I think Kami was just saying that we -- the Council -- are ultimately the authority that decides whether probation or blacklisting is the appropriate course of action when things get out of hand. I doubt he meant to imply that no one should express an opinion on the matter.
For what it's worth, I value the external input, particularly from board moderators and former Councilors like Iso, but also just from regular members; what you all consider to be over the line, etc. is important to me (at least) because this isn't my mafia forum, it's yours.
That said, we're discussing this internally for the moment. I'm not comfortable having an in-depth public discussion about it until after the game is over, since I'd like to avoid damaging the integrity of the game any further.
I think we're just approaching mafia strategy from different angles. If you crown a low impact player in order to minimize the impact of the double vote, you're also cutting yourself off from a mislynch you might need (no offense to Bur, of course). If you know you're going to kill Voxxicus/Iso/GJ or whoever on N1, there's no reason to cut yourself off from a potential mislynch on D1.
If you have a bunch of mislynches and you're confident you don't need another, that's fine, but you're not actually giving up info by killing the king each night. Either way, town has two dead bodies and one confirmed town to work with.
I think a 2v7 is probably too difficult for the wolves to win, given that town has an Innocent Child who is also a Double Voter. 9 players is also a mini, not a micro. An 11 player 3v8 is a mini, too, though that one gets you the three mislynch lylo and the extra wolf would make it not as much of a struggle. A 1v6 gets you the extra mislynch but it'd be almost impossible for the wolf to win that game, I think. It's probably fine as is, there isn't much you can do to squeeze extra mislynches out of micros really.
The simple solution to the double vote problem is just to make it not splittable, as a single vote that counts twice or something like that. This way it can still break ties and force through a lynch in F3 even if the players haven't crossvoted for some reason. I guess the King doesn't really need the vote, but you're simultaneously arguing for removing part of the town power while also claiming the game as-is is too wolf-sided.
Well, kind of. The idea I think is that you choose who to lynch first and then torches and pitchforks come out, I guess. There's an accusation and then at least half the game has to agree to form an angry mob, otherwise they don't have enough people to not be stopped by the others.
Buuuut yeah. On the one hand I agree that "lynch" has a lot of, frankly disgusting, historical baggage, but it's so ingrained into the game I'm not sure that removing it is really feasible. Like, you and I could agree to use a different word in vote counts, etc. but it's unlikely to catch on, especially considering we have cross site players and the wider mafia community is unlikely to adopt it... and I'm not even sure I'd want to enforce an alternative to the word even if I could persuade the rest of the Council.
I'd be interested in an alternative to "lynch", but it does match the reality of the basic game of Werewolf and no alternatives immediately spring to mind.
I think your analysis of where things went wrong is pretty, good, don't really have anything to add there.
I absolutely don't think it would be appropriate to modkill people for policy lynching. It isn't game throwing to use the lynch to remove a player who is intentionally making it difficult or impossible to read them by using a self-imposed posting restriction, particularly one like SoundCloud linking or playing pictograms.
If anything, the player using the post restriction is playing against their own wincon as both alignments, particularly when a bunch of the players have told them they will policy lynch them if they don't stop.
It isn't at all about making meta reads "easier", some of these post restrictions make posts either entirely incomprehensible or inaccessible. If someone is trying to dodge meta reads because their meta makes the game unfun for them (which, honestly, should only apply to a few players who warp games around themselves, like Voxxicus, due to their reputation) a much better option would be playing as a gimmick or actually adapting their meta to make it harder to read.
Edit: I won't pretend that I remember every post restriction from the last two years, but I have read 99% of games and the only one I remember that comes close to the ones used here was tom's spider... besides the serial killer cat Cythare in Star Trek Myriad Universes IV, which was mod imposed.
Actually wanted to ask you guys why you went with the "make Bur king and never kill him" strategy rather than the "make a strong player king and kill them each night" one. I guess as long as Bur is king you can just keep killing a strong player anyway and it sort of neutralized the double vote, but was there another reason?
Oh, right, it is the same size as a mini. You can run it as mini if you want to, then, or wait until the next basic fires. Main thing I was saying is that the timeframe for the next basic is completely unknown, but we can pencil you in at the top of the basic list if you want.
Reason they aren't combined is because basics are guaranteed to be low complexity while minis can be (almost) anything.
I don't believe there's a real "basic queue," they sort of just fire once there's enough players who want to play one. You could probably run it as a normal without changes though, or cut it down to a mini if that's not too much trouble. Or we could just pencil you in for the next one or something, I don't really know what's going on with basics at the moment to be honest.
As far as stats for C9 go, since that's a noob set up I'm not sure those stats are comparable to whether this set up, played by reasonably experienced players is balanced.
MU's 12v3 mountainous is probably a better comparison, but this isn't strictly a 12v4 mountainous it's a 12v4 with vig if everything goes wrong for town roles and none of them do anything.
I don't generally evaluate roles strictly by point value, either, my point is that even if you use his scale you have to contort the point values to unreasonable extents to make the game significantly scum sided.
I think its widely unreasonable to give the mafia GB goon status of + 0 and the town all three of the GB roles as power. Its either two for town or the mafia pick up that point of power in their own accommodation.
I was using your own values there, you said the mafia Ghostbuster was worth the same as a goon so I gave it goon points. Give it an extra point, that literally doesn't change the thrust of my post at all.
The JoaT is pure garbage for what it does.
RB is good.
Role flips whoopty doo.
Bus driver is so ******* hit and miss, I can **** the town over as much as I **** the scum over with that.
