First off there's the contradictions - as an example of what "could be a trust tell" you give
"I have never faked a guilty as scum"
, but later say "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."
I cannot see how these two statements are reconcilable.I also just,, don't see the point. Yes, consistently telling the truth about your role and to an extent being known for doing it gives you an advantage when you've played lots of games before. But so does a lot of things. So does having played several games with the same player so you understand the nuances of their play better than other people. So does just having played the game more in general. So does sharing a timezone with the majority of people in the game. There's lots of out-of-game things that can affect a player's ability and trustworthiness and you can't stomp out them all, and you especially can't stomp out this one in such a broad and confusing way that definitely affects valid play.
Like imo trust tells that should be punishable are ones that relate less to the actual,, playing strategy of the game. Like the red text thing. Or when Krazy said stuff like "you know I replace out as scum". Or saying you only self-vote or do some other
easily replicable
action as town. And I think it has to require an active level of building up or very explicitly pointing out that it's something you intentionally always do and plan to always do. Otherwise you heavily risk lots of people accidentally breaking the rule because they simply acknowledge (or even implicitly state?) how they happen to have always played.I agree it's tough to try and stop the trust telling stuff that's against the spirit of playing the game, but machine gunning in a way that makes talking about self-meta very scary isn't really it.