Town Meta Perspective 2020

[OkaPoka]

ok yeah dethy games are untoxic and mechanical boring decison trees.

ill refine my idea:

hyperposting/power struggles for thread control is a result of our liking of mountainous games because mountainous games are inherently equal setups with no existing power structure. With no actual hard evidence, it's very hard to create a majority of consensus to eliminate someone. Power structures are a necessary tool to get elims in mafia, and in these equality games, you kinda have to create the power structure yourself, which is where hyperposters vying for thread control can come in.

Contrast that not to your dethy games, but to your inherently "imbalanced" setups where you have one ungated super-town-role and a bunch of vts vs scum. Here you actually have a power structure existent without fighting for it. The VTs play around this power structure by doing things to protect it (hopefully) and once the time is right, the super-town-role is given the reigns to lead without needing to fight for it. idk maybe? it's hard to test this theory because its terrible setup design to create games with a super-town but i wonder if we evolved to enjoy this type of style of play where we play around the rand-ed super-town, would hyperposting even be a +ev stylistic choice. because as it currently stands, hyperposting is probably the best way to get thread control and create these needed coalitions, but remove the need to take over the thread and idk

[OkaPoka]

i will say its not a very interesting theory mainly because the only way we could test it is by isolating people and letting them develop a meta of playing these hyper imbalanced setups and seeing the results

and people don't like playing these setups for a reason

[OkaPoka]

i guess my "thesis" is majority elimination games like mafia require a power structure and "leaders" and in equality setups, players need to compete to fill that void. hyperposting is just the meta way to accomplish this, it gets you townread which is usually necessary to get people to work with you and lots of interactions are needed to whip votes to form a consensus and coalition

i mean let's think of the alternatives:

town doesn't need a power structure because they are always on the same wavelength on who to eliminate - will never happen. sometimes things can magically fall into place for a couple elims or things are more likely to fall in place for micros, but in larger playerlists, that's not going to happen.

town needs to be willing to bend over their back to compromise on any elimination so a power structure to build consensus isn't necessary - is terrible for town because scum just can power wolf and force bad elims if every townie was a compromiser.

a different way to get people in line maybe where everybody is so willing to trust player X's reads regardless of alignment they will blind sheep and the existence of player X is the power structure - nope

idk

alternatives?

[Infinity 324]

a different way to get people in line maybe where everybody is so willing to trust player X's reads regardless of alignment they will blind sheep and the existence of player X is the power structure - nope

To be fair, I do remember this happening more often back in the day with e.g. fate

But, you bring up some good points. Ideally, I think we’d have fewer players hyperposting so not everyone is competing for influence—that, or we lower the bar for what constitutes hyperposting so that’s it’s a similar situation to what we have now except lower commitment.

[Akarin]

Oka, how much do you think this problem would be helped if Innocent Child were a more common role?

And isn't some of the problem on town/human psychology for tending to listen to loud people repeating things disproportionately?

I feel like anarchy can work and compromises can happen without it being about sheeping a town leader, but people need to not just agree with whoever is repeating things a lot, and I think that's on quieter players too.

[shellyc]

ego

[OkaPoka]

Oka, how much do you think this problem would be helped if Innocent Child were a more common role?

And isn't some of the problem on town/human psychology for tending to listen to loud people repeating things disproportionately?

I feel like anarchy can work and compromises can happen without it being about sheeping a town leader, but people need to not just agree with whoever is repeating things a lot, and I think that's on quieter players too.

tbh i don't know

on one hand they should theoretically be able to step in and take control of the thread at any time, making hyperposting less palatable as vying for thread control is a little pointless

but on the other hand, in practice, i don't really see IC's stepping in that often to dictate the dayphase or utilize the fact that they are the IC to force wagons through/build blocs >average. in practice, most IC's play like they are a vanilla. maybe in an "evolved" world, optimal IC play would change this, but the lack of clears to create a PoE i think, makes it challenging to get your average IC to actually play the leader and push the envelope. and so there is still that void in IC games and hyperposters come in and party

[OkaPoka]

maybe the real answer is hyperposting gud

and to the analogy of not everyone should lock dps

you don't need to hyperpost to dps, and you can hyperpost as a support or a tank. hyperposting should be viewed less as offensive firepower and more of, idk, cooldown reduction. sure having CDR is supremely important on spellcasting dps, but it doesn't mean a healer or a tank doesn't want CDR. free CDR is good for everyone, but i do suppose a tank doesn't need cdr as much as an artillery mage.

