It's where I was born, where I lived, where I learned, and where I grew to view detectives as detrimental to town's efforts.

There was a game where I had a detective scan on someone as completely corrupt, and spoke to the player in question for a few minutes, listened to his reactions, and decided the detective scan I had was utter bullcrap.

I tossed out the scan, said the dude was innocent, said I didn't believe the scan, and said that if I was correct, I won the thread forever.

Spoiler alert: I won the thread forever.

Detectives blow, and they blow hard. It's not nearly as good as your own instincts. If I can read someone as townie when I have a scan that tells me otherwise (and by the way, I had never ever ever declared a scanned guilty person to have been townie before, and haven't since) then the scan is a useful tool sometimes, but not nearly as useful as keeping your mind open to possibilities, which is useful ALL THE TIME.

People rely on detectives too much, people are afraid of lynching detectives, people want to rely on detective scans instead of their own pushing of suspects, and claiming someone to be guilty derails the entire natural wolf-hunting discussion completely and everyone becomes lazy and they disconnect their brains.

I. Hate. Detectives.

Then you get actual detectives fakepeeking villagers as scum, and that's a whole next level of detectives sucking.

Shame on villagers who listen to such terrible detectives.

So you choose the wrong player to peek.

mets loves detectives, especially in his mouth

I propose we ban anyone using mafia terminology as it is clearly a terrible analogy to the game

Did I mention yet how much detectives/seers blow? Because they do.

Pizza rules

I agree that seers make people ie me lazy

Turns out, in that game, the truly guilty people (head of cults) would scan as being not very corrupt because they can hide their corruption.

It was actually deciding that a very corrupt scan was a town/villager tell and scanning someone who flipped not corrupt would out someone as guilty, that ends up winning that particular game.

It's much like Capo, where the mafia Dons always scan as innocent. Good cover in the beginning of the game where all the innocent people scan as innocent. Then, they perform vigilante attacks in groups and read as guilty because they've murdered, and the mafia Dons still read innocent. Then scanning innocent is actually a death sentence.

Just gotta figure out what insanity the game host has in store for you, and keep your mind open.

Detectives aren't useless, but because people rely on them more than their own hunting efforts, it causes people to stop thinking and stop hunting and stop discussing. Nothing is more devastating to a village.

A village in coast-to-victory mode is the easiest one to defeat.

How completely impotent was the village in Musketeers when the masons were revealing their peeks? We got a whole lot of nothing done both of those days.

Any wolves we found were on days when the masons and the peeks were not the deciding factor.

That tells you how INFINITELY superior normal wolf-hunting is.

yeah i'd be interested to try playing without a seer

My gut tells me with random lynches wolves are massively favored in a vanilla without a seer. I'll do the math later when I'm at a computer. There's a breaking point where it's even though.

werewolf without a seer is a useless exercise anyway, I mean the optimal strategy is to not read your PM and send in conditional kills if you're a wolf which is so silly. Say that the highest alphabetical guy determines the kill.

NKs would be interesting in a game without a seer

We've had games without seers. Endo ran one for my first game - was ridiculously unbalanced in favor of the wolves. Look up "no seer" in the db, on phone right now. He gave the village watchers, angels and other PRs in compensation.

I'm digging the revamped sticky

and this thread

great success

Detectives are not needed in mafia. I will never understand the reliance on them. You can read people based on their actions and interactions.

Noah for mod

I suggest you take a look at our database stats and realize this is probably the best ww forum on the internet.

In regards to what?

I disagree, but tell me, what makes this place better then everywhere else?

The Lynch Stats report.

Most people here have played on pretty much all the forums for ww out there. It's a pretty horrid landscape.

Explain? What are you getting at?

Pizza, is it really that hard to use our terminology when talking about game roles?

When in Rome and whatnot

Who cares what he calls stuff

This is of course correct, seers are not absolutely necessary, and village play is not merely a game of waiting for and covering for the seer.

But allow me to defend the humble seer. I think if you compare a vanilla setup with no seer to one with a seer, the setup with a seer has some advantages

1) It adds a lot of strategic interest to the game, across every role. For the seer: who to peek, when and how to leave hints, when and how to claim, FPS possibilities, etc. For the villagers: seer cover, evaluating claims, faking claims, looking for peeks. For the wolves: NK strategy, fake claiming. All of those elements are dynamic and fun

2) Let's assume that you could rebalance a POG vanilla setup after removing the seer by just decreasing the amount of wolves slightly. Without trying to figure out exactly how much a seer is worth, it should be the case that the seer adds village equity and its removal would be balanced by removing some amount of wolf power. As it turns out, if you look at single seer vanilla setups in POG, they have an interesting property: The threshold for mislynches for the village is ~50%. That is, in a 17-er, there are 4 wolves and you can mislynch 4 times. I think this is a desirable property. Since most games are fairly close, it means you'll almost always have at least one or two wolves lynched, which provides information to the village. You'll very rarely have complete sweeps either way. Close games in which most lynches are contested are more fun. A setup with no seer and less wolves should involve more mislynches on average per game, I believe, even when villages win. I'm betting that's slightly less fun

I do, clearly

Whatever, I'm done with this argument