Virkelig god læsning, som hjalp mig med at mistænke 2 af de 4 ulve i sidste spil:
As a villager, your goal is obviously to lynch all of the wolves. To get this done, you need to examine each of the other players and determine which ones should be lynched, and which ones shouldn't. The village is limited in how many players they can kill, and to win the game they will generally need about a 50% success rate on their lynches. The order of the lynches is largely irrelevant. Sometimes someone will say "We should lynch X this round, because if we're wrong we get another chance next round... but if we lynch a villager this round and lynch X next round, then we lose if we're wrong." This line of thinking is silly. If you're planning to lynch two players, then which one of them is lynched first is irrelevant. The end result is that they are both dead and everyone else is still alive.
When selecting who to lynch, you generally want to lynch the player who you feel is most likely to be a wolf. Learning a wolf's identity gives you lots of information to use to determine your future lynches. There are some exceptions though. If a player has claimed a specific role, then it is generally better to leave them alive until you are certain that they are lying. If they are telling the truth, the wolves will have to kill them at night. This takes away one kill from the wolves and gives one additional lynch to the village. Sometimes people say "Well they will die tonight anyway if they are telling the truth, so we might as well kill them now since they are probably lying anyway." This logic is terrible, because it ignores the fact that the village is limited in how many players it can lynch, and wasting one of those lynches hurts a lot. Whether the player gets lynched as a wolf immediately or a day later makes little difference, but if they are not a wolf then it is a great boost to not lynch them at all. (In special games where the wolves have their own powers, it may be correct to lynch a player who has claimed a role if you believe they are lying, since allowing them to live an extra day will let them use their powers again at night.) Another time where you might not lynch the player who has the greatest chance of being a wolf is if lynching another player could give you enough information to change your decision about which other players you would like to lynch. You should rarely, if ever, lynch a player solely for information, but when the decision is close, you should consider what you will learn from knowing their role. This is the counterpoint to the section of the Advanced Wolf Strategy where I explain that if one player could possibly become cleared for some reason at a future time, you should try to get them lynched quickly before you miss your chance. As a villager, you should take the opposite approach and choose to keep a player alive for a while longer if you might later determine that they are a villager and should not be lynched.
Of course, the big question is how to find the wolves. Well, it's not really just about finding wolves. It's really about learning everyone's role. Finding villagers helps to narrow your focus, and if you find enough villagers, then you can simply lynch all of your suspects and win the game. Learning someone's role has a lot of similarities to playing poker. No one wants to be easy to read, but the fact remains that it is impossible to play well as both a villager and a wolf without having some differences in your games. You just have to know what sort of things to look for.
Wolves differ from villagers in two key ways: They already know who all of the wolves are, and they are trying to get villagers lynched instead of wolves.
Wolf Tells Derived From Having to Think Consciously:
The subconscious mind is extremely powerful. It is impossible to turn it off, or ignore it. Have you ever looked at text and tried not to read it? It's impossible. Your brain does it for you. When villagers read posts, their brains make judgements. It's automatic. This doesn't happen for wolves, because they already know the answers. There's nothing to figure out. They have to use their conscious mind to try to determine how they would react to each post as a villager. It's tough work. And to make matters even worse, they aren't trying to make cases for why wolves are wolfy, or why villagers are villagery. They want to do the opposite. Trying to fabricate believable arguments takes time. In general, a player's wolf game is going to be several levels behind their villager game, in terms of amount of content and quality of logic. The gap is a result of the lack of subconscious help, and the need to consciously fabricate arguments.
Some potential tells include:
* A player who normally posts lots of short messages will instead post long, but infrequent analysis.
* A player posts less content than usual.
* A player asks for other people's opinions, while not stating their own. These questions sometimes appear to be rhetorical. For example: "Does Wolf X's post clear Player Y?" "Is there anything to be learned from those bandwagons?" Of course, villagers ask questions too, so don't get carried away with this tell. Look at the big picture, not a single post in isolation.
* A player posts entirely objective analysis, as opposed to subjective analysis - they will restate other people's opinions, summarize events, but they will generally avoid making judgements about it. I've named this "commentator mode" because the wolves that have done this sound like play-by-play announcers on TV that just tell you what's going on, which you already knew anyway.
* Similar to the last point, a player will come across as wishy washy because they do not make judgements about the other players. Villagers can be wishy washy too, but there are differences. For instance, villager wishy-washiness could be a result of a gut read contradicting the other "evidence" about a player. Wolf wishy-washiness is generally devoid of gut instincts and instead a result of simply not knowing how they would react as a villager. For example: "X voted for the wolf d2, but on d3 they voted to save that other wolf, so I don't know what to think of them."
