That's a very reductive way to look at it. And it's wrong too.
Many players also emphasize the importance of finding reliable Town which your explanation doesn't account for. If you want to say that this is covered by "finding scum", then you're explanation is reductive to the point of uselessness.
It is reductive. It's also correct.
Finding reliable town is literally totally useless. It has no mechanical impact. Projecting
yourself as town is useful. In a mountainous game, literally all you have to do is figure who to kill and kill them. There's no difference between 'unequivocally the towniest player I've ever seen in any game ever, if I was a cop in a closed setup and had a contradictory report on them that I could reasonably expect to be correct I'd disregard it without even the slightest second thought' and 'just barely more towny than the last scum'. You specifically, the town player themself, have to avoid being lynched because being lynched causes the lynch to not be on scum.
But anyway, the central point, that asking random shitty meta questions in very-late-to-post RVS when you could just launch into the game itself is a bad play, is for sure true.
You frequently talk about how important it is to say the important stuff as soon as possible. Bringing up your alternative win-con ahead of time so people don't think you're pulling it out of your ass later on. Sharing your opinions on lynching lurkers so you have an easier time pushing it when you feel like it has to be done (though thankfully it doesn't seem like we will need to do that this time).
Both of these examples are things I was doing that were immediately relevant to the game, that are important (for me, the player with the wincon or who would be pushing the lynch on an inactive player). Also, most/all of the comments on e.g. Lynch all Lurkers were responses to a conversation coming out of RVS, not something I brought up and wanted to talk about. I was just more aggressive about calling people inactive than some players expected and they called me on it and we talked about that
after it had come up in the game.
Your example is bad and lame and super meta (in the sense that it doesn't connect to e.g. actual reads you have on the players in the thread) and shouldn't come up in the first place. A town core is just like, a bunch of people most people think are probably town. You shouldn't lynch people you think are town just because 'oh noes they might be a big conspiracy of scum', if they were scum you should have scumreads on them. If you can't get scumreads on scum, you will lose the game (as town). That's just how it is. Flipping a coin and doing something totally illogical and fluking a win out of it isn't a good policy or a big brained idea.
That's dishonest Dolores. How do you justify that?
1/5 of the players you asked completely dismissed your question and you didn't really follow up with it on them. How's that different from asking inactive players?
I can be as dishonest as I want, what are you going to do, get mad and lynch me? If you're town, shade I throw at you won't stick.
I don't know that you're not scum, especially after only your first RVS post. In the general case, it's always in my interest (unless I know for a fact that you're on my team) for you to be easier to lynch, because you're not me and therefore less likely to be on my team than me; I am 'townier' if you are 'less towny', the same as every other player in the game that's not me.
That's an interesting take on Day1 that I've never heard before.
Pretty sure you've played on B12 in the last 2years. That 'take' has been in the OP of every beginner's mafia for like, a decade+ or at least 7 years.
A lot of the stuff you say makes a lot of sense though, and I appreciate the insight. The problem is that what you're saying is an ideal that only the top players can successfully put into practice. In all of the games I've ever played in, there has never been a day1 scum lynch.
Right now, I'm in hot water because the scum decided to maliciously target me with a day action (and possibly Iceytea). I'm doing my best to defend myself, but because of my lack of experience I can very well still fail. The only thing stopping your ideal from falling apart is me, someone who you see as an idiot.
We can talk about the meta of it after the thread and all, but it really doesn't require much skill at all to hold true so long as there are skilled town players to look at the posts wherein people do the work.
If you're a mediocre-to-bad player, it's impossible for you to have put as much effort into the game as you have without giving away your alignment. So long as there are good players to look at this, see it, and then
articulate it clearly in a way in which the other high-effort 'low'-skill players can easily grasp, that information is pretty much available to the whole town.
It's basically impossible to replicate the ease with which a high-effort player making sincere mistakes can get themselves an ironclad townread. Anyone who figures out how to like, method act it and can replicate it reliably as town and scum without impacting their capacity for analysis will unambiguously be the strongest player in mountainous setups probably the world has ever seen.
Of course the ideal won't fail if I'm scum, but scum!heydude must be quite a moron then. What was the purpose of scum!me pretending to receive a pm from webadict? To confirm that I'm town? Why would I create such an elaborate lie and risk getting it discovered when nobody really suspected me? Why would I risk receiving the potentially ruinous wrath of webadict?
To call ICT scum. That's it really, that's all I was thinking. The unedited post that I saw (it had no displayed edit text, so it must have been edited within the B12 edit grace period which is like a minute or something if it was edited) reeked of the kind of lame fake-mechanics bad!scum like to make up to throw at people for whatever reason and you were getting a lot of heat at the time and there's a lot of heat floating around on ICT and FoU that's looking for a better place to go.
Why would I then attack Iceytea with a day action, when he already was the runner-up for getting lynched? If that didn't happen, there wouldn't be people calling for a lynch and calling my pm a fake. If !Scum me wanted to get rid of him, I could have easily come up with a simple justification to move my vote away from Fallacy and towards Iceytea. That would break the Tie and put Icey next in line to be lynched, even if he removed his self vote.
Because ICT was a million years away from getting lynched (one of the votes on him was his own, nobody actually has a problem with the FoU lynch besides maybe FoU), and voting ICT without a reason and putting him into hammer territory would have been even more suspicious than the fake PM, whereas faking your own ?
I dunno, I wouldn't put the contract on ICT if I was doing that (say, if it was more of a 'crossed|lynch-or-be-lynched' scenario). That's not something a coordinated scum team should be doing, not that I think that most scum teams are very coordinated.
