That comment wasn't about balance; it was about swinginess. If 7 of 9 set-ups have potential to become degenerate, then there will be more degenerate games that won't appropriately serve the Newbie function. I can countenance having a bit of a problem in an otherwise good set-up but I would reject the current suggestion based on that alone.In post 248, mhsmith0 wrote:1) Pretty much all of the column A setups are very much "if the roleblocker gets lynched early, then scum will just lose" type setups, which are... fine? Newbie towns are pretty consistently poor at lynching scum early in general, much less the roleblocker specifically. If scum can't protect their roleblocker for even one day phase, then they deserve to lose.
Moreover, 3a (cop/doc/rb) in particular has been proven over time to be roughly balanced (town win rate >50% but not by a whole lot), and if add in daytalk AND take away the easy "a cop is auto-confirmed just by claiming" aspect, I think there's no reason to think that it should be substantially town-favored given overall newbie meta.
2) 3C is a block that LOOKS like it could be townsided given the potential of "follow the tracker", but in practice scum are winning that >50% of the time in the current meta, and that's with an essentially confirmed tracker AND no daytalk. Take away the auto-confirm of the tracker and add daytalk, and there's simply no way it's townsided in current newbie site meta.
3) 2B is actually one where you can argue against it just because of how messy it ends up being (tracker can guilty the rolecop), but I don't particularly think it's a balance issue unless you argue that the rolecop itself is a bad PR, in which case yeah I'd be fine with like odd night roleblocker instead.
While I understand the desire for more variety in the newbie set-up, I think 12 set-ups would definitely be going too far in terms of being too much for a newbie to digest when playing, at least in the absence of significant structure to simplify understanding. Having to learn about 7 different power roles and trying to keep track of which combinations they show up in, doesn't seem insignificant to me.mhsmith0 wrote:I also have a personal preference to have 12 cells instead of 9, since that reduces the setup gaming that comes from a smaller number of possibilities, but that's ultimately up to PP I think.
With respect to frequency of power roles, a 9p semi-open newbie set-up is a slightly different ballgame than a 13p normal. Some roles just don't work as well, but on the upside the ones that do work are easier to understand, so I don't think, for example, that we have to worry about how a Town Roleblocker would play in a Newbie - they just try to hit the scum and they get a success on one of them. I'm also almost wholly unsympathetic to the notion that Mafia Roleblocker or Encryptor would be a better choice for a Newbie than Mafia Watcher because of how common they are outside the Newbie Queue when there's been a long-standing problem with too high mafia win rates which I attribute mostly to the willingness of Moderators to give goodies to their Mafias.