Claiming evil early game would fall just into ridiculous awful play. It’s the extreme stupid case, and the fact that it sometimes works is an extreme amazing inditement of how the class’s potential is negative.
and your own example falls into pure luck. In the sense that by your own description he gets the MM “randomly”, when the hypothetical fool would have most likely been trying to get a random BD to make himself look scummy. So yes that’s bad luck, falls into the less likely than getting killed by the NK on n1 category.
The issue is in the “multitude” of clues as you say, the only one that I can think of that aren’t almost perfect overlaps with almost every actual evil, is “might happen to hit MM”. Bussing is a thing so, anything other than MM doesn’t do much to narrow down. Logs claiming actions that are contradicted by evidence (IE say observer noting supposed visit didn’t happen, supposed results not matching etc…) points both too evil and fool. Unseen/cult result from sheriff/pali… also could be either. Class claim that doesn’t match princess flirt result… also parallel. Maid checking compatibility with a known BD, also equal.
Players acting in a way to disrupt or distract from catching the actual evils… yet another thing done by both fools and evils.
Honestly behavior, strategy etc… of myself when I’m evil and fool, is virtually identical. I rarely if ever go out of my way, because I know statistically most evils are going to be found via all the methods to catch evils, and fool isn’t an exception. The only way you can possibly catch a fool, is a bad player trying too hard and playing with the goal to win on day 2. A long con fool is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from an actual evil.
