about teams

[Judge Sam]

More rambling! Anyway this game had the team idea. I've always resisted dividing people into groups mostly because of Spies 3. I wasn't a fan of half the game effectively getting Exile Immunity because they had 2 episodes less material of suspicion on them.


So the divisions in Spies 4 and 5 I liked because they didn't do that basically. So I decided to push it a little in this game to see if it would still be a problem, to test it out. I'm going to need to do something like this at the start anyway each time if I continue to have so many players just to make it managable.


One thing though is that the team addition was a relatively late addition, and I already had the +/- voting twist, blueprint, and future week. All of the opening day activities + the day one challenges plus all that was so overkill haha. It's why I killed the character imprisonment cause I had to cut as muc has I could and I did cut a bit but it still went overboard. Thankfully the next bit of time is less eventful. Ideally it starts out slow and ramps up in complexity but this time it started out all crazy. I did try a bit to move back future week or the +/- but it just didn't work any other way.


So anyway the teams thing has gotten universal praise. So that's a good thing. Another good thing the team idea does is that it frontloads the extra exiles I do. In each game the # of exiles are important, blah blah blah, but here's the thing.


It's harder for spies to survive Exile #10 than Exile #2. So if I were to take out Exile #2.5 and add Exile #10.5 then that would make it more difficult for the Spies. So I hoped that by having the extra exiles at the start it would give the spies a little boost. Of course that didn't happen they lost 3 scum in 4 exiles lol!!


Ok so lots of good things but like I said it has a STEEP negative. The negative being people assume that 2 or 3 or 4 spies are in a certain team. Then they might go "oh we found 3 or 4 spies in Team Z, let's stop looking in Team Z." Or "hmm haven't found a spy in Team X yet, let's start looking!" That is terrible. omg so bad.


Now I need to put this in perspective cause not everyone has been thinking this but I have heard it a lot. More vocal proponents seem to be Jason, Jenya, Tiberius I believe... can't remember who exactly. And even if it's just six of them that's like only 25% of the game. For example I've heard a lot of "we caught 3 bad guys in that team which had alma, jaya, and paris, so I'm going to guess the rest are citizens." BUT still, if that takes off and starts affecting the game and who they choose for exile... definitely X'ing the team idea for good haha.


That's why I made the team names so similar each time. Man I don't even remember who was in which team! I'm hoping other people get it mixed up quickly as well we will see if that happens. Hopefully the longer it goes the more people forget.


A few people seem to think that the division of spies is overwhelmingly likely to be 3-3-2 and just assume that and work from there. That sucks for a lot of reasons, not in the least that I did the math and I think the odds are like

32.35% for 3-3-2
21.57% for 4-2-2
12.94% for 4-3-1

But I could be wrong on that don't quote it. ofc the 3-3-2 is on top but it's still only a 1/3rd chance that's it overall.

Not that any of that matters whatsoever since it was actually completely random and has no significance whatsoever to people's alignments. For example, I happen to know that alma, jaya, and paris's favorite food is pizza... should we stop looking for spies amongst the pizza-lovers? ofc not lol.

[Judge Sam]

I should have mentioned that I was talking about my post there which, in my view, nixes the 'has to be at least one spy here' theory.


But I know it hasn't nixed that idea in most people's heads which is why that is helpful and I wonder if it ever will haha.


I also am not sure why when I say 'completely random' it doesn't deter people in the game, as well as yourself haha. Maybe we different on our definitions of completely random? My math definition is go to random.org and use that... switching anyone around after the random.org divide would make it not random lol.

You don't think it would be cruel to have an exile in a group that contained 0 Spies?

hmm... maybe my perspective is different cause I really don't think this is cruel haha. for a lot of reasons... but like I see how, if you're in the teams as it starts, and you're looking for spies and there aren't actually any, that seems cruel. but from a long term point of view... two months from now, after 17 exiles are done, was the 5% chance that one of the 5 teams had 0 spies in them really that bad even if it did happen once? I don't really think so... not to mention at that time, that team with no spies probably exiled a suspicious person that might have used up a later exile anyway.


with my survivor games I have gambled the entire game on a 5% chance, that's my limit and it didn't really bother me. this isn't really gambling the entire game it's gambling that 1 of 17 exiles won't have a spy, which to me means that the game just goes from 17 exiles to get rid of 8 spies to 16... which is a slight advantage for the spies but not that much when you consider you multiply that by 5%. and it is also likely that 5, 6, or 7 spies could be on one team... disadvantaging the spies equally as much.


either way, I think everyone would agree, that the cool parts of doing teams outweigh the bad part of a 5% chance of one exile without a spy right? i don't think it would be worth it to throw out the teams because of that. now it would be worth it to throw out the teams if they start doing this "gotta be 1 spy in team X" or "we already found 3 spies in team z so the rest are cleared" garbage lol.


with what you said about this exile, exile #3, i'm not as worried... but what if it gets down to the final 5 and the entire game is significantly decided because of a false assumption about the teams? sooooo unbelievably lame.


cause the teams have nothing to do with alignment, just like hair color, first name, or shoe size do. if i could quote myself:

Because the teams were decided randomly, it may be that one team has 0 Spies in it. The odds of that happening are 1.176%. Because that is so low I was willing to risk it.


You might say, okay, it's low, but that means there's still probably at least one Spy in each group right? Well yes. But that's like lining up the players alphabetically, A-Ge, Gr-M, O-Z, then saying there's probably at least one Spy whose name starts between A and Ge. Which with 98.82% probability there is at least one. But that doesn't tell you much because there is no relationship between the first letter of their name and player's alignment, just like there is no relationship between placement in a team and a player's alignment.

[Donald]

I agree that saying "We've caught 3 (or 4) spies in Team X, so there can't be any more. Let's stop looking there" is faulty and bad logic to be thinking.

However, what I was hearing in the late game sounded really reasonable. "4 scum existed in Team X, and they lynched a spy in the first round. There couldn't reasonably be any more scum (spies) on that team because otherwise a Day 1 spy lynch on that team would have been so preventable that it never would have happened." Basing the number of spies on a team and relating that to who the team lynched does make sense. Why should a team of almost 50% informed scum lynch a spy over a team with only 1-2 spies in it?


I think what would be really unfair for the spies is if you would have guaranteed at least 1 spy on each team. This would have lead to too many confirmed citizens too easily. I even played in a game that was split up into teams, and there was no guarantee that each team had a scum in it, but it was public knowledge whether each team had an even or odd number of scum.

Considering the teams were, as I recall, about 5-6 players per team, this gave the town almost the surefire win of the game. Whenever a team was down to it's last player, the player's alignment was a given based on the public knowledge. Even before getting down to the last player, there was too much confirmation of what team had scum left and which ones didn't. The only way the scum could be "safe" and "clear" themselves is if there were 2 or more scum on a team, and they both were as confirmed as Jason and Pete were, and everybody else on the team was dead.

Being able to narrow down suspects based on what team you started on will kill spies in the endgame, if there was publicly posted information about the # of spies per team.

[Jason]

Yeah, I agree, but I don't think people will ever fully throw it out as a method to catch Spies because unfortunately probability says there's almost definitely a spy on every team at the beginning...

The whole Spy per team thing definitely worked in Pete and I's favor but I didn't really like having it benefit us, either... So I choose to believe that it's like Donald said, there were too many Spies on that team to have lynched a Spy day one...



No matter how adamant you are about it, Sam, it's always going to pop up It's just a matter of hoping it doesn't take precedence over other evidence.