Both parts of your post are correct, but they're actually very different problems that Angel Nightless has had over its run, and you're missing one.In post 3047, Tierce wrote:In post 3046, quadz08 wrote:The worst parts of this for me:
-Nightless. I didn't realize how important that 3-day break is for me to take a break from the game.
I agree with this, and not just in this game. Nightless is more scum-sided than you'd expect, not just from the lack of Night actions that might point toward alignments, but also because it doesn't let Town have a breather.
My theory about it is that games snowball without the Night break. There are several Nightless games on record in which people just don't stop. At all. Day upon Day upon Day, sometimes within a span of hours. While this is something other sites have no issues with, it's not how most MS games are run, and many players are not prepared for the kind of on-the-spot thinking it requires. They don't review the game, they don't bother forming deeper reads, etc. It's a nightmare for Town more often than it is a blessing.
That 48-72h break allows people to wind down from the game, occasionally reread it, and come back to it on the next Day with fresher eyes. That helps Town.
(On a somewhat related point, I believe that Nights that are too long (96h+) are more scum-sided, because at that point Town players stop caring about the game. Who benefits from apathy? Scum.)
Another thing that Angel Nightless needs is deadlines. Rage/Grace/what-have-you accumulation is not enough to provide a 'natural' deadline. Players need to see thingshappening--people are lazy, nervous about doing the wrong move, etc. All sorts of things that make them postpone taking a final decision. With a lack of hard deadlines, as on the parenthesis above, Towns stop caring. They need incentive to lynch and do it on a timeframe; a potential kill far off in the future that scummaygain is not enough motivation.
The first two games were VERY FAST. Weeks to run, hundreds of pages. People were terrified of giving scum Rage accumulation (in those games, it was ~1 RP/week). So they speedlynched. Also nobody in those first two games really comprehended the power of Healing, so scum were able to chain kills very easily. That led to the panic you're talking about. Also Hurt/Heal functions similarly to a very slow "Day Vig" effect, where everybody gets more and more pissed off all the time, and retaliation runs rampant. Town found it very difficult to form blocks (which are an overrated concept anyway, but that's a problem in Mafia in general). That all said, people enjoyed the fuck out of them, and clamored for more Angel Nightless (my pre-ins were usually full within a week of the game ending, despite the next game being a year off).
WiH3 had very strict player-led controls on Hurting and keeping everyone at HP+1, which led to a big pseudovoting phenomenon and a LOT of frustration that "this wasn't what I signed up for". Despite that, Town obviously had a better control of the game and would have done fairly well. But the meta-frustration was high, and since I didn't anticipate that level of player-control, the game was dragging due to a lack of deadlines (I also overpowered NS's third-party role, having based it on the speed of previous games). Then of course the Great Rollback hit and I mercykilled the game.
For this game I specifically weakened Healing by the HP-drain mechanism, which worked better than I could have anticipated. It kept HP down somewhat and made people think about who they actually wanted to Heal. That was good. Of course since the next game won't be in Hell, I may or may not keep the Grace mechanic for the Town side. It's VERY Townsided to have it though...at the least Angels would have to gain it at a slower rate than Demons, otherwise Town ends up having 3x the 'Nightkill' power of Scum, which could be abused in certain scenarios I won't explain here in public.
Finally, the game isn't nearly as Scumsided as you'd think with the Nightless+Rage. Scum lose a major strength of team play in this setup: bussing. Even just losing their smallest member, this scumteam could NOT outright Gracekill a Seraph or Arel without some softening-up (5GP+5GP < 11 HP). Hence why Town did not have more Erelim and Seraphim, of course... that's really the worst part about balancing these. What RP total does scum have? They're probably going to lose one player over the course of the game, can a crippled team still compete?
