Mini 444 - Reverse Mafia Vanilla (Stopped)

[Yosarian2]

People will offer themselves up to be revived. That's how the game moves on.

Yup, pretty much.

Basically, the key thing to remember when voting is that the three people we revive before day 1 will determine how the rest of the game goes (or, if the rest of the game goes). If we pick 2 scum, we lose. If we get to day 1 and there's 1 scum, we're at a sort of reverse lynch or lose situation, where if one pro-town person who's alive votes to revive a scum, the scum jumps on and we lose. So, basically, when reviving, we want to pick people who A. we think aren't scum, and, to a lesser extent, B., whom we would want to bet on their judgement in not picking the wrong person in a lynch or lose situation.

On another note, untill someone has a better suggestion about who to vote for, I might as well

vote:Yosarian

.

[Yosarian2]

well, at least here i won't get lynched on the first day :p

All I can say is i'm still a newbie to this, so don't bother reviving me until we're further ahead in the game.

Heh. I started trying to WIFOM this comment, got to about the third level, and then gave myself a headache, and I'm still not sure if this is a town tell or a scum tell.

[Yosarian2]

I would like to stay away from all the voting for yourselves if possible because everyone is just going to do that. And since its just townies and scum, there is no reason to promote one person over another from a power role perspective.

And I believe thats part of what happened in the other game (unfortunately a big part of it seems to have been deleted so the end is hard to follow).

Well, that wasn't what went wrong in the other game. Yes, several people voted for themselves, that's obveously the logical place to start no matter what your role is, but that didn't hurt the game. What went wrong was that we revived me (a townie), 1 insane cop, and 1 scum. And the insane cop targeted a second scum, said he was a townie, and we revived him and lost. Brutal.

[Yosarian2]

Although that makes me wonder about whether selfvoting, or even self hammering is a protown thing to do. I doubt CD's usual rule of "Self vote = instant hamma" since that would be counterproductive.

Why not? I'd expect anyone, of any alignment, to vote for themselves if they though they had a decend chance of getting revived. NOT voting for yourself in that situation in this game is almost like voting for yourself in a normal game.

[Yosarian2]

Well, I guess random votes might serve the same (marginal) purpose they do in most games, which is that seeing how people respond to a random vote might give us a hint as to people's alignments; that is, seeing how people respond to Relph's random vote of KaleiÐoscøpe might give us a hint as to who is or is not linked to Kalei.

The big long-term problem for us is that we're going to have less info then in most games. In a normal game, you lynch someone, and then they're dead and you know their alignment, and can use that to analyze the people on the bandwagon. In this game, if we revive someone, we still won't know what their alignment is unless they die later, which means we'll have a lot more trouble drawing conclusions based on bandwagons. It's almost as bad as a no-reveal game, made even worse by the fact it's a vanillia game. Basically we're never going to have that much hard evidence of any type in this game.

[Yosarian2]

There are 4 people with information in this game, and we have to try to read that information out of them

Wait...what???

Did the mod say somewhere that there are 4 maifa members? Because if not

A. Did you just say there are 4 mafia members?

B. that seems like kind of an absurd number for a vanillia game this size where the town has this many disadvantages; I was thinking probably 2 mafia members

B. how do you know how many mafia members there are???

[Yosarian2]

Based just on experence and on who would be more likely to make good decisions when town, loudmouth lee's probably a decent choice for revival, although I can't say I've really got much of a read on his alignment yet.

[Yosarian2]

I agree completely with Yellowbounder. I don't like how they have team up together, not just in attacking my posts, but in calling themselves the best option to vote. I do feel loudmouth a better option that Yos anyway.

As a general note, it's quite dangerous to assume that people who agree with each other are on the same side. In fact, when someone starts agreeing with me all the time, that's when I start checking my back for the knife.

[Yosarian2]

Yeah, for some reason lots of games are lagging right now. Not sure why; college finals should be over, right?

[Yosarian2]

Eh? He's posting elsewhere in the forum. I was assuming he just hadn't posted a new vote count because no one's voted since the last one...

[Yosarian2]

Anyway, anyone have any ideas of anything else usefull we can discuss today? Anyone else getting any scum tells/town tells in the past few pags they haven't mentioned yet?

It might be difficult to keep the flow of the game going without any real bandwagons...

[Yosarian2]

I also think they we should all mentally prepare for this to be a very long game.

Hehehe...well, I hope so. Last time it wasn't.

[Yosarian2]

Well, in a desperate attempt to get some conversation going...

