Scum Are Winning Large Themes More Then Town

[zoraster]

i've got good news for you then, fakegod. the next fortnight is going to be played soon. Fortnight is the hardest game on the site to win!

False

Fortnight is way easier for scum than Gameshow was

Well of course, the hardest scum game to win is the one where RadiantCowbells won as scum.

[Oversoul]

i've got good news for you then, fakegod. the next fortnight is going to be played soon. Fortnight is the hardest game on the site to win!

False

Fortnight is way easier for scum than Gameshow was

Well of course, the hardest scum game to win is the one where RadiantCowbells won as scum.

Did you run two fortnights? I thought me and quail won that game

[RadiantCowbells]

By your own stats scum have won 40% of the Fortnight games, that's not a particularly low winrate unless you think that trend is not representative?

As for Gameshow, well.

[zoraster]

By your own stats scum have won 40% of the Fortnight games, that's not a particularly low winrate unless you think that trend is not representative?

As for Gameshow, well.

Gameshow has a 100% win rate for scum.

But of course neither is particularly telling because sample sizes are tiny.

Anyway, obviously my statement is meant to be fun more than actually true. There almost certainly have been unbalanced setups where scum would win less frequently, but I doubt many set out to do that purposefully. Anyway, in theory, scum have about a 33% chance of winning. And if (a) town is really better at finding scum than random or (b) if there are some super sleuths out there that are just so good at scum hunting but idiot townies get in the way, then scum should have a very, very hard time.

Anyway, the reason I find the setup interesting mostly isn't the scum or the town Day 1 but rather the position it puts the "Private Investigators" after that because there's nothing else to lean on. People are so sure they're great at nailing scum, but put in that position, town have only identified scum 5.2% of the time, which is actually lower than random.

[RadiantCowbells]

Yeah but on the other hand scum has literally never won Gameshow in lobbies where RadiantCowbells wasn't scum, so that should say it's pretty townsided.

[zoraster]

hahahahaha okay, fair enough.

[FakeGod]

i've got good news for you then, fakegod. the next fortnight is going to be played soon. Fortnight is the hardest game on the site to win!

I've actually tried to guess who the scum was in the fortnight games and I've gotten it wrong every time

[popsofctown]

I read/skimmed the setup. Escape mechanics can be extremely powerful for scum

[zoraster]

I read/skimmed the setup. Escape mechanics can be extremely powerful for scum

very much so. Doesn't change the underlying numbers, though.

[Oversoul]

i've got good news for you then, fakegod. the next fortnight is going to be played soon. Fortnight is the hardest game on the site to win!

I've actually tried to guess who the scum was in the fortnight games and I've gotten it wrong every time

I’m pretty sure my win was a fluke. Like I remember being surprised I submitted Kuribo because I had 0 memory I submitted Kuribo

But god. Kuribo and Benmage. That town had no hope

[Alisae]

Zor if we win in ur fornight game does the winner get to do an epic fornite dance?

[FakeGod]

If I win, can I get a signature from Zor Tester?

[zoraster]

Zor if we win in ur fornight game does the winner get to do an epic fornite dance?

absolutely.

[T-Bone]

i've got good news for you then, fakegod. the next fortnight is going to be played soon. Fortnight is the hardest game on the site to win!

No its not, I won like three times and I am bad at mafia.

[zoraster]

You were modkilled in the first game!

[chennisden]

Hey, do you guys feel a small satisfaction when your setup is deemed town or scumsided but the underdogs win? They really "proved" themselves, overcoming the setup disadvantage with stupendous play etc

the scumteam will hate you forever

[Nancy Drew 39]

Now we need statistics on how many times town loss was due scum efforts and how many times town just imploded and awarded free win for scum

*cough* Timeshift *cough*

Scum could have all been V/LA for the entire freaking game and they STILL would have won.

