Newbie 783 - Mongol Mafia - Game Over

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

/confirm

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Vote: Pablo Molinero

He and I both know I'm better at this game than he is, so his vote is cast purely out of envy.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

it'd be my first game on this site, 3rd game overall (if that matters...)

^From the Newbie Queue.

Probably doesn't have much experience with game theory and voting for him without him giving a response to Pablo's posting of the math behind no lynch being a bad idea seems premature.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

What an unexpected result.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

What is everyone's favorite role (or what you most want to play as if you've never played before)?

Replacement coming in after this humdrum phase of the game.

Unvote

Vote: Jarmo

Bandwagon-a-go-go.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Shadeaux's vote isn't great, but I don't have any problems with it either. Sure it was opportunistic, but it was seemingly legitimate in response to the opportunistic vote of Jarmo. Just because Jarmo apologized and unvoted doesn't mean his behavior should be disregarded.

Purple Princess doesn't appear to be voting for a rational reason. Furthermore, I dislike that she says Pablo has "earned" her vote, but then in her next post she's already backing away and calling it a pressure vote. It's a typical scum move (and caught scum in my last newbie game) to try and vote with a reason and if that fails claim the vote was just a pressure vote.

Another thing I don't like? Pablo's reaction, too cautious, especially following on the heels of his vote on BlyndSikick which completely lacked in caution.

Unvote

for now.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I don't have any problems with it either. Sure it was opportunistic, but it was seemingly legitimate in response to the opportunistic vote of Jarmo.

1) Two wrongs don't make a right? 2) Double standards are bad?

1) Correct, which is why I preceded that quoted section with, "Shadeaux's vote isn't great...". Funny how you managed to cut that section off.

2) Correct, but pressuring a newb for newb behavior like you and Jarmo did is a touch anti-town. Pressuring someone for anti-town behavior like Shadeaux and I did is a perfectly legitimate course of action.

3) Learn to use quotes properly already, you fool.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Vote: Purple Princess

Her reasons for voting Pablo were bogus and when confronted on those grounds she shifted from them being real reasons to claiming it was a pressure/activity vote.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

DDD, where you at?

The whole city behind us. What, we're not rapping?

I'm here, I'm following along, but there's not much for me to say. Quick and dirty summary…

I'm happy with my vote where it is right now, I'm still suspicious of your reaction to the PP vote. I think furpants_tom has a dumb name and is pro-town so far. ekiM's post #81 is disappointingly pointless, but I've liked his play other than that. Penguana and Jarmo are lurking too much for my taste. I agree with furpants_tom’s assessment of Shadeux as noobtown who thinks he’s much more clever than he actually is. I have no disagreements with ivanavich’s play, but no pro-town read on him either at this point.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Opposed, what penguana needs is a prod from the mod to make sure he's still interested in playing, not votes. It's not like we've got a player who drifting in occasionally and supplying no content in their posts which would be an obvious attempt to avoid helping the town where some votes would pressure them into contributing. We've got a player who has gone missing for the last four days, I don't see voting for him and letting other people off the hot seat helping the town.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

(First, it's certainly true that Shadeaux's behavior is very silly. His defense (L-2 isn't enough pressure!) is silly.)

But penguana's rationale for voting against him (bolded) is sorta baffling. I think he's trying to redefine what Shadeaux did for people who may've missed it. Shadeaux didn't create a bandwagon (that'd have been OK) -- he pushed an existing one dangerously close to a quicklynch.

Doesn't pass the smell test to me. As you yourself claim, "Prime suspects for me are Shadeaux (what everyone is saying)", there's no incentive for scum to so obviously misrepresent someone's actions when there's supposedly obvious reasons to vote for them. Since scum would derive no benefit from such behavior it's not likely a scum-tell, not a town-tell either though, appears to be an apathy-tell which is corroborated by the fact that he's gone missing.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Hoping DDD, Pablo, FT can give some more comment.

Comment about what?

I don't much like Icerint, stylistically alot of things bother me. The emphasis he places on certain words, the double and triple posts, and the emoticon usage all rub me the wrong way. Nothing remotely lynchable, but IGMEOY because of it. On the other hand I have no such issues with Katy, slight town read, but nothing that interesting either way.

My previous summary of everone else still stands. PP is the obvious lynch today as she committed the most blatent scumtell by revising the reason for her vote on Pablo after she got in trouble.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

The emphasis he places on certain words, the double and triple posts, and the emoticon usage all rub me the wrong way. Nothing remotely lynchable, but IGMEOY because of it.

D'ya mean that I'm sort of annoying (ergo, later policy lynch) or that I'm scummy? Assuming the latter, could you point out any particularly troubling passages? I've never played online before, so I may be giving a different impression than I'm intending (e.g. if I'm deviating too much from the forum culture, etc.)....

(I know you said it was "[n]othing remotely lynchable," but so long as we're waiting for S/PP/reps... <_<)

Sorry about the double/triple posts. It's my first game online. I'm excited.

No, it's not the content of the posts, it's the way they're delivered. The smiley abuse for example gives me the impression that you're trying too hard to get people to like you. The double and triple posting makes it seem like you're not content with the first post, that you are trying to constantly revise what everyone sees. It's things that could easily be playstyle, but could also be more insidious and make you worth a bit more attention.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Analysis of SOG’s analysis:

Lots of interesting things here. He raises a good point about FT’s pressure vote of penguana which is strange behavior from FT. He also promises a PBPA and never delivers it either which is a touch dodgy. I think his read on Katy is off as she appeared to counter his arguments ably. I also think his argument about Pablo is complete junk and basically on the level of PP’s reasoning for a vote, the post in question is clearly Pablo just trying to be a good IC and give the town something to talk about. I agree with his reads on ekiM and Icerint (mostly because he just agrees with me about Icerint). I have more of a null read on ivanavich than he does, but agree with his concerns about tracker.

Moving on to tracker:

Which of the many things should I point out first? Let’s start at the top, he’s “lurker” hunting. This is of course the easiest style of fake scumhunting to do, because you don’t have to actually analyze content, you simply need to point out someone isn’t around. Of course he also failed to do the second part of it, which is establish why lurking is a scumtell. In fact, he blows this up with his own analysis. Tracker cites four different people for lurking, me, ekiM, Pablo, and ivan; except even if both scum are in that group that also means there’s an equal number of pro-town lurkers, hence lurking as an accurate scumtell is bogus.

He also claims I provide no or limited content, when that’s clearly not true. In fact SOG said the complete opposite, saying “Debonair Danny DePietro – He makes a lot of observations”. Then we get to his confusing ordered but unordered but possibly ordered list which seems more designed to confuse the town then confuse scum because it’s easy to tell based off his other comments who he believes to be scum and town and a general order for them. I also think his comment about tracker is on point in that he’s done his best to not take a stance and he continues that now, he casts his vote not with conviction, but as a pressure vote.

That’s all for now, I’ll

unvote

because while I’m still suspicious of SOG because of PP’s behavior he looks to be contributing and I need to evaluate what the best of course of action is.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

mmmm.....

DDD,

the thing is i don't know where to stand,

i have my suspicions, i have my theories and hypothesises, i'm slowly gathering info and starting to draw a conclucusion.

lurking is a great scum strategy in my opinion, unless you get called out and voted upon, i'm willing to bet one of our scums is a lurker,

the reason i list four people though is in the name of accuracy, let's say i only listed 3 of them, then someone's going to come along and say, "hey what about such and such, let's not forget about him",

the other scum is probably a more active villager, i'm not sure which

the only way that i can think of to hunt scum is to put myself in their shoes and figure out what i would do in that situation.

See here's my problem, your actions seem to suggest you think lurking is a scumtell, you put those you consider to be lurking at the top of your list and you link the two in your individual analysis. Yet, you admit that there's probably only one scum in that group. So the scumtell you're basing everything you seem to be doing on isn't a scumtell at all.

Advantage to town: none, because your reason for pressure/suspicion/voting isn't really any better than randomness and thus isn't more likely to help you find scum.
Advantage to scum: can push the lynch of a townie without having to make-up a reason to vote for them and thus have better deniability later on.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

This is the part that I'm confused about, both for what it says and for what it doesn't. Here's the relevant part of the SOG post:

tracker – How do you not have a scum feel after reading eight pages. You pointed out yourself that neutrality is bad, yet you wrote that you are undecided about most players and aren’t voting. I also don’t like how it appears that you claimed your role. That is not a good thing to do, townies not excluded. Not a strong read yet, but I dislike your play so far.

Shadeaux – I didn’t read his actions as being indicative of being scum and I didn’t like the wagon on him. I didn’t like the wagon on purple princess either. Had neither of them replaced I don’t think either of them were the correct lynch for the day.

