Open 784 - Hard-Boiled (Town Wins!)

[superbowl9]

also on your Looker read, Looker is Looker. In my experience, there isn't much value gained by putting pressure on him, and at some point if he's still alive you have to make a judgement call

Good to know. At least he's pretty active in his play, not a bad one to have around for a while

[PenguinPower]

When you write an essay about stopping WIFOM VCA and everyone keeps arguing WIFOM VCA

Maybe because despite lots of words you're still wrong? Or because you used lots of words to say something that could be done in relatively few?

Maybe.

Your end premise

I see this as a valid interpretation - the only thing I would point out is that to use this logic in *all* cases would be to ignore the possibility of a WIFOM action, which would be naive. To say that scum *always* bus in such a situation would be firstly incorrect and secondly a poor assumption to work off of, even if true.

is basically saying what I said was valid because I didn't say "all cases," I said "almost certainly" and "probable."

I don't think I gel with most of the PL tbh. I'm a VT.

There, now that's out the way.

VOTE: nash

[Doctor Drew]

drew is confscum

Lol....ok buddy.

I probably won't be around much tonight or tomorrow. Plans I had are all up on the air.

[Battle Mage]

Excellent, I'm happy lynching PP then. I could have bought Midari's play if she was a PR just being overly worried about being directed, but definitely didn't feel vanilla.

[superbowl9]

VOTE: Nash now that you have what you wanted BM

[superbowl9]

is basically saying what I said was valid because I didn't say "all cases," I said "almost certainly" and "probable."

No I think you've missed the point of my essay - you are assuming that most players bus here simply because that is what you perceive the meta to be.
This is wrong because firstly I wouldn't agree that the overwhelming meta would be to bus in that scenario - I think it's more 50-50.

Secondly how do you know each of those 3 are familiar with the meta, and how do you know that there's a large chance they're following meta?

Thirdly it was not completely clear that Mara had to be the elim there - I've seen wagons fall apart that I was much surer of than that one.

[JacksonVirgo]

Sorrth guys I won’t be able to post VCs until later tonight . I’ll see if worst can do them

[the worst]

Sure why not

[PenguinPower]

I'm talking about probability from my experience over a couple of hundred games over the past few years. I'm applying that general probability to this instance. So, I think you're objectively wrong in your assumption that it's 50/50 there. I don't think you have to be familiar with the meta for it to be the action that you gravitate to. There's a reason why it's been a popular action. Hard disagree with the way eod went down and Mara not being the clear lynch, especially given the posting level and the main drivers.

I already said I wasn't going to debate this point, so this will be the last I comment on it.

[PenguinPower]

duck is stalking the thread and it's scary

[the worst]

VC 2.4

Doctor Drew (1)

- Tuxedo Mask

Nash (3)

- Looker, PenguinPower, superbowl9

PenguinPower (3)

- Battle Mage, word321, Froppy

Froppy

(1) - Doctor Drew

No-Hammer (0)

Not Voting (6)

- Nash, Aristophanes, Gypyx

With 6 votes to hammer... PenguinPower & Nash are at H-3

Deadline:

(expired on 2020-07-23 20:00:00)

Mod Notes:

Joined Mod iso

[Doctor Drew]

Well I think I got stood up, so I may be active tonight.

My vote isn't doing anygood where it is, I want to sheep my top town read (word) but BM is also on the wagon and the way he is calling me confScum is giving me bad vibes.

I will go with my gut from yesterday.

VOTE: Penguin

[Battle Mage]

I'm talking about probability from my experience over a couple of hundred games over the past few years. I'm applying that general probability to this instance. So, I think you're objectively wrong in your assumption that it's 50/50 there. I don't think you have to be familiar with the meta for it to be the action that you gravitate to. There's a reason why it's been a popular action. Hard disagree with the way eod went down and Mara not being the clear lynch, especially given the posting level and the main drivers.

I already said I wasn't going to debate this point, so this will be the last I comment on it.

I'm surprised you've gone to such lengths to debate this, given your approach otherwise of not wanting to waste time/effort.

To each his own!

[Battle Mage]

Well I think I got stood up, so I may be active tonight.

My vote isn't doing anygood where it is, I want to sheep my top town read (word) but BM is also on the wagon and the way he is calling me confScum is giving me bad vibes.

I will go with my gut from yesterday.

VOTE: Penguin

giving you "bad vibes"? i would think if you were town, it'd trigger a slightly stronger reaction than that

sorry to hear you got stood up though!

[superbowl9]

I'm talking about probability from my experience over a couple of hundred games over the past few years. I'm applying that general probability to this instance. So, I think you're objectively wrong in your assumption that it's 50/50 there. I don't think you have to be familiar with the meta for it to be the action that you gravitate to. There's a reason why it's been a popular action. Hard disagree with the way eod went down and Mara not being the clear lynch, especially given the posting level and the main drivers.

I already said I wasn't going to debate this point, so this will be the last I comment on it.

I'll respect that and not bring it up again. I still think I'm right though

[Battle Mage]

VOTE: Nash now that you have what you wanted BM

cheers dude!

and don't worry, I think you're right too. PenguinPower is a nice guy, but he never graduated from the BM School of Scumhunting.

