Why isn't daytalking standard?

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Prana, can you come back when you're ready to argue instead of simply claiming you're right in different formats? You completely ignored the argument I put forth.

P.S. What I do find plausible is that giving scum daytalk while townies are just learning to scumhunt could be a bad idea.

[DeathRowKitty]

Mean Value Theorem:

Would a two man daytalking scumteam with no powers but nightkill have an be favored to win a 25 man game? No.

Would a nine man team with a doctor, a roleblock, and a godfather all with daytalk be favored to win a 25 man game? Yes.

Somewhere in between there a combination of scum population and townie population, powers and lack thereof, and daytalk and lack thereof that makes the setup balanced. Daytalk should be a popular item in the toolbox because it makes the game a lot more fun. That's like, the same reason the newbie setup is the way it is instead of a 10 man vanilla game. You add in fun things and adjust. Daytalk happens to be really, really fun, and undoubtedly increases the skill variable. I don't buy that it lets the best scum teammate paper over a bad teammate in a way that makes his skill matter less, he's going to seem to coached and have funny playstyle changes if coaching is heavily used and create a relation tell in that way.

That's the intermediate value theorem, not the mean value theorem.

[Herodotus]

Nothing about the purpose nor the means of scum voting changes due to daytalk, unless they use votes as code. How do you think daytalk can mask votes?
"

vote: A

; but I have daytalk, so you can't see that I'm on this townie's wagon!"
Seems like a peculiar assertion that needs justification before ort will be able to rebut.

Overall, they never have to coordinate bandwagon hopping where the town can see them - it means that their general behavior is lost in the noise.

I don't think I've ever tried to "coordinate bandwagon hopping". I don't even know what that means.
Maybe that's why I don't play scum as well as town.

Fine. It means scum never have to worry about hopping on a wagon to give it momentum, only to have their buddy do it five posts later. It means scum never have to worry about whether a quicklynch will work. It means scum will never have to worry about whether their buddy will flip out if they bus them. It means scum will never have to, in short, make

any mistakes

with respect to utilizing their votes (i.e. the main Day Power of the game) in a detectable way.

Sorry for taking so long to respond to this...
You use three examples there:
1. Hopping on a wagon, then their buddy also hopping on (with the assumption that this is a bad thing for the scum in vote analysis.)
2. A failing quicklynch.
3. A buddy flipping out when they are bussed.

I would say that in the first and third examples, the daytalk is only helping to cover for a buddy with less experience or skill; there's no reason why decent scum couldn't avoid these problems without daytalk.
And I definitely agree that daytalk helps scum to cover for a lack of experience or skill in weaker team members. But I don't think that makes an almost guaranteed win.

The second example is true, but there's no reason why the scum shouldn't be able to arrange a time of day during the night before lylo when they will both be online, and there's no reason the scum can't see each other posting and start posting themselves to indicate that they're ready to quicklynch.

[AdumbroDeus]

daytalk isn't better or worse imo, it's just different and needs to be balanced differently. Smashboards runs a much better ratio of town to scum wins and daytalk is common standard.

[AGar]

daytalk isn't better or worse imo, it's just different and needs to be balanced differently. Smashboards runs a much better ratio of town to scum wins and daytalk is common standard.

Other forums tend to rely on varied mechanics and heavier night-action games.

TeamLiquid games run 50:50 on Town/Scum wins, or somewhere about that number. They use open communication for anyone. Doesn't mean that balances the game and doesn't mean that's a solid way to play.

(FWIW, there is no "right" way to play. We have our way here on MS, other sites have theirs. Stop bringing other forums up, they're completely different environments.)

[AdumbroDeus]

daytalk isn't better or worse imo, it's just different and needs to be balanced differently. Smashboards runs a much better ratio of town to scum wins and daytalk is common standard.

Other forums tend to rely on varied mechanics and heavier night-action games.