First, I have a hard time believing that an otherwise-competent player (SOG) would find neither the PP nor the Shadeaux wagon credible. Sure, "knowing" that PP was town (hypothetically) would provide him with unique perspective on the PP half of the issue (only), but you'd think he'd at least comment on their sketchy behavior. Instead, SOG makes it sound like players were wrong and even suspect to doubt Shadeaux and/or PP. Even assuming that he thought it would be poor play to attack PP (himself) too aggressively, this doesn't explain at all his defense of Shadeaux.

Second, I find it strange that DDD fails to discuss SOG's support for Shadeaux and PP, especially given DDD's staunch support for the PP wagon. (This can be sort-of explained as DDD not noticing SOG's Shadeaux post (and the PP comment within it) due to SOG's post's irregular spacing, but it seems like DDD's ordinarily a pretty careful poster. Even if DDD was benefit-of-the-doubt-ing SOG's support of PP (same person and all), you'd think DDD'd still find SOG's Shadeaux talk suspect.)

See, here's the issue, obviously SOG is going to find the PP wagon to wrong whether he's scum or town so it's not like I'm gaining any information there. And if you recall I was the one (or one of the ones) who made the original point about the Shadeux wagon not being so good, so SOG's comments about those two weren't really worth a mention to me.

I also think his comment about tracker is on point in that he’s done his best to not take a stance and he continues that now, he casts his vote not with conviction, but as a pressure vote.

Are you talking about my comments about tracker or SOG's comments about tracker (pronoun ambiguity)? Assuming the latter, how did you read SOG's tracker/Shadeaux talk? To me, it seemed that SOG was sort of cautiously minimizing the suspicion there rather than increasing it (i.e. it read like "tracker, you're doing X, and X is suspect, IGMEOY; btw Shadeaux is obvstown"). Maybe I'm just OMGUSing at his suspicion of me and am reading things into the post that aren't there.

It was an SOG comment about tracker: "You pointed out yourself that neutrality is bad, yet you wrote that you are undecided about most players and aren’t voting." And yet tracker continued to behave in the same poor fashion as I noted. And I disagree with your assumption that it's coaching or trying to minimize the focus, because I'm sitting in the same situation as SOG, not finding shadeux all that scummy and then finding tracker quite scummy.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Tracker cites four different people for lurking, me, ekiM, Pablo, and ivan; except even if both scum are in that group that also means there’s an equal number of pro-town lurkers, hence lurking as an accurate scumtell is bogus.

In fairness to tracker, 50% > 22%. 25% is also greater than 22%, so even if only one of the lurkers is scum, we're still better off than blind guessing. I'm not suggesting that he's not scum (I still think he is), but it's not true that his method is worse than random guessing.

Yes, if it was a reliable scum-tell (two of four) then the percentage would go up and a lynch of those players would be more likely to hit scum than random chance. Except, I haven't seen anyone agree with tracker that it's actually a reliable scum-tell. If there's only one scum in that group as even tracker suggests is likely then it is in fact no better than random chance. Your math is off because you fail to include the other side of the equation sure 25% (1 in 4) is greater than 22% (2 in 9) but 22% (2 in 9) is greater than 20% (1 in 5).

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

See, here's the issue, obviously SOG is going to find the PP wagon to wrong whether he's scum or town so it's not like I'm gaining any information there. And if you recall I was the one (or one of the ones) who made the original point about the Shadeux wagon not being so good, so SOG's comments about those two weren't really worth a mention to me.

My mistake. That said, if PP was scum and Shadeaux wasn't, I'm not sure why PP would have tried to divert attention away from him. Wouldn't she be thrilled that a town player had done something so sketchy and tried to ride it to a blameless mislynch? How would you explain her behavior in that scenario?

Which possible explanation would you like? PP/SOG doesn't feel they can present a convincing argument about Shadeux and it's better to be honest then push a bad argument and get more blowback on yourself. PP/SOG doesn't want to appear to simply be agreeing to the easiest lynch other than themselves and earn blowback from that so instead a mild defense is best. Both of those are straight out of "the best way to play as scum is to play as town" handbook. Finally, it could be PP/SOG introducing some WIFOM into the game and feeling if they are lynched then the town is likelier to go after the people they defended in this case Shadeux/tracker who already looked bad and is now linked to them making for an even easier mislynch.

(Also, could you clarify where the "1 out of 5" part of the probability equation (the "other side") comes from? I believe you that I'm mistaken, I'd just like to better-understand my mistake.)

If there's one scum in a group of four players, then there has to be one scum in the other group of five players. Thus by random lynching in the "scum-tell" group of four we have a 25% chance of success, but in the "non scum-tell" group of five we only have a 20% chance of success and since we have to lynch both scum to win you have to take both sides into account. Thus given an assumption of only one scum in the "scum-tell" group you have to compare both halves against 22.2% where we find little appreciable advantage.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I don't think the first set of possibilities holds. Shadeaux only had one vote -- Pablo's -- when PP voted Pablo. The "easiest" lynch at that point was the Jarmowagon. Shadeauxwagon started with Pablo's vote, and PPwagon started with the aftermath of her own vote. The second possibility is, ya know, "possible," but remote as I see it; her reaction to pressure leads me to believe she lacked that degree of sophistication.

I also find it strange that you suggest that behaving as PP did would be an example of "scum playing as town." O_o To me, it's either a newbtown player misunderstanding what Pablo has done or an absurdly panicky newbscum (who would only have reason to panic, as I see it, if her scumbuddy had been attacked).

I think we've had some miscommunication, I thought you were still referencing the SOG analysis and his comments on the wagons and that's what my comments were based around. If you're going to change tracks you need to make that clearer and then provide quotes or post numbers for me/other people to reference.

If this is where you were coming from, I think you were being a little misleading. After the first night we'll know the town/scum identities of 0-2 players (allowing the remote possibilities of doctorwin and nolynchvote), which will presumably alter and ease scumhunting (i.e. reducing the number of possibilities down from 5, assuming your somewhat suspect a priori "one from each group" assumption). I think it would be a stretch to suggest that tracker was really advocating ignoring all non-lurking/otherwise information as we vote for the remainder of the game. (Not that I don't think tracker's the better lynch.)

Way to post some generalized statements and present it as opposition. Yes, scumhunting should be easier tomorrow with either a successful lynch to draw connections from or at very least a narrower pool of targets, but that doesn't mean pushing bad logic on day one is acceptable. The strongest statement that's been made is that as a scumtell there's one scum in a group of four, statistically insignificant from a random lynch of the entire vote pool and that's ignoring the person presenting the logic. So far, that's the only logic that I've seen tracker present and it's not making the grade.

Also: DDD, why haven't you voted for me through all this (if you never suspected Shadetrack and feel that SOG has exonerated PP)? I had a vote on me until just a moment ago (from tracker), but all you've done is unvote SOG. Are you trying to decide between me and FT (the other player you've questioned a bit)? If so, have you ignored him because of his somewhat-troubling lurking?

Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I think you're scum. Conversely, trying to bait me into voting for you doesn't inspire me to think you're pro-town either.

~

I'm waiting for KK to post the end of day vote count before I do anything, but I'm thinking my vote will go on tracker. If he's on L-2 I'll move him to L-1 and if he's on L-1 it's claim time while I build a full case.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

First a quick look at his predecessor, Shadeux. The biggest thing that strikes me right now is the inconsistency. I still don’t think his vote was that bad when viewed on its own, but in retrospect it was exceedingly aggressive and comes right on the heels of him saying things like…

But honestly though? I think he's just mistaken (this *is* a newbie game after all), but better not to take the chance.

I would wait to hear his reply though, before jumping into voting.

Which seem very conservative in nature promoting a patient outlook to the game. Thus his actions and words don’t appear to mesh together.

On to tracker himself, he comes in and immediately goes on a lurker hunt and I’ve made my opinion clear that it’s not a productive behavior and quite possibly scummy. He then goes on to post an obviously ordered list, but claims it’s unordered which if true would defeat the purpose of posting a list in the first place. This seems like a convenient way to not be held accountable for his opinion because if someone objected to someone’s placement then he could always claim they weren’t really meant to be as low or as high as they were.

His last two posts are the proverbial nails in my opinion. In ISO 18 he reneges completely on the lurker hunt and admits to it being not a solid scum-tell, so his biggest contribution to the game was a pointless endeavor. Then in his last post he votes for SOG putting him at L-1, despite having expressed basically no interest in him previously and with no reasons in his post that I can see. He’s basically pushing the only other serious wagon on then his own for what appears to be that reason, it’s the only serious wagon other than his own.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

He’s basically pushing the only other serious wagon on then his own for what appears to be that reason, it’s the only serious wagon other than his own.

