In post 183, Gamma Emerald wrote: In post 182, SpyreX wrote:If 'not playing the game' is mildly scummy and the idea of stopping it carte blanche is a trust tell like that red text nonsense were too far down the rabbit hole.
Sounds like i need the original bam ruleset again hot damn.
Red text nonsense?
Red text was one example of a trust tell that's been used historically before they were banned.
A trust tell is just "I'll only use this when I'm REALLY telling the truth"; some sort of super-truth that a player will never use in their scum games but may use in town games, that they guarantee in a between-games sense. This is banned and rightly so; the inevitable end game is a site meta where town always wins. That's why it's so important that in each individual game, you are required to play to wincon and can be site banned for not doing it; if everyone wanted to increase their winning rate as a function of GAMES PLAYED, it would pretty clearly be the right answer for everyone to just truthfully claim their alignment in every game, since there are more town in a game than scum and a town win of the game produces more winners per game.
I fall somewhere between Spyrex and cfj on this one; I think the trust tell comparison is a bit extreme in scale, but it's not a vacuous argument. Playing against win-con (lynching for something that isn't actually correlated with being scum) in a particular game to create a site culture that's more pro-town in the future (via fewer lurkers and so on) does technically mean you're playing against win-con in this game in order to increase your winning rate in the future, which is the thing we've banned. The difference here is that we're penalizing things that full-stop benefit scum to be common (not needing to commit to reads, say); and the issue is just that townies are irrationally doing these things and so lynching for them is less productive than it "could be".
I think it's probably worthwhile to pressure a lack of transparency as scummy even if empirical data suggests that townies are irrationally choosing to be non-transparent at a similar rate to scum, because townies have more give than scum -town have no cost (and in fact a benefit) to start being more transparent, while scum incur a cost for the same. But going hard-line "I will always lynch non-transparency, even if it's not alignment-indicative" means that you're sacrificing playing to win con for a secondary case, and that can't ever, ever happen or the whole enterprise is pointless.
ps godfather sucks and I'm glad it's dead
"Don’t buy a dozen eggs if you just want a hardboiled egg. Don’t buy a head of lettuce if you just want a salad. Don’t buy eggs and lettuce if you want egg salad because those are not the right ingredients." -Julius Bloop