More Tips on Achieving a Town Win
I'm mostly going to frame this based on Ness' points because I wanted to bounce off them but it's going to be a big post so it merited its own thread. If you focus on these three things you will find yourself both successfully lynching mafia and becoming a respected player in the game and community:
1) Improve your posting, content, and presentation in order to be taken seriously
This bounces off of a lot of the points Ness has posted and an issue I think TBT sees a lot in players both new and old. But to put it simply, before you take the time to sign up for a game, get good at reading into people, and contributing to the game you are in you need to understand that part of playing mafia means you need to find confidence and energy in how you present both yourself and your reads.
Being a good townie is sometimes not enough if you are presenting what are good reads in one liners, posting in hard to read sentences or paragraphs due to lack of easy to read composition, and/or interacting with other players in the game in an overly emotional or aggressive manner. Posting in one liners or with bad writing/organization if your thoughts makes you come off as too young and careless to have a developed and experienced enough perspective to be taken seriously. Being overly emotional or aggressive can mean a lot of things (defensive, desperate, ****-stirry, someone guided by fear or a pushy agenda). This can come from either alignment but in relevance to just yourself you should keep it in check because it can get your tone read as suspicious, and if you want to be a good townie, it's usually best if you avoid being considered for a lynch. Avoiding being a mislynch not only assures that town is not being kept in the wrong track by mislynching you but also keeps the mafia trapped in a smaller process of elimination by you being eliminated as a category. See point two for more on the process of elimination.
Again, a lot of the stuff Ness suggested above both makes you a better player and improves your reputation in the thread immediately if not in the longer run in the community. Being reputable in a situation, such as a game of mafia, is vital as to whether or not people want to follow your reads and who you want to lynch because of them. A lot of new players find it daunting that their reads won't because they don't have the reputation others in the game might seem to have because they've been in the community for some time but I want to assure that you can very much earn a reputation as quickly as only one day in a game if you consider everything I have stated above as well as stay active, vote, and demonstrate your analysis has depth of thought.
2) Keeping the threadstate in town's control:
What 'threadstate' means is the state of the thread, primarily how much agreed upon solutions there are, who is currently the primary lynch candidate (or who are the candidates), the level of contribution from everyone or lack thereof, and what the main points being focused on are.
Mafia tends to control the threadstate when too many townies are inactive or not vocal or confident at all, keeping an easy mislynch maintained as a candidate, or multiple if they are skilled enough and can set that up for further mislynches, allow two more more townies fighting each other to take focus away from actual mafia behavior going on, and staying out of the PoE (process of elimination) and/or controlling what the agreed upon PoE is.
Process of elimination is narrowing down who mafia could be by confidently assigning living players as town, either because they are mechanically cleared or another player flipping mafia and they either tried to get that living player lynched when there would be no reason to bus a partner or the reverse of that situation. How a PoE can be confidently built and making that determination is its own guide but that's the base upon which a PoE is built.
I repeat: town has a better chance of winning if mafia are trapped outside of a PoE and town is successfully able to compromise on both who should be out of the PoE and who within it seems most likely to flip mafia with that day's lynch.
3) Focus on why somebody said or did something in the game, not just what
In order to be a good towny you need to have good reads. What are good reads? How can I explain that in just one post?
I can. Finding scummy behavior in somebody's posts involves looking for a multitude of things that mafia often post or do and it could easily take up ten thousand words of space in this post if I listed all the examples I've seen. But if you ask the average casual player of mafia they'll tell you to find mafia reads by looking for who was pushing a bad mislynch the hardest, perhaps who sheeped a bad mislynch without considering they could have been town, over-defensiveness after looking bad, saying or doing something that appeared to come from a place of having too much information, and my favorite: someone posted something contradictory or associatively bad (partnered with another mafia) and thus they have just slipped up.
Are moments like these going to result in finding mafia? Sure. They have and they will continue to. However you will find out soon that because these are commonly believed to be the type of behaviors mafia will display, you will frequently see a towny mislynched because they are guilty of doing these things. Either a skilled team of mafia will engineer lynches based on these bad looking moments, or in an even worse (and I'd argue more common) state of affairs, you will find out that they just sat back and let a townie engineer a mislynch against another townie over these things and just sat back to let it happen so they can mislynch that other townie in the future.
And so you and the rest of town grow frustrated and demoralized as the game goes on because tried and often true methods of scumhunting aren't producing correct lynches even though you put in all that work. What can you possibly do differently?
