In post 75, zoraster wrote:I don't trust you. I don't trust any mod. I don't think all mods who don't show their system manipulate at all,
but I wouldn't be surprised if something like a third to half do so
.
I doubt there are many mods who manipulate games hugely. I think it's likely that they randomly generate and then look at it and either (a) think this is a crappy draw and redo the randomness or (b) swap a couple of players around to make for what they think is a more fun experience. I think mods do this in the hopes of providing players with a better game, so it's not like I think mods are doing this maliciously. But I think it goes on.
100% agree with this estimation. I think it's obvious this is the case based on the amount of people who have nonchalantly owned up to mild manipulation over the last few pages. I think the majority of it is little things like players like Richard rerolling a few times to get the roles in a nice order, mods rolling two VI's for a scumteam and making sure the third is a competent player, rerolling the most exciting/powerful role of a game if it lands on a VI, rerolling the town PR's if there is a high concentration of VI's or strong players with them etc. If a mod has a penchant for ensuring a relatively even but random looking spread of good to bad players across both teams and across all the roles, a sizable chunk of the actual random rolls may not really look random and would be tempting to change.
The truth is, most people don't really know what randomness looks. They have a stereotypical idea about what randomness is, so when they attempt to simulate it, they will generally gravitate to that stereotype, indirectly ignoring a slew of possible results that look weird or have an obvious pattern to it - these outcomes occur in true randomness a lot though. Radiolab did a really interesting
demonstration about the nature of randomness (skip to 8:15 if you don't wanna listen to the whole ep), where they got the hosts to flip a coin a hundred times and record the results, and have another group fake the flips and just write down fake results. The experimenter can always spot the fake results because they never put in big streaks of heads or tails, when it's basically inevitable there will be multiple big streaks of 6 or more.
If I know or suspect a mod manipulates some part of their role distribution, I'll probably be looking for some unresolved streaks deep in the game (like two PR's flipped so far have been VI's. Two people currently counterclaiming guilty results on each other, with everyone else VT. Is the final PR
another
VI or a competent player?) and factor it into my decisions.
