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[Dismissed] Round Type: Just give people what they want, dang it [01/05/2018]


Kaed

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I'll make this short, it's conceptually simple, even if I don't know how it would be coded.


-Replace the majority vote system with a weighed chance by votes system, where every vote provides an actual chance for your vote to occur

-Replace 'Secret' with 'Random'

-Make every round start display as 'Secret', even if it started as a specific round type due to a vote, unless it's a vote-resulting Extended, at which point it displays as Extended.


This way, everything isn't just piled on secret because there is no other viable choice except extended and voting for anything else isn't a waste anymore. And you can't metagame the round because it's always hidden unless it's a voted Extended.

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These suggestions run on biyearly schedules, I swear.


Here is the ultimate crux: someone somewhere will be pissed with whatever voting system we implement. As such, is there really any point in putting extraneous amounts of effort into trying to fuck with it, if someone, three to six months down the line, will get just as sour as some folks are at the moment and we get to repeat this adventure all over again?


Though I will concede that there's one interesting point here. Secret is voted 90% of the time and perhaps it might be time to make a decision based on that majority outcome.

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But then you'd still consciously metagame knowing there are antagonists in the round. Extended is in the secret rotation so that players are supposed to treat the round as if it were possibly extended and be discouraged from metagamey behavior.


This won't solve anything. As you've said before, rules existing doesn't stop people from exhibiting the same behavior and eventually breaking them anyway.

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These suggestions run on biyearly schedules, I swear.


Here is the ultimate crux: someone somewhere will be pissed with whatever voting system we implement. As such, is there really any point in putting extraneous amounts of effort into trying to fuck with it, if someone, three to six months down the line, will get just as sour as some folks are at the moment and we get to repeat this adventure all over again?


Though I will concede that there's one interesting point here. Secret is voted 90% of the time and perhaps it might be time to make a decision based on that majority outcome.

 

To be honest I only posted this suggestion because of another recent suggestion whining about extended being in the secret rotation.


But the voting system we have right now is hard majority and inherently flawed by the bias that causes, and there is almost 0 purpose in voting anything except extended or secret, except in the very specific situation where someone manages to entice everyone to vote for a specific round type via OOC.


I don't honestly see how providing people with Actual Secret and giving non-Secret (random) votes some actual power would be met with whining.

 

But then you'd still consciously metagame knowing there are antagonists in the round. Extended is in the secret rotation so that players are supposed to treat the round as if it were possibly extended and be discouraged from metagamey behavior.


This won't solve anything. As you've said before, rules existing doesn't stop people from exhibiting the same behavior and eventually breaking them anyway.

 

This has zero bearing on the actual suggestion, surprisingly enough! Give it another read and perhaps consider it more carefully.


All this does is give non-Secret votes some actual power while preserving the Secret status we already have by dint of it being the only round type ever reliably picked if it isn't a voted Extended. There is a world of difference between "maybe there is antags this round" and "there are vampires this round because it's a Vampire round"

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I did read it. You're accomplishing the same objective of the last several threads that were denied. What makes you think the administrators would pass this through, too?


This still is masked as, "Remove X from secret", though, especially considering you're radically changing what "random" actually means on virtue of completely removing the meaningful random element to it. Some game modes will get no participation at all.


Edit: Actually, no. See my next post where I actually detail where improperly implemented RNG can work to the detriment of the players.

Edited by Guest
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... I'm not asking anything to be removed from secret, I'm actually asking for everything but a straight extended vote to fall under 'secret'. Extended along with all of the rest of the game modes will still exist if someone selects 'random' or if they select 'extended'.


I don't really get your problem here. This isn't a clone of the last few threads, and isn't accomplishing the same objective at all.


Look, if five people are voting, 1 person votes extended, 1 person votes Crossfire, and 3 people vote Random, then you have a 20% chance of the round being either extended or crossfire each, and then 60% chance that a random round is selected from all valid round types. You just don't get to SEE the result as anything but secret, unless Extended is rolled outside of Random.

