Balance and fun games (why town should be favoured)

[zMuffinMan]

"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"

By the way, mykonian, this is correct. Scum can only get away with lurking and coasting because a. town do it, and b. it's possible to get town-read from it (which is just sad)

so it is only the case that scum can lurk because of bad town play. the less bad town play there is, the fewer tools scum will have at their disposal

giving town a mehanical advantage does nothing to fix this; if anything, it will make things worse because there will be less incentive for town to stop doing it

your solution will just lower game standards overall. maybe that is enjoyable for some? if so, then so be it

[callforjudgement]

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.

Agreed, but I also feel as though scum should have the ability to kill players who are reading well (not because they're good players, but because they happened to be running hot that game). As such, protection should probably be based on the player specifically.

My setup Training Hospital (untested, and probably buried by now; the idea is that each townie was a semi-Doctor and two semi-Doctor protections on the same player would negate the nightkill) was designed to allow town to protect strong players (so that only the weak ones could get nightkilled). I think that's the sort of direction it's probably worth going down.

Likewise, I think it would help to have mechanics in place to discourage scum from simply bussing their weak members (as opposed to bussing their weak and strong players equally often), A simple way to encourage that is to give the scum a power role that looks valuable but happens to be useless in the setup (e.g. 1-Shot Strongman when there are no town roles that can stop a kill).

[Infinity 324]

You guys are assuming there is an objective way to measure how well people play other than win percentage...

What evidence is there to say town play worse than scum in general?

I could say the fact that the setups are scumsided encourages bad scum play, because scum can play slightly less well than average scum play while town plays average town play, and scum can still win.

I agree that scum can adapt much faster than town can. It requires a whole game up until a scum flip to see a scum strategy, while town's strategies are usually evident. Scum can even adapt to players' scumhunting styles in-game.

[mykonian]

What evidence is there to say town play worse than scum in general?

None, they are always connected.

[Infinity 324]

Exactly my point.

[mykonian]

ah, my bad. Didn't parse it that way.

[zoraster]

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

You started off saying "I'm not making this a post about playstyle"... and then you make a post about playstyle. Self-voting seems overall a bad idea to me, but I can at least see the merits of the argument for things like reaction testing.

I'll agree that people should be paying more attention, but I'm not sure I agree people in the past were all that much better.

[zMuffinMan]

i dont think we're referring to the same thing when we say "playstyle" because nothing i mentioned in that post has anything to do with what i would call someone's playstyle

I'm not sure I agree people in the past were all that much better

i've never made this argument and i don't know where people get the idea that i'm referring to some sort of glory days when i talk about bad play happening now. i'm not. it's just that it's more apparent to me now than it might have been when i was newer

i suppose it's because i'm saying people are getting worse? i mean, that's just an opinion based on the fact that there seem to be more players doing the bad things than i remember there being at other points in time, but that's entirely empirical and maybe ive just had bad luck or have a bad memory

it's secondary to the point i'm actually making

also

I can at least see the merits of the argument for things like reaction testing

there is no merit for that argument... and this is exactly the sort of thing that people come to md and read and take away and the problem persists

i mean, it's not impossible to gain something from a "reaction test" in that way, but the same argument can be made for every bad play you can imagine; there's bound to be

some

merit in everything you can think of that should never happen in a mafia game. the point is that it's far more detrimental to town than beneficial

e.g. i'm sure you could think of some potential merit in a cop never using their role for an entire game...

PS: self-voting for "reaction test" purposes is basically the equivalent of the slayers gambit... please don't encourage that, it shouldn't ever be in games

[Accountant]

I play to win and improve.

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

I tend to have fun when I win

[kuribo]

I tend to have fun when I win

several years of doing a hydra with DGB have taught me how to have fun regardless

[Majiffy]

tl;dr whole thread but as soon as games become town-sided people get bored and complacent, games become inherently less fun.

We play a challenging game because we enjoy a challenge. If it is no longer a challenge, why would we play it?

I feel you are missing the point here. If you aren't going to hit 50/50 every time, some part of the game isn't going to be challenged. Now this is consistently scum. I'm arguing games as a whole, for town and scum, accross the site, would be better if it was scum who was put to the test.

Why would you want to only challenge the minority of the playerlist? See my original post you quoted here for why you're wrong.

[Majiffy]

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

Yes

The only games I play on EM are near-mountainous because if you get a good crew of scum hunters playing games in a pack you can have seriously enjoyable games.

