What makes a good town player?

[Firebringer]

God nsg ur posts here are like ur preaching up high like ur aristotle or something

[northsidegal]

it's just my opinion.

[OkaPoka]

Firebringer vs nsg 1v1 pls

[Krazy]

The most important skill for a good town player is to have fun and to be fun to be around. Everything else is secondary because this game is exclusively recreational.

[Firebringer]

I like ur new avi Krazy

Ur part of the cool squad now aren’t u

[Firebringer]

Firebringer vs nsg 1v1 pls

I’m not fighting with nsg

I just thought it was funny how her posts read like she was an Ancient Greek philosophers

Also why do u want me dead?!?!?

[Ramcius]

Only NSG? I felt like me and Ank were philosophers from Ancient Greek discussing definition of egoistic, where we both are right, just we have different PoV

[northsidegal]

there's a joke in there about calling yourself an ancient greek philosopher and ego, but i'm not sure the best way to make it

[insomnia]

Here's another thing that my favourite philosophers can debate

How do you distinguish between confirmation bias and actually being right when other people heavily disagree with you?

[insomnia]

Also, a lot of team play talk here, but if I just

know

I'm right, how am I supposed to act in this situation if other people don't listen to my read?

Do I fall back on that read and pursue the common interest among towns?

[Klick]

If you're at the point where you

know

you're right, you should be able to successfully show your work

[northsidegal]

Here's another thing that my favourite philosophers can debate

How do you distinguish between confirmation bias and actually being right when other people heavily disagree with you?

i don't really think there's an answer to this. or maybe i should say i don't think there's an "easy" way to do this. understanding your own biases, recognizing them and trying to overcome them is, i think, a neverending process.

Also, a lot of team play talk here, but if I just

know

I'm right, how am I supposed to act in this situation if other people don't listen to my read?

Do I fall back on that read and pursue the common interest among towns?

my suggestion would be to go all out in explaining every piece of evidence you have that leads you to "

know

" you're right. if, in the process, you find that you have less evidence than you thought, your evidence is weaker than you thought, or you just begin to doubt yourself, i'd say that's a good process for checking yourself. if that doesn't work, you could always try other strategies.

although, let's return to the realm of our platonic ideals and assume that you actually

knew

that someone was scum, however that may have come about: a guilty, aliens beaming the information into your brain, hacking their account to read their role PM, having your alt RAS on the scumteam, having Mulch say "you're ruining the game", etc. in

that

case, it's probably just more effective to go for some other strategy to get people to listen to you rather than trying to list a bunch of reasons, especially if the method by which you

know

they're scum isn't actually based on their play. if you tried to come up with a case in that scenario, it'd look more like you just going through their posts looking for reasons why they're scum rather than actually having those reasons.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Try blocking town lynches instead of pushing scum lynches, that's a strategy I've had success with when people don't listen to my scumreads

[Alyssa The Lamb]

really is just as simple as breaking the momentum on the opposing lynch candidates a lot of the time

[insomnia]

This is more towards NSG, but what have you found to be a consistent way of catching scum based of off? I'm talking about...Some perspective slip / logical inconsistency / straight up lying / progressions not making sense. I guess the question is what are you looking for in posts when you want to town read someone and what are you looking for when you feel like you have a scum read on someone and want to see if your suspicion is right.

Sorry if the question's shit but I'm bad with expressing my thoughts anyway.

[Ramcius]

there's a joke in there about calling yourself an ancient greek philosopher and ego, but i'm not sure the best way to make it

That's another topic for debate - is being philosopher is something to be proud of or not

[Ramcius]

Here's another thing that my favourite philosophers can debate

How do you distinguish between confirmation bias and actually being right when other people heavily disagree with you?

Also, a lot of team play talk here, but if I just

know

I'm right, how am I supposed to act in this situation if other people don't listen to my read?

Do I fall back on that read and pursue the common interest among towns?

That's up to you, you can try pursue your scumread, or you can take step back wait for something new to come that you can add to your case. But thing is, people don't like people that try go against the grain so to say, I had to learn it hard way, so now I try few times and if no one cares, I just try other options, like pushing different scumread or question their scumreads

This is more towards NSG, but what have you found to be a consistent way of catching scum based of off? I'm talking about...Some perspective slip / logical inconsistency / straight up lying / progressions not making sense. I guess the question is what are you looking for in posts when you want to town read someone and what are you looking for when you feel like you have a scum read on someone and want to see if your suspicion is right.

Sorry if the question's shit but I'm bad with expressing my thoughts anyway.

I have quite good success on catching scum based on scum mentality of their plays. When someone propose something important, think who benefits most. If you can't see benefit for town, it's most likely scum. Drawback of this is that it works only with better players, bad players make anti-town suggestion due lack of their knowledge/experience

[Farkran]

I'm just still a newbie, but i want to think i feel entitled to give my opinion as well

Reading through the thread i have noticed that the main topic is Read Accuracy and how to get better in that characteristic, which is a good answer to the OP question - but to me the absolute most important thing as any alignment is how to convince others to follow you, aka Charisma. The basic concept is not hard to understand if we quote this popsofcpost

Reading accuracy makes you a good vig

In any single game you can have a read accuracy of 100% and yet catastrophically lose that game, because you are a VT and nobody listens to you.

