Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Game Over!


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Post Post #2125 (ISO) » Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:04 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

In post 2120, geraintm wrote:Thoughts on the set up

Mods have come in and said it was fine and balanced.
It didn’t feel balanced playing it. I realise losing one of us day 1 really helps town’s odds, but it felt like our 2 roles just didn’t help us at all. They don’t allow us to break up the advantages that town had. Once they got ahead, we had no way of coming back. It didn’t matter that we knew who was going where, there were a pair of confirmed neighbours, there was a Cop who, if they had targeted either of us it was a straight guilty, and the alien again was another role that once town was ahead we couldn’t interfere with. We could have been 3 goons and would have had just as great a chance of winning that game than with (almost) perfect knowledge of what town was doing.
Actually, this is an interesting point. The setup's pretty swingy (i.e. random events, especially early on, have a large influence on who will win, so it is likely to feel very townsided or scumsided depending on how the early game goes); that's a common issue. There's a second issue, though, too: there's very little scum agency in the setup, in that the way the setup swings is mostly not under scum control. (Imagine what would happen if Tayl0r announced a guilty on Italiano D2, compared to if Tayl0r announced a guilty on Gamma D2; there would have been quite a difference in how the game played out, and scum has very little influence on the targeting because cop-alikes normally aim for null reads.)

In the past, I've gotten annoyed at a setup in postgame due to lack of town agency. Lack of scum agency is a comparable issue, but one that reviews often don't focus on much. Perhaps they should.
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Post Post #2126 (ISO) » Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:11 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

In post 2112, mastina wrote:The town's roles were strong, but had significant anti-synergy,
and scum had reasonable safeclaims to claim that also gave them a significant edge in terms of information gained.
I agree with much of your balance review (as far as it goes), but have to take issue with the bolded section. 2× Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour + a full Town PT Cop + Town Alien + Town Tracker isn't balanced opposite any reasonable scumteam. Change the Town Tracker to a Town Watcher, and it's even less balanced. So what you considered to be a scum safeclaim wasn't safe at all; making that claim is inevitably going to lead to a 1v1 at massclaim time, and possibly sooner.

Evidence for this is that Gamma did indeed claim Tracker, and I correctly read him as scum based on the 1v1.

(That is, unless the claim you had in mind was "VT". That would have been a perfectly safe claim in the setup, and it was clued as a safeclaim by giving scum two different power roles, but I think most scumteams haven't yet cottoned on to the principle of "the more power you have, the less power you claim".)
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Post Post #2127 (ISO) » Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:02 pm

Post by geraintm »

In post 2122, callforjudgement wrote:
In post 2120, geraintm wrote:Question
Night 2
• callforjudgement is Alienating ItalianoVD.
• ItalianoVD is Friendly Neighboring Looker.
• Tayl0r Swift is PT Copping RCEnigma.
• WaltertheDunce10 is Friendly Neighboring CallForJudgement.
• geraintm is Watching ItalianoVD. [No result]
• Gamma Emerald is Tracking WaltertheDunce10. [targeted CFJ]
• Gamma Emerald is killing Taylor Swift

Why did I not see CFJ going to Italiano? I targeted italiano explicitly to watch a doc/protection role going there. They then were targeted and I didn’t see it happen./quote]

You didn't see my night action because I rolestopped your action (unintentionally, but it happened); an Alien action protects its target from
any
other action (not just kills), as long as it doesn't specifically pierce blocks. So although I was trying to protect Italiano from the nightkill, my action worked just as well at "protecting" Italiano from being watched, or indeed Titus from receiving Walter's Friendly Neighbour PM.
oh, this comes down to me not understanding that "no result" is different to "no action"
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Post Post #2128 (ISO) » Fri Oct 16, 2020 12:36 pm

Post by Looker »

Ah. Sorry for not playing.
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Post Post #2129 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:27 pm

Post by mastina »

In post 2126, callforjudgement wrote:2× Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour + a full Town PT Cop + Town Alien + Town Tracker isn't balanced opposite any reasonable scumteam. Change the Town Tracker to a Town Watcher, and it's even less balanced. So what you considered to be a scum safeclaim wasn't safe at all; making that claim is inevitably going to lead to a 1v1 at massclaim time, and possibly sooner. Evidence for this is that Gamma did indeed claim Tracker, and I correctly read him as scum based on the 1v1.
When I say a claim is a safeclaim, what I mean by it is that the town has no inherent way off of the claim itself to know that the claimer, and only the claimer, could be scum--for instance, sure, while the town would "know" (never underestimate town stupidity when it comes to setup spec, thus the quotation marks) 2x friendly neighbor + pt cop + alien + tracker is presumably too much town power, what makes it inherent that the tracker is scum? It could also be the PT Cop or Alien, both of which make sense as scum roles here just as much as they do town roles, if not more. With the PT cop dead and you being the Alien, obviously
you
would know the tracker was suspect, but it's not something that the town in general would be able to reasonably deduce accurately. (Especially since tracker is not a common scum role; both a PT cop in a mason game and an alien-type role
are
common scum roles.)

