Newbie 783 - Mongol Mafia - Game Over

[Iecerint]

Hi guys. I just finished reading through once, but I haven't gotten my role PM yet. I'll read through again once I have that piece of information.

Pesky details.. I'm old sick and dying, damnit. Cut me some slack.

[Iecerint]

OK, here I go --

The two players I get the most pro-town vibes from at the moment are FT and Pablo:

- I like FT because I doubt that a newbie mafia member would advocate NoLynch on Day 1. The intuitive thing to do as a mafia player is to do the opposite. (Granted, thinking about this from a "third person"'s perspective suggests that lynching is in the town's best interests.) Here's a summary of my thinking on this:

Newbie town = Don't lynch! We'll probably mess up! At best, follow others' conjecture!
Newbie scum = Lynch someone! But never one of us!
Expert town = Approaches default forum play.
Expert scum = Approaches default forum play.

The only category that fits FT's predecessor is newbie town.

The possibility that FT's predecessor was secretly an expert player without an avatar (maybe on an alt? I don't know if that's part of the culture on these forums) who was banking on a lack of expert players to call him out and a lot of newbie players to jump on the NoLynch bandwagon seems remote to me.

The only contradiction here is that FT's predecessor both claimed to have only played 3 times total and to have played large games on debate.org. This seems a little sketchy. My guess is that he just got defensive and mentioned the other online play to save face.

- Honestly, I like Pablo because of his calling out Shadeaux's taking my predecessor to L-1, even though he (read: I) was the first bandwagon of the Day. It seems like rushing someone through to lynch quickly might be a scum strategy, especially if their first thought is (as above) "Lynch someone who's not one of us!" rather than the equally-important "Don't seem too scummy while you do it!" This may inadvertently be like a reverse-OMGUS or something, but I still think it's one of the few well-motivated bandwagon-starters of the night. (Not that many bandwagons SHOULD necessarily be well-motivated on Day 1.)

The only caveat here is that, frankly, I used to think Jarmo might be scum before I got my role PM. (That's why I didn't post much the first time -- I thought I'd have to figure out how to reconcile his FT-predecessor attack with FT's relatively-clear innocence. I probably would've said, as I believe others have, that it was really just a glorified random vote.) Because of that, Shadeaux's bumping me to L-1 maybe isn't

quite

as damning as it might otherwise be (but it's still pretty suspect). Because of that, Pablo's "heroism" is diluted just as much (which, similarly, is not too much).

- princess's apparent scumminess in thereafter attacking Pablo is similarly slightly diluted (IMO). maybe she was just getting the same anti-Jarmo vibes that I was getting (prior to seeing my PM, etc.) That said, L-1 on the first wagon seemed awfully quick.

I'm going to finish by doing (officially) what my predecessor recommended. I agree with FT's suggestion that we encourage penguana (or whoever replaces him) to participate and explain in more detail his views of who's scum. For this reason, I

Vote: penguana

. (Let's keep him away from L-1, though, for the time being!)

Princess, it's good that you're thinking about the game globally rather than locally. It's about the town winning, not individuals surviving. That said, it's imperative that you provide us with as much information as you can about your ideas about who's scum and why. That way, if you die and turn up Townie (whether by lynch or NK), the remaining Townies are in a better position to use your clearly well-intentioned views to root out the scum (and secure you the win!).

Until then,

FoS: princess, Shadeaux

I disagree somewhat with DDD's objection. I don't believe that DDD's behavior is necessarily anti-town (I agree that we need to hear more from princess), but I think she may respond better to encouragement than anything else. I still think it's possible that she was picking up on Jarmo-scum-vibes and overreacted to Pablo's very reasonable suspicion of Shadeaux.

I'm also a little put-off by ivan's shorter posts. Could you let us know more about your feelings about the various players? IGMEOY.

tl;dr --

TOWN
Pablo
eKIM
FT
me

SUSPECT
Shadeaux
princess
ivan
penguana

NEUTRAL
DDD

NB -- Sorry it's so long. I'll try to quote more in the future, as I'll presumably not need to quote from so many pages. For that matter, is there an easy way to do that? Newbie question.

[Iecerint]

EBWOP: Erm, to clarify, the reason the possibility seems remote to me is that Pablo and DDD had already implied that they were good, active players.

[Iecerint]

I have no idea why Icerint has a pro-town read on FT.

FT clarified it, but he's right: it was because of my view of Mr. NL's behavior. I'll quote the relevant text from my own post below:

OK, here I go --

- I like FT because I doubt that a newbie mafia member would advocate NoLynch on Day 1. The intuitive thing to do as a mafia player is to do the opposite. (Granted, thinking about this from a "third person"'s perspective suggests that lynching is in the town's best interests.) Here's a summary of my thinking on this:

Newbie town = Don't lynch! We'll probably mess up! At best, follow others' conjecture!
Newbie scum = Lynch someone! But never one of us!
Expert town = Approaches default forum play.
Expert scum = Approaches default forum play.

The only category that fits FT's predecessor is newbie town.

The possibility that FT's predecessor was secretly an expert player without an avatar (maybe on an alt? I don't know if that's part of the culture on these forums) who was banking on a lack of expert players to call him out and a lot of newbie players to jump on the NoLynch bandwagon seems remote to me.

If you think FT's no good and I'm giving his predecessor too much of the benefit of the doubt, please let me know.

Prime suspects for me are Shadeaux (what everyone is saying), princess (for disagreeing with Pablo about Shadeaux, but she may have just thought Jarmo = me was no good -- I don't think mafia would attack the strongest player against the weakest Day 1 (this is sort of WIFOM, but it's just my intuition), but then again her defense was kinda lacking), ivan (short posts and so on; relatively weak suspicion, but I want him to speak up), penguana (the exact opposite of Princess -- lurks and votes with Pablo, but only on some bandwagons [did he join mine, though? don't think he did. probably means nothing. i'll check soon]).

[Iecerint]

But, sure, what more would you like to ask me? (other than that you think "it's scummy", which even I myself admitted as much)

I'd like to hear more about your own ideas on who's town and who isn't. If you're really pro-town, you should give us all the information you can about your perspective. That'll give us more fodder for analysis if you turn up town (and less-useful fodder if you turn up mafia).

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EBWOP: penguana just seconded eKIM's anti-lurker Jarmo vote, which isn't suspect at all except that he apparently did it again later. i agree with others that either he or his replacement needs to speak up.

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EBWOP: nvm -- penguana was first, eKIM was second. so penguana is in no way scummy relative to, at least, the Jarmo wagon (i.e. a pattern of only seconding votes by penguana may've been scummy. maybe).

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I know I've already like triple-posted, but I wanted to bring up a particularly sketchy post by penguana for him/his replacement to address:

For lack of better suspicion, really. Indeed it's shoddy evidence at best, but it's D1 after all.

But thinking about it, even hovering at L-1, I honestly doubted any proper townie would've quick-lynched without much further consideration (despite being a newbie game).

A scum, however, might be quite tempted to. And Jarmo would've definitely been obligated to scrounge a defense, or at least talk more. Surely it looks scummy on my part, but I'd risk it to put the pressure.

I didn't like the reasoning behind Shadeaux's vote.

I don't think creating bandwagons with no reasoning or evidence is good.

So

vote: Shadeaux

Also, i will closely watch purple princess,

due to her "random" vote.

(First, it's certainly true that Shadeaux's behavior is very silly. His defense (L-2 isn't enough pressure!) is silly.)

But penguana's rationale for voting against him (bolded) is sorta baffling. I think he's trying to redefine what Shadeaux did for people who may've missed it. Shadeaux didn't create a bandwagon (that'd have been OK) -- he pushed an existing one dangerously close to a quicklynch.

penguana does the same thing to the suspicion of princess. Her vote wasn't random at all (that'd be OK on Day 1!) -- she voted for the guy who voted for Shadeaux after his quite-sketchy move. penguana's consistently minimized genuinely-sketchy moves -- maybe so we'll forget about them.

It could be that he's just not a very invested player, I guess. That could also explain his behavior.

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Seconding eKIM's

prod request for penguana

. He hasn't posted since last Monday.

'least I'm catching up on posts.

[Iecerint]

EBWOP: Disregard that. Missed that Note.

I promise to shut up until at least 3-4 other people have posted.

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OK, I lied. 2 votes is enough. Gosh, post if you're there, people!

[
Also, this may seem particularly self-centered, but as I know I'm innocent AND a tempting lynch, penguana's vote was odd in my eyes -- but I'd think the mafia would at least put more effort in smearing me first, in case I did die as innocent. But then again, 3rd vote is pretty under-the-radar and quickly buried once the last two votes are casted.

Does this make sense to anyone? Why would the mafia put effort into smearing him "in case [he] did die as innocent." Plenty of us have "smeared" him, and the mafia already knows whether he's mafia or not when he dies.

I guess the last part is (functionally) just sort of daring anyone to throw on a 3rd vote, which is also anti-town. I'm going to switch to a

Vote:Shadeaux

, more for his prior behavior than this behavior, but also because the prods indicate that penguana hasn't even looked at the thread (i.e. he's not just not posting). Guess DDD was right.

Shadeaux, let us know who you think is scum.

If you're town, you should do this because you want to tell us as much as you can from your perspective (sans roleclaiming, unless we're about to make a huge mistake, etc.). If you're not, you should probably pretend to be town as best as you can.

[Iecerint]

Well like I said I think suggesting NL is completely a null-tell. Inexperienced scum can still work out that they ought to try and suggest things that are pro-town, and inexperienced players often don't intuitively understand the reason NLD1 is bad, whether they are scum or town.

If he'd played before in a PR-heavy environment where NL really was good for town, and he was trying to look good as scum...

.

I think it's a null-tell.

FT has been pretty neutral so far in his posts, I feel. Nothing especially scummy, but no heavily pro-town incisive comments either. Early days.

Italics are mine. You're correct that it could be that I'm underestimating BS/FT. However, his lack of avatar and so forth lead me to believe that I'm not. Sure, it's circumstantial, but it's just Day 1, what can ya do. :p

Even though voting for penguana to pressure him maybe wasn't necessarily so sharp in hindsight, I'd like to suggest that taking PP back to L-2 from L-1 was a pro-town move in a game like this (e.g. where everyone but Pablo, DDD, and eKIM can play the newbie defense to an "innocent" quick hammer and so on).

He did make that inane post about DDD, though.

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1. Welcome, Katy.

2. I just realized I never answered Pablo's question from way-back-when. (Where'd he go?) This is my first game on these forums or any other internet forum. However, I play live games from time to time with friends at parties or whatever. We only have "cop" and "doctor" power roles, though I'm familiar with other roles from reading through some games on this site (not that it'll matter much for this game). I prefer mafia or town power roles (i.e. I like knowing things!), but playing vanilla town is fun, too, especially if I'm playing with people I'm comfortable with.

3. @ eKIM: this is the FT post that I was alluding to (context: he posted it just after DDD commented that he thought the penguana-pressure thing wouldn't work out):

Well, maybe. But we've got some time to play with here, I'm not keen to leave someone on L-1 when there are other players who need questioning. Purple Princess isn't giving us much, despite the pressure; so I'm not sure where the payoff is in continuing to apply it.

Re-reading, I guess I fixated too much on the "L-1" part. He's not taking her off of L-1 to avoid a quick-lynch; he's doing it to put pressure on someone else. (Sorry about that.) I'd still characterize this post (or at least the action it was defending) as pro-town because, to me at least, it makes sense -- the PP interrogation approach wasn't working, so probing somewhere else might. Alternatively, it could be that my view of his action is tainted by my agreement with it (i.e. I agreed, so I liked it, so I still see it as pro-town even though it didn't work).

I'm trying to justify my lack of FT suspicion because you specifically questioned my lack of FT suspicion in this post:

I have no idea why Icerint [sic] has a pro-town read on FT.

So my posts about him have been attempts to justify my own views while listening to your (and others') criticism.

It's true that BS said he'd played power role-heavy games in the past, but he also said he'd only played 3 games total (or, at least, DDD listed his post from the Queue that stated as much). Taking those things together, I read his "power role-heavy games on debate.org!" comment as a defensive reaction to your assumptions about his being new to the game rather than evidence of his storied mafia past. (Implicit here is my assumption that a maximally-newbie scum would not be likely to suggest NL.) It could also be that I'm being unduly influenced by the town's comments implying the former just prior to his post, though.

4. @ FT: INDEED. NO FUN PERMITTED IN THE THREAD. :p

But seriously, I just meant that it could be construed as distracting from scumhunting. It's may be a stretch, but I try to include in my posts any evidence I can of the "opposite perspective" if I can remember to. In your case, that was the closest thing I could find. Keep in mind that this was in response to eKIM's stated incredulity at my faith in you.

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@ Pablo

@ Katy

Realized I didn't answer your implicit question. I pretty much agree with you that the best lynches at this point are Shadeaux or PP. Of them, I'd prefer Shadeaux (my current vote reflects that) because his post-wagon posts don't really seem to help the town much except in minimal ways (e.g. only commenting on his view of a single player) and were still suspect (if not always outright scummy). I'd really like him to post in detail a player analysis a la Katy's post before we decide on that, though. The same goes for PP. They've both been asked for this multiple times and have seemed evasive so far. (Maybe PP has a circumstance similar to Pablo, but Shadeaux's posted at least once this weekend.)

Katy's analysis has led me to believe, for the time being, that penguana's behavior may have been due to apathy. It also seems like she'll be a fairly active player (I may be jumping the gun here), which makes it easier to find evidence of her scumminess (if present) later moreso than Shadeaux and PP's.

[Iecerint]

I've just found Ekim's questioning of Icerint over his trust of me pretty interesting. I wasn't really thinking about it much, because it seemed obvious to me that I was pro-town; but with a bit of perspective, it does seem quite a strong stance to take on one piece of evidence. Looking for justifications after the fact in my text is less suspicious, I think. More that that's just how argument works -

"What makes you say that?"
"Well, it's mainly this reason, but now that I think about it, I've found 5 more!"

So it doesn't strike me as particularly scummy. Backing away too easily in the face of criticism would; and although 129 and 148 are a little equivocal, I can't see a backflip in there. I considered whether it might be a shot at buddying; but let's be honest, I'm not a great candidate. I'd pick Pablo or Ekim, one of the most active players - someone whose opinion is likely to be more often and forcefully repeated.

So some parts of the act are odd, maybe not scummy, certinaly odd - but most of his reaction has seemed fairly town.

If we're doing pbpas, I'll post mine early tomorrow.

Could you clarify whether this means that eKIM is scum, that I am scum, or that we are both scum? You're using pronouns to the extent that, sentence-by-sentence, I get a different read on who you're implicitly discussing. Maybe this is just because I don't have a neutral perspective on your post. (Well, you go out of your way to specify that whoever it is is "maybe not scummy," so maybe I'm just asking "who this is referring to.")

Assuming that you're referring at least somewhat to me, what's odd about elaborating on your views if someone challenges them? I think everyone should be prepared to do that. (But you kind of comment in your post that this isn't what you're talking about (paragraphs 1 and 3)? So maybe this is evidence that you meant to mean either "eKIM is scum" or "Iec and eKIM are scumbuddies" rather than "Iec is scum"? I guess?)

I also think you're kind of manufacturing my fixation on you. Posts 129 through 136 are predominantly about Shadeaux, and post 139 is about penguana. I only talk about you (I think) when eKIM's followed up on my response and I feel like I need to answer him.

On the subject of eKIM -- I guess it's possible he could be scum, but this is probably just the OMGUS talking. His problems with my trust in FT have been based on theory -- assuming that "NL is a null-tell" is default theory, and it certainly sounds like it is at this point -- so I don't think that's really suspect. I interpreted BS's NL as something other than a null-tell because of circumstantial evidence (mainly, BS's lack of avatar and this being BS's 3rd game altogether, the former of which tempered my interpretation of his statement that he'd played online in PR-heavy games in the past). eKIM did interpret my penguana quote differently from DDD (eKIM accepted that penguana's could be scummy, but posited it might be an apathy-tell, as I had also mentioned; DDD simply said it was probably an apathy-tell), but that may not mean anything. (I only mention this because they'd interpreted "NL is a null-tell" identically, so I was assuming they'd rely on theory to come to the same solution in the second case, too.)

Having said that, if eKIM and FT are the scum, then eKIM has played very well inasmuch as he has prompted me to post a piecemeal defense of FT while simultaneously appearing not at all associated with him. I doubt this case because there are only 2 scum, and I would be surprised if at least one out of Shadeaux and PP were not scum. (Well, I'd be the most surprised if Shadeaux's not scum.)

If I wanted to name something scummy about my own play up to this point, it would be that I've focused on players who have not been as active as others (Shadeaux and PP). Since I've joined the game, it seems like we haven't really gotten any new information from those two players, but some game time has gone by nonetheless. I find this frustrating, but I still think they're the best targets. Alternatively, it could be that this game isn't as slow as it seems. O_o

FT,

could you post specifically what you find equivocal about posts 129 and 148?

Is it just that the first one "supports" you and the second one "attacks" you in addition to that? (Keep in mind that the "attack" bit is only there in response to your question about my comment about your repartee with DDD.)

Newbie question: Is there a way to restore the text cursor when it disappears? I haven't been able to figure it out.... ^^;

[Iecerint]

Speaking of

PP

, I think she may be

due for a prod

?

[Iecerint]

EBWOP:

If I wanted to name something scummy about my own play up to this point, it would be that I've focused on players who have not been as active as others (Shadeaux and PP).

For the sake of completeness, I guess I should add that I focused on penguana, too. But he was similarly not as active, so the point stands. And I like Katy. She posts.

Should add ahead of time that I'll be

V/LA

this coming Saturday-Tuesdayish for college graduation. I mention this up-front because

the end of Day 1 is during that time, so I may not be able to change my vote on account of 11th hour revelations.

Failing further information, my vote will remain on Shadeaux.

[Iecerint]

Speaking of

PP

, I think she may be

due for a prod

?

Agree. Looking back she last posted on Friday, and it's Tuesday now. It's hard for us to move forward without hearing from either PP or shadeaux. I've been checking in on the game but find I have nothing to add really, until they speak up for themselves.

Well, Shadeaux

did

post...

I'd like a proper explanation from him. I actually found the last thing he said on the subject quite scummy:

Sure you can toss the two options around all day. Do YOU think a townie would've quick-lynched Jarmo? Or a scum would've been more likely? I gambled the latter. But I'm beating a dead horse now.

That's scarcely a good explanation, and he makes like we have to move on, there's no point discussing this. I don't buy it and vote him, and he hasn't responded to that at all. I wonder why?

I don't necessarily mind you grilling me, as I do acknowledge that your suspicions are perfectly acceptable. I twice explained what I could in two posts -- however poor you think my explanation was -- hence why I said I'm beating a dead horse (as I'm just repeating myself now), but not necessarily that you are.

But, sure, what more would you like to ask me? (other than that you think "it's scummy", which even I myself admitted as much)

Also, this may seem particularly self-centered, but as I know I'm innocent AND a tempting lynch, penguana's vote was odd in my eyes -- but I'd think the mafia would at least put more effort in smearing me first, in case I did die as innocent. But then again, 3rd vote is pretty under-the-radar and quickly buried once the last two votes are casted.

...but I don't think he's responded to eKIM's concerns very well. I guess he kind-of responded to my and eKIM's request for his views of who scum might be, but not in enough detail (IMO, and eKIM has asked again for views on scum, so I don't think eKIM was satisfied, either).

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Err, clarification: Shadeaux's post was

prior

to your joining the game, but

after

our requests for S/PP's opinions about scum. I didn't mean to insinuate that you had missed something. Sorry if I implied otherwise.

[Iecerint]

Iecerint (Replaces Jarmo on Day 1)

Does this mean you're not sure about me, or that you missed a spot?

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The emphasis he places on certain words, the double and triple posts, and the emoticon usage all rub me the wrong way. Nothing remotely lynchable, but IGMEOY because of it.

D'ya mean that I'm sort of annoying (ergo, later policy lynch) or that I'm scummy? Assuming the latter, could you point out any particularly troubling passages? I've never played online before, so I may be giving a different impression than I'm intending (e.g. if I'm deviating too much from the forum culture, etc.)....

(I know you said it was "[n]othing remotely lynchable," but so long as we're waiting for S/PP/reps... <_<)

Sorry about the double/triple posts. It's my first game online. I'm excited.

[Iecerint]

Gotcha.

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ice - connecting lines w/o dots, bandwagoner, goes with the flow, doesn't add to game enough,

I'm not sure what's up with this. Re: bandwagoning -- I voted for penguana first (page 5), who you also describe as sketchy ("lurker lynch"). I lost interest in this the same time you did (when Katy took over), and switched to Shadeaux (you). Barring that very last detail, I seem to pretty much agree with you most of the time (with regard to who's suspicious).

Re: not adding to the game -- I, uh, don't think I'd describe myself as a lurker. I guess it's true that a couple of my posts are responses rather than new analysis, but that's just because I believe in responding to criticism. As far as independent analysis goes, I'd point to posts 120 (FT defense), 133 (penguana attack), and 139 (Shadeaux attack). (Granted, the last two now seem to've been symptomatic of player apathy, and FT's moved to my bad list lately for ignoring my question.)

putting someone to L-1 isn't so bad, if that person is lynched w/o due thought process, and new content being added then whoever lynched them is most diffinetly a scum, (in my previous game we had quite a bit of discussion over this)

I disagree with this, especially on page 3 in the context of a newbie game like this one. A new player who hammers could just claim they were learning the game and hadn't realized voting worked that way, etc. (especially since Shadeaux failed to note that he'd put him at L-1).

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I'm still happy with my vote for now. Waiting to hear more from SOG.

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FT,

could you post specifically what you find equivocal about posts 129 and 148?

Is it just that the first one "supports" you and the second one "attacks" you in addition to that?

This. It was kinda buried toward the end of a long post, so it's understandable that you'd miss it. Was bolded, though. :p

[Iecerint]

finished p7,

don't see what's the deal w/ no avatar

only other game i played, half the people didn't have avators and i didn't get one till half way through the game(almost)

It could be that I'm misunderstanding the culture on this forum. My assumption was that 1) more experienced players, as well as players who frequent online forums generally, are more likely to have avatars and that 2) given that a player is not very experienced, "No Lynch" is a more obvious town move than scum move (even though theory suggests the opposite). This is because a newbie scum player would probably be focused on directing suspicion to town players (or that's how I think I would've played it). Even though BS said he had played on forums before, since he didn't have an avatar, I interpreted his prior forum play as having been minor (corroborated by this being his 3rd game ever). It's conjecture, but it seemed truthy enough for me to warrant posting it.

For contrast, Katy's take on this is a little different:

BlyndSikick/Furpants_tom: I really don't like the No Lynch vote right away. I've played in games where we have determined that a no lynch was the best choice Day 1, but I've never come across a situation where proceeding straight to a no lynch without even any discussion or pressure was considered a good way to start the game. On the other hand, if I was a newb and also scum, I'd probably try to lay low at first and see what other people did, rather than proposing something so different right away, so I'm not sure it reads as scummy. As far as FT goes, I can't tell ... he's been a bit jokey but that seems like his personality and he hasn't done anythign super suspect yet.

And eKIM emphasized that the fact that BS's prior forum play having involved power role-heavy games may make this line of reasoning a little tenuous, anyway.

I'm not liking DDD and ekim, they just pop in and offer small comments, but nothing in depth or that will benifit the game in the long run

i'm also disagreeing with shadow's way of voting first and justifying second, this obviously isn't a good way to do things,

DDD and eKIM are the two players who keep debunking my theories. So, unless you think I'm pretty much spot-on most of the time, I'd think you would find their contributions valuable. But you've criticized my posts as vacuous, so this seems unlikely. (The alternate possibility that would warrant your disliking all three of me, eKIM, and DDD -- that we're all scum together, with me making vacuous arguments and their making equally vacuous refutations to derail discussion -- is impossible, since there are only 2 scum.) I'm not sure where you're going with this.

I agree about Shadeaux being sketchy, though. :p

[Iecerint]

@ tracker

iec
DDD, ekim,
FT &Ivan
Palbo, Katy,

You realize you just LITERALLY described EVERYONE except for the former Purple Princess (and yourself) of being scummy?

@ SOG

You've kind of done almost the same thing as tracker, but not quite to such an extreme. I acknowledge that I try to list both sides of arguments in my posts -- I think I've even commented that I do that in one post. I think it's pro-town to provide as much information as I can about my thought process. I've also stuck by my arguments where I'm relatively confident in them (e.g. defense of FT), but I'm not above agreeing when I miscalculated (e.g. apathy of penguana/PP). I'd characterize my playstyle as active (maybe too active, since it draws attention) and pro-town.

These posts make me more certain that at least one of tracker and SOG are scum. tracker is slightly more suspect to me because his read on me seems to have gone up a notch since SOG's post. If one of them is not scum, I think the one that IS scum is scum with eKIM. My guess is that they picked up on eKIM's suspicion of me (whether he was genuinely suspicious of me or not, I'm not sure) as the next-most-likely Day 1 lynch and've latched onto that. I'm keeping my vote on tracker for now, but I could be persuaded to vote for SOG if someone provided information why one is a better lynch than the other.

An alternate explanation is that I'm actually the most suspicious player here. I find this hard to believe.

[Iecerint]

I do, however, agree with this:

Pablo, you also need to post more and in more detail

Maybe he's waiting to make an epic 11th hour post? If so, reminder that

the V/LA I alluded to earlier is currently in effect.

I'll be totally without access from Monday afternoon until Tuesday evening, and I'll be running around for commencement stuff the next few days. I'll try to post as much as I can, but please forgive grammatical errors, etc.

[Iecerint]

I'd like to hear from the people who haven't weighed in recently on their re-evaluated take.

