Newbie 1596: Exotic Birds (Game Over)

[Plotinus]

That's a pretty macaw! Hi everyone.

VOTE: Wyvernite for being last in the alphabet

[Plotinus]

Hey BBT. Been a very short while

short while is an oxymoron and an oxymoron is a contradiction between two words (the word oxymoron in itself is an oxymoron; with oxy meaning dull in latin and moron meaning sharp). only the scum contradict because THEY are the ones lying.

VOTE: Skold

Other way around, and greek, not latin

[Plotinus]

sorry for nitpicking.

So, did everyone get the role they wanted?

[Plotinus]

sorry for nitpicking.

So, did everyone get the role they wanted?

You're role-fishing and you should stop.

I wasn't expecting anyone to seriously tell me their role in response to that. I meant it more as a random question stage thing. I was expecting answers like "no, i was hoping to get scum because I was town last time", joking answers like "I was hoping for Jester but it looks like I got Cult Leader" (note for newbies: neither of those roles appear in newbie games), or to be ignored. But I'll stop now that we have a better conversation topic:

You said your vote on saad was a serious one, so what about his posts seems scummy? The early mafia mention in 6?

[Plotinus]

Everything he has posted so far looks scummy.

I will elaborate when more people have posted.

You're talking as if you're not a newbie. So this is an alt?

I don't see the point in random questions that lead to random, non alignment-indicative, jokey answers. Do you?

This is my second game. I spent a lot of my first game reading the wiki and spectating randoming other people's games, including some non newbie games, so I am picking up the jargon. I'm not an alt. I know your signature says you don't like meta and I think I agree with that for figuring out if someone is scum or town, but if you want to look at my early posts in my last game just to gauge cluelessness you can do that. It's fine if you don't.

My main weakness right now are not being good at generating accurate reads on people. I also seemed to tunnel a lot last game even when I was trying not to, so I'm going to keep working on those things. I am also terrible at telling whether someone is buddying me because they're scum or because they're townreading me. (Last game the scum succeeded in befriending me and I was on the wagons of two lynched town members (one of them a cop) who were correctly townreading me and thought we could be friends). Because of all of this I still consider myself a newbie.

I agree that jokey answers aren't alignment indicative but I'm not sure it's possible to skip the tedious stage of the game where nobody knows anything about anybody else and has nothing to go on. It's page 1 of day 1 and I'm still in RVS/fluff mode. I expect I will have null reads on everyone for at least the first few pages, but once people start talking to each other and interacting with each other, it'll be easier to read people and post things that aren't fluff. People talking to each other can only help with getting to that stage, though. Even the non newbie games I've spectated spend their first few pages doing /confirm and rvs and random chatter.

Singer & Plotinus; are either of you interested in voting saad?

Meh, maybe later. Are you trying to create a town voting block with singer and I?

pedit: hi singer! huh, I thought townie meant town aligned. It happened in my last game that I was trying to talk from the perspective "us town aligned people" and probably did use the word townie and people thought i was roleclaiming. It was true that I was a vanilla townie in that game but I didn't think I was roleclaiming when I wrote it and I didn't understand until now why they thought that.

I am really bad about making walls (and there doesn't seem to be any correlation between the length of my wall and the accuracy of my read), but I am getting better at just hiding them behind a spoiler tag and posting a tl dr at the end.

pedit:

Trying to prolong RVS ^^.

Scummy.

I have no bloody clue if this is serious. But it shouldn't be. Can't we wait until a couple more people have joined? Jesus I have to have OPINIONS already? Fucking OPINIONS? What is the world coming to?

Said it much better and more succinctly than I did!

[Plotinus]

@plotinus: I don't really understand what you mean with town voting block. Didn't want to ask before you got an answer, but that is still not making it too clear to me. And I also can't find it at the wiki.

I don't fully understand it myself but this is what I know and I hope the more experienced players can correct any parts where I'm wrong.

In one of the larger theme games I browsed through, someone tried to organise one early on. It's when a bunch of people who each think all the rest in the small group are town all decide to vote together as a group and work together. It can happen naturally in a game, without being organised, for example if there are multiple confirmed cops who clear multiple people as town, or just if a group of people all townread each other and are pretty sure of their reads. The group can know that they are safe to trust each other, work together in public, scumhunt together, and then put 3-4 votes on a wagon instead of just 1, which is powerful if they're right. If it happens naturally it can be okay, but of course if scum can get into a town voting block that's really powerful for them, which is what happened in the game I looked at.

I'm not sold on it being a great idea even if everyone in the group is mod confirmed town aligned because they can still be wrong about things and 4 people being wrong at once can make for quicker mislynches. I'm suspicious of people organising them if it's too early to have serious townreads. The question was a gentle push, wanted to see what they would say.

@Wyvernite: Those are things I'm working on improving. I will still try my hardest to play well, but if you know where I'm likely to screw up, you're less likely to sheep me when I'm screwing up. And if someone else notices I'm doing one of the things I warned you guys about, you'll know that I won't be upset if you point it out to me. I'll try to notice on my own, though. I hope to do a little better in all those areas compared to last game, that's my goal for this game.


pedit: lotsa people. I'm getting more suspicious of saad though.

[Plotinus]

I'm glad you didn't claim a powerrole. Way too early in the game for that.

[Plotinus]

I'm provisionally somewhat inclined to believe him because by chance one of the games I'm spectating is his last one but that game is ongoing and so I can't explain why this isn't an argument from meta.

And all those hedge words in the above sentence mean that I still want to keep my eye on him and see how he behaves in the rest of this day phase. I don't think we should actually lynch anybody for at least a week. I'm not impressed with his play so far but I'd like to see how he behaves ten pages from now.

[Plotinus]

Actually, I don't believe him at all. He claimed villager. It clearly states in the setup and the sample role PM's that the role is called Vanilla Townie.

I'm inclined to agree with this.

Not a plays-the-game-on-some-other-site-too slip?

[Plotinus]

i was looking forward to this game too

now can someone unvote me so we can discuss, i don't want to sign up for another game and risk flipping scum.

if you're worried about the long wait between doing /in in the newbie queue and a game starting, there are always people asking for replacements, that can get you into more games faster. If you try to always be playing two at once then it won't be so sad if you get night killed or lynched early on.

[Plotinus]

now that you have finished one game you can be in more than one at a time.

[Plotinus]

He may well do.

I find it more likely that he would use the terminology given in his role PM though.

fair enough.

re:94 I think it can be a good tactic for scumbuddies to fight each other early on and then make up. that logic would make more sense of saad was also scumreading BBT though, especially since he's doing OMGUS for everyone else.

[Plotinus]

Skold, what do you think of all this? I know it's the first reallife day of the game still but some of us are already starting to form early opinions. What do you think of BBT's pushes on saad and now mofo? What do you think of the way saad and mofo have been behaving?

Anyway, I'm ready to use my vote too to see how he reacts to some pressure, since he's closer to the bottom of my reads list. though I do think it would be suicidal to do this to everybody one at a time leading to a massclaim on day 1.

VOTE: Mofonugen

pedit: hi skold! You can answer tomorrow, it's ok.

[Plotinus]

what? I thought he only had two votes on him?

[Plotinus]

I'm going to do a recount. I'm really sorry if I messed up guys. I don't remember seeing anything about him being at L-1

[Plotinus]

Unofficial votecount:

saad 3 (Mofonugen, Wyvernite,)
Wyvernite 2 (Plotinus)
Mofonugen 2 (Argos, singersigner, saad, bofo, plotinus)
Plotinus 1 (Skold)

yikes. i'm really sorry about the derphammer guys. i dont know how i missed that argos and singer had previously voted him. I really thought he was at L-3. I'll count next time for sure :/

[Plotinus]

I'm really sorry, mofo. I wish you a lot of luck in your next game, and I hope you at least enjoy watching us from the dead players thread - you'll be able to chat with whoever gets night killed tonight.

[Plotinus]

Sounds good to me. Let's spend at least a week talking to each other. I've definitely learned a lesson about relying on my memory and the importance of counting.

I'd like to hear from Skold and Argos, and also singer when she gets off work, because we didn't get a chance to hear from them very much on Day 1.

My townreads at the moment are wyvernite for good scum hunting day 1, and wanderer for being the voice of reason.

[Plotinus]

The first two votes on mofo were RVS votes from argos and singer, which is why I forgot about them. If we don't count those, then saad started it, Blue, who is confirmed town, jumped on to pressure mofo but didn't say it was L-1 (possible they miscounted too), and then I hammered by mistake.

[Plotinus]

The first two votes on mofo were RVS votes from argos and singer, which is why I forgot about them. If we don't count those, then saad started it, Blue, who is confirmed town, jumped on to pressure mofo but didn't say it was L-1 (possible they miscounted too), and then I hammered by mistake.

Why do you think BBT was killed?

I'm not sure, because either of us would have been decent choices for a mislynch today, and possibly one of us today the other of us tomorrow: BBT for not saying mofo was at L-1 and me for derphammering, but it seems like BBT was an experienced player with an aggressive playstyle who was doing a lot of scumhunting and they may have feared BBT would be onto them soon enough. If our IC is innocent I'd expect to lose her next, because I expect her to be the next best scumhunter and one of our best hopes of a town win.

At the end of the day, I was a little suspicious of BBT because they seemed so sure that saad was scum, and I thought that only scum could be sure of anything on page 1, but I was wrong. My derphammer really hurt all of us: town didn't have enough time to get to know each other, town power roles didn't have enough time to figure out who would be good targets for their night actions, and the only good side is that mafia barely had a chance to get to do any power role hunting and landed on a vanilla townie, but that doesn't make up for it.

What do you think?

[Plotinus]

It will depend on how they behave today. I think it can be hard to distinguish between newbie and scummy -- to use examples from our last game, ducks who seemed (to me) scum but was newbie and mainez who seemed newbie but was scum, but it's worth keeping an eye on them.

people only wanna play as town, if i replace i'd likely get a scum slot from a guy who lurked because he flipped scum.

So what I'm reading from this is that Saad doesn't want to be mafia, he wants to be town, and that if he were mafia he would lurk until he was replaced. I disagree with his premise about what other people want to play, but do think that he believes it. Him not lurking is not evidence either way (because he could have been lying), but if he does start lurking after this I'll be more suspicious of him.

I think if we're dealing with two newbie scum, then it's 2 of [skold, saad, argos] (mostly by process of elimination on "newbie" and "scum"). We've only seen 9 posts from Skold so far, and only a few of substance. We've seen even less of Argos (just 2 posts). It is entirely possible they were sleeping or at work like singer during the entire 7 hour day, so complete null read on them.

House said something last game -- even though he was scum I think he was telling the truth about this part -- about a good way to distinguish IC town from IC scum, so I think we can fairly confidently wait and see what will happen with singer and how she plays this week. If singer is town then I do think we're dealing with 2 newbie scum. If singer is not town it is entirely too early to be guessing who her buddy is but probably one of the candidates for newbie scum.

Anyway, I'd trust your instincts about who to watch.

who even is our remaining SE? *checks* oh, Skold. But he's only been on the site for a couple months so he might still feel like a newer player? I looked over his completed games very briefly and I didn't find a completed scum game, so if he is scum then i'll count him in the newbie category.

[Plotinus]

I mean, it's true that newbie scum replace out more often than newbie town, but it's not literally the case that it happens 100% of the time. In our last game we had 4 replacements and only one of those was scum.

[Plotinus]

It will depend on how they behave today. I think it can be hard to distinguish between newbie and scummy -- to use examples from our last game, ducks who seemed (to me) scum but was newbie and mainez who seemed newbie but was scum, but it's worth keeping an eye on them.

people only wanna play as town, if i replace i'd likely get a scum slot from a guy who lurked because he flipped scum.

So what I'm reading from this is that Saad doesn't want to be mafia, he wants to be town, and

that if he were mafia he would lurk until he was replaced.

I disagree with his premise about what other people want to play, but do think that he believes it. Him not lurking is not evidence either way (because he could have been lying), but if he does start lurking after this I'll be more suspicious of him.

I think if we're dealing with two newbie scum, then it's 2 of [skold, saad, argos] (mostly by process of elimination on "newbie" and "scum"). We've only seen 9 posts from Skold so far, and only a few of substance. We've seen even less of Argos (just 2 posts). It is entirely possible they were sleeping or at work like singer during the entire 7 hour day, so complete null read on them.

House said something last game -- even though he was scum I think he was telling the truth about this part -- about a good way to distinguish IC town from IC scum, so I think we can fairly confidently wait and see what will happen with singer and how she plays this week. If singer is town then I do think we're dealing with 2 newbie scum. If singer is not town it is entirely too early to be guessing who her buddy is but probably one of the candidates for newbie scum.

Anyway, I'd trust your instincts about who to watch.

who even is our remaining SE? *checks* oh, Skold. But he's only been on the site for a couple months so he might still feel like a newer player? I looked over his completed games very briefly and I didn't find a completed scum game, so if he is scum then i'll count him in the newbie category.

About the bolded part: Where did saad say that?

I feel you make a rather one-sided conclusion. It makes me feel the same as what you did with Mainez: you believed her so much about afk due to school that you wouldn't really consider her as scum until you no longer could get around it, while not lying about being afk is not allignment-indicative (since you brought it up I am going back to it) Instead of scumtunnelling, you are towntunnelling.
Maybe saad wants us to think he'd lurk/replace out if he rolled scum. I'm leaning that way at least for now.

About trusting my instincts, just want to make clear I'm interpreting right: do you mean you agree with my instincts or are you telling me to trust them?

he didn't say that, I was just trying to interpret his statement that I quoted. If he lurks I will be suspicious of him because he said x is scummy and then did x. If he doesn't lurk then hopefully he'll write enough for us to have an opinion of him based on what he writes. I agree that he wants us to think he'd lurk/replace as scum whether it's true or not, and that he could still be scum even if he's very active and was lying earlier, but now he mustn't lurk or replace because that'll be scumclaiming from him for sure.

You are right about me that I'm equally likely to tunnel people who are town or scum. I was wrong about mainez, ducks, fromage, house, bv... but i'm not townreading saad right now. In the early game I can think that he's just hoping to get to play longer than 1 day for once, but if it's up to me this day will last almost the full 9 days and by then I won't be feeling sorry for saad if he's the most suspicious player.

I mean that in general you should trust your own instincts. I do agree about saad/skold for now because in my private notes I have you and me and wyvernite at the top and saad at the bottom and skold, argos, and singer in the middle in a jumble, and my reads on them will change based on how they act in the thread.

@saad who were you trying to protect?

[Plotinus]

saad, are you talking about the things you said in twilight last night? Did you think bbt was likely to be nightkilled?

