Yes, I just disagreed that it was more beneficial to kill him first, thus the last post. And so sorry Damuna, for replicating the caps in my post, too. But my posts aren't THAT long! :P There are also other options besides day cop to consider. Zch and Al1 could be masons, and planning all this in their daytalk, for one, which would explain why Al1 didn't really hit back against Zchinque. Is why I think role speculation generally doesn't really work so well on Day 1. It's just speculation and there are too many possibilities, and Mafia benefits a lot more than town from the discussion.


This partial quote is Typhoon's, but my text here is to Zchinque. Agreed with Typhoon - I certainly don't like having to be called out to explain away someone else's actions for them, even if I think I can see what you were doing, especially when you then continue to obfuscate after.

If you truly are town, you can see this is anti-town if it goes on too long, because it's distracting the focus from other scum, by polarizing everyone on the one topic. Plus it's a high chance of being a mislynch if you're town, as the first person gambitting is often lynched in my experience, though the playstyle doesn't really make sense from any other faction anyway (except jester).

Anyway you're L-3 now. I won't be voting you yet because I believe you were gambitting, but it's getting there.

Five votes, eh? That's typically claim range.

Anyway, I hope you will forgive me for not claiming at the moment. However, it seems we need to set some records straight, and I am busy all day tomorrow, so I suppose we'll have to do it now.

Oh, and you guys need to learn that being annoying doth not scum make.

Long-ish post incoming.

Also, I am disappointed in a couple of you who seem to have read yourself up on mafia.

What, no one posting in eager anticipation? :/

Okay, you're killing me.
What do you have to say?

Okay, let's start with this here mass claim business.

But I didn't. I'm not so stupid that I would deny saying something which anyone could read, and given that people kept pointing to it, I can't exactly claim that I have forgotten due to being drunk/insane/sexually molested by a penguin.

Let's look at what I said:

I did not say or or anything of the sort. I asked who would be in favour of a mass claim, which says nothing about my own thoughts on the matter in one way or the other. There is really nothing I can do about some of you reading specific intentions into a general question.
And for those who wonders, I am against a mass claim, and have been since the start of the day. From my play so far, does it look like I think this is a popularity contest?
And if you go through all my posts, you will see that I have consistently never said anything about being in favour of a mass claim – every time someone has accused me of it, I have been completely ignorant of the accusations. Prodding. For. Reactions. (Sorry Damuna)
This is also something I will probably get back to later.

The interesting thing here, to me, is not the chance of getting a mass claim to go through, but rather how you react to whole thing. Remember that townies and scum have different goals, and different amounts of knowledge. Most players have a scum meta and a town meta – even if they try as hard as they can to play like town when they are scum. They assess information differently, think differently. I know some players who have words or phrases they will almost only use when they are scum and not as town, or vice versa. But often it is not so much what people say that is of interest, but what you can gather of their thoughts behind the words – why they say what they are saying.

Anyways...

I fully expected people to interpret my question as me being in favour of a mass claim – I was counting on it. Would anyone be willing to blindly follow me? Would anyone's reaction be over the top? Who would answer and who would ignore the question?

The most interesting answer was this one:
Also known as Fence Sitting 101. (For the following to be correct, I'm working with the assumption that this game is a somewhat low power game, not too unlike the setup I used for GOG mafia #1. I think that is pretty likely to be correct.)

In most games, and certainly in low power games, early mass claims favour the scum. However, when the question arises that doesn't mean the best strategy for them is to go all out in favour of a mass claim. However, by «seeing both sides of the issue» they leave themselves open to be in favour a bit further down the road. If one or two townies go for the mass claim idea, the scum can safely have «thought it over» and ended up in favour of the mass claim – knowing that they won't be standing alone, and as such not revealing themselves. Also, once you have a couple of votes in favour, it's much easier to get the needed majority, to get the mass claim to go through.
(The idea being that once half the players are in favour, they can force the rest of the players to join at pain of lynch)

Moving on – another interesting case is nmillar. Not so much for how he responded to the idea of a mass claim (he didn't), but rather for his general play in this thread.

