alex1234321 wrote:The goal of an NK is essentially to keep a match even between Town and Mafia without getting caught. So if an NK kills a member of the side that's losing, they are going to be punished by shifting the balance of the game further in one side. This may not be severe as the punishment for a Vig shooting Town or something, but a single extra player on one faction is often enough to cause the NK to lose. The fact that they make one decision every night as opposed to a limited number means that an NK that consistently chooses the wrong players will be severely punished. If the NK kills a Mafia member who they think is Town, they will be punished because this would make a Town victory much more likely. I agree that NK misplays can swing the game for other factions, but by that logic it's problematic for you to be punished if a member of your faction messes up.
1) Random kills, way more random that TK or mafia. This is because NKs are not directly punished for killing someone, and they don't have anyone on their team, which means that with an NK in the game, it's basically down to luck (who the NK kills) to determine the victor.
But they are punished. If an NK keeps hitting one faction, the other faction will probably win easily, and the NK would have a hard time winning. Maybe the N1 kill is essentially random, but almost all plays are random N1 other than maybe a Jailor meta (which shouldn't exist).
2) Swingy tide-turning. I see you complain a lot about jailors and mayors having too much of an influence over the game and being able to turn the tide easily, but NKs do what TKs, mayors, and transporters do but to a much larger extent. I daresay that actions of the NK have more of an influence over the game than the actions of the jailor.
I would agree that NKs are swingy because a bad NK can shift the balance of the game heavily toward one side. But that is normally the side that is already winning. As an NK, you want to kill members of whichever faction is winning. So a good NK will make the game more even while a bad one will make it more one-sided. An NK may change the margin that one side is winning by, but it will very rarely shift the outcome of the game.
3) Kingmaking. No, just skipping king-making situations won't fix the problem, because there will still be situations like the last townie being a mayor, jailor, transporter, veteran, or vigilante that can still win or draw the game depending on who gets lynched (e.g. a vigilante might lynch the SK with the mafioso, then shoot the mafioso at night for a draw).
The detector would have to ignore situations with those roles present. Your example is not a kingmaker scenario, and the game would play on.
4) NKs punish mafia for playing well. If mafia is leading the town/acting like a townie, they're much more likely to be targetted by an NK. This means that NKs encourage mafia to be quiet and act scummy so they don't get targetted. In addition, the presence of an NK discourages mafia from doing plays that require multiple mafia working together, since if the NK randomly kills one mafia member, the entire mafia could be outted.
For an NK to be consciously trying to target Town members, the Mafia has to already be losing, so it is unlikely that its members are playing well and blending in. Even then, I doubt that the threat of being killed by an NK is ever even close to the threat of being lynched. Usually, NK roles will have higher priorities than an unconfirmed player who is probably claiming a weak role.
1) NKs are punished yes, but so are is the faction that the NK is wrongly killing, and NK is not part of that faction. So basically the faction is being punished for something that another faction did wrong. This is not the same as a member of your own faction misplaying, because they are part of your faction, so them playing bad should be detrimental to your team. However, NK misplaying should not screw over town/mafia because NK is not part of either of those factions. With only 2 sides, it is much harder to lose because someone on an opposing team played badly (witch and exe are technically on mafia's side and are essentially part of the same faction, so if they misplay, it's basically the same as a mafia member misplaying).
2) My point is that if one side is winning, it probably means they played better, unless they just had ridiculously good luck, but that's very rare. It would be unfair for, say, mafia to play well and make it a 5v5, but suddenly town and NK ally together against mafia and they lose. Also, "well they should've taken out the NK sooner" is not a good counterargument because that's basically implying that NK is harmful to evils since mafia has to get rid of them early, which is basically proving my point.
3) Even the scenarios I listed are kingmaker scenarios. Why? Because the last townie is still choosing who gets to 1v1 them, even if an evil might not necessarily win. For example, the veteran can choose to lynch the SK with the mafioso, reducing the SK's chances of winning to 0% while both the veteran and mafioso still have a winning chance, even though the SK also lived to the endgame. This means that there will still be many games (more than with the current rolelist) where "diplomacy" will come into play, which is not healthy at all for the game, especially not a competitive gamemode.
4) I mean, NK usually tries to target townies at the start anyway because they start with majority. Only a stupid NK would start by targeting mafia, since each mafia kill swings the game in town's favor way more than a town kill swinging the game in mafia's favor (1/4 vs 1/9). Also, again, the threat of being lynched cannot be compared to the threat of being killed by an NK, because you can, to an extent, control whether or not you get lynched, but with an NK, there is no way to control it. You can make yourself appear townie to discourage town from lynching you, or you can push for mislynches to distract the town from finding the mafia, but there is no way to prevent an NK from killing you (it's not like you can just say "hey NK, I'm mafia, don't kill me pls" to the entire town). This means that getting killed by an NK as mafia has very little to do with skill. Also, you seem to think that it's easy to figure out who's town and who's not as NK, but with no faction members, sometimes that's hard. Like, how are you supposed to know that the transporter claim with 2 transports is actually a hypno with a mafia member in his will? Sometimes you try to kill players from one side but you end up killing players from another because they played too well or too poorly. Either way, this doesn't sound like skill-based gameplay to me.