Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Game Over!

[ItalianoVD]

I can say Geraintm definitely surprised me. My reads were otherwise spot on save for Frogster, sorry again man.

[geraintm]

I'm looking forward to seeing the dead chat too btw, see what they were thinking

[callforjudgement]

The dead chat's been released already.

They thought you were town, for what it's worth.

[callforjudgement]

@

Titus

: Did you figure out, based on how townish the entire playerlist was looking towards the end, that scum had probably been bussing? In retrospect, that might have been the step in your VCA reasoning that I was missing.

(One problem I have with VCA is that although it often works, it can in many cases be hard to explain the reasoning. Incidentally, if the VCA is coming from someone unconfirmed, scum can take advantage of how difficult the arguments can be to follow to make up a VCA scumread on pretty much anyone, and it ends up looking like an argument that could genuinely have come from a townie, even when it doesn't convince the other players. I'm pretty glad that I chose your slot to confirm overNight!)

[callforjudgement]

I need to apologise a bit for the slow Day 4, too. This is the third time I've organised a breaking strategy as town (the first two were in Theme games), and I'm not really used to people not just immediately doing everything I say (in between the scumhunting to discover who goes in what slot on the strategy). When Frogster started scumreading Nosferatu, I realised there was potential trouble where nobody could agree who should go where, but town were winning by so much at that point that it was hard to get up the motivation (especially as I'm a little short on sleep at the moment).

[Titus]

@Titus: Did you figure out, based on how townish the entire playerlist was looking towards the end, that scum had probably been bussing? In retrospect, that might have been the step in your VCA reasoning that I was missing.

It came down to where was the scum on the shelley wagon or the Walter wagon. Everyone but geratim was clear on the shelley wagon. Everyone but you was clear on Walter. So either scum had a forced bus or you were scum favoring Walter over shelley. The forced bus theory turned out to be correct.

[callforjudgement]

I should probably react to the "CFJ is focused on optimal play" posts from earlier in the game: there are two main reasons I take care to explain what optimal town play is, a) so that townies who don't know it will play better, and b) so that scum who are pretending to be town have no excuse to do something different and then say "oh, I didn't know". b) is probably the larger reason, here; it's much easier to be confident in a "

player

is doing something scummy" scumread if you know they know that it's scummy.

[Raya36]

GG. Thank you George Bailey for modding! I feel bad about how it ended for me. I didn't anticipate online school to be as time consuming as it is. Wish I could've been around more

[GeorgeBailey]

All the PTs have been released! Thank you everyone for playing.

[callforjudgement]

Subject: Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Mafia PT

Trying to work out a path to victory left

7 left alive. CFJ, Walter and Titus are town and should be seen by all as town.
I believe I have to kill CFJ tonight, I cannot risk leaving them alive to either clear someone else or target me

Oh wow, it did work.

There was some evidence that the scumteam was making theory mistakes, and so I was hoping to bait scum into nightkilling me (e.g. my breaking strategy posts were clear on what would happen if I survived, but intentionally vague/worried about what would happen if I were nightkilled; and I made sure to stress how powerful my ability was). But a successful nightkill on me would have lead to 3 confirmed townies in 5 players, which is a 100% win rate ending no matter how bad your reads are (just eliminate the unconfirmed players), better than the 80% strategy that was available at that point anyway. So as an extra chance, I was hoping to be nightkilled and guarantee a town win even if Nosferatu were scum.

I can be disappointed in my reads this game (they were so bad I ended up looking scummy by VCA!), but I am really happy with how well I played this mechanically (this is probably my best mechanical play ever, although admittedly I usually end up drawing VT and having no real opportunity).

[callforjudgement]

(Also, I agree that I should have been obviously town after my claim – as scum, there's no way I don't claim VT in that situation – but given that the town as a whole wasn't seeing it, there wasn't much point in pointing it out, especially as pointing out your own towntells makes it look like they were planned.)

