Micro 1039: The Coalition [game over!]

[mc esther]

HEAL: mc esther

yeah i agree voting isnt a great idea rn

[mc esther]

actually,

HEAL: galron

idk i like the unvote, my hunch is that scum would either be more careful in their first post, or just stick with the vote

[mc esther]

It's so nice to not be replacing anyone. Now I can die because of my own actions

heh

Can someone explain to me why voting is not advised?

my thinking is that we want our elimination to be informed by the coalition results; if the coalition is not all-town, we're [i think?] eliminating the scummiest coalition member. while i dont think we're likely to hammer someone prior to locking in a coalition, i can easily imagine a situation where we get stuck with suboptimal wagons because the only people we've run up are no longer in our ideal elimination pool.

the obvious counterpoint is that it's difficult to pressure people without voting; i wouldnt be all "nah that's definitely wrong" if someone came in with a random vote right now, i can see this one both ways. imo, we can generate enough information to sort the game through heal tags alone, but i dont have any "real" reason to believe that.

[mc esther]

in other words, because i think the uh emotional cost isnt really made clear in my initial post: im worried that after pushing a couple of people all day, having maybe one or both of them respond real badly to e-1, etc., it might become very difficult to convince a sufficiently large number of people "no, we should really eliminate a weak townread".

this isnt so relevant if im wrong about eliminating a coalition member on failure, but idk lol if the mod says "there's definitely at least one scum in there", i think we have to take that?

[mc esther]

HEAL: andante

[mc esther]

i dont get why looker's town but i'll accept it for now

HEAL: looker

mbot heal someone you said you wanna lock a coalition in heal someone (ya that post pings super hard)

[mc esther]

HEAL: enchant

i think scum would be more explicit in why theyre voting for me, because it's difficult for them to gauge how plausible an accusation looks to people without their knowledge. to town, if it's self-evident why a post is scummy, you dont really feel the need to explain that, you know it's obvious to town because it was obvious to you! scum dont get a genuine unfiltered town-equivalent "obvious to them".

that's my five btw, esther/galron/andante/looker/enchant.

[mc esther]

mbot reads scum to me in the sort of way that makes me think im wrong

[mc esther]

yes, it is kinda forced ("fake"? eh). im trying to hard read enchant off these early game posts because, we might not really get that much else. enchant's vote clearly isnt rvs though.

[mc esther]

ikr i think it's pretty cool

[mc esther]

im gonna start voting when i see heals piling up on someone i, uh -- my phrasing's awkward here but im trying to be specific --, disbelieve to be town (or if we're converging on a a five-person coalition i agree with, i'll vote for the member im least sure of)

[mc esther]

looker, you self-healed ostensibly to preserve your exactly four slots, why is four so significant to you? and why was self-healing not something you considered worthwhile in your first post, but then something that you preferred to healing literally anyone else (e.g., t3)?

[mc esther]

my thoughts on looker are overall kinda complicated, but nah, healing four and voting is just a theory disagreement, not alignment-indicative

[mc esther]

i was gonna wait for galron but

HURT: looker
HEAL: mbot

[mc esther]

enchant seems really obviously town at this point imo, more people should heal enchant

[mc esther]

nah mbot reads like one of those d1 miselims where, someone drops a bunch of nominal scumtells but it turns out mafia doesnt quite work that way. like, strong guttown read on her.

overall i find the observation that prohawk/umlaut are not in coalitions pretty funny — yes, theyre not, because they don't post (okay, prohawk since has). idk how often scum random heal buddies; if that's usually what happens, then it implies that prohawk/umlaut (in acquiring no such heals) are town, but that's a big "if" and i dont trust it. i think the "people need posts to townread you" explanation is better.

[mc esther]

HURT: andante
HEAL: looker

happy cake day~

[mc esther]

mbot, youve played a few games off-site, have you ever been mafia in any of them?

[mc esther]

i happen to have games open in tabs from tallying up early-game scumbuddy heals (yeah, does not happen often enough to say anything about prohawk/umlaut's alignment); theyre just from the wiki though, which apparently doesnt include t3's and enchant's games.

town coalitions formed in micro 829, micro 833, and micro 873; that's 3 of the 7 games the wiki links

[mc esther]

mbot, youve played a few games off-site, have you ever been mafia in any of them?

actually,

@mbot

, while im asking you questions, answer galron too; i think youre town, but i think it's a good question

I didn't realize there was such a rush to lock in a coalition without any data to make my choices. I'm always stiff it's NAI. Galron has been trigger happy from first post of the game

Me knee jerking to rvs is scummy?

