Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Game Over!

[callforjudgement]

As usual, much of what's been posted so far isn't alignment-indicative, but there are a few people who are possible to get (weak) reads on, even this early.

The first player who caught my attention was SJReaver (newbie greeting tell in #13), but they've done it before as town (Newbie 2020). #13 still does seem a little off compared to SJReaver's usual first posts, but that might not be surprising for someone who usually replaces. #22 also strikes me as a bit strange, given that it's worded as a statement to nobody in particular. I can understand being angry with NM for quickhammering in a game in a past (he's historically done it quite a lot), but #13 isn't anger, and it isn't engaging with the person in question, or stating a read, or anything. It's just a statement, and I have no idea why it was made.

My biggest concern, though, is with RCEnigma. #36 and #37 look like the sort of posts made by someone who is trying to be hard to read, for whatever reason. #36 is just a straight-up "help a newbie" post; such posts are generally good for the game, but townies tend to answer them as a side thought while doing something else, whereas scum tend to realise "ooh, this is something I can answer without giving anything away" and just answer them, betraying the fact that they aren't really thinking about the game more generally. #37 is an incredibly guarded answer to RQS questions, and the first time I've seen such questions actually produce alignment-indicative answers.

VOTE: RCEnigma

1. What is your mafia experience?
2. What is your play style strength(s)? Weakness(es)? Do you know?
3. In your opinion, what is the most important thing to look for while scumhunting? While townreading?

1. I used to play more than I do nowadays, and mostly in small games (newbies, Micros, and replacing in late to larger games when the playerlist has become smaller). That's primarily due to a lack of time; I think it's important to avoid joining a game if you might have to replace out. That said, I am fairly experienced.
2. I'm good at looking town early on in games (even when I'm scum). However, I sometimes struggle with that later on; if I haven't established myself as locktown (or been nightkilled) within the first few days, people start getting paranoid of me. My scumhunting is somewhat spotty; sometimes i can catch entire scumteams (this happens more often than chance would predict), but sometimes I can be utterly wrong all game. Even when I do catch scum, it is frequently the case that my reason for the scum read can't possibly have been correct (I'm probably right for the wrong reasons more often than I'm right for the right reasons). I'm also a very experienced setup reviewer, and can often establish someone as 100% town because the setup wouldn't otherwise be balanced (so far I have a perfect record with this sort of read, although the conditions for it don't come up all that often).
3. Assuming we're talking about reading people from their dayplay, there isn't a real difference between scumhunting and townhunting; you just look at players and try to read them. In both cases, the best results I've had in terms of conscious reads have been from trying to figure out what someone is thinking and following their thought process (e.g. when Not_Mafia actually pays attention to the game and puts in effort, he's fairly easy to read this way).

Also, VOTE: CFJ, I hope your play matches up to your role and setup design skills

Huh, have you never seen me play? We've been in enough games together, after all; was I the moderator every single time it happened?

[callforjudgement]

Heyyy page 3.

RVS VOTE: callforjudgement as a call for peace

OK, I don't like this. Not specifically because the RVS vote was on me, but because you made an RVS vote in the first place, and labelled it as one.

The whole point of RVS is to get the game started; initially we have no information, a little later we do have information because people have started posting. So the whole point is to do things that people can react to, to do things that let your alignment shine through, to try to pressure people into making mistakes.

If you post an RVS vote labelled as an RVS vote, then:

• People will know that there's no read basis behind your vote, = you aren't trying to get your vote target voted out, = it doesn't apply any pressure;
  
• You're making yourself hard to read, because the post could just as easily be made by any alignment;
  
• In addition to muddying the waters about your alignment, you're neither forming reads nor pushing reads. So you aren't doing any of the three things a townie should be doing.

If you're town, this isn't good enough. We're at page 3, there's already alignment-indicative content being posted (and potentially alignment-indicative lack of content), and this should be fairly obvious to anyone reading the thread (I even pointed it out in my previous post!) Your post would be one thing if you planned to read the thread after making it, and immediately corrected the vote to something real. But you didn't say you were going to do that, and it's been 10 minutes since you posted it (easily enough time to read 54 posts). This isn't good enough. Please read through the thread and try to look for reads, don't try to continue RVS once it's already ended.

[callforjudgement]

Here's some better questions guys:

When you posted these, how were you expecting players to react to them?

[callforjudgement]

(PEDIT: re #58)

Why do you care about whether we're cultured, as opposed to whether we're scum? This is a Mafia game, not a classics exam. (Also, #4 doesn't have a single correct answer; Assyria no longer exists and its capital changed over time.)

There's only one town-indicative reason I can think of to make a post like #44, and if it were the actual reason, I'd expect you to have mentioned it.

As for your previous comment: I know I post a lot of text sometimes, but I'm trying to convince people to play in a more town-sided way. In the current metagame, town wins quite easily when townies put in effort, scum win quite easily when they don't. There are a lot of players out there (some of them in this game; hi Not_Mafia!) who are good players when they put their minds to it, but more commonly just end up passively floating through the game and eventually making everyone impossible to read. I therefore see trying to persuade people to get their brains into gear as important, as I'm unlikely to win otherwise.


PEDIT re #59: I believe we're out of RVS as soon as anyone posts anything that can be scumhunted from. We were out of RVS

before

my two posts, not

because of

them. That's why I didn't cast a random vote, and why I don't expect any more random voting in this game.

[callforjudgement]

sordros, are you reading the entire game? Or only the current page?

[callforjudgement]

Not_Mafia doesn't

always

quickhammer at L-1, but it happens often enough to be a real possibility. (In my experience, when he

does

quickhammer, it normally ends up losing town the game due to the loss of information from that day's dayplay.)

Still, if it's a bad thing for you to get quickhammered at L-1, it'd be a bad thing for anyone else to get quickhammered at L-1 too, right? So if you wanted to warn people about that, I would have expected a typical person to write it more like "Not_Mafia is in the game, so be careful about putting people to L-1, he might well quickhammer". The way you wrote it was unusually self-centred, and there isn't an obvious reason why you'd write it like that (meta/playstyle, perhaps?).

[callforjudgement]

More from me tomorrow

I'll count the second until you bless us with your insight.

There appears to be many UNCULTURED SWINE in this game - nobody so far has answered #4 correctly and I feel dated >:(

Assur or "I don't know." You're making a Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference.

I recommend that you make fewer "fluff" posts like this (i.e. statements that are unlikely to be useful in reading anyone). If you do, try to attach them to a post that contains useful content, or combine them all into a single post.

What happens when someone fluffposts a lot is that the thread ends up expanding quickly and making the useful content harder to find; then people end up dreading having to catch up (and get frustrated at the "thread has been bumped" indicators), stop reading for a while, their eyes glaze over and they stop scumhunting. Then scum win. Reducing the number of posts like that (even if you simply just combine them) makes it easier for players to get into the game, and makes people generally easier to read.

[callforjudgement]

What if I told you I've already caught 2?

If you have caught scum, you may as well tell the rest of us, together with sufficient reasoning to convince us, so that we can vote them out.

COJ why does your sjr read end at 22 and not say... 27 where Sjr had already done exactly what you're scumreading me for?

Because that sort of post is more scummy from someone who has a lower post count. It doesn't matter much if one individual post is being guarded/defensive if the rest of the ISO is giving away information. It does matter if the majority of a player's posts are being cagey and the rest of the ISO isn't there.

After reading through up to page 4 again, what it looks like to me is we were out of RVS once callforjudgment made his serious vote. @ callforjudgment I know you said that we left RVS before you made your post/vote, but I didn’t find that. Can you point to where you saw it move out of RVS?

The game isn't in the random voting stage as soon as there's something non-random to vote about. #31 appears to be the first post which contains a non-random (if weak) read, so it ended there.


VOTE: BananaCucho
This is a stronger read than the read I had on RCEnigma. #107 and #109 (I haven't checked #108 because I have images turned off) are the sort of content that's a) easy to post as either alignment, and b) doesn't help solve the game at all as town. This wouldn't be particularly scummy if it were posted together with more townish posts, but in isolation, it's pretty suspicious.

@SJReaver (#110): Why are you talking about day 1 in the past tense? Are you talking about a different game?

(Also, I have a mild scum read on SJReaver from #115; people are way more likely to joke about being scum when they actually are scum.)

Side note: I have limited access on Mondays and Thursdays, so I probably won't be able to post here for a few hours.

[callforjudgement]

Because that sort of post is more scummy from someone who has a lower post count. It doesn't matter much if one individual post is being guarded/defensive if the rest of the ISO is giving away information. It does matter if the majority of a player's posts are being cagey and the rest of the ISO isn't there.

Don't bullshit a bullshitter. Which posts were SJR giving away information pre post 50? Much less by post 27.

#30? #32? #22? Even #13? These are the posts of someone who talks too much, not the posts of someone who doesn't talk enough.

:D :lol: If your scum kudos, but I don’t think so. You’re a character for real, but I like it. I can’t feel my face when I’m with you.

I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here. Unfortunately, alignments are determined at random, they don't got to the most likeable players; Mafia would be a much easier game otherwise! (In particular, when likeable players draw scum, they often go for the strategy of relying on their likeability to steer votes off themself, because that's typically easier than producing town-indicative content as scum.)

I therefore see trying to persuade people to get their brains into gear as important, as I'm unlikely to win otherwise.

(added bold)

The bolded comment was intended to be a town slip (as was the post pretty much) but I'm here to make the case it's actually NAI.

If judgement is unable to persuade people to get their brains in gear he's unlikely to win as town or mafia, because he's unable to persuade people. He even said "...as

I'm

unlikely to win otherwise", as though he's scum and the cognitive dissonance of saying "town is unlikely to win otherwise" was too great.

The wording was intentional. I typically go for the strategy of wording things to suggest that I'm town regardless of my alignment, because there's very little cost to doing so and it often helps me win. (Actually, the better wording for subconsciously biasing people into thinking you're town in that context is "we're" rather than "I'm", but I was more concerned about accuracy than persuasion and was worried that I wasn't necessarily talking to a townie.) This is the first time I've been called on it, and I agree that it's incorrect to read me as town for the wording here.

I do not, however, think that promoting useful activity is generally a good strategy as scum. All I would have to do in that situation is to not speak up and wait for the game to collapse into apathy and spamposting and fluff. The only reason I might do it would be because I normally do it as town, so I might have to do it to avoid being caught on meta (but I don't expect many players to actually know my meta in this regard, especially as I haven't played much at all recently).

[callforjudgement]

#30? #32? #22? Even #13? These are the posts of someone who talks too much, not the posts of someone who doesn't talk enough.

Doesn't answer my question, but let's go deeper anyway.

Did you read these posts as alignment indicative one way or the other?

As usual, much of what's been posted so far isn't alignment-indicative, but there are a few people who are possible to get (weak) reads on, even this early.

The first player who caught my attention was SJReaver (newbie greeting tell in #13), but they've done it before as town (Newbie 2020). #13 still does seem a little off compared to SJReaver's usual first posts, but that might not be surprising for someone who usually replaces. #22 also strikes me as a bit strange, given that it's worded as a statement to nobody in particular. I can understand being angry with NM for quickhammering in a game in a past (he's historically done it quite a lot), but #13 isn't anger, and it isn't engaging with the person in question, or stating a read, or anything. It's just a statement, and I have no idea why it was made.

[callforjudgement]

(PEDIT: re #161)

Yes.

That's because it's wrong to read posts in isolation and say "this is scummy", "this is townish"; that's a good way to form reads but a bad way to work out whether they're reliable or not.

Instead, you look at what people post, and think "why is this person posting about X? why is this person

not

posting about Y, when they apparently had the time to post about X?" Then you work out what reads a player must have in order for their actions to make sense, and if their apparent reads don't match their stated reads, perhaps there's scum there.

On that note: were your recent posts to me primarily an attempt to read me? An attempt to read SJReaver? Or an attempt to defend yourself?

[callforjudgement]

The game isn't in the random voting stage as soon as there's something non-random to vote about. #31 appears to be the first post which contains a non-random (if weak) read, so it ended there.

Are you sure this is the post you meant to quote? This is not what you saying at all. A player is explaining something to another player. You wanna try again?

I did mean #31. "Bad post".

VOTE: BananaCucho
This is a stronger read than the read I had on RCEnigma. #107 and #109 (I haven't checked #108 because I have images turned off) are the sort of content that's a) easy to post as either alignment, and b) doesn't help solve the game at all as town.

This wouldn't be particularly scummy if it were posted together with more townish posts, but in isolation, it's pretty suspicious.

So what are you saying? Can you elaborate on the bolded?

Optimal strategy for scum would generally be to lurk (and thus give nothing away), except that intentionally lurking tends to look scummy in its own right. So the next best option, and one that happens ridiculously often in practice, is making posts that don't do or mean anything to make it look like you aren't lurking; you get the benefits of lurking and dodge some of the disadvantages.

(Also, I have a mild scum read on SJReaver from #115; people are way more likely to joke about being scum when they actually are scum.)

Really? How so?

I've been maintaining that this is a real tell for years (e.g. here). Actual results have been mixed; I've seen three joke scum claims, and one of them was from scum (from Firebringer here), but one of them was from Not_Mafia (for whom a scumclaim in the first post isn't alignment-indicative because he does it basically every game). So a 50% accuracy rate isn't that bad (given that only about a quarter of players are scum), although there isn't much data from my personal experience. (I can't remember where I first heard about the tell in question.)

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: Not_Mafia

Do it someone. Sheep him. :twisted:

I just got reminded of this while ISOing N_M.

@ItalianoVD, are you townreading N_M?

[callforjudgement]

Optimal strategy for scum would generally be to lurk (and thus give nothing away), except that intentionally lurking tends to look scummy in its own right. So the next best option, and one that happens ridiculously often in practice, is making posts that don't do or mean anything to make it look like you aren't lurking; you get the benefits of lurking and dodge some of the disadvantages.

Okay. And what about the other side of the coin? It’s not from scum but from the play style of said player?

If there were a player who posted meaningless posts in quantity (and nothing else), then regardless of their alignment they would be impossible to read.

That nearly always isn't the case in practice, though, even with respect to players who have a spammy playstyle. One of the major differences between townies and scum is that townies tend to be curious who the scum are (scum already know). That curiosity normally comes out eventually in a player's posting, if it's there; it's hard to stick entirely to spamposting when a couple of well-aimed questions might clear up all the uncertainty you have about the gamestate.

I've been maintaining that this is a real tell for years (e.g. here). Actual results have been mixed; I've seen three joke scum claims, and one of them was from scum (from Firebringer here), but one of them was from Not_Mafia (for whom a scumclaim in the first post isn't alignment-indicative because he does it basically every game). So a 50% accuracy rate isn't that bad (given that only about a quarter of players are scum), although there isn't much data from my personal experience. (I can't remember where I first heard about the tell in question.)

I disagree. I’ve seen it happen more from villagers and village power role players than from scum, not to say scum doesn’t do it, but I’ve seen it more the other way. (not on this site, but the other site I am a part of).

But in this case of SJReaver, a newb: 1) Do you really feel she would be more likely to do it and 2) Do you think her scum team would comfortably allow her to do it?

Re: 1), I normally treat all newbies the same until I have evidence otherwise (at which point they're arguably no longer new). Normally, this sort of tell works better on newbies because they haven't learned what to avoid yet. Re: 2), it's very rare for there to be significant coordination among the scumteam early in day 1; I think it's more common for players to go and unilaterally do something stupid than it is to ask their scumteam for permission to do something stupid.

VOTE: Not_Mafia

Do it someone. Sheep him. :twisted:

I just got reminded of this while ISOing N_M.

@ItalianoVD, are you townreading N_M?

I don’t know really. Not_mafia’s reputation precedes him from what I’ve hear. :) I really wanted to see who would jump on him. That no one did, I’m not sure what to think. Do you have a better read and/or feel of him?

I was trying to figure out why you'd made that post, in a situation where your vote was free/unanchored (your previous vote was an RVS vote that obviously wasn't a serious read), without moving your vote yourself. It wasn't any good for pressuring N_M, which made me wonder if you'd picked up a townread somehow. It makes sense that you were using it to read the other players, though.

As for your second question, I have some experience with N_M. He tends not to take games very seriously, but can be a good player when he does; and he's often hard to read (especially early) but it's not always impossible. On the flip side of that, he also has an unfortunate tendency to get to extreme prod-dodge range and post just enough to avoid replacement (which can be frustrating in situations where you need content from his slot in particular), although this game's fast prod timers should help to avoid that. I think #105 and possibly #28 are more indicative of town N_M, but there isn't a lot of evidence so far (the other posts could easily come from either town or scum N_M).

[callforjudgement]

Huh? At least nowadays, most of the time town wins, the groundwork was laid on day 1. An effective town will frequently arrange the gamestate such that scum have to play quite aggressively/unnaturally in order to halt a wagon on their own. In that situation, either scum bus and you get your day 1 caught scum, or else they don't bus and town notices and the scum start getting wiped out over the course of days 2-4. Then when you have a few flips, you can look back at day 1 and figure out the alignment of the player who came second in the vote, and that's often enough to solve the game from there.

This technique does rather need players to converge around a few wagons, though; this sort of reasoning is easiest when there's been genuine pressure on a few slots over the course of day 1. Right now, there are enough players who haven't had much chance to post that the votes are all over the place, and so there isn't much in terms of reaction to the gamestate to read. I think many experienced players have a habit of overstating the strength of their reads early on day 1 in order to try to get out of that aimless phase and into the useful "is this wagon going somewhere?" phase of Day 1, although that isn't really my style.

[callforjudgement]

I just noticed that sordros posted #117. I'd assumed that sordros had simply flaked / not had Internet access, but instead he decided to make a response that was fine in its own right, but ignored everything else that was going on in the game.

So far, sordros hasn't expressed a single read, hasn't posted anything directly related to the game, and hasn't answered my question in #72 (posted less than 2 minutes after sordros' last post). Meanwhile, sordros

has

been answering pretty much all the fluff questions available. I

really

don't like that combination.

(sordros does seem to be a lurker, but in the towngames I checked, sordros's few posts were generally stating reads and interacting with other players, rather than fluff. That said, sordros has no recent games, I had to look back over 5 years.)

VOTE: sordros

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: BananaCucho
This is a stronger read than the read I had on RCEnigma. #107 and #109 (I haven't checked #108 because I have images turned off) are the sort of content that's a) easy to post as either alignment, and b) doesn't help solve the game at all as town. This wouldn't be particularly scummy if it were posted together with more townish posts, but in isolation, it's pretty suspicious.

@SJReaver (#110): Why are you talking about day 1 in the past tense? Are you talking about a different game?

(Also, I have a mild scum read on SJReaver from #115; people are way more likely to joke about being scum when they actually are scum.)

Side note: I have limited access on Mondays and Thursdays, so I probably won't be able to post here for a few hours.

Citation needed.

The complete lack of comment on my Italiano case is interesting here. You’ve combed through at least a few posts from my previous games to see if I do ‘newbie greetings’ but when I point out how Italian’s posts are already quite different from his norm, you ignore that information and have a strong enough scumlean on Banana to vote for him.

I don't normally use meta to form reads on people, but rather to avoid making reads that are valid in general but invalid for one particular player.

Also, you have an Italiano case? Is it #90/#91/#92? I guess that makes sense for the point in the game at which it was made, although Italiano's posting has improved somewhat since, and I don't see #89 as suspicious (it makes sense to tell people if you're going to have to drop offline having just posted a burst of posts in the past few minutes; and if someone makes such a post without having posted immediately beforehand, in my experience this usually indicates issues with real life or time or attitude towards the concept of Mafia as a whole. rather than anything related to the player's alignment).

Very strong

FoS on Nosferatu for the active lurking and silent BW in the posts above + immediate attempt to create a counter BW from the players below:

I really hate this post. For one thing, if Italiano/Walter/Banana are creating a counterwagon, what is it a counterwagon to? You were the only vote on Nosferatu at the time of the post, so it can't be the Nosferatu wagon (not to mention, that there are too many players there for this to be a case of "Nosferatu's scum whose buddies are saving them"). As far as I can tell, the most logical view of the wagon on you as a counterwagon is if it's a counterwagon to Walter.(there are four votes there at the moment – although some of them were posted after the wagon on you started – and some players expressed suspicion of Walter without a vote). But if that were the case, and Nosferatu were scum, I would expect (and would expect you to expect) that Nosferatu would be voting for you, not Walter.

Actually, if you look at the votes on Walter, #191/#238/#244/#256, this is a surprising lack of reasoning for what is, for this game, a large wagon (there are more players scumreading Walter than there are votes there, e.g. #209/#213 from Raya, and #217 from Banana feels a bit like a scumread). The first vote by Gamma is fair enough – it's the first vote, and has enough logic behind it to make for a first vote – but the others are less explained and look more like players joining the wagon because they want to join the wagon, rather than based on a read on Walter specifically. Some of that will be town wagoning in order to get reactions, but I think it's likely (especially in a daytalk setup) that some of those votes are scum joining the wagon because they've decided that this is a wagon worthwhile for scum to push (either to get a townie eliminated, or to do some distancing in the hope that the wagon collapses). RCEnigma is probably the most likely scum on the Walter wagon (#256 looks a lot like a post-justification of "why this wagon, not that one?"), although this isn't all that strong a tell.

That said, my view of this situation is more that there's something going on that I don't understand, than that any particular player is necessarily scum. #257, in particular, doesn't fit well into a "there are two competing wagons, one town-driven on scum, one scum-driven on town" theory. If anyone can come up with a coherent view of how this particular gamestate came about, I'd be interested to hear it; it would likely help me set my own thoughts in order.

[callforjudgement]

(And #266, which Italiano posted while I was writing that, says pretty much the same thing in using many fewer words. This makes me suspect that Italiano is town, having come to the same conclusion as me independently from the same evidence.)

[callforjudgement]

@Frogsterking: Do you view Nosferatu as significantly scummier than sordros? If so, what's the difference between the two slots?

[callforjudgement]

I think Frog is probably town

also moving my vote somewhere more useful
VOTE: Walter

why do you think its more useful there???

@Nosferatu: Do you think Walter is scum? If so, why do you think Raya shouldn't think Walter is scum?

