This is actually an interesting question, my mind started racing in a bunch of directions as soon as I started trying to think about how I feel about it, it might be a good general mafia discussion topic tbh but I'll try to keep my thoughts concise and grounded in this particular gameIn post 531, Auro wrote:@GL: Do you agree with Esther's assessment: that summarizing and interpreting those pages of arguments hurts scum more than any towncred it may offer?
1) In the general sense, I think it's fairly difficult "work" to try to closely read through two players caught in a mudslinging slapfight and tease out what the underlying claims/reasoning are. In a more traditional single Mafia faction vs Town setup, I think town has a lot more incentive to do that work and try to draw Actual Reads out of those pages of arguments because they're the ones with a need to sort alignments of players involved. Scum knowing alignments already don't gain anything personally from that mental load. So from a bird's eye view, I see where mc esther is coming from, scum can usually just not post anything when there's a big fight in the thread and it's rare that they get scumread for it. I definitely see how someone diving in and
trying
to draw a signal from the noise gets townpoints accordingly on that basis. 2) That being said, I would say in this specific set up that the existence of multiple scum factions actually creates a real incentive for scum to also do that work, because scum in this set up should still be trying to figure out who the other scum faction are and eliminate them. So big caveat to point #1 there off the bat
3) Where I disagree slightly is that a scum's ideal gamestate is "low information" and so any generating of "information" inherently hurts scum. I think the ideal scum gamestate is one where scum have enough influence to secure the specific eliminations THEY want without drawing too much suspicion for it. Sitting back and hoping town eats itself alive can sometimes work in the right game/playerlist, but it's playing with fire because it's also fully possible that town will recognize each other and townblock effectively and POE you out rather quickly if you're not contributing. So I think if I were scum, there are a lot of ways where I could use a Roden vs LQ fight to my advantage, the classic one being that I could try to make one side look worse and make myself look good from it at the same time. If I have enough WIM to overcome the "mental load" of point 1, this would be a good play for scum!me. And the sneakiest/best play of all would be to subtly make both sides look bad in everyone else's eyes, so that I could hope town chains two lims that I might want back to back.
4) All that being said, I think it then comes down to looking at the conclusions/posts that I specifically made, and looking for any agenda or ~ uncharitable twisting ~, as it were. Was I fair in my assessment of LQ and Roden's posts? Did I try to leverage something NAI to give myself a reason to scumread one of the players involved? Is my summary more or less likely to lead to LQ/Roden being limmed, and if
more likely
, are my suspicions valid? If mc esther thinks I was fair, and not trying to embellish or throw dirt on a clean slot, then it makes point #1 stronger town!evidence than it would be if I came out of my summary championing a lim for dubious reasoning. There's also flip side questions of - were my posts actually meaningful? Is it solely a lot of summary without any indication of actual attempts to sort either player?I can't really answer the questions in #4, that's for everyone else to discuss. Personally I was hoping teasing out the poor/obfuscated reasoning surrounding the "did Roden invite a wagon on himself" and "if so, why would scum!Roden invite a wagon on himself" would lead to Roden specifically explaining why he said he was obvious town or why he thinks he doesn't get wagoned as scum.
I did walk away from that with a feeling that LQ was being sincere in what he was posting, though I've also since noted (429) that this being multiball makes it hard to fully townread LQ for it, as scum!LQ might genuinely believe that Roden is also scum of a different flavor.
