Mini Normal 2187: PIFiMDM [game over!]

[northsidegal]

greetings.

[northsidegal]

i'm getting the "starting a new game of mafia after months of not playing and being washed up" jitters, very nostalgic

hey dann! i'm glad you are both confirmed town and still alive

[northsidegal]

blind, i'm reading up right now

[northsidegal]

By the way, do we still want to put a delay on the hammer?

i'd prefer if you'd hold off for my sake

[northsidegal]

if you wouldn't mind, could i get a quick summary of your reads, dann?

[northsidegal]

or if you want me to go first i can

[northsidegal]

this is somewhere in the general vicinity of where I am right now, although I've had some recent fluctuations, I can expand on specific slots if you want, but I'm less solid on certain ones than others

how confident are you on NPOM / agar? his is the main slot i'm flip flopping on, all the others are at least approaching one direction or the other. i feel as though NPOM was immediately and obviously way more anxious in another scum game that i looked at (although that was his only one), and as the kids say i have ~reasons~ to think he might be town, but even still there's a residual doubt.

i think i agree with you more than i disagree with you so far, although maybe not to a huge degree. both kazyan and lunar are really the only ones on the town side for me, with gamma and elements being scumreads. i'd do one of those curly brace readslists but i'm not sure how helpful it'd be.

having skipped ahead to the start of day 2 i know there's some shenanigans surrounding hayker's fakeclaiming, but having not gotten to that yet in my main read through he's fairly null alongside 2ndchosen. zito is hovering somewhere around null/scum, although i think that might just be paranoia because he's a vaguely familiar player but i don't actually have any idea of how he plays.

[northsidegal]

Alchemist, I'm curious about your current thoughts on Elements. You voted him early on , asking him about their post, and havent seemed to elaborate much on the subject since then.

quoting this for reference

[northsidegal]

@gamma, how often do you accuse people of "white knighting", and why do you think it comes from scum, or benefits scum? more than town, of course.

[northsidegal]

also just for post-game credit and i guess just to make my reads clear if i had to pick three people as the scumteam right now it'd be hayker elements and gamma

[northsidegal]

sorry about the delay, gonna finish my readthrough now. don't think i have much left to get through but i did lose my page "bookmark"

[northsidegal]

alright, i'm caught up. i don't think my thoughts have changed

all that significantly

since 940 with maybe the exception that i'm a bit more confident in NPOM's slot as town (to be honest unwnd hasn't really factored into my read at all), and dann's case on zito occupies a prominent slot in my mind, if only because it's an angle i wasn't really considering.

i'm also fairly more confident in gamma scum. it's possible that my gamma-scum-o-meter is miscalibrated from being so unbelievably washed up, but so many of his posts are just really really devoid of any sort of scumhunting at times when almost everyone else was doing so. (i have posts from conftowns highlighted as green, so this really stands out reading back through day one)

2ndchosen i'm a little more comfortable calling town. although still not hugely confident. posts like 536 are i guess the perfect way to pocket me because they seem to be genuinely focused on solving things and noticing details / inconsistencies in a way that doesn't fit my schema of how generic scum players play.

[northsidegal]

oh, kazyan has sunk down a bit more to null for me since 940. i think a lot of my read was based on the idea that he actually was hectic, and he made a comment that seemed really hectic-town-indicative to me in 215, the "reactions more important than the act itself" point. given that he (as i now believe / know) isn't and given some tonally kind of scummy posts like 632 he's dropped

[northsidegal]

dann, i think there are some inconsistencies in the zito/hayker narrative that i want to mull over a bit with you. i guess the first isn't so much of an inconsistency so much as a really notable point, that of hayker's kind of weird and really strong townread on zito. it does, however, lead into the other point—agar said this:

#547 - If Hayker is scum, Zito is town. Book it.

i'm not sure how much an agar (assuming that penguin was the vig shot, which seems at the moment a decent assumption) kill makes sense with zito / hayker scum. to be fair, i think i might be ignoring the counterfactual here, which is simply why agar was killed at all, not even considering why specific teams might have killed him (and i have given that question less thought than i probably should have).

[northsidegal]

oh, kazyan has sunk down a bit more to null for me since 940. i think a lot of my read was based on the idea that he actually was hectic, and he made a comment that seemed really hectic-town-indicative to me in 215, the "reactions more important than the act itself" point. given that he (as i now believe / know) isn't and given some tonally kind of scummy posts like 632 he's dropped

Yeah I'm tinfoiling him a good amount too, even if our reasons aren't fully similar

i wouldn't say that i'm "tinfoiling" him necessarily, just that whereas before he was one of my only townreads i wouldn't really put him up there anymore.

[northsidegal]

i'm pretty confident in lunar being town such that i'd be really surprised if he ended up being scum, mostly because he's played in a way that really doesn't seem like in general how a newer player would play scum, nor does it seem like for him specifically he's playing his scum game. zito brought up earlier some point about him dying before lylo or some such as a liability, and i bring up him bringing that up only to disagree on both a reads level and a philosophical level. people "needing to die" should be struck from any town player's vocabulary.

anyways, to go into some specific examples while not overstating the subject, i think that lunar probably doesn't go really hard against the guy defending him (ben) like he does in 246 if he were scum. it doesn't match how he interacted with his partners in the one scum newbie game i saw from him and i would doubt that he would interact with a townie like that as scum – i'd imagine he'd just ignore it. (not sure why i bring up the partner point when ben is conftown already but whatever)

also just in general he's playing a pretty aggressive game such that it doesn't feel like he has anyone that he could be partnered with. again i'm going off of his other scumgame here with regards for what i was looking for in terms of partner interactions, but still even without that i feel as though he lacks almost any partner associatives. there are some other random posts that also seem like they basically only come from town too like 264 and 604 but that's probably enough said on the subject

[northsidegal]

Affirmative action was probably the wrong thing to say there

I'll rephrase: It looked he made such a deliberate point to basically say 'OK guys, here's the blatantly obvious thing townies should do, because I as well am town'

i believe the term is LAMIST

and yeah looking back i think that i sort of passed over it because if hectic were to say that i would understand it as him getting at some sort of underlying philosophy with regards to townies doing outrageous things, but without that context it doesn't quite look the same

[northsidegal]

i also thought the continual numbering 1) 2) list thing was a hectic bit too but yeah

anyways enough about hectic

[northsidegal]

scumread

i know that i harp on and on about not overfocusing on townies who do outrageous things but in this case i feel as though he did outrageous things and is just scum. we'll see if ignoring my own philosophy comes back to bite me, but to be fair another thing that a very wise townie once said is that the best townies know when to not dogmatically follow rules

[northsidegal]

specifically among other things i think that his end of day votes yesterday were fairly scummy

[northsidegal]

Y’all two need to read Hayker’s ISO once the flip happens

why

[northsidegal]

oh yeah and in case i haven't said anything on the subject yet which i'm not sure if i have i think we're green light on hayker dying today

[northsidegal]

The way Hayker handles Kazyan does not look like scum-scum interaction at all

point to specifics?

[northsidegal]

so he did

anyways point to specifics on what you're talking about there?

