The 5 things I hate most when playing mafia are...

[kuribo]

1. Players who think they can lurk and just pop in now and then with, "Hi, I'll answer whatever questions you have for me." YOU ARE SLOWING THE PACE OF THE GAME. STOP IT.

2. Asking to be replaced because the town has backed you into a corner. Congratulations, jerk, you've just added to the replacement problem, and also caused your replacement to be put into a bad position. If you don't like being lynched, don't play a game where people vote to lynch one another.

3. "X and Y are clear scum partners, but I won't state why. Vote X." Where X and Y are both living players whose alignment is unknown. Sometimes not stating your reasons can be useful or even helpful. However, the majority of players that do this are not good at it and shouldn't be doing it.

4. I agree with the misspelling thing. I get "kurbio" alot. IT'S KURIBO, AS IN THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME POWER UP OF ALL TIME.

5. I probably have alot more that I can't think of right now, but that's because I'm an angry person.

Also, Porochaz, I once played a game where a townie self hammered in LYLO. If I could have reached through the internet and punched him in the ear, I believe I would have.

[kuribo]

Being asked to

prove

that you are not scum.

haha, god yes.

that's like saying, "God exists. Now prove he doesn't."

[kuribo]

In no real order:

1. When people don't answer the questions they are asked (guilty, but If I missed something, I do my best to go back and find it).

2. Stupid defenses.

3. Self voting, unless you get certain roles (see Worst Role ideas thread)

4. stating "X is scum" and giving no real reason why.

5. chat speak

1 and 2 are things that scum do though, when they're backed into a corner. It's not necessarily "annoying," just a consequence of human behavior.

You should be pressuring these people.


Oh, and another of mine:

"This vote is only for pressure," congratulations, you've just removed whatever worth your vote had.

[kuribo]

3. People refusing to hammer before deadline, making days get pointlessly dragged out even though the lynch has essentially already been decided because "longer days are good for the town".

In response to this, I would like to assert that there are times when having a day continue is absolutely the best play, even if known scum has been outed. People who always want to take days to deadlines for the sake of just talking irritate me, too. I think the key word that you typed here is "

pointlessly

dragged out" -- if there's a legitimate reason for not-hammering, then that's fine.

As I've said in other threads, "long days are good for the town, excessively long days are not."

[kuribo]

So, let's get this very clear, you don't think it's a towntell to catch scum?

What kills me is when people say, "You caught a scum, therefore you must be scum, too!" It's even more painful when the person that says this is town.

Yes, bussing happens. Alot. But try and take the "bus" into the context of whether bussing there makes sense or not.

What's even worse is the two-sided argument, "You must be scum because you weren't on this scum's bandwagon," and its partner, "You must be scum because you WERE on this scum's bandwagon." I may have plenty of reasons for not voting someone that just happened to turn up scum. Perhaps I thought the bandwagon was based on retardation, or perhaps your "brilliant case" wasn't so splendid in my eyes. Or, hell, maybe I was at work while you lynched the guy. Remember, it only takes 50% of the players to lynch scum, the other half of the game either isn't voting, or wants someone else strung up. And by the way, odds are pretty good that at least one of his partners saw the writing on the wall and voted him to cut him loose.

[kuribo]

The problem with bussing and distancing is that people look for it, even when it wouldn't make sense for scum to do that. If you build a great case against a scum, you may be lynched next due to accusations of bussing. Even if you saw to it that scum was lynched on Day 1, when they had no other suspicion against them.

[kuribo]

Paranoia and WIFOM IS the game.

fixed.

only if you're playing wrong

[kuribo]

And this is just where people go wrong. Posting content regularly itself is not especially protown. Of course, it's protown in the sense that the converse is anti-town; but plenty of decent scum provide content, and arguments that sound reasonable. This does not especially help town find scum- it's a minimum requirement of towniness.

It reminds me of an argument I once made that anti-town and scummy are not the same thing.

Anti-town actions are those which prevent the town from finding scum. A scummy action is that which helps the scum achieve their win condition. Of course, an action can be both anti-town as well as scummy (such as hammering a townie). It can also be simply anti-town (voting completely at random) or simply scummy (attempting to build a case against someone you know to be a townie). The catch is that truly scummy behavior is far harder to pick up on, especially so if the scum is adept at doing scummy things without appearing anti-town.

As an example I used, spamming the thread with 30 pages of non-stop gibberish is certainly anti-town, since it does harm the town. But, it's not scummy since it doesn't help the scum achieve their win condition, either. (plus it's a dick thing to do)

But, I ramble. This post made far more sense in my head.

[kuribo]

An anti-town action is actually definitionally one which harms the town's pursuit of its win condition. (This is usually pretty much the same as lynching scum, but not quite always). Since the game is zero-sum, anything that harms the town's chances by definition helps those of any and all antitown groups.

Okay, I'll admit that some of my reasoning is flawed--- learning is why I come here.

But I also fail to see how, for example, someone who votes only at random, or who posts only spammy nursery rhymes, could help the scum?

Unless it's that since he's not scum, he's going to cause a mislynch by being a retard?

[kuribo]

I see now, thanks Fonz.

[kuribo]

Lurking is antitown, and if lurkers get lynched day one consistently, they have this nice tendency to learn their lesson. One of my things for this list is 'people who think that we just have to put up with lurking because lurkers aren't always scum.'

I refuse to play suboptimally in a game in order to possibly improve the quality of other games. That's not playing towards my win condition, and thereby cheapening the game.

Also, I agree with glork.

You see, I HATE precisely this attitude. For one, if you send the signal that lurking is OK, it will cause others to lurk, and make it harder to find scum. Secondly, there are genuine incentives for scum to lurk, but basically none for town. So someone lurking is acting in a way that makes sense for scum not town. This sort of thing should always be a scumtell. Lynching for anti-townness forces scum to act protown, which directly harms their ability to accomplish the other part of their mission (get town lynched).

If you lynch the players in order of antitownness, you end up with the most protown players at the end of the game. 'Most protown' is the same as 'least scummy.'

I have to agree with this. I've been in too many games where the lurker has been allowed to go all the way to LYLO because, "He's not a threat, he always plays like this." Yes, and sometimes he'll be scum because that's how this game works. Always playing shitty is no excuse for playing shitty. Once you let that lurker live to see LYLO, try getting him back there to cast an informed vote. Or, worse, even in the days leading up to LYLO, try not letting his absence be a distraction while you go after others. It's difficult.