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Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:15 pm
by rb
Im probably gonna host a mountainous type setup soon :D

Pedit: LUL

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:25 pm
by Transcend
Fucking hell that was a genius plan and my one and only fear was a fucking strongman

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:27 pm
by JaeReed
rb wrote:Im probably gonna host a mountainous type setup soon :D
Yeah I was thinking about hosting one too at some stage.

In normals you have to adhere to certain rules, which I think is why you'll find a lot more townsided setups here. Sometimes it just goes overboard though. I'm not sure if you'd find this setup to be much the same.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:31 pm
by JaeReed
In post 51, Transcend wrote:Fucking hell that was a genius plan and my one and only fear was a fucking strongman
I felt
really bad
when you responded to your role PM with "Ah fuck yeah." because I could predict this happening from the moment you got it.

I felt mildly sorry for you when you messaged me with "see my crumbs?" like an excited little puppy q.q

Then I felt less sorry for you when you kept doing it, lol.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:11 pm
by mastin2
As an experienced reviewer, I can tell you: most setups we receive are either hideously scumsided (scum have multiple PRs) or hideously townsided, and that near-universally to BOTH is extremely swingy setups. Different reviewers hold different policies. Mine is "less is more". It has been proven time and time again how scumsided mountainous games are and how no matter what, towns therefore fundamentally NEED some degree of power in order to so much as REMOTELY function properly.

The key though is to not make the town players
rely
on the power roles. Their PRs should be used to displace the tactical advantage that is scum on an online forum which allows for interactions over time that are inherent in the forum mafia environment. (Basically, because scum have no reliable tells, their informed minority is able to consistently do better than what statistical probability would dictate--you literally have better odds of random lynching to victory in a mountainous game than you do at scumhunting-based lynching. That's why we use PRs.)

Emphasis on
displace
the scum's
natural advantage
. So PRs should enhance the town. They should give clues. It's like a puzzle where instead of an infinite number of answers, you are given a list of fifty: suddenly, what became a statistical impossibility is now something far more reasonable. It should NOT be taken so far as to reduce the number of puzzle pieces down to, saaaaaaaaaaaaay, 2.

Thus, my policy of "less is more": less scum roles, because scum already have an inherent advantage that new moderators
consistently
underrate. They do not need a counter for every town role. Less town roles, because while towns are stupid, while towns are dumb and cannot win without power roles...there is such a thing as going overboard. The town only needs a
small
advantage to displace the scum's natural advantage. Not, "Cop, Doc, Watcher, Innocent Child vs 3 Goons", advantage. (Or far more commonly, six town power roles. Yes, reviewers get setups with SIX town power roles in a mini. It's not fun to deal with stubborn moderators who don't realize just how absurd it is to have half the game as power roles.)

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:46 pm
by rb
The only thing that's proven is how shit so many people are at playing the daygame as town.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:52 pm
by rb
Like I'm lucky to find 2-3 other town players I can say are actively making it more likely for town to win either with good reads or just cooperative nature. So more than half the town are just lurkers not trying or just outright bad.

I don't really think it's an achievement to have a winrate of 50/50 (seems to be people's idea of 'good' balance. I think it's an achievement when good play wins the game and bad play loses it.

If the game is harder for town and people lose because they suck it's not a reason to make games swingy. Swingy games are shit no matter who wins really and I don't care if some setup is a perfect 50/50 winrate because winning half the time isn't really the 'point' of mafia.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 11:09 pm
by JaeReed
I think all games are inherently swingy because everything depends on who rolls what alignment anyway. Like, disregarding roles, there's a huge level of play difference between so many people, and some just don't have the drive to improve. I think having a PR makes town lazy too. Towns on here have fallen into this state where they've started relying on PRs over all else. Then you've got town that can have good reads but start lurking the fuck out of games because they don't want to be wrong or they're procrastinating reading up on the thread and it's like ??? why even play?

Like, I can't imagine that kind of playstyle as being fun, tbh. I'm often wrong and my play in Fireworks was shit because I considered myself an important PR and wanted to be someone scum would take to D3 at least but for the most part I at least think I
try
. I've read so much theory lately and I don't know if it's helping but I'm at least trying to do something to improve my play, even if I don't get results right away because I keep getting dragged into the game too far to think about what I'm doing and then have to re-distance to read it again. Like, idunno, I'm rambling.

Tl;dr I don't think town tries hard enough because they're handed shit on a silver platter.

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 1:15 am
by Transcend
im a good town!!!!

sometimes

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 2:55 am
by JaeReed
^ you're not one of the town I'm complaining about =P I'm basically complaining about bad town that refuse to try to improve.

I haven't seen rb as town yet actually. My guess so far would be it's similar to town!Transcend but I've only seen his scumgame sooo... =P

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 7:42 am
by mhsmith0
In post 40, rb wrote:Actually I think its because 3 scum alive makes it so hard to cover tracks beyond day2 in a mini on MS unless you somehow kill lots of PRs since all of the games here are just fucking litteted with them.