If I did decide this was the best way to get rid of Iceytea, why did I use a method where successfully defending myself sheds no light on the guilt of Iceytea since his outburst could easily be rationalized as the mafia targeting him in order to make me look bad? It's like this plan is incredibly high risk, for only minimal reward! God, scum!heydude really is stupid! But you know, for an idiot, he sure seems to have a lot of brainpower in order to come up with these overly elaborate detailed plans.
I wonder what !townheydude's perspective must be like though.
He receives a malicious attack soon after making a big post. He decides that it would be best for the town if they were informed of this, because this a clear example of the scum taking action. He helpfully begins writing the details of the PM to let the town understand what they must look out for, when he realizes that he has an opportunity to provoke a reaction from the scum who sent it. So he sets a little trap just to see what happens. He makes sure to make the trap obvious to make his case against the person who falls for it more convincing to the town. Unfortunately, he misunderstood the rules about quoting PMs and so the PM debacle happened.
Webadict should have just modkillled you. Nah, that's a philosophical difference between him and me. It's whatever.
I don't think the trap was necessary or a particularly good idea, but I'm also wrong because it's baited out a long of responses and you've actually done the hard work of responding to the fallout and you're basically clear now.
Not mechanically, I don't care about any of that. You're fielding all of this shit and it's exhausting in that way that it is when there's nothing there and I'm burning through all of my motivations to see you lynched. I don't actually have a problem with how you've handled things besides the fact that I resent you personally for being responsible for all this, which is equal parts not even really your fault anyway and having done a worse job of it than theoretically possible because you don't have specific experience with this particular gambit setup I've never used and wouldn't know how to carry off well.
There was an unintended consequence of the PM debacle though. It gave town!Heydude's claim of being maliciously targeted more legitimacy, creating Scum's worst enemy: The confirmed towny. In a desperate attempt to get rid of him, scum decided to target Iceytea with another day action in order turn them against town!heydude. Or maybe Iceytea was scum the whole time. It sure is strange that their immediate instinct is to assume I sent it when doing so would put !scumHeydude in a lot of unnecessary danger. Doesn't that risk invalidating all of !scumHeydude's previous work at making him look town? Maybe there's something in the pm of the ability that was used on Icey that implicates me, but a malicious ability that gives a hint to the target about who used it on them sounds pretty awful. Oh well, it's a shame the ability prevents its victim from telling anyone about it, except when it allows them to share certain vague details. If Iceytea is innocent though, scum has no reason to worry. Either !townHeydude gets lynched, !townIceytea gets lynched, or maybe nobody gets lynched, but it doesn't shed light on their own identities.
Anyway, of those two scenarios which do you think makes more sense?
I'm really struggling to find the strength to call you scum, because I don't actually have anything to point to. I also don't have a problem with ICT's play and he did the work first (before me) and came to the same conclusion, but I guess that (ICT's alignment) is up for review. I'm super bothered both that you named ICT specifically and then that ICT claimed to have received the contract.
See, I think that ICT's reaction 'heydude is faking hard, more later' is super believable if he got the contract. He's definitely seen it; either it exists and his narrative is correct, it exists and he's the owner, or it doesn't exist and you're both scum. That's my opinion on the matter, I'll repost it outside of the spoiler.
It's a nice continuation of the point you made in the previous paragraph, but do you really think my flip won't have a drastic effect on how people perceive these current events and the alignments of Iceytea and you? If I flip scum, then Iceytea is either confirmed innocent or he pulled off one of the most epic buses in bay12 mafia history. If I flip town though, there will be more suspicion on Iceytea and some on you as well since you were one of the other people who claimed my PMs to be fake.
Do you mean, will people continue to make mistakes in this game? Sure.
Literally no matter how you flipped would have any impact on whether I or ICT scumslip in the future. You can determine our alignments from those or their lack thereof and positive town contribution. The bus isn't particularly hard to set up (I thought of it above before reaching/reading this part, for example) and it's the sort of thing ICT likes to do, but thinking about it in terms of 'would this player do this thing as scum' is again pure wine, yeah.
Bonus
outdated stuff:
Do you think this anecdote is worthless?
Yeah. That's what anecdote means, anyway.
Pressure on someone you know is a townie (like myself) is a waste since that pressure can be better spent on someone who's alignment is in question.
You're the least clear player in the game, what?(<-pretty funny in retrospect, but that is the attitude I was bringing in to the start of the above)
Then what do you think of the fact that Iceytea was targeted? What do you think of the fact that I had to edit it out?
I think that ICT was targeted before you posted in the thread about being targeted at all. Or, he wasn't targeted and he's scum (why?). If that's the case, worst case scenario for the town is you kill yourself with the contract you were given and we lynch ICT. Not a huge loss.
The fact that you were allowed to edit a post several times and make it a major game point means that either you(r scumteam) have the ability to edit posts, you definitely don't have a big 'kill your own heydude6 now' button looming over you, or webadict should just modkill me and everyone else that doesn't want to have to write a bot to save a copy of every post every minute for this game and every other one he runs ever. I can not overstate enough how big a deal this is (to me personally). If you're breaking the gentlemen's agreement and just flagrantly cheating with no justification and you've got a kill-yourself-now button, you should press it, because the alternative completely opens up purely meta plays like holding the game hostage.
(PPE: I guess you got told to edit it?
There's another possibility that I hadn't even considered because it's so awful and dumb, and that's that town!heydude through away his kys button even though we should be about to lynch them.
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Topic: BYOR 15: Game Over - Mafia Win (Kinda?) (Read 114350 times)