The Syndicate

If you can't use in-thread evidence to back up these "sudden feelings" or "revelations", then you should get lynched instead of the person you are having "second thoughts" about.

I think an important thing to take into account is the concept of prevention vs. punishment. Its all fine and good to have punitive measures in place, but I think a more successful approach would be if hosts developed their games to make it as difficult as possible for infodumping to happen, and as difficult as possible for role outing to occur.

Whether that means writing more secrets into the game to create paranoia and doubt regarding claims, or in-game mechanics that spread misinformation, or whatever the case. I don't think it needs to be a question of "What bad things can we do to infodumpers", but rather find ways to encourage actual effort, and make infodumping and role outing useless or too difficult to warrant.

There should *ALWAYS* be a way to get your point across without infodumping. "X Is bad" is the end result. Now that you know "X is bad" you can go back into the thread and frame their behavior in a baddie light, and get them lynched that way. Straight out infodumping is obviously wrong. How I would constitute infodumping is anything that cannot be read by anyone else in the thread (Night results, role PM's etc etc). Most of you guys know what constitutes infodumps.

I will fully admit that I may have infodumped in past games, but for the most part I try very hard to avoid doing it when civvie. I know for a fact I've false-info dumped, because I know the reliance on info dumping is so strong it is easy to mess with that and exploit it as a baddie. I can't say that infodumping is bad and fake dumping is good, I would prefer to win with neither. But if the thread is engaging in infodumping already, misinformation is the mafias best defense, even if that puts mafia at risk. Poisoning the well, so to speak.

Role outing, hinting, claiming, absolutely not acceptable. There are a million ways to get your point across without saying "I am X, So and so is Y" or whatever. The cheeky hinting that was in Champions was so annoying.. When you have 2 or three pairs of civs that are vouching for each other, where do you go in terms of suspects? What can you do as a mafia up against "Hey guys, me and so and so are civ, by the way. We've totally known we were civ since forever, and by the way we are also (whatever that ladys name was with the two heads)." If you're beating the thread across the face with hints like that, two things happen: Legit civs leave you alone, because duh; and mafia leave you alone in order not to draw suspicion for suspecting "The hint hint two headed civ team".

My overall point is that if it ain't already in the thread, shut the heck up about it.