on the other hand

is

disastrously scum sided in mountainous (like 80-20)

[zMuffinMan]

uh...

sure, but old newbie setups used to be 7:2 mountainous 25% of the time and, while scum almost certainly won those more than town, it wasn't 100% scum wins

11:2 being 100% scum wins is likely for other reasons than it being 11:2

[zMuffinMan]

11:4 is 87.8% scum win, 11:2 is 60.5% scum win

i threw away the code i wrote for an odds calculator, but even numbers would generally be expected to perform worse than if you removed a vt (worse odds of hitting scum and the same amount of lynches to do it). so 11:3 is slightly worse than 10:3 (<20% without doing exact calculations)

dont think i ever bothered calculating past 4 scum in a vanilla because break-even on 4 scum was something like 80+ town?

[zMuffinMan]

actually im wrong woulda been closer to 60 i think? but still

[zMuffinMan]

those are decent guidelines

[zMuffinMan]

the funny thing about guessing what roles make sense as town in a setup is that, other than the fact that most people can't do this (see: how they balance their own setups), it requires the mod thinking about it in the same way you do

[zMuffinMan]

I wasn't saying it can't be done, just that the cases where a town can do it aren't all that common, so it's not exactly an easy thing to balance for (you can make the assumption in setup design that a town will think X but in practice, eh...)

[zMuffinMan]

neighborhoods aren't power neutral when a neighbor is a power role.

they still probably are, but i don't have anything to back this up other than the fact that they can sometimes be protown and sometimes antitown, and it entirely depends on how theyre used

that said, i dont think you have anything to back your assertion up either

[zMuffinMan]

I don't think it's fair to say neighbourhoods are rarely truly negative

i can point to any number of games where all-town hoods affected games in negative ways (just due to the nature of how neighbourhoods work) and i can't point to any games off the top of my head where they helped town's win chances (though im sure others can probably point to some)

neighbourisers are pretty much in the same boat (except i can think of a few positive examples of a neighbouriser being used well)