Open 705: Polygamist - Game Over

[sheepsaysmeep]

pagetop yey

[Mathdino]

i mean honestly i thought "hating arbitrary lynch" was lowkey a scumtell but then my partner did it
so fuck me right

[DiamondSentinel]

Isn’t that like against site rules?

Welcome to my struggle this entire game.

[DiamondSentinel]

I guess what we are looking for is the set of interactions between declared groups that seem suspicious. If you think of every player group as a hydra, we're looking for the two hydra's that have shady interactions.

So with that in mind I think that the mass claim is probably for the best, and in flagrant disregard of what my lover said earlier, I'll go ahead and declare that I'm paired with DiamonSentinel. Interestingly we both independently hated on the dice routine.

In our topic we basically discussed what the setup was because apparently neither of us read it before signing up, then freaking out when we realised that we had no idea how to scumhunt in this scenario, and then to claim or not claim. We decided we'd just go with the flow, so, here I am, flowing away.

That kinda sounds gross :V

You mean here?

Why did you claim despite your claim that your lover suggesting you hide it?

I told Sky to hide it because Sky was an unknown in my strategy. If I could control what they did, then that would remove a wild-card from my "team's" actions.

[Mathdino]

it's not against the rules i think but it's frowned upon

because most of the time it lowers town winrate by nulling any associations and also random lynching creates a low winrate in general

i've never suggested it before

besides even if the dice tag was against the rules you could just randomise based on the stockmarket or some shit
or the national debt

[Toranaga]

I can't believe this is all I'm playing rn

[Toranaga]

i mean honestly i thought "hating arbitrary lynch" was lowkey a scumtell but then my partner did it
so fuck me right

lol fuck you sideways

idk still think it's cy;lalenda and sky;theother dude

also I'm pretty drunk rn, I don't use to drink so when I do I get wasted

[Mathdino]

i mean honestly i thought "hating arbitrary lynch" was lowkey a scumtell but then my partner did it
so fuck me right

lol fuck you sideways

idk still think it's cy;lalenda and sky;theother dude

also I'm pretty drunk rn, I don't use to drink so when I do I get wasted

go join another open game, this is basically not even a real game

i'd be so depressed if this was the only game i was playing

my open is queuing up once Masons and Monks hammers

and yeah that's our theory too so yeah

what do you think of kop/momo/red/manrock?

[sheepsaysmeep]

one does not simply get pre-ins for an open
idk how the hell you did it

[Mathdino]

one does not simply get pre-ins for an open
idk how the hell you did it

off topic so i'm going to say something game relevant

drunkposting is a major major towntell so tora is probably still town

also if these guys flip town what's your theory?



anyway off topic, yeah the moment i /in'd to mod i got 1 pre-in. got another from sitechat and got another PM asking about it over the past day

i also have 1 person in the replacement queue

the flavour/style is gonna be cool but idk how they knew that

[Lalendra]

i mean honestly i thought "hating arbitrary lynch" was lowkey a scumtell but then my partner did it
so fuck me right

[Lalendra]

i also have 1 person in the replacement queue

I'm happy to replace in if needed, this is also my only current game and I'm dying inside

[sheepsaysmeep]

s a d

[Sky_Paladin]

Dino

i've done a completely accurate political analysis of the gamestate and if you and i are in lylo together, you know we're just gonna tear each other apart

so yeah let's do it now

Well that is almost true. We'll agree to disagree about the accurate political climate chart because you could only truly do this if you knew the alignments of players, and we won't bother with the 'well only scum could possibly know that' train because we're not children.

Regarding Cy/Lalendra, consider my situation for just a second. Just a second!

Sky sees Dino massively favoring a slot (Sheep) for no reason, and vice versa.
Sky sees a slot with 3/4 of that psuedoteam all hardlocking a slot because 'random'.
Sky asks players what do.
Those players switch to Sky.
???

I think anybody with any reasonable amount of knowledge of the game state - or actually, a reasonable knowledge about how the game of mafia works - would want to question this. I also think anybody would question 'wait why would players who are barely posting, jump in to the thread JUST to switch their vote to the next popular bandwagon'.

