Mini 2265: Bears with Guns 2: Pandamonium game over

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Obligatory bear pun as a backup mod ego.

It's the bear minimum, I guess.

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Vote Count 3.1

Panda fact #25: Pandas are not the mammal with the most genetic similarity to Karl Urban.

JacksonVirgo (5): Greeting, wavemode, Enchant, JacksonVirgo, Cat Scratch Fever
Cat Scratch Fever: Toogeloo

Not Voting (3): Greeting, Malakittens, StrangeMatter,

With 9 alive, it's 5 to eliminate.

Deadline for Day 3 is Wednesday, March 30th at 1:30ish pm CST.

Deadline Timer:

(expired on 2022-03-30 14:00:00)

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Four player group scum in a 13p mini kinda just let them control the vote every day phase unfortunately. They could all hard defend each other and pile votes onto townies without really coming off as suspicious, and any time a townie tried to dissent or spoke up they'd just get steamrolled.

But tbh, town kept refusing to defend themself when ran up. Refusing to claim and/or self hammering as town just made it even easier for the scum team to do whatever they wanted.

Nero wanted to have a 4 scum with lovers, and I think there was definitely enough town power to justify it. By all rights there should have been a guilty and a failed kill during the last day phase.

You're not wrong that scum had a disproportionate amount of control over D1 though.

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4 mafia? Bruh

4 mafia versus a slightly more broken ftc town, yeah. It was higher swing than a normal for sure.

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First things first, thank you for your apology Mala. I accept it, and I apologise for my wording in return. Although it wasn't meant to be personal, it was a bit too harsh and was a reflection of my extreme annoyance at the situation and your defense presented. If that is my toxic trait then here is one to balance it out: I do not hold grudges against anyone and I'm surprisingly quick to forgive and forget, which had already happened while the game was still going. Let's hope that we both can learn from this.

Secondly, JV, you were in the right and I was in the wrong here. Sorry for that.

Finally, the game itself. Thank you for hosting it Nero and thank you to everyone for playing. I think the theme was cool and tbf I think the Veterinarian being able to poison someone is fantastic.

The set-up was unfortunately flawed.

Was it balanced?
On paper: kinda, but swingy.
In reality: not really.
I guess one could look at it as: town having strong PRs vs. mafia having more in terms of player numbers. But, if you break it down, then the PRs were strongly town-sided and parity was strongly scum-sided. Which made the game unstable and therefore, in my opinion, unbalanced.

Now, was this game winnable for either alignment? Absolutely. Town play was bad in this game, and that also includes myself. Scum play ranged from moderately good to very good. Did the mafia team deserve to win? Absolutely.

But, given the fact that the game was unbalanced, it took one less mistake for town to lose the game than usual and scums had an easier job manipulating the vote count. While townies had power concentrated in individuals, scum had power concentrated in their numbers and it was, ultimately, thanks to their numbers that they won.

I absolutely don't think this game was a waste of time. But I don't think this game can be compared to other Mini games I've played either. It was a different experience.

Congratulations to the scum team.

FWIW you’re conflating swing and balance. Balance is “do all factions have a roughly equal chance at winning?” To which I think the answer is solidly a yes. Swing is what you’re describing, where the chances of a roflstomp one way or the other increase. Normals tend to try for low to moderate swing in addition to good balance, but the two concerns are independent.

And yes, this was indeed a very swingy game.

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I don't think many people like swingy games.

The popularity of GIM and every other game in the genre disagrees with you.

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If a game can lose its balance very quickly (and that is bound to happen when the swing is too big) then it’s not well balanced at all. But that’s my personal opinion.

The point I was making is that that isn't balance. You're saying that you thought the game was too swingy for your tastes which is a valid criticism (and one I tend to agree with, as I mentioned in the mod thread (In hindsight, I think a vig and scum lovers was a poor combination, which didn't actually end up affecting the game)). It's more a function of telling you the right game design wording so that when you give feedback on a game it is more easily understood.

On the other hand, looking at this purely from a game design standpoint: I think that you think the game is actually swingier that it really was. A vast majority of the time town is going to get a guilty via watcher on night 1 or 2 and almost certainly on a goon barring any severe misplays, meaning the game should extend farther than it did this game resulting in a much more standard game experience. With a guilty outed, the watcher becomes functionally vanilla because the JK should sit on them until the JK dies and then they should be killed. The issue with the swing here was more the possibility of a N2 scumwin (2x Town elim, 2x town NK, 1x town poison) compared to the possibility of scum just being boned on D1 (lovers dying). What happened here was 4 very strong town roles not having any impact on the game at all, which is very unlikely.

I agree that this game was probably not the cup of tea of most of the player list, but the statement "I don't like coffee, so coffee is bad" is analogous. I think the setup itself is fine, although we definitely could have done a better job communicating design principles before it began to attract a pool of players more interested in a higher variance game. I also think that Nero's thought to turn it into a large would be a good way to reduce the swing element if he decides to run a similar game in the future.

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That is, unless the players are told before that they should expect the unexpected.

FWIW, I've been a pretty big proponent of a clearer system for establishing what to expect in games for quite a while now (Read: years) and agree that both Nero and I could have done a better job on communicating the type of game this was going to be (or any job at all in my case, really). I have always thought that setting up a proper expectation for the style of game you're running is a central part of running a great game, and to that end I tend to invite specifically players I think will enjoy the game I'm about to run when modding, which has an unfortunate side effect of making my games tend to be a little cliquish when I take the time to make them quality. With that said, it's much more difficult for less frequent mods to do that and I don't really think Nero did a bad job with the game at all.

I could continue arguing the likelihood of a middle of the road outcome, but frankly I don't think it gains anything to do so. Your assessments are valid, and the game WAS very swingy. I still absolutely think the scumteam deserved their win and the town earned their loss.