Mini Normal 1954: Iambic Tetramafia: Endgame

[CommKnight]

Also that I was killed N2(ish) because I would have considered taiho clear.

The problem here is that people still don't seem to understand that this "advantage" was completely negated by the fact the traitor auto-loses if both other mafia are lynched.

Even if I didn't kill you, if at any point during the game before LYLO I was lynched instead of the final town, Taiho and mafia loses.

I think what should've happened is that Taiho takes over the night kill as a lone mafia without PT.

But people seem to disagree while citing the advantage the traitor had, when he had none because him staying alive wouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Even if he managed to avoid the night kills and noose after being cleared, with just myself alive in an already screwed position, it just wouldn't have mattered.

Like I don't understand what is so complicated to understand that part of the imbalance here.

[jjh927]

You objectively do not understand the role of a non-recruitable traitor in terms of balance

[Jingle]

Like I don't understand what is so complicated to understand that part of the imbalance here.

The difference is in the fact that you're arguing that the setup was unbalanced. It wasn't. The reason you lost was that you had already lost when you replaced in. Awoo's hammer, my meta read, and an overwhelming townblock that primarily came from Town correctly reading each other's intentions put you into a situation that was unwinnable. It happens. The PR interactions really didn't even matter in this particular game. It's not your fault. It's not jj's fault. It's not even really your previous scumpartner's faults. Saying it was because the game was imbalanced though is insulting to the people who played the game, the mod, AND the reviewers.

Objectively speaking, I don't think there was a possible way to replace in and turn that game around. You MIGHT have been able to live a couple more days, but even then... Not likely, tbh. But that doesn't mean the game is unbalanced. It means you got screwed by replacing into a doomed slot. I'm sorry it happened to you, and it sucks that it did, but blaming others isn't going to do you any favors. Accept it, and move on.

And, btw, thank you for replacing into a doomed slot. Without you this could have drug on and turned into a cesspit. Your replace made the game vastly more fun and playable, despite the fact that it ended so soon after you joined.

[EspeciallyTheLies]

CK is as good as confscum here and tomorrow/next day we can lynch fykus or taiho one-two for the win.

all of that is moot because of this. even if taiho had become a full mafia, she was

going

to get lynched before town lost. and that decision had NOTHING to do with PRs at all and everything to do with good town being good at reading other townies.

there's nothing worse than a sore loser. losses happen. you can only blame yourself and your teammates when it happens if you absolutely need to blame someone.

and sometimes...

the other team was just plain better than yours and you have to either be mature enough to recognize it and congratulate them or move tf on.

[EspeciallyTheLies]

Saying it was because the game was imbalanced though is insulting to the people who played the game, the mod, AND the reviewers.

THIS. it's rude and childish.

[EspeciallyTheLies]

like... why didn't the mafia team hunt for the obvious masons? i dunno. but it didn't happen. why didn't they block flubber - the only one at the time with a confirmable town role? no idea. but they didn't and they should have. why did awoo hammer like that when he could have let LUV do it without suspicion? again, no idea.

these are just a few of the several missteps that led to the loss in conjunction with a strong set of town players. none of that had anything to do with the setup and everything to do with weak mafia decisions.

that's how you learn though. recognize what went wrong and do better next time.

[mhsmith0]

FWIW, I'd say that if the game WAS unbalanced, it's perfectly fine to say that the game is unbalanced. People fuck up on setup design (sometimes pretty egregiously too). It happens.

The issue I have is that THIS game design wasn't particularly unbalanced.

Traitor (and traitors in normal games are EXCLUSIVELY non-recruitable) is generally worth something like half a goon (mainly because it can't be recruited). The even night roleblocker is a little bit extra for the scum team, ditto encryptor, but you're still looking at a generally low amount of scum power. So essentially, you look at town power on 3 goon setups...

1921 - cop and jailkeeper - highly concentrated power, but hard to argue that it's less power than town got here
1908 - miller double voter, odd night cop, 3-shot gunsmith - double investigatives, the miller double voter is somewehat self-clearing (and at any rate will divert cop/gs investigations elsewhere by nature), more town power than this game
1905 - weak jailkeeper, ascetic JOAT (cop, doc, vig), loud role cop - more town power than here
1890 - 3x masons
1875 - cop, jailkeeper, 1-shot bp - more town power than 1921 due to the bp
1843 - 3x masons
1833 (2 goons, 1 encryptor) - hated, 2x masons, watcher - more town power than here, watcher and masons in particular have strong coordination potential

(for kicks, you can also potentially look at 1929, an 8/3 game where scum power was very comparable to this, but town got a watcher, 2-shot vig, and 3-shot doctor, though again that was 8/3 not 10/3 so the lack of an extra day doubtless played too)

