There's no such thing as an overeager vig

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Fiasco
Fiasco
Goon
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Fiasco
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Joined: September 21, 2005

Post Post #8 (isolation #0) » Sun Dec 03, 2006 12:32 pm

Post by Fiasco »

Yosarian2 wrote:I'm not sure I agree with that. Random kills can never be expected to change the town/scum ratio; if 2/3's of the people in the game are GG's, and 1/3 is scum, and 3 people are randomally killed, then on average one of them will be scum and 2 will be town, which means that the town/scum ratio will be the same as it was before.
Averaging over the vig outcome and then calculating the change in ratio from that average (which is what you're doing) is not quite the same as calculating the change in ratio from each vig outcome, then taking the average ratio (which is what Pie is doing). In practice the difference will be very small, though. And if you choose to measure game balance with a difference rather than a ratio ("townie power - scum power" rather than "townie power / scum power"), random deaths won't change game balance. Using the expected difference seems more appropriate to my gut than using the expected ratio; I think the latter goes wrong when you try to figure out the effect of multiple days of vigging.
What it will do is make the game shorter, which is bad for the town. Less votes, discussion, and bandwagons, and less night information from cops and such.
Less scum nightkilling.
if your odds are better then average (say, you have a strong hunch person X is scum
I don't think strong hunches make an average player's odds better than average. According to the statistics, people in C9 games lynch very slightly
worse
than random. They could improve their game by using dice tags. Apparently, most of the things the average player thinks are scum tells, simply aren't. I don't think people here have assimilated this insight yet.

Not sure what all this means for vigs. I've never been a vig, but I'd probably be quite aggressive.
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." - Oliver Cromwell

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