I’m fascinated by the math whizzes here discuss game balancing. Would you guys be opposed to a passing Mod separating out those posts into a new thread so that others who may not be paying attention to the current Mafia game might get a chance to provide some input? Might need a caution for those playing in Random to stay out until their dead or game’s over just in case there are any clues to the makeup of that game though.
All this stuff should probably be put into a pointing system V2.0.
While the notion of playing exactly like Town is a good one and one that scum try to achieve, the point of the game is identifying the delta between being town and trying to be town. Early on, I would say our games were vastly incapable of finding scum because the ideas of what scum would do or how scum would behave were wildly incorrect. Then a bit later, people caught on to ‘scum tells’ and finding scum became a bit easier and scum rarely won. I think we are hitting a new era where scum are very much aware of all the ‘scum tells’ so the players still caught looking for these overt signals are once again off target.
That’s the long way of saying: Scum perfecting the town-look is not the point of the game, but you are right in pointing out that a game analysis should assume perfect play on both sides which means a truly random shot.
That leaves a very troubling result.
Agreed. Said pointing system 2.0 could be written on the Wiki so we have a central resource on which to view it.
BTW, has everyone been to the wiki? You should all go and get to editing. It still needs a lot of work.
I’m actually planning on posting my findings on Idle’s board. I’ve been working on this for a while, but didn’t think it appropriate to post while I was modding. There’s also the caveat that I’m currently accounting for no power roles at all, and I can’t even figure out how to account for several common roles (the only role I’m thinking of so far is “confirmable Town”, basically someone who can, at any point, have the Mod declare them Town-- An approximation of Mason-type roles). The problem is that with most power roles, it’s hard to say definitively what “optimal strategy” is.
I smell a monte carlo simulation in your future.
Speaking of Idle’s Board. The next game going up their (after the reboot of the currently broken game) is going to be the long awaited Malazan game that Hoopy, Rysto, MHaye and I have been working on for…something like two years now.
It’s not exactly mafia so much as it is a game that is mafia inspired. We put a lot of work into it, and are really excited that it is going to finally see the light of Day.
We will probably start posting like crazy to drum up excitement for it, but I wanted to get that out there. We need players who will talk and think outside the box a bit, this game more than others will live or die according to how much the players bring to the table. We are also hoping that maybe some people who haven’t played in a while, or who haven’t played yet will get in on the action.
So, MALAZAN - THE GAME! Coming soon!
I don’t get why he plays. He admits that he doesn’t actually follow the game, he skims posts, and he always gets upset halfway. Several people said at the beginning of the game, hey, let’s make sure we don’t take things personally, what? And inevitably, here we are. I truly don’t understand why he wants to be involved in any Mafia games. His problem is that he doesn’t enjoy Mafia games.
Because he sees this as a flaw in himself, and wants to fix it. And he has been told that playing is the only way to get better, and has experienced that as a gamer. It’s quite common in people like Meeko who do not consider themselves to be “normal.”
It doesn’t help that he had a lot of fun in the first on-board game he played. But I think a lot of that came because he won.
I don’t disparage Meeko for this, I suppose he is like me. If I backed out of everything just because I wasn’t having fun, I would never do anything. Every game has its frustrations. Meeko just feels them more fully, and let’s them get to him. It’s a hard flaw to break.
I dunno, man. I consider myself pretty weird, and I’ve got a fourth-grade ADD diagnosis to my name, too. I don’t see what that has to do with the likelihood of my repeatedly signing up to play an internet message board game that I hate playing.
I understand that you take it kind of personally and think it’s unfair the way Meeko’s idiosyncrasies can be held against him, but I just don’t understand where he stands to gain from all this. He doesn’t act like somebody who’s trying to iron out any particular flaw. He acts like somebody who was forced to be here and is being repeatedly flogged for it, which is a strange tack indeed in the context of a whimsical, anonymous internet game. And I don’t disparage him for it, either; in fact I treat him, and the subject of him, in far more painstaking and thoughtful fashion than I do anybody else, and I don’t think anybody disparages him for it. Nobody wants to hurt his feelings. I don’t harbor him any ill will, and it’s because I don’t harbor him any ill will that I’m somewhat concerned about the fact that any future participation by me in a game with him will make his life worse.
I just don’t understand, I really don’t. I don’t get what he wants everyone else to do in the context of a game of accusation and purposefully constructed distrust. That’s the whole point of the exercise, which most of us are using a a diversion, a thing that is pleasurable and less stressful than most other things we do in a day, and playing it hurts his feelings.
Actually, he was a proven mason, and got lynched by a Scum hostile takeover in the last five minutes of the last Day.
I was referring to Haggle. From what I understand, that was the first message board game he ever played. Someone then told him he’d be good at mafia, and he wants to live up to that.
I’ll get to Jimmy in a minute.
Okay, so my response to Jimmy is really complicated, and I’m not sure it’s quite coherent. I think I’m gonna wait and sleep on it. And if I still can’t make it make sense, I won’t respond.
I think Meeko’s ADHD is a lot worse. And when I say he thinks himself as weird, I mean more like not neurotypical. Like there’s something wrong with the way his brain works. That there’s something wrong with him.
Good reading! It’s kinda my SOP to take things leveled at people I identify with personally. But I didn’t notice it was happening here.
That’s what I’m trying to explain. I’m going to have to get more specific. I think he has a learning disorder, something like Mafia Asperger’s. I think he misses a lot of nuance in the game. I don’t think he gets a lot of the things that are self-evident to others. I think he would do good to have someone spell out the self-evident stuff.
My reason is that, when he has a concrete way to improve, he jumps on it. There’s the whole outline thing he does in this game. And he jumps on terms and does his best to understand them. Bussing was one he didn’t get, and now he does.