[callforjudgement]

Err, lost my train of thought there, I meant to say that because town wasn't seeing it, I could have been a viable miselimination for scum to aim for.

[mastina]

And yeah idk what the setup reviewers were smoking

Hi that would be me; I reviewed this game.

To my eyes, balanced enough. Alien is a good role for the town here with strong kill-denial and some denial of info to the scum PRs, but does have some anti-synergy with the town's power roles; pt cop is a reasonably strong investigative, but has some anti-synergy with the friendly neighbor neighbors (who're, essentially, masons); the friendly neighbor neighbors are, essentially, masons; the scum PRs don't give them any hard-counters to the town PRs but give them extra information to work with.

But I'm the secondary reviewer here so it's more Nexus's call here.

This is what I said about the game and by and large, I stand by it:
The town's roles were strong, but had significant anti-synergy, and scum had reasonable safeclaims to claim that also gave them a significant edge in terms of information gained.

It wasn't noted in the review, but it should be noted, that obviously when the town has a jailkeeper-type role and scum die early, the jailkeeper role becomes disproportionately powerful, more powerful than would be reasonably anticipated--a D1 scum lynch in this game puts them pretty far behind, admittedly, but that's true for just about any setup and goes without saying because of how obvious it is: if scum die early, town get a large advantage, as they

should

. (Scum getting eliminated early

should

give the town a big advantage; I'd even go so far as to say that almost any game where scum getting eliminated early doesn't give the town a massive edge is poorly designed.)

With three scum alive past D1, this game was probably going to be much harder for the town. Alien is a very strong town role, but it cannot differentiate between a successfully-blocked-scum and a successfully-protected-town. So with more scum, the role is less powerful. With less scum, it is more powerful.

[callforjudgement]

I promised Datisi I'd give my own thoughts on the setup.

We can compare it to this, a very boring setup that should be close to balanced:
2× Town Friendly Neighbor Neighbor
1× Town 1-Shot Cop
7× Vanilla Townie
3× Mafia Goon

The actual setup had two changes to the town roles, compared to this one: a PT Cop compared to a 1-Shot Cop, and adding in an Alien. Meanwhile, the scum were given a Tracker and a Watcher (either of these can catch the PT Cop, but only the Tracker can catch the Alien because the Watcher will get rolestopped if they try).

First, let's look at the setup with a hypothetical full Cop opposite the scum power roles. That's obviously going to be better for town than the 1-Shot Cop version; maybe not that much better, though, as the full Cop is likely to get caught by scum quite quickly (either through power role usage, or due to claiming a guilty, or due to being forced to claim for unrelated reasons). In particular, they may well fail to get more than 1 shot off. There's also a risk that the scum discover who the confirmed players are "early", compared to when they would with a pair of Masons (the Friendly Neighbor Neighbors are targeting). So it's better for town, but only by a moderate amount.

Now replace the Cop with a PT Cop. As long as the PT Cop keep getting innos, nothing is different. If the PT Cop gets a guilty, though, 60% of the time it's exactly the same (scum will have serious trouble claiming out of it in this setup!), but 40% of the time it hits one of the Neighbours. This is a disaster for town, outing their pseudo-Masons and their PT Cop at the same time, and meaning that the power roles all get tangled up with each other. So we started with a balanced setup, made it a bit more townsided, then added a random chance that things go massively wrong for town. That's "balanced" in a sense, but the levels of swing are much higher than they could be.

Finally, let's add in the Alien. This generally creates chaos in the setup. It's possible that the Alien will prevent two kills, and benefit town that way (especially with confirmable players in the setup); it's also possible that the Alien will screw with the town power roles even more than the setup is doing by itself (this actually happened in practice, with me accidentally blocking Tayl0r; the block on Italiano was intentional, because I was hoping he would draw the kill and his night action wasn't required for anything that night). It's also possible, but unlikely, that the Alien will outlive two scum and end up solving the game by themself (this is much more likely if the role goes to a mechanically-minded player who knows how powerful town blocking roles are in the endgame, and intentionally plays to survive longer than normal). Maybe, in pure nightplay terms, it makes things a bit more townsided on average, but there's clearly a lot of swing that will overwhelm the win/loss balance effects on the setup.

