For Future Games

On January 03 2011 04:54 Ace wrote:
Less double lynches, less mad hatters, less Town PMs. More Vigilantes, more Serial Killers. Thanks.

Trying to read the last few games to find out what makes sense is ridiculous. You're killing skill levels giving the Town, and in some instances Mafia these stupid crutches. Let people get better by actually having to put some thought into actions.

No more voting threads unless your game has a lot of players. I don't think people actually realize scumhunting works when you force players to take a stance with their vote. Keep the game in the thread if you want a better game.

Serial Killers up the game KP and allow for more situations where pressure to claim happens. As it is now just look at the way most lynches occur. There isn't even pressure voting to claim or trying to figure stuff out. Put an SK in the game and when the multiple night kills start happening Vigilante hunting becomes important.

On January 04 2011 00:17 Qatol wrote:
Voting threads are pretty much going to happen for games with more than ~15 players. It is too hard on the host to not have them. More vote counts in the main thread would be nice though.

I think the reason we have been using Hatters is because Vigis are just ridiculous in PM games. If your game has PMs, you should not be using Vigis. It is too strong for them to just call out their hit and then form a PM circle.

I disagree completely with your statement that Vigis take more skill to play than Hatters. I don't think we have seen more than 1 instance of the Hatter role being used correctly actually (dreamflower in Mafia XV). The thing is, if the Hatter is lynched, the town is wasting KP. It might be appropriate to change the role so they have 1 bomb instead of 2 to avoid the carpet bombing effect, but it is a lot harder to draw out a hit from the mafia while placing your bomb correctly than it is to survive for a day or two and then take a shot.

We don't have the hatter roleclaim and double lynch immediately in an attempt to "carpet bomb our way to victory" because that's actually the easiest way for the town to lose. The town would rather use their KP when their information roles have had a little time to point out scum. Throwing KP at early game suspects is an easy way to kill townies and put the town into a big hole. Sure they might get lucky from time to time, but it just isn't a consistently effective strategy.

Why can't SK or Mafia pretend to be a Hatter? Because they're afraid of a lynch? That is a ridiculous waste. If they have managed to make themselves suspicious enough that they are worried they cannot dodge a lynch with a Hatter claim when they probably could survive with a Vigi claim, they probably screwed up anyways. Also, this isn't really that much of a problem because a lot of the games have the Vigi role on the role list and it just isn't used. The whole point of it being there is so the Mafia/SK can roleclaim it.

I'm with Incognito. I don't think your proposed changes really do much for the player skill level. It won't increase because people don't want to get better.

DrH, mandatory smurfing is just a bad idea. The games become more about figuring out who is which smurf than they do about finding scum.

On January 03 2011 11:12 DoctorHelvetica wrote:
mandatory smurfing imo

On January 04 2011 05:05 mikeymoo wrote:

This is a nightmare for staff, I think there was a problem with RebirthofLegend and Plexa and I had to tell the rest of the staff why smurfing in mafia was necessary for that game.

On January 04 2011 07:10 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:
I know. I try to hide here so I can avoid bans for at least every 1000 posts. Then all of a sudden we have mango and mikey up in here. I was tempted to push mango day 1 just to get rid of the ban thread

On January 04 2011 05:05 mikeymoo wrote:

This is a nightmare for staff, I think there was a problem with RebirthofLegend and Plexa and I had to tell the rest of the staff why smurfing in mafia was necessary for that game.

On January 04 2011 07:59 flamewheel wrote:

Smurfing bad.

On January 04 2011 07:30 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:
I approve of that! You are like a father to us, a father who beats his children. While at time we hate you and your belt (banlist) at the end of the day we can't help but love your tireless work banning inactives, making us a better game in the end, even if its at the cost of a healthy relationship.

On January 04 2011 00:17 Qatol wrote:

I disagree completely with your statement that Vigis take more skill to play than Hatters. I don't think we have seen more than 1 instance of the Hatter role being used correctly actually (dreamflower in Mafia XV). The thing is, if the Hatter is lynched, the town is wasting KP. It might be appropriate to change the role so they have 1 bomb instead of 2 to avoid the carpet bombing effect, but it is a lot harder to draw out a hit from the mafia while placing your bomb correctly than it is to survive for a day or two and then take a shot.

