'The Lost Boys' Mafia (Cry Little Sister, it's OVER!)

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

You guys were pretty close on day 3 when I almost got lynched.

[Dasquian]

The way I read it,

all

of the converts converted accidentally by being on the lynch wagons. No one could've seen that one coming; I know I assumed they hadn't turned due to the lack of deaths

[Mr. Flay]

This was the night things could have easily tipped in the town's favor...

Disagree. Especially with the "easily" part. MoS was lynch immune twice? Yes, he was smart to claim unlynchable, but I don't see any possibility that after it was proven once we'd have been able to wagon him again. I don't think there's any way the town could've won this game.

I blame ecto for the town loss and am irked he won.

If you had lynched Pooky for lurking/being contradictory, like several people suggested,

all

of MoS' lynch-protection would have gone away. WAY too many people got away with lurking in this game, which is unfortunate but not a game-balance issue IMO. Town had a Sane Cop, four Masons, a Vigilante/Watcher/Tracker pair, and a Roleblocker on your side, in addition to a Bomb (who is arguably of mixed utility, since the Frog brothers could have targeted him). The ONLY benefit MoS & Pooky had to begin with was the lynch-protection, which was basically to prevent a random D1 loss. And it still took

six

seven bad lynches for town to lose...

I will agree with Dasquian on one thing, though: I may have underestimated how hard it would be to find scum with only two of them in the early game, and then a steadily increasing number as the game went on. That's an inherent problem of cults, and I wanted to see if there was a way around it. I believe this game was totally winnable by either side (maybe not perfectly balanced, but

possible

), but 18 was about the minimum size I could make it to give Town a chance to get ahead of the 8-ball...

[Dasquian]

WAY too many people got away with lurking in this game, which is unfortunate but not a game-balance issue IMO.

This is very true; with the number of town players doing this, the scum who were benefitting from the strategy got a much easier ride than they deserved. To Pooky's credit, he was very active in the latter half of the game after he almost got lynched for it.

I'm very tempted to policy lynch lurkers as a D1 lynch in every game I play in from now on... having so many people not playing really dragged the fun of the game down for me.

[cicero]

This was the night things could have easily tipped in the town's favor...

Disagree. Especially with the "easily" part. MoS was lynch immune twice? Yes, he was smart to claim unlynchable, but I don't see any possibility that after it was proven once we'd have been able to wagon him again. I don't think there's any way the town could've won this game.

I blame ecto for the town loss and am irked he won.

I don't think it's fair to blame any one person for the loss. Ectomancer played a good game and put in a ton of effort. I personally couldn't have counted this as a win in my head if I were in his shoes so imagine it feels more like a loss to him. Basically blaming Ecto is bad form. He made some poor choices in who to trust, but Setael so did you and so did I. It's clear now that he spent a lot of the game trying to find the CR and making best efforts so I think your comment isn't quite fair.

Second to that, it strikes me that in your rush of passion you contradicted yourself. If, as you posit, there was no way for town to win, the fellow to blame would be Maestro Flayzelli not Ectomancini.

More thoughts on the game as a whole in another post.

[Adel]

Night Four

• Arafax bit Adel.
  She managed to send a PM to Arafax before dawn that outlined a code for discovering her sire, as she said she wanted to turn...

this was a gambit. arafax outed himself to me, but I wanted to wait for another night before revealing his mistake to the rest of the town. I didn't expect to be turned by being in on the lynch, so I'm glad I decided to wait.

I tried to get the cult to recruit Laggs or cicero instead of ecto.


Cicero put a lot of effort into this game. I wish he would've won.

[Mr. Flay]

By the way, can ANYONE explain to me how Yosarian2 got lynched D4 instead of MoS or Pooky???

Twelfth Vote Count of Day Four:

PookyTheMagicalBear - 5 (Dasquian, Mariyta, cicero, Setael, Crub)

Mastermind of Sin - 2 (Yosarian2, HackerHuck)

Sixteenth Vote Count of Day Four:

Mastermind of Sin - 5 (Yosarian2, HackerHuck, Sir.Laggalot, Dasquian, Battle Mage)

Yosarian2 - 3 (Mastermind of Sin, cicero, Crub)
PookyTheMagicalBear - 2 (Mariyta, Arafax)

Thirtieth (and Final) Vote Count of Day Four:

Yosarian2 - 9 (Mastermind of Sin, Crub, Setael, Mariyta, PookyTheMagicalBear, Ectomancer, Sir.Laggalot, cicero, Dasquian)

Eleventh Vote Count of Day Five:

Mastermind of Sin - 7 (Adel, cicero, Setael, AniX, HackerHuck, Crub, Battle Mage)

This town was incredibly lynch-shy. In addition to the above near-misses, you had to be deadlined D2, D3, and nearly on D4 (essentially you avoided it because of the holidays). That helps allow scum to control the lynch much more effectively than a full majority lynch would.

