Normal Game Balance

[Something_Smart]

I think I agree with you that the current perception is that mini normals are townsided.

I also think I agree with T-Bone that they aren't actually townsided. (I voted before seeing your request not to, sorry about that-- you should maybe edit the poll to make that more clear.)

I disagree with T-Bone that data is required for a claim to have value. Player enjoyment is the number one priority in modding, period.

I think the discrepancy is due to the fact that normals are balanced under the assumption that townies are going to have some level of suboptimal play, but strong players like Menalque see weak town play as aberrant and deserving of punishment. If towns consistently play like shit according to you, then all that means is that you are really good, and games where you are town are probably going to appear townsided as a result.

[Something_Smart]

Regarding Mini 2169: you said that scum killed PR's as though that's supposed to be indicative of good play. What happened was, scum killed all the useless PR's while leaving all the important ones alive. Presumably those town PR's played well in order to misdirect the scum kills; I don't know when exactly all the roles were claimed.

The town also got lucky in that they made the faulty assumption that TGP was town for being protected (if I'm reading it right) when that didn't actually happen.

Maybe that setup was badly designed, but if so it's because town was in a very strong position but scum weren't aware of that. That's a problem, sure, but it's a question of swing, not balance. That setup had a pretty high amount of swing dependent on night actions, but that in and of itself doesn't mean that the setup wasn't balanced-- imagine if Noraa had died N1, for instance.

[Something_Smart]

Thinking back i think i've more often felt as scum that town was stacked than vice versa

This might be because of asymmetric knowledge. By the time massclaim rolls around, you know what you're up against as scum, but as town you don't know for sure what the setup looks like until the end of the game.

So you're going to spend a lot more time as scum thinking "this setup is townsided" than you are as town thinking "this setup is scumsided", even if you play an equal number of scumsided and townsided games.

[Something_Smart]

I think the biggest problem role in the game Menalque linked was actually the bulletproof. The scum checked the bulletproof, found out he was a PR, and wasted a shot on him which also led town to think that the person protected by the doctor that night was conftown. They then proceeded to leave the bulletproof, the vig, and the person who was supposedly doc-cleared alive till lylo (which sounds like bad play to me, or at least unlucky play), and the bulletproof happened to also be vengeful. Pretty big defiance of expectations. Bulletproof is a very swingy role, possibly on par with cop and vig. There's probably an argument there about how vengeful shouldn't work in lylo.

The point is that I see Menalque's grievances. The setup had the potential to be pretty gross, and by chance it happened to end up realizing that potential. But none of this has to do with

balance

; it all has to do with

swing

. Had that unlikely confluence of factors not occurred, the gross situation wouldn't have happened, and scum would have probably just won via faking a guilty in lylo like they were planning to.

So I think this is a case of addressing the wrong problem, at least with regard to that particular game.

[Something_Smart]

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.

This is interesting; it must have been before my time (and I joined the NRG a bit after implosion took over). I think my design sense has been edging on the townsided side of things since the very beginning (my first modded Normal was Rolestopper/Neighborizer/Neapolitan/Roleblocker/6 VT's vs Rolecop/1-shot Encryptor/Goon which seems townsided in retrospect but was nevertheless won by scum), and so I never really had to go through this shift.

But I think it's a pretty natural thing to do since it's easy to romanticize good townplay as easier than it actually is.