Mafiascum.net

am I?

*gives Growlithe a treat*

..........

if you were a bad reviewer I wouldn't give my game to you to review

but this game was not balanced at all

98% scum will win

the game was actually balanced by sense

It was just "broken"

In post 679, Frozen Angel wrote:the game was actually balanced by sense

It was just "broken"

...................

what is that going to mean

There is no way for scum too looe the game - the only possible scenario is if their 3 all are retarded top scumreads d1/d2

mafai has like 50% auto win

40% very likly win

and 7% win with effort

i completely disagree with you fa.
if the game was that imbalanced, i would never have passed it of, even as "bastard balanced".

shrugs

the game is broken - not imbalanced

and thats why I said don't use the term "bastard balanced" for this

If titus had just followed her day 1 reads town would have won this.

In post 591, callforjudgement wrote:Just tried to work out the balance on this myself. Assuming I understand the setup correctly, the EV is a bit lower than 33% (it would be 33% exactly if town controlled the nightkills, but they don't if scum is lynched D1, which reduces it slightly). That's within the range I'd consider sane for a setup where the scum have no nightkill. It is likely to be over surprisingly quickly either way, though, and the game's small enough that it's inevitably going to be highly swingy (and in swingy games, the balance doesn't matter so much because the swing is going to outweigh it).

It would probably be better if town had knowledge of when lylo is, though. The scum could have made a plausible guess (although they might also have incorrectly suspected an opposite scumteam, given the circumstances), whereas the town didn't really have enough information, meaning that misplaying lylo becomes fairly risky. I doubt town would have followed the rolecop guilty so automatically if they knew that lynching a townie would lose the game.

Yeah, I didn't consider that during the review, that makes the game lame here.

In post 596, Dunnstral wrote:I'm going to disagree and say this setup was pretty unbalanced, and also if the only thing you look at is statistical EV then you're a bad player and probably not worthy to be designing setups.

The EV is close to the EV of the most known nightless open (4:8) which despite calling 66% for scum, in practice gets won by town a very large amount of the time. Which is why CFJ uses that as a reasonable starting point for games where scum don't get a kill.

The problem with these games is that the moment scum lose one member, town gets an extra mislynch (doesn't get evened out by a nightkill for scum like in normal games) which snowballs heavily. Town gets two shots here on three scum, if they get one the ball gets rolling. Basically you ace it as scum or you'll have a way tougher job, and usually one scum lynch means some townies get semi confirmed (which scum can't remove). The smaller game makes it somewhat easier for scum to win cleanly, but the problems are the same.

Which makes

dunnstral wrote:I suspect scum would win, I suspect the win % is like 30% for town, though. 98% is unrealistic

A curious statement from someone who said that looking at EV's was bad to decide who should win. Nightless-Open is the basic example where it breaks down, actually hitting the nineties for town, where the odds say they lose. Here the closed nature and the way things get split, all make it more confusing which helps scum, but that's not necessarily a bad idea... (though it wasn't fun here, that should be fixed somehow next time).

On the other hand, and this worried us in the review, the nightkill is with flipped people. One half of the kills is done by "confirmed" townies only. That was what worried me would push the game well into townsided territory again. Just have to get one of the first 3 kills to stick and scum will have to play their hearts out. Sadly we didn't get to see such heroics.

also no badmouthing the reviewers, Scout and FB did a wonderful job

Scout and FB are da best yeah

but the game was broken

In post 603, Dunnstral wrote: The surprise was

too

powerful. There was no way to reasonably anticipate it. The second lynch wasn't really towns to control, because who can convince 4 townies to not vote a guilty on day 2? Titus and I were dead and knew about the kill thing, and we didn't even suspect that scum had no kill.

Basically where I am on this.
The setup is swingy and scum hold all the cards.
The only time that the setup iterates solidly is on a D1 scum lynch, imo.

In post 605, RadiantCowbells wrote:I'd also like to point out that the vast majority of the time scum doesn't fake a guilty nor make myself as unlikely to be vigged as I did. A lot of why scum did so well is that I correct sussed out the general setup.

I think that if this were run as an open then 1) town's winrate would be obnoxiously high and 2) the best scum strat is to pick one person to hard bus the other two.

The whole point is that it's closed and scum have all the info they need.
That's like
the whole point of why it doesn't work.

5P Cult Vengeful is the balanced, open version of this setup, notably.