Herodotus wrote:I see the talk about lurking, and that the scum did it more than the town. How big of a problem was inactivity?
I think in this game most of the information required to find scum was produced early on when activity was pretty good. Bogre hadn't been driving the game and producing information in the same way Vala had, but if you look at Bogre's suspicions close to Day 2 deadline I think it's clear that town was in very good shape at that point, although credit's due to Bogre for getting some very accurate reads out of it, I wouldn't be surprised if he was the most accurate player at that point in fact. But I do feel that if that information wasn't available at that point and activity wasn't sustained, town would have had a much harder time of things.
What do people think of the prods? I wanted to institute some stronger activity rules like mandatory replacement / modkill after X prods but I felt that might actually harm the town more if it was needed.
Herodotus wrote:If the setup was run again, the players might use this game for background -- which means lurking could receive harsh attention. Do you think that might be sufficient incentive to keep people active?
I do think that scum have far more problems generating content in this setup, and that lurking is a big tell here. I can't really articulate exactly why that is. I do think that townies should make a special effort to be active & lynch lurkers if this is run again since it's a stronger tell than normal.
Herodotus wrote:Is low activity even a problem, given that only one player needs to make a big decision each day?
I do think it's a big problem for the town because they must base that decision on things that people said and it's relatively hard to get information in Kingmaker setups anyway.
When making the setup, I did think that the best choice for the first gunbearer would be the most experienced player. One think that I knew but didn't really click until pre-game was that it's similar to the most experienced player being nightkilled N0, since the odds of a successful shot on Day 1 are quite low. I don't like that, but I think it's okay since they do get to have a significant impact on the game first.
In retrospect, it's actually probably closer than I thought. If you pick a less experienced player to start out with, it's much less likely the town gets off to a good start and then they lack info on subsequent days; the gunbearer is critical in driving the game, and given town can only afford 3 mislynches, there's actually a decent chance they could lose without any dead scum. Infact if scum don't pick the most experienced then I think that's their best chance of winning, since (as we saw here) the endgame is immensely painful. It's my contention that not being able to kill off people who look town is one of the biggest problems scum face in nightless games and they're correspondingly far less likely to win as time goes on, as opposed to nightful games where better players tend to get killed off over time and they usually have a relatively easier time in endgame than midgame (I'm something of a skeptic about the conventional wisdom on vanilla balance given actual results). One person who deserves probably more credit that she's getting is is Vala Mal Doran, who did a very good job of getting people active and talking on Day 1, I thought. Many gunbears would have done an inferior job and I don't know it would have gone so well for the town in that case.
Succinctness is pro-town.
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. ~ Gregory Benford
