In post 671, VysePresident wrote:Stupid weather. I'm having connection issues, and I've been falling asleep waiting for WiFi to get a post in, so I'm just going to copy & paste what thoughts I have here, and call it a night.
I think the thing that gets to me the most in reading this thread is how many times it stalls in a morass of stuff that...well, honestly, I don't really care about. We have buzzwords flying all over the place - AtE, 'Misunderstandings', Inactivity, overreactions, 'slyly pushing mislynches', "Anti-Town play" (I hate that last buzzword in particular, to be honest.) However, the context behind these buzzwords is either incredibly flimsy, or completely irrelevant to actual alignments.
I think it be worth linking to this Mafia Discussion Thread about buzzwords & the like. It's not that they're always invalid, so much as frequently abused, and I believe this thread in particular would find it worth a look. (For instance, I tend to use meta a heck of a lot, with decent results, though I'm better able to gauge players I've actually played with 'live', than games I read after the fact.) I particularly recommend Brian Skies Post #21, but I can't exactly quote it here due to size.
Actually, having reread the thread in full, I'm particularly curious to hear from Elbirn now. His post there seems to agree with my reasons for scumreading him.
In post 7, Elbirn wrote:In post 0, Varsoon wrote:
Occam's Razor:"I don't want to overthink this game but I want to be justified for taking the path of least resistance."
WIFOM:"I can't accurately assess if you're rusing me or not."
IIOA:"Nice points but I'd like to disregard them."
Meta:"Because you've played other games on site, I want to add perceived validity to whatever my point is."
It's like you're me.
AtE & "slying pushing mislynches", Elbirn? How would you describe those two phrases, if not similar to these buzzwords here? Why am I wrong for thinking you should know better, again?
Then there are the gambits, based at best on quirks & personal tells I don't care much for, or at worst, less than that. (These enjoy a particularly irked spot in my heart after I got tunneled the entirety of the last game I played based on somebody trying to pull a gambit on me to find my alignment. He actually had some really good stuff mixed into his read, but the end result was that I was Town, and just barely survived by fighting his scumread on me tooth & nail with the other players, since he was so confident he was completely ignoring me.)
Honestly, I don't care about most any of this, because, in my experience & opinions, none of this is particularly relevant to alignment. The main things I look for is what interests people, when it interests them, and why. It's something I call 'direciton' & 'positioning', because scum's goal are ultimately different from the Town's. Town needs to lynch scum, scum need to survive until they equal Town, with mislynches & NKs to aid them. So, look for the people trying to blend in, the people aiming to look Town, rather than solve the game. (It goes a bit deeper than that, because there's an essentially infinite number of strategies for scum to do this, but I don't want this rant to get too long. It just takes flexibility & commonsense to get around most of them.)
In other words, anybody can look like Town when the spotlight is on them. The question is, how do they start acting when they're not aiming for Towncred. Do they still Towntell, or does it fade? How about when their strategy suddenly falters, without warning? (I'm rambling now, so I'll cut this off here.)
Sometimes, having such a different perspective than the rest of the game is helpful for me, because it lets me take an outside perspective while scum are playing to their audience. Usually, they don't really 'get it' anymore than I do thanks to knowing alignments, but they're busy looking for openings & vulnerabilities rather than solving the game. This time, I've had a bit of trouble, just because it's tricky to get a grasp on the narrative, and specifically, what people think is important as a group. It doesn't help that I haven't been able to obsess over the game like I used to, when I first started playing Mafia. That's why
---
That does all lead into the scumread I have on Elbirn. It's a matter of his play not following the personality I've seen from him, as well as resembling a chess game more than the typical paranoid Townie. (And even more experienced Townies are paranoid. They're just better at controlling it.)
You don't always want to go straight for the target in any strategy game, but this is particularly true of Mafia, where scum are trying to present an image. Mislynches are nice, but secondary to survival, which (ironically) is why bussing is such a common strategy. (And I love manipulating scum into bussing early.)
Elbirn stands out because of the manner of his read on Klingon, in particular. It's not that Klingon is some impressive bastion of Town play, because frankly, she's not in the least. However, Elbirn is consistently reframing the narrative in the case he had on her that I dissected earlier. Calling someone out for as bad a suggestion as auto-lynching replacements is fair, however, calling it a 'sly push for easy mislynches' is a ridiculous stretch. This is the kind of thing that would never get massive support outside of a particularly crazy Town, and Elbirn's been around a while. I find it very hard to believe that he thought this was actually remotely plausible, or that Klingon would think that way. Frankly, if anyone's 'slyly pushing mislynches', I would believe it was Elbirn.
I've also frequently seen scum use that line before, in exactly the same manner. Your mileage may vary, but it's something I dislike very strongly about his play.
Outside of Klingon, he's constantly feeling out various lines of thought - and I don't entirely have too much problem with people pushing a bunch of reads & all that. It's part of solving the game. The problem is the 'feeling out' part of the statement, because he's constantly directing suspicion outward, and looking at where it sticks - it's too efficient, for lack of a better term. As a general rule, Townies are the hypocrital, paranoid messes that don't know what they're doing. Elbirn is too polished, too Town on the surface, and not enough when you actually look for any depth.
Perhaps think of it this way - A famous bank robber is asked why he robs banks, and he just shrugs and says "That's where the money's at". It's kinda like that in Mafia. Town cred is worth more than gold in this game, and scum are naturally going to gravitate to where they know to find it. Good play is good play, nothing more, at least outside of context. Same with bad/inactive play. Effort is not indicative of alignment, to steal the line. Honestly, Klingon hasn't impressed me this game, but neither has the case against her - If she's scum, I think it's going to be for different reasons than the ones brought against her to day. (There's a reason I'm pressuring her for reads, and such. I want to see her commit, instead of continue what I believe is just a mutually bad tunnel.)
Or let me put this another way. Keeping my theory in mind, can someone look through his play & tell me what's so Townlike about it? I honestly don't think it'll be easy to come up with all that much, if you actually dissect it. I honestly don't see it. I see him going through the motions of Townreading people & pushing the game forward, but these things aren't particularly alignment indicative on their own. These things are just basic good play for either alignment. Where are the signs of any depth to his posts? Why is he hard-pressing Klingon based on "AtE" & "Sly pushes", when they resemble the same buzzwords he dismissed outside the game thread? (And I know they're technically different buzzwords from the quote I linked & all, but it's the same logic. If the four Elbirn mentioned are shallow & useless, what makes these two any different?)
I don't know. I always have a lot of trouble getting my thoughts across to people, because a lot of it is intuitive, and it's hard to convince people who don't also have a similar intuitive take on things. Sometimes, I even rely on buzzwords myself, to sort of sum up my thoughts, particularly when they just start forming. ('Genuine' is a word I use a lot, for instance.) The thing is, I can always go deeper into them when I have to do so, and it's a constant growing process. I don't see that coming from Elbirn.
Elbirn stands out to me the most, because I'm constantly seeing him hitting the basic level 'Towntells' - the ones that remotely experiences scum know to hit, and are very fakeable - and those Towntells don't combine to make a pattern or flow.
Does any of this make sense? Please?
Other reads later. I'm tired, I'm rambling & repeating myself, and I've spent enough time on MS for one night.
This is all fine and well, but I don't see how this makes your case on anyone that much stronger. I'd say its both IIoA and going against Occam's Razor at the same time. I'd really like to know why you find Elb "scummy".
