The New Newbie Game Setup

[Virtuoso]

The primary reason we are having this discussion is to fix the BP claim strategy and the follow the tracker strategy. This setup does just that while keeping it simple enough for everyone to understand. I don't think we should deviate too far from the old setup

[Realeo]

I think Toomai's explanation makes a lot of senses and ESL friendly.

@Virtuoso

Which part of the triangle setup doesn't makes senses, dear Think Big?

[PenguinPower]

The primary reason we are having this discussion is to fix the BP claim strategy and the follow the tracker strategy. This setup does just that while keeping it simple enough for everyone to understand. I don't think we should deviate too far from the old setup

The setup change is not being made to

only

address the BP claim and follow the tracker strategy, but to create a variation in the setup that is new to newer players and experienced players alike. The ultimate goal of the Newbie Queue is to convert newer players to regular players, like all of us once were.

[Mulch]

Suggestions to retain newbies: Make the normal queue easier to understand.

No joke lol

[Alisae]

What's confusing about the normal queue?

[mhsmith0]

@NK15, re:

Spoiler:

I did find this forum only recently, but I have experience in some other mafia-like games although arguably more on the side of what you all would call role madness. I have read the concepts tho. So I might not be correct in what I say, but I might be correct... and I am not going to predict winrates, but differences
Ok, the 12 possible setups are:

1. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Tracker, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
2. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Roleblocker, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
3. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Tracker, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
4. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Roleblocker, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
5. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Doctor, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
6. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Doctor, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
7. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Rolecop, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
8. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Rolecop, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
9. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Doctor, Town Tracker, 5x Town Vanilla
10. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Doctor, Town Roleblocker, 5x Town Vanilla
11. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Rolecop, Town Tracker, 5x Town Vanilla
12. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Rolecop, Town Roleblocker, 5x Town Vanilla

And these 12 setups should be somehow balanced(Not exactly balanced, but no outliers like a 70% town winrate, especially on all setups combined)
Ok.
First the Mafia Roleblocker setups(1-4)
Power roles: Tracker, Cop. The mafia Roleblocker cannot be roleblocked. It is of high importance for the mafia that the power roles die early enough. A tracker is in 2 of the games, so roleblocking is dangerous- if a tracker spots it and the other Power Role reveals itself then the Roleblocker dies. If the Cop gets a guilty result N1 with Tracker alive(or the Tracker with the Cop alive on N1) or if a Mafia dies early by lynch its near Game Over... for the Evils.

Power roles:(T)Roleblocker Cop
Clearly weaker than the previous setup. A roleblocker can target the cop and stop them(terrible) target the night killer(good) target the roleblocker who roleblocks a vanilla(meh) or roleblocks the cop(good). As long as Roleblocker does not stop the kill twice it is not giving the town another possible mislynch and it is worse than a tracker because the tracker always incriminates while the Roleblocker does not.

Power roles:Tracker Jailkeeper
The Jailkeeper can protect good people at the expense of their abilities or stop bad people. It is more flexible than the cop but also arguably not that strong.

Power roles:(T)Roleblocker Jailkeeper
Apart from these cycles that cannot be resolved via NAR we have two people who can roleblock. There is a high chance that one action won't get through... and possibly more as both roles are stronger at the end of the game.
(1-4) internal conclusion: There is some swing when setups differ, but it might not be that decisive. Win rate has to be found out by trial and error

Mafia rolecop setups(5-8):
Power roles: Doctor, Cop
Again, these power roles are quite strong and arguably Mafia has got the rolecop to find them fast before they run havoc. Still the Rolecop results cannot be used for killing before night 2!
The presence of Doctor and Cop makes a claim strategy possible. Large amount of what you call positive feedback.

Power roles: Doctor, Jailkeeper
If the jailkeeper has to claim then it can be protected by the Doctor. Although that only happens in a bit less than 50% of the setups its still a major concern for evils, especially with two protection roles running around. But this one has no cop so at least no evil will find itself in an untenable position even with good play.
Power roles: (T)Rolecop, Cop
The rolecop is a limited cop for the enemy rolecop... which means that the mafia power role is more endangered than the goon. The rolecop should probably claim if the other rolecop dies because they arent useful anymore. Which means that if the Mafia rolecop dies early you will have a claim cycle: "Rolecop claims plz". If no one claims Rolecop then there is a doctor and the cop can reveal... Or the... Jailkeeper, even(see above)

Power roles:(T)Rolecop, Jailkeeper
Arguably the weakest combo. Rolecop cannot see much, Jailkeeper gets more powerful the longer the game goes and (M)Rolecop can find out power roles

Internal Balance (5-8) Cop is better than Jailkeeper, especially when there is a Mafia rolecop running around and preventing the Jailkeeper from reaching later nights. Because Rolecop gets at least 1 result, and has definite knowledge of whats evil and whats not they are probably not weaker than the doctor here, except for the possible concerning combos.

