Team Mafia Results!

[Hoopla]

I was rooting for Team Evolution.

[Hoopla]

I don't think you read my post very well. I am well aware of independent random assignments. That's why I used the system I did. That said, it does have the risk of having one team with 3 or 4 scum roles, many with none. That's not ideal from a fairness standpoint, so if there were a way to divy it up so that each team got 1 or 2 scum roles, etc. without creating a meta problem, then I'd listen to it. I don't think it exists though.

I don't think it's a big deal really. We should be producing games as close to 50/50 as possible, so it should still be four coinflips before skill comes into play regardless of distribution. I actually think it's interesting having some teams with all town to powerhunt together, and other teams with 2 or 3 scum roles to deal with. Diversifies the strategies and way teams interact.

[Hoopla]

Wait, why on earth do we (and by we, I mean you) care how dissimilar Day lengths were?

It's frustrating having one game last less than a week, and one game go for months. That can't really be controlled, though.

[Hoopla]

I don't think it's a big deal really. We should be producing games as close to 50/50 as possible, so it should still be four coinflips before skill comes into play regardless of distribution.

That's true, but a scum win has a bigger payoff for your team then a town win (since if there is a scum win, only 3 people get the points, while in a town win 9 people get the points). That means that if all games are coinflips, a team with 3 or 4 scum has better odds of winning the whole thing then a team with no scum.

While a scum win is more valuable than a town win because you're restricting more teams from scoring in that game, a scum loss is equally damaging in the other direction. The payoffs are proportionate - there's just increased importance residing on a scum game. A team with 3 or 4 scum has better odds of losing the whole thing too.

[Hoopla]

I think in a game where team cohesiveness was a powerful virtue (just look at SDC's quicktopic), having majority scum roles carries some disadvantages - I think it's a lot harder to contribute to a teammate's game who is scum, than if your team had 3 or 4 town role PM's. Mostly because the skills required in a scum game is not letting people catch onto/suspect you, and a lot of that is based on how you phrase your posts and how you interact with other players. Your team can help in regards to fake scumhunting, but a decent amount of that games chances depends on the player themself. In a town game you're less worried about that, and having good scumhunting analysis in your QT will go a lot further to winning you games than fake-hunting does for a scum game.

It's not a significant disadvantage, because a lot of teams (probably) didn't use the team mechanic effectively/optimally, but in an environment where everyone used it well, it'd help town more than mafia.