Mafiascum.net

Much thanks goes to Toomai, whose spreadsheet and formatting I have borrowed. Despite that, this is still the product of a great deal of work in collecting data and editing to accommodate a changed setup.

• For any stat that counts wins and losses, draws are ignored.
  
• The replacement stats recorded here are likely lower than in reality, as replacements are not recorded if the player never confirmed. If a player posts in any way (or has been acknowledged by the mod as having confirmed/read their role PM), replacing them counts.
  
• Slot-based stats might be a bit off due to cases where slots "level up" via replacement (e.g. an experienced player replaces into a newbie slot).
  
• Players are assumed to have won regardless of modkills (unnecessary complication). They are however still dead. So far there have been no complications involving multiple scum/PRs dying in the same phase.
  
• If the last scum concedes, it's recorded as a lynch on them. If both scum are alive when they concede, it's recorded as no lynch; the game simply ends in a town win with both scum alive. (This is how a mafia PR might still be alive at endgame in a town win.)

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Keep in mind that with 51 games played, many subsetup specific stats still have a very small sample size.

Overall, NewD3 has a roughly similar if closer to balanced winrate (60%) compared to 2d3's 65% town winrate. That being said, so far there is somewhat of a notable difference in winrates between the columns, with A, B and C going from most to least townsided.

A few curiosities:

• Setup A1 (Cop + Doc vs RB) is both the most played setup and has one of the highest town winrates. This stands in contrast to that same setup's winrate under the Matrix6 setup. There are many factors that could explain this, with the two that most immediately come to mind being the faster deadlines of modern newbie games as well as claiming considerations given the semi-open nature of setups.
  
• Over 50% of friendly neighbors have replaced out. Granted, it is tied for being the least-common role in newbie games, but the Doctor which it is tied with has a below-average rate of replacing out.
  
• There appears to be something going on with 3 slots/players replacing out?? Those numbers have the highest sample size as well as an unusually high town winrate. I'm not sure what to think of this. It's
  possible
  that it's a mistake in the spreadsheet, but I don't think that it is.

Rolling subsetup winrates:

I want to join newbie game and yell that no-lynch on day 1 gives us 100% win.

In post 1, northsidegal wrote:A few curiosities:

Setup A1 (Cop + Doc vs RB) is both the most played setup and has one of the highest town winrates. This stands in contrast to that same setup's winrate under the Matrix6 setup. There are many factors that could explain this, with the two that most immediately come to mind being the faster deadlines of modern newbie games as well as claiming considerations given the semi-open nature of setups.
Over 50% of friendly neighbors have replaced out. Granted, it is tied for being the least-common role in newbie games, but the Doctor which it is tied with has a below-average rate of replacing out.
There appears to be something going on with 3 slots/players replacing out?? Those numbers have the highest sample size as well as an unusually high town winrate. I'm not sure what to think of this. It's possible that it's a mistake in the spreadsheet, but I don't think that it is.

I would add one more:

• A3 and C3 have slightly different winrates (80% vs 44%) even that they are almost the same setups. Mafia receives different information on the beginning but it shouldn't be that relevant against masons. I think that it proves how tricky this sample size is.

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

In post 0, northsidegal wrote:If scum is lynched D1, they go 1-14 (6.7%)

This might be the most interesting data point here.

yeah i think i brought that up somewhere a few months back ... this is not an easy setup to solo-scum. if your partner gets lynched day1 there's a pretty decent chance you'll be close to mechanically screwed by day3 or so

(Sorta) Off Topic:

I miss 2of4. Does anyone else miss 2of4?

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?

*i* have a hard time solo-ing this as scum, and i would imagine it's significantly harder for newbies

This has been the case since Matrix6 (and possibly before, but I don't have the data on-hand for that). Personally, I might theorize that it an element across almost all micro setups.

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.

Thanks for carrying this on, northsidegal.

There's an argument to be made that roles that aren't completely common across anywhere that plays Mafia reduce newbie retention. Neapolitan in 2d3 and so far Friendly Neighbor in NewD3 both have positive replacement z-scores in contrast to literally any other town roles. This is part of why I think that closed setups for newbie are probably not the best idea. You might say that the closed setups could stick with only the more basic roles, but I would say to that that the NewD3 setup basically a setup composed of subsetups with common roles which we consider to be roughly balanced. Basically, if we're going to have closed setups, those closed setups should really stick to the more basic roles to help newbie retention. And if we're only going to have closed setups with basic roles, it seems to me like a good idea to just come up with a list of setups like that and say "your newbie game is going to be one of these games". (Also, personally, I think that Beloved Princess is a terrible role. Maybe that's part of your point and I'm misunderstanding what you're saying)

The goal isn't necessarily a 50/50 split on winrate. I believe the previous consensus in threads discussing the newbie setup was that the primary goal is newbie retention, and sometimes I think that can mean keeping changes that might unbalance the winrate. For instance, I believe it was determined through an experiment a while back that daytalk in newbie games improves newbie retention (although I'm not sure how this was measured) despite increasing scum winrates significantly. Similarly—although I don't have evidence for this—I might imagine that the change to 10:7 deadlines has improved newbie retention despite increasing town winrates significantly, at least by Toomai's data for 2d3.

