Mini Normal Stats Update

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Mini Normal Stats Update

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:04 am

Post by Hoopla »

I don't think this has been done in a while. Here we go...

3:10 Closed Normals* (162 Games)
Mafia
- 95 Wins (58.6%)
Town
- 67 Wins (41.4%)

*This doesn't include 3:10 games that are nightstart or use a Mafia Traitor


3:10 Closed Normals (with Mafia Traitor)
Mafia
- 8 Wins (47%)
Town
- 9 Wins (53%)



3:1:9 Closed Normals (with SK)
Mafia
- 12 Wins (58.6%)
Town
- 7 Wins (41.4%)
Serial Killer
- 2 (9%)
Draw
- 1 (2%)


2:7 Closed Normals
Mafia
- 9 Wins (53%)
Town
- 8 Wins (47%)


~~

Looking at the main category (3:10), it's been a slight improvement from the old 3:9 days:

3:9 Closed Mini Normals (128 Games)
Mafia
- 81 Wins (63.3%)
Town
- 47 Wins (36.7%)


...but on the whole, I think the games aren't being balanced by the normal review group well enough. There are dozens of games that simply have too much scum power or too little town power. Compared the old 3:9 days, many games are being designed with weakened versions of roles, such as 1-shot or even-night and fewer full power roles.

To emphasize that point, only 26 of the 162 games have featured an all goon scumteam. However, 57 games have featured a scumteam with more than one power, and in these games mafia have won 38-19 (66.6%). If you remove the games that have more than one scumpower in them, you land on a respectable 57-48 scoreline, which is near where we should be aiming for. The normal reviewers need to stop loading scumteams to the gills with power (in particular, roleblockers) unless you are going to give town ~5 decent power roles too.

I see a lot of people making comments about the balance of a game after its finished, usually with the result dictating whether or not it was fair for either side, but you can't judge one game without looking at the whole picture. And the whole picture says we're giving mafia too much power, and town not enough. Collectively our instincts for what is balanced in a 13 player game is still wrong.

Personally, I think power distribution shouldn't deviate too far from this:

3 Goons
-
3 Strong Powers
OR
4 Middling to Strong Powers

2 Goons, 1 Mafia PR
-
4 Strong Powers
OR
5 Middling to Strong Powers

1 Goon, 2 Mafia PR's
-
5 Middling to Strong Powers
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:40 am

Post by mykonian »

oh wow, you've done this again. Thanks Hoopla!
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:57 am

Post by Hoopla »

Bonus stat: scum are winning 33-17 (66%) in 3:10 games where they have some form of blocking power (Roleblocker/Jailkeeper/Rolestopper).
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:58 am

Post by Ether »

I...don't really agree that 5 town power roles is ever a good idea in a normal setup. At that point setup speculation becomes more of a factor in the daygame than I'm comfortable with.

Most mafia power roles exist to be counters for town roles. (Encryptors are an exception, obviously, and so are roles that would normally go in the hands of town but are given to scum as fakeclaims.) Adding a mafia power role isn't going to entirely cancel out the town roles it's meant for; it's a nerf.

But with that said, I do agree that mods/reviewers are often too quick to nerf things, and everyone forgets that towns are
really really stupid
. A tracker or rolecop isn't the kind of information role that can carry a town. (And the scum seriously do not need a roleblocker to counter a tracker/doctor combination, or a mafia doctor against a two-shot vig.) A bodyguard is just a buffer; stronger protective roles help not just an individual town, but actively make the meta a better place by discouraging scum from shooting the most obvious targets. I don't know why voyeurs are even a thing.

It's interesting that we're in a good place with 9-player games. Both with Matrix6 balance, and also these closed games.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Mon Jul 04, 2016 6:07 am

Post by Hoopla »

In post 3, Ether wrote:I...don't really agree that 5 town power roles is ever a good idea in a normal setup. At that point setup speculation becomes more of a factor in the daygame than I'm comfortable with.
I agree that 5 town PR's (even if some of them are limited shot) will have a lot of the game decided by night actions, but when mods want 2-3 scum roles in the game, you need to give a lot of power to the town.

Sticking with an all goon team, or something simple like 2x Goons/1x 1-Shot Rolecop allows you to create a fair game without overloading the game with power.
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Mon Jul 04, 2016 6:14 am

Post by mykonian »

In post 2, Hoopla wrote:Bonus stat: scum are winning 33-17 (66%) in 3:10 games where they have some form of blocking power (Roleblocker/Jailkeeper/Rolestopper).
ah. We don't learn quickly, do we.
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Mon Jul 04, 2016 10:06 am

Post by Ircher »

In post 4, Hoopla wrote:
In post 3, Ether wrote:I...don't really agree that 5 town power roles is ever a good idea in a normal setup. At that point setup speculation becomes more of a factor in the daygame than I'm comfortable with.
I agree that 5 town PR's (even if some of them are limited shot) will have a lot of the game decided by night actions, but when mods want 2-3 scum roles in the game, you need to give a lot of power to the town.

