Open 9 - Basic Twelve Player (Game Over!) - before 400

[Ripley]

Vote: Battle Mage

I agree about the bad logic, but also there was something about this, the very first words of the first post of the day:

lol with a doctor called Sage, its hardly surprising that the Mafia got him lol.

I can just about see Battle Mage if he was scum saying to the others "hey, wouldn't it be funny if the doctor was Sage" and them agreeing, what the hell, may as well go for it, and then BM being unable to resist this post, a kind of coded "omg guys it worked how cool is that???"

[Ripley]

I'm happy with my vote on Battle Mage at present. I think he's playing the newbie card a bit too vigorously and not entirely convincingly. This, for example:

wow i gotta say im quite surprised that everyone seems to think i-in my first Mafia Game here, is actually a baddie. Unfortunately i am not a Mafia, nor do i have any interesting role. I am a townie.

SV pops in now because she forgot to add this game on watch list.

Why the heck did you claim on page 2?

You guys are like the pro's, so ur gonna have to teach me as i go along. i mean, what do u mean by 'claiming'?

I just don't buy this not understanding what claim means. It's not as if an impersonal discussion on claiming theory had just started, spectrumvoid is quite clearly referring to something Battle Mage himself has just done, and as if that weren't clear enough she

actually quotes the claim

.

There's also the whole "I know absolutely nothing" tone of the post quoted above, which sounds completely false when contrasted with this:

Your logic however IS flawed, because u dont seem to realise that not everyone in the Mafia Game tells the truth.
...
Unvote, Vote SpectrumVoid
Making simple mistakes, and being a general jerk=scum

.. where he's telling a much more experienced player they don't know the basics of the game and he does. The whole switch in tone is like he's forgotten to stick to an act he was putting on.

Then there's this:

u dont seem to realise that not everyone in the Mafia Game tells the truth. I have claimed i am a townie, but the Mafia doesnt know if that is true. I could just be saving my arse from a lynching.

You seem to be conceding here that you lie even when protown, in which case why should we believe anything at all that you say?

[Ripley]

Seriously guys, am I the only one who thinks the things I pointed out in post 79 scummy?

If you mean this:

I see no retraction from him at all.

I took Lowell's reference to retraction to mean that BM backpedaled on his claim. Which he did, saying he might have been lying.

What other things did you think you pointed out in that post? I only see this:

There was something else that I saw in that post also that I may hit upon later.

You seem to want people to comment - maybe they'd be more inclined to respond if you said what it was that you saw, rather than dropping hints like this?

[Ripley]

However, I am looking at SpectrumVoid. His only posts have been attacking Battle Mage, who I think is a relatively low target. He wants to lynch now, and quite frankly, I'm strongly getting scum vibes from him. My suspicion is that his strategy is to push for BMs lynch early on

This is so wrong. spectrumvoid wasn't even voting for BattleMage when you made this post. She had unvoted him 2 RL days earlier, saying "I don't think he's scum, more like a player who needs time to learn. "

Twito: is this the behavior you expected from Masterchief when you said he would be useless? We've had one early vote and since then nothing at all. I think somebody also said he claimed Mafia in another game where he was pro town? If he's really not going to make any useful contribution maybe we should consider lynching him. Maybe he's scum. If not, he's more or less guaranteed not to be nightkilled, scum never kill off useless people, so unless we lynch him we're stuck with him forever. And it'll be more and more of a pain having someone around who isn't helping, when there are fewer of us.

[Ripley]

I agree with Battle Mage, if ShadowLurker has found such a strong town tell in AndrewS's posts I'd like to know what it was.

AndrewS, I wish you hadn't thought it necessary to claim... the more people that do this, the easier it becomes for scum to pick out the cop. I don't think claiming townie is likely to deter voters anyway, and you got your unvotes for your other arguments.

[Ripley]

And it's 4 people he's cleared, not 3, because in addition to these latest 3 (AndrewS, Akbar, ShadowLurker) his earlier posts are all about how Battle Mage is innocent.

[Ripley]

Are you

still

rereading, IH? I'm all in favor of being thorough, but a week to read a 9 page thread?

