More Important: Day 2 or Day 3?

[NoPowerOverMe]

Common perception is that day 1 usually is a mis elimination. That being the case, would you say that day 2 or day 3 is more important for either side?

[Bunno]

It depends on the number of scum/players in my opinion.

If a micro, newbie or small game doesn't get into a good trajetory in day 2, it's harder to make a miracle comeback in day 3. I think Day 2 is most important than Day 3 here because they rarely have a reset from day 2 to day 3 in reads. You can often predict how Day 3 will go based on Day 2.

In larger games though, which I would include even 13p ones, day 3 is a day where they can still afford a miselimination most likely, but at the same time everyone feels more of a sense of urgency if there wasn't mafia eliminations. Day 2 people are still at ease/not pressured/trying to understand the first flip wagon, therefore they began to more intensively focus on the game in general on Day 3, which decides Day 4 often I feel.

[tn5421]

Day 2 is the most important, it sets the tone for the rest of the game.

[Nero Cain]

why not d1?

[tn5421]

why not d1?

1: Nobody else takes D1 seriously

2: Barring serious setup shenanigans, D1 is a no-information day.

[Ramcius]

why not d1?

Most people don't know how to play D1. That's not a joke, but the excuse people gave me in past, when I asked them why they don't do anything useful D1

[Albert B. Rampage]

Day 1 is the most important.

The more the game progresses, the less important the day.

D2 > D3.

[tn5421]

D1 could be the most important but most people refuse to take it seriously.

[Ythan]

What does taking day one seriously look like?

[Cheery Dog]

The earlier the day, the more lives you can save.

[Nero Cain]

I mean, it's old school to think that d1 is the most important day and the reason was mostly b/c there used to be a time when day chat wasn't a given (or almost) and scum didn't always get pre-game chat. I also think that, yes feelings ebb and flow but first impressions normally shape a game. You could certainly make the argument that more information is the most important aspect and thus latter days are more important but eh...

[mastina]

In general, in theory, the more information available, the more accurate the town's deductions will be, because the town players will have more evidence for them to be town and the scum players will have more evidence pointing to why they are scum.

In practice, this is a bit more tricky, because the more information available, the more false positives/negatives there will be, with every town player having made imperfect plays where it is possible they're scum and every surviving scum player having made smart (or, by lucky happenstance, at least appearing that way) plays which look town. (With the benefit of more time, scum can adapt their play to better tailor it to the needs of the surviving town and manipulate the town more effectively. So the longer the game goes, the better they will be at pulling this off, especially thanks to town paranoia of them doing this even if they're not, of town paranoia-thinking that a town player is scum doing this.)

If the town is able to accurately sift through this extra information and genuinely separate "scum that make occasional good posts but are still scum" from "town that have many scummy posts, but a few posts which show their alignment", and/or the ability to accurately sift through this information and genuinely separate "town that may have one or two weak points, but are still town", from "scum that look really good, but have a few posts that show their actual alignment", then the extra information is valuable.
With scum being exposed from the extra information and the town able to effectively and accurately townbloc without paranoia eating them up, extra information helps them secure the win.

By that token, later days with more information (and on that note, longer days that make use of the time) are more important. If the information being generated can be accurately used to help determine the alignment of players, then it is of great use. POE is a killer of scumteams, and if the town doesn't cave to paranoia (or if scum are in the townbloc, the town correctly has paranoia on the scum that infiltrated it), then the town will be able to use new information to find the answers they need in order to win.

Of course in the vast majority of towns these days, they can't actually do this with even remote accuracy/competency, so in that case, I'd actually argue that if you can't accurately sort/sift through the extra information well, the early stages of the game where there's less information are actually the most valuable--sayyyyy, on D1. I think that D1 is legitimately the most important day of the game for setting the tone of the game to follow, and it is quite possible to be quite accurate on it, and even get an elimination on scum! (Sometimes, albeit rarely, without scum having helped you!)

Assuming that you can't get good info from D1 is a self-defeating prophesy; you won't get good info if you don't try. Assuming a lack of pregame role info, the game/information starts from the very first post a player makes in the game, and this is where things are at their most pure/raw form where scum are at their most exposed. The information there is never truly obsolete, and is often surprisingly accurate, at least at identifying town as being town.

(For those who know me, this is why I tend to make my early readslists and quite often, the people who're significantly north of null are almost all or even entirely town. Because scum really struggle to look really town in the earlygame quite often.)