No Mafia Power roles setups(9-12)

Power roles:Doctor, Tracker
These roles are not that strong like full cops and jailkeepers, but if the Tracker finds one evil then they might be protected by a hidden doctor... and then it looks grim for the Evils. On the other hand every nolynch could be met with a nokill, dragging out the game endlessly. And there is no (M)Rolecop or (M)Roleblocker to deal with these power roles.

Power roles:Doctor, (T) Roleblocker
A doctor can protect the roleblocker, if it comes down to 1 evil and the rber is alive. I am unsure how strong this combination is in this case, because they have at least 1 synergy: They both stop kills so 2 kill stops(aka 1 more mislynch allowed) are possible. In the unlikely event that the blocker targets the doctor who targets the victim the blocker is bad, but they are still useful more than detrimetal

Power roles:(T)Rolecop, Tracker
The Rolecop is basically a named townie here, except when they try to out the Tracker.
This setup is clearly worse than its doctor counterpart. No synergy possible.

Power roles:(T)Rolecop, (T)Roleblocker
No synergy. The unlikely bad combination is no more, but the power drop is still high. Same problem as above, except that Roleblocker is worse than Tracker except in a few MyLo cases(where you have one more chance as opposed to the tracker)

Internal balance(9-12)
Setup 9 is much better for town than setup 11 and 12. The same can be probably said for setup 10 as well(much better than...) The Rolecop/Doctor dice is clearly imbalanced when you have rolled Goon before. Obvious internal imbalance.

Overall balance(1-12)

Roleblocker and rolecop are mitigators, they decrease the average effect the enemies have. I am unsure how this will play out Like I said its mostly trial and error anyways probably... as the setup knowledge is also a factor.
BUT
This has pairs of roles. The pairs should ideally be close to strength. The Cop/Jailkeeper difference is ok, even if cop is a bit better. You can't balance perfectly.
The Roleblocker/Tracker pair is arguably not equal, but the difference could -

could

- be not that bad.
The Doctor/Rolecop pair is... not so good. If paired against an enemy rolecop the difference isn't high. Ok. But against goon the balance is upset.

In the setups 9-12 we have a glaring imbalance.
Setups 9 and 10 are way, WAY better than setups 11 and 12.
If this setup is to be tested then there will have to be some changes to fix an imbalance there, but I don't know which way.

Some thoughts...

1) I think you are pretty substantially underestimating the power of the town roleblocker here. Yes, the town roleblocker COULD screw with town power, but it’s numerically much likelier to screw with scum, and again this role becomes super OP given a day 1 scum lynch.
For instance, look at the pair with a cop…
Cop/TB/SB (cop / town roleblocker / scum roleblocker)
Or
Cop/T/SC (cop/tracker/scum roleblocker)

Barring crap like no lynch, there are just a handful out outcomes…
Scum roleblocker lynch
Here the tracker probably gets you a bit more value, because both PRs can fire risk free and scum can at best kill one of them (the roleblocker can HARD clear a slot, but if he dies you could always get something shitty like town roleblocker hitting the cop before dying n1)

Scum goon lynch
Here I’d say it’s the other way around. Scum roleblocker can shoot tracker and block cop, or vice-versa, and there’s nothing at all town can do about it (if scum can find the PRs anyway… but a goon should basically always be claiming PR day 1, so yeah that’s kinda likely). OTOH, the town roleblocker can actively block the scum kill, which is an extremely potent ability (and again, here it’s reasonably likely that town power has been outed to at least some extent before the scum lynch anyway).

Vanilla Townie lynch
Debatable. As with the goon lynch, scum can hit both town PRs potentially, and that gets into a nasty situation. OTOH, town roleblocker COULD block the cop and that gets messy too.

Town roleblocker/track lynch
Obvioulsy it doesn’t matter which of them it is here

Town cop lynch
Roleblocker here is WAY stronger. Roleblocker gets a substantially likely guilty most of the time if there’s no death, AND (in the event he gets a guilty and drives a d2 scum lynch) he gets a second shot to fire. Tracker can potentially get a guilty (and the upside here is he can see the roleblocker AND the goon making a kill), but scum have two chances to hit him (roleblock and kill), which isn’t really great odds.

