Balance and fun games (why town should be favoured)

[Killthestory]

I agree with thei, but not to the point of adding PRs to compensate. If you add a ton of PRs, it turns into town of Salem. Give Mafia less power with less PRs rather than giving town more PRs.

[Accountant]

I feel like people in this chat disagree because we're all playing mafia for different reasons

[Killthestory]

I play mafia because I think it's fun and entertaining?

[Nero Cain]

I think most of us are playing for fun and/or the challenge but the definition of fun varies.

[Killthestory]

I think scumhunting is fun, and I don't like to rely on PRs. I also think screwing around and playing to my meta really well is fun. I enjoy being scum and seeing how ballsy I can be, too.

[Accountant]

I play to win and improve.

[Antihero]

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

yep

see, you're getting it

[Killthestory]

I play to win and improve.

Being competitive can be fun but not when you stretch it.

[Hoopla]

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?

I don't understand the desire to balance games for a community you wish you had, instead of the one you have. I mean, at its core it's a romantic, idealistic notion and I'm down with that, but I also think it's simplistic to assume that encouraging towns to get better will solve things, because a player improving their town game will probably also be improving their scum game too at similar rates (we can debate how big the gap is in the arms race of town detection/scum obfuscation, but scum will definitely improve too). By the time players get to such a level where they're a not-stupid/experienced/good player, other good players will retire/play less games, a newer wave of players will come in and we're still left with a spectrum of poor to good players making up poor to good towns.

To me it seems elitist to have games balanced with the presumption of a good/experienced town, when in actuality most games will have a sizable portion of new or poor/average players. I think average towns should win 50% of the time. If you end up in a good/experienced town against poor scum players, you'll probably win 70% of the time, and vice versa.

Another related point: Since good/experienced players tend to clump together and follow each other into games, games will tend to be polarised between lots of good players/lots of bad or new players, so determining your philosophy of balance on the basis of how towns go in the rare games when the town has a lot of good players just shafts townies even more in games with other new/bad players as their games are probably even more unbalanced.

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

There is a noticable trend of mods weakening town PR's by giving them modifiers, and giving more scum roles. I think a healthy compromise between the romantic notion of towns should be better and the practical (towns DO need some help) is to decrease scum power and use less modifiers for town. That doesn't really drastically alter things that much, but will get us closer to parity.

You can easily flip your statement and say something like: mods are giving scum more power because they can't find PR's well enough or appear town enough to not get vigged/copped.

[Majiffy]

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.

It's not the procedural bit, look at the setups made back in the '07-'11 period and the setups made afterwards, particularly the popular ones.

"Difficult" / Scumhunting setups have been abandoned because people don't want to do work or play something challenging. They would rather a setup where the optimal gameplay is "shoot and lynch pretty much randomly and hope for the best by the time you make it to 3P LyLo!"

i think people should just get better at the game...

To be fair, I fall in the pool of people that believe even the best players are only slightly better than 50/50 on pegging scum. Of course that can be skewed positively by playing with the same people / having meta and such, but in a blind game no one is really "good" at mafia. Just "slightly better than average".

There's not enough objective tells, because as soon as an objective tell is a known entity, it becomes subverted in scum meta almost instantly.

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

#EM

[zMuffinMan]

because a player improving their town game will probably also be improving their scum game too at similar rates

that's not true, though. i'm not even going to talk about general gameplay things like scumhunting and co-ordinating... the badness i'm referring to in town players is things like forgetting important events that happened in the game that are actually critical to arguments being made, not going back and looking at interactions, pushing flawed logic, making really dumb assumptions, etc. improving these things is easy and unrelated to improvements in general gameplay... balancing for people who are too stupid or too lazy to do basic things in a game is just encouraging this shit

i don't think it's a romantic ideal to expect people to improve on basic fucking concepts, and i think a lot of these basic concepts are a large part of the reason town are so shit in general

