Mini 1556: Greetings Without Spain (GAME OVER FAREWELL)

[Bicephalous Bob]

I really shouldn't have put it in a normal game and I'm sorry you didn't like it

the point that there was no reason to believe I made so little adjustments to your role still stands though

[Bicephalous Bob]

"your role" should be "the standard Hider"

[Equinox]

To be fair, it would have been really obvious that the hider role was not town given that the moderator had announced that there was only one anti-town faction; there was no other function for a mafia hider. RedCoyote claiming commuter was a stroke of genius and threw off that aspect of setup speculation.

[ICEninja]

Yeah I wasn't sure what else to claim besides compulsive and non-target-consecutive.

I feel that the fact that the mod announcing only 1 anti-town faction makes it LESS obvious that the hider was not town aligned. There weren't any kills for a mafia hider to be attempting to avoid, unless you somehow speculated I was dodging my own team's kills. I really don't follow any train of thought that would cause you to arrive to the conclusion I was scum based on setup speculation.

[ICEninja]

So I just read the mafia QT and realized both myself and the scum team knew who all 3 scums were. This setup was...very odd. I was basically a full scum except without night talk.

[ICEninja]

Did ICE just ScumSlip partners with piss/RC?!?

609- "I feel like if RC is lynched then Xay actually has a fairly low chance of being scum"

He doesn't say 'if RC flips Scum', he said "if RC is lynched"... thus showing knowledge of Scum alignment.

Balls. Nice catch. I really suck at scum, honestly.

[d3x]

After all the talk about ScumSlips, I was so torqued that the

real

one actually slid by with no one noticing. Tbh though, I pretty much lost all hope when piss wasn't insta-Lynched D2.

[Kthxbye]

I should have stuck to my guns on pk. Im pretty sure he dipped out because he was caught scum and i think thats a deplorable way to play as scum. He has been added to my black list.

Well played ICE. You and youvalone won this game for your team. I nevver even thought twice that you might be a scum hider. Sigh...

[Bicephalous Bob]

nah he siteflaked just like thomith and aisa

[ICEninja]

The safety and believability of my claim won the game for my team. There's a reason scum like to claim hider, you don't die.

[evilpacman18]

that was unfair really, I think the point of normal games is so town can just play without having to think about weird possibilities like that. My read on ICE was headed in the right direction until his claim which by most normal game standards would have been necessarily true.

[Rhinox]

that was unfair really, I think the point of normal games is so town can just play without having to think about weird possibilities like that. My read on ICE was headed in the right direction until his claim which by most normal game standards would have been necessarily true.

I kinda agree with this, only because a couple years ago the site got a stick up its ass trying to make all normal games fit a certain mold with the normal rules and reviews and what not.

On the other hand, I kinda like anything that tries to revert the meta back away from cookie cutter normals and reliable setup speculation, so I don't really have that much of a problem with it fundamentally. Just sucks that we lost because of it.

I think it would have been more fair and interesting had ice not known his scum partners, so he could have had a chance at dying if he hid behind scum. I think its pretty easy to predict which town scum would not kill, so there really wasn't much point to a scum hider at all. But its a lot harder to determine scummy looking (thus not likely night-killed) town from scum. That gives the role purpose, because ICE would be using the role to kind of identify his scum partners through POE. And maybe his partners give something away trying to breadcrumb themselves to him. Would have made it much more interesting. It would have made it a brilliant role, actually. But it still isn't a purpose the town would ever be likely to divine due to the mod-confirmed setup information.

Because there was mod info that there was a hider in the game and there was only 1 scum faction, the town really had no reason to spend too much time considering that the hider might be scum. From town's POV, there is no purpose to a scum hider in this game based on the information we're able to figure out. The only way we could have figured out if ICE was lying was if the tracker tracked the same target as the hider, and that is so specific and unlikely that it should really fall under the general "don't design your game around specific intended role interaction" guideline of setup design. I think had the mod-confirmed setup information not been given, the town would have been more skeptical of ICE's claim, and he wouldn't have been able to cruise the scumteam to a win based on the claim alone. It's almost a case where providing the mod-confirmed setup info makes the role kind of bastard-ish. It's borderline lying to the players, kinda like scum masons. Actually, its more like putting in a miller or GF without a cop, probably.

It was still a fun game though aside from the flakers, and I really enjoyed the flavor. I just think, make the hider not know the scum team, and take away the mod-confirmed setup information, and the game would have been infinitely better.

[ICEninja]

^Yup.

