Alright, not quite sure where to begin here, but I'll try it from a play-by-play approach of the game.
I'll start with from the moment I received my role PM. From there, my attention immediately shifted towards two topics:
-Players in the game
-Roles in the game.
Which, when combined, would result in strategy for the game.
For players in the game...something well-known about me is that normally, I will go into full detail about every single player, my experiences with them, and how we as a scumteam should handle them. How to mitigate damage, how to treat them, how to interact with them, etc. However, given this playerlist, my conclusion was quite simple:
In post 3, mastina wrote:Btw, in this playerlist, the only player I'd be even remotely concerned about in terms of play would be Wisdom.
We might get fucked over by literally any player by ROLE (in which case, fuck KittyMo for making the scumteam so weak and allowing the town that chance), but Wisdom is literally the only player on this playerlist who has the charisma necessary to push for a lynch. Errant can obvtown, Momrangal may be problematic, implosion may be competent, and Espeonage may be competent, but it is incredibly doubtful the players in this town are going to work together. There's very little town cohesion potential; nobody here will really act as a "town glue".
Wisdom, while he is highly likely to be divisive and antagonistic, also has the best shot of uniting the town in spite of people loathing what he'll do. (Think kinda like RadiantCowbells there.) Get him dead N1, and we're fairly set for the rest of the game.
This is a game where you can push literally whoever you want, be it town or scumbuddy. Do whatever you feel like doing. Do whatever you want to do. The one thing to avoid is acting in a way displaying too much info since that can and will compromise us; always keep in mind that a town-you is dumber than you think and that you're not actually as likely to see those things as town, but we can distance, we can bus, we can buddy, we can have free reign on what to do and when. Provided we eliminate the largest obstacles first.
In other words. All I needed to do to secure a play-based win was remove the singular linchpin (or is it lynchpin?
) of the town: Wisdom.
Now it
just so happened
I lucked out and the town had bad luck of the draw that their strongest town player by play was ALSO their strongest town power role, so in that regard, I can say I had a large boost from the onset; from the moment Wisdom was assigned his role and I determined he was the nightkill, the fate of the town was pretty much sealed. I was largely anticipating this being an easy win, in fact.
Then comes the roles. Immediately from having what amounted to an all-goon setup, I knew--assuming a reasonably-balanced game (which it was!)--the town would not be made up of super-strong roles, and most likely would not have a large number of them. They would have around 5 VTs give or take one, and I had a fair idea what the composition of those roles were. No ungated cops/watchers flying around; we were going to be dealing with investigatives around the strength of tracker, and protectives like a doctor or even bodyguard. Roles boosting the town, but which outside of luck couldn't win the game for town.
From there, I did my homework. For all players with less than 60 games' worth of games, I researched what roles they had been. mutant having PR-slipped, I was able to determine he was EITHER: a hider OR an innocent child. I didn't know WHICH, but I knew he was ONE of them. Come D2 with his Awoo innocent 'crumb I knew he was breadcrumbing hider. (Incidentally, this meant that come D6 when mutant was revealed a liar, I knew precisely what his actual role was instead of hider. But more on that later.)
I also determined there'd be a tracker in the game, although I wrongly attributed it to being BulletNLynchproof. (Oops!) Once BNL was claimed, and mutant was claimed, I knew most of the roles in the setup; with Wisdom's death N1 and the worst's claim D2, I had the setup nailed including the presence of a Named Townie in the form of the backup vig.
In came the scum strategy.
This was not my A game, believe it or not.
Or rather.
This was more of a standard scumastina game.
I've recently played some more lackluster scumgames.
In each, I've promised, "soon, you'll get to see an absolutely new scumastina who is at her very best".
You might be inclined to think that'd be this game, but while I did well, I knew this game was always going to be a walk in the park because the town just didn't have the composition where it'd ever be able to realistically win. So I was actually a bit lazy. I did what I felt like doing, rather than doing what was necessarily the smartest, best things to be doing.
