NY 120: Flash mafia 2. GAME OVER

[Ojanen]

I'm back, but I'm also really really sleep debted - bigger content tomorrow.

I have a few things in mind to check from yesterday. One is the group of people lurking around the days leading up to deadline.
The first one I came across and was blatant was Oman.
Deadline was Sun Oct 31, 2010 around 5:30 am my time.
Thu Oct 28, 2010 2:52 am

I'd definitly buy a Luchris over prozac

unvote; vote: prozac

I am the biggest tool. This is meant to be a Luchris vote. Fuck. I don't know what he's on now so I won't swap over until I know. Until then:

unvote

Sun Oct 31, 2010 2:37 am

Already stated that I think ut is scum-driven. Don't like this shit at all

vote Richard

due numbers I would still prefer several others over him, but what's done is done and this is a deadline decision.

The 3 day gap and 3 hours before deadline vote is not ok - it's not ok to only vote for "this is a deadline" while lurking up to it and staying active in GD.
What's also Bad is that I have no idea who would be the "several others" Oman would have preferred to Richard. Oman is a very white slot in the game. He has posts, but the only stances I can find on a skim in his whole iso are that
1. Esp is scummy
3. after much probing about it, UT is not scummy.
---
Ythill: is your new readlist an amalgamation of your earlier behavioural tells + voting analysis or have you substituted behaviour with that votecount analysis?

[Ojanen]

I'm gonna need to check out what I think about the shape of the wagon regards to UT - whether it implicates him as scum or not.
However, IF UT=town, I believe in the following:

1. The votecount was a mess about half a day before deadline.

Untrod Tripod (2): Luchris, RichardGHP
RichardGHP (2): Porochaz, mikeburnfire
Porochaz (1): Seol
Luchris (1): Fishythefish
Espeonage (1): Untrod Tripod
Ojanen (1): Ythill
Fishythefish (1): Parama
Ythill (1): Ojanen
not voting (3): Espeonage, Oman, Vollkan

2. This game doesn't require majority for deadline lynching => the lynch can easily swing anywhere
therefore
What happens next from that vc is that Fishy and Esp vote UT.

The unpredictability of the lynch landing somewhere means scum had every incentive to be lurking/just casting a deadline vote and no incentive to be diverting or gathering attention

IF

UT is town.

Leading up to deadline, we have
active (townpoints):
Parama
Ythill
vollkan

inactive - only deadline vote or less (scumpoints):
Oman
Seol+Luchris - can't tell if these 2 were absent from the site for 4 days or lurking, no posts after Thursday, no deadline vote even
Esp

Fishy is in inactive cat but his V/LA seems legit - null.
mbf makes his about only attempt at content, but it is in the deadline vote-ish category.

[Ojanen]

In previous post the therefore is on the wrong line, shoulf be before "The unpredictability of the lynch landing somewhere means scum had every incentive to be lurking/just casting a deadline vote and no incentive to be diverting or gathering attention IF UT is town."

[Ythill]

Even less, I can't see what is important about "noting" it - I see no purpose in saying "I am going to vote X now. Just so you all know, I was previously voting Y who is on X's wagon".

I wouldn't expect him to say that in particular, but I'd expect something. Either he thought Fishy was bussing or he realized one of his reads was wrong. Either way, it's worth mentioning. Stll... a molehill. Notice that this point and the other only moved him from town to null.

Ditto

I don't care if you take my conclusions seriously, and I'm not going to spell out every detail for you because it's all pretty obvious. Are you questioning my methods or my alignment? If it's the latter, please select one of those dittos that you'd like to talk about and I'll explain; otherwise... meh, whatever.

You seem to be playing devil's advocate a lot. Please at least get your vote into play, a suspicion list would be even better.

That goes for everyone. Votes in play, please. Tick tock.

[Ythill]

Ohai Oja, I got ninja'd by page 18. My new list is an amalgamation. Current reads, as it were.

"The unpredictability of the lynch landing somewhere means scum had every incentive to be lurking/just casting a deadline vote and no incentive to be diverting or gathering attention IF UT is town."

Not sure if I understand this properly pre- or post-edit, but wouldn't a low lynch threshhold be incentive to guide the vote, lest it fall on scum at the last minute? The only way I see them hanging back completely is if all of the major topics were town-aligned.

