Open 289 - Hard Boiled - Game over.

[Abelcain]

Hey, everyone. I've been away from MafiaScum for a while, thanks to some tricky problems with my laptop's power cord, so forgive me if I'm a bit rusty.

*gives avatars a look-over*

Vote: Snake

for not telling me the watch was on his prosthetic arm. That information could have stopped me from getting axe-murdered!

[Abelcain]

Hi, everyone. Time for some obligatory opening questions--

What time zone are you in?

RVS or RQS? Why?

What is your experience level with Mafia?

How active can we expect you to be?

I think I'm the same Time Zone as Umbrage and Vodark, which is to say the East Coast of the US (GMT - 5). RVS and RQS are both good, but I usually seem to get more mileage out of RVS in terms of scummy behavior. So far I've completed two Newbie games (got NK'd N1 the first one, then played through the majority of my second) and I was in an Open game a month or so ago, but my laptop's charger fell apart and I had to replace out so that my lack of activity wouldn't hurt the game. I have a new charger now, so hopefully that won't be the case this time around. I can usually post pretty often on weekdays, but I work Saturday nights and Sunday mornings so most of my posts on the weekends tend to be a little shorter than normal.

[Abelcain]

He's the devil... when he realizes he's actually in this game, by page ten, four pages of the posts will be his.

So you're saying that Ythan posts a lot, so you want him gone? Sounds like you're scum trying to prevent the flow of information in the game.

And what's this?

vote conspiracy

So you want us to policy lynch Ythan and then you're trying to subliminally tell to us to get rid of ConSpiracy too?

Unvote

Vote: Krazy

[Abelcain]

Abelcain:

and then you're trying to subliminally tell to us to get rid of ConSpiracy too?

I can't tell if this is serious or not. Ordinarily, I'd say no, but the tone of the rest of your post seems serious, so I can't tell if your vote is serious or not. Please clarify.

That last line was completely a joke, and the vote's only semi-serious. I was actually trying to get a reaction out of Krazy, and I figured it'd be easier to get a reaction if I also said something completely outrageous and made it sound serious. (This is also why I didn't post last night, because I didn't want to give it away so soon.) Isn't the point of RVS to get a reaction out of people anyway?

However, it's pretty clear that Krazy not only ignored my post

but

he still hasn't even given us a real reason for his PL against Ythan. And before anyone tries to tell me that he wasn't serious about a policy lynch, so far talking about the PL is the

only thing

Krazy's actually contributed to any sort of discussion in this game, aside from his short RQS answers in his first post.

Secondly, I already said why it struck me as kind of scummy, it was really out of the blue, I have no idea why he would ask me that unless he knew that I wouldn't give a straight answer and he wanted to make me look bad.

Could you explain this part? Why wouldn't you give a straight answer to ConSpiracy's question? And why would he "know" that you wouldn't give a straight answer?

[Abelcain]

I didn't answer the question because I don't like giving out opinions based on RVS stuff. I think ConSpiracy saw the above, and that's why he questioned me. Why else would he single me out?

That doesn't mean that you can't give a straight answer. Hell, your post (#19) where you told him you don't like forming RVS opinions was enough of an answer. Nobody accused you of avoiding the question when you said that. The only person who thinks you didn't give a straight answer is

you

. So instead of it looking like ConSpiracy was setting a trap, it looks like you're doubting your own posts and pretending to see scummy behavior where there is none.

You mean the quotes that explain that I did what I did to get us out of RVS.

You seem desperate to stop RVS and get a wagon started.

Contradictory much? Those two sentences were in the

same post

. You admit to actively trying to get us out of RVS then accuse someone else of being "desperate" to get out?

@everyone: Stuff is happening. Any thoughts?

Stuff is indeed happening.

[Abelcain]

I didn't answer the question because I don't like giving out opinions based on RVS stuff. I think ConSpiracy saw the above, and that's why he questioned me. Why else would he single me out?

Because you had two votes and nobody made the slightest attempt to get us out of the RVS. I thought I could do it, so bandwagon went up.

OK, that makes sense.

UNVOTE: ConSpiracy

VOTE: Snake Eyes

There's a difference between moving out of RVS and trying to start a premature bandwagon.

So ConSpiracy's attempt to bandwagon made sense, but Snake's attempt was "premature?" Even though Snake's bandwagon attempt came

after

ConSpiracy's?

Why are you drawing an arbitrary line between what I'm doing and what you're doing? Is it because you want it to be scummy when I do it, and not when you do it?

Same thing could be said about you. I've done more to get us out of RVS, something you clearly agree with as you're trying to do the same thing, and yet I'm scummy.

I genuinely think it's scummy that you're paranoid of ulterior motives when someone asks you a fairly innocuous question, yes.

His #26 set off my scumdar, saying that he had a serious vote on Conspiracy, and then pointing out something unrelated in another player that wasn't even a scumtell.

However, it's his reaction to my attack that really makes me think he's scum.

I'm pretty sure Snake's given more reasons than just "Umbrage tried to get out of RVS." Which seems to be the only argument you've made against Snake so far.

If you think a bandwagon is the best way to get out of RVS, then why not vote ConSpiracy with me? Even if you think he's town, it doesn't matter. It's just a wagon, and it gets us out of RVS.

If a bandwagon is the best way to get out of RVS, then why not vote someone who had two votes as opposed to someone with three? Even if he's got one less vote, it doesn't matter. It's just a wagon, and it gets us out of RVS.

Unless it's a wagon on Umbrage, in which case it's a scumtell.

[Abelcain]

CS said he was trying to get reactions, he could gain as town from the wagon. I don't see how a town Snake could benefit from wagoning me.

Really? What, exactly, could ConSpiracy gain that Snake couldn't?

Oh I see, sarcasm. Haha. Sadly, it falls flat because I did not have a wagon on me, I had a collection of random votes. A bandwagon needs people pushing it. I was pushing CS. If Snake really wanted a bandwagon that would get us out of RVS, he could've pushed with me.

Okay, let's analyze these wagons, as of the vote count at the top of page two, which was the votings situation before Snake voted for you:

Umbrage - 2 (iamausername, ConSpiracy)
ConSpiracy - 3 (Vordark, DarthYoshi, Umbrage)

VOTE: Umbrage

Nobody hates Harry Potter. Lynch all liars.

Clearly part of RVS.

UNVOTE: Xtoxm
VOTE: Umbrage
So Umbrage, thoughts on people?

ConSpiracy has already said he was pushing a wagon with this vote. You've already acknowledged that it made sense that this was a wagon push, so it's not a "random vote."

Vote: ConSpiracy

for being 1st.

Again, clearly RVS.

@ConSpiracy: Voting a player who already has two RVS votes on them, but without giving a reason for the vote (RVS or otherwise)? Sketch.

Unvote. Vote: ConSpiracy.

A legitimate vote, but not in any way considered to be "pushing a wagon."

VOTE: ConSpiracy

You singled me out for a reason, but why would you ask for my thoughts when I said I find RVS meaningless?

And this was you, and you've later admitted you were pushing a wagon as well.

To clarify my comment on the Darth vote, Darth was literally only the second vote on ConSpiracy, and with seven to lynch (especially with the first vote on ConSpiracy being RVS) there's no way Darth's one serious vote was trying to push a wagon just to leave RVS.

So... why exactly is the wagon you were pushing on ConSpiracy to get out of RVS more legitimate than the wagon ConSpiracy was pushing on you?

But no, he seemed to think CS was town, after only a few posts. Why? He didn't know why CS asked that question to me. He could've found out why by pushing with me. But he didn't.

I genuinely think it's scummy that you're paranoid of ulterior motives when someone asks you a fairly innocuous question, yes.

Innocuous means harmless. Snake clearly didn't think that there was any sort of problem with the question ConSpiracy asked you. Why would he push to find out the reasoning behind it? I admit, even I thought it looked like ConSpiracy was just trying to spark conversation. You're the one making a huge deal about his reasoning.

[Abelcain]

36 - From Abelcain. I like most of this post. I don't like the reasoning of "saying something outrageous and making it sound serious" in order to "get a reaction". That seems like an easy way to backpedal on something you've been called on.

...

neutral on Abelcain given the "act scummy" tactic use.

You do realize you're thinking that I'm backpedaling about my attack on someone's

signature

right? I admit, I was hoping to see Krazy get nervous because his signature happened to contain the name of someone in this game completely by accident and it looked like I was taking it seriously. But at least in my next post I admitted that my comment was just a ploy and not in any way serious, unlike someone who assured us that he was really serious and told us much later that he was setting himself up as bait.

Really? What, exactly, could ConSpiracy gain that Snake couldn't?

Well, apparently now Snake wasn't trying to get reactions anyway. Apparently, he found me scummy because of... well, I haven't quite figured that part out yet.

It's nice that one of Snake's later posts gave you a way to avoid my question, but that still doesn't explain what you thought CS had to gain that Snake didn't when you originally posted that.

CS had two serious votes on him. Even if Snake didn't want to push on him, he hasn't even acknowledged the possibility that CS could be scum. He's too sure of himself.

CS's serious votes at that point consisted of the obligatory "Xth vote on anyone in RVS is scummy" vote and your seemingly-OMGUS vote. CS's vote on you was a deliberate third vote. Which one seems like it's more serious?

You just made my point for me, Snake never thought there was something up with the question. As it turns out, there was something up with it, CS didn't want my POV on things, he wanted reactions and a bandwagon. So there WAS an ulterior motive! But Snake never even considered that.

Nobody else thought there was anything up with the question either. The post was a bandwagon, not a setup. He got the reactions and wagon solely with his vote; the question had nothing to do with it. You're the one searching for a reason to say someone's trying to make you look scummy with an impossible question.

OH I'M SORRY FOR SCUMHUNTING WHILE YOU'VE BEEN PICKING YOUR NOSE. You clearly don't understand what you are talking about, because the very nature of the gambit I pulled means that I will have to attack the people who attack me. It is only OMGUS if you do not provide reasoning for your votes. I've provided reasoning every step of the way. The only reasoning you've provided is that I'm 'silly'.

Funny that you happened to pull a gambit that makes every single one of your posts look like OMGUS. Especially since your "reasoning" seems to be... well, you like falsely quoting people, right?

See guys, I came up with this awesome gambit where I get people to attack me, and then, get this, I attack them back! It's totally not OMGUS because it's part of my gambit though.

NO!!!!!!! WRONG!!!!!!!!!!! SNAKE EYES SAID THAT HE FOUND ME SCUMMY!!!!!!!!! I HAVE PROVEN IT WAS NOT A GET-OUT-OF-RVS BANDWAGON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN FUCKING READING THE FUCKING THREAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why would anyone

ever

do something like this in a game of Mafia? If you were frustrated in reality you might be having trouble controlling the volume of your voice, but projecting that into a typed format is pretty classless. And the profanity was totally unwarranted.

That being said, you've "proven" absolutely nothing. All you've gotten Snake to say is that he found you more scummy than ConSpiracy - specifically, that he had no scumreads on CS while you were acting pretty scummy. It's also nice to say that your "serious vote" on CS wasn't really serious and you just said it to lay bait for a trap, but that would mean you saying that your vote was serious was also a lie. "Lynch All Liars" is a popular policy for a reason.

I retracted the policy lynch days ago, Umbrage, and pressuring a lurker to participate is not at all out-of-hand. The preponderance of lurkers does not give one more sway than the others, and in fact a lurker who comes in to post only to say they are going to say something only to then not say anything is actually more scummy to me than a pure lurker.

I think it's hilarious that Krazy's argument is basically "I'm not focusing on Ythan anymore. Instead I'm going to focus on someone with a name that starts with a Y and ends with than."

@Krazy, can you give us any reads or information you have to contribute on anyone

other than

Ythan?

[Abelcain]

Geez, there's really been fifty posts since my last post, which was only 15-16 hours ago? Okay then.

When I last posted, Umbrage had told Krazy to stop talking about Ythan. Krazy said he was going to, but then kept going on about Ythan. I made fun of him and asked him to post about literally anyone

other than

Ythan. Let's see how his post turned out:

But, Abel, why are you asking ME this, and not Ythan, who REALLY has engaged no one else except to dismiss my case against him? Not saying you shouldn't ask me, but why one and not the other?

