In post 14, Aisa wrote:
I think I personally find the idea of a cash prize this high a little... strange? awkward?
I don't know that there's an actual logical reason for this but I'll try to explain why I would find the ~ vibes ~ tricky to navigate.
Spoiler: Aisa's feelings
I think I'd prefer if first place were like $10 or $20. I think in this case the vibes are more "bet you suckers a tenner that you won't beat me in the final game" and I'm into that. Another way to put it would be that if I took part in the event, and I had the last two games to go and it looked like I was actually in the running to win, I would feel that $10 would be a Safe And Wholesome amount to care about. I could say something like "YOU'RE SCUM AND IF YOU THINK I'M LETTING YOU MAKE AWAY WITH MY TENNER WELL YOU'RE DEAD WRONGG!!!" and I
think
this would be an appropriate joke.
Whereas $100 is a Not Insignificant Amount Of Money and I'm not sure I would... know how to behave towards it? Do I act like I want to win it? But all of a sudden jokes like the above don't seem completely appropriate anymore, and generally my gut is signalling to me that I need to use Tact. Ok, so maybe I just pretend the prize not there and play the game like normal. But... it is there?
Maybe I'm just not sure about the idea of a monetary incentive in general. [Insert cliché about how I play mafia for fun and money would make it too serious].
I want to emphasise I don't know what's right or wrong. I'm... sharing how I feel to start a conversation. Others may feel differently in which case I encourage them to share their thoughts. In particular can see people thinking $100 is appropriate for an event of this size / length.
Your feelings are valid and i appreciate you sharing them.
From my end i think that 100 dollars is definitely of an appropriate level for the amount of time and effort that a person will have put into this event in order to win it over the course of a whole year and i promise you that the amount of money is not an amount that it matters for me to spend in this way or i wouldn't want to do it.
If it makes you feel better in terms of playing for it you can either a) opt out of prizes. In this case i will pass down the prizes you would have won to the person below you and move everything else down one slot. Or b) i am happy to make a donation in your name to the charity of your choice instead of the prize going directly to you.
Thank you.
Yes, I can totally see why to others the amount of effort and passion needed to win the event would justify the prize. And although I would have pretty confidently guessed that you could afford to donate the prizes, it's good to see this confirmed.
I think I'd find both options a) and b) satisfying and they would take away a lot of the hesitance I personally would have towards playing the event. If a lot of potential participants would want to take option a), maybe that would be a sign that the community as a whole feels a bit ambivalent about the prizes, but I suppose you cross that bridge if it arises.
(Also personally I'm considering a break/hiatus so not sure I'd be around consistently enough to give the event a serious go.)
How does the existence of the prize pool intersect with the rules about out-of-game influence - specifically the section about wagers? Interested in the spirit of the rules as much as the letter here - the letter can be covered easily enough with listmod approval if it's an issue at all.
Also, the play-to-win rule. Which is more important - playing to win an individual game, or playing to win the series as a whole?
In post 28, Farren wrote:
How does the existence of the prize pool intersect with the rules about out-of-game influence - specifically the section about wagers? Interested in the spirit of the rules as much as the letter here - the letter can be covered easily enough with listmod approval if it's an issue at all.
Also, the play-to-win rule. Which is more important - playing to win an individual game, or playing to win the series as a whole?
idk about philosophically but I have ran this by mith and he did tentatively ok it.
I think you would want to add to the game rules of each game that like, you can play to outside influences during the game if-and-only-if the outside influence is caring about the championship series.
obviously everything is designed so that people simulate playing each game to win that game but like if someone fakeclaims a PR so they can get NKed by scum night one it should be explicit not implicit that's allowed??
"Let us say that you are right and there are two worlds. How much, then, is this 'other world' worth to you? What do you have there that you do not have here? Money? Power? Something worth causing the prince so much pain for?'"
"Well, I..."
