Lurking's Not a Scumtell

[Mastin]

People consider lurking scummy.
It's not.
It's not pro-town to do,
And is inheritantly anti-town in nature,
But it's not scummy.

Why?
Because people do it all the time, regardless of alignment.

Then what do you do with a lurker, if you can't call lurking scummy? Just out of policy?

Wrong.
You don't lynch lurkers. You don't lynch people who've flaked, or are V/LA. Not on lurking alone, at least.

You wait.

Because lurkers have one of two things happen.
Either
1: They're inactive.
Eventually, said inactivity will frustrate the mod to the point of replacing said inactive lurker. Normally with a pro-town appearing active player. Instead of a lurker, you suddenly have a pro-town player.
Good to happen.

or

2: They catch up. Lurkers are normally lurkers because they can't catch up with the game. When the game is getting ten pages per day, even some legends at posts can't catch up. They fall behind.
Or they go V/LA. Either works, but they have the same result:
They Are Not Caught Up.
How they deal with it?
They lurk. It happens even to the best of us.


But eventually, even if it takes a month for it to happen, and five or six prods, they'll catch up. Eventually, when their schedule's clear, when they have no other projects to work on, they'll catch up.
And once caught up, they'll contribute. Actively scum hunt. Be a pro-town, extremely active player.

References:

Newbie 742. Ting, Kronos, and Caleb all flaked (Not to mention, my predecessor early on). Only one of them was scum. They were replaced later on by more active players (with one exception).

Maturin and PPP (Caleb's replacement) were both kinda lurking. Barely contributing anything, really. Both of them were pro-town.

763. I fell six pages behind. Kinda lurkerish, no? I was pro-town.
Both of the scum lurked/flaked as well (in one case, TWICE), though.

Mini 760. I replaced someone who flaked (said player wasn't particularly active and was slightly suspicious to most. When I came in, I became fairly active). Jebus was essentially lurking most of the game. Gorrad nearly got replaced. And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. Only one was scum.

Newbie 762. Two pre-game flakes. (Both Pro-town.) At least two more after that. (One pro-town, one pro-scum.) The only lurking was from MiteyMouse, scum, though.

Polygamist Mafia. Only pro-town players flaked. (There was scum lurking [me], though.)

Lynch All Lurkers had special game mechanics preventing a good deal of lurking, but several players were replaced. Only one of them was scum.

Newbie 779. Three players flaked. Two were scum.
Two people were lurking, one scum, one pro-town.

Mini 791. Several lurkers/flakes. One Mafia flaked, one SK flaked, two pro-town players flaked. Several players lurked. (Like me.)

Cubic Mafia. I'm not going to go into most of the game, but I can tell that when I replaced someone who had to flake due to V/LA, I instantly helped nail the last scum. That's a change from a player who was inactive most of the game to someone extremely active.

Open 148. It contained several lurkers. CJMiller contributed almost nothing at all. Iamausername initially wasn't posting a lot. A lurking accusation was thrown against me. (All town.)
Sotty7 and Caboose (Last scum, Werewolf, respectively) were lurking, with Caboose eventually being replaced because of lurking. His replacement, extremely active and fairly pro-town in comparison to Caboose.

---

Now, while those might not be the best examples, I think it proves the point well enough.
You don't lynch lurkers.
Night-kill 'em if you want 'em gone that much,
Or just wait for mod intervention (replacements),
Or just have the patience to wait for the lurker to catch up so they stop lurking.

[Talitha]

Interesting points. Excessive waiting for them to catch up kills the fun of the game, though. And lurking is contagious.

[Mastin]

If it truly seemed to ruin the fun, then the game could just continue on without them, (No "XX, YY, and ZZ haven't posted yet", or "We're waiting on XX", or "We need more input from YY". Extra input helps, but stalling the game to wait for that is ONLY helpful if the reason they're behind is due to excessive numbers of pages per day) essentially playing the game minus the lurkers (still possible to have fun), and in the night, if the scum could night-kill 'em to get rid of the problem.

