Why does town do so badly with the White Flag mechanic?

popsofctown · Post Post #10 (isolation #0) » Sat Jul 13, 2019 5:31 pm

The more scums there is the less it's like "Informed minority fighting uninformed majority"

popsofctown · Post Post #14 (isolation #1) » Sat Jul 13, 2019 5:45 pm

Yeah but more of those associations have to be preflip

popsofctown · Post Post #114 (isolation #2) » Mon Jul 15, 2019 8:41 am

Winrates aside forum mafia doesn't really have a mechanic where the people who would be enjoyable to play with get put into the same games as other people who would be enjoyable to play with and the people who aren't play with people who aren't.
If you leave a League of Legends game when you queue up again the system puts you with other people likely to leave a League of Legends game (actually mostly it just bans you but I think there is a short probation period where it's like that). Forum mafia is totally self-directed queueing with little-to-no playerlist control.
The dream would be some kind of system where at the end of the game you rate the other players and you can give the guy who met the letter but not the spirit of the activity requirement a -1 and then you don't have to do something as dicey as banning that guy you just making him play with other people who earned a -1. Eventually those people are playing hellhole games with eachother and some of them quit, rather than the current system they keep playing and enjoy the energy the games have without adding much of their own like a deer tick. And you give good fun players a +3.

I would probably enjoy a bastard game with a player who got a sane cop role PM but was informed by the mod he was actually cult recruiting and not investigating the whole time on Day 4 better than the most balanced normal setup ever run if the playerlist in the bastard game was much better.
Last I heard numbers were down not up so mafiascum can't actually tier out players to create semi-invitational playerlists in this way. But playerlists are probably much more of the answer to the riddles than setup mechanics. With data like this they have to be. It's not "what does a vengeful mafia goon, who causes 1 step towards the game's flag mechanic, do to the balance of a mafia setup in theory", it's "what kind of person is looking to join 9p opens with roles like vengeful mafia goon, what kind of player is avoiding those types of games, what kind of player replaces out from that kind of game, what kind of player replaces in". The best scum players seem to be able to bulldoze through anything but a hard guilty and it's amazing. So if you're going as extreme as saying "when we play games with hard guilties from night instead they play out differently" yeah you're not wrong. To the extent that night actions can focus the dayplay they sometimes do that but it's soft PRS that do that more, hard guilties actually just timewalk a day, a soft guilty will actually create a dayplay eddy. But probably it's the wrong questions and answers. Games without 50% winrates can be awesome, especially if they have a hidden knowledge component, like netrunner is awesome.

popsofctown · Post Post #115 (isolation #3) » Mon Jul 15, 2019 8:41 am

IDK if that wall had a point

popsofctown · Post Post #117 (isolation #4) » Mon Jul 15, 2019 10:04 am

law of large numbers

to some extent "personal bias" can be valid if you are active, 60% winrate, but can't finish a game without calling 3 players a **** you should be gradually ostracized

popsofctown · Post Post #119 (isolation #5) » Mon Jul 15, 2019 11:10 am

In theory they could get upvoted a bunch in their purgatory games then graduate back up to playing with the enjoyable players again.

Before that point, they deserve their punishment essentially tautologically, if the ratings don't actually reflect the impact they are having on other players, then the good players they are not getting to play with also aren't actually that enjoyable to play with so it's not any punishment at all.

popsofctown · Post Post #121 (isolation #6) » Mon Jul 15, 2019 12:46 pm

that criticism may be valid

popsofctown · Post Post #124 (isolation #7) » Mon Jul 15, 2019 2:03 pm

In post 122, geometry wrote:I also don't think that I'd sign up for a site with this kind of system and it would deter newbies.

Like, officially it'd start strictly as an activity score. But soon it'd devolve into a "do I like this player" or a "am I salty as hell" rating.

nah this is wrong according empirical data, games like League of Legends and Overwatch have incorporated these systems and found them to mostly indicate actual toxic players, leavers, and cheaters.

Lots of people promoted this viewpoint before they were widely tried and it was interesting to muse about whether it would pan out that way or not.

But this experiment has been run already. File it away with "I don't think hot water would freeze faster, that doesn't make sense"