Also, scum can also modify their claims by claiming nonexistent modifiers to their claims (admittedly, I don't consider it optimal setup design in most cases for scum to be forced to modify their real role, but if they feel their real role is unsafe to claim as-is, they can weaken their role by modifying it with them).
Full friendly neighborx2/pt cop/alien/tracker might be unbelievable, but friendly neighborx2/pt cop/alien/gated tracker isn't inherently overwhelming. It's five town power roles, which is still within the bounds of reason, even with most of them being strong power roles, if the scum has sufficiently strong counters in the scum power roles.

To a lesser extent, this applies to the watcher as well.
There's also the fact that if the town lynches one of the tracker/watcher when both have claimed, they're less likely to think both are scumclaims, because generally when you give scum one investigative of that sort, the other is, generally speaking, a town role. (I admit that this is a bit of a generic meta-wifom of setups tho.)
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Post Post #2130 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:33 pm

Post by ItalianoVD »

So sorry, forgot to thank you for running it George and Datisi and also a shoutout to Mastina for the setup. Had a lot of fun. :)
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Post Post #2131 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:34 pm

Post by ItalianoVD »

Also Datisi for the setup as well.
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Post Post #2132 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:36 pm

Post by mastina »

Basically, my definition of a scum safeclaim is that scum can claim their real role, and have that role be plausibly town in the setup, meaning they aren't instantly voted out for having claimed it.

Tracker/Watcher both fit the bill for that--they are both claims that could plausibly be town in the setup, meaning claiming them isn't inherently an instant death-sentence.

Given specific circumstances (where the town decides that the town has too much power and has confirmed the alignments of the PT Cop/Alien and the game contains a prolific nrg reviewer that knows how to break down setup balance), those claims do stop being safe, sure, where given those circumstances they could become incriminating...

...But those specific circumstances are not something that can be anticipated as going to occur when reviewing.

I'd have no way of knowing the town alien would be a nrg reviewer who, with the death of the PT cop, and knowledge of their own role plus the friendly neighbors, would be able to deduce a tracker claim was a scumclaim and via their knowledge convince the town of this. Who could?
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Post Post #2133 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:38 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

For what it's worth, I would expect a Watcher claim to be scum in the vast majority of contexts, unless there were strong clues in the setup that it were town. Town Watchers really warp setups around them, in ways which normally become fairly obvious by massclaim. A scum Watcher is much less specific in its usage.
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Post Post #2134 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:45 pm

Post by ItalianoVD »

I’m not really that versed in the roles yet, but for what it’s worth I believe the roles were balanced after knowing them. Early on I thought having two friendly neighbors who were also in a neighborhood was pretty powerful because of the potential of their being a large confirmed townbloc. Along with whatever Taylor’s pr was and the thinking of RCEnigma’s pr, etc. Not_Mafia confused things as well for me. But I figured there had to be something on the scum side to counteract all the potential roles, which is why I think the 4 scum theory arose. I just figured there was a scum roleblocker and a rolecop or something like that.

After seeing that there was an Alien then things made more sense. As an overall picture I don’t think it was too heavily favored in either direction, but like Mastina said losing scum early really hurt their chances. Had the scum gotten two miselims from the start it

Generally I think the town worked well together once we got over our tunneling problem. ;) which helped in the win. I don’t think it was bad play from scum imo, just better town play.
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Post Post #2135 (ISO) » Tue Oct 20, 2020 9:45 am

Post by Tayl0r Swift »

hmmm gg
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Post Post #2136 (ISO) » Wed Oct 28, 2020 7:00 pm

Post by Frogsterking »

CFJ, my reads are based on pattern matching as opposed to deductive or inductive reasoning. The patterns are relatively complex and so far I believe the patterns worth finding for the most part occur very early and very late in each day. I think most players use some combination of pattern matching and inductive/deductive reasoning, I think you rely almost solely on reasoning like inductive/deductive which is less common, and I rely almost solely on pattern-matching which is also unusual.

