STEVEN UNIVERSE 2 - GAME OVER

[Reasonably Rational]

@Cerb:

I do know you and I would have sheeped you blindly if I was 100% sure you're Town at this point.

The fact the game didn't end as of yet means we either have a scum team of Shiro + grapes (thus the game not ending when either of them was bubbled), or either or them with you (self explanatory) OR JUST YOU (again, self explanatory).

Also, I'm -once again- speaking from where I stand bc I know only I have access to my own PM at this time, so pardon me for dismissing any case of me being scum, bu you are welcome to do the math on that if you like.

I won't risk a situation where there are 2 scum alive come the night phase, so I'm offering my own in exchange of another of them suspects (and one whom I strongly believe to be scum). This leaves you and Shiro, and ONLY you and Shiro, and it has just ONE flaw: The case of you being Scum WITH Shiro.

Now that I very much doubt to be the case. Maybe I'm blind but I just can't see it, so I'm playing it extra safe and it will be up to you to lynch Shiro next if you are Town.

P-edit:

Then the alternative is to keep grapes bubbled and lynch ME. How does that sound then?

You missed one thing. Nobody currently "in game" can be scum with anyone else currently "in game" otherwise we would be guaranteed to be in MYLO and the universal loved modifier of tragic destiny would not be in effect.

I understand your position. I assure you, there is absolutely no chance that a rogue grapes will result in us going to night in a situation that will result in the scum team achieving their win condition, unless the scum team has additional kills(which is, as Drixx said, a universal flaw that we can't account for).It is, as a I said, better to NOT walk through this in case it does happen, because grapes could still make a mistake regarding his actions, and thus we shouldn't inform him anymore than we need to.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

You missed one thing. Nobody currently "in game" can be scum with anyone else currently "in game" otherwise we would be guaranteed to be in MYLO and the universal loved modifier of tragic destiny would not be in effect.

Hmm.. so.. if the universal loved modifier won't work in MyLo then we can tell grapes' alignment the minute he gets released (if the modifier is still on then grapes is Town AND there's only one scumster left alive. I it's gone the grapes is confirmed Scum rgardless of his next move). Am I correct in this??

I mean to say LYLO, not MYLO. MYLO is a lot more fluid when we KNOW we have access to a functional kill town can use tonight, I don't believe Varsoon could even tell us when "standard" MYLO was in effect...sorta makes me wonder about why Mastin's power functions in MYLO actually, lol.

Anyways, the point is that there can't be TWO scum among the five of us. There is at most 1. IF these 5 specific slots are alive, a mislynch can not immediately result in a loss, because if it could, then Tragic Destiny would not be in effect.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

@A50: From my perspective, our two plans are fundamentally identical. If grapes is town, we win 100% of the time. If he's scum, at some point a 50/50 could occur, either via a lynch or randoms bubbling.

That is unavoidable.

The difference between the plans is that ours allows a town!grapes scenario victory to occur before the scum night kill will even resolve, according to what random said, while allowing the very specific scenario of grapes event allowing an additional kill to pose a threat.

Let's talk about the likelihood of that being the case. Grapes additional power, the ability to return to the game during season finales, is a mark against it. The only reason for scum!grapes to have that utility is to enable them to pop back into the game without their partner, for instant endgame potential. In addition, the events of this game are designed to combat swinginess. If grapes event is truly only usable at high stress, which occurs when town has undergone a number of negative situations/the scum team is advantaged, it doesn't make sense to give them an extra kill in that scenario.

This, again, seems improbable to me.

Now your plan allows a victory after more nights and lynches, in he worst case scenario which simply allowed more opportunities for scum utility to come into play and steal the game from us.


Basically, imo both plans fail versus extra scum kills, the chances of an extra scum kill coming specifically from grapes event are slim, and our plan resolves the game state before scum even get to kill tonight.

That's why I support bringing back grapes and reacting appropriately to his actions. The upside is greater than thee downside when you consider the likelihood of each occurring.

@Shiro: running out of time at work, but I have a few comments about your six scum supposition that I'll outline in detail on my lunch break.
-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Btw assuming two scum left is dumb.

Legit

5 rubies and jasper is what it is. Peridot could have assisted scum.ad leftover but had the choice to turn. It makes no sense for anyone else to be Able to turn.

I know my opinion isn't if much value cause of how wrong I was but come on.

Mastin has the best plan btw.

Random I suggest you follow it.

Ideally you guys would see scum.is in almost v rr but I can't blame you not trusting me

So release grapes have him remove us from.tbe game, lynch rr and if game doesn't end bubble the other

GG

two scum is the most dangerous situation, so we do need to consider it.
if we have 1 scum as you suggest, my plan is foolproof.

are we going to consider the possibility of a two man scum team that isn't grapes/shiro?

We are obligated to. All that we know for sure is that any two man team has to include one of them. It could be them both, but it isn't just them that could make a 2 man team.

That's why we believe the course of action necessary is to release grapes and have him take a suspect out of game with him. That leaves two of us in the suspect pool. Lynch us and bubble the other, or vice versa, and the game state will be such that all possible scum are either dead, out of game via Grapes' ability, or bubbled and according to MoI earlier in the game, bubbled counts and would trigger the win.

I was actually considering begging Mastin to see reason and endorse this plan because all others put forward leave a 50/50 choice somewhere, and while Grapes could go rogue (in which case there's an obvious response nobody but us seems to have considered), it seems to me much better to at least try to keep our win chance at 100% rather than just chop it in half out of fear that Grapes might not play along.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Honestly scum depend on you assuming two scum left otherwise both me and grapes are confirmed alongside ransom and Mastin.

Which leave 2 unknowns, which is auto win for town.

6 scum + 1 leftover + 4 gems + 14 human is what we are.

Assume two wrong lynches and two shot on humans

7 + 1 leftover scum 10 human, a wrong shot by our vig and lylo at day 3 on a 25 people game.

And that is assuming gems didn't accidentally bubbles a human which can end it even faster cause scum don't need gems dead. They lose if all humans die.

7 scum just doesn't add up

Two problems with your assumptions Shiro.

1) First of all, though the idea of grapes as leftover turned scum has been the main thing we've discussed, there is a very prominent, though rarely on screen, threat to earth from season 2/3: Yellow Diamond. There's no reason why a seventh scum couldn't have simply existed from the start. There's even mechanical support for this idea because Xkfyu had an ability that allowed him to directly contact the leader of the threats to earth....something which occurred in the show when Peridot contacted Yellow Diamond.

2) The second issue is your supposition regarding balance in terms of scum v town numbers. Though you are, on the surface of things, correct regarding the worst case scenario, you have to consider that within that pool of non crystal gems you're supposing, there were 2 which were never going to be lynched(Titus could simply claim her IC power if ever at risk, and mastin was confirmed on D1 to Yume),one was immune to the scum kill, one provided immunity...and that's not even including the other possible protection available via the gems. On top of ALL THAT, scum were incentived to use kills on gems over humans via Skybirds role, making the worst case scenario EVEN LESS likely to occur.

Then, even after all that, in that D3 lylo scenario...there would be what, 7 non scum slots that town wouldn't lynch, and they'd have access to vigs and bubbles and all sorts of other events to prevent a loss.

I had a rather lengthy post that I was working on in my hydra pt with drixx going over all this back when we were talking about farside and why we expected there to be additional threats beyond the numbers weve been assuming. I can go finish it if you really want me to go into more detail, but I think it should be clear that there's ample cause to be cautious rather than assume that only one scum remains.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

We're down to 96 hours.

Random, in the end the entire grapes thing is entirely up to you. It would be best if you made a decision on what course we should follow with 48 hours or so left, so we can make sure we have time to get our votes where they need to be after you make that call.

-Certainly

[Reasonably Rational]

Only Mastin could possibly make a post saying "I have to think about things and figure it out but there must be a way to ensure a win" and

then later

claim ownership of the plan I outlined in the very next post demonstrating that it was not in the least bit hard to work out. Of course ... this is the same person who lurked most of the game on Yume telling us she was confirmed town via mod post in a PT and then said she deserved a scummy for her play. Just LOL.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

You know ... I went and re-read Mastin's posts today, and there's some bullshit she needs to be called out for, and some hypocrisy.

1.) Earlier we made the point that Mastin would lie to the town to get her way, because we know Mastin and have played with her and seen her do it. She accused us of character assassination, but now freely admits

she has done so

. It's not character assassination to point out the truth.

2.) And speaking of hypocrisy: she continues to assassinate our character. I've repeatedly said that it doesn't really matter whether we get killed or bubbled when talking about our plan. Why? Because we're town (and this must now be obvious to all because we've literally given the game a 100% win probability for town which would constitute game throwing if we were scum), it is only even relevant in two edge cases. There's no reason to go into them now, but there ARE two potential situations where there would be more reason to bubble us than just letting us be alive to see the game to the end, given that it's our plan and we've busted our ass.

3.) Speaking of character assassination again: Mastin is smarter than she's pretending to be. If we were scum, and if we had some sort of bubble immunity (as she's trying to suggest as a scare tactic to get her way; her ultimatums should be rejected simply because it's not okay to hold a game hostage and she's tried to do it twice now), that would only result in us being lynched the next day. We would gain nothing by that, and she knows it. The

ONLY

thing that can cause us to lose now is if scum has an extra kill, which we've pointed out repeatedly.

3.) Speaking of lying to the game to get her own way, how about that admission outright that she didn't get the answer she wanted from Varsoon but still tried to pretend she did to sway A50 (which is sort of amusing given A50's play today which is hands down the scummiest posting I've ever seen by a player who isn't outright mechanically outed as scum and just trolling the game).

Wow ... I got tired of that sooner than I thought. I could go on for like a dozen more points though. One has to wonder, at this point, what is motivating Mastin to behave this way. At times it has been like watching as someone's toddler throws a temper tantrum in a store and the poor parent is completely humiliated, except in this analogy Mastin is both the parent and the one throwing the tantrum.


In any case ... we've outlined the path to victory. We have two conftown and at this point we're inclined to follow the lead of the one who hasn't lied to the game, claimed character assassination when we (correctly) pointed out that she would lie to the game to get her way, who has been a complete hypocrite, who has repeatedly tried to steal credit for the work of others, and who has

repeatedly tried to strongarm the game

. I would rather follow Random and a flawed plan to a loss than give in to that kind of bullshit play.

@Random

- The ball is in your hands. Make the call. We'll go whichever way you deem best. Obviously we hope you consider our advice, but either way we're with you.

-Reasonably Rational

[Reasonably Rational]

Only Mastin could possibly make a post saying "I have to think about things and figure it out but there must be a way to ensure a win" and

then later

claim ownership of the plan I outlined in the very next post demonstrating that it was not in the least bit hard to work out.

*ahem*

Your plan?
Outlined in 12278.

Your shameless dishonesty is staggering. You literally made a post (which you conveniently forgot to link to) where you said you couldn't figure out the numbers and weren't sure there was a plan. I immediately responded and gave the exact steps to victory. The post you claim is the first place I outlined our plan is simply not even close. Again you are lying and trying to deceive the game.

As for the rest of your shit ... just stop it already. Your ego was already legendary, but at this point you're making yourself unpleasant to be around.

Why should we be the night bubble in the plan? Because we know we're town and therefore nothing can go wrong in the night in that case. The only reason we're even in the pool in our plan is because we didn't luck into being mod confirmed. Every single thing you tried to point to and say it made us scum, people came back and told you that your suppositions were wrong and told you that we behaved as you expected town us to behave. There's literally no merit to any of your specious bullshit, and being polite hasn't gotten the point across. The only way the game even progresses to us being bubbled would be if MoI was wrong, because our plan removes all possible scum from the game when the day ends.

You're the one who is pushing a plan that leaves a window open for scum, and frankly I'm getting tired of your lies and bullshit.

It would be one thing if there was any

semblance

of rational thought and continual re-evaluation evident in your posting. Instead you have been a broken record for coming up on MONTHS now. I mean ... You have what is the most obvious scum play ever in A50 today, but you seem totally oblivious to it and aren't at all accounting for it. You have lied to the game at least twice (that we know of), declared certain actions and behaviors would mean certain conclusions about our alignment but then developed

amnesia

when the facts didn't line up with your raging ego's desire to be the hero. And frankly ... holding the game hostage ... twice. There aren't even words to describe how shitty that is and how completely disrespectful to the rest of the game.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

And since it obviously HAS NOT occurred to you, let me outline WHY it's important for us to ensure that nothing goes wrong in the night.

MoI told us that the GEM BUBBLES count as "dead" for the purposes of win condition. We do NOT know whether the event Grapes claims would also count in that way, and because Grapes is a suspect we cannot get an answer about that from him that we can trust to be accurate.

Therefore, it is possible for the following to happen:

1.) Grapes takes himself and let's say Shiro out of game.
2.) A50 gets lynched and comes up scum OR town. (it's irrelevant which for the purposes of ensuring 100% win probability).
3.) The game doesn't end at the end of the day.
4.) Random bubbles us.
5.) The game isn't over and no kill happens (Presuming the claim that Grapes returns at the START of the NEXT episode, then no night kill should happen)
6.) Grapes and Shiro return and Random has us bubbled to talk to. We are at this point confirmed town because Magna asked and was told that the gem bubble counts as dead for win conditions, so if we were scum...


And there's so much more obvious shit that I assumed you had noted down but knew didn't need to be said. This is not the first time you acting like a bull in a china shop and displaying no subtlety whatsoever has made us feel forced to say things that simply shouldn't be said where we know scum can see it. Sooner or later, we'll say something that synergizes with whatever they have left in their toolbox and takes the 100% win away from us, and if THAT happens, you will never stop hearing it from me. NEVER.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

I know Varsoon won't answer a question about an event that hasn't happened because we already asked. And why would I take your word for anything given that:

1.) You're a self-admitted liar, in this game, multiple times
2.) You've behaved completely irrationally and for such a length of time that it's legitimately creepy at this point
3.) You somehow posted (presumably with a straight face) that you don't have a big ego when:
a.) You said, in this game, that you deserved a scummy for this game
b.) Your signature links to and "academy" of how to "properly" play mafia

I mean ... at this point it's just going to become a personal shitfest and I'm not interested in that. I already pointed out to you that we can become confirmed town and we also already pointed out to you that the only threat to town winning at this point is scum having an extra kill. It is, otherwise, a fait accompli.

You said yourself that you have no idea what to do once you know for sure we're town. That alone is reason enough for us to prefer that if the game doesn't end and the reason for that is because the event Grapes has does not count for triggering win conditions, that WE be around to ensure the win because, at that point, we will have been conftowned and unlike you, we aren't trying to bet the whole game on an ego driven "case" that has more holes in it than Bonnie and Clyde's car, and

again; unlike you

, we're fairly confident we can assess the situation should it come to that and be useful, whereas you've already said you would not be of any use.

So ummm yeah. If we can eliminate all suspects (we can), and we can make ourselves the last one

just in case

what MoI told us about the bubbles does NOT apply to Grapes' event, then that seems rationally preferable to leaving the game in YOUR hands. After all, you've demonstrated nothing but an irrational refusal to reassess when repeatedly presented with evidence contrary to your theory. Hell ... you argued that A50 is probably scum and still want to kill us. You aren't exactly a stable foundation upon which to pin our hopes upon.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

I've never blacklisted anyone and nor would I. I'm also

always

blunt about what I view as poor form or unacceptable play. You know this, so please stop with the histrionics already.

What you don't seem to get is this: if you are wrong and stubborn and insist on pushing a case that has been literally eviscerated from all angles and you cost us the game ... it doesn't matter to

anyone

that you're "willing to accept the blame" ... a whole bunch of people will have worked hard and deserved a win and lost it, and no amount of "my bad" on your part is going to change that.

HERE'S THE THING:

There doesn't need to BE any blame because we've freaking handed the game a 100% win probability plan which has two potential flaws:

a.) Scum can kill more than 1 person if the game goes through another night phase -- nothing can be done about this potential flaw. It either exists or it doesn't and no amount of planning can account for it.
b.) Grapes goes rogue, for which there is an obvious response.

That's it. There aren't any other magical boogie men out there that are going to snatch this away. At this point, I've taken an aggressive tone with you to try and get through to you. By your own predictions earlier about how we would behave if we were town or scum, everyone who responded to you told you flat out that we played as you predicted we would as town. I would have thought (prior to this game) that getting that response from so many people telling you that you were off base and that your own reasoning and predictions suggest we're town would make you re-assess, but so far as I can see, you have not actually done any re-evaluation of anything in two or three game days now. That's frustrating to me personally because (prior to this game) I felt like we are friends, and I also viewed you as a rational agent and someone who was willing to re-evaluate your thinking based upon the evidence. You have not behaved that way at all this game, and it has felt personal to me (Again, a conversation we can have post-game). If I didn't give a shit on THAT level, I would have just ignored you a long time ago.

Honestly evaluate today's play by us and by A50 and tell you me really believe we're scum and he's town. Don't say it just to say it. Actually sit down and put your skill to work. You already know the answer. You already even SAID the answer. A50 is FRANTIC to avoid our plan. There is only one reason for that, and we both know it.

It's time to hug and make up and bring this game home to a win. I really am tired of fighting with people I like in mafia games. First it was Titus in Space Dandy 2 and now you in this game, and it's just so freaking unnecessary. So much MORE so because you KNOW Cerberus and I. You know that we always feel like we're among the smartest people in the game and we always work to bring the game to 100% win chance EVERY time and you know that we have our own pride; not so much a pride in our play since we both can give you lengthy lists of ways our game needs work, but we do have pride in what we're good at. We are very good at striking a balance so as to seem like we aren't worth using a night kill on, which allows us to stay in the game and get enough info and known data to start working the game mechanically and putting together paths to victory, and we also basically NEVER get mislynched. It has happened one time, and it's in our signature.

So yeah ... pride vs. pride here. Your entire house of cards rests on the fact that we pride ourselves on being smart and capable of figuring out how to win AND that we are proud of not being mislynched and aren't willing to just rope ourselves for no good reason. If you had some actual reasoning where our death was necessary for the win, then we would be the first ones to march up and put our head in the noose. Thing is ... we figured out the path to victory 100% of the time and it simply doesn't require us to die. Bubbling is, in fact, the best way to rid yourself or paranoia about us since Magna confirmed to the game that bubbling = dead for purposes of win con.

Pay attention:

Here's the piece of the puzzle you overlooked. You say you're worried that we have some special ability to avoid being bubbled or some crap like that. The thing is, Titus made us claim everything about our role explicitly, and then STOLE it as a way to check us, and our honesty was a big part of why she trusted us. Shiro is still alive and can easily go to that PT and read that interaction and our role claim and our reaction to having it stolen. We simply can't possibly have anything up our sleeves. Our role has been completely outed since day 4


Also ... who ever said having pride or ego is necessarily a bad thing? Confidence, pride and ego can all be very useful. In this

particular

case, it seems to me that your ego is getting in the way. There was no mean intent in me pointing out things that demonstrate that you have an ego. I've got one too. So does Cerb. That makes none of us bad people. That makes us human. There's no upshot to denying it.


And finally, I agree that if Grapes' ability does not count in the same way that the bubble does, then we'll want to adjust. Cerb and I have even talked about HOW we'd like to adjust. Unfortunately, we're at the mercy of what Random decides when it comes to that.

~Drixx

P.S. - Seriously Mastin please hear this, if nothing else: I've considered you a friend since I joined here and bumped into you. We've played a lot of games together. Nothing I've said is meant to have a personal go at you. Furthermore, and please understand this is as a friend and just me talking... go take a break for a bit and come back with a clear head. Your posts tonight have had a bit of a frenetic quality to them that makes me concerned that I've agitated you and if that is the case, I would ask you to take me at my word that I mean you no personal injury and just go take a break from it all. I know that I have no desire to make the same points over and over in walls of text while we wait for Random, and I have to believe that you don't want to either.

[Reasonably Rational]

Never attribute to malice what can be simply explained without. Also you're arguing against yourself. You acknowledge we have been cleared of having anything personal unknown but then suggest it would be factional, but if that was the case, A50 wouldn't be panicked. You can't argue it both ways. It's one or the other.

Rationally speaking, our position is super easy to understand: The chances of the game progressing beyond the day are literally 0% unless Grapes goes rogue or his event doesn't count the same way bubbling does for triggering win conditions, so from our POV, there's absolutely no up side to allowing ourselves to be mislynched. We want the game to end before another night phase happens, which it will do if Grapes takes Shiro or A50 and goes (and it counts the same as bubbling) and we lynch the other. Game ends at that point.

If instead we allow ourselves to be mislynched on the assumption that the win is sewn up and it turns out that the scum team has held an extra kill in reserve, then I believe that to be the only way that this ends up as a loss. Consider:

If 2 scum: mislynching us means 2 scum go into the night. Random can bubble but since bubble seems to count as a kill, it logically follows that it resolves at the same step of resolution as kills, so a scum team with an extra kill simply kills random and you, and with 2 scum then either Grapes or the person he takes would be scum, so whether the bubble goes through or not in the event of Random being killed, scum win.

We're confident in victory simply because the plan we outlined literally eliminates every potential scum from the game before the night phase begins. According to the info Magna gave us, that should trigger Earth and Crystal Gem win conditions at the end of the day. It would be highly irrational to take any other course when there is a course which leads 100% of the time to victory. The

only

reason I even included us in the lynch/bubble part of the plan was to be completely thorough from an outside POV, and to a lesser degree because there might be edge cases we didn't think of which would allow a night phase to happen, and in that case bubbling us makes us conftown and avoids allowing scum to leave you and us both alive, which (given the last couple day phase from you) would hand scum the win as you would surely vote us.

Caveat: Grapes could go rogue and if he does it's super obvious how he would do so and it should be super obvious how we respond. It's staring everyone in the face so I assume you have realized and just also realized why we didn't go into detail. That falls under a bridge to cross when we get there.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Given that Varsoon's last post was on Tuesday, a full four days ago, and given the delay in how long it takes to release grapes given this, I think we would be within our rights to ask for one.

Mod: can we have a deadline extension?

V's normally pretty accommodating for things like this, especially if he thinks that he himself could in any way be partially responsible for it.

Agreed/seconded.

Also, just a thought I had: I actually think it might make more sense to have grapes remove us or A50, and just lynch Shiro. A50 because the argument you're making is that he's playing in a scummy defensive fashion...which means he's the most likely suspect from that perspective, which just means removing him there makes the most sense.

And removing us is to save us the ignominy of being lynched and also save us the trouble of being questioned while we figure things out tomorrow if something goes wrong.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Revisionist much A50? People only need to look at the start of the day. You call for talking things through and nobody should act rashly, and then an hour later put a vote on us, in a mechanical situation where (depending on how Varsoon resolved things during the night and how exactly the event in effect works) it was almost certainly possible to lynch slots with just two votes. That was the moment you tipped your hand.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

And it didn't happen, confirming you as SCUM. If there was ONLY ONE SCUM at loose they would have voted you. This means:

1- grapes is the lonely scum = NOT APPLICABLE.
2- YOU are a lonely scum.
3- You AND grapes are scum together.

It can't even be myself alone because if I was

I would have HAD to wait for someone to vote just about ANYONE first

before I tried to take it home. Nice try though.

Bolding mine.

That...that's exactly what you DID do?

So, Shiro cannot be lonely scum, and grapes can't be lonely scum either. I'm contemplating on Lynching RR just to prove Mastina wrong, but my fear is Shiro+grapes and random either NK'd or failing to keep grapes bubbled resulting is an instant scum win.

It's probably your call, random. Whom do we lynch today? I'm willing to listen to SHORT arguments from both Mastina & RR, but I'm much more likely to follow random as he has grapes fate in his hands now, and I would very much encourage him to "finish off the scumster".

I'm in no hurry though, so let's think things over before we cast votes, shall we?

A call for patience.

I'm not happy with these turns of events, but on policy, grapes should be left bubbled even though it should be pretty damn obvious he is town and Magna you're a fucking idiot for bubbling grapes because I was going to lynch him today to get that info and YOU bubbling him means now we'll never get it.

The scum's event here, however, had a pretty damn clear purpose. If grapes wasn't bubbled by Magna, my alliance with him would have been sabotaged by this event. This would one, mean he would be vulnerable to being lynched, and two, it'd be far easier to in fact lynch him. So grapes is town, albeit bubbled town.
Shiro can't be solo-scum, and can only be scum with grapes, who...would have been at a massive disadvantage thanks to this scum event. (Like, think about what the purpose of the event was. It quite literally was being done as to allow grapes to be lynched. There's ZERO other reasons to trigger the event. You can argue that scum triggered it to make grapes lynchable as to deter us from trying to lynch him, sure, yeah, but that's a load of bullshit and you fucking know it is.) If there were other alliance powers in play, sure. This would be to stop them. But Fuzzy was lynched. Almost50 had used his. The only non-gem player privy to the alliance powers of the gems is RR (thus this would incriminate them if not clearing grapes), so the only alternative explanation to the event being an attempt to fuck grapes over is an attempt to sabotage the gems.

VOTE: Reasonably Rational.
If there's two scum alive not including RR, so be it. We lose, I'll eat the loss because that'd be the Almost50-Shiro scumteam I rejected. I'll take blame for it, too.
If there's only one, then this is either L-1 or L-2. Presumably L-2. Either way, doesn't matter.

I'm confirmed town.

Almost50:

Please share with the town every message I have sent you, especially the one from last night.
randomidget is also confirmed town. (Well close enough.)

Between Shiro, RR, and Almost50, we have our scum.
And there, the obvious choice remains as it always has been: Reasonably Rational.

An opening given to you by Mastin2.

OK..

VOTE: RR

P.S. If you guys are scum, I salute you. You did play a GREAT game.

Also

@Mastina:

With or without the drawings? I mean.. I want you to tell me exactly what to post so as NOT to get banned for it. Praphrasing the text only?

If so: The first drawing (drawing #2) had no text to directly explain it, but I think it meant Mastina is ascetic (?) and cannot kill. (The text said it proved Mastina can send messages during Climax and that these messages are mod-confirmed to be true as long as they contain neither "speculation" nor alignment info.

Message #2 (drawing#3): is a list of whom Mastina allied with during the game up until Episode 7.

Message #3 (drawing #4): Mastina was telling me it takes 2 more votes to lynch her ally and that her allies on Season Finale cannot be lynched. (Disabled in LyLo, but no mention of MyLo here)

Hmm.. looks like some messages got deleted, so I'd appreciate a reminder of the missing one, but here's last night's message:

Yume (Steven Universe) DID get confirmation o Mastina's alignment in their PT (which does not count as an alliance).

A vote piled on, taking advantage of said opportunity, and occurring an hour after you suggested we not act rashly.

I mean, you have to understand why that sequence forced us to look at your slot differently.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

I'm here. A no lynch seems like exactly what scum would want today as it leaves all the suspects in play and will allow them to take conftown down to one tomorrow and it could be LYLO on top of that. Open to realistic ideas here. I accounted for every thing that Grapes might do once released

except

lurk and fail to act at all.

~Drixx

P-Edit: Unfortunately we KNOW Grapes has been on in that 17 days because Random talked to him. I don't think we can count on Varsoon to bail us out here

[Reasonably Rational]

That interaction is private, though--it took place in a non-game-thread location.
If a person fails to post in the game thread for 48/72 hours yet is posting in, say, a scum PT, do they not still receive a prod?
Most mods rule that, yes--they do in fact receive a prod in spite of having posted "in-game", because said posting wasn't in the public thread.

So by that argument, there's grounds to prod grapes, and given a potential dead slot, extend deadline--after all, if Varsoon failed to do so and it turned out grapes really had flaked from the site, grapes's absence during the night phase would basically serve to potentially clear his slot from being scum beyond what's already there. So if the prod/replace needs to happen anyway, why not while still during the day?

It would obviously be to our benefit if Varsoon steps in. Unfortunately Grapes was returned to the game with less time left in the day than the prod timer, so I am pointing out that we should not rely upon that. We need to figure out what to do on the assumption that Varsoon won't step in because the day will end before Grapes can be prodded according to the rules.

I'm torn by A50's posts. Part of me wants to believe that we were right about him all game and that his actions to start today just

look

scummy, and part of me believes he's offering himself up as a gambit. I don't think we can afford to be wrong about it though. As you pointed out, we need basically everyone to do a lynch, and the proper place for that lynch, in this game state, is Grapes.

The only thing I can think is to all put out conditional votes for 1 minute before day ends if Grapes hasn't shown up and done his event and if there will be no extension. But even then ... can we get enough people to do that in the next very short amount of time?

Let's be blunt: there's no way that Grapes didn't know what the plan was. There's no way that Grapes, who Random reported talking to, didn't know he was going to get released and isn't aware of the game state. His failure to show is literally taking away a 100% town wins scenario, and there's only one fucking reason for someone to do that.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

The only way we lose by doing nothing is if scum team has two and an extra kill. Grapes is basically confscum now. The only question is his partner.

Random ... it's up to you whether to bubble. If you do and scum can kill you plus another, I believe we lose. Choose wisely. I am sorry it comes down to you... thought we had this worked out 100%.

Sorry guys.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Actually if you bubble not-scum and get killed and that means the bubbled person dies, then if you bubble wrongly and scum have 2 and kill, we lose (6 minus 2 (you and whom you bubble) = 4 and if 2 scum, it's GG).

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

And that's the answer we expected. So the game is now in your hands mastin. Some thoughts:

1.) If we get it wrong the game could simply end with a loss. I'll just ask the question publicly since it occurred to me:

@Mod:

If an Earth aligned player is lynched in the pool today leaving it at one scum and one !scum, would the scum win condition trigger, since A50 and Grapes are removed from the game for the day?[/b]

2.) At first I assumed that with we three, Shiro has to be scum, but then another question occurred to me:

@mod:

Is it

possible

for all threats/scum to be temporarily removed from the game and the game still continues?[/b]


The answer to the first question is important for obvious reasons. The answer to the second question might be the more important one.

In any case, I do not envy your position. It's where we were in SU1, and we screwed it up. I don't see a lot of benefit in arguing in circles with you. I'll ask you to simply consider two pieces of evidence when you decide the game, because at the end of the day they speak directly to how you read ME, and ultimately we win or lose based upon whether or not you get it right.

First, I submit that our plan to ensure the game win was sound, given what we knew at the time. Varsoon's answers today are slightly off from what MoI told us, but he may come and answer my 2nd question in a way that confirms what MoI said, in which case the plan was 100% solid, and you would have ensured we ate rope yesterday, if only out of paranoia.

Second, I have always respected you far too much to have left you alive like this if I were scum. You being alive is basically the result of someone assuming you will just blindly lynch us based upon your posts the last few days. If you want to see specifically exactly how much I fear you when I'm scum, go back to SMITE and read the scum PT and read my reasoning for killing you, even though I was informed of what you were doing and you were a day or two (at least) away from your goo spreading finding any of us. I realize the sample size is small, but the sentiment is dead on. If I'm scum and I know you aren't scum, you are going to die long before you can be a problem for me.

