Newbie 595 - Game Over!

[Walnut]

As a newb, I like snafoo's thinking about not lynching a newb on day one.

Vote: Massive

Because it is early on and time to spread the fun around.

[Walnut]

I don't get what you mean; are you saying that we can't possibly know who's scum? Because that isn't true.

Well, the only way we would actually

know

if someone was scum was if we were scum ourselves. Is this a little slipup by Litral, or is he just sufficiently confused by Demonking's logic (or lack of it) that his reply got confused too?

Official Vote Count

Demonking - 2 (Litral, Muerrto)
Muerrto - 1 (snafoo)
massive - 2 (Walnut, Demonking)

Not Voting - 4 (massive, mike4876, starkmoon, Super Archivist)

5 to Lynch

[Walnut]

Actually, the more I think about it, the more that makes me suspicious.

Unvote massive; vote litral

[Walnut]

Since it would be a shame to vote off a newb on day one, I'd rather vote for an IC.

Please tell me this was a joke...

If you were a newbie only ever to play one game of Mafia, you would probably get the most satisfaction/enjoyment out of it if you stayed alive until the end of the game. Based on this assumption, even playing as a townie your personal goal would be to stay alive. Therefore you would want to vote for an IC as you are likely to have a better chance against other newbie players.

However, if you slightly broaden your perspective, the town wins even if you are dead. If this matters to you, and really it should, it may be better for a newb (even yourself) to be lynched than an IC townie as they may be better at detecting the scum than you are. Certainly, if you were a vanilla townie and sacrificing yourself was guaranteed to result in a mafia member being lynched (hardly a common scenario) it would be appropriate to do so. So yeah, you would prefer to random vote a newb (if it mattered who you random voted).

However, if you broaden your perspective again, mafiascum is a vibrant community that provides a large stock of players to ensure that games are always available. As such we need to protect its continued existence. Is lynching newb players on day one a sustainable practice? Can we afford to give them such a traumatising experience that they not only never return but also warn their friends not to come and get burned? Thok's first law (https://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?ti ... _First_Law) suggests that more players are needed to meet the existing demands of current players.* Shame on you that deliberately harm the community!

Based on that utterly sound reasoning , I voted for massive, an IC with no votes on him at the time and who was yet to post.

*Actually, if you follow Thok's first law it would suggest that an equivalent number of the newbies would also have a desire to moderate, but I am working on the possibility that the lag time between starting playing and starting to want to mod is significant.

[Walnut]

I'm also kind of suspicious of Walnut right now, come to think of it. He voted for massive apparently because he was an IC.

But you are not suspicious of Snafoo when he did exactly the same thing in the post immediately before mine? Heck, my stated reason for voting was that I liked his thinking!

[Walnut]

Ooops, somehow I mislaid the source of that quote- it was from Super Archivist in post #32

[Walnut]

Litral, what you said was sensible, and sounded very much like a player who feels that he has a bit of an understanding of the game explaining a mechanic to a new player. I agree with the thrust of what you are saying- that ignoring day one because we have no NK and votes to analyse would be wrong.

The bit which was suspicious to me was the phrasing around "knowing"- which might have been letting slip because you do know. Against a background of other odd behaviours by Super Archivist (see my previous post) and Demonking, that suspicion has subsided somewhat, so I may be more easily swayed than before.

[Walnut]

May we have a prod on Mike4876 please?

It is quiet here... understandably no Starkmoon, just the one from massive, and Demon king is perhaps keeping his head down since people focused on him when he posted.

Prodding!

[Walnut]

So when someone gets five votes to lynch them, they get killed and the day ends? Fair enough...

Unless it is you getting lynched, in which case there is nothing fair about it at all, and really the rules don't make any sense, and everyone else just sucks, and, and ...

[Walnut]

But to no avail - looking at the recent election results in Italy it should come as no surprise that no one is really interested in hunting down mafiascum anymore.

Well, I hope we are all still interested in scum hunting. I think quite a few people are waiting for Demon King to respond to the various allegations, and there may be a few people who are just... waiting. Obviously if you don't say anything you can't say anything scummy, but lurkers (as well as being suspicious for lurking) make particularly good night kills as their death gives nothing away. And no, that is not me giving hints to the mafia, it is me politely suggesting to the townies that they get more involved

[Walnut]

Thanks to massive for getting involved, and @Muertto for a good "I am here and watching you!" post. Fair enough too- I am inclined to go with Super Archivist and ask for a

prod on Demon king please

.

Demonking was prodded yesterday. No response yet. - Vel

It seems there is limited value in playing the game with half the players missing- if we get replacement(s) and Starkmoon is less sick and back from holiday I expect the game may be worthy of more significant posting from the various worthy members.