LML, why did you "Bad Karma" ralph for random voting? I'm not sure random voting is a bad idea here; if everyone votes themselves we wouldn't get anywhere, and that in order to get somewhere we would probably have to start some bandwagons, basically semi-randomally at best early in day 1, and see what happens. I think. Or I guess we could just have "negitive karma" bandwagon-ish things, but those seem likely to provide less information then actual votes since they don't really mean anything.

Anyway, I think my point was, why did you think that random voting is a scum tell?

[Yosarian2]

Why not, YB? I would expect anyone, either pro-town or scum, to rather have themselves revived then someone else, so I'd expect anyone to "self-hammer". Anyway, it dosn't really matter if it looks like a pro-town thing to do from the town's point of view, because with no vig or anything, once a person's been revived there's absolutly nothing the town can do to change that.

[Yosarian2]

Self hammering is a bit rude in some respects however. Almost as rude as hammering yourself in ordinary mafia, except more rewarding for yourself.

Well, a pro-town person might not hammer oneself right away if he's not ready to end the day yet, but I don't think it's at all "rude". In fact, NOT hammering yourself in this game is almost the same as voting for yourself in a normal mafia game; there's no real benifit to it, except as a WIFOMish attempt on someone's part to try and look more "selfless".

[Yosarian2]

Is OvertheUnder still in the game? He hasn't posted yet.

[Yosarian2]

bad karma: Machiavellian Mafia

I know he was away for a while, but even before that, he didn't really post much content, and more importantly, the one post of his that DID have content looks scum-like to me.

[quote="Machiavellian-Mafia"][quote="LoudmouthLee"][quote="Machiavellian-Mafia"]Looks to me like we can still play mafia like normal, except instead of voting for the suspicious people to lynch, we avoid voting for them to prevent their revival and vote for more protown people, essentially just like the "reverse" theme of the game.

And I like this good/bad karma idea from our mod.

Good Karma

: KaleiÐoscøpe for having unusual characters in his name.[/quote]

Random Good Karma? That makes no sense.

Bad Karma: MM

[/quote]
I liked the novel good/bad karma idea from our mod, so at the beginning of the game where it's ok to be random and silly, I chose to random good karma Kscope. I think you may be taking this a little too seriously.

I also think Relph has likely made a Freudian Slip with his "4 people with information" post, so I'd say he's likely scum and I wouldn't consider reviving him.

Bad karma: Relph

So far IMO Yos, LML, Logi, and DW have made the best initial protown impressions, but none of them have sufficient protownness to have my vote right now.[/quote]

In this, MM's only content containing post all game, he just kind followed my and others comments about Ralph's "4 scum" comment being off, and then said that he finds several people to look pro-town. The post kind of feels like he's just going with the flow, which is a scumtell especally when he's otherwise lurked. Worse then that, he just flatly states that he thinks Ralph's "4 people withj information" is a freudian slip while ignoring the fact that it's quite unlikely there actually are 4 scum, which makes a "freudian slip" explination seem a bit odd.

On another note, MM said a few days ago that he was back and would re-read "today or tommorow", and then he did not did so. I would like to hear more from him soon.

[Yosarian2]

This game, as I suspected, is a bit hard to get started... It's like having 3 day ones in a row, only instead of the relatively easy "I don't trust you, Vote: X", it's the much harder "I trust you, Vote: X"...

(shrug) Well "I don't trust you FOS: X" is still useful. Depending on what win condition we end up going for, we're going to have to end up revivng a large part of the town eventually in order to win, which means we need to figure out who we don't trust as well.

[Yosarian2]

you can go through the completed 12 player games in the Queue thread and easily find games with 3, 4, even 5 scum in just the first 2 pages.

Not in the same scum group, you can't. You can find games with 3 scum and a SK, or 2 groups of 2 scum, but I'd be quite surprised to see any game with 4 or 5 scum in one scumgroup. If there is a game with 4 scum in one scumgroup, I'd expect the town to be incredibly over-powered, like 2 sane cops or something like that; wheras the town here is vanillia, and not only that but we actually are in a worse situation then a "normal" vanillia game where we'd at least get information from lynches.

In any case, if you can really find any games with "4 or 5 scum" in one scum group, I'd like to see a link.

In any case, for the people who keep suggesting a link between me and LML; I did say that LML is a strong player, and that if we're just going to nominate on the basis of that he'd be a reasonable choice, but I did not (and still do not) think I have a read on his alignment.

[Yosarian2]

Well, the argument didn't need to differentiate between 1 scum group or 2. Scum are scum for the purpose of this argument, since the comment was directed towards the total number of scum in the game, not how many groups there are.

