Implementing an elo rating system for Mafia.

[Kagami]

Here would be a fun alternative to an elo system, and it would be available to both (town) players and observers:

Set up an external site with site accounts. There's no reason it couldn't be done on ms itself, but it's probably easier as a 3rd party effort.

The site scrapes ms to find games in night 1. Users can log in and make guesses as to who the living scum are.

Once the game has finished, the accuracy of the users' guesses are evaluated. Users could get something like an overall F-score from their precision-recall curve, which would be indicative of their ability to find scumzors.

[Stabulous]

^and it should let people see how often they are townread and scumread in their games, that could be a useful statistic.

[FakedBlogger]

Elo is not built for mafia. There are several obstacles that need to be overcome to implement such a rating system.

-Mafia, unlike Chess, is not a two-player game.
......
-Mafia does not use only a single set of rules. Setups vary wildly in terms of luck and balance.

-Forum mafia involves replacements. More than one player, more than one skill level can occupy the same slot in one game. This is the biggest concern to me

This is correct. I have an extremely inelegant but legit solution: ranked games. Conditions for a ranked game, explanation later, maybe.
-a ranked game consists of 5 games with identical setup and players list ran at the same time with synchronized, immovable deadlines/starts
-only 2 of the players get ranked, and it's being kept secret even from the players themselves until the 5 games have finished
-the setup will have a fixed scum-to-town ratio, for example 1:4.. preferably with 3 scum (12 town)
-with a supposed ratio of 1:4 each of the 2 players will be scum once and town 4 times; they shall not be scum together
-the mod randomly determines which players from the players list will be ranked, the rest of the players list gets randomized alignment/roles as usual
-if one or both the players replace out the mod may still have a palette of rankable players to choose from, since the only set of conditions for eligibility is that the players got a scum role only once and not in the same game.

The 2 face-off games determine the victory. In case of a tie the ranked players performance in the other games will be evaluated by the rest of the players and subjected to a vote postgame to determine the winner.

[FakedBlogger]

If one were to take the chaotic effect of meta and personal sympathy out of the picture anonymity would be the method, i.e. the players are given passwords to smurf accounts to post from.

[SleepyKrew]

Or we could just pretend you never posted that.

[vonflare]

please don't play league of legends

[vonflare]

Also I am against a ranking system for Mafiascum.

It's for fun, not a competition.

[Egg]

I'd love to see some kind of ranking system used even if it's not entirely accurate. Just the competitve aspect of it would be fun. It enhances rivalries and stuff and that's fun.

[Egg]

I mean. This in no way actually measures actual individual skill in mafia and is very swingy, but I love the ladder system. People are ranked 1 to whatever the total number of ranked players is. If you win, you move up by 50% of the gap between you and the person you beat. If you are directly underneath the person you beat, you jump over them. Under this system, you won't move up if you beat someone underneath you. You also can't take #1 without beating the person who holds #1. If more than one participating player is in a game, you apply it as if each person plays each other once. If players are on the same team, they didn't play against each other. (A, B, and C are in a game. A and B are town. C is scum. Town wins. This processes as A beats C, B beats C.) An unranked player who wins moves up as if they were previously ranked one spot under the last place player. If an unranked player loses, they remain unranked.

I'd be more than willing to keep track of this with each of the following happening:
A) For a player to be ranked, they must "/in" for the ranking system.
B) For a game to count, the Game Mod and appropriate List Mod must be ok with it.
C) Games only count if A and B happened before the start of Day 1 (or Night 0 if applicable).
D) Players must understand that their rank takes lower priority than winning any specific game meaning "

Vote Egg

because it's LYLO and if you are scum, my rank will move up" will have you permanantly removed from the ladder.