What makes a good town player?

[Ramcius]

Townhunting is nice and all, but you still need to lynch someone at the of the day. Tbh that's most annoying thing to me - people stopping my attempts to lynch my scumreads and shrugging their shoulders, when I ask who they want to lynch

[gobbledygook]

i think it's more important to just like look town enough to take yourself out of the lynchpool and to be able to identify other townies and work with them than to like be able to find scum

This tends to give better results than most other strategies in more games I've found

I feel like this strategy is really bad if said person happens to be wrong about their townreads.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

It works both ways, gobble.

[Ramcius]

not really, incorrectly scumreading town will result in ML, incorrectly townreading scum might lose game

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Yes it does.

Focusing on looking for and finding town will far more often create gamestate that are healthier for solving and/or that scum will need to stretch to counter.

Bias is more prevalent and likely to result in a stubborn incorrect read on scumreads on top of that.

[gobbledygook]

I think in a vacuum being wrong in “finding town” is worse for the game state than being wrong in “finding scum.”

Introducing egos, emotions, and other human elements into the mix probably has the opposite result though.

[Auro]

Fake innos on scum is worse than fake guilties on town.

[insomnia]

townhunting > scumhunting

as a town, you know how a town would act. you don't know how scum would act.

the nature of the game is to make you jump on anything that you see as scummy. town do inherently scummy things because they are uninformed.

now, if you look for scum in a game where 75% of the playerlist is town and, most importantly, UNINFORMED - therefore, they are doing a lot more scummy shit - you are at a disadvantage.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I think in a vacuum being wrong in “finding town” is worse for the game state than being wrong in “finding scum.”

Introducing egos, emotions, and other human elements into the mix probably has the opposite result though.

yup, emotions are the biggest reason this is true

this wasn't really the case back when I started playing since people handled the game very differently, but it's more true now since the game can get very volatile very quickly with a wrong scumread while a wrong townread just means you need to be a bit more proactive in double checking whether your townblock is accurate or not

[Alyssa The Lamb]

townhunting > scumhunting

as a town, you know how a town would act. you don't know how scum would act.

the nature of the game is to make you jump on anything that you see as scummy. town do inherently scummy things because they are uninformed.

now, if you look for scum in a game where 75% of the playerlist is town and, most importantly, UNINFORMED - therefore, they are doing a lot more scummy shit - you are at a disadvantage.

imo it's generally easier to lock people as town since there's almost always points where somebody will subconsciously indicate that they aren't informed in some way; these are a lot more absolute than identifying points where somebody is informed since you don't actually know what exactly their extra information is

[OkaPoka]

holiness

[Oversoul]

Fake innos on scum is worse than fake guilties on town.

[Ramcius]

townhunting > scumhunting

as a town, you know how a town would act. you don't know how scum would act.

the nature of the game is to make you jump on anything that you see as scummy. town do inherently scummy things because they are uninformed.

now, if you look for scum in a game where 75% of the playerlist is town and, most importantly, UNINFORMED - therefore, they are doing a lot more scummy shit - you are at a disadvantage.

It's lack of your experience/knowledge of scumplay, if you don't know how scum act. Also, you don't know how town would act just because you are same alignment, different people have different playstyles that might be vastly different from yours

[Ramcius]

I think in a vacuum being wrong in “finding town” is worse for the game state than being wrong in “finding scum.”

Introducing egos, emotions, and other human elements into the mix probably has the opposite result though.

yup, emotions are the biggest reason this is true

this wasn't really the case back when I started playing since people handled the game very differently, but it's more true now since the game can get very volatile very quickly with a wrong scumread while a wrong townread just means you need to be a bit more proactive in double checking whether your townblock is accurate or not

See, that's the issue, I don't like half-assed reads that I have to doubt and double check

As for your argument for better gamestate - it's not better, more pleasant, sure, everyone feels better, when they are townread rather than scumread, but it has it's own drawbacks, you have go back on your reads

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I think in a vacuum being wrong in “finding town” is worse for the game state than being wrong in “finding scum.”

Introducing egos, emotions, and other human elements into the mix probably has the opposite result though.

yup, emotions are the biggest reason this is true

this wasn't really the case back when I started playing since people handled the game very differently, but it's more true now since the game can get very volatile very quickly with a wrong scumread while a wrong townread just means you need to be a bit more proactive in double checking whether your townblock is accurate or not

See, that's the issue, I don't like half-assed reads that I have to doubt and double check

As for your argument for better gamestate - it's not better, more pleasant, sure, everyone feels better, when they are townread rather than scumread, but it has it's own drawbacks, you have go back on your reads

idk what this is even arguing

I can't tell if you're arguing against reassessing reads or if you're saying that incorrect reads in general are half-assed reads

[Alyssa The Lamb]

ut it has it's own drawbacks, you have go back on your reads

this tells me the former???