[vollkan]

I don't care if you take my conclusions seriously, and I'm not going to spell out every detail for you because it's all pretty obvious. Are you questioning my methods or my alignment? If it's the latter, please select one of those dittos that you'd like to talk about and I'll explain; otherwise... meh, whatever.

I do doubt your methods, but that wasn't why I asking you to explain yourself. As my scores indicate, I am somewhat at a loss right now. If your assumptions and reasoning are well-founded, it will give me something to work with. If not, then I fail to see the harm in having that exposed. And, frankly, policy-wise,I refuse to accept that it is legitimate for a player to scumhunt by posting quotes from the mod and stating powerful conclusions with no evidence, all under the appearance of it being based on some kind of objective set of rules.

You seem to be playing devil's advocate a lot. Please at least get your vote into play, a suspicion list would be even better.

I have a suspicion list all the time: my scores, which show exactly who I suspect and the extent to which I do so.

Fact is, nobody is playing in a way that is scummy enough for a vote from me to have any real meaning beyond "you've got a couple of points" (My "Devil's Advocate" mode is partly a product of me not agreeing with any of the attacks that are being made, and partly me trying to dig up meaningful content). And I'm not going to vote for the strongest of my incredibly weak suspicions purely for the apparent purpose of enabling wagon analysis; I don't agree with wagon analysis as a method generally, but I can't see how it can possibly have any value if the data it is using is in part a consequence of everybody playing to an artificial rule of "You must vote your highest suspect no matter how trivial your suspicion".

[Ythill]

A few misconceptions from your statement about legitimacy. There are only a couple of "powerful conclusions" in that entire post. I qualified them to show the weight I'm giving them, then considered them together to make my list of current reads. Saying there is no evidence when clearly the evidence is the placement of votes frozen by those counts is... well... just wrong. Also, I don't claim to have objective rules. In some places I use them (example: scum are unlikley to group votes on small wagons) but they are probably the least reliable points of the analysis, simply because anyone who knows them can play WIFOM with me.

Instead, I use the counts as a snapshot of the game-state at that time and try to imagine what the scum were thinking and therefore how they were acting. Obviously, this becomes much more useful as we learn more alignments. If I live long enough, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm not going to explain all of those points in detail but I'll discuss a couple of examples.

MBF has "ruined" Esp's trap and the cat is out of the bag. It's very likley that Vollkan and Esp are of the same alignment.

Tacit assumption that Esp is town based on my D1 read. He had stated that moving one wagon ahead of the rest would be considered a scumtell and, in context, it seemed like he meant that the wagon would be on a town-aligned player. If you are scum, you probably don't respond to that by voting a town-aligned player. Voting a buddy would be a reasonable move. If you are town and you voted scum, I'd expect his buddies to either pile on behind you or apply pressure somewhere else soon thereafter. However, if you are town voting town, I'd expect them to hang back and see if you got yourself in trouble. The voting climate got stagnant after yours. So, chances are, you're either both scum or both town.

Still no bites on the Prozac-Rich situation, which makes me wonder what the scum were waiting for and, more importantly, strongly suggests that one of MBF/Oman is mafia.

Prozac-->Rich is now confirmed to have been town-town and sitting there untouched by scum for much of the game. Neither MBF nor Oman were on the Prozac wagon at it's height, so they weren't very suspicious of him. Neither of them seemed interested in lynching Rich either. Yet, within three days, their votes became the turning points that caused it to happen. MBF had an OMG-Rich-is-scum moment and pushed him hard. Oman had an OMG-UT-is-town moment and pushed hard for his alternative, both in the eleventh hour, and both on a candidate they had been ignoring all day.

I don't believe they are scum together, but I think there's a good chance one of them is and I'd tell you which one if I knew UT's alignment for certain.

I don't agree with wagon analysis as a method generally, but I can't see how it can possibly have any value if the data it is using is in part a consequence of everybody playing to an artificial rule of "You must vote your highest suspect no matter how trivial your suspicion".

I really don't care who you vote. Hell, I voted one of my town reads yesterday, and I'm not voting my highest suspect now. I just want your vote in play. Let me try to explain why...

