Otter, could you explain why voting for someone for posting low content but with no other scum indicators would be considered NOT random, while voting for someone with time to provide content is seriously curtailed IS random. Both of them require picking someone for a posting reason. I am not able to see much of a difference. I think I would just like to see the reasoning laid out between the two so that I understand it better. Thanks!
I am obliged to respond! Although it seems like Shale and others are kind of explaining it too. I know people asked me not to go on rants about gameplay theory here, and I'm not going to harp on it past this, but I was asked to explain my reasoning so I will.
It seems you agree with and understand the fact that voting for somebody for your reason, ie predetermined availability issue, is totally disconnected to whether they're scum or not and is therefore what Alex calls a Hatbot vote in terms of actually finding scum.
So, why is LAL different? LAL is different because it judges the
actual content output of the player, regardless of number of posts made, various availability problems that may arise, or anything else. Well, ideally this is the case; some people try to practice LAL and only go after those with a low postcount, for example, but this is not true lurker hunting. Why is true lurker hunting, the hunt for players who just don't produce much substance, a favored practice? Because it is the case that a higher level of overall content helps town out a lot, while town is hurt badly by low content, whether it's in the form of an absence of posts or in the form of posts with a whole lot of meaningless flab in them. This is why I've been trying to cut down on my post length;
clear communication is what hurts scum the most, and I'm hindering that if I go on for too long and discourage people from reading anything I say. I'm also hindering that if I use a lot of confusing language, mixed metaphors, extremely verbose language -- anything that drags down the ideas and makes it harder to understand the substance of what I'm saying. On the other hand, I'm also hindering that if I don't include quite enough information and cause confusion over what I meant exactly. I try to strike a balance, but I'm prevailingly perceived as a relentlessly loquacious orator with a chronic penchant for sesquipedalian lingual arcanum.
I have no idea why.
Producing a lot of real content is a practice that favors every townie. It
doesn't favor scum, though, because the more real stuff we get out of them, the easier they get to identify. Scum also don't like authentic discussion because it gets to the point and gives townies plenty of time to get their lynch decided on; it's much better for scum if we're stuck pondering over tricky fallacious reasoning and having a generally muddled conversation until the eleventh hour, at which time it's easy to watch any random townie get steamrolled by a lot of voters who (correctly) want to avoid a no-lynch. So producing low levels of content,
irrespective of any possible posting limitations or anything of that sort, is an anti-town practice while producing lots of clear posts with high content density is a good sign of town. This means LAL comes into play. Naturally, scum don't just sit around lurking and allow themselves to get killed off by LAL most of the time, but it still forces them to produce a lot of
fake townie content, and that's where contradictions arise that let us nail them when we'd never know enough otherwise.
In summary: "lurking" or "not lurking" is a measure of content produced by any given player, and their content is definitely related to their alignment. An already-existing condition like Andrew's is not connected to alignment in any way, so a vote on that is random insofar as alignment goes; we can't afford random lynching here, we'd be mathematically doomed.
