Setup - In my opinion, this game was grossly town-sided. I predicted as much pre-game, but I very much underestimated it. I'm sure a lot of these things have been considered already, but I spent a lot of my solitude stewing over the setup so I'm going to comment at length anyway.
VT Cop - This role is only fractionally weaker than a full alignment cop. With 11 not-him players, he investigates TEN of them as accurately as an alignment cop, with Riku being the only exception. The single coin cost isn't really a hinderance since being on the lynch is easy if you want to, I only wasn't because I a) didn't want to lynch my buddies and b) didn't want to give the town more tools. So as a 90% full alignment cop, the role is overpowered. And "follow-the-cop" is a significantly less fun game than mafia is. Role would be better as a vanilla cop, as at least the rich scum would show up clear and the potential existance of goons makes the cop far less certain. Or 2 or even 3 coin cost.
Tracker/1-shot RB - This role is strong but fine. It could have been argued as a scum role, which is good. But it would be weaker (and much more interesting) if it could track messages. Since as the game stood, a positive result would be scum 3/4 actions (vezok, me, NK vs Tom), which is a high hit rate. Also him not costing coins to track was unexpected - it seems out of place in the setup, which I was expecting to have lots of weakish abilities that cost coins, rather than all the town power concentrated in two players.
Rich Townies - I am absolutely baffled as to why these guys counted as vanilla. The game becomes a million times more interesting if they show up as not-VT to the cop and can be tracked (and also show up as non-vanilla on Vezok's cop shot). On top of that, having three Rich Townies vs one Rich Scum should really have meant all or most of the Rich townies should have been cleared once GJ flipped - it was clear scum needed more power than 2 Rich + Vezok, and GJ not claiming Rich meant that the scum didn't think it was a safe claim (which it probably is if they have 2 since that would suggest more). So potentially clearing THREE townies off one scum death is broken, and I'm incredibly glad everyone just ignored it. Furthermore, they didn't really add anything to the game - messaging is already of limited use, and the ability to send an extra one doesn't make them any more useful.
Messaging - This came up in spec chat, but ultimately the mechanic was a bit pointless - as borne out by the lack of messages sent. It was correctly identified that those who can use it most (power roles) are constrained by it costing their Night action. And there's very little need for other townies to send messages since their thoughts would already be in thread. Very infrequent are the times where you do an important enough re-read during Night that absolutely MUST be passed on. Sending messages mostly only existed to prove another Night action wasn't taken (which would have been very breakable if scum had been relying on more roleblocks near the end of the game). The tracebility of knowing who gets coins also limited the ability for the scum to send disruptive/misleading messages.
Rich Scum - Seperate to the issue of him clearing the Rich townies, this role plus the sharing of coins made it look like just a goon who existed to give us a bonus-start coin that we could use to rush Vezok's vanilla cop shot or ensure we got a Night action. This made it appear unsafe to claim, whereas I imagine the mods were expecting all the Rich guys to claim at once and have a jolly old laugh at it all. It would have been very useful to know there were other Rich players in the game! This isn't necessarily bad, but I think it indicates the designers not considering the game from the scum perspective and just looking at the game with full knowledge.
Scum Vanilla cop/RBer - This role is crap: the 2-cost vanilla cop is very weak, overcosted, and tells us nothing about the Rich townies. I think a 1-coin rolecop would have been completely fair, even if the roleblock cost 2 coins. A second roleblock shot would have been nice, but that's not a disaster.
Quartermaster - I am generally against giving scum roles that only exist to appear town. I am rather against scum roles that are difficult to use for the scum (Watch shots are much better at finding protectives than investigatives, and giving an item to a scum buddy is high risk). I am very against roles like that that give the town very powerful tools (like Watch shots and Roleblocks). I am completely against it when the items you can give are actually traps because the town already so much investigate power that more is suspicious AND they already have a bonus roleblock, AND the role itself doesn't really fit into the setup on the town side. Pretty much everything about my role was a disaster and I'm quite cross about it (apart from the flavour, that was cool). It's one thing to give scum a role that actively works against their own team, but quite another to stip any benefit from it as well.
