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I can't recall exactly where I heard this, but there's this fascinating story I remember reading about one site that had a forum tool that allowed you to generate "provably random" information. i.e. they had a forum command like /randomnumber that when entered would spit out a random number.

When it became clear in one setup that town naturally performed worse than random after playing 10s of games, something quite perverse happened. One influential town player was able to coax the other players into lynching using the forum RNG tool (because opposing the strategy was literally anti-town).

It's a fascinating scenario because it demonstrates how, if a playerbase reaches a certain level of self-awareness, or is permitted to converge to a certain cultural context, players may be forced to adopt a meta so destructive it nullifies the entire game.

They fixed the issue by simply removing the forum tool. Players could still freely claim they were lynching by RNG, but the inability to confirm whether they were truly using RNG allowed order to return to the game.

I can't recall exactly where I heard this, but there's this fascinating story I remember reading about one site that had a forum tool that allowed you to generate "provably random" information. i.e. they had a forum command like /randomnumber that when entered would spit out a random number.

When it became clear in one setup that town naturally performed worse than random after playing 10s of games, something quite perverse happened. One influential town player was able to coax the other players into lynching using the forum RNG tool (because opposing the strategy was literally anti-town).

It's a fascinating scenario because it demonstrates how, if a playerbase reaches a certain level of self-awareness, or is permitted to converge to a certain cultural context, players may be forced to adopt a meta so destructive it nullifies the entire game.

They fixed the issue by simply removing the forum tool. Players could still freely claim they were lynching by RNG, but the inability to confirm whether they were truly using RNG allowed order to return to the game.