I agree with this. There are a few things that bother me about the current way RVS is generally looked at.Korts wrote:Great stuff. My one problem is that I expected you to discuss more of the theory behind RVS, namely that it shouldn't even exist as a seperate stage--having a term for a low-information stage in the game often makes players think that there is some magical threshold past which the RVS suddenly ends and the town is out of the woods.
1) People seem to think that there needs to be a distinct cutoff between "RVS" and "Serious."
2) People seem to think that everybody should accept that the RVS ends at the same time for all players.
And as a less-serious, more-nitpicky sidenote:
3) I generally prefer to think of page-one voting as "arbitrary," rather than "random." MoS is the only person I can think of who would consistently
randomly
vote. (That is, he would always use dice tags to determine where his vote would land on Page 1.)The second one bothers me especially. Back when I was but an IN DEBUT I SPEW, the "random voting stage" was nearly seamless. People would start off jokingly voting/wagoning each other, and then someone would vote for another for a non-arbitrary reason. People would examine that reason, agree/disagree, and wham! Suddenly we have people taking sides and interacting, and the game progresses as usual.
Eventually people began to notice "hey, these Page 1/Page 2 votes are for pretty silly reasons, and eventually people get serious," and so they labeled that early phase. Through evolution of game, playerbase, and meta, we arrived where we are today... that people seem to think that there is like a set real-life time period or number of pages/posts where random play is "acceptable," and everything after that point is :badposting: (or, worse, automatically "scummy").
In one of the games I played recently (can't remember which, too lazy to post), I actually saw someone attack another player for making a random vote "after the random stage had ended." I practically did a spit-take, because I couldn't figure out why the attacking player had decided that the RVS was universally over. Some players had found non-arbitrary reasons for votes, but not every player had posted, and not everyone was taking the game seriously. I certainly hadn't been up to the point where I read the attacking post. But it got me thinking "what makes one player decide that the random stage is or 'should be' over for everyone else?"
There are two other reasons that I like the Arbitrary Voting Stage (suck it, RVSers!).
First, it gives me information that I probably wouldn't otherwise get. If there's one concept which "works" for me when catching scum that I wish every other Scummer would follow, it's this: Around D3/D4, re-read D1 completely and in great detail. Shea makes a point about being better off with more information, and this could not hold true more than when examining D1 play. Because one thing that I don't think most players fully grasp is that
scum give off more about themselves when there is less information to go around
. Scum A will treat Scum B diffrently if B has heavy suspicion on D1 than he will if B has heavy suspicion on D5. I don't think it's ever a conscious thing, but it's almost as though scums assume that they won't be caught by interaction with a scumbuddy (whether bus, defense, counterwagon, or whatever), because they assume that the town doesn't have the knowledge to root out these interactions. On D1, that's completely true. But by mid-game or endgame, when you have more information, these interactions become much easier to point out.The second reason I like letting early-game play out is because it helps a wide host of metas. Some people are silly to different degrees and for different lengths depending on their alignment. Like with scum interactions, a ton of people don't even realize that they behave differently in early-game. While I understand that general mafia meta and individual player metas change over time, it is inherently impossible to play the exact same way with fewer unknowns and a different set of win conditons. And in this light, the RVS is a wealth of information waiting to be exploited by a keen eye and a sharp mind.
So how does this relate to Shea's musings on the RVS? Well, I think we can safely agree that any protown player should want to utilize the early-game, low-information stage as much as possible. Kudos there. We want information, and we want to be able to utilize that information. However, I think there's one subtlety with which I disagree.
I
do
think it's okay for people to be random in the random phase, but I think that too many people want, try, or happen to be too random for too long, whether this is a conscious effort or not. When you are protown, think to yourself "what kind of posting will help me and/or the town find scum?" While it may be amusing to you personally to banter with X for a page and a half about changing your gender, chances are this is going to clutter the thread for most players and create a lot of white noise. Scums love
white noise. Love love love love. It provides them with a whole host of excuses to attack people, to lurk (actively or inactively), and to be largely disinterested with "finding" scum. Or it can give them incentive to "look the part" of the person trying REALLY REALLY HARD to find the scums in spite of your own most random efforts. I know that we all love a little praise, and that each protown player wants to find and catch scums themselves. Believe me; I understand. But the better
players aren't just the ones who can find scums themselves. They're the ones who enable their entire townmates to find scum, too. They're the ones who, just by being in the batting order or by playing on the court, make their teammates hit and score and hustle that much more.So what does this mean? How do you lend your teammates a hand? Two things. One, be the instigator. Be me in Sesame Street Mafia and take a stand so strongly that people have no choice but to react and interact. Two, make people take sides on whether X is scum or whether Y's vote is good. Shea hit the nail squarely on the head when he said "make everyone accountable" and "ask questions." Suppose I bandwagon a player. Ask me why I did so, and ask two or three other people what they think about my vote, and about the person I bandwagoned. This is the type of behavior which not only makes the RVS useful to the town, but also leads us out of it in a natural and productive way.
tl;dr version
Some randomness is fine, and may even be necessary in any given mafia game. But don't let random play breed random play. Your goal as a protown player should be to make the "random" phase useful to the town not by eliminating it, but by using it to force players to interact with one another. Take it upon yourself to bring the town to the point where they can use gameplay to come to a productive lynch. If that means sticking your neck out a little bit, do so. If it means asking the hard questions, ask away. But this notion of "D1 is so random, we might as well be silly" leads to above-average mislynches, makes re-reads that much more painful, and sets a tone which strongly favors the scums.