Mafiascum.net

i mean like, in this game, scum played well in a sense that:

(1) we outed 3 major power roles on day 1
(2) used our one and only blocking role to block the vigilante, and then that vigilante shot the bulletproof traitor
(3) both investigatives hit a false inno on n1
(4) scum shot a power role each and every night

and it STILL resulted in a 7p yelo where 3 people were confirmed not groupscum. like. what. i'm sorry but like what is scum supposed to *do* here.

In post 8175, Datisi wrote:i mean like, in this game, scum played well in a sense that:

(1) we outed 3 major power roles on day 1
(2) used our one and only blocking role to block the vigilante, and then that vigilante shot the bulletproof traitor
(3) both investigatives hit a false inno on n1
(4) scum shot a power role each and every night

and it STILL resulted in a 7p yelo where 3 people were confirmed not groupscum. like. what. i'm sorry but like what is scum supposed to *do* here.

That’s my point

i mean you *could* argue "well, masons and neighbours are false positives for the traffic analyst!!!" but (1) scum then get punished for doing the Good Scum Play of outing town's power roles (masons), the entire hood got outed early anyway -- and i don't think this is a very unlikely scenario to happen, since hood almost ALWAYS get outed very early sincle people just have that gut reaction of outing them early, and i feel like the reviewers know this

there was supposed to be a (2) there^^ as a point of hood being outed early

i mean like i get that 5 scum in a 19p game is a lot of social influence (and it is definitely my fault for heavily misreading who the traitor is) but the town's mechanical counterplay just turns the game into... i dunno, feeling suffocating.

maybe mountainous really is the way idk

I don’t think NPR does enough how does scum win? Yes scum won here but imho if they didn’t have the stellar players they had they lose.

I just wish I would have stuck with Skitter D1

In post 8175, Datisi wrote:i mean like, in this game, scum played well in a sense that:

(1) we outed 3 major power roles on day 1
(2) used our one and only blocking role to block the vigilante, and then that vigilante shot the bulletproof traitor
(3) both investigatives hit a false inno on n1
(4) scum shot a power role each and every night

and it STILL resulted in a 7p yelo where 3 people were confirmed not groupscum. like. what. i'm sorry but like what is scum supposed to *do* here.

Well the only PR that actually did anything remotely useful for town was the one scum killed last, and they did a lot of good things I guess. my role was extremely neg util this outcome and on average is probably neutral for town given scum know we exist.

I personally think this setup would’ve been better if traffic analyst was nerfed and scum weren’t told psych existence. But overall probably close to balanced.

I agree TA is probably too strong this game especially with the hood getting outted a lot of the time. I agree this setup probably like slightly Town sided overall.

In post 8177, Datisi wrote:i mean you *could* argue "well, masons and neighbours are false positives for the traffic analyst!!!" but (1) scum then get punished for doing the Good Scum Play of outing town's power roles (masons), the entire hood got outed early anyway -- and i don't think this is a very unlikely scenario to happen, since hood almost ALWAYS get outed very early sincle people just have that gut reaction of outing them early, and i feel like the reviewers know this

I agree with this. Masons getting guiltied will just out them. They’re unlikely to actually get elim

role that can get hard guilties on scum and that punishes good scum play of outing the vigilante, in addition of being harder to get elim'd just by virtue of being a power role

"probably neutral for town"

dude i'm sorry but what

In post 8178, Datisi wrote:there was supposed to be a (2) there^^ as a point of hood being outed early

i mean like i get that 5 scum in a 19p game is a lot of social influence (and it is definitely my fault for heavily misreading who the traitor is) but the town's mechanical counterplay just turns the game into... i dunno, feeling suffocating.

maybe mountainous really is the way idk

maybe you just wanted to be mafia with me <3

In post 8183, Datisi wrote:role that can get hard guilties on scum and that punishes good scum play of outing the vigilante, in addition of being harder to get elim'd just by virtue of being a power role

"probably neutral for town"

dude i'm sorry but what

Luckily I was still gated in 3 other ways besides the vigilante being outted and scum know they can avoid my targets

I think it’s better if the psychologist is public info to everyone or public info to me

I do have some comments here (since I was pinged).

The first and most important is that from my skim here there are multiple people saying the setup was townsided and at least one person saying the setup was slightly scumsided, and also multiple people saying it was balanced. I see this as generally at least not a bad sign taken in aggregate, but also it makes it difficult to actually take a real lesson away from the game as the reviewer other than "yeah, seems like a reasonably good job". Of course it's not people's jobs to make that possible, people can say whatever they want and of course opinions will differ. And it is my job as an NRG member (and, well, the listmod) if I'm looking at feedback to sift through it and figure out what it means.