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Okay. Let's assume 100 people vote across the various game modes. For the sake of my argument I'm not going to use the dual-antag type game modes to keep this less confusing. This is exactly what you're suggesting, by the way.


EXTENDED - 30 votes.

MALFUNCTION - 5 votes.

MERCENARY - 7 votes.

WIZARD - 13 votes.

CHANGELING - 0 votes.

CULT - 15 votes.

AUTOTRAITOR - 10 votes.

VAMPIRE - 10 votes.

HEIST - 0 votes.

REVOLUTION - 0 votes.

NINJA - 10 votes.


End result: Secret - Malfunction, because a computerized dice roll decided it knew better than an overwhelming majority did. It's only fair!


Extended may have a 30% chance of being voted in through overwhelming numbers, but it won't matter because it has to contend with the 70% chance of it being another game mode. I will say for the sake of argument this is less significant when there are less participants (actually, wrong, it may be more significant with less participants) in a data set, but this may also work against people voting for extended because they'll have potentially less of an advantageous margin.


Then when we consider an actual margin of error, such as demonstrated with Malfunction being voted in by the 5% margin, it is due to factors completely out of the control of the player voting for the game mode. Meaning your vote would matter way less than it would matter in a system defined by majority vote. There is no sense of agency here. All you do with your vote is just help the computer determine what's best for you, and not actually voting in good conscience of what you want voted in as a game mode.


You've created more problems with this system than how it is currently. If the computer rolls a dice between 1 and 100, if it falls anywhere outside 1 to 30, you don't get extended. Period. It doesn't matter that a lot of people voted for extended. The computer knows what's best, according to the system you designed here, not the general consensus.


Most notably, this would more seriously screw with statistic gathering because there'd be nothing significant with voting extended if the computer randomly determines what the game mode will be outside of the will of the players voting for what they want. And that is more worthy promoting than just removing their ability to make decisions for themselves or for a collective effort to get a certain round type voted in.


Would it be nice for every round type that's voted in to always display as secret unless it's extended, especially if it's secret-extended, so that you don't waste the time of people who only join for antagonists, or to be an antagonist? Yes. Absolutely.


Do we need to go all the way here and and inevitably revisit this subject again in May? I hope not.


Anyone who supports extended remaining in secret currently won't want this. Anyone who supports having a voting system that actually physically matters will not want this.

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On the contrary, it's much more fair for everyone who votes than a strict majority system. The reason why majority votes happen so strongly right now between extended and secret is because of the knowledge that not voting for it is essentially wasting your vote. In your situation where Malfunction is selected from that hypothetical pool, it happened with a 1:20 probability, which was basically just lucky for the 5 people who voted malfunction. There was another 6:20 probability that Extended could have happened, but it didn't.


The system that we have right now takes makes the other 70% of players in this scenario basically each shit and waste their votes, which is not fair to them. Statistically speaking, 30% of people wanting extended does not mean that it is a real majority, the calculation is just being muddled up by there being 10+ other variables throwing off the majority in the 'do we want antags or not' binary state.


You're not taking agency away from the players, you are placing equal agency for everyone to have a round selected by a neutral judge. You act like rolling a die is somehow making the die steal your choice away, when the current system throws any choice that isn't Secret or Extended is already throwing that choice in the garbage in 95% of round starts. That system is really what is stealing your choice away, not a random number generator.

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On the contrary, it's much more fair for everyone who votes than a strict majority system. The reason why majority votes happen so strongly right now between extended and secret is because of the knowledge that not voting for it is essentially wasting your vote. In your situation where Malfunction is selected from that hypothetical pool, it happened with a 1:20 probability, which was basically just lucky for the 5 people who voted malfunction. There was another 6:20 probability that Extended could have happened, but it didn't.