To me it seems elitist to have games balanced with the presumption of a good/experienced town, when in actuality most games will have a sizable portion of new or poor/average players

elitist? to try to balance based on EV? to expect players to do about as good as random chance? are you serious?

it doesn't require a "good/experienced" town, it requires an average town. most towns aren't even average. that's sad. i think that should be fixed rather than making the game easier for them and gimping their rate of improvement, if they even ever improve. but then i value actually getting better at the game, not giving people a small amount of satisfaction because they start winning games they're favoured to win anyway. especially since that's never going to fix the core issues that are making town lose right now. it's just going to substantially drop the quality of play in games

To be fair, I fall in the pool of people that believe even the best players are only slightly better than 50/50 on pegging scum.

50/50 is kind of arbitrary and depends on the size of the game, but i agree; pretty much every player i'd rate as "good" at scum hunting probably isn't that much better than random... someone whose reads are like 10% better than what you'd expect with random chance is a

really

good player. but what sets good players apart from bad players isn't just their success at scum hunting, which isn't so easy a thing to improve upon (and, as hoopla suggests, may improve at the same rate as scum games)

[Lycanfire]

I just want to say that I originally started playing mafia in a community that loved 'night madness' type games and the quality of play progressively became worse until previously good players became lazy and bad. The same players would always win as scum so the community adopted follow the cop setups because 'town couldn't win without it'. After that the best way to avoid being caught as scum stopped being about being good but developing a lurking meta. Eventually lurkers grew in number and there were too many to policy lynch any more. People liked chaos, an in depth setup and a grocery list of conditions that could be activated in a game that the game was no longer about finding scum or appearing town. Instead it became a half RNG half roleplay game. Despite this whenever players were forced into open setups in realtime mafia, they would became scumhunting gods after a few games.

In the death throes of the community people realized this wasn't the mafia they wanted and demanded vanilla games (or the closest to it) but few could commit to log in any more due to lurker meta. People would have killed for mafiascum meta.

Been there. Done that. Scum still won and it was awful.

[mykonian]

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?

I feel you are missing the point here. If you aren't going to hit 50/50 every time, some part of the game isn't going to be challenged. Now this is consistently scum. I'm arguing games as a whole, for town and scum, accross the site, would be better if it was scum who was put to the test.

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...

Eh, then they have been stupid forever. The winrates have hardly moved through the years. Apparently we have a good feeling for how good town and scum are, and then year after year we set the average winrate at 55-60% for scum. How does it make the games worse if the "stupid" scum win a little less and the "stupid" town a little more? And they aren't even stupid, they are as smart as they always were. MS tends to be fine when it comes to intelligence anyway.

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

But giving the "bad scum" a free pass is fine?

[zMuffinMan]

a little more on the topic...

I don't understand the desire to balance games for a community you wish you had, instead of the one you have

This is what I really don't understand. Why would you not balance for the town you

want

to have?

To me, this seems a bit like someone taking their rooks off the board to give a lesser player an advantage in a chess game. Sure, it'll give them better odds of winning

that game

, but will it help them improve at chess in general? Maybe they'll still improve as a player, but I'd argue it would be at a much slower rate than if they were to play the game normally, take in the tactics, memorise good plays, etc...

But again, I value actually improving at a game. I wouldn't mind being out of my depth playing with no advantage in a game I'm not the best at, because I'd be constantly looking for things I could do to improve.

But I realise not everyone thinks like that, so maybe this thread is for people who just want to give lesser players an easier time with no real thought about making them better players. I suppose they wouldn't

need

to be better players in an environment where they're not punished as much for being bad at the game... But I also think that's likely to just degrade the quality of play in general.

Another example that comes to mind would be lowering education standards because kids aren't doing as well in tests. Sure, you're going to make some kids feel a lot better because they're getting better scores than they should, but is this really what you want to encourage? I mean, this is somewhat extreme as an example, because mafia is just a game and the consequences aren't as bad, but really... I think doing what the OP is suggesting is just encouraging a lower standard of play.

