In post 86, mastin2 wrote:The key isn't to look at actions.
Scum do town stuff a lot, and only rarely do scum stuff.
Town to scum stuff all the time, and only a fraction of the time can you see them do townposting that makes you think they are assuredly town.
Actions, in short, are useless: they're first-level play, so to speak.
Mafia is, at its core, a game of psychology. It is not a game with mathematical answers. You can game setups by using math, sure: crunch the numbers, find the probabilities, figure out which claims are more likely, and whatnot, but that only applies to PR claims when they pop up. So, the ability to use hard-defined limits in a game is incredibly-limited. It has its place, but usually is not what you need.
What you need is to look behind the action. What is the player going through? If the player is compromised in some fashion, their play is going to be erratic. This applies regardless of the three types: emotional, physical, or mental. If someone is mentally compromised, what that basically means is that they are barely functioning. If someone is physically compromised, it means that something in real-life is preventing them from being able to give something the same level of critical thought that they normally would. If someone is emotionally compromised, they are in a state where regardless of their alignment they are going to have some severe mood swings.
Now, there's an art to reading those things. First is to check sitewide activity: are those things influencing everywhere, or just one place? Now, this is NOT a check to see if they're lying. Nobody ever lies about being compromised and if you so much as think as much you're probably a worse scumbag than any of the scum players. This is a check to see how their compromised state affects them elsewhere. If, across all games, you see the exact same pattern emerging, then the chances are, the compromised state cannot be read as alignment-indicative. If, across all games, you see the same pattern, but there are little oddities here and there, reading it MAY be possible, but is an advanced-level skill. If, across all games, you see vastly different responses, then this is not necessarily a sign that you can read their compromised state...but what it DOES tell you, is this vital piece of information:
How they are compromised IS in fact influenced by the situation at hand. This is not necessarily alignment-indicative; two town games can have vastly different circumstances which lead to different effects. Same for two scum games. A town game might look identical to a scum game as well if the circumstances within that game are similar enough.
But, while not alignment-indicative, it tells you that you can prod and poke the player in question and figure out what lies beneath, even in their compromised state, and that you can find useful info there. This is where checking other games stops being useful (you can't exactly meta from ongoing games anyway), but if you've gotten this far, they've served their purpose: they tell you what to look for.
Now that you know what the player has gone through, the next step is to look at how it has influenced them in the current game with the current circumstances. Read not what they are doing, but why they are doing it: is the action born of a scum player pushing a clear agenda, or is the action scattered, without a clear, defined pattern? Scum can obfuscate stupidity all they want, but when they do so, they still are pushing for a specific cause, a specific reason. Town, on the other hand, when erratic...will not have a clear idea of what they are aiming for.
Furthermore, there's a difference between town contradictions and scum contradictions, and contradictions that are just the player not remembering. Town contradictions spawn from poor memory: they push for something, forget about it, and then later, push something else which contradicts what they said before. Scum contradictions spawn from a changed agenda. They push for something, and then, when it is convenient for them to push for something else, they start pushing there instead. This difference is hard to pick up, but vital. Then there are contradictions that exist purely because the passage of time is a harsh mistress. In these cases, the only alignment-indicative things are hard facts which contradict things. "I investigated this player N2"-->"I got no result N2" would be an example (albeit unlikely and extreme) of a scum contradiction.
Even there, you need player psychology: dig into the player's history. Are they someone who works off of memory a lot? Or are they someone who religiously checks their results to ensure accuracy? If the former, then ask yourself: how important was the piece of information to the person giving it? Was it just something that they saw and then wrote off, or was it something absolutely vital to them? This makes the difference between derptown and derpscum: derptown may forget small pieces of information that they wrote off and misremember the details until they check. Derpscum are more likely to forget larger details that were key events in the game.
But even there, you need to be careful. Scum tend to be more meticulous about the details, whereas town are more reckless. The above will catch more reckless scum and help clear more idiotic town, but what you need to be aware of is the other side: if you've got a player whose psychology is meticulous attention to detail, then as scum, their story is going to be flawless, or near-flawless. If that same player has a story that has some issues, then ironically enough, it's more likely for them to be town. What you need there is to look at their presented argument from THEIR point of view: in both cases, they should be presenting something they think is a flawless argument. As scum, because they designed it without any holes, and as town, because they know they are town and therefore they KNOW their argument is real by default. So, when examining the arguments, the one which has a few holes that the player making it won't see is more likely to be town than the one which has no holes.
This, because the scum player's argument isn't made from their perspective. They're making an argument to fool other players, so they are thinking like those other players and trying to present facts in a favorable light to those other players; the town player's argument is made from their perspective, because they are presenting the facts as they know them.
I realize this is complex, and highly circumstantial. Following the above, I'm basically telling you to half of the time side with the flawed argument, and the other half of the time, side with the less-flawed argument. But that's the thing about mafia: it's not universal. There IS no universal procedure. You need to adapt. You need to be able to identify what you're up against, and then from this profile, figure out what the most likely options are.
When it comes to the higher-level players, they do this instinctively. For instance, I've played enough games that I can flash-profile a player just on a few select details. If I have previous game experience with them, I'll have a better profile on them (this is the CORRECT way to use meta, where you're doing it to establish a profile on them rather than as an analytical facts-of-them approach that so many flawed meta users try), but I can do it even without that prior-game experience. What kind of avatar they have, what kind of sig they have, the way they speak, and most importantly, what they say and when.
That tells me what they are, and once I know what they are, I have a fair idea of what they're doing, which is why I'm able to call out players as "town" or "scum" so early-on with seemingly no evidence at all: because in their actions which THEY think are meaningless, I've assigned meaning to.
tl;dr:
Don't use meta to establish facts. "They do this as town, but this as scum." That is wrong. That is thinking of the game in terms of math, in terms of statistics.
Use meta to establish profiles. "They think like this." That's thinking of the game in terms of psychology.
