Newbie 958 ~Game over!

[Incognito]

/confirm

Hi! I'll use the confirm section to give you guys my patented "Words of Wisdom". See below:

1)

Games on this site tend to move somewhat slowly so be patient!

2)

If you haven't done so yet, you can use the Wiki Index as a good place to learn about Mafia theories and abbreviations that are often used in the game. I'd recommend at least taking a glance through it when you get a chance.

3)

As the IC, I'm here to help you learn the game of Mafia as well as play along. The SEs have some experience too, so they're kinda good to listen to, too (but I'm better to listen to ).

4)

Always remember that this is a game so have some fun.

[Incognito]

vote: ThatTumblweed

Incog Theory. Seriously.

[Incognito]

Oooooh a metagamer. What else have you learned about me?

[Incognito]

brianj, all of my games have links to them in my Wiki page though. So you wouldn't need to use the Search function to find them, silly. You sure you checked out my Wiki page?

Incidentally, if any of you are trying to search things on-site but can't do so because the Search function is down, I'd recommend using this link instead: http://www.msutils.net/search.php. It's a pretty good alternative to the normal Search function.

[Incognito]

But he already has a vote, so I'll refrain.

Why does me having a vote already cause you to refrain from voting me?

Ftr, I could see what brianj is getting at with his explanation. I agree that just because a person has a decent record as scum that doesn't mean the same thing would translate over to a person's town game too. I've certainly seem some people who are just absolutely amazing as scum but who suck as town and vice versa. LordChronos, have you seen differently?

[Incognito]

@ThatTumblweed:
I voted you because of "Incog Theory". It's this theory I made up awhile back that basically stated that the first person to post in a thread is likely scum. It's only worked about 50% of the time, so I use the reason now largely for poops and giggles - I couldn't think of anything wittier to vote anyone for. If you think the so-called RVS is silly, how do you propose we kick the game off instead?

Also, metagaming is silly.

Why?

Stating that you're using a number generator is really not doing anything at all, is it? It is essentially releasing you of having any ulterior motives other than just trying to get someone lynched. Actually, it seems sort of silly, in that you have no particular motivations behind any choices you could make- a deliberate attempt to appear as neutral as possible while trying to off someone. Hrmmm.

Well, now. This seems like you're using the so-called RVS to try to delve into the possible motivations that some people may have used when they chose to place a random vote, which looks like an attempt to step the game away from the RVS, no? So if you're able to come to conclusions like this about people's possible motivations, is the RVS really that silly after all?

Incidentally, do you think scum or town would be more likely to use a number generator to place a vote? Or do you think it's a complete null-tell?

[Incognito]

This game looks like it's moving on along pretty nicely so far. Few things to respond to here.

LordChronos, I don't mind you responding to the RNG question, but I asked a question here too:

Ftr, I could see what brianj is getting at with his explanation. I agree that just because a person has a decent record as scum that doesn't mean the same thing would translate over to a person's town game too. I've certainly seem some people who are just absolutely amazing as scum but who suck as town and vice versa. LordChronos, have you seen differently?

Could you respond?

I actually agree with ThatTumblweed when it comes to completely random votes - in my experience, I haven't seen any clear delineation that says that scum are more likely to completely random vote than town or vice versa, so I too would consider it more a null tell. In the games you've played, have you seen a stronger tendency for scum to RNG vote than town?

Well, I was simply wondering how I could pick someone randomly, I thought about random.org, used it, and then wrote that line without much thinking.

You could also use the Dice tag like so:

Code: Select all

[dice]1d9[/dice]

But seriously, voting someone with at least marginally non-random reasons is so much cooler. Do you have any current thoughts about anyone?

@ThatTumblweed:

Do realize that a random voting "stage" is nowhere near the same thing as random

lynching

. I get the feeling that you're working under the assumption that our random votes will somehow remain for the rest of the game and that we'll just end up randomly lynching the person who reaches the required amount of votes first. The RVS is simply a way to begin discussion; lynches, on the other hand, should only be done when enough information has been generated in the thread, and we all come to a consensus as to who is most likely scum.

-~-~-~

p.s. I think brianj is :goodvoting: and we rather need a bandwagon anyway.

unvote, vote: Earlder1

[Incognito]

remouk, it's usually just a good idea to just give your thoughts on situations. Let us know what you're thinking, etc. Once you do that, I'm sure the questions will just flow naturally. If you're town, we obviously need to

a)

figure out that you're town based on what you're posting and

b)

maybe notice things that you

yourself

may have noticed that maybe none of us have noticed. By keeping your thoughts bottled up, that doesn't help us at all if you're town, but I could see how it might help you if you're scum.

Also, the usefulness of bandwagoning is... I'm guessing to drive someone into a corner so they're forced to defend themselves?

Multiple uses. They're mostly related to reactions by both the person being bandwagoned, and the behavior of the people who aren't being bandwagoned.

[Incognito]

Incidentally, remouk, based on your title of "Goon" I'm guessing you've played at least one other game on here. I haven't looked at the game but were you scum there or town? If you were town, did you have a difficult time figuring out what to say there too?

[Incognito]

Well, random voting is one thing, but calling me scum, is a bit more serious. That's why I decided to reply. I didn't even mention incog's vote because it's obvious his is just random. You calling me scum, however, I felt needed recourse.

Er, I assure you that my vote was not random. I have very good reason for switching my vote to you even though I didn't provide my reasoning, and I don't think I'd ever switch from one fairly arbitrary vote to yet another arbitrary vote like that anyway. If you thought my vote was random though, you really wouldn't feel the need to question me about it? That strikes me as a bit counterintuitive at this point.

I don't mind ThatTumblweed's vote on remouk - he's still a big neutral read for me. I could see how his actions might make sense coming from a newbie town perspective since I do think that newbie players might have a harder time developing reads particularly early on (especially considering his claimed language barrier), but maybe a bit more pressure will get him to pipe in with actual reads of people.

Though I've never liked bandwagons in the RVS stage, so I'm also a bit suspicious of Incognito for even suggesting such a thing at this point.

What's suspicious about it?

@LordChronos: Fair enough.

[Incognito]

Coach Travis, I sometimes don't provide reasoning for my votes to try and see who might be thinking along the same lines as me when I place an unexplained vote. I figure that if a person can see what I see when I didn't even have to explain it, there's a decent chance that the person who has seen what I've also seen is likely thinking along the same lines I am and could potentially be pro-town. I wouldn't realistically leave an unexplained vote on a person up until the point that the person gets lynched, but I do think it's a good initial indicator.

Since you and Earlder1 have requested reasons though, I'm just seeing a pattern coming from him that I'm not entirely comfortable with. In his opening post he mentioned that he didn't want to place another vote on me because I already had one (he explained that he did this because he wants to make sure that everyone gets attention but if he's scum he might have done it in order to not seem suspicious) and then on page 2 he made the comment about how he thought he'd seem scummy for trying to diverge conversation. Both points just give me the feeling that he might be more concerned about how he appears to everyone else than I'd expect someone who's town to be concerned about. It's usually scum who try to focus more on their appearance to everyone else than town does - town is usually just concerned with finding scum, period.

[Incognito]

He's also lost more games as town than he's won. Doesn't that mean he's better at being deceiving than being helpful to the town? You should take all things into consideration.

Not necessarily.

I'm not being full of myself or anything, but I think I'm actually a pretty good town player (except for that terrible, terrible, no-good, really, really, horrible, bad, bad, bad, game called Pick Your Poison 3 that I advise nobody, nobody, nobody should ever look through). Last year, I just had a habit of dying really early-on so that my influence wasn't in the game very long and this year, so far I've only had one completed game as town and well, I think the phrase "the side that has the larger amount of village idiots usually loses" probably would go well with that game. Though, in that game, we only had one village idiot, and he ended up costing us the game.

-~-~-~

LordChronos, who's scum?

[Incognito]

Oh and Earlder1, fair enough I guess. I'll be keeping my vote where it is in the meantime though.

[Incognito]

LordChronos

currently gets pro-town judgement from me- all of his posts were intended in some form to provoke reaction from others.

Can you explain this a bit further? Cuz I currently have LC as pretty neutral right now. I thought his pulling up of Alta's two separate quotes where he interpreted them as "hypocritical" didn't really hold true to me - Alta's initial vote was pretty clearly a random vote and can't quite be compared to his other stance on remouk's possible alignmenet since it's not like Alta ever

really

voiced negative criticism of remouk at any point in the game. Leech picked up on this too it seems. Aside from that, I didn't really know where LC's opinion stood until recently where he placed his vote on Earlder1.

I didn't say I am intentionally being scummy. I just noted that it's better to be slightly suspicious than obvious town.

I don't really agree with this. If all or most of the townies are obvtown, that makes it much easier for all of the other townies to be able to focus their attention on the people who are legitimately scummy due to the fact that they actually are scum. Being slightly suspicious might give a person a better shot at surviving through the Night, yes, because the scum are less likely to kill people that they know they can potentially set up as mislynches in the future, but I don't really see why surviving through the Night should be that much of a concern for you. If you're town, you should realize that

even if you die

at some point, you have a chance at winning the game. Scum don't really have that same privilege.

And judging by the fact that in your last game you were actually Doc-protected because you were obvtown, I don't really see how you could now adopt the viewpoint you're mentioning here - your obvtowniness in your last game both prevented a kill AND practically confirmed you as town to one other person in the game -> the Doctor. That seems like a win/win situation to me.

[Incognito]

I see what you're getting at, and I too would like to know where he currently stands but I don't really hold that point against him right now. I know there have been plenty of times where I've held a random vote on someone that I was getting better feelings about, but I didn't move the vote simply because I hadn't found a better target to move to yet. I don't know if that's the case with Alta, but yeah, that's why I mentioned it.

[Incognito]

I might have had different opinion about LordChronos's motivations if his accusation were bit more serious and well-based, but it was obvious to me that his wording as "hypocritical" was illogical. As you said his interpretation of Alta didn't really sound valid at all- no one is going to get more suspicious of Alta because of that.

What do you think about his subsequent explanations then?

Also, was there more to this:

The very fact his interpretation

...this looks like something was cut-off.

Everyone is a little bit suspicious but a prime suspect to me is remouk. However despite his scummy behavior I am not convinved he is Mafia.

What do you find scummy about him? Previously you said you didn't think there was enough evidence to go after him but now you're considering his behavior "scummy" - what's changed?

[Incognito]

Nothing's changed I always found Remouk scummy I just don't think that his actions are enough to condemn him.

Ah ok. I could see what you're saying now. Break it down for me though: what specifically do you find scummy about him?

-~-~-~

FWIW, yeah, I can see how remouk and Alta might be acting

somewhat

similarly, but I do think Alta has at least offered his opinion on at least one player with respect to that player's alignment. remouk hasn't really told us anything about his thoughts in that regard to this date.

Also I agree with holding off any L-1 votes at this time. It's still FAR too early in this game, and I'd like to see a LOT more content coming from pretty much everyone. Leech, remouk, Alta, and even Coach Travis seem particularly low on content to me right now and because of that, I'm reading all FOUR of them as pretty much neutral right now.

Mod:

Could we get a prod on remouk right now? He's approaching the 72 hour mark.