[northsidegal]

oh man this is annoying, i get no quality dann time (probably)

@datisi how much bribe money for you to "forget" to check the thread for a day or so

[northsidegal]

The way Hayker talks about his elements scum read so much to subvert that with a Kazyan vote that’s only justified in the last line of the post tells me Hayker is doing the “push a buddy vote a townie” play, which makes Kazyan town

so you're confident in elements being scum?

[northsidegal]

oh man this is annoying, i get no quality dann time (probably)

@datisi how much bribe money for you to "forget" to check the thread for a day or so

I'm here but I can't promise quality

what's your best hypothesis for why agar was the nightkill? i've just realized that i can't really square it

is it a setup thing? they wanted to keep the jailkeep ability for one night more?

[northsidegal]

I actually defended elements quite early because he seemed very outrageous townie to me

i think that early on the whole "going to vote each player once" thing matches perfectly with what it looks like when a townie does an outrageous thing and people get upset at it and decide to vote the player more out of anger or whatever than it actually being scummy

as the day goes on though i think that his play gets less defensible under that sort of idea

[northsidegal]

snip

yeah check this out though:

Alchemist, I'm curious about your current thoughts on Elements. You voted him early on , asking him about their post, and havent seemed to elaborate much on the subject since then.

[northsidegal]

But, alternatively, it could just be that they weren't afraid of my reads and people seemed willing to sheep me enough that they were confident I'd just drive another mis elimination. Instead, they just killed my top town read, which I stated repeatedly was agar.

AGar had a strong SR on Hayker
I don’t think that’s enough for scum to have killed him but that’s a strong reason

yeah, something doesn't really square right with either of those explanations to me though. i had forgotten that we don't necessarily know if they knew you're a JK enabler, so them being informed of something is a possibility.

i've done some reviews with datisi that i could probably check to get a better idea of mod setup spec and how likely that is but that'd probably be unfair so i won't.

[northsidegal]

Gamma do you like busing as scum? This might sound like a stupid question, but entertain it anyways

if you're thinking about the gamma/elements thing going on right now my current hypothesis (read: confirmation bias) is that it's scum caught pushing each other down to try to stay afloat. i get that i'm basically just quoting my wiki page at this point with "outrageous things" and that line but still, that's my actual read of it

[northsidegal]

Gamma do you like busing as scum? This might sound like a stupid question, but entertain it anyways

if you're thinking about the gamma/elements thing going on right now my current hypothesis (read: confirmation bias) is that it's scum caught pushing each other down to try to stay afloat. i get that i'm basically just quoting my wiki page at this point with "outrageous things" and that line but still, that's my actual read of it

to expand on that, this elements scumread by gamma seems to have come out of nowhere starting on day two. i get that he says it's because of the sheeping of the IC, but there's practically no trajectory there from day one

Like, aside from condemning Hayker for sure for sure. I don't think I've been a particularly scary force at any point in this game. If mafia are informed as well, that's more than enough reason to not kill me.

I don't really think Agar was chosen for any reason in particular other than being widely town read

fair point. there is i think a common misperception of people thinking that scum plan their moves much more than they actually tend to, so it's possible that there were actually like four posts in the scum PT overnight and one person just decided "the IC isn't onto us so let's just kill this guy".

[northsidegal]

@dann how strong is your townread on kaz?

also, any contingencies in the wild world where hayker flips town? don't have to dedicate too much time to it but it's worth at least considering, stranger things have happened and maybe he was just a townie deciding to fakeclaim

[northsidegal]

medium? I think Kaz overjustifies himself to the extent that it's towny. Meaning, he's overly transparent in a way that reminds me of myself in certain town games. I think there are a few posts (namely the one where he made like a 10 bullet point list to justify sheeping me off of elements that everyone jumped on) that seem surface level scummy, but I think that post and others like it reveal his mindset and are rather hard to fake as scum. I think people are noticing the self-awareness as scummy but missing how deep that his thought process is actually going 10 bullet points deep. He's not making up those reasons to seem towny, those are the actual things his mind is thinking through.

At least that's my take. Kaz could be scum but I haven't spent too much time paranoia-ing the slot because he's been one of the slots more consistently posting content that I'm happy with, similar to Lunar Martian.

i like that analysis, actually, hadn't really thought about it that way. i think my eyes tended to just get kind of blurry reading over his posts and i may have focused too much on the tonal aspect, as well as the misunderstanding about being hectic (probably another point in favor of me ever playing a game at a time other than the dead of night, but some things just never change)

[northsidegal]

yeah, i guess i sort of lean towards that being an awkward attempt at distancing

with no offense meant, i think it being some kind of intentional move to make a townie look bad through association is a scum move one or two levels higher than hayker plays at

and it being just a random vote against a townie that he expects to actually be wagoned seems similarly unlikely

[northsidegal]

this is a fun game, i'm glad i replaced in. i'm enjoying myself

[northsidegal]

Yeah I think that "solve" makes me feel the most comfortable, I would actually go elements first over Gamma because Gamma has been pretty adamant about Elements too

for me i think it'd be gamma first. gamma / elements is my theory, yes, but it's equally as possible that scum gamma saw people partnering him with town elements and saw it as an opportunity to both get rid of a townie while simultaneously strengthening his own defense (after all, if a large part of your view is that the scumteam is gamma / elements, one element of that being proven wrong should make you doubt the other part. something something bayes).

(also, maybe i shouldn't call that "equally as possible", because i think it's actually less likely)

of course, i don't think it's actually

all that important

. but still.

I'm glad you replaced in NSG~!

Next time try not replacing in right before I get brutally murdered

woow, look at the ego on mister paragon here thinking that he'll get nightkilled when my reads

obviously

have the scumteam quaking in their boots

(i'll try to next time)

[northsidegal]

so be honest with me

do you guys floss daily

[northsidegal]

i got this water flossing thing recently which has been pretty nice, i have actually been flossing much more than i used to

the only thing is i don't really know how effective it is compared to regular flossing, or i guess just how effective it is at all. i could just be spraying water into my mouth for two minutes every day like an idiot

[northsidegal]

I don't floss at all and I really should

Last dentist appointment they told my mouth would be rated at like a C+/B-

dental hygiene is pretty important i think

flossing is a pain though. if you want to not use the same area of floss (is there a word for a specific length of floss? floss tape? floss line?) you have to pull out a huge length of it, wrap it a lot around your fingers and then sort of unwrap down the line. so if you pull anything out from your teeth, is it just supposed to end up on your fingers and you wash your hands afterwards?

i feel like a lot of people have to be placebo-ing themselves when it comes to flossing. especially if you use those things where it's just the one length of floss on a stick or whatever which makes it a lot easier to do. i'm under the impression that you're not supposed to use the same area of floss for multiple teeth so shouldn't that be ineffective? maybe it's still more effective than not flossing at all. wonder waht the effectiveness is compared to water flossers

i need like a seven part DVD box set containing a detailed scientific breakdown of the effectiveness of these methods and a tuotrial on the best way to do it honestly

[northsidegal]

floss is a noun and a verb huh and the verb is just to use the noun

[northsidegal]

well excuse me for carying about dental hygeine

[northsidegal]

i don't like the point i'm about to make because it feels like confirmation bias in that it just supports what i already think, but it seems to me given that mafia seem more concerned with keeping their jailkeeper than eliminating a conftown that they consider it important. i would wager to try to protect themselves from the vig shot, which would seemingly point more towards mafia being in the pool of people more suspected rather than less suspected, so more towards {elements, kaz}, less towards {2ndchosen, lunar, unwnd}

one problem with this is that even if they protect themselves from the vig shot, town collectively knows about the jailkeeper and so the vig could've just claimed where the shot went. that would mean that it'd be important to also kill the vig, so that town wouldn't figure out who they shot and have a soft guilty. so zito was probably a vig suspect shot?

