Speculation about why replacements occurred

[callforjudgement]

Moderately recently, the site rules changed to ban discussion of replacements before they occurred; players who are replacing out need to do so without explanation and by PM to the moderator, players shouldn't pressure each other to replace out or threaten to replace out. I strongly agree with these rule changes (having had games ruined by discussion of replacements as or before they occurred, to the extent of needing to abandon a game on one occasion). For this reason, my policy as a moderator is to post only "

Player

is being replaced." whenever a replacement occurs, with no discussion or explanation; this happens whether the replacement was voluntary, a force-replacement for activity, or a force-replacement as a consequence of rulebreaking.

This has left one opportunity for discussion of replacements: retrospectively discussing a replacement that has already occurred. It's quite common for players to say things like "player X doesn't like playing scum, their replace-out may imply the slot is scum", or even "that slot has been replaced 5 times, maybe it's scum" (whether or not these tells are actually

correct

is another matter, but they're commonly used). It's perhaps also common for people to feel guilty about possibly having caused someone else to replace out, or else annoyed at other players for perhaps having caused a third player to replace out.

Anyway, what I'm interested in is whether rulesets should go further in relation to banning discussion of replacements. As opposed to wording along the lines of "please do not discuss replacements until after they have been confirmed to have occurred, this means replace-out requests must be sent by PM", which is annoyingly complex, it would be simple for rulesets to just say "Do not discuss replacements. If you want to replace out, PM me" – in effect, treating discussion of replacements the same way that discussion of ongoing games are. That rule is simpler, and I'm not necessarily certain it's worse. (If it's equal, or better, I'd much prefer the simpler definition!) Note that, as with reads based on ongoing games, forming reads based on the circumstances of a replacement would be permitted, but explaining them would not be.

As such, I'd be interested in input on whether public speculation about replacements that have occurred is a good thing for games. Would it be better to ban it? Are there major balance impacts (enough to make the game unplayable, or small enough to be balanced around)? I have a suspicion that games might be less toxic if people couldn't get into arguments about what had caused a replacement to occur (especially because, under current replacement-discussion rules, there would never be any certainty about it); however, I'm not sure. I think it's a topic that may be worthy of discussion, anyway.

[Isis]

It's really bad to force a townie to play mafia while omitting key information about why their vote is located where it is located. It can result in what seems like continuity errors and read progression errors where none exist, and those things can be scum indicative. I see "don't discuss ongoing games" as a begrudging necessity.
It is ideal to replace a player with as little information given as possible to nerf the strength of replacement speculation, but forcing players to be disingenuous with their reads is something I don't want to do. It seems particularly disappointing that someone who felt cornered by the discussing-ongoing-games rule and dropped to a single concurrent game to negate its impact, could then go on and have a perfect replacement record and be forced to play town with plot holes in their read progression because of how they can't help but feel about

other

people replacing out.
Alignment indicate replacement patterns should be taken seriously and should result in bans. It is game-ruining behavior whether or not the pattern is collectively or individually analyzed.
This topic has definitely come up @gobbledygook takes your side on this.

To try to build an example
If I joined a large theme, and a player on the borderline of maybe needs some investigation has very sporadic posting then replaces out of the game day, then is replaced with a player active enough to retain the slot but not active enough to hardspew, when I reach Day 4 and all my townreads are dead and all my scumreads have fakeclaimed crap I need to let resolve for one night, my day is kind of ruined. I have to either naked vote this nullscum slot, break your rule, or force out reasoning that would justify voting out the slot - which is exactly what scum is going to be doing to townslot in that kind of day 4. It's going to be very hard to express a town alignment doing that. But aside from what that does to my winrate, it is awful dayplay to

participate

in, it's something that subverting the social deduction of social deduction game.
If I can discuss it, I can explain the meta, we can flip the slot, it flips green anyway, we go straight to unadulterated dayplay day 5. It is more humane to the mafia to, any mafia choosing to bloc and getting into an argument with me about the nullscum's alignment is going to be doubly frustrated when refuting much of my reasoning seems to do little to sway my opinion, because the ruleset requires a white lie about it. It's just, bad all around.

I think it's a design consideration that should give way to balance. Even if the lack of the restrictions forces mafia to play at a disadvantage akin to a 2:19 doc cop jk it is better for both factions to be playing with sincere unmonkeyed gameplay. That's my viewpoint.

[callforjudgement]

It isn't obvious to me why the replacement in your example would have much of an impact on your read. Is this a meta read, as in you think that replacing out under those circumstances is a scumtell for that specific player? Or do you think that that sort of replacement is naturally scum-indicative?

I guess this may go some way towards looking at the impact that meta has on a game. If I see someone post a bit, lurk out, come back and stay inactive and unreadable, my read on them is going to be very similar to the read I have if it was actually two different people in the slot with a replacement in between, because I'm not going to be considering there to be much of a difference between the two players. (Maybe it shouldn't be.) I'd also consider the period after the lurk-out to be more alignment-indicative than the period before; and that would be something for which the replacement doesn't seem to matter. Why can't you just say "this slot hasn't been posting much, I would expect them to be posting more as town", which is what your read seems to be based on in this scenario? (Or is it based on the replacement specifically?)

