Balance and fun games (why town should be favoured)

[mykonian]

Hoopla's latest stats collection thread got me thinking. Throughout the years, we have favoured scum, and her statistics show the same or even more scum bias throughout the years. And that's for mini normals. Themes are worse, large themes used to have an immense bias towards scum. Slight improvements made by the NRG are measured in single percents (average) and mostly deal with removing the excesses. The mean might actually not have shifted that much for mini normals, the most controlled kind of setup we have. This is while we try to approach "perfect" balance, give each side the same chance to win. Here I'll try to argue why it would be favourable that if we should err, we should do it with a town bias.

Balance, as I've talked about with some of you, is hardly a science. It could be better, but that's really too much effort for too little gain. Setups are played once or twice for closed games, theoretical winrates have been shown to be different from winrates in practice for more measured setups. So for balance, in the end, it comes down to 2 parts experience, 1 part looking at similar games, and some wishful thinking and/or guidelines. I have some, other people have other views.

Now historically, MS prided itself on running games where discussion and scumhunting determined the outcome. Other ("bad") mafia sites like EM depended on claiming strategies and procedural play, but we knew "better". You can see this beautifully in the progression of newbie setups, with Pie E7 basically being run the same on EM (but the meta was different, iirc), through c9, f11 and the current matrix setups which feature weaker pr's and avoid claiming strategies. This is a lovely thought, but one has to realise, the baseline, powerless setup, is heavily scumsided. Your blank canvas is incredibly rough on town, you don't even win 25% of the games in a 3:10, you do similar in a 2:5. 2:7 looks comparatively reasonable, with town getting 30% of the mountainous games. That's still 20% you have to somehow make up for with PR's and claims.

So it was a wonderful idea to go towards weaker powerroles, but frankly they aren't up to the task. As every game, with the same ideals, was scumsided, at this point we don't know better. We might balance with 2 parts experience, but for 8 years at least now, that experience of "normal balanced games" has been games that scum won more than 55% of the time. Depending on your queue that number probably went to 60%, or well above that in the large themed queue. What mods, players, reviewers expect, is an imperfect game. If scum had a tough time because town got some pr's, even town will agree that the game "was not balanced" despite evidence that there can't be that many townsided games being put out.

Now, since experience and looking at other games won't work out to get more balanced games, how about wishful thinking and guidelines? It's my belief that part of percieved balance is that either side, even in more advanced stages of the game, has the opportunity to make a difference and win as such. I think people feel the same, because one of our common failings in setupmaking imo, is that we give scum tools to thwart every power we give town. BP scum in vig games, ninja's when there are watchers, strongman shots etc. Now given the stats from earlier, we want town to have the advantage in power, it gets to be unfair. Scum already get the advantage in the basic setup. As long as claiming strategies that guarantee a perfect game are avoided, since we wouldn't want to lose our MS identity, giving real power to town is good.

Having pointed out the problems why it has been hard to get to the ideal of a 50/50 balanced game on average, that's an idea I want to challenge. Mafia, by nature, is an asymmetric game. One side hunts, the other side avoids. But that's a bit too optimistic, isn't it? Town hardly gets to chase down scum, make them move. Instead, town casts a net, tries to catch out the oddities, while scum tries to slip through and go unnoticed. I'd like to frame this as town being the defensive party, which waits to catch out when scum moves out of line, while scum always has to make a move and hope it doesn't get spotted.

You can disagree with me, a town player totally can get to set the pace of the game, a town pr can take initiative with a claim, or the odd fakeclaim. Initiative being the sign of the aggressor though, imo should be with scum, who has much more freedom in fakeclaims, who has choices in which wagon to follow instead of doing this naturally, etc. And scum get to organise movements between themselves. It's not an absolute, but for sake of argument lets see scum as the aggressive party.

First, taking the argument to the absurd, say we considered two states the modding meta could be in. One where scum would win 99% of the time, one where town would win 99%. In the first case, scum could perfectly copy the way they act as town, or attempt to. Once every 100 games stars would allign and town would lynch scum in order. Next game would be exactly as before. Scum has no incentive to change anything and being the defender, town can change the tells it uses towards the next game, but that's the meta of mafia, scum would move at the same pace. Changing the defense, the net as it were, is a slow process. Now take the other meta, where town would win 99%. Every game, if scum do not make a move, they know they are done for. So every game, you get the wildest fakeclaims, crazy busses, to hopefully once in a 100 games perfectly fool the entire town. The difference here is that scum can change it's strategy during the day. Fakeclaims, bandwagonning, bussing, are judgements and choices you can make day by day. The result would be that scum would lose most games, but every game would be different as scum get to try where the defense is weak at a much more rapid pace than town could do in the scumsided meta.

Clearly these examples are absurd, but they show the extremes. Bias the game against the offensive side, and they get to employ creativity at a game by game basis, while if you bias against the defensive side, the aggressive party can lean back and show little creativity, as the defense can't change it's strategies at the same pace. Now I don't think I'm crazy here. This was exactly the case in 2011 and from Hoopla we know that there weren't any landslide changes in winrates since.

