Newbie 1656 : Game Over

[Ether]

Got it.

[Ether]

So, uh...

Kyle, you three don't

actually

have the same birthday, right? I just want to be clear here.

[Ether]

Hi, goodmorning!

[Ether]

I am well aware of that! I was the Wigglytuff avatar back in the queue thread, if that rings a bell.

[Ether]

LoHa, what's your experience with mafia?

[Ether]

Where?

[Ether]

SilverWolf's vote doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I like that she made it.

Maybe it needs to be raining mans?

???????

[Ether]

I'm not sure what rain is a metaphor for here. Still, I'm obligated to support any and all song references. Maybe it

does

need to be raining mans.

The confirmation deadline is around 4 pm Eastern tomorrow, so there's that.

[Ether]

Buddying is way too much fun to be scummy! But no, I didn't really get that vibe.

I didn't realize lordj had completed games. May I see?

Disclaimer: I will probably never read them. Fortunately I'm like the third player to bring up meta publicly, so maybe someone else will!

[Ether]

In theory I believe in meta! In practice I don't really have the attention span to sit through games I wasn't in, and even if I did, my scumdar probably still wouldn't pick up on any scum that wasn't a direct and current threat to my own wellbeing. Since I have played exactly one game since anyone else here was even on the site, I'm out of luck.

...

But

still

.

i played games on another site replaced into one game here but was replaced out when i had to leave for i think 8 days for honeymoon or 4 days for miitary i cant remember off top of my head now

I know about the on-site one! I also know that it's ongoing, and I'm more looking for examples of your town game.

[Ether]

vote: LoHa

[Ether]

What's wrong with -2?

What do you think of LoHa himself?

I wish you wouldn't dismiss every vote you didn't understand as a joke vote. I'd still like those links, by the way!

[Ether]

Sakura could you give us a bit more than that?

[Ether]

Huh. Why LoHa?

(I typed a slightly

(slightly)

longer follow up and have it on hand, but then lordj posted and I decided to ask about his reads below.)

Lordj: you can't post unsolicited links to other mafia forums for the purpose of advertising, but since I asked you for them for meta purposes, they're fair play. If you don't want LoHa at -2, uh...why not fix that yourself?

Do you think anything about anyone else right now?

[Ether]

There's a difference between not voting and voting No Lynch, you know.

I'm also leaning town on kyle, for what it's worth. I have absolutely no meaningful opinions on goodmorning, which is weird because most of what I do have is from things that revolve around her in some way. I'm...starting to lean town on lordj too, I think.

[Ether]

I'm...starting to lean town on lordj too, I think.

Actually eh, I should probably actually read that game

pfffthaha

hahaha.

[Ether]

Tell me more.

[Ether]

I don't know yet! I think "tell me more" was bad wording on my part.

But if your play differs from that game because you've improved, I want to see how you've improved.

[Ether]

Don't discuss ongoing games.

[Ether]

Feel free to link to them if they end soon, though.

[Ether]

I joined because I was feeling out of touch with a community that I was growing closer to. But my last game made it clear that I can't just flip a switch and expect to magically be my past self again. Ironically my problem is that I haven't had

enough

emotions since I got back, and that's just no fun.

I'm hoping to work through that, though! Hence a newbie game.

Why do you ask, though?

Stepperman's missed his confirmation deadline, incidentally.

[Ether]

Hi!

I'm still voting LoHa, by the way. That didn't stop being a thing or anything.

[Ether]

Nah, the hi was for OceanWind.

I just...don't get what LoHa's trying to do. He has experience, apparently--it kind of bothered me that he was so terse about coming out with it, which is Page 2 logic but was still a part of my initial vote. (Also I already knew at that point that it wasn't very likely to be anyone else, for various reasons that mostly don't say anything about how townish they actually are.)

His 27 didn't really strike me either way. (Now that I'm typing this I keep wanting to talk about how weird it is that he was asking permission to vote goodmorning, when I don't see how he'd read her jokey reaction as a town tell if he thought she was scummy before then. And maybe that's true and maybe it isn't, but either way I know I'm saying it from a perspective of being sick of us spinning our wheels and really wanting to find somebody scummy already.)

I don't like his showing after I voted, either. People were exchanging reads by then, and he just dropped in and asked me about my return. He doesn't know me and doesn't strike me as someone who asks things just to socialize, and I don't see the point. Continuing to talk about Sakura's Page 1 vote didn't impress me either.

[Ether]

Also, yes, we do need reads from you two. Or "reads." (I'm not sure why you put that in quotes?)

[Ether]

Lordj, please don't speculate on power roles out loud. (Your train of thought doesn't really make any sense to me, but if it did, that would be really bad for the town.) When it's the right time for them to claim them, they can claim them. Until then part of the town's job is to keep them hidden.

This doesn't actually make me think lordj is more likely to be scum, to be clear.

I am loving my vote.

[Ether]

This is scummy. Town would never say things like this, even if thinking them.

Actually, I think every time I've seen that, it was from town. I can give links--I can think of at least four examples just off the top of my head, one of which was me.

My 16 year old self was such a mess.

[Ether]

Don't do it! I am a huge fan of the spilling your guts playstyle, and the hopes of shutting off the part of me that secondguesses everything and winds up not posting over it is part of the reason I'm here. But power roles are an exception; that's a kind of read you need to keep to yourself. If he claims vanilla later, THEN you can point out where you think he was acting like a power role. (In this case I'm not seeing what you're seeing anyway, but yeah.) Stick to who's scum and who's town!

SilverWolf you should come vote LoHa.

[Ether]

This hi is for you, Sakura. Hi!

[Ether]

I did!

[Ether]

In general I just think he isn't scumhunting at all, doesn't really have the kind of curiosity I'd expect from town and the questions he does ask feel artificial, and he doesn't lordj's/Mightymandarin's style of newbishness to protect him.

[Ether]

I just realized that LoHa is at -1, thanks to goodmorning's random vote. I'm going to

unvote

, even though I still think he's scum. I get goodmorning's logic about his 169 and...honestly I still think he's scum anyway.

Then I'm going to hypocritically agree with SilverWolf. More people should really be voting by now!

(Also I'm really hoping OceanWind starts posting here already. He's already announced his entry over in the newbie queue thread, but not here?)

[Ether]

Wait, yeah, you're right. For some reason I had it lodged in my brain that SilverWolf was voting him too.

[Ether]

Oh well. SilverWolf, what are you thinking right now?

[Ether]

Who's scum, LoHa?

Who's town?

[Ether]

I'm in the States, on Eastern time. My posting rate might stay like it is, or I might suddenly realize I don't have a clue what I'm doing, get severely depressed in real life and vanish for ages. It's hard to say! I don't feel depressed, but my track record in the olde days wasn't stellar.
I

hate

being scum.

From the way lordj was talking earlier (68), I think he thinks no lynch and not voting are the same thing. (Pre-edit: and that's what he just said, too.) I can elaborate on why I think coolkyledude's town if it's important and other people are bothered by this. But I kind of want him to post more instead of answering.

---

Here is Mightymandarin's experience: some games in 2008, where he felt like he didn't do very well.
Here is coolkyledude's experience: 3 games of EpicMafia, and Town of Salem. Those aren't forum mafia, and while I haven't played them, I don't get the idea that they translate very well, especially to a site like Mafiascum.
Here is lordj's experience: he got modkilled in his one completed game.

Those three blatantly

perceive

themselves as newbies, and it shows. (Well, maybe lordj doesn't. But I do.) LoHa described himself as a veteran and his second post was dripping with mafia jargon. So yes, I'm holding him to a higher standard than those three. (He's also not actually admitting that he doesn't have reads, unlike Mandarin and lordj; he's just failing to have them, beyond sorta-kinda OMGUSing me and occasionally bringing up Sakura's vote from Page 1.) It's hard for me to believe that you don't see a difference.

(I say all this. Sakura says Osu play isn't strong either, and she knows better than I do, considering I'd never heard of it before.)

What do you think of him on his own merits?

A lot of your accusations toward me are for attacking LoHa for things while ignoring or townreading other newbies for similar things. So why me/SilverWolf? If I were scum with another SE, why would I be bothering with this supposed double standard?

[Ether]

after rereading and looking more or less just at lohas posts i feel like the case on her is basically jsut off previous off site mafia games that they may or may not have played together

because i feel she is just wanting to lynch someone anyone, stated the case on Loha it stuck with a couple of players if it didnt stick she woulda jsut made a case up on someone else

Um.

How so?

(You're right about one thing, though. Normally I prefer to hold off on my first push longer than I did here. But this entire playerlist seemed to be the same way, with no non-random votes on anyone except goodmorning, and I didn't feel any real interest in that case. Someone had to make a move, you know?)

[Ether]

I have no past experience with LoHa, and no idea where you got that. I do think his behavior doesn't befit a so-called veteran, but again, Sakura says that Osu experience doesn't count for much, and she knows better than I do. I still think he's scummy.

[Ether]

Suit yourself.

That isn't why Sakura's voting him, either, though. You should...probably do some rereading.

[Ether]

i want to help you get in the game but i don't know howwww

Also I agree with goodmorning.

Is there anything I can do? Do you want to talk about anybody?

Would you like a pokemon avatar??

[Ether]

Good to know! I'm not sure I see the pattern you do, but of course I haven't read those and my studious "kick the READ GOODMORNING can down the road you don't have to care about this yet don't worry" campaign is still going strong, sooo.

Are you feeling better? Would it help you feel more invested if I started asking questions?

This page is an easy way to search people's recent newbie games, for future reference. I still have some unread tabs lying around from that. (But if 2/2's all you want to do, that's fair, that's more than I'd sit through.)

[Ether]

Goodmorning I am totally readable by this point if it helps. Probably. My last scum game was in 2009, so, you know.

LoHa is still the scummiest person in the game in my book, to be clear. (And his latest post, uh...I don't know if it's scummy that he suddenly flipped into thesaurus mode, but it makes his posts less accessible and I'd like him to stop.) I'm standing back right now because, hey, I wanted people

including me

to stop talking about possibly metaing each other in the future and get to the point, and I got that. My accidental unvote suits me fine.

I am not impressed with OceanWind's post, but I'm also not going to read him or anyone else on just a catchup. I really hope he doesn't stick to once or twice a day posting, though.

[Ether]

Heh.

I wasn't laying a trap, for what it's worth. I did want a reaction, but I'm not really sure what you're getting at there!

I think you (and lordj) are probably town, by the way. I don't really get your read on Mightymandarin. (I think he's likely to be replaced, though. He hasn't even logged into the site in the past 24 hours, let alone posted, and this is while the game's still young.)

[Ether]

I've found myself nodding along to a ton of what SilverWolf has said on this page, eeexcept my first impressions of OceanWind are townish now. You did kind of OMGUS him first.