Between those things, I think it should be clear that we are indeed town. In SU1, it should have been clear to Cerb and I that SCTH was town, and we screwed that up and lost the game. I'm not a big fan of the whole "X happened in Y game so Z now" thing, but it's a pretty strange coincidence that you're now in our shoes in the sequel. From experience I know you will think yourself in circles. All I can say now is good luck and I hope you get it right.

I'm going to hold off on putting down a vote because Varsoon could answer my questions in a way that changes the equation. If; however, Grapes and A50 being removed from the game means there must be a scum in game, as MoI told us Varsoon told him, then for us the math is obvious, as you already pointed out.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

We're Sadie.

Our main ability, which we never ended up using, allowed us to roleblock our previous ally if they submitted someone else. So, for example, if we were allied with Titus on D1, if on N1 they submitted someone else as their ally(regardless of what ally action we took), we could roleblock them, and once we had done so, we could continue to roleblock them indefinitely. This ability only worked on one person at a time.

Our second ability caused anyone we hammered on Season Finale's to be killed, and nothing could stop their death.

Our event was beach-a-palooza, which you're well aware of the details of.

I'll check with Varsoon regarding what exactly I can say about ability names. I think Drixx may have actually already outright claimed some of them, which I always thought was pushing a bit too close to quoting your role pm.

Our alliances were as follows. I'll note the most significant information off the top of my head, but any more in depth paraphrasing will have to come tomorrow, these PT's represent 40ish pages of conversations.

D1: Titus. We claimed our event seeking to get her assistance in using it as effectively as she had used her "hidden voting during thread lock" power from Suikoden Mafia. She suggested we use it ASAP.
D2: Yume. We told her that we believed she was a CG, explained why, and fully claimed to her. We also asked her to coordinate voting for Beach-a-palooza.
D3: A50. He infodumped to us immediately, fully claiming everything XK had told him.
D4: Shiro+Titus. We received Shiro's claim, and gave our own role. Shiro misunderstood how his role functioned(he thought it could copy ally powers) and we spent time considering how to coordinate the dual roleblocks we thought we could now possess to PoE the scum team. During this time Titus stole our ally power as a role check, I guess. Drixx went insane in reaction to this(some ranting about how she must be scum with some false IC power). We made up with Titus, and she claimed everything she knew about MoI to us(I don't actually remember why, part of what I'll need to double check our conversation for).
D5: None. We attempted to ally with random, but since D4 was when Farside22 quickhammered Snarky alliances were never confirmed or properly arranged.
D6: Farside22. Not much happened here. We intended to talk at length but both Drixx and I were super busy during this time frame and barely even checked into the game.
D7: Randomidget. We fully infodumped everything we knew, and shared our current thoughts.
D8: A50 and TFL. Tried to calm them both down because we believed both were town, explained why they were town to each of them, and discussed who TFL should shoot.
D9: TFL: Asked fuzzy if he had any thoughts on why only his shot occurred, Drixx asked him how he was gambiting(I don't remember what post TFL made that prompted this question from Drixx), Fuzzy said he wasn't gambiting, and Drixx basically said oh, just assumed you were gambiting. That was that whole pt.

No alliances since. A lot more was said during these alliances than just the cliff's notes above, and I'll get all that to you.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

I'm not convinced that the first choice we should make today has been properly evaluated. That choice is binary: do something (lynch) or choose not to do anything (no lynch). Because of Varsoon's answers to my questions, and in particular his most recent clarification, there's a high enough probability that any lynch today will be a mislynch and either we lose outright or we lose you tonight and whomever is left is in a 3 way LYLO without much of anything to go on. Mostly my concern is an A50+Grapes team, but I'm not going to rule out possibilities without any reason to do so.

So I would like for you to lay out exactly why you feel the Grapes/A50 team is impossible (which to me seems a necessary conclusion to conclude that we must lynch today), or at least improbable enough to be worth risking just losing outright by acting today. That will save me trying to work that out and I can start what will be an arduous process of reading what I think is well over 1,000 posts worth of alliance chats and paraphrasing and additionally giving you (as much as I noted or can remember) the thinking going on at critical times. Since basically everything that went on in all of our alliance chats has been brought to the main game already, my sense of what you're asking is for both a full accounting and the why behind it. Please correct me if I misunderstand.

If you can walk me through why it's better to act today than not (apart from the obvious point that not acting could end the game), I will at least put down the crossvote you requested. I'm not trying to be overly difficult, but I cannot think of a rational reason to prefer action or inaction, and I'm getting the feeling that you simply want to be in control. In other words ... if the ship is going to sink, you're going to be the one driving it.

~Drixx

P-Edit: Paraphrasing 1000+ posts isn't a small task Mastin. I appreciate that you are putting effort in. Still would like the questions I've asked here to be answered. Sooner they are, the sooner we can move on; although, I must admit, I'm wondering what on earth you're going to ask next, LOL.

[Reasonably Rational]

First alliances paraphrasing done, 6 pages of PT and it took about an hour, but it was a PT with Titus so there was more back and forth than there will be for most of them(except the Shiro/Titus/us pt which is 18 pages and will be fucking horrific to wade through)

I'm posting my version in my hydra PT for varsoon to vet, if he says it's okay I'll have that one up ASAP.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Titus alliance below, post as vetted by Varsoon. Note that he said it skirts the line in a lot of ways but he'll allow it, so...I'll be tryng to be less thorough going forward, to try to step back from that line.


I'm directly quoting everything said by our slot, and paraphrasing the Titus/Beeboy slot. The thing we're both hinting at here was our crumb about our beachapalooza event.

beeboy: generic exclamation of joy
OWK: Reads are forthcoming, asks us about them Apples.
Cerb: "Yo. I'm at work, so I won't have much to say in depth for about 9 hours or so. "
OWK: Reads(I'll elaborate if you want, but it's difficult to do so without quoting)
Cerb: "Beeboy, I'm very weirded out by your lack of presence in the game and the fact that you aren't pressuring ANYONE.

Please explain."
OWK: Asks about Drixx's reach out and if I think we're alone.
Cerb:"Alone as in is someone watching? If someone is capable of watching PTs, if they have ANY experience with us at all, it's almost guaranteed that we would be a high priority to watch. If mastin2 had allied, she would have also been one, but she didnt.

I'll look over the aliance list and see who else anyone would potentially want to watch.

And...beyond that, I can't talk about what he was saying because beeboy is honestly weirdIng me out. His non presence isn't normal for him as any alignment, so I have no idea what to think about it."
OWK: wants to talk about our crumb, but can't if we won't engage, beeboy is letting Titus kick things off, will be around later, and they don't want to be townread.
OWK: Asks if I think FB=scum, who would I lynch among NC/Creature/Random if I had to choose, and asks my thoughts on her readwall.
Cerb: "Confused by cooldog reminding you of saga and being in your scum pool. I think he was town there, but I might be totally wrong?

This head doesn't think fire is scum, but this head is also not used to fire playing mafia actively. :/

Creature, probably, but I don't see any reason to think there scum. Randomidget gets some townie points for referencing our town alliances in previous games...not that he couldn't do it as scum, BUT the exact way he spoke feels like the way he'd refer to it as town. I'm not familiar with NC or Creature at all, but creature would win as my choice there because I see NC providing content so I'm more certain I'll be able to read them accurately later on than I will be able to read Creature. "
OWK: thought cooldog was scum(here she's misremembering SF)
Drixx:"Kind of need you to care about being obvtown to us. I'm fairly certain you figured out what I was referring to, and if we can get past the sniffing each other's asses stage and I can get a solid town feel from you, then I think we can be more open and try and plan out how to maximize what we do and see if that twisted mind if yours can come up with any ways to catch scum with it.

But ... first things first."
Cerb:Quoted post 644, then said "Those are alliances I think, kts and snarky may have allied too.

If scum can look at alliance pts, would they look at any pt besides this one? Meh. Idk. Thinking about it this depends on the timing of when they'duse such a power. If it's a day thing, it's obviously best to look at the 5 man PT, unless they already have a member in their. In that case, it would be second best to look at mastins, since she's apparently conftown now.

If they made the decision based on pregame stuff..I feel like they'd choose ours. "
OWK: You know I don't care about being townread and don't want people to express townreads on me, I just wnat you to confirm we're talking about the same thing so I can help without outing stuff. I gave you my reads, and it's best to treat you as town until I have cause not to.
Drixx:"I'm not asking you to spill info. I just want you to talk to me in a way that will make me sure that YOU are town, because we're going to have to talk in some detail about what we do to get the best use out of it. As soon as I saw the power I was reminded of the game I crumbed to you.

There's like ... the regular usage for what our power can do and then there's this possibility space where it could have SO MUCH more utility."
Drixx:"And you assuming I'm town as a default position scares the fuck out of me. Who are you and what did you do with Titus?"
OWK: Quotes the first post from Drixx in the pair above, has to assume we're town if she's gonna work with us, otherwise the best thing to do is out our crumb.
Drixx:"Going to have to run it by Cerb to see what we're willing to say. Any attempt to use this to snare scum could be horribly manipulated if we read you wrong and you're scum just telling your team what "advice" you're giving us.

I'm weirded the fuck out by you right now."
OWK: ship already sailed, I'm just gonna scum hunt, i don't want to play around like this, either you think I'm town or you don't.
Drixx:"The ship certainly hasn't sailed."
OWK: Guess I misinterpreted the crumb and have no idea what's going on.
Drixx:"There's a world of difference between you knowing we can do something and you knowing exactly how we hope to snare scum with it. Normally you are climbing up my ass like you're a colonoscopy scope trying to work out my alignment but here you are like totally "IDGAF" about it. What's up with that?


P-edit: You got what I wanted you to to out of the crumb."
Cerb:"No, you have some idea, it's just what we have is different enough that just knowing about the potential utilization connection wouldn't let scum!you game things, I don't believe. At least, not anymore than the publicly announced portions of things would.

Also, Drixx thinks you're fucking with us with the whole "let's just assume we're all town in a nice happy family together" thing.

You have to admit, it is pretty dang far from the way our interactions in similar situations in the past have gone."
OWK: In this game I don't have to care about what others think, I only need to worry about what I beleive is correct. I don't trust you enough to tell you why. The best play for me is talking about it, if you're town it saves trouble, if you're scum you might slip up.
Beeboy: I'm busy, can't get into the game because people didn't vote.
OWK: I think people are trying to lynch you and I don't want you lynched D1 and don't think you should claim your power because it will look bad.
Cerb:"Lol. My ability would certainly look good actualy, but I just don't know if it's best if used unannounced or what groundwork to set.

I'm not too worried about lynch risk tbh. Not getting lynched is sorta my thing."
Drixx:"Cerb is nearly impossible to lynch and I'm not going to beat myself up because I saw something off in a couple posts and pushed people. They will get over being butt hurt about it and move on to actual scum hunting."
OWK: Disagree, what you're hinting at isn't townread without a plan or a townread slot owning it. Asks our thoughts on mastinas team(not sure on context here, if she's asking about our thoughts on something mastin suggested as scum team, or if she's suggesting mastin is scum and wants to know who we thought the teammates were.)
Drixx:"You haven't asked anything directly, have you? I have no idea what suspicions you want confirmed or denied. Let's see what I feel comfortable saying right now, which might help:

1.) What we can do is indisputably pro-town and hopefully we didn't err by letting you know. We'd rather not be killed out of this game before we can ensure it ends the way SU should have.
2.) What we can do will do what your ability in that game did. The game thread will get locked and people will have a/some choice(s)/decision(s) to make while the thread is locked.
3.) My gut says you're town but you know that neither Cerb nor I trust our gut and I can't find a reason in your ISO for why my gut is associating your play with town. This makes me wary a little bit.
3a.) I went out on a limb (Cerb wasn't down with it but he told me to do it if I was sure), and now it would be stupid not to try and maximize utility.

I'm waiting for Cerb to be available to talk, but I think we should probably just trust you. The absolute worst case is that we design a plan and if you are scum then the scum team has to behave in a believable way and somehow avoid the trap we plan. You're good, but I'm not sure you can fool both Cerb and I that a plan to catch scum is sound while at the same time being scum and keeping scum from getting caught.

So I think logically we just need to trust a little and try and get a plan set up. Remember how effective it was in that game when you were able to spring it early and get scum on their heels? That's the kind of utility I really hope we can get out of this."
OWK: Misunderstood the power, best use is to test a theory of some sort, and the sort of thought you'll need to create said theory might be outside your normal playstyle.
Drixx:"I'm talking to Cerb right now. I think the only way we can move forward is to tell you exactly what our ability does and what people will be voting for. I'm not sure how much info Varsoon is going to give out and whether we need to say something to the game or not. If he just locks the thread and tells people to vote ... I'm not sure any predictors could be accurate at all. But as long as we or he tell the game what's going to go down, we should be able to get good results out of it."
OWK: Okay. Maybe Beeboy and I can help.
Drixx:"Okay; Cerb is on board with my thoughts.

We have to trigger our ability during climax and the following exposition phase the day will start with the thread locked and the beach-a-polooza event will happen. Everyone will vote and the winner will get to choose in private between three 1-shots:

1.) Passive kill immunity used the next time they get targeted with a kill
2.) Climax usage "gunsmith" check (maybe gunsmith+; they can find out if someone is capable of killing or not)
3.) 1-shot climax usage lightning rod (all abilities re-directed to the winner)

The winner will have their flavor posted publicly (the fake claims for scum).

A vote for a person is worth 1 point, worth 2 if the person is in an alliance with the voter and self-votes are worth 3 points.

Scum votes are halved: .5, 1 and 1.5 <---- this seems like a possible avenue to catch scum. Varsoon is going to post how many points the top 3 vote getters receive, and ties will be broken in favor of whichever player has more words in their role pm.


So we have to submit the event action at night and if it resolves successfully, then the following happens:

Varsoon will announce the event, how the voting points work and I believe even what the rewards are, but I don't think he will out that we triggered it. There's a really obvious flavor connection if you have watched the show, so we're a little wary of obviously outing our flavor. I asked him to clarify if the votes will be revealed or not, and they will not, except that the point totals for the top three vote recipients will be posted.

I've had a bunch of ideas about how best to use this, but I really can't decide whether it would be best to try and co-ordinate getting a specific reward to a specific person. It would be awesome, for example, if we had a Party Host (role that reports everyone that visited it the night it ends up dead) that got the lightning rod, for example.

Best case would be to wind up with the 1-shot in the best possible hands along with a solid plan to catch scum.

So there you go. Cards on the table. If you've watched the show you even know who we are now."
Drixx:"actually never mind about the party host + lightning rod combo ... that would be awful. I even know that from experience because I was Party Host for a Baldur's Gate themed game on my home site and was gifted a lightning rod and used it and the net effect was sub-par.

But there are almost certainly some potent combos possible."
OWK: Lemme talk about an idea with beeboy.
Cerb:"Some hind Drixx forgot: our ability is only usable at +1 stress, and has no effect on the meter. So....we can't use it right now, but could have used it yesterday/going into today. :/

That's why I said it has limitations thst might make it so it's not usable for awhile."
OWK: Idea won't work yet, asked if the game drixx referenced above was on SC2.
OWK: Let's talk about mastins reads, do you agree?
Drixx: Quotes the previous, then "You mean apart from her shitty read on us?"
Drixx: "And as far as the time being ripe: I'm pretty sure the most probable outcome will be that when exposition #2 starts, the ability will have it's stress meter requirement met and will happen."
OWK: Quotes the Drixx post quoting her post, then exprsses agreement.
OWK: Quotes the Drixx post about ripe time, and asks if we could submit at climax 2.
RR(Neither of us signed this, but I think it's Cerb!):"I think it's stress at time of submission that's most relevant....so yes climax 2 is probably the earliest it will work, barring other events that modify the meter, and assuming town deaths, which is generally speaking most likely."
Drixx:"I checked with Varsoon. The stress is checked at the start of the exposition and in priority. So even if we're dealing with a single scum team and no other anti-town and no vigs, the highest probability between now and then is that two town will die, which will mean the stress meter is where it needs to be. If we submit it tonight and the stress meter isn't where it needs to be, that will mean good things happened and the delay won't be an issue. We won't lose our event if the stress meter isn't in the right place. It simply won't trigger.

That's why I said that at the start of exposition #2, the requirement will be met and the event can happen. We aren't obligated to use it right away, but it strikes me as the kind of thing we want to ensure we get triggered sooner than later, especially when someone people might listen to has decided we're scum for reasons that make your most extreme moon logic look sane. I mean ... odds are there's at least a 1-shot vig or something along those lines out there and some Mastin worshipper might zero vig us before we do it.

Ergo my desire to figure out how to use it to maximum effect and why I thought was worth taking the risk to just put the cards on the table."
OWK: Are votes public?
Beeboy: wants us to soft results using day start reads.
OWK: Assisngs soft detection to beeboy.
Cerb: Quotes OWK's previous question about vote revealing, then "No. The top three vote receivers will be revealed, along with their totals.


It's really quite a different beast in the details from the ability you used.

I honestly don't really see anything great we can do with it, other than working with the town to coordinate the votes in advance to minimize scum influence,so the right person ends up winning...I mean I see the potential for stuff, but it's really hard to tie a specific slot to any vote. "
OWK: Do it unexpectedly and then all claim votes, to make scum lie or give power to town, and tells us what they want either way.
Cerb:"Hmm. Do you think we can trust town to actually behave rationally in this situation? What can we expect them to do without direction if town is dumb and protectives don't keep mastin alive tonight? That's my real worry here, that the obvious choice of mastin will disappear, and town will just screw things up."
OWK: Believes OWK, Farside, or Mastin should be the choice of beach-a-palooza, only the mass vote claim is important.
OWK: Assumes number of voters gets revealed.
Drixx:"I'm pretty sure the only way Mastin dies tonight is if scum have some way to guarantee their kill succeeds, and while Varsoon likes to change things up, it wouldn't surprise me if we see a scum strongman whose ability to bypass protection is tied to the season finale mechanic again. Or my spec could be wrong and Cerb could be right but if that's the case there's literally no reason to spend any effort worrying about it. We can't trigger it any sooner no matter what, and we can set up a conditional trigger of "We want to trigger our event IF X player is alive" I think.

Also Titus ... you OTAF'd super hard in #1288. I'm not sure if it was intentional. It reads as emotionally motivated to me. You seemed to be trying not to OTAF to us and in fact acted like you didn't care how we read you but if you were going for ambiguity, you threw it out the window with that post."
OWK: I stopped trying to not be townread, vote NC.
OWK: Suspects fire for ignoring SU and attacking her
OWK: Doesn't believe he forget SU
OWK: Meant Suikodent, not SU
Drixx:"Firebringer is definitely acting way outside the norm. That's why I was pushing him earlier. I'm not completely sure he's scum.

I think we'll support the NC wagon. What you pointed out about the wagon is spot on."
OWK: Thanks, considers first four as a scumteam but not expressing it to avoid tunneling complaints, asks who they should ally with.
Cerb:"For the record, we should absolutely NOT support the NC wagon if you want it to go anywhere. At least not yet. Just saying. Based on the thread temperature regarding our slot, our support of that wagon will give scum a good excuse for why they're ignoring the reasons to think Not Chara is scum, and may outright kill what support you've gathered.

Just something to consider.

Also, I don't think the total number of votes will be revealed, because our ability doesn't say that's the case, but I'll double check."
Cerb:"Wtf is cooldog saying about a not chara/mastin flip?"
OWK:Quotes above, wants to test fire, reiterates question about who they should ally with.
OWK: Snarky response to 1340 that she wants to post
Cerb:"Lol. And good cop/bad cop how? Also what is your objective for allying? Is it sorting scumspects, or building a town bloc?"
OWK: Sicnce people scumread you, you attack fire and I'll defend him and he'll think he can pocket me, and I'm not sure which objective so you should suggest a best choice for each.
Cerb:"Actually, I sorta think shiro is best for both. You know Shiro and could this sort them, and if you get them involved they'll actually be effective in the game. DGB is always unreadable to me, she doesn't do enough, and I need to reread McMennos ISO, so I can't really say anything there.

And mmm, when I get home, maybe Drixx can say things until then."
OWK: Thinks farside is using moonlogic
OWK: Tells us to ally with grapes
Cerb: "Double checked SF, Cooldog was town there, he just appeared very scummy and was the D1 lynch."
Cerb:"So, it's possibly both mastin and yourself are suspicious of him due to the same behaviors that got him mislynched there. No idea what his scum game is like though. "
OWK: maybe. suspects six scum, with only one being vocal.
Titus: asks why we didn't ask her to do some digging, and wnats our thoughts on fb's request
Cerb:"Because I want to see who cares enough to actually go dig. :p

If you're free though, it wouod be awesome if you collected thst information in here for analysis. ^^"
Titus: Time is the problem, not desire, and repeats the fire question.
Cerb:"Oh, sorry, missed the question. And yeah, time is always a problem. :/

Umm. I actually think it's a little weird? It sort came out of nowhere, I don't think I've noticed any sort of resonance between your slot and his in terms of your stances on things, but I think he did express the belief you were town at one point so it makes sense in that way. "
OWK: Collected VC's
OWK: Asks about PT spies.
OWK: Getting scumread backfired, asks us to try to get them less townread so they don't die.
Cerb:"*sigh* defending myself is exactly how I wanted to spend tonight.

I'm going to ignore them actually, and try to actually figure out your McMenno town read/others scum read on them."
OWK: Nothing to defend against.
Cerb:"Yeah, I know. That's why I'm not going to bother, otherwise I'll just get annoyed.

Creatures vote on me IS super weird. Expresses a townread on me and then jumps on the wagon once it's being pushed by other, more credible slots."
Titus:suggests we get the information about this weirdness and she can point it out
Cerb:"Sorry, was watching Mr. Robot. You already grabbed the posts, that's why I noticed it. In the quotes you pulled from him he specifically states a townread on our slot."
Drixx:"I really want to make the following post so badly, but I want another set of eyes on it. I'm afraid I might be dumping gasoline on a fire, but I'm just freaking angry:

Okay let me see if I got this straight:

1.) Wagon on NotChara wouldn't budge despite really good reasoning and fairly obvtown first 4 on the wagon, which is a classic sign that scum don't want that person wagoned. I mean do you guys need a fucking neon sign here?

2.) We're being wagoned for no actual reason that I can tell, and some of the scummiest players jump right on and nobody bats an eye.

3.) Finally: Fucking TITUS, of all people, is telling you guys that we're obviously town by play, by role and because what we do is so fucking obviously town it hurts and has strong pro-town utility. If you don't realize how fucking BIZARRE it is for Titus to be saying that about us on day one, please come out from whatever rock you've been under and look at her game history and interactions with me and Cerberus. Like ... Cerberus didn't even think it was worth us talking to them to try and maximize the utility of what we do because he didn't think it was possible for them to town read us and be willing to help us with how to do it. So this is Titus pulling a read from ME. This is the same Titus who still insisted I was scum after a cop clear on me in WDPT, and after I was shown to be correct about one of the scum teams being a werewolf (which I outed before anyone could have known except the wolf team because I was immune to them). Like ... the monumental moment it is that Titus FINALLY gets us right, and people are trying to handwave that away?


Mastin is conftown and needs to get the fuck off the crack pipe when it comes to us. I'd bet anything at least two or three scum are on our wagon already, and the non-scum on our wagon need to remember that conftown doesn't mean confRIGHT.

~D



I kind of want to eviscerate Mastin a bit for how shitty she played the original SU. Like ... I'll give her propers for being above average at reads, but above average based upon site statistics means 50% right. Nobody is so right they should be able to push a wagon with no reasoning. And seriously, her play in SU amounted to the following: made an absurdly stupid assumption about her role which caused us to have to save her from being lynched when she couldn't conftown on day 3 like she had declared at the start of the game, which we could only do by outing ourselves as Steven and basically vouching for her. She then proceeded to be wrong about what little she said the rest of the game and was worse than useless on the last day.

I feel like if I unleash my vicious side and unload on her people will just think it's OMGUS though, even though it's actually a rational and objective analysis of her play in that game.

It would feel good, but I don't think it would help. I don't know if the quoted post draft would help or hurt either. Cerb said I should post it here and ask."

Cerb: "Spoiler: Weird creature read and vote progression, he says we're town, then we post a whole bunch and do a bunch of stuff, and then he says we're not doing anything and votes us" Within the spoiler, posts 783, 817, 824, 827, 829, 836, 840, 864, 1069, 1098, 1182, 1190, 1252, 1258, 1260, 1261, 1267, 1272, 1273, 1324, 1329, 1343, 1355, 1463 and 1469.
Cerb:"I was actually pretty sure you were way off on the creature thing btw Titus, because it seemed like it was purely a circumstantial read based off the pre-flip associations with NC, but...that progression is bad. "
Cerb:"I would need to check the timeline to see exactly when he *first* voted us. The second vote is clearly opportunistically timed, but I don't know if the initial shift onto us(before moving on McMenno) was."
OWK: Quotes Drixx's rant post, syas it would help her but she plays differently, notes that Drixx praising mastin at first then attacking her when she suspected us will look suspect.
OWK: Doens't like creatures policy lynch push on her and calls mastina hypocritical because mastina won't accept titus vouching for us.
OWK: I'm not drunk, I just want to seem nice.
Drixx:"Mastin is above the site average as a town player. That doesn't make her infallible. I called bullshit the second she gave her "reasoning"."
Titus: Guess NC is getting lynched instead of you, i'll double check in the AM.
Titus: Let's talk, you have a largely town wagon which is bad for you unless you're on a scum wagon.
Cerb:"DnD is over in an hour...then I'll have at least a few hours before I do anything tonight."
OWK: TTYL
OWK: You're going to die if you don't sheep mastin.
Cerb:quotes the above, then "Meh. Actually playing mafia like I haven't really been able to do properly in thread should be sufficient. I need to examine SC and McMenno. I started reading McMennos ISO this morning, but didn't finish."
OWK: Mcmenno's definitely town.
Cerb:quotes the above, then"I sorta have to so I can understand *why* there's all this conversation about him, to figure out whether or not any of the pushes on him actually make sense, or if it's all just noise and lynchbait. "
OWK: Do it fast and we're not lynching him.
Drixx:"Why is Mastin so good sometimes and so dumb other times?

She basically said the following: "Let's just pretend that Titus is an idiot so I can keep claiming RR is scum for no reason. But I think we should lynch SirCakez. I won't point out that the only actual case against anyone with any actual analysis and effort in the game so far came from Cerb working his ass off. If I don't point that out, then I can get credit if he flips scum and if he flips town I'll point everyone to Cerb's post and blame him."

Did you catch that she outed knowledge of who Steven is? How the hell would she know that ... and WHY would she say something that could lead scum to Steven?

Post #2445 - Who did Skybird ally with?

I don't even know what to say to that. I really want to rip her to shreds. You have no idea. I put in a vicious post in our hydra PT for therapeutic purposes."
Cerb:"Umm Drixx, the entire game knows Skybird has an alliance with Steven Universe.
It's in the opening post for the day. "
Drixx:"Herp derp on my part. In my defense, I have been dealing with a pretty serious medical condition."
Titus: Ventings okay, I want to silence farside and fb, I almost think my reads are wron gbecause of their stubbornness.
OWK: Vote SC.
Cerb:"I need to respond to his response. It, well, it actually was fairly reasonable. There are a couple things in there that pique my interest, but overall it's not bad. My skim doesn't say it's so not bad as to outweigh everything else, but it's worth looking into. "
Cerb:"So, just something to consider: If SC is scum, it seems basically impossible to get him lynched today. Between his teammates not voting him, and the joyride members not voting him, we'll basically need like 70%+ of the remaining town to vote for him. The existence of the joy ride even muddles how obvious it could be if his teammates refused to vote for him. "
Titus: We'll get the votes, don't worry.
OWK: Your vote will be the tipping point.
TItus: Taking the credit will stop the wagon.
Cerb:"It is 100% up to mastin whether this particular issue becomes major or not. We'll see what she has to say whenever she shows up.

Honestly, I would *much* prefer the NC wagon over this one, considering that one just completely disappeared for no reason I can see."
Titus: Agreed, but the AtE scared off people, we can get NC tomorrow.
Cerb:":/ you probably shouldn't have told the whole thread that you actively wanted to be scum read. Main reason to desire that is to lower your chance of being nkd, and announcing it to the thread means scum can figure that out too. :/"
OWK: No scumreads on me mean going to my backup plan.
Titus: Thoughts on what's going on? I'm sick.
Cerb:"Hate blank votes, coming from the slots they come from it makes me suspicious thst we've reached the tipping point and those two votes are scum rushing to make sure they're on the lynch,but probably at worst only one of xkfyu and creature is scum (assuming a scum flip from SC of course). If he's town, they could both easily be scum. That's pure theory talk though, doesn't take into account either slots play style.

Alsox feel better k?"
Titus: minimum of one is scum.
Cerb:"Actually, if he flips town, it's REALLY unlikely that either is scum imo. Considering the thread apathy, there would be no need for scum to jump on this wagon to push it over the edge."
Titus: I'll deal with that when it comes up.
Titus: whatever was just claimed in the main thread is a scum role.
OWK: exasperatoin at Farside
Cerb:"I don't want him hammered until I can sort out wtf farside and A50 are doing. How did A50 miss what was apparently a line in his pt that told him he was BP/now figure out the source of it? Why would farside remove the bp and targeting restrictions? It doesn't make sense."
OWK: I believe almost is the reason the hood was bp and SC convinced them he made it BP and farside blew it all up in a tantrum.
Titus: Claims something related to BP but no details.
Cerb:"I don't understand how SC could be fake claiming the bp thing.

The rest of the PT can corroborate it, and already has, except for Cooldog. FB said he revealed role details under the assumption of BP, A50, Farside, and SC all say they're bp from an alliance effect.

What load of crock is he selling?

Why can't there be multiple BP/enablers in a game where scum get autostrongman kills when they start to lose?

Sleepy time now."
Titus: Thinks the BP source was A50.
Cerb:"No, there are two effects that have been mentioned.

One is a limited targeting thing, where they may only target within and be targeted by those within the joyride, and another is an outright kill protection.

They're using different verbiage from what the OP from Varsoon has to say about the joyride. I'm pretty sure the bp is a totally separate thing from A50's thing, otherwise he wouldn't have let SC claim it as his own effect..."
OWK: Quotes 2984
OWK: Beleives he's saying in 2984 that A50 is giving SC credit for his own power.
Cerb:"I fail at sleeping.

The real point of my search for clarity, OWK, is to determine if A50 KNEW that SC could grant BP to mastin(or at least, if he SHOULD have known). Determining whether or not I trust his claim to have "missed" it is another issue entirely.

Any thoughts on NC completely ignoring the post where I tell him that his opinion regarding this issue isn't trustworthy because he's most likely to be lynched if the SC lynch doesn't go through? I would have expected him to note that I'm just as likely to be lynched(since the main point of that argument is that the same people who are going after SC are suspicious of him as well, and there's a moderate overlap with those who are suspicious of me as well). "
OWK: Asks if I suspect NC, and doens't trust A50's analysis of the game.
Cerb: Quotes the prevoius, and then "NC has been an unsubstantiated scumread for awhile, largely influenced by both Drixx and yourself. He's on the list of things to look into if I ever get the time."
OWK: Cool, I won't post until you guys catch up with one another.
Cerb:"Wouldn't mastin be a better attempted ally than Yume for you?

