You're following my chain of thought, but once I started expanding on it I realized I was recalling the era we won trophies in, not this era. Mechanical games remove the necessity to think outside of a vacuum since most case are 2/3 or better. Games aren't about appealing to the table they're about appealing to the clear and the stigma of meta just makes it even more pointless to use.
If you find me an example of something you think is player meta in this era, I can probably point out how and why it's mechanical.
"'Player meta' occurs because balanced 'mechanical meta' should rarely superceed players need to interact with each other to either resolve the day or win games."
player meta occurs because people learn each others' tells after playing w/ each other. that's pretty much objective. you can argue that player meta is more likely to be used when there's a lack of "mechanical meta" to follow, but that's only a portion of when people user player meta.
Yet nothing you've posted can match it. I was going to elaborate on it but it turned into a rant. Mechanical clear based meta is all we'll have for the foreseeable future.
Lets start by defining meta and then applying it to EpicMafia.
Meta is the ideal way to execute a game's system. You pick the best characters, use the best weapons, and take the fastest routes in your attempts to master the game's system.
When you take this approach in EpicMafia you start with the game's system. EM is a text based chat game in which you try to identify alignments then convince those you're aligned with to vote those you're not aligned with. I'll start with the notion of "mechanical meta" which covers the game and its system. It includes things such as how setups are being played, who claims, how you go about finding scum in the setup, and any night actions, day revelations, or interactions that happen that cause people to act or feel a certain way. This seem to be where you're failing your "meta abuse" cases as most of the actions you deemed suspicious tend to occur here, instead of "player meta".
"Player meta" occurs because balanced "mechanical meta" should rarely superceed players need to interact with each other to either resolve the day or win games.
This deserves it's own topic but I'll suffice to say that you're not going to be dealing with cases in this area because pointfarming has replaced scumhunting with mechanics based PoE. Few if any people put effort into this area of the game because games are simple enough to PoE based on roles and in-game events. The only pastebin that contained "player meta" was Cocacola's and the only outlying meta was Zwink's fos at the start of the game. Everything else in these pastebins was standard play based on "mechanical meta".
deletedover 9 years
i can't really remember what i did, but i remember it being high-level and mean as f*ck and apologising for it after
