And hey, why not, theorypost/metarant.
Meta is a tool, just like any other tool in the kit of scumhunting. It's misapplied more often than others, but it is ultimately necessary in some cases. Some players tend to have specific patterns as specific alignments in such ways that directly contradict those patterns in other players. Some players are more aggressive as mafia, some as town; some are more active as each alignment; some are more logical or more logically consistent as each alignment; and so on.
To the degree that that is accurate, meta is an indispensable tool when used correctly. There are actions that can be taken that may be acutely indicative of alignment in different directions on different players. Take for example you (Zoronos) criticizing me for attacking based on tone, and calling it scummy. If you meta me, you will find very objective proof that I do, in fact, do such things as town. You can find games where I have made arguments as town based on tone. That very simple, undisputable meta fact means that calling a point I've made scummy based on tone is inaccurate, unless you can show a trend where I don't do it frequently in my towngames and do do it frequently in my scumgames. That's the simplest application of meta, and also probably the least disputable IMO - using meta to show a simple fact that a player does do something as some alignment, and that they do it frequently as that alignment, so that it can't be accurately used as a tell that the player isn't that alignment.
My use of meta on PP is, admittedly, much shakier. It's based on a single game, in a significantly different context. That context does matter; it might be more likely for PP to display this kind of behavior as scum in this game because it's not a newbie game, or because the person he's arguing with isn't a newbie game IC. But based on the scum play I saw in that game, the tactics he'd have had to be employing as scum when he talked to Grendel just don't seem like his style; the way he was condescending is not like the way he was argumentative towards me. I think that him being condescending towards Grendel in the way that he was would have required thought processes and a way of looking at this game that I just don't think PP would be capable of given what I saw of his scumgame. Or, at the very least, I am confident that the condescension was not faked, and I think that genuine condescension in that case is indicative that he was town disgruntled by someone saying something that he saw as really stupid.
Zoronos wrote:Are you scum reading Boring / Dier here?
boring obviously yes. Dier I'm still digesting a bit; I think I might actually have an inkling of a scumread contingent on boring being scum, but I don't like putting stock in contingent reads on unflipped people, and I wasn't intending to communicate that in my response to him. His post towards me is overall just a dry response to what I said. Which is tough to read much off of.
The response I gave to Dier is just an argument, it's not an alignment-based criticism.