Sanderson Elimination: Questions & Answers and Game Meta Discussion

[The Unknown Ajah]

5 hours ago, Kasimir said:

A problem with the theory that inexperience was a major factor in the 75-25 skew is that 2014 is a case study of a period in SE where by definition, everyone was a new player! A naive response or expectation is that an influx of new players distributes evenly: they may struggle with Village play but should also struggle with Evil play and thus be more catchable. While the opposite theory might be that it is easier for a new player to be Evil than Village, it's worth comparing 2014 and 2020 more closely to see what's going on, because 2014 defies this theory.

Well, I think new players are less likely to be placed on an elim team, but when they are, the new player buffer and general assumption of innocence gives them the edge. The same considerations when a new player is village would just seem like they are equivalent with a particularly obvious (cough, Kas, cough) village player.

[---]

I'm gonna interrupt Kas's train of thought and move this here

I have a few parts to this but I'll try to stay concise.

@Ookla the Paragrapher @Araris Valerian

THE BENEFITS OF NIGHTS
I heavily disagree with the statements about no nights. if you want to play a MR then play or run an MR or QF, but nights give everyone time to accomplish things that shouldn't be done when the day is still happening.

Elims:
 - Strategizing on what to do the next day
 - Talk about who to kill that night

Villagers:
 - Taking a break from constantly posting, as posting during the night isn't as essential. Taking a day off from the game to have time irl for whatever reason.
 - Reading over thread and re-evaluating based on how the day played out (actions, voting, inconsistencies)

And for everyone it's time you can use to make better planned Night Actions based on how the day played out.

Nights exist as they do so that the game can be better informed. In a MR or QF? night actions, night kills- they're both made without the full info of what went down that day. not only that but if a large MR is running that is weeks of a game without any sort of a break for the people who survive. LGs simply aren't LGs anymore if you go that way.

ARCHER'S PROPOSED SOLUTION
"LG nights should be gone after the first Elim flip" is a bad fix for the problem of "people don't have enough time to play through a LG, because it's

1) a debuff to the Elims right when they don't need it- they lose one of their members, and then the consequence of that isn't just that they have one less member.
 - it's that their NKs now are less informed
 - they lose a whole day of strategizing time each cycle.

2) Nights give players time to take a break from posting or reading so much, and gives players with not as much time per day a chance to catch up on the previous day

3) Nights allow everyone to make more informed Night Actions and Plays during the game, which leads to an overall more enjoyable game

I also want to mention that even though you can run a test game, it won't show you the full effect until you can run like 20 and compare it.

ALTERNATIVES
I was thinking about this after LG91, when the GM asked publicly in thread if we wished to shorten the day.

Shortening Days
I think that LGs should allow a private vote every day after day 4 (in the GMPMs) where they can choose to vote to shorten cycles to 24/24 for the rest of the game.
Allowing this in thread can be bad, as it's outside of the game in a way and how you vote will show your alignment based on how the game has played out. (this has been okay in games so far because it's offered as an option when the game is basically won but needs to be played out, even though I think in some cases when the GM offers it and it isn't played out, which i have seen happen, it spews the last elim as an elim simply because the GM offers the option)

If your comeback to this is "isn't that an MR too" then I'd say no, and that you're simply saying that to be combative. the main point of an MR or a QF is that it's nightless, with very few being run as 24/24s.

This is my most direct alternative fix to archer's solution. It keeps the days while still shortening the total time played in the game.

Limit Nighttime Communication
Mostly what comes to mind is PMs. Keeping nights open for talking is a SE culture thing and I don't want to see that changed. What I do think however is that giving people a 2/1 on/off routine for a game allows them to get caught up irl after those 2 days of being stuck to their computers. adding more things on during the night cycle means that it's no longer a 2/1, but practically a 72 hour cycle. This leads to burnout in the game, and more days that they're going to have to be inactive in the future to make up for it.

This is a partial fix for burnout, and although it doesn't shorten the total time of the game, it does limit the amount of time players are expected to play per week.

Try Longer Cycles
I know this one might seem counter-intuitive, but assume you get the same amount of activity in a 72/24 that you get in a 48/24, then it gives people more time within the days where they don't need to be there. Instead of having to be present for 3 weeks in a row (for the longest living) it turns into you only need to be there between 2 and 3 days every 4 days. Yes, the total time of the game will be longer, but the time players have to spend in the game for it to function will be less per week.

This is a partial fix, and although it doesn't shorten the total time of the game, it does drastically limit the amount of time players are expected to play per week, meaning they can easily leave for 2 days in a row at any point and still be able to participate and not take away from the game as much as if it was a 48/24.

--

In the end it comes down to Information. The whole game is about information, and nights are a time for people to collect the information and make informed decisions that affect the next day, however that be done for them.

Nights make games more enjoyable long term, and if people have an issue with playing with them we always have MRs or QFs that they can play, faster games for those with less time, more activity all squished together for people who cant stand the slowness of nights, but also actions that happen during the day and without time to process them.

Changing a game that people like to fit the minority of people who go inactive isn't a good solution. if they are going inactive because of lack of interest, then that's on them to stop signing up for a game format that they don't like. If it's lack of time irl then my proposed solutions provide options we can look into without completely changing the LG format.

EDIT:

Spoiler

We could also always try a 36/12 :3

Edited December 15, 2022 by Ooklil' the Wei

[Archer]

I'll start by saying I'm not married to this idea, but I do think it's a valuable vehicle to drive a discussion about SE player demographics with. 