[Xylthixlm]

People consider lurking scummy.
It's not.
It's not pro-town to do,
And is inheritantly anti-town in nature,
But it's not scummy.

Why?
Because people do it all the time, regardless of alignment.

Stop right there.

The fact that townies do something does

not

mean it isn't a scumtell. Really, there are no worthwhile scumtells that only scum do - because scum would have to be really dumb to do something that town never does! The correct measure of a scumtell isn't "do townies do it" but "do townies do it

as much as scum do it

". If there's a difference there, it's either a scumtell or a towntell, depending on who does it more. Period.

Take one example, "buddying". People do stuff that looks like buddying all the time, regardless of alignment. It's still a scumtell - scum do it deliberately to gain an advantage, therefore they do it more often than townies do. It's not a conclusive case by itself, but it can be part of a pattern of behavior.

Lurking is the same way. Yes, people lurk all the time regardless of alignment. But scum also deliberately lurk to gain an advantage. Townies don't. So scum lurk more than townies. Is it a huge tell? No. Garden-variety lurking, where someone is contributing but not posting as much as they could be (or are in other games), is a small tell. Active lurking, where someone follows the game but doesn't contribute anything useful at all, is a much larger tell. Scum do it much, much more often than townies do. It serves no protown purpose at all, but it's a great strategy for scum if they can get away with it.

Why do scum deliberately lurk? It has to do with the psychology of townies. Most players look out for scummy things much more than they look out for protown things. The more you talk - even if you're a townie - the bigger your chance of doing something that looks like a scumtell or "scum slip". So people who are less active tend to look less scummy just because they have fewer chances to say something scummy. But that's just a trick of psychology - people don't think about you as much, so they think you're less scummy. At the extreme, someone who does

nothing at all

won't do anything scummy, but they have at least the same chance of being scum as anyone else.

There are two ways to avoid falling for this bias. One is to concentrate heavily on looking for towntells rather than scumtells; if you do that, lurkers will naturally fall into the scummy camp. The other way is to look for who is lurking and mentally bump them up a couple scumminess levels from your first guess. This isn't really the same as considering lurking a scumtell, but it has the same effect. If you're not doing at least one of those two things, you will lose to lurking scum, because there will always be a townie who has done more scummy things ... unless all the townies lurk too, in which case you have a dead game.

tl;dr: Yes, lurking is a scumtell.

(Lurking is probably not a scumtell for people who are V/LA and totally away from a computer, or have completely dropped off the site, for obvious reasons. But you still have to do a mental adjustment for the low activity.)

[Mastin]

The fact that townies do something does not mean it isn't a scumtell.

Of course not. And I wasn't arguing this.
I was arguing that, despite what people thing, it's NOT a scum tell, because it's NOT done by scum more often. Heck, in my experience, I've seen pro-town players do it far more often than pro-scum players!

The correct measure of a scumtell isn't "do townies do it" but "do townies do it as much as scum do it".

The definition of a scum tell is that it is something done more often by scum than by town.

I'm not arguing that--because it is done occasionally by town--it's not a scum tell.

I'm arguing that--despite what people think--it's done equally by people of both alignments (leaning towards pro-town, actually, in my experience). Now, that's no longer a scum tell. It might benefit the scum (Why lurking is never pro-town), but it's not a scum tell.

Lurking is the same way. Yes, people lurk all the time regardless of alignment. But scum also deliberately lurk to gain an advantage. Townies don't. So scum lurk more than townies.

How do you tell the difference between town lurking and scum lurking?

You can't, because, often, there is no distinction, because they're 'lurking' for the exact same reason(s), regardless of alignment.

I lurk all the time. I don't do it as a strategy as scum; it just happens. As a pro-town player, it also just happens. There's no way to tell the difference, and I do it no more often as a pro-town player than as a pro-scum player. And other players are known lurkers. (Like, say, Killa Seven has one of the worst reputations in the MS.net world for lurking. And does it regardless of alignment. Is K7 always scum? Only to SpyreX. )

Garden-variety lurking, where someone is contributing but not posting as much as they could be (or are in other games), is a small tell. Active lurking, where someone follows the game but doesn't contribute anything useful at all, is a much larger tell. Scum do it much, much more often than townies do. It serves no protown purpose at all, but it's a great strategy for scum if they can get away with it.