Regarding this actual run of the game: yes, lots of things went right for scum and the game was close. And also I haven't read the whole game ofc so feel free to correct me but:

Datisi wrote:and it STILL resulted in a 7p yelo where 3 people were confirmed not groupscum. like. what. i'm sorry but like what is scum supposed to *do* here.

This is a favorable situation for scum; 7p yelo with 3 people confirmed not-groupscum (assuming from what people have said that one of those 3 was the traitor) leaves 4 people, 2 town 2 mafia, where the town has to lim both mafia before limming either of the town. That's EV of 1/6 for town. So yeah, scum played well and ended up in a great position as a result.

It's easy to point to things that went well for scum, but there are also things that went poorly for them. Yes, scum managed to NK a PR every night, but town also managed to avoid miseliminating a PR every single day. From the sound of things, scum played well, but the town also generally played above-average, or at least it wasn't one of those games where the town caved in on itself and scum just swooped in to win it. The arguably-strongest PR lived until night 5 and managed to out four results.

Regarding balance in general: I think there's still fundamentally an effect where balancing a game on this site simply requires more town power than people would expect. Large games make things harder to judge (and consequently harder to balance) for lots of reasons (less experience balancing them, more variables, more inherent swing, etc). In a large game with lots of scum, ultimately all it takes is one scum playing really well to slip through the cracks and win, and with so many scum in the game that becomes pretty likely. I really don't know how close to 50-50 you'd get if you ran this setup 100 times but I don't think it'd be bad.

Regarding design patterns: lots of people complain about things like hard innos/hard guilties and yeah, they are intrinsically somewhat swingy and in some ways unfun if you're caught on the wrong side of things. But in practice there are just very few ways to balance a game that don't involve giving town quite powerful, and there is not anything nearly as strong as, in some form, hard information. There have been cases (at least one i remember) recently of setup designers/reviewers probably giving too much bulk of this to towns in design processes, so I think it is probably something NRG members are thinking about more in general lately, but I don't think 3 hard inno roles in a 19 player setup is anywhere close to egregious. Especially since there isn't a single other PR in this setup whose claim is likely to elicit a response of "yeah, this is definitely real".

And of course I'm not trying to say you can't feel that the setup was townsided or be annoyed at how many cleared roles there were :p. Just giving my 2 cents.

In post 8186, implosion wrote:I do have some comments here (since I was pinged).

The first and most important is that from my skim here there are multiple people saying the setup was townsided and at least one person saying the setup was slightly scumsided, and also multiple people saying it was balanced. I see this as generally at least not a bad sign taken in aggregate, but also it makes it difficult to actually take a real lesson away from the game as the reviewer other than "yeah, seems like a reasonably good job". Of course it's not people's jobs to make that possible, people can say whatever they want and of course opinions will differ. And it is my job as an NRG member (and, well, the listmod) if I'm looking at feedback to sift through it and figure out what it means.

Regarding this actual run of the game: yes, lots of things went right for scum and the game was close. And also I haven't read the whole game ofc so feel free to correct me but:

Datisi wrote:and it STILL resulted in a 7p yelo where 3 people were confirmed not groupscum. like. what. i'm sorry but like what is scum supposed to *do* here.

This is a favorable situation for scum; 7p yelo with 3 people confirmed not-groupscum (assuming from what people have said that one of those 3 was the traitor) leaves 4 people, 2 town 2 mafia, where the town has to lim both mafia before limming either of the town. That's EV of 1/6 for town. So yeah, scum played well and ended up in a great position as a result.

It's easy to point to things that went well for scum, but there are also things that went poorly for them. Yes, scum managed to NK a PR every night, but town also managed to avoid miseliminating a PR every single day. From the sound of things, scum played well, but the town also generally played above-average, or at least it wasn't one of those games where the town caved in on itself and scum just swooped in to win it. The arguably-strongest PR lived until night 5 and managed to out four results.

Regarding balance in general: I think there's still fundamentally an effect where balancing a game on this site simply requires more town power than people would expect. Large games make things harder to judge (and consequently harder to balance) for lots of reasons (less experience balancing them, more variables, more inherent swing, etc). In a large game with lots of scum, ultimately all it takes is one scum playing really well to slip through the cracks and win, and with so many scum in the game that becomes pretty likely. I really don't know how close to 50-50 you'd get if you ran this setup 100 times but I don't think it'd be

too

bad.