The Espeonage lynch and the Kokichi Oma double-target were unfortunate (although in the case of the latter this can also be thought of as fortunate), but I knew they'd only slow down the inevitable scum win.
Which brings me to a couple of my lylo comments.
ON SCUM BEING LYNCHED WITH SCUM'S HELP D1:
I meant this, that it was something that happens more frequently than not.
However, there was a contradiction in my narrative, Awoo/Myloninja, that you could have picked up on.
I was trying to have my cake and eat it, too.
I was arguing that because I called Espeonage scum, that was evidence I was town; I was arguing that the only reason I wasn't on the scum lynch is because I was V/LA (which is true). But at the same time, contradicting this, I was arguing that scum lynches on D1 often have scum on it.
In other words,
I was telling you that I should have been counted as if I were on the lynch
, which would then account for scum being lynched on D1 with the help of both scum.
ON MY DEFENSE OF KOKICHI OMA:
I maintain that, mechanically speaking, it was better to have vigged him than to let him live, especially knowing the setup had no scum roles to interfere.
However, this runs afoul of not one, but two factors you could have picked up on.
FACTOR NUMBER ONE: I was operating with too much knowledge.
With the benefit of hindsight
, yes, it was known that vigging him was better, but this was knowledge I only knew because I already had deduced the setup from my scum role PM. Had I been town, it was less likely I'd have known that and more likely I'd have argued that Lynches are the only guaranteed tool for death.
(That having been said. I'm not so sure. Town-mastina IS actually kinda psychic sometimes. When I stated that on D2 and restated it during lylo, it wasn't a lie. I can deduce facts about the setup as town that by all rights I
shouldn't
be able to deduce, and yet, somehow I did and do.)
FACTOR NUMBER TWO: While it was mechanically better for the town to vig Kokichi Oma than lynch him, that doesn't mean there was no scum agenda in arguing for it. Specifically, Kokichi Oma living into the night would have allowed me freedom to argue the second scum used their night ability, or allowed me to kill mutant with zero risk of being caught by the worst. So while I maintain that it was mechanically better for the town to vig Kokichi Oma, it was also something which would have afforded me as scum greater flexibility, something I glossed over in my narrative but which you may have noticed if you examined the situation closer.
Which brings me to what happened when we did lynch him.
I was always intending to no-kill, but I actually forgot to send in an action, even a bolded
no kill
. I had debated killing mutant in spite of his 'crumbed hide on me, because I figured I had nothing to lose, but I deemed it too much of a risk. If mutant lived through the night and the worst had seen me visit him, I'd have some explaining to do given I was already committed to a VT claim.
At this point, notably, I was THINKING mutant might not die when hiding behind me...but I couldn't be absolutely sure. I had to err on the side of caution, because if there were two kills in the night, that was game over for me right then and there, perfect town win. THIS WAS ANOTHER SPOT YOU CAME CLOSE TO CATCHING ME ON. No player had a greater incentive than I did for not killing anyone N2.
When I had confirmation that mutant wouldn't die when hiding behind me (via him being alive D3), I was already mapping out the road to victory.
I needed to push an implosion lynch through, but I lucked out a second time: due to defending both Pine and Marangal but not Marangal enough to save the slot, the implosion lynch was delayed. Delaying the implosion lynch delayed a need for me to fake a read evaluation. Around this time, you got me posting this:
In post 42, mastina wrote:Okay I just performed the mental math. I have a 95% pathway to victory.
It works like this:
We have 4 players who mutant hasn't hidden behind, but one is BNL, who he'll never hide behind.
We lynch one of the three. He hides behind a second, who I kill.
With him flipped, I lay out his crumbs. I bring up that I asked him to ask the mod if he died when hiding behind scum. He continued to call players clear after that, thus, he would die when hiding behind scum. This leaves 3 "clears”, and two uncleared. We Lynch one, I kill Myloninja, and in 3p lylo, Awoo votes BNL.