[northsidegal]

also i think wagon analysis on yesterday is probably not actually all that useful. it's basically a certainty that scum were bussing hayker so really the only meaningful insight would be if you had some argument as to why some particular position on the wagon itself was more scummy than another

[northsidegal]

i am a little sad that i won't get my bragging rights for the instant scumteam prediction, but maybe i can at least have two out of three

[northsidegal]

it's absolutely worth considering the world in which zito was killed for his reads over his potential for being a vig so just to make that clear, his scumreads yesterday seemed to be:

unwnd:

Honestly, unless I'm all sorts of wrong about this game and like the NPOM/unwnd slot is scum it feels like mafia have given up.

Can you expand on your NPOM/unwnd town read please

I'm still curious about your NPOM townread.

lunar:

Lunar does the scum thing of throwing shade, presuming intent in the worst light possible. They're either scum or exceptionally bad town, and either way need to be removed before endgame.

* I don't really think Lunar is town

those seem to be the main ones, at least on a quick skim

[northsidegal]

i would like to hear people's thoughts on the merits of a massclaim today

[northsidegal]

i also think that we never

really

hammered out a truly satisfying reason for agar being killed, and with more insight now we might be able to look back and figure out a better reason. at the very least it helps to know for certain that hayker was scum.

I think NSG makes a very good point that we should look into. Especially the bit about scum!unwnd

don't try to twist what i say for yourself.

[northsidegal]

Would love to yeet within {Hayker/NPOM/LM} today.

No desire to yeet within {PZ/GE/Alch/Elements} today.

{PP/Kazyan/Swims/Chosen} don't feel like flips where they'd give enough information as currently constructed, but there is likely some scumbag in there.

VOTE: Hayker

[northsidegal]

i would like to hear people's thoughts on the merits of a massclaim today

I see no way that this would benefit the town.

on further reflection i think you're actually right.

[northsidegal]

To elaborate, there's no pressure or FoS, just a "Hey I don't like you go away!". It's cheap and easy to tell someone to buzz off but with no actual pressure or analysis.

not everything needs to be pressure or analysis.

This also feels like Mafia throwing out an idea that would benefit them, and then backing off immediately when the idea gets shut down.

i think that your understanding of the way that scum plays is flawed. you also assume—and i say this while knowing full well that i am not very good at scum—that i am an absolutely

terrible

player. i'm not stupid. if i were scum proposing some idea to benefit me as scum, i wouldn't propose it without any sort of at least plausible justification. i wouldn't just throw some plan to benefit scum out with no reasoning and then back down the instant someone says "i disagree". i think that my progression there really only makes sense as genuine, and my lack of elaboration was deliberate.

[northsidegal]

HWS/NSG Scumread - calls for role fishing on HWS and nsg now, NSG even said I'm "pocketing" by simply providing analysis in 1022 which seems a subtle way of buddying town.

this is an either incredibly mistaken or incredibly dishonest reading of what i said in 1022. i said that a post like 536 was "the perfect way to pocket me because..." as a way of saying that i really like that style of post.

considering the fact that i

was not in the game

at the time of 536, implying that that comment was me saying that you're pocketing me seems incredibly silly.

[northsidegal]

and, again, on the "role fishing", i'd point you to 1142. i may not be great at scum but i am certainly not stupid, and stupid is what i would have to be in order for that to be me "role fishing" as scum.

and no, serial killers are not possible in a mini normal.

[northsidegal]

This line of argument isn't convincing. "You're accusing me of a bad move, but I don't make bad moves" is some seriously weak tea.

No, not especially. Something similar

could

be applied (fallaciously) in almost any scenario, where someone accuses you of something scummy and you claim that you're so good at scum that you would never do that. The thing is that in some (and perhaps a lot of) cases that argument is actually correct. For instance, I would never level the accusation against RadiantCowbells (a well known proficient player as town and scum) that because he hasn't really talked about someone else, that person is probably his partner. That sort of argument might apply more to newbie scum players, but RC is pretty much above that level.

It might sound like I'm starting to get pretty arrogant here, so let me return pretty specifically to what lunar said regarding me. He said that my asking for people's thoughts on a massclaim and then agreeing with someone else that it's a bad idea "feels like Mafia throwing out an idea that would benefit them, and then backing off immediately when the idea gets shut down."

My point is that this argument doesn't make sense for

anyone

except the most amateur players. It relies on, literally taking his words exactly, me as a member of the mafia proposing an idea that would benefit me as scum and then immediately backing down when someone just disagrees. I wouldn't play like that.

Most people

don't play like that. If I, or indeed most anyone, had some plan that I thought would benefit me as scum, I would try to come up with some plausible argument for it, and then if someone pushed back I would make those arguments. I am, as I hope you can see, capable of engaging people in arguments, and so the idea that as scum I would just back down from something seem not grounded in reality.

Essentially, the narrative that lunar proposed is inconsistent with aspects of how almost anyone plays, whereas the actual reality of me just changing my mind makes a lot more sense, because that's what actually happened. It's more about consistency rather than any sort of claim that "i'm too good to make mistakes".

[northsidegal]

I am, as I hope you can see, capable of engaging people in arguments, and so the idea that as scum I would just back down from

some plan I've constructed to benefit the scumteam

seem not grounded in reality.

[northsidegal]

well don't leave us waiting

[northsidegal]

in terms of his reads i think i had these quoted earlier today but my computer crashed before i posted them

Would love to yeet within {Hayker/NPOM/LM} today.

No desire to yeet within {PZ/GE/Alch/Elements} today.

{PP/Kazyan/Swims/Chosen} don't feel like flips where they'd give enough information as currently constructed, but there is likely some scumbag in there.

VOTE: Hayker

[northsidegal]

NSG, how are you reading the NPOM/unwnd slot now?

the gamma townflip obviously means that i need to consider other candidates although i would still consider him as probably townier than other slots

i

think

that my ~reasons~ for townreading the slot are probably still valid. i did a quick look back at the end of day one with the extra flip information we had and i also think that there npom's actions still seem to hold up decently, although i do want to do just a more comprehensive read-through with the extra info. also, as i type this now i wonder whether i should be uncomfortable with how much of my read is really based on npom and how little of it seems to be based on unwnd. not sure.

