Cop is a terrible role.

[Psyche]

hey gj

[Ythan]

All cops are bastard.

[mastina]

An ungated cop, in a Normal, is a thing I feel like we have to allow as something theoretically possible, but heavily discourage from being run in reality.

A gated cop is far less problematic. For instance, a 1x cop can only get a maximum of one innocent or one guilty--as far as investigatives go, that's actually weaker than most investigative roles. Even in the most role madnessy of Normals, for instance, a Neapolitan can still get 2-3 innocents (since no normal reviewer is going to pass a game with only one VT, there will always be a minimum of 2-3 in any given game); a gunsmith similarly will always have a reasonably good innocent-guilty rate leading to it being more powerful than a 1x cop is. (That is to say: there is exactly two scum roles, neither guaranteed, that can give a false innocent; the only false guilties are town power roles that can, to some extent, prove their status as town power roles. So most innocents are legit innocents; at least half of guilties are legit guilty.)

It should also be noted that this is Normal-exclusive.

In an Open game, if the scum know there is a cop, they can hunt for the cop more effectively;
In a semi-open game, a cop is not guaranteed so scum can play around it, but scum can still hunt for it if need be.

In a theme game, a sane cop can be countered by a scum Godfather, and/or by not guaranteeing the sanity of the cop--if the cop is actually insane, paranoid, naive, or random, then it is going to be less powerful.

Suffice to say: cops do have a space in design, even in a Normal, but they need to be handled smartly and handled well. It's not impossible to balance around a cop, you just need to take into account what type of game it is.

[Bunno]

I can see the reason for including cops in newbie setups but cops in the other queues feels a bit lame to be honest

it's kind of a unbalanced role really

Not only there's no way out for scum if they are investigated, there's very often not even a possibility of mafia counterplaying the cop due to a lack of mafia PRs.

Therefore the entire power to decide the game lays on the cops hands, rather than giving a fair chance to both teams. Not what I would call good design.

I think situational/conditional investigative roles are a lot more fun/balanced.

[Jake The Wolfie]

Not only there's no way out for scum if they are investigated, there's very often not even a possibility of mafia counterplaying the cop due to a lack of mafia PRs.

Which is why that's bad design if there is no way out. The mafia should always be given a way out for all investigative PRs.

[Ythan]

Isn't scum already considered op on ms? I could very easily be wrong here but

[Ircher]

Not only there's no way out for scum if they are investigated, there's very often not even a possibility of mafia counterplaying the cop due to a lack of mafia PRs.

I don't necessarily agree that not being able to escape an investigative guilty is bad design. In particular, the cop still has to choose their target carefully. Common wisdom is that you cop your middle reads and/or lurkers. I believe there is counterplay in the form of playing well enough that no one would think to cop you. I understand this may be difficult in certain games (maybe many), but ultimately, getting copped as scum is a sign that someone was already suspicious of you to begin with. If you are a shining beacon of town, people shouldn't want to cop you, so you will avoid guilties.

That said, cop does have issues especially the fact that it is a very powerful and dominating role. As mastina points out, a full cop is a bad idea for many reasons, especially in the late game where PoE starts to matter a lot. But getting copped on N1 or N2 (in a mini normal) is a sign that you didn't play well enough, so I don't agree that there is no way to counterplay a cop.

[Gypyx]

Not only there's no way out for scum if they are investigated, there's very often not even a possibility of mafia counterplaying the cop due to a lack of mafia PRs.

I don't necessarily agree that not being able to escape an investigative guilty is bad design. In particular, the cop still has to choose their target carefully. Common wisdom is that you cop your middle reads and/or lurkers. I believe there is counterplay in the form of playing well enough that no one would think to cop you. I understand this may be difficult in certain games (maybe many), but ultimately, getting copped as scum is a sign that someone was already suspicious of you to begin with. If you are a shining beacon of town, people shouldn't want to cop you, so you will avoid guilties.

That said, cop does have issues especially the fact that it is a very powerful and dominating role. As mastina points out, a full cop is a bad idea for many reasons, especially in the late game where PoE starts to matter a lot. But getting copped on N1 or N2 (in a mini normal) is a sign that you didn't play well enough, so I don't agree that there is no way to counterplay a cop.