(It's also worth bearing in mind that the Fruit Vendor properties of a confirmed Friendly Neighbour have some minor uses for town that can help to

However, after thinking about the nightplay, there's also the effect on the dayplay to consider. With things like the (admittedly, properly clued) duplicate role, multiple scum investigatives, and an Alien that looks out of place in the rest of the setup, what we have here is a setup that is very hard for players to believe (especially if they don't know how powerful the scumteam is; Tracker + Watcher is a long way beyond typical scumteam power for a 10:3). I've seen competing balance theories about this sort of unbelievable setup. Back in the early days of mafiascum.net, Mr Stoofer had a theory that, past a certain complexity limit, adding extra town power was actually bad for town; players would have trouble believing the setup, and draw incorrect conclusions as a result (and there would be general confusion, which Mr Stoofer hypothesized was good for scum). More recently, I was talking to Vi about setup balance, who came to the opposite conclusion; Vi's belief was (probably still is) that moments at which facts about the setup were revealed, or when something surprising happened, made players much easier to read, and ended up benefiting the playerlist as a whole.

I think we saw some of both of that in this game. The reveal of Italiano and Walter having duplicate roles made it fairly easy to catch Gamma as scum (Gamma seemed to believe that outing a confirmed townie would be perceived as a townish thing to do, apparently without realising that Walter really were a Town Friendly Neighbour, he would be pretty easy to confirm regardless; Gamma had incorrectly assumed even-night, but even so, there really wasn't much chance of me getting nightkilled and losing the information). Meanwhile, the complexity of the setup lead most players to give up on setup speculation entirely, and/or hedge their reads (quite a few players were seriously considering a 9:4 setup, although I eventually ended up rejecting that idea because I couldn't make it work without additional town power); in particular, that meant that I wasn't being perceived as town when I really should have been purely based on claims (as scum, it really wouldn't make sense to paint that much of a target on myself, and Gamma and I would have had no reason to create the interactions that we did, because they put scum a very long way behind).

All in all, I don't think this setup was unbalanced from the win/loss point of view. It was, however, a lot more swingy than I would be comfortable with, with two separate (and very large) potential sources of swing. If town did well early, they were likely to steamroll. If the town power roles got tangled early, winning from that point onwards would be very difficult.

(See also my balance discussion during the game in #1744; that was partly an attempt to get Gamma eliminated, but it's still intended as a genuine balance discussion.)

[callforjudgement]

(It's also worth bearing in mind that the Fruit Vendor properties of a confirmed Friendly Neighbour have some minor uses for town that can help to

EBWOP: (It's also worth bearing in mind that the Fruit Vendor properties of a confirmed Friendly Neighbour have some minor uses for town that can help to determine facts about the setup, e.g. I used it to probabilistically demonstrate that I was most likely an Alien specifically rather than some other power role, and if the game had lasted another Night, we could have used it to probabilistically test whether or not Titus was Ascetic and thus handle one of the potential scenarios in which she could have been scum.)

[callforjudgement]

I'm assuming I'm an Alien, not a Jailkeeper, to make the setup a bit less townsided. There's a chance of randomly rolestopping the Role Cop or a Friendly Neighbour by mistake, thus toning down the power of the other town power roles. A Jailkeeper wouldn't do that.

Going the other way, if I were hypothetically scum, Alien would make the setup somewhat more scumsided, for exactly the same reason.

In retrospect, my theory here was probably wrong; I didn't know at the time that there was a Mafia Watcher.