2) Interestingly, in a micro 7/2 setup vs goons jailkeeper has proven substantially stronger than cop (newbie results are pretty clear on this point). partially because it basically becomes a super cop once the first scum dies (if scum have a roleblocker this is BADLY nerfed, but rolecop is funtionally like a goon in terms of usefulness, and as a side benefit, the jailkeeper can potentially block the rolecop's investigation)

3) I tend to agree that the town rolecop is generally worse than the doctor. HOWEVER, one inherent nature of this setup is that scum are pretty likely to be fakeclaiming power roles. As such, the rolecop can potentially hard clear or hard condemn any PR claims, which has a pretty non-trivial value. But in a world where it's two goons and the goons never claim town power, then yeah it's basically just a named townie.

[Toomai]

What is the scum winrate over the past ~20 completed games?

Scum winrate over the last 25 completed games is 64%, but I think this is because replacement rate has skyrocketed to 4.84 players per game in that time, the highest it has ever been in the Matrix6 newbie queue (less than 50 games after it hit the

lowest

point in history at 2.36).
I should be able to update my stats thread within 24 hours, but you can see these numbers in the raw spreadsheet yourself.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Firstly, I don't think adding scum daytalk is a good idea. I understand the appeal of it but we have done the experiment and the town win rates were horrid. I don't know why you'd want to have a set-up like Doctor-Tracker which already didn't have a stellar town rate (43.7%) and add scum daytalk and the potential for an easy scum fakeclaim.

Secondly, Doctor-Jailkeeper is just not a fun set-up and not appropriate. It's got too much appeal for frustration and weirdness.

looking at the history it looks like it was only ran once?

viewtopic.php?t=18887

Although this was run outside the Newbie Queue and had a kickass playerlist, it is worth noting that this game managed to go to Day 7 (!) and is one of the reasons I strongly advocated moving away from 2of4 and the possibility of Doctor-Jailkeeper set-ups at the time.

Thirdly, I think the easy scum fakeclaim thing is a little weird because while you can expect a scum SE or IC to take full advantage of it, I don't think it's going to be that obvious to Newbies, especially since there's the added wrinkle that if the scum have a PR, then it's quite risky for the non-PR to make the fake claim.

I also agree with N that the d3 motif seems more confusing than helpful.

[RadiantCowbells]

I am intentionally hanging back right now, but I do value your input.

You would prefer to keep the setup the same? What changes would you propose? What is the scum winrate over the past ~20 completed games? You think this setup would make that worse? Why?

I'm glad for feedback, but make it constructive.

I mean I was never asked for feedback about this. You clearly have something that you want to put forward so go ahead and go with it. I think town winrates will fall hard.

[Something_Smart]

Though having a balanced winrate isn't the primary goal of the Newbie Queue.

[JaeReed]

I think scum daytalk will flatten ppl in newbies.
Think everything smith is balancing off is a d1 scum lynch and I don't ever think a set up should be balanced off that.

[JaeReed]

Though having a balanced winrate isn't the primary goal of the Newbie Queue.

Neither is having a like 20%* town winrate though.

*number pulled out my ass

[JaeReed]

snip

Pretty much agree with this person.

[Plotinus]

daytalk helps retention and part of the newbie queue is getting people used to site norms. daytalk is very common outside of the newbie queue and it is more fun. I heard somewhere that giving scum daytalk is like adding an extra member to the scumteam. It's not a problem you just have to balance accordingly, giving town more power to counteract it.

[RadiantCowbells]

I think that overall

1) The setups are more scum favoured than the old ones. There are some worse than JK/BP/RB which is the current worst one, there are scum better, but overall I would say it's harder. I think you badly overestimate the power of a RB in a setup where a JK or a Doc exists. There's going to be virtually no info obtained. There's a reason that JK/BP is so much worse than just JK; yes roleblocker, but also now you don't know dick about whether your jailkeeping action actually prevented anything. That's huge.

2) Daytalk is big. Very big. Yes, it also increases retention of scum newbies: but at the same time I also think losing 80% of games hurts retention of town newbies
The games where I remember where newbies stuck around and became -ms- players were games that were super well played by one side or ones that their side won.
Games that scum just won because it was hard for town to deduce anything or get shit done didn't keep a lot of players.

