What if everyone played one game

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Post Post #7 (isolation #0) » Sat May 07, 2016 9:33 am

Post by callforjudgement »

If you're going to have it as just one large game, I suggest a variant of Bad Idea or of Everyone Has One Bullet (which are pretty similar ideas in their own right). Also, the day-to-day moderation would have to be done by a computer program rather than a person, I think. (You would still have human moderators for dealing with things like illegal PMing.) In general, this means that the moderation team you'd need would be fairly small. Assuming a computer did all the objective parts of moderating, you could probably do the rest of the moderation with just the list mods. (This probably means that the game would be flavourless, or flavoured only in the opening post. Note that the mechanics in question tend to lead to players being able to make their own flavour.)

You'd need to do something about inactive players, too; it's unclear what. Preferably something that forces you to be active to win, like the Vote for Town mechanic. (Now I'm wondering what a combination of Vote for Town and Everyone Has One Bullet would look like…)

Based on all the setup balancing principles I've worked out over the years, I believe that the optimal size for a single scumteam would be somewhere around 5000 (it could be higher or lower depending on the details of the setup, of course). Most likely, though, the setup would be multiball.

The largest game I've seen so far is 50 players. It didn't work out all that well IMO. (Admittedly, I might just be a bit bitter about losing it.)
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Post Post #8 (isolation #1) » Sat May 07, 2016 9:35 am

Post by callforjudgement »

Oh, and note that in a game that large it's highly likely that someone would ruin it by claiming scumpartners. This would be totally against all sorts of rules, but given the number of players involved, the chance that at least one would break rules as a method of trolling is very high.

@kuribo: The game you're thinking of is here.
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Post Post #10 (isolation #2) » Sat May 07, 2016 9:59 am

Post by callforjudgement »

Actually, there's a mechanic that I've seen used in several large games where there are multiple scumteams that all win together (basically, the Mafia are fragmented and don't initially know each others' alignments), typically with some way to fuse the teams that only work in the later game. So far I've only seen it with two scumteams, but in a setup this large, you could probably support around 1000 scumteams that all won together, probably with some sort of "seeking Mason"-style method of fusing (e.g. if you send in your NK on scum, your team is fused with the team you tried to kill). NKs would need to be reduced in number in order for this to work (and you'd need to use a mechanic in which NKs existed, if you went down this path).
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Post Post #22 (isolation #3) » Sat May 07, 2016 8:04 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

I guess this thread is a good place to mention an idea I had a while back.

The idea is that whenever someone died, a new player from outside the game would be added in to keep the playerlist at the same size. Players win or lose based on how well their faction did while they were in the game; neither faction ever wins or loses the whole thing, just individual players, and the game lasts indefinitely or until nobody wants to continue playing. (Players would be able to rejoin the game after leaving it if none of the players who were alive at the time they left are still there, although they would have to do so on an alt.)

Theoretically the setup could expand up to involving Mafiascum's entire playerlist, over the course of several centuries, and yet would remain manageable at all times. It also works a lot better if some of the players don't want to play :-P
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Post Post #29 (isolation #4) » Sun May 08, 2016 4:36 am

Post by callforjudgement »

Right, the faction of the new slot might change. It's balanced in the long run but not immediately in the short run. (Presumably the way it would work is that each player would be replaced once, but not necessarily immediately; you'd start out with a pool of fake players waiting to be replaced, when someone is lynched their faction is added to the pool and a random faction from the pool is taken to determine the next entrant's alignment.)

If the game is large enough you can mathematically guarantee that this never produces a scum majority, while making it impossible to predict the alignment of a new entrant unless there have been
n
lynches of the same alignment in a row (where
n
can be arbitrarily large).
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Post Post #31 (isolation #5) » Sun May 08, 2016 5:47 am

Post by callforjudgement »

The more it had, the further back you'd have to reread when replacing in.

As such, I imagine it'd be Mini-sized at any given point, or possibly a little larger.
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Post Post #35 (isolation #6) » Tue May 10, 2016 3:08 am

Post by callforjudgement »

I already mentioned Everyone Has One Bullet as a reasonable setup to base this on.

If you wanted something more like normal Mafia, I had the following idea:

First, you break all the players into 16-player pods. Each pod has its own thread, in order to make things easier to read. You are allowed to read any pod's thread and to talk (in the game threads) about players in any pod; however, any post you make must be in the thread for your own pod (or in scum/mason PTs, etc.), and you can only vote for players in your own pod. Each pod is guaranteed to have between 3 and 5 scum (this is information the town can use to narrow down who can possibly be scum), and each pod has its own days and nights (scum in a pod can only kill players in that pod overNight). Once two pods get down to 8 or fewer players, they are merged with each other into a larger pod, that has its own thread (the original two threads are locked, but linked to in the new thread's OP and remain publicly visible). This continues until only one pod is left and there are no town/scum in the pod in question.

Scum have knowledge of other scum in their pod, and in one other pod (this is mutual, so you have scumteams that cross two pods). Masons can likewise be masons with other players cross-pod, and will be given new mason partners (in other unrelated pods) whenever the pods merge.

As far as I can tell, this idea scales to
any
number of players, and keeps the amount of reading you'd need reasonable. It would probably require ½-1 moderators per pod.
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Post Post #37 (isolation #7) » Tue May 10, 2016 8:38 am

Post by callforjudgement »

I assume we could have some number of 15-player pods mixed in with the 16-player pods to avoid even/odd-related issues.
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Post Post #43 (isolation #8) » Tue Feb 05, 2019 5:35 am

Post by callforjudgement »

There's a problem that if a pod ends up eliminating all its scum, or insufficiently many members of its scum, people will know how many scum are in the pod and adapt accordingly (e.g. lynch from a pod who's winning until there are no scum left). I think scum need more than a majority to get an automatic win (there have to be 8 scum left in the pod for them to survive a pod merge, although that is of course possible; something like a 7:6 majority isn't enough). Based on that, the setup needs some work, although I think the general idea could still be viable.
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