[Ripley]

It's hard to say anything about a player who's claimed illness without sounding callous and brutal, but I have seen IH around and posting elsewhere so it's reasonable to assume he's not

seriously

ill. And it does start to look like this is one thread he's avoiding. There's been nothing you could call content from him for ten days now, and with quite a lot of people suspicious of him it's getting harder to accept excuses for why he's not been here defending himself.

[Ripley]

At this stage I still think Battle Mage is the best lynch. Here are some reasons why.

1. He has been quite vocal about other players, and other players about him, so we would learn a good deal from his lynch.

2. Lynching Battle Mage compensates for the damage he caused when he claimed townie (on only 3 votes). With only one power role remaining we want to do all we can to protect our cop, and we can help do that by lynching one of the two claimed townies. Of the two I prefer Battle Mage - he just has seemed scummier than AndrewS. I thought ShadowLurker's town tell on AndrewS had some value (though certainly not enough to clear AndrewS altogther).

3. Continuing the day would presumably lead to more bandwagons and more claims. By lynching at this stage we avoid any more townie claims and. most importantly, avoid outing the cop. This is really an argument for a prompt lynch rather than a lynch of BM specifically, but since he's my preferred candidate it is also by extension an argument for lynching him.

4. The other reasons I had for suspecting him (overplaying and inconsistently playing the newbie card, admitting he lies when protown) are already set out in post 77 so I won't repeat them here.

5. I've never understood this, which was one of the first few posts of the game, and before Masterchief had even posted:

because Lowell seems happy to go for Masterchief, i can assume he is not Mafia.
Therefore i change my vote to Lowell, in an attempt to save a citizen.

I just did a reread and this post is mentioned by several people during the game:

This bad logic. But I think I got confused with the fact that I thought, he said Lowell is not scum, and he had no reason for Lowell not being mafia, when he only posted one thing. Then he votes Lowell. Which got my confused. I think I got the meaning wrong.

On a side-not here, I think the confusion here is genuine. BM says in the quote that he 'can assume HE is not mafia.' Then he votes lowell. The confusion was due to poor grammar. Which HE? Lowell or MC? It's BM's fault here for not clarifying what he meant.)

my vote on Battle Mage was because his logic for voting Lowell was faulty. "X votes for Y, I'm convinced Y is town, therefore X is scum" is bad logic. Furthermore, I'm (still) not sure how BM could be certain of MC's innocence when at that point he hadn't even posted yet.

... but as far as I can see Battle Mage has managed to avoid the topic altogether. In fact he responds to Fircoal's post (quoted above in full) as if Fircoal had said the bad logic was claiming early, and thereby completely avoids the issue Fircoal was actually talking about:

well i dont see how 'claiming' early on is bad logic.

when it is crystal clear Fircoal said nothing of the sort. spectrumvoid picks this up and accuses him of misrepresentation but Battle Mage dances right off topic again with a load of non sequiturs. As for TCS's comment, which comes some time after the others, BM simply ignores it.

So I think there is some evidence that the original remark was a slip and that Battle Mage subsequently diverted attention away from it. At any rate, this is a better case than I can find against any other player.

[Ripley]

By page 10, and after 3 weeks, and with conversation having dried up, I disagree that lynching would be a "fast lynch" by any definition of the word "fast". If posting hadn't picked up we'd probably have been looking at a deadline soon anyway.

Yes, I do think days can be stretched out too long and are sometimes driven to that by scum who are amassing more and more information as a result of roleclaims and people going into greater detail about who they find most suspicious. This is all very useful for scum when deciding on nightkills, and there are usually a few townies who can be relied on to parrot cry "quick lynch bad, slow lynch good!", without stopping to consider whether it actually

is

a quick lynch any more, or whether the potential gains of deliberately prolonging the day outweigh the potential risks. I think this is a case where the potential risks should at least be taken into consideration.

And it's very noticeable how nobody has bothered to discuss any of the points raised in my post, and there are plenty. It's so much more effortless to chant "quick lynch bad, Ripley bad!", isn't it? You can do it without thinking at all! Why take the trouble to think, when there's a convenient parrot cry available?

