"Smogon village never wins NOC games"

acid city 2 - mafia win
mafia 101 - mafia win
neighborhood (tropius) - mafia win
oc noc - village win
popcorn - mafia win
town of salem - village win
dbz noc - village win
paranoia mafia - mafia win
nice basic game - Mafia win
Acid City's Trouble - Village win
Anonymous No Contact Mafia - village win
Fallout NV mafia - village win
Completely Normal Open Setup 8p - Mafia win
Mario Kart NOC - Village win
Twilight princess - mafia win
ANOCymous - village win
medieval NOC - mafia win
returning to our roots - mafia win
desktop dungeons - village win
peace NOCed down - mafia win
neighborhood (jalmont) - mafia win
company NOC - village win

10/22 village win

I threw out games that were bastard (Troll NOC), heavily imbalanced (bulletproof), or didn't really fall under a typical NOC game (Amnesia, deathnote). Yes, this isn't an objective list. Still I think it makes my point fine enough. (I may have missed some games, I know some games weren't listed in the games listing, so I had to go off memory for some of these).

Bonus fun game - who said this (it's about NOC games in case it wasn't obvious)

??? said:
This format really doesn't seem to be very effective. It's almost impossible for the wolf to win, because by the time the village has stated all their clean players, the mafia would be able to figure out who the wolf is.

It's almost impossible for the village to win because everything they say is out in the open for the mafia and wolf to read. The village has no spreadsheet or secret information, making them an essentially clueless majority until enough of them die.

Should anything happen to the inspectors (not as though the BG can keep them safe for long, his identity goes out the third time he protects one!) the village is essentially lost. You can guess, but if the mafia bands together to keep pushing for certain people, any newer, basic villagers will follow a group.
don't cheat or i guess you can cheat but that would be p. lame.

Also in going through some threads von had a cool idea from all the way back in 2010. And I actually don't know why this isn't done other than the fact that it wouldn't be as fun? Feasibility? Not sure?

vonFiedler said:
The problem with NOC games is that the mafia has outside contact. I don't remember at summer camp a time when all the mafia players went into a cubby hole and talked to eachother and all the villagers just had to close their eyes. You're essentially playing half classic mafia, half forum mafia, and the forum half wins. We should do a true NOC mafia where the mafia can't communicate.
Let's give ourselves some credit here. We are better at these sort of games (and have gotten better I would dare say) then we think we are. Hopefully, I no longer have to listen to people making the incorrect statement that smogon villages never win NOC games and people stop spreading this myth.
 

Yeti

dark saturday
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want another one?

"notice that... all the villages that have won, have had me on them"
 
I put fire and ice under the nonsense category, in that I don't think it was very much a fair setup (too luck driven) so I didn't include it.
 

Yeti

dark saturday
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i think the problem nocs here have is two-fold

a. massive subs
b. inactivity

when half the game wasnt on the original playerlist its like ?? how do you even keep things consistent or hold anyone accountable, like you cant question the slot about its shady D1 because it was actually a different person

inactivity leads to people trumpeting the inactives are scummy and they will generally be in the PoE pool never getting townread, this helps more active scum hide bc everyone is suspicious of the guy with 5 posts a cycle

inactive mafia is harmful too but theres more villagers so better odds the idler rolled town. also he can be bussed by his partners.

if the playerlists were kept smaller but maybe nocs started up a bit more frequently, i think we might see some higher quality games.

this would allow hosts to be a bit more selective when they see a bunch of Known Idlers in their signup thread and they can cut all of them out of the game

its fine to not be a wallposter, but there are a few players who have memes about how few posts they will make in any given game and are chronic subbers. these players cause the bigger detriment to town, not scum.
 
If you look at that list, in recent memory (Anon No Contact and onward), all the village wins are in role heavy NOCs. So what that says to me is that village is great at role logic inherited from OC but poor at traditional scumhunting. I think that's what people tend to complain about and subs and inactivity are pretty key there.

We're also kind of hampered by a bit of a stale NOC meta. We have maybe twice the players needed to fill a reasonable NOC but we've seen them all do their thing a bunch. Variety is useful in making games interesting and breaking the pattern of boring meta reads.
 

Ampharos

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I think smaller game sizes for NOCs would solve quite a few of the issues we've mentioned.
 
I think smaller game sizes for NOCs would solve quite a few of the issues we've mentioned.
What do you think is appropriate? I ran 13 and 14 in my games because I felt having 3 scum was important. Any fewer than that and the scum barely have to interact with each other, making it a witch hunt.
 

Ampharos

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I think 13-15 is a good number.

