The Scumhunter's Playbook, Part I of V (Project Abandoned)

[Albert B. Rampage]

Introduction

Scumhunting. The very word inspires slight hesitancy and distant respect, splicing the visions of the dreaded witch hunts of an age long gone with obscure standards of playing that you will be judged on in nearly every mafia game you join. Scumhunting. The investigative process of deducing scum.

This is an in-depth guide to scumhunting, laid out to be as linear as can be imagined, exploring advanced scumhunting techniques as well as essential thematic elements, effectively taking you deep inside the minds of the most accomplished mafia players known to me. If you ever thought that lynching mafia was mostly about lucky guesswork and clumsy happenstance, this guide is about to blow the very lid off your perspective.

Profiling the Player

Profiling is the action of "recording a person's behavior and analyzing psychological characteristics in order to predict or assess their ability in a certain sphere or to identify a particular group of people", as defined by the Princeton WordNet lexical database. This will be the working definition I use for the remainder of this chapter.

Seasoned scumhunters profile their suspects much like the FBI does with criminals. Unlike meatworld criminals, however, the available evidence to profile a player in mafia games is limited.

Metagame

Metagame can be bended, altered, or face-lifted beyond recognition. As far as scumhunting goes, it's even less relevant than a secondhand opinion since you don't gain any new information about what player x thinks about player y. And it takes ten times the research. The dynamic nature of a mafia playstyle and its constant evolution through acquired experience cannot be held to a mold indefinitely, unless the player is intentionally perpetuating his metagame.

Some players I know actually do this. They hold to a specific metagame stipulation that they exploit as a last-ditch trump card in sticky situations. A classic example of this is the Pooky Guarantee:

Pooky GURANTEED his protownness this game.

You can not get more confirmed than thaT!!!!!

Pooky Gurantees have never been proven wrong!

Pooky's metagame was that every time he used the "Pooky Guarantee", he would be town. His logic was that it was a verifiable, historically accurate barometer of his pro-towness. The truth is that it was just a glorified Gambler's Fallacy.

This extends to my overall view of the concept of metagame itself. Although it is a powerful persuasion tool against the unwashed masses, it is fundamentally a fallacy. Don't let it impair your judgment, as it is the easiest thing to change in a playstyle, especially after someone points it out to you, which will always happen since this is mafia and players will post cases.

Archetype Assessment

Archetype Assessment is the counterpoint to metagame and what I personally use. From the data of the ongoing game, I loosely classify each player along the following points:

• Intelligence (INT)
  
  Intelligence roughly translates to communication, presentation and analysis skills, a logical system of beliefs and personal investigative prowess. Intelligence is built upon by experience gained by playing at the peak of one's ability. Some players can competently play a maximum of two games, others can play maybe four. Experience in substandard quality of play do not improve a player's Intelligence rating.
  
  
• Involvement (INV)
  
  Involvement can be defined as the unrelenting self-motivation and initiative to produce good content. The subject's posts express familiarity with the game across several different levels (the rules, the interactions, voting patterns, etc.) and a critical perspective that explores and expands new avenues of discussion. Involvement is cultivated by a player honing his capacity and desire to post relevant content.
  
  
• Activity (ACT)
  
  Activity is the general presence of the subject, whether it be to hammer before deadline or respond to questions in a reasonable timeframe. A player can improve his activity by simply having more time to check up on the state of his games.
  
  
• Links (LIN)
  
  The relationship and personal history the subject has with the other players in the game. More on this in a future chapter.

This constitutes a solid foundational framework to profile a player. Shifts in the parameters above are to be analyzed against the circumstances surrounding them. The method and manner of a scumtell is to be projected against the light of this information to gain insight on the intention -and therefore win condition- of the player.

EDIT: Instead of this article being part of a series, a standalone article on Gambits will be written.

[SensFan]

You're wrong about the whole Pooky Guarantee thing. The whole point of the Guarantee is that he could never fake a Guarantee as Scum, or he would lose the advantage of the Guarantee in all future games.

[Albert B. Rampage]

You're wrong about the whole Pooky Guarantee thing. The whole point of the Guarantee is that he could never fake a Guarantee as Scum, or he would lose the advantage of the Guarantee in all future games.

You can point to your meta all day and say, "but if I ever switched up my meta, I would lose the advantage my current meta gives me in all future games!"

The fact of the matter is that meta is irrelevant and no player worth his salt would want to gamble a read over the hypothetical future games of another player

[Yosarian2]

Well, Pooky never actually broke his Pooky promise, ever. He only used it about 1 game in 20 or so, because that way he could still play as scum.