And I'm confused by why that whole pt knew they were bp, but you claim to have a similar interaction and I haven't been informed of anything.

Bleh. Axtually, I think talking about this any more could only hurt us.

Also, sorry about last night. I got caught up in the desire to achieve perfect understanding of the game state/correct you when I waa pretty sure you were wrong about the game state, and didn't spend enough time considering if the points under discussion actually mattered.

I'm going to try to trigger my event every night from now on, and it has priority 0, so it should be able to coexist with all other events. "
Titus: because yume mad ethe request I figure she's talking to them.
Cerb:"I mean in terms of utilizing your protective thing you have going on. Yume is a much less likely shot than mastin. Mastin won't be shot at tonight because it's too obvious, but tomorrow she might be, so you'd want to be her ally then. I mean I have no idea what your ability is, but that just makes sense to me."
Thread close

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Yo, game night last night so I didn't end up with any time for this, sorry Mastin...and I'm supposed to go visit a friend tonight, so I might not be able to paraphrase any more days until Friday.

Varsoon got back to me about my ability names, I can use them freely as long as I'm not actually quoting the PM it came from.

So, the "roleblock when my current ally chooses someone else for their next ally" power is called "I understand enough! You're only my friend when it's convenient for you"
The season finale hammer kill is called "Just get out of my life!"
Our event is called "Beach-a-Palooza".
Our win conditon header quote is "I just thought, for once, I'd get to do things my way, but you came in and took over everything, like you always do!"

To answer your questions: The pearl points thing changes *nothing* about the setup. Assuming 7 anti-town roles, the point progression would be, at best(not counting the doubling, we'll get to that in a second): 4, 6(10), 6(16), 6(22), 6(28), 6(34), 3(37), 3(40), 3(43), 3(46), 3(49), 3(52). Assuming one kill and one lynch per day, that's as far as it would go, because on that last day we'd be in Lylo. Even if the point gain was doubled EVERY SINGLE DAY they would only cross that goal on the very last day(as they entered lylo, they would gain the 2 points from maintaining the consecutive alliance, bringing them from 49 to 51). Even IF they managed to get their ponits doubled EVERY SINGLE DAY it would only be on that last day that they would cross the threshold, assuming both they and random lived all the way to that point, without the scum team ever activating their consecutive alliance punishing event, or the gems activating their mass commute...not to mention the fact that I believe it's impossible to lynch scum over and over again and still keep stress at +3, which means the points WOULDN'T be doubled for the majority of those days.

Basically, it's a joke win condition, like the Boobies Reward Card from Space Dandy 2. It's not going to occur in a game, unless somehow scum fail all their kills, or town fail to lynch over and over again...and by over and over again I mean something like 90% of the time there needs to be no deaths in a given day.

A50's role: He claimed to be the Cool Kid Buck Dewey. He had the Joy Ride event that allowed him to bring 4 people of his choice into a special alliance for the day. At +2 stress, his alliance members could use their abilities as though it were the Season Finale, and on the actual Season Finale, their abilities could not fail. In addition, he had a 1 shot watcher variant that refilled on season finales. It allowed him to target a player and know if they performed an action on someone else, and whether that action was harmful to the target. At +2 stress and during season finales, the power allowed him to learn exactly who they targeted, and what the exact action was.

Grapes role: He claimed to be Lapis Lazuli. His allies do not get alliance benefits from allying with him, and he called himself "the death bubbler", but didn't elaborate. He also claimed the event that removes someone else. I don't recall if Grapes ever claimed anything else.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Oh, and grapes could also force those who were allied with him to stay allied with him, per MoI.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

It's not going to occur in a game, unless somehow scum fail all their kills, or town fail to lynch over and over again...and by over and over again I mean something like 90% of the time there needs to be no deaths in a given day.

Pray tell, who, exactly, has been reminding me of all the various methods of kill prevention we have in the game especially from the gems?

I haven't cared about that. I've cared about the sheer number of conftowns.

Also, it's irrelevant. Notice how I said 90% of the time there needs to be no deaths PERIOD. That means no lynch, and no kill, just a long sequence of days where random allies with the same person and they vote together over and over again, in addition to the 12 day progression to lylo. Every kill, whether lynch or nk, essentially decreases the probable pearl points a single slot could gain by 1.5. Even if we assumed scum lynches only occurred on high stress/season finale days(which is being INCREDIBLY GENEROUS, given that every time stress was high people have taken the opportunity to trigger events), that still only brings them up from 51 points to 87, thus requiring an additional 10 deaths to be missed, so realistically this won con could only occur on day 17, after 10 failed nks/no lynches.

So yeah. Not something that was going to occur, especially when you consider the fact that we're aware of what, 3 extra kills that flipped non-scum slots had access to(fuzzy vig, fuzzys event, xkfyus event) at a minimum, plus extra vigs over time, PLUS 3 kills from scum factional events, AND a kill from DGBs event.

This game having LESS deaths/day on average than most games wasn't going to happen, and without that happening, to a significant degree, the pearl point victory was not going to come into play.

I get your point, or at least how you're trying to utilize this information to help you determine if single scum is more or less likely than dual scum, but it's not useful data to work off of.

-Cerb

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Oh shit. And I just noticed the ability specifies that points can't be gained on no lynch days. That means it's 10 out of 12 expected nks that would need to fail, when the scum team had two strong men AND an additional method of gaining strongman shots, for the game to go on long enough for someone to attain the pearl points goal.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

There's not anything for me to paraphrase Mastin. Cerberus literally directly quoted what we said. The large season finale PT with Titus and Shiro is large and will take some time and again need Varsoon's approval, but is in the works. I had intended to go into detail on exactly what day and time we said things to fuzzy so you could see that there really was a progression on my read on her, and when I said I was going to test her by offering her the win con she claimed and my reaction when she refused to take it and how all of that happened before any discussion of whom fuzzy should shoot arose (since it has been suggested we were steering him towards shooting her right from the word go). Unfortunately that is not going to be allowed because date/time specificity is a no-no. I will put things in chronological order for you if you like though.

The best I can offer you is answers to questions you may have, since it makes no sense for me to paraphrase myself when we're being allowed to give you our exact words.

As for the pearl points thing; I agree with Cerberus. I cannot figure out a way for the math to realistically work for someone to get 100 pearl points. I have to make absolutely absurd implausible assumptions to even get close.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Spoiler: D2 Alliance:

D2 alliance, Yume and RR. Same deal, paraphrase what she said, direct quote what we said.
Yume: Says hi, and makes a reference to Jasper and Lapis Lazuli(she makes such references throughout, I'm still uncertain if these were references to the other crystal gems, or if she had used her hood creating power and she was talking about whoever she made a hood with).
Cerb:"Lol.

Point of allying with you was to claim our event and see if you/mastin could coordinate with making it work optimally for us. There's a vote involved, and we need to make sure the right person ends up receiving the benefit. Details when I get to a computer."
Yume: Confused about us trusting her enough to claim, and wonders if it's flavor related.
Cerb: Quotes her previous post(which was quite short, my paraphrase added the obvious meaning behind a short sentence), then"There are 4 options for your flavor, though only one is unquestionable, arrived at through a simple logical process.

1) Among her town reads, mastin would not have chosen you to friendly neighbor+gain a neighborhood with.
2) This means your slot selection was due to the mechanic she employed itself.
3) This means it was based on the role you rolled.
4) Mastin NEVER said you were conftown as in, rhe moderator had stated you were conftown.
5) Therefore you're conftown as a result of something else related to the effect. Most likely thing is either a flavor claim OR(more likely) moderator confirmed flavor.
6) So, you must be a role with near certain town flavor: One of the crystal gems.
7) Any of the gems are possible, BUT I don't believe Mastin would assume any gem except for Steven himself was town.

So, you're almost definitely Steven, and if not, you're one of the Crystal Gems, and such was confirmed by the moderator to mastin.

So you're safe to talk to. I wouldn't be saying all this right now except I'm pretty sure scum should have already figured it out."
Yume: Sucks that you figured that out even though we didn't want to give it away. She did use "we" here, another one of the hints about the CG being a separate faction.
Cerb:"It's possible they didn't figure it out. I mean, it requires one knows mastin and yourself and other people she put at the top of her town list, and understands that it's unlikely she would have chosen you over other options she had, since there were others she townread more (iirc) and others who generally have more of a thread presence.


I'm gonna summarize here cause I'm still comfy down here and my room is really fucking hot:

Our event (which we will be able to trigger tonight unless we have another scum lynch and this one flips immediately, OR an event lowers the stress) allows town to vote for a single slot who will receive either a gunsmith shot, a one shot passive bp, or a lightning rod. Town slots give someone 3 points if they voted for themselves, 2 points if they're voting for their ally, and 1 point if they vote for anyone else. Scum slots have all their vote values halved.

We told Titus about this because in Suikoden Mafia she used a similar power to get scum to basically out themselves. She suggested we just use it without warning anyone, and call for a mass vote claim afterwards.

My concern is that thus vote will end up torn between you, mastin, and OWK, and some slot scum throw their votes behind will get the benefits, sooo I'm here to work with you and mastin to try to get at least 3 votes focused on a single slot when the event happens."
Yume: Tells something about our previous posts is wrong, but doesn't specify what, and makes fun of our use of logic, and suggests that ther'es something obvious we're missing.
Cerb:"Are you talking about the reasoning I used regarding your likely flavor, or about the event thing?

And we don't really need to say anything more about your flavor. There are limited options as far as I'm concerned, and you shouldn't work to correct me. I was just letting you know that if my reasoning is true, scum could have figured it out too(especially with OWK announcing that your flavor is definitely town), so take appropriate precautions.

What are your thoughts on the event thing? Feel free to share it with mastin."
Yume: Clarifies that she was talking about FB(referring to something in thread without giving specifics, obviously the FB being removed from the game thing, but I'm not sure what exact part of what I said prompted her to make that comment, would need to check time stamps versus thread.)
Cerb:"Oh. I'm not really sure what I said about it that I could be wrong on lol, other than whether or not it was a scum kill. I assume mastin explained to you what she knows about it and why she knows FB is dead? Again, not something I need to know more about, just gonna take your and mastins words at face value on it. It would be good to know if it was the scum kill or not, but I don't know how mastin could possibly know that, so if she knows anything about it it means it probably wasn't. "
Yume: Mastin doesn't trust you, and then she refers back to the obvious thing we're missing.
Cerb:"There are obvious answers, yes. Either you or her caused it to happen, most likely. And, umm. Just tell her about the thing please and when it happens pick the same person then, I guess. I'll try to pick whoever I think you guys would choose."
Drixx:"I don't just want to STOP Cluster Yume ... I want to work out a way to get scum to be forced help. I think it's pretty easy but you should run it by Mastin.

The idea is that we announce we have a plan and that town watchers/trackers should focus on top scumspects because anyone taking an action will be considered scum. I mean it's a gambit because we don't know if we have the PRs necessary to actually catch scum, but the scum team can't really know either, so they have to choose between using their abilities (and potentially getting caught, which is as good as a cop guilty) or not using their abilities and helping us beat their own event.

Sometimes simple is the best. What do you think?"
Yume: Agrees
Drixx:"Well ... it counts on any town watchers/trackers realizing that they should NOT actually use their ability. We can't tell them that. We have to say they should and trust them to realize what we're doing. The idea is to make the scum fear that if they act they could be caught and thus force them to help us defeat their event.

It's a gambit, because I don't think we can afford to actually use actions. We have no idea how many points we need, but it's obviously going to be a lot because it's a Varsoon theme game and that means lots of PRs and the ability to get 3 points out of 2 people and having 2 nights to accumulate points ... that's going to be a HIGH bar to clear.

Run it by Mastin though. She may think of a better way to scare scum into helping defeat their own event."
Yume: Says she will do as requested.
Drixx:"We probably need to ask Varsoon in private if triggering events counts or not. I think it probably shouldn't count because they aren't abilities and I think they're all one time. Ours is and A50 said his was.

@Varsoon: Does withholding using an event that could be triggered give points?"
Drixx:"By the way Yume; what I just did in the game is intentional. I want to see who will jump on that and try to use it against us.

In the context of what I was saying, the only thing that would be "obvious" to everyone is me not posting again in the main game thread. By putting the word scum in there, I'm trying to see if I can bait scum into outing themselves to try and push our lynch, since it was pretty close to going through so fast so early in the day. Anyone who reads that sentence and tries to say that I would be saying that "obviously I didn't post in the scum PT" or something like that will be REALLY stretching, which makes them either REALLY confbiased or scum.

I don't know if it will work or not. I debated whether or not to do the "EbWoP" post or not. Let's see "
Drixx:"We have a winner! Creature bites."
Yume: More generic agreement
Drixx:"I gambit a lot. Misdirection is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal in mafia."
Yume: Me too, I was testing you with the cluster stuff, and you passed.
Varsoon:Answers the q uestion, which he also answered in the main thread.
Drixx:"Okay Yume. You have a lot to relay to Mastin. You should be sure to let her know that the top 3 vote receivers during "Beach-a-palooza" will be announced and have their point totals given. Also be sure she knows that scum votes count for only half. There may be a way to set up using the event in such a way that those mechanics out scum. Counting on you to relay info to her since putting it in the thread makes it useless."
Yume: Done.
Drixx:"Okay cool. I just hope Mastin will consider it. We've been trying basically since the start of the game to find town and figure out how to use this event to maximum utility. Getting a cop check into conftown hands plus having a chance to catch scum is really powerful."
Yume: Mastin should win beach-a-palooza.
Cerb:"It informs scum so they know to not shoot your allies. :/

And that's the plan. We just want to make sure votes don't get split between mastin and other highly townread options."
Yume: Quotes my last post, and says she's gonna protect town somehow.
Yume: Admits to flavor ignorance outside of her role, but personally likes Lapis and Jasper.
Cerb: Quotes the previous, then"Oh, okay. Lol. Got it. And okay. I suppose that makes sense. Reasonable gambit to virtually doc protect them."
Yume: What else do you want to talk about?
Cerb:"I have a headache. "
Yume: youtube video of a SU song.
Drixx:"Yume... we can't unilaterally decide who gets the reward. The event will lock the game thread for 48 hours and everyone will vote for someone. Scum votes count half as much points as town votes.

So ... it will be down to everyone voting who gets to choose the reward they get. Mastin should win without us having to out this information, which means we could potentially catch scum voting for one of their own. That's why I wanted to co-ordinate with Titus (remember what she did in Suikoden with the fruit code and the thread lock vote?) and now with you and Mastin. If only really strong almost certainly town people know, we have a good chance of not only getting the great reward in conftown hands, but also if we can figure it out we could maybe catch scum as well."
Yume: Your plan doesn't stop the cluster even if we get some guilties out of it.
Yume: Not certain that the whole town will make mastin win beach-a-palooza
Cerb:"Yeah, Drixx and I have differing thoughts on this. I think it's most important to firmly establish a bloc of slots who we know are going to vote for mastin, amd have them ally outside the bloc to maximize the number of votes on mastin. That ensures she receives the reward, which I believe to be paramount.

Drixx wants to be super clever and try to catch scum with it, but since only the top three vote getters will be revealed, I view this as implausible. I suppose if we have a strong enough circle of probtown. In out alliances, who all vote for mastin, low vote count anomalies championed by scum may show up which otherwise wouldn't?"
Yume: Tells us she can get someone else to vote with us and that we shoudl know who that person is(thus confirming to us that she's DEFINITELY Steven, rather than just one of the gems).
Cerb:"*sigh* you weren't supposed to confirm whether you were a gem or steven, but yes. Working with them as well would be very strong. That's 5 slots, up to 10 allied who could all vote for mastin.

You probably shouldn't tell them any of the details though, just push them to vote for mastin along with their alliance mate."
Yume: Suspicious that we immediately came up with 5 slots who could vote for mastin.
Cerb:quotes the previous, and then "Yume, RR, OWK, Mastin, and the mystery person who I won't name but we both know who it is.

All of us can ally others, for a total of 10 individuals we could organize."
Yume: Want to know how I know who the mystery person is.
Cerb: Quotes yume's previous post, then "Yume. You told me that if I had been paying attention , I would know who it is. I posited two possible scenarios, which gave you four possible flavors. Only one of those flavors has had anything happen that is so bvious that I should know if I'm paying attention. Maybe I'm missing something you said some unexplained town read you've expressed, but I don't believe you've expressed any such thing in thread."
Yume: Notes that we had mentioned four flavors, and that maybe those flavors had a pt, so maybe she's talking about one of them.(Thus confirming to us that the gems have PT together)
Yume: Not claiming anything, just pointing out something you've missed.
Yume: Don't tell anyone what you've figured out about who I am or jasper will hurt you.
Cerb:quotes the PT possibility post from yume, then "That absolutely occurred to me, but I found a four man masonry implausible, and there's *no* reason at all why I would "know" who they were if I had been "paying attention" In that case.

(Plus you just said you could BG your allies)

Not relevant though, doesn't really matter. All that matters is the potential to rally 10 votes for mastin, making it basically impossible for anyone else to win, and very likely that any low vote count slots scum might be trying to sneak in will show up.

-Cerb

Pedit: lol. Lips sealed."
Cerb:"We're probably getting lynched today anyway, eventually, so we won't have any more alliance to spill the beans in anyways."
Yume: Can you use your event before you get lynched today?
Cerb:"We have to activate it at night, so yeah. Only if we make it to night phase wilmth stress at +1 or greater can we trigger it."
Drixx:"So no ... we cannot activate the event before the town lynches us. Activate at night and the next exposition phase starts locked for 48 hours. (This is why I crumbed to Titus the way I did). Was hoping to pull of a Suikoden repeat "
Drixx:"It's really frustrating to me that it's conftown driving the lynch on us too. Out of the whole wagon, maybe 2 slots are questionable. Like ... when town lines up to lynch one of the best town players, and scum can just stay away from the wagon, that hurts PoE later on."
Yume: Talks about shiro's role overlapping with hers, with no specifics.
Drixx:"Do you believe that it was just a co-incidence and Shiro really just made up a power like yours, or do you think something like a rolecop might be in play and that could be a slip or a claim designed to get you to counter or something?"
Yume: Dunno.
Cerb:"Oh. I just realized. If you're going to ally with Titus, you're decreasing the membership of our mastin for beachapalooza winner by 2 (the allies you could each potentially get on board). Given what you've said you can do, it's probably for the best, but I just wanted to note it."
Yume: I just want to be her ally, the mechanical stuff is real though but I only said it to convince her.
Cerb:"Ya, that's cool, I was just noting it. "
Yume: Greets us
Cerb:"*waves*

Yo Yume. Working now, just keeping up with the thread. What's on your mind?"
Yume: posts a picture of Lapis Lazuli
Yume: She's just like me
Cerb:"That....makes me really sad. "
Cerb:"I'm really sorry you feel that way.

Umm.

Feel free to message me on your main and mine anytime you'd like to chat, k?"
Yume: we both act stronger than we are.
Yume: I won't, don't want to be replaced.
Cerb:"I understand. I didn't mean right now, that was an open offer, anytime you'd care to take me up on it."
Drixx:"Hey Yume. Got a lot of info for you. We made a bad assumption and I was looking at our role PM because of Cerb's speculation about a possible 3rd party faction (I think he might be right, but that's a separate issue that I'll address at the end of my post), and I looked at our ability and realized something. Assuming Mastin wins the Beach-A-Palooza, she will be able to choose from the following prizes:

1.) One-Shot Kill immunity, consumed when next targeted by a kill (so this is passive; doesn't have to be activated).
2.) One-shot Climax-phase investigate a target to see if they are capable of killing a player.
3.) One-shot Climax-phase mass-redirect, which causes all other abilities to redirect to the user. (Lightning Rod basically)

Since we're town and we don't have any way to kill someone (no vig shots or anything like that), we assumed we would be cleared by the 2nd item. You can look at our ISO and see us refer to it being able to clear us. We were WRONG. We need you to tell Mastin that if she takes that reward, she should NOT waste it on us. It will return a positive on us, and we freely admit it. I asked Varsoon just now and he confirmed that we will show up as having the ability to kill. The only way we can explain this is to full claim. I'm a little concerned about this, because if Cerb's theory about a 3rd party team is correct, you would almost certainly be in that group, but I think that group probably can win with town, so I'm going to risk it and share so you can pass along to Mastin.

We are Sadie. Under our flavor text it says we're aligned with the town faction and human. At the bottom of our role PM it says we're aligned with Earth and that in order to win, all threats to Earth have to be removed AND an Earth-aligned player must be alive.

That second part is why I think Cerb is right about a 3rd faction because otherwise it would be impossible to have all threats to Earth removed from the game but have all Earth-aligned players dead. I think there must be a third party group of Crystal Gems who have the goal of eliminating all the scum team, but they don't need any of us humans alive to win.

Our ability is called "Just Get Out of My Life!" and during the season finale (day 4, day 8, day 12, etc...) if we hammer a player, that player is killed -- no effect may keep them alive in any way. - The part that I made bold and italicized is the part that Varsoon says will make the investigate confirm we are capable of killing a player. We didn't think that it would count because it's not actually a kill. It's just finishing a lynch; however, Varsoon says it will return a positive. Make sure Mastin knows this. She can ask him questions about what will or will not return a yes once she has the ability to choose her reward. She should be able to confirm that our ability will show up on that investigate.

Our event is Beach-a-palooza and we already claimed all that.

So yeah: the biggest thing that Mastin needs to know is that using that on us is a WASTE. We will show up as capable of killing. We will claim this in the main thread if needed. If she wants to take the investigate instead of the kill immunity, she should use it on someone else since it would be wasted confirming what we just told you.


My thinking about the 3rd party faction is that you and Mastin a probably a part of it, and I think it PROBABLY wins with town, because our win condition is written in such a way that it makes no sense that a 3rd party group would win and town wouldn't UNLESS all of us are dead. I'm not asking you to confirm or deny or comment on this. I'm not fishing here. If we're correct about this, sooner or later we'll find out via a flip so it's irrelevant really. I just wanted to let you know what we're thinking in case we're on the right track.

Let me know if you have any questions."
Yume: confirms that the gems are 3p and mastin isn't one of them.
Drixx:"Yume. Don't just give out info like that. Like ... if you are telling the truth you don't want to out that. This site HATES 3rd parties. Admitted 3rd party are policy lynches to most people.

I mean ... it's nice to know that we figured it out (presuming you are being honest; the part I'm worried about is whether you win with town or not), but you gotta keep info safe.

Please pass on the info to Mastin; she needs to know so that she can ask Varsoon the proper questions when she wins beach-a-palooza. That should let her confirm that we will come up as having the ability to kill because of our ability to hammer during finale episodes and the hammered player cannot avoid being hammered (this implies that scum may have a way to get out of being hammered, by the way; make sure Mastin realizes that). That will also make it so she doesn't waste the investigate if she chooses that reward."
Yume: Told her.
Yume: I'm basically town and I don't want to lie anymore.
Drixx:"You don't want to publicly claim 3rd party. Does Mastin know? She just made a post a few minutes ago that any 3rd party claim will get lynched.

Cerb and I are going to tell the game our theory but we're not going to say a word about you confirming it. We need town to go look at their win condition and realize that having a third group who probably wins with town should alter how they read interactions. Cerb and I are doing a complete overhaul of how we're reading things now that we realized it."
Yume: I never told her and never will.
Yume: I can help you convince the town without claiming by just vouching for your reasoning.
Cerb:"Hmm. That's true.

That would save Drixx and I from having to figure out how to not actually say anything explicit about any specific slots.

Feel free to do so."
Cerb:"Just so you know what someone else may have been able to figure out based on the game:

Klingon is a gem as well.
Your faction is able to recruit peridot. This belief is based on klingons peridot "obsession" and your consistent mention of Lapis+Jasper, who are tied to Peridot.
You believed Firebringer was peridot, and that bubbling effect could have allowed you to recruit them. I don't know if they actually are peridot or not though, and whether or not you recruited them/actually did vanillaize them, or if they're just saying that so they can privately arrange to give their inventions to you guys.
If mastin isn't a gem, I have no idea who they are. Basically one of Mastin and Skybird is Connie, and the other is...I don't know? Maybe Lapis, who doesn't count as a crystal gem technically? Or maybe Lion? Or umm..idk man. Steven has too many friends.

Anyways, yeah. That's where my game solving stuff is at right now.


Don't confirm or deny ANY of this, even if I'm super wrong. If I'm super wrong, just laugh about it to yourself please. I just want you to aware of what others may have figured out at a minimum."
Yume: lol
Yume: I just love jasper nad lapis.
Cerb:quotes the laugh post, then"<3"
Yume: You telling me to stop telling you stuff makes me want to tell you stuff.
Drixx:"We believe that the Crystal Gems will help us win. Therefore it's in our best interest not to know. What we don't know we can't accidentally leak.

For example: there's a lot of places in the game thread where strange phrasing and such made us sure there is a PT out there unclaimed, which we think is probably the Crystal Gems factional PT. We don't think anyone meant to reveal it, but just by knowing they leaked it. We're really careful, but no matter how careful you are, if you know something you can accidentally give clues. If you don't know, there's no way you can ever reveal it, even accidentally.

So in this case, the less we know the better."
Cerb:"Yume, could you please tell mastin to let the game know about the fact that there is very possibly a scum mechanism for avoid death by lynch? Either a resurrection or a straight up lynchproof? If we share it we're less likely to live to the season finale to potentially shut down that effect, so we probably shouldn't share it, but mastin already had basically infinite attention on her and has consistently displayed additional knowledge, so it wouldn't be too surprising if she were to share the information and it wouldn't increase her risk at all."
Yume: I will.
Yume: Scum can't resurrect, and mastin can tell you the details.
Cerb:"Understood. Yeah, the resurrection thing seemed less likely than straight lynchproof, but it was the only other possibility I could think of. "
Yume: The town doesn't agree with your theory.
Cerb:"Yeah. :/

I mean, all I can really do is present the evidence, and make sure people aren't doing dumb things because they're not aware of the possibility."
Drixx:"The obvious reason not to say anything more is because Crystal Gems 3rd party faction, assuming we're right, already demonstrated the ability to "remove" someone from the game, which helps town win condition. They also are likely to have really strong abilities and events. We don't want to point out the places where people leaked unintentionally, because that basically outs the people most likely to BE the group in question, and so we can't point the game to the strongest evidence.

Also; tell Mastin to stop being silly. Our ability really is what I said it is. Tell her that yes I know that it is basically the ability I fake claimed in SMITE and yes I understand that might make her wary, but it's just a co-incidence. We really do have the ability to hammer someone on finale episodes and no ability or effect can prevent them from being lynched. The fact that we have this implies that scum have the ability to escape lynch somehow.

At this point, I'm ready to just ignore her and move on but if we could get our best people all working together, it would be so much better."
Yume:Only one other CG can bubble until we both die.
Yume: It's hard to convince her.
Yume: Our win condition also needs us to keep town alive.
Drixx:"Don't share any more Yume. Please. We figured out the third party thing based upon people phrasing things in ways that didn't make sense. If we know, we could leak. We don't need or want to know.

I'm sure your group has more than just the bubble ability, and I suspect you have really powerful abilities (We were Steven in SU and we had the ability to bodyguard AND not die doing so, for example), and probably really good events. We do NOT want to say anything that points out who you guys are to the scum team. Let us protect you guys so you can help us win. Don't tell us more. I know you want to (and I understand that urge), but just don't.


P-edit: Interesting. But PLEASE stop telling us stuff."
Yume: agrees to stop telling us stuff and just tell it to jaspis instead.(still dunno who jaspis was)
Yume: There's lot's I could tell and I really want to.
Yume: I want to flavor claim.
Drixx:"And I would personally love to know all of it. And I will: AFTER the game. Knowing now won't help anyone. Trust me ... part of me wants to just let you spill it all, but that would be selfish and it wouldn't help.

It's taking considerable willpower to keep telling you to stop."
Drixx:"Umm... we worked out who you are awhile ago. You gave it away when you said you could BG."
Yume: public flavor claim.
Drixx:"You said you could BG in public, and anyone who looks at the first SU game will see that Steven is the BG. Therefore, it's most probable you are Steven and anyone paying attention probably knows. Don't confirm or deny. Varsoon likes to change things up, so we may have come to the wrong conclusion, but it doesn't matter if we're right about which person you are."
Yume: I'll be malachite in the future.
Yume: I'll probably die soon if everyone knows who I am now.
Yume: After I die tell them I'm gonna be Malachite.
Drixx:"Okay. Only if you stop telling me stuff though. Like ... pretty sure you just said that if you die you will resurrect. That's something that NOBODY should know but you."
Yume: You're wrong, I didn't say I have that power.
Drixx:"I misunderstood then. You said if you die to tell the game you'll come back.

But that's also besides the point. If the gem group has a resurrect, then scum almost certainly has one too, or it wouldn't be balanced. I think we should assume scum has some kind of resurrect or else several ways to avoid death. Maybe both?"
Cerb:"Let's...just stop this line of conversation.

Moving on. How do you feel about the DGB/Mathblade thing? The late ascetic thing is super irritating to me and I think I might be a little biased towards just wanting to lynch anyone who does it on principle."
Yume:Mathblade is not town.
Yume: I meant I'd be malachite in the next game.
Drixx:"I misunderstood. Then again ... you said that there was a resurrect in play and then said you'd come back, so it makes sense why I would misunderstand. And if you do have the BG ability like we had in the first SU, I can't imagine a better target to resurrect and protect. But I have way less info to work with.

Is mathblade scum because of the late ascetic claim, the prior play on the slot, or because of something else mathblade has said?"
Drixx:"Also I disagree with Cerberus. I think that the late Ascetic claim is reason to pause and re-evaluate."
Yume: cheep cheep reference, telling us that mastin=centipeetle, though it takes me abit to get it.
Yume: More references to that episode
Cerb:"I'll be honest, I've been trying to figure out what you're hinting at and I'm drawing a blank.

That's okay though."
Yume: More references.
Cerb:"OHHH.

Lol.

You just confirmed a suspicion of mine.

Like, I literally *just* expressed this thought to Drixx."
Yume: I want to read your PT.
Yume: That's connected to what you asked.
Cerb:quotes the last two Yume posts, then"Will do, you'll have to read our huge walls of chat logs to find where I told him my theory. "

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

RR seems so town in these conversations that it makes it so hard for me to see him as a must scum.

Was it confirmed as impossible that both of us are town?

Us both being town was explicitly confirmed by Varsoon as being possible, but mastin2 believes it's most productive to treat today as a traditional lylo involving a conftown, so she can get the most engagement out of both of us.

That's why we haven't voted you. We just aren't sure that you MUST be scum, and if you aren't, the most likely reason for that( a grapes/A50 team using some modified scum version of the event the gems had) means a no lynch is our only chance. Of course, a no lynch means we LOSE if you are scum.

@mastin: not ignoring your question, just need to refresh my memory on Varsoons previous utilization of very similar roles.
-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Read the day 2 alliance chat Mastin. I went into GREAT detail about our role. It's exactly what I would say, which is why I'm sort of confused you're asking me to just say it again?

