Mini Normal 1839 - Game Over!

[bji]

Hey ho, catching up obviously. I'm at work and my time is limited at the moment so this might take a while. Then again, who likes to work when they could be reading mafiascum instead so maybe this won't take a while.

[bji]

OK so I read all 40 pages. Mostly all I got was buyer's remorse, but I do have a few clear(ish) thoughts:

- The day 1 lynch was piss-poor in my opinion. For all of the accusations flying around of players not basing their reads on demonstrably credible reasoning, the idea of lynching a lurker on Day 1 because "he appears to be active elsewhere on the site" is utterly ridiculous. I mean how is not playing the game any more scum than it is town? Would scum really be so obvious as to avoid play like that? Bad bad wagon. So I will have to analyze that wagon and how it went down a little more clearly on a second more focused read, because I think I might be able to get some good reads from that.

- I tend to look for subtle interactions more than obvious ones. Sure some people have put forth dumb theories or sometimes have not been entirely self-consistent in their reasoning, but that stuff is just as likely to happen for town as for scum. I don't find the argument that "X must be scum because I defeated X's position on Y" particularly compelling. Regarding subtle stuff, I find aronagrundy's posts and votes to repeatedly tingle my spidey-senses, I feel like there is alot of subtle maneuvering there. I'll provide more detail later in this post.

- ironstove is high on my list of interesting persons. I appreciate how he's tried to drive wagons repeatedly and all of them seemed well justified to me.

- I think Knighty Knight was lying about not having played before. His grasp of the game lingo was too strong for someone who hasn't played before. He was replaced by someone who has claimed a power role. I would tend to believe that Knightly Knight was trying to feign newbishness as a means of providing him some "space to work" with his PR, so that he could say and do seemingly dumb things that had a PR purpose, without being suspected of having a PR. For this reason, and others (mostly related to Fire Assassin's posts on the PR subject themselves), I believe that Fire Assassin is a confirmed town PR.

I have two strong town reads at the moment: Fire Assassin, and ironstove. I already explained why above.

I have one really strong scum read: aronagrundy. My reasoning here, is twofold: I generally don't like the tone of his posts, they feel a bit slimy, he feels like he is just trying to prod town along to making mislynches, more than actually scum hunting. And the quantity and timing, just seems carefully planned, he pops up just enough to guide or participate in bad wagons.

The second issue I have with aranogrundy is his voting record. It's really bad.

He spends most of post-RVS Day 1 voting Knighty Knight, whom I feel never really deserved a vote, and then jumps over to malpascp when it's clear that that wagon has momentum, happy to stay on that terrible wagon with the only two players he had previously voted for (Fire Assassin and PenguinPower). This feels very opportunistic to me.

VOTE: Aronagrundy

[bji]

I can't really respond to much else you say specifically about me unless you want to give examples.

Here are some things I didn't like:

I don't have a problem with the pressure tracer is getting but I'd rather vote knight right now.

VOTE: knight

This vote was not explained well. The reasoning for a vote against Knight, previously given in post 247 does not seem significant enough to warrant this vote. Shows a preference for voting Knight (now FA, whom I have as confirmed town).

This post sticks out like a sore thumb to me compared to anything else I've seen before in the game. No real reason for voting karnos plus misrepresenting what lmk said.

I think this is a reaching post looking for justification to put a vote back on Knight.

investigate iron/lowell, protect nero, kill mal if he doesn't replace out

Not interested in gathering any more info on the person who you previously spent most of the day voting for. Just not a consistent position.

I'm aware but there were legitimate reasons for the mal wagon, he just happened to flip town. Scum would know that he was town, though, and would also know that a mal lynch would give the town almost zero information. I'll actually take back using the mal wagon as a reason against you because I think it was a good move for scum regardless of your alignment.

So if you know after the vote that a mal lynch would give town almost zero information, you must have known that before the lynch too. And yet you jumped on that wagon. Like I said, I have to analyze that wagon a little more to see who went on it and why, but the whole thing was pretty suspect to me, and you're square in the middle of it.

[bji]

investigate iron/lowell, protect nero, kill mal if he doesn't replace out

Not interested in gathering any more info on the person who you previously spent most of the day voting for. Just not a consistent position.

Just wanted to respond, that post was in response to FA asking what he should do n1. By then FA had already claimed so I thought he was town. And it's not like I can ask see to investigate themselves lol

Yeah. That is a good point. It was hard to follow all of the back and forth on a read through, so many intertwined threads of interaction. It's been my experience in the past that I cannot find scum by following the main points of contention, because WIFOM, so I try to look at the more subtle interactions. Eventually I get something. But it's harder when I am not observing them in real time.

UNVOTE: aronagrundy

[bji]

bji, who should we have lynched d1 and why?

It's a bit hard to say in retrospect because my evaluations are already somewhat affected by the actual vote and the results and today's further posts. The only players I would have avoided voting for are ironstove and Knighty Knight/Fire Assassin. I would have favored voting for aronagrundy or one of the { karnos, Saru } duo. Looking back at my notes, which started out more detailed but as you can imagine got sparser as the read through wore on and I got tired, I didn't like the karnos/sanu exchange where they traded insults about some other game, and I seemed to dislike karnos' involvement more than disliking saru's, especially karnos' vote on saru. But that fight seemed "weird" enough to me to put them both under some suspicion.

I'm not that experienced at this game but I am under absolutely no illusions that I'm going to figure much out on Day 1, so as long as interactions happen, and a vote is placed on a player who was meaningfully involved, I'm pretty OK with it. What I really don't like about that day 1 lynch was that it was against a player who was not meaningfully involved.

I still have to re-read that mislynch wagon a little more closely and see if anything stands out. My first read-through was linear and I didn't pay as close attention to the mislynch wagon because I didn't know that it was going to go all the way.

[bji]

OK so karnos put FA at L-1 in post 608.

Nero Cain responds with a fake hammer vote in post 612. I somehow missed that on first read through. It's not that interesting though because it doesn't really do anything. He does a real vote for ironstove 621. Then post 626 is the place where he starts some FUD about Mal which begins that wagon.

If Nero Cain were scum, I don't know why he would lead a wagon away from town PR Fire Assassin, I'd only see him doing that if FA was his scum buddy, and I really don't believe that FA is scum. My only problem is that the logic of "and Mal posting everywhere but here is prob scum" is terrible, but then again, if Nero is town believing town!FA PR claim, then he's gotta be happy to lead a wagon just about anywhere in preference to seeing a FA lynch.

644 and the subsequent postings between ironstove and FA I read as ironstove trying to fake a hammer as a reaction test. I am under no illusion that ironstove actually believed that he was hammering FA. His post 652 makes it pretty clear that he was just reaction testing FA. This is one of the reasons that I have a strong townread on ironstove.

Around post 685 a wagon on Thor is starting to form. Nero Cain prefers to vote against Mal though. This is actually interesting. Post 689 Nero Cain says "so scum is voting Thor. Does this mean Saru is a scumbuddy or he's voting off the wagon to manipulate us onto the Saru wagon?". Who was voting Thor? Saru, FA, and ironstove. Saying "Does this mean Saru is a scumbuddy" means that Nero must have been referring to one or both of the other two as scum. If Nero thought that FA was scum presumably he'd be focused on hammering him instead of pushing a new wagon. That leaves ironstove. This is consistent with his earlier postings wrt ironstove. But why is Nero Cain pushing for a wagon on Mal if he believes that ironstove is scum?

FA is second on the mal wagon in post 695. The vote is not explained. I don't get it.

Thor is third on the mal wagon with 701, and his reasoning is sheeping. This looks bad to me. Sheeping didn't fit into any part of Thor's approach up to this point. I felt like he was being methodical and consistent previously and then all of a sudden is happy to be on a wagon that makes no sense? Highly suspect.

Nero Cain post 702 makes it very clear that ironstove was the scum he was referring to being on the Thor wagon.

703 to 707 ironstove bounces from lowell to Mal, becoming fourth on the Mal wagon. It seems like he does it in response to interaction with Nero Cain, who thinks iron is scum. Is ironstove joining the Mal wagon just to test Nero Cain's response to having his top scum read join his wagon? I can't see any other reason given by ironstove for the vote. Nero Cain doesn't really respond though and doesn't seem to care that his strongest scum read has joined his wagon. This is weird.

710 aronagrundy pops in and doesn't give much substance and happily joins the Mal wagon, putting Mal at L-3, despite having no good reason to. I didn't like this vote either which was one of my strikes against aronagrundy.

713 LmkGuy refuses to join the Mal wagon. 714 says he would like to see mal killed though, which is a more reasonable approach than the lynch.

karnos tries to inject reason into the debate in 738.

742 Nero Cain is now actively pushing for the Mal lynch for bad reasons. This is significant. In 743 he doesn't even suggest that taking any action against Mal in the event that the Mal lynch doesn't happen is worthwhile. Also significant.

GreyICE 746 also tries to inject some logic into this bad wagon.

ironstove post 752 unvotes Mal. Would be town cred, except later he gets back on the wagon anyway.

759 Thor replaces no reasoning for being on the Mal wagon with bad reasoning. Thor seems to me to be too experienced at this game to actively be preferring a bad lynch to his earlier lynch targets.

Following posts (I'm getting tired of typing post links, find the posts yourself) have karnos trying to get people off the Mal wagon using good reasoning. BUT THEN post 767 he totally does a 180 and votes him to L-2.

Soon thereafter ironstove does his own 180 and puts Mal on L-1. WTF is going on here?

Nero's post immediately after that claims that "Mal prob filps scum here. I tend to think that his buddies are in LMK, PP, and Stove." If Nero is scum he would have known that Mal is town, so he'd be weakening his own case against Ironstove by this post, suggesting he'd rather target LMK or PP for the next mislynch in day 2.

Thor comes on strong after that to push the Mal wagon. He's pushing what was a mislynch at L-1. I don't like this.

GreyICE hammers. We know GreyICE was town so I will trust that his reasoning really was policy lynch. I don't agree with that, but there it is.


OK so ... out of all of this, here are my conclusions:

- I don't know why Nero would prefer a Mal lynch over Ironstove, or why Nero moved his vote off of Ironstove and onto Mal. This is really bad.
- I don't know why Nero completely ignored the fact that his top scum read had joined his wagon on Mal
- LmkGuy, kamos, and GreyICE were the only players I saw really trying to put the brakes on the mad Mal wagon
- Thor looks opportunistic and bad in all of this
- ironstove confuses me, his overall contributions have been very towny to me but his presence on this wagon and the way it went down at the end are very troubling

So this analysis lets me further refine my reads.

Town: Fire Assassin
Lean Town: ironstove, LmkGuy, Kamos
Lean Scum: Nero Cain
Scum: Thor

VOTE: Thor

[bji]

- ironstove is high on my list of interesting persons. I appreciate how he's tried to drive wagons repeatedly and all of them seemed well justified to me.

Could you pick any one of his wagons (he has plenty to choose from) and explain why you like the well justified logic of it?

I liked what he did in post 60. I thought he was faking a claim that he would hammer to see how others would react. I can see him trying to apply pressure on players (post 73) for a similar reason. I feel like there is a scum hunting motivation in all of these reaction tests and bluffs and stuff.

117 and 118 feel like more of the same.

225 same.

236 tries to strengthen the weight of his bluffs.

It's just a feeling I get, this looks like a player who is trying to use voting to apply pressure. I would not expect scum to spend so much time moving votes around, I'd expect them to more opportunistically stick to one or two wagons.

Of course, I have been fooled in the past and will be fooled in the future. But my gut feeling on ironstove leans town because of all of this.

I just don't get why he voted Mal, the reasoning was thin and what was there was bad.

Care to offer any explanation ironstove?

[bji]

Your definition of opportunism is not moving your vote much?
And your theory that he is faking his pushes is what shows 'justified logic' to you?
And me sheeping Nero is tantamount to a scum case.
Eeeeeh.

You should vote Karnos.

It's not my definition of opportunism. I think of opportunism more as 'following wagons' than 'leading wagons', although sometimes it can include starting wagons. I think of opportunism as being more passive than active. All of these are fuzzy definitions of course. And ironstove just doesn't strike me as passive, and thus doesn't strike me as opportunistic.

Please don't get hung up on my 'justified logic' phrase. It was part and parcel of a general observation that I found myself agreeing with ironstove's logic and apparent motivation, and also approving of the way he was going about it, more than disagreeing.

