Micro 690: Every Vote Counts (Game Over)

[callforjudgement]

In general, I'd say that the scum did much better than the town here. They got a bit lucky with killing some of town's most powerful roles (TTTT called the scumteam, got died for it, and unfortunately couldn't be protected due to being the Doctor; Charloux was intended to have a confirmable role that's highly likely town in this setup), but more importantly, they had enough skill to avoid suspicion pretty much all game. (Towards the end of the game, Not_Mafia pretty much admitted being scum. So why not vote for him, rather than who you thought his buddy was?) Meanwhile, town didn't really do a whole lot of scumhunting at all, meaning that they didn't have much chance to force the scum out of hiding.

It's worth mentioning that there's a hidden mechanic that the scum knew about, but the town didn't (because it would have confirmed way too many people as town for the setup to be balanced if it were public); if scum "got lucky" with the lynch without being able to persuade at least one townie to vote along with them, they lost their nightkill for the night. This made relying on luck with the kill as scum somewhat risky (although it ultimately didn't matter, both because they avoided even the chance of triggering it most days, and because town didn't manage a successful protection). In general, if town had played more actively, forcing players to be more differentiated, aiming the protections (of which there were quite a few) would have been easier.

The scum roles weren't really designed to be all that useful for scum (although Nahdia played theirs very well!), but rather to prevent them being caught out by setup speculation / massclaim (several town roles in this setup, like the Triplevoter, were necessary for structural reasons, and scum needed a fairly convincing way to dodge a massclaim). That said, one of the scum managed to survive to endgame entirely unclaimed, and with no votes on him, which is fairly crazy in a role madness setup.

By the way, I was worried that with the general lack of activity, Day 3 would end due to deadline (it pretty much had a Blitz deadline; I rolled a pretty short deadline), but the end-day consensus happening first came as a surprise. Good thing I happened to check the thread!

[Aristophanes]

This game ended on page 10!
No wonder town didn't have a chance!

[JasonWazza]

To be fair, almost none of the town members that were alive were putting in any effort.

Also CFJ, while you can say "you should have lynched NM" i don't really agree because i see no reason for a neighborizer in this setup to be scum, seems like a poor balancing decision in my opinion.

[TTTT]

prediction #1: scum will win this game
prediction #2: it won't get to page 40
prediction #3: at least one of NM and Nahdia is scum

[Nahdia]

haha, nice! fun game guys. good reads TTTT :p

[Nahdia]

oh and yeah im fine with the scum PT being released.

[Not_Mafia]

As am I

[Randomnamechange]

im just going to go and cry in a corner for a bit

[callforjudgement]

To be fair, almost none of the town members that were alive were putting in any effort.

Also CFJ, while you can say "you should have lynched NM" i don't really agree because i see no reason for a neighborizer in this setup to be scum, seems like a poor balancing decision in my opinion.

Neighbourizer isn't a role that's automatically seen as town, or shouldn't be. Also, NM wasn't a neighbourizer (you're thinking of Nahdia). NM didn't claim

at all

.

Actually, after the game started, I realised I'd screwed up by adding a scum neighbourizer because it makes scum too easy to catch by setup speculation (i.e. the scum neighbouriser was actually excessively townsided, rather than excessively scumsided). In the context of this setup, all the town roles (except possibly the Diarist, who was mostly there to confirm the Day 4 Dayvig as town) are more powerful than all the scum roles, which means that after a massclaim, there's actually only one way to build a balanced setup out of the roles that are likely to be claimed (as swapping roles between the scum and town sides would leave it scumsided). Additionally, a Town Neighbourizer would be blatant negative utility in a setup that has a Traffic Analyst; the presence of negative utility town roles is of course not impossible, but this setup clearly wouldn't be balanced with one. As such, it should have been possible to setup-speculate Nahdia as scum (which is something that I hadn't intended to be possible, and didn't realise was possible until after it was too late to change). There's also nothing scum can plausibly do about this, as pretending you're not a Neighbouriser is almost impossible.

Of course, what actually happened is that town didn't even massclaim, so the information that would have broken the setup wasn't there.

[Randomnamechange]

i would have suspected Nahdia but the RK kill through me :/

[Radja]