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Oh and can you be a little more specific in what you want from a game summary? I'm pretty sure you don't want me to just tell you every thing that happened because that's basically in the first post already. It follows that you don't actually want a bland summary of "On day one the following happened: an event was triggered which mod confirmed that farside and beeboy were not masons together... (etc.. etc...)"

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

You didn't fullclaim in there. I literally just read it.
You left out your roleblock ability.

As for a game summary: what has transpired in the game, as you see it. Even if you're describing the same facts, different perspectives will lead to different word usage and right now that could help me.

Okay.

So we had a roleblock ability. It had a long name but it's basically "you're only my friend when it's convenient". If someone allied with us and then chose to ally with someone else, we could choose, as an action, to passively roleblock them. We would have to decide each climax whether to continue doing so or not, and if we stopped doing so we could not do it again unless we again allied with the player and they again chose to ally elsewhere.

I'll begin working on a game summary. Please do recall that I had a water spilled into my computer issue partway through the game, so you're going to get my best recall on some things simply because this is a massive thread and we're running out of time.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Alright.
Next question.

This is actually my top priority question right now.

EVERYONE:

I want you to rank every one of the remaining four roles, most to least, in terms of the following:
"If this role were scum, how useful it would be in disrupting town synergy".
And then give the reasons why you ranked them most to least in that order.
The roles have all been made known in their entirety.

A50
RR
Grapes
Shiro

A50 moves to the bottom if there's some clause known only to the scum team that indicates their factional kill can't be enhanced by his ally bonus.

A50 because enhanced kills naturally remove all synergistic options involving a given slot. A plan is made or a threat perceived, and it is permanently removed.
RR because roleblocks are naturally disruptive to organization, though the limitation we have would make it more of a way to shut down a threat long term rather than actively disrupt things being planned, since it would require setting up an alliance and then arranging for another alliance, so it's at least a couple nights of delay.
Grapes because the passive disruption of alliance bonuses is disruptive in a similar fashion to RR's ability, but aimed at a different part of roles. If used offensively it's also more overt than our own, limiting it's usefulness.
Shiro's power's as claimed don't seem to have any disruptive effects, other than preventing negative effects originating from a specific slot from targeting it for a single phase. Rather limited use.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

So(this is partially in response to your question Mastin, but also tangential to it), I've been thinking about what our actual reasonable possible scenarios are here.

The only solo scum possibilities are A50 and ourselves, UNLESS the gems lied or were misinformed about the way the bubbling works. We have to assume they weren't, so we'll work with that as a solid premise.

We're town, therefore A50 is the only solo scum possibility.

In a universe where we're looking at solo scum, grapes is town, and therefore did not lie about how his event worked. That means that were A50 scum, he would have died rather than being removed from the game by grapes' power.

This means A50 can't be solo scum.

So, we must be in a two scum universe.

The possibilities for that are Grapes/A50, and Shiro/Grapes(Shiro/A50 is not possible, because if they were both scum then yesterday the lynch threshold would not have been increased since we would have been in MYLO).

The issue here is that a Grapes/A50 team necessitates a no lynch as the response, while a Shiro/Grapes team necessitates a lynch on Shiro as the response, and I'm not certain which of the two options is more likely.

A Grapes/A50 team requires that A50 was deliberately arguing against the release of his teammate yesterday, after seeing that everyone else appeared to be in favor of said release. It's possible that such arguments were made for the sake of delaying grapes' release since the event in question was apparently a climax event, and he may have feared that town would have defaulted to lynching Grapes had he made that claim upon his return(particularly since it would seem that he failed to mention that restriction upon his ability to random, in order to get random to return him). Given that Grapes is ALWAYS scum, the fact that he lied about his ability in order to get released doesn't have any relevance with regards to determining the likelihood of who his partner is.

The Shiro/Grapes team is, well, difficult to really find much reasoning for off the top of my head. Shiro's general lack of engagement in the game makes it rather difficult for me to determine how likely that might be.

I'll need to chat with Drixx some more to further flesh out which of those two probabiliites we weight as more likely.

Another consideration that needs to be cleared up to be absolutely certain the Shiro/A50 team is not possible. We've been working under the assumption that the Tragic Destiny modifier functions the same way Mastin's ally bonus does, that is, that it turns off in both MYLO and LYLO, but the mechanics post does specify LYLO. If it only turns off in LYLO, then it's possible that a Shiro/A50 team exists, which we'll need to weight properly as well.

@Varsoon: The universal loved modifier applied by Tragic Destiny specifies that it doesn't apply to LYLO. Does this mean it doesn't apply in MYLO? How do you define MYLO/LYLO for purposes of making that determination?

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

There's a mechanic involved that until recently, we were all forgetting about, Cerb.
If Almost50 were scum and grapes told the truth about their ability, then the stress would have plummeted to slice of life.
It did not.

As a result, the only possibilities are that Almost50 is town, or grapes lied.

The reason I don't think grapes lied at this point is many, many things, but among others is that an Almost50-grapes scumteam makes zero sense, because Almost50 was pushing for grapes's death for basically most of the game, and if that wasn't enough, Almost50-grapes as a scumteam has no reason to no-kill the night Fuzzy killed. (The main reason for a no-kill there was to not be caught and become confscum--a nonissue if Almost50-grapes is the scumteam in question.)

So realistically speaking, what I said before is now more true than ever:
We are assuming a lynch today. Because I do not view Almost50-grapes as a realistic scumteam. I haven't done the research I'd LIKE to, there, but I don't think I ever will get that far. I don't need to, however. Because if Almost50-grapes is the scumteam, I am absolutely comfortable losing to them at this juncture.

The question to ask is whether it's grapes-Shiro, or just you.
Ergo, this is basically a traditional 3p lylo now, for real.

I realized this on my own, in my notes, just recently. (So recently, I hadn't even PMed Varsoon to let him know I knew. Well, remembered what I already knew.) But now that you bring it up, I will too.

Almost50-grapes is not the scumteam.
Almost50 cannot be solo-scum because stress did not go to -4.
Almost50-Shiro is impossible because stress did not go to -4.
The only possibilities then are Shiro-grapes or Reasonably Rational alone.

Oh duh. Yeah, the same reasoning that guarantees solo A50 isn't possible also precludes the A50/Shiro team.

Hmm. A50 pushing for Grapes death the entire game is, well, not something I view as significant in any way, given that grapes was NEVER in any real danger of being lynched. The closest he came was on the day he was functionally unlynchable due to your ability. However, the no kill thing is definitely major. I'll need to review some things to make sure there's absolutely no reason why they wouldn't have killed on that night, but yeah, I'm pretty damn sure you're right, and barring a hypothetical restriction to the scum factional kill that would have kept A50 from enhancing his own shot, there's absolutely no reason for a scum kill to fail that night, or for them to no kill with that pairing.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

@Varsoon: The universal loved modifier applied by Tragic Destiny specifies that it doesn't apply to LYLO. Does this mean it doesn't apply in MYLO? How do you define MYLO/LYLO for purposes of making that determination?

-Cerb

LYLO is the game state where the scum team automatically wins if one of their members is not lynched.
MYLO is the game state where the scum team automatically wins if a non-scum player is mislynched.
Tragic Destiny's loved modifier only functions in LYLO.

So since LYLO requires a successfull scum kill/town death during the night after the no lynch, while no scum are removed, if the game state were such that it were possible for the scum kill to fail, OR for a member of the scum team to be removed, would LYLO still occur?

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

There's a mechanic involved that until recently, we were all forgetting about, Cerb.
If Almost50 were scum and grapes told the truth about their ability, then the stress would have plummeted to slice of life.
It did not.

As a result, the only possibilities are that Almost50 is town, or grapes lied.

The reason I don't think grapes lied at this point is many, many things, but among others is that an Almost50-grapes scumteam makes zero sense, because Almost50 was pushing for grapes's death for basically most of the game, and if that wasn't enough, Almost50-grapes as a scumteam has no reason to no-kill the night Fuzzy killed. (The main reason for a no-kill there was to not be caught and become confscum--a nonissue if Almost50-grapes is the scumteam in question.)

So realistically speaking, what I said before is now more true than ever:
We are assuming a lynch today. Because I do not view Almost50-grapes as a realistic scumteam. I haven't done the research I'd LIKE to, there, but I don't think I ever will get that far. I don't need to, however. Because if Almost50-grapes is the scumteam, I am absolutely comfortable losing to them at this juncture.

The question to ask is whether it's grapes-Shiro, or just you.
Ergo, this is basically a traditional 3p lylo now, for real.

I realized this on my own, in my notes, just recently. (So recently, I hadn't even PMed Varsoon to let him know I knew. Well, remembered what I already knew.) But now that you bring it up, I will too.

Almost50-grapes is not the scumteam.
Almost50 cannot be solo-scum because stress did not go to -4.
Almost50-Shiro is impossible because stress did not go to -4.
The only possibilities then are Shiro-grapes or Reasonably Rational alone.

Scum push one another all the time for later credibility. Given that several slots (including us) were going after Grapes, and given that he would have died if not for being allied with you, A50 would have come out shining with a Grapes scum flip. As soon as you posit scum!Grapes, then what we're seeing looks like a mirror of the crystal gems thing where they commuted away out of the game, and we don't actually have a direct claim from Grapes.

Add to that the fact that we were hard defending A50

and

going after Grapes, so a Grapes scum flip along with our reasoning for why A50 must be town makes perfect sense as a way to make A50 nearly unlynchable in the end game. In fact, look at how you don't have any

evidence

, but are dismissing the pairing, simply because of that.

Like ... just because MoI says Grapes claimed his ability would kill scum and plunge stress to the minimum doesn't make that so. I get that assuming it is true allows you to eliminate some pairings (because if he's town, it's true, and I think that's sound), but you cannot eliminate Grapes+A50 as a pairing, because you cannot assume Scum!Grapes and assume the stress change claim is true simultaneously. Apart from that error, that's actually really clever logic and greatly simplifies the scenarios.

Furthermore, we already have reason to suspect Grapes was not honest about his ability. It appears that it was a climax ability, so it could

NEVER

have been used for the plan we (you and us) hammered out yesterday that guaranteed a win, and yet in order to convince Random to release him, Grapes would have had to say he would act as asked ... fully knowing that he would do no such thing. I cannot think of any plausible town motive to explain it. If town, I would expect Grapes to have told Random way early in the day yesterday that his ability was climax only so we could adjust the plan. This is pretty strong evidence for scum!Grapes, imo.

As far as the no kill goes, I see a really obvious reason for it. We're town and the gems commuted leaving only you as a conftown target and plausible mislynches. And since it was even numbers, the lack of kill wasn't really harmful. Why kill you when you were pushing us, and why kill any possible mislynch and narrow the pool when it doesn't move the end of game moment? I mean it's speculation, but hell ... there's a whole list of things that don't make sense:

I can't give you any explanation for why a scum team that contained Shiro or us would have taken a shot at MoI, given that Titus outright told us both about his passive, or WHY A50 would let Skybird get set up at risk from Xkfyu, or why A50 or us would have killed Yume given that it enabled Xkfyu to kill Skybird, or WHY a scum team with us would even have killed Yume at all, since we had allied her and could have just roleblocked her while letting Skybird work her for info all game. I mean ... you saw how much she wanted to spill to us in that alliance.

Shiro has said he didn't read that finale chat closely, so I suppose that isn't necessarily an informed blunder, but it could just as easily be Grapes and A50 with A50 passing us that info to pocket us.

---

You also asked earlier why we're town.

#1 - As you can now see, we have been actively game solving all game long, right from the start.
#2 - We used the alliances

precisely

how you posited we would as town, long before you ever laid out your expectation of how you expected us to behave, and always brought things into the game when the appropriate time came.
#3 - There's the pile of things we became informed of along the way as people town read us and trusted us to pass info to the gems and you, much of which ended up hurting the scum team.
#4 - You're alive. This might actually be the strongest point. I honestly thought when the day started that it would be over within 24 hours, we would be mislynched and it would be GG scum wins. You gave absolutely NO indication you would ever consider not lynching us. We're not stupid, nor are we suicidal. Someone wanted you here with us here as a target for you to go after.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Spoiler: First half of the D3 alliance with A50

D3 alliance
Cerb:"HI A50! So, thoughts on voting? "
A50: No thoughts yet, but I have a lot of info to share.
A50: A50 claims a shitload here. He tells us that he's Buck Dewey, along with explaining crumbs he's made throughout the game(I can point these out if you want, but in the interest of brevity I'm refraining). One of his crumbs came from him having Xkfyu tweet something for him, to prove to him that he was who he claimed. He thought Titus was Jenny. He tells us that Xkfyu claimed peridot on D2, and all his abilities just as they appear on his role PM. Among the things claimed to A50 by Xkfyu was part of the redacted part, which was that Xkfyu was permanently deathproof while he was the leader of the crystal gems until there were no other gems alive, HOWEVER he had a priority 7 for becoming the leader(No idea what that means, but yeah).

He then outlined a plan Xk had created, to join the gems, use his power to pm the scum leader, and pretend to just be a survivor still and be a spy on the scum. Xkfyu also claimed that he planned to use his ability that allowed someone to view your past PT's to A50.

Then he speculated, well, a lot of stuff, including who the gems were, and that we were ronaldo fryman, and that there were several factions in the game. Then he claimed his tracking power to us, and told us he had not claimed it to anyone else. Asked us for help with evaluating everybody else, and for how to reverse his read on people who he had changed his mind about without doing so suspiciously.

This post was massive, and this was a lazy paraphrase because fuck he said a lot. I can revisit it and give you more detail if you want, but those were the main points.

A50:Asks Varsoon what exactly the flavor reveal from beachapalooza would reveal
Cerb:"@A50: at work, lot to digest, need Drixx to come weigh in on what we should tell you about what we've figured out."
Cerb:"Oh, and one thing before we move on:

Original crystal gems from the show: garnet(ruby/sapphire, may be two slots), amethyst, pearl, steven/rose
Joined later: Peridot and Lapis Lazuli
Crystal gem from the war who was bubbled by rose for being too bloodthirsty basically: Bismuth
Homeworld gem stranded on earth, did not join gems, became corrupted from fusing with a corrupted gem: Jaspar"
A50: Corrected a misunderstood part of Xk's role.
Drixx:"That's a lot of info to process. Cerb and I will talk tonight and see if we're both in the same place. Suffice it to say that you filled in some places where we could only decide what was most logically probable, and I think you confirmed a lot of what we already figured out. We need to decide whether we can trust you enough to talk through the whole thing and update our understanding in light of what you've told us, whether we should tell you where people have intentionally lied to you (or perhaps you lied to us to test us?), and whether we should just go with full disclosure.

My first instinct is to be very wary of that much info blind. We'll discuss and view things rationally before we decide how much to say. If we decide that we have sufficient reason to trust you ... we could blow this game wide open together, especially if there really is a way to infiltrate the scum group and pick them off.

Your alliance ability was announced in the first post, btw. It looks like the event that made Titus an IC lowered stress, or we could have confirmed our ability (it's really strong but finale only and has serious implications so I'm not going to say more) today, which would have helped tremendously. I'm not sure if an IC is better or not; depends on how that IC behaves."
Drixx:"Question for you: Our plan and what we told people to do was vote Mastin for the beach-a-palooza. But now Titus is Innocent Child. Does that impact things? I feel like mod confirmed IC might be the best person to hand the prize choice to, but I don't know if people will realize that and deviate, and I don't want us to throw our votes towards Titus and dilute the vote, potentially allowing scum to screw with it. Do you have any idea what people are going to do given we're in lockdown and can't get any messages out?

By the way: I got really excited when I thought you had an open PT and could have the twitter thing relay a message to vote for Titus the Innocent Child... but then you said it was locked."
Varsoon: Answers A50's question.
A50:Not sure how people will vote, suspects yume will vote for mastin, thinks the beachapalooza should be won by someobdy who isn't having an impact so they can lightning rod, but can't decide because he doestn' know roles. Suggests that we vote for ourselves and we use the cop check since we have a narrower field of suspects than most people since we've figured out a lot based on mechanics and flavor, but suspects that maybe someone else is better because that might make us a good nk target.

Finally decides that we should vote for mastin since that's what had previously been arranged by us, but is concerned she'll waste the cop check on our slot.
Cerb:"Well, the event has built in protection for the winner, since which reward they get is chosen privately. Thus, if scum specifically go after the winner, it's basically a waste if the winner chose either the bp OR the lightning rod...so the whole "prime scum target" argument doesn't apply as much here as it normally would."
A50: Agrees and asks for confirmation on voting mastina to help make it harder for scum to hide where they vote.
Cerb:"quotes the previous post, then "That was the original thought behind my organizational attempts. I just don't know which slot would be the better one to throw support behind.

I'm home now, so I'll be able to chat with Drixx soon hopefully and figure some stuff out."
A50: Keep me informed. Haven't voted yet.
Cerb:"Ya same. I messaged Drixx when I got home and no response, so..just waiting. :p"
Cerb:"Hey, do you have any thoughts on why SC would have allied with you? It doesn't make much sense for him to ally with anyone who isn't on his team in a Varsoon game where you KNOW there are going to be vigs around...

Also, you mentioned certain characters on your joy ride. Was that purely flavor, or we were you not in full control of which slots joined that alliance?"
Cerb:"You said Xkfyu could join "either join the crystal gems or ..." And then went into quoting him.

What else could he do instead of joining the crystal gems? Did he tell you? The logical "either" option is joining the scum team, which...obviously makes this worrisome."
A50:quotes the SC question, then tells us he doesn't know any more than what sc said, which is that A50 was a non-town read who was available, but he suspects it might be because SC as scum always fooled A50 in the past, and tells us that he chose everyone in his joyride. HE then quotes my post about crystal gems flavor, then asks for more flavor details basically, like why sapphire and ruby would be two slots, and expresses suspicion of lapis/bismuth/peridot slots.
Cerb:"In the first SU game they were two separate slots. If one of them were to be the leader, it would be sapphire. Reasonable to think they're just one slot though, with the leadership information we have.

And yeah, the 7 thing requires bismuth to be recruitable as well, OR for sapphire and Ruby to be two slots. Bismuth was bubbled by rose, and freed by Steven on accident...then bismuth revealed the same plan and bloodlust that had made rose bubble her to steven....and steven fought her and did the same. So, she's a perfectly reasonable character to have in the game.

I can't think of any real reason why scum would specifically be able to check for jaspars flavor unless she was a traitor..or I guess if they got some other benefit for killing her or being allied to her. She might be 3p and some of them have enhanced powers while allied with her or something?"
A50: quotes my question about xkfyu possibly being able to join the scum team, and tells us that he didn't say anything more about that. Thinks XK probably just joined town because they're ahead. Suggests that perhaps there are two scum factions, since SC was leader of the ruby squad specifically.
A50: apologizes for previous post not being well formatted.
Cerb:"No worries. Flavorwise(and due to lack of multiple kills) multiple scum factions of any sort seem unlikely. SC flipped as a member of "the threats to earth", which could easily include various corrupted gems and other Homeworld gems besides the rubies.

I don't know what Xkfyu power could do if the leader of the scum is already dead. Perhaps they have a leadership priority like the crystal gems do? Maybe SC wasn't thr actual leader of the faction?"
Cerb:"Aa far as checking his claim....no way to do it privately I don't think? We could ask skybird since she has a pt with steven, but we can't do it privately.

Regarding the fb as 3p thing: I actually thought he was peridot, and the bubbling thing waa a recruit attempt by the gems. The people who are inventors among the gems are peridot, pearl, and bismuth. Pearl wouldn't have been bubbled by the gems...and bismuth wouldn't have said all the stuff he said referring to the Homeworld gems.

So, basically, I have no idea who he could be at this point. "
A50:Asks to confirm that pearl wouldn't be 3p, and asks who he should check using his track if stress is high.
Cerb:"Pearl will be a crystal gem.

Mmm, I'd be prioritizing checking lurkers, so you can prevent a mislynch on someone just being quiet to hide a pr, or catch lurker scum.

I'd say just go ahead and send in mastin btw, that's what our plan was sk fuck it let's stick to it and hopefully we'll end up with two suspects if everyone votes for mastin."
A50: Voted mastin, suggests we specify which lurker he should check because there are a lot of lurkers, lists KC/TWIE/SS/S_S/Skybird/DGB/Creature/Random. Thinks sky and shadow are town, prefers creature and snarky.
A50: Thinks centipeetle means mastin isn't town.
A50: Wonders if we think NC could be scum because of all the votes they got, considers voting NC.
Cerb:"Pearl will be a crystal gem.

Mmm, I'd be prioritizing checking lurkers, so you can prevent a mislynch on someone just being quiet to hide a pr, or catch lurker scum.

I'd say just go ahead and send in mastin btw, that's what our plan was sk fuck it let's stick to it and hopefully we'll end up with two suspects if everyone votes for mastin."
A50: So it's possible that NC's whole team voted for them?
Cerb:"Yeah. Don't reveal that math until we get everyone's vote claims.

5 could also just be NC plus their partner if they're town though. "
A50: alright
A50: Says he'll be watching the blog to get later info, and asks who he should ally with and what he should tell them. Considered a Titus alliance if she wasn't already going to be allying elsewhere.
A50: Quotes 6454 and asks if FB is serious.
A50: Shiro's claim to have not bubbled FB confuses him(in the wall of speculation he was considering shiro may have been the bubble source.
Drixx:"I think we're probably 80% sure you're town A50. Cerb is tied up this weekend. There's some places where you have bad information. We need to decide how much is safe to share and see if you have any insights that we missed."
A50: Asks us to tell him what he needs to reevaluate, and then claims his event proves he's town. Clarifies that he doesn't want mechanical info, just needs to know who he should trust. Asks us if he should ally with MoI, doesn't trust them after KTS' play, and after MoI's interactions with Farside.
Drixx:"Well let's start with what we told the game yesterday. Did you catch that? What did you think about it?"
A50: asks us to specify what Drixx is talking about.
Drixx:"The post where we told the game there's a third faction in the game."
A50: Reminds drixx that he's speculating multiple factions already, and lists the ones we know about, the town, the CG, the leftovers, and the scum.
A50: Asks for us to have someone list all the alliances so far in the game, and doesn't think scum would have paired up on D2 or D3 to prevent cluster points.
A50: Asks who we allied with D1.
Drixx:"Titus Hydra day one - We told them about beach-a-palooza and about the points thinking we might be able to use it to PoE.
Yume yesterday - What was discussed there is what we're deciding whether to say or not.
You today "
A50: Does anybody pretend to be someone else in the show?
Cerb:"Well, gems can all naturally change their shape, but there haven't been any real issues of people impersonating one another. Amethyst does most of the shape changinf, but it's usually for relatively innocuous purposes like playing a prank on steven, or being tall enough to go on a ride at a carnival. Stuff like that."
A50: Asked because I noticed mastina didn't know who she allied with, and McMenno claimed the alliance failed and thought maybe someone took his spot.
Cerb:"Okay.

Short version:

In our PT with Yume yesterday, we informed her that we had deduced she was one of the crystal gems, due to the reasoning below:

1) Among her town reads, mastin would not have chosen you to friendly neighbor+gain a neighborhood with.
2) This means your slot selection was due to the mechanic she employed itself.
3) This means it was based on the role you rolled.
4) Mastin NEVER said you were conftown as in, rhe moderator had stated you were conftown.
5) Therefore you're conftown as a result of something else related to the effect. Most likely thing is either a flavor claim OR(more likely) moderator confirmed flavor.
6) So, you must be a role with near certain town flavor: One of the crystal gems.
7) Any of the gems are possible, BUT I don't believe Mastin would assume any gem except for Steven himself was town.

So, you're almost definitely Steven, and if not, you're one of the Crystal Gems, and such was confirmed by the moderator to mastin.

So you're safe to talk to. I wouldn't be saying all this right now except I'm pretty sure scum should have already figured it out.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



She then semi-confirmed our thought process by saying that "we" tried so hard to hide it.

The we is important, clear implication of a PT. I assume she was referring to her pt's with mastin and Skybird, but she was probably also referring to whatever pt the gems have together.

Later, we brought up the fact that we suspected that the crystal gems were in fact a third party, and she confirmed that was the case. That's the piece of information we couldn't share yesterday because we didn't want to expose steven.

So, MoI, Yume, Klingon, and one other were the original gems. Xkfyu is peridot. Firebringer is probably another gem, Bismuth/Lapis most likely by play, but his references he has made to the homeworld etc. sound awfully like a traitor trying to inform his team of who he is....but idk, it's probably too blatant to actually be the case.

Umm. I don't actually remember if we had anything else to tell you really lol.

Yume has hinted at some ability to resurrect someone, which is no doubt what the delayed flips are about. I assume they're deciding whether or not to resurrect klingon, or maybe they already decided to do it and have it set to trigger when someone hits L-1 or something.

If they *don't* end up resurrecting her, I wouldn't be surprised to see a win con that doesn't require town success in order to win...because i can't see any other reason why they would keep the flip hidden longer than necessary unless they were trying to maintain the facade that the gems are all legitimately town a bit longer."
A50: Titus messed up then, her ally table included Yume allied with skybird.
Cerb:"Ugh. I didn't even notice that because I already knew about it, but we should assume scum now DEFINITELY know who steven is. :/"
Drixx:"That's why we compartmentalize information. What you don't know, you can't accidentally post later because you forget it's important not to even refer to it obliquely."

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

So since LYLO requires a successfull scum kill/town death during the night after the no lynch, while no scum are removed, if the game state were such that it were possible for the scum kill to fail, OR for a member of the scum team to be removed, would LYLO still occur?

-Cerb

Yes. LYLO will only be ever be calculated purely by numbers and public effects--hidden possibilities such as the ones you mentioned would not influence LYLO.

Okay, so this, plus the logical sequence that clears A50 when grapes is town, means an A50+Shiro team is absolutely impossible. Even if grapes were somehow town(which he's not) and chose to lie about his ability, when we had 5 alive yesterday the lynch threshold would not have been increased by tragic destiny if any two living slots could be scum together.

Which brings us to your question, mastin, about the similar roles. I don't believe I've ever seen Varsoon use three roles with an identical application in a game before, but these aren't identical. I actually wouldn't even include TWIE in the conversation, because he's a self watcher, not a tracker

Now, given the innate limitations of both roles, and the fact that said roles were the scum teams only ways to discover what powers town had(other than DGBs ally power, which wasn't information the rest of the team had access to), I don't find it impossible, or even implausible, that both those powers existed on the scum team.

In short, the similarities are worth noting, but not conclusive.

With all that said...

VOTE: Shiro

I'm torn between the two options. Drixx is pretty sure it's Grapes/A50, but since I don't have any actual reason to prefer the A50/grapes team over the shiro/grapes one, I'll leave it in your hands. I had some brief thought of talking to shiro and seeing if he felt it was more likely that an A50/grapes team exists than that I'm scum, and if so urging him to withhold his vote and hold the game hostage the way you did on previous days to ensure you didn't make make a choice that 1/2 of the voices remaining alive disagree with, but I realized it would just be emotional vindictiveness and rejected it in favor of giving you the room you need to make the optimal play.

You make your choice mastin, and hopefully it's the right one. I'll keep working on getting the pts out there at least, the game summary is a lot less likely to happen . If you prefer one over the other let me know and I'll try to comply with the higher priority request.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Tbh RR, it would be impossible to convince me that there are two scum left anyway. I would have just hoped that maybe it is almost that is scum instead of you.

If it's one scum, then it's Grapes or you. Can't be A50 solo because Grapes had ample opportunity to correct MoI on what his event did and chose not to, so a town!Grapes would only have been hiding that his event was climax only and solo scum A50 would be known guilty due to the event. Thus Grapes can be scum with anyone, but A50 can only be scum with Grapes. Assuming that it's just one scum would be a really good way to lose.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Tbh RR, it would be impossible to convince me that there are two scum left anyway. I would have just hoped that maybe it is almost that is scum instead of you.

If it's one scum, then it's Grapes or you. Can't be A50 solo because Grapes had ample opportunity to correct MoI on what his event did and chose not to, so a town!Grapes would only have been hiding that his event was climax only and solo scum A50 would be known guilty due to the event. Thus Grapes can be scum with anyone, but A50 can only be scum with Grapes. Assuming that it's just one scum would be a really good way to lose.

~Drixx

Umm, no Drixx. Grapes and Shiro can't be solo scum because of the bubbling(unless the gems were a malevolent 3p whose presence kept the game from ending, or they lied/were misinformed about whether those they had bubbled would allow the game to continue if they were scum(this second possibility only makes sense if the gems had a second step they could initiate to fully remove the slot(which I guess could have been keeping them bubbled overnight and seeing if there were no kills), but both of those are unlikely and purely speculative and should be dismissed as such)). That plus the fact that town grapes=dead A50 if he were scum means there must be two scum remaining.

In all possible two scum scenarios, grapes is scum, due to purely mechanical PoE, and his behavior yesterday to trick the town into releasing him.

The question is which slot is his partner.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Would you like individual answers to the post above?

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

I told Drixx to answer you, because I was just going ot tell you to fuck off, and then when he said he was writing a post, I told him a bunch of shit to point out but I simply can't be fucked to make it into an actual post, so I took out the fucking time stamps of me pointing out the bullshit you said that you need to fucking choke on:
you should note that I had to go through that entire pt
post by post
and that with nobody left alive to contradict me. there's absolutely no reason why scum!me would have left that bit she views as damning in there
also note that the only person in the entire game who has actually done things for the town was xkfyu
when he killed skybird
even she had a fucking guilty on a scum slot and tried to argue against lynching them
Not ot mention the fact that her entire fucking wall
is clearly her looking at the entire game trying to find justification for her belief that we're scum
or else she's essentially scumreading us for bothering to show up and play
otherwise, why the fuck isn't she wallposting about shiro
why the fuck is the FIRST thign she looks into us
because she admits she hasn't even researched the other slots
she could have fucking looked into the other slots first, because OBVIOUSLY they have way less to look at
and arrived at conclusions about them
and been way more fucking productive
instead, today has been about her REASSURING herself
instead of seeing what the other possiblities are
also note that she missed DGB's forced roleblock/role steal thing when talking about scum ways to control town
oh, and the fact that we have a long history of not being as stupid as everyone else is in varsoon games
and not assuming that similar roles mean people are fake claiming
because we learned long ago that he does that shit deliberately
plus, farsides role was QUITE different from ours. She could just target people and block them, we had to talk people into allying us and then allying someone else
AND we also know that varsoon specifically notes if an ability can't interact with factionals
the fact that we didn't mention it, means that it obviously fucking can
and it's something there's no fucking reason for us to clarify
Oh, and you also need to note the fact that we DID NOT MISS THE FACT THAT GRAPES POWER CLEARS A50 IN THE EVENT THAT GRAPES IS TOWN
we fucking specifically mention that in the post immediatley prior
what I DO fuck up is rmeoving the A50/Shiro team as a possibility due to that same fact
but I DID NOT miss that mechanical point
not in the fucking least

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Actually. Fuck off and just fucking lynch us instead of wasting everyone's time pretending to actually evaluate the game. I'd self vote right the fuck now if self hammering in 3p lylo weren't playing against win con, just to spare myself and everyone else the pain of reading through another wall of your masturbatory prose.

