Votestealers. Opinion?

[vonflare]

Vote stealers of any alignment. Good? Bad? Discuss.

[Kagami]

Bad.

Being voteless is highly demotivating in a game where motivation to play is fairly critical.

[Elbirn]

^ Pretty much this imo. I used to play mafia on another site where there could be multiple roles that would affect votes; a vampiric effect where your targets vote is nullified and you have two votes that day, or "there were x cases of players changing their vote, so your vote power is x", or "the grass is green today, so the total number of votes you possess is equal to the inverse of the square root of pi, but only if the moon is full and today is National take your kid to work day."

I've yet to see any screwy roles like that here, but if I did I would call them bastard. I can tell you from personal experience that anything that changes your vote is simply not fun, and often more confusing then necessary, for players and the mod.

[mastin2]

Being voteless is highly demotivating in a game where motivation to play is fairly critical.

I disagree about this: being voteless robs you of half of your default arsenal. (Voice and vote.) You lose the vote, then it can actually serve as a HUGE motivator to become a large Voice.

...That being said, a role which STEALS votes I heavily frown upon, as it is frankly a broken role.

[Vampirate]

Being voteless is highly demotivating in a game where motivation to play is fairly critical.

I disagree about this: being voteless robs you of half of your default arsenal. (Voice and vote.) You lose the vote, then it can actually serve as a HUGE motivator to become a large Voice.

...That being said, a role which STEALS votes I heavily frown upon, as it is frankly a broken role.

Solution: Give that role some kind of cool night or day power to offset the loss of vote power.

[saulres]

OMG you just gave me an idea for a completely wild game. BRB going to the Micro Queue.

[mastin2]

Solution: Give that role some kind of cool night or day power to offset the loss of vote power.

In a way, we have one: treestump. For all effective purposes, it "kills" the town player: they lose their vote, they no longer count as a living player, they're flipped and alignment confirmed...but they can still talk.

[Kagami]

Treestump is radically different, it comes with being confirmed town and bulletproof. Conf-town players have a leadership role that keeps the game fun for them.

A voteless player without that advantage has almost no reason to post in the thread, unless he can reasonably expect to manipulate another players' vote in a positive fashion.

Also, town vote thieves are negative utility. Stealing a vote from scum is bad, since that's one less thing they're accountable for. The best use of a town votestealer is never to use it at all until lylo (which has the side benefit that if a vote is stolen pre-lylo, it's clear that the thief is scum).

[Kagami]

In rock operafia, I had a relatively easy scum game in part because I never had a vote.