I am opinionated about modding

[Zachrulez]

if you're allowing hydras (or even if you're not bc people might slip a hydra from outside into your game), make it absolutely clear whether votes from an incorrect account, actions from an incorrect account, or anything along those lines count or not instead of just saying "if it looks like a vote i count it". regardless of what your policy is, it eliminates any potential for "i thought X vote counted and it didn't count" situations which could severely affect the gamestate.

i'm also pretty strongly in favor of giving players basic setup-related information, i.e. specifying whether a game is multiball or not, and in another instance i specifically pointed out that the assignment of flavor to alignment was random so that players wouldn't bother to speculate over it. i don't really get arguments for not doing this because in most cases it just prevents players from wasting their time speculating over irrelevant shit and allows them to focus more on pure scum hunting. it's a practice i prefer when i'm actually playing, anyway

I will count anything that looks like an attempt to vote if it can be reasonably determined where that vote is coming from. (Having votes not count because of incorrect account can be a dangerous loophole, especially when alts have similar avatars to the main account and are known.)

As to multi ball, do those kind of setups still commonly appear? I don't understand the need for disclosure of multi ball in a large game as it's something that should reasonably be expected in a large game, but I might agree with disclosure in a mini game because it isn't reasonably expected there.

[Zachrulez]

i don't necessarily agree with always getting multiple reviewers, but that might be because all of the games i've ran have been based on obscure shit no one knows about so it's almost impossible for me to find more than 1 or maybe 2 reviewers most of the time. both mini theme games i've ran or co-ran have been fine despite only having 1 reviewer each whereas every large (normal/theme) game i've ran has been critiqued for its balance one way or another regardless of how many people reviewed it.

i might just be lazy? /shrug

Well given reviewers should not care one bit whatever the obscure flavor is and just looking at the set-up itself for balance / sanity / normalcy I don't see why getting multiple reviewers should be hard personally.

Quality > Quantity

Also more reviewers isn't necessarily better. It might keep setups from getting approved, but that can be more because of ideas clashing than any reason that actually has any merit.

[Zachrulez]

i don't necessarily agree with always getting multiple reviewers, but that might be because all of the games i've ran have been based on obscure shit no one knows about so it's almost impossible for me to find more than 1 or maybe 2 reviewers most of the time. both mini theme games i've ran or co-ran have been fine despite only having 1 reviewer each whereas every large (normal/theme) game i've ran has been critiqued for its balance one way or another regardless of how many people reviewed it.

i might just be lazy? /shrug

Well given reviewers should not care one bit whatever the obscure flavor is and just looking at the set-up itself for balance / sanity / normalcy I don't see why getting multiple reviewers should be hard personally.

Quality > Quantity

Also more reviewers isn't necessarily better. It might keep setups from getting approved, but that can be more because of ideas clashing than any reason that actually has any merit.

If your reviewers are any good, yes having more reviewers is better.

The only real benefit of multiple reviewers is that the 2nd, 3rd, ect finds something either the mod or the reviewer didn't. I don't find that benefit large enough to merit requiring more than one reviewer. With one good reviewer your game is not likely to find a major issue. (Whereas having multiple reviewers can be an impediment to even getting a game off the ground.)

[Zachrulez]

there are other ways to enforce speculation about a setup that aren't as much of a total crapshoot as "durr is the game multiball or not".

i've actually done it indirectly in my last two theme games. in the first, i had a full vigilante, with no restrictions, which is a really awful-looking role which leaves open the possibility for an SK. the second was role madness, and me/my co-mod included several awful-looking town roles and town-looking scum roles. i could be wrong but i am pretty sure both had the intended effects, especially in the second game (in general people kept trying to outguess the setup and losing, as opposed to reading play).

playing around with setup spec can be a good thing to do sometimes. but i don't think that having to blindly wonder if a game is multiball or not is the kind of setup spec people enjoy actually doing when they're in a game. (+ some aspects of the setup, i.e. flavor, shouldn't be speculated on at all.)

Well you shouldn't really spend time worrying about whether there is more than one scum team in a game, you should more or less figure out it naturally in the course of lynching scummy players.

[Zachrulez]

I've found in practice, the issue with that is that by the time you figure it out "naturally" you've basically lost all control over whether you can win the game or not, for a lot of reasons (1. in multiball it's very easy for scum to legitimately scum hunt, and town has no way of distinguishing this from town scum hunting unless they know the game is multiball; 2. if you get unlucky with crosskills, and the setup isn't balanced well, which happens almost all the time with multiball setups, it sometimes only takes 2 or 3 mislynches before you're completely suffocated; etc.). but, I don't wanna turn this into a debate about the merits of multiball setup-wise.

You don't really have much control over whether your faction can win a multiball game or not. The main problem with them is that it comes down to luck for a particular faction. I generally don't run multiball setups anymore for that reason for what it's worth.

[Zachrulez]

I think some mods don't do it because they don't want to spoil the surprise of how the game ends, not realising that people who weren't playing in the game mostly just care if the person they're meta diving was town or scum.

That's kind of my rationalization for not flipping the players from LYLO in the OP, though as I looked at the last game I modded, I didn't put a link in the OP for endgame and full reveal. I feel shame.