I started doing both of these not in games where I was scum, but in games where I was pro-town first. And from there, it became null. I respectfully disagree.

Why do scum deliberately lurk? It has to do with the psychology of townies. Most players look out for scummy things much more than they look out for protown things. The more you talk - even if you're a townie - the bigger your chance of doing something that looks like a scumtell or "scum slip". So people who are less active tend to look less scummy just because they have fewer chances to say something scummy. But that's just a trick of psychology - people don't think about you as much, so they think you're less scummy. At the extreme, someone who does nothing at all won't do anything scummy, but they have at least the same chance of being scum as anyone else.

On the contrary, I think lurking raises one's awareness of said player and makes them more suspicious of them, making it not beneficial for scum to lurk.

I don't see the psychology you see. I see the opposite, where the lower a player is lying, the more attention they end up receiving. Kinda like reverse-psychology, I guess.

tl;dr: Yes, lurking is a scumtell.

And tl;dr:
To me, it is not.

[The Fonz]

People consider lurking scummy.
It's not.
It's not pro-town to do,
And is inheritantly anti-town in nature,
But it's not scummy.

ANYTHING that is inherently antitown is inherently scummy, since it means that town shouldn't be doing it deliberately, but scum might.

Why?
Because people do it all the time, regardless of alignment.

Untrue. That town people can sometimes lurk doesn't mean that scum don't lurk more. Even if this were the case, a town which does not avail itself of the threat of lynch to discourage lurking dooms itself to death by that very thing.

Then what do you do with a lurker, if you can't call lurking scummy? Just out of policy?

Wrong.
You don't lynch lurkers. You don't lynch people who've flaked, or are V/LA. Not on lurking alone, at least.

You don't lynch people who've flaked or are V/LA because:

1. You know it's not a deliberate tactic. Part of the reason for lynching lurkers is that they might be doing it deliberately as a scumtactic to avoid being read.
2. There is the possibility of that player returning (V/LA) or being replaced by someone who will post (flaked).

If a game had a no replacement rule, I think you would find people lynching flakers. Why? Well, there's no particular reason to believe flakers are less likely than random to be scum, and you have the possibility of getting a read on players who are actually posting.

You wait.

Because lurkers have one of two things happen.
Either
1: They're inactive.
Eventually, said inactivity will frustrate the mod to the point of replacing said inactive lurker. Normally with a pro-town appearing active player. Instead of a lurker, you suddenly have a pro-town player.
Good to happen.

or

2: They catch up. Lurkers are normally lurkers because they can't catch up with the game. When the game is getting ten pages per day, even some legends at posts can't catch up. They fall behind.
Or they go V/LA. Either works, but they have the same result:
They Are Not Caught Up.
How they deal with it?
They lurk. It happens even to the best of us.

Here, you're COMPLETELY discounting the existence of scum lurking for tactical reasons, which happens frequently. You're not even admitting the possibility. Of course you're going to come to a dodgy conclusion, when you leave out such significant datapoints.

But eventually, even if it takes a month for it to happen, and five or six prods, they'll catch up. Eventually, when their schedule's clear, when they have no other projects to work on, they'll catch up.
And once caught up, they'll contribute. Actively scum hunt. Be a pro-town, extremely active player.

This is just unrealistic bullcrap. It'll take a month? What if the deadline's in a week? Also, you ignore the following:

If a player is not genuinely absent, but has fallen behind, they still don't want to get lynched. If you ramp up the pressure, often that will cause them to start posting.

ITT: Mastin cherry-picks a selection of games where lurkers were not scum, and uses it to strawman the anti-lurking argument.

[The Fonz]

The fact that townies do something does not mean it isn't a scumtell.

