So, I was wondering about pair investigations, and how often they would yield "false guilty" results. So, I wrote a program for simulating investigations of deaths, making the following assumptions
- 0 mafia/SK investigators giving results
- investigators investigate in sequence, such that the first investigator randomly picks two people from all living players, and subsequent investigators always investigate a random person with the latest not-innocent person (no one investigates cleared people)
A "false guilty" result would be produced whenever there was a run of n investigations calling someone not-innocent, where n was set to the "sketch bar" constant. The program would run 100 iterations with 9 investigations per day, then print out how many total instances there were of townies vs mafia hitting the sketch bar.
With a sketch bar of 3, there are roughly twice as many instance of townies hitting the sketch bar as there are mafia. With a sketch bar of 4, townies hit the sketch bar 20% more often than mafia. Only with a sketch bar of 5 do we get mafia hitting the sketch bar more often than townies. So even if townie Jackie had personally made 4 investigations calling Pesto not-innocent, with no clearing of him whatsover, it might STILL have been more likely from her perspective that Pesto had not made the kill.
And this program is with no mafia throwing in false investigations to clear mafia, or even to make random townies look sketchier, which they are probably doing.
tl;dr: It's really easy to overestimate how bad people look from having several investigations on them calling them not-innocent.