You're choosing the floor and arguing it's the average case. Average case is that it does stone cold nothing, for all of these roles, which makes the set up mountainous with an extra town kill. Do you fundamentally disagree with this assessment or not?
Also, role flips are a very, very strong ability in no flip set-ups, and getting delayed actually makes them better since you get an extra flip for the same activation.
I think fundamentally part of the problem is you're bad at playing mafia. And I mean the alignment.
I'm bad at actively posting as mafia and rolereading, I'm not that bad at night action assessment lol.
Scum just have way more power in this game. They can sit back and watch and react to town and they really are kings of the castle in this game for being able to always succeed in the kill they want with very little claims from the town. I'm looking at this from the prospective of a holistic approach you seem to be looking very much at each tree.
I'd argue the reverse , you're the one trying to say "the individual mafia roles are too strong, look at this garbage tracker they're competing with" while I'm saying the town as a whole is roughly balanced against the wolves.
This town is garbage. I'm baffled that you think otherwise.
Also, you can definitely claim the Rodemy and Delayer roles. Once again bad at playing mafia here. Its really holding you back. You are making hand waving arguments and you don't understand.
You reallllly can't claim those and use them in a scum sided way, dude. And if you town side with them, then what's the point? Also, you're doing waaaay more handwaving than I am here.
You mentioned in scum chat that I didn't want to claim the two shot of revealing roles, and you thought that was the most town ability I had. I saw it as a SK claim, I was aware of the problems it presented in claiming that.
What? Two shots of mass gravedigger, dumping flip info into the public where it's most relevant for town, is a serial killer ability?
I just think you're bad at mafia and that's why you don't understand.
The tracker is sort of real power but it can turn itself off night one. Its so ******* swingy. Its a bad role.
I'm not saying it isn't swingy, I'm saying it should be a CC to the loud mafia role at worst and is virtually a full tracker at best. I don't like the role myself, I don't go in for the swingy ones and I probably wouldn't have passed this set up in review just on the number of swingy roles alone, but that doesn't mean it's useless. And I only gave it a half point anyway, yep, I gave it half tracker points even though it only disables itself 25% of the time. That's a bargain.
The GB is power, but its hard to figure out what to rate them, they work as a collective and sort of in an interesting way. You want to rate all three of the towns higher, but you're ignoring the mafia one and not giving the mafia any power for that. Ehhh seems like a noob decision to me.
Dude, look. The first two are worth a vig at least, right? The third at worst forces the wolf to target someone in the PoE. Same for the wolf, he stops the other kill from landing on a partner but the kill still has to be in the PoE and is therefore, at least slightly, townsided. But fine. Give the first two .75, the third .5, and the wolf a full point for all I care, you aren't engaging in the core of the criticism I gave you, you're nitpicking point values while refusing to concretely assign your own in order to sidestep the actual point of my post.
Which is that these point scales aren't objective, but that the game is roughly balanced according to them anyway, and that the floor for this game is a 12v4 with a town day vig versus the ceiling which is multiple stopped kills and tracked/CC'd wolves. The average game is going to be between those two extremes, clearly, but even if you're right that the game is slightly scum sided, the mere idea that it might be slightly town sided is not so ludicrous that I deserve to be insulted the way you've been insulting me since the beginning of this conversation.
You realize there are hero shots in this game right? I've continually brought it up.
Yes, and? What does that have to do with literally anything? What's the point of an extra role cop + witch when you're the last wolf left? I guess it's somewhat useful if it's, like, a 1v8 or something, but at that point you're so far behind you're hosed anyway, one more shot of anything other than an extra kill isn't really worth points. If you're in F3 the shot does nothing. The delayer shot activates earlier and could be somewhat more relevant, I guess, but is it worth another .5 points? I don't think so, but you know what? Fine. Give the delayer another half point and the Rolecop+Witch another full point for all I care. Or vice-versa. Unless you think the Tracker is worth a Town Alignment Cop that still only puts the wolves at 19.5 while overvaluing the wolf ghostbuster at a full point even though he can't place his shot at will versus the town's 17 (with two ghostbusters at .75 and the third at .5 because wolves can mess with it or whatever).
This still doesn't matter, because the point is that you have to completely contort reasonable point assignments for these roles to make this significantly scum sided, and I think that's why you're refusing to concretely assign points to most of these roles.
Your whole arguments seem disingenuous to me. Its like you are avoiding talking about some things and really only trying to fight like one battle. Its just such bad logic. Its not all of their power, the town has like no power. The scum have limited power, but its ******* defined and they know what they have. They also get hero shots and you're ignoring that in your analysis.
Wow, okay, wolves can coordinate and town can't??? That's super strong, maybe we should ban mafia night talk too??????
Stop treating me like I've never played a game before and engage me on the substance of my argument.
Vanilla cop isn't bad, it isn't good, and its just a potential?
I'm not downplaying, the doc is a doc. Its not worth much more than that, and its not worth less. Vig is vig shot I'm not sure how to rate it, I don't think its that much stronger than a normal vig in the game, but I'm not sure its weaker either.
Joat is pretty bad and the tracker is so swingy its hard to figure out.
Okay, but do you fundamentally disagree with my assessment of their point values? If we rate the Ghostbusters at .5 each (including the wolf buster), the Doc at 1 point, the joat and tracker at .5, then wolves only come out (significantly) ahead if you rate their tracker at the same strength as a Town Alignment Cop. Does that really seem so unreasonable to you that it deserves saying you're talking to someone who's never played Mafia before, or are you going to continue dismissing me without actually engaging with the argument I'm presenting?