It's not guaranteed to work, but I like my odds.
Now there was a flaw in this plan. Notably, that mutant wasn't actually the hider he was pretending to be. Which is where I think the value in mutant's claim came in: he almost threw the scum off of their game, and with a claim that
almost
lead to their exposure! The nightkills DID point to a player knowing he was 'crumbing hider...and because I was the player who most obviously knew he was 'crumbing hider, this was evidence I was scum.
THIS IS WHY I THINK THE GAMBIT WAS GOOD.
However. The flaw entered in how easy it was to adapt:
In post 51, mastina wrote:I can use this.
Mislynch Errant as per the plan, then kill whoever I want to get a 4p mylo where there's no conftown.
The day we mislynched Errantparabola was the day to come clean about the gambit, mutant. You didn't need to claim your real role/have KittyMo reveal it for you, but you
should
have revealed the gambit at that time. This not only saves Errant's life but also would place me in a tight spot. Maybe, MAYBE we lynch Errant anyway, but if so, we do so after having given the entire collective of the town more time available to analyze the game and find scum.
By removing the clout a full day phase early, you'd have allowed every town player to be in a position where they were thinking. On the day we lynched Errantparabola, we were on autopilot. By coming clean, you'd force players to think. If your life was in danger, you'd always have your trump card, but it was doubtful you'd have been run up anyway. I think this was the key error you made in the game.
COME TIME FOR LYLO:
Awoo, Mylo, something both of you overlooked was that the day before, I indicated I knew mutant was an innocent child. Now, I can understand missing this detail while mutant was still alive since you didn't put the puzzle pieces together, but after he had died, if you went back, you would have seen that I knew he was an IC and thus had a trump card.
Now I feel the need to explain my thought process here.
I didn't explain this in the mafia PT at all. Mostly because when I said I dropped the ball and didn't think of the game at all?
That wasn't a lie
. I didn't know we had gone into night. I had
one hour until the deadline
when I submitted the mutant kill...and EVEN THEN, I did so before immediately doing something else. (I think I was cheating on my girlfriend by squeezing time in to submit the kill and reducing our time together?) It was quick, last minute, and thus I didn't get to explain my process behind it.
The basic process I had was a choice between a no-kill (which, for the second time, I almost defaulted to anyway), or killing mutant. There were reasons to leave mutant alive, and the reasons were much as I argued them to be. With mutant alive, it would take all three town players to lynch me. mutant being the nightkill was something I knew would point to me. mutant was townreading me. mutant's death would expose him as not being a hider, causing you both to reanalyze key parts of the game I didn't want you to be looking at (namely, the N2 no-kill).
However, because mutant could pop the IC at any time, I felt that having that extra voice as conftown, revealing him as not a hider ANYWAY, would have been an issue...in part, because it would take 2/3 town rather than just a single town player to get my game-winning lynch. I also knew that while there was a risk Awoo would reevaluate (I already knew Mylo was going to have some bias towards lynching me), ultimately it was quite likely you'd cross-vote one another, allowing me to hammer Mylo because I didn't want to COMPLETELY betray Awoo by casting a hammer vote on Awoo's lynch.
I ran into a bit of an issue, however.
Both of you stepped up your games and were incredibly obvtown, just in different ways.
I meant what I said about mylo/lylo content not being trustworthy, but that's largely due to what I had to do. I had to step up my game. Prior to you two both putting in obvtowning effort, I was sitting back and waiting. You two actually forced me to play more actively. With me playing more actively, I was playing identically to how I would play as town.
There are a few things I didn't comment on, though. Some of the highlights:
In post 1628, Awoo wrote:sorry this is my first lylo so i don;t know what proper voting ettiquite is for making the first vote
You need only look to a player from this game, implosion, to explain it:
this thread explains the math behind voting in detail. I don't quite remember if it's right play 2/3 times or 3/4 times for town to vote first, but I think it's one of the two.