Agreed. I trust myself more than I should when I'm the only one talking. Also, IF we were on the wrong track, the best thing the mafia could do is lurk to twilight... <_<

[Iecerint]

@ tracker

iec
DDD, ekim,
FT &Ivan
Palbo, Katy,

You realize you just LITERALLY described EVERYONE except for the former Purple Princess (and yourself) of being scummy?

do you realize what i said about this list not being in any particular order?

This is what you said:

(no particular order, though the top bunch are the most scummy and the bottom ones are least.)

So, it's in no order, but there's an order. I really wasn't sure what to make of this, so I assumed you meant the second thing you said (e.g. as the names seem to be organized into "tiers"). (Everyone: please let me know if there's a sensible interpretation of this that I'm just not picking up on.)

the reason i put the list in no particular order is to benifit the scum as little as possible, by making lists that list who i find most scummy in order give the scum better targets and people who they might find easier to lynch.

during my mafia game me and my partner used this very well to get town people lynched and i'm not going to give the scum in this game that chance.

Although I'm not convinced your list is really in "no particular order," I still disagree with this point. If you are really town, you should try to give us honest, detailed information about who you think is scum. This way, if you die via lynch or NK, we'll know that your posts and reasoning were at least well-intentioned, and we can use them in further lynches. If you turn up scum, we can (mostly) ignore the list.

[Iecerint]

EBWOP: For the record, since I haven't reposted mine in awhile, here are my current reads:

Pro-town
Katy, Me (I've agreed with pretty much everything Katy's posted, even when she's corrected me. As tracker pointed out, it could also be that she's just really good.)

Leaning-town
eKIM, Pablo, FT (I think the basis of eKIM's suspicion of me was better-motivated than SOG's, and especially more than tracker's. Pablo needs to post more. FT keeps out of the top tier because he's mostly listed jokey posts instead of analysis.)

Neutral
ivan, DDD (ivan's here mostly for lurking; his posts themselves seem innocuous-enough. DDD's not quite as warm-and-fuzzy as eKIM (and nowhere near so much as Pablo), so he comes off as a little scummier to me (i.e. so his placement here may be a little less rational than I'd prefer). In terms of actual play, DDD and eKIM seem to be in agreement much of the time.)

Leaning-scum
SOG, tracker (There are too many things I'd have to explain to myself as "poor play" for at least one of them not to be scum. I do kind of understand SOG's suspicion of my also-post-alternatives-to-your-hypothesis style (though I disagree) -- FT also commented on it, etc. -- but his claim that Shadeaux doesn't appear scummy sort of keeps me from giving him the benefit of the doubt.

[Iecerint]

ok, let me try and clarify what i'm saying here for you,

and in order to do that let's imagine for a second that your scum, would you or would you not want to know who the village finds to be the scummiest people around?

If I were scum, I'd want to know how the townies felt; that's accurate.

then once you know who the village suspects wouldn't you act on that?

that's why i refuse to put my list in order,

I see where you're coming from, but think about what it would mean if everyone played that way. Let's suppose that there are 2 scum: players X and Y. X plays poorly on Day 1 and everyone is suspicious. X and Y don't want to kill X, because X is mafia. So they vote townie Z, the most suspicious non-scum. If everyone else voted X and X turned up scum, then the remaining non-X voter (Y) would easily be identified as the remaining scum. After all, all players have the same information except the mafia (and power-role players, I guess, if present), so the townies would induce the simplest explanation for the opinion difference.

It's not just that mafia may avoid playing that way to avoid suspicion. If all town players refrain from discussing scum, then the only way to distinguish scum from non-scum is by voting behavior, which itself has largely become arbitrary due to lack of information (except for by mafia; but since totally arbitrary town lynches will generally result in a mafia win, this isn't from where the mafia/town balance derives -- power roles help a little, but they're not guaranteed to exist). (Everyone: let me know if this is mistaken.)

That said, you've given us your views by now (as well as in the original posts, albeit with the disclaimer I still don't quite understand), so I guess it's a moot point.

I don't think we should comment on ourselves; i think everyone would put themselves on the bottom of their decection radar,

town people because they know that their town and scum because they don't want to get themselves lynched.

I agree with this, of course; the only reason I pointed out that you hadn't listed yourself as scum was to make it accurate that you had literally listed everyone (save SOG/PP).

[Iecerint]

EBWOP: In case someone calls me out on listing myself in my "reads" list, I'd like to clarify that I meant that I agreed with tracker's point that everyone will list themselves as pro-town. As such, I don't think it matters whether or not we explicitly list ourselves as pro-town. However, for the same reason that I think it's pro-town to describe who a player believes is scum, I disagree with tracker's implicit notion that a player shouldn't comment on his or her own actions.

[Iecerint]

I mostly agree with DDD, with one obvious exception and one concern:

Analysis of SOG’s analysis:

Lots of interesting things here. He raises a good point about FT’s pressure vote of penguana which is strange behavior from FT. He also promises a PBPA and never delivers it either which is a touch dodgy. I think his read on Katy is off as she appeared to counter his arguments ably. I also think his argument about Pablo is complete junk and basically on the level of PP’s reasoning for a vote, the post in question is clearly Pablo just trying to be a good IC and give the town something to talk about.

Agree 100%. Pablo does need to post, though. He hasn't since Thursday, if I'm not mistaken. That makes him

due for a prod tomorrow

.

I agree with his reads on ekiM and Icerint (mostly because he just agrees with me about Icerint).

Disagree 100%, but that's to be expected.

I have more of a null read on ivanavich than he does,

but agree with his concerns about tracker

.

This is the part that I'm confused about, both for what it says and for what it doesn't. Here's the relevant part of the SOG post:

tracker – How do you not have a scum feel after reading eight pages. You pointed out yourself that neutrality is bad, yet you wrote that you are undecided about most players and aren’t voting. I also don’t like how it appears that you claimed your role. That is not a good thing to do, townies not excluded. Not a strong read yet, but I dislike your play so far.

Shadeaux – I didn’t read his actions as being indicative of being scum and I didn’t like the wagon on him. I didn’t like the wagon on purple princess either. Had neither of them replaced I don’t think either of them were the correct lynch for the day.

First, I have a hard time believing that an otherwise-competent player (SOG) would find neither the PP nor the Shadeaux wagon credible. Sure, "knowing" that PP was town (hypothetically) would provide him with unique perspective on the PP half of the issue (only), but you'd think he'd at least comment on their sketchy behavior. Instead, SOG makes it sound like players were wrong and even suspect to doubt Shadeaux and/or PP. Even assuming that he thought it would be poor play to attack PP (himself) too aggressively, this doesn't explain at all his defense of Shadeaux.

Second, I find it strange that DDD fails to discuss SOG's support for Shadeaux and PP, especially given DDD's staunch support for the PP wagon. (This can be sort-of explained as DDD not noticing SOG's Shadeaux post (and the PP comment within it) due to SOG's post's irregular spacing, but it seems like DDD's ordinarily a pretty careful poster. Even if DDD was benefit-of-the-doubt-ing SOG's support of PP (same person and all), you'd think DDD'd still find SOG's Shadeaux talk suspect.)

Moving on to tracker:

Which of the many things should I point out first? Let’s start at the top, he’s “lurker” hunting. This is of course the easiest style of fake scumhunting to do, because you don’t have to actually analyze content, you simply need to point out someone isn’t around. Of course he also failed to do the second part of it, which is establish why lurking is a scumtell. In fact, he blows this up with his own analysis. Tracker cites four different people for lurking, me, ekiM, Pablo, and ivan; except even if both scum are in that group that also means there’s an equal number of pro-town lurkers, hence lurking as an accurate scumtell is bogus.

He also claims I provide no or limited content, when that’s clearly not true. In fact SOG said the complete opposite, saying “Debonair Danny DePietro – He makes a lot of observations”. Then we get to his confusing ordered but unordered but possibly ordered list which seems more designed to confuse the town then confuse scum because it’s easy to tell based off his other comments who he believes to be scum and town and a general order for them.

Back to agreeing 95~100%. I'm not sure I'm at 100% because I can't tell whether this is just symptomatic of poor play. I sort of have a hard time believing that both Shadeaux and tracker had this problem, though.

I also think his comment about tracker is on point in that he’s done his best to not take a stance and he continues that now, he casts his vote not with conviction, but as a pressure vote.

Are you talking about my comments about tracker or SOG's comments about tracker (pronoun ambiguity)? Assuming the latter, how did you read SOG's tracker/Shadeaux talk? To me, it seemed that SOG was sort of cautiously minimizing the suspicion there rather than increasing it (i.e. it read like "tracker, you're doing X, and X is suspect, IGMEOY; btw Shadeaux is obvstown"). Maybe I'm just OMGUSing at his suspicion of me and am reading things into the post that aren't there.

I'd change my vote to SOG, but tracker's here. I'd like to hear Katy's take (or others') on the DDD/SOGPP/Shadetrack business.

[Iecerint]

Tracker cites four different people for lurking, me, ekiM, Pablo, and ivan; except even if both scum are in that group that also means there’s an equal number of pro-town lurkers, hence lurking as an accurate scumtell is bogus.

In fairness to tracker, 50% > 22%. 25% is also greater than 22%, so even if only one of the lurkers is scum, we're still better off than blind guessing. I'm not suggesting that he's not scum (I still think he is), but it's not true that his method is worse than random guessing.

And double/triple posts annoy me. But sadly, not liking someone's style =/= scum, as I've seen many, many times. Still, the above keeps you at #2.

SOG's scatershot of "I don't like" statements about nearly everything in the game is a great way for scum to shoot a lot of ideas out there to see what sticks. It ain't terribly productive to just point out everyone's faults when you have one vote. Throw out your suspicions when you can act on them. While he did throw out a vote, there was little true focus in the post on Iecerint to draw out a good reaction from the town (instead people can just pick and choose, because more likely than not everyone is going to agree with one or two of the things he said). It's a negative post and a moderately "safe" post, and I think it's plenty shady.

Seeing as PP=SOG, this won't come as a suprise.

vote: semioldguy

I find it interesting that Pablo and DDD have such different takes on SOG's post. What led DDD to unvote SOG led Pablo to vote SOG. Since there was a long gap there without any Pablo posts, I suspect that Pablo may have been waiting for DDD to post. (He'd said he was waiting for the PP/S replacements, but that's not what brought him out. Another possibility is that he posted/voted because I commented on his not having posted.) Pablo's take seems truthier to me (DDD's fails to comment on SOG's more troubling comments), so I'm going to follow his lead and

unvote vote semioldguy

. I believe this puts SOG back at L-2.

[Iecerint]

Missed some great posts. I'll try not to miss anything:

@Katy
I also now find it interesting that on the topic of your replacement analysis you completely omit Jarmo, who I think was the scummiest of all the players who replaced out. As soon as he came under pressure he replaced out as well, why didn't you mention this?

I view this as a bit of a distortion. The (public) "suspicion" on Jarmo had died down by the time I replaced in. Jarmo/I only had one vote at that point -- Shadeaux. So Katy's explanation that newbscum leaves once they're under pressure shouldn't apply here. I guess you could claim that Jarmolurking is what made the suspicion dissipate, but I looks to me like it was more the Shadeaux/PP debacle than anything else.

See, here's the issue, obviously SOG is going to find the PP wagon to wrong whether he's scum or town so it's not like I'm gaining any information there. And if you recall I was the one (or one of the ones) who made the original point about the Shadeux wagon not being so good, so SOG's comments about those two weren't really worth a mention to me.

My mistake. That said, if PP was scum and Shadeaux wasn't, I'm not sure why PP would have tried to divert attention away from him. Wouldn't she be thrilled that a town player had done something so sketchy and tried to ride it to a blameless mislynch? How would you explain her behavior in that scenario?

(Also, could you clarify where the "1 out of 5" part of the probability equation (the "other side") comes from? I believe you that I'm mistaken, I'd just like to better-understand my mistake.)

I also find it suspicious that iecerint doesn't vote for me until he can follow someone else in doing so, especially since in the same post (Post 222) he says that he thinks tracker is scum yet removes his vote from him.

Actually, I switched to you at a time when fewer players had voted for you. (You lost two votes from L-2, then picked one up from Pablo; I put you back at L-2 where you've been for much of the game.) Also,

mod, though I'd love to vote for both tracker and SOG, I don't think I'm allowed

. It's true that Pablo's analysis is what made me switch to you from tracker, though. I'm still not entirely satisfied with DDD's posts, and Pablo's makes sense to me. I guess it could be that their perception of me colors whose argument I favor, but I'm trying to be objective.

@Iecerint
When you return could you please provide your case against ekiM and what about him you find scummy?

I think you have me confused with someone else. I view eKIM as a leaning-town player (post 213). Of the four players who've expressed suspicion of me (eKIM, DDD, tracker, and you), I currently view eKIM with the least suspicion (eKIM > DDD > tracker ~ SOG).

I'll post again later tonight.

[Iecerint]

@ SOG

You've kind of done almost the same thing as tracker, but not quite to such an extreme. I acknowledge that I try to list both sides of arguments in my posts -- I think I've even commented that I do that in one post. I think it's pro-town to provide as much information as I can about my thought process. I've also stuck by my arguments where I'm relatively confident in them (e.g. defense of FT), but I'm not above agreeing when I miscalculated (e.g. apathy of penguana/PP). I'd characterize my playstyle as active (maybe too active, since it draws attention) and pro-town.

These posts make me more certain that at least one of tracker and SOG are scum. tracker is slightly more suspect to me because his read on me seems to have gone up a notch since SOG's post.

If one of them is not scum, I think the one that IS scum is scum with eKIM.

My guess is that they picked up on eKIM's suspicion of me (whether he was genuinely suspicious of me or not, I'm not sure) as the next-most-likely Day 1 lynch and've latched onto that. I'm keeping my vote on tracker for now, but I could be persuaded to vote for SOG if someone provided information why one is a better lynch than the other.

An alternate explanation is that I'm actually the most suspicious player here. I find this hard to believe.

Can you explain the part I bolded then? If your suspicions changed, then what made them change between posts 205 and 213?

Prior to your replacement, I was only really attacked by eKIM. DDD sort of weakly agreed with him, but said he had problems more with my style than anything I said; he added that it was "nothing lynchworthy." When you both replaced in, tracker posted first. I inferred from his poor spelling and punctuation that he, if scum, would probably focus on his scumpartner's posts. The scumpartner that would best lead to his focus on me was eKIM, so he was my best guess.

Since the replacements, on the other hand, DDD has come out more strongly against me, but eKIM has mostly ignored me. This could be eKIM trying to avoid being vilified in the event of your mislynching me, but DDD's relative grouchiness and opportunistic attack-time (waiting until he had some wind at his back before pretty much just referencing others' arguments) led me to suspect him over eKIM. Since there's at most 1 non-tracker/SOG scum (if neither of those are scum, we're in bad shape), DDD's guilt means eKIM's probable innocence. (And if both tracker and SOG are scum, eKIM is similarly innocent.) So eKIM's moved to leaning-town. DDD is only neutral because it would take pretty damning evidence for anyone to move to tracker/SOG level.

Also, since asking DDD to explain PP's Pablo vote in the context where only she is scum, I've realized that a tracker lynch might be more useful than an SOG lynch this round. Here's why:

1: Neither SOG nor tracker is scum (hard for me to believe)
2: Only SOGPP is scum (somewhat lower probability, because no motivation for PP to draw conversation away from Shadeaux)
3: Only Shadetrack is scum (somewhat higher probability; maybe PP-as-newbtown didn't understand how silly Shadeaux had been)
4: Both are scum (higher probability)

So tracker may be a better lynch. On the other hand, I think Pablo's criticism of SOG is pretty solid (and my pet theory that scumtracker is deliberately spelling/playing poorly to feign innocence is so compelling that I almost want to watch more of it; do we have evidence that he always plays this way?). For now, I'll

unvote vote tracker

, which I believe puts SOG back to L-2 and puts tracker at L-2 (the last vote count incorrectly has me voting for both players). Everyone: please let me know if my reasoning for "only SOGPP is scum is improbable" is not convincing for some reason.

[Iecerint]

See, here's the issue, obviously SOG is going to find the PP wagon to wrong whether he's scum or town so it's not like I'm gaining any information there. And if you recall I was the one (or one of the ones) who made the original point about the Shadeux wagon not being so good, so SOG's comments about those two weren't really worth a mention to me.

My mistake. That said, if PP was scum and Shadeaux wasn't, I'm not sure why PP would have tried to divert attention away from him. Wouldn't she be thrilled that a town player had done something so sketchy and tried to ride it to a blameless mislynch? How would you explain her behavior in that scenario?

Which possible explanation would you like? PP/SOG doesn't feel they can present a convincing argument about Shadeux and it's better to be honest then push a bad argument and get more blowback on yourself. PP/SOG doesn't want to appear to simply be agreeing to the easiest lynch other than themselves and earn blowback from that so instead a mild defense is best. Both of those are straight out of "the best way to play as scum is to play as town" handbook. Finally, it could be PP/SOG introducing some WIFOM into the game and feeling if they are lynched then the town is likelier to go after the people they defended in this case Shadeux/tracker who already looked bad and is now linked to them making for an even easier mislynch.

I don't think the first set of possibilities holds. Shadeaux only had one vote -- Pablo's -- when PP voted Pablo. The "easiest" lynch at that point was the Jarmowagon. Shadeauxwagon started with Pablo's vote, and PPwagon started with the aftermath of her own vote. The second possibility is, ya know, "possible," but remote as I see it; her reaction to pressure leads me to believe she lacked that degree of sophistication.

I also find it strange that you suggest that behaving as PP did would be an example of "scum playing as town." O_o To me, it's either a newbtown player misunderstanding what Pablo has done or an absurdly panicky newbscum (who would only have reason to panic, as I see it, if her scumbuddy had been attacked).

If there's one scum in a group of four players, then there has to be one scum in the other group of five players. Thus by random lynching in the "scum-tell" group of four we have a 25% chance of success, but in the "non scum-tell" group of five we only have a 20% chance of success and since we have to lynch both scum to win you have to take both sides into account. Thus given an assumption of only one scum in the "scum-tell" group you have to compare both halves against 22.2% where we find little appreciable advantage.

If this is where you were coming from, I think you were being a little misleading. After the first night we'll know the town/scum identities of 0-2 players (allowing the remote possibilities of doctorwin and nolynchvote), which will presumably alter and ease scumhunting (i.e. reducing the number of possibilities down from 5, assuming your somewhat suspect a priori "one from each group" assumption). I think it would be a stretch to suggest that tracker was really advocating ignoring all non-lurking/otherwise information as we vote for the remainder of the game. (Not that I don't think tracker's the better lynch.)

[Iecerint]

A couple points he made had escaped my notice until he mentioned them.

Care to share them? I think he's the first to attack Pablo's clearly-not-anti-town question and to suggest that the conditions surrounding Jarmo's replacement are scummier than those surrounding PP or Shadeaux's, but that's all I can think of. <_<

@ tracker
I'd read the post where Pablo ultimately votes for SOG again. That's the best summary of your play I've seen. For my part, my suspicion of you is based mainly on you predecessor's behavior. (Your own behavior, as Pablo describes, is clearly quite bizarre, but not-as-clearly ill-intentioned.)

I just read through pages 8-10 a third time and am leaning back toward an SOG vote rather than a tracker vote in spite of the only-PP-is-scum case seeming near-impossible to me (maybe because geniustrackerscum is attacking an implausibly well-intentioned DDD to appeal to my noted-vulnerable emotions). I'm not changing my vote back because I've convinced myself that only-PP-is-scum isn't plausible, but I'm probably more persuadable than I should rationally be.

Also: DDD, why haven't you voted for me through all this (if you never suspected Shadetrack and feel that SOG has exonerated PP)? I had a vote on me until just a moment ago (from tracker), but all you've done is unvote SOG. Are you trying to decide between me and FT (the other player you've questioned a bit)? If so, have you ignored him because of his somewhat-troubling lurking?

[Iecerint]

@ SOG

I had a vote on me until just a moment ago (from tracker)

Tracker was not voting for you.

Also, why are you only suspicious of the players who are suspicious of you?

You're right about the tracker vote; it was you rather than him. I had a lone vote from Shadeaux most of the game that I got used to seeing there. My mistake.

For the second -- first, the main reason for my suspicion of you and tracker is the business on page 3 from before I was even in the game. That part has less to do with your suspicion of me and more to do with poor/scummy play. So that, at least, is separate from any OMGUSing on my part. Apart from that, though -- I guess I'm reasoning that in general players that seem more predisposed to lynching me are slightly more likely to be mafia. This is because there are exactly two players -- the scum players -- who know for certain that they would be OK to see me go. This isn't the only information I've been using to make judgments, but it is the surest piece of information I have.

That said, there are only 2 scum, so I'm trying to take that into account, too. eKiM was the first player to question my posting style, but I think of him as leaning-town by (not-quite-error-proof) process of elimination at this point. This could change if tracker turns up town, etc. Actually, the only players who haven't posted suspicion of me in some form are (I think; forgive me if I missed something) Katy, ivan, and Pablo. So I'm also just more likely to hit suspecters than anyone else.

@ DDD

I think we've had some miscommunication, I thought you were still referencing the SOG analysis and his comments on the wagons and that's what my comments were based around. If you're going to change tracks you need to make that clearer and then provide quotes or post numbers for me/other people to reference.

I'm sorry to've been vague. I tried to be clear by referring specifically to PP and Shadeaux by name rather than their modern incarnations or a hybrid name; I'll try to be more specific in the future.

That said, now that things have been cleared up, I would appreciate your thoughts on the question -- that is, the remote possibility you appeared to have prior ascribed to (that Shadeaux was not scummy, but PP was) in light of PP's vote for Pablo following his vote for Shadeaux (page 3). It's apparent from your discussion of tracker that you've rethought your position somewhat -- Shadeaux = tracker, etc. -- but I'd still like to hear what had prior motivated it. That eventuality (PP-onry) is so remote to me that I don't think your having ascribed to it is scummy, really; rather, your having ascribed to it leads me to believe that I have missed something.

If this is where you were coming from, I think you were being a little misleading. After the first night we'll know the town/scum identities of 0-2 players (allowing the remote possibilities of doctorwin and nolynchvote), which will presumably alter and ease scumhunting (i.e. reducing the number of possibilities down from 5, assuming your somewhat suspect a priori "one from each group" assumption). I think it would be a stretch to suggest that tracker was really advocating ignoring all non-lurking/otherwise information as we vote for the remainder of the game. (Not that I don't think tracker's the better lynch.)

Way to post some generalized statements and present it as opposition. Yes, scumhunting should be easier tomorrow with either a successful lynch to draw connections from or at very least a narrower pool of targets, but that doesn't mean pushing bad logic on day one is acceptable. The strongest statement that's been made is that as a scumtell there's one scum in a group of four, statistically insignificant from a random lynch of the entire vote pool and that's ignoring the person presenting the logic. So far, that's the only logic that I've seen tracker present and it's not making the grade.

Way to be defensive and snide? I still believe you were using math based on the false assumption that a lurker-lynch policy requires a random lynch from the remaining 5 non-lurker players on Day 2. I don't believe that tracker was implying this at all, but you've not really corrected yourself. (For that matter, tracker didn't really question it, either, so it may largely be a moot point.) You're also not taking into account the possibility that two lurker players (or none) are scum, which would change average probability of a successful lynch, especially if the prior probability of 1 or 2 players is relatively high. (This may just be because tracker listed he suspected that only 1 lurker was scum, but since you were responding to my own math, which included the 50% both-are-scum possibility, it seems to be an inappropriate omission.) Were you trying to see whether tracker would take issue with your straw-manning?

I'm not arguing that tracker had some kind of brilliant strategy that we should all ascribe to. I've already posted why I think he's the best lynch, even though I kinda do enjoy reading his posts. Rather, I'm pointing out that you seem to be (unnecessarily) using some pretty biased, straw-man math to attack him. I hoped that in pointing out why I thought the math was biased you would do one of a) explain why the math was not biased or based on false assumptions b) clarify the rationale for the built-in assumptions (e.g. "it was a trap!") or c) apologize and agree that you were oversimplifying tracker's position. The fact that you've instead accused me of "generalizing" for pointing out that your math was itself generalizing tracker's perspective is more suspect than anything else. (May just be that you're sometimes not very friendly, which I can't say is a total impossibility.)

Also: DDD, why haven't you voted for me through all this (if you never suspected Shadetrack and feel that SOG has exonerated PP)? I had a vote on me until just a moment ago (from tracker), but all you've done is unvote SOG. Are you trying to decide between me and FT (the other player you've questioned a bit)? If so, have you ignored him because of his somewhat-troubling lurking?

Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I think you're scum. Conversely, trying to bait me into voting for you doesn't inspire me to think you're pro-town either.

I'm just trying to understand your actions. You explained, up to a point, why you didn't vote for Shadetrack or SOGPP upon unvoting the latter (i.e. you never liked the Shadeaux wagon and you liked SOG's analysis), but didn't really act until others already had. Your behavior could be construed as waiting to see how things would pan out before weighing in on it too whole-heartedly. Since the voting abstention seemed to be coupled with slightly ratcheting-up the rhetoric against me (or just voicing stronger-than-prior agreement with others'), I don't think it's unusual for me to question it.

[Iecerint]

@ SOG (correction)

Can you explain the part I bolded then? If your suspicions changed, then what made them change between posts 205 and 213?

Prior to your replacement, I was only really attacked by eKIM. DDD sort of weakly agreed with him, but said he had problems more with my style than anything I said; he added that it was "nothing lynchworthy." When you both replaced in, tracker posted first. I inferred from his poor spelling and punctuation that he, if scum, would probably focus on his scumpartner's posts. The scumpartner that would best lead to his focus on me was eKIM, so he was my best guess.