Town's power CAN be insane, but more likely than not its not going to be. The tracker disables itself. The Joat can **** the town over almost as much as it can **** the mafia over. Its like you've never played mafia before. You've never seen a RB, block the town doc.
Uh. Yes, I have, and we're talking floors again now, and the floor for this game is 12v4 with a town vig. I don't think that's too scum sided. Could it lose a game that would otherwise be saved? Yeah, sure, but we aren't talking average cases anymore, you're cherry picking bad things that can happen with town roles and saying that's the average case. I already agreed the wolf roles have a higher floor, I just don't think that matters as much.
But, yes, your point about "what if the game was mountainous" is well taken. See, the wolf abilities don't actually do anything except block town abilities. That means even if the wolves perfectly blocked every single town action and the Tracker disabled himself on N1, it would just be a 16/4 mountainous game with at least one extra lynch the mafia cannot vote for due to the Ghostbuster kill.
Come on you've played mafia, you should know normal setups. Normal setups are like 3 goons 9 VT and a jailer and a doc. That's like slightly town favored but not much. I just feel like I'm arguing with someone that hasn't played mafia.
What does this have to do with... literally anything? It has nothing to do with my claim that the ceiling for wolves is to make the game effectively a 12v4 with a town vig. You're just quoting stuff I've said so you can dismiss it without even engaging it. I'm not even actually sure you read my post as much as you selectively quoted it and ignored the stuff you couldn't argue against.
Your logic is lack of safe claims, even though all of the roles are safe claimable. Ways of catching wolves is off, because of this also that vanilla cop might never turn on and likely won't in most games. Tracker is like Ehh sometimes they hit sometimes they don't(Also the tracker can track the doc to the GB and the mafia can force the kill on that player). Town doesn't have any info. The vanilla cop may turn on but likely it won't. The JoAT likely is going to **** with the doctor as much as with the town.
Uh, no the roles are definitely not safe claimable. You cannot use those roles in a wolf sided way and claim them, and the rolecop+witch is outright a wolf role, that's nearly never town. The tracker should get CC'd immediately and is loud. The delayer is possibly claimable but only if you town side with it / only target scum reads.
I just feel like you've never played mafia. That's what this feels like. Its bizarro land to me.
Cut this ***** out. It's rude, it's demeaning, and it doesn't help your argument. It doesn't make me a fundamentally bad player or game designer because I disagree with you to within a couple of points on an arbitrary scale made up by someone neither of us have ever actually talked to.
The night kill is not really disrupted though that's the problem. 3 out of 12 of the town have a guaranteed kill on them 25%, the mafia also can safe guard from the RB by just using kami. The busdriver is going to be just as likely to **** with the doc as with the mafia. The doc is powerful, but its also going to die.
"The night kill isn't disruptable, but here's all the ways the nightkill is disruptable that I'm handwaving as bad while accusing you of handwaving wolf power. Also, I'm gonna say that a quarter of the town was unprotectable even though I already know the strong man only works once and automatically activates the first time you target one so it's more like 1 in 12 town are unprotectable."
Your whole analysis just really lacks for the power of the wolves and I think that's because you don't know how to play wolves.
Your whole analysis really lacks for the power of the town and I think it's because you don't know how to play town.
Yeah yeah, but scum sided to me means if you run the game 100 times the scum win 60 the town win 40. Its a probability game. The scum have counters to literally everything the town can do, and in ways that feels almost unfair. If this game was to be run a lot, the mafia would always be able to save their abilities for the town PR claims that inevitably happen in mafia and then pick the town off at their leisure. The moment the doc claims the mafia can guarantee for at least two nights with the delayer that person doesn't do anything. And they can target another player as well.
I mean, yes, that's what's scum sided (or town sided) means, it means that on average one side defeats the other instead of being "perfectly" balanced (not that a game really can be perfectly balanced). "Roughly balanced" means maybe within 10% of each other (55-45 in either direction) so we're only off on evaluation by 12% of games? I think it's more like 52-48 town sided so if you think it's 60-40 scum sided, then, yeah. (But I don't think your math further on shows that it's 60-40 scum sided, either, it shows roughly balanced with a slight scum side if you value vigs and docs the same as trackers.)
I just don't value town kills nearly as much as other people do I guess. Vigs in good hands can be brutal, in bad hands they can be equally brutal. Extra kills like this are basically extra lynches, they pretty decent. But, that's really the only power the town had. And that's the issue. It isn't that the town didn't have power, its that the town had limited power.
The Ghostbusters absolutely are real power. The doctorguard is real power. The tracker is real power. The JoAT is real power (1 shot bus driver plus 1 shot roleblock, plus the 2 shot grave digger that gave more set up information than Cantrip usually gives out). The neighborizers can get a reusable vanilla cop shot that looks pretty strong in this set up since neither I nor Rodemy can actually claim our roles and we only have one fake claim (and Rodemy's role using it could actually be caught out by Tubba trying to track him and getting disabled).
You're seeming to ignore how much of an advantage on paper the mafia have over town. The mafia can **** with all of the power roles in a single night. Hell, they get the super witch on me it isn't even hard for them to do so. RB one, delay the other two, and **** me over as well wasting my one shot.
Yes, if Ivo Shandor targets exactly the JoAT on N1 and wolves spend all of their other resources to hose them specifically, the JoAT gets hosed, but it's not like the delay actually messes with the gravedigger shots anyway, and it uses basically all of the wolves' resources. The delay barely affects the doctorguard unless wolves target the same player he tries to because they still get cocooned.
