A Story Revisited (Anything uPick): Day 6

[Chickadee]

That essentially makes her a public daycop, no? If the target can be NL'd then we get free townreads in exchage for lynching, which is, I suppose, the balance tradeoff. Still hard to believe though.

Yes. It is pretty much a public daycop. And you don't ever lynch a fucking public daycop on D2.

Mastina is not a clear and present threat to the town. By ANY stretch of the imagination.

If it seems too good to be true though.......

[Jingle]

Yeah yeah, fancy words. takeaway: we know nothing

So... You're claiming you're an idiot.

Because that whole post? That's all about why it's stupid to lynch mastina. And you've responded to literally 0% of it.

And what I saw of mastina's early play (looking primarily at the claim and surrounding pages) looks town. Your argument of "mastina's not here because RL" is fully NAI wrt her, so it's not even worth addressing.

[Aristophanes]

That essentially makes her a public daycop, no? If the target can be NL'd then we get free townreads in exchage for lynching, which is, I suppose, the balance tradeoff. Still hard to believe though.

Yes. It is pretty much a public daycop. And you don't ever lynch a fucking public daycop on D2.

Mastina is not a clear and present threat to the town. By ANY stretch of the imagination.

I never said that was means for a lynch

Just because its an unlikely role doesn't mean it should be lynched. If she is what she says she is this is a huge advantage to us!

[Jingle]

If it seems too good to be true though.......

Then there's probably something in the wings you don't understand.

The evidence supports the claim. Leaving the claim to be sorted later is low risk high reward. Lynching the claim is high risk low reward. This is not a difficult concept.

[Jingle]

The logic behind mastina is equivalent to the following scenario. Player claims public daycop. Player claims they are publically daycopping X. Mod posts "Player X is town." Player Y says, "But maybe they're a scum reporter!" Town agrees with Y and lynches the daycop.

You don't fucking lynch a possible public daycop on D2. Ever. The fact that I even have to explain this is infuriatingly baffling.

[Jingle]

Setup speculation:

2 masons (id assume a mason needs a partner, and that they have a hood)
3+ people in a hood that can kill people and recruit people
2 kills last night.
A confirmed town jailkeeper and neighbouriser.
3-4 scum in a pt

Part 1: The kills
We had two kills last night, and Math states the hood didnt kill. Unless the 2nd kill of last night was made by a 1shot vig type of ability, were looking at 3 potential kills for all following nights. Thats a LOT of kills to be in town hands.

Part 2: The clears and potential for mass amounts of town clears.
2 Masons, and a PT cop that has a pool of 15 people to scan in if a lynch occurred day1. Assuming the neighbouriser wouldve lived thats 2 masons + the good community x2 + 3-4 scum + whatever is the special hood. Its quite likely the neighbouriser or the special community would recruit from people already in hoods though. So out of the 15 people, roughly 10-12 would be expected to be in hoods (im starting to feel quite left out here). Roughly 30-40% to create an extra 2 townclears every night, depending on whether hoods close down if only 1 person is left (hebi + whoever she would get an inno result on).

Part 3: being able to break the setup by mass claim.
If what everyone has been claiming is true, this game could be broken by massclaim on Day2 or Day3 quite easily. If Hebi wouldve gotten a clear on either N1 or N2 thats 4 townclears right there. If that vig that shot TGP wouldve hit scum (if it came from town) thats another potential townclear. The neighbourizer could claim and be seen as a clear probably. All of this leads to the question: How hard would it really be to break a setup that is designed as people are claiming? Because this looks to me that at least one of the major pieces in here is probably lying. Massclaim day 3 with anywhere between 3-6 townclears that can be followed by a lynch and 2 kills that night?

Also: Example of Vecna town setup speccing.

Note: he doesn't believe all the PR claims (he was right, btw, the claimed seer was in fact a scum seer. The claimed tracker was a scum tracker.) He also doesn't advocate lynching the PR's because it's too good to be true. He tries to get town utility out of them in the early game, and then went back to sort them in the late game.

BoP says: Vecna isn't this stupid, therefore Vecna is scum.