Well, that's not true for purpose of balance, though; two small scum groups gives the town a much better chance then one big scum group, because of cross-kills and such. And I definatly got the impression from the mod post that we're dealing with one single scum group here:

Mafia: More living mafia than living town players.
Town: Either: all of the pro-town players revived (it is not required that all pro-town players survive after being revived though), half of the total pro-town players alive, or all mafia dead.

I don't think that "mafia" win condition makes any sense if there's more then one scum group, so I'm pretty sure we're just dealing with one scum group here.

But, I did find this, about 1/2 way through the completed games on pg 1 of the Queue thread:

Mini 342 - Mlakerville had 4 scum (2 goons, 1 Godfather, and 1 Mafia Thief), all in the same group,

and

a SK....and the town won.

Wow, that's unusual. What's a "mafia thief", is that like a mafia spy, where the rest of the mafia dosn't know who he is? Because if not that's really unbalanced.

Anyway, I can't imagine how 4 scum could possibly be a balanced setup in this game.

To be clear, I went looking for scummy looking lurkers there; I've always thought that lurkers are very dangerous to the town, and...let's say that my beliefs on that account have recently been confirmed. Especally with the game going so slow, I was hoping to lean on a few lurkers and see if we could get them active, and at the same time I was trying to find scum. MM only made one real content-filled post, which is already a scum tell in my book, and that one post felt scummy to me; the way he just accepted it as a freudian slip when that dosn't make sense is only a small part of that.

Do you disagree with me that that Machivellian Mafia post, where he just goes along with the crowd in denouncing Relph, and then names a third of the people in the game as "giving him good pro-town impressions" looks scummy? Because to me, that whole post looked like he was just trying to go along with the group, and perhaps make some allies if he could by buddying up to all the most active people in the game, without actually willing to vote for anyone to revive or even to explain why any of us were giving him pro-town vibes.

[Yosarian2]

Very true. If people aren't going to be active now, we need to either get them active or replace them. We're going to be running on so little information this game, we can't afford any lurkers, and unlike a normal game we can't even lynch the lurkers ourselves, so we're really going to rely heavily on mod prods and replacements to keep the game going.

[Yosarian2]

[quote="KaleiÐoscøpe"]
Yosarian2... the things that happened around him early game, combined with the way he posts don't give me faith in his revival. To me, he's being more agressive to the bad karma's while we instead should focus towards the good (a.k.a. voting). Also, the fact that he got votes so quickly makes me a bit hesistant to revive him (yet).[/quote]

Just trying to keep the game moving her by creating content. And I think bad karma is just as important as good karma; if the town's going to win this game, depending on how it plays out, we might have to revive all the townspeople in order to win; in that case, we will need to try and figure out who the scum are in order to revive everyone else. So trying to figure out who the scum are is, in the long-term anyway, just as important in this game as it would be in any other game.

Besides, bad karma will help us figure out to revive, at least by process of elimination.

[Yosarian2]

[quote="KaleiÐoscøpe"]I think bad karma on day 1 has no relevance yet. The fact that we have not revived yet means the karma's mean very little so far.[/quote]

Why is that? I think it's very important to keep track, right from the start of the game, who we find scummy and why. I often find my day 1 instints on who is scum are pretty good, and so if we talk about who we find scummy now, it will definatly help us figure out who to revive and who not to revive both today and over the course of the game. Not only that, but the only way we're going to figure out alignments is through player interaction, and a major part of player interaction is attacking and defending people; even without lynches, we can and should still attack and defend.

If a pro-town player things he sees something that looks suspicious, why shouldn't he say so? If we didn't have karma, I'd just use FOS's instead, but Karma's even better because we have the added advantage of the mod keeping a karma count to help us see what the majority of the town thinks at any given point of any given day.

[Yosarian2]

I don't actually have an issue with Yosarian here but I think he could likely post everything he's posted so far as equally as town or scum.

Fair enough. I think the same could be said about pretty much everyone in this game though.

If anything I'd say it's more likely LeeScum could be buddying up to YosTown to try and get himself revived later on.

Now that is possible. I have not had any luck reading Lee's alignment in past games, and I could see him acting this way as scum.

I'd like to ask Lee whether he still thinks Relph's thing about 4 people having information was a freudian slip. My own opinion is that 4 scum seems very unlikely. I haven't read the entire first game yet, but I know it had 3 scum and the town had poweroles and the town still lost anyway. Taking away our poweroles and adding one extra scum? I doubt it.

Truth.

[Yosarian2]

Actually, Patrick, the game balance is probably better for us this way than it was last time. We outright lost the game Day 2 due to an Insane Cop.

