Chancell0r wrote:A common misconception is that VFR only helps Town. This is not true.
VFR can easily help evils. Ironically, low elo/new players won't like VFR "because it reveals important roles" (see the OP of this post).
VFR can be effective for town by reducing claim space for evils, forcing evils to claim early (which is always bad for evils) and getting information on voting patterns of specific players.
VFR can be effective for mafia by making townies look suspicious. If a confident mafia claims Investigator day 2, and then during VFR 3 townies slowly claim some TI, they will look more suspicious than the original mafia member who claimed investigator. If one of the suspicious TI claims are hanged (and are town), the focus doesn't switch immediately to the mafia who claimed TI, but to the other real TI townies because they claimed more slowly.
So who does VFR really benefit?
It's quite simple really, it benefits the better players. If you're town and a good scumreader, you should be able to read voting patterns and claims/how long it took someone to claim to figure out if someone is evil. A lot of time in ranked (esp high elo) there can be 3+ accusations day 2. People accusing each other left and right. Your job as a townie is to hang the person who will give the most information. For example, if 2 people are accusing 1 person, if you hang that 1 person and they are town, you expose 2 evils. From the votes you should be able to get another 1 or 2 evils.
If the evil plays well, they will make themselves look town, mislynch townie (not in a 1 for 1), conflict with fellow evils if necessary, get the right kills etc.
The onus is always on the evils to make the most out of VFR. If neither town or evils are really trying during VFR, normally town will win. This isn't saying it benefits Town mostly, it just means if no-one is playing well as evil, you can expect town to win (this should be the case for all Mafia type games IMO, the onus is always on the evil to deceive rather than the good guys to spot liars).
A strategy that benefits town more than VFR is the Day 1 Jailor claim meta. This is really difficult for evils because it limits the claimspace of a lot of roles unless they pull off some fancy RM visiting jailor trick. Plus the Jailor is p much literally unkillable N1. A lot of the very best players in the game have realised this and therefore don't participate in the meta (if you always play optimal as town, i.e. taking part of the d1 meta, your town winrate will be ~75%, but your evil winrate will be very bad because you are expected to play optimally as town. However, if you don't play optimally as town (i.e. visit someone else than jailor n1 lookout), you give yourself the possibility of doing this when you are evil, therefore increasing evil winrate. Town winrate is more important than evil winrate because you get Town more than evil and tbh there's not a massive difference in elo from winning as town/evil. So you'd have to make sure your drop in town winrate is less than half of the increase in your evil winrate.
But why would town do it literally every game if it helps evils? :/