Since the replacements, on the other hand, DDD has come out more strongly against me, but eKIM has mostly ignored me. This could be eKIM trying to avoid being vilified in the event of your mislynching me, but DDD's relative grouchiness and opportunistic attack-time (waiting until he had some wind at his back before pretty much just referencing others' arguments) led me to suspect him over eKIM. Since there's at most 1 non-tracker/SOG scum (if neither of those are scum, we're in bad shape), DDD's guilt means eKIM's probable innocence. (And if both tracker and SOG are scum, eKIM is similarly innocent.) So eKIM's moved to leaning-town. DDD is only neutral because it would take pretty damning evidence for anyone to move to tracker/SOG level.

I've just noticed that I put eKIM into the leaning-town tier PRIOR to DDD starting things up, so I thought I'd point out that I messed up. Looking back with this in mind, I'd guess that the real reason eKIM and DDD were leaning-town and neutral, respectively, in the second post was that I thought it was a cop-out to list 4 players as neutral, so I had to promote one of them to leaning-town. Knowing what I did at the time, I probably just chose eKIM because he's a little friendlier (yeah, not a good basis; I know). Sorry about that; I was fixated on how I came to suspect DDD a bit more (which made eKIM look even better) a few posts later when he joined in on the back of attacks from tracker and SOG and got my chronology a little mixed-up.

The post still accurately reflects my current perspective, though.

[Iecerint]

That said, now that things have been cleared up, I would appreciate your thoughts on the question -- that is, the remote possibility you appeared to have prior ascribed to (that Shadeaux was not scummy, but PP was) in light of PP's vote for Pablo following his vote for Shadeaux (page 3). It's apparent from your discussion of tracker that you've rethought your position somewhat -- Shadeaux = tracker, etc. -- but I'd still like to hear what had prior motivated it. That eventuality (PP-onry) is so remote to me that I don't think your having ascribed to it is scummy, really; rather, your having ascribed to it leads me to believe that I have missed something.

I viewed them as unrelated events at the time and still don't see this hard and fast connection you're trying to draw. PP's vote there seems to be completely devoid of recent context (eg the Jarmo wagon and Shadeux's L-1 vote) which suggests to me that she didn't take into account any of the recent activity.

Thanks for this! Looking back, I think this may be correct, after all. For whatever reason, I'd thought that PP's Pablo quote was from the post where he'd just voted for Shadeaux. That's why I thought there was a connection, and that's why I thought PP was so scummy. (Did someone post something to this effect somewhere from page 3 to page 6? Or did I totally make it up?) Were we just wailing on PP because she freaked out when we questioned her?

I wish we hadn't had that miscommunication earlier. I'd found it suspicious that your tracker decision came on the heels of my (now perhaps flawed) can't-be-only-PP analysis without your alluding to my post. (Actually, no one really responds to my posts anymore except DDD and SOG. Are they incomprehensible, or just too long?)

Way to be defensive and snide? I still believe you were using math based on the false assumption that a lurker-lynch policy requires a random lynch from the remaining 5 non-lurker players on Day 2. I don't believe that tracker was implying this at all, but you've not really corrected yourself. (For that matter, tracker didn't really question it, either, so it may largely be a moot point.) You're also not taking into account the possibility that two lurker players (or none) are scum, which would change average probability of a successful lynch, especially if the prior probability of 1 or 2 players is relatively high. (This may just be because tracker listed he suspected that only 1 lurker was scum, but since you were responding to my own math, which included the 50% both-are-scum possibility, it seems to be an inappropriate omission.) Were you trying to see whether tracker would take issue with your straw-manning?

It's not a false assumption, the guy promoting the theory admitted that he only expected one scum to be found in that group. Meaning I was working off of his

best

case scenario. And if you're including the 50% both are scum possibility why are you not including the statistically more likely (because of a larger pool size) 0% none are scum scenario. And I've presented no strawmen, I've simply used the information tracker has given us as his motivations and carried it to the logical end.

The reason I was put off by this was that the only player who used numbers with respect to the lurker business was me (in an "in fairness to tracker" apologist post), so it seemed that your numbers were intended to be a response to my numbers ("nope, that point is wrong in the general case") rather than a specific application to tracker's point ("well, in the context of what tracker said and in the absence of other data/forms of evidence he might present us with, his method statistically performs at chance"). I think you already mentioned that you intended it to reflect only tracker's point, but I was so convinced by my interpretation of your original intent that I had to ask one more time. My interpretation of your "my numbers were about tracker's comments onry" post was that you were trying to discredit me (with math that wouldn't apply to my own point) in preparation for Day 2 stuff. (Yeah, I know, I'm kinda a narcissist.)

With regard to using 50% but not 0%: it's true that the greater number of townies implies that 0% scum probability is greater than that of both scum with respect to a Maximum Likelihood sample, but the use of a high "lurker" prior probability may compensate for that (e.g. via Bayesian inference). Given tracker's model (prior probability is somewhat greater for lurkers, but not much more), though, I agree with you that you'd need to use 0% if you used 50%, and the result would be an even-worse scumfinding rate. (I mean, I haven't done the math by hand, but I strongly suspect the prior probabilities aren't different enough.)

My point was and still is, any "scum-tell" which merely splits the town in half and each half being equally likely to have scum isn't a scum-tell at all, it's basically no better than a random lynch. But it looks busy, can easily be directed against a townie, and has plausible deniability: all advantages to scum.

I agree with this in the general case, but I have some problems with it in this case. I still think it's hard to believe that tracker really meant to imply that the Day 2 lynch would be a random vote among active players (as your "1 out of 5" 20% vote in his "best case" seems to imply). Sure, tracker never really corrected you on this (and, as I now understand it, you consequently never worried about accounting for it in your math), but I'm as prone to interpret tracker's failure to rebuff you as meekness rather than guilt. After all, I posted a response to your math; it's not as if he was irrevocably trapped. Based on this interpretation of his behavior, I think you're giving tracker too much credit.

(I guess you could argue that he didn't really need to respond because I was sort of doing it for him. Sorry if I messed up something you were trying to set-up. It looks like he's being lynched, anyway.)

This is all very beside-the-point, though, because we seem to agree that tracker is the best lynch.

I've certainly argued with you more since my unvote because it almost seems like you've adopted tracker's lynch lurkers logic[...]

My intent was to see where your 20% number was coming from, and to determine what you were trying to do with it (force tracker to explicitly come up with auxiliary scumhunting techniques to boost the probability of a successful Day 2 lynch? maliciously misrepresent tracker's position? make a simple error?). I agree with your discussion of "lurker lynch as fake scumhunting" above, but some details of your argument seemed questionable to me. Any sketchiness perceived there will be nullified for me when/if tracker comes up scum.

[Iecerint]

Also can Furpants_Tom be prodded?

Yes, please.

[Iecerint]

Oh man, I sure have sucked at life for the past couple of weeks.

I still have no pbpa. And I can't claim to have read the thread closely enough to have gotten a better feel for either semioldguy or tracker. I do know, however, that I thought Purple Princess was much dodgier than Shadeaux, and that carries over to SOG.

Vote: Semioldguy

I realise that my vote at this point has no effect barring a switch from one of the tracker voters; but it's important to flag my suspicions in a verifiable way, so that the rest of you can properly analyse me later. I also promise that if I haven't managed to put in some proper analysis by about a week into the next day, I'll request a replacement. Sorry about this.

How do you expect us to hold you accountable and analyze you later for your suspicions when you admit to not being up to date enough to get more recent reads on any of the players?

Indeed.

[Iecerint]

Bla bla bla, I'm mostly wrong because I misinterpret everything Danny says so I can disagree with him.

Or something like that. At least that's what I got out of the first two overly long paragraphs you wrote.

Nah. I misinterpreted other things you said, but not here. But it's true that it's me admitting I'd been wrong.

With regard to using 50% but not 0%: it's true that the greater number of townies implies that 0% scum probability is greater than that of both scum with respect to a Maximum Likelihood sample, but the use of a high "lurker" prior probability may compensate for that (e.g. via Bayesian inference). Given tracker's model (prior probability is somewhat greater for lurkers, but not much more), though, I agree with you that you'd need to use 0% if you used 50%, and the result would be an even-worse scumfinding rate. (I mean, I haven't done the math by hand, but I strongly suspect the prior probabilities aren't different enough.)

Correct, and part of my contention was that my experience shows that tracker's prior distribution is unsound which would turn the statistics even further against him. As it stands a reasonable assumption of randomness still doesn't back his theory.

But the important thing to be noted about this paragraph is that mafia isn't just a game of being right (though that helps alot), it's also about persuasion. And while I as a trained statistician understand what you're talking about with maximum likelihood functions and Bayesian assumptions, someone without specific training like Katy appears to be lost. If you've lost your audience you surely aren't persuading them and thus failing at one of your primary duties. /Fake IC Mode

Good point.

I agree with this in the general case, but I have some problems with it in this case. I still think it's hard to believe that tracker really meant to imply that the Day 2 lynch would be a random vote among active players (as your "1 out of 5" 20% vote in his "best case" seems to imply).

No, he never said that, but if we make the assumption of one scum in each side of the equation then it doesn't make any sense to ignore the other half of the equation because doing so loses the town the game. This wasn't a point tracker made at all, but something I raised to address the flaw in your analysis.

What if I argued that Night actions/miscellaneous data might exonerate/kill enough players that the Day 2 lynch was reliably better than 20%? This is my main gripe with that number, but you seem pretty convinced it's a silly thing to argue. Why?

My intent was to see where your 20% number was coming from, and to determine what you were trying to do with it (force tracker to explicitly come up with auxiliary scumhunting techniques to boost the probability of a successful Day 2 lynch? maliciously misrepresent tracker's position? make a simple error?). I agree with your discussion of "lurker lynch as fake scumhunting" above, but some details of your argument seemed questionable to me. Any sketchiness perceived there will be nullified for me when/if tracker comes up scum.

And again the 20% argument came in rebuttal to your points, stop trying to shift all of this off onto tracker. He's the one who pushed the general idea, but you're the one who has been arguing the soundness of it, except you're not even pushing it as a legitimate course of action.

It's true that the argument responded to my request that you help me understand what I had missed, but you've argued that you based it on tracker's one-scum-in-each-group assumption; ergo, I imagined that it was (intended) as much targeted at tracker as at me. Also, it's a stretch that I'm arguing the "soundness" of it; I'm just arguing that it might be at-least-slightly-better-than-random, whereas you have argued that it is no better than random.

Hence I think you're arguing with me just to argue with me and not out of any real conviction for the idea and while I appreciate the mental workout it distracts us from our purpose of finding scum.

This is mostly accurate, but it ignores the possibility that you are among the scum. In that case, the discussion might hypothetically have helped to expose scumminess.

It's also worth pointing out that my two DDD conversation pieces are related to, respectively, the Shadeaux/PP business on page 3 and to tracker's lurker lynch business. I thought I'd caught you defending an untenable position in the first case, but it turned out I'd misremembered the relevant parts of the thread. Similarly, I thought I'd caught you exaggerating the silliness (in this game) of a Day 1 lurker lynch. So I don't think that it was unwise or diversionary for me to try to clarify your positions on those issues.

[Iecerint]

I'll read through with knowledge of our two new confirmed townies and try to give a more substantial post as soon as possible. Until then I'll

Vote SOG

. This is partially to get the ball rolling again, but it's also because:

1. That was where Pablo was headed with his analysis, and we know for certain that he was both competent and well-intentioned.
2. DDD pointed out how my can't-be-only-PP idea was no good ("read the thread, please"), so I'm left with my shocka-if-PP-and-Shadeaux-are-both-town feeling.

[Iecerint]

@Furpants_Tom
Is there a reason you thought you should have hammered right then as opposed to waiting until Tracker came back to post?

I found it more suspicious that he voted for you at first rather than hammering. There was already a pretty broad consensus on tracker. He switched to hammering tracker after you berated him (and I agreed with you, as I found his reluctance to hammer or give his perspective a little odd).

We didn't get a claim from him or even hear from him since he was at L-1 and you prevented that from happening. Do you think it would have been wise to wait a little longer to see if he would post? If not, then why? And if so, then why didn't you?

Actually, I believe it was you who criticized tracker for implicitly claiming vanilla town a few pages back:

PS. (this is my first game as a townie and i'm not sure how to go about it)

I also don’t like how it appears that you claimed your role. That is not a good thing to do, townies not excluded. Not a strong read yet, but I dislike your play so far.

oiy, i didn't even realize that i semi-claimed, i'm having conflicting thoughts on this, can you explain why you think it's bad? (so can everyone else if they want)

The reason why claiming townie is bad is because it makes one person that the mafia can ignore when thinking who to night kill (or roleblock if they have one). It helps scum figure out where they need to be looking to eliminate power roles.

For my part, I don't think tracker had really claimed vanilla town at all (since when does saying you're playing "town" imply that you're playing "vanilla town"?), but you seemed to think so (as your explanation for why tracker's behavior was anti-town doesn't apply unless you think he claimed vanilla). I gave you the benefit of the doubt at the time because some of tracker's other behavior was so questionable, but I find it strange that you'd complain about tracker not being able to claim when you've already complained at him for doing just that.

[Iecerint]

Here are some of the bandwagons from Day 1; they're intended to be chronological left-to-right in the order that people jumped onto the wagon:

Jarmo: penguana, (ekiM, DDD)*, Shadeaux
PP: ivanavich, DDD, FT**, Pablo
Shadeaux: Pablo, penguana, eKIM --> Katy, ekiM, Iecerint***
tracker: Katy, ekiM, Iecerint, DDD, FT

* - These two players were the first to leave the Jarmo wagon. ekiM left for Shadeaux, where he remained for the rest of the day; DDD left for PP, where he remained until SOG posted nice things about him
** - FT first voted for penguana, then was berated and switched to PP, then again tried to start a penguana wagon; I've included him here because this is the longest the wagon got
*** - The wagon's members shifted as Shadeaux went missing

I'm afraid I'm not really sure what to make of the list for the most part, but at least this organizes some of the major wagons for everyone. My least-favorite player (SOGPP) only voted for penguana (vacuously), Pablo (questionably), and me (as SOG), so I haven't really noticed anything new there. As goes without saying, I've left out some intermediate "voting" stages, so please mention anything I've neglected that you think is important, or any errors on my part.

It's a little challenging for me to get much new out of Shadeaux/tracker's posts (other than that his heart was in the right place), but, with regard to Pablo's posts, I did pick up on some interesting contrasts between him and DDD. Post 170:

While I agree w/ DDD that PP reversing her opinion voting for me is suspicious, how is that any different than Shadeaux's "clever" L-1 ruse where he voted first and tried to justify it later?

Another (more significant) difference in interpretation is between DDD's post 216 ("SOG is great! tracker is O_o") and Pablo's 221 ("SOG is suspect. tracker is O_o but idk"). I can't really fault DDD for preferring tracker to SOG, and I agreed (in a post, even) with some of his points on SOG, but the disparity between those two players is striking. It could just be that SOG said nice things about DDD and mean (relative to what everyone else had said about him, at least) things about Pablo. I also found it strange that DDD waited until my big "trackerlynch is better than SOG" post to come down on tracker, even though he disagreed with the premise behind my argument, and I still find his lurkerlynchstats to've been a little suspect.

Even though DDD looks bad, I'm sticking with my SOG vote for now. Pablo's post 221's probably the best reason. I also think SOG's "omg you didn't let him claim!" post is weird in light of his own complaint about tracker's having claimed earlier, as described in my prior post.

tl;dr -- I'm happy with my vote for now.

[Iecerint]

@Furpants_Tom
Is there a reason you thought you should have hammered right then as opposed to waiting until Tracker came back to post? We didn't get a claim from him or even hear from him since he was at L-1 and you prevented that from happening.

This, however, is a really good point. Tracker never got a chance to claim or to even respond once he was L-1. I do not like to lynch people without letting them have a last chance to respond to claim, and also to make their final argument/case.

Normally, I prefer to wait for that response unless it seems likely the person is trying to wait out a deadline.

I think that's only semi-suspicious but I would like to see FT's response to SOG's queries, so for now I am going to

Vote: Furpants_Tom

I agree that it would be nice for FT to participate more. He went from participating decently to pretty much lurking just as tracker and SOG replaced in and we had something important to discuss. He eventually came back just in time to vote SOG without much explanation; then, SOG and I criticized him, and he hammered tracker. Because of that sequence of events, I interpreted FT's move to hammer as a response to pressure from SOG and me more than anything else. If he really wanted to "rush" to the end of the day (quotation marks because it was already pretty much the end of the day), I think he'd have hammered the first time he came back.

Katy, don't you find it strange that SOG would first lecture tracker for claiming and then attack someone for failing to let tracker claim? To me, this is on-par with tracker's bizarre "no particular order, in this order" comment. (Granted, tracker ended up being town, but SOG strikes me as fairly competent.)

[Iecerint]

EBWOP

We didn't get a claim from him

or even hear from him since he was at L-1

and you prevented that from happening.

In fairness to SOG, I just reviewed how the voting went and noticed that we actually hadn't heard anything from tracker since he was at L-2. O_o So it looks like FT's hammer might've been hastier than I'd thought. I still find it weird that SOG complained that tracker wasn't able to claim, though.

[Iecerint]

Problems that I see: Iecerint states that the vote is "partially to get the ball rolling" which allows himself a convenient backdoor to back off the vote if it's not viable or something backfires.

Fair criticism. I'd rather explain this as symptomatic of a personality flaw on my part, though.

He then shamelessly jumps onto someone else's logic and at least to my eye I don't see evidence that he's gone and analyzed Pablo's points, but instead is merely running with his conclusion.

That's pretty much accurate, but I think that "shamelessly" is a bit of a stretch. I think it's OK for us to jump onto Pablo's logic to an extent -- we know it was well-intentioned. And since I noted that I hadn't re-read yet, I don't think I was meaning to imply that I'd yet done any analysis.

Finally, one of the key points seemingly for his vote is based around an argument I presented. Except later we see he continues to disagree with other points I've raised and suggests, "DDD looks bad" and I get the feeling that I'm #2 or #3 on his scumlist. So he accepts my conclusions when it becomes convenient for him to do so, while pushing me as a target otherwise.

I'm not sure what argument of yours you're referring to. Do you mean your observation that PP's changing the reason for her vote was scummy? I'll wait to comment on this until I'm sure of what you're referring to to prevent what happened at the end of Day 1.

It's true that you're relatively high on my scum list, but I worry that it may be partially that you sometimes rub me the wrong way, which isn't a productive basis of suspicion.

Iecerint provides several logical explanations for these posts and completely ignores the common occurance of two townies disagreeing majorly on another player to try and establish a significant difference between myself and Pablo (a confirmed townie). It's a pretty bad thing when you toss out several logical explanations and then make an argument based around a logical fallacy.

My point was just that two players of comparable experience and equal knowledge of this game (assuming both of you were town) had disagreed twice; the Pablo quote is listed to demonstrate a time when Pablo explicitly asked you to justify your position. It was the most interesting bit I could get out of the Day 2 re-read. Granted, I read it as someone who'd already had a bit of a shouting match with you, so it could just be that I'm not a neutral reader.

I also found it strange that DDD waited until my big "trackerlynch is better than SOG" post to come down on tracker, even though he disagreed with the premise behind my argument,

Wait, what? Frankly, I'm not understanding your argument here and I'd rather you explain it before I try to argue it.

When you read SOG's post and liked it, you unvoted SOG, but you didn't immediately place a vote for anyone else. The event immediately preceding your (later) statement of intent to vote for tracker was after a triple-post (or something ungodly like that) of mine that included post 246. In that post, I laid out why I thought tracker was a better Day 1 lynch than SOG (to summarize, it was because I had misread/interpreted PP's vote for Pablo as chainsawing on behalf of Shadeaux, so her action was only scummy (or maybe just "extra scummy") if Shadeaux was her scumbuddy). DDD later pointed out that PP's actual post suggested she hadn't taken the Shadeaux business into account, suggesting he didn't agree with my argument (and when I re-read PP's post upon DDD's suggestion, I agreed with him).

Because you decided to vote for tracker just after I posted an argument about voting for tracker that you later specified you hadn't agreed with, I reasoned that you may have decided not to commit your vote until enough of a consensus had gathered around a certain player. This interpretation of your behavior makes it seem quite suspect. Since you quoted posts AFTER 246, you must have read the relevant post. I guess an alternate possibility might be that the timing of your trackerconversion was a coincidence.

and I still find his lurkerlynchstats to've been a little suspect.

And you keep saying things like this, but you've been completely unable to show where my math is wrong. If you want, I'll pull out the hypergeometric distribution and run a full probability tree for you to show once and for all that I'm right.

Your math assumed that players will base their lynches ONLY on the lurker/non-lurker dichotomy. This strikes me as unrealistic.

As I understand it, your defense of that built-in assumption was that tracker hadn't explicitly named any additional criteria by which to further narrow-down scum. While I agree that tracker didn't come out and list other tools for the town (voting patterns, poor mafia play, miscellaneous scumtells), I think a reasonable mathematical model needs to take into account that the mafia will screw up enough to give the town some of these tools. From this perspective, your math looks like an (unnecessary, because there was plenty of other stuff to criticize) attempt to intimidate/condemn tracker.

For that matter, unless I'm mistaken, if mafia plays perfectly, all lynches will be random and the town will lose on average.

[Iecerint]

(1) When someone says "townie," vanilla town is implied as I see it. I wouldn't ever call myself townie unless I was vanilla, otherwise I would just use town.
(2) If he had claimed something other than vanilla, he would have been confirmed scum to me as it would have been going back on what he said earlier. Since I already thought he was innocent, I wasn't looking for a claim verifying his innocence, I was looking for something that was an admission of his guilt.

I guess this is understandable, but I'm with Katy on point 1; I use them interchangeably.

I never said that I thought Pablo was scummy, or even that his question was scummy, and I don't really understand why this keep being brought up. I thought the question was anti-town and I don't like that it was asked, but there is a difference between anti-town behavior and scummy behavior.

I didn't say you called him scummy; I said you said mean things about him relative to other players. I brought it up to give an alternate explanation for why Pablo and DDD may have had different takes on your PBPA.

I also disagree that Furpants_Tom was ever participating decently, I don't see any evidence that he was ever participating or contributing a whole lot.

I meant "decently" as in "one notch above passably." (Slightly ambiguous word-choice on my part.) My point was that he disappeared off the face of the earth at the worst possible time.

[Iecerint]

EBWOP @ DDD Oh, it seems like you were referring to your debunking of my PP-only-makes-no-sense point (right?). If that's the case, I'd like to make two points:

1. The extent of your argument was pretty much just to point out that I'd misread PP's post. When I looked back, I saw that she had quoted earlier Pablo posts and not the immediately-preceding Pablo post, so I admitted I'd misremembered the post and retracted my argument. Since I know that my theory rested on a misremembered post, I'm certain (and happy) that the theory was fairly debunked.
2. I know (think) you haven't used the s-word yet and so sort of hesitate to point it out, but supposing that I'm scum and neither of SOG/tracker are scum, what would be my motive for coming up with that kind of SOG/tracker-lynchpicking mechanism, especially when I already had plenty of questionable tracker/SOG behavior to choose from (other than setting-up this very point)?

[Iecerint]

Why is it that you completely discount the fact that people, even well-intentioned confirmed townies are often wrong?

So at least one of us had to be wrong, yet your bandwagon vote is based on the old logic of a dead townie, despite knowing that players of comparable experience and knowledge can come to different conclusions and subsequently one of them must be wrong. You see where my problem is? You seem smart enough to realize these facts, but you just blatantly ignore them as suits your interests.

More than anything else, my "bandwagon" vote (quotations because I started the bandwagon, but I see how you could call it a bandwagon vote since the suspicion was already there) is based on my oft-stated view that there was too much weirdness between SOGPP and Shadetrack for both of them to be town. I mention this in my first post as point 2, and I mentioned this Day 1. Pablo's corroborating position on SOGPP for most of Day 1 just makes me happier about this.

Since you were also suspicious of PP, if not SOG, you and Pablo actually agree on a lot of these points (e.g. the Pablo quote I listed is a time when he was trying you to get you to admit Shadeaux's scumminess, not PP's). Where you disagree, I'll put more stock in Pablo because we know that he was town, but you may or may not be town. So where you and Pablo disagree, I'm prone to agree with Pablo. If it's not good play in general to trust confirmed townies, I'm not sure what's OK to trust.

I guess an alternate possibility might be that Pablo was killed precisely because following his perspective would lead to more townie kills, but I find this unlikely. I agree with ivan and Katy that he was killed because he was the most "obvious" pro-town player; thus, NKing him doesn't decrease the set of scummy players. Then again, it could be that he both looked the most pro-town AND had largely anti-town suspicions, but we have to have the benefit of the doubt somewhere.

When you read SOG's post and liked it, you unvoted SOG, but you didn't immediately place a vote for anyone else. The event immediately preceding your (later) statement of intent to vote for tracker was after a triple-post (or something ungodly like that) of mine that included post 246. In that post, I laid out why I thought tracker was a better Day 1 lynch than SOG (to summarize, it was because I had misread/interpreted PP's vote for Pablo as chainsawing on behalf of Shadeaux, so her action was only scummy (or maybe just "extra scummy") if Shadeaux was her scumbuddy). DDD later pointed out that PP's actual post suggested she hadn't taken the Shadeaux business into account, suggesting he didn't agree with my argument (and when I re-read PP's post upon DDD's suggestion, I agreed with him).

Because you decided to vote for tracker just after I posted an argument about voting for tracker that you later specified you hadn't agreed with, I reasoned that you may have decided not to commit your vote until enough of a consensus had gathered around a certain player. This interpretation of your behavior makes it seem quite suspect. Since you quoted posts AFTER 246, you must have read the relevant post. I guess an alternate possibility might be that the timing of your trackerconversion was a coincidence.