By the time players get to such a level where they're a not-stupid/experienced/good player, other good players will retire/play less games, a newer wave of players will come in and we're still left with a spectrum of poor to good players making up poor to good towns.

I don't think "new" players are necessarily bad (I mean, players with recent join dates might be making a strong argument for why I'm wrong about this, but I don't think it's necessarily true) and I don't think ingraining basic concepts in newer players should be that difficult a thing.

I mean, this could be as simple as small things like encouraging players to take notes on things that might be important that they're likely to forget. Like that's just one example of a basic thing that almost no one does and it could improve a town player's strength... I haven't played in newbie games in a while (I don't play as much as I used to in general), but ICs should be fostering this sort of behaviour, encouraging certain behaviours, etc, if they aren't already. And if they aren't already, then that's maybe a large part of why newer players are bad at the game.

[zMuffinMan]

Eh, then they have been stupid forever.

i'm not going to argue against this (even though there's more in play here than just town being bad, because i doubt setups have been more or less balanced ever over a long period of time)

it also doesn't really matter to what i'm saying

But giving the "bad scum" a free pass is fine?

if town are consistently losing to bad scum when they're expected to win roughly 50% of games, then town must be that much worse, so scum isn't really getting a free pass (except insofar as getting to play against lower-skilled players is a free pass, i guess?)

[mykonian]

if town are consistently losing to bad scum when they're expected to win roughly 50% of games, then town must be that much worse

Hey, we are getting somewhere. Now we don't expect them to win 50% of the times. We know our expectancy, and that's when everybody gets randomized over the roles, so every side is just as stupid. Scum win 55-60%. What's the issue with making that 45%? Town and scum won't change, but scum would have to work harder for their wins. I think that's going to make games more exciting for scum and town.

[Accountant]

you balance the game around the good players, not the bad ones. that's not being elitist or optimistic, that's just basic competitive integrity

you design your game around good players so good players will play your games

[zMuffinMan]

if town are consistently losing to bad scum when they're expected to win roughly 50% of games, then town must be that much worse

Hey, we are getting somewhere. Now we don't expect them to win 50% of the times. We know our expectancy, and that's when everybody gets randomized over the roles, so every side is just as stupid. Scum win 55-60%. What's the issue with making that 45%? Town and scum won't change, but scum would have to work harder for their wins. I think that's going to make games more exciting for scum and town.

i fail to see how that makes games more exciting

my theory is it just leads to worse gameplay overall (because town don't have to be good at the game), even if the win rates become more even

in my opinion, you should be aiming for an equal chance for all parties involved to win, and then if there's still a discrepancy, work out what's going wrong and attempt to fix it... i think i've made this point pretty clear...

the counter-argument seems to be "games are more fun if we find a way to immediately increase town win rates!"

*shrug*

i don't think this is a good line of thinking for the game's health... and i've explained why

EDIT:

since gaming analogies were brought up previously in thread, i'm going to talk about dota. the overall win rate for a lot of heroes in dota, particularly heroes that have limited utility, can vary greatly. some patches, you get heroes with win rates greater than 60% while others have less than 40% win rate overall. but the funny thing is, the overall win percentage of heroes doesn't necessarily have any bearing on competitive play... some of the heroes that most players are overall worse with are heroes that have had long streaks of being high priority picks in competitive games

most players who play the heroes with low win rates aren't good. they don't have basic understandings of core concepts. they lack knowledge about the game. they lack basic intelligence in some cases... to attempt to give all heroes an equal win rate would just horribly imbalance the game as it's meant to be played

i personally don't see this as a good thing. it discourages improving. it discourages good play in general. it discourages everything that makes a game fun for me, personally

but maybe others would enjoy the game more because it's more balanced for bad players

so be it, but it's not objectively more fun or exciting or anything like that. to me, it's just going to make the game shit, and if this philosophy is adopted, then so be it - it's not like i really have any say in it, i'll probably just start playing less than i do, if i play at all

[mykonian]

well you've explained that you don't want people to get a free pass. But this isn't a test you make easier and suddenly you've got more stupid people passing. You are treating mafia like they don't change, and all they do is decide which towns are worthy.