[Plotinus]

@Saad

Oh, I thought you were voting me because of the hammer thing. So you're scumreading because I seemed nervous in my opening but I seem nonchalant about being voted for.

About the opening, my answer to my own question is "I was hoping to get scum because I haven't been scum yet in an online game and I want to try it but it didn't happen this time." Make of that what you will. I didn't think I would really catch scum with the question, but I thought seeming either a little bored or a little relieved with the role might be a weak town tell.

I actually spent all of LYLO last game (as town) tunnelling a townie who had squirmed too much (I thought) in twilight over having misread someone, so I guess we disagree about that being a tell -- I think it's going to depend a lot on a person's personality.

The way I think is that you're entitled to your vote, even if it's for me, and even though you're mistaken about me it's understandable. I'm hoping I won't be mislynched today, because then we'll have to guess right twice in a row for town to win, but I don't think anyone wants to lynch me right now so it doesn't seem worth getting upset about it yet. I'm interested in scumhunting, and that means deciphering your posts and trying to coax the others out of their shells to talk with us.

As for why I didn't vote you yesterday: I was suspicious of how sure Blue was about you, saying they'd found scum on Page 1. I wasn't sure where they were going with it. But it seemed to work okay, you started talking to us when you were at L-1 and it seemed better than RVS for scumhunting, though I was worried if we did it to everyone we'd just out our powerroles for no reason on day 1 before they had any info to give us. But it seemed like a little pressuring might help with the early hunting your interaction with Blue. So then with mofo, Blue said they were pressuring him but I thought he was only at L-3 so it didn't seem like very much pressure. It all happened pretty fast, but after Blue made the big letters for you about you being at L-1, I trusted them to do the same for mofo and I shouldn't have.

And of course today I'm shy about voting anyone after the mishap, but I think even if I'm not just about to go to bed I won't do any voting after midnight at all anymore. I can vote someone in the morning if I feel like it.

[Plotinus]

but I don't think anyone wants to lynch me

right now

(as opposed to towards the end of the week) so it doesn't seem worth getting upset about it yet.

But it seemed like a little pressuring might help with the early hunting

after

your interaction with Blue

EBWOP

[Plotinus]

On page 1, I wasn't sure what to make of BBT for being so sure, and I was a little suspicious because they seemed to be taking charge of the game. I guess I didn't do a good job of telegraphing that at the time. The only signs were not joining in the saad wagon and waiting to see what the consequences of BBT's actions would be. I felt it was too early for real suspicion, either BBT of saad or me of BBT, but I was keeping my eye on them.

Then when saad was at L-1 there was some good discussion and I was glad we were getting out of the RVS stage and into Day 1 so early, so I started liking BBT's technique then. By then I was reading them as an experienced player who knew what they were doing, so I thought I could try to help, which went about as well as a baby trying to help wash their own diapers. The technique seemed to only work when someone was at L-1, and nobody was acting like they thought mofo was at L-1. Mofo said in twilight that he also thought he was at L-3 so that's why he wasn't really reacting.

Then in twilight I was suspicious again because of how things had turned out. I felt bad for what had happened and I wanted to know if anyone who had a part in it was doing it on purpose, so I was a little suspicious of BBT again. BBT had accused me of rolefishing early on, and in hindsight I thought the "let's get everyone up to L-1" game was rolefishing in its own way.

For the record, I'm back to disliking BBT's technique. If Mofo had realised he was at L-1 he probably would have roleclaimed. Claiming bulletproof on Day 1 means the mafia will never waste a shot trying to night kill him, which makes his power useless. If we'd gone around getting everybody up to L-1 to see how they reacted, we could have outed all of powerroles on Day 1 for no reason at all. I think it would be best if powerroles can keep it a secret until they have some information that can help the town.

[Plotinus]

@Wanderer: I had to look over it again to remember, but I think this was the post that BBT made that influenced me the most to jump on mofo.

It would be a ballsy play to call anyone else like that. As far as your alignment, I am inclined to believe saad that you are town.

You're inclined to believe someone you're scum-reading?

What?

@Argos: Wanderer and I played our first newbie game together, and in that game, the scum unvoted to put someone at L-2, waited for someone to put them back at L-1, and then quickhammered every single day, and he managed to convince us all somehow that he was just chaotic-town instead of chaotic-scum. So I have every reason to believe that Wanderer was telling the truth about being nervous about lynching early. I realise you might not want to take my word for this yet when I'm not a townread of yours, but she's my strongest townread at the moment.

@singer: I'm getting two conflicting feelings about voting and maybe you could help me out as IC. On the one hand, our votes are our only tool in this game for putting pressure on people, and showing the rest of the town who are number 1 scumread is. Not voting people we say we're suspicious of shows a lack of commitment or wishywashiness, which is scummy. On the other hand, our votes can be used to lynch each other which ends the day early and cuts off conversation, so we need to be careful with them.

How sure should we be before we vote for somebody once we're out of RVS? Should we only vote if we'd be willing to lynch the person (regardless of where on the wagon we are, so even if we think we're the first vote, we should still only vote if we're okay with seeing that person lynched)?

22% was random chance on day 1, and today we have 28% chance of guessing correctly with random chance. I think we should be more sure than random chance before voting, but I'm not sure how much more sure. How much percent sure should we be before we vote? How much percent sure before we put someone at L-2? at L-1? before we state intent to hammer?

[Plotinus]

right, got sidetracked. To answer the rest of your question, Wanderer, I think that post of BBT's influenced me the most and I did have a slight scumread on mofo at that point. Maybe it wasn't a strong enough for voting, but we were just getting out of RVS so I wasn't very sure of any of my reads yet. When I'm not very sure of anything it's easy to convince me one way or the other, but when BBT picked at that post, the picking made sense to me, even though it wasn't something I would have noticed on my own.

[Plotinus]

At the time, I thought BBT's point was better, 125 didn't convince me but it should have. Looking at it again, this quote from mofo jumps out at me: "I was planning to call you out no matter who you jumped to." it seemed like he was saying that he'd be suspicious of BBT no matter what.


Yes, it was carelessness, and that's separate from early voting. The earliness is why my feelings about everyone were still weak, in hindsight perhaps too weak to justify voting at all.

I guess I figured (sheeping BBT) that we'd get him up to L-1 and he'd squirm like saad did and then we'd be able to compare them with each other.

Skold, how are you doing? Who are you townreading at the moment?

[Plotinus]

If you do wish to ask in thread, be sure to bold it so the moderator will know you are talking to him. Asking privately is fine too though.

[Plotinus]

@Argos That's what I think now too. When BBT was doing it it seemed like BBT knew what they were doing but I no longer think it was a good idea. The last paragraph of 183 is my current opinion on this technique. The post you quoted was an attempt to remember what I was thinking at the time at Wanderer's request.

What we got out of saad was not all that convincing, most people seemed to be dropping it not because they believed the claim but just because they wanted to focus on other people too.

Slight town lean on argos for now because I like his contributions so far. I am trying not to townlean him just because of that metaphor at the end of 182 because I know writing evocatively is not indicative of alignment but it's probably influencing my townlean anyway. He also hasn't said anything yet that I disagree with, which is also not alignment indicative but it's nice.

[Plotinus]

@Saad Townlean is weaker than townread. I don't have a list of towntells memorised and most of them can be faked anyway. I just have some early game positive feelings towards Argos for now.

@singer: Thanks for the explanation. I think I will avoid pressure votes until I have some idea of what I'm trying to accomplish with them, then.

About the "best scumhunter" thing: BBT was very enthusiastically scumhunting on Day 1. You weren't because you were at work and the day was cut short. However, as IC, and as a person with a green name, as someone who has been here for 4.5 years, we can guess that you know something about this game, that you have learned something about how to read people, that you know when to trust your feelings and when not to, that you've seen newbie scum in many different games and you have some idea of what to look for. Of course this is all conjecture because we haven't seen it in action, but it's an educated guess. As IC, your advice is more likely to help us pull off a town victory.

I'm not saying we should all sheep you because we do need to learn to think for ourselves (or I need to learn anyway), but I do think that if I were scum and if I didn't have any leads on powerroles, if nobody was mod confirmed town, and there was nobody I wanted to policy lynch for being annoying, then I would go after the best scumhunters, the IC, and leave alive whoever looked the most confused. I've given it some thought (especially the policy lynch part), but I keep drawing town-aligned roles so I can't actually test my thoughts.

So that's why I think both that you are more likely than the rest of us to be night killed and why I think you weren't killed night 1.

[Plotinus]

Disagree. I was spectating his last game, which is ongoing so I can't talk about it, but it gave me some pre-game impressions of him, and my early interactions with him, including the "coaching" were based on those impressions. I have impressions of you too from last game. As the game progresses, I'm forming impressions based on this game, which are more valuable than any pre-game impressions.

I do want players who are town to be visibly town enough that we can avoid mislynching them, but of course the flaw in that is that some people aren't town, so you're probably right that I shouldn't have been doing that. In our last game, you and starkmoon were the only two people I read correctly as town, and I was never 100% sure that you guys were town until the flips. And I was thinking that if everyone who was town could just clearly telegraph that they're town then the whole thing would be much easier. I know the flaw in that argument, that scum could just telegraph that they're town too, that then it would just come down to who was better at telegraphing. But I still feel that way. What I was trying to get across to saad in the RVS stage was "if you're town, please act like it." If he's not, then whatever.

By telegraphing I mean scumhunting with sincerity.

[quote=Wanderer]
I think that's odd because saad was at L-1 at some point and to me it feels Plotinus was avoiding that bandwagon[/quote]

I think by the time I was starting to think about joining the saad wagon, he was both at L-1 and I knew that he was at L-1.


I will probably be voting saad or skold at some point in day 2, probably soon after the next vote count.

saad, because it's really hard to find out why he thinks the things he does and he just puts up votes and takes them off with little explanation and it takes a long, tedious back-and-forth interactions to find out why he does things, and I suspect that he's capable of writing out logically why he thinks the things that he thinks, but he isn't, and maybe he's not giving reasons right away because it's easier to make up an explanation for your behaviour after the fact. I've certainly been finding that it's difficult to remember why I do things if I don't write it down at the time.

skold, are you out of RVS yet?



I am still townreading wanderer and wyvernite, and for now I am townleaning on argos and singer but want to hear more from pretty much everyone.

[Plotinus]

I'm not saying we should all sheep you because we do need to learn to think for ourselves

(or I need to learn anyway), but I do think that if I were scum and if I didn't have any leads on powerroles, if nobody was mod confirmed town, and there was nobody I wanted to policy lynch for being annoying, then I would go after the best scumhunters, the IC, and leave alive whoever looked the most confused. I've given it some thought (especially the policy lynch part), but I keep drawing town-aligned roles so I can't actually test my thoughts.

I'm agreeing with the bolded part, but wanted to elaborate. There are very few situations I've found where sheeping as town benefits town at all. Usually you'd be sheeping someone because

a) You don't have any worthwhile contributions of your own to make, but want to look busy/productive, so you sheep someone. (scummy)
b) if the person you're sheeping dies, and flips town, you want it to make you look better, because you defended them. Actively seeking for everyone approval, and trying to get a town read is in and of itself scummy.
c) You want to make someone innocent look bad by sheeping them, and then flipping mafia. (again, obviously very scummy)

Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, and you should use your own discretion, but in general those points stand.
------------------------------------------
The amount of activity in this game is crazy! I'll be posting my reads within the next few hours, unless something comes up which would prevent me from doing so.

I wanted to come back to this. These are really good points that I hadn't thought of before. It's hard because one of the ways people (me, but I think others too) learn things is by copying people who seem to know what they're doing. It's how you get better at chess, painting, programming, etc. When I learned to paint, our teacher had us paint copies of famous artworks so that we could come to understand what was being done by doing it ourselves. To get better at chess, you replay games the masters have played, moving your pieces just as they did and trying to understand what they were seeing when they did that. And in programming it's outright encouraged to copy other people's work (not doing so is reinventing the wheel). The way we learn language is by copying other people's words until they start to mean something.

But I agree with you that sheeping in this game mostly has anti-town utility, even if done with good intentions because the person you're sheeping could be scum or they could just be wrong about their reads or whatever. I want to think about this some more.

[Plotinus]

It'll come down to who seems the most scummy after more activity from both.

If skold continues lurking and not having opinions, I'll vote skold. If skold becomes active and starts has opinions, I'll make a decision based on how genuine the opinions seem and how much scumhunting he seems to be doing. If there isn't much scumhunting despite an increase in activity, I'll still vote him. If he's doing better scumhunting and interacting than saad I'll probably vote for saad.

If saad starts posting longer, more detailed posts that contain his thoughts and the reasons for having the thoughts -- even if some of his reads are based on gut feelings, but not if all of them are --, and if his reasoning makes sense, so that even if we disagree with him we can understand why he thinks the things he thinks, and if he does some genuine scumhunting and interacting with everybody, then I won't vote for saad. That's a tall order based on saad's earlier participation in this game, and it would take consistent work to get it, but I do think townsaad is capable of it, so if saad is town he should let us know.

I think right now it's more likely I'll vote saad than skold but I do realise the things I'm asking for are easier for a more experienced player to fulfill than a newbie so I'm not sure what to do about that, but the solution isn't to just townread someone for being new (like with mainez last time).

Argos and singer are still in the "I like what I'm seeing so far but I really want to see more of it" category, so there's room for both of them to move up to the strong town read category or down to the scumlean category, and that's also going to be based on their behaviour, specifically the things I talked about with skold and saad.

[Plotinus]

Then they'll be replaced and we can see how their replacements behave.

*looks through saad's ISO again* saad, I guess, because there's more there that looks anti-town. skold is basically a policy lynch for inactivity right now, and process of elimination.

[Plotinus]

saad, what do you think of wanderer's 211? what do you think of singer's case against skold?

[Plotinus]

Skold, I happened to see your username on the active users a few hours ago and I was hoping you'd drop in and share your thoughts with us, but you didn't and its gone now. Why didn't you drop in? It's been over 2 days now since you posted in this thread, but you posted somewhere else yesterday. I think you are lurking.

[Plotinus]

Okay, thanks for that warning. I accept that I crossed the line but that does mean I am not fully sure where the line is. I think I will ask the mod privately for advice on how to answer questions where the answer is something that's against the rules to say.

In 226 I'm scumhunting. My townreads are wanderer and wyvernite. strong townlean on singer. weak townlean on argos pending more activity. i know my own alignment, so that leaves saad/skold for scum, skold for inactivity which does appear to be active lurking and saad for being hard to communicate with. I'm trying to get both of them to communicate more, because I would rather scumread someone for what they are doing than for what they're not.

