Team Mafia 2015 Winners: Young and Beautiful

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

I also preferred the "first come, first serve" rule as that at least was some test of the level of dedication the team had.

But Team Scummer Commonwealth will definitely be signing up to crush any other geographically linked teams.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Zor, 3 questions:
1) Is it public information how each team spends its tokens?
2) If not, are you allowed to talk about how you spend your tokens?
3) Are team members allowed to talk face-to-face?

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Zor, 3 questions:
1) Is it public information how each team spends its tokens?
2) If not, are you allowed to talk about how you spend your tokens?
3) Are team members allowed to talk face-to-face?

1. No
2. Yes
3. I can't really regulate it, but I'd prefer communication happen where it can bring the whole team into the conversation.

So you can say e.g. that your team used all its tokens to try and get one of your team mates a scum alignment?

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Matrix6 would be fine with me but I know many people have mixed or negative feelings about it. I'm not as in tune with newbie stats and what not so if someone who knows more in depth it's strengths and weaknesses wants to describe those....

The design of Matrix6 was definitely limited by having it be suitable for the Newbie Queue.

What about this more refined version:

	A	B	C
1	Town Jailkeeper	Vanilla Townie	Mafia Goon
2	Mafia Tracker	Town JoaT (Cop/Track/Bodyguard)	Town 1-shot Roleblocker
3	Town Motion Detector	Mafia Goon	Town Friendly Neighbor

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

A motion detector determines whether their target took an action that night.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Tracker rather than a Watcher, but otherwise yes.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Except motion detectors ARE the watcher who doesn't see who or what type, basically a weaker voyeur; the tracker who doesn't see who or what type is called Reporter.
(Reporter/Follower/Tracker and Motion Detector/Voyeur/Watcher are the two different ones. Reporter/Motion Detector just sees if actions were done; Follower/Voyeur is stronger because it sees what type of action, and Tracker/Watcher we all know sees the name of the target.)

People have used Motion Detector to mean both the Tracker-variant and the Watcher-variant in the past. But a Motion Detector-variant of Watcher is very close to pointless and the other name for the Tracker-variant Reporter has also had various other meanings and is also not at all evocative of what the Tracker-variant does.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

In your suggestion above CES, isn't Town JK, VT, Goon pretty different in win chance than Town JK, Mafia Tracker, Town Motion Detector?

I tried to get them all fairly close to 50-50 and I don't think any of them are that far off for it to be an issue. The advantage here is that we do have the Matrix6 statistics at our disposal to calibrate. If you look at those, the major outliers are the JK/Cop+Townie vs. Goon set-ups (in favour of the town) and the two 1-shot Bulletproof set-ups (in favour of the scum); I can't really imagine that the JK+Townie vs. Goon set-up is town-sided (a Cop is definitely a notch above Jailkeeper), so I left that alone, weakened the Cop Role and replaced the 1-shot Bulletproof Townie with a meaningful town PR instead.

I'm not really that fond of either Twin Trap or Alternating 9p. They both suffer from having 2 guaranteed power roles with individual names, which is just boring. The Power roles in Alternating 9p mostly just don't do anything unless the Cop makes it to D3. And Twin Trap is silly; I don't want Team Mafia to possibly come down to whether the Mafia and the Watcher can outguess each other nor do I want a 4-player team to be arguing about who the correct Track target is when the Mafia have already decided that the Track-immune Goon is making the kill.

Having had more time to stew over the set-up, I think the set-up can be improved upon (for one, having multiple PRs whose power level increases once there's only one scum left is probably undesirable + I'm a perfectionist). What I'm thinking of right now is:

	A	B	C
1	Town Jailkeeper	Vanilla Townie	Mafia Goon
2	Mafia Role Cop	Town Odd-Night Cop	Town 1-Shot Friendly Neighbor
3	Town X	Mafia Goon	Town Motion Detector

Where I haven't decided on the role in the bottom-left corner. One possibility I was thinking of was just another 1-shot Friendly Neighbor, in which case the set-up is a bit more straightforward but we probably shouldn't be using a Matrix to represent it (but we still get the benefit of being able to compare the set-ups to Matrix6 to help determine balance!).

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

I don't know if the role cop has enough power equal get friendly neighbour

I think those two roles do a pretty good job of cancelling each other out; friendly neighbors help the Town narrow things down and Role Cops help the scum kill power roles, which has pretty much the opposite effect. I've always liked that pairing.

I don't know that I like the idea of trying a new open setup for Team Mafia; feels like part of the appeal of doing opens for TM is to get something that's been field tested.

That's part of the reason why I'm basing my set-up on Matrix6, which we have lots of statistics about. A game like Twin Trap has only been played 5 times, so that's not particularly telling in terms of whether it's balanced; my guess would be it's scum-sided (in the 40-45% town win percentage range) but it's hard to say. And we've got plenty of experienced mods paying attention, so I doubt some weird unforeseen interaction is going to pop up.

To that end, I think my suggestion is Chosen Mafia. I'm digging the 50-50 win rates, and searching for mafia tells of knowing who the chosen are seems like a good way to engage the whole team.

I do like Chosen Mafia as a set-up (I know Fenchurch would happily play in it) but considering that White Flag and Nightless are already in the mix, I assumed there'd be desire for something more standard, less stripped-down and purely based on day play.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

I don't think I'm going to come up with anything better than 1-shot Friendly Neighbor (maybe someone else will?), so this is how I'd present the set-up.

Flip a coin to choose between Jailkeeper and Odd-Night Cop. Then pick at random from the following three set-ups:
1. JK/Cop + 6 Townies vs. 2 Goons
2. JK/Cop + 1-shot Friendly Neighbor + 5 Townies vs. 1 Mafia Rolecop + 1 Goon
3. Motion Detector + 1-shot Friendly Neighbor + 5 Townies vs. 2 Goons

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Blue methblade, etc. & Westeros
Confectionery Animals & Hitmen
Gestalt & Team with no name & The Kliq
God Save the Black Goo & Marshmallow Pillow Fort
Indecisive & Peruvian Flute Band & Sickeningly Sweet & The Cockettes
TBD & Unviggable Vegetables
Athenians & Captains
The Leftovers & Young and Beautiful

Team nocaps is the only team without a match.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

I'm going to try my hand at trash talk!

Cheery Dog, you're not as cool as N.
Regfan, your team name is a bit immature. I preferred the old one.
BlueBloodedToffee, I don't really know who you are.
Psyche, I don't really get your team, but you might be fun to play with anyway?
Singer, I'm sorry you don't get to play. I really liked how we worked together last White Flag.

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

Hey Reckoner: don't worry, I won't ruin the next Team Mafia. Two is enough for me.

That's a shame. I thought you mostly played well, seemed enjoyable to play with and The Captains is a good team.