Your sheeping is just out of character with the rest of your postings. Do you deny that? Can you show me another post (in this game) where you decided to sheep a position for no obvious reason? As far as I can tell you spent most of the game steadfastly defending a Karnos vote from detractors, and attacking other people's positions against anyone except Karnos, and then suddenly you're sheeping a vote on mal for unexplained reasons (I'd quote posts but it's pretty much your entire ISO for Day 1). Please describe to me the chain of logic that gets you from point A to point B there.

Why should I vote Karnos? I have a town lean on him.

[bji]

It's not my definition of opportunism. I think of opportunism more as 'following wagons' than 'leading wagons', although sometimes it can include starting wagons. I think of opportunism as being more passive than active. All of these are fuzzy definitions of course. And ironstove just doesn't strike me as passive, and thus doesn't strike me as opportunistic.

That's a bad definition.
By that definition aren't you being opportunistic by voting me?

If I am consistently opportunistic you might rationally use it as supporting evidence against me. Won't happen though. I've already been nonpassive in analyzing the Day 1 lynch wagon and taking action based on my analysis.

Isn't FA (a person you claim as town) being opportunistic on everything?

No, FA has taken fairly agressive action from time to time in this game. Please don't ask me to give you examples, they're in the game, and I'm tired of doing your homework.

If town does exactly what you're using as evidence that Iron isn't scum, isn't that kind of an empty logic ball you're holding up?

I must be misunderstanding the question. If town does the thing that I am saying seems towny, then doesn't that make my evaluation that the actions are towny correct? Because it's being done by town?

Please don't get hung up on my 'justified logic' phrase. It was part and parcel of a general observation that I found myself agreeing with ironstove's logic and apparent motivation, and also approving of the way he was going about it, more than disagreeing.

Your agreement of him is based on a presumption of what he's doing though, isn't it?
Shouldn't you have at least asked him 'hey, what was your motivation with these votes?" first before town reading him? Y'know, to verify your presumption was correct?

Not really. I prefer to try to deduce motives from what I can read from people's actions when they are not aware of my interest. Because they can posture for me any way they want to if they think I am looking for something; but if I'm looking when they don't know that I am doing so, then I feel that I will be less likely to be fooled by a charade meant to specifically fool me. I am satisfied with what I saw iron do earlier in the thread that I understand his motivations; I don't need him to tell me, and in fact I trust my own observations more than I would his answer to a direct question from me anyway. That being said, sometimes I will ask questions, when I don't feel that I can gather evidence elsewhere. Not necessary in this case though.

Can you show me another post (in this game) where you decided to sheep a position for no obvious reason?

Fascinating that you want to restrict it to this game only when making a value call about how I play the game. Why is that?

I avoid all meta. I never read older games for anybody and will not do so even when asked to. It's just a personal position I take. It feels too much like homework to have to read other games, and I also prefer to play this game making my own discoveries in the game thread rather than being directed to cherrypicked "evidence" from other games. The ironic thing is ... you'll know this is how I play if you look at my meta (full disclosure - I may have looked at prior games once or twice in the past before I decided to hold myself to a strict no-meta policy, but certainly in the most recent three or four games, which would be half or more than half of the games I've ever played, I have refused to look at meta when asked).

And here's one;
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 1#p8431551
I agree (for no reason, as I don't justify the stance, am sheeping PP's opinion, and also am theoretically attacking the slot) that Karnos isn't over defensive.
So...your move?

Agreeing with someone and following up with clarifying questions is hardly the same thing as sheeping a bad mislynch vote. Even suggesting that they're the same feels like desperation to find some justification for the bad vote. Yeah I'll keep my vote on you.

Why should I vote Karnos? I have a town lean on him.

You've read the game, I tend to presume you've read my case.
Would you like to explain why my case is bad/why you have a town read on Karnos? You were scum reading him a few posts ago so I'm not sure where that really came from.

Simple: 1. I never scum read Karnos, that's your interpretation of what I wrote. When I post that I don't like what people did, that doesn't mean that I am scum reading them, it means that I don't like what they did and will consider it in the overall body of evidence I use when analyzing that person. The fact that karnos was not mentioned as a scum read in any of the two explicit reads lists I have given (post 990 and 1032) is my proof that I never scum read him. Yes, I have had my doubts about him -- but I've had doubts about everybody! ... and 2. my more detailed analysis of the mislynch wagon gave me town vibes on karnos because he was one of the only ones to try to derail that wagon, and his actions read as sincere.

With regards to your case against him, I will look into it. But not right now. I have work to do.

[bji]

Ugh, wallposty guy. Let me introduce you to

Code: Select all

[spoiler=][/spoiler]

My apologies, walling is an unfortunate speciality of mine.

How do you suggest I use that tag? On only my responses to quotes, or to break up all long posts into a series of separately expandable small posts?

[bji]

But why is Nero Cain pushing for a wagon on Mal if he believes that ironstove is scum?

Why should I have stopped voting one scum read just b/c a another hoped on?

Because I don't think you ever credibly established that Mal was scum, so I wouldn't characterize your actions that way.

I will trust that his reasoning really was policy lynch

His vote was clearly not a policy lynch.

Perhaps I used the term incorrectly. I only play this game a couple of times per year and I might be misremembering the definition of "policy lynch".

Oh holy shit though.

I looked at mal's recent posts. Whatever you can be town.

This is fake VLA shit.

Vote: mal

Jesus. Don't claim, just die.

Fucking fake VLAers.

This doesn't just make you scum,

it means you're garbage who abuses site rules meant to accommodate people IRL. Welcome to the hell of "I will expect you to post content at all times in all games I am a part of regardless of VLA status."

Like I assume that you are taking the italics out of context but he's clearly saying he was scum that was breaking site rules. This is not something he'd say as a PL.

I thought that hammering someone because they are breaking site rules, not because they are scum, falls under the heading of "policy lynch".

this is also your second misrep.

Misrep of who? A dead player already confirmed as town? What do I gain by that?

[bji]

Spoiler: Response to Nero Cain

there was no appears, he was 100% posting elsewhere while generally ignoring this game. Even your top town read (iron) noted this.

I never really bought into the Tracers case and I don't understand why

ANYONE

considers a "Tracer is lurking so it must be scum!" as a good case.

I do not understand why Mal lurking is scummy but Tracer lurking is not. Is the difference to you the fact that some kind of site info indicated that Mal was playing other games but not this one, but the same source of data showed that Tracer was not playing other games? That's weak sauce if so. Did you consider that Tracer could have an alt and be playing other games constantly here while ignoring this game too? And did you really think that this is the behavior that scum would use - blatant and obviously fact-checkable lurking? Attributing the dumbest possible play to someone so that you can lynch them doesn't sound like good town strategy to me.

Spoiler: Second response to Nero Cain

Because I don't think you ever credibly established that Mal was scum, so I wouldn't characterize your actions that way.

it is really really really easy to pooh-pooh a mislynch wagon in hindsight. I think it was pretty clear that I had a scumread on him, you even post several of my posts that clearly state that I'm scumreading the Mal slot so I'm not understandng how you can say that I didn't "credibly establish" that. If you calling the reason for the vote into question then we run back into how easy it is to pooh-pooh in hindsight.

You made one reference to Mal before voting him:

and Mal posting everywhere but here is prob scum.

This reasoning is patently and obviously false, and is much less evidence than you ever presented against iron prior to this, so I don't see why you're trying to start a new wagon at this point.

The only other thing I see that gives any justification prior to the hammer is:

vote:Mal

since we have a extension

Why does having an extension make you want to vote a V/LA lurker?

he's a scummy lurker and with the extension we have time to get r done

Here you are not just saying he's a lurker, you're saying he's a

scummy

lurker. I didn't see A SINGLE THING in his ISO that could be read either way. So I'd call this a misrep.

Spoiler: Summary of points

So please just confirm these points so that there is no uncertainty about it:

1. malpascp had approximately ZERO useful interaction with any player in this game
2. You started a wagon against malpascp based solely on the fact that he had posted sparingly in this game while apparently being site active elsewhere
3. None of the reasoning that karnos or GreyICE used to try to deter the wagon had any effect on your vote
4. You never expressed any suspicion of karnos or GreyICE and thus had no specific reason to disclude their arguments out of distrust
5. Your only other consistent scumread, ironstove, joined the Mal wagon, but you made no comment about it
6. The end result was that the least useful lynch was achieved by town, from a wagon that you started and supported.

The above is the reason that I have a scum lean on you. All of these facts indicate a strong preference on your part for lynching a town player with poor justification and whose mislynch would provide minimal benefit to town, and in the face of rational deterrence that you ignored.

Please explain to me why I should

not

be suspicious of you for that. Do you expect me to just give you a free pass because ... ????

[bji]

I must be misunderstanding the question. If town does the thing that I am saying seems towny, then doesn't that make my evaluation that the actions are towny correct? Because it's being done by town?

No - I'm saying that town does what you're saying Iron doesn't - which is why you're calling him town, even though town blatantly does the thing. Also, frankly, scum do what Iron is doing. Like, when your case is 'he's voting lots of peeps (but I presume fake doing so for pressure)" I don't think it takes much to look like that's an iffy case.

It is tiring arguing with you because you act like any evaluation that anyone

else

makes has to have perfectly airtight justification, but you are free to sheep votes

for awful reasons

and we're all just supposed to accept that as great play.

You also tend to ask questions that feel like the whole purpose is to tire/wear the other player out. I have been observing this from you all game; find the question that takes the minimal effort for you to ask, but the maximal effort for anyone else to respond to. Seems like a strategy designed to exert your will by wearing opponents out.

Not really. I prefer to try to deduce motives from what I can read from people's actions when they are not aware of my interest. Because they can posture for me any way they want to if they think I am looking for something; but if I'm looking when they don't know that I am doing so, then I feel that I will be less likely to be fooled by a charade meant to specifically fool me. I am satisfied with what I saw iron do earlier in the thread that I understand his motivations; I don't need him to tell me, and in fact I trust my own observations more than I would his answer to a direct question from me anyway. That being said, sometimes I will ask questions, when I don't feel that I can gather evidence elsewhere. Not necessary in this case though.

So...'gut'.
Ooookay. I'll be ignoring you a lot, unless I decide to lynch you now.

Nothing about the strategy I described is about gut reaction. I described a metric for evaluating players that is based on looking at the evidence in situ instead of trying to gather evidence through questioning. What about that approach deserves being called making reads by gut reaction?

Yeah, meta would be a bother to justify your weak case with, so better ignore it because...well, meta *in one game* is readable, but meta in *more than one game* can't be trusted.
I want to slap whoever started teaching newbs this dreck as sense.

Sorry it's just a personal policy of mine not to read external games. If you think that makes my play weaker, oh well. I come to this site to enjoy myself, and slogging through prior games to look for circumstantial evidence is not my idea of fun and I'm not going to do it. And if you point some cherrypicked content from another game out to me, I could only trust that evidence if I could confirm that it is not contradicted by other evidence from other games. And since like I just said I'm not doing that slogging, I simply cannot rely on anything from exterior games at all.

I also do not play alts because I can't be bothered, I never play more than one game at a time, and I always replace into every other game and start from the outset on every other game. It's just the way I roll, dog.

[bji]

Sorry I meant to put that in spoiler tag to reduce the wall effect, mea culpa.

[bji]

Ah, damnit.

VOTE: bji

Please expound upon your read on karnos read for me. Also, elucidate your town!iron read.

Karnos - I didn't like his tiff with Sanu and I didn't like how he voted Sanu in post 427 when it was clear that Sanu and he were just in a tit-for-tat argument and nothing from that stupid argument should have been used for any voting purposes period. However, emotion can get the better of anyone so that could explain the vote too ...

I liked his attempt to derail the mislynch. If I were in the game at that point I would have been making the same points. I cannot find any scum motivation in trying to stop a mislynch. I see lots of town motivation in trying to stop a lynch that had no credible likelihood of being a scum lynch and that had no value except as a scum lynch because it would provide nearly zero information as a town lynch.

Didn't I just argue with Thor about my iron read? Did you read it? Do you really want me to repeat it?

Oh fine. In short, I don't see scum fake hammering for reactions, starting wagons for reactions, making votes for reactions. In my experience not many scum want to work that hard or try to take a leadership role like that. I could of course be wrong, and his Mal vote is very troubling to me. He's explained it in a way that is at at least palatable though, and he never to my knowledge claimed that Mal was scum, just that he was a lurker and that it was mostly a policy lynch. Nero Cain may not find that to be significant, but I do.

