So this will all be hypothetical, and has nothing to do with the game that was played in this thread.In post 1146, MathBlade wrote:9 alive, into next day 8 alive.
2 PRs claim open D2 become conf on virtue of claiming. (Assume no results to be friendly)
6 other players remain. 2 scum 4 VTs.
Assume VT dies
PR dies
2 scum 3 VTs 1 PR.
Miselim a VT then NK a PR
2 scum vs 2 VTs is barely a scum win.
So technically possible for scum to win but then they have no thread control and it’s whoever the PRs say is elimmed dies.
So that’s a thing.
Let's say you do a no-lim, massclaim d2, and assuming an even better case for town than you're outlining here (let's say both PRs are assumed to be confirmed town, scum shoot a VT, and one of the PRs has an additional living clear). So going into d2 there's 3 confirmed town, 3 unconfirmed VTs, and 2 scum.
This is an
excellent
position for scum
to be in, by my estimation. There is one downside in that, as you say, scum won't have control of the thread in that they won't have the ability to be the ones leading. But by no-limming d1, town now has only one mislim and is in evens, and scum knows exactly who to kill. Yes, by play this essentially splits the game into the 3 confirmed townies who are the only ones "playing the game" in the sense that they're making decisions, but the rest of the players are still playing the game, they can still hunt and such, it's just that appearing town is more important for them than finding scum.By EV, this situation is fantastic for scum - effectively the town gets to pick 3 of the 5 unclears to eliminate, and they need both scum to be among those 3 people (i.e. they have 3 possible choices of 3 people that will win - both scum + any one of the other three people). This gives an EV of 3 / (5 choose 3), which is 30%. Another way to put it is that all scum need is for one of the two scum to appear more towny than 2/3 of the actual townies. Scum could potentially get there by distancing, or by calling each other town, or etc. In the situation you gave where there are 2 clears and 6 unclears, that EV drops to 4 / (6 choose 3), which is 20%. Of course this is assuming town lims every day, and these odds go up quite a bit if town does lim a VT on d1 (putting the game in odds).
All this is to say that I don't think having outed clears early in the game in a micro, or playing around getting them, is really gamebreaking for town. It might, say, interfere with a particular person's
playstyle
as scum and force them into less comfortable territory (which is I think what you're getting at with scum not having leverage), but it's not good for town in an odds-of-winning way because they have very little wiggle room. Scum can still get a perfect win in this situation in my book - the situation that you described as "barely a scum win" is a perfect win for scum, in that none of them ever got eliminated. And I do think it's possible (though yes, always somewhat risky) to fakeclaim a role even if you don't know what else is in the setup. Typically the composition of scum roles is enough to get at least an idea of what might be claimable (even if they're both goons, which implies a low amount of town power so that it'd be relatively safe to claim something relatively powerful). There's always the option of claiming something weak or flexible, like, idk, a motion detector or a 2-shot rolecop or a bodyguard or a novice watcher. Is it possible that you'll get counterclaimed, yes, but it's extremely unlikely with how many normal roles are on the whitelist at this point. Is it possible that you'll claim a role that doesn't make sense with other roles? Again yes, but game design space has expanded a lot over the years, and I think there are claims that could reasonably fit into pretty much any situation. If you played the early game well enough to be considered towny and get the privilege of claiming after other PRs, all the better - you can claim something on the fly that fits with what they claimed and avoid that risk.Now, is this a problem of
uniformity
in micro design, that there's basically always two town power roles that become pseudo-clear unless scum claims a power role in massclaim? Maybe. It's sort of a limitation of micro design space. In a literal sense, a micro has much less room to design different kinds of setups - you can
design setups with one or three PRs but it's harder to do so in a way that won't break current players' meta expectations.