Mafiascum.net

In post 5088, Natirasha wrote:(This is a sign your mechanic was broken Magua)

I have three observations here.

First, the bonus-on-red-auctions mechanic worked as intended. That is, it was not intended for Town to win most, if not all, of those auctions. Previous drafts of the setup simply had Town unable to bid on them (it would just be between the two scumteams), but that was deemed too much.

For Night-kill, it was specifically intended that scum would win all, or all-except-one, of those auctions. Town could cost scum money, but it was never intended to be an even or "fair" competition. It could happen, but I wanted it to happen no more than once in the game, even if the scum were being trampled.

For Investigation Immunity, Hitman, etc, there is a very strong town strategy of claiming when you won it (as was done with both II and Hitman D1), and I very much wanted to avoid that because I wanted to avoid confirmed innocents being confirmed innocents.

Allowing Town to bid on these auctions as well was more to do with giving the scum things to have to worry about and being more cautious than anything else.

---

Second, for the "sheer amount of money scum have" bit, there is an issue of scum snowballing when they're not lynched (that was the reason for Nero being governed -- he could generate more money for the team), yes. I played around with different systems that would scale the amount gained to the size of opposing players, but they proved very unwieldy.

Beyond this, "the plan" resulted in Lost Butterfly gaining about $500 from being transferred to, making up about 1/3 of the Right Hand Mafia's money at the end of the game.

This was contrasted, as before, with Town almost never lynched except at deadline, which I'll admit was not in the forecasted plan for the game. That did hurt Town in comparison to scum, yes.

---

Third, Town didn't really bid on much. Half the town never bid on anything because they transferred their money. N5, only pieguyn and Lord Mhork bid on anything at all. pieguyn won three abilities for $1 that Night. Several auctions that the scum put a lot of money on (eg, Governor) throughout the game went for $2-$10, rather than costing scum money.

Natirasha wrote: The second half of the "let's randomly fuck with the town". All of these abilities simply serve to prevent the town from coordinating properly. I understand what you want the mechanical point of this to be--all the factions, bidding on different powers to get them. It creates an interesting counterplay, and the unlinked scumteams only serve to excetuate that. I like the basic theory. However, obviously scum will try to coordinate actions in such a playground. These countermeasures, however, completely undermine that aspect of the game--in fact, it actively punishes the town for talking!

The design goal was so that the Town wouldn't communicate about Night stuff, yes (or, wouldn't communicate about Night stuff until a Day or two afterwards, which I couldn't stop). This was a direct response to what happened in the second game.

To the statement that without coordination Town couldn't win, eg, Night-kill: As above, that was the point. Town could win Night-kill if they always bid on their money on it (and got an Efficiency Bonus instead of never getting one...), but again, it was *never* the goal that Town could do so consistently. Maybe once around N4 or N5, but in doing so they'd lose all their money and that would be that. That is, I never wanted this game to become Nightless (or, with Town-controlled kills, essentially Double Day Nightless). It could happen, but it was never going to be dominant strategy. It was never intended that Town ever be able to communicate to control all the auctions.

The intention (if I can use that term loosely) was that Town would scumhunt, etc, during the Day, do their own individual thing at Night, and if they came up with something from those actions, maybe use it. It was always intended that mass-claim be bad for the Town.

Mistakes I made in this game:

- I incorrectly transcribed Harakiri's Night results one Night, indicating that they'd bid $10 on Bulletproof when they hadn't. This left them $1 short. Mistake was not caught until they claimed to Lost Butterfly in the Neighborhood QT and Mina thought they were signalling scum. This was the public mod error, because it involved information already claimed to another player.

- I incorrectly transcribed other results that were caught in time -- the Left Hand team's Mafia bonus (after DoctorPepper got lynched), which ability ProHawk advertised one Night, and who someone transferred to. In all cases these were transcription errors; the spreadsheet was always correct.

- Deadline should not have both taken money from Town and reduced the number of Days. Should've been one or the other.