So in short, he seems townie to me, except for the Mal vote, which I feel he explained adequately. That yields a town lean in my rough evaluation.

[bji]

Sorry it's just a personal policy of mine not to read external games. If you think that makes my play weaker, oh well. I come to this site to enjoy myself, and slogging through prior games to look for circumstantial evidence is not my idea of fun and I'm not going to do it. And if you point some cherrypicked content from another game out to me, I could only trust that evidence if I could confirm that it is not contradicted by other evidence from other games. And since like I just said I'm not doing that slogging, I simply cannot rely on anything from exterior games at all.

Says the guy basing his entire concept of my play off one game, and two votes.
When you meet someone for the first time do you think you know everything about them from one meeting, or do you discover new things on subsequent interactions? Your logic is so inherently flawed I'm not even sure why you think it sounds good.

This debate is pointless. You are just pointing out what I've already admitted - I'm not trying to play optimally if playing optimally requires doing shit that I can't stand doing. I've not had any problem playing this game well enough without having to read outside of the games I've played, and doing so has maximized my enjoyment, which is a big part of why I'm here.

I get it, you're trying to weaken other people's faith in my ability to play this game as a means for getting them to ignore my case against you. So let's just agree that we've established my play style here and they can judge me based on what's already been said. Because this line of debate must be boring the shit out of everyone (I know it's boring me).

I also do not play alts because I can't be bothered, I never play more than one game at a time, and I always replace into every other game and start from the outset on every other game. It's just the way I roll, dog.

...okay...are you trying to educate me on your meta play? First off, since you think that info from other games is meaningless, why are you doing it? Second off - I didn't ask about your replace in habits, and am not sure what this has to do with anything I've said. Clarify?

Just trying to demonstrate that I have fairly strict criteria for how I play the game, and these criteria are numerous and I take them seriously.

[bji]

I do not understand why Mal lurking is scummy but Tracer lurking is not. Is the difference to you the fact that some kind of site info indicated that Mal was playing other games but not this one, but the same source of data showed that Tracer was not playing other games? That's weak sauce if so. Did you consider that Tracer could have an alt and be playing other games constantly here while ignoring this game too? And did you really think that this is the behavior that scum would use - blatant and obviously fact-checkable lurking? Attributing the dumbest possible play to someone so that you can lynch them doesn't sound like good town strategy to me.

So I (and the others, I was far from the only one to notice that Mal was posting elsewhere) and should have gone "oh hey, Tracer

could

be playing on an alt. This is something we should consider and not lynch a lazy slot that should have been mature enough to replace out while they coast through the game

BUT

we shouldn't even consider this." PBBBT!

As an example, this game had a player that flipped scum while constantly posting elsewhere.

but its just one example!

There are more but I don't feel like slogging through my past games to find them. Its a somewhat common scumtell.

The difference is that the others all agreed that it was policy lynch, but you explicitly called Mal scum on several occasions. That's not objectively discussing the merits of a last minute policy lynch, that's trying to push it, and is a bridge too far if you ask me.

Here's the thing. We have only a few pieces of undeniably true data in this game. A major piece of objective information is that Mal was town and was fairly quickly lynched at the end of Day 1, in what read to me as a flurry of people giving up on their prior cases and just deciding to join that wagon. Mass hysteria? I dunno, but I would be more likely to believe that at least one or two people on that wagon were scum. My two most likely candidates are you and Thor, for reasons I have already given.

[bji]

Spoiler: Penguins don't like walls

lol no one called it a policy lynch.

You lie.

We are essentially voting this guy right now due to him being active on site, but not posting on the thread.

Did not use the words "policy lynch" but clearly is saying that the vote is a policy lynch.

I oppose the mal train because there is no actual reason to lynch him other than he is not playing the game.

Same thing. LmkGuy's position is clear.

I guess I'm fine with a policy lynch, because that's what this feels like rn.

Explicitly called it a policy lynch.

Oh holy shit though.

I looked at mal's recent posts. Whatever you can be town. This is fake VLA shit.

Vote: mal

Jesus. Don't claim, just die. Fucking fake VLAers. This doesn't just make you scum, it means you're garbage who abuses site rules meant to accommodate people IRL. Welcome to the hell of "I will expect you to post content at all times in all games I am a part of regardless of VLA status."

This is clearly a policy lynch vote. Clearly states that he has no belief that Mal was actually scum and just wanted him to die because he is "garbage who abuses site rules".


Literally

everyone except you

justified their vote as a policy lynch vote, either explicitly, or implicitly by saying that they weren't sure that Mal was scum but that he should die because no one should go on V/LA in one game and still participate in other games, because that's lame.

Thor came

close

with posts like:

So you are saying it's perfect to push mal and get a last minuted claim if he is a town power role? What side are you on?

The one looking to sort slots and scumhunt.
The reverse of your complaint towards me is that you are perfectly fine doing absolutely nothing to a slot that is barely here - also known as the exact reason scum lurk as a strategy. Like, if he's scum, you're giving him exactly what he wants. if he's town, you're accepting that he is playing to help scum.
I mean, if you're telling me I could just declare v/la and auto get to lylo - let me know.

He's not really saying that Mal is scum or town, though; he's making a (bogus) argument for why to lynch Mal either way. And later:

Of Malp's 11 posts - almost half (4) are just discussing his multiple v/las)
One is going "/first"
One is an RVS vote.
One is complaining RVS is over.

I mean, seriously.

This reads to me like anti-evidence for a reads-based vote of Mal, pointing out that Mal had basically no activity so we can't really infer alignment from anything he actually did. Leaving the only reason for voting him being policy.

You now look worse than Thor to me, and that's saying something.

UNVOTE: Thor
VOTE: Nero Cain

[bji]

Well I've been prodded, but I really have little to add except to restate my case.

Call me naive but in the face of lots of uncertainty I'd rather focus on something that is at least grounded in fact, and that's the wagon. I wasn't a part of it in real time so maybe I'd have felt differently about it if I was, but reading it after the fact, it's just really hard for me to believe that this mislynch happened without scum help.

Again, almost everybody abandoned their Day 1 cases to join a fairly quick mislynch based on what I think is patently poor logic, and furthermore, targeted at a player who had had zero meaningul interactions and was, therefore, the least valuable mislynch if he was to be a mislynch (and he was).

It's very, very hard for me to believe that all of those factors happened by chance. Of course it's possible, but this is a game of odds and those odds don't seem good to me.

So now, I had to ask myself, who are the most likely scum drivers or participants of that wagon?

The wagon had Nero Cain, Fire Assassin, Thor, aronagrundy, karnos, ironstove, and GreyICE.

GreyICE is out because already dead town.
ironstove is one of my top town reads for other reasons that I have already stated, so I'm not going to focus on him when I have better choices.
karnos, same.
aronagrundy would be my third choice for scum, and I would vote him absent other choices. I tried to push a little on aronagrundy but I felt like his reasoning in response did seem sincere, and additionally, he doesn't post a lot so it's easy to lose focus on him when other people I am interested in are posting more. That being said, not posting alot should not be a free pass to coasting through so I'd still be happy to pressure aronagrundy if anyone else in this game would bother to try with me.
Thor - I didn't like his unexplained sheep vote and I don't feel like any of the reasons he gave for voting Mal were even remotely as well explained as any of his other reasons for vfoting any of the other people he's voted. So he's a strong candidate for scum on this wagon from my perspective.
Fire Assassin I have as a town read because of the claim and the way that the NK went down, so I'm not focusing on him while other better candidates are present.
Nero Cain started the wagon, which I didn't like, and I really didn't like his defenses, which also involved outright misrepresentations of other players' reasons for being on that wagon, which I elaborated on in post 1089.

I'd lynch one of { Thor, Nero Cain, aronagrundy } today.

Until and unless I do a deep re-examination of the game, I don't see my stance changing there. Everything else feels like pushing ropes because it's all just assumptions based on assumptions that are all founded and based on unverifiable evidence. But the wagon was REAL and is an ACTUAL FACTUAL BASIS to draw evidence and cases from.

[bji]

Spoiler: Is it a wall?

which also involved outright misrepresentations of other players' reasons for being on that wagon, which I elaborated on in post 1089.

If you think that misreps are scummy then you should be self voting 'cause like your claim that Grey was accusing town of abusing site features is fucking laughable.

Oh holy shit though.

I looked at mal's recent posts. Whatever you can be town. This is fake VLA shit.

Vote: mal

Jesus. Don't claim, just die. Fucking fake VLAers. This doesn't just make you scum, it means you're garbage who abuses site rules meant to accommodate people IRL. Welcome to the hell of "I will expect you to post content at all times in all games I am a part of regardless of VLA status."

This post 100% says that GreyICE was accusing Mal of abusing site features. It doesn't say that GreyICE was accusing TOWN of abusing site features, although it's interesting that you talk about Mal as if he could have been known to be town before flipping.

Whatever you can be town. This is fake VLA shit.

Translation: you could be town, but in any case I think you're faking your V/LA status.

EXPLICITLY noting that even town could fake V/A status.

Jesus. Don't claim, just die. Fucking fake VLAers. This doesn't just make you scum, it means you're garbage who abuses site rules meant to accommodate people IRL.

Doesn't even want a claim. Just wants Mal dead because of an apparent serious anger about the V/LA faking. I don't read "this doesn't just make you scum" as GreyICE actually having a strong scum read on Mal. I read this as GreyICE saying that IF Mal is scum, THEN faking V/LA as scum makes him garbage who abuses site rules.

Whats also laughable is the idea that we (mostly I) should have ignored Mal posting it up elsewhere while ignoring this game b/c Tracer could have had an alt (or a main) that was posting elsewhere.

Laugh all you want, you should have ignored it. You had NO IDEA if Mal was intentionally ignoring this game. The rationale was completely flawed. I don't think that everyone who succumbed to this rationale was scum, obviously they couldn't be, there were 7 people on that wagon, but I do think that some of them were. And I think that those that DROVE the wagon are more culpable. You who explicitly stated that Mal was scum contributed a driving force to the wagon, not to mention starting it.

He's also flat out ignoring the idea that scum could have, and likely did, avoid and/or cast doubt on said wagon b/c they knew it would flip town, so he's pretty likely scum that has at least 1 buddy that avoided (LMK) or threw doubt on the wagon before joining. (Karnos, Iron)

I am not ignoring that idea; if I thought that no scum avoided the wagon then I'd be saying that all the scum were definitely on that wagon, which I never said. I said that at least ONE scum is likely on that wagon, and I have a three most likely candidates.

[bji]

You are putting things in spoiler b/c PP fussed at you for walling right?

Yes, I'm trying to honor his request. I don't know exactly the length of a post that makes it a wall though, I didn't think that one was too long but I erred on the side of spoilering it anyway, hence the "Is it a wall" tongue in cheek question.

[bji]

Nero trying to play the role of clueless town?

[bji]

The point was that I have a hard time seeing Grey accuse Mal of faking V/LA b/c why the fuck would town

EVER

do that?

The point is that Grey accused Mal of faking V/LA and didn't even CARE if Mal was scum or even say he thought that Mal was scum. Grey said in the SAME POST that Mal could be town or could be scum, but that he wanted to lynch him anyway because V/LA shenanigans. That is like the definition of a policy lynch. Everyone on that wagon except you was calling it a policy lynch.

That was my original point, that invoked all of this argument about GreyICE's statements about Mal.

Really nothing has happened today that fundamentally changes my evaluation as given in post 1130, except that Nero has squirmed like crazy in response.

We really need other players to contribute though. All I'm hearing is echoes off of the walls from me, Nero, and Iron.

[bji]

The 'Whatever, you can be town' from Grey in 777 was a reference to his 776 'you' was 'Thor'.
I swear no one in this game reads.

That makes no sense. There was literally zero to change his mind about you between 776 and 777, those are consecutive posts! He's not talking about you in 777, he already talked about you in 776, he's obviously just ISO'd Mal, and he says "Oh holy shit though. I looked at mal's recent posts. Whatever you can be town. This is fake VLA shit." Cripes it is completely obvious that every statement there is about Mal, not you.

Or are you now going to claim that his further statements of "Jesus. Don't claim, just die. Fucking fake VLAers. This doesn't just make you scum, it means you are garbage etc etc" was about you also?

And the thing is, you've shown from prior posts that you can read the game alot more carefully than that when it suits your needs.

{ Nero, Thor, Aronagrundy }, with Arona a distant third at this point.

[bji]

Cripes it is completely obvious that every statement there is about Mal, not you.