3) Newbies are currently balanced around Mafia not having fakeclaims. In games with competent ICs it's extremely hard to get a fakeclaim to stick.
Only in 2/6 of games can fakeclaims be made and only 1/6 do any individual ones work. As a result, lynching PR claims early is a fucking terrible decision.
As soon as scum have viable fakeclaims this goes out the window: first scum wagoned can easily just claim PR and not be lynched.
So either lynching scum is going to become a fuckton harder on D1 or PRs are going to start getting lynched more, or both.
This is the #1 point to me and I think it alone represents like a 10-15% increase in scum winrate.

I would say that this proposal is at the moment so broken that I can't even just give constructive feedback: I'd rather stick with what we have.

daytalk helps retention and part of the newbie queue is getting people used to site norms. daytalk is very common outside of the newbie queue and it is more fun. I heard somewhere that giving scum daytalk is like adding an extra member to the scumteam. It's not a problem you just have to balance accordingly, giving town more power to counteract it.

This is both less town power and setups that give scum a lot more options.

[RadiantCowbells]

Like right now scum claims PR and they trade 1 for 1 with the PR. Sucks for the PR but still hurts scum.
You make that change and all of a sudden scum can claim PR D1 and avoid the lynch, then go on to get a different PR lynched later in the game. That's huge.
There's a reason that in multisets on EM the individual setups are pretty fucking easy for town.

[RadiantCowbells]

Oh: and scum post change also have a shitload more information than they used to. They have their PR and they have a lot more information about the setup than town does.
There's definitely more overall -variety- in town to counteract that, but the difference in information between town and scum is far higher.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Taking 3d3 as a starting point, I did end up designing a new Matrix set-up though (I thought it might be easier to avoid dud set-ups if you restricted to one role from each row in addition to one from each column but it turns out that's just the same as the original matrix concept but formatted more confusingly), so if part of the issue is simply wanting to change, this can be my suggestion. I think it's probably a bit scum-sided given scum daytalk but I don't think more town power would be desirable and a bit town-sided without daytalk but possibly not overly so.

Pick a row or column:

Mafia Watcher	Town Cop	Town Roleblocker
Town Jailkeeper	Mafia 1-shot Role Cop	1-shot Friendly Neighbor
Town Tracker	Town Universal Backup	Mafia Goon

Since it might not be entirely obvious how this relates to 3d3, I think it's worth spelling out: the 3rd column (Goon-Cop-Jailkeeper) is the same, the Mafia Rolecop becomes 1-shot but otherwise the 2nd column is also the same, the first column is completely different (Mafia Roleblocker-Doctor-Rolecop becomes Mafia Watcher-1shot Friendly Neighbor-Universal Backup) and you add the condition that you not only take only one role from each column but also one from each row - this ends up being equivalent to the above matrix.

The reasons I made the changes that I did are as follows:
1) Mafia Watcher replaced Mafia Roleblocker to weaken the mafia a bit and avoid crossblocking situations.
2) I got rid of Doctor because Doctor-Jailkeeper is horrible and Doctor-Cop doesn't really seem that desirable either.
3) I got rid of Town Rolecop mainly because it's just not intuitive in the set-up with 2 Goons and I think a newbie would be disappointed if e.g. they targeted scum but were never going to get information out of it.
4) I added the 1-shot Friendly Neighbor and Universal Back-up roles just because seemed reasonable. They're definitely the roles that could most easily be changed.
5) I added the row restriction, partly because I like symmetry, but mostly because this way you can avoid some more awkward set-ups (e.g. Roleblocker+Jailkeeper or Cop+Friendly Neighbor which has the potential to confirm too many players).

[RadiantCowbells]

Like you say that you're not looking for an entirely new setup or anything but you never gave me a chance to give feedback while this was in design.
So now you're coming out with it and telling me to be 'more constructive' when I'm seeing a finished work that I think is broken in several ways.
Which I think is kind of rude and not something that you should be doing.

[JaeReed]

Siding with RC on this.

If you're gonna have daytalk then you need to look at why daytalk wasn't implemented after the first test run of it.

Most of these setups are confusing for newbies I think too.

Pedit this is done without the last 2 posts in consideration and not reading those til later

[Virtuoso]

One thing we did on my homesite is that the newbie games were divided in to two parts: The standard matrix 6 setup and once that was over they would do a theme game with flavor and other roles. Not sure how feasible that would be here

[Virtuoso]

I like Cogito Ergo Sum's suggestion. I really don't think we should deviate too drastically from the Matrix 6 setup we currently have.

[Not Known 15]

Spoiler:

@NK15, re:


Some thoughts...

