My case for amendment of rules 2 and 3

[bugspray]

I believe that the integrity of Micro 988 was compromised due to my adherence to rules 2 and 3 because in following those rules I was forced to play against my wincon as town.

The Slime Collective made a strange misgendering post which I reported. The bolding of the misgendering to indicate strong intentionality behind the transphobic sentiments I believed were in the post made be believe that it was very likely that the slot would be force replaced.

Subject: Micro 988: 09:12 [Game Over]

Code: Select all

if (system.gettime() == 5:00:00) {
postmessage("I like Bugspray and [b]his[/b] avatar");
}

-Black

Then, over the course of D1 the slot which I townread was eliminated.

Subject: Micro 988: 09:12 [Game Over]

The Slime Collective has been yeeted. They were a

Town Vanilla Cop

.

---

Night 1

Everyone sleep tight!
The next day will begin in (expired on 2020-12-16 14:20:30).

It should be noted there was PLENTY of time on the deadline, so when The Slime Collective was banned for the misgendering it was absolutely possible that the occupant of that slot would have been able to not get fucking yeeted.

Subject: Ban/Restriction Announcements

Blatant Scum, his alt The Slime Collective, and all other alts have been banned from mafia for one week for intentionally misgendering another user. As the recent update to community guidelines makes clear, those who make mafiascum an unwelcoming place to play for a segment of our users are themselves unwelcome here.

As a reminder, do not discuss ongoing games.

After the ban was announced the two following posts were made by slots in the game in the SGB thread and due to me knowing Datisi as a person at least a bit I thought that his posting in there was at least slightly scum indicative.

l m a o

Whoa.

Subject: Micro 988: bugspray's notebook

l m a o

Whoa.

would datisi make that post if he is town in the game? i think it's nai but ythan's post must be town indsuative

I even didn't want to admit that I thought it was a scummy Datisi post and it eventually turned out he was scum.


tl;dr A slot I thought was towny was likely going to get force replaced for breaking a rule and got eliminated under 12 hours before they were banned and flipped as a tpr. I couldn't tell town not to yeet the slot because of rule 3. Two players in the game reacted to the ban in the SGB thread in the speezy and I was able to obtain information from it I believed was indicative of slots' alignment in the game (and turned out to later be true) but could not talk about it because of rule 2. I believe these rules need to somehow be modified.

[OkaPoka]

Do not bring outside influences into the game - this includes threats, bribes, wagers, promises, "trust tells", alliances, etc. Using knowledge from previous games is perfectly acceptable, but try not to carry grudges from one game to another.

Replacements, while sometimes necessary, also serve as an outside influence. As such, do not tell other players to replace out. Do not publicly threaten to replace out of a game. If you do need to replace out, do not publicly discuss your reasons or anything else, as you are no longer a player in the game. PM your game moderator if you are considering replacing out or have concerns and believe another player should be replaced out.

are these rules 2 and 3?

[Ythan]

I've been looking forward to this thread ego.

[implosion]

I have two immediate reactions (just speaking for myself) - one, this is a really, really good example of why we take the "no discussing ongoing games" rule so very, very seriously. It's really possible for something as seemingly innocent as these SGB posts to influence a game, and I'd really recommend a mindset where if you're in a game, if you say anything even remotely pertaining to the game (like a comment on a user who was banned for actions in that game), try to cultivate an automatic internal response of "is there any even remotely theoretical way this could affect the game", and if the answer is yes, don't post it. Sure, there's some limit here (e.g. it's fine to make completely unrelated posts across the site even though that could affect the game by telling players that you're being active elsewhere) but in this case I think I would personally try to avoid it, innocuous though it seems. I do want to emphasize it doesn't actually matter that bugspray was right or wrong, what matters is that they saw posting somewhere on site by players in their game, that was related in some way to that game, and were able to try to draw some kind of connection.