[mc esther]

galron was wayyyy subdued as town when i played with him, it doesnt really ping to me.

"looks like the sort of iso that could get day 1 miselimmed" might have been a better phrasing. im, idk, drawing analogy to an archetype, i guess; not practically worrying she's the yeet (like, if we eliminate within the coalition, she's almost certainly not). i get that's a pretty fuzzy and subjective (and perhaps even unreliable!) read, but the questions are relevant, i might feel comfortable calling it in slightly less hazy terms if she comes back to answer.

Is there anyone here who doesn't think Looker is town?

if the point is that looker should self-heal, yes, i agree

[mc esther]

this game's mechanics mean that someone who would usually be very easy to miselim might not even be in an elimination pool, to clarify further on what i mean by "looks like a d1 miselim" (in the abstract) but also "not likely to get d1 yeeted" (in this specific game)

[mc esther]

And did your strong guttown read come from her three posts?

missed this question, although i suspect it's rhetorical; yes, i think those posts are enough to say "i flatly just dont believe scum actually post like that". im unsure why this seems odd to you, most of my reads have come from very few posts.

[mc esther]

It wasn't rhetorical - I didn't know if you had experience with MBot the same way you have experience with Galron. And none of your other reads you described as "strong".

oh, fair question! no, i dont know mbot at all, i just skimmed her post history.

I don't characterize my play as being subdued

honestly, when i first heard you were excited to play with looker, my thought was "woah, this guy gets excited about things?". overall, youre not particularly high-volume; youre a little bit closed off in expressing your reads; i could be wrong on this point, but you dont strike me as a wild gambits type of player; youre very measured; and you have an extremely consistent tone that comes across to me as, unfailingly polite. "subdued" is the word i'd use for it, youre not particularly high-energy, and you dont blurt out everything in your head. i kinda view your gameplay as just, steadily prodding at things, waiting for the contradictions to shake out. youre not really, idk, "in it for the drama".

_

and, okay, mbot's answers make me less certain. my thought so far, all game, has been "there's just no way someone with even a single previous scumgame posts like this as scum". i still think this just seems like the sort of iso that scum in fact consciously avoid, but i can very vaguely imagine a literal first scumgame being this awkward.

i dont mind the answer to galron's question, i dont think it's a particularly good opinion for town to hold, but my expectation was that scum!mbot would view the question as an accusation to back away from; where she kinda (though not with much confidence, so again, she didnt entirely 'pass' this 'test') went with "yes, actually".

[mc esther]

yeah, i hard agree with the suspicions on andante. probably mafia.

[mc esther]

i dont get why she complains about rvs and having nothing to go on (which, imo, hasnt been true since the second page but whatever), then drops entirely empty posts like that. cmon lol, i dont necessarily expect you to have reads (although, eh, ive done a lot, i do think it's kinda weird not to have an opinion on my alignment at this point), but this doesnt read like frustrated town trying to find an angle on a tight game, this reads like scum very happy to cruise out on a low level of activity.

[mc esther]

i have complicated feelings about this, because im not sure i see a ton of benefit to scum lurking out this stage of the game, seems a great way to just get townblocked. if she is scum, her buddy's probably at least somewhat townread — if i had to pick a name, i'd go with t3 on poe, but idk how useful that actually is.

[mc esther]

there seems a mild discrepancy in "what's the rush [to heal]?" followed quite immediately by two heals

[mc esther]

my first thought was "woah wait t3 misread mbot last game yeah okay lol she's even more town", but i skimmed isos and his read that game was poe, so eh it's kinda not the same thing

[mc esther]

anyone who believes that mbot is scum so awkward and flailing as to make her early posts, probably cant also believe that she'd willing claim to scumread the only person in the game with a townread on her.

[mc esther]

Because i think mc esther is mafia trying to follow waves.

what? ignoring self-votes, i was the first person to heal galron, you, and mbot — looker is my only sheep read. im not following waves, im making them.

[mc esther]

I am concerned with the post implying that Looker may not be town because he isn't self-healing.

no, i had galron's thought too; it makes some sense, though i ended up dismissing it as theory disagreement. it looks hella scummy if you view it in terms of "what town motivation is there for a widely townread player to not self-heal when asked" (like, he knows he's town, shouldnt he want to be locked in?), compared to scum (who should imo also self-heal, but might reasonably be worried about looking too eager). but the flipside to me — which caused me to dismiss the read — is "looker and i clearly just dont agree on how self-healing 'works'", like, we established that earlier in the game.

