How much have things shifted?

[Katsuki]

Godfathers died along with the queues unfortunately.

[Katsuki]

That was a fabulous game on so many levels.

Vi many players have mentioned how much they miss you. Will you ever grace us with your awesomeness again~?

[Katsuki]

Vi many players have mentioned how much they miss you. Will you ever grace us with your awesomeness again~?

You are also welcome to play not-Mafia with me.

While I'm here, nice avvy.

Or we could all play in a Vi mafia game~

Also thanks!

[Katsuki]

Is this a byproduct of the new feel good mafia without enough bloodlust to grease the wheels or what

Welcome to MS.net 2016.

ITT we learn that Ether is trying to convert mafia into all things ice cream.

[Katsuki]

Nowadays towns are perfectly fine with spamming up 200-300 pages in two days, let alone that we were setting records back then with breaking 200 pages for an entire game.

[Katsuki]

Why so much hate for vanilla cop?

nai is a silly term that should be beaten to death should it ever appear in any games

[Katsuki]

Vanilla cop is better than Neapolitan because it adds a sense of mystery. Neapolitan is just a bargain bin Normal Cop.

Mystery is exactly what we don't want too much of in normal games. The idea always has been normal games are more or less "the setup adds spice to dayplay, but doesn't become the focus of it" and theme games are where "setup mystery" can sometimes take over.

Not arguing for or against either, but how does Vanilla Cop add "mystery" exactly?

[Katsuki]

I'm gonna disagree with the "not alignment-indicative" hate.
Unfortunately if you just mow through people who do bad things and "deserve" to be lynched, the Town loses more often than they already do.
At some point you have to understand that many people don't play the game the way you'd like it to be played ("well") and you have to get people to do what you want within the confines of how they want to play the game.

Mafia is a team game.

Man your join date ain't too far back from mine and I never heard of Goons showing up "goon" to town role cops.

also this
I like the idea of Vanilla Cop in theory but Role Cop is so much more fun.

Determining alignment indicative actions was useful once upon a time, but everyone nowadays thinks they secretly play for scum so its fruitless to sort out that scum-scum from the town-scum. It used to be a game of sorting out bad apples from the good apples but now you're given a basket of rotten apples in which you have to find the ones which contain the worms.

[Katsuki]

Not arguing for or against either, but how does Vanilla Cop add "mystery" exactly?

Well, why is the Vanilla Cop in the game? Like Tracker, I know some things about the setup - the mafia has at least one targeting role, there's at least one other targeting role in the town. Just the way things are. I bet you could find at most a handful of normal games with trackers that don't follow that. Too obvious a use case. Or masonry. I know there's at most one more weak investigative role, I know that if the scum have some sort of detection it's likely a role cop over a tracker/watcher. But these only slightly inform your use of the role. It's more or less the same.

Vanilla cop, lets jump in the hole. So I know there's a vanilla cop. How are the scum/town power role balances arrayed? If one goon flips this becomes VERY pertinent. Is it 2/1 or 1/2? If the mafia have two PRs you're clearing people, if they don't then you're not. If you're sitting there looking at two "vanilla" results this might just be the most important question possible. You have most of the information, you just need to sift it.

And something I've learned having run two normal games... most people suck at setup spec. Seriously. The game can and will devolve into a debate between people who think that its just fine for the town to have a mason recruiter and a town cop and people who think that a 4-man scumteam is reasonable in a 13 player normal game. These are things that happen.

So you're giving them exactly enough information to cause serious fucking damage, and for what? It's not actually good information. If they guess that the mod gave the scum team 2 PRs and the mod gave them two goons but the Vanilla Cop happened to investigate a handful of townies, does it matter? Does it do anything other than piss the scumteam off when they lose?

It's just like... it's not a good role. It's information that's close enough to hard that it can do serious damage without actually being hard, and as such its impossible to balance. It's like if I made a "

Binary Sensor

" role that could only tell if the lynch wagon from yesterday had scum on it or not.

Obviously

it will always say "scum on wagon", but then there will be that 5% where the town just literally wins on the spot. Vanilla cop is not that bad, but it's pretty bad. It's a role that usually tells you nothing useful but then sometimes gives you a ton of information, and the hows and whys are a little murky. It's not only a role without an obvious use case, but a role where the power of the use case varies so much that it's nearly pointless.

Plus there's no way that it doesn't encourage ridiculous setup debate if you have 1-2 dead scum and some Vanilla Cop results. For all this, what does it bring to the table that, say, a Town Role Cop doesn't? And town role cop has a really clear use case - you're checking people's claims to see if they're really the role they said. Vanilla Cop is just frustratingly vague.

I always thought the point of Vanilla Cops was exactly what Gamma Emerald said - to support/disprove claims, with a tad bit more function than a simple Named Townie. The purpose never seemed to be about providing/using it for solid investigative information, and if you're trying to setup spec based off of a vanilla cop you probably deserve to lose anyways.

It's like you said, a Vanilla Cop serves as a much weaker version of a Role Cop. Not every game needs a Cop, and I think we've moved away from the days where you had a Cop in every game.

[Katsuki]

I'm gonna disagree with the "not alignment-indicative" hate.
Unfortunately if you just mow through people who do bad things and "deserve" to be lynched, the Town loses more often than they already do.
At some point you have to understand that many people don't play the game the way you'd like it to be played ("well") and you have to get people to do what you want within the confines of how they want to play the game.

Mafia is a team game.

i agree with this particular vi statement.

i'm all for an expansive glossary of terms essentially saying "no, that garbage tell is pretty much garbage, try again" in slightly different ways. null, nai, void, it's all good

hopefully it never becomes a term because then you'll just get people throwing it around who don't actually know what it means or what constitutes as appropriate usage but simply because it's a term

like when was the last time you saw an IGMEOY statement ever be useful?