In post 10, Spangled wrote:I also don't see what you are talking about with faking a mislynch or scumlynch - scum don't need to fake lynches either way because the game is almost flipless. I'm not sure where you're coming from here...
If you leash the entire village to guess a single number, the appearance of a FV or no appearance of a FV becomes a flip for the previous day. FV here balances like a named townie (or actually slightly better than because they have an advantage when claiming targets, but Named townie is the closest comparative role).
If there is a FV claim, Either: A. You lynched town. or B. Scum claimed FV.
If scum claims FV, there probably won't be an additional FV claim the next day AND there won't be a fruit given at night, meaning you have a functionally guaranteed scum lynch.
If two people claim FV, you KNOW that there was a mislynch and that one of those two players is scum.
Both of those fakeclaims are bad for scum in the long term, so it can be assumed that claims are valid until LYLO for most purposes.
Basically, balance wise the setup breaks down to 10v3 with a public cop that hits a random towny whenever there is a town lynch, which is an okay-ish setup but probably more fun as 10v3 with a public cop whenever there's a town lynch because the random nature of the cop would just be frustrating.
(Note to self: Check if 10:3 vengecops is a thing) EDIT: 10:3 Vengecops is 43% EV according to the wiki, FWIW.
If you want to fix variable scum to be viable, you could punish town for lynching while there are no scum alive. Perhaps if town lynches and there are no scum alive, the last scum to be lynched recruits a town player to join the scum faction. In this case, you need to up the level of town power to assume that there's always 4 scum, because the mechanic would be very scumsided. (Which is a lot of power for both teams in a mini, FWIW, and probably super swingy because of it.) Potentially a sensor, probably public, would work well with the synergy of the setup. At that point, you don't need the guess mechanic, because town no lynching is always good for scum if they have players left and manipulating the perception of the gamestate is skillbased, not luck based.