Mafiascum.net

Or the next six month's challenges, it's a really worthwhile endeavor.

I think making it a challenge is a SUPER good idea

In post 107, u r a person 2 wrote:if TTTT took a break from newbie queue, scum win rates would jump 10% at least, and he never rolls scum =/
guy needs a title like "newb-hunter" but more clever
(love ya buddy)

I rolled scum in my first two Newbies (w/ this account) but that was in 2016
I've been town 11 times in a row since then (10/11 record)

In post 127, TTTT wrote:

In post 107, u r a person 2 wrote:if TTTT took a break from newbie queue, scum win rates would jump 10% at least, and he never rolls scum =/
guy needs a title like "newb-hunter" but more clever
(love ya buddy)

I rolled scum in my first two Newbies (w/ this account) but that was in 2016
I've been town 11 times in a row since then (10/11 record)

you heard it folks - nerf TTTT, problem solved

In post 124, Irrelephant11 wrote:

In post 113, Irrelephant11 wrote:I think Creature's complaint in a recent newbie is also a valid one on behalf of scum

I think this ^ (making scum abilities factional rather than assigning them to a slot) would be a good simple change if we're looking to keep things relatively similar to the way they are but help scum out a bit.

If there's consensus the setup has to change to help scum not git rekt, I think this is a solid answer that's ultimately minor but may very well have a good effect.


Note that both goons would flip as "Mafia Goon", so town would never know (for confirmed) what PR scum has.

A weaker alternative would be to make the second goon a Universal Mafia Backup, which would still mean scum can never be without their PR, but give town information if they die first.

In post 129, Toomai wrote:

In post 124, Irrelephant11 wrote:

In post 113, Irrelephant11 wrote:I think Creature's complaint in a recent newbie is also a valid one on behalf of scum

I think this ^ (making scum abilities factional rather than assigning them to a slot) would be a good simple change if we're looking to keep things relatively similar to the way they are but help scum out a bit.

If there's consensus the setup has to change to help scum not git rekt, I think this is a solid answer that's ultimately minor but may very well have a good effect.

Spoiler: 2d3 modified (changes in bold)

	A	B	C
Mafia	Mafia Roleblocker	Mafia Rolecop	(none)
Row 1	Town Cop and Town Neapolitan	Town Cop and Town Tracker	Town Cop and Vanilla Townie
Row 2	Town Jailkeeper and Town Doctor	Town Jailkeeper and Town Tracker	Town Jailkeeper and Vanilla Townie
Row 3	Town Cop and Town Doctor	Town Neapolitan and Town Doctor	Town Tracker and Town Doctor

Each Newbie Game will be given a setup that incorporates one mafia

factional ability

from the top of a column, and then two town roles from a row below the selected mafia role.

The mafia is composed of

two mafia goons

, but either of them may use their factional ability each night, in addition to the mafia factional kill.

The remaining town roles will be filled in by

five vanilla townies

appropriately, to create a

2-mafia

and

7-town

setup.

All Newbie games use the Natural Action Resolution system for determining Night action effects.

Mafia Roleblocker

action takes precedence over a

Town Jailkeeper

action should that apply.

Mafia are able to communicate in their Private Topic at all times (daytalk).

Note that both goons would flip as "Mafia Goon", so town would never know (for confirmed) what PR scum has.

A weaker alternative would be to make the second goon a Universal Mafia Backup, which would still mean scum can never be without their PR, but give town information if they die first.

I think that's not effective enough. Currently, the win rates(and those are by 33% still from the more favourable long deadlines) are at about 60% for column C. And Column C would not change much!

I think "longer deadlines = higher scum win rates" is a bit surprising in its own right (most people assume the opposite), and would suspect that there might have been other changes at around the same time (e.g. a different playerbase) that might be an alternative explanation for the change.

In post 131, callforjudgement wrote:I think "longer deadlines = higher scum win rates" is a bit surprising in its own right (most people assume the opposite), and would suspect that there might have been other changes at around the same time (e.g. a different playerbase) that might be an alternative explanation for the change.

It is not surprising. There are different effects here:
-The Time To Get More Info and Time To Sleep Over Info effects, which drive scum win rates down. These effects diminish with more time - obviously. 7 days can give plenty of information and more information is not as helpful because you can keep track of only so much. And time to reevaluate... 7 days is plenty.
-The More Time for People To Get Bored Or Busy With RL effects, which help the scum win rate. More bored townies who just want the day to be over and do nothing are excellent for scum. This effect does NOT diminish with more time. The chances are greater that people have unexpected RL issues over the game, which helps scum. This effect INCREASES with more time avaliable.
With this in mind, it should be no longer surprising to you that, at some point, more time avaliable begins to help scum instead of town. If you go from 14 days to 10/7 days this is better for town.

There's definitely conceivable factors where more time and also less time can be worse or better for scum. There's lots of psychological biases that will operate differently at different day lengths.


Here's a question I have though: Are lynches made at or near the deadline to avoid a no lynch hitting with a different accuracy than lynches made because a town is satisfied with their day? And how do those two outcomes impact subsequent days?

Intuitively one would assume that towns are lynching scum more accurately, and winning more often, when they do not even need to skate along the deadline and find a lynch they are confident about in less time. But I think it's worthwhile to stay open to a counterintuitive result. Maybe these deadliners are compromise lynches with just a little bit of the right thinking from everyone in the town and therefore more accurate, instead of 1 idea 1 player had in the town and managed to spread virally - it's easier for 3 out of a group of 5 ideas to be valid than for 1 idea to be valid, if that makes sense. Or maybe the relative inability to defend oneself from a deadline lynch is important, and mafia are outperforming town at talking people out of lynching them (which is not a particularly counterintuitive result, it serves the mafia wincon more dramatically to pull the endeavor off).

