Test your VCA skills

[Raskolnikov]

Spoiler:

Madame Rose (48), The Cook (38), Mrs. White (59)
The Butler (93), Mr. Boddy (39), Captain Brown (28)
Mrs. Peacock (44)
Miss Peach (6)

D1 scum lynch kinda implies bussing? The cook and Mrs White positions being more hop-on and potentially triage in that they felt he'd be lynched anyways
lol brown selfvoting

The cook feels like obvscum IMO. position on the d1 scumlynch, n1 nightkill being mustard who pushed the cook d1
votes azure d2 when scarlet goes through but when azure goes through next day is to be found on sgt grey.
posts to vote ratios very low. Going to make rest of scumteam assumptions based on this being scum so if wrong then everythings fucked.

as for off the d1 wagon miss peach could be scum for sticky votes/parking throughout game and low impact... I guess that would make mrs peacock kinda towny though

Now idk if third would be off as well or bussing. hell it could technically be slategray.

Mr. boddy feels kinda scummy? feels like a scum vote off of the d1 scum vote, seems like brown is low hanging fruit type player also with the selfvote.

?Cook, Peach, Boddy
if wrong then... white I guess?
Damn this is like when you finish a test and you know you didn't do well. Fuck.

is plum a PR kill? I dont get why hed be killed

[Raskolnikov]

Fuck.

Spoiler:

All 3 of them bussed really? I thought if they did that they wouldn't keep killing in the wagon though. If you hard bus someone you don't just kill off the rest of the wagon, that screws you over doesn't it? Damn.

Grumble grumble well at least my first lynch if I was in the game would be right, I guess the rest not so much.

[acidphoenix]

Spoiler:

Rask the problem with that assumption is that somebody points that out literally every game

so town goes "hur Durr they killed on the wagon hurr durr scum is probably off wagon

[Raskolnikov]

Spoiler:

IDK, if I 3 man bus someone and the gamestate makes it feel like someone was hardbussed I'm not going to kill everyone else on the wagon and make it so if anyone picks anyone left for bussing they'd be correct. So like the first thing I looked for in the lynch wagon was cook but literally any lynch there would have been right. I guess maybe town in this game didn't pick up on the hard bussing gamestate feel so scum didn't care about killing in the wagon though idk. Yeah I'll concede this scumteam definitely beat me in the VCA sense.

Round 2?

[mhsmith0]

One of the fun/interesting uses of VCA (the good kind anyway) is

Spoiler:

to evaluate the likelihood and locations of bussing

You never want to go overboard, but when you have the data of:
1) early scum lynch clearly not driven by a PR shot (since day 1)
2) massively dysfunctional and ineffective town

Those two things clash with each other pretty heavily... UNLESS there was bussing.

Sometimes there just isn't bussing, and a scum lynch truly is town-driven and pure. But the nature of a game state tends to look different than THAT one

Another useful outcome of it is (or at least can be)

Spoiler:

to get a sense of where town's focus is in general and how effective said focus is

In this game, town was VERY clearly going whole hog on the "there was no bus" theory, since they spent basically the whole game wagoning absolutely everyone OTHER than people who might have been bussing.

The more times that town is looking at a specific pool of people with specific traits (in this case, not on the d1 wolf wagon - but you could just as easily look for pushes on people OFF a scum wagon, or pushes on lurkers, on high count posters, on people in the middle, etc etc etc), while consistently being wrong about what they find, the more likely it is that the underlying theory/paradigm of behavior is simply incorrect for where wolves are (obviously that's not 100%, but if the theory is correct, and town is JUST BARELY missing out on the correct scum members of that pool, that's both somewhat statistically unlikely, and also is likely to have some level of identifying characteristics and/or active scum behavior in deflecting attention specifically from one slot to a different one).

[mhsmith0]

Round 2 will come when I think of another good or interesting example. Nothing immediately comes to mind but I'll try thinking on it.

[acidphoenix]

i'm grabbing a random mu game without actually checking if it's good for vca analysis and posting it now rask/smith

later we can have an actually good one when smith finds one

[mhsmith0]

We could always reference the mash where

Spoiler:

I was pointing out the mass day 2 bus as it was happening

[Raskolnikov]

Spoiler:

cmon how am I supposed to win when I get noobs like capt brown, miss scarlet self hammering and mr slategray on my team?

[acidphoenix]

well i mean

we COULDVE

but now you SPOILED IT

[mhsmith0]

no it's ok, it's fixed now

[mhsmith0]

but wagonomics on a large MU mash is largely difficult IMO unless there's particularly interesting things going on. And especially since MS games tend to be smaller, I wouldn't really tkae a mash as a good/instructive VCA archetype for an MS discussion group *shrugs*

[Raskolnikov]

theoretically if well done vca is good and semi reliable shouldn't it be decent in most games

[Raskolnikov]

smiths next example is going to be

Spoiler:

scum doesnt bus at all?