I swear no one on this site is remotely capable of playing a mountainous setup, makes every town win ive ever had feel almost cheap tbh
Mountainous is hard because towns are lazy and there are a lot of lynchbaits and it's tough to separate bad from wolf. NY198 was an especially town-sided setup where reviewers just didn't balance it right. Honestly I think that towns in general get too much power vs what I feel like they shoudl need, but town win rates suggest that they DO need such power (though NY198 was still over the top).

The main reason I like mountainous is that my odds of randing town are high. That said, mountainous also has the annoying feature of just getting SPK's (strong player kills) on early nights, so some kind of nightless or semi-nightless (like open 646) is IMO pretty nice as well.

PS in 10v3 mini normals, there should always be 3-5 town PRs. Always. There are no roles good enough to give town just 2 of them (at least not roles that are remotely reasonable to expect - it'd be like ascetic 1-shot BP cop and jailkeeper vs 3 goons, and that kind of setup is just stupid)

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 7:48 am
by mhsmith0
FWIW I also think that it's relatively more fun to have roles that require skill to use correctly (vig, tracker, doctor, odd night weak doctor :D, jailkeeper, roleblocker, etc.) vs stuff that's just simple "make peeks and don't die" (cop).

I also find it interesting that 10v3 when one of the 3 is a traitor seems to be generally balanced, while 10v3 when all three are actively together has been anything but. Not entirely sure why, especially when traitor games are a low sample size, so it could very well be noise.

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 8:22 pm
by rb
In post 57, JaeReed wrote:I think all games are inherently swingy because everything depends on who rolls what alignment anyway. Like, disregarding roles, there's a huge level of play difference between so many people, and some just don't have the drive to improve. I think having a PR makes town lazy too. Towns on here have fallen into this state where they've started relying on PRs over all else. Then you've got town that can have good reads but start lurking the fuck out of games because they don't want to be wrong or they're procrastinating reading up on the thread and it's like ??? why even play?

Like, I can't imagine that kind of playstyle as being fun, tbh. I'm often wrong and my play in Fireworks was shit because I considered myself an important PR and wanted to be someone scum would take to D3 at least but for the most part I at least think I
try
. I've read so much theory lately and I don't know if it's helping but I'm at least trying to do something to improve my play, even if I don't get results right away because I keep getting dragged into the game too far to think about what I'm doing and then have to re-distance to read it again. Like, idunno, I'm rambling.

Tl;dr I don't think town tries hard enough because they're handed shit on a silver platter.
Yeah I agree.

Tbh I don't see the problem of there being lots of lazy players as being fixed by handing out more town power. It's fixed by having less lazy players. Town winrates might plummet for a bit but it's better than having terrible games. The way the site 'meta' goes now is that if the town has 4-5 players who are semi-decent, the game is won for town because they'll tack on 3-4 mechanical clears minimum on top of that in like no time at all.

Although when I say I like mountainous I should say that it's not the pure VT vs Goons that I think it has to be, my favourite setup is literally 9VT + 1Cop vs. 3 goons. Gr8est setup evar kthx.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 10:48 am
by JaeReed
You guys still following along?

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 10:51 am
by JaeReed
Welcome ironstove! Keep spoilers behind tags, yada yada yada, you get the drill I think.

Feel free to submit any night actions you may have had in spoilers btw and I'll let you know whether it would have made a difference!

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:11 am
by mastin2
I am!
Albeit mostly snarking in the private threads. :P

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 3:33 pm
by rb
In post 63, JaeReed wrote:You guys still following along?
Bored tbh, town has like 27 PRs again.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 4:12 pm
by JaeReed
Does that mean you have been following?

Spoiler: town PRs in full
Town has 5 if you include neighbours.
There is a 1-shot Universal Backup Neighbour (so Titus has to choose between the gunsmith or the jailkeep tonight then loses the other, shots aren't refunded)
Neighbour
Doctor (this was the only thing I was kinda iffy about in the setup because it can cause a lot of clears if the doc is good enough and isn't forced to claim)
2-Shot Follower
JOAT

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 4:18 pm
by mhsmith0
Spoiler:
Neighbor isn't really a pr tho, so really it's 4 IMO.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 4:19 pm
by mhsmith0
Oh that should probably be spoiled sorry

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 4:33 pm
by JaeReed
What? I think your eyes are playing tricks on you, smith. You totally spoiled that. ;)

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 4:34 pm
by mhsmith0
Oh of course :lol:

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 6:42 pm
by rb
LUL 4 town PRs

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 6:46 pm
by rb
This town is playing the daygame like absolute dogshit but will probably win anyway :^)

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 6:50 pm
by rb
Like there's a 7person argument going on and none of these geniuses have figured out that by basic mathematics there's not enough scum left for everyone else in the argument to be scum, but let's all keep having a big town argument and not try to cooperate or find middle ground.

Also the top wagons of players who've played terribly dissipate because claims.

Dat feel when 50% of town lynches result in a PR claim (neighbour) - I guess we just assume every town player is so shit they need a claim to not be lynched.