May 26th, 2016, 16:32
(This post was last modified: May 26th, 2016, 16:35 by Winston Hughes.)
Posts: 183
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Joined: Sep 2011
I want to say something about the way I played this and the way I was read by others.
Based on what is admittedly a very small sample, the basic assumption on this site seems to be that long, wordy analysis of the details of a post, often focused on the search for logical inconsistencies, is pretty much the only way to catch scum. But it's not. Indeed, from my perspective, much of it reads like a load of irrelevant waffle, in which it's far too easy for a scum to hide simply by joining in with the wordiness (and by being careful to avoid inconsistency).
However, I recognise that it does work for those who know what they're doing with it. The fact that I can't pull quality reads out from that kind of activity does not mean others are similarly inhibited.
But what I got lynched for in this game was just sticking to the kind of scumhunting that I know I can get results from, rather than attempting to imitate the dominant style here. Indeed, as I tried to get across in the thread, the reason I did the whole scumposting bit was that I knew it would generate clear, concise points of the type that I can work with.
Now, I'm a pretty relaxed townie for the most part, and the pride-related baggage I once carried around is more-or-less gone now. I've learned to just enjoy scumhunting as a heuristic exercise, rather than a chance to prove myself (following virtually every game in all three seasons of the mafia championship is a major cause of this - some of the play I've seen there is way beyond anything I could ever hope to match). And for that reason, I'm only annoyed at being lynched here because it prevents me carrying on in a game I was very much enjoying. I can't complain that I got lynched whilst playing my strongest town game, because the strengths of my game were more-or-less universally read as weaknesses, and in the end it's the read that matters. Here and now, it was my failure to fit in that cost town a mislynch.
But I can't help thinking how obvious it was from pretty early on that the lynch was going to be a straight choice between me and Psilly, and how this reflects a slight weakness in the site meta. At base, towning is a guessing game in which you attempt to reason out the likelihood of other players to be with you or against you. But if you treat divergence from a town archetype as the prime reason for suspicion, you block off other modes of assessing that likelihood, whilst giving the scum a predictable way to minimise their exposure.