We don't have the hatter roleclaim and double lynch immediately in an attempt to "carpet bomb our way to victory" because that's actually the easiest way for the town to lose. The town would rather use their KP when their information roles have had a little time to point out scum. Throwing KP at early game suspects is an easy way to kill townies and put the town into a big hole. Sure they might get lucky from time to time, but it just isn't a consistently effective strategy.

Why can't SK or Mafia pretend to be a Hatter? Because they're afraid of a lynch? That is a ridiculous waste. If they have managed to make themselves suspicious enough that they are worried they cannot dodge a lynch with a Hatter claim when they probably could survive with a Vigi claim, they probably screwed up anyways. Also, this isn't really that much of a problem because a lot of the games have the Vigi role on the role list and it just isn't used. The whole point of it being there is so the Mafia/SK can roleclaim it.

I'm with Incognito. I don't think your proposed changes really do much for the player skill level. It won't increase because people don't want to get better.

DrH, mandatory smurfing is just a bad idea. The games become more about figuring out who is which smurf than they do about finding scum.

On January 06 2011 14:06 pevergreen wrote:
The PTI or PTN (Pro-Town Information group or Pro-Town Network) was and, depending on the host, still is a big problem where I play.

It was winning game after game, and frustrating many people. If you were town, you followed them. If you were mafia, you died fast. If you were in the PTN, you had all the fun.

Hosts started to take measures against this. In a game called 'Netherworld', a pro town group formed. It comprised of the detectives and two doctors. It was later joined by myself and another person.

I was part of the mafia, a 5 man team in this game. I had a traitor role, if I could kill 4 people, I would break off and form my own mafia, directly against my old teammates. I pursued this objective, infiltrating the pro town group. It was, however, also infiltrated by a guy named TinCow, who was revealed as the serial killer, but passed himself off as pro town. He got 4 kills, formed his own mafia, killed the PTN from the inside, and won the game.

Different people restrict it in different ways. A game just finished had three tiers of investigations and players could change alignments. Thats a common form, as is the nerfing down of detectives.

Its up to the host to take into account the likelihood of a PTN forming, and counter-balance it, or don't let it form.

I don't believe removing PMs is the best way, and it has always been a big part of how we play.

The other problem people complain of is that if you are in the PM network, you feel like you are playing the whole game by yourself and the town is a bunch of lazy players piggybacking off your work. If you aren't in the circle, you are pretty bored because the circle doesn't trust you and all they want you to do is vote the way they tell you to vote.

On January 07 2011 19:03 L wrote:
Stop playing with detectives that rolecheck and PMs won't form game deciding circles. Compensate by giving town abilities that need to be properly used, like vig hits.

The games typically run along the Day 1) Random lynch. Day 2) Lynch an idiot. Day 3) Lynch whomever the DT/blue claimant has fingered route, and as such we see huge drops in activity midway through day 2, as there's nothing for most townies to add to the game at that point, regardless of if there's a townie circle or not.

Also, regardless of the role setup, even in no PM games, most games do devolve into setups wherein a very select few people do the hard lifting, push conversation and actively scumhunt while the majority of town sits back and chimes in from time to time. That's not a game problem, its a time management issue from the players. Not everyone's going to have the time to push their agenda, and even 2-3 superb posts by a time stripped town player can be chumpposted and ignored if mafia are on the ball.

On January 19 2011 02:19 Qatol wrote:

Amusingly, this happened in Mafia XXXV (which was going on when you made this post). Instead, there were 3 Vets and a Vigi. Most of the town players spent a good portion of the game complaining about how worthless the DT was. More mini games without DTs might be interesting.

Assassin
The Assassin is this game's third party candidate! Except for, there may be more than one? To complete his/her win objective, the Assassin is to find and kill all the other Assassins in the game. Assassins will be told in their role PMs how many Assassins there are in the game, but nobody beyond them will know. Assassins show up as Assassins to role checks. To clarify the Assassin's win objectives: The Assassin wins alone, and must complete his mission before the war between the town and the mafia ends. The Assassin counts toward the number of town-aligned people for counting town vs. mafia purposes.

