Article #1: Making Fake Reads and Bussing: The Truth is Your Enemy
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written by TheDean1
Based on my experience from playing and railing werewolf games, the single biggest and most common leak in most people’s wolf games is that they simply are not good at being wrong. This can loosely be broken down into 3 aspects of content posting: making fake wolf reads, making fake villager reads, and voting. But before I get into those aspects, I will first touch on some cognitive biases that drive wolves to be too right.
I believe the most abundant leak is in wolves who do something anti-wolf because “it's what they would do as a villager.” Don't take this the wrong way, but most people are probably less impressed with your villager game than you are. Even the best of the best make bad reads and decisions all the time, so don't assume that you are being held to a high standard of correctness. If you don’t have a reputation as a top notch villager, people will tend to be at least somewhat forgiving of your bad reads. Even if you do have a good rep, you will still get some leeway as well as an excuse to be alive at end game. As far as logic and reasoning goes, most people probably don't care or pay attention to your villager game enough to be able to read your mind. Even the people I am most familiar with do things that I would not expect them to do as a villager quite often. It's awfully self-centered to expect people who are not even that familiar with you to know what you'd do as a villager in every situation. It comes naturally since being a wolf heightens your self-consciousness; your entire goal is to be perceived in a certain way, so you need to care about what others think of you. Many people can't help but worry "If I do X or Y anti-village thing, how will people
not know that I'm a wolf?"
The reality is that they won't know because catching every detail and coming to the correct conclusion as a villager is impossible, and doing so at a high % is extremely difficult. Villagers are wrong quite often, so wolves should be even
wronger. But the problem is that it's hard to be wrong when you have complete information, because the answers seem quite a bit more obvious once you already know them. If you ever feel compelled to defend a villager or push a wolf because they should be obvious, you should immediately reject that notion and ask yourself: Is it obvious to the vast majority of the village? If not, it doesn't matter how obvious a player's role should be, you have free reign to fake believe whatever you want since your job is to be wrong and you can blend in with other wrong villagers.
Bearing in mind how common it is for villagers to be off the mark, everybody should be comfortable in their fur enough to wolf as if they are having a significantly (or at least moderately) below average villager performance. First and foremost, I strongly believe that you are an elite wolf if and only if you are capable of generating convincing and credible wolf cases on villagers. This is important for a number of reasons:
1) Not many wolves are capable of making up strong wolf cases on villagers. When you come in with a strong and thoughtful wolf case on somebody, people are going to inherently be inclined to trust and believe that you are a villager since it's really, really hard to do so while knowing roles.
2) If your case is convincing enough, you can get a villager lynched.
3) The more time villagers spend focusing on the wolfiness of a villager, the less time they will be spending focusing on the wolfiness of the wolves.
When you have all three of these things in your favor, wolfing becomes smooth sailing. You don't need to FPS, you don't need to frequently face the ever difficult dilemma of awkwardly defending your wolf pal vs bussing him, you just need the entire team to vote villagers (and the occasional very wolfy wolf partner, but the longer you delay this the better - most wolfy partners are more salvageable than you might think) and not spew themselves and you win (barring elite seering of course, which is a different story for a different day).
Similarly important is knowing who to defend and when plus how to do so. It's important to not correctly clear/defend too many villagers. This is to your disadvantage for a number of reasons. Obviously you can't endorse every villager wagon ever and not eventually seem really scummy unless you're playing a 9er turbo, but there are not many (if any) people with this problem so it's best to not worry about it. But if you hard defend a villager and they get wagoned against your wolf pal, good luck trying to get away with anything other than a vote on your fellow wolf to save the mislynch. If you hard defend too many villagers, you will inevitably find yourself in this unenviable predicament (or similarly if you always feel compelled to throw a wolf at the end of your wolf list, you might price yourself into voting them over a villager you gave a slight villager lean to). Note that in these situations, it’s still best to attempt to flip your read(s) but it can be difficult to do this without looking bad - it’s a lot smoother if you were just wrong to begin with. Even if you normally read a particular villager well, unless everybody expects you to 100% soulread that person on page 1, you are going to have some margin for error and it's safe to not hard defend that person (or even cast doubt on them) when he/she falls under pressure. Actively defending somebody in a way that may cause villagers to reconsider their opinion (i.e. aggressively defending them as if you peeked them or claiming lock soulread with a clear villa read) should be done sparingly since it might prevent a mislynch but won't get you cleared.