[northsidegal]

i think that just in general i find npom probably an easier player to evaluate than you. and that isn't even necessarily based on both of you as players, because it is the case that i've looked at what i think is npom's one and only scumgame whereas i have yet to actually do any meta on you (which i probably should)

[northsidegal]

if you'd like to help me townread you it would be a massive help if you could give as long or as short of an explanation as you want as to why you think you're playing your towngame this game and how you think your town and scum metas are meaningfully different (if they are)

i don't expect this or anything, you don't have to if you don't want to and i already lean on you being town more than other slots but it genuinely would help me a lot.

[northsidegal]

i do agree that, assuming elements is scum, npom's reads there are notable for their accuracy. can't comment right now on the other associations, i'll take a look tomorrow

[northsidegal]

scum

[northsidegal]

those two positions seem like the same thing as regards you being scum

[northsidegal]

to clarify: you being scum was never contingent on gamma being scum

[northsidegal]

nsg also seems upset that I have grievances about who was in the slot earlier when most the reads done on NPOM/unwnd come from the NPOM side.

where? quote a single instance of me being upset at someone having grievances with HWS's play.

While the call on "I'm not bad at this game so my actions aren't scummy" hits my thoughts on Hanlon's razor. Sometimes it is just malice, it cost very little to make that call and then backup and go "lol jk that would be a terrible scum move" and nonetheless IC is potentially calling for it.

my point has never been that it's

impossible

for someone to do that. it's that it's far less likely of a scenario than me actually changing my mind. if you think that what you say is

more probable

than what i say then i'd be interested to hear why, but so far all i've heard is an assertion that the scum scenario is what happened without any justification as to why it's more probable than the town scenario.

[northsidegal]

considering the fact that i was not in the game at the time of 536, implying that that comment was me saying that you're pocketing me seems incredibly silly.

this is an either incredibly mistaken or incredibly dishonest reading of what i said in 1022. i said that a post like 536 was "the perfect way to pocket me because..." as a way of saying that i really like that style of post.

My logic was you came in and basically said "this style of post is what I like" which as I said back then felt like a subtle way of buddying up to town. Now maybe it wasn't to overt. I also have the major concern of rolecall from you and HWS, which you've addressed but not really answered me satisfactorily. I don't have a quote from you but for the slot to ask for rolecall from both players yesterday and today felt legitimately weird and your hostile attitude towards the line of questioning makes me want to push it harder.

okay, first of all i'm going to assume that you're admitting that the point about me being upset at someone having grievances with HWS's play was wrong because nothing here relates to that.

as regards my hostile attitude towards the line of questioning, i like to think that i'm generally a pretty relaxed / non-aggressive player and that i've kept the argument pretty focused purely on the reasoning, but obviously everyone reacts to things differently so it's possible i could come across as hostile towards someone else.

So, I'll ask you a question. What benefit would a mass rolecall have had towards the town as of when you called for it and why?

given knowledge of myself being town and dann being an IC, all it would take would be two more confirmed town or very strong townreads in order for the game to be auto-win, from my perspective.

[northsidegal]

yeah sorry i realize we're all basically collectively spinning our wheels here and i am contributing to that

you know when i think about it "spinning our wheels" really sounds like it should be a productive thing and not a way to say that you're being unproductive

anyways, i will probably also be busy tomorrow but after that i'll do what i planned to do and read back through day one. i think i'm still pretty set on elements being scum but obviously reviewing always helps

[northsidegal]

having taken a quick look through kaz's recent posts in his ISO i actually disagree with a lot of his reasoning and find a lot of it (no offense) sort of superficial. granted, i make a lot of reads that people might (and sometimes do) call superficial, because a lot of the reasons i've found to read people on way or another might seem superficial on the surface but are backed up by my experience.

i don't really just bring this up to be a contrarian or argumentative (although i still might do that even if i townread kaz), i bring it up mostly because it sort of seems like motivated reasoning to me (i.e. someone who needs to do something and has to come up with post-hoc justifications for doing it)

[northsidegal]

i realize i've done a lot of talking about reads on myself today so i promise i'm just getting this one out of the way first before moving on (besides, there are only so many people alive and not confirmed as town so it's inevitable that in talking about people's reads you'll come around to yourself)

It's based on how NGS is the only person besides Elements who doesn't appear to have an opinion on who the other Mafia member might be--NSG does not have any scumreads besides Elements. I'm giving Lunar some side-eye, but ultimately a bit of a pass because he's been pecking at everyone for the entire game and I'm just gonna chalk that up to playstyle for now.

this read is sort of weird to me. it's obviously (ostensibly) based on the chart in 1243, but the reasoning itself seems sort of inconsistent. if we look at what kaz says in 1243:

So, to clarify, the case on Elements is that he doesn't seem to have an idea about the scumteam, just a particular person?

In that case, I've gone through everyone's D3 reads, and this is what they look like to me as of post 1242:

Of course, this chart immediately gets outdated because I have to update my own reads based on what I see in it. And what I see is VOTE: northsidegal, followed possibly by Lunar, unless Elements actually does flip as scum and I look like a fool.

it sort of seems like someone saying "is the case on elements this? well actually NSG also does this, so VOTE:NSG". and there's a really conspicuous "the only person besides Elements" in 1247. so is "having a single scumread" actually a valid reason to think that someone is scum, or isn't it? it sort of seems like kaz is trying to downplay that as a reason to scumread elements while simultaneously using it as a reason to scumread me (my personal opinion on how valid of a scumtell it is is mostly irrelevant to this line of reasoning, fyi).

dann sort of brings up this inconsistency or at least questions the validity of it as a scumtell at all and we just get the total nothing response of 1249. faced with the obvious inconsistency of asserting that only having a single scumread is a scumtell and a confirmed town player only having a single scumread, kaz chooses to completely ignore the topic — as i said, which seems like motivated reasoning.

[northsidegal]

i know it sounds stupid but i actually dislike it when i only find information that confirms my prior beliefs because it just feels like confirmation bias, but even with that being said it seems like in kaz's recent posts that he's looking for reasons to give elements an excuse, or some kind of out.

having typed out eleven different potential pairs for scum, kaz singles out a

single one

to rule out immediately based on the imagined bussing being absurd, and none else.

Unrelatedly, excluding myself, here are the possible scum parings:

• unwnd/Elements
  
  
• unwnd/Lunar
  
• unwnd/2ndchosen1
  
• unwnd/northsidegal
  
• Elements/Lunar
  
• Elements/2ndchosen1
  
• Elements/northsidegal
  
• Lunar/2ndchosen1
  
• Lunar/northsidegal
  
• 2ndchosen1/northsidegal

I think we can rule out unwnd/Elements, because Elements started attacking unwnd's slot on Day 2 and has continued that crusade into Day 3. That would just be absurd play for a scum team.

of course, it's possible that he simply saw the first pair on the list and the reasoning came to mind and he wasn't even planning on doing much elaboration past that, but even still it stands out as conspicuous to me to list out all of those teams, have a single thought as to why one of them can't be possible, and then decide that your post is done.

