I think that's an interesting design space considering how ingrained soft-networking has become in our meta. Making some level of lie detection or inherent dangers in talking behind the scenes helps mitigate it somewhat.
I forgot Langly's point re: vigging vs. orchid vote.
The two things were there to serve depending on which VC the village went for. The village wasn't in the money game this game because the mafia were really active in their sabotage, and got some really lucky kill placements (you'll notice that they killed everyone that they had dirt on except invictus, and those people always managed to be on the same mission).
Because they were so aggressive, you had a chance at taking them all out (a 50% chance on the last day given jdark's strategy of "pick 3 out of these 4"). If they weren't so aggressive, you would have been in the money game, and you could use the orchid vote to keep people at bay, while still allowing them to keep the overall pot up, which was based on the number of players alive.
That link was perhaps another problem that tied to the swinginess and the uncertainty of mafia kills.
I really enjoyed the monetary aspect of the game. It forces the mafia to stick their neck out a bit, and it motivates villagers to pay attention and discuss strategy. I'd like to see this kind of thing more in future phallas. However, I'm not sure designing it as a separate win condition is ideal, as this leads to a situation where the game can swing very heavily in one side's favor early on. One option would be to integrate it with regular phalla mechanics: play it as a normal phalla, but the village starts with no specials and must buy them from missions. Maybe a particularly difficult mission would turn a randomly selected villager into a seer, some other specials might come from easier missions. Or missions might grant random specials. Or maybe the missions give money, and the village needs to vote on what specials to buy with it?
The self-incrimination mechanic was not my cup of tea. I dislike the idea that people have to start being careful about the RP fluff they use in their posts and PMs. I almost never roleplay so I was pretty impervious to the kill, but I'd have been mildly pissed off if I had roleplayed and been punished for it.
I forgot Langly's point re: vigging vs. orchid vote.
The two things were there to serve depending on which VC the village went for. The village wasn't in the money game this game because the mafia were really active in their sabotage, and got some really lucky kill placements (you'll notice that they killed everyone that they had dirt on except invictus, and those people always managed to be on the same mission).
Because they were so aggressive, you had a chance at taking them all out (a 50% chance on the last day given jdark's strategy of "pick 3 out of these 4"). If they weren't so aggressive, you would have been in the money game, and you could use the orchid vote to keep people at bay, while still allowing them to keep the overall pot up, which was based on the number of players alive.
That link was perhaps another problem that tied to the swinginess and the uncertainty of mafia kills.
But that strategy is all up to chance. If the whole point of the game is to have the mafia hunt happen in the missions, and the village stops getting missions in day four because they've reached a fail state, then it is entirely up to chance if they'll vote or vig someone, because they have no data to work with.
If you either lowered the requirement or raised payments, or even raised payments as the game went on, it would not be up to chance. The fact that the vigs could have just gotten lucky and picked the two correct people doesn't mean the village would have earned a win. The mafia beat us on day three.
The game as it is required the village to either purple vote correctly on day two as well as vote out mafia in order to reach the goal. The village above all else needs time to organize and figure out what's going on. When you take that from them, yeah they can get lucky and win, but that seems like the opposite of what this game is supposed to be.
I forgot Langly's point re: vigging vs. orchid vote.
The two things were there to serve depending on which VC the village went for. The village wasn't in the money game this game because the mafia were really active in their sabotage, and got some really lucky kill placements (you'll notice that they killed everyone that they had dirt on except invictus, and those people always managed to be on the same mission).
Because they were so aggressive, you had a chance at taking them all out (a 50% chance on the last day given jdark's strategy of "pick 3 out of these 4"). If they weren't so aggressive, you would have been in the money game, and you could use the orchid vote to keep people at bay, while still allowing them to keep the overall pot up, which was based on the number of players alive.
That link was perhaps another problem that tied to the swinginess and the uncertainty of mafia kills.
If you either lowered the requirement or raised payments, or even raised payments as the game went on, it would not be up to chance. The fact that the vigs could have just gotten lucky and picked the two correct people doesn't mean the village would have earned a win. The mafia beat us on day three.
The game as it is required the village to either purple vote correctly on day two as well as vote out mafia in order to reach the goal. The village above all else needs time to organize and figure out what's going on. When you take that from them, yeah they can get lucky and win, but that seems like the opposite of what this game is supposed to be.
