Jd- wrote:There are a few options on how to handle avoiding the Spy/Informants hijacking the votes, as I mentioned a few days ago/last week. The minimalist option would be to make it so that the votes are never shown and the special role players can only pretend to vote but have no actual votes to give (thus making it so only civilians can actually do arrests, even if they're misled). Like this, the special role players (including the Detective and Spy both) would have to get involved in the topic in order to get votes from other players to stay in the game. I'm not entirely sure how this would work out, as the vote exchanges could eventually reveal who's who from the people who are supposedly exchanging votes but ending up arrested (potentially). Another option along these lines is to give special role players some votes, but not many, or to give the Detective and Spy the ability to vote but not the Informants.
This has two problems:
1) Abusability:
Assuming you can vote at most once for each player, split the players in groups of six, and another group of less than six (possibly taken from your list). Then have everyone vote for the other people in their group, except for the people in the extra group who wouldn't vote. If everyone goes along, it would become immediately obvious who hasn't voted by who has more votes than their groupmates.
That doesn't guarantee civillian victory, as the detective is also revealed (or limited to a small group), and there's always the chance that the spy is in the small group, but I think it's too powerful.
If you can vote for a person as many times as you want, then you need groups of 2, and things become a lot easier.
2) Our current problem is that we often can't figure out where people are standing. Instead of concealingt he voting we should use a voting system which reveals more about where people stand.
Jd- wrote:We can go with the system of everyone getting five votes to hand out and the player that receives the most votes is the elected player ("Mayor"/"Representative"/"Governor" or something along those lines) and can silence a certain set of players' votes. This would, at the very least, prevent the Spy/Informants from immediately seizing control of the game, but may have its own pitfalls.
I can't agree with that either. With these rules, assuming that one can cast more than one vote for the same player, the only way to eliminate the spy is to figure out all the infmants, elect a representative who's not amongst them, have that representative silence all the informants, and ensure the spy gets 0 votes while everyone else gets at least one (needs coordination of at least 20% of the players). Otherwise, at least one informant would cast all their votes forthe spy and there'd surely be someone with less votes (or, unlikely, everyone will be with 5 votes). Doable in enough rounds, so the spy couldn't afford to announce themself at prep phase, but way too hard.
The only way that I see, which makes your voting system work, and is not extremely complicated is this:
1) Max one vote per person.
2) Total votes at least thrice the number of informants. That way the average number of votes would be three times more than the number of votes the informants could give the spy, so they wouldn't find it too easy to protect him/her.
I'd suggest that the number of votes you get be 50% of the alive players, or thrice the number of informants, whichever is larger. That way one's vote would give enough information on where they stand.
Also, each unassigned vote should become half (or a third, or however is balanced) self-antivote. If it becomes a full self-antivote, one single day inactivity would very likely kill you, which is a little severe.