 

That 5% chance basically worked against the will of 95% of everyone else, though, they overwhelmingly voted other game modes for a reason. Why does a tiny minority even get considered? Because the dice roll matters more than what an overwhelming majority voted for? It's only fair to that 5%, because a system actually benefited their wishes and not anyone else's, they have no room to complain in that case.


Then again it's really easy to bitch about losing, right? In the same vein I think someone has a point when someone's vote gets trashcanned even if it was in the majority, even if no other game mode received more votes than theirs, even if their vote accounted for more than 50% of all accounted for votes. RNG is a very capricious variable and it's important to keep it in check.

 

The system that we have right now takes makes the other 70% of players in this scenario basically each shit and waste their votes, which is not fair to them. Statistically speaking, 30% of people wanting extended does not mean that it is a real majority, the calculation is just being muddled up by there being 10+ other variables throwing off the majority in the 'do we want antags or not' binary state.

 

As opposed to this situation, which makes 95% of the players in this scenario have their vote be worth shit? What if extended was the 5% and auto-traitor was the 30% instead, and extended won this vote? Does that make this system any more fair? I'd be pretty damn bitter if the system decided to put a game mode in that only myself and the other 5% of the lobby even voted for as the defined game mode, because that's just unfair.

Just because it's unlikely to happen doesn't mean it's not going to happen. It's statistically unlikely you'll have people fight tooth and nail with equal amounts of votes fighting for extended and secret, yet it happens pretty often.


And now we compare to the current system, and nobody complains if malf only got 1 vote because that one guy at least has a pretty darn good chance of having it be in secret, which allows them to fundamentally change their vote to secret to at least get a better chance at antagonizing than they had with voting malf. You know what's nice about the current voting system? A game mode gets initially voted in due to actual physical influence and not entirely due to a random nature, only secret does that so it becomes impossible to adequately enable metagamers.

 

You're not taking agency away from the players, you are placing equal agency for everyone to have a round selected by a neutral judge. You act like rolling a die is somehow making the die steal your choice away, when the current system throws any choice that isn't Secret or Extended is already throwing that choice in the garbage in 95% of round starts. That system is really what is stealing your choice away, not a random number generator.

 

The best judge of who decides what the game mode should be is the people actually playing the fucking game. Secret is special. You purposefully vote for the game mode to be kept secret from you and everyone else until you have played the round for awhile. That's what it says and implies. You could very easily vote for another game mode if you wanted to, but you can't complain if a bunch of other people besides you want to vote for a game mode kept secret from them.

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Except that the antagonist game mode would already be concealed from them in this proposed system, and they wouldn't even know if their antag vote got picked. There's actually no way to know if your vote for Malfunction is what got the round type what it is, or if it was selected due to the people who voted Random (and those votes will happen, regardless).


This concept of objective unfairness doesn't actually exist, Scheveningen. People have to perceive the result of a random selection for them to feel they were cheated by dice, because injustice doesn't exist unless someone imagines it is there. There is nothing to complain about when you can't observe what choice was selected outside of Extended, which remains a transparent round type because it only attracts people specifically interested in no antagonists, beyond the usual complaints about not liking the specific antagonist round type, which already occur in any game mode outside of extended.


What the entire voting system really boils down to is 'antags or not', regardless of how many different options there are to vote for. That already exists in the situation we have now, it's just a busted system where a single majority makes all the choices because making other choices is irrelevant. What your proposed scenario of 100 votes would actually look like in the current system would be 30 votes for extended, and 70 votes for secret (give or take the couple outliers who pointlessly vote for a specific round type), making secret win. At least my system is giving is a the 30 people voting extended a partial chance that it happens.


You know, much like there is a partial chance that extended happens in what is currently called Secret.

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Okay, apparently you have now established that objective unfairness doesn't exist. Injustice is completely imagined therefore anything is justifiable with your viewpoint. So nothing can possibly be wrong with your suggestion if you just ignore my previous criticisms and inflate them as formed on a basis of "imagined issues". So okay, I can totally work with this logic.