[callforjudgement]

@Nosferatu: Do you think Walter is scum? If so, why do you think Raya shouldn't think Walter is scum?

no, someone literally asked why the wagon existed and i said that it was literally like trolling idk why anyone would join the wagon after that exchange

In that case, why is your vote still on that wagon?

[callforjudgement]

I would have thought "this wagon is the largest and growing and I don't think it's on scum" would be a pressing reason to switch off. This is also a gamestate in which your vote might be particularly helpful elsewhere; it's definitely a case of too many scummy people rather than too few, and wagons anywhere are having trouble forming, with the votes spread all over the place. So I'd expect you, if town, to have a stronger scumread elsewhere (i.e. someone who's scummier than "I don't think this person is scum"). The whole reason that unvoting is usually bad is that it makes you harder to read and means your vote is of no use for pressuring people – but voting a townlean is bad for exactly the same reasons!

[callforjudgement]

callforjudgement continues their focus on optimal play. I suspect their desire to lecture people over how they ought to play is a NAI personality trait.

I do it to make it possible to distinguish between players who play in an anti-town way out of ignorance and players who play in an anti-town way out of choice. It isn't intended to read me, so much as to read other players.

On that note, VOTE: Nosferatu. I was hoping to sort Nosferatu by seeing where their vote moved after I pointed out that it wasn't doing anything useful, but Nosferatu seems happy to be intentionally hard to read and to make it hard for it to scumhunt other players, even after I explained the consequences of those actions.

I think Frogster's initial case on Nosferatu is weak (but seems to be sincere), but Nosferatu's reaction to it has been pretty telling in its own right.

[callforjudgement]

Only a quick post before bed, will post properly tomorrow, but i think mynaim this game is to make it last long enough that mod runs out of images of bricks

The length of a game normally depends on the length of day 1. In a way, although it would be nice to have a four week day 1, with everyone active and trying out lots of different wagons and getting lots of useful information for future days, it generally doesn't work out like that in practice. People get bored, things go nowhere, you need flips to keep activity up and stop people flaking. So wanting a long game frequently turns out to be a bad thing for town, in practice. (Also worth noting: newbie queue win rates going way up when the deadlines were reduced.)

[callforjudgement]

I think my problem with this game is all of the surface level accusations that are surely to go nowhere.

It's hard to know that an accusation will go nowhere until you make it. Trying it to see what happens tends to produce more useful results than not trying it and getting no information as a result. Even if it doesn't help people read the accused player, it may help them read the player making the accusation.

Nos I think you reducing Frogs case down to unintelligible babble is disingenuous at best. But the strong reaction to a weak case concerning.

This is a good example of a flimsy accusation leading to useful results!

[callforjudgement]

That no one has seriously scum read me or pushed my slot is a touch disappointing.

You did get results from this, even if not the ones you expected:

Bad post Reaver click on the link for normal games, and to answer since this is a mini only one town and one mafia faction.
There is a list of roles on the wiki for normal games.

is that an actual claim sj in 216?

(For reference, the claim in #216 was Paranoid Gun Owner, a role that is not Normal according to the Normal Game definition, thus it can't be in the setup.)

Apparently Walter, despite knowing that Normals only allow a specific list of roles, decided to rolefish in response to your claim rather than checking it. (Part of the reason there was little response to your claim is likely related to the fact that it's a bad idea to discuss roles too much in a Normal, especially early on; it tends to give scum hints as to where the power roles are, and most Normals become very scumsided if you can't keep the power roles hidden. In my previous Normal, scum won, and a major factor in this was having too many roleclaims on D1. So gaining any results at all were something of a surprise.)

I'm pointing this out in the hope that the information is useful for whatever test you were running.

[callforjudgement]

it is anti-town wincon to bleed town d1 and you know it cfg

I can parse this sentence fragment about three different ways, none of which make any sense. Are you saying that you're acting scummy because you think looking town is anti-town? That you think I'm town, but playing badly because I'm trying too hard to be townread? That you think I'm scum because I look town? (Why do you even think that I look town?)

[callforjudgement]

I find it very unfair to expect everyone who plays Normals to be 100% up to speed on what is and isn’t allowed in them. I had a game where I thought I knew my stuff but I made a fatal error that lost the game for town. No one’s perfect.

I don't expect everyone to be up to speed on what's allowed in a Normal. I'm not scumreading Walter for that (and am not strongly scumreading him for anything).

I did, however, expect SJReaver not to know it, and they're unlikely to get viable reads from their actions otherwise. So it was worth pointing this out purely for SJReaver's sake.

I also think it's a little strange that a player would point someone else to the Normal Game rules without actually reading them, although it's understandable. If you're thinking about jumping in to answer a fully setup-based / mechanical question, wouldn't it be more townsided to leave the explanation to someone who had a better understanding of it? (Or to put it another way, #226 isn't scummy but #31 might be.) It isn't a strong tell, though.

[callforjudgement]

that is what im saying, im not hinting at a pr tho i think its optimal play as town unless you have a negative utility role which i don't

If the townies act like that, the scum will act like that too. Then, how will you ever tell them apart?

If you're thinking in terms of "avoiding the nightkill", that generally isn't a good thing as town. Some townie is going to be nightkilled, after all, and the fewer obvtown players there are, the more of a free choice scum will have to make a kill on someone with good reads / who they expect is a power role / etc. rather than being forced into killing obvtownies to avoid getting caught by the process of elimination.

[callforjudgement]

ik for a fact that you've played with good scumplayers who actively scumhunt and promote pro-town ideas and are totally passable as town by like 80% of this playerbase so that argument falls on its face right there

So what? You don't have to catch all three scum day 1. Do you really think there are likely to be three such players on the scumteam?

There's also a very real cost to scum of playing in too townsided a manner; it gives away a lot of information that's helpful for future days. If a scumteam contains one strong scumhunter who's playing as though they're town, they'll likely end up isolated with nothing but strong townreads on day 4, with their buddies dead, and somehow never nightkilled. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what happened there. In practice, therefore, most scum who are capable of playing in a highly pro-town way simply don't do that. The thing about pro-town play is that, by definition, it tends to make town win.

[callforjudgement]

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what happened there.

In practice, this does not occur

Of course not. Scum don't play that pro-town, even if they're capable of it, because it would be bad strategy for them. Town do play that pro-town, sometimes, and it usually wins them the game. Why would you think that playing like that would be a

bad

thing for a townie?

[callforjudgement]

In general, I'm happy if I get nightkilled night 1. Maybe I shouldn't be, because sometimes the town ends up losing to something I could have prevented, but I don't think my reads are that much better than the average townie's that I should be playing for self-preservation.

[callforjudgement]

im so over this bullshit read my town pm and weep

VOTE: nosferatu

if ur on this wagon you suck at this game

it is anti-town wincon to bleed town d1 and you know it cfg, and that bullshit abt consequences of being on whats basically an rvs wagon is ridiculous

those actions.

I think Frogster's initial case on Nosferatu is weak (but seems to be sincere), but Nosferatu's reaction to it has been pretty telling in its own right.

which bit didn't you like?

i dont like unvoting; i dont see a pressing reason to switch off, etc

this I amfine with for example.
note that you are buddying up with frogster and using their logic/wagon to justify your own vote

thats not what buddying means bro im not pocketing him by telling him his case is shit or endearing myself to him in any fucking way

just send me to the fucking spoiler chat

im not entertaining u more votes lemme see the spoiler chat

well, id rather lose a game being wrong in xylo than winning from literally just obvtowning and dying night 1 but we have diff personalities and we've already left the scope of this game

These strike me as an odd combination of posts. a) Surely the sort of person who'd rather win or lose a game through their own agency lategame would prefer to fight rather than giving up? b) It seems strange for a person who's apparently sufficiently exasperated with me to refuse to engage with a simple question to clarify an ambiguous statement to subsequently have a civil and quite reasonable conversation with me about correct town strategy.

As a consequence, I'm pretty much convinced that Nosferatu's self-vote is insincere. I'm not sure whether this specific bit of insincereness is scummy, though; I can believe that Nosferatu genuinely thinks that a bit of AtE/theatre in this situation is actually good townplay (it isn't, but…).

Nosferatu, I would at least encourage you to unvote yourself. I know you don't put much stock in putting town off to a good start despite dying early; but if you do end up being town's target for today, having one more vote from unflipped players on you will give us more information from your wagon; and if we end up having to decide between multiple wagons, having fewer votes on yours will obviously increase the chance that you survive.

[callforjudgement]

I've been trying to see you as town for pages now! (I think some players might have picked up on this.) You are making it very difficult, though. Why do you think I didn't vote you immediately in #305 or #307? My read is along the lines of "players acting like Nosferatu do normally (but not always) end up flipping town, but Nosferatu's behaviour is so anti-town, and will be read as such by the majority of players, that it really needs to be changed in a hurry, and hopefully the tells from that will make things clearer to everyone". So after you refused my first couple of attempts to get you to allow yourself to be sorted, I thought that increasing the pressure would help, but you just doubled down on the anti-towniness (meaning that you might need to be voted out anyway because you'll almost inevitably become a compromise elimination at some point, and sooner is better than later in these situations, so my vote wasn't exactly being wasted).

Also, even if you're scum, it's still in town's interest for you to not be on your own wagon at the time you get eliminated. More information from day 1 = more dead scum later.

[callforjudgement]

In relation to the fake dayvig, I guess it doesn't matter whether the "dayvigger" knows whether the role exists or not, as long as they think the people they're trying to bait for reactions will think it's real.

Of course, dayvigs don't exist in Normals. A dayvig shot that makes no sense is highly likely fake, anyway; and RCEnigma had a

very

] dubious choice of target. Normally you'd pick a dayvig target to get a reaction from the target, but Gamma Emerald has enough experience to know that it isn't a possible role; or you'd pick a dayvig target who's in the middle of a web of interactions to see how people reacted to the choice, rather than someone who's mostly off to the side. (I really hate fake dayvig gambits, but if I somehow went crazy and decided to do one anyway, I'd most likely choose a slot like Frogster or Nosferatu or Walter, and I would make sure they were online first.)

If Nosferatu is town, then Nosferatu seems to think that I'm town; changing vote in #368 is, in effect, listening to my advice, something which people typically wouldn't do for a scumread. (As for #408, i've been using this avatar since 2011, and you can easily meta some of my games since then to see what my usual posting style is like.)

#379 is the towniest of the votes on me. This is the sort of gamestate in which garnering reactions to wagons seems like a good way to break a deadlock, and I would expect a hypothetically town SJReaver to vote me unless they had strong reads elsewhere (given SJReaver's playstyle); that's exactly what happened.

The reads list in #381 really bothers me; I thought that Italiano's play up to that point was pretty town, but so many players are in the wrong places. Why the Not_Mafia townread out of nowhere, for example? (I'd expect him to have that slot as null.) Why have Walter as town rather than null (a bad case on a player doesn't necessarily make that player town, it just invalidates the case)? I also agree with RCEnigma that having Frogster and Nosferatu as both scum seems unlikely (for what it's worth, I think Frogster thinks his case on Nosferatu is a powerful and convincing case, even though to everyone else it isn't).

I think Banana's recent posting has been townish.


I don't have time for a full post right now, and am about to go offline for a few hours (it's Thursday). I'll be back after that, though.

[callforjudgement]

Charmander just shot up to FoS #2 for his terrible defense of Nosferatu. Arguably it makes him even scummier than Nosferatu.

I can't find the defence in question. Which post are you talking about?

[callforjudgement]

I assumed it was real because I checked the wiki

Normal Guidelines

Vigilantes are considered Normal on mafiascum.net if their kill flavour is indistinguishable from other factions'. As of 9 November 2015, they must also be town aligned.

And i read that and went "oh..." but every game I play there seems to be a new role I've never played with before.
I wish people wouldn't lie :( fake claims just confuwe me. I'm a simple man and just want things kept all easy

Vigilante and Day Vigilante are normally considered different roles (you can also see a dayvig as Vigilante plus the Day modifier, but Day is abNormal).

Anyway, what's bothering me about this is: if you assumed that a dayvig is legal in Normals on the basis that it's a type of Vigilante, and that the dayvig shot were real, but were aware that Vigilantes were always town, surely you should have assumed that RCEnigma was confirmed town as a result?

@RCenigma - you have call for judgement as scum, but you have just killed Gamma??

There doesn't seem to be much reason to ask about the motivation of a "confirmed townie", unless you want their help sorting a slot (and in the hypothetical world where Gamma is "about to flip", there is absolutely no reason to try to scumhunt the slot, you just wait for the mod to get online). So in retrospect, this post looks more like you were trying to figure out how a townie would react to the dayvig, than actually reacting to the dayvig.

[callforjudgement]

you might want more....but I am notgoing to fake a bunch of reads just to please you.

I kinda like this statement by gerain because it does not show a willingness to appease and shows he wants to put some thought into it.Though he could just be stalling but Idk

Why does Walter pick this post in particular to comment on? It's the only read that Walter's expressed in the previous 36 hours. Even just looking at Wednesday (because Walter hasn't been online today), there's been a lot to react to besides that, and in particular, a lot more that's

obvious

to react to besides that; lots of those posts from that time period have received comments.

(It's worth noting that geraint was under a little fire at the time – #317 – so I can easily imagine a scum Walter softly defending geraint in that context, either because he's a buddy or for pocketing purposes.)

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: geraintm

[callforjudgement]

I think you underestimate how puzzled I can be by other players. I had had a conversation with them about how they knew someone had voted for scum, worked out they meant one exact vote on one exact player, and then they just went and vigged someone else. I wanted to know why.

I guess it's natural to want to know why someone does something weird. But information that doesn't help in figuring out anyone's alignment is

dangerous

to know as town, especially if publicly posted in the thread – the scum will learn it too, and they can make better use of it than a townie can. This is why, for example, it's hugely anti-town to push someone to claim (except if you have a guilty on them, or during a generally agreed-upon massclaim). So as town, you have to train yourself into not asking questions when you can't make use of the answers for scumhunting/townhunting purposes.

Your next post though confuses me, where you attack Walter for only interacting with me. You think you have found two scum in me and Walter?

They're reads that work independently (although obviously, they fit together with each other quite neatly). On day 1, reading players based on their interactions necessarily has to take a lot of possibilities into account; without flips, there's rarely enough information to be able to make use of associative tells. (It's still worth recording them, though, so that when people look back over the thread after a few players have flipped they have the information to understand what they mean.)

[callforjudgement]

I think Frog is probably town

also moving my vote somewhere more useful
VOTE: Walter

There's no wagon on callforjudgement anymore while there is on Walter. Plus I can barely read judgements posts so I need to go back through later

Based on this reasoning, why didn't you move your vote back onto me?

[callforjudgement]

367 (cfj) i dont see this coming from town. why would town want to read someone as town? you only want to read townies as town, so wanting to read someone as town comes off as scum knowing someone is town but seeing their posts as scummy, or maybe SvS

When your heart says town, but your brain says scum.

Normally my heart is right in this situation, and it really annoys me.

[callforjudgement]

For what it's worth, I had a moderately strong scum read on RCEnigma until #525. Although I can easily imagine a hypothetically scum RCEnigma deciding that Tayl0r's entrance is scummy, I don't think scum RCEnigma notices (and/or points out) that if Tayl0r is scum, that likely makes me town. (Tayl0r's catchup posts look somewhat like they're trying to find an excuse to join the large wagon and push me over the line, which is very opportunistic behaviour; opportunistic behaviour is one of the few scummy things that it's often worth doing as scum because the gains are so large, and the way I normally end up getting caught when I am scum. But if I were scum, then it wouldn't be an opportunity worth taking.)

[callforjudgement]

Did you know? part 1: geraintm's vote on Not_Mafia was his RVS vote (#29). It hasn't changed since.

Did you know? part 2: Although the fact in the previous paragraph would be a horrible scumtell coming from almost anyone, it is

not

a scumtell coming from geraintm. In Mini Normal 2153 (where geraintm was VT), geraintm made an RVS vote in that game's #62, and didn't unvote or place another vote until that game's #1377, almost 11 votecounts into that game's day 2 (despite having moderate scumreads elsewhere in many parts of day 1). So I think any tells on geraintm based on bizarre voting behaviour are invalid. (geraintm sometimes moves his vote sooner, but only upon having a very strong read, which he normally doesn't D1.)

day 1 I am nothing but shade. you know it will take a lot on day 1 for me to actually vote someone.

Did you know? part 3: geraintm seems to use the same RVS gimmick every game. This might produce interesting scumhunting information if this fact were generally known (because posting at the critical post count is, in effect, volunteering to be D1 Hated when geraintm is playing). However, I think it's highly likely that the playerlist as a whole was unaware of geraintm's tendency to breadcrumb the algorithm by which he'll subsequently cast his first vote, meaning that it's effectively random (weighted by posting frequency) and provably unmanipulatable (possibly even to the extent of bypassing the rules on provable randomness?). Perhaps if geraintm outright stated "I will vote for the person who posts #22 [or whatever] for the entirety of day 1, check my meta, I do this every game", the gimmick would produce more interesting information for scumhunting purposes; as it is, it's basically just a method of playing that's anti-town, but repeated so consistently that it isn't a scumtell for geraintm in particular.

VOTE: Tayl0r Swift

[callforjudgement]

However, I think it's highly likely that the playerlist as a whole was unaware of geraintm's tendency to breadcrumb the algorithm by which he'll subsequently cast his first vote, meaning that it's effectively random (weighted by posting frequency) and provably unmanipulatable

(possibly even to the extent of bypassing the rules on provable randomness?).

What are you referring to in the part I bolded though?

So a common rule that you see in games (it's in this game, too: rule 5 in #1) is that you aren't allowed to prove you're making a decision randomly; making decisions randomly is legal, as long as there's no way to distinguish that from making decisions intentionally and simply claiming you're making them randomly.

geraintm's vote on Not_Mafia is provably nothing to do with geraintm's

read

on Not_Mafia, and the provability there is making me a little uncomfortable in terms of rules breaches: it's closer to breaking the rule than most tactics I've seen. (Not alignment-indicative because he does this all the time.)

Can you do a Did you know? on Gamma?

The Did you know? on geraintm came about because I was trying to figure out what was up with the lack of vote changes, checked a few games, and realised that there were strong patterns in geraintm's early voting (the RVS vote is consistent, the failure to rescind it isn't quite as consistent but we have both actions and statements from past-town geraintm that he doesn't change vote D1 without a strong reason). That was enough of a surprise that it was worth mentioning in the thread, as he's likely to be very hard to read without knowing it.

That sort of thing is harder to make without having noticed a pattern already, wanting to check what it means. I checked a few recent games of Gamma's (in addition to a few older ones which I was involved in and thus knew a little better), and there are a few noticeable patterns (a lot of one-liner posts or quote+one-liner posts, with vote changes being rare; and a focus on mechanical/night-play over dayplay), but I'm not sure it's possible to deduce anything from that about this game. (Gamma does seem to be more active this game than is usual for him, but for most players, activity isn't linked much to alignment; there are some players where it is, but that's rare.) If there's something specific that Gamma is doing that you think is townish/scummy, and can describe what it is, then it would be possible to check Gamma's existing games to see if he's done the same thing there too; as it is, though, it's hard to do a "meta dive" (= reading past games) on a player when you don't know what you're looking for.

One fun Did You Know? fact for Gamma, though: did you know that out of all the Mini Normals listed on Gamma's wiki page, Gamma has only been scum once – and the game number listed there is wrong, meaning that I can't find a Mini Normal scumgame for Gamma at all? (There are enough Themes, Micros, Larges etc. to get an idea of how Gamma behaves as scum, but still; there's probably also at least one Mini Normal that I simply can't find.)

[callforjudgement]

I’m sorry what the fuck is the point of all this?

Like, the random trivia on geraint + rhetoric vaguely painting geraint as town + unexplained vote on Tay + the fact he was on geraint before then makes that looks extremely suspicious

Past CFJ: "geraintm's acting scummy, this is suspicious"
More recent past CFJ: "hmm, I should meta geraintm, the argument against him is stronger if he normally plays more sensibly than he currently is"
Even more recent past CFJ, after meta-ing geraintm: "WTF? I should definitely tell the thread about this, he doesn't play anything like a typical player and won't read like one"

Then I lose my confidence in my ability to read geraintm because his play is

so much

of an outlier from typical play, and move back to my previous top scumread (who has incidentally done more scummy things since replacing!). So the trivia isn't random at all: it's a) directly helping other players to read geraintm better (at least Frogsterking seems to have a better view of the gamestate because of it), and b) explaining why I've lost confidence in my geraintm read (which would cause the read to be less strong, thus causing me to revert to an older read that had gotten stronger in the meantime).

The vote on Tayl0r isn't and wasn't unexplained, it was explained in #211 and later #547. I thought the reason for the change would be obvious, and people get annoyed at me when I overexplain things, so I was hoping to avoid having to repeat myself and annoy everyone again in the process, but apparently not?

[callforjudgement]

The only posts of mine you've mentioned are #50 and #357 (and you thought at least the first of those was minor, based on #516.
Based on your stated reads in the catchup, I would have expected you to continue with the walter vote, maybe try to reignite that wagon. Instead you chose to vote me at the end, apparently almost entirely based on #367 (or possibly on some other reasoning you haven't stated), or perhaps simply because it was a large wagon on a townie (which scum would naturally want to push to claim or lynch if they could).

As for voting a slot that replaced out for activity – why do you consider that to be a bad idea? For most people flaking out is not connected with their alignment (and for the few where it's alignment-indicative, it normally indicates scum). sordros didn't post much, and what they

did

react to was pretty much uniquely confined to the least useful posts to react to (normally if someone is town-minded and has limited time to play, they'll try to post about the things where it's most useful, not where it's least useful).

[callforjudgement]

I didn't vote the slot

because

it flaked. My scumreads were on sordros's actions before the flake, and your actions after the flake – not on the flake itself.

You're talking as though flaking makes a slot confirmed town (or at least more likely to be town). That isn't the case, and thus the flake isn't a reason not to vote the slot.

[callforjudgement]

I am amazed that we somehow managed to get information (mildly) useful for reading people out of a gambit

that

stupid.

I have something to say in response to #584, but will wait for RCEnigma to reply first. (This is mostly a reminder-to-self.)