To be fair, with only two days left before deadline, it is typical for the people on the chopping block to jump on the other for survival reasons only. After all, if you know yourself as town, the other guy is always a better option. However, with a game as active as this, I think we could still swing any lynch of whoever we wanted even in "just" two days, so he loses points for taking the easy way out, but it's not as

completely

damning as you make it out to be.

Maybe not when just looking at that one aspect of it, but when coupled with the fact that there's absolutely no indication that he thinks it's a good let alone the best lynch or even that he has any specific opinions on SOG suggests to me that it is that damning.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

That said, now that things have been cleared up, I would appreciate your thoughts on the question -- that is, the remote possibility you appeared to have prior ascribed to (that Shadeaux was not scummy, but PP was) in light of PP's vote for Pablo following his vote for Shadeaux (page 3). It's apparent from your discussion of tracker that you've rethought your position somewhat -- Shadeaux = tracker, etc. -- but I'd still like to hear what had prior motivated it. That eventuality (PP-onry) is so remote to me that I don't think your having ascribed to it is scummy, really; rather, your having ascribed to it leads me to believe that I have missed something.

I viewed them as unrelated events at the time and still don't see this hard and fast connection you're trying to draw. PP's vote there seems to be completely devoid of recent context (eg the Jarmo wagon and Shadeux's L-1 vote) which suggests to me that she didn't take into account any of the recent activity.

Way to be defensive and snide? I still believe you were using math based on the false assumption that a lurker-lynch policy requires a random lynch from the remaining 5 non-lurker players on Day 2. I don't believe that tracker was implying this at all, but you've not really corrected yourself. (For that matter, tracker didn't really question it, either, so it may largely be a moot point.) You're also not taking into account the possibility that two lurker players (or none) are scum, which would change average probability of a successful lynch, especially if the prior probability of 1 or 2 players is relatively high. (This may just be because tracker listed he suspected that only 1 lurker was scum, but since you were responding to my own math, which included the 50% both-are-scum possibility, it seems to be an inappropriate omission.) Were you trying to see whether tracker would take issue with your straw-manning?

It's not a false assumption, the guy promoting the theory admitted that he only expected one scum to be found in that group. Meaning I was working off of his

best

case scenario. And if you're including the 50% both are scum possibility why are you not including the statistically more likely (because of a larger pool size) 0% none are scum scenario. And I've presented no strawmen, I've simply used the information tracker has given us as his motivations and carried it to the logical end.

My point was and still is, any "scum-tell" which merely splits the town in half and each half being equally likely to have scum isn't a scum-tell at all, it's basically no better than a random lynch. But it looks busy, can easily be directed against a townie, and has plausible deniability: all advantages to scum.

I'm just trying to understand your actions. You explained, up to a point, why you didn't vote for Shadetrack or SOGPP upon unvoting the latter (i.e. you never liked the Shadeaux wagon and you liked SOG's analysis), but didn't really act until others already had. Your behavior could be construed as waiting to see how things would pan out before weighing in on it too whole-heartedly. Since the voting abstention seemed to be coupled with slightly ratcheting-up the rhetoric against me (or just voicing stronger-than-prior agreement with others'), I don't think it's unusual for me to question it.

I have no idea why you continue to twist my actions. I've certainly argued with you more since my unvote because it almost seems like you've adopted tracker's lynch lurkers logic, but I haven't spoken towards your alignment at all except for post 249 after you call me out for not voting for you.

~

Vote: tracker

(L-1)

Case is in post 251.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Bla bla bla, I'm mostly wrong because I misinterpret everything Danny says so I can disagree with him.

Or something like that. At least that's what I got out of the first two overly long paragraphs you wrote.

With regard to using 50% but not 0%: it's true that the greater number of townies implies that 0% scum probability is greater than that of both scum with respect to a Maximum Likelihood sample, but the use of a high "lurker" prior probability may compensate for that (e.g. via Bayesian inference). Given tracker's model (prior probability is somewhat greater for lurkers, but not much more), though, I agree with you that you'd need to use 0% if you used 50%, and the result would be an even-worse scumfinding rate. (I mean, I haven't done the math by hand, but I strongly suspect the prior probabilities aren't different enough.)

Correct, and part of my contention was that my experience shows that tracker's prior distribution is unsound which would turn the statistics even further against him. As it stands a reasonable assumption of randomness still doesn't back his theory.

But the important thing to be noted about this paragraph is that mafia isn't just a game of being right (though that helps alot), it's also about persuasion. And while I as a trained statistician understand what you're talking about with maximum likelihood functions and Bayesian assumptions, someone without specific training like Katy appears to be lost. If you've lost your audience you surely aren't persuading them and thus failing at one of your primary duties. /Fake IC Mode

I agree with this in the general case, but I have some problems with it in this case. I still think it's hard to believe that tracker really meant to imply that the Day 2 lynch would be a random vote among active players (as your "1 out of 5" 20% vote in his "best case" seems to imply).

No, he never said that, but if we make the assumption of one scum in each side of the equation then it doesn't make any sense to ignore the other half of the equation because doing so loses the town the game. This wasn't a point tracker made at all, but something I raised to address the flaw in your analysis.

My intent was to see where your 20% number was coming from, and to determine what you were trying to do with it (force tracker to explicitly come up with auxiliary scumhunting techniques to boost the probability of a successful Day 2 lynch? maliciously misrepresent tracker's position? make a simple error?). I agree with your discussion of "lurker lynch as fake scumhunting" above, but some details of your argument seemed questionable to me. Any sketchiness perceived there will be nullified for me when/if tracker comes up scum.

And again the 20% argument came in rebuttal to your points, stop trying to shift all of this off onto tracker. He's the one who pushed the general idea, but you're the one who has been arguing the soundness of it, except you're not even pushing it as a legitimate course of action. Hence I think you're arguing with me just to argue with me and not out of any real conviction for the idea and while I appreciate the mental workout it distracts us from our purpose of finding scum.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Anyways, I've got three people near the top of my list...

Furpants_Tom seemed to have a real desire to lurker hunt instead of hunting scum. Promises analysis and then fails to deliver it and then votes in his second to last post with no current reasoning and then hammers with no current reasoning other than quoting a post of mine and agreeing with it.

SOG opened with a full game analysis which I critiqued in my ISO 13. My biggest concern now is that while I agreed with his analysis of Icerint I let slide the fact that those points did not merit a vote in my view. SOG is back again pushing the an Icerint lynch with no new reasons that I can see. Furthermore, I think Icerint raises an interesting point when he notes that SOG called tracker out for claiming, but then comes after Furpants_Tom for not allowing tracker to claim because those two behaviors don't seem to fit together at all.

Icerint is chatty enough to warrant his own post which will be made later (probably much later) tonight.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I'll read through with knowledge of our two new confirmed townies and try to give a more substantial post as soon as possible. Until then I'll

Vote SOG

. This is partially to get the ball rolling again, but it's also because:

1. That was where Pablo was headed with his analysis, and we know for certain that he was both competent and well-intentioned.
2. DDD pointed out how my can't-be-only-PP idea was no good ("read the thread, please"), so I'm left with my shocka-if-PP-and-Shadeaux-are-both-town feeling.

Problems that I see: Icerint states that the vote is "partially to get the ball rolling" which allows himself a convenient backdoor to back off the vote if it's not viable or something backfires.

He then shamelessly jumps onto someone else's logic and at least to my eye I don't see evidence that he's gone and analyzed Pablo's points, but instead is merely running with his conclusion.

Finally, one of the key points seemingly for his vote is based around an argument I presented. Except later we see he continues to disagree with other points I've raised and suggests, "DDD looks bad" and I get the feeling that I'm #2 or #3 on his scumlist. So he accepts my conclusions when it becomes convenient for him to do so, while pushing me as a target otherwise.

Another (more significant) difference in interpretation is between DDD's post 216 ("SOG is great! tracker is O_o") and Pablo's 221 ("SOG is suspect. tracker is O_o but idk"). I can't really fault DDD for preferring tracker to SOG, and I agreed (in a post, even) with some of his points on SOG, but the disparity between those two players is striking. It could just be that SOG said nice things about DDD and mean (relative to what everyone else had said about him, at least) things about Pablo.

Icerint provides several logical explanations for these posts and completely ignores the common occurance of two townies disagreeing majorly on another player to try and establish a significant difference between myself and Pablo (a confirmed townie). It's a pretty bad thing when you toss out several logical explanations and then make an argument based around a logical fallacy.

