I feel as if I'm almost obliged to post in this and having the perspective of someone who comes from a very different Mafia/WW foundation would probably be helpful.
Before I go any further there really needs to be a clearer distinction between 'veteranism' and reputation. Veteranism is where one considers everything that a "vet" says to be correct because they are a vet. Reputation is a completely different matter and the line between the two seems to be blurred right now. Someone might have a reputation for being a good player - that should inspire respect and/or fear depending on your faction but should not mean that you are obliged to agree with everything that they say.
Talking about not agreeing with everything that someone says:
cabd said:
Sableye also made a major slip up by saying the town should no lynch if they were in MYLO, while also having it be public knowledge that all town investigative roles were dead. Very obvious scum tell.
I felt that was a beautiful segway from me
While I disagree entirely with this theory, cabd, there's another point to be made first and that's LYLO v MYLO. Some others seem to be confused about MYLO and LYLO:
3 Wolves
5 Town
This is MYLO i.e. Mislynch
and Lose. There is only one condition to this, being that if you lynch a townie, the wolves will lose.
3 Wolves
4 Town
This is LYLO i.e. Lynch
or Lose. Here, a wolf must be lynched
or the town loses.
Back to Day 3 in Beta Anon, we were in LYLO as there were 3 Wolves and 4 Town remaining. Not MYLO. Theory for MYLO does not work in LYLO, but theory for LYLO does work in MYLO. Only goes one way. In this particular situation I commented briefly that we would No Lynch without question
if we were in MYLO. The only situation in which you would lynch in MYLO is if there was a 100% wolf kill to be made i.e. Priest protection flips or Seer dead after revealing investigations. Otherwise, you No Lynch, regardless of whether every role is revealed dead or if every role is hidden or if chickens start rampaging over Brazil. This No Lynch forces the wolves to make a kill (or there will be a No Lynch-No Kill loop which defaults to Town Win), bringing numbers down to 3-4. This theoretically means that the town has a higher chance of blind lynching a wolf. In practice odds are better for the town to an extent since there is the influence of scum hunting which can give the town a better read and thus better vote.
tl;dr If you're in MYLO, you No Lynch unless you have a 100% wolf kill. Full stop. But I'm not here to prove game theory and nobody really wants me to do that.
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So what do I have to say about Beta Anon? First of all, props to cabd for putting the effort into hosting it. Props to all of the players who put their necks on the line in a very new way.
I'm biased, but it doesn't seem like our Wolf Team is getting as much credit as it should be. No, Anon games do not make it easier for the wolves in any way. What did we have in our favour?
> Closed Setup. While always an advantage, it is only small.
> No Background Reads. People couldn't do background searches on playstyles because of anonymity. As we saw, I made no effort to hide that I was Sableye, which shows how much I care about using past plays as hard evidence for a player having a certain role.
> Day Talk. This is potentially a great advantage but is useless in the hands of bad players.
What did the Town have in their favour?
> No Wolf Roleblocker. Plus plus everywhere.
> Seer + Priest + Backups. Follow the Cop everywhere to win.
> No Background Reads. We Wolves couldn't (if we wanted to) do background reads on how particular people played certain roles.
> Night Updates. As far as I could tell, there were no negatives for the Town in the Night Updates. The only minuses were for the Wolves. I had my name revealed both times I took a kill.
> Closed Setup. This is also a small advantage for Town as Wolves did not know if we were dealing with Seer+Priest only or with other PRs.
Overall, Town really did have an advantage over the Wolves. If we look at the Setup:
Priest
Seer
6 Vanilla Town
3 Vanilla Wolves
This puts the ratios in at 8:3. That's fine. The PR Ratios are (2 or 3):1 in that Town has potential for extra roles in comparison to our single kill per night. This would also be fine if those roles weren't Seer and Priest together without a Roleblocker which leads to Follow The Cop aka Town Win.
For a moment I'm going to take the perspective of someone who knows the setup and watches the game from outside. The Wolves are at a clear disadvantage. If the Town plays a purely theoretical game, Wolves lose.
Back to the game, the Wolves have two main advantages on Day 1 and Night 1. The Closed Setup (an advantage which will eventually become a Town Advantage on Day 2) and the fact that we can talk during the Day.
I'll break off from my analysis at this point to say that I could not possibly have asked for a better Wolf Team. I am not a person who is a particularly avid Wolf player and I thoroughly dislike having to rely on teammates who could potentially kill me off even if I played perfectly, often through no fault of their own. These teammates, though, renewed my faith in team play in an otherwise solo game. Ninetales-Vysekun has a play style which (although I despise it to no end!:lol
complements well with mine. Marshtomp-SS7 also has a play style which I absolutely hate but it works!:lol: And if it works, I can't really criticise it. Vysekun has the great ability to completely change the topic without really trying, and that helped us a lot. SS7 flies under the radar pretty easily and is always a secure and reliable team player. And then there's me. I kinda just rage at people a bit and tell them not to role reveal when they have no votes on them.
From the word go we were talking all the time. At times we submitted our kill after everyone else had submitted roles. During the Day someone always had something new and interesting to say. This sort of synergy wins games and we proved that it does.
Wolves did not necessarily win this game alone. Town did most of our work, particularly on Day 1. Jigglypuff-Akane didn't make it easy for herself. Crobat-darkwing was simply begging to be lynched Day 1 and Steelix-KP made Day 2 autopilot by accidentally hammering Crobat, riding on the back of all the pressure I had put onto Crobat.
And after that almost certainly incriminating Day 1, who was Priested? Me.
Nidorina dies at Night, leaving everyone slightly confused. However, Night 1 is about getting that secure kill on the board. I show up in the Night update. Okay.
