Lynching town is not bad, per se, but the game would be so much easier if townies stopped making themselves easy to lynch. Make the scum work for those mislynches.
Okay, now that I'm at home I can write up some more detailed thoughts on the game and how it played out:
My team not knowing I was a Servant
I'm kind of unhappy with this, though my choice to stay hidden probably makes it not have a significant impact anyway. I had assumed that they at least knew - if you're going to follow through on flavor as a reason to tell the Servants how many there are, then it should also follow from flavor that the three Mafia would at least know that their co-conspirator (the one they entrusted with killing the king!) lives in the Servant Quarters.
Obviously, the roles were written up under the assumption that the mafia Servant would become publicly known anyway, but after receiving my question about hiding, I think DYH should have clarified to the scum that I was a Servant, especially since he did clarify other aspects of my role in the Mafia chat (that I had no abilities, knew their identities and character names but not their abilities, etc.) Withholding that information feels to me like he personally wanted the strategy to backfire (which it would probably would anyway even if he had told them)
My assumption that they knew mistakenly led me to interpret Axel's #551 ("Seems like there isn't an immediate need for any more Servants to say anything right now.") as a signal that the team was okay with me hiding and were going to be accounting for it in their strategy.
Protective roles
That is a LOT of protection for the town, with no visible compensation other than TMCT's burnout.
- Armored is essentially an unkillable townie. The mafia Servant design makes the Servant the natural assigned killer, and giving the servant a physical kill method means that the scum can't kill the Armored player. This is made particularly painful by the fact that the Servant can't communicate to his team *why* the kill failed (or even that he really did attempt to kill the assigned target), so the scum are left in the dark about that protection. (And the Armored guy isn't even susceptible to the town's vig)
- Bodyguards can almost be counted as equivalent to a doc, but the Retaliation burnout makes this more potent. This functions against both physical and magical kills, and like the Armored, the design weighs heavier against the Servant killing (burning out leaves the physical protection remaining).
- Illusionist can be thought of as half a doc, and this also function against both physical and magical kills.
- The Cleric also has a one-shot protection (from both physical and magical).
The number of protection roles makes it very likely that the scum will miss one of their kills at some point in the game. (I'm not sure if they were supposed to infer that from their access to a tough-guy kill or not.) This is not necessarily a bad thing, but given that the Servant will generally be doing the killing, it leaves them completely in the dark about what is going on. One possible solution would be to allow the Servant to be able to communicate a limited message to the rest of the team, maybe once at the end of night or perhaps once during the whole game (though this only solves the problem of information, not the problem of lots of protection to get through).
Axel's role
I agree with Axel that his role is very misleading with regard to the town's investigative capabilities. This is not necessarily wrong, but it definitely should be counted a minus for the scum team when balancing the game.
Townies falseclaiming
I really hope this game serves as an example of why townies shouldn't falseclaim. Guardman may have been lynched anyway even if he claimed vanilla, but making an obviously false claim makes it easier for scum to get away with joining the wagon since it's entirely justified at that point. Seppel's was even worse, which was so bad that he got 8 townies to vote him in a wagon that lasted less than 24 hours.
Meta
There were some seriously bad meta arguments going on in the early game. Iso read Meg as scum on meta; EtR was labeled as scum on meta; Cyan, Zionite, and Iso treated AI as town on meta; a few people called Axelrod as town on meta (despite his lurking); for the first time, I managed to get Cyan to misread me as town on meta; etc.
Between the D1 spam and the awful meta arguments (especially when people just say "have you read game X?" with no explanation), I briefly considered just replacing out on D2. The first two days of this game were probably my least favorite to reread out of all the games of my career. Seriously, if that kind of play is normal, I really think this site will have trouble attracting and retaining new players. (I know at least I'm going to be more choosy about who I play with from now on.)
As for Zionite specifically, I don't know him well enough to know whether he's a player with a very fixed playstyle. (Certainly not to the same extent as Cyan, for example.) Perhaps the late-game meta argument is valid for Zionite, but I can guarantee it's not valid for a lot of players.
