Toriel's Patience (end)

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hello. i will actually play this game this evening at some point.

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oops i played board games until midnight and there's 18 pages >_>

might start catching up tonight, probably won't and will do it all tomorrow. I don't think i'll be lurking for too long in this game though.

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oops i played board games until midnight and there's 18 pages >_>

might start catching up tonight, probably won't and will do it all tomorrow. I don't think i'll be lurking for too long in this game though.

which board game?

2 games of terraforming mars: the dice game, followed by 1 game of everdell

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At some point before d2.5 or during the beginning of it I'll do the EV for each option if no one else has. It looks like the design thread doesn't have it for this version of the setup.

Gut from pages 1-4 is Dann town (though I think I remember seeing that's someone consensus?), Mandate town, Taly scummy e.g. don't really like the "is of note" at the end of 76. Noncommittal, throwing shade without actually saying that he scumreads a slot that's been doing a bunch of stuff. I thought Mandate's opening was slightly +town even from someone who is clearly gimmicking and I like the timing of the Taly vote on page 4 quite a lot. Dann is townish just for voting like 8 times in 4 pages.

I'm pretty much with Mandate until 140 which is a Bad Post. I mean it's easily Mandate lying to themself as town but the Bayesian argument against hard partner tells on page 6 is a pet peeve of mine. The sheer odds that you're right about a "x and y are partnered" read is so low (less than 4%) as to, in principle, require a huge amount of evidence to surmount. I also don't really have a read on Keyleth at this point fwiw

149 is actually an interesting post and probably true of me bc I probably would have explained things in the scum PT at some point, alas. Probably +town (maybe strongly) for Brown Eyes to point out an observation like that, it's an observation that could easily just never be made by anyone. Dunn calling Brown Eyes town shortly after this is slightly good for Dunn (who I don't really have much of a read on at this point).

167 by Mandate is also a bad post IMO (they're still town), I think making a strong assumption that scum would townbloc in this setup is sort of unfounded. Plus scum would have to actually be in the thread to do that and it's always possible that scum just hadn't entered the thread yet at that point

Through page 7 so far and I guess I'm hitting submit on what I have so far

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221 is a pretty good point (on Keyleth being town) and probably +town a bit for Sakura. To elaborate a bit since it came into question why I think it's +town for Keyleth, the post is just very frank about what it's trying to do. I think scum on average will tend to shy away from a post that's like "hey, we already have me + x as town, who are the other two" particularly in the context of Keyleth having some heat on her. It's not a slam dunk or anything, but I think it's very easy to glance at that post and briefly *think* it's a slam dunk before you've thought it through intensely, hence Sakura is slightly townish for it (but only slightly and this paragraph is already way too long)

225 gave me a very strong gut ping about who Mandate is an alt of but i'd mostly just be amused if i was right because i am hot trash at trying to guess alts

265 is a funny post because yes, those odds are indeed terrible (EV of limming scum today + tomorrow is just above 3%... only ever so slightly lower than the a priori odds of Mandate's teamread being right)

323 by Dunn is a really interesting one. I read that post by Meuh and like, I agreed with it but the only thing it made me feel was "Meuh is skilled or experienced at the game of mafia". It didn't make me feel anything about Meuh's alignment. So I'm curious what Dunn means by calling it "strong posting", if he means what I just said or that Meuh is townish for it.

332 Hooray mandate is going through a redemption arc

Might want to revisit page 14 regarding Aristeia later but checkpointing again

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So far I feel best about Dann and Brown Eyes and Mandate, then Keyleth, then Sakura

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gonna take a break before reading the last 6 pages though

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more of a i should probably eat something today kind of deal

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who qualifies as a lurker in a game thats gone on for maybe 3 days or less?

my friend, it has been about 28 hours lol

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Mandate is town because Taly was giving me pings around the time they voted them.

oh hey beeboy said this too. neat.

which would you recommend between the two?

TM dice game is quite new. Everdell is somewhat heavier and more complicated generally, but definitely a game I'd recommend to most people who like almost any sort of strategy games.

have now caught up to my first catchup

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shirou is interesting because for whatever reason my eyes glaze

completely

over every time i start reading one of his posts. they also glaze over when reading some meuh posts but not as hard.

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i can see 449 being townish, 378 is kind of eh though.

ARE YOU STILL GLAZING OVER THEM

yes

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i am excited to work with mandate in this game and i am going to be very sad if they are scum.

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EV time.

There is one very interesting wrinkle in EV analysis of this setup, which is that if we choose a strategy on day 1 and plan to stick with it, then Dunn has flat odds of 11/14 of being town. So in the point of the calculation where we consider Dunn's probability, it's ambiguous whether we should stick 11/14 or whatever the current random odds are. I think the current odds at that point are technically the right thing to put in. It's similar to the Monty Hall problem, but the difference is that in Monty Hall you don't get any new info by opening the door but here every townie we lim does make Dunn more likely to be scum and every scum we lim does make Dunn more likely to be town. Anyhow. Gonna be rounding to nearest % at every step for convenience.

Suppose we mislim twice. Then if we choose Fight, 3/12 that we go to 2:9 mountainous (35% town win) and 9/12 that we go to 3:8 mountainous (17% town win) for about a 21% EV.

If we choose Mercy, well, there's not a wiki page already in existence to make this easy. Assuming that spares are chosen entirely at random still, as with regular EV calculation. 3/12 that Dunn is scum and we go to 2:9 sparegame. To win from there, we have to spare correctly at 11p, 9p, 7p and 5p, for total probability of (9/11) (7/9) (5/7) (3/5) = 3/11 or about 27%. In the 9/12 that Dunn is town, we go into 3:8 where we have to spare 3 times to win and scum have to spare twice. From there, 3/11 that we hit scum at which point our EV is (7/9) * (5/7) * (3/5) = 3/9. 8/11 that we go to 3:6. From there, 3/9 that our EV becomes (5/7)(3/5) = 3/7, and 6/9 that we go to 3:4 at which point scum's EV is (3/7)(2/5) = 6/35 so ours is 29/35.

All in all, the EV is this:

(3 / 12) * (3 / 11)
+
(9 / 12) * (

(3 / 11) * (3 / 9)
+
(8 / 11) * (

(3 / 9) * (3 / 7)
+
(6 / 9) * (29 / 35)

)


)

Which, if I've typed it into Google correctly, is just above 50%.

So that's definitely a very strong argument in favor of sparing Dunn. Almost regardless of his alignment - in fact, if he's scum, correctly choosing Fight instead of Mercy improves our EV from 27% to 35%, but if he's town then correctly choosing Mercy instead of Fight improves our EV from 17% to a whopping almost 60%. At those odds, we would need *incredibly* persuasive evidence that Dunn is scum to want to pick Fight over Mercy.

There are caveats. The first is that this is assuming we mislim twice (if we hit scum then we can redo this under those assumptions; i highly suspect that we'll get similar results). The second and much more important is the degree to which EVs are reliable. EVs are questionable even for regular mountainous games, but in the sparing game they're perhaps even more questionable due to the view that we'll be hemorrhaging all our best/towniest players both by sparings and by nightkills, and that we will ultimately *have* to win the game in a 2:3 or 3:4 ElO where in principle all 3 or all 4 town will have to unanimously be correct.

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ah hell yeah what a pagetop

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There's an argument that if we're going the spare game route then it can be valuable to keep at least *some* reads close to our chests, or probably more importantly that once we start sparing, we all collectively frequently re-evaluate. I say this because one framing (I think Mandate was implying this framing earlier) is that we can think of the spare game as all collectively making a town->scum ordering and just sparing the top townie in that ordering every day. But if we make that list public then scum killing the top of that list is more impactful than it is in a normal game, because every time they kill someone, we can no longer spare that person.

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Ari's posting is very curious to me. It doesn't make me feel anything strongly about her alignment right now though. There's a notion in my mind of embroilment in the gamestate which makes certain players like her easier to read, and I think the game state sort of needs to marinate more before I can get much of a read on her.

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I have to wonder if you would bother with the calculations if you're mafia.

sadly i would *probably* make that exact post as scum lol.

I might or might not have gotten around to it as quickly though.

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implo

i get the impression you're distancing from a stance on me, is that correct?

Not actively but I definitely don't feel especially confident on my read of you. I am still inclined to call you scum bc I don't really buy the reasons I've seen for you as town as much as the bulk of the field and I think there are some reasons to see you as scummy but it's a read with no real confidence whatsoever.

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Somewhat inclined to trust Ari on Sakura.

I guess I don't really want to explain why I'm scumreading Taly atp because explaining the read takes away the room for Taly to improve because she would then understand my thought process about what I expect town!taly to be doing.

It's like less than 2 days into the game so I'm fine letting Taly do Taly things.

How meta-based is your read here? Entirely or partially?

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How about this then. Taly is trying to get people to explain their stances and pushing people then changing their mind and voting elsewhere. Do you see this as scum controlling the thread vs town trying to sort things out?

I kind of view it as someone just enjoying the process of playing mafia either way

explain the mandate tr plz

wasn't to me but mandate is extremely town in my eyes.

They have all the right stances at all the right times. The way they're thinking about the game feels right, I liked their opening, I liked the evolution of their taly+keyleth team read, I like the evolution of their stances in general, like, the townread on sakura a page or two ago is good for example

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i think dannflor's first 10 or however many pages were really town, i'm not interested in voting for dannflor unless time passes and he falls off (which could happen but time has not yet passed).

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you are correct that i am enjoying this, but thats not necessarily NAI, is it?

there's a reason i asked ari how meta based her read is.

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i'm almost definitely going to sheep mandate on to whoever they are about to vote

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yeah sure whatever taly is town probably

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finally

VOTE: beeboy

this game moves too fast :X

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wound up spending a bunch of energy on board games again. alas

I think I need to not try to keep fully up with this game at the pace it's going, it'll be more productive to just do stuff in the moment.

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played a game called expeditions, it's the sequel to scythe (which i haven't played). It seems really good

I can vaguely do stuff. i'm sort of tiredly skimming some random stuff from the past few pages right now, only sense i'm getting is a reinforcement of my townread on mandate

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Relevantly the coalition game that I was in w Ari and Merlyn just ended today and I was scum so I have some extremely fresh scum meta, which is almost never true of me lol

I think it gave me a pretty good sense of some things from Ari to be on the lookout for as reasons to townread her. If I were a man of more patience I would go back and reread the game from forever ago where she snowed me as scum but i am not going to do that probably ever lol

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I'm interested in Alisae once they start playing because historically, though we haven't played together in a long time, I remember Alisae being like, exceptionally good at catching me as scum to the point where at one point i was kind of afraid to sign up for a game if they were in the player list. So I have some curiosity how their read on me will be. I don't think lurking is meaningfully scummy for them though at all, in my mind they're pretty tryhard as scum though of course it's been some years.

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skimmed beeboy's iso. no thoughts, head empty.

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I'm not finished but yeah I think she is just scum here

Which is really fucking refreshing LOL

survey says, mandate in 3 pages: "shit, merlyn is town"

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Also it's kinda unfair to say I can't scum read people for voting me when its a combination of POE, you not moving and mandate who literally ignored my post in response to there read on me.

I mean the odds of multiple scum voting for you are probably pretty low just because I don't really see what scum would get out of voting together on you at this stage.

My vote right now isn't really doing anything in particular but I don't really have anywhere else I especially want to put it. I think I could be convinced to scumread Meuh potentially.

[implosion]

VOTE: Implosion
Let's nudge here, why don't we?

VOTE: implosion

????

You know what, i'm not gonna ask anymore, i'm just gonna hope someone that's good at the game gives me some guidance while I figure out where my head is at.