I'm done dumping hours into giving you the fucking information you demanded only to have you come back and just repeat the same shulit ad nauseum.

Either play honestly or stop wasting everyone's(but mostly fucking my) time.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Actually, also, how the fuck are our posts today preplanned? We prefucking planned for grapes to use that fucking ability to remove A50, and for random to not use his claimed bubble, and thus put us into 3p lylo? We, the people who, by your own analysis, are ONLY scum if there's just one scum left, and thus couldn't have organized shit with grapes, anticipated that he would do that, and that random wouldn't bubble, and thus that the game would end up here, right now?

Yeah. Just keep fucking bending your own fucking rules to make the square pegs fit into round holes.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

What have we done for town? We pointed out exactly how to win with no escape routes for anyone. The only reason it didn't happen is because Grapes freaking LIED to conftown/gem to get released and then lurked out the day. I mean ... we're working out and constantly adjusting a plan as people think of flaws, constantly tinkering so it was always a town win at the end, and he's busy being obvscum ... and you're asking US what we did that's town?

As for your wall of mostly the same shit from 3 day phases ago:

I can answer all of those and even show you where you are stuck in confirmation bias. I have two questions for you before I invest any further time, because at this point you appear to be dead set on lynching us and losing with us rather than risking losing TO us. That's the only thing I can think of that explains the cognitive dissonance displayed in your huge wall. It is

precisely

because we know each other fairly well that I can level that criticism.

1.) Why have you assigned us an absurd burden of proficiency? You seem to think that we are infallible and should never ever make mistakes or forget things. Even if I hadn't had a computer issue partway through the game, I cannot imagine why you would hold us to such a ridiculous standard.

1a.) You DO realize that Titus stole our roleblock ability early on day 4, right? You are basing a large portion of your suspicion on the fact that you believe we would have asked a question about an ability that was permanently removed from us. That's well beyond reachy.

2.) You seem to have made up your mind. Despite a combined literally 30+ hours of doing what you've asked (while Shiro gave you a tiny post and came to the conclusion that we're town with the same info you claim makes us look scummy.), you claim we're not co-operating with you. This also seems like cognitive dissonance. Now you're asking a tremendous amount more time from us, in a very compressed amount of time because of the looming deadline. I'm not convinced that there's anything we can do to make you realize we're town, and nothing in that post makes me believe you are going to do anything other than hammer us. Frankly, that's a dick move (and after reading that wall, I feel like your plan for today was to see how much of our time you could waste, which is unbelievably rude and seriously pisses me off). Can you convince me in any way that you are actually open minded here?


Like ... we've spent a great deal of time in good faith. Cerberus went post by post through PTs where other people aren't here to contradict what he says and directly quoted everything,

even things which don't look great, like the fact that the early pressure on us made us feel like voting SC would actually hurt the wagon, but you say is us trying to 'have our cake and eat it too' (nice attempt at humor)

. Like ... and then you outright just tell us you

haven't even bothered

to look into other slots. That wall you made? That's you going through the thread specifically trying to find anything to make yourself feel justified when you hammer us and we flip town. There's not a shred of honest evaluation in there.

If you were actually being intellectually honest, you would have looked into the other slots first and decided what you thought about them.

In the end, all you have in that big old wall of conf bias and cognitive dissonance is a bunch of "cover your ass" so you can feel/claim you are justified in hammering us, and you've ignored the largest reason you should realize you're wrong if you believe we're scum: you're still alive. And the cognitive dissonance on display is staggering on that point, because you are saddling us with the burden of perfect proficiency, but then positing that we would engineer a scenario where we have to convince you to change your mind about a game long death tunnel on us.

I mean ... for fuck's sake ... you know

from experience

that I respect you enough to kill you and talk my way out of why you're dead. You watched me do it in SMITE. You really think we invested the absurd amount of time we have this game and decided "Hey ... let's leave Mastin alive so we can lose."? Really? Either you believe we are so good that we should have this absurd burden of proficiency applied to us, or you don't. You can't have your cake and eat it too (See what I did there?).

Oh ... and for the record: the only person who took an action that directly helped town all game was Xkfyu, who killed Skybird. You had a fucking GUILTY on TWIE and tried to argue against lynching him, and in literally the MOST staggering display of cognitive dissonance (and that's saying something), you have called us (me, specifically) scummy because I gave reads on like day 2 or something where I said that TWIE is a mid game player and usually lurks early, and I wanted to make sure he would get pressured if he didn't engage later. While you were busy trying to explain away a fucking investigative guilty, I was busy telling people I was town reading to make sure to go after him. But somehow I'm the scummy one?

I'm going to stop now. I like you and I consider you a friend and I'm not trying to just take a shit on you and ruin that. I'm just extremely exasperated. Especially because it's super obvious that you have just wasted our fucking time this day phase and haven't actually given any honest intellectual evaluation at all.

~D

P-Edit: Caught another example of just how far your head is up your ass. You haven't even read our posts. Like just a couple posts ago I pointed out that if Grapes is town, then it follows the only thing he lied about is when he could do his event and we should assume A50 is town, or else stress would have plummeted. Like ... I laid out the possibilities and explicitly pointed that out, and you think we missed it. Like ... I don't even know what to say when your post displays ignorance of the most simple things we've said today. I could

maybe

understand if you missed something in the alliance paraphrases, but really?

P-Edit 2: Wow. You managed to actually legitimately piss cerberus off. That's an achievement ... I guess.

[Reasonably Rational]

Actually, also, how the fuck are our posts today preplanned? We prefucking planned for grapes to use that fucking ability to remove A50, and for random to not use his claimed bubble, and thus put us into 3p lylo? We, the people who, by your own analysis, are ONLY scum if there's just one scum left, and thus couldn't have organized shit with grapes, anticipated that he would do that, and that random wouldn't bubble, and thus that the game would end up here, right now?

Yeah. Just keep fucking bending your own fucking rules to make the square pegs fit into round holes.

-Cerb

Oh, right, and we also performed that fantastic feat of play prediction while simultaneously deliberately failing MULTIPLE kills, AND wasting what appeared to be a day kill at ANY point prior to the time when it would automatically win us the game, AND thus setting up a teammate to be killed, AND utilizing an event to give THE PERSON WHO LITERALLY WROTE THE GUIDE TO BEING A COP a fucking cop check.

And then we rounded it all off by letting the conftown who has been scumreading us for MONTHS into the endgame with us.

Yeah. Right.

Fucking researching my ass.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Here's what really bothers me (and Cerb too ... he's been ranting at me for like 2 solid hours). The day started and I looked at the situation and the first thought I had was "GG scum" because I had literally 0% hope that you would actually take the time to evaluate the game on an intellectually honest level. But then you asked for us to spend a CONSIDERABLE amount of time and effort because, you said, you wanted to actually do your fucking job as conftown.

Then you proceeded to do jack shit for the whole day phase. Know how I know that? You haven't even bothered to look at other slots flavor, let alone dig any deeper, as you admit yourself. All you did was regurgitate your already debunked bullshit and look for things in what we did in good faith that you could twist into justification for what you had already decided to do.

That, I'm afraid, is something I won't be forgiving you for. You knew this entire day phase what you were going to do, and you decided to be spiteful (for whatever reason) and had us give up real life DAYS of our lives while you never had any intention of actually putting in the effort to figure things out. No effort and you're going to just lynch us, so why the FUCK did you waste so much of our time when you HAD TO KNOW there was no fucking way you were going to actually honestly do the work?

THAT is what pisses me off. If you had actually engaged and honestly evaluated everything and there was even ANY evidence of that at all, then that would be one thing. You haven't done jack shit except for waste our time, and that's just ... frankly the only word I can think that fits is reprehensible. Even if you feel 100% sure we're scum, you don't fuck around with our real lives and demand days of our time. That's so fucking despicable I can't even think of a way to express myself.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

You know, the sad thing is I know exactly how this ends. You come back, you read me turning my filter off and telling you the shit that I normally just keep to my pt with Drixx, and you call it "AtE". You call it "scum flailing". You IGNORE the content, and do what you've done all day...figure out how to make the new information fit the narrative you've created.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Actually, you know what, thank you mastin.

Thank you for making that post BEFORE I decided to spend my evening trying to get you all the information you asked for, and summarizing the game, and all that bullshit.

Thank you for only fucking us for 11 days instead of 14.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

You don't get it. We already dumped every spare moment of our daily lives into engaging with you, and all you did with that engagement was look for things to supplement your previous death tunnel walls. I wasn't kidding when I said I firmly believe that you came into today with the plan to just see how much time you could get us to waste. If there were any evidence of honest engagement from you, I would give you the benefit of the doubt. There simply isn't.

I asked you to tell me why on earth either of us should believe that going through that massive wall of shit we have already responded to before (for the most part) and talking to you will have any effect whatsoever. Still waiting for that answer.

~D

P.S. - I'm going to bed. I will check when I wake and see if you actually answer my question. There's not much benefit of the doubt left from my end. Read what I said. I meant it. I believe you intentionally cost us the bulk of our free time for the past 10 days when you knew you didn't have the time or intention to actually honestly engage. Nothing you have said or posted contradicts that theory. You cannot possibly understand, and I would be the worst sort of person if I explained it. Just know that you could not possibly have picked a better strategy to hurt me if you spent years experimenting.

[Reasonably Rational]

Actually. Fuck off and just fucking lynch us instead of wasting everyone's time pretending to actually evaluate the game.

I am not okay losing to you.
I am okay losing to Almost50.
I'm not sure if I'm okay losing to Shiro/grapes.

This is the problem.

You AREN'T evaluating things objectively, and that's on YOU, not us.

It's not on us to teach you how to be objective.

You shouldn't be "okay" losing to fucking anyone.

That shit above is WHY you approached things the way you did, all your rationalizing aside. You know we're town, but you're too afraid that you're wrong and "not okay" losing to us, so you'd rather just put on blinders and lose with us rather than risk losing to us.

With regards to my previous posts: No fucking shit. None of that was intended to convince anyone of anything. I simply had no desire to deal with what I view as your bullshit in the cordial fashion I would normally approach a series of questions like that, even if they're incredibly inane questions.

I am also going to sleep, and then I'm going to have work. I won't have anything substantial to say in here for at least 16 hours. If we're still alive at that point, I'll see how I'm feeling.

Before I go though, could you do me a favor and consider that, if scum!me was able to accurately predict that set of actions...how does today play out with random, who you just said was listening to me, in your place?

Mull that over.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

What we've done that is pro-town is so obvious it's staring you right in your gobsmacked face all game. We immediately networked and went to someone known for synergizing abilities to maximize our event. Even if Titus were scum, her advice to us had to be town or she'd out herself to us, so we got the use of her expertise on that. And while you say we blindly trusted her, that just tells me you didn't read what I had to say. I was skeeved out that she wasn't butting heads with us and just accepted us as town.

And ummm.. that plan fucking worked. It got YOU, a CONFTOWN, an investigate in a game which lacked any other HARD investigative abilities ... at all. Which you used and got a guilty with. Set aside the fact that you tried to argue against that guilty ... it still CAUGHT SCUM.

So explain to me why the FUCK scum!us even tells anyone about our event when you were outed as conftown by Yume. It makes sense that we did it the way we did because we're town and getting YOU the prize along with the extra information for town. That's fucking win-win for town and "why the fuck would you do that?" for scum.

Just Head to desk on the rest of your walls.

~D

P.S. - Push me a little further and I'm going to tell you why I'm so angry about the time wasting, and if I do, you will feel like a terrible person (which is why I'm restraining myself, because despite how angry I am, I still see a future where I stop being angry and I still have a friend, whereas if I unload the full brunt of this ... that future vanishes rationally).

[Reasonably Rational]

Okay, Mastin. I'm not irritated anymore. I'm going to take the time to respond to your wall. I will address all your points to the best of my ability. This will hopefully take an hour or less. I would appreciate if you took the time to check in AS SOON as you're able to. I have time tonight, we can have a conversation.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

The abilities you possess flavor-wise fit Army as being the last scum

.
The kill-upon hammer, and the forceful blocking of an ally, both seem like traits which fit the last scum for being Army. In contrast, the other two possible players for being Army (Almost50, Shiro) have abilities that I don't think make sense as coming from Army.
How would they, flavor-wise, make sense? How would yours NOT make sense? Because by the flavor as I understand it, your abilities are a perfect match for the flavor of Army; their abilities don't fit for Army at all.

The abilities you possess don't seem to match well with your given flavor of Sadie

.
Related to the above. While Beachapalooza is no doubt a Sadie event, we know that scum's town-events are tailored to their fakeclaim. I have no issue with the Beachapalooza events. But I maintain that your standard abilities seem to not match Sadie's flavor. I can

kind-of

see them. Sort-of. But it seems like a stretch. It feels like something Varsoon would give as a fakeclaim. It feels like something that is "close enough" to fit as a fakeclaim, but isn't as close as it'd be if it were an actual town role.

Now to be fair! I haven't looked up Shiro's flavor. I haven't looked up Almost50's flavor. I want to, and think I need to, to see how well THEIR abilities match their claims. If their abilities seem like a stretch, then this point would be invalid. But if their abilities seem to just naturally "fit", then this point becomes relevant: yours doesn't seem to fit well.

The flavor argument is flawed, for two reasons. First, the flavor of my abilities PERFECTLY match Sadie. Sadie as a character is rather low impact throughout, and the only truly significant instances of development with her character come from her relationship with Lar's, and her participation in the beach-a-palooza event. My abilities are entirely based upon the characters sometimes estranged relationship with Lars as expressed in those instances when she feels betrayed or used by him. She attempts to shut him out of her life or otherwise punish him as a result of these situations, which is essentially what my power's both correlate to. Second, regardless of whether or not the abilities that have been claimed by our scumspects match up with the flavor of Army, that doesn't account for the possible existence of abilities more obviously connected to the flavor of the character, nor does it account for the fact that the seventh scum could easily be yellow diamond, which means when we're looking for flavor correspondence there is essentially a nearly blank slate Varsoon had to work from for one of the slots.

All of that isn't even taking into account the fact that we have been specifically warned against "flavor gaming" the setup, which indicates to me that perfect correlations, or the absence of said correlation, shouldn't be considered as significant parts of any analysis of a slots likelihood of being scum.

The abilities you possess give the scum a much-needed strength boost

.
Almost50 has a tracker/watcher-type ability, when the scum have TWO other tracker/watcher abilities. This redundancy seems incredibly unlikely. (Additionally, if Almost50 were scum, that'd mean the town didn't have ANY tracker/watcher-type abilities.) Furthermore, his enhancement ability would give scum YET ANOTHER kill enhancement ability, something their scumteam has plenty of, between their scum roles and scum factional events which have been triggered throughout the game.
Shiro's ability is absolutely worthless to the scumteam outside of ONE specific scenario, that being, a permanent DGB neighborhood with scum. Aside from that one specific usage, aside from that one specific instance, Shiro's power grants the scum absolutely nothing.

In contrast, your claimed hammer ability (which, by the way, I'm not certain exists--why was SirCakez bubbled when you hammered D1? By my understanding of your ability, you should have caused him to instantly flip) would be able to shut down farside's lynch immunity and the gem's bubbling, among others. (Heck, it might've been able to even overcome increased lynch threshold!) It's an ability which can hurt town, but can't hurt scum because scum had no lynch immunity as you have claimed across the game they would possess.

Furthermore, and this is the ironic thing: you made a point in your ranting about how the scumteam lacks a way of shutting down the scum's power. This is true. The scum's flipped powers this game revolve almost entirely around TWO basic concepts: blending into the townbloc with town-sounding abilities...and enhanced kills to overcome protection on conftown. Yet there IS a slight deficit in scum power. The scumteam can blend into the town. The scumteam can get extra kills on town. But the scumteam, as it is, has no way aside from enhanced kills to actually

shut down

the town.

This deficit in scum power is not enough to justify an extra scumbag. It's only a slight deficit, not a severe one. Having an extra scumbag swings the game the other direction, giving them too much power, especially if said extra scumbag would be Almost50. But it IS enough where I thought the scum needed SOME form of power...and your claimed roleblock ability offers exactly that. Furthermore, if the scumteam's extra member is Shiro, it still doesn't solve the problem of scum being unable to shut down conftown.

First of all, my hammer ability only functions on season finales. That's why it didn't do anything on D1. Every opportunity to hammer on a season finale since then has ended up being a quick hammer performed by someone else, in spite of me specifically requesting to be allowed to hammer on that day. Yes, I expected all game for there to be SOMETHING the scum team had to justify my hammer power(especially when I learned that MoI also possessed that same ability). No, that ability has not materialized yet. I can't say whether this ability was put in by Varsoon as a red herring/limited value power(because it's main usage if no scum with any sort of lynch resistance exists is to force an immediate stress change rather than a delayed one), or if something actually exists that makes it a direct counter to a scum mechanic, and unless we no lynch and the scum team is grapes/A50, we will never reach a situation where it can be used again.

Now, regarding my ability to shut down the town's power(which is what I assume you meant when you said the scum's power): First, as I said, DGB did exist, and though I agree that her power was, by virtue of her inability to properly coordinate with her teammates, naturally limited, that doesn't make it magically go away. Second, the ability was quite limited, and rather lacking in the ability to actually shut down town power in a non-obvious way, and required prescience to have an active impact. I don't disagree that the power in scum hands could have been used to select a single target and prevent them from acting, but I don't see it being particularly likely to have the flexibility to be a power boost at the level you seem to think it would be.

I believe we severely disagree on the power levels. The towns most powerful roles were either both IC's and protected by layers of kill resistance options(the gems), or they simply werent the IC's. Scum almost had no choice but to shoot within the pool of Gems+IC's throughout the game, meaning that they were certain to waste at least a couple kills, and that the larger portion of towns power had a good chance of surviving to the late game. I think you simply don't weigh the functional IC slots as significantly in terms of town power as I do, which is consistent with your own modding position, but is something I feel is quite flawed. One simply has to look at Gistou to see what your perspective is on the matter. The URS were CLEARLY a huge benefit to the town, but you maintained that having such a large number of town slots coordinating together wasn't too bad, because of the distrust you sowed among them, and the fact that they could become anti-town. The Gems are almost exactly the same as the URS, except they WEREN'T given cause to distrust one another(though perhaps they had a similar anti-town clause in their win con/how their faction functions).

Basically, I don't believe that you accurately evaluated the strength of large groups of unlynchables in that game, and I don't believe you're evaluating it correctly in this game. The power gap between what we've seen from all factions and what I would expect is significant.

Oh, and to address the strength of what's been claimd: I agree that A50's ability enhancement may be a level of redundancy that goes too far, but considering the gulf in power from what we've seen, we can't clear him because of it. Shiro's power allowing the scum team to permanently communicate with DGB(which, btw, I DID miss) would, well, be an incredible boost, given the sheer strength of her role. I'm not sure why you view that as weak.

The timing/reason you joined the SirCakez wagon felt like bussing for towncred

.
You have consistently stated you have done this as your main selling point for why you are town. Yet your statement feels like you are overselling the importance of your position there. At the time you made your case against SirCakez, SirCakez was the main wagon, backed by many conftown/obvtown players such as myself. We were pushing HARD to get him lynched. Your vote hop onto the wagon there felt reminiscent of the way you bussed your scumbuddy on D1 in SC's game when you knew they were going down: it was a lost cause, on a player who was by and large now useless (thanks to DGB), and thus, running simple cost-benefit analysis would show that the benefit of bussing outweighed the cost of losing a scumbuddy.

Furthermore, you have painted a picture in which you say that your case important...and yet, behind closed doors, you were privately trying to dismantle your own case. With Titus, privately, you were attempting to discredit your own case. To make it weaker. To make it less valid. You were attempting to shift momentum AWAY from SirCakez in private, while publicly pushing him. This strongly looks like "having your cake and eating it two", trying to have it both ways: you publicly want the towncred, yet privately want SirCakez alive. Stuff like this is where you show that:

OWK: Vote SC.
Cerb:"I need to respond to his response. It, well, it actually was fairly reasonable. There are a couple things in there that pique my interest, but overall it's not bad. My skim doesn't say it's so not bad as to outweigh everything else, but it's worth looking into. "
Cerb:"So, just something to consider: If SC is scum, it seems basically impossible to get him lynched today. Between his teammates not voting him, and the joyride members not voting him, we'll basically need like 70%+ of the remaining town to vote for him. The existence of the joy ride even muddles how obvious it could be if his teammates refused to vote for him. "
Titus: We'll get the votes, don't worry.
OWK: Your vote will be the tipping point.
Cerb:"It is 100% up to mastin whether this particular issue becomes major or not. We'll see what she has to say whenever she shows up.

Honestly, I would *much* prefer the NC wagon over this one, considering that one just completely disappeared for no reason I can see."
Cerb:"Hate blank votes, coming from the slots they come from it makes me suspicious thst we've reached the tipping point and those two votes are scum rushing to make sure they're on the lynch,but probably at worst only one of xkfyu and creature is scum (assuming a scum flip from SC of course). If he's town, they could both easily be scum. That's pure theory talk though, doesn't take into account either slots play style. "
Titus: minimum of one is scum.
Cerb:"Actually, if he flips town, it's REALLY unlikely that either is scum imo. Considering the thread apathy, there would be no need for scum to jump on this wagon to push it over the edge."
Cerb:"I don't want him hammered until I can sort out wtf farside and A50 are doing. How did A50 miss what was apparently a line in his pt that told him he was BP/now figure out the source of it? Why would farside remove the bp and targeting restrictions? It doesn't make sense."
Cerb:"The real point of my search for clarity, OWK, is to determine if A50 KNEW that SC could grant BP to mastin(or at least, if he SHOULD have known). Determining whether or not I trust his claim to have "missed" it is another issue entirely.

Any thoughts on NC completely ignoring the post where I tell him that his opinion regarding this issue isn't trustworthy because he's most likely to be lynched if the SC lynch doesn't go through? I would have expected him to note that I'm just as likely to be lynched(since the main point of that argument is that the same people who are going after SC are suspicious of him as well, and there's a moderate overlap with those who are suspicious of me as well). "
Cerb: "NC has been an unsubstantiated scumread for awhile, largely influenced by both Drixx and yourself. He's on the list of things to look into if I ever get the time."

You also unvoted at a time where it was realistic that unvoting would have killed the momentum on his wagon altogether.

We rarely vote mastin. You know that. We also don't lynch people lightly, and we also FREELY kill momentum on wagons by unvoting when we have things we want to review before ending the day. These are facts. I'm well aware of what the late unvote on SC looks like, I was well aware of what it would like like if he flipped scum when he did it, and I didn't care. It's more important to me to resolve inconsistencies before ending the day.

Earlier you attempted to say that scum!me wouldn't bother removing the parts of my PT's which painted me in a bad light because I was so sure that everything looked incredibly town.

If I had been able to simply copy and paste the entire PT into the game, without having to read for context and to add some of those notes when things were unclear, you'd be right.

But I didn't. I had to read the entire PT. I read that part, I thought "well, that shit looks really bad, especially since I personally have gone on and on in the past about how D1 posting analyzed late game is one of the most useful tools for winning a game", AND I POSTED IT ANYWAYS. Because town doesn't lie. Perhaps I SHOULD have removed it, the same way sometime's the optimal play as town IS to lie to make sure the wagon doesn't shift onto you when you KNOW you have scum on the run, but I've always been quite opposed to town lies. They lose games, and I won't indulge in them.

It's possible that were I scum, I would choose to leave that bit in. I'm not going to deny that. I might view it as the bit of "bad" posting I could argue away, while allowing me to doctor the logs elsewhere. However, there is NO WAY I would leave that in thinking it's going to make ANYONE think I'm town.

With that said, you're again trying to argue opposing points. You're saying that I threw SC to the hounds, while working to keep him from being lynched, when the far SIMPLER explanation is that my read on him evolved over time due to his responses, and when doubts arose I kept them from the thread to keep from poisoning the wagon...the same way I chose to not vote NC when public opinon was against me, in spite of Titus' urging to do so.

Finally, and this is really important: My analysis up above, regarding the likelihood of SC actually getting lynched, is quite accurate. In a scum!SC universe without scum bussing, it was quite improbable that he would get lynched. Why would I choose to be the fulcrum of the lynch rather than rallying the troops to push elsewhere? Before you answer "town cred", let me remind you of a couple things: I'm well aware that mid wagon votes are viewed as prime bussing spots, and...the scum team had a sacrificial lamb to throw away, one who was already receiving suspicion. It would have been childs play to replace the post censuring SC with a post attacking the S_S slot and rallying for votes there, and instead of just getting towncred for a mid wagon vote, I could have been the driving force behind a D1 scum lynch. If you're going to have to give up a piece D1, why would you trade a queen for a pawn, when you could instead trade your pawn for a knight(figuratively speaking, in terms of relative town cred)?

The game narrative best matches with you as scum

.
It's true that the scumteam doesn't necessarily

require

a scum mastermind...but all the same, it's undeniable that the scumteam's actions this game have been, by and large, "smart". They have been on-point. Every time the town developed a strategy which was meant to catch/confirm scum and lock down a town win, they managed to prevent this from happening, every single time, every step of the way.

This doesn't match the level of quality I would expect from a Shiro scumteam. This does not match what I think grapes is capable of doing as scum. It could theoretically come from Almost50, but even then that feels like a stretch. But the scum slipping through the cracks makes perfect sense if you are scum, because exploiting gaps in town strategies and synergy is something you happen to specialize at doing.

I actually have no ability to respond to this. I'm simply not familiar enough with the planning abilities of the scum we've flipped, along with the remaining suspects. I"ve seen Shiro in hydra as scum, and I've seen A50 as scum in a game where I died N1. I can't speak on what is or isn't within their abilities. I do know what's within my abilities though. I've pointed out the incredibly stupid things I, as scum, would have had to do up to this point(and yes, we don't know WHAT the event that killed yume was..but if whatever restrictions it had in place were NOT time or stress based, it seems quite plausible that it could have been used late game rather than early. Even if it was a kill specifically targeting Steven, scum!me could have simply blocked Yume for the rest of the game with the plan of using it to kill her at the optimal time). You still haven't actually addressed these points to my satisfaction actually. Is your position that we masterfully dodged things while making some fundamental mistakes, or is it that the fundamental mistakes were in fact ploys on our part?

The stances you have held have consistently been the stances most convenient for the scumteam

.
You were a late pusher of SirCakez, not understanding the wagon initially, and then making a push when it was inevitable. When SirCakez claimed and some players unvoted, you too unvoted, making the SirCakez wagon no longer inevitable.
You similarly protected DGB until it was shown beyond any reasonable doubt she would be scum.

You reversed your stance on Skybird. Initially, you advised against mechanically clearing Skybird for knowing who Steven was on D1 (but formed a nulltown read on her slot anyway). Then, come D2, suddenly you have her as unlynchable town...not via play, but because...she knew who Steven was on D1. The very thing you advised against doing, and yet she went from nulltown to unlynchable town, violating your prior advice.

While you said you noted that "TWIE needs to do something to be town, else lynch him", when push actually came to shove, you showed incredible resistance to his lynch. You were advocating for farside's death that day, insisting that we follow Titus's will rather than mine. You eventually relented when I continued pressing the issue, but I had to fight tooth and nail to get that lynch through.

You protected Shadow_step when he was up for a lynch. The votes between Creature and Shadow_step were basically tied, and your vote helped swing momentum towards the Creature lynch. You voted for an incredibly-scummy, opportunistic-sounding reason as well, "welp, might as well do this", essentially, rather than a clear-cut case for why Creature was the superior lynch.

Furthermore, you also kept Fuzzy from vigging Shadow_step, which not only gave Shadow_step an extra day alive (forcing us to lynch him), but also prevented Fuzzy from being confirmed as town, because Fuzzy's shot going through that night would have confirmed Fuzzy as town (since scum couldn't act).

Then, you convinced Fuzzy to shoot farside. Farside was immune to the scum nightkill. She could NOT be killed by them. Both the conftown players were heavily defending her. And with her executioner-lite role, she would be incredibly hard to lynch. With ANY non-farside wagon gaining ANY momentum, she could use her role and force the lynch through on a non-her player, and that is something the scum couldn't have around. (She was also heavily-scumreading your slot.)

Additionally, Fuzzy shooting farside rather than in you/Almost50 prevented the resolution of the grapes/Almost50/RR/Fuzzy dilemma which CONTINUES EVEN NOW DAYS LATER because it wasn't resolved.
This, not even going into your consistent third party paranoia. Your paranoia towards the crystal gem faction. Your paranoia towards farside. How much paranoia am I to expect is actually reasonable or rational coming from you?

And then, on a last note, you resisted the plans which involved your death every step of the way. You insisted, "we need to live" almost every time. "Don't lynch us". Let a less-assured nightkill take you out instead. From a Fuzzy vig to a Shiro bubble, you've insisted on not being lynched, but rather, on the less-assured being taken out at night. This showed extreme survivalism, at a time there was no justification for doing so. (Fuck, we had an autowin plan! Why try to survive if the town can win 100% of the time?)

Almost50 advocated for his own death, his own lynch, for literally days. Shiro similarly showed signs of wanting to be dead. You always showed the opposite. You always insisted that you needed to live...or at the very least, "we shouldn't die

right now

, even if we should later". What time was "later" actually supposed to be? Because it sure hasn't materialized!

On that note, you kept randomidget from bubbling within the Almost50/RR duo off of "paranoia of an extra scum kill", which...again. Is paranoia.
Until today when you being town would necessitate the stance, so too was the idea of an extra scum paranoia. So again. At what stage am I to believe this amount of consistent paranoia is actually town? Because your constant, neverending paranoia EVERY step of the game has served to discredit town after town, cast shade on player after player, with most of them having flipped town. Why should I believe that constant paranoia casting comes from a playerslot whose fucking NAME is "Reasonably Rational"?
Because reasonable means "sound judgment; fair; sensible"; rational means "based on/in accordance with reason or logic".
Paranoia means "suspicion and mistrust of people/actions

without evidence of justification

".
It's pretty much a fucking antonym of reasonable and rational, and yet paranoia has been YOUR DEFINING TRAIT this game.

I'm going to address your last sentence first, and I'll give you the necessary context to explain this paranoia, because I know you missed these transformative experiences.

In Space Dandy 2, we had a guaranteed victory locked up. 100%. There was quite literally no way(with the scum mechanics as they ended up being revealed), for the scum team to live...had we had the foresight to be properly paranoid and force someone to utilize a single shot multi-vote we KNEW was in play, and which was of no benefit to the town in the current game state. In addition, in that game it was possible for the scum team to have won the game EXTREMELY early on with optimal play on their part. They didn't realize, or at least didn't take that particular line, but had they, our paranoia is the ONLY thing that would have prevented them from winning through optimal mechanical play on D3 or so.

In Bloodborne, which you seem to have some awareness of...the scum team was able to quickhammer their way through multiple day phases using a single slot, because of a mechanical quirk that slot had which I actually viewed as something which scum would NEVER be given in that game, thus contributing to my town read on the slot prior to me catching them(though not posting quickly enough to turn the catch into an actual lynch).

