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Clarification of rules regarding killing out of suspicion

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Deathie:
So full disclosure. I'm not an admin partially because I don't want to be involved in community affairs like this anymore. My opinion, and the entirety of this post, should NOT be treated as that from an authority.

With that said, I'll leave my opinion on this kind of thing, if it even matters.

Having a black and white rules list with an organic gamemode like TTT isn't healthy for the game.

With the exception of say, first blood RDM 5 seconds into the round, almost every case is going to be extremely situational, circumstantial, and with a HUGE margin for meta-gaming.
"Does player X favor this kind of weapon? Player X often does this when he's a traitor, and the murder matches his MO. Player X was one of the only two people unaccounted for during the murder, and the evidence leans more against his favor."

The goal of the traitor should be to eliminate all the players without getting caught.
The goal of an innocent should be to prove your innocence and to not incriminate yourself.
The goal of a detective should be to track down traitors based on evidence and witness testimonies.

My server only had three rules because I wanted to leave enough grey area so that people didn't need to play internet lawyer when they were being banned.

* You may not kill another player without a good reason.
* You may not exploit flaws in the design of a map or the game mechanics.
* You may not harass or otherwise target other players outside of normal gameplay.
This isn't my server, though. Our karma system was tweaked in a way so that as an innocent you wouldn't want to T-bait, and as a traitor, you would be walking on thin glass trying your best to not get caught. That doesn't change the fact that killing someone FOR A REASON is NOT RANDOM.

By imposing an arbitrary set of rules like "are following someone else", "appear to be aiming at people's heads", and "dropping a weapon which was the same type as what killed another player", you're restricting the skill ceiling of the game immensely.

Not to mention you're creating a very simple guideline for a T to follow to kill everyone, and if anyone tries to stop them for those reasons, it's bannable.

Monorail Cat:

--- Quote from: ホロ on September 30, 2015, 11:52:48 PM ---
* You may not kill another player without a good reason.
--- End quote ---

In your opinion, what is a "good reason"?  This is what I'm trying to point out.  Half the time the person in question has killed someone out of suspicion, it was definitely not a good enough reason to me and several other members.

Deathie:

--- Quote from: Monorail Cat on October 01, 2015, 12:28:20 AM ---In your opinion, what is a "good reason"?  This is what I'm trying to point out.  Half the time the person in question has killed someone out of suspicion, it was definitely not a good enough reason to me and several other members.

--- End quote ---

"Good reason" was anything other than "I kind of felt like it" and "I just don't like the guy".

Don't get me wrong, someone using this excuse to do it constantly or to target a specific player is bad. That's why rules against excessive RDM and target RDM exist.

Like, take the Peaches Castle example. You gave yourself a reason to be suspected. It wasn't "I did something to be suspected", it was your lack of action that led to your demise.

And assume you were innocent. Isn't that the point of the karma system? To punish people who gamble poorly?

Prox:
If everything happened precisely as you've told us then the guy who killed you probably didn't have enough proof. I believe there is that option on the score board that lets tag people as innocent, suspicious, traitor etc.  Killing a traitor before he was able to do anything requires a good reason and by your description of that situation that happened to you I don't think it was enough for that guy to kill you.

ursus:
Lets find out what the rules say using the power of reading.










There we go. That's the rules. If someone is following the rules but you think they deserve to be punished anyway, you either ask to change the rules or accept that your judgments are subjective and learn to cope with that. You learned about rule of law in high school.


To be fair, though, I'll talk about this one:



This is way too ambiguous. We know they have to "do something" before they can be suspected or killed, but it doesn't say whether or not you have to witness them do it with full certainty. If you hear a gun go off, you hear someone die, and you see someone walk out from that direction holding a shotgun less one round, is that enough to kill them? If they didn't do it but you think they did, is it RDM if you kill them? Where is the line drawn on how concrete your "evidence" has to be? It could be that the traitor is still in the room and about to come out to kill the person you just saw.