I think this reaction would be kind of incredible to fake as scum. Like, I've been vaguely lurking and beeboy has been talking about thinking their wagon was scum driven and so i feel like replying to beeboy jumping on me with a ???? after beeboy just listed me near the bottom of their reads list the previous page is just like, something scum who care sharply about how they're perceived would never do. I think sakura is already (widely?) townread but this cements it pretty hard for me sort of in the vein of the philosophy that I think Shirou mentioned earlier of trying to read people off a few key posts, which I think I kind of agree with or at least am interested in thinking about as a philosophy of forum mafia.

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I have very mixed feelings on beeboy's current trajectory. I think the part of it that I see as unlikely to come from scum is that just literally calling every single person on your wagon scum is I think a somewhat unnatural reaction to have as scum, I think as scum you get to choose what your reads are and so the normal thing to do is to like, pick a token person on your wagon whomst you will say is actually town and then lambast the rest of it. The counterpoint to this is that beeboy is coming back from a long break so I could see them theoretically being kind of lazy as scum and just falling in to pushing all the people pushing them. But I think I am tending to think it's probably town, I don't really see a good reason for scum beeboy to decide to wake up and choose violence in this way. It just kind of puts them at the center of narratives and in the spotlight and embroils them in conflict and idk what the point would be when simpler options exist.

In a dramatic turn of irony i am now going to call beeboy the only townie on my wagon (nah but i am about to call meuh scum i think)

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VOTE: Implosion
Let's nudge here, why don't we?

I do think that I have a pretty good read record lately actually, the issue is that I'm too busy being mislimmed to do much with said reads!

i kind of despise this vote and follow-up for some reason. Possibly because I know that I'm town and so I'm tempted to just BoP the person who voted me and then immediately said that her reads are really good lately, but she's not actually calling me scum with this vote, she's aggressively not calling me scum with the very noncommittal phrasing of the vote, but then immediately saying she has really good reads? It's just like sort of mentally incongruous, she votes me in a way that seems not motivated by a read (or at least not a materially strong one, though she can correct me) but then mazkes this next post 5 minutes later about how her reads are good lately, it's just like, I don't know why she makes that comment after making a vote that strongly looks like it's just prodding a lurker to start doing something.

Unvote

VOTE: Meuh

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i guess you can try to argue (and many already have) that beeboy's readlist is kinda "convenient" with for example me that is defending them at the top along with the universal town Taly, and most people voting him at the bottom.

however my own readlist would be similar enough to his so i don't have an issue with it.

This is an interesting sentiment to me because (as I just said) i think they're really inconvenient reads to have as scum.

I think the actual odds of there being 2 scum in a sample of 5 random people is actually pretty high as well :V

For reference, if you are town and you sample 5 random people in a list of the 13 other players in the game, 3 of whom are scum, the probability of there being 2 or 3 scum in that group of 5 is about 31% (namely, (3 * 10 choose 3 + 10 choose 2) / 13 choose 5). So yeah it's not awful odds. But it's also not really actionable to say "i think there are 2 scum in this group of 5" because even if you're right, you still only have a 40% chance of hitting scum.

I wanna say stuff about Merlyn but I think I might need more data to read her, I feel like if she's scum she's going to be playing in a way where she's very aware that her play will be getting compared to coalition so she'd be trying to replicate that so I'm not super confident on her atm but I would like to be more confident on her

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he feels like he's being a wallflower and his comments about being busy with board games reminds me of his comments about being busy traveling.

i dont want to be uncharitable and come down hard on him because he's such a nice guy and the deadlines are pretty long so I am just waiting to see what he does atp.

the ev calculations about sparing dunnstral felt kind of nice and reminded me of our guardians game together but he doesn't feel like he wants to be here.

when he said he wanted to interact in realtime i popped in to talk to him and he just didnt feel like he was very enthuiastic to interact with me.

I think i got distracted by something else shortly after you popped in. I don't remember if I actually posted this or if I just typed it up and then didn't post it but I am kind of expecting my fervor for this game to wax and wane somewhat arbitrarily - I am very much interested in the game and enthusiastic to play it on some level (which should be evidenced by this page of the thread, because I have a lot of thoughts buzzing in my head at this exact moment even though I should sleep soon) but some combination of real life and, importantly, the fact that this thread is going Too Fucking Fast most of the time is making it hard to maintain that level of interest with any consistency.

I don't know how I actually feel about interacting in real time in general, I think at one point in my life I probably thought it was a weakness of my scum game but it doesn't like, excite me at all on day one in a 14 player game. To me it's a tool to use once there's a bunch of stuff out there and a history to the game to really hash out with someone, and we're not at that stage yet. D1 is sort of a weakness of mine as town anyway, I think my d1 reads are very often mediocre to terrible and I was very much describing (or trying to describe) my towngame accurately in coalition when I said I like to rely on townreads early on and then audit them later. It's very very common for me to go all of d1 without getting a single real scumread. When I do get d1 scumreads I don't think they're especially accurate. I think my reads tend to get fairly significantly better as the game goes on though.

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Anyway. Let's wrap up the post chain with a summary of where I'm at with everyone.

Very Much Locktown: Mandate, Sakura. It'd take a hell of a lot to convince me away from either of them.

Town: Brown Eyes, Keyleth

Probably Town but not as confident as above: beeboy, Dunn (only townread I think I haven't talked about at all yet, but kind of a gut feels-like-he's-playing-like-i-remember-his-towngame-looking)

Town, but will need to be audited sooner than other townreads: Dannflor

Town, but I still have reservations: Taly

Still gotta sort: Ari, Merlyn, Alisae

Also in the still gotta sort tier, but I'm choosing to put him separately not because I think he's scummier than the other people in the tier but because it'll make him angry: Shirou

I saw a thing I don't like and don't remember seeing anything I thought was particularly town but I am definitely going to go look over more stuff later: Meuh

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They called Taly town and the rest mafia.

mm. Not sure how i feel about the slot then. (and yeah as meuh points out, not sure why i missed you mentioning this, i guess i was partially skimming but it was late so maybe i was just tired)

what reservations do you have with my slot

implo

?

You seem like the sort of person who's willing to put a lot of effort into a scum game, I haven't played with you before, the town things I've seen from you aren't ironclad and you did ping me early.

and would you say it is accurate your recent activity is due to the wagon formation?

Partially, it's also partially just the whims of nature that I happened to feel like looking into some stuff yesterday, but I am absolutely a player who tends to get off my ass when there are votes on me sometimes.

1295 was a reflection I had on 1293, not an assertion that I have good reads and therefore should be followed on you. Kind of confused why you thought it was?

because i simply did not see post 1293.

[implosion]

wait that was a decent post from

meuh

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

See, this is my problem with this sort of game. Everyone in this list is competent enough to shed suspicion from themself.

Gut from pages 1-4 is Dann town (though I think I remember seeing that's someone consensus?)

I think sakura is already (widely?) townread but this cements it pretty hard for me sort of in the vein of the philosophy that I think Shirou mentioned earlier of trying to read people off a few key posts, which I think I kind of agree with or at least am interested in thinking about as a philosophy of forum mafia.

Anyone else find this scummy? Implo invoking how much a player is already being townread/thread consensus on an issue when posting his take on it is kind of off to me. It's not really a consideration I have when posting reads as town. It comes more from scum thinking about the optics and the ramifications of their read than a townie just dropping some thoughts.

This is an interesting point but I think this is just how I think about games? I like working with people and thinking about consensus townreads and trying to find people that aren't consensus townreads to bring up to that status. For example this post I found by going into a game where I remember playing like this and ctrl+f'ing for "consensus".

[implosion]

I think I have done things that "should" be town indicative. Off the top of my head, the way I townread Brown Eyes is something I think I'd have avoided saying as scum.

Isn't this kinda the same reason people mentioned about this being my towngame a long time ago but in a lot more words?:

I mean, sort of? I think the additional words are important for why I think it's the kind of townread that you ought to be locktowned for rather than just townread for.

Gonna pick apart Meuh's wallpost on me sort of bit by bit. I sort of assume most of it is "this is why this thing is fakeable" and probably a lot of it is accurate at that level.

The Brown Eyes townread is probably the best read Implo has, but 1. I think it's something he could still notice and then comment on, and 2. it's a read based off of a singular post.

This is interesting because in response to you saying I've done nothing town indicative my read on Brown Eyes was the main

tangible

thing I could think of that I think I probably wouldn't have done as scum. Specifically because it's a strong read based off of a singular post with a specific insight that if I hadn't made it, it may never have been made - essentially for the same reason that I was townreading that post from Brown Eyes themself.

it's interesting the way that Implo is laser focusing on a single post, I think it makes it easier for him to argue a scumread but also feels less townie because well, there's a whole bunch of other posts to consider!

3 points here. 1, it shouldn't actually feel more or less townie because it isn't any easier to fake as scum; I could consider that whole bunch of other posts as scum just as easily as I could as town. 2, can't find the post specifically right now but I mentioned earlier that Shirou made a post earlier this game that has made me think about framing things in these terms, and so I've been thinking about them more lately (this isn't especially relevant to the Brown Eyes read because I think it was after I saw that). 3, and I cannot stress this enough, this game has been going Too Fucking Fast. I don't have the will to go to sleep and wake up to however many pages and digest them all fully every time.

It's always specific things being pointed out and being the reasoning for reads, which seems to me to come more from scum trying to make sure their reads are understood to be about a thing in particular.

This feels like a pretty extreme case of mistaking playstyle for alignment. Like, I use reasoning about specific things in my posts as the basis for my reads... so I'm scum? Like, the fuck? Read any game I've ever played as either alignment and you'll see that. If anything it's just how I feel I'm most rhetorically effective.

This read is less specific ("the way they're thinking about the game", "evolution of stances"), though I think Implo going out of his way to explain why a widely townread player is town isn't the best look?

Okay, now I'm getting frustrated. When I explain why Sakura is town and mention that she's a consensus townread, it's scummy. When I explain why Mandate is town but don't mention that they're a consensus townread, it's scummy. Am I not allowed to have opinions about consensus townreads? Like, you say this about consensus townreads:

It's not really a consideration I have when posting reads as town.

And now you say this:

I think Implo going out of his way to explain why a widely townread player is town isn't the best look?

As though it

should

be a consideration that I have when posting reads as town, because it's scummy to post a townread on someone who is already consensus town.

Also it was literally in response to Ari who had asked someone to explain the Mandate read? How is it relevant that I'm explaining why a widely townread player is town when someone literally asked for an explanation. This is inane.

Just kind of reiterating that read without anything new, but making sure to keep the door open for a future vote. So like all this accomplishes is setting things up so Implo can vote for Dann later? Which is also something Implo ends up saying about me. Can't say I'm a big fan of these posts anticipating votes instead of just voting when it feels right to. Feels overly careful.

I think this is mostly fair; town do in fact often change their minds and scum are often I think bad at replicating that process naturally so they try to leave the door open explicitly. I can entirely see that reading of my stance on Dannflor. Town do also do this, though. As I said earlier, insofar as your post is trying to say "implosion's ISO is fakeable by scum", I would agree that this isn't something that I'm specifically more likely to post as town but it is absolutely something that I can (and in this case, did) post as town.

He acts all murky about Ari for a while, then says he can have better reasons to townread her now, and then doesn't elaborate. Only been 24 hours tbf but his positioning around Ari is definitely odd. Feels like he's scared of her.

There's a few interesting meta factors between me and Ari at play here. We just played a game where I was scum and she was town where she never really found me. Historically, when we're both town, I think what usually has happened is that Ari becomes absolutely convinced that I'm scum at some point early, pushes me, I become very frustrated at her and then sometimes we find each other as town. I might be misremembering very easily because, been a while since I've played much. So there is probably part of me that is actually scared of her. But my stance on her right now is that in the game we just played, even though she was scum I feel like I saw a kernel of some way to accurately read her, which I think I'm historically not great at (there was a game a while ago where she absolutely snowed me as scum) and so I'm sort of in a waiting mode to see if she acts how I want to see her act as the game progresses.

