Mini Theme 1513: Theater Season Mafia: Day Four

[Lord Mhork]

Because. Of. Role. Confirmations.

[Psyche]

Without, I suppose we'd have made room for Smudger.

[Psyche]

But trollie seemed sorta inevitable, too. :/

[Lord Mhork]

Dude. Smudger was taken off for his claim. Alpa had a blindingly obvious town claim. Nacho had a town claim with confirmed townies. If BROseidon lived, he would have been confirmed town too. Then there's your watcher ability. The mason chat. All of that.

Town did super basic strategy of lynching from within the conf town. Good job for that. The point is that it's hard to be impressed when the pool gets absurdly small do quickly via the mod.

[Mantisdreamz]

Mantis, my avatar is a cartoon caricature of De Niro..

oh ya, there it is.. i see it now :p


mhork - there may have been a lot of town specials, yes. but i mean, a mod can't predict how it's going to turn out. even you said in the scum qt, that i shouldn't have been targeted for n1 kill in case i was protected. but you guys did anyway... so that was a bad move. stuff like that

i don't like seeing criticisms of the mod when they take their own time and efforts to create a game for others to play.

[notscience]

mantis we need to play again sometime

I like being town with you more than scum against you

[Mantisdreamz]

we do ns! i know, you'd probably catch me immediately if i were scum. i get all weirded out and awkward :p

i like that i can read you (so far) : )

[Gedak]

Your crumbs would in no way have been noticed by town.

People would have looked, yes. But nothing concrete.

It was pretty straightforward, about 2 steps of logic.
The obvious place to look is 811 where I was concerned about a possible dayvig. I definitely should have indicated my result there, being concerned about a dayvig and all. It's a scale, so if I have a result, my result would be at the top or the bottom.

Top (scummiest): uct. Did I have a guilty on him? No, because I moved him to my 4th scumread by the end of the day. Also I found his hammer scummy at the end of day 1, and I even mentioned that I thought he would be a prime vig-target, so I wouldn't have investigated him.

Bottom (towniest): Alpazard. Did I have an innocent on them? Yes, because at the end of day 1 I was reading them as nullish, and on Day 2, with no explanation at all, I had them as my biggest townread according to the scale.

Then there were other, smaller, hints, like even though I had that big argument with you, I never seriously considered the possibility that you might be scum on Day 2 - I even mentioned you again among my townreads at the end of Day 2. I also made it pretty damn clear, with CAPS, that I did not have a guilty on Mantis. So what else would be my result?

You must have a pretty bad view of the town if you think this would have been too difficult.

And putting one over on trollie was no large feat, I'm pretty sure almost everyone else knew we were a doc and he didn't think to RB us.

The point is not that Trollie didn't realise. The point is that Trollie was the last surviving scummember, so if any of the scumteam realised I was likely to be a PR, they could have told Trollie. But basically everyone thought I was unlikely to be a PR, which was to town's benefit.

[Mantisdreamz]

gedak
why're you so mad

[Gedak]

I'm mad? I'm talking with ns. Post-game discussion.

[Gedak]

i don't like seeing criticisms of the mod when they take their own time and efforts to create a game for others to play.

I disagree.

Players invest a similar amount of time in the game as the mod.

If the mod does something bad, it affects many players' enjoyability of the game. It's in fact far worse if a mod does something bad than if a player plays suboptimally.

So I don't like this polite fiction of pretending that the mod is always wonderful and perfect. It's to the benefit of everyone (especially future players under said mod) to point out things where we think the mod made a serious mistake, if he isn't already aware.

If I was modding a game, and I made a serious error, I would want to know about it so that I could be a better mod in the future.

[Mantisdreamz]

ya still though. he can't predict the outcomes. he got a 2nd opinion on the balance.. and was given the OK, that it was fine.
i just don't like seeing mhork giving him shit, like it was all his fault.
scum could have done better... imo

lurking doesn't help

[Mantisdreamz]

but ya constructive criticism is fine
it's not like they're perfect. but still putting themselves out to run a game, seems kind of thankless. last thing you want to do is be ungrateful

[Gedak]

Gedak, your treatment towards Mantis was the OTHER reason why I made an effort to look into Alpazard's force replace out request.

What am I supposed to do with my biggest scumread?

Just vote on her and shut up? Whisper sweet nothings in her ear?