Anyone who wanted to keep things going today was perfectly free to read back over the thread, find something suspicious, post an analysis. Nobody did. The hypocrisy in particular of Fircoal is amazing. He posts nothing for a week, and then when called on it says he has nothing to contribute. His only two posts in the 9 days prior to that week were single sentence placeholders that added nothing of any use whatsoever. If you want the day to continue so badly, Fircoal, put some work into the game. Like I did.

[Ripley]

spectrumvoid has in her post attempted to make it seem that I tried to get IH lynched and when that failed turned my attention to Battle Mage.

There's so much wrong with this it's hard to know where to start. I made one brief post drawing attention to the fact that IH, despite repeated assurances that he was "rereading", had posted no content for about ten days despite posting elsewhere. This is the entirety of what spectrumvoid would have you believe is my campaign for IH's lynch. A campaign which didn't even include voting for him despite his being the voteleader (on 4 votes for a while, and now on 5...)

And since IH has been at lynch -2 for some time and still not lynched, he could be going after BM instead, since BM is the next best candidate we were discussing

spectrumvoid completely distorts matters by trying to insinuate that I switched attention to the "next best candidate", when actually I was voting BM all along. I have never changed my vote. By your logic the "next best candidate" was actually

yourself

, spectrumvoid, on 2 votes along with BM. By switching my vote to you I would have bumped you up to 3, clearly a better move if I were dead set on getting the easiest person possible lynched, as you seem to be implying.

And by the way, newbie 280 a 7 player game hit 20+ pages for day 1. I don't see why a lynch at page 10 with more players isn't considered a quick lynch

This is the most awful piece of logic I've seen in a while, using a single example of an unusually long Day 1 in another game as evidence that a lynch now, in this particular game, would be a "quick lynch". I could point to a game where they lynched on Page 2 and argue the precise opposite. I won't do so because it would be insulting to people's intelligence.

The main reasons I get from his wanting a quick-lynch is

I'd also argue that pushing for a quick-lynch at this point deprives us of that info.

I object strongly to your characterizing of my arguments as "pushing for a quick lynch". As already stated, I consider the logic you use to define this as a 'quick lynch' spectacularly wrong. All your arguments that depend on that are therefore invalid.

And why does he seem so sure that we'll out a cop?

Well, if we keep on bandwagoning people and they keep on claiming, at some point we're going to have to actually lynch a claimed townie or out the cop.

I'd rather push for a claim from a scummy person and start deciding whether that claim is true. That gives us way more info.

This is a game with a known setup. The only claims you're going to get are townie or cop, almost everybody will be claiming townie, and every genuine townie claim helps the scum identify the cop. You say we can "start deciding whether a claim is true" as if we're likely to get some kind of detailed roleclaim that can be examined in context. When in fact all we're likely to get is "townie". "Deciding whether that claim is true" amounts in that case to no more than deciding whether a person is scummy or not. If you thought a person sufficiently scummy to push for a claim, how would you "evaluate" a claim of townie from that person? It's not as if they're likely to claim Mafia.

[Ripley]

The scumgroup of the day is AndrewS and Lowell.

Votes on either would be appreciated.

Is that the same AndrewS as this:

I'm fairly certain AndrewS is town by the way. All votes should be off him, look over his posts in isolation, he dropped an extremely strong town tell.

?

Well, if you really want, I can give you links to around 75 games or so that I've read/played in.

Please, please don't. Ever.

[Ripley]

Very interesting. But what were the post #'s for those posts.

1. 262

2. 145

[Ripley]

I read through the game a couple of days ago and I remember thinking IH had a point, there wasn't much of a concrete case against him considering the level of suspicion there has seemed to be in the second half of the game or thereabouts. TCS claims to have found a scum tell but doesn't say what it is, giving IH nothing to defend himself against. I wouldn't be

surprised

if IH were scum. But then I can say that about almost all of you. IH would improve my own opinion of him if he spent less time grumbling about how there's no case against him, and more time analysing the game or putting together a lucid case against somebody else.

