Normal Game Balance

[implosion]

A couple of days ago nsg said that the past 2 years have been quite close to 50%, but she wasn't as sure on 2020. I won't say more as I don't have the data but if she finds this thread and wants to then she's more than welcome to~

Right: my point is that’s a bad criteria to use. If towns consistently play like shit and win 50% of the time because they’re loaded with power then that’s a strongly townsided group of setups. And the only way you’re going to know if people are experiencing that in their games is asking them, as I’m doing here.

This argument has never really been convincing to me, specifically the "town win rates are low because towns are playing bad" argument. Towns play how they play, and scum play how they play; if "towns are playing bad", then that means we exist in a meta where players tend to be better at scum than at town, and the balance of a setup has to reflect the meta. I've played mafia in a lot of different contexts: forum mafia with long deadlines, in person, in different IRC environments with different kinds of communication and different deadlines. And each of them has a different standard of balance. There is no hidden platonic ideal of a balanced setup; a setup is balanced in reflection to the people playing that setup and the medium in which it is played.

If you want to talk about whether it subjectively feels like towns have too much power, sure. It's quite likely there are a good number of people who feel that way. But I'd argue that those aren't actually feelings about whether the setup is "balanced"; they're feelings about whether the setup is as hard as they want it to be. As far as I can tell, there's no way to call something "balanced" except to say "in the environment and with the people with which this game will be run, we expect it to be won by town roughly 50% of the time". For an alternative, some do exist. For instance, if you want to run or play in games that are explicitly harder, pick an open setup with a relatively low EV and run it or play in it. But I feel like the alternative you're implying would be like, a "hard games" queue? And the site has litigated the issues with queue splitting and merging again and again over the years, and I think it ultimately comes down to: if there's a lot of demand for it then we could consider it, but if not then the downsides outweigh the upsides.

I guess my question is, if not to a 50% win rate, then what standard do you want games balanced to, and why do you think it's the appropriate standard?

[implosion]

For what it's worth, there are plenty of normal game reviews where the reviewers will describe things as swingy but balanced. Designing to minimize swing in general is, imo, more challenging than people might realize. Part of this is because it can conflict with other design principles like simplicity; increasing simplicity would have you consolidate town power into fewer roles while reducing swing might imply you should spread it out. It often can conflict with balance, because we've found that for balance the town generally needs some very tangible power, but most tangible power introduces swing. The good majority of town power roles are swingy simply by nature, and those that aren't swingy are mostly not swingy because they don't impact the game all that much. Any investigative that gets tangible info will either find or not find what is best for them; any disruptive or protective role might just have no impact whatsoever if they target wrong; etc.

Another conflict is that between players and mods - mods will generally design the setups they want to run, not that players necessarily want to play, and it can sometimes be an uphill battle to convince a mod that their setup is a bad idea beyond simply conceptions of balance. Pre-designed setups can perhaps be held to a higher standard here.

[implosion]

With regards to balance it's important to mention, for those who are new to this discussion, the historical context. One old point that might be new information to many of you, I'm not sure, is that mini games used to have a 12 player limit, not 13 - this thread is the reason that changed. The other is that a few years ago (I think this is when I became listmod but I might be horribly misremembering tbh) there was a paradigm shift in reviews, because games were *still* scumsided. The change that resulted from that is that, in essence, every NRG member had to pretend that setups were a little bit more scumsided than their instincts thought... because they were, in fact, more scumsided than peoples' instincts thought. I think the NRG has pretty much internalized this at this point, which is reflected in generally fairly even winrates as of late, apparently, which I'm happy with.

If people as a whole want to shift the paradigm again to aim for something that is not a 50% win rate for each side, then I'm listening... but if that's the question, then the way to answer that question isn't a poll about whether people feel like normal games are balanced. Because,

empirically

, how people feel about balance is always more townsided than actual balance on this site, so people feeling like games are townsided doesn't intrinsically mean things need to change.

For what it's worth I suspect there are a lot of factors at play in why people find setups more townsided than they are. There's a cultural element where people harp on towns for playing bad more than they harp on scum for playing bad, I think. There's probably a Dunning-Krueger effect where people think that they can estimate balance because they've played lots of games, when those are really two separate skill sets. I think there's also an effect that people are more likely to notice a town stomp as townsided than they are to think of a scum stomp as being scumsided because the town is the team that ultimately has more agency in the game; ergo, after a scum stomp people will blame the town because why didn't they just catch the scum, but after a town stomp people will blame the

setup

because well the scum couldn't necessarily have played better, the town is the side that's ultimately making the decisions.

[implosion]

y'know, off the top of my head I can't really think of any or many normal reviews that had that (maybe there are some), but I do agree it's an idea with merit. It's perfectly implementable within the current rules of course, just tack on an informed modifier to a scum and then if desired give public setup info that such a role exists. Of course it does fundamentally change how certain roles work or would be balanced (some examples being watchers/trackers/roleblockers/any role that cares which scum makes the kill, because the scum would know if they want a scummy scum or a not scummy scum to make the kill).

In particular, if it is something that people would be interested in, it'd be quite easy to e.g. ask the NRG to make some pre-designed setups with it.