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In the end it comes down to Information. The whole game is about information, and nights are a time for people to collect the information and make informed decisions that affect the next day, however that be done for them.

For example, some players privilege types of information that are much more straightforward. Counterintuitively, more blood seems to be bled from the stone of vote analysis than gut reads, but in practice, both are used to justify very quick and stable votes. Xino's playstyle is a good example of this, and his success rate indicates it has enough merit he shouldn't be shunned for it. 

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Changing a game that people like to fit the minority of people who go inactive isn't a good solution.

If you lump people who make quick, stable decisions in with those who go inactive due to disinterest, I think the number of people with low activity due to game design is larger than is acknowledged. This frustrates people who thrive on getting more information through discussion. Regardless of your impression of this as a better playstyle (the stats would probably agree with you), enough players don't play like this that it frustrates those who do. They're shouting into the void, essentially. 

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we always have MRs or QFs that they can play

The expectation is that people will play differently in an LG, but I don't think the added time gets used efficiently. If you're going into it with the mindset that Nights downtime is built into the format for resting and refreshing, great. But if you expect people's output to increase proportionally to the extended length of cycles, it can be infuriating. I think we need to clarify what the expectation of activity is - eg. is a silent Night broadly acceptable? I haven't been operating under that assumption, which might be the problem here. 

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I think that LGs should allow a private vote every day after day 4 (in the GMPMs) where they can choose to vote to shorten cycles to 24/24 for the rest of the game.

I considered this, but it's always the suboptimal decision to shorten the rounds as a villager. In theory, you're supposed to use the extra time to reconsider a million times. Why risk quickening the game when it lessens your time to have a game changing epiphany? Or reduces the information you might get from longer discussions. These rarely happen, but smart players should choose to maximize their in game resources, even if it's at the expense of their non tangibles, like enthusiasm. On paper, the right choice is always to ask for more time. 

Which brings me to the diminishing returns of added time. People's reads solidify as the game goes on, and their Night actions become more predictable. The elims have a better idea of who they need to kill, and the villagers with roles have a narrower list of suspects and have had more time to plan their strategy overall. I don't believe players need as much time between exes if the game becomes predictable.

Side note: This is mostly about games where some elims have flipped, leading to clear suspects and clear village clears. Hence why my suggestion triggers after an elim death. Games where the elims all survive have a much different dynamic. In elim dominated games, pressure builds as they dive towards parity. In village dominated games, pressure releases with every elim flip as the village win probability skyrockets. If it's 10v:1e, no one's on the edge of their seat, but the structure of the game doesn't allow them to hit fast forward on their votes to find the deepwolf. 

I agree that this wouldn't work for games with complex actions and fluid situations and that aligning the NK with the exe rollover is a big disadvantage. I also acknowledge that due to timezones, an elim could get screwed by a 12 hour rollover during their nighttime. So Nights need to be 24 hours to be accommodating. 

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where they can choose to vote to shorten cycles to 24/24 for the rest of the game.

How do you feel about 24/24, but voting that occurs during the Night carries over into the Day? That'd probably be better framed as an MR with an action dump in the middle of the cycle. Either way, it introduces actual pressure during Nights to drive discussion.

It doesn't make sense to me that you're given the same amount of time to find an elim among 20 players as you are an elim among say four suspects with much more information. In the back half of a game, I don't need breaks as frequently, and believe that maintaining them at the same intervals leads to disengagement.

[Araris Valerian]

40 minutes ago, Ookla the Paragrapher said:

I haven't been operating under that assumption, which might be the problem here. 

I have been assuming that there is no expectation of activity at night. I typically make few or even no posts in the night and refrain from doing analysis then.

42 minutes ago, Ookla the Paragrapher said:

Side note: This is mostly about games where some elims have flipped, leading to clear suspects and clear village clears. Hence why my suggestion triggers after an elim death. Games where the elims all survive have a much different dynamic. In elim dominated games, pressure builds as they dive towards parity. In village dominated games, pressure releases with every elim flip as the village win probability skyrockets. If it's 10v:1e, no one's on the edge of their seat, but the structure of the game doesn't allow them to hit fast forward on their votes to find the deepwolf. 

I guess I would say the recent game is a counterpoint; we flipped an elim and still had no idea what was going on. Then we flipped another, and still had no idea. I definitely would have been upset with shorter cycles.

My understanding of the LG format isn't that you do more work since you have more time. It's that you do (roughly) the same amount of work, spread it out a bit, and then have time for some RP and PMing. The LG, in my opinion, should be (and historically has been) the most casual game format.

[---]

I'm only going to address one point of your post Archer, because you don't seem to be talking about the same things I am.

What I, personally, am talking about right now is that taking away nights changes the fact that it's a LG.

As Araris said, the expected effort put into each game by each person should be about the same, which is why you usually see a lot more real-timing and quick conversations in QF threads.

1 hour ago, Ookla the Paragrapher said:

Which brings me to the diminishing returns of added time. People's reads solidify as the game goes on, and their Night actions become more predictable. The elims have a better idea of who they need to kill, and the villagers with roles have a narrower list of suspects and have had more time to plan their strategy overall. I don't believe players need as much time between exes if the game becomes predictable.

I agree with the point here that you need less time between exes. This is why you see some sites who have majority hammer (if maj of people vote the same person after d1 day ends), and some sites day bumps down to 24 hours after day 4. both are solves to the problem of disengagement that have worked.

What you don't see is people taking away the nights. Because yes, time in between exes can be shortened as time goes on with less people alive. but taking away the nights isn't the answer.

