Duck_42 wrote:1. The upfront cost might be reasonable. Still if we're going to a pay per guess model, it almost seems like the Phantoms should then be allowed to guess at will (as long as they have the resources).
No, because a fixed upfront cost does not scale with the progression of the game. 30k mass is a massive investment at 16 minutes into the game, a significant but by no means crippling expense at 25 minutes, and increasingly spammable past 30 minutes. Thats why guessing at will does not work well with a fixed cost.
2. Revealing the Phantom means these things are completely useless until after the player has revealed themselves as a Phantom. I intentionally left out names in my the mark messages so that no one would know for sure who marked who. Including the names takes away a big part of the intrigue and mystery.
Frankly I don't see the issue here. Considering the upfront price, the marker only becomes usable at typical phantom self-reveal times anyways. But fine, if the mystery is so important to you, we can discard this idea.
3. Penalizing the Phantom by nearly half of his Phantom income for an incorrect mark means that no reasonable Phantom will ever use a mark. That's way too much of a risk.
Not accurate. But the phantom would use it only if he is almost certain about the paladin's identity, which is the entire point of this change.
This would give the innocents (non-paladins) a huge incentive to actively deceive Phantoms in an attempt to get them to mark the wrong player.
Exactly. This is a desirable outcome. You said yourself that you want intrigue and mystery. Just being left to wonder "who marked just now?" is neither mystery nor intrigue.
As an innocent, if I can get a Phantom to mark me early in the game, the odds of the Phantoms winning go to practically zero (unless the other Phantom just happens to be really, really good).
So with all that in mind, if you were a Phantom would you ever use one of these things?
Yes, carefully. "Lol lemme use it on some random guy" is shit gameplay and should not be encouraged.
I agree some balancing will probably be necessary, but I don't want to make the cost so extreme as to render this feature useless.
None of my proposed additions render it useless.
So, I suggest we try the mod out as is and go from there. I think we'll both get a better idea of how much balancing is needed after we play it a bit.
Not even necessary. We know the balancing of 1.7 with standard settings for paladin. It is good. We also know the balance of earlier versions without paladin. It was bad. With 1.8 in its present form, about a third to one half of all games will be artificially returned to pre-1.7 balance. It seems obvious that this is not a good outcome.