In the Court of the Gods (Game Over)

[Lady Lambdadelta]

Furthermore, I have the utmost respect for the way you play the game.

So to see you give up so easily is rather disheartening.

[hitogoroshi]

I'm about ready to put my hands up in the air and just admit scum, even if I'm lying out of my ass.

This is stupid.

It's useless, isn't it? It's all useless!

No, seriously, keep your head in the game. I don't know if I agree with your conclusions or not but you're definitely my strongest town read and I don't want to see you flaking Petra-style.

Take a thread break if you need it, lord knows you've earned it.

[farside22]

Lots of arguments to read last page. I want to finish my read of all the players before I get in the middle of LL and Eq.
DRK wins the award for knowing Gary Larson. That was the best laugh I had today (sad to say).
I have tons o crap to do so I don't expect to finish my read of everyone before my LA tomorrow, I will try my best.

[Equinox]

Pulling these out of my wall, since it's getting really big.

Jack: Why did you vote Lady Lambdadelta in post 25? "I forgot" isn't an answer, by the way. Oh, yeah, I don't understand your FoS on farside22, either; her post was reasonable.

SpyreX: What do you mean by post 214?

[Equinox]

While I'm at it, post 217 from SpyreX in response to Nobody Special:

Yes, I do.

I think you screwed up and this is going to pan out in a perfect storm of WOOOAH.

I'd rather not waste a lynch to get there.

Jack claims Nobody Special claimed scum, an allegation Nobody Special denies. Nobody Special states that the only communication that went between him and Jack at this point was Nobody Special's request for a claim and Jack's 2-3 word response. Why did you think Nobody Special was lying?

[Lady Lambdadelta]

It would appear Battler has regained his swagger.

Good.

Equinox, with regards to TMH, what parts of my case do you disagree with, and what makes him town in your mind?

[DrippingGoofball]

Equinox is town, folks.

[farside22]

Almost done. I have 3 more players after this but I'm heading out to dinner.
Here's were I am at, and no I'm not going to worry about who is scum God at this time, my goal is to find the scum mortal.


Feysal - sarcastic

Ok guys, why would knowing who the scumgod is NOT be worth it?!?

You know I'm town thus you are scum.

It was SpyreX who said you would flip town. Andrius simply followed up on that. Are you even paying attention?
What??? One has nothing to do with the other.
I really don't know about Feysal. I feel troubled when I see someone who hasn't voted someone and doesn't have real scum reads. I don't read anything that really comes across as scummy. I read his post as more trying to figure things out but I wish I could see more scum hunting from him and opinions or question of others to decide for sure.


Mina - 2 post seems thought out, too early to get a read.

themanhimself -

post 145
This is lazy and way too early for thinking like this.
There is a lot of talk about Jack's lie and I get the frustration and feeling from TMH from his views and opinion as a town prospective and not scummy.
TMH do me a big favor and tell me who else you find scummy in the game and why?
I think this may help clear you single mindness as well.

Benmage - four post, 1 promising to catch up. Nothing super great, nothing to report here.

DeathRowKitty - after not much said the first few post I get to a post full of oppinions. I do think it's odd that he votes for TMH, but says he has subtle town vibes for him. Doesn't quite make sense.
I really, really don't understand the vote for hito when you never said anything about him in your catch up post
well at least he is voting for LL for a reason. I expect more from DRK but maybe that's just a long ago memory when he did his own gambit as town once upon a game.

[DrippingGoofball]

CURRENT OFFERINGS AT THE ALTAR

DELICIOUS FRESH FRUIT

hitogoroshi
farside22

WINEGRAPES

Andrius
Lady Lambdadelta
Mina
Equinox
DeathRowKitty

PRUNES

themanhimself
Benmage
Feysal

OVER RIPE & MOLDY

Jack
me=weird
SpyreX

WORMY APPLES SERVED BY A TALKING SNAKE

populartajo/brokenscraps
Zang

[Jack]

If dgb doesn't grant equinox the BP, she's the scum god.

[DrippingGoofball]

BP... Blood Pressure? British Petroleum? Brad Pitt? Black Power? Bipolar Disorder? Boston Pizza?

I'll grant what I want, when I want. Suggestions are NOT welcome.

Where's the fruit????? You know I demand fruit, and you come empty handed. Curses be upon you!