So far, he has pretty much only talked about what happened in the previous game, or repeatedly been asking me why I voted for Al1 (there was also the silly theory about how me asking Typhoon to quit the nolynch-voting somehow made us possible scum buddies). Now, nmillar has been in a game on this site before, so here we have a meta to compare to. We know that nmillar was town in #1, and by reading that game we know how nmillar played as town (given that we have only one game to work with, the meta analysis isn't the strongest, but bear with me). To anyone who played in #1, or read along with it – how do you feel that nmillar's play in this game compares to his play in #1?

While speaking about nmillar, I'd also like to point you to this little goodie

Can anyone tell me what is wrong with this post?

One thing I wanted to add, about trying to read the intent behind the words.

This post is Azarr's entire contribution to the game so far.
And from it I get major town vibes, enough that he is probably one of my strongest town reads at this moment.

In the first game, I wrongly accused Robbeasy of being mafia, but as the game progressed and more information became available, I correctly identified two mafia members.

This time, I want to avoid making the same mistake (lynching Robbeasy), so I am giving more time for information to present itself before I make any premature accusations.

Apart from being in bold (this was before Damuna asked us to refrain from doing so when not casting votes), I don't know what you're trying to get at. If people refuse to answer questions about their votes, how is anyone supposed to conclude whether they are mafia or not?

So, I read your post.
Then I went and played flash games for half an hour while thinking about it.
I realized something.

You came up with a good few points, especially concerning play styles and lurking.

But you never explained why you voted for Al1 in the first place. To run a gambit (by jumping on someone then never explaining it) while also fishing for mafia (with a mass claim opt-in) just seems too extensive to me, so why would you try?

Also, I dislike how you then scapegoated nmillar by bringing up previous play, in a way that I feel was an attempt to drop the spotlight from you.

Finally, you are perfectly right in that some people (read: Azarr) aren't participating enough, but that doesn't make me want to jump them first round.

In the end, your post caused me to doubt my vote. But not enough to remove it. I am going to leave it standing for a little while, and then see how things have developed in the morning (IRL).

I have not asked you to explain anything on my behalf. I think my play has been distinctly pro-town. :D
I just wish I could have kept up that play style a bit longer, for more effect. I'm still somewhat annoyed by a couple of votes on me that seem to have been cast because they found me annoying, not because they found me scummy.
Though I suppose there is information to be gleaned from that as well. I don't plan to get lynched just yet. Other faction than...?

Err... this was supposed to be in the above post. (I hate the auto-merging post software forum thingamajig by the way)

Where have I talked about roles? The only thing I can think of is that I have asked people not to drop hints about their role, and said that fishing at the cop is bad.
Outside of the thread I have also chuckled a bit at the speculation that I might be an insane miller day cop, or some such, but that is neither here nor there. Have I told people what to do?
And I sure have told people a couple of things I think they should not do - such as dropping hints about their role for no reason, fishing at power roles, voting nolynch - but what is scummy about warning people about acting anti-town?

Sorry, been fighting knee-deep in another offsite Mafia game.

@Zchinque in response mainly to #123 Yeah, that was me being slightly miffed at myself at explaining what I thought the gambit was, before you had come out and say so, and thus kind of breaking the rest of the effect. But it can be anti-town if done wrong, costing a mislynch or a claim etc that will push us one step closer to defeat. Especially with (assumedly) a lot of newer players and only 7 votes needed to lynch, you picked up enough votes to get to L-2 fairly quick, where a dangerous double post (like I believe happened to bring you from L-4 to L-2) could have mislynched (if you're town). I suppose that was your threshold to cut it though. Than town. Like, the gambit "at first glance" had the potential to be anti-town if persisted for too long, but just because it was anti-townish doesn't mean it was particularly pro-scum either, or pro- any other possible Mafia group mechanic (cults, etc), and that was what I was pointing out. Basically similar to your 'annoying is not scum' point.

I did catch the meaning of your phrasing eventually, when you started denying you had said it at all. That's why I started hunting the replies directed at you instead of you, and landed on Typhoon for now. Typhoon's tone of reply was townish though, to his credit, though I'm not sure of his overall towniness from the content yet (rolefishing etc). But he's in no danger of being lynched yet and I like my vote somewhere, so.. :) Plenty of time.