So the reason I say that 'is almost true' is because even at this point I as a player can realistically change my reads and do interesting or strange things, even if we wind up going to LYLO with both you and I standing.
Meaning if you and I are just town raging there is an even chance at some point I will figure it out and go 'Wait a minute, what is player x even doing?'
However I don't believe that is true of the Dino slot, because as you say, you have 'analysed the political climate' and you also confessed that your partner and you are in hip synch for a random (not actually random btw) and arbitrary lynch.

In short your predicating that Cy must be scum if I am scum, and that Cy must be scum because he wasn't hammered yet. But there were six player slots that barely existed that could have hammered and switching it over to me for no reason better than you haven't got your hammer yet is, actually, fucking bonkers. In a regular game of mafia we call that 'opportunistic voting' and that is a scum alignment tell.

[Sky_Paladin]

I guess there is one more thing. I think that town players ordinarily are not super confident in their reads. For example, I'm not town reading anybody. The strongest scum leads I have are Maths and Sheep, and this fundamentally began as a simple question 'Why are you guys townreading each other?' and went from there. So if at some point, Maths/Sheep revisit this and/or provide credible reasoning, a reasonable chunk of my push does dissolve. Because I'm aware of this I have at least floated the idea that scum may indeed be outside of the Maths/Sheep slots and am considering the possibility of yes, Cy/Lalendra could be scum, yes, Red/Hyrule could be scum, etc etc. I also do see indecisiveness in some other players, and to be absolutely fair one of them is Sheep, who has backflipped on their reads a couple of times in ways that I hate, but town aren't naturally confident because every town player has that secret nugget of doubt somewhere buried in their cold dark heart.

From time to time I expect to see traces of that nugget emerging and that's what I'm looking for when I town read players. I think townslips can be manufactured and scumslips can be misattributed, so I usually don't rely on them because often times I am wrong.

What I am interested in are sudden, unexplained behaviors - usually votes - or players influencing the game. The second camp I want to know can I trust this player because if somebody else has done all the hard work then I don't have to.

So when I see a player like Maths who specifically wants to avoid attributing themselves to any one thing, and yet is super hard behind a lynch of a certain slot - and uses an abstract case such as mathematics, or a WIFOMY case like lining-up-lynches - I don't see that towny nugget of doubt there. When Dino refused to look at sheep, it's because there's no need for him to do it - he already knows Sheep's alignment, and everybody who disagrees with him must be wrong. Not the intuitive "Oh, I see a player doesn't understand why I think x, let me explain to them why it is so", but actual totally ignoring that he was even asked, and even haranguing on me that I didn't ask properly as a justification for not doing it. This sense of entitlement, that they deserve a please and thank you, doesn't come from town.

These players are confident. They know exactly what they are trying to do. That confidence doesn't come from town who thinks they've caught scum. It comes from players who don't want to be questioned and don't want to have to explain themselves. Dino will happily engage on math discussion and talk with his partner or cut walls with me but he will literally not engage with any player in any meaningful way about game state and the reads.

I guess I'm having a hard time seeing that coming from town.

[momo]

Analyzing a few lynch options

DS/sheep

MD seems town

Sky seems town

[Toranaga]

i mean honestly i thought "hating arbitrary lynch" was lowkey a scumtell but then my partner did it
so fuck me right

lol fuck you sideways

idk still think it's cy;lalenda and sky;theother dude

also I'm pretty drunk rn, I don't use to drink so when I do I get wasted

go join another open game, this is basically not even a real game

i'd be so depressed if this was the only game i was playing

my open is queuing up once Masons and Monks hammers

and yeah that's our theory too so yeah

what do you think of kop/momo/red/manrock?

I believe redflavour's description of their mason thread because I 'know' manrock and the things redflavour said match with how I think manrock would act in the mason thread.

