[MAFIA] SPY VS. MAFIA II DAY 3

Posts

Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
For me it was mostly because in deadchat the item argument was dismissed by piano. And CAVE was already targetting Psy long before the item argument even started. And also Psy was one of the prime suspects.

Also it's CAVE. I always trust him for no reason.
OzzyTheOne
Future Ruler of Gam Mak
4676
author=Jeroen_Sol
For me it was mostly because in deadchat the item argument was dismissed by piano. And CAVE was already targetting Psy long before the item argument even started. And also Psy was one of the prime suspects.

Also it's CAVE. I always trust him for no reason.


I never trust him xD
Or have a very hard time trusting him if I do think he's town.
Cap_H
DIGITAL IDENTITY CRISIS
6625
I didn't trust him. He put a piece of yuno in his read of me. I just got pocketed early and he is good in keeping me pocketed.
author=CAVE_DOG_IS_BACK
I think making the double agent's wincon still supercede everyone else's still makes sense and would up the duplicity factor. I think you would still have to use something besides QT for the chats to avoid timestamps but I don't know what's appropriate.


You just want a message board with no timestamps? Have you ever asked anyone? I mean this place is full of programmers.

author=OzzyTheOne
Ok, so I just got mostly done with reading up on thread and I must say.

Psy builds a claim against CAVE and then CAVE uses an item that negates Psy and makes sure hammer happens at 4 votes. How did this not seem scummy to most people?

It was a part of why I went with Cave over Psy, had Cave just wanted to prove he had the item then using it on someone like Odd who never votes would have been sufficient.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
author=Fomar0153
You just want a message board with no timestamps? Have you ever asked anyone? I mean this place is full of programmers.

That's... a really good point, actually. I don't know how hard it would be, but we have skill here, and it would solve a lot of problems games like these have.
Umming and arring over this, I don't have masses of time at the moment but I don't imagine it taking a lot of time to make. A message board was one of the first things I ever made when I learnt PHP.

What would the exact requirements be? No promises on me having the time though.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
*Edit: Wrong thread.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
author=Fomar0153
Umming and arring over this, I don't have masses of time at the moment but I don't imagine it taking a lot of time to make. A message board was one of the first things I ever made when I learnt PHP.

What would the exact requirements be? No promises on me having the time though.


People would need to be able to log in, and posts would need to show up in the correct order, just without exact timestamps. If anonymous chats like in this game need to exist to, then maybe some way of adding aliases or something?

I don't think any more than that is necessary, though the options that Cap pointed out like being able to see all the posts one person made are very useful.

But if you don't have any time, don't do it.
CAVE_DOG_IS_BACK
On sunny days, I go out walking
1142
author=OzzyTheOne
Ok, so I just got mostly done with reading up on thread and I must say.

Psy builds a claim against CAVE and then CAVE uses an item that negates Psy and makes sure hammer happens at 4 votes. How did this not seem scummy to most people?

his case was mostly predicated on me holding an evil item since the start of the game. I knew this was where he was going with his narrative so I let it proceed without claiming my item so that I could drop my bombshell (why would scum have such a redundant item set(also my item is provable(XD))) when there was not enough time on the clock for town to, uh, defuse the bombshell.

i had also said I got an item in the middle of day 1 but never revisited that quoteb ecause the game ended.

also tbf I didn't know that it would affect hammer in that way.



author=Fomar0153
It was a part of why I went with Cave over Psy, had Cave just wanted to prove he had the item then using it on someone like Odd who never votes would have been sufficient.

using an item that erases votes on confirmed town instead of potential scum would be, well, a very bad idea, if I was town. it makes sense to use on the person i think if scum, if town.


author=Cap_H
I didn't trust him. He put a piece of yuno in his read of me. I just got pocketed early and he is good in keeping me pocketed.

it was actually luca blight

author=Fomar0153
You just want a message board with no timestamps? Have you ever asked anyone? I mean this place is full of programmers.


actually I've just always used a formatted google spreadsheet for this stuff. I think it might work appropriately. I think you can restrict who can see edit history but idk.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Once upon a time, when mafia was relatively new to RMN, I played a couple of games where there wasn't any scum chat room or message board. Scum could communicate with each other only by sending messages to the moderator, which the moderator would then forward to the other scum. Any other method of scum communicating with each other was against the rules.

If you really want better anonymity among the scum team, I think that's the way to do it. Can't see timestamps if you can't see messages.

I think one of those games actually had no communication method between scum at all. The subordinate scum could send one message per night to the moderator, suggesting who to nightkill, and the moderator forwarded that to the scum with the nightkill power. The scum with the nightkill role just got a list of the suggested names (no reasons or anything) and then made the kill choice. This pretty much nullified scum's ability to coordinate.