That said, in response to massive's

All right, I'll get more involved. I'm going to go ahead and vote snafoo. His response to my question basically said "I'm willing to go ahead and vote for any person, even if no reason is given for said person's bandwagon." That to me is not how a townie would play.

Is it not quite common, especially on day one, for people to pile votes on any player to see what they say and do under pressure? I am not convinced that it is a good idea, mind you, but curious as to whether it is considered fairly standard.

[Walnut]

Ah, good to see some action here!

We may not have got 3 of the players into the game at all, but somehow it feels like we have wandered into a discussion of whether ICs are kindly serving the community by donating their time to patiently coaching in a newbie nightmare or hanging out around kindergartens boosting their egos by beating up small kids. I think the former is likely to be far more common, and while Muerrto may be giving the hard word about those frickin carebears, he sounds more upset that his efforts and his honest, logical approach to the game are potentially being slighted than particlularly anti-newbie. I would actually say that this game is pretty newbie friendly, both as the ICs are willing to offer advice etc and that often newb tells and scum tells are hard to tell apart. Unlike Litral I would say that it is fine to play the newb card here- this is the Road to Rome (newbie) thread, after all. However, first and foremost, this is mafia, and your newbie play will be judged as to whether it is hiding a mafiascum.

Unfortunately, in following the approach of looking for inconsistencies, the waters are getting a bit muddier:

As for snafoo, he did at one point claim it was newbie-friendly to lynch an IC.

I don't know whether I should be apologising for my elaborate explanation for a random vote, but unless he is talking about snafoo's very first post, it does seem that muerrto has attributed my post to snafoo, whether deliberately or not. If you take this away, I find it hard to agree that snafoo is pushing the voting an IC thing way too much.

Um...you just replied to a post ONLY about me and ended with a vote for me and a thrown in FoS for Massive...

Where exactly did he come up?

One post earlier, where snafoo finds it suspicious that massive says that he was going to vote for muerrto but then couldn't (presumably as there was a random vote already on him). I don't find this behaviour particularly suspicious- I think he just wanted to make a clearly random vote, which makes sense if you look at what happened to Demon when he made a less random seeming vote.

For me, what makes massive more interesting is

post 53:

All right, I'll get more involved. I'm going to go ahead and

vote snafoo

. His response to my question basically said "I'm willing to go ahead and vote for any person, even if no reason is given for said person's bandwagon." That to me is not how a townie would play.

then in post 61:

Walnut

: You ask if it's common to pile votes on people to see reactions in the early stages of games. This IS common. It can be done for a variety of reasons, as well -- townies want to stimulate discussion, mafia might want to get roleclaims or mislynch. Ultimately it's a null tell. Everyone has a reason to vote because everyone has a victory condition.

Massive says that he is voting for snafoo for jumping on a bandwagon, then shortly after says that everyone does it and it is ultimately a null tell.
The bit where he comes back and says that Snafoo's side comment about being "spineless enough to kick a defenseless kitten" some other time is a clever defence against later vote analysis made me genuinely laugh out loud. Either Snafoo is a criminal mastermind who has been brilliantly unmasked (phew!) or that was a wonderful piece of misdirection.

Jumping back to the difficulty of separating newbie play from scum play, it will be interesting to see how Demon King or his replacement takes it from here. My read is that despite all of the backwards and forwards in the last day or so (realtime) most of the people here still retain their initial suspicions about Demon. The other bit to not forget is that there are two other players, who statistically could be both of the scum, and we are just happily marking time until they show up

[Walnut]

Walnut, you seem convinced that Muerrto is misdirecting on purpose, and that Demonking is also quite suspicious. Uh... why is your vote on me, then? You've been very reluctant to change your vote all this time.

@Litral I believe I said Muerrto had done something "... whether deliberately or not", which hardly translates to being convinced that he is misdirecting on purpose. This little snippet is the kind of thing which is enough for me to be calm about leaving my vote where it is. Right now I think Demon king would be a better lynch than you, but there is no need to add to his vote count at this stage, as he (or his replacement) will soon be shedding more light on that.

Muerrto's meta defence about newbies trying to teach him how to play and being wrong might sound better in other circumstances, but as Litral had already explained that he had missed it, if taken with the out of proportion attack on Snafoo, sounds increasingly dodgy. FOS Muerrto for me.

[Walnut]

Yep, I got that bit and had noticed the times, as it did read a bit disjointedly. The way I understood it was that:

1) Litral had misread your post and responded mistakenly (post 80).
2) He realised his mistake and apologised (post 81).
3) You read his first post and responded in frustration (post 88).
4) A minute later you read his next post and apologised (post 89).
5) At the same time Litral apologised again (post 90).