[superbowl9]

Thank you my friend <3

[Doctor Drew]

Well I think I got stood up, so I may be active tonight.

My vote isn't doing anygood where it is, I want to sheep my top town read (word) but BM is also on the wagon and the way he is calling me confScum is giving me bad vibes.

I will go with my gut from yesterday.

VOTE: Penguin

giving you "bad vibes"? i would think if you were town, it'd trigger a slightly stronger reaction than that

sorry to hear you got stood up though!

You calling me confScum is the only thing that makes me think you are scum, since I can't think of anyway, mechanically or otherwise, how you came to that conclusion.

[word321]

Tuxedo Mask, Doctor Drew, Word, Looker, Gypyx	28%
Nash, Superbowl, Aristophane, Froppy	14%
Battle Mage, Penguin Power	0%

This is a percentage table of probabilities to ppl being in the {hider, visited by hider} situation as either of the 2 assuming uniform distribution.
The percentages henceforth indicates raw probability of being town

For that situation

(u can still be town, but not conftown in the sense of the hider mechanic); it is assumed froppy=>pp and bm=>nash is not a thing.
That is, a player with a lower percentage is more

mechanically disposable

, that is, by mechanics alone, it is more probable for them being scum; it has nothing to do with guts, positioning and whatnots.
Tomorrow this table will have more info, as we will have more information on new slots.
Checking Nash, as is the current proposal, could potentially out the hider or make Nash a 0%, down TM by one level and change the odds to 33% and 17% respectively.

Id rather just kill PP at this point instead of going for a claim on Nash and risking outing a PR

; well garantee the hammer will not interfere with this mechanic, and the only risk well have at that point is scum killing the hider (and his hidee) or the hider finding scum; I think there r good odds this will not happen, as it is currently 14% chance alone (except is scum is on the possible hiders list). If we out Nash, and he dsnt end up beign scum, we r effectively increasing by a large amount the odds of scum outing the hider; without scum on hider candidates, it is an increase from 1/7 to 1/6, but with scum on those candidates, it may be as far as 1/5 to 1/4. Of course, there is no need to actually say who those candidates r.

So my recommendation is just to kill pp. He has real possibilities of being scum (in the sense that there is not anything against that, giving it at least an uniform distribution wich Ill not math), and he dsnt interfere with the mechanic.
This is not personal; it seems like a personal vendetta or whatnot, but it has nothing to do with it. im actually with pp on the mechanical argument of wifoms (and for that, u have this spoiler of mechanical blabbering:)

Spoiler:

The explanation given to wifoms works to a certain extent; it is on the base that both alternative, stage 0 and 1 of the wifom (wich r identical for all intents and purpose to every single other stage) r equivalent on all regards. This is not generally the true, tho; creating a counterwagon to a wagon on a scum for example, has benefits and detractions outside the view on ur slot, or bussing ur partner early or late. Therefore, one of the stages have a weight in it; it is more desirable to be on that stage than the other. Since this is a social game, in practice it means ppl will naturally drift towards that alternative, creating henceforth higher odds on that being a case for scum. The same argument can be given to difficulty; if one stage require more levels of difficulty in being executed (like faking a case when bussing ur partner), it will have the same practical effect.

Another factor to consider is the alleged "cycle" in metas. I dnt rly have that much experience to back it up, but I think the use of one strategy or the other on such an specific level of meta is more chaotic, that is, there is a lot of "noise" (in the stochastic sense) to that process. Even then, one "meta" being imperant leads naturally to the other being more desirable; this kind of situations usually tend to drift to a more stable state, when both situations tend to be equally used if truly equal considering the factors on the above paragraph, or a equilibrium with a weight to one side if those factors do matter (to illustrate this, it is quite difficult for one stage to completely impose itself on the other in a meta, since to reach that state, scum would need to actively play against their interests from some time).

From the above, the easier/more profitable stage of both tend to be more probable; this is backed up by PPs experience, so I find it a reasonable argument. I dnt think the argument that to call wifom u need to back it with something else does apply, too; a case on someone is build on a lot of selfconsistent arguments to that slot (at least that is how I see it), and from what is written above, there is no reason to say bussing ur partner is less probable than not; on the contrary, it is profitable on the towncred sense (that is natural human psychology, ppl search for the odd one first) and it is easy to execute; it is reasonable to think that the odds r inclined to that possibility, specially considering pps experience.

That dsnt mean I think his opinion is good;

only that argument

is too few.

So pp, nothing personal; if I was on ur situation as a VT u claim to be, Id consider commiting harakiri. Just a lil bit tho, as it is almost always better to kill someone else if u can. U just happen to be on the wrong spot.

On the same vein, I recommend for the hider strategy tonight checking 2 spots above u.