I think ShadowLurker has been evasive and unhelpful, things that always make me deeply suspicious. There was no suspicion of IH at all until post 88, where ShadowLurker FOSes him with no comment. More than one person asks him to explain the FOS, he refuses. He then upgrades the FOS to a vote, again with no explanation. This all happens well before anyone else takes an interest in IH, as does this, post 135:

So our three scum are AndrewS, IH, and TCS, which one of them should we lynch first?

A scum group of 3 now, but - of course - still no explanation. Then later in the game there is much more interest in IH, who reaches 5 votes at one point, and what does ShadowLurker do? He unvotes IH and votes Lowell instead, announcing:

The scumgroup of the day is AndrewS and Lowell.

We are - naturally - given no reason for IH being dropped, any more than we were for his being on the list in the first place.

TCS has already picked up on this:

Sorry for the triple... I want you to explain

1) Why IH was scummy and then stopped being so in your eyes, not hammering him, and not even mentioning his wagon in your posts.

The reply:

I wanted to see a reaction, he had been lurking. While he is still lurking, I didn't really find anything unsual to warrant him being lynched.

This is really unconvincing. The original vote came long before there was any indication that IH was lurking.

Then there's the other issue addressed by TCS in the same post to ShadowLurker: the changes of mind about AndrewS, who he first declares to be scum, then all but cleared by a townie tell (he does eventually explain the tell, pretty much the only thing he's ever answered) and finally scum again.

2) Why Andrews had a "huge town tell" that made you "almost certain" of his innocence, but is now part of the scumgroup.

and the reply:

Plz read the preceding page.

Quite deliberately unhelpful. ShadowLurker has evaded answering any awkward question put to him, or even neutral questions such as asking him the reasons for a FOS or a vote.

But my vote stays on Battle Mage as long as he continues to avoid explaining exactly what he meant by post 11. This has been raised at least 4 times now by different players, and he continues to ignore it every time, or pretends not to understand.

[Ripley]

Neither IH nor Akbar is screaming out "scum" to me, but these are the only candidates available, and it happens that all the people I suspect most, with the exception of Fircoal (who I am almost certain will join them), are voting for the same person, so I can only do the opposite:

Unvote: Vote IH

[Ripley]

I said when I voted IH that all the people I suspected most were on the other wagon except Fircoal, who I expected to join them (and he did). So with IH turning out scum it won't be any surprise that my suspects remain unchanged: Battle Mage, ShadowLurker, Twito, Fircoal.

I had plenty to say about

Battle Mage

yesterday and I haven't changed my mind. There seems to be a general feeling that his behaviour is down to stupidity rather than scumminess (as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive). I'm not so sure. He did all he could to get IH off the hook yesterday, and before you all start shouting "but a scum would never defend a scum buddy so openly" - remember, we're talking about Battle Mage here. You already decided he isn't Einstein, and he's already learned he can get away with almost anything just by acting so scummy that people simply come to the conclusion:"far too scummy to be scum".

I said what I thought about

ShadowLurker

yesterday as well. I see his inconsistencies have continued today, he's now denying he ever thought AndrewS was scum despite having posted that he did, and has in addition now done a turnaround on Lowell. I'll see what he has to say in response to TCS's Post 397 but he's looking like a really strong candidate for my vote.

Fircoal

tried desperately to paint me as scummy towards the end of yesterday (posts 331, 333, 335). His case was so pathetically puny, so laughably shallow, so devoid of even an atom of a reasonable argument, that I took the view that, rather than responding, it would be far more instructive to see if anybody pretended to be swept along by his puling meaningless squeaks. And look! in jumps

Twito

, post 334, with a post so terrible it could almost have been written by Fircoal himself.

In this situation I find Twito the more culpable. Fircoal did have some kind of an excuse; he'd already openly picked me as scum, and to move back from that position would mean having to admit he was wrong. Clearly this is something he cannot bear to do; once's he believes he's found scum, he's not going to let little things like evidence get in his way. There are issues of pride here. Twito however has no such excuse.