I think Implo not noticing the mention that Taly had been on the Beeboy wagon and that Beeboy was townreading her isn't a very good look... feels odd to drop a read like this but then also just not see 1281 which is quite literally 2 pages earlier, and right after Beeboy's readlist.

I actually genuinely think that as scum there's a chance I would have gone and double checked who was on the wagon before posting that point. I'm usually a lot more willing to just hit the submit button without double checking anything as town. It's something I try to do as scum just because I often do it as town but yeah me missing these posts is indicative of me having finally felt like wanting to catch up into the game and trying to digest however many pages I needed to in a reasonable amount of time.

Brown Eyes and Keyleth seemingly haven't changed in Implo's eyes since like his second post?

Brown Eyes is a strong read based on a single post; nothing else has really changed that.

Keyleth is a player I haven't really focused on recently but I felt pretty good about the early stuff. This is just how my reads go sometimes, especially in what is, for me, quite a large game.

I think the specific mention of the Dunn townread not being spoken about yet is another one of those things that could theoretically be said by town, but that I think scum are more likely to notice.

"Notice" is a weird word here. I wanted to explain my reads (for other people, but also for myself! I very often reference my past reads as town) and remembered (not "noticed") that i hadn't talked about Dunn at all. Don't see why that's weird for town to do.

Him elaborating on that read but not some of the older reads that he hasn't touched on in ages very much gives that scummy feel of a player sticking to exactly what's been said before and only deviating on an explicit mention of the contrary.

I think this is kind of fair but I expect (if you're town who is able to read me accurately) that this feeling would go away as I continue to play the game because my reads are going to change over time, especially after day one. (And fwiw I don't think I should be "given a pass" for d1, I think I should be not eliminated today because I'm town and am showing that, alas)

[implosion]

I can see that we're starting to get a tad divided and while that's probably good if we can sit down and calculate the exact meaning, right now it's a tad challenging. I wanna catch up and comment on a few things but right now this is just at the front of my mind and I wanted to get the thought out as I put my groceries away.

I am inclined to call this a town post specifically for the statement that it's being said as she puts groceries away. I think this would feel like a possibly risky thing to post as scum while not really reading closely and it shows that the game is on her mind in the way that it's I think more likely to be as town.

I have to say that Meuh's case on me is making me feel self-conscious about posting reads - not like I'm going to not do it, but like, fuck, am I allowed to call this post from Keyleth town when most people already think Keyleth is town???

I think the

Alisae's

low WIM could be scum indicative.

Unless things have changed since like 5 years ago or however long it's been since I've seen Alisae play, this is false, but obviously they could have changed.

[implosion]

I'm still mulling what I think Meuh's case on me means for Meuh.

[implosion]

wasn't townreading Meuh initially until the implosion case

Why do you think the case on me is town-indicative for Meuh? You describe it as a "case that looks decent", but why is a decent case something that's more likely to be posted by town than by scum? I mentioned earlier that my early impression of Meuh was that she's a broadly competent player, even if she is town I am absolutely certain that she could have posted that case on me as scum.

If I am under the current assumption that the townblock in my head is mostly correct, someone needs to make jabs at it or villagers to remove it, and right now Meuh is fitting that bill. Maybe we just disagree, and that would be great if you could help show that to me?

This is certainly a straightforwardly cogent explanation for Meuh casing me. The fact that I am (or at least was iirc, I guess with Sakura voting me maybe less so?) being sort of townread specifically by the other consensus townreads, while I have also been

relatively

disengaged, would make me an appealing target in the gamestate for scum.

I guess conceptually this game is pretty close to nightless - we skip the first 3 nights so we get

4

flips before scum have any control over who is in the thread at all. So if there's a correct townblock then they're sort of obligated to do something about it at some point. I think the reservation I have about that being the straightforward reading is that I don't know if it'd be the tactic scum takes this early, as opposed to waiting and seeing which parts of the townblock tend to chip away over time.

I think Alisae could be afk scum but if that's the case I doubt that e is afk because e is scum because e has reasons (not good ones imo but reasons) for being afk

I think if Alisae's afk is probably broadly unrelated to alignment either way.

[implosion]

Dannflor - Eh towny?
Aristeia - Idk
Lazy Shirou - Idk
Brown Eyes - Idk
Dunnstral - Most likely town
Meuh - Most likely town
Merlyn - Idk
Keyleth - Town
Mandate - Town
Alisae - Idk
Taly - Town
implosion - Probs scum
beeboy - Town

Actually I townread a lot less people than i thought i did.

Your "idk" list here is notably

exactly

my "still need to sort" list plus Brown Eyes.

[implosion]

Also like as a general rule I'm not saying never but town rarely write things like all the stuff Meuh wrote about the metaphor of the seeds and the watering and the sprouting, it happens on rare occasions

I can think of some reasons why this would be the case but am curious why specifically you think this is something that would be really rare from town.

[implosion]

How do you feel, metaphorically, about those seeds sprouting into the tree that is your avatar

[implosion]

I'm gonna let the stuff implosion said percolate a bit

What drove you to feel like this was something you wanted to pop in to say? I worry since it was your first post in a day that it's you as scum feeling like you needed to post something about me because you'd have an opinion as town because of context, but not actually knowing what to say, whereas I feel like you as town would have something to say after asking about me and then sitting for a day (even if it's not about the newest stuff).

implosion - How do you feel about Meuh's case on you? Is it AI in any major form or is it independent from the POV you already have on that slot?

Still uncertain. I do think that the logical disagreements I have with her case have mostly little bearing on her alignment. I still don't love her vote on me though her explanation assuages it because I did just miss something simple. The reason it would be scum indicative in my mind is sort of a stochastic argument; I think her attacking me at that point in time has lots of utility as scum (re: townblock type stuff), which means it'd be more likely to come from scum, but doesn't preclude it coming from town meaningfully.

[implosion]

how do you describe your scumplay vs townplay

implosion

?

Historically, the way I play scum is mostly to try to mimic my towngame, i.e. in any given situation i mostly try to do whatever i would have done there as town, and I'm intentional about cases where I don't or where I am doing something specifically because I have info. I tend to be pretty bad at concealing partner interactions to some degree, or at least every time I post something about/to a scumbuddy I'm afraid that I'm giving away something.

I think the best way to describe my towngame most of the time is "soft PoE" - I get some townreads I feel good about, and then over time I try to refine those reads to see which ones I feel ought to persist in the face of a changing gamestate. I tend to have a harder time finding confident scumreads, but it does sometimes happen. So I usually wind up generally trying to work with the people that I'm hard townreading to sort the soft PoE over time. But I think my day one reads are like, probably roughly =rand.

[implosion]

What do you need to resolve in order to vote confidently?

A town read on one of implosion or Meuh that doesn't hinge on the read of the other.

Is your current stance that you think we're both scummy but not scum together? Do you solidly want one of the two of us to be the lim today, at this point in time?

[implosion]

So, you basically townhunt?

yes but i do it very, very verbosely

[implosion]

i am a little tempted to unvote just because mandate's agony is really quite entertaining

[implosion]

I don't think any Implo has said is out of his scumrange. I think the only way I will be able to catch him as scum is if we both make it to later in the game and I can see any inconsistencies in the things he said. I really, really question anyone townreading him so casually.

5 people I'd townbin are Shirou, Meuh, Beeboy, Ari, Keyleth.

As fair as this is from you, I think it is eminently possible to have a correct townread on me right now. Just because you just saw me play a good game as scum, doesn't mean it isn't possible for someone to quickly identify me as town. Essentially I think it's very fair for you to be cautious on me but there's no intrinsic reason that caution necessarily has to apply to everyone in the lobby, especially when, as Mandate is correctly pointing out, there are lots of really good scum players here.

It just clicked for me who Mandate probably is, and if so, I think it doesn't change anything practically about the game for me.

I think a problem I'm having with Ari is that her posting is almost too clean. She's making very reasonable comments and questions on the gamestate, she's not doing anything particularly wrong or anything but I feel like I ought to have seen more stuff from her that pings me as town. I think it's very reasonably possible that this can be chalked up to this being a gamestate that is not good at drawing out the kinds of play from her that I think I'd be able to identify as townish but it does sort of mean that right now she feels off the table in terms of readability to me just because I need her to be in a different flavor of interaction than she currently is that the current gamestate just isn't conducive to because the current gamestate has absolutely no material threat behind any of its pushes. The current gamestate is a wonderland where it feels like every push is bound to dissipate into smoke two hours later, and I think Mandate is essentially combatting that with their rhetoric around Meuh lasting more than a day but it feels like despite all these Consensus Townreads there is absolutely no deep level of cohesion within the town right now.

[implosion]

I think it is eminently possible to have a correct townread on me right now.

what should I be town-reading from you?

This has similar vibes to the question you asked Mandate about their townread on me of saying if they said they're so sure of it are they willing to stake whatever on it. The real answer is idk, I don't know how you in particular get reads on people, I don't know why you historically scumread me early, I just know that I'm not so masterful a scum player that I could have emulated everything I've done in this game so far. I gave some examples when talking with Meuh. There are various things I've done that I think I probably wouldn't have done often or ever as scum, the way I've approached catching up and keeping up with this game, the particular way I've been engaged with it (which I have been, you're wrong that I haven't shown interest in this game, I think I pretty clearly have at this point), details of how my reads on people like Meuh and Brown Eyes and you have worked. But I don't magically know my own game well enough to truthfully say I can pin down exactly what I would have done differently as scum. That's your job, you signed up for this game, and if you're town your read on me is currently wrong, and it's not my job to explain to you exactly what details you should be picking up on, it's your job to pick up on them just like it's not your job to explain in detail to me why I should be townreading you when I'm not right now. That's just how the game works, idk why I'm getting annoyed at this question because it's a very normal question it's just annoying to me in the context of this game for whatever reason.

[implosion]

Ditto to Merlyn's question to me to some degree but honestly I don't really expect her to ever "find me as town" here, at least not for a few days when probably if we're both alive if she's town she'll figure out that there's Something Different about my game here compared to the one where we just played together. After all she was able to find me as scum there eventually (although maybe it was PoE in elo, i'm not sure what was going on in her head precisely)

[implosion]

Yeah, because this game has been weird with scum being near goddamn invisible and no one being able to agree on anything.

The feeling that scum are "near goddamn invisible" is interesting; there are plenty of games on this site where, say, there are consensus miseliminations on days one and two. In those games, in retrospect, it turns out that scum had been "nearly invisible" early on.

In that sense I'm not really

worried

per se about the fact that there's a generally low level of suspicion being thrown around, it makes the game awkward to play but ultimately we are going to eliminate someone and maybe it'll be right and maybe it'll be wrong, just like any other mafia game.

Then I turn around and see that the players who alt guessed me are by and large unwilling to commit townreads on me even though by any ordinary standard I've obvtowned like crazy

For what it's worth, and I don't want to derail the game by going down this path a lot but I do want to say something here just because I think I understand where you're coming from with this sentiment.

I understand the frustration, and I am really tempted to write paragraphs here, but I just want to say I'm still hard townreading you. Perception in mafia isn't a monolith. People interpret things differently.

I don't think Ari picks a fight with you as scum, because as scum it's unlikely to make a difference.