- Although it didn't come up, multiple Governors should not be stackable during the same Day (I was worried the Right Hand Mafia might do this before the Nero Cain wagons started). As for what happened to Nero Cain, I was fine with that.

In post 5125, Magua wrote:First, the bonus-on-red-auctions mechanic worked as intended. That is, it was not intended for Town to win most, if not all, of those auctions. Previous drafts of the setup simply had Town unable to bid on them (it would just be between the two scumteams), but that was deemed too much.

For Night-kill, it was specifically intended that scum would win all, or all-except-one, of those auctions. Town could cost scum money, but it was never intended to be an even or "fair" competition. It could happen, but I wanted it to happen no more than once in the game, even if the scum were being trampled.

I go back to the question I asked--why even have them be biddable? What's the point? Why not just tone it down, give the two scumteams even/odd kills, and go from there?

For Investigation Immunity, Hitman, etc, there is a very strong town strategy of claiming when you won it (as was done with both II and Hitman D1), and I very much wanted to avoid that because I wanted to avoid confirmed innocents being confirmed innocents.

Allowing Town to bid on these auctions as well was more to do with giving the scum things to have to worry about and being more cautious than anything else.

...are scum not allowed to do that? Especially with Shell Game allowing them to transfer uses, if they wanted. It's "free" towncred.

Second, for the "sheer amount of money scum have" bit, there is an issue of scum snowballing when they're not lynched (that was the reason for Nero being governed -- he could generate more money for the team), yes. I played around with different systems that would scale the amount gained to the size of opposing players, but they proved very unwieldy.

Beyond this, "the plan" resulted in Lost Butterfly gaining about $500 from being transferred to, making up about 1/3 of the Right Hand Mafia's money at the end of the game.

This was contrasted, as before, with Town almost never lynched except at deadline, which I'll

happily

admit was not in the forecasted plan for the game. That did hurt Town in comparison to scum, yes.

I understand the plan backfiring and the deadline screwing with projected total, but I don't actually have much of a problem with the base cost the mafia had. Really, I don't.

Third, Town didn't really bid on much. Half the town never bid on anything because they transferred their money. N5, only pieguyn and Lord Mhork bid on anything at all. pieguyn won three abilities for $1 that Night. Several auctions that the scum put a lot of money on (eg, Governor) throughout the game went for $2-$10, rather than costing scum money.

I think this goes into another problem--lots of the abilities listed were of really marginal use, or in such a nerfed form as to be useless(Auction Detective, Medium, etc). Half the time, I was having trouble finding things I actually wanted to bid on--it all seemed so bland, so...generic, as if you were adding things for the sake of adding things.

The design goal was so that the Town wouldn't communicate about Night stuff, yes (or, wouldn't communicate about Night stuff until a Day or two afterwards, which I couldn't stop). This was a direct response to what happened in the second game.

This is one of those things that will fall over to human nature. Especially, considering that night actions are a big talking matter in even normal & newbie games, to think the town could discuss potential night actions is, well, kinda folly.

If I could give some advice, I'd recommend doing a scaled back version of this game next. Just have a few, high-profile auction actions and work from there. The auction mechanic was fun, but instead of trying to do this overelaborate and focused on countering style, just let things roll.

Sorry that I replaced in even though I really didn't have time for it, and turned what was an obvtown slot into an easy mislynch. Due to my pretty much non-presence in the game, I really don't think I have all that much I can say.

Good job to the scum, especially to LB and Muffin who I never once doubted until after I was dead.

Hard to say how balanced this was, scumteam controlled the daygame and nightgame pretty effectively - and a lot of the daygame was just because of the players involved.


Also town lost one of their strongest abilities in uh, idr the name of it (accountant) night 0/Night 1 due to no one advertising it. Also there's certainly enough abilities to trip scum up here.

Victory! Well done, team. It was so much fun working with N (hope to see you at the Reckoning!), Quilford, and Nero. Our QT was truly a thing of beauty. (I was scum at the same time in at the same time, and had to keep my mouth shut at my teammates bragging over how the QT might reach .) Nacho, Empire, and Muffin: you were all so good that even when all the evidence pointed to you, we were still never confident any of you were guilty. And judging from the scum QT, I'm sad I went for the "protown" neighbourize choice, because working with you guys would have been awesome.