Okay, you're clearly wrong, but let's use small words.

If he's claiming the Mal vote is a policy lynch.
Why is he calling his V/LA "fake" as opposed to complaining that he's just not posting?
He is claiming town is faking being unable to post...?
That makes sense to you?

Doesn't policy lynch mean lynching for non-alignment-related reasons?

So not caring whether or not Mal is town or scum, just caring whether or not Mal is ignoring this game while posting elsewhere, is a policy lynch.

Now, you're asking how could Mal have believed that a town player would lurk like that? I don't know, maybe he thinks Mal is some kind of griefer, or is not interested in this game for ??reasons?? and just doesn't want to play, preferring to leave himself on V/LA here so that he doesn't have to deal with prods for a while. The whole concept seemed to piss Grey off pretty well, I suspect he wasn't thinking "awesome, this foolish scum has revealed himself by a brain dead V/LA ploy", because, my god, who actually believes that scum would employ that technique? I think he was pissed about lurkers and especially pissed about lurkers that would hide behind V/LA in a game for any reason at all, because you know what, lurkers piss me off too and if I thought someone was doing it intentionally I'd be extra pissed.

To be frank, the whole concept of believing that someone is scum just because they appear to be abusing V/LA features of the site is so far beyond rational to me that I can't actually even believe that anyone would truthfully propose that. Which is why the fact that everyone else (including Grey) calling it a policy lynch, while Nero called it scum behavior, is telling to me.

[bji]

Are you for real with this post? Grey was obviously referring to Thor with his "ok you can be town" statement. He called out mal for the fake V/LA, so he "let" Thor be town given previous interactions.

It's not hard to understand.

I will admit, that the meaning that you and Thor have ascribed to his statements, could make sense if read that way. That is not the way I read it though, and my interpretation makes more sense when you consider the emotional content of Grey's post.

[bji]

No it doesn't. Not even a little bit. He literally said that, then voted mal, then went on a anti-V/LA faker rant. It's completely obvious.

You are implying that Grey really believed that Mal was scum and using literally the dumbest possible scum strategy. I just don't believe that.

But hey, I'm happy that you're kind of playing the game. Why are you voting me again?

[bji]

Your posts on this page are reason enough.

You had your vote on me long before this page and never explained it, so giving that reason now seems a bit convenient don't you think?

[bji]

At the risk of Karnos thinking that I'm just sheeping him, I will re-state that I will be happy to vote for Thor also, but I would like to wait to hear what some of the lurkers and replace-ins say.

[bji]

Ah so I checked the replacement requests forum, Foxbird has only requested a replace for LmkGuy, and I see that everyone else that Foxbird sent weekend prods for has posted here. So I guess we already have just about everyone who is going to contribute in here already.

So in the interest of trying to get things moving forward, let's step back and take a look at this game. Thor and myself are the two hottest wagons at the moment. And yet there are some players who are piddling around with wagons that clearly aren't going anywhere. I present to you: LmkGuy, Lowell, and Saru.

LmkGuy has a very bland ISO. One thing that caught my eye was post 741 where he said "Maybe everyone should post a few reason why they want a certain person lynched", but then he doesn't actually follow through and provide "a few reason" why he wants anyone lynched. This is either very lazy scumhunting, or is an attempt to just kind of coast while looking like he is trying to scumhunt. I mean if you think that everyone posting some concise reasons for a vote is needed to get clarity in the game, why wouldn't you start out by doing it yourself? Unless you actually didn't care or didn't believe what you were saying?

That being said, his whole game reads as just lazy so it could just be that. Plus he's going to be replaced so I'd much rather see what his replacement says that relying on his ISO for evaluating his slot at this point.

Lowell has never voted anyone that I have a scum read on, while at the same time town reading me at every opportunity. He's so not present that he's been slipping under my radar but on re-read of his ISO and paying closer attention to his votes, I am getting a pretty icky feeling about him. He's also not given a single opinion about the Thor wagon or my wagon. Lowell - if you had to choose between me and Thor, who would you vote and why?

Saru is completely hung up on his fight with Lowell and is basically not interacting with the rest of the game, except to occasionally defend himself whenever anyone such as aronagrundy mentions him. If I recall he spent quite a bit of his time on Day 1 in a tit-for-tat with karnos. Saru -- do you have any plans to scumhunt any further than the person you happen to be in a fight with at the moment?

PEdit - Yes Thor I mislynched you in our only other game together. But I've already stated numerous times that I'm not going to let other games influence my decision making in this game. Unless and until I read every game you've ever played, and can evaluate all of your play instead of one example, I'm not going to look at just one example of your play and try to extrapolate anything from that. And besides, if you are a skilled player, and I believe you are, then your scum play should look just like your town play, and you do look pretty similar in this game as you did in the other. But of course, I'm not even factoring that into my case against you. But keep squirming, it's fun to watch ...

[bji]

Anyone else notice Thor trying to bait me into voting him so that everyone can become suspicious of my "sheeping" of karnos' votes?

[bji]

It is blatantly obvious you're going to vote me eventually.
What I'm trying to point out to everyone is how you're aware this is a bad wagon - and your avoiding of it is a scum plot.

Yes, I've already stated that you and Nero are my top two choices and the Nero wagon doesn't seem to have nearly as much support despite being my preferred wagon so ... we agree that I've already made this clear. I'm not avoiding the vote, I'm just keeping my vote on my top read until it's in town's best interest to move it, and not a moment sooner.

What plot anyway? What do you think I could possibly gain by "avoiding" a vote I have already expressed willingness to make?

[bji]

I mean, it's a nice pincer move and all ... try to goad me into voting Karnos and if I do, claim that I must be sheeping him because I keep moving my vote to match his, and then if I don't take the bait and refuse to vote him, claim that I am avoiding the vote and have a "scum plot".

[bji]

Oh cripes I mistyped that. I meant "try to goad me into voting WITH Karnos", and also "don't take the bait and refust to vote YOU". See, you've got me all hot and bothered.

[bji]

UNVOTE: Nero Cain

VOTE: Thor

Thor is at L-1

What's your claim, Thor?

[bji]

Also...lulz at bji.

Lulz at yourself dude. I haven't seen you do anything useful in this game, whereas I am at least trying.

[bji]

I will agree with that point. You are definitely playing to your wincon.

Treading water while trying to look involved would be a decent way to play to a scum wincon ... and you've certainly got that nailed.

[bji]

Yeah...sorry, still waiting for the response to my last question. Weak retort. Points lost.

OK ok. You're more smug than I am. You win.

[bji]

MathBlade, how much of the game do you plan to read?

[bji]

No, it's not a website, it's code I run locally on my machine and it's not user friendly at all as I wrote it for my personal use.

Answer me this: what language(s) did you code it in? Keep in mind you are speaking to a computer programmer.

public function determineAlignmentOfPlayer(Player player){

var response = player.askQuestionToThem();
if (response.truthful)
examineReadOnPlayer();

}

Looks like flash. Poor bracing though.

[bji]

Somebody better do something or else we're going to NL ...

[bji]

I think most of us are in the U.S. though, people will be asleep during most of those hours.

[bji]

Okay, so yesterday there was no case on me at all.

This is not a presidential election; you can't just say factually verifiable bullshit and expect people to believe you.

There were clear cases against you yesterday. I, for example, can recall having a pretty good one.

Today the case on me is "there can't be two Trackers!"
Not that there is any reason to think that as far as I'm aware, I've been in multiple games with duplicate roles.

Well I haven't played all that many games of Mafia (7 or so now), but I've not only never seen duplicate roles, I've never even heard anyone mention it as a possibility, not even once. So I'd venture a guess that duplicate roles, if they do exist, are extremely rare.

I was already confident in my vote, and FA's flip countering your claim just about pushes it over the top for me.

I'll happily vote Thor but I would like to understand one thing first: if Thor fake claimed as scum, why would he agree to a NK of the only townie with a claim, and one that seemed pretty believable? Wasn't that just a huge gamble that his fake claim wouldn't be outed? I had been thinking that FA was pretty likely tracker, I mean this question:

Who should I target for Investigative/Protective/or Killing abilitie(s).

The bodyguard already died so he wasn't protecting anyone, so that left either an investigative role (tracker) or a killing role (vigilante? Are there any others in a normal game?). I've seen quite a few more trackers than vigs in my day, so tracker seemed the most likely case.

So now ... did scum!Thor really agree to kill the one player most likely to out him?

PEDIT:

@thor:

So...potentially FA cleared town?
I'd like to lynch in here; aronagrundy, karnos, ironstove
I think Aronagrundy is probably town.

Vote: Karnoe

Second Day, going the same way

This is thor's first post d2. If he was sitting on the knowledge that FA didn't visit anyone N1, why is he even entertaining the idea that FA is cleared town?

Thoughts?

That is a very good point. Thor looks all kinds of inconsistent with this claim. I think I'm just going to have to conclude that scum really was dumb enough to kill the one player most likely to out their fake claiming teammate.

VOTE: Thor

The only remaining question I have is, does it benefit town to have any more discussion today beyond Thor's almost guaranteed lynching? Seems like any discussion beyond that is only in scum's interest as it gives them more info for their NK, and anything we say today beyond Thor's lynch can wait until tomorrow can't it?

[bji]

@bji: that post of FA's you're referring to was made before grey died. Honestly what were the odds from scum's perspective that FA would flip tracker?

That's not the point. The point is that Grey died and was revealed as bodyguard.

From that evidence, I had already concluded that FA was likely the tracker. Why couldn't scum see the same thing? Well I guess they didn't because they derp killed the one player who could out their fake claiming teammate.

Seems like any discussion beyond that is only in scum's interest as it gives them more info for their NK, and anything we say today beyond Thor's lynch can wait until tomorrow can't it?

well unless something happens to the nk we lose a townie so isn't that reason enough to not lynch Thor right off?

I'm just saying that all discussion should be about Thor, anything else can be used against us tonight, and anything we say now beyond the Thor lynch (if we are going to lynch him, and given that flip I can't see how we don't), doesn't do us any good TODAY and can only help scum TONIGHT. Unless we think that our discussion will somehow confuse scum into making a suboptimal NK choice, but I think it's more likely that anything we say helps them more than helps us.

[bji]

Ok that said I'm confused re: bji too. Like there are investigative roles beyond tracker

Well aside from cop, I haven't personally played with any others. I guess scum could have thought FA was cop too. But then:

Thor would have to believe that FA was cop, and then he'd claim tracker knowing that since the bodyguard was dead and there was likely no doctor (doctor + bodyguard in same game, does that happen?) that a NK of the cop would not out him. But he'd have to be pretty sure that FA was cop and not tracker ...

Maybe there are other investigative roles but I haven't seen them personally. I'm just not sure that if I were scum I'd agree to a kill of the one player most likely to out me.

Anyway, this is all just speculation about scum motives, and not particularly important given what we know about FA's flip and Thor's claim.

[bji]

Not to mention I just realized that Thor is actually lynched if my math is correct.

[bji]

Thor claimed at like 6am my time (EST) when I was getting ready to head to college. I didn't see the claim until I left my class which was on my mobile 10 minutes before the deadline (I never mobile post, fwiw). I figured it would be better not to take the chance of lynching a PR, basically. Nothing more to it.

This is clearly a lie because no college student gets up at 6 am. Also no college student goes a whole day without checking every possible source of information on their phone numerous times.

j/k It's not

clearly

a lie, but it's no better or more verifiable than Lowell's non-reason for not hammering. Also MathBlade ...

I believe Thor's claim.

Why? Why did you believe Thor's claim?

I agree that all these refusals to hammer are ... interesting.

I have a long flame post I wrote while night was out I'm gonna a paste it here so I can get banned from this game

Please don't.

[bji]

@ironstove, @MathBlade -- I see a shitstorm of personal attacks brewing, please don't do it. It's just going to clog up the thread.

[bji]

I tried being nice about this at d2 to push people to Lynch and explain why it is actually worse to no lynch than Lynch a town when a mislynch is available but people don't listen because they act like they're too fucking good at this game.

Like I don't FUCKING care if I get mod replaced I have already won fmpov it's these fucking shitty town players who are fucking idiots and can't fucking play the game correctly by listening to reason because they're so fucking obsessed with their conf bias and are basically more concerned with their egos than winning

Dude that's a little harsh.

Please show me where you "explain why it it is actually worse to no lynch than Lynch a town when a mislynch is available" ... I looked at your day 2 ISO. I see lots of "do this, because I say so", but little explanation.

