[REVIEW] Open Setup Reviews

[Isis]

Looks like the setup has actually been run with this oversight. I think if you ran a slightly flawed setup like this, and one townie figured out that exploit midgame and pressured the suicide mafia about doing it in a time sensitive way, I would pragmatically accept Kerset's approach as a way of handling what has happened.

I think the cleanest answer is to specify in the suicide bomber role PM that only bombings submitted by PM are valid, and to post all role PMs in the OP.

There might be some fancy convoluted redesign you could do that converts the Vanilla townies to Loyal Suicide Bombers and pulls the strategy into some sort of range where it can be useful but isn't gamebreaking, but Kids With Guns isn't interesting enough to me for me to want to figure out how exactly I'd turn those knobs.

[Isis]

Local suicide bomber is a role though... like if you hit mafia it's technically worth

Not really.
If you correctly identify scum and target them with suicide bomber, you get a cop shot at the cost of a life.
If you miss, you lose one full mislynch.
A full mislynch, is like, a guess at the mafia, a la a cop shot. So loyal suicide bomber does not grant a net positive to the town, as far as I can tell.
It does provide a novel gladiator/governor type effect that you are getting that lynch-esque decision without consensus from your town, which can be cool, but those effects aren't generally expected to improve town winrate.

[Isis]

Further adjustments... I'm replacing "the flu" with "sepsis", the infected player inherits the virus role and the original player dies, and patients don't know if they are even/odd commuters. I'm also removing the bulletproof protection from the virus.

Pandemic Mafia

13 Players (1 Cult, 1 SK, 11 Townies)

1

Virus

(Cult Recruiter/Self-Poisoner)
1

Sepsis

(Serial Killer)
1

Town Quack Doctor

(Essentially a Vig)
5

Town Patient

(Odd Night Compulsive Commuter)
5

Town Patient

(Even Night CompulsiveCommuter)

• Each day phase, players must choose a player to receive an experimental treatment. If they are town, they will be killed. If they are anti-town, they are "cured" and removed from the game.
  Lynching is compulsive
  (plurality voting, if there is a tie BOTH players are lynched)
  
• Virus
  - Can infect 1 player each night. The Virus player dies at the end of the next day phase and the infected player inherits the Virus role. If the targeted player is also targeted by sepsis or quack, the infection fails. If the virus is targeted by sepsis or quack, the virus faction survives with an infected player.
  
• Virus wins when the majority of the town is infected or nothing can prevent that from happening.
  
• Sepsis
  -
  Immune
  to being infected. Can target 1 player each night to try and kill them.
  
• Sepsis wins when all other players have died or have been cured.
  
• Quack Doctor
  -
  Immune
  to being infected. Can target 1 player each night to receive the treatment. anti-town targets are cured, patients are killed
  
• Town Patients
  - Are not told if they are even/odd night compulsive commuters.
  
• Town wins when all anti-town players have been "cured"

I think the original "virus" role will receive an "infected" role PM pregame, they don't become the virus until the end of day 1. the "virus" role PM will be part of the virus PT

I was surprised this didn't fill. I expected players to want something simple-ish during these "unprecedented times". I have a couple observations about trying to correct my own predictive thinking:
-Sitewide demand for games in general has been lower, as far as I can tell, during these "unprecedented times". I giggled at the people who thought it would be

signficantly higher

, but there was an even more dramatic dip than I expected.
-Publicly disclosing a third party seems like it might be a poison pill, with TemporalLich's setup also not doing well (and as an anecdotal thing, being the reason I queued for neither setup based on my personal preferences). It makes me wonder whether closed setup moderators ought to have a come-to-Jesus about whether it's a player-driven choice to use a third party as well. The last time I can remember Open 3p firing was Jingle firing a game with a lyncher nearly a year ago, and I'm pretty sure Jingle has a pretty strong site rep etc.
-Having guaranteed access to a certain kind of game twist seems to do better than having uncertain access to it, at least in the minitheme queue. I think the virus mechanic was interesting, but for those looking at the setup it maybe didn't look interesting enough for players who didn't roll it and instead rolled town to play against it.
I want to make a pointed note that making that speculation is not the same as the game filling, firing, and checking afterwards whether it was actually fun or not. I was part of a closed large with near-unanimous consensus that the SK in the setup made the game unfun. Its a bit disorienting to see an open setup not even fill potentially because a <small 3p faction> was present so soon afterwards, when this one is implemented far better imo.

