stop fakeclaiming as town!: the case for lynch all liars

[northsidegal]

to be honest, i think i actually sort of see where jake is coming from here.

starting from the premises that you should always be playing to your win condition as much as you can and that you shouldn't be playing to future win conditions, i could see a line of thinking in which not only is faking a guilty logical, but it's the

only

thing to do. falsely claiming guilties destroys both your credibility and the credibility of all guilty claims for future games, but you shouldn't be playing to future win conditions. with that in mind, if one were to truly think that someone else were scum and if falsely claiming a guilty is the quickest and most convincing way to get people to vote with you, it could be said that in order to most effectively play to your win condition you would

have

to do everything possible to get your scumread lynched, and that would mean falsely claiming a guilty.

just in case it's not clear, i do not think that this is actually a good idea. i think it just

can

logically follow from a set of premises.


First, I think that "don't play to future win conditions" isn't entirely accurate. I think a more accurate statement would be "don't play to future win conditions

instead of

your current win condition. I think that this is more accurate because it gets to the heart of the entire reason that it's a principle in the first place, trust telling. Among other possible reasons, we don't like trust telling because when someone refuses to trust tell that they're town, they throw away the game as scum for the sake of being confirmed town in future games, and this isn't fair to the scumteam in the game they refuse to trust tell in, and it's arguable not fair to the scumteam in the game that they

do

trust tell in. The person refusing to trust tell as scum is playing to a future win condition

instead of

their current win condition. To put it succinctly, it's game-breaking.

As a player, there is nothing wrong with playing to

both

your current and future win conditions, and indeed this is what most people actually do. If you care about your credibility at all beyond the purview of the game that you're currently in, you are in some sense playing to a future win condition. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, and I don't imagine many people would argue that there is.

Second, I don't have a problem with "you should always be playing to your win condition as much as you can", but I

do

think that fake-claiming guilties would be a misapplication of this. I think that as a player you should always be aware of your own strengths, weaknesses and accuracy, and take that into account. Mathdino has the best summary of that idea, so I'll leave most of the elaboration to him. Basically, I think that failure to take into account your own accuracy when considering whether or not you should fakeclaim a guilty

would

be a failure to play to your win condition as much as you can, just the same as a deliberate refusal to take into account some piece of information in the game thread would be. Information about yourself and your own abilities is perhaps equally as relevant as information about other players.

How is faking a guilty being an asshole?

How is gambiting in general being an asshole?

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

[northsidegal]

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

People are by no means obligated to follow the guilty result, whether real or false.

to be honest, i don't think that what you just said responds to anything that i said in what you quoted. it seems like a bit of a non-sequitur.

[northsidegal]

There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.

People are by no means obligated to follow the guilty result, whether real or false.

to be honest, i don't think that what you just said responds to anything that i said in what you quoted. it seems like a bit of a non-sequitur.

I was responding to how you were applying the fake guilty, as if it was a false commandment given from on high that "This person shall die today, and any deviation must be eliminated."

Can you explain where in my post that I do this? I don't think it's apparent in any of my arguments, much less the one that you quoted.

It's true that nobody

has

to follow through on someone claiming a guilty. That doesn't change anything I said there.

[northsidegal]

Can you explain where in my post that I do this? I don't think it's apparent in any of my arguments, much less the one that you quoted.

It's true that nobody has to follow through on someone claiming a guilty. That doesn't change anything I said there.

culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement.

The assumption you were making is that people would always follow the culture, when in reality no one is bound by a standard, instead free to follow site meta or forgo with the unspoken agreement entirely.

So when I said that I was responding to the question "How is faking a guilty being an asshole?", explaining

why

(in my view) people get angry when you fake a guilty. I wasn't saying that people always follow this culture or that they

have to

follow this culture, and—at least in that section—I wasn't even saying that they

should

follow that unspoken agreement. I was just explaining why they get mad when you

don't

follow it.

It's true that nobody is

bounded

by unspoken agreements or by site culture, but that has nothing to do with whether or not people will get angry at you if you go against it.

[northsidegal]

never thought of that one before

[northsidegal]

once again i will say that i see where he's coming from in that i have been the sole person hard defending someone who made an unbelievably stupid fakeclaim on the basis that i thought that the player was town regardless and that people were just blindly following a policy of "he fakeclaimed, lynch him". in that case i was sort of making the same argument that he is now, that someone fakeclaiming doesn't instantly mean that they're scum, it's just an element of a read that can be weighed against other evidence (and i was correct in that case).

that still doesn't change the fact that the fakeclaim

was

a stupid thing to do and, in most cases,

will be

a very bad idea. yes, someone who fakeclaims isn't necessarily immediately scum, but that doesn't mean that fakeclaiming is a smart thing to do. for perhaps an equally relevant anecdote, one of the more recent games that i've played was probably lost solely because an investigative role lied about having a guilty and even after being lynched didn't retract the lie. he prioritized his own reads above everyone else's and it ended up costing town a game that they really otherwise should've won.

if your read accuracy is such that the expected benefit of a fakeclaim is positive, you probably don't need to be fakeclaiming in the first place. that is, the chance that you're correct "multiplied by" how much it benefits town for you to have fakeclaimed correctly weighted against the chance that you're wrong multiplied by how bad it is for you to have fakeclaimed incorrectly is almost always weighted towards it being a bad idea, because the downsides of an incorrect fakeclaim are almost always much more severe than the upsides of a correct fakeclaim.