Also ...

In retrospect I should have held my vote and waited last minute but I thought the outcome would be the same and fmpov nl was the only outcome that would have occurred had I fought the Lynch with that little time. Fmpov even if I thought mal wasn't scum, I voted because maybe I was wrong and the flip would give information.

You are one of the people who screwed up on the Day 1 lynch, you admit it here.

It was very troubling to me that you flip flopped your way onto that mislynch, and your outrage today looks a little fake to me. Me thinks thou dost protest too much ...

[bji]

VOTE: MathBlade is scum.

Where did this come from? Surely not just OMGUS?

And please, for the love of god, don't say it has something to do with 1800 ...

[bji]

Spoiler: Don't upset the penguin!

I emotion tested ironstove and I am fairly satisfied with the results. Still town reading him.

22: this is where penguin says if thor flips scum, add karnos penguin also says he thinks scum resides between saru/lowell

You know what would be delicious? If the remaining scum team is karnos-Penguin, who, once Thor was lynched, decided to off the neighborizer leaving only themselves in the neighborhood so that they could coordinate by day in the neighborhood thread instead of the mafia thread. And now we're witnessing their carefully calculated plans come to fruition, complete with misreps of everything that was said in the neighborizer thread to match their agenda.

I think it's a long shot that a scum team would actually do this, but it would be just so AWESOME, I almost wouldn't mind losing to that.

Why couldn't I just be town and wrong?

If you are town you are wrong far more often than anyone has the right to be. Example:

Thor665 (6) - MathBlade, aronagrundy, PenguinPower, Saru, bji, karnos (LYNCH!)

like do you really think scum would pass up the opportunity to hard bus and get town cred here?

I cannot believe you'd actually suggest that a lynch of Thor could be construed as an attemp to get "town cred", ESPECIALLY when it contradicts your assertion that hammering as fast as karnos did is scummy, and ESPECIALLY when since Thor was 1000% likely to be lynched yesterday, there is zero town cred to be gained from getting on his obvwagon.

Are we really going to let Nero slide with this half assed play? If he's scum it's like he doesn't really even have to work hard at it because no one is calling him out on his crap and forcing him make sense. If he's town he shouldn't need any motivation to work harder.

By the way, this goes for Saru and Lowell too who really need to contribute more. Lurking is not particularly alignment indicative in my experience but it is really just totally lame.

Karnos is likely scum for that horrible day end hammer that didn't let us partner hunt.

This is dumb. We can partner hunt today just as effectively as yesterday, and we didn't have to give scum any more info to assist in their NK.

I'm also now pretty sure saru is town after all.

What the ??? Where did THIS come from? Why the sudden 180 degree reversal on Saru after self-admitted "been after saru for days" despite Saru not even posting here today?

Yes he cut the day short and didn't let us partner hunt.

For a person making an argument about days you sure are hypocritical and wrong about when you apply it.

This is still dumb.

Except he was on Saru most of D1. And he parked on D2, which wasn't too much of a risk. And the quickhammer was just all sorts of bad after looking at D1 and D2!karnos Then there's the stuff in our Neighborhood (yes, arona neighborized me N2. Neighborized FA on N1. I asked to neighborize karnos which was dumb) that just comes across as scum!karnos to me based on meta (trying to hard to appear town).

(pp is referring to karnos)

This is such a blatant misrep I don't even know how to address it. Read Karnos' ISO. He was equally against Thor and Saru from way, way back on Day 1, and if you look at the number of times he addressed points directly to or from Thor, it's quite clear that he's intensely interested in Thor as well as Saru. So how is it inconsistent for him to have hammered one of the two players he consistently scum read?

Also I'm not going to quote them but posts 1496, 1506, and 1510 are just screaming Penguin trying to misrep and doubtcast karnos.

Okay, re-read nero's iso. Feeling real good about the penguin:nero scumteam.

Those are my top two scum reads at this point also. Penguin looks bad to me today with the misrepping, bad logic, deflections, defensiveness, etc. And Nero has done nothing to assuage my suspicions of him based on the Day 1 wagon, not to mention the fact that he didn't vote for Thor which puts him on the wrong side of two wagons, not to mention this:

Bj can be town I guess. Not going to put Thor in hammer range yet.

and then this:

There's scum within PP, Saru, BJ and Karnos.

with ZERO in between to change his mind about me, also his use of the phrase "Bj can be town I guess" almost feels like some kind of weird taunt given how much disagreement there was about what Grey meant when he used a similar phrase and how that disagreement put me at odds with many other players.

The only players who consistently make sense to me this game are ironstove and Karnos. MathBlade, while confirmed town, doesn't make much sense most of the time.

Saru and Lowell are basically lurking half or more of the time, and almost not even in the game at this point, and we need to start demanding more from them.

[bji]

Spoiler: You can see over this wall

Not a misrep in the least, though your taking this out of context is interesting. I'm clearly talking about his vote. He never once placed his vote on Thor D1. I can scream someone is scummy all day long, but if I don't put a vote on that person then it's all empty words.

I am getting a little lost in what the argument is about here. It was my impression that you are trying to make points about why Karnos' hammer of Thor made no sense, and was trying to use the fact that Karnos never voted for Thor day 1 and otherwise mostly had his vote on Saru as evidence for this. The point I am trying to make is that Karnos may have had his vote mostly on Saru but he expressed tremendous interest in Thor and called him scum numerous times along with Saru, so to me, a Karnos hammer of Thor is not inconsistent with his position. And when I say that your argument is a misrep, it's because Karnos' position was so clear and his vote on Thor so wells supported by his previous postings, that to suggest otherwise doesn't seem like it can have an innocent motivation.

Also I think that it's patently false to say that if you don't vote someone, then all of your statements about them are just empty words. There were 3 scum on Day 1 and one can't vote all three at once so does that mean that on day 1 it's not possible to have more than one scum read? And that it's not possible to make any more progress towards winning the game than to place a vote on one scum? Where "progress" here means placing suspicion on the one suspected scum you happen to be voting? Obviously not, therefore your statement is false.

Finally, let's assume that what you say is true, and that only votes count. Then Karnos redeemed himself by voting Thor didn't he? Because he finally did something beyond "empty words" with regards to Thor?

By saying that his repeated talking about and question of Thor and also outright calling Thor scum, but not voting him, was scummy, and also saying that his actual vote of Thor was scummy, you are basically in retrospect making Karnos' scumminess a truism; he was scummy if he did vote Thor, and scummy if he didn't, according to your position.

Town: it's a scum claim to quick hammer, don't do it.

Nice scum claim quickhammering Thor.

You see, this also feels misreppy to me. The Thor hammer was not a traditional quickhammer, so here you are misrepresenting the hammer to make it fit your position against Karnos.

I think most people would recognize, and those who don't need some education, that a quickhammer is a hammer that is done without giving time for town to discuss the now very imminent lynch, usually including not giving time for a claim, and always when further discussion of the lynch has merit and therefore the hammer being "quick" eliminates the possibility of this discussion.

It is quite clear that the Thor situation was different. His outed fake claim was very close to 100% going to get him lynched that day. I believe that the hammer was actually the CORRECT TOWN PLAY in that situation because any further discussion beyond Thor's lynch could 100% be done on the next day, and deferring it was actually beneficial to town because it was less info for scum for their NK. The singular and only difference between having any discussion beyond the Thor lynch on Day 3 instead of Day 4 is that there would be one less town player on Day 4; but this is neither a reason for nor a reason against having the discussion on Day 4 instead of Day 3 since while one less town player means one less player who could inject town motivation into the discussion, it is also one less player to misidentify as town and thus making it that much easier to zero in on actual scum. That issue being a wash, all we're left with is the deferral of the discussion being better for town because it gave scum less info for their NK.

Karnos' quickhammer being the correct town play does not guarantee that he is town, by the way, but it certainly is not a reason to call him scummy.

[bji]

Lots of unnecessary words.

1st wall: I guess we disagree. I think votes are the only thing that matter in the end, and karnos was weakly pushing Thor while voting elsewhere. I already said his D2 was bussing, and D3 had to happen given the claim. Literally said that right above.

2nd wall: Whatever. It was a quickhammer.
From Wiki:

is a technique (usually) used by scum to

secure a lynch by hammering a player before anyone can react.

OK so you prefer terse and uninformative arguments. Message received and understood.

You are wrong, and you are wrong.

Better?

[bji]

Spoiler: For everyone except Penguin

Iron, I think it makes sense to come out, but I don't really care. I just think it might be beneficial for town to be united, I think this back and forth between you and MathBlade is not terrible constructive.

Yeah I don't get this line of thinking. Iron is doubling down on his town claim by adding a role claim. If you believe he's town, you'll likely believe his claim and knowing his exact role doesn't really add anything. If you don't believe he's town, you wouldn't believe his role claim anyway. If you are unsure about Iron, then allowing a town claim, which can be made up by scum or town alike, to sway you either way is not very sound thinking.

Therefore I do not see any benefit in asking Iron to claim his role. If and when he thinks claiming is role is most beneficial, he will do so. If he's town, let's hope that he does it right. If he's scum, let's hope that it makes no sense and gets him lynched. Every fake role claim I've ever seen has completely backfired and screwed the player making the claim, and I've seen both town and scum do it.

For Penguin:

I don't think Iron should claim his role.

[bji]

What is your case on me besides "didn't vote Thor"?

1558 and 1559.

Nero is absolutely not even trying to play this game.

What happened between your day 1 vigor where you made posts like 284 and started wagons and such, and today, when you can't even be bothered to read the game?

[bji]

Why did you feel the need to answer for Iron?

A few reasons --

- I want to engage with you
- I want to demonstrate that you are not even reading the game, because I think town needs to be aware of this
- I want to avoid Iron having to re-post his case again because this thread is already so damn long and cluttered with sh** it's just getting easier and easier for scum to hide in all the detrius

[bji]

Also I don't want iron to have to revive his anger from yesterday.

[bji]

What happened between your day 1 vigor where you made posts like 284 and started wagons and such, and today, when you can't even be bothered to read the game?

[bji]

I mean you have argued (and Iron) that I'm scummy for pushing Mal but as I have shown I've lynched scum for this exact same reason so why is it scummy that I'd think Mal could be scum for the exact same reason?

You never showed that.

I'm curious to know what you think of iron's claim. Don't you want to know what his actual role is? You haven't expressed any interest.

PEDIT: What? Can you please rephrase the question NOT in the form of a run-on sentence? I cannot parse it.

[bji]

Also, yes, I am scum reading PP. I feel a sense of unease though about the way these wagons are lining up and I'm trying to tread carefully.

[bji]

As an example, this game had a player that flipped scum while constantly posting elsewhere.

but its just one example!

There are more but I don't feel like slogging through my past games to find them. Its a somewhat common scumtell.

This is me showing where I have successfully flipped scum using the "there are posting elsewhere but ignoring this game" tell

http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=60340
^
that too. It was Ika

How can I be sure that you haven't been in 100 other games where you mislynched 100 town players for the same dumb reason? How can I be sure you didn't just cherrypick the one or two cases to present here where you got lucky and caught scum instead?

If I'm supposed to be evaluating whether or not you are likely to have believed that going after someone for possible V/LA abuse is a strategy that you had seen work more often than not, then unless I can verifiably know how often you have seen it work, I cannot even make that evaluation. And I cannot verifably know how often you have seen it work versus not work.

This is why I don't read external games. It is a useless exercise.

PEDIT:

Huh? Are you quoting yourself and admitting you lied?

[bji]

I'm curious to know what you think of iron's claim. Don't you want to know what his actual role is? You haven't expressed any interest.

I'm ok with him claiming though I'm p sure that was a fake venge kill claim.

Why do you think iron would fake a venge kill claim? Why do you think he would fake any claim?

[bji]

I'm curious to know what you think of iron's claim. Don't you want to know what his actual role is? You haven't expressed any interest.

I'm ok with him claiming though I'm p sure that was a fake venge kill claim.

Why do you think iron would fake a venge kill claim? Why do you think he would fake any claim?

By the way just to be clear, I don't even know what a "fake venge kill claim" is, all I am sure about is the "fake" part, I am assuming that the rest means some kind of "revenge kill" thing where if scum kill him then the scum who fired the shot dies too.

I believe he made a different claim based on his day 1 crumb, and I already stated what I think he was claiming.

[bji]

If you think PP is scum why were you up in arms about my assertion that scum would and could bus Thor?

