It’s a meta game, but it isn’t a rule break. They aren’t going to outlaw volunterally saying something out loud. No different than catching the just jumped possesor if you are jailor by asking him what you said in jail. Or a psychic telepathically saying “I’m number 13 stop accusing me”, etc…
Sorry if I wasn’t clear - the non-convertibles were taken out of the set because I was calculating the probability given the conversion was a success (which it can’t be in the scenario where you hit a non-convertible). They’re accounted for in the overall probability assuming I didn’t mess any math up.
I would not make this assumption because it is wrong more often than not. In fact I would assume that a Royal Unseen would always be voted up because the assassin would vouch for them to ensure it and the free 2 votes is enough to make a huge difference that early on in the game.
Plus if they aren’t elected the go to strategy is to kill the king again.
And remember. This is also being weighed against: Having that class that would step up, Having order exe, Having an additional 6 guards, Lynching D2 and Possablely lynching D3 too. At that point an additional 4-8% chance of BD king with EKing taking the rest of that and leaving to probability of Neut king is not worth it.
Ah, I see.
Yes it is, and I’ll explain why there’s a difference between this, possessor, and psychic.
With psychic, they have the option to communicate with the room at large if they prefer to not out themselves, or are confirming they are still psychic. It is entirely possible that a psychic, within the game environment, could share the information of who they are if they chose to.
With possessor, their role doesn’t allow them access to info on what the player whispered before they were possessed, so it is entirely within the game environment that they not be able to reply to the prince when questioned.
With the whisper meta proposed by orange for anonymous whisper system, that is entirely designed to circumvent the anonymous part and to allow players access to information that they should not have access to.
That makes it a rule-breaking meta by definition.
There’s nothing rule-breaking about whispering somebody a code word and then saying it out loud lmao
We’re just back to square one
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It’s wrong in my favor though - ignoring the actions of the other players strictly favors the Unseen in the scenario I just laid out. With heals, Knight guards and ability confirmations you are far, far more likely to get a BD King.
Losing 2 guards and 2 OEs is a fair trade. People already poison the King day 2 with an 80% chance he’s not evil.
I’ve only just seen this, but I have a bit to say.
This game has been around for the best part of a year now in total with the kickstarter and all.
So far, there have been many improvements to this game made, as patches have been pushed out in order to allow us to have a better experience.
I am more than thankful for what we have already.
Now, I do also have to say that I find whispers to be important.
There is the whole ‘Whisper King’ Meta and while it’s annoying, it is a valid strategy.
We do have many ways to prove ourselves and claiming results to King does work.
The main concern with whispering King is that the King may not be your faction.
As it was changed to 60% BD and 20/20 Neut/Evil before.
This means that even if you claim, you may be harming your faction.
Therefore it is an individual basis which is needed to be considered here.
We have thousands of players here who have thousands of different tactics.
Every player, every playstyle, has it’s own unique twist.
So to me, the question isn’t about removing whispers. As this feature is good anyway.
The question is the value of whispers in the game which I believe is subjective.
Therefore we cannot say that whispers are always good or always bad.
It is one of many tactics which can be used and is even more useful when you have someone who can be confirmed to be on your side, without everyone having to know.
TL;DR:
The constant improvements and patches show that the devs (and staff) have best interests.
Whispers are subjective and have varying levels of importance for all players.
If you don’t like whispers and don’t want to use them, then that’s your choice.
However, it cannot lower the value of the game overall, when this game is about one thing…
Community
It is impossible to please everyone, but many are happy to be able to have whispers.
As it pleases well over the majority, it is only logical sense to keep them
4 Likes
Well, here’s where it comes into debate… is the whisper game meta pleasing the majority, or is it pleasing a vocal minority in a way that makes the majority afraid not to participate due to fears of gamethrowing and getting killed.
Whether anyone likes it or not… a strategy with the highest chance of winning will be used. In town of salem they went through more or less this same thing in mayor games. Of which people went along with it for months.Then you started seeing “I hate mayor games” topics getting more and more common in the forums and then it hit a critical breaking point where a large enough portion of the community started gamethrowing in protest (Town roles that could kill mayor, did, and put #nomayorgames2016 on the kill notes to make sure everyone could tell that they were knowingly and intentionally throwing in protest).
I’m not supporting their actions, and I’ll be quick to point out, after their solution, mayor can no longer whisper after revealing. The same segment of the community that loved mayor games (it was a known fact that mayor games had ~80% winrate), replaced it with Vote for Roles. IE put everyone up on the stand one at a time, get a claim etc…
Which more or less accomplished an even higher town winrate than mayor games. After that they attempted to solve that problem via reducing the amount of trials per day. Which didn’t really help much, people volunteered their claims and they could focus the VFR on just the tiny amount that didn’t.
After that they actually made some headway by doing a pretty major shakeup to the role list, which I do believe helped quite a bit.