I've also moved more towards running mountainous setups on MR -much to the chagrin of the playerlist because they like PRS - because that's the best way to become better at the game as a whole.

Anyone can sheep a guilty report. We gotta go back to discerning scum on our own.

[Killthestory]

Lurking isn't a playstyle, it's just a measure of activity. If you're purposefully lurking, there is no playstyle, you're just limiting your activity, and therefore, your content. Just going to get that out of the way.

I used to be the person to think fundamentals were important, but they're really not. If someone is enjoying the game, they can play how they want to. This doesn't include lurking because it isn't a playstyle, and it's just flat unfair. In real life mafia, everybody's actively present. However, back on the point, dictating how others play because 'they're doing the core fundamentals wrong' is silly because you're sitting here saying that people in MD are blind, but here you are leading the blind? Your post is filled with contradictions on how people are wrong, but then you begin to dictate how others play because you don't enjoy it. I personally don't care as long as the meta shift doesn't turn into a monstrosity.

And even then, town isn't terrible. There are a ton of good town players, and there's a lot of bad mafia players as well. Some people do better as town than they would as scum, so I don't understand why you're defending town here when there's two sides to the whole argument regardless. You might have, and I didn't really read the first couple of pages. That's cool. However, I know a ton of town players who are very good and dominate any games there in. It's rather fun to play with them, but I also know dominant scum players. I also know shit scum players. I also know shit town players. I also know...

I could go on. All players differ, and simply grouping them into the same meta on such a large site is ridiculous. If you wish to change how the meta is currently going, change it yourself instead of whining about it on a forum. A simple change to how we do setups isn't going to change anything. Making games more vanilla isn't going to hurt. I wouldn't even mind adding more town PRs to compensate for mafia even if I don't want this turning into 2.0 That won't shift the meta. It's just how the players look at things, and there perspective on things that will. That's how it's always been.

I ended up just rambling in this post. Sorry, I just woke up.

[mykonian]

tl;dr whole thread but as soon as games become town-sided people get bored and complacent, games become inherently less fun.

We play a challenging game because we enjoy a challenge. If it is no longer a challenge, why would we play it?

I feel you are missing the point here. If you aren't going to hit 50/50 every time, some part of the game isn't going to be challenged. Now this is consistently scum. I'm arguing games as a whole, for town and scum, accross the site, would be better if it was scum who was put to the test.

Why would you want to only challenge the minority of the playerlist? See my original post you quoted here for why you're wrong.

Yes we are rather tracking back.

Because the minority challenged happens to have a larger degree of freedom. This means scum is more able to rise to the challenge by changing up their playstyle, compared to town who have to grind out the tough games and generally "improve".

Now there are some people who think scum would lurk rather than take risks if their predicted winrate goes down, but imagine I got that part right, that means that over the course of the year, as town, you'll be facing many scum who try many ways of getting past you, in stead of people always playing the same. I believe that's fun. So from a modding point of view, without compromising the game, I'd want that scenario and incentivize the team that has the potential to make every game different, to do so.

How you arrive at more townsided setups, that's the next step. There's more than one way to get there. But possibly that's not a topic for this thread.

[Majiffy]

Scum's job is to act like town. If the game is challenging to town, the challenge for scum is to also look challenged while having inside info.

If the game is easy for town, town will sit back and do little, allowing reports and night actions to dictate. Thus there is no challenge for scum, they just sit back and pray. Or counterclaim. That's EM meta to a T.

We don't want to follow EM meta. They're terrible at scum hunting which - guess what - is the point of the game.

Stop trying to take the personal involvement of the players out of the game. Otherwise we might as just roll dice and determine the game through sheer probability.

[Killthestory]

Majiffy, you can fix that by having a general vanilla game with a little more night power to town.

I get what you're saying, and I agree with it in the sense that adding more PRs to give town a crutch is silly. However, just decrease the overall amount of PRs in general rather than increase it to get to where Myko wants to go.

[Majiffy]

Which is what I'm saying already but ok

[Killthestory]

I basically didn't read the thread, so I'm sorry Majiffy.

If you're already saying that, then I agree with you bud ; )

[mhsmith0]

this feels like we're giving PRs to town more because town is bad at scumhunting and can't catch scum well

Evil will always triumph because good is dumb

Ps when designing games I HATE making it too easy on the town. The wolves should be required to win more days than the town (mislynches vs correct lynches) to win, and maybe town gets a bit of potential PR help. As it is I think towns get too much help from pr's and game design.

[mhsmith0]

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

There are nightless or semi nightless games on the site though.