Watched the game from the sidelines while it was occuring, and while it was nowhere near as bad as Invasion and thus does not warrant yelling, I just want to make four things clear (even though Kefit's already mentioned them a lot - and could you guys listen to him for a change? He's actually right about a lot of stuff that MoTK Town does wrong a lot of the time.)
First off: "Rou was spotless apart from the chainsaw defence on Sodium".
This is actually a very *Scummy* thing to be. It's very easy for Scum to be spotless, heck, I do it all the time, so does any competent Scum (Kilga did an awesome job at this in a game we played in together on another site recently, for instance), and in this game, so did Roukan. However, there's the issue of the chainsaw defence. At the time it was made, there was no indication that it was bad. After Sodium's lynch, it
was. This was a perfect Scumtell: defending a Scum that didn't have to be lynched but ultimately was, with the reasoning for the defence being sketchy at best.
Secondly: "But Kefit was totally bussing Sodium!"
No. Bussing only makes sense if the person you are bussing is either: A) a derpsicle, or B) already under fire from Town OR did something that once Town found out would now
make him go under fire. Over here, Kefit wasn't very prominent, but overall thought of as Town, and Sodium was being lauded as Town after his vigging of Sakana.
At this time, a Scum is not going to off the one which is *better off in the eye of Town* when neither of them are under suspicion! That is not gambiting, that is just sheer lunacy.
And anyone who stated anything to the effect of "but Kefit's argument was written so well it had to have been staged!" needs to be ashamed of themselves. Now. Then they need to read
this post and actually
do what it says that you should do. Being able to make good, coherent, understandable, logical cases is a
good thing, not something to hold against people, ffs!
Thirdly: Not everything is WIFOM.
I'm pretty sure this is why Kefit actually started deconstructing the concept near the end of D5. Because a lot of people here seem to miss the point as to what WIFOM is. For those of you who know game theory, WIFOM is a weighted, head-to-head guessing game, between two or more choices, where one of the choices carries an inherent drawback, and this drawback is countered by a different drawback for the other person. As a result, there is no dominant strategy for this guessing game, because any attempt at one will just cause one to go into logical reasoning loops and waste time without ultimately being any closer to making a valid guess than they would by pure random chance.
A lot of the stuff you guys call WIFOM is not WIFOM. Analysing people's actions subjectively is not WIFOM, especially if you can very easily trace a given action to a motive which is unambiguously Scummy (i.e. trying to go after the guy who COUNTERCLAIMED THE SCUM VIG AND GOT HIM LYNCHED), and in fact sometimes needs to be done to tell between bad Town play, weird Town play (due to various reasons), and Scummy play. Quite often in Mafia you
simply do not HAVE enough information to be able to do a full first-order logic deduction to determine everyone's roles, heck, if you always did, the game would be fairly boring, as you could just have computers decide the final set of lynches and either Town would virtually always win or Scum would virtually always win (then again, MoTK seems like somewhat of an example of the latter, so who knows, really.). As a result, one is forced at times to make subjective judgements. Sometimes these can be wrong, if they are, this needs to be pointed out. However, they are very much *not* Scummy in and of themselves, and quite often *need* to be done, and thus should
not be used as a Scumtell in and of themselves. Argh.
Fourthly: D1 lurking is not a Scumtell.
I do this regardless of alignment. So does Alex. So does K4U. So does Kefit (I presume - I've never really seen you play Scum). There are many reasons why you'd do so, ranging from "busy with real life matters" (my lurking on D1 in GWU that lead to my almost-getting-lynched and then the now-infamous doc fakeclaim was as a result of studying for a final exam that was that same day, for instance), to "just does not want to deal with the shitpile that is D1". As long as the posts they do make on D1 are good, and contain votes with at least some amount of sensible reasoning, this is perfectly fine. If they continue lurking D2 onwards, now is the time to LALU, but D1? D1 is largely irrelevant past about D3 in next-to-any game that I've ever been in, and the majority of the information that is gathered is from voting patterns and wagonalysis, not actual posts/content - this is why, as long as they still
vote, they are justified in otherwise lurking on D1, but again,
only on D1.
To see how competent Town decides things,
here is still my favourite game as Town. Start reading at Page12.html and keep reading until the game is over. You will note how various things are analysed, and stuff that looks bad but is not Scummy in and of itsself is ignored, whereas stuff that is Scummy but doesn't seem all that important at first sight is eventually used to locate the relevant Scum and lynch them. This is what *should* be done. Unfortunately, as long as Town here persists in being lazy, we're stuck with games like this, where the principal reason for Town's loss was simply their own stupidity.
And that doesn't make Town a fun alignment to play for anyone who *is* even halfway competent, at all.
