Open 804: Popcorn Mafia Redux [Game Over!]

[Tammy]

Good game scum!

I should have argued with nacho on STT more, and should have paid more attention to Dunn. He was a weak townread who didn’t hit my radar really except a twinge on that last day when he brought up the egging on comment again. That was the only time I really had doubts.

Sorry for misreading you Wheme! I enjoyed your presence, just got a bit paranoid there.

[petapan]

personally i enjoyed driving you crazy even though pushing you in the first place was a pretty bad misplay on my part, from that point on i just wanted to keep you off balance and generate noise so that you didn't hone in on my partners

[SirCakez]

while acting pompous and condescending in the process

I can understand everything else you said but this I can't understand.
I specifically try to avoid doing this in my play because it bothers me when other people do this too.
I am not sure where you're getting this from because there was never a point where I was lording over you guys or something.

[Duchess]

Well played, everyone! I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this game and it was fun to follow afterward. I am very proud of our team's play. Thank you Syryana for modding!

[unwnd]

Scum did what they needed to

I got too complacent in some areas

[Tammy]

personally i enjoyed driving you crazy even though pushing you in the first place was a pretty bad misplay on my part, from that point on i just wanted to keep you off balance and generate noise so that you didn't hone in on my partners

LoL

It was so obvious to me yours was a scum push.

[unwnd]

For some reason this game makes me really salty thinking on it

Wheme it's not even your hipfire either, as far as why I scumread you; just thought you were faking wanting the gun at base level

[unwnd]

Oh and MUSH this was definitely definitely not your fault

[Tammy]

Oh and MUSH this was definitely definitely not your fault

[Syryana]

Thanks everyone for playing! I hope this iteration of popcorn made it fun for both sides!

I think this setup still needs more tweaking; it feels slightly scumsided because town only got three "miselims" when in a normal 13p town should have four.
That said scum deserved the win here.

Maybe one less scum but keep the vengekill and gf bomb kill and this feels pretty fair but idk I haven't looked at the other iterations

I think you meant 2 mislims vs the normal 3, but the point is noted.

I ran simulations and the way this setup works is that basically the more accurate town is, the more screwed scum are. Like even a small increase in accuracy from shooters results in a huge swing against scum. Just 5% more accuracy on the town's part swings almost 10% of games in town's favor.

With regards to the mislims, I considered changing scum's wincon from "half or more" to "more than half", which makes it such that scum needs to exceed the number of town and town gets its three mislims. However, I think the reduction in average mislims is good for this setup due to the late game swing towards town. Once scum exhaust their tools each correct elimination directly adds more mislims into town's pocket and makes uphill climbs for scum almost impossible. Therefore I think having a slightly more dangerous early game is both balanced and actually slightly beneficial to town as it further discourages rushing, hero shots and hipfires. This setup is all about good day play on both sides. It is absolutely swingy but personally I think it's pretty well balanced. Assuming town shoots correctly slightly more than half the time (55% of the time, in my sims), town will win 52% of games.

This all being said, I am absolutely open to feedback from both teams (please give me feedback!) and I will run a tweaked version of this in the future. I already have some ideas on how to make it slightly better feeling for scum (not in terms of power, but rather agency).

[petapan]

i actually thought in terms of agency it was fine, you get two opportunities to remove town players you'd otherwise never be able to kill which is the big roadblock in nightless

[Dunnstral]

My thoughts on Dunn are complex. But I like Dunn for town within the context of the whole gamestate.

So, let’s rewind to end of Day 2: i townread Imperium and unwnd, scumread Duchess and Cakez, and was focusing on sorting Dunn and petapan — who I was scumreading, but without much confidence. Suddenly, townreads gone, and the next post is Lotus saying he changed his mind. I need a mind blowing discovery to get me back in the gamestate, I tell Lotus as much while trying to not be too obvious about where I’m at, and then it’s a Duchess shot anyway. Well. GREAT. And then I get the gun! And I’m screwed.

(At least I prepped the gift box and Tyulpan mortar thing well beforehand...)

One thing to note here is that Dunn was not nearly reactive enough and wasn’t interacting enough with my townreads to disrupt them.

Now, one thing you’ll notice on Day 3 is Dunn pushes back on me a lot but never tries to guide my hand. At least five other players did, so I don’t think that’s necessarily scum-indicative, considering one is now flipped town and one was Cakez, who I townread. I think NOT doing it is more town indicative (lurkers excepted), because scum have a chance to guide me into a disastrous miselimination there; if it won’t destroy their positioning they should always try to get me on their preferred target, or at least echo someone else in hopes of guiding the next shot in that direction. Like. That’s nearly a game winner.

Dunn just throws his hands up like “I’m sick of this shit” when I unveil that I’ve been bluffing to try and get any content I can use out of the player list.This is Dunn’s chance to get into my townreads and save the game for scum, but no, instead... nothing. Makes sense enough as town, doesn’t make much as scum.

My one doubt is pretty flimsy, it’s the Day 2 Beetlejuicing Dunn did with me. It might mean nothing, but it’s still concerning to me and I think it’s enough to shove Dunn into my nulls. He’s top of them, because there’s a much better chance of petapan (very weak associative) or NM (based on only two posts in that ISO that seem AI to me) going red 3 from where I’m at... but it is nice to have someone for that last ELo slot, in case we go two red and two green and it’s all down to the wire. I think unless someone gets a galaxy brained idea, Dunn always loses against the other likely slots in endgame. Given I like unwnd and Cakez for the most townie here and I would hope none of my targets are both green and foolish enough to shoot in there without a very compelling reason that they for some reason haven’t shared... I’m willing to give Dunn the benefit of the doubt for now.

