if you want some vulnerability, i'm gonna go ahead and admit that i'm not gonna jeopardize my scum w/l record by staying in a losing game if i'm mafia here (people have been suspecting me since D1, and i'm unable to give my best game because i'm swamped).
did this really break any rules? is this a real trust tell?
no i dont think so. 1.) it's not a real trust tell of mine. it's a total lie. check my games. it's never been a pattern 2.) i didn't say never/always. 3.) i did not publicly consider or publicly announce a choice to replace out.
Invoking trust tells.
Trust tells have long been a point of confusion, and for good reason - they are one of the most subtle rules we have, and if you don't understand them it's not even clear why they'd be a problem. They act as a form of OGI typically by allowing a player to assert themself as town more strongly than would normally be possible. The subtlety around trust tells comes mostly from their distinction from acceptable self-meta. Self-meta turns into a trust tell when there is an explicit or implicit statement that it would never be broken, or that it would only be broken extremely rarely. Important here, and a distinction from how we've handled things in the past, is that we are extending this to include cases where the person is not intentionally building up a trust tell, but is instead simply pointing out a pattern in their meta that they never intend to break. For example, the following may all constitute trust tells depending on context:
"I will never lie using red text."
"I have never faked a guilty as scum."
"I will always claim my real role."
"I never bus as scum."
Context is very important here. If a relatively new player says that they've never fakeclaimed before, this is not a problem - however, if a player with many dozens of completed games points out the same thing and says that they never fakeclaim as a policy, then every game where they don't lie about this policy increases the credence of their claim. After a certain point, this becomes an unfair advantage because statistically, the more times in a row someone has told the truth about something, the more likely it is that they will always tell the truth about it.
There are a variety of factors that each push something toward being an unfair trust tell: history of having followed the tell, specifically stating that the tell will never be broken in the future rather than merely stating that it's been followed up until now, an explicit advantage (such as being more plausibly town) being gained by people believing the tell, the tell being about very specific behavior, and so on. However, none of these individually are necessary for something to be a trust tell.
If you wish to refer to your own meta, as a rule of thumb, do not speak in absolutes. We obviously cannot (and do not want to) punish someone for having some of these policies (e.g., if you believe that it is never correct to bus as scum, or don't want to fake a guilty, we can't make you). In these cases, you simply cannot discuss behaviors like this in discussion of your own meta. If someone else brings up something that may qualify as a trust tell for you, you can say that you've never done the behavior in question, but you cannot say that you have a policy of never doing it. This is not a perfect solution, but we don't believe that a perfect solution exists.
i want this game to be clean so a listmod might want to rule over this one.
Posted: Wed May 11, 2022 7:39 am
by ItalianoVD
You sly dogs you.
Great game by scum. Ya pretty much had this in the bag because HEM and Math would have been able to push anyone but each other and most of us if not all of us wouldn’t have been the wiser. Very smooth performance. I had lots of fun; thanks for running it cat.
Posted: Wed May 11, 2022 7:41 am
by MathBlade
Thank you Day one was really nerve wracking.
It was really infuriating no one wanted to town lead (well besides koopa which woulda been bad for us) and Scorpious was literally so any elim happened. Like I suspected FL suspected me (as in the PT) but if I got him to elim a scum or two it’d be fine.
Posted: Wed May 11, 2022 7:57 am
by MalcolmTucker
Fun game that, well-played from scum. I was somewhere along the right path but got too tunnelled on Kitty. I think I'd have pushed Math more strongly had I not got the clear on D3. HEM/Math did well to distance themselves from each other though and more importantly I think Math managed to make Kitty look like the more likely partner.
Think it was always hard early on in that obviously two mafia slots were inactive initially but the Andres elimination D2 gave us a good shot. Italiano elimination D3 was incredibly lazy for me though and probably cost us it from there.
