Even so, both sides have a serious point. A basic townie's power is the lynch and townies who have no other influence on the game but to hold an opinion as to who should be lynch, lose their interest in the game once you strip that away from them.

How this could have been negated: If the shyster role was known about from day one; then you could predict that a scum could pull off a tactic where they intentionally get lynched just to disable the town's main weapon against the scum.

If there was a heads up on that, Tincow/GH et al would not have tried to lynch me twice in a row on those critical rounds where the town still had a numerical edge, and they would have gotten a scum instead. It also would have started the hunt for such a role much sooner, possibly causing folks to cooperate on that point more, leading to a collapse of that power structure.

It is just a nasty surprise, sort of like holding a vanilla mafia game and having a godfather you cannot lynch until the henchmen are dead, but not putting that in the rules.

Try to lynch the godfather over and over, and then lose... but if you knew the setup, such a bad end wouldn't have happened.

Really, the strength of the shyster role was that it was not an announced role. If it was publicly known from the start, the whole game would have been different.

Some do have a point about it being less a mafia game and more a faction-oriented game. Town barely existed here except as the potential to be not town. For balance, the game needed more incorruptibles or zero incorruptibles, so everyone could have gone mafia. The town investigators kinda got the shaft there.