Mini Normal 2170: Stuff I’m Listening To [Game Over]

[the worst]

just got to work so this is an egopost
ppl please leave me notes on what's good because i'm not likely to read 120 pages

[the worst]

why do you think i'm not town?

[the worst]

bork bork thanks for talking around me

[the worst]

this is gonna be one of those games where y'all scumbags are gonna keep pushing your miselims without even giving me two glances unless i read the game or start screaming isn't it

[the worst]

OH sick that makes my life a bunch easier

are gammo/blitzo the only ones in the hood?
was there no kill n4/do we have an explanation for that?
is bulge town?

[the worst]

worstyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

ya im town. kasu should also be town unless scum no-killed which is a rather silly theory.

why is scum nokill any more silly a theory than usual?

I think your slot is pretty much confirmed to be scum mechanically from my pov so there's that.

umlaut has a different opinion on that so unless you're scum we might have a problem.

but I am very happy to play with you.

this makes me happy too though <:

[the worst]

#3003 explicitly doesn't look like you're trying to get thru to outworld

[the worst]

why is scum nokill any more silly a theory than usual?

where was the followup? what was the point? why not kill the ic?

i mean
no kill makes a tonne of sense if they're gambiting today

[the worst]

why is scum nokill any more silly a theory than usual?

where was the followup? what was the point? why not kill the ic?

i mean
no kill makes a tonne of sense if they're gambiting today

why are you being all subtle here lmao
obviously yes my claim could be that. and obviously im answering this question fmpov, which is what you were trying to understand in the first place.

i'm kinda surprised as either alignment you're playing hard this phase but just utterly not acknowledging the value of a scum gambit
i appreciate you're pushing your perspective but this feels disingenuous

[the worst]

shea is inside my brain

[the worst]

i'm not saying you should be acknowledging another gambit and i'm not ~implying~ anything? i'm being completely explicit - the way you dismissed a nokill carte blanche as SILLINESS felt disingenous.

[the worst]

half of me wants to take this phase and press people for actual solves
the other half realises that's a really bad idea just before a no elim and we probably should be no eliming

[the worst]

that's why you pretend to tap out, to subvert expectations~~ :3

[the worst]

just got to work so this is an egopost
ppl please leave me notes on what's good because i'm not likely to read 120 pages

Pretty much you’re working from a blank slate imo, since NM did shit all
So if you can at least put in some leg work I am willing to trust you (though NM wasn’t the key figure in my PoE anyway)

i trust my ability to obvtown fairly quickly usually i am just slightly Nervous because we appear to be in XyLo

[the worst]

i'm not gonna get reading done today and given i feel like half the game wants to murder me i don't think i can lean on you all for catchup help.
VOTE: unyeet

[the worst]

I think I know what's going to happen tonight and it's going to infuriate me to no end.

if i was scum i'd shoot you just to make this post funny

[the worst]

pending rereading? i could be talked into that

[the worst]

don't snapvote don't snapvote don't snapvote don't snapvote don't snapvote don't snapvote

[the worst]

VOTE: bulllllllllllggggggggggggggg.......................be strong duck

[the worst]

ok bulgey let's hear why you're alive and the ic isn't i'm so keen for this

[the worst]

i'm wondering if it's weird that i kinda believe you

pedit: pooky humour me - why would bulge actually shoot outworlder rather than consolidate their own claim there?

pedit2: sorry - i thought i was close enough to the "transparent shitpost" spectrum that it wouldn't count
UNVOTE: for posterity

[the worst]

is it silly?

Why would scum target Kasu N3 and not the person who was claiming IC?

this is why I didn't believe your LJK claim at first, I'm still not sure I do.

It really is not indisputable fact. I can think of multiple reasons scum would no-kill, such as wanting to gambit a protective claim during MeLo to try and secure the win today, or not seeing good targets for a kill because said kills might implicate one of the team

I am, however, not seeing any reason to target Kasu.

VOTE: No Eliminate

I think this is probably the best option today.

