A Few Final Thoughts

[RadiantCowbells]

Honestly I take the opposite view; this hyper focus on individuals and their strengths and weaknesses and personal journeys and whatever is the reason town play isn't that good.

[RadiantCowbells]

I would never have won a dozen consecutive scum games just starting out if I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants; I saw LLD and Thor665 play scum very early in my career and learned a lot from their approaches that I internalized into my own play. My town play was also heavily influenced by Thor665 as well even though I believe I have mostly deviated from what I originally learned from him. I don't think it's coincidental either that Northsidegal who put herself together as an insanely strong townie very quickly was also spending a lot of time talking to and learning from strong town players (not referring to myself either) that came before her. There's this attitude that everyone has to make their own mistakes to learn from them and improve. If we let every player in every town have wrong reads and lunch them so they can improve town are just going to lose and no one's really going to learn anything. Towns run into the same systematic errors over and over again and most players are too myopic to look at the bigger picture and wonder where these losses come from and how to avoid them. Sheeping strong townies shouldn't mean not learning anything from the game, it should mean learning from why lynch X player vs Y player and why it was correct in that situation. If mafia isn't fun for you unless you're going off of your own reads then that to me is the failure of town as teams, not "failing to account for everyone as an individual and trying to find our own special path to endgame as a team".

[RadiantCowbells]

You learn a lot more from winning as town because you can see how town correctly found scum whereas if town just flailed all game it's very difficult to see what individuals could have done better.

I also don't think I could have had the jump in town performance I'd had if I didn't see NSG last year consistently have townreads that I didn't have and try to figure out how she got them and learn to have them for myself.

No one's alone in the quest to get better and if you don't try to figure out how the people who had correct reads that you didn't had those reads then you're not going to learn to get better because if there's one thing I've seen on MS it's that players who see progress as solely an individual thing and don't try to learn from others never end up getting better.

[RadiantCowbells]

You can learn solely from your own experiences

Or you can aggregate the knowledge of the successes and failures of everyone around you and improve dozens of times faster at the cost of maybe not having all the individuality you crave.

It's your choice, really.