Oh, I missed Jamiet's earlier question - I've got the alignment stats:

Win/Draw/Loss
Town - 6/2/7
Mafia - 5/2/8
Third Party - 1/2/7

Third Party Breakdown:
Serial Killer - 0/2/3
Arsonist - 0/0/1
Werewolf - 0/0/1
Bounty Hunter - 1/0/0
Power Thief - 0/0/2

Town win: M2, M3, M8, M11, M12, M15
Mafia win: M1, M5, M9, M13, M14
Third Party win: M10
Draw: M4, M6 (Both of these ended with a single mafia member with a roleblock ability versus a nightkill-immune Serial Killer. If this happened now it would probably be considered a Serial Killer victory, depending on the GM.)

Thanks.

@everyone saying that nobody should care,

Yes, the whole thing is a game, and it's all for fun. Of course I agree. But it is fun for me, and I suspect for some others, because we want to win, and we want to win more than anyone else. That may not matter to everyone, but it matters to me. I am an insufferable, competition addict. Feel free to call me similar names; you're not telling me anything I don't know.

captainmeme's suggestion now that his ruling is "the right one" because of the way the rule was written in the Mafia QT is unjust and incorrect.

Consider the game of Diplomacy. There are complicated moves and difficult contingencies that result in a detailed set of official rules. There may be sets of moves that nobody anticipated occurring, that result in outcomes that nobody planned, but so long as the adjudication is governed by an official set of rules determined at the outset, it is just.

Here, it matters that my death was contrary to the official rules. It matters because, while the change in rules MAY not have affected my game play, it is important that kill adjudications are not left to GM discretion wherever possible. I don't play so that a GM can arbitrarily decide whether I win or lose. So long as I am dealt with according to the official rules, I have no complaint.

It also matters because this particular rule can have an affect on the game, however slight. If the rule is oldest vote breaks a tie (as the rules proclaimed), three of four mafia members have to be online and have to agree to change a kill vote, rather than two of four. As all players can post at night, and can have all sorts of reasons to time particular posts, it matters, however slightly, to everyone how mafia kills will be adjudicated in the likely event of a tie.

Based on this, the decision here must come down to what constitutes the official rules. If you agree with me to this point, there can be no correct answer other than the first post of the thread, which presents a public and complete set of rules to all players. If an adjudication is addressed plainly in the official rules, there is no discretion. The official rules govern.

That is how we avoid arbitrary and unjust decisions, such as captainmeme declaring my death a misadjudication on the day it happened, and then changing his mind and saying it was "the right one" more than two weeks later.

It is a kind and generous act of anyone to be a GM. Nobody expects a flawless adjudication. But I think the right thing to do here is to own up this mistake, and declare it a mistake. Trivial and meaningless...perhaps. But considering how much effort people put into the game, getting the standings right should be as much of a priority as the rest of it.

@Balki: It's a computer game. Meme is right, you're wasting far too much energy getting worked up over this.

This issue has already been discussed anyway, in the appropriate God thread. It was the correct adjudication, for that particular game for what was set forth in the mafia QT, and how the mafia team's play was informed by this.

Remember that you're talking about a computer game when you're talking about the "arbitrary and unjust" system. We're not talking about apartheid South Africa here.

In the words of Alyssa Edwards, and meant with the best intention: get a grip, get a life, and get over it :)

@wjessop, remember you're talking about me taking 5 minutes to make a post in a web forum when you tell me to "get a grip, get a life, and get over it." We're not talking about a call for a hunger strike or a boycott here.

If it's worth taking hours and hours to play, it's worth taking a few minutes to discuss the rules and make sure their applied fairly and correctly.

And to be clear, I'm saying all of this in a high-pitched, screaming tone, while standing on the empty steps up to the Lincoln Memorial, wearing no shirt,flaring my nostrils violently, and raising a flaming typewriter in my slowly burning hands.

The whole mafia voting tiebreak mechanism is a weird one. After reading how y2k did it, I did it the opposite way in my last GM game - it seems dumb for a new vote to override an old vote. That isn't how we did things back in the earlier games, where we had ties counting the oldest vote as the important one.