If I die tonight then Bulge is most likely lying about his claim. The only possibility he's not is if there's a strongman, which, I hate to try and outguess the mod, but I doubt in this setup. He should absolutely target me.

Bulge dying clears Kasu meaning we have two conftown going into Day 5.

Anybody else dying we'll cross the bridge as we come to it, but I still think we have good info regardless.

i like, appreciate that a loyal jailkeeper protecting the IC is like......objectively the linear correct play
i was like literally drooling over the idea of literally any flip coming into this phase and nearly fell off my chair
but i actually kind of believe bulge - i'm not actually sure what the scum motivation for shooting outworlder is

[the worst]

i feel like i'm sinking in quciksand inside my brain

[the worst]

I'm pretty sure it's just shea/pooky/worsty and both neighbours are clear. pretty sure but not confident. I had a table made up to track which pairings seemed least likely between the 5 unconfirmed but I didn't get that far in my overnight iso reads. I did read thru all of our dead/confirmed town isos and tracked their voting history. give me a minute to add post tags to my draft so it's at least semi-legible, and I'm hoping to continue along the same track for the rest of you 5 as well as finish my anti-associatives table. hold up

i'm kinda prejudiced bc i know that solve is wrong

but, let's work through this.

[the worst]

i appreciate the effort and the formatting is fucking lovely but am a lot more interested in your thoughts/conclusions than in data

[the worst]

i'm kind of, wavering

ugh
like
your action is either sincere, or a very well planned out fakeclaim. and i don't think i have the psychic powers to divine the difference between those two at surface level.

i'll look forward to what you can do when you're free.

[the worst]

i'm not sure how i feel about pooky's insistence that you're absolutely fakeclaiming scum but i feel like if i had actual deep reads in this game i would probably feel similar

[the worst]

either you are or i am!!
you're right that like, the IC kill with a loyal jailkeeper is an insanely bad look
but the amount of badass energy it takes to make that play after the IC themselves point out that it wouldn't be a good look is like.. huge

[the worst]

leaving the IC alive despite the IC not really townreading him adds like, a level of credibility to his claim

[the worst]

leaving the IC alive despite the IC not really townreading him adds like, a level of credibility to his claim

Does it?

a loyal protective?... yes

[the worst]

you don't have to like me shea. my wishy washiness is exactly how i'm feeling because at a surface level it SHOULD be an outright scum indicator but like. is it actually anything scum have the balls to do in this situation? i legitimately don't know

i should probably actually do some reading etc.

[the worst]

Actually I am probably reading this backwards - whether or not Bulge is incentivised to shoot OutW is probably markedly less important than like who the hell is incentivised to shoot OutW when there's a town ungated protective out there?

[the worst]

the fact you keep bringing up occam's razor as if anything about your stance on me isn't riddled with massive assumptions is laughable.

let's talk about this some more.


Shea keeps bringing up occam's razor as if his me-scum theory doesn't hypothesize that I have been one-man-show scumtheatring it up since the start of day 3, wasting all of my faction's actions on the stupidest fucking unnecessary wifomy bullshit multi-phase huge-target-on-my-back "play" that gives scum-me ZERO clout, credit, or credibility. all of that after 3 miselims in a row and 3 dead prs? get the fuck outta here you don't believe any of that for a fucking second.

Pooky acts like me being scum should be the most obvious thing in the world, when anyone reading the game can clearly tell this is an extremely complicated and nuanced situation (or else guess what? I would have been dead already if it's so cut-and-dry). he has stopped dead in his tracks on any other lead he's been following this whole game. Is that something a townie does when HALF OF THE OTHER LIVING PLAYERS ARE SCUM, or something scum does when they 1)need one more miselim to win, 2)there is a player who has put a huge target on their own back, 3)and so far this game they have been successful at manipulating the town thru three miselims in a row?

fwiw like yeah I will hear out the posts pushing for your beheading but I don't feel like anyone is holding a smoking gun, just yelling a lot?

