Mini Normal 2276: Around the World - Game Over!

[Ausuka]

Like

I have tried looking at setup reviews that have been released

I still don't really get what assumptions I'm supposed to make.

It kind of feels like sometimes players are expected to make assumptions and if that's accounted for in the balance, but there are also setups which try to punish players for outguessing the mod with curveballs? Like idk. Maybe I'm just an idiot who doesn't get it.

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

it's fine for a doctor+cop to work together in such a way

but you already have 2 dead vigilantes and 1 dead friendly neighbor.

usually towns do not have 5 useful PRs in a game where they are against a mafia team of 2 plus a traitor.

[Gamma Emerald]

Yeah I think a problem with expecting people to put together certain balance points is that roles dying out early muddles their possible effects on the balance

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

the roles dying increases your knowledge of the setup.

when the graveyard is 2 dead vigs + dead FN + dead traffic analyst, it is unlikely you have another PR that happens to be able to protect and doubles as a vanilla cop.

[Ausuka]

it's fine for a doctor+cop to work together in such a way

but you already have 2 dead vigilantes and 1 dead friendly neighbor.

usually towns do not have 5 useful PRs in a game where they are against a mafia team of 2 plus a traitor.

I mean maybe I overestimated the power of a traitor jailkeeper but I didn't feel it was that weak. I also felt like the clears were extremely situational because in this game none of them fired. Is that my fault? Maybe, idk, but I'm not really sure how to get better at setup spec. I've tried looking at what seems to be the only public resource for it. Idk.

Also like if scum had a different power role instead of the double invest thing scamper had I feel like that'd make a simple doc viable but again like idk

[scamper]

Like

I have tried looking at setup reviews that have been released

I still don't really get what assumptions I'm supposed to make.

It kind of feels like sometimes players are expected to make assumptions and if that's accounted for in the balance, but there are also setups which try to punish players for outguessing the mod with curveballs? Like idk. Maybe I'm just an idiot who doesn't get it.

i will echo this, fwiw, and i'm not really a fan of what the normal queue is right now but i dont put the blame for that on pooky in particular

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

the traitor jailkeeper is kind of a double edged sword

you can try to target town prs to stop them from clearing themselves or generating clears but you can't reliably do it without interfering with the factional nightkill.

if you could play in a way where you signal your role to your scum team and coordinate with them on the nightkill/jailkeep - it becomes a much more powerful role, but the communication is difficult to set up and difficult to keep hidden.

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

you really can't make a lot of assumptions in normals safely.

focusing on dayplay imo is still the best way to play them for town.

just a lot of unfortunate circumstances for the town in this game [their most powerful pr getting sniped n1, their FN not claiming and just getting yeeted]

it was still an uncomfortable endgame imo for the scum side, if Ausuka and Marci could find each other the game could've flipped on a dime.

[Ausuka]

I mean I agree that it's not like nearly as powerful as a full scum jailkeeper but like... It still seems pretty powerful as a role capable of completely neutering power roles? Maybe that's just my brain seeing the word jailkeeper and overestimating it, but like, I don't think it's that much worse than a goon? Especially since it's immune to both of the vigs

I agree it's hard to setup spec in normals and idk. I don't think I could ever have found Johnny just by setup spec personally but that could just be me.

Again I don't really want to complain about the setup and wouldn't feel confident in my judgement of balance to do so anyway so eh

[Ausuka]

Yeah idk. If I was better maybe I could have townread Marci but I couldn't see her as town. Her reaction test being meant to anger me was just not something I anticipated or understood coming from a town perspective. I don't know

[scamper]

i think if i was in your position i would have struggled with it as well

[Gamma Emerald]

past a certain point I find it very hard to be accommodating for laziness/lack of WIM

[Alexcellent]

I actually don't know if my logic is sound, I probably need smarter people to weigh in.
I instinctively don't want to trust Johnny and I'll be just very, very irked if scum!Johnny wins this, but I think the setup suggests that he's legit.