Basically, it was a tactic that was so effective, while being against the spirit of the game (since by never using the tactic as scum, you could argue there was a "play to win" violation there), mith actually changed the site rules to specifically ban that tactic. Also, to ban another tactic Pooky used in a disturbingly effective way, the "huggle alliance".

Mafia Specific Rules

Breaking rules, not posting, or certain other behavior may result in a modkill or replacement in individual games; rules regarding this should be (and generally are) included up front by the moderator. Some rules apply to most games, and should be assumed to hold unless the moderator explicitly says otherwise. These are:
...
* Do not bring outside influences into the game - this includes threats, bribes, wagers, promises, alliances, etc. Using knowledge from previous games is perfectly acceptable, but try not to carry grudges from one game to another.

Mith can correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that that was specifically put into the rules to stop the Pooky promise and the Pooky alliance.

Yeah, Pooky's basically the Wilt Chamberlain of mafia.

[Pomegranate]

Could you please explain what the Pooky alliance was?

[Yosarian2]

Could you please explain what the Pooky alliance was?

Pretty much a game would start, and he would declare "the huggle alliance" and invite people to join, and say that "people who join the huggle allliance won't lynch or kill each other until they're the only ones left". I'm really not at all sure how serious he was about that; that was probably always a gambit, but it was a really effective one, and some people started to get uncomfortable about it when the same people started to be in the alliance every game.

[UncertainKitten]

Pretty much a game would start, and he would declare "the huggle alliance" and invite people to join, and say that "people who join the huggle allliance won't lynch or kill each other until they're the only ones left". I'm really not at all sure how serious he was about that; that was probably always a gambit, but it was a really effective one, and some people started to get uncomfortable about it when the same people started to be in the alliance every game.

Huh. I wonder if this is where SpyreX got that strategy. It's kinda a cool idea ^-^.

[Pomegranate]

Yeah, Pooky's basically the Wilt Chamberlain of mafia.

[Yosarian2]

Pretty much a game would start, and he would declare "the huggle alliance" and invite people to join, and say that "people who join the huggle allliance won't lynch or kill each other until they're the only ones left". I'm really not at all sure how serious he was about that; that was probably always a gambit, but it was a really effective one, and some people started to get uncomfortable about it when the same people started to be in the alliance every game.

Huh. I wonder if this is where SpyreX got that strategy. It's kinda a cool idea ^-^.

I'm pretty sure if anyone who's not Pooky ever suggested this, they'd get speed-lynched. Pooky's, you know, awesome.

[MrWhereItsAt]

The pooky alliance is actually a workable tactic, and although ive never seen it used in a mafia game anywhere, i have seen permanent alliances formed outside of games where the participants are essentially matchfixing, whether it be in chess or other games. Definitely should stay banned.


Good article, ill be interested to see this series continue.

[UncertainKitten]

I'm pretty sure if anyone who's not Pooky ever suggested this, they'd get speed-lynched. Pooky's, you know, awesome.

SpyreX lived to near endgame IIRC. Unfortunately, despite picking all townies for his UNBREAKABLE ALLIANCE, they lost to cult. Hey wait...you were IN that game! I remember! And we had all the inconsistent modding because the project was a little too big to really be run effectively with the amount of planning we did.

[SpyreX]

I'm pretty sure if anyone who's not Pooky ever suggested this, they'd get speed-lynched. Pooky's, you know, awesome.

Hi!

I think the difference is the UNBREAKABLE ALLIANCE (TM) is more of a free-flowing thing. Its not constant from game to game.

Altough FL did bring up dirty old memories of that sinner game.

[Glork]

As far as I know, Pooky only used the Huggle Alliance in Lights Out Mafia. I could be mistaken, though.

Still, Pooky's Guarantee is indeed something I would always, 100% stand by. I haven't seen anybody else provide that kind of track record of using a keyword like "Guarantee" in a long-term meta, so until someone provided significant (I'm talking half a dozen or more) examples of them using a meta, and it could be verified that they never made a similar statement as scum, I wouldn't buy into it. It's kind of a Pooky-only thing.

[Adel]

Metagame

Metagame can be bended, altered, or face-lifted beyond recognition. As far as scumhunting goes, it's even less relevant than a secondhand opinion since you don't gain any new information about what player x thinks about player y. And it takes ten times the research. The dynamic nature of a mafia playstyle and its constant evolution through acquired experience cannot be held to a mold indefinitely, unless the player is intentionally perpetuating his metagame.

