Basically, the idea is that town have to estimate whether having the scummiest scum revealed would be more useful in the future or now. If there's obvscum, you lynch them as if they're actually scum, no lynching now would give scum a relatively cheap sacrifice. If there isn't, it may well be that a flip would make the situation clearer, in which case it's probably in your interests to get a scumflip now rather than risking lynching someone who makes the scum's sacrifice decision easier. This reminds me of Deal or No Deal a lot (you try to estimate the best time to "take the offer" as the probabilities change, you can only take the offer once, but even after you do you play the game out), so the name is very fitting :-)
The idea originally came about when trying to fix an issue in White Flag (that it's hard to get associatives with dead scum in a mountainous and the White Flag mechanic just makes it harder, thus forcing you to scum
team
hunt rather than scumhunt in the normal way). Giving town the first scum death for free rather than the last seemed like the way to go, but you can't just flip one scum at the start of the game because town wouldn't gain anything from it. Instead, by adding the possibility that scum can be lynched
first
, scum are encouraged to defend each other and thus create associative tells.
The EV (town win percentage with random lynching) is highest if town delay their no-lynch to the last possible moment (to increase the chance of a random lynch hitting scum), at 48.646%.
Important note:
This setup uses a plurality lynch if the deadline expires (something that was decided after the original post was made), i.e. you can't "default to No Lynch" without votes actually on No Lynch.
The Open rotation is looking a bit moribund at the moment, so I'm planning to try to get this one into rotation. Before I /in, though, does anyone have any comments on it?
If it gets down to 1 scum left and town haven't no-lynched yet, they win automatically (because they can no longer be prevented from winning). So in theory town could play the setup like White Flag, but because it starts at 9:3 rather than 10:3, it's considerably harder to win that way than it would be playing the intended way.
I guess you could argue that leaving scum the choice of who gets killed for free makes it a bit harder for town, and early evidence seems to indicate WF is scum-sided so far.
just because you get evil player role doesn't mean you are a evil person at HEART - KainTepes!!!
9:2 vanilla, where the scumteam is stronger than average (because they sacrificed their weakest member), is going to be very hard for town to win. (For reference, town have never won a vanilla 2:11 on mafiascum.net, although they do occasionally win at 7:2; this might be due to a larger sample size or because the extra numbers give scum more time to kill competent townies while they're still hard to find.)