We may have to suck it up and run some games with shorter deadlines as well. I'm not saying 36/12, necessarily, but even something like 48/24 is less likely to have inactivity flakes than 72/24.
 
If you look at that list, in recent memory (Anon No Contact and onward), all the village wins are in role heavy NOCs. So what that says to me is that village is great at role logic inherited from OC but poor at traditional scumhunting. I think that's what people tend to complain about and subs and inactivity are pretty key there.
Well yeah, that's because pretty much every game except walrein's a nice basic game of mafia and paranoia (which is scum sided) have been role heavy. An 0-2 record isn't really telling one way or another (and I would argue the village didn't do that badly in walrein's game even though it ended in a loss).

Pretty much every game from before the point you mention were not role heavy NOCs and villages won plenty of those games as well. Of course, you could chalk that up to being in too far in the past, but then all you would be left with is walrein's game and again that isn't really telling.

We're also kind of hampered by a bit of a stale NOC meta. We have maybe twice the players needed to fill a reasonable NOC but we've seen them all do their thing a bunch. Variety is useful in making games interesting and breaking the pattern of boring meta reads.
Interesting, I haven't really thought much about this. I feel like the issue here may be that people go to meta reads too often. Meta is a powerful tool, but I think people focus on it too much when they should be restricting their focus on actions that take place within the game itself. I don't think that's a problem that is solved by getting new players (although that should always be welcome ofc). I think the onus is on the player to move beyond meta. Even then, using meta to that extent isn't necessarily a bad thing. IDK I guess I don't get the same sense that the NOC meta is all that stale.
 
Mafia 101 had just a cop. Bulletproof I'd argue was light on roles if less balanced. Neighborhood was a game that arguably had more roles but never made it to a traditional claiming stage.
Popcorn is not exactly traditional but it's far closer to that than role heavy.

I guess the point wasn't that the statistics spoke for themselves but that looking at the games village wins were more recently defined by claim logic. And I don't think we're trash at NOC either even if the meme is funny but as players we could certainly stand to try new directions every once in a while. I even think this improvement is happening at a relatively slow rate, it just pays to be aware of what our strengths are and what we can work on.
 
I'll post more thoughts about general noc play after the current game ends but imo some solutions to the inactivity problems which pretty much killed paranoia and some other recent nocs would be to enforce 48/24 cycles and force a very strict posting requirement of at least 10 posts per day or get auto subbed out.
 
People should just stop bitching about inactives in game. Like I agree with the sentiment that people who sign up for these games and then proceed to sub out probably should just not be playing these games. Whining about the issue doesn't make it better. Just let people post at their own pace. I know it can be frustrating but it's something you can't control so why continually get worked up about it?

obviously i don't expect people to take up my opinion but still. I don't think implementing a post limit is going to change anything. it just makes it harder to find a sub. the fact that matrix is going to hit 200 pages isn't something that should be celebrated imo.

Mafia 101 had just a cop. Bulletproof I'd argue was light on roles if less balanced. Neighborhood was a game that arguably had more roles but never made it to a traditional claiming stage.
Popcorn is not exactly traditional but it's far closer to that than role heavy.

I guess the point wasn't that the statistics spoke for themselves but that looking at the games village wins were more recently defined by claim logic. And I don't think we're trash at NOC either even if the meme is funny but as players we could certainly stand to try new directions every once in a while. I even think this improvement is happening at a relatively slow rate, it just pays to be aware of what our strengths are and what we can work on.
oh yea it's true i missed those. my counterpoint would be that 101 didn't have a representative playerlist, bulletproof flat out town had no chance, and idk what to really say about neighborhood but it would prob fall under the "not balanced" category.

If you count popcorn, which I didn't due to lynch mechanics, the game was extremely tight and won by very good mafia play, and less of town throwing. I would really only consider walrein's game to be a truly representative classic "mafiascum" type game and even then that game was very close. there were a lot of positives to take away from village play and i just hate how people have a tendency to become downers about games like that since there's no shame in losing in such a close game. i think the losses in games that tend to be biased against the village make people think that all villages and all games are like that. it's just annoying to me i guess.

i think the overarching point is that villages on smogon have really never actually been all that awful historically.
 

Texas Cloverleaf

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what you could do is godkill people who dont hit the 10ppd requirement, give it one or two games getting ruined by inactives and the rest of the playerbase will peer pressure people into posting or not joining
 

Yeti

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if you just godkill them then town doesnt have to worry about wasting mislynches on them before LYLO and they're out of the PoE pool which they otherwise never would've made it out of
 
I mean if someone wants to try it, be my guest, but it will be pretty easy to show how silly that requirement is...
 

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