VOTE: Skold because I want you to come talk to us. I want you to post your reads and to actively participate in this game.

I'm picking skold not saad because the active lurking (seeing Skold's name on the player list for but him not turning up in game) was the tipping point for me. When Skold made most of his fluff posts, we were still in RVS, so it's okay, and I can relate to feeling exasperated by being pressured to have opinions before I'm ready to have them (especially on page 1-2 of a game), but we've had 229 posts so far and this has been an interesting day 2 so far with lots of things to talk about and yet Skold isn't here chattering.

I would be almost equally happy with a saad lynch, though I do find him hard to read. His ISO is all over the place. But there are a few posts of his that give me pause for reasons I don't want to share right now, but 40 made me suspicious and 84 allayed those particular suspicions for reasons that are entirely about this game, but I wasn't townreading him after that either. In today's interactions, 167 was really cryptic and hard to understand and it took a lot of back and forth to figure out what he was talking about and I'm still not sure I understand what he was trying to do and why. and now he's scumreading singer but he won't tell us why and that's weird. His last activity was about 40 minutes after he posted so he probably did see Wanderer ask why he's suspicious of singer, but hasn't seen my own questions for him yet. He ~could~ have answered wanderer but he didn't.


pedit: @singer, yeah kinda. i mean he gave a reason that he called serious, it just wasn't a very good one.

Spoiler: here is what he said about why his vote was serious

OK.

Here are my thoughts on it;

the mafia could be anywhere, watch out!

This is scum unsure about how to approach the game. You feel uncomfortable voting 'randomly' because you know everybodies alignments. It's also a subtle way of saying 'Hey, I have no idea who scum are!'

short while is an oxymoron and an oxymoron is a contradiction between two words (the word oxymoron in itself is an oxymoron; with oxy meaning dull in latin and moron meaning sharp). only the scum contradict because THEY are the ones lying.

VOTE: Skold

This is you flat out copying Skold's RVS vote in 9. This is an attempt to fit in, you wasn't sure how to vote without drawing attention to yourself (scum are much more self-aware and careful with their actions than town) and you found what you thought was a good choice in copying somebody elses style of RVS voting.

The fact you're trying to claim that it was a serious vote (to excuse not voting earlier) is laughable.

Votes should be piling onto Saad now.

i like the way ur thinking.

first was just an innocuous comment lol

second, well Skold is 14 and I thought an early vote would put pressure onto him, so no it wasn't a random vote it was a serious vote, putting pressure on him. he's young, so if he's scum, he's more likely to squeal, that's the way i see it. kids aren't usually experienced liars. also his content throughout the game has been non serious, trollish filler comments so the vote sticks for now.

[Plotinus]

just saw the va/la thing. well that takes away some of my argument about active lurking but he's only at L-3 so I'll leave it for now.

[Plotinus]

@Wyvernite I had this problem last game too that at one point I was townreading 8 people or something. I think at that point the only person I was scumreading was town. Having only two scum reads doesn't mean I'm sure them. It just means the rest of you haven't made me suspicious and that I'm not that great at re-evaluating my reads. It's true that you haven't posted all that much yet, but everytime you do you have something to thoughtful to say that advances the game and displays genuine scumhunting. I think you're incorrect about me but I think it's understandable. If I didn't know I was town-aligned I'd be suspicious of me too because in our last game scum lolhammered every day and managed to convince us it was just his personality. So, I think it's okay that you and wanderer don't believe me. It's good to think critically about these things and to remember that two of the people in this thread can be lying to you. It's fine that you think I'm one of them even though it's incorrect. If you haven't made up your mind about me and there are any questions I can answer that would help that, feel free to ask.

@Wanderer I don't know why saad does the things he does. I don't know why he wanted me to react to a single naked vote or why he unvoted after I did respond. After a while, I got used to House last game enough that I could sometimes understand his posts, but he was scum anyway. I haven't reached that stage where I think I see what saad's doing yet, and the House comparison could be a good one.

VOTE: Saad because if Skold's not here then my vote isn't doing anything where it was.

[Plotinus]

Mainly because I think it would be townier to explain himself and we've been asking him for days to do that and he doesn't. He's promised us an explanation of singer vote soon and I'm looking forward to that, but it would have to be really well argued to change my mind. I can go through his ISO and point stuff out if you want. The things that are holding me back on him are all things that are not really alignment indicative: argos saying maybe his english just isn't that good. His grammar looks okay to me but maybe it's hard for him to explain his thoughts. his behaviour in post 84 already caused me to flipflop from suspicious to null.

maybe he's just not good at communicating. maybe he's one of those unlucky people who gets scumread for his personality no matter what. But at this point I feel like all of those things are too much benefit of the doubt for someone whose alignment I don't know. If the only things about a person that make me think they could be town are "what ifs" i've made up in my own head, that seems like it means something.

In favour of townsaad we have my imagination. in favour of scumsaad we have most of saad's posts. at least scumsaad is visible outside of my own head.

[Plotinus]

Spoiler: literally every post in saad's iso, but not quoted just linked

6, 7. I thought it didn't mean anything when BBT was talking about it, and maybe it doesn't, but i was browsing some games and there have been times where scum make a joke about being scum in their RVS post and then at the end of the game everyone laughs about how ironic it is. I think town can do it too and it can be a personality thing but I think it's a thing.

12, 46, 56, 60 rvs which he claims is serious but the reason he gives is the guy's age. Also, to find out Skold's age he must have gone to Skold's profile to see it. Skold is so far the only one of us that saad has given evidence of checking up on like that before the game. If they are scumbuddies, maybe that's why.

15, 42 early game fluff, but we have to break the ice somehow, so I think that's okay for posts below 100.

38 asks why BBT is voting him. null (he had 2 votes on that point and BBT was claiming it was serious)

40, 47, 71 looked suspicious to me for reasons i don't want to talk about, but I also disagree with him, because wanting to progress the game isn't scummy. 84 allayed those suspicions bringing it back to null.

51 I don't understand what he means by safeguard here. He says mofo was jumping to conclusions but was he? Saad did start defending himself really early. I do agree that's a reason to be suspicious. It's one of the main reasons I was tunnelling ducks last game because she was squirming. I was wrong about ducks but I don't think I'm wrong that being upset about a couple votes is suspicious. But I don't know? Is it really suspicious or am I just failing theory of mind again? When people vote me I mostly think "well you're wrong but it's understandable because I'm wrong a lot too, maybe you'll see the light later, sometimes I do if something knocks me out of my tunnel." I was being townread for that last game but scumread for that this one. it's probably better to nullread me for that.

54 He quotes wyvernite saying "you're misinterpreting", wyvernite interprets that to mean that wyvernite is misinterpreting, then saad says he wasn't talking to wyvernite but to wanderer. what? if he was talking to wanderer why didn't he say @wanderer or hey, wanderer what do you think of this quote. throw this one in the bad at communicating jar I guess. Trying to find scum motivation here, it could be that he didn't like wyvern's point and is backpaddling to say he wasn't talking to wyvern after all. but I can't read his mind so who knows.

59, 66 looks like he's not scumhunting but just trying to call everybody scummy and see where he can get it to stick. wyvern made good points here too, and saad looks like he's trying to deflect them but it's clumsy.

68 it's kinda weird that he was squirming a lot at L-4 and L-3 and then at L-1 claims not to be feeling any pressure.

71 i thought he was gearing up for a fakeclaim of a powerrole here but he didn't. Anyway I actually agree with saad here that trying to get people to claim stuff on page 3 is overzealous and could have gone all kinds of badly. In the 66.67% of setups that don't have a doctor, that's just going to get someone who claims honestly nightkilled.

76 he seems thinks wyvern scumslipped by saying the word scum when talking about saad's scumreads. If this argument is as serious as he claims his other arguments to be (the one on skold for being 14, the one I'm expecting about singer), then it's really weird. and scummy. and then he complains when mofo does it to him in 93 and gets angry about it in 99.

77 wishywashy, hedging his bets.

84 he claims villager. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that but other people seem to think it's undeserved and especially singer says it's more likely he would have used the words in his role pm. I was happy he didn't fakeclaim a powerrole. his read on bbt was good. he was wrong about mofo but so were the rest of us. i believe he was wrong about wyvern and i disagree with saad's reasons. his point about singer here might have been a good one, i don't know enough theory. i also think wanderer is town but for different reasons than saad seems to.

85 no one likes to be killed on the first day. Feeling dejected at the prospect of being lynched on day 1 feels townier to me than being angry about it.

90 if he's town he says he's playing against his wincon. "I'd rather play than have my faction win."

97 he is townreading BBT because BBT is pushing really hard against him which he thinks newbie town would be more likely to do. But BBT has been here for more than a year so he wasn't a newbie. In 105, his argument is that BBT is SE so isn't a newbie.

108 he's really wants us to know that he hates being scum and doesn't want to be scum. Wanderer pointed this out earlier in 165 and I agree with the conclusions we came to in our discussion there: he's telling us something about how he would behave if he were scum. Either he's telling the truth (and lurking would be suspicious from him) or he's lying to get us to townread him for activity. So this was null for me at the time, but i'm leaning towards the second now because i'm not townreading him.

112 i can't really parse this but it looks like trying to deflect attention off of him onto mofo.

114 claims to have refuted some points by BBT. BBT wasn't satisfied with this post.

115 fluff

118, 119, 124 claims he would have claimed villager-i-mean-townie if he was scum, which is what he did. claims that it would have been suicide to claim a powerrole on day1. it worked pretty well for house last game, but I disagree with this. He could have softclaimed. He could have claimed that he had something to claim and left it at that. It would be a bad move for town to lynch a claimed powerrole on day 1. he'd be suspicious the next day when he wasn't nightkilled, but he couldn't have known that wanderer and I had just seen a fakeclaimed scum live until to LYLO and wouldn't buy it so soon again. So, I disagree both that it is suicide to fakeclaim a powerrole on Day 1 (worked for house for 3 days x_x) and just in general. I think the town would have been a lot more hesitant to lynch a claimed power role on day 1. "at least he's just a villager-i-mean-townie" is what we would have said when we eventually lynched him. Anyway, I'm really suspicious whenever one says "As scum, I would do ____" and then goes on to do it.

138 naked unvote in twilight.

143, 144, 166, 168, 170, 173 even after all that back and forth i'm not sure what to make of this, but in twilight he made sure to be suspicious of BBT, then when BBT flipped town I thought he was claiming that he was trying to keep BBT from getting nightkilled, but instead he said he thought scum would try to get to get BBT lynched on day 2, and i just find this whole exchange really confusing and it makes more sense if i read it as him trying to distance himself from the planned nightkill before it happens.

176 one of the few posts of his that i genuinely like. he's actually explaining his thoughts and his reasoning here. anyway i've replied to this post already.

190 naked unexplained unvote of me.

191, 194. he wants to ask the moderator a question, and then instead of just asking the question he says he's going to do it here in this thread. Anyway, I hope he got the answer he was looking for. These posts are null.

200 looks like he's buddying me. he's been flipflopping between voting people and then befriending them.

209, 222, 242 out of nowhere scumread on singer. I mean, it's great to be considering everybody, that's what we're supposed to be doing, but a lot of his opinions seem to come out of nowhere and that's troubling.

221 a smiley that doesn't appear connected to anything, so I'm interpreting this as "Hey i'm here but i'm not participating"

241 claims that Argos suggesting that saad is a nonnative speaker is a towntell.

so while there's a lot here that I don't understand, there's a lot of times where what I don't understand is what the town motivation could be for his posts. My vote on him stands.

[Plotinus]

oh, I think you're right about 54. That makes more sense and fits in with his behaviour elsewhere. I misread what he was saying about who those posts were directed at. null on that post i guess.

[Plotinus]

somewhat. I'm not actually sure whether wanting to get out of rvs soon is protown or not. I think that being eager to get onto scumhunting and

then following through on that

is protown. I'd be interested in hearing what singer thinks about that in general, but saad being wrong about mafia theory is a newbietell not a scumtell.

But since he was trying to deflect criticism off of himself and onto you, that fits in with an overall pattern of behaviour of trying to make other people look scummy and then checking for reactions. He did it to you in that post, and to mofo in 51, and wyvern in 76, and to BBT, and me at the start of this day phase which I thought was for the obvious but it turned out not to be, and now singer. He did RVS with skold but otherwise left him and argos alone (except to townread him for saying saad might not be a native speaker).

I'd like to hear from Skold or his replacement, but Argos has also been consistently inclined to give saad the benefit of the doubt, though he also is describing saad as seeming scummy.


preview-edit: you're probably right about 40 but i need to get some food so i'm going to leave what i wrote and think some more. I also wish BBT were still here.

[Plotinus]

COSIGNED.

saad said mafia would lurk until they were replaced and now he's doing that. It's been almost 2 days since we've heard from him.

Hi Skold! Welcome back. Glad you managed to pop in despite the internet troubles. I agree there's no harm in waiting a few days before you hammer, not until conversation stalls out anyway. if we reach a stage where we're all agreeing that there's nothing more to learn until Day 3 then it'll be time, but I don't think everyone's there yet. When you have time, I'm curious about any other reads you might have.

@Wanderer I don't know. I agree it was pretty lame. My early game opinions, when I have them, change a lot, sometimes back and forth with each post because I'm starting with so little information and there aren't any clear patterns yet, so every post can change my mind. I think it was part inertia --being ready to jump on the saad wagon only after that was over meant i was still ready to vote even though I should have been starting from 0 with mofo. I think I had some leftover inertia from wanting to vote saad. it was part voting past my bedtime. i decided after not to do any more voting after midnight. previously i was just against voting and going to bed to leave the thread unattended for 8 hours with possibly no time to unvote if things changed, but i wasn't going to bed i was just wandering to a different part of the internet and back again. so the new rule is midnight and it's about not doing things when i'm not thinking clearly.


singer, I had thought of RVS as being just an icebreaker type thing to get people talking, and I still think that's a large part of what it is, but I've been noticing people like BBT and elsewhere -- more experienced players in general I think -- who are able to form gut opinions of someone just based on "vote ____ because i like their avatar", and sometimes some of these opinions turn out to be right. I get that it's probably not something that can be taught but do you have any pointers anyway?

[Plotinus]

Wanderer, what makes you think I'm still doing that? I gave reasons for voting saad. They're genuine. When I'm sheeping, my reason is going to be given as "I dunno" or "I thought ____ knew what they were talking about". I was the first to bring up Argos. It's true I didn't vote Argos but only because my suspicion of Argos is relational to saad. I don't know if I should keep my vote on saad so whoever replaces him knows we're serious (L-2 is more serious than L-3, which is where he'd be if I invoted).