The rolestop was most likely intended to reduce the chance that scum would discover me to be a power role via watching, and thus counterbalance the Watcher somewhat. (Of course, that just makes the setup even swingier, by increasing the chance I survive into the lategame.)

[callforjudgement]

Anyway, something that's still confusing/bothering me: why didn't shelly cross-vote Walter at the end of Day 1? I'm not sure it ever got explained how or why she flaked from this game specifically while continuing to post elsewhere.

[shellyc]

Anyway, something that's still confusing/bothering me: why didn't shelly cross-vote Walter at the end of Day 1? I'm not sure it ever got explained how or why she flaked from this game specifically while continuing to post elsewhere.

the revelation: genuinely forgot about this game. sorry for my forgetfulness that led to a scum loss

I did read some of this through, well played town!

[callforjudgement]

I tend to use the "subscribe" and/or "bookmark" features in order to make sure that I don't forget about games I'm playing in ("subscribe" sends you emails, "bookmark" doesn't, otherwise they're much the same).

Funnily enough, I townread you for forgetting (I thought you'd be more likely to remember the game if you were scum), and so was particularly surprised at the flip.

[shellyc]

Funnily enough, I townread you for forgetting (I thought you'd be more likely to remember the game if you were scum), and so was particularly surprised at the flip.

I've looked up my games, I post more as scum vs. as town so that's reasonable

[geraintm]

so, I have thoughts about this game.

first, it was my first time being scum in a long time, so I was kinda excited.
but boy did this game go South fast.

Day 1, we lost an original member of the team. no biggie.

but I got so trapped voting for Shelly. it shouldn't have happened I don't think, the end of the day should have been walter getting lynched, but shelly disappeared when they were needed to actually vote. and every time I was making an excuse to not vote shelly, something would come up where I felt very, very forced to vote otherwise I would look incredibly suspicious.
them posting elsewhere on the site for example.
it didn't help that they were going to be replaced but there be no extension, I just assumed a replacement that close to deadline would kick it back a day or two so I unvoted to take the pressure off shelly, but then got told that wasn’t the case, combined with them posting elsewhere was bad.

And then not mafia posted at me saying I can vote for shelly now and it was the final straw I felt for me where if I didn’t vote for shelly I would look awful and there was a very high chance they were going to get lynched with my help or not so I tried to get the credit for doing it.

I pushed not mafia getting killed night 1 btw because I felt they were confirmed town now, no way would scum encourage someone to vote their partner as they had done.

Day 3

My partner wanted to come out and claim their role and I was horrified. My post in the mafia thread wasn’t as strong as I would have liked, but I thought it was a horrible idea. I’m fairly sure without that claim the pair of us would have survived the day but it happened. I ended up voting for my partner again

And then titus replaced into the game and that was a disaster. They sat there and just went “it is Geraint” and it was game over. My outlook in the mafia thread just nosedived.

There was almost no chance of winning the game I felt after gamma had come forward, but there was a slim one because I felt that those who had been in the game and had the emotional attachment to it might find it harder to lynch me than someone fresh like titus.
I wanted to concede the game for the last few weeks bt had to play it out, sorry for having it drag on.

Thoughts on the set up

Mods have come in and said it was fine and balanced.
It didn’t feel balanced playing it. I realise losing one of us day 1 really helps town’s odds, but it felt like our 2 roles just didn’t help us at all. They don’t allow us to break up the advantages that town had. Once they got ahead, we had no way of coming back. It didn’t matter that we knew who was going where, there were a pair of confirmed neighbours, there was a Cop who, if they had targeted either of us it was a straight guilty, and the alien again was another role that once town was ahead we couldn’t interfere with. We could have been 3 goons and would have had just as great a chance of winning that game than with (almost) perfect knowledge of what town was doing.