I believe kop;momo for much thinner reasons, but I think the timestamp mentions, while fakeable, are pretty sound reason to believe they're town

[Mathdino]

@Sky:

I understand all of that. And even if you are scum, I feel the need to defend myself here because I genuinely believe you would say all that as town anyway. This is more of a postgame rant but I'm probably not gonna care by then.

I came into this game already kind of nihilistic. I avoided the signups because I knew the setup was messed, but I wanted to insta-join a game so I chose to jump a replace and try my hand at setup-breaking (if I landed town).

Simply put, while it benefits me to change my mind and be malleable in my reads in a normal game where we have multiple days to go back, get flips, reevaluate, etc, it doesn't benefit me to change my mind here.

Because none of you mofos have given anything that I believe is townreadable in this setup, I rely on slips. I gave you reasons on townreading Tora. I did a quick analysis post somewhere. But besides all that. I'll tell you my thought process going through the game.

- okay so Diamond wants to claim, but that's irreversible, so lemme check first
- wait okay i saw a game that said we should wait for claims
- wait but the scum probably already planned out the claims anyway, so yeah i might as well claim
- okay a random lynch is pro-town, but how the hell are we gonna achieve a random lynch?
- the rest of the town has absolutely 0 reason to trust me. i'm never going to personally roll a die that could land on me. but from an observer's standpoint, if i'm scum and i roll, scum wins 70%. so in order to show good faith in my strategy, i need to find a townie and get them to do it.
- tora seems town and the way they're acting towards me seems pretty town.
- okay i'll lock them as town and try to get them to roll the dice and see what the rest of the town thinks about it
- okay the town fucking hates that idea but their RVS vote is equivalent to a random vote. so i can show the same good faith by sheeping that initial random vote and following their vote anywhere, because sheep's reads are equivalent to a dice roll.

I'm not reevaluating my read on sheep/Tora because I'm so far in that reevaluating them or unlocktowning them would completely unravel any semblance of a strategy I have.

If they are town, and the 4 of us can lynch 2 pairs other than us, we have a 83% chance of winning.

If they're not town, then fuck it I guess. It was a 67% chance that any given slot is town. I think the chance is slightly higher due to Tora's early behaviour. If they end up being scum, my entire strategy was doomed from the start. Rolled the dice and I lost.

But I'm comfortable losing to a low-chance dice roll as long as I know that I did the thing to maximise a win. I think that's what sets me apart from most players. Plus, highkey, I still believe scumhunting is total horseshit in this setup, because almost every lynch in this setup has been on town. And this isn't exactly a strong town by any means. I'm not comfortable taking what seems to be a 36% winrate when I could have a ~64% one by picking someone, locking them as town, and having them randolynch.

Let me know if you have any questions on any of that. Above list is an honest rendition of my stream of consciousness that I guess I could've outed earlier.

[Mathdino]

You know, now that it occurs to me, I think a major source of our misunderstanding (if there is one at all) is that I didn't really want to play this setup in the first place, and that was unclear because I'm actually here. I just replaced into the first low-pagecount game I could find.

[Sky_Paladin]

I am unfortunately out of time right now and will get to your response hopefully within the next 12 hours. I will at least say that what you have written appears to be in good faith and I will return in kind.

[DiamondSentinel]

- okay so Diamond wants to claim, but that's irreversible, so lemme check first
- wait okay i saw a game that said we should wait for claims
- wait but the scum probably already planned out the claims anyway, so yeah i might as well claim
- okay a random lynch is pro-town, but how the hell are we gonna achieve a random lynch?
- the rest of the town has absolutely 0 reason to trust me. i'm never going to personally roll a die that could land on me. but from an observer's standpoint, if i'm scum and i roll, scum wins 70%. so in order to show good faith in my strategy, i need to find a townie and get them to do it.
- tora seems town and the way they're acting towards me seems pretty town.
- okay i'll lock them as town and try to get them to roll the dice and see what the rest of the town thinks about it
- okay the town fucking hates that idea but their RVS vote is equivalent to a random vote. so i can show the same good faith by sheeping that initial random vote and following their vote anywhere, because sheep's reads are equivalent to a dice roll.