I don't know whether it is better strategy to keep my vote on saad or switch to argos while we wait for saad to be replaced. If I thought it was better to switch to Argos I'd do that right now because Argos has had 11 posts so far, less than 4% of the thread. Argos gives reads when asked but otherwise hasn't been talking very much, hasn't been asking questions of everyone or trying to get to know us. The reason I'm not switching is that saad asking to be replaced has only made me more suspicious of his slot because:

people only wanna play as town, if i replace i'd likely get a scum slot from a guy who lurked because he flipped scum.

actually just replace me, get someone who will play the game, sorry for the inconvenience.

its singer and wyvernite

just no motivation to play at all

I don't think asking to be replaced is scummy in general because there's a lot of reasons a person might replace out, but if you yourself say that only mafia would get bored of the game and then get bored of the game, i'm going to connect the two.

I do think that whoever replaces saad is, entirely regardless of his rolepm, going to be able to believably say "I don't know what was up with my predecessor, sorry guys." and then the slot will improve because there's nowhere to go but up.

I do like the point you made that if 6 of us are willing to vote saad then at least one person has to be bussing. I guess the counter to that is that if I were scum and my partner were behaving like that I'd probably be driving his wagon, not just hopping on reluctantly at the end. Though maybe not as a newbie, it's hard to speculate what scumMe would have done last week when all I know is what townMe did. I don't think I would have had the confidence to do that strategy this game at this experience level if I were scum, because I've only thought of it just now but I am now planning to do it sometime in the future if I ever do finally get to play scum and get a lousy partner.

Spoiler: About Skold

As for Skold, well singer's reasoning made sense about him but it turned out he had internet troubles so it makes sense to wait until that's resolved. The entire case against him was inactivity and it turned out he had a real-life reason for that, which makes the inactivity null in my eyes. I'm okay with waiting a few real-life days to get to know Skold, because we do have time, but if we make it to day 3 without much more from him -- even if it's still due to internet troubles -- I'll run out of patience, though day 3 is a terrible time for a policy lynch so i don't know. I do think he still makes sense as a potential partner for saad.

Spoiler: About Wanderer

about Wanderer: we built up some rapport in our previous newbie game and I'm glad that I'm playing with her again this game because it's nice to have a familiar face. I guess we're both trying to figure out how our respective behaviours differ from last game and what that means if anything. She seems a lot like the wanderer from last game to me which is part of my townread on her. She asks people questions, she's trying to figure people out. She hasn't yet posted a list of who she's townreading and who she's scumreading and who is in the middle, and most everyone else has done that so far, but I think she just hasn't made up her mind yet.

it's kind of frustrating being accused of sheeping because then if I agree with someone I'm still sheeping and if I disagree with someone then maybe I'm just doing it in response the accusation (which is something I noticed saad doing a lot. if people called him on anything then in his very next post he'd try to do the opposite but it felt really forced.)

Spoiler: about Wyvernite

Wyvernite started by posting lots of theory stuff, and I'm not sure how much he's right about. He thinks questioning your scum/nullreads is scummy which is weird, and I guess explains why he's not asking people questions. He's posting his reads and stuff which is good. I don't agree with everything he says but I can see town motivation in his posts.

Spoiler: about singer

about singer. Singer is our IC. I ask her theory questions when I think of them because I want to get better at playing mafia. I'm townreading her because she's been active enough as IC because House said that scumICs tend to flake. I also do tend to agree with her posts because she explains her reasoning in ways i can understand.

Spoiler: about me and the derphammer incident

about me and the derphammer incident. I think it's absolutely fair that people are questioning me about it and trying to work out for themselves whether it was dumbtown or scum doing it. In one of singer's games it was town doing it. In wanderer and my last game scum lolhammered everyday (not by mistake). We shouldn't just be taking everybody at their word, but be scumhunting and trying to make sense of how things fit together.

But assuming I'm town, that means that two other people are scum and they do both benefit from continuing to wonder in public about my behaviour from last week. I don't think we've yet reached the point where

only

scum benefit from continuing to bring it up, because there are 4 other town-aligned players who also need to make up their minds and it's fair for them push me as hard as they need to until they reach some decision. But there will come a time when it will be to town's benefit to let it drop.

I think the rest of the town should decide when that point is, though, without my input, so I'm not going to bring this thought up again.

p-edit: ugh this is too long. i'll use some spoilers. sorry guys.

[Plotinus]

i missed that when I went through your ISO again. sorry. thanks for linking it again.

Yeah, I could unvote, but saad's is the slot that I'm least happy with at the moment.

you're right about my day 1 behaviour. i played badly, i was overeager, i should have slowed down or gone to bed or something. i'm taking steps to prevent the inertia thing in the future. It's like walking into the kitchen and opening the fridge by mistake, except there are consequences for it that the fridge thing doesn't have.

I sheeped a lot last game too. It was hard for me have my own opinions then too. I kept giving everyone else's opinions by mistake. That doesn't excuse it because I do still need to work on not doing it but it really is a strong personality trait and a big part of how I learn things. I think if I can manage to sheep less over time it will be good for my real life personality too so I'm actively working on it.

I think my opinions about saad are my own opinions at this time because I went through his ISO.

I'm sure my opinions of Argos are my own because I was the first to talk about Argos.

My opinions of singer are based on something house said last game so that's still sheeping I guess but it removes any of the scum motivation in sheeping because I'm not trying to make house look better or worse in this game by agreeing with him because he's not playing (it would be funny if he replaced saad though now that i've said that).

My opinions of you is my own -- a mixture of pre-game impressions from our last game together and have you've been acting this game.

My opinions of skold did initially come from singer but I think we've diverged somewhat by now -- she's still scumreading the slot and I'm willing to give skold the benefit of the doubt about the activity thing so i've upgrade him to null for now.

[Plotinus]

Welcome Reubus

[Plotinus]

Guys Reubus is at L-1 again be careful about hammering

pedit: Reubus, really? If you're town, you can recover from this. You're not dead yet. You misread something. It could happen whether you're town or scum. You haven't wasted an hour and a half if it was time spent reading the thread. Just take in the new information and adjust your reads accordingly. it's not an easy slot you've replaced into, but do your best, that's all we want from you-as-a-person whatever your role pm says (don't quote it for us).

The first day was actually about 13 hours long (i just counted) from first non-mod post until hammer. I'm not sure why we were saying 7 earlier (i think i took singer's word for it). Now you know. day 2 has been longer with more content.

[Plotinus]

Don't bus me while I'm asleep, that would be just silly

I mean, if he knows what bus means this is a really unfortunate comment to make even in jest at this stage in the game from that slot, and it's going to take quite a bit of work to get me to unvote at this point, but I can kinda relate to feeling like you've fucked up an entire game for town here, so I do have empathy and I will respect him more as a person if he stays even though I still think we should lynch him during this game day.

[Plotinus]

@deep-city reubus was you. and saad was you before reubus. so don't vote either of those names in your readthrough and you'll be fine. You can safely vote anyone but yourself, no one else is in danger right now.

Actually, I'm going to bed because I have a headache and I don't want to stare at the computer anymore, so I'm going to unvote to prevent any accidental self hammering because she only has two posts to her name and if she accidentally votes saad that could be bad.

I'm still scumreading the slot but I don't want the day to end early. I'm expecting to revote deep-city in the morning unless she's at L-1 or some miracle of towniness occurs.

UNVOTE: deepcity

but still try not to vote yourself.

[Plotinus]

If deep-lights does flip scum, which I'm pretty sure she will, then I wonder if we should take the bus comment to mean her scumbuddy isn't in [skold, me, singer]. That leaves [wanderer, wyvernite, argos]. I'm townreading wanderer. I'm starting to reconsider wyvernite.

I think it's okay to give the new player time to read the thread and at least practice making reads and asking questions of players and asking the IC about theory stuff before we lynch her. Even if she was lynched before reading the thread I think I would count towards the limit of 2 games that you can play as a newbie before you can only play as SE or by replacing in, so I'm fine with letting things sit for a while. Consider my vote to be on her anyway.

If she does ask to replace out or gets prodded enough that she's almost ready to be replaced then I think we should just lynch the slot though instead of making cephrir find another replacement.

I thought House meant a scum IC would flake on IC advice too, but it's good to consider everybody, and you're right that she hasn't given reads for those two yet. She's mentioned them a few times and talked to one of them a couple times but not in a giving-reads-about-them sort of way.

I also want to hear more from the quieter people.

[Plotinus]

I think *it would count

ebwop

[Plotinus]

at least she didn't claim cop or jester or fluffy kitten or something.

[Plotinus]

not disagreeing, though.

[Plotinus]

By the way, with all the people townleaning/townreading me, wyvernite can hardly be scum.

can you walk me through how people townreading you says something about wyvernite's alignment?

[Plotinus]

Spoiler: introduction

This new format I thought of is quite a bit of work for me but it really helps me put myself in someone else's shoes and try to understand their motivations. Basically I go through their ISO and keep track of their slots interactions with every other slot and try to summarise how their view of the player has changed over time.

I expect this to help me detect things like suspicious lack of interaction between slots, bussing, softbussing, sniping from the sidelines, casting doubt on multiple slots at once with a scattershot, working together with mutual townreads, etc.

I will need to try it out a few more times and I won't know until someone I've analysed flips if it makes my reads more accurate, but I'm finding it helps me put aside preconceived ideas of a slot and look at them in a different light if deserved.

+ defending another player, agreeing with them, townreading them, townleaning them
- being suspicious of another player, disagreeing with them, scum reading them, scum leaning them
= neutral interaction with a slot or disagreeing about theory stuff
+? i think he's saying something positive about this person but i can't tell
-? same but for negative things

After the initial interaction with a slot, I will only be commenting on posts that indicate a change of mind and why he changed his mind.

Spoiler: how Wyvernites interaction with different slots changed over time

BBT -39 +45 =121
started off arguing with BBT, then defends BBT against saad's deflection

mofo
(never interacted, probably didn't have time)

Plotinus -+?39 =207 -244 v245 -249
started off telling me I was making excuses to play badly in the future but says everything else seems town-leaning (not sure if that was still about me or if he'd moved onto someone else), fairly consistently scumreads me or anti-town reads me throughout day 2.

singersigner +-244 -249 -331
comes out as strong town on singer but says we need to reevaluate her later, later accuses of her soft defending me and later is dismissive of her marinating idea

Wanderer-nl =244 -268 +270 -v331
starts out null on wanderer, then finds her scummy for offering to answer any questions he has and for asking too many questions, then posts encouraging her to not be uncomfortable posting reads, then votes her, accusing her of being inconsistent in changing her mind on deep-city

Argos +244
starts out slight leaning town on argos because argos has been helpful and because he's "actually provided posts with a bit of content in them"

Skold v33 -244
rvs voted skold, reads him as scummy for inactivity

deep-city +39 -45 =50 -57 v-61 -83 +-121 -244 -331
started off defending saad to BBT, then disliked saad's 40 for not making own argument but deflecting onto BBT (really wanderer), defends saad's terminology mix up as not the important reason he's scummy.

What's jumping out the most to me in the above, aside from the saad tunnel that we're all caught in, is the interaction with Argos. I like Argos' posts too, because they're eloquent and they use nice metaphors and I think I would like them as a person a lot, but if I was trying to describe someone who has "actually provided posts with a bit of content in them" as opposed to ... doing the opposite: lurking, or posting lots of off topic fluff (from my perspective we haven't had that this game but I think wyvernite defines fluff differently than I do), then Argos is not someone who leaps to mind because Argos has posted less than Wyvernite. Argos seems like someone measured and calm and thinking and watching and not quite sure how or if to leap into the fray. I could see both newbie town and newbie scum doing that so for me it's kind of null.

Otherwise there hasn't been much interaction between Argos-Wyvernite but they've both been quiet enough that it's hard to say whether that means anything or not.

The reverse on wanderer also seems to come out of nowhere.

There's just not been enough interaction between wyvernite-everyone else for this to show stronger patterns that I can be confident aren't just random noise. However I did notice something that stood out a lot to me:

Spoiler: What wyvernite thinks is scummy:

inactivity and posts lacking content scummy in 39
(he's only had 16 posts, which is about 4% of the thread. and most of his posts are about theory, mainly his theories that everything is scummy. I don't think that's necessarily scummy but he does)

saying people are misunderstanding you without clarifying what you're saying and throwing out half-assed reads on scum 57

fluff posts that don't mean much that still imply the other person is shady so you can backpedal later 61
(he's done this a bunch of times himself. I also don't think this is necessarily scummy all the time because it can harm town to appear more sure of your reads than you are. if you're nightkilled and everyone thought you had a strong scumread on someone when you actually weren't very sure, that could lead to another townie being killed. but scum definitely do it too and I agree that saad was doing it the scummy way.)

121 fluff posts aren't scummy, implying that people are scummy without wording it strongly is
(he does this a few times, for example in his interactions with singer when he says she's softdefending (which implies she's scummy) without saying she's scummy. I disagree that this thing is scummy because that means questioning your scumspect without outright accusing them is scummy which is absurd, but it's important to take note when someone says x is scummy and then does x.)

207 sheeping is scummy because it lets others do the mental work for you while still making you look busy, if they were town it makes you look better for defending them, if you flip mafia it will make an innocent person look bad if you sheep them.
(I think this was a good point and he doesn't seem to be sheeping anyone which is good. This idea

can

be taken too far and I think it has been at times in this game though not really by Wyvernite. Sheeping is anti-town, sure, but if you rob the town of the ability to agree with each other, we're never going to get anything accomplished. This is a game of persuasion. Sometimes you will be the one persuading, sometimes you will be persuaded, neither are scummy.)

244 it is scummy to be too towny, to acknowledge your mistakes as a newbie, to townread wyvernite, to not have enough scumreads, talking too much, posting quote walls
(wyvernite is also townreading wyvernite)

245 derphammering
(I agree this is anti-town)

268 posting quotewalls is town if you post a lot of your thoughts in response to them or bold the parts you like but not posting enough of your thoughts in the quotewalls is scummy. asking too many questions to try to get everyone talking is leading the town which is scummy
(when my posts are too long, that's scummy. when wanderers posts are too short in comparison to what she's quoting, that's scummy. i think this is when i started losing patience with wyvernite thinking everything is scummy)

269 (soft)defending your townreads is scummy. the mistake wasn't necessarily scummy but it was definitely anti-town.
(wyvernite has defended people a couple times, like he was defending his scumread saad about the terminology mixup thing. I agree with singer's response to this and that defending is an important part of a townie's toolkit. I even think that sometimes it's okay to defend a scumread if you think people are being unfair, for example saying "I think [my scumread]'s right for once - I'm still scumreading them but it was way out of line for [my townread] to call them a _____")

331 changing your mind is scummy
(So much disagree with this. being open to new information from a slot changing your mind is good play. changing your mind a lot without reason is bad play. never changing your mind is terrible play. from either alignment. Anyway, Wyvernite changed his mind about BBT early on, me (early on, I think he was townleaning me early day 1), wanderer (very recently), saad (early on))

I had a look at the scum game of singer's that she linked to (thanks singer I tried to metadive you earlier but because you're a listmod you posted the final goodbye post on a lot of games before archiving them and it made it too hard to find which you'd actually played in), and in the mafia thread, singer tells her partner to act like a towny on overdrive, asking themself for every post a townie makes "what is the town motivation here" and if they don't find one, to nitpick it.