[Jake The Wolfie]

Maybe create the opposite of a slank vig?

[Gamma Emerald]

Spam vig is a role I had once
It was cool

[unwnd]

Want to implement a Geriatric-esque ruleset for my Mini theme:

Each player exhausts energy by posting. A player will achieve overheat by making more than 60% of the posts after 20 Pages. Overheat is a debuff that will limit your actions both in-thread and during the night phase. Your actions in NAR will be less prioritized (including beneficiaries done to you) and you may receive a MOD VOTE if you continue posting. After 24 hours your Overheat will go down by 10%, allowing you to post again.

Thoughts?

[Awoo]

Any town player with an ounce of humility and not a great power role should be trying to draw the nk.

Incorrect: if you have 2 scum nailed but can only push 1 before town's attention span runs out, you should probably try to survive two days minimum.

[Infinity 324]

Generally, it’s just as likely that you’re wrong and you’d be better off dying in place of someone else.

[Ythan]

Any town player with an ounce of humility and not a great power role should be trying to draw the nk.

Incorrect: if you have 2 scum nailed but can only push 1 before town's attention span runs out, you should probably try to survive two days minimum.

[Alisae]

But Ythan, what if I wanna play mafia T_T

[Jake The Wolfie]

Any town player with an ounce of humility and not a great power role should be trying to draw the nk.

Incorrect: if you have 2 scum nailed but can only push 1 before town's attention span runs out, you should probably try to survive two days minimum.

>:3

[Awoo]

Generally, it’s just as likely that you’re wrong and you’d be better off dying in place of someone else.

Maybe in forum mafia where everybody is good at the game, but in IRL games where you're clearly the best player in the room and you need to carry this strategy holds.

Speaking from experience.

[TheGoldenParadox]

Want to implement a Geriatric-esque ruleset for my Mini theme:

Each player exhausts energy by posting. A player will achieve overheat by making more than 60% of the posts after 20 Pages. Overheat is a debuff that will limit your actions both in-thread and during the night phase. Your actions in NAR will be less prioritized (including beneficiaries done to you) and you may receive a MOD VOTE if you continue posting. After 24 hours your Overheat will go down by 10%, allowing you to post again.

Thoughts?

love the idea, but i think this needs to be set out more clearly to avoid fucking with night action analysis
if there's no solid action resolution scheme the game gets a lot weirder

[unwnd]

I will clarify the NAR for the setup so there isn't any confusion.

[the worst]

there's like, some merit in what Awoo is saying. townies with decent read quality surviving until lategame improves the gamestate a lot - even if those reads turn out to be sucky tunnels or just incorrect, being able to table the conversation about them later in the game when there have already been a number of elims based on consensus reads is powerful!

that said it takes like a decent helping of modesty to actually be that person because if you sit on a read for long enough it can become stale pretty easily :/

this is a cool topic, thanks for the read everyone. I agree with Infinity and Hoopla the most, probably. I hope there's a change from the perspective of "pro-fun" play, because the less polarised people's towngames and scumgames are, the more fun mafia gets.

Also while I don't believe in sandbagging your towngame neeeecessarily? I'm often drawn to the idea of presenting thoughts in a more opaque fashion as town. I think it lends a lot of agency to other players making a *decision* to townread you or listen to your reads, rather than just defaulting to hyperposting or being overly transparent. I like giving other players agency because it feels like a more nuanced engagement and helps me read them.


that all said, maybe I'm not the best critic of hyperposting. try and stop me quacking.

[Akarin]

Also while I don't believe in sandbagging your towngame neeeecessarily? I'm often drawn to the idea of presenting thoughts in a more opaque fashion as town. I think it lends a lot of agency to other players making a *decision* to townread you or listen to your reads, rather than just defaulting to hyperposting or being overly transparent. I like giving other players agency because it feels like a more nuanced engagement and helps me read them.

I agree with this a lot. I don't think it's sandbagging at all, really. Sometimes you get better reads from people by not explaining everything right away. There's value in the town mind meld read I think, and this is a way to give it a chance to happen.

[Cabd]

We fixed it lol.

2021 new meta.

[unwnd]

I hope so, Cabd

I hope so

[Alisae]

~

[OkaPoka]

so when does the TAS (Tool-Assisted Scumhunter) get released