1. "Let's do what other games have done" is a bad sentiment because the actual winrate is horribly below what it should be.
2. Have some good sportsmanship, kiddo. Random lynching isn't sportsmanlike. It's just boring. See: Most every other post I made on the topic.
3. Hey, there's a decent thought process that I can actually discuss. So, yes, RVS is random voting. That's the point of it.

However

, RVS isn't the be-all-end-all, and should never be. Rather it jumpstarts the game. Which is what it didn't get the chance to do.

But enough theory talk. On the last one, why did you sheep sheep? You claim to think exclusively logically, but you have yet to give me good reasons why sheep is town.

[Mathdino]

1. I know. I looked at the game that town won. Figured at the very least they'll have had the discussion. And at you actually using my own "actual winrate is horrible" argument

2. I mean you could argue that about breaking any setup. But you're not voting me for being unsportsmanlike. You accept that I'm delivering a pro-town strategy, and then accusing me of scum doing one of:
A. Pretending to be okay with a random lynch for towncred when I know that others won't be down with that. Which is ludicrous because your slot is literally what stopped us from getting a majority.
B. Using my random lynch strategy for EVILLLLLL purposes. For example, if I know sheep/Tora are scum. But that's really the only situation in which this helps my scumteam. And in this case, you can't accuse me of being unsportsmanlike for setup-breaking.

3. Diamond you keep talking to me as if you think I'll eventually think "Oh, this is a normal game, I'll just apply Mafia Theory to it" (I'm only now considering scumhunting because my partner is unwilling to budge on the arbitrary lynch idea, and you know I couldn't have planned for that).

Like, you're ignoring what I've told you so many times about how I view this game. It's becoming an ego argument. I know I won't convince you. That's not my intent. My intent is to show every reason that my arguments are valid in

my mind

. I'm doing this to help myself be read. Like, every single goddamn time I explain what I was thinking 20 pages ago, you guys bring it up again with either more shit to give me (I know you disagree already) or more misrep (and I've explained everything sooooo many times). THAT's what's lengthening the thread.

I don't give a shit about what you think RVS should be used for. I used it for what I thought it should be used for.

4. Jesus christ, it's like you guys want me to drown the thread with wallposts by asking the same questions.

LET ME SPELL OUT MY SHEEP SHEEP STRATEGY

Actually, fuck it, I'll do it in another post and then I'M NOT EXPLAINING MY PAGE 1 AND 2 TRAINS OF THOUGHT AGAIN.

[Mathdino]

i'm reduced to making a towncase on my own page 1

what is this game

brb quote walling myself

[Mathdino]

LITERALLY A CASE ON MY OWN PROGRESSION, NOT DOING THIS AGAIN

I don't know about claiming lovers yet. I'm gonna check game history and see what They Who Came Before Us thought on the matter.

I was young and naive on post 6. At this point, I'd only read the setup. Hadn't done any serious reading.

Yeah okay so NO ONE CLAIM YOUR LOVERS YET

The wiki suggests that claiming early is bad but I'm still working through the literature on the subject

Another interesting thing is that lynching completely randomly actually benefits town. The problem is that random lynches don't happen because scum won't let it. I would actually be done with creating a townbloc that follows a dice tag in the thread. Would give us a 60% chance.

Not voting because it'll be obvious that whomever I vote isn't my lover.

At this point, I had ONLY read the entire wiki page. You can see this because I'm literally just parroting statements that the wiki page made. See for yourself.

1. Let's not play to win, so to speak. Let's just play to play a battle of wits. So, no random lynching.
2. How could claiming lovers not help? Au contraire, since it's a nigthless setup, I think it's our biggest weapon here. If we claim lovers, we force the scum into pairs to begin with. Furthermore, if we have anyone super strong (I don't necessarily know if we do), if scum pressures their partner, it makes it pretty obvious. So, scum has to be careful about pressuring 2 slots in the case of one player being spot-on or whatever.

1. I basically ignored this as much as possible because I disagree with that philosophy.
2. This was slightly convincing to me but I wanted to read up first.

