Team Mafia 2018 Results and Postmortem

[Alisae]

I miscommunicated to Alisae that a custom banner included custom text at the start of the event and that miscom went down the line until post-"Basically God of Scumplay" banner was made.
So yeah that's on me.

god dammit Elli.

[Ellibereth]

I'm curious if 15 is actually a "worse" number than 13 balance-wise

it definitely is for 3 scum white flag

I don't think that's true.

10-3 has a 47.8% Town EV that translated to a mid-20% town winrate in practice.
12-3 has a 51% Town EV.

I would even argue that normal runs should probably be 12-3, the debate should be how many percentage points does a team mafia town advantage actively contribute. (Which is a number that I personally think is less than most people think it is).

[Alisae]

Now I feel fucking terrible because I dissapointed Kats and friends

[Ellibereth]

Ali chill they don't care as much as you think they do.

[Alisae]

oh ok

[Alisae]

I would like a 2nd place banner please

I beg of you this is all I have left

Ya know what
if I can get photoshop to open from my thumbdrive tomorrow, I will make one
JUUUUUUUUUUST for you
but you will never get it
and I get to wave it in front of you and be like
"HAHA SPIFFY DOESN'T HAVE A BANNER HAHA"



luv u spiffy
<3

[Patrick]

Thanks to all the organisers for running the event, not an easy thing to do. Random comments on stuff:

1) Having played with both tokens and people choosing their own alignments, I definitely preferred tokens. They still give players a measure of control over what they get, and provide a talking point in games, but without confirming multiple people as town. Letting people choose their roles allows for pseudo confirmation of a non-trivial number of players, and while you can argue they might pick scum to surprise everyone, I don’t think it’s especially plausible (and don’t think anyone really did this?) I say this as someone who benefitted, and still didn’t like it. I can imagine the frustration of some of the noted strong scum players, having to enter games with a huge target on their heads.
2) I never really wrapped my head around the rules about how much we could discuss other teams alignment preferences, especially after the rule update, so I mainly steered clear of it to avoid a potential modkill. I don’t know if that kind of rule can ever be implemented in a completely clean way, which to me is another argument favouring tokens, to remove some of the focus on who would pick what.
3) I struggled with 15 players to keep track of, but that’s more my preferences than anything else. I generally stuck to 12 of fewer when I was playing more regularly.
4) Probably nitpicky but I think flips should happen as soon as possible after a lynch. I have in mind mainly the last lynch of White Flag, where it was held back without particular reason, and I can say that had I been in Davsto’s shoes that would have cost me most of my night’s sleep. A similar thing happened in previous team mafia for the last lynch in my game. Players get invested, and the emotions are real. Note that I’m not criticising mods who aren’t around exactly at deadline to do the flip – everyone has different timezones and commitments away from the site.
5) The tiebreaker method was great. Would have loved even more if my team had been in contention for the top spot, but great method nonetheless. I’d take that over a ratings based tiebreak.

It’s forever ago now, but in my game…
Props to Cheetory, Kagami and Eddie Cane for catching Mulch and making themselves appealing nightkill targets
Props to implosion, Spiffeh and Kmd for giving me Vanilla results. Major slops to Chara for giving me a non-Vanilla result, but good job on protecting Eddie =P
Props to Ether for inventing the Neapolitan role, and for keeping on top of things as a mod.

Definitely enjoyed playing as an investigative for a change, it affected my play but I think people not knowing me very well and some others obvtowning worked nicely, keeping me middling enough to never come under suspicion nor ever be a likely nightkill target until it was too late. Implosion and Spiffeh were people I thought wouldn’t come under immediate pressure but people might be paranoid about later, Chara I barely thought about because I assumed Ginngie had just scumclaimed (lol) and Kmd I was fishing for a VT result, and picking someone who didn’t seem likely to have been cleared by anyone else. All my speculation about Chara being masons with Ginngie, or a weak investigator who’d cleared Ginngie or Firebringer looks funny now, but it was one of the reasons I avoided investigating either.

Anyway, thanks to all involved in playing and running. I can’t say I loved the current meta, but I don’t regret taking part. See you all next time, probably.

[Alisae]

Neapolitan has been a thing for a while I think now but it might have not been around while you were.

[Patrick]

Yeah I know it's not a new role, I discussed it with Ether ages ago after I had a Vanilla Cop in a game of mine that actually functioned like today's Neapolitan.

[Creature]

White Flag and Ether's normal were notably townsided.

[Creature]

thinking we should let teams rate MVPs from each game.

[Creature]

still, though, I liked carrying my teammates (at some points)

[Patrick]

From town to scum favouring, I'd probably rank them

White Flag
Ether Normal
Alisae Theme
Beeboy Inventions
mhsmith Normal

With the qualifier that it's really hard to tell for the theme and I definitely don't remember every role.

[Ether]

I'm not sure 3:10 White Flag is as balanced as people think. Town only won two of the ten completed games I managed to dig up.

Mine was probably townsided, though. It was intentionally designed to have callbacks to the oldschool follow-the-cop-catch-the-doctor ways, with scum's victory hinging a fair amount on whether they could identify/draw out power roles, and town's information role potentially being a tool to help them do that. I tried to signal that this was important from the very start of the game with the scumteam's roles, and, um, I failed miserably. (Apparently DEFCON, given scum roles in both normal PMs, assumed mhsmith's game would be much more townsided just based on the scumteams' relative firepower.)