What’s forcing him to play is himself. The Asperger’s thing fits here too. HE gets really focus on wanting to do one particular thing. Mafia is his obsession. He thinks he should be good at it. He thinks he can figure it out. I suspect it’s also a way to “fit in” with the mafia crowd. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me that the stuff that happens to him in Mafia often happens in real life. More below.
I’m not trying to say anyone does. I was more trying to say that I understand it. I have OCD. I understand getting stuck on something and continuing to do it not because it makes me happy, but because not doing it makes me less happy. I think it really, really bugs him that he’s not good at this game.
I think it’s probably a strategy that he’s seen work before, in other games. Quite often, persistence in a game is precisely what makes it fun, especially for someone like Meeko, who seems to define fun by winning.
It doesn’t help that, a lot of time, his inability to be understood makes people annoyed or even mad. I think he likely experiences it a lot in real life, and that, if he can fix it in this game, he can fix it in the macrocosm of real life. (though I bet this is subconscious).
Two things: I suspect he doesn’t think in such big picture terms. It’s probably never really crossed his mind WHY he wants to play. I don’t think he really gets the theme that this game is designed to make people nitpicky and distrustful. He may get it on some superficial level, but not to the point where it doesn’t really bother him that he’s Town and no one trusts him.
Second, I don’t think he has much else to do. And he’s ADHD, so he’s gonna be chronically bored. So I think that, even getting upset in Mafia is more exciting and more fun than his normal day. He’s got to constantly be doing something.
BTW, did you ever see his videos? I think they’re really enlightening on who he is, particularly the ones where he’s just talking to the camera. I wish I could more specific, but a lot of my impressions of him came from this.
(I’m not sure if this discussion has been officially moved yet, so:)
I see where you’re coming from. What I’m getting at is:
a) Just one scum is no scum at all - that’s a Serial Killer. You don’t have scum until you have a team, so on the scores above I’d say 1 scum =0, 2 scum = 8. This seems like a technicality, but the point that scum function as a team is an important one because…
b) On the same scum = team basis, I think there’s an optimal team size which can be exceeded. This is because scum cannot help but interact with each other, and the more of these interactions there are, the more leads there will be for town once they get their first scum. Consider the case where on Day Two the two close contestants for the lynch are Scum and Town. The remaining scum will want to choose between voting Town to save their buddy and further their WinCon directly, or bussing Scum to look good. If neither of those options seems attractive, they’ll fall back to a throw-away vote, which in itself can draw attention. Now, with a smaller scum team, they can split themselves among these options and hide in the crowd while still achieving their goal(s). With a larger team, some of those votes become redundant (you only need to win a lynch by one) which means that the cost of achieving their tactical goal is that they leave a number of scum on a vote list which, over time, will gradually be colour-coded blue. If three out of five unconfirmed names on that list are scum, that’s a worse position to be in than having one out of two.
This example just looks at concrete vote patterns, and doesn’t account for the softer interactions between scummates, which will also leave a trail. The bigger the team, the more trails there will be. So I’d never say that adding scum *weakens *the scum team, but that there is a cost to adding scum such that the sixth scum probably doesn’t add as much as the fourth.
Does that make sense?
Counting 1 scum as 0 doesn’t. Since vanilla town are by definition equal to one, counting a scum as zero would mean that a scum playing by himself would have an equal chance of losing. That makes no sense.
You see, while the team thing is important, it’s not the only thing scum has. Even 1 scum has more information than Town. There’s no way he can accidentally kill someone on his team. And town cannot learn anything via vote patterns, as no person will vote for themselves. So it’s probably the only game that balances entirely on probability:
Using Chronos’s numbers (4v1) simply means that there are 2 days in which to make a choice: 1/5 on the first day, 1/3 on the second.
That’s 4/5*1/3 +1/5 or 46%.
What I don’t understand is how the scum’s actual play factors in. Would a gambit that gives scum a greater chance if it works, but lesser if it fails factor in? Or would the probabilities cancel out. (i.e. the probability of it working would be the same as the decrease probability if it doesn’t). This is the stuff about balance I don’t understand.
Huh? Reboot? I haven’t checked over there since Thursday evening. I’ll have to go over there and see what happened.
It shall be epic!
To hijack for a bit, I started Learning Disability testing this past Saturday. My second and last session is on Sunday. I should hit pretty high on the ADHD scale, but it’ll be interesting to see what else I got. I don’t actually need the diagnosis for my job or anything (Software engineering is one of those professions where ADHD doesn’t seem to have overly negative repercussions, and ADHD can actually be a benefit in some aspects of the engineering process), but I need to know just for the sake of knowing. Plus, it might help explain why I struggled through college and grad school.
Oh, why does it have to be on Idle’s board? The interface there gives me hives.
Idle’s board allows for some customization of the board restrictions that we can’t do here allowing us to essentially say to the players that there are no game restrictions beyond making sure that the mods stay in the loop on everything. PM each other out of game, set up your own sub boards, edit your posts after the fact, do whatever you feel you have to in order to win the game, just let us know that you are doing it.
We were originally going to have the game run over here, and if the first run goes well we will probably re run the game over here…but don’t let that stop you from heading over there. What about the board interface don’t you like? If you PM Idle about it (or FCoD) it is likely that it can be changed.
I find the quote function very difficult to use. Literally almost every time I try it something gets screwed up somewhere and I wind up drawing an unwarranted conclusion or some such. It makes me look flaky. I wind up creating impressions I didn’t mean to create. And even beyond that it seems to be more time-consuming than other sites, so I wind up working harder than I would on another site to get to an end product that’s completely screwed up half the time … just ugh.
In games on other sites we’ve used Quicktopic for off-board communications – it has its perils, though.