That compares to a 2-man masonry (WITHOUT daytalk, which nerfs utility quite a bit), a cop who knows he's questionable sanity but is actually REALLY questionable on sanity, a net neutral utility neighborizer, and an explicitly NU role that shuts down a good part of town's communication powers when it dies (though in fairness, it also enables the PT cop to be stronger, though frankly it's pretty unusual for the PT cop to not be outed by the time the NU role dies barring like a d1 lynch or something)

I think ultimately the interactions between the town roles was really poor, the potential for the PT cop to completely blow things up on town was substantial, and town had zero active defense against scum's nightkill (no watcher, doctor, bp, jailkeeper, etc etc etc)

I'd also note that there's a reasonable expectation that somewhere along the line the traitor is going to blatantly strongarm a town mislynch, possibly even via some kind of fakeclaim (like a cop guilty or the like), so barring a really early shot on the traitor, scum team really shouldn't be too disadvantaged by the possibility of a late game traitor shot. When the traitor is the role that makes it to endgame, something went drastically wrong for scum.

[Flubbernugget]

Town is massively under buffed in comparison to the games you cited

And the neighborizor in this game acted like some sort of Miller cult and trying to argue it had any town utility at all is extremely questionable

[Flubbernugget]

"Games which are otherwise Normal may still be more suited to a different Queue. For example, a game with a large number of Doctors may be better run as an Open Game (after review in the Open Discussion Thread) or as a "Hospital" Themed Game."

Tbh im surprised this setup was approved normal by the above clause (at no detriment to the fact that it was a pretty good setup)

[Wickedestjr]

That's a good point. This could be an awesome open setup, but it would have to be adjusted a little bit because the neighborizer would know to never neighborize people.

[mhsmith0]

This would be pretty brutal as an open. Five claimable and confirmable town PRs is a gimme win for town. Well, I suppose some towns might lose it anyway, but it'd take a lot of town dysfunction to blow 10/3 with 5 effective ICs.

[mhsmith0]

Town is massively under buffed in comparison to the games you cited

And the neighborizor in this game acted like some sort of Miller cult and trying to argue it had any town utility at all is extremely questionable

Yep. Neighborizer in general is not much help to town, other than rare setups with a good stack of investigative power where somehow you might coordinate (and said setups are kind of rare)

"Games which are otherwise Normal may still be more suited to a different Queue. For example, a game with a large number of Doctors may be better run as an Open Game (after review in the Open Discussion Thread) or as a "Hospital" Themed Game."

Tbh im surprised this setup was approved normal by the above clause (at no detriment to the fact that it was a pretty good setup)

Nothing about this setup was particularly odd in terms of normality. No multi-doctors (and 2 docs probably ok if you can balance it, but like 4 is blatantly non-normal), nothing else that was particularly bizarre. You had role interactions that were a bit challenging, but that also is pretty normal.

Like, a 10/3 with 3-5 town PRs and something not crazy weird in terms of scum PRs, and with just one graylisted role, is just on the surface normal, so you'd generally need quite a bit (like, REALLY weird roles / role interactions and the like) to argue it wasn't.

PS
5 town PRs of (on average) poor strength against a goon, a very limited roleblocker, and a traitor that is effectively a godfather to the investigative. That's generically around balanced.

I'd also note that in 10/3 games, you have town records of:
0-6 with 3-4 VTs (i.e. 6+ PRs, though a decent % of those the "PRs" are neighbors which really aren't PRs)
1-5 with 8 VTs (i.e. just 2 PRs, i.e. just 2 PRs is unbalanced AND pretty non-normal)

in a more standard range (5-7 VTs, 3-5 PRs)
7-15 with 5 VTs (and 5 PRs) 32%
22-36 with 6 VTs (and 4 PRs) 38%
31-36 wiht 7 VTs (and 3 PRs) 46%

in general, one of the more notable tendencies in normal games is for game designers and/or reviewers to give town a big stack of garbage power roles (and/or really stack the scum teams with power) and just presume that a higher # of PRs is itself substantially protown, when in fact the data pretty strongly shows the most balanced setups we run in 10/3 mini normals are 7 VTs, 3 town PRs.

[Jingle]

This would be pretty brutal as an open. Five claimable and confirmable town PRs is a gimme win for town. Well, I suppose some towns might lose it anyway, but it'd take a lot of town dysfunction to blow 10/3 with 5 effective ICs.

Anything more than 3 PRs in an open with 13P is probably way too townsided, tbh.

[CommKnight]

Well what you could do is if it were to become open, is to make all the roles "possible" but to have only 3 picked from them. (Mason would take up two though if it was rolled).

You leave room for fake claims and the traitor can potentially work on outing the PRs with a fake claim if the situation looks like it's going down hill for scum if there's too many PRs still in play.

Just a suggestion. I think it'd balance it pretty well then. (Plus the cop would know there's a traitor so no one is "auto-cleared").