If Tayl0r is town, Nosferatu is probably town as well.

[callforjudgement]

Something that's bothering me generally about this game: why is nobody making a serious effort to change the gamestate? In particular, why aren't the

scum

making a serious effort to change the gamestate? In the situation we have at the moment, there are lots of impatient townies looking for something to do, and if someone made a serious and not-ridiculous case on a scumread of theirs, they would likely get a lot of votes following. That seems like a risky situation for scum if the scumread in question is correct, so I would have expected them to start a wagon of their own, or at least push mine harder. I can only see two real possibilities here; either a) scum are happy with the current gamestate (in which case we should be trying to change it!), or b) scum are not in the thread / out of their depth / have no idea what to do and are simply being inactive as a consequence (in which case we may be able to figure out who they are, directly or via PoE).

Meanwhile, I see attempts to shake things up (such as the whole daycop thing we had recently) that don't ultimately have a huge impact as being unlikely to be from scum; it mostly just helps to get information with which to read players more accurately without making long-term changes to the gamestate, and that seems to only help town.

There are still a lot of players who are alone on their wagons. If anyone's interested in persuading me (and the rest of us) to join them, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say! If not, I guess I'll try doing a full reread of everyone in order to come up with an updated reads list, because something has to happen to get this game moving again (I was hoping that the replacements would help in that respect, but that's going too slowly).

[callforjudgement]

(PEDIT: re #638)

The reasoning should be correct regardless of my alignment. If you think there's a mistake, please point it out so that I can re-evaluate my reasoning.

I agree that it points towards me as town, but that's hardly a reason not to mention it in thread! Of course, it's harder to be objective about something when it points to you as town, so it's possible I have some confirmation bias here (i.e. "this correctly predicts me as town, so it's more likely to be correct"), in which case it's especially important that you point out any flaws in my reasoning! But "this reasoning benefits CFJ and CFJ is making it" is not a reason to ignore it or consider it invalid.

[callforjudgement]

and by #638 I mean #636

[callforjudgement]

People are complaining about something happening but refuse to vote on wagon. Callforjudgment is being scumread. Nosferatu is being scumread. At the moment callforjudgment is the leading wagon so jump on it and we can kill scum. Thrones complaining about wasting time are the ones wasting the time.

You voted me in #382, and since then you've done nothing to push your read on me or try to persuade people to vote for me. (It was unclear from your posting whether you still scumread me or had just left the vote there out of inertia.) Normally, if you're town and think someone's scum, it's worth trying to get more ammunition on them, either to help the wagon get over the line or to help re-evaluate your reads when you discover that maybe a player isn't that scummy after all.

Instead, you've basically been just sitting there, sitting on your read, not even reading the game. (I can tell you aren't reading because you're wrong about the size of wagons: I'm not the leading wagon, but the fourth-largest (third-largest if you ignore the wagon on shelly, which is a joke). The largest wagons are on Walter and on you.)

Also, why haven't you expressed a read since #490? Even if you think you've caught one scum, townies are normally curious about the others as well; and it's nearly always a good idea to allow for the possibility you might be wrong. If nothing else, identifying townies would help make the pool of viable wagons smaller, increasing the chance that your favoured wagon would go through.

VOTE: ItalianoVD

[callforjudgement]

Did you know? part 1: geraintm's vote on Not_Mafia was his RVS vote (#29). It hasn't changed since.

Did you know? part 2: Although the fact in the previous paragraph would be a horrible scumtell coming from almost anyone, it is

not

a scumtell coming from geraintm. In Mini Normal 2153 (where geraintm was VT), geraintm made an RVS vote in that game's #62, and didn't unvote or place another vote until that game's #1377, almost 11 votecounts into that game's day 2 (despite having moderate scumreads elsewhere in many parts of day 1). So I think any tells on geraintm based on bizarre voting behaviour are invalid. (geraintm sometimes moves his vote sooner, but only upon having a very strong read, which he normally doesn't D1.)

day 1 I am nothing but shade. you know it will take a lot on day 1 for me to actually vote someone.

Did you know? part 3: geraintm seems to use the same RVS gimmick every game. This might produce interesting scumhunting information if this fact were generally known (because posting at the critical post count is, in effect, volunteering to be D1 Hated when geraintm is playing). However, I think it's highly likely that the playerlist as a whole was unaware of geraintm's tendency to breadcrumb the algorithm by which he'll subsequently cast his first vote, meaning that it's effectively random (weighted by posting frequency) and provably unmanipulatable (possibly even to the extent of bypassing the rules on provable randomness?). Perhaps if geraintm outright stated "I will vote for the person who posts #22 [or whatever] for the entirety of day 1, check my meta, I do this every game", the gimmick would produce more interesting information for scumhunting purposes; as it is, it's basically just a method of playing that's anti-town, but repeated so consistently that it isn't a scumtell for geraintm in particular.

VOTE: Tayl0r Swift

Did you see anything odd?

I did: the subject of the post, the player geraintm, is not matched with the element that increases the win condition of the game we are playing; the vote at the end, which is on a different player Tayl0r. This seems odd because normally when we vote a player the subject of the post is in some way attached to that player.

It was related. My previous vote was on geraintm, but my review of geraintm's meta made me think that my scumread on geraintm was based on behaviour that wasn't scummy when coming from geraintm, so I unvoted him (moving my vote to my next-strongest scumread, because in the early game it's generally always a good idea to have a vote out). Perhaps I should have used an explicit unvote tag to make things clearer.

[callforjudgement]

@callforjudgment: there were 3 other players on your wagon why are they not getting the same speech? Why didn’t they try to persuade people to vote for you?

Again, are you even reading the game?

Tayl0r was pushing me as recently as #561, and started to loosen her read in #602, changing vote in #634. That's the absolute opposite of parking on a wagon and doing nothing (look at how close those numbers are, especially relative to Tayl0r's activity level).
RCEnigma voted for me in #364, started loosening his read in #525, changed vote in #641; and also did look at other slots rather than just me (#396, #397). Despite this, I felt that this was a bit slow / scum-convenient for a read progression; it wasn't a strong enough scumread to vote the slot while other reads needed sorting, but I did mention the read in #547.
SJReaver (=Looker) posted me in #379 and almost immediately flaked out. Not posting when you're gone from the site is hardly suspicious. (Besides, I think this was most likely a pressure/wagoning vote rather than being based on a read, due to the timing and SJReaver's general style)

Acting like I'm being unfair by calling you out in particular is being really oblivious; the way you've been treating my wagon is much scummier than the way anyone else has been, and I'm not the only person to notice this.

(On a side note: suppose the circumstances had been different, and I had singled out you in particular. What conclusions could you draw from this? It sounds like you're implying that you think I'm scum and that everyone else on my wagon is scum alongside me, which is very implausible.)

It’s not my job to make people vote for who I want.

If you are town, and if you have a strong scumread, it

is

your job to make people vote for it.
Because of this, I think most people assumed that you didn't actually have a genuine scumread on me, which is why your complaints about my wagon going nowhere were so surprising.

[callforjudgement]

Acting like I'm being unfair by calling you out in particular is being really oblivious;

I didn’t say that. Don’t assume.

Now you're acting like I'm not allowed to try to figure out the motivations behind what you're doing, based on your posts. The whole point of playing Mafia is to try to figure out what everyone else is thinking.

the way you've been treating my wagon is much scummier than the way anyone else has been, and I'm not the only person to notice this.

Really? Who else?

Walter:

655, is just really weird in that it sorta shows like cfj said a lack of reading/ disengagement.

(On a side note: suppose the circumstances had been different, and I had singled out you in particular. What conclusions could you draw from this? It sounds like you're implying that you think I'm scum and that everyone else on my wagon is scum alongside me, which is very implausible.)

If you singled me out I would’ve just kept playing the game. My conclusions would be that you are either wrong or scum. Where am I implying what you think? If you can quote it, I will handle it as such.

If you think "CFJ is attacking Italiano, but not anyone else who voted CFJ" is a scumtell, you need to explain why you think that's a scumtell, also what that says about the rest of the wagon.

If I scumread you and you are my top scumread, I’m not going anywhere else. You think I dropped a vote and checked out. That’s not it at all. I was actually being scumread for jumping all over the place early on.

I still think you dropped a vote and checked out. There is a lot of evidence that you haven't been following what's going on in the game at all (e.g. not realising, that the playerbase were generally looking for other wagons), which is close to the definition of checking out.

The other possibility is that you do have something of a handle on the gamestate, and are pretending not to. Tayl0r thinks that the wagon on you is an attempt to distract from the wagon on Walter. The way I see it, it's more likely that you were trying to shift things back to me in an attempt to restore the previous status quo (of a moderate wagon on me and no viable wagons anywhere else), as a way to stop the wagon on Walter and/or the wagon on you, and incidentally make it much harder for town to get useful reads.

Tayl0r called me out on my "happy with the current gamestate" argument, but it's telling that when there was an attempt to change the gamestate, you tried to put it back the way it was rather than trying to get useful information in the new situation!

If you are town, and if you have a strong scumread, it

is

your job to make people vote for it.

I don’t agree with this. Call it my playstyle, but I don’t do that. That’s why it’s a forum. You place your thoughts down and people are supposed to read them and either agree or disagree with them and then you engage in conversation to clear it up. I also don’t assume.

For one thing, you haven't been placing your thoughts down. You have no useful content between #490 and #611, and due to site rules, #490 isn't useful for reading players other than you, so it's more like #420[/post to #[post]611.

For another thing, knowing who scum is as town and sitting back and thinking "ah, I know who scum is, I'll just wait for town to come to a decision without knowing my resaoning and feel vindicated in postgame after they lose" isn't just a "playstyle thing", it's actually a violation of site rules. You have to play to win; the town win condition is for the town to outlive the scum, and that means that to win you need scum dead, and you need other peoples' votes to do that. If you aren't actively trying to get them, therefore, the only legitimate reason is that you aren't sure enough of the read to push it:

Because of this, I think most people assumed that you didn't actually have a genuine scumread on me, which is why your complaints about my wagon going nowhere were so surprising.

Why are you speaking for people?

I think most players here are intelligent enough to follow my reasoning and come to it independently. Your comment here effectively just insulted the entire playerlist (other than me).

As a more general answer to the same question: you aren't going to get very far in Mafia without trying to figure out what other people are thinking. In many cases it's obvious; sometimes it isn't. The main fundamental difference between town and scum is that town are trying to work out who is guilty, and scum already know; that means that in order to find townies, you follow their thought processes in trying to identify scum (and in order to find scum you realise that those aren't there).

[callforjudgement]

why this vote? ive really seen nothing so far to indicate you had suspicion of italiano, and this isnt a major wagon, so why join here? seems like now that theres a little momentum on walter that you come in and start a counterwagon. interesting.

No one's convinced me that Walter is scum. But I feel like Italiano can flip red by virtue of being outside of my townreads.

I'd like to flip all of Italiano, cfj, taylor, gamma, Raya, banana today and then reevaluate after.

Why banana? Tayl0r's vote on shelly (=banana) makes sense based on reads stated earlier, but this read is more of a surprise coming from you; you haven't commented much on the banana slot, and what it has posted seems to be thinking along similar lines to you (notably #436 expresses a very similar viewpoint to your #661). Is this just a process-of-elimination read?

[callforjudgement]

@

Walter

: Two questions.

a) In #511, who does the "you" in the first line refer to?
b) Have there been any updates to your Nosferatu read since #278?

[callforjudgement]

also worth noting that italiano is taking this opportunity of pressure on him and plausible counterwagon and NOT being opportunistic.

This statement really got me thinking. If you haven't already, I recommend reading Italiano and Walter in double ISO, following how they interact with each other.

The first wagon on Walter starts at #238 by Nosferatu. Italiano's next post, #266, is denouncing it. (At the time, I assumed that this was Italiano reading the situation the same way I was, and townread Italiano for it. I think I was wrong, though.)

Italiano had previously implied a townread or at least "no reason to think scum" read on Nosferatu (#234).
Walter attacked Nosferatu around the time Nosferatu voted Walter (#249, #257, #278).
Soon after, Italiano was attacking Nosferatu too (#281, vote in #294).

The Nosferatu wagon sits at four votes for a while. Then I derail it, based primarily on a gut read (#367).
Italiano places a (what is to me) surprising scumread on me in #381 and vote in #382. (This is the third vote, after RCEnigma and Nosferatu.)
Walter does not join this wagon (although he does ask lots of questions about it, that's natural when it's the largest wagon).
Eventually Walter calls me "70% certainty" of town (#614); this is technically a mild scumread (assuming a 10:3 setup, a hypothetically town Walter would think a perfectly null read was 75% likely to be town.)

The CFJ wagon sits at four votes for a while.
Then it starts shrinking, as Tayl0r moves to Walter (#634); that wagon's now the same size as mine (N_M voted Walter in #600).
Italiano reacts surprisingly strongly to this (#655), in effect complaining that the wagons should be on me and/or Nosferatu.
Italiano then defends Walter by attacking the wagon (#674, #675).

Walter earlier agreed with me that #655 is scummy (#659), but doesn't vote for Italiano.
As Tayl0r pointed out, there is notable pressure on Italiano but he has no interest at all in the counterwagon on Walter (instead, he's primarily been attacking me).

---

What I get out of all this is that Italiano is focused quite heavily on defending Walter. Whenever there's a wagon on Walter, Italiano votes the counterwagon (except that with this most recent wagon, the counterwagon to Walter is Italiano himself, and his response is to complain that people aren't on the wagons that previously collapsed!). Basically every time anyone scumreads Walter, Italiano attacks the

read

(but Italiano has only twice actually called Walter town, placing him top of a townread list in #381, without explanation; and giving a gut townread in #687). The attacks tend to be with weak or no reasoning, too (e.g. #674 attacks a read as "sheeping Not_Mafia", and you can't really sheep someone who never explains).

I think the most plausible explanations for all this are:
a) Italiano and Walter are scum together.
b) Italiano is scum (with Walter town), and wants everyone to think that Walter is scum alongside him, in the hope that we end up voting out Walter and Italiano can end up being vindicated by the townflip.

In either case, though, Italiano ends up as being scum. Unless someone can find meta evidence otherwise, I don't think it makes sense for a hypothetically town Italiano to defend Walter

this

hard based only on a gut read.

[callforjudgement]

@ call for judgement - this feels like a well meaning post. can you see yourself not voting for Italiano today>

It's always possible that someone does something incredibly scummy, or someone posts a new argument that I hadn't thought of, and that that's sufficient to get me to change wagon. It's also possible that we need to scramble to agree on someone as deadline approaches (we only have a few days left!), and it's necessary to be flexible in such situations (often there's a need to compromise). However, I currently have a much stronger scumread on Italiano than on anyone else.

With respect to the discussion about Looker's replace-in: I think "I'm reading" along with an unvote is null because it's a very common thing for replacements to do. You can sometimes get an idea of the player's playstyle by looking at the next post after that. If someone spends a long time reading and then doesn't come to many conclusions, then they probably weren't really reading fully/properly (and may even have lied about the fact that they were reading). Unfortunately, I don't think that this is particularly alignment-indicative in general; some people just generally have a hard time getting into games. There are some people who have trouble getting into games as scum but not as town, but I checked two of Looker's games for meta purposes, and they acted in a similar way ("I'm reading" post, followed by a fairly bare-bones catchup post) in both the scumgame (Newbie 2016) and the towngame (Newbie 2009).

My opinion on Looker otherwise is very similar to Frogsterking's; I had a mild townread on SJReaver's later posts, and haven't picked up any particular tells either way from Looker's posts since replacing in.

[callforjudgement]

Also I do think that Nosferatu's recent posts are much more pro town, so at this point while I'm still skeptical of Nosferatu I'm happiest with where my vote is currently at because of my earlier read on Banana.

Have you gained any new reads/insight into the shelly/Banana slot since #488? That's quite an old read, so I'm wondering if anything's happened since to confirm your view or to make you re-evaluate (especially as your read on Gamma, in the same post, seems to have evolved somewhat).

[callforjudgement]

@cfj

I had a question for you as well, when you were doing meta on geraintm was there any difference in his attitude toward the other players between alignment? Namely is what I'm observing about his skim-reading and shade toward me this game consistent with his behavior in the past as town and/or scum?

I could only find one remotely recent scumgame for geraintm, Newbie 1978. So it's hard to get a good meta read based on that.

There are some potential style differences between town and scum geraintm when it comes to reading people, e.g. this post by scum geraintm looks quite different from the typical reads post by town geraintm, but they aren't large enough for me to be sure there's a pattern or to see how this game compares with the previous games. geraintm's usual town playstyle seems like it would be quite easy to imitate as scum, anyway.

• I'm surprised there's not more consolidation of wagons before deadline.

I'd like to repeat this point: there are a large number of people on small wagons, and with less than 2 days left, we're going to need to consolidate somewhere in order to avoid a mad rush at the end (something that, in the most recent game I played, lost the entire game by itself by outing too many town power roles). Players who are on small wagons need to either be much more active in swaying people to join them (e.g. like Frogster is currently doing with the geraintm wagon), or at least make it known which of the larger wagons they would move their vote to, so that we can get a good idea of who the consensus reads might be. (Note that although scum can usually steer a consensus/deadline choice away from hitting scum, they often end up making themselves obvious in retrospect when they do so.)

@Mod:

I will be V/LA for much of tomorrow (Saturday).
(I will be back online well before deadline, though.)

[callforjudgement]

@ frogster

Can flashwagon Walter please, italiano is a vig kill not a lynch

I'd be more likely to consider joining your wagon if I understood why you scum read him.

This is blatantly a post where you are trying to get someone else to make the case for you to join their wagon. you might not like the way I phrased it "asking for permission" but is the type of post people use where they want to move their vote to another wagon, cant justify it themselves so want to get someone else to write something so they can go "oh yeah, good point, I didn't see it that way, I will join you"

I read this as Frogster trying to get Not_Mafia to play more actively / less cryptically. If it had succeeded (and it was unlikely to do so), that might have been beneficial to scum (assuming Walter town) by giving an easy excuse to join the Walter wagon, but there are more obvious benefits to town in terms of reading both players. So I don't think #745 is particularly scummy.

[callforjudgement]

Scum should kill Italiano

Can flashwagon Walter please, italiano is a vig kill not a lynch

Have you changed your mind about #105? If not, why do you want the scum and a hypothetical vig to aim at the same target?

[callforjudgement]

Less than 24 hours to go, and there's been surprisingly little posting considering that. (I was participating in an online tournament for a non-Mafia game, and kind-of hoping that there'd be a few pages of posts to catch up on after I came back, but the game's been mostly barren.) I'll be online for the next few hours, and will also be online at (and a few hours before) deadline.

If people aren't interested in Italiano, my first preference for a compromise elimination would be Walter; I am also willing to move to geraintm or shelly, and have little preference between them.

I don't think Not_Mafia is a good choice for Day 1 because it would be purely policy; not many people have interacted with the slot, so we wouldn't get much information from the flip.

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: Walter

Italiano is still my first choice, but I don't think there are the votes, so this is the best of the options that might actually go through.

[callforjudgement]

Less than four hours to go. Where is everyone?

@Looker: I don't think there's time to build a geraintm wagon at this point, with only two votes on it; you posted recently, please move if you're online. I would prefer you to move onto Walter; however, if you think that Walter is town and/or shelly is scum, and place the fifth vote on the shelly wagon as a consequence, then I'll provide the sixth vote on the shelly wagon in 1½-2 hours from now in order to avoid hitting deadline.

[callforjudgement]

shelly is posting elsewhere (e.g. in url=[viewtopic.php?p=12108322#p12108322]this completed game[/url], about 40 minutes ago). Hopefully she turns up here soon.

[callforjudgement]

That's… a really awkward time to pause deadline at, because it means I (and everyone else) have to check the thread every 2 hours or so for the rest of the Day in order to move to a consensus wagon to avoid deadline, and that could happen at any random time of day. I can't reasonably be online constantly.

I'm wondering whether showing lack of interest in this game in particular (shelly has apparently forgotten about it while signing up for new games elsewhere) is a towntell for shelly (even though it would be a scumtell for many players). Her first game here was as scum (flying solo from N1 onwards) and she apparently really enjoyed it. (She also has a list of completed and current games in her signature, and this one isn't listed.)

[callforjudgement]

RCEnigma already offered to move his vote, as the hammer vote. So I was counting that vote as already virtually on both large wagons.

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: CFJ

He tried to pull the BW off shelly yesterday.

I did. I'd pretty much talked myself into seeing shelly as town, and was very surprised by the flip (and still am). I didn't (and still dont) have a townread on Walter (although I don't have a strong scumread either), so the choice from my point of view was obvious.

Normally it's very hard to get a scum wagon over the finish line. That's especially the case when day's ending and it's a compromise wagon and many of the players on it don't feel particularly strongly about it; that should be (and usually is) a trivial situation for scum to manipulate. So why didn't they?

It would help to know whether shelly a) had forgotten about this game entirely, or b) was intentionally avoiding it, but I don't see if there's any way to find out. She was busy signing up for new games even as we were scrambling to find a deadline wagon; you'd expect her to at least drop a post in thread and/or to vote for Walter, maybe getting that wagon through first. If she

was

intentionally avoiding the game, the only explanation I can see is that she was scum with Walter and scum agreed upon her as a sacrifice to make Walter look good (that would explain why she was interested in signing up for a new game).

Enough has happened that I don't understand that I don't feel comfortable in voting yet, though.

[callforjudgement]

And I appreciate that a lot. It's going to come up eventually, but I am the Friendly town neighbor and I share a neighborhood with Walter.

Do you have the ability to confirm yourself to people overnight?

If so, who did you confirm yourself to last night?

[callforjudgement]

I'm very curious what power roles scum have available to them in a normal setup. Does anyone mind giving a brief summary of the current normal setup meta on the scum side?

Most commonly, either three goons, or two goons + a weak investigative (Rolecop, Tracker, etc.). Encryptors used to be common, but nowadays simply putting "scum have daytalk" in the rules is more common.

It's possible for scum to have a Roleblocker or similar role, but those tend to need a very powerful town in order to counteract their balance effects.