In Saga Frontier, I won with wgeurts because town was too short-sighted to consider any endgame scenario that didn't include gaining 50% of the remaining slots.

What do these games all have in common?

Town lost because they were not paranoid enough.

Consequently, I am FAR more paranoid now than I have been in the past. FAR less likely to dismiss something merely because it's improbable. I can weight it when evaluating probabilities, but I DO NOT dismiss things, and when those improbable things are supported by suspicious day play and ignoring them results in a loss, I latch onto them and refuse to let them go.

It DOES fly in the face of our name, on it's surface...except, well, what's more reasonable than survival? What's more rational than accepting the sub optimal play that shuts out the guaranteed death scenario?

Alright, now let's get back to everything you're saying.

SC wagon: I didn't understand why people were wagoning him until I actually ISO'd him. That's pretty straightforward. I already explained my unvote.
DGB: This is another instance of you attempting to have your cake and eat it too. I actually don't recall at all how the DGB wagon formed and was pushed. What I do remember is that you say the SC wagon was allowed to happen because he lost all value once DGB and KC had their interaction...yet after the SC flip was revealed, and I would have had every expectation that the entire town would turn on DGB...I instead chose to protect her? Another slot that was, if anything, even more inevitable a lyhnch than you believe SC was on D1? Why do I again take the suboptimal path?
Skybird: I actually have no recollection of my early game interactions with skybird. I don't recall ever saying that she was probtown or anything because of the alliance with Steven, but Drixx may have? This is something that I'd need to iso myself to resolve, and this is already taking longer than I planned to get through. You might be right? We may have discussed it and decided that, once we figure out mastin was confirmed town to Yume, that it was too obvious to have scum as the other individual Yume could chat with? I know we threw ideas back and forth, but I have no fucking clue if we ever actually arrived at a conclusion.
TWIE: *shrug* Titus wanted Farside dead before TWIE. I haven't got around to that PT yet(and I very much doubt I will before deadline), but that's basically it. We had plenty of cause to believe she was scum, and the greatest threat to town, and Titus had told us to go after her first. Not anything more to it than that, as unsatisfying as that answer is.
S_S: You can see in our PT with Titus that Creature was on our radar for essentially the ENTIRE game. Beyond that, this is again a spot where I'd need to check the context and my logs with Drixx to see what other thoughts we had regarding the situation.
Fuzzy vig: No. No. No. We explicitly told fuzzy that if he was going to shoot anyone he should shoot S_S because that shot would guard against the worst case scenario, which is also what shooting farside was intended to do. Yes, in hindsight we should have said "Either shoot S_S or don't shoot anyone", instead of asking him not to shoot and then suggesting that if he did shoot, it be at S_S. That was poor communication on our part once we had realized that a proper shot would prevent the threat we were concerned about. Call it irrational paranoia all you want, we saw a clear and present danger and did everything in our power to ensure a game loss wouldn't occur outright because people were being short-sighted.

I already addressed the farside shot at length in the past. In short, everything about her play was scum!me's wet dream, and she was the easiest possible 3p lylo mislynch, since all 3p lylo's required the removal of her defenders.

Regarding the survivalism: First of all, we have REPEATEDLY offered ourselves up to be killed. Yes, at every point we preferred someone else was killed, because it's nearly always better to have someone of uncertain alignment removed rather than yourself. You suggest that the night kill variants were "less certain", and you'd be right if we still had our ability...but we don't. A NK was functionally identical to a lynch as far as we were concerned, except lynching someone else meant the game could END outright rather than giving scum further opportunities to change the game state.

Every step of the way, you have shifted blame

.
It's NEVER been your fault. It's always someone else having fucked up. To whit,
Beachapalooza not catching scum was Titus's fault for activating her IC. A miscommunication allowing scum to hide.
The gem paranoia was Yume's fault, for not communicating appropriately.

Protecting TheWayItEnds on Day 5, that was Titus's idea, plus "farside deserved it" because she was clearly scumming the thread up.
The Creature lynch, that was Creature's fault, combined with bad communication from farside meaning she was also partially to blame. (More on that below.)

Fuzzy holding fire and not conftowning himself was his decision, his choice, not yours.
Similarly, Fuzzy shooting farside was his decision, his choice, not yours. Also, because Almost50 was pressuring him to do so, you hold no responsibility for also having pressured him to do so.

Titus DID fuck up beach-a-palooza. Period. It was a colossal mistake on her part. She should have either insisted she receive it in our initial conversation(which we would have looked askance at, but it would have made sense when she popped her IC), or simply not popped her IC.
The gem paranoia should have been in the game from the start. I don't believe I ever blamed Yume for anything regarding them, other than her resistance to flipping KC. That's the only thing Yume ever did that gave us any reason to be suspicious of them. Oh, and the fact that she didn't claim to conftown. Touche, actually. That initial suspicion of the gems was spurred on by her actions, and the power imbalance from our speculation.
Umm. Don't put words in my mouth. I am pretty fucking sure I did not claim that "farside deserved it". And no, protecting TWIE was not Titus' idea. Ensuring Farside was lynched ASAP was.
I don't think we said we didn't deserve some degree of the blame for farside getting shot? The difference is just that we believe it was the optimal play, and you disagree.
Already addressed the fuzzy thing above. Same with the Creature lynch.

You have consistently treated me like crap the entire game

.
You have put me down every step of the way, even when I have been shown to be objectively right at almost every turn. You have ignored me when I've pointed stuff like this out before (the large majority of what I'm saying here is a rehash of old stuff I said before!), and focused on strawmanning my arguments, attacking the weakest points and acting as if that served to dismantle my entire argument.

You resisted simple requests of mine every step of the way. You have constantly stalled. The few times you address me, often from Cerb there were "misunderstandings" of what I asked, or from Drixx flat-out hostility towards my requests. You have pretended that you don't have an attitude problem, and insisted that *I* have one. You have insisted that *I* am the problem here. You have consistently pretended that nothing you've done is wrong, displaying a level of arrogance beyond what I've EVER seen from you in any capacity in a prior towngame. As Cerb, as Drixx, as RR.
On that note,

No, mastin, you have NOT been objectively right at almost every turn. You've been stubborn. You've refused to admit you were wrong.When we've responded to your posts, you've brushed our responses aside as inconsequential, and done EXACTLY what you accuse us of doing, strawmanned them.

The ONLY request you've made that was "simple" that I didn't deliver on in a timely fashion was you asking me to propose a game winning plan, and yes, that was a misunderstanding.

Wtih regards to the difference in our attitude towards you: You've NEVER gone so far out of your way to paint us as scum. From the moment you DELIBERATELY misinterpreted a post I made some days back asking you to explain how something would benefit me (or something along those lines, I honestly can't remember the post details), I've viewed you as hostile and unreasonable, and there's nothing you've done to make me feel any differently. You admit this is just a rehash of things you've said before, THINGS WHICH I HAVE INDEED ADDRESSED FOR THE MOST PART, BUT WTIH RESPONSES YOU SIMPLY CHOOSE TO BRUSH OFF.

Regarding us never admitting fault: Look at your voting history throughout the game. Look at the pushes you made. There were some good ones, yes, but there were also PLENTY of bad ones...and you haven't displayed contrition for those. The ONLY thing there could possibly be the tiniest reason for us to feel we've done wrong is push farside, and that was absolutely the optimal play to make.(This is, of course, barring me seeing some obvious reason why we shouldn't have voted for creature).

You should have known I believed you to be scum, yet acted otherwise

.
This is bad wording on my part, but during part of the game, you were actively working to discredit me. You were saying how much I wasn't actually scumreading you. How it was personal. How it was bias. How it wasn't sincere. How I was a liar. Yet you know me enough to know that was bullshit.
And similarly,

You have worked against me the majority of the lategame

.
In spite of me being conftown, rather than try and work within my requests, you discredited me in the eyes of others. You worked with randomidget, rather than me. You worked with MoI, rather than me. You worked with all the players you now think are scum, rather than working with me, the one player who was 100% conftown. I was scumreading you, yes. But you, as town, have worked with me in the past while I was scumreading you with zero problems at all. You worked around the scumread. You tried to find common ground. You tried to present stances which would get me to be more receptive. You were, in a sentence,
"Okay, I get that you're scumreading me. I can't stop that. What I can do is give you my thoughts, which are this. Please listen when I flip town". I saw basically none of that this game. Instead, I just saw, "mastina is wrong". Over and over again, addressed to everyone except for me.

Your inability to grasp these issues goes beyond reasonable doubt

.
You've never had this much problem communicating with me in past games as town. Not ONCE. Not once have you felt so off, so out of touch, with my issues towards you.

These are all the same point, essentially. Please refer to the previous section. Again, you very deliberately misinterpreted a question I asked you to continue your tirade against me. You became, as it were, persona non grata from that point forward as far as I was concerned. Perhaps it was shortsighted, but I didn't view you as having anything of value to offer the game because you refused to honestly evaluate the game state.

Your stances have consistently changed as most convenient/opportunistic

.
When grapes was seen as town by the rest of the town, you treated grapes as town. It was ONLY when grapes became a viable mislynch that you formed a scumread on them. And then, suddenly, when grapes became an inconvenient mislynch, you reversed your read back to town. When grapes's power potentially could break the game, you were buttering up to grapes, and when grapes was no longer an issue, this was dropped.

When I townread grapes, you formed a grapes townread yourself. When I voted grapes, it was back to a scumread. When Shiro was considered all-but-conftown, you treated Shiro as town. Yet when Shiro became the only possible realistic scum, suddenly Shiro shifted into a hard-scumread as if you were always scumreading Shiro from the start.

When Almost50 was a universal townread (and also, had you as his main townread), you had him as your strongest townread. And yet, when Almost50 turned on you and became a viable mislynch, he was suddenly a scumread of yours, a 180 reversal which went almost without any explanation whatsoever.

In this lylo phase, you have taken every step possible to prevent me from eliminating teams. You have overlooked mechanics until I have pointed it out. When you have stated things about the setup, you have prevented them from definitively ruling out teams. You have been keeping your options open, not locking yourself in. (This, in spite of my deliberate request for you to do exactly that!)

When I wasn't someone you needed the help of, you were consistently pushing me away. (See above.) And yet, now, when I'm the game-deciding vote, suddenly you're treating me a whole different way, as if all of that shitty stuff you said to me had never happened and we were always on the best of terms. Buddying up to me.

No. I treated grapes as unlynchable, because he was. There were always people more suspicous to push, especially with you and MoI opposing me on farside. Grapes simply wasn't important enough to put time or effort into evaluating.

I'm not sure what you're referring to in a lot of these stance shifts, actually. A shitload has happened. Again, I could go find the context and give you a proper response, but I'm up to over 2 hours responding to this right now, when I only budgeted an hour for it. With that said, if someone becomes the only realistic scum, then yes, I'm going to posit them as scum. I don't see what the problem is here, but again, I'm not sure exactly what situation you're referring to.

A50 did something extremely opportunistic, and in direct contradiction to both his stated stances throughout the game, and his own suggestion made shortly before. The fact that the slot he attacked was us is irrelevant. Anyone who behaved the way he did would immediately come under suspicion from us. You should know that.

And this last one, there are a couple problems with it. First of all, if we had the capacity to treat you this whole different way deliberately and manipulate you at any time, why didn't we do it throughout the game? Why make an enemy of you, of all people? Where's the sense in taking this line? Also, again, after spending the entire game antagonizing you...WHY ARE YOU HERE to be the critical vote? You can handwave away this point by saying there are too many variables, but NO, there are not.

Grapes event he used was a climax event. Thus, the game state as we entered today would not have been changed based on who was killed in the night.
If we could have anticipated both grapes and randoms actions, as you believe we would, then we would have anticipated a Shiro/us/Randomidget LYLO.
The bubble that random claimed to have is irrelevant, because either way random would be the deciding vote. The only question would be whether random would decide during the day with a cast vote, or at night with a bubble.

So, again, why the hell do I leave you alive?

You have looked for every escape route possible

.
You've avoided closing doors. You've avoided confronting issues revolving around you. You've avoided the lynch like a plague. You've tried to find every possible way for scum to not be you. I don't see genuine scumhunting. I don't see genuine game solving. I see a player who is trying to keep options open, as to best have a chance of avoiding the noose.

This isn't something I can respond to. I've told you what I've done. You choose to interpret my actions otherwise. I responded above to the lynch avoidance accusation. Yes, I've avoided closing doors because YOU DON'T HAVE GOOD REASONS to close them. There's an entire game of evidence of scumhunting and gamesolving. Lead a horse to water and all that...this is all mushy feeling stuff, and I can't argue with that. You don't feel what i've done is genuine. I don't have anything to say to arguments of that sort.

You have been incredibly manipulative of the game's narrative

.
Every step of the way, you have said "we are town, we have helped the town, we did these things, and they were town". And yet, none of them are, as far as I can tell, actually true. (More on that below.)

Your private topics were incredibly manipulative

.
I haven't read the D3 one, but I have read the D1 and D2 ones.
Your blind trust in Titus felt beyond reason. The way you tried to go about gaining her trust also felt like it was something which was only of benefit to you as scum. Then when you actually did gain her trust, you went about trying to influence her. You encouraged her to lynch town players and discouraged her from voting SirCakez. (As seen above.)

Yet most of your thoughts in there were sheeping Titus--they were giving her exactly what she

wanted

to hear. You consistently were hedging bets on many key players/issues in the game. The way you were trying to make Titus ignore me, in private, when I was already conftown. And then there's how, on both D1 and D2, you point out justifications for scum acting ways now that certain behaviors have come true...before the scum acted that way, as if laying the groundwork to allow the scum to do exactly that, and leave you saying, "See, we warned you about this!".

It all was tailored to the individual. The way you treated Titus was tailored specifically to Titus. The way you treated Yume was tailored specifically to Yume. It looks like you were doing exactly what you needed to do in order to not only gain their trust, but also avoid the noose.

See my previous post about your feelings. I can't respond to these arguments, because there's no substance to them. I don't know what you're talking about when you say we were trying to make Titus ignore you, unless you're referencing Drixx's rant post that he wanted to make to you? If so, nothing in that was an attempt to make Titus ignore you, it was Drixx being pissed at you. But again, because this is all "interpretive" there's no real discussion to be had.

Your posts coming into today felt preplanned

.
It was as if you knew the outcome of the night, that randomidget would die rather than me, that you'd be most likely facing the scenario we're currently in. How would you have predicted this as town?
On that note,

You know I am prone to doubt

.
Your posts today have appealed to my natural-born fears. I am innately afraid. I am innately paranoid. I constantly reasses, with a strong fear that I might be wrong. You have appealed strongly to this fear, exploiting it. You know my personality, and know that I would be reevaluating. You know that I would reexamine. You know how prone to doubt I am, how much when I live longer than I should I begin to question fundamental assumptions.

So you know better than anyone else how well you could argue against me and appeal to my nature as a player. Why should I believe you're not?

I already addressed this, but let me add something else: Why do you think I would PREFER to have to fight tooth and nail to convince you, to capitalize on your nature and manipulate you, when instead I could be spending the day talking to random and shiro? Why do you believe that I pay so much attention to your walls that I actually have this gut knowledge of your character that would cause me to choose to autolose if I were wrong? There's so many assumptions about the way I think and approach the game in almost every point you make, and I can't for the life of me figure out WHY you believe these things.

You have made mechanical misplays which violate your namesake

.
I'm missing plenty (like you having 'forgotten' about grapes's ability's claimed -4 stress if aimed at scum), but among them are two critical ones. One, I'll mention separately.
A second involves the Creature/farside day. Farside was rather unambiguous about her role: her ROLEBLOCK could not stop factional kills; she blocked Creature.
Her ASCETIC she clarified was full-on action immunity, and COULD block the scum's factional kill, an altered detail of her claim.
She was claiming her ACTION IMMUNITY was triggered.
Yet even after this clarification, you acted as if she had a guilty on Creature she herself said she did not have.

Drixx is a fucking idiot. That's all there is to this. I told him, REPEATEDLY that he was wrong about this, and that he had misunderstood. Over and over again, but he kept posting that bullshit. Look those posts over. Seriously, I wasn't the one suggesting we had a guilty on creature due to farsides roleblock claim(at least, not after she clarified how it functioned(I can't recall if I bought into the guilty before she clarified). I tried to drag Drixx in here to respond to this because it didn't make sense to me then, and it doesn't make sense to me now, and he told me he was too pissed at you to go back to reread and he didn't remember the situation, and when I refreshed his memory he just said he misinterpreted it and didn't have shit to say when I told him I kept tellin ghim he was wrong and he kept insisting.

There is a glaring hole in your play this game given your roleclaim

.
You claimed a permaroleblock, but something I noted was that you did NOT include any reference to whether that permaroleblock would affect the scum's factional abilities.
I gave you every chance to clarify this in-thread. I prodded you both on it, by asking for both heads to give the paraphrase. I also asked the question about the way your role functioned, which would have given you an additional chance to lay out the nature of the roleblock. (Admittedly I could have probably done this better.)

And yet, not ONCE did I see you claim the same clause that farside claimed, that her roleblock could not block the scum's factional abilities.
Am I to believe you left out that critical detail of your role PM? You, the mechanically-based player, neglecting to mention a vital part of your role?
Am I to believe you didn't have it spelled out in your role PM and never asked the mod for clarification on the issue?
Or am I to believe your roleblock actually COULD block the factional abilities of scum, when farside's roleblock could not?

No matter which option is the case, it's a difficult pill to swallow. No matter what, there is something absent which should not have any reason to be absent. Why did you not specify this detail? Did it never occur to you? It occurred to me, and I'm NOT the same level of mechanical genius that you two are, so why did you mention absolutely nothing about this, when FARSIDE the less-mechanically-inclined person had the mindfulness to do so?

Furthermore, I admit that this part I haven't gone to check on yet. I want to, but I haven't set aside the time to actually do it yet.

You have a permaroleblock ability.
When farside claimed her own roleblock ability, I recall nothing in the way of you trying to ask her a bunch of questions about it.
You, who had a roleblock ability yourselves.

Where was your attempt to either catch farside in a lie about it, or confirm she really had it?

Where was you pressuring her, for having a nearly-identical ability to your own? You having that ability, you could as Varsoon about it. You could get him to answer questions about yours, and lay traps for farside. Test her knowledge. Force her to ask questions to Varsoon about her role, and if she failed to deliver, you would've had proof that she was scum; if she did deliver, you would have something loosely indicating she was town.

Where was this process? This is something that should have been pathetically simple for you, the mechanical-based players, to have figured out: "farside's claiming a roleblock, we have a roleblock, let's pressure her about it". Yet I don't recall you so much as ONCE bringing this up at any point of the game.

I admit I haven't verified this point. But this is a really fucking huge thing. How could you, the mechanics-based player, make such a mistake as to pass the golden opportunity up?
This also exemplifies my problem with your attitude towards the Creature lynch. If you knew your roleblock couldn't block the factional kill, why would you think farside's could? Why try to lynch Creature that day, rather than try to lynch farside who you'd have good reason to think was a liar?

Yes, you lost your permaroleblock when Titus stole it...but you still STARTED with the ability, and had access to it for, what, three days? You could have asked about it if you had any interest in using it. And furthermore, even after having lost it, because you STARTED with the ability, V would be more than happy to answer questions about your original role PM even if the section questioned about would no longer be valid.

Addressed previously(Sorry, it's like 10:36 now and I needed to be done with this an hour ago). We NEVER viewed Farsides role as so similar that we should be suspicious, and if we had said suspicion wouldn't have applied because of our knowledge of the mod meta, and again because of said mod meta, there was no need to clarify that our ability could stop factionals.

What have you done that was actually town?

You

say

that you have done things which were town. But what have you done that was ACTUALLY town? Aside from the SirCakez lynch, which I put my issues with above?
You cleared Skybird off of mechanics.
You kept suspicion away from DGB for as long as humanly possible.

Your main claim to being town and having towncred is the Beachapalooza event...yet that event didn't catch scum in the voting. The only way that event caught scum is via me using a gunsmith shot on TWIE, something you, personally, had no control of and no way of knowing I would do. You had no way of knowing which power I would choose. You had no way of knowing which target I would choose. You had no way of knowing I'd do that, so you cannot claim credit for it, especially when TWIE wasn't my main choice. (You were my first, you told me via Yume that'd be a waste. MoI was my second, Yume told me not to. This was all very, very public, but my investigation was not.)
The point I'm making here is that the Beachapalooza event didn't actually catch scum by nature of the votes themselves.

What have you done since then? You made a plan with Titus which would have allegedly confirmed you--except Titus died, so there wasn't anything actually town there.
You said you had an early point about TWIE needing to do anything else he'd be scum...yet on D5, you insisted on lynching farside before TWIE. A move which would have favored scum.

You lynched Creature instead of Shadow_step when both were on the line--how was that town?
You encouraged Fuzzy to hold fire when Fuzzy successfully shooting would have proven Fuzzy was town--how was that town?
You encouraged Fuzzy to shoot farside, when we knew farside was immune to the conventional scum nightkill--how was that town?
You can claim these were "the right idea, IN THEORY". You can claim that these were right ideas on principle. You can claim that these moves were technically-correct plays, plays which made sense to do at the time even though in hindsight they were mistakes.

Yet the simple fact is, in hindsight, NONE of them were actually town moves, because NONE of them brought the town closer to victory--quite the opposite, they brought the scum closer to a win each and every time.

So again, what have you done which was actually town? Not "town in theory". Not, "town if used optimally". Not, "town in ideal circumstances". Not, "town with conditions that didn't materialize".
What have you done which was town THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?

A tl;dr of the above could be this one sentence:
The whole game, you have acted in a way convenient to scum, and yet when called out on it, denied having done so.

This last bit is, well, such bullshit. It's a request for something that can't be provided, because you've already dismissed out of hand every action we've taken that's been pro-town, because of your results bias.

The KEY to playing ANYTHING is knowing the optimal response to any given situation, and making that response. We have done so. The results are, to be perfectly honest, irrelevant. In addition, using those same standards you've demanding of us, I don't believe that any slot, with the exception of Xkfyu, could answer your question in a satisfactory fashion. People play in the way they believe to be optimal. Sometimes, those optimal lines end poorly. Sometimes, suboptimal lines are taken and end well. You try to dismiss things that are "in theory" correct, but THAT'S all that matters, because that's the only thing you can look at objectively. If you look at things based ONLY on results, then your analysis is fundamentally flawed, because it is naturally biased by hindsight.

Sorry this took so long, got close to the end and realized I needed food. Let me know if there's anything more we can have an actual conversation about, I'll try to respond as best I can throughout tomorrow.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Gonna answer your first few comments before I head off to work. I'll try to get around to the rest at work, but the formatting will surely be messier for each portion.

In a scum!SC universe without scum bussing, it was quite improbable that he would get lynched.

And yet, for me to believe you are town, it requires exactly that:
I am believing Shiro is town.
grapes did not START the game as scum. (This I am 100% firm on, as an absolute fact.)
As a result, if you were town, SirCakez would be an all-town lynch. (Well, effectively so.)

True. However, I believe a large part of why that occurred was due to farside removing the alliance, which is not something i could have predicted. At the time I made that post, a lynch on SC was, in spite of the votes currently on him, a pipe dream. This is something I'm pretty good at, that is, evaluating how likely suspicion on someone is to turn into an actual lynch, taking into account various factors. It's a large part of why I'm good at avoiding getting lynched in spite of nearly always attracting some degree of early game pressure...I know when it becomes possible that, without damage control, a lynch is more likely than not, and move to get out ahead of it.

I'm actually not really sure what the point of this portion is. There are two options. Either I was wrong in gauging the probability of an SC lynch occurring(which, btw, is the opposite of what you're accusing me of doing. You believe that I accurately gauged the probability of his lynch, and chose to bus(which of course begs the question of why did only *I* bus?)), or because circumstances changed in a fashion I couldn't predict, my evaluation was rendered obsolete. I don't believe either of those possibilities are significant.

Why would I choose to be the fulcrum of the lynch rather than rallying the troops to push elsewhere?

There were signs of exactly that, were there not? And when those attempts didn't materialize, the lynch went through anyway.

The SirCakez wagon had no scum counterwagon.
So it's not a question of "why would a scum player not try to rally the troops elsewhere?".
Because we know they didn't. Regardless of who is scum, we know they failed to do this, because there was no scum counterwagon. None really. The closest was farside (Almost50) at 3. Shiro (Skybird) had 2. McMenno had 2 but none were scum. So we know for a fact...scum were not wagoning town. Asking, "Why didn't we?" is pointless as a result, because we know scum didn't.

No. It's important because of your constant BoP'ing of me. You can't conveniently ignore actions(or lack of action) that contradict the level of play you expect from me, while simultaneously holding up other instances as proof that I must have been involved.

The question isn't "Why would a scum player not try to rally the troops elsewhere?" It's..."why wouldn't Reasonably Rational try to rally the troops elsewhere, OR try to make sure more of his team was on the lynch?"

I've pointed out the incredibly stupid things I, as scum, would have had to do up to this point. You still haven't actually addressed these points to my satisfaction actually. Is your position that we masterfully dodged things while making some fundamental mistakes, or is it that the fundamental mistakes were in fact ploys on our part?

Option C: the scumteam this game, while playing

well

, has not played perfectly. This is undeniably a fact, yes?
This applies regardless of who is scum: the scumteam has managed to evade every town trap, every town maneuver. This is the type of play I describe as the "scum mastermind".
But the thing about even the best scum players is that they are not infallible. They are human. They can make mistakes, make a miscall, make a misjudgment: something which

seemed

like a good idea at the time, but which in hindsight proved to be an error.

Would you say it is beyond your capability to make a mistake in a scum ability when scum?
Of course it's not. You make mistakes

less

than a normal scum player would. You have a tighter grasp of mechanics than most players, so you usually understand the consequences of your actions. Yet you can fuck up.
And when you fuck up as scum, what do you do as scum?
Be honest.

You already know the answer: You self-burden-of-proficiency with damage control and say, "If we were scum, we would be competent enough

not

to do that".

Can't argue with this. I'm capable of making mistakes. If I made a mistake, I would definitely attempt to at least get some benefit out of it. That's absolutely correct.

The issue here is the matter of scale though. I could reasonably see you feeling this way if it were just one out of character thing, but it's not JUST one thing. It's several things. Not just is it several things, it's several OBVIOUS things that would cause me to double down on my planning and predictions, to ensure these things wouldn't happen again...and yet they did.

I am FAR more paranoid now than I have been in the past.

Is it fair to say I am paranoid of your alleged paranoia?

Fair enough. I can't say much more about this other than to suggest you at least skim our hydra pt notes in Space Dandy 2(I'm pretty sure we copied most of it in) It shouldn't take long, but you should see us, from VERY early on, working out auto-loss scenarios and trying to prevent them from happening. As much as I love Varsoon and the work he does, Saga Frontier weakened my belief that he wouldn't utilize mechanics that would make the game feel unfair at endgame. Space Dandy 2 crushed that belief, and Bloodborne cleaned up the rubble.

Off to work, I'm going to tell Drixx that he should respond to the rest if he feels up to it, otherwise I'll do my best to get to it myself.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Oh, and real quick before I go:

You'll note that I never answered your question about why Shiro is scum.

That's because I don't really have any reason to believe he's scum, other than PoE. Other than "If it's not A50+Grapes, it MUST be Grapes+Shiro". There have been things , even today, that could be argued as being scummy. He misrepresented our power as a mass roleblock. He asked for us to vouch for his words in the Titus/us/him PT earlier, but also claims that he didn't read it well enough to have anything to say about it today. His event utilization can be viewed as a hedge against the kill failing, to make sure he couldn't be bubbled tonight, because using it on random really doesn't make all that much sense for town!Shiro.

The problem is, all those things are well within the boundaries of mistakes and contradictions I would expect from town!Shiro. He didn't even understand how his own role functioned until he claimed and we pushed him to get more details so we could maximize it. He COULD easily not read a PT but expect us to corroborate the things he said the view times he did speak in there. He COULD use that ability expecting random to be alive and ensuring that the pool of misbubbles was smaller.

He could also be feigning any of it.

If you look at the rest of the game, other than the MoI kill, there's no objective reason to believe he's either town or scum.

Contrast that with Grapes and A50.

If it were a Grapes+A50 versus just Shiro equation, I would always believe Grapes+A50 was more likely.

However, because it's a Grapes+A50 versus Grapes+Shiro equation, I don't have enough certainty either way to make that call.

Gun to my head, etc etc? I'd say it was Grapes+A50, because that's what Drixx believes and I'm neutral...but it's close. It's really, really, really close.

...and now I'm 10 minutes late. *sigh*

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Cerb basically already pointed out the things I had noted that were off about Shiro. None of it is enough to move the probability of Shiro+Grapes even close to the A50+Grapes level.

Grapes is obviously scum due to the fact that a town!Grapes would not have withheld that is event was climax. Town!Grapes would have told random that and we would have been able to plan for it. He therefore had to lie to conftown to get unbubbled. That's not a town action. Finally it then logically proceeds that either MoI was completely wrong about what Varsoon told him about bubbling, OR, Grapes must have a partner. I choose to believe MoI was thorough enough to be sure of what he told us, so it then logically follows that Grapes has a partner.

Since we are town (We just are. You are wrong if you still somehow feel otherwise. I don't know any other way to explain it to you. Your own predictions for how town us would behave have been borne out even.), that means the partner must be A50 or Shiro.

Case for A50: his actions yesterday. Absolutely over the top scummy. I have to assume misunderstanding on his part though. That quick reversal of throwing a 2nd vote on us (before we even posted, but AFTER he called for everyone to talk first and vote second) only makes sense in the context of the possible lowered lynch threshold, imo. That's why I'm convinced he's the scum we're looking for. This also dovetails with the gems having a way to escape their vulnerable time as we would now be seeing scum gems escaping during their vulnerable time and betting the game that you will vote us rather than risk the no lynch. It just FITS. And you know town!me well enough to know that when I can't lock someone down via logic, I look to narrative. On the narrative level, Grapes + A50 rings true, and it also brings Varsoon's warning not to try and flavor game this game into razor sharp focus. So much flavor spec about the army has led people to assume things, and all the while there's a built in blank slate villain for Varsoon to use (and therefore reason for him to warn against flavor breaking). Again... it just FITS.


Case for Shiro: Asked us to vouch for him several times in the game about the Titus alliance; however, ignored all of our requests that he go look and confirm info from there when it would have been useful. Has at least selective knowledge from that alliance PT while claiming not to have read it. Tried to suggest that our stolen RB ability was some kind of mass roleblock when both Cerb and I clearly stated that if we had ever used it, we had to keep it up on a single target as a new action each night or else stop blocking them. There's no possible way to have misunderstood as we were crystal clear. That's probably the strongest objective point against Shiro. You were looking to figure out how to fill a perceived power vacuum on the scum team and positing that we might be the answer, and Shiro chimes in and plants the idea that we were some mass roleblocker to start ... and there's just no way to arrive at that conclusion. This gets even worse when I consider the finale alliance with shiro and titus, because Shiro told us he could copy the ability set of someone in a PT he made permanently (or something like that... Cerb says he just misunderstood) which led to Titus and us planning how to use a hidden Shiro with a copy of our roleblock to juke scum out. While we would be publicly forcing people to ally with us and be roleblocked, the idea was to have Shiro quietly go after the bigger threats since nobody but Titus (IC) and us would know that Shiro had copied our abilities. Then all of a sudden Shiro clarifies that he can't do what he said, which led to Titus stealing our power to confirm our honesty. If I posit scum!Shiro, this exchange looks REALLY bad in hindsight because there's no way on earth Shiro could have been involved in that discussion and believed we had a mass roleblock ability.


