Keeping your vote in play

[Mathdino]

Policy lynch everyone who doesn't vote
It's very very slightly more likely to hit scum than random actually

[Mathdino]

Tfw he made that post as scum though trying to mislynch non voters

[Mathdino]

Subject: Newbie 1856 - It Was A Very Good Year: GAME OVER!

Just as a general IC observation, and to explain one of the points I'm rampaging about in my above post to multiple people, I'd like to describe something that just happened in this game, and that I often see happen in Newbie games (and that I personally detest).

1. People will RVS. (I find this brilliant and good)
2. People will hold people accountable for their RVS choices (I find this brilliant and good)
3. People will respond to #2 (I find this brilliant and good)
4. People will then unvote their RVS and claim it as a joke...and do *nothing else with their vote*. (I will slightly vomit into my inner soul in sadness)

Look. Let me explain it like a joke;

Currently we have a lot of people voting 'Not Voting'. The hing is, I town read 'Not Voting', anyone with half a brain should. I guran-damn-tee you that 'Not Voting' does not have a scum role PM. 100% of the time voting him will not result in your vote being on scum.

Now, I'll *agree* that voting town is a bad thing for town to do. It does not help the town wincon to vote for town. And I also get that voting
Not Voting' will result in a 0% chance of voting town - huzzah for you. That said, generally speaking if you vote a random player in the game (and, yes, forgive me, I'm going to simplify the math, but it's a general statement, go with the basics and don't get bogged down in the specifics.) But, mathwise - random vote will be 66% on town and 33% on scum.

So let's compare;

100% of the time, the only way town wins is by voting scum and not voting town.
0% of 'Not Voting' votes are on scum (or town)
66% of all other votes are on town.
33% of all other votes are on scum.

So...how do you expect to vote scum by voting 'Not Voting' exactly?
or is that a meaningless, wasted vote, that is of zero help to your wincon, and is arguably a place for scum to hide and avoid stuff whereas it is *never* a place beneficial for town to be?

Not everyone agrees with me on this, so take it with your own grains of salt.
but I'm pretty sure I'm right.
And I 100% know the math is right.
And even the best argument against me is that people want to wait for "more info" before placing a vote...which requires them to ignore that info conversation is pretty much 99.9% generated from votes being placed, so even then they're wrong and I'm right.

Just a thought.

[Mathdino]

1. i disagree with the idea that voting for town is unhelpful for town wincon. thor is jumping to the conclusion that voting for town is unhelpful when it's really LYNCHING town that is unhelpful. the strange thing about this game is that the vast majority of votes do not lead to a lynch, and oftentimes can't possibly be expected to lead to a lynch.
like the vote is such a weird arbitrary concept and the idea of it as a weapon is such a weird emergent construct from mafia
despite the fact that we all know most votes are useless, we all in some way react to votes, consciously or subconsciously
anyway that's a tangent

2. there are many good players who basically don't vote and only vote people they'd be willing to dayvig
partially because they recognise that the vote is kind of a meaningless construct until the vote is actually used to reach a lynch
so they use scumreads and FoS's to demonstrate what the rest of us would use votes for, and that's somewhat valid to me (if annoying because it makes things like VCA harder since they don't play like the rest of us)

that said too many players copy that style of being nervous to vote anyone they're not sure on
but then extrapolate that to also being useless in other areas of townplay
to the point of being unwilling to actually take stances on anything

so as a general rule, thor's POV would be helpful to the game of mafia, and is what we should be teaching newbies
i just don't think it works as a universal rule

sorry for the essay

[Mathdino]

In that case I stand corrected, people probably do deserve to get attacked ingame by town and scum for not voting
Thanks for the data Gamma