I also found it strange that DDD waited until my big "trackerlynch is better than SOG" post to come down on tracker, even though he disagreed with the premise behind my argument,

Wait, what? Frankly, I'm not understanding your argument here and I'd rather you explain it before I try to argue it.

and I still find his lurkerlynchstats to've been a little suspect.

And you keep saying things like this, but you've been completely unable to show where my math is wrong. If you want, I'll pull out the hypergeometric distribution and run a full probability tree for you to show once and for all that I'm right.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

He then shamelessly jumps onto someone else's logic and at least to my eye I don't see evidence that he's gone and analyzed Pablo's points, but instead is merely running with his conclusion.

That's pretty much accurate, but I think that "shamelessly" is a bit of a stretch. I think it's OK for us to jump onto Pablo's logic to an extent -- we know it was well-intentioned. And since I noted that I hadn't re-read yet, I don't think I was meaning to imply that I'd yet done any analysis.

Why is it that you completely discount the fact that people, even well-intentioned confirmed townies are often wrong?

Iecerint provides several logical explanations for these posts and completely ignores the common occurance of two townies disagreeing majorly on another player to try and establish a significant difference between myself and Pablo (a confirmed townie). It's a pretty bad thing when you toss out several logical explanations and then make an argument based around a logical fallacy.

My point was just that two players of comparable experience and equal knowledge of this game (assuming both of you were town) had disagreed twice

; the Pablo quote is listed to demonstrate a time when Pablo explicitly asked you to justify your position. It was the most interesting bit I could get out of the Day 2 re-read. Granted, I read it as someone who'd already had a bit of a shouting match with you, so it could just be that I'm not a neutral reader.

So at least one of us had to be wrong, yet your bandwagon vote is based on the old logic of a dead townie, despite knowing that players of comparable experience and knowledge can come to different conclusions and subsequently one of them must be wrong. You see where my problem is? You seem smart enough to realize these facts, but you just blatantly ignore them as suits your interests.

When you read SOG's post and liked it, you unvoted SOG, but you didn't immediately place a vote for anyone else. The event immediately preceding your (later) statement of intent to vote for tracker was after a triple-post (or something ungodly like that) of mine that included post 246. In that post, I laid out why I thought tracker was a better Day 1 lynch than SOG (to summarize, it was because I had misread/interpreted PP's vote for Pablo as chainsawing on behalf of Shadeaux, so her action was only scummy (or maybe just "extra scummy") if Shadeaux was her scumbuddy). DDD later pointed out that PP's actual post suggested she hadn't taken the Shadeaux business into account, suggesting he didn't agree with my argument (and when I re-read PP's post upon DDD's suggestion, I agreed with him).

Because you decided to vote for tracker just after I posted an argument about voting for tracker that you later specified you hadn't agreed with, I reasoned that you may have decided not to commit your vote until enough of a consensus had gathered around a certain player. This interpretation of your behavior makes it seem quite suspect. Since you quoted posts AFTER 246, you must have read the relevant post. I guess an alternate possibility might be that the timing of your trackerconversion was a coincidence.

So most of the post seems to be basically a conspiracy theory that I waited for you to make a post that I couldn’t be sure you’d make so that I could in fact pick apart your case and then immediately vote for your target anyways. This doesn’t make any sense to me because I don’t see how such behavior benefits either town or scum. If we look at your more specific claim that I “may have decided not to commit your vote until enough of a consensus had gathered around a certain player.” That’s easily refuted by the fact that there were two bandwagons of near equal strength for a sufficiently long-time prior to that. If my sole desire was to push a wagon then there was no need to wait as you suggest.

and I still find his lurkerlynchstats to've been a little suspect.

And you keep saying things like this, but you've been completely unable to show where my math is wrong. If you want, I'll pull out the hypergeometric distribution and run a full probability tree for you to show once and for all that I'm right.

Your math assumed that players will base their lynches ONLY on the lurker/non-lurker dichotomy. This strikes me as unrealistic.

As I understand it, your defense of that built-in assumption was that tracker hadn't explicitly named any additional criteria by which to further narrow-down scum. While I agree that tracker didn't come out and list other tools for the town (voting patterns, poor mafia play, miscellaneous scumtells), I think a reasonable mathematical model needs to take into account that the mafia will screw up enough to give the town some of these tools. From this perspective, your math looks like an (unnecessary, because there was plenty of other stuff to criticize) attempt to intimidate/condemn tracker.

For that matter, unless I'm mistaken, if mafia plays perfectly, all lynches will be random and the town will lose on average.

A) Sure it’s unrealistic, but that’s all the logic tracker had provided so that’s what I was countering. It only makes sense to address the arguments that someone makes and not imply, infer,or assume anything else. And if someone is touting unsound logic as tracker did, then I’m going to counter that.

B) If we use other tools and use them well then a scumtell that isn’t a scumtell will be irrelevant anyways.

C) Your reasonable mathematical model is all well and good, but it again ignores the other half of the equation that scum can and will turn those same tools against the town. Hence we assume random lynches when calculating probabilities because we assume that long-run town and scum play will balance each other out. Given that, tracker’s proposal was at best no help to the town and at worst slightly detrimental.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Since you were also suspicious of PP, if not SOG, you and Pablo actually agree on a lot of these points (e.g. the Pablo quote I listed is a time when he was trying you to get you to admit Shadeaux's scumminess, not PP's). Where you disagree, I'll put more stock in Pablo because we know that he was town, but you may or may not be town. So where you and Pablo disagree, I'm prone to agree with Pablo. If it's not good play in general to trust confirmed townies, I'm not sure what's OK to trust.

And this causes me to revise my expectations downwards to a large degree. Hypothetically, if competent, confirmed town Pablo had voiced major suspicion on you on D1 you wouldn’t be using that to push your own lynch on D2. So, you’re not using Pablo’s name because it comes from a competent, confirmed townie, but because it supports the conclusion you want to push. Furthermore, it’s a dubious tactic because Pablo’s dead and can’t speak up on how he may or may not have changed his mind or how you’re misinterpreting something he said.

And the existence of two bandwagons obviously doesn't exonerate you. For example, if SOG were your scumbuddy, you'd have motivation for edging the vote toward tracker if possible. I agree that "waiting out" wouldn't make much sense for you to do if only you were scum and neither of them were scum.

Waiting doesn’t make any sense even if I was scum with SOG because as scum you either want to get credit for your partner’s death (bus) or divert attention to someone else. Waiting until the town reaches consensus without you as scum is about the worst possible option.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that long-run town and scum play balance one another out. If we were to assume that they did, unless I'm mistaken, there would be no point in relying on anything except power roles to find scum, since nothing would b e a tell for anything (e.g. everything can and should be WIFOM'd into oblivion). This would also imply that mafia win most of the games on this site by a large margin, which I don't believe is the case. Seeing as how mafia and town wins seem pretty balanced on this site (and a power role-less 5:2 newbie game is termed "balanced"), I think it's better to assume that the miscellaneous scumtell tools will on average help the town more than scum. (Otherwise, mafia would tend to win by a large margin, which I don't (think) the statistics show.)

Over the course of however many hundreds of games long-term scum and town play should balance fairly equally for us to make predictions. Since roles are assigned randomly, on a long enough time line, the distribution of good, bad, and in between players to each role type should be rather normal. Furthermore, far from debunking the theory, your hypothesis that “there’s be no tells at all” is basically correct there are in fact no universal tells that I’ve found. The trick is to find tells within a given context of such quality and quantity one way or another that the odds of someone of the opposite alignment doing them is significantly unlikely.

(Where did you get the insane idea that 5:2 vanilla is balanced? Scum has an Expected Win Percentage of 77.1429% in that setup).

@ Katy I think the problem is that both of us have to have the last word.

Incorrect, the primary problem is that you can’t accept that you’re wrong.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

For the first part: well, yeah. You could point to tracker, for example, who put you, ekiM, and me at the top of his scum list, for an example of this. I'm not pushing tracker's perspective as much as Pablo's because it seems less reasonable to me. I don't really find that suspect. For the second part -- it's true that Pablo's death means that players can twist his words to their ends with relative impunity, but at least we know those words (if represented honestly) aren't scummy. By contrast, we don't know that about you/me/FT/SOG.

For that matter, what would you propose we do with dead town players' thoughts? Ignore them, because they can't correct us when we misrepresent them? That certainly isn't default play in any mafia game I've read through.

See, the problem remains that you aren't differentiating between being not scummy and being right. Those two things are neither mutually inclusive or exclusive, just because Pablo was not scummy doesn’t mean his opinion is correct. If you want to use it then you need to go back and find Pablo’s arguments, repost them, and back them up with evidence to establish that his opinion wasn’t just “not scummy”, but also correct. Simply dropping his name as being in general support of what you’re pushing, as you’ve done, just makes it appear that you’re making some weak variation of an appeal to authority.