(I don't get why his explanation of why he RQSed is enough to get a town read from Sakura Hana. Like, I'm not actually anti-RQS in any way, I totally agree that knowing people's alignment preferences can be helpful. But it's just a piece of theory. Anyone who ever uses RQS will tell you the exact same thing.)

OceanWind, could you try to condense your posts a bit more? I don't mind a wall of pure text every now and then, but that quote-reply-quote-reply style is really hard for me to focus on. Shorter more frequent posts would be even better.

I think a lot of your case on SilverWolf kind of assumes she has to be scum and therefore everything she does has to be scummy. Like, her paranoia toward goodmorning acting differently (but more pro-town before meta considerations) doesn't have to be ego-stroking. I get where she was coming from and I think she's town (and that was one of the first things that led me to that conclusion, actually), but if she were scum it could still just be noise. That's also how I feel about the idea that I'd townread some newbies and attack other newbies for comparable behaviors as scum with SilverWolf.

I think MoosyDoosy also said this.

(Relatedly I don't see "not answering questions" as part of the case on LoHa as far as I'm concerned, but I continue to think he's scum anyway. Hmm hmm.)

Yeah, do this. Now that he replaced out, you are not really throwing away a chance to develop your read further by revealing what you know.

Kyle didn't do a ton, but what he did do had a paranoia to it that I'd expect more from newbie town. Both paranoia toward an IC, and paranoia about someone being friendly toward him...I'd expect newbie scum to start with easier targets, and I'd expect town (newbie or not) to have worse reactions to potential buddying, where scum just see an ally.

[Ether]

Eh. I think it's just a fallacy people let themselves fall into, I don't think it's scummy. Sometimes people get confirmation bias, that's all.

[Ether]

I am still absolutely fine with LoHa's death! But I feel like my reads are still improving, so I'm not really in a hurry to end things.

Despite what I said about lordj, if LoHa flips scum I could see him as a partner. Going through his posts, there are a lot of places where he seems to have more concern for his wellbeing than I'd expect, and his vote on me is kiiiiiiind of chainsawish in that light.

(And I could kind of see his "you look like a power role" comment as being an attempt to scare people off of LoHa, in his brain? Maybe? I have no idea, honestly I say this but that was one of the things I saw as probably town.)

I'm not remotely interested in pursuing this before we have LoHa's alignment, but I'm throwing it out there.

I think OceanWind's failure to get into quicker more interactive discussions with other players is a bad side-effect of that "make a huge post once a day" approach. That's another reason I wish he'd switch to smaller more frequent posts, yeah.

Town usually go looking for

scum.

Sometimes they get that wrong; sometimes when they lock onto someone they proceed to lock on to absolutely everything about them. I'm from the days of full PBPAs, and yes, I think it's confirmation bias. I think this is OMGUS on your part, not in the scummy sense but in the sense that people are subconsciously more inclined to view attacks on them as scummier than attacks on others.

Mightymandarin has slipped into prod range.

[Ether]

Lordj this is an excellent time to prepare this all at once and use that

Spoiler:

tag. Please don't give us pages and pages of this! And yes. Yes, we absolutely did see an answer.

LoHa, would you like to do anything that doesn't involve talking about yourself?

[Ether]

Why?

I would still like an answer from Sakura, by the way.

[Ether]

(I don't get why his explanation of why he RQSed is enough to get a town read from Sakura Hana. Like, I'm not actually anti-RQS in any way, I totally agree that knowing people's alignment preferences can be helpful. But it's just a piece of theory. Anyone who ever uses RQS will tell you the exact same thing.)

[Ether]

I...find it really difficult to believe that you'd think that's enough to say.

[Ether]

Random Question Stage. That's the term for doing it to hit the game off, as a sort of counterpart to the more standard Random Voting Stage. (My experience is that it doesn't work all that well and tends to just end in a bunch of people arguing about whether bothering with a RQS is scummy, but again, it doesn't hurt to have that information later.)

It's probably not accurate to call it that on Page 8, but those are the same sorts of questions.

[Ether]

Huh? LoHa has nothing to do with this. We're talking about OceanWind's questions, the ones about people's alignment preferences and posting rates.

(Well. Actually I'm talking about Sakura's reaction to OceanWind's questions, but close enough.)

[Ether]

Um...okay.

[Ether]

Got to admit, that last post makes me embarrassed not to be voting him.

[Ether]

He's given up, SilverWolf.

[Ether]

So, um...is there anyone except me who

isn't

null-reading Sakura?

[Ether]

Apparently Ocean is townreading me, i don't know why.

It's nice how in video games you can just press the "A" button and people will keep talking. You don't have to say anything or set the subject for yourself, they just go ahead and keep saying what they wanted to say. Reality is so much trickier than that.

I'm not sure what I'm asking yet. I'm asking

something

, though.

[Ether]

I don't think it was a ploy in the sense that he's secretly brilliant and trying to portray himself as helpless. But he had to post

something

, and asking newbie questions is much less work than giving reads--either real or fake.

The nature of the scum PT depends a lot on who's in it. If it's two newbies, then they wouldn't be getting a whole lot. (For that reason, if LoHa flips scum, I'd absolve goodmorning, SilverWolf and Sakura Hana then and there. I think if he had an experienced coach who was around early while his fate was less bleak, his play would look different.)

Mightymandarin's likely to get replaced tomorrow night, if he doesn't reappear. I really wish he'd just ask for replacement instead of waiting out the prod timer, if it has to be one of the two.

[Ether]

Why?

[Ether]

I know everyone is dogpiling on LoHa right now because his reasoning is weak and he's being aggressive. But wouldn't Mafia play more lightly, less aggressively in a newbie game?

Try again.

[Ether]

Goodmorning, what are your reads at this point?

[Ether]

My gut is currently screaming to high heaven that it's Sakura, and that if that's true then goodmorning is her most likely partner. It's getting distracting.

[Ether]

Parts of it are! Sakura's been bugging me for a lot longer than you have. The OceanWind thing was always the tip of a much bigger, frustratingly vague iceberg.

I'm going to try to pinpoint my feelings later, but I only have about half an hour right now and I might not answer in that timeframe.

[Ether]

All right, let's see.

The fact that almost everyone is null-reading Sakura bothers me in itself. I know that Sakura traditionally gets scumread as town, and skates by as scum. The only other person who's claimed some kind of suspicion toward her thinks she's unemotional, which is (of course) a really dumb reason to scumread someone, but also in Sakura's case suggests to me that something is very wrong. (And she's already agreed just before this post that she's out of character here, so yeah.)

Her read on OceanWind bothers me

so much.

Three different people asked him that dumb RQS question, because the ritual is the same every time, and his answer was the same one you get every time. SHE LITERALLY SAID THAT that's the reason almost everyone gives. If she townread him for that answer on Page 10, then that strains my ability to believe any of her reads are real.

And up until this page, that's been like the only read she's volunteered without prompting at any point since her Page 1 goodmorning vote, and soooooooort of the LoHa vote. (EDIT: Actually no, her 207 lists SilverWolf as town. I don't really have any objections to this post. I still think this isn't enough, but I'm putting it in.) And the whole thing around when I first voted LoHa gave me a bad vibe too. For convenience's sake I'm going to quote the exchange under the cut, but you can start late on Page 4 and read it all in context if you prefer.

Spoiler:

vote: LoHa

im not so shure putting loha @ l-2 right off already is very good

ps as well Ether whatts ur reasoning behind putting the joke vote (im assumeing) on LoHa and 2 if its not a joke vote whats the reasoning behind putting her at L-2

It's not a problem, no scum would attempt to QH this early, specially with people like GM (if town) and me around (or at least me).

Sakura could you give us a bit more than that?

What kind? Reads? I'm currently townreading goodmorning, and have mild townreads on

both

LoHa, you, cool and Silver. No one else has anything i can read them off

Huh. Why LoHa?

This post by LoHa gave me good vibes:

[reasons]

[time passes]

Hi!

I'm still voting LoHa, by the way. That didn't stop being a thing or anything.

Was this directed at me?

Nah, the hi was for OceanWind.

[initial case on LoHa]

[time passes]

This hi is for you, Sakura. Hi!

Hello, Can you please tell me why you're scumreading LoHa?

Basically everything about this is reactive on her part, or just useless. When lordj asks me about my vote, her 98 is pretty much a nonreaction--it's making no attempt to improve her read on lordj or LoHa or me, it's just slapping lordj down on easy theory that any SE could give. I had to drag the fact that she had a weak townread on LoHa out of her, and she didn't seem to care at all that I just voted him. I don't mind that she didn't notice that I'd already typed a case on LoHa, exactly, but if that was something she actually wanted, then why did I have to "Hi!" her first?

And this is the vibe I get from practically everything she's done. I don't think she's terribly interested in looking for scum.

(I would like her goodmorning vote if I hadn't just declared concern for a her/goodmorning scumteam, which kind of kills it.)

As for goodmorning...that's a lot more recent, and a lot of it is kind of associative. But at some point it started bugging me that, even in full "don't worry you can read goodmorning later" mode, absolutely

nothing she did whatsoever

stood out to me. I do think it makes no sense at all that she'd put Sakura at the top of her townlist for some innocuous post she made on Page 1, and yeah, her treatment of SilverWolf, who went so far as to meta-dive her, does look pretty inconsistent to me. (With that said, I didn't know that she already has a history of misreading SilverWolf. Could both of you elaborate on that?)

Mightymandarin's gonna need another prod. His third will get him replaced.

[Ether]

Stay awake, Mightymandarin. Talk to me.

(Posting this quickly to try to catch him.)

[Ether]

I don't want to clearly spell out what I do and don't expect from your play, sorry. I could be missing things and I'm not claiming to be the high authority on the subject. The people who've actually played with you probably have better; SilverWolf's advice would be nice to have.

But aside from that, your response was literally "Yeah, you're right, I've barely been scumhunting and my play is closer to my scumgame." I don't really know what you want from me!

This all does reflect badly on goodmorning, so there's that.

[Ether]

Eh, I'm kind of liking this voteless thing. The part of my brain that tells me when to vote says it wouldn't be theatrical enough.

[Ether]

Okay?

[Ether]

...Have you actually read this page?

[Ether]

vote: Sakura Hana

.:theatrics:.

[Ether]

That threat was like custom-made to be everything I don't care about.

Nearly everything I buy about the goodmorning case also reflects badly on you. In the end, I think you're scum and she's likely to be your scumbuddy, not the other way around. So I'll push this route even if it's a little less convenient.

[Ether]

You're scum because you aren't scumhunting, your reads make no sense and you have literally admitted that your play is closer to your scum meta. (And goodmorning and OceanWind are the only people who are outright townreading you, as far as I know. Everyone else was null.) You can flanderize that all you want, but your own first response doesn't really convince me that you think I'm wrong.

Goodmorning's read on you from a Page 1 post doesn't make sense, but again, it reflects almost as badly on you, and that's on top of every other problem I have with you. I'm not really sold on most of the rest of the case on goodmorning--I'd probably still be going after LoHa myself if it weren't for this, and the double standard with SilverWolf makes more sense if she's been burned by her in the past.