Two, I just want to make sure I'm getting the reasons you're citing these rules right, bugspray. I believe you're saying rule 2 means you can't say "Ythan and Datisi made these posts in this other thread and that could be alignment-indicative", and that you're saying rule 3 means you can't tell the town "this player might get replaced because I think they're going to be banned, so we should wait for that"? If so, I don't think these cases necessarily mean "these rules need to be modified". These are cases where we sort of have to pick between two evils. For the rule 2 case, the *ideal* solution is that people all act perfectly and never post anything even remotely game-related outside of the game thread. And usually, I think, that is the case, and this is why I had the entire first paragraph, because I think that is at least partially the moral here. But if it does happen then we have to pick between the evil of "this external thing might affect this game's integrity" (especially in a case like this, where the offending posts were in the speakeasy, which not all players may have access to) and the evil of "we can't talk about this thing that my reads might be affected by". A valid option, I believe, is (if you really do think this has an impact on your reads) to say e.g. "i also have other reasons to scumread Datisi, but can't discuss them". In the rule 3 case, we have to choose between the evil of "people might discuss replacements in a way that hurts game integrity" and "people might be unable to discuss replacements in a way that hurts game integrity".

I'm not really sure if there's a good rule that can act perfectly in all these situations, and I tend to think the situations that these rules were designed for that they do adequately address are more common than situations like these. That's not to say these rules are perfect, nor that they can't be improved, I just don't really see how to do so in a way that addresses these, at least at a glance.

[Ythan]

offending posts

Nah

[bugspray]

I'm most salty/passionate about the fact that I highly expected the force replace to happen and couldn't talk about it.

Also just mentioning an illegal read in the main thread feels so nebulous.

me: I sr datisi and tr ythan but can't say why.
jabroni: Why not?
me: Explaining the reasoning for my read would be in violation of rule 2.

Just explaining that my read is violation of site rules feels like it's also violating rule 2 because it means people know that I have a read.

why is mafia pain?

[bugspray]

Spoiler: rule 2

Do not bring outside influences into the game - this includes threats, bribes, wagers, promises, "trust tells", alliances, etc. Using knowledge from previous games is perfectly acceptable, but try not to carry grudges from one game to another.

Spoiler: rule 3

Replacements, while sometimes necessary, also serve as an outside influence. As such, do not tell other players to replace out. Do not publicly threaten to replace out of a game. If you do need to replace out, do not publicly discuss your reasons or anything else, as you are no longer a player in the game. PM your game moderator if you are considering replacing out or have concerns and believe another player should be replaced out.

are these rules 2 and 3?

Yes.
edit: added spoiler tags bcs space

[OkaPoka]

well i was going to say i don't feel like you would've been in violation of those rules but implo seems to imply otherwise

and implo is probably a better judge of the rules than i am

[bugspray]

I asked Isis after the game if those would have been infractions and after consulting with the modteam she indicated it would have been.

[OkaPoka]

What makes this different from activity/elitells. Is it the specificity then? If we invent the bugtell and define it as this situation, can i run around saying x is scum cuz bugtell?

[bugspray]

activity/elitells.

I don't know what these are.

[Ythan]

I think it's like, if a player is or is not active elsewhere on site relative to the game it's alignment indicative.

[bugspray]

I would say an activity tell would be distinct from a bugtell.

Activity tell would be like if you decided it's possible to determine if someone is posting in a PT you don't have access to and you can get crude information about when they post in a PT by looking at their postcount since you last checked and how many posts they made in public mafia (pertaining to a game) threads you have read access to. Someone who diligently does this could probably notice players postcounts increasing in ways that would be indicative of scum talking in their private thread to each other, especially during night phases.

[Ythan]

Huh I'm not sure I get it all the way through but I don't think I really want it to sink in anyway.

[bugspray]

let's say at regular intervals you check the post count of multiple profiles in games and write it down along with the time (or even automate this)

so now you have the Δp (delta posts) between two (or more) times of the player. You can look in public threads that the player is posting in that count towards postcount and see how many posts they are making in private threats and get a rough estimate of when and subtract the amount of public posts from the Δp you get the amount of private posts made over various intervals by the slots in your game.
The problem is people can request personal private threads.
It's not a big problem because peoples' posting habits in personal private threads are usually very different from their posting habits in factional private threads.
Even so, it's inadvisable to use this tactic because you might accidentally yeet a mason or neighbor

[Ythan]

Gotcha now!

[MURDERCAT]

Do private threads show up in post counts for other users though? I think they don't but I don't know for sure.

[Datisi]

Do private threads show up in post counts for other users though? I think they don't but I don't know for sure.

i checked this a bit ago, they do not.