Me killing RR
I also considered killing Zionite instead, but under the scenario where I would kill Zionite and then claim I used my ability on Meg to see if I could get him mislynched before going down (because why would scum lie about using his ability on Meg when he could've just lied about using it on Zionite?).
Obviously I should've just gone with the Iso kill and tried for the 1-for-1 with RR. If that went through, Axel would just need to get PRP lynched after me in order to get the win. In hindsight, this at least looks like it could've worked, as opposed to the RR route which we already saw play out.
I already alluded earlier to some of my reasons, but here's pretty much the list of all the things I miscalculated (these also partly apply to the decision to bus AI as well):
- Overestimated how easy it would be to get a Zionite lynch
- Underestimated how much the town was giving AE a pass
- Underestimated how much the town was willing to lynch Meg (since that still makes no sense to me)
- Overestimated the value of AI's lynch
- Underestimated how much effort Axel was putting into the game (and thus overestimating how necessary I was for the endgame)
- Underestimated how active Iso would be
I generally consider myself good at reading the flow of a game, so missing on all these counts qualifies this for the worst scum game of my career.
Other comments
RE: AI being pissed about his bus. I completely sympathize with that. I would be pissed if I were him too, especially when it was unnecessary and we didn't even pull it off right. (Sorry, AI, I'm not usually this bad as scum.)
RE: Not coming forward as a Servant. I already explained that in previous posts. That was my first big mistake in this game. If I had carefully read my PM and noticed that it specifically mentioned 5 servants, I may have changed gears when Iso dropped the hint about being in a group. Instead I plowed forward against Iso and it left me in a bad spot.
RE: Me being quiet. Part of this was indeed lurking (as I tend to do more as scum), part was due to being more invested in WWE (especially after all the aforementioned spam, meta arguments, and getting burned out on the D1 Iso fight), part was due to work schedule and time zone difference (it's also harder to appear active when you can only post during quiet times of the thread).
RE: My claim. As mentioned before, I was originally planning to get myself lynched (via an intentional "slip-up" that would out me as the 5th servant) before AI or Axel. When it came time to claim, I didn't expect to survive to endgame, so I didn't account for that. What I wanted was something that would at least be able to last 2 more days, and I settled on the Alchemist claim because it felt like something that could plausibly be in the game (I wasn't even aware of similarities to a role from a previous Amistarian game). AI recently mentioned the "Don't lie as mafia" philosophy in the spec chat, but if you know my game history you know I used to frequently claim vanilla as scum, and I felt that wasn't a very strong strategy so I went for something different this time. (I think in fact that this is the first time I have ever made a completely false claim as scum.)
Agreed with Axel's comment about the pain of replacements turning useless townies into analysts who are threats. Obviously there's no way to fix this, but sometimes you just want to vent when you've been selecting your kills to leave the useless guys around and that goes completely to waste.
Anyway, I'm sure there's more I've been wanting to say the entire game, but I think that's almost all of it.
Xyre, thank you very much for modding the game (and for letting me in!). I really hope you do come back soon.
I do have some criticisms for the game balance, but don't take this as if I'm putting you down. Balancing a complex Mafia game is hard, and there's obviously no guarantee that a game will be perfect, but setups do need to be analyzed afterward for the sake of future design.
Azrael in Townie Aspect is indeed a lot better than a regular Godfather. Evil Scum Mod Aspect, on the other hand, seems pointless. I think the natural way to play this would be to stay in Townie Aspect forever.
The rolecop, however, is weak. A typical rolecop is a strong information role for Mafia because you can secretly collect information on threats, but this is one that necessarily has to bring public attention to itself. Plus, using the ability naturally limits your falseclaim options, since in a flavorful game the only realistic abilities it could be are along the lines of: Copycat, Rolecop, Backup. Which are not strong town claims. Although he has the advantage of early night information, the Mafia team actually has limited use for a rolecop in this type of game, since several town roles naturally tend towards becoming public anyway (Tilde, Cheshire Cat, Captain Hammer).
The redirector would be fine, even with limited usage, but it is automatically forced to find a falseclaim (given that the target receives Sack of Galleons flavor). In addition, with this array of town abilities, the redirector actually has little chance to punish the town, given that the only relevant night abilities are Bodyguard, Cop, Name Cop, and Rolestop, none of which are particularly harmful to the town when redirected (unlike, say, a Vig).