I was focused on looking town

Wheme/NM were in the shot pool, I couldn't save peta, and stt probably wasn't going to get shot

[Syryana]

i actually thought in terms of agency it was fine, you get two opportunities to remove town players you'd otherwise never be able to kill which is the big roadblock in nightless

My tweak as it were is to substitute the godfather for a suicide bomber, activatable at any time the bomber is alive and on anyone, including the gunbearer. Same killing power, more agency. Also makes the role more strategic as it's proactive instead of reactive.

[ScrewTheTells]

I liked the synergy our scum players had. We basically had very different styles so it spread out the risk in case anyone was really good at catching a certain class of scum tells. It also gave each scum a lot of wiggle room to make up reasons to put some scumbuddies as town-reads while others as scum-reads, so that when they flipped it would be basically impossible to untangle the WIFOM. Or even if they didn't flip it made pinning down a 'solve' a lot harder. I know I was happy I could put 2 buddies in town-read section and 2 buddies in the scum section.

i actually thought in terms of agency it was fine, you get two opportunities to remove town players you'd otherwise never be able to kill which is the big roadblock in nightless

My tweak as it were is to substitute the godfather for a suicide bomber, activatable at any time the bomber is alive and on anyone, including the gunbearer. Same killing power, more agency. Also makes the role more strategic as it's proactive instead of reactive.

This is interesting mechanically. Is the bomber strictly better though? What happens if the bomber gets shot before activating their bomb? Based on the above wording it would not result in a nightkill so in that situation it's worse than the current godfather trigger. Would make for a pretty intense game of chicken for the players involved, though. But it might encourage a meta of shooting without much warning.

[RLotus]

ggs it was fun

[Syryana]

This is interesting mechanically. Is the bomber strictly better though? What happens if the bomber gets shot before activating their bomb? Based on the above wording it would not result in a nightkill so in that situation it's worse than the current godfather trigger. Would make for a pretty intense game of chicken for the players involved, though. But it might encourage a meta of shooting without much warning.

It involves some chicken. And some strategerie.

But yes, if the gunbearer hits the bomber, the ability is lost. Use it, lose it, or get the bomber so townread he never gets shot. But it's also bad play for town to quickly hipfire just to try to hit this.

It'll be interesting. If it doesn't work well in practice, I'll can the idea.

[SirCakez]

Thanks everyone for playing! I hope this iteration of popcorn made it fun for both sides!

I think this setup still needs more tweaking; it feels slightly scumsided because town only got three "miselims" when in a normal 13p town should have four.
That said scum deserved the win here.

Maybe one less scum but keep the vengekill and gf bomb kill and this feels pretty fair but idk I haven't looked at the other iterations

I think you meant 2 mislims vs the normal 3, but the point is noted.

I ran simulations and the way this setup works is that basically the more accurate town is, the more screwed scum are. Like even a small increase in accuracy from shooters results in a huge swing against scum. Just 5% more accuracy on the town's part swings almost 10% of games in town's favor.

With regards to the mislims, I considered changing scum's wincon from "half or more" to "more than half", which makes it such that scum needs to exceed the number of town and town gets its three mislims. However, I think the reduction in average mislims is good for this setup due to the late game swing towards town. Once scum exhaust their tools each correct elimination directly adds more mislims into town's pocket and makes uphill climbs for scum almost impossible. Therefore I think having a slightly more dangerous early game is both balanced and actually slightly beneficial to town as it further discourages rushing, hero shots and hipfires. This setup is all about good day play on both sides. It is absolutely swingy but personally I think it's pretty well balanced. Assuming town shoots correctly slightly more than half the time (55% of the time, in my sims), town will win 52% of games.

This all being said, I am absolutely open to feedback from both teams (please give me feedback!) and I will run a tweaked version of this in the future. I already have some ideas on how to make it slightly better feeling for scum (not in terms of power, but rather agency).

?
In a 13p town can have four miselims: 10v3, 8v3, 6v3, 4v3
Here we had three mis-shots - on Lotus, Wheme and NM

[MUSHSHAGANA]

This is interesting mechanically. Is the bomber strictly better though? What happens if the bomber gets shot before activating their bomb? Based on the above wording it would not result in a nightkill so in that situation it's worse than the current godfather trigger. Would make for a pretty intense game of chicken for the players involved, though. But it might encourage a meta of shooting without much warning.

It involves some chicken. And some strategerie.

But yes, if the gunbearer hits the bomber, the ability is lost. Use it, lose it, or get the bomber so townread he never gets shot. But it's also bad play for town to quickly hipfire just to try to hit this.

It'll be interesting. If it doesn't work well in practice, I'll can the idea.

I’m open to trying another round of this to help you test. I don’t think my performance here had anything to do with my living situation, and I think there’s value to the setup.

[fferyllt]

I hope your hands and wrists are doing better, Mush. That sounded miserable, writing so much on mobile.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

It would be better but I have no furniture either here.

Picture me, huddled in the corner of a concrete basement and tapping away on my phone like I’m Gollum and I’m texting the One Ring.

[notscience]

Wheme was town as fuck lol

I’ll take 3/5 in my scumpool at end of day one

[notscience]

Wait you shot notmaf?

Jesus all my townreads got shot

[WhemeStar]

I blame not mafia for not being a good jester and getting shot earlier

[notscience]

That’s the second strongest townread ive ever had on notmaf

[ScrewTheTells]

Curious, how does one town read not-mafia? Because I think if I were town I'd have shot him too.