In order to kill his targets/competitors, the Assassin is a combination of vigilante and detective. Each Assassin will have two role checks to use per game, and two night kills per game. You may only use one of each per night. If you manage to kill another Assassin with your night kill, it will be refunded.

On February 11 2011 15:27 Incognito wrote:
Agree with Foolishness here. Third parties just add too much volatility to the game that imo don't help gameplay too much. Distracts town from actually knowing what their win condition is, and just makes town hope SK does the dirty work for them. Just look at PYP3. Besides BC, town didn't deserve to win anything. Yet they still got close because SK was being pro-town. At the same time, mafia just has to hope SK isn't smart enough to target them, since they're pretty much powerless to eliminate the SK even if they know who he is. The only way to eliminate him is by lynch, and most times town isn't going to be up for letting that happen.

Also as with Qatol's first point, its really hard to win with SK. If I got an SK in a 30 person game, I wouldn't be too inclined to play seriously. So many things can go wrong, and I'm going to have an extremely difficult time trying to make everything play out the right way. It will take days/weeks of effort to actually win, but if anything goes wrong, my chances of winning could vaporize in an instant. With this sort of payoff, is it worth it? Probably not. Might as well mess around and just get a good laugh out of it instead of potentially getting an ulcer trying to win the game.

If SK is actually trying to win the game, then the SK has a balancing effect on the game. If town is doing poorly, SK is going to be pro-town. If mafia is getting obliterated, SK is going to try to shoot some townies. Which gives town/mafia the option of playing a mediocre game and still getting away with it. So in essence, smart serious SK allows the rest of the town/mafia to slack off and play a mediocre game and still be ok, while a non-serious SK just makes the game volatile. No reason to have SKs imo.

As for assassins, I'm not sure how this mechanic helps the game. First, it adds a bunch of KP to the game, making it volatile. Second, if they're made bulletproof, thats just disadvantageous for the mafia, since now theres around 2-4 non-hittable 3rd party characters, 2 potential medic prot targets and potentially a vet. No point in either mafia or town finding assassins either, so basically this just creates two games, which doesn't improve gameplay imo.

On February 11 2011 16:23 Ace wrote:


You are assuming that every SK is going to be in a position to know who is Town and who is Scum. This rarely happens even up to end game scenarios.

On February 11 2011 14:51 Ace wrote:
I agree with 1.) but not A.) and certainly not 2.

Mafia, even if they know the presence of an SK don't have to Night Kill anyone if they don't want to. Sure, deconduo NKing someone makes it easier for the SK to win but Mafia aren't forced to NK. The role is hard to win with because it requires a balancing act and some luck. This is exactly why SKs are bulletproof and show up innocent. If we could go back in time I still wouldn't force deconduo to NK if he didn't want to. Also JimboSilvers was still in decent position to win as the Town was still in LYLO. He had options for sure.

As for 2 that doesn't happen often. SKs are rarely outted early on unless it's known there is one in the game or they do something to make themselves known. That could be getting caught in a lie about being a Vigilante, attracting too much NK attention and living, or even playing in a funny way. Even so when they mess up I rarely see them screw the other 2 sides over apart from maybe 2 games on TL. Those few instances where SKs sell their services in attempt to screw the Town/Mafia are hard to moderate since the SKs may be thinking they can live longer and in fact further their Win Condition. Otherwise a hidden SK that outs himself purposely to screw over one of the other factions should be modkilled and this won't be an issue.

b.) is what I was just talking about (in Insane Mafia I think). Really though Town should just lynch an SK at that point. Part of it can be blamed on LD I guess, but most of the blame has to go on town at that point for being so damn stupid.

If c.) happens oh well. If it gets down to 4 players with a known SK then really what happened before that to let an outted SK live so long?

If the SK lives to the late game then they deserve it. Assassin was just a boring role. I think I was in a game with them and really didn't care about their WC. It was also a broken role that could affect the game just as much as an SK could. Having a game within a game doesn't seem to work well in Mafia imo.