Logical vs. Behavioral Scumhunting

[Fiasco]

Townies use plenty of bad logic, perhaps more than scum. I'm not sure either logical or behavioral scumhunting works at all, for the average player. What does work is 1) cop investigations and 2) catching people in bad role claims.

[Fiasco]

You use any strategy that works. Without claims and cops, you'll have to look at speaking and voting behavior, which can be fun and isn't wholly useless (and is arguably the most in the spirit of the game), but is much less effective if the scum are competent enough not to make dumb mistakes.

edit: and yes, I do agree cops and claims shouldn't be the

only

things you pay attention to, but when you do catch scum it's mostly by those means.

[Fiasco]

I was probably unclear in my first post here; I didn't mean to say they're not tactics you should use, just that they probably won't work (compared to analyzing the night game).

[Fiasco]

Instead of saying looking at voting and speaking patterns "doesn't work", I guess I should have said "doesn't work well enough to do much more than compensate for the advantage over random lynching that scum gain through their bandwagon manipulations". That does make a difference.

I don't think you should be ABLE to catch scum often by bad claims in a well designed game.

It's not the game design, it's just that in my experience people are much dumber about claiming than they are about voting/speaking. For example, they'll state the wrong number of night targets or claim something that contradicts the flavor.

You can find scum without the use of either. Everyone plays differently based on their role, no exceptions. The better a player is, the harder it is to detect, but it's always there.

Sure, it's not wholly futile, but if it's comparable in power to cops/claims, then why aren't towns winning more vanilla games?

BTW, Rabbit, I've never knowingly used bad logic as scum. I don't know if townie logic is worse than scum logic, but if it is, it's because scum are more careful.

I suspect some people behave scummy when they're town just so they seem less scummy when they're actually scum. I suspect this explains part of the lurking behavior on this site.

[Fiasco]

Are you

seriously

advocating comletely random lynching?

No, I'm not advocating that at all.

Claiming is a last resort to avoid a lynch. People shouldn't be forced to resort to that unless there's a strong logical/behavioral case against them.

Mostly right; how does that contradict anything I said?

You're missing my point. Scum don't knowingly use crap logic or anything, but their lynching targets are biased so they tend to compromise it.

Their lynching targets don't

have

to be biased; they bus each other sometimes. Even if they don't, the bias only forces them to use slightly worse logic. My gut feeling is town logic isn't better than scum logic on average, but I don't know.

Said people are really selfish and hurt the game in general.

Yes.

I guess this sort of analysis would work better if people posted more content. How am I supposed to judge scumminess from, for example, one random vote, three off-topic comments, and three on-topic oneliners?

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I've heard he was a Mussolini supporter.

You know what else we have where I live? MOUNTAINS! OMG, OCCASIONAL CHANGES IN TERRITORRY!!1

Territory is for cavemen.

[Fiasco]

I'm still skeptical about hunches -- it's easy to remember the one time they caught scum and ignore the three times they caught town.

You know what else we have where I live? MOUNTAINS! OMG, OCCASIONAL CHANGES IN TERRITORRY!!1

...

What are mountains?

They're like RR's ego, but smaller and made of rock.

(RR's ego has year-round snow on the base and Martians dancing on the tip. Hezbollah once tried using it as an artillery platform, but found their missiles decayed into elementary particles before hitting the ground.)

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Are they - are they anything like windmills?

Not really, no. Not all mountains look the same.

OTOH, mountains don't help ventilate when there are weed fumes.

[Fiasco]

Mole, I kind of agree with Rabbit; if logically speaking one player is the best lynch, and it's a scum, then the scum may make up imperfect logical reasoning to conclude the second best lynch is actually the best lynch.

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OTOH, mountains don't help ventilate when there are weed fumes.

Mountains pwn.

There are spectacular mountains in the Netherlands, but there are also spectacular valleys; it just happens that they're in the same place so they all cancel out.

Is "agreeing with Rabbit" even legal in this site?

Fishing for a modkill, huh?

[Fiasco]

The "best lynch" is by definition the player that the town has logical reason to believe will benefit the town the most if lynched. (I'm using "logic" in a loose sense here.)

[Fiasco]

(edit, never mind)