Micro 624: Grey Flag Nightless (Game Over)

[Infinity 324]

Yeah, go ahead

[callforjudgement]

Ugh, did I somehow manage to get pagebottom twice in a row? :-(

Mod notes, etc., are on the previous page.

[Infinity 324]

gg, thanks for modding cfj!

If anyone has advice for me about who I should've pushed, etc I'm open to it. This game was rather difficult in that regard, and I think that's why I was able to fake confused town on d2 (because I was confused scum).

Java vote was meant to be a distance vote so that I could switch to hoopla at deadline, I didn't expect a wagon on him. I didn't know what else to do at that point since it was hard for me to justify a vote on hoopla over java.

[GuiltyLion]

Thanks for modding CFJ! I had fun, this is a cool setup

Infinity like I said earlier, you played really well. Occasionally you pinged me horrendously but overall I couldn't sell myself on you being scum, and you did a good job making me doubt myself at a critical juncture in LYLO.

While I was stuck on rb for most of the game, I also think he did a great job somewhere around late D1-D2 when I backed off on him because I felt his frustration was genuine. I knew his arguments were always bad but I stopped chasing him and got distracted by karnos, and that was good play by him to take advantage of that.

[Infinity 324]

Thanks! And I agree rb played well too.

Java wasn't really that scummy looking back, I do think I exaggerated some of my points against him Java, I do think it would help if you gave more overall thoughts on the game instead of focusing on small things.

[rb]

I'm fine with releasing the scum thread.

Tbh when Hoopla + Rach both got on Joe, then Infinity started bussing I couldn't NOT hammer.

[callforjudgement]

I was pretty amused at town being lynched at 4:2 with all four townies on their wagon. Just try to VCA that! (Incidentally, for much of the day scum were intentionally planning to get a deadline plurality lynch to go through with three townies on the wagon. This is part of the reason why the day was stalling so much.)

The scum strategy through the end of the game isn't one that I was really expecting, although it worked out. Bussing is kind-of risky in a strategy like this one (although I understand that scum had somewhat backed themselves into a corner so may have been forced into it), so after the successful bus on Javajoe24, I'd have expected scum to spend their towncred fairly quickly (via using it to push lynches on townies). Instead, they tried to hang onto it, which just lead to a lot of confused players and not much happening. That struck me as a bit of a risk, in that scum seemed fairly likely to end up being voted for by chance, and once the lylo 1v1s start various scumteams can come under a lot of scrutiny and various townies can avoid the lynch (e.g. some players were concerned that RachMarie was scummy but nobody was likely to vote for her). One possibility I would have considered as scum would be an early vote by Infinity on whichever townie he felt was most lynchable; I may well have rejected it (you don't normally want to vote first in lylo in the hope that a townie votes for another townie), but it would have had the advantage of protecting rb from being caught in a 1v1, and it probably wouldn't have drawn that much suspicion due to the reads of the town at the time.

[rb]

Also I struggle playing scum because the part of the game I enjoy most is the investigative part, I actually have a hard time being motivated to post as scum.

Oh and yeah Hoopla was terrifying to say the least.

+1 for setup being great.

[rb]

Yeah CFJ this was a frustrating game for both sides I think. I think I got less towncred than I deserved for my Joe hammer, so I didn't try to push hard. But I guess as scum all you have to do is be less-lynchable than the next guy. Infinity was great from start to finish when he took that slot. I was trying to avoid bussing Joe but he just went for it and it was kind of good since it got us a free NK on Hoopla, who I think would have been really hard to get lynched.

[Infinity 324]

What you're saying make sense cfj, but honestly I had a hard time coming up with reasons for anyone as scum. I guess that's my main weakness as scum player: how to justify voting people I would town read as town.

You're right that voting TNE could've been a good strategy, I didn't think through the implications of voting early that much.

[Infinity 324]

Hoopla certainly could've been lynched before the java flip; afterwards it was much harder:

Hopefully with more experience I'll get better at pushing who I want when I want (this is only my 4th scum game ever I believe).

[GuiltyLion]

well luckily rb has boxed himself into a townread on you so we'll see if he "changes his mind"

infinity has as well. I'm telling you, if you're town then at least one of them is scum, if not both.

feHHhHhhh

I agree with you that activity has died, and it's really annoying. I think rb and infinity are largely responsible for this and want to lynch in between them. I think TNE is town, but certain posts of yours make me think town too.