As much as I'm paranoid it could be Grapes + Shiro, I think the stronger case is Grapes+A50. It fits elegantly (which is a Varsoon signature) and more importantly it fits the players involved.

We both already laid out the reasoning for why lynching us ends in a defeat earlier, so I'm not going to rehash that. You already know the stakes.

I think if you stop and think about it you'll realize that Grapes basically HAS to be scum, and if you posit A50 as the partner you'll find that it makes more sense than anything else. Especially the parts that just line up perfectly with how Varsoon does things. It's perfectly elegant, and that's literally what Varsoon goes for in setups. I'm kind of almost as much convinced by that aspect as I am from the way A50 played yesterday. A50's play yesterday screamed "we just need this one more mislynch!".

By eliminating Random and leaving you in a game state with us and shiro, I believe they used their equivalent of the Gem faction's commute to put you in this very position. In order to win you have to go against every instinct you've had all game and choose to surrender control and not lynch. The up side is that we can be pretty strongly sure that Varsoon would not let them kill, escape the day phase where they could get lynched, and then kill again, so a no lynch here and tomorrow arriving is basically CONFIRMATION of Grapes+A50 and we simply lynch Grapes and he flips scum and then we lynch A50.

I don't know how else to put it to you. I'm so sure of it that it hurts and it fits so fucking perfectly and makes so much sense. It makes

WAY MORE SENSE

than positing that I would leave an antagonistic you alive if I were scum. You were super sympathetic to me and helping me in SMITE and I ruthlessly cut you down. You know exactly how cold and calculating I am as scum. You know I am VERY good at figuring out who my biggest threat is and getting rid of them and then talking my way out of it. If we were scum, you are literally the

only

slot all game who never came around to reading us as town. If you want to talk about us honestly, you have to explain that, and if you are honest, you know there's no way a scum!me lets you live beyond many days ago. You have been conftown since the beginning, so there would be literally no suspicion upon your death. Like ... you would be a freaking gift to a scum!me because I could kill you and then easily play the responses as I needed.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

EbWoP: Forgot this: I believe that any course other than a no lynch today results in us losing. Putting my money where my mouth is:

VOTE: No Lynch

If it's Grapes+Shiro, then it's on me.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Bleh. Sorry to triple post. I had mostly skimmed what you said because I saw Cerberus posted already this morning. I did see you ask us to convince you to vote shiro. The thing is I believe that lynching Shiro results in a loss, and while I could probably make a good case on him ... I just don't believe it. I'll be around if you want to ask questions but PLEASE for my sake don't make really long walls. I have too much on my plate and won't be able to adequately respond to them. Give me short questions or realtime it with me if you want.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Taking 10, one more response.

I actually don't recall at all how the DGB wagon formed and was pushed. What I do remember is that you say the SC wagon was allowed to happen because he lost all value once DGB and KC had their interaction...yet after the SC flip was revealed, and I would have had every expectation that the entire town would turn on DGB...I instead chose to protect her?

The thing is, you were distancing the slot while still protecting it: you were pointing out things which were bad, but making excuses to not actually lynch her.
This continued even past the Klingoncelt lynch.

You held a stance that Klingoncelt's flip would, if containing certain details, be bad for DGB...and it wasn't until Klingoncelt was in fact flipped that you did exactly that and condemn DGB. Prior to that point, you were still taking that same distancing-while-defending approach.

[

Unfortunately, this is another one of those "we just don't have the time for me to actually respond to this properly. I think the simplest thng to do will just be laying out everything I remember about the conversations Drixx and I had regarding the DGB and the traitor possibikities.

Once SC flipped, Drixx and I had three possible suspects in mind for jaspar:

DGB, because of the KC interaction.
Firebringer, for early commentary about homeworld gems etc.
Xkfyu because he responded to something someone said in a fashion that hinted that he was not town aligned. In his case we were more sure he was gem related, because he had said he could be confirmed at asked later time, so we believed he was possibly a recruitable gem.

So, DGB and Firebringer were our prime candidates for the traitor SC was designed to find, but the evidence for each of them was really bad...as in, it required them to have played at an exremely low competence level in terms of their crumbing. In addition, DGB claimed ascetic, which if true, would have meant that scs flipped power would not have worked on her, thereby taking her out of the running as traitor.

All the discuss Drixx and I had about this took place over multiple days, and so it's difficult for me to, without a lot more research, tell you exactly where we were in our thoughts at any given point during the time she was alive. I know her ascetic claim was a huge point in favor of her claim that what she did in the pt with KC was a gambit, rather than a scum claim, but we knew it was quite possible that the claim was another gambit to cover her first one.

Anyways, something to note here: we didnt actually condemn dgb at kcs flip. We DID pressure her more. It wasn't until a couple days later that a lynch actually formed on dgb. That wagon in particular I don't actually recall the details of.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Is the confirming that it isn't grapes and me?

Btw I think I just forgot you said you can have only one person blocked ^_^;

I'm as sure as I can be that it's Grapes and A50. If I had ironclad logic to prove it, I would have. It could be Grapes and you, and if that's the case, then a no lynch would result in a loss, which I would view as directly my fault.

It's just that on top of the reasons to believe they are scum, there's also the elegance and the narrative aspects. When logic doesn't produce an ironclad gotcha case, I look to narrative.

Let me turn the question back on you: Do you see any flaw in my argument about Grapes + A50 and how it fits in so many ways? Poke holes if you can ... or if you can't, add your own thoughts to it. I'm very interested in seeing what you have to say and your own thoughts on it.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Personally I think it tips the scales too much towards scum if they are so many. Again Peridot could have assisted scum instead of joining crystal gems. Grapes having the same role is nonsensical and even if he did, why join scum? They weren't on the winning side.

Two points. First of all, I'm more inclined to believe that Grapes was always scum and is Yellow Diamond. Second, there is an explicit difference between 3p that can join a faction, and 3p that can be recruited to a faction.

The fact is we simply do not know, mechanically, how Varsoon chose to balance things. What we DO know is that we (most likely) had a 5(because I can't imagine circumstances under which someone with Xkfyu's role would choose to remain a survivor that early in the game, when they could join a faction of what were likely powerful roles) man masonry, along with two nearly pure IC's, and a conditional IC that could have duplicated the pure IC's power and turned it into another IC at worst, or a guilty at best...on top of a large number of other significant powers, including at least three kills.

At seven scum, there were more potential IC's in this game than scum, and barring any extra kills being hidden by scum, at least as many extra kills possessed by town as scum have displayed...and that's not counting the bubbles OR the extra kills Fuzzy could gain over time OR the kills random could give out. And keep in mind that normally, all those vigs would be a double edged sword...but with the large number of IC's, those kills were nearly as likely to hit scum as town, rather than being significantly more likely to hit town than scum as is normal.

I don't really understand why you feel that a seventh scum is unlikely, rather than something we should expect.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

Personally I think it tips the scales too much towards scum if they are so many. Again Peridot could have assisted scum instead of joining crystal gems. Grapes having the same role is nonsensical and even if he did, why join scum? They weren't on the winning side.

Ewww... this post seriously just made it nearly 50/50 in my mind who is paired with Grapes. My gut (and a small voice says my ego/pride) says that it's still more probable that it's A50 + Grapes, for all the reasons I already related. But then you show up and try to argue that Grapes is town (with an overwhelming mountain of evidence that he's scum) and instead of countering the scum case against him or making an argument why he is town in spite of the damning actions he took ... you come with flavor as your only argument ... in a game where Varsoon went way out of his way to warn against using flavor as a primary tool to figure things out?

I mean ... the one doubt in my mind about A50 + Grapes is that A50 was arguing against releasing Grapes.

No. I think it still has to be A50 + Grapes. If you were scum, I think you would have hammered No Lynch and won (unless you are somehow solo scum, which requires believing MoI misunderstood Varsoon's answers to his questions, which I rate is exceptionally unlikely).

And in the time it took me to write this post, my mind thought through it and yeah. It's Grapes + A50.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

I will give you the point that with the huge number of conf towns it significally makes it easier for bubble and vigs to hit scum but it still leaves a gapping day 2/3 scum win by a mere miscalculation, which I find to be too much. Let alone that scum had an event that could kill multiple town people in the clsuter.

P,edit

I did not argue flavour but the mechanics of peridot. She could cummunicate with scum with her direct line with a diamond and instead of ever joining Crystal gems win as 3p with them.

That's not a very strong argument though. In both Space Dandy 2 and Bloodborne scum could have functionally won the game on day 2 or 3. Neither game played out that way, but the fact that Varsoon has shown he's willing to risk that in the past means it's not something we should discount.

You also need to consider that in a perfectly played town game, we could have won by D3 or something, if all the abilities hit properly and we utilized our stress management mechanics to enable abilities perfectly.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

And it continues.

Skybird: I actually have no recollection of my early game interactions with skybird. I don't recall ever saying that she was probtown or anything because of the alliance with Steven, but Drixx may have?

That would be this series of posting:

Spoiler: You ranting about Steven Universe

Umm... we were Steven in the first SU game. Our big thing was that we could IC on day 5. On day 3 we had two people and ourselves thrown into a permanent alliance. (Mastin and Xtoxm). We then lynched a scum that day who had strongman on season finale and so we actually ended up using the same logic. We concluded that Varsoon would not have given scum knowledge of who we were so they could just turn around and murder us the next night without us having any reliable way to avoid it (there were two ways for us to avoid it: luck into lynching the strongman before first finale (this is what happened) or another town slot had to be both alive, allied with us, have a 1-shot per game ability available and USE it to commute us and them out of the game on the finale night). We were so certain that it made no sense to make an IC and then have it get killed 99% of the time before it could ever become IC that we concluded scum would not have been given access to our identity.

Now ... Varsoon does like to change things up as a mod so I wouldn't go so far as to say Skybird automatically must be scum ... but I sure as hell am not going to assume town after what happened in the original game.

Long story short: farside was being widely scum read but we put together a case for why they were almost certainly town. We were running a reaction test on them before we unvoted and moved on to plan we had stated. The plan we had stated called for us lynching Grapes (claimed miller) that day, someone else the next day and the final scum the day after.

Grapes, ignoring our really strong case for why farside must be town decided to hammer farside and end the day rather than take his lynch, which he knew he had to eat because of being and claiming miller. His action took us from guaranteed win to a last day where we had someone who had been kind of super trollish (think firebringer, only WAY worse) plus our two day 3 alliance people still alive.

Since we assumed scum would not have been gifted knowledge of who we were, that really strongly influenced our thinking and we ended up lynching the super-troll player, and Xtoxm was the last scum.

So yeah ... ummm. Please don't make unfounded assumptions. Please.

^Drixx post. "Skybird could be scum for the ability, or not, let's not assume anything off of role".

how do you feel about Skybird rr

I have absolutely no feelings about Skybird at all, which is basically how I always feel about her posting. I'll look at her ISO after I finish SC's, but she's generally fairly low impact on the game so I rarely actually ISO dive her.

^Cerb head. "I have no opinion of her".

Pedit: we used that same flawed logic to lose SU 1(plus some other stuff, but that was what ultimately drove the lylo mislynch), except we had EVEN MORE REASON to think scum wouldn't possibly be given confirmation of Stevens identify than you do, and we were STILL wrong.
Don't be us. Don't close your mind to the possibility. Evaluate Skybirds play on its own merit.

^Cerb post, saying: "Evaluate Skybird on her own merit".

Skybird ISO(previous post included in this one)

Spoiler: reduction for length

First three posts are fluff, then an ally request.

300: willing to ally with Yume.
318: Questions FB about having mastin who he townreads in his lynch pool. Tells him to leave Yume alone.
337: At Farsides suggestion, invites Foxbird to ally with her, responds to Drixx's confusion and shows willingness to ally with RR as well.
353: Asks CoolDog if he's read the thread and informs him of the ally state for mastin and RR.
445: FB responds to her 318 in 323, saying mastin is in his lynch pool for annoyance, and Skybird asks him what's annoying him.
578: Farside feels town to her.
673: RR null, KC and mastin town, CoolDog scum. What reasons did you have for the KC and CoolDog reads at this time?
1012: Calls Xkfyu's 716 "sucking up to OWK". Because they voted Creature? Because of the exact verbiage they used? Why exactly is this sucking up? Asks for an explanation of OWK's town read on CoolDog. Consistent with their scumread on him, but that read is still unexplained.
1018: MIsreads OWK's 1014 explaining their CoolDog read as feeling bad in their guts, without any evidence in thread(which is a weird conclusion to arrive at, sounds like the sort of thing that make someone null, not "might be town") as a read on FB, and asks if he's ballsy enough to be scum and call himself such all game.
1044: 1019 OWK clarifies that the answer previously was about CoolDog, Skybird agrees regarding the CoolDog read and reasoning, and calls it strange that CD asked mastin to ally after she said she was never going to ally with anyone.
1049: Suggests snarky may be "trying too hard" as a devil's advocate, and disagrees that snarky is "so town". How town is Snarky then Skybird?
1502: Votes NC. Why did you do this? Whose points against him swayed you?
1585: Asks SC about his town read on NC. Consistent.
1825: Confirms that the blank vote on Snarky did not come from her slot.
1855: Gut town read on RR, willing to lynch DGB(because of the empty iso, or because of the bad reason/lack of reason for the vote on RR?). Questions SC's justification for the townread on NC. Good questions and points.
1925: Cakez is a scum lean.
2192: Willing to ally farside22, questions her on her SC townread.
2223: Agrees with the points everyone else has been making about SC, reiterates the question from 2192.
2249: Votes Shiro with Farside, with no reason given. What were your thoughts here? What are they now?
2416: Asks shiro for his reads.
2434: In response to Shiro's ansewr to 2416 "going back and forth on KC too, asks why he scumreads Mcmenno, doesn't have any thing to say about any of his other reads. Why didn't you ask him why he scumread A50?
Nothing of note past this point.

Super minor town read overall. I see attempts to put things together when she's here, even if she's not doing it too much.

^Cerb post. Holds Skybird as a minor townread, basically nulltown. And here's the funny thing, Cerb.

The post in question WASN'T a Drixx post.
Your next mention of Skybird after having her as a minor townread?

Town/unlikely to be aligned with scum:(important distinction)
Titus
Klingoncelt
mastin2
Yume
Farside22
Xkfyu(this is because of a realization I had about the potential meaning of some things he's said which I won't be revealing)
Firebringer <<bubbled by gems in a way that could have resulted in his death apparently, but did not. This implies certain things to me.
Skybird <<< PT with steven
killthestory <<<fake IC claim

So yeah. The people above are unlynchable yo.

...An unexplained bump up to absolutely unlynchable. The given reason? "She has a PT with Steven". The very fucking thing the above posts I quoted from BOTH HEADS warned against doing multiple times. Why did Skybird, overnight, jump from "minor town, off of play" to "unlynchable town, from claim", when your earlier stance was to NOT clear her off of that?

The setup came together in my mind in the intervening time, and it simply seemed unlikely that Varsoon would essentially hang a scum slot out to dry. By giving Steven PT's with two individuals early in the game, and conftowning one of them to Steven, the other one would naturally be suspected simply for the symmetry. I expected that to be an instance of Varsoon subverting our expectations and setting us up to reduce the power of the steven role as a communication hub by mislynching a spoke. There was also a degree of trust in Yume's judgment.

Fuzzy vig: No. No. No. We explicitly told fuzzy that if he was going to shoot anyone he should shoot S_S because that shot would guard against the worst case scenario, which is also what shooting farside was intended to do. Yes, in hindsight we should have said "Either shoot S_S or don't shoot anyone", instead of asking him not to shoot and then suggesting that if he did shoot, it be at S_S. That was poor communication on our part once we had realized that a proper shot would prevent the threat we were concerned about. Call it irrational paranoia all you want, we saw a clear and present danger and did everything in our power to ensure a game loss wouldn't occur outright because people were being short-sighted.
I already addressed the farside shot at length in the past. In short, everything about her play was scum!me's wet dream, and she was the easiest possible 3p lylo mislynch, since all 3p lylo's required the removal of her defenders.

I'm quoting this to say that this is still something I have an issue with--it is

not

something you've said which made me go, "That's actually a good point". But, unlike most of what I've brought up as responses...I can't think of how to verbalize a response here. Maybe I can do it later, but this is basically me saying: "This part's not satisfactory, but I don't know how to explain why it's not satisfactory".

Okay. Let me know when your able to verbalize your objection.

You suggest that the night kill variants were "less certain", and you'd be right if we still had our ability...but we don't.

While this is probably something which is true, is there any way you can definitively PROVE you don't have your ability? I believe you have indicated before there is, but this is a formal request to restate it for the record, just to be sure.

I don't think we ever said we had a way to prove it. Unfortunately Titus' role doesn't specify if the power returns upon her death, but what we can verify(and which shiro will hopefully corroborate, assuming Drixx is right about him) is that Titus stole our role and found it to be exactly as we claimed. Given that it's exactly how it was claimed, 1) it would be negated at this point, and 2) if it had returned to us, it would only have been usable on individuals who we allied with who then swapped to a new ally after N4. Our allies have been public knowledge. I believe the only slot still alive who, had our power been returned to us upon Titus', we'd be able to roleblock, is A50. Randomidget would have also been an option. Anyways, basically I can't prove to you that we don't have our power back, other than by going through the alliance history and figuring out where scum!us would have roleblocked someone performing a publicly known action.

Yeah. Not much I can do to assuage any doubts you may have about that.

Umm. Don't put words in my mouth. I am pretty fucking sure I did not claim that "farside deserved it".

That's a succinct paraphrase on my part. Are you going to deny you made posts about all the things farside did that were scummy, even after she flipped town? Because I sure remember plenty. And for me those posts boiled down to "farside deserved it". You can argue that exact phrasing is too harsh. You can argue there are perhaps better terms to be used. Maybe, "because farside was that scummy, and was too unbelievable". Or something to that effect, if you feel "farside deserved it" is too accusatory. The point still stands that it was shifting blame onto farside and not accepting any of it for yourselves.

And no, protecting TWIE was not Titus' idea. Ensuring Farside was lynched ASAP was.

The two are functionally identical. I wanted TWIE dead. You pushed farside instead, shielding yourself behind Titus as justification for not lynching scum. So it was Titus's fault, or farside's fault, if you prefer, but it was still you placing the blame elsewhere, not on yourself.

Basically every point here you're saying, "I wasn't saying they were responsible! I was saying this different thing...which says they were responsible". So my point still fucking stands. Even right now, in this very damn post, you're shifting blame away from your slot.

Yes, because we were being attacked for the decision we made, which meant we had to lay out the reasons WHY we made that decision. We weren't trying to drag her through the muck or anything, we were telling everyone else WHY we made the decision we made. Also, in that post I claimd responsibility for the farside shot, which is the one thing I agree with you about having responsibility for. Yes, obviously our desire to remove Farside22 over TWIE was a choice we made, but it WAS spurred on by Titus' preferences. We believed that Farsides flip would clear or condemn TWIE, therefore it made more sense to remove Farside first, while removing TWIE wouldn't have any effect on how likely Farside was to be scum. Sure, I agreed with her reasoning, hell, we arrived at that logical sequence mostly independently, so sure, if you want me to take full blame I can. I don't know if I would have been so certain about my conclusions had Titus not agreed with me, but sure, fuck it, say I would have been.

Spoiler: blahblah

No, mastin, you have NOT been objectively right at almost every turn. You've been stubborn. You've refused to admit you were wrong.When we've responded to your posts, you've brushed our responses aside as inconsequential, and done EXACTLY what you accuse us of doing, strawmanned them.

The ONLY request you've made that was "simple" that I didn't deliver on in a timely fashion was you asking me to propose a game winning plan, and yes, that was a misunderstanding.

Wtih regards to the difference in our attitude towards you: You've NEVER gone so far out of your way to paint us as scum. From the moment you DELIBERATELY misinterpreted a post I made some days back asking you to explain how something would benefit me (or something along those lines, I honestly can't remember the post details), I've viewed you as hostile and unreasonable, and there's nothing you've done to make me feel any differently. You admit this is just a rehash of things you've said before, THINGS WHICH I HAVE INDEED ADDRESSED FOR THE MOST PART, BUT WTIH RESPONSES YOU SIMPLY CHOOSE TO BRUSH OFF.

Spoilered to say: this is "feel bad" posting.
And not "feel wrong" posting.

Not much I can do about that. That post is the reason why we've treated you the way we have this game, in a fashion contrary to what you've come to expect from us.

Regarding us never admitting fault: Look at your voting history throughout the game. Look at the pushes you made. There were some good ones, yes, but there were also PLENTY of bad ones...and you haven't displayed contrition for those.

Aside from how that is easily shown to be objectively false given that I have on multiple occasions admitted to every shortcoming I've had, aside from how behind the scenes I've been wracked with doubt ever since the Mathblade lynch showed my approach to the game was laced with arrogance, aside from how this is more feel-bad posting rather than feel-wrong posting, aside from all of that and probably more: deflecting the issue by saying, "You did it too!", is not going to earn you favors.

I wasn't looking for you to say, "mastina, you did this".
I was looking for you to address my fucking point.
Saying "you did this" (especially when this is actually one fucking thing I

haven't

done--many of the sins you accuse me of I am in fact guilty of but NOT this one)? Not addressing my fucking point.

You have not admitted fault. Not once. You have made misplay after misplay this game. And after each misplay, you have denied responsibility for it having been a misplay.

It's entirely possible that I may have missed you admitting to shortcomings, but I don't have any recollection of any such public declarations prior to this day phase. I recall mentally noting that complete absence of any mention of mathblade after that flip was revealed, when I expected to hear contrition when the day phase started, and it's possible that I'm basing my analysis of your attitude off of that particularly notable incident. In any case, the point of noting that the accusations you've levelled at us could be (from my recollection at least) be applied to you as well is NOT meant to make you feel bad. It's meant to make you realize that there's no reason to expect us to apologize for being wrong if vocalizing such isn't going to actually accomplish anything. I assume that's why you didn't immediately say oh shit I'm sorry I'm going to sheep everybody else now after the mathblade lynch. It wouldn't have had any positive effect, and it would have merely made it harder for you to get town to follow you going forward.

I'm not sure what you're referring to in a lot of these stance shifts, actually. A shitload has happened.

Prime example: On Episode 9, when we mislynched Fuzzy, you had Almost50 as your strongest townread. You posted many plethora of reasons for why he wouldn't be scum, and were his strongest defender.
On Episode 10, you had Almost50 as your preferred lynch...but more than that, he was actually your strongest scumread. It wasn't that you were lynching him because of a plan to lynch him. You were lynching him because suddenly, all the above evidence was washed away and he was now scum for...well, I don't recall the reasons off the top of my head so I'm not going to claim you used stretchy reasons because I don't actually remember what reasons you used. But you were using actual reasoning to call him scum. Not "this is POE". Not, "this is part of the plan". He was actually

scum

to you.

Those types of shifts with no given explanation are what I am talking about. You discarded previous long-held opinions when they became inconvenient stances to hold. And you've been doing that the whole game. Can you name a stance you have held which was inconvenient to hold? farside doesn't count, for a myriad of reasons. I mean, aside from farside, is there a single stance you have held which was inconvenient for you to have held at that time? A stance which you were firm on, and yet which was something that was actually detrimental to you, yet you held it anyway because you're town and your reads are what they are?

Do you have so much as a single non-farside instance of a read of that type in the entire game?

I saw none. Instead, I see stances as most convenient to be held.

During episode 10, in addition to the initial posting that we found suspect from A50, we also came to the conclusion that all living slots had evidence in their favor which would, under normal circumstances, cause us to rule them out as possible scumspects. Given that, we looked at things while ignoring those pieces of hard evidence, since they weren't doing anything to inform us as to who was more or less likely to be scum. A50 immediately jumped out a scumspect at that point, partially due to the temporal proximity of his suspect actions to the time we realized we had to approach things differently, and partially due to the relative dearth of explicit reasons to suspect the other slots. It was messy, but Drixx was quite convinced that A50 was scum by the day start.

The answer to your second question depends on how you define convenience. We moved to keep A50 and Fuzzy from scumreading one another and attempted to keep the peace between them, when it would have been simple to get fuzzy to shoot A50 while he was using his track. I don't think we've had any other reads that we've tenaciously held onto that have put us at risk though, if that's what you mean by inconvenient.

First of all, if we had the capacity to treat you this whole different way deliberately and manipulate you at any time, why didn't we do it throughout the game?

You did. Midgame, the non-shitty way of treating me was how you were treating me. Coincidentally, that is the time period you were in my townbloc.
Even large swathes of the earlier part of the game, where you weren't my main focus, where you weren't my main push, you were not treating me with hostility.

It was only when I formed the scumread that this attitude emerged from you.

Fair enough. I don't have the time to go back and verify the exact correlation of timelines etc, but I'll assume you're accurately presenting the events. Why would we react that way though? Where's the benefit of engaging with you, of all people, with hostility? If it was clearly a choice we made, why would we make that choice?

As I said before, it wasn't the fact of the scumread that incurred our wrath, it was the way you prosecuted it.

Also, again, after spending the entire game antagonizing you...WHY ARE YOU HERE to be the critical vote?

I'd be here no matter what thanks to the gem's bubble mechanic. randomidget wouldn't be able to read all of my posts and translate them fast enough to get proper responses, sure. But he'd be getting the bombardment all the same.

Do you think that randomidget would have gotten my list of grievances, looked at it, and said, "but i townread them tho :/" and just left it at that?
Do you think that I wouldn't point out to randomidget, "RANDOM. I AM DEAD. YOU ARE ALIVE. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THAT IS?"?
Do you think that the feedback I'd give to him would have been discarded as useless?
Given how much randomidget was sheeping others, namely MoI but also to some extent he actually did listen to me, I'd say no.

I am here because I am the only option to be here.
I am also here because I'm expected to vote wrong, yes. I'm here because it's expected that I have a higher chance of voting wrong than randomidget would. Yet that's not something I see as being alignment-indicative for you.

I believe you are drastically overestimating your ability to influence random. He definitely wouldn't have discarded your input though. It's possible I'm overly biased in my belief in this position simply because I know my own alignment though, and I may be underestimating that effect. You might be right and the scum team had no choice but to go after random over you.

Basically, alright, touche.

Grapes event he used was a climax event.

Was it a climax-specific event?
Or was it just USED during the climax?
I'm relatively certain mine could have been used at literally any time there was the appropriate stress--day, night, doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if it's a day event or night event(though it was tagged as "the climax event blah blah"). What's important is that it was triggered during the night, which means even if it may have been possible for him to trigger it during the day, the game state at day start was determined during the night, which is relevant because the point I was addressing was indicating that you believed it was possible that his targeting may have changed based on how night actions resolved.

If we could have anticipated both grapes and randoms actions, as you believe we would, then we would have anticipated a Shiro/us/Randomidget LYLO.

Never said you couldn't! I said that you had a scenario where killing me gave you a lower chance of victory than killing randomidget.

And it's true. You know DAMN good and well that when I live past my expiration date, I get paranoid.
You know DAMN good and well that I can be charismatic when I need to...and that if I died instead of randomidget, I would be right there, in a private topic with randomidget, separated from the main thread, able to convince him. I could lay traps for you, and I could explain to him exactly why I was doing what I was. You nightkilling me would be an objective mistake, because it'd place me in a position where my influence on the gamestate would INCREASE.

In short, a dead me = no reevaluation on RR = me pushing randomidget to vote for RR.
An alive me = wracked with self-doubt = me having not a fucking clue what the fuck I'm doing.

Already addressed. Though I disagree with your conclusions, the point has merit.

this is all mushy feeling stuff, and I can't argue with that.

No, that part is one of the few things which isn't mushy feelings. Your own response is contradictory:

Yes, I've avoided closing doors because YOU DON'T HAVE GOOD REASONS to close them. There's an entire game of evidence of scumhunting and gamesolving.

If there's an entire game of evidence of scumhunting and gamesolving...why are the fucking doors still open? Why is there so much room for them to still be there? Why aren't any of them getting closed until they're literally impossible? That's not mushy feels. That's simple fact. You've kept options open. You've not worked to close them.

No, mastin, what's fact is that those doors didn't get closed fast enough. My success or failure in my attempts to close those doors exists independent of whether or not I was working to close them. I maintain that I was. You don't see it. That's the mushy feels part. You don't feel that my play was working towards those goals, and I can't argue with how you interpret my play, without having a shitload more time to go through my own ISO and pull out specific instances, which is something we don't have. I know I could do it, but that again, isn't something that I can really use as a meaningful argument against your position.

Why do you think I would PREFER to have to fight tooth and nail to convince you, to capitalize on your nature and manipulate you, when instead I could be spending the day talking to random and shiro?

My options here are that you either forgot about the bubble mechanic by this point, or are conveniently ignoring them.

Neither seems like something you should do as town.

As addressed, though, the answer to the question IS in fact, the bubble mechanic. I would do MORE damage behind a closed door than I would out in the open. I would do MORE damage with a private topic to talk to randomidget in which you had no access to. I would do MORE damage by being able to know I was dead and dead for good reason, and I would be able to talk to randomidget and appeal to him as a result, in a place you would have zero influence over. You couldn't talk to me. You couldn't do anything with me. But I could do plenty to you, even when dead.

Again, it's not like there's much of a choice on-hand. You leave randomidget alone, the bubble mechanic is in play. You leave me alone, you have to deal with me. But I am easier to deal with. I am easier to mislead. I am easier to placate. randomidget might have been townreading you, but it was still easier to placate me because again: randomidget would have access to me. randomidget would know he was townreading you and yet still alive. randomidget would have all of me pushing him, pressuring him every step of the way with absolute conviction to vote RR. That, you'd have no control over whatsoever.

But by killing randomidget and leaving me alive? You can interact with me directly. And interacting with me is...a good way to get me in this zone of self-doubt. You claim, "we fully expected the day to open with you voting us", yet that's bullshit; you know me well enough to know that I would absolutely doubt EVERYTHING come lylo. So I'd be easier to sway.

It's not that you have to have mysterious mystical knowledge of me.
It's that you have game experience with me and you call me a friend.
My friends know how I fucking think.
My friends know that I have incredibly-low self-confidence. That I have high levels of self-doubt. That every step of the way, I am plagued by my indecision. I have a reputation for the contrary, sure! I have the "mask" of mastina. The mask of my play, the me that I show of, the fearless, doubtless mastina who would never admit she could be wrong. But it's just a mask, and every one of my friends. Every player who knows anything about me. Knows that it's just that, a mask. That inside I am a shattered, broken, frail individual who simply can't sort the game and tries to pretend otherwise.

