Self-Voting: is it always a bad idea?

[Thesp]

Main problem is that the hammer vote can be the most incriminating. Since you hammer yourself, the hammerer is thus obviously innocent, and it's one less risk the scum may need to take to get a lynch. So just be patient and wait to get lynched next time. While you're doing so try to behave as pro-town as possible so that townies are less likely to make the hammer.

QFT. Making someone else do the deed makes it incriminating. fight to the end and don't give up - it will help the town get more information based on how people react.

I've only self-voted once, and it was because I was town, there was a large bandwagon on me, we were 5 minutes from the deadline, and I wasn't at enough votes to be lynched. I self-voted to prevent a no-lynch, because in my opinion lynching a townie is far worse than a no-lynch.

As a survivor of such a vote (where I wasn't lynched at deadline and thus we no-lynched), I think this is nearly categorically wrong. In this instance, no-lynch was ultimately clearly superior to the lynch of a townie.

And absolutely zero information regarding the previous day's vote and lynch.

This is very, very wrong. How in the world could you suggest there's

zero

information garnered on a failed deadline-lynch? (In particular, in Face-to-Face Mafia, the lack of lynch on an eventual confirmed townie gave us troves of info about who did and didn't vote.)

[Thesp]

I think there is one situation in which a protown player can feasably self-vote without getting utterly destroyed.

Nobody has managed to name that situation yet.

When your name is Lloyd? Except he never self-hammers, which seems the issue.

I'd guess Town A self-hammering in a Town A, Town B, 1 scum from group C, 1 scum from group D endgame is OK, especially if Town B is clearly identified as a town and town A's role seems to be up in the air. Basically you're making the Prisoner Dilemma completely clear.

This happened at MeMeMeet. Pooky played it brilliantly as A. C killed D, but D killed B.

[Thesp]

In Mini 486, a D1 self-vote by Nelly632 was bandwagoned upon by a number of people until he unvoted and claimed vanilla.

Anyway, I was a dayvig-mason and I decided that it seemed strange for scum to do what Nelly had done and, thus, he was most likely town. On that basis, I went ahead and began interrogating Oman, who was one of the wagoners, figuring it was likely that one/some were scum. Oman, who turned out to be mafia, made a fatal slip in response to something I had said and I dayvigged him, D1.

So, yeah, self-voting is not always a bad idea (though this particular example depended on a lot of luck).

This does not mean self-voting was a

good

idea, even though you were able to deduce information out of it.

PPE: Seol beat me with wiser words yet again. Curses!

[Thesp]

But the thing is, the question was initially if

self-voting

is called for. Since you know yourself to be innocent, it seems that voting for someone you know to be innocent is silly. Re: the arguments that lynching unconfirmeds is a good thing, such a case is ideal if and only if you have a

significant

numbers advantage, which is pretty rare.