Neighbourhoods are more commonly town+town, although town+scum is also seen. (Some mods will pick one neighbour as town, then randomly pick who the other neighbour is, in order to avoid modmeta/modWIFOM being used to figure out the alignments of a neighbourhood.)

[callforjudgement]

I think there's a chance that Italiano is confused between the roles "neighbour" and "friendly neighbour"; Italiano has been confirmed to have the first by Walter, and has claimed the second (possibly by mistake). It is possible, even in a Normal, for him to have both. This is why it's important to get a clarification of the claim, because there's a big difference in terms of balance impact and in what we can deduce from Walter's actions.

@

Italiano

: Are you a Friendly Neighbour (can confirm self as town), or just a Neighbour (can talk privately)? If you are a Friendly Neighbour, a) who did you confirm yourself to (knowing this will probably let us confirm you as town), b) did Walter know that prior to the end of Night 1?

[callforjudgement]

at this point it may be helpful for everyone to claim whether or not they are in a neighborhood. no need to claim neighbors, but it would be very helpful for me to understand my role. i can claim/explain everything or at least something based on what people say.

I am not in a neighbourhood.

[callforjudgement]

At this point it's very unlikely that Italiano is scum; a Friendly Neighbour claim is hard to substantiate as scum (you have to keep claiming to target your buddies and/or the nightkill), and easy to prove as town (that's literally what the role does, proving itself as town). It would be helpful to verify that the claim has actually been substantiated before day ends, though, otherwise it'll lead us to be paranoid into future days.

If scum knew that Italiano was a Friendly Neighbour, that would make him an obvious nightkill choice. So it's also useful to know whether Walter knew Italiano was a Friendly Neighbour prior to the end of Night 1; if he did, that somewhat reduces the chance that Walter is scum.

@Tayl0r: mods (and playerlists!) differ on how much utility a T/S neighbourhood gives to town and/or scum. Some mods think that such a neighbourhood helps town (you can quiz your neighbour in the PT, figure out they're scum, and sometimes even figure out their buddies by the way they talk over the game with you); I once caught 2 out of 3 members of a scumteam because I was in a neighbourhood with one of them. But recently, players have had a tendency to assume that neighbourhoods are T/T, so some mods/reviewers will balance a T/S neighbourhood as though it helps scum and put in extra town power to compensate.

[callforjudgement]

Since we're making assumptions.

Assumption 1: frog is in a hood
Assumption 2: this game is not 9-4
Assumption 3: I can end this game by day 3 potentially.

I'm a PT cop and have a result on someone that is not frog/walter/Italiano.

OK, yes at this point we definitely need a PT massclaim (i.e. everyone claims "I'm in a PT" or "I'm not in a PT". Players with results should keep them hidden until after everyone has confirmed whether they're in a PT or not (and thus would be a miller to a PT cop).

I said this earlier, but just to repeat it: I am not in a private topic.

[callforjudgement]

Arsonist is not a possible role in a Normal. The list of roles which are allowed is on the wiki, at Normal Game. Any roles that aren't listed there cannot be in the setup.

The flavour is not supposed to be related to the setup. (In most Normals, the flavour is designed by the moderator, but the setup is designed by someone else. According to #0, the setup for this one was designed by the backup moderator.)

A Friendly Neighbour Neighbour (with no confirmation about the alignment of their neighbour) isn't all

that

powerful, not to the extent that scum would need unusual powers to offset it. You could put another two roles of equivalent power into the same setup, against a three-Goon team, and the resulting setup would only be slightly townsided.

[callforjudgement]

While that is a lot of power that I definitely could have pushed a lynch through with.

I'm retracting my claim. @Taylor I'm not really gunning for you any more I think your reaction was pretty genuine, interesting you brought up the ascetic modifier because I do believe scum to be ascetic or Walter is just scum.

Mostly this was to prevent wiggle room for scum in the worst case and force a head to head in the best.

Doesn't change my position that burning off wagon probably ends the game.

I'm not sure this is a sufficient explanation of why you made the fakeclaim.

Fakeclaiming as town is nearly always a bad idea (even if you retract it before anything bad happens); for example, it can draw counterclaims that let scum figure out the gamestate, or worse it can end up turning the town's anger towards you.

That said, although fakeclaiming as town is a bad idea, sometimes people think it's a good idea, and that they have reasons. #951 doesn't seem like enough for anyone who isn't an outright troll, though. What

was

the reason you fakeclaimed? (Obviously one plausible explanation is that you're scum and were hoping to make use of the confusion to out power roles and/or hope that someone claimed to be in a neighbourhood so that you could claim your guilty was on them, so the onus is rather on you to show an alternative.)

VOTE: RCEnigma pending an explanation.

[callforjudgement]

Also, why did you say that you assumed that Frogsterking was in a neighbourhood? Do you still have that assumption after the retracted claim? Or was that part of a fakeclaim gambit somehow?

[callforjudgement]

at this point it may be helpful for everyone to claim whether or not they are in a neighborhood. no need to claim neighbors, but it would be very helpful for me to understand my role. i can claim/explain everything or at least something based on what people say.

I assume this is still valid, given that it was made before RCEnigma's post?

[callforjudgement]

Can't speak for nos but glad we agree it's likely cfj + Raya

VOTE: CFJ

You haven't answered my questions.

I have another: have you fakeclaimed as town before? The closest I could find was Newbie 1903, where you fake-breadcrumbed a role, planning to fakeclaim it (but another townie who actually had the role claimed it first), and had a long explanation of what was going through your mind at the time. I'd expect an actual fakeclaim to have a similar story/post behind it, especially if you had something like that for a soft. (Are there examples I've missed where you fakeclaimed a role as town and then had no explanation when you were called on it?)

[callforjudgement]

I'm finding it difficult to trust the subjective nature of Tayl0r's posts. Especially since her overconfidence in RCE has fell through.

Could you clarify the second sentence here? I don't understand what you mean.

[callforjudgement]

No, the worst case is that someone counterclaims PT Cop before the neighbourhood massclaim is completed (most likely a townie; fakeclaiming scum would be risking a 50-50 chance of losing the game if the wrong member of the scumteam counterclaims). That's a pretty bad worst case, seeing as it would generally lead to you being eliminated today and the town power role who counterclaimed dying overnight.

Anyway, I managed to find an instance of you fakeclaiming as town (3-shot JOAT as 4-shot JOAT, adding on a Doctor shot), from 2018:
Subject: Large Normal 216 - Endgame

Inb4 scum has a roleblocker, but yes I can save you tonight. Afterwards I'm out of shots in my abilities so I'm counting on you to solve the game.

Subject: Large Normal 216 - Endgame

So all my abilities were 1 shot:

-Disloyal vig
-Cop check
-Commuter (couldn't be targeted) this was the night I tried to pull the night kill.

I very well could have lost this game for town last night. I don't have a protective ability. I just had to kind of bluff it to keep FL alive at least one more night regardless of who we flipped. If scum didn't buy it we lose FL anyway, I get lynched today and I think that's game if AP is scum. Town doesn't have a way to prevent 2v2 and I doubt there's only 1 scum left.

This was way harder to find than it needed to be. (I was assuming you'd be better at remembering which games you'd fakeclaimed in than I would at finding them, but apparently not?) It's also an instance where your fakeclaim was even riskier than the one here, so OK, this sort of thing is in your townrange.

(But seriously, where did the "Frogster is a neighbour" thing come from? That was kind-of out of left field and doesn't serve any obvious purpose in combination with the rest of the claim. Actually, it somewhat undermines the rest of the claim; an actual PT Cop who hadn't investigated Frogster would have no way of knowing he was a neighbour, unless the PT Cop was the other neighbour.)

[callforjudgement]

After rereading Frogster (and thinking about the nightkill somewhat), I think that Frogsterking is town. Not_Mafia's play was, whilst not actually scummy, very anti-town (and Frogster picked up on that). So I'm pretty sure that Frogster would consider Not_Mafia's presence an asset to scum, and there's pretty much no way that a hypothetically scum Frogster would make that kill. (Sometimes scum make non-obvious kills for WIFOM purposes, but I don't think that a hypothetically scum Frogster would expect town to reason "Not_Mafia dead → Frogster town", so this would only be useful for WIFOM if he had a buddy point it out, and this hasn't happened.)

I was townreading Frogster anyway, though, even before the nightkill (his reads are bad but that doesn't make him scum).

---

Also, @

Not_Mafia

, just in case you're reading this from the dead thread:

Can flashwagon Walter please, italiano is a vig kill not a lynch

Even D1, some players were picking up on the possibility that Italiano was a confirmable power role (I saw Mason as a possibility, but thought that scum was a stronger possibility, and of course if Italiano was on the point of elimination as a Mason he would be able to claim out of it so that was no reason not to push him). He was, in fact, a confirmable power role. Those players are the worst possible slots to vig because if you wagon them and they claim, now you can let them confirm themself overnight and you get a second town-controlled kill; but if you nightkill them as town, then they don't get a chance to demonstrate why you're wrong about them. (This is especially important because players who are confirmable as town tend to put less effort into showing themselves as town through their dayplay!)

I'll be hopeful that you have a good explanation for this postgame. If it was just pure trolling, then you were playing quite heavily against your win condition.

[callforjudgement]

(And just to clarify for any newer players who don't know the terminology: "scummy" = "likely to come from scum"; "anti-town" = "likely to

help

scum". Obviously there's a correlation, but some things are anti-town without being scummy, such as siteflaking.)

[callforjudgement]

• Gamma Emerald asked for a votecount and here it is; so who are you going to vote?

---

• Why did CFJ ask me to move my vote but not RCEnigma? Why are players ignoring RCEnigma?

Why didn't you move your vote at the time you made this post?

This is especially relevant as moving to shelly at this point would have caused her to be hammered (the demand was there: #826, #827, #830), and if you preferred the Walter wagon, there was demand there too. You could probably have pushed either wagon over the finish line, but instead you waited and Nosferatu made the decision.

(Although deadline had been paused – at 2½ hours, so we were effectively in a "go offline and day could randomly end before you can react" situation ­– it was still very unlikely than anyone other than Shelly or Walter would be town's choice at that point.)

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: Gamma

Gamma's normally quite a mechanically minded player, so this should be the sort of gamestate he thrives in, yet he hasn't posted much toDay. I'm interested in hearing more from the slot (and I don't think my RCEnigma vote serves much of a purpose any more).

[callforjudgement]

@

Frogsterking

: Have you forgotten your screenfuls-long posts on Nosferatu? #255 and #288.

By comparison, you did basically nothing to push shelly. You had a mild scumread in #488 and didn't make any cases for a stronger read all Day (and admitted as much in #784). The only actual pushing you did was #854, very late in the Day (it's after the deadline freeze had occurred).

You're currently posting as though you had a super-strong read on shelly throughout, but your day 1 posts don't match that very well.

[callforjudgement]

Nosferatu isn't confirmed town. He is very likely town, though, especially given that a) he was the person who decided the D1 elimination and b) he should be an easy slot for scum to push given the general playstyle, and yet we haven't seen serious pushes on it from anyone since early Day 1 (such slots are nearly always town in practice).

Also, this is what I mean by your reads being bad; in this game, you've already shown a tendency to jump to conclusions and then stick to them / overblow them even when they don't make much sense, like you did on Nosferatu. Even if he does somehow turn out to be scum, your read on him will

still

have been a bad one, because it wasn't convincing to anyone else.

[callforjudgement]

How do you define "discrediting" / "reputation" in this context?

From my point of view, Frogster is tunnelling on me. I'm reading him as town, and town vs. town tunnels are one of those things that has a tendency to lose games that should be very winnable. (I once lost a game in a 4:1 ending where I was confirmed town and I had strong setup-speculation/mechanical reasons to think that two of the other players were also town, but unfortunately they were tunnelling on each other and nothing I could do or say would persuade either of them to believe that the other was town; I guessed wrong as to which of the possible-scum players were scum, scum nightkilled me and they crossvoted, and even though one of them turned out to be Vengeful town

still

ended up losing.)

I take #1029 as particular evidence that Frogster is tunnelling, because he's taken something very minor / non-alignment-indicative, and is acting as though it's a highly convincing scumslip, together with bold underlined size 150 font.

[callforjudgement]

I'm not pushing frog. As I said, I think he's town-aligned.

I do think his reads should generally be ignored, though, so I'm trying to discredit him in that sense. His current read on me is incorrect; I'm hoping that he will see that, and even if he doesn't, that the rest of the town will see that. I am definitely trying to take out the points of someone who is scumreading me, because a) I would much prefer that scum dies toDay rather than me and b) even though this is probably not intentional, they're generally making scumhunting harder for the town by pushing an incorrect narrative.

[callforjudgement]

After rereading Frogster (and thinking about the nightkill somewhat), I think that Frogsterking is town. Not_Mafia's play was, whilst not actually scummy, very anti-town (and Frogster picked up on that). So I'm pretty sure that Frogster would consider Not_Mafia's presence an asset to scum, and there's pretty much no way that a hypothetically scum Frogster would make that kill. (Sometimes scum make non-obvious kills for WIFOM purposes, but I don't think that a hypothetically scum Frogster would expect town to reason "Not_Mafia dead → Frogster town", so this would only be useful for WIFOM if he had a buddy point it out, and this hasn't happened.)

I was townreading Frogster anyway, though, even before the nightkill (his reads are bad but that doesn't make him scum).

---

Also, @

Not_Mafia

, just in case you're reading this from the dead thread:

Can flashwagon Walter please, italiano is a vig kill not a lynch

Even D1, some players were picking up on the possibility that Italiano was a confirmable power role (I saw Mason as a possibility, but thought that scum was a stronger possibility, and of course if Italiano was on the point of elimination as a Mason he would be able to claim out of it so that was no reason not to push him). He was, in fact, a confirmable power role. Those players are the worst possible slots to vig because if you wagon them and they claim, now you can let them confirm themself overnight and you get a second town-controlled kill; but if you nightkill them as town, then they don't get a chance to demonstrate why you're wrong about them. (This is especially important because players who are confirmable as town tend to put less effort into showing themselves as town through their dayplay!)

I'll be hopeful that you have a good explanation for this postgame. If it was just pure trolling, then you were playing quite heavily against your win condition.

Given that it had the opposite of the desired effect, I probably should explain this post.

The Not_Mafia kill N1 was outright bizarre, and combined with the surprising shelly flip D1, left me very confused as to what was going on; it felt like scum were intentionally trolling rather than trying to play normally (why doesn't scum shelly turn up and crossvote Walter? why kill the least useful townie in the game?) One explanation that neatly explains those two events is for Walter to be scum, but it doesn't seem to fit well with the rest of the gamestate.

As such, I was wondering whether the N_M kill was a vig kill rather than a scum kill (with the scum kill having been somehow prevented). I generally prefer to choose players who are being widely scumread as vig targets, but many players prefer to "policy vig" useless or lurky townies, and N_M really stands out as a vig kill when chosen on that basis.

I also suspected that the most likely Vigilante was Frogsterking (who was one of the players most strongly concerned with the N_M slot, and #809 looks like a breadcrumb to help town deduce Frogster's actions post-flip), leading to a townread (Vigilantes can't be scum), and a lot of alarm, because

I'm the Vigilante's top scumread

, which bodes pretty badly for N2. So I posted #1002 in an attempt to send a signal that would be picked up by a hypothetical vig Frogster, saying in effect "I think you made the kill last night, I was townreading you anyway but am townreading you more strongly because of it", hoping that he would realise that I was town as a consequence (if I'm vigreading someone and I'm scum, I could just shoot them and nobody would figure out it was me who had vigread them; although I only formed the vigread on D2, if I were hypothetically scum I would have the information to do this N1). I also included, in the same post, a discussion of vigilantes in order to clarify what the signal was about. Unfortunately, this sort of signal has to be quite subtle to stop scum pickign up on it.

Instead, Frogsterking started tunnelling me, which is not the reaction I expected and is pretty harmful to the gamestate. (It also rather increases the chance that I'm wrong about him being a Vigilante.)

[callforjudgement]

This is not a defense, but all those suspicious of Looker, were you suspicious of SJReaver?

I townread SJReaver (not early on on D1, but I had a growing townread as the day went on, up until the flake). I would have a rather stronger scumread on the Looker slot if not for my townread of SJReaver offsetting it

[callforjudgement]

Pretty sure I had the MOST posts D1, so this is a bad take.

For what it's worth, my memory of your D1 play is that you had a high postcount but also hadn't done anything particularly noticeable or game-progressing; my thoughts were often along the lines of "Gamma Emerald feels like a lurker, how did the postcount get so high"? It may be because a large proportion of your posts (not all of them, but many of them) are obvious comments that could have been made by anyone and/or didn't related to the main themes that were going on at the time, so it's hard to remember that you specifically were the person who made them.

As such, I don't think "Gamma Emerald is a lurker" is a useful conclusion to draw, but I also don't think it's useful to conclude anything from the fact that someone does think you're a lurker. A playstyle that includes lots of very short posts, many of which are generic, is naturally going to lead players to forget that you've done much in the game.

[callforjudgement]

Why has Looker not expressed a read on me all D2 (even if they'd prefer to vote elsewhere)? Moving to Frogster, especially when the conversation's been mostly about me recently, is a surprise; I would expect Looker to be defending me if they had a townread, and voting me otherwise.

VOTE: Looker

[callforjudgement]

at this point it may be helpful for everyone to claim whether or not they are in a neighborhood. no need to claim neighbors, but it would be very helpful for me to understand my role. i can claim/explain everything or at least something based on what people say.

Are you still interested in explaining this? Or have you changed your mind?

im concerned because i picked up on the crumb and made an assumption about your role and then hard defended you and walter (especially walter). following that, the pressure on walter disappeared. if theres a possibility that walter could be scum (if most/all of you are in neighborhoods it becomes increasingly likely that at least some of you are in neighborhoods with scum). if the pressure on walter disappeared for bad reasons, then we should look back at day 1 and reconsider whether walter is a good push today.

(Or is this the explanation, i.e. you think that Walter is town if Italiano/Walter is the only neighbourhood, but may well be scum otherwise?)

[callforjudgement]

I'm pushing you mostly because a) my vote on Gamma isn't doing much any more, with the game stalling (the Gamma wagon produced some good content but is unlikely to generate more), and b) you seem really disconnected with what's going on in the game more generally. In particular, I'd expect the self-vote in #994 to be more likely to come from scum than town; it doesn't make any sense to do intentionally as either alignment, but it seems more likely that scum would do it by mistake (as they aren't normally as invested in any particular read as a typical townie is; scum are more likely to forget who they're suspicious of than townies are).

On a more general note, do you normally consider defending players to be scummy behaviour in general? (I'm trying to understand your read on Raya.)


PEDIT: It takes me a while to write posts. (And I've been receiving quite enough / too much attention recently, which is why I was surprised that you apparently hadn't noticed at all.)

[callforjudgement]

Cfj bringing up vig so often is interesting, I'm not sure what to make of it but I don't think vig fits the setup. For that town would have FNN + Taylor as a presumed pr + protective/rb + town kp in a vig which is insanely townsided for at best 2 scum prs.

NM was a scum kill.

I was going to argue with this but after thinking about it a bit more, I think you may be right. If the hypothetical vig has more than 1 shot it'd need something like a scum roleblocker or doctor to balance, and that's a somewhat hideous setup that I don't think is likely. A 1-shot vig would fit (especially alongside a protective) but only if town has additional power somewhere (e.g. if Tayl0r's role is powerful or if there's an additional unclaimed power role); that might actually be a fairly elegant setup (if the scum kill is stopped N1, then town buys an extra day but the vig is unconfirmed, so it's self-balancing to some degree).

[callforjudgement]

If a town power role is out of shots, normally the only reasons not to claim are a) that you want scum to fear you have more and waste a nightkill on you, or b) that you think you can confirm yourself via describing your previous night actions (generally speaking if you can confirm yourself, you want to leave that until the last minute because a confirmed townie late is more valuable than a confirmed townie early). As RCEnigma pointed out, a) is unlikely in this setup. b) may be a consideration, but there may be a lot of doubt about a vig claim if there wasn't actually an additional kill, in which case there'd be no reason to delay it.

[callforjudgement]

All this said, a reviewer-meta note: last time I put a 2-shot vig into a setup, mastina's estimate of its power was somewhat lower than the other reviewers'. The setup was modified during review and became Mini Normal 2148, which is now completed; the review isn't public. I don't know Nexus's or Datisi's opinions on the strength of a vig.

Even so, though, a 2-shot vig seems unlikely based on what we know about the setup, even if the reviewers underestimated its power (and unless the scum have a roleblocker, a D2 claim of a 2-shot vig doesn't hurt much because scum can't kill them fast enough to stop the second shot).

[callforjudgement]

There are other reasons why I consider CFJ to be scummy, in short: he tried to pull the BW off of a confirmed scum player, he seemed frustrated after the scum player got lynched, and he posted an inauthentic looking town read on me in 1002.

I was frustrated with the scumflip D1. Obviously it's very helpful in terms of our win condition, but on the flipside of that, it doesn't make any sense (and nor does the nightkill). OK, so one scum was apparently unaware that this game was happening, which increases the chance that scum simply couldn't control the D1 voting (alternatively, one scum was intentionally avoiding the game, but that makes less sense rather than more). But even so, how often does it happen that scum end up getting voted out D1, when there's a viable counterwagon and many/most of the players on the wagon don't even think they're scum?

To me, scumhunting/townhunting is all about trying to figure out what everyone else is thinking. In a situation like this, I have no idea at all what scum were thinking, and that makes it very hard to work out what I should be looking for.


@

Frogster

: in terms of the "inauthentic townread", I've explained where my townread came from. Is there part of my reasoning that you specifically think can't/doesn't come from town? If so, which? I'm concerned that you think the read is inauthentic because you think I'm scum, rather than vice versa.

[callforjudgement]

And just to elaborate on why this is frustrating: "looks like all my reads were wrong, I need to re-evaluate" is one thing that often happens to townies and can be annoying for them; but in this case, it's more like "looks like all my assumptions about how people play Mafia are wrong". We're in a game where some players are/were intentionally obtuse about their actions (Not_Mafia, RCEnigma), and some players have an excessively reactive playstyle which makes them hard to read (geraintm, Nosferatu, even Walter to some extent), and (perhaps because of this) few players seem to have a strong read on anyone.