This is a crazy thing to say when the rational strategy the last day gave a theoretical 50% chance of success. Nobody has beaten anybody on Day 3 when on Day 6 the village's rational strategy has a coin flip chance of success.
At the same time, luck did not determine the outcome of the game, because the claim that the strategy gave a 50% chance of success assumes we had nothing else to distinguish people, and that's obviously false.
The outcome of this game depended almost totally on the village's read of CesareB and The Anonymous. I killed one, after pushing hard to have him killed, and basically exonerated the other. Reading the data from 6 days with regard to a subset of suspicious people is what this game came down to, and that strikes me as exactly the kind of thing a good mafia game ought to come down to.
Generalísimo de Fuerzas Armadas de la República Argentina
This is a crazy thing to say when the rational strategy the last day gave a theoretical 50% chance of success.
Absolutely not. We would have had a zero* percent chance of success if the two remaining mafia hadn't been on the same sabotaged mission. I'm not saying the game was imbalanced (I think it was pretty great), but you can't just say "it was close, so it was balanced."
This is a crazy thing to say when the rational strategy the last day gave a theoretical 50% chance of success.
Absolutely not. We would have had a zero* percent chance of success if the two remaining mafia hadn't been on the same sabotaged mission. I'm not saying the game was imbalanced (I think it was pretty great), but you can't just say "it was close, so it was balanced."
* Depending on how things played out, obviously.
Good, yes. I intended to put in another caveat and just forgot; yes; this is a tiny sample size and all kinds of weird shit could've gone down. I think your argument is no good either, though; we don't know what else would've been different if the mafia hadn't been on the same sabotaged mission. Maybe they'd have sabotaged another mission, we'd have had more data, and we'd have caught them earlier. It's hard to say, because at the point when the mafia is making that decision, they don't know how crucial it will turn out for them later not to sabotage that extra mission.
At the same time, note what exactly I'm responding to in that quote. Langly said "the village lost the game on Day 3". That's the claim I'm calling crazy, not any claim explicitly about balance. Balance in complicated for many of the reasons you give, but Langly's "we lost the game on day 3" is unjustified hyperbole given the chances we had to win on day 6.
Generalísimo de Fuerzas Armadas de la República Argentina
If the whole point of the game is to have the mafia hunt happen in the missions, and the village stops getting missions in day four because they've reached a fail state, then it is entirely up to chance if they'll vote or vig someone, because they have no data to work with.
I don't think that was the whole point of the game. I guess I'm not sure why you think by taking out the last 2 missions worth of that data you think the vigs had less to go on than in a normal phalla.
Given the strict time limit and that fact that hitting a villager would get two people kill instead of one (guaranteeing the loss of at least one special). There really needed to be something in place to offset the handicap on vigs; especially, when one factors in that not killing any one was an option for the mafia. I get the impression that had I lived past day one, I would have be frustrated by having a power but not really having a good means to utilize that power without screwing the village over.
Given the strict time limit and that fact that hitting a villager would get two people kill instead of one (guaranteeing the loss of at least one special). There really needed to be something in place to offset the handicap on vigs; especially, when one factors in that not killing any one was an option for the mafia. I get the impression that had I lived past day one, I would have be frustrated by having a power but not really having a good means to utilize that power without screwing the village over.
Vigs were there for end-game, or when you had enough data to use them. Vigging was a poor strategy unless you had good evidence because the pot went down with the population. Since that wasn't obvious, I basically made it extra apparent that vigging was not to be taken lightly.
Given the strict time limit and that fact that hitting a villager would get two people kill instead of one (guaranteeing the loss of at least one special). There really needed to be something in place to offset the handicap on vigs; especially, when one factors in that not killing any one was an option for the mafia. I get the impression that had I lived past day one, I would have be frustrated by having a power but not really having a good means to utilize that power without screwing the village over.
I find this part of the current meta weird. Why does everybody want it to be the case that it is always a good idea to always use your abilities every time it's an option?
I liked the limit on the vig; it made me think more about whether to use my ability. I like more decisions that are more important, and fewer decisions that are trivial.
Generalísimo de Fuerzas Armadas de la República Argentina
It's also not really true.
Look at how battle games are played these days. Everyone just sorta hangs out until some good targets pop up and then a hit squad forms up.