At this stage it looks like you have each made a mistake (Litral misread a post, Muerrto failed to read all the posts before replying), you had each apologised and then we were ready to move on. But then you came back with the next post which was hard for me to see the sense behind.

Can you a) point out where the above summary is wrong; or b) explain what post 91 meant, and if the summary is right, how it made sense to say it at this time?

[Walnut]

I guess my suspicions of Litral could fall into Muerrto's category of overanalysing posts. As everyone says, it is tough to figure out what is a noob tell or honest mistake as opposed to a scumtell. There have been enough mistakes (honest or otherwise) from the initial "we can know who scum are" through missing the bit in Muerrto's post about "case in point" to even your last post where you say that you went bonkers and mixed up two names. It is a bit similar to massive's reason for voting Snafoo, in that it sets you up for later when you do something really scummy to be able to say "Oh, but look at all the mistakes I have made".

Official Vote Count

q21 - 1 (Litral)
massive - 1 (q21)
Litral - 1 (Walnut)

snaoo - 2 (massive, Muerrto)

Muerrto - 1 (snafoo)

Not Voting - 3 (mike4876, starkmoon, Super Archivist)

5 to Lynch

[Walnut]

The next post was aimed at Snafoo and Litral both and shows my frustration. Call it an appeal to emotion if that helps but I'm in 6 newbie games and if I'm getting grilled on semantics here I'm definitely gonna put less focus in this one.

I know that with only six of the nine players participating most of the time that what has happened so far is largely meaningless. We can look for tiny flaws in posts, more for practice and entertainment than for practical use, until we get the numbers up. Muerrto calls it pointless overanalysis and chooses not to do it; I call it the one game of mafia I am allowed to play and choose to do it. Muerrto has six newbie games (and possibly other non-newbie games?) on the go, while having joined mafiascum.net because I want to play mafia, this is the only option that I have. I actually agree with the one game for newbies restriction, although I would say that the slowness of this game due to lack of players makes it more irritating than it would be otherwise. So to answer Litral- I will look for holes in everyone's arguments but not necessarily think them scummy, because I am aware that we are in a bit of a limbo until the others arrive.

Analysing posts too deeply leads to mislynches. You have to know/figure out with experience what's a scum tell, what's legit, and when to argue a case and when to not.

I try to impart that knowledge to the people I play with but most newbies, like the ones here, are more interested in assuming they know better and questioning the IC judgment. Frustrating to say the least. Think I might lay off newbie games for a bit after these 6 end.

.

But... it is mafia, a game based around people deceiving other people. I would be a lot more worried if newbies didn't question your

stated

judgement- if they knew you were town it might be a bit different.

Also, I was serious. Because if I'm lynched I've proved myself right and that's worth it to me. It's the only way I can prove myself.

This, sadly, is sufficiently wrong to make my post about voting for ICs look compelling. If you are lynched (and turn out to be town) you have simply proven that more people voted for you than anyone else. There are any number of reasons why this may happen, but a simple one is that mafia is not a game of 9 people being given some stuff to read and make a decision from in isolation- it is as much about being able to convince people that your suspicions are right and also not appear suspicious at the same time. What it sounds like you are saying is that you are good at the scum identifying part and that is all that counts.

If this game is frustrating you as much as it sounds like it is, a better option than asking to be lynched would be to ask to be replaced. Of course, asking to be lynched is itself a reasonable gambit, especially when there are only one or two votes on you at the time

[Walnut]

It is my first game at this site. I am playing on another site too.

I played a few face to face games a few years ago. That is quite a different dynamic, as it is a lot easier to read people when they are sitting around a table with you, you don't have a lot of time to go away and think about what they have said, and there is a lot more remembering as you can't go back and re-read what they did on Day 1.

[Walnut]

Welcome to q21! Thanks for replacing and thanks for jumping in boots and all, even if you did mistakenly vote for me.

I guess my suspicions of Litral could fall into Muerrto's category of overanalysing posts.

Muerrto calls it pointless overanalysis and chooses not to do it; I call it the one game of mafia I am allowed to play and choose to do it.

In both of these posts I am saying that I am looking closely at Litral's posts and picking up on tiny possible flaws, because that is all I have to go on. I am conceding that, as Muerrto says, this may be overanalysing. I can see the contradictory angle if I was saying that my suspicions of Litral were caused by

his

overanalysis, but I was in fact referring to

my own

(potential) overanalysis in both posts.