1) I think you are pretty substantially underestimating the power of the town roleblocker here. Yes, the town roleblocker COULD screw with town power, but it’s numerically much likelier to screw with scum, and again this role becomes super OP given a day 1 scum lynch.
For instance, look at the pair with a cop…
Cop/TB/SB (cop / town roleblocker / scum roleblocker)
Or
Cop/T/SC (cop/tracker/scum roleblocker)

Barring crap like no lynch, there are just a handful out outcomes…
Scum roleblocker lynch
Here the tracker probably gets you a bit more value, because both PRs can fire risk free and scum can at best kill one of them (the roleblocker can HARD clear a slot, but if he dies you could always get something shitty like town roleblocker hitting the cop before dying n1)

Scum goon lynch
Here I’d say it’s the other way around. Scum roleblocker can shoot tracker and block cop, or vice-versa, and there’s nothing at all town can do about it (if scum can find the PRs anyway… but a goon should basically always be claiming PR day 1, so yeah that’s kinda likely). OTOH, the town roleblocker can actively block the scum kill, which is an extremely potent ability (and again, here it’s reasonably likely that town power has been outed to at least some extent before the scum lynch anyway).

Vanilla Townie lynch
Debatable. As with the goon lynch, scum can hit both town PRs potentially, and that gets into a nasty situation. OTOH, town roleblocker COULD block the cop and that gets messy too.

Town roleblocker/track lynch
Obvioulsy it doesn’t matter which of them it is here

Town cop lynch
Roleblocker here is WAY stronger. Roleblocker gets a substantially likely guilty most of the time if there’s no death, AND (in the event he gets a guilty and drives a d2 scum lynch) he gets a second shot to fire. Tracker can potentially get a guilty (and the upside here is he can see the roleblocker AND the goon making a kill), but scum have two chances to hit him (roleblock and kill), which isn’t really great odds.

2) Interestingly, in a micro 7/2 setup vs goons jailkeeper has proven substantially stronger than cop (newbie results are pretty clear on this point). partially because it basically becomes a super cop once the first scum dies (if scum have a roleblocker this is BADLY nerfed, but rolecop is funtionally like a goon in terms of usefulness, and as a side benefit, the jailkeeper can potentially block the rolecop's investigation)

3) I tend to agree that the town rolecop is generally worse than the doctor. HOWEVER, one inherent nature of this setup is that scum are pretty likely to be fakeclaiming power roles. As such, the rolecop can potentially hard clear or hard condemn any PR claims, which has a pretty non-trivial value. But in a world where it's two goons and the goons never claim town power, then yeah it's basically just a named townie.

I removed the spoiler quote to my text in the quote above

1)As you can see I still somehow said "probably balanced enough" so there isnt much to worry about internally, we agree in this.
2) Hmm interesting. Probably because the death threat and the double effect hmm...this is still in the range of try out and adjust I guess
3)"one inherent nature of the setup is that scum are pretty likely to be fakeclaiming power roles"
In these setups, the goons know who they are NOT against. They are not against any Cop or Jailkeeper. Their enemies are tracker/rber and rolecop/Doctor
So they can only claim cop or jailkeeper unless they want to CC... but then again this setup has a 50% chance of rolecop. And with tracker or rber alive you do NOT want to die in a CC fight with the rolecop because then your win chances plummet. A 1v1 trade is not really a good thing for the evils. Because then there is only one scum, and that one has to fight long. Don't get me wrong... it is the possibility of the presence that will make scum hestiant to fakeclaim. But it will make scum even more hestiant to fakecounterclaim. Because THAT can swing the game largely in the favor of town.
And one last thing... with rolecop possibly present you will want to get wagons to L-2 now and then stop, waiting for 2 people to declare intent. Why? Because then they cannot sacrifice 1 scum into a power role, especially a roleblocker.

But ONE thing looks really like you totally underestimate the point. If Roleblocker blocks someone that one is either scum or... scum decided not to attack. If it is only the latter but not the former you will not only mislynch a townie but also die at night unless you find the right target. Tracker does at least not have that problem(although they can die easier)

EDIT: Yeah and Post164 from Radiant Cowbells sounds like good reasoning that this setup might be even a horrible idea. And I don't see any flaws in that reasoning...

[Realeo]

If we are concerned that scum will roll town with day talk, should we start considering upgrading the player size from 7 v 2 to 9 v 2?

Please don't kill me

[Virtuoso]

The problem with increasing game size is that it will take even longer to fill games.