If you did flip town, I don't think I would follow up by attacking goodmorning. You can try to convince me otherwise, but to change my mind you'd need to interrogate her, not just me.

[Ether]

Hey, SilverWolf. Any chance we could do a Sakura wagon instead?

I don't miiiiiiiind lynching goodmorning, but this is better.

[Ether]

I don't really believe that you think I'm scum.

[Ether]

My gut is currently screaming to high heaven that it's Sakura, and that if that's true then goodmorning is her most likely partner. It's getting distracting.

Sakura's been bugging me for a lot longer than you

[goodmorning]

have.

[five paragraphs about Sakura Hana]

[one paragraph about goodmorning]

Not really sure what you were expecting me to do!

[Ether]

Like I've said a couple times, I've attacked Sakura for being scummy independently, and my suspicions of goodmorning are more associative. This far from deadline, I'm more interested in pressing the person I find scummiest than I am in joining someone lower on my list with a bigger wagon.

(And related to that, if Sakura's actually sincere about wanting to lynch me over goodmorning now, that makes

no sense

. If she's so sure that goodmorning's scum because of her weird townread, and that the only reason I could possibly have a preference is because I'm scum with goodmorning, then obviously she should want to lynch goodmorning first.)

I'm pretty sure LoHa isn't scum with Sakura or goodmorning. He could be scum if they aren't.

I'm not actually sure what I think at this exact moment! You...could be right about Sakura's reaction to pressure? (But if I outright thought she was town then I don't know if I'd support the goodmorning wagon, honestly. I don't think I'm ever actually going to townread her, I wouldn't fight it that hard unless I really really wanted a different person dead, but yeah.)

[Ether]

Did you even read my post?

[Ether]

There's no way in hell I'd sincerely take that kind of deal with the intentions of seeing it through if I were wrong. I could probably agree now and I still doubt I'd actually be lynched if you did flip town, but it would be dishonest and kind of dumb. And I think you already knew I'd say that.

[Ether]

Eh. I might.

I'm...kind of stunned that that's what gave you pause in the end, but for now I think I'm flipping back to my between reads state anyway. If you're town, please count this as a vote against that experimental playstyle.

unvote

[Ether]

I like a LoHa lynch better than a goodmorning lynch, which I know is getting predictable but there you go.

The way she was trying to sort me. It's not something she couldn't do as Scum, but I feel pretty comfortable calling her Town for it atm.

It's not something she couldn't do as Scum. The way in which it was done, though, feels Town based on what I know of Sakura.

Some things are easy to change, some things aren't.

But yeah, I don't really get this whole progression either.

For what it's worth, if that kind of deal could be enforced somehow, I'm pretty sure I still would never take it in any game, outside of role-based reasons or possibly just plain wanting to die.

(And even then I'd probably be more likely to accept a lynch as a valid way out as scum--as town I'm kind of vain about my track record, I can just afford not to let it show. But again, it's been six years since I've even had a scum game, so take that with a grain of salt.)

Goodmorning's right about that--it's just not my kind of personality! I can get deeper into the theory there.

[Ether]

Also, in this case I was already wavering on you by that point. That was what I was trying to get at back here:

I'm not actually sure what I think at this exact moment! You...could be right about Sakura's reaction to pressure?

If you're so sure i'm scum then how about my offer?
My life for yours. If i flip town.

Did you even read my post?

By then I wasn't so sure in the first place!

[Ether]

I'd like to hear this, too.

[Ether]

I'm strongly considering hammering. LoHa, you might want to claim.

Or claim if you're a power role, anyway. Just keep arguing if you're vanilla or you still think you can talk us down.

There's no hard and fast rule for claiming. Claiming as town permanently cripples your night phase value--either as a power role or as a decoy--and the policy has kind of evolved past its utility. If you think about it strategically, there are four logical reasons that claiming might get you out of a lynch:

• To bring up mod-outguessing aspects, in a semiopen or closed game. Best example I can give is here, where the Dutch mod gave an American a role from an obscure comic he'd obviously never heard of, in a language he obviously didn't know.
  
• There's an equivalent to this in open setups: if you claim a power role and nobody counterclaims you, then you are probably telling the truth.
  
• To demonstrate why your actions, which wouldn't make sense as a vanilla townie, would make sense as the role you actually are. A cop with results would definitely have reasons to behave differently, for example.
  
• Not technically to convince people that you're
  town,
  but just to convince it not to lynch you: if you claim a power role, then that raises the stakes so they might want to go for a safer wagon and give you a few more nights.

Like I said, a claim hurts you in the night phase regardless of what you are. Claiming outside of massclaim should be a

very last resort

; if you've still got more defenses in you, try those first. If you take a hard look at that list, there's not much of a reason to do it at all as vanilla. I'm of the opinion that vanillas should

never

claim under pressure, except in the case of the next paragraph.

Unfortunately, the current site meta doesn't really see it that way: there are lots of people who

will

try to kill you if you don't claim on command, and at the same time will unvote you as vanilla and run more people up to claims. These people are idiots, but nonetheless claiming is obviously better than dying. So you might not actually have a choice. Go forth and enlighten the masses!

Despite this educational rant, I reserve the right to demand that people claim or die in the future.

Is it bad that I hate it when ICs have precanned responses instead of typing them fresh every time? It's

convenient.

With that said, I don't think this 1v1 is really helping.

[Ether]

LoHa, what do you think about goodmorning now? What do you think about the other newbies? Can you tl;dr for me, not for Sakura, why you're voting her?

Sakura, what's with that thesaurus thing he keeps doing? He said he was familiar with you on Osu; is there anyone from there who does that?

[Ether]

By thesaurus, I mean the sort of dry "wants to look smart" textbook tone he keeps flipping into. This sort of thing:

Furthermore SilverWolf is seemingly agreeing with you that I lack prowess in answering questions; I say this question has a false premise, and I am left with either answering it in an improvisational manner to uphold the illusion of both of our competence (which I won't do because it would be untruthful), or address the problem for what it is (incompetence to ask a valid question on your part), regardless of how momentum-stalling it might be perceived as.

Meta has no business here. Player A wants to get Player X off his back so he answers his redundant question as if it was a good one and gives Player X a good feeling about himself, thus conditioning him to give back good feelings in the form of townreads, i.e. scum, because town doesn't want inflated townreads, town would rather have unadulterated feedback about his and other people's play because town wants to figure out the game and other townies can help him if they stay objective.

Player B wants to get Player X off his back as well, if only because Player X is causing an unnecessary distraction, but B won't sugercoat the awfulness of the question and expects further to be rewarded with the same amount of candidness. In fact he's probing the playerlist to see who is capable of this trait so he can get to work on day2 and find some scum, now with a fairly decent psychological profile on each of the players at his aid. Sacrificing day1 sympathy, the appearance of being oh so interested and invested in the game has to make way for the tactic and discipline to gain instruments of scumdetection for player B, who is town, to assure a win for his team.

[/obnoxiousbullying]

[Ether]

Sentences are for communicating, dude. If you're intentionally making a sentence as hard to understand as possible, then

you have failed at making a sentence

.

This claim makes me even more convinced that LoHa is scum, and I'm not going to be picking any lynch from the assumption that he isn't. I mentioned this earlier, but I think his play would be pretty different if he'd had an SE or IC partner in his corner from the start. That gives me a nice, small lynchpool.

Lordj makes sense to me as a LoHa partner, and I...guess I could go for him independently? Maybe? I'd want to follow up on that. I wouldn't mind lynching OceanWind or Mightymandarin.

I think OceanWind is probably more likely than Mightymandarin to be scum. But I don't think he's actually been around since his computer broke? I'm not going to lynch him without any chance to claim, and if he's town with a power role, then he needs someone in that slot who'll actually send in a night action, so I want that resolved anyway.

[Ether]

Then we can lynch someone who makes sense as scum with LoHa. That's fine. I can elaborate on my thought process if you want.

[Ether]

I don't think SilverWolf is scum with LoHa.

[Ether]

It's less about interactions and more about the existence of daytalk. I think LoHa's play, especially his early play and his decision to claim bulletproof in particular, would look different with SilverWolf as a partner.

[Ether]

Not really sure how to elaborate! He just doesn't look like he's being coached, to me, or if he was it happened later and ineffectively. I know SilverWolf in particular is an avid user of mafia daytalk, even though I'm also using this logic for Sakura Hana and goodmorning.

As for the bulletproof thing, I think bulletproofs are both the most stereotypically tempting fakeclaim for newbie scum, and also a trap because of what Sakura said about how a real one doesn't really lose anything for counterclaiming.

I was actually kiiiiiiiiind of tempted to talk about just lynching him without a counterclaim, but it seemed like a hassle and I already think the game is broken if he's scum whether he gets counterclaimed or not. And I'm not positive an experienced player would account for people thinking like that.

(This is my first Matrix6 game, so I don't actually know the conventional theory about this. I could be wrong about what an experienced player would tell him to claim, or if she'd care.)

[Ether]

I don't really understand why you think he's more likely to be town for the claim, SilverWolf.

(Also, generally I think of fakeclaiming as being less about surviving and more about guaranteeing a dead/blocked power role on the way down. But it varies.)

I want to reiterate that a cop

should not counterclaim until tomorrow

. I don't think a doctor should either, because whether it can protect or not, even its existence forces the scumteam to secondguess its kill target.

[Ether]

There's a 2/3rds chance that there is no bulletproof in this setup to counterclaim. A cop shouldn't counterclaim and a doctor shouldn't either; trackers and gaolers are compatible with the claim. It's true that there's only a 1/6th chance that he's lying and there's no role in this setup that COULD counterclaim him, but that isn't the framework we're working with.

Also, we aren't actually lynching him yet. We are assuming he's scum, and we'll lynch based on likely partners.

[Ether]

I'm leaning toward Mightymandarin being that likely partner, by the way.

[Ether]

That's fine!

The exchange that started in 540 just felt off to me. There's a part of me that even thinks it's

too

obvious, but I'm willing to take the bait.

(Not before we either have OceanWind back or get a new OceanWind, though.)

[Ether]

Doc is the ONLY PR I would ever consider fakeclaiming as scum because there is one set-up where you might be able to get away with it and this guy didn't because he was scummy in the first place and the cop was already dead. Fakeclaiming 1-shot BP or any other PR would be stupid. You will def get a CC sooner or later if you avoid the lynch either by an actual 1-shot BP or a cop or doc. There is one set-up where it might work with the JK only but I still wouldn't do it unless the JK is out already. If LoHa is scum, he won't last. If he's town, then it would be incredibly stupid to mislynch him.

This doesn't really make sense. Doctor and bulletproof are both claims with one setup where you can get away with it, and bulletproof is probably the more survivable one for scum. (Assuming you're going for survivability at all.)

[Ether]

Because his claim is scummy and he's playing like scum?

