So here’s my thought process behind the point of RVS. It’s not really supposed to be random, your supposed to vote people you know to sort of reaction test them or do an early wagon, something along those ideas to basically sort the awkward people from the smooth and suave. But playing a bunch of newbie games, where half the player list is unrecognizable and awkward no matter what, because they are newbies leads me to the belief that day 1 really is just a newbie/not_mafia genocide of sorts, not a good place to kill scum, you know what I mean? And voting people you are familiar with, it’s not really fair right? People should always shake up their meta a bit to find what’s optimal, at least I do it a lot because I’m still trying to find that successful style, and I doubt anyone has perfected their game. Voting your friends and not getting the right reaction is punishing them for trying to do better, or voting your friends and getting the right reaction can lead to bad townreads (because the point of scum is to look town!)
So then I was thinking, does RVS provide anything more? There exists the claim about interactions in RVS to find associatives and stuff, but I feel like we’ve evolved as site enough to understand that RVS is too jokey to be taken seriously, it's all wifom, people who claim they found the scum team in RVS are most likely full of themselves.
Considering all of these reasons for why RVS kinda sucks, I read the wiki and some articles on RVS, and they mostly pointed to the same ideas: RVS sucks but it’s alternatives are worse. Don’t do RQS blah blah blah.
But what makes RQS garbage? Looking at the wiki article, the disadvantages are that the questions suck, but is it really that hard to create some good questions rather than begin the game with lighthearted and low pressure playstyle? If we ask the right questions, maybe RQS won’t lead us to scum, but it’s a great way to philosophically start the game, get to know how each person plays and processes the game so we don’t genocide the unfamiliar. Maybe for people unfamiliar with the player list, it’ll help a lot, and it’ll establish some basic guidelines of how people process games so in the future of the game, town can come back to the beginning and look for inconsistencies and the scum override-al of normal town behavior relative to the person.
Anyways this post was a roundabout attempt of starting a better, “enlightened” RQS rather than going with the same old RVS. Let’s start a discussion on why RQS sucks, why we do RVS. But let’s get down to the meat of the reasons why, like the fundamental ideas of your beliefs. You’ve seen my thought process of RVS and RQS, so what’s your thought process?
Pedit: I know people don't like reading large blocs of text and skip to the end, but please just read this one.