[Setup] 9 and 2 [Edited]

[Quick]

Don't know if this is a setup already, but I digress.

Mountainous: 8 Townies, 2 Goons

That's it.

[Ircher]

Horribly scumsided. For starters, it starts on evens. Second of all, it is mountainous, and mountainous is notoriously difficult for town to win. I think for EV purposes, you need at least 11-2.

[Quick]

Horribly scumsided. For starters, it starts on evens. Second of all, it is mountainous, and mountainous is notoriously difficult for town to win. I think for EV purposes, you need at least 11-2.

Sorry I forget how good scum is on this site/how bad town is on this site.

Disregard.

[Quick]

For starters, it starts on evens.

That is intended for Town to decide if they want to No-Lynch or not.

[Quick]

I guess the only other thing I would add is that I thought Town was supposed to play way above EV, but maybe I am wrong about that?

[Ircher]

1) Evens is bad in setups with mafia kills because town's best chances come from no lynching at some point. There are exceptions, but in mountainous, no lynching is ALWAYS the correct move in terms of EV. This takes a town controlled kill and turns it into a scum controlled kill.
2) Town only performs above EV in nightless setup. I believe town has yet to win a mountainous setup on this site, so mountainous probably results in town performing below EV if anything.

[Quick]

1) Evens is bad in setups with mafia kills because town's best chances come from no lynching at some point. There are exceptions, but in mountainous, no lynching is ALWAYS the correct move in terms of EV. This takes a town controlled kill and turns it into a scum controlled kill.
2) Town only performs above EV in nightless setup. I believe town has yet to win a mountainous setup on this site, so mountainous probably results in town performing below EV if anything.

Wow, Town really really sucks on this site. I didn't know it was THAT bad.

[OkaPoka]

fwiw i dont think a true mountainous setup has been run on this site for years, quicksearch shows last game was in 2014

[Quick]

fwiw i dont think a true mountainous setup has been run on this site for years, quicksearch shows last game was in 2014

I have no idea what the implications of that are. Does that mean it's a "1/1,000,000 chance" or what?

[Awoo]

10/10 trolling thread

[Quick]

Okay. People don't like scum hunting here I guess.

[Isis]

I still stubbornly agree with the design philosophy that town should always be put into a position where they are required to outperform their EV.

Starting a mountainous game on evens is kind of objectively bad, the suboptimal plays for no lynching could be interesting but the optimal play isn't: always do it day 1. The more you orient the gamestate, the more the inevitable extra nightkill that occurs at some point during the game can target someone unmislynchable.

I think towns' performance in mountainous is getting pretty overstated here. Using actual mountainous data as the best guess about mountainous winrates is not the right way to go, such setups haven't been run in a long time, and when they do get run, it's not many of them, and when they do get run, it's a very biased sample, with certain types of players being interested in that kind of setup. If you really wanted to be the bookie for a mountainous game that was going to run next week, I think you'd look through some normal games and try find cases where due to lucky kills hitting the PRs, the game was functionally mountainous, and I'd bet we have lots more scum wins than town wins for those kinds of games but plenty of both.

We currently have a newbie queue meta that is massively townsided in comparison to the rest of the site, with RC credibly positing that sample of players could have a positive town winrate as a 7:2 mountainous. Since that is, like, a newbie queue, it's pretty suspicious to tag communities with higher town winrates as stronger in a general sense.

It's pretty important to note that adding vanilla townies to a mountainous setup does not improve town winrate as dramatically as it "looks" like it would. From the percentages each time you add two more townies, the lynch phase you're adding is the lynch phase with the largest number of players, and the fewest correct hits on a lynch. Beyond the percentages, looking at the dayplay in smaller games versus larger games seems to exhibit a lot of trends of scum doing better in larger games in ways that are acting independently of the EV.


Anyway, if you just read the title of this thread, it seems to suggest "7:2 mountainous seems too scumside to me but barely so, is 8:2 better?" the answer is pretty much no, the gameplay ought to degenerate to day1 no-lynch, and that doesn't sound that compelling. You should probably just go to 9:2. And no, even here, we don't have 20 recent 9:2 mountainous games with 0 town wins and I would bet a lot of money against that lab experiment.

[Isis]

Site interest in straightforward setups isn't that low, but nightless steals a lot of the show when it comes to almost vanilla or fully vanilla setups, for whatever reasons. We've run 3 nightless 17ps with no midgame investigations in the past year, have fired off setups like 7p vengeful and less pressure, and I'm alive in a nightless vanilla game with 33% EV. The Team Mafia event featured a run of White Flag, which has sub50% town EV and resulted in town victory.

