On Scumhunting

Original Lecture: On scumhunting

That's actually a great start! It's a little-known secret about my play, but in actuality, my reads are massively, MASSIVELY influenced by the works of others. No, seriously. I'm generally good at reading the people I engage with heavily, so when I have a townread on someone, when I trust a player, and that player gives a read on someone that I don't have a strong read on?

It makes a huge, HUGE difference to my read on that player. I am not a sheep; I have my own opinions on things. I'm going to do my own analysis and form my own conclusions. But I read the words of others and take them to heart. I actually listen when they voice their own opinions. I don't blindly follow them! I'm not going to instantly accept that their reads are better than mine. But their reads DO influence my own, and do so heavily. I analyze things knowing what they think, and building off of what their opinions are, with my own opinions mixed in, I weigh the scales to form an ultimate conclusion, one that is generally surprisingly effective at catching scum.

Now that said! I don't rely on others. I love their input, and I prefer to have it. But it's not a necessity for me to have that feedback. While these opinions of others (let's call them interactions, even though that's generally a different concept) have an influence over me, overall, I'm going to call it as I see it, and make my judgments largely off of the content of players. (My opinion OF the content might be painted partially by others' interpretations of it, but I'm still going to form my own interpretation of it.)

Of course, it's not perfect. It gets more accurate if there's a decent amount to work with. (And less accurate if there's too much to work with. :P The whole parabola theory, and all that. Too much is just as bad as too little.) I'm at my peak typically immediately after replacing in on D2 or D3 with my accuracy, because my initial reads get things that are corrupted if I'm in there longer or I never pick up on if I've let my biases form progressively. But in GENERAL, my reads get stronger the longer I live.

And I think it's largely because of the fact that I aim for the whole picture. When giving scumreads, I know that my scum list should not be double the size of the number of scum in a game. (4 scumreads in a micro is too many. Unless your moderator is Human Destroyer. :P 6 scumreads in a mini is too many. [5 is borderline too many as well, but isn't as bad.] 8 scumreads in a large is also too many. So if you have that many, you've gone horribly, HORRIBLY wrong in your approach, because there are going to be more town than scum, and your reads should be reflecting that!) Thus, the theories I form for scumteams, off of interactions and their general content, get more accurate with time as I have that additional info at my disposal. I keep things realistic, and that makes me a threat. I also see what isn't true, and what isn't true is just as important as what IS true. I can have a reasonable theory in mind that seems plausible enough, and a flip will cause me to realize that theory was wrong, and likely to investigate if the theory is completely and totally wrong, or needs a tweak.

To put it another way--the strongest part of my game is that I play the wifom game. The weakest part of my game is that I play the wifom game. :P NKA, VCA, I do them both, but they're educated guesswork at best. Everything in the game is, in fact. (See below.) I try to read things for how they are, but ultimately, it's just my own take on things when all is said and done. I take the perspective that, in a sense, the entire game is one giant load of wifom, and that it's the job of a town player to figure out what "level" is the actual one for the wifom. (Including figuring out alternatives. Most people think of wifom as having one glass poisoned and figuring out which it is. A good town player recognizes that it's possible BOTH are, and also thinks about neither. By which, I mean, can recognize that sometimes, both scenarios are true, and sometimes, neither are.)

Now, mind you. This next part I'm going to talk about is a slight tangent, but is related to this concept overall. I consider my gut and my logic to be one and the same, in that they're different aspects of the same concept (integrated into one another), in which I run through things to try and make sense of them. When I read a post, I might have a gut reaction to it--logic is what makes me search for what. When I compile a bunch of analysis, it's not my head which tells me what the analysis means. (That requires an objectivity that simply doesn't exist in mafia games; what is true in one game isn't true in another.) It's driven by my feeling, my "gut", of what's right.

To put this into general terms, I use logic, I use reasoning, I look at posts with the overall picture in mind, I keep an eye on interactions and mindset when looking for patterns (finding patterns is key!), and analyze all of that, but ultimately, after all of that is said and done, I'm going to go with what feels right. (For better or for worse, but generally, better.) Though there are a few basic rules I work by, they're for the most part more accurately defined as "guidelines" that define my general outlook on the game. (For instance, I mention above that I don't have double the scum in my scumreads. It's more applicable to finding townreads [which CAN be part of getting scumreads, via POE, but is not the focus of this post], but I generally DO try and have double the scum in my townreads. Four in a micro, six in a mini, eight in a smaller large, ten in a medium large, and 12 in a larger large.)

If you couldn't tell by this, there's no universal method for finding scum. I can give you general tips and guidelines. A key part of finding scum is recognizing scum thoughts. Their mindset, their motive, the intentions present in their post, are INCREDIBLY important to pick up on. A scummy player can be town whose words were scummy but intention was town. A townie player can be scum whose words looked good but were pushing a scum agenda. Mindset involves a lot of guesswork, and you'll get it wrong more than you get it right. But having meta knowledge helps, and also paying attention to those key interactions helps even more.

By reading how others interact with one another, and by seeing what they flip, and by guessing at what their mindset was when making those interactions, you can form increasingly-coherent reads that make progressively more and more sense as fitting. You'll never get a picture-perfect scumteam; there's no such thing. (If it looks too good to be true, it's not true. :P) But in general, you'll get a scumteam that looks like it's plausible enough to maybe actually be true, to actually exist.

That's the best tips I can give to everyone in general. If you want me to help you, specifically, just say so and I'll add you to the list. Further reading: interactive tells talks about interactions you can pick up on. Recognizing Reads talks about the process of giving out your reads, which ties into... Mafia as a Social Game, where I talk about, well...talking to others. :P The article there mainly focuses on convincing players, but I also recommend it for reading on how to work with other players and incorporate their feedback into your own reads.

I realize those articles are a bit long, but that's because they go into these things more in-depth than I can in this session. They're for reading if the tips I present in here aren't enough.