Again, sure run a game like that, run a game with whatever setup you want to test things out, but it's not a solution for our inactivity.

1 hour ago, Ookla the Paragrapher said:

How do you feel about 24/24, but voting that occurs during the Night carries over into the Day? That'd probably be better framed as an MR with an action dump in the middle of the cycle. Either way, it introduces actual pressure during Nights to drive discussion.

Personally I wouldn't call this a night, especially because you're missing my point about the nights. They're not there to exist for discussion. Sure, you can talk in them, but they have always existed more as a purely social aspect of it. People drop reads and discuss the kill of course, but then they also do that in the day especially once we have the night kill. they're mostly there for the people to recoup and recover from the day and get ready to head into the next.

as for a 12 hour night cycle, I know most people here are dubious of it, but when it's planted at the right time it's doable, giving people either time to go about their day or sleep through the night depending. it's not my idea for fixing inactivity, but mostly an idea i'd like to try to see how it goes sometime. (same with wanting to run a 16/8 :P)

1 hour ago, Ookla the Paragrapher said:

It doesn't make sense to me that you're given the same amount of time to find an elim among 20 players as you are an elim among say four suspects with much more information. In the back half of a game, I don't need breaks as frequently, and believe that maintaining them at the same intervals leads to disengagement.

Which is exactly the point.

The part of it that you're missing is that we're not trying to create a solve for you specifically getting bored, we're trying to figure out how to limit the amount of inactives we get from things we can control while keeping the formats as they are.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Ooklil' the Wei

[Exotic Almond]

How does someone join a game of Sanderson Elimination?

[The Wandering Wizard]

6 minutes ago, ExoticAlmond said:

How does someone join a game of Sanderson Elimination?

^^ This is the current sign-ups for the game that is going to start on saturday. You just say that you're signing up and you can sign up with an RP character which isn't required but it does make it a lot more fun and then the GM can give you a better death if you die

[Exotic Almond]

2 minutes ago, Ookla the Myopic said:

^^ This is the current sign-ups for the game that is going to start on saturday. You just say that you're signing up and you can sign up with an RP character which isn't required but it does make it a lot more fun and then the GM can give you a better death if you die

Ok thanks.

[Kasimir]

More minor drop, as @|TJ| and I were looking a little into something said during MR57, about the Village having a tendency to lose when an Elim is exed D1.

Spoiler

Thoughts:

• As @Fifth Scholar pointed out, the Elim 48% win rate is already surprising: normally you'd sort of expect the Elim team to be on the back foot but it's very nearly 50/50 here, even after subtracting the confounding games like MR38 from this.
   
• Village win rate is less surprising, given what we already know of Village performance.
   
• I'd be very hesitant to take this as anything powerfully causal, but the numbers are still interesting.
   
• 100+ games for the green doughnut chart, and 27 games for the red doughnut chart. Also suggestive of how often a Elim gets D1ed in the first place.

[Kasimir]

I've had it with the new forum update. I think it's clear it's staying as Chaos mentioned in the other thread that it's an anti-spam feature thing and we can't expect a forum update to take into account the needs of a subforum, which is fair.

I think we need to adjust the "do not edit a vote in" rule or whatever or get GMs to realise that they need to refresh when looking at votes. My posts get merged and I'm sick to the back teeth of this kraem.

I also think we kind of need to rely on player integrity to flag inadvertent edits, both in thread and in PM, because the merge makes new posts look as though they're part of the OG post, and that doesn't help given the no changing content rule. Or at least be aware it's a new feature.

Thanks.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Kasimir

[DrakeMarshall]

I've been doing some data analysis on the mighty spreadsheet of past SE games. I think there are takeaways.

 

I've analyzed a total of 158 V/E games from the past decade:

 

First of all, let's get it out of the way and talk about player count. It likely doesn't surprise you to know that the average player counts of games have been clearly declining over the years:

You really don't need a fancy graph to tell you that, just open any 5 random games from page 1 of the subforum and any 5 random games from pages 2 or 3 and you can see it clearly enough for yourself. But just in case you wanted a fancy graph with hard numbers in it, now you have one.

I think the declining player counts is a bit of a shame, and I'll have more to say about the whys and wherefores later. But whatever you decide to think about it, the fact is what it is, and we'd best plan for it. Recent pushes to create games that accomodate lower player counts are entirely justified.

 

The average player count also varies considerably based on the type of game:

This is as it should be. It's part of why we have the different categories in the first place. There isn't really much to say here except that the categories are working as intended, so, that's cool.

 

While our player counts have declined, I want to stress that I don't actually think player engagement has declined.

If anything, it's actually increased.

The number of posts-per-game has basically held steady, which is actually fairly remarkable. We've been posting just as much with significantly fewer players.

Likewise, the number of inactivity filter kills has if anything slightly trended downwards. Which, if I'm being quite honest, was not what I expected to see, but it's a pleasant surprise.

So, in conclusion, our playerbase is shrinking, but those who are left aren't becoming any less active on average.