[Incognito]

Glad to see remouk becoming more involved but unfortunately it's against me. Responding to his case:

There's nothing more scummy than voting without explanation (except when there are none at the begining of the game).

Why? There have been plenty of times that I've voted without explanation, so I completely disagree with what you're saying here. And I know plenty of other players who feel the same way I do, so I'm gonna need a bit more than this because honestly, voting without explanation is not a scum-tell at all.

The game is about poiting things. If no one voted XXX when you decided to vote him with no explanation, I don't get how it can change someone's mind to the point that he sees the same thing as you.

The point of my vote wasn't to change anyone's minds about anyone at that point - it was to obtain reactions from both the person I voted, and the other people in the game. Votes can serve multiple purposes; they don't necessarily

only

have to be used to push someone towards a lynch - they can also be used to apply pressure to people or gauge reactions from the player being voted or the other people in the game. There are probably other purposes for votes that I can't really think of right now. Also, in that very post you quoted me from, I pretty clearly explained why I voted Earlder1 in the first place - what did you think of my explanation?

I see it as a "let's vote XXX, maybe someone will vote him too, I'll agree with his explanations and won't be seen as a follower/scum jumping on a wagon".

That's just silly. If I was really voting someone just to try to get a mislynch, wouldn't it make more sense for me to actually provide the reasons that I'm voting the person since that would probably me more likely to help me persuade the other people in this game to join the same wagon as me? Especially if, as you say, I'm an experienced player who would likely know how to do such a thing?

You may disagree with my method here, but I really think you need to think a bit more if the method I've used is really more likely to come from a me-scum or a me-town. I mean, you stated that you agree with Coach Travis's suspicions of me, but even he changed his mind about it and decided that he doesn't find me suspicious for it anymore.

Also, about Earlder1, he's not a newbie player like you're claiming he is. He's one of the semi-experienced players in the game, so he at least has some idea of what he's doing here. It's fine if you disagree with the reasons we've found him suspicious thus far, but I think it's incorrect to disagree with them simply because you think he's new to the game.

[Incognito]

Kinda short on time right now but a quick post anyway.

I thought Leech and I were SEs. Do we have more than two?

Oh whoops. You're right. I just assumed Earlder1 was an SE too because his join date's in February, and he has "Mafia Scum" as a title. But yeah, the mod's post does seem to indicate differently.




And ah, thanks, brianj.

Everyone: We could really do with more posting. I just posted yesterday and there've only been 3 posts added since that time. You can't all be scum, so please pipe in. These are exactly the kinds of conditions that favor scum.

[Incognito]

I don't really find remouk to be suspicious right now like some of the others have mentioned. There might be some WIFOM involved in this read, but I just wouldn't expect a pro-scum newbie to push on a pro-town IC the way remouk has done with me here. And I'm getting the feeling that he genuinely believes that what I did was a scum-tell even though, as I've mentioned before, I'm positive that he's wrong in this case.

remouk, do you have any thoughts about the other players outside of me and Earlder1? You mentioned you don't really have anything to add about them - why is that? Do you not have a read on them?

-~-~-~

I'm feeling a bit more content with having my vote where it is right now. I'm not too crazy about the fact that after receiving a good amount of pressure from a bunch of people, Earlder1 has seemed to vanish from the thread. I'm modding him in my Mini Theme game right now, and I will note that I did have to prod him there over the weekend, but he was still active there up until at least Thursday, which is about the time that he last posted here.

I don't like how he's saying he suspects Remouk even when earlier he didn't, with no reason to really become suspicious of Remouk during that time(this happened before Remouk's weak vote)

I questioned him about this before - what did you think about his explanation?


Eager to see more from Leech and Alta (or his eventual replacement).

[Incognito]

Coach Travis: ah, ok. Previously you had said that Alta had mentioned that he wasn't suspicious of remouk

at all

but in your most recent post, you seem to correct that and mention that he was initially suspicious of him but just hasn't given thoughts on anything outside of him. That's why I questioned you about it.

The rest of what you've said is accurate though.

[Incognito]

Wow, thread explosion. Haven't read any of it yet - will post again tonight.

Hi Shadow Dancer and thanks for replacing in.

[Incognito]

You guys went from verbal constipation to suddenly having verbal diarrhea.

First of all, I won't be doing a player by player analysis at this time. I still just don't feel like I have as solid an opinion on everyone as I'd like to be able to produce one and that's really the ONLY time I ever do those things. So while it's nice to see that all of you have put things together analyzing everyone, you guys can count me out. I guess I'm not one of the cool kids like Tumbles mentioned.

A few comments though:

Leech- Post more. I like your first post however, because it was full of good analysis, which is always pro-town. So yeah, post more but I am leaning him toward town for now.

Others talked about this point already, but I don't see how Leech's first post was very pro-town at all. He put together a bunch of pointers that contained IC-like advice but didn't really commit to any opinions about people's alignments. And I find it strange that your analysis of him ends up leaning town on him but your analysis of me makes you lean more in the iffy column when I'd think that based on your own logic, I would be considered pro-town as well.

What do you think of everything Leech has done outside of that first post?

-~-~-~

I found myself really liking brian's post 125; I think he brings up some excellent points about Alta that I myself was beginning to notice as well, which was why I was beginning to question Alta before he replaced out. I'm a bit annoyed that Alta left the game - I would've liked to see where he was going with his suspicions and thoughts because I think we were beginning to get a feel for what the genuine Alta really is like, which might have hinted better at his alignment.

I will comment on this now though:

He is completely neutral to me- he has done well to draw out conversations from other people, but to my belief he also never commited to his opinion about other peoples?

I've pretty clearly stated my opinions of Earlder1 and have made it a point to mention that I was beginning to lean town on remouk too. And I think I've mentioned that I found you pretty town so far as well. Just because I'm not constantly updating my reads and stuff doesn't mean I'm not forming opinions; if I don't see anything questionable about a given player, I generally won't feel the need to comment on them.

Incog, what do you think of ThatTumblweed's play thus far?

I'm actually not completely sure right now. Everyone else seems to be reaching universal town reads of her, but I haven't seen anything from her that's given me that definite town feel from her at all. IMO, she's just seemed fairly logical which might be the reason behind the universal town reads, but in my experience good use of logic does not equate to being pro-town at all especially when it comes to Newbie players. I do like her taste when it comes to Earlder1 though so if I had to guess, I'd say town by default right now? She wouldn't be my first choice of a D1 lynch that's for sure.

-~-~-~

I'm gonna separate additional thoughts into another post since this one's getting kinda long.

[Incognito]

@Shadow Dancer:

Why so wishy-washy? You mention that you feel Earlder1 seems like an inexperienced player but then you conclude that he's no newbie and he should know better? Also, you mention that you didn't like my vote without reason but then mention that that's just some people's playstyles and then you IGMEOY on me? Which is it?

-~-~-~

At this point, I'm gonna

unvote, vote: Leech

.
This doesn't leave Earlder1 off the hook by far, but we're about a week and a half into this game, and Leech still hasn't produced any real content. I know he mentioned that he's been having some RL issues, but I'd really expect more from him given the fact that he has some experience around here, and I'd be real hard pressed to allow him to skate under my radar for the entirety of Day 1. Plus, I'm finding it a bit creepy that everyone seems to be mentioning at least SOME suspicion of him but nobody's bothered to place a vote down on him.

Either get involved, get replaced, or face the noose.

[Incognito]

Since Shadow Dancer brought up the topic of policy lynching, I just wanted to mention that I'm strongly against policy lynching. Our goal should really be to attempt to lynch scum Day by Day. In my opinion, policy lynching is downright lazy - it's not an actual attempt to figure out a person's alignment since it just pushes for a person's lynch very blindly, and it's a very easy thing for scum to join in on without looking so bad after the lynch has occurred. So yeah.

IGMEOY is all I can say for now, really.

Well, did you disagree with the reasons I voted Earlder1 in the first place? Do you think the line of questioning I've done here looks fake? If you don't disagree with my reasons or don't think my line of questioning looks fake, then I can't really see why an IGMEOY would be necessary in this case. I don't know if you're just paranoid about ICs in general, but I think I'm a fairly readable person.


-~-~-~


I'm getting a slightly better vibe from Shadow Dancer than I did with Alta - I like the fact that he's using the metagame to try to help him out with regard to LC's alignment since I think metagaming is something that's more likely to be done by town as opposed to scum. I would obviously still like to see more from him though - I realize that there's a very real chance that Shadow could just be a better scum player than Alta. But for now my suspicions of that player slot are decreasing a bit.

[Incognito]

LordChronos, which situations? I can't think of any that I'd really ever support one.

[Incognito]

Hi Niko-mod! remouk unvoted!

Oops. There's that blindness again. ~Nik

[Incognito]

Shadow Dancer: I listed my reasoning for voting Earlder1 in this post. To summarize, I was just seeing a pattern of behavior coming from him that suggested that he was more concerned with his own appearance to the rest of the town than I would expect town to have. Examples included: 1) one of his initial posts where he was reluctant to put another vote on me out of fear of jumping on a bandwagon, and 2) his other post where he mentions that he's concerned about looking scummy for diverging discussion.

Since then, I just took issue with his initial stance on Leech.

In fact, I think I'm ready to

Unvote

, because ever since joining the game he's done nothing suspicious, and he's been helpful.

This is a common misconception. Being helpful does not in any way shape or form mean that the person being helpful is town. Scum can just as easily take on the helpful role as town can, so I'd be careful with using this as a town-tell. That said, I don't think Shadow Dancer is the play Today either.

Who would you vote for at this moment, Coach Travis?

[Incognito]

V/LA until at least Tuesday, sorry.

[Incognito]

Back from V/LA. With Shadow Dancer's vote on Earlder1, he should claim in his next post. I am willing to hammer.

Shadow Dancer, is your post #178 directed at me? I couldn't tell cuz the post you ended up linking to was your very own post.

There are some situations where you have an incredibly anti-town player that is likely to do things that drastically hurt the town's chances to win and you know this early in the game when I would support a policy lynch.

Well, if a person was acting incredibly anti-town, wouldn't you at that point begin to consider that maybe just maybe that person might be scum? Just curious.

I don't know, I've just always been slow to vote outside of RVS, like I'm afraid it could cause some bandwagon and backfire on me or something.

Can you explain this a bit further? How would a bandwagon that forms after you place a vote backfire on you?

-~-~-~

smashbro: Do you have any additional thoughts about anyone else? Your initial analysis made it seem to me like you were slightly suspicious of Shadow Dancer/Alta and very suspicious of Lord Chronos but now that you've unvoted, I'm not entirely sure who your top suspect is at the moment. What do you think of Earlder1?

[Incognito]

Coach Travis, I see. I don't really see that as being something to worry about though - basically, if it DID happen, I'd actually argue that that's something that we might WANT to happen because it would easily expose the scums the very next Day. With the slower more methodical way people have been playing this game, I would think it would be completely out of character for anyone to do what you've indicated, and I'd really only expect scum to pile on two quick votes for a hammer the way you've said. And that would be a plus overall even if we did lose someone who was town to a D1 lynch.

Which of your posts were you thinking I referred to?

I had no clue and that's why I asked haha. Since you made that post directly after I announced I would be V/LA, I thought you were directing it at me. That's why I was confused because I thought I always made my stance on Earlder1 extremely clear but your post (if directed at me) seemed to indicate that you thought otherwise.