I'm not ignoring the mafia's advantages, but I feel like you're downplaying the extra lynches, the doctorguard, the tracker, the potential vanilla cop, etc.
It just feels like you are not taking into account the litany of scum powers that exist in the game. All four of the mafia have power. The town has like 5 members that really have power and then the gatekeeper/keymaster roles. But that's not even true.
The wolf Ghostbuster doesn't have power, lol. That role merely ensures that one of the Ghostbuster kills is on a villager or that, at least, it can't kill a wolf (at the risk of tying yourself to them if they're lynched anyway). That's not a power role, it's a limitation on a town power. Requiring the other Ghostbuster also ensures that the kill is inside of the PoE and gives information because they aren't going to sign off on the wolf trying to daykill the towniest player in the game.
The town have the GB's lets give them .5 each That's what they are worth.
A doctor thing(True power role)
Then they have a tracker that loses their tracking.
A JoaT that has one ability that is sort of meh(The role flips) and two abilities.
And then the keymasters, which may or may not ever find each other and then their ability is OK afterwords.
At best the town have 6.5 power roles. In practice its something more like 4.
I hard disagree that the Ghostbusters are only worth a half point each, lol what even is that. A vig is worth 3 points by Axelrod's point method, so the first two should be worth 1.25 points at minimum. Maaaaybe the third is only worth a VT (1 point) because a wolf has to sign off on the second kill, but giving the town a potential two full extra PoE kills and only charging them for half of a vanilla town is. Weird to me.
Okay, I read the rest of your post and you're using a different point system / math than I'm used to, and not just that, but your point system values Doctor and Vigilante at the same rate as Tracker when they're closer to Watcher in power level, I think. But sure, we'll roll with that.
Three Ghostbusters are worth .5 points each by your count (1.5)
I'm assigning Doctorguard 1 full point because Bodyguard is worth at least .5 and this is quite a lot better than that (2.5)
The tracker with a disabling limitation is worth .5 probably? (3)
The JoAT is worth at least .5 given it has a busdriver + a roleblock, though it doesn't have control over which abilities it gets first (3.5)
The Gatekeeper+Keymaster are worth a full point together, I'm sure, given they become neighbors (+.5) and have access to a repeatable vanilla cop shot and one of them is a self watcher (4.5 total)
Plus 12 points for vanillas + town bodies is 16.5.
Let's take a look at the mafia.
Mafia goon that can also have access to a day kill(I'm going to count this as a one because goons already are counted as a one by most math and this does more a lot more).
Mafia two shot delayer that can target two players
Mafia one shot ROLE COP and WITCH
Mafia PERMANENT(albeit loud) tracker plus can't be targeted.
And the mafia have access to a strong man on three players.
We're counting the Ghostbuster as a goon, yes? So that's worth 0 points of power (0)
The delayer is maybe worth a full point, I guess you could push it to 1.5 given it double targets but also, limited shots (1.5)
A oneshot rolecop+witch is maybe worth another 1. (2.5)
The tracker is worth 1.5. Maaaaybe 2 if you're really pushing it because of the ascetic bit even though it also stops the tracker from being disabled and makes them suspicious as hell. (4.5)
The strongman shot is maybe another .5, though that's generous given that it only works on 3 players and is automatically expended on the first Ghostbuster kill. Call it 5 total, I guess, which puts you at 17. Barely "scum sided" given the town's 16.5 points. Even if you give the tracker a whole extra point and make it just as a good as a Cop (which is clearly not true) the wolves only have 18.
However, (1) I believe your point system doesn't value extra kills correctly, and the Ghostbusters should be worth closer to 1 each, and (2) points being exactly equal doesn't guarantee you a perfectly balanced game anyway because it doesn't take into account interactions between roles, set up size (masons are better in smaller set ups and worse in larger ones), or anything else. This isn't a science, it's an art, and having point values exactly the same isn't the goal, it's to be roughly equal so you know the game isn't an obvious blow out. This isn't wildly unbalanced by any stretch, especially considering the Ghostbusters are probably worth closer to .75 points each if we're valuing extra kills at 1.5 as I would prefer (which puts the wolves at 18.25 at most and the town at 18.25 points).
You see the problem here? What exactly does the town do? How do you see this as being town sided? The town just sort of suck.
The problem seems to be that you're using a point system to rate the set up in a vacuum, and your point system somewhat underrates town power like cops and vigs. In my opinion. You're also using it as some kind of final, objective arbiter of balance when it pretty clearly isn't. No point system is, it's all guidelines. It's someone else's opinion about what makes sense, not an objective fact, and being roughly equivalent is the goal of these things. Not to be exactly balanced, but to be "close enough." Off by a point or two isn't going to give you significantly lopsided games.
If this was a mountainous game 4 v 12 is balanced. And that's the issue. The mafia have pound per player more fire power than the town does. By A LOT.
Mafia have to have more power per player for the set up to be balanced. They have fewer players, so to keep the set up balanced according to these point tallies you have to spread the same number of points worth of power over a smaller number of players. Say you want to give each side 8 points worth of power, that means giving Mafia 2 points per player but only giving town one point per player with 4 vanillas.
But, yes, your point about "what if the game was mountainous" is well taken. See, the wolf abilities don't actually do anything except block town abilities. That means even if the wolves perfectly blocked every single town action and the Tracker disabled himself on N1, it would just be a 16/4 mountainous game with at least one extra lynch the mafia cannot vote for due to the Ghostbuster kill.
