Host thoughts of game balance and item balance.
Yeah this was kinda townsided. Should have removed bus driver at least probably. This might have been the most townsided setup that we had on our list, even more than our 17p setup. I think that that's just the end of the discussion on this end, independent of item involvement, which is another tale I guess. One-shot vig, doc that can't protect 2x in a row, and cop feels more fine at least for a 16er.
Now as for items, the original intent was that they would be relatively low impact mechanically, while still having an impact on the game. We had five selected before we knew how many players we had (releasing up to Day Nine), but for this game only decided to release four, a track (which was supposed to be the mechanical cream of the crop), a message, a bodyguard, and a tree-stumperizer. We assumed going into this that every item would almost definetely be going to town, and we were actively hoping that the game would enter LYLO and the megaphone would be distributed successfully. What we weren't anticipating was how effectively the items were used. This setup was somewhat townsided to begin with, but we weren't expecting the impact that the items had, and had pretty much designed for the opposite. For the track specifically, we had thought that it was possible, though unlikely, that a clear could have been generated that would have relevance to the late game. What we were not expecting when designing this was that bodyguard would have the impact that it did, pretty much ending the game for mafia. What we thought was going to happen was one TRed player dying in place of another, not probably the second most eliminatable town (Winston and Syn would be clear in F4, Nutella cleared Syn plus there was dead framer, Marcher was pretty clear to and had cleared Winston, so that probs leaves Hollowkatt in that slot, though you'd have to argue Hollow's case that mafia shot TGT to "clear" him, you'd still also have to do the same to argue Marcher was the last maf) at that point in the game dying in place of the cop. I think that it was unlikely that Daisy would have been exiled before Marcher Jovian or Hollowkatt, however, mafia winning was definetely possible had bodyguard not existed.
Also, we probs should have told mafia that there was a bus driver, even though none of them claimed it. That's also on us