I fully understand Balki, and have burned buildings down for less.

@balki and chaqa, please do not resort to arson to make a point. Arsenal n isn't as bad as meta-gaming or multi-accounting, but still pretty bad.

Arson not arsenal - even though arsenal are pretty bad also.

The result was a loss. That's not being changed.

DL and I talked though, and I wanted to get everyone's opinions on the scoring wrt Third Parties. I recently changed the points system to 3 for town/mafia victory, 4 for third party victory, 1 for loss/draw/modkill. DL suggested that third party losses are given a slightly higher score than a normal loss to reflect the difficulty of the objective. I feel like if that's implemented town/mafia victory score needs to go back up to 4, and third party victory score would need to go to 5.

Thoughts?

Why do you score a point for being modkilled? If you're modkilled it means you were either breaking the rules, or actually failing to participate in a way that harms the game. I would propose 1 point for a loss or draw, and 0 for a modkill.

There's two reasons...

First one is that having someone with one modkill and nothing else results in errors when calculating average points per game if modkills are valued at 0. I could fix this by getting rid of all the formulas and putting in everything by hand, but that would take a fair amount of effort. It could also be fixed by removing players who only have one modkill from the list, but that means that if, say, someone who was modkilled in M4 joins M16 I'll probably forget to put that modkill into the spreadsheet - the idea is that whenever a new game is completed, I only have to update one column and don't have to go rooting back through all the old QTs to see if the player has played before.

The second one is that, because of the way the formulas work, changing modkills to equal zero points actually raises the player's average points per game, since 0 point games are not counted.

The idea behind the one point scoring is that a modkill is equivalent to a loss, no matter what side you were on. This is how it's handled on other mafia sites - if you're modkilled then your role is changed to a Survivor (objective survive to the end of the game) so you automatically lose.

Giving more points for a third party defeat just brings an element of chance into the scoring system - those who are assigned a third party role being rewarded by chance.

That's just incorrect; if it's harder to win as a Third Party then that element of chance is already included by how many times you draw that role.

@ captainmeme - then your formula for average points is screwed. Surely that could easily be fixed?

The formula for the "average" column should be:

Total points / x

Where x = the total number of games which have taken place.

When inputting the next column of stats at the end of a game, use the "Go To Special" command to replace any blanks with zeroes. Then update the value for "x" by 1, and the job is done.

^ I believe this solves both your first and second problems.

For help on using "Go To Special" in Excel to replace blanks with zeroes, look here:

http://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/772-excel-fill-blank-cells-with-0-or-specific-value.html

Otherwise I find it a shame that someone who tried hard, and lost, gets the same treatment as someone who signed up and then pissed off and didn't care.

Also on the subject of Mafia nightkill voting I propose a new, much simpler rule:

Apply the same exact rules that are used in the lynch vote. That is, if the Mafia nightkill vote is tied, NOBODY gets nightkilled.

This would hopefully prompt the scum to get their act together, and would also avoid tricky adjudications like the one that mistakenly killed Balki.

"Remember you're talking about me taking 5 minutes"

Not really -- you've clearly spent a number of hours in this thread alone; inappropriately, I might add, brvause this is ND's sogn-up thread and he politely asked for people to refrain from debating any issues they had from previous games; everyone else managed to respect this. And, your input here comes on top of you complaining about repeatedly in the God thread for the previous game -- which I'm not criticising you for, merely pointing out that it's not been "5 minutes" but more like 3 weeks.

So seeing as you're clearly still upset about this -- I'm absolutely reasonable when I'm saying get a grip and get over it, if only for your own sake.

The Curse of the Power Thief is what it is :)

@ wjessop: You're spending far too much time arguing with Balki. Get a grip, get a life, and get over it

anyone else interested in signing up?

@Jamie: Cute! :O :D

@ ND: I've already signed up, but can my second account join too?

It's not personal, it's drag.

Get a grip, get a life, and get over it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idJRmUDRrb8

Alyssa Edwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enELU-JOYSM

@meme ... what do you think of my suggestion of allowing GMs to assign point values (non-zero) to the potential results based on difficulty in their setup? It makes little sense to assume that every game is the same.

That's a worthwhile point.