VC analysis looks pretty silly right now, because we only have two flips. By D4 or D5, when half of every D1 VC is red or green, it's going to be a lot more useful. When we discover things like...

hey look, there was a player at L-2 with all town on his wagon and enough people suspicious that a hammer was very likely, why didn't scum vote to L-1?

Thing is, the most recent VCs will still only have two flips on them. It's looking at the D1 and D2 VCs that will give us the best info and we will only get good info if there are lots of wagons and lots of movement. We must force the scum to make decisions, to join wagons or avoid them, and make them feel comfortable playing loose. If we do enough of that, we're going to catch them voting strategically.

Right now, we've got one really big wagon on a guy named "not voting" and it's a very safe place for the scum to hide. I want them to feel uncomfortable voting that guy ASAP and the only way to do that is for all of the town players to move.

I know you don't put any more stock in this than I put in your numbering system, but I do and you can look at my meta to see the results.

[Ythill]

Right now, we've got one really big wagon on a guy named "not voting" and it's a very safe place for the scum to hide. I want them to feel uncomfortable voting that guy ASAP and the only way to do that is for all of the town players to move.

Repeated for emphasis.

[Parama]

There are 2 votes on UT by my count...

[mykonian]

votecount

Untrod Tripod (2): Fishythefish, mikeburnfire
Luchris (1): Parama
Seol (1): Ythill
Oman (1): Espeonage

not voting (6): Oman, Vollkan, Untrod Tripod, Luchris, Ojanen, Seol

With 11 players it is 6 to lynch.

Seol and Oman were prodded.

[Ojanen]

Ohai Oja, I got ninja'd by page 18. My new list is an amalgamation. Current reads, as it were.

Why does adding, as far as I can tell, null voting to behaviour perceived as scummy move me from "busted scum" to "null"?

"The unpredictability of the lynch landing somewhere means scum had every incentive to be lurking/just casting a deadline vote and no incentive to be diverting or gathering attention IF UT is town."

Not sure if I understand this properly pre- or post-edit, but wouldn't a low lynch threshhold be incentive to guide the vote, lest it fall on scum at the last minute? The only way I see them hanging back completely is if all of the major topics were town-aligned.[/quote]
What I'm saying is that if UT is town, all the major topics

were

town-aligned.
Rich was town. Prozac was town. Esp was the third suspicion momentum topic D1, although upon deadline he had no wagon to speak of. I think he's town. The only hot thing a couple of days before the deadline was you vs. me. I'm town. Your motivation in getting caught up in that as scum isn't really there if everything was indeed town.

And I count a single post that is a vote+justification on deadline day or the previous day to the inactive category.
Also, I would bet most people, regardless of alignment, 3 or 4 days before the deadline, before it was brought up, not remembering/knowing a majority wasn't required. Because I didn't, and I'm usually more cognizant than average about the ruleset.

[Ojanen]

2nd Oj quote is supposed to be embedded in a Ythill quote.

I've only played with vollkan-scum, twice. I'm leaning town on him due to the activity et al, but reading him is always hard because his mafia philosophy generally is quite alien to me. The point system and not believing in towntells except very rarely. Everyone is at 50, someone with close to no contribution equals someone with a bunch of posts but nothing he rates as a scumtell. And all the stuff about legitimacy - I get the hyperlogical mindset, I think I do. But I just can't help thinking that getting "legitimately" caught (without setup info etc) requires scum to either not be paying attention to staying consistent and logical or be a weaker player.

[vollkan]

Saying there is no evidence when clearly the evidence is the placement of votes frozen by those counts is... well... just wrong

You are right. It would have been more accurate to say, as I did in my second-to-previous post, that there was a lack of

reasoning

rather than

evidence[/u]. As in, I can't as an outside observer undestand how you reached your conclusions

Tacit assumption that Esp is town based on my D1 read. He had stated that moving one wagon ahead of the rest would be considered a scumtell and, in context, it seemed like he meant that the wagon would be on a town-aligned player. If you are scum, you probably don't respond to that by voting a town-aligned player. Voting a buddy would be a reasonable move. If you are town and you voted scum, I'd expect his buddies to either pile on behind you or apply pressure somewhere else soon thereafter. However, if you are town voting town, I'd expect them to hang back and see if you got yourself in trouble. The voting climate got stagnant after yours. So, chances are, you're either both scum or both town.