Regarding design patterns: lots of people complain about things like hard innos/hard guilties and yeah, they are intrinsically somewhat swingy and in some ways unfun if you're caught on the wrong side of things. But in practice there are just very few ways to balance a game that don't involve giving town

something

quite powerful, and there is not anything nearly as strong as, in some form, hard information. There have been cases (at least one i remember) recently of setup designers/reviewers probably giving too much bulk of this to towns in design processes, so I think it is probably something NRG members are thinking about more in general lately, but I don't think 3 hard inno roles in a 19 player setup is anywhere close to egregious. Especially since there isn't a single other PR in this setup whose claim is likely to elicit a response of "yeah, this is definitely real".

There’s 6 hard innos not three

That’s the issue

Yeah, this game was close, and I don't think the town fighting each other was as bad as people say it was. There were times when we nearly had a VPB-Fire-DV-Yeet-Myself town block, but scum was able to break it before it got built. One or two clutch scum fades could have opened up this game heavily.

I also feel the 5 scum is being downplayed to how powerful that truly is to have an extra voice for scum play.

There weren't any like Hard Inno slots, which automatically make it so scum don't get boxed in, and scum can fake claim and mess with the setup so they don't get boxed in.

With 5 scum, yes, there's gonna be strong PR's, and personally, I don't think there was that many overly strong PR's, which showed. I don't think there was a single scum PR claim other than Eyes, and that was done at a decent albeit after I found out it was A50, and reanalyzed, it did come off as super scummy.

But yeah, the mere fact there were 5 scum is why it was hard to get on the same page as town because it ended up with multiple townies being right, but that is the premise of this setup (and every game to a certain extent), but if town is able to collectively get together, then they pull it off.

We were close to doing so, and I believe Tene vs Scorp, finding out they were both town, would have been the last key to pulling this game off for town.


It's one of the reasons I'm not the biggest fan of having that extra traitor as scum because it always feels rough as scum to have to play against a setup like that no matter what, especially considering you don't fully feel like a 5 person scum team.

Years back we had a large extra traitor slot meta for some reason, and it always feels like it sucks for scum when you're playing.


I do think town were working together as much as they could, and we were super close.

For instance, my moment of doubt and paranoia on VP Balter and Cape and compromising rather than holding the ground could have changed the game, but Frogster actively played that VPB/Frogster into my head, whether by accident or not, so scum did heavily effect the day play.

STD also coasted on me and it protected Frogster.


I do think it's slightly scum sided based on that extra slot, but it wasn't like broken scum sided.

In post 8186, implosion wrote:I do have some comments here (since I was pinged).

...

Thanks for this. I was personally curious because I wanna get better at setup design, but I also thought it was worth getting feedback considering some people felt like this setup shouldn't have ever gotten through review

To be clear I'm not hurt by that, just feel like it's a discussion worth having

idk much about setup design, but my thoughts:

i don't know if it comes down to personal preference or not, but i think that the nature of games that have >standard balance number of scum, and therefore have to have strong town PR to balance that, will automatically make there be a lack of wiggle room and things can feel oppressive, especially for scum, but in some ways town can feel that too. like d1 it felt like we kept running people up and they ended up being PRs, and had to keep turning elsewhere. then with the hood, the masons, the various PR results, it felt like we were constrained a lot by mechanics and it ended up taking prominence over dayplay. and scum had a much smaller area to work in, because there were several clears from PRs plus they had an extra scum which narrows the field of limmable town even further.

basically point is that if town needs strong PRs to be balanced, then they must use those effectively or they are at a disadvantage, and so naturally mechanics tend to dominate play, and it limits the directions that both sides can go

i don't think there's anything super wrong with that, there are elements of mechanical play that are enjoyable, and i think if we were better at finding the right balance between focus on mechanics and focus on dayplay, town would have won. and i still had lots of fun and think it was a good game overall. but the setup by nature makes for pretty different experience than a more standard, less power-heavy setup

honestly? I don't feel like town was really that powerful. I mean it COULD be more powerful than I think it is and it just looks not very powerful b/c 3 of our 4 most powerful roles got outted d1. The TA was made more powerful b/c the hood was outted and she avoided the 3 false positives. Psychologist seems sorta useless. doc might be more powerful than it really was b/c I was shit with my actions.

agree with Boon that 5 scum made scum pretty powerful.

large's also might be pro scum in a way, like in a mini only like 4 or 5 players have to work together whereas in a large that 4 or 5 isn't going to do much and there are many more voices all competing and there's going to be much more swing in the day phase.

April was town???

hi Fua. I missed you after you replaced out.

In post 8194, fua wrote:April was town???

Yes, to the surprise of many, including scum

I'm always shocked anyone can think I am mafia :<

i manage to scumread ari even when i am scum >_>

In post 8198, Datisi wrote:i manage to scumread ari even when i am scum >_>

you just wanted me to be on your team <3