[mc esther]

Are we at the point of locking in a coalition though?

mechanically, no; but i think enchant and looker are basically locked-in, yeah. looker much less so if galron's gonna start getting all paranoid, but we'll see.

However consider the opposite... not self healing is anti-scum behavior.

im going to make a stronger statement than t3 which more directly challenges your premise -- scum dont need to self-heal. i talked about this earlier when discussing this seeming paradox in the andante scumread (because it's a little bit more odd than "doesn't self-heal", she only very recently healed at all, and under pressure) -- only one scum needs to heal (in any capacity), and only if neither mafioso is being townread.

[mc esther]

it can even be true in the first three posts of the game. if your buddy self-heals and immediately picks up a heal, you well decide to take an early punt on no-healing. i also just, dont think it's that hard to tell where you stand in a game where the mod literally keeps count of everyone's strongest townread.

this is conjecture, and if i can find time (no promises, but it'd be cool of me), sure i can go check what naked self-heal rates actually look like town vs. scum. but like... your theory is just conjecture too

[mc esther]

enchant's reaction wasnt great from a "keeping the thread chill" perspective, but i cant see scum in it. like, do you think theyre feigning their frustrations? t3 thinks youre plainly wrong too, why is he not scum?

[mc esther]

slef healing is always pro-your alignment

this isnt true, scum sometimes want to avoid self-healing to avoid being in coalition with their buddy. i dont think that's happened this game though.

[mc esther]

because if people start out eliminating within the coalition, both scum in coalition means scum probably gets eliminated d1. they perhaps benefit a little from the ensuring wifom as people ask "so, where's the second? surely they didnt?", but idk lol you really wanna play 1:6?

[mc esther]

so what, you shoot your way through the rest of the coalition and just hope that town completely rules out the possibility that second scum's hidden in there? or shoot your way through the out-group and hope that town are willing to just keep flipping them? youre more ballsy than i am if these sound like acceptable risks to you. this is actually worse than 1:6, this is "1:6 and also literally any shot you take might just randomly poe yourself out of the game".

[mc esther]

and to be clear: i dont want to rule this possibility out because the risk is "unacceptable", scum play wifom in these spaces and we need to be aware of that. literally all i am saying is that scum do occasionally have direct mechanical incentive to not self-vote, where this is not so true of town until the final stages of negotiating for a coalition lock.

[mc esther]

have you caught enchant "for the wrong reasons" before? is this how they reacted? i really dont see it.

[mc esther]

t3's enchant unheal doesnt seem sincere to me

[mc esther]

like, it's been a really consistent townread from him that evaporated because, enchant attacked a weird post?

im not sure exactly what prohawk's doing that scum doesnt do either. argue about theory? scumread enchant?

[mc esther]

i completely misread mbot's townread on me as a scumread, uvfgh why is reading so hard. idk lol, im still weak town on mbot but everything that's made me dead sure is gone now, so it might just be confbias.

[mc esther]

i was curious why i wasnt obviously town to you, looker; that makes sense! dont get me wrong, im heartbroken, but i see it.

im not sure on umlaut, but i think i can be talked around on it. prohawk is a lot spicier imo.

the andante theory seems super weird to me, im assuming it's based on a gambit youve seen before?

[mc esther]

HURT: mbot
HEAL: umlaut

idk. just want a coalition at this point tbh. he's not particularly suspicious, close enough.

but i dont really like prohawk, i think he's a plausible t3 buddy (though i dont think he's a plausible andante buddy, so there's some advantage there). i'll do it if i see consensus, but idk just a hunch that there wont be.

[mc esther]

tbh i wish galron was here so i could sheep him

[mc esther]

like, prohawk's enchant scumread, a scumread on a hard coalition lock-in for the sole reason that "they self-healed first"; that comes from town? how is that not just, scum trying to dislodge town from a largely correct coalition?

p-edit: ive put plenty of my own opinion out there and you know i'll continue to do it. sheeping galron on a handful of specific points wont change that and it's very weird to imply that.

[mc esther]

we almost literally have galron/looker/enchant locked in — galron imo is clearly gonna come back around on looker, and umlaut's said theyll probably come around on enchant, that's five. the "there's no consensus we cant do it" line of thought only benefits scum here.

[mc esther]

i dont know. i know ive explicitly scumread him once and implied it a few other times, but there are problems with scum!prohawk (basically, "this almost seems too blatant for scum"). my point with that last comment was more to (a) snap him out of it if he's town, and (b) make it very clear to any players not following too closely that it's simply not true.

if he's scum, i dont think he's certain of his place, and i also believe him when he says he'd try to coalesce with his buddy as scum — im not really sure what play i would expect from this mental model of scum!prohawk. this is part of why im struggling to read him, he's probably the player with the least similar approach to this game from me.

