Fundamentals of Scum Hunting feedback

This forum is for discussion related to the game.
Forum rules
User avatar
callforjudgement
callforjudgement
Microprocessor
User avatar
User avatar
callforjudgement
Microprocessor
Microprocessor
Posts: 3972
Joined: September 1, 2011

Post Post #10 (isolation #0) » Sat Jan 23, 2021 10:42 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

I guess one way to think about it is that bussing as a weak player simply doesn't work (weak players would prefer to be the ones
being
bussed).

Probably, how correct it is to bus depends not only how strong you are, but how strong your team-mates are. I've won scum games by bussing my entire team (they were under heavy suspicion and I thought they wouldn't survive until endgame). I've also won scum games by
not
bussing in situations where I think most people would. My suspicion is that people do it too much (a situation that looks dire to scum given all their information can often end up being salvaged by town's cluelessness), but it's nonetheless something that has to be done sometimes.

On another subject: a tell I've had some success with is "having too many townreads", which is objective but based on a different fundamental from the ones listed above: scum have one fewer scum to find than town do, because they can't reasonably scumhunt themself, and this makes it harder to produce scum cases on sufficiently many people. I'm not sure where (or whether) that fits into the framework of this thread (and I'm not 100% convinced it's even a real tell).

One that does fit into this thread's framework (which doesn't come up that often but can be devastating when it does) is perspective slips when revealing non-public information (e.g. night action results). Scum often don't realise that a townie in their position would have released the information earlier, or held onto it for longer, because they aren't concentrating on what value the information would have to scum (because they know that scum would already have it).

I think I'd also elaborate on "knowledge of impossible information", which comes in a second form: when someone ignores an easy explanation for something because they know that that explanation's incorrect, instead coming up with a more complicated theory to explain the same events. This is different from outright stating something that they shouldn't know; it's more of an implication that they know something that they shouldn't know. There are several games I've been in where this would have been a clear indication of a particular player as scum, if anyone had picked up on it, so I suspect it's a powerful tell if it's possible to get better at noticing when it happens.
scum
· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·
town
Post Reply