by S0me0ne23 » Sun Oct 21, 2018 1:48 pm
I’ve been wanting to post this for a while, relating to the things I take issue with regarding how people approach fm as town, and as I’m deciding whether or not to come back to this site, I figure I’d just post this and see what people think. That being said…
The problem:
A lot of people on this site seem to think in reactionary terms: Somebody does something scummy, therefore I vote them. Something notable happens, I give my thoughts on it.
This type of play is WRONG.
Why? Because scum have no incentive to do anything. They literally can just put the bare minimum effort in, avoid any conflict, and just slank by the entire game. There’s also nothing pushing discussion, so town isn’t making any progress towards solving the game.
Another way people unintentionally avoid contributing is by posting reads, especially reads list. Instead of contributing, people post reads lists. Instead of asking people to contribute, they ask for reads lists.
This is better in the sense that people are proactively posting content, but at the same time it’s usually done in an impersonal manner. Reads lists are like essays, not conversations, and since mafia is inherently a social game, they lose a lot of the important content that comes from interacting with people to form opinions. It also focusses too much on what has already happened, with nothing to say about where to go from here in terms of reads.
This gives the false dichotomy of processing and pushing, where the only time people do anything proactive is when they arbitrarily decide who to lynch, and they do so with ill-informed reads based on a surface level glance of what he said, she said.
So how do we fix this?
First we need to define a goal for day play: Resolve players.
Resolving players can be defined as sorting players into one of two categories: Lock town, or lynched. However, townies need to be cautious about how they resolve players. Lynches are a limited resource, so they need to be used conservatively. Similarly, letting a wolf into your townblock can be a major setback, which can cause mislynches and force you to redo your reads.
Keyword is caution. Tunnelvisioning or blindly sheeping aren’t thorough enough to be viable playstyles. Instead, you need to analyze where players were coming from. Guess at someone’s thought process, then ask them what they were thinking. If you were wrong, maybe you shouldn’t be townreading them, or maybe you were townreading them for the wrong reasons. If you think someone may be scum, offer up a townie reason for their actions, and if they deny it, maybe you just didn’t see what their thought process really was. If a player accepts a thought process / motivation that was imposed on them habitually, they're probably scum. If you don’t understand something someone did, you can literally just ask why they did it, then see if their reasons or motivation are believable.
Most people I’ve seen here either feel lost or have blind certainty. Both of these are wrong; certainty isn’t something that just happens, it needs to be built up methodically. In order to effectively play town, you need to actively interact with players, both to form your own reads and so that other players can see that you are town. This is the only way that discussion can flow in a productive manner and should be the go-to method of gamesolving.
This is something that takes practice and nobody is perfect at, but you’re not going to get to the point where you can just ez read people unless you put the effort and intellectual curiosity towards actual human social interactions. It’s about learning how to read people, and if you can habitually view mafia with an attitude of learning, it’s only a matter of time before improvement follows.
I know a lot of people that do this, and I've found that most of the players that do are also the players that I have a high opinion of, but a lot of people don't do this, and I think this is the first step if people want to salvage this site's meta.
This is the longest post I will ever make on this site and fully intend to go immediately back to one-liners.