Swinginess?

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Swinginess?

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Thu Sep 01, 2016 12:32 am

Post by BNL »

In game design, two things are needed to make a good game: balance, and low swinginess. Balance is easy to understand: it's just about whether both sides have equal opportunities to win, which is done by adjusting quantity and quality of PRs given to both sides.

The concept of swinginess, however, is difficult to grasp. It is something about certain events happening in the game which can cause one side to have an unfavorable advantage over the other as far as I know, but I still do not fully understand. Could someone help to explain clearly what "swinginess" is?
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Thu Sep 01, 2016 1:25 am

Post by karnos »

I'm not an expert, but this is something I have thought about.

The issue is when a side starts to win and it gives the side an insurmountable advantage as the initial aspects of winning make the side strong and stronger. I'd disagree that it is always bad, in certain games it's a crucial aspect to the game play, for example... Monopoly. If Monopoly wasn't swingy, it would probably never end. It's the very fact that landing on an expensive property and giving your opponent a bunch of money to upgrade hotels that allows the game to actually reach an end state.

Hearthstone is a game which is swingy in a bad way sometimes, if you are familiar with it. By getting out the first strong creature, you have the advantage in that you can attack your opponent and he can't do anything about it. But this is swingy because creatures generally can't attack the turn they come into the game, so you get the first opportunity to trade into any creatures played by your opponent. This gives you the advantage of favorable trades, and keeping your opponent from ever building up a defense of creatures.

In a general mafia game, I think it's not too swingy, it's sorta of anti-swingy in some ways- for example if you nail scum on day 1, it means it's harder to lynch scum on the following day just because of random distribution there being fewer scum left in the game. OTOH, some sets are very swingy, for example if town has a tracker nailing 1 of 2 scum day 1 makes the tracker much stronger, swinging the win odds strongly towards town. A lot of that depends on the design of the setup.
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Thu Sep 01, 2016 1:40 am

Post by Something_Smart »

First of all, I think the word you're looking for is just "swing" :P

(I wrote this before I saw karnos's response, but it's interesting to see that we have different views. I guess it means that BNL's question is valid as there is no single commonly used definition...)


Based on my experience, I think the best way to define swing is as the impact that bad luck can have on the result.

High swing for scum roles entails putting too much stock into one role, to the point where the game becomes very difficult if that member is lost. A good example is Row 2 of the Newbie Setup:

Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Cop, Town Doctor, 5 Vanilla Townies

The Roleblocker was put into this particular setup to avoid Follow The Cop, which is game-breaking. So suppose now your scumteam has two members: Newbie McObvscum and Don Corleone. Now NewbieMcObvscum gets lynched day 1 and if he just happened to draw goon, then the scumteam still has a decent chance. But if he happened to draw roleblocker, then the game is now hugely in town's favor... and nothing the scumteam did differentiated between these two scenarios.


High swing for town roles is similar, putting too much stock into roles that could die at night just by chance.

For this, let's look at Column B of the Newbie setup:

2 Mafia Goons vs. Town Cop, 6 Vanilla Townies

Clearly, if the cop dies early, town is in a very bad spot. So, then, this setup might not be considered swingy but just scumsided if the scum were able to identify the cop from their day 1 posting. Since one goal of all town players is obviously to avoid that, I think we can likely say that probably the scum won't be able to shoot for the cop and hit them with great accuracy. So then it just comes down to who they do choose to kill, be it because they are afraid of an IC or SE, to frame someone else, or because somebody knows them well, and if that player just happens to be the cop then town's winning chances go way down. Nothing the town or the scum did (and likely almost nothing the cop did) brought about this result; it was just misfortune.

Of course, all setups with PR's must have swing. It's unavoidable, and it's not usually that hard to keep it down to an acceptable level. But games with high swing have a higher chance of being decided due to chance, and that's not usually fun for the players. If you're looking for tips to keep swing down, here are a few:
  • Don't have multiple town roles that serve the same function (i.e. Tracker, Jailkeeper, Follower, Roleblocker all can catch the scum doing the kill, Cop, Mason, Neapolitan, Weak roles all can confirm players as town)
  • Don't make your setup dependent on one role to be balanced (the Newbie setup violates this one to an extent)
  • Think carefully about using roles that have high impact and unpredictable effects on other roles, such as PGO or Bus Driver (this applies only to themes, Normals don't want those roles in there at all for this reason)
  • Where possible, try to spread town power across multiple roles, making it more likely that some of it will die sooner and more likely that some of it will live longer.
  • Don't make roles with random or arbitrary elements that could have serious effects on the game
  • Keep in mind that multiball and SK setups have significantly higher inherent swing because crosskills could happen but can't be counted on to balance the setup
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Thu Sep 01, 2016 3:11 am

Post by kuribo »

It's not swing or swinginess, it's swingificationation
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Thu Sep 01, 2016 7:03 am

Post by Alchemist21 »

In post 0, BNL wrote:In game design, two things are needed to make a good game: balance, and low swinginess. Balance is easy to understand: it's just about whether both sides have equal opportunities to win, which is done by adjusting quantity and quality of PRs given to both sides.

