dean

Generally a set-up like Cop + Doctor and everyone else vanilla is considered reasonably balanced. All-vanilla and nightless games have also been run and seen a good amount of success for both factions.

Town in this game had:
Two masons
Maribro's MUP
MrL's lightning rod
Aero's Innocent child
Aero's firefighter
Laggy's Watcher
DD's Forensic Investigator
Blaze's Roleblock
JEANS's Governor
Bijou's Bookie
JonCheee's motivator
Exist's Sensor
Windkeeper0's Virgin
All these roles if played even somewhat smartly are neutral utility AT THE VERY WORST (some of these are extremely strong)

Coroner and Nexus are whatever and Princess is negative utility but unlikely to be enacted.

If asa hid his hammerer, then Mafia had:
2-shot janitor (not useful)
Roleblocker (good)
1-shot ninja with a voting restriction (...)
A player with 1-shot immunity to kills, cop investigates (which there were few of), and his teammate's vanillarise (fine)
An odd-day vanillariser that didn't know who his teammates were

Town is SO MUCH stronger than mafia in this set-up compared to the more basic setups. The main thing in mafia's favour is a decently sized team (ignoring third parties it's five mafiosi vs. 13 townies), but town has no reason to have such a dominant advantage at night time.

I think the two games we've hosted with a setup most similar to this is Aero and Ryan's Sun and Moon (landslide victory for town) and Maribro's Users of Qld Smash (town won despite getting outplayed the whole game).

Here's an example set-up from Mafiascum (which checks setups for balance beforehand pretty rigorously) with similar specs to our own and had town win: https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?p=6879738#p6879738
You can see that the town is much weaker and the mafia are much stronger and town still managed to win.

Insie was going to die because even if asa had hid his hammerer powers why would Insie even bring up hammerer in the first place? It's not a role we'd know of beforehand and he's not just going to flick through roles on the Wiki one day and arbitrarily go "hEY GUYS WATCH OUT FOR POTENTIAL HAMMERERS". Hey asa when's the next game.

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02/16/2019 11:48:33

Blaze said:
We had no suspicion of insie n1

Who is “we”? I’d think you’d be in the minority here.

Bijou said:
To be fair, three of the mafia were dead by like day 4 which is what led to a mass role claim.

If the mafia didn't die so early then the game likely would have been very different.

Town weren't even looking at Insie until you called it out so realistically it's your fault Dean : p

If he didn’t die day 1 he was going to die day 2. It was an obvious scumslip.

Every game that has stacked town power roles like this has turned out very similarly. This isn’t a coincidence.

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02/16/2019 08:03:06

In case I'm sounding too critical here are some things that I liked:
I thought that Janitor + Coroner + Forensic Investigator + limited reveals was an interesting theme if an odd choice for a Smash Bros.-themed game
Day 1 was good
Thought that this was the best JEANS (apart from the horrible decision to save Insie) and a few others have played

And some Interestings:
Why did Laggy watch Aero night 3?
Why did Blaze block me night 1 instead of Insie?
Both these plays worked well for town but I'm not sure of the reasoning behind them.
I thought the flavour text didn't incorporate the Smash theme much.
DD's a bad person "oh is it nighttime?"
Sign-ups should be closed earlier
I think the thread header should be decluttered; a mod should take the first post of the thread and shift some of the information there

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02/16/2019 06:08:00

I think that if you're including Jesters, faction-changing abilities or role madness this heavy you should advertise the game as such.

If Duon won't play if he's not a vengeful jester then... don't put him in the game. DON'T create the role and assign it to him - non-random role assignments are a big no-no and has happened in two of Rhyno's games now.

The set-up needed a bit more review beforehand to set out how the roles would function. I shouldn't be dead and then be asked "what happens if a mason gets vanillarised", this should be established beforehand.
Also feel that there should have been more checks for potentially ABSURDLY broken combinations, including faction-changing Innocent Child / death-confirmed Mason / unlimited-shot Governor. Luckily none of this came into play. I'm not sure why Invisi was told the results of his vanillarisation actions and surprised town didn't ask him why either.