I also liked meeting lots of newer players I've never been exposed to before, since I don't play much anymore. Some of you really impressed me.

Most of all, thanks to Magua for an impeccably modded game with a great, well-designed set-up.

In post 5130, Mina wrote:Victory! Well done, team. It was so much fun working with N (hope to see you at the Reckoning!), Quilford, and Nero

Thanks!

Reading the other scum QT out of order right now, and thoughts roughly as I go (will save more for another post):

-We were thinking of the Austerity Measures + Deadline plan, but worked out that it screws the scum over more than the town since Austerity Measures resolves after the wage and bonuses (because some town might have under $100, while all scum get more than that every day).

-It's embarrassing how many mistakes we made over role resolutions this game. We did not find out that Messenger was a action until we tried sending Muffin a message during N4 and were told, "Nope!"

-I love that the other team was as shocked by Hermy's flip as we were.

-@the other team looking for cues to who they should vote: I put off voting Nero D2 for so long because I figured you'd be looking out for that. You guys should have watched Pyro on N2! And my interactions with my partners this game were painfully obvious ("Yeah, uh, this player is totally scummy...but here, let me softly defend them for three paragraphs to the people voting them.")

-The point of the advertising post was 1) to look town, and 2) to clear upside down so he could make it into the top six. We'd advertised cop based on a misunderstanding of the set-up, so I figured we might as well capitalize on it.

-Yes, "How does it feel to be in the same camp as Nero?" was a blatant signal. Muffin messed with my head this game. If we'd only received KA's money, his guilt would have been obvious, but we were transferred $176 (which meant either KA or Muffin could have been the liar). N correctly spotted that Seanald could have sent us his $80 and Muffin nothing for the math to add up. But we were still paranoid. (upside down never getting his money from PeregrineV also sent me into spiraling paranoia about town roles that could interfere with night actions.) And I could see town conceivably not sending money as a gambit or reaction test. I voted KA and made a few comments at the beginning of D4 to set up a "Yeah, my money didn't add up!" claim just in case it became obvious you were gambiting town.

-Shit, Left Hand was the $355 bid on Neighbourizer? Sorry! ;_; I only bid so much on Neighbourizer because we were filthy rich and assumed that people in the town bloc like Peregrine or pieguyn could outbid the LH team. (Also, I had to do protown justifiable things with the money everyone knew I had.) And when we bid on it, we were really confident Muffin was scum, but then the innocent fucked with our heads.

-

was that extra hour extension really necessary? were there people who were frantically ISOing people in thread who were like, "OH FUCK NOW I CAN'T READ ISOS ANYMORE, PLEASE MAGUA EXTEND THE NIGHT PHASE JUST AN HOUR, JUST ONE MORE HOUR!"?

...um...this isn't as shocking as you'd think.

*hides under a rock*

-I was so close to neighbourizing Muffin, but then we were all, "Omigod, let's be REALLY, REALLY 100% SURE Harakiri is town and then NK him tonight!" I actually think it worked out well, because it allowed us to manipulate them better, made him look like our partner (thus deflecting ProHawk's paranoia onto them), and helped us recover from the $1 mistake. But you guys were supposed to pick up Messenger, dammit!

-I felt bad for not making it more obvious on D4 I'd won cop (I did make a deliberate cop slip, but it was too obscure to pick up on)...but why the fuck did you activate Investigation Immunity on a night you KNEW scum had the cop? The reason I claimed cop on D4 wasn't to protect Nero, but to signal to the other team that they SHOULDN'T use II tonight. I knew the N4 investigation was meaningless, but if I'd got an innocent on N5? Hell, , I would have assumed you were town. The only reason we had lingering doubts on eagle was because we could see him being silly enough to do something like that.