[Ankamius]

I'm referring to towns thinking they are necessarily winning the game because they lynched scum

for reference, this is assuming that you're lynching the scum that are least likely to endgame in the first place first

Lynching bad scum or not lynching bad scum has no real impact on the game. If people can't catch other scum, they can't win. So going back to our old conversation, how no lynch helps finding good scums? Considering you claim people are bad at associations, so keeping bad scum alive has no real merits

I'm confused as to how this relates to what I said

I'm referring to how towns perceive scum lynches compared to the reality of scum lynches, specifically that towns think they're better at turning scum lynches into a win than they actually are; this is especially true if the scumteam properly prepares to sacrifice one of their own for strategic purposes and widens the gap even further

[Ramcius]

Now we need statistics on how many times town loss was due scum efforts and how many times town just imploded and awarded free win for scum

*cough* Timeshift *cough*

Scum could have all been V/LA for the entire freaking game and they STILL would have won.

wasn't that a mini?

[Ramcius]

I'm referring to towns thinking they are necessarily winning the game because they lynched scum

for reference, this is assuming that you're lynching the scum that are least likely to endgame in the first place first

Lynching bad scum or not lynching bad scum has no real impact on the game. If people can't catch other scum, they can't win. So going back to our old conversation, how no lynch helps finding good scums? Considering you claim people are bad at associations, so keeping bad scum alive has no real merits

I'm confused as to how this relates to what I said

I'm referring to how towns perceive scum lynches compared to the reality of scum lynches, specifically that towns think they're better at turning scum lynches into a win than they actually are; this is especially true if the scumteam properly prepares to sacrifice one of their own for strategic purposes and widens the gap even further

I agree with your observation, and I'm also saying that it doesn't change outcome of the game regardless if town lynch scum and gets excited or if they no lynch (we had discussion back in the day about D1 no lynch). Problem isn't with scum lynch, problem is with town mindset and how people are scumhunting. In short, people are bad at actual scumhunting

[Ankamius]

So we essentially agree then, just from different angles

[callforjudgement]

I think part of the problem is that the town win rate of a game can depend strongly on the playerlist, and in particular how engaged the players are. If all the players are really focused on the game (even the scum) and trying their best, I'd expect town to do better. If all the players are apathetic and not caring (even the scum), I'd expect scum to do better. Apathetic players are harder to read and tend to have less accurate reads.

A game like a newbie or White Flag might be boring, but most of the players here know how to engage with it and what gameplay looks like: if they sign up at all, they're probably up for that sort of gameplay and will put in decent effort throughout the game, and if a player doesn't want that sort of game, they're unlikely to participate at all. In terms of Large Themes, though, the proportion of players who will enjoy any particular Large Theme is considerably smaller than for a Newbie or Open, and the players who do want to play it tend to get worried it won't fill, so you get a lot of advertising (from the mod or for other players). I think there's a lot of pressuring players to play in Large Themes, and the result is that you get players who won't be particularly helpful as town and who will be hard to distinguish from a disinterested townie as scum. (In retrospect, my largest balance mistake in Role Call was not pulling it when signups started to slow. I was very tempted to do so, and should have done so. The playerlist makes

that

big a difference to the balance of a setup like that one.)

I'm not sure there's so much you can do from the setup balance point of view. Most of the changes you can make to increase town win rate either a) allow for the potential of a near-unavoidable blowout if town unexpectedly gets their act together, or b) make it harder for scum to kill the engaged townies by adding a number of must-kill town power roles to the game, adding a large random factor based on who gets them.

[RadiantCowbells]

Truth is that I think the nightkills is a shitty mechanic.

[RadiantCowbells]

Being able to remove the best players in the game from play is really silly if we divorce the concept of it from the fact that it's how things have been done forever. It's not like you can just remove the enemy's forward in soccer.

[callforjudgement]

Anyway, the reason I find the setup interesting mostly isn't the scum or the town Day 1 but rather the position it puts the "Private Investigators" after that because there's nothing else to lean on. People are so sure they're great at nailing scum, but put in that position, town have only identified scum 5.2% of the time, which is actually lower than random.

This doesn't surprise me at all. Scumhunting is hard, scumhunting after the weakest scum member has been sacrificed is even harder, scumhunting without the ability to talk to other players to discuss your ideas or to elicit reactions from them is even harder than that. (FWIW, I'm almost always surprised when my scumreads actually flip scum; sometimes I feel like my reads are better than random, but rarely by enough to expect them to actually hit scum. In fact, often I feel like my reads are no better than random.)

Of course, this implies that in The Fortnight, the best strategy may be to randomize the private investigation, which is pretty unfair on scum because it makes their play more or less irrelevant (it only matters in surviving the Day 1).