* A player who is normally very excited about finding the wolves comes across as being disinterested.
* A player overexplains things. Villagers generally don't explain things unless they think it is necessary. Wolves are trying to emulate a villager's thinking and may post their thought process when there really wasn't any need to. Or, the wolf might realize that it's obvious, and actually state that it's obvious in place of posting an explanation. Wolves know that their "reads" are wrong and they are generally aware that if they were a villager, they would be reacting differently. They want to make sure that everyone is aware that they aren't just making their "reads" at random and that there is actually logic behind them. Villagers know their thoughts are pure and don't feel as much need to justify themselves. This goes along with my first point about players that post lengthy analysis which is out of character for them.
* A player's posts do not maintain internal consistency. Wolves sometimes forget about one of the phony reads that they have posted, and contradict it later. Sometimes a wolf will simply forget about one of their suspects because no one seems to be interested in lynching them. Villagers will change their mind a lot, so make sure that what you're finding are real contradictions, and not just changes of opinion. Along similar lines, if you are dealing with a player who is less experienced than yourself, you should be able to make a timeline of how their reads have changed, and then locate specific reasons for them to have changed their mind. If you can find a reason for all of their changes, there is a good chance they are a villager. If their opinion changes seem to be strongly correlated to which players have a good chance of being lynched, then there's a problem.
* A player posts things which simply makes no sense - not to be confused with logic that you personally disagree with, unless you happen to know that the other person does not believe it either.
* A player overreacts to bad news. He's actually happy to get that news, but has to pretend that he's unhappy, and doesn't do a good job of it.
* A player does not know how to react when encountering an unusual circumstance. Wolves are always asking themselves how they would be acting as a villager, and most of the time they have enough past experience to come up with the right answer. For many players, just living until endgame is a somewhat unique experience. There will also be some times where there will be a truly bizarre string of posts, or some funky roleclaims, and the wolves won't know how to react. Look for players that clam up in these spots (or players that say something really stupid). When it's must-lynch with 5 players left in a turbo, it's not uncommon for only the villagers to be talking.
* A player mostly follows the majority consensus, and rehashes the same arguments presented first by others, rarely contributing unique thoughts. Players that seem to be on a completely different page than everyone else are usually villagers, even if their thinking makes no sense (exceptions occur if the wolves are in bad shape and need to shake things up in order to have a chance at winning).
Wolf Tells Derived From Having Different Goals:
Most of the above tells relate mostly to how wolves have a hard time blending in due to the way they have to think about what they should be thinking. The other thing that makes wolves different from villagers is that they are actively trying to get villagers lynched.
* I once heard the saying that professional gamblers consider what is probable, while suckers consider what is possible. Villagers are the pros, and wolves are the suckers. Villagers have no issue with deciding that someone is a villager - they are after the truth. Wolves hate to clear villagers, because they want to lynch villagers. They will be looking for reasons to lynch someone, while discounting or ignoring competing evidence. This is often manifested in the form of quotes such as "he could definitely fake that as a wolf" rather than "he's probably a villager, although it doesn't clear him."
* Along similar lines, lesser experienced wolves often don't bother at all with identifying villagers - they are looking solely at who they can get lynched, and ignoring the extraneous stuff. As villagers, they will honestly assess people and will conclude that some of them are villagers. More experienced wolves know that they need to clear villagers in order to blend in, but they still hate to do it too much and will often fall into the traps mentioned in the previous point.
* Villagers will reevaluate constantly. Wolves go into cruise control once they have a villager lined up to be lynched.
Tells Derived From Who Knows How They Will Look Tomorrow:
My first group of tells was derived from the fact that the wolves know who all the wolves are because it causes wolves to use their brains differently, but there is another group of tells which come as a result of the wolves using this knowledge to try to avoid making themselves look any worse than they have to while getting villagers lynched. These types of tells rely on the fact that wolves are not going to take an action which increases their chances of getting lynched unless they have something to gain from it as well. Going into specifics is somewhat futile because what villagers consider wolfy is constantly changing over time, and wolves will continue to adapt to this to avoid being lynched. However, there are some general tendencies that will generally hold true unless all of the players in the game are very experienced and aware of all of these tells. Just like using tells in poker, you need to know if your target is aware of these tells and could be reversing them on you.
