In post 2659, Tchill13 wrote:No i welcome it, especially from someone I've seen and I feel they're competent.
Town has two jobs. Not being lynched is the most important. People tend to disagree. If no town is never lynched town will win. This is my issue with lurkers. It's scummy. It's easily avoidable. Good townies can easily play town. Not to mention you can't vote scum if you're dead. If enough townies can't vote scum scum win.
This is correct in a vacuum, but there are instances where it is not.
One thing that a lot of people are aware of but don't pay much attention to as town is general town perception. This is where the general headspace of the town as a whole is and is very likely the single most important thing to the game as a whole since that is what decides who gets lynched during the day and roughly how the game proceeds afterwards.
So yes, generally lynching scum when you can is optimal in most situations, but is that always possible? If you have a choice between two town reads, who do you lynch? The general town perception sometimes gets into a spot where your only options are to either accept that you're going to lynch town that day or you can try and fail to swing the game into a scum lynch.
That also applies to your own lynch; usually it is better to fight for your own life in order to avoid being mislynched, but that's not always correct. Sometimes it is in fact better to accept dying (such as if four other slots are going to be deathtunneled on you until you are dead) and your life is worth less than what your death would affect. It all depends on how the town's total perception is leaning at that particular time. Dying to guarantee the death of two scum is an easy choice.
The 2nd job is lynching scum, which is much more complex. Lynching scum DOES require less activity than being able to convey that you're town. You can easily piggy back off others logic. Scum can also lynch scum, so this doesn't make you town so to speak.
I'm just saying if you eliminate bad town practices then town will win more. It's common sense. Bad practices can't be eliminated here specifically for 2 reasons.
Meta is used to town clear people with bad practices. Lurking, tunneling, bad logic...
This is all pretty closely related and the big reason I make a big deal about the town's total perception.
Not everybody is going to be amazing in every game, the most active player, the MVP, etc. Different gamestates evolve each game based on the differences that happen from game to game and specific players wither or thrive in different gamestates. This is why I think meta isn't that great of a tool; most people are capable of pulling off the majority of things that scum or town can do in order to win, it just needs the exact right situation to occur first. This is ignoring players that just don't give a shit entirely as scum or town every time they roll it, because that's just not playing to the spirit of the game. Meta is very gray and a lot of people use specific reactions or actions people use in the past and directly apply it to the current game, which... doesn't work.
Is hard to say that towns just need to get rid of since of the negative things that drag them down because it's rarely just that; often there's something in game that's causing town to shut down and not function properly. Occasionally there's an outside source, sure, and occasionally there is a player that will always play very anti town every single game, but the majority of the time issues are firmly within the town for why town is not operating the way they should. I think the solution is less eliminating these bad practices and more encouraging town to try to function as a unit as much as possible.
This is not easy in the slightest with how vastly different many players in the playerlist will be, but I guarantee you that every single game where town dominated the scumteam nailed this down pat. It's the single strongest town tool there ever will be.
Mods justify over powered town by assuming town PRs will play as poor or worse than expected while assuming scum will play well. This is a never ending cycle of town playing worse and worse.
I'm sure someone thought that'd fix the inactivity issue for players that don't play when they draw VT. Well it takes activity to convey your town. Now you even have PRs that lurk so they're scummy enough not to beNK'D .
This site rewards inactivity. It rewards bad play in the for of town clears from meta. That's why town sucks here. Nobody is doing anything to fix it.
I agree that anti town players should be lynched more often or at least forced to do more in the game, but that's not a solution if there's an ingame reason for it. If there's 50 pages a day in a game, then there's no way in hell every slot is going to be engaged the whole way through. If there's a fight happening every few pages, since people are not going to want to deal with it. If town are running around with their heads cut off and make having a more deliberate conversation very difficult, not everyone is going to want to post a lot.
I think a good chunk of the issues is that people don't really understand the difference and that they're part of the cause. It's a very difficult thing to notice (and the insane ego from a lot of players, MYSELF INCLUDED in a lot of cases, are the single biggest offender of this), but I believe this is the fundamental cause of the problems with town winning on this site.
I've had a few very strong games since I returned from hiatus and this was the biggest thing I noticed; it's significantly harder to get town onto the right path when you're right and it's harder to see who's right when you're not. Towns have gotten significantly more chaotic over the years and it has driven town cohesion, and therefore town win rates, down.
And yet the egos have gotten even bigger.