[Menalque]

Do private threads show up in post counts for other users though? I think they don't but I don't know for sure.

i checked this a bit ago, they do not.

something every sweaty tryhard has looked at lol

I think I found this out like a month in on site

[Menalque]

I sr datisi and tr ythan but can't say why.

why not just make up reasons for the reads, I'm not seeing an issue here

edit: I also don't see how saying "I think that X is gonna get force repped for transphobia" goes against rule 3 as written at all, so I think you would have been fine saying "uh can we wait on limming for a day or two bc I think they're gonna get repped"

like the things prohibited are (1) telling someone to rep out and (2) threatening to rep out yourself

speculating that someone might get replaced isn't either of those things

[bugspray]

After the game I privately pm'd isis about if predicting a force replace is against the rules and was told it is against the rule of bringing outside influences to the game. I share it with her permission.

Hi bugspray,

The existence of reports against a user is an outside influence being brought into the mafia game. This is part of Mafia rule 2 from site rules. As such, you're not allowed to discuss them as part of the mafia game. Therefore, you did play to your win condition to the greatest extent the rules allow. Thank you for asking.

[Jake The Wolfie]

I sr datisi and tr ythan but can't say why.

why not just make up reasons for the reads, I'm not seeing an issue here

Because it would be a definitive lie at that point, something which either the scum could capitalize on (Proving that you are a liar), or something that you yourself can't back up.

[Menalque]

After the game I privately pm'd isis about if predicting a force replace is against the rules and was told it is against the rule of bringing outside influences to the game. I share it with her permission.

Hi bugspray,

The existence of reports against a user is an outside influence being brought into the mafia game. This is part of Mafia rule 2 from site rules. As such, you're not allowed to discuss them as part of the mafia game. Therefore, you did play to your win condition to the greatest extent the rules allow. Thank you for asking.

I think that’s kind of a bizarre interpretation of the rule as written and think that if you’d done it it would have been very hard for mod action to be pursued against you. If that is how the mod team are interpreting tule 2 then they should either make it explicit within the list of things prohibited there, or they should change their interpretation. Ambiguity in the rules is useless.

I sr datisi and tr ythan but can't say why.

why not just make up reasons for the reads, I'm not seeing an issue here

Because it would be a definitive lie at that point, something which either the scum could capitalize on (Proving that you are a liar), or something that you yourself can't back up.

If people were that good at realising when ur lying then mafia would be a lot easier

[Jake The Wolfie]

I sr datisi and tr ythan but can't say why.

why not just make up reasons for the reads, I'm not seeing an issue here

Because it would be a definitive lie at that point, something which either the scum could capitalize on (Proving that you are a liar), or something that you yourself can't back up.

If people were that good at realising when ur lying then mafia would be a lot easier[/quote]

You can't back up a lie you make based upon things that are either inside the main thread or inside other game threads.

[OkaPoka]

just to clarify bugspray, an activity tell isn't about private topics

its that a very smart person once upon a time figured out that for a lot of people, being active elsewhere on site but not in the game present was scum indicative. it was like a step up from the lurktell, someone (ellibereth probably, at least the elitell is named after him) noticed it was super scummy for someone to be specifically lurking in game x while doing stuff in game y or chatting it up in thread z.

now id reason that arguably the elitell, is kinda bringing in outside influence because you are snooping around and developing a read based on not game x related stuff, but this is/was a super common tell and there weren't any consequences leads me to believe that it is okay to bring in 'outside' influences as long as its 1) generalized to not reference the stuff a specific game i.e. person is active elsewhere on site vs person is posting in specifically thread y and 2) it is something that everyone can check really quick (everyone can check someone's activity equally, vs activity on the discord that not everyone is in)

which is why i wonder if we generalize a situation like yours to something like a 'bugtell', where its scummy/opportunistic to push someone who is getting banned would be a passable alternative. i get not allowing quoting specific posts in other threads, especially since its in a restricted area, would constitute as an outside influence that is 1) not generalized and 2) not equally accessible. but say hypothetically jake (sorry jake) and i were in a game and jake launched a push on someone who just got banned, would it be legal if all i said was "JAKE SCUM BECAUSE BUGTELL!" and everyone understood what that meant? and if they didn't could i explain what a bugtell meant in a general manner?