"should perform better than random play" is not saying much and is not contentious and kind of unanimous. Towns do perform better than if they were playing with their eyes closed and started swinging. This can be true even if town is failing to perform at EV, because EV is somewhat bloated, it assumes scum will vote scum exactly randomly, which implies a degree of pressure from the town that is reflective of that extraordinary problem solving ability from humans. I doubt much of any meta exists where town winrate fails to reach at least "EV, except that scum don't even have to vote scum". I tend to interpret data sets that look bad enough to flunk that bar(like Flag setup history) as a combination of poor sample size and those setups being rarely played but different from games commonly played in a way that causes town to consistently import habits from more common setups that happen to consistently work well in the common setups and consistently do harm in the rare setups.
"
by a mile
" is subjective and pretty speculative on how the ability of the town to problem solve and the ability of the scum to deliberately undermine that problem solving interacts. If "largely undermined" is usually the outcome it's hard to say if that's a 20 beating a 10 or a 200 beating a 100.
Removing scum daytalk is generally thought to improve town winrate and in all likelihood does so.
there are very few things about mafia theory or just about mafia in general that i feel comfortable calling 100% wrong with confidence. this is one of them.
if you think that everyone who makes fallacious arguments is scum, if you think that you can catch scum by only analyzing who makes bad arguments, or if you think scum needs to lie and/or make fallacious arguments to win, i expect that you will lose a great deal many games.
oh, and here's a lie that isn't a fallacious argument for you – i just flipped a coin and it landed heads.
my point here, as i believe that isis' point was with the baseball analogy, is that you seem to consistently ignore the idea that scum has any affect on the game at all. "humans are good problem solvers, so they should be able to solve the problem of who mafia is" is a reductionist view of the game. mafia isn't a riddle, puzzle or logic problem, it's a social game, and figuring out
Yeah, I was thinking about not-monotonic curves during this thread too. They turn up in asymmetric games from time to time, or symmetric games with assymetric strategies available.
You must first accept that both a positive and negative slopes are possible to consider that a second order curve (is that the word for it?)though. I think it's possible there's more ups and downs than this, too.
Quick, few people understand the MU meta and where it comes from better than I do, and 90% of the reason setup balance is different there boils down to shorter phases and plurality lynches, not some vast skill-gap between MU and MS.
In post 34, Blair wrote:Quick, few people understand the MU meta and where it comes from better than I do, and 90% of the reason setup balance is different there boils down to shorter phases and plurality lynches, not some vast skill-gap between MU and MS.
If it isn't clear enough, I disagree with your claim that the skill disparity between the two sites is a "fact" and look forward to hearing what your sample size and conclusive evidence is to support this.
The
perception
of MU players for the past couple of years has largely been that MS has strong scum and MU has strong town. It's impossible to gather conclusive data to support this conclusion, however, because even identical setups are run differently on the two sites - MU considers plurality lynches and shorter phases to be standard, and MS considers majority lynches and longer phases standard.
Phase length and plurality/majority lynches are major factors that influence game balance - that's why setups that produce balanced win rates on one sites often have to be tweaked to produce the same on the other. Not a "factual" skill disparity.
Maybe you used the word "fact" where you meant to use the word "opinion", you're not really trying to rebut any points anymore, just restating an intuitive belief you have that might be based on some subjective assessments, which you'd be plenty entitled to.
In post 39, Blair wrote:If it isn't clear enough, I disagree with your claim that the skill disparity between the two sites is a "fact" and look forward to hearing what your sample size and conclusive evidence is to support this.
The
perception
of MU players for the past couple of years has largely been that MS has strong scum and MU has strong town. It's impossible to gather conclusive data to support this conclusion, however, because even identical setups are run differently on the two sites - MU considers plurality lynches and shorter phases to be standard, and MS considers majority lynches and longer phases standard.
Phase length and plurality/majority lynches are major factors that influence game balance - that's why setups that produce balanced win rates on one sites often have to be tweaked to produce the same on the other. Not a "factual" skill disparity.
Quick do you realize you are comparing the winrates of MS towns against MS scum to the winrates of MU towns against MU scums (under rulesets more favorable to town), and drawing conclusions about what the winrates of MS and MU towns each would be like against MS scum.
In post 48, Isis wrote:Quick do you realize you are comparing the winrates of MS towns against MS scum to the winrates of MU towns against MU scums (under rulesets more favorable to town), and drawing conclusions about what the winrates of MS and MU towns each would be like against MS scum.