Sticking with an all goon team, or something simple like 2x Goons/1x 1-Shot Rolecop allows you to create a fair game without overloading the game with power.
One problem with the above -- Having 4-5 town prs can make it extrenely hard for mafia to find believable fakeclaims.
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Tue Jul 05, 2016 4:17 am

Post by Zachrulez »

People tend to underestimate the impact mafia power roles can have on a game. A roleblocker for example can easily wreck a town's power role structure in a very short amount of time.
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Tue Jul 05, 2016 4:50 am

Post by implosion »

Thanks for doing this again, Hoopla. I enjoyed looking at the stats last time as well.

I agree with you in general. I also have felt for a while that people tend to call setups more townsided than they are. I'm curious what you think about weak PRs in terms of balancing (since your guidelines never suggest any), and where you draw the cutoff in your guidelines for what a weak, middling or strong town PR is. There has definitely been a trend towards both having generally weaker town PRs in mini normals, and weakening those that have been used (most notably, it seems like the trio of gunsmith + x-shot-vig + mafia doctor, three roles which all make sense together which I've seen in at least one game and I think has been in others, makes the stereotypically pretty strong gunsmith somewhat weak - in fact just looking at some recent completed games the second game I looked at had this trio as well).

It sort of feels like a couple of weak town PRs should be about as strong as a single stronger one, but if there are too many then it sort of becomes a stoofer's-third-law grayzone, particularly depending on what the site meta around mini normal setup design is like.
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Wed Jul 06, 2016 12:47 pm

Post by BBmolla »

Hoopla can you give me an example of a couple setups you think are balanced?

Trying to see what you're aiming for.
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Wed Jul 06, 2016 1:34 pm

Post by Ircher »

Maybe out of the more recently ran setups?
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Wed Jul 06, 2016 3:00 pm

Post by hitogoroshi »

Hoopla, when doing this analysis, did you get much of a sense of what proportion of the game played "last scum PR alive can use action/kill", and/or how many scum wins were achieved with one living PR scum?

I think I'm pretty infamous for not liking mafia goons and I'm curious what makes my setups tend to skew neutral to slightly town-sided despite usually having full PR scum teams. I think it might be because I don't give the last scum double actions when they're the last alive - and if that rule is something that helps full-PR scumteams be balanced, could be something to look in to.
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Wed Jul 06, 2016 7:40 pm

Post by Hoopla »

In post 11, hitogoroshi wrote:Hoopla, when doing this analysis, did you get much of a sense of what proportion of the game played "last scum PR alive can use action/kill", and/or how many scum wins were achieved with one living PR scum?
When I was in the normal review group, I used to make mods select beforehand which option they'd go with, but I don't know if this is standardized now or what. Perhaps someone currently in the group can tell you about the frequency of these.
In post 11, hitogoroshi wrote:I think I'm pretty infamous for not liking mafia goons and I'm curious what makes my setups tend to skew neutral to slightly town-sided despite usually having full PR scum teams. I think it might be because I don't give the last scum double actions when they're the last alive - and if that rule is something that helps full-PR scumteams be balanced, could be something to look in to.
Perhaps as a well-established mod you have a higher ratio of good players which decreases your chances of a VI-ridden town and making it harder for scum, or perhaps it is just random luck over a small sample size. Your games could be scum-sided for all you know, but a couple of results or closeness of games makes it seem otherwise.

But this is the thing - many people seem to think this way. They think if a game was close or the town won, it must have been balanced. There isn't really a way to tell if a game was balanced or not based on the result. You have to make inferences from large collections of data to establish patterns across setups with similar design elements. Most people's instincts for setup design are scumsided - we know this because across 3:9's winrates were 36% and in 3:10's (a much friendly base number to work with), winrates are only 40%. People are instinctively giving scum more power and town less because that is what 'feels' right.

The problem is, because each game has a lot of variation in roles and our sample size still isn't huge yet, there is only so much data you can collect (and it has to be broad), so when designing setups you still have to make a lot of inferences and instinct calls.

~~

The main things I've learnt are...

- Blocking roles for scum are detrimental to town winrates.


