Okay, let's start with this here mass claim business.
Robbeasy: Zchinque - [...]said a few things that would be exactly what a Mafia would say - wanting a mass claim (then claiming you never said it),
But I didn't. I'm not so stupid that I would deny saying something which anyone could read, and given that people kept pointing to it, I can't exactly claim that I have forgotten due to being drunk/insane/sexually molested by a penguin.
Let's look at what I said:
Zchinque: Screw the random vote stage.
Who's up for a mass claim?
I did not say
I think we should all claim
or
I want us to mass claim
or anything of the sort. I asked
who would be in favour of a mass claim, which says nothing about my own thoughts on the matter in one way or the other. There is really nothing I can do about some of you reading specific intentions into a general question.
And for those who wonders, I am against a mass claim, and have been since the start of the day.
I don't believe you. This is something you made up after you saw that pretty much everyone were against a mass claim!
From my play so far, does it look like I think this is a popularity contest?
And if you go through all my posts, you will see that I have consistently never said anything about being in favour of a mass claim – every time someone has accused me of it, I have been completely ignorant of the accusations.
But there's still something fishy... Why would you bring up the question of a mass claim if you were against it all along?
Prodding. For. Reactions. (Sorry Damuna)
This is also something I will probably get back to later.
The interesting thing here, to me, is not the chance of getting a mass claim to go through, but rather how you react to whole thing. Remember that townies and scum have different goals, and different amounts of knowledge. Most players have a scum meta and a town meta – even if they try as hard as they can to play like town when they are scum. They assess information differently, think differently. I know some players who have words or phrases they will almost only use when they are scum and not as town, or vice versa. But often it is not so much what people say that is of interest, but what you can gather of their thoughts behind the words – why they say what they are saying.
Anyways...
I fully expected people to interpret my question as me being in favour of a mass claim – I was counting on it. Would anyone be willing to blindly follow me? Would anyone's reaction be over the top? Who would answer and who would ignore the question?
The most interesting answer was this one:
Al1: As for the issue of a mass roleclaim, I am unsure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it may provide us with a few pointers as to who is mafia through dodgy sounding claims. On the other, it could simply lead to mass paranoia, squabbling and finger pointing, as well as giving the mafia ideas about who to nightkill.
Also known as Fence Sitting 101.
I don't know [...] on the one hand [...] on the other
(For the following to be correct, I'm working with the assumption that this game is a somewhat low power game, not too unlike the setup I used for GOG mafia #1. I think that is pretty likely to be correct.)
In most games, and certainly in low power games, early mass claims favour the scum. However, when the question arises that doesn't mean the best strategy for them is to go all out in favour of a mass claim. However, by «seeing both sides of the issue» they leave themselves open to be in favour a bit further down the road. If one or two townies go for the mass claim idea, the scum can safely have «thought it over» and ended up in favour of the mass claim – knowing that they won't be standing alone, and as such not revealing themselves. Also, once you have a couple of votes in favour, it's much easier to get the needed majority, to get the mass claim to go through.
(The idea being that once half the players are in favour, they can force the rest of the players to join at pain of lynch)
Moving on – another interesting case is nmillar. Not so much for how he responded to the idea of a mass claim (he didn't), but rather for his general play in this thread.
So far, he has pretty much only talked about what happened in the previous game, or repeatedly been asking me why I voted for Al1 (there was also the silly theory about how me asking Typhoon to quit the nolynch-voting somehow made us possible scum buddies). Now, nmillar has been in a game on this site before, so here we have a meta to compare to. We
know that nmillar was town in #1, and by reading that game we
know how nmillar played as town (given that we have only one game to work with, the meta analysis isn't the strongest, but bear with me). To anyone who played in #1, or read along with it – how do you feel that nmillar's play in this game compares to his play in #1?
While speaking about nmillar, I'd also like to point you to this little goodie
Zchinque: @nmillar:
Why are you not contributing?
nmillar: Because I'm still waiting for you to answer the question you've been asked 5 or 6 times now!
Why have you voted for Al1? Can anyone tell me what is wrong with this post?