Team mafia has the opposite problem of being far too townsided that hosts now intentionally wolfside the setup, so it’s funny that you mention it because mashes could probably do with a similar thing in the opposite direction
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What are we talking about? Anni?
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yeah and mash balance in general
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I think this actually benefits wolves more because of the planning of actions they have- they can assign decent numbers of action points to whatever they want whereas village is left scrambling either stacking too much or not enough on certain people
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I was envisioning a normal sized mafia game not a mash. With a lot more powers too, this just as the baseline. Like eimm but mafia
Everyone is mafia mafia with town
A good example of why this is a bad idea was the shots mash where overnight ITAs were hosted on night 1 (but processed at eod). Wolves could effectively split all of their ITAs onto priority targets to ensure a good chance the people they needed died, but town couldn’t do this at al and would put too many or not enough on poe slots. And the fact it was ITAs specifically and them being hidden meant that town players were also more inclined to hero shoot (vulgard killed me because of this, he wasn’t even that suspicious of me but just thought “fuck it”) because there’s less responsibility
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oh ok then fair
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tbh a lot of the reason to have wolf leader roles is literally just like. healthy gameplay effects imo
what happens otherwise can often be living wolves overextending to do it
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To be honest this is just an arbitrary norm that has been developed, like we could just as easily say wolves aren’t able to proxy actions which means they are fucked in the same way town roles who holster are. Having proxied actions let alone a wolf leader role aren’t necessities
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i. think you kinda whiffed entirely on what i was saying dude?
i’m talking about the fact that werewolf players will literally deprive themselves of sleep unhealthily to do things like do wolf actions and they’re more likely to do that without a wolf leader role. and i’m personally strongly in favor of measures that decrease the likelihood of people feeling the need to make unhealthy decisions for their team/wincon!
the fact that people make bad decisions to increase their odds of winning werewolf games isn’t an arbitrary norm lol
in terms of the effective balance implications i think it would be preferable to nerf actual direct mechanical power than remove wolf leaders for healthy werewolf gameplay reasons.
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They are less likely to do that if everyone had to submit their own actions
You can always fuck with the mechanical power of each side to account for dips in equity but I don’t think that mech power imbalance is usually the problem in mash balancing (other than 1-2 roles occasionally being busted), so you would be addressing the problem indirectly by changing this. The bigger issues are that wolves are way more organised than town because of the structure of the format, and that wolves can kill town threats much faster than they should be able to - causing the endgame villager problem. The first issue is exacerbated by the arbitrary norm of wolves being able to proxy actions which there is no town equivalent of. People are so used to this that changing it would not go down well, but I can’t conceive of a way to buff town’s organisation with actions, only a way to nerf wolves. It would be problematic to inflate town’s power with the expectation that some people will holster because that obviously increases variance by which roles do/don’t holster.
also maybe an unpopular opinion but i don’t think it’s fair how a wolf can not show up at all during a night phase and still have their action be usable when town do not get this obviously
hmmm, I think this is mostly false – like, I think the action-plan-y people would still end up trying to micromanage everyone’s actions, it would just be harder/less consistently effective because some people would tree or submit a different action from what they were told to
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it might end up leading to action-plan-y people spending more time doing actions if they felt like they had to, like, stay in wolfchat so that if a kind of flaky wolf doesn’t show up they can ping people to change actions that depended on the flake wolf’s action, but I’m not confident
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sure but then a bunch of individual people would feel obligated to make themselves around near action deadline and and whoever is organizing the actions anyway would be extremely stressed probably a lot of the time lol
you cant mechanics away peoples compulsion to optimize in any way available for their wincon
(also: no proxies also means that most likely the way things play out a lot of the time is: cramming action decisions into the immediate time period after sod.)
i also think it’s kind of, hm. a structural overcorrection probably? in the sense that wolf actions are ~balanced around being able to coordinate them imo
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perhaps designed around is a better word for it than balanced around wrt the last bit
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also truthfully i think a lot of the time the social organization? element for lack of a better umbrella term is the bigger issue than idling for villages
idling hurts, but its definitely amplified disproportionately in a specifically anni context
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Anni 2022 Wolf Leader showed why having 50 wolves playing the game end game is a good way to ensure wolves win.