Archetype Assessment

Archetype Assessment is the counterpoint to metagame and what I personally use. From the data of the ongoing game, I loosely classify each player along the following points:

In my opinion the two are not mutually exclusive, they are complimentary parts of a single whole. Meta-based profiling is a far richer and more useful method than your initial paragraph suggests. I think of a player's game history as being the domain that the specific game variable fall with. If his history is sparse, either from only playing in one game at a time, or because he is new, then you do not have anywhere enough information to help you. This was a limitation for me for a while, until I began to understand that a specific player's history can be supplemented with an understanding of similar player's history. Fortunately, there aren't that many truly separate personality types or playstyles, and most mafia players don't seem very unique at all if you've read enough games, so a tell from one player can often map to another player if the two are similar enough. Combining the play histories of similar players into overlapping areas of archetypical meta can yield a more robust domain to analyze the specific game variables for one player in one game. I think of it as adding color to a black and white drawing. With a full meta on a single player, informed and reenforced by existing metas on similar players, subliminal things start to stand out, but it takes solid judgement and informed intuition to separate the signal from the noise. I often state that there is no such thing as an accurate universal scumtell, but there is such a thing as a tell that is accurate for players of a certain playstyle if you are rigorous enough to accurately determine their playstyle (and a single ongoing game certainly isn't a large enough dataset) and map their game specific variables within that playstyle. All of this is very fuzzy since play-styles aren't separate and distinct sets, more like general regions that are mapped by six or seven axis.
Anyhow, that is my take.

And it takes ten times the research.

{

snip

}

This extends to my overall view of the concept of metagame itself. Although it is a powerful persuasion tool against the unwashed masses, it is fundamentally a fallacy. Don't let it impair your judgment, as it is the easiest thing to change in a playstyle, especially after someone points it out to you, which will always happen since this is mafia and players will post cases.

It takes far more than 10 times the research. Much more. I'm not the kind of person who would waste thousands of hours of my life on refining a process that doesn't work.

~~~
Great article, solid format, and very articulate. I wish more people tried to write these.

[Ellibereth]

If you carry the Archetype Analysis from game to game does it become Metagaming?

[Adel]

If you carry the Archetype Analysis from game to game does it become Metagaming?

in my opinion, yes.

[Yosarian2]

As far as I know, Pooky only used the Huggle Alliance in Lights Out Mafia. I could be mistaken, though.

If I remember correctly, that was at least the third time he made the Huggle Alliance.

Still, Pooky's Guarantee is indeed something I would always, 100% stand by. I haven't seen anybody else provide that kind of track record of using a keyword like "Guarantee" in a long-term meta, so until someone provided significant (I'm talking half a dozen or more) examples of them using a meta, and it could be verified that they never made a similar statement as scum, I wouldn't buy into it. It's kind of a Pooky-only thing.

I got Pooky lynched after he made the Pooky Promise once.

[dramonic]

and he flipped town?

[Yosarian2]

and he flipped town?

Oh, yeah. Big time. (Ftr, this was in a face to face game at one of the meets)

Anyway, getting away from that, I do have to disagree with Albert's idea that metagaming is useless. I find making adjustments for the playstyles of certain players to be a very powerful tool; there are some players who always look scummy to me, but that's because a behavior or group of behaviors that I normally find to be pretty reliable scumtells are part of that player's normal town game. Now, if they're just anti-town, then I'll still pressure a person for them, but sometimes an action is a scumtell in general without being anti-town, but is not a scum tell for that person.

For example, the first few games I played with Dripping Goofball, I pretty much tried to lynch her every time I saw her, because her norma town play-style looks scummy to me (and I think my normal town playstyle looked scummy to her as well, for different reasons). Now that I know how she plays as town, I have a much better chance of reading her correctly, and when she is town I am much better able to use the reactions her play generates to find scum. These days, because we know each other's metas, we're much less likely to end up in an endless town vs. town fight of the kind that can be so disruptive to the town. On the other, when she plays under a new alt and I don't recognize her, I'm pretty much right back to trying to lynch her from the start of day 1 again, because I'm not making compensations for her known meta .

[Adel]

On the other, when she plays under a new alt and I don't recognize her, I'm pretty much right back to trying to lynch her from the start of day 1 again, because I'm not making compensations for her known meta .

ditto, we might even be thinking of the same game.