Matrix6 and the Newbie Queue

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Matrix6 is complicated. There are 6 roles to teach with screwy interactions. (Without looking, what happens when roleblocker kills and blocks jailkeeper, who blocks roleblocker?) Only one of the 6 is balanced, though averaged winrate is ~50%.. Is it time for a suspect test?

That's the one interaction that's not obvious, but it's also fairly rare. As for balanced, I don't really think you're going to do much better.

F11 without the all-VT option still has a 2 Goons vs. 1 Doctor option. That's not close to balanced.

The problem is essentially that making a good Newbie game is really really hard. You're very limited in what roles you can use (it's a small game and it's for newbies) and if you have only a few possible set-ups (like e.g. the classic "Cop or 2 Masons" set-up), then claiming is really straightforward and the power roles become a crutch and if you go for more set-ups, it's really hard to make the set-ups relate coherently without creating bad or unbalanced set-ups (like the 2 Goons vs. 1 Doctor or 2of4's Doctor+Jailkeeper set-up).

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

For the record, I'm still in favour of replacing the 1-shot BP by a Town Backup (for either the Jailkeeper or the Tracker) in Matrix6.

I'd also be quite willing to help try and design a better set-up, if it was done in a private topic somewhere (I don't think another 30-page thread is the best way to get things done myself).

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

There's only some incentive to fake-claim doctor if the tracker's alive and claimed (and even then, he might be lying). (If there's no tracker claim, you risk getting indirectly counterclaimed and if the tracker's dead, scum should shoot or counterclaim you anyway.) It's not really an issue.

I also would have no fucking clue what to claim as new scum.

Claiming Doctor or 1-shot Bulletproof townie seem like the most obvious options and neither of them is a particularly bad fake claim (Doctor is a little better, admittedly).

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

After further dicussion it also became clear that, even though they'd all read the wiki page, nobody really got the Roleblocker vs Jailkeeper resolution (which suggests it may be unintuitive) and the Bulletproof claiming as Doctor scenario was bewildering.

I don't think Newbies need to know those things anyway. They're edge cases.

When you say 2x3, Mina, do you mean a set-up where you pick one of two rows or one of three columns? I don't see how you can make that work without giving the rows inherently more town power.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Oh, I get why the survey responses were complaining about balance now - the wiki page has some outdated statistics on how each of the individual set-ups has fared (with a 65% win rate for one and 33.3% for another); the more recent win rates are all more reasonable, so I'll edit that.

If we're still worried about the two 40% win rate scenarios, I'd go back to my earlier suggestion of replacing the 1-shot bulletproof with a town back-up.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

I guess you could design a 2x3 matrix in this format:

Town Cop	Mafia Anti-Cop role	Town PR
Mafia Anti-Jailkeeper role	Town Jailkeeper	Town PR

The idea is that you weaken the rows relative to the columns by including mafia PRs that only do something meaningful in the rows but I'm not sure that's the type of design we want in a Newbie, nor do I think there are even good mafia PRs that would work (Godfather and 1-shot Strongman are the only ones I can even think off the top of my head).

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Relatively simple set-up idea:

One of {Jailkeeper, Cop}
One of {VT+Goon, Town Back-up, Mafia Role Cop}

Downside is that all 4 set-ups are a bit samey and Town Back-up is still not the greatest role but it's certainly simpler than Matrix6 and definitely no scum-sided set-ups.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Probably a dumb question, but since I wasn't around back then: What was the problem with Pie E7?

It was town-sided but I think the bigger problem was that some non-trivial proportion of the games just saw a Mafia get lynched D1, a Townie get nightkilled and the Cop claim a result D2 that ends the game (if the Roleblocker got lynched D1, the Cop doesn't even have a result yet). 7p games with that many PRs is too swingy.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

I really like CES's backup set-up, except I feel like Town Cop + Backup needs more than a Rolecop to compensate it. (But my sense of balance is completely intuitive.) It means two players to kill so that there's no cop, unless scum get lucky on the lynch order.

If they nightkill the Cop, that still guarantees there's no investigation that Night, which is still quite good in such a small game. It seems to me like the added difficulty for the Mafia mostly lies in having to find more PRs over the course of game and a Role Cop would do that pretty effectively.