It doesn't take some oracle to know this. It doesn't take some level of intimate, deep knowledge about my psyche that you couldn't have. All it takes is even the most basic of understandings of how my mind operates--something you have on multiple occasions demonstrated you have awareness of. You might not know the specifics. Fuck, even I don't, I don't think anyone on here does. But you know the generalities of how I go about my process. It's impossible for you not to know this much about me.

Our expectation of you voting us to start the day off once we saw the situation was not at all bullshit. Perhaps there was a bit of hyperbole, but we absolutely did expect you to vote us SOON after day start, basically as soon as you had Varsoons answers to your questions. Remember, everything about the way you've interacted with us has felt just as foreign and unusual for us as our reaction to this play has been to you. I saw no reason to think you wouldn't simply double down on your existing stances.

The random/you interactions had you died have been addressed already, but I did just have a thought tangentially related to it: Grapes claimed to be the death bubbler, insinuating that he was the reason why people who died were bubbled. I don't see any reason why the prescient us you've posited wouldn't be willing to gamble that with grapes gone, you wouldn't have the opportunity to talk with random, and have the confidence that even if you were able to talk to him, he could still be controlled. It's not really relevant, since it's pure supposition and we have no idea how that would all work, but it does weaken my agreement with your point a bit.

Look those posts over.

I will try to (I have less than 24 hours and yet I've got like a month's worth of work for this game; I'm not even sure what I need to prioritize at this point), but I still want to ask: why does Drixx make the mistake at all, though? And why does he continue to misunderstand when you were coordinating with him to try and clarify?

I've asked for a lot of separation of you two as individuals in a great many number of my responses...but the simple fact is, when you two are Reasonably Rational, the hydra, you two by and large blend together. You become something "more" than you otherwise would be. You can still tell who is posting often even without signing. You can still make mistakes. But you make mistakes less often, because you coordinate your efforts, you coordinate your posts, you talk to each other, you communicate with one another. And beyond that, Drixx misinterpreting it feels like something which is a stretch in of itself--even if he was playing solo, I find it difficult to believe he makes such a large mechanical misplay.

Lol. Drixx makes a lot of dumb mistakes like that. He made one a bit ago, where he thought it was possible for grapes and shiro to be solo scum still. He forgets things, nad I remind him. I have NO FUCKING IDEA why he was so insistent on that misinterpretation. Hell, if you want an example of a stance that was, in the moment, inconvenient for us, it was that, because it was DEMONSTRABLY UNTRUE, and could have easily resulted in us getting lynched. I *think* he just conflated her two claims and thougth I was getting it wrong, but that's the onl possible explanation I have for his behavior.

We NEVER viewed Farsides role as so similar that we should be suspicious, and if we had said suspicion wouldn't have applied because of our knowledge of the mod meta, and again because of said mod meta, there was no need to clarify that our ability could stop factionals.

I'm not talking about that. That wasn't the issue. The issue is, you could have tried to verify farside's status with her block. It didn't matter what your read on her was. It didn't matter what you viewed her ability as, relevant to her alignment. She had a block. You previously had a block.

Why weren't you trying to confirm the specifics of her block, to see if you could either verify it or catch her in a lie? You should have jumped at a golden opportunity to catch farside as a liar with something which was 100% beyond all deniability: knowing your roleblock, and knowing hers, and asking about yours, and asking her to talk about hers. Would that have definitively "caught" her, no, but was it worth trying?

Why WASN'T it worth trying? That's the fucking problem; you didn't try it when you should have.

We probably should have pushed her about that. It was just so obvious to us that she was a threat, and that she had already lied about portions of her role, and that nobody else seemed to care, that we just didn't bother. The mechanical differences were evident to us, and could have explained away any issues with her role. Mind you, this was all subconscious, it wasn't something Drixx and I actively discussed. At no point did we float the idea and discard it. It never felt worth floating. That was a mistake. I don't believe it would have done anything had we pushed her on it, but it was definitely suboptimal not to do so.

It's a request for something that can't be provided, because you've already dismissed out of hand every action we've taken that's been pro-town, because of your results bias.

You call it results bias.
I call it actually wanting results.

Because let me tell you something.
Push come to shove.
When it comes to the top-tier players.
The players who are scum are going to get results which favor the scum and did not favor the town. (Most likely, while APPEARING to have favored the town, except for small details. Hint: this is what I see your play as!)
The players who are town are going to get results which might not always favor the town, but do so more than not. Their results might sometimes favor the scum, but often don't favor either alignment. Basically, the players who are top-tier town will have town-results > null results > scum results in order of likelihood.

Where are the RESULTS of your play?
YOUR play.
Not the play of others you assisted with.
Not the play which was good in THEORY if not in practice.

Where are the results of what YOU, PERSONALLY have done, THAT HELPED THE TOWN DIRECTLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY with zero room for scum to have gained something.

That is what I don't see from you.

And that's the largest fucking problem.

Yes, as town, you are not going to make perfect plays.
You will make mistakes.
You will have plays which you thought were good but which in hindsight were a mistake.
Those exist in every game. They exist in my game, they exist in Titus's game, they'd exist in your game.

But as town, you are still going to make plays which show town results.
Maybe not immediately. Maybe not on D1. In fact, many town players of good skill get mislynched because they were unable to show those abilities at that stage in the game even if they were capable of it at a later time.

But you've have eleven fucking days, eleven full day phases, to show off your town self, to further a town objective.

So why the fuck is it that when I look at your play, instead of seeing stuff that furthers a town win, I see shit that has helped the scum survive this long?

You say the results are irrelevant?

Fuck that, results are everything.
What results do you have to show for your play?
That's what I'm asking, but which you're not giving me.

And you keep saying, "no slot except Xkfyu could".
Bullshit.
I can lay out reasons for almost every player. randomidget. Magna. Fuzzy (not in his vigs, but in his voting pattern). grapes. Titus. kraskaesque. Creature. Yume. NotChara. Klingoncelt. McMenno! The list goes on and on. Some have smaller contributions than others. Some have contributions which are a little bit hazier since we don't know the alignments of four key players that they focused on, but by and large, I can name reasons each and every player gave results, actual RESULTS which were unambiguously town.

I can't name those results for you. Maybe your definition of results is different than mine. Mine's not, "hey I vigged scum, that's results" as you seem to think it is. It's, "we did this, and this was what happened as a consequence. This consequence was pro-town because it helped the town in this way and hurt the scum in that way". That's almost entirely, utterly absent from your posting. You lack town results.
You have plenty of scum results.
You have a plethora of, "This was town, even though...", "this was a good plan, except...".
You're the only one who doesn't have, "This was town, because it did this town thing and it worked to do that town thing".

I think we have fundamentally different interpretations of what makes an action protown. By my standards, I CAN'T point to said "obvprotown" actions that you can see in others. It's just not how I function. I see actions people take that don't make sense for scum!them, or actions that scum take that don't make sense for scum!someone, and diminish or increase the probability that different slots are scum appropriately. The sort of intangible, subjective results you're talking about aren't something I'm equipped to identify and express in a way that satisfies you, but I'll try.

Beachapalooza was undeniable a pro-town thing. Yes, us mentioning it was used by us diminish the pressure on us, but do you seriously think we couldn't have avoided a lynch without mentioning it? The simple fact that we even let anyone know we had the event(long before that pressure existed on us) was pro-town, simply by virtue of how damaging the event was to scum. You can argue that we couldn't have predicted that you would get the cop, but what else would have made sense for you? You were a known conftown, and thus had every reason to expect people would be townreading you and thus protecting you(not to mention the fact that Yume had claimed her bodyguard to the game, so you had even more reason to expect to survive), and the result of either a cop check or an additional layer of protection on a conftown is an undeniably pro-town result. Even if you HAD used your cop check on a town slot, that's still an additional conftown. THAT undeniably, at the minimum, even WITH people screwing up and removing the possible tangential benefit of it, had a pro-town result, that far outweighs any benefit it would be to us, the people who are certainly the least likely to be afraid of getting lynched. At some point earlier you said we "panicked" and claimed it, when that's not true. We claimed it because we had talked to Titus about it, and she advised claiming it. There was no reason to not do so at that point and get people to stop wasting all their time on us when we had actual scum to catch.

In addition, we spent the entire game making sure that the conftowns and probtowns had access to as much information as possible, in as secure a fashion as possible, and then presented that informatoin to the game at large at the best times. That is also undeniably pro town, and hurts scum. This is something where I can't point to a specific mechanical thing that resulted from it, but you KNOW that benefits town and hurts scum.

If you look at things based ONLY on results, then your analysis is fundamentally flawed, because it is naturally biased by hindsight.

Lylo is DEFINED by hindsight. That much I know.

It's defined by hindsight. NOT bias. It's about looking at the game, the ebb and flow, OBJECTIVELY, using the facts you've uncovered and the knowledge you now have to put the pieces together. NOT by interpreting things in the fashion which fits your established beliefs.

-Cerb

[Reasonably Rational]

It sucks to be the conftown on what is (in this case, if you're wrong) a last day. You are in the situation we were in the first SU game. I believe I made the case as succinctly as it can be made. We're really not scum, and I think everyone agrees there is no plausible town motive or explanation for how Grapes behaved, and so it becomes a question of who is partnered with Grapes.

If that partner were shiro, then shiro could have hammered no lynch earlier so unless he just didn't realize, shiro is probably not the partner.

That means it's A50 + Grapes. If it's not, then you can blame me 100% Mastin. I made the case and I believe it fits perfectly with the game, how the game flowed, the way things happened, how voting played out, mod meta and even fits expected balance. It just freaking fits. I figuratively offer to film myself eating my boxer shorts if it's not Grapes+A50. I'm that sure.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Drixx (me) was dumb and misunderstood what Farside said. I'm operating on memory, but Farside checked with Varsoon and then relayed an answer, and then a clarification. I thought she was saying that the answer she got indicated a guilty. It wasn't until Cerberus asked me about it last night and explained the mistake that I realized I even had made one. I simply assumed until Farside died that she had misled us and after she flipped I assumed it was a misunderstanding on her part. Honest mistake. You'll see a lot more of them if you read the hydra PT. Cerb and I complement each other. He caught it and I just misunderstood.

If that's what you're going to decide on ... it's going to be really shitty for us to lose together because I misunderstood. I would say ask yourself if me both making a mistake and then sticking to it all game lines up with your expectation of scum me. I think we both know the answer.

~Drixx

P-edit: Meh ... I have been stuck awake with an unpleasant health issue. I feel pain. Maybe not your pain, but pain.

[Reasonably Rational]

I'm busy trying to fix my computer, but...none of this makes any sense.

This also didn't feel genuine.

I confirm on my personal integrity that Cerb had legit issues when attempting to upgrade his computer. It interrupted other plans we had. Please stay away from implicit or explicit statements that state either of us lied about real life to benefit in a mafia game. I will seriously lose the last bit of patience I have and unload on you like a mack truck if you keep that shit up.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

I'm busy trying to fix my computer, but...none of this makes any sense.

This also didn't feel genuine.

I confirm on my personal integrity that Cerb had legit issues when attempting to upgrade his computer.

I never ever ever would call into question real-life aspects about that and I'm frankly insulted you are insulted because you should fucking know better than to accuse me of making that accusation. You know damn good and well I was referring to the second half of the post, not the first, about the "none of this makes sense".

Played a game that was at 11,500 posts and around 200,000 words of hydra chat on your phone before, have you?

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

Let me die like a man tomorrow if I'm wrong.

Just let me live one more day and I swear it will all work out, he says. LOL.

Quoting this for the hilarity considering your slot is far more guilty of this sin than grapes's slot ever would be. I don't think I need to reiterate how many times you said, "Don't lynch us, let us live for just this much longer".

Just be sure to re-itereate the times we put the gun to our head. For example, we literally arranged for Fuzzy to have a guaranteed situation to prove his claim to be a vig where he could not fail, and then we told him to shoot us if he had

any

doubt that we were town.

I'm sitting here watching you literally go through and cherry pick things that could literally be planned out in scum chat and brought into the thread as theatre, completely disregarding the fact that scum distance and do shit like that all the time, and saying things like "this

feels

town", all the while ignoring the absolute logical certainty that you cannot give any town motive for Grapes' behavior yesterday in lying to conftown to get released instead of giving the info and allowing for a plan to be hammered out to ensure a victory. Nor can you give any town motive for A50's actions at the start of yesterday.

At this point, you have abandoned making a choice based upon evidence and decided to go with feelings, and the whole game you have expressed the feeling (quite hostile most of the time) that we're scum. Ergo it logically follows that you are behaving exactly as expected.

As I said yesterday: as soon as I saw the day start, I expected you to lynch us. As I said yesterday, you have intentionally wasted our time. On the assumption that you are going to hammer us (seems inevitable to me), I will expect your notes that you claim to have generated today (but just don't have time to share, you claim) to be posted within 48 hours. If they aren't, I am going to conclude that you intentionally told us to engage or else (you actually told but us and Shiro to do so, but shiro gets a pass by making like 3 short posts all day phase apparently (pretty sure he has to be town since he didn't hammer the no lynch, but that's a separate point)) out of spite and to waste our time. And then I'm going to explain to you, via Varsoon, exactly why that is something I will forgive (because I don't hold grudges) but which will result on us never speaking again.

I'm dead serious. If you've decided to vote us, that's fine. You better be able to prove that the something like 40 hours Cerberus put in with another 20 or so from me was not just a game of waste our time. I don't give a shit about win or lose, because as I've said multiple times, I expected you to lynch us the moment I saw the day start. It's the whole reason you are alive and we are alive. Having my real life toyed with is an egregious violation and when you fail to produce this supposed pile of work you did in the last 14 days, you're going to find out why. It will make you feel terrible. I hope the pleasure you got out of fucking with us was worth it.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

Almost's ability lends more credence to scum not killing and also trying to brew up paranoia on fuzzy if he's town. That's pretty clear.

And as previously established: Almost50-grapes as a scumteam has no reason to no-kill. There's no risk of being caught killing, because Almost50 can just lie about his result and say grapes went nowhere even when someone died. All these posts, they just...don't look like scum talking about a scumbuddy.

As previously DEBUNKED. Gems commuted out of the game, leaving a choice of killing you or killing a potential mislynch. The numbers were even. A scum team in that position who wanted to set you up to lynch us to seal their victory would not change their number of mislynches needed by no killing.

This is the kind of shit that makes me certain you have just been fucking with us all day. You're ignoring all logic and evidence and doing this great big build up. Be prepare to prove me wrong, or be prepared for the consequences.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

The more you ignore things and assert things which are not true, the more you are pissing me off. I'm sitting here enduring physical discomfort to a level you have never known out of respect for your

claim

that you have been talking to us in good faith, but you are demonstrating that you have not, in fact, been doing so. Only someone who didn't bother to read the thread could conclude that we didn't offer ourselves up to die. I'm pretty sure we're the

only

slot who intentionally set up the claimed vig with an unblockable shot and then told him to aim that gun at our head.

And that's setting aside the fact that every time I adjusted our plan yesterday I listed us in the kill or bubble slot, depending on who was left when Grapes left (assuming at that time that the game could end with that action).

So the only rational conclusion is that you are

intentionally

trying to push my buttons. I'm up at 6am because you made some small show of actually pretending to engage honestly and once again fooled me into investing time to satisfy your juvenile spiteful bullshit.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

As I've declared before; everybody gets a taste of their own cooking. I will be the first to tell you I will not be voting RR until grapes is gone. In fact, I'm not going to vote ANYONE until grapes is gone.

This was, again, a hard stance against grapes, and felt incredibly genuine.

Yes because, as everyone knows, Mastin is super reasonable and will totally cave when she gives an ultimatum if you challenge her.

Like ... people who have only

heard

of you know they can say that to you after you've leveled an ultimatum and it won't sway you at all. And it didn't. Or else Grapes would already be dead and you would have realized you are wrong.

Still waiting for you to explain A50 and Grapes' actions yesterday. If you are going to say we're scum, then you have to have plausible town motivation for at least one of them and unless you have some reason to prefer one over the other, you really need to demonstrate plausible town motivation for both of them.

But you can't. So instead you're posting a bunch of shit to justify what you're going to do so that you can claim you had good reason and nobody should blame you. Problem is ... you claimed you were going to actually approach today

intellectually honestly

and you clearly have not, and so now you are going to have to deal with me, no matter what decision you make and no matter how the game ends. You made it personal when you lied repeatedly and spitefully fucked with me.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

You know what? You're still persistent on your thoughts .. your theories .. your understanding to be correct all the time. I -on the other hand- will always be a stubborn asshole in response to that notion in particular.
If farside was stll alive today I would not have lynched anyone bu her, not even if I was told grapes was guilty AND she got mod-confirmed in public. The same now applies to RR. I'm not lynching that slot even if Varsoon himself confirms that slot to be scum. You keep pushing your agenda, and the harder you do the harder my stance is on the opposite direction. We're not children, but you seem to want to play it that way. OK, forget I'm Almost 50.. I'm now almost 5 years old, a brat, and a mule head. I go before RR goes.

This also felt incredibly genuine.

Stop publicly masturbating and giving yourself bullshit excuses that nobody will care about and get on with it already.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

I'm not going to quote all of 11860, but I'll give the highlight: grapes pushes Almost50, and pushes Almost50 HARD.
That goes from distancing to flat-out cross-bussing.

Am I expected to buy that as a narrative?

That the scumteam, with the gems in the game wanting to lock the game down, with many conftown players, aimed to lynch each other rather than mislynch?

That's a tough pill to swallow.

No. It's not. There were only four possible outcomes:

1.) You cave and vote grapes. He flips scum and A50 becomes untouchable because he got you to change your mind and we defended him for half the game. That's a ticket to a win.
2.) The game turns on A50 and lynches him. He flips scum and Grapes then becomes untouchable, and gets us mislynched in the bargain. Another ticket to a win.
3.) The game lynches someone else and they have this interaction in place and have a high chance to get a "no way they would do that" belief out of people.
4.) No lynch.

Which of those outcomes is undesirable for a Grapes+A50 scum team who was 1 or 2 mislynches from victory?

I didn't arrive at the conclusion it's them out of my ass Mastin. You think I didn't read the same shit you did? I read it, took notes on it, and spent hours discussing it with Cerberus. We wrote like 3 and 1/2 novels worth of words this game of discussion. I didn't arrive at my conclusion whimsically or lightly.

Oh ... and you're welcome for the no lynch vote which demonstrated almost beyond a doubt that Shiro is town. While you're busy trying to find reasons to justify the belief you picked instead of looking at evidence, I've been busy trying to work out how to figure out if a no lynch would lose us the game. Pretty sure I proved that it won't because scum!shiro hammers the no lynch every time.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

Like ... the moment you made it clear you were going to push to lynch us forever, you opened to door for people to make posts to play off of that. They can easily make you "feel" like they are genuine and like they are doing something that makes no sense, because as long as they keep you and us around long enough and what they're doing keeps at least one of them firmly town read, they win.

The narrative is staring you in the face. The last like four day phases have been playing out to this end. You here to lynch us. Can you think of any other reason scum went to the trouble of killing MoI (twice!) and Random and left you alive?

I'm genuinely gobsmacked that you don't see how much you've been played. You're literally spam posting a bunch of stuff to justify a vote on us and NONE of it is hard evidence of anything. In that time, you could have tried to figure out if there is any plausible town motive for what Grapes did yesterday. You have not (as far as I can tell). You could have tried to figure out a plausible town motive for A50's behavior at the start of yesterday. You have not (again, as far as I can tell). You could even have done the same test on Shiro that I did to confirm that you weren't dealing with a world where scum!Shiro is on the table. You didn't.

THAT is why I'm both convinced you aren't actually trying to work this out but instead just trying to cover your ass /slash/ justify voting us, and why I'm both angry and frustrated at the amount of time you made us waste.

~D

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

Could I ask for an A50 vote?

This at the end of the wall is what makes it feel meaningful, feel genuine.

See #12548: If Grapes gets A50 lynched, then he probably gets us mislynched and he still has credibility to spare. Like ... I outlined the only four ways that scenario could play out, and NONE of them harm a Grapes+A50 scum team, while two of them basically guarantee a win and the third (the world we're in) results in You alive with us, which is pretty much a guaranteed win for them, unless I am drastically misreading what you're posting here like 35 minutes before the deadline.

You are the person who TAUGHT me to look at narrative when I couldn't figure it out with my strongest skillset. I am literally sitting here in utter disbelief that you don't see it. And that's not even taking into account all of the OTHER things that just fit and make total sense when you posit that scenario. The truth ALWAYS has an elegance to it.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Almost is town.......

I've already dismantled all of almost's contrived reasons for scumreading me. In particular using the knowledge of Almost tracking whomever last night as a basis for 'clearing' rr and you but not me doesn't stand up to reason. He's admitted that he'd rather us no-lynch than lynch anyone but me which means that he's either scum or willing to throw the game away based on nothing. He's told the gems to bubble confirmed-town multiple times. He pushed you as SK in an attempt to save confirmed scum. Being survivalistic is what got him lynched in borderlands; he's adapted his play to that here.
RR could also be scum but I think they're just bad town.
The fact that those two are the only ones alive that could be threats to earth with the knowledge of Xk's role means that skybird attempting to derail that alliance means there's exactly one scum between them when you consider that skybird was assumed to be confirmed town by many. Simple explanation is that scum didn't think xk had the balls to shoot sky and wanted to save twinwings.

Among others (I'm skipping some), this stood out as a particularly town interaction as well.

We are why Fuzzy town read A50. In our day 8 finale chat, they were at each other's throats. Each was hard scum reading the others. I personally told them to shut up and only talk to me until they understood why I was town reading each of them (turns out I was almost certainly wrong about A50, but that's another point entirely).

This was quoted for you into the thread by Cerb quite some time ago. I'm very sure that Fuzzy genuinely believed A50 was town, because I'm the one who convinced him of it.

~Drixx

[Reasonably Rational]

Also ... at NO point in the ENTIRE game,

especially

during this part you are quoting between A50 and Grapes, were they in any real danger of being lynched. Especially once you gave your ultimatum. It's not dangerous to make a hard push on someone that's going nowhere, especially when if you accidentally make it go somewhere it just makes you look absurdly town and gives you a high chance to win.

Like ... A50 never had any votes on himself except when he pulled the self-vote stunt and never got to L-1, and Grapes had your protection. They could safely push each other because they were unassailable. If you won't vote Grapes and A50 doesn't get lynched while he's self-voting himself, they're free to plant that shit in the game in anticipation of their end game, which is what we're in right now.

Tell me you honestly believe that I would leave you alive as scum. Tell me that you believe that is more likely than the actual scum team realizing that you were gunning for us and that we represented the game winning mislynch for them. One of the following must be true:

1.) I left you alive, despite the fact that you have been headhunting our slot for like 2+ months.
2.) You were left alive to be the vehicle to execute the final mislynch

I literally can't compute a world where you even believe I would leave you alive as scum. Not after SMITE.

~Drixx

P-Edit: No Mastin. It was obvious to anyone paying attention that the gem bubbles were limited. The most town read player was never going to get bubbled. That's the point.

And as far as scum theatre sustained over a long period ... I did that in SMITE for like a solid MONTH with one of the people on my scum team. That's why I recognize it for what it is. Instead of just letting it convince me emotionally, I evaluated the possible outcomes and realized that no outcome was actually bad for them, given the state of the game and what they needed to get to win.

[Reasonably Rational]

Like you have to remember the scum partner I had who could tunnel out of the game with someone, right? He could have easily just avoided lynch forever, but instead we set it up so that I was going after him hard. Since he was using his power to help outed town slots, it was decided that either he would die and I would gain massive cred as being honest and working for town from it, or I would get lynched and me pushing him so hard while he was behaving so townie would give him massive cred. That shit you've been quoting is straight out of my playbook from SMITE. The question I have is why you don't recognize it since you watched me do EXACTLY that kind of scum theatre, for a VERY extended time period. If memory serves, we carried that out across three entire day phases before I managed to get him lynched.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

Thank you for admitting that you were dishonest about how much effort you were going to put in this day phase (and dishonest earlier when you said you had pages and pages of notes that you just weren't posting). You'll get a message from me routed via Varsoon so you understand why lying to me and wasting so much of my free time in the last 13 days was so bad and something that it will take a long time for me to get over, if ever.

Apart from that... time to see what happens now.

~Drixx

P.S. - To the rest of the game ... Varsoon is aware of the reason I am exceptionally angry with Mastin for lying to us and pushing us to waste voluminous amounts of our time when she clearly had no intent to do what she said she would. I'm sure he'll vouch. I'm not going to air it publicly because in general I don't hold grudges and I can see a future where I get over it and mend fences, and it's a deeply personal and potentially upsetting thing. Anyone who is absolutely dying of curiosity and knows me well enough to believe I will tell them what the deal is should feel free to PM me when the game is over and ask.

[Reasonably Rational]

I'm sorry but if you didn't even read the game thread, you didn't come anywhere near close to putting in the effort you said you would, and you wasted an exceptional amount of our time on the premise that our time investment would be met by you actually doing something. All you did was go look for reasons to stick with what you posted like 2 and a half months ago or something. Might have been longer even.

~Drixx

P-Edit: I've had 8 hours sleep in the last 3 days. It's 7am and I haven't slept in nearly two days. Don't play the "I stayed up late" card with me, because I was here trying to engage your points and you just ignored me in favor of quoting things to justify yourself not doing the work and sticking with what you posted months ago. If you can prove differently, then by all means do so. Otherwise, the only rational thing to believe is that you acted with malice in asking us to put in this gigantic time investment.

You KNOW what your life and schedule is like. You know what your other commitments are. You know what the planning fallacy is, because I've explained it to you. There's simply no excuse. Sorry. I'm also sorry because what I'm going to ask Varsoon to send to you, so you realize why I'm so angry, is probably going to make you feel bad. But ... I don't hate you. I'm mad right now but I'm not a grudge holder. A year from now I probably won't even remember why I was mad at you. Probably sooner than that. But right now... in this moment? There aren't words to adequately describe it.

[Reasonably Rational]

Thank you for admitting that you were dishonest about how much effort you were going to put in this day phase (and dishonest earlier when you said you had pages and pages of notes that you just weren't posting).

I didn't lie. Those notes ARE pages and pages and pages and pages, probably like 100,000 words total between all my PMs and such. I haven't done anyu official compilation.

I put more work into this game than any other. Not as much as I felt neeeded to be done.
But as much as humanly possible.
I set out goals I new I couldn't reach, but tried to reach them anyway.

How much did you do THIS DAY PHASE. You know ... the one where you started out by saying you were going to re-evaluate and you wanted things from us which took a combined 50-60 hours of our time, including me staying up when I'm already on a huge sleep deficit so that I could engage with you (while you ignored me)? Honestly ... how much time did you put in THIS DAY PHASE. Because there's no way in hell you can claim with a straight face you did what you said you were going to.

We acted in good faith. I have no reason to believe you did.

~D

[Reasonably Rational]

I'm going to sleep now. If the game happens to end and post game comments begin: nobody should venture anywhere near suggesting my outrage today was a strategic move in any way. I'm generally not an emotional player in mafia, although if someone attacks me, I'll fight back. Varsoon knows exactly why I'm so angry and I talked to him about it and I'm pretty sure he'll confirm that my anger is warranted. I have hopes the game doesn't end, but in case it does and I'm asleep, I would really prefer not to come back to a bunch of people flaming me for being angry, or suggesting it was faked, because it's a very serious legitimate thing and I believe Varsoon will also vouch that it's better that I don't just post it to everyone.

Since we're lynched and just waiting around, I do want to say I had a lot of fun this game. I also want to apologize to Farside. We legitimately thought you were a serious threat because of the roles in SaGa and Bloodborne, and I really was testing you when I offered you your win condition so you could exit and simplify the end game. Your refusal convinced me that we were right about you being a serious threat. It was nothing personal, and I hope I didn't go too far. I really enjoy playing with you. When I see your name on a player list, that's a reason that makes me want to join it.

I'll have more detailed thoughts after I get some sleep and once the game actually ends (still hoping it isn't done now). There's a few players I'd really like to compliment on their play this game.

@Varsoon: Please don't lock our hydra PT if the game comes to an end state. I still need to copy in a large chunk of Cerb and me talking through the game. I will put it at like priority 3 (behind my mod duties) for when I wake up, so it shouldn't be a huge delay. Much <3 and thanks for another awesome game.

~Drixx

P-edit: Nightmares? You and me both. I dream about Varsoon's mafia games fairly regularly while they're ongoing. It's part of how our brains process information for long term memory storage. I'm sorry yours are bad.

As far as what you're saying goes ... I accept your apology that you didn't get what you intended done; however, I know you know what the planning fallacy is. You committed to doing something as an incentive to get us to spend a great deal of time, and I'm both certain that you didn't put in the time we did AND that you had everything you needed to know two weeks ago to know ahead of time that you would not be able to do that. As I said before ... you knew about your real life commitments, your mod commitments and all the other things that kept you from doing that list of things you said you would have done in an ideal world. The planning fallacy is when you plan as if everything will go perfect instead of evaluating how long things will take based upon how long similar things have taken you before, as you know, because we've had this conversation before.

In this case, I'm even willing to believe you fell prey to the planning fallacy. That still doesn't let you off the hook because if you had been 100% honest with yourself and us, you would never have said you were going to do those things, because there's no way all of the other commitments just randomly sprung up this day phase.

So that it doesn't happen in the future, you're going to find out why I'm so upset at the situation. I want you to know that the POINT of that is so you understand, NOT to hurt you or make you feel bad. As I said before, I don't hold grudges and I see a future where we're good friends. It's just not going to be today or tomorrow. When you get the message from varsoon, I believe it will make way more sense. Perhaps he'll even make a PT and mediate or something and we can hug it out.

But before all that, I need to try and sleep, if it's possible.


P-Edit 2: You've read our hydra PTs. You know we put absurd time into games. You know that when you ask us to commit time and engage, it's a BIG ask. I think about games when I'm not actively talking to cerb or reading ISOs or whatever also. I didn't include that time in my estimate. The 50-60 combined hours is time actually spent talking with Cerb or checking the paraphrases or going through ISOs and comparing to my notes and such along with the time Cerb reported he spent actively working on the game. Knowing him, the amount of extra thought that he put into things ran circles around both you and me.

You keep avoiding the actual issue. The reason I'm angry is simple: you had to have known when you made the ask of us that you could not do all the things you intended. Therefore it was deceptive for you to tell us you were going to do it when you knew you couldn't. Therefore you dealt in bad faith and wasted our time. It would have been much better if you said something like "I'm really busy, but on X days at X times I will be here and real time back and forth if you're willing to engage" and we could have had a much more productive use of both your time and ours.

Live. Learn. Improve. Most of all ... have fun. Stop beating yourself up. Yes I'm angry. Yes you'll find out why. And hopefully it will hammer home how to avoid the planning fallacy in the future. If I wanted to write you off, I would just tell you to fuck off and avoid you. The fact that I'm talking to you is all the proof you need that I value you and our friendship, even though I'm angry at having been jerked around.