Longer rant:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)The reason TTT is a good gamemode is that there's literally infinite situations you can find yourself in, and those situations can be as complex as the players make them. You aren't supposed to be certain about anything. If you're a traitor and you get killed because you incriminate yourself, that just means you need to improve your skills. Like Deathie said, when you try to impose specific rules on what constitutes incriminating evidence to protect traitors you end up restricting the skill ceiling and making the game less fun. This gamemode is about asymmetrical psychological gameplay with opportunities for social engineering mixed in, and the only rules outside of those imposed by the gamemode itself should only be in place to decide how to punish people who manage to go beyond the game's inherent ability to enforce the rules.

If you let people kill on any suspicion, you give people an incentive to ghost and render the gamemode completely un-fun. If you can only kill someone when you're 100% certain they're a traitor and that rule is enforced with steep karma loss, you give innocents an incentive to bait their own teammates. A line has to be drawn somewhere in the middle. That's what the rules are for. But complaining that you're being killed on suspicion with insufficient evidence is the equivalent of a silver player in CS:GO calling hacks on everyone who lands a headshot on them, when in reality they just don't understand the game mechanics well enough. You're assuming that you're the most skilled player in the world, and that anyone who outperforms you is either cheating or just lucky.


More simply, if you get killed as a traitor, you can reduce the situation to two possibilities:

* Someone thought you were a traitor and was confident enough in their judgment to kill you.
* Someone didn't know whether you were a traitor, but killed you anyway because they didn't care about karma loss.
If you get killed as a traitor, either someone killed you for absolutely no reason or you drew suspicion somehow. It's also possible that someone suspected you based on wrong information and you were just unlucky, but there's nothing you can do about that. There's a reason that insurance forms have a checkbox for "Acts of God." Shit happens.

The reason that the rules only explicitly punish excessive RDM (4+), targeted RDM, round-start RDM, and RDM that circumvents karma is that the gamemode already punishes you for it otherwise. You lose the same amount of points for killing an innocent teammate as you gain for killing an enemy traitor. Your karma actually goes down more when you kill an innocent teammate than when you kill an enemy traitor.

The reason for this is so that if you were truly killing people at random, basic probability dictates that you would end up with a negative score and minimum karma because  only 1 out of every 4 players (rounding up, including detectives) is assigned the role of traitor. The higher someone's score is, the better they are at figuring out who is traitor while innocent and killing innocents while traitor. While the situations that exist from round to round are always different, the one thing that stays consistent is the numbers. The numbers tell you who is playing well and who is not.

It happens that score is tracked on TTT, so I'll use that as an example:




These are the 10 players with the highest total score over the server's lifetime, which is about 2 weeks. Cable and I, along with Blah, Monorail, Sora, and Apie, have score/min values from 1.27 to 1.33 (Which is well within the ~15% standard deviation of this value, since gametracker often misses the 6th round's score). Since we also have some of the highest playtimes, it is almost mathematically impossible that any of us are killing players at random. This impossibility increases as playtime (sample size) increases, of which we also have the highest.

All of that being said, I think any reason that's logically sound is a good one. Your goal as an innocent is to figure out how to decide whether or not someone is a traitor, and you have absolutely no tools within the game to help you. You're supposed to rely on your own deductive reasoning.

Traitors get instant-kill knives, silenced pistols, body armor, disguisers, healing kits, high-caliber snipers, several kinds of bombs, flare guns to burn bodies, radar decoys, and anything else people feel like modding in. As an innocent, you get absolutely nothing. Even as a detective, your tools for finding traitors are foggy on purpose. Your DNA scanner only points you in the general direction of the person who killed someone unless they're literally standing in front of you, and even then you can only be sure if they're standing still when it refreshes. You can put down a portable tester that will tell you who is innocent with 100% certainty, but as a traitor you want to avoid it for obvious reasons. The game is specifically designed in a way that encourages you to train your instincts and trust them, and uses a simple reward/punishment system to do it.

I will say this: If you think people are RDMing too much, ask coolz to make the karma penalties steeper. It's his call. Otherwise, we can at least agree that the rules themselves are too vague.

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