Including Oneself in Town Lists

[mastin2]

Back when confirmations were normally done in-thread, at least one player claimed that you could figure out if someone was scum purely from the way they confirmed.
Given that many people used to type /confirm regardless of alignment, it's hard to see how that could work.

That player happens to be me.

I'm pretty sure that if not the first, I'm the most famous prominent user of it.

And to this day, I maintain it to be true.

There are town confirms and there are scum confirms.
I do have a technique involved behind reading whether it's town, scum, or neither (a technique which has gotten more accurate with age rather than the inverse), but I largely refuse to disclose it specifically because it's MY thing. (Though, if you know me, it's really not that hard to guess my mystical magic ways.) My way of reading people. I like using it. Does it have 100% accuracy,

hell

no. But is it good for generating RVS reads? HELL YES. All those times you see me call people "town"/"town?"/"scum?"/"scum", I'm dead serious about it. (I tend to just use silence for nulls, though I may comment on a null post and simply not include an "Also, *alignment*" with it.)

[callforjudgement]

Also in practice people are bad at identifying anime.

Clearly we're going to need a list of animetells, not-anime-tells, and things that are Not Anime Indicative.

I once saw someone arguing that all the town PMs had gone out sooner, therefore everyone who confirmed quickly was town.

I'm paranoid about something like this happening in a game I mod. That's why I've always sent out role PMs one at a time in playerlist order, even though my rules ban things like timestamp discussion and thus should theoretically make it safe to send out all the VT PMs at once.

[Vi]

Also in practice people are bad at identifying anime.

Clearly we're going to need a list of animetells, not-anime-tells, and things that are Not Anime Indicative.

well

First off there's the anime style. If you can't pick that out, maybe you shouldn't be the first to call people weebs.

There are several media that USE the anime art style, though. Cobalt kept insisting that one of his avvies (not the one he has now) was a vocaloid; my current avvy is from a video game (that tries its best to be a cartoon, but nonetheless). These are somewhat gray areas (are vocaloids weeaboo? ehhhh yeah but they're also niche), but if the source material is not actually a work of media passively consumed and few other animetells are triggered, the avatar is Not Anime Indicative.

From there, the list of animetells in ascending order of severity looks something like...
*Lighter colors - relatively few dangerously anime avatars make extensive use of dark colors
*Females featured - or more properly, anime males are markedly less of an animetell than anime females
*Non-normative-sexual fanservice - animal ears, heterochromia, etc.
*"Cool" factor - the masculine equivalent to normative-sexual fansevice (thinking of DeathNote's avatar, which is decisively anime but not damningly so)
*Well-known characters - A Hatsune Miku avatar would be judged more harshly than any other vocaloid.

Any

Haruhi or K-On! avatar will be judged harshly.
*Normative-sexual fanservice - of varying degrees ranging between boob windows, misshapen breasts, unrealistic poses, exposed panties, etc.
*Moe - in general the larger the blush, the more egregious, especially if it extends beyond the character's face
*Caricature art - characters presented in a simplified art style from their original incarnations for purposes of looking "anime cute"

In short, if I saw someone with an animated Carmelldansen avatar I would push them through a rope so quickly I wouldn't realize what was going on until their body stopped twitching. Pure reflex.

[Untrod Tripod]

In short, if I saw someone with an animated Carmelldansen avatar I would push them through a rope so quickly I wouldn't realize what was going on until their body stopped twitching. Pure reflex.

yeah that sounds pretty awful

[Raskolnikov]

From there, the list of animetells in ascending order of severity looks something like...

hmm

[Alchemist21]

I might be able to hide my Anime and not get lynched according to Vi's tells.

[Gamma Emerald]

Nope. Name is a dead giveaway.

[Alchemist21]

Damn, you're right.

[Zachrulez]

I once saw someone arguing that all the town PMs had gone out sooner, therefore everyone who confirmed quickly was town.

PS, they were wrong about the PMs but right about the person being scum

PSS, believe it or not it was Tierce in a rare moment of not thinking clearly that made the argument

PSSS, scum won regardless because I was the sole survivor

If you're prepared enough as a mod, there shouldn't really be much of a time difference for when role pms go out. (Though discussing timestamps should be banned by any reasonable mod already.)

I take confirmations as a reply to the role pm for exactly those kind of stupid metagaming reasons. When someone confirms should never be a point of discussion in a game, ever.

[callforjudgement]

I take confirmations as a role PM reply partly for that reason, but for a bunch of other reasons too. Here's the full list:

• What's being discussed here: as long as your thread only lists the
  number
  of confirmed players, not the
  identity
  of confirmed players, it prevents any sort of confirmation tell happening (which I consider valuable mostly because it doesn't pressure scum into ending their pre-game discussion early, if they have something to say);
  
• As long as you don't acknowledge any confirmations until every role PM is sent out, it prevents any sort of information leaking from the timing of role PMs (whereas if someone /confirmed in thread before all role PMs were sent out, the players who got their role PM later would know that they'd got it later); this probably isn't a problem but because scum PMs take slightly longer than town PMs to send as you have to edit in the names of the buddies, there's a tiny possibility for an information leak;
  
• It helps to ensure that players have actually read their role PM and are aware of their role;
  
• If the game is doing anything even slightly nonstandard (e.g. nonstandard win conditions) you can ask players to repeat it back to you as part of the confirmation, and thus are aware of which players have misunderstood their role;
  
• It means you don't have to leave the thread unlocked while the game's still in confirmations (and thus has a chance of needing last-minute playerlist changes), which reduces the potential for abuse.

[Ircher]

I once saw someone arguing that all the town PMs had gone out sooner, therefore everyone who confirmed quickly was town.

PS, they were wrong about the PMs but right about the person being scum

PSS, believe it or not it was Tierce in a rare moment of not thinking clearly that made the argument

PSSS, scum won regardless because I was the sole survivor

If you're prepared enough as a mod, there shouldn't really be much of a time difference for when role pms go out. (Though discussing timestamps should be banned by any reasonable mod already.)

I take confirmations as a reply to the role pm for exactly those kind of stupid metagaming reasons. When someone confirms should never be a point of discussion in a game, ever.

I send my in the order I prepare them but I shuffled the role list anyway to keep that from being gamebreaking. Discussing timestamps is DEFINITELY a modkillable offense and it happens to be one of the few rules I don't spell out in my ruleset (partially cuz its implied by the rules concerning mod communication.)

[Zachrulez]

I spelled it out because a player some time ago asked if he could do it because it wasn't spelled out.

[Gamma Emerald]

About including yourself: when talking about non-clears, I'll include myself if I'm not clear. A normal reads list will probably not feature me.

[Sleepless Assassin]

I didn't look at the dates and i was excited at yos. Thanks

Sorry Spy. Would have been cool if Yos was back.

[Amrun]

Yos posted recently in the Speakeasy, but holy necro Batman.