Oh, and Twito and Battle Mage demanding a roleclaim from Akbar does absolutely nothing to improve my opinion of them.

It is well known that town does not benefit from roleclaiming. The only way your getting a claim out of me is if these 3 individuals think it’s a good idea.

I don't think it's a good idea.

Finally a few thoughts about

spectrumvoid

, so very conveniently absent at the lynching hour, though the deadline was extended by a day to allow her time to return from her weekend off and vote. The deadline was Tuesday the 20th, 11 pm GMT. spectrumvoid posted in 5 other threads on Tuesday the 20th, well before the deadline. She therefore omitted this one through choice, not force of circumstance. Note also that immediately before she left she was voting Akbar.

If spectrumvoid is scum, I can see how she would have been keen to avoid the game until the deadline was safely passed. A vote on IH would almost certainly have cost nothing (he was about to be lynched anyway) but how could she account for the switch from Akbar without drawing suspicion? A vote on Akbar, meanwhile, would cast her as the lynching voter on a townie (assuming Akbar to be town). Much better to keep well away. Scum are the people who find themselves in dilemmas like this at crunch time because they have so much knowledge.

Not voting yet, too many suspects.

[Ripley]

No, I'd unvoted Akbar in post 321.

Sorry, I should have said "immediately before she

unvoted and

left she was voting Akbar". I hope it's clear from the rest of my post that I was aware you had unvoted.

I did not post in around 3 other games that were also at deadline.

I don't think the fact of a game being deadlined is enough to make it a valid comparison with this one. It's only comparable if the deadline was that same day and the voting was such that your vote would be crucial. No matter how many other games you're in, I'd have expected you to be aware of the situation in this one and the importance of your vote. I simply can't believe you wouldn't have looked at the thread. It's just human nature that after returning from a few days' absence you'd look at a game so close to deadline, to see if there was a lynch. Even if you believed the deadline had passed, you'd definitely have looked to see what happened, and once you'd looked you couldn't avoid seeing the actual situation.

[Ripley]

Well you''ll know from my previous posts I wouldn't have any problem voting ShadowLurker.

Of my other suspects, I'm less suspicious of Fircoal, though, as somebody else said, this is more due to the shady characters on his bandwagon than an unexpected exhibition of fine pro town play from Fircoal himself. Also IH did vote him at one point of Day 1, though it wasn't a vote likely to put him in any danger.

spectrumvoid's the one I've become

more

suspicious of. I didn't like how she avoided the thread at deadline. Is there a difficulty in the fact that she and IH voted each other yesterday? Maybe not, for notice how fast SV was to unvote IH when he reached lynch -1. ShadowLurker had earlier done just the same thing - bailed off the IH wagon as soon as it got to lynch -1, and Akbar has already presented a sound case for why his (SL's) change of vote to Battle Mage was illligocal.

As for Battle Mage - seemed like I was waging a mostly solitary campaign against him all of Day 1. Let's hear what he has to say to Akbar's post. It is noticeable, as Akbar points out, how similarly Battle Mage is speaking about the SL wagon as he did the IH wagon. It does make a vote on ShadowLurker look strangely attractive at this point. (Though, of course, maybe that's what we're

supposed

to think...)

[Ripley]

Just posting to say I'm not counterclaiming cop.

[Ripley]

The silence of Twito and Fircoal is telling, I think. Both have posted in another thread since the claim.

Anyway, like Akbar I'm willing to wait and hear what they have to say before voting, though I'm almost certain to be voting for one or the other. Both were on my list of 5 suspects at the start of the day, though Fircoal had moved down a bit, and spectrumvoid's claim conveniently clears the other 3.

[Ripley]

Twito is my first choice. He's now at lynch -1. I'll vote for him later today if he hasn't posted anything to sway me in the meantime.

[Ripley]

Okay. I think it's reasonable to assume if Twito was busy working on a defense he'd have posted to say so before now.

Vote: Twito

[Ripley]

Well, I've been very wrong indeed about this game. I thought Twito was acting scummy as hell.