HOWEVER, mafia gain power for each roleblock and they can target two players with it. PLUS they have the can't be targeted.
I don't understand your point about the wolves gaining power with each roleblock, but I already accounted for point assignments including double target delayer and ascetic so I guess you can just tell me what you disagree with.
Its not town sided its scum sided.
The math says this is scum sided at the outset. Compound that with weaker town roles, and stronger mafia roles and this game is scum sided.
I disagree.
I disagree that the math shows the game is scum sided to any significant extent. Even if you alter the point totals so the wolves are two points up on the town somehow, that doesn't mean the game is actually wolf sided, it means if you measure the game using that specific, arbitrary point scale the game appears to be wolf sided. In addition, I'd probably rate the the Ghostbusters at .75 each rather than .5, and maybe even the JoAT as well since it actually has quite a bit of disruption on it that can change kill targets, etc.
I disagree that just because the town roles are weaker individually that means the entire town is weaker as a whole.
I think the game is roughly balanced (within 55-45), but if it's slanted in any direction it's slanted towards the town given the lack of safe claims, ways of catching wolves like the vanilla cop, the tracker working on half of the wolves and returning suspicious results on the other (who, it must be noted, must claim his role because it's loud and who should be counterclaimed immediately by the actual town tracker), etc. Wolves needed the amount of disruption we had given the amount of information the town had in this set up (tracker that acts as a psuedo-ectocop, the repeatable vanilla cop on the neighbors, the mass gravedigger shots) in addition to the amount of night kill disruption the town has (roleblock and busdriver on the JoAT, Doctorguard).
I'm not expecting you to agree with me, dude. It's just, like, my opinion, man. But I don't think I'm being wildly unreasonable with these ratings to the point that all of the hyperbole is warranted.
Re: Ghostbusters claims, you don't think it was maybe silly for them to claim on D1, before they could shoot, when they knew there were 4 Ghostbusters ad should have suspected they weren't all town because two extra town controlled day kills is a silly, silly thing in a 16 player game with probably 4 antitown roles?
You really think "maybe use your ability before you claim unless under pressure and your claim gets you out of a lynch" is a bad argument?
I see you don't think assuming the players will know one of the Ghostbusters is a wolf is fair. I'm not saying they should have known, I'm saying they should have thought about whether it was likely or not and what they were risking by claiming before they could shoot.
Re: optimal play, no, I don't think it's nearly as clear cut as you're making it. With perfect knowledge of the set up you can say "the optimal doctor protect is this role, the optimal night kill is this one" and so on, but you can never predict which players will get which roles or whether they will be able to get town read or their claim will be believed, etc. etc. The best you can do is assign roles a floor, a ceiling, and an average/random target case, and work off of those.
The floor for wolf roles is a bit higher than the floor for town roles, though, while the ceiling for town roles is quite a bit higher than the ceiling for wolf ones. The ceiling for Tubba's role, for example, is "catches a wolf doing the night kill" and the ceiling for ZDT's role is *Stops multiple kills" while the ceiling for, say, Kami's role is him taking a night off from tracking to do the kill and him getting tracked by Tubba, but Tubba doesn't get the usual clearing message of "Kami visited no one" he gets "Your ability failed" instead, which keeps Kami in the pool of players who might have done it. Or that he can see who everyone targets, passively, except that doesn't really tell us anything except who ZDT was permaguarding after he spent a doc protect on them.
I agree the wolf roles required less skill to pilot optimally (well, delayer required fairly precise targeting to be optimal), but that doesn't mean the wolf roles were stronger overall. I think the game is roughly balanced to maybe slightly town sided, not that you all should have crushed us because you had significantly superior resources or anything like that.
I value extra kills very, very highly. So maybe that's where we disagree. I actually think the doctorguard has a lower ceiling than straight doctor because he can't protect the same target ever agai, though the floor on the role is waaay higher than straight doc.
Re: counterclaiming, I would CC another tracker claim as a tracker, 100%. Even if the other claim is believeable, at worst we spend a lynch on a neutral, at best we lynch a wolf, and I eat a night kill either way (except, you had a Doctor/Bodyguard hybrid too, which would have guaranteed he had two nights minimum to track a kill!). Games aren't designed with multiples of the same role as villagers for a reason, and I think something like 2 town trackers in a closed set up is very bastard.
Edit: as far as ascetic roles on wolves, no, I'm not really a fan of them in general, but they're much better/less bastard than ninjas and godfathers.
For what it's worth, I value the external input, particularly from board moderators and former Councilors like Iso, but also just from regular members; what you all consider to be over the line, etc. is important to me (at least) because this isn't my mafia forum, it's yours.
That said, we're discussing this internally for the moment. I'm not comfortable having an in-depth public discussion about it until after the game is over, since I'd like to avoid damaging the integrity of the game any further.
If you have a bunch of mislynches and you're confident you don't need another, that's fine, but you're not actually giving up info by killing the king each night. Either way, town has two dead bodies and one confirmed town to work with.
I think a 2v7 is probably too difficult for the wolves to win, given that town has an Innocent Child who is also a Double Voter. 9 players is also a mini, not a micro. An 11 player 3v8 is a mini, too, though that one gets you the three mislynch lylo and the extra wolf would make it not as much of a struggle. A 1v6 gets you the extra mislynch but it'd be almost impossible for the wolf to win that game, I think. It's probably fine as is, there isn't much you can do to squeeze extra mislynches out of micros really.