 

This is the part where we take a brief intermission from cold hard mostly objective numbers and I take a bit of time to talk exclusively about my opinions on the declining player count issue. My sense is that we aren't losing old players any faster, what's happening is we're drawing in new players to replace them more slowly. My sense is that a lot of the more recent new players came from off-site or had RL connections to existing players. That is to say, we've gotten fewer newcomers from the forum at large. I believe there are two reasons for this:

1. The SE community has grown more insular. Fewer SE players are active in other parts of the forum. I can at least say that this is anecdotally true of myself - I'm nowhere near as active in other parts of the site as I used to be. IIRC, I originally found SE by following a link in somebody's signature, so (anecdotally again) I think this impacts our ability to draw in new players at least somewhat.
2. The 17th Shard Forum as a whole isn't growing as much these days, not just the SE subforum. A lot more people actively use the 17th Shard Discord than the 17th Shard Forum, and they are pretty mutually exclusive, as evidenced by the results of this survey. For various reasons that are complex and probably above my pay grade, Sanderson Elimination doesn't have a presence in the 17th Shard Discord. We do have our own SE Discord server, and it's quite a nice server in my opinion, but folks inside it are by definition already SE players so it isn't exactly bringing in new players.

I don't really have an answer to the first point, since I have little interest in ramping up my own activity in other parts of the site at this time, and if I don't want to do anything about it then I won't expect anyone else to.

The second point is something I feel potentially is in my wheelhouse. If all the young'uns these days are using Discord to socialize, the next step seems pretty simple: why don't we try running a game or two over Discord and see how it goes? It can't hurt to at least experiment with it. I've honestly been slightly interested in trying something along those lines for a while now, if it's something the folks of SE would be amenable to trying.

Okay intermission over! Back to sacred numbers.

 

In a different mafia community, in the wake of a game with remarkably low village engagement, I once heard a player say that being roleless makes it harder for players to feel invested in the game. Well, the explanation sounded plausible at least, and I don't know if they were right or wrong about their community. But I can conclude that they were probably wrong about my community:

Apparently, the number of roles you hand out has just no correlation at all with overall player engagement.

And honestly? That makes me really happy

Apparently, players of Sanderson Elimination don't really feel like they need to have the spotlight to care about the game. And I think that's a very healthy approach to have in a team game! One of the many things that makes Sanderson Elimination a good time.

 

The final thing I will say about activity and player counts is that getting more players to sign up does not necessarily mean getting more engaged players:

One thing that I think we should not do in response to lower player counts is constantly beg for more players during signups.

I get it, I really do. Right now, I have setups in the forge that I really, really, really want to have a good player turnout when I run them. I'm excited about the mechanics. I want to be able to actually use them all. I want people to enjoy them. I still dream of getting to run a 34+ player game 

But you can't conjure players out of thin air. If you try, what you will instead succeed in doing is convincing players who do not really have the time to play to sign up against their better initial judgement. People who are on the fence about signing up are generally on the fence for a legitimate reason. I will reiterate that I feel designing games to accomodate lower player counts is the best short-term response to our situation. It's not actually the worst thing. There are some games that I've really enjoyed playing that've had low player counts.

 

Moving right along, we should talk about the number of elims.

Conventional wisdom is that the appropriate number of elims in a game is about 25% of the total player count.

I'd contend that the evidence suggests conventional wisdom is wrong.

In fact, the average proportion of elims in SE games is about 22%. The exact proportions favored by GMs depends slightly on the total number of players, with smaller games tending to have a slightly larger proportion of elims:

If 25% was really and truly the ideal proportion of elims for a balanced game, you might reasonably expect that our village win rates would be pretty good, since our elim team sizes are often less than 25%. Meanwhile, the average village win rate in SE is somewhat less positive:

While the village has done better in some years than others, the win rate averaged over all time is only around 40%. The last two years of SE have been pretty close to that average.

It's possible that the village just needs to get good. But we can only always work with what we have. I believe the fact that the village only wins 40% of the time means we should change something. If nothing else, a game that's closer to 50/50 is just plain more fun.

Of course, a skilled GM can correct for unusually large or small elim teams in other ways, by altering the role distribution or mechanics of the game. But we should still aim for a good understanding of what the starting point should be. You can't nudge the distro to account for a larger than usual fraction of elims if you don't know what the usual fraction of elims ought to be. And for that matter, you can't nudge the distro at all if you're running a roleless game. For these reasons, it's important to have solid criteria for choosing the size of your elim team.

Which begs the question what percent of elims should we be using, if we want things to be balanced?

Using linear regression based on past games, I can predict that the right amount is 15%, but there simply isn't enough data for that prediction to be confident. (The light blue area shaded around the dark blue line is the confidence interval -- it's pretty large, which means it's not very clear where precisely the line should be drawn.) Conservatively, though, I can say that the right proportion of elims is probably something less than 20%.

 

This is a very surprising result, I think. Aiming for 25% of players being elims is a pretty well-established guideline in SE. And an elim team that's only 15% of the total player count seems just really small to me.

But several other things independently cast doubt on the 25% rule.

For one, there's what got me started down this whole rabbit hole: after running thousands of mock SE games, my simulator is convinced that 25% is much too large a fraction of elims for an all vanilla game. Admittedly, my simulator is kinda jank, but it's yielded legitimate insights in the past.

For two, there's just a bit of simple math you can do to estimate it. If 25% of all living players are elims, then in order to just get a tie, you need to average 1 elim killed per 3 villagers dead. Assuming no fancy roles, this means the village needs to successfully execute an elim 50% of the time (over 2 cycles you'd expect 1 elim and 1 villager to get exed on average, meanwhile 2 villagers would be elim killed, for a grand total of 1 elim dead to 3 villagers dead). Anything worse than that and the village is going to run out of players before the elims. The thing is, a 50% hit rate is insanely good. Our actual hit rate for executions is much worse than that. So, if there aren't any roles putting a finger on the scales, it's pretty clear that an elim team sized to 25% of the total player count is in fact pretty strongly elim-sided.

