Balance and fun games (why town should be favoured)

[The_Jester]

I agree town should be favored cause I'm always town.
Also, I never lie.

[Accountant]

If we see that EM high risk high reward plays happen if the setup is tough on scum, why wouldn't MS-high risk plays like leading a wagon on town or pulling off that crazy bus not work?

Well they work here, it's just that most scum are too unconfident to do it

[Accountant]

And it's not even a real issue, since lets be fair, balance is not an exact science. The issue is that the right way for scum to play is to coast, because town has little real way to turn up the heat on scum, playstyle wise. The new tells they find, they avoid the next game they are scum themselves.

Uhh if scum coasts then town lynches em, what's the problem here

Town has more than enough tools to change the outcome of the game unless they suck, and if they suck that's not the fault of the setup

[Accountant]

You seem to think that it's more important to have a dynamic game where everyone gets a fair chance at winning no matter their skill level and everyone has fun

And that's anathema to balance

Town has a disadvantage for the reason that players are bad. Well, yes, that also means that scum players are bad, but they have less bad players

[zMuffinMan]

But otoh, you hear no towns complain that they only win 40-45%. We are used to that.

do you even read post-game stuff?

also, i don't think the assertion that town don't complain because they're used to it and scum do complain because they're not used to it has any foundation in reality...

I don't see how the same people if they rolled scum suddenly became smart. The same townies you insist on calling stupid, are scum every 3-4 games.

being mafia is a completely different skillset to being town... mafia (in general) don't suffer from the common town mistakes like forgetting major events, not reading interactions, making stupid assumptions and basically anything else i've mentioned...

what's more is that the same people who are utterly garbage as town get leeway as scum because of it, so it's actually an advantage for them being that awful

like there's no comparison to be made here, you're not even comparing apples and oranges, you're comparing apples and elephants

The issue is that the right way for scum to play is to coast, because town has little real way to turn up the heat on scum, playstyle wise.

... what?

And you seem to disagree with me, but scum can bus, scum get to choose which wagon to follow, scum have a plethora of possible scumclaims. Scum are allowed to strategically lurk. There's a myriad of curveballs scum can throw at town. How many curveballs do town have? You can call towns stupid as often as you want, without organisation, and with the need of honesty from them, their maneuvering space is smaller.

you don't

need

to manouevre as town (even though there

are

plenty of ways you can if you so wish). i don't know where you're getting the idea that scum and town need to have the same tools at their disposal; they don't. being a good town player doesn't require cunning or the ability to throw curveballs or anything like that. you say the easiest way to play scum is to coast? that's because town players are fucking atrocious at mafia. they shouldn't let that happen. it happens because of bad town players continually being bad and letting scum do that

there is no rise in the level of play that's causing towns to mystically be unable to catch scum as much as they should. if anything, the level of play is gradually getting worse. players are getting worse

my solution isn't towns magically getting better; i honestly think that some players are just beyond hope and have no chance of improving at mafia. but others just need to learn. and they aren't being taught properly, if what's happening in games now is any indication. or maybe they don't want to learn? either way, the way to fix it is NOT to make it easier for them so games are more tolerant of shit play; it's to brainstorm ways to stop the shit play

though you obviously seem to think that this is a worse idea than just saying "fuck it, let's not punish bad play from town, let's encourage it by giving them more chances"

that's an utterly ridiculous concept to me

[zMuffinMan]

like, i get it, you have this vision that making the game harder for scum is going to make being town more enjoyable and being scum more enjoyable because the town win more and the scum have to up their game to bring their win rate back up

but this is so out of touch with reality that it's not funny

what will probably happen is demoralised scum teams (and no, there's no fucking way that the reason scum complain about overpowered towns now is because they expect it to be balanced in their favour... like if you're actually serious about that, then i don't know what to say, and if you seriously think that a scum team that knows they game is balanced against them is going to be less inclined to do this and more inclined to go "hey guys, let's try our best!" then wow) and towns who don't get punished for shit play (or don't get punished as much as they should for it). in the event you have a scum team with decent players, yes, they're going to be more challenged, but how is that a good thing? it means that if the win rate somehow gets back up to 50/50, it's because scum teams are fucking spectacular and towns are utter shit, and how is that a good thing for the game? how is it at all a good thing that scum teams that outclass town would be breaking even with shit towns? how is that going to help players improve or improve the game quality?