Damn it. All he had to do was go a whole post without attacking Ythan. One post, immediately after getting yelled at and being made fun of, and he still couldn't do it.

Why do you pop in only when I address other players, Ythan? Who is the one tunneling here? You QQ about me tunneling you then only respond when I start to address other players.

Insert proverb about hypocrisy here.

I see I am not the only person to have this reaction to just about every one of your posts.

lolumad?

Troll.

It's obvious from his actions Snake wasn't interested in reactions. If he was, he would've pointed out the bad reactions, and attacked other people.

From where I'm sitting your reactions were quite bad. And they continue to be. Why are you so worried, anyway? You're the one who keeps saying page two scumreads don't mean much.

Oh, except the reads on you have persisted until page six now haven't they?

Fine, it's obvious I can't change your mind on this, but you have to see where I'm coming from. CS' vote on me was not accompanied by any reasoning, or even saying that I'm scum. There is NOTHING there that suggests it's a serious vote. Whereas my case on CS was a true attack.

There was nothing suggesting CS's vote on you

wasn't

a serious vote either. You're the one who's still telling us that you voted seriously on CS because he voted for you, but it wasn't really a serious vote because it was just bait.

And what is with this whole 'nobody else thought it was scummy' crap? I don't give a shit what the majority thinks, if something strikes me as scummy, I point it out. Only scum try to avoid posting opinions that aren't popular.

If the majority didn't think it was scummy, then why are you singling out Snake for not trying to figure out the reasoning behind the question? I didn't try to find any reason for it. Neither did Krazy. Nor iamausername. So why focus on Snake on this point?

YES THAT WAS MY FUCKING MASTER PLAN I NEEDED AN EXCUSE TO OMGUS PEOPLE SO I CREATED THIS GAMBIT BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW HOW WELL OMGUS WORKS AND IT IS SUCH A GOOD THING TO DO AS SCUM.

I don't even need to make up quotes for you, you write good ones on your own!

Why would I not only WANT to OMGUS, but actually create a plan to provide an excuse to do it?

Hit the nail on the head there, you did. Nobody said you planned to OMGUS. I implied you were OMGUSing and pretended that there was a gambit to cover yourself. I refuse to believe you didn't realize that when I said it.



I like Krazy's last couple of posts, if only because they've been relatively Ythan-free. Hope he continues like this.

[Abelcain]

Worried? I'm far from worried. And guess what? Page 2 scumreads are the best we have at this point. I'm not pissing around for 20-something pages. I'm finding scum.

Oh, except the reads on you have persisted until page six now haven't they?

Uh, what? Do you mean the reads I have on others?

I have to apologize for this, actually, I did read your words wrong. You kept saying that page 1 reads were essentially worthless and unlikely to persist throughout the game. Later on you mentioned that you thought Snake Eyes was scummy for a page 2 read, but you didn't say they were useless necessarily. I just jumbled the quotes together in my mind. By "worried" I was referring to how a number of people who said they thought you were scum on page 2 still think you're scum, even though you said that early game reads don't persist.

Because you didn't care either way. You weren't concerned, it had nothing to do with you. Snake Eyes though, DEFENDED ConSpiracy. With no solid reasoning as to why he's town. He jumped straight into the middle of our debate.

I still don't see him defending CS anywhere, though. I only see him attacking you for your reaction to the question. Are you saying that he wouldn't have said the same things if someone else had asked the question?

And you accused me of paranoia? I want you to take a good, long look at this quote. What you are saying is that every single one of my posts, every argument I've made thus far is totally made up of thin air. Do you really think that's the case? Well then, I think I'll decide that ConSpiracy's vote on me wasn't a test at all! He's likely just 'pretended' there was a reaction test to cover himself! Wait a minute, maybe you're only PRETENDING to find me scummy! Maybe you actually think I'm town! Maybe Ythan and Krazy are best buddies! Maybe Elvis is still alive!!

So you're acknowledging that you change your mind about everything in this game to suit your voting pattern? Because that's the same thing as rationalizing OMGUS.

Maybe I'm just playing this game like everybody else.

I haven't seen anyone else typing in all caps when they get annoyed at something in this game. So I doubt this is the case at all.

Are you actually accusing Umbrage of having that be his "master plan," or are you just being sarcastic here? Straight answer please.

I wasn't being serious. I was merely making a reference to Umbrage writing fake quotes (and myself faking one of his quotes) and I showed that I can just literally quote his posts out of context and achieve the same effect.

And what do you think of Ythan's posts?

No joke.

I'll do you one better; I'll tell you what I think about Ythan in general. Your references to another topic piqued my curiosity after all, and after comparing notes between this game and the first few pages of that one gave me a decent picture.

Ythan is incredibly smug. He feels the need to be superior to others in any given situation. I can't give details because the other game is ongoing, but there was an argument Ythan was in early on which was very similar to this one. I don't believe that Ythan alone is responsible for the series of disruptive posting. Whether or not Ythan sparked the situation, he still spent his time in an attempt to assert his dominance. If either one of you had simply ignored the other, we wouldn't have had the thirty-post argument.

Krazy, you deserve as much blame as Ythan does. You told us that Ythan would post often, but didn't explain the context of him posting often. Then you let yourself fall into the same situation. You could have left him alone rather than constantly attacking him. You two only filled the space because neither one of you would give up on an admittedly boring argument.

Maybe it's just because I used to deal with people like that all the time when I was in high school, but it seems pretty clear-cut to me that Ythan just draws people into arguments to make himself look better. That doesn't make him scum, but it can definitely rub a lot of people the wrong way.

[Abelcain]

@Ythan: I didn't say Krazy was in the right at any point there. But at any time during page four your could've stopped responding to him. It was pretty clear nobody was taking him seriously at that point, especially on the policy lynch and after his subsequent reason-switching. But when he spent his posts bitching at you, you made the decision to bitch right back.

[Abelcain]

I believe the term is 'chainsaw defence'. When Snake Eyes attacked me, he did so under the assumption that CS is town, an assumption I see no basis for, and for which he has provided none. I don't know if he's protecting CS or just trying to make him an ally against me, but I don't like it.

From Tarhalindur Standard Tells:

After further analysis, Tarhalindur has determined that the Chainsaw Defense is only trustworthy once the player defended has been revealed to be group scum (once the player defended is proved to be Mafia, any player that used Chainsaw Defense on the dead scum should be scrutinized). Otherwise, it is a null tell.

Chainsaw is null unless you can prove that CS is scum (or if you can show that both CS and Snake are defending each other). I'm not saying that there isn't any chainsaw going on, but it's difficult to prove that he's attacking you to defend CS rather than just attacking you for scummy behavior.

I'm not sure what to what you are referring. The only time I changed my mind, as I recall, is when I dropped my case on CS. But that was a case made on page 1, and it died out. My case on Snake Eyes however, keeps getting stronger.

Well, you couldn't decide on whether or not you voted for CS for a serious reason or if you voted for him just to bait people into defending him. You also can't decide on why you think CS asked you the question (if he had a make-you-look-bad motive, you wouldn't have dropped your case on him so easily). Still, it seems you flip-flopped a lot less than my memory has led me to believe, or else I'm just not noticing it in your ISO.

Although now that I'm looking through your ISO your case against Snake is starting to make more sense than it did the first time around. I'll read it tomorrow when I'm less tired and can retain more information.

I think if you don't respond to Ythan's insults, he will stop insulting you.

We tried, right? I'm pretty sure I told them both to ignore each other too. I don't think they both need to be replaced though. If one gets taken out of the game the other will probably shut up about it.



I'm taking a page from Krazy's playbook (incidentally it's the only page that doesn't have "DIE YTHAN" scrawled across it in crayon) and looking at the less-active players in our game. iamausername is only a few hours away from a prod, Quaroath went to a basketball game last night and never came back after telling us he would, and xtoxm has so far lived up to his promise of one post every few days. TBL's active lurking bothers me too, especially when he asks Krazy why he doesn't have anything to say about the irony of his one post. TBL seems pretty fixated on this, too.

@TBL: How do you feel about Umbrage/Snake/CS/me?

[Abelcain]

@iamausername: You need to post

reasons

and have more to contribute than just direct answers to questions posed to you. Get in the game.

prod avoidance, just finished a 44 hours work weekend fri-sun, will catch up/post when conscious in morning.

Quaroath's last two posts have been placed only to avoid getting prodded and have contained no content. I think he needs some encouragement.

Unvote

Vote: Quaroath

I know how scummy Snake Eyes is, I want to know how scummy TBL is.

This sounds like you've already decided that TBL is scum with so little content from him.

But that's what you claim you DID do! You joined a bandwagon on someone you didn't have a scumread on, or so you say. So why would you say that?

Having a scumread =/= necessarily thinking you're scummy. If someone did something really scummy once, but otherwise you felt like they were town, you'd have a scum read on them for the scummy thing but you'd still have town read overall.

AND DON'T USE THAT FUCKING RIVERTOWN GAME AS META, THE PLAYERS THERE WERE SMOKING SHIT AND I WAS THE ONLY RATIONAL HUMAN BEING IN THE GAME.

It's nice to know that you get like this just about any time people don't give as much weight to your arguments as you think they deserve.



Another post later tonight or tomorrow, I have class now and the professor checks to make sure we're doing our work on our computers.

[Abelcain]

prod avoidance, just finished a 44 hours work weekend fri-sun, will catch up/post when conscious in morning.

Quaroath's last two posts have been placed only to avoid getting prodded and have contained no content. I think he needs some encouragement.

Unvote

Vote: Quaroath

I stopped at #195 for this.

Fair. And deserved. The (what felt like) 5 page explosion while I was at work sunday made it a slog and I put it off.

It's fine. You got some material posted, so I'm happy.

Unvote

Except it does mean that. That's what it means.

I must be working with a different definition than you are, then, because I'm pretty sure a scumread is when you "read" an action someone's taken as a "scum" action. Hence scumread. If I'm wrong, then what is what I'm talking about called?



iamausername is bothering me with his inability to post more than a few sentences in each post. I understand he doesn't like it when there's long posts, but the game of Mafia as played on this site is pretty much centered on big posts.

Just out of interest, Vordark, why are you voting Umbrage over Yoshi again? Do try to keep your answer as brief as you can, if you don't mind.

cuz

As such, I approve of this post.

CS, at that point, had not shown why his question was from a pro-town perspective, whereas I had argued why it was from an anti-town perspective. So why would he hold that CS was town and I was scum at that point?

So? If I argued that you asking the mod to replace Krazy and Ythan was because you were afraid that they would be able to out you as scum, does that mean that everyone should automatically assume that you're scum until you post to refute it? By your logic, if anyone other than you was to refute that post, I'd be able to declare that they were defending you because you hadn't shown why asking to get them replaced was from a pro-town perspective.

I would like to hear other people's thoughts on DarthYoshi, Quaroath and iamausername.

I've already said that I don't think iamausername should be playing around here if he's not willing to read the long posts. I was a little annoyed at Quaroath but his last few posts have convinced me he's at least making an effort to get in the game; as long as he keeps posting regularly, I don't forsee any problems with him (unless he's scum, naturally). I've seen your case on Darth, and I do agree with some parts of it but I'd rather ISO him myself to see what I come across.

Actually, that last part doesn't sound that bad. Starting tomorrow I'll get to my own ISOs of everyone in this game so I can reassess what's going on.

[Abelcain]

Alright, first alphabetically (aside from myself) in this game is CS, so I'll start there.

He's only got nine posts in his ISO, and he really doesn't say a whole lot. I know Umbrage made a gigantic deal out of his question being scummy, but other than that there hasn't really been a whole lot from his camp. I feel like he's really neutral via lurking, but I guess if he gives us a post like he promised tomorrow I'll have to revise my thoughts on him. There isn't really a whole lot in his posts to pick apart that Umbrage hasn't already gone over.



Next up is Darth, whose posting record promises more to work with than CS.

Snake Eyes defends Conspiracy:

I don't understand why you would immediately assume ConSpiracy had some ulterior motives, as asking questions in early game can only help move the game forward.

Snake Eyes sez:

Not so much defending Conspiracy.

Um, right.

I know someone mentioned this earlier, but just saying that Snake was defending ConSpiracy with that post doesn't make it true. This gives me a slight scumread, but it's only a very slight one. To me, it reads more like confirmation bias; Darth has already taken the position that Snake was defending CS, so anything that circumstantially confirms that position is definitively confirming that position to him. Again, only very slightly scummy, I'd be lying if I said I'd never done anything like that myself.