The simple solution to the double vote problem is just to make it not splittable, as a single vote that counts twice or something like that. This way it can still break ties and force through a lynch in F3 even if the players haven't crossvoted for some reason. I guess the King doesn't really need the vote, but you're simultaneously arguing for removing part of the town power while also claiming the game as-is is too wolf-sided.
Buuuut yeah. On the one hand I agree that "lynch" has a lot of, frankly disgusting, historical baggage, but it's so ingrained into the game I'm not sure that removing it is really feasible. Like, you and I could agree to use a different word in vote counts, etc. but it's unlikely to catch on, especially considering we have cross site players and the wider mafia community is unlikely to adopt it... and I'm not even sure I'd want to enforce an alternative to the word even if I could persuade the rest of the Council.
I think your analysis of where things went wrong is pretty, good, don't really have anything to add there.
I absolutely don't think it would be appropriate to modkill people for policy lynching. It isn't game throwing to use the lynch to remove a player who is intentionally making it difficult or impossible to read them by using a self-imposed posting restriction, particularly one like SoundCloud linking or playing pictograms.
If anything, the player using the post restriction is playing against their own wincon as both alignments, particularly when a bunch of the players have told them they will policy lynch them if they don't stop.
It isn't at all about making meta reads "easier", some of these post restrictions make posts either entirely incomprehensible or inaccessible. If someone is trying to dodge meta reads because their meta makes the game unfun for them (which, honestly, should only apply to a few players who warp games around themselves, like Voxxicus, due to their reputation) a much better option would be playing as a gimmick or actually adapting their meta to make it harder to read.
Edit: I won't pretend that I remember every post restriction from the last two years, but I have read 99% of games and the only one I remember that comes close to the ones used here was tom's spider... besides the serial killer cat Cythare in Star Trek Myriad Universes IV, which was mod imposed.
Unless KJ is radically opposed to the idea for some reason.
Reason they aren't combined is because basics are guaranteed to be low complexity while minis can be (almost) anything.
/in/spectate
MU's 12v3 mountainous is probably a better comparison, but this isn't strictly a 12v4 mountainous it's a 12v4 with vig if everything goes wrong for town roles and none of them do anything.
I don't generally evaluate roles strictly by point value, either, my point is that even if you use his scale you have to contort the point values to unreasonable extents to make the game significantly scum sided.
You're choosing the floor and arguing it's the average case. Average case is that it does stone cold nothing, for all of these roles, which makes the set up mountainous with an extra town kill. Do you fundamentally disagree with this assessment or not?
Also, role flips are a very, very strong ability in no flip set-ups, and getting delayed actually makes them better since you get an extra flip for the same activation.
I'm bad at actively posting as mafia and rolereading, I'm not that bad at night action assessment lol.
I'd argue the reverse , you're the one trying to say "the individual mafia roles are too strong, look at this garbage tracker they're competing with" while I'm saying the town as a whole is roughly balanced against the wolves.
You reallllly can't claim those and use them in a scum sided way, dude. And if you town side with them, then what's the point? Also, you're doing waaaay more handwaving than I am here.
What? Two shots of mass gravedigger, dumping flip info into the public where it's most relevant for town, is a serial killer ability?
I'm not saying it isn't swingy, I'm saying it should be a CC to the loud mafia role at worst and is virtually a full tracker at best. I don't like the role myself, I don't go in for the swingy ones and I probably wouldn't have passed this set up in review just on the number of swingy roles alone, but that doesn't mean it's useless. And I only gave it a half point anyway, yep, I gave it half tracker points even though it only disables itself 25% of the time. That's a bargain.
Dude, look. The first two are worth a vig at least, right? The third at worst forces the wolf to target someone in the PoE. Same for the wolf, he stops the other kill from landing on a partner but the kill still has to be in the PoE and is therefore, at least slightly, townsided. But fine. Give the first two .75, the third .5, and the wolf a full point for all I care, you aren't engaging in the core of the criticism I gave you, you're nitpicking point values while refusing to concretely assign your own in order to sidestep the actual point of my post.
Which is that these point scales aren't objective, but that the game is roughly balanced according to them anyway, and that the floor for this game is a 12v4 with a town day vig versus the ceiling which is multiple stopped kills and tracked/CC'd wolves. The average game is going to be between those two extremes, clearly, but even if you're right that the game is slightly scum sided, the mere idea that it might be slightly town sided is not so ludicrous that I deserve to be insulted the way you've been insulting me since the beginning of this conversation.
Yes, and? What does that have to do with literally anything? What's the point of an extra role cop + witch when you're the last wolf left? I guess it's somewhat useful if it's, like, a 1v8 or something, but at that point you're so far behind you're hosed anyway, one more shot of anything other than an extra kill isn't really worth points. If you're in F3 the shot does nothing. The delayer shot activates earlier and could be somewhat more relevant, I guess, but is it worth another .5 points? I don't think so, but you know what? Fine. Give the delayer another half point and the Rolecop+Witch another full point for all I care. Or vice-versa. Unless you think the Tracker is worth a Town Alignment Cop that still only puts the wolves at 19.5 while overvaluing the wolf ghostbuster at a full point even though he can't place his shot at will versus the town's 17 (with two ghostbusters at .75 and the third at .5 because wolves can mess with it or whatever).
This still doesn't matter, because the point is that you have to completely contort reasonable point assignments for these roles to make this significantly scum sided, and I think that's why you're refusing to concretely assign points to most of these roles.
Wow, okay, wolves can coordinate and town can't??? That's super strong, maybe we should ban mafia night talk too??????
Stop treating me like I've never played a game before and engage me on the substance of my argument.