That's true, but that was still due in large part to bad luck; if you had investigated a pro-town person or two, we might have figured out you were insane. Still, other things we lost really hurt; for example, it's really a shame we don't have a vig this game, that'll make it a lot harder for us.

And yeah, this game is not going to be easy. If there's only 2 scum, we might be all right; if we can guess right and correctly get scum tells off of 1 of them, and avoid revivng him all game, we should win. If there's 3, it'll be harder.

[Yosarian2]

I was posting everything that caught my attention at the time, and one of them was relph's comment. Upon further review, yes I would agree that 4 scum is not very likely in terms of balance wise, but I still think relph made a slip, but more towards something that could have misled us.

Which one do you think? Do you think he made a freduain slip, or do you think he was intentionally trying to mislead us? Because I don't see how it could be both.

Plus, relph has basically disappeared after the round of bad karmas given to him. I would not consider reviving relph at all any time soon.

That much is true, people who don't post are not candidates for revial, and we will quite likely eventually need to revive ALL pro-town people in order to win, so lurking is very bad. I especally don't like that Ralph last posted on May 22 to say that he would "post some more today or tommorow morning".

One other question though, MM; you mentioned 4 people in your earlier post who looked pro-town to you. Could you explain why you thought that?

[Yosarian2]

(Although that gives pause for thought that a serious protown player may wish to stay in Limbo, since then there's no risk of death? I mean, scum would never want to stay in Limbo, since there is only gain for becoming alive again.)

Well, the thing is, unless we play this game absolutly flawlessly and never revive scum, we're probably going to have to revive ALL pro-town players in order to win, so every pro-town player needs to try to get revived. I think part of the problem with the last game is that most pro-town people didn't try hard enough to get revived, and the scum did.

[Yosarian2]

This may seem like an odd question, but -- what do people think of lurkers in this game? Is it scummy?

No, that's not an odd question; I can understand what you mean, which is that lurking and staying under the radar probably isn't a good stratagy for anyone this game, scum or town, so it's harder to say "lurking is scummy" then it would be in a normal game.

However, the only thing we're going to have to go on is people's conversations, so we NEED people to post more if we're going to have a chance. And while lurking may or may not be scummy, I'm certanly not going to vote for someone to be revived if I don't have some good way to guess their alignment based on their posting, so I don't see myself voting to revive a lurker any time soon; if nothing else, if one out of the 3 day 1 voters is a lurker, the game is likely to really suffer.

Honestly, I can understand why people aren't saying that much, it's hard to get a conversation going this game. But we all really need to try to post more, or this game is going to be deathly boring and is probably not going to go well for the town; if people don't post, then with no night info and next to no roles revealed we've got no chance of figuring out who the scum are.

[Yosarian2]

Oh, and to comment on another point in Patrick's post:

Well, the thing is, unless we play this game absolutly flawlessly and never revive scum, we're probably going to have to revive ALL pro-town players in order to win, so every pro-town player needs to try to get revived. I think part of the problem with the last game is that most pro-town people didn't try hard enough to get revived, and the scum did.

This is what's bothering me. We can win by reviving a bunch of protown players at the start I suppose, if I'm understanding it right, but failing that it seems like winning will be very difficult.

The way I see it, we've basically got 2 possible ways to win.

Town: Either: all of the pro-town players revived (it is not required that all pro-town players survive after being revived though), half of the total pro-town players alive...

So, let's say that there are either 9 or 10 good guys. That means that if we revive correctly 5 times in a row, we win.

However, if we mess up and revive a scum, and townies start dying, we're not going to ever get to 5 people alive, because each time we revive 1 good guy another one will die. In that case, we're going to have to revive all of the good guys without ever having half the people alive be scum. Which means that if it goes that way, we'll basically have to figure out who the other 1-2 scum are and revive everyone else.

Either way, yeah, this is going to be difficult.

[Yosarian2]

No posts for 4 days? Where is everyone?

[Yosarian2]

Half the total players alive, I'm assuming means that half the total of non dead townies.

So, if there are 6 townies, and three of them are alive, we win?

No, I think that means half the total nuimber of townies in the game are currenlty alive and revived. So, if there's 3 scum and 9 town, then if there's 5 townies alive we win.

[/quote]
Although if you think about this game with an end game view, we've already lost if we bring back a single scum, since there's no stopping the kills, and no way of disposing of a scum.[/quote]

No, if we bring back 1 scum we still can win, because each day the scum kills 1 person and each day we revive 1 person, so the # of people stay constent, and we can win with the "revive all townies" win condition if we revive the rest of the townies without the scum ever being 50% of the people living. And the longer we go before we revive a scum, the bigger the # of constant living people will be, so the more a margin of error we have; if 1 of the first 3 people we revive are scum, we have to revive perfectly for the rest of the game or we lose.