First, I was not "up in arms" about your assertion that "scum would and could bus Thor", I was expressing disbelief that you could be genuine in your argument that anyone lynching Thor would have been doing so for "town cred", when there was really zero town cred to be gained from carrying out a lynch that was really just a formality at that point.

Second, even if I think that PP is scum, I am

not

going to just latch onto any supporting reason no matter how ridiculous it is. I am not trying to lynch scum for bad reasons, I am trying to lynch them for good reasons, and if a reason isn't good, I'm not going to agree with it, even if it supports my scum read.

Your questioning me about this point must mean that you feel the opposite though? You'll be happy to latch onto bad reasoning as long as it supports your lynch?

[bji]

Why do you think Karnos couldn't have known Mal was town?

The full question was:

Why do you think Karnos couldn't have known Mal was town, thus making him scum?

And I do not understand the question. Please ask it again, more clearly.

[bji]

Fire, I believe it's time to claim your role.

stop role fishing

What is the difference between today's calls for iron to fully claim versus iron's post back on day 1 that you had a problem with here, such that you are not saying "stop role fishing" to anyone now?

[bji]

I probably have lynched town for this, does it matter? The point is there's possible scum motivation in ignoring a certain game. So explain to me what the town motivation is?

Um, you

definitely

have lynched town for this,

in this game

and yes, it does matter. Part of your defense of having started that wagon is to refer to external games where, if one read them presumably, one would see that in that game a player who flipped scum and had engaged in V/LA shenanigans. But that defense only makes sense if it can be used to demonstrate that you could reasonably believed that it was

more likely

that a player who engages in V/LA shenanigans is scum than town. And since your history with players engaging in V/LA shenanigans cannot be reliably identified, this defense cannot be expected to hold any weight with anyone.

My "town motivation" for not trusting your cherrypicked "evidence" blindly is that I want to use good sound reasoning in my scumhunting.

[bji]

There was no reason for Fire to claim. Why do you think he should have claimed?

I didn't say I thought he should have claimed. I am asking why YOU have a difference of opinion about these two situations with regards to whether or not people *should* or *should not* engage in role fishing.

There's a bit of a difference in Fire getting ran up and claiming a PR and Iron claiming unprompted for what reason I don't know. Don'tcha think?

Yes, I do think. But I asked you because I want to know what

you

think, not because I want an opportunity to say what I think.

[bji]

How do you know its cherry picked if you haven't and aren't going to read my previous games?

I don't know that it is cherry picked, but I can never know that it's not, unless I read every game you ever played (which I am not going to do, for obvious reasons), and also have some confidence that you never played under another name on this site or on another site (which I can never have).

The point is, it's unreliable "evidence", and a defense that requires me to accept unreliable evidence is not a sound defense.

[bji]

but I just told you, they are different situations and shouldn't be treated the same. Like there was F all reason for Fire to claim what PR he was. I am ok with Iron full claiming b/c I don't necessarily see the point in claiming unprompted like he did and we can see if his claim lines up with normal guidelines.

I agree with this thinking, and I feel the same way.

[bji]

And why can't my beliefs carry over?

They can. But I can't know whether or not they did, so you'll have to come up with a better reason for why you voted for Mal, and if you can't, just accept that skepticism about your reasoning is rational.

[bji]

In your last town game you were reading players as scummy for lurking, including BBT, who was scum. Can you explain to me how my belief that Mal was lurker scum is not a town mindset when you've gone after lurkers yourself as town?

This is an OUTRIGHT LIE. Here is the closest I came to even considering lurking as scummy:

From http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 9#p6792639

"OK so, scum killed at least one player from the lurky category. As I said before, this suggests to me that there was little/no benefit in killing players from the "actually playing the game" category, which implies that the scum were not in any particular danger after Day 1. The scum kill of either Slandaar or evilpacman18 suggests to me that scum liked the Day 1 fighting between BBT/RC/me/Scripten. Of all the players in that group, there are two who have mostly escaped scum reads during Day 1: BBT and me. I'm not scum, so the only interesting person in the category of "players who played hard day 1 but didn't get many scum reads" is BBT.

Therefore, I categorize my likely scum as BBT, and one or more of the lurkers."

I was scum reading the lurkers for REASONS,

NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE LURKERS

.

AND, BBT WAS NOT EVEN IN THAT CATEGORY!

Furthermore, your vote on Mal had the unique characteristic of choosing the player with the least interaction with anyone, making it the optimal scum mislynch. You are conveniently ignoring that part of the argument, every time your defense of the wagon you started on Mal is brought up.

Furthermore to my furthermore, you didn't argue against Mal because he was lurking, it was because his V/LA status happened to coincide with day end.

You lie too much to be town.

VOTE: Nero Cain

[bji]

Will work on my last will tonight but I want from everyone their list of reads in order of scumminess.
Exclude me and yourself.

Scummiest >> Towniest

The formatting of karnos' list is gorgeous, I'm going to steal his technique:

Town

ironstove

karnos

Saru

Lowell

Penguin Power

Nero Cain

Scum

[bji]

Furthermore to my furthermore, you didn't argue against Mal because he was lurking, it was because his V/LA status happened to coincide with day end.

I need to clarify this because I think I made a mistake. I misremembered Nero's reasons for his vote, indeed he never mentioned V/LA coinciding with day end, that was I think LMKGuy who made that argument.

[bji]

@MOD:

For clarity, can we please make PenguinPower's list NOT look like a quote of Karnos?

Fixed!

[bji]

@Penguin: Are you town reading Nero for any reason

other

than just to disagree with those who are scum reading you?

[bji]

WTF? I'm saying that the only reason I scum read him was because of meta. So, I'm discounting that, and I have two stronger scum targets which I explained. Like, seriously...wtf?

Here's what I don't understand about you, Penguin. You are outright admitting that your top scum read was a scum read solely due to some kind of meta evaluation.

This deep in the game, and your strongest scum read is paper thin?

Then Karnos says "And this is all because I voted an IC, before the IC was mod confirmed?" ... and your whole scum read on him falls apart and now your scummiest read is no longer scum?

I mean you literally went from "That would involve me believing that karnos is town. That's hard for me to do right now."

to

"Fuck it. If you're scum, I'll let you have this one." (directed at Karnos)

for as far as I can tell, basically no reason.

Why are people so sure that Karnos-Penguin is not a possible scum team? Penguin said to Lowell:

Either karnos or penguin or

both are scum

.

Bolded for emphasis: I think this might be the dumbest thing you've said.

Why is Karnos-Penguin the dumbest thing possible?

On the flip side ... Penguin's exasperation does feel very real.

Penguin is doing quite a lot more defending himself than he is trying to get Nero lynched. If Penguin's goal as scum is just to "live another day", he'd probably be better served by trying harder to actively complete the Nero lynch I think.
Of course he did park his vote on that wagon and with a reason that he somehow never surmised before it was needed to allow him to get on the Nero counter wagon (post 1766).

WIFOM out the wazoo here but I'm not feeling the Penguin scum case as strongly as I was.

Also this:

Spoiler: Penguins don't like walls

lol no one called it a policy lynch.

You lie.

We are essentially voting this guy right now due to him being active on site, but not posting on the thread.

Did not use the words "policy lynch" but clearly is saying that the vote is a policy lynch.

I oppose the mal train because there is no actual reason to lynch him other than he is not playing the game.

Same thing. LmkGuy's position is clear.

I guess I'm fine with a policy lynch, because that's what this feels like rn.

Explicitly called it a policy lynch.

Oh holy shit though.

I looked at mal's recent posts. Whatever you can be town. This is fake VLA shit.

Vote: mal

Jesus. Don't claim, just die. Fucking fake VLAers. This doesn't just make you scum, it means you're garbage who abuses site rules meant to accommodate people IRL. Welcome to the hell of "I will expect you to post content at all times in all games I am a part of regardless of VLA status."

This is clearly a policy lynch vote. Clearly states that he has no belief that Mal was actually scum and just wanted him to die because he is "garbage who abuses site rules".


Literally

everyone except you

justified their vote as a policy lynch vote, either explicitly, or implicitly by saying that they weren't sure that Mal was scum but that he should die because no one should go on V/LA in one game and still participate in other games, because that's lame.

Thor came

close

with posts like:

So you are saying it's perfect to push mal and get a last minuted claim if he is a town power role? What side are you on?

The one looking to sort slots and scumhunt.
The reverse of your complaint towards me is that you are perfectly fine doing absolutely nothing to a slot that is barely here - also known as the exact reason scum lurk as a strategy. Like, if he's scum, you're giving him exactly what he wants. if he's town, you're accepting that he is playing to help scum.
I mean, if you're telling me I could just declare v/la and auto get to lylo - let me know.

He's not really saying that Mal is scum or town, though; he's making a (bogus) argument for why to lynch Mal either way. And later:

Of Malp's 11 posts - almost half (4) are just discussing his multiple v/las)
One is going "/first"
One is an RVS vote.
One is complaining RVS is over.

I mean, seriously.

This reads to me like anti-evidence for a reads-based vote of Mal, pointing out that Mal had basically no activity so we can't really infer alignment from anything he actually did. Leaving the only reason for voting him being policy.

You now look worse than Thor to me, and that's saying something.

UNVOTE: Thor
VOTE: Nero Cain

Here you go Penguin.

In no way, shape, or form was I referring to Penguin in that post. As he already stated, my only mention of him there was because he asked me not to post walls so I've been putting spoiler tags in with cheeky references to him as the spoiler title text.

I have a lot to say about Math's giant game summary but I don't have the time at the moment. It's Saturday morning and my 8 year old son really really just wants me to put an emoji in my post so here it is:

PEDIT: Now Nero is suggesting a Karnos-PP team??? I CAN'T KEEP UP WITH THIS!!!

[bji]

Sorry I sincerely intended to spoiler that post but forgot.

[bji]

I think it was BJ that said something along the lines of "but we are able to buddy hunt today!" but its still dumb as we were guaranteed to lose at least one townie over the night and reduce the town brain power.

You don't seem to be able to comprehend that a single town player's brain power is balanced by the incorrect suspicion that that player will draw from the rest of town. Losing a town player is mostly a wash, because while it removes one player with good intentions, it also removes one player for town to incorrectly focus on.

It's a wash. There was no disadvantage to ending the day as early as possible.

Karnos response that he was worried that town wouldn't lynch Thor doesn't mesh with reality.

NO ONE

was going to buy there being two town trackers in a mini. It was deff a bus.

I actually agree with this. Karnos should have known that that lynch was inevitable, and his reason for hammering was weak if it really was based on fears that Thor might get away.

The correct reason for hammering quickly there was the one I already gave -- to avoid giving scum more info to help them make the optimal NK.

[bji]

Prod dodge. I prefer Penguin as I think Nero is town.

Penguin did a lot of work to avoid his lynch this weekend. The "someone please hammer me" dramatics could easily be fake, given that no one was going to jump ahead of Math and hammer anyone. I'm still more sold on the Nero lynch than the Penguin lynch though. Let me reiterate my case on Nero, so that it's very clear:

- He started a wagon on what turned out to be a bad mislynch and which I think could have been identified as a bad mislynch at the time
- He is the only one to have explicitly called Mal scum, everyone else recognized it as a policy lynch. To me this could easily be a slip, overplaying his hand.
- He started that wagon right after FA claimed. The chances that FA was going to be lynched after claiming were low, anyone could have seen that, and Nero's first vote after the FA claim was the start of the Mal mislynch wagon, "coincidentally" timed right when scum needed a better wagon than the FA wagon.
-

Spoiler: Thor/Nero interactions

Of what I've read? Saru, Karnos, and maybe Nero. I'd actually wager money Nero isn't empty regardless, I'm sure he's made multiple clear pushes.

Thor's first post, about who he considers "not empty", notice that for the rest of the game he is scum reading Karnos consistently and town reading Nero consistently. In one of his first posts he has already established the players that he is going to pay most attention to.

I agree with you on Nero town.

Like right now I am leaning invest Thor/Saru, Prot Nero/Ice, and killing any of the lurkers.

Make it a kill Karnos and drop Saru for PP or Grey and I'm good with this.

Asks for a Karnos kill and a PP/GreyIce investigate but leaves Nero/GreyIce as protect. I didn't notice the inconsistency here on first read but it is interesting. He's saying to both investigate and protect GreyIce is weird, investigating and protecting the same player makes no sense that I can think of, to me this means he never actually meant the protect or investigate of GreyIce, but he left Nero in as protect. Protecting someone you know is your scum buddy is a good plan because it takes protection away from town.

