How to read lurkers/VIs

[Yosarian2]

Well, with a lot of lurkers, you can tell the difference between scum and town. You just have to consider the amount of their content; that is, if someone's only make 3 posts, and one of them looks kind of scummy, they're a better lynch then someone who's made 30 posts and 10 of them look scummy.

The frustrating thing is that even when I find a lurker who looks like scum, people are still overly reluctent to lynch a lurker even though his few posts look activly scummy. I never understood that; you should always be more willing to lynch a scummy lurker then a scummy active player, all esle being equal.

[Yosarian2]

I disagree. In my parlance, VI means Village Idiot but it's a playstyle, not an intelligence statement. If the rest of you are using it the other way, then it's really just clever-sounding ad hominem, isn't it?

Not an intelligence statement, per se, but it is a comment on their ability to play mafia. Basically, a VI is someone who has no idea what's going on and doesn't really know what they're doing; someone who as town has a history of doing, well, dumb things that you would normally lynch most people for . DGB doesn't all fit into this category.

And, yeah, it's not a complimentary term, but it's not an ad-hom either; ad-hom would be to call someone an idiot in order to undermine their arguments; calling someone a VI is describing their play in order to better read them (the trick to reading a VI is very diferent from reading most players.) There are a couple of players who, if they claim doc at the start of day 1, then halfway through the day unclaim doc and claim cop, and then say they were just kidding and that they were really vanilla all along, I honestly have to consider the possibilty that they might just be a pro-town person who's doing random dumb stuff, even though I would not consider that possibility for most players; and, well, we apparently need a term for that, considering how often it comes up.

On the other hand, yeah, I agree that it's very helpful to the town to have a few people with very unconventional playstyles in order to scumhunt, who is willing to go out on a limb and sometimes act in apparently irrational ways. If everyone plays exactally the same, it's harder to spot the scum. I don't consider that to be at all the same