Okay, but do you fundamentally disagree with my assessment of their point values? If we rate the Ghostbusters at .5 each (including the wolf buster), the Doc at 1 point, the joat and tracker at .5, then wolves only come out (significantly) ahead if you rate their tracker at the same strength as a Town Alignment Cop. Does that really seem so unreasonable to you that it deserves saying you're talking to someone who's never played Mafia before, or are you going to continue dismissing me without actually engaging with the argument I'm presenting?
Uh. Yes, I have, and we're talking floors again now, and the floor for this game is 12v4 with a town vig. I don't think that's too scum sided. Could it lose a game that would otherwise be saved? Yeah, sure, but we aren't talking average cases anymore, you're cherry picking bad things that can happen with town roles and saying that's the average case. I already agreed the wolf roles have a higher floor, I just don't think that matters as much.
What does this have to do with... literally anything? It has nothing to do with my claim that the ceiling for wolves is to make the game effectively a 12v4 with a town vig. You're just quoting stuff I've said so you can dismiss it without even engaging it. I'm not even actually sure you read my post as much as you selectively quoted it and ignored the stuff you couldn't argue against.
Uh, no the roles are definitely not safe claimable. You cannot use those roles in a wolf sided way and claim them, and the rolecop+witch is outright a wolf role, that's nearly never town. The tracker should get CC'd immediately and is loud. The delayer is possibly claimable but only if you town side with it / only target scum reads.
Cut this ***** out. It's rude, it's demeaning, and it doesn't help your argument. It doesn't make me a fundamentally bad player or game designer because I disagree with you to within a couple of points on an arbitrary scale made up by someone neither of us have ever actually talked to.
"The night kill isn't disruptable, but here's all the ways the nightkill is disruptable that I'm handwaving as bad while accusing you of handwaving wolf power. Also, I'm gonna say that a quarter of the town was unprotectable even though I already know the strong man only works once and automatically activates the first time you target one so it's more like 1 in 12 town are unprotectable."
Your whole analysis really lacks for the power of the town and I think it's because you don't know how to play town.
The Ghostbusters absolutely are real power. The doctorguard is real power. The tracker is real power. The JoAT is real power (1 shot bus driver plus 1 shot roleblock, plus the 2 shot grave digger that gave more set up information than Cantrip usually gives out). The neighborizers can get a reusable vanilla cop shot that looks pretty strong in this set up since neither I nor Rodemy can actually claim our roles and we only have one fake claim (and Rodemy's role using it could actually be caught out by Tubba trying to track him and getting disabled).
Yes, if Ivo Shandor targets exactly the JoAT on N1 and wolves spend all of their other resources to hose them specifically, the JoAT gets hosed, but it's not like the delay actually messes with the gravedigger shots anyway, and it uses basically all of the wolves' resources. The delay barely affects the doctorguard unless wolves target the same player he tries to because they still get cocooned.
I'm not ignoring the mafia's advantages, but I feel like you're downplaying the extra lynches, the doctorguard, the tracker, the potential vanilla cop, etc.
The wolf Ghostbuster doesn't have power, lol. That role merely ensures that one of the Ghostbuster kills is on a villager or that, at least, it can't kill a wolf (at the risk of tying yourself to them if they're lynched anyway). That's not a power role, it's a limitation on a town power. Requiring the other Ghostbuster also ensures that the kill is inside of the PoE and gives information because they aren't going to sign off on the wolf trying to daykill the towniest player in the game.
I hard disagree that the Ghostbusters are only worth a half point each, lol what even is that. A vig is worth 3 points by Axelrod's point method, so the first two should be worth 1.25 points at minimum. Maaaaybe the third is only worth a VT (1 point) because a wolf has to sign off on the second kill, but giving the town a potential two full extra PoE kills and only charging them for half of a vanilla town is. Weird to me.Okay, I read the rest of your post and you're using a different point system / math than I'm used to, and not just that, but your point system values Doctor and Vigilante at the same rate as Tracker when they're closer to Watcher in power level, I think. But sure, we'll roll with that.
Three Ghostbusters are worth .5 points each by your count (1.5)
I'm assigning Doctorguard 1 full point because Bodyguard is worth at least .5 and this is quite a lot better than that (2.5)
The tracker with a disabling limitation is worth .5 probably? (3)
The JoAT is worth at least .5 given it has a busdriver + a roleblock, though it doesn't have control over which abilities it gets first (3.5)
The Gatekeeper+Keymaster are worth a full point together, I'm sure, given they become neighbors (+.5) and have access to a repeatable vanilla cop shot and one of them is a self watcher (4.5 total)
Plus 12 points for vanillas + town bodies is 16.5.
We're counting the Ghostbuster as a goon, yes? So that's worth 0 points of power (0)
The delayer is maybe worth a full point, I guess you could push it to 1.5 given it double targets but also, limited shots (1.5)
A oneshot rolecop+witch is maybe worth another 1. (2.5)
The tracker is worth 1.5. Maaaaybe 2 if you're really pushing it because of the ascetic bit even though it also stops the tracker from being disabled and makes them suspicious as hell. (4.5)
The strongman shot is maybe another .5, though that's generous given that it only works on 3 players and is automatically expended on the first Ghostbuster kill. Call it 5 total, I guess, which puts you at 17. Barely "scum sided" given the town's 16.5 points. Even if you give the tracker a whole extra point and make it just as a good as a Cop (which is clearly not true) the wolves only have 18.