I am actively aware of Mal's activity elsewhere.
Mal wagon is fine and dandy - so is Nero.
Your cases are pretty soft - and I'm not sheeping you.

Thor explicitly calling Nero out as "fine and dandy". Nero is clearly Thor's strongest townread.

@PP That wasn't the right word. I mean I do think BJ is buddyng him but for you I kinda of hate

Then lynch that. If he's scum, good lynch. If he's town, he hurts town. Lynch it. Seriously, dude got me a scum win based off a rage vote. If he's not going to play - and not going to be replaced - lynch it.

like its really goading me into trying to lynch Iron regardless of alignment.

but you can help me remove doubt by voting for scum.

vote:BJ

Unvote: Karnos
Vote: bjj

I'mma sheep this without logic

Sheeps Nero again. This is twice that he sheeped Nero's vote without any justification given at the time.

I don't like the Nero wagon, not that that should shock anyone, but I want to be on record for it.

@bji: that post of FA's you're referring to was made before grey died. Honestly what were the odds from scum's perspective that FA would flip tracker?

Also pretty much everyone townread FA last time I checked so maybe they killed him because of that?

Seems like any discussion beyond that is only in scum's interest as it gives them more info for their NK, and anything we say today beyond Thor's lynch can wait until tomorrow can't it?

well unless something happens to the nk we lose a townie so isn't that reason enough to not lynch Thor right off?

And some people start posting sense - shock.

- Joined the Penguin wagon at L-1 with no previously expressed suspicion of Penguin. This was as good as a hammer because Math had already expressed intent to hammer Penguin
- Has lied repeatedly when attempting to defend himself from my case on him, look at my ISO and search for the word "lie", it's all clearly laid out. Note: one occurrence is in a spoiler tag post 1089 so a simple search won't find it.

[bji]

- Joined the Penguin wagon at L-1 with no previously expressed suspicion of Penguin. This was as good as a hammer because Math had already expressed intent to hammer Penguin

By the way I think this clearly indicates that { Penguin, Nero } is not the scum team. I don't see Nero essentially hammering Penguin when he had no case for him previously, there is no benefit for Nero to bus Penguin in this way.

If Nero flips scum then I think Penguin is off the hook.

[bji]

Also it appears that Math came to basically the same conclusion, with further supporting evidence from 1822:

"This means likely only one of Nero and Penguin is scum and the other is town. Of the two, ironstove is much more adamant that Nero is scum. Both Nero and Penguin attacked bji in the mid 1000s range. However Penguin was the one who was caught deliberately lying about the state of the policy lynch 1089 This would make bji the counter wagon for Thor and make him town."

Note that Math was wrong about Penguin being the one caught deliberately lying about the state of the policy lynch, it was Nero who did that, as has been established by further discussion.

[bji]

Saru vs. Penguin, that would be some pretty ballsy mutual bussing out of the gate, and I don't see what the value would be in trying to set up a choice between two scum today when all they need is one more mislynch. So almost certainly not both scum.

Saru's case on Penguin is bad. Additionally, it's ???weird??? that Saru is so active today after doing almost nothing yesterday. What lit a bug under your butt Saru? Is it the excitement of being one mislynch away from a win?

I think it's much more likely that scum targeted Math (scum really would not want IC holding hammer in MYLO, although fortunately this is what happened) than iron (who presumably inherited Bodyguard from GreyICE, and took the bullet for Math, himself clearly believing that Math being in MYLO was valuable despite 1681), but I also don't think there's much to be gained from speculating on which was their actual target since we can't know.

It being Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday!), this is going to be my only post today.

To those who celebrate it: HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!

[bji]

Who do you think the scum team is?

Well I can't find any obvious fault in post 2047. I am not scum reading Saru.

I had been scum reading Penguin already before yesterday's vote before doubting my vote late in the day after Penguin worked so hard to avoid his lynch, but I'm leaning back in a Penguin scum direction, especially after today's Saru-Penguin exchange.

I see no reason to switch my town read of Karnos.

This leaves Lowell, and given the number of weird things he's done this game (whiffing on the Thor hammer, lurking until just after Nero was lynched yesterday, not to mention very half hearted play all around) I think he's most likely the second scum.

So at this point I'd call the team as { Penguin, Lowell }. I have not yet bothered to read their ISOs to see their interactions though.

[bji]

To clean up my last post, my scum team is:

penguin
karnos/saru
bj

That's 4 players. In fact that's every player except you and MathBlade. Which of those do you actually think is the team?

but honestly bj's lack of curiosity in that last post does him no favors.

What is "lack of curiosity"? I already admitted I haven't read through ISOs yet to see interactions. I will do so but it's a holiday weekend and I haven't had a lot of time to spare.

beyond that, at this point I just don't see lurkerteam of bj/saru as viable.

Well I don't think I've been lurking at all.

But assuming for the moment that I have been lurking, why don't you think that myself and Saru could be a scum team?

[bji]

Spoiler: WARNING: This wall is not Penguin-friendly

I'm here. Briefly, since I'm running to a meeting (and am old). I agree with Math's 1550 in response to penguin's "why would I do this" post, for the reasons he stated. After that we can sort it out, but I'm relatively sure iron and saru are town. I lean town on bji, and I'm not quite seeing the nero case yet. My guess is the other is Karnos. I'll check in on this once more this evening if I can, and then tomorrow.

VOTE: penguin

This post specifically feels planned. I would trust bji to figure out which.

Not sure what you mean about "figure out which" ... do you mean, figure out whether or not Lowell's vote was "planned"? If so, I really don't have any feeling either way, I don't exactly see what in that post feels planned to you.

Looking at Lowell's ISO I find these two posts in sequence interesting:

VOTE: saru

I don't know how we got here, but fine. There's about three or four others I'd rather lynch but I'm not nolynching to protect a null lurker read.

VOTE: saru

I don't have a strong case-based reason here, but I do have a strong feeling that the way that day ended was no accident. I recall putting saru to L-1 to avoid a no lynch, then coming back to find some random rube dead.

These two posts stand out because the first one Lowell is saying that Saru is not a scum read for him, but that he's voting Saru to avoid a NL. Then in the second post he re-votes Saru at the beginning of D2 still without any actual scum read. And he also uses the phrase "coming back to find some random rube dead", which implies that he interprets the lynch of Mal as being without good explanation ... this seems disingenuous because he had voted Saru "just to avoid a NL", a day and a half before the deadline, which seems pretty arbitrary too. This posturing of "what are you all doing, my lynch choice was much better" seems fake because he admitted that his lynch choice was just to avoid a NL long before such a reason was valid.

I couldn't describe the Saru case for the life of me - I think the theory is that I'm his partner or something, while being accused of both buddying him, and not defending him. Your guess is better than mine. I kind of look forward to if anyone takes you up on the bulletpoint though.

Also, this from thor about saru makes me think thor is one of his buddies. Not particularly subtle deflection. Looks like they can't decided whether to bus each other.

So here he's calling Thor "one of his [Saru's] buddies" ... but he has by this point repeatedly stated that he has no scum case on Saru, so why go so far as to call Thor the buddy of someone who isn't even scum? Here we have Lowell claiming a scum team of a player that turned out to be scum (which scum!Lowell would have known was scum) and a player that Lowell never even scum read. That's super fishy. @MathBlade, if anything seems planned, it's this post, where Lowell could be trying to associate a scum buddy with a patsy.

I found nearly nothing in Lowell's ISO regarding Penguin. Penguin didn't even seem to be on his radar until post 1659, and then suddenly he's all hot for a Penguin lynch, all the way up until now. I am still thinking about what that means with regards to a possible { Penguin, Lowell } team.

I have not read Penguin's ISO w.r.t. Lowell yet, but will do so soon.

[bji]

Can we get this going please? MB isn't going to vote until he "has hammers," and I'm not responding to any inane drivel that Saru posts. So, if karnos or bji have any questions/reservations/accusations/etc let's get those out and move on. Please don't drag this out for 8 more days.

I've never played with an IC before but this game has taught me the effect that the IC has on town's game. It makes you feel like someone else is driving the game because we can't really do anything without Math anyway. We can't build a wagon because it's pointless to build one that Math isn't willing to hammer, so it feels like we're just waiting to hear Math's plan and then express our opinions. And he/she/it hasn't posted a plan yet.

[bji]

VOTE: Lowell

Just need to move the game forward. Between Saru/Lowell/Penguin, I feel most strongly that Lowell is scum.

If Bji/Saru is actually the scum team (I hope not) they can quick-lynch now and win.

Interesting play. You essentially took the hammer from Math there.

@Saru: why do you want Math and I to pick the last lynch and announce it today?

[bji]

At this point, every moment that passes is just more confirmation that Lowell is scum.

Karnos' play was anti-town. He enabled a quickhammer. Karnos -- why did you think it was OK to enable a quickhammer instead of waiting for Math to request the wagon?

[bji]

I'm confident that between lowell and penguin, there is AT LEAST one scum.

Yeah but, you have to be 100% sure that lowell is scum to not risk the whole game with that vote on him. Saying there is "AT LEAST" one scum in Lowell/Penguin while voting Lowell is basically saying that you're not certain that Lowell is scum, but that you're OK with enabling a quickhammer if he's not. That is anti-town.

Furthermore, Math already expressed an interest in lynching Lowell so the correct town approach would be to agree with Math that Lowell is likely scum but wait for Math to give the go-ahead for the lynch. Having the IC as a hammer is a very powerful tool against quickhammer losses (and quickhammering is how scum wins 90% of the time), so taking the hammer away from Math was also very anti-town.

[bji]

I'm confident that between lowell and penguin, there is AT LEAST one scum.

Yeah but, you have to be 100% sure that lowell is scum to not risk the whole game with that vote on him. Saying there is "AT LEAST" one scum in Lowell/Penguin while voting Lowell is basically saying that you're not certain that Lowell is scum, but that you're OK with enabling a quickhammer if he's not. That is anti-town.

Furthermore, Math already expressed an interest in lynching Lowell so the correct town approach would be to agree with Math that Lowell is likely scum but wait for Math to give the go-ahead for the lynch. Having the IC as a hammer is a very powerful tool against quickhammer losses (and quickhammering is how scum wins 90% of the time), so taking the hammer away from Math was also very anti-town.

You don't understand. Penguin is already voting Lowell. If lowell is town and penguin is scum, there is only one other scum who could vote for Lowell, which isn't enough for a quick lynch.

MathBlade is confirmed town. Literally the only way Lowell could get quick lynched is if you and Saru are the scum team.

Since I can't realy see you getting lynched anyway, everyone town reads you, it's not really much of a gamble to risk things an you not being scum.

Yes, that was my point. If you're town, you couldn't know that myself and Saru are not the team, so you allowed a quickhammer possibility.

I know that this wasn't going to happen because I know I'm town, but

you

couldn't actually

know

that.

Having the IC as a hammer is a very powerful tool against quickhammer losses (and quickhammering is how scum wins 90% of the time), so taking the hammer away from Math was also very anti-town.

And I'm not even sure what you mean by that. Hammer is the last vote that leads to a lynch. I put Lowell at L-2, I didn't hammer. Math can still hammer.

Math can still hammer, but Math doesn't

hold

the hammer, meaning, that Math is no longer in full control. You gave away our IC's full control. I do not understand why.

Also, you should still be suspicious of me and Saru but you are not. Didn't the sequence of postings by myself and him look like maybe feeling each other out to see if we're online at the same time? Do you think I actually cared about the answer to my question in post 2094? I did not. I was just trying to post around the same time as Saru to see if you'd get nervous and unvote Lowell. But you did not. I wanted to try to time my postings closer to Saru's but I could only get within 15 minutes or so because people kept interrupting me at work.

Your lack of caution is really bugging me.

[bji]

vote: penguin

[bji]

I am willing to hear any counter evidence but right now it's looking pretty clearly like Lowell is the best lynch choice for today. The fact that he's barely even trying to defend himself speaks volumes I think. And his lurking until just after lynch yesterday was just so bad.

I'd like Math to post Math's final thoughts on myself, Penguin, Karnos, and Saru, and then for us to lynch Lowell, because I just can't see Math living to tomorrow given Math's IC status.

After Math posts Math's final thoughts, I would expect to see four votes on Lowell quickly follow. Doesn't really matter who makes them.

[bji]

VOTE: Lowell

No offense Math, but just sitting around waiting for you to wait for other people to do something is really boring me.

