Newbie 2023 - Hedgehogs - Day 3

[The Bulge]

if i had to i was gonna townslip that scum had a rolecop result n1 i wonder how that would have played out

[The Bulge]

but yea the walter kill was purely pr-hunting

[WaltertheDunce10]

Huh k.
Wondered how i got zeroed in so quickly

[shellyc]

Bulge said in our PT you PR slipped or something

I really am trash at picking up PR slips

[The Bulge]

for walter it was the urgency nearing EoD to stay alive, for clarity it was the early game enthusiasm but I was less confident on that one. hence why we killed walter and investigated bell n1

[shellyc]

Fun reading for y'all: my NS case that I was going to finish if bulge was limmed

TL;DR - NS is The Bulge's partner.

Sorry for the huge wall but I was deep diving at night. I only included things up to day 2 - by lylo scum have a very clear direction for manipulating town.

Notscience's ISO Part 1

- RVS vote for The Bulge in 7: potential distancing attempt
- NS keeps engaging Bulge for example in 125, since The Bulge was semi-lurking d1, they tried to engage with him which great easy towncred for asking lurkers to give opinion
- 131 and 136thinks Bulge has posted safe stances and is scummy but DOES NOT vote for him or ask others to vote for him. Does not apply any pressure either.
- in 204 says Bella wagon is fine wtf happened to your Bulge read?
- 217 states Bella / Bulge but again, does not vote for them (I know RVS is on Bulge but why not put some pressure)
- 242 casts ghost vote on Bella instead of voting for Bulge which sets a predecent
- 257 randomly steps back and gives Bulge a null despite all your serious attention on Bulge and despite you stating Bella/Bulge is scumteam
- 334 attempts to "engage" with Bulge again

Another point that I want to make is that a HUGE majority of NS's posts up to this point are trying to get Bulge to talk / slightly SRing them without making a real effort to push them. They also do IIoA a fair bit of the time

Notscience's ISO Part 1

- 371 states intent to vote IV despite the many slight SR Bulge posts
- 392 SUDDENLY STATES THE BULGE TOWN. "Town?" "Maybe?"
- 414 says scum!NS would pocket Bulge and Bella but this could be wifoming
- 424 reaffirms the IV lynch again
- 437 they say themselves they haven't done much which is self-focused on appearance. A scumtell out of the book.
- 528 SR andres, TR Bell, Null Bulge, Bella and me and likes Nash. Let's take a moment to analyse that. Right here we know Bell and Nash(PlusJoy) are town and NS was right on that so there's a very high chance there's a pocket there. Null on Bulge (red) who NS has been pestering at the whole game but he suddenly pivots to null. Also SRing Andres who is being setup for lynchbait
- 547 and 597 are wagoning
- proceeds to post fluff in end of day then says Nash wagon is ass in 690 which was probs a warlock
- "11 hours left" then proceeds to spam the thread

[shellyc]

Btw where's the dead thread, I'm super looking forward to it

[the worst]

I was going to beg to see the draft, thanks Shelly.

[shellyc]

it's in the mafia PT, you'll see it sooner or later but I reckoned you wanted to see it sooner.

[innocentvillager]

of all people Ouroel was scum, lmfao wtf

everything else was pretty expected

sad I never got around to high efforting this maybe I could’ve survived if NS didn’t push me jk

gg

[innocentvillager]

I’m too good at reading NS

jk I’ll always be paranoid of u

[PlusJOYED]

Good game. Advice needed.

me 2

[beeboy]

Mafia PT - https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=83897
Dead PT - https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=84001

[shellyc]

lol dead PT was less interesting than I imagined

thanks to beeboy for modding the game, this was a great game!

[the worst]

Good game. Advice needed.

You were in a profoundly unenviable position this game and one which makes giving direct feedback a little Bit Difficult. being a confirmable pr who has been correctly rolecopped (and to be blunt, given away by your predecessor) is a pretty unique one.

probably the biggest clue you missed this game was in the players who just wouldn't say anything against you. shelly directly pocketed you & the bulge just sort of, floated around you. I genuinely believe that NS missed the clues. I did not miss the clues, but I tried to signal to you/soft tpr a little bit without just lazily townbinning you.

in any situation where you're town, scum know that you're town. so reads where scum just "default to you being town" are slightly unreliable, because they need to pretend that you're scum. when you're a tpr and there's a reasonable probability they know you're a tpr, scum are more often than not going to *avoid* pushing you because they know that when you confirm yourself it's going to blow up in their face.

to this end I think it's worth noting that your pred had a few tpr tells. I've talked a bit about her defaulting to the assumption that she would be townread/not eliminated - this is a really strong tpr mindset tell. if you're in either a slot which has done this, or a game which does/may have a rolecop, try to be really mindful of the fact you're increasingly pocketable.

other than missing the dayplay clues I think you played a pretty obvtown daygame. you pressured well, and I think your reads advanced reasonably well. you were definitely caught out by having been pocketed!

that's what jumps to mind immediately. let me know if there's any other stuff you'd like to ask.