So now we're back to, "Well this wouldn't really change anything", apparently, being your argument. And I agree. It is not meaningful enough of a change to be worth investing any amount of effort in doing because the same system is already incorporated in secret. If you want this, just vote secret. It's already being done.


What is the actual point of all of this if we're going to revisit this subject in May? Why change anything at all? Objective unfairness doesn't exist. There's no injustice to people getting extended in secret, it's what they vote for. Nothing is wrong with the current status quo, it doesn't need changes. You could just vote secret and achieve exactly the same effect here.

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It would change something, though.


Because at least you would know your vote, whatever it was, was considered by the voting system, regardless of what the actual result is. A 5% chance of getting what you wanted is still better than 0%.

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That is not how voting is supposed to work. Have you ever participated in an actual political election? If you vote for an independent with zero polling for interest, you're throwing your vote away by technicality, but for purposes of statistics it does matter to whatever interest you voted for. The purpose of a vote is that it is meant to gauge consideration for a specific interest or agenda. If that interest is outnumbered by overwhelming votes considered for a different interest, then it loses. The ultimate objective of voting schemes is the hope your vote will win by numerical advantage.


This totally undermines that, for some reason?

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This is not a political election, though. This is determining the round type in a video game. You can't make the comparison because they aren't an analogue of each other. We don't vote for 'no president' or 'pick a random president but don't tell us which which one it is until they step out onto the podium, and maybe it was no president after all, so just sit there and wait hopefully for a present to come out' like we do here with antagonists.


Majority is important in a political election because only a single individual can be picked, you can't create situations where any other outcome happens, and you can't hide who the present is because it's important that the candidate is identifiable at the end of the voting. There is no reason why in this situation one vote should be more meaningful than another, other than because you are attributing it to be the same as a political election and it works that way there.

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No I didn't, really.


Only one thing can be picked in any deterministic outcome, yes, but you don't have to see what the outcome is in this scenario, nor does there have to be an outcome where get something (antagonists) so you can do things that make it more fair for everyone.


A majority ruling does not make something more valid than other choices. It just means that more people wanted that thing. When you have a situation where something has to be specifically picked and you can't select 'random' or 'nothing', then you have to use majority. But not here.

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Objective fairness doesn't exist. Your point on fairness is irrelevant.


A majority ruling is a majority ruling. Objective fairness has no room to factor into the equation. More people wanted one game mode more than what other people coordinated to vote for another. Why would you have it any other way?

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When I spoke of objective unfairness, I was drawing attention to the fact that you can't judge something is unfair if you can't see what was actually selected, primarily because of your claim that my system was unfair due to giving a 5% chance that a something the other 95% didn't want. Objective fairness not existing is largely irrelevant in comparison to the perception of what is fair and not fair, and citing it as a reason why a majority system works is nonsensical. This argument basically boils down to "nothing is fair, therefore my unfair idea works better than yours because I want it and it's easier to keep it."


A person can't claim what went on behind a curtain is unfair to them because they don't know what actually happened. It doesn't matter, practically speaking, if only 5% of the people voting picked the result that occurred, when there was a 30% chance that a differently-weighted revote would occur because of the people that selected Random. The only thing the players actually see is what the round ends up becoming, and their vote only counted for a 1:[voters] chance that they would get what they wanted, anyway.


Objective fairness might not actually exist, but we can simulate it a lot closer than we do with straight majority voting.


This argument can keep going for ages until we both look like prats, Scheveningen. Maybe letting it go so other people can weigh in would be a good idea?

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I am iffy on this whole thing. But a thought to toss in the ring.

On the matter of majority doesn't matter vs minority doesn't matter.


Why not have the randomizer split. The majority wins 50% of the pot, and then the other 50% is divvied up by the actual votes


Do using the hypothetical votes above. We would get:

EXTENDED 65% (50 for majority+15 vote count), MALFUNCTION 2.5%, MERCENARY 3.5%, WIZARD 6.5%, CULT 7.5%, AUTOTRAITOR 5%, NINJA 5%


It would also remove the 70% of the time it is a round not by the majority as the majority will always have over 50% of the weighting.