[bji]

Always a great idea to throw down a vote in MyLo before discussion. Sara is totes scum.

If it doesn't make sense, why is scum more likely to do it than town? Are you saying that scum is looking for a reason to make nonsensical plays and draw your attention?

I would, however, like to debate the idea of a no lynch today. 95% chance that means bji dies tonight, but it at least gets that 5% chance out of the way that he's been playing us all.

Surely just typing that last sentence already made you realize how entirely based on WIFOM this line of thinking is. I.e. if scum really did believe that you thought that I was guaranteed scum if I lived until tomorrow, then of course they'd just let me live until tomorrow for the guaranteed win via my mislynch.

The correct argument for a NL is that it

in theory

makes the analysis easier for each town player, as each town player only has two other players to evaluate. This really depends upon the dynamics of the players involved though; are you

sure

that the two remaining town tomorrow will be better at identifying scum than the three we have today? Also, it also means that a single town player can lose the game via a single bad vote whereas today we need two town players voting wrong to lose.

Based on the above, I'm not willing to call a NL a net positive for town at this point.

[bji]

But I'm truly on the fence. It could be Saru, he was acting hella scummy on day 1.

So what do you think changed after day 1? I notice this:

Your debate with Saru is becoming very much white noise to me. I do tend to agree with his stance, because you appear to be more emotionally worked up, and I think his point about suggesting his scum read on you is based on you beating him elsewhere is pretty plainly fabricated (feel free to explain how it's a valid issue if you can - it looks like flail to me).

Are you calling Saru scummy?
If not, can we drop the debate and/or simply focus on what he's calling you scummy over?

@Saru - same goes for you, let's just pretend you bested Karnos on all the piddly points, and narrow down those walls by about half, yeah?

In the scenario where Saru is scum, and the Tracer/Thor slot is scum, this is scum!Thor telling Saru to back off because he is drawing too much attention to himself and he will be the next one lynched after I flip town.

Do you have an explanation for Saru's behavior post Thor's flip that fits this narrative?

[bji]

Penguin has been playing the long con, waiting for this one game to play against his self-imposed meta.

Half serious here. I don't think meta arguments mean much when they are brought up by the person who they personally benefit.

I agree with this 100%.

Just FYI, since I'm responding to Saru today...Your comment on me defending Thor making me scum...I have never once, as scum, defended any of my partners. Ever. I have only ever hard bussed them, except for the one newbie I replaced in (karnos was town in that one). Still didn't defend my buddy, just didn't bus.

Feel free to meta me - which town should do if town doesn't want to lose.

Spoiler: Sorry penguin, this part is a bit wall-ish

Yeah, I don't want to lose, but there's only so far I'm willing to go in a friendly game like this. Reading through thousands of pages of old games of other players is not something I'm going to do.

The thing about penguin is, he seems to invoke a lot of "do this [impossible thing] if you don't want town to lose" type arguments. I suppose everyone does that from time to time, but for penguin it seems to be a pattern. The reason I don't like these statements is that they feel a bit gamed. I can see them being a setup where you can later say, "but how can you believe I'm scum if you didn't do the [impossible thing] that I asked you to do to verify that I'm town?", or even if it never gets to a specific exchange like that, town players may subconsciously feel that X has been proven just because they know that they didn't do the thing they were asked to do to prove X so out of a sense of 'fairness' they may be more likely to just believe 'X', as in, "it's not fair of me to think that penguin is scum when he told me what to do to verify that he's town and I was too lazy to do it."

Another big example of that was the "someone please hammer me" dramatics at the end of day ... what was it? Day 4? When penguin was at L-1 and Math held the hammer and penguin was spouting all of this emotion and asking for people to hammer him to put him out of his misery and also saying that he should just hammer himself. Well, he must have known that no town player was going to hammer him with a confirmed IC having asked to hold the hammer and having been granted it, so what was the point of those dramatics? It feels like the same kind of psychological manipulation.

[bji]

100% confident Saru is scum now.

I'm done, and quite honestly nothing I say will make a difference at this point. karnos and bji can decide what to do.

Saru is blacklisted for me. Totally an not-fun game when this guy posts.

VOTE: Saru

This feels like more of that appeal to emotion stuff that I talked about before.

You know how Lowell was just reeking of that scum-treading-water-just-waiting-for-the-hammer feeling? I get that same vibe here.

I feel pretty confident in Karnos town. Saru is pretty confident in penguin scum, and I actually trust both of these players more than I trust penguin at this point in the game. So Karnos if you're scum then gg man, you definitely had me fooled.

VOTE: PenguinPower

[bji]

Well it's 12:54 a.m. in Germany so I think we won't know whether or not we won for a while now ... although, checking ISOs, Foxbird has posted around this time of day before, which is odd since in Germany it's the middle of the night ...

[bji]

Scum you might as well come clean now ... so who was it?

[bji]

Well assuming the game is over, I'd like to say a big

THANK YOU

to Foxbird for some great moddin' ...

I'd also like to respectfully request that all the other game threads be opened up so that we can read them. Some mods want to wait for confirmation from everyone that this is OK first, but if the game is over then I don't think such confirmation is needed, just open em up ...

[bji]

In particular I can't wait to read the Karnos-Penguin exchanges in the neighborhood ...

[bji]

Hey Math remember our first game together?? That was actually my very first Mafia game. Good times.

[bji]

So I guess you are confident that Saru is not scum? Because if he is then he shouldn't be on your blacklist, because he did what he was supposed to do to win the game.

[bji]

I felt a little triggered around 1253.

[bji]

Also I've seen so much worse than anything that happened in this game, I felt like everyone was pretty good with the emotions. I have seen such awful stuff between players, I liked how everyone kept everything mostly above board. Iron went off the deep end a couple of times, but for some reason I found it more amusing than anything else ..

[bji]

Is it possible to blacklist players? As in, do something to prevent being put in a game with them or something?

I wouldn't blacklist you even if there was though.

There's only one player I'd blacklist, and he wasn't in this game anyway.

[bji]

Actually ... just because I like you Penguin ... one final spoiler for you:

Spoiler: Especially for Penguin

I win.

[bji]

The Dead/Spectator Thread can be found here:
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=68689[/color]

I think the link is wrong ...

[bji]

Really wish we had pursued the no lynch, though I still would probably have ended up lynched.

Yes, I think NL was the best option for town, of course I didn't want to admit that.

Thanks for the congrats, and I genuinely believe that town played well. I think the fact that town wins only 50% of games (I believe I read that stat somewhere, certainly it must be true because the game of Mafia is known to be well balanced) should indicate to everyone that it's kind of a crapshoot overall really. Sometimes town gets lucky, sometimes not.

In this game we got some really lucky kills and mislynches. Almost all the town power got taken out pretty systematically. Arona was just a random shot in the dark. Iron taking Math's bullet was lucky for us too.

My posts 2178 to 2183 were hedging my bets in case something happened that prevented Penguin dying. In particular I was a little worried about Karnos and Penguin still having private talk in the neighborizer thread and thinking maybe they were going to work me over somehow. After Math posted though I knew the game was really over so I had a little fun. Thank you for taking my super smug "I win" comment well Penguin.

I genuinely felt really badly for Penguin when he was at L-1 the day that Nero went.

Since the dead thread is open, if someone from it wants to post the real link I would appreciate it.

Finally - Math, I'm just lucky, not good. You are a much better player than I am.

[bji]

PEDIT: Sorry, the dead thread link was fine. I just got confused by all of the non-players posting at the start, thought it was the wrong thread.

[bji]

From the dead thread (why can't I quote the dead thread? Annoying ...):

By GreyICE:

"Post #215 (ISO) » Wed Nov 30, 2016 6:52 pm

In post 209, Nero Cain wrote:

In post 2088, bji wrote:
And he/she/it hasn't posted a plan yet.


thogh chances are Math throws a hissyfit and starts to scumread BJ for this.


To be fair it's fairly insulting.

And not in the "oh my gawd he called me a retard I'm so fucking triggered" sense that MS has been overrun by."

I honestly don't know what was so insulting about that statement.

I didn't mean it to refer to Math "not posting any plan at any point", because obviously Math had that huge post that required a ton of effort. I just meant that Math hadn't posted a plan of how Math wanted to run that current day, w.r.t. how Math wanted the wagon to form, who should talk or vote when, whatever. I was trying to say that I wanted Math to lead the day and that all of "us" town should follow.

[bji]

From dead thread:

Fire Assassin:

"i don't like it when scum players are cheeky like "Who was it, wasn't me"
Just admit it when it was MYLO and there was a lynch >.>"

Sorry, just playing to my win condition. I couldn't be 100% sure that some freak of the game was going to keep Penguin alive.

After Math posted I did have a little fun, but only a little.

[bji]

FYI, you can hit the "PM" button to quote from locked threads.

Thank you!

[bji]

What can we learn from this game? Town needs to be less stupidly OMGUSY. This prob would have been a town win had Iron went ahead and hammered Alpaca.

As I mentioned in the scum thread, this town was really good at making reads, but really lousy at agreeing on anything.

[bji]

@Math: I would like to understand the reasoning for claiming IC when you did. I have never played with an IC but I can see how it affected the rest of town, everyone kind of lost interest because it just becomes a game of follow the IC. It feels to me like the real value of IC is to claim in LYLO/MYLO so that you can hold the hammer and prevent a quickhammer. So I probably wouldn't claim it unless I was at L-1. Just curious why you claimed it when you did?

[bji]

I thought maybe I had scared you off when I didn't see you. I was so excited to see you playing again

No way, my newbie game was awesome and set the foundation for my enjoyment of the game. I only play once or twice a year though, I don't join games unless I feel that I can really give them my undivided attention, and I am not always able to/willing to make the time commitment.

Many players in this game have a much deeper understanding of mafia and can think more strategically about the player associations and likely outcomes than I can. When I read some things that Thor posts or ironstove (in the dead thread), or really many players in this game, I think to myself, wow, these people are like three steps ahead of me at all times.

@iron: was post 35 some kind of crumb? When you mentioned crumbing your role this is the post that I latched onto, I assumed that you had some kind of role that I had never heard of before, some kind of undying thing that would bring you back to life after you were killed, maybe even with a cop action from beyond the grave, hinted by the "mafia feel free to kill me", and "I pop back in with a fabricated report" phrasing in that post. I figured either that or you just planted something that you could use later in the game to try to deter scum from NKing you.

I will repeat that I think Foxbird is a great mod. So timely, so on top of the game, which is super appreciated as not all mods are like that. If she is really in Germany she's also going above and beyond by modding games at all hours of the day and night.

[bji]

Yay bji! I was terrible, thor was meh, but bji carried the day.

Also, no, you weren't terrible, you did your part and survived until nearly the end. And you made yourself a nice patsy for me to bus when needed. You have to learn to like to play scum though; it is more work than town (in my opinion), but you also have a lot more agency in the game than most town do.

[bji]

Votecount 2.22

Thor665

(5) - karnos, Fire Assassin, aronagrundy, bji, ironstove

(L-1!)

MathBlade

(1) - Lowell

Lowell

(2) - Saru, MathBlade

bji

(3) - Nero Cain, Thor665, PenguinPower

Not Voting

(0) - No one!

With

11

players eligible to vote, it’s

6

to lynch!

Day 2 will end in

(expired on 2016-11-11 12:47:28).

Mod Notes:

None!

This vote count had me really worried. Scum were the top three wagons! But then town NL'd ...

[bji]

Can someone help me out here:

- What is the difference between bussing and distancing? Have I been misusing the term bussing? I use it whenever a scum works against another scum in game thread to any significant degree, especially and including voting, and usually requiring consistent, not just transient, pressure

- What is White Knighting? Is it when someone champions someone else's cause? Most likely when a town player champions a scum unwittingly?

- What is pocketing?

- What is "snowing", as in: "Looks like maybe you snowed Iron?"

[bji]

@Math: reading the dead thread, I finally got what this supposed insult was about. It was about when I referred to you as he/she/it. My apologies, that was not meant to be insulting, it was just meant to me awkwardly not knowing how to address a 'they'. I still don't know how to do it, because using 'they' for a singular person just wrecks the grammar part of my brain. No offense was intended. I eventually decided to just stop using pronouns for you, which is what I will do in future. Sorry again.

[bji]

I think you have to measure the claim against play.

I genuinely thought Thor was a tracker mostly because of Tracer's play. However in the game you and I were scum there was no way you were a town neo and not lynching you was a crazy decision by Town.

What about Tracer's play led you to believe that she was a tracker?