[mc esther]

based on "would try to coalesce with his buddy", i was almost certainly wrong when i called him a potential t3 buddy earlier.

[mc esther]

Do you feel that ProHawk is trying to distract now that he's in a coalition and doesn't have to push his partner into one?

i think scum!prohawk is far more likely trying to discourage coalition at all because he sees himself getting locked out of an otherwise all-town coalition, than he is distracting from coalition-building having secured his place. like, again, he hasnt really secured it; he's on three lists, but mbot and t3 are pretty fringe lists that imo arent going to factor into coalition-building. it's hard for me to say for sure that prohawk recognizes this, the things i think are obviously true are things which prohawk borders on disbelieving entirely; but idk lol i think he recognizes this.

[mc esther]

assuming umlaut's also in (bit of an assumption, i admit!) the only real source of friction i see is the fifth slot. looker probably wont let me in, i likely wont let t3/andante/prohawk in, and im pretty sure mbot is gonna be a generally hard sell.

[mc esther]

isnt that just, galron?

i dont really view it as alignment-indicative from him, he had some pretty lurky phases as town last game i played with him too. there's a slight difference there in that he made specific complaints about the gamethread in that case, but i dont think that's a huge alignment-differentiating difference.

[mc esther]

cop killer, you kinda dipped out after lickety and roden got fighting

[mc esther]

i also believe him when he says he'd try to coalesce with his buddy as scum

HEAL: Andante
HEAL: Umlaut
HEAL: MBot
HEAL: ProHawk

Prohawk - Worse than I am on posting and I call BS. I don't buy this “too inebriated to post” nonsense. Maybe its just being retaliatory from 73 but the previous T3 - Superficial posts and grasping at straws. In response to 80 and 81 I was going for those who were not pulling the trigger too soon on alliances. Feels like trolling to me but why?

Why would you not want to be in a coalition with your scum partner?

I would think scum would try to distance at this point to avoid later vote/heal analysis. I could be wrong, which I normally am.

enchant's reaction wasnt great from a "keeping the thread chill" perspective, but i cant see scum in it. like, do you think theyre feigning their frustrations? t3 thinks youre plainly wrong too, why is he not scum?

Ever see scum caught for the wrong reasons?

sorry for quoting that last post in full, but i wanted to emphasize that it does not contain a reason for the prohawk townread.

Yes, YOU. It's ok. Not this game though *patpat*

VOTE: mbot
oh that right okay

This makes it so hard to TR you because there has yet to be a reason. I think its yet another fixation but you do you. The one and only game I played on this site was with T3 and Looker. I'm very obviously a newb and still getting used to figuring out reads without flavor or anything but dialog to go off of. Confidence is not there because when I have been so sure in the past, I'm wrong. Sneaky mafia. All I can do is throw out my gut feels to share where I'm at on reads. I don't often post just to throw out a comment unless I have a valid thought behind it that Id like to share but when I do sit down at a computer, I try to compile it all into posts that will actually share what my thoughts are.

VOTE: Enchant

I'm not liking the posts recently. Gut read SR but whatever. Post 156 didn't make sense to me seeing how the coalitions will be in flux with the more content to use. That should happen since original heals were based on very little. Maybe I get triggered by early "I'm town." statements because.. well.. why? Town knows their town and stating you are town never makes sense to me. Not the best reasoning with the only scum would say they're ok with not being in a coalition. Why in the world would they choose not to try to fudge up more coalition options and keep everyone guessing? The odds of us getting the coalition right is slim. Fingers crossed that we get it right and its game over but with 9 players and only 5 in a coalition, there will obviously be two town at least left out.

HEAL: Mbot
HEAL: Prohawk
HEAL: Looker
HEAL: Umlaut
HEAL: Mc Esther

If T3 could stop being a turd and make actual content posts, that'd be great.

[mc esther]

uh, i meant to add "sorry for quoting that last post in full, but i wanted to emphasize that it does not contain a reason for the prohawk townread." to the end of the message, but somehow accidentally inserted it into the middle of the long quote.

[mc esther]

scum sometimes want to avoid self-healing to avoid being in coalition with their buddy. i dont think that's happened this game though.

Why would you not want to be in a coalition with your scum partner?

because if people start out eliminating within the coalition, both scum in coalition means scum probably gets eliminated d1. they perhaps benefit a little from the ensuring wifom as people ask "so, where's the second? surely they didnt?", but idk lol you really wanna play 1:6?