I just assumed that the newbie game set-ups would be balanced. Based on that assumption, I reasoned that scummy behavior must be a fair indication of scum often enough for 5:2 to be pretty balanced. Unfortunately, it seems I was wrong. If scum really do that well with 5:2 -- even in newbie games -- then the conclusions from the prior assumption don't hold. (Since the 3 other set-ups help the town more to various degrees, I might've expected that 5:2 games were slightly scum-biased, but nothing to that extreme.)

Are those statistics on the wiki somewhere?

Well part of your problem is that you're forgetting we started with nine players and if this is a vanilla setup it's 7:2, not 5:2. In that case scum has an expected win percentage of 70.1%. But then again the problem isn't with the numbers, but with some of the assumptions you're making. There's a Wiki page entitled Numbers, Part One which has similar numbers, but those numbers assume a night start when all newbie games and most games on the site currently have a day start.

@ Katy I think the problem is that both of us have to have the last word.

Incorrect, the primary problem is that you can’t accept that you’re wrong.

I've admitted I was wrong twice in this game so far.

Clearly not enough.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

EBWOP

The following lists probabilities for the town winning in different setups. All are basic games, with Mafia and Townies only, starting with Night and

assuming random lynchings and night kills.

The numbers probably do not reflect what the actual outcome would be if real games were played, as

they don't account for the Mafia giving themselves away through bad logic.

Only games with probabilities between 30% and 70% are included (except for 5 players, where 25% is the closest to 50%). Note that the probability for the Town drops when there are an odd number of players to start with.

You sort of failed to mention that these numbers are based on the "random lynches" assumption, rather than being based on actual play (say, sampled from the games played on these forums). Since this was pretty much the gripe I had with your earlier numbers, I'm not sure this is good evidence that 7:2 isn't balanced, after all.

The wiki even goes out of its way to state that poor mafia play isn't included, which implies that poor mafia play (read: scumtells) is a valid factor.

Since wiki claims that 8:1 would be best-balanced for 9 players, I'm inclined to believe that 7:2 is closest to 50% in practice, which gives an idea of the extent to which scumtells do play a role.

I'm not sure whether you didn't notice this, or just thought I wouldn't bother to read it.

:headdesk:

It also doesn't include poor town play which would balance things out, no?

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

EBWOP

The following lists probabilities for the town winning in different setups. All are basic games, with Mafia and Townies only, starting with Night and

assuming random lynchings and night kills.

The numbers probably do not reflect what the actual outcome would be if real games were played, as

they don't account for the Mafia giving themselves away through bad logic.

Only games with probabilities between 30% and 70% are included (except for 5 players, where 25% is the closest to 50%). Note that the probability for the Town drops when there are an odd number of players to start with.

You sort of failed to mention that these numbers are based on the "random lynches" assumption, rather than being based on actual play (say, sampled from the games played on these forums). Since this was pretty much the gripe I had with your earlier numbers, I'm not sure this is good evidence that 7:2 isn't balanced, after all.

The wiki even goes out of its way to state that poor mafia play isn't included, which implies that poor mafia play (read: scumtells) is a valid factor.

Since wiki claims that 8:1 would be best-balanced for 9 players, I'm inclined to believe that 7:2 is closest to 50% in practice, which gives an idea of the extent to which scumtells do play a role.

I'm not sure whether you didn't notice this, or just thought I wouldn't bother to read it.

:headdesk:

It also doesn't include poor town play which would balance things out, no?

I don't think we should expect it to, for the reasons I've already stated. Namely, if it really did cancel it out in practice, we'd probably have 8:1 newbie games rather than 7:2 newbie games.

I'm done with this, seriously, you're wrong yet again, but I don't have the inclination to keep correcting you and it's distracting me and the rest of the town from doing what we're supposed to be doing, finding scum.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I'll stop harassing you if 4 players ask me to. I count you and ivan so far.

You can harass me all you like, but on this topic you're not getting any more responses because it's not productive. I'll drop knowledge on you in post-game or in MD or you can go argue with mith here (though that thread is a few months old) if you really want to argue about game theory that much.

I'm trying not to get tunnelvision in regards to you, but it's hard when you keep disagreeing with me on every single thing and when you're not even raising good points when you do so.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

DDD, before tracker and SOG replaced in, you were suspicious of purple princess, and thought Shadeaux felt like noob-town. You already said some things on the subject, but it isn't exactly clear to me what made you change your mind. Care to explain?

Probably replacement behavior was the biggest thing. Tracker came in and for the reasons I outlined in ISO 19 I believed him to be scum, SOG came in and contributed to the game in a mostly positive way which basically flipped their positions from the beginning of D1 towards the end of it. Let me know if that clears things up or if you've got follow-up.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Probably replacement behavior was the biggest thing. Tracker came in and for the reasons I outlined in ISO 19 I believed him to be scum, SOG came in and contributed to the game in a mostly positive way which basically flipped their positions from the beginning of D1 towards the end of it. Let me know if that clears things up or if you've got follow-up.

That does clear things up, but some questions remain. Most importantly, what is your current feeling about the original tells? Was tracker's behaviour so bad you voted him despite Shadeaux L-1 vote being a noobtown tell? Or did tracker's behaviour actually change Shadeaux vote into a scumtell? Same question with PP's unexplained PM vote and SOG's behaviour.

Current feelings? A bit annoyed that I was right about Shadeux, but allowed my opinions about tracker to take precedence. However, given the tracker flip I'm more cautious about the PP tell because the tracker lynched reaffirmed that sometimes noob town just plays bad and that there's no explanation beyond that.

Shadeux/tracker? Probably much more the second that the first, as for me everything exists on a continuum. That is while Shadeux's behavior suggested he was most likely noob-town there was a long tail on the scum side of things. Given tracker’s behavior it made the long tail seem much more likely to the point where given the two players together I believed them significantly more likely to be scum than town.

PP/SOG? Same principle as above, in reverse. PP’s behavior suggested to me that she was scum, but there were significant tails in both directions. When SOG replaced her the pro-town side of things seemed more credible then it had before, not a lot more as SOG is still in my top three suspects for the day, but towards the end of D1 less likely to be scum than Shadeux/tracker.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Current feelings? A bit annoyed that I was right about Shadeux, but allowed my opinions about tracker to take precedence. However, given the tracker flip I'm more cautious about the PP tell because the tracker lynched reaffirmed that sometimes noob town just plays bad and that there's no explanation beyond that.

If you had so many scruples about voting tracker, why didn't your feelings about PP color your analysis of SOG's analysis?

I'm not understanding the criticism, in both cases the behavior of the replacement took precedence and significantly moved my previous perceptions.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Summaries of things since my last post.

I really disagree with Iecerint (and Katy’s) adopted argument about SOG’s opening analysis. SOG’s analysis is exactly the sort of thing I’d want to see from any replacement and I think you have to ignore the actual text to try and make the “SOG was throwing things at the wall and seeing what would stick” argument work. It feels to me like Iecerint’s continued pushing of this is/was basically an attempt to railroad the next easiest lynch.

Iecerint’s argument about Michel seems to be to be straight WIFOM. Iecerint: Why would I use bad arguments to defend BS? How about so you can pull out this exact argument later or perhaps because you wanted to buddy with the player, but there weren’t any plausible reasons so you went with whatever was available. You want throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks? That looks exactly like what Iecerint is doing just pushing whatever arguments he can come up with against the other biggest suspects to try and get something to resonate with other players.

I’m in near complete agreement with Michel’s 399 summarizing things against Iecerint. Couple this with my objections that I posted near the beginning of the day and I’m seeing Iecerint as scum. In fact, at this point I’m confident enough and willing to…

Vote: Iecerint

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Iecerint: Why would I use bad arguments to defend BS?

I never said it was a bad argument; I still don't think it was a bad argument. What I said is that it was not the default argument. It's not a default argument because it uses information specific to this game to support its position.

See, you answered your own question. Why did you use such a "complicated" argument? Because you thought it was a good one and if you had a better one you would've used it. And since both scum and town have a vested interest in presenting their best arguments, it's a nulltell and not a towntell as you've tried to suggest.

That looks exactly like what Iecerint is doing just pushing whatever arguments he can come up with against the other biggest suspects to try and get something to resonate with other players.