If, as you posit, there was no way for town to win, the fellow to blame would be Maestro Flayzelli not Ectomancini.

QFT.

[Dasquian]

Speaking for myself, I piled on to Yos2's lynch due to extreme exhaustion at the length of the day. There'd been an all-out scrapfight between Pooky, Ecto (still townie) and Yos2, and it showed no signs of abating. At that point I was ready to lynch any of them, but had the nagging feeling they were all town.

To my shame I never did go back and do the reread of that lynch with the knowledge that Yos2 was town. I don't know if I would've noticed Pooky being scum, probably not

MoS avoided the noose because his claim threatened us losing our lynch altogether (and it would've done - though the dusk scene would probably have been very useful!)

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

Cuz Yosa makes children wet their beds at night.

[Ectomancer]

This was the night things could have easily tipped in the town's favor...

Disagree. Especially with the "easily" part. MoS was lynch immune twice? Yes, he was smart to claim unlynchable, but I don't see any possibility that after it was proven once we'd have been able to wagon him again. I don't think there's any way the town could've won this game.

I blame ecto for the town loss and am irked he won.

I don't think it's fair to blame any one person for the loss. Ectomancer played a good game and put in a ton of effort. I personally couldn't have counted this as a win in my head if I were in his shoes so imagine it feels more like a loss to him. Basically blaming Ecto is bad form. He made some poor choices in who to trust, but Setael so did you and so did I. It's clear now that he spent a lot of the game trying to find the CR and making best efforts so I think your comment isn't quite fair.

Second to that, it strikes me that in your rush of passion you contradicted yourself. If, as you posit, there was no way for town to win, the fellow to blame would be Maestro Flayzelli not Ectomancini.

More thoughts on the game as a whole in another post.

Thanks Cicero. As for the "game breaking moment", I think that came and went when the Frog's never bothered to Vig MOS. Even if he didnt die, I think that would have been a telling point the following day.

If I had any major failing, it would have been the failure to deduce that being on the lynch wagon would convert half-vampires to vampires. Without that game mechanism, which nobody saw, including fingerpointing Setael, then the game situation would have been exactly as I described it.
None of the half-vamps converted willingly. All of us were suprised.

So, while I don't really consider this a win, I don't consider it a loss either. I played to win, and that's what matters.

[cicero]

So here's my thoughts:

First, Lost Boys is a very important game for me. It started before I joined the site or shortly thereafter. It was one of the first non-noob games I joined. While I think it was an extremely flawed set up (I'll get into that) it was incredibly useful for me to play. I think I am 3x the Mafia Player because of the work I put into this game. It was an incredible learning experience. Lost Boys for me was like a gym I went to to pump up, and I think it's fair to say that the growth shows in my play as the game goes along. So in that respect, thank you Flay. You built the best treadmill and weightlifting set in the world.

Now some criticism and compliments of set up, moderation, and play.

The problem with the set up in Lost Boys wasn't really balance. I'm beyond caring if it was balanced. I imagine that this game could have easily gone either way. Therefore balanced. We had MoS and Pooky in our sights. I have to ask an indelicate question, Flay: was the apportionement of roles actually random? I assume it was. Just checking. In any event, MoS and Pooky are two of the best players on the site and they still, both of them, essentially got found, scrutinised and almost lynched.

The trouble with this set up, and the reason there may be an intangible balance problem that you may not have considered, is that as town moved along with mislynch after mislynch and no information, town just got sick of playing it. A lot of the players subtly just thought "fuck this" and quit. I personally am guilty of this to a small extent. To my great shame I will tell you that I was pretty sure Setael and Anix were mislynches and we were headed for a cult win, but I just wanted the fucking thing over with.

I couldnt fight any more. This whole game I felt like I was pushing Sysyphus' boulder up the hill just to have it roll back on me.

The last Anix wagons was pretty transparent. Mariyta completely mixed up how a 50% success rate works. MoS was in quick. All the cult were on the wagon. But when Anix couldnt be bothered to come in and help the town avoid his own mislynch I knew the game wasnt really woth playing any more because we had to be at Lylo and with Anix refusing to vote the last three days or so, I doubted we had enough votes to actually do a townside lynch. So since I wasnt 100% sure I was right, I basically said fuck it and voted Anix.

Now. This setup was terrible.

