Well the winning percentage charts are posted both on our reddit and discord server ;)

https://discord.gg/tol #news ~

Pretty balanced, lately! The main faction has like a 51% win rate, iirc. It's harder to win as evil or neutral, but that's expected. They're technically more OP, but their objective is more difficult.

We'll come up with some bonuses later for those guys.

Ok thanks for the answers!

Role “balance” is a touchy subject.

Take NKs for example, they are basically a one man faction. They only win when both “good” and “evil” factions lose.

How would you handle it? End up with a role that loses 12-14 games out of 16 in a 3 team game or end up with a role that defeats 12-14 other players on regular basis?

What I'm trying to say here is that games like these have much more important things in them than role balance or even role playability.

It all has limits (so that we don't end up with people instaquiting on unpleasant roles) but in general how the role affects the ENTIRE game is waaaaaaaaay more important than how likely it is to win or how nice it feels to play it.

With all that said...

I dare say ToL is notably lacking in role balance. It's not balanced to be played without resorting to whisper meta (not even nearly enough investigative power on BD side, unless BD rolls a natural 20) and with whisper meta the cornerstones of those whispers hog all the fun to themselves.

Conversion-based balance is also not helping matters. It's a bit of long logical chain, but because of how conversions work game strongly depends on having people you can consider to be dependable.

And the devs are only adding oil to the fire by also handing out the strongest ability sets to those exact roles.

Just try comparing the king to a knight.
One is the guy to whom everyone claims in private, one who gets leads, one who can protect important claims and eliminate suspects and gets info needed to direct teams effort. The other is a meme claim that has to sit on his ass and hope that a king is both good and kind enough to give him the correct orders on who to guard and who to strike.

Ya think there can be something even remotely close to balance between the two of them?

And no, I'm not buying that “you can pay attention and be good as anyone” BS (aren't we "conveniently" forgeting that king and prince can do the the same AND more?). I mean, it's true, I can pay attention to dead logs and voting behavior , but back in ToS I could also pay attention to all the PUBLIC claims and living logs flying around, and that's a big part of what made it so great. As long as ToL sticks to whisper games this deep flaw will not close up.

Call me weird if you have to, but I'm not playing those games for chat-based poker. Lies are only a PART of those games, the other key part is strategic use of one's abilities, and this is where ToL sucks. Strategy requires information, and the flow of information in ToL is absolutely NOT balanced for the fun of anyone other than the prince and/or the king (and the occasional noble/mystic).

P.S. Also tos is overdoing it with ability power. I mean take a look at obs and then take a look at LO and tell me which one needs more brainpower to make good use of. But that's a different topic.

P.P.S. Don't get me wrong ToS has some balance hicks of it's own, but when compared to the ones in ToL they may as well not exist.

um, 54% BD 34% unseen 35% cult dont seem so balanced to me XD.

Also it is VERY hard to win as neutral killer. Also, I don't believe those NK results, posessor has worst win rate? That is by far the easiest neutral killer class.

Originally posted by Christian2222:

um, 54% BD 34% unseen 35% cult dont seem so balanced to me XD.

Also it is VERY hard to win as neutral killer. Also, I don't believe those NK results, posessor has worst win rate? That is by far the easiest neutral killer class.

It's not perfect by any stretch, that basically means in 10 games, 5 are BD wins, 4 are unseen/cult wins, and 1 as an NK win typically. NK is always going to be the underdog, as it's litterally 1 in 16 of the players in the game.

Still though, it's amazing for the genre. At least back when I played town of salem, town's winrate was somewhere around 80-90%. with mafia and NK competing for that last 10-20%. I haven't seen a mafia based game that didn't run into that problem (even the original no abilities mafia partygame wound up with around a 70-80% town winrate if players have access to notepads).

So yeah for me I'm ok with shooting for 50% BD 50% non-BD as a general rule of thumb target range. The majority of players in the game are going to be BD...


oh and as far as pos, I see it there, end game is the roughest time of the game for NK.

IE when there's say the final 4 or so. That's when it's generally very easy to tell who has what abilities etc.... Reaper generally can have a reaped corpse, and his chill ability completely stall voting, Sorc can hope to have some unseen/cult that will vote with him. Pos can kind of hope to jump but he's still got some rough challanges, also he lacks any way to get past the kings guards, so I can certainly see that as the hardest finish

Tbh these winrates are almost ideal. BD has the most members so they're supposed to win more, unseen/cult comes second and then the nk with really low rates since it's only one player.

The balance is okay, but the game relies on quarterbacking from King & Prince far too much now.

I guess the game is balanced in terms of win rates, but the supporting cast does not feel like they impact much. Some games everything is silent and nothing but whispers to the king and prince. You send off your results to the king and just sit there while being carried hoping you don't die.

A good king and the prince definetly require experience and advanced understanding of the game, but for a lesser experienced player this is too much weight to carry. Half the time as King I spend the entire day or night just trying to understand the meta formatting of wills or copying down information people feed me that I have little time to interpret it or make appropriate decisions. I know there are players good at this and carry their team to victory, but I think some of this effort should be divided among the supporting cast is all.

Communication by whispers is great, but ask any ToS vet about the days of mayor whispers. Every mayor game there was 1 or 2 people upset about the meta. Games just reduced into the dull meta of letting the mayor deduce based on private whispers. This was a major complaint among the community and they addressed this by preventing whispers to the mayor. Those games only happened every now and then, in throne of lies, we have mayor games every game.

The design of the supporting roles do well in adding complexity by surroudning them with numerous weak abilities in hopes that they work together to achieve results. However, I think that the synergy of these roles fall short becausae the only thing bringing this information together is the king or the prince being loaded with whispers. It's just not really engaging or fun. Also hard for me to learn more about the game mechanics when I don't see the deduction of information happening in chat.

I think the game meta became this way because frankly, the supporting roles just are too weak to contribute effectively on their own. Having 3 or 4 class abilities does not necessarily make things more engaging if you don't feel like you are impacting much. I think ToS does well because, while the roles are simple with less abilities, they are incredibly unique and can carry on their own many circumstances. Writing last wills are much more simple without trying to code in so many abilties with their results. Sometimes less is best.

Yeah exactly, what I want to know is how often do BD win when they have a BD king, and how often do cult/ unseen win when they have an EK ?

How often do BD win when the prince doesn't die? etc etc, would all be great stats.