Obviously. That's the best thing I can hope to do. I know I'm town, and I suspect (hope) that at least one of the players working on my lynch is scum, so the best I can do -- both to save myself and to put attention elsewhere -- is to do the best I can to show town as much. If arguments A-G aren't enough, I'll try H. That said, H is the 7th argument, and it's probably not as salient as the first 6, so I'm certainly starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

See, a pro-town would be concerned about the truth and I'd presume that you'd have found that somewhere in arguments A-G. But instead you're rolling from A to B to all the way down the line just trying to find "not me" not trying to find the truth.

~

I'm more than a little annoyed at the stalling. The policy I work off of is that you don't claim just because you're at L-1. But when you're at L-1 and someone off your wagon expresses either intent to hammer or a desire for a claim then you do so. Considering you're Michel's top suspect and ekim has asked for a claim then you should claim.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Moreover, I think (and have stated) that a great scum tactic would be tell the town to ignore all tells, as they can trivially all be explained away. Doing as much leads to random lynches and a scum win on average, unless town has power roles to save the day. Incidentally, you and DDD have done this, and I think it's scummy.

You know as much as I already thought you were scum this takes the cake. This statement is just egregiously untrue. You've somehow taken the fact that I don't believe in universal tells and somehow have decided to spin that into me suggesting we ignore all tells.

The even more ironic thing is that here you're quite willing to accept and use "my" statistics against me, but in your 434/435 you continue to try and use "my" statistics to damn and that's even after you acknowledge that I'm merely using the established site method of calculations.

You want scumtells, here they are. Twisting someones words and actions beyond recognition and selectively using and dismissing an argument as you deem it convenient to do so. Sure, there's a chance a townie might do these things, but they overwhelmingly fall on the scum side of the ledger and that's exactly what you've done in these cases.

~

Summary on other players coming up next.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I think both eKim and Katy are playing this game on cruise control and it worries me that there's not enough interaction between those two and everyone else to get a real good read. I have no idea what eKim thinks of any other player besides Iecerint and it appears to me that Katy thinks everyone is a townie. coincidentally, I have no such problem with ivanavich. of course I could be mistaken, but I get the feeling he's just an overwhelmed townie whereas I've seen enough to expect more of the other two. problem is it's hard to get engaged when players start directing wall posts back and forth and back and forth and I think that's probably the big reason we haven't seen more out of him. That's why I've tried to avoid doing that since the Iec/statistics argument. SOG has been been real solid chasing down Iecerint's myriad of issues. I'm not a fan of his style and his "Can you believe this guy?" posts are obnoxious if not true. Michel has been real solid since stepping into this game and I'm hoping that he's got some real insights (and that he can keep them concise to keep everyone engaged) from his re-read of the thread.

Most pressing concerns from that paragraph:

@eKim, analysis of players other than Iecerint, plz.

@Katy, if Iecerint is not scum, then who is?

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Just because you say it's untrue (or even think it's untrue) doesn't mean your actions don't reflect such an intent. Your argument against all my defenses has been a lazy, blanket (vacuous) "town could do that" with only minimal consideration of the actual arguments I'm making. Even SOG tries harder. If there's really some mental town-scum scalebar you put people's actions on, I see no evidence of it apart from an allusion to "scumtails" and so forth in a Day 2 post.

Actually it would be "scum could do that" and considering your arguments I feel it's generally appropriate. You're actively presenting things as towntells that are in truth nulltells because they're plausible actions of both town and scum (True towntells are exceedingly rare). Conversely you've done nothing to dissuade me that the scummy actions I and others have pointed out are likely the actions of a pro-town player.

The even more ironic thing is that here you're quite willing to accept and use "my" statistics against me,

lolwat? I have never accepted your statistics. The closest I've come is admitting upon reasonable evidence from you (which came about a hundred posts late, I might add) that big names on these forums use the same statistics as you. I still think they're inappropriate for real play, and I think you know that, too -- you even acknowledged your own statistics were "unrealistic" in one post! Your defense was snooty at best and scummy at worst -- tracker himself never complained about the statistics, so you had no reason to use realistic statistics.

See, there you go again. You've already acknowledged that my statistics are site standard, but continue to try and twist them into something sinister.

~

And thanks for agreeing with me, but you don't need to quote the entire thing back at me to do so. On the ivanavich point, I agree he should contribute more, but I don't believe I should hound a player I believe to be an under-participating townie.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

You've already acknowledged that my statistics are site standard, but continue to try and twist them into something sinister.

They're site standard for comparing otherwise-equivalent hypothetical circumstances. For example, they're useful for comparing win probabilities for X players and Y scum for different Xs and Ys. But the absolute numbers are biased almost certainly in favor of scum. When you used the statistics, you used the absolute numbers to demonstrate something without trying to account for said bias. You later even admitted that your use of the statistics was unrealistic, which renders laughable your assertion that I'm "twisting" your statistics. Those statistics are great for informing the town that one course of action is better than another, but they can't comment on the absolute utility of an isolated action -- the bias for scum will make every isolated action look disproportionately bad. This is useful for scum because they can paralyze the town, and the use of numbers to do it gives the illusion that the argument is full-proof if people don't judge the math critically.

and I still find his lurkerlynchstats to've been a little suspect.

And you keep saying things like this, but you've been completely unable to show where my math is wrong. If you want, I'll pull out the hypergeometric distribution and run a full probability tree for you to show once and for all that I'm right.

Your math assumed that players will base their lynches ONLY on the lurker/non-lurker dichotomy. This strikes me as unrealistic.

As I understand it, your defense of that built-in assumption was that tracker hadn't explicitly named any additional criteria by which to further narrow-down scum. While I agree that tracker didn't come out and list other tools for the town (voting patterns, poor mafia play, miscellaneous scumtells), I think a reasonable mathematical model needs to take into account that the mafia will screw up enough to give the town some of these tools. From this perspective, your math looks like an (unnecessary, because there was plenty of other stuff to criticize) attempt to intimidate/condemn tracker.

For that matter, unless I'm mistaken, if mafia plays perfectly, all lynches will be random and the town will lose on average.

A) Sure it’s unrealistic, but that’s all the logic tracker had provided so that’s what I was countering. It only makes sense to address the arguments that someone makes and not imply, infer, or assume anything else. And if someone is touting unsound logic as tracker did, then I’m going to counter that.

B) If we use other tools and use them well then a scumtell that isn’t a scumtell will be irrelevant anyways.

C) Your reasonable mathematical model is all well and good, but it again ignores the other half of the equation that scum can and will turn those same tools against the town. Hence we assume random lynches when calculating probabilities because we assume that long-run town and scum play will balance each other out. Given that, tracker’s proposal was at best no help to the town and at worst slightly detrimental.

And now you've taken to taking my words out of context to try and smear me.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

@ DDD -- I don't see any twisting there whatsoever. Please make your case clearer, as it's evident that you, at least, find it self-evident.

A Play in Two Parts

Tracker: We should do X
Danny: X is a bad idea in practice and theory
Iecerint: Theory?
Danny: Well if we assume X and run the numbers in comparison to normally assumed behavior we see no benefit.
Iecerint: Numbers r hard.
Danny: Yes
Iecerint: That was an unreasonable assumption.
Danny: Yes, that was exactly the point I set out to prove, that X was an unreasonable course of action.

~

Iecerint: Danny said his numbers were unreasonable.
Danny: What?
Iecerint: Danny said his numbers were unreasonable.
Danny: Are we even playing the same game?

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Back. Vacation was good. Reading D3. Done Reading D3.

It appears we're waiting on Brandi to give us her thoughts of the game and to continue the popcorn claim.

As for today's posts not a whole lot to pull from them. I really don't trust Katy's post at all since I had a very pro-town read from ivan and knowing I'm pro-town and seemingly number two on her list it looks to my eye as she's targeting pro-town players. She buries ekiM on the bottom of her list and she sets SOG on a near-equivalent level to me but she doesn't provide any reasoning as to why she did so. So assuming Katy-scum, I’m not sure if it’s SOG or ekiM that’s her partner. Probably have to re-read for earlier interactions, but I’m leaning ekiM right now.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

So on the one hand, you don't trust me because I don't give any reasoning for putting you and SOG on the same level, but it's perfectly all right for you to think I'm scum because you have a "pro-town" read on Ivan that you don't need to give reasons for?

Yeah, I already gave reasons, see about two pages ago when I re-summarized my views of the game state. In regards to ivan, Iecerint snapped at me and everyone else, including yourself appeared to have no substantial objection to that part of my analysis.

SOG is on a near equivalent level to you because I think that Ivanavich/Brandi is scum who's been laying low and I think either you or SOG make the best candidates to be his/her scumbuddy. Both of you got into big long arguments with Iecerint that provided a lot of distraction and certainly would have helped him to lay low and avoid detection while still posting every once in a while.

