Town of Salem Game Forums

Spy

You are a Spy.

Your alignment is Town Investigative.

You were once used in battle with the goal of gaining information about enemy tactics.
You were able to retire young, having gained the support of the military who in turn paid you very handsomely.
However, your stay in the town of Salem does not remain the peaceful retirement you once envisioned due to the Mafia invasion.

You can choose one player to spy on during the day and hear all whispers that player has sent to others.
You also have the ability to see who the Mafia visit at night. You will not know what Mafia role visited which player; all you will know is that they were visited by a member of the Mafia.

You win with the Town
You win with Survivors
You must kill the Mafia
You must kill Arsonists
You must kill Witches
You must kill Serial Killers
You must kill Stalkers
You must kill Bombers
You may spare anyone else

Agent

You are an Agent

Your alignment is Mafia Support.

You were a brilliant Spy in your early days, one of the best in the country. However, on one mission, you were captured - by the Godfather.
To your great surprise, he wanted to help you retire after all your years of service. The deal was simple. Use your talents to collect sensitive information from the Town, and he will rule to grant you whatever you want in this silly little town.

You can choose one player to spy on during the day. You will hear all whispers involving that player, both sent and received.
Each night, you also have the ability to plant a bug on a person. The bug will allow you to see who they visit that night, or if they do at all.
You can communicate with your allies each night , for as long as they are alive.

Your allies are [x] the [role], [x] the [role], and [x] the [role]

You win with the Mafia
You win with Survivors
You win with Witches
You must kill the Town
You must kill Arsonists
You must kill Serial Killers
You must kill Stalkers
You must kill Bombers
You may spare anyone else

HalkInHunt wrote:First

I am going to be using these behavioral cues as a baseline for judging whether someone is Town or Scum:

Townie behavior

Being active - If you are making the bare minimum of the post requirement you are probably not posting enough. Being active does two things. 1) Makes it easier for people to give you a town read and 2) prevents Scum from winning simply from lurking the whole game.
Asking probing questions - this is a huge part of the game. If you are not asking questions to players, you best have a really good reason for why. Asking questions help in a multitude of different reasons and a thread could probably be made just on this but here are a few. 1) It tells Town that you are actively trying to solve the game which can help you get a town read. 2) Obviously if you ask a question you are going to get some information out of it even if they don't answer which can help you to clinch that scum read you were thinking about or help clear someone from possibly getting lynch that is Town. 3) It can stop you from assuming something about someone by simply asking a question like "What do you mean?" or "Why?" or "Could you explain your thought process here?"
Providing a conclusion - Simply providing a rundown of what has happened in the thread can help, but it helps 10X more when you provide what your thoughts are about what has happened means rather than simply stating facts. Conclusions should be logically sound and not something used as WIFOM to be effective. Your conclusion should be Inductive or Deductive reasoning and something that is not easily refutable. An accurate conclusion doesn't have to be a super complex thing, it can simply be used to tell if what someone says is true or not
Putting in effort into the game - Play every game like you want to win and if you can't do that, don't play. Showing effort may not be AI, but based on the content that is produced from putting in effort very well could be.
SCUM HUNTING -admittedly this looks different for different playstyles, but it should be obvious that you are doing it. I expect each and every person in this game to Scum hunt since that is the basic fundamental basis for a mountainous game. If you are not Scum hunting, I will be raining fire down on your ass.
Observing reactions - It is one things to make plays yourself, but it’s on another level altogether to observe and make a conclusion on a conversation that you were not even a part of. Keep your eyes sharp and watch everything that happens in the thread and comment on what what observations and conclusions you have made. Often the best posts are ones that have a lot of people involved in a single conversation and it sometimes just takes someone with the wherewithal to conclude what several people have said about a single topic. I admit this is very difficult for me to do personally.
Making new points - if you are making new points on things and providing new analysis to the game, this shows that you are actively trying to solve the game. This is something that is Townie because Scum have a harder time to come up with new legitimate things to analyze in the game.



