When should the cop come forward?

[mathcam]

I love these really old necro threads...get to remember all the people that used to be on the site.

I think the answer to the original question is probably pretty complicated, but my general rule of thumb would be to compare probable days left in the game to the number of people you can out. In a 25-person game with one scum group, even if I could verify 5 townies for free on day one, I think it would be a bad call. You'd run out of verified townies well before the end of the game. But again, this is just an intuitive reflex -- depending on the level of sophistication of the model, I don't think it would be too hard to get exact numbers in a vanilla cop+mafia+townies game.

Cam