[Yosarian2]

Anyway, day 1's lasted for more then a month now, and we've only got 7 pages of posts. That seems like it's not a good sign to me.

Can we just revive me and move on now?

[Yosarian2]

Yeah, do we have a mod here?

Anyway, looking at the list of people Zind wants us to comment on:

Zinderas: Eh, his latest posts are good pro-town play, trying to get teh conversation going and get comments on specific people. Dosn't mean he's pro-town, of course, but at least he's helpful. I'd consider reviving him.

LML: Needs to post more; he's been lurking for quite a while now. His early posts at least make sense and seem reasonable, but that's dosn't really say much about his alignment as he's quite good at sounding reasonable when scum. From my point of view, I guess I consider him voting for me to be revived while he was also a revival option to be a weak pro-town tell, but nothing I'd bet the farm on. I'm pretty much neutral on him right now, and definatly would not consider reviving him early unless he becomes more active.

Yellowbounder: I like the way he's thinking in general, and he's quite active. It's really hard to get any definate readings on anyone in this game, but if I had to guess, I'd say more likely pro-town then not. Might consider him for revival.

Vel-Rahn Koon: Meh. Some reasonable posts early on, but nothing that screams town to me. Has been lurking since the 4'th. I would not vote to revive him early without a lot more activity from him.

logicius: Again, like most of the game, hasn't posted enough lately. That being said, I don't really get a scum vibe from his posts. He dosn't really seem like scum to me.

Basically, my second choice to be revivied at this moment (after me, obv) is probably Zinderas, and my third is probably Yellowbounder, although hopefully we'll have more to go on then we do now by the time we get up to the third revival.

[Yosarian2]

Yos: Most of the posts so far have been strategy-type posts - helpful but lacking substance as far as actually looking for someone to revive. Also early on, LML was a viable candidate for him to revive, but with the current list, that's changed a bit. What's happened?

Note I never actually said LML should be revived. All I said was that if we were going to revive an experenced player, he wouldn't be a bad choice, but that I didn't have a read on his alignment yet.

Well, I still don't have a read on his alignment, the lurking is not helping, and there are other people who now look at least somewhat pro-town to me. And like I just said, I'm not going to vote to revive a lurker, especally not this early in the game when we really need the first 3 revivals to be active players because they'll be the ones with the votes.

[Yosarian2]

And zindaras push to narrow the feild feels like a push to get him or a scumbuddy revived.

(shrug) I think he was just listing everyone that people had said they were in favor of reviving. If there's someone else who's not on Zind's list who you think should be revived, I'd be interested to hear it.

[Yosarian2]

Ok, very cool, glad you're back CD. We're probably going to need some replacements, but I guess we'll see who responds to the mass prod first.

[Yosarian2]

I don't have any problem with Zinderas's self vote.

Anyway, why pick all 3 today? I already have pro-town vibes from some people and such, but it's certanly subject to change. Don't really see any advatnage to that suggestion.

[Yosarian2]

(shrug) We're going to have to just bite the bullet and revive someone, I think.

I'm also thinking we're going to need some replacements; if not now, then on day .5 at least.

[Yosarian2]

Yeah. The problem is that reviving someone won't necessarily increase activity.

I guess not, but continuing to do nothing certanly won't increase activity either.

Anyway, do we still have a mod here? Are we going to get replacements? Is this game still alive here?

[Yosarian2]

Let's hammer Yos!

[Yosarian2]

Well, like I said earlier, Zinderas is currently one of my top choices for revival.

[Yosarian2]

:twiddle thumbs: were'nt we supposed to get a vote-count like 5 days ago?

[Yosarian2]

Cool, glad you're back.

And hey, zindy, you're plan worked.

[Yosarian2]

Ok, although I'd rather have mod confirmation on that first, but yeah, after I get revived, Zind's looking like a decent .5 day revival at the moment. Once we get confirmation that it's now day .5, I'll have to look back through the thread and see if there's any hard questions I can throw at Zind, heh.

[Yosarian2]

Well, the players are interesting in still playing. We're just waiting for the mod to show up and give a votecount and/or annoice I've been revivied or whatever.

[Yosarian2]

Yeah, I agree with Zinderas. Roles made the first game much more interesting (well, except for the silly "insane cop" role, lol). With roles, like vig, roleblocker, doc, ect, the town has a lot more options, and still has a chance of surviving even if they bring back a scum.