[Ether]

I also think Mightymandarin makes sense as scum anyway, that's just what reminded me that he existed.

[Ether]

How so?

[Ether]

Doc is the ONLY PR I would ever consider fakeclaiming as scum because there is one set-up where you might be able to get away with it and this guy didn't because he was scummy in the first place and the cop was already dead. Fakeclaiming 1-shot BP or any other PR would be stupid. You will def get a CC sooner or later if you avoid the lynch either by an actual 1-shot BP or a cop or doc. There is one set-up where it might work with the JK only but I still wouldn't do it unless the JK is out already. If LoHa is scum, he won't last. If he's town, then it would be incredibly stupid to mislynch him.

This doesn't really make sense. Doctor and bulletproof are both claims with one setup where you can get away with it, and bulletproof is probably the more survivable one for scum. (Assuming you're going for survivability at all.)

Sakura said it better than I did in 566. The chance of a cc is too high in this setup and there hasn't been one.

Yeah, but that goes just as much for doctors.

[Ether]

Hmm.

I think I want to pressure someone else now.

[Ether]

I'm not trying to scumhunt based on who's being coached! But I do think that LoHa is scummy, and because he doesn't seem to be coached, I am playing under the assumption that he probably isn't.

I think that kind of WIFOM you're worried about will pop up more if we keep newbie daytalk as a thing. In this game, it's probably okay to just take what's in front of us.

[Ether]

I'm stepping away too, but when Mightymandarin gets back, I would like to talk to him!

I will be gentle and kind.

[Ether]

vote: OceanWind

Pretty much process of elimination! I could sort of go with lordj too, maaaaaaaybe Mightymandarin, but I have more misgivings there.

VCA is silly,

THANK YOU. Holy shit, everyone takes it so seriously now and I just want to give them some horoscopes or something just as effective. Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

[Ether]

Furthermore SilverWolf is seemingly agreeing with you that I lack prowess in answering questions; I say this question has a false premise

SW I hope my vote wasn't too overbearing on your psyche,

Ether, are you going to be this neurotic

Childish? Not even 10% compared to you.

Your hysterical and inflated reads and behavior

So if someone is exaggerating reads and being hysterical about their vote,

you're also incapable of providing a good reason,

I was bringing objective arguments for my townieness, and you were taking Ether's side when she was obnoxiously bullying me.

My arguments and behavior have been extremely town and coherent,

I'm confident I can argue my points objectively and logically.

I am not responsible for your emotional or otherwise irrational assessment of the situation,

I mostly just probe for intelligence and the capability for objectivity and logic

I lack the prowess to even consider to lower myself to that level

I guess I have to put in extra effort and compensate for swarm stupidity.

it must be swarm stupidity creeping again.

[Ether]

I think that the best thing for my sanity is ignore what sLaiNi says, because apparently he's one of THOSE people that like to insult the people's intelligence.

It's been working for me! He's not actually pseudoconftown, by the way. He's a guy we aren't currently lynching, which is different.

I really wish goodmorning and MoosyDoosy would get the second half of that memo too. There are two scum, you know? If LoHa is one of them, he's already on borrowed time anyway.

Like I said, I have no meta experience with anyone here. I know about them through osmosis, looking things up, and asking people before the game. I've specifically been warned that goodmorning is hard to read. With Moosy I think I'd be worried about him under other circumstances, but it just...never seemed like the right time? When I've had LoHa at the top of my list, the fact that I don't think they're scum together protected him, and when I was trying to push Sakura, that kept me KIND OF BUSY. He's always just stayed off my radar, and I'm not really interested in getting him onto it now either.

(I am not the sort of person who's flattered by people being paranoid of me, by the way. I'm not convinced that's actually a thing. Also, I don't remember using pre-flip associations before, like...right now with LoHa, and that's different because of his claim. I took some heat specifically for avoiding them, even.)

With that said, I'm not going to answer every single question you have across the next somethingteen pages. You can ask them again at the end if you still care. You're wrong about the proper way to treat a bulletproof claim.

[Ether]

Elaborate?

[Ether]

I'm not asking for your readslist, even though I'm pretty unimpressed if nothing's changed in 12 pages. I am asking why it is so hard for you to help us converge on a wagon, because LoHa is the only person who has more than one vote on him and I don't think you can get him to 5.

[Ether]

Ugh. I'll compromise on lordj in a pinch, but why not OceanWind?

[Ether]

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INSIGHT.

[Ether]

2 LoHa (MoosyDoosy, goodmorning)
1 goodmorning (Sakura Hana)
1 MoosyDoosy (SilverWolf)
1 OceanWind (Ether)
1 Sakura Hana (LoHa)
1 SilverWolf (OceanWind)

2 Unvote (lordj210, Mightymandarin)

Not the best votecount. We have three and a half days.

[Ether]

I'd appreciate you joining me on OceanWind, by the way!

Then we would have

two

votes on OceanWind.

[Ether]

Could you read the game before asking all this? You got the iceberg later in the section you covered right in that post, it's just a question for the sake of the question.

Pretty much every other person in the game has given me at least some reason to think they're town, or at least not scum with LoHa. You haven't. On the rare occasions that you're around at all, it's strictly in the background. I don't agree with that whole "effort is not indicative of alignment" line, not exactly, but the kind of content that you've given is just long and wordy and safe. How am I supposed to get a read from it?

[Ether]

So, uh...

When is effort indicative of alignment in your book, and when isn't it, exactly?

Thoroughly reading and asking questions don't strike me as the kind of thing you'd be impressed by. I don't really agree that he's tried to stir anyone up beyond that one thing with me and SilverWolf, which happened across his first two posts of the game. The one and only time he finally dropped the quotewalls and questions and

quantity

that make it so hard for anyone trying to read him to focus on any one thing, he just asked other people to give him questions.

I don't get what's so townish about the "lots of people are scummy" line, either, it wasn't as bold as your summary's implying. And he isn't really new, he's another one who's played off-site.

[Ether]

I don't think goodmorning is scum.

Which puts me in a weird position, because I think I'm already tied to her in some people's minds, and I'm scared that defending her will just make it worse.

[Ether]

You should not be afraid of this if you are town and think GM is town.

I didn't mean worse for me.

[Ether]

I could see lordj's line as a connection to LoHa. Like, if LoHa mentions his breadcrumb in the PT, and lordj gets it in his head that he's subtly foreshadowing it and adding credibility to the claim later. (For those of you who still think LoHa is confirmed town, and not just "could potentially be vindicated as town in the future depending on the setup and flips," it can't be associative, so it probably doesn't mean anything. Unless you'd like to reconsider!) I'd be willing to vote lordj.

I still don't think goodmorning is scum. Hmm hmm.

You should not be afraid of this if you are town and think GM is town.

I didn't mean worse for me.

Do you mean worse for the whole town? Because you're so definitely, assuredly town?

You're kind of annoying!

And no, that's obviously not what I meant in context.

[Ether]

I don't know

what

to do about it. I reached out to goodmorning, she hasn't budged from a lynch she can't get and somehow managed to dig herself deeper in the process, I'd counterwagon if I had a clue what a viable counterwagon would even be, feel like I barely have any common ground with anyone here to work with them let alone four of them, I don't even know.

Like I said, I'm not interested in answering every single wall of text question you come up with. You can repeat what you want if you want it, but waiting over 36 hours between posts after you did your big catchup doesn't really convince me that you care all that much. (Also, I didn't actually read them that thoroughly, not gonna lie. I was kind of expecting you to actually talk to people once you finished, I thought the catchup was more showing your work before you'd get to the fun part.)

Prod MoosyDoosy, please.

[Ether]

Sakura - Town, once she got back to her roots.

SilverWolf - I've been assuming she's town. Fairly active, apparently read four games' worth of meta homework, I'll take it. That she tricked goodmorning twice gives me pause, I guess, but in the end I'm not really interested.

goodmorning - I think if she were scum she wouldn't have dug herself so deep, unless she seriously thought she could get a no lynch. I don't think she'd still be voting LoHa as scum. (Although 698, so I don't even know.) I get the vibe that I realized she was on the verge of everyone piling onto her before she did, which is...probably a town tell on her part? Also I don't think she's scum with LoHa, since everything else I said here is a pretty recent development.

Mightymandarin - I dunno. I don't really think he's scum. I'd go for him if I absolutely had to; I wouldn't be wild about it.

OceanWind - You made two posts back when you replaced in. Then nothing, except one day when you asked other people to give you questions. Then your catchup. Then this, so at least that's a step up? Unsurprisingly, I still don't trust you.

MoosyDoosy - Meh.

lordj - Could be scum? I can see a lot of things tying him to LoHa. Some of those things were actually influencing me townreading him before LoHa's claim, but like SilverWolf noted the veteran thing sort of bothers me for that.

Worth noting that that off-site town game he mentioned is complete now, if anyone wants to compare it.

LoHa - I still think he's scum. But if he's town, the means to confirm him exist depending on flips, soooo I'm not actually interested in lynching him today.

---

Annoying like the community you find yourself distanced from?

What did you mean then? I find your play to be annoying. You ignore any point I've (as well as others') been trying to make (whether they're good or not).

Huh?

I meant that I was scared that by defending goodmorning, I'd just make people go, "Well, Ether's probably scum with goodmorning anyway, let's keep lynching goodmorning." When I

did

try to help her, it just made things worse for her, although not for that reason.

I'm...not sure what points you're getting at? As far as I know you hadn't actually made any points against me as of that post that you haven't shot down yourself when I asked.

Opportunistic, [...], following the trends of the thread,

You tried to get a few wagons on different people throughout the thread,

Which is it?

I pushed LoHa until he got a wagon on him, then unvoted because I didn't want him lynched yet, and he took a place as the default lynch in everyone's brains for a while. I pushed Sakura until she obvtowned herself, then stopped. (Even if SilverWolf helped snap me into realizing Sakura was finally serious.) Up until the goodmorning wagon the votecount was scattered with everyone on their own little 1-person wagons, and I didn't much like any of those, so...yeah, I tried making my own, and it didn't get traction either. I disagree that no one took the bait, up until this deadline trainwreck. But even if they didn't, why would that be scummy?

I'm not "just active enough to not be suspicious." I have the second highest postcount in the thread, and it'd be first if I hadn't called Sakura out and gotten her out of her shell. I don't understand what you're getting at with why my behavior toward goodmorning is wrong, especially since your wording seems to imply it'd be even worse if I

did

vote her. It's a lose/lose proposition and I'm not sure how I'm supposed to come out of that sort of attack

not

looking worse.

[Ether]

There's an icon to the left of the post number that looks like a scrap of paper. That has the URL you want.

[Ether]

Yeah, SilverWolf's town.

[Ether]

Moosy's stance on LoHa is the main thing that's kept me back. I could be wrong about him, but I don't think he's a good lynch for today. I don't think I can elaborate much.