I actually liked the design of the vigilantes. I think it's good to give players a choice (other than who to target), and I think the choice should be somewhat difficult (because otherwise it's not a choice at all). Perhaps I would think differently if I actually was the vigilantes, but from the outside it seemed okay.
I similarly liked that the investigators only learned if a player sabotaged a mission. Although I only lived one day after my first investigation (of blahmcblah), it made my next move more difficult not knowing whether blahmcblah was actually a villager or a badguy lying low. Had I survived longer perhaps I could have done more with the information, but at the time it limited me (in a good way).
I'm saying there should have been something in place to off set the loss of info that can be gleaned from being eliminated. If I vig the wrong person, that still illuminates the vote record some for the village. If I'm holding back on killing people and the mafia stops killing people, all of a sudden the village has much less information to work with. Nothing inherently wrong with the vig having to weigh the options of whether they should pull the trigger or not, but that does create a need to make sure that there is additional info that off sets the lack of kills; especially, when the village has a time limit.
That said, I rather liked that this game had a mechanic that ensured the mafia wasn't hosed if the body count was low. That was also something I liked about 38thDoe's batman game, the mafia wasn't forced to zerg down the village as quickly as possible. Sure it was an option, but you could also opt to drag things out.
Given the strict time limit and that fact that hitting a villager would get two people kill instead of one (guaranteeing the loss of at least one special). There really needed to be something in place to offset the handicap on vigs; especially, when one factors in that not killing any one was an option for the mafia. I get the impression that had I lived past day one, I would have be frustrated by having a power but not really having a good means to utilize that power without screwing the village over.
I find this part of the current meta weird. Why does everybody want it to be the case that it is always a good idea to always use your abilities every time it's an option?
I liked the limit on the vig; it made me think more about whether to use my ability. I like more decisions that are more important, and fewer decisions that are trivial.
In a standard, vanilla game, the vig should always use his kill barring a few extreme circumstances. This can change as the game gets more complex, but it's a nice solid rule to use as a starting point
Given the strict time limit and that fact that hitting a villager would get two people kill instead of one (guaranteeing the loss of at least one special). There really needed to be something in place to offset the handicap on vigs; especially, when one factors in that not killing any one was an option for the mafia. I get the impression that had I lived past day one, I would have be frustrated by having a power but not really having a good means to utilize that power without screwing the village over.
I find this part of the current meta weird. Why does everybody want it to be the case that it is always a good idea to always use your abilities every time it's an option?
I liked the limit on the vig; it made me think more about whether to use my ability. I like more decisions that are more important, and fewer decisions that are trivial.
In a standard, vanilla game, the vig should always use his kill barring a few extreme circumstances. This can change as the game gets more complex, but it's a nice solid rule to use as a starting point
Which is kind of too bad. IMO the worst fact of phalla is that so many people who sign up don't really get to participate in the real "meat" of the game, which usually doesn't start until day 3 most games. Giving the village an abundance of vigs, but disincentivizing their early use, is a neat idea to keep more people alive while still giving the village the firepower it needs to finish the game out.
Okay hi hello yes sorry for the one off post earlier but my life is abnormally busy at the moment (as in busy at all).
First off I'd just like to say that yes I agree with Mill and his agrees that the Inactive Mafia is a myth. HOWEVER mafia activity is very deeply linked to village activity. The mafia must mirror OR control the village because the literal design goal of the mafia is to seem like they are village. Trying to make a mafia that isn't supposed to blend in among the village is like making a vig without a kill. You are actually making a different role.
Now yes there are some players who don't play a very active mafia. I think T_A took actual inactivus hits this game. But it's important to remember that that's a player's playstyle, not "how the role is played". Until you run a role a ton of times with a bunch of different players, you won't actually know what the best way to play a role is. That's why kime and I can agree in this thread about how a general vig should be played, and then come to blows in the other about whether or not item merchant neutrals are worth voting out. "Vig" has been played out a lot more than "Merchant". Anyway I digress.
First off, I'd like to know from people "active" they want to imagine the mafia should be. Should they be in the thread, proposing vote targets, discussing mechanics? Because mafia do that. You might not do that when you're mafia, but I mean you can look to this very game to see mafia who did it. Do you want mafia to scream "LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME"? Because we have a mafia do that this game and he was immediately killed. And that's why mafia can't be too obvious:
Because the mafia can be targeted.