Just look at the shelly wagon, for example:

• Tayl0r Swift: Appears to have had a genuine (if mild) scumread on shelly, but didn't explain it D1 (the closest to an explanation is #690), and didn't really push it.
  
• Frogsterking: Recently claimed to have had a D1 scumread on shelly; this surprised me, because it wasn't apparent in his D1 posting (it's stated in #619 and #734 but without explanation, and was explained but weak in #488).
  
• Italiano: Deadline vote; apparent counterwagon vote to Walter, who Italiano was defending at every opportunity D1 (presumably due to getting a townread from the neighbourhood), rather than being due to a scumread on shelly.
  
• Walter: Cross-voting the counterwagon. Doesn't appear to have had a scumread on shelly.
  
• Nosferatu: Explicitly stated a townread on shelly, but disliked the composition of the Walter wagon.
  
• RCEnigma: Had already expressed a willingness to hammer either the shelly or Walter wagons (apparently primarily as a deadline scramble, but RCEnigma rarely explains anything); chose shelly after the Nosferatu vote, with a "+1" implying sheeping/agreeing with the reasoning.
  
• geraintm: Naked hammer vote. geraintm seemed to be interested in both the shelly and Walter wagons (going back and forth to some extent) but scumread shelly towards the end (#830).

Based purely on the apparent motivation behind the votes, what would you consider the possibility that shelly would flip scum? I'd put it as close to 0%; a wagon like this, with no apparent attempt by scum to stop it, would make me think that the target of the wagon was town purely based on the wagon composition and the way other people were reacting to the slot. The resulting scumflip, therefore, didn't make any sense.

(In fact, you can even scumhunt from this to some extent; I'd expect scum to think town would think "yay, shelly flipped scum!", whereas I think the more probable town reaction is along the lines of "huh, shelly flipped scum?", at least from someone who didn't have a scumread on shelly in the first place. This is one of the main arguments for Frogster as scum, due to #864, although he subsequently claimed that he had had an actual strong scumread on shelly and had simply forgotten to mention it.)


Side note that I found while reading this: I wonder if #574 was the reason for the Not_Mafia nightkill? To me this was an obvious fake guilty (especially given the context), but scum might have assumed that the choice of shelly's slot for the fake guilty was non-random in some way.

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: Walter

This is still the simplest explanation for what happened at the end of D1. I didn't have a strong scumread on Walter at the end of D1 (what weak scumread I had was primarily based on Italiano associatives that have now been explained), but his D2 play is somewhat concerning; it seems to have been intentionally trying to fly under the radar and soft-pushing wagons, without much of a read progression. (#1074 is fairly concerning, especially given the subsequent vote on me in #1114; it looks a lot like scum hedging because they aren't sure which wagons will take off and want to be in a position to push any of them.)

This reminds me: everyone has posted since #898. I'm wondering if we can learn anything about Italiano's Friendly Neighbour target from the fact that they haven't confirmed him yet. (In particular, I see no town motivation in refusing to / failing to confirm Italiano, whereas scum would obviously benefit from the uncertainty about Italiano's slot if his Friendly Neighbour action was on scum N1 and fails/is roleblocked N2. So I think the target in question is more likely than random to be scum.)

[callforjudgement]

Like, there's no theory reason to fail to confirm a claimed Friendly Neighbour as town. You aren't giving away anything about their role because they've claimed it, and you aren't giving away anything about your role other than that you aren't Ascetic. So it doesn't meaningfully help scum with their rolefishing at all.

[callforjudgement]

This reminds me: everyone has posted since #898. I'm wondering if we can learn anything about Italiano's Friendly Neighbour target from the fact that they haven't confirmed him yet. (In particular, I see no town motivation in refusing to / failing to confirm Italiano, whereas scum would obviously benefit from the uncertainty about Italiano's slot if his Friendly Neighbour action was on scum N1 and fails/is roleblocked N2. So I think the target in question is more likely than random to be scum.)

Like, there's no theory reason to fail to confirm a claimed Friendly Neighbour as town. You aren't giving away anything about their role because they've claimed it, and you aren't giving away anything about your role other than that you aren't Ascetic. So it doesn't meaningfully help scum with their rolefishing at all.

How did you rule out the option of an Italiano fakeclaim

I didn't. It's unlikely, though (given that it would be close to suicidal for a scum Italiano to make it), and if it is the case, this line of discussion is likely to reveal it.

[callforjudgement]

Something I randomly stumbled across while reading another game (not because I expected it to be connected with this game, simply something to do; I was reading through Scummies nominations):

I actually have historically done very poorly as neutral/neutral evil roles tbh. As mafia I'll usually bus my partners for that sweet sweet town cred

It's still fun to stab tho lol. Here I am tho, no knives and no votes... for now at least heheh

Banana was town that game, so they were probably telling the truth (although they were a fairly important town power role, which might have made them play a little more scummily than normal). (Banana also mentioned in the postgame that they dislike long Day phases, which is probably why they replaced out of this game.)

That said, Banana made only three votes this game, and only the Italiano vote looks like it might be a bus vote. So this is probably irrelevant to this game, except in the unlikely situation of an Italiano fake-claiming (something which should be resolved toDay). I thought I'd post it anyway, though, in case it informs anyone else's reads.

[callforjudgement]

I'm saying that I have no idea what happened, and it bothers me; and that I'm somewhat surprised that other people don't seem as bothered as I am.

Most of the playerlist either had a townread or no read on shelly, or at minimum was unwilling to vote for her. Wagons on such players are normally very hard to build (of course, deadline helps, but there were other deadline options). Normally I wouldn't expect such a wagon to be able to go through without scum manipulating for that to happen; but I also don't see why scum would manipulate a wagon on one of their own if they weren't going to get credit for it (I don't think many people are being given or trying to take credit for the shelly wagon). So I'm utterly confused as to how this situation could have happened at all.

[callforjudgement]

Actually, a theory: maybe a lot of the town has fairly accurate gut/subconscious townreads, so any wagon that gets traction is likely to hit scum by PoE (because a wagon that goes anywhere else will tend to stall out on votes). That might help to explain D1.

(Also a reminder: you should probably disclose your N1 Friendly Neighbour target; as far as I can see, there's no reason not to, because they've already chosen not to reveal themselves and it's hard to figure out what the implications of that are until we know who it is, and it would help to resolve any scepticism about your claim. PEDIT: I wrote this before seeing your most recent post, we can delay until later in the Day if you want to, but it probably needs to be sorted out toDay.)

PEDIT: on the subject of bussing, scum normally do it because they think it'll get them towncred; historically, on this site, they've had a tendency to do it more often than they theoretically should. Sometimes scum bus their partners because they think it's what they would do as town and want to avoid giving themselves away in the process; that might be a situation in which it's not intended to directly get towncred, but rather avoid scumcred. (And sometimes scum are planning only to distance, but and accidentally go too far.)

[callforjudgement]

I don't think RCE's fakeclaims are scummy (either of them, he fakeclaimed D1 too). It was terrible play in general, because it was unlikely to help meaningfully as town and could massively backfire. If RCEnigma were scum, it seems even less likely to help scum though (massively backfiring would still be possible and could lose the game for scum in that scenario, and if it works it doesn't gain anything). There's a potential exception to this, if RCEnigma is specifically a scum PT Cop and thus knew he almost certainly wouldn't be counterclaimed, but in that case why wouldn't he simply use his night action to determine PTs rather than fakeclaiming a guilty during the day?

[callforjudgement]

#1145 makes me seriously alarmed as to whether Italiano is actually fakeclaiming after all. It's just a summary of events, without much discussion or any conclusions – the sort of post that players often make to show that they're putting in effort, but not immediately useful for scumhunting other players or creating reactions (sometimes it helps people read you by showing what sort of eyes you're viewing the game with, but that doesn't help figure out other players' alignments). In short, it's the sort of post that players make when they're trying to prove themselves as town; if we're looking for scum on the shelly wagon, I'm not quite sure how that post helps with that (and I don't particularly want Italiano to waste his effort and eyesight producing something that isn't useful to the other players, unless this sort of summary is useful as a sort of "personal notes").

Proving yourself as town is normally a worthy goal to aim for for both town and (if you can successfully fake it) scum. But why would a Friendly Neighbour need to do that? (Likewise, Italiano's "didn't" not "don't" when talking about his read on Tayl0r; if Italiano is or becomes confirmed as town, his D1 reads are irrelevant as they only help read Italiano, the current reads (with more evidence) are what we need to read Tayl0r.)

(Just to make sure it's 100% clear: I did not receive a Friendly Neighbour report about Italiano last night, nor do I have any reason to think that such a report wouldn't arrive if it were sent to me.)

[callforjudgement]

Actually, I just realised that it's best not to claim "I would/wouldn't receive the message", and it was a mistake for me to claim that in my previous post; if Italiano

is

fakeclaiming, we don't want to give him more information to guess which target he should fake the claim about. Claiming did/didn't receive should be useful, though.

[callforjudgement]

(by "fake the claim about" I mean "fakeclaim to have targeted")

[callforjudgement]

Yes, but why? You're putting a lot of effort into something that doesn't obviously help town win the game, so I'm wondering what your purpose behind it is.

[callforjudgement]

And again, why are you defending yourself?

You have claimed one of the roles that has the least need to defend itself, out of all power roles (only Innocent Child has less of a need).

[callforjudgement]

Because people who are generally considered scummy are the least likely to be nightkilled, and they have to confirm the action or else you can prove them as scum.

Friendly Neighbour shots should normally be used on the scummiest players around, unless you suspect a vigilante. If you use them on a highly townish player, they frequently just end up dead and the confirmation goes missing.

[callforjudgement]

Friendly Neighbour doesn't let you talk or discuss things, though. It just confirms you as town to a player. The only way that helps to form a voting bloc is that players are more likely to sheep your reads if they know they comes from a townie.

When you're a

claimed

Friendly Neighbour, you get that advantage with

everyone

, not just the player you targeted. All that's needed is for the recipient to claim and confirm that yes, you are town. So the only important factor, now that you've claimed, is that the message gets through. (Of course, during N1 you were unclaimed, so I can see targeting a townie if you were planning not to claim D2.)

[callforjudgement]

@

geraintm

(and everyone else who hasn't clarified yet, but geraintm is posting recently): Could you confirm whether or not you received a Friendly Neighbour message about Italiano last Night?

Italiano's Night action is something that it's fairly important to clarify quickly; it's incorrect in theory to vote him out toDay either way, but knowing whether or not Italiano is a confirmed town voice would be helpful in scumhunting other players, because it would help us know what we should and shouldn't be paranoid about. Normally Friendly Neighbour claims are always town (because it's hard to fake them opposite a town that's checking out the claim), but I

have

seen one successfully faked in the past, and Italiano's recent play (e.g. stalling multiple times when I can't see any pro-town reason not to just say who he targeted) looks a lot more like a player who's hoping to get away with a fakeclaim than someone who's claiming their actual role.

(Even if Italiano is a Friendly Neighbour, the fact that nobody has claimed to receive the message yet makes me suspect that it didn't get through, because there's no reason not to claim it and yet nobody has. You're one of the few players who hasn't yet at least implied not having received the message.)

[callforjudgement]

Also, on the subject of my recent vote movement: I don't think RCEnigma is scum. I think that the majority of his posts feel a little scummier than normal, and there are some massively anti-town things that shouldn't have been done as either alignment (e.g. the fakeclaims), but that seems like it may well just be a playstyle thing; meanwhile, RCEnigma puts up the occasional very townish post like #525 (I also think #1097 is rather townish). The pressure on him was helpful because it was easier to get a read from pressured-RC than lurky-RC, but I had a townread from it, so I moved to Walter (based on objective information like the Day 1 voting, it's highly likely that either Walter or I are scum and many players have deduced that; so it's strange that there aren't more votes on Walter and I was wondering who would be interested in following me there, but apparently nobody has; maybe it's just a consequence of the general lack of activity we've had recently).

[callforjudgement]

I don't think town/scum is all

that

unlikely. It also isn't always the case that players who look scum based on voting patterns actually are, especially as scum has some degree of control over what flips we get.

(If the Friendly Neighbour is a fakeclaim, then scum/scum is also a possibility – in this situation, the neighbourhood might not even exist at all. But there isn't much point in worrying about that unless Italiano continues to stall on confirming himself.)

[callforjudgement]

Or, you know, you can just scumhunt without that information. I looked at the deadline and we have a little over 8 days. If you don’t get that information until the deadline day, what are you not gonna scumhunt? Since you like assuming stuff about me, assume I am what I say I am and go from there.

Every flip makes scumhunting so much easier. It's certainly possible even without the information, but every read I have needs to deal with two possiblities, you as town and you as scum. If I (and everyone else) spend the day assuming that you're town, and then it turns out towards the end that you aren't confirmed town after all, we're all going to have to scramble to re-evaluate and will probably end up making a suboptimal decision. You shouldn't want the possibility of that happening if you're town, whereas it seems like something that would work out very well for you if you're scum.

After all, if you

are

town, why are you so confident that your message was successfully received? If I were a Friendly Neighbour, and despite all the odds and prompting, nobody had confirmed me by this point in the Day, I'd start being really paranoid that something had gone wrong with the night action somehow and attempt to determine what that was and why. You're acting like it's no big deal if you end up not being confirmed today.

[callforjudgement]

I’m 99.9% sure my message was received. (bolded): That’s kinda it. I just believe it’s not the

most

pressing issue facing us at the moment. With a week left I want to get into more interactions and ask more questions to everyone. You seem more interested in clearing one slot.

It doesn't really matter how pressing or non-pressing an issue is when a) some people are bothered about it and b) it's possible to clear it up with very little effort. One post from you, one post from the recipient, and that's it, everything's done and we can move on (as there'll only be one remaining possible scumteam containing you). It's taken you much more time to say "actually I want to get into a lot of interactions and ask people questions" than it would be to simply say "I targeted

player

last night", and I can't see any possible pro-town reason to delay doing this once you've got all the information you can from seeing whether the target claims it themself or not.

[callforjudgement]

It's not like he's in danger of being lynched even without the claim.

I disagree with this; if not for the claim, I would be voting Italiano today and hoping that other people would follow me there (and I don't think I'm the only person suspicious of him; Not_Mafia wanted him vigged, so presumably that was a scumread, and it wasn't me who pushed him to a claim in the first place). He has been one of the scummiest players both Day 1 and Day 2 (admittedly, this may be because being confirmable as town means that you don't have to try to look town).

(As for your mention of "twilight", that would be a terrible time to out a target, because it would give us no time to react if the target claimed not to receive the message, and it's probably worse in most respects than claiming the following day. Half the reason to claim it early is to give us time to react if it turns out that we need to react because the message didn't go through and/or the recipient fakeclaims that it didn't go through. I also have a mild scumread on Italiano's target (assuming that the action went through) because they didn't claim it; it would be nice if I could make use of that to inform my scumhunting, but I currently can't do that reliably because I don't know for certain who it is.)

At least in a Normal, it's theoretically incorrect to vote out a Friendly Neighbour claim without at least giving them a second chance to prove themself, so I don't expect to be voting for Italiano today. However, I am a lot more likely to sheep him if he does turn out to provably town.

[callforjudgement]

Do you believe Shelly lurked out of the game because they were the designated buss or not?

I don't know. I think it's possible, especially if Walter is scum. I also, however, think it's possible that she somehow managed to forget that this game exists (she's new, perhaps she doesn't use egosearch, got prodded while busy and then forgot about the prod by the time she was ready to play again).

It might be worth looking into this in more detail: the prod on shelly was made public in #789 (Friday 4 September 2020 18:42:55 UTC), and prods are generally made public only a few minutes after they're sent (because the mod normally performs all modding actions related to a game at about the same time). Shelly's next post after that time was post 420 of newbie 2027 (which fortunately has since been completed, so I can talk about it), around 6 hours later. Her previous post before the prod (which was about 3 hours before it happened) implied that she was going offline for a while:

imma head off for a bit though if you want to give me game feedback.

Shelly's timezone / sleep pattern appears to be one where she sleeps in the evening UTC, waking up at around midnight UTC:

I just woke up 10 mins ago

So she was probably prodded shortly after she went to bed. If she woke up to find a prod and then started posting in other games, it's hard to see how the lurking-to-replacement couldn't have been intentional. It's a little unlikely that she was prodded while on the point of sleep, read the prod PM and then forgot about the game overnight, because of what her previous post said and the normal timings (most but not all people sleep more than 6 hours per day). It does, however, seem possible that she woke up, checked her email/PMs, did things other than Mafiascum for a while and had forgotten about this game by the time she started posting in earnest.

(I guess there's also a small chance of a mod error. Completely ignoring one game you're playing in, while playing actively in others, is really strange behaviour as any alignment; some of the players I've seen who are in lots of games and not enjoying all of them will lurk to the point of prodding, but will almost invariably come back to make a post or two when prodded. This seems to increase the chance that something went wrong when sending the prod.)

[callforjudgement]

Here's something I'd like the opinion of someone else on: do you think Raya is trying to pocket me? I've been townreading Raya this game, mostly for defending me / stating a townread on me in circumstances where scum would have no reason to defend me or could easily push me (but where town would be likely to gain more of a townread on me), but I'm starting to wonder whether that's because Raya wants me to townread her, rather than because she's picking up towntells from me.

[callforjudgement]

Isn't it somewhat likely at this point that the person you targeted is scum (assuming that your action went through, which you seem to be assuming even though I haven't)? They've failed to confirm you despite numerous opportunities and numerous people trying to convince them to do so, when there is no pro-town reason not to, and when they've been asked to do so by you (who should be confirmed town to them and thus they should be following your instructions).

[callforjudgement]

EBWOP: which you seem to be assuming even though I'm not

[callforjudgement]

...and when they've been asked to do so by you (who should be confirmed town to them and thus they should be following your instructions).

I’ve never asked anything.

The person I targeted knows who they are and I would rather them confirm.

OK, that isn't technically a question, but I think it's close enough to use the word "asked".

I am amazed that you are going to this much effort to intentionally antagonize me, and everyone else asking you, for no obvious pro-town reason. Your behaviour over the last few pages has been much more similar to caught scum than it has to confirmed town. (This is, of course, what's fuelling and intensifying the calls for you to stop stalling and just solve the issue that could be trivially solved – because given that you are acting like caught scum, people are starting to read you as having fakeclaimed, and thus expecting you to

become

caught scum in a few pages from now, once your claim turns out to be impossible to substantiate. Or to put it another way, if you're fed up with the conversation about your night action, simply claiming it would be a trivially simple way to get town back on track, and the most likely consequence of continuing to refuse to claim it will be to increase the number and vehemence of people calling on you to claim it.)

[callforjudgement]

I think we should get back on track and get on these wagons and see what’s happening there. I was gonna give my analyses of the shelly flip after (1145 & 1170), both on and offwagon but these jokers have fully distracted the town and some of you have fallen right into it. Don’t do it, get your minds back on track and disregard the shade and the nonsense. And I’m not saying this to take the attention off of me. I want to lay it all out, just not right now. It’s not a stall, it’s a choice.

Why didn't you?

This is a serious question. There is absolutely no reason you couldn't just post your analysis of the shelly flip, regardless of what you're otherwise talking about. If you think that people are trying to distract the town, and for some reason are unwilling to make the distraction go away when it would be trivially simple to do so, surely the next-best course of action is to ignore the distraction and continue with what you're doing anyway.

I was considering calling you out on this in the vicinity of #1169:

I will say that doing these ISO’s has completely destroyed whatever reads I thought I had. :eek:

This seems like valuable information that would help guide the scumhunting of the rest of the playerlist. If there's something that you missed that made you re-evaluate, maybe the rest of us would re-evaluate upon seeing it too. If you're town, surely you should value the rest of the town having accurate reads! #1169 was almost 36 hours ago. What is the town motivation for holding back information that helps us scumhunt correctly? What is the town motivation for

not doing what you've been trying to pressure other players into doing, and instead talking about the Friendly Neighbour result, which you've been trying to pressure other players into

not

doing

?

It is not me who has been distracting the town. It's you, and you have put a disproportionate amount of effort into it. I, and a number of other players, have been trying to get you to stop. You say that there are four players calling on you to disclose your result. A 13p Normal is almost invariably 10:3, so at least two (and quite possibly more) of those players must be town.

[callforjudgement]

EBWOP: I was considering calling out Italiano on this in the vicinity of #1169, but instead decided to wait to see if he posted the information of his own accord. Even if a hypothetically town Italiano has some sort of weird mental block against substantiating his claim (maybe he misread his role PM so badly he thinks he has a post restriction, or something), I would expect him to finish posting his analysis, especially as he's apparently written it already, rather than waiting another 36 hours for… what? Like, if he wants to do things in a particular order, why not immediately move on with the first choice on his TODO list?

[callforjudgement]

Also, given that there's been a (fairly) direct counterclaim at this point, I would expect Italiano to be voting Walter:

If it is a fakeclaim then why

tell me in neighbor chat where he sent it too

.
That would out his scumbuddy.

And don’t pressure Walter.

He doesn’t know

and it’s not his decision.

It shouldn't take more than a few minutes for Italiano to reread the Neighbour PT and verify whether the Friendly Neighbour target is listed there or not.

I can see zero reason why a hypothetically town Walter would lie about this. I can also see zero reason why a hypothetically town Italiano wouldn't immediately call out Walter if/when he did lie about it. If the stalling of results is some kind of overwhelmingly stupid reaction test, then this is surely the most informative sort of reaction you could hope for.

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: ItalianoVD

Normally, if someone claims a confirmable role early in the game, but it fails to confirm, you leave them alive for at least one more Night just in case something went wrong and it can all be fixed. But that assumes that there's actually an attempt being made to confirm the role.

If someone claims a confirmable role and then

retracts

the claim, that's different: there is now no prospect of the player being confirmed by Night actions, and they've caused a distraction / derailed scumhunting for no good pro-town reason. This normally makes the player look scummy, and Italiano was looking scummy Day 1 has been acting even more so Day 2.