I also feel as though town had too many incredibly strong power roles. Out of the thirteen townies, the only negative utility was Extra's Princess but even that only activated from lynching and it's hard to get a mason lynched. Governor SHOULD be neutral-at-worst utility but JEANS goofed. Sensor, Watcher (especially in a game with Lightning Rod) and Forensic Investigator are all INCREDIBLY powerful abilities. Why was Sensor unrestricted when most of the mafia's roles were restricted?
Between Hammerer (which is negative utility) / Watcher + Lightning Rod / Sensor the game was basically "solved" after Day 1 even without DD's role ever coming into play. I don't really think that mafia is a game that should be "solved" so easily (Duon would have found it very hard to win???). Even with a solid 5/21 players I felt mafia were underpowered in comparison with very weak night powers. Voltz' faction on the other hand I felt always had a chance if he could have pulled off some of the broken faction-changing plans but needed to kill Blaze night 4.
I don't really feel as if role madness has been run well on this website so far so would suggest not running them before gaining more experience as a game host.

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02/16/2019 05:21:45

Can't wait to post in this thread again on Wednesday!

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02/10/2019 06:25:39

Well, I said that I'd vote for asa if Atyeo posted first. VOTE: asa

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02/10/2019 03:52:56

Bijou said:
I'm happy to jump on either the DD or the Atyeo train tbh but I kind of want to wait for Asa to actually make a vote first.

I feel like if asa posts first we should test Atyeo first and if Atyeo votes for asa first I'll switch votes to asa. You're right that we need at least one of them to vote first though.

Bijou said:
By the way, what do you think happened last night anyway? The fact there was only one kill and it didn't specify how they died is pretty interesting don't you think?

I don't know.

It's possible that mafia and arsonist both targeted MrL (for some reason).
It's possible mafia killed and janitored MrL and the arsonist failed due to firefighter, hitting a fireproof (is this a thing? Aero?) player or being roleblocked. I'm assuming that janitor cleans up the method of killing too.
I mean hell it's possible that our "arsonist" is just a fire-based vigilante or something and had way too much faith in my Day 1 read on Extra.

There are other possibilities too...

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02/09/2019 09:40:28

OK.

First, when Glace was modkilled someone should have unvoted (Blaze / Bijou since they were online at the time). But there's no helping this now.

For the hammerer, we've narrowed it down to these possibilities:
1. asa or Atyeo are the hammerer
B. The hammerer could hammer even if he (or she? I don't think there are any females in this game) was already on the wagon, and is still alive
III. The hammerer could hammer even if his vote was already on the wagon, and was Insie or MrL

So what's the risk of checking if the remaining two players are the hammerer? I think it's if we're in Scenario B and the player we end up putting on L-1 for the test flips town.

So what should we do? If we think that Scenario 1 and III are the likely ones then we could put asa or Atyeo on L-1 with the other player on the wagon. If we're on scenario 1 then one of them will self-hammer and flip mafia; great. If we're on scenario III then neither of them will get hammered and we can continue play as normal.
If we tested on a third party (DD) we'd need both asa and Atyeo to vote for him, and then check them both individually on each other so we're wasting more time.

If we're on scenario B then there's a risk if we do the method above that the player will flip town.
So IF we're worried about scenario B then we'd need to do the tests on a player that we're reasonably confident will flip scum, and we need asa and Atyeo to agree to it.

What's my personal opinion? I think that the moderators will have used a low-risk approach to a role they're unfamiliar with so used the standard variation and we're in scenario 1. I think that the main rebuttal to this point is from Bijou and that if a hammerer could have stopped from hammering Insie on day 1 they would have already been on the wagon, but I think that it's reasonable that they may have missed this opportunity either because they didn't realise or they were too inactive to react.

But in the chance that we're in scenario B, I think that Atyeo's been the scummier of the two players (I agree with JEANS) so I guess it would be safer to test on him first. VOTE: Atyeo; as long as we keep in mind that we shouldn't put him on L-1 until asa's voted for him.

There's also a hammer variant I've seen that can't vote if it's on a wagon but it also can't self-hammer (it's not on the Wiki because that page hasn't been updated in 7.5 years). Don't think it would be in this game? I don't think when most of us host games that our scope of research extends beyond the wiki hey.