I don't really agree here. Ari's fight with Mandate feels like a natural outcropping of things to me and I feel like it's a relatively natural direction for her to go in if she is scum. I do think it's not like, an especially practical thing to do as scum probably but I think she still does it sometimes here

I'm worried about Brown Eyes :/

I think this is a town post. I think it's a post scum are probably afraid especially in this particular way to make because it'd look like trying to bring a townread lurker back into the lim pool

[implosion]

sad.

idk i feel like Ari has to play a lot harder here to have a chance of winning as scum. There are so many towny slots and in a hypothetical meuh/ali world neither of them are getting spared at this rate

What exactly does playing harder here mean to you?

[implosion]

I will say, I essentially have no issues with Mandate's solve but obviously I'm not as confident of a player as Mandate. But I do think it's a coherently possible scumteam.

[implosion]

She has been a bit ancillary a lot of the time in this game but (1) we're still less than a week in, and (2) she usually has more thread presence (in the sense that I think you're using the phrase) than she currently does when she's town as well.

To be completely frank, I think it's hard to really dive into the mindset of how scum will be thinking about this game in regards to things like how they intend to win or who needs to carry. I think this setup at a glance looks like it'd

feel

absolutely brutal to play as scum in the early game. Keep in mind that if we go spare route, the EV is maybe something around 50% but like, we

will

have to reckon with a 3:4 or 2:3 gamestate at some point. I think in many ways it makes lots of sense for scum to keep a low profile early; they're eventually going to have much better numbers compared to the town and if they've been too townie but haven't been spared it might get suspicious for them. I think it's entirely possible that the scum mindset here is just "don't get limmed d1-2, then take control of things after a couple spares". They don't need to be the towniest person, or explicitly even in the top 4 (spare dunn, then spare-nk-spare-nk gets rid of the towniest 4 people), to win this game.

[implosion]

(this is assuming we mislim d1-2 i guess, but this is also with the assumption that a big part of the scum mindset is to get through d1-2)

[implosion]

To the

Meuh

voters, curious about what they think of

implo

i think i am town softly

[implosion]

I think I'm getting demotivated by the stream of replacements. Presumably it'll subside eventually.

VOTE: Dannflor
Way too strong of a push for how early this post is into the game

This is such a weird reason for a vote honestly. For a few reasons, one that I just don't think this is something that comes from scum more often and two that it wasn't really a strong push, it was answering a question from someone who asked so of course he's gonna give a lot of explanations if it's an early scumread on someone who has a lot of posts.

I keep waffling with Dann/Implo

Tbh, kinda don't like this from you right after Ali gives suspicion on us. Feels like a possible opportunistic jump in response to Mandate, the person who was hard townreading me and openly defending me, repping out and Ali starting to push me. Ditto Dann, Mandate wasn't defending him as hard as me but was saying he was villagery and iirc that people were silly for pushing him.

[implosion]

At least, based off my knowledge of scum!implo, he is more than likely to bus D1.

oh i missed this but yeah that's just not true lol. I happened to bus in coalition because it was expedient to do so because it was going to be really hard to imitate my towngame accurately while not pushing my scumbuddy (which is also why I really wanted to push to get them off the coalition). I don't think I have any predilection toward bussing and I especially doubt I'd have such a predilection in this setup.

don’t like implosion so far

pls your predecessor was convinced i'm town you're obligated to sheep them

[implosion]

@Freedom, are you a publicly known alt?

I think it's safe to say that you've probably been the most at risk for elim along with beeboy. If you're a villager, you have a much better view of the gamestate than us. Have you tried to differentiate the pushes against you? What ones seem in good faith vs the ones that don't?

i like this question a lot. Interested to hear Meuh's response and also I think somewhat townish of Keyleth to ask it. I think generally this fits in with a broader narrative of how I view Keyleth's play as townish which is that she feels somewhat unconstrained in what she feels like she can post, but she frequently makes posts that indicate a real thought process behind how she's viewing the game in a way that doesn't feel manufactured.

Every single Dannflor post on page 77 is fantastic. The way he's talking about me, the way he talks about Meuh (I also felt like her posting in the previous couple pages was somewhat townier than before), and the comment that he doesn't believe Alisae would be scumreading him here which is basically exactly what I thought when I saw Alisae vote him.

[implosion]

Am I an absolute rube for getting gut townvibes from 1870? I know the answer is yes but i need to be told it.

The one thing about Dann's post on Meuh that I want to maybe disagree with is the statement that town when asked to explain a read won't post a wall's worth of content. I think I've definitely had cases where someone asking me to explain a read caused me to look at their ISO and then there's just a bunch of stuff I want to talk about.

I'm considering the merits of hopping to Alisae but it doesn't really feel like the vote does a whole lot and I kind of need Alisae to explain at least a few more of eir pile of reads because right now it just looks like a pile of reads that was picked from a tree and it's not really judgeable for the most part (except the given reason for the dann vote which is Bad)

[implosion]

Was occupied yesterday, will be catching up probably in a few hours

[implosion]

implosion it kind of feels like you want to hop away from meuh but won't let yourself

what are you seeing in 1870

I wouldn't say that I'm not letting myself, I think if Ali had a bigger wagon than Meuh I'd jump.

Regarding Freedom: I asked if he was an alt because I thought his posting sounded exactly like RH's but he mentioned that he'd read some of the coalition game which I thought might mean it wasn't him (since he repped in to that game) but yeah. I think I err on agreeing that RH is not easy to read, I remember having trouble in the guardians game I played with him where i was town a long time ago and in the coalition game he was pretty easy to mislim but that was mostly because I'd been pushing his predecessor really hard. But yeah I don't have a sense of what looks different about his town and scum game so if Ydrasse thinks he's easy to read, i.e. if she has a good idea of that, i'd love to hear it.

I'm trying to reevaluate implo I'm just kind of frustrated with their approach toward my slot.

I really don't see why you should be frustrated. I do still think you're town, the last comment I made was like, a thing that pinged me. You have pinged me this game and I think it's important to note those things for later but right now I'm not really interested in thinking about you that much today because you're pretty clearly not getting limmed today and I think you're more likely than not town anyway. Hence me calling you town with reservations, or whatever I did. You're a skilled scum player (from what I can tell) who I've never played with; it'd be pretty hard for me to ever call you town without reservations.

[implosion]

dann/implo

how do you feel about

shirou

?

This is a hard question. The short answer is that I'm not sure if I'm ever really going to feel confident on Shirou this game. The long answer is that my eyes have stopped glazing over at his posting but I don't really think he's done things especially out of his scumrange but he says that he has but I don't really remember what the things he said he's done that are out of his scumrange were, and I'm not sure how to evaluate them either, and I feel like he is probably the kind of player who would be like "it's unreasonable to not townread me here i'm way out of my scumrange" as scum or as town, and yeah, I'm just kind of ignoring him :X

[implosion]

Unvote

VOTE: Alisae

2051 seems a bit unlikely to come from scum, the admission to a shallow read, telling someone else they're probably correct on poijnts they don't seem to have examined, and looking at ydra again based off recent votes doesn't seem like a progression an informed thought would make.

This is a decent point, I do like him saying his read on me is shallow because it'd make sense for him to feel inclined to rest on the laurels of something like that but also understand it's not solid as town.

my poe is lazy shirou, meuh, freedom, alisae

hooray

[implosion]

Isn't it a bit too early to decide that we're going down the Mercy route?

see here for an argument that we should probably just do mercy anyway unless we specifically suspect Dunn, or at least bias ourselves in that direction.

[implosion]

I will say I still never reached the point of particularly thinking Aristeia was town, so Random Nurse is also in the PoE for me.

[implosion]

I will say I still never reached the point of particularly thinking Aristeia was town, so Random Nurse is also in the PoE for me.

Should we be reading into these replace outs?

I generally prefer not to as a matter of course.

[implosion]

And fwiw I don't think there's a whole lot of alignment relevant info to glean there anyway

[implosion]

Also

Implo

, how do you get the idea I'm a good scum player if you haven't seen me as scum before?

i actually have no idea where it's from, i'm guessing it's from reading some random game that you were in where someone called you good as scum or something along those lines. Or maybe it's just a wholesale fabrication of my mind!

[implosion]

I don't even know where to go anymore
Flips table

Ok, rant over, maybe i do really need to clear my head a bit.

I think it's worth taking a moment to just acknowledge that it's okay in a game like this setup to feel this way. We're implicitly townhunting and there's quite a long d1 deadline and we have no hard info and it's a completely mountainous setup except for Dunn, and even then him being Toriel gives us no info about him. We are strictly trying to build something out of nothing and so it makes sense that it feels like running in circles.

[implosion]

I want more discussion in this day

I think there's a point at which more discussion will be a strictly bad thing because, vis a vis my last post, it's probably just going to hurt morale/engagement until we get some info to go off of. Of course if you're now not feeling good about the Alisae wagon then etc, but I think prolonging the day for the sake of wanting more discussion broadly is just going to cause consternation when the trajectory of most of this game right now is summed up by a sentiment that I think I mentioned earlier where it feels like no matter who comes under the spotlight, they will find a way to worm their way out of it. Mandate's presence in the game was i think good in a way because Mandate eventually found someone that it seemed they weren't going to waver on (Meuh). But everyone in this game now seems inclined to waver constantly, which I'm not saying makes them scummy (it doesn't) nor that it's bad play (i don't think it is, but i think that could be debated). But it does make it viscerally feel like no progress is being made.

also I was trying to remember just what games it was that made implo scared of me which had me re-reading my older games and omg i am cringing so hard jesus christ

I think i'm proud of the fact that i can reread games from like, within the past 5ish years and they don't make me cringe that much, but gosh reading old games is truly extremely cringe-inducing

[implosion]

Alright so I have some time to put towards this game. Is there anything new of substance at the moment? And no I'm not lurking, I just came off 6 nights in a row and am just now wrapping up some of my chores I do on my nights off. I just need to get into the game a bit to find my footing.

I'd say current players in particular to comment on would be Alisae (the leading wagon), Meuh (the previous wagon/generally somewhat contentious slot), me (who other people have said to rep-ins to comment on since i've been contentious). Really if you can come up with what you think are good reasons to think someone is scum in this game, that would be useful since I think the dominant feeling in this game is the feeling of "it's hard to find scum".

[implosion]

My current feelings: I still think Random Nurse is the slot I think is being prematurely PoE'd because I still think Ari was in her scumrange. I feel better about Taly being town. I don't specifically see what in Bingle's posting is making Taly feel better about the slot, and I think the Brown Eyes single post I was reading off of is sort of not really up to the standard of this game at this point, so I want to consider Bingle more. I still feel good about Keyleth as town. I think I'm probably being premature when my gut says to take Meuh out of the PoE; I think probably she should still be in there when compared with the rest of the game, she's had like, some good individual posts but I don't really feel like she's done much that isn't fakeable as a scum who pops in to the thread, does a round of Faking Stuff, then leaves; i.e., I don't think she has any particularly challenging-to-fake progressions, or particularly original/nuanced reasoning that would be hard to fake, or anything like that. A part of her recent posting feels a little bit defeatist, and I don't want to use that term in a negative way exactly - just like, compare someone like Taly, who seems viscerally annoyed that she keeps finding new reasons to townread people. Like, I suspect Taly is going to read this post I'm making right now and go "fuck, i guess i was right that implo was town" and be annoyed at that. I think that's the emotional state that this game is kind of imposing on townies, and I don't really get any feeling of deep concern over the correctness of Meuh's reads coming from her. She's kind of parked her opinion on me to be some sort of broad suspicion but not a push. She did the case on me after ISOing me but like, from what I can tell she has not substantively commented on a post I have made in around five days. I don't think that's the behavior of town who has the stance she does on me in the gamestate we're in, where like, I think the average voice in this game is mostly-but-not-confidently townreading me. She should be either talking to people about why I'm scum, or looking at my posts and evolving her read on me in response to them, or trying to suss me out, or like, interacting with me or my content in any way.