I know, it seems really simple right? You're like "...Well I fucking know that." And you're right, you totally do! But the thing is, as long as the seer and the vig are roles that exist, the mafia cannot be super big playmakers. Because the mafia have to not be so suspicious that the vig kills them, but not so important that the seer wants to bring them into the network. In short, the mafia has to be absolutely normal.
And in the end, in this game? A mafia who played like Joe Everyvillager was the one who lived to the end. In other words, he played the best strategy. And if the best strategy for the mafia is to be average and unassuming, and you demand that they play otherwise without somehow nerfing the aspects of the game that make that the best strategy, all you are doing is weakening the mafia.
I'd also like to just point out how funny it is that we're talking about alleged mafia inaction now when three or four months ago we were talking about how soft networking and everyone-has-a-power games are making it too easy to soft confirm villagers and expose mafia members. If mafia don't think they can soft network, try looking at the games first.
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AssuranIs swinging on the SpiralRegistered Userregular
Thanks for running.
I figured Baidol was mafia with his ridiculous accusation, but I didn't actually think they had kills tied into confessions.
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BaidolI will hold him offEscape while you canRegistered Userregular
I figured there would be more discussion about INANTP'S post.
I mean, I basically agree with his premise, but I disagree that that means mafia shouldn't be given incentives to deviate from that behavior. It's an additional risk/reward scenario that I think is interesting and meaningful. Really, the wiretap mechanic was no different than the sabotage mechanic is the dimension he's talking about. Both draw unwanted attention to you, and you get some benefit in return for pursuing that risky behavior. The meaningful difference is that one has a public action with private consequences, and the other is a private action with public consequences. I don't think one is inherently better than the other.
I also disagree that CesareB was MVP just by virtue of the fact that he was alive at the end. Without the kills from the people that put themselves out there, the mafia would have almost surely lost.
So I guess I don't think I see how INANTP's big post here makes good on the promises of his short previous post.
The mafia in this game had two challenges. One was to stay hidden; the other was to get other people to admit to committing crimes. There's an obvious tension between those two things. That tension kinda made the game interesting; different mafia balanced those approaches differently, and I think the balance the mafia struck was part of what allowed them to win.
That's to say: the big picture of the mafia /always is/ that they have to fit in without actually being the same. In a vanilla game, the difference is just that the mafia have different goals. In this game, in addition to having different goals, they also had to act differently in private in order to pursue those goals.
Now, if you're going to do that, you should also give the mafia some advantage in exchange for it being harder to hide; in this case it was the many kills per night they could have if they used the wiretap mechanic well.
None of this means that the soft-networking mechanic is intrinsically flawed; it just means it gives the mafia an additional challenge. I take it that what INANTP means to be referencing is that the best way to get active mafia is to get active villagers. Well, fuck me, if we knew how to do that everybody would do it. This game I think was very active for its size, and had design decisions that had created that situation, and still TA made it to the end with minimal activity.
Certainly this approach is a little bit artificial in a certain way, but I'm not sure that makes it intrinsically flawed. It would be less artificial if the mafia had to be active to fit in, but that's really really hard to do.
Generalísimo de Fuerzas Armadas de la República Argentina
So you suggest the answer is to force the mafia to be more active instead of forcing the village to be more active?
No, there is no answer because there is no problem. At least not in the sense that people are saying.
I make weird games because I like having to think through something that I haven't seen before, and for there to be variety in games so that the strategy doesn't become the same every time. That's also probably because I play more often than do most people.
There's no problem with mafia having a certain way of playing, I'm just tired of playing that way, and some people agree, so I want to give people options. In this game, there was a role for the typical unassuming mafia, and for the mafia that wanted to go out there and try to make big plays. The two styles were complementary, and while neither was strictly necessary for victory, it was going to be a hard road if everyone took the same path.
So you suggest the answer is to force the mafia to be more active instead of forcing the village to be more active?
Do you think abusing the inactivus mechanics as a strategy is something to be rewarded?
I think that is a cultural issue instead of a game issue. Phalla is a game and when you start kicking people out the moment they cannot play because life suddenly hit the fan you've crossed a line, so the inactive warning cannot go away. That being said, it really sucks for the village when they have a suspected mafioso who went inactive for a day and then the village needs to decide whether to kill the that night or hope inactivus takes them. If you want to stop mafia from using inactivus in that manner, you'll need to do it outside the game. To try and minimize this issue in the last phalla main I ran, players got inactivus warnings until ~15 players remained, at which point and inactive player was immediately culled, but there is only so much you can do mechanics-wise to prevent this problem before you start making the game not a game anymore.