[Gamma Emerald]

just left some mash where flavorclaiming would get you modkilled

So?

saw some players flavorclaiming here

And the point is...?
This feels like hardcore fluff while trying to look not-fluffy

[Gamma Emerald]

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This post took 3 minutes to make. It would not take significantly longer to change the numbers into the letters of the cornholio posts. This is a shitton of work.

Would he be able to make that abundantly clear though? I doubt it

You realize that jjh made an outright request for him to make a post in this format right? Like... It would have been abundantly clear, because at that point in time it had already been requested he do this.

I don’t recall that

[Gamma Emerald]

Actually I maybe do

[Gamma Emerald]

So yes, my strong preference is, we run up some dodgy person that wont be missed if scum kill them later on as a townclear, have Mastina gladiate them (or finally form a spine and give her own input/preference maybe, but whatever this also works), and either get a scum caught or lynch Mastina and proceed with two townclears if she flips town that both really wont be missed if scum is forced to kill them.

No.

First of all: Already addressed to some Extent

Second of all: Let us consider the three avenues of balance.

1: Town gets ridiculous power, so scum gets ridiculous power to compensate. In this case, this would probably be something along the lines of a scumvig, an extra member, 2 godfathers, etc.
2: Town gets ridiculous power, so scum gets a direct counter to said power. In this case, there's a bunch of options I've considered. Hidden day rb, day lawyer, day tailor, full strongman etc.
3: Town gets ridiculous power, so is disincentived from using it. In this case possibly something like a macho modifier on mastina, a lack of town protectives, or a cult.

Okay, so here it becomes obvious that it is in fact possible to balance mastina's role.

Third of all: Balance fail. We cannot discount it because it does happen, even to the best of mods. It is even more likely here than in normal circumstances because this is A. a UPick which are annoyingly hard to balance at the best of times because of their very nature. B. a role madness large, meaning lots of moving parts to design and fit together, and C. RC had limited time to come up with the setup. As evidenced by Page 1.

Fourth of all: The Fakeclaim. Unlikely, because scum tend to avoid fakeclaiming into expiration dates. Additionally unlikely because mastina doesn't like fakeclaiming. Additionally Additionally unlikely because even if mastina did decide to fakeclaim, she would do so in a game that wasn't likely to have a bunch of moving parts she couldn't control to catch her. + part of her claim is confirmable.

Fifth of all: The Scum Realclaim. More likely than 4, but if so mastina has played this claim in the most protown manner someone possibly can.

Now, we put it all together.

It is possible the game is balanced and mastina's role exists. It is further possible that town's chances of winning rely heavily on said role. Therefore we run a risk/benefits analysis.

Scenarios:

Game is unbalanced: Best course of action: who gives a shit.
Mastina is central to our chances: Best course of action: milk her role for all that it can give us.
Scum counter to town mastina: Best course of action: play around possible counters.
Mastina is scum realclaiming: Best course of action: Leash mastina and milk her role for all that it can give us.
Mastina is scum fakeclaiming: Best course of action: Lynch mastina.

Lets look at the worst case scenarios:

Tailor/Lawyer: I'm going to leave discussion on how to play around this til tomorrow because it's too late in the day to do anything about it now.
Cult: The only thing we CAN do is hunt for cult leaders. Which... fuck cult.
Scum Fakeclaiming: We lose x days of lynching, but we don't lose any time with PR's. assuming x is 5 clears, that means we are at 16 alive assuming 1 KPN before we lynch mastina assuming scum don't . mastina dies, meaning one less scum and we have five days of PR results. If scum choose to kill in the 'clear' pool to keep mastina alive longer, they are literally shooting people we would've lynched anyway. If they shoot mastina, it resolves the situation. If mastina is scum, then there is more town power hiding in the wings to make catching her/other scum more likely.

Today, lynching mastina is possibly the stupidest choice we could make, and I think I'm well within rights to BoP you wanting to lynch her today given what I remember of Lynch the Wolves.

Game is not bastard, cult and tailor shouldn’t be possible

[Gamma Emerald]

That essentially makes her a public daycop, no? If the target can be NL'd then we get free townreads in exchage for lynching, which is, I suppose, the balance tradeoff. Still hard to believe though.

Yes. It is pretty much a public daycop. And you don't ever lynch a fucking public daycop on D2.