[Lady Lambdadelta]

I brought you a Unicorn.

Does that count?

[DrippingGoofball]

I LIKE FRUIT

What am I going to do with a unicorn? Can they haul fruit out of the temples' back doors up Mount Olympus?

[Equinox]

All right. I didn't think I'd be doing this while being an angry, hissing cat, but I have to do this now or I'll never get it done.

Spoiler: The Wall of Doom

Apologies for the wall. Also, some of this is out of order. +props to anyone who reads to the end, I'll love you forever.

---

While I'm berating Lady Lambdadelta for looking for associative tells without flips, I will go ahead and start this reread wall with the following: Lady Lambdadelta cannot be scum with Nobody Special. That's helpful and all, since Nobody Special is never going to flip, I'm sure. Dammit.

Did anyone ever explain the benefits of 50, 52, etc., were? I still don't get it, even with this from hitogoroshi.

I like Me=Weird for pointing out that calculating probabilities are useless.

Well, hitogoroshi, that Jack wagon wasn't thrilling because you were trying to figure out which of the 3 gods was scum when Jack's flip would have provided no such information.

Jack (4): Equinox, Lady Lambdadelta, hitogoroshi, Andrius

This is just more evidence that Jack is lying.

Interesting fact: themanhimself was watching the thread and not posting up until this point.

Hmm... Posts 132 and 135 from themanhimself have some trippy logic.

Post 140 also has trippy logic and goes for the Jack vs. Nobody Special dichotomy.

Oh, yeah, post 145 continues the trippy logic. Post 151 continues the LAL tunnel.

Fun fact: 2 minutes. Lady Lambdadelta and themanhimself aren't scum together. Useful, eh? I need to draw a diagram.

DrippingGoofball continues to chase lurkers/inactives (and again) like she's MeMe.

Jack upped the ante and still you didn't see it. I'm confused, to say the least.

Someone remind me to read up themanhimself's more recent games to see if he's as newbie as I think he is.

I'm surprised how many people fell for Jack's gambit. Seriously, guys. And by "guys," I mean Feysal.

Don't get me wrong, I want to lynch Jack because he's obviously lying and obviously scum and for no other reason. It's a bonus that even on the off-chance we're wrong, we still get to know which god is scum.

Hmm... Wait a minute... Haven't I read this line before...?

If we're wrong then we know who the scum god is which is totally worth it because we can get reads from him.

Okay. The problem I had was I felt the scum reads on Jack and themanhimself had to be mutually exclusive (i.e., they can't both be scum). I still believe that to be the case, actually.

Here in post 176, I run into the same problem again. Despite Lady Lambdadelta saying what he did in this post, his vote was still on Jack.

I'm getting the newbvibes from themanhimself. Ironically, an old quote from Shadow Dancer comes to mind, that we can't dismiss newb tells as town tells because newbs can be scum, too. Oh, man, what the hell is going on with my head right now as I'm writing this...

Gah, Me=Weird is being Me=Weird, which is unreadable.

I should note, too:

I'm trying to shut down a potential war of walls in post 189.
themanhimself doesn't like that I'm trying to do that and... accuses me of going on a power trip?
I again try to shut down the war of walls.
Much later, themanhimself states again his dislike that I am shutting down the Jack gambit line of discussion.
Again, I shut it down.

I should also note, too:

Incident 1 of themanhimself missing the trash bin.
Incident 2 of themanhimself missing the trash bin.

Post 198 from themanhimself makes me think he genuinely believes in the Jack case, which is a town tell. Looking back, the case against themanhimself didn't have that much support, and there was indeed more support for a Jack lynch at this point. Also, I notice that themanhimself felt threatened by the fact that I was trying to shut down the Jack wagon, as evidenced by his "Do we do this just because one player says so?" statements earlier. Hmm...

From what I know of my own history, I've done that before as newbtown. Dammit. My head! IT'S USELESS IT'S ALL USELESS

I'm surprised at DrippingGoofball's question to themanhimself. She's played enough to have seen a Jack-scum gambit, no?

Well no one can deny that Jack has been

scummy regardless of his motivations and

actual alignment

, so what's better, eliminating one of the scummiest players from discussion or focusing on him?

Wait... What? And not just the emphases I put in there, either.

