What makes a good town player?

[northsidegal]

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who are born with worth, and everybody else. No matter how hard a lowly human tries, they will never be the same as someone who was born worthy. They say that "effort breeds success"... but that's a complete lie. The world is not that accommodating.

No matter how hard a small dog tries, it will never become a large dog. No matter how hard a penguin tries, there's no way it will ever soar through the sky. Which means... unworthy humans will never become worthy, no matter what they do. People with talent don't become talented... they're just born with their abilities right from the start.

[Firebringer]

that sounds so depressing.

[OkaPoka]

I don't think this one is it chief

[northsidegal]

(just to be absolutely clear: that post does not reflect my actual opinion at all)

[popsofctown]

(just to be absolutely clear: that post does not reflect my actual opinion at all)

You should correct this, all of Nagito's beliefs should be your beliefs

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Nagito is my spirit animal

[Alisae]

(just to be absolutely clear: that post does not reflect my actual opinion at all)

dam, I'm the small wooper and I'll never be the big wooper.
feelsbadman

[Alyssa The Lamb]

That's ok just eat me to become big and strong alisae

[Farkran]

Spoiler: mastina

Years ago, I defined the town triple-threat:
*Being obvtown
*Being charismatic
*Being accurate.

You can be a god of charisma with the entire scumteam nailed, but if the town paranoia-mislynches you because they don't see you as town, then all that charisma, all that accuracy, is worthless. So, you need to be able to be obvtown in order to be good to the town. A player who has absolutely zero charisma and is absolutely trash at scumhunting can still add value to the town by being

so ridiculously obvtown

that players who're better scumhunters can, via knowing the obvtown player is town, narrow in on the solve. By pure virtue of being obvtown, even lacking the other aspects of a good scumhunter, you can make the game easier for your faction to win.

You can be godly good at obvtowning yourself and have reads that are ridiculously accurate, but if you can't convince people to follow you on those reads, then you won't be able to translate that into a win. Sometimes, being charismatic in of itself can be enough to make you a threat--even if your reads are wrong, well...wrong reads can change at any time to be right. If your wrong reads change into right reads, and you have the charisma to get people to listen to you, that is lethal.

You can be incredibly obvtown and charismatic, but if you drive the town off a cliff via having the worst reads in the game, the town will still lose. By having accurate reads, you can provide value to your team by applying the pressure where it needs to be. That read accuracy presents a credible threat to the scumteam, because even if you're only one vote--the later into the game you go, the more one vote can make a difference. One vote from an accurate player who isn't obvtown or charismatic doesn't mean much on D1...but one vote from an accurate player in lylo probably wins the town the game.

You can never rely on any one of them individually, but having one of them individually as ridiculously strong will always

help

even if it cannot be relied upon in of itself to win you the game.

And in my opinion, the best town players on-site are the ones who have the overall balance of all three traits. Not the most obvtown players in the game, not the most charismatic players in the game, not the most accurate players in the game, but the players who have the

overall highest

across all three traits. In other words, say someone is an 8/8/8 in all three; they're probably the highest threat in a game even if other players in the game are a 10/3/3, 3/10/3, 3/3/10, etc.

Just, being able to be a credible threat in any field, rather than a threat in one specific field.
It is usually doable for scum to work around a town player who's ridiculously obvtown. It is usually doable for scum to work around a town player who's absurdly charismatic. It is usually doable for scum to work around a town player with insane accuracy. The scum pretty much only have one answer to a town player who can provide all three. (AKA, the nightkill.)

Respectfully, RC, your analysis of Ellibereth is flawed.
Ellibereth had the highest accuracy yes, but he wasn't lacking in the charisma or obvtown departments, they just came from a different location than usual.
Ellibereth had the

reputation

of being so highly accurate, and by putting that reputation forward, he could--and did--get the people who were scum, lynched. This is not the form of charisma most people think of when they think of charisma, but it is still a type of charisma.
Ellibereth had the reputation of being so highly accurate, that if he lynched scum, he was basically instantly obvtown (and similarly, if he pushed for the lynch of a town player, basically instantly obvscum). That's not the form of being obvtown most people think of when they think of being obvtown, but it is still a form of being obvtown.