So you suggest the answer is to force the mafia to be more active instead of forcing the village to be more active?
Do you have ideas on this front? Seriously, I am designing two games right now. I will take any input.
EDIT: that's to say, ideas for how to force the village to be more active.
It has to be positive reinforcement and the mafia have to have a shot at the rewards as well to further provide further incentive for participation . Players who suddenly have things crop up should not be punished for suddenly not being able to play, but a few players missing out on whatever the mechanic is should not greatly affect the game as the rest of the village can do it. Langly's CYOA was an example of this, but that was heavily dependent on people being online in the timezone he decided to do his CYOA's and also being able to actually post and participate in a narrow timeframe. You'll also remember the discussion about how the mafia was/was not underpowered in that game because of those CYOA's, so that is also something to keep in mind.
The only way I could see for discouraging intentional inactivus on the mafia's part, would be to make sure each member of the mafia has a power that the mafia was to us every night, but it only gets counted as being active if the member using/possessing it votes. I enjoy the whole group order post on the mafia boards, but it does cut down on how punishing inactivity is for the mafia. I know when I'm villager and in a network, that we are shit out of luck if someone with an important role goes inactive or forgets to submit orders.
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Ah yeah.
I think that's an interesting design space considering how ingrained soft-networking has become in our meta. Making some level of lie detection or inherent dangers in talking behind the scenes helps mitigate it somewhat.
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The two things were there to serve depending on which VC the village went for. The village wasn't in the money game this game because the mafia were really active in their sabotage, and got some really lucky kill placements (you'll notice that they killed everyone that they had dirt on except invictus, and those people always managed to be on the same mission).
Because they were so aggressive, you had a chance at taking them all out (a 50% chance on the last day given jdark's strategy of "pick 3 out of these 4"). If they weren't so aggressive, you would have been in the money game, and you could use the orchid vote to keep people at bay, while still allowing them to keep the overall pot up, which was based on the number of players alive.
That link was perhaps another problem that tied to the swinginess and the uncertainty of mafia kills.
I really enjoyed the monetary aspect of the game. It forces the mafia to stick their neck out a bit, and it motivates villagers to pay attention and discuss strategy. I'd like to see this kind of thing more in future phallas. However, I'm not sure designing it as a separate win condition is ideal, as this leads to a situation where the game can swing very heavily in one side's favor early on. One option would be to integrate it with regular phalla mechanics: play it as a normal phalla, but the village starts with no specials and must buy them from missions. Maybe a particularly difficult mission would turn a randomly selected villager into a seer, some other specials might come from easier missions. Or missions might grant random specials. Or maybe the missions give money, and the village needs to vote on what specials to buy with it?
The self-incrimination mechanic was not my cup of tea. I dislike the idea that people have to start being careful about the RP fluff they use in their posts and PMs. I almost never roleplay so I was pretty impervious to the kill, but I'd have been mildly pissed off if I had roleplayed and been punished for it.
Often, doing nothing is rewarded. It means people have nothing to analyze of you.
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But that strategy is all up to chance. If the whole point of the game is to have the mafia hunt happen in the missions, and the village stops getting missions in day four because they've reached a fail state, then it is entirely up to chance if they'll vote or vig someone, because they have no data to work with.
If you either lowered the requirement or raised payments, or even raised payments as the game went on, it would not be up to chance. The fact that the vigs could have just gotten lucky and picked the two correct people doesn't mean the village would have earned a win. The mafia beat us on day three.
The game as it is required the village to either purple vote correctly on day two as well as vote out mafia in order to reach the goal. The village above all else needs time to organize and figure out what's going on. When you take that from them, yeah they can get lucky and win, but that seems like the opposite of what this game is supposed to be.
This is a crazy thing to say when the rational strategy the last day gave a theoretical 50% chance of success. Nobody has beaten anybody on Day 3 when on Day 6 the village's rational strategy has a coin flip chance of success.
At the same time, luck did not determine the outcome of the game, because the claim that the strategy gave a 50% chance of success assumes we had nothing else to distinguish people, and that's obviously false.
