The first and most important is that from my skim here there are multiple people saying the setup was townsided and at least one person saying the setup was slightly scumsided, and also multiple people saying it was balanced. I see this as generally at least not a bad sign taken in aggregate, but also it makes it difficult to actually take a real lesson away from the game as the reviewer other than "yeah, seems like a reasonably good job". Of course it's not people's jobs to make that possible, people can say whatever they want and of course opinions will differ. And it is my job as an NRG member (and, well, the listmod) if I'm looking at feedback to sift through it and figure out what it means.
Regarding this actual run of the game: yes, lots of things went right for scum and the game was close. And also I haven't read the whole game ofc so feel free to correct me but:
This is a favorable situation for scum; 7p yelo with 3 people confirmed not-groupscum (assuming from what people have said that one of those 3 was the traitor) leaves 4 people, 2 town 2 mafia, where the town has to lim both mafia before limming either of the town. That's EV of 1/6 for town. So yeah, scum played well and ended up in a great position as a result.Datisi wrote:and it STILL resulted in a 7p yelo where 3 people were confirmed not groupscum. like. what. i'm sorry but like what is scum supposed to *do* here.
It's easy to point to things that went well for scum, but there are also things that went poorly for them. Yes, scum managed to NK a PR every night, but town also managed to avoid miseliminating a PR every single day. From the sound of things, scum played well, but the town also generally played above-average, or at least it wasn't one of those games where the town caved in on itself and scum just swooped in to win it. The arguably-strongest PR lived until night 5 and managed to out four results.
Regarding balance in general: I think there's still fundamentally an effect where balancing a game on this site simply requires more town power than people would expect. Large games make things harder to judge (and consequently harder to balance) for lots of reasons (less experience balancing them, more variables, more inherent swing, etc). In a large game with lots of scum, ultimately all it takes is one scum playing really well to slip through the cracks and win, and with so many scum in the game that becomes pretty likely. I really don't know how close to 50-50 you'd get if you ran this setup 100 times but I don't think it'd be
too
bad.Regarding design patterns: lots of people complain about things like hard innos/hard guilties and yeah, they are intrinsically somewhat swingy and in some ways unfun if you're caught on the wrong side of things. But in practice there are just very few ways to balance a game that don't involve giving town
something
quite powerful, and there is not anything nearly as strong as, in some form, hard information. There have been cases (at least one i remember) recently of setup designers/reviewers probably giving too much bulk of this to towns in design processes, so I think it is probably something NRG members are thinking about more in general lately, but I don't think 3 hard inno roles in a 19 player setup is anywhere close to egregious. Especially since there isn't a single other PR in this setup whose claim is likely to elicit a response of "yeah, this is definitely real".