I don't think Mightymandarin's really been looking for scum at all, he's just coasting on that paranoia. But then I direct something critical his way and he says something paranoid again and all of that just melts. His new characterization of me is contradictory, kind of insulting and most of it is completely wrong, but at least it's more than "she seems logical, THAT DOESN'T MEAN SHE'S NOT SCUM, I BET SHE'S SCUM." Bluh. I think he's town, yeah.

Rest assured that my behavior toward goodmorning has never for a second made my life easier in any way. I think goodmorning/SilverWolf was/is TvT, yeah. I think SilverWolf is someone who gets bothered when people scumread her, even when it doesn't make any political sense for them to do it. (And she's expressed the same misgivings here already.) I don't really think anyone's suspicion toward goodmorning is scummy, exactly, including yours. The reasons for her reads don't really make sense to me either.

I mean Sakura flipping out earlier than that. The exchange that got SilverWolf to unvote her (404) also made me realize that it was probably wrong. I think I was figuring out on my own, but that push helped.

If Mightymandarin thinks my involvement is bad, then that's a double standard, plain and simple.

I'm gonna

unvote; vote: lordj210

. Dunno.

[Ether]

Hi, Moosy.

[Ether]

Bluh.

SilverWolf, you around?

[Ether]

Can I talk you into a meta dive on lordj? His scum game's over too now, even though it hasn't been formally called yet. (Granted, he replaced in and out in five pages, but yeah.) And two town games, not counting the one he got modkilled in--here and here. This is, like, incredibly late to ask and no pressure if you don't want to, I'm just terrible at getting information from games I'm not in that players don't flat-out say.

If goodmorning's still on, that would also be nice.

[Ether]

Searching by author is sort of like ISO, if that helps. (Here and here.)

Lordj, could you elaborate on your thoughts on goodmorning? I don't really get what she has against that post of yours, honestly.

I have a bad feeling.

[Ether]

Yeah. This wasn't your first intent to hammer, she's posted since then.

...The things I said recently about why I don't think goodmorning is scum...they're true, I think they're more likely to come from her as town. But they were never the real reason I was so against her wagon.

At this point I'm pretty sure the real reason was never true in the first place. And I think that my belief that it was has been crippling my play for the better part of a week.

I don't know. I have no idea what I'm thinking right now.

[Ether]

Even though I feel like if she WERE scum, she had so many smarter moves than what she actually did.

Ugh.

[Ether]

Well. That works.

vote: MoosyDoosy

[Ether]

I don't think it can be anyone else. I think it's completely obvious that you, SilverWolf and LoHa are town, and OceanWind's looking pretty good too. And it's pretty hard for me to see Mightymandarin or lordj as scum either.

My views on goodmorning yesterday were nuanced and complex, and also completely wrong.

[Ether]

I think that would be more meaningful if there was any chance whatsoever that it might actually happen.

I'm...kind of surprised by Mightymandarin's vote, I admit.

[Ether]

Speaking as someone who tried to save goodmorning, I get the impression that I tried harder to coordinate with her blatantly in thread than she and her scumbuddy did in private. There was no self-preservation from her, it didn't make any sense.

Which does point to MoosyDoosy, I think, as the other person who didn't even think ahead far enough to get off the LoHa wagon until I handed them a counterwagon on a silver platter.

[Ether]

No counterclaim. Anyone who's either a tracker or jailkeeper should speak up now.

unvote

I'm still in the "lordj or Mightymandarin" camp too. I don't think lordj being the counterwagon really means anything, since goodmorning made no effort to even vote him until the wagon was already in front of her, when he and LoHa were supposedly her top scum reads. And Mightymandarin's vote today still just feels weird to me.

I should reread if there are no counterclaims and I suddenly have a splitting 1 in the afternoon headache, so that's fun.

[Ether]

Well. Since my role's out now too, I have more freedom to explain myself, at least.

I thought her behavior toward LoHa, and just generally under the radar play when she apparently makes top poster a lot as scum, implied she was a cop or doctor. That's why I was so frustrated by her play, but could never give her the all-out defense I wanted to. It's also why I made a point of never wavering on LoHa. I wanted to protect her--not just from the lynch, but also to draw the nightkill if LoHa was scum.

That plan got kind of painful as things went on. I told myself that someone had to do this, that I could attack her on Day 2 if she and I were both still alive and she didn't open the day with a counterclaim, that it'd just be a little longer. The plan was in pieces by the time things got down to the wire. Goodmorning's play when wagoned didn't match up to a power role; she'd have counterclaimed if I'd ever been right. But by then I

fucking wanted that nightkill

.

Admitting to myself that it was already way out of my hands was hard. By the end, I didn't really think lordj was scum, after he made that post about thinking goodmorning was town. My heart wasn't in it at all, and goodmorning was blatantly not a power role, but it still didn't feel that simple. So, uh, that's the saga of why I should never lock myself into plans.

I really hope someone counterclaims.

[Ether]

Yeah. I don't know about her play toward you specifically, but my own stance wound up evolving into "she's scum or a power role, just GET HER THROUGH TODAY and you can find out which one," and then her play at deadline was all wrong for a power role but I'd gotten myself invested and it was dumb.

[Ether]

If there was a deliberate no-kill, then in a vacuum I expect those to come from experienced players being tricky, not first-timers so much. But I find it really hard to see any of the experienced players here as scum, so yeah.

I take back what I was saying about Ether too, I realize my accusations were baseless.

Could you elaborate on how/when you changed your mind?

[Ether]

There's no point worrying about LoHa. If he's scum, then the setup is gaoler/goon/goon. If the scum do have a roleblocker, then MoosyDoosy's skills are useless, because it can block him anyway. So MoosyDoosy should block LoHa every night from here on out, since there's no point blocking anyone else. And if a kill makes it through, then LoHa's confirmed.

I'm leaning lordj right now.

[Ether]

LoHa can be shot if he's town. If he's town, then the scum have a roleblocker, so they've got free reign to shoot whoever they want. All this does is clear LoHa, or turn the game nightless if he's scum. Still the best we can do!

Can I talk you into a meta dive on lordj? His scum game's over too now, even though it hasn't been formally called yet. (Granted, he replaced in and out in five pages, but yeah.) And two town games, not counting the one he got modkilled in--here and here. This is, like, incredibly late to ask and no pressure if you don't want to, I'm just terrible at getting information from games I'm not in that players don't flat-out say.

This is still a thing if anyone's got a meta inclination, by the way.

[Ether]

Moosy. Please stop it with the death wish, we aren't going to lynch you.

We can catch scum with the jk during the night. Why would he jail me?!

No, we can't. If you're town, then the setup is bulletproof/gaoler, and the last surviving scum is a roleblocker. Since Moosy has claimed, it can block him every night and go about its business, so no scum actually wind up getting caught that way. He can only be effective in a setup where the scum have no roleblocker--that is, a setup where you're scum. Targeting you is the only way to get any mileage out of Moosy's role whatsoever, so targeting you is what he is going to do.

[Ether]

http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Matrix6

The Mafia Roleblocker is allowed to

both

submit the nightkill

and

perform his Roleblocker action. In addition, the Roleblocker is stated to resolve before the Jailkeeper. This only matters in the case where the Roleblocker and Jailkeeper target one another, and even in this case only matters if the Roleblocker was also going to submit the kill (the end result being that the kill will not be jailed).

[Ether]

I still think it's probably lordj. In the end I just have more reasons to townread everyone else. I can talk about how Mightymandarin hasn't done much, and how that bothers me, but he still

feels

like he isn't scum.

So...

vote: lordj210

, I guess. Again.

[Ether]

Mightymandarin's behavior toward me is just...something I empathize with. That mode where you're convinced someone is scum, and they aren't giving you any dirt to work with, and they have better things to do than care what you think? The part where he started getting really upset about it? I've been there. I just feel like things like calling me annoying are way more likely to come from him as town who actually cared that I wasn't bothering with him, as opposed to scum who just needed someone to suspect.

It weirded me out because I thought my behavior toward goodmorning would have been like hitting the jackpot for him, but ISOing him, I can see that too.

I don't know if I'm right about lordj, and I'm not really sure what my backup plan is. But yeah.

[Ether]

Eh. It's not something everyone necessarily knows, it matters for a few edge-cases in 33% of the subsetups. Don't fight him, this doesn't matter.

[Ether]

I don't think she masterminded the lordj wagon; she just took what was in front of her. Admittedly I put it there at least partially because I thought maybe she'd actually go for it, but...I still don't think it was a real plan on her part. If they'd hashed it out beforehand and decided that she needed sacrificing, then lordj could have taken a strong stance on her beforehand or something, and he didn't.

I think fakeclaiming just didn't occur to her, or didn't until she felt it was too late.

I do think she was just going through the motions on lordj, so that's kind of incriminating without getting into conspiracy theories about how she really wanted a wagon on him all along. (Although by that point I think she'd just given up anyway.) I still think lordj's the most likely person to be scum, so yeah.

[Ether]

That's what I was saying, yeah.

[Ether]

@Ether How did you like the game so far?

Eh, it's filled with annoying jumps between "everyone is terrible especially me" and "well I suck but this still is in the bag!" and "wtf nothing makes sense" and "well, hell, everything else makes less sense, let's do this." Could be worse, though! Not having to care about you or feel guilty that I'm putting off MoosyDoosy anymore is kind of nice, and goodmorning being scum means I don't have to be mad at her.

Also, I think we are going to win? With luck I won't even have to fight for my life first.

Why?

[Ether]

...

That doesn't make any sense.

[Ether]

I didn't think that

then

, obviously. I thought that when she was sticking to the LoHa wagon when it didn't make any sense. I thought LoHa was likely to be lying--I thought he was scummy, obviously, and claimed power roles are

more

likely to be scum, not less. The fact that it's suboptimal to lynch them doesn't change the fact that about 24% of town players in a Matrix6 game are power roles, and the odds of a caught scumbag on Day 1 claiming a power role is probably a lot higher, or that the bulletproof claim in particular felt like the most stereotypical scumclaim to me. But the fact that she wasn't even bothering to vote someone else made me wonder, "What the hell? Why is she doing that?" and then it got into my head.

(I was also looking out for MoosyDoosy for the same reason, which was less obvious in some ways and more in others--he didn't have the same kind of heat, but on the other hand there really was no good reason at all to defend him from OceanWind's questioning, while I genuinely did see a few things from goodmorning that I felt were townish.)

The thing with you and goodmorning was just an unpleasant coincidence. I still don't really regret it, it got me a townread on you, and I don't feel like my rationale for going for you over her was wrong. But any refusal to vote goodmorning at that point was 100% natural wrongness on my part, unhampered by any weird gambits.

[Ether]

Because she was blatantly getting nowhere, it was completely obvious that it wasn't going to happen and she was still holding on anyway. And her alignment wasn't as obvious at the time as you're making it out to be. There wasn't a wagon on her yet at the time, there were a few scattered votes and no one else had quite decided where to go next yet either.

Even if I don't get into an argument about how my play would have been different if I was scum--

hers

sure as hell would have been if I'd have a line to her.