The first part is DY's case that SE is defending CS. Two quotes and an "Um, right". Again, not a defense.

You say it isn’t without explaining why. I say it is without explaining why (although I feel like a sentence that attempts to attribute town motive to a person kinda constitutes defending them…odd, I know). Looks like we’re tied.

Part 2 of the above quote. Again, I don't see Snake saying that CS had a town motive. All I see is him saying that his motive wasn't necessarily scummy. The possibility that the question wasn't scummy isn't the same thing as guaranteeing the question wasn't scummy.

Yeah, there totally is not any scum motivation in insinuating relationships between players. Totally not a way to tee up future (mis)lynches.

You mean the way you and Umbrage have been insinuating (or outright declaring) a relationship between Snake and CS?

I personally think that hypothesizing about relationships so early in the game needs to be taken with a few grains of salt.

Associative tells only become tells usually when flips have occurred.

Meta me, and you’ll see I hold to this belief as town.

His #26 set off my scumdar, saying that he had a serious vote on Conspiracy, and then pointing out something unrelated in another player that wasn't even a scumtell. I wanted him to set the record straight on xtoxm, since him pointing xtoxm out as odd was so out of the blue. There's definitely an unnatural player relation there, and

should Umbrage flip scum, I'd start looking for his scumbuddies in xtoxm.

I also wanted to pressure him on Conspiracy to see if he still found him scummy after some pressure and also to get him to clarify why he found Conspiracy scummy.

Emphasis mine.

I never implied the existence of a scumpair.

Neither did Snake. He said there was an unnatural player relation, not that they were definitely a scumpair. Stop drawing an arbitrary line between what Snake said about Umbrage/xtoxm and what you're saying about Snake/CS. You're implying that there's an unnatural relation between Snake and CS too.

Summary for tl:dr folks: Vordark believes that I am defending myself primarily through misrepresentation and personal attacks. I do not believe that to be the case, and that we have different definitions of what it means to defend someone or to tunnel, while his timeline on my Krazy scumhunting isn't fully accurate. I also clarify that my philosophy regarding associative tells for determining scumpairs while scumhunting as bad play before flips. I do not believe associative tells are unreliable per se, though this seems to be what Vordark suspects I think.

I think it's fantastic that you explain your side of the case in a patient, thoughtful way while making Vordark sound like he's unreasonable in his side of the argument. Normally this wouldn't bother me, but given the amount of TL;DR that's been thrown around in this topic I'm actually somewhat worried that people are going to take this seriously and not bother reading your posts.

Teeing up mislynches has nothing to do with the fallacy of the excluded middle. It is scum misrepping a connection with a player in order to get that player mislynched. It's manipulation, not a fallacy.

So... are you

admitting

that you're scum using a manipulation and not a fallacy? Vordark said

you

were committing the fallacy by saying that people had to believe that the question was scummy or not scummy, and that Snake must think it wasn't scummy because there was a

possibility

, not a

certainty

, that it was town. You're right that teeing up mislynches via connection has nothing to do with the fallacy, but Vordark never said that either. Way to misrepresent what he said though by trying to attribute the fallacy to Snake, though.

Hunting for scumpairs before there have been any flips is junk science.

And I note your lack of a comment regarding the first sentence. I'm not saying its impossible, I'm saying that

I don't think its effective compared to

other scumhunting tactics until there have been flips. If you need help reminding yourself of associations, make a comment in notes that you keep? Once flips occur, associative tells become far more valuable, and can actually act as scumtells on their own. This is what I have been saying all along.

So is it completely junk? Or is it just less effective? Because you're definitely not showing the same conviction that you were earlier.

Like I said above, my point all along is that searching for associative tells to determine scumpairs is ineffective play on D1. So, yeah, I'm going to be skeptical of "If so-and-so flips X, this-and-that will too" statements. For the purposes of scumhunting, searching for associative tells usually involves looking for a scumpair by definition.

That doesn't mean that you can't note associative tells. What's the difference if someone writes down the connection they see in their personal notes or if he posts it in the thread? If anything, I think it's better to post it in the thread, because that way it's been left behind if you happen to get NK'd night one.



Well, that's two ISOs down. I'm leaning Darthscum, but I really want to go through all my ISOs before I commit to that. I might see something in Vordark's ISO that paints everything Darth's saying in a whole new light.

[Abelcain]

@Darth, if you find any of my "present tense" loaded against you, it's only because I was reading your ISO and responding to it as it came up.

Firstly, lets start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. (Points for whoever can work out what the reference is from).

Pretty sure it's from The Sound of Music, but I couldn't tell you which song it's from.

Abelcain: Although now that I'm looking through your ISO your case against Snake is starting to make more sense than it did the first time around. I'll read it tomorrow when I'm less tired and can retain more information.

@ Abelcain: I've yet to see this, in which case do you mind looking into it today?

Of course, once I'm done catching up with your post here.

Abelcain: Having a scumread =/= necessarily thinking you're scummy. If someone did something really scummy once, but otherwise you felt like they were town, you'd have a scum read on them for the scummy thing but you'd still have town read overall.

No offence but this would be the stupidest post I've read in the entire thread, having a scum-read implies that you think they're mafia, whereas reading someone’s actions as scummy doesn't have to mean you think they're mafia. Either you've made a severe typo or don't understand that there's such thing as a scummy-town whereas there's no thing as a mafia-town.

No, I think we established that I was just operating under the wrong definition of "scumread." I understood a read as applying to any individual action as perceived by someone else. For example, Umbrage has gotten scumreads on Snake from not asking about CS's question earlier on, but other people might not have received that same scumread. I'm starting to realize that reads actually refer to the overall feelings (what I would have referred to as "overall" reads, like the culmination of reads).



As per request, today I'll be doing my ISO of Umbrage. In addition to just ISOing him, however, I'll also be paying special attention to his case against Snake. Since this is an ISO, I'll already mark a disclaimer that my responses will be in the present tense even if Umbrage has given up on those points. I'm also going to try to avoid commenting on the parts of his posts that I've already responded to in earlier posts.

OK, so my vote on ConSpiracy is about as serious as you can get for page 1 reads. Xtoxm stands out as odd to me, he didn't random vote, he didn't really say hello or anything, he just answered the questions. I'm not saying it's scum or town, it just looks odd.

I know the xtoxm part of this post has been beaten to death already, so I'll let it slide since there's nothing new to be gained today by dredging that up. Still, this is the post where he confirmed that his vote on ConSpiracy was serious - for a page 1 read.

OK, that makes sense.

UNVOTE: ConSpiracy

VOTE: Snake Eyes

This came right after CS explained his reasoning behind asking the question. I still think Umbrage let up a little too easily in this post, especially compared to how he acts arguing with the reasoning of other people later on.

When I voted ConSpiracy, I made sure to let everyone know it was a serious vote. I was setting myself up as bait, and you bit.

I've already gone over the rest of the post this quote comes from, but I just wanted to see if I could clarify something here. In the first Umbrage quote in this post, he said that his overall read on ConSpiracy was as serious as a page one read could be, implying that page one reads are never really serious (compared to reads formed later on in the game). I can understand that, especially since here he claims that the vote on CS was just bait.

@Umbrage, for clarity's sake, was the vote on ConSpiracy a serious vote? Was it purely bait? Or was it some combination of the two?

ConSpiracy has already said he was pushing a wagon with this vote. You've already acknowledged that it made sense that this was a wagon push, so it's not a "random vote."

Yes, but that wasn't clear at the time. CS only revealed it was a test later on.

This was in response to Umbrage's claim that Snake's wagon wasn't legitimate because it was a collection of random votes. I pointed out that one of the votes on Umbrage was legitimate before Snake jumped on, and he retorts with the fact that CS didn't reveal that until later. I'm just noticing this on this readthrough, but the same argument could be made against ConSpiracy's wagon on Umbrage; the only two votes on Umbrage at the beginning before CS tried wagoning were RVS votes.

@Umbrage, why did you forgive CS for his wagon so easily yet continue to attack Snake for the same thing when the first wagon was arguably being pushed even less than the second one was?

You just made my point for me, Snake never thought there was something up with the question. As it turns out, there was something up with it, CS didn't want my POV on things, he wanted reactions and a bandwagon. So there WAS an ulterior motive! But Snake never even considered that.

This also confused me. I said I didn't think there was anything weird with CS's question either when you responded to this, so why did he only blame Snake for not thinking the question was suspicious?

The rest of this post is where Umbrage degenerated to capsrage and swearing, but I do want to point out that seeing Snake say he had a scumread (now knowing the correct definition of scumread) does set off an alarm in my head, though no more of an alarm than Umbrage not being able to decide if his vote on CS was serious or bait. Still, I want to get his input on that.

His next couple of posts fake-quote Vordark and then complain about the Krazy/Ythan thing. Both read pretty neutral to me, since I can't imagine town OR scum benefitting from the fake-quote and I'm sure everyone was thinking the same thing about Krazy and Ythan.

Most of the next post was directly to me and I responded in kind, but this last bit caught my eye:

If you voted for me to get reactions, why didn't you initially get that I did the same with my vote for you? And why did you unvote that easily when I told the reason for my vote? It just doesn't really add up.

I unvoted because I believed you. I had no reason to disbelieve you. I suppose I should've picked up on your attempt to get reactions, but somehow I didn't think of that.

I would think that asking Umbrage a question that Umbrage felt was a set-up to make him look bad would have been a reason to disbelieve ConSpiracy.

If the majority didn't think it was scummy, then why are you singling out Snake for not trying to figure out the reasoning behind the question? I didn't try to find any reason for it. Neither did Krazy. Nor iamausername. So why focus on Snake on this point?

Because you didn't care either way. You weren't concerned, it had nothing to do with you. Snake Eyes though, DEFENDED ConSpiracy. With no solid reasoning as to why he's town. He jumped straight into the middle of our debate.

I've glanced back at the beginning of page two and I'm not sure that the way Snake brought up the question was necessarily

scummy

, you're definitely right that he brought it up its scum-value when he had nothing to do with it.

Well, you couldn't decide on whether or not you voted for CS for a serious reason or if you voted for him just to bait people into defending him. You also can't decide on why you think CS asked you the question (if he had a make-you-look-bad motive, you wouldn't have dropped your case on him so easily). Still, it seems you flip-flopped a lot less than my memory has led me to believe, or else I'm just not noticing it in your ISO.

I already answered that. I didn't know why CS was asking me to give reads. I had three choices.

1: Say I didn't have any good reads, and look stupid, maybe even scummy.
2: Make up some weak page one reads and end up eating my words later in the game, looking scummy.
3: Call CS out as scum, get us out of RVS, and maybe catch some scum along the way.

I still think I made the right call.

This I don't really get either. He says that his case on CS (that he made on page 1) died out, but having bad page one reads would make him look scummy. Wouldn't the now-dead case be considered the same thing?

Thinking back, it does seem like a strange thing to do, but once I thought of it, I was blinded by my own cleverness and had to do it, if that makes sense. I just couldn't resist.

Much like Darth's confirmation bias, I have to admit that I know the feeling here.

Overall, I get the feeling that Umbrage isn't really scummy, but he's not incredibly town either. Slight town read on him. Everything past that last quote seems to be him mainly repeating the same arguments for people who haven't read them or didn't understand them, so I don't think I really need to get into any more detail on that. Going through his ISO has definitely made me a little more suspicious of Snake, but only a little more. I'll have to reserve my judgment until I really get onto the Snake ISO.

I have to agree with everyone that some of the less-active people really need to get into the game.

Preview Edit: You have GOT to be kidding me. Okay, next I'm going to respond to the last eight posts that were made when I started this thing.

[Abelcain]

Wow, okay, talking setup theory. I'm going to postpone my ISO reads for a while so I can get into this. I'm not fantastic at running the numbers in a situation like this, but here's some things to think about:

If we try using the hider to identify someone's alignment: If he chooses to hide behind Mafia, he will die and he won't be able to tell us who he hid behind. Assuming the mafia kill "a power role" in the first night, they might very well choose to kill the hider tracker so we end up with a dead hider and a dead HT so nobody knows who he hid behind. So to avoid that scenario, the hider has to announce who he plans to hide behind during the night. This not only makes the HT essentially useless, but if the hider hides behind a townie the Mafia can just kill the townie and take out the hider as well, which gives the Mafia an extra free town kill. Both of these scenarios are undesirable to the point that the hider should just about not hide, which renders both the hider and the HT useless as power roles.