[Isis]

I think "the community has tried AitP and determined it's not very fun" could maybe be added to BBMolla's common setup traps thing.

[Isis]

I'm not sure whether the core idea of giving townies mechanics they can use to game throw, then jacking up the EV is good game design. It probably is I'm just not sure about it.

[Isis]

It's generally presumed that if we tighten deadlines up to a certain point, we reach a different part of the curve where the deadlines are too short and it is favoring scum because there's no time to scumhunt. We don't really have the data to know for sure where that breaking point is, but we know that MU runs setups generally similar to ours with time constraints nearly as drastically different as this and they have better town winrates, so probably this short of a deadline is not truly a handicap. Of course, running the game with a playerbase that might actually post on the 47th hour several times might lead to some differing results, but this setup would be tied with setups that punish activity-based policy lynching the least.

The multivoting and 1-day nature is where the scumsiding is going to come from, and I think it's plenty of scumsiding. This queueable as is, my guess is a little townsided if run on ms.net but not enough for me to advocate removing an entire VT.

[Isis]

Uh. Doesn't the town just agree lynches with accountability are better and vote no lynch each night? Eventually mafia can redirect enough votes to force a lynch at night but they can derail no lynch at the same point they can derail a lynch on a specific player, so this is just vanilla nightless with certain black flag conditions

[Isis]

I am trying to figure out how to scale Undertale to 3 scum, out of concern 1 scum 9p day2's kind of aren't mafia.
Please halp
https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.p ... #p11956213
https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.p ... #p12022732

[Isis]

Narrowed down to this, please can I have some eyes: https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.p ... #p12022732

[Isis]

When players adopt a very deferential strategy with vig, it already is that. There's a strong argument for that strategy.

[Isis]

hello balance wizards!

i have a window of free time coming up that i was considering dedicating to modding a game. an old idea that i never ended up experimenting with was my trapdoors nightless setup. i was hoping to finally give this a whirl pending peer review.

the setup;

3 mafia, 7 townies. Nightless.

- Imagine all ten players lining up in a row
- At the start of each day the mafia selects which player to place the trapdoor under. That player is poised to be executed.
- The town can choose to execute that player or move the trapdoor under someone else
- If the trapdoor was under the player in position #5 and the town instead decides to execute player #7, it costs two moves to execute that player
- The town can only move the trapdoor ten times for the entire game
- For the purpose of this game, position #10 wraps back around to position #1, and when someone is executed the gap closes in the lineup, ie; if #8 is executed, #7 is now connected to #9
- The mafia can't place the trapdoor under the same player on consecutive days
- Mafia have daytalk
- The ten players' positions in the line up are randomised pregame

Mafia wins if they control 50% of the town. If the town has used all their moves while the mafia is still active, the town will be considered endgamed as mafia cannot be executed now.

~~

Scum will probably need to place the trapdoor under themselves at different points in the game, so it should create some tasty wifom about how the mafia think the town will react to their choices. For town, determining how to spend your resources could be an interesting mechanic -- how sure do you have to be for someone to be scum if it costs two or three moves to do it? Do you wait until the scum place the trapdoor closer on future days and execute a second or third best target today who is closer? Conserving moves and regularly executing scum's choice could be viable and as it gives the town more flexibility deeper in the game, but if scum thinks the town will be doing this, they might select townies for their trapdoor choice with a higher frequency, and so the wifom will flow.

is it balanced?
is it fun?
is 10 moves an appropriate amount of flexibility afforded to town?

You might be interested in skimming Deathlist since it was a somewhat similar setup. For assessing the 2nd and 3rd questions, that setup was horrendously scumsided so it won't say much about balance.