i just... don't understand how anyone can actually think that intentionally trying to imbalance games in a substantial way is good for the health of mafia as a game

[Persivul]

The issue is that the right way for scum to play is to coast, because town has little real way to turn up the heat on scum, playstyle wise. The new tells they find, they avoid the next game they are scum themselves.

^ This

If town isn't winning enough, it's because too many players feel that they have no obligation to town it up when they're town. When several townies coast, scum can as well, and there's no way to tell the difference.

Coasting doesn't just mean low post count. Some people get a high post count, but just give reads without any reasoning to them, and refuse to give any when asked. When that comes from town, it's indistinguishable from scum, and it's happening a lot lately.

I'd rather see better town play than additional PRs.

[callforjudgement]

I disagree with the OP, but I see the issue in quite a different way.

The fact is that there's only so much you can do to improve town's win rate without shutting down scumhunting as a strategy (because night madness works better). If I see a setup with a 90% town winrate, I assume that the reason is that town's getting too much information from night actions, and that little to no scumhunting is actually occurring; in other words, I wouldn't expect that to be a result of any player actually playing well, and in particular I wouldn't expect the quality of the players to have anything to do with the game's end result. If I see a setup with 10% town winrate, then I'd assume that the issue with the setup is that town didn't have enough information to work with, but I'd also expect the relative quality (scumhunting ability for town, being-read-as-town ability for both factions) of the players to have a large influence on the end result. As such, setups with a high town winrate are likely to be fundamentally broken, whereas setups with a low town winrate is more likely to be superficially broken.

However, it's not actually the case that towns are tragically bad in practice. For example, 6:2 nightless (theoretical EV 50%) is considered highly townsided on Mafiascum, which means that town can outperform their theoretical EV in practice. This means that there's scope to raise town's EV quite a way without cutting down on the amount of scumhunting required to do well.

There's also an observed pattern that as soon as you give Mafia a standard nightkill, town winrates go way down even if the setup has the same EV and otherwise works much the same way. As such, I suspect that what's happening here is that there's a large disparity in skill levels between players on Mafiascum (I don't think this is a statement that many people here would deny!), and that scum are more inclined to "policy kill" good scumhunters than town are to policy lynch weak scumhunters. (Most likely, this is because scum have much more freedom in their NK choice – they can aim it at any townie, the majority of players – than town do in their lynch choice, as they have to try to hit scum.)

As such, I think fixes to the problem of high scum winrates need to work on reducing the number of scum NKs or limiting scum NK selection, as opposed to adding town power roles. It's not a coincidence that many of my setups have restricted access to scum nightkills, in one way or another. I also don't think there's a need to "fix" unfun games, given that the majority of players seem to enjoy the majority of games (often even if they're unbalanced, so long as the player doesn't know the game is unbalanced at the time).

Here's a thought experiment for the OP: given a 7:2 setup, is "town win if they identify a townie D1, lose otherwise" or "town win if they identify a Mafia member D1, lose otherwise" a better setup? (I mean, they're both terrible setups, but…) In the former setup (78% town EV), I don't see scum really being able to do anything dramatic or grandstandy; their best choice is to keep their heads down, try to act as they have no information, and hope to be selected at random (and town may well just randomize). In the latter setup (22% town EV), there's a lot more incentive for town to scumhunt and scum to pretend to be scumhunt, and in fact it's not unheard of for scum to actually be lynched on D1 of a Micro as a consequence of scumhunting.

[mykonian]

I feel like you answered your own question at the end.

