stop fakeclaiming as town!: the case for lynch all liars

[Akarin]

Winning because one of your teammates is an asshole is infinitely less enjoyable than winning because your team played well. It's not like getting carried by a better player, it's like someone doing something obnoxious and stupid and then acting superior if it pays off.

[Jake The Wolfie]

How is faking a guilty being an asshole?

How is gambiting in general being an asshole?

[Akarin]

If you fake a cop guilty, you're taking away the part of the game where you argue about your reads (i.e. the whole fun of the game for VTs) and deciding your judgement is all that matters. If you're wrong you threw the game for your team and didn't give them the chance to try, which is terrible. But even if you win, you think you're getting all this glory from your great play but the rest of the town feels robbed of actually getting to play the game.

Team games where one player cares more about their ego than letting the rest of the team actually play the game are no fun whether you win or lose.

[Jake The Wolfie]

So basically it is never ok to gambit ever, and you must cooperate with your teammates or else you're being an asshole?

[Akarin]

I'm sure you could come up with tons of small lies that no one would think would ruin a game and it'd be really hard to write a rule that allowed those but banned the actual really harmful stuff.

[Jake The Wolfie]

I'm sure you could come up with tons of small lies that no one would think would ruin a game and it'd be really hard to write a rule that allowed those but banned the actual really harmful stuff.

It's extremely subjective on what is really harmful.

Some players play laid back, letting their team do more of the heavy lifting. Are they being an asshole, or harming their team?

[Akarin]

After a certain point, yes.

Extreme lurking is sort of the same problem, messing with deadlines helps, but you can't really ban all lurking without unfairly punishing some reasonable behavior. But there's a point where the lurking is both playing against your wincon and making the game less fun for the other players, and policy eliminating players at that point can be reasonable (but often isn't because in that instance even though you want to, it seems like a better move to eliminate someone else.)

But it's much harder for one player lurking to do anywhere near the harm of one player trying to pull potentially game-throwing gambits. (Which are bad whether they work out or not.)

[Nancy Drew 39]

If you lie about faking a guilty or being a mason, no one will believe when it’s actually true. Hrnce, The Boy Who Cried Wolf type of thing because META.

So.. I shouldn't do something... because it will damage my meta..

which will affect future games

.

Why should I care about future games?

That was just a point on top of the bigger point that faking guilties and Masons doesn’t help you win the current game. It hurts you in both the current and future games.

+1

[Nancy Drew 39]

If you fake a cop guilty, you're taking away the part of the game where you argue about your reads (i.e. the whole fun of the game for VTs) and deciding your judgement is all that matters. If you're wrong you threw the game for your team and didn't give them the chance to try, which is terrible. But even if you win, you think you're getting all this glory from your great play but the rest of the town feels robbed of actually getting to play the game.

Team games where one player cares more about their ego than letting the rest of the team actually play the game are no fun whether you win or lose.

Misleading the town about the setup is a different version of the same thing. People are going to come to wrong conclusions and not get to play their best for the sake of you feeling special.

[Jake The Wolfie]

But it's much harder for one player lurking to do anywhere near the harm of one player trying to pull potentially game-throwing gambits. (Which are bad whether they work out or not.)

How are they bad when a fake guilty works out? Your team feels like shit because they weren't involved in the decision making? Guess what: They still wouldn't be involved in the decision making even if the guilty was legitimate. Do you advocate for no player to ever give out legitimate guilties, for fear that their team will feel like shit, or you realize that teamwork was never in the process of a cop getting a guilty?

[Nancy Drew 39]

But it's much harder for one player lurking to do anywhere near the harm of one player trying to pull potentially game-throwing gambits. (Which are bad whether they work out or not.)

How are they bad when a fake guilty works out? Your team feels like shit because they weren't involved in the decision making? Guess what: They still wouldn't be involved in the decision making even if the guilty was legitimate. Do you advocate for no player to ever give out legitimate guilties, for fear that their team will feel like shit, or you realize that teamwork was never in the process of a cop getting a guilty?

The difference is the TRUE guilty is based off of facts, not some player’s potentially wrong hunch.

[northsidegal]

to be honest, i think i actually sort of see where jake is coming from here.

starting from the premises that you should always be playing to your win condition as much as you can and that you shouldn't be playing to future win conditions, i could see a line of thinking in which not only is faking a guilty logical, but it's the

only

thing to do. falsely claiming guilties destroys both your credibility and the credibility of all guilty claims for future games, but you shouldn't be playing to future win conditions. with that in mind, if one were to truly think that someone else were scum and if falsely claiming a guilty is the quickest and most convincing way to get people to vote with you, it could be said that in order to most effectively play to your win condition you would

have

to do everything possible to get your scumread lynched, and that would mean falsely claiming a guilty.

just in case it's not clear, i do not think that this is actually a good idea. i think it just

can

logically follow from a set of premises.


First, I think that "don't play to future win conditions" isn't entirely accurate. I think a more accurate statement would be "don't play to future win conditions

instead of

your current win condition. I think that this is more accurate because it gets to the heart of the entire reason that it's a principle in the first place, trust telling. Among other possible reasons, we don't like trust telling because when someone refuses to trust tell that they're town, they throw away the game as scum for the sake of being confirmed town in future games, and this isn't fair to the scumteam in the game they refuse to trust tell in, and it's arguable not fair to the scumteam in the game that they

do

trust tell in. The person refusing to trust tell as scum is playing to a future win condition

instead of

their current win condition. To put it succinctly, it's game-breaking.