So most of the post seems to be basically a conspiracy theory that I waited for you to make a post that I couldn’t be sure you’d make so that I could in fact pick apart your case and then immediately vote for your target anyways. This doesn’t make any sense to me because I don’t see how such behavior benefits either town or scum. If we look at your more specific claim that I “may have decided not to commit your vote until enough of a consensus had gathered around a certain player.” That’s easily refuted by the fact that there were two bandwagons of near equal strength for a sufficiently long-time prior to that. If my sole desire was to push a wagon then there was no need to wait as you suggest.

I don't think you were waiting for me specifically to post something, but I do think you may've been waiting for the town "in general" to get behind a particular candidate (i.e. it happened to be after my "here's why tracker" post, but it could've been Katy or Pablo or ivan). This makes scum relatively blameless when they come up town.

And the existence of two bandwagons obviously doesn't exonerate you. For example, if SOG were your scumbuddy, you'd have motivation for edging the vote toward tracker if possible. I agree that "waiting out" wouldn't make much sense for you to do if only you were scum and neither of them were scum.

and I still find his lurkerlynchstats to've been a little suspect.

And you keep saying things like this, but you've been completely unable to show where my math is wrong. If you want, I'll pull out the hypergeometric distribution and run a full probability tree for you to show once and for all that I'm right.

Your math assumed that players will base their lynches ONLY on the lurker/non-lurker dichotomy. This strikes me as unrealistic.

As I understand it, your defense of that built-in assumption was that tracker hadn't explicitly named any additional criteria by which to further narrow-down scum. While I agree that tracker didn't come out and list other tools for the town (voting patterns, poor mafia play, miscellaneous scumtells), I think a reasonable mathematical model needs to take into account that the mafia will screw up enough to give the town some of these tools. From this perspective, your math looks like an (unnecessary, because there was plenty of other stuff to criticize) attempt to intimidate/condemn tracker.

For that matter, unless I'm mistaken, if mafia plays perfectly, all lynches will be random and the town will lose on average.

A) Sure it’s unrealistic, but that’s all the logic tracker had provided so that’s what I was countering. It only makes sense to address the arguments that someone makes and not imply, infer,or assume anything else. And if someone is touting unsound logic as tracker did, then I’m going to counter that.

B) If we use other tools and use them well then a scumtell that isn’t a scumtell will be irrelevant anyways.

C) Your reasonable mathematical model is all well and good, but it again ignores the other half of the equation that scum can and will turn those same tools against the town. Hence we assume random lynches when calculating probabilities because we assume that long-run town and scum play will balance each other out. Given that, tracker’s proposal was at best no help to the town and at worst slightly detrimental.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that long-run town and scum play balance one another out. If we were to assume that they did, unless I'm mistaken, there would be no point in relying on anything except power roles to find scum, since nothing would b e a tell for anything (e.g. everything can and should be WIFOM'd into oblivion). This would also imply that mafia win most of the games on this site by a large margin, which I don't believe is the case. Seeing as how mafia and town wins seem pretty balanced on this site (and a power role-less 5:2 newbie game is termed "balanced"), I think it's better to assume that the miscellaneous scumtell tools will on average help the town more than scum. (Otherwise, mafia would tend to win by a large margin, which I don't (think) the statistics show.)

@ Katy I think the problem is that both of us have to have the last word.

[Iecerint]

iecerint

And since I noted that I hadn't re-read yet, I don't think I was meaning to imply that I'd yet done any analysis.

Then why are you talking? I've noticed this a couple times now. Don't write anything if you are going to say "well it's not like i'm sure or anything."
I don't know if your scum but right now you are being antitown, please stop.

I promptly followed it up with a post-reread post that included analysis. Said post also predated DDD's post. For that matter:

Katy I voted for SOG because he was my vote for the last day. I was implying I need to review the older pages to see if I should in fact change my vote but until then SOG is still my most suspicious.
Unfortunately I have not had much time at once to go back and I try to adress the most recent chatter with the most priority.
Although I am getting tired of the iecerint vs DDD talks and am leaning towards Iecerint for a vote at this moment(vote based on irritation)

The post in question is pretty much the same as what you appear to claim your own SOG vote was: you hadn't reviewed older pages yet, but you had a tentative vote based on your lingering impressions. I took an extra step and tried to specify the impressions that motivated the vote: Pablo's suspicions and a prior belief that at least one of Shadetrack and SOGPP were scum.

Also, my name has two "e"s. O_o

[Iecerint]

FT's behavior was generally absent when we needed it, and it was a little strange when he finally rejoined us. I think ekiM's interpretation of the "strange" bit is quite plausible. I'd be OK with an FT lynch provided that he can't give an explanation for his behavior that's at least as good as what SOG came up with. For the time being, I'll keep my vote where it is so that both of them are at L-2.

[Iecerint]

Since you were also suspicious of PP, if not SOG, you and Pablo actually agree on a lot of these points (e.g. the Pablo quote I listed is a time when he was trying you to get you to admit Shadeaux's scumminess, not PP's). Where you disagree, I'll put more stock in Pablo because we know that he was town, but you may or may not be town. So where you and Pablo disagree, I'm prone to agree with Pablo. If it's not good play in general to trust confirmed townies, I'm not sure what's OK to trust.

And this causes me to revise my expectations downwards to a large degree. Hypothetically, if competent, confirmed town Pablo had voiced major suspicion on you on D1 you wouldn’t be using that to push your own lynch on D2. So, you’re not using Pablo’s name because it comes from a competent, confirmed townie, but because it supports the conclusion you want to push. Furthermore, it’s a dubious tactic because Pablo’s dead and can’t speak up on how he may or may not have changed his mind or how you’re misinterpreting something he said.

For the first part: well, yeah. You could point to tracker, for example, who put you, ekiM, and me at the top of his scum list, for an example of this. I'm not pushing tracker's perspective as much as Pablo's because it seems less reasonable to me. I don't really find that suspect. For the second part -- it's true that Pablo's death means that players can twist his words to their ends with relative impunity, but at least we know those words (if represented honestly) aren't scummy. By contrast, we don't know that about you/me/FT/SOG.

For that matter, what would you propose we do with dead town players' thoughts? Ignore them, because they can't correct us when we misrepresent them? That certainly isn't default play in any mafia game I've read through.

And the existence of two bandwagons obviously doesn't exonerate you. For example, if SOG were your scumbuddy, you'd have motivation for edging the vote toward tracker if possible. I agree that "waiting out" wouldn't make much sense for you to do if only you were scum and neither of them were scum.

Waiting doesn’t make any sense even if I was scum with SOG because as scum you either want to get credit for your partner’s death (bus) or divert attention to someone else. Waiting until the town reaches consensus without you as scum is about the worst possible option.

I disagree in a case like this game's Day 1, where the town was already leaning toward Shadetrack, anyway. And besides, you actually

did

do a good job of diverting attention to someone else -- by simultaneously praising SOG's "good analysis" (the same analysis Pablo subsequently described as "scummy") and unvoting him.

(Where did you get the insane idea that 5:2 vanilla is balanced? Scum has an Expected Win Percentage of 77.1429% in that setup).

I just assumed that the newbie game set-ups would be balanced. Based on that assumption, I reasoned that scummy behavior must be a fair indication of scum often enough for 5:2 to be pretty balanced. Unfortunately, it seems I was wrong. If scum really do that well with 5:2 -- even in newbie games -- then the conclusions from the prior assumption don't hold. (Since the 3 other set-ups help the town more to various degrees, I might've expected that 5:2 games were slightly scum-biased, but nothing to that extreme.)

Are those statistics on the wiki somewhere?

@ Katy I think the problem is that both of us have to have the last word.

Incorrect, the primary problem is that you can’t accept that you’re wrong.

I've admitted I was wrong twice in this game so far.

[Iecerint]

Well part of your problem is that you're forgetting we started with nine players and if this is a vanilla setup it's 7:2, not 5:2. In that case scum has an expected win percentage of 70.1%. But then again the problem isn't with the numbers, but with some of the assumptions you're making. There's a Wiki page entitled Numbers, Part One which has similar numbers, but those numbers assume a night start when all newbie games and most games on the site currently have a day start.

My mistake; should've typed 7:2 originally. Looks like it's still not very well-balanced, though, as you say.

@ the other -- I guess it's perfectly fair that I'm basically making in part an appeal to authority. (I suspect you're saying that it's "weak" because Pablo wins out not from being an expert, but from being well-intentioned.) The only thing I'd really add to said appeal is that SOGPP was also my second-favorite lynch Day 1 anyway on account of PP's bizarre behavior (which most players said was scummy) and SOG's i-hate-everyone PBPA (which Pablo said was scummy, and Katy seconded). I actually preferred SOG after I read Pablo's analysis (and changed my vote), but I switched back to tracker based on tracker-is-a-more-informative-lynch idea (which DDD debunked, but by that time DDD was already behind the tracker lynch, anyway, and tracker's behavior was strange enough that he seemed like a reasonable lynch).

[Iecerint]

EBWOP

The following lists probabilities for the town winning in different setups. All are basic games, with Mafia and Townies only, starting with Night and

assuming random lynchings and night kills.

The numbers probably do not reflect what the actual outcome would be if real games were played, as

they don't account for the Mafia giving themselves away through bad logic.

Only games with probabilities between 30% and 70% are included (except for 5 players, where 25% is the closest to 50%). Note that the probability for the Town drops when there are an odd number of players to start with.

You sort of failed to mention that these numbers are based on the "random lynches" assumption, rather than being based on actual play (say, sampled from the games played on these forums). Since this was pretty much the gripe I had with your earlier numbers, I'm not sure this is good evidence that 7:2 isn't balanced, after all. The wiki even goes out of its way to state that poor mafia play isn't included, which implies that poor mafia play (read: scumtells) is a valid factor. Since wiki claims that 8:1 would be best-balanced for 9 players, I'm inclined to believe that 7:2 is closest to 50% in practice, which gives an idea of the extent to which scumtells do play a role.

I'm not sure whether you didn't notice this, or just thought I wouldn't bother to read it.

[Iecerint]

EBWOP

The following lists probabilities for the town winning in different setups. All are basic games, with Mafia and Townies only, starting with Night and

assuming random lynchings and night kills.

The numbers probably do not reflect what the actual outcome would be if real games were played, as

they don't account for the Mafia giving themselves away through bad logic.

Only games with probabilities between 30% and 70% are included (except for 5 players, where 25% is the closest to 50%). Note that the probability for the Town drops when there are an odd number of players to start with.

You sort of failed to mention that these numbers are based on the "random lynches" assumption, rather than being based on actual play (say, sampled from the games played on these forums). Since this was pretty much the gripe I had with your earlier numbers, I'm not sure this is good evidence that 7:2 isn't balanced, after all.

The wiki even goes out of its way to state that poor mafia play isn't included, which implies that poor mafia play (read: scumtells) is a valid factor.

Since wiki claims that 8:1 would be best-balanced for 9 players, I'm inclined to believe that 7:2 is closest to 50% in practice, which gives an idea of the extent to which scumtells do play a role.

I'm not sure whether you didn't notice this, or just thought I wouldn't bother to read it.

:headdesk:

It also doesn't include poor town play which would balance things out, no?

I don't think we should expect it to, for the reasons I've already stated. Namely, if it really did cancel it out in practice, we'd probably have 8:1 newbie games rather than 7:2 newbie games.

[Iecerint]

I think harassing you is as good a method of finding scum as any. FT's en route for replacement, and I've already laid out my case for SOG. You've also contradicted yourself by now -- you'd prior admitted that the random lynch (to say nothing about random NK) assumption was unrealistic, and you've now shifted gears to claim that poor town play is what makes the assumption OK. This could just be that you don't like being wrong (town interpretation), or it could be that you want to argue "all scumtells are null-tells unless I say so," which is pretty much what you've been doing since Shadetrack, because you know that, mathematically, getting the town to ignore all scumtells via WIFOMing them into oblivion leads to random lynches and a better win rate for scum (scum interpretation).

I'll stop harassing you if 4 players ask me to. I count you and ivan so far.

[Iecerint]

Iecerint

The post in question is pretty much the same as what you appear to claim your own SOG vote was: you hadn't reviewed older pages yet, but you had a tentative vote based on your lingering impressions. I took an extra step and tried to specify the impressions that motivated the vote: Pablo's suspicions and a prior belief that at least one of Shadetrack and SOGPP were scum.

My vote was based on the same thing it was based on in d1. I have no need of reviewing old pages to make my vote. I simply said I would vote for whom I thought was most suspicious and review the pages to see if someone else stood out. (or you may reread my post) Your vote apparently was based on pablo's suspicions. So please don't put me in the same boat as you.

This is what the post in question said:

I'll read through with knowledge of our two new confirmed townies and try to give a more substantial post as soon as possible. Until then I'll Vote SOG. This is partially to get the ball rolling again, but it's also because:

1. That was where Pablo was headed with his analysis, and we know for certain that he was both competent and well-intentioned.

2. DDD pointed out how my can't-be-only-PP idea was no good ("read the thread, please"), so I'm left with my shocka-if-PP-and-Shadeaux-are-both-town feeling.

Bold added. So my vote was also based on my D1. I put the reasons in the order I did because the Pablo factor was topical, new information, so I wanted to highlight that. I'm a little surprised that that's being viewed with such suspicion, but that was my rationale.

So we're in the same boat.

Completely agree. It can be a wonderfull tool for the mafia if used by assuming Pablo was correct while at best it is just 50/50 for town since we do not know if an opinion is right or wrong.

It's true that in the general case it can be a great tool for the mafia, but I think it's more parsimonious to assume for this game that Pablo was killed because he was the most town-like player D1. Katy's already mentioned this, and you agreed with her (page 12). It's possible, of course, that Pablo was both innocent-looking AND had usefully-inaccurate suspicions, but that strikes me as a comparatively extreme hypothesis given the circumstances. If the mafia had killed someone more moderately suspicious (like me, DDD, or you), and that person turned up town, I'd be more sympathetic to that kind of argument.

Ivanavich is making me nervous, because while I have no strong scum feeling from him, he seems to be inhabiting that middle area of participation that could easily be someone flying just under the radar.

You caught me. I was hoping nobody would make a complaint but it is true I have not had as much input as many of you. I have been looking for time to do a readover as i've said and I just can't find the time. It seems I only have time to review and respond to the last coouple days at a time. On the other hand I don't think posting many words in an argument that isn't taking us anywhere is much more usefull. This will probably be my last game for a while. I ask you all for your input on whether I should seek a replacement or not. I would say 3 people chiming in would do the trick.

Stay. I'm comfortable with your level of participation.

[Iecerint]

Hello everyone, glad to be in this game.

Welcome

[Iecerint]

I'll try to answer the three questions directed at me I found in your posts, Michel; let me know if I've missed something. Some of the question's answers depend on one another, so please read through as a whole:

1. Why do you think that ekiM is pro-town?

My prior suspicion of ekiM was based largely on his early attack on me at a time when (I thought that) there was minimal basis for suspicion. He pointed out that my tendency to post alternate explanations for my intuitions was scummy as it provided an "out" in the event that I was wrong. DDD commented that he had also noticed my tendency to do as much, but also described it as "nothing remotely lynchable." When suspicion failed to catch on, ekiM sort of let the issue drop. Up to that point, I thought he might be scum.

Later, when tracker and SOG replaced Shadeaux and PP and both described me as scummy (tracker moderated his position after I berated him, which only made me more suspicious of him), I interpreted that as scum having somewhat lazily voted the only other player to have any kind of concrete suspicion cast upon them prior in the game. (In retrospect, people had mentioned that DDD rubbed them the wrong way, and people had wished that ivan would post more, but 1. I was inappropriately focused on myself and 2. since the wiki does list (I think?) the "alternate hypothesis" business as a potential scumtell, I think I was still the low-hanging fruit.)

Given that one of them was scum, I tried to determine who the scumpartner would be. If both of them were scum (not the case at present), we were already set. If exactly one of them were scum, then there was one other scum. The obvious choice to me for this one other scum seemed to be ekiM, as that was the player whose suspicion they had originally latched onto.

Later, however, I noticed that DDD characterized tracker's "lurker lynch" strategy as poor using statistics that were, to me, highly suspect. At first, I assumed that I was merely misunderstanding; however, DDD's subsequent elucidation just made the statistics look even sketchier to me (e.g. built on unrealistic assumptions, etc.). When I pushed still further and asked him to justify what he had done, I was met (mostly, but not only) with a series of ad homs.

I began to wonder (at that point, at least) whether DDD was scum with SOG who had overshot how much he had to discredit tracker to save SOG; however, because I was already pretty set and sure on tracker, I didn't put too much stock in it. Still, it was strange. That strangeness reminded me of his tentative endorsement of ekiM's prior (minimal) attack against me. At length, DDD surpassed ekiM as my best guess at the scumpartner of at-least-one-out-of-SOGPPShadetrack. Just as my suspicion of ekiM had in large part been by process of elimination, he was now (relatively) pro-town by process of elimination.

In fairness to DDD, the mith thread that he linked to a bit ago makes it clear (finally) that, however absurd I think it is, randomlynch+NK statistics are apparently the cultural norm on these forums. (It seems that it would be a simple matter of sampling from the games on these forums to develop a more ecologically-valid system, but that's neither here or there.) That aside, the remaining sketchy things about DDD are 1. his weird combination of attacking me whenever someone else does while never voting for me and 2. ad hom defense, but I think that's just his personality. Then again, I do pretty much the same thing to him.

2. Why did you think that one out of tracker and SOG was scum?

There are too many things I had to describe as poor play for both of them to be town. Shadeaux's bizarre Jarmo vote was the clearest tell for me, but it's now clear that that was poor play. PP's Pablo vote is probably second, followed by her lame "I'm a victim" defense. SOG's OMG DUN CLAIM MORON -> OMG WHY DIDN'T YOU LET HIM CLAIM business & I H8 EVARY1 PBPA I would add to the list, but he's maybe added somewhat plausible explanations for those. (SOG's targeting me may be coloring how I read his posts.)

There was also that both of them replaced as soon as things against them started to heat up. PP's final posts in particular read like ragequitting, which I think would be more likely of mafia than town. penguana also repped at a time when there was pressure on him, but I think Katy's played very pro-town. (Jarmo repped as well, obviously, but not at a time when there was pressure on him.)

3. If SOG, who is the scumpartner

If SOG is scum, then it would strengthen my scummy read of DDD's statisticsattack on tracker. So if SOG, then DDD. I'd read his pressure on PP after/during her meltdown as bussing.

One question for you:

Michel, it seems like you've stated that I am half of your favorite "scum pairing." Given that I am scum and you are not, how would you explain my lengthy defense of BS (your predecessor twice removed)'s early push for No Lynch?

[Iecerint]

I H8 EVARY1 PBPA

This is a blatant exaggeration.

You "disliked" or found scummy 5 of the 8 players (not counting yourself, obviously). I suppose it's true that 5 is less than 9, but while my characterization of your PBPA is sort of trivially exaggeration, I wouldn't call it distortion. The point is that you were very generous with the hate wand.

For my part, you'll notice I went on in the same sentence to point out that you've plausibly explained said PBPA. To summarize, you've said that only posts with the word "scummy" in them are the players you truly found scummy. Given the benefit of the doubt here, 5 is reduced to 3 (Katy, FT, and me), which is a more reasonable number, at least. (We're left having to believe that language like "strongly disliked" doesn't entail scum suspicion, but that's neither here nor there.)

(For the record, SOG was pro-town on ekiM and ivan, and he was neutral on DDD; the other players were scummy or "disliked.")

[Iecerint]

Let's see if I understand you correctly, Iecerint.

You claimed that at least one and possibly both of tracker and SOG has to be scum. In logic terms

P = tracker is scum
Q = SOG is scum

You claim P OR Q
This means:
(NOT P) IMPLIES Q
(NOT Q) IMPLIES P
NOT (NOT P AND NOT Q)

in normal words:
if tracker is town (not scum) then SOG must be scum.
if SOG is town (not scum) then tracker must be scum.
it is not the case that tracker is not scum and that SOG is not scum.

I actually said that I would be shocked if neither of them were scum, but yep, that's pretty much right.

You believed that at least one out of tracker and SOG had to be scum because

1. You assumed that there is little chance of a pro-town player playing poorly.

2. Shadeaux played poorly.

3. Purple Princess played poorly.

4. semioldguy played poorly.

Therefore, you believe that there is little chance of all of them being town.

"1" isn't quite right. There's a high chance that a town player will make occasional errors. I've made and pointed out several of my own. If you were to edit it to read something like "Given that poor play occurs, there is a disproportionately great probability that it was performed by scum," then I think it'd accurately reflect my argument. Moreover, I think this is a fair assumption, as, if it isn't a fair assumption, all town can do is random lynch, and they will lose on average (as DDD has pointed out). Relying on the assumption that 7:2 is chosen as a newbie set-up because it's reasonably balanced, I think "1" is a fair assumption.

You might also add that tracker played poorly. Two starting players and both their reps is a big coincidence in my book. But:

However, the poor play of Shadeaux if he is town is independent of the play of PP and SOG. Therefore, it is not the case that PP and semioldguy are more likely to be scum if Shadeaux is town.

You're totally correct here; this was my mistake. I should switch my mental model of scumplay to something like coins that independently show evidence of scum. Thanks for clearing that up for me. That said, I still think that SOG was probably my best vote because, even observing him independently, I think his play has been the most questionable of the current players (and what else are we supposed to rely on?). The runners-up are (in retrospect) BS/FT/Michel and DDD.

besides that, this is a newbie game. Newbies in general are quite likely to play poorly due to lack of experience, regardless of alignement.

I don't agree with your assumption that pro-town players are more likely to play poorly then anti-town players are.

Then how on earth do you propose we find scum?

The first point also goes for your argument about replacing out. You completely fail to address why one being town makes the other more likely scum.

I mentioned ragequitting, which is what PP's replacement timing looked like. It could be that she was a town ragequitter, but I think I, at least, would be more tempted to ragequit if I were playing as mafia.

I'm not sure I understand your second sentence. Are you contrasting the circumstances surrounding Jarmo vs. penguana/BSFT/PP? In that case, Jarmo's circumstances were less scummy because he wasn't under suspicion when he replaced out (hence, no ragequit). Katy and SOG discussed this toward the end of Day 1 (Katy taking my view, SOG not), and I agree with her. Are you contrasting "having been replaced" and "not having been replaced"? I agree (if I understand you correctly?) that that isn't in itself a reliable scumtell.

Michel, it seems like you've stated that I am half of your favorite "scum pairing." Given that I am scum and you are not, how would you explain my lengthy defense of BS (your predecessor twice removed)'s early push for No Lynch?

However, by defending that it is essentially a null tell, scum can participate without taking risks. As participation is seen as a towntell, this is good for them. Furthermore, BS is likely to get a town read on someone who is nice to him.

I buy that being nice and active is probably a reasonable scum strategy if they're careful not to screw up. However, you'll notice that I didn't defend that it was a null tell; rather, I somewhat aggressively argued that it was a town read in the context of a newbie game. From page 5 (my second post):

OK, here I go --

The two players I get the most pro-town vibes from at the moment are FT and Pablo:

- I like FT because I doubt that a newbie mafia member would advocate NoLynch on Day 1. The intuitive thing to do as a mafia player is to do the opposite. (Granted, thinking about this from a "third person"'s perspective suggests that lynching is in the town's best interests.) Here's a summary of my thinking on this:

Newbie town = Don't lynch! We'll probably mess up! At best, follow others' conjecture!
Newbie scum = Lynch someone! But never one of us!
Expert town = Approaches default forum play.
Expert scum = Approaches default forum play.

The only category that fits FT's predecessor is newbie town.

The possibility that FT's predecessor was secretly an expert player without an avatar (maybe on an alt? I don't know if that's part of the culture on these forums) who was banking on a lack of expert players to call him out and a lot of newbie players to jump on the NoLynch bandwagon seems remote to me.

The only contradiction here is that FT's predecessor both claimed to have only played 3 times total and to have played large games on debate.org. This seems a little sketchy. My guess is that he just got defensive and mentioned the other online play to save face.

Brief summary of what's happened to this reasoning since then: ekiM followed up the post with "I have no idea why Iec has a pro-town read on FT," which led to a brief back-and-forth between the two of us with ekiM and DDD ultimately concluding it was a null (newb) tell. In contrast, Katy agreed with my reasoning when she replaced in.

Given that I went so far as to use circumstantial evidence to claim that BS's NL was evidence of town behavior when the default interpretation of his action was that it is null tell, are you in a position to revise your perspective? I ask because I think it's probable that you missed details of the post in question during your re-read.

[Iecerint]

I H8 EVARY1 PBPA

This is a blatant exaggeration.

You "disliked" or found scummy 5 of the 8 players (not counting yourself, obviously). I suppose it's true that 5 is less than 9, but while my characterization of your PBPA is sort of trivially exaggeration, I wouldn't call it distortion. The point is that you were very generous with the hate wand.

Not sure if I had comented on this but since it is still in debate I'l have my say. I have no problem with his posting his likes and dislikes along with his suspects. I try to do the same thing in my reviews.

It gives extra info that may help any other player identify with.

I think the bolded part was the basis for Pablo's problem with the pervasiveness of SOG's hate wand. Everyone except me (since he voted for me) could no doubt find something to like in there somewhere.

Current feelings? A bit annoyed that I was right about Shadeux, but allowed my opinions about tracker to take precedence. However, given the tracker flip I'm more cautious about the PP tell because the tracker lynched reaffirmed that sometimes noob town just plays bad and that there's no explanation beyond that.

If you had so many scruples about voting tracker, why didn't your feelings about PP color your analysis of SOG's analysis?

[Iecerint]

@ ivan - Sure, this is it. It's part of post 221, Pablo's analysis of SOG's PBPA:

SOG's scatershot of "I don't like" statements about nearly everything in the game is a great way for scum to shoot a lot of ideas out there to see what sticks. It ain't terribly productive to just point out everyone's faults when you have one vote. Throw out your suspicions when you can act on them. While he did throw out a vote, there was little true focus in the post on Iecerint to draw out a good reaction from the town (instead people can just pick and choose, because more likely than not everyone is going to agree with one or two of the things he said). It's a negative post and a moderately "safe" post, and I think it's plenty shady.

