Multi-factionality would make it very hard to trust any comrades gained so far. Seems like a divisive tactic to sow distrust among any groups that already exist. Scarlet throws out the possibility and people start getting paranoid. Sure, the possibility of it exists, but I don't have a strong feeling that it is happening.

Unless fair Scarlet has some actual evidence, which I would gladly listen to with eager ears.

Hard to gather evidence when nobody writes anything publicly.

That was the point of my "you're all playing the game wrong" post Mown. You can't find inconsistencies in what people are saying if you only let them talk privately. Forcing everybody into public conversations makes them take a public stand on things that you can then compare to what they are saying privately to more accurately gauge their true intentions. People that are opposed to this method are probably the ones doing the shady shady.

I'm just reading the OP guys. It's a bit in the middle, but it is pretty clear:


As an aside, wincon is for 2 factions to survive, so I'd guess that if someone like this exists, he should be pretty relaxed because he's less of a threat than most others and can have more people backing him. Provided he actually is talking to the people of those factions and they are truthful in what faction they belong to.

And yeah, I would like some more public talk too, so I figured, why not post options like that.

I mean, I'm pretty sure I know the names of at least 3 factions. So it's not that hard to falsely claim to belong to one.

And anyone can do that because there is no public information from the mod.

given what i know about the setup of the game, that shouldn't matter.

The ones who play the shadiest and who connect to others the most aggressively are probably the ones who are going to win.

This game is very mechanically based, scumhunting isn't going to be as important as applying logic and accumulating a mechanical lead.
The game is also very self-motivated. Death equals loss, and every faction is roughly the same size, which removes most of the motivators for team play that exist in traditional mafia.

If someone belongs to multiple factions I am assuming they would be more of a threat

Say there are four factions, "A,B,C, and D".
If someone is a member of team A, he has to win with team A but can also potentially share a win with teams B, C, or D. Depending on the state of the game and its players, which team he shoots for is up to him.
Now, if someone is a member of team A and B, he needs to win with team A and B, and no matter what the state of the game is, has to be the enemy of teams C and D, meaning a larger number of players are out to get him.

the first half of that was directed at numbers.

(emphasis mine)

Truthful at the end game, but early on it's the other way around. Stragglers are more easily picked off at this point because they do not matter in the grand scheme of things and everyone is everyone's enemy. So someone who is now in A/B is an enemy of C/D, but anyone in A is an enemy of B/C/D.

Depends on the amount of information various people have.

As a member of faction C with a certain number of contacts, I am currently shooting for a C+D victory. That might change if something happens to shift the balance of powers in the game. Say it becomes apparent that there is an indestructible night-killing player on faction A and it seems likely that faction A is going to pull ahead. If C and D are of similar sizes, i now have motive to throw some members of D under the bus to promote a C+A win instead.

As such, C aligned players are currently my strongest allies, with D aligned players also being allies, albeit that might change in the future. Its definitely not the case that everyone who isn't aligned with me is my enemy, from my current perspective.

There's also the case of end-game culling

Say the end-game looks like this:

A: 3 players
B: 1 player
D: 5 players

Except there's overlap between A and B because of an A+B aligned player.
With the exception of the A+B player, A players are trying to kill the final B player for an A+D victory. D players are doing the same, although there's less pressure on them because its very likely a D+A or D+B victory will result in either way.

In short, the A+B player is screwed in either case. They can't allow either the A faction or the B faction to become too weak while other players still have the option to jump ship on an alliance should their partners grow too weak.

Except you can't trust a shady player. That's why people vet their allies, otherwise that alliance you think you might have could just as well be a carefully constructed trap. There's a reason why you can't build Rome in a day Rag.

The critical point here is that you cannot trust what a lot of people tell you.
I can claim to belong to both Roman and Persian, but it's kinda hard to verify. And judging by some PMs received from players combined with claimed info from other players I know at least one of those is lying to me.

It's partly my fault (I play mafia by confirmed info, so this game is kind of a misfit for me ), so I fully expect this game not to win unless my faction happens to be one of the last two standing.

You can only trust any player as far as your understanding of the game state, and your understanding of that player's mentality goes. You don't need to be able to know that everything a person's saying is true to get ahead by being shady, as it were. You'll potentially gather more information spinning webs than by forcing people into relinquishing information via group talk, but more importantly you'll probably create a bigger information discrepancy between you and your opponents than if you gained the information via public means.

That was a lot of sentences to say you can't trust anybody Rag.

depends on what trust means to you

you can't blindly trust anybody but you can reason that what they are telling you is probably true.

If they are just telling you what you want to hear you're naturally going to assume it's true.

wouldn't being told what you want to hear normally make you suspicious?

For the most part, no. It's well documented that when people want to believe something they will ignore what's right in front of their face to do so. We've even created a cavalcade of idioms to try and justify the phenomenon.

if someone gives you a horse as a gift you should hire a dentist to make sure there aren't tiny bombs hidden in its teeth

Why would I accept such a gift? There's far too much work involved in maintaining a horse.