ALSO a janitor in a game with already limited reveals seems weird but it looks like that's what we're up against. I think it's reasonable to think that MrL was town because janitor seems more of a mafia rather than a serial killer power.

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02/09/2019 08:29:38

Bijou said:
Hey Dean, have we ever had a Janitor or anything like that in a game previously?

No, we haven't had Janitor in Qld/Ausmash mafia before.

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02/09/2019 04:30:51

Blaze said:
Twilight hasnt started yet... Also wheres dean when we need him!!!

Did you need me for something?

If you were interested in my reactions to Insie killing himself I can make a reaction video. I can just imagine the title now. INSIE HAMMERS HIMSELF?!? 71 HOUR NIGHT PHASES XD XD ALSO DEAN'S TOP 10 PLAYS OF THE DAY 👎

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02/09/2019 04:23:01

Do we not have replacements available? Did sign-ups last for too long? Are there too many spectators in the dead players chat?

Atyeo and DD's behaviour in particular is not acceptable (this is the second time DD's gone over 72 hours of inactivity). Why sign up if you can't commit at least five minutes out of a 72-hour period of your time to the game?

I don't want to be impatient because I think we've got a good plan set up and I think that the offending players will be removed in due time. But this is very frustrating to play.

But if they're kept in the game we should still lynch Insie today and focus on others tomorrow.

Blaze, Duon's role isn't important.

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02/06/2019 02:16:36

Hey there morning gang.

It's a shame my witnesses are unreliable but I guess I shouldn't expect people to remember things from three years ago.

Clock's still ticking:
Atyeo (133 hours)
asa (84 hours, notified the mods)
DD (69 hours)
Glace (62 hours, asked to be replaced)
Insie (60 hours)

I like Windkeeper0's idea too. VOTE: Atyeo

The plan works best if DD unvotes first.
Let's say that we have the following votes on Insie:
DD, Blaze, Bijou, JEANS, MrL, Voltz, Glace, ThatLaggyPerson, asa (9)
If Insie doesn't get hammered then the hammerer is one of the eight non-DD players on the wagon.
If Insie gets hammered, we don't know if this means that Insie was the hammerer, if the remaining player (Atyeo in this example) was the hammerer, or if the hammerer functioned as a double-voter. So there's more uncertainty.

Could we test e.g. Atyeo the next day? Let me think.
Get e.g. Atyeo to L-1 and see if there's a hammer. He'd get hammered if either he's the hammerer himself or if the hammerer functions as a doublevoter. If the hammerer DOES function as a doublevoter then we've lynched him for no good reason (or if he flipped maf a very good reason! although we wouldn't be able to tell if he was the hammerer or not)
If he doesn't get hammered then Insie was the hammerer.
What if we get him to vote for himself? Then if we get him to L-1 and there's no hammer then either Insie or e.g. Atyeo are the hammerer, and if he gets hammered then the hammerer functions as a doublevoter.
What if he doesn't want to vote for himself because he's worried that the hammerer functions as a doublevoter? That would be fair enough.

What if we don't test it on e.g. Atyeo? Say town pretty unanimously decides to lynch DD tomorrow at some point. If we get e.g. DD to L-1 with e.g. Atyeo on the wagon then if there's no hammer either Insie or e.g. Atyeo are the hammerer. If there is a hammer then the hammerer functions as a doublevoter and could be any of us.
So if there was no hammer then we'd get e.g. Atyeo to unvote and someone else votes to put e.g. DD back on L-1. Then if there's a hammer e.g. Atyeo is the hammerer, and if there isn't a hammer Insie is the hammerer.
If e.g. Atyeo refused to unvote then that would be pretty suspicious.
So here, the issue would be if e.g. Atyeo didn't want to vote for e.g. DD because he thought that e.g. DD was town and didn't want to risk putting e.g. DD on L-1 for risk of the doublevoter-esque hammerer. Which could be a valid reason.
It depends on how likely we think it is that the hammerer functions like a doublevoter, if the risk is worth taking. How worthwhile it is might depend if arsonist hits town again tonight.
The plan works today because I don't think any of us have good reasons for not lynching Insie.