Also of note is that themanhimself has yet to call Equinox scum despite the work she was doing to stop the Jack wagon.

Hmm... Suddenly, the memory of Andrius comes to mind. Where is he, anyway?

Fishythefish votes Zang without mentioning themanhimself, but he does talk about Jack. Interesting for reasons I'm noting in a (more than a) few lines.

Not really helpful, DrippingGoofball.

Feysal has a tendency to go stream-of-consciousness, and this post borders on TMI... which makes no sense in a day-talk game, really.

More waffling from Nobody Special.

Post 216 is interesting from Nobody Special; he's suspicious of SpyreX for thinking Nobody Special is lying, but Nobody Special can't bring himself to be suspicious of Jack for lying. I guess I can get the whole "Jack's a gambit player, so it's null" thing, but Nobody Special continues to call it anti-town and not quite scummy.

Yep, this from Nobody Special stinks.

---

To spam the thread later:

Vote: Andrius

Unfortunately I think he's town :/

Why did you think Andrius was town at this point?

It's unlikely that this set-up uses a jester but what's the harm in suggesting it?

That being said, I don't think he's a jester and I want to lynch the shit out of him.

I am once again reminded that I can't read people, at all, because this stinks.

Oh, and I come in guns a-blazin' to say that I get "honest confusion" vibes from themanhimself for post 231. I'm confused by Equinox, too, guys.

DAMN YOU PEOPLE AND YOUR ONGOING GAMES

I figured I'd leave my vote on earlier to at least let it do something before I changed it in the same post I made it.

Explain, please.

Get out of my court. Um, I mean,

what a useful question

, I want to know, too. See Feysal above.

This thread indeed needs more Benmage.

DrippingGoofball completely misses the other reads people were passing around and votes populartajo for something in the QT for which other possibilities were equally likely. I believe I'm still waiting on an answer for this, so I'll hang onto this.

Andrius is town. I will vouch for this

until he makes a mistkae

.

Wait, what?

Also, Benmage is town.

HOW?

Okay,

now

I'm feeling the DrippingGoofball-scum read. But what the fuck, Nobody Special is scum, too. They can't both be scum.

SpyreX is the exception to this, due to him taking the stance that Jack is town. It is also odd that Jack missed this. He called Andrius scum for knowing he was town, but he has not mentioned SpyreX at all.

Wow, talk about... talking about 2 different things and tying them together.

We're getting closer...

At this point, I spam up my QuickTopic with Fishythefish. He explains to me that he feels themanhimself is town for banging on the Jack case for so long and getting flak for it when scum would've backed out. I agreed.

Again I don't understand the FoS Jack/vote themanhimself combination from Lady Lambdadelta here in post 278.

Of course, the scum god and priests knowing it was a gambit would've enabled them to give calculated responses. Spotting those might even have been easier than trying to separate townies wanting to lynch Jack for his lie from scum who see easy prey.

This still reads to me as trying to cover up a potential slip.

Fun fact: Feysal and Nobody Special are not scum together.

You know, with these kinds of reads, I'm almost inclined to think Nobody Special is a town god. And again, I have trouble with that because his posts have been fairly scummy. Dammit.

Feysal's post is TMfI.

Feysal's last paragraph there is reasonable, and it matches with what Fishythefish said, too; scum don't like pressure and prefer to back off. On the other hand, I have hitogoroshi, who says that's what scum would do to shake off the pressure.

Beatrice's laughing face comes to mind.

DAMMIT.

Post 280 is still disgusting.

As is post 281 from Nobody Special, who nonchalantly shifts his weight to the themanhimself wagon. A sudden thought came to me that this might be tied to his power; I gotta check the role PMs as soon as I'm done.

We all know Zang is scum, so moving on. No, wait. He's doing that Vote Jack/FoS themanhimself thing, too. What the hell is going on here?

---

I am almost done and almost ready to summarize this shit! WOOHOO.

Hrm, now I'm thinking equinox is more confused town about the Jack situation which contrasts my earlier reads. I'm nowhere near ready to unvote Jack but I agree that LLD unovting Jack and going to me is a very, very weird move. I've seen scum pull that exact same move when they were bussing another scum and wanted to get off the bandwagon. If it looks like the LLD lynch is where we're gonna end up further into the day I might consider switching my vote only if I think it could help confirm Jack as scum. Forgive my single-mindedness but I've never had a read this solid.