Scummy behavior

Posting WAY too much - If you are taking up a large chunk of the total post in the thread you are posting way too much and are not allowing discussion from happening between many people that would otherwise have plenty to say about the game and to each other. This is mostly a problem if you are posting fluff, but if you have half the post in the game, you are going to need to relax a bit. I have been guilty of this on may occasions.
Posting too little - If you are posting the bare minimum of the post requirement you are not giving town enough to work with. Even if you are just posting the bare minimum and making huge gigantic posts with one liners, this does not help town win for two reasons 1) It keeps people from even wanting to read that monster, let alone respond to everything you have said and 2) It does a lot of harm for the thread to flow organically. If people are not responding to things as they come up then there is really no change of opinion for people when you are bringing up a lot of old information that can get addressed relatively easily by just letting people think about a couple topics at a time and being able to then come up with a conclusion. This is not the same as an ISO where you are quoting many posts from a specific person.
Extreme WIFOM - While debatably WIFOM has its place even as a Town tactic, if all you are doing is that, then you are not helping Town narrow down possibilities, but instead creating conversations that don't lead to anywhere.
Low effort posting - while effort isn’t indicative of alignment, if all you are doing is making low effort posts i.e. just one liners, I am going to assume you are just trying to coast as Mafia to get an easy win by watching Town tear itself apart.
Voting for yourself without a really good reason - While it's really easy sometimes to throw up a vote for yourself, most of the time it creates a ton of unnecessary WIFOM and is rarely productive for Town to help in finding scum debatably. I don’t want to see anyone doing this in this game because this game is mountainous. I only expect Scum to do it to hammer themselves to take time away from Town.
IIoA (information instead of analysis) - This is where you are stating facts but are not providing any kind of conclusion on what this means. Almost anyone has the capability of giving facts that have happened in the thread, but if you are not telling what that means, it just ends up being a recap of events that doesn't add anything new.
Sheeping too much- While sheeping as an isolated incident isn’t a Scum tell, doing it over and over without ever providing any of your own thoughts out there is Scummy.



Note that these are only a baseline and I will be looking at a lot more things, but obviously I can’t tell you everything I am going to look at to judge whether someone is Scum or not. The other part of this is that I tend to look at motivation a lot and try to judge whether someone is making X post as Town or Scum and this will usually trump any of these above behaviors.

It is my humble opinion that this setup is ridiculously Scum sided. Not only does Town not have a single PR to dead with the odds against them, but Scum also have Day Chat. Evidence of this is seen in the fact that every Scum team has won for the first 4 completed games in the MC. I would have voted for 14:3 without Day Chat for Scum. With that said, If all Town follow these guidelines, I feel this will give Town an edge. So let's not let these Scum $#@!s rule our destiny!



Some things about me and some possible difficulties in reading me:

I sometimes say some things that people don’t understand or they don’t think my reasoning is valid. If I do this, don’t just assume I am Scum for me saying this. Instead I will ask that you ask me about what I meant so I can try and articulate myself better saying roughly the same things with more or different words used and more explanation given.
I don’t believe RVS (Random Voting Stage) is conductive to produce content any better than any other method so I’m going to avoid it because I think there are better things you can lead off with than that.
We are lynching D1, period. Statistically speaking, Town has a better chance of winning when there is a lynch D1, at least where I come from.
I am a very strong believer that a reason should always be given for a vote and if a reasons is not given, it should be blindingly obvious why you are voting for who you are voting for. What this does is forces Scum to have to come up with reasons for their votes, which Scum have a more difficult time with coming up with believable reads than Town. That said, sometimes the reasons I give are not "accepted" reasons due to their "out-of-the-box" nature.
I prefer as playing as Town for a few reasons. First reason is that I don’t feel as much pressure to perform as Town and I can just play being me. Secondly, I feel EVERYONE should prioritise their Town game over Scum game for the very simple fact that you will statistically play as Town far more often that anything else.

With that said, I am ecstatic I am Town this game!


P-edit you stole my first I am writing so slow