Overall, I agree that forcing the scum to play harder is not necessarily bad, but the bar was set much higher for the scum than it was for the town. This is a very flavorful game with no vanillas, so having a confirmable ability is essential to avoid being PoE'd out. None of the scum have a very confirmable ability (or more specifically, one that would look townish), which means they need to invent falseclaims out of their ass, while most of the town can just play their roles straight. And none of the confirmable town abilities are particularly suspicious-looking.
The Hitman, of course, does affect the game dynamic, but it's hard to estimate by how much given that it had a very conditional kill. (Question: How many people in MTGS ever post in red?) It does hurt the scum a little that they also had no protection against the Hitman, while the town has the Bodyguard and the Zombie.
Obviously, poor Mafia play also contributed to their loss, but I think they did not have as much leeway as the town did in terms of having to play tightly.
The Bodyguard is also overpowered. While Xyre is right that, *in these instances*, it turned out to be effectively like a normal Doctor, a Bodyguard with eternal protection and an extra life is *very* hard to deal with. The PR helps mitigate this, and observant scum could speculate on a superhero role (and consequently a protective role). But if they don't catch on quickly, you can potentially have a double-life Lightning Rod, which really screws with the scum's capability to take out power roles or analysts.
Town also had two "traps" at their disposal: the Zombie Suicide Bomber and the Public Self-Watcher, which are both very effective roles when played right, and still a pain to deal with even when played wrong.
The setup is interesting, but I get the feeling that the game is only balanced if the scum are playing well and the town is playing mediocre, which is kind of an unfair requirement.
I also think that the fact that both games played so similarly is not entirely coincidence; there may be something about the roles (or combinations of) which naturally lead to certain outcomes.
I have sent Void a message RE: the replacement message that more or less everyone just got. For future reference, the Active Player List is only really for keeping track of the player base rather than for use as a mailing list. Hopefully in future we can avoid such spam-like messaged.
Unless people think this approach can be refined into a good idea? Or would people like to still only be informed of replacements (or starting games etc) on a strictly opt in basis?
An Active Replacement List might be a good idea, if we are willing to maintain one.
Isn't that what the Replacements list (the one right above the Active Players list) is for?
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If you care about surviving, then the other thing you can do is change your playstyle so you don't easily get wagoned in the first place.
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My team not knowing I was a Servant
I'm kind of unhappy with this, though my choice to stay hidden probably makes it not have a significant impact anyway. I had assumed that they at least knew - if you're going to follow through on flavor as a reason to tell the Servants how many there are, then it should also follow from flavor that the three Mafia would at least know that their co-conspirator (the one they entrusted with killing the king!) lives in the Servant Quarters.
Obviously, the roles were written up under the assumption that the mafia Servant would become publicly known anyway, but after receiving my question about hiding, I think DYH should have clarified to the scum that I was a Servant, especially since he did clarify other aspects of my role in the Mafia chat (that I had no abilities, knew their identities and character names but not their abilities, etc.) Withholding that information feels to me like he personally wanted the strategy to backfire (which it would probably would anyway even if he had told them)
My assumption that they knew mistakenly led me to interpret Axel's #551 ("Seems like there isn't an immediate need for any more Servants to say anything right now.") as a signal that the team was okay with me hiding and were going to be accounting for it in their strategy.
Protective roles
That is a LOT of protection for the town, with no visible compensation other than TMCT's burnout.
- Armored is essentially an unkillable townie. The mafia Servant design makes the Servant the natural assigned killer, and giving the servant a physical kill method means that the scum can't kill the Armored player. This is made particularly painful by the fact that the Servant can't communicate to his team *why* the kill failed (or even that he really did attempt to kill the assigned target), so the scum are left in the dark about that protection. (And the Armored guy isn't even susceptible to the town's vig)
- Bodyguards can almost be counted as equivalent to a doc, but the Retaliation burnout makes this more potent. This functions against both physical and magical kills, and like the Armored, the design weighs heavier against the Servant killing (burning out leaves the physical protection remaining).
