Newbie 769 - Game Over

[Artem]

Vote: Slaine Hayes

for stealing the second IC spot.

[Artem]

Vote: Hero764

for having a questionable name.

Why is it any more questionable than yours?

[Artem]

@Toledo: Gotcha.

Nope. I know you have no legitimate concern to vote me at this point. Wheras if I have put someone else at L-3 they might've thought I suspected them or something.

Why would somebody think that you suspect them? If Tenchi has no legitimate concern to vote you, do you have a legitimate concern to vote somebody?

[Artem]

@Hero: Putting a second vote on somebody is not dangerous at this point. So, you being overly careful naturally raises questions about the underlying motivation.

[Artem]

So will it make you feel better if I put a second vote on someone?

I never said it was dangerous, just that it wasn't necessary.

I never said you said it was dangerous.

You said you didn't want to "threaten" anyone. Now you're wanting to do something just to make another player feel better.

Why are you so cautious about not stepping on anybody's toes?

(Too early to say anything with certainty, but one theory is that you're mafia and don't want to draw anybody's votes/attention.)

[Artem]

It's just like the ICs to hate new players.

If a player votes you, it doesn't mean they hate you, especially if the vote is for a good reason. Thus, far you've changed your vote three times, i.e. you were jumpy with your voting.

First, you voted for no lynch, which is bad for town. (See below for the explanation.)

Second, you voted for an inactive player, which is also bad, because 1) inactive players have no chance of defending themselves and 2) should really be replaced, not lynched.

Now you're voting for Hero because there's a "general opinion that he's a mobster". Several people found Hero's behavior odd, but I was the only one to suggest that there may be mafia motivation behind it and even then, I stated that it's too early to know anything with certainty.

So, yes, you are being jumpy with your voting and Slain voted for you for that.

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@Hero: On mafiascum, you can expect being overly cautious to draw attention.

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But I'd be willing to believe he's just a townie who wants to save as many townies as possible.

Not sure where you're getting this vibe from.

Actually it's a different type of beginning here than I'm used to. Instead of random vote-phase, we'd just do some boring speculation about role setups/chances and possible strategy.

First vote, be it random or not, would be immediately judged by others as something like "either the voter or the one who voted is scum". It needs a bit of adjusting.

The newbie setup (or rather four setups, one of which is chosen randomly) is pretty simple. As such, probabilities and theories don't change, so there's no sense in spending valuable time (remember, we're on a 3 week deadline) on them. Random votes get the ball rolling on discussion, as you've already seen.

I have been told that no lynching is bad, unless it figures into a larger strategy(what type? I have no idea).

Here's an explanation. With 2 mafia alive, we have 3 opportunities to lynch one of them (assuming no successful doc protections, if there is a doc):

Opportunity 1 - Day 1 - 7 pro-town players, 2 mafia.
Opportunity 2 - Day 2 - 5 pro-town players, 2 mafia.
Opportunity 3 - Day 3 - 3 pro-town players, 2 mafia. If there's a mislynch, town loses.

If we choose a no-lynch play on Day 1, the number of opportunities drops down to 2:

Day 1 - no lynch
Opportunity 1 - Day 2 - 6 pro-town players, 2 mafia.
Opportunity 2 - Day 3 - 4 pro-town players, 2 mafia. If there's a mislynch, town loses.

However, here's a scenario, where a no-lynch makes sense. Suppose the game is down to 3 townies and 1 mafia. If there's a mislynch, the town loses. If the town chooses to not lynch, the mafia makes a night kill and the games continues for one more day (with 2 townies and 1 mafia). The advantage is that each townie now only has to consider 2 other players, instead of 3, thereby increasing the chances of correctly finding the last mafia.

A simple rule of thumb: no lynch is the optimal play if there's an even number of players in a LyLo -- lynch (correctly) or lose -- situation.

[Artem]

As you can see, an even number of townies is better than an odd number of townies.

It's not an issue of even vs. odd. A bigger number of townies is always better because it gives more flexibility in lynching. However, in LyLo, an odd number (i.e., there's exactly one more townie than there are mafia) is better because each townie has to consider fewer players.

[Artem]

@Artem, I'd think he figured out that if he is a townie, his power is his vote, therefore he should use it as much as possible. I'm thinking he's not all too experienced, I want his answer to the questions so I can make my own decision on that. The more I read, the more sure it seems he would be an inexperienced mafia, so I'd be more than happy if I got more material from him.

This is a newbie game, so I don't expect the new players to be experienced, which is why I explained why his votes are anti-town and why Slaine's vote on him is not hatred-driven.

I would like to see more content from Slaine.

[Artem]

Yes, I found him suspicious mainly because he seemed to act in a very odd way for a townie. I did not want to vote for him because I was iffy on whether it's time to random vote still or not, exactly because all votes on him haven't been random. I do not find him vote worthy yet because I read his actions more like inexperienced town rather than mafia. Depending on the answer to the questions by Tenchi, I will either vote or not vote for him.