That clarifies it. Why do you think that a scum player (especially in a game like this populated by experienced and, thus, less-easily-intimidated players) would react that way to one player (Espy) stating that something was a scumtell (I don't recall much agreement with Espy)?

I've only played with vollkan-scum, twice. I'm leaning town on him due to the activity et al, but reading him is always hard because his mafia philosophy generally is quite alien to me. The point system and not believing in towntells except very rarely. Everyone is at 50, someone with close to no contribution equals someone with a bunch of posts but nothing he rates as a scumtell. And all the stuff about legitimacy - I get the hyperlogical mindset, I think I do. But I just can't help thinking that getting "legitimately" caught (without setup info etc) requires scum to either not be paying attention to staying consistent and logical or be a weaker player.

On that last sentence, my test for determining whether or not an action is a scumtell (ie. more likely to come from scum than town) is a kind of "rational basis test": if a hypothetical townie with the known characteristics of the person I am analysing* could, thinking reasonably, do a particular action then I will not consider it a scumtell.

(* Thus, meta and a player's weakness are accounted for).

I also think this is why Ythill's and my playstyles grate on each other. Ythill focusses on the patterns of vote movement, whereas I am only interested in whether each individual vote or action was reasonable in the circumstances.

[Ojanen]

...and I otoh find staying intentionally reasonable the safest and most comfortably shielding mode to be in when I'm scum and am instinctively suspicious of overt reasonability. But I digress.

[mikeburnfire]

Geez, I have no idea who the scum are. Somebody present me a case. I will unabashedly hop on whichever one is most convincing.

[Ojanen]

Also I agree (Not voting) wagon is not productive

vote: Oman

for active lurking to deadline in the scenario I elaborated on. And (this is an anti-town category complaint) being too white a slot - 2 stated reads, one after intensive prodding. Slot badly needs content, has stayed out of the web of being connected through not taking stances.

Needed backreading has to wait for tomorrow.

[Ojanen]

mbf. there are a couple around. if you really have absolutely nothing in mind, you could start making yourself at least slightly more readable by saying how you find those. I remember Parama's Fishy case, Fishy's UT case, Ythill's me case. Don't buy case and it's scummy/don't buy case but not scummy/case might be onto something. And why.

[Oman]

Day 2 has started...I uhh..I forgot to check this. Expect a post tonight, a big post, w/ detail.

Also, Not Voting is a scummy bastard and needs to die, I disagree with Ythill that Not Voting is a scumwagon and think that we need to get Not Voting lynched before he pushes his scum agenda more!

[Ythill]

Why does adding, as far as I can tell, null voting to behaviour perceived as scummy move me from "busted scum" to "null"?

Two reasons. D1 reads are weak, and my reads are generally given on a curve. My top 3-4 suspects will typically be listed under scum, the people I am seeing as town are labeled as such, and everyone else falls into null by default.

Why do you think that a scum player (especially in a game like this populated by experienced and, thus, less-easily-intimidated players) would react that way to one player (Espy) stating that something was a scumtell (I don't recall much agreement with Espy)?

"Populated by experience" doesn't change the relative field. An experienced scum would probably act more confidantly in a game full of n00bs, but not while among avid hunters. And I think the lack of comments oter than Esp's would fuel the paranoia rather than reduce it, because it is also a lack of disagreement.

Also please note that wagon analysis isn't the only tool in my shed, just the only one I've used so far. More to come, possibly tonight.

Also, Not Voting is a scummy bastard and needs to die

D2 lurker wagons are meh.

[Ythill]

UNVOTE: Seol
VOTE: Oman L-3

[Espeonage]

And he does it again. Oman is quite scummy. I have found in my past experience that joking on a regular basis and jovial dismissal of things and basically just a simple sense of nonchalance usually points to scum. He showed this quite a few times day 1 and has just done it again.

Scum usually do this to discredit townies so that people don't listen them. When someone does this once or twice it could mean nothing. When it is done on a regular basis however, it usually points to a scum peep.

[Ythill]

I'm guessing Esp's super-secret suspects were Parama and MBF. Amirite?

[Espeonage]

no

[Fishythefish]

Prod avoidance; content in 10 hours or so.

[Parama]

I think I'm going to make an alt and name it Not Voting.