#2: a treatise on the random voting stage

[Vi]

I think this is an important point. It is my firm belief that the most difficult part of scumhunting is catching the initial scum, precisely because you have no reliable associative tells to go on. Similarly, it can be very hard to catch a lone scum. Associative tells are often by far the strongest tells; catching x by how he interacts with his scumpartners as opposed to how he reacts to townies is pretty much expected.

I fully agree with this. A lot of scum-side awkwardness comes from having to deal with other people. With a lone SK or no flipped scum, it's more difficult to see that awkward behavior (pairing theories between two living players almost always end in tears).

I also agree with how RVS silliness is fun but really counterproductive. Making silly votes to be silly just clouds an already cloudy stage of the game. Then again, it is a decent scumtell...

I disagree with Glork about how artificial it is to say there's a "clear division" between RVS and serious business. If you random vote after nonrandom discussion has already started, you're effectively ignoring it... why?

Probably my biggest gripe about the early game is how people say "oh you, it's only the RVS, don't get worked up". The game doesn't get started if someone doesn't take a stand. I would prefer if it didn't take something this to get discussion going <.< (sadly, this worked very well if you read on)

[Vi]

If you just start out every game where the first post is jumped all over for any scumtell you can find, just because you have nothing else to go off of, that actually discourages activity. Since if you can't have a stage where you can at least joke around, introduce yourself or just shoot the shit before things get inevitably serious, then what's the fun in playing the game? This isn't a super serious ultra competitive must win situation every game. The point is to have fun. So if we just start every game with constant unyielding ruthlessly aggressive word by word analysis of even the simplest of posts, then you discourage people from wanting to play the game since they can't say anything at all without being called out as scum.

The fun

is

to constantly unyieldingly ruthlessly aggressively tear peoples' posts apart.
Plus first posts can be quite telling of alignment - SensFan is one player who ardently supports this; Pesco47 is infamous offsite for "First Post Mind H4x", where he (accurately) pegs scum based on putting peoples' introductory posts through causation analysis.

[Vi]

Because it's no fun feeling like you can't post because no matter what you say, it's going to be scrutinized.

This isn't the game for you, then.