1) In general I'm pretty pleased with how the game played out. I feel like I hit my design goal of giving each faction a roughly 25% chance to win the game. Town did not eliminate very well and they still had an ability to win right until the very end if they had eliminated corrected 1 or 2 more times. The idea of the setup was to give everyone roughly a 25% chance of winning among town rats cats dogs. So if it felt like your individual faction was underpowered thats likely because it was, by design. Giving everyone a fair chance at winning sort of gives everyone a reasonably low chance of winning by default.
2) The kills in this game worked out in a really weird way, which ended up being a super unintended red herring. The fact that scum teams hit the same person repeatedly led to the norm for this game being 2 kills per night instead of the intended 3, which really put the town at a disadvantage for figuring out the game. Obviously this gave scum a huge unintended advantage because it made town not realize the number of scum remaining and I think that influenced the play heavily on day 5 6 and 7. I think if town had known just how many scum were still around at that point (or had been given a reasonable chance to guess based off of NKs) there would have been a very different game down the stretch.
3) That said, there was a level of apathy in this game that I don't think I've encountered before in any games I've modded (including multiball) I don't think town tried very hard, and I think that they had a defeatist attitude of "oh, well, theres lots of scum and we don't have agency" which they used as an excuse and honestly I found that extremely disappointing. The vast majority of wagons in this game were town directed. To the extent that scum did consolidate on people it was generally on other scum players. Town could have easily won this game with just a slight bit more investment and their actions mattered a lot. I am really sad that several town players basically gave up this game, when I think that there were a lot of really obvious scum to go after, and the existence of the other scum in multiball makes those scum wagons easier to achieve, not harder. I don't really know what to do about this except to say that if you hate multiball and think town has no agency you should not play my games. I have a disclaimed in them for a reason. If you are feeling hopeless and you no longer want to play, you should replace out. I have a "please replace out if you are not enjoying the game" rule for a reason.
4) That being said I was very pleased with the ruleset overall. A lot of the rules I implemented for this game (especially the no toxicity rule) were experimental in nature, and I felt like they ended up working out very well. Part of that is a function of the fact that I don't think this is a player list that is naturally inclined to toxicity, but on the few instances where I felt something was approaching the line a brief nudge was all that I needed to stop it. We obviously never got close to removing anyone from the game, and we didn't need to even think about it. So thank you for that. I'm very interested in any feedback people have about the rule set in particular because its something I intend to keep using and refining.
5) Let's touch on the elephant (alien) in the room. I think maybe it was incorrect to make Titus an alien cop specifically. In designing the setup I liked the ambiguity of the role in that it could either be flavor or a faction and sort of gave the town a chance of considering three factions if it flipped, but seeing it in practice I'm not sure I love the effect. It sort of made the claim a touch more dubious than I wanted it to be and derailed the game a little bit more than I wanted in terms of a red herring. I don't think it was awful and it accomplished a lot of the stuff I wanted it too but it kind of feels like "Horse cop" would have accomplished a lot of the same things while giving titus a little more believability and would have derailed the game slightly less. It also is extremely unfortunate that the kills lined up in such a way as to make aliens completely plausible for most of the game, and it kind of felt like a miselim of titus at some point because a foregone conclusion because of the role, which was not really how I had envisioned it in my mind.
6) Speaking of which I want to shout out titus specifically. She replaced in to a slot that many in the game were ready to yeet without a word due to beeboy meta and then had to claim "alien cop" with a straight face which she did and managed to live for several more days after. It was not an easy position she replaced into at all.
-- Or here if you just wanna see fae/faer used in context.