And what is your reasoning for the hammer? I know Earl has been your top suspect for a while now, but IMO there is still a fine line between suspecting some one and being willing to lynch that one.

I could go for either a him-lynch or a smashbro-lynch right now since I think they both have the highest chance of being scum but since Earlder1 has the largest wagon, I'm fine with lynching him for Today instead of shifting the wagon to someone completely new.

I'd also like to note that I could see the potential for an Earlder1 and Leech/smashbro pairing, which makes either one of their lynches extremely informative in the long run too if we're right - Earlder1 was probably the only person in the game to think Leech's long post was town-ish (mostly everyone else thought it was neutral at best), and smashbro's opening analysis didn't even touch on Earlder1 despite the fact that he's been the subject of attention for pretty much all of D1. Also, I'm noticing some differences in Earlder1's play here and the game I just modded him in - he seemed a lot more involved in that game and much more detached here.

[Incognito]

ThatTumblweed has requested replacement.

[Incognito]

I agree that Earlder1's last post seems really town right now too but with the vanilla claim and the deadline falling this Saturday, I'm extremely reluctant to shift the wagon to someone new - the risk is just too great. If he does end up flipping scum, then that's good obviously, but if he flips town then at the very least we'll gain a lot of info from his lynch.

@smashbro: Fair enough.

-~-~-~-~-~

I don't see how confidence is a scum-tell either. I too would like remouk to elaborate on that read a bit more if he can before the deadline arrives.

[Incognito]

Yeah, I'm not seeing the case on Shadow Dancer at all.

Deadline's on Saturday, and no lynch is the worst thing we could do on a D1. And I've already made my feelings pretty clear about Earlder1.

vote: Earlder1

That puts him back at L-1. I recommend that we do wait for DTMaster to share his thoughts before anyone drops a hammer but if he doesn't get to do so in time, someone needs to hammer before deadline no matter what.

[Incognito]

Earlder1, the mod's already said he's not granting a deadline extension, so I'm pretty certain that there's no way to shift a wagon right now:

There will be no deadline extension.

I have not read the most recent wall posts on this page and probably won't until after I see an Earlder1 flip. Our deadline's in less than 24 hours though, guys, so whoever has the power to do so right now NEEDS to hammer in his next post.

[Incognito]

I need to do a reread including reading through the large posts DTMaster made before he died. Never got a chance to read through them, and I'm curious as to why the scum chose to NK him.

[Incognito]

I really do not like this post, especially I think DTMaster is first player to actually point out Incognito's scummy points extensively.

What don't you like about it? I seriously saw the hammer and the Earlder1 flip and didn't bother reading DTMaster's posts during the Night because a) I was already reading Tumbles as town anyway, and b) I didn't have much time to do a reread over the Night. And even though a lot of people try to avoid NK speculation because they claim it's subject to Night-time WIFOM, I think the exact opposite - I like looking into what NK-ed townies had to say because they're usually killed for a very specific reason.

I'll have some analysis tomorrow. I'm adjusting to a new work schedule - should be fully adjusted by then.

[Incognito]

OK, so I finally got some time to put some of my nebulous thoughts together. I'll try to keep this as condensed as possible.

Right now, I'm thinking there's definitely one scum in

{

LordChronos, Coach Travis, Shadow Dancer

}

. Both scum could very well be in there, but I'm like 99% positive at least one is in that group right now. The strange thing is I feel like I'm getting very similar reads of LordChronos and Coach Travis - neither one of them seem to do anything that's outright scummy, but at the same time, neither one of them really pushes the envelope for me the way I would expect town to do. Chronos seems to ask a lot of questions, but looking back at his posts, I've noticed now that he basically just kept his vote on Earlder1 for the entirety of Day 1 and didn't seem to force too much pressure on anyone else.

Also this bugged me looking back on it:

If Earlder flips scum, I think remouk could very well be his partner. Attacking SD with a case that is incredibly lame while defending Earlder suggests they could be scum buddies to me.

While I did disagree with remouk's case against Shadow Dancer, I don't at all see why his case against SD would have made him the natural buddy of a hypothetical Earlder1-scum. One thing that I've liked about remouk is I've always gotten the impression that he actually

believes

in the stuff he's saying and that he's not just putting stuff together for malicious purposes. His initial vote on me convinced me of that pretty well, so I'm curious as to why you got a different feel from remouk here, Chronos.

Also, can you explain this:

@CT
I have seen posts like Earlder's last from new town players, yes, but I have also seen them from scum. He really didn't respond to anything said against him or try to fight against his lynch, but just gave up.

What gave you the feeling that he "gave up"? I'm curious about this because as I mentioned before, I really did feel like Earlder1's final post made him look more town-ish, but you seemed to arrive at a different conclusion and downplayed that here.

-~-~-~-~-~-~

As for Coach Travis, I've looked through his posts, and I feel like he's had a tendency to be waffly for a good portion of the game. I could pull up specific examples but for the most part, it seems like he's trying to play both sides of the fence a lot of times looking more like he's attempting to appease certain people rather than figure out their alignments. It's the kind of behavior I'd expect to come more often from scum than town.

Also, I really don't like his Earlder1 vote now that I see it in a new light:

But yeah, since I am suspicious of him and he's no longer at the stage where voting him causes an L-1, I have no real excuse, so:

Vote:Earlder 1

I think he's probably the most likely day 1 lynch, but I'm not against voting anyone else if it comes down to it.

He doesn't say that he's voting him because he thinks he's scum; instead he says it's because he's the most likely day 1 lynch. It's like he's trying to absolve himself of responsibility.

Coach Travis, what are your current thoughts on the players particularly LordChronos?

-~-~-~-~-~-~

The last of the threesome is Shadow Dancer. My read of him Yesterday was leaning town - I liked the fact that he used meta-gaming to try to develop reads since I think meta-gaming is usually more likely to be done by town than scum especially when it's coming from a newer player. Reading through brianj's case against him, I'm seeing that brianj actually seems to mark that as a strike against him.

brianj, why does SD's metagaming negatively affect your read of him?

Also, I'm looking back at the point that DTMaster brought up on Shadow Dancer's flip on Leech - hadn't noticed it before actually, but I do think DTM brings up an interesting point there.

I also repeatedly said that that was just a prodding vote and not a lynch all lurkers vote. Of course, in retrospect it looks kind of silly to try to pressure an obviously absent player. But again: I could not know that back then.

Right, but in the post that DTMaster brought up, you used Leech-SE's flaking as a reason to confirm your vote on him, which would lead me to believe it was something that you thought was scummy coming from him since he has experience around here. Are you now saying that wasn't the case?

-~-~-~-~-~-~

Separate post to follow as this one's kinda long.

[Incognito]

I could probably see myself voting either LordChronos or Coach Travis at this point based on the points I raised in the above post.

vote: Coach Travis

for a push in a different direction from smashbro's vote.

I'll pick up on my read of anyone else I missed tomorrow, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there since I felt like the three players I've analyzed above needed the most immediate attention.

[Incognito]

I'm behind. Hi Equinox and win-chester. Thanks for replacing in. Since the last page did have a lot of textwalls, I'll try to keep this brief.

1) emphasizes that you have not read DTMaster's post, and 2) subtly suggests that DTMaster's analysis caused scum to NK him (=scum NK'd DTMaster after reading DTMaster's post). See how it works? =/ Also I felt the need to shift some spotlight onto you because no one seemed to be paying attention to you that much, and like I said in case of Coach Travis, I don't like people slipping through people's suspicion list very much.

I see what you're saying. I wasn't really trying to say that the scum NK'ed him because of what he posted; I was very much aware of the fact that pretty much everyone in the game had Tumbles checked off as town, so I could certainly see that being a reason for the scums to kill him, and there could be other reasons the scums chose to NK him too. But if his posts were the reason for his kill, I felt like looking through his posts might have given me something that I myself hadn't noticed before. His top suspicions were LordChronos, Shadow Dancer, and Earlder apparently, so I wanted to see what he had to say about them since I think there's very likely scum in the group I mentioned in my last post.

Poor choice of wording, my major point of attack toward Shadow Dancer is:
1) Shadow Dancer's over-zealousness to distance himself from Alta when suspicion against him was hardly critical.
2) His over-reaction toward remouk's attack.

I could see both of these points but at the moment, I'm still leaning town on him.

-~-~-~-~-~

After completing my read, I'm still thinking brianj is town, and I'd like to see win-chester's thoughts before coming to a conclusion on her/remouk's alignment.

I have pretty much zero aggression in me, and it takes me a long time to come to conclusions on other players alignments.

Why do you think aggressiveness is the most important trait to have when scum-hunting?

[Incognito]

I was prodded. Will update ASAP.

[Incognito]

I can't believe how lazy I've become. Must be all the heat or something.

Anywho, I too still agree about remouk seeming newb town. I'd like to see what win-chester has to say about the game though -

mod:

is she still with us?

I'm not completely sure what to make of Coach Travis' recent posts; if he's town, he could genuinely have very little clue about people's alignments and could just be having a hard time developing reads, but after seeing his quick vote on Equinox after he received an additional vote from smashbro, I'm getting more of a scum read from him as it looks self-preserving to me.

@Equinox:

Why does the fact that Coach Travis has begun to suspect your former player spot make you feel better about him? Also, I don't see the thing about being coached over the Night; I feel like Coach Travis' playstyle has remained fairly consistent all game.

A townie who keeps getting off-reads is fairly harmless unless they have some degree of unpredictability, and DTMaster showed no signs of such in his walls. Therefore, there is at least one mafia in the group of Incognito,

LordChronos

, and Shadow Dancer.

How does Tumbles' impact on the game effect this read though? Also, I'd be more inclined to agree with your assertion about NK-ed townies if we were dealing with experienced scum but since I know the scum team must have some inexperience in it, I'm not sure your breakdown is as simple as you've written it. I could certainly see a Newb scum team killing off someone who they thought they'd have a tough time getting a mislynch on.



Would like to see more from pretty much everyone.

@smashbro:

What's your current read of Shadow Dancer?

[Incognito]

@smashbro: I see. I couldn't recall you touching on him much especially recently, so I figured asking your opinion of him might shed some light on stuff.

Shadow Dancer, that's a lot of words...

I don't understand your Coach Travis vote - your belief is that he was wishy-washy during D1 but has improved lately... and he therefore gets a vote? Wouldn't the fact that you think he's improved be reason to maybe reconsider your opinion of him or do you subscribe to Equinox's belief of him being "coached" over the Night? Also, you do realize your vote placed him on L-1, right?

Also, I really don't like your half-attack on me - you mention that you should look into me more, then you seem to propagate the paranoia that everyone else seems to have about me by calling smashbro's attention to me too, but you don't even follow any of that up with a vote on me or an FoS on me. I don't understand the purpose of calling attention to it then.

[Incognito]

Actually, I'm gonna

unvote

.

I don't want L-1 right now when we still need our win-chester replacement to chime in and still need Equinox to finish her analysis. And I'd like Shadow Dancer to respond to the issues I've raised in my last post too.

[Incognito]

Responding to Equinox's criticism

(though, I'm secretly wondering if her vote on me is some ploy to make herself the only Incognito left standing in this game)

...