[shellyc]

Advice needed as well and thanks in advance worst!

[shellyc]

your advice is much appreciated since before you came in I sorta got a universal townpass

[notscience]

Oh that? I say shit like that all the time lol

[the worst]

Good game. Advice needed.

me 2

ooh ooh ok

a couple of things first:

I really like your vibe. You have like a sincere / positive energy which is always really delightful to see. Mafia can get really intense and it's easy to get carried away with it and take stuff to heart. during the heat of everything that was going down this post made me smile:

Also I just realized I never said hi to the worst, how rude of me

Hi the worst! I like your pfp, I've been meaning to watch kaguya season 2

Hopefully next time we're on the same team.

secondly, I was a little bit dismissive of your contributions on d3 and I'm sorry for the way I projected that. Your end of day two was actually pretty towny, and your reads on bulge & Andres at a minimum were really solid. When i read up on Nash's iso, I was pretty sure you had replaced into a scumslot. So I suppose it's fair to say my "surprised [you] flipped town" comment was pretty exaggerated.

I think this one was tricky. Shelly was hard to get right; she's like, naturally good at posting as scum in a way that's quite rare for a newbie. A lot of scum struggle to create convincing content at the level she does. So the best advice I can give is probably around interacting with Things Going On rather than necessarily directly reading players.

Tangentially, you reminded me of my first newbie game. I was town, but really struggled with committing to my townreads because I always had that fear, like

what if I'm wrong and look silly?

I'm not sure if that's exactly what happened with the Andres read flip situation, but I feel like the feedback I got from my first ever game applies at some level: don't be scared to be more liberal with your townreads.

Your Andres townread was strong, well-considered and ultimately correct. I wasn't trying to push you to convince you Andres was scum; I was trying to push you to show me how you reached the read originally. Plus, I was also incorrectly heavily scumreading you - so you had the extra benefit of knowing that my reads were wrong.

If you're ever in a situation where you're being confronted about a read which you really believe in, don't doubt yourself. Try your best to talk through it and make the other person see your perspective. If they refuse to...that's a problem with them (either they're scum, or don't understand). But if you're right and convince them, that's a bonus. If you're wrong, you might start to realise that you've used incorrect logic while you talk about it. It could to lots of other ways but hopefully this illustrates the point - if you believe something, back yourself! It makes big things happen.

With respect to your elimination....I think your posting after I incorrectly cases you was quite good. This playerlist was unique because both scum had deeply pocketed a few town players. But if you check the vote count.......

Day 2, VC 8

With 7 alive it takes 4 to eliminate.

PlusJOYED(4) -

The Worst, shellyc, The Bulge, Andresvmb

The Bulge (2) -

notscience, PlusJOYED

Not Voting (1) -

Bell

Mod Note:

Deadline: (expired on 2020-08-31 23:59:00)

...... The scumteam were clearly very happy with your elimination. Andres' vote seemed to me to be quite similar to notscience's intent to hammer. It felt more like a situation where you COULD be scum... and it would have made sense if their townreads were correct. But I think in a playerlist where scum played a bit less well, your posting there probably could have gotten the elimination onto Bulge.

your read on me made sense. I'm probably capable of doing most of what I did this game as scum, I think (just maybe not as quickly/effortlessly ). when you're incorrectly pushed by someone, it's really valuable to ask yourself: is their case rubbish, or does it make sense? does it feel like a real thought they're actually having? etc.; It is in scum's best interest to mis-elim you, but unfortunately sometimes town will accidentally mis-elim you too. The best trick is to look for behavioural tells. There's a decent chance you already did this with me and just arrived at "scum", but I wanted to say it anyway

I think from there your elimination preferences might have been me => notscience before shelly. but honestly, I think the best way to improve on this is to just keep practicing. losses happen sometimes, and I think it's ok (maybe even an honour) to play your hardest and lose to someone who played really well.

[the worst]

@the worst I might chat with you postgame on why you decided to dig so hard on me knowing I flip town. If I was mafia in bella slot, I don't think it'd be a very good idea to push me this hard when you know I'm town, since you'll just get elimed the next day. How do you plan on reacting when I do flip town day 3?

speaking of experience: this post is actually really intuitive, by the way. following this reasoning, I would be crazy to replace into a scumslot and powerdrive your miselim to save my scumbuddy the bulge, only to go into final 5 with egg on my face...... therefore, there's a higher chance that I actually believe my push on you, therefore I'm more likely to be town.

[the worst]

shellyyyyyy
I'm always excited to see newbies who enjoy the day-game, and who play hard to their win condition. it's really nice to have you around, and I'm excited to see how you develop.

Starting complimentary: congrats on the win! It was really well deserved. Bulge did really well in pocketing NS and remaining *just* on top of the elim-pool, but you really worked some powerful pockets on quite a few players. Even following a bulge scumflip, I think it would have been quite hard to catch you. You have a cool natural ability as scum to post reads which are absolutely made-up, but sound sincere. You were also focused & present enough in this game to know which townies to pocket. And you did a really good job of keeping momentum up enough to not make them doubt you.