I don't feel like I've seen anyone solve the hoodies

I feel uncomfortable because Shea's solve is incorrect and yday I very much got the "it's PoE so :shrug:" vibe and I'm hoping he is scum so he's not town who is about to just lose this game

I'm terrified Pooky is about to do that Pooky thing where he gets so overwhelmingly flamboyantly explosive about one point that he forgets the rest of the game exists

I see what's going on and I see your rebuttles and I'm like. yeah no I need to do more legwork before I'm ready to end this game. cue Shea screaming that this is wishy washy.

[the worst]

pooko what are your reads collectively - who are Bulgey's buddies?

[the worst]

I think I want Kasu to give their read on Bulge
I think I want more focus on the hoodies
I don't know how to advance with Shea rn

[the worst]

This would be a game where all the PRs threw wouldn’t it
Honestly I’m still thinking Bulge is town because look at the PR play standard in this game

Gammo what is your solve like rn hit me

[the worst]

gammo if you are town you are going to lose this game by half ass tunnelling me

can you expand a bit

[the worst]

Well we've got one between TSQ/bulge, so that's something.
Worst I'd imagine that his reasoning is the same as everyone else's - NM has been scummy and useless all game and has had terrible reads across the board. It is the most obvious observation in the world.

I mean following this logic you're going to elim NM in XyLo 100% of the time and he's going to be scum, what? 25% of the time?
no way I'm rolling over and letting y'all policy elim me into a loss.

[the worst]

that's utterly wrong. every player in every game has a vote. fundamentally, the onus is on a player to play the game rather than just policy yeeting into oblivion - we're humans playing a game of mafia, not a mafia simulation. if you always blast lowposters or lurkers you stop playing mafia and start playing "spot the wikipedia scumtell". but like i'm obviously doing what i can to show that i'm town.

[the worst]

how about like.. do you have any reads other than "man i want to policy yeet tw based on his pred"?

[the worst]

I will say I'm liking worsty for town a lot more today than when he first repped in (sorry if I was grumpy to you before<3)

it's ok, i was being provocative

[the worst]

how about like.. do you have any reads other than "man i want to policy yeet tw based on his pred"?

See yesterday.
I suspect Shea and Gamma for reasons already discussed.

I also have yet to hear a reason for kasu being town and am still rather cross about not having that answer. It's getting to the point where people are just saying he's town and then leaving it at that and it's driving me nuts.

There are just way too many people to suspect so I'll probably end up narrowing it down between TSQ and bulge for the sake of simplicity - Gamma is obviously anti shea though which puts me in a weird position I think.

i'm probs not gonna read back in a hurry - it's in my best interest to get you involved anyway.

suppose i'm allergic to scrolling back. eli5 shea & gamma as scum for me. i tend to lean shea before bulge as well but i'm working off my sense of smell. gamma is kinda in lurker null territory for me atm

[the worst]

grats on the new job

[the worst]

good towny post shea very towny of you

[the worst]

Meanwhile NM did Jack all to help while he was here, his only real “contribution” being to tunnel the IC for 3 game days, and then you came in and started trying to make Bulge validate a viewpoint that suggested he was scum

this is legitimately such a warped viewpoint that I don't understand what you are trying to say about me. can you try again?

[the worst]

Kasu is town because he is playing THE EXACT SAME GAME he played last time I played with him and he was town there

HAPPY????

not remotely

I think this looks nothing like you in betrayal mafia ergo you should be scum

you're mighty noisy but I am not convinced you've been trying to solve this game.

[the worst]

Gamma because he's really only towny sounding on the front foot - whenever I try to put him on the defensive he shuts down and becomes impossible to talk to. He also seems to sheep every single thing I say and the few things he came up with on his own are wifomy and not smart.