If the Det/Psy is a Psychologist: Is this really a useful role? If the vig and the mafia both kill on night one, then the Psychologist should get a "cannot kill" result for everyone in the game, right?

In which case the scum will have to claim detective or psychologist. Hider-tracker and hider are cross-confirming, vigilante would just shoot his CC, and tracker would be confirmable.

I'm not exactly sure how hider and HT are cross-confirming, since both would have to survive to the next day to be sure. Assumedly, if there are two hider claims, each one will "hide" during the night. At daybreak, they will both announce who they hid behind and the HT will confirm who he tracked, but there's nothing stopping the Mafia from NKing the HT and thereby leaving the hiders unconfirmed as to which is which.

If it's the HT which is doubled, then the hider would have to hide behind the Det/Psy or Tracker in order to guarantee his survival (as in, not hiding behind Mafia) and if the Tracker/Vig chooses Vig, that means the hider MUST hide behind the Det/Psy. If the Mafia then shoots the Det/Psy at night, the Hider dies too AND the HTs are left unconfirmed. If the hider doesn't hide behind the Det/Psy, he risks getting killed anyway by hiding behind Mafia, which frees up the fake HT to name one of the townies as the Mafia he hid behind.



@iamausername: I know it's WIFOM, but it's possible that Regfan

doesn't

really believe that this is a breaking strategy and is only proposing it because he thinks it gives him a good shot at winning as scum.

[Abelcain]

Hey guys, I'm back. I'm going to be playing catch-up for the last page or so, so I apologize in advance if I ask a question that you already answered and I missed the answer.

In every thing else you are telling us everything some players (me, SE, Abel) have posted very good while others (Umbrage, DY) have only posted bad things. This was in consensus of the thread back then, although for example I hadn't done a thing back then: The RVS-thingie, and some questions towards Umbrage.

How exactly can you call that "consensus of the thread?" I didn't like anything about your posting record in the first few pages, I just had problems with Umbrage's attacks on Snake (specifically, the way Umbrage was attacking Snake for doing the same things you did but he was letting you slide on them). And neither Vordark (in that post) nor anyone earlier on in the game had any problems with Darth, so why are you saying the thread considered DY's posting bad?

I've got to say, I don't really see a whole lot of buddying in the catch-up post either. Unless you're trying to make the argument that anyone saying that they think someone else is town is buddying, it looks like Vordark was just stating what he thought. Even if it was "consensus of the thread," that doesn't make it buddying.

I think that is all. And I would like every body to remember we are playing a game here. Mass-claiming may give us better odds, but it ruins the fun of the game. Setup speculation always seems to help us, but it distracts us from playing mafia. Please stop it.

I don't like the way CS said this. Yes, we're playing a game here, but you have to remember that one of the main rules of Mafia is to play towards your win condition. I don't condone doing anything that would break any other rules, but we would be stupid if we didn't at least go over the potential for massclaiming and the information about the setup.

@

Why Umbrage Thinks Snake Eyes is Scum

: I understand your case completely, but I still don't like the way you just let CS slide away while you're attacking SE so hard. I think you should at

least

have thrown as much suspicion on CS as you did on Snake.

For one, he more or less says that I should find xtoxm more scummy than ConSpiracy because he's not getting out of RVS, which is weird.

Or, he was asking you why you bothered to state that you thought xtoxm was neutral and CS was scum, and why specifically you thought that. Come on, I asked you something similar about CS's wagon on you and Snake's wagon on you and you had no problem with answering me.

If he truly didn't understand my reasoning, then why did he vote me at this point? The logical thing to do if you don't understand someone's reasoning is to ask them to explain, not assume the reasoning is scummy and vote them.

Why me? As I said, I don't consider RVS means much in the way of scum versus town. I really don't think anyone can find scum on page one.

VOTE: ConSpiracy

You singled me out for a reason, but why would you ask for my thoughts when I said I find RVS meaningless?

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Honestly, Umbrage, your whole case revolves around one minor contradiction made early in the game and what you perceive as a relationship between Snake and CS. Either come up with some more evidence (admittedly difficult, since Snake isn't the most active poster) or start looking for other suspects. Even if Snake is scum, he's not the only one in the game.

@ Umbrage: Your case sucks as hell. Please stop the tunneling.

OH OK I'LL DO THAT BECAUSE YOU'VE TOTALLY CONVINCED ME WITH YOUR BRILLIANT ARGUMENTS AND SHOT DOWN MY TWO PAGE ESSAY WITH YOUR ONE SENTENCE PLEASE LET'S HAVE MORE WISDOM FROM YOU.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR..................................................................................................................

MAYBE YOU DON'T LIKE THE FACT THAT I'M ATTACKING SNAKE EYES. HMMMMMM.............. LET'S SEE............. SNAKE EYES DEFENDS CONSPIRACY.............................. CONSPIRACY DEFENDS SNAKE EYES..................................... COULD THERE BE A CONNECTION??????????????????????????????????????????????

You have to be kidding me. Stop doing this. This is worse than the Krazy/Ythan argument.

Why do you guys not have a vote out? There's no excuse for not having one out this deep into D1.

I keep telling myself I'll vote when I see a vote count because I don't want to accidentally hammer/put someone to L-1 without meaning to, but I haven't been on the past few days so... yeah.

Wow, feels like I posted just yesterday but apparently it's been almost 4 days.

Posts like this shouldn't count as "responding to a prod." I know I haven't been around for about as long, but at least I'm trying to catch up.

Abelcain - Seems to have stood back a lot more then the other players in this game, he has posted logical and contructive posts however a lot have to do with defending suspicion away from himself rather than actively scumhunting. Leaning mafia read.

I know it's weird to ask this, but where exactly have I been defending myself? My gameplay is based around poking holes in other peoples' arguments and seeing where they lead. There hasn't been a whole lot of suspicion pointed at me through this whole game. I also try to respond more to things asked of me necessarily because I'm never sure when I'll suddenly have a lot of free time to work on my scumhunting as a whole. I know I haven't been super-active in this topic, but my Spring Break is coming up next week so I hope I'll be able to focus on this game a lot more than I have been.

Tomorrow afternoon I have another class, but once that one's over I'll be on spring break. More to come from my ISOs then. But for now...

Vote: Xtoxm

Stop skirting around the topic and give a real post. I know I got prodded too, but at least I gave a shot at some content.

[Abelcain]

@Quaroath: Good luck with everything that's going on with your wife.

Just by the by, can anyone remember the last time Ythan said anything that made any kind of impact on this game?

Well, the last time Ythan said anything useful it made Umbrage trip all over himself because he had a vote on Quaroath while he was still pushing his Snake Eyes case, and it made him change his vote. He's also somewhat close to the three-days mark since his last post, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

And no matter how long ago he made an impact, it's still more recent than the last time Xtoxm made an impact.

Speaking of Xtoxm, for someone who isn't scum he sure doesn't seem to be putting up a huge defense. I know it's all crazy levels of WIFOM to even

suggest

this, but I'm getting a strong feeling that Xtoxm really is coasting scum and not just an incredibly lazy anti-town player based on his claim. I can't believe that he bothered to pick up the prod and not request replacement and then only give a claim when he's at L-2 immediately after a post like this:

@Everyone, we only have 5 days till the lynch and we need to be able to attain a claim before the lynch progresses as well as allow time for a counter-claim if there is one.

There was an hour and a half between Regfan's post and Xtoxm's claim, but he gave in way too easily. I'd normally believe that he's just not focused at all on this game, but the fact that he purposely picked up that prod makes me think otherwise, so I'm feeling good that my vote on him is in the right place.

My sister flips out if she hears someone say 'perturbed'. Certain words mean certain things to us, but attributing those to my arguments is just bad play.

Anecdotal evidence has no place in a game of Mafia. Or, to put it the way you would in your allcaps exaggerations: "WELL IF YOUR SISTER IS BOTHERED BY CERTAIN WORDS FOR NO GOOD REASON THAT MEANS THERE'S NO GOOD REASON ANYBODY COULD EVER BE BOTHERED BY THE WAY SOMEONE WRITES ANYTHING RIGHT? ESPECIALLY IN TEXT-BASED FORMAT LIKE MAFIA!"

Wait, xtoxm claimed VT? Shit. He needs to die now. If he lives, it's just easier for a PR to die. Mafia love keeping claimed VTs alive.

I honestly can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic or not.

Otherwise this place has pretty much seemed like more of the same, with Regfan and iam going over Darth's posts with a fine-toothed comb, Umbrage howling about how certain he is that Snake is scum, Snake completely ignoring him and hoping that everyone else finds Umbrage's arguments to be too ridiculous to pursue, and a huge number of non-contributors like Xtoxm, Krazy, and Ythan. I have to admit Vordark's last post accusing CS of chainsawing for Darth and Umbrage has piqued my curiosity. I'll check it all out at the end of the weekend, since it's 4AM here and I have to wake up for work in a few hours.

[Abelcain]

Anecdotal evidence has no place in a game of Mafia. Or, to put it the way you would in your allcaps exaggerations: "WELL IF YOUR SISTER IS BOTHERED BY CERTAIN WORDS FOR NO GOOD REASON THAT MEANS THERE'S NO GOOD REASON ANYBODY COULD EVER BE BOTHERED BY THE WAY SOMEONE WRITES ANYTHING RIGHT? ESPECIALLY IN TEXT-BASED FORMAT LIKE MAFIA!"

Certain words mean certain things to us, but attributing those to my arguments is just bad play.

Did you even bother to read the whole quote? Or were you just LOLZ ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE I CAN POST IN CAPS TO!!11?

If you could explain what your sister has to do with Vordark thinking your word choice was suspicious, then sure. Or did you only read the first sentence in the piece you quoted and then decide to try to brush the whole thing away?:

The phrase "singled me out" generally rubs me the wrong way.

That choice of words implied victimization.

Subtle words choices like this tend to jump out at me.

Bolded for emphasis. You implying that Vordark had no reason to feel "rubbed the wrong way" by comparing it to your sister being uncomfortable with hearing a word is borderline strawman. You're right that certain words mean certain things, but when he backs up why he thinks the words are suspicious you can't just handwave it with a story about your sister and magically hope nobody else notices.

3) However, we have the exact same chance of hitting a scum tomorrow. If xtoxm was dead, then at least our chances of hitting scum would improve with their chances of hitting us.

While I do agree with the rest of your points here on why town-Xtoxm's claim puts the town in danger, I just want to make sure that you also realize that by deciding to lynch him today we are reducing our chances of lynching scum today to zero (assuming he's not scum himself), so take that into account when you also give reasons showing the scum chance of getting a PR.

Some of the things that Regfan is noting as town tells—like joining the discussion on the setup/massclaim speculation—I don’t see as a town tell. It is partly why I said what I said regarding the massclaim—if the setup could truly be broken via D1 massclaim, IT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN APPROVED. So, a scum could join in that discussion, appear helpful to town, all the while knowing that there is no significant risk to having to concoct a fakeclaim because town would realize that a massclaim wouldn’t crack the game open.

You're completely right here. Scum could join that discussion even though they knew that there was no way it would be approved if that was a viable strategy. But so could town. If you're trying to use my contributions to this subject as a scumtell, please look into the other people who discussed the setup as well (like Regfan, Umbrage, Snake Eyes, ConSpiracy, Krazy, etc.).

Hell, even

Xtoxm

contributed to that discussion:

I don't think a massclaim day one strategy is feasible, due to the complete absence of any kind of protective role. There are enough vanilla townies in the game (5) that all the mafia could simply claim VT and then pick off the claimed power roles, and potentially leave us with very little information from night actions. I think we should wait at least until day two. The only down side to not massclaiming today, I think, is the vig potentially killing a town power role, which would be pretty catastrophic.

How exactly is it a good point when you admit how far-fetched the scenario really is to have two leading wagons on scum?