- First, just as a starting position, cults are problematic. They make people change sides in the middle which makes "winning" and "losing" problematic concepts. I find it kind of funny that people here are willing to accept that they "won" or "lost" because the mod says so. Sorry, in my mind, Mariyta, Adel and Ectomancer all lost. Particularly Ectomancer. The fact that there is a de jure win doesn't matter. De facto, Ecto put all his effort into winning for town. His efforts were unsuccessful. This is a loss. Another way to look at it is this: cult rectuits play two games so they always win one and lose the other. And how they should feel about that situation kinda depends on where they put their effort.

- The Lynch Turnings: Telling people they have a choice of whether to kill or not and then forcibly turning them for being on a successful wagon is an abysmal mechanic. Making devil horns doesnt really excuse it. I could see a mechanic where if they chose to hammer they lost. But a vampire kill should really be an act of clear volition. This also was not a mechanism anyone would have figured out. But lets say they did - that was probably worse, because your mechanism would make it even harder to lynch someone and therefore make lost boys even more insufferably long.

- Multiple recruiters: I was right when I speculated that there were multiple recruiters. This makes the cult even more unstoppable. The roleblocker was more of a hindrance than a help and he was useless anyway because as more recruits joined, it was effectively impossible to stop the recruitment.

- Thorn and Max Lynch immunity: this should have been limited to one and only one lynch protection from Thorn.

So really you had a cult that had multiple lynch immunity, and could dodge the roleblocker. Town didnt just have to kill him, they had to kill the cult in the right order. Challenging stuff given no information.

Then if you look at what the other side had.

Frog Brothers - Far too complex and underpowered a mechanism, having all the towns powers mixed in to two people who had to work together and couldnt trust each other. I thought it suited the flavor though that throughout the game they were completely fucking incompetent and that even the addition of Adel didnt stop this basic truth. The Frog Brothers were indeed the Frog Brothers.

Cop - The problem of Vernon Beasley might have been lessoned had Mariyta known that she was sane for sure. It still wasnt helpful though since alignments could change.

But look at those roles all together, they were all as much impediments to town as helps. You cant say town had a lot of power. It had powers that gave it false information and false hopes. A roleblocker who really couldnt block a recruitment very well. A cop who couldnt find a recruiter and whose results were only good the day they were made and before, and the watcher tracker team who had to coordinate to get above 50 percent. PLUS the fact that there were almost no bad guys.

Finally on Lurkers: I really like you Flay, as you know, but I've decided not to play in any more of your games. My opinion is that I much prefer Stoofer's active mod style to your limited one. Particularly in a cult only game where people could get discouraged I think you had more of a responsibility to deal with and replace the lurkers and, probably, to set firm deadlines at the outset of play. I dont want to get into a philosophical argument on this. I'm stating my preference. I know you think it isnt the mods responsibility to deal with this. I disagree and will steer my choices accordingly for my own future enjoyment. Town does not have the luxury to waste half its lynches chasing lurkers and never will play that way. Particularly in a game like this, a participation rule should have been in place and enforced. But I dont think that's something you needed to have thought of beforehand. It's something to think about for future.

Lastly this was just a plain old bad town. There's lots of play to criticize from my own choices to that of others but mostly to the legions of people who just didnt care enough to play hard and who lurked or barely contributed. But I'm undecided about whether to lay this at the feet of just the players or to suggest that it is evidence of how players responded to this set up.

That's enough for this long post. I'll probably say more if we chat more.

[Setael]

Basically blaming Ecto is bad form.

I can live with that.

Though I now give most of the blame to Adel for the anti-town move of not telling us about Arafax and letting me die instead. That's worse than anything ecto ever did.

[Ectomancer]

P.S. @Flay - I thought it was a great game btw. My only caveat is I feel that the half-vamps should have had to be the hammer, instead of simply being on the wagon, but Im not sure how that would have worked out.

A consideration for other cult games - a "fading" kill protection for CR's. I understand the need for one at the beginning of a game to prevent the D1 CR kill, but after that, it becomes something that needs balancing as well

later

in the game. Simply dropping it after it has served its original purpose would make sense to me.

[Adel]

Basically blaming Ecto is bad form.

I can live with that.

Though I now give most of the blame to Adel for the anti-town move of not telling us about Arafax and letting me die instead. That's worse than anything ecto ever did.

given my win condition was in flux, and I didn't know what the day or night would bring (my unwilling conversion to cult, as it turned out) I think my choice way the correct one.

[Setael]

By "my win condition was in flux" do you mean that you were planning to eventually turn cult of your own volition? If that's the case I agree that move was "correct" as you see it, as in it was pro-cult. However, at the time you decided to NOT tell the town about Arafax recruiting you, you were still town. Nothing about that sits well with me.