- Illusionist can be thought of as half a doc, and this also function against both physical and magical kills.
- The Cleric also has a one-shot protection (from both physical and magical).
The number of protection roles makes it very likely that the scum will miss one of their kills at some point in the game. (I'm not sure if they were supposed to infer that from their access to a tough-guy kill or not.) This is not necessarily a bad thing, but given that the Servant will generally be doing the killing, it leaves them completely in the dark about what is going on. One possible solution would be to allow the Servant to be able to communicate a limited message to the rest of the team, maybe once at the end of night or perhaps once during the whole game (though this only solves the problem of information, not the problem of lots of protection to get through).
Axel's role
I agree with Axel that his role is very misleading with regard to the town's investigative capabilities. This is not necessarily wrong, but it definitely should be counted a minus for the scum team when balancing the game.
Townies falseclaiming
I really hope this game serves as an example of why townies shouldn't falseclaim. Guardman may have been lynched anyway even if he claimed vanilla, but making an obviously false claim makes it easier for scum to get away with joining the wagon since it's entirely justified at that point. Seppel's was even worse, which was so bad that he got 8 townies to vote him in a wagon that lasted less than 24 hours.
Meta
There were some seriously bad meta arguments going on in the early game. Iso read Meg as scum on meta; EtR was labeled as scum on meta; Cyan, Zionite, and Iso treated AI as town on meta; a few people called Axelrod as town on meta (despite his lurking); for the first time, I managed to get Cyan to misread me as town on meta; etc.
Between the D1 spam and the awful meta arguments (especially when people just say "have you read game X?" with no explanation), I briefly considered just replacing out on D2. The first two days of this game were probably my least favorite to reread out of all the games of my career. Seriously, if that kind of play is normal, I really think this site will have trouble attracting and retaining new players. (I know at least I'm going to be more choosy about who I play with from now on.)
As for Zionite specifically, I don't know him well enough to know whether he's a player with a very fixed playstyle. (Certainly not to the same extent as Cyan, for example.) Perhaps the late-game meta argument is valid for Zionite, but I can guarantee it's not valid for a lot of players.
Me killing RR
I also considered killing Zionite instead, but under the scenario where I would kill Zionite and then claim I used my ability on Meg to see if I could get him mislynched before going down (because why would scum lie about using his ability on Meg when he could've just lied about using it on Zionite?).
Obviously I should've just gone with the Iso kill and tried for the 1-for-1 with RR. If that went through, Axel would just need to get PRP lynched after me in order to get the win. In hindsight, this at least looks like it could've worked, as opposed to the RR route which we already saw play out.
I already alluded earlier to some of my reasons, but here's pretty much the list of all the things I miscalculated (these also partly apply to the decision to bus AI as well):
- Overestimated how easy it would be to get a Zionite lynch
- Underestimated how much the town was giving AE a pass
- Underestimated how much the town was willing to lynch Meg (since that still makes no sense to me)
- Overestimated the value of AI's lynch
- Underestimated how much effort Axel was putting into the game (and thus overestimating how necessary I was for the endgame)
- Underestimated how active Iso would be
I generally consider myself good at reading the flow of a game, so missing on all these counts qualifies this for the worst scum game of my career.
Other comments
RE: AI being pissed about his bus. I completely sympathize with that. I would be pissed if I were him too, especially when it was unnecessary and we didn't even pull it off right. (Sorry, AI, I'm not usually this bad as scum.)
RE: Not coming forward as a Servant. I already explained that in previous posts. That was my first big mistake in this game. If I had carefully read my PM and noticed that it specifically mentioned 5 servants, I may have changed gears when Iso dropped the hint about being in a group. Instead I plowed forward against Iso and it left me in a bad spot.
RE: Me being quiet. Part of this was indeed lurking (as I tend to do more as scum), part was due to being more invested in WWE (especially after all the aforementioned spam, meta arguments, and getting burned out on the D1 Iso fight), part was due to work schedule and time zone difference (it's also harder to appear active when you can only post during quiet times of the thread).