Incognito not getting solid reads is a bit strange, particularly when everyone else has determined that Earlder1 is scum with a few other scum reads in between. This coming from an IC makes it all the more noteworthy!

First of all, hindsight is 20/20. If you look back to when I made that post, you would see that Leech still hadn't said much to get a read off of, I couldn't tell if Alta's behavior was legitimately scummy or just newb-ish since he still hadn't done much, and remouk still hadn't posted much. That's a whole 3 out of 8 voices missing in a pretty crucial part of the game.

Second, I said I didn't have as solid reads

as I'd like

. Normally when deadline's counting down and Day 1's about to come to a close, I LOVE to produce nice player by player summaries showing what I think about each and every person in the game particularly in Newbie Games since I'm expecting to get NK-ed. But since such a large portion of players still hadn't said much, I didn't feel comfortable writing out a patented Incog PBPA - if I DID draw the NK, I suspected people might have looked back on it and tried to look into it too much, which I wouldn't have liked since I wouldn't have had much confidence in it. That's p much the reason why I said that there. If you look back through Day 1 though you could see at various points that I definitely did touch on my own reads - I was the first one to state that I was leaning town on remouk, I was pretty clearly pushing Earlder1 hard all Day 1 because I thought he was scum, I believe I said that I was leaning townish on brian around that time too, I had previously stated that I found Coach Travis neutral, etc.

Coach Travis posits that scum NKed DTMaster for being too town. The exact same reason Incognito gives me later... Hmm!

There are multiple reasons DTMaster could have died. I said DTMaster being regarded as town by p much everyone was probably the most likely reason (I mean, think about it, everyone except me had Tumbleweed pretty definitively on their town lists), but I also implied in that first post of Day 2 that you said you didn't like that scum could have potentially killed him because his suspicions were correct. I pretty much ate my words when I actually read his posts since it turns out I was one of his top suspects.



A lot of the rest of your post is extremely speculative - I find it strange though how you claim to have such strong suspicions of Coach Travis and seem to bring up pretty strong examples for finding him scummy but then you wind up voting me claiming that you could see us as scum together? How does that work? I've been voting him for pretty much all of Day 2 to the point that he's actually reached L-1 - what would a hypo-Incog scum gain from bussing his buddy at this stage of the game?

- Incognito buddied up to you ("I think brianj is :goodvoting:") when you voted Earlder1 for his avatar question.

You say this rather definitively.

[Incognito]

I'm pretty solid on Coach Travis. I'm not so solid on you, and that was what I was trying to find out.

Odd. Do you always have a tendency to go after the person you're less sold on? Cuz, if so, I know I pretty much always do the exact opposite.

If you answer to my satisfaction, you're free to stay until Lylo when I get suspicious of you again. I'd be happier if you got lynched and just flipped, though, as that would answer a lot of questions and settle our doubts before Lylo. Think of this as the "lynching the confirmed cop" thing.

I've read these lines over and over and over again, and I can't help but think they're a slip. Apparently, if I answered to your satisfaction, you would switch your vote to Coach Travis and push for his lynch, but you seem to imply that doing so would lead us to a LyLo situation and you're already positive that in that kind of situation I'll both

a)

be alive and

b)

you'll definitely be after me at that time too? Please tell me why I shouldn't vote you right now, my Incognito protégé.

I do. I said that the first time I read your post. What were you trying to accomplish by complimenting brianj at that point in the game? That was an odd thing to do, IC or not.

I was being sarcastic when I said 'definitively'. Normally when I suspect someone is buddying, I'll say "this

looks

like buddying" or "I get the

feeling

that he or she is buddying", but you just said I was buddying, period. I don't know if it's confirmation bias on your part or some other kind of potential slip where you seem to imply knowledge that brianj is indeed town and therefore buddy up-able.

Either way, I complimented brian in that post because when I read Earlder1's posts on pages 1 and 2, I got a bad feeling about them, and I thought it was pretty interesting that brian seemed to get the same impression of them as well (which I assumed was the reason he voted Earlder1 in the first place). It's a habit of mine to buddy up to people who I think are town.

[Incognito]

Please link to the meta, yes.

As for your question about buddying, yes, I find it to be beneficial as long as I'm actually right about the person being town. I've found myself forming fairly strong pacts between townies in the past, which makes it much much harder for the scum to get mislynches.

I'd imagine you want examples so here goes:

Me buddying up to Ether in Mini 594
Me

incorrectly

buddying up to camn in Mini 803
More incorrect buddying this time to Hoopla in Open 214...





Uh, as much as I'm enjoying the dialogue that I'm having here with Equinox, does anyone have anything they'd like to say? Anyone agreeing with Equinox's case? Why or why not?

[Incognito]

And actually, here's another example too. You can see boberz voting me in his very next post because he felt like I was buddying up to him.

[Incognito]

Hey, Zach. I'm pretty sure that at least one of Coach Travis/Shadow Dancer is scum; Equinox would probably be my number three suspicion more because of LordChronos' play than anything else but that's where I am right now.

brianj, I don't recall you mentioning you ever had a problem with me. When did I become a "scum" read? Why didn't you ever complete an analysis of me?

Also, I think it's ridiculous for you to say that I haven't done anything remarkably pro-town - I've been scum-hunting, I've probably been the most active player in this game, I've been prodding and probing at players, I've been offering my opinions on pretty much all events. I mean, seriously?

[Incognito]

Speaking of Inco:

I'm pretty sure that at least one of Coach Travis/Shadow Dancer is scum;

I do not know at all were you take this dichotomy from.

I brought up a trichotomy (if there's such a word?) a long time ago. Actually, I'm surprised that nobody asked me about that until now. My original post was as follows:

Right now, I'm thinking there's definitely one scum in

{

LordChronos, Coach Travis, Shadow Dancer

}

. Both scum could very well be in there, but I'm like 99% positive at least one is in that group right now.

I got this from the end of Day 1 votecount and my idea that there's usually at least one scum on any given Town lynching wagon:

Day One Final Vote Count

Earlder1 (5)

- LordChronos, Coach Travis, Shadow Dancer, Incognito, DTMaster

Since DTMaster flipped town, and I know I'm town that pretty much narrowed everything down for me to you, LC/Equinox, and Coach Travis.

In that same post, I was originally leaning town on you but after reading your reason for voting Coach Travis it made me feel like either you were being opportunistic or, if CT is scum, you were placing your vote on the wagon of your buddy so that you could potentially get town-cred at a later time after he flipped scum. I'm a firm believer in the idea that oftentimes the people with the worst reasons for voting someone are generally scum.

-~-~-~-~

I am willing to hammer Shadow Dancer, but I'd like to see a claim from him first and Equinox's vote on this page is making me twitchy. Equinox, in your long analysis post you seemed to barely mention anything about Shadow Dancer and were heavily pushing the idea of a me/Coach Travis scum-team. Why the sudden L-1 vote and full-on case against SD?

-~-~-~-~

Anywho, here's my current impression of all the players.

remouk/win-chester/Zachrulez:

I was leaning town on remouk, and I still largely get that impression upon reading his posts. I'm a bit paranoid about win-chester's disappearance though since I think Newbie scum would be more likely to flake out on a game like this upon replacing in than newb town, and Zachrulez hasn't really come forward with much as of yet. Because of that, Zachrulez is neutral leaning town for me.

Coach Travis:

Still getting a scummy read off of him. The one thing that's bugged me about him as of late is that in his analysis of all the players, his only scum read is Shadow Dancer, and I really have no clue who he suspects would be SD's buddy. It just gives me the impression that he might just be suddenly tunneling on SD to gain a possible mislynch to ride into Tomorrow with a LyLo situation. In fact, prior to CT's vote, the only thing I can recall him mentioning about him is that he thought he was town and that Lord Chronos was scum. To flip so quickly and then focus on nothing but Shadow Dancer... yeah. That's bothersome.

Shadow Dancer:

Initial vibes were leaning town - I liked the fact that he seemed to be using the meta-game to figure players out because I think that's more likely to be done by town. I never got a bad read off of Alta; he just struck me as newb-ish if anything. All that said, as I've mentioned in my response to him, I felt like his L-1 vote on Coach Travis and reason for doing so seemed shady to me, and it definitely taints my read of him. Plus, he's in the group of CT/SD/Equi.

brianj:

Still leaning town on him. He doesn't seem afraid of conflict, which I think is more likely to come from town than scum, and his scumhunting has seemed genuine all game. He's been focusing on Shadow Dancer/Alta from very early on but it doesn't give me the impression that he's trying to railroad a town the way scum would - it seems more like he genuinely believes he's found scum and is trying to get him lynched.

Equinox:

LordChronos was a neutral to scummy read, and Equinox has done some things that have bugged me too, especially with her recent vote and complete flip in opinions as well as things that pointed out that could have been potential slips. She explained them away, but it's possible that she's just a good smooth-talker or something along those lines. I doubt we could get enough votes to lynch her at this point but if she's still alive Tomorrow, she's definitely someone I would look out for.

Leech/smashbro/Nobody Special:

Our revolving door play-spot. Leech was scummy, smashbro was just there, though I liked his Coach Travis-hate, and Nobody Special definitely is not gonna have enough time to do anything. Would probably support his lynch though since this spot is a complete null read and null reads are not good to have around in potential LyLo.



Btw, I've never had anyone call my playstyle in-transparent, so that's definitely a new one to me. I suppose it's possible that I have been that way this game largely because I've had moments where I've just tuned the game out - when a game needs as many replacements as this one has had and my reads keep on suffering because of that or when a game moves as slow as this one has moved at certain points, I tend to get apathetic about the game. So that might be the explanation for it.

No more walls. kthx.

[Incognito]

Agreed on the tearing posts apart thing. It's basically an attacking the argument thing rather than trying to figure out the player. I don't see the buddying up thing though; he claimed to agree with your analysis. Maybe the portion about how he liked your initial replacement post could be interpreted as being buddied up to, but I think that's a stretch since he said the same thing about DTM who is dead and can't affect the game any longer.

I guess my issue NOW though is you claim that you pretty much skimmed through the remouk/SD exchange because it was too many walls for you to handle and after this recent exchange that SD had with brianj, you apparently decided to have a closer look at that rem/SD exchange to re-evaluate it. Because of that, I just don't at all see how you were able to determine that one side of the exchange was being genuine (you said remouk was being this in your long analysis post) while not commenting on the other side of the exchange (Shadow Dancer) until recently. It just strikes me as really contrived.

-~-~-~-~

Mod:

When exactly is our deadline, anyway? Your last post says Sunday, June 29th but June 29th is on Tuesday. Does our deadline fall on Tuesday then?

[Incognito]

I also talked about how I had trouble reading Shadow Dancer and his posts because of his style of attack. remouk was easier to read, so I was able to get that vibe from a skim.

Fair enough, I guess.

[Incognito]

Incognito, we're being paranoid?

Because he's the IC. I have found they need to be watched more closely than anyone else in Newbie Games. (And I'm up to pg. 5 or 6.)

That answer your question, Equinox?

@Nobody Special:
Since you claimed that you were up to page 5 and 6 and decided to ask about me, was there something there or before that time that piqued your interest?

Noting for later. Does this change?