I had been speculating about what any Demon king replacement would open with, and I must say you impressed me. The immeditate mention of your predecessor (as it could not be avoided) with the throwaway defence of "He was a first timer who got pressured so left" then moving straight on to lots of analysis, flinging a few FOS and a vote for the last player to be named in a post prior to your replacing was good. The defence is not as silly as it sounds- all you need to join the site is a valid email address, so you could get some fairly inexplicable behaviour, especially in the first few posts of someone's first ever game. Even so, you start with a burden of suspicion based on your replacee's brief contribution, and will have to work hard to clear it.

I don't think I've been contributing less but I simply got to the point where beating the dead horse was getting messy and monotonous.

I definitely agree. While I am too lazy to count up the exact number of posts everyone has written, you have certainly done your share. The dead horse part is where we differ- to stretch the analogy I think some of us, having only the one horse to ride, are giving its sun-dried skull mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate attempt to keep it alive. Incidentally, one way to get a vicarious fix of mafia is to read other games, and I have read a couple here and am currently following a couple more. In one of these Muerrto was mafiascum and was partnered by a series of fairly unfortunate newbies who dug a deeper and deeper hole leading to a 2 day game, if I recall correctly. Hence perhaps the frustration with newbies (or perhaps a more definite attempt to stay unassociated with a potentially fatal partner...).

In answer to Litral's request for a detailed analysis of all of the players in the game so far, I am reluctant to do this. One reason why is that we have Starkmoon posting soon and potentially Mike4876, and I would like for them to read the thread and come up with their own thoughts first, and not just be able to say "I agree with so and so" much. Just to check though- the first time you asked for a detailed analysis of all players currently in the game (post 105), then the second time (post 115) you said

Walnut, my request still stands; I want an explicit argument from you.

What does it mean when a general analysis turns into an explicit argument? I think it means that my single vote sitting on you is making you edgy, and I don't mind that.

That said, I did a bit of headscratching about Mike4876, and reluctantly have come to the conclusion that he needs to be voted for. The tricky bit is that just possibly he has a legitimate reason for not posting, and statistically speaking he is more likely to be a townie, and even a silent one gives us an advantage in the win condition. However, if he is mafia, I am damned if I am going to be the fool who let him win by never posting.

Unvote, Vote Mike4876

[Walnut]

I don't mind you paraphrasing Muerrto at all. I do sometimes wonder what the alternative to the grilling over semantics/overanalysing is- waiting for someone to make a such a blindingly obvious blunder that it is immediately apparent that they are scum?

I was thinking that it is quite natural that when someone is voting for you, you tend to suspect that they are scum or at least thinking wrong. The little bit of pressure remains there, even though it is just one vote, making it harder to sleep at night, and every now and then in the street you twitch and look over shoulder just in case

By the same token, I am glad that you accept my reasons for not publicising my thinking, but a little curious as to how I seem to "flow along". Would it be possible to elaborate on that at all?

[Walnut]

No problem with having gut feelings. There is not much certainty, so some of it is likely to come down to that sort of instinctual thing. As noted before, I did feel that there was not a lot to go on, and not a huge point in getting too committed with a third of the players absent, so yep, I can see how that can be seen as flowing along.

[Walnut]

Vote: Mike

If he's town remind me not to speak to him again =p

Given his performance so far, he probably wouldn't reply.

My only regret about lynching him so soon is that Starkmoon won't get a day one post in, but I guess she can get underway on day two just as easily.

[Walnut]

Bah.

Vote: Vel

Sorry, I would aid this game by posting more, but I'm dead

[Walnut]

Congrats q21, well done!

You know, if we had lynched Demonking early on Day 1, then lynched Mike for lurking, we would have had it, so q21's bussing may have won the game for the mafia.

The disappointing bit was the lack of energy and how we got to the end of Day 1 with two people not even posting, if you count Starkmoon's "I am sick, then on holiday and can't post".

I am intrigued by the comments about the power role tells I was giving. See my sig for my newbieness and difficulty in not getting night killed. I think I may somehow sound a lot more dnagerous than I am.

I definitely had Muerrto pegged as the other scum. His over reaction to Snafoo and my joke posts about lynching an IC and the absurd "Let's lynch both Litral and me" seemed good cover for masking scumminess.

[Walnut]

q21, thanks for the feedback. I genuinely appreciate it.

On day 1 I was waiting for more certainty, and as I think I said at some point, it seemed weird to be choosing to lynch one of the active players when both scum could have still been lurking and yet to have posted at all. I think a lesson I will take from this is to be less afraid of being wrong-experienced players seem to accept that they will lynch a lot of townies along the way.