Mastina is not a clear and present threat to the town. By ANY stretch of the imagination.

Mastina is not an immediate threat, no. But if scum she is a LOOMING THREAT. In that situation every day we spend continuing to no lynch is one more free kill we give scum. Plus all the confusion upon mastina’s death wrt whether the clears can be trusted. So the longer we avoid the issue the worse it gets. It’s like this: would you rather spend a little money taking your car into a mechanic to get the brakes fixed, or have to pay thousands of dollars for a new car? You take the early mild inconvenience, not the late massive one.

[Gamma Emerald]

The logic behind mastina is equivalent to the following scenario. Player claims public daycop. Player claims they are publically daycopping X. Mod posts "Player X is town." Player Y says, "But maybe they're a scum reporter!" Town agrees with Y and lynches the daycop.

You don't fucking lynch a possible public daycop on D2. Ever. The fact that I even have to explain this is infuriatingly baffling.

That’s a wrong analogy. The mod isn’t posting X is town. The only reason we are concluding the target is town is via how the role works. Plus day cop doesn’t gimp the lynch.

[Porkens]

Jingle is scum

[mastina]

um mastina could you gladiate soon

Sure can!

I have a guilty on Chickadee.

[Jingle]

You take the early mild inconvenience, not the late massive one.

Except that it's not a late massive one.

You're trading a potential gamesolve for almost no potential gain.

Assuming normal mafia numbers, we are 9 town deaths away from LYLO. 9. if we no lynch 3 more times, that number is 6, with a possible 5 confirmed town. That's still 3 mislynches, with a guaranteed scumlynch, if mastina is scum. Additionally, there's no potential for outing serious town power, because we don't need claims as long as mastina is alive.

Mastina, if scum, is caught by any investigative role. If she is town and we continue using her role, scum functionally have to kill either her or her investigations or they lose. This isn't rocket science.

[Jingle]

VOTE: Chickadee

[Jingle]

Oh, wait, that's how the gladiate starts. Doh.

[Jingle]

Game is not bastard, cult and tailor shouldn’t be possible

2) Whether the setup is bastard or not, there will not be any mechanics that involve lying to players outside of standard fare (ninjas, godfathers).

BTW.

[Jingle]

Oh yeah and Vecna, if you could do a makeshift readslist by rainbowposting where the first 22 letters are coloured individually depending on the read for the 22 players in order on the list that would be great

Use red for scum, green for town and yellow for null I guess

Also btw.

[Chickadee]

Cool. I’ll be “confirmed town” when RC shows up.

I still don’t like letting Mastina live too long. I disagree with Jingle. The longer we wait the higher the risk.

[Vecna]

Yeah yeah, fancy words. takeaway: we know nothing

So... You're claiming you're an idiot.

Because that whole post? That's all about why it's stupid to lynch mastina. And you've responded to literally 0% of it.

And what I saw of mastina's early play (looking primarily at the claim and surrounding pages) looks town. Your argument of "mastina's not here because RL" is fully NAI wrt her, so it's not even worth addressing.

No im claiming youre rehashing every argument we've already had and that everyone with a bit of common sense has already gone through these motions in their head. Its not like you just pulled out the holy grail of wisdom here. Its just a lot of words.

Its really simple: If she's town, duh we dont want to lynch her. If she is scum, she is doing something that will completely fuck us over.

So yes, it comes down to reading her. Not some mechanics debate where we continue to argue over upside, downside and risk. My argument is that she HAS been here. She contributed more than 60% of the thread pre replacements. But a significant chunk of it was talking about RL stuff, and she is refusing to answer about any reads when asked about it so far.

So I WANT people to press her on that. I want people to get a read on her. Letting her live because of mechanical reasoning here is the dumbest thing you can do. If she's scum youre just giving her a free win.

[jjh927]

Pretty sure the logic quite explicitly goes into detail on how no, if scum, she is not doing something that will completely fuck us over.

[Vecna]

VOTE: Mastina

[jjh927]

Pretty sure the logic quite explicitly goes into detail on how no, if scum, she is not doing something that will completely fuck us over.

This is actually also one of the reasons I think she's town

[jjh927]

Why are you voting Mastina when she might be about to have an actual guilty on Chickadee? If she doesn't then votes will reset