kingawsumeWho's your top pick for scum as it stands right now? Why?
There are at least three people you could point suspicion at already, so you've got no excuse for not having a decent response to this if you're going to take the time to make jokes.
ICT assume that I -- serve as a useful comparison for other players to make themselves.
I don't think I've made that assumption. When have I compared anyone to you?
Is this some kind of wierd bait that I'm interupting your use of?
hector & ICT assume that I'm comfortable playing the way that I am and serve as a useful comparison for other players to make themselves.
The reactions of the two of you, having specific experience with myself and a metagame which endorses this playstyle, are something produced by your presumption that I might play this way. Other players can compare their own reactions to your (theoretically better informed) reaction without me having to specifically spell out my reasoning in every case.
If I was scum, why would I lynch and not nightkill dolores?
Why would you not lynch me? I want to give you the benefit of the doubt but this is the essence of bad!scum reasoning. Why would you ever not want a strong town player (who you know is town in this scenario) to be more free from suspicion than they could be, even if you didn't expect to manage to lynch them? The more agressively I use questionable tactics like deliberatly setting up lynches the easier it would be to drive a lynch against me, and since I'm playing fairly uncautiously it seems reasonable to suggest scum!ICT would try to push a lynch on me. If you nightkilled hector you wouldn't even have someone to point it out the next day and champion the counter case. This is the laziest and worst kind of WIFOM and I think worse of you not just as a player as much as in alignment for having brought it up.
"If I was scum, why would I lynch a powerful town player"
And again, honest question: how could that argument be used as 'seeds to reap' against a strong player?
I literally gave you an example, although the alignments were reversed.
The more points you have that were never answered, the more you can damage someone's credibility when you try to force a lynch without a specific central point (like a single major slip of some kind). Some strong, valid, effective arguments can only be supported by sustained comparison, when you seek to establish a pattern of behavior.
In my experience, having a huge pile of weak evidence against someone over a couple strong arguments only serves as an intimidation tactic. I would argue that scum!dolores would have more to gain than scum!IcyTea31 from their respective arguments, because there is hope of intimidation working against QH.
Sometimes a huge pile of weak evidence is actually a huge pile of individual parts of one piece of extremely strong evidence. You can imagine that if you were able to convince people that I wasn't doing anything to try to divine people's alignments and had continued to set up future lynches, it might be easy to justify a lynch against me based off of that.
The reason you won't be able to do that is because I won't ever actually 'pull the trigger' on anyone without a legitimate suspicion of them, which I would be able to post in the thread and in doing so defend myself. I'm suspicious of questorhank. He jumps on claims he shouldn't for the stated reason of protecting himself and doesn't seem very concerned about ideas like 'stoping the cop from getting nightkilled'. I can imagine I'm more likely to want to lynch him in the future than, say, pooka, who's just awful at the game and not here enough and so reads relatively neutrally on the town/scum index.
When someone with good faith reads an argument, their thoughts turn outwards to 'why?': why are they making this argument. When someone with bad faith reads an argument, their thoughts turn inwards to 'how': how can I use this argument. It's all about whether they actually want to hear what I have to say; as noted before, town wants to know what my alignment is, scum already knows. The difference for nonsensical arguments is that town players usually back off the argument itself when they realize little useful information lies that way, and turn to the player instead.
What if, you might find this radical, you did
both.
Using a faulty argument that someone makes by accident against them is not something exclusive to the scum, my dude. If anything, I'd say that town have more reason to do so since they have no alternatives to persuading the town into voting a certain way if they want to complete their objectives. Lynches are their only tool, or at least the most important in a setup like this with no other way of making the bad men go away. I can do this and still think 'why would ICT say this dumb shit". You don't get to recontextualize my attempts to set up the lifeline of a future lynch on a strong player in a game where scum can easily direct town attention to weaker or less active players as an action I would only ever think of doing as scum.
I see. Do you believe you couldn't have made that argument if you hadn't challenged them to be active earlier? Your point in that post was that 4maskwolf hadn't scumhunted enough. Couldn't you have made that point even without the earlier case?
But he might of
pretended to scumhunt if I poked the dog too early, and I'm not nessecarily so astute that I wouldn't be fooled into accepting his artificial activity as legitimate. If I maintain the position 'this guy really seems like he's scum' and never give him a specific out by requesting some kind of content, it becomes far easier to achieve the lynch in the future if they, being scum, fail to produce any kind of content. If they weren't scum, one would assume that they would later produce content on their own. It's certainly true that you can alignment test by asking people to do things while they're under pressure and then seeing if they also produce any original content due to a legitimate interest in the ongoings of the game (i.e. because they are town and do want to find scum), but it's much harder to achieve the lynch from the negative position (they only respond to the pressure and do nothing else) since a lot of bad!town players will do just that.
Is the response "I don't understand what your point is, please clarify" a suspicious response?
Yeah, because it slows the game down. "I've got no idea where you were going with this but here's some bullshit in response" is much better because you still get the idea that they could rephrase the question for clarity across, but you also generate content. The idea that not giving a bad response is more important than getting content out onto the page where other players can see it is deeply scummy,
ICT. Why are you so concerned about how you look? Surely if you give a forthright response and let slip things like your identity, that can only be good for you, right ICT?
An experienced player capable of humility should find it easy to avoid that trap.
Alas, I am neither of those things
As an aside, my original argument did have a clear point: "you are using psychological tricks to mind control other players into posting scummy things." And that's the point you engaged with. Good job.
Ironically, I basically lied about the fact that I'm basically doing just that. Just not in the conversation that you were quoting.
The opposite: the players who entertain the thought that they might not have determined my alignment yet are most likely town.
Regardless of my alignment, it's in my interest to see you lynched. The correlation between 'easy to lynch' and 'should be lynched (is scum or antitown)' is generally pretty high, and the only real problem with that methodology is it's easier to lynch antitown than it is to lynch real scum.
It's not in your interest to see me lynched if we're both town, unless you believe my behaviour is actively counterproductive to the town's goal. Is that so?
Allow me to rephrase that: regardless of my alignment, it's in my interest to have the
option to lynch you (unless I know that you're on my team, but if we were the scum team we should possibly do this anyway to fuck with hector). I won't know your alignment until you're dead or I inspect you, so that's not a fact that's going to change any time soon. It is absolutely in my interest to begin the building blocks of an icytea lynch and establish them as sensibly as I can into something usable.
Exactly. The whole point is to determine alignment by determining how motivated players are to lynch me. Town wants to lynch scum, scum wants to lynch me.
Cute, but you're not that important. Scum might have a weak interest in lynching stronger players, but generally you would think that they're happy with any lynch which isn't them or their scumbuddy.
Not really a great trend of leaving questions unanswered
kingawsume
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Topic: Not-So-Beginner Mafia 6! [Day 4] (Read 43692 times)