How much have things shifted?

[callforjudgement]

I'm gonna disagree with the "not alignment-indicative" hate.
Unfortunately if you just mow through people who do bad things and "deserve" to be lynched, the Town loses more often than they already do.
At some point you have to understand that many people don't play the game the way you'd like it to be played ("well") and you have to get people to do what you want within the confines of how they want to play the game.

I think everyone here's fine with the concept of a null tell. We just don't like the acronym "NAI" for describing it.

Dealing with bad players on your own team is indeed a part of the game (much as many players would love it if it weren't).

[Chuck]

Unfortunately if you just mow through people who do bad things and "deserve" to be lynched, the Town loses more often than they already do.

At some point you have to understand that many people don't play the game the way you'd like it to be played ("well") and you have to get people to do what you want within the confines of how they want to play the game.

This statement is a small symptom of a greater problem.

If site culture now consists of valuing "teamwork" with people who don't play well with others, more than valuing victory, then "winning" is relegated to little more than a glorified participation medal where things also just so happened to go right for you that time because you hit the jackpot in a lottery of detrimental players.

What happened to old guard players teaching "the way things have been" to the new school scrubs by example, and lynching them mercilessly until "the way things are" dawned on them and they started contributing towards making "the way things'll continue to be" into something the old guard could comfortably hand off and retire? (or keep playing until they were well and truly over the hill but then thaaat's none of my business)

The inherent beauty of mafia-style "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink" is that when anyone refuses to drink you can just rope them until they stop kicking. Neutering that is just watering down the game you claim to know and love, in favor of playing slappywags in kid gloves.

Knowledge and culture trickles

down

, not the other way around.

[callforjudgement]

The problem is that sometimes, winning is at odds with making an example of someone who doesn't deserve to win.

Site meta in many places favours the second (and I know there used to be more attempts at it here, although I don't remember many succeeding). Site meta here, not to mention the site rules, favours the first. Sometimes you have to leave someone alive just because they're town, much as you'd want to lynch them.

FWIW, working around terrible players can be a fairly fun challenge, so I don't mind doing it. The main problem is it means that the meta is unlikely to improve over time.

[SpyreX]

Chuck used slappywags, he's permanently alright in my book aside from the fact I agree with the sentiment.

I think the thing is there is winning in the local sense and winning in the grander sense. Lynching chucklesmclurker may, and emphasis on may, impact the local chance of winning but helps the global winning. When lurking, lying or just spewing nonsense become 'nai' then they create a perfect breeding ground for scum to hide in. By forcing the rats out into the light it's a bit easier to catch them.

[Vi]

cfj has it right. It's a lot easier for scum to win when all they have to do is not be the least skilled player in the game.

Like if all it took for the environment to improve was to yell at people and unilaterally eject them from games (or at least say you want to) and when they flip Town fall back on explaining it by policy...

*it still wouldn't work because of how bad players do not perceive themselves as bad and/or resist being told to change because lol edgy teenagers
*how would that be different from the arbitrary policies and playstyles other people use?

[callforjudgement]

For what it's worth, I consider lurking to be mildly alignment-indicative (to be precise, scummy). It only becomes null if the player flakes out entirely. If you're town and have a lot of townreads among the active players, going after lurkers thus makes a lot of sense.

(There are also a few lurker-specific scumtells. Turning up at a moment in which you'd expect their buddies to be yelling at them to do something specific in daychat, after having disappeared for days, is a pretty strong scumtell. You'd think scumteams would be more wise to this by now, but at least the lurkers tend not to be.)

I guess I also dispute SpyreX's mention of "helps the global winning". Mafia has two teams (or more). Why would it be to your advantage to aim help town winrate in fewer games (given that you might well draw scum, and given that if town winrates go up moderators will make setups more scumsided to compensate)? That's very close in nature to a trust tell (in that you're hurting your chance of winning to aid town in future games, without even a guarantee that you'll be town in those games), and those are banned for a good reason.

[Gamma Emerald]

This is what post game discussion is really for(at least I think so): constructive criticism. Automatically voting them is bad.

[SpyreX]

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.

[Gamma Emerald]

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?

[MagnaofIllusion]

This is what post game discussion is really for(at least I think so): constructive criticism. Automatically voting them is bad.

This only works if the players in question want to improve and actively seek to do so.

I can point to a number of newer players who are happy with what they bring to the game and don't see it as bad or detrimental to their teammates and thus ignore anything said on improving their play.

[callforjudgement]

Red text nonsense?

It was a relatively frequently seen trust tell (i.e. not all that many players used it, but they were fairly prolific) that players would never lie when talking in red (the "Red Text of Truth"). There were various unofficial rules for using it which may or may not have been completely made up on the spot to give players outs if they drew scum (e.g. "you can't use it every game" or "you can't use it to break the game"). There were various variations of it (e.g. blue text IIRC had a meaning like "the information you need to verify this is already public", but IIRC with some slight change in the meaning that brought it into trust tell territory).

We're better off with all that stuff banned nowadays.

[Gamma Emerald]

Okay. On my home site, red text is used in thread to declare day actions. Faking this is a modkillable offense.

[hitogoroshi]

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

[SpyreX]

Ohh snap hi hito.