Assuming that the wagons were entirely randomly chosen, this scenario has a one in twenty-two chance of happening in any twelve-player game with three scum and two leading wagons. Since these wagons are based in some fashion on the actions of the players, we can assume they they are not entirely random, and that there is at least a slightly greater chance that the wagons would land on scum. Let's make it a very slight chance increase (since there is guaranteed at least one scum-mate on one of the wagons, so not everyone on both wagons is definitely trustworthy anyway) and say that it's closer to one in twenty, or 5%. So in about 5% of twelve-player games with three mafia and two leading wagons, both leading wagons are on scum. Given the number of games on this site played with a setup with those numbers, it's bound to happen from time to time. Improbability =/= impossibility. Can you come up with a better/more likely motive why Xtoxm claimed so early?



Work in a few hours. More in the afternoon or Monday depending on how my day unfolds.

[Abelcain]

While I do agree with the rest of your points here on why town-Xtoxm's claim puts the town in danger, I just want to make sure that you also realize that by deciding to lynch him today we are reducing our chances of lynching scum today to zero (assuming he's not scum himself), so take that into account when you also give reasons showing the scum chance of getting a PR.

...

What...

That's a scumclaim. How else would you know xtoxm would flip town?

VOTE: Abelcain

xtoxm can wait. Lynching claimed scum D1 trumps any other strategy.

[Abelcain]

Wow, hit the submit button by mistake. Okay, I first want to point out that Umbrage replaced the name in the quote from me with xtoxm, which... I don't even know how or why that's supposed to make sense. But that's not my point.

While I do agree with the rest of your points here on why

town-Xtoxm's claim

puts the town in danger, I just want to make sure that you also realize that by deciding to lynch him today we are reducing our chances of lynching scum today to zero

(assuming he's not scum himself)

, so take that into account when you also give reasons showing the scum chance of getting a PR.

I was replying to your four reasons why Xtoxm has to die if he's town. He obviously has to die if he's Mafia anyway, but you listed four reasons that he had to die if he's town, and I was pointing out that one of them says we have a better chance of hitting scum tomorrow, but only if we assume that Xotxm is town, which means we have a zero percent chance of catching scum.

Next time you complain about people not paying attention to the entirety of one of your posts, make sure you pay attention to everyone else's too. Otherwise it makes you look like a hypocrite and dumbass.

[Abelcain]

I never assumed xtoxm was town. I don't know how the hell you can think that from my posts. You are assuming that. Why?

We have to kill xtoxm. These are the problems with him being alive:

1) We run the risk of outing a PR if we decide to lynch someone else.
2) The mafia have one less potential PR out there, making it more likely that they will hit a PR.
3) However, we have the exact same chance of hitting a scum tomorrow. If xtoxm was dead, then at least our chances of hitting scum would improve with their chances of hitting us.
4) Most of next day will revolve over whether or not we made the right decision keeping him alive.

Two of your points here, number two and number three, both only apply if Xtoxm is town. If he's scum, there is absolutely no way that his claim removes a potential PR from their list (because the mafia already knew he wasn't really scum). Also, if he's scum then killing him now in no way improves our ability to hit scum tomorrow - in fact, it makes it

less

likely we'll hit scum as opposed to town tomorrow because we'd have two mafia out of ten players instead of three mafia out of ten players. Therefore, your points two and three

only

apply if we already assume that Xtoxm as town. And the part of my post you quoted as a "scumclaim" was a direct response to those points (I even quoted point number three in that post).

This is infinitely regressive. I have a not-impossible chance of being struck by lightning right now because I’m writing this from the roof of my apartment building. So, should I base my next series of decisions on that singular possibility? Or, I have a not-impossible chance of winning the lottery, so I might as well buy the Ferrari I have my eye on. See where I’m going with this? On D1, we should be exploring the most likely avenues for finding scum, not the most improbable.

That's just one extreme, and you know it. If I go to the extreme in your direction, we shouldn't bother putting safety devices on planes or in cars because they're less likely to be involved in crashes than they are to arrive safely at their destinations; also, they shouldn't have bothered putting

any

lifeboats on the Titanic because there was such a small chance that it would sink. I didn't say there was any guarantee that the two leading wagons were both scum, but it's a possibility and we shouldn't immediately discount it.

I’m not psychic, but I’ll give it a shot—the players with town reads on Xtoxm called him “lazy town” (or similar). Claiming that early is something that lazy town would do, so it allows him to stay in character.

Someone who is just trying to appear "lazy town" would also try to be less lazy and become more involved in the game once he received notice of his inactivity. Xtoxm picked up his prod and proceeded to post a completely content-free post, then three days later (assumedly just before getting another prod) claimed. No defense, no attempt at hunting any scum, just a claim and a "please kill me." If he's trying to appear "lazy town" as scum and doing the things he is then he's doing a terrible job at playing towards his win conditon anyway, but it's a terrible way to play as town too.



@Ythan: I'm pretty sure nobody's jumping to vote Umbrage because we're so close to deadline with two other wagons that have a decent number of votes.

Earlier I read Umbrages posts as newbfrustratedtown, though lately he's been attempt to jump ship whenever a lynch seems as if it may actually go through to avoid suspicion cast on him later in the game. Thus although I don't believe changing the lynch completly is a good idea due to there being 2 days to the deadline, I would certaintly say he's growing on my suspect list.

Huh? Attempting to jump ship to avoid suspicion? Umbrage's vote was never on a big wagon until he brought Xtoxm to L-1, was it? He was the one who brought Xtoxm to L-1, and his vote sat there for a while where anyone could have come in and hammered. It only came off of Xtoxm recently. If his vote was changing to avoid suspicion, he wouldn't have put Xtoxm at L-1 to begin with.

[Abelcain]

Okay, are Krazy and Ythan going to do this fighting thing every day?

Also, Abel, I'm not really sure why you dropped Umbrage in your iso post 15.

Well, since you brought up my misinterpretation of the "scumread" definition, that's also your answer. Assuming that Snake Eyes was using the

actual

definition, then it seems like Snake completely avoided answering Umbrage on his whole situation (i. e., when Snake decided that he had a scumread on Umbrage as opposed to just trying to move past RVS). Since that was a big thing that bothered me with Umbrage at the time of the ISO you're looking at, I started seeing a lot of what Umbrage was doing as bad town-play rather than scum-play. Of course, this was all before his "Why Umbrage Thinks Snake Eyes Is Scum" and way before he decided that he can talk about how we could increase our chances of hitting scum by taking out Xtoxm and then attacking me when I pointed out that we were only increasing our chances of hitting scum D2 if Xtoxm wasn't scum. I still don't think Umbrage is scum, despite the fact that I really don't like the arguments he's been making; he seems to be a lot more reasonable today in light of the flips, which I think is a pretty good thing.



I need to do some re-reads. I just got off a long work weekend and my Spring Break just ended, but one of my classes tomorrow was cancelled so I should definitely be able to get in some solid reading/analyzing tomorrow or tomorrow night. I'll also try running the numbers on claim situations. Since I'm the last to arrive to the party, I guess this means we don't have any confirmation from a HT? That leaves the Det/Psy as our only investigative role, and based on that lack of response I can assume we don't have any usable results there either. Still, I want to do a check on who/what is the optimal play for claims before anyone does any claiming.

I am not in favour of the tracker/vig choose the vig. In my previous experience of vigs they only shoot townies.

The vig must be damn sure about himself to choose vig.

Godspeed, ConSpiracy.

[Abelcain]

OH COME THE FUCK ON. I was doing some work while I wrote my post, and I timed out from being logged in and lost it. There wasn't a whole lot, so I can try to repost most of it, but I'm not going to try to redo that entire thing again.

Reasons the HT shouldn't claim today:

or

What Umbrage didn't think about before making unreasonable boasts:

Right now we're at six town vs. two scum. Assuming the worst case scenario (regardless of claims), we lynch a town player today and scum kills at night. That leaves us tomorrow at 4 vs. 2, which is MyLo, not LyLo. In MyLo, it's generally considered optimal play to go for a no-lynch, if I'm not mistaken. This would put us into LyLo, which means we have one mislynch and one no-lynch starting now before we enter LyLo.

Essentially, my proposition is that we take the no-lynch today instead of tomorrow. Then we can also have the HT claim tomorrow. The benefits?

-When the mafia pick a kill during the night, assuming they choose randomly, they have a one in six chance of hitting the Det/Psy at night, while a mislynch would give them a one in five chance of hitting the Det/Psy. This means it is more likely that the Det/Psy can live to tomorrow, and potentially have an investigation result worth reporting.
-If the HT confirms tomorrow, we'll have six unconfirmed to choose from for the lynch as opposed to seven today. The number of potential town players we could hit shrinks because the Mafia will have killed one during the night. Also, we will still have an available mislynch in case of a counterclaim, since we won't be in MyLo or LyLo yet.
-Yes, there is a chance (one in six, again assuming random scumkill) that the HT will be killed during the night, which completely ruins this plan, so we have to decide if the benefits of giving the scum a larger killpool and having a smaller lynchpool tomorrow are worth the risk of potentially losing the benefits of the HT claim today.



@Regfan: I looked over Snake and Quaroath's interaction today... and found surprisingly little. They rarely interacted, and the few interactions they had with each other seemed to be either simple questions thrown innocently at each other or a few negative comments. There's not a whole lot there to go on because they rarely interacted - on one hand, they could have been trying to keep a distance between them, but it seems to me more like they were just never really involved in the same conversations in the thread. It doesn't help that neither one was the poster boy for thread activity, even though they're not slouches, but compared to how active people like Umbrage and Vordark have been they didn't spend a whole lot of time involved in the same topics at the same time (if someone can point out a time when they

were

and still didn't talk much, please point it out to me, as I did this analysis by looking at their ISOs).



@DY, you're right I haven't defended myself. This is because I don't see anything to defend. For the most part, you seem to think I'm scum because I haven't contributed much content to the thread and because Quaroath defended me. I know I haven't been contributing a whole lot, I'm not going to deny it. Personal reasons that have no place in this thread have been making it difficult for me to spend a lot of time on this game the way I did in earlier games, and I'm honestly trying to get more into it. As for Quaroath defending me, I don't know what I'm supposed to say. The guy was scum. He was trying to buddy up to me. I'm not going to defend him because he was scum.

Oh, right, you also don't like when I voted to get onto the Xtoxm wagon:

Not voting: Abelcain, Quaroath

Why do you guys not have a vote out? There's no excuse for not having one out this deep into D1.

@Abelcain and Quaraoth: Please put some votes out, like, now.

Next time you prompt someone

twice

to place a vote, don't bitch about when the vote was placed.

[Abelcain]

You thought Quaroth had surprisingly little interaction with Snake Eyes over any other player? Not Ythan? Not Regfan? Not Vordark or yourself? Also, unlike most of those other players, the few interactions Quaroth did have with Snake Eyes usually involved him calling SE out for some WIFOMy argument. Are you taking this to be early distancing or what? Also, do you think Snake Eyes is scummy outside of Quaroth's lack of interaction with him?

Note the "@Regfan" at the beginning of that paragraph you replied to with this - Regfan asked me what I thought of Snake Eyes in light of the flips, and since knowing that CS and iam were town doesn't really help much with ascertaining SE's alignment (any potential "buddying" has both scum motive to associate themselves with town players as well as town motive to get rid of scummy statements against them), I decided to look at the way Quaroath associated with Snake Eyes. It wasn't a "Search every single person to determine buddying" this time around, it was just a look at Quaroath and Snake Eyes.

And "calling SE out for some WIFOMy argument" is a load of crap. There was exactly one time Quaroath said anything about Snake that wasn't "I think Snake Eyes is town" or "I agree with this Snake post" and that was asking him about one WIFOMy statement. Not "calling him out", just asking a question. There was no follow-up to that question after Snake answered it, Quaroath just let it go. So to answer your question about distancing, is it possible? Yes. It's also completely possible that they just weren't involved in any conversation together. I want to go back and reread the early Umbrage-SE-CS triangle again to see what Quaroath's involvement in that was.

Outside of looking at Quaroath, I'm getting a hair's width of town from Snake, but I might as well consider him null. A lot of his more recent posts seem to be repeating the same arguments other people made as well as commenting on Xtoxm's lack of drive - outside of Umbrage and DY, I don't think he's talked to much to or about

anyone

still in this game.