Also, by claiming lovers, it lowers the pool for scum to bus from, and lower the amount of chaos we'd have.

This was bullshit. Feel free to ask me why but yeah.

Counterproposal. Through the day, we'll probably as a town come together on a townread of someone. That person will then dice roll 2 lynches that don't include themselves or their lover. In effect, we'll be playing kingmaker. If we're right about the king we elect being town, we then have an exactly 70% chance of winning by sheeping them.

This is me trying to come up with a compromise idea. The kingmaker idea came from me saying "Okay, they want a battle of wits, and townhunting is, to some extent, a battle of wits, so the townie can just rando the lynches". I was not, at this point in time, as nihilistic as I later became.

My quick scan sees dice rolling as a tactic suggested. I appreciate the idea behind it but how to know that mafia aren’t loading the dice?
Also I kind of feel that using dice to decide goes against the spirit of the game.

The first point was bad because dice tags (remember that I came up with this idea knowing dice tags existed). Mafia cannot load dice.
I ignored the second point.

I propose electing someone we think is town to roll the dice and vote for someone other than them and their lover. So yes it would involve them loading the dice but they wouldn't be able to control the dice. No one would.

This is me formalising my idea on the philosophy that *I* can't the roll the dice because I could be scum, but it shows very good faith to have *someone else* roll the dice. My fatal flaw was that I started this too early, before we could locktown anyone by playing the game. Once I suggested this, I was doomed to pretty much have shit reads (because saying this changed the game).

wassup

happy new years
bye

i support claiming lovers
tl from diamond

I obviously had no reason to townread any of this.

Yes. While I'm sure they haven't already decided, if they have one really really townread person and one scumread person, then the TR person could take charge and say "I'm lovers with [scumread person] so if you think that they're scum, you think I'm scum". It's to our advantage to claim ASAP.

Let's not dice-lynch.

The first point is what finally convinced me that claiming lovers was important. So congrats on that I guess. I also realised that scum probably coordinated claims in the PT. Which is probably bullshit since half the scum probably wasn't even there.
And I didn't really give a shit that you didn't wanna dice lynch.

Yeah that's fair. I guess me claiming doesn't really benefit me or town, but scum claiming does, so it's best to set a precedent. Yo I'm lovers with Amrororawrachurrochora. Your turn?

Also why not dice lynch?

Here I finally claim because your claim logic was solid, even if it provides a marginal advantage. I asked if you wanted to not dicelynch on the hopes that you had a better strategy.

Also, fuck dice lynches. This is a game of "skill" and a battle of "wits". Dice have no place in this.

You did not. This is where our battle began.

Hello
Happy new years
Lets random lynch, mathdinos counterproposal seems interesting
Idk if we should claim lovers or not

The first post that wasn't from me or your slot. By this point I was lowkey in kingmaker mode, so I was on the lookout for things to townread.
My gut said to townread this because he agreed. But then I realised he might be dumb scum (not inconsistent with RedFlavor) who didn't realise that my idea was good and that random lynching would actually likely fuck him over.

I wonder if we'd have a higher chance of winning this game by playing kingmaker then, where the king we make straight up chooses the lynch straight up. We model open games by assuming random lynch; the flaw being that lynches aren't random, and in a game with such a high percentage of scum, lynching scum is unlikely. I wonder if we'd have better odds trying to townhunt and sheep. Will come up with a model and get back to this.

This is the point at which I was also beginning my Econ 101 class. You can kinda tell. I'm also, once again, just repeating things the wiki said.
You can see the beginnings of my "easier to townhunt than scumhunt" strategy. The idea at the time was that it's far more likely for the town to agree on a towniest member and be right, than it is for the "town" to agree on a scummiest person and be right. Doing this was a political move in an attempt to counteract the scum's weight.

So I go off to actually factcheck my own kingmaker strategy.

random lynch GOAT

also I'm lovers with someone I forgot which makes me lock town

also never lynching amrochora even if she is a wolf

sheepsaysmeep replaces jzhenson93

ah ok it was literally this guy

hi sheep

^i unironically believe this shit at face value and will in return also never lynch toranaga/sheep

Great progress on the scumhunting front, folks.