I think this is all from when i was a mafia youth innocent and carefree and i saw these lurkers and i made cases and the people went but spyrex they do this all the time as they beat me unmercifully.
I picked myself up from the dirt and said never again meta. Never again lurkers. Ya'all are scum even if the name is green.
And so not just a sig but a life vision was born.
I cant even imagine how many games ive said ill lose to x before i let y lurker jerk get a win

[SpyreX]

Ohh and for the record i hate cops and godfathers but my wtf was at it not being 'normal' like whaaat

[SpyreX]

I mean somehow the idea of lets allow multiple players to inhabit a single slot is fine but maaaybe a cop action might not be the gods honest truth isn't.

Needless to say I'm being very productive at work right now. Teach them to block the site.

[mykonian]

Well, lots of people hated godfathers, to the point they were actually not in games all that much anymore. The rule followed what was already happening there, I feel.

[callforjudgement]

My policy on transparency as town is to be more transparent the higher I assess my chances of being lynched. (Intentionally keeping some things secret can improve your scumhunting accuracy, if the rest of the town trusts you enough to let you get away with it.)

As such, I aim to fake it as scum. I'm not always successful; the whole reason that I do it as town is that it's hard to fake as scum. It often fools people for a few days, though, at least.

PEDIT: Re abNormal Godfathers, we all agreed that they need to either be firmly allowed or firmly banned in Normals (if they're in a game, players need to be thinking about that possibility). We tried with them allowed for a while but they were hardly used and yet created paranoia, leading to more modWIFOM than players were comfortable with in Normals. As such, opinion shifted to having them banned instead.

EDIT: And of course hydras are banned from Normals too.

[mykonian]

we are still working on having them banned on site. Surely, someday people will get bored of them.

[hitogoroshi]

Ohh snap hi hito.

I think this is all from when i was a mafia youth innocent and carefree and i saw these lurkers and i made cases and the people went but spyrex they do this all the time as they beat me unmercifully.
I picked myself up from the dirt and said never again meta. Never again lurkers. Ya'all are scum even if the name is green.
And so not just a sig but a life vision was born.
I cant even imagine how many games ive said ill lose to x before i let y lurker jerk get a win

hi spy! Are you back to play or mod a game? I think it's about time for me so maybe we can get a cranky old folks game.

that last line of yours is a tricky gray area. threatening it is productive because y jerk has a easier time capitulating if they're town. But actually goin through with it, and playing to wincon times how much I'd hate losing to X, is pretty clearly not playin to wincon!

[SpyreX]

Well that's something at least awful hydras back to your hell pit where you belong.

I need to look at the normal guidelines in detail but i have a feeling is a swing towards 'concrete' results which is fine i suppose.

I just am more liberal in my idea of normal.

Edit

Hi hito little of both.

And what I'm talking about is two unknowns. If I'm unsure on x or y at lylo I'm coming down on lurkerface every time.

[Infinity 324]

The transparency thing is a fine line. What cfj said is right that non-transparency can help scumhunting because scum don't know how to get them to townread you and may react differently than they would if they knew your read on them.

Usually what happens when I'm town is that I dump all my thoughts into the thread and it ends up spamming the thread and/or degrading the tells I use. And I still make a habit of almost getting lynched.

But a lot of the time transparency is useful, and of you get NKed you want people to know your thoughts.

[MagnaofIllusion]

But a lot of the time transparency is useful, and of you get NKed you want people to know your thoughts.

This. So much this. Another thing I've noticed about the site meta is the tendancy for players to "keep things tight to the vest", subsequently die, and then in the Dead thread wax about how they had this player and that player nailed as scum. If you don't post it in the game thread the rest of Town can't use that knowledge to follow up on your suspicions if they choose to.

[Untrod Tripod]

Unfortunately if you just mow through people who do bad things and "deserve" to be lynched, the Town loses more often than they already do.

At some point you have to understand that many people don't play the game the way you'd like it to be played ("well") and you have to get people to do what you want within the confines of how they want to play the game.

This statement is a small symptom of a greater problem.

If site culture now consists of valuing "teamwork" with people who don't play well with others, more than valuing victory, then "winning" is relegated to little more than a glorified participation medal where things also just so happened to go right for you that time because you hit the jackpot in a lottery of detrimental players.

What happened to old guard players teaching "the way things have been" to the new school scrubs by example, and lynching them mercilessly until "the way things are" dawned on them and they started contributing towards making "the way things'll continue to be" into something the old guard could comfortably hand off and retire? (or keep playing until they were well and truly over the hill but then thaaat's none of my business)

The inherent beauty of mafia-style "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink" is that when anyone refuses to drink you can just rope them until they stop kicking. Neutering that is just watering down the game you claim to know and love, in favor of playing slappywags in kid gloves.

Knowledge and culture trickles

down

, not the other way around.

I wanna cry

let's join a game together and raise hell

[Infinity 324]

i think overconfidence in reads is more toxic than seeing most of the game as null

it really is strange to me how confident some players can get about their scumreads and the mental gymnastics it takes to filter out all those mislynches and think you've got great odds this time for XYZ reason. i think a more honest evaluation of one's abilities and accuracy as town would be greatly beneficial for towns on the whole and should lead to smoother compromising and less tunnelling and 1v1 nonsense.

Something I thought I should say wrt this.

I feel like there is a lot of pressure on people to have solid reads, especially scumreads. Personally I feel this pressure a lot, it's common for me to have no scumreads for d1, then people tell me to get more solid reads, and I sometimes even subconsciously make up reasons to scumread people. This can help get pressure reactions, but usually does more harm than good.

But yeah there's a lot of pressure to have solid reads and be confident in them.