Perhaps DY shouldn't have had to provoke you into posting in the first place? Also, DY asking you to *vote* does not mean he cannot also question you about your vote and the rationale therein. You seem to be saying here that DarthYoshi shouldn't have asked you to vote, or shouldn't have asked your reasoning behind your vote, when really DarthYoshi should have been doing both of these things, as town or as anything else. Gotta be honest AC, this point is pretty scummy from where I'm sitting.

Which would be nice if DY was questioning my reasoning, but he hasn't been doing that. From what I can see, he didn't have a problem with the fact that I voted Xtoxm, or why I voted Xtoxm. He has a problem with

when

I voted Xtoxm, because at that time the "groundwork had been laid" as I remember. To which I reply that my vote was made then because he prompted me to vote twice.

[Abelcain]

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE. NOT TODAY.

THIS IS A UNIQUE SITUATION.

GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE WIKI AND THINK ABOUT IT.

Town never no-lynch,

except in special cases.

You're exactly right. We are in a unique situation, one that I think might benefit from a no-lynch today. Maybe if you actually looked at what I was saying rather than just assuming that the no-lynch is suboptimal play regardless of the situation you'd understand.

Voting no-lynch today is wasting a lynch.

Except it's not. We have an available mislynch and no-lynch, due to the number of players. Going with a no-lynch does

not

reduce the number of lynches we have available, as it would if we had an odd number of players today. With the vig dead, there's only a lynch-scumkill dynamic. That means two deaths a day. Since we can still lose three townies without losing, and the scumkill

always

kills town, we can only mislynch once because a second mislynch would make it 2 town to 2 scum, which is endgame. After one mislynch we can

still

lose another town without losing, and the only way that'll happen is if we no-lynch. I'm suggesting we take that no-lynch today rather than after another mislynch.

THERE IS NO DOWNSIDE TO MY PLAN.

HT claims today, and if we still mislynch it's pretty obvious the scum will kill the HT too. That leaves it as four to two, none confirmed. Unless the Det/Psy has a guilty by that point (more on this later) this is a fairly bad situation to be in.

I'm saying we have a choice. Scumhunt when there are 8 unconfirmeds, or scumhunt when there are 7 unconfirmeds.

And I'm saying there's a third choice, which involves scumhunting today with eight unconfirmeds but no lynch, and then letting the HT claim tomorrow which lets us scumhunt with only

six

unconfirmeds

and

an available mislynch.

Either we waste time arguing about whether player X is scum, or we know without a doubt that player X is scum. Which one do you think is pro-town?

I'm sorry? How is confirming who the HT is equal to knowing without a doubt that someone is scum?

Scum ALWAYS kill confirmed town, because they are fucking dangerous if left alive. This has the added benefit of making sure our last PR survives another night. So by D3 we have two results from the Psych/Det, GUARANTEED.

WIFOMy "Should the scum kill the confirmed town or try to hit the PR" aside, I think you're putting a little too much faith into the Det/Psy powers. Any innocent result he gets is essentially meaningless unless there's only one scum left AND we have a detective. Why? The Detective only picks up a guilty on scum if they are designated as "the killer" that night. So he could target scum that isn't "the killer" and get an innocent. The opposite is true for the Psychologist, who gets a guilty if he targets scum who

isn't

the killer. So the Det/Psy only has a 50/50 chance of getting a guilty on scum tonight, with 100% chance of innocent on any town. If he gets a guilty, he knows it's scum, but if he gets an innocent it's possible he just targeted the wrong scum that night. When we're down to only one scum then the Psychologist becomes what the HT is now - a unique-claim with no extra use - and the Detective would basically be a cop.



I'm not saying I'm completely right. I'm just saying we should discuss the

possibility

of my idea before the HT claims. We still have more than two weeks to deadline, we can spend at least a little time going over it.

[Abelcain]

And what if the Det/Psy is killed tonight? My plan ensures that he lives. Besides, if the Det/Psy doesn't get a guilty, he can claim as well.

You're right. And under my plan, tomorrow, if the Det/Psy lives and doesn't get a guilty, and if the HT also lives, we'll get

two

PR claims. There's a 2/3 chance of them both surviving. Plus, if you have the Det/Psy claim tomorrow after a mislynch today, then his claim will be completely useless if the scum decide to counterclaim.



Wait a second. This just occurred to me, but it involves a counterclaim in your plan. It's possible that scum could fakeclaim Det/Psy and claim a guilty on a town. It's also possible that they could fakeclaim Det/Psy even if the real Det/Psy has a guilty. So even if the Det/Psy did get a guilty result tomorrow, there's no way to verify that it's an actual investigation result and not a fakeclaim from scum. This... completely removes any use the Det/Psy might have come tomorrow. If we decide to just lynch the guilty and it turns out to be a fakeclaim, we lose. If anything, the Det/Psy is just a glorified townie now the same way the HT is because scum wouldn't be stupid enough to just let the guilty go through if they can fake us out.

Now think about the no-lynch plan this way:

• Nobody claims today, and we don't lynch anyone. At night, there's a 1/3 the scum hit one of the power roles and 2/3 chance both power roles survive the night.
  
• Tomorrow, any surviving PRs claim. If we only have one surviving PR, so be it, we go with my original scenario where we still have the mislynch available to deal with any counterclaims. If we have both PRs leftover, they both claim tomorrow.
  
• If only one PR claims, they're cleared if there's no counterclaim or they help us narrow down one of the scum to one of two if there is a counterclaim (much in the same way of any normal counterclaiming scenario). That means we either have 2/6 chance of lynching scum tomorrow or 1/2 tomorrow and 1/4 the next day.
  
• If we have two surviving PRs, no counterclaims clears
  two
  town. This means we have two scum within a group of five, which is really good odds for us. If one role is counterclaimed, we have the available mislynch in case we accidentally kill the wrong claimer. If both roles are counterclaimed, that clears all the remaining townies and gives us a 50% chance of winning
  at worst
  , because we have an available mislynch to guarantee we kill at least one of the two scum and the second scum will be one of the two claimed for the other PR.
  
• As a bonus, if we ever do confirm the Det/Psy and he gets a guilty result, that's extra points for us too.

Emphasis mine. You say there isn't anything to defend, but then concede my accusation.

Uh... yeah. That's what I meant. Your accusation isn't something to defend against because I'm conceding it. You don't have a defense attorney argue on your behalf in court if you plead guilty to a crime.



@Krazy, I'm intrigued by the Ythan meta you have provided, and I know there was another one of his games that I looked at where he was also very aggressive and unlike the way he's acting now. I don't remember which game it was or what his role was, but you're right that he seems uncharacteristic of the way I expected him to play (and, in fact, even the way he was playing earlier in the game). This change in his behavior seems to have occurred during the night, since he was still acting pretty vicious towards the end of Day 1. I also don't like how he decided to try to push an Umbrage wagon at the end of the day with so little time to build it to anything, so it looks like he was really just trying to avoid being on a town wagon when the lynch went through so any votecount analysis would come up clean. (I'm sure someone else has mentioned that before, but I can't remember who it was if they did.) I'd like to get Ythan's perspective on the whole attitude situation before I start crying scum.

@Ythan, what do you think about the change in your behavior since the night? Or do you not think that there is any change? What about the meta that Krazy has provided on you?

[Abelcain]

@Everyone: Do not vote no-lynch any further until we all agree that the no-lynch is the best course of action and we are satisfied with the amount of discussion we have had today. If we decide to call the no-lynch early to give the scum less information we must once again be sure that everyone agrees with it.

@ Krazy, thanks for catching that, but I'm just giving it in bold in case someone else comes in and skims it.

@Umbrage, I'm not sure if you just skimmed this paragraph I posted earlier, but it's about what would happen if we followed your plan and the Det/Psy gets counterclaimed:

Wait a second. This just occurred to me, but it involves a counterclaim in your plan. It's possible that scum could fakeclaim Det/Psy and claim a guilty on a town. It's also possible that they could fakeclaim Det/Psy even if the real Det/Psy has a guilty. So even if the Det/Psy did get a guilty result tomorrow, there's no way to verify that it's an actual investigation result and not a fakeclaim from scum. This... completely removes any use the Det/Psy might have come tomorrow. If we decide to just lynch the guilty and it turns out to be a fakeclaim, we lose. If anything, the Det/Psy is just a glorified townie now the same way the HT is because scum wouldn't be stupid enough to just let the guilty go through if they can fake us out.

What do you think we should do in light of this?

@Vordark, I don't know if that last part was directed at me but I am in no way saying we should call for a no-lynch in hopes of getting a Det/Psy result. As I said in the post I quoted above, I don't even think the Det/Psy could be that useful even if he does get a guilty, since scum can counterclaim anyway. But Umbrage's idea is to sacrifice the HT do that the Det/Psy is guaranteed another check, and he wants to lynch on top of that because that way we can get in a lynch with a confirmed townie or a unique-counterclaim-situation. I agree with him that we should probably go for a lynch if the HT claims today, but I think that it's a better move to have the HT

not

claim and wait for tomorrow. As I said, there's a 2/3 chance that both the HT and the Det/Psy will live to tomorrow, which gives us a double-claim situation; if one of them gets killed then we still have the one-claim situation with the available mislynch.

[Abelcain]

I think on the basis of AC's last post, a no-lynch is probably preferable to having the HT claim today. However, if one of the PRs is whacked tonight, what do the no-lynch advocates see as the contingency plan for that?

If we lose one of the PRs, we'll still have the other one. Like I said earlier, a Det/Psy counterclaim can even stop an actual Det/Psy guilty from being confirmed, so the Det/Psy essentially is about the same level of use as the HT is - namely, a unique claim (although it has the added bonus of a slight chance of getting a usable investigation if we ever confirm his identity). So basically we're guaranteed to have at least one PR that can claim tomorrow, and we'll have the mislynch available to verify them in case there's a scum counterclaim - this was the basis of my original explanation of why we should no-lynch and wait for the claim. No matter what, tomorrow we'll have a PR that can claim. There's a 2/3 chance that we'll have

two

, which would definitely be better, but even having one PR to claim for tomorrow is a potent weapon against the scum.

Basically, the train of thought goes something like this:

• Scum kill one of the PRs at night.
  
• Living PR claims.
  
• If there is no counterclaim, we have a confirmed town. This means we have an even smaller group to choose from when picking scum (2 out of the remaining 6 are scum)
  and
  a mislynch available.
  
• If there is a counterclaim, we lynch one of the claimers (dependent on who the town thinks is scummiest). If we're wrong, we use up our mislynch, which puts us in LyLo, but then we
  know
  that the other claimer is scum. Guarantees us 2 vs. 1 LyLo at worst.

Now, since we're generally in agreement that no-lynch is the best option, the question becomes "Do we want to prolong the day to scumhunt some more, or should we cut the day short to limit the information for scum so they have more difficulty guessing the PRs?" I'm not really leaning towards either side, but I'm willing to cut the day short if everyone else is.

[Abelcain]

If it's possible for you to do both, that would be highly appreciated. From re-reading interactions I feel the need to get some thoughts down before I forget them later. If you need any explained just ask and I'll elaborate.

If Umbrage is mafia Snake and Ythan are town.
If Snake is mafia Umbrage is town.
If Darth is mafia Vordark and Abelcain are town.
If Abelcain is mafia Darth is town.
If Krazy is mafia Ythan is town.
If Ythan is mafia Krazy and Umbrage are town.
If Vordark is mafia Darth is town.

@Regfan, can you be sure that some of those aren't just bus-masked relationships? For example, if Krazy and Ythan are scumpartners they might be staging their arguments to create a really nasty chasm between them. Their "history" of not getting along only lets them make the argument seem more realistic.



I didn't want to get involved in the whole Umbrage/Ythan thing, but I would like to point out that Umbrage is... technically... right. There is no real "flaw" in his plan, as such. Having the HT claim today and go for the lynch is a perfectly valid line of action to take. But, Umbrage, just because there's one good plan doesn't mean it's the

best

plan. Sometimes there are better plans, even if yours isn't "flawed." Most of us just think the no-lynch plan is a

better

plan, is all. It doesn't help that your plan really hopes that the Det/Psy can get a guilty and I've already pointed out why the guilty can be completely overwritten by a scum counterclaim if we don't have another mislynch available.