So now that's 3 totally different methods of arriving at the conclusion that 25% is significantly too many elims.

At this point, there isn't much I can do but just show my work and say what my findings are.

 

Switching gears, the mechanical complexity of a game is surprisingly impactful.

Earlier I established that the village has a lackluster overall win rate. But in really complex games, the village actually dominates a bit. This kind of makes sense, I think. Complex games tend to give more abilities to everyone, and everyone consists of more villagers than elims, so if you aren't careful you are going to tip the scales in the village's favor. It's easy to create mechsolving potential, or for power creep to accidentally nerf the standard elim powers.

I think this is a good reminder to give the evil team some love in complex setups. It's also a case where 25% is probably absolutely a reasonable amount of elims to have. Apparently, the approximate complexity of your setup should be one of the main factors you take into account when deciding the size of your elim team.

Complexity also seems to generally get more player engagement.

(Although it goes without saying that players can get tired of complex setups if we run too many in a row. Complexity is wonderful and it can spice things up nicely but it's still possible to cook with too many spices.)

Higher complexity increases player engagement during the game but it doesn't really get you any more players at signups. Or at least there are diminishing returns. At some point it's less a question of interest and more a question of availability.

While complexity significantly improves village win rate, it doesn't have quite as pronounced of an effect on village voting:

I suspect seekers are part of the reason why standard setups achieve the best accuracy. Basic setups likely contain no information roles, whereas more complex setups tend to make seekers unreliable or more nuanced somehow. Standard setups are the most likely to just contain straight alignment scanners.

This also hints that the village is rather bad at catching elims without the help of info roles

 

We're nearing the end I swear

Have several graphs about voting accuracy.

I find these results mildly fascinating.

Villages that ultimately win still get the D1 vote wrong almost as much as villages that lose. The difference is in the next few cycles, winning villages have a much clearer pattern of improving with much lower variance, whereas losing villages just sort of flounder. Luck certainly plays a big part in these games but it's cool to see how at least in villages that won the benefits of learning and analyzing from previous cycles is something pretty clearly represented in the numbers.

(Minor Disclaimer - Take the averages calculated at around cycle 12 and later with a grain of salt, because there's like probably only 4 games in the entire dataset that went on for more than 12 cycles so the sample size is miniscule at that point.)

 

Conclusions:

• Our player counts have been going down, but our activity levels haven't been going down. In the short term, we should scale back to smaller games.
• The correct proportion of elims in a game generally depends on the complexity of the setup. While 25% is a very reasonable starting point for many complex setups, most simple setups should have significantly fewer elims. Very probably under 20%, maybe even as low as 15%.
• I stayed up too late making all of these charts and should get some sleep >:P

 

If you want to see my code and even more graphs that didn't make the cut, I've made it all available here. You should be able to actually run the code and reproduce my results if you have much knowhow in that direction and of course if you have the interest, but let me know if you run into any difficulties doing it.

[StrikerEZ]

As someone who has found that real life makes long term engagement with a game very difficult, I would love to see Discord SE games given a chance. They would presumably be much faster paced games. Games that you could sit down and play and be done with in a couple hours at most. Scheduling would be the hardest part, but if each game is shorter you can schedule games more often. It would be like scheduling a meeting or a D&D session. Difficult with the sheer number of people and timezones involved, but doable.
 

I think Discord games would ultimately be worth it in the long run. It would be a way for those with busy lives to get more involved in the game side of the community again. Sometimes you can spare a few hours here and there, but nothing consistent enough to keep up with a true forum game. 
 

That’s just my two cents as someone who’s been here for 6+ years and also hasn’t played much this year.

[Kasimir]

1 hour ago, DrakeMarshall said:

The second point is something I feel potentially is in my wheelhouse. If all the young'uns these days are using Discord to socialize, the next step seems pretty simple: why don't we try running a game or two over Discord and see how it goes? It can't hurt to at least experiment with it. I've honestly been slightly interested in trying something along those lines for a while now, if it's something the folks of SE would be amenable to trying.

You know how I feel about this, Mr Infiltrator sir 

[DrakeMarshall]

Ok have one more bonus graph, because I only just thought to chart this, and it's relevant:

GMs are already taking complexity into account when deciding how large of an elim team to make. Great job GMs!

Spoiler

However, the win rates suggest that we could stand to be doing it a little bit more.

It's hard to say exactly, but I'm going to throw out that simple games should dip below 20%, standard games should sit at around 20%, semi-standard games are perfect as they are and should be somewhere between 20% and 25%, and complex games should be at around 25% and make sure the elims have options to counter widespread village shenanigans.

[Elandera]

There was a question recently in another thread about the lexicon of SE. We've had some terms develop since our last update in our General Rules thread. Please review this list and if you know of any others that aren't here, let me know.

Please note that we won't be including terms that are easily searchable in other realms of the internet or that are more common in other mafia forums but not so much around here. We want to keep the lexicon fairly SE-specific to avoid it getting too much longer than it already is. Also, we overall encourage plainspeak as much as possible to avoid confusion and to be as easy for newer players as possible.

[DrakeMarshall]

I think the SE glossary is definitely helpful and it helped me get my bearings back in the day when I started SE

And I'm not a new player so take my feedback with a grain of salt here because the glossary is for new players.

But I do have some suggested updates to it!

 

Like for example we have a definition for "Jack" in there and uh ??? I've literally never heard anyone on the site use that before. That probably does not need to take up space on the list.