That’s around where I burned out on the game though and came here, so I can’t say much more on the saga past that. But I will say, the majority of players seemed happier in the games when whispers/vfr weren’t the instant strategy. Not to mention the winrates weren’t in the 80-90% town sided.
This game is running through the same problems. let me give some of my opinions of what I think are the shortcomings, our limited class list issue.
While ToL does by default do almost exactly what ToS had to do (add more random towns, less hard coded classes). we also have much more rigid rules. IE 2 of each non-uniques, and quite a few unique classes. That limit does hit the point where in short a single knight dying puts huge jeopardy in all existing knight claims. as 1. if there is a real knight, he knows to insta CS any other knight claims etc…
Then of course we come to the classes themselves if I recall there’s about 3 very fake claimable BD classes, 3 semi-claimable but could be dangerous as they do have means to self confirm, and 6 you’d be an idiot to claim if you aren’t it, or the exact converted form of it classes.
So right off the bat we’ve got a shortage of claimspace… a huge danger if your claim is a duplicate of a living class, or shared with a different evil, etc… Personally I’d say the biggest thing we need, is more classes, and a good portion of them being fakable. Admitted that’s where it’s going to be toughest… as a good 90% of suggested classes, fall into the very confirmable category, as people want classes that are fun and exciting… and that rarely ever lines up with “no one can really be sure if you did your job”
2 Likes
It is, if it gives the character information they should not have access to, and using a code-word in this instance is to circumvent an anonymous whisper system. That’s the definition given for a rule-breaking meta strategy.
It’s all using in game Information which you are expected to have.
What a player said in the public chat is something that should be known to you. What was said to you in a whisper should be known to you. The fact that what was said in the public chat reveals who whispered you is something you figured you on your own using Information you are supposed to have and gotten using the intended methods.
No step in this prossess is rule breaking nor is the intention or the method of putting it together.
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Other examples of things that are meta gaming by your logic include:
Cross referencing logs.
Figuring out that the drunk is converted because he HHed a sheriff
Claiming. Like at all.
Being a Psychic
Basically the entire game outside of the night phase.
This is because under your reasoning it is meta gaming to tell someone something they don’t already know. ESPECIALLY if they back it up with evidence (AKA: Posting your logs. Which definitely contains Information that the other players don’t have and aren’t supposed to have).
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The only game that considers things like posting logs as Meta game is camp cadaver (The game does not consider code words meta gaming however so long as the codes are made in game.) And that game does not have a rule against meta gaming anyways so it doesn’t matter.
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I think the best way to fix the whisper meta would be to rework noble so it’s focused around whispers, and change the starting king so it’s 50% good and 50% evil with no starting neutral king
Honestly that whole whisper game and VFR thing was so blatantly obvious
I used to get all sorts of abuse from people for suggesting that stopping Mayor from whispering would just move the issue rather than fix it
Sure enough, I was right
I don’t thing it should be nearly as big of a problem in ToL.
If everyone has everyone’s claims in ToL then Scum has a much better chance compared to in ToS.
Excluding NK anyway. They are just fucked.
1 Like
There are two things that seem to be causing confusion in this thread.
First, meta gaming is doing something that only makes sense if this is a game and not real life. Using a code in jail to counter Possessor is not meta gaming, since you could do the same thing if the game were actually real life. Concluding that the person who just died was not a poss jump because he immediately left the game, on the other hand, IS meta gaming. Because people can’t “leave the game” in real life after they die.
Second, the comparisons with Town of Salem are very, very bad because there is no conversion in that game (ignoring Vampires). So having a bad claim in this game is not nearly as bad (and not comparable to having a bad claim in ToS) unless you are Reaper or Sorcerer.
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or MM… yes conversion is a game changer, but on the whole, the same principles apply. Good guys identifying the bad guys is the way to get ahead. yeah catching the assasain isn’t the same crippling long term effect as catching the mafioso, but that only pushes it further into the BD has extra motives to use whatever trick they can to insta identify the baddies.
ToL is kind of a side step with town of salem’s primary problems. They eliminated town of salem’s defined role list via basically off the bat having 7 Random towns.
ToL is a step easier to PoE, due to non unique classes having a cap of 2
Both games fall into the huge weakness of the majority of classes being more or less confirmable (or only mimicable by their exact evil counterpart).
Now cult games I don’t think fall into this problem as badly… Only 1 of up to 4 cult members have no ability to mimic a BD counterpart. Unseen on the other hand, 2/3rds of them have that problem, and as soon as you catch one of them… the untestable one becomes testable. Thus claims out and paying attention is almost an autowin.
I don’t know current winrates, but I would be willing to wager, if we get a vets or ranked mode… we are going to run into a very serious blatent issue, where we’ll see the low tiered game… with a 50%ish winrate, and the high tiered game with a 90% BD winrate.
Of course maybe the solution to that is what they are already dabbling with, IE different rules/skills for different skill levels of players, but I find it hard to imagine the current game, being competitive when we do get newish players out of the mix.
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