[Ramcius]

I'm saying that this approach is terrible - for it to work, you have convince other people that your townreads are solid, while they are not. You're not making much progress, you not clearing slots. Problem becomes obvious, when you die and people don't bother to go back and just go on with these reads

[OkaPoka]

I guess only way to tell is to 1v1

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I'm saying that this approach is terrible - for it to work, you have convince other people that your townreads are solid, while they are not. You're not making much progress, you not clearing slots. Problem becomes obvious, when you die and people don't bother to go back and just go on with these reads

I'm really confused because it sounds like you're assuming townreads can't be solid because... I'm not sure why?

and if people aren't going off your reads after you die, then that's a failure of reshaping the playerlist's perception of the game, not the fact that they're townreads

[Ramcius]

If people, who townhunt had only solid townreads, I wouldn't say a word, but most of them are gutreads.

People are lazy, ofc they will sheep some dead townie, if they consider them a good player

[northsidegal]

Whether it's egotistical or not depends on the delivery

No, thinking that you're superior is egoistical, no matter how you slice it. Not egoistical would be making some agreement, i. e. we lynch your scumread today and then we lynch mine next day

I don't really think that it (it being "thinking your reads are correct") is necessarily egotistical and that it's just a matter of presentation to make it not look so. All arguments in mafia are (ideally) based on some kind of evidence. If you scumread or townread someone, it is because of some piece of evidence, textual or subtextual, known to you consciously or subconsciously.

Different people have different methods of affecting the game given their reads. If you intend to convince other people using evidence, it seems to me that none could say that this is necessarily egotistical, unless your evidence is something like "i'm the best ever at this game and i scumread X", and even then that argument is theoretically valid and not actually based on the speaker's ego. You might argue "assuming that your interpretation of the thread is better than others' is inherently egotistical". I'm actually not sure if I could say that that'd be false, but I would say that the premise is flawed. A difference in reads can just as easily (and perhaps far more probably) be explained by a difference in prior knowledge (or prior beliefs) rather than a "better reading".

That is, if you're aware that Mulch always says "you're ruining the game" as scum, I personally wouldn't consider that putting yourself in some superior position. That's an obvious meta-based example, but other examples less meta based are easy - they're just the things that you believe are scum or town indicative: knowing that newbie D1 lynch wagons on town almost always have 1 scum on them, thinking that scum almost never do self-meta, etc.

[northsidegal]

I disagree (somewhat) with the notion that read accuracy is unimportant, or only important up to a point. If we imagine the ideal town player as someone who ensures that town wins every game in which they are town, then it seems natural that this ideal town player does so by rattling off the name of every member of the scumteam and possibly also by showing themselves to be town (if, say, in a setup where there isn't even enough leeway to lynch the ideal town player first and ensure that they're town). You might call that an absurd example, but I think it illustrates an important principle - even knowing nothing else about our ideal town player, even assuming that they have to get lynched themselves to confirm that they're town, they can still win the game for town every time through read accuracy. They could be the least charismatic, least eloquent, least mechanically knowledgeable player in mafia history and still win every game.

Of course, I assume that this ideal town player is known as such through reputation, which you might call cheating the scenario. This is where I start to agree that it's not the

only

factor that matters. If we were to assume a scenario where our ideal town player was starting out unknown, or perhaps played every game without reputation effects,

then

skills like making oneself known to be town and effectively pushing lynches comes into play.


Disconnected from platonic ideals and also moving into the realm of some kind of actionable thought, I think I agree somewhat with hito's linked post in that there's a sort of pyramid or something of what makes a good town player. Trying to actually come up with some kind of order would probably be pointless, but among the skills besides reads accuracy would certainly be making yourself look town, working with others and recognizing when someone else has a read you should listen to (a la Mathdino), being willing to admit that you're wrong, and being able to work with others to get your goals accomplished.

[northsidegal]

townhunting > scumhunting

as a town, you know how a town would act. you don't know how scum would act.

the nature of the game is to make you jump on anything that you see as scummy. town do inherently scummy things because they are uninformed.

now, if you look for scum in a game where 75% of the playerlist is town and, most importantly, UNINFORMED - therefore, they are doing a lot more scummy shit - you are at a disadvantage.

It's lack of your experience/knowledge of scumplay, if you don't know how scum act. Also, you don't know how town would act just because you are same alignment, different people have different playstyles that might be vastly different from yours

Then, couldn't I say that you don't know how scum would act just because of your "experience/knowledge of scumplay", given different people have different playstyles that might be vastly different from what you expect?

[Ramcius]

townhunting > scumhunting

as a town, you know how a town would act. you don't know how scum would act.

the nature of the game is to make you jump on anything that you see as scummy. town do inherently scummy things because they are uninformed.

now, if you look for scum in a game where 75% of the playerlist is town and, most importantly, UNINFORMED - therefore, they are doing a lot more scummy shit - you are at a disadvantage.

It's lack of your experience/knowledge of scumplay, if you don't know how scum act. Also, you don't know how town would act just because you are same alignment, different people have different playstyles that might be vastly different from yours

Then, couldn't I say that you don't know how scum would act just because of your "experience/knowledge of scumplay", given different people have different playstyles that might be vastly different from what you expect?

There aren't that many different playstyles. Yes, you can't predict every scum playstyle, but you can recognise some pattern, if you seen scum doing similar things or you thought/heard about similar scum strategies. I really wonder how people are scumhunting, if they aren't doing pattern recognition based on their knowledge/experience

[Firebringer]

They could be the least charismatic, least eloquent, least mechanically knowledgeable player in mafia history and still win every game.

This hypothetical player exists

It’s called a cheater.