But this is his first newbie game so maybe he just is a townie on overdrive? Scumhunting is good. I'm not saying scumhunting is scummy. Obviously. But a lot of this is reaching, and nitpicky, and some of it is contradictory, he's done lots of the things he's calling scummy himself.

So tl;dr: I've been growing more concerned about wyvernite. This is why. Even though deep-city's slot has been scummy all game, deep-city is

right

that we shouldn't just spend the next few days prodging until we lynch her. Why not continue interacting with each other and try different ways of looking at the game.

[Plotinus]

I'd explain the difference in entrance this game with last game as having more experience. My first game, I was widely scumread for that entrance, until I didn't know something about the setup and was considered conftown after that. Also, last game people spent the first while trying to get me to explain what I was thinking and prodding me to give more information, so now I can do that without prodding. I remember early on it took wanderer about 3 tries of prompting me with "what do you think?" before I figured out what kind of response she wanted. I know I'm still too verbose and it's not something I can control very well but I think it's better than one liners. I have a lot of trouble understanding one liners when other people post them. By the end of my last game, I was in the habit of writing longer posts. One of the main reasons I'm at this site is to get better at communicating and reading others.

[Plotinus]

I swear, can nobody tell when I'm joking? The ''FUCKING OPINIONS?!'' was mock shock. -_-

I liked it on day 1. It was funny and relatable and I agreed with it at the time. it takes me a few (real life) days to get into a game. I find RVS frustrating. I know i'm in the minority on this and so I participate instead of whining but I definitely have those "how can i have opinions when i can't tell any of you apart or remember your usernames" feels on day 1. I'm seriously thinking of just replacing into games instead of starting them from here on out because it'll let me skip the boring part (including the "waiting for the game to start" part). i'll replace in on page 10 or something.

But you haven't put in all that much since then so that's all that sticks out about you. it's been about 11 days now. that's 1/3 of the time my first game lasted, so we're in the middle by now. it's opinion time now. discussion time. everybody talking back and forth and figuring things out time.

[Plotinus]

Skold, if you're too busy with exams and stuff to focus on this game properly, why are you replacing into more games? (link to the newbie queue) http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 7#p6804797

city, pick someone else. you're tunnelling me.

[Plotinus]

I wouldn't quite call it a scumread on wyvernite yet. There are things i'm concerned about with him, and I'm not townreading him as strongly as before -- but I think that if he's town it could be a good thing that he's not in lockstep with the rest of us (like ducks in LYLO last game was the only one with a different perspective and she was right) -- but I went through his ISO like that to try to figure out what was concerning me about him, and I did find the "everything is scummy" to be concerning enough to cancel out the townread but not really enough to put him in the scum pile either. I'm not voting him and he's not in my top 3 choices for a lynch today.

I am also interested in hearing other people's opinions about my concerns about Wyvernite.

[Plotinus]

I wasn't discussing ongoing games, I was discussing your participation in the newbie queue thread. I haven't looked to see what you're doing in that game.

[Plotinus]

like, regardless of my alignment, if I was feeling overextended in my games and not able to devote enough attention to them, I wouldn't be joining more.

[Plotinus]

I'm serious Argos. I can't say why because it pertains to my other games. I genuinely am not allowed to explain why I feel that I have enough time to play in other games.

I don't want you to talk about that game or anything going on it. The reason people join games is that they want to play in them. You don't have to get any more specific than that, that's your own business and would break the rules and would be unfun for everyone.

Instead, I want you to say something like "now that I've finished my last exam*, I have a lot more free time so I'm going to be participating here a bunch more." and then, you know, do that.

*or whatever

[Plotinus]

ok, sorry Skold and Cephrir.

[Plotinus]

The longer this day goes on, the more apathetic I'm feeling. I tried to combat that by going through some ISOs, like I did with wyvernite earlier, but I feel like DCL has set up a narrative where if we do try to end the day before she's caught up, that's scum wanting to prevent her from saying her piece instead of town wanting to combat player apathy by moving on once everyone-but-dcl feels that they're not going to get anything else out of the day until they see some flips/can use their night actions to narrow things down further.

If Skold is town, maybe he's feeling some apathy too.

Wyvernite hasn't posted in over 3 days, maybe he's made up his mind.

Wanderer still seems to be figuring things out and finding things to talk about which is good and if she wants to keep going in day 2 for longer I'll defer to that because I'm townreading her.

Singer's barely here, not sure if it's apathy or waiting for the day to end or busy elsewhere or what.

Not sure what Argos is feeling.

DCL clearly wants the day to continue.


So I think we should call an unofficial vote. There are 5 of us who are town so I think we should get 5 people to agree -- even in the worst case scenario that 2 of the people agreeing are scum, the remaining 3 are a majority of town players, so I think that's fair.

If you are feeling the apathy / feeling that you are running out of things you can resolve before seeing some more flips, write "vote day 3". If you want to stay in day 2 for some more time, write "vote vote 2". If 5 people vote for day 3, we should start placing our votes where we think they should go. If 3 people vote for day 2 then that's enough to call it for staying in day 2.

so I'm voting: vote day 3

Copy this part below and edit it into your message:

day 2 (0/3):
day 3 (1/5): Plotinus

abstaining (6): Argos, deep-city-lights, singersigner, Skold, Wanderer, Wyvernite

[Plotinus]

wanted to make it clear that I don't think voting either option is necessarily alignment indicative. I can see an argument for town picking either day and I can see an argument for scum picking either day.

[Plotinus]

*If you want to stay in day 2, write "vote

day

2"

ebwop

[Plotinus]

@Wanderer, oh I didn't know that about wyvernite. It's true he wasn't active last weekend either but I can't find where he said it in his ISO. Do you know? We can wait for him. We can wait for singer who seems to want to catch up. We can talk about saad/reubus/dcl's reads.

I think they seem to come out of nowhere. Saad seemed to be deflecting onto pretty much everybody (except Argos who he had one nice thing to say about, and Skold who he ignored after RVS). Reubus' reads also seemed pulled out of nowhere and weren't explained. DCL is still talking about the first couple pages. She wants to get a firmer opinion of Argos. How long does it take to a read a 19 post ISO? She writes a lot of words but her read on me is entirely based on the first two pages. I don't think she's even gotten to twilight yet. Now she's sure Skold is town. Why? She and saad both don't like singer, but neither say why. Gut reads are fine for the person with the gut but they don't do much for the rest of us.

The only thing keeping me back from voting dcl now is that i wasn't sure if there was more you guys wanted out of day 2 or not. So, 3 of us are ready to vote, but we can wait until 5 of us are ready. I definitely think we shouldn't push it right up to the deadline, but should vote at least 24 hours before.

[Plotinus]

what do you think of my 374? I went in mostly townreading wyvernite with a few vague concerns and i came out of it kinda null on him -- it wasn't enough for me to be scum reading him over it but i did have some concerns.

[Plotinus]

Hypocrisy isn't a scum tell.

Oh, I thought it might be one, but I suppose that would make the game too easy.

[Plotinus]

Hypocrisy isn't a scum tell.

Oh, I thought it might be one, but I suppose that would make the game too easy.

Have you never found something scummy and then done it yourself? Like...say someone's scum for posting around the site instead of the game, but then you find yourself doing it because it's easier to respond to one thread than try to thinking critically in another?

That was probably a terrible example, but I'm having a hard time coming up with something without having anything in particular to point out.

Also, it's not the hypocrisy that's scummy, it's the way someone manipulates it. So like, if it looks like they're furthering their own agenda with their inconsistencies, as opposed to actually trying to find the differences to support their argument. Again, I wish I had a better example off the top of my head, but if you don't understand I can try to clarify it further.

I meant that if hypocrisy were a scum tell then the game would be easier but it's probably just a human tell.

It was a good example and I've done exactly that actually. I did it because one place needed a short response and the other needed a long response, or one place it didn't seem like there was anything that needed to be said by me, for example other people had asked some other people some questions and I couldn't think of any I hadn't asked so all I could have said would have been a pointless "yeah I want to hear that too".

Or it could be the opposite: I want to spend a good chunk of time focusing on one game in particular -- going through an ISO very carefully, rereading a thread, taking notes on the combined ISO of several people, and I don't want to be flipping back to other games to do short question and answers when I'm focusing on this one project because it'll make the longer project take all week. Or maybe one game is kind of at a lull and there's stuff going on in another. Just to be clear I'm not referring to any game in particular with these vague examples, but behaviours that I will do in any game I'm in at different times.

But that said, once I do finish a larger project I'll go catch up real quick on my others.

So I'm starting to reverse my opinion on effort and lurking especially early on, and I'd like to appologise to Skold for picking on him earlier. After the mod asked us to drop it I started noticing how of course I'm not going to pay 100% of my attention to any one thing I'm doing when i have other things in my life to pay attention to.

I still think lurking over

long

periods can be scummy especially if combined with other things like wishywashiness (which is something I haven't noticed from wyvernite at all). If a month in a slot has done hardly anything at all but hasn't replaced out either is scummy.

[Plotinus]

Wanderer, I think you're Town and I think you'll understand what I mean by this question so: how closely have you read this thread?

[Plotinus]

I feel the same way.

VOTE: Deep-city-lights this puts her at L-2.

And at her request here are some sentences, and none of them are about her scummy predecessors:

She's amused in 341 that we're speculating on who her buddy is preflip but a little over a day later in 405 (about 30 hours or so), she's ready to call the scumteam as me/singer/argos.

In 348 she expects town credit for having claimed VT instead of "trying to buy time with a Jailkeeper or Tracker claim." but the first thing anybody (but especially scum) should do is read their predecessor's ISO and saad claimed VT early on, so while it's less damning than claiming something he didn't claim, she would have been instantly counterclaimed and she knows it. She's expressed enough knowledge of mafia theory that she has to have known that claiming Jailkeeper/Tracker would have been suicide. Also, if she was town-aligned then she'd be stuck claiming whatever her role pm said. When saad first claimed VT, he didn't have the luxury of knowing that mofo would flip bulletproof. It looked at one point like he was crumbing cop, and if he had gone on to claim that then none of this would have happened because he would have been counterclaimed by two people. But by the time Deep-city-lights claimed any other claim than VT would have been suicide and she knew it. But she tried to get towncredit for not fakeclaiming as badly as she could have.

Her case against me in 350 is contrived. I haven't played as well as I might have but instead of focusing on the larger mistakes that I've appologised for she focuses on little stuff. My RVS vote. Then the interchange with saad when I corrected his Greek/Latin and then didn't want him to be embarrassed about his mistake so I let him save face by appologising, but being polite is scummy. If analysing RVS is the best approach, why are day 1 lynches somewhat less accurate than lynches on later days? Could it have anything to do with having less information on day 1?

Her case against singer in 368 is that it's scummy or hopelessly idealistic to imagine that upon learning we were wrong about something we might reconsider what else that meant. what? why wouldn't we reconsider if we turned out wrong. If someone flips town, that means that NOBODY was scum with them, so all of our prior reasoning based on "x and y were scum together" has to be thrown out. The whole post is AtE to try to make us feel guilty for lynching her.

I also realise that she may be legitimately busy offline but I do feel that if a day drags out beyond the natural point at which a person would be lynched it can lead to town apathy which benefits scum.

[Plotinus]

Give me a fucking break, Plotinus. It's pretty obvious I hadn't read a single post besides seeing the big L-1 text when I replaced in, and that I hadn't read anything besides the last page or two when I began my catch-up. Not to mention with the argument you're making regarding my VT claim, there's literally nothing I could have done that you wouldn't call scummy. I claim Jailkeeper, I claim Tracker, I claim VT - whichever of those I had done even if I was scum, the way you're talking about it it's pretty clear you're either scum or shitty town bending a point in any direction you can to support your tunnel.

I was referring to your claim in 341, that you made over a full day after replacing in. Your very first post said that you were town so you must have known on some level that whether you were town was in suspicion, even though you seemed to think Reubus wasn't you, still you knew enough to claim that you were town. But almost a full day goes by and then you claim vanilla townie in bold print. That was more than enough time to read up on things or see if your predecessor had claimed anything.

I was not saying that it would be scummy no matter what you claimed. I said it was scummy that you were trying to get town points for choosing to claim VT instead of a power role. Like assume for a moment that wyvernite is a vanilla townie, which he could be, if wyvernite claimed vanilla townie would he then start saying "and I could have claimed something else but I didn't so that makes me more towny"? No. It wasn't the claim itself it was the language around it.

If I was scum I would have seen how doomed my slot was.

Sure, but you've been coming off like a person who likes a challenge, an experienced player who created an alt to have some fun (which is totally fine and I'm not asking who you're an alt of because that's your own business). I think you've played this slot extremely well, and if you'd started the game in the slot maybe we wouldn't be lynching you today because the slips you've made have been small enough that they could have passed under the radar.

Also, the idea that everyone ISOs their slot when they replace in is extremely fallacious.

I can't prove whether you read or not, but over 24 hours passed between your first post and your claim so it's not impossible that you could have seen saad's vanilla townie claim which happened pretty early on, page 3 or 4.

[Plotinus]

@Wyvernite: the ones I talked about in 470 and 476. She asked us to list the reasons we thought she herself was scummy without reference to predecessors so I did. I don't know if they'd be enough all by themselves if she was starting from a clean slate, but she wasn't.

[Plotinus]

We are in LYLO nobody vote until we're sure because one misvote and scum can quickly hammer!

Let's all reread things and try to figure out who we want to vote for. Once we've all written who we're planning to vote for then we can try voting, but we have to get it right today.

My reads:

Town: Wanderer
Probably town: Wyvernite
More likely to be scum than Wyvernite anyway: Argos
Probably scum after all: Skold

[Plotinus]

In defense of Skold, I'm pretty sure both scum are newbies, which points at wyvernite/argos but I was townleaning wyvernite. Anyway, I'll want to figure that out before I'll be ready to vote and I think we should wait until we're all sure.