I think this makes sense.
Anyway, DD isn't the only player we're waiting for right now.

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02/05/2019 23:33:05

Boozer said:
You wound me dean :< as if u think that if i was mafia id listen to what people wanted me to say

So you'd ignore your teammates advice if you were mafia? That would be an innovative strategy.

Boozer said:
Forgive me for not joining in on day 1 roulette finger pointing

Well it looks like we've hit maf from this roulette so maybe you should join us next time!

Boozer said:
Actually people think bradley is mafia now dont they? Aero does at least (and im inclined to agree). My brain isnt big enough to be on 2 fellow mafia trains one after the other unfort

People think that Bradley's mafia now? So they didn't on Day 1? Were you part of these "people"? Why did you vote for him if you didn't think he's mafia? Why do you think he's mafia now?

I raised my points against Insie on Sunday evening and Shane and Aero gave the train wheels on Monday evening. You didn't comment on anything related to Insie until you voted for him Thursday morning. Why did you ignore this, instead keeping your pseudo-meme/pseudo-policy vote on DD? You didn't give any opinions as to whether the Insie train was a good/bad idea until after he was lynched and all-but-confirmed as mafia.

Bijou said:
Hmmmmmm. When I played with Jon as mafia I don't think we necessarily fed him ideas, it was more a case of he could see things we were talking about and perhaps be more informed on something than he otherwise would have been.

So in a way it's not like we were telling him to say anything, but as a result of the mafia chat he might have chimed in on the forum where he wouldn't normally.

Are you sure? I remember you guys saying stuff like "hey Jon here's something you can post to pretend you're contributing" but it was three years ago so I might be wrong (it's unusual but it happens sometimes). Doubt the server's still lying around to check. This post was the one that stuck in my mind (I don't think Jon researched this himself):

Bijou said:
Do you think the mafia chat might be restricted to night only for this game Dean? If so then I think it'd be more likely Boozer was influenced by whatever discussions they had at night and is posting certain things today because of it.

I don't know. Mafia daytalk becomes stronger the more members the faction has so if there are 4-5 members it might be more likely to be restricted for balance reasons.
Nighttime would be the best time to come up with ideas leading into the next day though, daytalk or no. They have 72 hours to do whatever they want without having to worry about what's happening in the thread.

Bijou said:
Personally I think the read is a little too hard at the moment to convince me but your instincts have been pretty good so far Dean so I'd keep going with it.

Just something to keep in mind. After we're done with this hammerer nonsense we'll likely be back to not having any great leads. I'm not going to push this until the time comes. Open the image in a new tab if you want/need to read it I didn't think it would be that small. I know DD said he usually checks this thread when he's updating his character data and EBS just finished so DD IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOU NEED TO UNVOTE FOR INSIE OR WE WILL LYNCH YOU TOMORROW.

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02/05/2019 10:58:40

I might respond to Cameron's post when I get home.

Aero I think we might be thinking of different games? I'm thinking of the first Smash Bros-themed game (you were the seventh out of nine voters, pages 7-9 for reference), not sure if you've been mafia together in other games.

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02/05/2019 04:41:52

So we're waiting on:
Atyeo (113 hours of inactivity)
Glace (42 hours of inactivity and has asked to be replaced)
Insie (40 hours of inactivity)
asa (64 hours of inactivity)
DD (50 hours of inactivity)

So while I'm bored waiting for these five rude players, although it seems pretty cut-and-dry what to do today (and potentially day 3 depending on how today goes) I thought I'd post what we should look to do in future days incase I'm cruelly killed at night.

Here are Boozer's five posts at the start of Day 2 (Sunday):

Boozer said:
Insie not being worried at all about being lynched definitely makes sense now lol

What kind of roles can make someone unlynchable?

Ill hold off on voting hik until the op is updated so i know how many votes it takes

Dont want him getting hammered !!!

Boozer said:
Im blind its in the flavour text aha

Vote: Insie
Whats a governor
Gov'ner

Boozer said:
Well yeah, you cant hammer if your votes already on someone

That would be op

Hammerer is basically useless now anyway, if anyone puts someone in hammer range now theyre basically outing themselves as scum

Or theyre retarded !!