Four of my five suspects are cleared - so at least one of the people I thought were clear must be scum. And either Akbar is scum, in which case it ceases to matter who was on which wagon Day 1, or else at least 1 scum voted for their scum buddy IH rather than the innocent Akbar.

I'll have to take the time for a proper read through. At this stage I trust Lowell the most, though I don't have the greatest faith in my judgment right now...

[Ripley]

I was still reading back through the game when SL's two votes abruptly ended the day. Twito and Fircoal had seemed so likely to be the outstanding scum, I was still recalibrating. This post by IH made me think a bit:

Twito... if you think Fircoal is scummy for Ripley's reasoning.... why aren't you voting Ripley? If that's why you're voting Fircoal, shouldn't Ripley be your manin vote, and watch Fircoal?

IGMEOY:Twito

Would IH really try and move a vote off a scum buddy so openly? Well, it turned out he did, so that was that.

I was also looking at TCS, especially in view of this from Akbar:

TCS could be scum as well. He tried to remove his vote off IH when he got close before I pointed it out to him.

I'd forgotten about this, so I went back and reread, half expecting to find that TCS's vote on IH had been made at a time of low danger or without any reasoning, but it didn't really seem that way. He places a third vote on IH (post 200) shortly after the second vote, saying that the wagon needs steam. And he did previously express his suspicion of IH in post 175, saying he was posting like "lazy scum" and failing to follow up on his alleged suspicions of TCS and Fircoal. He doesn't vote IH then, though, waiting till he's reached two votes. Why? Did he spot something else in the meantime? He says later (post 287):

I have something which I consider to be a scumtell, but I am not making the mistake of giving it away. Suffice it to say that if one was to look at your posts in isolation, one would find something that gives it away.

but of course unless TCS tells us what the scum tell was we have no way of knowing for sure that this is true. And he does indeed move his vote to SL later, though moves it straight back when called on it.

Lowell and Akbar add fourth and fifth votes on IH shortly after TCS's third vote. Which really gives me a problem singling anybody out as scum.

Akbar is town because I don't think we could have run up two scum day 1.

Really? Why? Because it's against the odds (even things against the odds happen sooner or later)? Because the scum would always be able to throw together a decent alternative? There's no evidence of IH and Fircoal managing to do this. I don't think they were ever actually voting the same person at the same time. And towards the end of Day 1 (post 317) TCS thought they could be scum together:

Of course, Akbar's argument against the IH lynch, especially his last post, is also WIFOM-tastic. So it's quite possible that he's scum with IH as well.

At this stage IH was on 4 votes and Akbar 3, with the deadline about 3 days away; it really looked like these were the only 2 candidates, and yet at that stage TCS thought both could be scum. So what's changed his mind?

To me, a more convincing argument against Akbar being scum is Fircoal's behaviour at deadline. He wouldn't care which was lynched, but he chose to vote Akbar rather than place what would have been a lynching vote on IH. IH was going to be lynched at deadline anyway, but Fircoal would have looked much better the next day when IH turned out scum. The weakness in this argument is that Fircoal had lately been saying he was suspicious of Akbar. Several times towards the end of Day 1 he mentions me, Lowell and Akbar as likely scum. So maybe he couldn't vote IH without it looking phoney.

One of you has to be scum, dammit. I haven't really looked at Lowell yet, mostly because he was the one I thought most innocent, but I'll do so in my next post.

[Ripley]

Yay town! And thank you guys for saving me from hours of rereading for the second day in a row.

(waits for Fircoal to arrive and blame TCS and IH...)

[Ripley]

She also stated that Ripley deserved an award if he was scum.

I was really enjoying that sentence till I got to the last four words.

I wasn't reading as closely as most players I'd imagine, so I wasn't entirely clear what the case against IH was, though it seemed to work well enough.

I wasn't entirely clear either. In fact I'm not sure I had any idea at all. I was fairly consistently clueless in this game. I stumbled into lynching the right person, IH, Day 1 because I suspected everyone else who was on the other wagon at the time (SL, BM, Twito). All three of them turned out to be town.