However, (1) I believe your point system doesn't value extra kills correctly, and the Ghostbusters should be worth closer to 1 each, and (2) points being exactly equal doesn't guarantee you a perfectly balanced game anyway because it doesn't take into account interactions between roles, set up size (masons are better in smaller set ups and worse in larger ones), or anything else. This isn't a science, it's an art, and having point values exactly the same isn't the goal, it's to be roughly equal so you know the game isn't an obvious blow out. This isn't wildly unbalanced by any stretch, especially considering the Ghostbusters are probably worth closer to .75 points each if we're valuing extra kills at 1.5 as I would prefer (which puts the wolves at 18.25 at most and the town at 18.25 points).
The problem seems to be that you're using a point system to rate the set up in a vacuum, and your point system somewhat underrates town power like cops and vigs. In my opinion. You're also using it as some kind of final, objective arbiter of balance when it pretty clearly isn't. No point system is, it's all guidelines. It's someone else's opinion about what makes sense, not an objective fact, and being roughly equivalent is the goal of these things. Not to be exactly balanced, but to be "close enough." Off by a point or two isn't going to give you significantly lopsided games.
Mafia have to have more power per player for the set up to be balanced. They have fewer players, so to keep the set up balanced according to these point tallies you have to spread the same number of points worth of power over a smaller number of players. Say you want to give each side 8 points worth of power, that means giving Mafia 2 points per player but only giving town one point per player with 4 vanillas.
But, yes, your point about "what if the game was mountainous" is well taken. See, the wolf abilities don't actually do anything except block town abilities. That means even if the wolves perfectly blocked every single town action and the Tracker disabled himself on N1, it would just be a 16/4 mountainous game with at least one extra lynch the mafia cannot vote for due to the Ghostbuster kill.
I don't understand your point about the wolves gaining power with each roleblock, but I already accounted for point assignments including double target delayer and ascetic so I guess you can just tell me what you disagree with.
I disagree.
I disagree that the math shows the game is scum sided to any significant extent. Even if you alter the point totals so the wolves are two points up on the town somehow, that doesn't mean the game is actually wolf sided, it means if you measure the game using that specific, arbitrary point scale the game appears to be wolf sided. In addition, I'd probably rate the the Ghostbusters at .75 each rather than .5, and maybe even the JoAT as well since it actually has quite a bit of disruption on it that can change kill targets, etc.
I disagree that just because the town roles are weaker individually that means the entire town is weaker as a whole.
I think the game is roughly balanced (within 55-45), but if it's slanted in any direction it's slanted towards the town given the lack of safe claims, ways of catching wolves like the vanilla cop, the tracker working on half of the wolves and returning suspicious results on the other (who, it must be noted, must claim his role because it's loud and who should be counterclaimed immediately by the actual town tracker), etc. Wolves needed the amount of disruption we had given the amount of information the town had in this set up (tracker that acts as a psuedo-ectocop, the repeatable vanilla cop on the neighbors, the mass gravedigger shots) in addition to the amount of night kill disruption the town has (roleblock and busdriver on the JoAT, Doctorguard).
I'm not expecting you to agree with me, dude. It's just, like, my opinion, man. But I don't think I'm being wildly unreasonable with these ratings to the point that all of the hyperbole is warranted.
You really think "maybe use your ability before you claim unless under pressure and your claim gets you out of a lynch" is a bad argument?
I see you don't think assuming the players will know one of the Ghostbusters is a wolf is fair. I'm not saying they should have known, I'm saying they should have thought about whether it was likely or not and what they were risking by claiming before they could shoot.
Re: optimal play, no, I don't think it's nearly as clear cut as you're making it. With perfect knowledge of the set up you can say "the optimal doctor protect is this role, the optimal night kill is this one" and so on, but you can never predict which players will get which roles or whether they will be able to get town read or their claim will be believed, etc. etc. The best you can do is assign roles a floor, a ceiling, and an average/random target case, and work off of those.
The floor for wolf roles is a bit higher than the floor for town roles, though, while the ceiling for town roles is quite a bit higher than the ceiling for wolf ones. The ceiling for Tubba's role, for example, is "catches a wolf doing the night kill" and the ceiling for ZDT's role is *Stops multiple kills" while the ceiling for, say, Kami's role is him taking a night off from tracking to do the kill and him getting tracked by Tubba, but Tubba doesn't get the usual clearing message of "Kami visited no one" he gets "Your ability failed" instead, which keeps Kami in the pool of players who might have done it. Or that he can see who everyone targets, passively, except that doesn't really tell us anything except who ZDT was permaguarding after he spent a doc protect on them.
I agree the wolf roles required less skill to pilot optimally (well, delayer required fairly precise targeting to be optimal), but that doesn't mean the wolf roles were stronger overall. I think the game is roughly balanced to maybe slightly town sided, not that you all should have crushed us because you had significantly superior resources or anything like that.
I value extra kills very, very highly. So maybe that's where we disagree. I actually think the doctorguard has a lower ceiling than straight doctor because he can't protect the same target ever agai, though the floor on the role is waaay higher than straight doc.
Re: counterclaiming, I would CC another tracker claim as a tracker, 100%. Even if the other claim is believeable, at worst we spend a lynch on a neutral, at best we lynch a wolf, and I eat a night kill either way (except, you had a Doctor/Bodyguard hybrid too, which would have guaranteed he had two nights minimum to track a kill!). Games aren't designed with multiples of the same role as villagers for a reason, and I think something like 2 town trackers in a closed set up is very bastard.
Edit: as far as ascetic roles on wolves, no, I'm not really a fan of them in general, but they're much better/less bastard than ninjas and godfathers.