In post 647, Firebringer wrote:I am calling bs.
Heres why:
Theres several things subjective on the manipulation part, did they manipulate due to their role claim in the setup? Did they manipulate because the town were being ridiculously bad? or easily sheeped them? Did they manipulate because of happy coincidences, perhaps clears with actions that shouldn't have cleared them?
Lots of stuff happen in the game. You can have a dumbass town members and you luck out by completely being dominant voice as nobody takes any effort to look through your bs.
So how do these factors go into judgement?
1) Setup
2) Player base
3) Night Actions
Unless every game is same, you have to be subjective and allow much leeway into setup accounting for manipulation. Some setups its easier to manipulate town than others, by design. Player base can't be accounted for that much unless you have same players each and every game, so thats hard to neutralize to be "objective". Night actions can be semi random, if a player has a Innocent on a player they should have a guilty for insance (like a GF), then how does that factor into a game where someone was attempting to manipulate but failed due to a Guilty on them?
First, no reason to call bullshit on anything, we're not trying to deceive anyone.
Second, I think you're misunderstanding what subjectivity means in the context of this thread and these changes, so let's forget that word for a second. Let's talk about historical data and evidence, instead. When observing the judging threads for these awards over the past several years, there's plenty of debate over scum performance/town performance/third party performance. Those debates involve people arguing their case over whether the setup strengthened a performance or hindered it. There's debate about whether the town just rolled over and died, or whether the town put up a good fight and therefore made the scum performance stronger. All the things you took into account here are the same things our judges take into account already. I've seen the judges engage in discussion on these points and have a pretty good handle on the nuances involved. Many times, if the setup is really one-sided and makes it easy for a certain side to win, and that side gets nominated, I've seen judges take a pretty heavy scrutinized look at that player and their performance.
Now, conversely, the discussion around funniest player/most enjoyable player goes something like this:
Person A
: "I find this person to be enjoyable or funny!"Person B
: "I don't. I find this other person to be more enjoyable or funny."Person C
: "Well I remember playing with this person, but not that person."And then everyone stops posting until it's almost deadline and just goes along with whoever has the most votes already. Opinion-based preferences in awards are fine -- that's why we have a judging panel, and not just a spreadsheet with data points to help us decide who did the "best" in that category. But it should be a prerequisite that an award category has enough meat to it in order to be able to actually discuss it at some length, and without any redundancy.
And that's just the enjoyable category, anyway. No other category was removed because it's too "subjective". Best Replacement was removed because it winds up being a data analysis contest of who replaced into the most games (or who replaced into the longest games) and there's not much in the way of activity for that award anymore [this year we had one nominee; last year, two]. Professor Mafia was removed because it felt archaic and no longer relevant to the site (and was also severely undernominated... one nominee this year, two last year that were both fairly subpar). Best Pro-Town Team was removed because it was a bad award that was too broad in scope and ignored the core nature of mafia itself (uninformed majority vs informed minority). Best Scum Group was removed for being redundant with the new Don Corleone. Community Contributor was removed due to lack of competition (award was given to the admin of the site last year, and was not even awarded the previous year) and because the award puts OOC/community contribution under the judgmental microscope which felt wrong.
