A) Wrong. Less people alive, easier to deduce skum after the fact.
B) My method takes like 8 additional seconds.
Your point is nonsensical. You said that more people alive give scum more strength when it comes to claiming via a popcorn method - this is simply untrue. The greater the ratio of town to scum, the less scum can control the order of claims. Further, you're now claiming something completely different, something unrelated to anything you said in the first post - that the fewer people alive the easier it is deduce scum after the fact.
This is also untrue, as we're going to see 3 claims, maybe 4 in total, and we already know what they are. Cop, Cop, Cop, and maybe Cop. It's not as if scum can fakeclaim something here - the two members of the mafia team will be claiming VT just like every other VT in the game. What order they get to do so in is irrelevant, and any attempt to draw conclusions based on claiming order will ultimately lead to no useful ends. The only player that can reasonably fakeclaim isn't known to anybody but himself, and thus the only thing we want to avoid is that player getting to claim early.
I endorse this. Especially the last sentence.
Though I will point out, they are dis-incentivized from fake claiming early, since they could mistakenly claim the same thing as the two sane cops.
Sorry, my last word was obviously backwards - we don't want them to claim LATE, as they can then match their claim. Early forces them to choose not to claim, or to risk claiming incorrectly.
I don't see a way to FORCE them to claim early though - if we do it randomly they have a chance to get the last, safest spot randomly.
We want them to feel PRESSURE to claim early, for the reasons you mentioned. But I don't see a way to force it. Hence, there needs to be a lot of suspicion on the late claimants - assuming there wasn't a bungled claim (like 3 people claiming a guilty result).
That's why I liked the idea of a popcorn claim. If each player popcorns their highest scum read, we increase the chances of forcing* an earlier claim... at least, the increase in chance is about equal to the quality of our reads. It may not be much but... it's about the best I can think of outside of letting randomness decide if we get lucky or not.
Are you suggesting that we popcorn and claim both role and alignment at the same time?
I think that's ultimately the safer bet...
If we don't do so, if we make a cop claim and then make a results claim, then the order we go in now (first round) doesn't matter - either the traitor is or is not going to claim cop. He can do so first, or he can do so last - it doesn't actually change anything.
At that point, on the second round of claiming, we want to try and force the traitor to claim early - but is there any feasible way to do so?
If we claim both at the same time, ultimately we run into the same issue... except that if, say, the traitor is called on early to claim they may choose not to claim instead of risk messing it up. In this case, we'll at least get 3 IC's out of the claiming process. And if they don't like the sound of that, then let them claim and risk it.
I guess ultimately I think the risk of them getting to go last is about the same, but the benefit of doing both forces an early traitor into deciding to risk the claim at all or not.