Team Mafia 2020 (YOADSG Wins!)

[Ellibereth]

I think it's dumb

Jingle, suppose you're right, and Kagami is wrong, and you go on to kick Kagami's ass in team mafia by exploiting the mechanic correctly, then you get a fancy banner all year that says how good at mafia you are, then I queue up for a bunch of large normal and minithemes with you that year and Kagami Sherlock Holmes's me every time I

randomly

am scum and powerwolfs me everytime I

randomly

am town, and we are just mislynching Bingle d1 all year: I'm going to start to feel your banner is rather silly as an award that implies "good at mafia" when you won a event with deliberately included mechanics perpendicular to mafia.

The fallacy here is thinking that winning team mafia at all implies generally "good at mafia".
Fundamentally different skill-set regardless of how the selection meta pans out.

[Ellibereth]

A calculated risk of "The payoff of this teammate getting this role is worth the risk of some people wanting to play meta instead of mafia"

Making a distinction between the two is silly.

If you want to remove the selection component (which I think is fine) just do away with that line of thought completely (no swaps).

[Ellibereth]

If someone swaps they're inherently drawing attention to their slot which is a decision they can choose to make or not.
If everyone gets to pick who gets which PM the game is just going to be meta about every slot rather than the few who decide to swap games for some reason.
Wherein the reasoning for swapping games could be a variety of reasons and less distracting from the game.

I mean it's not distracting from the game - it'll be part of the game.

The actual reason for swapping hardly matters, it just depends on what percent of the conversation y'all would want to be about some sort of selection meta. If the answer is some small nonzero positive number then yeah swaps work.

The primary concern I'd imagine is it'd be fairly trivial for a player to pseudo-clear themself without downside via swap. (It becomes optimal for the hypothetical lopsided player to always swap into a town game regardless of the rest of their team's distribution and their original role just to reinforce the non-randomness of their choice). If that's not undesirable then :shrug:

(If swaps are announced simultaneously and there are sufficiently many lopsided players they can even use swap ordering to weigh games as desired).

[Ellibereth]

No because the original role of the lopsided player doesn't matter.
They're not swapping if scum, they're ALWAYS swapping to town just to be able to say they selected town.