Neither would be possible without his reputation.

If Ellibereth had no reputation behind him, then him having the best reads of anyone, ever, wouldn't make any difference--he was never charismatic about it and he was never obviously town on his own. When you compare Ellibereth's success before he gained a reputation for accuracy and after he gained a reputation for accuracy, it's pretty much night and day. Before he got the reputation, he was good, but not renown. After he got the reputation, he was only not a double-Paragon because he turned down the title when he was nominated for it as the current holder of the award.

(Basically. Ellibereth played the game for like, nine years. He was accurate for most of those nine years, but it wasn't until the last three or so of those years that people knew of him. Was he less accurate before, during those six prior years? Would have to check, but I'd wager no, he wasn't any less accurate. But in those last three years or so, he stepped up his reputation and got people to follow said reputation.)

Rarely have i agreed with something this much, lol. I guess mastina put to words what i meant to say in my earlier posts.

Now, about the argument that Reputation does not equal Charisma, i would say it's true, but i also wouldn't separate the two concepts entirely as NSG and pops have pointed out. Reputation is a subset of Charisma. Having a reputation

will

help with your likeliness to be sheeped. In some games, even the simple fact of having an earlier join date than someone else will guarantee more sheepability. I have seen this happen. Having banner awards, or being known throughout the site, brings this to an even higher extent.

The argument that being sheeped even on a secret alt (careful though: it shouldn't be

just

an incognito alt, so that people will wonder who they are the alt of - it should fake being an entirely new player) proves that Charisma is

not only

reputation but also a personal trait unrelated to past events. This is obviously true, and is tied to even more subsets of categories such as activity and communication skills, but it's not limited to those. Charisma, expressed in fm context as the ability to be sheeped by others, is a vast concept, and separating every single subset is beyond the point of this discussion, what's important is that we agree that being sheepable is one of the traits that defines a good town player.

Which brings us to another point to discuss:

Spoiler: RC

There's some stuff I agree with and a lot of stuff that I disagree with. There's also a response to NSG's comment on read accuracy in this post but I'm not quoting her because she sux.

First of all, one of the things that I really like is saying that charisma is not very useful on its own. Charisma in mafia games generally is a way to get people do what you want them to. How helpful this is as either alignment depends on how good you are at pushing for things that serve your win condition. Uncharismatic players generally have a floor where they will never perform worse than a certain level or better than a certain level because regardless of their reads, they won't be listened to. Charismatic players have a much wider range of possibilities and at the extreme end with players like MathBlade and myself who succeed the vast majority of the time at getting lynches they want you can have super wide variance in games won and successful lynches because your individual reads become a much larger part of the game. This is another reason I say that your first goal shouldn't be getting better reads necessarily; just because you have good reads doesn't mean that you can push them and figuring out other aspects of the game is more immediately rewarding.

Regarding being towny on the other hand... I really think it's a less valuable skill than people think it is. Once you get good enough as scum you will

never

be a true townread for people and it's more than possible to work around that. That is also going to apply as town but if you are good at getting what you want and have good reads it's a lot easier for people to set aside their read on you and say ok let's let X lynch someone and we'll see what the flip is.

Read accuracy exists in isolation to an extent. Not to bash Ellibereth but he didn't put a whole lot of his eggs in the charisma basket relatively and still ran around with a higher town winrate than anyone else both in his time and historically. NSG would be the prime example of what you consider a triple threat and she simply did not do as well as Ellibereth who only really had one skill, having correct reads. I only have two of these skills and I outperform a lot of players who are more easily townread but lack my ability to get specific lynches and have them be the right one.



Regarding NSG: what I'm not saying is that read accuracy doesn't matter. What I am saying is that having

good reads

is

hard

. There is a vanishingly small amount of people on MS whom I would say have

good reads

but a lot of people with relatively good reads are exceeded in winrate by people who have worse reads but have other positive benefiical traits. And when you learn other skills for being a good town player you become useful a lot faster than plodding down the path of developing reads. If you want to be a true top player you need to have good reads but if that's not your aspiration that really isn't the basket to put your eggs in.