I'm not telling you not to look for those common mafia behaviors at all, because they do produce results, but if you find yourself in one of those games where you can tell by the playerlist that there are going to be some socially perceptive and manipulative players on the mafia team you have to start looking at the why as well as the what.
I recently played in a game with a player who shared a philosophy that can better explain how to construct good reads that look at motive rather than just the behavior in order to find mafia:
Ignoring those percentages (the exactitude of them is arbitrary), take a look at the categories he lays out. What he argued was that in order to confidently nail scum and avoid a mislynch you need to be able to determine why it fits in category two or three rather than category one. This is because you have to search for those posts that could never come from mafia in order to build a confident PoE for yourself that helps avoid initiating or participating in one of those mislynches or in the least argue for why they shouldn't happen.
I can't really give specific things to look for when it comes to things a towny could never fake or posts only mafia would make since it's situational. However when you are looking at why someone said or did something that they did you can figure out when someone is pushing a lynch based on a category 1 post rather than one based on category 2.
More importantly, in the long-game, you should be looking for those rare but important posts that fit into category 3. When you have a PoE you should have a hard PoE and a soft PoE. Hard PoEs should contain only people who have been mechanically cleared. Soft PoEs should come from people who have been spewed* town by flipped mafia and then further refined by looking for players who haven't made the cut based on that criteria and seeing if any of them have made a post that fits category 3.
But again, if anything, reading from this approach of 'why' can make you a better townie by preventing mislynches. In the quote above I was setting up a player named Aliza who had me (correctly) as a suspect in her readslist and in order to keep myself in a position worth following I had to disenfranchise her read by casing her readslist as sus for having too many bills among other things. Two of my partners swooped in and positioned against her to try and make her the mislynch but suddenly this player pops up and presents this philosophy in order to investigate if the stances building against Aliza were made by opportunists trying to get her mislynched and he was absolutely right. We shut it down and let a different candidate be lynched before we killed him at night for this and other reasons. But the point is that somebody had the potential to prevent a mislynch by basing the way he read around the why/intention/unfakeableness of people's posts.
To conclude, you should consider these things, nothing less, but follow point 1 as a hard rule in the least.
*Spewed: when the flip of someone who was lynched or killed implicates a person as towny or scummy. Can be either alignment but typically mafia is looked at for spew, such as when they tried to get a living player lynched and it didn't seem like distancing or bussing.
I'm mostly going to frame this based on Ness' points because I wanted to bounce off them but it's going to be a big post so it merited its own thread. If you focus on these three things you will find yourself both successfully lynching mafia and becoming a respected player in the game and community:
1) Improve your posting, content, and presentation in order to be taken seriously
This bounces off of a lot of the points Ness has posted and an issue I think TBT sees a lot in players both new and old. But to put it simply, before you take the time to sign up for a game, get good at reading into people, and contributing to the game you are in you need to understand that part of playing mafia means you need to find confidence and energy in how you present both yourself and your reads.
Being a good townie is sometimes not enough if you are presenting what are good reads in one liners, posting in hard to read sentences or paragraphs due to lack of easy to read composition, and/or interacting with other players in the game in an overly emotional or aggressive manner. Posting in one liners or with bad writing/organization if your thoughts makes you come off as too young and careless to have a developed and experienced enough perspective to be taken seriously. Being overly emotional or aggressive can mean a lot of things (defensive, desperate, ****-stirry, someone guided by fear or a pushy agenda). This can come from either alignment but in relevance to just yourself you should keep it in check because it can get your tone read as suspicious, and if you want to be a good townie, it's usually best if you avoid being considered for a lynch. Avoiding being a mislynch not only assures that town is not being kept in the wrong track by mislynching you but also keeps the mafia trapped in a smaller process of elimination by you being eliminated as a category. See point two for more on the process of elimination.
Again, a lot of the stuff Ness suggested above both makes you a better player and improves your reputation in the thread immediately if not in the longer run in the community. Being reputable in a situation, such as a game of mafia, is vital as to whether or not people want to follow your reads and who you want to lynch because of them. A lot of new players find it daunting that their reads won't because they don't have the reputation others in the game might seem to have because they've been in the community for some time but I want to assure that you can very much earn a reputation as quickly as only one day in a game if you consider everything I have stated above as well as stay active, vote, and demonstrate your analysis has depth of thought.
2) Keeping the threadstate in town's control:
What 'threadstate' means is the state of the thread, primarily how much agreed upon solutions there are, who is currently the primary lynch candidate (or who are the candidates), the level of contribution from everyone or lack thereof, and what the main points being focused on are.