Day 2, Steelix-KP's lynch is almost inevitable and the Wolves pretty much disappear from the scene, letting the town kill themselves off. But we're still talking in Wolf Chat. I throw a few taunts out into the town to see if anyone bites and focuses on me, particularly targeting Grovyle, the major town player at this point. Grovyle-I_S is pretty much nonexistent but surprisingly nobody at all bites. Not even Steelix-KP, who probably had the best chance of survival by saying that I had pushed for a lynch on Crobat-darkwing. Not a strong case, but still better than the "
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" that he was posting. Nobody attacks me and this says a couple of things:
1. People know who I am. I intended this to an extent - more correctly, I had no intention to hide my identity. It's not surprising that people don't want to attack me if they know who am, considering that I don't sit around and let myself die. They would rather take a free kill on Steelix-KP.
2. People are scared of what will happen. In an Anon game you don't have your reputation aiding you as much (even for me, who didn't hide). People may have felt like a select group of faceless individuals who had lost an element of their previous play styles - that is, validity from name. They didn't know which players they had lost so far and they didn't know who was left.
Psychologically we had already won.
We take out Grovyle-I_S on Night 2 (inactive, needs to be killed before reacting) and who gets Priested? Ninetales-Vysekun, a wolf. Once again I show up in the Night update. Righty-oh.
Day 3 LYLO and Jigglypuff-Akane returns to the scene after a Day 2 inactivity with all guns blazing - or not. Evidence? I was in the Night update. All we needed was for one person to vote incorrectly (in this case, Carvanha) and we Wolves would all jump on simultaneously for a quick end to the game. Time zones made this difficult so I stalled Jigglypuff's case with a case against her which was far more substantial. Even without the quick hammer tactic I don't doubt that we could have had Jiggly lynched manually simply because we had played the game better. Jiggly had nothing to work with. What Day 1 material was there that incriminated me? I lynched a Seer? No, I lynched an anti-town player. Day 2? Nothing. I active lurked. Day 3? Well, obviously nothing or we'd be discussing how I had died.
This brings to light 3 points which determine whether a game is won or lost:
1. Player Skill
2. Momentum
3. Game Theory
Player Skill is a biggie, of course. The wolves played a more skilled game in terms of tactics than the town and thusly we whitewashed the Town. But what really determines player skill? In my opinion, the ability to control momentum and knowledge of Game Theory.
We wolves won this game because of our huge momentum advantage over the town. Losing the Seer was bad luck for the town, but we turned it into momentum by pushing through the town's confusion. Ninetales-Vysekun was particularly important here, since changing the topic of discussion shifts momentum into our favour. We only lost a little momentum on Day 3 when Jiggly threw a case against me. After I replied and Jiggly apparently disappeared, that momentum was passively recovered.
Game Theory. Oooooh wow. I notice that on the 'Gym and on 6P this is almost completely absent and not without reason - there are always crazy new roles and factions which throw any type of orthodox theory out the window. However, this also removes much of the strategic element of the game and replaces it with "who gets the best role wins". In Beta Anon Day 1 I took the effort to discredit any possible role claims from Crobat so that if they did come, they would not be believed. This paid off. If Crobat had a better grasp of earlygame theory he may have claimed earlier and requested "Follow the Cop", potentially leading to our certain loss if he pulled it off. Lategame LYLO theory also played a significant part in our win. The Town didn't know the number of wolves and so should not have been putting votes on players with such a low lynch count. We merely quick hammered.
So no, I don't agree that Anon makes the game easier for wolves. I also don't agree that Anon itself removes reputation advantages although for this player pool it appeared that it did so. Every game, no matter what style, will eventually boil down to how the players play the game. When it comes down to it, gaming is all about the game. We played a far superior game - even cabd, the host, could only find a moot theory point and active lurking as the only scum tells for the entire wolf crew.
Once again, credit must go to my team who eliminated all speed bumps in that game.
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Back to the 'Gym, I have three main criticisms:
> Game Size
> Roles
> Flavour Text
I have never, ever, ever played in games as large as these ones except for fun alongside a smaller (or several smaller games). Right now I'm in multiple games of WW/Mafia, the greatest number of players in a single game being 16. The 'Gym should stronger consider running two or three smaller games simultaneously with a more orthodox setup rather than one massive game with a setup which can't possibly be balanced. Maybe try it out and see what the community thinks. This gives more players more chances to play more roles (smaller games mean smaller game times) and subsequently allows players to develop their own play styles. This is also by far the most effective way to deal with Veteranism as experience will come quickly and the playing field will be levelled out.
The 'Gym gives new meaning to Roles (while we're at it, some of them are broken and some combinations of roles (WWXV Wolf Role Setup OH GOD WHY) are just plain insane) and I have never seen so many in a single game. Credit of course goes to the mods who somehow have the imaginations to think this stuff up! I think their imaginations get the better of them, though. Sure, everyone wants to play a role which means you do stuff at night - it's great fun! But the game has a Day as well. It's not about lynching the first person to RVS or the first person to say that one of the pros is a bad player and repeating this every day, then abusing the Night phase. Sure, it's great to be able to kill 5 people at once and be unable to be killed at Night but it's just not the game. This makes players less able to play the Day phase than others. It's the reason why I showed up in XIV? and wreaked absolute havoc with my Cynthia role because I could play the Day phase and Night phase equally well. I know people who have played this game with me and a dozen other people for a couple of months and are significantly better than many of the people who have played here for longer than that. I'm not saying that's because my circles are "pro" per se but we play the game as it's intended to be - informed minority versus uninformed majority, a game of wit, skill and above all logic, a game where the best man will win more than the worst, not a game where the best role wins.
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TL;DR?: Gaming. It's all about the game.