[mhsmith0]

It really depends.

A decent chunk of the time, if you look at the voting data it won't actually tell you anything all that interesting, and if you try and force it you just get bad results.

Which is probably a lot like most other scumhunting tools; half or more of the utility on any tool is knowing when NOT to rely on it.

[Raskolnikov]

at least we still have good old OMGUS as a 100% reliable scumtell

[acidphoenix]

1) This isn't a secret alias game obviously
2) You know that it's 12/3
3) Every slot colored green is a dead villager, the one red slot is a dead wolf
4) At the dawn of day 4, it's now 7/2
5) For clarity, night kills were:
N1 Cuthalion(subbed for Sagittarius N1, got shot without ever posting)
N2 philgone
N3 Archangel

note: Adrian subbed for Zone Q11 d2

no looking it up, probably some are familiar with the actual agme in the first place u.u

cba to do tables

Spoiler:

day 1:

Quick

(LYNCH) - House (34), AwesomeDolphin (123),

Archangel

(19), Csargo (18), Takhitty (34),

philgone

(5)
AwesomeDolphin - BATMAN (23),

Quick

(101),

Alabaster

(36), TomKat (14),

Fake Passport

(16)
gbsfranca - Zone Q11 (4)

Alabaster

- gbsfranca(13)
Not Voting -

Sagittarius(0)

, Psycho666Soldier(10)
day 2:

Alabaster

(LYNCH) - Takhitty (32), AwesomeDolphin (125), Csargo (44), House (54),

Fake Passport

(20)

Fake Passport

- TomKat (11),

philgone (16)

, BATMAN (15),

Archangel (39)

philgone

- Adrian (70), gbsfranca (27), Psycho666Soldier (12)
BATMAN -

Alabaster

(41)
day 3:

Fake Passport

(LYNCH) - BATMAN (23),

Archangel (12)

, Psycho666Soldier (26), TomKat (17), gbsfranca (58), Adrian (40)
TomKat - AwesomeDolphin (18), House (38), Takhitty (27)
Takhitty - Csargo (42)
Not Voting -

Fake Passport

(9)

[callforjudgement]

Not sure how many times I've repeated that, but scum don't check how many other scum a wagon has before voting.

This is actually the only reason VCA works.

If scum are counting the other scum on a wagon and voting accordingly, that implies an intentional effort to manipulate VCA, and it can be hard enough to do reliably even when it isn't being manipulated by the scum.

[Raskolnikov]

Are the townflips all VTs?

[acidphoenix]

it's a vanilla game

[Raskolnikov]

If scum are counting the other scum on a wagon and voting accordingly, that implies an intentional effort to manipulate VCA, and it can be hard enough to do reliably even when it isn't being manipulated by the scum.

Manipulated VCs wouldn't just neutralize VCA but like massively screw over anyone doing the VCA compared to if they were just scumhunting traditionally huh? You have no way of telling manipulated vca apart from actual vca short of mislynching the people and losing the game no?

Oh boy that reminds me of this game people were VCAing the entire game up to and including LYLO even though it was mentioned as a big thing early d1. It's like dude, if you start the game off talking about VCA you think people are going to just ignore it?

[callforjudgement]

What do the numbers mean in that VCA? It can't be "post number of vote" unless the votes are in the wrong order, and voting order is actually fairly important when you don't have much else to go on.

I have some thoughts but am not sure I'm correct (I don't normally play via VCA). I know that in this gamestate I'd be looking at stated reads on previous days which did

not

lead to a vote, but for the sake of the puzzle that information isn't available, so we'll have to go with what we have.

[mhsmith0]

1) This isn't a secret alias game obviously
2) You know that it's 12/3
3) Every slot colored green is a dead villager, the one red slot is a dead wolf
4) At the dawn of day 4, it's now 7/2
5) For clarity, night kills were:
N1 Cuthalion(subbed for Sagittarius N1, got shot without ever posting)
N2 philgone
N3 Archangel

note: Adrian subbed for Zone Q11 d2

no looking it up, probably some are familiar with the actual agme in the first place u.u

cba to do tables

Spoiler:

day 1:

Quick

(LYNCH) - House (34), AwesomeDolphin (123),

Archangel

(19), Csargo (18), Takhitty (34),

philgone

(5)
AwesomeDolphin - BATMAN (23),

Quick

(101),

Alabaster

(36), TomKat (14),

Fake Passport

(16)
gbsfranca - Zone Q11 (4)

Alabaster

- gbsfranca(13)
Not Voting -

Sagittarius(0)