[Isis]

I got 1/12th for a straight row also and am just gonna assume gamma is correct for 3/4

[Isis]

I think you should probably reshuffle the playerlist randomly every single day. Fixing a random swing by adding more randomness is an underrated option, large numbers of random events tend towards the mean.

The odds of worst-case-scenario scum positioning drops from 8% to 2% with daily reshuffles. 2% is like acceptable tolerance for some normal queue setups that become broken abominations if certain PRs die in the wrong order or whatever.

It will also be less swingy and unsatisfying in terms of there emerging a 3 card townbloc that happens to be sitting adjacent to eachother that gets picked over and over, etc, just better in general.

[Isis]

ebwop, "I am going to assume Gamma Emerald's final result of 1/6th for three mafias with one gap is correct without calculating for myself 3 mafias 1 gap"

[Isis]

Mafia&Mafia

3 Red Mafia
4 Blue Mafia
2 Masons
8 Vanilla Townies
Nightless. At any time, a Red Mafia may submit a kill by PM. If the named player is mafia, they will die. If the named player is a Mason, nothing will happen. If the named player is VT, the submitter will die.
At any time, a Blue Mafia may submit a kill by PM. If the named player is a Mason, they will die. If the named player is a Mafia, nothing will happen. If the named player is VT, the submitter will die.
Red Mafia win the game and exit the game when they outnumber Vanilla Townies and Blue Mafia combined. Blue Mafia win the game and exit the game when their numbers are tied or better with the red mafia and are tied or better with the town. Town win when all mafia have been eliminated and at least one town aligned player is alive, but lose instead if both mafia groups exited the game.

[Isis]

I like the statistical mindset, but I think that specific solution goes against the original setup idea
The setup seems based around the static locations of the players. Taking that away creates a chaotic not-really-system that just seems less interesting.

I hear this. Maybe make it quasi-static like Deathlist? Things get mutated based on the actions of the previous day but something about the order of the initial rand affects the game every phase.

[Isis]

Typos

[Isis]

It's fixed now.

It's a shitpost setup anyway

[Isis]

I think you want the investigative to check mafia, not wolves, so that it doesn't incidentally determine which setup you're in, right?

[Isis]

I can't play Mask of Monsters type games anymore


Anyway, I think this proposed setup is not as good as running Mask of Monsters again would be. A random subset of the playerlist take an interest in/is proficient with guessing alts, so the mechanic is more interesting if you maximize the number of players who can participate in altguessing. Instead of just scum

If you had some weird system where the townies could altguess each other to doctor the altguess nightkills maybe? Idk. I think the possibility you rand this and both the wolves are players who happen to frequent a different queue from the other 7 most of the time is a sort of risk with this design.

[Isis]

This looks roughly balanced to me. Cupid's role in the setup is exciting because in a closed setup such a role would be more likely to be used for consensus eliminations but in this setup the dead's potential disagreement with the consensus of the living adds some pizazz. The same is true of the vig, too, I guess.

[Isis]

Could you clean up the setup wording? I'm not sure how the setup works.

[Isis]

2:4 nightless.
First elim is a mandatory vengecop.

Playable?

[Isis]

Maybe vengecop only for townies?

[Isis]

Is townplay onsite strong enough yet to just run 4:2 nightless? Lol.

I want there to be a good 6p setup with no flagbearer.

[Isis]

I swear I actually would have just run 2:4 nightless to see what would happen if I didn't get hit by closed setup inspiration X_X

[Isis]

Those numbers look scumsided even for 2021 and even for Isis

[Isis]

A dayvig has marginal effect on balance. There's so much kill prevention in the night play missing kills can't be interpreted..

I think the setup is not townsided at 100/50

[Isis]

The dayvig is sus, as Jingle points out. It could mitigate their strength if they were forced to be used immediately and publicly

[Isis]

I'm convinced the scum have an advantage going into the game but it will probably be a fun time right

[Isis]

Keep it at 4. Watcher is so strong.

[Isis]

Tryna shit on my scumgame to my face do you wanna fuckn go right now Hectic I got a parking lot right here

[Isis]

I really doubt that was my median scumgame

[Isis]

I think you should be aiming for the low 40s at least for a nightless vengeful.