[Added] Also a possible cut off for minimum percent/votes to matter. NZ parliament voting has a 5% minimum to get a seat. That would drop malf out of the above, an the 2.5% could be split evenly or be given to the majority meaning if the are a bunch of small votes but it is overwhelmingly one, it could be 100% the majority. with single or very low vote counts not winning by pure chance.

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I am iffy on this whole thing. But a thought to toss in the ring.

On the matter of majority doesn't matter vs minority doesn't matter.


Why not have the randomizer split. The majority wins 50% of the pot, and then the other 50% is divvied up by the actual votes


Do using the hypothetical votes above. We would get:

EXTENDED 65% (50 for majority+15 vote count), MALFUNCTION 2.5%, MERCENARY 3.5%, WIZARD 6.5%, CULT 7.5%, AUTOTRAITOR 5%, NINJA 5%


It would also remove the 70% of the time it is a round not by the majority as the majority will always have over 50% of the weighting.


[Added] Also a possible cut off for minimum percent/votes to matter. NZ parliament voting has a 5% minimum to get a seat. That would drop malf out of the above, an the 2.5% could be split evenly or be given to the majority meaning if the are a bunch of small votes but it is overwhelmingly one, it could be 100% the majority. with single or very low vote counts not winning by pure chance.

 

That sounds even more unnecessarily complicated and more like you're trying to still cater to the majority while given token consideration to everyone else, which barely solves the problem I'm trying to fix with this. Giving the majority vote half the value in a vote means that you're still making the majority have more power than everyone else.

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Let me continue with the government analogy, parties that win a small majority make a coalition with others to make it over 50%, round types can't bargain, so most majorities would get stuck in the weeds below 50% giving them little to no reason to vote at all. In the analogy, winning the vote gains the party power with which to deal and discuss. A flat point for point, means no one wins a vote. The majority cannot bargain for a better position, so the majority should have more power, it isn't token. It is a representitive concept At 51/49 split currently has a 100% outcome (An I am fine with that, I don't think we need a change) In the system I suggested 75.5/24.5 split chance. At half the vote, the majority only has a 75% chance of winning versus all other comers.


The majority should be catered too, they are the most. But minorities matter, an should not be without consideration. But round voting is probably not the way to do it. Honestly just off the top of my head, a recurring non secret or extended day would probably serve it better than affecting every round. A day without the heavyweights so the small votes can fight it out every now and again.

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  • 3 weeks later...

We're discussing this among staff, but as it stands, what Skull said is a major point here.

 


Here is the ultimate crux: someone somewhere will be pissed with whatever voting system we implement. As such, is there really any point in putting extraneous amounts of effort into trying to fuck with it, if someone, three to six months down the line, will get just as sour as some folks are at the moment and we get to repeat this adventure all over again?

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We're discussing this among staff, but as it stands, what Skull said is a major point here.

 


Here is the ultimate crux: someone somewhere will be pissed with whatever voting system we implement. As such, is there really any point in putting extraneous amounts of effort into trying to fuck with it, if someone, three to six months down the line, will get just as sour as some folks are at the moment and we get to repeat this adventure all over again?

 

Maybe, but there are lots of things that effort investment could be avoided on. Skull himself also mentioned in his post that almost every round comes down to secret or extended in this system.

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We're discussing this among staff, but as it stands, what Skull said is a major point here.

 


Here is the ultimate crux: someone somewhere will be pissed with whatever voting system we implement. As such, is there really any point in putting extraneous amounts of effort into trying to fuck with it, if someone, three to six months down the line, will get just as sour as some folks are at the moment and we get to repeat this adventure all over again?

 

Maybe, but there are lots of things that effort investment could be avoided on. Skull himself also mentioned in his post that almost every round comes down to secret or extended in this system.

 

I completely understand. We'll give this a proper discussion, with the number of suggestions presented here.

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