Here's what's wrong with this:

I hate it when I call someone town and they turn around and call me town for calling them town. Weird funky OMGUS going on there. From this, I gather 2 rather important things about themanhimself that I need to investigate and find out in a few hours:

1. OMGUR is a newbie tell. After a while, one becomes jaded and don't really feel it anymore. I am about to read some themanhimself games. If he displays newbtells, then I will reevaluate his posts again (yes, I will probably die while reading this thread) and try to figure out newbtown or newbscum. Which... is difficult for me. But doable. Probably.
2. Some players are really prone to tunneling. The one town game I have of themanhimself does not show this, so I will hunt down other recent games to see if he's tunneled recently. I have a particular game in mind I want to check, too.

Um, yeah. Placeholder read.

Skipping past my argument with Lady Lambdadelta for the moment, as it's too recent and is still raw.

By the way, hitogoroshi's insistence of his town read on me makes me really paranoid. I have to go check on a couple of things before I can pass verdict on this.

Okay, SUMMARY TIME IS GO.

tl;dr

UNVOTE:

Scum: Feysal, Zang
Pending: Andrius*, Benmage, DeathRowKitty, hitogoroshi*, Lady Lambdadelta*, SpyreX, themanhimself*

Spoiler: Summary from above wall of the not-really-case on themanhimself

• Crappy logic (unfortunately, a null tell)
• False dilemma (scum)
• Unprovoked jester speculation and subsequent backpedal (scum)
• Hedging bets (scum)
• Lashes out against people who don't agree with him (newbtown)
• Attempts to launch war of walls (...swingy. On the one hand, frustrated town will do this and demand that the line of discussion be opened; on the other hand, scum LOVE war of walls and will start one wherever possible)
• Genuine belief in case against Jack (town)
• 2 incidents of misinterpreting/improper responding to posts (need to see if he has a habit of this)
• Post 201 (scum)
• Post 242 (I have no fucking idea, guys.)
• "Equinox is probably town" (swingy as well, pending metagame)

Looking at that list makes me depressed, since I'm really confused right now. I'm hoping further reading will sort this out.

I'd also take this moment to say that if themanhimself is scum, Lady Lambdadelta is not scum; their interactions don't read like bussing.

...

I actually am kinda useless until I get this stuff done. Be back in a few hours.

Last fun fact: This took me nearly 3 hours.

[Equinox]

I just realized I have more stuff to pull out of that wall.

But before I do that:

Jack: Why did you vote Lady Lambdadelta in post 25? "I forgot" isn't an answer, by the way. Oh, yeah, I don't understand your FoS on farside22, either; her post was reasonable.

Answer would be great, thank you muchly.

Vote: Andrius

Unfortunately I think he's town :/

Why did you think Andrius was town at this point?

Italicized content is my addition:

I figured I'd leave my vote on

[themanhimself]

earlier to at least let it do something before I changed it in the same post I made it.

Explain, please.

Andrius is town. I will vouch for this

until he makes a mistkae

.

Also, Benmage is town.

What?
How?

[Lady Lambdadelta]

I LIKE FRUIT

What am I going to do with a unicorn? Can they haul fruit out of the temples' back doors up Mount Olympus?

The unicorn was for sacrifice.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

Also, @Equinox: Your case on TMH is perfecto.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

EBWOP:

[hitogoroshi]

Thanks for spoiling the Doom Wall.

Spoiler: Herd you liek walls so I wrote a wall bout your wall

Did anyone ever explain the benefits of 50, 52, etc., were? I still don't get it, even with this from hitogoroshi.

I don't want to go into too much detail, because this is something I'm actively watching for, but lets just say that the scum god (assuming we ever find them) would have different reactions to having 0, 1, and 2 fellow-scum high priests, and it's possible (with a degree of error, certainty, but possible) to look at the gods reactions to their five followers and try to figure out what kind of distribution it is.

Well, hitogoroshi, that Jack wagon wasn't thrilling because you were trying to figure out which of the 3 gods was scum when Jack's flip would have provided no such information.