"What? Nothing? You would make the prince suffer over... nothing?"
i think i barely played enugh mafia in my peak to maaaybe do this thing so i'm obviously not a participant but a couple of other observations:
1. the thing about 100$ is that it's a different amount in different places. Moving across the US has greatly changed how I feel about 100$ and internationally it can be even more different. It can be impacted by income, CoL, strength of local currency, and also like spending/lifestyle (how much do you spend for fun on weekends vs how much do you save up for big disney vacations could tweak how 100$ feels too)
It's a respectable viewpoint to calibrate it to medium or high CoL U.S. and let other people be excited about the even higher infinite EV. maybe think about like 89$ which is still a strong amount
2. People usually figure out who I am in secret alt games without me slipping. there's probably a few people like that
"Let us say that you are right and there are two worlds. How much, then, is this 'other world' worth to you? What do you have there that you do not have here? Money? Power? Something worth causing the prince so much pain for?'"
"Well, I..."
"What? Nothing? You would make the prince suffer over... nothing?"
$100 meaning vastly different things to different people is imo both part of the stickiness around it, and also going to contribute to people putting greater or lesser weight on it when considering the planning of the event, which may come across as overthinking
I think there are lots of competitions very similar to this one that have very similar prizes and while I agree that this means different things to different people I do not think that is particularly problematic.
mostly for the exercise (i dont do enough of this sort of thing lately...) i made an R simulation for this and got that there would be a tie between first and second place about 18% of the time with best 7 out of 15, vs. about 13.5% of the time with 5 out of 12.
Spoiler: methodology
generate a game result: 50% chance to produce 0 + about 1.5 points, and 50% chance to produce 3 + about 3 points, capped at 9. i'd assume that a player who wins is likely to get more bonus points (for example i assume that "survives at endgame" doesn't include getting endgamed?)
for 5/12: make 8 players who play 9 games, 5 players who play 8 games, 4 with 7, 3 with 6, and 2 with 5. i didn't think very hard about these numbers - i'm conceptually working off of 12 17-player games, and so this takes up about 80% of player-games and leaves 20% for people who just played a couple games for fun. no idea if it would work out like that, obviously there are large ramifications on the numbers based on how exactly it plays out
for 7/15: 8 players who play 11 games, and then just 4 who play 10, 9, 8, 7.
add the highest 5 or 7 scores from each player and check whether the highest and second highest are the same
```{r}
game_result <- function(){
return (min(c(sample(c(0,3+rpois(1,1.5)), 1)+rpois(1,1.5), 9)))
}
guyvector <- function (x){ #player who has played x games
ret = c()
for (i in 1:x) {
ret = append(ret, game_result())
}
return (ret)
}
ties1 = 0
ties2 = 0
for (p in 1:10000) {
bmf = c()
for (i in 1:8) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(9)),5))) #generate 9 games; add up the 5 best results
}
for (i in 1:5) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(8)),5))) #generate 8 games . . .
