ya those are defintley poor decisions bc the whole point of the setup is you have a lot of powerful abilities trying to counteract eachother and you don’t know which ones are which (see diamond arc). nerfing those abilioties or puposefully misintrepreting them isn’t fun for the players bc they just get all of their agency in the game removed
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I wrote down “learn why hte hosts made 3 decisions”, because I expected Eliza to deny anything with significant power and I wanted to learn exactly what she was denying, but the feedback I got was extremely cryptic and wasn’t something I could actually gain any relevant information out of
thats kind of wild
i too think this could have the potential to not be super duper broken if both sides have looser caps on abilities
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if thats how host decisions went i am not a fan of how this game was hosted then
The first one was just because Hazard’s song (we didn’t start the fire) referenced Richard Nixon, and the hosts went on a tangent thinking about that Nixon quote and using it to do a fake arsonist douse (???) but decided not to: this does not actually directly relate to a player’s submission
The second one is just “a spectator was convincing”, and specifically a spectator who would have given input on any kind of mechanical decision
The third one was “an arsonist douse would be bad, so we didn’t do an arsonist douse”, again referencing the we didn’t start the fire song
I was supposed to guess what the host decisions were, and I had ot get one “mostly correct” or all “non-harmful” abilities on me that night would fail (I asked repeatedly whether this included investigatives and didn’t receive an answer)
It wasn’t really possible for me to guess anything but the last one, because the information I got essentially just related to random conversation in spectator chat rather than anything I could actually… use
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And to be clear I’m not, like, angry about this, I just think this is a setup with potential that was significantly mishandled and I’d like to give a postmortem as to how I feel about it/talk about it with people to understand how they feel to advise future hosts! I think there’s a lot to learn here regarding the site’s general attitude toward game balance!
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again as i said before. i think if i ever stated truthly what my song was it would have been obviously a “choose me”
but if i didnt. there was no way
I think, in creating the kind of Wacky Special Queue Games this was advertised as, it’s a lot more important to make a game that is fun than one that is balanced, and by that I don’t mean the, like, immediate thing people conclude which is “nightmare OP abilities for one side”. Nightmare OP abilities for one side are also not fun for the people who have to play against them. I think it’s more important to consider, like, ensuring each ability has both meaningful agency and skill expression in both how it is played by its user and how it is counterplayed by its user’s opponents. And neutralising essentially every ability submitted is not meaningful play for the submitters and it provides no meaningful interesting counterplay for the people playing against it
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Like the fact that the mafia’s abilities got neutralised too was also unfun for me. Because I couldn’t use my actions in order to counterplay them and do cool stuff. In fact my ability directly pertained to other people’s actions and was significantly harmed by the fact that abilities didn’t end up doing much
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may cooking hard
i kind of thought some of this stuff would happen with the way eliza was talking about balancing the game before it started in spec chat but i wasn’t really sure so i didn’t wanna try and like force my viewpoint or anything
but ya. this game isn’t meant to be balanced, it is meant to be fun. it’s fun bc it’s unbalanced. you cannot balance this game, so there is no point trying to. let people do wacky shit bc this is a great avenue to do that wacky shit in (kind of like a genie 13er) (hint hint wink wink)
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same idea as lizards. don’t aim for balance cause its never gonna work XD aim for fun
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I think talking about these things as a dichotomy between “balance” and “fun” is kinda misleading because of the different ways people interpret those words. Like. It’s still important to ensure both sides have a fighting chance, otherwise you don’t have a game: you still want what the term “balance” refers to in the abstract. “It’s fun because it’s unbalanced” used to justify, like, a bad BotC setup that Good has mechlocked (which I have seen before) is silly, that’s not fun, and it’s [not fun] because it’s unbalanced…
But I think the loaded concept of “mafia game balance”, the way people come up with vanilla queue games, the whole “no cop checks, cops are OP, the mafia can’t get kills, no one ability should have significant impact on the game, nothing should be weird or unpredictable” kind of deal… that doesn’t really have a place in this kind of game. I agree with what you’re saying but I think what your words are saying can be misunderstood
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you explained that in a way better than i could, ty for that
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To be fair, it’s hard to determine these things when you have no clue how this information could be used down the line.
Like, in Zelda Mafia, if town ever learned how the factional kill worked, it’d thunderdome Atlas and Marluna in a setup where losing a mafia member is practically a death sentence. As such, I was stingy with information, which led to Zone’s actions being pretty much useless.
Damn, right before loss
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i mean in soweli’s world. those had to be the new two worlds.
It was game over once town voted town there.
Mafia didn’t activate me, that’s why it’s tame smh