The outcome of this game depended almost totally on the village's read of CesareB and The Anonymous. I killed one, after pushing hard to have him killed, and basically exonerated the other. Reading the data from 6 days with regard to a subset of suspicious people is what this game came down to, and that strikes me as exactly the kind of thing a good mafia game ought to come down to.
* Depending on how things played out, obviously.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
Good, yes. I intended to put in another caveat and just forgot; yes; this is a tiny sample size and all kinds of weird shit could've gone down. I think your argument is no good either, though; we don't know what else would've been different if the mafia hadn't been on the same sabotaged mission. Maybe they'd have sabotaged another mission, we'd have had more data, and we'd have caught them earlier. It's hard to say, because at the point when the mafia is making that decision, they don't know how crucial it will turn out for them later not to sabotage that extra mission.
At the same time, note what exactly I'm responding to in that quote. Langly said "the village lost the game on Day 3". That's the claim I'm calling crazy, not any claim explicitly about balance. Balance in complicated for many of the reasons you give, but Langly's "we lost the game on day 3" is unjustified hyperbole given the chances we had to win on day 6.
I don't think that was the whole point of the game. I guess I'm not sure why you think by taking out the last 2 missions worth of that data you think the vigs had less to go on than in a normal phalla.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Retaba.
He had the order in Day 1, but chickened out at the last minute.
Vigs were there for end-game, or when you had enough data to use them. Vigging was a poor strategy unless you had good evidence because the pot went down with the population. Since that wasn't obvious, I basically made it extra apparent that vigging was not to be taken lightly.
I find this part of the current meta weird. Why does everybody want it to be the case that it is always a good idea to always use your abilities every time it's an option?
I liked the limit on the vig; it made me think more about whether to use my ability. I like more decisions that are more important, and fewer decisions that are trivial.
If I have a toy, I want to use it. Limits to that are frustrating.
Well, I don't like that then. Pbbbbbbbth.
Look at how battle games are played these days. Everyone just sorta hangs out until some good targets pop up and then a hit squad forms up.
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I similarly liked that the investigators only learned if a player sabotaged a mission. Although I only lived one day after my first investigation (of blahmcblah), it made my next move more difficult not knowing whether blahmcblah was actually a villager or a badguy lying low. Had I survived longer perhaps I could have done more with the information, but at the time it limited me (in a good way).
That said, I rather liked that this game had a mechanic that ensured the mafia wasn't hosed if the body count was low. That was also something I liked about 38thDoe's batman game, the mafia wasn't forced to zerg down the village as quickly as possible. Sure it was an option, but you could also opt to drag things out.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
In a standard, vanilla game, the vig should always use his kill barring a few extreme circumstances. This can change as the game gets more complex, but it's a nice solid rule to use as a starting point
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Which is kind of too bad. IMO the worst fact of phalla is that so many people who sign up don't really get to participate in the real "meat" of the game, which usually doesn't start until day 3 most games. Giving the village an abundance of vigs, but disincentivizing their early use, is a neat idea to keep more people alive while still giving the village the firepower it needs to finish the game out.
First off I'd just like to say that yes I agree with Mill and his agrees that the Inactive Mafia is a myth. HOWEVER mafia activity is very deeply linked to village activity. The mafia must mirror OR control the village because the literal design goal of the mafia is to seem like they are village. Trying to make a mafia that isn't supposed to blend in among the village is like making a vig without a kill. You are actually making a different role.
Now yes there are some players who don't play a very active mafia. I think T_A took actual inactivus hits this game. But it's important to remember that that's a player's playstyle, not "how the role is played". Until you run a role a ton of times with a bunch of different players, you won't actually know what the best way to play a role is. That's why kime and I can agree in this thread about how a general vig should be played, and then come to blows in the other about whether or not item merchant neutrals are worth voting out. "Vig" has been played out a lot more than "Merchant". Anyway I digress.
First off, I'd like to know from people "active" they want to imagine the mafia should be. Should they be in the thread, proposing vote targets, discussing mechanics? Because mafia do that. You might not do that when you're mafia, but I mean you can look to this very game to see mafia who did it. Do you want mafia to scream "LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME"? Because we have a mafia do that this game and he was immediately killed. And that's why mafia can't be too obvious:
Because the mafia can be targeted.