Question
Night 2
• callforjudgement is Alienating ItalianoVD.
• ItalianoVD is Friendly Neighboring Looker.
• Tayl0r Swift is PT Copping RCEnigma.
• WaltertheDunce10 is Friendly Neighboring CallForJudgement.
• geraintm is Watching ItalianoVD. [No result]
• Gamma Emerald is Tracking WaltertheDunce10. [targeted CFJ]
• Gamma Emerald is killing Taylor Swift

Why did I not see CFJ going to Italiano? I targeted italiano explicitly to watch a doc/protection role going there. They then were targeted and I didn’t see it happen.

Overall, this was a horrible game to play. I felt like the 2 moments when my partners got lynched could have been avoided, but I did let myself get trapped into situations where there was no obvious way out, and there was no catchup feature once scum got behind.

[geraintm]

Subject: Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Mafia PT

Trying to work out a path to victory left

7 left alive. CFJ, Walter and Titus are town and should be seen by all as town.
I believe I have to kill CFJ tonight, I cannot risk leaving them alive to either clear someone else or target me

Oh wow, it did work.

There was some evidence that the scumteam was making theory mistakes, and so I was hoping to bait scum into nightkilling me (e.g. my breaking strategy posts were clear on what would happen if I survived, but intentionally vague/worried about what would happen if I were nightkilled; and I made sure to stress how powerful my ability was). But a successful nightkill on me would have lead to 3 confirmed townies in 5 players, which is a 100% win rate ending no matter how bad your reads are (just eliminate the unconfirmed players), better than the 80% strategy that was available at that point anyway. So as an extra chance, I was hoping to be nightkilled and guarantee a town win even if Nosferatu were scum.

I can be disappointed in my reads this game (they were so bad I ended up looking scummy by VCA!), but I am really happy with how well I played this mechanically (this is probably my best mechanical play ever, although admittedly I usually end up drawing VT and having no real opportunity).

I don't get your logic. where does my thinking fall apart? who would have been the extra confirmed town player apart from walter and titus if I had killed you?

[callforjudgement]

[quote="In post 2120, geraintm"]Question
Night 2
• callforjudgement is Alienating ItalianoVD.
• ItalianoVD is Friendly Neighboring Looker.
• Tayl0r Swift is PT Copping RCEnigma.
• WaltertheDunce10 is Friendly Neighboring CallForJudgement.
• geraintm is Watching ItalianoVD. [No result]
• Gamma Emerald is Tracking WaltertheDunce10. [targeted CFJ]
• Gamma Emerald is killing Taylor Swift

Why did I not see CFJ going to Italiano? I targeted italiano explicitly to watch a doc/protection role going there. They then were targeted and I didn’t see it happen./quote]

You didn't see my night action because I rolestopped your action (unintentionally, but it happened); an Alien action protects its target from

any

other action (not just kills), as long as it doesn't specifically pierce blocks. So although I was trying to protect Italiano from the nightkill, my action worked just as well at "protecting" Italiano from being watched, or indeed Titus from receiving Walter's Friendly Neighbour PM.

[callforjudgement]

I don't get your logic. where does my thinking fall apart? who would have been the extra confirmed town player apart from walter and titus if I had killed you?

The player that I targeted overnight. (If I had targeted you, you wouldn't have killed me.) That's the reason I was leaving the clearest possible messages in the game thread as to who I was targeting.

The player that I targeted would be confirmed for the same reason as Titus was: someone (me) died, and the player I was blocking couldn't have killed them.

[callforjudgement]

Like, imagine a hypothetical alternate universe where Titus was less vocal about eliminating you, so I decide "OK, Frogster and Looker are the scummiest players here, we'll sort the rest out later". We eliminate Frogster, and I block Looker overnight (telling the thread that I'll do so).

If you nightkill me, then the next day, Titus and Looker are confirmed (due to me blocking them while someone else performed the nightkill), and Walter is still confirmed via his Friendly Neighbour ability. That would create a PoE of just {geraintm, Nosferatu}, and town would have enough time remaining to eliminate both players.