The Newbie NewD3 stats thread (upd. 2020-05-20, 51g)

[Isis]

This data doesn't deter my desire for all newbie games to be mason games.

[Isis]

Five of the nine cells have a PR that dramatically improves in power if scum is lynched day 1. How does that make sense for a setup that's supposed to be for a lot of newbie players making a lot of mistakes?

[Isis]

I don't think these data are miles different from the last round, overall, though. Like, I think it depends a lot how people decide they want to feel about the data. The last decision seemed like an exceedingly small power shift red away from the previous setup, at least on the extremum, and I think the extremum are pretty important.

Like, A1 is a setup that any buff to the setup would make it flunk NRG. But these setups are supposed to be for an environment where we already know the playerbase is going to benefit the town. 7-1 should not be a miraculous revelation rather than, last time everyone shrugged and just said this is what they want it to be, so of course this is what the result is.

The general argument was, "it's an entire matrix". But every subsetup is some newbie's first game, and you don't actually have to use a matrix, I'm still a hard sell on "since mafiascum is 80% closed setups and 20% open setups, the right answer is to present newbies with an open setup in the top tenth of open setup complexity to get them ready."

If we just want newbie queue to be half scum wins on average we could replace the masons in A3 and C3 with Beloved Princesses. I think we could get there that way.

I think it's really concerning that a newbie who's a natural at mafia could roll scum alongside a newbie who was probably doomed to quit forum mafia no matter what setup was tried, and the latter can get lynched day 1 and the former could get turned off from forum mafia either because of general overall high power level that's unnecessary for assisting 3 SEs in catching a firsttime player or because of power roles that trigger bonuses off partner loss like in A2. Maybe that's a bad utilitarian solution, maybe it's better to have 7 newbies win and try to keep them that way, by volume, in which case we should go the other extreme and engineer town stomps, and weaker setups ought to go. I'd like to imagine the more hardfought wins retain more players than stomps, though.

pedit: yes, it's natural for day1 lynches to be closely interlinked with town wins in a micro, they reflect a town that must have been stronger to begin with and provide an informative flip with the most days to work with it. But just because the advantage is naturally occurring doesn't mean it's wrong to design against it. If there's a matrix it should have more psychologists than trackers.

[Isis]

I'm strongly against closed setups for newbies. I want a single setup, or at least a 2x2 matrix instead of a large 3x3.
Beloved Princess was indeed intended as argument ad absurdum /joking, it's an objectively bad role.

but it's also possible that the two best scum players on site could roll scum together in a newbie game and stomp the entire town.

If any of the losing townies played like elli, even after a very dreadful townie got d1 mislynched they would have won. If the solo scum who lost their roleblocker partner day1 is playing against an unleashed follow-the-cop, it doesn't matter if they're Flavor Leaf or LLD, because mechanics mechanic. That might be me underrating the extent to which it's possible for good scumplayers to prevent a partner who makes poor decisions from getting lynched D1 in the first place; I think it has its limits, it's only an opinion. I'm not in the newbie queue a ton but the last time I was there it sure seemed hard.

In terms of balancing for fun instead of balancing for winrates, that can be the way to go. I'm not sure new d3 is the funnest set of roles though. JK endgames are a hellscape of potential no-kills an if-then-else clears and involve concession and ruminated night choices, I think replacing every JK with a sane cop makes games more fun. And since JK specifically relates to solo scum it's part of what I might be on about. I don't mind tracker as much. Oops, you got tracked, it's over.
Then on the other hand there are arguments for FN being unfun and it looks like maybe we have decent data that FN is unfun. I wonder if anyone will go to bat about using FN in setups.

For example: the setup Goons vs Doc + Tracker had a 44% town winrate in Matrix6 across 76 games. That same setup had a 70% winrate in 2d3 across 10 games.

Cop-Doc-Roleblocker had over 70% winrate last time around. Mystifyingly it appears in this setup again, with an 88% winrate. Why does that one belong anywhere in the newbie matrix? The possibility of a day 1 roleblocker lynch is so, so absurd in that setup. I think even ignoring both stats people would generally agree RB-doc-cop is on the greensided end of an acceptable micro. I think it would be great if the newbie setup reflected the center or redsided end of acceptable micros given that it's likely newbie queue towns are strong.

[Isis]

I misread/misapprehended what you were doing with the stats and see that better now. I kind of expected to make some kind of mistake, which is why I also appealed to a generalized perception of how powerful RB cop doc is. You are right I confused which was the source of strong data and weak data.

Anyway, Matrix6 data gives 70+ games of each gametype and suggested from that doc+cop+roleblock is the strongest setup in all of Matrix 6.
People said we need to do something weaker than d3.
The strongest setup in all of matrix 6 was kept.
I'm having a hard time reconciling that sentiment with that decision.
It can be the sentiment that's wrong, even 70 can be a weak sample size.

[Isis]

ok wow
I naively assumed 2d3 didn't have anything more powerful, or significantly more powerful, than cop-doc-roleblocker
but it did, and it was removed
it had neap-doc-rolecop?!?!?!?!
wowo
ok I guess at least the strongest subsetup was removed
I feel a little better.
I'm a little sad there wasn't heavier trimming I guess

[Isis]

Ok it has some other crazy setups too
I should just delete all my posts in this topic.

[Isis]

Ok so the movement in the red direction was significant
and we haven't been moved a statistically significant number of games
so really you should wait
I have to accept that since my desire for towns to suffer is probably idiosyncratic and subjective and butthurt from being bad at scum
I still don't like that the newbie setup is so complex though

[Isis]

If you want to challenge the extent to which balance really matter,s it could be possible to get something a lot simpler by removing the management that ensures certain town roles appear alongside certain scum roles, and have something more like, "Mafia Rolecop, Mafia Goon, 5 VT, roll 2 things from {Tracker, Cop, Doc, VT, FN}" and any other things you want to add to that list. That's much simpler. The bounds on the greenest and reddest setup is going to be higher, because it becomes possible to roll the worst red role and the best green role at the same time. But if fun matters more than balance sometimes, doing all the midgame legwork from traversing the matrix isn't necessarily worth the balance gained.

[Isis]

Is that what 2 of 4 is?

[Isis]

Adding a rolecop to the masons setup not for balance per-se bit because the masons/mafia/vt 5p is awkward is a neat idea.
Masons seems at about the power level needed in the queue while also being a fun role.

[Isis]

On the topic of clarity/normalcy, I just found out/realized for the first time the newbie queue is silently using multiaction versions of all of its power roles. The information is in the publicly available role PMs, but it's not specified "new d3 using multiacting scum" nor listed as a Multitasking modifier that would necessarily change the titles of the Mafia's roles. I think that should be cleaner if the newbie queue is supposed to be on on-ramp to the normal queue, either designing the setup so that it doesn't need multitasking, listing the Mafia PRs or both the goon and the PR as multitasking, or listing that it's a rule for the setup that the game will use multitasking scum.

[Isis]

I like the setup being simple to communicate, I'm not committed to what the four roles are.