And lastly before I head to bed, I'm not really sure about the nmillar quote, if it's a scumtell I haven't noted it yet, though I'd hazard a guess it's that he agreed that he wasn't contributing, or that he's only trying to seem to be scumhunting by latching on to a question that had been asked many times already?

(Also, are you softclaiming insane miller day cop??? :P)

---

Pasting this at the end because it's to a different person and doesn't make sense embedded halfway in Zch's reply where it was.

Typhoon, he DID explain the vote on Al1. It was fence-sitting, it's basically a scum tell to be wishy washy about potential big issues and present both sides of the argument and then ending up neutral, scum do that because they can then sidle off the fence onto the side that the town supports in the end, so that they more likely escape the scrutiny from the town of having made "a wrong choice". The town's goal is not to survive, but lynch the mafia no matter how many of them it takes, for all of them win in the end if they hit all the Mafia. The Mafia are a lot more preoccupied with, and worried about, survival, as they are outnumbered to start and have to make fake cases to get someone mislynched, so they like to slide onto others' bandwagons to hide, and also to make it more likely a mislynch or misstep will occur, but not be able to be traced back to them as they didn't put forth the idea.

You can spin your tales all day long, but there is one thing that doesn't check out, at all.

Everyone, look at the post history. Posts 21, 22, 23. Zchinque threw out the mass claim thing. There was only one reaction to that, and that was Damnation's. Immediately afterwards (there are no timestamps on this forum, but I believe these posts were within an hour or two at most of each other), Zchinque votes for AI1, who speaks about the mass claim only in post 26. The rationale we've been presented crumbles apart pretty quickly, eh? Prodding for reactions is fine, but you have to actually wait for the reactions afterwards for it to work, I believe.

Another smaller thing: the players are at very uneven starting positions here, but that's something we'll have to live with, I suppose. Could I just ask everyone not to drag GOG Mafia 1 too much into this? I didn't follow that game too closely and I'm not exactly willing to read all of it now.

Good point - Jesskitten, it would appear the vote on AL1 is not explained that well at all yet, but as it was very early and may have just been thrown out there to get reactions, going to dismiss it for now..

buuuut,

Zchinque DOES make some very good points - I do like the logic behind the Al1 read.
I can't see whats wrong with the nmillar post myself, but as I also didnt see the Al1 thing either, its becoming clear I need to pay a LOT more attention to whats going on......time to go away and have a good read back through all the posts methinks...;o)

By the same logic, you just now implicated yourself with your fence-saddling as well. Just saying.

I've been thinking about this in the shower now (a good place to do just that) and came to the following:

1. I still think the tactic Zchinque used is silly [I'm hungry. Who's up for a hamburger? -- Why do you look at me that way, I never said I wanted a hamburger!], but it could be theoretically useful. The timing of his posts, however, is way off, as I said.

2. At this point, I'm not convinced of anyone being on either side, but from gameplay perspective, lynching is pretty much mandatory on first day.

3. Even if we let Zchinque go, he'll still remain a rogue agent in our midst. The only people who'll have some sort of idea who he actually is will be the mafia, and they aren't going to be very helpful. For the townies, he will remain an enigma and a source of much confusion. (Unless we let him go today and he's killed at night, which would be interesting, to say the least.) The only way to get at the bottom of this is to cut the Gordian knot in two and let dear old Zchinque hang. That would give us a piece of concrete evidence, in light of which we could then re-examine what has been said so far. Lynching anyone else doesn't have the same effect.

4. I'm probably not going to post over the rest of the weekend; it would be nice if some of the more quiet participants could chime in now.

Actually, that's not a bad idea. If Zchinque does turn out to be mafia, then that's a great start for the town.

On the other hand, if Zchinque turns out to be innocent, then those who have voted for him are immediately implicated. This theory does of course assume that mafia members are jumping on an easy target!

The thing that makes me suspect him the most though is the constant attempts to turn the attention from himself on to other (seemingly) random people.

I'm still not convinced that Typhoon45 is innocent either, but I don't have any real evidence to back that up.

In fact, only basilisek and Damnation have dropped obvious hints about their respective roles (the cheerleader and the geek?). Everyone else is a suspect, with Zchinque and / or Typhoon45 seeming the most likely at this stage.