Overall - I'm disappointed in the balance and setup to be honest. I know this isn't easy and the focus was more on the possibilities of message sending and how Rich townies or scum might use them to gain an edge, but it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that a virtually full alignment cop is overpowered and that the scum have some seriosuly crap tools that double as traps, and that the town power could be more distributed. The lack of protective roles is insufficient as a balancing factor, and just makes the whole thing more swingy.
I don't know what the actual involvment was for each member of the mod team, but I have some advice that I intend constructively:
Wuffles - Your games are always town sided (and I'm going way back to thgames ings like Fairytale Mafia) because the town get more and more interesting tools than the scum do. This appears to me to stem from your preference/ease with creating town roles and a dislike/struggle with scum roles. Your games are super cool and imaginative, but you need to focus on the interplay and fun for the scum more than you currently do, and confront (the diffcult act of) cutting or modifying stuff that is really cool but ultaimtely not good for the game as a whole.
Osie - I think you need to spend more time looking at the bigger picture of a game. I think you can focus too much on minutiae or neat interactions/possibilities or individual things being cool and lose sight of the overall balance/interplay between teams.
Grapefruit - I understand your desire to explore the "additional messaging" mechanics, but you need to produce more incentive to use them - people don't need to send thoughts, and only rarely will gambit by privately revealing action results etc. I think ultimately the space has been explored and found to not be nearly as interesting as it could be in principle, but I can't fault your dedication. I do, however, think you need to ensure that games you make not only have a neat mechanic and ways to interact with it (message passing or not), but that they are also fundamentally balanced. Recall, for example, the dubious usage of the Jailer in Neighbours, and I think there's something of a (small dataset!) pattern of getting caught up in mechanics and the excitement of how they might be used that neglects the important step of bulding solid, balanced foundations.
Despite all my complaining, the game was fun-if-nervewracking, and there was a lot of scope for interesting things to happen even if they didn't manifest, as well as future design space. The flavour was good and the moderation was excellent. I would certainly encourage Grape (and his reviewers) to continue making games, just with more introspection about overall balance.
I'm confused why you didn't use any VCA vaimes. Eco never voted a buddy, and always NKed people starting to find him suspicious. There was tonnes you could do.
While this is very true, there's a a decent amount of hypocrisy here - orthodox analysis isn't exactly a common component of your play, and I think a lot of people would really appreciate it if it was. Without rolling power, you'd have very much been in the frame for the lynch on D1.
Also I'm going to hold you to this:
It'll be good for your health, and maybe your scumhunting too.
I have a lot to say about the setup, but I'm on a phone so right now I'm going to bask in this win. Thank you Highroller, and no hard feelings vaimes I hope.
Incidentally, the item I got was a one-shot roleblock. Woulda been really useful yesterday...
So, I'm going to reread the thread and then cast my vote. The thing is, I'm probably not going to have a whole lot of spare time tomorrow, so the vote will probably come Thursday. So I guess you guys are going to have a day of staring each other down.
... I'm kind of afraid to think of what might happen by the end of Wednesday.
The sexual tension might become unbearable by then.
Vote Vaimes. I don't really have anything in the way of a case, but at least Vaimes being confirmed as the last scum explains why GJ was distancing so enthusiastically but never actually pushed him. He's clearly come into toDay with a Plan, although I have to say "I'm too bad at scum to be scum here" is a very weak line to take.
Grapefruit is refusing to answer if scum can kill and use an ability either way, which is unfortunate because if he did I could have been cleared by now.
Switching your vote at the 11th hour with no compelling reason either way doesn't look a lot like wanting to get it right toDay but ok. If we no lynch I will scream.
Ecophagy, what were your thoughts on GJ at this point?
I don't really remember, but I do remember spending the early game not really understanding why GJ was so widely read as town and disliking his reluctance to vote. But I never really dug into it because I was focussing on Shadow (oops).
Ecophagy:
Can you walk us through your mindset when tomsloger counterclaimed vezok and your not voting vezok?