Well, as you said, obvtowning is really hard on it's own, plus, the fact that you're still alive by endgame is gonna raise some pretty bad eyebrows, so really, it's not that better

[Psyche]

i do like the dynamic where scum have to be attentive not just to global suspicion against them and their allies, but also to the suspicion of particular players who could hold investigative roles
if investigative roles are too weak, then that concern isn't impactful enough on gameplay
1-shot cops seem a neat compromise, though there are alternatives — like jailkeeper?

[Ythan]

Jailkeeper is good for that I think.

[northsidegal]

i do like the dynamic where scum have to be attentive not just to global suspicion against them and their allies, but also to the suspicion of particular players who could hold investigative roles
if investigative roles are too weak, then that concern isn't impactful enough on gameplay
1-shot cops seem a neat compromise, though there are alternatives — like jailkeeper?

i definitely agree with this and in fact it seems to me like it actually offers more depth to scum gameplay rather than being poor design. i think it's uncontroversial to say that effective PR hunting

is

an element of good scum play and so, for a scum player or team, rather than just considering the majority town opinion on how scummy they are, an additional element is added of people who might be PRs suspecting them being more dangerous than others. i would say that getting investigated—while probably not all that fun—is the

outcome

of that gameplay rather than the gameplay itself.

[TheGoldenParadox]

i don't have the time or energy to give a full response right now, but please know that y'all arguments have generally been moving and my view (specifically for the Newbie queue and some Theme games) has been changed somewhat, so thank you all!

[Bunno]

I don't necessarily agree that not being able to escape an investigative guilty is bad design. In particular, the cop still has to choose their target carefully. Common wisdom is that you cop your middle reads and/or lurkers. I believe there is counterplay in the form of playing well enough that no one would think to cop you

There's little counterplay the higher you go. If someone is known as a good scum player that people have a hard time reading, an average cop would target them and mafia instantly loses not only one of their members, but their strongest ones. There's little counterplay to be done in dayplay in most setups that aren't bastard. You're assuming here that meta doesn't exist, even though right now it's one of the most important aspects of any game you see being played.

This balancing you say does ~kinda~ work in many games though, but for example in a Team Mafia, I'm extremely opposed to using cop roles at all, because it gets more and more unbalanced the more stacked a playerlist is.

That's why in my opinion its best use is also in the newbie queue like I said before. It's a role that punishes the more skilled a mafia player is, and rewards average play from both mafia and townies. It's still not good design at all especially in more competitive games.

I'll give an example:

RC often wins games as scum even without trying but it only takes a single cop night target to possibly change the entire game. I played against scum!RC in a Open, and I strongly recommended the cop to investigate RC since N1. The cop didn't and we lost, but if the cop had investigated RC in night 1 like I said (and I definitely would have done if I was the cop), we possibly could have won the game because RC was the biggest contributor for a mafia win there by constantly distracting us from the right targets and ruining town cohesion (the game REALLY would have looked completely different if we had caught RC on D2).

One mafia member just makes that much difference in some cases. It's a ok but not really "balanced" role. To me it's a role designed for inexperienced/new players, not people that have years of experience in this. It's a role that punishes high and low play from mafia, and rewards average. It's a role that pushes you to blend in the crowd rather than stand out.

[Bunno]

Cop is the equivalent of no protective roles or mechanics for town.

It rewards if you're are average or above-average, in other words a townie that has its good moments but also bad ones, and heavily punishes any townie that is known as a good scum hunter because people will often fear nightkill them regardless of the game context.

It doesn't really make much sense to me. We've many setups that have no protective roles for some reasons, like we should have setups that have cops for reasons, but is it "good design" by itself?

It isn't. It's something we should use in some situations that it's demanded but overall not incentivize it.

Cops also rewards low skill play from town by making it possibly for bad town players be saved from eliminations without any effort of their own, although this is a much more acceptable thing given how many lurkers we often have in games.