[northsidegal]

the reasoning in 1223 for clearing elements off of associatives is pretty weak to me, and lunar notices this as well. this isn't inherently really scummy in itself though, it's really just a part of my larger point about seemingly motivated reasoning to clear elements.

finally, this is kind of a really weak response:

Don't like how easily Kazyan gave Elements a Town pass.

I don't like it either, per se, since we're running out of leeway on miselims. But I'm trying to sort people here. I'm willing to listen to unwnd's case on Elements, regardless.

i think it's hard to have an opinion on the interactions between hayker and elements that isn't pretty firm on at least one end. it

seems to me

like with that kind of interaction you should either think that it points strongly to them being aligned or strongly to them being non-aligned (i think it's fine to not have an opinion on the subject, especially if one hasn't reviewed as much as they would like, but having reviewed and come out with a mild opinion is what seems unlikely to me). if you're using the interactions to clear elements, i wouldn't really expect one's degree of confidence to be all that low in them in the first place. but even if kaz's townread on elements was only pretty light given the associatives, the way he talks about it here pings me in a way that

does

seem individually scummy, not just in the context of a partner read (warning: tone-read alert). i feel like the normal way that people respond when questioned on light townreads is generally to just own up to it being a light townread, but something about saying "i don't like it either but you know what can you do we're running out of leeway here" seems like looking for justification in external circumstances.

[northsidegal]

anyways, lest i be accused of some inane scum plot i should say that that's all neither here nor there when it comes to who i still think is the best vote today, which is still elements. most of the stuff (although not all) i just said there is pre-flip associative as the kids say, and would obviously be completely recontextualized (or just contextualized) depending on elements' flip. so with our timer getting uncomfortably close to deadline it's probably time for this

VOTE: elements

[northsidegal]

thought i'd give a brief overview of some of the reasons that i think elements is scum. i still haven't reviewed day one like i've been meaning to but i have done some ISO-ing and some meta-ing.

luckily, elements themself sort of nicely sums up how a lot of my thoughts on them being scum tie together:

So you're saying that scum are more likely to pop into the thread, comment on a read that has nothing to do with the current topic of conversation, then leave.
That's not how scum play. Scum try to imitate the solving mindset of town and emulate that in their posting. I am significantly more town read as scum than as town because of this. Scum don't play my town game. It's too erratic.

i basically disagree completely with the argument elements makes here and, in a large sense, agree with the characterization of how scum play in the first line. of course, there are a lot of different schemas for different "types" of scum players and even the same player might play scum differently from game to game, so i'll go into a bit more of specifics. i just wanted to bring that up as sort of a broad overview, and because i think that it

loosely

actually does describe elements' play this game and why i think it's scum—there's been a lot of popping in, a lot of questions asked and votes placed, but in the end none of it has seemed to actually "coalesce" into something that leads me to believe that elements actually has real thoughts and is actually trying to solve while playing the game (no offense).

if you look back at elements' day one, there are a lot of votes and a lot of questions that seem like scumhunting, but again it doesn't ever seem to coalesce into a coherent view of the gamestate. i never really get the impression that elements is gathering townreads or anything, despite a claim to the contrary (276) and a lot of questions on the subject of townhunting (291 293 294 296). there's never any sort of readslist, there's never any sort of defense of a townread that might be getting pressured, there seems to only really be votes and pop-in questions. it's entirely possible that this is just a lazy game for elements, but there really is only so much that can be explained by playstyle and in-game laziness.

i think it's also worth contrasting their play here with another game. element's iso here is superficially pretty similar to their one in this game: there are a lot of vote switches, and i even noticed an "outrageous thing" that people seemed to scumread (the "switching votes" thing this game, the "readslist" in 374 in that game). i think it's worth highlighting a few differences though, differences which i think are pretty key.

there's an attempt at casing someone, and then a subsequent push to get people to follow onto the wagon:

Spoiler:

Here is why A50 is scum:

Anyone who votes me is going to eat a bullet tonight. You have been forewarned.

Claims to be scum in the first post. This could be construed as nai but I disagree. Town coming into a game wants to find out who is town and who is scum. Scum want everyone to think they're town. Opening by claiming scum is, I agree, very WIFOMy from scum. Which is why it's more likely to come from them. They want us to second guess ourselves when considering them.
Claims scum again in 136

Just reading through A50's iso, there's very little actual content, but that's most likely due to the pace of the game so far now I think about it.

That would make N_M the seventh scum to be caught on D1. WELL DONE, Town.

congratulating the town. unconscious distancing. not including himself is the town group. -> scum

Starts scum reading IV for being IV. This is opportunistic and very different tonally to the rest of A50's iso.

VOTE: dave

Weird time to be voting dave tbh

A50/dave pairing!

this is the strongest read I've got
VOTE: a50

The N_M wagon is stupid and pointless

this is true

What are your thoughts on a50?

Eh I’m not liking a50 posts now but it might be the mixture of troll plus aggression

help me push him then

@ns, can I convince you to join in on a50?

there's evidence that elements actually

has

townreads, in the form of questioning wagons on people and just straight up declarations:

Spoiler:

I don't rlly get why N_M is the biggest wagon. It just seems like people have jumped onto it because they can and it's easy.

ns is town and anyone saying otherwise is just wrong

iv is also town

and, in a moment we can directly contrast with day one of this day, we can see clear expressed thoughts on that day's impending hammer:

Spoiler:

Days ending soon we need to start consolidating

I agree. My preferences are a50 and sircakez. I'll fold to N_M if we can't agree on anyone.

ugh
VOTE: not_mafia

E-1
unless I can't count

contrast with this game, where despite a declared happiness with the alchemist wagon, we get no commentary at all for hayker being put at L-1:

Spoiler:

nope, I happy with the Alchemist wagon
there are still 2 people I haven't voted yet
I'm hoping for a day 1 yeet somewhere in [Alch, Ben slot, NPOM, Gamma]

Intent to hammer

huh, I can't count

VOTE: Hayker
E-1

VOTE: Alchemist
e-1

my point is, in essence, this: when people genuinely have reads, you can generally find evidence that they do. i think there's a serious lack of evidence that elements actually has reads this game, and there's only so much that can be put down to playstyle or this being an off-game, especially when even direct comparison with another game comes up unfavorably. the evidence just honestly isn't there, or if it is then i don't see it.