I know, it seems really simple right? You're like "...Well I fucking know that." And you're right, you totally do! But the thing is, as long as the seer and the vig are roles that exist, the mafia cannot be super big playmakers. Because the mafia have to not be so suspicious that the vig kills them, but not so important that the seer wants to bring them into the network. In short, the mafia has to be absolutely normal.
And in the end, in this game? A mafia who played like Joe Everyvillager was the one who lived to the end. In other words, he played the best strategy. And if the best strategy for the mafia is to be average and unassuming, and you demand that they play otherwise without somehow nerfing the aspects of the game that make that the best strategy, all you are doing is weakening the mafia.
I'd also like to just point out how funny it is that we're talking about alleged mafia inaction now when three or four months ago we were talking about how soft networking and everyone-has-a-power games are making it too easy to soft confirm villagers and expose mafia members. If mafia don't think they can soft network, try looking at the games first.
I figured Baidol was mafia with his ridiculous accusation, but I didn't actually think they had kills tied into confessions.
I also disagree that CesareB was MVP just by virtue of the fact that he was alive at the end. Without the kills from the people that put themselves out there, the mafia would have almost surely lost.
Of course, I would have left T_A alive. He was super inactive, and he had RL stuff going on. But what does that mean? That being inactive is rewarded.
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The mafia in this game had two challenges. One was to stay hidden; the other was to get other people to admit to committing crimes. There's an obvious tension between those two things. That tension kinda made the game interesting; different mafia balanced those approaches differently, and I think the balance the mafia struck was part of what allowed them to win.
That's to say: the big picture of the mafia /always is/ that they have to fit in without actually being the same. In a vanilla game, the difference is just that the mafia have different goals. In this game, in addition to having different goals, they also had to act differently in private in order to pursue those goals.
Now, if you're going to do that, you should also give the mafia some advantage in exchange for it being harder to hide; in this case it was the many kills per night they could have if they used the wiretap mechanic well.
None of this means that the soft-networking mechanic is intrinsically flawed; it just means it gives the mafia an additional challenge. I take it that what INANTP means to be referencing is that the best way to get active mafia is to get active villagers. Well, fuck me, if we knew how to do that everybody would do it. This game I think was very active for its size, and had design decisions that had created that situation, and still TA made it to the end with minimal activity.
Certainly this approach is a little bit artificial in a certain way, but I'm not sure that makes it intrinsically flawed. It would be less artificial if the mafia had to be active to fit in, but that's really really hard to do.
Do you have ideas on this front? Seriously, I am designing two games right now. I will take any input.
EDIT: that's to say, ideas for how to force the village to be more active.
No, there is no answer because there is no problem. At least not in the sense that people are saying.
I make weird games because I like having to think through something that I haven't seen before, and for there to be variety in games so that the strategy doesn't become the same every time. That's also probably because I play more often than do most people.
There's no problem with mafia having a certain way of playing, I'm just tired of playing that way, and some people agree, so I want to give people options. In this game, there was a role for the typical unassuming mafia, and for the mafia that wanted to go out there and try to make big plays. The two styles were complementary, and while neither was strictly necessary for victory, it was going to be a hard road if everyone took the same path.
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I think that is a cultural issue instead of a game issue. Phalla is a game and when you start kicking people out the moment they cannot play because life suddenly hit the fan you've crossed a line, so the inactive warning cannot go away. That being said, it really sucks for the village when they have a suspected mafioso who went inactive for a day and then the village needs to decide whether to kill the that night or hope inactivus takes them. If you want to stop mafia from using inactivus in that manner, you'll need to do it outside the game. To try and minimize this issue in the last phalla main I ran, players got inactivus warnings until ~15 players remained, at which point and inactive player was immediately culled, but there is only so much you can do mechanics-wise to prevent this problem before you start making the game not a game anymore.
It has to be positive reinforcement and the mafia have to have a shot at the rewards as well to further provide further incentive for participation . Players who suddenly have things crop up should not be punished for suddenly not being able to play, but a few players missing out on whatever the mechanic is should not greatly affect the game as the rest of the village can do it. Langly's CYOA was an example of this, but that was heavily dependent on people being online in the timezone he decided to do his CYOA's and also being able to actually post and participate in a narrow timeframe. You'll also remember the discussion about how the mafia was/was not underpowered in that game because of those CYOA's, so that is also something to keep in mind.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.