Seeing as PP=SOG, this won't come as a suprise.

vote: semioldguy

@ DDD - While I was retrieving Pablo's analysis, I reread yours, and you're absolutely right. For whatever reason, I'd remembered your "SOG analysis" analysis as "SOG is a genius; tracker is lolwat." Looking back, it seems like you were much more tepid in your praise of SOG. I think I misread your intent in the sentence "Lots of interesting things here." Sorry about that.

[Iecerint]

wow, thanks Iecerint. I must say I think pablo was wrong in what he said. There is no such thing as too much info for everyone to go on. I am sure everyone here agrees that dislikes and opinions of scum are in fact needed to agree on someone to lynch. Our votes after all are not based on luck. But where is this line of having too much information drawn? It simply doesn't exist because you have never have or give too much information. This is of course you have reasonable post sizes

I agree that it's great to put your beliefs out there. It gives the town something to analyze and helps contextualize your actions. The problem with SOG's post is not that he listed a PBPA (that's great! I wish FT had done the same), but that said PBPA didn't appear to differentiate between players very much in a game where all players know that there are exactly 2 scum. His explanation for this, if you accept it, makes the PBPA more reasonable (5 scum, 1 neutral, 3 town --> 3 scum, 2 "dislike", 1 neutral, 3 town).

It seems like you've played with ekiM before. Does he always use ellipses in his posts as he's been doing?

And I'm sorry about my post lengths.

[Iecerint]

I H8 EVARY1 PBPA

This is a blatant exaggeration.

You "disliked" or found scummy 5 of the 8 players (not counting yourself, obviously). I suppose it's true that 5 is less than 9, but while my characterization of your PBPA is sort of trivially exaggeration, I wouldn't call it distortion. The point is that you were very generous with the hate wand.

Not sure if I had comented on this but since it is still in debate I'l have my say. I have no problem with his posting his likes and dislikes along with his suspects. I try to do the same thing in my reviews.

It gives extra info that may help any other player identify with.

I think the bolded part was the basis for Pablo's problem with the pervasiveness of SOG's hate wand. Everyone except me (since he voted for me) could no doubt find something to like in there somewhere.

Why would a vote on you keep you from being able to agree with anything I wrote?

Categorically, it's correct that it wouldn't prevent that.

What's your point? This seems even emptier than your complaint about my "exaggeration."

[Iecerint]

Because you have been twisting what others have said into an interpretation that benefits your own desires rather than its actual meaning, which is not pro-town. My point is that you are saying things that are clearly not true, but stating them as if they were fact.

How does adding "except me" benefit my "desires"? It seems like Pablo's criticism of your post holds regardless of whether I personally bought into it.

I don't believe I've intentionally twisted anyone's language. I do occasionally misread or misremember (the recent DDD bit is a good example), but I'm quick to apologize for these sorts of errors. If you're talking about my mentioning your PBPA as a "twist," you'll notice that I've also consistently mentioned your defense of it.

[Iecerint]

Because it would let you choose to ignore whatever you wanted from that post by your invalid reasoning.

I don't believe I've ignored anything about that post. If you think I have, please let me know. So far, your complaint sounds awfully vague and hypothetical.

For the record (I'll pull a bit of an SOG here), I did "agree with" your assessment of DDD in that post. Your vote against me using ekiM's reasoning was sufficient to keep me from "liking" any of it.

[Iecerint]

Iecerint, aside from mathematically calculating scumtells and anti-town behavior do you have a gut feeling of someone being a possible scum. I don't mean for you to ignore facts only do you have a gut feeling other that you can't explain rationaly?

Not really. I find that if I rely on my intuition, I end up with a mental list like SOG's (prior to the "scummy" != "dislike" business). (For that matter, I've not really done any math, other than "1/4" on page 9 or 10. That was DDD.)

Because it would let you choose to ignore whatever you wanted from that post by your invalid reasoning.

I don't believe I've ignored anything about that post. If you think I have, please let me know. So far, your complaint sounds awfully vague and hypothetical.

For the record (I'll pull a bit of an SOG here), I did "agree with" your assessment of DDD in that post. Your vote against me using ekiM's reasoning was sufficient to keep me from "liking" any of it.

It looks like you are saying you didn't like my assessment of Debonair Danny DiPietro, but that you also agreed with it. Why would you agree with something you didn't like? This is not at all in line with my dislikes, because I don't agree with any of the things I disliked.

Here you are comparing liking/disliking to agreement/disagreement; while previously I was comparing liking/disliking to scummy/non-scummy. This has just been you twisting something else to your own liking (claiming you are doing the same thing I did, "pulling a bit of an SOG," but you aren't doing the same thing I did).

I'm comparing differentiating liking/agreeing to differentiating disliking/scummy. The point was that it's not very intuitive. It was topical because 1) you had similarly recently asked us to differentiate concepts which are not always differentiated in-game and 2) you had been arguing about my use of the word "like." It was mostly a joke.

Iecerint:

Your vote is on SOG. What is your number one reason for thinking he is scum?

It's more a lot of small reasons that add up to a big one than a single, number-one reason (PPragequit, PBPA, asking me to explain things and not really following up on his questions, claimgate, the relative purity of other players). The most salient (new!) thing at this time, I think, is his poor scumhunting. I'm presumably his top suspect, but he's not very aggressively damning me. He's said he's "watching" Michel, but I'd be surprised if anything came of that. Maybe he's hoping he can put someone else under the bus when I turn up town. The same could be said of DDD, but his top suspect is less clear as he hasn't yet voted, so I'm not sure the criticism applies in the same way.

My second suspect is becoming Michel rather than DDD, because I think it's a bit odd that BSFT would get a scumread from JarmoIec. My comments about BS (in my view) are best explained either by both of us being town, by both of us being scum. If only I were scum, I don't think I would bend over backwards and refer to BS's lack of an avatar and so forth to add credibility to a player who had already been damaged. My action makes "sense" if we are both scum, if neither of us are scum, or if only Michel is scum (as I'm blind to that if I'm town). The eventuality where only *I* am scum seems remote to me. (Additionally, it seems like his main argument against me is that I use arguments against people. He's correct that I've made some implicit mistakes, though.)

Alternatively, it could be, as he states, that he just missed that upon his first read, came to a conclusion without that fact, and is now sticking to his prior conclusion even though the facts (from his perspective) have changed. People do that sometimes.

My preferred lynch order is: SOG. If scum, DDD; else, Michel.

[Iecerint]

Iecerint, I believe there is a difference between scummy play and poor play. Poor play is not a scumtell, scummy play is.

This is an interesting distinction, but I highly suspect that poor play is actually indicative of scum more often than not. Town players just have to play the game free of pretenses. Scum have to lie, feign ignorance of information that have, and be consistent about it. I imagine that this leads to poorer play on the part of scum simply because there's more to consider. (I could be relying too much on my RL game experience, where staying active and consistent as a scum player is a big challenge.) This is similar to, but more general than, Katy's comment that the distinction breaks down a bit in newbie games.I know you've already explicitly disagreed with this point, but I wanted to put my reasoning out there in more detail.

In fact, I may go a step further and claim that because "scumtells" can be (fairly and often blamelessly) WIFOM'd into oblivion, poorer play is the surer tell.

The first point also goes for your argument about replacing out. You completely fail to address why one being town makes the other more likely scum.

I'm not sure I understand your second sentence.

The point I was trying to make was the following. You explain why you felt tracker was likely scum. You explain why you felt SOG was likely scum. However, I specifically asked why you believed either tracker, or SOG, or both had to be scum. The reason I asked, was that I felt that you were arguing "tracker was town, one out of tracker and SOG had to be scum, so SOG must be scum".

The only explanation you came with for saying that one of them had to be scum is P(tracker town) * P(SOG town) = very small. As I explained, these chances are independent, so P(SOG scum|tracker town) = P(SOG scum). So it didn't back up this perceived reasoning.

First, I've already admitted that I should have revised my "one of both is scum" theory after Shadetrack died to account for the chances being independent. I agree with you on that. Your quoting implies I ignored your point. I'm not sure whether this was intentional, but it could be that you're quoting selectively to make me appear evasive. I'd also add that I go on in the same passage to explain the difference between the circumstances surrounding the various replacements.

You're also pretending that some hypothetical house of cards will fall to the ground as soon as you reveal that I messed up the independence assumption. That seems a little silly to me. Using your notation, I just have to revise "P(tracker town) * P(SOG town) = very small" to "P(SOG town) = small." Crisis averted.

One additional comment about the independence of scumtells. Upon reflection, it seems to me that it's actually NOT true that scumtells are independent. This is because there are 2 scum, and the scum know who one another are. In fact, your own PBPA, which considers scum predominantly in pairs, seems to evidence understanding of this. I know that this doesn't apply to my tracker/SOG business (as we now know that tracker was town), but do I have that right? (Not going anywhere with that; I just want to make sure I'm not missing something.)

Because of how weak the argument is, scum can still relatively easy push for a BS lynch later. I think the slightly smaller chance of a BS lynch is easily compensated by the read BS will get on you.

Decent point, but you're neglecting that making such a bold claim is pretty attention-grabbing. BS might get a town read on me, but everyone else's impression would be much more challenging to predict. I also went out of my way to use really circumstantial, game-specific evidence (no avatar) to support my hypothesis, which I don't think I would have ever bothered with as scum. See my prior post for further thoughts on this.

[Iecerint]

EBWOP (to the first post):

My comments about BS (in my view) are best explained either by both of us being town, by both of us being scum.

Should list the possibilities:

a) both are town OR only BSFT is scum (as these are identical from my perspective)
b) both are scum

The point is that "only Iec is scum" is (IMO) the least intuitive interpretation. I think this was clear from the rest of the post, but I still wanted to fix this sentence. <_<

[Iecerint]

It's nice that SOG is finally responding to my criticism.

(a) This is backtracking. (b) My point was it was not the same thing, meaning that if your point was that it wasn't intuitive, then that point failed because I noticed and pointed out the difference between liking and agreeing, not you. If it wasn't very intuitive, then why did I pick up on the discrepancy right away? (c) Dismissing something as having been a joke is a slight scum-tell.

(a) I'm not sure what you mean by labeling it "backtracking;" please clarify. (b) That's not what you said here:

It looks like you are saying you didn't like my assessment of Debonair Danny DiPietro, but that you also agreed with it. Why would you agree with something you didn't like?

Your own discomfort with my intentionally-shoddy language mirrored our own discomfort with your dislike/scummy distinction, which was the point of my comment. (c) I think my use of quotation marks and of the phrase "pull an SOG" made it clear that the remark was intended to poke fun at you. If it had been only questionably a joke and then I had tried to dismiss it (defensively) as a joke, I'd agree with you.

My second suspect is becoming Michel rather than DDD, because I think it's a bit odd that BSFT would get a scumread from JarmoIec. My comments about BS (in my view) are best explained either by both of us being town, by both of us being scum.

Why do you think it would be odd for Firpants_Tom/MichelSabelheart to get a scum read on you? Are there other players you would find it odd to have suspicions of you? Why or why not?

Whether Michel is playing as scum or not, he has an interest in playing as if he is town. Given that he is town (or trying to look town), I think it would be odd for him to get a scum read on me because I used unconventional means to describe BS's behavior as town (said post was recently reposted). That is, I didn't just provide the general knowledge that BS's behavior was a null-tell; rather, I went above-and-beyond and used evidence specific to this game to conclude that it was a town-tell. This distinction is important because, as Michel has by now pointed out, providing the general knowledge is also good town play, and it helps the town less. That would have been the more obvious fake pro-town behavior.

The reason this only applies to Michel is that only he knows his own alignment. Players who aren't Michel might have thought, for example, that I was panicked scum overestimating how much I needed to save my teammate. TownMichel, on the other hand, would know that this was not the case, as he would know that he himself was town.

However, Michel found me scummy in spite of these circumstances. Why? We know that part of it is that he missed the post in question, which could happen to either a town or scum player. Why is he

still

supporting (implicitly, at least) my lynch? It could be that he's scum who sees me as the easier lynch (or the easier town lynch, whichever), or it could be that he's a town player who just got an impression based on incomplete data and is sticking with it in spite of data to the contrary. I'm a little surprised that he doesn't find my anecdote more persuasive, but it could just be that he's stubborn. I'm stubborn myself.

I'm fairly certain that I only have this kind of relationship with Michel; that is, if another player finds me scummy, there's no reason why third parties should find said player scummy. So if Katy (just because she hasn't yet) were to come out with a litany on me, third-party players shouldn't see her as scummy for doing so. Only in Michel's case should his suspicion toward me give third-party players pause. (As I've said in this post and elsewhere, one explanation for his suspicion is just that he misread part of the thread and is now sticking to his guns or whatever.)

Does that make sense? I think I have it worked out properly because Michel confirmed that it was a weak town-tell.

How do your own comments and actions in any way determine whether or not someone else is scum? The only way you actions would be indicative of someone else's alignment is if you knew their alignment, which means you would have to be scum.

You're missing that it's not just my actions. It's that his behavior given my action (assuming that he is town) was suspect.

Scum are perfectly capable of adding credibility to other players for a variety of reasons. Scum can do it to help save a scumbuddy. Scum could do it to an innocent to help make themselves look better if that person dies and flips as town. Scum have more reasons to add credibility to other players than town members do.

I mentioned that scum could do it to save a scumbuddy. One of the two high-probability interpretations of my post that I listed (to a third-party observer) was that iecscum was overshooting a need to prop up BSscum. So we agree there. The problem is that, if this is true, then Michel is scum. And if Michel is town, he knows that that can't be what happened.

Your other possibility, that scum could do something like what I did to look better when the player flips town, is still a possibility from townMichel's perspective, but I think a few details about this case suggest that that isn't what happened here. Namely, I used some pretty circumstantial logic to support a pro-town read of BS. I don't think scum would bother with this because (as Michel has noted) there are safer, more default ways to respond to the situation. For example, I could have done what ekiM and DDD did to respond to my post -- point out that NoLynch votes are a null-tell with regard to alignment.

My action makes "sense" if we are both scum, if neither of us are scum, or if only Michel is scum (as I'm blind to that if I'm town).

So you are essentially saying that it only makes sense if both of you are in this game (i.e. possible in every possible scenario)

No -- it doesn't make sense if ONLY I am scum. If we are both scum, I'm helping a scumbuddy. If only I'm scum, there were easier, much less dramatic ways of dealing with the situation (see above). If I'm town, then I'm just excited about the game and trying to contribute something new in my first post in an online game of mafia, and I don't know his alignment for certain, so either of those conditions are plausible.

To re-summarize my take on what makes sense (to a third-party):
Iec and BS are scumbuddies -- Yes
Iec is town and right -- Yes
Iec is town and wrong -- Yes
Iec is scum, but BS is not -- No

Additionally you offer no actual explanation as to why scum wouldn't do what you did, you merely say that they wouldn't without stating any reason why only town could do what you are doing.

I didn't want to give up too many details before Michel responded, and then he seemed to understand where I was coming from, so I didn't feel the need to elaborate too much. I hope this post makes my reasoning clearer to you, absurdly long as it has become. Please let me know if it makes no sense.

The parts where you think that the things you do any say make it more or less likely for another player to be town or scum are beyond ludicrous.

Not sure what's going on here, but it sounds like it's a repeat of the 4th thing I've quoted? The answer there reapplies here: it's not what I said, but his reaction to it.

[Iecerint]

The reason this only applies to Michel is that only he knows his own alignment. Players who aren't Michel might have thought, for example, that I was panicked scum overestimating how much I needed to save my teammate. TownMichel, on the other hand, would know that this was not the case, as he would know that he himself was town.

Town-MichelSableheart could also see you as scum trying to buddy up to him in order to get on his good side. Like I already said, your actions don't determine his alignment. Other players can still see this a buddying, scum don't have to buddy up only to their scum buddy, they can buddy up to any player. Buddying is scummy.

That's true, but I see it as a comparatively remote possibility from Michel's perspective. If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what else I can say on the matter. You're still insisting that my action "determine[d] someone's alignment," which I've made very clear is not what I'm arguing.

[Iecerint]

You're also pretending that some hypothetical house of cards will fall to the ground as soon as you reveal that I messed up the independence assumption. That seems a little silly to me. Using your notation, I just have to revise "P(tracker town) * P(SOG town) = very small" to "P(SOG town) = small." Crisis averted.

Take a look at the reasons you give for voting SOG in post #278. 1. Is an appeal to authority on sketchy assumptions, 2. is based on a sketchy use of probability. Sure, you still have reasons to vote him, but I'm really don't like how you are trying to convince the town on faulty arguments.

1. I don't think the assumptions were really that sketchy; it's not as if Pablo was the lone voice that campaigned against SOGPP Day 1. There were and are lots of other players and reasons for voting him. 2. I have already said like 3 times that I forgot to incorporate that the scumtells were independent because of Shadetrack's town status. You can argue that I was being sneaky, I guess, but I'd like to think that I'm a better sneaker than that. I'm similarly assuming that your misread of my early-game post was just a mistake. You'll also notice that the same post forecasts another post soon-to-come (that came!) that gives my thoughts in more detail. (Granted, I got more on DDD than on SOGPP from looking through Pablo's posts.)

On to the argument about you defending BS. Let's take a look at what you said:

- I like FT because I doubt that a newbie mafia member would advocate NoLynch on Day 1. The intuitive thing to do as a mafia player is to do the opposite. (Granted, thinking about this from a "third person"'s perspective suggests that lynching is in the town's best interests.) Here's a summary of my thinking on this:

Newbie town = Don't lynch! We'll probably mess up! At best, follow others' conjecture!
Newbie scum = Lynch someone! But never one of us!
Expert town = Approaches default forum play.
Expert scum = Approaches default forum play.

The only category that fits FT's predecessor is newbie town.

The possibility that FT's predecessor was secretly an expert player without an avatar (maybe on an alt? I don't know if that's part of the culture on these forums) who was banking on a lack of expert players to call him out and a lot of newbie players to jump on the NoLynch bandwagon seems remote to me.

The only contradiction here is that FT's predecessor both claimed to have only played 3 times total and to have played large games on debate.org. This seems a little sketchy. My guess is that he just got defensive and mentioned the other online play to save face.

I very strongly disagree with your assesment of this post. You claim that you 'bend over backwards ... to add credibility to a player who has already been damaged'. I believe all you are doing is making a very weak argument, that is unlikely to convince anyone, because of two major objections.

1. Newbie scum knows it's a good idea to act as town. Therefore, if newbie town is likely to do something, newbie scum is likely to do that too.
2. No-lynching is in fact in favour of scum, as it costs the town a lynch opportunity. Newbie scum who is aware of this will easily be happy trying to get a No-lynch.

I've re-added the bold you removed, which highlights why the defense is unnecessarily extreme if I were a scum player. An extrapolation of your reason 1 reveals it to be garbage at this stage, because that can be lazily applied to pretty much any argument that anyone makes in this game; moreover, ignoring all scumtells/towntells ala DDD leads to random lynching and a loss for town, so I still think that it is unwise.

I agree with your reason 2 in principle, but I don't see what it has to do with whether my post is town or scum. If anything, it implicates your predecessor (and you) as scum. If anything, I think it makes my post look even more extreme for a scum player. At worst, it makes me look sort of dumb.

Decent point, but you're neglecting that making such a bold claim is pretty attention-grabbing. BS might get a town read on me, but everyone else's impression would be much more challenging to predict. I also went out of my way to use really circumstantial, game-specific evidence (no avatar) to support my hypothesis, which I don't think I would have ever bothered with as scum. See my prior post for further thoughts on this.

Personally, I did not think much of you defending BS there. I could understand where you were coming from with the argument you made, but believed your conclusions were unfounded. Why would other players feel different? What is the risk scum take by making that argument there?

And why wouldn't scum use evidence for their arguments? Don't they want to look credible?

Other players feel different because they don't know townMichel's alignment, so it can still look like scum protecting scum. Of course the conclusions aren't water-tight -- it's a Day 1 argument, and we aren't really talking about whether the Day 1 argument was water-tight (things have happened since then, etc). What we're talking about (right?) is how your reaction to said defense doesn't take into account your "knowledge" that you cannot be scum with me (different from everyone else's).

---

I was talking about BS voting No Lynch being a weak town tell

at best

, meaning that I don't necessarily agree that BS voting no lynch is a towntell, but if it is a towntell, it's a weak one. Where do you get that I'm confirming it was a weak towntell?

Since I clearly wasn't bringing up a post from Day 1 as evidence that you are town, I assumed you referred to the remaining thing for you to evaluate (my defense of BS). Hence, I thought you were acknowledging that my defense of BS was a weak towntell (from townBSFTMichel's perspective, but not other players'). I don't really care whether you agree with my assessment of BS's behavior; other stuff has accumulated since Day 1 that could affect a player's view of his alignment, anyway. What I care about is your reaction to it in spite of your (implicitly) alleged town status.

It might be nice if other players could comment on my argument. I'm going to have a hard time being convinced I'm wrong by my two favorite lynch suspects.

[Iecerint]

I didn't write those things you quoted in the above post.

EBWOP: Sorry, those should all be Michel. Got used to typing SOG from the prior long post.

[Iecerint]

The reason this only applies to Michel is that only he knows his own alignment. Players who aren't Michel might have thought, for example, that I was panicked scum overestimating how much I needed to save my teammate. TownMichel, on the other hand, would know that this was not the case, as he would know that he himself was town.

Town-MichelSableheart could also see you as scum trying to buddy up to him in order to get on his good side. Like I already said, your actions don't determine his alignment. Other players can still see this a buddying, scum don't have to buddy up only to their scum buddy, they can buddy up to any player. Buddying is scummy.

That's true, but I see it as a comparatively remote possibility from Michel's perspective. If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what else I can say on the matter. You're still insisting that my action "determine[d] someone's alignment," which I've made very clear is not what I'm arguing.

(1) You can't know MichelSabelheart's perspective because you are not him and you can't know his role unless you are scum. Why would you assume what MichelSabelheart's likely perspective would be? (2) I have never once said that you actions determine his alignment, I have specifically been saying that they don't. But you keep basing HIS likely alignment off of providing arguments of things that only YOU do.

1. Every player in this game knows that I am not scum with them. However, no player in this game knows whether I am scum with another player in this game. That's why we expect Michel's perspective on me to be different from another player. My action with him (IMO) has a strong chance of being interpreted as scum-helping-scum, but townMichel knows that cannot be true. Does that answer your question, or am I answering a different question or something? I can't tell whether you're getting it an discarding it, or if I'm not explaining myself very well.

2. You were saying that *I* was claiming that my actions determined his alignment. I was pointing out that I was *not* claiming that; rather, how third parties should view Michel's alignment is on account of things that he has done given things that I have done. They only make sense if he is scum, he made a mistake and is stubborn, and/or other stuff is sketchy enough to cancel out the effect of his mistake. I'm supposing the second one, regardless of his alignment; he's claiming the last.

[Iecerint]

Decent point, but you're neglecting that making such a bold claim is pretty attention-grabbing. BS might get a town read on me, but everyone else's impression would be much more challenging to predict. I also went out of my way to use really circumstantial, game-specific evidence (no avatar) to support my hypothesis, which I don't think I would have ever bothered with as scum. See my prior post for further thoughts on this.

Personally, I did not think much of you defending BS there. I could understand where you were coming from with the argument you made, but believed your conclusions were unfounded. Why would other players feel different? What is the risk scum take by making that argument there?

And why wouldn't scum use evidence for their arguments? Don't they want to look credible?

Other players feel different because they don't know townMichel's alignment

, so it can still look like scum protecting scum....

1. And you do know townMichel's alignment? The argument of other players getting reads off

your

defense (aka YOUR ACTION) doesn't have to do with MichelSabelheart's alignment, it has to do with yours.

2. Not only that, your look back on this makes it look like from you were attempting to manipulate another player's view of you. Doing something with the motives of thinking that you will look town for doing it is scummy. Being town is not scummy,

trying

to be town is. Town players shouldn't prioritize appearing town to others, we should first be concerned with catching scum and helping the town, that should be our motivation.

1. This is an argument about my alignment. I know my alignment 100%, so this debate doesn't apply to me; that is, I know 100% that I am not scum.
2. I remember most of my own actions better than other players do. Since I remembered a specific action I made that should be persuasive to someone who knows townMichel's alignment, I brought it up. I agree that trying too hard to look town can look bad, but I also think that given that I am under scrutiny, the best thing I can do is a) explain my perspective in full detail for analysis later and b) since I know 100% that I'm town, I should try to avoid the lynch unless I know that town will gain disproportionately much significant information from it.

Running errands, be back in a few.

[Iecerint]

Pretty much everything Iecerint has said on this page is a load of crap.

Ugh. Two times is enough. No more repeating myself because you can't (or won't) read English.

As I said before, I don't really like the argument of "If [X] result happens, then I am not scum." It's easy for a scum player to make this argument because they have the knowledge of whether any particular player will turn out innocent or guilty.

I'm not sure I formed my argument that way. It's more like "X happened. Because of X, player Y (but only player Y) should have perspective Z. Player Y has evidenced that he does not have perspective Z. This merits explanation."

It's more convincing to have good reasoning behind your actions than trying to ask for your actions to speak for themselves. As town, you should generally have good reasons for what you do, even if you're wrong. As scum, your reason is always the same: "make sure someone besides me is lynched and make sure I look like town." So, let me put it this way: saying that BECAUSE you did a particular thing you are not scum, is not convincing to me. Convincingly explaining your thought process or why you did something as a townie is convincing.