I mean, hell, at this point it's obvious neither Vordark or myself are the HT, or we'd have claimed. Assuming he's not scum, it's a one in four chance the HT will be dead if we no-lynch. If we mislynch, it's a one in three chance. Actually, the odds are probably higher than that seeing as the scum hit the most dangerous PR with their first shot. HT, are you really comfortable with all that? Are you sure you want to go into the night unclaimed? This will likely be your last chance.

Now I'm convinced that Umbrage is rolefishing. He seems more interested in figuring out who the PRs are than whether or not they are any use. This is especially glaring since he agreed with the no-lynch plan only a few posts ago, which hopes that both PRs remain safe, and he's now announcing who he thinks is not the HT.

Even if the HT gets killed during the night, we still have the Det/Psy. Like I said earlier, the Det/Psy's guilty can be defeated by a counterclaim, so the Det/Psy is just a unique claim in the same vein as the HT (although if we ever manage to confirm who the Det/Psy is,

and

he has a guilty, we have scum). So if the HT

does

get killed during the night, the Det/Psy claims tomorrow. Simple as that. Then we'll still have your precious confirmed town you want to turn the HT into. Besides, if we're no-lynching, having the HT claim just means the HT dies at night

anyway

. Wouldn't you rather have the (since you pointed it out) one-in-four chance that the HT gets killed, other than the one-in-one chance that he gets killed after claiming?

I would

also

have hoped that the HT would wait on his claim even if he didn't agree with the no-lynch plan, because so many other people agree with the no-lynch plan and there's no way everyone arguing for the no-lynch is scum.

I don't understand why you're so confident that the scum knew that CS was the vig/tracker. From what I remember of Day 1, there wasn't a whole lot of suspicion being thrown at CS by the end of the day - in particular, the only people I really remember that thought he was scummy were DY, who changed his read on him about halfway through the day to finding him townish anyway, and you with your capsrage posts so nobody was taking the you very seriously anyway on your CS case. Which would make CS probably the player with the fewest scumreads on him, and a good candidate for a "most pro-town player" to kill. I don't remember seeing any PR-tells anywhere in his posts (please point them out to me if you see them), so at this point the only person who seems to be helping the scum figure out who's a PR is

you

by trying to narrow down the HT.

Finally, your last few sentences ("HT, are you really comfortable with that?" etc.) sound like so much AtE it's making my scumdar go crazy. I can't imagine any way that trying to scare the HT into claiming can possibly be considered pro-town.

[Abelcain]

DAMN IT.

IT IS THE BEST PLAN.

I HAVE PROVEN THERE IS NO ADVANTAGE TO NO-LYNCHING THAT IS NOT ACHIEVED BY CLAIMING AND LYNCHING.

By no-lynching, the worst case scenario is that tomorrow we have one unique claim and a mislynch available in case the scum try to counterclaim on that unique claim. The best case scenario is that tomorrow we have

two

unique claims and a mislynch that we can use to try to prove either of those claims. Prove that there is any way that the claim and lynch plan has the advantage that my best-case scenario has.

NOW YOU'RE SAYING I'M ROLEFISHING?

USE YOUR HEAD. SCUM DON'T WANT TO FIND THE HT. THE HT IS USELESS. THEY WANT TO FIND THE D/P.

MY PLAN ENSURES THAT THE SCUM DO NOT FUCKING KILL THE D/P.

I've already demonstrated that the Det/Psy is just about as useless as the HT. I can't believe you don't understand that, but let me spell it out for you. Let's assume that the HT claims today, but we mislynch. Tonight, the HT gets killed. Even if the Det/Psy gets a guilty, here's how tomorrow plays out:

Person A: Hi, I'm the Det/Psy, and I have a guilty on Person B!
Person C: What are you talking about? I'm the Det/Psy, and I have a guilty on Person D!

Now who do you lynch? You have no more available mislynches since you mislynched the day before. Taking the no-lynch tomorrow results in the scum killing Person E, who is completely unrelated to the claims, that night. Now if you're person F you're in LyLo with only a 50/50 chance of winning. And that's only in the extremely small likelihood that the Det/Psy gets a guilty. Without a guilty, Person A and Person C both claim with no guilties, and you can't even lynch one to figure out the other because one mislynch ends in loss. And if one claimant claims a guilty, you still don't know if it's a reliable guilty or if it's a scumlie in an attempt to win.

Now that it is established that the Det/Psy's guilty result cannot be reliable without having a mislynch available to verify whether or not the guilty is coming from a real Det/Psy, the Det/Psy has essentially turned into what the HT is now.

ERGO IF I AM ROLEFISHING THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO ME IS IF PEOPLE DID WHAT I TOLD THEM TO DO.

IF I AM SCUM, THEN I AM SCREWED BY MY OWN FUCKING PLAN.

Nice try, but that's completely untrue. Scum are screwed if they go with the no-lynch plan, or at least more screwed than the claim/lynch plan. The best way to ensure that the town decides to go with the claim/lynch plan is to out the HT and/or force him to claim. If who the HT is becomes knowledge before the end of the day, then the no-lynch plan ceases to be the better plan because there's zero chance that the HT will survive the night. So if you're a rolefishing scum, the best thing that can happen to you is that you find the HT before the day is out because it forces the town to have to go with the claim/lynch plan.

THE HT CLAIMING GIVES US THE BEST CHANCE OF LYNCHING SCUM TODAY.

You're completely right, because the HT not claiming leads into us no-lynching which means we have zero chance of lynching scum today. But we have a much greater chance of lynching scum

tomorrow

. The HT claiming also gives us the best chance of mislynching today too.

THAT'S ALL I CARE ABOUT. LYNCHING SCUM.

DO YOU WANT TO LYNCH SCUM?

THEN THE HT HAD BETTER FUCKING CLAIM.

Today alone I called you out on trying to AtE the HT into claiming, rolefishing to try to find one of our two PRs, trying to coerce the town into following your plan rather than letting them make their own decision, and now here you're

threatening

the town to get the HT to claim. Why do you have such a problem with the majority making the decision? Why are you trying to force your plan to go through if the rest of the town doesn't want it to go through?

[Abelcain]

WELL HOW ABOUT THIS: MY PLAN ENSURES WE WILL GET TWO LYNCHES WITH A CONFIRMED TOWNIE AVAILABLE, AND THE BEST CHANCE WE HAVE OF GETTING A GUILTY. YOUR PLAN HAS A CHANCE OF GETTING TWO CONFIRMED TOWNIES FOR ONE LYNCH, THAT IS IF THE SCUM DON'T COUNTER-CLAIM OR NO-KILL OR KILL A PR OR BASICALLY DO ANYTHING OF ANY IMPORTANCE.

Really? Because as far as I can tell, tomorrow scum can counterclaim too. So even if the scum decide to not counterclaim today, they can still counterclaim tomorrow, which means the "confirmed townie" for tomorrow's lynch won't be confirmed. My worst case scenario has the same effect as your best-case scenario, which is having a confirmed townie for one lynch. And a counterclaim can be beaten if there is a mislynch available, something that your plan is sorely missing.

WHICH IS ALL THE MORE REASON WHY THE PRS SHOULD CLAIM SOONER RATHER THAN LATER, WHEN THE SCUM CAN COUNTER-CLAIM.

Scum can also counter-claim tomorrow, to eliminate your Det/Psy's potential result. Did you even bother reading my post?

BUT THE HT IS EXPENDABLE. THE D/P IS NOT.

See above. Without an available mislynch, the Det/Psy is just as expendable as the HT.

WITH YOUR PLAN, SCUM CAN KILL WHOEVER THEY THINK IS THE D/P. WITH MY PLAN THE D/P IS SAFE.

REGARDLESS OF HOW GOOD YOU THINK YOUR PLAN IS, MY PLAN STILL FUCKS SCUM.

Your plan completely eliminates any possible use for the Det/Psy in any capacity, because there's no way to confirm that the Det/Psy's guilty isn't a scum lie. My plan at least gives us a chance to confirm the Det/Psy if he gets a guilty tonight, which automatically makes the Det/Psy a hell of a lot more useful than he can possibly be in your plan. For someone who's depending so much on the Det/Psy's guilty result, I'd think you'd take being able to actually use the guilty into consideration.

IF WE FOLLOW MY PLAN, SCUM ARE SCREWED. EITHER THEY ENSURE THE D/P LIVES ANOTHER NIGHT, OR THEY TAKE A GAMBLE OF HITTING THE D/P AND SUFFER ANOTHER DAY WITH AT LEAST ONE CONFIRMED TOWN.

EITHER WAY, TOWN WINS.

I think you have a really terrible definition of "win" here. Town doesn't win if the HT claims today. Town wins if we manage to eliminate all the scum. The HT claiming gives us even less of a chance of winning.

THAT. IS. BULLSHIT.

HOW DOES THE HT CLAIMING MAKE A MISLYNCH MORE LIKELY?

If the HT claims, we lynch. If he doesn't claim, we don't lynch. It's that simple. The optimal play without a claim is not lynching, and the optimal play with a claim is to lynch. So if the HT doesn't claim, there is a 0% chance of mislynching today, because we are not lynching. If the HT does claim, we have a chance greater than 0% of mislynching, therefore it is

more likely

that we will mislynch today with a claim than without a claim.

HOW THE FUCK CAN I THREATEN ANYONE? WHAT POWERS DO I HAVE TO DO THAT EXACTLY?

Saying "You had better do this" to try to force someone to do something is a threat, because you are implying that something bad will happen if they don't do what you say. Whether or not you have the power to carry out the threat is irrelevant, it's still a threat.

Umbrage, please reread my reasoning on why the Det/Psy isn't really as helpful as you think it is. I know you're obsessed with the Det/Psy, but his chances of getting a guilty are slim to none, and even if he does there's no way to guarantee it. If we follow your plan and mislynch today, there is at best a 50/50 chance of winning come tomorrow, and that includes assuming the Det/Psy gets a guilty.

Also, I don't know if your caps-lock is stuck on, or if your shift button is broken and your computer thinks it's always being held down or something, but you should probably get a new keyboard or at least get the current one repaired.

[Abelcain]

Regardless of how we call it, if there's any counterclaim tomorrow then we are guaranteed to make it to a three-person LyLo, because we have that extra mislynch available and that guarantees us at least one counterclaim verification. I was thinking more along the lines of just calling for a massclaim tomorrow to force the scum to make a stand on if they're going to counterclaim or not. Still, if everyone decides they like Darth's idea better, I don't have any objections.

[Abelcain]

Just checking in. I'd hammer right now if we weren't waiting on SE. Once he gets replaced or somehow finds his way back here I'll hammer if Ythan doesn't get there first.

[Abelcain]

Reporting in. No counter-claim from me.

I agree with Umbrage. Speculation can wait until after the claims. Once we have someone cleared we can worry about who of the remaining six are scum.

[Abelcain]

I caved when AbelCain started THREATENING me to go along with the no-lynch. When I get called scum for pushing a pro-town suggestion, that tells me town is totally fucked up in the head and any effort I put in is useless.

Care to point out where I threatened you? Or where I called you scum for your suggestion? I said more than once that your plan was perfectly viable, I just came up with another one that I thought was better and you stuck your fingers in your ears and called me scum for suggesting it. Then when everyone else started to agree with me, you threw a fit:

Umbrage, the idea of HT claiming is pure stupidity it guarentess the death of what will essentially be a clear, and it's not as if their reads are going to be any better then ours. Your insistance to bring up anti-town suggestions is growing old to be quite frank.

AND WHAT DO YOU CALL MASSCLAIMING DAY ONE YOU FUCKING HYPOCRITE?

YES IT GUARANTEES THE DEATH OF A CLEAR. IT ALSO GUARANTEES THE SURVIVAL OF OUR LAST POWER ROLE.

AT LEAST WITH MY PLAN WE GET SOME USE OUT OF THE HIDER TRACKER BEFORE IT'S KILLED.

THE HIDER TRACKER IS USELESS AT NIGHT. THE DET/PSYCH IS VERY USEFUL AT NIGHT. SACRIFICING THE HT TO SAFE THE D/P IS A GOOD MOVE.

IF WE NO-LYNCH, THEN SCUM JUST HAVE ANOTHER SHOT AT A POWER ROLE. AND SO FAR THEIR AIM HAS BEEN PRETTY FUCKING GOOD.