(EBWOP: claimed cop on D5, not D4)

Other blatant signals:

In post 4641, Lost Butterfly wrote:Can you elaborate on why you've been up and down on me, Muffin? I'm not sure I've followed your trajectory on my slot this game, since you've gone from being leery of me to having me as a weak townread to not wanting to go anywhere near lynching me to now apparently being unsure of me again. Also, shouldn't I be the one you're questioning, rather than asking other people about their reads on me (I mean, was ProHawk really going to change your mind)? Considering you're apparently unsure of me, I don't like how you haven't even mentioned the NK thing or any of my arguments with Harakiri, or that I have an innocent on you.

I mean, I'm reasonably confident in your alignment at this point, but I'm not quite "bet the game on it" sure, yet.

In post 4950, Lost Butterfly wrote:Fuck. I've got something like 2-3 hours of sleep within the past thirty-six hours, and can't think straight. I'm really confused right now.

Muffin, do you have a strong objection to either a Voided or baldeagle lynch (as in, you'd prefer to no-lynch rather than get rid of one)? Right now, I'm still leaning toward Voided because he seems like a surer bet, but I'll be around to switch to eagle if necessary. Hey, eagle, why is your vote still on uwop? I'm not quite sure penguin_alien is a good idea because I bought her explanation for the townslip (not so much that it's impossible to fake, but that she bothered to check the OP and was even on the verge of

voting

Garuda).

(Translation: can you promise that none of these are your partners?)

Muffin's and Garuda's posts going, "Gee, LB must be town, because unless her team is REALLY incompetent and doesn't know their partners, there would have been a quickhammer!" were hilarious, though. Sorry, but there was a non-zero chance that eagle had used II N5 (although what IDIOT would do that? ), or that Harakiri was too paranoid to claim in the QT, or that the other team hammered, or that there might have been a role that could block our kill if we outed ourselves. Slow-playing in LYLO when no one on your team is in danger of a lynch is always the best move.

Hilariously, I only realized that Garuda actually HAD been trying to quickhammer like a minute after I unvoted. And then I wanted to cry. I couldn't have left my vote on in case my lack of reaction outed me before upside down or Nero got back. His distancing really threw me off--I thought scum!him would have worked with me rather than sow paranoia against my slot over the $1 NK.

On the final day, we had the scum narrowed down to Muffin, Garuda, penguin, and BBmolla (and thought the latter looked really town). Muffin-Garuda seemed too good to be true, and after penguin's half-assed vote on Harakiri "to see what would happen," we were CONVINCED she had to be scum. We were then furious when all our other suspects started bussing her. The Voided wagon was an attempt to save her.

EBWOP: or that the other team took too long to hammer/didn't know what was a town lynch/.

1.8k posts damn

I will say that scum put in a TON more effort than any town here so they absolutely deserve the win.

In post 5135, Katsuki wrote:1.8k posts damn

Now look at the other one.

I guess I should say *most* of the town - myself included. Morph did work hard when they were alive.

In post 5136, ProHawk wrote:I will say that scum put in a TON more effort than any town here so they absolutely deserve the win.

This is truth.

If Marketplace 4 people could stop trying to "break the game" that'd be great.

Not that we would have won, none of us remaining town had the confidence to lead a lynch on any one of the scum left.

Sorry Voided.

Mass infodump.

Prohwak was... town??

yus

In post 5144, AngryPidgeon wrote:Prohwak was... town??

Why does this surprise you?

I mean me lynching Voided was inherently anti-town, but I was pretty much done by that point.

I think you mean Voided 's quote strip walls were inherently anti-town.

In post 5127, Natirasha wrote: I go back to the question I asked--why even have them be biddable? What's the point? Why not just tone it down, give the two scumteams even/odd kills, and go from there?

Early drafts did indeed have that, for the Night-kill (even/odd between the scumteams).

The main reason I didn't use it is that I really liked the idea of two scumteams who didn't necessarily want to outbid eachother, but wanted to outbid the town, and that setup removes that facet. That is, the fear of the Town being able to get a shot during the game should induce the scumteams to be more cautious.

...are scum not allowed to do that? Especially with Shell Game allowing them to transfer uses, if they wanted. It's "free" towncred.

