The Newbie Queue Setup

[Cook]

ego

[Cook]

cough cough basic roles using a blacklist

[Cook]

if we do a review system for newbies i'd like to suggest the following:
1. all setups are predesigned by a group of people who are trusted to make them, like the NRG but they review each others' setups
2. a list of all roles that can/are used in newbies needs to be maintained publicly and changes should be declared in the queue thread
3. modifiers should be legalized case-by-case and used sparingly, if for instance odd-night cop is a role that passes, then odd-night cop is part of the list of roles that is publicly known to be possibly used.

[Cook]

IME bodyguard is not a very common role

[Cook]

i'd be willing to think/pseudocode this

[Cook]

let me think about an if then structure

[Cook]

here's the setup sketch:

7

Town

2

Mafia

We start by adding 4 VTs and a Goon.

First roll is 1d3 to determine the scum PR

1. Goon (no bonus budget)
2. Rolecop (1 bonus point)
3. Roleblocker (2 bonus points)

Next we roll 3d15 to determine the town's power roles. We have initially a PR budget of 4. This number was modified by the scum PR roll.

1. vanilla (costs no points)
2. cop (costs 4 points)
3. tracker (costs 3 points)
4. vanilla cop (costs 1 point)
5. neapolitan (costs 3 points)
6. role cop (costs 2 points)
7. doctor (costs 3 points)
8. jailkeeper (costs 4 points)
9. roleblocker (costs 2 points)
10. bulletproof* (costs 3 points)
11. mason pair** (costs 4 points)
12. friendly neighbor (costs 3 points)
13. fruit vendor (costs 3 points)
14. reroll as 1-shot (decreases cost by 1 point)
15. reroll as 2-shot (cost is unchanged)

*this role automatically rolls as 1-shot, and, therefore, costs only 2 points.
**if town can afford masons then all other town rolls are discarded.

Naturally, it's unlikely we can actually afford the random rolls (for instance, a rolecop {+1} vs. neap {3}, fruit vendor {2}, and masons {4} puts us at -4 budget.)

To fix this we discard the PR rolls from most recent to least recent until we're under budget.

In this case, we get rid of the masons roll.

Now we have rolecop vs neap and fruit vendor, which balances evenly.

thus, our setup is:

1

Mafia Goon

1

Mafia Rolecop

1

Town Neapolitan

1

Town Fruit Vendor

5

Vanilla Townies

[Cook]

this idea can be tweaked

[Cook]

you realise a 1s vanilla cop costs zero points right?

with strange RNG a setup with all townies being 1s vanilla cops is possible

This doesn't appear to be possible because it seems town only gets three chances at PRs. On the other hand, the absurdity that is 7x VTs vs. 2 Goons is possible. I really don't think a randomly generated setup is going to work well.

remove the potential vanilla from the die

and now town is guaranteed a PR

decrease the budget normally to 3

and now we can't have cop9 or JK9 and mafia

has

to have a PR for any of those to generate

[Cook]

cop + doctor adds an extra point for follow the cop

in this config cop + doc cannot roll without one or the other having X-shot

[Cook]

Also, like, a lot of how we get users is through exporting stuff to small offsite mafia games and then people taking interest and eventually coming over. NewD3 is fairly commonly played on small mafia sites, as was Matrix6 before it.
Regardless of what Penguin says about balance if we end up with a newbie game that is generally agreed to be poorly balanced that will hinder it being taken up on other sites which will reduce the inflow of traffic which, etc.

I did include balance as a focus, but achieving perfect balance is secondary to a setup that people want to play. If we can get both, great!

Also, I'm not sure where you're getting your referral information, but it doesn't jive with the the user reported reasons from newbie accounts over the previous 18 months.

What were the prevalant sources?

[Cook]

and what sources have the most user retention? do we have that data?

[Cook]

and as a general survey:

what do you consider "fun" in a setup?

[Cook]

I've said my piece on that; I don't think that any token or buy in design will end in a good newbie setup and I think the next step forward is either a new setup that cuts whichever are subjectively the "worst" setups in ND3 or the "leap" forward of jumping to automatically designed setups.

are you aware this is essentially defining an algorithm that the mod runs to generate the setup?