And...okay? I don't share your experiences, I don't think the same things you do. You don't need to convince me why goodmorning is scum anymore, her role's right there.

[Ether]

Yes, I got that.

[Ether]

This is stupid.

[Ether]

OceanWind coming back softened me on him, and also, I started the lordj wagon expressly as a counterwagon. I

wanted

a wagon I thought other people would join, including goodmorning, who sure as hell wasn't doing anything to help herself. I don't think OceanWind is scum now, either, since he started the goodmorning wagon, and I feel like his behavior toward me would be different if he'd known for sure that goodmorning would be scum.

Obviously I don't think you're scum with goodmorning anymore! It's completely obvious to me that you're town.

Like I

keep saying

, lordj is process of elimination. I have stronger reasons to think everyone else in the game is town, and I've given those reasons, so that leaves him.

[Ether]

Do you think I made up this whole "I thought she was a power role" line after the fact, or consciously decided to fake it the whole way through?

Because I

know

how stupid it looks, and if I'd actually known she'd flip scum I could have been a hell of a lot more graceful about it.

(Or broken down ages ago, but no one likes selfmeta, so let's just keep pretending I'm a mastermind who can fake this. Whatever.)

And if I'd been daytalking with her, she would have at least had the sense to counterclaim.

[Ether]

Moosy thought he was vanilla at the time.

I was willing to consider LoHa being town. (Although it took me a while, since I originally decided to play that way in the first place when I was still pretty sure he was scum. And I do still think that waiting a day before letting a cop or doctor counterclaim would have been the correct play--like Sakura said herself.) I wasn't willing to consider it out loud, because if he

was

scum and I waffled on it, then that would make it obvious that I wasn't a power role myself and would have led to goodmorning being shot instead.

Hamstringing myself like that ended in me hating the game more and more and therefore getting more and more invested in drawing that potential nightkill the more it slipped away from me.

[Ether]

And defending someone when my main reason for believing in their innocence at all was that I was scared you were going to out a power role...I didn't really know how to do that. I didn't have a strong townread on her to work with, I had what I thought were breadcrumbs that I certainly wasn't going to be the one to give up. I tried to reach out to goodmorning, and of course I got nothing.

[Ether]

This isn't really a matter of passive or aggressive...I don't even know what I am anymore, my 2015 play has been more passive but I hope that's just a temporary thing while I get a sense of things. It's about conviction. I'll argue for tells I believe in, but I'm not just going to pull something out of my ass, and I couldn't

give

the real reason.

If you think I could have found something stronger to say as town, why couldn't I also have done that as her scumbuddy? Wouldn't I have had even more incentive to just make random things up then?

[Ether]

...

Bluh.

[Ether]

I'm not, like, a perfect power role seeker, but sometimes things just click into place. Like I said, in this case I had that epiphany when I saw she was still voting LoHa when it was obvious that there was no traction on that wagon, and I remembered other things people had said about her being top poster in her scumgames, while she was so under the radar here. I can give links to games where I take note of that sort of thing as town, if it helps.

[Ether]

...Okay?

[Ether]

3 people were pushing to lynch LoHa-GM, Ether, and Moosy. If I'm wrong, correct me please.

Also, this is late, but I wasn't pushing to lynch LoHa, not exactly. I acknowledged that if he was town then he was potentially confirmable in the future. I was treating him as scum while trying to figure out who would be lynched instead, though.

[Ether]

Sakura.

Sakura are you kidding me.

Sakura if that is your reason for unvoting me than get back on my wagon this instant, this is everything I hate about VCA.

You realize that everyone else on the lordj wagon today was also voting goodmorning, right? If it's so unthinkable that he bussed, then they're off-limits too. And MoosyDoosy and LoHa are power roles, so there aren't a whole lot of people left over. Mightymandarin is literally the only person who I could vote under those constraints. I'm not voting lordj because I think he bussed, but he was late on the wagon and only joined it when it seemed inevitable, so that detail doesn't really give me pause.

OceanWind and SilverWolf aren't voting him for that either. I've technically influenced them in the sense that I convinced them that I'm more likely to be town than he is, and maybe my explanation of my read on Mightymandarin also resonated with SilverWolf, I don't know. Could you try to actually understand where we're coming from before going, "Ether's on this wagon, there's no way any townie would buy this crap?"

Go ahead and reread, I support that, I should really do it too at some point. But ugh.

MoosyDoosy needs to be prodded and/or replaced.

[Ether]

My head hurts and I'm done for the night.

You should talk to Mightymandarin, he'd appreciate it and I've never been sure what to actually say to him. I hope you do a better job of actually reading what he says than you've been doing with me, though.

[Ether]

When I said "talk to him," I meant "talk to him." Just in case that wasn't clear or anything.

[Ether]

unvote

I feel slightly worse about Mightymandarin and slightly better about lordj. Bluh.

(I still stand by what I said to Sakura, though. I hate how her exchange with me was just a bunch of stupid potshots without any real attempt to understand my positions, and while I don't

mind

that she's no longer voting me, the reason she stopped still makes no sense. I think that's a personality thing, I don't think it's scummy, but I don't want to see her do it again to someone else.)

I would ask a question to Ether or Moosy, and they'd ignore me, which to me isn't very fun. So, I would go on stronger until maybe I got a little overzealous and a few days later read back over what I wrote and think "Hm, I'm actually not sure about this."

This isn't an attack, but: you asked me nothing early on. You expressed suspicion of me that boiled down to not trusting my playstyle; there wasn't anything that seemed like it needed a response. (I did consciously go, "Meh, I don't really care what this guy thinks" in my head, so, you know, I'm not actually claiming to be a good person here.)

[Ether]

I don't really think Mightymandarin's suspicion is sincere. I thought it was weird that he lost his nerve and went conciliatory at the same time that the surviving scum lost its line to a daytalking scum IC with advice, and I think now he's just trying what already got him townread once. (If anyone else is actually worried about the details of his case, I can address them.) I'm not gonna call that a scumtell, since his going passive in the first place was what bugged me, but it doesn't really change that I'm not impressed.

It did give me pause that he didn't hedge his bets on lordj, but then the fact that he went and called himself town for doing just that in the exact same post kind of killed that.

The other thing that bugged me is weirder.

That's what I was arguing earlier with Sakura, Ether and Silverwolf (I thought there were 3 scum in the game then).

This is kind of circumstantial, but...Mightymandarin mentioned this back on Day 1, and between the timing--OceanWind had recently claimed not to know that scum had daytalk, and goodmorning had drawn attention to that--and the fact that he'd supposedly pored over the thread over 5 times and had been reading guides and glossaries and stuff, it's hard to believe that it's a real mistake. It felt like he was really hoping one of us would catch this, and wanted to bring it up again just to make absolutely sure we did.

[Ether]

I actually can see a reason that an experienced mafiate would no kill (or target LoHa).

I'm also pretty much completely certain that Sakura and SilverWolf are town, and comfortable writing OceanWind off, too. So I don't think it's actually what happened.

[Ether]

It's a common psychological thing for scum to townread the people that scum read them since they are technically right and as a buddying tactic.

Eh. Not really.

I do think that he's just trying to hit as many notes that have either worked for him before or that he believes should work and hope some of them resonate with us--scumreading me after OceanWind and I expressed that his paranoia was townish and that we were weirded out that he'd stopped, deciding lordj was town and then immediately demanding to be townread for saying this in the exact same post, repeating that he thought there were 3 scum because no one saw it as a townslip the first time--but like I said, the first two wouldn't really bother me on their own. I just think it's too little, too convenient, too late.

[Ether]

Eh, plenty of people thought lordj was town. I was one of the later people to falter on that scumread. (In general the Mightymandarin wagon always had positive feelings toward lordj, while the three of us who voted lordj either lost faith in our townreads on Mightymandarin or never had them in the first place.)

I do wish lordj hadn't vanished after that last post, though. He's due for a prod soon.

Also:

If I were new to forum-mafia and playing as scum, I'd coast by the first day certainly on asking newbie questions here and there

If I did have a person to talk to during the day, would I need to ask the technical-assistance questions I've been asking?

(Although this one's a bit weird, because in the past he's also talked about looking things up outside of the thread, before trying to simultaneously take credit for asking questions and not asking questions here.)

and giving reads with little basis behind them.

@Ether I guess I realize I was going more by coming to a conclusion first and trying to find evidence that fits.

Either he has no self-awareness at all, or he's just being cheeky now. I am kind of tempted to -1 him.

[Ether]

I'm saying that his description of how he would play differently as scum--hiding behind his newbishness and throwing out reads without really bothering to make them make sense--is pretty much exactly what he did here.

Moosy, you caught the thing about you blocking LoHa if we do go to night, right?

[Ether]

Normally you would. (Assuming there's only one scum left; with two scum they can choose which of them is carrying out the kill and is therefore blockable.) But if LoHa is town, then the setup is bulletproof/gaoler/5 vanillas against a goon and a roleblocker. Since you've claimed, the roleblocker knows to block you, so it can go carry out the kill anyway. That means that blocking LoHa--who would be a goon if he's scum, since he wasn't counterclaimed--is the only way to get any mileage out of your role at all.

This guarantees that he's town if a kill goes through tonight. I think it's pretty clear at this point that he's town anyway, but this will guarantee it and it's the only night action you can take that has a chance of working.

[Ether]

I want to hammer more after that. I'd have expected more frustration with how I ignored his case yet again if he'd ever cared about it at all. It's just pathos.

I don't really understand what you just said about lordj?

[Ether]

Meh. That

was

a giving up post.

[Ether]

Mmmmnope. If you really believed that, you wouldn't have needed me to prompt you. It would have made it into that last words post on its own.

OceanWind I like you but I really want to do this.

[Ether]

Your opinion of me as a player isn't terribly important here! The sincerity of your read on me, though...that is. If I'm your top scumread, then I'd

absolutely

have been worth mentioning.

[Ether]

You had nothing to do with why I'm up on the chopping block,

Like, this is pretty clearly an attempt to hurt me, but it's one that only makes sense if you're scum and we're talking about who gets credit for your lynch.

OceanWind, if you're not about to talk me down, I'm going to hammer.

[Ether]

All right, sweet.

vote: Mightymandarin

[Ether]

Eh.

If you're telling the truth, and possibly also if you're not, I do owe you some apologies after the game. Not for the lynch, though. I was second fiddle to anyone else with something interesting to say on that anyway.

[Ether]

Ugh.

I can say that it still has to be lordj, that nobody else makes any sense. That would be true. But it wouldn't change the fact that I've spent all night stressing over endgame scenarios anyway.

[Ether]

If it helps, I can reiterate why I have town reads on all of you. I don't want to actually turn this day into a paranoia fest, I think the main reason I'm scared is just that I know that if there's a tomorrow it'll be hell on me personally.

(Any misgivings, I'd rather not elaborate on unless I absolutely have to. I figure I'm not going anywhere overnight, and I think talking those out now will do more harm than good.)