The advice or the opinion on Shadow Dancer? If it's the opinion on Shadow Dancer, then yeah, it changed when I thought he placed Coach Travis at L-1 for what I thought were terribad reasons. I was originally checking him off as town because his use of metagaming early on to determine alignments seemed genuine, and I usually find that to be something that's more likely to come from town than scum. I play this game using probabilities, gut, and logic.

I'd be fine with a Shadow Dancer or Equinox lynch at this point. Not particularly interested in lynching anyone else.

What are your thoughts on Leech/smashbro/Nobody Special?





Coach Travis is getting me twiiiiitchy again... What are the reasons people don't want to lynch him exactly again?

[Incognito]

And if I need to spell out why he's making me twitchy again, it's because if he's scum he pretty much implied that he knows Shadow Dancer will be a mislynch due to what Equinox just pointed out.

He's certainly my top suspect and I do believe he's scum, but that doesn't mean we need to rush to hammer before he has a chance to claim. Of course, with how hesitant people in this game have been so far, that comment does seem unnecessary, but still, no reason not to take advantage of the extra time, so we're as sure as we can be.

This seems evasive. Even if he claims, we won't exactly know right away whether or not he'll be a mislynch, so I don't really see why you said that in the first place.

[Incognito]

I... don't really see why the Earlder1 as an SE thing would set up a red flag really. I mean, what would be the scum motivation for a hypothetical me-scum lying about that when it's something that could easily be checked for anyway? It was just a mistake which I myself corrected later on here anyway. I thought he was an SE because he played in my Mini Theme game (Dirty Dirty South Mafia), and I could've sworn that when I scoped out his playing history to check if he qualified to actually be in my game (I had /in-ing requirements), he had at least 3 games under his belt.

And fair enough to the other stuff. That's pretty much why whenever I replace into a game, I just read through it in one sitting while trying not to write anything down except for the replacements and then trying to type out general thoughts after I actually have a rough idea of exactly what's going on. Also, no rush on the hammer - our deadline's on Tuesday, so we still have a couple of days to get a claim out of SD. I'd actually like to see a player by player come out of you before the Day's end if possible.

[Incognito]

@Inco: I ask you about what appears to be serious accusations and all I get is

this

(?!?!):

I got this from the end of Day 1 votecount and my idea that there's usually at least one scum on any given Town lynching wagon:

You really start to disappoint me. I'd expect more from an IC.

What exactly is wrong with that? For every town mislynch, I can almost guarantee that there's at least one scum who was on the wagon that ended up lynching said townie. It's *extremely* rare for a mislynch to happen that was completely town-pushed. My analysis helped me narrow down my focus on the people who weren't me so that I could potentially figure out who that scum likely is. That's called good scum-hunting. I have no clue whatsoever why you'd think otherwise.

I think Newbie scum would be more likely to flake out on a game like this upon replacing in than newb town[/quoze]
You can't be really serious about this, can you?
Maybe I need to reconsider some things coming from you...

...and that's a problem because?

Also, you're at L-1 with people who are willing to hammer you in a situation where the deadline is a day or two away. We need a claim.

[Incognito]

Still leaning town on him. He doesn't seem afraid of conflict, which I think is more likely to come from town than scum, and his scumhunting has seemed genuine all game. He's been focusing on Shadow Dancer/Alta from very early on but it doesn't give me the impression that he's trying to railroad a town the way scum would - it seems more like he genuinely believes he's found scum and is trying to get him lynched.

Nice how you turn brian's overfocussing into a good thing. And if you consider that conflict thing a town tell *ActivateHeavySarcasm* I feel like the center of most conflict now, maybe you should credit me. *DeactivateSarcasm*. I am impressed how swiftlly you can "adjust" your reads...

This doesn't even make any sense. I've pretty much had a town read of brianj for a good portion of the game, so I have no clue where you're getting this supposed "read adjustment" stuff from. And the conflict thing that I was talking about related to brian was his playing method and what I perceived to be genuine scumhunting. There's a huge difference between that and what you're doing right now.

Can't you see that you're flailing right now and attacking pretty much anyone and everyone who even raises an ounce of suspicion towards you? I wouldn't be surprised if you suddenly switched your vote to me after just recently swapping it over to Zach.

[Incognito]

I just got home from work, and I have to run out for a bit, but I saw SD's Cop claim. I'll just confirm that I am not a Cop. If someone else is a Cop though, he or she needs to counterclaim ASAP.

[Incognito]

Interesting. I'm leaning towards believing brianj's claim over Shadow Dancer's - I just simply won't accept the fact that my read of the two of them could have been

that

off especially after SD's recent flailing against everyone and anyone tirade.

I don't think anyone should hammer anyone just yet though. brianj, who do you claim to have investigated during Night 1? This is important.

[Incognito]

Oh, missed that. Shadow Dancer, I've looked through your posts and I couldn't see any indication of breadcrumbing an innocent result on LordChronos/Equinox. Did you in fact do so?

[Incognito]

I think chances for that are 25% (and as an RB he would likely not have counterclaimed).

Errrr, this looks like a slip. If you were really a Cop, you'd know that the chances for a Roleblocker would actually be 50%.

[Incognito]

Ah, that's your math. Either way, I'm still leaning towards thinking you're scum. That one post that you pointed me to did sort of break down DTM's case against LC, but you still never really leaned any direction on him (town or scum). In fact, in that post, you pretty clearly called

brianj

of all people town, which is more what I would expect you to say about LC if you really did investigate him as innocent. It just doesn't make sense. When you compare all that to brianj's actions Today where he's consistently attacked you and asked for people's opinions of you, it seems like a pretty clear choice between who's likely the real Cop and who isn't.

Anywho, since deadline's right there and this really seems like a no-brainer, I'm gonna go with this for the hammer -

vote: Shadow Dancer

If he does manage to flip Cop and I'm not around for Tomorrow, you guys should know who to go after.

[Incognito]

I don't at all see how you could believe SD's claim, Zach. Have you read all of the interactions that happened during Day 2?

[Incognito]

All right.

So first things first: with the death of brianj, I think it's probably safe to say that we're dealing with the following set-up:

*2 Mafia Goons, 1 Town Cop, 6 Vanilla Townies

So the last mafiate is a Mafia Goon and apparently we don't have a Doctor here.

My initial impressions coming into Today are as follows:

- I'm thinking that Coach Travis is town. I just can't see any reason why Shadow Dancer-scum would place a Coach Travis hypothetical buddy at L-1 at the time that SD did. The vote count at that time was pretty deadlocked, and there were certainly viable alternative wagons that SD could have voted for instead of his own buddy's wagon that had only two votes on it (and, realistically, my vote on that wagon was the only serious one at that time anyway - smashbro's vote seemed half-hearted to me). So yeah.

- Zachrulez's stance Yesterday before the SD flip completely blew my mind and left a really bad taste in my mouth, but I think he's safe because of the interactions that SD had with remouk (Zach's predecessor) all game. I just can't at all see two newbie scum buddies going at each others' throats the way SD and remouk did here, so I think it's safe to say that they were on opposite sides. Zachrulez is probably town too.

That leaves me with Equinox and Nobody Special as the most likely scum candidates. I'll be reading through their predecessors' interactions with the known scum and their own interactions with the known scum to try and figure out which of the two is the most likely buddy. I should have a full case by tomorrow.

[Incognito]

I did a nice full read-through of the game today, so I'll have my thoughts up by Monday since I'm going down to the shore. I found some cool stuff.

[Incognito]

The only reason I said I didn't want an immediate hammer was because I thought brianj hadn't claimed his investigation results. After ShadowDancer pointed out that he had already told us them, I was fine with a hammer on someone. In fact, I very nearly was going to ask one of the SD voters to unvote him in order to prevent a possible self-hammer but thought better of it - I didn't want to give SD any ideas that he himself might not have thought of if he really was scum at that point.

-~-~-~-~-~-~

Anywho, while I can see the case that's been made against Nobody Special, I'm not at all comfortable enough with Equinox at the moment to feel like NS is indeed the final scum. I noticed a few things in my read-through that gave me bad vibes about both her and Lord Chronos who was previously in her spot.

For example, post 225 from LordChronos looks really bad to me in hindsight:

remouk,

I just ISOed Shadow Dancer s well, and couldn't find a quote of him saying he had a town read on Early. He said he thought Earlder might have just been a newbie, but no explicit statement that he thought Earlder was town. Also, as I recall his case came up some time after he replaced in and in no way was only based off another game. It was also based off what Earlder said about being a little scummy being good and how that made no sense given the rewards Earlder got in his first game for being townie and not scummy.

So, where did you find a statement of a town read on Earl from SD?

@All

If Earlder flips scum, I think remouk could very well be his partner. Attacking SD with a case that is incredibly lame while defending Earlder suggests they could be scum buddies to me.

Here, LC mentions that he disagrees with remouk's case against Shadow Dancer but then he ups the ante a step further and attacks remouk calling him a potential buddy of Earlder's for "defending" him. If LC was scum, this absolutely reeks of chainsaw defense.

There were a few other posts that came from both LC and SD where they almost seem to be casually defending one another using the metagame almost too cleanly. It literally made me shudder while reading through it. I can pull up the quotes if anyone wants me to.

In the same token, Equinox's great wall of replacement brought up a bunch of negative comments about Shadow Dancer's posts, but she ended up concluding that me and Coach Travis were likely scum together because she felt like our interactions "looked fake". And then of course she ended up voting me when she didn't really bring up too many points that were particularly damning against me. Her eventual vote on Shadow Dancer did take him to L-1, but I think at that point in the game the tides were definitely shifting - I had unvoted Coach Travis and was becoming suspicious of Shadow Dancer for his L-1 vote, other people (the replacements, primarily) had mentioned that they were becoming suspicious of him too, and the push that initially existed against CT was definitely fading. If Equinox is scum, this could have easily been a very very very good cue that her buddy was probably going down soon and that it might be a good idea to get that vote in there in an effort to sap up some town cred.

Equinox, I realize that a good portion of this has more to do with LordChronos' play than your own, but could you respond to any of the above? Also, why so quick to place Nobody Special at L-1?

[Incognito]

Equinox's last post seems town-ish to me. I'm beginning to think this game really COULD be as simple as Nobody Special being the last scum, especially since he seems to be missing in this game despite being active elsewhere.

In response to Coach Travis' recent post, I'm still pretty much reading Zach as town. I just can't fathom a Newbie scum team attempting a huge bussing act the way remouk and ShadowDancer/Alta would have had to have orchestrated here. I've read through their interactions over and over again, and they really seemed completely genuine to me. There were even moments where remouk seemed to be taking

offense

to what Shadow Dancer was saying about him -- that kind of thing just doesn't usually happen between arguing partners since they themselves know that their argument is just for show.

[Incognito]

Reading through Nobody Special's case on Coach Travis, I'm really not seeing it at all.

While I think it is a very brave move, and could likely backfire, I cannot fathom how he can have only one scum read and the rest are town (or null). It seems odd that he would drive the lynch on his partner, but honestly, everyone else is giving me a very townish vibe.

This seems like you're trying to push some kind of conspiracy theory or something of the sort, which doesn't really hold much weight in my eyes. A sort of "how could his one and only scum read end up flipping scum" kind of thing. The big picture is this: Why would a CT-scum be more likely than a CT-town to have all but one scum read?

And then distancing here and here.