Would it have been so terrible as to include this in your first post? Of course I think it's nonsense as you're basically trying to indict SOG and myself for trying to scumhunt, but at least it's a reason.

I "buried" eKiM at the bottom of my list (pretty hard to bury someone on a list this short) because I think he's town. I've been pretty clear about that both in the previous day and today. His thought process about the game events parallels mine and I think it would be pretty hard for scum to fake thinking like a townie for so long.

That's a perfect recipe to allow scum to coast through the game simply agreeing with another player.

~

Claim: Vanilla Townie, think that only leaves SOG.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Yeah, I already gave reasons, see about two pages ago when I re-summarized my views of the game state.

All I see from you two pages ago is a comedic play starring you and Iecerint. Can you be a little more specific as to the post you are referring to?

Post 460 (Post 466 reiterates my opinion on ivanavich as well); sorry it was three pages back instead of two.

In regards to ivan, Iecerint snapped at me and everyone else, including yourself appeared to have no substantial objection to that part of my analysis.

Because at that point there were others I found scummier than Ivan, but Ivan has always been on my "one to watch" list because of the way he was posting. He didn't post a lot and when he did it was carefully nonconfrontational, even when he was calling someone out. I think I've been pretty consistent about that.

There doesn’t appear to be much evidence of this as even after my summary, Iecerint arguing with it, and Michel’s summary you still offer no comments evidencing suspicion of ivan.

Perhaps you were trying to scumhunt. Or perhaps you were trying to create a distraction to let your buddy stay out of the radar. You can scumhunt without creating multipage arguments that continually repeat the same points because everyone needs to have the last word.

And you’ll note that later in D2 I worked to cut down the length of my responses and the overall arguments. But the tendency to wallpost or not to do so is much more likely to be a play style difference than a tell and I’ve gotten burnt too many times lynching and getting lynched on things that were play style and not actual tells.

If that's all it were, then I would agree with you. But there's a huge difference between just saying "yes I agree with that person" all the time, (aka the rather obvious tactic of buddying) and believing someone is genuine because the reasons they give on their own are ones you agree with. I have my own opinions on the game as well, that have nothing to do with what eKiM has said and haven't hesitated to give them.

Town wants people to agree with them, scum want people to agree with them; putting forth agreeable arguments is not a towntell.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

There doesn’t appear to be much evidence of this as even after my summary, Iecerint arguing with it, and Michel’s summary you still offer no comments evidencing suspicion of ivan.

I said as much in post 323:

Ivanavich is making me nervous, because while I have no strong scum feeling from him, he seems to be inhabiting that middle area of participation that could easily be someone flying just under the radar. He wouldn't be my lynch vote today but as time wears on and we're still looking for a hidden scum, he may look more suspicious.

Time has worn on and we're still looking for a hidden scum. Ergo my conclusions about today.

You'll have to excuse my skepticism about a post that happened over 200 posts ago and that you never followed up on.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I started following up on it this day. In the previous 200 posting times there were other people who were more suspect to me, and my thinking on ivan didn't change, so I was focusing on the people who I felt were more suspect. Am I really supposed to put an addendum on every post following up on every thing I've ever said just because it's still in the back of my mind and my thoughts haven't changed regarding it?

You're moving the goalpost. I gave you evidence that my thoughts on Ivanavitch were there previously, and now it's not good enough because I didn't register that I still felt that same way in subsequent posts. My thoughts didn't change until this day, so I didn't feel the need to keep reminding everyone that I still felt this same way. Only today was I ready to bring it to the forefront again because the events that I said would cause me to think he was suspicious have happened.

You don't see where my concern comes from? You mention a suspicion once, a few hundred pages ago and never follow-up. Even when other players including myself mentioned a completely opposite read on him, you didn't object at all to that assessment. Then suddenly when we're in LYLO you start pushing a long ignored suspicion against the player least likely to competently defend himself. Couple that with your dubious behavior yesterday when you did your damndest not to have an opinion until I called you on that and it looks pretty bad to me.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Brandi seems especially committed to continuing ivan's style.

~

If anyone had any suspicions of my predecessor, bring them forward just in case I miss them as I finish up my reread.

I think both eKim and Katy are playing this game on cruise control and it worries me that there's not enough interaction between those two and everyone else to get a real good read. I have no idea what eKim thinks of any other player besides Iecerint and it appears to me that Katy thinks everyone is a townie.

~

Interesting, both of the people I'm considering as possible Katy-scum partners came back into the game and voiced suspicion of Katy. Bussing is certainly possible, but I need to check the possibility of a SOG/Kitoari pairing.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

@DDD: I'm not sure how different it is here, but from my experience bussing seems to mostly to be used when the scum partner is in immanent danger of being lynched anyway.

That's where it happens most often, but not always, and of course imminent danger can be defined in many different ways. With just a few people left one person with strong arguments could easily be considered an imminent threat, especially when a second player expresses similar sentiments.

~

@Katy - So your proposed scum team is PP/SOG and ivan/Brandi? I'll give the game a quick read over with that thought in mind, but frankly I think you're grasping at straws now.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

@SOG - You deem Katy most likely to be scum and then say her partner is likely one of the replacements (eg. eKim/Kitoari or ivan/Brandi). Except two posts later you're saying that I'm not a likely town player? If you're voting player one and you think either player two or three is her partner, then how is player four not town?

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Vote: Semioldguy

GG All.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Man, I booted up my computer this morning, saw that Brandi had the last post in this thread and my heart just dropped and then I clicked the thread only to see she had voted for SOG and I was once again elated. More stuff later.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

No QT, I'll post PMs shortly.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~N1~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

O hello mafia buddy

Any thoughts on who to kill? I'm tempted to kill Iecerint for being so wordy.

Pablo seems like the obvious choice, but I don't feel like he's really been a danger to either of us yet, and I was thinking he could make a good scapegoat later because he's experienced and could be argued to be good scum.

Another good kill might be eKim, who seems to have good insight when he posts but isn't too prolific. It might be hard to pin anything on him, or lead him. It will also be a kill that would be hard to trace back to any particular person so it might lead to a lot of useless speculation.

But I'm open to anyone, so if you have a good plan, I'm down for it.

Any ideas for strategy tomorrow? I'm not the greatest scum player. I basically have two tricks: (1) appearing really innocent and (2) when caught, exploding BS all over the game to try to confuse people.

I figure SOG/PP is still a plausible target, but I'm sure he knows it and will be looking for evidence against other people. I think we're both doing pretty well so far though, and hopefully we can make it through another day, that would put us at four townies down (assuming not getting foiled by a doc if there is one) and in a pretty good spot.

The three kill options for me are the same: 1) Icerint, 2) ekiM, or 3) Pablo. Despite Icerint being a constant pain in my ass I don't think he has any credibility with the town and he could present a fair target so he's out as a NK option. I'm torn between ekiM and Pablo, but I think in the end Pablo is a better choice. If we're power role hunting Pablo is more likely to be one in my view than ekiM and also Pablo knows me better than I know myself and sooner or later he'll probably turn on me and if he does that I'm sure he'll get the correct read and won't let up, better to remove him from the equation now.

I think we roleblock Furpants_Tom because I think BlindPsychic's initial vote is possibly indicative of him having a power role or at least it's the best tell I've found so far.

I don't like pre-planning targets because I worry it'll seem forced which will hurt our credibility and possibly lead us to being targeted. In terms of general strategy, just be warned that you can't bus me because if I get lynched my flip would provide the town with too much role information (I had a partner in a newbie game who did just that and ended up giving away a game we had all but won in LYLO). If we get another townie lynch we'll discuss LYLO strategy tomorrow night.

If I don't hear anything from you, I'll send in the kill and roleblock orders sometime in the afternoon EST Friday.

I just realized you are a roleblocker too. I'm fine with however you want to use that, but if you want more input from me, let me know.

The three kill options for me are the same: 1) Icerint, 2) ekiM, or 3) Pablo. Despite Icerint being a constant pain in my ass I don't think he has any credibility with the town and he could present a fair target so he's out as a NK option. I'm torn between ekiM and Pablo, but I think in the end Pablo is a better choice. If we're power role hunting Pablo is more likely to be one in my view than ekiM and also Pablo knows me better than I know myself and sooner or later he'll probably turn on me and if he does that I'm sure he'll get the correct read and won't let up, better to remove him from the equation now.

I agree completely. Pablo is the most trusted right now, I think, and can definitely sway people's votes. If he knows you and you think he will go after you, then I think he definitely should go.

I think we roleblock Furpants_Tom because I think BlindPsychic's initial vote is possibly indicative of him having a power role or at least it's the best tell I've found so far.

All right, that sounds fine to me. I have no better idea.