[cicero]

Yeah. Me neither. I recruited Adel into the game because what I knew of her was that her graphical analysis penchant might find connections I hadnt seen. What I didnt know at that point, but do now, is that Adel is a very different type of mafia player than me. I would now put her and ecto together in a scummy or gambitty category. Playing as townie isnt quite enough for them. They want to trick the scum in to slipping up.

I think that can work but I think more often than not it just adds to the confusion. I spent most of this game chasing Ecto because I would be goddamned if I was just going to fall for a paltry parlour trick. Which, in my view, suggests that employing paltry parlour tricks is a problematic behavior for townies, but one I doubt I'll be able to discourage either of them from employing in future. (I'm happier with my own "whining cicero trap" against MoS. Too bad I couldnt get more people to listen to me. )

Adel also was far more amenable to joining a cult than I would be. Which is disappointing. I dont believe in just accepting a "flexible win condition". I also disapprove of its inclusion in the game at all, I think, but am not done thinking about it. I did my best to guilt the players into staying town.

But do remember, Setael, that Adel was a late addition to the game and was not as invested in its outcome as, say, I would have been.

[Dasquian]

She wasn't still town. The moment she got bitten, she had no win condition. Her best play was to maximise her chances of fulfilling

a

win condition, and she had many ways of doing that.

[Adel]

at the time, I saw it as being the same as a cop sitting on an investigation result. I had that bit of info (arafax is cult, and recruited me, and thinks I want to join the cult) and with additiuonal night moves I could build on that. I kept my brother informed every step of the way, until I was fully recruited.

But if you need someone to blame, I guess I'm as good as any one else.

[cicero]

Such a mechanism is broken imho.

[cicero]

at the time, I saw it as being the same as a cop sitting on an investigation result. I had that bit of info (arafax is cult, and recruited me, and thinks I want to join the cult) and with additiuonal night moves I could build on that. I kept my brother informed every step of the way, until I was fully recruited.

But if you need someone to blame, I guess I'm as good as any one else.

Again, the choice about Arafax wasnt unreasonable. The blame game is annoying me... because it doesnt involve more Anix!

[Dasquian]

Adel's moves were entirely reasonable, both as a pro-town player with info she was sitting on and a suddenly-cult player with info that she no longer benefitted from sharing.

I really wish they had vigged MoS when we all agreed they should have done, though, and for that you do get an accusatory finger of blame

[Mr. Flay]

I have to ask an indelicate question, Flay: was the apportionement of roles actually random? I assume it was. Just checking.

Absolutely (via Excel). I'll eat my hat if I ever violate this one... I did wince when those two came up, but as you say, even still they came close to being lynched.

The trouble with this set up, and the reason there may be an intangible balance problem that you may not have considered, is that as town moved along with mislynch after mislynch and no information, town just got sick of playing it. A lot of the players subtly just thought "fuck this" and quit.

I will cop to this one. I wildly underestimated how difficult/demoralizing town would find it to have no nightkills, because to my mind that's a GOOD thing, usually. Not being able to track/detect cult recruitments was probably tougher than I expected, though.

Now. This setup was terrible.

- The Lynch Turnings: Telling people they have a choice of whether to kill or not and then forcibly turning them for being on a successful wagon is an abysmal mechanic. Making devil horns doesnt really excuse it.

Fair enough, but I'm going to quibble with your definition of "successful wagon". If any Half or Full Vampire or Thorn had

ever

been lynched, that wouldn't have turned anybody. They got punished for lynching pro-town players, not lynching

per se

- and toward the end, it really was a target-rich environment.

I could see a mechanic where if they chose to hammer they lost. But a vampire kill should really be an act of clear volition. This also was not a mechanism anyone would have figured out. But lets say they did - that was probably worse, because your mechanism would make it even harder to lynch someone and therefore make lost boys even more insufferably long.

I teetered back and forth on whether to make it the hammerer or just anyone on the wagon, and will agree that I probably went the wrong way this time.

- Multiple recruiters: I was right when I speculated that there were multiple recruiters. This makes the cult even more unstoppable. The roleblocker was more of a hindrance than a help and he was useless anyway because as more recruits joined, it was effectively impossible to stop the recruitment.

*shrug* You also had multiple Cops and Watchers/trackers out there to help detect multiple people moving around at night. This game probably would have

benefited

from an earlier Mass Claim, without any risk of being broken due to the Cult mechanic.

Question to all the Players: Should I have made this a Smalltown setup, where everyone's identity and abilities (or at least their safeclaim, in the case of Max & Thorn) was known from the outset, so you could focus on defeating the Cult sooner?

