I don't recall any player ever saying they felt they didn't stand a chance. Also, if you're claiming the game is unbalanced, are you implying that it was Town-sided? Because that wasn't obvious to me at all, when the Mafia had a Djinnblocker to put Djinn on Standby, a Mayor to use those Djinn and others on Standby, and a Softener to further amplify all those votes. And someone who could save their allies from lynches and gets to act as a Ninja, Hitman, or Janitor. At the start of the game, I certainly did not think it was Town-sided. If it turned out Town-sided afterwards, it's a result of player decisions, not from game design.
The softener is useless. For it to matter as more than a tiebreaker you'd need your vote to count as 10 or more, something which is completly unrealistic. The Mayor was too unpredictable to actually be reliable, it's a mircale we got to two votes and tied the C4 lynch. Honestly, a standard Mayor (i.e. double voter) would have been stronger. Djinnstorm was a good ability I'll give you that, and the JoAT was also pretty decent.
However what you completly fail to take into account here are the Djinn abilities, which are a part of game balance. The town ended up getting two docs, a redirector who you claim could redirect kills, a roleblocker, a watcher, a tracker, a silencer and kidnapper for more vote control than we had and two revives on top of that. Yeah you assigned them randomly, so what? They are still a part of the balance.
EDIT: I wrote this two days ago or so, might as well add it in...
First of all, just from a numerical standpoint, the game is something like 12-4 (I'm writing this at the beginning of C6 [I realize it's 11-4-1, but with the vote control the town had, it came down to the same thing more or less]), which gives the town 3 mislynches. That's already rather generous.
But hey, numbers aren't everything and depending on the roles, tilting the numbers into either direction may very well be justified... sadly this was not the case here. The town had a Roleblocker, a self Doctor and two normal Doctors for protection, a Tracker, a Watcher and an Alliance Checker for inspection, as well as two Revives, and a Motivator on top of that. What did we have? Djinn Storm was kinda nice, and the JoAT role was decent, the other two were pretty bad. For once, the Softener is almost completly useless, essentially being a tiebreaker. The only way it would ever do more is if someone had a way to make their vote count for 10 or more which is just unrealistic. Then, while the Mayor was potentially nice, it is way too unpredictable to actually be used properly and I honestly would have prefered a simple double voter instead. As for the Djinns, the post restrictions are almost completly useless, the other two were decent. Heck, the town had a Silencer and a Kidnapper which would have done a much better job in this area, as well as their own vote manipulation. Effectively all of that combined brings gets them up to like 6 or 7 mislynches or something silly. Then we have the issue of one of the townies (incidentally maybe the most powerful one) being hidden and us having pretty much no indication of that besides hidden players being not explicitely excluded. Adding to that, we had no way to determine the hidden player either, even if we did think of it earlier, and shooting randomly is absolutely not an option with those numbers. So now I'm really curious to hear from you how that was even remotely mafia sided or even balanced.
I'll be blunt here, the majority of the town didn't play well after Prims died or didn't play at all, on the other hand, the mafia wasn't exactly composed of low level players, there were two modkills and it's this close... that should tell you something about the balance of this thing.
"Once in every cycle, you may choose to send any Guardian to kill another player. This will be treated as an addition to the killer's current action, and is not involved with the actions/Djinn restrictions."
It mentions that they're not involved with the actions/Djinn restrictions. As in, you can kill and use a Djinn at the same time, or that Blues could use Guard/Refresh Ball and kill at the same time, etc. Never did I see a game where kills aren't treated as actions and don't get redirected (unless the redirection specifically doesn't apply to kills).
I might have something more to say to this, but you didn't answer my question. Did Imp actually input the redirecting action?
Edited by Kaoz, 27 April 2012 - 03:49 AM.