I feel like you’re letting recent events cloud your mind. May I remind you I composed a biggol wall against Noraa D2 all on my lonesome? No help from you, no WIFOM points, and no “not sounding smart”, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. And I become hard to talk to because I really feel like I’ve had to put in a ton of the work in our relationship, since you were crying a fucking river about how you had no idea what was going on but HAD NO DRIVE TO FIX IT. I had to give you a huge kick to even start trying to figure shit out, and then you go and try to act like I’M the suspicious one. If I were scum why do I PROPEL YOU into trying to solve the game??? IS IT NOT EASIER TO JUST LET YOU FLOUNDER??????

I don't understand what you're arguing here and if you're suggesting you explicitly must be town for hood dynamics I've got some bad news for you pal

[the worst]

apparently blitzo is inside my brain

[the worst]

Pooky who are you even talking to here?

[the worst]

*Breathes in*
ok
*Breathes out*
he hasn't been voted out because Shea is scum

bang

[the worst]

I'm talking to the dead IC whos up in heaven with the angels at this point

every time I have seen you in xylo your face is exploding like a glorious supernova and I literally don't understand who you are talking to here

[the worst]

ok I think Shea is a wolf before bulge and don't think they're likely s/s too
and........

[the worst]

continue

[the worst]

this is good news to me because the last couple of pages have read like Gamma has nothing in this game except for praying that he's correctly pocketed you via hood interactions : )

[the worst]

hold on you're not the hoodie are u

[the worst]

ugh
I need blitzo to reevaluate Gamma and I didn't really want to say that
whatever I think our solves are closeish and I think this is fairly close to being Just Correct

[the worst]

Pretty close to just self voting to end this game tbh. If the day is just going to end with gamma the worst the bulge and kasu voting me then I'd rather just do it now. I'm pretty frustrating. There's lots of people saying I'm scummy but no one explaining why at all. And when they do the explanation makes no fucking sense. I don't have the mental strength to deal with it when I feel like 2 or even three of those people are scum anyway.

Meanwhile bulge is caught scum. His play makes no sense from a town perspective repeatedly. Every day of this game. And he would be dead if he were town and I am, so either vote me or bulge and get it over with so I can move on with my life.

every time I have seen you in xylo your face is exploding like a glorious supernova and I literally don't understand who you are talking to here

i'm clearly talking to god in heaven since nobody in this town is apparently on the same planet as me

not sure exactly what to make of the fact that both shea and pooky are deep in despairville. this tact in sync is making me think possibly not s/s?

[the worst]

if bulge is scum he's like, probably scum with kasu
it's not a huge thing but it's >rand for sure

stuff like this

Shea's vote Today is so scummy too. I feel like it comes from a really frustrated townie or it's scum theatre between Bulge and Shea but that seems, like, really unlikely.

Scummy on the surface, that is.

and not like playing the game or advancing reads is actually making me wonder if a bulge/kasu world isn't that unrealistic

[the worst]

is it
bulge/kasu/gamma....

[the worst]

honestly i feel like off d4/n4/d5 that's pretty much my gth solve
like pooky is exactly correct, that scumteam needs outworlder dead quite a lot more than a scumteam WITHOUT bulge
i have no idea what this team's POA is coming into d5 but i feel like shea voting bulge is just literally not it
i'm pretty startled that bulge still hasn't crossvoted shea despite shea being mechscum fhpov and i'm pretty sure this is a guilty conscience indicator

[the worst]

i appreciate the effort and the formatting is fucking lovely but am a lot more interested in your thoughts/conclusions than in data

yea the night deadline hit before I could get as much work done as I wanted. today turned out to be unexpectedly busy around the house. believe me in my head this was gonna be the wall of all walls lmao because I know my ass [and thus, the entire game] is very much on the line today.

off the back of this i feel like i'm still... very much wanting

i think i might actually want to yeet bulge here

[the worst]

pooky is definitely in my weak point
i don't know his scumgame particularly intimately but even following the metric that he sows the seed of doubt i like. feel like that isn't really what he's doing here? if anything he's just trying to repeatedly donk the thread with a common sense hammer

the town pooky i know when very confident on reads gets so tunnel visioned that the rest of the game ceased to exist and he kinda forgets to actually assess people's alignments and actually avoid scum agenda and find other townies and mesh with them and win their votes over (micro 960 raven pocketed him while i pushed him off a cliff; undertale c open i just pocketed him while making sure he got miselim'd and then pushed his dying read into the win) like i continuously win scumgames against pooky and this literally just looks like his late towngame again

[the worst]

sigh
i really don't feel good about my pooky read

[the worst]

ngl i feel like my most confident read is that there's scum in the hood and it's probably gamma.