I've already covered that a bit, but in 3:9's with a scum-RB, mafia won 69% and in 3:10's, scum win 66%. I think the reason this is the most effective scumrole, is because it gives scum twice the chances of a neutralizing a town PR at night (either hitting their kill or block). An advantage PR's have in normal games is when they're outed, they can draw the NK, taking attention away from obv-townies or other PR's. But with a RB, scum can blanket the town at night far more effectively.

- Vigs were the most powerful role in 3:9's for town, but in 3:10's they're borderline anti-town.


In 3:9's, setups with a vig were an admirable 44% winrate for town (well above the average of 36%), while setups without a vig were a mere 28%. This is primarily because the vig in 3:9's were getting their first shot for free (ie; they don't cost the town a mislynch for shooting). The majority of shots vigs took in 3:9's were in even numbers, whereas the majority of shots vigs take in 3:10's are in odd numbers and come at the expense of a town mislynch.

The main purpose of running 3:10's instead of 3:9's was to start town in odd numbers, which gives them an extra mislynch with better odds for the rest of the game's lynches. To me it's no surprise that vigs in 3:10's have a
worse
town winrate than 3:9 games with vigs. 3:10 games with vigs only have a 39% winrate, and it's only 35% in games with 1-shot-vigs (a role that eliminates the chances of getting back in odds with another shot, something a full-vig or multi-shot vig can).

Personally, I think 1-shot vigs are an extremely anti-town role for 3:10 games, as they will almost certainly be making a -EV shot and roles like doctors/roleblockers etc. simply don't save a kill often enough to balance this out. I probably wouldn't use this role at all in a 3:10 game without something like a Weak Doc, 2+ of JK/Doc/RB/1-shot-BP or possibly another 1-shot-vig. The games we're making are already unbalanced and I think 1-shot-vig games are some of the worst. They offer the same amount of town-aligned kills in the game, but at worse lynching odds for every day you're in evens.


- The strength of the Cop has gone up with the additional dayphase 3:10's have brought


In 3:9's, Cop winrates were fractionally below average (35%, as opposed to 36% overall), whereas in 3:10's Cop winrates are 47% (compared to 41% overall). I think it can conclusively be said, the value of the Cop has increased given the length of the game has increased. It gives the Cop a higher chance of survival deeper into the game, something that Cops were having difficulty with in 3:9's. IIRC, only 40% of Cops lived to Day 3 in 3:9 games, which is predominately where people will claim Cop, so many Cops would die/be outed by D3 without actually helping the town at all (and that doesn't even factor in things like your investigation targets dying or being blocked etc). It would also sometimes be mylo on D3 in 3:9's which makes Cop claims less trustworthy/untestable without putting the game on the line.

To me, it's clear that an extra day phase is extremely helpful for Cops and this is reflected in the numbers. Another role winrate I checked out were masons, who had a 44% winrate, again, a bit better than average.

I think for the most part, we're collectively not good enough scumhunters to win near 50% without some confirmed information being in the game to aid process-of-elimination and increase lynch odds on some days. Masons and Cops are the two best roles for narrowing down the pool and trapping scum, and to me, it makes sense that these roles win more often than vigs as more lynches at improved odds (+ the occasionally guilty) is far better than the vig speeding up the game and making odds worse.

~~
In post 8, implosion wrote:Thanks for doing this again, Hoopla. I enjoyed looking at the stats last time as well.

I agree with you in general. I also have felt for a while that people tend to call setups more townsided than they are. I'm curious what you think about weak PRs in terms of balancing (since your guidelines never suggest any), and where you draw the cutoff in your guidelines for what a weak, middling or strong town PR is. There has definitely been a trend towards both having generally weaker town PRs in mini normals, and weakening those that have been used (most notably, it seems like the trio of gunsmith + x-shot-vig + mafia doctor, three roles which all make sense together which I've seen in at least one game and I think has been in others, makes the stereotypically pretty strong gunsmith somewhat weak - in fact just looking at some recent completed games the second game I looked at had this trio as well).

It sort of feels like a couple of weak town PRs should be about as strong as a single stronger one, but if there are too many then it sort of becomes a stoofer's-third-law grayzone, particularly depending on what the site meta around mini normal setup design is like.
I agree with stoofer's law, especially if the roles aren't confirming or overly powerful type roles that can puzzle the game out. Most of the time overly PR heavy games in mini normals have a heap of backup doc, even-night tracker, one-night-rb type roles that will generally not receive/do any anything meaningful all game, but give an illusion of power. Because these roles can be on either side too, them claiming doesn't often clear them or attract the NK or do any of the cool things other full PR's can do.