In post 1670, the worst wrote:ohhhhh so THAT'S why everyone's scared of scum!mastina...
I'll be back after the ptsd wears off (read: never)
I literally reversed my bleedingheartlockobvtown read on awoo in the dead thread. fuck. very very well played.
I don't think my win is actually that remarkable.
I'm making one hell of a wall post to explain what I was doing, mostly for the benefit of Awoo and Myloninja to understand where I came from, but my view on the matter is that any scum player of a reasonably decent skill level could win this game once Wisdom died. I'm not going to go so far as to say "this was a town loss more than a scum win" (that would place an unfair amount of blame on the town who, overall, I feel
did
play well), but the fact remains, I got really lucky at a couple points in the game (including that Myloninja had been two roles as mafia that served my narrative) and the first time I even needed to use skill was in fact lylo.
Before that, all I had to do was cruise off of the town's mistakes. Which is something most skilled scum players are capable of doing. Awoo had me dead to rights in lylo with the description of "middling town, the level where scum's usually at"; that was
precisely
what I was, and it's something not hard to accomplish. I may have earned the win in the end, but it was mostly by taking advantage of a series of events that happened to leave me openings.
Plus. I said this on D1. Effort != alignment, and as Awoo correctly pointed out, a specific form of that would be aggression != town. I was aggressive, but none of my aggression was actually something which was hard to do.
People are scared of me because I am remarkably good at that, turning what should be a massive disadvantage into a game-winning boon. (For instance, the classical example is Left 4 Dead mafia where I had a cop guilty on me and by claiming scum it ultimately lead to town not believing the cop was real even though it was, compounded by telling my scumbuddies from the onset to bus me with me bussing them back in a time when I had never done that.)
I have a very good handle on what needs to be done to create a pathway to victory. But really, my success first and foremost can be attributed to the right game environment. Just as my skills as a scumhunter vary by the playerlist (get me the right playerlist and I can catch almost every scum, get me the wrong playerlist and I'll be lucky to catch one), so too does my ability to execute a scum win vary by the playerlist. I just got the good fortune of being in one where I happened to have an advantage, compounded by the game mechanic making it easier to take advantage of my natural scum strengths. (By knowing what roles people had held, it made it easier to POE down the town PRs.)
I suppose.
Were I to sum everything up.
It'd be like this.
(
CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH MY TL;DR.
)
I don't think town played bad.
I actually think town played well.
I just don't think the scum victory should be attributed to spectacular scumplay; I think the scum victory can be better described as in spite of the town playing well, them lacking what they needed to pull together the win, especially given a few key events which they had bad luck in.
Oh I know. I play up lylo narratives to my favor though, so arguing you had 100% faith in me was quite convenient to my narrative.
In post 1674, BNL wrote: In post 1662, mastina wrote: In post 1657, Pine wrote:Yeah called it Mastina. You took me out for that reason, or for my claim?
Neither. I took you out because I thought mutant was hiding behind you and I wanted mutant dead for my narrative.
But didn't you already know that mutant was fakeclaiming when he claimed a hide behind you?
Actually, no. This is related to a comment mutant made in the dead thread:
Subject: Mini Theme 2017: Encore Dead Chatmutantdevle wrote: In post 986, mastina wrote:Fuck.
Awoo isn't conftown.
I can't tell you the exact question I asked the mod without giving away both the identity and exact role of the "third investigative", but I can do this:
PLAYER WHO TARGETED AWOO:
Ask what'd happen if you targeted Espeonage.
The answer you get won't be what you thought it'd be, which VASTLY changes optimal usage of your role.
I don't think this comes from scum!mastina tbh. If she was scum I doubt she'd try to inform me about this as it would be beneficial to her to allow me to get false positives. If Mastina was scum, she probably would have tried to get me lynched at the beginning of day 6.
