Newbie Game Stats, and Solution?

[Yosarian2]

Agreed, PJ. I've found newbie games to be much to easy when I'm scum, and completly impossible when I'm town, and either way they're not interesting for me so I stopped playing them even though those were the main thing I was playing when I got started. If we can balance them better, that would be much better.

[Yosarian2]

Well, one suggestion I made a while ago to balanace newbie games was to make them all have a cop, and just flip a coin to see if they also have a doc or not; that would eliminate the "day one cop claim" breaking stratagy but would be better for the town then the currect setup.

[Yosarian2]

Mith: I see. I'm not sure a cop-only claim is a no-brainer in this modified setup. By claiming D1, the cop runs some risk (usually 1/3) of getting himself killed N1.5. In return he probably gets some credibility. Not sure what I'd do myself.

Basically, the theory is that the day 1 cop claim means that the doc will protect the cop, which prevents a night 1 cop death. In a normal newbie game, that insures the town gets at least one cop investigation, and if the scum don't kill the doc night 1 (which isn't very likely unless they're good at picking up doc tells), the cop will probably get 2 or 3 investigations, which pretty much always means a loss for the scum. The whole idea of the random setup was that the cop can't claim if he dosn't know if there's a doc or not.

[Yosarian2]

It's newbies, unless they've played before, they're going to have problems, they're going to think lurking is ok, they're going to think that they can't get anywhere without a cop, they're going to think that they can't change their votes.

That is somewhat balanced out, though, by the fact that newbie scum tend to self destruct early quite often, sometimes bringing down their scumbuddies with them.

Doh! Of course. The cop claim is so the doc knows who to protect. It's not obvious to me that it would help (what if the scum claim doc when in danger of lynch?), but apparently people have gone through the analysis.

The breaking stratagy went like this:

Cop claim day 1.

No lynch. (Avoids any risk of outing the doc day 1, slows the game down to give the town more cop investigations).

Day 2, lynch a scum if the cop found a guilty; otherwise no lynch. (Only a 1 in 4 chance of the doc being killed night 1, which is about the only way this plan ever loses).

Day 3, cop reveals two investigations. Town almost always wins at this point. If the doc's still alive, OR if both people the cop investigated are still alive, then it's a 100% guarenteed win, I believe. Even if not, the odds are still in the town's favor.

The stratagy let the town win most of the games, and what's worse it didn't rely at all on the town scum-hunting or scumtells or any of the things that makes mafia fun, which basically completly ruined it as a learning experence.

My setup doesn't have this problem; claiming cop just changes the mafia's problem from finding the cop to finding the doc (with one candidate, the cop, now ruled out).

Well...perhaps. It would make the "cop claims" stratagy more risky, at least.

[Yosarian2]

Yeah, I agree with Kelly. Looking at the statistics, though, it seems like having a cop and no doc is still a situation that benifits the scum.

Perhaps it'd be more balanced with a cop-head-start? (Game starts in night 1, when the cop can investigate but the scum can't kill)

[Yosarian2]

Well, the stats seem to indicate a 30% win percentage. Which pretty much means that it's a challenging setup. Personally, a 30% win chance would motivate me even more than usual.

..well, it could mean that it's a challanging setup. Or it could mean "town loses unless they get really lucky or the scum screw up big time". It's hard to say.

If we want the newbie games to be good teaching games, it's best if it's close to 50%, because that's the point where "play well and win, play badly and lose" is most often true; so if you want newbie town and newbie scum to learn what works and what dosn't, what good play and bad play is, it's best to have a more balanced game. Otherwise, the behavioral learning lesson a newbie might get could be "I only win as town when the cop comes out and nails the scum, so I might as well just wait around and do nothing until that happens."

[Yosarian2]

Well, for a newbie game without a cop to playable, it might have to be expanded to make it a 9 player game. In a 7 player game with 2 scum and no cop, if either one of the scum is a good player, I'd expect the scum to win easily.

[Yosarian2]

Cops who investigate people they think pro-town will lose anyway, as it is normally a dumb thing to do.

(shrug) Some cops, especally newbie cops, just always investigate the more experenced players, "just in case", on the theory that if the experenced player is scum you'll never nail them without an investigation, and if they're town you can follow them.

Not the best play, to be sure, but not uncommon.

And acutally, in some situations (not in newbie games, but in others), it is sometimes better to confirm an innocent then to nail a scum, especally if there are other confirmed innocents.

[Yosarian2]

In a mini game, if the town already has 2 or more confirmed innocents, either from you or from masons or something, the ideal thing to do is usually to try to find another confirmed innocent; if you ever get to the point where more then half of the town is made up of confirmed good guys, town generally automatically wins.

[Yosarian2]

Stalling Champ: That wasn't directed at you, it was just a general point about why sometimes it's better to find an innocent then a guilty for a cop.