Yep! I thought it would have told us such then, though. Then Jack made his point clearer and I realized that things weren't as awesome as I hoped. That's a big part of my suspicion on TMH, honestly - because we started with the same interpretation, but Jack deliberately upped the ante in a way I KNOW is apparent to someone who's taking Jack ISO 0 at face value, because I was that person.

Fun fact: 2 minutes. Lady Lambdadelta and themanhimself aren't scum together. Useful, eh? I need to draw a diagram.

Just saving this one for when I ISO myself in the future.

Here in post 176, I run into the same problem again. Despite Lady Lambdadelta saying what he did in this post, his vote was still on Jack.

LLD is female. The "Lady" seems like a bit of a clue :p

Okay, now I'm feeling the DrippingGoofball-scum read. But what the fuck, Nobody Special is scum, too. They can't both be scum.

For what it's worth, I've gotten a pretty strong town-vibe from my QT conversation with DGB.

Of course, the scum god and priests knowing it was a gambit would've enabled them to give calculated responses. Spotting those might even have been easier than trying to separate townies wanting to lynch Jack for his lie from scum who see easy prey.

This still reads to me as trying to cover up a potential slip.

I'm not seeing it. Help a brother out?

By the way, hitogoroshi's insistence of his town read on me makes me really paranoid. I have to go check on a couple of things before I can pass verdict on this.

Okay, to be fair, I've mentioned a town read on you three times. The first was when I figured out the Jack gambit and I shifted quite a few reads around. The second time, I figured it was worth noting why I was feeling conflicted, with town reads arguing on both sides of the aisle. The third was simply because I was worried you were going to rage-quit out of frustration, and I figured it'd help to know at least one person really does think you're town and wants to see what you have to say. (And yes, I

did

read that whole wall thank you very much.)

While I like the DOOMWALL, I'm missing some of the links from there to your scum reads. You say "We all know why Zang is scum" but I'm not one of them. (There is a theory DGB and I are kicking around in QT, but it was mostly her idea so I'll leave it to her.) And while Feysal's 280 is iffy (Aww fuck, I suspected hito and Equi! I don't want to get tangled up with either of them!) it's the walking-on-eggshells hesitance that I see when I look at my own personal early town play. He has a terrible signal:noise ratio with his too-long posts, but I'm leery to rank him any scummier than our bumper crop of lurkers without seeing more. Of course, I'm biased after getting a lot of flak starting out for, essentially, being Feysal.

Speaking of bumper crop of lurkers...perhaps we should slow down a bit and let the other kids catch up. I've been in multiples games where a fast-paced town absolutely

killed

some of the townies.

[Jack]

@equinox: I found several of LL's posts about NS to be scummy. First, not commenting, then the weird post where she just refers to him as "my god" and brings up the "he asked for my role" thing, and the last line of 22; overall it sounded to me like someone who had inside info on whether NS was the scum god or not.

Have no idea why I fos'd farside though.

[Fishythefish]

@Fishy: Does LLL = Lady Lambdadelta? (Post 299)[/b][/color]

Yeah, I just got carried away with the Ls.

To reiterate what I said there: LLD going after Jack and tmh at the same time feels wrong to me - if you think Jack is scummy, I don't see how you could fail to understand tmh's position. As Equinox notes, this just seems like a lie:

I stayed on Jack because I was convinced he was scum, until I started to see what people (namely you) were talking about with reference to the gambit. Since the Gambit was outed, Jack has started to play more like a townie, so I dropped him.

If you recall, I had been suspicious of the way TMH handled his case on Jack, even going as far as to FoS him for tunnelling (I was still voting Jack, because I was still under the impression that his motives were scummy.)

The scum motivation for TMH tunneling Jack was that Jack seemed to be a rather easy lynch at the time. Just use a LAL policy and go under the claim of "this will provide the most info" and you have your case on Jack. What makes him scummy is that now that the Jack case has died, and it is no longer a easy lynch, TMH seems to be slinking off it. He is slowly backing off.

LLD really didn't just drop Jack like that. She continued to FoS him while going after TMH - which feels like an attempt to withdraw slowly from her read. This post attempts to brush that under the carpet.

LLD says TMH attacked Jack, and slunk off when he stopped being a difficult lynch. Sounds good, but that's just not true. TMH attacked Jack for a long time after Jack stopped looking like a likely lynch, with no obvious scum benefit.