For the most part, I think the simplest way to produce a balanced game is to include a Cop or Masons but they're a very blunt tool in terms of creating balance as you always have confirmed players in the game, and understandably some mods don't like using this role. The challenge is to create a balanced game when these roles aren't present, and I think it's necessary that the town has multiple full-power roles, like Watcher, Tracker, Jailkeeper, Gunsmith etc, with scum getting no more than a 1-shot RB. The dinky little weak PR's that can on either team like 1-shot Doc, Even-Night Role Cop etc, should be like garnish on the finished setup to make it a bit unpredictable, and not really counted when tallying up the power you've given to town. But I'll talk about that more when I do this:
In post 9, BBmolla wrote:Hoopla can you give me an example of a couple setups you think are balanced?

I noted a handful of setups in that I noticed that looked the least balanced for town when I was looking through all the games. Theoretically, the weakest looking setups in data set of 40% town wins should be the setups we should be trying to eliminate, so I will show you some of those when I have time. Then I'll analyse a few others that I think are good.
Trying to see what you're aiming for.
When I was going through the games, I noted a handful of the really bad ones. I'll make a post soon analysing a few different normal setups that have run and show you some that I think are good.
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Post Post #13 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:26 am

Post by callforjudgement »

In post 11, hitogoroshi wrote:Hoopla, when doing this analysis, did you get much of a sense of what proportion of the game played "last scum PR alive can use action/kill", and/or how many scum wins were achieved with one living PR scum?
As a current NRG member: we make mods decide on "all scum can action+kill" or "no scum can action+kill", and encourage them to specify which is the case in the ruleset. (Most mods outright place a rule in the ruleset saying how many abilities can be used per night.)

It may be interesting to compare the game results to the length of the review thread, too. Some reviewers go over games much more thoroughly than others, and some games are almost impossible to get into a runnable state. (Also, note that historically not all Mini Normals were checked for balance; there are a few that were allowed to run with a "this game is not checked for balance" warning, and in most of those cases the reviewers believed that the games were highly scumsided.)
scum
· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·
town
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Post Post #14 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 2:49 am

Post by zMuffinMan »

In post 8, implosion wrote:I also have felt for a while that people tend to call setups more townsided than they are.
most people don't have the faintest clue how to balance a game

these stats are not particularly surprising

people need to consider how incredibly scum-sided a 10:3 mountainous game actually is and then consider that adding pretty much any two town power roles and no scum power is just going to make it less scum-sided but still probably scum-sided
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Post Post #15 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 11:29 am

Post by Antihero »

finally

an md thread worth reading
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Post Post #16 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 11:36 am

Post by Antihero »

In post 12, Hoopla wrote:But this is the thing - many people seem to think this way. They think if a game was close or the town won, it must have been balanced. There isn't really a way to tell if a game was balanced or not based on the result.
i can only assume you meant to say "scum won" instead of "town won" because recently after a lot of town wins (and even a few scum wins) i seem to hear a lot about how townsided the setup was.

in general, it seems like towns won't rip mods who make awful scumsided setups a new asshole, but scumteams who feel like they were cheated are not shy about voicing their discontent.
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Post Post #17 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 11:47 am

Post by Antihero »

In post 3, Ether wrote:A tracker or rolecop isn't the kind of information role that can carry a town. (And the scum seriously do not need a roleblocker to counter a tracker/doctor combination, or a mafia doctor against a two-shot vig.)
but ppl THINK they do

because they remember the couple freak occurrences of a tracker getting multiple guilties (like organic chemistry) and they don't remember the million times it didn't do squat.
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Post Post #18 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 11:52 am

Post by zoraster »

Yeah. One of the biggest issues is players are
really
bad at deciding what's balanced. Mods are too (after all, mods are players too), but mostly mods don't want to get yelled at after a game. If people THINK a game way balanced, for most mods that's better than it actually being balanced and getting yelled at. And that's understandable. Few mods do enough games where we can look at it and say whether their games are town or scum sided.

Fortunately, Normal games have a way to standardize it a bit more, and if our review group shifts their balance-meter a bit, we may be able to move it more toward 50/50
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Post Post #19 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:03 pm

Post by Antihero »

(i've been accused of being too townsided in making setups

but, over 13 games, my town:scum win ratio in setups i designed is 6:7)

/bragbragbrag
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Post Post #20 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:38 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

One problem is that there's lots of things to consider when you're reviewing a setup than just town:scum win balance. For example, excessive swing is less fun than an imbalance, often: if you make a setup where the scum can be effectively defeated by D2 and it actually happens, the scumteam will be very upset. Likewise, you have to ensure that the setup won't be decided by role assignment (if there's a role that badly needs to not be NKed, you don't want it to go to a player who always gets NKed N1, but there's no way to ensure that when randomizing roles correctly, and thus you have to get rid of the role altogether). You want to try to preserve the mod's idea behind the setup (unless it's utterly unworkable), so that it isn't just a case of the NRG picking out setups for mods. And of course, you need the setup to be one that'll actually be fun to play.