Also I don't think we disagree as such? Not about what you say at least. I couldn't care less if you make games more townsided by making town stronger or by making scum weaker. Personally I've fiddled around quite a bit with ways of making scum weaker, also discussed it at length, mostly with buttons. If one finds a sensible way of making scum weaker (like white flag, godfather with a heart problem, etc), balance becomes much easier to do, because otherwise the blank canvas is so harshly scumsided. Sadly there aren't that many "normal" approaches to achieving this.

Either way, as long as you end up with on average more townsided setups going out, I believe games could become more fun.

[mykonian]

I'd rather see better town play than additional PRs.

Muffin also has this wonderful idea that somehow towns will get smarter, but those same people will stay the same as scum.

If for years on end, scum and town have advanced at a similar rate (because the winrates don't shift that much, but that doesn't mean the game didn't change throughout). You, accountant, muffin, somehow want that to change, and town to improve beyond what scum learns in the same time. I don't see how you plan to achieve this. It might be my rose tinted glasses, but some of the crew that were around when I got here were quite compatetive. They really tried to improve. I don't think it's even a lack of will nowadays, there's some people who like fun games, some who want to get good at this. I think assuming that you can straighten up winrates just by somehow teaching town to play better is as close to ignoring the issue as you can get.

Winrates as you say, do have two parts to it. The players, and the setup. But the players we randomise, over the course of years that evens out, it's not like town always gets the stupid ones. There's skill involved in scumhunting, as there is in avoiding getting caught. Some people are good at town, some are good at scum. Take a 100 games, and these even out. Which leaves the setup. We have consistently, year after year, produced setups that are, if you throw the dice that determine allignments enough, give scum the win. You know this as how it's always been, but can you explain why it's the correct way to do it?

[Persivul]

I don't see how you plan to achieve this.

I don't plan to achieve it. I plan on not playing nearly as much. I'm in one game and no queues at the moment.

But, giving more PRs to improve win rates won't get me playing more either. A game where people fuck around for two weeks just waiting to use their PRs sounds boring as hell. PR intensive games are OK in blitz format, but that queue's not coming back anytime soon.

[zMuffinMan]

mykonian, you keep insisting that it's a far-fetched idea to try to get town players to improve because scum can also improve, but town and scum don't require the same skillset (even though you seem to keep ignoring this by insisting that scum and town will improve at the same rate) and improvements to how town plays in aspects that aren't scum hunting (you know, the basic shit that separates good players from bad that i've mentioned several times) are probably going to improve town's win rate just because scum aren't allowed to get away with as much

sure, scum might adapt and find ways to get past town anyway... but then the game will come down to whether scum outfoxes a town in the scum hunting category and not whether scum would be incredibly obvious if dumb-player-x-who-makes-it-to-lylo-every-game just read the fucking game and saw the obvious contradictions or fact-checked things or if town weren't so incompetent that they left lurking unchecked because town lurks so much themselves, etc etc... and if scum is STILL winning then, and the setup is actually balanced, then maybe consider your idea

you say it's a magical concept that hasn't ever worked before? ok... has it ever even been tried? what site-wide initiatives have there been to improve town play overall? do ICs in newbie games even teach newbies things that aren't basic mechanics?

edit: you also keep failing to address the obvious downsides of your suggestion, but hey, whatever... i don't really expect you to address this because there is no answer you can give that will be satisfactory. persivul's attitude essentially mirrors mine, and i expect any decent player who actually likes the game of mafia to have a similar attitude towards intentionally making the game easier for town

[callforjudgement]

I feel like you answered your own question at the end.

I did, but I was curious as to whether you agreed with me, and this isn't a Mafia game so I don't have to leave the answer unsaid as a reaction test. (The point is that the unbalanced-in-favour-of-town setup is less interesting than the unbalanced-in-favour-of-scum setup.)