I'm not seeing how those posts could definitely be called distancing between CT and SD as opposed to the alternate explanation of CT being someone who's town who's just sticking with his top suspicion and trying to evaluate things as they come. Do you think his reasons for suspecting SD seem contrived or that his reactions seem fake?

Also, your replacement posts at the start of Yesterday seemed to imply that you found multiple people suspicious in this game. But now recently you've mentioned that you find everyone else aside from Coach Travis townish. What changed between then and now?

[Incognito]

See, that's the thing. CT-scum is not necessarily more likely than CT-town to have only one suspect; in fact, I would expect a scummember to have

more

than one suspect, because, well, that's the best way. (I'm not saying I have an excellent case; I'm saying I have a case.)

...which is exactly why your vote on CT was so weird. And you don't have a case against CT; like I said, you're pretty much sprouting a conspiracy theory at this point, which is extremely far from a case.

HOWEVER, thanks to your questions, I've re-read myself in iso, and I recall that you are also quite scummy. It's Friday, and I have a deadline this evening, but I will try very hard to re-ramp my case against you.

Interestingly enough, you also said that you found remouk (Zachrulez) suspicious for his early game activity. So I have no real clue why you've suddenly decided to focus on me and me only. And you never really said that I seemed scummy at any point in this game; you originally mentioned that you wanted to look into me just because I'm an IC, and you mentioned something about the Earlder SE comment sending up a red flag for you which is still something I completely don't see.

I took you up on your offer*, and glanced at a couple of games. Also, the Earlder-as-SE thing really sent up a red flag. I spent more time on that than I probably should have. (*I know it wasn't an offer.)

However (again). Your prodding me in that manner is not something that careful scum would do (trying to avoid the spotlight and all). So, are you town, honestly trying to understand my reads, or are you VeryBoldScum pushing me. Worth looking into (and when I say

looking into

I mean I have to find a scum!Incog game to read.)

I thought you looked into games of mine already?

-~-~-~-~

Zach's point about Nobody Special looking at himself in iso is a decent one; it's usually scum who feel the need to stay consistent with their thoughts rather than town, so I think they're more likely to try to make sure everything they mention in-thread meshes well with anything they say in the current time as well.

Eager to see Nobody Special's case against me, though at this point especially after these last few posts I'm really considering just hammering him.

[Incognito]

It's eerily quiet.

Zach, what are your own thoughts about my play here, and my play in that game we played together? Or do you not do meta?

[Incognito]

@Nobody Special:

Since we know for certain we had a Cop in this game, we know we're dealing with one of the following two set-ups:

- 1 Mafia Goon, 1 Mafia Roleblocker, 1 Cop, 1 Doctor, 5 Townies
- 2 Mafia Goons, 1 Cop, 6 Townies

If we were dealing with the first-mentioned set-up, I think it'd be very unlikely that the scum would choose to kill the Cop as opposed to just roleblocking him. They'd know that there's definitely a Doctor in the game, so, in order to kill the Cop, they'd basically have to send roleblocks almost completely in the dark hoping to roleblock the Doctor so that they could successfully kill the Cop. The risk is ENORMOUS if they're unsuccessful too; they'd basically be dealing with a situation where

a)

the Cop would have some kind of an investigation the next Day to deliver to the town (whether it be guilty or innocent doesn't matter - it would still be catastrophic for the scum) and

b)

a Doctor who's alive and well. So I really don't think the scum would opt to go that route.

Since the scum just flat-out killed brianj, I think it's safe to assume that all of us who remain alive are just VTs and that we're dealing with role set-up #2 that I've listed above.

-~-~-~

I'm a bit shocked that Nobody Special hasn't come forward with a case against me; I really don't know what to make of that, though I do find it interesting that Zach is apparently his next choice, and I previously mentioned in Post 485 that he talked about Zachrulez/remouk in a negative way in his opening post. This might be confirmation bias on my part, but it again almost looks like he's just trying to keep himself consistent with his thoughts.

And this part of NS's post gives me a really weird vibe:

@Equinox:

Don't take this as an AtE, but I know I'm town, and you know how I play as scum. Can you comment a bit more on this:

From a quick skim, Zachrulez's defense of Shadow Dancer's cop claim is kind of odd. I'll have to read through those again, but (WIFOM ALERT) I doubt he'd do that sort of thing as scum, seeing as he knows I lynched someone for doing that in a game he modded. >_>

From what I've seen of Zach, he's a pretty ballsy player and I would not put this past him. Thoughts?

It almost seems like he's trying to collude with Equinox by pointing out a past experience they've had with Zachrulez together to try and sway her towards his side.

Nobody Special, I'd like your thoughts on the complete game interactions between remouk and Shadow Dancer/Alta. Thanks.

[Incognito]

Ah ok. That makes sense.

Also, wow, this new feature of post review is pretty cool. If someone posts something new after you hit submit while you're replying to a thread, it'll make a comment "At least one new post has been made to this topic. You may wish to review your post in light of this." Nice.

[Incognito]

@Zach: Fair enough.

@Nobody Special: I haven't been able to read through your case in as much detail as I'd like yet especially since you linked to another game, but to answer your question, if I absolutely HAD to choose between those two, I'd probably shoot Equinox. CT just doesn't seem like scum to me at this point. Equinox doesn't really seem like scum to me at this point either, but I feel less sure about her than I do about CT.

My order of suspicion goes something like this: you > Equinox > Coach Travis > Zachrulez

[Incognito]

Yeah, I managed to read through the game that Nobody Special linked to and as far as I could tell, the two situations are so vastly different that I don't think they can be used in any way as a point of reference to determine how an Equinox-town would always act. In fact, in the early game of that Newbie 940 game, Equinox looked fairly similar to how she's looked here - it was only later on when her back was against the wall that she led the attack against NS-scum and his fake-claiming buddy for obvious reasons (NS's buddy had fake-claimed a guilty on Equinox-town).

And the "subliminal slip" thing... I can't at all see how that could be interpreted in that way. I'm pretty sure other people have mistyped people's names in this game; are we going to scour through the thread and try to call those things subliminal slips too?

-~-~-~

Nobody Special's constant, quick changing of opinion leads me to believe he isn't really concerned with genuinely finding out who's scum, and he's more interested in just surviving. Does anyone object to me hammering, or does someone have a compelling enough reason to believe NS is town? Cuz I'm thinking he's our guy.

[Incognito]

Well then let's do this, son.

vote: Nobody Special

Game ovah

(I hope)

.

[Incognito]

Could be tricking.

/waits for Nika-mod

[Incognito]

This is interesting. My initial thought tells me to vote Equinox because of the previous town read I had on Coach Travis due to the reasons I brought up Yesterday but with the Zach NK, I need to think a bit more about this - considering the fact that I brought up a case against Equinox Yesterday, I'm second-guessing myself as to whether a her-scum would benefit as much from a Zach NK as a CT-scum would. And then of course there's the WIFOM that goes along with all of this.

Either way, I agree - nobody should vote just yet. I'll be combing through the thread for interactions that I consider to be interesting and will have a bunch of questions for both of you to answer before coming to a decision.

[Incognito]

I got a chance to read through Coach Travis' posts particularly his early ones. One thing that I had long forgotten up until now was the push CT made against Alta early on in this game. In this post Coach Travis actually went forward and voted Alta to place his first non-random vote of the game and then he even went further than that and listed him at the top of his scum list in this post as well. He *did* eventually unvote him about 5 days later once Alta was replaced by Shadow Dancer citingthat Shadow Dancer seemed to be doing a much better job than Alta, but I too began to feel that way at that point as well so I can't really hold that against him. All of these initial suspicions that CT had of Alta make his Day 2 posting look even more interesting in retrospect in the sense that he didn't really ever let up on Alta/Shadow Dancer - if CT and SD were scum together, I'd just expect CT to try and "forget" about his SD/Alta-suspicions rather than continuing to keep them alive and well. It indicates to me that CT just might be genuine here. And then of course all of that led to the point where Coach Travis and Shadow Dancer ended up cross-voting one another in which SD's vote in particular placed Coach Travis at L-1 at a time when alternate wagons were definitely available. If they're scum together, it could have been the ultimate act of distancing, but I'm not sure I see the necessity for both SD and CT to distance from one another that strongly at that point.

Coach Travis, when you placed your vote on Alta during Day 1, how likely did you think it was that he would be lynched at that point? What in particular did you like about Shadow Dancer's entrance into the game?




LordChronos' posts were very different with regard to the level of attention given to Alta early on. While I and others spent some time trying to question Alta and read into his behavior a bit further, LordChronos pretty much ignored Alta altogether. The only point that I can see LC mentioning anything about Alta in a critical way was in this post where he calls out Alta for being "hypocritical" (this was back when Alta kept a random vote on remouk but mentioned that he wasn't really finding remouk scummy at that point). I didn't really see what LC was getting at at the time because I didn't see Alta's vote and comment as being contradictory but if LC was scum, I can see him possibly getting a bit antsy with his partner even for something very minor or not scummy at all. It would basically be a classic case of Stoofer's Syndrome (when you're scum, oftentimes your buddy's actions become even more magnified than they would if you were town looking in on them). The ignoring of Alta/Shadow Dancer pretty much continued all the way into Day 2 when LC eventually got replaced by Equinox. And I've already covered some points about Equinox's behavior towards Shadow Dancer back in this analysis post of mine. Now that NS is gone, I'm thinking much of what I've mentioned there is still valid.



So that's pretty much where I am right now. I'd like to see CT's responses to my questions but my current lean is towards Equinox being the scum.

[Incognito]

I really don't see why it would be a suicide move on his part to call his buddy town. The only part I could see is the other part of what you mentioned above about how a scum might claim an innocent result on someone who actually is town in an effort to "join forces" with them, but I don't think it's completely necessary for a scum to do that. I think it's equally as likely for a scum to claim an innocent result on his own buddy in an effort to play mind games with the town.

Further, I haven't seen any evidence from past games to suggest that scums will *always* claim results on actual townies - I've seen it go both ways.

[Incognito]

I should probably briefly respond to some of Equinox's points too.

Equinox, can you point out where exactly Shadow Dancer made any kind of a case against you

or

your predecessor? I remembered him always thinking that you and your player slot was either neutral or town for pretty much the whole game, and I quickly glanced through SD's isolation and couldn't find anything major that he mentioned about either person in your slot, which seemed to confirm my memory of past events. I also couldn't find a single point in his isolation where he FoS-ed LordChronos either, which is another point you bring up in your own favor apparently.

[*] Interesting that he brought up Stoofer's Syndrome, yet the crux of his paragraph was LordChronos ignoring Alta and Shadow Dancer. Yes, scum will read their buddy differently from everyone else, but if that is the case, why ignore your buddy for most of the game except to point out this or that? That would just be a poor attempt at distancing.

My point there was LC's response to that first action that he said he found suspicious about Alta seemed a bit uncharacteristic coming from him because he didn't really ever seem to follow up on it either. Looking back on it, it looks more like a slap on the wrist than an actual attack since it was followed by absolutely no other comments about Alta or Shadow Dancer for pretty much the remainder of his (LC's) time in this game.


I'll wait for your comments about what you consider to be fakeness coming from me before commenting on that since I'm not really sure what you're getting at there.

[Incognito]

Right now, I can see a case either way, though still leaning towards Equinox.