TeamLiquid games run 50:50 on Town/Scum wins, or somewhere about that number. They use open communication for anyone. Doesn't mean that balances the game and doesn't mean that's a solid way to play.

(FWIW, there is no "right" way to play. We have our way here on MS, other sites have theirs. Stop bringing other forums up, they're completely different environments.)

Not really smashboards honestly, the only major mechanical difference is the daytalk, otherwise they run it about equivilent to ours down to the fact that minis are 13 limit and large are 14 and over (which was adopted right before we did here).

The metagame went in a different direction and role data is nowhere near as important as in other forums I've seen mafia so behaviorial tells are priority. Only one or two mods run NA-heavy games and they advertise heavily. Really unusual mechanics are rare, but unusual roles are reletively common, though truly crazy ones are again rare.


There are meta-game differences but the games themselves would for the most part be right at home in mafiascum.


A large part of this I chaulk up to Xivii (he still post here at all, haven't seen him) basically establishing our mafia community.

[Mr. Flay]

I would say that in the first and third examples, the daytalk is only helping to cover for a buddy with less experience or skill; there's no reason why decent scum couldn't avoid these problems without daytalk.
And I definitely agree that daytalk helps scum to cover for a lack of experience or skill in weaker team members. But I don't think that makes an almost guaranteed win.

I don't think I ever said it DID create an "almost guaranteed win" - just that it removes a lot of the chances for catching scum.Are you responding to somebody else with that part? It changes the balance point of the game, and historically we're already scum-tilted on MafiaScum. If you don't account for daytalk in some way with your game design, it WILL result in many more scum wins.

The second example is true, but there's no reason why the scum shouldn't be able to arrange a time of day during the night before lylo when they will both be online, and there's no reason the scum can't see each other posting and start posting themselves to indicate that they're ready to quicklynch.

Except you don't really KNOW the person is there/still there, unless you can actually ask them outright. That's the risk I'm talking about with #2.

[Herodotus]

PranaDevil did.
And I agree, it does help the scum.

[LimMePls]

Mean Value Theorem:

Would a two man daytalking scumteam with no powers but nightkill have an be favored to win a 25 man game? No.

Would a nine man team with a doctor, a roleblock, and a godfather all with daytalk be favored to win a 25 man game? Yes.

Somewhere in between there a combination of scum population and townie population, powers and lack thereof, and daytalk and lack thereof that makes the setup balanced. Daytalk should be a popular item in the toolbox because it makes the game a lot more fun. That's like, the same reason the newbie setup is the way it is instead of a 10 man vanilla game. You add in fun things and adjust. Daytalk happens to be really, really fun, and undoubtedly increases the skill variable. I don't buy that it lets the best scum teammate paper over a bad teammate in a way that makes his skill matter less, he's going to seem to coached and have funny playstyle changes if coaching is heavily used and create a relation tell in that way.

That's the intermediate value theorem, not the mean value theorem.

OH SNAP! YOU JUST GOT MATH-TOLD! Turn in your math-nerd card pops, game over man. GAME OVER.

[Sleepless Assassin]

Except only a really really stupid scum team would outright feed him lines. They would just tell him to post "something along these lines", and he'd word it in his own way. You're confusing a bad scum player taking advice from a good scum player with a bad scum player taking advice from a bad scum player.

^this. If it doesn't sound like the same player, the coaching arguements are sure to follow and the new player isn't learning.

[Ranmaru]

I like day talk. Skimmed thread; have no time right now.

[Something_Smart]

Gonna be the Sleepless Assassin here, because I want to see how people stand on the question presently, and there was no more recent thread about it than this one.

The question came up when I was talking with Enter about his upcoming game. He said, among other things, that he wanted to experiment with things and get hard data about the effects of daytalk rather than just hypothetical reasoning.