Neapolitans are kiiiiind of mine. I'm not the only or even the first person who came up with them independently, but they are probably more mine than they are anyone else's. I can get into the history if anyone cares.

[Patrick]

Yeah, maybe White Flag just looked worse from our perspective than it really is. Having to mislynch 5 townies just felt like such a long road, and the only reason scum came close to pulling it off was the modkill.

Maybe the way Ether Normal turned out also makes it look more townsided than it is, though. If the Neapolitan gets killed early, town has almost nothing, and even in the scenario we got, the forced win evaporates if the scum roleblock is still available, while throwing suspicion on the doctor as a bonus. I feel like most towns wouldn't predict a second roleblocker when trying to break the game.

[zoraster]

I think 11p White Flag is balanced, though in favor of scum and 13p White Flag is balanced, though in favor of town (at least in a Team Mafia setting). So 15p is probably not super well balanced. But then again, the call here was for 15p games overall and outside giving scum a one-shot vigilante, it'd be really hard to give scum enough power to rebalance that and keep White Flag, which has been a staple of Team Mafia.

For what it's worth, I think 15p games are pretty hard to balance. Putting in 3 scum means town's power has to be relatively low and putting in 4 means the town power has to be REALLY high. Honestly, I'd rather try to balance a 21p game with 4 scum than a 15p game with 4 scum.

[Fenchurch]

Fine with our own one being released anyway.

Yep, I agree for ours to be released, and singer has confirmed too.

[17/04/2018 21:57:10] Fenchurch: Mina and singer - can you confirm if you're okay with our team topic being released?
[17/04/2018 21:59:17] singer signer: I'm good with that

Add in my permission.

We should have more team PTs released.

[17/04/2018 22:39:21] Mina: I'm okay with it being released

Mina has confirmed too, so our team topic is good to go.

[Ellibereth]

I genuinely think that the people are overestimating the "team mafia setting" town buff.
I don't any percieved buff is coming from a lot of people getting together to discuss the game if at all, I think the buff comes from some individuals trying much harder than they would on average.

EVEN if there was a buff, it being sizable enough to take a ~48% EV 2 out of 10 town winrate and boosting it to town favored seems crazy to me.

[Gamma Emerald]

I think the buff doesn't come from the thinktank aspect but being able to assess preferences and take them into account across games

[Mathdino]

the buff comes from the fact that you're MUCH more likely to run into players who know you given that there's 70 other slots in the game who can read you

it assumes people actually take advantage of it -- creature basically spewed his entire team but obviously smith's game turned out the way it did because town didn't take advantage of creature's readability

but as another example, NSG was placed in a game where basically no one knew her meta, but ended up being locktowned due to
- RC being in the tournament and aware of her meta
- me being able to talk to Almost50 through her, and A50's ability to read me

this kind of thing is hard to get outside of hydra games and team mafia style games

[Ellibereth]

I think the buff doesn't come from the thinktank aspect but being able to assess preferences and take them into account across games

I agree this is on avg plus town EV but not majorly (say >10%) so. MUCH less people tried to abuse this than in the 2011/2012 runs which had basically the same choice mechanic.

You can argue that now, unlike then, the concept of "I'm only able to play one alignment and I play the other SIGNIFIGANTLY worse" is much more prominent, but I think that sort of "style", if you can even call it that, is a bug and not a feature and something the playerbase should actively be trying to subvert.

[Ellibereth]

the buff comes from the fact that you're MUCH more likely to run into players who know you given that there's 70 other slots in the game who can read you

it assumes people actually take advantage of it -- creature basically spewed his entire team but obviously smith's game turned out the way it did because town didn't take advantage of creature's readability

but as another example, NSG was placed in a game where basically no one knew her meta, but ended up being locktowned due to
- RC being in the tournament and aware of her meta
- me being able to talk to Almost50 through her, and A50's ability to read me

this kind of thing is hard to get outside of hydra games and team mafia style games

I don't think that's why she was locktowned at all but I'm sure some other plays from White Flag can chime in with regards to that.

The rest is probably a good point usually - I honestly feel most "A can read B" relationships are fairly shallow and if B tried they could "beat" that relationship, especially in a 1-shot setting. If anything I think scum are just less motivated to "tryhard" than town are in this setting and will just do "what always works*". (shout to shea who definitely played his heart out for the whole event).

*or even doesn't work

[Ellibereth]

Oh yeah - one thing I left out of the wrapup.

A nontrivial amount of people approached me at some point saying the event should have STRICTER entrance requirements.

It was (and probably still is) zor's intention to have the event be as open as possible to the community, so filtering players in some arbitrary way likely won't workout.

[Mathdino]

that's silly

the entrance requirement is

1. your ability to actually find a team to play with

2. your ability to not get intimidated by having to "play" 5 games with 75 players

there's an argument that players should be background checked with whatever magic tools the mods use to make sure they're not alts (Smocaine, Sauce) but idk what software they use so that might not be feasible

i think sauce shouldn't have been allowed to play but that's about it really

[Eddie Cane]

if the mods knew they were banned alts they would be banned not just blocked from team mafia lmao