The game of mafia is one with two sides. You aren't going to get to 50% winrates, someone's going to have it easier. If you give the deficit to the side with greater opportunity for initiative (which in my opinion is scum), they could use that initiative to try something new, or at least slightly different, every single game.

Town does not have this freedom of movement, really how much game impacting initiative can you show? You make a case, because you should. You vote the scummiest player, because you should. As a VT, only the tempo of the game is something you have a hand on the dial for, and you share that dial with many (who are suspicious of you too).

I'm not saying that it'd be more fun if towns just won. I'm saying it'd be more fun if scum got challenged.

[zMuffinMan]

You are treating mafia like they don't change, and all they do is decide which towns are worthy.

that's... not what i've been saying at all... but on that note, your argument makes no sense

you seem to be under the impression that drastically buffing towns, such that the current win rates swing massively in the other direction, is going to encourage scum to improve their game... really? based on what? because every game i've seen scum thinking they're against an overpowered town has led to scum lurking, scum giving up, scum expressing negative feelings towards a mod, the setup, the game in general...

further, you're not doing anyone a favour with your suggestion. if scum somehow acted like you think they would, you'd just get a bunch of incompetent town players playing against better scum players and still pulling off wins. how is that fun? would you get some sense of accomplishment in outrunning a little kid? do people actually enjoy that sort of thing?

at least if you strive for a balanced game, the winner is decided based on who the more skilled team is, and if the more skilled team is scum in most circumstances, then they

deserve the fucking win

You aren't going to get to 50% winrates, someone's going to have it easier.

that's... not true at all... striving for 50% win rates might not make each game perfectly balanced (games don't need to be perfectly balanced anyway, just reasonably balanced where one side isn't expected to win the vast majority of the time), but it should make the overall EV roughly even

Town does not have this freedom of movement, really how much game impacting initiative can you show? You make a case, because you should. You vote the scummiest player, because you should. As a VT, only the tempo of the game is something you have a hand on the dial for, and you share that dial with many (who are suspicious of you too).

that's... also not true at all... i mean, it's somewhat true in the current climate, and i know for a fact this is what is turning or has turned a lot of players off the game... the incompetence of a lot of players means what you can do as an individual is a lot less than it should be. individual town players have less impact on a game when they're allied with really awful players. and you're talking to someone who often spends the game in the dead thread watching a town go down in flames from the sidelines... but that's only when the player list is incompetent. i've never looked at a player list of competent players and felt i can't make a major difference in this game if i work together with them. i've never looked at a player list of competent players and thought that just because i'm a VT there's not much i can offer

and i think if you honestly think that, then you're probably the sort of player who i'm complaining about. like really, i don't think anything in the paragraph i quoted is true, except for the fact that there's so much fucking incompetence in mafia right now that it's made it true; you really don't have much power to sway a town full of people who either get lynched in every game or make it to lylo because they're never a threat to scum even if they have a correct read or two, but i don't think the fix to this isn't buffing town to make their incompetence be less relevant; games aren't going to suddenly become more enjoyable because their incompetence doesn't make as much of a difference on the outcome of a game. i'm not going to be sitting in the dead thread going, "well, gee, i feel really happy that i won a game despite player X making mistake after mistake after mistake and not being punished because of the setup..."

and quite frankly, i don't think i'd want to play in a game with anyone that thinks as long as you win, everything else doesn't matter (or is less significant). it doesn't matter that town were heavily favoured to win and that town played like shit and got away with it; we won! yay!

[Accountant]

If you give town more PRs scum isn't going to burst into action and play super dynamically like an anime character transcending into a higher form because they can no longer win with their old one. They're just going to roll their eyes and go "hoooo boy, another batch of overpowered townies. Let's lurk and hope we can pull through somehow"

[Accountant]

I'm not saying that it'd be more fun if towns just won. I'm saying it'd be more fun if scum got challenged.