In this case, Italiano hasn't retracted the claim by his words. However, he has, in effect, retracted the claim by his actions. He isn't acting in a way remotely consistent with a Town Friendly Neighbour (or Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour); if he really did have such a role, I'd expect him to soon be in serious trouble with the listmods for repeated, outright, intentional flagrant breaches of the "play to win" rule. Everything he's been doing at all recently appears to be calculated to make it harder for the town to scumhunt; and his actions are completely inconsistent with his stated opinions (e.g. he's stated that the talk about his Night target is a distraction, but has failed to clear up this distraction even though it would be trivially easy to do so,

and

has been talking about the distraction rather than posting a list of reads he's apparently already created). This isn't a situation I've been in before, but I suspect that it's theoretically correct to vote Italiano out here. (There's very little risk to this wagon; if he's town, and thus telling the truth, he could stop the wagon at any time simply by finishing his claim. Normally, you don't want to take the risk of voting out a confirmable player, but in this case there is no way a hypothetically town Italiano wouldn't claim to save himself if he were anywhere in the same solar system as the "play to win" rule.)

[callforjudgement]

I've also been thinking somewhat about who the remaining Mafia member is (after shelly and Italiano). My main views on this are that it's probably either Walter or RCEnigma.

During Day 1, when looking into the possibility/probability that Italiano and Walter were scum together, I decided to look for who the likely scumpartners were. I thought that shelly and RCEnigma were the most likely options. I can no longer remember what my reasoning for this was (and I didn't post it because I didn't think it was anywhere near strong enough to persuade people with, especially as it relied on associative tells D1; I often trawl through ISOs looking for things, but don't normally post the results unless I actually find something). I do, however, remember the reads themselves. shelly did actually turn out to be scum, which I think increases the odds that I was on the right track (and a shelly scumflip is not remotely a surprise if the counterwagon was also scum; a hypothetical Italiano+Walter+shelly team would have preferred a shelly elimination to a Walter ellimination because a Walter scumflip would have made Italiano look

really

bad).

My reads assuming that the Italiano+Walter pair is scum mostly came from the Italiano slot, however, which reduces the chance that Walter is correct in that solve. RCEnigma stands out as suspicious today not necessarily for the fakeclaim (it created a distraction at a convenient time for scum, but I can see a hypothetically town RCEnigma doing that without realising what the consequences would be), but rather for the actions beyond that. He's been prolonging the whole distraction with Italiano's target (which, although it benefits scum either way, is only mildly suspicious if Italiano turns out to be town, but really massively suspicious if Italiano is scum). He's been quite heavily focused on Raya as scum, and I don't get why he'd push her as scum in preference to me if he's town and thinks that both of us are scum (I know that he's been stating second thoughts on me, but the reads on me and Raya seem a little artificial). Meanwhile, I can see why scum would prefer to push Raya over me; she is probably less good at defending herself than I am, and would probably be an easier wagon to push over the line. So I'm currently in the weird position of disagreeing with the reasoning behind RCEnigma's wagon, but somewhat agreeing that the slot is scummy.

I'm a little concerned that scum have been trying to create an environment in which the general mood is "it's CFJ or Raya" in the hope that town goes along with it (many of the votes on Raya appear to be based on townreads on me, rather than scumreads on Raya). It's suspicious that nobody followed me onto Walter (even if he does turn out to be town), when Walter being scum is the simplest way to understand the shelly wagon; that makes me think that there's an attempt going on to manipulate reads within the town in general. Day 1, there was basically no wagon consolidation. Today, there is, but the top wagon is a slot that hasn't done much and is much less suspicious in terms of voting patterns than many of the other slots (especially me and Walter). It's hard to see how town gets there of its own accord. This is another factor that points towards RCEnigma as plausible/likely scum.

[callforjudgement]

Raya and cfj pushing the same angle still.

Cfj I asked about Shelly being bussed because I would find it difficult to believe with a wagon already leading on scum!Italiano, with Shelly involved -- would then designate Shelly as the buss and have her lurk out.

Also the spearheads of both the cfj wagon and Italiano wagon were mostly present on the Shelly wagon. It makes the walter wagon look a ton worse in retrospect. I mean, worse than it did in being the counterwagon to a scum flip.

Add in the night kill, likely to specifically set up a walter elim, and cfj you are part of the tandem pushing these counter-town angles.

I've kind of been wanting to give you the benefit of the doubt because maybe you're just a townie on the wrong side of the tracks. But you have not had the thought that maybe you had been voting against town interest and were wrong on walter with A.) The wagon composition on scumflip and 2.) The company you are keeping. For example Raya with soft defending the Shelly slot before votes were in favor of flipping Shelly.

I don't think it's unreasonable for a townie to have soft-defended the shelly slot. There wasn't all that much which was scummy there. At least one player called it the slot town even while voting for it, and much of the rest of the wagon doesn't seem to have cared about it either way.

Also, what conclusion are you trying to draw from the voters on the Italiano wagon also being on the shelly wagon? That sounds kind-of like you're assuming that Italiano is scum, if you're lumping together his wagon with shelly (on flipped scum) and mine (on town, but you seem to think it's on scum). For what it's worth, I think the main conclusion is that some people just like to wagon, and some people don't; this game contains a number of players who are very cautious to place their votes.

I agree that the nightkill may have been to set up Walter to look bad. (This doesn't necessarily mean that Walter is town; scum may have wanted him to look bad from the nightkill so that they could use the argument "the nightkill is setting Walter up to look bad" to defend him.) This is actually one of the better arguments for Raya as scum (if she were town, she would likely have been a better nightkill for this purpose than Not_Mafia, although if scum are inexperienced with Not_Mafia they might have been paranoid of what he might do later in the Day).

In terms of Raya soft-defending, I looked into this; there does seem to be some evidence of it, e.g. #580 / #699+#704 / #805; Raya seemed to be townleaning on geraint, whereas her read on shelly is more neutral, so why rank geraint above shelly when it becomes time to compromise? I don't, however, see this as at all strong a tell about Raya. If she had defended shelly a little harder than she had, I would expect the day 1 wagon to have ended up elsewhere. Soft-defending would serve no purpose for scum unless they expected it to accomplish something; if the player flips anyway, and flips scum, you've just made yourself look bad for no reason. The behaviour in question more frequently comes from town with a null or nulltown read, because they don't expect the slot to flip scum and thus aren't thinking about how bad they'll look if/when it does.

[callforjudgement]

I just realised that there's a scenario in which Italiano could be town, but nonetheless display the behaviour shown so far this game – if Italiano is

not

a Friendly Neighbour, but

is

confirmable as town via some other means. This would explain the otherwise inexplicable stalling: if he confirms himself, he'll likely just end up drawing the nightkill, whereas if he just waits and hopes the pressure will go away, there's a chance that day ends with him looking very scummy, and scum shoot elsewhere, and there's always a fallback plan for if a wagon does build on him.

It doesn't explain the focus on deflecting the pressure against him rather than on scumhunting (like he says he wants to), and it doesn't explain the lengths he's going to to intentionally antagonize people. But at least I can now just about imagine his behaviour coming from town.

With that said, RCEnigma seems pretty likely as an Italiano partner, and is also pretty likely scum if Italiano is town (even if Italiano thinks he has a good reason to wanting to increase the general confusion and antagonism surrounding the game at the moment, RCEnigma doesn't really). My main reservation against joining that wagon is that I don't much like the wagon that's there at the moment – I would have expected it to dissipate upon realising that RCEnigma has a tendency to do stupid and ill-advised gambits as town, but it didn't (in particular, the fact that Raya is still there is something of a point against Raya, as she doesn't seem to have a scumread for independent reasons). I guess I'm starting to see where the Raya wagon has come from.

[callforjudgement]

Still torn about the existing RCEnigma wagon, but I don't think that's a reason not to vote there:
VOTE: RCEnigma

If someone on the Raya wagon would prefer to push that one through, I'd be interested to hear your case.


PEDIT: If Italiano is town, he is playing against town wincon because the significant uncertainty around his slot is making it very difficult to scumhunt. Remember that he originally claimed under duress; the claim was to prevent a wagon building on him, it wasn't just a random claim out of the blue (see #876 / #[post]878). So right now, players who don't know whether or not Italiano is confirmed town have to take into account both the possibility that a) Italiano is town, and b) Italiano is fakeclaiming scum. (In fact, there's a third possibility, "Italiano is fakeclaiming town", which makes things even harder.) The more possibilities you have to sort through, the more uncertainty there is in the game and the harder it is to form conclusive reads. This also makes it harder to read everyone else, because town are confused by the uncertainty and give weaker signals, and scum can take advantage of it to hide.

On top of that, if Italiano is trueclaiming (i.e. is town, and is a Friendly Neighbour), the information about who he targeted is useful information for scumhunting the player who he targeted. Failing to reveal for this long doesn't help town, so the player in question has been acting in an anti-town way and thus is more likely to be scum.

[callforjudgement]

Or to put it another way, it's not "what does Italiano get out of it?" but "what does the rest of town get out if it?" The amount of that the rest of town gets is quite a lot. The amount that Italiano gets is much smaller, but the amount that Italiano

loses

is also very small or nonexistent; scum already know whether or not Italiano is town, so (excluding the possibility of fakeclaiming town) they know whether or not the claim is real already, but town doesn't have that information.

[callforjudgement]

With that said, RCEnigma seems pretty likely as an Italiano partner, and is also pretty likely scum if Italiano is town (even if Italiano thinks he has a good reason to wanting to increase the general confusion and antagonism surrounding the game at the moment, RCEnigma doesn't really).

It literally DOES NOT MATTER if Italiano is confirmed today or not. I take issue with you using it as a crutch for the gamestate when it is such a miniscule part of the day.

If he is FNN then he is either night killed tonight or he isn't and can confirm tomorrow regardless of who his target was last night. This affects 0 parts of the day today.

If he isn't FNN then he has two options, try and super anti spew his partner or have his partner claim to get the message. Worst case there ends up being a 50/50 down the line about which world to dive in but that's it. Italiano isn't being elimmed today regardless of alignment.

It may well matter if it's the difference between eliminating you today and eliminating Raya today. (For example, you are more likely to be town if Italiano is town than if Italiano is scum, although you could easily be scum in either situation.) Or are you deciding "OK, let's assume that Italiano's town, if he's actually scum it's OK if we accidentally waste the entirety of Day 2 and vote out a townie due to the lack of information because we'll then have caught scum Day 3". Then say Day 3 actually comes round, and there's a weird nightkill and Italiano claims to have targeted the killed player, and also that his Night 1 target was the Day 2 elimination.

Again, remember that this wasn't a random Friendly Neighbour claim out of the blue; it was a claim to save himself, on explicit request by Tayl0r (who is very likely town).

Scum

already have

the main part of the information that's being kept secret (Italiano's role and alignment). They don't have his exact target, but I don't see that mattering much to scum. Town do not have this information. Town can scumhunt much more effectively if it has as much information as possible; the only reason to keep information secret is to prevent scum from getting it, and yet scum have it already in this case! So there is no pro-town reason not to out it, assuming that outing it is even possible.

[callforjudgement]

Or another scenario: say there's a scum roleblocker, and they roleblocked Italiano N1. If he doesn't out today, it looks really suspicious when he tries to out D3 and both of his targets claim not to have received the Friendly Neighbour message (scum would definitely block rather than kill in that scenario). If he does out today, and the recipient claims not to have received the message, we'll be somewhat suspicious of Italiano, but at least we'll know that there's a scenario in which he's town, and maybe town will have power roles that'll be able to check for any shenanigans N2.

[callforjudgement]

Or are you deciding "OK, let's assume that Italiano's town, if he's actually scum it's OK if we accidentally waste the entirety of Day 2 and vote out a townie due to the lack of information because we'll then have caught scum Day 3". Then say Day 3 actually comes round, and there's a weird nightkill and Italiano claims to have targeted the killed player, and also that his Night 1 target was the Day 2 elimination.

Yes because we'll have traded town for scum. Which is 100% in favor of town.

We'll have traded three townies for one scum. This is a very neutral outcome in most scenarios, probably slightly scumsided (as scum would get to choose two of the kills – their nightkills – and would have a lot of influence over the third due to assumed-town-but-actually-scum Italiano's input into the D2 elimination). Simply being able to hang on one more day is a huge benefit to caught scum.

(Admittedly, this would be less bad for town in the current gamestate than it would in most cases, because the D1 elimination hit scum and the N1 nightkill got rid of a useless townie.)

My point, though, is that this situation could happen regardless of Italiano's alignment. Obviously, a scum Italiano could fake it; but it could also happen to a town Italiano if the target of his night action ends up being the elimination today, and fails to claim it during twilight at the latest. So the next Day, we

still

won't know whether or not Italiano is scum; if he can't substantiate himself by that point, we'll almost certainly be forced into eliminating him just in case, and if he is town, town may end up collapsing.


PEDIT: (re #1266) I had a very strong "either scum, or intentionally throwing the game" read on Italiano until a couple of hours ago (to the extent that I got very angry in real life about the whole situation), when I realised that it was possible that he was town fakeclaiming one confirmable role as a different confirmable role – that's one of the few ways to make sense of the game, so I calmed down somewhat and also my read got somewhat weaker. I no longer have much of a drive left to push the slot, and am not that certain of my own thoughts on it any more.

It is not surprising that the wagon of someone who claims to be confirmed town is empty. You need a really strong read on someone to not at least test their claim before eliminating them. (That's what I was trying to do, test the claim. We can do that D2, we don't have to wait until N2.)

[callforjudgement]

Then gg town wins.

I'm not convinced: in Nosferatu's scenario, then D3 we have Italiano (scum), Italiano's buddy (claims a town result on Italiano), 7 townies. We'll probably waste a few days miseliminating townies in that scenario, and if we do get suspicious of the Italiano+buddy pairing, we'll almost certainly eliminate the buddy first. At that point, we'll still have no idea whether or not Italiano is scum; after all, even if he's town, he could have targeted scum and the scum player in question would confirm him. I fail to see how this scenario is an automatic town win.

[callforjudgement]

If someone on the Raya wagon would prefer to push that one through, I'd be interested to hear your case

honestly if i wasnt scumreading raya i wouldnt remember that shes in the game

100 posts with almost no substance, no impact on the game that i can think of, and she also refuses to put her vote where her mouth is wrt the italiano claim, almost like she knows that he's town and knows his claim will get confirmed :o

As for the "high postcount but no substance or game impact" read, I can sympathise with that.

This game has quite a few other slots of that nature (Gamma, geraint, and you), but I have a townread on all three of those slots. So I guess the wagon on Raya is a sort of "active-lurker PoE"? The main thing that worries me about voting for slots like that is that they're nearly always where scum looks to get their miseliminations, especially on Day 2 of a game, so I tend to be suspicious of wagons on them.

In this case (especially as my reads have been fairly off this game and there's evidence that the town as a whole may have good PoE reads this game), I'm interested in joining the wagon if it actually is a "this is a scumread, I want this player flipped" wagon (I was reading it more as a "well, I have to go somewhere, and I'm getting bored of toDay" wagon, and it seems massively against the odds to hope that those somehow end up hitting scum two Days in a row). I am not willing to vote Raya on the basis of having a scumread there myself. However, I am willing to vote there on the basis of sheeping you and Tayl0r, if you feel that it's a wagon that's worth pushing.

[callforjudgement]

We're 11 now, 2v9. Say Raya is town and we elim town today tomorrow we are at 2v7 and scum!Italiano is "confirmed" by their partner, we elim another townie. 2v5. Scum!Italiano is still alive and has no confirmation message, claims to have fn'ed the night kill. Yes you're right we elim the partner first and on a scum flip Italiano is dead.

Oh right, Italiano would have to come up with a third target N3.

If Italiano confirms that he is a

full

Friendly Neighbour (i.e. can confirm himself every Night all game, rather than just once or twice), that would be sufficient for me for today. (I don't want a scum Italiano weaselling out this by claiming to have limited shots.)

[callforjudgement]

Then gg town wins.

I'm not convinced: in Nosferatu's scenario, then D3 we have Italiano (scum), Italiano's buddy (claims a town result on Italiano), 7 townies. We'll probably waste a few days miseliminating townies in that scenario, and if we do get suspicious of the Italiano+buddy pairing, we'll almost certainly eliminate the buddy first. At that point, we'll still have no idea whether or not Italiano is scum; after all, even if he's town, he could have targeted scum and the scum player in question would confirm him. I fail to see how this scenario is an automatic town win.

Are you thinking in that situation the town (as a collective) will immediately regard the buddy as town?

No, I'm not. My mistake was forgetting that Italiano would, in this hypothetical, have a night action on N3 (RCEnigma corrected this).

[callforjudgement]

Walter, do you still have a scumread on Looker? Or do you now think me+Raya is the only possibility?

Are there any other slots you're considering? The only scumread-like thing you've expressed all D2 on anyone but me, Raya and Looker is a dislike of RCE's and Tayl0r's claims.

[callforjudgement]

There was no way I could anticipate there would be three fakeclaims D2 when I replaced in D1.

Three? I can only think of one admitted and one probable fakeclaim D2 (RCEnigma and Italiano respectively). What was the third?

On a side note, #1318 was necessary because #1312 directly violated a site rule (Mafia-specific rule 3). The moderator would get into trouble with the site administration if they didn't at least give a warning for it. (If you haven't read the site rules yet, you should do so; games have been ruined due to people breaking them out of ignorance.)

[callforjudgement]

I'm aware that Tayl0r claimed. I don't understand why you're describing it as a fakeclaim, though.

[callforjudgement]

lets do an exercise: everyone post your gun to head scumteam of two people with one extra person who might be scum for me please. this could potentially provide very interesting data.

Only one extra person?

I would say Italiano/Walter as the most likely scumteam, and RCEnigma as the next-best option. I'll throw in a bonus "most players are townish, this player isn't" read on Looker, for if you're aiming to solve the game by PoE.

[callforjudgement]

@

Frogsterking

: As scum, it's nearly always correct to do PR-hunting at Night (rereading the thread), while you're looking at the kill. It would be a bad idea for scum to post pages of rolefishing analysis in a daytalk thread because they couldn't make use of that information immediately, and it would mean that they weren't being focused on the game.

As far as I can tell, you've never drawn scum (there are two games you were in whose records are incomplete due to a site crash, you might have been scum in those), so you might not be used to what a scum PT typically looks like. It is very rare for them to be anything like you're imagining they might be, though. If you're interested, here's a scum QT in which I was scum, in a mechanically complex game where roles were quite important, and it

still

doesn't look anything like you're imagining; there's very little bouncing ideas off of each other, and much more statements along the lines of "this is what I've figured out so far". In less mechanically complex games like Normals, there's rarely much rolefishing going on at all, it's more like "I think this person might be a power role", and even then it's usually a backup plan for if there's nobody you want to kill based on reads or WIFOM purposes. Besides, scum don't have the information to effectively work out the details of the setup on Night 1; trying to find associative tells pre-flip is hard enough, trying to solve complex balance-logic puzzles with no power role flips is even harder, and D1/N1 is just too early to effectively pull it off. So any early game PR-hunting is effectively done on the basis of "I think this player is acting abnormally scummy, but they aren't on our scumteam, maybe they're a power role".

I also don't think I've done any prompting of people to claim roles this game? I have been pushing Italiano to reveal his target, but he already has a claimed role, so that isn't revealing any additional information that's useful for scum (rather, it's trying to reveal information useful for town, by exposing a fakeclaim and aiding us in scumhunting the person he targeted).


(As a side note, Not_Mafia has been known to misuse power roles in the past, but softing vig would be an incredibly big mistake for an actual vig to make – there's no town benefit at all, and it runs the risk that scum pick up on the soft and kill you, or that town realise you're acting oddly and vote for you – so it's unlikely that an experienced player would even consider the possibility. #799 wasn't an attempt to determine if Not_Mafia had a role, it was an attempt to goad him into making a post other than his usual intentionally useless posts.)

[callforjudgement]

For the excercise,
I would go with raya + CFJ. if CFJ is town then look at gamma/ looker/italiano.

The mention of Italiano here really worries me. If Walter is town, then his actions toDay indicate a strong townread on Italiano (why would you go along with letting him stay unconfirmed if you think there's a decent chance he could be scum, when you're in a position to intervene?). I can understand why Walter would defer to Italiano if he thinks Italiano is almost certainly town, but not otherwise.

Instead, Walter's basically just listed a list of "scumreads that are widely held", apparently without actually thinking about them. These reads don't seem particularly consistent with Walter's actions, but are easily explainable as a scum Walter wanting to keep his options open.

[callforjudgement]

Out of all things CFJ could comment about he says that in a hypothetical scenario where Walter is town, provoking NM into playing less cryptically may be beneficial to scum by giving an easier excuse for them to join the Walter wagon.

How is that the first example you post when you don't even read Walter as town? And what would NM reveal that would provide an easy excuse for others to join the Walter wagon?

Did you miss #774 in the middle of your quote? geraintm thought that #745 was scummy because it might be scum trying to find an excuse to vote Walter. I thought that that was possible, but wasn't the most likely explanation (in that there were obvious benefits to town too).

There's a difference between having a scumread on someone, and not even considering the possibility that they're town. I didn't have a strong scumread on Walter; and even if I did, I would be open to considering the possibility that he was town (especially when looking at a hypothetical scumread on someone else – in which there would be fewer other scum in the setup – or when trying to reason with someone and trying to explain to them why their reasoning was wrong, a situation in which I need to use their reads rather than mine).

In this case, I thought that the reasoning behind geraint's scumread on you was incorrect. geraint's read was based around a hypothetical in which Walter was town, so I started from the same starting point as he did, and explained that although how the post was consistent with you as scum, there were also obvious pro-town reasons why you might have made it, and therefore this wasn't evidence that you were scum. You seem to be taking geraint's argument for you as scum, falsely attributing it to me, and then claiming that clearly I have secret knowledge that Walter is town or otherwise I wouldn't have made it. Don't you see how utterly illogical this is?

I don't think I've ever seen people use reasoning quite this bad unless they're really deep in a tunnel. Please, step back, and try to evaluate your reads more objectively rather than getting caught up in emotion. I fear you've constructed some really elaborate, complex, unlikely and probably even internally inconsistent scenario in your mind by starting with an incorrect assumption that I'm scum, drawing tenuous conclusions from that, taking them as fact, drawing more tenuous conclusions from that, and so on. (I've been there myself; I've been known to tunnel as town on occasion, and it's really helpful if someone catches what I'm doing and points it out to me.) When you're this deep into a tunnel, the assumptions you're reasoning off have essentially no connection to reality, so your conclusions don't either. That means that, in addition to being wrong on me, they aren't going to be useful for scumhunting anyone else either.