The concept of swinginess, however, is difficult to grasp. It is something about certain events happening in the game which can cause one side to have an unfavorable advantage over the other as far as I know, but I still do not fully understand. Could someone help to explain clearly what "swinginess" is?
I would say swinginess is the potential for the tide to turn at a moment's notice based on something that's more or less luck.

In a balanced game, if one side gains a considerable advantage, it can be assumed it was done through the skill of the winning team. If a single act of dumb luck (like shooting a player they didn't know was lovers with 3 other players) can change which side has the advantage, the game is swingy.
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Thu Sep 01, 2016 10:04 am

Post by callforjudgement »

My personal definition of a swingy game is one where the game's balance later in the game can be disproportionately far away from what you'd expect based on the players' actual play. (This can be because the game gives an excessively large reward to good play early, or because the balance is mostly determined by factors other than how well the players have been playing.)

A perfectly balanced game would start with 50% odds for each team. If, by day 2, one team is 99% likely to win, then the game is probably excessively swingy (unless one team really has played that well compared to their opponents, which is unlikely). Most games aren't
that
swingy, but it's still fairly common for the balance to be a long way away from where you'd expect by day 2 or 3, and often based on factors other than how well players have been playing.

What karnos is talking about is positive feedback (when one team does well, they can snowball and continue to do better). That's related to swing in a way (because it's a method of increasing a team's chance to win above how well they've been playing). It's not the only possible cause of swing, though.
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Fri Sep 02, 2016 2:21 am

Post by mykonian »

I do think karnos gets feedbacks application wrong. Mafia does have positive feedback, imo. Lynching one town means scum has more influence in later lynches, town has to be more unanimous. Lynch a scum, and you can use relationship tells. It's not a problem, we know this as the norm.
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Fri Sep 02, 2016 2:47 am

Post by callforjudgement »

There's also a strong negative feedback, though: lynching scum means that there are fewer scum left to find, so a lynch is more likely to hit town. (And vice versa: mislynching a townie at least gets them out of the lynchpool, making it easier to find scum the next day.)
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Fri Sep 02, 2016 3:14 pm

Post by mastin2 »

The simplest way to think of swing:
The more things you have in your game (regardless of Open, Normal, Theme, Micro, Mini, or Large), the more of it you will have.
This is why Normal Reviewers CONSISTENTLY tell people, both in public MD threads like right here and now, and privately come time for an actual review:
Keep things simple.

Less is more.

The closer your game is to role madness,
And the more non-standard mechanics your game possesses,
The less control you have on the outcome: the number of possible scenarios increases exponentially for EVERY single extra you add in. No matter the nature of that extra.

If you want to run a role madness game, that's fine.
Just know that it will, by its very nature, contain extreme swing.
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Fri Sep 02, 2016 3:42 pm

Post by zMuffinMan »

role madness doesn't necessarily mean "extreme swingificationation"

some roles have high swingificationation factor (watchers, cops, blockers, etc) and some roles have very low swingificationation factor (neighbourisers, fruit vendors, roles that are gated heavily in some way, etc) where swingificationation factor is measured by how much of an effect on EV any given role has if it dies or doesn't die on a certain day/night and/or who that role is used on. most roles are somewhere in the middle, or can become somewhere in the low-middle region by being gated in some way

you could probably very easily design a role madness game with not much swingificationation, it's just it wouldn't be your traditional balls-to-the-wall everyone-can-win-the-game-by-themselves role madness game like so many people are used to when they think "role madness"
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Fri Sep 02, 2016 3:45 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

(EDIT: @Mastin:) I'm not totally sure on that. For example, multiple weaker roles tend to be less swingy than fewer more powerful roles (because it makes the loss of a PR less important). There are more scenarios, but you're increasing the proportion of average scenarios and reducing the proportion of extreme scenarios.

Cop, 6 VT, 2 Goon is a fairly swingy setup: the cop can get nightkilled (or forced to claim) and fail to investigate, they can investigate town, or they can investigate scum, and these tend to lead to pretty disparate outcomes. As such, the game will be partly decided by who gets the Cop role. (Town don't want it to be a good scumhunter, as it raises the chance that their Cop will get NKed by mistake.) However, it's about as simple as you can get a balanced Closed 7:2 (and as such, is frequently used in newbie setups).

Meanwhile, a role madness game doesn't necessarily have much swing at all, because it provides a steady trickle of town advantage and the roles tend to trip over each other (meaning that the exact set of PRs alive is often not all that relevant, as nobody is sure what their results mean anyway).

Reviewers often caution players away from excessively complex games. However, I see that far more often as a result of imbalance, than I do as a result of swing; role madness games can be very hard to gauge the balance of. (In particular, if an excessively complex game isn't obviously townsided, it's probably highly scumsided.)

PEDIT: I wrote this before seeing zMuffinMan's comment but I agree with it.
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