[Bunno]

I think Cop or a No-protectives setup is what I would call "artificial balancing".

You sacrifice the power of the individual to give strenght to the majority/average and that's exactly why I think it's a particularly amazing role/mechanic for a newbie or inexperienced game. It doesn't matter as much if the newbies are outskilled by the veterans, because the setup can help them even it out.

It doesn't matter if you're the hottest scum hunter on town. If there's no protectives you're as good as dead in night 1 and the scum team can try to play around you in day 1, only then proceed to play around the rest of the playerlist in day 2.

It doesn't matter if you're a good distractor, your gimmicks are over once someone claims a guilty on day 2.

It's artificial balancing. It creates a skill ceiling which it's often bad if you're higher than it. It removes the extra power that someone with a higher skill has by inserting those mechanics, making they more vulnerable to a "mechanical" counterplay since directly counterplaying their skill would be harder.

Wheter you agree or not with a cop role also often begins to correlate to how much you like or dislike the idea of raw meritocracy. There are many people that believe that town needs to have a very considerable advantage to mafia largely because they are the "majority", and it's better that they win most of the time.

In other words, to those people the actual clash of skills in the game doesn't matter as much as making the "majority" happy. Therefore, they'll gladly create mechanics or roles that handicap mafia to satisfy the average player regardless of the skill of those townies.

Cop is a product of this subtly or not subtly philosophy. I'm a believer that if town/mafia sucks they should just lose therefore I dislike the idea of cops or a town where their best scum hunters die N1. It actively makes the design unfun to me.

[Ircher]

This isn't a refutation of your point, but that problem applies only to a very small group of players. Maybe the top 2% well known scum players. Furthermore, it's not just cops those players have an issue with. People will try to policy eliminate those players in the day as well simply because they could be scum.

[Bunno]

This isn't a refutation of your point, but that problem applies only to a very small group of players. Maybe the top 2% well known scum players. Furthermore, it's not just cops those players have an issue with.

I don't think it's a top 2%, even people that are beginning to get some good scum games may get copped out of context simply because of paranoia, just like if someone has seen 2 or 3 good town games from someone, they may default to a fear kill.

It doesn't matter if it's town or mafia, I'm a believer that setups should be designed in a way that the more skill a player has regardless of his alignment, the more impact they should have.

By saying that this isn't a common problem what you're basically saying is that not only you believe that town should have an upperhand from a object standpoint in PRs balance (which at the moment I'm not interested in discussing), but you also think that we should have a equal to a "no protectives" mindset in regards to mafia, even though everyone loves putting protectives to protect the best town players in the game.

In essence this view is kind of like what I said early, you're creating ceilings and artificial balances in the game to help town in any way possible because you're worried about the majority rather than a meritocracy.

I don't actually mind that opinion at all as long as we understand what it is (I'm not very interested in playing mafia anymore anyway). It's an anti-meritocracy philosophy, policy and design against mafia, but town is still given their protectives because they are in the "majority" side.

People will try to policy eliminate those players in the day as well simply because they could be scum.

Nah that doesn't happen to be honest

People may say it but it doesn't happen. People say as if policy eliminating lurkers is a thing when it's definitely not, and the main reason lurkers are eliminated is because town is in apathy/confused and don't feel they have any better alternatives at the moment.

It's not that people often actively try to eliminate lurkers, it's just that they often can't find a good consensus and default to the lowest-charisma common suspects, lurkers.

Policy Elimination is something that appears on paper a lot more prominent than it actually is. The unique real reasons I've seen for a

real

policy elimination where it's not external factors leading to the elimination but a very

direct

problem with the player itself, is when drama/AtE is involved in the game.

It's relatively easy to untangle a "policy elimination" and even use it as ammunition against someone when it's used in dayplay regardless of your alignment.

[Jake The Wolfie]

Remember: Cop is used in a NEWBIE setup, designed for NEWBIES. I think you would be willing to give up some ground of what might be town-pandering if it meant a better experience for newbies who probably have never played FM, or have little experience with FM. It's meant to be easy for newbies to catch on. The whole point of a newbie setup is to teach newbies how to play.