I also do not believe that you need to qualify your playstyle CFJ, it's similar to my friend who is a (literal) chess master. He just describes himself as a technical player.
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Post Post #2137 (ISO) » Wed Oct 28, 2020 7:03 pm

Post by Frogsterking »

This game made me wonder if setups with longer days have higher town win rates.
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Post Post #2138 (ISO) » Wed Oct 28, 2020 7:15 pm

Post by Frogsterking »

It's interesting that Looker and I both experienced extremely negative emotional reactions to geraintm after similar amounts of time playing the game: two weeks. It's as if we were experiencing some type of narcissistic exposure type symptoms with geraintm, like his lies were giving us a sunburn.
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Post Post #2139 (ISO) » Wed Oct 28, 2020 7:17 pm

Post by Gamma Emerald »

lmao
Btw shorter deadline are actually generally more pro town
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Post Post #2140 (ISO) » Wed Oct 28, 2020 7:28 pm

Post by Frogsterking »

In post 2137, Frogsterking wrote:This game made me wonder if setups with longer days have higher town win rates.
Let me rephrase this question: if specific time frames like one week vs two week vs three week for the same setup have been tested.
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Post Post #2141 (ISO) » Wed Oct 28, 2020 7:29 pm

Post by Frogsterking »

In post 2139, Gamma Emerald wrote:lmao
Btw shorter deadline are actually generally more pro town
That's pretty interesting.
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Post Post #2142 (ISO) » Thu Oct 29, 2020 10:52 am

Post by callforjudgement »

Shortening deadlines increased town win rates
in Newbie games
. I suspect that the reason for this is that it reduced the rate at which players replaced out, making people easier to read.

I'm pretty sure that longer deadlines are beneficial for town if players stay focused and all the time is used, but that isn't always the case in long-deadline games, and sometimes the focus advantages of short deadlines outweigh that.

I recently ran a game in which town had control over deadlines, and they chose to set the deadline of each day to the minimum of 96 hours. Although they caught scum D1 (both scum, in fact), it ended up in scum winning (from 6:1!), with at least one elimination happening as a consequence of deadline expiring rather than being intended by anyone. I think town would have had more chance if the deadlines were longer.
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Post Post #2143 (ISO) » Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:21 am

Post by mastina »

Generally speaking, longer deadlines are protown if the town is actively using the time for constructive play where they are trying to progress the game and there is good reason to.

If the game stalls, but the town wants to drag things out to that longer deadline, that's when longer deadlines stop being protown, because if the game has stalled, then the day SHOULD end. If no progress is being made, if there's a stalemate, if there's no new information to be shared, if stances aren't progressing, etc. then waiting for a deadline rush will kill a town's momentum. Shorter deadlines help prevent this, and this is probably the reason why people think shorter deadlines are protown; because they think towns will, by default, use all of their allotted time and if there's less allotted time, there's less stalling in the game.

But say the game isn't stalling yet you run into the deadline--having longer deadlines would help the town there and not having them forces them to make plays that are rushed and more often than not, mistakes, because they needed more time than they had available to reach the right conclusion.
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Post Post #2144 (ISO) » Tue Nov 03, 2020 9:00 am

Post by RCEnigma »

In post 2094, callforjudgement wrote:I should mention that this was a pretty difficult playerlist to play with, not in terms of personality (there's nobody here I hate talking to and many of the players were a lot of fun to be around), but in terms of readability. There were players who rarely explain anything (RCEnigma, Not_Mafia)
Sorry about this, it's an intentional thing. My playstyle and town is usually straightforward and very readable. My scum playstyle is not up to snuff making it also... Very readable. So will I reign both into a sweeter spot my general play is more erratic and less insightful.

Also apologize for dropping out. Real life came at me fast. But it was good playing with mostly everyone here!
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Post Post #2145 (ISO) » Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:15 am

Post by clidd »

Btw, this is what scum!Gera looks like:

Spoiler:
In post 769, geraintm wrote:thoughts on frogster

had a strong red on nosferatu earyl game, loads of long posts.
then switched and said gamma and banana were...but not the associated long posts with evidence.

back to long log posts on rc enimgma

528 - vague post hinting at scum but not disclosing any actual reads

weird read on CFJ about them being scum, but not wanting to lynch. instead focussing on nosferatu and banana

662 - raya is now scum

734 - wants to look at walter in case they are scum (and later asks permission from not mafia to join that wagon)

overall, they are throwing a lot of scum reads around. sticks with them but quickly moves onto the next shiny thing. not impressed

(tryng to go trough these in order of number of posts)
In post 770, geraintm wrote:thoughts on taylor swift

their entrance seems fine,i find their method of reading not townie or scummy just fine. except they manage to get two scum votes as they go through

679 - already said I dislike this when they group so many together as potential scum

690 - said already dislike them saying we aren't allowed to discuss their votes

by 730 have hard turned away from walter

thoughts - it was a good entrance, but posts have dialled back and now just seems in an style disagreement with nosferatu and I don't like the way they entered in hard against walter and now they aren't in their top 3.
I realise I already finding it easy to find bad things to say about everyone and not looking for good things.


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Post Post #2146 (ISO) » Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:15 am

Post by clidd »

Oh, wrong place.
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Post Post #2147 (ISO) » Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:15 am

Post by Gypyx »

nice one cliddd
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Post Post #2148 (ISO) » Mon May 31, 2021 7:43 pm

Post by Gamma Emerald »

this has happened before lol
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