I knew, due to mutant's breadcrumb of hiding behind me, that he wasn't a
weak hider
that'd die when hiding behind MAFIA. But I didn't know he wasn't a hider at all.
The reason I asked this question was the obvious; I wanted to know if mutant's clears were really clears. When I learned it was possible they weren't, I shared this information.
Now, mutant, you may wonder why I shared that information in spite of it being used to give me a false innocent on my slot.
The answer is because I valued the mislynches I could gain from it more.
If people assumed your hides were town and you never hid behind me, it'd be...problematic. I'd be guiltied-via-POE for the wrong reasons. If you did hide behind me, it was still a problem because I couldn't kill you until N4 at the earliest due to not doing so N2 and needing to take out the worst's track N3. What that meant is there'd be a lot of hider clears, potentially the whole games' worth, revealing the innocent to not be an innocent
anyway
.
By hoping to expose the role for what it was, I was hoping I'd open up an Awoo (and later, Myloninja) mislynch. Even then, I was planning towards my preferred lylo.
Subject: Mini Theme 2017: Encore Dead Chat That's actually not a minor spoiler at all; it's a pretty major one given I'm the only one who does that.
LAST NOTES FOR AWOO:
I did mean it when I said that the "LOL"-like posts were dragging you down, and procrastination of the sort you gave by consistently going "sorry I have an exam" also dragged you down. I also feel like you didn't follow your thoughts through, which I feel is directly correlated to the previous. If you had put
just a little more
into this game, then that little bit of extra could have been connecting prior conclusions, where you put the effort into following trains of thought.
You can, several times, close to the truth, and forced me to be on my toes; had you kept up your push rather than letting off on the gas and resting, then it would have been much harder for me to hide. By letting off on the gas, you gave me an opening to appeal to you which I wouldn't have had if you had been operating without my guidance.
LAST NOTES FOR MYLONINJA:
In general, I'd recommend game-wide having a higher level of engagement and contributing more actively. In lylo, you showed what you
could
do; I guarantee you, had you done what you did in lylo across the whole game you could not have been lynched this game at all.
However, specific to the lylo: I feel like you did make yourself obvtown, but I feel like you were dragged down by an over-reliance on meta. Metagaming is a tool, which has its use in a game, but it can't be your
only
tool. If you had focused a little more on
this
game and a little less on
past
games, you may have been able to put some stronger analysis out, and also made some more convincing points by cold logic suggesting you were town.
At the very end, you did bring this analysis, but only after I had actually directly asked you to (and I was scum!). I feel that if you had brought it earlier into the day, that you would have had more success in engaging with Awoo.
In sort,
FOR BOTH OF YOU:
Lylo is tough, and it can be difficult to know what to focus on, but I feel like you both could have engaged with one another
directly
much earlier on than you did. You both wrote cases on one another and you both defended against the cases from one another, but that's not what I meant by engagement. A fair amount of the engagement which happened between the two of you was
guided by me the scum player
; if you had done the engagement WITHOUT me, you'd have held less bias towards thinking I was town.
To get what I mean about engagement. Essentially. What I mean is. By explaining your thoughts and feelings and backing it up with evidence throughout the game, it would have been much easier for you to see the town in one another, especially if you two had realized you were actually thinking two different halves of the correct puzzle.
Myloninja brought up good reasons for me to be scum, but they were different from Awoo's reasons for me to be scum; neither half was, individually, enough to convince you that I was scum, but if they had been combined, you'd have been able to probably realize much of what I laid out, why the things implicating me combined together meant I was the most likely scum.
Just a little bit more communication, active and open, is what I'm getting at here. I feel like given more time to talk and making use of that time to talk, you two could have easily hashed it out to find the answer.
Sorry, I was hoping to give you better feedback than this but as I'm typing this I feel like I'm not giving you what I was hoping to give earlier today, but it'll have to do.