Of course not. And I wasn't arguing this.
I was arguing that, despite what people thing, it's NOT a scum tell, because it's NOT done by scum more often. Heck, in my experience, I've seen pro-town players do it far more often than pro-scum players!

Oh, and your methodology is flawed. There ARE far more town players than scum players in mafia games. That town do something more than scum in absolute numbers is no evidence at all.

[Lord Gurgi]

Whether or not it's a scumtell is less important than the fact that if you lynch a lurker, you're doing the town good. Their alignment is just a detail.

[Hoopla]

The fact that townies do something does not mean it isn't a scumtell.

Of course not. And I wasn't arguing this.
I was arguing that, despite what people thing, it's NOT a scum tell, because it's NOT done by scum more often. Heck, in my experience, I've seen pro-town players do it far more often than pro-scum players!

Oh, and your methodology is flawed. There ARE far more town players than scum players in mafia games. That town do something more than scum in absolute numbers is no evidence at all.

This is the most important point in the thread so far. You never assess scum/town tells by counting up the number of instances on either side and comparing them to each other. You compare the ratio to the ratio of scum in the games.

Most of Mastin's examples that have clear enough numbers, show that scumlurkers were 1 of 3 or 1 of 4 which is on par, if not better than the ratio of scum to town players in a standard game.


I don't like it when players try and reason that lurking is acceptable. Not only does suck fun from the game, it is a tactic that favours scum more than town. More games would be won by town if they took a more proactive approach to policy-lynching lurkers early in the game.

[The Fonz]

Mastin also ignores the fact that, even if scum didn't deliberately lurk now (which they do) in a meta where towns ignore people who are lurking and lynch amongst those active, whilst ignoring the lurkers, lurking immediately becomes a dominant strategy for scum. There's actual ingame evidence of this in MAD Mafia. No-one nuked the lurkers, they nuked the active players who said things they disagreed with.

Also, MoS blows hard.

[VP Baltar]

tl;dr

Lynch all lurkers and lurking suddenly stops occuring so often.

Also, if you don't happen to post gigantic walls of text and respond to every single post, catching up doesn't take a month.

[PokerFace]

There are some players that lurk more as town than as scum. Would lurking be a town tell for them?

[Ectomancer]

I completely disagree.

Lurkers need to be pressured and the only 2 effective means of doing that is either to vote them with the threat of lynch, or cajole the mod into replacing them. If scum knows that a vote for lurking will not result in a lynch (ie you say don't lynch lurkers), then we are down to only 1 effective method of dealing with it and that is through an external game mechanic.

A vote must be a real threat, and the only way it can be is if scum believes that it could result in a lynch.

P.S. - if I spot someone doing some 'strategic' lurking, you can bet my vote is there for the lynch.

[ortolan]

http://www.mafiascum.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11246

[VP Baltar]

In Mastin's specific situation, it is generally a case of he is lurking in one or two games while posting up a storm in other games. The town has no choice but to lynch a player like that whether or not they do it as both town and scum.

[Quagmire]

The fact that townies do something does

not

mean it isn't a scumtell. Really, there are no worthwhile scumtells that only scum do - because scum would have to be really dumb to do something that town never does! The correct measure of a scumtell isn't "do townies do it" but "do townies do it

as much as scum do it

". If there's a difference there, it's either a scumtell or a towntell, depending on who does it more. Period.

Take one example, "buddying". People do stuff that looks like buddying all the time, regardless of alignment. It's still a scumtell - scum do it deliberately to gain an advantage, therefore they do it more often than townies do. It's not a conclusive case by itself, but it can be part of a pattern of behavior.

Lurking is the same way. Yes, people lurk all the time regardless of alignment. But scum also deliberately lurk to gain an advantage. Townies don't. So scum lurk more than townies.

This is wrong.

I think people think lurking is a scumtell because it annoys them when someone's not posting, not because it's scummy.