Or maybe it informs future lynches better when this occurs D1 or D2. You can vanity wagon more safely in games where lynches are regularly getting achieved well before deadline, if you vanity wagon when the town needs to build consensus to avoid a no-lynch it starts to become more alignment indicative. And there might be tons of other gameplay mechanics that follow that pattern that are just harder to put your finger on.

In post 130, Not Known 15 wrote:I think that's not effective enough. Currently, the win rates(and those are by 33% still from the more favourable long deadlines) are at about 60% for column C. And Column C would not change much!

I think it could be more effective than it seems on the surface. Making the scum PR factional would:

1. make the scum PR unkillable
   
2. deny town information used to narrow the setup
   
3. make both scum equal; one of them doesn't have to fight harder to live and so might not resort to riskier fakeclaims

I don't know if it's something that happens a lot but #3 here could be important.

In post 133, popsofctown wrote:Here's a question I have though: Are lynches made at or near the deadline to avoid a no lynch hitting with a different accuracy than lynches made because a town is satisfied with their day? And how do those two outcomes impact subsequent days?

My stats aren't able to capture this question but I'm sure another interested individual might be willing to investigate.

My guess is that #2 is relevant but #1 and #3 are mostly unimportant.

Quick stat: in the 38 town wins in subsetups where scum has a PR, said scum PR died first in 19 of them (exactly 50%).

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, #1 matters for roleblocker setups, just not for rolecop setups.

Unusual idea to stack on top of the 2d3 modified setup: If scum have a Rolecop, the mod gives them a head start of a night 0 result on a random VT. (As opposed to a selectable or fully random result, which might hit a town PR and that'd be huge swing.) Combined with 2d3M mostly giving Roleblockers more power, that'd do a fair bit of scum tilting in the A- and B-groups. (C-group isn't as wacked, I think it's fine to leave alone if we're poking the other two.)

think it's better to start over rather than invent new game mechanics to try to make a broken setup work

Even with the change to roleblocker functionality nea cop is still a shit show and it imo makes for a bad game in roleblocker setups when 1) no one has any motivation to defend their partners under any condition and 2) newbies are meant to give a site introduction and that doesn't happen when we're inventing new mechanics to prop up a setup that was bad when it was new

Let's just take the setups that work and run from a list instead of trying to do some fancy matrix

In post 139, RadiantCowbells wrote:Let's just take the setups that work and run from a list instead of trying to do some fancy matrix

In post 70, PenguinPower wrote:I'm happy for people to recommend/create a small number of setups for discussion.

I was wondering what if we changed the Mafia Rolecop to Mafia 1-shot Strongman OR Ninja.

In post 18, RadiantCowbells wrote:I think towns just being better than they used to be is a big deal

This statement in the other thread had me musing, but I will post in this one because I am not suggesting a setup and this is statisticsy


I was curious how much newbie towns would be winning at mountainous mafia if they played it about as well as they are playing 2d3. Are they so good they could even win at mountainous mafia (maybe because bombtastic SE is always around, and newbscums are always around?) maybe?

So here's what I did. I wrote a program that simulated C2, because it seemed like the simplest setup, and though is still pretty complicated. I debugged it until the theoretical winrates seemed sane, 60% scum winrate with random lynching and night action usage and correct application of the investigative impact of jailkeeper (which I approximated as roleblocking a lone scum outside of MYLO instantly wins you the game and doing it in MYLO 50/50s the game, I believe that's right or close to it).
Then I added a skill factor to it, a dice roll before every lynch and jailkeep to attempt to "read correctly" and guarantee the desired outcome. And I adjusted this dice roll's chance to succeed until the results of my sim matched how much newbies are actually winning C2. It ended up at 11%.
Then I went over and did a different program and just did mountainous mafia, with the same amount of skill factor, 11% chance to ignore randomization and just lynch correctly.
It came out to a 55% winrate for scum.
There's only a sample size of 9 for C2, but C2 doesn't seem like an outlier on winrate so I can treat it as a somewhat larger sample. Unless something special happens in setups that are easy to write programs of but there's no reason to believe that.
If we are shooting for a 50% winrate for scum there may be very very little power that can safely be added to mountainous newbie games in the next revision. A lot of people seem to want a matrix for at least the possibility for 2 protown PRs so that more people get to play a protown PR, but I doubt there's actually enough legroom for that.

I mean your conclusion simply matches what has already been suggested in this thread: strengthen scum to match the use of TPRs

I don't think we should necessarily be pushing 50% town/scum winrates empirically in this context.

Only nea/cop and tracker/jailkeeper really to me are so bad that they really needs to fucking die now

Cop tracker is as well by winrate but I don't think it's actually worse than jailkeeper tracker.

In post 144, Irrelephant11 wrote:I mean your conclusion simply matches what has already been suggested in this thread: strengthen scum to match the use of TPRs

Ok. I apologize for trying to contribute. I promise not to try again.

In post 142, Creature wrote:I was wondering what if we changed the Mafia Rolecop to Mafia 1-shot Strongman OR Ninja.

I think even experienced players use limited shot abilities terribly

I'd rather not thrust that burden on newbies

In post 147, popsofctown wrote:

In post 144, Irrelephant11 wrote:I mean your conclusion simply matches what has already been suggested in this thread: strengthen scum to match the use of TPRs

Ok. I apologize for trying to contribute. I promise not to try again.

Oh no that’s not what I mean at all! I think the question of “could newbies win mountainous” is fascinating and I liked your experiment very much!
I just thought it was worth adding that “town PRs might be too much for these newbies” is one solution to the problem - and another is “if town should have power, scum should have more power”, which is something that’s already been suggested here.

Your contribution shows me we’re on the right track