Mafia tends to control the threadstate when too many townies are inactive or not vocal or confident at all, keeping an easy mislynch maintained as a candidate, or multiple if they are skilled enough and can set that up for further mislynches, allow two more more townies fighting each other to take focus away from actual mafia behavior going on, and staying out of the PoE (process of elimination) and/or controlling what the agreed upon PoE is.
Process of elimination is narrowing down who mafia could be by confidently assigning living players as town, either because they are mechanically cleared or another player flipping mafia and they either tried to get that living player lynched when there would be no reason to bus a partner or the reverse of that situation. How a PoE can be confidently built and making that determination is its own guide but that's the base upon which a PoE is built.
I repeat: town has a better chance of winning if mafia are trapped outside of a PoE and town is successfully able to compromise on both who should be out of the PoE and who within it seems most likely to flip mafia with that day's lynch.
3) Focus on why somebody said or did something in the game, not just what
In order to be a good towny you need to have good reads. What are good reads? How can I explain that in just one post?
I can. Finding scummy behavior in somebody's posts involves looking for a multitude of things that mafia often post or do and it could easily take up ten thousand words of space in this post if I listed all the examples I've seen. But if you ask the average casual player of mafia they'll tell you to find mafia reads by looking for who was pushing a bad mislynch the hardest, perhaps who sheeped a bad mislynch without considering they could have been town, over-defensiveness after looking bad, saying or doing something that appeared to come from a place of having too much information, and my favorite: someone posted something contradictory or associatively bad (partnered with another mafia) and thus they have just slipped up.
Are moments like these going to result in finding mafia? Sure. They have and they will continue to. However you will find out soon that because these are commonly believed to be the type of behaviors mafia will display, you will frequently see a towny mislynched because they are guilty of doing these things. Either a skilled team of mafia will engineer lynches based on these bad looking moments, or in an even worse (and I'd argue more common) state of affairs, you will find out that they just sat back and let a townie engineer a mislynch against another townie over these things and just sat back to let it happen so they can mislynch that other townie in the future.
And so you and the rest of town grow frustrated and demoralized as the game goes on because tried and often true methods of scumhunting aren't producing correct lynches even though you put in all that work. What can you possibly do differently?
I'm not telling you not to look for those common mafia behaviors at all, because they do produce results, but if you find yourself in one of those games where you can tell by the playerlist that there are going to be some socially perceptive and manipulative players on the mafia team you have to start looking at the why as well as the what.
I recently played in a game with a player who shared a philosophy that can better explain how to construct good reads that look at motive rather than just the behavior in order to find mafia:
Ignoring those percentages (the exactitude of them is arbitrary), take a look at the categories he lays out. What he argued was that in order to confidently nail scum and avoid a mislynch you need to be able to determine why it fits in category two or three rather than category one. This is because you have to search for those posts that could never come from mafia in order to build a confident PoE for yourself that helps avoid initiating or participating in one of those mislynches or in the least argue for why they shouldn't happen.
I can't really give specific things to look for when it comes to things a towny could never fake or posts only mafia would make since it's situational. However when you are looking at why someone said or did something that they did you can figure out when someone is pushing a lynch based on a category 1 post rather than one based on category 2.
More importantly, in the long-game, you should be looking for those rare but important posts that fit into category 3. When you have a PoE you should have a hard PoE and a soft PoE. Hard PoEs should contain only people who have been mechanically cleared. Soft PoEs should come from people who have been spewed* town by flipped mafia and then further refined by looking for players who haven't made the cut based on that criteria and seeing if any of them have made a post that fits category 3.
But again, if anything, reading from this approach of 'why' can make you a better townie by preventing mislynches. In the quote above I was setting up a player named Aliza who had me (correctly) as a suspect in her readslist and in order to keep myself in a position worth following I had to disenfranchise her read by casing her readslist as sus for having too many bills among other things. Two of my partners swooped in and positioned against her to try and make her the mislynch but suddenly this player pops up and presents this philosophy in order to investigate if the stances building against Aliza were made by opportunists trying to get her mislynched and he was absolutely right. We shut it down and let a different candidate be lynched before we killed him at night for this and other reasons. But the point is that somebody had the potential to prevent a mislynch by basing the way he read around the why/intention/unfakeableness of people's posts.
To conclude, you should consider these things, nothing less, but follow point 1 as a hard rule in the least.
*Spewed: when the flip of someone who was lynched or killed implicates a person as towny or scummy. Can be either alignment but typically mafia is looked at for spew, such as when they tried to get a living player lynched and it didn't seem like distancing or bussing.
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