I'm not suggesting to go full out unbalanced setups, instead having more leniency for user experience so that they stick around longer.

[Something_Smart]

I don't understand what Bunno's arguing at all. Scum being able to kill threats to them is bad? Balancing for the average result is bad?

What Bunno is calling "artificial balancing" I call "balancing". People are going to target stronger players; this is a natural consequence of playing a game with more than two people.

If your strongest member gets guiltied, well... that means you got unlucky, maybe, to have the auto-cop-check roll scum in a game with a cop. But there's pretty much no such thing as an auto-cop-check that everyone agrees on, so in practice, there's always town skill going into that guilty.

And I think there are very few people who think town should win significantly more than mafia. It's not like all setups with cops are townsided; it's a balancing tool like any role, and a very easy to use one at that.

[Bunno]

I don't understand what Bunno's arguing at all. Scum being able to kill threats to them is bad? Balancing for the average result is bad?

like I said, I feel some of you guys are so used to this that you don't even notice and it's the "obvious" answer to you, but a setup where the best scum hunters gets killed d1 without any chance to counterplay (aka no protectives to protect them), isn't what I would call the best design.

I'm not even gonna bother with the rest of this post because I feel like we've completely different views on this game and ultimately there's no correct answer since game design is often based on your principles, but what we are arguing here is that

Scum often are able to be counterplayed on killing the best scum hunters by protective roles

However scum aren't able to counterplay a cop other than not only correct PR hunting precisely on day 1, but also having a spider sense for precisely the cop between the PRs, plus having extra luck that the cop isn't being protected.

The amount of precision in counterplay from mafia vs town is glaringly uneven. PR hunting is one thing, but correctly identifying the cop everytime is literally more difficult than having an almost-perfect streak of correct scum eliminations like Eli.

Even if you do target a PR, there's no guarantee it's precisely the cop. PR hunting as a counterplay to cop alone is overall innefective when compared to any counterplay other roles have.

Watcher, Tracker, Janitor, all are better investigative roles than Cop, that requires more skill to use and are able to be counterplayed properly.

Even if your average player theoretically gets widely town read to avoid the cop, being too much "obvtown'd", contrary to common sense, isn't necessarily the best scum play and it can hurt you as the game goes on. Especially if you're doing the newbie mistake of playing against your wincon only to get town read (which can pay out in the end but also often makes you suffer in endgame).

Cops also gets rewarded regardless of whether they target it wrong or right, because they either get a inno or guilty, they always win and are hard to be counterplayed. It's probably a lot easier to play around 2 Innocent Child in a 11p setup than a 1-shot cop unless you're lucky to be able to eliminate the cop on day 1 for some reason.

a 1-shot cop, in most cases, either equates to:

one free mafia kill + 1 IC

or

2 ICs

There's only a few cases where that isn't the case, in most games it's precisely what happens.

I don't need to explain how ridiculous a non gated cop power is I hope.

If you think that's a good design I feel like we've completely different mindsets about what's considered balanced and further discussion isn't useful.

[Gamma Emerald]

Tbh Cop has good and bad aspects, but personally I wish my homesite would stop acting like a cop is needed for every game ever
Legitimately can’t recall a game there that hasn’t had one.
Also, gated cop/cop with modifiers kinda dodges some of the issues in the OP

[Zachrulez]

Cop isn't necessarily a bad role from a balance perspective. Towns have a lot to overcome to win a game and a cop can really help tilt the scales into giving a town half a chance.

From a practical standpoint they can end up being quite boring. You get into late game with one scum remaining and you can have epic back and forth discussions and battles with players over who is scum. You put a cop into that situation with a guilty and you get none of that. The game is over instantly for the most part when that happens.

Still it's kind of silly to hate specifically on the cop for creating certain situations when roles like tracker and town roleblocker can do basically the same thing in late game.(They target the last scum in late game it's the same thing as a cop guilty.)

[DrippingGoofball]

Any thoughts on Hiders?

[Ythan]

Ayyy happy cake day.

[StarToAYoungCulture]

Cop is the best roel