In general, this may mean that being mildly (but only mildly!) scumsided might actually be more fun than being balanced. The easiest way to "balance" a scumsided setup is to increase the chance of the town completely locking scum out early, but they won't enjoy it if that happens. In an extreme case, imagine a meta in which scum are generally very good and town are pretty bad by comparison (not saying that necessarily describes the meta here; it's a thought experiment). Pretty much the only way to get a 50:50 win rate will be to give town a chance of winning the game at random despite a lack of scumhunting ability, and the scum will feel highly cheated if it actually happens.

From another point of view, imagine a game that ends in 2:1 lylo. Then imagine a game which ends in 2:1 lylo but with a confirmed townie. Having seen these situations repeatedly from a number of viewpoints, the former feels more balanced to the players (regardless of alignment), but the latter is closer to balanced theoretically, and most likely in practice as well (it's very hard to read players in 3p lylo and looking back over the history of the game isn't as helpful as you'd think). Now consider what sort of games lead to these endings. Hitting 2:1 with no confirmed players is pretty easy. Hitting 2:1 with a confirmed townie, though, means (barring combinations involving bulletproof players who can either confirm players themselves or be confirmed by other players) there were two confirmed townies at the start of the night before. Two! Tweak the numbers a bit, and suddenly the setup-with-two-confirmed-townies-that-became-a-balanced-endgame is a setup-with-so-many-confirmed-townies-that-scumhunting-is-pointless,-town-win-easily-and-the-scum-are-upset.

And from another another point of view, 10:2 and 11:2 mountainous are both disastrously scumsided (in addition to their other known problems), and yet it's common for both factions to feel like they have a chance through much of the game. (I suspect 9:2 or maybe even 7:2 mountainous would actually be
more
enjoyable, despite being even more scumsided.) This probably works better if the players don't know it's scumsided, though.

And from yet another point of view, I once replaced into a game for which there was only one set of actions that gave my faction even a theoretical chance to win, all the actions in question would need to have been taken by other players, and they had no reason to do so in any case. I enjoyed myself, right up until the end when I realised it was impossible to win (but then the game was almost over so I just played it out). What was important was simply that I didn't know I had no chance to win, because it let me play to my win condition, scumhunt, drive lynches, and all the other things that are part of the game.

Anyway, after all that arguing to say that games being scumsided is not necessarily indicative of a problem, I will say that I'm not convinced that there isn't, in fact, a problem. Some of the most scumsided games could probably have been made more balanced or even townsided with changes that wouldn't have fundamentally changed the nature of the setup nor allowed for a blowout, and doing so would be a good idea if possible.

I think the most useful thing to do here would be to find specific examples of scumsided setups that have been allowed through the Normal queue, that a) were reviewed for balance; b) were perceived as scumsided postgame; c) (not required but would be helpful) have a public review thread. Then we can debate how it went wrong and what should have happened instead.

(As a counterpoint: did any excessively townsided setups slip through the review net recently? I know you sometimes get cases where players claim the setup was townsided, but oddly those setups are often won by scum, which means that the players may well be incorrect in their assessment.)
scum
· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·
town
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Zachrulez
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Post Post #21 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:42 pm

Post by Zachrulez »

The roleblocker is clearly the biggest detriment to town winrates. It really shouldn't be getting any use at all in a setup that doesn't have a cop/doc combo. (Even then I would probably only consider the role if there were more town power roles on top of that. Cop/doc doesn't even get the town to 50%.
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Post Post #22 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:56 pm

Post by Antihero »

In post 20, callforjudgement wrote:For example, excessive swing is less fun than an imbalance, often: if you make a setup where the scum can be effectively defeated by D2 and it actually happens, the scumteam will be very upset.
let 'em be upset

it's not the game designer's duty to protect scum from getting steamrolled when they're playing badly
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Post Post #23 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:59 pm

Post by Antihero »

i strongly disagree with the whole premise that games should be balanced by how "fun" you think they're going to be. "fun" is REALLY subjective and varies from person to person.
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Post Post #24 (ISO) » Thu Jul 07, 2016 1:07 pm

Post by Antihero »

i may or may not be talking out my ass, but i bet if you did this study for themes, you'd find the same thing
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