Look back at page 14 -- that's exactly what I did, in the form of answers to MS's questions. The business about BS was originally a question of my own directed specifically at MS with minimal elaboration. My hope was he'd be satisfied with my answers to his questions, be reminded of/informed about the BS event, and recognize that I wasn't scum. (Note that the BS business was intended specifically for MS; I didn't expect anyone else to find it convincing, for reasons I've already stated.)

Looking back, I've also noticed that MS's original read on me was based on alleged overfocus on trackerSOG Day 1 and on SOG today. This seems pretty silly inasmuch as I wasn't any more focused on trackerSOG than any other player Day 1 -- in fact, I was more focused on DDD than anyone else for most of Day 1 and Day 2. I never noticed this before because I was too focused on answering MS's questions.

[Iecerint]

MS, I've had a little trouble cross-supplying all the arguments because of the way you've isolated them. I think that presenting the arguments out-of-context may at times mask how they build on one another. That said, I agree that the quotations-of-quotations have gotten a little out-of-control. I'll try to respond using the format you provided:

Iecerint, your current argument against me feels a lot like you saying "MichelSableheart believes I could be scum even though I took the trouble early in the game to buddy up to him! That's just not fair!"

This is an oversimplification, but I'm sure that was intentional.

You are telling me not why you are town, but why I should believe you are town. That's simply ridiculous. Given that I am town, I must carefully examine all other players. The fact that one of them defended my predecessor should NOT give that player a free pass.

Not a free pass, sure, but certainly the benefit of the doubt. You've been arguing that my action might be scummy for that very reason, right? (= WIFOM, but we're way, way past that point.)

• 1. Attacking BS over voting No Lynch was unlikely to accomplish anything.
  (false dichotomy)
  
  2. Defending BS had little to no risks attached.
  (see below, and false dichotomy)
  • A. Your defense of BS was extremely weak and unlikely to convince anyone. A BS lynch would still be a good possibility.
    (ShadePP had already happened by then, which had in my view dwarfed the other players' unusual behavior. Also, I think the defense of BS was about as strong as a defense of a NL vote can be, so I don't agree with your language that it was "weak." I kept up with it through posts to the contrary by ekiM, actually, which you'll know since you just read through him in isolation.)
    • a. Newbie scum knows it's a good idea to act as town.
      Therefore, if newbie town is likely to do something, newbie scum is likely to do that too.
      (Refer to the prior post on poor play for why I disagree)
      b.
      No-lynching is in fact in favour of scum, as it costs the town a lynch opportunity. Newbie scum who is aware of this will easily be happy trying to get a No-lynch.
      (This is about BS, not me, as I don't believe your rationalization (elsewhere) that my defense was weak applies.)
    
    B.
    Other players are unlikely to become suspicious of Iec defending BS.
    (lolwat)
  
  3. Because Iec defends BS, BS will probably like Iec, and is therefore unlikely to vote for him.
  4. Should BS flip town, the other players will remember that Iec defended BS, and will like him for that. (argument brought up by semioldguy)

Considering all this, defending BS has a serious advantage, and no serious disadvantage for scum. Therefore, it is something that scum could do.

1. I didn't know you could make lists like that. Neat.
2. If I disagreed with an argument, I bolded it. Italics means "has nothing to do with my alignment." Underlining is distortion. Parentheses are brief reasons.

MSh is stubborn and does not want to change his opinion which is based on incorrect facts.

This is a very serious misrepresentation. After my mistake was pointed out to me, I have adjusted my theory accordingly (note that the participation argument has disappeared because of this). It is perfectly fine if you disagree with my explanation, but please do not act as if I am still explaining why you claimed BS no lynch vote was a null tell.

I listed plenty of alternate possibilities. You've listed this as if I argued that it was the only possible explanation for your behavior. "This is a very serious misrepresentation."

Iec has put more effort in the defense then he would have if he were scum.

I disagree with your claim that town puts more effort into their games then scum. If scum wants to make an argument, they want to be convincing, and will therefore take the time to put in the effort to support their argument with evidence.

That's possible, but I think the more obvious scum play is to contribute only in minimal, default ways to minimize the probability of screwing up. This follows from my hypothesis about poor play being a tell for scum more often than town.

There were safer ways for Iec to act if he were scum.

This argument is completely irrelevant. Your question wasn't "if Iec is scum, how would he have acted", your question was "how do you explain Iec's behaviour if he is scum?". The fact that there were other, perhaps better ways for scum to act does not change anything about the fact that scum could have acted as you did.

There's a scum interpretation for ANYTHING. You've said as much. The best I could do is point out that the obvious scum play was something different. The fact that you describe my argument as "irrelevant" rather than "wrong" may imply that you agree with me there, so I guess I could've done worse.

Of course the conclusions aren't watertight. But that's irrelevant for the discussion at hand.

It is extremely relevant. Because your argument wasn't watertight, as you call it, or very weak, as I call it, your argument wasn't likely to convince anyone. Because of this, you could make the argument without much risk as scum.

I think "weak" implies that I didn't stick with the argument or was wishy-washy in my commitment to it, so I don't agree with that language. I defended the argument even when ekiM was a bit incredulous in a series of posts. By saying it's not "watertight," I'm pointing out that on Day 1, page 5, there's obviously room for error. I pointed this out because your evidence that BS (read: you) might not be town seemed to be intended to discredit my argument, so I was pointing out that whether I was correct about someone on my first post on Day 1 probably didn't have anything to do with my alignment. (You make this clearer a few points down.)

I don't really care whether you agree with my assessment of BS behaviour.

But once again, this disagreement with your assessment is a very important reason why I believe that you could safely make that argument as scum.

This is literally the same point as the previous one. Why did you list it twice? Did you think it was an extra-good counterpoint, or do they only look like the same point because they're out-of-context?

In order for something to be a valid towntell in my opinion, there has to be a very serious disadvantage for the scum to doing it, and a different option for scum that would be less disadvantageous while still not being suspicious.

Why do you need both of those things? Don't you just need one of the two? Obviously, having both is better, but I don't think that one is useless without the other. Rather, it's that both are useful, and they are additively useful. Given that, my BS business IS a towntell (given that you are town), as you pointed out that my example of a less disadvantageous option was "irrelevant" (i.e. presumably not "wrong").

If, on the other hand, there's a reason you definitely need both for either to matter, then we'll just have to disagree on that issue.

By defending BS, Iec would draw the attention to other players to himself.

But as long as you could make your argument sound convincing enough, they have no strong reasons to believe you are scum. Except perhaps the possibility that you are scum defending a scumbuddy. If you are scum and I am town, that is not necessarily a bad thing for you. The reasons for this belief would be pretty circumstancial, and are unlikely to lead to a lynch unless there is more evidence. If they do lead to a lynch, there is a 50% chance they lead to my lynch, disproving the argument. And even in the very worst scenario that your lynch happens, my lynch would probably be next because of the connection, giving your buddy at least one free pass.

This is a great point that I had not considered. The only defense I can give is that I'm overly self-focused and had erroneously worked out the argument as if I was Survivor Mafia on the scum half of the equation. Good point.

Scum buddying up is a remote possibility from MSh's perspective

Nonsense. I have been arguing that I consider you buddying up a very likely explanation for your behaviour. None of the arguments you have given adress why buddying up specifically isn't a possibility.

I guess the best explanation apart from what I've already said that I could give would be a post FT made on the subject soon after he replaced in. He argued that while he had considered that my behavior might be buddying, he reasoned that other, more pro-town players (namely, Pablo) would be more obvious choices.

I'd also point out that I haven't irresolutely stuck by the hypothetical buddying -- FT rubbed me the wrong way a little after he replaced in with the jokey, minimal posts, and I pointed out as much. He took another dive when he started lurking.

[Iecerint]

You assuming that you can predict other people's perspectives is absurd in a game based around hidden information.

It depends upon what you mean by "predict." If you mean that you can't know for certain, then you're trivially correct. If you mean that you can't make an educated prediction, then I disagree, especially in the context of a Newbie game where there are only a small number of roles and alignments, and we know how many players of each alignment exist. Granted, this would be even more challenging in a custom game where factions and roles in play cannot be predicted reliably.

[Iecerint]

ivan, I'm not sure I understand why you kept your vote on SOG for so long then. If you only thought it was bad play, why didn't you vote for someone who you thought was scum at the end of day 1? And why did you revote at the beginning of day 2?

I kept it because I had no reason to change. Even if I don't find him particularly scumy he was being antitown(PP). It was the next best thing after my random vote.
I kept the vote to day 2 because I still did not have a better vote to make and it moves the game along. I am hapy with the responses I got from SOG and they seem consistent with my last game with him. Leaving the vote also allowed me to see if anyone voted for SOG maybe to start a bandwaggon.
SOG is one of my least suspected mafia.

So basically, you do not suspect SOG of being scum whatsoever, but don't have any other suspicions either? I know you have been rather short on time, but that seems extremely lazy, and not helping the town at all.

In fairness to ivan, he's voting for me. That seems to be a pretty public way to publish your suspicions. I agree with you that I'd like him to weigh in more if possible, though.

[Iecerint]

But what you fail to take into account in this manner of predicting, is that no two people think exactly alike. The same situation provided to different people playing the same role will yield different results. You are trying to predict a perspective based what role a player slot has and not taking into account the actual player who is filling that player slot. A perspective cannot be predicted with any certainty based on role at all because different people play the same role in different ways.

That's true. In principle, we could try to work out that sort of thing by looking at play history, but it's more difficult in a game like this one where so many of us have limited histories. As it is, I still think it's reasonable to make assumptions based on the archetypal town or scum player.

[Iecerint]

Iecerint: Why would I use bad arguments to defend BS?

I never said it was a bad argument; I still don't think it was a bad argument. What I said is that it was not the default argument. It's not a default argument because it uses information specific to this game to support its position.

How about so you can pull out this exact argument later or perhaps because you wanted to buddy with the player, but there weren’t any plausible reasons so you went with whatever was available.

I hope anyone playing along at home can read this and recognize that it is very, very silly.

That looks exactly like what Iecerint is doing just pushing whatever arguments he can come up with against the other biggest suspects to try and get something to resonate with other players.

Obviously. That's the best thing I can hope to do. I know I'm town, and I suspect (hope) that at least one of the players working on my lynch is scum, so the best I can do -- both to save myself and to put attention elsewhere -- is to do the best I can to show town as much. If arguments A-G aren't enough, I'll try H. That said, H is the 7th argument, and it's probably not as salient as the first 6, so I'm certainly starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

If you are ivan or ekiM and haven't weighed-in on the most recent exchanges yet, please do so.

unvote

for the moment

[Iecerint]

Katy, I'm actually glad you said that because I originally had a passage in my last post along the lines of "to prevent scum and/or overeager townies from controlling the discussion, which has degenerated into me repeating old arguments and their repeating old responses, why don't we discuss who everyone thinks is likely scum given my town flip as I now count 4 players on-board with my lynch (ivan, DDD, Michel, SOG)." I deleted it because 1. I figured one of them would claim I was (scummily) trying to draw attention away from myself and 2. I wanted to make sure ivan and ekiM weighed in before I mentioned that.

Michel, could you restate your actual case against me pre-BS discussion (unfortunate acronym)? I know we've had a lengthy discussion about what was originally a question directed specifically at you that I thought I would find persuasive, but it seems like your initial suspicion of me was based only on my trackerSOG tunnelvision and SOG tunnelvision. Is that accurate?

[Iecerint]

ekiM, in your ISO (reading you in isolation. This can be done by selecting "display posts from previous: all posts by ekiM" and pressing go)posts 5-8, you are putting quite a bit of pressure on purple princess. After that, though, you completely drop the subject, focussing almost entirely on Shadeaux/tracker during day 1. Why?

Because I thought Shadeaux/tracker was scum.

Iecerint, roleclaim please.

I know I'm at L-1, but I'd rather wait until I get this request from more players. There's a lot of time until Day 3, and I've seen (read through) a lot of games where mafia leads the town through a series of L-1s to force a large proportion of the town to claim. I will roleclaim if 3 more players request it.

Argument H for Michel -- if I was so set on riding trackerSOG to a 1-2 mislynch on Day 1, how would you explain my approach here (incidentally, I've edited out the bit that answers your prior question about why I'm leaning-town for ekiM, so you may've also missed this post):

Also, since asking DDD to explain PP's Pablo vote in the context where only she is scum, I've realized that a tracker lynch might be more useful than an SOG lynch this round. Here's why:

1: Neither SOG nor tracker is scum (hard for me to believe)
2: Only SOGPP is scum (somewhat lower probability, because no motivation for PP to draw conversation away from Shadeaux)
3: Only Shadetrack is scum (somewhat higher probability; maybe PP-as-newbtown didn't understand how silly Shadeaux had been)
4: Both are scum (higher probability)

So tracker may be a better lynch. On the other hand, I think Pablo's criticism of SOG is pretty solid (and my pet theory that scumtracker is deliberately spelling/playing poorly to feign innocence is so compelling that I almost want to watch more of it; do we have evidence that he always plays this way?). For now, I'll

unvote vote tracker

, which I believe puts SOG back to L-2 and puts tracker at L-2 (the last vote count incorrectly has me voting for both players). Everyone: please let me know if my reasoning for "only SOGPP is scum is improbable" is not convincing for some reason.

I switched from SOG to tracker because, based on a misread of an early-game post, I thought that towntracker would (largely) clear SOG. DDD points out my misread in a subsequent post, and I admit said misread. As a result of said misread, I recognized that towntracker does not actually clear SOG.

Why would I bother to make the above argument if I were intending to "mislynch" tracker and SOG back-to-back? (Something other than that I made this theory knowing for certain that someone would take issue with it to clear my way to attack SOG Day 2, please, especially when he was already wide-open. Also, there's no day talk, so it's improbable that I'd somehow planned for scumbuddyDDD to shoot down a fake hypothesis for said purpose.)

[Iecerint]

I will roleclaim if 3 more players request it.

Why would you not consider the votes that are already on you as requests for a claim? You seem to be basically saying you won't claim unless everyone in the game requests you to, unless for some reason you think someone would vote to lynch you but not want you to claim at this point. I can't see any reason why someone would do that.

If I really thought conversation was pretty much closed, I'd count them as requests for a claim and claim. As it stands, there's plenty of time until the deadline, I just came up with an Argument H, and ekiM and ivan haven't weighed-in on the circumstances yet. (ivan has done it implicitly by voting me, but his attitude toward me in his actual posts seems relatively ambivalent.) Town players should want to minimize total claims, so my claiming reduces the expected benefit (from a third-party perspective) of developing an alternate wagon. So I don't want to claim until my lynch is otherwise mostly inevitable. Throw in the fact that ekiM, one of the players I'd prior mentioned hadn't really weighed-in yet, is the one requesting the claim, and I definitely want to seek explicit consensus before claiming.

I know you've said that you're not convinced I'm scum, but you also mentioned that you'd find explanations of my behavior more persuasive than instances of my behavior (I'm paraphrasing). What behavior on my part, specifically, do you think requires explanation? I ask because Michel's original case against me, before I apparently did scum a huge service by trying to use an example of my play to convince him, was focused mainly on hypothetical trackerSOG tunnel-vision.

[Iecerint]

It was just asking for three more people to request it seemed weird, because it seemed like a stall, by placing such a weird arbitrary line for claiming when you already have three votes on you.

3 more people would put it at 4 out of 7, or a majority. I figured that was as good an arbitrary line as any.

Also, to be honest, I was expecting a different reason from you as to why you made this request.

Pray tell? Or is it better that you wait?

[Iecerint]

If scum does not have a different option that's less disadvantageous, they have no choice but taking the action. Because of this, the fact that they took the action does not mean they can't be scum.

If scum have a different option that's less disadvantegeous, but there's no serious disadvantage to taking the original action, they have a choice which action to take. One is better for them, but they can viably take either action. Because of this, the fact that they took the action does not mean they can't be scum.

Only when an action is seriously disadvantegeous to them, and they have a better option, it could be concluded that they won't take that action, meaning that action is a towntell. And even in that case, there is some amount of WIFOM in play.

It still sounds to me like this is a difference of degree rather than a categorical difference. But we can agree to disagree there.

After searching, the post in question is #246, not #205. I did not consider your ekiM explanation in that post because you backed up on it in post #258.

My mistake here. I quoted post 205 in post 246 with the "Post 205" text in the quote-line, which confused me.

Nowhere in the quoted section do I read that you believe that tracker town implies SOG town. I only read that you consider tracker to be more likely scum, because you believe tracker scum SOG town is more likely then tracker town SOG scum. Can you please back up your statement with a more accurate quote?

My argument wasn't "If tracktown, then SOGtown," but "If tracktown, something sketchy about SOG isn't sketchy anymore (reduced probability of SOGscum)." It's because I thought PP's vote on Pablo was only scummy if it was in response to his vote on scumbuddyShadeaux. DDD pointed out that PP may not've even noticed the reason for Pablo's vote, since she didn't quote the immediately-preceding Pablo post; given that, information about tracker's alignment doesn't change (not as much, at least) how SOG's alignment should be interpreted.

Here's an exchange between DDD and I that makes it clear that this is the (mis)information I had based that theory on (context: in the innermost quote, I attack DDD for finding only PP scummy as, from my view, PP's action is only significantly scummy if she is scumbuddies with Shadeaux, which requires that Shadeaux also be scum; I'd already asked him about this question before, much in the same way that I asked Michel about the BS defense, because I thought I'd caught him promoting an unusual perspective):

That said, now that things have been cleared up, I would appreciate your thoughts on the question -- that is, the remote possibility you appeared to have prior ascribed to (that Shadeaux was not scummy, but PP was) in light of PP's vote for Pablo following his vote for Shadeaux (page 3). It's apparent from your discussion of tracker that you've rethought your position somewhat -- Shadeaux = tracker, etc. -- but I'd still like to hear what had prior motivated it. That eventuality (PP-onry) is so remote to me that I don't think your having ascribed to it is scummy, really; rather, your having ascribed to it leads me to believe that I have missed something.

I viewed them as unrelated events at the time and still don't see this hard and fast connection you're trying to draw. PP's vote there seems to be completely devoid of recent context (eg the Jarmo wagon and Shadeux's L-1 vote) which suggests to me that she didn't take into account any of the recent activity.

Thanks for this! Looking back, I think this may be correct, after all. For whatever reason, I'd thought that PP's Pablo quote was from the post where he'd just voted for Shadeaux. That's why I thought there was a connection, and that's why I thought PP was so scummy. (Did someone post something to this effect somewhere from page 3 to page 6? Or did I totally make it up?) Were we just wailing on PP because she freaked out when we questioned her?

I think Argument H (more clearly contextualized here and listed in the prior post) fits your definition of a towntell. First, there was a less disadvantageous thing for scum-me to do in this circumstance: I could have failed to contribute this information, and have been more free to push a (hypothetical) SOG mislynch on Day 2. Second, the option I

did

choose was seriously disadvantageous for scum-me because it would have largely prevented me from attacking the most suspicious remaining (hypothetical) town player on Day 2 had DDD not happened to (correctly) debunk my argument. (The lack of scumdaytalk makes it unlikely that scumDDD and scumIec had that planned out.)

Is that any clearer?

Michel, could you restate your actual case against me?

1. Your tunnelvision, 2. your pushing either tracker or SOG must be scum, 3. and the way you immediately voted SOG day 2 were the main reasons, yes.

I think Argument H accounts for 2. because it shows that, if scum-me was going for a double mislynch based on poor town play, I probably wouldn't have shot myself in the foot like that (except as part of some really improbable, unnecessary gambit). I reasoned that towntracker would greatly reduce the scumminess of PP's actions, and therefore reduce need for suspicion of SOG.

I don't buy the premise of 1 at all (assuming you're referring to SOGtracker tunnelvision) because of the pressure I've tried to put on DDD this whole game. 3 I just don't find very scummy, as I think SOG was the obvious vote based on Day 1 events and PM's death did nothing to change that.

There's also your tendency to use (what I consider to be) poor logic (examples of this include following PM after he has been killed and the one out of tracker/SOG must be scum argument).

I can't do much about your perspective here, but I can try to restate why I think those were OK ideas. I think it's OK not to be too cautious about following PM's views because it's likely he was killed for his townishness rather than his views. Could have been both, but it's more remote; I've made this argument elsewhere. I think it was OK to at least tentatively assume that at least one of tracker and SOG were town, too. For me, it was because their play (and their replacements') was very strange, and it eventually becomes parsimonious to explain strange behavior. Hell, Katy made pretty much the same argument, though hers was based on one of the pressure-replacements Katy-tracker-SOG being scum.

Pray tell? Or is it better that you wait?

I strongly dislike this question.

Why? I specifically say that she can wait to say anything if it's more pro-town to do so. Just some context would be nice, even -- like "your explanation is less suspect than I thought it would be" or "your explanation is more suspect than I thought it would be." In these cases, it would seem reasonable to give the town that information, as it might help clear/damn me.

[Iecerint]

As it stands, there's plenty of time until the deadline, I just came up with an Argument H, and ekiM and ivan haven't weighed-in on the circumstances yet.

Argument H begins "If I was set on...". This is strawmanning and/or begging the question. It's not necessary for you to have planned the whole time to lynch tracker then SOG for it to be scummy for you to later argue that we should lynch SOG largely because he was the second biggest wagon yesterday and tracker flipped town.

I don't follow this; maybe you misunderstood/I was unclear about Argument H? If the recent post doesn't clarify/change matters, please clarify the above for me.

Moreover, this post you cited doesn't even seem to suggest at all strongly that towntrackerflip clears SOG.

Well Christ, I'm not an oracle. Claiming that things are any more sure than they are would be inaccurate.

365: Ice 'It seems like you've played with ekiM before. Does he always use ellipses in his posts as he's been doing?' --- what?

Like 4 times up til now that I've noticed you've kind of hinted that something someone has done was scummy without really explaining it, and then you add an ellipsis afterwards. I can recall offhand that you did this in response to BS-defense (you were implying, I think, that I was scum-protecting-scum, but you were vague) and when I attacked penguana for making shit up (you were implying, tautologically, that I could be correct or not, but you were again vague). I think you'd also done it again at someone just before I asked ivan about it. If you always do it, then it's just a stylistic thing, but if you don't and it's some kind of tool for letting people take what they will out of your posts, then it could be a scumtell based on meta. So I've asked ivan about his prior experience with you, as he has it and I don't.

• Selectively citing dead players as support.
  
• Extensive theoretical discussion and weak scumhunting.
  
• False dichotomy between tracker and SOG.
  
• Pushing on SOG based on little.

1. What, you think it'd be pro-town to follow tracker's intuitions to you and DDD (and me as the "neutraler" read)? I think Pablo seemed somewhat more competent than tracker, and I don't think I'm alone in that opinion.
2. Most of my "theoretical discussion" has been an attack on DDD's theoretical discussion, which is as reasonable a form of scumhunting as any, and I didn't even wait for Michel to do it for me.
3. I didn't make a dichotomy; I listed all 4 possible conditions and assigned subjective probabilities to each. Reread Argument H.
4. I've listed over and over and over my reasons for suspecting SOG. You are choosing to ignore/disregard them.

[Iecerint]

Add me to the list of players who want you to claim, that makes three. Your stalling is noted.

You'd have said I was overeager to claim if I had. Also: OK.

[Iecerint]

It seemed to me that she did not say more on purpose. If she had wanted to give you more information, she probably would have done so. On the other hand, I don't see how you as town would benefit from knowing what Katy was expecting to hear. After all, you are going to tell the truth anyway.

Half of it was that I thought she might be setting-up the flexibility to contextualize her comment however she chose on Day 3.

Your question was asking Katy for information that will help you figure out what you should do to make her believe you. It felt like you were trying to figure out which lie is most likely to work. Basically, it felt scummy.

Actually, this was the other half of it, with the obvious exceptions that 1. I was trying to find out which

truth

was most likely to work, and 2. I don't believe it's terribly scummy. After all, Argument H was based largely around your own requirements for a towntell, and I couldn't have delivered it to you if you hadn't told me them. I've been pretty active this game, so I have a lot of material to draw from (and I'm town, so I know I can give a town explanation for all of it).

If you believed that PP was scummy solely because she defended Shadeaux by attacking PM, I admit the section you quoted would be a towntell, Icerint.

I definitely thought (up until DDD corrected me) that the common interpretation was that PP had voted for Pablo because of his vote for Shadeaux, and I thought that was the basis for the subsequent wagon. However, I should point out that her reaction to pressure (victim card) and subsequent ragequit didn't sit too well with me either, so I don't know if your "solely" qualifier will be satisfied.

[Iecerint]

OK, I've just read through all of my posts up through where DDD corrected me and have compiled all my allusions to PP's actions. 6 of the 7 posts contain what I believe to be evidence that I interpreted PP's Pablo vote to have been based on his vote for Shadeaux. If you look at my posts in isolation, here's their numbers and brief context:

Post 1 -- My BS defense
Post 7 -- My penguana attack
Post 35 -- I first ask DDD to explain why he would only suspect PP
Post 38 -- Continuing conversation
Post 39 -- Continuing conversation
Post 41 -- Enlightenment via DDD

I've edited them down a lot so that this isn't totally gruesome to read, so please refer to the context above.

princess's apparent scumminess in thereafter attacking Pablo is similarly slightly diluted (IMO). maybe she was just getting the same anti-Jarmo vibes that I was getting (prior to seeing my PM, etc.) That said, L-1 on the first wagon seemed awfully quick.

My interpretation of her behavior only makes sense if I assumed that PP's vote was based on Pablo's attack on Shadeaux, as Shadeaux had just L-1'd Jarmo.

Her [PP's] vote wasn't random at all (that'd be OK on Day 1!) -- she voted for the guy [Pablo] who voted for Shadeaux after his quite-sketchy move.

Here I state it explicitly. Probably the best evidence in my posting record. I should add that I don't believe anyone corrected me on this point following either of these first two posts, but that could be because the focus of these posts was BS and penguana, respectively.

