Remove notifications to a merc's target

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#21

PoE works when a majority of players are completely confirmable without a doubt. For example 2 CW’s who are barriering each other who are both cleared by a sheriff that later died along with a Prince and a Psychic who is constantly linking the prince vs Whatever unseen. If the Unseen looses their MM then PoE is also possible.

However. So long as the converts are backing up the MM as much as possible and the assassin’s are causing as much chaos as possible there will not be enough information to do PoE before everyone dies even when playing optimally as BD. That’s a good thing although it is hard to pull off with noob unseen.

#22

a confirmable merc sure… it’s the high confirmability that makes them non auto execute. Now if you’ve got a merc, that might be the unseen, might be NK, might have been merc but could have been converted. You bet your ass if I’ve already jailed that as prince and that’s the claim, I have no reason to save my execution (as the one thing he can’t be is a non gamethrowing BD that will cost me my executions). I’d certainly execute that claim if it’s known publicly and we have no better leads currently etc…

yes if merc is confirmable, we’ll let them go… possibly throw an investigation etc… (becuase if he actually is evil, that then becomes a twofor).

without the confirmability… he just becomes liability stacked upon liability.

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#23

If being hard to confirm gives mercs a reason to lie about their role, that’s even better. We want there to be more deception and lies in the game, don’t we?

I feel that the worst possible scenario is a merc saying “hey, I’m a merc”, target saying “yep, she’s a merc”, then everyone else ignoring her for the rest of the game. That’s boring and serves no real purpose but to eliminate someone as a possible MM / NK.

Putting the Merc in a position where they have to think hard about whether to be honest or not - and where a late-game Prince, with only one execute left, has to decide to go after a merc claim or someone else - is much more interesting.

Or, in other words…

You bet your ass if I’ve already jailed that as prince and that’s the claim, I have no reason to save my execution (as the one thing he can’t be is a non gamethrowing BD that will cost me my executions).

Yes, but the merc could also lie (since they’d know your situation.) That’s interesting!

Under the current situation, meanwhile, the merc claims early on and you never jail them to begin with. That’s boring - it’s reduced the work you have to do as a Prince, because you can scratch one person off your list of possible NKs / MMs immediately. I feel we should try and minimize that - and I feel that “scratched off the list of possible NKs / MMs” is actually much worse than “auto-executed as a possible NK / MM”, since realistically executions do have costs and risks, whereas scratching the merc claim off your list is a no-brainer with zero thought to it at all.

(Sure, they can be converted or possessed. But overall the ease of confirming a merc drastically reduces the amount of thought you have to give to that person as a Prince - or as anyone else, of course. That’s bad for the game. Rolling a merc shouldn’t instantly reduce the number of possible considerations for MM from 14 to 13, not when we already have so many other roles that can trivially cross themselves off that list. Finding the MM / NK should be hard, which means giving them more of a crowd to hide in and not letting neutrals just autoconfirm that they’re not the MM / NK with the push of a button.)

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#24

No, because he’ll just out his contract every single time and get a BD.

They do right now, if they were 100% they’d do it every game.

“Hey guys, I’m a merc, so 5 is evil. Kill 5 and someone take my contract.”

That said, I do think merc needs to be a less safe claim. Right now it’s 100% solid.

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#25

Uh outing their contract to be evil is throwing

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#26

Just to add on seeing as boslof is the one who does the balancing i think he wont change the whole notification since merc is convertable so its balanced

#27

They’d be outting their contract to buy favor with the BD, who they would then contract.

Which would work most of the time and you’d be hard pressed to call it throwing.

I mean mercs kill their first contract as it is now and do it. If their contract was guaranteed evil the smart play would be to bus them and get a prince contract.

#28

Mods mentioned this your not supposed to intentionally out your contract its pinned on the discord

#29

It doesn’t need to be guaranteed. Just weighted. Kinda like king right now.

#30

That could work. But the smart merc play would still be tell everyone who your contract is (who is probably evil) and then get a new contract with a BD guy. Not a huge deal in say a Cult game, but in unseen your contract would be the MM more often than not. Unless they really crack down on protecting your first contract or something.

I think just removing the whole “you were guarded by a mercenary” thing would be enough. Merc would become a claim no one really trusted since the only way to prove it would be to kill someone or have someone try to visit your contract, both of which would take some coordination.

Coordination is superior to: “HEY YOU HAVE A MERC, ITS THAT GUY WHO SAID HE WAS YOUR MERC” imo, though it would make the class a lot trickier to play.