Boozer said:
Even if the role is effectively useless, google says hammerers are usually mafia

So if you pinpoint who it is then thats most likely a scum that you dont have to infer from opinions and stuff hey

Boozer said:
Might also be a good idea to look at what train was happening before insie brought up the possibility of a hammerer

Could have been trying to get heat off another mafia O:

I think this flurry of activity is unusual contrasted to his Day 1 posts.
I think it's possible that mafia brainstormed some ideas during the night phase to give him some topics to post about and contribute. Quote #5 in particular stands out to me.
It kind of reminds me of the kinds of things JonCheee would say in the Fire Emblem game where Bijou and Maribro were feeding him ideas. Shane / Jon what are your thoughts on this?
Confirmed townies (Extra and Maribro) both also had him on the scummier side of things when they were alive. They're opinions weren't any more informed than ours but at least we know that these two weren't trying to deceive us.
He also joined the Insie train very late which is something mafia can do to try and blend into town, when they've given up on trying to save the player, similar to when Aerodrome voted for ThatLaggyPerson / LEF when he was mafia with them.
(yes I'm aware that Boozer has been accused of being mafia for both using his brain and not using his brain in the same game now).

There are a couple of other players that I have my eye on but there's plenty of water to go under the bridge until then. I get the feeling that we may be waiting for a while.

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02/05/2019 03:32:38

Yeah can we actually get an update on Atyeo? He hasn't posted in the last ~109 hours of thread uptime.

Blaze said:
@dean Wouldnt that be a better way to do it? then thered be no risk of insie being a double voter?

Yes, I suppose it would be.

I think the main thing was that by doing the Insie-votes-for-himself method we prevented him from hammering himself if he WAS town hammerer. But I think we've convinced ourselves that this isn't the case.

And now if we test Insie first, if there WAS a doublevoter-esque hammerer at least we're not falsely accusing one of our own (but we should still treat L-2 as the new L-1 for the next day's lynch).

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02/04/2019 22:53:16

Nah, Insie doesn't actually NEED to cooperate.
If the nine non-Insie potential hammerers all vote for Insie to put him on L-1 and then Insie gets hammered, then we can be somewhat confident that Insie was the hammerer.
It doesn't really matter WHICH nine of the ten potential hammerers jump on the wagon, as long as we get nine on there at some stage.

If he doesn't get hammered, then that means one of the nine on the wagon is the hammerer and we start swapping out votes.

So we're still waiting on cooperation from DD and four of these five players: Atyeo, Glace, asa, MrL, Insie.

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02/04/2019 11:51:29

Bijou said:
Question: what if the hammerer actually gets to choose when they hammer and this is some 200 IQ plan to frame a townie?

Just because Insie says it's passive doesn't mean we should believe him.

Mind you if they actually managed to setup a play like that they probably deserve to win but whatever lol

Well IF it's the type of hammerer that needs to PM the mods to hammer (which I doubt; BattleDolphin's post was almost immediately after Maribro's so there wouldn't have been much time to get a PM in) and IF mafia decided that revealing another one of their powers and saccing Insie day 1 was a smart decision just to get us to mislynch once then good on them. Doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me but whatever.

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02/04/2019 07:18:25

As it stands we just need JonCheee and DD to unvote.
If people from yesterday's train start voting or people not from yesterday's train don't vote then we lynch them day 3 or 4 since they're clearly acting VERY anti-town unless they have a valid reason why the strat wouldn't work. This shouldn't be hard to organise.

As mentioned earlier the main issue is that if Insie gets hammered on our very first test (e.g. say we're testing Blaze) we can't say for sure whether it was because the hammerer functioned as a double-voter or whether it was because e.g. Blaze was the hammerer. This would be unfortunate but not detrimental; we still lynch the dude we're going to lynch and town just needs to not jump to conclusions about e.g. Blaze's alignment.
So it's interesting that Blaze volunteered to go first hey.