- Thorn and Max Lynch immunity: this should have been limited to one and only one lynch protection from Thorn.

Probably.

So really you had a cult that had multiple lynch immunity, and could dodge the roleblocker. Town didnt just have to kill him, they had to kill the cult in the right order.

It's probably not clear from my role PMs above, but if Max had died, there'd have been no more recruiting. No thematic reason given the ability to decentralize recruitment, just a balance decision.

Frog Brothers - Far too complex and underpowered a mechanism, having all the towns powers mixed in to two people who had to work together and couldnt trust each other. I thought it suited the flavor though that throughout the game they were completely fucking incompetent and that even the addition of Adel didnt stop this basic truth. The Frog Brothers were indeed the Frog Brothers.

Thanks, I think?

Finally on Lurkers: I really like you Flay, as you know, but I've decided not to play in any more of your games. My opinion is that I much prefer Stoofer's active mod style to your limited one. Particularly in a cult only game where people could get discouraged I think you had more of a responsibility to deal with and replace the lurkers and, probably, to set firm deadlines at the outset of play. I dont want to get into a philosophical argument on this. I'm stating my preference. I know you think it isnt the mods responsibility to deal with this. I disagree and will steer my choices accordingly for my own future enjoyment. Town does not have the luxury to waste half its lynches chasing lurkers and never will play that way. Particularly in a game like this, a participation rule should have been in place and enforced. But I dont think that's something you needed to have thought of beforehand. It's something to think about for future.

Well, if it helps, this is my last

laissez-faire

game when it comes to non-posters. I made the mistake of telling some players early on that they could refrain from posting so long as they checked in with me to let me know they were still reading the thread, and that became a distraction for way too long. However having said it, I couldn't change midstream.

For what it's worth, I agree with you now, and future games will have a different standard of participation. I was grinding my teeth at the pace as much as any player...

---

FYI, your least-posting players were, unsurprisingly:
Pooky, 0.48 posts/day
HackerHuck, 0.46 posts/day
Sir.Laggs, 0.44 posts/day
Sudo_Nym, 0.31 posts/day - this was truly frustrating because he started off good and then dropped off the face of the earth, but kept telling me he'd catch back in... and I was out of replacements at that point.
AniX, 0.27 posts/day, or once every 3.5 days, and many of those were contentless. Criminal.

::edit:: I had a better posting ratio in this game than six player-roles!!!

TinVision was also down there in the basement, but Adel came in and made up for it, at least in length if not helpfulness...

Most frequent poster? cicero. Anybody suprised?

[cicero]

Most frequent poster? cicero. Anybody suprised?

And I was a replacement. :p

[Mr. Flay]

P.S. @Flay - I thought it was a great game btw. My only caveat is I feel that the half-vamps should have had to be the hammer, instead of simply being on the wagon, but Im not sure how that would have worked out.

A consideration for other cult games - a "fading" kill protection for CR's. I understand the need for one at the beginning of a game to prevent the D1 CR kill, but after that, it becomes something that needs balancing as well

later

in the game. Simply dropping it after it has served its original purpose would make sense to me.

These are both excellent ideas, especially the latter. I somehow thought 2 vs. 17 would mean one of them would get lynched fairly early on, which was probably dumb.

She wasn't still town. The moment she got bitten, she had no win condition. Her best play was to maximise her chances of fulfilling a win condition, and she had many ways of doing that.

This isn't

quite

correct (at least from my perspective. At that point she had two potential win conditions, but could definitely have played strongly to keep the WC she already had (lynch-kill weirdness notwithstanding, since nobody ever figured that out).

Adel, what exactly did Arafax do, PM you directly?

I really wish they had vigged MoS when we all agreed they should have done, though, and for that you do get an accusatory finger of blame

Quoted for truth. I thought the Frog Brothers would have made a good policy lynch about mid-game, as their information/choices/announced choices were ALL over the place.

[Dasquian]

I can't even be angry at Pooky for lurking - he was scum, it worked for him, fair play. It's the pro-town lurkers who bear the shame of providing him a crowd to blend into.

I think the only really broken thing about the setup was the lynch-recruitment. The problem was that we had no info anyway, but this mechanic was undetectable and made our only safe assumption (that Mariyta, Ecto and Adel couldn't

all

be lying when they said they got bit, and that none of them had turned as no one had died) incorrect. I don't know how it should've been balanced, though, so apologies for providing criticism with no solution.

In the setup's favour, town

did

have a bunch of strong roles, and we were lucky that the masons hooked up early too. We just started to lose them all to recruitment, and the Frog brothers were, through a combination of human error and sheer bad luck, nowhere close to as useful as they should've been.