On the reliability of scumreads Day 1

[northsidegal]

i have always disagreed with the notion that day 1's are useless and will argue against it every time i see it brought up. reading people based on their play doesn't really change significantly from day to day, and i really don't think that should be something that you just ignore.

Spoiler: i wrote more words about this here

I can see why analyzing day 1 dialogue in the later days would prove to be useful, but on the first day itself, unless you get lucky and hit scum with a wagon, how would you hunt for scum? There's no inherent information distinguishing them from town, right?

Do you believe that people lying and people telling the truth do both of those actions in the exact same way? If so, you would be factually incorrect.

In real life, at least, there are various traits of liars that can distinguish them from people telling the truth: that's the principle behind the polygraph (despite its dubious reliability) and police interrogations. This is perhaps a lot more noticeable in face to face mafia where the stress of continued lying gets to people in a way that might be a lot more obvious than could come across through a textual medium like a forum. That being said, in principle it's still visible through a forum – just because there aren't necessarily

objective

rules for what town do versus what scum do, that doesn't mean you can't analyze things within the context of the game: for example, if someone's thought process is consistent, if it seems like they have conviction in what they're saying, etc.

On something of a separate note (and I bring this up separately because I know that some people disagree with me), a tool that is almost always applicable regardless of the day phase would be using a player's meta. If someone posts a lot as town but doesn't post as much as scum and they're posting a lot in Day 1 of a game that you're in, well... that's something that points towards that person being town that you didn't need any flips to derive. That's obviously a very simple example, but there are much deeper things you could look at, all of which basically come back to the principle of "what's the difference between someone's townplay and their scumplay".


Trying to analyze everyone's alignment simply in terms of the information gained by flips is, in my opinion, almost certainly bound to get lose you games to scum who do things that you just don't expect: bussing, white flag gambits, nightkilling strange targets, etc.