I am both dumb and irked.

[Alexcellent]

GG though, well played scum
I think if I made it to ELo I would have 100% voted for Marci anyway
It was SO hard to buy you as scum, Scamper, after the way Corwin blew up at you on D1, that was crazy convincing

[Alexcellent]

Thanks for modding Pooky!

I don't want to pile on too hard although I do sort of agree with Ausuka and Gamma. I know these roles are "normal" but this many combinations of them and this many layers to the game feels significantly more complicated than I guess what I would expect when signing up for a "normal" game. But I'm also more of a casual player these days so it might just be sour grapes on my part.
I DO appreciate the effort and how tough it would have been to put this game together though and I did have fun even though I played pretty horridly

Thanks all!

[Roden]

I don't think the game was unbalanced, just a bit swingy. Even just one good Vig shot probably turns it around for town. Same if I'd survived and got a guilty result or even just got an inno on Marci.

[Corwinoid]

@scamper

Part of it was natural, I was really frustrated exactly while I was typing that because my wife came in to start arguing with me. I meant to come across as a little angry at first and it just really flowed after that. Mainly I was hoping to signal that I was the traitor, and I thought the second of those posts did it, and everyone missed it... I was surprised I was willing to be that blatant.

[Corwinoid]

@Cresc: I said as much in the DT, but I think the bella elim was okay. I also think StD's vig was +town, sorry -- I think it's the best chance town had at not towntunneling scamper, but Alex picked up the mantel and carried it D3 (and I'm really surprised he was the NK). Despite being informed, I kept thinking that scamper was just blatantly scummy this entire game.

[Corwinoid]

It was SO hard to buy you as scum, Scamper, after the way Corwin blew up at you on D1, that was crazy convincing

I lucked into this, really. I had so much RL stuff going on and I was so stressed I played absolutely awful. The reads on me were mostly right-for-the-wrong-reasons, but I felt like I could have and should have done a lot better.

Traitor's hard, I didn't really know what to do, and replacing into that even as an inactive slot with the game ahead of me already was like... oof. I think I was working uphill at that point anyway.

[scamper]

@scamper

Part of it was natural, I was really frustrated exactly while I was typing that because my wife came in to start arguing with me. I meant to come across as a little angry at first and it just really flowed after that. Mainly I was hoping to signal that I was the traitor, and I thought the second of those posts did it, and everyone missed it... I was surprised I was willing to be that blatant.

It was SO hard to buy you as scum, Scamper, after the way Corwin blew up at you on D1, that was crazy convincing

I lucked into this, really. I had so much RL stuff going on and I was so stressed I played absolutely awful. The reads on me were mostly right-for-the-wrong-reasons, but I felt like I could have and should have done a lot better.

Traitor's hard, I didn't really know what to do, and replacing into that even as an inactive slot with the game ahead of me already was like... oof. I think I was working uphill at that point anyway.

ah

well i didn't think you would vote me out of the blue if you were traitor when no one else was pushing me so i decided to case you. i did start to worry it might be you when you blew up on me because i was worried it might be, like, anger that i was pushing you (JF was actually more vocal about you being possible traitor in the topic), but at that point it had kind of already sealed your fate

i agree you were probably dealt a difficult hand to work with given your position in-game, but you were kind of MVP even if it wasnt really intentional, hope theres no hard feelings about how day 1 went

sorry you had to deal with all that stuff irl, best of luck in the future

[Corwinoid]

Reading through the scum PT I saw you pick up on the terrible scumplay drop (sorry ). I think it's hilarious that everyone missed this though:

Let me restate what I said in 761 though:

That is scum manufacturing, and so is this.

[Corwinoid]

Is that egregious enough?

[Gamma Emerald]

yeah I think my main lesson from scamper coming up scum is to never ever allow a shitpush on me to go unpunished

[mastina]

This setup was fine but not what I wanted when I signed up for a mini normal I guess?