It might sound weird to say that reads don't matter on a mafia forum but it's sort of true. The majority of players have =rand reads so if they simply just rnged their lynch targets it wouldn't change anything. Only the best reads on each player or on gamestate or w/e really matter if you're trying to play optimally.

I would disagree that Charisma is not inherently useful as either alignment. Being charismatic is one of the best assets to have as scum, when read accuracy is not required - as long as you pair it with good planning skills (who to remove first and how to remove them), you can pretty much always get to awesome results. How does this translate to the town world? By acquiring the ability to work in a team, even when you lack the necessary information required. If your skillset is characterized by high Charisma/low Accuracy, you should try to improve your townhunt and try to get at least *some* people you can work with in order to improve your read accuracy and push where you want to. It's not always easy and it does not guarantee success - if you are pocketed hard, you will likely fail. Luckily for you though, town can usually afford several mislynches/NKs before losing, and you can use these to test your in-game theories. If people have been listening to you so far, why are you still alive? That's a good question to ask yourself in d2/d3, and reassess the gamestate based on added information (VCA/NKA).


Now to get back to the original question, "what makes a good town player?", i think we have produced a comprehensive description of the stats that define a good town player. It's probably time to talk about how to increase each of these stats in detail, because that's also part of the question. I'll start.

Read Accuracy

= Ellibereth offered a good example of what you should look for when scumhunting, which might be frowned upon but it exists and as long as it does, it's a valid and probably efficient method. I used it in the past to correctly read people i would have vigged by my reads alone. Other than that, are there any other efficient tactics? I am probably not the best person to answer this, because i don't think of myself as a >rand accurate reader, but i think NKA and deadsheeping are almost always valuable assets when applicable.

Charisma

= i already talked about this - Charisma will inherently improve over time. It will also improve by increasing activity and effort. The most important part of the Charisma subset is getting better at communicating though. Look into other people's mindsets to discern what they would accept and what they wouldn't in terms of vocabulary used, post length, posting pace, and content. Will you be sheeped more for being aggressive, or polite? Should you wallpost ISO analysis, or talk to people in real time? Should you push your cases, or simply ask/order other people to vote where you want to?

Obvtowniness

= in my own definition, this almost always relates to genuineness. If you can get other people to believe that YOU believe what you are pushing, you will be townread until proven wrong. My best advice would be to always believe in what you are doing. This does not translate into thinking that you're the only one being right whereas everyone else is bad (i know, i'm guilty of this in many of my games), but you shouldn't flail around trying to produce content that is not backed up by motives, whether they are actual scumreads, reaction tests or wagonomics.

[mastina]

No matter how hard a penguin tries, there's no way it will ever soar through the sky.

Umm, about that...

[Klick]

Learn to Fly would beg to differ

[popsofctown]

The cute flash game?

[Klick]

Absolutely. Try telling that adorable penguin it can't fly.

[RadiantCowbells]

charisma is a tool and if you're good at getting people to do what you want and bad at knowing the right thing to do it can serve against you and there's plenty of examples of players in that boat.

[RadiantCowbells]

all the _really bad_ players are highly charismatic, as are all of the really good ones.

[Boonskiies]

I’m not good, i just trick you guys into thinking I’m good with charisma and get lucky most of the time.

[Nancy Drew 39]

I haven’t read the entire thread but a key factor is confidence. I learned this the hard way in a MU game I played where I got mislynched. If you lose confidence in your ability to prove your towniness, you won’t get tr, no matter what else you do. In that game, I made the critical mistake of losing hope when being wrongly sr and that 100% contributed to my mislynch in that game. Why? If you allow other people’s bad reads on you to fuck you up and adversely impact your gameplay, people will auto view that as scummy.

Essentially, if you’re not confident about your own towniness, how can you expect others to have confidence in your towniness if you don’t? It’s not an easy feat when your dealing with players who sr you for incorrect reasons but you can never lose hope and have to keep the fght alive. People find this incredibly annoying but unless I virtually have no clue about what’s going on in a game or for whatever reasons play badly, I almost always get obvtown read now, even if I literally have to piss people off to make that happen. I have found that sometimes hydra partners can get in the way of that but usually only when you’re in a multihydra. So, while it’s never fun to be considered annoying, it’s definitely preferable to getting mislynched. In short, if you don’t believe in yourself/your towniness, no one else will.

