In post 49, Alyssa The Lamb wrote:
I think that game feel and game balance are inherently different things. A game can be balanced by numbers and still feel really shitty to play, which the open setup listing should hopefully provide enough examples to show what I mean.
I agree. Balance doesn't translate to being fun, and EV also doesn't necessarily translate to balance. Those are both things that I think are definitely true, and we seem to agree there.
This might be a bit tangential, but I do however think that common criticisms of EV tend to miss the point. I think that most people who consider open setup balance recognize that there are outside factors that influence EV, and you can't consider a game's balance only on its EV without considering the mechanics. I think almost everyone by now knows that nightkills lower in-practice EV, and the lack of them raise it significantly. There are similar raising and lowering in-practice EV factors for, say, Vengecop and White Flag, and almost any other open setup you can name. Whenever I see someone criticize the use of EV based on saying that "EV doesn't mean a setup is balanced", I tend to think to myself, "yeah, we know". Obviously the specifics differ, but still. (i don't think this is what you're saying, i was just reminded of this. sorry for the tangent)
My problem is that in the normal games I've played, the scumteam either have unrealistic expectations of them compared to town, or the game is incredibly swingy to balance a specific role or player amount. This is functionally the problem I have with normal games. The fact that they're technically balanced means very little to me, because my idea of an optimal normal queue is relatively simple games that focus on day play while theme games can focus more on mechanical play. I've gotten this feeling in years past, but this has been lost in recent ones.
It sounds like we agree that overcomplexity is a problem for normal games. It seems like you consider this problem to take priority over winrate balance, although I would problem put them in the opposite order. I don't think that really puts us at odds, however.
On your first point, however, we might disagree – that of the scumteam having unrealistic expectations compared to town. Based on some comments and conversations I've read from you in previous normal games, it seems like our philosophies on setup design differ. For instance, earlier skitter mentioned that she felt like it was bad design that she was involved in so many games where scum had neighborhoods and yet the setup at large seemed to lack anything to do with neighborhoods – no Traffic Analysts, no PT cops. I disagree with this line of thinking fairly strongly.
In the first place, neighborhoods have been in games since long before PT Cops and Traffic Analysts were normalized. Those two roles have certainly been in many normal games since their being whitelisted, but to assume that the two must come together—that a neighborhood necessarily implies one of those roles—seems like recentism bias.
Skitter said that it felt like a red herring. I think that red herrings in closed setup designs tend to be a good thing. That's a fairly strong statement, so let me clarify it – I think that, for closed setups, it is necessary to not always conform to players' expectations. When it comes to any puzzle, there is the signal, and the noise. To have a setup with no red herrings would be all signal, no noise. Imagine if every time there was a Gunsmith, there was a Mafia Doctor. If every time there was a Miller, there was a Cop. I think that this would lead to less interesting and subsequently less fun setups – I think that an important part of closed setups in the first place is uncertainty over roles, even if everything has been claimed. There are important meta considerations along this line of thinking as well. If nobody ever included just a regular Fruit Vendor—if it were always Loyal, or Complex, or Disloyal, or whatever—it would change the way that people play. Uncertainty is an inherent and necessary part of closed setups, and having "red herrings" is the only way to keep that sort of uncertainty alive. Not conforming to expectations can also be used as a part of balancing a setup – for instance, giving Mafia Strongmen or Ninjas when those roles have no utility in the setup. You might say that that seems unfun or frustrating, but I would counter by saying that almost all setups mislead the Town similarly in some way, and again state that that is a necessary and good thing.
Bringing it back to your point, reading some of your conversations in various Normal games, I was reminded of "skew", a balance property that CFJ once talked a bit about. Skew is the tendency for one faction to be able to make massive gains if they play well or get lucky, while the other faction does not have that ability. It seemed to me like many of your problems stemmed from the fact that the games you were looking at seemed to be Skewed – it seemed like you took great issue with instances of scum playing well and yet still losing to good town mechanical actions. To put my main point here concisely, I think that skew is basically an inherent property of Normal games. I also think that basically all setups that involve Power Roles of some sort tend to be skewed (If you want to talk more about this I'd be happy to, but it seems a bit tangential right now). The very peak of scum mechanical play mostly looks like killing the best people each night, probably very good PR hunting and
maybe
good roleblocking (if scum have a roleblocker), whereas the very peak of town mechanical play (where we imagine every town PR makes the best decisions possible) would almost certainly end with town victories in most setups. I say this because Normal games tend not to be balanced around PRs making perfect checks every night, because that's not how most games go. I think that I've said some things that might get interpreted in a direction that I didn't intend them, so I'm going to just restate a few points here:
- Normal games aren't balanced around TPRs making perfect checks each night, because this doesn't tend to happen.
- If TPRs took perfect (or at least very good) actions each night, they would probably win a lot of setups.
- The same ability does not exist for scum, because their PRs tend to be based around disrupting town PRs. Perfect nightkills and roleblocks would stem the tide of perfect TPR actions, but would still likely give town the advantage in most games.
- Thus, we might say that these games are skewed, because the town can make more gains through great actions than the scum can through similarly great actions.
(Most people have probably heard a lot more about "swing" as a balance property, and might consider skew the same thing. I think that there are a lot of cases where they match up, but there are still some meaningful distinctions. For example, I would consider the Newbie A1 RB vs Cop + Doc to be a swingy setup, but not a very skewed one. Again, probably too tangential at this point)
Basically, I think that very few people would disagree that they would prefer Normal games to focus more on dayplay than on night actions (and I would agree with you), but there will almost always be setups where town can either win or gain a significant advantage through good night actions even if the scumteam is playing well, simply because there are very few roles which do not allow for this (mason and innocent child come to mind).
At the end of this very large amount of text I'd just like to restate that I agree with you more than I disagree with you. I dislike setups that have been contorted just to fit some crazy role that the designer really wants, or some "unique" idea that isn't actually fun. I've been guilty of this myself a bit in the past, and seeing how people disliked having to actually play those setups has really stuck with me. The only points it seems to me like we disagree on are expectations when it comes to setup design, and the capability for scum to still lose after playing well via town night actions. I think that skew should still be minimized, but that it is pretty much an inherent part of town power roles.
Fundamentally, I think this is probably a sizable chunk of why a lot of scum players can't get motivated to try in them anymore, which means that when competent towns appear, they ultimately stomp the game in my experience. I can describe what I mean by competent towns when I have time to sit down.
I call old towns better because they simply had to be. There was less of a cushion in PRs in a lot of games and there were more strong scum players. It's rather disturbing to have this reputation for strong scum play when I only ever got the impression that I got the advantage in games because towns destroyed themselves and i just happen to be half decent at amplifying that. That's not strong scum play, that's abusing weak town play.
I agree that I think there used to be more strong scum players on-site in the past, but I'm still not sure there's any evidence that both 1) setups in the past were significantly less townsided and 2) winrates under those setups were comparable to today.