I made a big effort to try to get my scumread lynched. I'm kind of stunned that you thought this was a reason to consider force-replacing me.

While I did not get the same impression on Smudger vs. Mhork, Your treatment of Mantis and Alpazard had my warning bells ringing. Fortunately I was smart enough to get a second opinion.

Smudger was insulting and trying to rile up Mhork for no game-related reason. Smudger also mocked Psyche's age for no game-relevant reason (e.g. 389). Those were completely fine by you, deserved no remark.

I strongly criticised some players' competence, most notably NS'. That was when I was arguing that 1) penguin was not rolefishing and that 2) scum didn't target Mantis with a RB. It turned out I was right about both of those, but NS at the time wasn't willing to listen, thinking he's already figured out the answers, saying things like he doesn't need to even read the thread. The goal of the town is to discuss things. So I made disparaging remarks about his ability, which got him to start discussing things with me, which is exactly what I wanted. So what I said ended up benefiting town. It had a game-related purpose.

So you didn't think what Smudger did was wrong. Alpazard calling Antimony a moron was also fine. Rach liveblogging her life instead of playing the game was also perfectly fine. But me trying to get a town-discussion going (through drastic means, I admit, but look at the purpose and the effect it had, which was to create a pro-town discussion), you thought that's what's worth a force-replace.

[Grey and Crimson]

Ns here phoneposting

Gedak, don't get started on things I was wrong on, because you were wrong on more

I didn't have to read 20 pages of your walls and still haven't, nor will I.

You were right it wasn't a rb. Congrats. He was still scum.

[Gedak]

he can't predict the outcomes. he got a 2nd opinion on the balance.. and was given the OK, that it was fine.
i just don't like seeing mhork giving him shit, like it was all his fault.

You can't predict the outcomes, but it is possible to balance games. This wasn't balanced. That's TAM's fault, and whoever OKd this. I think this should be discussed.

but still putting themselves out to run a game, seems kind of thankless. last thing you want to do is be ungrateful

Players invest a similar amount of time and effort into a game. I read there's an overabundance of people wanting to mod - it's not like modding is a terrible experience that people grit their teeth through as some selfless sacrifice.

[Gedak]

Gedak, don't get started on things I was wrong on

Wasn't bringing it up to criticise you here. Look at the context - I was talking about the force-replace threats, and why I did what I did.

[Lord Mhork]

Mantis, my avatar is a cartoon caricature of De Niro..

oh ya, there it is.. i see it now :p


mhork - there may have been a lot of town specials, yes. but i mean, a mod can't predict how it's going to turn out. even you said in the scum qt, that i shouldn't have been targeted for n1 kill in case i was protected. but you guys did anyway... so that was a bad move. stuff like that

i don't like seeing criticisms of the mod when they take their own time and efforts to create a game for others to play.

Ok I think you're missing the point of my posting. I am not giving TAM shit for the sake of giving him shit. I'm giving him shit because his game was legit unbalanced and skewed absurdly in favor of the town. You can't argue that this game was hugely put in town's court and was nigh-unwinnable by scum outside of a once in a blue moon thing where town didn't play.

And I'll tell you why I'm posting this too. Why this unbalance makes me this upset. A game of mafia is a huge time, energy, and emotion commitment, at least if you're doing it right. Yeah, yeah thanks to the mod for putting this together, but if it's unbalanced to the point of being basically unwinnable for a faction, you just wasted that factions time and energy. I could have, rather than playing a game i was doomed to fail in, played in another game where I had a shot. This was a HUGE waste of my time. It wasn't fun. It wasn't balanced. That's why I'm making a big deal about this. This is a legit modding concern and I'm frankly shocked this got any endorsements at all. Like, what were you thinking, Empking?

But yeah. Don't try to tell my I shouldn't make comments on what I view as a gross violation of basic moderation courtesy.

PEDIT:
Oh yeah everything about the Gedak force replace/modkill threats was bad on pretty much every level. Like totally

[Mantisdreamz]

i wasn't trying to tell you anything. just stating my opinion.

"yeah yeah thanks to the mod"?
ugh

[Gedak]

I will say this, I considered the roles for both Town and Scum tremendously balanced.

Ok, let's look at it.