Whereas there are some terms we bandy about nigh-constantly like "V/E" or or "v!<playername>" or "PoE" which aren't in there. Or for that matter what the heck we're talking about when we cite "the split" or "the distro" which sure yes those are real English words but they have a pretty specific assumed meaning in context if you use them in SE.

And like sure you could figure out "PoE" with an internet search (a couple different mafia communities have wikis that have definitions for it) but, it's a really commonly used acronym here. And I figure at some point if something is central enough in SE, it crosses a threshold where it's allowable to include it in the glossary even if it's searchable elsewhere. Because well... "AI / NAI", "Alignment", "Balance" and "Bandwagon" are all things in the glossary that I could easily get google results for, and that's just from me quickly checking the first 7 terms on the list, I'm sure more of them are searchable if I went through all of them. Make of that what you will.

(I think a case could be made for including "TMI" in the glossary but I actually think it's fine to leave that one out. I think this is a fairly legitimate case where "you can search for it elsewhere" is a valid reason to exclude it. Because "TMI" isn't even a specific acronym to mafia games in general, let alone SE. It's just, an English acronym. Like ASAP or ETA. It does not need to be in the SE glossary, and it isn't, and all is well )

Also, in my estimation, we use the term "train" quite a lot more often than "bandwagon" nowadays. Probably because it's a few letters shorter and therefore easier to type And AFAIK that one isn't easily searchable anywhere else. Some cursory searches indicate that "train" might actually be a piece of lingo fairly unique to SE

Also interestingly there's "hardclaiming" (which I've rarely if ever heard said) but not "softclaiming" (sometimes just abbreviated to "softing") which is odd bc afaik softclaiming as a term is used much much more frequently than "hard" claiming. I think the implication when you say "claim" is very much that it's a hardclaim unless you specifically qualify it as a softclaim. If we're only going to define 1 of the 2 then it should be softclaiming.

...although actually, more generally "soft" and "hard" are used in a larger variety of contexts, like you could talk about a "soft" defense of somebody or a "soft" clear. So maybe instead just have a definition for "hard vs. soft" and call it a day, instead of having a bunch of seperate definitions for hard/soft claims, hard/soft clears, hard/soft defenses, etc. Idk.

I think a case could be made for defining "poke vote" mainly just because it's something new players are bound to run into fairly early on since they happen at the beginning of a game, but after thinking about it, I don't believe it should be included. I think that one is kind of self-explanatory. It's a vote intended to poke, it's exactly what it says on the tin, imo it doesn't need a spot in the glossary.

IIRC somebody asked what derpclearing means semi-recently, could be worth an inclusion. Note however that I'm pretty sure this term is more favored in other communities than it is in SE.

I also think it would be nice to add "Rollovet" It's a bit more niche, but it's absolutely unique to SE and it's been brought up in multiple games, and heck I'm pretty sure in some cases the word "Rollovet" has even been used in the wording for the mechanics of a game as written up by the GM, so I'd say it deserves a spot on the list.

Currently, we have both a definition for "metagame" and "metagaming." In my opinion, it is good and correct that we have 2 seperate definitions here, but I think the names "metagame" and "metagaming" don't make it very clear why there needs to be 2 seperate definitions. I think it would be clearer to call it "community meta" and "player meta" because that's more nearly what the distinction actually is. You have established and agreed upon norms about how you play the game ("the meta in the SE community") and you have the established track record of a particular player ("<playername>'s meta"). In both cases we are talking about "facts outside the scope of a single game" which is why it falls under the umbrella of "meta" but the subject is different.

Finally you have abbreviations like "elim" / "eliminator" or "wincon" / "win condition" which personally I lean towards not including because they are basically just shortenings of terms that are clearly understood, but. I could go either way on those really ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

TL;DR -

ADD: PoE, V/E, V/V, E/E, V!<player>, E!<player>, Split, Distro, Train, Derpclear, Rollovet

REMOVE: Jack

CHANGE: Hardclaim -> Hard/Soft, Metagame and Metagaming -> Community Meta and Player Meta

Bolded are the terms to add which I believe are both 1) pretty ubiquitously used in SE and 2) not used anywhere else in any significant capacity afaik, even in other mafia communities. The other suggestions I've made have what I believe is fairly sound reasoning justifying them, but I recognize that they might be more contentious.

Edited January 3 by DrakeMarshall
I modified the bit about defining "meta", in the meta discussion thread, how meta!

[Kasimir]

I think @Ashbringer requested the Tallybot link be pinned on the Discord, but not all SE players use the Discord, and it's worth placing the current Tallybot link on the main forums itself for use.

This is the link to the publicly accessible version of Tallybot hosted on Google Colabs. Everything else will be explained subsequently.

Important note!

This version of Tallybot integrates about three different versions of Tallybot that @Sart, @DrakeMarshall, and myself were working on. 

-AG-centric Regex has been updated: this allows Tallybot to now recognise votes like 'Rhino' as referring to 'Plum Rhinoceros'!
-Tallybot can now provide more targeted votecounts if given a start post and an end post! This makes historical vote progression analysis less of a pain!

As always, keep in mind that there are known bugs/problems with Tallybot (we are working on them though admittedly not always with the same amount of motivation) - please do not rely on Tallybot as a single source of truth. Please be sure to doublecheck when in doubt!

FAQs:

What is Tallybot?
Tallybot is the name of a Python script designed to scrape the thread and provide an automated votecount. To use Tallybot, you will need to login to your Gmail account; however the link can be viewed by anyone. You should not need coding knowledge to use Tallybot. The instructions are designed to allow any SE player to use it.