This may just be because I'm in favor of it, but the case for daytalk seems very obvious to me. If nothing else, it's more fun for the scum, and it isn't less fun for the town since it doesn't affect them at all. In addition, the camaraderie argument is pretty strong-- the whole premise of mafia is a small, unified, informed scumteam versus a large, divided, uninformed town. The ability of the scum to know who their team is and to work together with them is the only advantage they have during the day, so why inhibit them working together and force them to try to guess how their teammates are going to act, rather than just letting them coordinate?

Probably the most valid argument I've seen against it is that it makes it so the scum players don't have to think for themselves or react on their own, but that doesn't really seem accurate to me, because they still have to write their own posts and react to things in real-time. It can maybe get bad with bossy scum players who tell their partners what to do, but I think there are very few people who do that. Other than that, most daytalk scumteams I've see have had the players collaborating to try to figure out how they should act in a given situation.

But like I said, I'm curious to see what other people think. Are people for or against daytalk, and how come?

[Albert B. Rampage]

Its more fun for me with no daytalk as both alignments

But I always allow daytalk in my games because replacing into a 80 page game is a bitch and daytalk helps with that

[Something_Smart]

How could it be more fun without daytalk? Couldn't you always choose not to use it, if you didn't want to?

[Xtoxm]

If nothing else, it's more fun for the scum

i am pro-daytalk for this reason. its lot more fun playing scum with daytalk than without.

[Umlaut]

How could it be more fun without daytalk? Couldn't you always choose not to use it, if you didn't want to?

In a competitive game, playing to win means doing whatever maximizes your likelihood of winning, even if it's not the most fun way to play, so you can't just decide not to use daytalk when it's available unless you believe it adds no value for scum.

[Umlaut]

Chess wouldn't necessarily be a more fun game if your bishops and rooks were all replaced with queens, even though you could still choose to move them as if they were bishops and rooks

[Isis]

Yeah I wanted to post what Umlaut said but wasn't feeling as eloquent

[Keychain]

I generally prefer playing scum without daytalk. It adds an element of people reading to the game as scum - what are your teammates doing? how can you coordinate with them? are they signalling something? You play independently when the game is on, and then you regroup at night to plan. It's one of the more fun aspects of playing scum to me and daytalk kills that.

Also because most of the time no daytalk means all my focus is in the game rather than split between the game and the scum pt, which I find more enjoyable and immersive.

It was nice as a novelty or a newbie but I don't really like playing with it as standard.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I've found that I have to actually focus a lot more on what my team is doing than otherwise when I don't have day talk

I put a lot of emphasis on working cohesively together so the advent of daytalk being standard really helped me focus on my own play instead

[Albert B. Rampage]

Daytalk is rarely used effectively by scum IME

The caliber of players is too low

[Something_Smart]

Daytalk is rarely used effectively by scum IME

The caliber of players is too low

This is a weird comment to me, because daytalk seems like it would help weaker scumteams relatively more than stronger ones, since they can work together to try to figure out how to handle difficult situations which means it's less of a problem if they can't do it on their own.

And that also checks out with my scumgames because I feel like daytalk has had a positive effect on most of my scum wins, and I don't consider myself a strong scum player.

[Albert B. Rampage]

Daytalk is rarely used effectively by scum IME

The caliber of players is too low

This is a weird comment to me, because daytalk seems like it would help weaker scumteams relatively more than stronger ones, since they can work together to try to figure out how to handle difficult situations which means it's less of a problem if they can't do it on their own.

And that also checks out with my scumgames because I feel like daytalk has had a positive effect on most of my scum wins, and I don't consider myself a strong scum player.

You are a strong and active player. Daytalk helps strong players more than weak players. Weak players don't know what to do with it and the PT is often dead.

[Something_Smart]

I don't think that's true? I utilized daytalk pretty heavily when I was much newer as well.

[Nancy Drew 39]

My worst scumgame ever was the one without daytalk and we won that. That game was hell for me because my buddy was being toxic and insulting me all through day 1 and the mod wouldn’t do anything about it. When it finally got to night 1, I confronted my buddy right in the scum pt and threatened to report him if he didn’t stop. The result was day 2 was infinitely more pleasant.