High Read Accuracy = good vig
High Charisma = good scum player
High Read Accuracy + High Charisma = good town player

Both skills can be improved with experience and reputation - my above example was not worded randomly. In a single game you can have a read accuracy of 100% and lose, but people will realize you have been doing good in that game. Once you accumulate several games like that, assuming you already have a high Read Accuracy stat, your Charisma will grow accordingly and you'll start to win more.

Learning to communicate to other people, and how other people communicate to you, is probably the single best asset that you can work on to improve at this game. After you achieve that, you will always die n1 so it's pointless anyways!

[northsidegal]

Once you accumulate several games like that, assuming you already have a high Read Accuracy stat,

your Charisma will grow accordingly and you'll start to win more.

I don't think this is necessarily true unless you define charisma more as "having people listen to you" rather than a more traditional definition, and doing that feels somewhat tautological to me. I also feel that, taken as a goal or as advice, it'd be misleading to define charisma like that.

That is, if theoretical town player Belli Ereth always lists the scumteam and then prodges until death or game over in every game, I think it would be misleading to say that if people started noticing that Belli's scumreads were always accurate, that would represent Belli's "charisma" improving. We imagine that Belli's winrate would start to go up over time, but this doesn't mean that any aspect of Belli's play has changed.

[Klick]

What Fark is describing as Charisma seems to be perception-based as opposed to innate - your play can be the same and yet you can have more situational Charisma if people listen to you.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Charisma at its fundamental level is just playing to your audience

The way to get better charisma is to work on deciphering what approach is going to work for the specific situation and/or players involved

[northsidegal]

What Fark is describing as Charisma seems to be perception-based as opposed to innate - your play can be the same and yet you can have more situational Charisma if people listen to you.

Sure, I get that. I guess I just feel like that is better described as something like "reputation", and that calling it charisma is a bit confusing and perhaps a little bit misleading, in my opinion.

[gobbledygook]

I'm just still a newbie, but i want to think i feel entitled to give my opinion as well

You are
I agree that communication is one of the most important skills to develop, regardless of alignment.

In any single game you can have a read accuracy of 100% and yet catastrophically lose that game, because you are a VT and nobody listens to you.

Are you saying that nobody listens to you because you are a VT? I do not think that people disregard others because they are a VT.

---

The most important skill for a good town player is to have fun and to be fun to be around. Everything else is secondary because this game is exclusively recreational.

I wish more people realized that having fun is a crucial part of Mafia. It is a game after all! Offtopic: people put the pride/shame of replacing over their own happiness and wellbeing, which typically has a cascading effect on other players.

---

After some introspection, I think I am Team Alyssa when it comes to my "style" of scumhunting. I scumhunt within process of elimination pools that contain the scummiest (from my point of view) players. This means I have necessarily created a townbloc before I begin scumhunting.

Within that pool, I scumhunt by primarily looking for a number of scumtells that have

totally

been peer reviewed such as the Dumbtell, lurking, and people retreading their footsteps.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Tbf a lot of my hunting is based on eliminating slots from contention and seeing what pops into my head from the rest

I generally pick up on enough stuff that I don't necessarily realize at the time, so it's a lot more productive for me to run through and test my theories and/or check for as many possibilities as I can because I'll eventually hit the right answer (and probably drag the rest of the town to it also in the meantime)

This is somewhat why my methods look really bizarre and hard to parse logically, my process is generally hidden because I link things subconsciously rather than a conscious set of logical steps

But yes forming a townblock often helps my solving considerably even if I end up having scum within them

[Farkran]

See, this is one of my limits when trying to communicate to others - it's part language barrier, part my own subjectivity when twisting semantics to my needs and assuming everyone else will understand what i meant to say (more often than not, they don't).

I used Charisma as a name for the skill that "makes others listen to you, follow your lead, do what you ask them to", so NSG would be correct in the first line of 93.

I used reputation as an example, but that's not all there is to Charisma. It's undeniable that it plays a part in it though.

That is, if theoretical town player Belli Ereth always lists the scumteam and then prodges until death or game over in every game, I think it would be misleading to say that if people started noticing that Belli's scumreads were always accurate, that would represent Belli's "charisma" improving. We imagine that Belli's winrate would start to go up over time, but this doesn't mean that any aspect of Belli's play has changed.

To further my example, if this player lists the scumteam with 100% accuracy in every game (as you said, his accuracy may come from whatever source like magical power or hacking skills, but the important thing is that he has absolute accuracy, not where it comes from), his reputation as an accurate reader will grow and so will his ability to be listened. At his 10th game, once he makes a post where he says "the scumteam is exactly player 1, 3 and 11", i can foresee every other player voting to lynch exactly those three players as soon as possible - this means that Belli Ereth gets listened much more than he was in his first game.

Of course, this example is a stretch, because it's unlikely that you can reach these levels of accuracy, but as i mentioned above it's not the only aspect there is to Charisma. Activity and communication skills in general are a better measure of how much you can get listened to, but this was already said earlier in the thread, i only added Reputation as one of Charisma's substats.