Let's Talk About the New Sheriff

Feedback/Suggestions
#21

These changes need to be reverted, fullstop. They’re going in the completely wrong direction.

  1. Only the King and the Prince should ever be permanently unconvertable. Conversion is a vital part of the game’s balance, and without it (given the large number of protectives out there, including the guaranteed king), Unseen don’t have enough options to deal with their targets. The reasons that person (as far as I recall, it was just one person) wanted the Sheriff to be unconvertable were mostly “it makes it tempting to gamethrow as a Sheriff because I’m afraid I’ll get converted if I’m revealed”; but this risk is a core part of the game, and Sheriffs were exposed to it for a reason.

  2. Making the Sheriff both unique and guaranteed is an obviously terrible idea that makes it impossible to fakeclaim Sheriff because the (guaranteed-to-exist, knows-he’s-unique) real Sheriff will immediately counterclaim you - especially when combined with the ridiculous conversion immunity, which together mean that the real sheriff faces almost no risk in revealing to counterclaim you in this manner. We need to be moving in the direction of providing more roles evils can claim, not removing one of the few that was available.

  3. The new ability is unnecessary (Sheriffs were already good at what they did), and, again, makes them harder to fakeclaim.

I just don’t see any benefits to these changes at all - the only thing worth keeping is maybe making the Sheriff guaranteed. If the goal is to differentiate unseen / cult games, there are better ways to do it - certainly better ways than removing Sheriff from the already-short list of things evils can reasonably fakeclaim without extensive prep and luck.

1 Like
#22

It is to balance out the fact that allies no longer exists. Besides, Sheriff used to be unique, guaranteed and unconfirmable, and the game was still balanced.

3 Likes
#23

The issue isn’t “balance” in the sense of faction-vs-faction win rate. I feel that people overwhelmingly overestimate the significance of that; unless it would catastrophically shift them to the point where the game ceases to be fun, the impact on that is the least important part of any suggestion, since it can always be balanced out by (unrelated) tweaks elsewhere, since the game is already heavily and intentionally asymmetric, and since it’s extremely difficult to assess long-term win-rate changes as a result of tweaks like these. The removal of allies in particular absolutely did not need any immediate changes to “balance” it; it should have been done on its own - then, after a period of a few weeks, if it seemed like BD win rates had dropped catastrophically, other adjustments could be made to fix it.

But in general I am strenuously opposed to any changes whose sole purpose is to try and brute-force win rates to be closer together - the important thing is tactical balance (ensuring that the game supports a wide range of strategies, so it continues to be interesting and the metagame continues to develop in a healthy manner rather than devolving down to just a few lines of play.) Sacrificing tactical balance to try and adjust win rates will make the game boring in the long term - and it’s a particularly terrible idea when dealing with changes whose impact is entirely speculative.

Beyond that, sheriffs used to be unique, guaranteed, and uncomfortable and it was not fun. It led to tediously boring, obvious gameplay surrounding them, with no real tactical depth. It leaves evils with fewer roles to claim, makes playing as or against Sheriff boring because every action is nearly “solved”, with the correct choices for BD being glaringly obvious and almost no options for Unseen to force a deviation from this path. It limits what can happen in a way that severely hurt the gameplay - that was why it was changed in the first place!

Reverting such an important and drastic improvement to the game because “oh, what will BD do without allies?” is silly. We don’t know how the removal of Allies will impact win rates; and if they do, there are a thousand better ways to buff BD than to go back to the gut-churningly awful situation if unique, guarenteed, unconvertable sheriffs.

Yes, we endured that awfulness before, but (if we really think BD needs a buff to compensate for the removal of allies), why would we make that buff a reversion to a setup for the Sheriff that was widely-loathed and eventually removed due to being so horrifically boring and unfun?

1 Like
#24

While I do hope that sheriff gets reverted I would like to point something out. The fact that sheriff is unconvertable and guarenteed but Paladin isn’t is HUGE for fake claiming in either Unseen or Cult games. Example: Your the N1 convert and you want the sheriff to die. You whisper the king that you are paladin and then when the sheriff speaks up the king will out that he is lying. Sure you die too but that’s no big deal.

That’s not the only strategy you can do in regards to this. Claiming sheriff in Cult games for example. It won’t work long term but it doesn’t need to.

#25

To be fair, almost every single Unseen conversion can safely claim its old class.

#26

While I do hope that sheriff gets reverted I would like to point something out. The fact that sheriff is unconvertable and guarenteed but Paladin isn’t is HUGE for fake claiming in either Unseen or Cult games. Example: Your the N1 convert and you want the sheriff to die. You whisper the king that you are paladin and then when the sheriff speaks up the king will out that he is lying. Sure you die too but that’s no big deal.

You could do that before, couldn’t you? It’s not a very good strategy because you’re screwed if another member of your faction dies before you (and will probably have cost your faction the entire game due to it losing two people at once.)

Also, the member of the Unseen who has the most trouble claiming is the Mastermind (plus the initial Assassin, but the Mastermind is more serious because they’re irreplacable.) There’s absolutely zero room for a Mastermind to claim Sheriff now, and claiming Paladin is obviously insane given that they’re not expendable.

The other class that has trouble claiming is NK, and, again, these changes flatly remove Sheriff as a usable claim for them, since sacrificing yourself isn’t really an option.

1 Like
#27

MM and NK aren’t doing sheriff/pally plays anymore. And the reason it matters more now is because cult now has a legit reason to fake claim sheriff.