Yeah, but people were saying nobody agreed with me. My point was to show that that’s not the case.
Beyond that, nobody has provided any meaningful arguments for why it should be removed. “The dead should say dead” isn’t an argument, it’s an opinion. I disagree - it should never be safe to out yourself or to play badly. If someone knows who you are, it makes sense to me that there’s another role that can extract that information from the dead. It shouldn’t be easy or automatic, but it adds to the game - without it, you’re encouraging (and even rewarding) careless play by letting you ignore information that the dead obtain.
That post has been up for 14 days and managed 4 likes. This has been up for 34 minutes and has gotten 3.
I think Aquillion is right here. Part of the reason I’ve stopped playing in the PTR is dying is boring and in most games most people are going to end up dead. That, and the long wait times. DK and Call were fun abilities and I’m sad to see them go in favor of… somewhat more boring abilities.
Likes don’t really prove agreement either - I’ll often find myself liking posts I either only partially agree with or disagree with, provided I appreciate the viewpoint or explanation.
Res on Physician was just overpowered. It wasn’t extremely blatant, but it was way too much power consolidated in one class. That was probably changing either way, and getting rid of Death Knights for good was definitely the right call.
No, I mean things that the dead deduce, especially from stuff that they see on their final night. Contact with the dead is one of the most important and valuable aspects of a game like this one, since it ensures that even in the late game (when there’s few people alive), there can still be a lot of minds trying to solve things provided your Mystic / Psychic / Medium / whatever is still alive. This, in turn, rewards smart play and punishes careless play.
But it only really rewards smart town play, doesn’t it?
Why not focus on features that raise the skill ceiling for everybody, rather than letting that one smart BD that the evils killed continue to help carry his team from beyond the grave?
Does it through? I mean if your smart players are in the graveyard then either they died N1/N2 and never got invested anyways (and will probably leave even with dead interaction) or something went wrong as TP should keep the smart ones alive.
If your good players can be dead and contributing then don’t that mean your healers can blatantly fail with very little consistence?
I completely agree with you. There should be more opportunity for dead player interaction, not less. Being dead does not have to be a boring spectator sport.
There are ways to do this without being overpowered, for instance, what if the dead BD and maybe even unseen/cult players were playing their own game? It could be as simple as voting to give 1 player a boon or a curse every night.
No, it rewards both. You have to look at things from both sides like this:
If something punishes stupid play by evils, then it’s (conversely) rewarding smart play by evils. If one of the big threats to evils in the late game is deduction by the dead, then evils who avoid revealing information that the dead could use to solve the mystery are going to do better. Just like eg. the existence of the Jailor rewards smart play by evils because his raw power means they will win more often if they can find and kill him.
You have to look at the effect an ability has on the overarching meta and the way the game plays out. Making the deductions of the dead one of the threats to evils increases the impact that skill has on the game by decreasing the chance that a mistake or misplay will be overlooked.
Being dead is still a severe disadvantage - your communication has to go through the psychic (who can die themselves), you lose your vote, you can’t communicate during the day, and you can’t use your abilities. The Psychic smooths the impact of these deaths out a little bit; they don’t remove them entirely. Obviously you wouldn’t want to remove them entirely!
But most D1 / D2 deaths (when the psychic is most likely to be alive) are random. So it’s good for the game to smooth their impact out a little bit.
I don’t see how allowing a BD hivemind to all scrutinize a game somehow makes evils smarter
The dead are collectively going to have a lot more time, energy, and knowledge to figure out evils than the living players. It’s like having a bunch of Citizens with more night results than everybody else that you can’t kill because they’re already dead.
None of this punishes poor play by scum any more than it just punishes scum.
Not to mention it devalues killing smart players for being smart to instead make killing powerful classes a better option.
But you just said yourself that a dead smart player should be a threat to the Unseen/Cult. But the purpose of killing a player is to remove their threat. With something like a medium (or Psy in this case) you can just pile your TP on them mindlessly and not even the Psychic has to think because the dead do it for them.
So rather than thinking about who the strongest player is you end up thinking about who has the strongest class. Which is a much less interesting question.
Look at it as less of a balance tug-of-war between BD and evils, and more as a decision of what the “shape” of the game will be - what will determine victory or defeat. Balance between evils and BD isn’t the important part of an individual suggestion or change - that can be adjusted in a lot of different ways. What’s important is how games play out, and what leads to a victory or defeat.
To me, a good game is one where everyone plays well, and the smartest players are the ones who win. The worst games, then - the really bad ones, the ones the game should generally be designed to avoid happening - are where someone makes an obvious misplay which gets overlooked and they still win. That’s a feelbad moment for me even when it’s my side winning. I mean, sometimes it inevitably happens, but it’s not a good thing. Ideally we want both sides to play “smart.”
And the BD is the investigative side - their goal is to find the evils. Keeping the game smart requires a setup that rewards and encourages complex deduction by the BD, so evils can’t get away with half-assed lies or obvious mistakes.
It doesn’t completely devalue it. You just have to kill the psychic as well. This decreases the chance that it will happen at random, and makes it more likely that the endgame will involve, well, “smartness” on both sides - which is good for the gameplay and the meta overall.
But like I said above, “stupid games” aren’t a desirable thing. I don’t want to win because only the dumb BDs were left at the end. Even if it’s because the smart ones were picked off, it ultimately leads to unsatisfying gameplay. If you want to target them, I can see the argument for it being there as a strategy (and it is, if you target the psychic etc), but I don’t think it should be the main way of playing, and I think that on the whole the endgame should be set up to encourage and reward “smarts.”
Except that the Psychic, itself, is a power and a class that can be taken out. If you want to completely silence someone, that’s an option. I just don’t feel it should be easy - I feel that the Psychic’s power is more interesting (and leads to smarter games) than, say, the Jailor’s power, in that respect (when talking about powers evils might want to be encouraged to take out early if they can.)
Survival is part of smart play. When I play it is either early game where I leave if killed regardless of dead interaction (N1-3 usually) or I am going out of my way to make sure there is protection on me.
Basically if all your smartest player are in the graveyard then clearly they weren’t smart enough to figure out how to avoid the night kill.
Even if there are no TPs in play (which there always are because of king but I digress) you can still survive by keeping a low profile until you can out multiple evils at once or get the killers locked down by offensive classes. If you are at the point where all of this is impossible you are usually at late game anyways so you won’t be waiting long for the end of the game anyways (you can wait 30 seconds right?)
I don’t think “smart enough to avoid death” is reasonable. Evils kill every night whether you keep a low profile or not. It’s something a lot of people do because being alive is more fun, but I’m always skeptical that it actually helps (I actually feel that the urge non-neutral players feel to stay alive is frequently detrimental to their side - which is another reason why it’s good to have a psychic-type role, so players are a bit more willing to risk their lives and die knowing that they can still participate and enjoy the game through that to some extent.)
That statement makes no sense unless you’re a class with night immunity (and even then). If you get Empower Reaped n2 in a 0 Knight game how were you not smart enough to avoid the night kill?