Unvote

VOTE: Meuh

I've re-convinced myself. Still okay with an Alisae lim as well now though, but.

[implosion]

Not really tmi-ing, but more just a lack of anything that really makes me sense that he’s looking to push any of his suspects.

This is mostly the norm for my d1 town game.

I think your saying my posting looked MD-esque is fair for everything but my post with the Meuh vote, which is partly why i started writing that post because I realized I hadn't said anything actually pertinent to reads in those posts or maybe in a while. I think they're also important things to say because I have a sense that town morale is imperiled by a combination of the day dragging on, the repeated actually-no-lets-do-someone-else in response to every wagon, the slew of replacements, etc. And I think it's quite important that we talk about that at least a bit so that it doesn't fester.

Honestly it kind of feels like Taly might be setting up to pivot onto implo if Meuh flips town.

I think this is sort of foreign to how scum would be viewing this game. I feel like if Taly is scum then he doesn't need to worry about setting up a pivot because lord knows the gamestate is going to give twelve more opportunities to pivot before the lim is locked in. I think Taly's very reluctant insistence that I'm town is a good look, because it's exactly the kind of trajectory that I think scum would be afraid to make for fear of seeming noncommittal and like they're looking to pivot.

[implosion]

WHO IS SCUM

PLEASE RAISE YOUR HAND

You feel

Meuh

is town?

I feel that i dont even know what's going on anymore, did u read my other post?

I want bodies

Fuck I want to unvote

Isis

trolled us everyone is town

I’m less confident you’re scum now alisae but i don’t really have any better ideas

here's a smattering of posts from the last 3 pages illustrating the gamestate

[implosion]

If the gamestate is an entity that is waiting for Alisae to be limmed, then it is doing so resignedly.

[implosion]

I feel I’m at the point where I have little or nothing to add today and am ready for a flip but gosh those wagons are small

[implosion]

excitement is a-flutterin in the air

[implosion]

and meuh if you are town then yeah sorry this probably feels like an especially shitty game to get limmed in :X

[implosion]

and meuh if you are town then yeah sorry this probably feels like an especially shitty game to get limmed in :X

WDYM?

idk it probably feels pretty bad for the town to vacillate between calling everyone in the game town for two weeks then decide to lim you if you're town.

[implosion]

i felt bad about making post 2452 after i saw post 2450 >_>

[implosion]

i really have absolutely no strong vibes about the wagon itself and I question anyone who thinks that the wagon for the wagon's sake is specifically likely to come from town or scum. Town are probably fed up with the game state and want blood (e.g. me, but also Meuh is my preferred lim). Scum are probably not strongly feeling the need to push the wagon nor strongly feeling the need to avoid it; it's probably gonna be pushed anyway eventually so scum probably don't *need* to hop on (unless Alisae is scum but even then I don't think scum would be avoiding the wagon and Alisae is the person saying the wagon might be full of scum) and I don't think it's especially suspicious to be on a wagon after how this day has gone so I don't think scum particularly would care to avoid it.

I really don't especially care about getting RN's replacement to commit to a stance before the day ends, I don't think it's especially likely to be super info-meaningful.

This isn’t why Implo thinks I’m scum or how he convinced himself, it’s him justifying turning back.
On a surface level, the things I have done aren’t necessarily super helpful or justify a townread, but Implo never actually shows that he scumreads me. He’s just saying that the position in which I exist is one where a scumread on me is justifiable, and then plops a vote back down. To the people who think my Implo read lacks a backbone, this should be sounding the alarms.
He says he SHOULDN’T take me out of the POE. He says I SHOULD be more actively be trying to sort him. It’s going down a checklist of productive town behaviours and checking yes or no, it’s not trying to sort me.

Sure I’m defeatist, sure I “should” be more actively sorting Implo, sure other townies have provided meatier content, sure my progressions can be faked.
But am I scum? Implo doesn’t ask himself that question. He just explains why a world in which I am scum can exist.

This is such a weird time to make this argument because the post of mine that you quoted is literally the first time that I have made a salient argument for why you are scum actively, rather than just why you can potentially be scum. Like it honestly feels like you didn't read the post of mine that you quoted here and are responding to the rest of my ISO. In that post I specifically say "I don't think that's the behavior of town" in describing your actions. Like I have no clue what calling you scum or asking myself that question means other than saying that your posting isn't coming from town

[implosion]

You have to understand, I think it's 8 to elim since 14 players.
The doublevoter is not voting.
Village needs 8 votes to vote off a wolf while Mafia needs to convince 5 villagers. If you convince the doublevoter, you need to convince 3 villagers other villagers.

village also needs 8 votes to vote off a villager with no help from the mafia

this is not an argument

[implosion]

Alas, alas.

I also am inclined to go after the empty slot next.

[implosion]

And I don't really feel anything in particular about the hammer

[implosion]

Alas, alas.

I also am inclined to go after the empty slot next.

Because there's going to be no contributions from it?
I might have to read Ari's iso first but I guess we could go for it if Ari was scummy.

Nah, I never really found Ari as town and have mentioned a couple times that the slot is in my PoE.

[implosion]

i will say, i am less stoic on Ydrasse's slot being town than i was 50 pages ago, partially because Ydrasse's play hasn't made me feel anything and partially because of very lightly BoPing mandate

[implosion]

All of the people that immediately are like "OK NEXT INACTIVE" are mafia

assuming this is subtweeting me this is also just incredibly inane

meuh has 5th most posts in the game, she wasn't being arbitrarily limmed for inactivity

I've said for a while that Ari's slot is in my PoE

I am potentially willing to buy the townslip just because I don't really think scum ali would be especially likely to fake it. Not because of not being capable just because of like, idk why e would

[implosion]

(the townslip = on alisae)

[implosion]

like does a scum rep-in make this post on a suspected predecessor

Why do you think they don't?

[implosion]

i think its less likely scum does it because its showing a belief in a town alignment to defend or understand ones predecessor

its fakeable, but i view predecessors like dead masons or dead scum partners

viewing your predecessor with either curiosity, critical thinking, or understanding is a sign of good faith that is AI

I feel like this is giving a lot of credit where it isn't due. Sakura is the one who proposed this framing, RCE literally just said "yeah, that seems good to me".

and also, im kind of starving for townreads here so

This is fair and also interesting. I am trying to let my d1 townreads kind of evaporate a little. But this does feel like a little bit of a drastic shift

[implosion]

I do think Sakura is probably worth adding to your super-town list at least. And me in theory but lol, I have certainly been idling in this game for a bit. I also don't really know why Dunn deserves to be there but I also don't really care about sorting Dunn in principle because of blah blah math blah.

[implosion]

meuh

was my one confident scumread, them flipping town earns a drastic shift

and if im giving

rce

too much credit from the framing, how do you read their rep-in yourself?

Sure. I guess I sort of view reads mostly devoid from each other so one being wrong isn't a reason that all the others are wrong, especially d1, I just separately try to re-evaluate over time.

I'm saying you're giving RCE too much credit because literally the thing you're saying is town about that post isn't something RCE is doing; you said they're town for "viewing their predecessor with curiosity, critical thinking, or understanding" but like, the post in question is them saying

I like this. I’m inclined to trust aristeia’s take.

in response to someone else summarizing Aristeia's take.

Essentially it amounts to RCE saying "yes, i agree" which is not a good reason to townread

I haven't really evaluated any of their posting directly yet in any real way, will do so now, none of it like, pinged me strongly on reading the first time

[implosion]

I’m also in a particularly interesting position knowing my own slots alignment. So on my rep in I read the page or two before, saw meuh was flipped as town. Saw Shirou immediately go, well since RM isn’t playing that’s a good next vote and thought wow that’s a really Wolfy post to make.

Given the context, even without knowing my alignment it’s just not good.

VOTE: Shirou

This is the only post that really sticks out to me, as a pretty 1-dimensional reason to vote, but like, it's not like it's a horrible vote to make as someone who just replaced in. It just feels a bit like, 0-dimensional chess, if that makes sense. Like, I look at this and see meuh was flipped as town, and Shirou immediately goes, well since RN isn't playing that's a good next vote. And yeah, it's a pretty "wolfy" thing to do at a glance, but it's almost like breaking the basic decorum of the game, voting the afk slot immediately after a mislim with absolutely no care. The kind of thing that is "wolfy" and is probably really obviously "wolfy" to scum to the point that I imagine like, if I were scum in that situation I'd never make that vote because why the heck would I put myself out there like that first thing in a new day. But that actually town could reasonably want to do if they already thought the slot was scummy, want to use their vote, etc. So yeah I think this is a bad vote but it's not like, an *abysmally* bad vote

[implosion]

0-dimensional chess is my new term for a post that seems to want to ignore the nuance of WIFOM and call something that "scum would obviously do" scummy, even when it'd definitely be apparent to that person that what they were doing was scummy, so why would they make that post in the first place. Particularly w someone like Shirou with a noted scumgame and lots of experience.

Calling something 0-dimensional chess is not the same thing as making a too scummy to be scum argument, because that phrase is loaded and incorrect sometimes whereas this new one is always accurate

[implosion]

i liked the vote wreyhf4qwgjbhk

that's too bad

[implosion]

I don't really know what to think of you finding my takes "theoretical", everything is theoretical idk anyone's alignment

[implosion]

I’ll give a more explicit summary of where I’m at in various stances later today

[implosion]

I don't especially object to a Freedom lim but it also doesn't specifically spark joy. Though at this moment there isn't really a vote I can give that sparks joy for me.

The towncore I still feel comfortable with right now is myself, Taly, Sakura; followed by a second tier of Alisae (which I really hate), honestly maybe Keyleth goes here, and beeboy sort of goes here but it's like, largely a trusting-consensus read rather than something I individually feel really confident about.

After that is probably Dann. I still think Dann's posting feels town, the main trepidation I have on him is that it feels like he has bursts of good posting rather than consistent things that I would find hard for scum to do and so it feels like his posting is potentially fakeable by scum at that point; but I do like the posting.

That leaves RCE, Ydrasse, Shirou, Dunn, Freedom and Bingle. Shirou and Ydrasse are probably the slots out of this 6 that I find towniest right now, Dunn is irrelevant, so yeah, I'm perfectly happy with a Freedom lim at that point. My hang up on Freedom is that I feel like he just is acting the way he always does and I don't actually have any idea how to read into his posting. I've kind of had a mental block for a bit in this game stopping me from really feeling like I know what's going on with much of anyone's alignment tbh :/ it's not really for lack of trying though

[implosion]

I was here for a while after I made my post yesterday but no one was there :X

Im very sort of here right now if there’s anything in particular you want to ask about but only sort of

[implosion]

Did

Meuh

townflip do anything to your townreads? Where and what?

The town flip itself, more or less no. It’s not like I was dead confident meuh was flipping scum, she was just my best scumread, and like I’ve said my day one reads are normally garbage. That’s also just not really how I think about the game. The one exception is like I mentioned a small inclination to bop mandate but it’s certainly nothing major, rc has been wrong on plenty of reads before

The passage of time has changed my reads in the way I outlined. Tbh I am realizing basically my entire bottom tier at this point is replacements that I haven’t seen do anything strongly town yet (freedom, bingle, RCE) which is kind of bleh.

[implosion]

I think Dann is now my top townread for silly reasons but they're here.

I think keyleth probably should be one of the reads that I don’t let decay over time because I feel like when she contributes it’s consistently not something I’d expect scum to say at that time

[implosion]

I doubt

Bingle

or

RCE

are scum.