Except playing as the hider would have been WAY worse. Take away the scum team's knowledge of the hider is much much better. That way the traitor is trying to signal to the scum team who he is and what he is doing, which is what I thought I was doing and what I thought I had to do. It should be this way and a suggestion in the role PM letting me know that the scum team has no knowledge of me.

[Bicephalous Bob]

I considered doing that, but in the end I decided not to because it would make everything even wackier and swingier

[Bicephalous Bob]

Also, if you guys want to give me a chance to redeem myself, I'm probably going to run this setup in the near future. Just tell me if you want me to PM you when it's happening!

[mykonian]

Ice pm'ed us, the normal reviewers that took Bob's setup, to have a look at the postgame.

that was unfair really, I think the point of normal games is so town can just play without having to think about weird possibilities like that. My read on ICE was headed in the right direction until his claim which by most normal game standards would have been necessarily true.

I agree that this is our job. We looked on this game for balance and if it fell within the normal guidelines. Hiding is a mechanic that's allowed, which makes the combination role of traitor hider Bob's one "new" thing in this setup. Basically, there's nothing we can do, he's well inside the rules. But Bob wasn't an idiot and to help his players out already gave away pregame that something was up with his hider. So moreover, there's nothing we

want

to do.

Somewhere in Ice's post pm there's the dangerous bit. The core argument of calling Ice town is because a hider goon would not make sense. This argument has come up before in MD in a different way: setups do not have to make sense. If a mod wants a miller in a game without a cop, he's allowed to. Had bob wanted to make a goon hider, there's literally nothing that would keep him from that.

Ice made a claim in such a way that people didn't go looking on, town decided to try to outmeta the mod. And yes, that working claim then takes over the game, because scum obviously abuse it to the fullest. In the end, that's the peoples play during day that make that scum win this game, not because some set of roles are too strong or the numbers on something are off. That's what I can take care of as a reviewer. I'm not there to protect town from giving some claimant a free pass he shouldn't get. Bob's admittance that there was a "non standard" hider in there was already nice towards you.

All in all, I do not believe bob should feel bad about this. The setup he came to us with had options for nice play, wasn't power mad and showed some inspiration. After that, how the players decide to use the roles and information you've given is all the game.

[ICEninja]

Fair enough.

[Rhinox]

But Bob wasn't an idiot and to

help his players out

already gave away pregame that something was up with his hider.
<snip>
Bob's admittance that there was a "non standard" hider in there

was already nice towards you.

If you really think this, then it was a pretty big oversight on the balance part of the review. The mod-confirmed role information helped the scum a lot more than it helped the town. It gave scum a confirmable role ability, and the knowledge of a town role.

Without the info, ICE's claim is not a confirmable role and thus he is not immediately believed, and N doesn't get cleared either. Since a protective role is also confirmed, and the scum know its not them, they know to hunt for one in the town, and they can draw it out or CC it like RC did. Leave that info out, and maybe RC doesn't crumb commuter and the doc would be hidden from scum's knowledge longer. So that info gives scum info about the town PR's they can use to plan and manipulate the town.

How exactly does the mod-provided role information help the town at all? We're supposed to read it and know that there is something up with the hider? How exactly was town supposed to do that without speculating about the mod-provided setup information (aka "outmeta-ing the mod)? The presence of the info itself is what invites the setup speculation and mod-guessing and etc into the game. The whole game comes down to whether the town can guess correctly that the mod would use the hider as a scum role, but that is pretty hard to do when the scum have all the information on the setup. No one is ever ever ever lynching a mod-confirmed hider when there is also a mod-confirmed standard protective role and 2 players claiming to be that role. Town could do, what exactly, about it? RC played brilliantly, ICE played brilliantly, but the setup was clearly in scums favor, and the town made plenty of mistakes and got some unfortunate breaks - the titus lynch instead of pkop D1, the bad Xay lynch D2, the unfortunate nk of the tracker N1, and the fact that scum got a huge upgrade in the replacements - its clear that everything was getting stacked against the town this game. The setup is one thing that didn't have to be stacked against the town though, and it could have been easily fixed simply by omitting the mod-confirmed role information, and maybe weakening the traitor-hider role a bit so it was more likely it would die on its own. Just IMO, anyways.

I'm not mad at bob at all though and I'd happily play in any game he'd mod in the future, just I think you're being pretty disingenuous myko because I think you and anybody else probably makes the exact same mistake had you been in the game. It's just not something the town really had any control over. All the options for nice play, whatever you think they are, were all on the scum side.

[Tierce]