[Flubbernugget]

That's a good point. This could be an awesome open setup, but it would have to be adjusted a little bit because the neighborizer would know to never neighborize people.

I think the effect you're looking for here is best replicated with a tracker and a compulsive fruit vendor

[Raskolnikov]

well this is interesting
idk how to feel about balancing a setup via NU as scum doing what usually is good (getting a lynch on pr d1) instead makes them suffer

[jjh927]

I think you're taking that as a general thing, whereas in the specific case scum shouldn't be bending over backwards anyway to lynch a town neighbouriser as that's low power stuff.

[ironstove]

Yea I don't know why traitor should auto lose. In stack the deck traitor traditionally picks up night kill power if all goons are eliminated and that's also a 3:10 setup, so what's up with that? One could argue that the PRs given to town this game rival the max spec for stack the deck.

This setup was town sided in that sense, but it also shouldn't be used as an excuse to hide the fact that scum also played rather poorly to get lynched back to back the first 2 day phases.

[Not Known 15]

It is both: The setup was townsided, and scum wasn't really good(and I have to apologize here for my play, it was abysmal)
Yes, the setup was townsided! The interactions between these roles were far better than the first look seems to show, excluding the Neighbourizer.
The breaking role here was the Town PT enabler. Yes that one. Remember? Jingle claimed very early that there must be masons. That was the problem with the PT enabler. It was, with PT cop alive, anti town. The claim broke the game. The early claim meant two things:
Mafia knew that there were masons(probably).
The PT cop knew that there were Masons, making them reluctant to claim.
The town got a basically confirmed town that the Mafia would NOT want to kill(at least not until the PT cop died).
A PT innocent was good for town(yes there was the traitor, but the traitor did not need to die for mafia to lose!) as they could have been no mafia killing team member.
Traitor surviving is a very very weak false innocent.
The only, yes ONLY roles the weakened roleblocker could block were the Neighbourizer and the PT cop. The latter was the only good target, the Neighbourizer would have been a bad target.
The Encryptor is a fairly weak power role for Mafia in this case, especially because it

Yes the Neighbourizer was lynchable.
The enabler, if they were claiming D1(which did happen!)?
No way.
The masons? Sorry... doable, but uhhh...extremely hard to pull off. If you are caught lying its game over.
The PT cop?? That one was so outlandish yet did fit so good... very hard to lynch. Then you get these hard clears from PT cop(yeah one is fake but the fake one could not be used for anything else but one BS claim then ppl would think"traitor".
This game was not obviously townsided.
Now, I did not say that game was badly designed. I, however, will say that there was a problem that was hard to spot; and it is more in line of problems that probably just come up during play. It happens, and I am not angry about the reviewers missing it. But this game should be an example further reviews should take into account when scanning for less obvious problems.

[jjh927]

The PT enabler dying doesn't make the PT cop get negative results on people who were in PTs.

Scum should have killed Jingle after the enabler claim was accepted by town.

[CommKnight]

Oh look, someone else seen the imbalance and actually broke it down.

[skirt skirt]

Doesn't even matter if it's broken because scum lost on play 5 times over lmfao

[jjh927]

But the fact is that it objectively wasn't imbalanced.

PT Enabler could have very easily been scum (scum enablers are normal too, and scum enabling town roles is more common than you might think) and was far from conftown, but would have also been a good target for a scum nightkill following the claim in the absence of knowing who the masonry was.
The PT cop outed the masonry to anybody with eyes, and this was highly probable to occur. It's verifiable, but when you do so you out basically all of the town PRs. Scum can kill PRs.
Except they don't even have to kill the PT cop right away, because they have the even night roleblock which is in there entirely to further reduce the impact of the PT cop.
Mafia were not high power PRs everywhere because they had an extra ~half goon (traitor) in a 13p game.


You're thinking this is imbalanced because you saw everyone townblock. That is NOT an inevitability in this setup. With better scum NKs and a worse town, it simply wouldn't have happened.

[UC Voyager]

Well. Scum seem to always win so sometimes it is good to see a good town win. I feel the set up was fairly balanced, but the traitor could be switched for a goon.

[mhsmith0]

Yea I don't know why traitor should auto lose. In stack the deck traitor traditionally picks up night kill power if all goons are eliminated and that's also a 3:10 setup, so what's up with that? One could argue that the PRs given to town this game rival the max spec for stack the deck.

This setup was town sided in that sense, but it also shouldn't be used as an excuse to hide the fact that scum also played rather poorly to get lynched back to back the first 2 day phases.

stack the deck is essentially unique in how traitor is treated. In general traitor is considered half a goon with the reason being that traitors can die to scum team and get endgamed if the other scum die first (some mids let traitor be recruited if scum team shoot but that’s nit a “normal” role)
Hilariously in stack the deck most scum teams recruit the traitor, which is objectively anti win con but there are a lot of dumb scum out there