…ok

[implosion]

Tbh I am realizing basically my entire bottom tier at this point is replacements that I haven’t seen do anything strongly town yet (freedom, bingle, RCE)

This might be a hard question to answer, but would you consider yourself a biased person when it comes to mafia? Maybe it's hard to find reasons they're towny because of your read on the previous slots. It might help a little!

I feel kind of awkward about replacements in general in that way tbh. I’m certainly a “biased person” but like the read on the old person doesn’t become irrelevant when they’re replaced

[implosion]

I doubt

Bingle

or

RCE

are scum.

I mean like bingle I can understand. RCE I told you why I thought the reasons you gave were bad and I haven’t bought anything you’ve said about the slot that I remember

[implosion]

The town slip is Ali thinking there were 4 scum instead of 3.

Dunnstral - Taly - Alisae - Ydrasse - Dannflor - Sakura

V

Freedom

beeboy - Keyleth - implosion - RCEnigma - Bingle - Lazy Shirou

I feel like I'm all over the place with reads, but this is where my thought experiment has led me

I mean I feel this is not bad. I think Keyleth deserves more towncred than has been given generally (and of course I know I'm town) but I don't like, hard object to anything else here as a view of the gamestate

[implosion]

implo

hasnt changed tune even with votes, i want to say thats NAI but is it?

i mean the votes on me felt kind of flaccid. yours at least did, alisae i just literally cannot bring myself to care about in this game because i just disagree with almost everything e says lol, and iirc the only other vote was shirou who immediately went back to freedom?

I think first-sparing Taly is probably the play.

[implosion]

town core is like implosion, taly, keyleth, ydrasse

This feels like a really gross towncore. Like... I'm never comfortable hard townreading Ydrasse after too many games of watching Mena do that and lose hard. Taly is probably just the leader here and the more I think about the gamestate being weird the more I think that's not really townreadworthy-ish. I'll admit I've been falling into the trap of letting Taly be my rock to kind of guide me, but I don't know that there's something he's done to deserve that. Implo is solidly null for me, and a hard townread there is just :/ And legitimately I can't remember shit for keyleth's alignment.

This is sort of a weird post, especially the part about Taly. Feels like a weird thing to call "gross". The Ydrasse thing sounds like it's Bingle's issue, "Mena is bad at townreading Ydrasse so no one can do it with accuracy" is a non-argument. The Taly thing is just not engaging with anything Taly has actually done, how his reads have shifted or his interactions with the game state or so on or so forth. The comment on me (and also on Keyleth) also kind of feels like "I don't have a read here so I don't understand how anyone can have a hard townread here". And I don't really understand what the conclusion about Dannflor is supposed to be either. I get it's a catchup post but it's weird.


3171 glad to see you've gotten there but please don't say it too loud so she does not get shot :X

[implosion]

I strongly disagree

If you're campaigning for your own elimination, which I'm heavily considering just a turbolim on you right now, you are NOT helping town by removing a green slot in the game

You increase town odds of winning spare by eliminating SCUM

I will say, I think this kind of logic is garbage in the general case but there

is

a mechanical argument to make in this setup if we're always sparing; I have always hated the idea of limming someone because their flip will be high-info but you can make a compelling argument in this setup that, if the person in question was never-ever-under-no-circumstances going to be spared, and that they are a high-info flip, you should flip them because it's no harm to the town even if they're town. The counterargument (which I tend to agree with even in this setup) is that there

is

always a chance of perceptions changing on someone, especially given that we're likely going to have to go all the way to 4:3 and/or 3:2, where likely everyone alive will be "in the PoE" to some degree, and so "i'm never gonna be spared anyway" is a bad argument. The other counterargument is a strict EV reading of things where we assume spares are random every day in which case obviously we want to lim scum today above all else.

[implosion]

The other counterargument to what Bingle is saying is i don't think a bingle townflip helps us in the slightest lmao

[implosion]

I am tending to go back to thinking (/agreeing with dann) that Ydrasse is just likely to be town here.

[implosion]

i still genuinely dont know how to approach

bingle's

alignment

does scum say unhinged shit to save their ass when it wasnt necessary?

but, i want to townread it... because

bingle's

made plays like this as town before

like

what

im honestly trying here and im getting nowhere

I mean, I think that it's more or less nai lol. I think if I had to read into it I'd be inclined to call it more town than scum, because getting limmed today (from a purely win condition point of view, not an emotional one) probably feels a little bad for town but quite bad for scum because it'd mean both their teammates need to be spared. But if Bingle does genuinely believe that there's no chance of ever being spared then that kind of becomes a shrug. It's all sort of a shrug.

[implosion]

we still go mercy

I personally don't really want to talk about reads too much until people have to vote to spare people

This is pretty fair actually.

If people broadly agree that we're going spare, and that we're sparing Taly first, then there isn't much reason for anyone except maybe Taly to talk much about reads. Telling scum who to NK matters more in this game than the average game.

[implosion]

I kinda feel like way more people would have wanted to go Implo if he was actually town but like idunno whats going on lol

i mean

freedom flipped town, so, lol, i doubt scum were particularly salty that he died and not me? If you are town your read on me and play toward me is like, deeply garbage by the way. Like, it's really just atrocious. If you are town then it's really wild that I was scared of you like 5 years ago, maybe you just never played with me as town and are just predisposed to scumread me. Or maybe you're just scum in this game. Alas.

I think the towncore is likely infiltrated and sparing is a lost cause

This isn't even a reason to go fight though, if the towncore is infiltrated then it's not like we're gonna have an easy time winning the normal way lol.

At rand it probably does, at least it seemed to from implosions post, but we're now down 2 town

The numbers in my post were made assuming we mislimmed d1 and d2 because i assumed it was the most likely outcome in a 3:11

[implosion]

Like according to this there were 4 players on both wagons and one is getting yeeted before we move to D4. We can go kill route and kill all 4 of these players and we only lose if all 4 of them were town.

Actually I think you're just misunderstanding the setup?

If we go fight, the game is simply mountainous. As in, we need to lim

all three scum

. Including whoever has "infiltrated the townbloc".

[implosion]

Probably should be 4 scum in hindsight.

Hard disagree here lol. The EV is alright, it's just imbalanced between spare/fight, and the problem isn't that spare is too easy imo. I strongly disagree that it's near autowin if Dunn is town, if that's the case we

will

have to spare correctly in either 4:3 or 3:2 in order to win the game. Meaning in principle all townies will need to agree. The issue is just that fight is too hard, and maybe also that mercy is (i suspect) more fun sounding than fight in the eyes of the average mafia player bc fight makes it just another game.

[implosion]

I know that isn't game relevant but well, yada yada rabble rabble

[implosion]

but after my experience hard defending lurker scum!Redtea and being scum read for the entire game when he flipped scum, I'm not doing that anymore yeah

ah, good times....

I'm kind of okay with rethinking Ali but don't really want to say too much because Ali is/was a viable nightkill if town and I don't want to guide scum so I kind of hate how much we're talking about things right now in general tbh

[implosion]

i'm like reading what's being posted but i can't bring myself to care about content that is being posted right now

[implosion]

Idk what the current count is but I am pro ending the day fast generally unless someone has some good reason not to

[implosion]

alas, really wish we hadn't said so much yesterday. i'd be voting keyleth if she was alive.

I'm probably okay with kyouko. I might prefer sakura, i never really understood why she was seemingly taken out of the town pile.

[implosion]

not a huge fan of the ali wagon comp lol

[implosion]

happy birthday implosion!

thanks

the bingle post is interesting. I guess gamestate-wide reads are sort of more relevant in this setup than they would be in a normal game especially since the total amount of scum influence over the thread is ever increasing. I'm still a little afraid that it has some underlying assumptions about how scum would view playing this setup, i.e. that they would necessarily feel the need to push each other upward, when I think I would be quite afraid to do that as scum in this game because of the potential for extremely damning associatives and I could imagine someone trying to just play under the radar and not really do much toward other people that has the potential to be damning

[implosion]

I think my problem with dropping Sakura as town is that I think the d1 reasons to townread her were like, pretty high tier convincing. Like Mandate's affect toward her was almost utter certainty that she was town and I was definitely vibing with that affect at the time. I can go back and look at what the reasons were but I remember them feeling pretty ironclad.

[implosion]

I also disagree that Sakura would not be valuing the townslip as much as she is if she were scum. I've like,

hard

townpushed people that i thought had legitimate townslips before (see ZZZX's signature) and I think it's entirely possible to think this was legitimate, i mean i think it probably was but i have reservations.

[implosion]

if she were town*

[implosion]

implosion, what is your read on sakura

specifically like compared to me

I feel like you’ve town read us both pretty consistently but always slightly favored sakura and I’m not sure why that is

At a glance I'm more comfortable with Sakura right now. My main issue with you is this:

Anyway Dann regardless always makes +winrate moves for his alignment I trust him enough to do that

Basically that it's always possible that I'm mistaking you playing well for you being town.

I'll need to think a lot though. I have no intention of playing this day quickly at least personally. I also do personally think I ought to be on the table to spare, though obviously I'm biased. In particular one thing I realized is that it's entirely possible I just would never have made the EV post if I were scum with Dunn as town because as much as it is something that I would do as town and my scum game is largely based on trying to imitate my towngame, It did in one sense singlehandedly guarantee that Dunn would be spared by making that post. Of course someone else might have made the analysis eventually and I could be doing it for towncred, etc, yada yada.

[implosion]

I need to meditate on brown eyes, to some degree. I honestly haven't felt much of anything about any of Bingle's posting, it's kind of the problem I've had with replacements at large this game. So for people who feel strongly that Bingle is town I'd be curious to hear your best reasons. In principle, today is the single most important day of the game - if we do mess up today, which I believe we are in some sense supposed to, we need to get a lot of info out of it.

[implosion]

and I pretty much agree with alisae that I feel like it was probably not The Plan for e to get spared there

I am inclined to disagree. There's plenty of worlds here where scum are roughly out of plans. They

need

towncred from somewhere, and the chief targets for sparing yesterday were Alisae and ssbm_kyouko. Actually, fmpov it explicitly *was* the plan, at least myself and ssbm_kyouko were off the wagon meaning there was at least one scum sparing Alisae.

Like, scum had to shoot kyouko here to stop us from sparing her. But that flip gives us a lot of info about yesterday, namely that scum were simply not going to win yesterday. Especially if Sakura (the other person who had at least some consideration as a spare target) is also town. Scum may have simply been obligated yesterday to vote for town.

[implosion]

I think if anyone

does

get towncred on the Alisae wagon it should be Sakura, who voted alisae page one immediately after alisae voted kyouko

[implosion]

like i think this vote commits a lot more than sakura's and i like that it's a tonal read not related to the townslip at all

This I like, disagree with for several reasons.

One, sure it's committal. What else is Bingle supposed to do yesterday if Bingle is scum? Try to start a different wagon?

Two, I think it's way townier to be giving Alisae credit for the townslip at the point of the game that Sakura was. I feel like scum hate being forced to do that kind of thing and would rather feel like they're coming up with """""actual reasons""""" to scumread someone, like a tonal read. Sentiment about the townslip was a wave that crested, and then came to a trough with people being like "eh idk" or "Alisae could fake that" - and then Sakura came in and used it as a reason anyway. I feel like that's super not a scum mindset.

[implosion]

I also struggle to find Sakura partners if she's scum, probably (though tbh i haven't tried very hard yet). I mean sure you could argue I am scum advocating for a partner if you wanna be wrong but I'm not. I think this is also good because if I'm right on Sakura then hopefully she can solidify me as town based on this as well.

I think Sakura is like, sort of hard spewed town by Mandate-scum. I find it pretty hard to imagine Mandate on d1 as scum successfully convincing everyone that their partner is super duper obvtown. I think Dann+Sakura is unlikely to play out this way unless third scum is Bingle.