Can. We. Please. Lynch. Rb.
Everyone should go back and look at the rb-java interactions

Sigh

[Infinity 324]

[Hoopla]

Nice game scumbags. I enjoyed this setup and thought it was a nice variation of White Flag. Nightless games are hard for scum as they have no means for eliminating obvtownies, but regular nights can sometimes make it took easy for scum to pick off the best players/most obvtownie players -- so I think this is a nice balance.

For town I thought GuiltyLion played a good game and especially in lylo looked very town (although I had spoilers at this stage so I might be biased there), while all the scum played good to great. On balance, I think a narrow scum win was a fair result as town was relatively inaccurate and honestly had a couple passengers at times. Infinity had a nice air of sincerity about him, but I still would have gone after him on D3 if I survived the night, though it seems like he would have been a hard sell to this town, as nobody was really suspecting him too much.

[Infinity 324]

Yeah I agree guilty played quite well

[callforjudgement]

Something that's an easy mistake to make, either as a player or a moderator, is that 3:2 lylo is rarely as hopeless for scum as it looks. Scum only lose if all three townies agree to lynch the same scum member, so they have three chances to make town make a mistake and lose as a result.

So although I was expecting a town win after rb got voted, I hadn't taken into account that just because town were doing better than average in the lylo, that didn't mean that they were necessarily going to win; average is not enough. (On the other side of things, town were playing a bit below average on the previous days, I think; scum generally did a good job of hiding, and they made sure to get a good amount of towncred in exchange for Javajoe.)

(By the way, I apologise for mostly thinking from the scum point of view when giving postgame/dead-thread advice. As a moderator, you always know who the scumteam are, which tends to put you into a scum mindset because you wouldn't know the scumteam as a townie.)


In other news, thanks to Infinity for replacing in, and thanks to the whole playerlist for sticking with the game and not replacing out. Activity flagged at times, but that's partly because the scumteam were intentionally stalling out days and partly because the players were so active much of the time that the periods in between looked inactive by comparison. I hardly had to hand out any prods this game, which is a nice change from the usual (and frequently, I could look at the activity overview and see a nice column of "0 days 0 hours").

[Hoopla]

Nice modding by the way, callforjudgement.

My only criticism would be to prune your rules a little bit. Rach and TNE didn't even remember the setup, so there's no way they read all those rules. I feel like it's more important to make them succinct and likely to be read than to cover absolutely everything and nobody read them.

[Infinity 324]

Yeah I felt pretty confident the whole way through even though we were close to losing at points.

And yeah, it's impressive how few replacements were needed.

[callforjudgement]

@Hoopla: I'm kind-of conflicted about what to do about the rules. I want to cover everything, in case someone new is playing, but I also appreciate that players tend not to read rules that they're already used to. (Not to mention that I'm frequently having to ask mods rules questions in setups that don't list all the rules. That's actually where my username comes from; a "Call for Judgement" is an official query about the rules in Nomic. Because the rules of Nomic change over the course of the game and are often written in a hurry, there are often loopholes and omissions in them, so Calls for Judgement tend to come up quite a lot.) Thanks for mentioning this is a problem; I was aware that it was a potential issue, but this makes me want to look harder for a solution that will keep everyone happy.

My current theory about the best solution to this is to write up a standard ruleset on the wiki, that explains all my rules and the reasoning behind them in detail, and just link to it in the second post. Meanwhile, any unusual rules, exceptions, setup details and the like would be shown in the second post. That way, experienced players would see only the relevant rules, but new players would still have access to the whole list.

[Infinity 324]

Yeah that's a good idea, and you should emphasize that new players should read through all the rules

[Javajoe24]

Good game guys! I agree that hoopla and GuiltyLion played very well. It's a shame I didn't make it to the end, but I am glad I could help on my way out. I really liked this setup, and it was extremely challenging being semi night less. Also, I don't mind if you release the scum thread.

[callforjudgement]

Mafia thread is now released.

[GuiltyLion]

Yeah one cool/unique thing about this setup is that 3:2 LYLO effectively required you to nail the scumteam instead of being able to get by and onto the next day with just one scumlynch (since scum will absolutely not bus). So even though I knew rb was scum, my misread of Infinity/RachMarie was significant as it impacted my ability to appeal correctly to the other town and moved my argument in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, Infinity was able to ignore giving a hard read on rb because he could make noise about a TNE scumread which didn't fit with scum!rb

[RachMarie]

GL

I really am sorry I let my irritation make me vote the wrong way.

[thenewearth]

ok that makes sense now