[the worst]

what if
shea and bulge are bussing

[the worst]

it's kind of startling to me that ppl were policy PoEing NM because he did nothing and now you're trying to talk me down because I'm posting

like roleplaying as sans and referring to my posts as an unmeaningful contribution is a disturbingly pointless way of pretending to solve this game but u do u

I've clutched victory from the jaws of defeat and defeat from the jaws of victory more times than I can count and I'm really not going to like...stop replacing into games that need someone to finish a slot....

[the worst]

also hi new gamma. are we about to have a bad time?

[the worst]

I don't know, I've been paranoid of shea all game but when he actually sits down and talks to people or addresses things it seems like it clicks. Maybe it's just because he's town and bulge is just scum because him not protecting the IC is just awful and kasu really isn't that towny either.
Like I've been asking for a huge period of time about why kasu is town and I still don't think I've gotten a single answer. I got something on meta but that's not really that great either, especially with his whole current "bland comment and dip" strategy he's got going on right now.

I also feel like a lot of the arguments for bulge being town at this point are wifom and weak.

Kasu is town because bulge protected him from the n3 kill
otherwise balance of probabilities they just didn't kill if he's faking the inno

Kasu responding to the inno by doing nothing has me like :/ tho

[the worst]

sigh
i really don't feel good about my pooky read

What's changed and why?

what's changed since when lol

[the worst]

i'm pretty startled that bulge still hasn't crossvoted shea despite shea being mechscum fhpov and i'm pretty sure this is a guilty conscience indicator

wha

why haven't you voted back?

[the worst]

Its not about whether you actually would or would not place the vote as scum it speaks to your mindset and that your number one goal in the game ain't to yeet scum because no town player just knows someone is confirmed scum and doesn't vote them.

^^^^^ this is literally the inside of my brain
i'll go dig up the last time i saw scum doing literally this if y'all want but i'm a firm believer that the moment a phase plays outside of the anticipated trajectory, there's a moment which is very telling - town realise they're being voted and if the other person is town the game is over. scum aren't geared towards parsing other players' alignments and have a tendency to panic or wonder what they're meant to do next.

if bulge is town i'd find it pretty hard to believe that he's had shea voting him for like 48 hours?? and still hasn't registered that a x-vote is necessary because {shea,bulge} is now confirmed to contain scum

[the worst]

that's weak as fuck. how often does scum just "forget" to crossvote back lmao

like
the moment they're startled or something doesn't go according to plan?
constantly.

[the worst]

+1 please settle down on telling people to fuck off and/or die we are playing mafia not trying to kill each other irl

[the worst]

gammo. this is an incendiary question, but i want to be incendiary so yolo.

are you voting shea because he hurt your feelings?

[the worst]

Yeah the more I'm thinking about it the more Gamma's vote on you feels more like an excuse to have a vote on you than an actual read - his reads in general this phase have felt very stiff (there was a semantic misunderstanding between you two therefore Shea must be scum); he thinks I'm scum because NM was a lurksack (psa NM is nearly always a lurksack). like I think he wants us dead but I do nottttt buy that he's tried to sort either of us.

I read Shea as town for kinda similar reasons to why I weakly read Pooky as town I think? particularly I think him coming into today with absolutely no chill for Bulgey's claim is town indicative and I think his frustration with others not seeing it the same way has an indignant energy which is like, very hard to fake believably as scum.

Pooky is in a similar area with the way he grabbed me and shook me when I took Bulge's claim at face value but not quite as strong, just similar kinda gamestate position read.

