↑ Lowercase wrote: ↑ Mathilda wrote:
The problem with a policy lynch is that it is essentially a no fault lynch. This means that it's safe for scum. When challenged they can point to the policy and say that it was for the good of the game.
This seems like it could be true, but in practice you never make friends by suggesting a policy lynch like that. More importantly though, there is a good reason to lynch the way I'm suggesting. The fact is that town has a pretty abysmal level of accuracy according to newbie game statistics (at least last time I checked).
It turns out that a lynching a random replacement into a newbie slot is more likely to hit scum than a typical day one lynch
(my bold)
This is possible, I certainly don't know myself, but let's examine the reasons why this would be the case.
A newbie can flake out for many reasons but let's stick to the ones that are relevant. Off the top of my head I could imagine them as:
1) They get bored
2) They find it all too confusing
3) Things start going badly for them and they give up before because they have lost any sense of reward from playing
Please add more reasons if you can think of them. There are two cases, the newbie is either town or they are scum.
1) A Vanilla Townie will be more likely to get bored than scum because they don't feel that their role is important and they do not have a night action
2) It doesn't matter to scum if they find the process of scum-hunting too confusing because they don't actually want it to be successful. Whereas that's entirely what the townie newbie needs to do, especially a VT. Town is more likely to quit because they are confused.
3) Scum are more likely to give up if things are going badly for them because faking sincerity is difficult over very long periods and it can be extremely frustrating when everyone thinks that you're scum and you have no idea how they came to that conclusion. On the other hand town power roles are also likely to give up if they think they're about to be lynched for something arbitrary and this could lose the game. It is less likely that town will quit because they are not winning than scum though.
The next question then, is which of the three causes happens most frequently. I don't know but this analysis does tell me that a policy lynch for replacements may only marginally hit scum more often than town at best because of scenario 3. But on the other hand if we combine it with knowledge of how the replacement is acting and what they are saying then it can be yet one more piece of evidence that we can use.
tl,dr: policy lynch may possibly have a marginal improvement on chance and at best should only be taken as a recommendation
