Why is a Mercenary’s target told when they’ve been guarded? All this does is make it easy to confirm that someone is a Mercenary, which, in turn, makes the role harder to fake.
I would even extend this to make “offer contract” non-optional for the target and produce no message as well. There’s no logical reason that I can see why someone would refuse that I can see, so all the message does is confirm the mercenary.
Mercs could still confirm with retribution, just not so easily.
You do realize that prevention is provable. If you want to prove a merc claim just whisper someone random to visit you. They don’t even need to be good as long as the person you whisper isn’t NK your covered.
A merc has to confirm themselves if they dont and their target is a killing role then the merc wouldnt have a way to prove
Making merc confirmable to their contract is important for letting them do their job.
Plus if you get bad players who does neuts out being confirable stops people from doing it to the merc
Take town of salem guardian angel has a msg when they protect their target and its announced to everyone
Sure, but that requires more work (and a third person who could be evil / fool / scorned / etc.) It’s good to make proving require more like that rather than letting roles auto-prove on their own, since that leaves more room for deception and distrust.
Making merc confirmable to their contract is important for letting them do their job.
The NK and MM are more important; leaving claimspace for them should always take priority over making things easier for other roles. And, beyond that, if it’s not possible to fakeclaim Merc, what purpose to they serve? They’re just auto-confirmed neutrals who always protect their target.
Basically, ToL is a game about deception and trickery. Having an auto-confirmed neutral goes against that and serves no purpose beyond wasting a slot on a randomly-assigned buff.
And beyond that, it’s good for the game to have a large number of people who can’t easily claim, since that makes it harder for BD to just win by killing everyone who lacks a confirmable claim and forces them to rely on deduction, trust, inference, and so on instead - which leads to more interesting gameplay.
No role should ever be any easier to confirm than their mechanics require.
Covering for an evil contract and letting Evils fake it using each other. In other words the point of the merc is to claim something other than merc and use your confirmability to make sure your contract knows what is really going on. Think ONUW Mason where your confirmability gives you the ability to lie.
AKA the problem isn’t mercs but rather the fact that they are usually contracted to BD.
Why would a merc ever publicly claim something other than merc in the current meta? It risks getting you killed if your claims contradict anything else, it requires a lot of time and energy to focus on faking your will, and publicly claiming merc actually serves to protect your target, both because people will be more reluctant to try and attack them and more reluctant to vote against them. (Even if a merc did randomly decide to do that - which I guess they can, comfortable in the fact that they can auto-prove any time they please - what does it add? The fact that they can auto-prove makes any sort of depth or deception related to the role mostly moot.)
Now, if mercs couldn’t auto-confirm, then they might have an incentive to lie, since merc itself would become a suspicious claim; and those lies would be interesting, since nobody could just instantly reveal the truth. But that’s a good thing! We don’t want things to be obvious or straightfowrard, we want there to be lies and deception and distrust so gameplay is deep and interesting.
But beyond that, again - I feel that you’re making the mistake of only looking at this from the perspective of playing a merc (and what makes things easiest / most fun for the merc.) The merc’s individual perspective isn’t too important; I feel that even without easy confirmability, it’d still be fun to play and possible to win as (they might need a few buffs, but it wouldn’t be a big issue.)
From the perspective of the meta, having mercs be a viable fakeclaim (late in the game, in particular, when there may not be time to follow up on a neutral) is vastly more important than making things easier for the merc. I don’t see how an easy-confirmable merc contributes to the game at all.
Again, a social deduction game like ToL is all about evils lying and people trying to unravel their lies. A class that nobody can fakeclaim and which has no incentives to lie doesn’t serve a purpose - and every role that can’t be fakeclaimed makes the game a bit less interesting, the strategies involved a bit less deep.
It also makes it easier to find the Mastermind or NK (since it is extremely unlikely any of them would be able to claim Merc under the current rules, you can instantly scratch someone off the list of possible Masterminds / NKs as soon as the merc outs themselves.) And that’s a much, much more serious problem than your concerns about keeping the Merc game easy, since catching the Mastermind and NK makes up a huge part of the gameplay. Mercs shouldn’t be able to easily remove themselves from the list of suspects.
first of all. Prince, Psychic, Noble, King.
Second of all I consider the “no incentives to lie” the bigger problem. A simple solution is to make the merc far more likely to start out contracted to evil. Possibly even 100% likely. That way he needs to fake claim due to merc claims being sus and he also indirectly buffs fools because a merc contract is one of the ways to be unvisitable.
first of all. Prince, Psychic, Noble, King.
As I said, it makes a bit more sense if the role’s abilities leave no other option but to make them auto-confirmed - we can’t change those roles without undermining their capabilities. Mercenary doesn’t fall into that category. He’s just randomly given the ability to auto-confirm for no reason at all.
(That said, I do think we should do whatever we can to make the Psychic and Noble less auto-confirmed. That’s why I suggested giving the Psychic’s broadcast ability to a Cult role as well, and that’s why I suggested giving the Possessor the ability to mimic some abilities of whoever they possessed. Having people confirm themselves by using their ability makes for less interesting gameplay and ought to be removed as much as possible, provided we can do so without hurting the way classes function; the game particularly benefits from leaving as many fakeclaims as possible open to NKs and MMs, since their fakeclaim is often going to be decisive.)
Second of all I consider the “no incentives to lie” the bigger problem. A simple solution is to make the merc far more likely to start out contracted to evil. Possibly even 100% likely. That way he needs to fake claim due to merc claims being sus and he also indirectly buffs fools because a merc contract is one of the ways to be unvisitable.
Well, making him evil would remove the problems of being auto-confirming, yes. But I don’t like the swinginess of adding another neutral role that will always vote with evils and who starts out knowing an evil they can side with. Beyond that, I don’t see why we’d need such a drastic change when it would be much simpler to just remove the merc’s messages, forcing them to prove themselves through their actions just like eg. Knights or CWs.
IMHO Knights and CWs are the ideal - as many roles as possible should be like that in terms of confirmability. We need more roles that the MM / NK can claim, and more people who could credibly be MM / NK suspects with no easy way to clear themselves. The Mercenary is an easy target for this - making him unable to auto-confirm himself wouldn’t directly interfere with his abilities, and wouldn’t dramatically impact the balance between the various sides because he’s a neutral.
I don’t think huge numbers of NKs or MMs would claim Mercenary (it’d be as suspicious as a Knight, with the added disadvantage of not necessarily being BD-sided), but I feel that it’s worth arranging things to leave the option open, in order to make it harder to solve the game through pure process of elimination.
The merc is a neutral… he’s already a safe execute, he’s also one of the few convertable neutrals which makes him a high risk to keep around no matter how you slice it. Alc is difficult to confirm, but impossible to convert. Merc is easy to confirm, but can be converted, can be contracted to an evil etc…
merc would be a horrible fake claim even if it wasn’t confirmable. Alc is at least motivated to try and confirm himself by healing whatever BD is poisoned/bled etc…
So long as evils are smart the game will never be solvable by PoE consistently. So long as any information can be either False or misleading any misinformation can either be forgiven on an evil or cause a misslynch on the real deal. For example the Scorned can frame someone so if a sheriff claim says someone is unseen it can still be an actual sheriff and it often is.
For example I love to give NK ability’s that give them extra information. The possessor is a good example right now.
Depends what you mean by “consistantly”, If BD is all experienced, skilled and pushing logs, I would say it is solvable by PoE 75-85% of the time, With how few classes are totally fake claimable, in unseen games you’re basically set for everything except for the one converted guy.
Its a waste of a exe for exing a merc all merc wants to do is keep their contract safe