[@ DDD] That said, if PP was scum and Shadeaux wasn't, I'm not sure why PP would have tried to divert attention away from him. Wouldn't she be thrilled that a town player had done something so sketchy and tried to ride it to a blameless mislynch? How would you explain her behavior in that scenario?

If PP's vote had nothing to do with Pablo's vote, there'd've really been nothing to explain. So I must have been assuming the connection.

Also, since asking DDD to explain PP's Pablo vote in the context where only she is scum, I've realized that a tracker lynch might be more useful than an SOG lynch this round. Here's why:

1: Neither SOG nor tracker is scum (hard for me to believe)
2: Only SOGPP is scum (somewhat lower probability, because no motivation for PP to draw conversation away from Shadeaux)
3: Only Shadetrack is scum (somewhat higher probability;

maybe PP-as-newbtown didn't understand how silly Shadeaux had been

)
4: Both are scum (higher probability)

So tracker may be a better lynch. On the other hand, I think Pablo's criticism of SOG is pretty solid (and my pet theory that scumtracker is deliberately spelling/playing poorly to feign innocence is so compelling that I almost want to watch more of it; do we have evidence that he always plays this way?). For now, I'll

unvote vote tracker

, which I believe puts SOG back to L-2 and puts tracker at L-2 (the last vote count incorrectly has me voting for both players). Everyone: please let me know if my reasoning for "only SOGPP is scum is improbable" is not convincing for some reason.

I've already re-posted this, but I'm including in for completion. Note the bolded section, which again doesn't make sense unless I interpreted PP's vote as a response to Pablo's.

I just read through pages 8-10 a third time and am leaning back toward an SOG vote rather than a tracker vote in spite of the only-PP-is-scum case seeming near-impossible to me (maybe because geniustrackerscum is attacking an implausibly well-intentioned DDD to appeal to my noted-vulnerable emotions). I'm not changing my vote back because I've convinced myself that only-PP-is-scum isn't plausible, but I'm probably more persuadable than I should rationally be.

Kind of a miscellaneous post, but I mention the PP business, so I'm including it for completeness. No new hard evidence of my perspective.

That said, now that things have been cleared up, I would appreciate your [DDD's] thoughts on the question -- that is, the remote possibility you appeared to have prior ascribed to (that Shadeaux was not scummy, but PP was) in light of PP's vote for Pablo following his vote for Shadeaux (page 3). It's apparent from your discussion of tracker that you've rethought your position somewhat -- Shadeaux = tracker, etc. -- but I'd still like to hear what had prior motivated it. That eventuality (PP-onry) is so remote to me that I don't think your having ascribed to it is scummy, really; rather, your having ascribed to it leads me to believe that I have missed something.

You've seen this in the form of a quote already, but it's here for completeness.

Thanks for this! Looking back, I think this may be correct, after all. For whatever reason, I'd thought that PP's Pablo quote was from the post where he'd just voted for Shadeaux. That's why I thought there was a connection, and that's why I thought PP was so scummy. (Did someone post something to this effect somewhere from page 3 to page 6? Or did I totally make it up?) Were we just wailing on PP because she freaked out when we questioned her?

And that's the end of the saga. I'd still encourage Michel/whoever else wants to to do their own analysis to do so, but hopefully this is helpful as far as Argument H is concerned.

[Iecerint]

Iecerint: Why would I use bad arguments to defend BS?

I never said it was a bad argument; I still don't think it was a bad argument. What I said is that it was not the default argument. It's not a default argument because it uses information specific to this game to support its position.

See, you answered your own question. Why did you use such a "complicated" argument? Because you thought it was a good one and if you had a better one you would've used it. And since both scum and town have a vested interest in presenting their best arguments, it's a nulltell and not a towntell as you've tried to suggest.

In my view, Iecscum has little motive to go to so much trouble, except for to give himself the opportunity to point out as much later (as you have argued, but I find that possibility remote), or to buddy-up with BS (as Michel has argued, perhaps because that's the best way to explain Iecscum from townMichel's perspective). I can see where Michel's coming from, but I think Iecscum would've preferred to buddy less controversial players (as FT pointed out). I also think he's underestimating how much unwanted attention going out on a limb like that can bring, which explains why I think scum would be better off sticking to the default way of handling that situation (e.g. what you and ekiM did -- which is not to imply that you were scummy to do so).

But this is just repeating old arguments, and I think Michel'd rather have this issue closed.

That looks exactly like what Iecerint is doing just pushing whatever arguments he can come up with against the other biggest suspects to try and get something to resonate with other players.

Obviously. That's the best thing I can hope to do. I know I'm town, and I suspect (hope) that at least one of the players working on my lynch is scum, so the best I can do -- both to save myself and to put attention elsewhere -- is to do the best I can to show town as much. If arguments A-G aren't enough, I'll try H. That said, H is the 7th argument, and it's probably not as salient as the first 6, so I'm certainly starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

See, a pro-town would be concerned about the truth and I'd presume that you'd have found that somewhere in arguments A-G. But instead you're rolling from A to B to all the way down the line just trying to find "not me" not trying to find the truth.

I gave my perception of things in my lynch order a long time ago. (To summarize that order, with some added explanation -- "SOG is the best lynch due to XYZ (review old posts). If he is scum, DDD is his likely scumbuddy because it makes his statistics look more ill-intentioned. Otherwise, Michel may be a good alternate place to start looking as his case against me is both rigorous and minimal." Of course, things've happened since then, but that's an example of such a post I've made in the past.)

I've focused on myself because Michel and I have had a disagreement (disingenuous or otherwise) about my BS defense. (Really unfortunate acronym.) I still think it was a good exercise because I've learned that he misread that defense originally (even if he still disagrees with my analysis of it), and he apparently finds Argument H compelling enough to read through the thread to make sure I'm not making shit up. I should add that his behavior appears pro-town to me as scumMichel could probably have realistically denied all my arguments via ICfiat and turned to pretty much the whole town implying that they found his questions directed at me convincing.

I'm more than a little annoyed at the stalling. The policy I work off of is that you don't claim just because you're at L-1. But when you're at L-1 and someone off your wagon expresses either intent to hammer or a desire for a claim then you do so. Considering you're Michel's top suspect and ekim has asked for a claim then you should claim.

I don't want to claim before Michel finishes his analysis, but as 4 players have now asked me to claim (chronologically -- ekiM, Katy, SOG, DDD) and Michel posted long enough ago that DDD surely knows that Michel's analysis is forthcoming, I really can't stall anymore. I'm vanilla town.

I find it more than a little weird that you would ask me to claim given Michel's forthcoming analysis. The only reason I can think of is that you think that Michel is ill-intentioned, but you list that my being Michel's "top suspect" is what makes you want me to claim, so it seems like you trust him. Not to mention that Michel specified that he does not yet support my claim.

[Iecerint]

if you were town, perhaps you wanted people to go on record before you claimed as asking for your claim. A townsperson might want their claim to yield as much information as possible and forcing a certain number of people to come out and explicitly ask for your claim even if they weren't voting might yield some info.

That too.

I would love if the people who are actually voting for Iecerint would give me a summary of their cases against him. All of this "Argument H" and "Shadetrack vs. PPSOG" is bogging me down and if I can get some nutshells then I can look again at relevant posts in context and try to think about it for myself.

I know this isn't directed at me, but I can probably nutshell Argument H for you:

1. Scum that want to double mislynch players X and Y won't argue that lynching X will reduce Y's action's scumminess.
2. Iec did that.
3. Therefore, he was not scum that wanted to double mislynch players X and Y."

The rest is mostly just evidence that I did as much, and explanations for why in spite of doing that I still think SOG is a good lynch. The argument is topical because Michel's contextualization of my early vote against SOG was that Iecscum wanted to double mislynch tracker-SOG, and most of his original case against me was based on that read of my SOG vote.

Re: Shadetrack et al, I just use the hybrid names to remind players of who all the replacements are.

Also would love Iecerint to make a case for someone else. Part of what's bothering me is the fact that he's taken his vote off of Semioldguy and has been defending himself, but I haven't seen a strong case for anyone else.

I unvoted SOG because I thought I had come under tight-enough scrutiny that players might feel uncomfortable supporting me against him. So I didn't think my lone vote was doing any good. He's still among my top scumsuspects for reasons I've already stated. I guess I could add the recent barrage of lightweight attacks on my last set of posts to that.

DDD's my other top scum, as you've probably noticed. I don't like that most of the positions he's taken this game have only been taken after someone else had taken them first (his post against me at the start of Day 2 is an exception to this rule), I don't like his questionable use of statistics on Day 1 (though the mith thread he finally posted does suggest they're standard on these forums), and I don't like the context surrounding his being the 4th player to request my claim (I can't explain away this one yet). As you can see, there's been a lot of benefit-of-the-doubting I've put his way through the game. Moreover, during the recent scrutiny surrounding me, whereas Michel's questions and observations seem (to me) to be aimed at finding actual answers, and his subsequent questions have actually reflected my answers, DDD just lists increasingly lazy "scum" interpretations for my behavior; his notion that I would call BS pro-town (rather than call it a null-tell) just to later point out that scum wouldn't do that takes the cake (Michel's explanation for Iecscum's behavior was way more reasonable).

For the most part, these are all arguments I've already made, so I doubt they'll convince you if they haven't already. I'm quite puzzled that no one else seems to find DDD scummy, particularly. Everyone else, as far as I can remember, has listed him as "neutral," and he's ivan's favorite player.

Iecerint, it makes me wonder if you are waiting for someone else to "rescue" you.

I've been as active as can be trying to provide the town with as much evidence as I can of my townhood. I mean, sure, at least 1 of the 4 people implicitly supporting my lynch will have to be convinced if I'm to avoid it ("rescuing" after a sense). And now that DDD's prompted my claim, I think a rescue from Michel (in the form of believing Argument H) is realistically about all that can save me. But I've been trying my best.

Given that you are at L-1, if you are scum, and you were to point the finger at someone and we lynched you and you flipped scum, then you we would be able to pick that person as likely town and narrow our inquiry in the next day. On the other hand, if someone else were to bring up an alternate lynch candidate and you supported it, we would have to consider whether they were doing it innocently or were your scum buddy helping you, leading us into a WIFOM about that tomorrow.

Consider my finger pointed at SOG and DDD, which is where it's been all day (and yesterday, when it wasn't pointed at Shadetrack). Refer above for refreshers as to why, but they're mostly old arguments.

[Iecerint]

You think that there are actions that scum are not likely to do. This is just flat out wrong.

I would bet you money that it is not wrong at all for reasons I have already stated. To summarize some of what I've already said elsewhere:

1. Scum have a more stressful role than townies, so they're more likely to screw up. This explains why I think poor play is more likely to be scummy than not.
2. While it's true that scum can make really silly anti-scum gambits to later "confirm" that they are town (DDD has mentioned this and I have acknowledged his mention), it quickly becomes improbable as the number as actions that must be explained this way increases.
3. Specific to my Argument H, DDD would almost have to be in on it for it to have been malicious on my part. The alternative is that I feigned misinterpreting PP's vote the entire game, was lucky enough to have no one correct me until I planned to use that fact, and then got DDD to correct me JUST as I had had the opportunity (which I could have made pages earlier) to post my reasons for tracker > SOG to free me up for suspecting you Day 2. If you don't think that is remote, I don't know what to say to you, other than that I hope you're not town.

Moreover, I think (and have stated) that a great scum tactic would be tell the town to ignore all tells, as they can trivially all be explained away. Doing as much leads to random lynches and a scum win on average, unless town has power roles to save the day. Incidentally, you and DDD have done this, and I think it's scummy.

Another thing: You can't look for scum only on the people who get one your wagon.

I've read a lot of 2 scum games where players base lynches after a mislynch on the assumption that one player on the wagon was scum and one wasn't, so I'm familiar with this argument. However, I think DDD fits the bill as the "cautious" (off the wagon) scum in that paradigm. He never does anything until the town has already come to general consensus. Look at what happened yesterday -- he posted a big trackerscum post at the 11th hour, and now he's acting like he should have trusted his "instincts." Barring his initial post against me today and then some back-and-forth with me, he's done the same thing today, regardless of which way his vote lies. So even though my two top suspects are on my wagon, I think they still match the eagerscum/cautiousscum dichotomy that that argument is based on.

[Iecerint]

And this was exactly why I disliked that you asked that question. If this was one of the reasons why you wanted more people to ask for your claim, you should have said so when Katy asked why you wanted more people to ask for your claim. Because you waited till Katy mentioned it, we can't know for sure if this was one of your original reasons.

I wouldn't have listed this reason even if it had been the only one, because I think scum would have been more careful about how they rationalized requests for my claim.

---

I unvoted SOG because I thought I had come under tight-enough scrutiny that players might feel uncomfortable supporting me against him. So I didn't think my lone vote was doing any good. He's still among my top scumsuspects for reasons I've already stated. I guess I could add the recent barrage of lightweight attacks on my last set of posts to that.

I believe that is a very bad tactic, regardless of alignement. People are extremely unlikely to believe you if you say "Look, I'm pro-town because of A, B and C!" The mere fact that you mentioned them makes them less believable, because of the reasons SOG laid out in his post #436. If you insist on mentioning them, only point them out, and possibly explain them. Don't argue about them when someone disagrees.

It seemed that some of the "disagreement" was based on people misunderstanding (genuinely or otherwise) the argument in question. I hoped that by clarifying the argument in question, town players would accept and understand them, voice as much, and scum might either switch to bad logic or find another target. This has actually happened twice. During BS defense, a series of posts went like this:

Iec: ABC
SOG: AB Not true because D
Iec: Clarification: ABC
SOG: U SUCK

The shift in SOG's argument-debunking strategy when he realized I wouldn't let him distort the argument looked plenty scummy to me.

There was also the matter of my re-explaining Argument H leading you to go from "this makes no sense" to "maybe this is a towntell if you aren't desperately making shit up."

A much better way to defend yourself would be to say "Look, I'm not very scummy. The things you are suspicious of are easily explained because of A, B and C. Just take a look at player X! He is far more suspicious then I am, because of D, E and F. He should be lynched today!

The thing is, I HAVE done those things. I've just ALSO done the other stuff. Maybe the moral of the story is that I should lurk moar.

[Iecerint]

Michel

So basically, you do not suspect SOG of being scum whatsoever, but don't have any other suspicions either? I know you have been rather short on time, but that seems extremely lazy, and not helping the town at all.

What part of my oppinion of SOG seems lazy? I do have suspicion of the person I am currently voting for. Iecerint. I never said I had no suspicions

I'll second that I thought your bizarre vote on SOG yesterday (because you couldn't answer DDD's questions about it) were very strange. Probably more lazy than scummy, though.

Also, it would be nice if you could follow Katy's advice and point out in more detail what about me you think is scummy. As it is, everyone except Michel has only disagreed with my personal defenses, which aren't related to his criticisms of my play except inasmuch as they are both (in my view) indicators of alignment.

I know this isn't directed at me, but I can probably nutshell Argument H for you:

1. Scum that want to double mislynch players X and Y won't argue that lynching X will reduce Y's action's scumminess.
2. Iec did that.
3. Therefore, he was not scum that wanted to double mislynch players X and Y."

I disagree with your oppinion.

And please claim. If our claim were to change our oppinion we would need time before the deadline to make a decision.

I've already claimed. You should try reading my posts. Then you'll probably be better prepared to make judgments about my nutshell'd "opinions."

[Iecerint]

1. Scum have a more stressful role than townies, so they're more likely to screw up. This explains why I think poor play is more likely to be scummy than not.

In a normal game, you might be right. In a newbie game, however, I disagree with that analysis. New players are far more likely to play poorly then experienced players, to the point that the tell becomes completely unreliable for them.

Good point. I wish either of them had framed it this way.

Moreover, I think (and have stated) that a great scum tactic would be tell the town to ignore all tells, as they can trivially all be explained away. Doing as much leads to random lynches and a scum win on average, unless town has power roles to save the day. Incidentally, you and DDD have done this, and I think it's scummy.

I strongly disagree with this assesment of what SOG and DDD have been arguing. As far as I can see, all they have been arguing is that there is a large element of WIFOM in the towntells on you that you mentioned.

I'm also taking into account the ramifications of their statements. SOG's gone so far as to say that all towntells are nulltells because scum could do them to look town. While vacuously accurate, the practical application of such a perspective is to ignore towntells, which leads to random lynches. Either he doesn't really believe what he's saying, or he wants random lynches. It's possible that he has some kind of WIFOM-proof definition of a scumtell that would save him, but he hasn't stated it.

I think DDD has a pattern (within this game) of pushing that kind of argument both as theory (his Day 1 statistics, which assume random lynches) and as practice (pointing out vaguely that scum could do what I did to look town). Either he doesn't really believe what he's saying, or he wants random lynches. If he believes in any form of towntell or scumtell that is WIFOM-proof, he hasn't stated it.

The closest thing to a scumtell either of them has mentioned is poor play, which they have elsewhere characterized as a null tell (always in the context of disagreeing with me ).

I suspect their response to this (I'll list it just so we can skip some tedious back-and-forth) will be to (hypocritically) point out that all tells contain a certain amount of WIFOM, and that my request for WIFOM-proof tells from them is therefore disingenuous. I would then refer them to my personal defenses, which, while vacuously not WIFOM-proof, are in my view as much as one can hope for short of already having caught one scum.

Terminology question: when using WIFOM as a verb, does it mean "to make an argument that may be debunked via WIFOM-type reasoning" or does it mean "to (lazily and vaguely) debunk an argument by pointing out that it can be so debunked"? I'd been assuming the latter, but it looks like I have it backward. Do people use it nonstandardly?

And this was exactly why I disliked that you asked that question. If this was one of the reasons why you wanted more people to ask for your claim, you should have said so when Katy asked why you wanted more people to ask for your claim. Because you waited till Katy mentioned it, we can't know for sure if this was one of your original reasons.

I wouldn't have listed this reason even if it had been the only one, because I think scum would have been more careful about how they rationalized requests for my claim.

In that case, you shouldn't have asked Katy to clarify, because you risked her putting that reason in the open.

I asked for people to publicly support my claim for various reasons (listed elsewhere). I asked Katy to clarify her statement (while specifying not to clarify if it was anti-town to do so) because I thought she could later construe it however she chose. I agree that Katy could conceivably have let out sensitive information, but I thought she had the good sense not to mention it if it was anti-town. Ultimately, she didn't mention it until we already had 4 people on record, so I think I was correct.

Your arguing with me on the BS defense did not feel like you arguing against me misunderstanding, at least not after I had admitted that I missed you had been arguing he was town rather then neutral. After that point, it felt to me like all you did was refusing I could possibly disagree with you.

Yep, you're totally correct there. In the post you've quoted, I was defending my initial clarification of the BS defense. I agree that, in hindsight, I should probably have let it sit after it was clear that my argument was clear enough for you to understand it. I kept at it because I had convinced myself (excitedly) that the anecdote would be convincing to a player who knew townBS's alignment. I guess I was wrong.

But that was not the point I'm trying to make. I'm trying to tell you that the fact that you bring them up in the first place makes you look suspicious, as it seems that you are trying to prove you're town, rather then trying to find scum.

Understood. Fail on my part. Somehow I suspect that SOG et al would have criticized me for trying to direct the attention away from myself in that case, though.

[Iecerint]

The fact that you think they are town tells means that you could do the same thing as scum, since you'd be aware that it helped to make you look town. As soon as you call your own actions a town tell, it is no longer a town tell; it becomes a null tell.

You're missing that Michel had just replaced it. It was not at all unreasonable that he would have missed something important from prior to his having replaced in. Therefore, I think what I did was OK. I'm sympathetic to the substance of your second sentence, but dislike that it leaves me to hope that other players are paying attention specifically to my play.

Scum tells are how we should be hunting.

Town tells can be easily explained as "Scum can do that to because thet can help them achieve their win condition." Scum tells can't be explained as town being just as likely to want to do them.

I think this is the closest thing you've offered to a scumtell definition, so let's go with that.

What you have been doing is saying that your actions are likely town before you give anyone else a chance to respond or think about your responses. This is a slight scum tell because it makes it look like you are

trying to appear town

. Town doesn't need to TRY to appear town because town players ARE town and town's play should support that fact without asserting it to everyone else. Scum have to try to appear town, because otherwise they look like scum and get lynched and lose.

So maybe I'm "trying to be town" because I'm a town player under scrutiny trying to defend himself, especially in the context of the main questioner being a recent replacement? Ergo, this can be explained as town being just as likely to want to do it. So it isn't a scumtell, at least not by your implicit definition.

You could counter that scum is subjectively more likely on average to want to do this, but at that level your "scumtell" example is no different from my "towntell" defenses.

As it is, everyone except Michel has only disagreed with my personal defenses, which aren't related to his criticisms of my play except inasmuch as they are both (in my view) indicators of alignment.

This is also wrong as I disagree with much more.

Then what's stopping you from prattling on about it, Mr. Scumhunter?

4 posts are on the way.

[Iecerint]

SOG's gone so far as to say that all towntells are nulltells because scum could do them to look town. While vacuously accurate, the practical application of such a perspective is to ignore towntells, which leads to random lynches.

Please explain how ignoring town tells leads to random lynches when we are still using scum tells to determine who is to be lynched. This is a huge leap to make that ignoring town tells leads to random lynches. We aren't looking for town. We are looking for scum.

You'll notice that I go on IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH to answer your question by stating that you *may* have a yet-to-be-offered WIFOM-proof scumtell definition that would solve the problem. On the other hand, if your scumtells are just as vulnerable to WIFOM as my defense, your scumtells cease to be scumtells, become nulltells, and thus should be ignored by the spirit of your argument.

It is very suspect that you would miss this when it was provided in the very same paragraph you quoted. Either your reading is very cursory, or you are intentionally distorting what I said.

The closest thing to a scumtell either of them has mentioned is poor play, which they have elsewhere characterized as a null tell (always in the context of disagreeing with me ).

My scum tells I have brought up against you do not consist of poor play as reasoning for the scum tell. I don't have to twist them or anything. I'll go find what I have said and you can explain to me from the direct quote how my scum tell on you is only poor play.[/quote]

[Iecerint]

EBWOP: Quote fail. Just ignore the second quote; I thought I'd deleted it. Happy to hear what he comes up with, though.

[Iecerint]

Town does not benefit by doing things that help the scum.

That's true, but it has nothing to do with what your argument as I understand it. Town doesn't know who scum is, so they could simply be wrong (as DDD has pointed out); ergo, this only practically applies in some bizarre circumstance where a player defends an outed scum. I think this is craplogic.

Moving onto your "scumtells" on me -- I'll show how they're not WIFOM-proof by demonstrating that townIec benefits (or thought he would benefit) from doing them (I'll try to take Katy and Michel's criticisms into account):

You leave a bit of wishy-washiness and a back door to disconnect you from most of you suspicions if need be; using a lot of wishy-washy and non-committal language. A lot of your suspicions are accompanied with an explanation against those suspicions.

Regarding the second sentence -- why aren't any of the other players who post arguments of the form "It could be X, or it could be Y" considered to be scummy. Namely, I've noticed that ekiM and Michel do this from time to time, but I don't believe you've made this criticism of them. It sounds like you're only applying this where you want it to apply. I think town benefits from hearing alternate explanations because it makes one's conclusions more transparent -- whether you list them or not, they're there.

I don't think my language itself is wishy-washy, so I'm going to assume that that part of the quote is just another allusion to how I tend to frame my arguments, especially in my earlier posts.

That was an argument originally borrowed from ekiM, if I remember correctly?

I also find it suspicious that iecerint doesn't vote for me until he can follow someone else in doing so, especially since in the same post (Post 222) he says that he thinks tracker is scum yet removes his vote from him.

If I can recall, I voted for you to put you back at L-2; tracker was L-1 and you were L-3. The result was that both you and tracker were at L-2. This just reflected genuine ambivalence (but not indifference) with regard to which of you was scum.

Because you have been twisting what others have said into an interpretation that benefits your own desires rather than its actual meaning, which is not pro-town. My point is that you are saying things that are clearly not true, but stating them as if they were fact.

It'd be easier for me to explain this if you'd actually post evidence of it happening. I think you posted this after DDD made a similar accusation? If so, reread the start of that Day 1 discussion. You'll notice that I ask for clarificataion from DDD before casting doubt on his statistical methods. That wasn't me "twist"ing anything; it was me first responsibly confirming that I understood DDD's argument, and then attacking it. I don't think even DDD would claim that I was "twisting" his statistics (but I do think he'd probably still maintain that I was wrong on the issue, which I continue to contest).

Here you are comparing liking/disliking to agreement/disagreement; while previously I was comparing liking/disliking to scummy/non-scummy. This has just been you twisting something else to your own liking (claiming you are doing the same thing I did, "pulling a bit of an SOG," but you aren't doing the same thing I did).

As I have made clear since then (and as I think (hope) was clear to everyone watching at home), the point was that I was mocking how you expected us to automatically differentiate commonly-synonymous terms. You

can

fairly call this one a "twist," but I think it was pro-town because I was calling attention back to your dislike/scummy distinction at a time when people'd given you what I saw as too much of the benefit of the doubt.

Iecerint's Post 379 is extremely scummy.

I'm comparing differentiating liking/agreeing to differentiating disliking/scummy. The point was that it's not very intuitive. It was topical because 1) you had similarly recently asked us to differentiate concepts which are not always differentiated in-game and 2) you had been arguing about my use of the word "like." It was mostly a joke.

(a) This is backtracking. (b) My point was it was not the same thing, meaning that if your point was that it wasn't intuitive, then that point failed because I noticed and pointed out the difference between liking and agreeing, not you. If it wasn't very intuitive, then why did I pick up on the discrepancy right away? (c) Dismissing something as having been a joke is a slight scum-tell.