For what it's worth, I argued in another thread (the one on Mini Normal statistics) that it's quite possible that games would be more fun if intentionally balanced as mildly scumsided (~30-40% town winrate) rather than as 50% town winrate (although the argument relies on some assumptions that I'm not sure are true in practice). The reasoning is based on the dayplay/nightplay theory, in which giving town PRs to strengthen them (needed for reasonable town winrates in a Normal setup, which is what the thread focused on) tends to increase swing (which makes the game less fun because one side or the other has a chance of getting slaughtered) and tends to increase the chance of the game being decided by something other than scumhunting and looking innocent.

As for the underlying argument about how good the town should be, I'll put things this way: it's my belief that the average player on mafiascum.net has a better scumgame than towngame (this says nothing about the absolute skill levels of the player, just which position they're better at playing). You can't necessarily expect a player to become better at playing town faster than they become better at playing scum, either. Whether or not we want to take that into account when balancing setups is something that I'm far from sure about (although in terms of NRG setup review duties, I do, because it's quite clear from the typical views in Mafia Discussion threads that players value having a town win rate close to 50%).

PEDIT: I'm suddenly getting a huge urge to run a 6:2 NIghtless. The theoretical EV of this is 50%. I suspect that it's highly likely that town will win, and scum will consider the setup imbalanced in the postgame discussion (although, of course, this isn't guaranteed).

[mykonian]

Here's a thought experiment for the OP: given a 7:2 setup, is "town win if they identify a townie D1, lose otherwise" or "town win if they identify a Mafia member D1, lose otherwise" a better setup? (I mean, they're both terrible setups, but…) In the former setup (78% town EV), I don't see scum really being able to do anything dramatic or grandstandy; their best choice is to keep their heads down, try to act as they have no information, and hope to be selected at random (and town may well just randomize). In the latter setup (22% town EV), there's a lot more incentive for town to scumhunt and scum to pretend to be scumhunt, and in fact it's not unheard of for scum to actually be lynched on D1 of a Micro as a consequence of scumhunting.

I fear I don't understand how you get to first conclusion. I think the disagreement we'd end up with in the base is that I believe the best play for scum is townier than town, while you believe that town will lynch someone who'll be different from town, and the best thing scum can do is to approach their town play.

On top of that, say you have a 50/50 play that confirms you as town or scum (like a claim/counterclaim scenario in an open). In a normal 9p, or the second setup, they'd be insane to go for it. There's no need to force that hard if you know you are going to win in 78% of the case, or even slightly less. Might as well try to get your advantages in smaller increments. However, in the first game, 50/50 is a huge improvement over the odds where you do nothing. So idk if they'd keep their head down, given the odds while doing that are pretty poor, while making a play might be comparatively not that bad. If you are going to win anyway, many of the risks will look worse in comparison to just doing nothing?

[RadiantCowbells]

I still think there should be mechanics in place to prevent scum from systematically killing the best town players in the game. It feels very against the spirit of the game.

[zoraster]

I think we want a developing game and unique experiences with scum trying to outsmart town more than we want a perfectly fair game, and as such we should attempt to bias the games towards town.

I agree with this in principle.

[mykonian]

you say it's a magical concept that hasn't ever worked before? ok... has it ever even been tried? what site-wide initiatives have there been to improve town play overall?

MS had a reputation for being elitist, and the statements you are making build on a couple of years of people saying that we are the best scumhunters around. MS was pretty proud of playing the best mafia. You are hardly the first to say that the current generation is doing mafia all wrong, lol.

Yes I dare say people have tried to improve, both their and the general level of play. MD isn't as alive as it used to be as far as I can tell, but regardless most work in there, for the public, has been about town play. Similar story in the wiki. We've had some nice contributors around the years, some are still around.

And I wouldn't want to imply their efforts are wasted. I'm sure it advances the general level of play. It's just, evidentaly, the next game, as scum, the players use the same lessons and play accordingly. They advance the meta, don't have the biggest effect on the overall winrates.