[callforjudgement]

@callforjudgment: Why did you kill Not_Mafia?

I didn't. It does look more like a town-performed kill than a scum-performed kill, but I wasn't responsible for it.

[callforjudgement]

(this post inspired by a post by Frogsterking, but directed to everyone, and about a somewhat heavier / less light-hearted topic than normal)

I view both of these posts as the long and anguished cries of an injured wolf, filling our afternoon sky.

Actually, this statement hit me really uncomfortably close to home.

Part of the reason I play Mafia is to get more understanding of real life interactions. If you're worried about people trying to intentionally deceive you, or want practice at defending yourself when you're falsely accused, or want to see how effective various techniques are for persuading someone of something false, it would be really unethical to do that sort of thing in a real-life situation, or about something that matters. Mafia gives us an opportunity to try out this sort of thing in a controlled environment, where we're all (or should be) playing to win, but nothing bad happens if we lose. So Mafia is, in a way, a model of the real world.

Frogsterking's statement above reminded me of a behaviour all too commonly seen in real life (especially in the case of politics): people who decide that they have such-and-such a view on some particular issue, then try their best to rationalise it, cherry-picking evidence that they think favours it, even to the extent of coming up with long and bizarre conspiracy theories when they can't justify their statement in a simpler way. When you confront these people with evidence that their view may be wrong, they tend to deflect it, or weigh a tiny bit of evidence in their favour up against a huge amount against and claim theirs is larger. When you undermine part of their reasoning, they'll insist that the rest is still correct, even though its premises may have been undermined. If you disprove the entirety of their logic, they'll eventually just say that they're ignoring you and that they're right regardless (especially if they see you as "opposed" to them). I don't know of any effective techniques for actually getting these people to change their mind, or even to start reasoning in good faith to help you come to a decision if you're undecided or there's conflicting evidence. ("You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.")

So in effect, the conditions are here for Mafia to show us something that could really improve real life; this sort of "stubborn, unpersuadable voter" behaviour is almost certainly caused by the exact same thing that causes a townie to get into the sort of illogical, unreasoned tunnel that Frogster is in at the moment. That means that if we can figure out a way to stop a player tunneling (short of something absolutely undeniable, like a flip), the same technique would probably be really valuable in real life, maybe fixing many of the world's major problems by allowing opposite sides of the political spectrum to sit down and actually come to a joint conclusion rather than just butting heads endlessly. That's something that would be more important than any Mafia game.

As such: does anyone know of a way to talk players out of a tunnel? I've tried and failed in the past; even attempting it as confirmed town (so that my motives couldn't be questioned), I couldn't get anywhere (and lost that game because the last two townies were deathtunnelling each other and scum nightkilled me). Some way to accomplish this would be really valuable, both in terms of helping towns that are stuck in Mafia games, and more importantly, with ramifications for real-world interactions too.

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: Frogsterking

I can't possibly see Frogsterking acting this way if he knows I'm town. Tunnelling may not be all that hard to fake, but this sort of utterly illogical tunnelling, based on a fantasy gamestate that makes no sense and exists only in Frogsterking's mind, is almost impossible to fake; I don't think it's possible to get your mind into that place if you have proof from your role PM that you're wrong. Frogsterking's behaviour is very anti-town (in that it doesn't actually help with finding anyone else as scum, and doesn't help Frogsterking get sensible reads either, and means that Frogsterking will probably end up losing the game by voting for the wrong player near late-game due to having no understanding of the actual gamestate). But it isn't something that I think can come from scum.

As a consequence, I'm seeing Frogsterking as pretty much certain town, and other players should be seeing Frogsterking as "town unless CFJ is scum, and probably still town even then".

[callforjudgement]

I'm trying to explain to Italiano why Frogsterking is almost certainly town (and thus his vote will be more useful elsewhere).

[callforjudgement]

I'm not defending Frogster to get towncred on myself. In fact, I knew when I made the post that I might get scumread for it. I don't care, though; this looks like the sort of game that will get solved by PoE, and being able to remove one player from the PoE will be helpful for that, even if they are being worse than useless at the moment.

I don't believe Frogster (or anyone else) is capable of faking Frogster's play this game when scum. That sort of violent self-destructive tunnelling is just not something someone can do without truly believing in it. (I appreciate that this argument is more convincing to me than it is to other people, because a hypothetical scum!Frogster could truly believe that a hypothetical scum!me is scum. But if you have an argument that needs me to be scum to be correct, it makes more sense to focus on me first.)

I think it's very unlikely that this setup is 9:4. (This is partially due to reviewer meta. Talking only about completed games only because I don't know the setup of ongoing games and can't talk about them anyway, the last time mastina reviewed a 9:4, there was a lot of discussion in the review thread about whether the game could be Normal; this ended up dominating discussion, and mastina accidentally entirely forgot to do a balance review. The game turned out to be very scumsided (it would have been scumsided even as a 10:3), mastina got called out on it in the Normal Review Group forums, and apologised. Given what happened last time, I think that it's basically impossible that she makes such a mistake again, and it's almost impossible to cram enough roles into a 9:4 with a normal day/night cycle to balance it,

especially

if you're letting the scum multitask by default). Incidentally, in the very unlikely situation that the setup

is

9:4, this almost guarantees that Walter is scum because otherwise it would have been almost trivially easy for scum to redirect the day 1 deadline wagon without looking overly suspicious.

[callforjudgement]

I think it's very unlikely that this setup is 9:4. (This is partially due to reviewer meta. Talking only about completed games only because I don't know the setup of ongoing games and can't talk about them anyway, the last time mastina reviewed a 9:4, there was a lot of discussion in the review thread about whether the game could be Normal; this ended up dominating discussion, and mastina accidentally entirely forgot to do a balance review. The game turned out to be very scumsided (it would have been scumsided even as a 10:3), mastina got called out on it in the Normal Review Group forums, and apologised. Given what happened last time, I think that it's basically impossible that she makes such a mistake again, and it's almost impossible to cram enough roles into a 9:4 with a normal day/night cycle to balance it,

especially

if you're letting the scum multitask by default). Incidentally, in the very unlikely situation that the setup

is

9:4, this almost guarantees that Walter is scum because otherwise it would have been almost trivially easy for scum to redirect the day 1 deadline wagon without looking overly suspicious.

The last 9-4 I was in had a like 8 person neighborhood, a traitor, a cop, an IC, a babysitter, and an informed goon. Scum won easily and that was with elimming traitor day 1.[/quote]
For the record, RCEnigma and I are talking about the same game, Mini Normal 2058.

[callforjudgement]

Also I messed up quote tags in the above, the bit that shows as being from RCEnigma was actually from me, the bit before the [/quote] is from RCEnigma.

[callforjudgement]

That sounds unbalanced. Surely there can be a way to balance a 9-4.

There is. Make the setup 10-3.

I was thinking a vig, a couple different investigatives, a watcher or a doctor or both, additionally some kind of alternative pr like a day messager, vs a role blocker and three goons. Something like that.

You can create a setup that's win/loss balanced along those lines, but it'd be no fun to play. Either you get saved by the power roles and town wins, or you don't and scum wins. A VT would have very little influence over how the game went.

[callforjudgement]

@Frogsterking: On the subject of "town driven" – which specific players do you think were

driving

the shelly wagon, as opposed to being merely

on

it?

[callforjudgement]

@Frogsterking: On the subject of "town driven" – which specific players do you think were

driving

the shelly wagon, as opposed to being merely

on

it?

That is a good question, if I recall correctly there was a quick trio of votes very late in the day: myself, Walter and Italiano, I would say that trio "drove" the wagon. I town read Walter and Italiano and am confirmed town to myself of course, so I believe the shelly wagon was town-driven.

Then tayl0r slid on after a short delay I think, then at the last minute geraintm, Nos and RCE voted creating the hammer. I am lightly town reading these slots that were also on-wagon as well, though I wouldn't describe them as "driving" the wagon as much as making sure it went through. I believe this second group was mainly voting on this wagon because they trusted the slots that were already on it more so than the Walter wagon and wanted to ensure a lynch went through.

My own view on this:

• Tayl0r started the wagon. She was consistent in having shelly as scum, and implied she wanted other people to vote the slot. She never once explained the reasoning behind the scumread (except an oblique reference in #690 which was mostly a refusal to explain), which may have made other people reluctant to join.
  
• Frogster/Italiano/Walter joined the shelly wagon in quick succession, effectively killing any chance that the geraint wagon would take off. I don't think this is particularly town-indicative for Walter, because he voted for both the plausible counterwagons to his (shelly and geraint) at around that time, and made it clear that he would switch back to geraint if needed. Unless geraint is scum, it is somewhat somewhat town-indicative for Frogster and Italiano (especially Frogster, who was quite vocal in stating that this was likely to be the best compromise).
  
  @
  Italiano
  /
  Walter
  : Did you discuss #820/#821 in your neighbour PT prior to voting? If so, what were you talking about?
  
• Looker joined the geraint wagon
  after
  it pretty much had no chance of going through.
  
• If not for the mod intervention in #833, shelly would almost certainly have been hammered as a consequence of me and RCEnigma changing vote (I had already promised to change my vote to avoid deadline expiring at a time between 9 and 39 minutes from that post, and RCEnigma had already promised to hammer if I did so).
  
• Instead, Nosferatu moved onto the shelly wagon. Not_Mafia asked geraint to revote it, and geraint did so. RCEnigma moved to shelly in between, making geraint's vote the hammer.

I think the shelly wagon was primarily PoE. I think that Frogster and Italiano are largely responsible for saving geraint (without knowing what was going on in Italiano/Walter's neighbourhood, it's unclear how much credit to give each of these two parties), that Nosferatu and Not_Mafia are largely responsible for the choice of shelly over Walter (a little strange because Not_Mafia's words were pushing Walter over shelly), and that Tayl0r is the primary reason why shelly was even seen as a valid compromise wagon in the first place.

In retrospect, it's also quite plausible that the reason the shelly wagon went through is that it was an "unexpected" wagon that grew very quickly, while one of the scum had flaked, giving scum less opportunity to interfere with it.

Purely based on the immediate circumstances surrounding the end-of-D1 wagons (rather than looking at the rest of the game), it looks like the most potential scope for scum on the shelly wagon are Tayl0r (who, although fairly active in general, was apparently offline at the critical moment and would have had huge trouble leaving the wagon convincingly at #839), Walter (who may well have just been following Italiano and made it clear that he'd move back to the geraint counterwagon), RCEnigma (whose strategy was, in effect, committing to only push a wagon over the line if it was likely to go through anyway, which is quite plausible for scum who is planning to bus if necessary but doesn't want to have to), and geraint (clearly willing to push either the Walter or shelly wagon). Meanwhile, Looker just looks bad from all this, especially if Walter turns out to be scum in addition to shelly. This analysis makes it very likely that Nosferatu is town. (I have a townread on Nosferatu anyway, but this reinforces it). It also makes me feel somewhat better about Italiano, who had probably the best opportunity of anyone to get Walter or geraint eliminated D1 rather than shelly (a simple "I'm neighbours with Walter and think he's scummy in the PT" would likely be enough to push a Walter wagon over the line, whilst being hard to disprove). Italiano's recent play has also been much more townish than his play earlier in the game (although he still needs to confirm his night action).

The above analysis got me thinking about Looker again, and I'd rather be voting for a slot that hasn't done much townish and has been flying under the radar (even if it hasn't done much that's particularly scummy), rather than a slot I'm conflicted about. VOTE: Looker

[callforjudgement]

• Frogster/Italiano/Walter joined the shelly wagon in quick succession, effectively killing any chance that the geraint wagon would take off.

I was the leading wagon at the time (729). In 789 you, Walter, and Geraintm were tied at two votes. Shelly was at one vote because Frogster had switched to geraintm. Not sure how much momentum there potentially was for geraintm to become the leading wagon.

During or a little before the shift onto shelly at the end of Day 1, geraintm was listed as a scum read, scumtelling, or a reasonable compromise wagon by:

• Frogster (#781, again in #808, again in #816)
  
• Gamma (#797)
  
• Walter (#800, again in #810)
  
• Raya (#805)
  
• me (#813)
  
• Looker (#825, after the geraintm wagon had mostly collapsed)

[/list]
I was expecting more people in this list, but that was partly because Frogster was so insistent on geraint as a viable option. On the other hand, Frogster was

also

insistent on preferring shelly, so the geraint wagon may have been doomed by voter overlap with the shelly wagon.

Walter (who may well have just been following Italiano and made it clear that he'd move back to the geraint counterwagon)

I must have missed it, but where did Walter make it clear that he’d move back to geraintm?

#810 seems clear enough.

Meanwhile, Looker just looks bad from all this

How? Why?

I was thinking of #825, which given the timing looks very much like it's trying to save shelly by trying to divert the players unwilling to eliminate Walter onto geraint instead. While looking up the post number for this, I noticed #802, which given shelly's flip is bad individually and makes #825 look even worse; this was before the big move over to shelly, and the vote count looked like #789 (except that Walter was on N_M), so it was effectively a request for Tayl0r to vote somewhere other than shelly. I can imagine a townie doing this purely because Tayl0r was the only player on a wagon alone, but there's obvious scum motivation behind it given the shelly flip, and a player who is interesting in consolidating wagons wouldn't be likely to subsequently go over to a two-player geraint wagon rather than the Walter or shelly wagon.

Italiano's recent play has also been much more townish than his play earlier in the game (although he still needs to confirm his night action).

I will reveal my night action confirmation upon twilight. I feel as though I might be the nightkill, so I’ll get all my final thoughts out then. If I knew that I would survive the night then I’d just wait until Day 3 to reveal both night revelations and possibly clinch the game (along with the other potential town prs) through PoE, but I claimed pr and while the tfnn can’t directly hurt the scum team ultimately they need it gone.

This gives insufficient time for your target to confirm you (especially if they're scum; they can just be offline / pretend to be offline until the mod locks the thread; but even a townie might be offline). This greatly raises the chance for scum shenanigans N2.

The above analysis got me thinking about Looker again, and I'd rather be voting for a slot that hasn't done much townish and has been flying under the radar (even if it hasn't done much that's particularly scummy), rather than a slot I'm conflicted about. VOTE: Looker

Do you town or scumread Gamma?

Townread (previously stated in #1274, and not much relevant has happened with the Gamma slot since). Gamma appears to townread the top wagons, and after being pressed, made a reasonable case in Looker (over multiple posts, the events in question span the range from around #1018 to #1053).

[callforjudgement]

Interesting contradction in Frogster's ISO that I noticed while writing my previous post:

Gamma starting to town tell now in recent posts leaves me with a solid scum read on the CFJ slot.

After being provoked by Looker, CFJ responds that the Gamma wagon did indeed produce good content, but for an unstated reason is unlikely to produce more, hence the vote switch.

This seems odd to me, because I'm not seeing where CFJ applied pressure to Gamma, or where Gamma produced such content, it just looked like an empty distancing vote to me.

(For context, "Gamma wagon" starts at #1019, and was pretty much over by #1060 when it became clear that Frogster preferred me over gamma today, meaning that there was no more pressure coming from the Frogster slot; Gamma hadn't posted since #1053.)

So in other words, Frogster picked up towntells from Gamma while I was voting for him. He subsequently claims that my vote must have been distancing rather than genuine, on the basis that I'd claimed to have picked up good content from Gamma while I was voting for him. And the reason that the Gamma wagon was unlikely to produce more content was that Frogster killed it! (#1060, #1062).

(I think the reason for this contradiction is the same as the reason for the other failures of logic I've pointed out from Frogster: that Frogster has decided to scumread me, initially as PoE, then deciding that pretty much everything he reads is compatible with me as scum and is interpreting everything in that light, getting confirmation bias, and ignoring his own prior reads and the context as a consequence.)

[callforjudgement]

It could, on its own. I don't think the sort of cases that Frogster has been making on me more generally could come from scum, though; I find it hard to see a player

intentionally

inserting logical fallacies into their posts, and reasoning as bad as #1359 (I analyse this in #1364) is far more likely to come from someone who incorrectly assumes that I'm scum and makes incorrect assumptions about objective facts in order to make their read fit, than someone who knows I'm town and is trying to push me anyway. If you're scum pushing a townie for made-up reasons, it's rare to pick reasons which are easily and trivially shown to be faulty reasoning by anyone; you simply don't make that post, and look for a more reasonable argument to push.

[callforjudgement]

could i ask people to give me the benefit of the doubt on raya here? im not an investigative with a guilty on raya or anything, but i do have a very strong gutread. this doesnt feel like town!raya after reading over a few games. this doesnt feel like town!raya based on raya's own description. a few people are trying to get counterwagons going. none of the people i scumread are voting raya.

If your read is that strong, I'm willing to sheep it, even though I don't have a scumread on Raya myself (especially as my current scumreads aren't all that strong).

VOTE: Raya

[callforjudgement]

That's not a contradiction. He made some bad looking posts, then some posts I liked, then bad posts again, and overall I read the slot as scum.

The contradiction is "I'm not seeing […] where Gamma produced such content", versus you explicitly stating at the time that Gamma was producing such content. Or in other words, you're assuming that you saw something townish from Gamma's posts, but that I couldn't possibly have seen something townish from the same posts.

[callforjudgement]

I received a Friendly Neighbour's PM last night (and I'm pretty sure I read it correctly).

Italiano is Town.

[callforjudgement]

Also, probably not a surprise:
VOTE: RCEnigma

One thing that's bothering me is #912; RCEnigma fakeclaimed a role that was actually in the game, and managed to retract before there was a counterclaim. (In retrospect, the "I have a guilty" made the claim a little safer, because it would cause any real PT cops to hold off on claiming until the guilty was revealed, so as to create a 2v1.) Obviously, this was a hugely risky thing to do as either alignment; potentially disastrous claims seem to be within RCEnigma's meta for either alignment, and I'm having trouble working out what alignment would be more likely to make this one. (Perhaps I should ignore this and just read RCEnigma from play, which has been pretty scummy lately.)

RCEnigma, could you explain what your "idea of what Taylor's role is" in #913 was? I didn't ask at the time because the information seemed too potentially useful for scum, but now that she's flipped, I don't think it'll giving away any information that matters to them.

[callforjudgement]

For what it's worth, I also have quite a strong scumread on Looker at this point. #1384 looks pretty bad after the Raya flip, in addition to #802…#825 looking bad after the shelly flip.

If the remaining scum aren't RCEnigma + Looker, I think Gamma and geraintm are the next most likely possibilities, but have no particular reason to think that either of them are scum.

[callforjudgement]

On Day 1, my reads were wrong and Tayl0r's were right.

On Day 2, we'd reached a deadlock, and my reads weren't all that strong. So I was interested in sheeping players who I believed to be town and had strong reads. I held off on voting Raya for as long as I did primarily because I wasn't sure whether Nosferatu's and Tayl0r's votes were just weak PoE votes or strongly held reads.

I previously explained this in #1274.

[callforjudgement]

(PEDIT: followup to #1577)

I should also point out that you were acting similarly; your vote was "virtually" on the Raya wagon, seeing as you'd given intent to hammer repeatedly, most clearly in #1498. So was mine as of #1274, and I moved it when it was clear that my stated conditions to move my vote were met. And you joined the virtual votes on Raya much later than I did.

You need to stop tunnelling; accusing something of being a scumtell when you did it yourself means that you aren't thinking clearly, because if you did it yourself (knowing that you're town) then it's clearly something that can come from town. You probably didn't realise that the situation was the same, but that's because you were tunnelling and thus assuming things about the situation rather than thinking about them.

I

strongly

recommend that you reread the game under the assumption that I'm town. Even if you continue to maintain me as scum afterwards, it would make your reads on

other

players more accurate. Don't ever vote other players based on conclusions drawn from the assumption that I'm scum; that sort of behaviour may well be how the Raya wagon built up momentum. If you have conclusions based on me as scum, please only aim them at me; at least that way your reads will be more accurate on future days after you re-evaluate, as opposed to the potential for repeatedly flipping innocent townies based on incorrect assumptions and

still

holding a scumread on me

[callforjudgement]

Or in other words, if Looker makes the same excuse, why should I believe you over him?

You should follow the reasoning that players stated at the time, if available, rather than after-the-fact reasoning.

Looker's vote for Raya is in #1384. It appears to be written as a lurker-vote, plus a bit of "agreeing with" Tayl0r and not with Walter. This is strange as a sheep vote given stated reads (he hadn't stated a read on either for a while, but #962 shows scepticism of Tayl0r and I can't see anything to contradict that read in between). Reads evolve, but if Looker had a strong enough townread on Tayl0r to trust her judgement, I would expect him to have mentioned it at some point.

Incidentally, Looker calls me scum in #1479 for

not

voting Raya, which is an interesting form of soft pressure in retrospect. #1416 contains similar pressure, although not directed specifically at me.

[callforjudgement]

Actually, take geraintm out of my PoE for good (this is me upgrading a town read to locktown). #824/#830 can't possibly come from a geraintm/shelly scumteam unless Walter is on it too, and #828 doesn't come from a geraintm/Walter team because it would be too much of a risk.

Between #826 and #828, Walter was only one vote (quite possibly Looker's, based on what was publicly known of his reads) away from an almost certain flip. All a hypothetically scum geraintm had to do to get a townflip at the time, therefore, was nothing. The Walter wagon would almost certainly get over the line before the shelly wagon did, especially given the existence of a deadline rush. geraintm might well not get credit from a shelly flip, and would be unlikely to get the blame from a Walter flip. So there was very little scum motivation not to just wait.

[callforjudgement]

Incidentally, I've been checking SJReaver/Looker and RCEnigma in double ISO, looking for how plausible the slots are as a team.

(Note that this post is "tunnelled reads", starting by assuming that they're a team and trying to determine how consistent the theory is, i.e. the same thing I've been accusing Frogster of doing. So even though the post looks overwhelmingly bad for them, it should be taken with a pinch of salt.)

