fwiw, I agreed that you had chosen the right N1 vig target :)

And yeah, you were super towny in that game as well. Not a fan of the symp town flip as a mechanic, but I don't think it mattered much.

I think one of my last posts was pointing out how jumpy Thieves was, but at that point I'd run out of WIM and energy both due to the energy it took to get caught up and IRL stuff. She'd had the good fortune to throw suspicion on her buddy right before Whiskey faked him out of his shorts.

My comm skills are good, but require a lot of work. Sometimes I don't put it in... given the culture diffs and many of them not knowing me, I judged (correctly at least for D1) that being my natural town, but more careless and upped a notch in the pushy could be enough to achieve desired effect.

Above all else I trusted that at least some of the others that knew me would correct a bit for that - Nacho, Tammy, Cristi, RW, Wyrm, Trent and Stan... not all of them could be scum right? And I saw the kind of analysis MU players can pull out in some of Yogs games. I never would give actual fake reads. So they'd "lynch" me, and get a flip, but keep me around - hopefully... only thing I was worried about was getting rushed and not having time to claim / PM yogs.

At a meta level, my main problem is that my one scum game I towned it so much that I'm trying on purpose to avoid it because I think it would confuse town if I actually played naturally. Heck of a dilemma to have...

No worries, mate. Like I said, I try not to force other people to play a certain way.

I do disagree with you a bit here though! (perhaps unsurprisingly)

The problem with playing your role like this is twofold:

1) If you play deliberately scummy, it becomes very, very hard to distinguish people pushing on you. Since the essence of evaluating a push comes from the mindset - like, does this person actually believe the case they're making? Or does this case lack conviction because they know it's wrong? If you play deliberately scummy, town is going to push on you because they think you're being scummy, and scum is going to push on you... because they're being scummy.

2) Your role wasn't strictly an Innocent Child - if I'm reading it correctly, you very crucially become effectively dead - i.e. your vote no longer counts. Meaning, scum are one step closer to having vote parity with the town. In my view, your role should have been played with the intent to never, ever activate it, since removing your vote from the game is strictly -EV town. Sure, you could still be around to talk, and that's nice and everything, and better than being actually dead, but from where I'm sitting that would have to be a measure of last resort.

Basically, I don't think getting a wagon on you would have actually resulted in revealing many/any wolves, and in using your ability to get the wagon off you, you would have effectively mislynched yourself, mechanically, and deprived town of a vote.

So... not the way I would have played it. I understand the temptation as a peusdo-IC role to kind of... bait out reactions, and everything, but in my experience it's a tactic that rarely, rarely works. See Nego in the Champs wildcard game for a semi-recent example.

I think you're doing Zork a disservice here. Sure, the way he was playing, tone-wise, was abrasive as hell, but if you look at his content, I think "floater" is like... completely opposite of what was actually going on. He very, very much wanted to play. He had the most posts in the game. He was clearing people, he was pushing wolves. He was on both dyachei and Bookwyrm, with good reasons for each. He was quite, quite obviously a townsiding Neutral. He was helping town; if we'd have lynched, say, Bookwyrm and dyachei in the first 3 Days (which is very likely), he'd have had even more reasons to townside.

And as for lynching a Neutral D1 having a 100% chance of not outing town PRs... I mean, you're not /wrong/, exactly, but I have to say it's a pretty risk-averse way to play mafia. I mean, if you just No-Lynch all the time you won't hit town PRs either. By killing Zork D1 you're effectively giving wolves a free NK right off the bat, and then starting the "real" game on D2, which is... not ideal.

So yeah. There were a lot of reasons to just let Zork do his thing, both mechanically, and contextually based on his play.

Easier, yes. More accurate, no, not in my experience. Like you said earlier - you're good at faking tone, right? Tonality is a lot more fakeable than an organic progression of trying to figure out the game. Thus, sorting people by the second one gives you a better hitrate with your reads. Again, can't speak for everyone, but it has been my experience over a fair number of games.

Like... I know a handful of players who are pretty much immune to tonereads because they either change up their meta really well, or can fake tone really well as either alignment. Those players are still caught eventually by pure VCA / mindset analysis.

I will cop to that, heh. In retrospect maybe not the best idea. It's just so much more... helpful, interface-wise, IMO. My whole thing is like, this game is already pretty hard, I'd like the forum software to not be actively making it harder. But yeah, if it would have made the game go smoother I could have stomached it.

I'm curious though, it's like - what would really have been different about playing here? You put that playerlist into a game here, and like... we'd still have played like we were going to play, just without embedded GIFs and automated votecounts. It's a little baffling to me.

Anyway, cheers, no hard feelings at all.

Derp, that should read: "If you play deliberately scummy, town is going to push on you because they think you're being scummy, and scum is going to push on you... because you're being scummy.

Agree - loss of the vote means he's effectively down to a bully pulpit. And there his only value is if he has the best reads and can convince people of them.

The other flaw here is that a tree stump doesn't necessarily have to be town even if they tend to be. And looking at yogs' QT, it just says "revealed as a tree stump."

I think Brasas made a leap of faith that he'd full flip including alignment. And I'm not sure that holds up. On top of some of the other issues mentioned with the approach.

This is definitely true. Take some posters like scoobs on MU. His posting rate in games would not be a problem for GoGers I think.

But many of the people on MU like to really get into the games and focus on them which can lead to an explosive amount of posts even just casually.