I on the other hand have made no progress in modeling kingmaking polygamist vs normal lynch polygamist. See you next year.

FINALLY my first townread. I townread this slot because I interpret "I forgot who I'm lovers with" as a slight townslip. Plus hypothetical scum buddying up to my slot read as a very very bad idea if they knew my slot was town. I recognised that doing this mutual townread would be scummy as shit but it was also my best lead.

You'll notice that I came up with a townread before I came up with a kingmaker idea. My intent at first was to PoE the scum by townhunting.

An argument that jzhenson and my slot are both town: Scum loves to whine to the mod when one of their members straight up doesn't show up. These fuckers didn't post a single thing in their PTs (I assume, correct me if I'm wrong Tora) for 3 fucking days and the mod still started the game. Locktown.

VOTE: Lalendra as good a PoE vote as any

Here I came up with another reason that the 2 guys who got replaced on gamestart are town.
Since I was still into a random lynch idea, I just arbitrarily'd someone who wasn't here yet.

I'm only now reading the game properly, and for some reason I thought you were lovers with pisskop just realised you're the replacement and lovers with amrochora.

I thought we should all claim, because then you can read one or both heads of a lover claim as scummy and that's where you wanna lynch.

1. More townslippiness.
2. The second argument makes no sense at all and reads as VI town coming up with an original idea. I ask myself, does this make sense as something scum would say?
No, it has 0 utility. Asking everyone else to claim doesn't help scum.

I kinda like this game now lol

I expect it to be filled with replacements if it takes too long though

Oh how wrong you were on point 1 and how right you were on point 2.

LOL

there's a good chance both amrochora and manrock forgot all about this game

it's too bad, I like playing with them

also I believe you too. game highly POE'd down already imo

Again buddies up to my slot (low utility as scum) and then intends to use it for PoE. PoEing my slot out of the lynchpool doesn't help scum at all.

VOTE: cy

no one showing up :'(

The first RVS vote by a slot I trusted.

VOTE: cy

Sheeping sheep. Sheep me!

Because I wanted to make a truly arbitrary vote that would also be arbitrary to you guys, I couldn't just random vote someone myself. Because I could be scum choosing to vote town.
In order to show my good faith and true belief in my strat, I had to sheep someone else I was townreading (already was) on whoever they vote. My honest willingness to vote literally anyone that sheep voted would, I hoped, help convince you guys I was town, and thus my strategy was in good faith.
Note that my theory of this setup is that while in a normal game, mafia doesn't care who we lynch while town does? In this game, mafia heavily cares who we lynch while town doesn't (or shouldn't). I hoped it would become obvious that I wouldn't put the lynch in some total rando's hands if I were scum (because we could just accidentally lynch my partners, or the person I sheep could decide to lynch me/Amro).
The reason I sheeped sheep is because sheep voted first. That's it. Otherwise I'd have said sheep Tora.

Note: I'm gonna repeat this. Yes, I said I intentionally acted in a way to convince you guys I was town. Do not take this out of context. I specifically did that because a common Open Queue trope is someone breaking the setup and the rest of the town being like WELL WHAT IF YOU'RE SCUM MANIPULATING THE POWER ROLES or WHAT IF YOUR STRATEGY SECRETLY BENEFITS SCUM. I did not want to deal with this bullshit. Unfortunately, I had to anyway.

Well sheep's vote is equivalent to a dice lynch so why not compromise and join the locktown wagon?

This is why I liked RVS. Don't bitch to me about theory or why we use RVS. I wanted to use it to generate a truly random vote from my perspective. The ONLY way that vote wasn't totally random from my perspective is if the scumteam was me/lover/sheep/Tora, which I figured people would think is crazy. Lo and behold, the people who started proposing that 20 years later are exactly the people that have always been in my lynchpool.

[sheepsaysmeep]

shit im not reading that