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#31

Sure telling people who your contract is fine but out right outing what they are is against the rules

#32

It is only you that is saying mercenary is not a viable fakeclaim. Back when allies was a thing, I once claimed mercenary on the stand as sorcerer with a target that I couldn’t attack and won the game because of that. I have also seen unseen/cult claim mercenary to one another and it succeeding. It is not one of the easiest claims, but all the “confirmability” of a mercenary is just between her and her target. I can see why the second contract message might not be good for this. Having guards show up is essential though and might otherwise make the role too hard. They are also convertable, so you can’t trust a mercenary’s claim throughout the whole game.

Having a change to this might also indirectly buff a fool’s hide though. That is something to consider.

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#33

Sure, but you can 100% confirm as a Merc. No one questions you because… you can 100% confirm at that moment.

Conversion is always a threat, but claiming Merc is one of the easiest things to confirm, probably 2nd to Prince even because of that message that says “That dude that claimed he is your merc is 100% your merc.”

But if the Merc’s contract is usually evil… they’ll nearly always kill your contract because it’s the numerically smart move. Hell, odds are pretty darned good it’s the Mastermind in an Unseen game.

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#34

Yeah, they’ve said as much recently in the forums. Problem is that it isn’t in the game itself. Most people don’t visit the forums or use discord. Hell I’ve got like 300 hours in the game and didn’t know it was a rule because a Merc can easily win doing it.

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#35

Just gonna throw out that “Mercenary can be converted” isn’t a reason to let it auto-confirm to its target whenever you want.

If the Cult or Unseen (esp. the Unseen) convert a Mercenary, they are already at a loss. Converting a Neutral is much less beneficial than converting a Blue Dragon player is in every circumstance.

The fact that Sellsword isn’t nearly good enough to make it worth the huge downsides doesn’t help.

In addition, Merc’s easy confirmability means that if it gets converted, it really shouldn’t take that long for its target to figure out what’s going on.

All in all, I think it’s more than fair to remove this message from the Mercenary. In a social deduction game, more social deduction is good, and there really aren’t any tangible downsides to this change.

#36

while I do agree fake claming might be good… if there again weren’t too darn few fake claimable classes in the game. Merc is still a non entirely un fake claimable unseen class (admitted of course it takes say 2 unseen/cult agreeing to play the part). So real mercs are going to be competing with the NK, assasain, MM/CL, for the phys/knight/CW claimspace that is already in high use. (of course, to me that’s an issue of the key problem being that there aren’t enough not super testable classes in the game to begin with, the idea of adding more fakable classes really does need to come up soon).

Also what I was getting at with regards to conversion, it isn’t so much that they are the priority to convert for the baddies, but that they are still on the table to convert when it gets down to the wire. I’m sure many of us have hit the coming down to the wire games in which as unseen/cult you’ve got the king and an unknown… desperate to take the numbers at the last second you grab that last unknown, only to realize you bounced off an alc.

#37

If Merc weren’t confirmable it’d be an auto-exe in most games, much worse than Knight. It’s not like the Merc loses if you kill them. It wouldn’t give claimspace to fools, because the Merc that guarded would out themselves if it came up. Basically, I agree with Vandalay that Merc needs to be confirmable by their target to not be auto-exed

I think the contract not letting the player accept would be OK because it would buy you a night.

Edit: Just going to add that the scenario that Aquillion describes can happen with current Merc as well, but if we remove guard confirmation then there’d rarely be a Merc as they’d all be dead before end game. And if Merc is exe on sight then nobody would claim to be Merc so it doesn’t increase claimspace at all.

#38

That’s something we need to focus on fixing. And it should start with the Mercenary himself, since it’s such an incredibly easy change (just remove a few messages.)

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#39

Merc would still be a useful claim in the late game, when BD doesn’t have time to waste randomly going after neutrals. And people could even bring it up as an explanation for their initial claim being a lie.

Yes, auto-lynches are bad. The solution to that is to push more roles into the current auto-lynch category, until it reaches a point where BD can’t reasonably win by lynching all those suspicious claims. If you auto-lynch anyone who changes their claim to merc in the late game, sometimes BD is going to lose because they lynched a merc and let the NK go free - and they’ll have to keep that into consideration. This would make Merc a more useful thing for evils to focus on.

(And, of course, evils could also push BD to waste time on a merc rather than an actual evil - “NEUTS OUT” and “lol, Knight Claim in 2018” are absolutely the rallying cries of evils.)

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#40

I would like to say that if you have no leads, going after neutral claims is usually a good option, since worst case scenario, you kill a non ally, best case you kill an evil.

Mercenary does complicate this a little, since if Mercenary is on BD, they are an ally, but they can change sides if their target changes sides, so usually you probably shouldn’t execute them.

I do support this change, as it would make Merc fake claimable, and makes not all claims trustworthy.

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