In post 672, Varsoon wrote:Aaaaah, I'm just gonna post this and hope I'm right. I've been debating it because I think that if I am wrong and we make these setup assumptions, it could really kick us in the ass.
I was thinking a lot about what's keeping scum from just completely gaming the delegates, especially considering the snowballing that happens if scum manage to get multiple delegates.
As an earlier post of mine implies, I figured it was initially just a balance point of either scum knowing resolutions already (no info to be gained from being a world leader) or that a lot of scum voting a world leader in would be very obvious.
I then realized that it's much more likely the setup is multiball and that scum teams are only two or three players. Why's that?
1. What really tipped me off was the non-specificity of my role PM and the opening posts in regards to a 'scum team'. There's mention of eliminating 'all threats to town', but that's it.
2. I thought for sure the 'all threats to town' was an absolute nod to the game being multiball because of the wording, but after digging Venmar's mod-meta, I've discovered:
--a) Venmar uses the same wording even in his singleball setups with exclusion of an open setup he ran way back in 2012.
--b) Out of over 5 different setups of Venmar's design, only one of them was singleball entirely.
3. Given the flavor of the theme (multiple civilizations forming alliances, the fact people often play multiple 'teams', the multiple wincons in the game that different civs shoot for, etc.), there are several avenues to make this a multiball game
4. Singleball would actually make the World Congress mechanic unbalanced in favor of scum.
5. If anti-town factions have daychat, then there's NO WAY that the game is singleball, because the amount of co-ordination a full-size singular scumteam could do in this kind of setup with daychat would make the world leader mechanic almost pointless for town. However, if there are multiple smaller teams, daychat makes a lot more sense. I did not check Venmar's previous games to see if daychat was normal in his setups, but I do recall there being encryptors in the setup.
I had this revelation awhile back, between posts 100 and 200, because I had a pretty dynamic shift in how I was viewing the game/mechanics by 226 and forward.
Assuming multiball, we should be a lot more critical of the people who are laying low and self-voting, like Klazaam, because in multiball:
1. Scum players are likelier to self-vote and get a partner to boost them.
2. Scum players are likelier to avoid voting people they don't have a hard townread on because they need to avoid the other scum team become leader, too.
2. Scum players are likelier to lay low and not draw a lot of attention to themselves because they don't want to catch a cross-kill because cross-kills are what makes scum lose very fast in multiball.
This is why I townread Elbirn so hard, because he self voted but didn't seem aware of the mechanics all that much, then voiced support for Kokichi, who is not likely to be on the same scumteam as him if he was scum--if Elbirn were scum aware of multiball, he'd be way more hesitant to couch support of someone with some votes on them already. Furthermore, Elbirn's opening posts draw a lot of attention to him, imo, and wouldn't make sense coming from a multiball scum player PoV.