Well my initial response wasn't super enthusiastic because at the time Tom was my top scum read, but the soft counter claim was a) not likely a play scum Tom would have made, and b) I knew that I gave Cheesecake the Watch shot and potentially had more up my sleeve, which meant that one of the investigative claims was probably a lie. I also lost a bit of the plot and thought the situation had a Riku vs Vezok angle, until I managed to work out that Vezok telling the truth would have cleared Riku as well. By the time I was comfortable enough with Vezok being the scum, he had a lot of votes and I didn't want to put him in self hammer range and end the day prematurely. GJ clearly was keen to get his buddy dead before Vezok could spew so he put the vote down instead.
Quote from HR »
Can you walk us through your mindset for being skeptical when Riku claimed to have roleblocked GJ and not voting for GJ?
I didn't remember expressing scepticism, so I looked back. It turns out I was sceptical in #1206 - but about GJ's claim. I was perhaps giving him more credit than he deserved by trying to think through what his claim being true would have meant, but it was imaginative enough to be worth a momentary pause. I did actually think that LnG's vote in #1232 was the L-1 vote so I tried to hammer for a coin, but it turns out I'm bad at counting. If I'd have known he was already at L-1 I'd have dropped it earlier to cut off the self hammer - or at least asked for someone to unvote.
With regards to the setup Cantrip, I think it definitely is town sided, even if the last scum has something rolecop-y. I think the mod/reviewers underestimated the strength of the VT cop, overestimated the drawback of the town having no real protective roles, or overestimated GJ's bonus coin. Or all three really. But I can at least see the train of thought - with no doc/BG/jailer/etc then there's a very real chance the town's 3 power roles just get mown down without achieving much, but the possibility of that doesn't balance the investigative strength. I wouldn't take GJ at face value, but his anger is likely based in a very real belief that the scum team is underpowered.
Had a look through GJ's ISO for references to Vaimes and LnGrrrR, and there is a decent amount of interaction but not a lot of solving (GJ didn't actually do that much solving on anyone). Broadly, LnGrrrR is listed as a townish read for "TWTBAW", whereas he treats Vaimes as a borderline scum read - not enough to ever get voted or actually analysed, but enough to be in the pool. These are most clearly captured in #672. I'm actually struggling to get anything particularly interesting - I think #1133 and #430 are neat because he mentions both of them in the same post, but the stances are consistent and I don't know how indicative they really are. I generally get the impression that GJ knows that as scum you need to interact a lot with everyone including your buddies.
As something of an aside, I'm still surprised that GJ and Vezok were scum together. It's one thing to call the non-poster-who-is-your-buddy scum for distancing, but it's another thing entirely to call name their replacment your top scum read and vote them. Given that the scum strategy seems to have been based pretty heavily on distancing/bussing then I'd say Vaimes looks worse off given that GJ repeatedly named him as a suspect but never dug into it. But GJ didn't really dig into his scum read on Rhand or Highroller either, so it's not an earth-shattering revelation.
Looking through these ISOs has made me more nervous about Vaimes, but I still think that individually speaking Vaimes has been the less scummy of the two (mostly down to LnGrrrR's enthusiasm to solve the Tom/Eco "dichotomy", and Tom's reliable read on Vaimes). Ultimately though, it doesn't matter to me which order we lynch them in.
I'm re-reading through at the moment, trying to collect thoughts, but so far besides a few "Hmmm" type posts there isn't a lot out there that I can point to as an "A-ha!" moment. Whoever is the last scum is playing pretty well.
tbh I think it's mostly because the game has been on auto-pilot since Tom counterclaimed Vezok. No-one has had to really think that hard since then so there's not that much genuine content to analyse.
I was inspired to have a look through Vezok's posts for any other interactions with Vaimes and LnG, but there weren't really any interesting ones. The best is probably #1106 where Vezok admonishes both of them for voting him after Tom claimed. This would be significantly more useful if he'd mentioned anyone else instead of one of them, but it's the sort of snark that could definitely be directed at a buddy that Vezok is cross at for being snap voted by. The additional singling out of Vaimes is maybe indicative of him being the buddy Vezok is annoyed at, but that's pretty tenuous.