[implosion]

hi. can we please for fucks sake not make this day take fifteen minutes total because i essentially know for a fact as town that we can't win without my vote or scum throwing but we can fuck up the day without my vote!

[implosion]

Basically that it's always possible that I'm mistaking you playing well for you being town.

I don't know what this has to do with the quote from alisae

I also don't know what to do with this read at all

it feels like you're saying there's no amount of town I could be that would lead you to fully trust me which is not really a position I feel you've expressed before today

this isn't what i said??

i said i trust sakura more than you right now

[implosion]

One, sure it's committal. What else is Bingle supposed to do yesterday if Bingle is scum? Try to start a different wagon?

Try to start a wagon on someone other than the person who flipped town and wasn't actually that tr-d ITT? I mean... yeah, probably. I think outside of RCE/Sakura everyone had Ali as a never spare before yesterday happened, and I certainly could have chosen literally anyone to push as a spare instead.

This is just, factually entirely untrue i think? i might go back and check, i might be wrong, but i feel like alisae was solidly in the townpool for a significant amount of people. i definitely didn't have alisae as never-spare, ut i did have lots of reservations about sparing em

[implosion]

hi. can we please for fucks sake not make this day take fifteen minutes total because i essentially know for a fact as town that we can't win without my vote or scum throwing but we can fuck up the day without my vote!

I'm not gonna stop trying to win this game in fifteen minutes, no. Sorry? I guess?

yeah this isn't to you, it's to the people voting you if they are town

[implosion]

like, town should ABSOLUTELY not be in a rush to lay down their vote today unless they are selfvoting, or incredibly, incredibly sure of themself

[implosion]

i will say if for whatever fucking reason dann quickhammers here i would consider that a scumclaim and would be absolutely furious if i died and sakura didn't get spared tomorrow

[implosion]

One, sure it's committal. What else is Bingle supposed to do yesterday if Bingle is scum? Try to start a different wagon?

Try to start a wagon on someone other than the person who flipped town and wasn't actually that tr-d ITT? I mean... yeah, probably. I think outside of RCE/Sakura everyone had Ali as a never spare before yesterday happened, and I certainly could have chosen literally anyone to push as a spare instead.

this would be so incredibly outing yourself as scum in the gamestate yesterday i feel i shouldn't even need to say it

the gamestate of yesterday that bingle is describing is just so far from reality, the alisae wagon got pushed through so quickly and easily and bingle is acting like it was some magical impossible thing that was never going to happen

[implosion]

there is a HUGE difference between yesterday and today in that today, scum are absolutely obligated to get a spare on scum. they can posture but their votes matter. and the trajectory yesterday was not such that Bingle could magically singlehandedly start a spare wagon on one of his scumbuddies without it being so fucking obvious that he was scum trying to salvage the day.

Who would he start it on? Himself? One of shirou/ydrasse/rce or even dannflor? none of those people were ever ever ever getting spared yesterday over alisae and kyouko

[implosion]

thanks ydrasse.

i'm splitting my attention between this and a zoom meeting for the next 5 minutes so i'm going to take the opportunity to try to calm down a bit

[implosion]

So one other important thing to keep in mind about today is that scum are probably really, *really* reluctant to get a spare on scum by having all 3 of them on-wagon. I might be muddling this a bit by saying this but it's fine. This is because obviously being on the spare wagon today, if it lands on scum, is highly suspicious, and scum absolutely need to be spared both today and tomorrow.

My like, pet scumteam is bingle+rce+shirou, which is cogent in that sense in that they could try to angle for Shirou tomorrow. I think it's much more important than in a normal game to think about every day of this game differently.

The first couple days were basically normal mafia with maybe some odd incentives around bussing. But more or less it was normal mafia. D2.5 and D3 were basically nothing. D4 was a given because imo we all managed the incredibly difficult task of noticing that Taly was obvtown.

Yesterday

was

a real day of the game in the sense that I do think it wasn't an entirely foregone conclusion. Or at least, to townies it wouldn't have seemed that way, because no one was as obviously town as Taly (or imo Keyleth) that was left. But scum still

had

the option of playing the strictly long game, and from what I can see, it looks like whoever scum are, they didn't really have much of a choice.

Today, scum cannot

entirely

play the long game. But they still are obligated to play it a little: they can't treat this like 3p eLo and quickhammer if they get a townie to do the wrong thing.

Tomorrow (if we get there) is the equivalent of 3p eLo in that it's winner take all, and scum's whole entire goal is to make one single townie misvote.

[implosion]

i will say if for whatever fucking reason dann quickhammers here i would consider that a scumclaim and would be absolutely furious if i died and sakura didn't get spared tomorrow

i don't know what you actually think i would quick hammer a buddy here

You pseudo-quickhammered alisae yesterday. I don't think it's

likely

that you as scum here would quickhammer your scumbuddy but it's possible especially if you thought some other scum was in contention to be spared tomorrow. And obviously fmpov it'd be really unlikely for you as town to quickhammer town-bingle by numbers

[implosion]

(like, it's possible you'd quickhammer your scumbuddy and then play it off tomorrow, and you making the comment about wanting to hammer test was making me nervous in the moment)

[implosion]

the problem is I don't know what your problem is with me exactly

it's just a very nebulous "I could be playing well" but I don't know why that doesn't apply just as much to Sakura or anything else

idk it's the very same paranoia reads I've been dealing with all game but you've not seemed to have as much of an issue with that sort of read until today

I do think you're town. It feels like you're complaining that you're not my #1 townread but you're basically my #2 townread behind Sakura and I don't know exactly why you're complaining about that.

The kinds of reasons I have for townreading you are i think more likely to be me getting it wrong and mistaking good scum play for good town play than the kinds of reasons i have for sakura. simple as that.

I'm going to towncase sakura soon probably

[implosion]

ydrasse's unvote i think softly implies that she and bingle are not teamed? ydrasse seems somewhat resigned/forlorn towards the game right now (she can correct me if wrong). if she's scum and bingle is scum then i feel like natural inclination of scum in that situation would just be to keep the vote on and hope for the best (e.g. that town-RCE keeps their vote on, etc)

[implosion]

I guess right now I'm trying to conceptualize what the world looks like to me if Bingle is town. I'm definitely letting confirmation bias seep in pretty hard.

Ydrasse could be scum who either (1) was planning on unvoting at some point all along or (2) was resigned to lose and now thinks she has a shot. RCE could be scum in theory but that'd be kind of iffy. Them both being scum would be buck wild. They could both be town, and Dannflor could be posturing scum who's never actually going to hammer bingle. Idk. All of those possibilities feel pretty weak to me.

i am curious how other people feel about what i laid out with regards to how yesterday/today/tomorrow need to be conceptualized differently from each other. Essentially an open question to everyone, how exactly do you conceptualize the Bingle wagon today as making sense, and what are your implications on other people's alignments, if Bingle is town? What about if Bingle is scum?

[implosion]

Well if Dann is scum then Bingle HAS to be scum unless Dann was gambiting and hoping Bingle doesnt get hammered after pushing him hard.

Agreed. Actually, this can and should be taken a step further: the contrapositive of "if dann is scum then bingle is scum" is "if bingle is town then dann is town".

So basically, and I'm gonna bold this one for emphasis,

unless people think Dann might have made 4071 as scum with Bingle as town

(which I think would happen like, approximately absolutely never)

we should spare Dann over Bingle

.

[implosion]

("spare dann over bingle" meaning that if we want to spare bingle, instead, we should spare dann. though i still may want sakura! or myself obviously but it sounds like i'm not super viable atm)

[implosion]

Well I guess Dann can make that post and then shoot bingle but bingle is alive so lol

[implosion]

I mean I think it's exactly you/sakura/shirou if bingle is town and I admit I've let that world view kinda settle in maybe more than I should have

The world where one or both of RCE/ydrasse are WIFOMing the heck out of the day like technically exists, but only if they think the game is so far out of their control that this is the best path to victory they have. I'm not sure what third team mate they could have that would make that world make sense.

So I guess imagine that today ends in something like a 4-3 split in votes. Like, two people get to 3 votes and someone hammers a wagon. The hammered wagon flips scum. Scum then shoot the other wagonee, confirming them as town (this is not guaranteed to happen but I think is quite likely if this is how today plays out). There are strictly 3 possibilities:

1) the scum were all piled on their own wagon: the scum wagon was 3 scum 1 town, the town wagon was 3 town.
2) the scum were split naturally: the scum wagon was 2 scum 2 town, the town wagon was 1 scum 2 town.
3) the scum managed a bit of a coup: the scum wagon was 1 scum 3 town, the town wagon was 2 scum 1 town.

This is of course putting the cart before the horse because the day might not end this way and if it does then me making this post could influence things, blah blah i don't care.

I think possibility 3) ought to be discounted just because we as town have to back ourselves to have better collective reads than that.

Possibility 1) is, i suspect, terrifying for scum. Because they need to convince town tomorrow to spare someone who voted for scum today.

That leaves 2). And 2) is, I think, the natural thing scum would aim for today. But that does necessitate some scum voting for town at some point. Maybe they wouldn't be inclined to do so early.

[implosion]

Well I guess Dann can make that post and then shoot bingle but bingle is alive so lol

You say this as if Dann had any option other than Kyoko in that scenario.

If dann is scum, and yesterday dann thought kyouko was so guaranteed to be spared today that dann would be obligated to shoot kyouko, then dann would never make 4071 because Dann is both (1) sealing his fate that he will be pretty hard obligated to vote bingle today and (2) sealing his fate that he's making what will probably be, to some of the town, a convincing town case on bingle. It's just so, unnecessarily, brutally committal of a post for scum to make in that situation.

[implosion]

I do think dann could be scum with bingle though in principle. Yeah, "why doesn't dann advocate for himself instead of bingle", sure, but scum needs to pick some tact and all of them look kinda bad yesterday in most worlds i think.

Also I do still just think dann is probably town and increasingly I am confirmation biasing myself to think that the 3 of us are just all town

[implosion]

If bingle were scum the exact team would have to be bingle + me + Ydrasse… or he’d have been hammered.

this is untrue for like 8 reasons lol

no one is getting away with quickhammering their scumbuddy today in this setup. Scum do, in fact, need to be thinking about tomorrow and not monolithically about today. Like this,

I don’t want to hear any arguments about posturing or angling for the future, scum NEED a scum flip today and there isn’t a way around that. You just flip your partner and try to figure out how to spin it later.

is just hogwash. Scum do NEED a scum flip today. They also NEED a scum flip tomorrow an exactly equal amount.

[implosion]

bingle is there anyone besides yourself that you'd be comfortable sparing

Not really, no.

I think I'm super obvious town, and it's gonna take a lot to shake that. I don't need to solve to win this, I just need to show what I think is obvious. Unless it becomes impossible for me to be spared, I'm probably just going to, yknow, try to win the game.

How do you feel about Dannflor in light of my argument?

[implosion]

Or do you have reads more generally right now? I myself am not finding an especially coherent worldview where both of us are town and so I'm certainly not going to vote you because you think you're obvtown right now.

[implosion]

There is no downside for scum quickhammering if they get a townie on the wagon. Outed scum doesn’t matter if they aren’t in the spare pool. They weren’t getting spared anyway.

This is vehemently false. People have last minute changes of heart in eLo all the time. If we reach tomorrow, it is for all intents and purposes eLo. It feels like you're staunchly refusing to engage with the content of my argument here. There is no fixed "spare pool" that we're guaranteed to spare from tomorrow. Scum need to look townie. If one scum outs themself to quickhammer, they're turning tomorrow from 5 people, 3 of whom have to more or less mutually trust each other, to 4 people, 3 of whom have to more or less mutually trust each other. That is

dramatically

simpler.