Even though you say you're leaning towards Equinox, can you point out why you can see a case on me?

[Incognito]

Right, so I just got back from work, and Coach Travis hasn't hammered yet so it must be Equinox.

vote: Equinox

I'll respond to Equinox's points as well as any questions CT might have for me and look for other points of the thread that show why Equinox is scum.

[Incognito]

Everyone in this game knows Coach Travis is town. Don't bother with that, scum.

That's productive.


Anyway, in response to Equinox's case, I'm noting that Equinox has merely used a combination of scare tactics ("IC still alive in LyLo? must be scum!" and "Incognito is known to be skillful scum. Be careful!") along with pointing out things that aren't even scummy or were dramatically different in reality when compared to how she "interpreted" them to try and support her "case". I'll try to briefly respond to each point to show why each one is so flawed and scummy of her.

Town do not need to find other town; their sole objective is to find scum. Using process of elimination to scum hunt is just handing the mafia victory on a platter. Besides, and you would know this, being on the same wavelength does not indicate alignment by any stretch of the imagination; it just helps you find out, assuming you are scum, who is easier to manipulate.

This is just flat-out wrong. There's absolutely nothing wrong with town-hunting; I've certainly used it to great success in the past to find scum, and I'm going to continue using it in as many situations as I can because in reality, it's an extremely good way to find scum. The fact of the matter is most scums simply won't

do

the things that one would consider to be scum-tells because they know that that kind of thing will get them locked into a noose extremely quickly. Town-tells, on the other hand, are things that are oftentimes extremely difficult for scum to emulate because they require more energy to do, and they oftentimes result in clearing other people as town. One of scum's main objectives is to keep as many mislynches alive as possible. Clearing townies makes a scum's job that much more difficult, which is why town-hunting is so cool.

[*] Incognito managed to avoid mentioning anything significant about Alta, despite the questions around Alta's play. Pro-town IC should have noticed something at the very least.

I'm pretty sure I was the first one to question Alta about his early inconsistency in this post. How could you possibly call that insignificant? And Alta wasn't around very long for me to say much more than that; you're basically sprouting a "burden of proficiency" logical fallacy in that you're saying just because I'm an IC, I should have somehow known Alta was scum straight from the get-go. It simply doesn't work that way. In my experience, I've found that it's oftentimes difficult to differentiate between behavior that's just "newb-ish" and behavior that's legitimately scummy. I can't see how you're seriously arguing that I should have known better about him after his 5 or 6 posts of content. I'm an IC not God.

[*] Incognito did some distancing from Shadow Dancer with some questioning and more questioning. The first questioning aims to get Shadow Dancer to take a stance; the second is more to get a grip on Shadow Dancer's stance than to determine alignment.

They were both questions that I asked SD to try and figure him out. The fact of the matter is Shadow Dancer

was

being wishy-washy with respect to Earlder, and I was trying to figure out why he seemed that way. And he was also doing this weird attack of me that had absolutely no basis behind it, so I was trying to figure out if he was legitimately concerned about my alignment or just riding the "IC paranoia" train in an effort to gain a mislynch since everyone else in this game seemed to have no trouble hopping on at various points.

[*] In that same post, Incognito presents some suspicion against Shadow Dancer's slot, despite lack of mention of Alta elsewhere on Day 1. This is the first time he talks about Alta's play in any sort of detail.

This is just wrong. In that post, I said Shadow Dancer was giving me a better vibe than Alta was; I didn't say he seemed suspicious there. And I talked about Alta prior to this post here and especially here where I talked about how he still read neutral to me. You really missed that?

[*] Later, Incognito does not see a case against Shadow Dancer. No other mention of his stance regarding Shadow Dancer was made between the post where he had "suspicions" and this one. Something changed and went unmentioned, or it's just inconsistent play.

What I've mentioned above makes this point completely invalid.

[*] Lynch all liars. Uh, I mean, there is no pro-town motivation to mentioning how he didn't read DTMaster's posts. If town didn't read it, they'd just read it later and talk about it as if nothing strange happened... because nothing strange happened, merely honest neglect. Scum not only feel their own actions are scummier than they are, but they also feel the need to explain, almost excessively, the reasons behind their actions. This is one of them.

Was it smart of me to mention that I hadn't read his post? Probably not since it could have potentially tipped the scum off to me not being a PR here. But there's nothing scummy about mentioning that there. It was the truth - I hadn't read his post, and I was somewhat surprised to see him as the NK choice. I figured there was probably deeper meaning to it within his entrance posts, and I intended to find out what that might be.

[*] Incognito leans town on Shadow Dancer because of only one action -- metagaming. That may be a valid reason early in the game to read someone because there's no other information, but this is a poor excuse of a town read in Day 2. Besides, scum can do metagaming, too. It's just a matter of how much time one has and how dedicated one is to the game.

I thought his meta-gaming looked genuine here, and I've found that to be a fairly reliable town-tell in the past since scum are usually too lazy to do such things and don't really even need to since they already know who's who in the game. They usually just focus on in-thread stuff as a result. Obviously I was wrong about SD though.

[*] In his response to Equinox's accusation about the lack of PBPAs, Incognito says he didn't want people to bank on them too much when he himself isn't confident. Lack of confidence in reads aside, this isn't very pro-town. Town needs information; any information you can provide, no matter how little, can help. Confidence issues can be addressed with a disclaimer. You just outright refused to provide it.

I'll keep the disclaimer thing in mind for next time then, I guess. You're acting like everything else I provided up until that point wasn't informational on its own though. I didn't put it in a fancy lay-out or anything like that, but I think mostly anyone looking back on my posts could have gotten a sense of where my thoughts may have lied with respect to certain people's alignments. So in actuality, I did provide town with plenty of information.

[*] Why base your suspicion against Equinox mostly on her predecessor's play? Oh, that's right... because Equinox can't defend LordChronos's actions without using divination.

Because you share the same role? Because he spent more time in this game actually interacting with his scum buddy than you did? And anyway, I

did

talk about how I found your sudden shift from a Coach Travis/Incognito scum pairing to a full-fledged Shadow Dancer attack when the tides were shifting against him pretty eyebrow-raising. So yeah.

[*] Incognito's response to Zachrulez is defensive. He brings up his "town credentials" as a shield. Town knows they do not need to do this because their actions are innocent.

I'm assuming you mean brianj here? If so, brianj was accusing me of things that were simply untrue, and I was illustrating why what he said was untrue, and I wanted him to show why he thought otherwise. Just because I know I'm innocent doesn't mean I don't have to worry about people's attacks on me. Obviously I'm still trying to figure out what the possible motivations of those attacks might be, right?

[*] The last time I saw Incognito talk about Shadow Dancer, Shadow Dancer was a "leaning town" read. No apparent changes in opinion between that post and his intent to hammer. Even when Incognito was talking about his trichotomy (suspects after DTMaster's death), he claimed Shadow Dancer to be town. Wishy-washy, much?

After my read, I thought Shadow Dancer seemed town. I'm not going to deny that. His L-1 vote and reason for putting Coach Travis at L-1 seemed opportunistic as hell, and I began to think that he just might be scum taking advantage of the situation. How is that wishy-washy? That's me re-evaluating my read in light of new information which is something town SHOULD do.

[*] In the posts after this, Incognito begins throwing Shadow Dancer under the bus, followed by the hammer. He claims his flip in reading Shadow Dancer was first from Shadow Dancer's willingness to do metagaming and then Shadow Dancer's L-1 of Coach Travis. IIRC, Shadow Dancer received heat for his vote; that was a signal for Shadow Dancer's scum buddy to start bussing.

He received heat from the vote from me and then eventually Coach Travis. I like how you've tried to re-order the actual situation to make it seem like my change in opinion only came about after a momentum shift was happening though.


-~-~-~-~-~-~

@Coach Travis:

I apologize for the wordiness. I really think you should look into each point that Equinox brought up and my responses to each of them for yourself to see just how far from reality Equinox has twisted each situation. If you have any questions, lemme know. I'm off to bed, but I'll try to bring up more points against Equinox/LordChronos tomorrow.

[Incognito]

I spent some time looking through different things that might illuminate this better. It's a series of quotes/posts that tell a revealing story and show make this a much easier decision.

LordChronos' actions

• LordChronos didn't really take a stance on anyone during Day 1 until I asked him to and when he did finally take a stance, he did so by placing an L-2 vote on the leading townie wagon of Earlder1 in this post. He didn't bother to move his vote to anyone else at any point after that; instead he poked around with a few questions here and there but pretty much just reaffirmed his vote on the townie mislynch. Keep in mind that around this time, Alta was receiving some heat and LordChronos largely ignored him. A LordChronos-scum would certainly have a vested interest in trying to maintain the townie mislynch wagon of Earlder while trying not to fan the flames of his buddy's fire.
  
  He actually seems relieved when he sees the replacement:
  

  Sweet!
  
  Hiya Shadow Dancer.

  I can see why now.
  
  
  
• Check out the defense of Shadow Dancer at the bottom of this post. Somewhat subtle since he disguises it in pseudometa-gaming but it's still there, and he does it in response to smashbro's analysis. I'm noting here that Shadow Dancer himself didn't even get a chance to defend himself to this accusation before LC did - why did LC feel the need to step in there so quickly especially when SD didn't even earn a vote from smashbro at that point? Hmmm, it's one of those imponderables.
  
  
  
• I mentioned this post in my previous LC analysis, but I mention it again now because I find it so interesting in retrospect. LC actually uses remouk's mistake as an excuse to attack him rather sharply. He even goes so far as to call him a potential Earlder1 buddy because of it. This is called chainsaw defense in its purest form.

Equinox's actions

(and she accused me of relying on only LC-related stuff rather than stuff on her. ha.)

• Here's Equinox taking a stance on the remouk side of the "spat" but not taking a stance on the SD end of the spectrum:
  

  The remouk vs. Shadow Dancer spat

  : remouk was being genuine. I'm not entirely sure of Shadow Dancer's motivations, but whatever they were, this amount of tunneling won't get us anywhere. It looks like the debate is over, though, so I'm hoping to hear more from Shadow Dancer about everyone else in the game.

  And what's that at the end there? That looks like coaching to me. Such prescience - Equinox is actually affording her scum buddy a way out of what looked to be a potentially dangerous, attention-grabbing spat between her buddy and a townie by asking him to comment on everyone else in the game.
  
  
  
• This links to the infamous "Great Wall of Replacement". If you don't feel like reading through all of it, the key points that I think you should focus on are the following:
  
  - Equinox says some fairly negative things about Shadow Dancer's play but somehow ends up mentioning that she's feeling better about his player slot. I mean, check out this whole bullet point of hers to see what I'm talking about:
  

  So, Shadow Dancer doesn't have an actual stance regarding Incognito, just a vague cloud of paranoia. Okay. Also, the way Shadow Dancer said that first paragraph gives me a bad gut feeling -- probably the way "mislynching an IC" went in there or something. Bleh. Anyway, how did Shadow Dancer miss brianj's posts? Other than that, this post is one of the reasons why I "felt better" about Shadow Dancer's slot.

  In this bullet point, she simultaneously does all of the following:
  
  - She points out that she thought SD's stance on me was wishy-washy and vague.
  - She says the first paragraph of his post gives her a bad gut feeling.
  - She points out that SD missed brianj's posts.
  - But then she concludes that she's feeling better about SD's slot... and she doesn't even explain why it is that post made her feel better about it.
  