[northsidegal]

first, i agree with awoo. i'm a big believer in "assume good faith" and even i find it hard to believe that you made this thread for any purpose other than to comment on how bad you think this site is.

second, mountainous setups have been won before. i personally participated in and won a variant of mountainous, the only difference being the inclusion of neighborhoods. i suspect that how much you are willing to accept this as a true victory comes down to how closely you hold any feelings of superiority.

[Awoo]

2) Town only performs above EV in nightless setup. I believe town has yet to win a mountainous setup on this site, so mountainous probably results in town performing below EV if anything.

town won cul-de-sac viewtopic.php?f=52&t=76520

[Quick]

All my point was is that Town SHOULD play WAY above EV. That is all.

[northsidegal]

All my point was is that Town SHOULD play WAY above EV. That is all.

town does play significantly above EV in certain setups—for example, nightless and other setups that in some way disrupt the mafia factional kill. town plays significantly below EV in other setups, the reasons for which are somewhat more nebulous.

i'm interested to hear why you believe town "should" play way above EV, in general and for this setup specifically. i put "should" in quotes there because i believe the way that we use the word with regards to setups differs: if i were to say "town should play above EV in nightless", i would be using "should" to indicate likely probability. it seems to me, however, that in this context you are using "should" more in the sense of "ought to", perhaps with some connotation of duty or obligation. it's possible i'm interpreting you incorrectly, but that's the way that i'm reading what you're saying.

regardless, my primary interest is, to repeat myself, hearing why you believe town "should" play way above EV, in general and for this setup specifically. this is something i was actually just considering earlier – if you consider an equally skilled town and scumteam, where does the expectation that town should be the ones to perform better arise from? my guess is that it lies on the assumption that finding scum is easier than deceiving people as scum. i could be wrong in that guess, but if i weren't i would wonder whether or not that assumption is true.

[Isis]

Batters SHOULD hit WAY better than average probability of blind swings in the strike zone.

Did you know that lots of little league batters nearly double the batting average of MLB players? smh MLB is such hot trash, there's literally no other human actors involved in the process of batting that I can think of

[Quick]

Batters SHOULD hit WAY better than average probability of blind swings in the strike zone.

Did you know that lots of little league batters nearly double the batting average of MLB players? smh MLB is such hot trash, there's literally no other human actors involved in the process of batting that I can think of

Okay, is this just ego or what?

Don't really get why this site should be so much better than other sites. Would you mind unpacking that?

[Isis]

No one but you is promoting a hypothesis that any site's playerbase inferior or superior to any other site's playerbase.

The negation of "X>Y" is not "Y>X".

[northsidegal]

i'm often told it's scummy to answer other's questions for them, but i think you may have misinterpreted what isis was trying to say there.

personally, i interpreted it more as a comment on the nature of scumteams and their role in games rather than any sort of comment specifically about mafiascum.

[Quick]

i'm often told it's scummy to answer other's questions for them, but i think you may have misinterpreted what isis was trying to say there.

personally, i interpreted it more as a comment on the nature of scumteams and their role in games rather than any sort of comment specifically about mafiascum.

At least you didn't say I was misrepping them...

[northsidegal]

like i said, i'm a believer of "assume good faith".

interested to hear your thoughts on 16.

[Quick]

All my point was is that Town SHOULD play WAY above EV. That is all.

town does play significantly above EV in certain setups—for example, nightless and other setups that in some way disrupt the mafia factional kill. town plays significantly below EV in other setups, the reasons for which are somewhat more nebulous.

i'm interested to hear why you believe town "should" play way above EV, in general and for this setup specifically. i put "should" in quotes there because i believe the way that we use the word with regards to setups differs: if i were to say "town should play above EV in nightless", i would be using "should" to indicate likely probability. it seems to me, however, that in this context you are using "should" more in the sense of "ought to", perhaps with some connotation of duty or obligation. it's possible i'm interpreting you incorrectly, but that's the way that i'm reading what you're saying.

regardless, my primary interest is, to repeat myself, hearing why you believe town "should" play way above EV, in general and for this setup specifically. this is something i was actually just considering earlier – if you consider an equally skilled town and scumteam, where does the expectation that town should be the ones to perform better arise from? my guess is that it lies on the assumption that finding scum is easier than deceiving people as scum. i could be wrong in that guess, but if i weren't i would wonder whether or not that assumption is true.

Town should preform better than random chance by a mile. Why? Humans are good at problem solving, among other reasons. Of course this doesn't even factor in guilt, but there might be a small tick that Town does better because of that as well.

I guess, for this game, it really boils down to whether Mafia have Day Chat or not. I would also make the game so Mafia could NOT talk before the game started.

[northsidegal]

humans are also good at lying, and deliberately deceiving and misleading people - especially when it is their task to do so, and in a non-face to face setting. thus, couldn't i similarly say that we should expect town to do worse than ev?