The Syndicate

I think it's still pretty balanced.

The game I played on Gamefaqs a while ago had a different spin to it. It closed setup role madness with claiming allowed. But it was based on a famous flavor (a song of ice and fire) so it would be possible for the players to guess the setup by claiming (that's something you need to observe, whether your flavor has characters where it's possible to deduce their allegiance or not).

Anyway, what the host did was provide the mafiosos with a giant list of characters not in the game. He would also volunteer to write them role pms for those characters, if they ever needed to claim.

I dropped the game after day 1 so I don't know how well that worked (probably did since it's an old community and they seem to do that often) but I thought it was prettycool.

In Guess Who mafia there was at least one day where I sent the kill for my faction, way after I was lynched. I assumed that was the standard here.

I don't think this one makes a huge differenxe to game balance though.

ika wrote:

Metalmarsh89 wrote:Civilians have been dominating the Heists here on the Syndicate though. That makes for an interesting counter-study.

I think with hesit, it is more straightforward and counteracts one of the most important things on the site, claiming and info dumping. As it was seen in the one that just finished, if info dumping wasn't allowed, scums might of been able to walk it out. WIth the ability to claim it made it impossible for scums to win

If you make role claiming allowed you need to be aware that might break tbe game and balance accordingly. Specially if your game has flavor (based on a specific theme) Give mafia janitors or godfathers, for example. Or make it closed setup and maybe even provide the mafia team with a list of "unused" characters they may claim. Open setup games with flavor and role claiming can become extremely pro-town.

I personally prefer the standard I see in a lot of games at NF. Allow info dumping but not claiminf your own role. I find that allows roles to be used to their full extent without giving civs an easy path to win.

Btw I'm not replying to every post adressed at me because I'm on my phone.

I think I have played 6 or 7 games here and never seen civs win. I'll probably get retired from mafia before I ever see a civ win in the Syndicate at this rate.

@Rabbit

"Horrible civvie play" is relative, civilians are not gods who can overcome any difficulty and Sherlock Holmes their way to victory. If baddies are winning games way more often in this site, it's because games are not being designed well enough to be balanced.

Knowing roles upon death, using cops results, changing votes, all of those are tools that civilians could be able to use to overcome the baddie's tools. The game isn't automatically better if it's harder for civilians to win. It has to be balanced first.

I think a lot of it has to do with specific game design style. A lot of SYndicate traditions, while not bad by themselves, tend to be pro-scum, and combined they seem to make the game unbalanced on scum's side.

Example:

- Allowing scum players to talk and send actions after death: pro-mafia
- Banning info dumping: pro mafia
- Civilians don't win if they are dead: VERY pro-mafia
- Unchangable votes: pro-mafia
- Not flipping roles that are killed in the night: pro-mafia.

Some things I see are are pro-town, like allowing posts in the night, but they don't seem to compensate.

I don't think it has much to do with culture/skill. The site I come from has some of the laziest and dumbest civvies I've ever seem, and yet they still win games more often than Syndicate's civvies. On NF I often watch civvies pull off victories out of nowhere after doing nothing to deserve them, while here civvies butt their heads until they bleed to try and find mafia only to fail over and over.

Now, I'm not calling for a major overhaul in game design culture, since all those things I mentioned have their charm even if they are pro-mafia, but maybe hosts should be aware the way we host games is very pro-mafia and try to balance games accordingly. Give civs stronger roles, for example, to compensate for the fact they are not allowed to dump info.

MovingPictures07 wrote:

S~V~S wrote:

Metalmarsh89 wrote:

rabbit8 wrote:Because civs don't sacrifice themselves for the team. Let's change that...

What do you think I've been doing this whole time?

Then again, there's been a recent increase in banning of self-voting.

I will never ban that or self targeting either. Both have a strategic place. I don;t like either, but who am I to impose my standards on my players?

I disagree. Self-targeting is one thing. A self-vote has no strategic place in a mafia game, and this is coming from someone who's done it out of frustration more than once over the years.

Jesters. Or any game complicated enough to award player bonuses if they die in a certain way.

I've recently had a role that made my mafia faction stronger if I got people to follow me in a bandwagon. One day the cop found I was mafia and revealed. I immediately self-voted and watched as 15 players voted for me, giving my faction a huge bonus.