(This isn't necessarily me disagreeing with you; rather, I think I don't understand your example properly.)

[Isis]

In the example it's a meta-read
"borderline in need of investigation" was supposed to refer to investigations by listmods betwen games : "so many replaceouts they are appearing game preferential and at this point listmods are or should be paying attention but not necessarily (nor necessarily should be) taking action". I realize upon review it looks like I was maybe saying they made a scummy post or two during low information phase and I was unclear.

I don't think intepreting rep-outs is generally accurate except when combined with meta, and coincidentally combined with the same sort of "meta" that actually warrants censure. But the threshhold for there being EV value in noticing the patterns is going to be lower than the threshhold for handing out the exceedingly rare bans users have ever been given for strategic replaceouts. It necessarily will be if there is a westernish presumption of innocence for users, and I expect the site will always have one.

And yes you can cite some generic reasons to do your best to bridge the gap but if you're expressing a strong preference for exiling Bob's replacement instead of Alice's replacement because Bob has a doesn't-wanna-play-scum infamy and Alice doesn't and you've mostly otherwise been adopting a PoE playstyle it will be really hard.

[callforjudgement]

Ah right, I see. That's a problem which ideally would be fixed at the listmod level, but I get your point that it often won't be in practice.

From one point of view, at the point where a player has made a tactical replacement, the game is already ruined in a sense: it's quite similar in nature to a trust tell (and very unfair on the player who replaces in). One of the reasons why discussing replace-outs was banned, I suspect, is to try to make the presence of a tactical replacement less obvious (was it based on scum, or friction with another player in the game thread, or Real Life circumstances, etc.). If players are picking up on a replacement as being alignment-linked, the game is probably beyond hope already, given that a slot has been compromised by outside-the-game effects. Arguably, allowing townies to push based on the meta read is more harmful to the game integrity than trying to limit it by banning discussion. (Perhaps the best compromise would be a "you can say this vote is based on the circumstances of a replacement, but you cannot elaborate", which is basically what the existing ongoing-games rule says.)

So I guess I entirely sympathise with a viewpoint "I've been placed in an awkward situation already by a borderline rules breach, please don't make it worse by creating a second awkward situation when I either try to take advantage of it or intentionally avoid taking advantage of it", but nonetheless would hope that this could somehow be fixed by dealing with the original breach rather than the side effects of it. That might be impossible, though, especially at the moderator level. (One thing that frustrates me as a mod is that when a player replaces out under suspicious circumstances, there's nothing I can do other than inform the listmods, because the player isn't in the game any more; quite often, it would be a force-replacement-level offence but the player's being replaced anyway, and modkilling the slot is hardly likely to help matters.)

[Isis]

That's one reason discussing your replace-out is banned, but I don't think it should be viewed as the end-all-be-all main reason because if that's more than a secondary purpose tactical replaceouts are an even bigger problem than I believe them to be. There's also an issue with making posts in the limbo state where you are ~somewhat~ sympathetic to your slot's interests but also aware you are divesting yourself of your wincon in the game, and so the information that can be gleaned from your replaceout post can break the spirit of mafia. It's just kind of the de facto spread that a townie replacing out will express sincere regret they could not stay and solve with the thread if they have to rep out for exams, but a mafia will skip the final tedious exercise of pretending to care about solving, because they don't have a wincon, and they needn't play to it (I did exactly the former in one of my very few replaceouts long before the rules came to exist.)

I do think adding murkiness to whether a repout was tactical or not, and it also adds murkiness to whether a repout was due to mechanical compromise, which can sometimes only go way so having a full site meta of masking it benefits all games.

I have not had much experience with games becoming toxic due to a blame game about whether a toxic player caused another player to replace out. That's different from "it's impossible to force replace a player for replacing out in a compromising way", though, it's, "is it impossible to force replace both players that created a lot of ugly friction in the game thread, one who repped out and one who now has the ire of the town for causing rep-outs?" Yeah it is. Since another replacement search just happened it might seem an oof, but I'm skeptical force replacement is the wrong tool there.

[Iconeum]

i've voted that discussion should be allowed, and will now read this thread

[Menalque]

i've voted that discussion should be allowed, and will now read this thread

[NorwegianboyEE]

I voted no.
Why should it be ban-worthy? If a player replaces out for seemingly no reason when they usually don't. It's inevitable that speculation will occur. In fact i think most players replacing out should state a reason such as "I'm really busy lately" if they don't want players to speculate, because that is inevitable. You can't ban people's thoughts, and those thoughts will impact the game whether you want them to or not.

[callforjudgement]

In fact i think most players replacing out should state a reason such as "I'm really busy lately" if they don't want players to speculate, because that is inevitable.