[Ether]

So...here's where I am.

I'm pretty sure Sakura is town. She was first on the goodmorning lynch and had a ton of chances to back down on it, and actively kept pushing. I found her Day 2 play kind of exasperating, but I think it's a town kind of exasperating from her, like...knowing that she tends to draw more heat when she's town? I wouldn't be surprised if things like her fight with me or weird VCA unvote or getting so caught up in arguing theory with OceanWind that she missed me hammering Mightymandarin are why. Just...a really visible kind of weird that I can totally see being taken the wrong way.

I'm pretty sure SilverWolf is town. My gut had a huge hand in this, this is the read that I've had the longest and questioned the least, but it's still going strong. She wavered on the goodmorning lynch the most, but it still feels pretty sincere to me. Little things like worrying about forcing too many claims (740) cement that. I think she's the experienced player who was the most worried about the no kill--like I said, I actually can see a reason for an experienced player to do it, but I don't think she'd want to draw attention to it if it were

her

reason. Also, I read somewhere that she was more active as town, so I checked her activity rates in recent games, and, uh, at some point this got out of hand and there's going to be a table on it later.

[/Ether]

(Also also, now that I'm thinking about it, goodmorning's fixation on SilverWolf toward the end makes sense as making up an excuse not to be voting lordj instead, back before he had any other votes on him and he was supposedly in her probably-scum section.)

I'm pretty sure OceanWind is town. He was on the goodmorning lynch early, and his behavior toward me around her...as scum it would have made sense to tie me to her, it would have been an easy position to take, but from the start he was consistently more worried about what it'd say if goodmorning flipped town. 793 is just really bold if he's scum.

...

I guess this is like Sakura's bet. I'm not the sort of person who can just sit by knowing that I've been shoehorned into everyone's second place. And I was worried about it coming to that last night, but...

Seeing SilverWolf and Sakura getting paranoid makes me a lot less paranoid, actually. And having typed all that out, I can't really see it not being lordj. I think I'm ready to just go ahead with this lynch whenever the rest of you are. I'm biased--not having to figure out my own alignment doesn't hurt, and for me another night phase would just tell me more about what I'm up against. But yeah. Just...if lordj does flip town, give me a chance?

vote: lordj210

[Ether]

there's going to be a table on it

So the table was less conclusive than I was hoping. Still town, but not the "HOLY SHIT I HAVE DISCOVERED THE SECRET TO READING SILVERWOLF FOREVER" breakthrough I thought it was going to be when I decided that making a table was a good idea.

But still.

[Ether]

Regardless, the elegant thing to do would be to go around and recap by putting the spotlight on each potentially scum player and treat them as probscum. I mean spend a day or two, at least 2-3 posts each to tunnel said player, then switch on to the next.

He did say he was going to do this.

I will not be taking part.

[Ether]

The town hasn't run out of ideas. Maybe you could make a case for doing that tomorrow, but I'm not expecting there to be a tomorrow, and if there is then we can cross that bridge when we come to it. We'd have more information to do it with, too. I think I still wouldn't be interested, though.

The annoying part here is that I still don't actually care about VCAs. I think Sakura is even more obviously town for secondguessing this, and I guess as a tourist from the past maybe I should want to actually see what all the hype is about or whether they're still the same dumb thing they always were. But really I just want to get on with it.

[Ether]

The scumputer is saying that, if you assume that each person has a random 2/9ths chance of being scum, then you can try to determine the probabilities even as people flip. It's flawed logic--in reality, those probabilities don't stay at 2/9ths. They change as people flip. There's a thread about it here.

If I'm getting this right, OceanWind is the scummiest and I'm the towniest. It's mostly weighing me as town because a.) I was alone a wagon with goodmorning for a while, and what would two scum be doing voting together, and b.) I wasn't on the goodmorning wagon, and the scumputer doesn't differentiate between wagons on town and wagons on scum. I can't take this seriously. There are plenty of good reasons to townread me; this isn't one of them.

[Ether]

Generally I think no lynch is overrated.

But really, I was just terrified that LoHa

wasn't

going to get killed overnight. If there was any chance at all that he could have made the endgame decision by himself, I would have fought tooth and nail to just take my chances with my scumdar here in 4-player. In this case...I don't really think it'll help, but I don't have a very strong opinion on it. It probably wouldn't hurt. If we're going to do it either way, then yeah, minimizing discussion is probably the better option.

...Okay.

vote: No Lynch

[Ether]

Okay...

I thought I was going to go for SilverWolf here, but I can't fully convince myself that she could have pulled this off as scum. The more I look into the activity thing...even with Freshwater Frenzy, her activity broke down after the opposing scum were eliminated. I don't know what scum games she was talking about that she was actually active in. Sweet Dreams she did pretty well before her breakdown. I don't know. This isn't actually quite town levels of activity for her either, it's a tiny bit under the least active town game I checked from her, but it's still closer to that than to any scum game I found aside from Sweet Dreams.

I hate her hammer.

This is frustrating because with SilverWolf the things that scare me are what's there, and with OceanWind it's what isn't. His positions on Day 1 and 2 are almost all flat-out better than hers, but he's an unknown and his low posting rate spooks me and I'm kind of expecting this to just boil down to what I wind up concluding with SilverWolf more than anything he himself has done.

Both of you have offsite scum games, right? Could you link to them?

SilverWolf, could you elaborate on the conclusion you drew when you metaed goodmorning back in 202?

[Ether]

I hate your hammer because it was a way of shutting Sakura down immediately after she came out with her attack on you.

I also distrust it for reasons specific to you:

I was told by someone awhile ago, that patience is the key to winning as scum-I need to work on that some. I see L-1 in Lylo-I hammer L-1 in Lylo. LOL

Also, fun fact, I think I've only hammered someone one time as town but several times as scum.

I'm not sure how general that first quote is. Hammering people at -1 in LyLo as scum just seems like a no-brainer, it's not a matter of patience. The second one definitely seems relevant either way, though. I don't have any problems with the fact that you hammered goodmorning, the deadline was close, you wanted to sleep, that's totally understandable. But the lordj hammer felt premature, and with those quotes in mind, my guess is that they come from a mindset that's more likely to be scum for you.

OceanWind: I mean a.) getting onto the goodmorning wagon when you did and sticking with it, and b.) townreading me and Mightymandarin at points where SilverWolf consistently kept her options open.

Do you have anything at the standard Mafiascum pace?

[Ether]

which is exactly what I expected scum to do out of the gate.

Who did you expect to die?

[Ether]

Could you elaborate on what it was that goodmorning had done that struck you as townish after doing that meta dive?

Freshwater Frenzy broke down for you when the game stopped being multiball, and in 180 you didn't even know who your scumteam was. They aren't evidence that you could have pulled something comparable here as scum.

Could you please just settle down and let me try to figure out your goddamn alignment without freaking out about it?

I, um...honestly, I am COMPLETELY incompetent as scum, and I don't actually have any LyLo scumgames outside of my first game on the site as a pretentious 16 year old. I'm both bad at it, and I don't draw it enough to correct that--that 2009 game I keep mentioning is 16 games back now. This is my most recent LyLo as town. I'm, uh, not really used to actually being in danger, between my old reputation as a walking trust tell, and not generally screwing things up as badly as the goodmorning thing.

[Ether]

his low posting rate spooks me and I'm kind of expecting this to just boil down to what I wind up concluding with SilverWolf more than anything he himself has done.

With regard to posting rate, my style is to condense several points into a single post unless I'm having a real time interaction with someone. I'm not the spammy type alignment regardless.

Why are you not attempting to read what I actually did? Despite having a low number of posts, I don't think the content I've produced is low and I've condensed into few posts what it takes others many posts.

I am trying. I have tried, and I townread you, and one of my reads is wrong. At this point, I think my impression of you is mostly stable, while my read of SilverWolf won't stop flipping wildly between "there is no way in hell that she's even physically capable of playing this game as scum" and "argh but what if she is, this was bad." I think it'll probably be more effective to try to reach a firmer conclusion on SilverWolf, one way or another, than to focus on you directly,

because

I know I have the sort of scumdar that gets spooked by lower posting rates.

With that said, could you link to towngames too?

---

I've caught up. My scumreads are GoodMorning and MoosyDoosy. I'll go with GoodMorning because I could see her either defending a partner or whiteknighting a townie and there was also a moment early on in the game where MoosyDoosy looked like he was trying to figure things out but I found no reason to think GoodMorning is town. Lordj is another player that I think could be scum if it isn't GoodMorning or MoosyDoosy as there are several problems I have with his posts.

UNVOTE: SilverWolf
VOTE: GoodMorning

@ Silver (737), don't abandon me now. I hate the way the Lordj wagon popped up from nowhere the minute you suggested that you'd move off of it and Moosy showed up out of the woodworks to push it. I didn't have a strong townread on Lordj but I'm feeling more confident that it's actually GoodMorning and Moosy as scum together. GoodMorning's last post didn't make me second guess my read. She's mostly dodging the questions I asked and her non-answers are likely the result of her not having good reasons and making them up afterwards.

Sakura Hana, Ether and SilverWolf are obviously town. Scum don't spend this much effort agonizing over a lynch. MightMandarin is town for reasons I posted earlier.

I'm townreading MightyMandarin independent of GoodMorning. I can't see Ether as a logical GoodMorning partner. She looks bad and says all the wrong things to the point I almost believe she wouldn't have said them if she was scum.

That leaves lordj, MightyMandarin, and Ether.

IMO, lordj lynch now, if that doesn't end it, jail LoHa, then tomorrow we look at MightyMandarin or Ether.

And that's just been my impression of your stance that whole day. (That's Day 2-specific.)

I am answering this because you asked. My brain is currently flipped to town on you again.

I'm frustrated that no one has actually gone back, looked at the exact nature of the ways I was contorting myself around goodmorning and MoosyDoosy, and figured out that I'm telling the truth about my read on her. Do you think I schemed out a way to defend goodmorning as ineffectively as possible? Do you think I told her not to counterclaim just so I could make this argument after days of having a sword over my head? Do you somehow believe that I made it up after the fact and it fit perfectly?

[Ether]

I would recommend reading my scumgames anyway. They're old, but they're still just a huge contrast from my play this game in every way, and with no practice in between, I really don't think I could have made the leap to the way I'm currently playing. I mean, it's a crappy towngame, don't get me wrong, but it's still a lot more thought and effort and endurance and generally keeping it together than I think I could have managed as scum.

I mean. It would be even better if you'd take my word for that. I was kind of hoping not to lean on that reputation too much. But if it's a choice between reading them and scumreading me, yeah, read them.

[Ether]

If I were scum with goodmorning, I would have

broken down and started crying in the corner of our little newbie thread

. That's my best guess for how I would play as scum, based on past experiences, and I don't know what you're expecting me to say here. I can talk about a hypothetical mastermind who posts exactly like I do and has an accurate model of my towngame in her brain at all times, but let's not kid ourselves.

