I did decide to look out of curiosity at one player who had substantial overlap on EM and MS, which is Regfan, former paragon and probably the EM GOAT.
His wiki lists a 72% townwin from 2010-2017, whereas his town winrate on EM was usually in the low 60s, so perhaps you could say the forum format is better at rewarding good players, but I suspect the low sample size plays much more of a role here.
MS-EM also poses a great difficulty for cross-comparison in that the in-practice EV for setups on EM was publicly known and extremely robust because there were often 10,000+ games of a single open setup. This is not at all the case on MS, which is closed playground of swingsets. Whether this cuts in favor of the reliability of results for players like RC or against is unknown to me.
Either way the best players usually didn't get to those high win rates by saying "I had little to no meaningful agency to change the result", so you are at least right in approach!
In post 247, Dannflor wrote:
i think scum get a lot more agency than individual townies in most games
I would expect an elite town player to win about 75% of their games
I would expect an elite scum player to win close to 100%
I definitely would moderate and update my thinking based on empirical data as Prism is suggesting but my intuition in support of this is that if you are never eliminated as scum then you will always win. Obviously you also have to play around mech, not get guiltied, etc, but theoretically there always exists a path where you can solocarry every scumgame. such a path doesn't exist for town so someone who has mastered the art of making themselves unlimmable will inevitably have a higher winrate as scum
"I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away"
(And this is in fact the case in the majority of setups on MS. I mentioned earlier that the 70% scumwin upper bound on EM was accomplished in part because the player picked played almost exclusively setups where the chance of mechanical autoloss was near-zero, so the expectation of 100% win in mountainous does track reality to some extent.)
yah I didn't mean "unlimmable" in the sense of "universally townread" but rather just "the remaining players alive do not achieve majority vote to eliminate you", but you're correct that my definition is handwaving away requisite skills such as ensuring you that are not mechanically POE'd
mostly I'm just saying if you play a perfect scumgame you win by definition, but you can play a 'perfect towngame' (in the sense of having perfect reads and eliminating scum every day you are alive) and still lose. it's somewhat tautological but I do think there's an important distinction of things being more 'out of your control' as town once you're dead
"I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away"
although I guess maybe to argue with myself, if I believe 'not getting guiltied' is a controllable aspect of scumplay then I perhaps should similarly say 'not getting NK'd' is a controllable aspect of townplay
"I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away"
In post 255, GuiltyLion wrote:such a path doesn't exist for town so someone who has mastered the art of making themselves unlimmable will inevitably have a higher winrate as scum
Also it's true that you can't singlehandedly win the game this way as town, but reducing the rate you are miselimmed is the single easiest way to skyrocket your win %!
Which, when combined with the rate of rolling town, is a huge part of why
Also while I'm really the only one who cares about the EM-MS cross comparison, one of the biggest things MS has that EM didn't for player agency to is that MS doesn't have a Night 0.
For example, one of the most friendly setups for a scum player trying to maximize their rate of solo carrying had a 1/8 chance they would be a mechanically guaranteed Day 1 elimination. Not the best result!
MS has no night zero, and thus your day play always factors into the mechanical decisions that are made.
Okay no one cares but I have to correct the above, the mechanical worst case in the described EM setup was the player is mechanically flipped Day 1 1/56th of the time, much more favorable than 1/8th
In post 105, Andresvmb wrote:
Also, {GuiltyLion, Dusa} should literally always get executed in this game.
I didn't want to make this argument during the game cause I feel like it's just WIFOM but now that I'm flipped town let me just say I would never be so awkward around my buddy getting guiltied like that
(of course, I am saying this now so that if I ever AM that awkward, I can point to exactly this game and say why me having clumsy associative with scum is a towntell for me)
Me saying that I wanted to believe you was real. But you had aligned with Dann so hard that I had real difficulty with it.
I also can’t read Titus like ever. I thought it was so weird Titus wasn’t SR’ing me. I guess I should have stayed with that.
My thoughts:
for the longest time I thought my role was like a Mason traitor, and that there was a masonry already out there that I would pay to join. My logic for this was that 400 points being spent seemed like a lot, though in retrospect finding another confirmed town is way better than a cop, I guess.
Amusingly furtive also flubbed his fakeclaim, claiming both that he could not and that he could get a result on a player who had a a PR but had not gained points
Which means literally the only scum player who managed not to scumclaim was dannflor who got guiltied
"As best I can tell, jjh is some kind of wizard with mind control powers." -Jingle
In post 272, jjh927 wrote:
Amusingly furtive also flubbed his fakeclaim, claiming both that he could not and that he could get a result on a player who had a a PR but had not gained points
Which means literally the only scum player who managed not to scumclaim was dannflor who got guiltied
In retrospect I should have just immediately called BS on furtive when the claimed amount for his role was 80 TPR.