RE: My claim. As mentioned before, I was originally planning to get myself lynched (via an intentional "slip-up" that would out me as the 5th servant) before AI or Axel. When it came time to claim, I didn't expect to survive to endgame, so I didn't account for that. What I wanted was something that would at least be able to last 2 more days, and I settled on the Alchemist claim because it felt like something that could plausibly be in the game (I wasn't even aware of similarities to a role from a previous Amistarian game). AI recently mentioned the "Don't lie as mafia" philosophy in the spec chat, but if you know my game history you know I used to frequently claim vanilla as scum, and I felt that wasn't a very strong strategy so I went for something different this time. (I think in fact that this is the first time I have ever made a completely false claim as scum.)
Agreed with Axel's comment about the pain of replacements turning useless townies into analysts who are threats. Obviously there's no way to fix this, but sometimes you just want to vent when you've been selecting your kills to leave the useless guys around and that goes completely to waste.
Anyway, I'm sure there's more I've been wanting to say the entire game, but I think that's almost all of it.
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Just personal feelings sometimes that I wish certain players would be replaced.
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I do have some criticisms for the game balance, but don't take this as if I'm putting you down. Balancing a complex Mafia game is hard, and there's obviously no guarantee that a game will be perfect, but setups do need to be analyzed afterward for the sake of future design.
Azrael in Townie Aspect is indeed a lot better than a regular Godfather. Evil Scum Mod Aspect, on the other hand, seems pointless. I think the natural way to play this would be to stay in Townie Aspect forever.
The rolecop, however, is weak. A typical rolecop is a strong information role for Mafia because you can secretly collect information on threats, but this is one that necessarily has to bring public attention to itself. Plus, using the ability naturally limits your falseclaim options, since in a flavorful game the only realistic abilities it could be are along the lines of: Copycat, Rolecop, Backup. Which are not strong town claims. Although he has the advantage of early night information, the Mafia team actually has limited use for a rolecop in this type of game, since several town roles naturally tend towards becoming public anyway (Tilde, Cheshire Cat, Captain Hammer).
The redirector would be fine, even with limited usage, but it is automatically forced to find a falseclaim (given that the target receives Sack of Galleons flavor). In addition, with this array of town abilities, the redirector actually has little chance to punish the town, given that the only relevant night abilities are Bodyguard, Cop, Name Cop, and Rolestop, none of which are particularly harmful to the town when redirected (unlike, say, a Vig).
Overall, I agree that forcing the scum to play harder is not necessarily bad, but the bar was set much higher for the scum than it was for the town. This is a very flavorful game with no vanillas, so having a confirmable ability is essential to avoid being PoE'd out. None of the scum have a very confirmable ability (or more specifically, one that would look townish), which means they need to invent falseclaims out of their ass, while most of the town can just play their roles straight. And none of the confirmable town abilities are particularly suspicious-looking.
The Hitman, of course, does affect the game dynamic, but it's hard to estimate by how much given that it had a very conditional kill. (Question: How many people in MTGS ever post in red?) It does hurt the scum a little that they also had no protection against the Hitman, while the town has the Bodyguard and the Zombie.
Obviously, poor Mafia play also contributed to their loss, but I think they did not have as much leeway as the town did in terms of having to play tightly.
The Bodyguard is also overpowered. While Xyre is right that, *in these instances*, it turned out to be effectively like a normal Doctor, a Bodyguard with eternal protection and an extra life is *very* hard to deal with. The PR helps mitigate this, and observant scum could speculate on a superhero role (and consequently a protective role). But if they don't catch on quickly, you can potentially have a double-life Lightning Rod, which really screws with the scum's capability to take out power roles or analysts.
Town also had two "traps" at their disposal: the Zombie Suicide Bomber and the Public Self-Watcher, which are both very effective roles when played right, and still a pain to deal with even when played wrong.
The setup is interesting, but I get the feeling that the game is only balanced if the scum are playing well and the town is playing mediocre, which is kind of an unfair requirement.
I also think that the fact that both games played so similarly is not entirely coincidence; there may be something about the roles (or combinations of) which naturally lead to certain outcomes.
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Isn't that what the Replacements list (the one right above the Active Players list) is for?
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