[MAFIA] SPY VS. MAFIA II DAY 3

And you could totally metagame based on when item spawns. Isn't that what I was trying to beat into people's heads for a day?

i said i had received an item day 1 at some point but never referenced it again

slep

author=Jeroen_Sol
Can you also note to self never to put live players in dead chat again? The whole game I felt like I was basically cheating.

I thought the same and even suggested piano to scrap it early D1 but he already mentioned in deadchat to not reveal any infos so it was useless to spy in dead chat anyways.

e: piano i never "blabbed" about anything in dead chat. You accidentally did and I told you to delete it before anyone could see it lol.

So I was right, Cave was just being intentionally confusing and misleading. Whooo would've thought?

For what it's worth, I liked how it was setup. I actually kind of wish that all the items had a chance to backfire or fail. Yeah it made scumhunting difficult, but that kind of just means that every time you think you find the smoking gun, you have to wonder if it's a good idea to share or not.

I didn't like the no-nolynch part though, who votes when is pretty important and not having nolynch changes that.

author=pianotm
By "nobody could ever have two items" I meant "At the same time".

*brags* I surmised this fairly early (and Piano confirmed by saying "it is unknown" when I asked about that rule in PM).

So I just had this super scummy magnet for life.

All I will say is this. CAVE for no reason cast a hammer vote on cap on day 2 the moment the day was over. I realized that that was him being scum gloating. I don't get how none of you picked that up though.

Anyhow, good game CAVE! You played town like a damn fiddle and I can't complain because I died night 1.

can't slep

author=AlaskanEmily
So I was right, Cave was just being intentionally confusing and misleading. Whooo would've thought?

actually no. at least not with regards to the things you kept quoting. you actually kept misinterpreting several like, direct, concise statements that contained no misdirection so. idk what to tell you.

author=pianotm
Soo...note to self: More balanced == less zaniness.

first of all, thank you for running this game. here is a long wall of text.

this game was not balanced. this is not to say I didn't have fun playing it, but I feel I need to give my perspective here. the only reason I wasn't annihilated was that I took every single optimal action I could after demon died (which, he died because scum didn't know who each other were, being an informed minority, like, the biggest advantage scum can ever have) and odd outted for no reason. I never killed vanilla town. Cap_H revealed and I (minimally) helped push towards him so there would be a wider pool of players alive in case the game didn't end for some reason. If odd hadn't outted, if I had potentially killed wrong, (the fact that the paper bag just stayed on him and I had to pierce through it was ridiculous. the agents don't actually need to stay anon if they can grant a bulletproof.) if cap_h hadn't been the execution, I'm dead. milk made it worse but there's nothing to do about that.

basically, the agent team got outplayed but spies still almost lost just because we had no way to deal with the gauntlet of items. the ending was narrow in spite of this, not because of it. although when I talk about an item gauntlet, I actually just mean the bag and, of course:

the fucking tuba was a nuclear bomb that took 3/4 of living players off of the table and turned day 3 into a 50/50 choice. not only was it confirming people (a 1/20 or 10 percent chance or whatever it was is basically as good as confirmation. no one is going to vote against that) but it was indisputably mod-confirming them instead of the result being given via PM or something. the fact that so many people ended up 'confirmed' through no agency of their own, just because god willed it, and put a spotlight on the scum, is not balanced. that's extremely townsided. I'm going to assume it was random, but it certainly felt like very bad luck for me, considering who it kept landing on. i think the game experience for everyone could be vastly improved by having this item either removed or severely modified.

game theory-wise: as I said above the percentage to fail was way too small. this goes for all items but especially the tuba. it's going to deliver accurate results almost all of the time. and in the nightmare scenario that it lands on scum and backfires, reading them as town, then what? pretty unsatisfying conclusion for all players when the game is over.

functionally the double agent role just doesn't work. he has no incentive to bother playing both sides or doing anything with a bulletproof vest. he also has no incentive to actually side with scum because this setup it's not just two scum versus two agents. it's two scum versus two agents and an additional seven other players (not counting the double agent himself) who are aligned with the agents. so from the outset it's like 2 scum who can't talk to each other with another and don't know who eachother are, versus 10 other people. one way to fix this would just be to make the double agent's wincon supercede everyone else's. if the agents or spies get eliminated while the double agent is still alive, the double agent wins and everyone else loses. alternately ditch the role altogether and make a third team. would require more players. the entire town vs 3 independently aligned teams. or 6 teams and you could theme it around shin megami tensei

in addition to informed minority and scumchat being sacred, the conceit of this game encourages metagaming to an insane degree. there's no way around that. as long as chats aren't 100% sealed off that text analysis stuff is going to happen, explicit or not. incidentally the reason I started immediately asking jeroen questions about scumchat was because this game was entirely just about faking reactions to meta stuff instead of faking scumhunting. it was basically impossible for the setup to not devolve into the item speculation that it did. also part of what confirmed jeroen to be the double agent was timestamps. with players in different timezones, this is gonna happen. i hate this kind of meta-shit so i was in actual hell

also obviously responding to players ingame (influences reads) and not doing something about that deadchat situation is. mistake. glad nothing came of it i guess.

in conclusion stop making me scum. all of you. i'm scum every game now for some reason and it's probably liberty's fault somehow. and the setups just keep getting more difficult for me to win!!!!

author=OzzyTheOne
All I will say is this. CAVE for no reason cast a hammer vote on cap on day 2 the moment the day was over. I realized that that was him being scum gloating. I don't get how none of you picked that up though.

Anyhow, good game CAVE! You played town like a damn fiddle and I can't complain because I died night 1.

thank you. that actually wasn't scum gloating though. I was definitely playing with the possibility that the game might not end that night in mind. idr the reason I hammered but it wasn't that.

Congratulations CAVE. Well played!