Marketplace Mafia III - Game Over

[Natirasha]

Red auctions are even more bullshit than I thought, holy shit. Impossible for town to win+a feedback cash loop.

I mean, I dunno, scum played well. I would not have gotten muffin.

Eagle town, whatever.

[Natirasha]

I knew LB was scum as soon as the NK went for $1

I figured as such, but with people like Mhork and Prohawk I couldn't push the Occam's razor, so I just consigned myself to losing if LB was scum.

plus I bid $570 something on the NK on N5 and foudn out in the dead thread that even if I wasn't locked out I wouldn't have won. at that point it was just uuu

(This is a sign your mechanic was broken Magua)

[Natirasha]

I figured as such, but with people like Mhork and Prohawk I couldn't push the Occam's razor, so I just consigned myself to losing if LB was scum.

wow you sure hid your suspicion well in the qt!

I'm not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, but I adapted a position that this game is over if you were scum day seven and played as such.

[Natirasha]

I should have pushed Garuda over eagle. I was actually kinda hurt by my not using Skype, because I couldn't coordinate with Sakura really at all.

[Natirasha]

Okay, first off, I want to say that this game was fun on the whole, Magua, but I'm feeling fired up and I wanna critique the setup a bit.

So, I agree the deadline thing was painful, and I liked that you punished town for playing the waiting game. This is an older-style design framework that is rarely seen today and, really, it's inclusion here was perfect as a meta-measure, since one of the main problem's with the current playerbase is their willingness to grind the game to a halt and always want to use all the time available to them--it's to the point where I've seen players(myself included) literally being scumread due to wanting to keep the game moving. So, for this punishment measure, I actually adore you for this.

So, onto the scum role PM, which is what my petpeeve is with.

Nest Egg:

You start the game with $150.

Wage:

At the end of every Day, you will receive $100.

Efficiency Bonus:

You do not receive an efficiency bonus.

Mafia Bonus:

At the end of every Day, $100 is split evenly amongst the living members of your team (any fractions are lost).[/

Okay, so this all makes sense within the framework of an informed minority.

Insider Dealings:

Any money you spend bidding on auctions that are listed in red is counted as 50% more, rounded down. If you win the auction, you are refunded 66% of the unused amount, rounded down. As an example, if you bid $50 on

Night-kill x 1

, it is treated as $75. If you win for $40, you will receive (($75 - $40) * 0.66) $23 back.

This is the actual biggest thing. Answer me this question, Magua.

Why even put the nightkill+things like Roleblock up for auction? What is the point, besides trying to screw over greedy townies?

Think about this, even disregarding countermeasures, if the town wanted to get a nightkill, they logically need a fuckton of money. Since an individual town player will never have more money than an individual scum player, you REQUIRE the town to coordinate actions to get the nightkill/roleblock/etc. But, with that being the case, how can they coordinate? First off, transfering is highly inefficient--town loses 50% of their net worth by transfering, in addition to the whole fact town has to transfer to people they don't have confirmed alignment of. Those two things alone inhibit people from want to transfer cash to each other baring some sort of plan...but even if we planned it, well, scum can pool their money much easier and efficiently, THEN they get a huge bonus on top of that AND a feedback loop on the cash to maintain that they will always win red auctions.

So, what's the point of red auctions? If you want to ensure scum get those powers,

just give them to them

, all red auctions did was give the town the illusion of the chance to get these abilities(and simultaneously

prevent

them from getting the auctions they could actually win).

*]

Wire Fraud:

Name two players, a transferer and a transferee. Any money that the transferer would transfer to the transferee during this Night will instead go to the member of your team who used this power.
[*]

Lockout:

Name a target player and a current auction. Any bid made by the targeted player for that auction is cancelled and treated as if it had not occurred. The targeted player will be notified of this only if they bid on that auction.
[*]

Countermeasures:

Name a target player, a targeted ability name, and a target. If that player attempts to use that ability on that target during this same Night, it will be roleblocked.[/list]

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!

tldr: Some of the countermeasures in place due to the travesty of last game naturally inhibit townies from trying to play as a townie should.

[Natirasha]

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

not

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.

[Natirasha]

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

This is truth.

[Natirasha]

I fall into quote stripes at times, but never have the problem voided has.