[Doctor Drew]

^town

[superbowl9]

Ik I said like 1 post ago I wouldnt talk about this, but it's not really @ PP anymore and if people don't want to read theory they can just skip over these posts - this is too interesting to not talk about for me though

Totally agree with you word, was going to go into the weights of different levels but my post was already long enough. As you said this meta can reach a Nash (lol) equilibrium, which would be a 50/50 assuming each option is more or less counter to the other (they are) and there's not a clear marginal benefit from choosing one option over the other (debatable, I would actually say not bussing actually has the strategical advantage in higher-level games), hence why I said 50/50.
This is still debatable, though, because mafia players are not perfect and may incorrectly weight the strategical advantage of bussing - how good is the average scum at estimating the effectiveness of a bus? I think, in this case, we would all agree that scum's decision on whether to bus is dependent on the % chance of the wagon going to elim, which is also subjective evaluation, and hence my issue with the assumptions.
In a sense, the natural equilibrium of the metas leads to a more direct correlation of bus% with wagon hammer probability, with a meta shift skewing this correlation one way or the other. However, this is all assuming that scum are playing perfectly rationally, which isnt necessarily the case.
My point is there's way too many variables in this to have any reasonable certainty that a random sample of scum A weights the EV of bussing > the EV of not bussing, B thinks that the wagon will go to hammer enough to reach the bus section of their curve, and C is acting as a rational enough player in order to follow this curve in the first place.

[Doctor Drew]

I will be honest, really tough for me to read super analytical posts. My eyes just glaze over.

[superbowl9]

Haha you don't have to read this interaction with me/pp/word if you don't want:

Just know I disagreed with PP's elim pool selection for theoretical reasons, none of this really has notable implications on this game in the first place because functionally I don't really care where PP pressures as long as they are pressuring.

[word321]

hmmmm
I think we should spoil mechanical talks to not clog the game too much. I do like to talk about theory, so Ill leave this here.

Spoiler:

I do agree with a good degree of what u said; indeed, there r a lot of factors, too many, to consider an "analytical" answer to the problem in an objective way; even if there was, the nature of the game is so that being able to know the answer makes it mostly invalid (cause it is accompanied henceforth by a reaction from the playerbase). But there r still some points I disagree; players r diverse, but I think it is not exageration to say that most of the players "learn" from the games they play, and when I say learn, I mean they take the feedback of the effectiveness of their decisions into considering their next decisions. If someone busses a partner and gets instantly caught, it is less likely to bus on the same way again; and so on and so forth. Mafia being a probability game tho, being wrong dsnt necessarily implicate not taking the optimal decision, so on the short term it implicates a degree of chaos in the way ppl take decisions (but skewed on avarage to the best decision given a similar group of players), but under ideal conditions it grows to the optimal solution.

Mafia not being ideal, Id dare to say that there is so much noise (like having different amounts of xp among the player) that on average this only works on paper. And here is when the social nature of the game begins to show: we need to use reasonable estimations.

Reasonable estimations dsnt always comes from observed behavior, but from expected behavior; as we said earlier, we cant rly know the actual distributions of probabilities to a given situation, especially with a newer playerbase or whatnots, but we can

estimate it in a reasonable way

by taking assumptions. U already mentioned one of those: "most ppl think that it is good to bus their partners if u r arriving at a hammer on em, if u can get away with it.". U can also estimate other things associated: "The earlier u join the wagon on ur partner, the more towncread u get, or at least the more indistinguishible from the player base u get."
The effectiveness of such a representation ultimately comes from the ability of the player to understand the psyche of ur "average joe" playing mafia, and is what I truly think a good player develops with the years; u become more socially savvy.

I feel like we r drifting to the realm of nonsensical knowldge that is not based on reality itself, so lets go back to the argument with penguins argument.
Penguin inherently made an estimation based on his knowledge of the game at that point; note here that the fact of it originating from a wifom-able situation or not, becomes irrelevant to the actual effectiveness of said argument.
The argument is valid if it heightens the chance of caughting scum; given the nature of the argument, I too think it is reasonable as an estimation, given my reduced knowledge of the playerbase of the site. Saying it is not valid from a theoretical way must be something more than estimating it is not like that from knowledge alone, as that is the ability difference btw 2 players, not "theory"; it must mean there is an objective way as to why it is wrong, or there is a proper way to do an argument in a more reasonable way (and most of the time, there isnt, from what weve seen before).

Now, to the game:

Nash!

Even if I think that from a mechanical reason PP is a better hammer, I still think from a gut read that u r more suspicious, and seems that other ppl think so too. U jumped on Maras wagon when it was about to hammer; then u jumped out and went for the no-hammer argument. Then to looker. Saying ur behavior is unusual is getting short, and it seems quite erratic tbh.
But alas,

Let me help u help urself. Why dnt u give us a narration of ur thought process from when u voted Mara to the end of D1?

Suspects at the time, hunches, the reason u didnt go to PP and found it oportune to go for Looker; anything is valid. We r not interested in how good or wrong it was, but what u thought at the time. So the more details and reads on ppl (and reasons, if there r any), the better. Ur actions didnt rly seem random, Im sure u have some reason to have acted that way.

[Froppy]

Excellent, I'm happy lynching PP then. I could have bought Midari's play if she was a PR just being overly worried about being directed, but definitely didn't feel vanilla.

Would a PR not out as a VT? I feel like anyone would have said VT if they were in that position.