[Plotinus]

I like that line of thought, though (but thanks for unvoting for now)

[Plotinus]

His vote on you made no sense to me. He was complaining about

Spoiler: post 281 and 328 posted a little over a day apart by wanderer

Usually when everybody agrees on a lynch this fast, it means we're lynching town. However, with how saad is behaving this game I wouldn't see it past scum to be happily lynching the useless partner.

You know, I did like 312.

I'm afraid we have come to the point where the saad/Swagrid/lights-slot is so messed up that we are best off lynching it. I don't want this to happen and I hope Lights is able to work with it. Looking at her joindate, this is her first game on the site, I hope it's not too rough.

In hindsight, you were right in 281 (I think in both sentences you were right), and you were still right in 328. And I don't see it as that big of a shift in opinion. From my perspective, it looks like you went from not being sure but probably leaning scum on DCL to not being sure but thinking the slot should be policy lynched because it would just be a distraction in LYLO even if it were town.

In 456 he lists DCL as one of his top two scumreads, and in his very next post, 477, asking me to articulate what I thought was scummy about dcl (which I had just done), it now looks like he was distancing himself from his scumread on DCL just in case DCL flipped town.

[Plotinus]

also, DCL, if you're still reading this, I'm sorry we were all wrong about you. You replaced into a very difficult slot and you did the best you could. I hope you'll be around in the endgame to chat with us.

[Plotinus]

and also, going back to that vote of wyvernite's, I don't think it's scummy to change your mind. Taking into account new information as it comes in, forming opinions, reconsidering when someone makes a good point, all of that's protown. Otherwise, what's the point of changing our RVS votes?

[Plotinus]

me too.

[Plotinus]

I'm townreading wanderer. Everything else is kind of a jumble. I think I'm leaning Wyvernite/Argos at the moment for scum because wanderer's wagon analysis makes sense to me, but I don't have very strong feelings about which of you three is innocent yet.

[Plotinus]

Skold, since you've got the most experience here, how often do scum teams assign the nightkill to their least suspicious member? As often as they can, right?

[Plotinus]

Skold, since you've got the most experience here, how often do scum teams assign the nightkill to their least suspicious member? As often as they can, right?

This I don't get.

The least suspicious person on the team is the least likely to be tracked (or jailkept) so they're a better choice for the person to do the night killing. It might be too much to assume this is how they make that choice everytime, but maybe they make that choice most of the time.

If we can determine who the least suspicious person in each of the possible teams is, we can do some process of elimination, not of a person but of a team. I asked skold because he's seen more games than I have, but I could go visit the private threads from completed games and see how often the decision is made that way.

[Plotinus]

i am feeling lazy so i'm not going to read actual games to see who was the most or least suspicious, just looking at the private threads for cases where both were alive and they explained why one or the other was doing the nk, skipping ones where no explanation was given, only looking at newbie games because it's too much work to look into what setup some other game was using.

in support of my theory:
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 0#p6581950
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 0#p6680380
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 9#p6644709
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 5#p6699475
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 7#p6661057 (the couple posts after this one explain there is suspicion on the one who isn't doing the kill)
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 0#p6610600

other:
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 6#p6721226 being tracked would have messed with one scum's fake claim
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 8#p6667128 can't kill and roleblock in the same night so if they want to roleblock someone the other needs to do the kill (in another game this was allowed though...)
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 1#p6581671 i can't really tell

made it two pages back before losing interest but it seems like in games where scum don't know that there isn't a tracker/jailkeeper (games where there is one of those, or games where they haven't had flips yet so they don't know), outside of some strange circumstances (like House's fake claim), they pick the least suspicious person to do the kill.


preview-edit: @Skold: Wyvernite. Because I'm pretty sure it's not you and Argos together.

[Plotinus]

Spoiler: quotes mostly from wyvernite about the things we've been talking about today with minimal commentary

As much as I love letting everyone marinate as singer says, and analyize everything, since you're just now coming into a game 14 pages of posts to slog through I'll let it slide this time. but if I catch such defensiveness as "pls don't put me L-1 so I can read everyone" again, I will vote for you. and then throwing out an OMGUS to town in general. Nothing about 329 bodes well with me. I guess time will tell though.

@wanderer what exactly changed between posts 328, and 281, that made you change your mind on DCL/saad's slot? I don't like the inconsistency here
VOTE: Wanderer

he was referring to these two:

Usually when everybody agrees on a lynch this fast, it means we're lynching town. However, with how saad is behaving this game I wouldn't see it past scum to be happily lynching the useless partner.

You know, I did like 312.

I'm afraid we have come to the point where the saad/Swagrid/lights-slot is so messed up that we are best off lynching it. I don't want this to happen and I hope Lights is able to work with it. Looking at her joindate, this is her first game on the site, I hope it's not too rough.

he could've hammered here but didn't:

I'll throw this out there for now, my two biggest scumreads are wanderer, and DCL. I'm not quite as sure of everyone, since I haven't been here to read stuff. I'll catch-up on reads for everyone by tomorrow but for now my vote sticks where it is.

the votecount around that time:

Vote Count 2.5

deep-city-lights 3 (Skold, Plotinus, Argos)

Wanderer-nl 1 (Wyvernite)
Argos 1 (deep-city-lights)
Skold 1 (singersigner)

Not Voting 1 (Wanderer-nl)

With 7 alive, it takes 4 to lynch. Deadline is in (expired on 2015-05-02 10:00:00).

question he asked me that looked like backpedaling since he'd just said dcl was one of his main scumreads:

Sure, but you've been coming off like a person who likes a challenge, an experienced player who created an alt to have some fun (which is totally fine and I'm not asking who you're an alt of because that's your own business). I think you've played this slot extremely well, and if you'd started the game in the slot maybe we wouldn't be lynching you today because

the slips you've made have been small enough that they could have passed under the radar

.

What slips are these exactly?

my answer to it:

@Wyvernite: the ones I talked about in 470 and 476. She asked us to list the reasons we thought she herself was scummy without reference to predecessors so I did. I don't know if they'd be enough all by themselves if she was starting from a clean slate, but she wasn't.

[Plotinus]

I'd like to hear from Wyernite and Argos before finishing that line of thought, but basically if the tracker-or-jailkeeper didn't target singer last night, process of elimination can happen because it will be known (to them) that somebody didn't go somewhere. That's not the same as a cop innocent, but if that somebody is the more widely townread in a pair of two then it makes that pairing less likely than other pairings, I think.

Skold, Wyvernite, Argos, if you were voting now who would it be for?

Maybe 4 of us will agree on something, maybe only 3 will.

[Plotinus]

I am completely on board with hearing what Wyvernite (and Argos) have to say. and with nobody voting until we've all said who we plan on voting for and we've had 3 people declare intent to hammer.

The process of elimination shouldn't decide anything by itself, but it can be a piece in a larger puzzle.

[Plotinus]

Maybe 4 of us will agree on something, maybe only 3 will.

4 means at least 1 scum is happy with this lynch. scum are hoping to lynch town today for a perfect win.

[Plotinus]

Wyv, come share your reads with the rest of us please.

[Plotinus]

@Wanderer: yes. a few actually but some of them are improbable. I think the most likely is that the newbie scumteam didn't manage to figure out who the remaining power role was on day 2 so they went with the most experienced player instead. The IC would have been helpful in LYLO, so in the absence of an obvious power role, the IC was chosen. Skold's idea of everyone listing their suspected scumteams can sort of help rule this out once they claim because anyone who suspects the person with the power role hasn't figured out who it is.

Or a more experienced scumteam thought singer had a power role because she didn't stick her neck out too much this game and was careful not to lead the town and she wasn't the most widely townread which may have been an intentional move to avoid the nightkill (if she had a power role).

the improbable theory relies on the power role intentionally not being killed because the person with the powerrole would consider anyone who knew that they were a power role and didn't kill them to be innocent. For example if the power role crumbed their role to a particular player and then weren't nightkilled, that particular player would look innocent and wouldn't be a lynch candidate.


Last game in LYLO when we were all so sure of ducks, I did have a thought "oh no what if it's wanderer" because I'd read on the wiki that you should vote your townread in LYLO and because I'd been wrong about everything so much I worried I was wrong about wanderer too, but wanderer was the one person in the entire game that I wasn't wrong about. Anyway, the improbably theory feels like that "oh no what if it's wanderer" feeling from last game.

@skold: leaning argos/wyvernite at the moment but not ready to vote. I want to hear from Wyvernite or Wyvernite's replacement (he's due for a prod soon, but I really hope he won't have to be replaced because a replacement can't tell us what wyvernite's been thinking. Wyvernite has been out of step with the rest of us which if he's town could be a good thing after two mislynches, and I want to know how his reads have changed after dcl's death, if he still suspects wanderer and me, what he thinks of you and argos)

[Plotinus]

sure, Argos can be on the table. He is reminding me a bit of mainez from last game.

Skold? Wyv? opinions about Argos?

[Plotinus]

@Mod can wyvernite be prodded please

[Plotinus]

Wyvernite hasn't even visited the site since before the hammer: Last visited:29 Apr 2015 07:39

[Plotinus]

yeah. I'd still like to hear from Wyvernite's replacement if he's being replaced, though. Deadline wasn't listed in the daystart post, but I guess we have until around the 16th May, so that's plenty of time for Wyvernite to either come back or be replaced.

Or, I guess we have to wait anyway, because we need 3.

[Plotinus]

I have listed every interaction here, not just ones i found particularly towny or scummy. That includes referring to arguments we've been asked by the mod to drop so responses to this post shouldn't focus on those. the interaction happened but it should be considered null.

Wyv/Skold

Wyvernite's interactions with skold

:
RVS voted him in 33
Unvoted him to vote saad instead in 61
found him scummy in 244 but didn't want to read him because he was V/LA

Skold's interactions with wyvernite

:
shared favourite type of pasta in 52
asked wyvernite why he was scumreading wanderer in 347
was nullreading him in 375
tentatively accepting of the case against wyvernite in 502
wanted to give wyvernite time to defend himself in 509
called him scummy in 517
listed wyvernite as scum with argos in 523
asked wyvernite to explain his views on me in 525
prefers wyvernite lynch over argos in 530

Wyv/Argos

Wyvernite's interactions with Argos

:
townlean on him in 244

Argos' interactions with Wyvernite

:
Wants to hear more from him in 184
has trouble reading him in 326
doesn't like how wyvernite is afraid of bandwagonning people and voting people others are townreading in 513
guesses he would vote wyvernite 516
scumread on wyv is mostly process of elimination but doesn't think skold would bus wyvernite so soon 521

Skold/Argos

Skold's interactions with Argos

:
wants dcl's opinions on argos (and singer) in 343
null on argos in 375
refuses to continue the replacements/ongoing games discussion with argos in 418
asks me who of himself, wyv, and argos I'd be willing to vote in 502
i think he's calling argos inactive in 509 (this is just a brief mention of argos, he's asking for clarification on something wanderer said)
argos is scum by PoE in 523 and 529
prefers wyv lynch over argos in 530

Argos' interactions with Skold

:
finds his posts flighty and odd but it could just be playstyle in 184
would be suspicious of Skold if he replaced out because newbie scum are more likely to do so (this is true) but doesn't want to rush to judgements based on statistics in 236
wants skold to talk more and would like to see some pressure applied on him in 326
wants him to explain his reads regardless of alignment in 377
ongoing games thing in 416
not fully happy with skold but liked his response to pressure in 452
skold-wyvernite team based on PoE but doesn't think Skold would bus wyvernite this early in 521

Argos seems a lot more tentative around Skold than around Wyvernite. Like, every interaction with him is "he seems a bit off but it could be nothing" or "he seems more towny but could be still be scummy". I think Argos is cautious in general and I have a soft spot for cautious players, and I think there was some of this with saad as well: he seems scummy but he could be a non native speaker, he seems scummy but maybe it's just his punctuation (and I was saying those things early on too for different reasons that I still can't talk about, but the main reason I stopped was that I didn't

know

he was town and defending him didn't seem to be doing any of us any good. it was just too much work for someone who easily could have been scum after all.)

there are a few things that don't quite fit but maybe i'm assigning too much weight to them. I think one of my flaws is that I keep trying to approach this like a logic puzzle and it isn't one.

[Plotinus]

I still don't know, Skold. I'm pretty sure that there are two scum in [skold, argos, wyvernite] so i looked at everyone's interactions and hoped it would help me make some sense of it. Argos' interactions with you have been kinda weird, but none of your slots have had a lot of interaction with each other (or with anybody else) so every little insignificant post seems more significant which is unfortunate. All three of you have been pretty null on each other all game which makes it hard to sort things out.

I *can* see what Wanderer is driving at, and Argos/Skold makes sense in that light from that perspective. I can also still see Argos/Wyvernite as making sense for a few different reasons that are kind of logic puzzley though. I think Wyvernite/Skold is unlikely.

I do think that Argos' perspective on you is weird. Your own perspective of "well it's not me and plot and wanderer seem town so it must be wyv/argos" makes perfect sense to me. Argos' perspective of "well it's not me, and plot and wanderer seem town, so it must be skold/wyv but no wait it couldn't be skold/wyv" seems off to me. but it seems off as either town or scum. I'd really like to here Wyvernite's perspective too, though.

In my last game, it was wanderer and plot must be town so it's 2 in [house, mainez, ducks] and all three of them were pretty firm about "it has to be the other two". anyway we lynched ducks and it was house/mainez.

I know I should look at wanderer's interactions with the 3 of you as well even though I'm pretty sure that she's town by now, and I probably will later. i should probably also do up my own interactions with you guys so that i could compare because at least my own alignment is modconfirmed (town) to me so i could use that as a baseline.

I also have been reading up mafia theory and want to think about BBT's and singer's reads, what little we have them in the first case, and think some about why those of us who were brought into LYLO were brought here. I am alive because scum thought I'd still be suspicious for the derphammer thing, I think.

Wanderer, Skold, Argos, Wyvernite*: why do you think you're here?

*If Wyvernite is replaced I'd still like his replacement to look over wyvernite's prior activity and try to make a guess.

[Plotinus]

I mean here in LYLO. Two nights in a row scum didn't nightkill any of the people who are still alive. They could have done if they wanted to. They thought BBT and singer would be better at finding scum or harder to mislynch or more likely to be a power role or something. They left (each of) you alive. Why?

[Plotinus]

I am alive because scum thought I'd still be suspicious for the derphammer thing, I think.

[Plotinus]

it's been more than 24 hours since wyv was prodded and he still hasn't visited the site since 29 april and it's not the weekend (when he was usually V/LA).