[northsidegal]

contrast with this game, where despite a declared happiness with the alchemist wagon, we get no commentary at all for hayker being put at L-1:

by the way, not sure how relevant this is or whatever, but maybe a year back (or jeez, maybe even two years at this point) i analyzed the data for every mini normal across the entire year to see where scum tended to end up on day one wagons

on day one scum lynch wagons scum was significantly more likely to be at the end of the wagon, either the hammer vote or one preceding the hammer vote. not sure if that still holds up, might check it again once i get the time and the inclination to spin up a spreadsheet again

[northsidegal]

someone come talk to me

[northsidegal]

it's only just striking me now as i try and fail to fall sleep that drinking two massive cups of coffee late at night is probably the cause of both that long series of posts as well as my current sleeplessness

anyone reasonable would agree that there was no way to see this coming

[northsidegal]

It's fair to say I have motivated reasoning for voting you: it's because I dug through a bunch of ISOs and made an entire chart to try and find that mythical final piece of information needed to decide between the pool of {unwnd,northsidegal,Lunar}. And I need that information to be there, because my position of "Elements is town" is obviously a hot take right now, which requires a strong alternative.

i think this is either a misunderstanding of what i mean by motivated reasoning or essentially a scumclaim or maybe just admitting to lazy play. but at this point i think there's more than enough information to make a pretty well reasoned argument so i would still call that scummy

[northsidegal]

you once again basically just dodged someone pointing out inconsistencies / the questionable validity of your current vote & line of reasoning

[northsidegal]

then why do you believe what you do / why is your vote still where it is

[northsidegal]

like as far as i can tell you're just agreeing with me as to what you're doing. so i guess my question is, assuming you aren't basically just claiming scum, why are you behaving this way as town?

assuming you agree that starting with a conclusion on someone's alignment and then working backwards to justify it is a bad thing / a thing that townies shouldn't do, i guess

[northsidegal]

UNVOTE:

[northsidegal]

Are we sure these second night kills come from a vigilante rather than a serial killer?

@Dann, According to the wiki there is a Normal variant of Serial Killer. so possible?

dann any thoughts on these two posts or am i officially going conspiracy theory here

[northsidegal]

the answer is a genuine no because i couldn't

[northsidegal]

Yes, I'm agreeing with you about what I'm doing. I'm not claiming scum; I'm just bad at forming logical arguments and am not always aware of when they're terrible. But then someone shows me why they suck and, oh, right. The reason that I'm folding is because my argument is logically incorrect, even though I have a gut feeling based on all of the posts that I've looked at that you're scum, but, like, I can't say that, because we're trying to have an adult discussion.

for the record (and this is a bit of a tangent here), i don't actually really care all that much about winning arguments or "out-debating" people, at least not inherently. obviously if i want to do anything with my reads i need to convince people on them, but i would much rather have a game where i had perfect reads but couldn't convince anyone of anything rather than a game where i convinced everyone to agree with me completely and ended up wrong, because i care more about my reads strength as a skill rather than convincing people as a skill (which, now that i think about it, might play into why i prefer town so much more than scum. never thought about it that way before).

in that sense i care a lot more about people's "self-actualization" in games a lot more than me having more logical arguments than them or whatever, and a lot of the times when i might make an argument at someone or pose a line of questioning to them it's about teasing out that self-actualization and internal thought process rather than in the moment trying to convince anyone of anything. at this point some hypothetical person might say "nsg this just sounds like you're describing scumhunting but in a really pretentious and self-aggrandizing manner", and to that i might say that i feel as though a lot of people scumhunt or ask questions to their scumreads with the end goal being that if the other person's arguments can be proven illogical then that means they're scum and if they're proven logical or consistent or whatever then they're proven town, but really i feel as though the

thought process itself

that the other person is going through is a lot more important than the conclusion itself (at least, a lot of the time – obviously you can still sometimes read people through their conclusions themselves rather than solely the process). i'm also not really pretending that this is some unique thing to me or something that i've "discovered" or anything.

i guess the point i am really trying to make here is that i would really prefer in a lot of cases to just see someone else's thought process clearly rather than beat that person in an argument, because the former helps a lot more with actually gathering reads on people. it doesn't help me at all when elements looks at everything i wrote and says "i can't argue against this". it might be gratifying to some people to have made some great argument that even the subject has to admit to, but that isn't my end goal – my end goal is to have good reads. similarly, i barely even know how to react to me posing that whole line of questioning to you and you saying "yeah, i guess that was kind of illogical". what i'm actually interested in is

why you thought what you did

, even if you now think it's illogical.

[northsidegal]

mm, after having done some more meta i think i'm back (if i was ever even gone in the first place) to thinking that elements scum is really the only responsible conclusion i can come to. i say "responsible conclusion" specifically because it just seems like almost all of the evidence that i look at points towards that direction, so what justification would i have to just ignore that? for instance, it

seemed

at first that elements had the tendency to post only around 50-60 posts in scum games consistently, i.e. was a sort-by-postcount player. but if you actually examine the post-per-day rates this "trend" was broken in mini theme 2094 and 2161, both of which had fairly high rates and were scum games. (if you think this is a ridiculous method of analysis, it's worked before)

i also really just can't seem to find a comparable town game when it comes to elements' sort of floating nature day one except for scum games, especially the naked and uncommented on L-1 vote (as also seen in mini theme 2412, another scum game)

aside from paranoia about other teams potentially making other people higher "priority" scumreads, the one thing i can think of in elements' defense is this:

Anyone else think NPOM's posts so far today have been severely lacking?
And the one about role madness PR fishing?

it

seems to me

that if the scumteam actually thinks that this is PR fishing then unwnd ought to have been shot over papa zito, and thus a scumteam with elements would have shot unwnd, whereas a scumteam like kaz / 2nd could have thought that zito was the vig and then planned that if they missed (or discussed after they missed – daytalk is enabled if i recall correctly) they'd propose the idea of the vig being a serial killer to try to get some fishing there. this isn't

exceptional

evidence, though. given that we (probably) know that the scumteam has a jailkeeper, it's possible that NPOM was blocked night one and yet the penguin shot still went through, and thus the scumteam knows that unwnd isn't the vig.

[northsidegal]

i guess the point i am really trying to make here is that i would really prefer in a lot of cases to just see someone else's thought process clearly rather than beat that person in an argument, because the former helps a lot more with actually gathering reads on people. it doesn't help me at all when elements looks at everything i wrote and says "i can't argue against this". it might be gratifying to some people to have made some great argument that even the subject has to admit to, but that isn't my end goal – my end goal is to have good reads. similarly, i barely even know how to react to me posing that whole line of questioning to you and you saying "yeah, i guess that was kind of illogical". what i'm actually interested in is

why you thought what you did

, even if you now think it's illogical.

Okay, so here was what I thought:

1) If "not looking for a scumteam" is a valid reason to consider Elements scummy, then it's a valid reason to consider other people scummy if they follow the same pattern, all else being equal.
2) The chart indicates that there are three people who behave in accordance with 1): Elements, northsidegal, and Dannflor. Therefore, these people are more likely to be scum.
3) Dannflor is town, by mod fiat, and can be excluded from consideration.
4) I have, or had reason to believe, that Elements is town. This is, or was, due to Hayker's D1 and D2 behavior.
5) I do not have any reason to believe that northsidegal is town. Therefore, northsidegal is now scummier to me.
6) All else being equal, I had previously considered unwnd, northsidegal, and Lunar to be equally scummy.
7) northsidegal is now the most scummy person. Therefore, I should vote northsidegal.

talk to me about this gut feeling of yours that i'm scummy

did it come about before or after this thought process? and are there any posts at all you can even just point to to elaborate on it?

