Qikzmas wrote:Waitrose Richly Fruited Christmas Cake wrote:The Alpha absolutely needs seer invulnerability. People are endlessly complaining about trusted PM groups and seer circles and protection circles, etc., all of these things would be far more prominent if the Alpha was detectable by a seer.
The balance was just right in this game, in my opinion. Ironhide's list of seered players was critical at the end once the Alpha scum was killed.
I think if you remove the alpha invunerability it'll be fine, just have them come back as a bad guy and not say what the role is.
If you want to remove trust circles you ban PMs as we suggested before. PM's at the end of the day just keep the already completely out of the picture villagers in the thread completely out of the game and it leads to people being bored and not taking part or it kills activity in the thread where nobody is working anything else.
The fact the seer couldn't see roles meant the seer could never actually trust anyone. They could 100% scan someone as human and talk to them and immediately die the next day. I think the balance in the end of the game worked out this time, but I think there are ways of improving it moving forward and my personal favourite idea is to ban PMs and keep everything bar the bad guys conversing in the thread. I know Pedz will sit there and say I was in a PM circle, but at the end of the day all I did was tell what sawyer said to me in the thread.
Yeh I just disagree on both counts.
I would be happy to try a no PM games, why not, but I don't think it's the glorious solution to every problem, I just don't see how it would make such a big difference. Special roles will be just as tentative in the thread as they are in PM games, they're trying to avoid detection after all. They can drop hints in the thread in the same way that they can with PMs allowed, but these are very hard to decipher as a Villager until the person dies and their role is revealed, and even then it is problematic (see aayl1's message about Cora leading to his death, against all common sense I might add).
I've always been a plain Villager, and from my point of view, there is no need to PM. I have nothing to hide so my best play is to theorise in the thread and get involved; it's the job of the villager, if people find that boring then they shouldn't bother signing up, honestly. If I get a PM then I'm happy to respond to it, of course, but it's not where a Villager should be doing most of their work. However, I don't see the benefit of preventing special roles from communicating behind the scenes if they need to, because they're simply not going to communicate openly in the thread whatever you do.
Besides, the influence of PM groups is always massively overstated. This game was won because Ironhide posted the list of seered players in the thread and because smart Villagers (Ob Bob, Satriales, Moggy) got the job done off the back of this intel.
I think Drumstick's solution to remove mayors and make the seer role only identify good/bad is a better and more elegant solution than removing PMs.