[hiplop]

I still think there should be mechanics in place to prevent scum from systematically killing the best town players in the game. It feels very against the spirit of the game.

the answer is doctors (who are often in game) and better playerlists?

And I agree with Myko for the most part

[wgeurts]

Similar story in the wiki.

There hasn't been a good article in years.

[kuribo]

I play to win and improve.

Why would you want to improve if you weren't having fun

[wgeurts]

Anyway, I don't feel like we should be giving mechanical power to change win-rates, that seems like it would degrade quality of the other factors as towns come to rely on mechanics more. Scum can't outsmart town more with more town power like some have said, as mechanics are one of the few things they really can't do all too much about. They however can manipulate and beat people through rhetoric, and if town is bad at finding them then town needs to improve their play, not receive some handicap.

If scum-lurking is the best play for scum now, towns need to start cracking down on lurkers, not be given a vig and a cop to sort all lurkers. This is a game of skill, the skill required ends up lowering the more any side is given more power.

[wgeurts]

Like if anything, I'd suggest we start moving back to more vanilla setups to force better rhetoric play and quality.

Those here only for fun can stick to other games specifically for this. I have played others from other sites, I can say MS is pretty good regarding level of play but I'd be hesitant to call it the best.

[kuribo]

"The right way for scum to play is to coast."

Stop townreading people for shitposting / low effort posting and you'd see a dramatic drop across the board in "coasting"

[kuribo]

I still think there should be mechanics in place to prevent scum from systematically killing the best town players in the game. It feels very against the spirit of the game.

Part of any competitive game is adjusting and accounting for better players.

That's why Tom Brady doesn't throw directly to Terrell Suggs. He avoids him. He game plans around him. And sometimes, Suggs still knocks Brady out of his cleats. And I laugh because fuck Brady. But the point is, it's very much in the spirit of any game to take the effort to neutralize good players.

[zMuffinMan]

You are hardly the first to say that the current generation is doing mafia all wrong, lol.

you don't seem to understand what my point is so i'm going to make this very, very, very clear for you.

town are not abysmal because of their reads or because of their "playstyle" or anything like that. i'm not talking about walls vs short posts or anything like that. i'm talking about fundamental things that the majority of players on site are extremely bad at. fundamental mistakes that players should never make. no player, for example, should ever forget major game events, and if they're the sort of player who does forget things easily, then they should be taking notes. there should never be a situation where someone says "X happened" and doesn't even fact-check it. town should NEVER be doing basic shit like lurking for days on end (why are you even signing up to games?) or self-voting (barring the edge cases that everyone brings up every time self-voting is discussed)...

i ask about site-wide initiatives to improve towns and you say mafia discussion is a resource for people, intended to help them learn and that some people use it and improve their game?

well there's two problems with this.

the first is that something being available doesn't mean anyone is learning. sure, there are books available if someone wants to become a rocket surgeon and certainly some individuals do take initiative and read them in hopes of becoming a rocket surgeon, but when was the last time someone around you was encouraged to become a rocket surgeon or given a basic understanding of what a rocket surgeon does? do you even KNOW what a rocket surgeon does? it's pretty fucking intense shit

the second is that you don't NEED to be qualified in any way to post in MD, so a large amount of what happens in MD is the blind leading the blind. see, for example, the recent thread about self-voting. the amount of people trying to justify it by pointing out edge cases or suggesting it's a good way to get reactions and whatnot is disgusting. two years ago, thor made a similar thread with the underlying message that was well-justified: don't do it, the only good reason to do it is if the setup requires it. but there are STILL people who suggest it can be a good thing to do outside of the setup. in MD. the supposed resource for people to go to to learn about the game...

like, in this very thread, you've made posts about how town can't make a difference by themselves, or are at a disadvantage because they can't manouevre as much as scum and that the right way for scum to play is to coast... none of this is true, and all of this is in MD... some resource, hey?

i mean sure, individuals CAN seek knowledge themselves if they wish... but "there's MD" is not an answer to what i asked about