I'm frustrated too. it's a bad point in the game for people to site flake.

[Plotinus]

Welcome millar13, we're in LYLO so please don't vote for anybody yet!

[Plotinus]

That's a start, but deep-city-lights and singersigner have already flipped town, so you've narrowed it down to the living players who aren't you. We have some time left (until the 16th of May but let's not leave it to the last minute) to narrow it down further. You can ask us questions if you want.

I know it's hard replacing in at LYLO -- it's hard for us too because we've lost a player whose opinions would have been useful now. But you can look at the game with fresh eyes and that will help us too. Just keep us updated on how you're doing, what page you're reading, what you're looking at. It's okay that you don't have opinions yet, but you're going to need to have some before the end of this game day.

[Plotinus]

@millar: Skold's early "roleclaim" was in response to some early joking around:

So, did everyone get the role they wanted?

You're role-fishing and you should stop.

I wasn't expecting anyone to seriously tell me their role in response to that. I meant it more as a random question stage thing. I was expecting answers like "no, i was hoping to get scum because I was town last time", joking answers like "I was hoping for Jester but it looks like I got Cult Leader" (note for newbies: neither of those roles appear in newbie games), or to be ignored. But I'll stop now that we have a better conversation topic:

You said your vote on saad was a serious one, so what about his posts seems scummy? The early mafia mention in 6?

I don't see the point in random questions that lead to random, non alignment-indicative, jokey answers. Do you?

Back from my food and this jumped out as a massively...kill-joyish. It's the early stages of a game, I damn well EXPECT joke questions. AND joke answers.

And no I didn't get the role I wanted. Was hoping for Serial Killer, now I just got Survivor.

[Plotinus]

we are in LYLO and we are going to lose the game! don't vote until you've read everybody's ISOs for fucks sake!

[Plotinus]

unvote and then write that you have intent to vote me. you can vote me for real when you're sure.

[Plotinus]

i'm the tracker

[Plotinus]

first night I tracked BBT, because the fast wagons were dangerous and i was feeling unsure about him. Second night I targeted Argos. Argos didn't go anywhere.

VOTE: Millar13 for premature voting in LYLO. I will unvote when he does.

[Plotinus]

right before dcl was lynched, I crumbed my role to wanderer. her reply indicated that she understood. if wanderer were scum I would have been killed last night. I strongly suspect that the scumteam didn't understand the exchange between me and wanderer and didn't pick up on any of my crumbs.

preview-edit: sorry. do you want me to unvote? I'm still not actually sure that millar is scum here

[Plotinus]

Millar, not unvoting right now is a scum claim.

I will unvote if you do.

[Plotinus]

UNVOTE FOR FUCK SAKE. IF YOU ARE TOWN THEN SCUM CAN QUICKHAMMER FOR GAME OVER SCUM WIN.

you can revote later.

[Plotinus]

HOW LYLO WORKS:

it takes 3 votes to lynch. There are two scum left. If you are town and you vote town then both scum can vote and win. I am the town tracker. Unvote.

[Plotinus]

UNVOTE: , though you should fix the formatting on your unvote too millar.

Here are some of my crumbs:

Spoiler: this is kind of long

That's a pretty macaw! Hi everyone.

VOTE: Wyvernite for being last in the alphabet

First letter was T and I mentioned the alphabet. When dcl pointed out that this opening seemed forced and that looked scummy, I was suspicious that she'd picked up on the crumb.

sorry for nitpicking.

So, did everyone get the role they wanted?

I wasn't rolefishing, I was alignment fishing. If everyone had answered in a jokey way that might have helped me know who to track that night. I realise in hindsight that it was dumb, but I've never played a power role before.

I'm glad you didn't claim a powerrole. Way too early in the game for that.

This was in response to 40 and 84 from saad. In 40 the way he used that cop smiley made me think he was crumbing cop and I knew there wasn't a cop in this game.

Wanderer, I think you're Town and I think you'll understand what I mean by this question so: how closely have you read this thread?

This was echolaelia from our previous game: the town cop said that when trying to get people to realise they'd been crumbing. Unfortunately none of us n00bs had heard of crumbs before and the person the cop was talking to was scum. This was a gamble; if wanderer were scum I would be nightkilled and this crumb was subtle enough that I don't think people would have picked up on it after my death. Wanderer's response showed me that she understood.

In 348 she expects town credit for having claimed VT instead of "trying to buy time with a Jailkeeper or Tracker claim." but the first thing anybody (but especially scum) should do is read their predecessor's ISO and saad claimed VT early on, so while it's less damning than claiming something he didn't claim, she would have been instantly counterclaimed and she knows it. She's expressed enough knowledge of mafia theory that she has to have known that claiming Jailkeeper/Tracker would have been suicide. Also, if she was town-aligned then she'd be stuck claiming whatever her role pm said. When saad first claimed VT, he didn't have the luxury of knowing that mofo would flip bulletproof. It looked at one point like he was crumbing cop, and if he had gone on to claim that then none of this would have happened because he would have been counterclaimed by two people. But by the time Deep-city-lights claimed any other claim than VT would have been suicide and she knew it. But she tried to get towncredit for not fakeclaiming as badly as she could have.

Her case against me in 350 is contrived. I haven't played as well as I might have but instead of focusing on the larger mistakes that I've appologised for she focuses on little stuff. My RVS vote. Then the interchange with saad when I corrected his Greek/Latin and then didn't want him to be embarrassed about his mistake so I let him save face by appologising, but being polite is scummy. If analysing RVS is the best approach, why are day 1 lynches somewhat less accurate than lynches on later days? Could it have anything to do with having less information on day 1?

The main reason I was suspicious of dcl (aside from how her predecessors had behaved) was that she calling my tracker crumbs scummy and I was afraid she had picked up on them and was trying to hint to her scumbuddy about them if she was lynched. I was wrong about her. Also my case that I thought she was fakeclaiming which I think is more from a power role's perspective than a vanilla townie's perspective.


And then pretty much all of my posts in day 3 have been pretty obviously crumbing (at least I thought so) but epecially my perspective here:

@Wanderer: yes. a few actually but some of them are improbable. I think the most likely is that the newbie scumteam didn't manage to figure out who the remaining power role was on day 2 so they went with the most experienced player instead. The IC would have been helpful in LYLO, so in the absence of an obvious power role, the IC was chosen. Skold's idea of everyone listing their suspected scumteams can sort of help rule this out once they claim because anyone who suspects the person with the power role hasn't figured out who it is.

Or a more experienced scumteam thought singer had a power role because she didn't stick her neck out too much this game and was careful not to lead the town and she wasn't the most widely townread which may have been an intentional move to avoid the nightkill (if she had a power role).

the improbable theory relies on the power role intentionally not being killed because the person with the powerrole would consider anyone who knew that they were a power role and didn't kill them to be innocent. For example if the power role crumbed their role to a particular player and then weren't nightkilled, that particular player would look innocent and wouldn't be a lynch candidate.


Last game in LYLO when we were all so sure of ducks, I did have a thought "oh no what if it's wanderer" because I'd read on the wiki that you should vote your townread in LYLO and because I'd been wrong about everything so much I worried I was wrong about wanderer too, but wanderer was the one person in the entire game that I wasn't wrong about. Anyway, the improbably theory feels like that "oh no what if it's wanderer" feeling from last game.

@skold: leaning argos/wyvernite at the moment but not ready to vote. I want to hear from Wyvernite or Wyvernite's replacement (he's due for a prod soon, but I really hope he won't have to be replaced because a replacement can't tell us what wyvernite's been thinking. Wyvernite has been out of step with the rest of us which if he's town could be a good thing after two mislynches, and I want to know how his reads have changed after dcl's death, if he still suspects wanderer and me, what he thinks of you and argos)

[Plotinus]

UNVOTE: Millar13

apparently I needed to fix my formatting too

[Plotinus]

i was looking forward to this game too

now can someone unvote me so we can discuss, i don't want to sign up for another game and risk flipping scum.

if you're worried about the long wait between doing /in in the newbie queue and a game starting, there are always people asking for replacements, that can get you into more games faster. If you try to always be playing two at once then it won't be so sad if you get night killed or lynched early on.

an interesting point. With saad being replaced originally could not have looked more innocent looking at this viewpoint. Makes me suscpicous of Plot; in what appeared to be great detective work. Only to be later ignored

*further reading may offer a more valid answer

I still cannot discuss that ongoing game because it's ongoing but I was right after all about him. I let other people persuade me because even when I tried to give saad the benefit of the doubt, that maybe he was just like that, he was still refusing to work with the town and I gave up on him. Maybe I shouldn't have, but as town we can't afford to continue giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Unofficial votecount:

saad 3 (Mofonugen, Wyvernite,)
Wyvernite 2 (Plotinus)
Mofonugen 2 (Argos, singersigner, saad, bofo, plotinus)
Plotinus 1 (Skold)

yikes. i'm really sorry about the derphammer guys. i dont know how i missed that argos and singer had previously voted him. I really thought he was at L-3. I'll count next time for sure :/

Looks more like a hammer, covered up as an accident. Very suspicous indeed.

It was a real mistake. It hurt the town. Two of the votes on the wagon were RVS votes and it's hard to remember RVS votes because they don't have a reason behind them, but I should have counted. I've gotten a lot better at remembering to count since then.

Okay, thanks for that warning. I accept that I crossed the line but that does mean I am not fully sure where the line is. I think I will ask the mod privately for advice on how to answer questions where the answer is something that's against the rules to say.

In 226 I'm scumhunting. My townreads are wanderer and wyvernite. strong townlean on singer. weak townlean on argos pending more activity. i know my own alignment, so that leaves saad/skold for scum, skold for inactivity which does appear to be active lurking and saad for being hard to communicate with. I'm trying to get both of them to communicate more, because I would rather scumread someone for what they are doing than for what they're not.

VOTE: Skold because I want you to come talk to us. I want you to post your reads and to actively participate in this game.

I'm picking skold not saad because the active lurking (seeing Skold's name on the player list for but him not turning up in game) was the tipping point for me. When Skold made most of his fluff posts, we were still in RVS, so it's okay, and I can relate to feeling exasperated by being pressured to have opinions before I'm ready to have them (especially on page 1-2 of a game), but we've had 229 posts so far and this has been an interesting day 2 so far with lots of things to talk about and yet Skold isn't here chattering.

I would be almost equally happy with a saad lynch, though I do find him hard to read. His ISO is all over the place. But there are a few posts of his that give me pause for reasons I don't want to share right now, but 40 made me suspicious and 84 allayed those particular suspicions for reasons that are entirely about this game, but I wasn't townreading him after that either. In today's interactions, 167 was really cryptic and hard to understand and it took a lot of back and forth to figure out what he was talking about and I'm still not sure I understand what he was trying to do and why. and now he's scumreading singer but he won't tell us why and that's weird. His last activity was about 40 minutes after he posted so he probably did see Wanderer ask why he's suspicious of singer, but hasn't seen my own questions for him yet. He ~could~ have answered wanderer but he didn't.


pedit: @singer, yeah kinda. i mean he gave a reason that he called serious, it just wasn't a very good one.

Spoiler: here is what he said about why his vote was serious

OK.

Here are my thoughts on it;

the mafia could be anywhere, watch out!

This is scum unsure about how to approach the game. You feel uncomfortable voting 'randomly' because you know everybodies alignments. It's also a subtle way of saying 'Hey, I have no idea who scum are!'

short while is an oxymoron and an oxymoron is a contradiction between two words (the word oxymoron in itself is an oxymoron; with oxy meaning dull in latin and moron meaning sharp). only the scum contradict because THEY are the ones lying.

VOTE: Skold

This is you flat out copying Skold's RVS vote in 9. This is an attempt to fit in, you wasn't sure how to vote without drawing attention to yourself (scum are much more self-aware and careful with their actions than town) and you found what you thought was a good choice in copying somebody elses style of RVS voting.

The fact you're trying to claim that it was a serious vote (to excuse not voting earlier) is laughable.

Votes should be piling onto Saad now.

i like the way ur thinking.

first was just an innocuous comment lol

second, well Skold is 14 and I thought an early vote would put pressure onto him, so no it wasn't a random vote it was a serious vote, putting pressure on him. he's young, so if he's scum, he's more likely to squeal, that's the way i see it. kids aren't usually experienced liars. also his content throughout the game has been non serious, trollish filler comments so the vote sticks for now.

just saw the va/la thing. well that takes away some of my argument about active lurking but he's only at L-3 so I'll leave it for now.

tying in with the hammer, this stance looks scummy as hell. If you were a lazy poster i'd blame it on laziness. A strong town player really need to unvote at this point.

I'm not a strong town player. I'm a weak town player. I've made my share of mistakes this game.

VOTE: Saad because if Skold's not here then my vote isn't doing anything where it was.

no unvote. So this vote isn't legitamate.

no, the mod doesn't require us to unvote before revoting.

Vote Count 2.2

saad 3 (singersigner, Plotinus, Wanderer-nl)

Plotinus 1 (Wyvernite)

Not Voting 3 (Argos, saad, Skold)

With 7 alive, it takes 4 to lynch. Deadline is in (expired on 2015-05-02 10:00:00)

.

maybe this was an accident. But plot seemed to have been saved/tactic blown by the mod vote count. Town players SHOULD have picked up saad was still L2 and not L1.

There were 3 votes on him. It takes 4 to lynch. that's L-1.

Guys Reubus is at L-1 again be careful about hammering

pedit: Reubus, really? If you're town, you can recover from this. You're not dead yet. You misread something. It could happen whether you're town or scum. You haven't wasted an hour and a half if it was time spent reading the thread. Just take in the new information and adjust your reads accordingly. it's not an easy slot you've replaced into, but do your best, that's all we want from you-as-a-person whatever your role pm says (don't quote it for us).

The first day was actually about 13 hours long (i just counted) from first non-mod post until hammer. I'm not sure why we were saying 7 earlier (i think i took singer's word for it). Now you know. day 2 has been longer with more content.

Then unvote, so he goes back to L2

@deep-city reubus was you. and saad was you before reubus. so don't vote either of those names in your readthrough and you'll be fine. You can safely vote anyone but yourself, no one else is in danger right now.

Actually, I'm going to bed because I have a headache and I don't want to stare at the computer anymore, so I'm going to unvote to prevent any accidental self hammering because she only has two posts to her name and if she accidentally votes saad that could be bad.

I'm still scumreading the slot but I don't want the day to end early. I'm expecting to revote deep-city in the morning unless she's at L-1 or some miracle of towniness occurs.

UNVOTE: deepcity

but still try not to vote yourself.

