1) Being survivalistic is scum indicative. This false belief is mainly predicted on the belief that scum cares more about winning than town cares about being misexected.
FACT: town is in general far more likely to get upset at an incorrect scumread than scum is at a correct one. I’ve observed quite a few players even act chill about this as scum who practically went postal over that as town.
2) Tunnels, only inexperienced or newbscum tunnels when it works against their wincon but wrongly deathtunnelling town may often be ego or emotionally invested in being “right” and may ignore obvious clues that detract from that.
3) AtEs, particularly displays of anger are wrongly viewed as usually scum indicative. For the vast majority of players, it tends to be the opposite. Unfortunately town tends to be emotionally put off by AtEs (especially angry one, because
infrequently
scum can do this as well) but in general, it’s town indicative, especially if everything else points to that player being town.4) Ellitells - ignore them. In almost every game I’ve seen them used, they’re usually wrong.
6) Activity levels, whether you base your reads on high post count or lurking, this method is more frequently than not, useless.
7) Ignoring meta. While it’s definitely true that players can and do change their meta, far too many players ignore its value.
FACT: even the most experienced players don’t completely surpass their meta, only up to a point.
8) Omgus scumreads, while it’s way more logical to assume a player is just plain wrong as opposed to scum, when they scumread you, making this assumption is more often than not wrong because many players don’t often see this.
9) Reads are based more on a particular player’s ISO, voting history or player interactions. In an ideal world, this would definitely be true but unfortunately all too often, people allow their emotions or confibiases to trump all of that and there is pretty much no reasoning with people who are locked into to bad reads because of emotion or confibiases.
10) Misusing meta. Meta is generally only useful when there’s a clear, long-standing AI pattern. This also includes selective reading or outright misinterpretation. This is why it’s important to actually back up any meta reads with links or quotes.
11) Gut/soul reads. They are often hit or miss and are most useful when they don’t trump logic or facts. If gut/soul reads align with logic/facts, they are probably correct but when they don’t, it’s best to ignore them.
12) I personally have probably been guilty of most or all of these things at one point or another.