I mean if I wanted fun I'd let a clown mod my games. What I want is a balanced game, not one that's been artificially tweaked to be unbalanced in the interests of fun.

[McMenno]

I'm not saying that it'd be more fun if towns just won. I'm saying it'd be more fun if scum got challenged.

I mean if I wanted fun I'd let a clown mod my games. What I want is a balanced game, not one that's been artificially tweaked to be unbalanced in the interests of fun.

if the clown didn't want to play mafia it wouldn't be fun

[mykonian]

because every game i've seen scum thinking they're against an overpowered town has led to scum lurking, scum giving up, scum expressing negative feelings towards a mod, the setup, the game in general...

Well, you are talking about it in an environment where they are used to having it easy. But otoh, you hear no towns complain that they only win 40-45%. We are used to that.

But the fact that we are used to it doesn't make it right. We can change what we expect from games.

if scum somehow acted like you think they would, you'd just get a bunch of incompetent town players playing against better scum players and still pulling off wins.

I don't see how the same people if they rolled scum suddenly became smart. The same townies you insist on calling stupid, are scum every 3-4 games.

at least if you strive for a balanced game, the winner is decided based on who the more skilled team is, and if the more skilled team is scum in most circumstances, then they deserve the fucking win

And currently about 5% of the scum didn't deserve their victory. They got it handed to them. Nobody is complaining at all about that.

And it's not even a real issue, since lets be fair, balance is not an exact science. The issue is that the right way for scum to play is to coast, because town has little real way to turn up the heat on scum, playstyle wise. The new tells they find, they avoid the next game they are scum themselves.

And you seem to disagree with me, but scum can bus, scum get to choose which wagon to follow, scum have a plethora of possible scumclaims. Scum are allowed to strategically lurk. There's a myriad of curveballs scum can throw at town. How many curveballs do town have? You can call towns stupid as often as you want, without organisation, and with the need of honesty from them, their maneuvering space is smaller. The only way to improve is to magically catch more scum than you did yesterday. Or last year. Or last 5 years.

They haven't

. Next game they are scum and they avoid the same tells that makes them magically amazing scumhunters. It's not a curveball, it's a general rise of the level of play. Your solution, for towns to magically get better (ignoring that the same players play scum as well), hasn't appeared as long as MS exists. The meta shifts, but towns end up with the same deficit comparatively to scum. The overall level likely has risen and dropped at points, but the games we put these towns in were slanted to scum. Only the reason fakegod has named so far is a reason why that could be the right choice.

I think what you want, is for the weaker side to have tools to change how the game turns out. Scum have more of those by design, so maybe we should put them in a tough spot and see what they come up with.

[mykonian]

If you give town more PRs scum isn't going to burst into action and play super dynamically like an anime character transcending into a higher form because they can no longer win with their old one. They're just going to roll their eyes and go "hoooo boy, another batch of overpowered townies. Let's lurk and hope we can pull through somehow"

ok, it's convenient that we have an extreme example of a powerrole heavy game that a couple of us know in EM. Compare claiming strategies there and here. Common wisdom here is that you should claim VT. Lay low, wait for town to trip over their own feet. On EM, you see counterclaims, fakeclaims before the original role can claim, etc.

Now EM is very role focussed, so that's really their only freedom, but it's scum that approach the game differently depending on game (when and how they fakeclaim), while town plays procedurally.

Here on MS however, we have votecounts, with wagons. Our lynches aren't determined just by guilties or a confirmed person calling it. So here scum can distance, scum can bus, they can lead wagons or hammer aggressively (while now they tend to just go with the flow and end up more often halfway the wagon than not, letting town do the lifting).

If we see that EM high risk high reward plays happen if the setup is tough on scum, why wouldn't MS-high risk plays like leading a wagon on town or pulling off that crazy bus not work?