}
for (i in 1:4) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(7)),5)))
}
for (i in 1:3) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(6)),5)))
}
for (i in 1:2) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(5)),5)))
}
if((sort(bmf)[21] == sort(bmf)[22])) {
ties1 = ties1+1
}
}
ties1
for (q in 1:10000) {
bmf = c()
for (i in 1:8) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(11)),7))) #now we take the best 7 out of 11
}
for (i in 1:4) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(10)),7)))
}
for (i in 1:4) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(9)),7)))
}
for (i in 1:4) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(8)),7)))
}
for (i in 1:4) {
bmf=append(bmf, sum(tail(sort(guyvector(7)),7)))
}
if((sort(bmf)[23] == sort(bmf)[24])) {
ties2 = ties2+1
}
}
ties2
```
it's up to you what to do with those numbers or to reject them obviously, and also how much to value ties to begin with. there ended up being more ties than i thought and maybe that makes my proposal to knock away a bunch of the points-scoring things weaker. i guess ties aren't very scary to me; the thing that team mafia does for ties (?) and also that the big MU tournaments do exclusively to select the winners where the players determine an MVP sounds like at least a comparably strong way to recognize player skill as the other metrics. and of course it could be something the moderator optionally does if you are worried about the whole perverse incentive situation. or alternately, specific matchup record between the tied players when they were opposite alignments, or else something like finding the proportion of the points scored by each player's teammates vs their opponents (i.e. to figure out whether they had skillful teammates or opponents. i'd volunteer to do the tallying here)
sort of not convinced about the calculus of less weighty investment when there's more games but idk i'd say about that
this time around i guess i'm more spooked by the idea of like "i should push x because they're the favorite to win. and
i
want to win." especially since it's not unheard of for people to seem to have a vendetta-based push on someone in the first place. i still think that's much less of a pernicious problem in game N-4 vs. game N-2, even if there's usually gonna be a frontrunner by that point, especially because the "best 7 games" thing makes it hard to compute how many points someone's gonna end up with. and i would choose to the line in the sand such that it's easier to opt out of playing an anon game while still getting the max games notched. sure that's easier with 15 games.
My reaction to most of your suggestions about scoring is kind of a "but why?" so I'll wait to hear your rationale for it before responding.
[/quote]
i guess i try to think about these a lot and they're just a big black hole of consideration.
vig thing: naming vig as the only special power role worth awarding points strikes me as problematic. first of all there's the obvious thing where you get bonus points compared to the field by rolling vig. secondly, shooting mafia isn't the precise measure of whether someone uses vig skillfully/productively, many good players will also prioritize shooting non-PRs, people that were gonna get executed anyway (and this conceptually includes obvious mafia and guiltied mafia, who just end up being free exclusive points for the vig), and also deep wolves when applicable (which impacts the game hugely but isn't valued higher than any old mafia). and then also there's just like plenty of power roles that can be used skillfully or unskillfully.
nightkill: a large portion of nightkills in later nights are PRs, confirmed towns, etc. rather than good players. night 1 and night 2 it's often more like "i dont wanna play against this person" but is still sometimes because somebody claimed PR (which in turn happened because they got wagoned!)
scum survival: this discourages bussing of course, and also puts scum in the very harshly awkward position of having to argue with their teammates when there's disagreement there. granted, i can't remember almost any game i've seen where the wolves specifically chose to bus someone rather than doing it in response to their teammate getting wagoned, and they also almost never talk in great detail about it when they do. i don't watch team mafia games and maybe it's different there though. anyway, it can be good to bus a teammate and it doesn't always reflect poorly on a scum player if they died At Some Point, which is why i would remove the final survival point but begrudgingly keep the day-to-day survival (because it's rarely good for someone to go down very early in any case)
there's more to say but i'm gonna click post again
Last edited by schadd_ on Fri Jun 09, 2023 1:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
there's also the problems with the fact that you can cheese out the points for voting correctly just by always making sure to hammer a wagon, and also there's a sort of buzzer race that happens if someone announces a guilty (in which case the first
n
players to jump in and vote get a point). vaguely i would think about penalizing people for voting town in some way (+2 points for voting scum and -1 point for every two town you vote out?) and then also like having a subjective way to discern when an execution is automatic
i think i agree with schadd wrt scoring. could be interesting to incorporate surveys in some form (for the anonymous games, perhaps some kind of "rank the anonymous player accounts' play" post-game survey kinda thing).
curious to hear how replacements would be handled, especially in the anonymous games. jingle's recent anonymous game kinda shows a potential dilemma there unless nobody knows any of the mains in the game to begin with.
cool idea though! let me know if my modding services could be of use. probably the one thing i'm decent at on this site.
Idk, but would be nicer if we abandon the points system and focus on the total victory counts? (This would be more reasonable imo, since I just dislike people playing in the style on how to farm points)
Tbh I'd rather do this just for total wins instead. At least for scum, a player that consistently goes down early and wins is better than a player who survives long and loses.