  Why would someone who talks about 3 fairly malignant things about another person's play then come around and say she's feeling better about him? Very odd.
  
  
  
• Following the Great Wall of Replacement, Equinox attempts to push the idea of an me/Coach Travis scum team, but she doesn't vote CT right away despite the fact that he was the leading wagon - she votes me instead. My guess is she probably thought it would look scummy of her to place her first vote on the leading wagon of Day 2 (especially since that wagon was beginning to dissipate after I removed my vote from CT), so she nudged it on to someone else who, ironically, she was trying to tie to the leading wagon anyway. It's a very nice, elegant way that she could use to eventually nudge her vote onto the leading wagon itself. Of course that all backfired on her when the tide completely shifted towards her buddy SD, and she was suddenly forced into bussing mode to try and recover at least some kind of a chance to win the game.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

I could probably list some more minor things if needed, but I felt like the above does a pretty nice job of showing why Equinox is undoubtedly scum here.

If you want me to respond to anything else, just let me know. The ball is in your court now though, CT.

[Incognito]

Good game, all. I'm sorry Travis, but I was scum.

Going to sleep now, but I'll have some comments to leave for everyone tomorrow.

[Incognito]

I felt terrible about it especially after your last post, Equinox, since I could tell you were extremely frustrated about the whole situation but let's blame Nikanor for his bad random role generator!

[Incognito]

Now that the game's over, as the IC, I felt like I should clarify a few things. The last time I was a scum IC in a Newbie Game I had noticed that one of the newbies who left my game went on to play others, and he had mentioned in another game that he was unsure if the theories and thoughts I mentioned in that game thread could be trusted since I was scum. I'm sure some of you are probably wondering the same thing, so I figured it would be good if I touched on some theory or other general play stuff that came up in this game.

• Town-hunting

  .
  I still strongly support this. Equinox mentioned that it just ends up narrowing things down to process of elimination, but I think it does so much more than that. If you have a strong amount of confidence that another player aside from yourself is town and you end up being right, not only have you narrowed things down further for yourself with respecting to scum-hunting but you can also use your confidence in that player's alignment to analyze attacks that might be directed towards him or her. The truth is that for any attack that's supported by multiple people against one townie, there's a very strong chance that one of the attackers is scum. If you can look at the reasons for the attack and the play of the attackers, you might be able to further narrow down your pool of suspects and then spot the person who you're thinking stands a strong chance of being scum.
  
  
  
• Unexplained votes

  .
  Again, this is something that I do as town as well, so the stuff I mentioned here about it is stuff I believe in.
  
  
  
• Cop counterclaims

  .
  I do believe Cops should counterclaim in certain situations, and yes, I'd have supported a Cop counterclaim in this situation as well just the way I did here. I'm usually
  against
  Cop counterclaims happening on Day 1's but on Day 2's and beyond, I'm totally for it. The reason why I wouldn't counterclaim as a Cop on Day 1 is because you could potentially gain more information by waiting until the next Day to counterclaim than doing it right away for the following reasons:
  
  
  a)
  You know the claimed "Cop" is lying, so you can go into Night 1 with a better shot of getting a positive investigation result by investigating anyone but the claimed Cop.
  
  b)
  If you die Night 1 then yeah, you won't be able to get that additional information but at least the town will see your flip as Cop and know the Day 1 claimed Cop is lying (at least in Newbie Games. this isn't ALWAYS true in Closed games though).
  
  c)
  If you survive the Night, you can then counterclaim on Day 2 and even if the town doesn't believe you and you end up getting lynched, the town still has a shot to win the game since they had a mislynch to spare anyway. And they could also benefit from your Night 1 investigation on subsequent Days.
  
  
  
• Meta-gaming
  . Still believe it's usually a town-tell but obviously I wouldn't be so quick to write someone off as town because of it. In this game, I really was trying to use it as a subtle way to defend Shadow Dancer.

I can't remember if there were other things that came up; if so, lemme know, and I can share my thoughts about them.

-~-~-~-~

Separate post for other stuff...

[Incognito]

@Inco: When did you realize brian was cop?

I had two trains of thought after I saw how everyone was acting at the start of Day 2:

Either...

- we were dealing with the set-up that didn't have a Cop but a Doctor instead

or

- brianj was the Cop who got a guilty result on you during Night 1

I don't think it was as clear-cut as you're making it seem though. brianj was attacking you during Day 1 just the same way he was attacking you during Day 2, so it was definitely possible that brianj was just a Vanilla or even a Doctor who just strongly believed in his read of you.

To find a Cop, I just usually look for any sudden changes in suspicions after a Night has happened. Nobody else really fit the mold; everyone else's suspicions either didn't change across Night 1 or weren't firmly held enough to be the result of a guilty investigation except for brian's. But again, like I mentioned above, I could have easily seen him as just being a Vanilla who was dead-set on lynching you.

So that part also worked - not perfectly, though... I really should have build a solid case against Inco and have voted him on some point, but I was too lazy... but well enough was well enough.

I think this is where we definitely differ in scum ideas and methodology. Like I mentioned in our QuickTopic, I'm still strongly of the belief that distancing and bussing usually isn't necessary at all. In fact, I think it's oftentimes done so badly that it makes the pairing extremely obvious. I don't think anyone in this game ever REALLY believed I was scum except for DTMaster; everyone else was just showing signs of paranoia but I doubt anyone could have really put together a convincing enough case against me. So sacrificing me would have been kinda dumb, and it would've just made things harder on you.

I mean even though I have a perfect record as scum, I definitely didn't feel confident enough to last in this game on my own, which is why I wanted to protect you so much. But it was difficult to do that at times when you were attacking me so much.

[Incognito]

2. Why did you keep Equi alive instead of Zach? Because you had the case prepared against him and thought LC following you would suffice to win the game?

I never had a case prepared against Zach. Zach was one of my two "town reads"; the other town read was Coach Travis. I had a case prepared against LordChronos/Equinox though, and I was banking on that case along with CT's trust of me to somehow get the Equinox mislynch.

And actually, I added some NK analysis at the start of Day 4 to try and make Equinox more paranoid about CT's alignment just in case CT did some crazy change of opinion on me, but she didn't bite.



Also also, I was actually considering killing Coach Travis as opposed to Zachrulez. I really thought that by killing Zachrulez, Equinox would be skilled enough to know that I was the obvious choice for scum just based on NK analysis, and she'd convince CT to vote me right along with her. I finally just bit the bullet and killed Zach because I was afraid of leaving him around at LyLo too; he seemed more set on me being scum than Equinox. That and I wanted the last newbie in the game to make the final decision; I figured it would be a good experience for him rather than having the end-game with a bunch of ICs.

[Incognito]

P.S. Quicktopic: http://www.quicktopic.com/44/H/Yt2E228evuCZA

[Incognito]

Incognito: Well-played. But don't bring up not reading posts... because the next time I see you do that, you're dead. Scare tactics FTW. :P

Honestly, that was my biggest fuck-up of the game. I wanted to say something completely different to how it ended up being written, and I immediately regretted writing it after I hit the submit button. Everyone who pointed it out was absolutely right though; it was completely scummy and very sloppy of me.

INCOG I WILL GET YOU FOR SHOTTY's BRR MAFIA!!!

lol. But like Nikanor said, you were already dead when I joined. Whyyouwannagetmebacksobad? :P

[Incognito]

I had to be hard on you because you showed no signs of having a cop read on brian and I saw you as brians next investigation target and your safing attempts, along with some other minor slips in your play (however, you where intransparent enaough for town not noticing, also some Stoofer's syndrome, I gues...) could have turned out really bad for you after my death. I was staging my death, and must Admit I kind of enjoyed causing some mayhem in the process, and you seemed not too helpfull in that (also, my timing sucked for the most part due to prolonged periods of absens).

I don't really get what you wanted me to do exactly. I mean, it's not like I could have said in the thread that I thought brianj was a Cop before he claimed - that would've been obvious role-fishing/role-speculating and would have been scummy as hell. What do you suggest I should have done?

[Incognito]

I actually consider you in the same category as her. Skilled scum... and slippery as hell. (Also, I never once referenced your scum record if I recall correctly.)

True. It was mostly the Day 1 attacks that were focusing on my scum record that I was ranting about. It really was a pretty good find by brianj; it kinda threw me off a bit when I saw him mention it on page 1 haha.

[Incognito]

@SD:

Would you have thought my demand for a counterclaim was scummy if you were town here?

@Equinox:

It's here. Basic gist of it is as scum, you try to take the exact opposite opinion of your buddy with respect to your "thoughts" about other people's alignments.

So for example, if you and me were scum in this game, and I said that I thought Coach Travis was scum for blah blah reasons and I voted him, you might go on and comment on the case and disagree with it and say why you thought he was either town or neutral instead. Likewise, if you said you thought Zachrulez was scum for blah blah reasons, I'd take the opposite opinion on that too. In effect, you and your scum buddy would never come to an agreement about a certain townie's alignment and would never be seen on the same wagon together. And if you do it correctly, you could end up dividing the town into "factions" of people who will vote more predictably.

Ectomancer's article talks about how he feels that a lot of townies just end up calling anyone who disagrees with them the scumz; people who agree with you or share your opinion are people you're more likely to look favorably on. This assumes the strategy is done correctly.

If it IS done correctly, you'll find that most towns won't ever be able to come to an agreement on one of the actual scum's alignments, and you could lead the town to a number of mislynches and win a game without a single scum lynch.

[Incognito]

ninja'd.

[Incognito]

I talk too much.

[Incognito]

I see. My logic is the closer and closer you get to LyLo, the less and less likely a Cop claim is going to be believed even if it's legit. If brianj didn't counterclaim and instead let a lynch go through on someone else (say, CoachTravis who was next in line to be lynched), I think the town would have had a hard time believing him if Day 3 rolled around and he decided to counterclaim at that point. Counterclaiming on Day 2 affords a Cop one mislynch to spare (just in case he or she is disbelieved), and allows the town the chance to figure out who the other scum might be based on interactions. A Day 3 counterclaim is basically a his word against the scum's word kind of thing.

I honestly messed up by investigating Shadow Dancer over Incognito first, I think. I might have been able to form good argument against SD independently but for some reason I suffered from chronic laziness whenever I attempted to iso Incog *sigh*. I was pretty sure Incog was guilty when SD halfheartedly started attack on Incognito when the town consensus seem to swing that way. Maybe really should have taken the risk and fake claimed on the Incognito investigation. Either way, good game and excellently played by all.

Yeah, in the QuickTopic I had mentioned that I pretty much expected to get Cop investigated on Night 1 when I noticed that everyone seemed to have a middling read of me. It's usually a pretty good idea to investigate the unreadable person as opposed to the person you have a scum read on (in other words, DTM was pretty spot-on).

I don't think the fake claim on me would have been smart, tbh. If I was town here and you got me lynched, you'd have had a hard time explaining that one away come Day 3, and you'd have probably handed the scum the game. You would have just lucked out since I actually *was* scum here but it's a risky thing to do.



If anyone wants me to offer feedback on their play, I can probably do so. Otherwise, I had fun with this one, and I think this really was a good game to learn from overall.