If Lynch all Liars is horsepucky, then there ought to arise good players who can make consistently make beneficial lies for town or consistent examples of beneficial lies for town that helped win games. Go through and review the games, you might find half dozen in hundreds of games.MrBuddyLee wrote:I think Lynch all Liars is horsepuckey. The game's about adjusting to new challenges. When a fellow townie lies, it's their right, and you should give their reasoning fair consideration before lynching. I do think these forums should have a mechanism for dealing people who ruin games repeatedly with flagrantly poor behavior, but that's a different story.
As for your second comment, we do have a mechanism for punishing poor play-if a person play poorly, they lose games and are shamed into either improving their play (or if they aren't able to do that, they just leave).
Basically, mafia playing styles work in a Free Market system-bad styles don't emerge and good styles are recognized as good styles. Lying has never emerged as a good playing style for townies.
If you can build such a machine, I say go ahead and do it! I wouldn't consider it particularly lame; rather I'd thank you for exposing a weakness in my game and then proceed to adjust my playing style as scum and townie to make your spider fail, either by adding those words when I'm a townie or removing those words when I'm scum or some combination of both.MrBuddyLee wrote:Let's say I run a spider on these forums and figure out what words people use when they're scum and not when they're town. If I then out mafia in all of my games and tell everyone how I nailed them, people will find me incredibly lame. If I do it, use the info, and don't tell anyone how I figured everything out, I'm still lame. I see mining forums for people's behaviors as the same concept to a lesser extent, and I plan to avoid it. The info in our heads should be what we bring to a game. It's not so much an issue of ethics as it is of the beauty of the game and a desire not to sully it.
You're partially falling into the trap of assuming the the "best mafia" play is a static entity-in fact, all such behavior is cyclic.