S~V~S wrote:
I think it is better to give a win to 10 people who did not deserve it than to deny it to one person in the winning faction who did, tbh.
While I must note beforehand that I have so far never expressed any opinion on whether any player "deserved to win" a game or not
(although you know who you are), nor did I feel the need on even a handful of occasions to privately judge a player's performance in such words, if the hypothetical situation would be "I won a game together with 10 people who did not deserve it", I would profoundly dislike the 10 wins granted to those who did not deserve it. Civs, mafia, indies, no distinction. You don't play, I don't like. There's absolutely no variation to this, as far as I'm concerned.
On a personal level, if I would die on Day/Night 1 and win with the rest of the civilians after a 12-cycle confrontation or so, such victory would feel completely hollow. Granted, the further into a game I'd fall as a victim, the more losing would very likely start to ache.
I don't feel that Talking Heads is a pertinent example, because it was announced from the get go that it would be DoA - and it being a crossover game with RYM, it wasn't expected to be anything other than that. That beind said, yes, losing the game on Day Fifteen would have been devastating. Would losing the game have had the same impact for Epignosis, a Night 9 victim, though? Dunno, maybe? Would losing the game have had the same impact for a Night 4 victim? How 'bout Night 1?
Epignosis's point of view is quite good. Come to think of it, I've still witnessed cases, even in "survive to win" games, in which civs or neutrals cracked under lynch pressure, getting as close as rolehinting as "legally" possible. Which faction never does that? The one that can always wins as a team. Mafia.
Anyway, for new or conservative players, I could suggest perhaps embracing at least one game that's designed in this fashion (whether you participate or you design it yourself), to get a sense if the disentchantment of losing a game in such way is real or not. For instance, have we actually had civilian complaints or bitter afterthoughts about losing the game due to being killed?
Otherwise, I actually feel the dead-or-alive format is gaining serious ground on the Syndicate, so supporters of this should feel positive about the outlook, they're kinda winning with their cause.
One last factor that I consider relevant to this is the Hall of Fame rankings, which, for some reason, I still value [I'm undergoing therapy to get over it, though]. I have 5 wins, each and every one having absolute sentimental value for me. Instead, I have 7 losses [not sure if Arrested Development counts as an eighth, and I frankly hope not] out of which only one do I consider to have been out of bad luck / bad odds [hint: I was mafia] and six don't stack up one bit to any great performance or legacy in my books. Technically, the civilian faction never actually won a single game of these six I myself lost, so I can't really build a statement of how me not winning with them would have felt disappointing, lol.
But back to the Rankings, they probably require to be slowly devalued by the increase in wins that Heists and Dead-or-Alive formats will influence - which is, again, already happening. I project that in another year or so, the overall leaders will have like 30 wins to their name, at which point these rankings themselves will lose any meaning they had, for instance, during the two-three years in which the victors were few and the ranks were tight.