All of this work to keep people from being able to identify each other in scum chat seems pointless though. I mean, if you're not spending your time identifying the people in chat, then what's the point of this spy vs. spy setup in the first place? That's the whole point of secret messages. You have to figure out who it is.

The actual solution is to give scum and agents a way to kill the double agent, and a reason to do so. Nobody wants to kill the double agent right now and that seems bad. Sharing their illicitly obtained info and revealing their identity shouldn't be risk-free like it is right now. It should be an almost-assured death sentence.

My solution would be something like: Every scum and every agent except the double agent starts with a single-use item. All of these items are the same. They can each be used one time only to try to identify the double agent - you pick someone you think is the double agent, and if you're right, they die and you get another random item for free.
In werewolves there was a role called a "little girl". Every night she can "secretly" try to open her eyes and look when it was scum's turn to kill someone. If scum doesnt notice her, she gets to blurt out on everyone the next day given she lives through.

If scum does manage to target her during the night, they get an extra kill that night.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
LockeZ
If you really want better anonymity among the scum team, I think that's the way to do it. Can't see timestamps if you can't see messages.


That wasn't the point. I'm not interested in them keeping a secret. I'm just interested in creating a condition in which they don't want to reveal themselves. The point was that at any moment, the agents or scum accidentally reveal who they were to the double agent, who could then immediately tell the other team. That said, I do agree making it a condition that both agents and scum have to die for double agent to survive could help to balance a bit better.
CAVE_DOG_IS_BACK
On sunny days, I go out walking
1142
author=LockeZ
All of this work to keep people from being able to identify each other in scum chat seems pointless though. I mean, if you're not spending your time identifying the people in chat, then what's the point of this spy vs. spy setup in the first place? That's the whole point of secret messages. You have to figure out who it is.

well, I don't think anyone (or me, at least) wants that. The timestamp stuff just feels bad because it's largely out of players control. people live in different timezones. when they post can be used to identify them. players *can* get around it, but it's potentially irl unhealthy. it's also just less fun/simpler than looking at how someone is talking/what they're knowing or not knowing.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
I think it's a difficult call. I definitely think there needs to be more reason to want the double agent dead. My roleclaim D2 came because I basically felt invincible, which you should never feel in a mafia game.

But I don't know if making the double agent unable to win with town or scum is the solution. Then the double agent can't pass information to the other team at all without being found out and killed, so the double agent basically becomes the one true scum (like Cave in this game) which may not be what you're going for.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I think my solution would make it so the double agent could potentially pass information in the scum and agent chats, where they have a code name, but wouldn't be able to reveal themselves in public. And even just passing info in the scum/agent chats would be risky because the scum and agents would both be incentivized to kill this double agent, and once they know that Agent Orange is the double agent they might be able to figure it out. But the recipient of this info would also be incentivized to leave them alive in order to learn from them. Risk and reward.

The item might benefit from some kind of penalty if you target the wrong person with it. Not a big penalty though. Something very minor. Even just telling the opposing team "Scum/Agency has wasted one of their double-agent-finder items to no avail" would probably be enough, since that gives them info they can use to make more informed decisions about their own use of those items. Since the double agent would be in the other chat, they'd get this info too, and would know they were relatively safer. Specifically telling the opposing team "Scum/Agency has wasted one of their double-agent-finder items on Cavedog to no avail" would be even more info, maybe too much.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
That's definitely too much info. Double Agent should benefit from successfully misdirecting one of those items, and narrowing the pool of double agent candidates is not beneficial at all.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
I think what I saw here was there's no way to completely eliminate technical metagaming. The "each-other" rule is all well and good. I want to stop people from getting the information they shouldn't have and then analyzing it like what started to happen here because I feel like that's really not in the spirit of the game, but I don't want to stop you from being able to say, "You know, this guy in chat said 'each-other' and I thought that was an odd way of saying it." What I DO want to stop is "Okay, so here are all of the strange grammatical ticks I could find in my scum partner's writing pattern..."

And that's a thing about timestamps. Yeah, that risks that kind of metagaming, but at the same time, when someone's around is a tell in circumstances like that, anyway, and that's fair game, and there are ways around it. We could clearly see when CAVE was on in this thread, but we couldn't see it in scum chat because he decided not to use it, which is absolutely his prerogative, so he was able to avoid that tell. There are plenty of other ways to do that. If you're not usually online before dinner, you could take fifteen minutes before to make a quick post so that it looks like you're about an hour earlier than people would usually see. What I'm getting at, is, I know I can't close all the loopholes; I just want people to have fun, not feel like they were cheated, and then not have to overthink how I'm going to accomplish that.
One thing that didn't come up that I'd likto mention. Scum could easily figure out the double agent through nightkills too since the double agent cannot submit one. You could just have a different person submit the nightmill each night and then start analyzing oranges posts. Not sure how I feel about this possibility staying in since you have to manipulate how the game works to do this. Even if you assign the nightmill to someone that still narrows it down to two.