Unless they hit one and go for outside the coalition next? Yes it increases the first chance of getting caught inside the coalition but then what?

just, for reference on what i was referring to in #251

to expand on the others on prohawk's heallist: umlaut doesnt townread or heal prohawk. i missed that andante does have a similarly arbitrary townread on prohawk, but she also had a townread on prohawk really early in the game, where mbot kinda soft-180s ("soft" in that she stops short of an explicit scumreads, she's just generally pretty skeptical of him; it wasnt hard-scumread to hard-townread). mbot's vote is the one that needs an explanation, which these posts provide; andante's is internally consistent (but vague).

[mc esther]

HURT: everyone
HEAL: Galron, mc esther, Umlaut, Looker, T3

it's umlaut's heal list, i'd prefer enchant over t3, but it doesnt include prohawk/mbot or andante, so i'll take it.

obvs if this goes through, t3 is my vote, though i kinda suspect votes wont matter. i think if he flips scum, it kinda clears prohawk. if we take enchant instead, idk, i'll probably vote umlaut, but it'll be a much harder discussion.

i'd accept enchant over myself or umlaut too.

[mc esther]

HURT: t3
HEAL: enchant

gonna see if i can make this version happen, i'll go back to t3 if there's no support

[mc esther]

243 (Esther) - interested in hearing why ProHawk isn't a plausible Andante buddy but it's not a priority today.

yeah i dont believe what i said in #243 any more, ive very much flipped t3 and andante around since. my thinking at the time was that it doesnt make sense for scum!andante to avoid healing for so long if her buddy isnt widely townread (which, prohawk wasnt throughout that no-healing period). when i type it out like that i kinda start believing it again lmao, idk, i'll think on it further if it starts to matter.

i dont love the idea of t3 over galron, but i see why people want it after the question about galron only healing three. ideally we'd wait for him to explain (i think almost every question about weird heals so far has ended in "okay yeah i get where youre coming from"), but that's perhaps not a great use of our time right now. sure, i'll flip if that's the way we're trending.

[mc esther]

I think assuming scum are so doctrinaire in their planning as to even have a significant preference for one vs. two in coalition is probably a mistake

hehe, good catch! i think i tend to play pretty doctrinally, and kinda tend to [yeah, wrongly] expect that by default from others.

this doesnt really change my prohawk/mbot case though, the point there is not that it matches prohawk's views on scum coalition building, the point is that it's an entirely unexplained 180 from mbot which is best explained by those views.

[mc esther]

i imagine the mod wouldnt count the heal tag that took you beyond five

[mc esther]

although i guess if you can heal less than five with the understanding that it cant make a coalition, you "should be able to" heal more than five under that same understanding. this might not be an awful way to play the set-up in future -- immediately heal everyone and strike people over the course of the day until you hit five. im struggling to see any relevance to this particular game though.

[mc esther]

HURT: galron
HEAL: t3
VOTE: t3

i dont love it but youre right

[mc esther]

i think umlaut and t3 will (tbh i think t3's scumclaiming if he wont) so, enchant, you on?

[mc esther]

i missed that t3's already self-healing. him refusing to self-heal over prohawk would be a lot more incriminating than him refusing to heal enchant over prohawk; nevermind, bad call in that post.

[mc esther]

because if the coalition isnt all-town, we want a few days on the deadline to elim properly. imo t3 should be trivial but idk lol i think there are some holdouts. if im wrong and t3 does get flashwagoned [as in, vote-tag vote flashwagonned] to e-1, i'd appreciate holding things (both heals and votes) at x-1 if applicable; i might have questions at that point.

[mc esther]

but what is the coalition is all town?

obvs i dont believe galron is conftown? like, if i thought galron literally had to be town but that t3 was balance-of-probability scum, ofc i wouldnt agree to this switch.

waiting to see if there's a follow-up to the galron healpost before casting judgement lmao

[mc esther]

current votes arent that different from the vc, the neo-umlautian heallist was at c-1 until enchant unhealed self; andante's coalition is -enchant/+esther from viewcount

[mc esther]

damn lol i did not see prohawk to come around on the "literally chosen to exclude potential prohawk teams" list

[mc esther]

i just woke up words arent

[mc esther]

this aint a scene it's a coalition

[mc esther]

enchant can you please hammer?

[mc esther]

i cant spam up the thread from tomorrow onwards, i'll be checking in daily

[mc esther]

yeah town got way lucky lmao, gg