But again, I don't really have to pick out the scumteam. I have to shine as town for the town players. Scum is the group in the hotseat where they have to prevent my spare from going through at all costs.

I understand the impetus here if you're town (and that you're just copying that impetus if you're scum) but if you are town, I'd implore you to do so anyway, for various reasons. You outlining where you stand on other people might help people find you as town. If you are town and aren't chosen today, it won't

just

be because scum drove the spare away from you - it'll be because a townie either helped drive the spare away from you, or listened to scum who were doing so.

And tbh i am town and you're really doing a bad job of shining as town today as far as I personally can see. This is endemic to the setup to some degree where everyone is probably more frustrated than usual that people aren't finding them as town.

[implosion]

I'm glad Ali was town but that does not fix the problem of you all not sparing Kyouko, an obvious nightkill target, before sparing Alisae which had more suspicion on her

This seems like a deeply silly thing to complain about tbh. I don't think it bears on your alignment in particular. I guess you could complain that the kyouko nightkill gives less info but like, i think the fact that alisae got spared yesterday implies that alisae was at least in some sense more obvtown in the eyes of the people than kyouko was. Though of course I know (and you if town also know) that the alisae spare had at least one scum on it so etc. Frankly I think I'd have reservations about kyouko if she'd not been shot, probably.

[implosion]

As it currently stands, I'm voting myself, Dann's voting himself and Bingle's voting himself while you're voting Bingle.
Literally you could vote any of us 3 and it'd be the same ammount of votes so that cant be it either.

Idk the vote count but if my vote hammers I’ll vote. Otherwise it doesn’t really matter where my vote is inside the spare pool.

I feel like RCE is just openly scum here

like i feel like the very last instinct i have as town here is to throw my hands up in the air and say "any of these x people are fine to vote". I want to win today. Or at least, I want to make absolutely certain that we're in as good a position as possible going into tomorrow if we don't. I genuinely don't understand how anyone can feel good about voting someone else

this quickly

today in this setup. Scum by sheer numbers have a ton of thread control right now. Why are we trying to end the day fast? Why are we not trying to optimize the best possible spare that gives us the best odds of winning? It just baffles me.

[implosion]

I was thinking that if Dann was town, you had to be scum, but if you were scum you wouldn't be voting for me, i... i dont even have words right now.

I think the meme about DANNWOLF is real in this game!

Like, look at the way he opened the day today. Does that look like a townie very close to achieving their wincon or a wolf trying to step up their game to not lose?

Dann is scum and I've many doubts about Bingle now that he pushed him strongly

I mean i understand where this is coming from but i am town and i have felt the need to step up my game today because today is the hardest day lol

we are close to achieving our win condition but this is by definition the hardest part.

[implosion]

let me be clear: if i was wolf i would not spit on the efforts of mandate and roll over and die. i would enter into this game with a wonderful body of work and keep it going.

that everyone somehow, psychically, decided that i was a wolf for reasons i still don't understand - town players, mind you, not entirely wolves trying to discredit - and doubt will be explained beyond "dunno mandate has good reads usually didn't here so kill" as previously posted is miserable. i don't have the will to try and sway against loud town players who have decided i am mafia for what i feel are obscure reasons. it's not fun. i don't care, let alone my actual posts being minimal alongside all of this.

my viewpoint of this day is that everyone is going to suggest me as a partner on their scumteams. it's easy for town and easy for mafia. i'm just accepting it because screaming into the void makes me want to cry and i don't like crying over mafia anymore, so i won't.

I get where you're coming from (whatever your alignment is, really). I think it's especially true when there's players like Alisae who tend to get into a pattern of imbuing their reads with a sense of bravado at a certain point where they're not necessarily like, directly being mean, but they're acting so overconfident in what they're saying that it just feels entirely not worth engaging with any of it.

For what it's worth, I have implicitly called you town today (I said my pet scumteam was bingle/rce/shirou earlier). Obviously shirou's vote is evidence against that pet theory (though for reasons I've already said I don't think it disproves it out of hand, but it is definitely evidence). The townteam being you/me/shirou/sakura is certainly a possibility though it's one I'd want to think a lot more about before calling it in any way likely.

I also personally suspect BoP isn't a good way to read Mandate anyway... i have seen mandate have some trash reads before. I don't even know if mandate's reads were that bad in this game tbh, i don't remember a lot of them other than me and sakura being town and like, meuh and maybe alisae as scum.

[implosion]

Alright. The chief important thing to do right now is clearly towncase Sakura. This is for my own benefit and not just for others'. Sakura is a peculiar slot right now - she's being voted by one other person, i've indicated her as my likely top choice, RCE has indicated her as "in the spare pool" and that they'd hammer anyone in the spare pool, and I don't think dann or ydrasse have called her scum (and bingle hasn't given any reads so). Essentially, no one seems to be really making a concerted effort to stop a sakura wagon; part of the reason for this could be that Shirou's vote is the first actual momentum it's gotten and that was last page so people haven't had a chance to but it is necessary, if we are sparing sakura, to at least have some kind of vision for why this is the case.

Anyway. With that disclaimer aside. Reasons for Sakura town in non-chronological order.

1) Yesterday. Alisae opens the day by voting kyouko. Sakura then immediately votes Alisae, crucially citing the townslip. There are two points I want to make here. Point one, is that voting Alisae here is more or less conceding the day if Sakura is scum. Bingle claiming that his vote is what sealed yesterday is, imo, a misreading of the day. Scum have almost no way in at this point, four posts in to the day. kyouko looks like a pretty solid spare choice, with pretty broad consensus, iirc. And Sakura shows up and proposes we spare a different townie. If scum come in and propose no, we should pick some third person, they now need to justify that person over two other people and they're gonna look real bad if they manage to spare that person and they flip scum. Sure, some scum could self-advocate but that's pretty unlikely to work, people have been clear enough with their reads and I think there's a certain terror scum probably feel about self-advocating in the gamestate yesterday because simply put, in the gamestate yesterday scum are under more pressure than town, they're more likely to feel the need to do something like that whereas at 3:6 there's still plenty of town alive and it feels (or at least to me it felt) like we had pretty solid odds of hitting town without any need to self-advocate.

The reason I feel this is a really strong tell is that if I put myself or like, a generic scum player in the shoes of Sakura at the start of that day, there's a good chance scum quite want to get a win yesterday, and sakura making this vote both adds a new town candidate to the sparing pool for yesterday and gives up 1/3 of scum's votes that could help get scum spared because it's going to be very hard for Sakura to convincingly vote hop because, point two: the use of the townslip to justify the vote. I already mentioned that I think scum probably on average avoid using something like a townslip to justify a vote, and that Sakura is basically bringing up this old point that people were using to townread Alisae that popular sentiment (iirc) had sort of soured on. I think that's something scum have little incentive to do. But beyond that, using the townslip is super committal - she's probably not gonna get away with saying she changed her mind about the townslip, and well, a townslip is a townslip if it's real.

2) Ari and Mandate's reads on Sakura. I sort of think these reads are unlikely to have come from scum->scum, I think if Ari and/or Mandate were scum then they essentially TMI'd Sakura as town. And well, pure numbers game, if Ari and Mandate were both town then that doesn't leave a lot of room for the scumteam (it is possible of course etc but i just have such a hard time seeing RCE as town in this game >_>)

Iirc, Sakura d1 felt consistently like when she popped in, her views felt like they were townie and coming from actual thought, and that as Ari said she had idc energy. She felt very unagenda'd. Kind of feels like someone who is not in a scum PT discussing how they want the game to go. As Alisae put it, she was consistently townie.

1327 is an argument I made for her on d1 and I still think the posts I quote there are really town

there are a lot of posts like this one that I feel are coming from a real place. And this one like gosh i think that's a townie post.

I'm sure i could find more posts if i go into her iso but those are ones from ctrl+f'ing her name in my iso and yeah, i feel like there's a pretty strong case to be made off just those.

[implosion]

I mean there’s like no way Sakura isn’t trolling.

Bingle if you are town and Sakura is scum then I am going to be massively pissed at you for quick hammering after I screamed into the void to take today slow

[implosion]

If Sakura isn’t trolling then this is truly some twilight zone shit, I guess maybe it’d be that aliases core townreads were all correct but gosh

[implosion]

It’s almost like someone’s wagon going from 2 votes to 4 in like 5 minutes on a day that’s obviously very good for town to take slowly might be… a bad sign????

Like gosh I don’t even know what I’m going to think of what’s going on here if Sakura flips scum all I know is I’m going to be super mad at bingle if bingle is actually town

[implosion]

We should not talk about reads right now because it only helps scum figure out the nk, btw

[implosion]

like it's really hard to overstate how much we could have gotten out of today if people had just kept their fucking votes to themselves

(all my angst/anger is contingent on sakura flipping scum but honestly maybe it's not)

[implosion]

i guess if sakura flips town it's just confusion because that means bingle is also town (he hammered) and no one was advocating for scum to be spared today

[implosion]

>_>

[implosion]

oofie owwie my reads :X

gg. i'll have more to say once done with a meeting lol

[implosion]

Scum played damn well. I think surely there's some lesson here where in this setup, on average the people who have been by and large towniest in the eyes of the town all game are likely to be the scum once you hit roughly final 7. It's a phenomenon in most games to be sure but it's extremely more so in this setup with spares, because both spares and nightkills are going to be targeting the obvious-townies who are actually town, and people aren't perfect at sorting, so inevitably some scum will have been largely called town all game and they'll still be alive. It might be +winrate to just literally invert your reads at the start of day six. Like, day six the viable spare candidates were precisely the scumteam.

[implosion]

Also sorry Dann and Bingle, i think my shenanigans Day 6 may have contributed to that loss.
I dont really know what other approach we could have taken this game tbh, the high EV drove down my motivation a lot throughout the majority of the game, added to the fact that going for Mercy was all but certain, with anyone that tried to even look at Fight being hit by getting scumread.

This is really fair. I think EV is in some sense the wrong way to look at this setup but I can imagine it being really hard/demotivating to play as scum because I imagine a lot of the time the best strategy is to do what happened this game and make it through the first 2 days and then kind of accept that you're going to suffer until final 7.

I like the concept of the setup but honestly I think the EV issues are the smaller of two flaws (they could be fixed by some number tweaking). The bigger issue is that playing a weirder/different game of mafia is more fun than playing another normal game of it.

Actually I think maybe the best fix is to just change the rand so that Toriel is scum exactly 50% of the time. Right now the fact that usually Toriel will flip town to me makes the mercy/fight decision have a lot of buyer's remorse where it feels like you should pick mercy just because it's usually correct to do so. Obviously it does give town info though.

[implosion]

Anyway. I think Shirou sparing Ydrasse was pretty impressive. I was definitely feeling like Dann was the winning spare, although of course I don't know how I would have felt if I'd been alive. But I definitely would have taken the last day a lot very slowly, though it sounds like possibly the exact same thing might have happened tbh, the question is if RCE would have found me like they managed to find Ydrasse because obviously I wouldn't have minded a fast day with me getting spared. It's definitely a tough kill choice and I think killing me makes a lot of sense from the perspective of it making Dann a good-looking spare, which is part of why I'm impressed with Shirou instavoting Ydrasse. RCE finding Ydrasse is also really impressive given where they started the day at. Really I guess town did manage to play the last day really well, it does feel like snatching victory from the jaws of defeat a bit.

This was a cool game and I enjoyed playing it with people. There's also a part of me that's glad Ydrasse wound up getting spared after the agony of feeling like she had no chance to ever be.

[implosion]

I'm definitely a big fan of mountainous setups with a mechanical twist in general as well.