I think this situation is undesirable. Should we get to a state where town wins 55% of the cases, scum have more incentive to make up the difference in the 55% games they are about to lose with more proactive play, meaning more real scumhunting is possible (because in a way scum are forced to behave differently from town), scum have to find new avenues to avoid getting caught while getting an edge. And while that is happening, town will have to change what scumtells they are looking for, meaning a meta that changes quicker, with more unique games.

I think we want a developing game and unique experiences with scum trying to outsmart town more than we want a perfectly fair game, and as such we should attempt to bias the games towards town.

[mykonian]

Many thanks to MTD for proofreading this!

[MTD]

Many thanks to MTD for proofreading this!

aka: blame me!

[McMenno]

hey look a wall

hi mister wall

[Nahdia]

good post

[Davsto]

ego

[McMenno]

ego

do you have things to compensate for

[Davsto]

no i just want to see the discussion which follows this thread I'm sure it'll be interesting

[Randomnamechange]

I agree, the onus should be on scum to be townread rather than just to not be scumread. The only issue is that investigatives being too strong could shut weaker scum players out too hard. I think this works in a situation where scum are given opportunities through good night play to avoid being caught.

[FakeGod]

Yes, myko, mods should make their games more town-sided, but consider:

First, you can't have a setup with EV that favors town, or random lynching with no discussion becomes the town's dominating strategy. (if town wins on avg with random lynchings; why should they try something different and potentially lower their EV?) In your example of extremes, if everyone knew that games had 99% EV of town win, town would just random lynch with no discussion all day and enjoy their 99% win rate.

Second, players' perception of balance has been always more important than actual balance when judging whether the game was fun. Redundant mechanics to reduce swing and manufacturing a 3p LyLo is much better than actual 50/50 balance if you don't want to be yelled at by angry players postgame.

Third, the site has shifted to favoring "crazy" setups rather than traditional VT heavy setups, where EV is largely dictated by power roles and mechanics than actual discussion/scumhunting. It seems that people don't really care any more about playing traditional mafia; they rather roll something crazy like Double Strongman Dayvig and shoot up random bystanders before going down.

I'm pretty sure we had this conversation before in sitechat.

[mykonian]

some of it we have talked about.

Your third point just shows your age. Every old scummer has complained about that, heh.
Your second I hope to do something about here, in a way. Swing doens't really appear in the post, but the idea of what the game should be like could change over time.

The first is the most relevant point. You are obviously right that the moment town stops hunting the game is in a poor state. And given that I've seen examples of setups where town performed worse than random consistently, it is a real danger. Now they didn't straight up stop playing the game, but they could. It doesn't even help if scum would become more different from town if town gets fooled too often, lynching randomly would be enticing. Hmm

[Katsuki]

Everything FG said, especially point #3.

I would almost bet that if we ran exclusively mountainous setups, scum WR would be upwards 55-60% based on the current meta.

[Majiffy]

tl;dr whole thread but as soon as games become town-sided people get bored and complacent, games become inherently less fun.

We play a challenging game because we enjoy a challenge. If it is no longer a challenge, why would we play it?

[Majiffy]

Like lets not become like EM

Because this is how EM became EM

[Nahdia]

i'd say a huge part of EM's procedural gameplay is because their setups are 99% Open setups and as long as we play primarily Closed Role setups we're not gonna start matching EM's meta.

[zMuffinMan]

tbh i think a lot of the reason town might perform worse than expected in setups where EV can actually be calculated easily is because people, in general, are fucking stupid... and i don't think that's something that should be balanced for; i think people should just get better at the game...

making setups town-sided to account for bad players being bad isn't a good thing

if you don't think the issue is just bad players, here's a challenge for you: create a player list for a hypothetical 20p game that consists only of active players who are not bad at mafia

if you do think the issue is just bad players, then why on earth would you want to change the curriculum to "if you can build some thing with lego, you get a passing mark" instead of thinking of a way to encourage them to just get better?

[Accountant]

this feels like we're giving PRs to town more because town is bad at scumhunting and can't catch scum well

[Accountant]

We don't want games that give town and scum a 50% winrate in practice, we want games that give town and scum a 50% winrate if both sides played perfectly. The thing is scum is smaller so they fuck up less often and win more

[RadiantCowbells]

this feels like we're giving PRs to town more because town is bad at scumhunting and can't catch scum well

Except it's way fucking easier to play scum.

As town you need to not get lycnhed and scumhunt. Scum just needs to not get lynched.

[Accountant]

it's way easier to play garen than zed but that doesn't mean we should make zed more powerful than garen to compensate

[FakeGod]

ugh myko look what you have done

time to hijack this thread

Spoiler: Sausage-addicted kookaburra too fat to fly

[RadiantCowbells]

it's way easier to play garen than zed but that doesn't mean we should make zed more powerful than garen to compensate

This is a terrible comparison.

[Nero Cain]

this feels like we're giving PRs to town more because

town is bad at scumhunting and can't catch scum well

but they are :/

I think a game is near impossible to balance unless it is near mountainous. Also agree with RC.

[zMuffinMan]

it's actually a pretty apt comparison. essentially this thread is encouraging rebalancing for pub players instead of encouraging the pub players to actually improve

[Nero Cain]

but all the popular games are bastard games and "role madness" and upicks no one will play in games that focus on scum hunting.