[callforjudgement]

Thinking back on the games I've played, most of the time I've won as town it was a consequence of what happened on D1 (this isn't to say that you can necessarily figure out a lot about the game

on

D1 – although sometimes you can! – but that the information from D1 is often what goes on to help you solve the game on future days). A few years ago, a long-standing player (I forget which) observed that when Mafiascum towns win, it was typically a consequence of a really high-information D1 elimination which gave a lot of insight into the motivations of the various people on the various wagons (even though much of the time, it was a townie who actually got eliminated).

I think it's worth noting that as the game goes on, optimal town strategy and optimal scum strategy become closer to each other (in an extreme case, imagine a 2:1 ending with one player confirmed: the unconfirmed townie and the scum will be doing everything they can to get each other eliminated, so the townie's play and the scum's play should be indistinguishable by that point because they both have identical motivations and the situation is entirely symmetrical). In fact, you can probably make a reasonable argument that the more information that town has, the harder scumhunting becomes, because one of the main scumhunting tools is trying to work out who has more information than they should.

My gut reaction to the question, though, was "the most important day is the day on which lots of players become claimed and people start to get a good handle on what the setup actually is" (this applies primarily to Closed games, of course). Games where town are forced into claiming early often go south quite quickly, for example. Days like that are also a gold mine for gathering reactions, and days

after

that become much less useful for scumhunting because the optimal strategy for each faction becomes a lot more obvious. And of course, it's also the day when you get your "setup speculation hints" (i.e. players who are highly likely to be town, or scum, on the basis of what people have been claiming; this is pretty much an inevitability in Closed setups, and is something that reviewers take into account when balancing games as part of the town's power budget).

[callforjudgement]

It's probably also worth posting the following, the strongest town performance I've ever been part of:

Game breaking: Although I'm obviously biased, I don't believe that the game was broken via the transfers. As I say in the Dead QT, I believe that the Mafia could have won every single auction in the game, and still lost. The plan of transferring would've backfired disastrously if the Mafia had had 2 (or perhaps even 1) person in the "receiving money" column. However, that wasn't the case here. All of the Mafia were identified as not-Town D1, and none of them were ever able to shake that suspicion. That was incredibly surprising to me.

Here's SlumberPartyBois' #696, color coded appropriately.

HERE ARE THE PEOPLE I WANT TO TRANSFER THEIR MONEY TO OTHER PLAYERS:

• ELMO
  
  
  GREYICE
  
  
  GUILLE
  
  
  VOIDEDMAFIA
  
  
  PITTY
  
  
  EIDOLIN
  
  
  PHILAMMON
  
  
  SEANALD

If I did not list you, you are a town read (other than Defender who is dying).

We can force players that are not town reads to transfer their money. If they don't it's a scumclaim. Sure, scum won't have to transfer everything but they will have to transfer the amount that they would have as town, which fucks them over. THIS IS HOW WE BREAK THIS GAME. IF ALL NON-TOWN READS AGREE TO THIS, EVEN IF THEY ARE ACTUALLY TOWN, FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE GROUP, WE WIN.

If I did not list you you are a town read of mine. This includes:

• BBmolla
  (at least he's not scum)
  
  Mehdi
  
  
  Stefan
  
  
  Peregrine
  
  
  Tazaro
  
  
  greygnarl
  
  
  Tammy
  
  
  Salamence
  
  
  Gentlemen Bastards

Mafia was not helped that callforjudgement was able to completely dismantle the wagon that had been building up on Elmo TeH AzN, but, again I don't think it would've mattered.

It was a 14:6 setup. Day 1, town managed to dayvig one scum, and form a townbloc of 10 (!) of the townies. It was one of my best town games ever, and yet my play was entirely irrelevant; town had figured out so much on D1 (before I even replaced in) that even if I'd outright tried to gamethrow, they would have resoundingly won anyway.

If anyone tries to tell you that it's impossible to form useful reads D1, ignore them. It's definitely doable, and it's definitely happened.

[BBmolla]

I was also a miller dayvig and no one believed me

great game

Edit: I miss Magua

[Ranmaru]

Day 1 is the most important.

The more the game progresses, the less important the day.

D2 > D3.

Agreed. Every other day is just Day 1 revisited.

[Jake The Wolfie]

I'd suggest that D1 play is by definition hard because early game town/scum play usually looks identical, and scum tend to only get caught because they deviate from town play (which should be obvious). IMO a great scum player would razzle and dazzle the town into thinking that they are town, like a themepark. It's all a facade, no doubt, but if the town isn't paying attention, they see the trees and think there's a forest.