Mafia governors are x-shot because having unlynchable mafiosi sucks.
I would imagine that a mafia governor would have acted last twilight because either:
a) Insie has a useful power role for them, perhaps a rolecop or another investigative role
b) they were worried they would die before getting another good opportunity to use their power
c) It doesn't really matter who they save; they're just stalling for time / pushing for more night phases
Aero you were on a mafia team with a mafia governor before, I imagine the reasoning would be similar to this.

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02/04/2019 02:12:11

Sorry guys I realised the ACTUAL biggest flaw in the plan: it requires DD reading the thread so that he unvotes.

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02/04/2019 00:40:35

Oh true, you did.

Well I said it in more words.

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02/04/2019 00:28:59

Hi Jamie. How are you?

So this was the method that I was thinking of yesterday that could prove that Insie was the (town/mafia) hammerer and not a mafia teammate:

We have nine players other than Insie that could have been a potential hammerer (Atyeo, Blaze, Glace, ThatLaggyPerson, JEANS, asa, MrL, Bijou, Voltz). Conveniently it takes nine votes to get to L-1.
If Insie votes for himself, then we can fit eight of the players above on the vote train until Insie reaches L-1.
If he gets auto-hammered, then the one player not on the vote train is a mafia hammerer and should be lynched day 3.
If he isn't auto-hammered, then we rotate the one player not on the wagon through unvoting and voting until either Insie gets auto-hammered at L-1 or we go through all the players with no hammer (which would prove that Insie is the hammerer).

If Insie refuses to vote for himself, then I think this is an admission that he's mafia and is trying to cover for a hammerer teammate. If he was the hammerer why would he not take the chance to prove it? Unless I've missed something obvious with the above theory in which case please let me know.
In this scenario we'd do the same process as above, just replacing Insie's vote with someone from yesterday's wagon (me, Aerodrome, etc.)
(in case it wasn't obvious whoever puts him on L-1 needs to unvote straight away)

Where this theory falls apart is if we had a doublevoter-esque hammerer such as like Bijou suggested.
In which case Insie would die the moment he's on L-1 no matter who was on the train.
But we haven't actually PROVED that the hammerer functions in this way, and if it does work this way:
a) at least we tried
b) we end up lynching the guy who we were planning on lynching anyway (I can't actually think of a reason why Insie survived yesterday's lynch without coming to the conclusion that he's mafia. There isn't any reason a town governor would save Insie)

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02/04/2019 00:12:44

Well my theory that Incineroar was a furry cultist is now a lot more likely! 👎

Bijou said:
This is really easy to prove but I'll let some other people go first in case they trip themselves up somehow.

Oh I see what you're thinking. Maybe. Not a bad idea.

For the possibilities of what happened yesterday:
1. A town governor saved Insie and Insie is town Hammerer
2. A town governor saved Insie and Insie (or a teammate) is mafia hammerer
3. A town governor saved Insie and Insie is unrelated to the hammerer; he picked it up off the wiki and coincidentally there also happened to be a hammerer in the game

I think all of these options are extremely unlikely; why would a town governor save Insie? Unless he's in a mason with one (ala one of Maribro's games)

4. Insie is town lynchproof hammerer
5. Insie is town hammerer governor.

I'd be surprised if we had complex combinations of roles like this in the game, and his behaviour so far hasn't led me to believe that he's town.

6. Insie is lynchproof mafia and he (or a teammate) are mafia hammerer.
7. Insie (or a teammate) are mafia governor and Insie (or a teammate) are mafia hammerer.

One of these seems the most likely.

In general the most simple answer is usually the correct one so we should definitely lynch Insie today. But I'd also like to post my thoughts on what we should do Day 3 at some point in case I die during the night.

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02/03/2019 05:09:45

Well from the Wiki it's a passive role which means it automatically activates.

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01/30/2019 23:29:22

Can't we put Insie on L-1 and see if he gets autohammered?
If he doesn't that doesn't necessarily free him of guilt but I'd be inclined to look at other options I guess.

Can we get an update on Glace? He's been absent for five days and we haven't found a replacement? The only thing he's doing right now is increasing the number of votes it takes to lynch.

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01/30/2019 22:49:59