As a player, there is nothing wrong with playing to

both

your current and future win conditions, and indeed this is what most people actually do. If you care about your credibility at all beyond the purview of the game that you're currently in, you are in some sense playing to a future win condition. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, and I don't imagine many people would argue that there is.

Second, I don't have a problem with "you should always be playing to your win condition as much as you can", but I

do

think that fake-claiming guilties would be a misapplication of this. I think that as a player you should always be aware of your own strengths, weaknesses and accuracy, and take that into account. Mathdino has the best summary of that idea, so I'll leave most of the elaboration to him. Basically, I think that failure to take into account your own accuracy when considering whether or not you should fakeclaim a guilty

would

be a failure to play to your win condition as much as you can, just the same as a deliberate refusal to take into account some piece of information in the game thread would be. Information about yourself and your own abilities is perhaps equally as relevant as information about other players.

How is faking a guilty being an asshole?

How is gambiting in general being an asshole?

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

[Jake The Wolfie]

The difference is the TRUE guilty is based off of facts, not some player’s potentially wrong hunch.

Could a player's facts not be altered by the unforseen, such as a miller?

[Akarin]

How are they bad when a fake guilty works out? Your team feels like shit because they weren't involved in the decision making? Guess what: They still wouldn't be involved in the decision making even if the guilty was legitimate. Do you advocate for no player to ever give out legitimate guilties, for fear that their team will feel like shit, or you realize that teamwork was never in the process of a cop getting a guilty?

It feels like you're not really arguing in good faith here.

The problem with most of these gambits (aside from the point others are making that often the players making them have a vastly inflated opinion of how likely they are to work out compared to reality) is that they're about

your ego

being more important to you than actually having a good game.

You're gambling the entire game with no consent from the other players. Whether it pays off or not is irrelevant.

And yes, cops are lame.

[Jake The Wolfie]

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

People are by no means obligated to follow the guilty result, whether real or false.

[northsidegal]

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

People are by no means obligated to follow the guilty result, whether real or false.

to be honest, i don't think that what you just said responds to anything that i said in what you quoted. it seems like a bit of a non-sequitur.

[Jake The Wolfie]

You're gambling the entire game with no consent from the other players. Whether it pays off or not is irrelevant.

Then why isn't there some big argument whenever a gambit is thrown out about whether gambits should be used or not?
And most gambits cannot have the consent of other players without giving the game away that something is up.

If gambits were not good, then we would not have wiki pages describing the gambits, especially if those pages don't have disclaimers stating that "This should not be used in actual gameplay"

[Jake The Wolfie]

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

People are by no means obligated to follow the guilty result, whether real or false.

to be honest, i don't think that what you just said responds to anything that i said in what you quoted. it seems like a bit of a non-sequitur.

I was responding to how you were applying the fake guilty, as if it was a false commandment given from on high that "This person shall die today, and any deviation must be eliminated."
That's false. You aren't obligated to execute a guilty result, whether truthful or not. People can lie, be corrupt, be mistaken, or be all three at once.

[Nancy Drew 39]

The difference is the TRUE guilty is based off of facts, not some player’s potentially wrong hunch.

Could a player's facts not be altered by the unforseen, such as a miller?

Well yes, that’s why a miller unless they are extremely confident that they will never be cop checked ought to claim.

You also have to take the gamestate into account, of course but If I say tracked player X to player Y who ate the previous night’s NK and I’m the next and I never reveal my result, I’d essentially be gamethrowing hiding important information from town. As long as you are 100% honest about the specific nature of your “gulity”, then it’s up to town to make that ultimate judgment call.

[Akarin]

If gambits were not good, then we would not have wiki pages describing the gambits, especially if those pages don't have disclaimers stating that "This should not be used in actual gameplay"

This doesn't follow at all.

Is every role and setup on the wiki good?

And anyway, these kind of things are disproportionately likely to get coverage because they're something people can be egotistical about.

And as I keep saying, there's a huge difference between gambling the game on something and, for example, a reaction test.

[Jake The Wolfie]

Well yes, that’s why a miller unless they are extremely confident that they will never be cop checked ought to claim.

A miller claim makes them more suspicious, no? That would seem to hinder your objective, not help it.

[Jake The Wolfie]

Is every role and setup on the wiki good?

That depends very much on the scenario.

Every role is good, and every role is bad.

[Jake The Wolfie]

And as I keep saying, there's a huge difference between gambling the game on something and, for example, a reaction test.

A Reaction test is a gambit. You are gambitting that the person you are talking to won't catch on to the test, and therefore make the entire test pointless, which can lead to a false trust, which leads to a lost game.

[northsidegal]

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

People are by no means obligated to follow the guilty result, whether real or false.

to be honest, i don't think that what you just said responds to anything that i said in what you quoted. it seems like a bit of a non-sequitur.

I was responding to how you were applying the fake guilty, as if it was a false commandment given from on high that "This person shall die today, and any deviation must be eliminated."

Can you explain where in my post that I do this? I don't think it's apparent in any of my arguments, much less the one that you quoted.

It's true that nobody

has

to follow through on someone claiming a guilty. That doesn't change anything I said there.

[Ythan]

Heads up people have been playing this game for 20+ years and these thoughts have all been had many times before it's like the mafia version of I'm 14 and this is deep.