In post 12, Isis wrote: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.

I'm not really sure the best way to respond to this. I'm not sure I agree with anything you're saying here.

The situation you describe is possible, 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. Should we change the setup so that that isn't possible? I think that fundamentally, setups are designed for the general rather than the edge case and so using a worst case scenario as a point against a setup is not really the best way to think about things. Certainly they deserve consideration as to how they are, but I think just the possibility isn't necessarily a point against something.

I'm not sure how serious you were with the last part, but I also think that it's the wrong way to think about the newbie setup. Even if it were proven to me that we got more newbie retention through town wins than scum wins, I would still say that engineering town stomps would be a bad idea, because I think a secondary goal of newbie games in addition to retention is to be an introduction to site meta / culture. With that in mind, it seems like a bad idea to give newbies an idea of setup balance that doesn't really align with the rest of the site.

And, as much as I may be making conclusive statements about the winrates in 2d3 and NewD3, there is still the fact that we just don't have all that much data for either of these setups. So our conclusions should be somewhat low-confidence.

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. This would be an example of a really extremely swingy setup based on the death of a single Goon. Did something about site meta change from Matrix6 to 2d3 that caused town winrates to go up? Did town winrates actually even go up, or is there not enough data – given time, would it have trended towards 50%?

A less empirical and more philosophical question – even if the winrate would have been 50%, would the setup still bear changing, because of the swing? One might consider me stupid for even asking this question, but is it necessarily even a problem that scum tends to lose more when one of their members is lynched day 1?

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.

In post 14, northsidegal wrote: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.

In post 15, northsidegal wrote: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.

In post 12, Isis wrote: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."

This is why I miss 2of4.

Simple roles, easy to understand, nothing ever happens in 2of4 that makes you scratch your head and click back over to the setup description to figure out what's going on.

(I'm ostensibly not a newbie and I consistently find myself referring back to the setup description in utter confusion, as Skitter can attest to when she scumread me in our last game for misunderstanding the setup )

In post 16, Isis wrote:

In post 14, northsidegal wrote: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.

I don't think your view is consistent. As far as I can tell, you seem to be saying "The losing townies in a game with the best scumplayers could have won if they played well, but that isn't the case for the losing scum in a game with an unfortunate PR situation." But that view seems to ignore that PR hunting is a skill in itself. Being Flavor Leaf or LLD or whoever the best scumplayer is make a difference, because PR hunting is a trait of good scum players, and even if you're in a follow-the-cop N1 without your roleblocker you can make it to LyLo without a single confirmed innocent by making the right shots. Mathdino killed a power role literally every night he was ever alive as scum. Is that likely? Maybe not. Is someone playing like Elli in a game with the best scumplayers likely? Also probably not. My point is that you seem to ignore skill as a mitigating factor for scum, but not for town.


And yeah, I'm certain some people might be rolling their eyes at me specifically being the one to be "lecturing" on this, but I don't think it's too unreasonable to say that preventing your partner from getting lynched is a skill. As with all team based games there is only so much you can do to directly influence the outcome of a game, but all the same I would say that preventing scum lynches and pushing mislynches is something scum should be doing.

In post 15, northsidegal wrote: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.

It had a 77% winrate over 9 games. That same setup in Matrix6 had a 54% town winrate over 83 games. Do you see the point that I was trying to make in that post?

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.

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

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

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

i agree that matrix6 was a lot easier to understand than any of the d3 setups. that being said, as long as we would be using the setups that we're currently using, the "matrix" of newD3 i think serves as a way to make things simpler – for instance, if the setups were just presented as a list, it might be harder to immediately understand that, say, the death of a rolecop means that you're in column B.

of course, that probably doesn't mean anything to someone who just wanted less subsetups in general, but still. back when a new newbie setup was being theorycrafted by a lot of people, people kept trying to come up with these really "cute" setups like Matrix6 that had some kind of graphical element, but i personally (along with some others) felt that this was unnecessary – just randomizing from a set of setups known to be good is enough. like i said though, as long as we do have the setups we do, the graphic element makes it easier to understand, i feel.

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.