I've already responded to this in what was probably an absurdly mammoth post; will not do so again. I remember that you never responded to said defense, though, as I still have no idea what you mean by calling it "backtracking."

The only way you actions would be indicative of someone else's alignment is if you knew their alignment, which means you would have to be scum.

I've posted literally like 4 times that this is BS (the common acronym, not the player) because it was never my actions alone, but my actions viewed from player X's perspective due to one fewer interpretations from said player's perspective. This is a conclusion that anyone can reach, so you don't have to be scum to reach it. The problem with it is that it assumes that the prior probability of the action being scum-helping-scum was relatively high, which Michel took issue with. As that prior probability becomes low, townMichel's perspective becomes similar to everyone else's perspective, and it's no longer a convincing argument for him.

You make it sound like I argued that I can wave my scumwand and transform players into scum or something. It's a clear distortion on your part.

Other players can still see this a buddying, scum don't have to buddy up only to their scum buddy, they can buddy up to any player. Buddying is scummy.

First, I was NEVER intending the BS business to convince other players. It was intended only for Michel, as I thought he'd missed something and would revise his perspective of me upon noticing it. The only thing other players should get out of it is that assuming that the problem I listed above doesn't exist (it apparently did), Michel should have found it persuasive, and he didn't.

If you're defining any defense of another player as "buddying," then I also take issue with your assertion that buddying is scummy. Town players can certainly have reasons to defend others -- they may believe they've discovered something that other players haven't noticed (as was the case in my BS defense).

Doing something with the motives of thinking that you will look town for doing it is scummy. Being town is not scummy, trying to be town is.

I never did anything with the motive of thinking I would look town for doing it. I don't know where this is coming from. I do think that my actions demonstrate that I am town, but I doubt that that is what you are taking issue with.

As I have demonstrated (except perhaps for in the case of your particularly vague posts), your "scumtells" are vulnerable to the very same kind of WIFOM as my defenses. We have yet to establish the categorical distinction you seem to draw between the two with regard to which is impervious to WIFOM. I suppose you're now going to see the light and argue that we should ignore your scumtells, as there are town explanations for them.

NB: So that you don't hilariously "call me out" on that last sentence, that was sarcasm

[Iecerint]

Here are the 4 posts I was alluding to in an earlier post. It comes out as 6 posts in isolation because I responded to SOG's posts in a doublepost. I've listed the chronological order of these posts in the quoteline, but I've organized them so that it's clear what all the numbered lists correspond to (2 goes with 4 and 3 goes with 5). I've added a little context after each quote. My first post was originally directed at Michel. (Take care if you go back to check over my post -- I mistakenly attributed the quote to SOG)

Other players feel different because they don't know townMichel's alignment, so it can still look like scum protecting scum. Of course the conclusions aren't water-tight -- it's a Day 1 argument, and we aren't really talking about whether the Day 1 argument was water-tight (things have happened since then, etc). What we're talking about (right?) is how your reaction to said defense doesn't take into account your "knowledge" that you cannot be scum with me (different from everyone else's).

Explains for the umpteenth time why BS defense was only meant for Michel.

(1) You can't know MichelSabelheart's perspective because you are not him and you can't know his role unless you are scum. Why would you assume what MichelSabelheart's likely perspective would be? (2) I have never once said that you actions determine his alignment, I have specifically been saying that they don't. But you keep basing HIS likely alignment off of providing arguments of things that only YOU do.

1. SOG makes a true statement and then an unrelated question. 2. SOG confuses my pointing out what he was accusing me of doing with my accusing him of endorsing what I said (which I obviously would never do).

1. Every player in this game knows that I am not scum with them. However, no player in this game knows whether I am scum with another player in this game. That's why we expect Michel's perspective on me to be different from another player. My action with him (IMO) has a strong chance of being interpreted as scum-helping-scum, but townMichel knows that cannot be true. Does that answer your question, or am I answering a different question or something? I can't tell whether you're getting it and discarding it, or if I'm not explaining myself very well.

2. You were saying that *I* was claiming that my actions determined his alignment. I was pointing out that I was *not* claiming that; rather, how third parties should view Michel's alignment is on account of things that he has done given things that I have done. They only make sense if he is scum, he made a mistake and is stubborn, and/or other stuff is sketchy enough to cancel out the effect of his mistake. I'm supposing the second one, regardless of his alignment; he's claiming the last.

I give SOG the benefit of the doubt and clarify my positions in keeping with what I pointed out in the prior summary.

1. And you do know townMichel's alignment? The argument of other players getting reads off your defense (aka YOUR ACTION) doesn't have to do with MichelSabelheart's alignment, it has to do with yours.

2. Not only that, your look back on this makes it look like from you were attempting to manipulate another player's view of you. Doing something with the motives of thinking that you will look town for doing it is scummy. Being town is not scummy, trying to be town is. Town players shouldn't prioritize appearing town to others, we should first be concerned with catching scum and helping the town, that should be our motivation.

1. SOG misses that the reads come from Michel's response to my defense, not my defense itself. At the time, I didn't really understand this point, though.
2. Refer to my last post; still don't really know where this was coming from.

1. This is an argument about my alignment. I know my alignment 100%, so this debate doesn't apply to me; that is, I know 100% that I am not scum.
2. I remember most of my own actions better than other players do. Since I remembered a specific action I made that should be persuasive to someone who knows townMichel's alignment, I brought it up. I agree that trying too hard to look town can look bad, but I also think that given that I am under scrutiny, the best thing I can do is a) explain my perspective in full detail for analysis later and b) since I know 100% that I'm town, I should try to avoid the lynch unless I know that town will gain disproportionately more information from it.

1. I probably could have come up with something better. I confess I didn't understand the corresponding #1. Hopefully he prefers the one in the above summary.
2. A defense of the concept of making a defense.

Pretty much everything Iecerint has said on this page is a load of crap.

U SUCK. Keep in mind that this was just after I'd literally written a page to try to explain my perspective to him (as 4th Iec and 5th Iec were back-to-back).

[Iecerint]

You know as much as I already thought you were scum this takes the cake. This statement is just egregiously untrue. You've somehow taken the fact that I don't believe in universal tells and somehow have decided to spin that into me suggesting we ignore all tells.

Just because you say it's untrue (or even think it's untrue) doesn't mean your actions don't reflect such an intent. Your argument against all my defenses has been a lazy, blanket (vacuous) "town could do that" with only minimal consideration of the actual arguments I'm making. Even SOG tries harder. If there's really some mental town-scum scalebar you put people's actions on, I see no evidence of it apart from an allusion to "scumtails" and so forth in a Day 2 post.

The even more ironic thing is that here you're quite willing to accept and use "my" statistics against me,

lolwat? I have never accepted your statistics. The closest I've come is admitting upon reasonable evidence from you (which came about a hundred posts late, I might add) that big names on these forums use the same statistics as you. I still think they're inappropriate for real play, and I think you know that, too -- you even acknowledged your own statistics were "unrealistic" in one post! Your defense was snooty at best and scummy at worst -- tracker himself never complained about the statistics, so you had no reason to use realistic statistics.

Twisting someones words and actions beyond recognition and selectively using and dismissing an argument as you deem it convenient to do so.

If your words and actions don't match up, something's gotta go somewhere. However:

I think both eKim and Katy are playing this game on cruise control and it worries me that there's not enough interaction between those two and everyone else to get a real good read. I have no idea what eKim thinks of any other player besides Iecerint and it appears to me that Katy thinks everyone is a townie.

As much as I'd hate to admit it, I do agree with this. One of Katy's big posts Day 1 was expressing a belief in one of the replacements being scum, but she seems to have abandoned that now. She's also encouraged me to throw around the hate wand a little, and I've done as much, even though I'm not sure it was very productive. All I've done is make more transparent my suspicion of DDD and SOG, which I don't think is news to anyone. (There's another possibility I've considered, but I'm not sure I should mention it.)

That said, if Katy is scum, she's not my friend anymore.

coincidentally, I have no such problem with ivanavich. of course I could be mistaken, but I get the feeling he's just an overwhelmed townie whereas I've seen enough to expect more of the other two.

That's just because he's BFF with you. It's kinda like how Katy is BFF with me, so I don't really suspect her. I wish she'd throw the hate wand around a little, though. I guess by process of elimination she must suspect ivan (I think she's said nice things about everyone else recently), but it might be nice for her to go on record.

problem is it's hard to get engaged when players start directing wall posts back and forth and back and forth and I think that's probably the big reason we haven't seen more out of him. That's why I've tried to avoid doing that since the Iec/statistics argument.

Oh yeah, we should all lurk to find scum. Great strategy.

SOG has been been real solid chasing down Iecerint's myriad of issues. I'm not a fan of his style and his "Can you believe this guy?" posts are obnoxious if not true. Michel has been real solid since stepping into this game and I'm hoping that he's got some real insights (and that he can keep them concise to keep everyone engaged) from his re-read of the thread.

I agree that SOG's style is obnoxious, and I'm glad he compiled his arguments for me. I also agree with your assessment of Michel.

[Iecerint]

You know as much as I already thought you were scum this takes the cake. This statement is just egregiously untrue. You've somehow taken the fact that I don't believe in universal tells and somehow have decided to spin that into me suggesting we ignore all tells.

Just because you say it's untrue (or even think it's untrue) doesn't mean your actions don't reflect such an intent. Your argument against all my defenses has been a lazy, blanket (vacuous) "town could do that" with only minimal consideration of the actual arguments I'm making. Even SOG tries harder. If there's really some mental town-scum scalebar you put people's actions on, I see no evidence of it apart from an allusion to "scumtails" and so forth in a Day 2 post.

The even more ironic thing is that here you're quite willing to accept and use "my" statistics against me,

lolwat? I have never accepted your statistics. The closest I've come is admitting upon reasonable evidence from you (which came about a hundred posts late, I might add) that big names on these forums use the same statistics as you. I still think they're inappropriate for real play, and I think you know that, too -- you even acknowledged your own statistics were "unrealistic" in one post! Your defense was snooty at best and scummy at worst -- tracker himself never complained about the statistics, so you had no reason to use realistic statistics.

Twisting someones words and actions beyond recognition and selectively using and dismissing an argument as you deem it convenient to do so.

If your words and actions don't match up, something's gotta go somewhere. However:

I think both eKim and Katy are playing this game on cruise control and it worries me that there's not enough interaction between those two and everyone else to get a real good read. I have no idea what eKim thinks of any other player besides Iecerint and it appears to me that Katy thinks everyone is a townie.

As much as I'd hate to admit it, I do agree with this. One of Katy's big posts Day 1 was expressing a belief in one of the replacements being scum, but she seems to have abandoned that now. She's also encouraged me to throw around the hate wand a little, and I've done as much, even though I'm not sure it was very productive. All I've done is make more transparent my suspicion of DDD and SOG, which I don't think is news to anyone. (There's another possibility I've considered, but I'm not sure I should mention it.) I might add that she's certainly been more active than you, but her post implies that you may have a lot of irons in the fire.

That said, if Katy is scum, she's not my friend anymore.

coincidentally, I have no such problem with ivanavich. of course I could be mistaken, but I get the feeling he's just an overwhelmed townie whereas I've seen enough to expect more of the other two.

That's just because he's BFF with you. It's kinda like how Katy is BFF with me, so I don't really suspect her. I wish she'd throw the hate wand around a little, though. I guess by process of elimination she must suspect ivan (I think she's said nice things about everyone else recently), but it might be nice for her to go on record.

problem is it's hard to get engaged when players start directing wall posts back and forth and back and forth and I think that's probably the big reason we haven't seen more out of him. That's why I've tried to avoid doing that since the Iec/statistics argument.

Oh yeah, we should all lurk to find scum. Great strategy.

SOG has been been real solid chasing down Iecerint's myriad of issues. I'm not a fan of his style and his "Can you believe this guy?" posts are obnoxious if not true. Michel has been real solid since stepping into this game and I'm hoping that he's got some real insights (and that he can keep them concise to keep everyone engaged) from his re-read of the thread.

I agree that SOG's style is obnoxious, and I'm glad he compiled his arguments for me. I also agree with your assessment of Michel.

[Iecerint]

Fail. Oh well. Note that I have one extra sentence in the second one.

[Iecerint]

Because a player being mistaken about what's advantegeous to them is less likely then a player being correct about what's advantegeous to them, a scumtell is more likely exibited by scum then by town.

I buy that in the general case, but I don't think SOG's scumtells qualify. Half of them are allusions to hypothetical behavior on my part, and the other half could plausibly be done by town.

You've already acknowledged that my statistics are site standard, but continue to try and twist them into something sinister.

They're site standard for comparing otherwise-equivalent hypothetical circumstances. For example, they're useful for comparing win probabilities for X players and Y scum for different Xs and Ys. But the absolute numbers are biased almost certainly in favor of scum. When you used the statistics, you used the absolute numbers to demonstrate something without trying to account for said bias. You later even admitted that your use of the statistics was unrealistic, which renders laughable your assertion that I'm "twisting" your statistics. Those statistics are great for informing the town that one course of action is better than another, but they can't comment on the absolute utility of an isolated action -- the bias for scum will make every isolated action look disproportionately bad. This is useful for scum because they can paralyze the town, and the use of numbers to do it gives the illusion that the argument is full-proof if people don't judge the math critically.

@ Michel - From my perspective, failing to post cedes the floor to my detractors, one of whom is likely scum; it doesn't help that I often have a lot to respond to, and I find that I'm sometimes not understood if I don't explain in detail. On the other hand, I can see how the ramifications of that perspective could be frustrating. I'll try to reduce the length of my posts.

[Iecerint]

He [DDD] shut down the idea of a policy lynch on my predecessor for not participating and I found enough posts where he offered real game commentary on people's behavior that I was satisfied. At this moment he falls into a category of "undecided, leaning town."

I don't think FT and I were advocating a policy lynch on penguana, if that's what you're referring to here. A bunch of players were voting PP, prompting her to play victim and leave. Then nothing happened for awhile. When FT replaced in, he suggested that we put pressure on penguana, as the PP votes clearly weren't doing anything and PP had been trying to get penguana to participate while we were interrogating her. I agreed with him, and Jarmo had FoS'd penguana, anyway, so I went along with it. The object was to encourage hypothetical active-lurker penguana to participate. Ultimately, as both PP AND penguana had by then become totally absent rather than active-lurkers, it didn't work.

Or, at least, I personally wasn't yet up for a penguana lynch, and certainly not on the basis of his lurking. He did make that one weird distortion/misunderstanding post, though.

I will be

V/LA this coming Thursday until the following Sunday

due to a family vacation. I may have access to the internet, but it will be significantly reduced. Maybe Michel and DDD will get their wish, after all.

[Iecerint]

@ DDD -- I don't see any twisting there whatsoever. Please make your case clearer, as it's evident that you, at least, find it self-evident.

@ ekiM

This [ekiM's use of ellipses] is a serious complaint? If you're not sure what I'm saying, ask for clarification.

I'll use short sentences so that this is minimally "complex," OK? It's not a complaint. It's a question for ivan. He has played with you before. I haven't. He knows your style. I don't. You have often used ellipses in conjunction with vague posts. This helps ekiMscum because he can lead people to wrong conclusions while appearing relatively blameless. I suspect you find this concern legitimate because you accused me of the same thing Day 1.

ivan, please answer the question. does ekiM always use ellipses as he has been doing? if not, is there reason to believe he uses them when scum?

When scumhunting is severely lacking, it is sometimes because the player is scum.

lolekiM

"I could write volumes of complaints about his attempts at scumhunting in this point but others have done that and I don't want to bog down the thread even more."

Argument H has zero value.

You're missing that Michel specifically accused me of trying to double-mislynch tracker and SOG. Argument H was intended specifically for that. I'm not saying that Argument H is some kind of ULTRATELL that blocks all scum attacks against me or something. But I do think it debunks Michel's main gripe with me as well as can be hoped without any scum caught.

3. Specific to my Argument H, DDD would almost have to be in on it for it to have been malicious on my part. The alternative is that I feigned misinterpreting PP's vote the entire game, was lucky enough to have no one correct me until I planned to use that fact, and then got DDD to correct me JUST as I had had the opportunity (which I could have made pages earlier) to post my reasons for tracker > SOG to free me up for suspecting you Day 2. If you don't think that is remote, I don't know what to say to you, other than that I hope you're not town.

Wow, or you could just say "Oh wait, I was wrong about that making it less likely he's scum, maybe he is after all"?? And who has been suggesting you had a fiendish plan all along? Nobody. Strawman.

ekiM, you fail at at least one of reading, thinking, and expressing your views. Does anyone else see some connection he's attempting to make here?

[*]Iecerint - Scum? I think so. I fucking hope so. I'm boggled a lot if not.

Prepare to be boggled, then.

Hope any town players who've been suckered into attacking me (and, let's face it, there are necessarily several) have thought of what to do when I turn up town. Mafia's already had plenty of time to work it out.

You don't need to write 1000000 words if your argument is clear in your mind. If it isn't clear, why not?

The greater portion of my long posts are responses to the 8-10 things I have to respond to whenever I check-in, coupled with, you know, actually needing to do something other than answer attacks on occasion. But since I have so much respect for your wisdom, I've taken your advice in this post and ignored most of your garbage. If I ignored it, please cross-supply either ":roll:" or "lol" to it, and it'll pretty accurately convey my views. And hell, this is STILL a mammoth post.

I think ivan is town. Probably Michel, too, since I don't think he has a scum motive to go to all this trouble AND the rest of you have made it clear that crappier arguments will suffice. Maybe Katy. I'm thinking bad thoughts about the rest of you (SOG, DDD, ekiM). Then again, it should be evident after a few pages of interrogation that I hardly have a neutral perspective.

[Iecerint]

ekiM -- Why did you specifically (sarcastically, if not ironically) ask me to make a post reiterating why I find SOG scummy? Why didn't you ask me to do the same for DDD, for example?

[Iecerint]

EBWOP: Ah, nevermind. Doublechecked the context of that.

I find it odd that you give SOG points for knowing that tracker was town.

[Iecerint]

Iecerint: That was an unreasonable assumption.
Danny: Yes, that was exactly the point I set out to prove, that X was an unreasonable course of action.

Your numbers assumed tracker wanted to vote only on the lurker issue. THAT was your unreasonable assumption. Sure, he didn't explicitly call you out on that, but I think you need to reasonably give people the benefit of the doubt in cases like that. For example, they might find details so obvious that they don't bear mention (e.g. "let's also take other tells into account") My town interpretation for your behavior there is that there does appear to be a culture of using statistics that way on these forums, which would explain why a town player might do this, even if it looks deceptive from a new player's perspective.

I get relative town reads from Katy, Michel, and ivan because of the way they've interacted with me today. Rather than ask a series of questions and then ignore or distort my answers, they ask a question, they answer it, and they respond with a balanced analysis of what I've said. I think this is the pro-town way to handle players under scrutiny, and it's what I tried to do with tracker Day 1 until I started to wonder about DDD's numbers. If you want me to compare it to a standard tell, it'd be like a reverse-IIOA. Many of the non-ivan, Katy, Michel posts against me go:

1. Iec did X. (minimal evidence, may or may not be distortion)
2. X is scummy. (little to no evidence to demonstrate that town could do as much under the circumstances)
3. Iec is scummy.

...which is just a theory summary masquerading as a statement about this game. DDD provides the most egregious example of this -- when he comes back from lurking and blithely applies the "scum could do that" argument without evidencing attempts to contextualize the theory. (As Katy has said, it could be that he's involved in lots of games, but his own explanation for his lurking -- "I didn't want evilIec to take control!" -- implies that this was not the case.)

[Iecerint]

If you read a post by me (or anyone) and it's vague, you should point this out and ask for clarification. That's perfectly reasonable, and yes if someone is chronically vague in a game it can be a decent scumtell. Getting animated about the use of a punctuation symbol, on the other hand...

Next time someone is using a potential style-based scumtell, I'll be sure to warn them about it. "ekiM, I think your use of ellipsis may be a bit odd. Keep an eye on it; people might think you're scum!"

The unwarranted condescension isn't working in your favor, by the way.

Meh, I'm at the stage now when I wanna have a little grouchy fun. Eye for an eye and all that.

You're missing that it's already been refuted.

Not when you posted that, bro.

• A post in the past where you express a weak belief that tracker flipping town makes SOG less scummy doesn't obviate what you've done with regards to the false dichotomy since then.
  
• You weren't closing off the possibility of an SOG lynch, or basing it solely on the PP connection (though you've said you were).
  
• You explicitly asked people to critique your reasoning in that post.
  
• Again, making that post then simply doesn't imply that you've never been trying to get a double mislynch on D1's two big wagons.

1. I posted LOTS of posts in the past where I express the belief that tracker flipping town makes SOG less scummy. Or are you saying that posts in the past are categorically useless? Also, I'm starting to think you don't know the definition of "dichotomy." It means there are two possibilities. I listed four.
2. That part's true -- I'm happy to report that SOGPP have done plenty of sketchy things other than PP voting for Pablo at a very awkward time. I find it laughable that you would consider this a net point against me. I also went out my of my way to correct Michel by pointing out that his "solely" qualifier would not be satisfied for this very reason; the only player who said "solely" was Michel.
3. This is true, and it's the best argument against Argument H. I'd still argue that this venture would have been a very risky venture for Iecscum. I'd also point out that it's certainly pro-town to ask for players to weigh-in on theories like that in general.
4. What, are you arguing that it's categorically scummy to suspect SOG? That strikes me as bull. I think Michel's argument was that the manner of attack was the sketchy part -- a vote in the first post of Day 2 and "tunnel-vision" on those two players. I have since attempted to demonstrate that my behavior is not parsimoniously interpreted that way because 1) I provided evidence that SOG could be partially vindicated by towntrack and 2) if anything, I have DDD tunnelvision.

Why haven't you responded to my (sincere) request?

I'd just quote an old post, and you've already said that those didn't satisfy you. I also didn't interpret your request to be sincere.

[Iecerint]

I don't like the delay from MichelSabelheart at all. I find that delaying an inevitable lynch to be a slight scum tell. When a lynch has been determined (as I am considering this one to be as there are three people voting and more than one who claim Iecerint as their top suspect) then extra information is really most helpful to the scum as it can help them determine a night kill that can benefit them by either preparing to set up a mislynch or have a better idea of what to plan for the next day as far as town suspicions and arguments go.

To clarify, you're saying that Michel's behavior is anti-town rather than scummy. Is that accurate?

Michel, it seems like you still have more material forthcoming. Is that accurate?

[Iecerint]

I don't like the delay from MichelSabelheart at all.

I find that delaying an inevitable lynch to be a slight scum tell.

When a lynch has been determined (as I am considering this one to be as there are three people voting and more than one who claim Iecerint as their top suspect) then extra information is really most helpful to the scum as it can help them determine a night kill that can benefit them by either preparing to set up a mislynch or have a better idea of what to plan for the next day as far as town suspicions and arguments go.

To clarify, you're saying that Michel's behavior is anti-town rather than scummy. Is that accurate?

Michel, it seems like you still have more material forthcoming. Is that accurate?

Oh, missed that. I was going by your "don't like" language, which resembles "dislike," which had prior meant anti-town-not-necessarily-scummy

I agree with you except in the case where townMichel is worried about an NK and consequently wants to get his whole message out there now.

[Iecerint]

Maybe you could actually point out where I've been vague and why it is bothersome instead of continuing this utterly bizarre harping on about the use of a piece of punctuation?

It's almost like you don't believe what you're saying at all...

Thankfully, I don't have to look very hard because you somewhat amusingly did just what I've referred to right here. What is your point in surmising that I don't believe what I'm saying? Do you think it's scummy? Do you think it's anti-town? Are you just baiting me? Your intent is not transparent.

Just because you describe something as "irrelevant" or "distortion" doesn't make it so. I stand by everything in that post, and I think that your color-by-numbers and vague denunciation just make you look bad. If you have a more specific question about something (e.g. "why is X relevant"), I would be happy to answer it.

Your color-by-numbers'd post

was

my response to your list about Argument H; don't pretend I didn't respond to it. Your new statement is just as silly. Obviously, when an argument is debunked, it doesn't make much sense to adhere to it anymore. The point of bringing up the Argument was that Iecscum got very lucky that DDD debunked his argument; otherwise, he'd be stuck behind his own argument and would have a harder time abusing that poor townie, SOG, Day 2.

You're happy to waffle for PAGES saying the same couple of things over and over again,

Get it right the first time, and I won't have to repeat it. Keep asking the same question, and you'll get the same answer.

But I ask you for a few bullet points on why you suspect someone and you won't comply. What to make of that, hmm?

You have shown no willingness to read or think critically about my posts. Players who have shown said willingness to engage at some level include Michel, Katy, ivan, and SOG. I would be happy to repost an old quote if they think it would be useful, but as they (with the possible exception of ivan) have presumably read my posts, I doubt that they would find it useful.

[Iecerint]

Least my body parts were all in one piece. Learned a lot; thanks guys. Go town.

[Iecerint]

Knew it. Half of it. Kinda. Well-played.

Katy's not my friend anymore.

[Iecerint]

I agree that she started to look bad Day Three; or, at least, the ivan vote seemed totally out of nowhere. I'd have picked ekiM.

Sorry I didn't play it cooler at the start of Day 2. At least I don't have to feel guilty about yelling at DDD anymore.

[Iecerint]

^ Same

[Iecerint]

I think Shadeaux was scummier than you were. I let myself tunnel way, way too much. Sorry about that. For what it's worth, I learned my lesson.

Your disclaimer'd scumlist was a bit odd, but, in retrospect, it wasn't really scummy. I think you did as well as could be expected.

[Iecerint]

^ I make smaller posts now. I learned my lesson.

DDD, would you have used statistics against tracker the same way if you had been town and thought he was scum?

[Iecerint]

If you didn't want to give scum too much information, you probably could've listed your scum reads without listing town reads.