I don't find any votes on him suspicious. In the opinion of those who have already voted for him, the current evidence is enough. It's just that I'm not that easily convinced.

I think we need to pursue this a little more. I find this to be a strange combination of a desire to randomly vote and an FoS on CJ.

You say that you randomly picked a target for your random vote and when that target ended up being somebody already with votes, you FoSd instead. Then you say that FoS was due to your suspicion of CJ. My question is:

Which is it? Are you FoSing CJ because that's what your random vote target was OR are you FoSing CJ because you suspect him? If it's the second one, then why do you feel the need to vote randomly when you find somebody suspicious?

[Artem]

I want CJMiller to answer my questions.

Ditto.

[Artem]

IC duties:

I "randomly voted" CJMiller before reading the thread, then I read through what had been posted earlier. So I changed my vote to FoS because he was my random vote target, and he had already votes on him which weren't exactly random. I only suspect him of being newbie atm, before he posts more I'm saying he's like 50-50 scum.

Why not read the thread first, then decide if there's even a need to vote randomly?

I specifically held off from voting him randomly because of other votes on him. A bit offtopic question, is there some recommended way of randomly voting? Like, pick a random target from the list, check he hasn't gotten votes yet, if he has been voted already then find someone else?

If there are already votes that may "prevent" you from voting randomly, maybe it's time to analyze the votes rather than add new ones?

what's the difference of being noob and noob scum. I had trouble with this last Newbie game I had. And I think I'm having the same trouble right now. Too many newbie mistakes being done, the question is, if it is a tell of anything.

It really depends on the mistake, but the best question to ask is probably "Can this mistake be made without the knowledge of everybody's alignment/game setup?". For example, a common scum slip is to inadvertently reveal something about the setup (e.g., there's a role-blocker.) Scum have more knowledge about the game, so they will sometimes "leak" that knowledge, but in general you have to decide yourself what is and is not a scum-tell. It will come with experience.

That comment was directed at Hero and not you. He had said something along the lines of us both finding fault with you. I'm confused as to what you mean by WIFOM, I'm not at all familiar with that acronym.

WIFOM stands for Wine In Front Of Me and is a reference to the Princess Bride scene where the protagonist presents a villain with two cups of wine and the latter gets himself confused with infinite recursion. A classic WIFOM argument is as follows: "Mafia would not do what I did. Therefore, I'm not Mafia", because the counter-argument is "You knew that mafia would not do that, so you did it to make the previous argument. That makes you mafia", which can be countered by infinitely recursive counter-arguments.

Hockey, let me know if this doesn't make sense and I'll explain it in more detail.

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Very good discussion so far. I find most of the active posters to be playing very well: asking questions of each other, finding logical fallacies in each other's arguments, etc.

Personally, I'm suspicious of three players at this point:
-CJMiller, whose defense I'm not happy with and who's been laying low ever since the discussion of Feeres picked up.
-Slaine, who I suspect is lurking. Yes, I know that he's not able to make big posts until the weekend, but that's just the right excuse a mafia would use for lurking. His two-cents posts have not been enough to counter his lack of posting thus far. I'm keeping my vote here for now.
-Feeres, who I suspect less than the two above, but have some questions/concerns for:

Yes, I can't anymore prove that I got CJ as my random result or that I rolled the dice before reading the thread. Why would I read the thread first, I thought that it's a random vote so just let it be random with no bias from other posters whatsoever. I mentioned it because I felt like it. Is there something scummy about that?

Yes. Why do you want your vote to be completely unbiased? Random voting is supposed to generate discussion. If it's completely unbiased, it tells us nothing except for the fact that you like unbiased random votes. I find this suspicious because it feels that you a) don't want town to have information and b) don't want to draw attention.

Ok, I'll try to explain where I think there was WIFOM. I originally thought nobody had commented on him voting for me so shortly after kikuchiyo had voted for me as well. I saw him stating that he wasn't ganging up on me as WIFOM for the following reason: He thought somebody in future would say something about his ganging up on me being suspicious. Therefore he would himself bring up the ganging up on me. From this would follow the ad infinitum-reasoning that:
1. He is possibly (claims not) ganging up on me, therefore he is doing something scummy
2. He brought it up himself, therefore he isn't doing something scummy

Until he makes an argument that "mafia would not gang up on players", it's not WIFOM.

Both people that are "ganging up" on you are using logically sound questions and arguments. Their votes on you are not scummy and well justified (even if you disagree with them). I don't buy the theory that one or both have anticipating somebody calling them out on ganging up.

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Toledo88 needs to post something other than addendums to my IC points. While I don't find the player suspicious right now, I would say that I haven't seen much scum-hunting from them.