Curious.

I was scumreading the slot at that point but I didn't want them to self vote by mistake. It would have sucked for the person at the keyboard, who I care about regardless of their alignment.

If deep-lights does flip scum, which I'm pretty sure she will, then I wonder if we should take the bus comment to mean her scumbuddy isn't in [skold, me, singer]. That leaves [wanderer, wyvernite, argos]. I'm townreading wanderer. I'm starting to reconsider wyvernite.

I think it's okay to give the new player time to read the thread and at least practice making reads and asking questions of players and asking the IC about theory stuff before we lynch her. Even if she was lynched before reading the thread I think I would count towards the limit of 2 games that you can play as a newbie before you can only play as SE or by replacing in, so I'm fine with letting things sit for a while. Consider my vote to be on her anyway.

If she does ask to replace out or gets prodded enough that she's almost ready to be replaced then I think we should just lynch the slot though instead of making cephrir find another replacement.

I thought House meant a scum IC would flake on IC advice too, but it's good to consider everybody, and you're right that she hasn't given reads for those two yet. She's mentioned them a few times and talked to one of them a couple times but not in a giving-reads-about-them sort of way.

I also want to hear more from the quieter people.

a town player would or rather should never want to kill a player off without just cause.

what does this even mean? I wanted to give the new player time to catch up. I had plenty of reasons for scumreading the slot. I had shared them. I continued to share them. If you mean the part where I suggested we should lynch the slot if she replaced out, it was because we were all sure that slot was scum and getting a replacement would have just been a formality.

first night I tracked BBT, because the fast wagons were dangerous and i was feeling unsure about him. Second night I targeted Argos. Argos didn't go anywhere.

VOTE: Millar13 for premature voting in LYLO. I will unvote when he does.

an OMGUS? REALLY

no. a "this is LYLO and you are voting someone in the town voting bloc" vote.

Millar, not unvoting right now is a scum claim.

I will unvote if you do.

That makes no sense.

I am town. behold how i'm not being counterclaimed by anybody. You were voting town. In LYLO. There are two scenarios:

a) you are town making a horrible mistake. realising you are about to end the game for town, you unvote before the scum team can hammer. you can always revote later once you've read everyone's ISOs and come to a conclusion. Unvoting lets you finish reading before scum ends the game.
b) you are scum and believe that you can convince at least one townie to hammer me. This is a mistake of a different kind (none of the townies will hammer me).

temporary

unvote[/] although unless wanderer-nl stirs up something big in terms of read, im voting again

That's better. Thank you. Fix the formatting on your unvote please.

[Plotinus]

sorry i meant to put that behind a spoiler because it was so long. i hit submit instead of preview.

[Plotinus]

skold, argos, do either of you want to try counterclaiming me?

wanderer believes my claim, but millar, who has claimed vanilla, would probably believe a counterclaim from Argos.

also:
argos seemed to prefer voting millar over skold
millar seems to prefer voting (me and) skold over argos
skold seemed to prefer voting millar over argos

that's interesting.

I'd like to see millar do some more thinking and interacting. I don't know if millar is scum or incorrect, and we don't want to lynch people in LYLO for being wrong on the internet.

I would also like to hear from Skold and Argos on today's events.

[Plotinus]

more thinking?
more interacting?

Expand.

your pov is im either incorrect or scum.
you read offers scum to it.
but you are very patronising about it.

skold and argos need to speak up though.

You've been here less than a day. You can take longer than a day to make up your mind. You're doing good at catching up so far. You can keep reading stuff, asking people questions, etc. I know it's hard replacing in and you're doing us a favour. I'm sorry for being patronising. I don't think being incorrect makes you stupid. I've been incorrect often enough myself.

If neither Skold nor Argos (nor anybody else) counterclaims then you should be willing to reconsider your reads. There is one protown powerrole left in this setup and I'm claiming that person is me. If everybody else agrees that the remaining powerrole is not them (even if they don't particularly think it's me) then that means it's me. If I'm lying, the real powerrole knows that I'm scum and can just vote me.

[Plotinus]

@Cephir thank you for being a reasonable.

[Plotinus]

I can follow this logic. (though after a few iterations of this scum are going to be able to game it)

[Plotinus]

It would also explain why Argos didn't go anywhere last night; wyvernite was more widely townread than Argos. Also this conversation:

Spoiler: quotes between me and Skold

Skold, since you've got the most experience here, how often do scum teams assign the nightkill to their least suspicious member? As often as they can, right?

This I don't get.

The least suspicious person on the team is the least likely to be tracked (or jailkept) so they're a better choice for the person to do the night killing. It might be too much to assume this is how they make that choice everytime, but maybe they make that choice most of the time.

If we can determine who the least suspicious person in each of the possible teams is, we can do some process of elimination, not of a person but of a team. I asked skold because he's seen more games than I have, but I could go visit the private threads from completed games and see how often the decision is made that way.

Unless scum has reason to suspect town are trying to find the least suspicious member, I think they will always set it in the least suspicious member.
@Plotinus who of Argos, Wyvernite and I think myself, are you most willing to lynch today?
The case on Wyvernite is logical, if it s true. Though I'd like some quotes, because I've seen town get lynched based on a case with no basis in fact because nobody bothered to fact check it.

I'd like to hear from Wyernite and Argos before finishing that line of thought, but basically if the tracker-or-jailkeeper didn't target singer last night, process of elimination can happen because it will be known (to them) that somebody didn't go somewhere. That's not the same as a cop innocent, but if that somebody is the more widely townread in a pair of two then it makes that pairing less likely than other pairings, I think.

Skold, Wyvernite, Argos, if you were voting now who would it be for?

Maybe 4 of us will agree on something, maybe only 3 will.

Even if I wasn't scared of a potential quickhammer, I probably wouldn't be voting. Give Wyvernite time to defend himself. Just a reminder, to avoid voting we need to declare intent to hammer as a group. (Wanderer -1/3 intent to hammer, Skold - 2/3 intent to hammer, Plotinus 3/3 intent to hammer) < that kinda idea.
@Wanderer Wait you'd put Wyvernite as a scum buddy with Plotinus or me for inactivity? I'd say that if you were going from there, Argos or myself.

@Plotinus except that since we've had an NK each night a jailkeeper/tracker non-result wouldn't give us much. It could just be (also not unlikely) that the other scum buddy did the NK so it can't really create a town bloc.

Either Skold didn't fully understand what I was saying, or he's town, or both.

My reasoning there was: of the 3, Wyvernite was the least suspected last night, Argos was in the middle, and Skold was more suspected. If Argos didn't go anywhere, that would rule out Argos/Skold and make it either Wyv/Skold or Wyv/Argos making Wyv the best lynch. I was leaning Wyv/Argos at the time with Wyv first. If it was Argos/Skold after all, Skold should have been on board with any arguments for a wyv lynch.

Argos/Wyv: Wyv gets the kill, argos doesn't go anywhere
Argos/Skold: Argos gets the kill, skold doesn't go anywhere <--- this didn't happen
Wyv/Skold: Wyv gets the kill, skold doesn't go anywhere



There's also the newbie scumteam angle -- skold has been giving me the impression from the very start of Day 3 that he knew I was the tracker (when he said that I was acting erratic but he was townreading me for it). It's possible he'd figured it out sooner. Maybe Argos/Wyv didn't know to look for crumbs. Wyv's other game just finished and I'm not very good at crumbhunting but I don't think he crumbed it early on (he was cop in that game).

There's also the fact that Wyv and Argos have both been really hestitant in their convictions and voting especially around lynch time, as if they're already distancing themselves from the townflip that they know is going to happen.

I can understand millar not being sure when he just joined us that the only credible choices for him was skold/argos, but I can't really understand Argos not realising that Argos' choices are Skold/millar.

I think scum should be coming into LYLO with a plan of who they're going to go after today for the mislynch. I actually think I was supposed to be the mislynch because the scum team didn't realise I was the tracker (or they would have killed me) and they didn't have a good backup target. An experienced scum team would have adapted to this and just gone off after skold together.

Also I think that lurking in LYLO is weird and makes more sense for newbie scum than for any other alignment/experience level. Town wants to figure this out and save our chances at winning the game. Skold and Millar's activity levels have been good, Argos has not been trying to figure things out.


So I think Argos/Millar makes the most sense.

VOTE: Millar.

Argos tomorrow.

[Plotinus]

also, of millar/argos/skold only one of them (skold) has been acting sure of who the scumteams is (skold) and I think that's because the scumteam has had to pretend all game that they didn't know for sure who the scumteam was. But there are two scum in [skold, argos, millar] so the townie in that group has to be sure that the other two are scum. especially this late in the game that i've come out tracker and wanderer is as close to conftown as can be because she apparently figured out i was tracker on day 1 and didn't kill me.

[Plotinus]

wyv hasn't accessed the site since before twilight, though. But Argos could have submitted as "Wyv kills singer". but would Argos have thought of that?

[Plotinus]

UNVOTE: Millar in the meantime.

[Plotinus]

yeah okay. It seems we more or less agree with each other. And I think if you were wrong they might have hammered by now anyway.

VOTE: millar

I think my only case in favour of Argos' innocence is "he might not have thought that he had the option of writing "wyv kills singer" instead of just "kill singer" and that's a pretty weak case.

[Plotinus]

I agree with your reasoning in 645. I think both you and I would have been mislynch targets if I hadn't claimed.

I wasn't 100% sure that you were town until today -- I explained my reasoning to Cephrir for targetting argos and not others in my PM to the mod (I thought maybe it would entertain the mod, I wasn't expecting a response to the reasoning and I didn't receive one), and the reason I didn't target you or singer was that I was pretty sure that if either of you were scum I would be dead in the morning. I didn't target skold because he'd been the most suspicious and was least likely to be assigned the kill, I was townreading wyv at the time so I thought Argos was the most likely to give me a guilty to bring into LYLO. I probably should have tracked wyv anyway though.

[Plotinus]

You kept scumhunting me after you figured out that I was the tracker. I think I spent a lot of day 2 trying to convince you that I was town. Now I think you were giving me cover to shield me from the nightkill.

[Plotinus]

I just went back to see what I wrote. It was in 161, and I was totally crumbing that I'd tracked BBT in that post.

I think it was good for you to keep scumhunting me -- maybe my answers helped to say other people's opinions of me (for better or for worse but based on my own merits). It also helped you to figure out whether my crumbs were honest or not, because scum can crumb too. This game might have gone pretty differently if saad hadn't used that damn cop smiley in post 40. And I do think if I'd been considered obvtown like I was last game then I'd have been nightkilled sooner.

I think when the game is over I would like feedback on how to play a powerrole because this was my first time. And also about how obvious my crumbs were (especially from BBT, skold, and singer) because I felt like maybe I was subtle enough early on and that I got progressively more obvious about it until the end -- I don't think I was very subtle at all during day 3, even at the beginning of the day. And also advice on when I should have claimed, if I should have done so sooner than I did. My reasoning was that I should claim with my results if it would prevent a mislynch but if we mostly had it figured it out then I should try to dodge the night kill for another night.

[Plotinus]

I'm beginning to understand why some people like the Amished tell.

(though I think I would always look at my predecessor too. If I'm town, that person is the only person in the game who is modconfirmed town to me so why wouldn't I take their opinions into account? And if scum then of course I'd want to have my story straight. so it's a null tell for me.)

[Plotinus]

sshe can't. she's already voting you. we're waiting on skold or argos.

[Plotinus]

I figured it wasn't in post 85 when he claimed "villager" because if he was scum crumbing cop he should have claimed cop, but everyone was suspicious of him and he was acting suspicious (which I think was just a personality thing for him). and then when DCL started quoting

my

crumbs I got a lot more suspicious again. I missed that about wyvernite before, but looking at it again it looks right. I should have paid attention to who else was reacting to that smiley. Mofo reacted: he voted saad right after that. and wyvernite reacted.

and then in 47 saad said "you are misinterpreting what i'm saying" which made me think of fromage's "how closely are you reading this thread".

[Plotinus]

Thanks mod

We were right the first time. we shouldn't have gone back to wyv. Next time we'll do better.

Good game everyone.

Wanderer, I really want to be scum with you sometime.

[Plotinus]

thanks for to millar and dcl for subbing in. I'm really sorry we didn't believe you guys.


pedit: me too about feedback.

[Plotinus]

What Wanderer and me were trying to do:

In our last game we were in a 5 person LYLO situation and we agreed that everyone should say who they wanted to vote for, and we had 4 out of 5 who strongly wanted to vote for one player. after lots of discussion and figuring out (preflip) who the scumbuddy was, we voted that player. And they flipped town, and House explained to us that if 4 out of 5 people in LYLO are happy with voting for one person that means at least one scum and we should ask ourselves why that is, because scum would rather win on day 3 than bus and then win on day 4 because that means another day of LYLO and another day of having to dodge suspicion when it's much easier to just win right now.

preview-edit: thanks for the feedback, singer. You're right that we missed those things about the scum team.

[Plotinus]

@Skold: why did you do the night kill instead of Argos?

[Plotinus]

I need to work on brevity. I think there is a happy medium between tl;dr and skold and I'm not hitting it yet.

I'm really impressed in hindsight with how DCL played in particular because that was a hard spot to sub into.


I was kind of egging Argos on to counterclaim me because I thought I could survive it but maybe I couldn't have.


eeee I'm quoted in the dead thread!

argos seemed to prefer voting millar over skold
millar seems to prefer voting (me and) skold over argos
skold seemed to prefer voting millar over argos

that was my way of saying "it's skold/argos" in a way that I hoped the scumteam wouldn't understand.

[Plotinus]

BBT you hate meta so much but it makes it so much easier to communicate with people! Once I knew wanderer was town we could talk strategy privately-in-public without other people knowing what we were driving at.


preview-edit: you were right, millar.

preview-edit: @singer wanderer understood it. millar couldn't have but you're right. wanderer and me were both flip flopping between skold/argos and argos/wyvernite. we should have explained it to millar and sold him on argos.

[Plotinus]

We ran into trouble because we applied the "scum wants to win today instead of bussing if they can get away with it" logic iteratively.

[Plotinus]

/in

[Plotinus]

I need to work on brevity. I think there is a happy medium between tl;dr and skold and I'm not hitting it yet.

Are you suggesting my posts are too big?

The opposite. I'm suggesting on one end of the spectrum is me, the long winded person who can barely filter her thoughts at this stage, and on the other end of the spectrum is you with the short posts and the gut reads and the not explaining why you're townreading or scumreading anybody.

[Plotinus]

I'd like to play with townArgos someday. I really liked what I saw of your personality. I think with more practice you'll get more confident.