* Wolves and villagers both want to get "credit" for driving the lynch of a wolf... but villagers can't ever be sure that they are right. Anyone that seems to be trying hard to take credit for a villager who gets lynched is probably a villager. Wolves will put in the minimum amount of effort necessary to get a villager lynched, because they don't want "credit" for it. For the next month after I've posted this essay, this tell will likely be meaningless, since it is so easy to fake.
* Conversely, if a wolf gets lynched, any fellow wolves on the bandwagon want to make sure they get their credit for it, and are unlikely to post last-second messages expressing doubt about their vote.
* If the two leading candidates at the end of the day are both villagers, wolves are more likely than villagers to leave their vote on a meaningless third party. This doesn't apply to people that aren't around near the deadline and left their vote on a reasonable candidate at the time of their final post.
* If one of the two leading candidates is a wolf, the fellow wolves who are around at the end will generally either try to save him, or pile on him to look good, but are unlikely to make a throwaway vote at the end.
* When a wolf is very obviously getting lynched, his fellow wolves are unlikely to continue defending him once things appear hopeless. People that continue to insist he is a villager or make absolutely futile attempts to save him are villagers.
* If both of the leading bandwagons are wolves, the fellow wolves will almost certainly pile onto one of them to make themselves look good in the short term, until it is revealed that the other wagon was also a wolf. It would be very strange for a wolf to make a throwaway vote here.
* Wolves are unlikely to assume a leadership role and try hard to get people to follow their vote. This always has a bad outcome: either they lead a villager lynch and take the blame for it the next day, or they lead the lynch of a wolf who might not have been lynched had they not pushed so hard. Wolves would much prefer to work outside of the spotlight, and have villagers lead lynches of villagers.
* Somewhat related to this is that wolves are unlikely to argue with each other at great length. People get into arguments in order to get the other person to change their mind... why bother getting into an argument where both people already know who is right?
Tone Reads, Player-Specific Tells, and Miscellaneous:
There really is no such thing as a generic villager tone. Many players consider it villagery to post sound, logical arguments and wolfy to post emotional, strange arguments. This is often backwards. Clearing anyone based on their tone without solid previous history with them is certainly a mistake. While there may not be such a thing as a generic villager tone, there are some tone things that can be associated pretty closely with wolves. The biggest one is unprovoked, random hostility. Villagers tend to see the game as a puzzle, while wolves are more likely to take the "us vs them" mentality as if there were some sort of heated rivalry. Naturally, villagers will react if you push their buttons, but people that seem to lash out for no reason are often wolves. Very similar to this is the use of insinuation and innuendo in place of logical attack, which comes off as being pretty aggressive. Sometimes, wolves will mistakenly show their happiness when things are going well for them. This is not to be confused with sarcastic type of remarks... but if someone seems genuinely happy when the village is in bad shape, you should be wondering why they are happy. And as a general rule of thumb, most players are more serious as wolves than they are as villagers.
For the most part though, analyzing tone comes down to comparing how a player acts from one game to the next. Three big things to look for are level of seriousness, level of interest, and level of confidence. When someone has played several games in a row claiming to have minimal reads and then all the sudden the next game he acts like he has the game cracked wide open halfway through day 1, he's a wolf. But for other players, that's their standard villager game.
Somewhat different than player-specific tone are player-specific tells. Just like tells in poker, player-specific tells are almost always generic tells which apply very strongly to specific people. Seeing someone eat an oreo when he is or isn't bluffing is useless. If you figure out that he's eating an oreo because he's calm, then you've got something solid to work with, and in the future you can associate that tell with other things that he does when he's calm. In werewolf, people are going to do things that give away their role, and they are likely to continue repeating the same mistakes in future games. If their actions are the result of some sort of psychological drive that you can identify, then you have a solid tell. If your tell is something random, then there is a good chance it is just a coincidence and it's not reliable.
And finally, there are still some other wolf tells which I haven't really covered, however, I believe that most of them are subsets of the things that I've already gone over. Trying to enumerate everything that I find wolfy would be a futile task, as much of it depends heavily on timing and context. At this time, there are only two other things that I'd like to add which don't seem to fit in well with the other sections. The first is that wolves will often make excuses for themselves preemtively. Villagers tend not to defend themselves until they are actually under attack. The second thing is that villagers tend to be more honest about posting things that seem wolfy on the surface. For example, a villager will generally be willing to admit that they really had no reason for their vote switch, when a wolf would invent a reason for it.
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(nej, se, mere fluff fra mig selv)