Strategically, yeah, I agree that bussing scumbuddies on Day 1 of a Matrix6 game is a bad idea. It still happened here...and really, goodmorning's behavior does point to that. I cared more about saving her skin than she did.

I saw Sakura's death coming, honestly. It made sense from SilverWolf, and it was the most likely thing to come from you, although there was a low but tantalizing chance you'd have killed me instead.

(I actually didn't remember SilverWolf's suspicion of you and got confused when she said it, and then saw you'd mentioned it too and had to check back.)

I was pretty certain Sakura was town by that point. My Sakura-SilverWolf-you town reads list on Day 3 wasn't originally intended to be in order, but typing it cemented my town read on Sakura for good, and at the same time made me waver on SilverWolf a little when I realized I couldn't articulate it as well as I thought I could.

You were my backup guess during pretty much all of Day 3. After Sakura's analysis and SilverWolf's hammer I started panicking about her, because your stance on goodmorning really did look much better. I think around this time was also when I found Sweet Dreams, her only scumgame that really worries me, and which I should probably actually read instead of just skim her ISO for. That was during Night 3.

For Night 4 I pretty much ignored the game and stayed with suspecting SilverWolf until a few hours before the thread opened, at which point I randomly freaked out and decided my reads were all wrong again and shitshitshit maybe SilverWolf was town.

852 and 910 both start exchanges where I talk about what was going through my head during the goodmorning lynch. (The 910 one goes on through the next page.)

[Ether]

I did start the lordj counterwagon, and it was dumb, and I'm still town. I talked a lot about the reasons I did it back around 852 and 910. Seriously,

please

reread that wagon with those posts in mind, because

every single thing I did

over those six days was twisted around that train of thought.

The two of you have said that you'd have told goodmorning to counterclaim. I wrapped my whole playstyle around trying to protect her as a potential power role. That possibility was on my mind every single moment, and my posts are proof of that. I don't think it's equivalent.

I've been everyone's backup plan since Day 2. SilverWolf can stress about Sakura's last-minute case, OceanWind can stress over some offhand comment SilverWolf made in the middle of Day 3, but I've been dealing with it longer than both of you put together, and I'm both of your top suspicions now. I'm a better patsy than either of you. Killing me would have been a huge waste.

I'm going to back up for a moment.

It's safe at this point to assume that this is what happened on Night 1: from the scumteam's perspective, they knew as soon as LoHa claimed what the setup was, and that there was a gaoler out there. If they were confident they weren't getting targeted, or just felt it was worth the risk, no killing/shooting LoHa would have lured it out and gotten its target lynched instead of confirmed. So Moosy forgetting his role actually worked out in our favor here.

To be honest I had this figured out since maybe the first or second time that someone went "Wait. Is it possible the scum no killed on purpose?" back on Day 2 and then kept sitting on it forever because I couldn't see any of you as scum, and figured it would incriminate me and accomplish absolutely nothing else. Then at some point late in the day it stopped feeling right to stay quiet every single time a person brought it up, and that was the point that everyone randomly stopped worrying about it.

I think this was thought out during Day 1. Whatever else happened, I think the scumteam already had a plan to eliminate both power roles as threats and prevent anyone else from getting cleared. Their goal would have been to survive two more lynches after Day 2 with no more role-based upsets.

[Ether]

To be clear, the hammer thing is less about hammers from you always being scummy, and more of a mindset thing, like...not wanting to bring things to a premature end as town, while not worrying about that so much as scum. I didn't read all of those games and note down when you hammered, I really was just extrapolating from your comment in the postgame of Newbie 1642.

A lot of the below is gonna be kind of musing to myself. Like, I already know for a fact that goodmorning was bussed, it is 100% safe for me to assume that that's a thing that happened and try to make sense of things from there. This is more stream of consciousness than a case, although I did try to organize it a little.

I think this was thought out during Day 1. Whatever else happened, I think the scumteam already had a plan to eliminate both power roles as threats and prevent anyone else from getting cleared. Their goal would have been to survive two more lynches after Day 2 with no more role-based upsets.

This would only have worked with goodmorning dead.

Assuming OceanWind is scum means assuming that he always had this up his sleeve, or at least that he did very soon after his initial vote, in time to oppose the lordj wagon later. I can't see it any other way. And I can see it, and bussing goodmorning wasn't completely out of the blue. He had the second vote on her, but there was momentum before that. There are

reasons

that bussing is bad play, it's not just an arbitrary taboo, and knowing through the Matrix6 structure that he wouldn't have to deal with power roles takes the biggest reason away.

That's in general. He could still be someone who strongly opposes bussing. But I don't think he's made much of a case for being that sort of person.

In the Blitz game, I fake-claimed Masons with one of my partners and dug him out of a hole when he was strongly accused D1.

That quote is technically true, but it's dishonest. His post about the blitz game implies that he fakeclaimed masons to help his partner, but the implications here are different from what actually happened.

Here's his scum PT for the blitz game. Note that I haven't actually read the game thread itself, or even looked all that closely into his ISO in it yet.

This is a risky as hell play but the game has fairly short deadlines so I'd love to do this. Everyone's first instinct will be that "scum won't do it."

Okay, as a heads up, I'm never outing you as my mason partner in the thread.

If you think the odds are that I won't be lynched, then you claim to be my mason partner. If you think I'm going down anyways, just cut your losses and don't say anything. There is still a possibility for you and Ranger to win a 5 way LYLO by lynching Kop after me.

We claimed mason for fun. I noted in the pt that claiming VT would give the higher chance of a win.

So I don't think this it was ever really a noble power of friendship kind of thing. What I'm getting from this isn't that he's necessarily protective of scumbuddies, what I'm getting is that he's not afraid of making big plays as scum, and won't show me exactly what other cards he has up his sleeve. I can understand not wanting to link to his home forum, he's not a bad person for refusing, but...seriously. I kind of need it.

I still feel like goodmorning had a deathwish. I can't get over the fact that she didn't have the sense to move her vote off of LoHa. (Her unvote and revote happened before OceanWind ever came back, though. It's a pattern that went on and on from there, but it is something that started before his vote.)

SilverWolf wavering on goodmorning implies that that would have been more of a backup plan for her as scum. If it was her, it was a more spontaneous thing. But she was on goodmorning earlier, too.

It's easier to see OceanWind coming up with the no kill thing than SilverWolf. I don't know how much easier. I do think it's meaningful that SilverWolf kept asking about it and OceanWind kept ignoring it when other people asked. I think some of this might be confirmation bias.

I think I have a

ton

of confirmation bias by now. Yesterday there was a voice in the back of my head going, "You already know you're going to screw this up either way. You might as well just vote SilverWolf so you can share the blame with the dead PT. This doesn't have to be the second time you protected a scumbag that every other player managed to get the memo on, you're just going to embarrass yourself." Even that's quiet now.

...

I think the lines are already drawn. I don't think OceanWind is trying very hard to read me either. I want to rip this bandaid off.

If he wants me to try harder to read him first, I

need

his offsite games.

[Ether]

Link to your offsite games, please. If you're not going to give me more to read you with, I don't want to draw this out. I think it's clear that both of us have already made our minds up.

Well, my theory for why GM kept on LoHa was because:

a) She had the support of you and Moosy at least and was hoping to get a PR lynched OR

b) She didn't want to move her vote around or change her reads because she knew she was going to go down anyway.

Why is b possible? Because I've done that as scum when I know I'm screwed and still have buddies alive. I'll stop giving reads, votepark one person, and basically stop fighting. To keep anything I do from being used against anyone else after I flip. I have and will self hammer in this situation also which she didn't do.

Knowing she was going down would make sense as to why GM wasn't fighting to stay alive, claiming, or moving her vote. She lashed out at me sure, but I don't think she liked how I was pushing her. I think she just got annoyed with me in general there and it was genuine. I'll be super curious to see post game if I'm right or she faked that. If she faked it, she did a good job. Maybe she was trying to paint me as a partner she was annoyed with for bussing. idk but it'd be pretty clever scum play if she was going that route.

I can see that better than what I was saying.

It definitely doesn't make sense that OceanWind could just make like two posts with content, have his computer break, and then come back and go to his scum IC buddy and be like, "Okay, I'm going to bus you now and get ALL THE TOWNCRED" and have her be like "Okay that is a sweet master plan let's do it," not if that's the whole story on its own.

I don't know.

[Ether]

That was more me secondguessing what was really going on behind the scenes back then.

But okay. I'm pretty sure you're hiding them for a reason at this point. Let's go.

vote: OceanWind

[Ether]

Okay. Okay.

Good.

[Ether]

He's competent scum, and I'm not. Even if I were, I can't imagine faking the knots I tied myself into at that deadline. There are some things that no scum would ever be stupid enough to do.

I'm open about my history, he's not, and he has

very clear things to hide

. Ask him for the link.

[Ether]

I'm saying that your home forum can probably shed a lot more light on what your bussing habits really are, because they're definitely more nuanced than you're making them out to be. Saying that you're withholding a relevant part of your meta is nothing like claiming you lied about your situation offline.

I have like four scumgames in total, and I flaked from two, broke down upon being voted in a third on two different occasions, and the last was my first game on the site. Seriously, I'm physically incapable of drawing scum, I do not actually have experience in that department. It's weird, but you can look it up.

Being incredibly transparent as town, though?

That

I can do. I've only been mislynched once.

For the record, I don't actually have anything against OceanWind's vote on Day 3. I do, however, think that he spent that entire day coasting while the rest of us actually worried and secondguessed things and took leaps of faith.

Sakura Hana wasn't the only person who suspected me at some point in the game. I was always going to be in for a fight, and killing me would have lost him his easiest mislynch.

[Ether]

The bottom line is, there are valid reasons that people don't bus, and there are valid reasons that they do. He could have probably kept goodmorning alive, but not doing it wouldn't have sunk him--as we've seen here.

I don't know the exact reason that he chose to bus her. I don't think we

can

know. It was an initiative that he chose to take when he didn't have to do it. But scum can do that too, and coming from a guy who fakeclaims masons and quickhammers people he thinks are power roles before they can claim, you shouldn't put it past him.

I do think you'll have better luck trying to understand me than trying to understand him--it's what I wound up doing with you.

[Ether]

Yes,

it's important. I don't have the attention span or the kind of scumdar that will let me sit through a whole game, but it can still take objective facts down just fine. I can look through people's quicktopics/PTs as scum, I can note their activity and run calculations on it, I can look for things other people have said about them and what they've said about themselves. It's what I did with you. If OceanWind is really so anti-bussing, I can find that.

But he's lying. He's initiated busses before, and he did it here.

If you read 771, take special note of the timestamps. The game actively threw off my sleep schedule because I hated posting in it so much. Here's my quicktopic for it, since I couldn't find that in the thread.

[Ether]

Actually, I was talking about townreading Moosy, not goodmorning.