I'm trusting you to get me right here Shea.

[the worst]

sigh
i really don't feel good about my pooky read

What's changed and why?

what's changed since when lol

What are you saying you don't like about your Pooky read then if it hasn't changed?

That it's not confident. I rolled scum against the dude b2b and I was pretty sure when I actually needed to read him it would be magnificently easy and now I'm here looking at his posts and being like "oh god fuck what am I meant to be looking for again"

[the worst]

I'm not interested in picking at every little nitpick you've brought up, shea. I don't care to convince you of anything, my job is to convince blitzo and kasu and worsty to vote correctly or lose.

what exactly is your solve atm Bulge?

[the worst]

ngl bulge if you're town I have the feeling I'm going to be the losing vote here. I really don't get the impression that Gammo is pocketing you and Gammo is very clearly scumposting - the scumcase stuff from Shea is kinda fine and I don't have a lot of thoughts about it because I just wasn't there at that point of the game but I'm finding myself nodding my head to his posts a lotttt

[the worst]

Gg all, nice plist.
I think I need to read the review before I can recover.

[the worst]

I think I am more upset about gamma and bulge being town than I am about literally anything else in this game.

I am also spooked.

I thought you were signalling to us that you were the traitor for a few minutes and I swear that's the only world which made sense to me

[the worst]

hm I didn't realise I hard lurked, duly noted

[the worst]

should've just had a n4 ic instead tbh

[the worst]

Hi I reviewed this game.

hello
was it picked up on that there was the potential to clear the traitor and that the checker was a really abstract way to balance around that?
was it noted that the checker & loyal jailkeeper should have confirmed each other as town via setup?

in general i just think i really strongly dislike the design concept, i'm curious to see what approach was taken to reviewing it

[the worst]

Honestly I think the reviewers massively underrated the potential to fuck up the game the scumteam had.

Well I do admit; the thought of the loyal jailkeeper protecting the bulletproof traitor the same night the scum killed them, providing a false innocent, did indeed not occur to me.

What're the odds of that happening? 1/(Number of players alive - 2) * 1/(number of players alive - 1)? So 1/6 * 1/7? That's, what, a 2.380952380952381% chance?

oh
yeah


it was fairly hilarious

[the worst]

hoods are overrated unless you have synergy, please don't shade people for preferring to play in the main thread / not really solving well with you

[the worst]

Hi I reviewed this game.

hello
was it picked up on that there was the potential to clear the traitor and that the checker was a really abstract way to balance around that?
was it noted that the checker & loyal jailkeeper should have confirmed each other as town via setup?

in general i just think i really strongly dislike the design concept, i'm curious to see what approach was taken to reviewing it

I was the backup reviewer, so can answer these questions:

- We missed that the Jailkeeper could soft-clear the Traitor. Umlaut was concerned that the setup was townsided, so it may have been allowed unmodified anyway. That interaction was hard to fix, I suspect; if you make the traitor non-Bulletproof, then we end up with scum being killed accidentally overnight even though they're massively winning, which is probably an even worse interaction.
- It was intended that town would confirm at least one player from setup clues. We weren't entirely sure which (it depends a lot on who dies first and who targets who), but it's the sort of interaction that typically exists in Normals and helps to balance them. (One of the things I look for when checking for setup balance is that there's neither too little, nor too much, of this sort of thing in the setup.)

I should note that I'm not confident in my ability to balance traitor setups, and pretty much said as much in the review. In retrospect, the setup might have been a little scumsided. The players seemed to think it was townsided during the game itself, although I'm not sure how much of that sentiment was genuine and how much was scum blowing smoke in order to cast doubt on the Jailkeeper's claim.

I definitely see how this setup came about actually. I haven't really sat down and thought about how I would balance a traitor in a closed normal and it is *not* easy at all.

Thanks for replying, thanks mastina for swinging in as well.

[the worst]

The worst, can you confirm whether or not you replaced in thinking it was a scum slot?

i read nothing, i wanted to play with these ppl