The scum certainly can do it, but...
1) There's a shitload of abilities that can trip them up -- the game is balanced with the assumption that one scum will get outright tripped up by mechanics at some point (eg, Lost Butterfly being confirmed to win the NK for $1...) In this case, Auction Detective, Coroner, Forensic Account, Accountant, etc, etc could all trip up that claim. All of them except Auction Detective could do it Days after the fact.
2) In most games, scum can do Town-seeming things for little-to-no-cost besides effort. In site-meta, even bussing is usually not a big deal. The money mechanics here make all of these things non-free, which should dissuade scum from just doing it willy-nilly. Bussing costs money. Shell Games costs money. They can be done, but there's a cost to be considered.

I think this goes into another problem--lots of the abilities listed were of really marginal use, or in such a nerfed form as to be useless(Auction Detective, Medium, etc). Half the time, I was having trouble finding things I actually wanted to bid on--it all seemed so bland, so...generic, as if you were adding things for the sake of adding things.

Actually, I was simply adding things for variety. Well, not *just* for variety, but also to pad out the lists so that there could be "big" abilities in the game and have auctions every Night but not have the big abilities come up every Night.

Some of them still had pretty marginal benefit, yes (Market Analyst, eg -- I was flabbergasted how much attention that got).

Some of these had zero benefit for the Town, except that then the scum wouldn't have them (eg, Governor, Hitman, etc etc).

This is one of those things that will fall over to human nature. Especially, considering that night actions are a big talking matter in even normal & newbie games, to think the town could

not

discuss potential night actions is, well, kinda folly.

I tried to be as upfront as I could with what the sticks in this situation were, eg, the Mafia Role PM spelling out what the dirty trick triggers were. Or the cartoon at the top of the signup thread. Or my comments at the end of the last game. Etc.

These were things people were aware of, and mentioned, and even eg factored into The Plan.

In general, I'm not in favor of banning things outright, but in changing the carrots and the sticks to match the behavior. If someone decides they think the risks are worth it, that's fine. That's more or less how I feel about this game once The Plan came out. A bit more on this later.

If I could give some advice, I'd recommend doing a scaled back version of this game next. Just have a few, high-profile auction actions and work from there. The auction mechanic was fun, but instead of trying to do this overelaborate and focused on countering style, just let things roll.

Believe it or not, I've given this idea thought. My thoughts on it:

If you let the Town collaborate, they will. This will then change the game to being entirely Night action driven. This is what happened in both previous games. "Here's the list of auctions, here's who bids on what, any deviations from the plan will be met in fire. At the beginning of every Day be prepared to have your money audited."

That is simply not the type of game I am looking to run. It's not just this game -- I'm very heavily influenced by Percy's Stars Aligned games, and do not want repeats of what happened in SA3 (basically, you gain post restrictions by doing things in the game, with the scum also gaining one for the NK. At the start of every Day, town forced all players to run through each post restriction to see if they had any that were unclaimed.) Although I love my games mechanics-heavy, I don't want the discussion to be about the mechanics, I want it to be about the players. (Same comment goes for eg Zoraster's strategy mafia, which was played like a boardgame with limited moves).

The "you really shouldn't claim all information you have the moment you get it" is a running theme in my games (eg Paranoia). It may not be for everyone, but I am highly unlikely to ever change that facet because it is something I enjoy about the game. If we disagree there, that's fine; just being upfront about what I'm looking for.

Back to your simplified example: You could take away the "bid-for-NK" bit, and then massively reduce the number of auctions, or have them only occur every X Nights, or whathaveyou. You should have a better way of tiebreaking than random.org, because the tiebreakers will be a lot more frequently needed. But I don't think you'll have changed the basic underlying formula (well, removing the bid-for-NK would allow you to put town and mafia on a more similar money curve...but if you do that, and there's any sort of confirmability, scum are going to get screwed if they actually try to play like scum). If town knows there's a Cop and a Doctor that have been auctioned off, what mechanic do you have in that makes Follow-the-Cop not the ideal town strategy?