VOTE: LLD

[farside22]

before I forget to ask and go to bed and have absolutely very little time to think about mafia tomorrow.
Fishy: Why did you ask me in the QT what I found scummy about you and you didn't ask that in public?
What is your view of equinox in the QT? and are you chatting with all your follows to some extent?

[Fishythefish]

@farside:
1. You said you always found me scummy. That made me think that it wasn't massively game relevant, and so I asked in the QT (your answers were actually more specific to this game than I expected from your post in the thread). Also, I wanted to get a conversation going in there.
2. I am chatting to all my followers to varying extents. I don't intend to make any reads from my QTs public until it becomes a good idea (ie. they are being wagonned, or I have a decently strong scumread on them). I think there is more to be gained by waiting.

[farside22]

@farside:
1. You said you always found me scummy. That made me think that it wasn't massively game relevant, and so I asked in the QT (your answers were actually more specific to this game than I expected from your post in the thread). Also, I wanted to get a conversation going in there.
2. I am chatting to all my followers to varying extents. I don't intend to make any reads from my QTs public until it becomes a good idea (ie. they are being wagonned, or I have a decently strong scumread on them). I think there is more to be gained by waiting.

1) Well the last game we were in was a zoraster game and I thought you came off scummy there for different reason, hence my I always find fishy scummy comment. I'm sure we were in another game but that was the one I was thinking of when I made that statement. I answered what in this game made you scummy to see what you would say. (hey your 3rd on my list as far as scum God, but not for a good reason).
3) fair enough. But I think a few days (game days) all the God's should have some feed back about their follows from the QT.

[Feysal]

I'm surprised how many people fell for Jack's gambit. Seriously, guys. And by "guys," I mean Feysal.

What do you mean I fell for it? I believe I was the first to mention Jack's reputation for town gambits, some posts after themanhimself had speculated on it being a scum gambit. Having seen a scum gambit from Jack, I was left wondering which one it was here, since I could not see his purpose.

Feysal has a tendency to go stream-of-consciousness, and this post borders on TMI... which makes no sense in a day-talk game, really.

You already wrote in #283 that I tend to use too many words to get my point across (it was Jack who first mentioned that by the way). I admit that I am verbose. Does this matter?

SpyreX is the exception to this, due to him taking the stance that Jack is town. It is also odd that Jack missed this. He called Andrius scum for knowing he was town, but he has not mentioned SpyreX at all.

Wow, talk about... talking about 2 different things and tying them together.

Tying these things together really was not the point I was trying to make. I find it interesting that Jack's gambit was supposed to get reads by provoking reactions, and the focus has been almost solely on themanhimself. I find that SpyreX's reaction of calling him town very early was at least as noteworthy, if not more so. His explanation in #266 was that Jack's gambit was suicidal, and combined with Nobody Special's play it made him think Jack town. But... at the time SpyreX first called Jack town, I really don't know how he could've had such a strong read on Nobody Special's play, and he admitted that Jack had made suicidal gambits before as scum. Also, SpyreX was not really answering the question he was asked. He explained why he thought Jack was town, when the question was why he thought Jack was telling the straight truth. Many others seem to think Jack is town, but that he still lied.

Of course, the scum god and priests knowing it was a gambit would've enabled them to give calculated responses. Spotting those might even have been easier than trying to separate townies wanting to lynch Jack for his lie from scum who see easy prey.

This still reads to me as trying to cover up a potential slip.

I see hitogoroshi already asked this, but I'd like you to clarify this too. What slip are you talking about?

Post 280 is still disgusting.

It was a mistake on my part. I wrote in #279 that we might have a better chance of finding scum among those who jumped off Jack, and posted before checking who those people were. Then I realized it was just you and hitogoroshi, and posted that as a correction, since you are one of my better town reads.

So much about that, for now. My top suspects are SpyreX and Andrius. I've played with them both before with them as scum, and I am getting the same kind of feel from them now. For SpyreX, the read is mainly due to his early stance on Jack, and for them both it is about them being in the background without really doing much. I have a question for them both:

@SpyreX: Why would you think Jack is telling the straight truth? You say you think Jack is town, but many others believe Jack could be town and still lie.

@Andrius: Can you explain your reads in #270?