[northsidegal]

Either way, the Town ends up with one confirmed townie on Day 4, but in the massclaim case, it has a good chance of losing its Night 3 vig shot

there isnt going to be a night three vig shot unless we lynch scum today. not really here to litigate any of that reasoning though

anyways haha time for other people who aren't me to say things

[northsidegal]

Are there merits of a no-elim day?
There is currently the Dann, Kazyan, NSG, LM, Ele, unwnd, 2nd. This is 7 people and I will also assume 2 mafia.
Here are potential Routes that will be taken tonight.

DayVoteHit/VigiShootHit
DayVoteHit/VigiShootMiss
DayVoteMiss/VigiShootHit
DayVoteMiss/VigiShootMiss
DayVoteMiss/VigiShootSkip

Don't Use These Weird Programmer Ways of Saying Stuff Just Say +Day -Night Or Something Like That

anyways the answer to your question is no, as far as i can tell. assuming our vig has an ounce of sense they will holster tonight unless we hit scum today, in which case it is always the right choice to shoot. if we hit today, not shooting leads us to 5 alive 1 scum from which we have two town-directed elimination shots before it's game over for sure. even if the vig lives to 3 person lylo, they can't shoot scum after lynching incorrectly because the town wincon stipulates that at least one townie must still be alive. so to reiterate the "holster after scum lynch today" line gets us two town directed eliminations. contrast shooting, which gets us one with the vig shot, one lynch when we're at 4 people alive 1 scum, and then another potential vig shot (assuming the vig lives). assuming the vig dies tonight we only get two town-directed eliminations, but it's possible we would get three, so it's optimal to shoot.

[northsidegal]

i would like some commentary from you on your current reads

[northsidegal]

after all we do you know only have two days left

[northsidegal]

i have once again decided to drink a massive cup of coffee at near midnight. i can already feel the heart palpitations setting in

[northsidegal]

nsg you still awake?

yep

[northsidegal]

I'm not a huge fan of #1307

like at all

it's classic iioa and despite bringing up two posts from two people in a somewhat critical manner he dodges really giving any reads, which is pretty important giving how little time we have

earlier when i unvoted elements i was considering kaz first given he's the commonality in kaz/elements and kaz/2nd, but then i re-metad elements

[northsidegal]

kaz/elements and kaz/2nd

(which currently seem to me to be the two most likely teams, if it wasn't clear)

thing is i don't have a lot of reasons to scumread 2nd individually and honestly the connections between kaz and 2nd are a little sparse, at least purely from memory

[northsidegal]

I'm not a huge fan of #1307

like at all

it's classic iioa and despite bringing up two posts from two people in a somewhat critical manner he dodges really giving any reads, which is pretty important giving how little time we have

earlier when i unvoted elements i was considering kaz first given he's the commonality in kaz/elements and kaz/2nd, but then i re-metad elements

apologies if I missed this, does this mean you aren't considering 2nd/elements?

this isn't a great answer because it's basically circular but i'm not really considering that (at least right now) because it hasn't occurred to me once that it could be a thing. not to say i haven't even thought it possible, but at no time during the game has it come up in my thinking, if that makes sense.

also, if that's not really good enough (which, admittedly, it isn't), 2nd isn't behaving how i'd expect given someone with elements as a scumbuddy. it seems like elements is on the chopping block and so you expect the buddy to either be defending, bussing or chainsawing, i'd think. you could say 2nd is chainsawing unwnd who is also elements' push but it'd be a weak chainsaw. might just be the way 2nd pushes things even as scum in this situation but my money's on that not being the case

[northsidegal]

maybe a little crazy, lunar has been going pretty hard on elements which i guess defies my expectations of how a scum lunar plays around his scumbuddy

[northsidegal]

I think scum's goal here is surviability. Do what seems the most townie.

by the way i feel like this type of analysis is sort of flawed

obviously you can postulate what you think scum's goal is and what actions they're trying to take but i think that in doing so it's really easy to miss the fact that often what scum

can

do and what they want to do don't align

for instance an analysis along this line of "scum want survivability" might say that elements is facing a ton of pressure, is under the spotlight and even owned up to a lot of the case on him, which doesn't align with what scum are trying to do, so he might be more likely town. but that ignores that a lot of that is external circumstances outside of elements' control, and that given the choice they'd likely not be in the spotlight at all

just to be clear i'm practically not even talking to you at all and just talking to myself because i have no idea if you're even thinking anything along the lines of the imaginary opponent i'm arguing against in this post, but i just felt like saying this i guess. that one sentence you posted just sort of got me thinking about this

[northsidegal]

maybe a little crazy, lunar has been going pretty hard on elements which i guess defies my expectations of how a scum lunar plays around his scumbuddy

I thought that too but I just find their read histories of each other weird

fair, checking lunar's ISO today has been more of a death tunnel on elements than i realized before you brought it up

[northsidegal]

I also think what town thinks scum's goal should be is often not what scum end up actually doing simply because actively going for that specific goal is out of their skill range. Meaning I think there's a lot of scum players that just don't know how to play for specific goals beyond the basics of trying to look townie

this is definitely true, only the more "power" scumplayers on site really actively go hard on goals that benefit them, most scum players tend to just try to imitate their town game

funnily enough in my experience this sometimes makes "powerwolves" easier to catch, because both they make themselves really prominent through their pushing and they don't try to imitate their town game as much. i've caught alisae a few times like that, for example. the real problem there comes in pushing them

[northsidegal]

It just comes out of nowhere and I don't get as much of a sense that Lunar is trying to solve the game this phase than I do from Kazyan or even 2ndchosen

how set are you on elements scum in the first place?

Elements has pretty much been close to the most common scumread and I don't really feel anyone has defended him? Why would scum after losing one mate just decide to throw the other aside unless they were very confident they were fooling town in the first place.

i pointed out what felt like motivated reasoning from kaz to not scumread elements earlier but i sort of come to agree with you in that his reaction after my posts to him where he voted elements really gave me pause.

[northsidegal]

Yeah I myself don't even know how to play in that goal oriented way at scum, I'm still stuck at that town-emulation level

and honestly, I don't really think any of our current suspects can play to that level? admittedly I don't have a lot of experience with any of them but it's usually pretty easy to tell when a player has that type of range

yeah, i think nobody in this game plays scum at that level really, i guess it's just an interesting subject to talk about i feel

[northsidegal]

You saying that does not help the paranoia I was referring to You/Kaz already lol

why

[northsidegal]

i won't go hard on self meta here (in fact this will probably be my one and only post on it this game), but i am hilariously obviously playing my town game here. i don't think i've ever once made a post like my case on elements as scum

[northsidegal]

can't say i fully understand what you mean

[northsidegal]

how set are you on elements scum in the first place

not like "will never reconsider dead set" set, but like, pretty set?

okay same

[northsidegal]

I'm absolutely confident one of 2nd/Elements flips scum, and now it's been a case of being choosy and determining which reality feels the most true to me. I just need a bit more before I determine if I'm flipping my vote or staying on here. Would you be willing to trust my judgment (despite being wrong on Gamma) if that were the case?

are you talking here about partners, like who's next if we flip scum today?

also, sorry if you said this already, but do you think 2nd / elements is a likely team or just they're individual scumreads

