Acting your town meta when scum

[Ankamius]

I don't know what I expected when I reopened the thread.

[VysePresident]

meta is trash

Nope.

Meta is a crutch.

Meta is the single best tool in the game, in my opinion, if you know how to use it.

The problem with meta usage isn't the meta, it's the usage. People have a tendency to use it something like - "Person X has sneezed during both his scumgames. Person X just sneezed now. He must therefore be scum".

In other words, people have a tendency to focus on all the wrong things, trying to build up tells. Meta works best when it's used to understand how a person thinks, and then reverse engineer their play to comprehend the player. This is useful in basically any game from there on out with the player - we can change

how

we do things, along with our understanding, but people don't really change at the core of who that are. Once you understand that, the rest follows.

What I find is that the more I grow to know a person, and understand how they think, the better I can predict them in the future. For instance, on my home forum, where it was mostly just the same group of people every time, I had something like a 66% accuracy in terms of my serious pushes being scum for quite a while. I mean...it works. (Granted, my ability to push them through to a lynch was pathetic at the time, because I'm not a natural people person.)

[pirate mollie]

meta is a tool and just like all tools it is entirely dependent on the skill level of the person who is using it!

[VysePresident]

I always find it odd that people think they have to "act" when they're scum. The word implies that playing scum requires you to create and hold this unnatural facade. Of course you're going to get caught if you do that.

The majority of time as scum you should play just as you would as town. You'll obviously make specific plays that you wouldn't as town, but for the most part, your scum game shouldn't be markedly different from your town game. There aren't any legitimate reasons why you can't do something like this, unless you're a godly town player, in which case you're basically going to have to play out of your skin.

Occasionally, I push a town player as scum and become so involved in the push that I actually have to check myself and remember that I already know he's town. This isn't bad scumplay, it's just being able to detach from reality when it suits you. If you're constantly trying to scheme against the town, you'll simply come off as forced and unnatural.

This is actually the best post on the subject here, in my opinion.

Playing scum doesn't mean acting out a charade, it means controlling which aspects of your personality & thoughts people see. Just use what's there, and don't force it too hard. It's surprisingly hard to catch out a scum member who can play a relaxed, thoughtful game.

[VysePresident]

meta is a tool and just like all tools it is entirely dependent on the skill level of the person who is using it!

Haha, fair enough.

[pieguyn]

In other words, people have a tendency to focus on all the wrong things, trying to build up tells. Meta works best when it's used to understand how a person thinks, and then reverse engineer their play to comprehend the player. This is useful in basically any game from there on out with the player - we can change how we do things, along with our understanding, but people don't really change at the core of who that are. Once you understand that, the rest follows.

^ correct usage of meta and the only way in which I use it. the only exception is when I wanna look up stuff like how often someone busses when they're scum, or other basic metrics, but I don't regard it as a 100% tell and always analyze the motivation of what actually happened in the game.

it's the exact same as everything else besides meta, if you just try and apply meta to form "tells" it won't work, you have to use it to divine motivation. most of the time, though, you don't need meta to hunt motivation, which is why I hardly use meta anymore except on people I know really well.

[GuyInFreezer]

I usually only use meta to eliminate alignment-null stuff to better the focus on alignment-indicative stuff.