Town had:
1. watcher+tracker / bodyguard,
2. a doc/vig,
3. a cop,
4. a flavourcop,
+ King abilities that will most likely reach town (because if town is smart there only needs to be 1 obvtown to king)

Scum had:
1. a roleblocker / potential for extra NK (the extra NK only occurs if they not only find the HL, but the HL is also targeted at the same time by town PRs. yes, this could happen, but one cannot count on this situation occurring. so this is very situational - most often they should just RB)
2. a weak godfather (the random target onto whom the investigation gets redirected could hit scum, so they're not fully immune, and they're vulnerable to the flavourcop because they wouldn't know what result it is that they'd randomly give)
3. a scum-revealer doublevote giver (basically a named goon, because the ability is actually useful in finding scum once town figures out how it works).

So basically, in terms of usable PRs:

3 town informational PRs + a doc + potential for vigging and bodyguarding + most likely the king abilities

vs

a roleblocker and a weak godfather.

tremendously balanced.

I remember a game where the design concept was that there were two town cops (who weren't aware that there are two of them), the idea being that they'd counterclaim each other, because "obviously two town cops wouldn't make sense", and this likely counterclaiming, motivated by the players thinking about game-design, was factored into the game balance.

Now, compared to that setup, here we had a watcher plus a cop, which is an even more powerful combination. And here Smudger wasn't just a town watcher, he apparently also tracked Mantis at the same time, and had the ability, if he chose, to bodyguard her. So this is like supertownwatcher. Much more powerful than a cop.

And we had a flavour cop too, just in case town didn't have enough information from the other 2 informational roles. And this in a game where having a confirmed townie is much more powerful than usual because having a confirmed townie would ensure that the king ability goes to the town. So putting 3 informational town roles in such a game...

BROseidon was in fact prepared to counterclaim me, presumably because a cop + a flavour cop together in the same setup already sounds abnormal:

TROLLIE IS NOT A COP.

That cop claim is fake.

And I thought a town cop + a town watcher + a town doc would be so powerful that it's hard to even think of a combination of scum PRs that could reasonably counter it. Cop + Doc is already dangerous, with the potential for Follow the Cop. Watcher + Doc is really dangerous, if they target each other. Cop + Watcher + Doc? But then not only Smudger was even stronger than a typical watcher, the doc could also vig, and there was an extra flavourcop. It's just ridiculous.

And scum had very little firepower to counter this. The only real thing they had for them was the RB. Now imagine if the RB gets lynched early in the game. Not an unlikely scenario: presumably in a third of the games the first scumlynch would be the RB. If we think that town has a decent chance of lynching at least one scum during the first 2 days, that means that in maybe a little less than a third of the games with this setup, Day 3 would start with no useful active abilities for scum, while town has 3-4 strong inherent abilities, plus presumably the king abilities. So let's say in roughly 25% of the games with this setup, scum would be pretty much doomed.

This is already problematic, even if we assume that the remaining 75% of the games would go evenly between town and scum: that would already imply a 62.5% town winrate, and in reality it would be even worse for scum. Even if the RB doesn't get lynched, they can't roleblock 3-4 town PRs at the same time. The only other thing they have is the GF, and the GF getting investigated would require luck, as it would require that exactly the cop (not the rolecop) targets exactly the GF (and not other scum), AND that the random redirection would land on a townie. Overall, this is pretty unlikely. Not to mention that in presumably another quarter of the games, scum would lose the GF early, so they wouldn't even have a chance of this.

So even in the let's say 75% of the cases where scum starts Day 3 with the RB alive, I think it still favours town massively. The superwatcher could very easily catch scum (with the kinged player being an obvious NK target). The cop could get a guilty on a non-GF scum, the doc could protect successfully (the kinged player being an obvious NK target), etc, and then we haven't even discussed the king abilities that will most likely land in town hands.

So overall, if the RB gets lynched early, town almost certainly wins, and if the RB doesn't get lynched early, town very likely wins.

[Lord Mhork]

Thank you for doing the math. I have no idea how to actually calculate that.

[uctriton00]

Tbh while I've been jokingly taking aside to the whole post game chat, Mhork is actually right, Mantis.

You see it as being ungrateful, but mods are supposed to listen to feedback. TAM's response has just been "it would have been balanced with better players".

Players are just as important as moderators. Goes both ways, I loved my players like they were my kids, and so on.

[notscience]

ucit when are you modding again

[uctriton00]

I should get on that again, when work settles down

[Mantisdreamz]

that's fair uct