Mafiascum.net

In post 24, Isis wrote:something more like, "Mafia Rolecop, Mafia Goon, 5 VT, roll 2 things from {Tracker, Cop, Doc, VT, FN}

*broken record scratch*

Oh look, it's 2of4.

Is that what 2 of 4 is?

2of4

Mafia Role Cop x1
Mafia Goon x1
Vanilla Townie x5

Plus Two Randomly From:

Cop
Doctor
Jailkeeper
Vanilla Townie

In post 22, Isis wrote:Ok so the movement in the red direction was significant
and we haven't been moved a statistically significant number of games
so really you should wait
I have to accept that since my desire for towns to suffer is probably idiosyncratic and subjective and butthurt from being bad at scum
I still don't like that the newbie setup is so complex though

First time i saw newd3 table i couldn't understand how can i pick a cell if there are no scum in there. Then i though that i need to pick a column header and combine it with row header... but it had just 'row 1' in it.
idk maybe this would look better

	Mafia Roleblocker	Mafia Rolecop	Mafia Goon
Vanilla Townie x5	Town Cop and Town Doctor	Town Tracker and Town Friendly Neighbor	Town Cop and Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie x5	Town Jailkeeper and Town Tracker	Town Jailkeeper and Town Friendly Neighbor	Town Jailkeeper and Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie x5	Town Mason and Town Mason	Town Tracker and Town Doctor	Town Mason and Town Mason

In post 11, northsidegal wrote:This has been the case since Matrix6 (and possibly before, but I don't have the data on-hand for that). Personally, I might theorize that it an element across almost all micro setups.

There are three common town roles that become much more powerful with 1 scum left: Tracker, Roleblocker, Jailkeeper. (Follower does too, but it's less common; Motion Detector is also uncommon, and although it improves with 1 scum left, it improves to a lesser extent.)

Avoiding those roles entirely places a huge limit on your setup design abilities, especially if you want to keep the setup simple in other ways (e.g. avoiding modifiers). So Micros have a tendency to suffer from swing problems.

Not entirely joking suggestion: 7:2 vanilla as the Newbie setup.

This was one of the possible subsetups in F11 (almost: scum had a roleblocker but it didn't do anything), and the observed 35% town winrate isn't ridiculously out of range, especially as it was in a more scumsided meta than today's.

(7:2 is easier for town to win than 11:2 in practice, incidentally, because scum are easier to lynch before the competent townies have been nightkiled, and there's less time for town to get demoralized by constantly missing.)

The main disadvantage I see is not teaching the new players nightplay, but I don't think the current ridiculously complex semi-opens do a good job of that anyway.

In post 27, Blair wrote:2of4

Mafia Role Cop x1
Mafia Goon x1
Vanilla Townie x5

Plus Two Randomly From:

Cop
Doctor
Jailkeeper
Vanilla Townie

I kinda like it

In post 30, callforjudgement wrote:(7:2 is easier for town to win than 11:2 in practice, incidentally, because scum are easier to lynch before the competent townies have been nightkiled, and there's less time for town to get demoralized by constantly missing.)

is this backed by data? I can sorta understand your explanation but I have a hard time believing those things outweigh the fact that town gets 2 additional chances to hit scum as well as more information from NKs and wagons

There is not enough data about mountainous in general for comparisons between 7:2 / 11:2 to be statistically significant.

In post 30, callforjudgement wrote:This was one of the possible subsetups in F11 (almost: scum had a roleblocker but it didn't do anything), and the observed 35% town winrate isn't ridiculously out of range, especially as it was in a more scumsided meta than today's.

No. You are making the mistake to confuse a subsetup of a Semi-open with a standalone setup. In a semi-open scum might hunt power roles that do not exist. Standalone? They make the optimal nightkill for dayplay(or what they percieve it to be).
The EV for 7:2 is just 29%, and the results will be probably not in the 40-50% range.

How about:
Tracker 9p(with the improvement of meta this should be balanced. Swingy though, but setups can be swingy.)
Night 1 Cop 9p(Prevents the worst of cop)
Cop/M Multitasking 1-shot Rolecop/M Multitasking 1-shot Roleblocker 9p(can avoid cop more easily but also runs into the risk of 2x cop results)
2x Masons/M Multitasking 1-shot Rolecop/M Multitasking 1-shot Roleblocker 9p(The 1-shot Rolecop is not a strong role vs two masons, but it avoids very bad results)
2x 1-shot Rolecop/M 1-shot Rolecop 9p(This is the odd one; claiming Day 2 is optimal and may split town or not; but claiming strategy is something you should learn, especially for opens)
4-shot Roleblocker/M 1-shot Rolecop 9p(the 4-shot is not trivial, the mafia can just wait until the shots run out, then kill(at the cost of 1 more mislynch though!) if things went badly early.)

Adding a rolecop to the masons setup not for balance per-se bit because the masons/mafia/vt 5p is awkward is a neat idea.
Masons seems at about the power level needed in the queue while also being a fun role.

On the topic of clarity/normalcy, I just found out/realized for the first time the newbie queue is silently using multiaction versions of all of its power roles. The information is in the publicly available role PMs, but it's not specified "new d3 using multiacting scum" nor listed as a Multitasking modifier that would necessarily change the titles of the Mafia's roles. I think that should be cleaner if the newbie queue is supposed to be on on-ramp to the normal queue, either designing the setup so that it doesn't need multitasking, listing the Mafia PRs or both the goon and the PR as multitasking, or listing that it's a rule for the setup that the game will use multitasking scum.

I will not claim that my setup was perfect.

I will however say that historical evidence showed that it would be balanced but due to improving town play relative to scum play that is no longer really a thing. As previously pointed out, the winrate in individual setups present in both matrix6 and newd3 have universally skewed their winrates towards town and the fakeclaim argument flatly does not apply to at least one (and I strongly dislike how it worked in practice, which was scum claiming doctor D1 and ICs very rarely explaining the situation properly and the game defaulting to not lynching them; seriously look back at Matrix6 and how often scum won by claiming doc and barely playing.)

I think NewD3 is more scum sided than Matrix6 was. I think the gap in observed winrate is due to a shift I have observed across social deduction sites where informed minorities are simply not winning very many games relative to how well they did in the past (ie, spies in Avalon 6P having a >50% winrate that is lower than it was a year ago is still a decline.)

The fact is a lot of these games are not being won by PRs. Scum lynches are happing incredibly disproportionately often on D1 and even the idea of what a town sweep is has changed. Games were describes as town sweeps in the past (2015) that were larges with two mislynches; there were a significant amount of games last year where every scum got consecutively lynches including in larges and sometimes with 0 useful PR results at all. As Ankamius/Alyssa said in a thread at some point this year the bar is just rising for towns.

I am not certain that giving towns less power than they reasonably should have to maintain a 50% winrate is the right answer, and I'm not certain that Skitter feeling like the game is an uphill battle would be a thing if being scum wasn't so oppressive in general at the moment. Even me and FL both lost scum games last year (ego dictates I cite major mod error etc etc) and we have both gone multiple past years undefeated.

I'll finish by again saying that I don't think my setup was perfect and it's not going to last forever but I think that this context might help to explain why the fence was constructed so you can decide whether or not to take it down.

Oh, and at NSG for lecturing people on scum play!

Also people calling for 2 of 4... it has 1 stupid setup that scum are almost always going to win (Doc VT) and a bunch of setups more townsided than anything in NewD3 (basically anything else), so I am really curious what you see in it.

I like the setup being simple to communicate, I'm not committed to what the four roles are.