Same. This is the sort of game I very much would not like to play and honestly, I absolutely hate reviewing games like this one.

I still don't really get what assumptions I'm supposed to make.

It kind of feels like sometimes players are expected to make assumptions and if that's accounted for in the balance, but there are also setups which try to punish players for outguessing the mod with curveballs? Like idk. Maybe I'm just an idiot who doesn't get it.

No, no, you have it!
In some setups you are meant to assume for balance; in other setups, you are punished for outguessing the mod. That's mod-dependent.

As for what it

should

be, it should be both, and yet, neither.

Ideally, a game's setup is such that you don't need to assume things, you don't need to guess things, but if you get it right you get an advantage and if you get it wrong you get a disadvantage, and the game is designed where it doesn't need to be guessed but where guessing right gives an edge.

I'm writing a NRG article which will have a section about this.

[quote="In post 3155, scamper"[i'm not really a fan of what the normal queue is right now[/quote] Neither am I!

I wouldn't ever want to play in a game like this one nor would I want to ever review it nor would I ever want to design it!

This is not the type of game I enjoy. This is not the type of game that I want to see. I'm writing my NRG article in part to try and encourage mods to move away from setups like this and more towards what my actual preference is. (My preference is ~3-4 town PRs of moderate strength vs. 0-1 scum PRs of weak strength.)

But as much as I don't like this kind of game and hate when I have to review them--I can't let my personal bias get in the way of my job. I hate traitors; I hate complex games. But if I am put into a review for a game with both, I can't abuse my power to say "yeah I'm not going to let this through at all because I don't like it".

I once did, as a reviewer--the mod (who at the time was reasonably new) put a traitor into their initial setup, and I veto'd an otherwise-fine setup just because I don't like the role of traitor. Because the mod was reasonably new at the time, they didn't stand up for themselves so the setup was reworked to be more in line with what *I* preferred...
...But to this day that review haunts me. It is one of the worst mistakes I have made as a NRG member, because past-me forcing my will onto a review and forcing my likes and my opinions on them was

wrong

. It was terrible. It was something which never should have happened. The past-me made a huge mistake that the current-me can never forget, as an example of What To Never EVER Do In A Review.

So while I might not

like

the direction the Normal Queue is headed towards, I as the reviewer

cannot

enforce my will, my likes, onto my reviews.
I can

state

that I don't really like the sort of setup that I am reviewing (and I did, for this one), but I still have to do my job, since the majority of the power lays with the game's designer (which is usually also the game's moderator).

I tell people this fairly often, but well and truly, if you want to see the Normal Queue change, you need to BE the change, and the best way to change it isn't as a reviewer (because a reviewer should never overstep their boundaries and stop a mod from running their setup just because the reviewer doesn't like an otherwise fine setup); the best way to change that is as a moderator and game designer, because the majority of the power in a review IS with the designer,

not

with the reviewer. (Especially the secondary reviewer.)

[mastina]

I know these roles are "normal" but this many combinations of them and this many layers to the game feels significantly more complicated than I guess what I would expect when signing up for a "normal" game.

Yup, I feel the same way.

I will certainly defend the game on merits of balance and being focused primarily on dayplay.

But while it's in my opinion balanced and accomplishes the goal of focusing on dayplay, it's still just...not my cup of tea.

I genuinely considered quitting as a reviewer for this game when I saw the setups Pooky came up with, because it's exactly the thing I am least able to competently review. My preference is fairly simple things, because that keeps the number of interactions possible to a saner level. There's a difference between 4 roles and their interactions, and 9 roles and their interactions. The former is far easier for me to comprehend than the latter.

But while I don't like games which have this many parts, they are still valid setups if a moderator wants to run them. I certainly encourage them not to! But I can't

force

them to not.

I do a lot of quotes for it in the review PT, gimme a sec for them.