Is Tallybot completely accurate?
In general, Tallybot is designed to supplement manual votecounts rather than replace them. Rely solely on Tallybot at your own risk. I recommend crosschecking with a manual count. There's also @Haelbarde's supplementary script here, which provides a list of vote movements with linked posts, which can be used to crosscheck Tallybot results and discrepancies.

What are the known issues?
Tallybot can't handle non-standard playernames (in other words, we'll probably have to keep on updating the regex to address this.) There's a longer-term fix we can probably go for but this would result in changes to how SE players vote, so that's a harder sell (despite potential benefits.) 

Tallybot also can't handle some of the more rare non-standard reds when used for voting, and in some cases, the Shard borks the font style/colour tags so Tallybot doesn't register votes, e.g. LG92 Orlok/Bookwyrm/Tani votes, and AG10's Hyena vote. There's not much we can say about this because the issues can't be consistently replicated, but we're trying to get Tallybot to be able to handle these cases as well.

Tallybot can't really deal with historical games at this point. Anything within the last one to two years is probably alright if you define the start and end posts correctly (exclude the initial GM post for the cycle as this might wrongly reflect a flip as a GM vote), but we can't swear for anything beyond that.

I still haven't integrated my regex with Drake's as I'm currently a Frieren fanatic, my marathon has been long-delayed and the idea of sitting down and working on matching the two just isn't appealing to me  Edited to add: Alright, I've integrated both regexes. Now I can Frieren in Friede and will stop for nothing

If anything's still weird about it, probably yell at me or Drake and we'll see what we can do.

Edited January 10 by Kasimir

[TheRavenHasLanded]

9 hours ago, Kasimir said:

I think @Ashbringer requested the Tallybot link be pinned on the Discord, but not all SE players use the Discord, and it's worth placing the current Tallybot link on the main forums itself for use.

This is the link to the publicly accessible version of Tallybot hosted on Google Colabs. Everything else will be explained subsequently.

Important note!

This version of Tallybot integrates about three different versions of Tallybot that @Sart, @DrakeMarshall, and myself were working on. 

-AG-centric Regex has been updated: this allows Tallybot to now recognise votes like 'Rhino' as referring to 'Plum Rhinoceros'!
-Tallybot can now provide more targeted votecounts if given a start post and an end post! This makes historical vote progression analysis less of a pain!

As always, keep in mind that there are known bugs/problems with Tallybot (we are working on them though admittedly not always with the same amount of motivation) - please do not rely on Tallybot as a single source of truth. Please be sure to doublecheck when in doubt!

FAQs:

What is Tallybot?
Tallybot is the name of a Python script designed to scrape the thread and provide an automated votecount. To use Tallybot, you will need to login to your Gmail account; however the link can be viewed by anyone. You should not need coding knowledge to use Tallybot. The instructions are designed to allow any SE player to use it.

Is Tallybot completely accurate?
In general, Tallybot is designed to supplement manual votecounts rather than replace them. Rely solely on Tallybot at your own risk. I recommend crosschecking with a manual count. There's also @Haelbarde's supplementary script here, which provides a list of vote movements with linked posts, which can be used to crosscheck Tallybot results and discrepancies.

What are the known issues?
Tallybot can't handle non-standard playernames (in other words, we'll probably have to keep on updating the regex to address this.) There's a longer-term fix we can probably go for but this would result in changes to how SE players vote, so that's a harder sell (despite potential benefits.) 

Tallybot also can't handle some of the more rare non-standard reds when used for voting, and in some cases, the Shard borks the font style/colour tags so Tallybot doesn't register votes, e.g. LG92 Orlok/Bookwyrm/Tani votes, and AG10's Hyena vote. There's not much we can say about this because the issues can't be consistently replicated, but we're trying to get Tallybot to be able to handle these cases as well.

Tallybot can't really deal with historical games at this point. Anything within the last one to two years is probably alright if you define the start and end posts correctly (exclude the initial GM post for the cycle as this might wrongly reflect a flip as a GM vote), but we can't swear for anything beyond that.

I still haven't integrated my regex with Drake's as I'm currently a Frieren fanatic, my marathon has been long-delayed and the idea of sitting down and working on matching the two just isn't appealing to me  Edited to add: Alright, I've integrated both regexes. Now I can Frieren in Friede and will stop for nothing

If anything's still weird about it, probably yell at me or Drake and we'll see what we can do.

ay, the rhino suggestion was me yay!

[TheRavenHasLanded]

12 hours ago, Kasimir said:

I think @Ashbringer requested the Tallybot link be pinned on the Discord, but not all SE players use the Discord, and it's worth placing the current Tallybot link on the main forums itself for use.

This is the link to the publicly accessible version of Tallybot hosted on Google Colabs. Everything else will be explained subsequently.

Important note!

This version of Tallybot integrates about three different versions of Tallybot that @Sart, @DrakeMarshall, and myself were working on. 

-AG-centric Regex has been updated: this allows Tallybot to now recognise votes like 'Rhino' as referring to 'Plum Rhinoceros'!
-Tallybot can now provide more targeted votecounts if given a start post and an end post! This makes historical vote progression analysis less of a pain!

As always, keep in mind that there are known bugs/problems with Tallybot (we are working on them though admittedly not always with the same amount of motivation) - please do not rely on Tallybot as a single source of truth. Please be sure to doublecheck when in doubt!