[northsidegal]

meh

i'd think lunar elements before 2nd elements personally

you can have full credit if you're right though

[northsidegal]

yeah, I pretty much said as much in the post. At this point I'm just trying to pull any kind of tell I can, like aggressive jumping on what would be a bad suggestion. is it not something you have done?

uh, no? i'm not sure why both you and kaz seem to think that you have to "scrounge" or whatever for reads at this point when we have an entire game to look back on and analyze. i'm not trying to be arrogant or anything but i think that it's not really all that hard and i do a pretty good job of taking a look at the whole game in posts like 1261

[northsidegal]

god. dann please let me know when you get online

this game is just... unreal

[northsidegal]

NSG - unsure if death tunneling on Ele or if opportunistic crusade. has ~reasons~ for thinking the way she does.

by the way, i'm not sure where you get off on reducing a read that i have explained, elaborated on and clarified to death a "death tunnel" or an "opportunistic crusade", but if you're actually town here then you honestly just need to try harder. like it's completely just not a fair way to play a game where you're meant to be on a team (i.e. the town) to do this

also pretty scummy to be focusing this hard on a word that i've said literally twice in my entire iso!! neither here nor there though i guess

[northsidegal]

like this genuinely makes me upset here and maybe that's misguided because you're scum but only two people can be scum and yet more than two people are playing in just a really pretty annoying way!

we've spun our wheels here for six days straight and now here in the eleventh hour your reads still seem to be shifting on a dime like some (hilarious programming joke incoming, this is how you know i'm really trying to get through to you) markov chain. shifting your reads isn't a bad thing in itself but i think that i and the rest of the game—especially with 24 hours left—deserve a little more justification than

one single line

. where's the

trajectory

? where's the

process

?

i really just can't help but feel bitter when i've put an absolute ton of effort into this game reading, re-reading and going through people's metas but nobody except the one other person who's already confirmed seems willing to even

try

putting a similar kind of effort in.

[northsidegal]

okay, it's fair to be skeptical of meta as a justification. i disagree pretty strongly with that and i think that overwhelmingly evidence is in the favor of meta as a tool being valid, but we don't even have to litigate that.

a lot of what i say can really be justified on elements' play this game alone. so are you really that strongly confident in your analysis of hayker's play being non-aligned with elements that it overrides everything else?

[northsidegal]

see, i said that anyone who really analyzed hayker's play as regard elements would probably come out of it thinking pretty strongly one way or another, and so you might think that given my scumreading of elements i would also be pushing that as an angle for them being scum, but i haven't actually really done that. why? it's because i think that actually analyzing hayker's play in the first place—and i mean analyzing it meaningfully—is probably pretty hard. it's pretty easy to look at it and go "obviously this weirdness around elements was him talking to his partner" just as easy as it is to say "he would obviously never do this to his partner". the commonality between both of those arguments is that they're based on basically nothing except how the reader feels hayker might play, which isn't a great foundation.

deeper analyses

could be made

if, say, we went into how we think hayker personally might play scum and how he might relate to his scumbuddies, and how the scumteam might have been feeling at certain times of the game and how much they coordinated and how much was planned and so on and so forth. all of those would provide a little more of a justification for viewing hayker's play as aligned one way or another with elements, but that'd all be pretty complicated, and i don't think anyone has really done that.

[northsidegal]

that's fair. i will concede that i may have been slightly uncharitable to both you and 2nd in terms of not really giving you the leeway that i normally extend to other newbies. it might actually even be the case that lunar has more experience than you and yet in my mind he's the one i've been analyzing under the schema of a newer player.

i think part of this is because i was under the impression that you, 2nd and hayker all had some kind of experience off-site, but it's i suppose just occurring to me now that when he said he invited you guys to play here it might not have meant "invited from another mafia site". also, earlier in the game i was under the impression that you were an alt of someone else i knew, and the lingering thought of "this is an experienced player" might not have ever really gone away even if the thought that you were someone i knew did.

so, apologies for that.

[northsidegal]

yeah, i guess i probably have said some stuff that i probably either would not have said or would have worded a bit differently if i were more actively cognizant of how new you guys are. i certainly don't think i've been rude (and if you feel that way then i apologize), but i guess i would have been more charitable.

that lens also does sort of shift my thinking reads-wise a little bit. at least, off the top of my head, i might be more inclined to disregard 2nd's read shifts as scummy and slightly more inclined to consider kaz partnered with elements.

[northsidegal]

see, i said that anyone who really analyzed hayker's play as regard elements would probably come out of it thinking pretty strongly one way or another, and so you might think that given my scumreading of elements i would also be pushing that as an angle for them being scum, but i haven't actually really done that. why? it's because i think that actually analyzing hayker's play in the first place—and i mean analyzing it meaningfully—is probably pretty hard. it's pretty easy to look at it and go "obviously this weirdness around elements was him talking to his partner" just as easy as it is to say "he would obviously never do this to his partner". the commonality between both of those arguments is that they're based on basically nothing except how the reader feels hayker might play, which isn't a great foundation.

deeper analyses

could be made

if, say, we went into how we think hayker personally might play scum and how he might relate to his scumbuddies, and how the scumteam might have been feeling at certain times of the game and how much they coordinated and how much was planned and so on and so forth. all of those would provide a little more of a justification for viewing hayker's play as aligned one way or another with elements, but that'd all be pretty complicated, and i don't think anyone has really done that.

I suppose I don't currently have the range to do that. I know the guy out of game but I don't know enough of the game to make inferences on what he might do. That previous thought has given me a more positive look towards meta reads.

PEDIT: In short my experience tends to be more Among Us and Town of Salem. make of that what you will, Forum posting is certainly not my forte

i apologize for calling you lazy or saying your play was unacceptable or whatever. i take that back. once again, i thought that you guys had more forum mafia experience, and i think that in your case specifically i thought some of your analyses earlier in the game were pretty detailed and so i just sort of imagined you as one of the more experienced players that i tend to play games with.

i guess it hasn't really occurred to me until right now that i might be the most experienced player in this playerlist (even despite dann's 2012 join date). it's not a position that i'm used to being in.

[northsidegal]

Joindate doesn't reflect my mafia experience NSG, I was hoping my posts made that evidently clear

well i mean clearly we've demonstrated that i don't have an entirely rock solid intuitive grasp of how experienced people are based on their posts

my point wasn't really about whether or not i am the most experienced, just that the thought itself that i

could be

just hadn't occurred to me at all despite the fact that like half of this game is newer players

[northsidegal]

how in favor / opposed are you guys to wrapping up this day phase some time in the next, say, five hours

[northsidegal]

i'm ready for hammer any time and can give the L-1 vote when needed

[northsidegal]

is that the green light to end the day then, dann?

if i'm alive tomorrow i'm not going to just ignore your other reads but just asking in case there's anything else pressing you want made clear before day's over

[northsidegal]

here goes nothing then

VOTE: elements

[northsidegal]

how funny would it be if you survived another day because scum tries to shoot the vig instead

[northsidegal]

bleh, i'm still rusty.

great game everyone, I had fun playing with you all. thanks to datisi for designing/modding, that mod thread was a fun read.