And some of us just have a lot to say. There have ocassionally been post restriction games on MU and thst can help keep things light. Played one, 30 post restriction in a 36/12 phase game with restrictions lifted in the last hour. Tended to make denser posts to make up for it.

The irony with the neutral obsession on GoG is that, at least to some extent, it derived from Wyrm's scum thread comments in the 1st dungeon game where he talked fervently about blackmailing the Arthur Dent neutral if it came down to it.

So scum-Wyrm in this game was really coming full-circle, and I think Brasas "grew up" in the post-Dungeon leeriness about that vulnerability. Though as a practical matter I don't know that we've ever actually seen a game play out that way.

Now, if someone is pushed to L-1 and claims neutral, then sure, they're probably gonzo, but that's quite a different calculus than someone who outs as neutral completely unforced where we've tended to give them some rope if it was reasonable to do so in context/gamestate.

As someone (tom/newcomb?) noted in the game thread, the huge flaw in trying to lynch Zork D1, aside from the fact that he was engaged and being helpful generally, was that it's a completely useless wagon for analysis, even by the low standards a policy lynch normally sets. Scum have every cover to be on/off that wagon without any distortion.

Never happened. I don't know what you thought you saw, but I wasn't fishing for squat all game; I was never current enough to try it.
I stopped reading his posts because of this. I haven't been this personally irked about a player since Spaceman Spiff, or very early Hijack. If I had a kill available, I'd likely have blown it on him as soon as I could.

oh hey, my reads were actually pretty good.

[redacted]

still always read tammy as scum. gotta work on that.
probably dont deserve credit for reading uber correctly either

Newcomb! It was great getting the chance to play with you. Sorry I didn't get fully caught up. I did read that dya game this morning and had totally misremembered her meta, was gonna talk to you about that. I do have a soft spot when people ate a bit though sometimes for a little bit.

I had a thought last night that if I was wrong on tom being scum then he was probably a vig and I was getting thrown off by false positives. Haha.

Trent definitely had the potential to go the farthest in the game, but I think we'd have won this one.

I was looking forward to being a tracker though. I've only been a tracker once before and I tracked scum to the night kill two nights Ina row. I was hoping I'd have a similar record :(

Tom *slaps wrist* considering you were my scum partner in my last pathetic scum game how could you come close to thinking I could be scum?

Same, Tammy. Drop me a line sometime if you find yourself signing up for a game that looks interesting.

I don't think I was playing scummy per se... as mentioned to Bler above. And exemplified by the Zork push mindset, which would all come out throughout D1... but spaced.

Regarding vote parity. And risk aversion. And No lynching. All valid points, and the kind of stuff where I listen to my experienced elders. And then likely go bump my head into a wall to actually get the lesson. :D Because in your cost benefit analysis you again conveniently (and I'm sure mostly subconsciously) ignore all the town PR actions that go with the "free" NK.

Zork... I don't know. As in, I don't know him. I asked in the game and well, it would have resolved itself in time. You know him, and I believe you. So I retract.

On tone vs prog. Tone is the wrong word. I try to read character slips. And I try that, because I think I fake prog and tone decently enough. At some level I kind of get what you mean (and even suspect we might have just a semantic disgareement - you say prog/mindset, I say tone/character... prog / tone seem wide apart, but mindset / character not so much...), because faking prog well requires almost dissolving your ego, whereas faking tone is more like distorting it. And I think in general letting go of ego is harder for humans. On another hand I think you might be looking at the wrong side of things - hindsight bias basically. Our argument is not about the scum that gets caught. It's about the scum that wins. Which of our approaches (if they are different) has better chances of catching them? I'm not sure assuming the hitrate transfers linearly is warranted...

Now off to bed for me.

Yeah it seemed like a bad idea to lynch Zork D1 due to lack of info. That's why I was hoping for a vig to get him. We had no confirmation of his role but if he was a survivor as he said then a lynch would be wasted.

I eyeballed that - I can see the logic, and at the same time it pretty easily could have come from a scum motivation of wanting town to waste a vig shot somewhat unnecessarily.

It's not to say he couldn't have been lying (Nacho was, Newcomb was), but the scum motivation to make that move really isn't clear there, to me anyway. I guess might not be the worst play ever if he was scum traitor, or something.

I confess I was also eyeballing your slot because of personal bias - I hate playing scum anyway, but I find playing scum in a bastardy game to be even harder. I can't fake tone, and don't really like lying - the advantage of scum is that you're at least supposed to know WTH is going on. Scumming while not knowing I think is a higher degree of difficulty.

Kinda wondered if Spank had bailed for that reason, though really wasn't anything more than a hunch about someone I don't know at all maybe kinda/sorta thinking like me. But in looking at the SR/tammy fight, I was still kinda reading her null, but I absolutely would've taken her side there for those reasons. You know, hypothetically if it were you vs. her as wagons, and hypothetically if I'd been in the game at all ;)

I didn't think we could just let him go with a claim alone. It certainly seemed questionable to me for a neutral survivor without any bp to claim like that without any provocation and the way he handled it was very heavy handed with his attempt at manipulation when anyone considered killing him.

Well in the end I decided Tammy was probably town. Decided she wouldn't react as she did as scum. As for Spank subbing... guess there are some mechanics she doesn't care for. Never saw her sub for that reason before hobestly