Do you ever find yourself tryharding harder than that time you spent an hour on the toilet bowl pushing that stubborn turd out of your a s s after 1/2 off taco night? After you spend 11 minutes pushing on your hard scum fos to the point of having an aneurism, only for them to get hammered and flip blue, or worse flip PR.
Accept the fact that you can't scumhunt for sh*t and that your reads are always wrong.
Find a townread and sheep their reads. You'll win more games.
Townhunting is more valuable than scumhunting.
When you're stuck in 3 way no clears, do not rely on your godsent scumhunting talent because you will surely mishammer. Instead, consider the reads of all confirmed town who died.
If you sheep a townread and their FOS always flips town, your townread is mafia OR you should dodge them because they suck OR you should stop playing ranked mafia because you suck.
PSA: Unnecessary bussing does not win you games ever. Bussing is scummy. Do not do it.
won't mention specific players because i don't want to hurt their gameplay but for example if i know player A doesn't care about mafia and is just at a table to circlejerk with me and suddenly tries to make actual reads and such, i'll tend to fos him because he doesn't feel the impetus to do so as town.
player B, for example, tends to townread people for rather trivial things as mafia, but finds really insightful reasons to townread people as town, so i just have to ask him about his reads and if he instantly replies with something meaningful he's probably town.
meta informs both of those reads heavily; reactions and responses from players A and B are colored by my existing meta on them
that is, the majority of my reads will come from the combination of what i expect people to do in certain roles and what they actually do, rather than objective things that say "town" or "scum"
A really effective way to learn is to ask yourself "Why?" I feel like a lot of "bad" or new players focus too much on what's plain sight and completely disregard the ulterior motive. With this you can also weed out the non-alignment indicative tells and focus on what really matters
deletedover 7 years
A play style is extremely difficult to change. Over a long period of time, it'll change, but not in a short span.
For example, assume a competitive game of 8 players where everyone is putting in 90% effort. If you flip mafia in one game, you have a set way to act. If you play with some of the same players in the next game and flip mafia again, it's extremely hard to change your play style assuming you're putting in the same amount of effort.
Also, this is assuming that people are trying to win and not trolling. When you troll, your play style will obviously be different.
That's assuming a player's playstyle is static and never changing. But the truth is that people's playstyle adapt overtime based on the meta of the community, the personalities of the players at a table, their alignment, and their level of care.
Someone is going to play a lot different with a table of friends than they are with a table of strangers.
I personally follow this strategy when I'm not confident in my own reads, or haven't paid attention to the game.
Being too cocky in my own reads hinders me so I tend to consider the reads of confirmed town, especially players who tend to have more accurate reads than myself.
If you're a beginner who fosses wrong 90% of the time, considering the reads of confirmed town is beneficial and something to be encouraged.
Of course no one should just blindly sheep the reads of confirmed town or a townread. That's not what I'm saying at all. Sorry if that wasn't clear!
deletedover 7 years
You don't play enough then. The more you play, the more you understand setups and their mechanics. You start to understand other peoples' play styles. When you learn how some people play in a table, it helps you understand how the players you don't know play
deletedover 7 years
I mean I get the point of taking townreads' views into account but one can't really improve (or at least, it greatly hinders your ability to improve) if ALL you do is sheep "your townreads," and ability to get townreads is, just like ability to get scumreads, not consistent, and the two should go hand in hand
ex. would you ever follow this advice yourself, expose? I have a feeling the answer is no because you're confident in your skill, but do you think you would enjoy that even if you weren't? I certainly don't, although I end up doing it anyway sometimes, and I don't think it really leads to an increased winrate because town can be wrong, too
disclaimer: I haven't read this whole thread, just skimmed the OP+like two posts
That not true, look at me as a prime example. I've been playing this game competitively for 3 years and I'm still bad :^]
But then there are a handful of other players who started off terrible and improved over the span of 6-12 months.
Clearly there was shift in their approach, the methods they use, and a change in how they analyze text. It's worth recognizing and writing down.
deletedover 7 years
I guess what I mean to say is to improve your overall knowledge of how town behaves. Look at behaviors that town usually do and determine when someone is being genuine when it matters. If player x fails to do such behaviors then you mark them accordingly.
I just don't see the point of specifically look for town only and then just sit there like a potato expecting someone else's reads are correct. I can concede that if the person you confidently townread, or is clear, usually has better reads than you than you might as well sheep them, but this is rarely ever the case
