Town Meta Perspective 2020

[Awoo]

I'm going to play devil's advocate. No matter what format of mafia you play, this is sort of process is inevitable. Mafia is a game where the team that is able to push agenda more effectively will win. In order to push agenda, you take up a part of the information space. If you take up all of the information space, you are de facto in control of the game, and can advance towards your wincon unimpeded.

In IRL/F2F/Video mafia, the information space is very small, since the natural limits of human hearing make it so you can only really have one conversation at a time. This leads to some situations like 4-3 LYLO where mafia can monopolize the information space, simply by talking in circles and running out the clock, and completely decimate town's chances of making it another day. In my experience, any LYLO of 4-3 or greater in a F2F situation is completely hopeless as town.

A similar phenomenon happens in chatroom mafia. The information space is larger, because you can have lots of conversations at once as the stream of messages flies by. Learn to watch for your name and important stuff in the logs, and suddenly town is able to co-ordinate better. The information space is now several conversations instead of just one. That being said, the most effective way, in my experience, to win chatroom mafia as scum is to swiftly nightkill anyone who displays signs of being able to lead or co-ordinate town, then step in and take their role along with your team. I have funny memories of rolling groupscum without a nightkill in a chatroom game, and co-ordinating and hard aligning with my mafia partners each night on which name we were going to spam in all caps lock the next day and get votes on. We ended up endgaming and winning with only one bus because we completely controlled the information space of the game. As town, putting in a lot of effort to become the town leader and voting off suspicious people is also extremely effective and gets me a lot of wins. It's also not toxic, since the game doesn't last 40 days.

Forum mafia, especially in the iteration on mafiascum where days are weeks, and games last months, shouldn't have this problem of a very small information space at all, at least in theory. Quoting and replying to people lets you have an unbounded number of side conversations. All the time means no time is lost and you can read and re-read every post. In this case, I think the information space limitation ends up coming from human limits. People posting too much can overwhelm that. And then as OP says hyperposting and a #killallnonhyperposters meta kind of breaks human limits of having fun.

In terms of inciting change... posting a lot to take control of the game is a winning strategy! Unless players take action and start policying hyperposters (who you call town), there's no in-game reason not to follow a winning strategy. I also think based on the way you write this, you're thinking about the game of mafia in a bit of a narrow minded way. Mafia isn't just a game of argument VS argument. Reading people by emotion and manipulating people by emotion is part of the game. Truly, I think reading people based on human elements and intuition is far more effective than trying to find logical reasons why they're mafia. I don't know how effective it is over forum, but in other environments it can be very effective to make reads as town and trick people as scum. I might be missing your point though since I don't play on this site.

Also, "(e)lim" is such a lame word. Does not work well semantically or mechanically. Just say voted off, it's unambiguous and to the point. Every killing method results in elimination, but rarely is there more than one mechanic involving voting somebody off.

[Awoo]

Yeah, AtE in chatroom mafia is literally a matter of minutes. It's not very draining whatsoever. F2F is draining because it requires you to actually feel the emotions you're projecting, and forum yikes one day is two weeks.

[Awoo]

As an allegory: I really advocate players to play support in their head instead of thinking the town needs 10 fricking DPS roles. Even a tank, someone who is just really really town even if they're not doing anything game-changing is great. Everyone just wants to DPS

This is a really good allegory. In my own experience, sometimes I had to know when to sit back and let the big town voices get nightkilled and pretend to be a dead parrot before I stepped up as town and carried on the torch to victory, since if I tried to push too hard early on, town would become erratic and uncoordinated.

[Awoo]

Any town player with an ounce of humility and not a great power role should be trying to draw the nk.

Incorrect: if you have 2 scum nailed but can only push 1 before town's attention span runs out, you should probably try to survive two days minimum.

[Awoo]

Generally, it’s just as likely that you’re wrong and you’d be better off dying in place of someone else.

Maybe in forum mafia where everybody is good at the game, but in IRL games where you're clearly the best player in the room and you need to carry this strategy holds.

Speaking from experience.