[Korts]

Lurking cripples discussion. There are some arguments that cannot be continued without some players in particular, and if those lurk, the line of discussion stalls; and at any one time, there are only a limited number of avenues of discussion.

Lurking also breeds more lurking. The discussion having stalled, other players would have to dig up new evidence by going through the past conversation. This requires time and patience and mental effort, and people are inherently lazy; procrastination leads to lurking from other players as well.

Lurking is effective as a scum tactic, and very unhelpful as a town tactic. Scum have more motivation than town to lurk, therefore lurking is a scumtell regardless of the actual number of town players vs. scum players doing it. If lurking isn't punished by "policy" lynching, people will never learn to play to their win condition properly.

[ChannelDelibird]

I agree with The Fonz.

[Quagmire]

Lurking is effective as a scum tactic, and very unhelpful as a town tactic. Scum have more motivation than town to lurk, therefore lurking is a scumtell regardless of the actual number of town players vs. scum players doing it. If lurking isn't punished by "policy" lynching, people will never learn to play to their win condition properly.

This is bullshit theory. It never works this way practically. Scum are never more likely to do this.

I agree with policy voting them until they start participating, but a legitimate vote for someone who lurks is more scummy than lurking itself.

[NabakovNabakov]

ITT, Mastin attempts to compensate for flaws in his game by altering mafia theory.
[EDIT: Quag too]

And I'm actually getting a nearly 1:1 ratio of scum to town lurkers from Mastin's examples (16 town and 13 scum, various others not quantified) which is some pretty hard evidence that scum are roughly 2-3 times more likely to lurk than town (Though inclusion of newbie games in the sample at an above-average rate might be throwing things off).

[Thok]

And I'm actually getting a nearly 1:1 ratio of scum to town lurkers from Mastin's examples (16 town and 13 scum, various others not quantified) which is some pretty hard evidence that scum are roughly 2-3 times more likely to lurk than town (Though inclusion of newbie games in the sample at an above-average rate might be throwing things off).

This. Scum tells don't need to be 100% accurate to be useful. As long as a scum tell consistently beats the 25%-33% range you get by voting randomly, and you don't use a single scum tell in isolation, then a scum tell is useful.

To be fair, if somebody is lurking, then you are forced to use their lurking in isolation (or at least argue by elimination; the person who is lurking is scummy because the others aren't.)

[Quagmire]

ITT, Mastin attempts to compensate for flaws in his game by altering mafia theory.
[EDIT: Quag too]

What are you talking about? How does lurking have anything to do with 'flaws in your game'?

[Yosarian2]

Lurking is effective as a scum tactic, and very unhelpful as a town tactic. Scum have more motivation than town to lurk, therefore lurking is a scumtell regardless of the actual number of town players vs. scum players doing it. If lurking isn't punished by "policy" lynching, people will never learn to play to their win condition properly.

This is bullshit theory. It never works this way practically. Scum are never more likely to do this.

I don't think that's true.

I think scum naturally tend to post less and SAY less then they would if they were town, just because the main scum motivation is "don't get lynched" and the main town motivation is "lynch scum". Scum don't need to scumhunt in thread; they pretend to, but that's a little different. In general, people do lurk more as scum.

A lot of people lurk as both alignments, or as neither alignment; to an extent, you kind of have to "grade on a curve". (As in, "if this person always lurks, are they lurking more or less in this game then usual?") But for the most part, lurking is a scumtell; in most games I've seen, a higher percentage of lurkers tend to be scum then non-lurkers.

[Yosarian2]

Or just have the patience to wait for the lurker to catch up so they stop lurking.

Towns that do this, that simply ignore lurkers and let them keep lurking, almost always lose. Lurkers do NOT tend to catch up over time; if they're not pressured, if allowed to lurk, they tend to fall farther and farther behind and post less and less over time. Plus, the scum is going to kill off the active pro-town people, the threats, so if the scum is only killing active people and the town is only lynching active people, eventually you end up with nothing but lurkers, and then the town loses horribly.

[Zachrulez]

Easy solution to this argument.

Stop lurking and post moar.