You're undisputedly pro-town, but don't believe in vote pressure?
Right, so what's this right after:
FallacyofUrist
I kinda dislike unvoting caz here because I don't think their behavior to date is acceptable, but I also think a resting vote is going to bother FoU a lot more
You're voting FoU to pressure them.
That's right. I don't believe in vote pressure and a whole bunch of other players here don't either. FoU does, and
brings it up as a possibility.
FoU is already hot and if they just stopped posting altogether there's a high chance that they would get lynched. But I don't actually especially think that FoU is scum, though lurking is within his scum meta if I'm remembering this right (I'd need to reread their games including more recent ones before I'd be at all happy with joining or starting a lynch over this).
I'll clarify something specific, which is that I don't believe in vote pressure as an objective tool. The context where I was asked about pressure was
regarding 4maskwolf specifically and very defensive low content posters in general, where I said that 4maskwolf wouldn't believe in the pressure of that vote; you should note here that I explicitly raised the possibility that he might believe in the pressure of votes in a general sense but not buy into that vote specifically. When I say I don't believe in pressure, that means that I don't believe in the pressure of votes on me ever (maybe I'm deluded), and that pressure is basically useless for that reason (that there are players who don't care). Broadly speaking, any player you're able to get a response out of from the pressure of votes will give themself away as scum more frequently and more thoroughly in their posts than the players who do respond to pressure agreeably.
Respond or not responding to pressure doesn't tell you anything about a player's alignment. If a player posts more because of pressure, you can discern alignment from the content of those posts, which I guess you can attribute to the pressure, but it's a dead end path, a technology which doesn't scale.
And how would we go about removing your action-blocker to do this? By targeting you?
I am not my role. Like I said, I was thinking you could target the action which applies the action-blocker, since it's name is public, but didn't realize you can't target actions.
So if I posted my role, you'd probably be able to target it. That said, I'm happy to lose the game with this role, since it gives me membership in the town wincon and broadly speaking failing to reach that is definitely a failure on my part, so I've no intention of making it easier for anyone to take me out of that.
And...? Not posting is a completely possible and even effective scum tactic. This is especially true past Day 1.
It's incredibly effective because it's
not alignment indicative. Players can be disengaged assholes who join games and barely contribute for a huge variety of reasons. If you're one of 8 active 'townies' in a game with 7 more-or-less inactive players, who do you lynch? How do you vote? If one of the 8 is kinda scummy but you're not overwhelmingly confident about it, is it better to kill them or one of the lurkers? Note: it's a practical certainty that many if not (almost) all of the inactive players are town. It's incredibly effective because it gives me (town) no information.
The only real solution I've found is to have every in town be super engaged all the time so any anti-town activity sticks out like a sore thumb.
No. No.
Unless you're some lame-o who doesn't read their role PM before posting, everyone knows their alignment and possible scum buddies when the game starts. The fact is:
1. Town don't know anybody else's alignment
2. Mafia know their buddies' alignments
People will act differently whether they're town or mafia. Disputing this is the same as denying the game of mafia itself. The challenge is for the mafia players to pass off as town.
Yeah.
Hey asshole, did you read any of my posts where I said the way you discern people's alignments is by reading
their posts. Do you know the difference between
their posts and
someone else's posts?
When you know that a player is scummy, before you have lynched them, during the daygame, you know that the player is scummy generally because they have displayed knowledge that the town doesn't have. That's why we keep lynching cops, because until they claim they're all too often secretive and disengaged from the daygame and have information town doesn't (PR identities). If you know for sure that a player is scum (post flip), you don't actually have any more information about them then you did when you only thought that they were scum. All you have is more confidence in your read that they were scum, and no confidence in the counter-narrative that they're not.
Armed with this incredibly narrow information, you are telling me that it's not pointless WIFOM to try to read into their posts what they know about another player. But guess what? I can pretend to know whatever the fuck I want about another player, and so can you. All it costs me is the fact that my posts will seem less genuine and it'll seem like I'm hiding something and that I'm posting kinda counter to town's interests. Y'know, that I'm scum or at least anti-town. If you've got a positive scum flip on me, how is that different from any of my posts where the thing that's making me seem like I'm lying is the fact that I'm covering up that I'm not town?
Looking at an argument that you know is a deception, and trying to figure out what level of irony it's on, whether it's a genuine lie, the deception is in making it seem like a like, it's an attempt to attenuate the sincerity of the lie, etc. is the definition of WIFOM. All it costs the person who you know for a fact is scum is the fact that it makes it seem like they're scum. Would scum do that? Depends on the person and the situation, you don't have all the information, it's pointless WIFOM. Keep it in your head and out of the thread, I say.