Setup - In my opinion, this game was grossly town-sided. I predicted as much pre-game, but I very much underestimated it. I'm sure a lot of these things have been considered already, but I spent a lot of my solitude stewing over the setup so I'm going to comment at length anyway.
VT Cop - This role is only fractionally weaker than a full alignment cop. With 11 not-him players, he investigates TEN of them as accurately as an alignment cop, with Riku being the only exception. The single coin cost isn't really a hinderance since being on the lynch is easy if you want to, I only wasn't because I a) didn't want to lynch my buddies and b) didn't want to give the town more tools. So as a 90% full alignment cop, the role is overpowered. And "follow-the-cop" is a significantly less fun game than mafia is. Role would be better as a vanilla cop, as at least the rich scum would show up clear and the potential existance of goons makes the cop far less certain. Or 2 or even 3 coin cost.
Tracker/1-shot RB - This role is strong but fine. It could have been argued as a scum role, which is good. But it would be weaker (and much more interesting) if it could track messages. Since as the game stood, a positive result would be scum 3/4 actions (vezok, me, NK vs Tom), which is a high hit rate. Also him not costing coins to track was unexpected - it seems out of place in the setup, which I was expecting to have lots of weakish abilities that cost coins, rather than all the town power concentrated in two players.
Rich Townies - I am absolutely baffled as to why these guys counted as vanilla. The game becomes a million times more interesting if they show up as not-VT to the cop and can be tracked (and also show up as non-vanilla on Vezok's cop shot). On top of that, having three Rich Townies vs one Rich Scum should really have meant all or most of the Rich townies should have been cleared once GJ flipped - it was clear scum needed more power than 2 Rich + Vezok, and GJ not claiming Rich meant that the scum didn't think it was a safe claim (which it probably is if they have 2 since that would suggest more). So potentially clearing THREE townies off one scum death is broken, and I'm incredibly glad everyone just ignored it. Furthermore, they didn't really add anything to the game - messaging is already of limited use, and the ability to send an extra one doesn't make them any more useful.
Messaging - This came up in spec chat, but ultimately the mechanic was a bit pointless - as borne out by the lack of messages sent. It was correctly identified that those who can use it most (power roles) are constrained by it costing their Night action. And there's very little need for other townies to send messages since their thoughts would already be in thread. Very infrequent are the times where you do an important enough re-read during Night that absolutely MUST be passed on. Sending messages mostly only existed to prove another Night action wasn't taken (which would have been very breakable if scum had been relying on more roleblocks near the end of the game). The tracebility of knowing who gets coins also limited the ability for the scum to send disruptive/misleading messages.
Rich Scum - Seperate to the issue of him clearing the Rich townies, this role plus the sharing of coins made it look like just a goon who existed to give us a bonus-start coin that we could use to rush Vezok's vanilla cop shot or ensure we got a Night action. This made it appear unsafe to claim, whereas I imagine the mods were expecting all the Rich guys to claim at once and have a jolly old laugh at it all. It would have been very useful to know there were other Rich players in the game! This isn't necessarily bad, but I think it indicates the designers not considering the game from the scum perspective and just looking at the game with full knowledge.
Scum Vanilla cop/RBer - This role is crap: the 2-cost vanilla cop is very weak, overcosted, and tells us nothing about the Rich townies. I think a 1-coin rolecop would have been completely fair, even if the roleblock cost 2 coins. A second roleblock shot would have been nice, but that's not a disaster.
Quartermaster - I am generally against giving scum roles that only exist to appear town. I am rather against scum roles that are difficult to use for the scum (Watch shots are much better at finding protectives than investigatives, and giving an item to a scum buddy is high risk). I am very against roles like that that give the town very powerful tools (like Watch shots and Roleblocks). I am completely against it when the items you can give are actually traps because the town already so much investigate power that more is suspicious AND they already have a bonus roleblock, AND the role itself doesn't really fit into the setup on the town side. Pretty much everything about my role was a disaster and I'm quite cross about it (apart from the flavour, that was cool). It's one thing to give scum a role that actively works against their own team, but quite another to stip any benefit from it as well.
