My big problem is that with 4 scum, getting even one good vote in the first couple of day phases is just absurdly hard. On day 1, you need buy-in from 8/10 townies to get a lynch on a scum unless scum bus. That's...hard. Scum can just refuse to bus, mislead 3 townies (which really isn't hard at all), and that's one bad vote secured. Factor in town's tendency to lurk in our meta, and it becomes even easier. And that's the situation on day 1. Town can't just play well, they have to play nearly flawlessly. If town don't play flawlessly (they won't), withholding a shot basically isn't an option for the vig, because lynching scum is just going to be very hard (assuming vig knows that there's 4 scum). Town (actually, just the vig) have to take massive risks just to stay in the game UNLESS town is playing nearly flawlessly.MW wrote:Shooting town as town costing a phase is par for the course. That's the risk to counteract a very powerful ability, and does make the game swingier (and is also why general theory at least used to be considering hard whether or not to take a shot). Yes, the game could've ended in two phases with two bad vig shots and two bad votes. The other side of that is the game could've ended in two phases with two good vig shots and votes.
Watcher and Tracker, I feel, are very unreliable at clearing townies? Let's take the tracker. Assume the tracker's scumdar is good. If you investigate someone and see that they do nothing, you shrug, can't do much with that, maybe if you think they're scummy you can push them to make a claim and hope that their claim contradicts your results. If you investigate someone and see that they targeted someone who's getting townread, you can't clear them with anything resembling surety--maybe they're a town protective role, and maybe they're a scum roleblocker. You can guess, but it's not really a guess your average tracker will feel all that confident in making. If you investigate someone and see that they targeted someone who's getting townread, you can usually assume that's town, since scum rarely get abilities to target their own (I've seen maybe one scum doctor ever on SOTF). Looking at setup, we only have 2 power roles that are typically aimed at scummy players (vig, roleblocker, tracker doesn't count obvs) and one that might get aimed at scummy players (rolecop). That's roughly 20% chance of clearing a townie. And odds of nailing scum are 0% while Ninja is around.MW wrote:I disagree really, really hard with the idea that town's PRs were bad for it. Town was gifted an incredibly potent setup, because half the point of investigative PRs is clearing townies. At three investigations a night, town had an incredible theoretical ability to parse and compile information, and also had a kill that scum had to jump through hoops to counter or play around (no BP scum = scum must either guess a roleblock or else investigate first and then start blocking).
Watcher has marginal utility too, at least insofar as clearing townies go. Watchers tend to target townread players to see who visits them. If you see that they're getting targeted by multiple people, then I guess you can clear them. That's fairly unlikely to happen, since it requires for doctor, scum, and you to target the same person. If you see one person visited them, or nobody visited them, it feels like it'd be rather hard to make the right guess about the implications. Zero chance of catching scum until ninja's dead, low chance of clearing someone as town, and a not-negligible chance of accidentally nailing town.
Rolecop can catch 2 scum (ninja and scum rolecop are incriminating results), and can potentially catch roleblocker too if they happen to also investigate the town roleblocker, or if the town roleblocker claims, or something. Godfather, depending on how that ruling works out. So, okay. Point there. It can't clear townies, though, for the most part. Trackers can be scum, vt's can be scum, roleblocker can be scum. Just about the only town power roles you can investigate that would clear your investigation target are watcher and bodyguard. 16% chance of clearing town. 16-25% chance of getting an incriminating result. 32-41% chance of a useful result on night 1, assuming town mislynch a vt or something. Not bad for a long game, but if town mislynches twice, you got two shots at getting info. A little better than a coinflip's odds of getting one useful result between n1 and n2, basically.
I agree that most of scum's power are concentrated in the ninja, and if we lynch the ninja early on things look very different for both teams. Problem is,The ninja's not getting lynched without rolecop hitting them, though, not unless they play scummy enough that scum's forced to bus. Town only had a chance at winning this if the ninja messed up badly or got investigated by the rolecop. Both of those feel unlikely to me.
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