, Psycho666Soldier(10)
day 2:

Alabaster

(LYNCH) - Takhitty (32), AwesomeDolphin (125), Csargo (44), House (54),

Fake Passport

(20)

Fake Passport

- TomKat (11),

philgone (16)

, BATMAN (15),

Archangel (39)

philgone

- Adrian (70), gbsfranca (27), Psycho666Soldier (12)
BATMAN -

Alabaster

(41)
day 3:

Fake Passport

(LYNCH) - BATMAN (23),

Archangel (12)

, Psycho666Soldier (26), TomKat (17), gbsfranca (58), Adrian (40)
TomKat - AwesomeDolphin (18), House (38), Takhitty (27)
Takhitty - Csargo (42)
Not Voting -

Fake Passport

(9)

Quick / Not Fully Thought Through Thoughts:

Spoiler:

Day 1: Quick was lynched on a relatively tight race between himself and AwesomeDolphin
Night 1: Cuth shot suggests either someone who cuth was familiar with shot him, OR that wolves were relatively comfortable with the game state despite the early wolf lynch
Day 2: triple town wagons, with the other two flips being the night 2 and follow up day 3 lynch
Night 2: shooting philgone was either a framing kill explicitly on FP (possible given the runaway day 3 wagon), or something just odd in general.
Day 3: looks like a hammer result? Probably look at Adrian for the hammer vote and see how good that does or doesn’t look in context

1) Scum consistently shot NON-participating slots. That MIGHT suggest that there’s relatively more scum in the high posters of the game (AwesomeDolphin and House most notably)
2) Looking at House/AD pairing… they were together on Quick, split on the day 2 wagons, together again on TomKat on day 3. If TK is a wolf, then they obviously can’t be scum together, and probably a bit odd for them to be scum together there (unless there was a particular reason to bus Quick over AD?)
3) Shooting the most useless members of the day 1 wolf wagon is in general weird if that’s an all-town group…
4) BATMAN/Tomkat are unlikely to be w/w together given how consistently they voted together (on all 3 days), especially given that but one of them being a wolf wouldn’t be surprising
5) CSargo/Takhitty not an impossible combination given the late pile-on for Quick, though it’d be a weird bussing spot there when a CW was realistic. I’d probably look closely at CSargo’s vote on Takhitty on day 3 and see if it looked legitimate and figure out why it never went anywhere
6) I’d probably give a minor townlean on TomKat due to the n3 shot on the main wagon, as well as being early on the day 2 counterwagon
7) Unless AwesomeDolphin is a wolf, then BATMAN’s voting record is objectively terrible, but given his low post count and personal meta it seems like he’s not giving enough of a shit to be a wolf?
8) I’d probably given minor town points to takhitty/tomcat/Adrian for being early on the day 3 wagons (barring ppl moving around skewing the #s there or something), since you’re pretty decently at a point where scum aren’t actually going to give a damn who gets lynched
9) I’d probably FOS House half gut, half for kind of bandwagoning on other wagons after the wolf wagon. As a totally ass-pulled guess I’d say CSargo doesn’t look great either, as the late positioning on the day 1 wolf wagon is easily within standard-issue mediocre bus range, the bandwagon on alabaster is meh, and the one vote seemingly vanity wagon on takhitty day 3 seems odd unless there was a good reason for him to have been sticking on that wagon even when no one actually cared to join him

Lazy guess of House/CSargo for the other two wolves (with an equally lazy guess of takhitty/Adrian/tomcat for slightly >rand villagers), though honestly there are a bunch of people who don’t look particularly great, and the weird pattern of night kills suggests that there’s probably something non-obvious going on that’s worth more investigation. I'd also want to look at the day 1 game state in more detail to see if it looked like a bus or if it looked like there was an actual save attempt, and that kind of micro analysis is going to be harder without reading the actual thread. I'd probably also want to evaluate the case/wagon on tomkat in more detail t osee if there was something legitimately compelling there , and then if so I'd want to see if it looked like the villager wagon might have reasonably been a save attempt.

[Raskolnikov]

It's number of posts in that phase AFAIK

[mhsmith0]

What do the numbers mean in that VCA? It can't be "post number of vote" unless the votes are in the wrong order, and voting order is actually fairly important when you don't have much else to go on.

I have some thoughts but am not sure I'm correct (I don't normally play via VCA). I know that in this gamestate I'd be looking at stated reads on previous days which did

not

lead to a vote, but for the sake of the puzzle that information isn't available, so we'll have to go with what we have.

In what I'd posted, the #s were # of posts in the given game day (so slate-grey was a zero poster through 4 game days, for instance), and then the order was the order of votes (possibly ignoring vote/unvote issues shifting around the wagon state).