This is against site rules, and for good reason. In particular, when a townie replaces out for out-of-game reasons, it's very frequently possible to deduce them as town from their replace-out post.

Perhaps it would be preferable to have the player state the reason and nothing else, but it's very hard to enforce that in practice.

[Ircher]

Please do not discuss the reasons a player is replaced. In the vast majority of cases, those reasons are external to the game at hand, and we should assume good faith of others, especially since tactical replace-outs are against site rules. If you feel a player replaced out for alignment-related reasons, you may pm me, but again, please avoid bringing it up in thread as it is an outside influence.

This is more or less my stance with regards to replacements.

[clidd]

It has always been natural for me to speculate in my mind about players replacing in and out.

But I understand and respect the reasons for not being publicly advisable.

[Isis]

Let me toss a topic at this thread
If someone breaks the rule about discussing their replace out by posting in the thread with a writeup to replace out, do you think mods should consider deleting the offending post?

Usually such posts are not deleted.

It's a super super common infraction, in many cases from players who aren't aware of the rule, even for all the pains we've gone to put up a stickied reminder and put it in every ruleset

If a mod catches the post before every single player, you can undo some damage. If the mod catches it before part of the players, you get a split where some of the players have viewed it and some haven't - but there's a philosophy where the less people see it the better since it's inappropriate information, and having the info halfdispersed across the playerlist may be better than having everyone see it.

You would want it to be a monolithic policy you always apply evenhandedly, rigorously deleting rep-out posts whether they are scum saying "I don't have time for this, good luck to my replacement trying to prove you guys wrong about me " or town saying "I really feel guilty but I need to replace out" or the less expected alignment making either post, so the moderator action itself isn't interpretable.
Assuming you do favor banning speculation about replaceouts, you could go further and forbid the discussion of the replace out post that was deleted for those that saw it before the mod, which you might view as an even more crucial preservation of game integrity than the purely speculative discussions or might view as argument ad absurdum for how rendering players mute on what's in their head could be too rough, up to you

[Nahdia]

as a player i generally discourage speculating on why someone replaced (unless they have a substantial history of repping out as one alignment, but that's its own issue), but i dont think it's practical to punish that behavior. people are gonna have their thoughts on it, and that is gonna impact the game.

[callforjudgement]

Let me toss a topic at this thread
If someone breaks the rule about discussing their replace out by posting in the thread with a writeup to replace out, do you think mods should consider deleting the offending post?

I would do this if I caught it before the players were likely to have seen it. If most of the players had likely seen it already, it's too late to delete it at that point. (I follow a similar principle with all posts that break Mafia-specific site rules,

except

that if the post could potentially break the integrity of

another

game, it gets deleted or redacted regardless. Players tend to check their own games more frequently than games they aren't playing in.)

Incidentally, one big advantage of the current replacement rule is that you can just delete all content of the post, force-replace the player, and ask if anyone had seen what was in the post. This looks identical to, say, a player talking about ongoing games or otherwise making a site rule breach, so it'll be hard for a player who didn't see the post to realise it was a replace-out post.

I did once have to abandon a game due to not catching a replace-out post in time (this predated the current site rule against replace-out posts, but the post violated certain other site rules). The slot was so obviously town as a consequence of the post that it needed to be modkilled, but it was early enough in the game that we decided to restart (especially as it was a mechanically complex Theme in which the death of a townie would be, on average, a

good

thing for town, and thus I would have needed to add an extra punishment on Town in order to cancel it out). (And by "decided", I mean "one of the players accidentally PMed the entire listmod team when trying to PM me, leading to a lot of additional damage to the gamestate integrity". That incident may have prompted the removal of the "PM every listmod" option from the interface.)

[Menalque]

In particular, when a townie replaces out for out-of-game reasons, it's very frequently possible to deduce them as town from their replace-out post.

I’m not persuaded by this. I think rep out posts are generally exceedingly NAI when done for OOG reasons. And if you do think they’re town for one and they’re not, then you deserve to get burned, but that doesn’t mean taking away the option for people to try to speculate and to share that speculation with the thread.

As much as players do rep out for AI reasons, and I think we’re kidding ourselves if that doesn’t happen, I think the answer is not “restrict the knowledge that a rep out was likely AI to those already aware of that players meta” but instead, try to hold people to a higher standard of seeing through games even when they don’t like the alignment they’ve rolled.

[callforjudgement]

Many replace-out posts are impossible to read either way (and those don't end up damaging the game). Some of them, though, are very obviously town.

[Umlaut]

Agreed with what seems to be the majority opinion that players should be allowed to speculate about the implications of a player replacing out, as long as the player themselves isn't chiming in on this. I think disallowing "I'm replacing out" posts and replace-out threats, etc., was a good move because of the potential to compromise the game, but people forming opinions about a replace-out is pretty much unavoidable and telling them not to talk about those opinions doesn't actually help.

[Gamma Emerald]

My rules give leniency for discussing replacements for in-thread reasons and their legitimacy. I still ban discussing oog and shoshin-clause type replacement reasons.