BUT AS I SEEM TO BE THE ONLY ONE WITH ENOUGH BRAINS TO SEE THIS:

VOTE: NOFUCKINGLYNCH

JUST REMEMBER THAT WHEN WE ALL WAKE UP TOMORROW WITH OUR LAST PR DEAD AND ALMOST NO INFO TO GO ON THAT UMBRAGE HAD A WAY OUT.

Don't accuse me of threatening you when I did no such thing.



I refuse to believe that Amrun thought that DY was claiming a guilty on her. She claims she read the game a few days ago, and even with fading memory she would have noticed the three-death N1 and the discussion we had about if the HT should claim if he had anyone other than Quaroath or CS. I don't think anyone else thought DY was implying that she was the hider target with that vote.

So you think my top scum read would be my buddy? Tell me how that makes sense.

I could tell you exactly how that makes sense. It's called bussing for town-cred. It's happened before in many games where scum offers up their partner to the town to make themselves look pro-town. I know I'm your top scum read, but I'm not saying that I'm scum; the fact that you tried to deflect any sort of buddying theory with such obvious WIFOM looks really stupid.

Vote: Amrun

Preview Edit: Holy crap. Okay.

Abelcain also goes after Umbrage for a long time but never places a vote on him. He places few votes ever, in fact. Why? Avoiding vote history?

No, it's because I think Umbrage is a pain in the ass, but he's not scum. At least not as far as I can tell. Day 1 I had my vote on Quaroath for a while to prompt content. Then I wasn't getting any sort of super scum-vibe from anybody except disliking xtoxm's whole early claim, so I voted him when prompted by DY to throw out a vote. Then the next day I wanted to keep discussion going for as long as possible about our plans and scumhunting and whatnot, so I didn't vote because I wanted to hold the day out as long as possible.

This is horrible. How did no one ride his case for this?

Ride my case for

what

exactly? Ride my case for saluting CS? When CS said Vig/Tracker should only pick vig if he was sure he'd hit scum, then proved it by picking vig and hitting scum? I thought it was a damn impressive move. And DY

did

point it out right afterwards, anyway.

Abelcain ISO #25: Argues on Quoroath's behalf post-flip (??) and promises to go back and re-read the Snake Eyes / Quoraoth conversation and re-examine Quaroath. Never follows through.

Way to not actually read that post, or the part of Krazy's post I was replying to. I said that there was no Snake Eyes/Quaroath conversation outside of one small part of one post. Krazy came back telling me that Quaroath had been arguing with Snake Eyes over WIFOMy arguments and that they looked less like partners because of it. My reply, which was the very post you claim I was arguing "on Quoroath's behalf" was me pointing out that the "argument" Krazy was mentioning wasn't really an argument so much as one question that had no follow-up.

And who said I never followed through with reading about Quaroath's involvement in the early Umbrage/Snake/CS debate? There's just not a whole lot there. Quaroath did take the unique position of agreeing with Umbrage that CS was trying to lay a trap and agreeing with Snake that Umbrage's case on him was completely unfounded, though. I don't think anyone else that thought that Umbrage was right in suspecting CS but wrong in suspecting SE. Unless he was trying to try to keep SE safe and wanted people to suspect CS or Umbrage instead.



I love how the majority of Amrun's "case" on me is all about Quaroath trying to buddy up to me, too. I especially like how it's a lot like the same argument DY made against me and I replied that I can't defend against it because he was scum (when I was accused of not defending myself).

All in all, Abelcain has appeared to have said a lot when in reality he's offered very little content. Lots of un-followed up questions, set-up breakage speculation, and vague suspicions not followed up by votes.

Also almost the

exact

same case that DY made against me.

In general, Abelcain is highly AGAINST massclaim

Against massclaim? Which massclaim are you talking about here? Regfan's D1 massclaim plan who everyone (Regfan included) decided would be bad for the town? Or a D2 massclaim which would have outed our two PRs and been completely stupid? Or a D3 massclaim, which is what I spent the majority of D2 arguing in favor of?

You're tunneling on Snake Eyes for the dumbest reason ever, btw.

...

That's a dumb thing to rest an entire case on, though.

Thanks for telling us that reasons are dumb. Are you going to explain, or do you just expect people to back down because you said that?

[Abelcain]

It's hard to exxplain away your scumbuddy chainsawing you, huh?

@DY, you're right I haven't defended myself. This is because I don't see anything to defend. For the most part, you seem to think I'm scum because I haven't contributed much content to the thread and because Quaroath defended me. I know I haven't been contributing a whole lot, I'm not going to deny it. Personal reasons that have no place in this thread have been making it difficult for me to spend a lot of time on this game the way I did in earlier games, and I'm honestly trying to get more into it.

As for Quaroath defending me, I don't know what I'm supposed to say. The guy was scum. He was trying to buddy up to me. I'm not going to defend him because he was scum.

[Abelcain]

Okay, first off, holy hell pod. That was probably the dumbest, scummiest thing I have ever seen happen in any game (aside from some of drmyshottyizsik's plays, but they have no relevance to this game).

i don't like how everyone but me and abel have scum reads on me and abel.

Hahaha, that's damn funny, because your play was completely stupid. This is even a terrible attempt at buddying up with me. It looks to me less like you're giving any sort of honest belief that you think I'm town and more like you're attempting to design an associative tell with me, since you're likely to get lynched today and you know it.

FoS: pod

I believe Regfan asked me for my reads on everyone in the game? Or someone did, before the hammer. There's no reason for me to give reads on Darth and Amrun anymore, but I'll give my reads on the four others.

Umbrage: Town

I'm feeling pretty confident in saying this. Umbrage is very passionate about his play and ideas. Unfortunately, this makes him look like he's saying "Town is dumb, I know best" which can alienate people. He's done this before (Rivertown Mafia, I think? Snake Eyes posted a link to it early on in the game and Umbrage ranted about the town's behavior in it) as town, and the fact that he argued so hard for what he was sure was the "right thing" on D2 tells me that he's really likely to be town.

pod person: Scum

I know I was buying into Vordark's schtick about Darth back on D1/D2, but a lot of what he said wasn't making fantastic sense even then. That's not necessarily a scum-tell, but then pod's play on D3 alone is just...

too

scummy. He didn't bother reading the game outside of reading Quaroath's posts; while that's a good place to start, it's a terrible place to end. He should've used Quaroath's posts as a springboard to look at other posts, at worst. He's clearly not patient enough to read through the whole game, and then his quickhammer tells me he's even more anxious to end the game. I'm not even sure if he knew we weren't in MyLo or LyLo on D3, and his quickhammer would've been a scum-win in one of those scenarios. I think that today he realized that he's probably going to get voted out, so he's doing whatever he can to lead us away from his partner, whether it's by trying to obviously buddy-up to me or refusing to answer questions that might implicate someone else.

Krazy: Leaning Scum

This might just be Krazy rubbing me the wrong way, but my gut says he's scum. He's tried buddying up to Umbrage, especially on D2 ("Umbrage is obvitown") but his personal problems with Ythan really cloud a lot of his posts up. More than once he tried goading Ythan into saying things in an attempt to incriminate him, and almost everything Ythan or Quaroath said he tried to twist to make it look more like Ythan was scum (see this post where he decides that Quaroath asking him about the argument between him and Ythan means that Quaroath was protecting Ythan).

Regfan: Null/Leaning Town

I've noticed Regfan asks a lot of questions. A lot of questions. And he rarely answers any. He has acknowledged this more than once. His playstyle is very hands-off - referencing the rules of the game and working at strategy more than conversing. I know I theorize about strategy a lot too, but I'm noting this. Most of Regfan's posts are setup-strategy, posting his reads, or asking questions. He doesn't do a whole lot of back-and-forth. Not a scumtell necessarily, but it makes it difficult to get a strong read on him.



The way I see it, either me or pod person is probably going to get lynched today. I know I'm town. If pod's town too, then we've probably lost because I can't see a sudden swing onto Regfan or Umbrage, and I can't get a good read on whether or not Krazy is suspected enough to risk our potential endgaming-lynch.

[Abelcain]

Oh, and Regfan, I generally don't lurk while I'm logged in anyway. If I'm logged in, you can assume I'm writing a post, but I'm usually also watching TV and doing homework or something at the same time which is why I'm logged in for so long in comparison to my post length.

@Umbrage: Wh... what?

[Abelcain]

^To clarify that: Umbrage, how the

hell

is that a message to me? Don't you think knowing Regfan's also logged in I would've voted instead of writing that massive post if we were the scumteam?

[Abelcain]

Umbrage, I'm just curious; what makes you so sure that Krazy/Regfan can't be the scumteam?

[Abelcain]

@Regfan: I still haven't ruled out the possibility that you and Krazy are scum together. That would exclude pod. I want to make sure the rest of us are agreeing to take out pod before voting for him, because if I voted for pod you could have hammered and won. I'm pretty confident that the scum are within the trifecta of you, pod, and Krazy but I'm not so confident in podscum that I'm willing to risk the game. It looks to me like you complaining about my lack of a vote is an attempt to throw a little extra suspicion on me if there is a tomorrow.

Also, it's entirely possible that they're bussing each other. It would be absolutely

impossible

for pod's scumpartner to avoid bussing him today, after that horrendous hammer yesterday. A little discussion during the night could help determine that it would be unlikely for pod to also try bussing his partner too, so they might decide to employ that play. Alternatively, pod might just be playing a stupid move by bussing his partner, god knows his quickhammer yesterday was scummy enough.

[Abelcain]

Huh. You're right, Krazy.

Vote: pod person

Also just calling attention to the fact that Krazy unvoted pod when we determined that either he or pod had to be scum.

[Abelcain]

Krazy, it can't be Regfan + Umbrage, or else they would've hammered back when you still had your vote on pod (or even later, isn't his vote still on you too?).

[Abelcain]

And yes, I know my vote was a hammer. Doesn't mean we can't discuss until the lynch scene.

[Abelcain]

Also just calling attention to the fact that Krazy unvoted pod when we determined that either he or pod had to be scum.

I want to go into this a bit more. Regfan mentions a lot of WIFOMy "but Krazy wouldn't have unvoted pod because a bus would give him town cred, so he must be town." The problem is that he unvoted

after

we said that either he or pod had to be scum (Umbrage's post #768 defines this, and Krazy unvotes in #771). If he's town, he wants to lynch pod because he would

know

he's scum. There's no other way. If he's scum, then he wants to lynch pod if pod's town for a win, and he wants to lynch pod if pod's scum for town credit. Is there any motive for him to unvote after it is stated that either he or pod has to be scum? Certainly not if he's town.

[Abelcain]

Did Krazy fall into a sugar bowl or something? He's bouncing off the walls in this topic.

Krazy, could you take a break from "LOL SCUM" and explain why you unvoted pod person AFTER it was determined that one of you had to be scum?

[Abelcain]

Umbrage posted that either Krazy or pod had to be scum in post #768. Krazy unvoted in #771. Nice deflection attempt, Krazy. If only I hadn't pointed that out beforehand too.

[Abelcain]

Heheh. Son of a

bitch

.

Umbrage,

this is just a question for my peace of mind, because of how sure this made me think you were town. Did you really think that my no-lynch plan was scummier than a lynch that day? Were you arguing against it because you realized it was a better plan, or because you actually thought it was scummy and arguing against it would score you town points? If you were town, would you have analyzed my idea more instead of (what looked like from my point of view) throwing a tantrum about it?

Regfan,

I noticed that we had similar playstyles too, more than once. (One thing that freaked me out was when we both posted the exact same sentence to declare that we had no counterclaims at the beginning of D3.) You were fun to play with.

Krazy

and

Ythan,

please don't play games together anymore. Your personal problems cause a lot of distractions, regardless of your alignments. I feel like you both could've played a lot better if you weren't dealing with each other so much.

Xtoxm

and

pod person,

just... ugh. Terrible play on both of your parts.

ConSpiracy,

I once again bow in deference to your vig play.

implosion,

you were a great mod. Thanks for running a setup like this.

Everyone,

seriously a good game. Yeah, play may have sucked in multiple directions from just about everyone, but it was still fun and I think that's what really counts in the end. I'd like to play with most of you again, if we ever run into each other.



I really wish I was mafia or a PR in this game... I have yet to be a non-VT...