As far as clearing wolf mates goes, everybody should be capable of hard defending their co-wolves at least on occasion. Even if they aren't objectively villagery at all, villagers always are capable of finding thin reasons to soft-clear people or doubt their wolfiness, so you should be able to as well. You don't want to find yourself in a situation where you are bussing your partner simply because you are afraid of spewing yourself wolf with an awkward defense. Remember if you were a villager without complete information, there would probably be a little (or maybe even a lot of doubt) as to whether that player is a wolf or not, so play accordingly as a wolf.
If you actively keep villagers on your wolf list and don't have too many villagers on your villa list, voting villagers for lynch will follow naturally. But you might be thinking, "What difference does it make if I decide to vote a wolfy wolf over a wolfy villager? The wolfy wolf isn't going to win at end game regardless, and we can always lynch the villager later." The answer to this is that it's extremely advantageous to lynch villagers before wolves for a number of reasons:
1) Every time a wolf dies, spew happens and the villagers have more information to solve the game. And even if you voted for the wolf, you aren't going to get as clear as the villager(s) who outed the wolf. If you ever bus a wolf that did not necessarily need to die and don't get universally cleared for it, you should ask yourself what the bus did to advance your team.
2) Keeping a villager alive for an extra day buys him/her outs to clear himself. Some villagers start off wolfy and then clear themselves with a strong effort later in the game. Or maybe he's the seer (seers are often read as wolfy, after all) or seer peeked, or fake peeked by a vanillager that you might eventually NK in a seer hunt. It's always good to get a villager lynch when the opportunity is there, since that opportunity might dry up before you would expect it to.
3) The greater the wolf:villager ratio, the higher % of the vote you control and the easier it is to win. Not every wolf is going to blend in well enough to be there for the end game victory, but for the most part if every team member votes the right villager at the right time, you should win comfortably. Winning with a teammate or two alive is quite a bit easier than winning solo. It doesn't matter if a few (or many) villagers read you (or a partner) as wolf if they can't lynch you, and the greater the wolf:villa ratio, the harder it is to lynch a wolf on a non-bussing team.
4) Even if you are convinced that bussing is a +EV strategy, doing so less frequently will increase the EV when you do decide to bus. It's far more likely that you get cleared for voting a wolf if you have a history of not bussing than it is if you are regarded as a serial busser.
Making incorrect reads comfortably in the most villagery fashion that you can is going to be very healthy for your team. To recap: it keeps villagers focused on the wrong details, it catalyzes the death of villagers before they become clear, lynching villagers helps you kill the seer(s) faster, and it yields a much faster path to victory and allows you to revert to a normal, honest life where you don't have fur and teeth to hide from the world. You obviously need to be correct to some extent, such that people can't just turn your reads upside down and solve the game if you're revealed as wolf. But ultimately people care about how right you are far less than you might expect. Even if you look very suspicious at end game for making a lot of bad reads, once you get to must lynch with 3 or 4 wolves alive it is almost always going to be too late for the town to do anything about it. I would implore anybody that takes wolfing seriously and would like to learn to consistently win to try to push the boundaries of being wrong and seeing how far it can take you; you might be pleasantly surprised with how fun it is to be a wolf when you can consistently lynch villagers and protect your teammates.
Cliffs:- You should worry little about what you think you would do as a villager, since very often it is -EV for the team
- The consequences of being wrong are less severe than you think
- The ability to build strong wolf cases on villagers will advance your wolf game more than any other means of wolfing in the thread
- Having too many correct reads will often price you into either bussing or looking bad voting a villa when w/v wagons pop up
- Villagers getting lynched early and often makes wolf life easy for a number of reasons.