It starts very early on, with #95 and #99. I've picked up weak scumtells from SJReaver, and acknowledged that they're weak. RCEnigma defends him just a little harder than would seem warranted in the situation. Incidentally, I expressed scumreads on all of SJReaver, RCEnigma and Banana(=shelly) in #119. If those reads turn out to be correct, no wonder I got attacked early (e.g. #216, #215/#216 being SJReaver's next posts after I posted it)!

#118 also looks bad in this situation, an "obviously nonserious vote" that nonetheless shows up on the vote count. In the past, scum used to use these really frequently when distancing. Then towns caught on, and scum generally stopped doing it, but maybe it's making a revival now that fewer people are aware of it?

#225/#231 looks quite a bit like a scum/scum interaction in retrospect. It's the sort of "safe banter" that lets you fill out your post count while looking like you're scumhunting, whilst simultaneously not doing much to give players a scumread on you or really progressing the gamestate.

(#232 seems like a relevant post. But I'm not sure what conclusions to draw for it, so I'm just going to note it for now.)

#272 looks like it's setting up for a scumread on me at a later date. It expresses "retractable townreads" on RCE and Banana, which look a little different from the read on Walter, and diverting suspicion elsewhere without any actual scumreads. If the scumteam really is SJReaver/RCEnigma/Banana, they would badly need to be ready to cause a distraction in the gamestate at the time.

In the late 300s, the wagon on me starts developing. I read #379 as townish at the time (seeing it as a pressure vote as the gamestate was stalling out). In retrospect, though, assuming RCEnigma is scum means that it could easily come from a scum SJReaver; scum needed a change to the gamestate, and would be especially interested in discrediting me.

#525 is RCEnigma's towniest post of the game (even if scum does manage to reason that scum Tayl0r likely implies town me, why mention that to the thread?), and it doesn't look any less town in this hypothetical. This is one of the reasons I'm a little torn about voting for RCEnigma. That said, RCEnigma would know that Tayl0r

wouldn't

flip scum, so the relational townread on me would be safe for scum to make, and RCEnigma immediately backpedals a little in #526.

#641 starts to retreat from the wagon on me. My reads are much worse at this point than they were at the start of the game (I now have SJReaver as town and am retreating from my RCEnigma scumread, and scumread Tayl0r and Italiano who are both now confirmed town). I am moderately easy to pocket as players go, and retreating from a scumread on me not that long after my reads get a lot worse seems like the sort of thing that scum would be likely to do.

Not only that, but #641 and #642 are a wagon out of nowhere immediately after shelly replaces in. #642 is a wagoning vote from a now-confirmed scum slot. How come #641 turns up just a few minutes before that, for shelly to wagon? This is a daytalk game, these posts look a lot in retrospect like scum decided on an Italiano wagon in their PT and then decided to make it happen in a reasonably convincing-looking way. (Soon afterwards, shelly calls Looker's #648 scummy, when most players agree that it isn't; overblowing a scumtell on your partner, so that nobody follows you, is a classic method of distancing.)

#661 is weird. I totally agree with the content of the post. But what's up with the

timing

? RCEnigma could have noted how weird #381 was at the time, but didn't. Instead, he went for a random reaction test in #397. Why do something like that to mark time if you've spotted someone do something alarmingly scummy, rather than pointing out your feelings? (Note that RCEnigma uses the past tense "sent" in #661, implying that he noticed the issue at the time, it wasn't the consequence of a reread or anything like that.) Well, an obvious scum motivation would be that they really wanted to avoid derailing the wagon on me (who was, in this hypothetical, accurately scumreading them at the time), and were happy to accept any help they could get, planning to make use of the scummy-post-from-town later on if they needed a new wagon to push. (This is especially the case as "I'm reading CFJ's posts as being constructed to look town, thus they're artificial and from scum" was a reasonable reason to scumread me, even if the way Italiano expressed that was bad.)

#666 is a pretty scattered post from Looker (and his first substantive post). It votes me, for unexplained reasons (maybe with a small hint, below the Raya quote, that Looker is concerned about how the collapse of the wagon on me looks, without clarifying whether it's my alignment or the wagon's he's interested in). The choice of me to vote for seemed strange even at the time (given that pressure had mostly moved elsewhere); I wasn't sure what to make of it, and I still am not sorry, despite really wanting a contraction there, I refuse to use "ain't".

#697 is pretty much I'd expect when I asked one scum to explain a (non-bus) scumread on another scum.

As previously mentioned, #802 is bad because it's asking Tayl0r to unvote shelly (there is, however, no particular link to RCEnigma here).

#826 is bad (and #825 was recognised by Tayl0r as scummy, although I thought it was more null), but #825/#826 are even worse as a pair. This looks a lot like RCEnigma is setting up to a) force a claim from Walter, and/or b) quickhammer Walter with Looker being the second-last vote. There's a 1 hour 50 minute time gap; Looker probably went offline at some point during that (especially given the gaps between his posts), and I think the plan was for Looker to change vote to Walter (as a "deadline vote") and have RCEnigma hammer. geraint was a spanner in the works, though, moving to shelly, at which point scum were pretty much screwed (with #858 being RCEnigma getting onto the wagon so that he could push the "look offwagon" narrative the next Day). #894 fits that; I was wondering why RCEnigma would explicitly mention that the N_M kill is not a reason not to look offwagon (why would a townie even think that that kill had anything to do with whether to look offwagon or not?).

Oh, #956 probably explaines #232. It's quite possible that one of the scum came up with an "I want to do this bit of theatre" and RCEnigma approved it in the PT, or indeed that this is the sort of thing that new scum come up with anyway and RCEnigma just wanted to paint it as "not possibly SvS". Generally speaking, towntells are only reliable if they aren't being pointed out by scum (if scum points them out, that increases the chance that they were planted).

#993 is a little strange. I can understand why someone would have second thoughts about me (it's quite common for people to gain an increasing townread on me as the game goes on, when I'm town). But even given the explanation in #984, I'm not convinced that it makes sense to read Raya as scummier than me at the time of #993. Posts like #977 are very common from players who have just been fakeclaimed to.

After that, there are no real connections until #1119. Why would a hypothetically town Looker vote

RCEnigma

in that context? Looker isn't Nosferatu, he tends to park his vote on himself rather than on a random null-read. This looks a lot more like it's intended to look good on a votecount, rather than having any real scumhunting reasoning behind it.

#1303 is an interesting soft-push on Raya by Looker. It's also surprisingly RCEnigma-focused, with a lot of "personality shade" (i.e. shading RCEnigma as a person, not RCEnigma's alignment) without actually stating any sort of scumread on here. (It also incidentally tries to shut down RCEnigma arguing for geraint as town, when the reasoning for geraint as town is basically watertight at this point.)

Why does Looker not vote RCEnigma in #1332?

#1416 / #1417 – wow, Looker really seems to have an RCEnigma fixation (and yet is pushing Raya despite that).

And that's about it. I note that RCEnigma quickhammered (after claim, but still) at the end of D2; this looked bad, was widely acknowledged to look bad, and could have been predicted to look bad. I'm not sure why a hypothetically town RCEnigma wouldn't be looking to gain more information before hammer; we weren't near deadline, after all. On the other hand, assuming a shelly/Looker/RCEnigma scumteam, there was a failed attempt to quickhammer D1, so it would make a lot of sense if RCEnigma were jumpier about the quickhammer D2.

---

The main conclusion I drew during the above exercise is that there's a lot more evidence for RCEnigma as scum than there is for Looker as scum, but the whole team hangs together pretty well. RCEnigma isn't lockscum in my view, but an RCEnigma townflip would surprise me. It does feel quite plausible that the above solve is right on RCEnigma but wrong on Looker (the RCEnigma/shelly associatives feel stronger than the RCEnigma/Looker or shelly/Looker associatives). That said, the PoE is getting pretty small at this point, so the number of plausible scumteams is dwindling

[callforjudgement]

For what it's worth, I also have quite a strong scumread on Looker at this point. #1384 looks pretty bad after the Raya flip, in addition to #802…#825 looking bad after the shelly flip.

Not really. If he scumread her.

Did

he scumread her? He voted for her, and tried to push her wagon, but I don't see much evidence of a scumread. #731 is an implied townread (this isn't the way most people react to a scumread), then Looker's interactions with Raya until #1327 are pretty much entirely repeated requests for clarification, then #1327 itself is another implied townread (why would Looker worry about you quickhammering Raya if Raya were scum?). #1384 and #1416 push the Raya wagon, but without an apparent scumread behind the push (it reads to me more like a pressure vote or deadline push).

[callforjudgement]

Normal games have to be very careful to distinguish the "failed from being blocked" case from the "succeeded but got an innocent" case; the two possible results need to be worded in such a way that you can't fail to tell them apart. The use of the word "failed" implies that something interfered with the action.

Sometimes modifiers can interfere with an action, but Tayl0r didn't have one. That means that Tayl0r got roleblocked, and/or tried to investigate an Ascetic or commuting player, and/or tried to investigate a rolestopped player. (Wiki links: Roleblocker, Ascetic, Commuter, Rolestopper.) I don't think there are any other effects that can stop an action made by an unmodified player in a Normal. Note that merely having one of those actions available one night doesn't necessarily mean a player can use it over and over; things like Odd-Night roles are common in Normals. (However, for some reason moderators have a tendency to either give most roles modifiers or to give no roles modifiers; having seen an unmodified power role flip, that reduces the chance that whatever blocked Tayl0r is limited in use.)

Killing a player's target wouldn't cause her action to fail. It would produce correct information (although it wouldn't be particularly useful).

[callforjudgement]

Meanwhile, I have a strong scumread on RCEnigma both by play and by PoE.

@

Italiano

: You've apparently ruled RCEnigma out of your PoE. Could you explain why? I'm worried that I'm starting to tunnel, and would appreciate seeing the case for him as town.


PEDIT: "No result" and "failed" are synonyms. Ascetic would cause a "failed"/"no result" result (as opposed to a "cannot communicate" result).

[callforjudgement]

Err, a "does not have PT" result. Sorry, I got PT Cop and Traffic Analyst confused for a moment.

[callforjudgement]

I received a Friendly Neighbour's PM last night (and I'm pretty sure I read it correctly).

Italiano is Town.

Does it say Italiano's name?

Please answer this ASAP CFJ

What is your motivation behind asking the question? As far as I can tell, an answer is more likely to benefit scum than town.

If you explain why the answer would be useful to town, I'll answer it.

[callforjudgement]

…actually, it looks a lot like you're asking a question about how a PM is worded, so I'll need to check with the moderator whether it's OK to answer the question.

[callforjudgement]

…actually, it looks a lot like you're asking a question about how a PM is worded, so I'll need to check with the moderator whether it's OK to answer the question.

OK, the moderator says I can answer it. Still, though, the question makes me uneasy; what town motivation is there in asking it?

[callforjudgement]

Italiano + me is not theoretically possible. Assuming 10:3, Nosferatu would be town in that situation, and Italiano is confirmed town to Nosferatu. As a consequence, that could only happen in a 9:4 setup.

[callforjudgement]

And an idea that prompted for me: Frogster, what is your read on Gamma?

[callforjudgement]

CFJ is going to:

a) not-subtly imply that something I did was scummy, while still maintaining he is completely convinced that I am town.
b) attempt to get ANOTHER townie lynched.
c) both.

I was just trying to rule out a possibility, but haven't been able to conclude anything from this. It might make more sense later in the game.

Meanwhile, you got me thinking: if Tayl0r did indeed investigate RCEnigma night 1, perhaps RCEnigma picked up from Tayl0r's posts that she had investigated him and attempted to get out in front of the guilty claim with a guilty of his own? That would explain RCEnigma's fakeclaim.

The timing doesn't work out for that, though; #897 might well have been read by scum as Tayl0r implying a result, but didn't specify a target, and didn't hint RCEnigma as the target until #934. RCEnigma's claim was in #912, before Tayl0r hinted a target. So the only way RCEnigma could have been trying to get in front of a claim is if he somehow knew who Tayl0r might have investigated via nightplay, which seems unlikely. As a result, I don't think this line of thought is going anywhere, but wanted to mention it in case other people are thinking along the same lines.

[callforjudgement]

(PEDIT: re #1637)

Confirming players is beneficial to town. But letting scum know which players are confirmable is beneficial to scum (as they will know they can kill them, rather than an unconfirmed player).

Is the player in question me or RCEnigma? If not, then assuming you are correct, then the only way scum can hide the knowledge of who the confirmed player is will be to nightkill me (as I'll be able to reveal the same information tomorrow rather than toDay, or if I'm run up and forced into a claim). I think town would get a bigger benefit from scum nightkilling me (rather than a more generally townread player) than it would from a player who is unlikely to be eliminated anyway becoming publicly confirmed.

[callforjudgement]

I really don't like what you're doing here. It feels a huge amount like rolefishing.

I think scum have probably managed to figure out what happened already (assuming that you aren't scum yourself) because you have been hinting

far too strongly

at something that should have been left secret. I hate it when claims are outed without good reason, especially with regard to which players are confirmable and/or which players have power roles.

Trying to give enough information to satisfy you without spoiling much more than you have effectively spoiled already: at some point during the game, I received an unexpected PM from the moderator that is not linked to Italiano's night action. From the way you are acting, I suspect you are aware of the PM in question. There is a third player (neither me nor you) who is also aware of the PM in question; I believe that third player is town.

There is zero town interest in the contents of the PM in question becoming publicly known right now (because it appears to have been created by a town power role that isn't currently claimed/public, and because with so many people knowing what it is, there's no chance of the information being lost, and at this point no longer any chance of me baiting scum to kill me in the hope of causing it to be lost). Obviously, scum would have quite some interest in finding out what's in the PM. Do you see why I'm so reluctant to explain in more detail? Do you see why I tried so hard to dissuade you from pushing me on this (first intentionally ignoring you, then challenging you when you pushed further)?

[callforjudgement]

VOTE: CFJ
I am no longer asking. Answer my question. You are obstructing my ability to confirm a town slot as I see it. How does knowing what the FN result PM looks like help scum? I can make conclusions already but I want to be certain.

In addition,

Italiano

, do you have any modifier to your role? You don’t have to claim what it is, but knowing yes or no will help me determine whether I can piece together the situation.

The literal answer to your question is "no".

Please,

please

stop rolefishing. I didn't have a scumread on you before now, but I'm getting a pretty strong scumread now.

I have a question of my own: did you receive the same PM I did? (If you aren't sure at this point, then you didn't; if you did, it will be very obvious given the information I've disclosed so far.) This answer is highly important, because it will help me figure out why you are apparently acting in such a highly anti-town way.

[callforjudgement]

Also, I should mention that I can't think of any possible combination of Normal roles for which my answer would allow you to confirm a player (who you didn't already know was town) as town. (The closest I can get is Disloyal Rolestopper, but that wouldn't have prevented me from receiving the message regardless of its wording.)

This is part of the reason I'm so suspicious of your motivations here.

[callforjudgement]

I said I wouldn't really fight my elim but 1589 is wrong in so many ways. I'll respond in ehhh the next 5ish hours.

It's been much more than 5 hours now.

Your statement here is generally suspicious because there's obviously a lot of scum motivation in a) quickhammering someone, b) saying "if that person flips town, eliminate me" in twilight to try to make people think you're town, c) backpedalling on it the next Day in order to try to avoid that elimination; and it is separately suspicious because if you have the time to read a long post and spot errors/mistakes in it, it doesn't take much longer to point those issues out.

Producing "if player X is scum, this is what happened and how" posts is one of the scumhunting techniques that I've found to be more successful in practice. If the conclusions you reach don't hang together / don't make sense / are contradicted by later developments, then the assumption was wrong; that's one way in which it helps. But the other way in which it helps is as a reaction test; if the targeted player is town, then they'll know for a fact that the listed scenario is wrong, which makes them better at spotting mistakes in it, so you tend to get some explanations in reply, or some "did you consider this?" options. If the targeted player is scum, it's more likely to be correct (thus harder to find any mistakes in it), and they're more likely to try to discredit it in a general way rather than by attacking the reasoning.

In this case, you apparently haven't been able to find any flaws in it despite having over 12 hours more than you said you needed (otherwise surely you'd have posted them?). I know people sometimes disappear after saying they're going to make a post, but this is a really suspicious timing for that to happen.

I expect to see you post a list of flaws in #1589 within 20 minutes of your next post. If you don't post them, that will be decent evidence that you were lying when you said the post was wrong in "so many ways". If you do, then we can discuss my reasoning; maybe you'll even convince me (or the rest of the town) that you're town!

[callforjudgement]

Also, VOTE: Gamma pending an explanation of the recent rolefishing (and an answer to #1649).

At the moment, I can't see any set of circumstances in which Gamma, if he had been paying attention / correctly following the game, could truthfully be making the statements about Italiano's Friendly Neighbour PM that he has made so far.

I can see circumstances in which Gamma might be making those statements if he hadn't been paying attention / thinking things through properly / had misread something, in which case he has (by pushing me this hard) revealed a lot of important information to scum for no good reason, which would be a hugely anti-town way to act (but not outright scummy). An explanation might help figure the situation, and I hope I can ask oblique enough questions to get at one without revealing yet more information. Alternatively, it's possible that there's something

very

screwy going on here (beyond what I can easily imagine could happen in a Normal setup), in which case we need to figure out what's going on fairly quickly; and it's also possible that there may be a 1v1 at this point if Gamma's information outright contradicts mine.

One final possibility, if people are going to insist on spilling out all the hidden information about roles that exists, would be a massclaim. I don't think that this would be helpful (especially in a daytalk setup, where there's no advantage in an unexpected massclaim because scum get to discuss their fakeclaims anyway) – at least, it wouldn't have been if Gamma hadn't been rolefishing so strongly and leaked it, and probably won't be even now. But if people are getting excessively paranoid about everything going on behind the scenes, it might be that the damage to town from the massclaim would be less than the damage to town from the sort of nonsense Gamma is doing now.

[callforjudgement]

Also, I should mention that I can't think of any possible combination of Normal roles for which my answer would allow you to confirm a player (who you didn't already know was town) as town. (The closest I can get is Disloyal Rolestopper, but that wouldn't have prevented me from receiving the message regardless of its wording.)

This is part of the reason I'm so suspicious of your motivations here.

Actually, I'll challenge Gamma with this too:

Please list a combination of Normal roles for which the answer you pressed me for in #1648, and I confirmed in #1649, could possibly cause you to learn that a player is town (i.e. before the answer, you didn't know the player was town; after the answer, you do). They don't have to be the actual combination of Normal roles that caused you to ask the question (ideally, they should be a combination that isn't the actual circumstance, so as not to give away your role; obviously, don't say whether they are or not). Just, any combination of roles at all that could exist within a Normal game.

If you can't find one, then you have, in effect, been lying repeatedly in order to force a claim. There is no town motivation for this at all, and it directly hurts town for obvious reasons.

If you can find one, but think that it would give too much information away about players' roles to tell the town as a whole what it is, then try to at least give partial information, so that I can figure out what is going on / going through your mind. In particular, my question in #1649 should, I believe, be safe to answer, and may help focus my thoughts on the matter (although I currently can't find a combination that works either with a "yes" or with a "no" answer).

[callforjudgement]

…actually, I found one, but it's so stupid that it can't possibly be correct, so I'll add one extra condition: your combination of roles must not include a) multiple players (other than you) who are already confirmed to you as town and have used their action in a suboptimal way, combined with a multirole that can use multiple investigative actions in a night; or b) a player who was, prior to asking the question, confirmed to you as scum.

[callforjudgement]

…and another, which is a little less silly but still ridiculously silly, and which might cause Gamma to have violated site rules if correct. I'll leave that one to Gamma to find.

[callforjudgement]

The literal answer to your question is "no".

is this a typo? theres no reason to lie abt this

I knew this would happen. This is why I was accusing Gamma of rolefishing: because the truth would inevitably come out when you got to the thread.

I received a Friendly Neighbour PM last night. It was

not

sent by ItalianoVD, but by a different player (and contains that player's name, and confirms that player as town). The post was intended to clarify to that player that I had received their PM.

I expressed a townread on Italiano in the same post (#1570) to avoid disclosing to scum that there was a second Friendly Neighbour in the setup. That townread was not based on mod information, but rather on the fact that Nosferatu had confirmed Italiano as town in twilight of Day 2 (which is really all the information that should be needed).

[callforjudgement]

(This Friendly Neighbour PM listing an unexpected player is the "unexpected PM" I talked about in #1646.)

[callforjudgement]

Ooh, an idea that could explain Gamma's actions…

@

Gamma

: Did you receive

Italiano's

Friendly Neighbour PM Night 2? That would explain your actions here; you would naturally assume that I'd fakeclaimed to receive Italiano's PM for some reason, and would be hoping to catch me in a contradiction (in this scenario, you'd be lying about the "confirms a player as town" reason for pressuring me in order to reduce the chance I caught on). The question in this scenario would be intended as a subtle way to check for a second Friendly Neighbour (with you forgetting that Nosferatu would be able to counterclaim a "no" answer and thus it would reveal the existence of a second Friendly Neighbour in the case that I was town).

[callforjudgement]

But you didn't consider RCE's fakeclaim rolefishing? Or him asking who was in a hood?

It's about what information the question is likely to reveal to town and to scum.

Knowing who is in a neighbourhood is only very marginally useful information to scum, especially if there's a neighbourhood revealed already.
The fakeclaim seems to have been calculated to avoid town power roles being revealed (note that there

was

a town PT Cop, and she didn't counterclaim).

Meanwhile, Gamma's question was, if answered, inevitably going to reveal the existence of a particular town power role, which is why I tried so hard to dissuade him from pushing me on it (especially as enough townies already had the information that there was no real reason for it to become public yet); and the stated reason for pushing the question is very hard to believe. (I'm waiting on Gamma to explain, in case there's an innocent explanation.)

[callforjudgement]

Can you justify why you pressed me so hard to answer your question, and out the existence of a second Friendly Neighbour?

[callforjudgement]

A lot of people, including me, are scumreading you for it.

You should explain the thought process in question right now, if doing so wouldn't out additional information useful for scum. Even if it would, you should explain to the extent you can do it without outing any more power roles.

[callforjudgement]

(Or, well, my read at the moment is "maybe there's a good explanation for this, but I can't think of one".)