Town Meta Perspective 2020

[OkaPoka]

i thing the core issue is most people don't enjoy rolling scum so a pretty good way to catch a good % of scum is to cull everyone who isn't efforting

one great way to demonstrate you are efforting is by hyperposting the thread. also not getting miseliminated is a huge boon for town, and more and more people are cognizant of the idea that not getting miseliminated is one of the most important things you can do as town.

i think that until a sizeable majority of players like rolling scum - this meta is going to stay on top and the trend of hyperposters will only increase

so i think the first step is: how do you make rolling scum more enjoyable? or how do you encourage people to effort scum to the point where they are willing to hyper-post and match that intensity? if you aren't willing to put in the effort as scum to win, then you shouldn't win, and that's the phenomena that's really happening - i think.

i do apologize as i am a chronic hyper-poster

[OkaPoka]

is 80% meaning townies made 80% of the post?

[OkaPoka]

This is my thread and this topic still ails me, so here come the statistics. Going to use sample size of the large theme games as that seems to have the most posting.

Game	% Town Activity	% Town	% Town Activity - % Town	Outcome
Epilogue!	80%	76.5%	+3.5%	Town Win
Xenoblade 2	87%	77%	+10%	Town Win
Death Curse	75%	75%	+0%	Town Win

It actually took me too long to format that nonsense, point is the percentile difference of scum activity out of 100 is absolutely staggering

i dont think the table is too telling?

[OkaPoka]

im confused, when its 80% town activity, are you saying given any random post, there is an 80% chance town made that post?

[OkaPoka]

Number of townies not calculated, it's their posts see two posts above you

Oka has a point though, it makes sense that 75% of posts are made by town if the game is 75% town. (Also death's curse was 1/3 scum I think?)

praise murdercat but im not sure if i interpreted the 80% correctly which is why im asking

[OkaPoka]

I think where games suck is that the concept of playing Mafia lately is more about ensuring it's only

your

idea of how it should be played.

This makes everything more stale. Narrative-driven towngames leads to compliance and lack of variety in play-style. It also will lead to scum gaining credibility in the eyes of those who drive the narrative by simply following along, which someone already touched on already in this very thread.

Interesting tidbit: Narrative gameplay is not something that popped up just because of hyperposting. This is something deeply embedded within MS as old meta used to be way more stringent on what was good and bad play. To me, Narrative was a more ubiquitous way of the game was played back then and now Narrative has become contextual. I hardly ever see the term 'VI" thrown out anymore and advocacy of policy lims is practically non-existent.

wdym by narrative-driven?

[OkaPoka]

you know, i wonder if a lot of these "problems" are a result of this site's love for dayplay and dislike of nightplay

we all love our nightless-esque mountainous-esque setups, but in a world with limited nks, the value of scumhunting goes down and the value of townhunting goes up (making hyperposting more effective)

in a world where power roles are gated and we don't have the broken-ness of f2f mafia's follow the cop/doc, dayplay is the most important and stuff like meta and emotion-spewing is extremely relevant b/c there is little concrete information to go off of, so you need to get those reactions and emotion reads. there isn't that extra layer of playing to draw the nk, or trying to keep your townreads/pr reads to yourself to protect player x. Everything should be transparent and townblocking (circlejerking) just makes more sense you know?

and importantly with no hard clears and limited soft clears, authority is basically gained by imposing yourself onto others. contrast that to a completely ungated cop, people will look and even wait for the claimed cop and his clears to lead the way. like if you know there is just an ungated cop chilling in every setup, you probably aren't going to try and hyperpost your way to lead town down a path. there is a clear better win condition which is: protect the cop and follow the cop etc. idk, setup spec gaming is probably less "toxic" than people killing each other over bad reads and play (emotionally)

edit: i don't consider these actual problems btw

[OkaPoka]

ok yeah dethy games are untoxic and mechanical boring decison trees.

ill refine my idea:

hyperposting/power struggles for thread control is a result of our liking of mountainous games because mountainous games are inherently equal setups with no existing power structure. With no actual hard evidence, it's very hard to create a majority of consensus to eliminate someone. Power structures are a necessary tool to get elims in mafia, and in these equality games, you kinda have to create the power structure yourself, which is where hyperposters vying for thread control can come in.

Contrast that not to your dethy games, but to your inherently "imbalanced" setups where you have one ungated super-town-role and a bunch of vts vs scum. Here you actually have a power structure existent without fighting for it. The VTs play around this power structure by doing things to protect it (hopefully) and once the time is right, the super-town-role is given the reigns to lead without needing to fight for it. idk maybe? it's hard to test this theory because its terrible setup design to create games with a super-town but i wonder if we evolved to enjoy this type of style of play where we play around the rand-ed super-town, would hyperposting even be a +ev stylistic choice. because as it currently stands, hyperposting is probably the best way to get thread control and create these needed coalitions, but remove the need to take over the thread and idk

[OkaPoka]

i will say its not a very interesting theory mainly because the only way we could test it is by isolating people and letting them develop a meta of playing these hyper imbalanced setups and seeing the results

and people don't like playing these setups for a reason

[OkaPoka]

i guess my "thesis" is majority elimination games like mafia require a power structure and "leaders" and in equality setups, players need to compete to fill that void. hyperposting is just the meta way to accomplish this, it gets you townread which is usually necessary to get people to work with you and lots of interactions are needed to whip votes to form a consensus and coalition

i mean let's think of the alternatives:

town doesn't need a power structure because they are always on the same wavelength on who to eliminate - will never happen. sometimes things can magically fall into place for a couple elims or things are more likely to fall in place for micros, but in larger playerlists, that's not going to happen.

town needs to be willing to bend over their back to compromise on any elimination so a power structure to build consensus isn't necessary - is terrible for town because scum just can power wolf and force bad elims if every townie was a compromiser.

a different way to get people in line maybe where everybody is so willing to trust player X's reads regardless of alignment they will blind sheep and the existence of player X is the power structure - nope

idk

alternatives?

[OkaPoka]

Oka, how much do you think this problem would be helped if Innocent Child were a more common role?

And isn't some of the problem on town/human psychology for tending to listen to loud people repeating things disproportionately?

I feel like anarchy can work and compromises can happen without it being about sheeping a town leader, but people need to not just agree with whoever is repeating things a lot, and I think that's on quieter players too.

tbh i don't know

on one hand they should theoretically be able to step in and take control of the thread at any time, making hyperposting less palatable as vying for thread control is a little pointless

but on the other hand, in practice, i don't really see IC's stepping in that often to dictate the dayphase or utilize the fact that they are the IC to force wagons through/build blocs >average. in practice, most IC's play like they are a vanilla. maybe in an "evolved" world, optimal IC play would change this, but the lack of clears to create a PoE i think, makes it challenging to get your average IC to actually play the leader and push the envelope. and so there is still that void in IC games and hyperposters come in and party

[OkaPoka]

maybe the real answer is hyperposting gud

and to the analogy of not everyone should lock dps

you don't need to hyperpost to dps, and you can hyperpost as a support or a tank. hyperposting should be viewed less as offensive firepower and more of, idk, cooldown reduction. sure having CDR is supremely important on spellcasting dps, but it doesn't mean a healer or a tank doesn't want CDR. free CDR is good for everyone, but i do suppose a tank doesn't need cdr as much as an artillery mage.

[OkaPoka]

so when does the TAS (Tool-Assisted Scumhunter) get released