[northsidegal]

something that occurred to me recently is that i don't think that what we typically think of as real-life charisma actually translates into being able to have people follow you. what i mean by that is that players who i think of as the most charismatic in the traditional sense of the word aren't actually the players who i think of as most being able to get the lynches they want, and vice versa: players who most often get the lynches they want i don't think of as the most traditionally charismatic. if anything, charisma in the traditional sense just seems correlated with not getting lynched - not even necessarily getting townread, just not getting lynched.

of course, this could just be a function of the specific players that i'm thinking of, but it seems to me that it's never through traditional "charisma" that hard-gotten lynches are attained.

[the worst]

something that occurred to me recently is that i don't think that what we typically think of as real-life charisma actually translates into being able to have people follow you. what i mean by that is that players who i think of as the most charismatic in the traditional sense of the word aren't actually the players who i think of as most being able to get the lynches they want, and vice versa: players who most often get the lynches they want i don't think of as the most traditionally charismatic.

if anything, charisma in the traditional sense just seems correlated with not getting lynched - not even necessarily getting townread, just not getting lynched.

of course, this could just be a function of the specific players that i'm thinking of, but it seems to me that it's never through traditional "charisma" that hard-gotten lynches are attained.

this is fantastic commentary on the relationship between charisma and lynches. the bolded is an awesome takeaway if nothing else. good townplay is definitely a multi-faceted spectrum and like, social play & charisma are essential in any social game. but the way you're making a division between different types of charisma is making my brain tingly.

at a dungeons & dragons level you'd almost say it's e.g. having a high charisma score vs. taking persuasion proficiency/expertise?
assigning asinine terms that come to mind it's like splitting charisma vs. sheer ~force of personality~ or something.

[northsidegal]

i think "force of personality" is exactly what i would call the trait that correlates with getting the lynches you want. very good term.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

i think "force of personality" is exactly what i would call the trait that correlates with getting the lynches you want. very good term.

This is also my experience

[Nancy Drew 39]

something that occurred to me recently is that i don't think that what we typically think of as real-life charisma actually translates into being able to have people follow you. what i mean by that is that players who i think of as the most charismatic in the traditional sense of the word aren't actually the players who i think of as most being able to get the lynches they want, and vice versa: players who most often get the lynches they want i don't think of as the most traditionally charismatic. if anything, charisma in the traditional sense just seems correlated with not getting lynched - not even necessarily getting townread, just not getting lynched.

of course, this could just be a function of the specific players that i'm thinking of, but it seems to me that it's never through traditional "charisma" that hard-gotten lynches are attained.

Agreed, it’s often the least charismatic slot, somehow translates to the least towniest looking slot. It has very little to do with likability in general but more in being perceived as sincere and genuine. I know for me personally, I used to have trouble getting tr until I learned to develop confidence. I think probably one of the worst things a good town player should ever do is worry about getting tr, because it reads scummy and not genuine. The more you focusing on doing townie things like trying your best to form reads, the more other people will tr you.

[Nancy Drew 39]

i think "force of personality" is exactly what i would call the trait that correlates with getting the lynches you want. very good term.

i think "force of personality" is exactly what i would call the trait that correlates with getting the lynches you want. very good term.

This is also my experience

Well yes and no, if you have a meta of convincing the rest of the playerlist to sheep you on bad lynches, you can have charisma up the wazoo and no one will care. That’s why I only try to push others to sheep me, when I’m like 97% sure I’ve hit scum, because I know that a combination of trying to drive what inevitably turn out to be mislynches, will just hurt players’ trust in your reads. In early game especially, I’m far more confident on my trs and feel far more confident in vetoing those lynches and I am usually quite persuasive in that and get listened to, provided I don’t get NK’d. My early game tr accuracy is pretty high. In contrast, my sr accuracy is much better in late game, because it’s a process of essentially narrowing down the towniest from least towniest. That’s how I eventually solved YGM.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

my initial Blake experiment basically proved that force of will is like 98% of what you need if your only goal is to get the lynches you want

it has severe drawbacks when you rely on it, but it IS effective in that sense

[Klick]

'Influential' or 'Influence'