- + Fun and intersting, good to see the Traitor/Turncoat concept in ToS, it puts a nice twist on the game.
- - Games are extremely reliant on Traitor's role.
One solution could be to limit what roles Traitor can be, but the same time, fixing this issue seems like a difficult balancing act – if potential Traitor roles are limited, then it becomes very easy to confirm a lot of roles, which can defeat the purpose of having a Traitor in the first place if it becomes too easy to identify the Traitor.
An idea that I saw being tossed around was to remove a scum role (Mafioso in Classic, RC in Coven) and add in a second traitor, with each traitor being restricted to a set of roles to ensure that scum gets one powerful traitor and one less powerful traitor... but this, again, seems like a slippery slope, not only due to the fact that the Traitor(s) would become easier to identify, but removing scum members would also worsen the below issue...
- - When all scum (Mafia/Coven) are lynched except the Traitor, games can drag on pointlessly long.
The two solutions that I came up with are as follows:
1) Give the traitor the ability to carry out scum factional kills instead of their regular night ability when all scum members are dead. A similar solution would be to promote them into a Mafioso (or equivalent in Coven), but I'd prefer this iteration of giving them the ability to kill, as it allows them to blend in better as a Townie, which is the point of this gamemode. Regardless of what form, giving Traitors the ability to kill once all scum are dead would keep the game moving. Furthermore, this would also give some power to weaker Traitor roles as well, since they would gain some utility outside of just their vote.
2) If there are more than 3 non-Traitor Townies left (with Witch dead, in the case of Classic TT), immediately end the game in Town's victory. As mentioned above, there are cases where the game shouldn't end, since a few mislynches can result in a scum victory, but realistically speaking, if there's more than 3 Townies left, it's going to take more than "a few" mislynches, and the game should just end there.
- - (Unity client issue) Pulling up chatlog lags the game
One last thing that I wanted to mention is that most players on the PTR are very familiar with the game, and utilize optimal strategies to find scum. As a result, it becomes very difficult for scum to have reasonable claims due to the somewhat restricted claimspace, making it very difficult for scum to win without a powerful traitor who know what they are doing. When this gamemode is released in the live servers, however, players are likely to be a lot more casual (especially in Classic TT), which is likely to shift the balance of this gamemode. TT is a gamemode with a high skill ceiling, and with the Traitor’s role being random, it seems that balancing TT will be a difficult issue (which is arguably fine, given that it will join the rotation of “Chaos” gamemodes which don’t necessarily need to be completely balanced). Thus, I don’t want to mention too much about balance for the time being, but providing scum a little bit more claimspace would be helpful.
Anyways, I’m having fun so far, looking forward to when this is added to live servers! Will update/post again once I have more things to add.