FAQs:

What is Tallybot?
Tallybot is the name of a Python script designed to scrape the thread and provide an automated votecount. To use Tallybot, you will need to login to your Gmail account; however the link can be viewed by anyone. You should not need coding knowledge to use Tallybot. The instructions are designed to allow any SE player to use it.

Is Tallybot completely accurate?
In general, Tallybot is designed to supplement manual votecounts rather than replace them. Rely solely on Tallybot at your own risk. I recommend crosschecking with a manual count. There's also @Haelbarde's supplementary script here, which provides a list of vote movements with linked posts, which can be used to crosscheck Tallybot results and discrepancies.

What are the known issues?
Tallybot can't handle non-standard playernames (in other words, we'll probably have to keep on updating the regex to address this.) There's a longer-term fix we can probably go for but this would result in changes to how SE players vote, so that's a harder sell (despite potential benefits.) 

Tallybot also can't handle some of the more rare non-standard reds when used for voting, and in some cases, the Shard borks the font style/colour tags so Tallybot doesn't register votes, e.g. LG92 Orlok/Bookwyrm/Tani votes, and AG10's Hyena vote. There's not much we can say about this because the issues can't be consistently replicated, but we're trying to get Tallybot to be able to handle these cases as well.

Tallybot can't really deal with historical games at this point. Anything within the last one to two years is probably alright if you define the start and end posts correctly (exclude the initial GM post for the cycle as this might wrongly reflect a flip as a GM vote), but we can't swear for anything beyond that.

I still haven't integrated my regex with Drake's as I'm currently a Frieren fanatic, my marathon has been long-delayed and the idea of sitting down and working on matching the two just isn't appealing to me  Edited to add: Alright, I've integrated both regexes. Now I can Frieren in Friede and will stop for nothing

If anything's still weird about it, probably yell at me or Drake and we'll see what we can do.

may wanna add Cham for Chameleon (i think i spelled it right)

[Kasimir]

10 hours ago, TheRavenHasLanded said:

ay, the rhino suggestion was me yay!

1. It wasn't.

2. You shouldn't be claiming your Anon Game identity publicly. Player guessing and speculation is one thing, as players can be wrong.

8 hours ago, TheRavenHasLanded said:

may wanna add Cham for Chameleon (i think i spelled it right)

I've already added most common misspellings and shortforms. - Rhino was an actual example as it caused a vote to disappear. I refused to spend time on Axolotl as they're not in this game.

[TheRavenHasLanded]

8 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

1. It wasn't.

2. You shouldn't be claiming your Anon Game identity publicly. Player guessing and speculation is one thing, as players can be wrong.

I've already added most common misspellings and shortforms. - Rhino was an actual example as it caused a vote to disappear. I refused to spend time on Axolotl as they're not in this game.

i didnt say anything of the sort. im pretty i just mentioned that in the discord. 

[Kasimir]

3 hours ago, TheRavenHasLanded said:

i didnt say anything of the sort. im pretty i just mentioned that in the discord. 

Ah fair  Well, now you know it came up.

I've made another series of patches, but Tallybot should be okay now.

Edited to add:

Separate issue -

@Elandera, @DrakeMarshall - Would also suggest adding FUD as I notice it comes up more often these days and not everyone is familiar as it's quite SE-localised. 

Edited January 11 by Kasimir

[TheRavenHasLanded]

13 hours ago, Kasimir said:

Ah fair  Well, now you know it came up.

I've made another series of patches, but Tallybot should be okay now.

Edited to add:

Separate issue -

@Elandera, @DrakeMarshall - Would also suggest adding FUD as I notice it comes up more often these days and not everyone is familiar as it's quite SE-localised. 

alright, kewl.

[DrakeMarshall]

19 hours ago, Kasimir said:

Ah fair  Well, now you know it came up.

I've made another series of patches, but Tallybot should be okay now.

Edited to add:

Separate issue -

@Elandera, @DrakeMarshall - Would also suggest adding FUD as I notice it comes up more often these days and not everyone is familiar as it's quite SE-localised. 

(Yeah "LHF" is also a possible term to include although probably less important than the others!!)

Anyways yeah tallybot

[DrakeMarshall]

ALRIGHT y'all I found the motivation to do some work on tallybot

you will see the changes reflected in the colab link that you all presumably have

changelog in no particular order:

• redid how tallybot identifies colored text, thereby fixing a lot of the cases where it would fail to count votes
  • every (known ) example of a vote the old code didn't count correctly now is counted correctly
  • tallybot probably has a better idea of what shades ought to count as "red" or "green"
• added stuff to let you get tallies for past cycles in a merged thread in a more convenient way
  • now you can just say turn number you want a tally for, and it'll look at the quick links list and do its best to automatically figure out where that turn starts and ends and generate a tally for you
  • this is also a decent amount faster on games with lots of pages, because it only asks the shard to send over the pages it actually needs instead of requesting all of them
• added a "verbose" option which basically makes tallybot show it's work more -- in particular, this will give you the full sequence of votes and retractions in chronological order, instead of just the final tally, which might be useful for vote analysis
• tidied up a bunch of inconsequential crem that mostly only I cared about, like making the indentation consistent, or fixing some old and broken regex patterns for players that haven't been around in a while, stuff that didn't really matter and didn't really need fixing but braize if I didn't just fix it anyways

Anyways feel free to give it a whirl!

It won't necessarily build a tally for just any arbitrary older game because it won't necessarily have regex patterns for every player in an older game, but um otherwise it should be pretty good to go so yeah