New Year's Eve Masquerade Ball - [Game Over]

[Regfan]

Congrats on the win scum team, think you guys had the game under control for the most part.

Posted this in the dead thread but thought I'd move it to here too; I was casually following along (Mostly tuned in after pieguyn left the game) and wanted to get a few thoughts down here in the dead thread/postgame in hope that people improve if a future iteration occurs or just in general.

1) The IC in the game needed to try and take control from the get go. Optimal IC strategy would be to "create" all the pairings themselves, this means there's a) A reasonable chance that mafia will be leaving the dance pregame (3/16; 18.75%) which is rather high and b) Increases the chances of a Scum-Scum pairing being forced upon the scum team which is a great boon for town.

2) The setup shouldn't be instantly started with a "Look for T-T" pairings strategy, doing such is very sub-optimal play. It has multiple downsides to it such as A) Mafia can fake "town-hunting" significantly easier than the can fake "scum-hunting" so enacting this reduces the amount of alignment indicative posts inside the thread while also increasing the total posts; both of which are bad and B) Mafia win the game by getting T-T pairs lynched or them leaving the game, this means that T-T pairs that exist in the game will likely be questioned/wanted to be removed from the T-T pool by mafia. Similarly T-T pairings are typically more suspicious or paranoid of their own partner than a S-T one would be as scum has less incentive to want to remove their pairing from the universal T-T pairing situation. This all up means that "Trying to agree on T-T pairings" is actually more likely to lead towards a S-T pairing being in a stronger position than T-T.

This game should have just been played out like a normal mafia game at least in the early days of "Look for scum reads, vote scum reads, try to get scum reads lynched and base reads upon peoples reactions to wagons pre and post flip". The way it was played out instead leads to an unhealthy game state and a scum favoured one where scum can feed off town paranoia to a win.

3) People leaving the game / having suicide pacts is very nonsensical play and something that should have never been brought up or suggested at all. I've spoken with Piegun about this but in the day phase where she left the game she was aware that there was a 71.4% chance that her pairing was a town pairing; if you're in a T-T pairing you're significantly better of being lynched than having left the game, you want to see who's pushing that slot that hardest and assess them better after the flip, similarly if you're a T-S pairing the information via lynch is enormous. People needed to be playing this in a "I can try to read my pairing but I should never ever contemplate aiding their lynch/death until there's only 1 scum remaining".

[Regfan]

Re: regfan post

#3 isn't as clearcut as you're making it seem, because execution is indeed an issue. The logic that pie's pair, from her perspective, was unlikely to contain scum so suicide is never the answer has the corollary that you shouldn't vote your own pair either. Because the game is always in evens and scum isn't going to self-vote for you, it takes an overwhelming majority of the other players to vote a pair to achieve a lynch. This is exacerbated by the fact that scum win when there's no lynch.

In the situation where pie suicided, with 8 players alive, it would take a unanimous town-vote to actually lynch SAD or Dunn without suicide or self-voting. While in a world of EVs or allowing confirmable randomness, that kind of cohesion is possible, in practice if you can get so many town-aligned players to vote in the same place, you're probably going to win anyway.

It really is that simple though, people should never be instantly suiciding, it actually provides minimal information to the town while having a very high likelihood of resulting in a T-T death. You're much better of trying to get a lynch go through first, if you notice that there's some serious resistance for a particular pair receiving votes and notice that there's not a great deal of logic presented by the players refraining from voting then sure there's a higher chance that pair is scum. And if it comes to the point where a lynch on the slot is completely impossible due to lack of cohesion then suicide is a potential consideration but at least then you have a lot of alignment indicative tells from how players are acting with their votes or lack of votes upon the flip. Basing everything on "I want this pair to suicide now, X pair suicides" minimiilaises the alignment indicative tells in the thread while assisting the scum in doing the dirty work for them.

If town play this early/middle game strictly like a normal mafia game with no talk of suicide or T-T pair hunting town win this almost every time, I explained it to Pie earlier but consider the following;

Do you gain more information from a T-T pair suicide or being lynched? The answer is clearly the latter.
Do you gain more information from a T-S pair suicide or being lynched? The answer again is the latter.

That means it's never optimal to just flat out suicide, a lynch should at least be attempted first.

[Regfan]

I agree that IC should set up the pairs, but I don't think that would have worked out so cleanly. Lots of people want to pair with specific other people.

Sure, people may not get to be paired with the specific player they want but in my eyes that's a worthwhile trade for the potential of getting a S-S pairing in the game that scum don't want. I'd have been willing to compromise with the IC just randomising a particular player NOT to be paired and just take the 18.75% chance of scum being eliminated at game start though.

[Regfan]

Kagami, I hope your Post 5854 wasn't you being entirely serious, Mhmsmiths assessment of the game is very much closer to accurate. There was never a real serious attempt at actually making cases and hoping a lynch goes through - it's a large game, lynches in these games are never meant to be easy regardless of the mechanic involved in it and in the early day phases if scum aren't going to vote a partner and you shouldn't have pair selfvoting getting 9/12 votes isn't impossible plus like a normal game scum do vote their partners. Something to really keep in mind here is you guys finished a 16 player game in just under a month, that's almost unheard of so there's no way with a straight face you can tell me that you genuinely tried to get those 6-7 pairs lynched before their suicides. I think everyones just come into the game with the wrong impression of how to handle the setup and it's the reason why something that should be town sided has led to mafia wins.

Wow hi regfan I haven't seen you around in ages! How's everything been?

I'm good! And yeah it's been a little while since I've played, getting back into the swing of the game soon hopefully. Nice to see you're still playing, should try and get a Weteroes game going at some point in the future. Congrats on the win again, you did play it very well.

[Regfan]

As for the IC enforcement, I think at bare minimum the IC randoms a player not to be paired with someone, the explanation behind the gain in this needs to be clearly stated early on (18.75% chance to remove scum) and if anyone pairs themselves with the player that's not meant to be involved you treat it as a hard scum claim and state if it occurs that person gets lynched within 9 posts, this means anyone doing such would be playing against their win condition to go against the IC here.

As for having the IC random the pairs, yes harder to enforce given that if a bunch of people don't listen to it you're going to have to consider either wasting a lot of lynches going through them or all or just leave it be. I'd personally be hoping that people understand the reasoning and gain behind the action and just listen to the IC but I'd probably judge their alignment based on their reasoning/reaction/genuineness of their action there.

[Regfan]

Given scum win with 2 pairs alive at endgame, what was the game's maximum length?

58 days so town used just about half of their allotted time only with lots of that being the lylo dragged down to deadline which means the earlier deaths all occurred in a very short period of time compared to what was allowed.