Overall - I'm disappointed in the balance and setup to be honest. I know this isn't easy and the focus was more on the possibilities of message sending and how Rich townies or scum might use them to gain an edge, but it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that a virtually full alignment cop is overpowered and that the scum have some seriosuly crap tools that double as traps, and that the town power could be more distributed. The lack of protective roles is insufficient as a balancing factor, and just makes the whole thing more swingy.
I don't know what the actual involvment was for each member of the mod team, but I have some advice that I intend constructively:
Despite all my complaining, the game was fun-if-nervewracking, and there was a lot of scope for interesting things to happen even if they didn't manifest, as well as future design space. The flavour was good and the moderation was excellent. I would certainly encourage Grape (and his reviewers) to continue making games, just with more introspection about overall balance.
While this is very true, there's a a decent amount of hypocrisy here - orthodox analysis isn't exactly a common component of your play, and I think a lot of people would really appreciate it if it was. Without rolling power, you'd have very much been in the frame for the lynch on D1.
Also I'm going to hold you to this:
It'll be good for your health, and maybe your scumhunting too.
I have a lot to say about the setup, but I'm on a phone so right now I'm going to bask in this win. Thank you Highroller, and no hard feelings vaimes I hope.
Trust yourself.
And I won't strangle you if you lynch Vaimes.
The sexual tension might become unbearable by then.
Grapefruit is refusing to answer if scum can kill and use an ability either way, which is unfortunate because if he did I could have been cleared by now.
I don't really remember, but I do remember spending the early game not really understanding why GJ was so widely read as town and disliking his reluctance to vote. But I never really dug into it because I was focussing on Shadow (oops).
Well my initial response wasn't super enthusiastic because at the time Tom was my top scum read, but the soft counter claim was a) not likely a play scum Tom would have made, and b) I knew that I gave Cheesecake the Watch shot and potentially had more up my sleeve, which meant that one of the investigative claims was probably a lie. I also lost a bit of the plot and thought the situation had a Riku vs Vezok angle, until I managed to work out that Vezok telling the truth would have cleared Riku as well. By the time I was comfortable enough with Vezok being the scum, he had a lot of votes and I didn't want to put him in self hammer range and end the day prematurely. GJ clearly was keen to get his buddy dead before Vezok could spew so he put the vote down instead.
I didn't remember expressing scepticism, so I looked back. It turns out I was sceptical in #1206 - but about GJ's claim. I was perhaps giving him more credit than he deserved by trying to think through what his claim being true would have meant, but it was imaginative enough to be worth a momentary pause. I did actually think that LnG's vote in #1232 was the L-1 vote so I tried to hammer for a coin, but it turns out I'm bad at counting. If I'd have known he was already at L-1 I'd have dropped it earlier to cut off the self hammer - or at least asked for someone to unvote.
As something of an aside, I'm still surprised that GJ and Vezok were scum together. It's one thing to call the non-poster-who-is-your-buddy scum for distancing, but it's another thing entirely to call name their replacment your top scum read and vote them. Given that the scum strategy seems to have been based pretty heavily on distancing/bussing then I'd say Vaimes looks worse off given that GJ repeatedly named him as a suspect but never dug into it. But GJ didn't really dig into his scum read on Rhand or Highroller either, so it's not an earth-shattering revelation.
Looking through these ISOs has made me more nervous about Vaimes, but I still think that individually speaking Vaimes has been the less scummy of the two (mostly down to LnGrrrR's enthusiasm to solve the Tom/Eco "dichotomy", and Tom's reliable read on Vaimes). Ultimately though, it doesn't matter to me which order we lynch them in.
tbh I think it's mostly because the game has been on auto-pilot since Tom counterclaimed Vezok. No-one has had to really think that hard since then so there's not that much genuine content to analyse.