I don't like pre-planning targets because I worry it'll seem forced which will hurt our credibility and possibly lead us to being targeted. In terms of general strategy, just be warned that you can't bus me because if I get lynched my flip would provide the town with too much role information (I had a partner in a newbie game who did just that and ended up giving away a game we had all but won in LYLO). If we get another townie lynch we'll discuss LYLO strategy tomorrow night.

Got it.

If I don't hear anything from you, I'll send in the kill and roleblock orders sometime in the afternoon EST Friday.

Go ahead and send it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~N2~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Katy,

First things first, I'm going to be on vacation from 06/21 through 06/28 with no computer access likely thus you'll be on your own for a while at the beginning of D3.

Anyways, I breadcrumbed that I'm a cop in my post #460 with an innocent on ivanavich. IF our NK is vanilla as well then I can fake claim cop on D3, point to that, declare an innocent on ivanavich and a guilty on someone (ekiM, perhaps) to try and get us our game winning lynch. Ivanavich seems like he'll follow me on anything and ekiM is Michel's top suspect. That would mean tonight we either NK Michel or SOG (Michel would make more sense) and roleblock someone (I think we started 2 scum, 7 VTs so I don't think it matters). Let me know what you think.

Hmm, let me look at the thread very quickly because I want to see how the hammer happened, and I haven't read it since MIchel posted his analysis. Depending on how it reads I might have more thoughts, but if you don't hear from me, consider me giving a thumbs up.

I think Michel is a good kill and I'll support that. My next choice would be ivanavitch, because although he's your bud in the game, he also seems least likely to cast a vote we could pile onto (and not have to use the cop ploy at all)

I see the cop ploy as risky because town should know we are in LYLO and if someone is smart they will easily see how perfect a mafia ploy that would be but if no one seems inclined to cast a vote that's not on us by the time you get back, then I think it's a good fallback plan.

Question: Why would there be a mafia roleblocker in a game with 7 VTs? Is that a usual thing here?

All right, I went and checked it and saw that Michel went ahead and hammered. Basically what I was wondering was if someone came and hammered before eKiM had a chance to respond to Michel's accusations.

But given that Michel hammered, and on some thought, it's a pretty weak argument that there was anything suspicious about that. eKiM has plenty of time to respond tomorrow and if he was killed, his alignment would speak for itself. So NVM on that.

So that no one is working with complete information at the start of the game. There are four possible setups...

2 mafia goons, 6 townies, 1 cop
2 mafia goons, 6 townies, 1 doc
1 mafia goon, 1 mafia RB, 5 townies, 1 cop, 1 doc
1 mafia goon, 1 mafia RB, 7 townies

We know we're in either of the last two setups; theoretically since we haven't seen a power role flip or claim we don't know whether we have any power roles, but my intuition suggests we're playing a straight vanilla game.

Gotcha. I had looked at the setups when I replaced in but for some reason it didn't register that one of them had an RB with no powers. But that makes sense, and in that case, I totally agree - no powers, which is good since I think the thing that could screw us up the most in the next day would be a cop.

Aight, I'm packed and ready to go, Antigua here I come. Here's my standing orders...

Chose between SOG and MS who we're going to kill. Consider who looks more pro-town, who is more likely to build a successful case, and who you can build the case on and then submit your kill order to Kublai Khan.

D3 starts, pick a target other than ekiM and me and start pushing them; just build a case and run with it. You should also flack both me and the other non-ekiM player/non-main case player. Try and intentionally build a blind spot for ekiM, brush off anything he does as not a big deal and do your best to link yourselves by not interacting at all.

I'll be back next Sunday at which point I'll give the thread a thorough reading and decide whether to go forward with my fake claim or just to jump in as normal.

Final thing, starting Monday, June 29th is there a time of day where you can always check the thread? That you can always be at the computer? If so, send that time to me (pick a time between 10a-Noon and 6p-2a Eastern) and I'll make sure to be on at the same time and if there's an opportunity to hammer where we need both of our votes we do so at that time. If you can't guarantee such a time, let me know and we'll have to hope to get lucky.

Good luck.

Aight, I'm packed and ready to go, Antigua here I come. Here's my standing orders...

*jealous* Ooh, have fun!

Chose between SOG and MS who we're going to kill. Consider who looks more pro-town, who is more likely to build a successful case, and who you can build the case on and then submit your kill order to Kublai Khan.

Check.

D3 starts, pick a target other than ekiM and me and start pushing them; just build a case and run with it. You should also flack both me and the other non-ekiM player/non-main case player. Try and intentionally build a blind spot for ekiM, brush off anything he does as not a big deal and do your best to link yourselves by not interacting at all.

Got it. I was already thinking that my target for the day would be Ivanavitch, because I think he'll be the easiest for me to build a case on, and to be quite frank he has less to read going back and I'm lazy.

Final thing, starting Monday, June 29th is there a time of day where you can always check the thread?

Yes, that should be quite easy, my schedule is very flexible. I'm on PST, so the morning time is a bit early for me, although I could check in right at noon ET, and if you wanted to do two check in times, I could check again between 10-11 ET.

Exactly at noon is bad since I'm usually at lunch then, 10-11 ET works for me though.

Okay, we'll make it then.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Post wall for everyone to hate me for:

Shadeux

: I actually loved his play and agreed with most of it from a neutral standpoint. It’s a shame he went missing.

Tracker

: Okay, first the semi-ordered list was an extremely strange move and while strange doesn’t equal scummy it’s often painted that way, so sadly it usually works to your benefit to play “boring”. It would’ve been simpler and more useful to simply isolate your top three scum suspects and list them without a specific order. It gives people a better idea of your thought process while not giving everything away. Furthermore, while I don’t have a problem with your backing away from your proposed lurker lynch you needed to do it sooner than you did. You need to immediately either argue back and defend your position or immediately concede that you were wrong. If you just let it sit out there like you did though, someone like me is prone to take the argument and either use it against you or twist it to our own ends.

Pablo

: You were a bit more spastic than usual in your voting in this one. I think that led the town to suspect you less than usual, but you lost a bit of credibility with the town as well. Frankly, you should’ve busted my balls when I was pushing for the PP lynch because she was so N00b town that it hurt my brain.

Jarmo

: Nothing much to comment on, clearly got his attention drawn by n00b players which is common. It was fun to bandwagon him, at least that got things going a little bit.

Iecerint

: Wall posts are bad, walls posts are bad, wall posts are bad. Usually wall posts are a sign that you’re overposting which is bad because the more you say beyond what is necessary to make your point and it becomes increasingly likely you’ll say something dumb/scummy in those extra words. Furthermore, it breaks the town’s spirit to have to comb through obnoxiously long posts which is generally great for scum and not so great for town. As scum I was more than happy to encourage you while making myself look like the good guy by breaking the habit.

BlyndSikick

: Dumb name.

Furpants_Tom

: Also a dumb name.

MichelSableheart

: Good player and clearly knew what he was doing; had to be NKed because he was the only one who stood a chance of keeping the town on track on D3.

P

: “She [PP] was so N00b town that it hurt my brain.”

SOG

: I followed another one of your games and I wasn’t impressed, but I was with your play in this game. You came in on the heels of a predecessor under fire and yet I really couldn’t find much to attack you with, well done on that front.

Ivan

: Was like my best friend ever in this game. As the PMs mentioned I had a fake cop claim that I breadcrumbed in my ISO 37 (see if you can spot it) and was ready to pull out on D3 with an innocent on ivan to try and lead him to voting with Katy and I to pick up the win. Then he got replaced out and the fake claim wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.

Brandi

: Sorry to be so blunt about it, but scum’s biggest asset on D3. Your lurking through D3 just completely broke the spirit of the town more effectively than anything scum could’ve done. Did put a scare in my heart though.

eKim

: Solid player, but I don’t think he posted enough in this game. He could’ve and should’ve been an effective leader of this town, but instead he was reduced to an observant lurker.

Kitoari

: Needed to do something to shake up the game on D3, was too accepting of the status quo.

Penguana

: Best partner ever for replacing out and giving me Katy.

Katy

: By no means a scummy winning caliber of performance, but it got the job done and in the end that’s what counts. D2 could’ve been extremely bad for you/us if Iecerint hadn’t been throwing up his big wall posts to distract the town from the fact that you didn’t supply anything to them on that day. I know it doesn’t often feel natural, but you’ve absolutely got to try and play as town; which means you've got to fake the scumhunting.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Heh, which other of my games did you follow?

Don't remember which it was, just the lack of positive impression.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

DDD, would you have used statistics against tracker the same way if you had been town and thought he was scum?

Honestly, I have no idea because I don't think as a townie I would have chosen to argue that point with him anyways.