You clearly made a *decision* not to bus Bulge (rather than just, not bussing because you weren't sure what to do). I think that was a smart decision. Bussing him and then cycling through cases on why different players might be scum with him, would have been a substantially more difficult endgame. He also played very well in a different way to how you did.

I'm in a prejudiced position, because we were in "opposing solves", so to speak -- we were very unlikely to be scum together. People's solves very consistently included one of us as scum. So it is fairly intuitive for me to eventually reach the conclusion that you're very likely to be scum.

The main thing I'd suggest by way of feedback is: be careful with how much you show your hand. There were a couple of points as early as the JOYED wagon where you seemed very comfortable with the gamestate. That was around the time I realised if I was wrong on JOYED, you were likely scum.

I'll try and talk through what I saw

and you aren't voting scum who is trying to rectify whyyyyy exactly?

were my walls & walls of insightful catchup with clear read trajectory too scummy?

I read your catchup - imo you could have put that in your notes PT but yeah sure I see your townie mindset. Your vote is a placeholder and I'm currently reading PlusJoy's ISO to read them as I can't really get a read off there

This came after you were talking to me about the idea of town!JOYED. I could very much feel your read shifting from:

1) shelly leans town on joyed
2) the worst scumcased joyed
3) shelly is null on joyed now

in the moment, it was very hard to tell whether you made this shift because 1) you were scum who needed JOYED dead; 2) you were town who was reevaluating your JOYED read. But it stuck out quite a lot to me.

The comment you made about my towny mindset also did a fair bit to soothe my mind. I was definitely softpocketed for about 5 minutes there. I'll come back to this.

That's E-1 by the way if I recall correctly.

I no longer scumread the worst. Those posts are solid gold town mindset.
VOTE: Unvote

Solid gold town mindset is important - I'll cycle back to this.

From the above PlusJoy's slot leans scum. Haven't finished reading the next half though

Semi placeholder vote VOTE: PlusJoy

This circled back to that shift in your read which I mentioned. Your comments about JOYED's iso were actually kinda convincing. But the way you shifted through {townlean => null => reread iso => vote} definitely made it seem like you were quite happy with the idea of a JOYED elim, over myself/bulge/Andres.

Hope not much goes on and I'll continue reading

By the way PlusJoy-the worst is TvS to me. Literally if PlusJoy flips green today (which doesn't seem plausible) we should elim the worst

When I read this post, I had this feeling like "if JOYED flips green, shelly is mafia and she's going to win". lol. A couple of things I picked up about this post:

1) you went from townleaning me for a towny mindset, to confidently calling it a "solid gold town mindset", to suggesting that I might be scum but not with JOYED. These posts were made quite quickly after each other, and didn't feel like your opinion on me had *changed*, just that you were stating it differently. This is slightly contradictory and makes your read change on me stand out quite a lot. You could say something like, for example, "I really liked the worst's analysis of JOYED and Nash's posting. I'm still a bit concerned he's going so hard after an un-pushed slot when I'm still not convinced about Andres/Nash, but I think he's town here." - I'll still look like an idiot after JOYED flips green, but it seems like a more cohesive read on me. Creating fake thoughts is hard. Creating clear, cohesive thoughts is really damn hard. It takes a lot of focus & practice.

2) there's a classic scumtell about this type of posting, which is not actually all that reliable, but you should be wary that it might get you caught out. In short, this type of post displays an agenda. As town, you should not know how JOYED will flip; you will have thoughts on whether we might be scum together though. A townie in this situation might say "I think there is one scum in JOYED & the worst, and I think it's JOYED". The message is similar; you're not comfortable with our engagement and think there's scum in it. But that statement doesn't make it *seem* as though you're pre-planning for the next phase. On the other hand, saying "if JOYED flips town then ......., But if JOYED flips scum then ........." does make it seem as though you're planning for a certain thing in the next day phase.

Both of these are fairly small nuanced things. And in this game, they didn't matter because you were on a clear trajectory to victory which you followed well. But thinking about the way you explain thoughts like this might help you in a future game.

you're literally the only factor in this game which makes me apprehensive about eliminating JOYED
like ftr i'm just reminding myself that nash was Intensely wolfy and JOYED's posts don't make sense from a solving mindset and he's reacted to being pushed by hedging a read on me and then posturing (again)

i guess i sincerely don't think JOYED is town so this isn't really important

After reading their ISO they look bad. PlusJoy will almost certainly flip scum here

This comment kind of jarred with your previous comment where you weren't certain about whether it was scum!JOYED or scum!worst; it seemed like you were placating me rather than sorting me.

PlusJoy are you just going to disregard the ISO analysis I have done?

yeah, I don't care much at how scum or town I look really now that I've trapped a scum. I mean I've townread you and you seem to be just decieved by maf the worst. It's fine though, just make sure you tunnel the worst if I get elimed tomorrow and all will be well

We'll see you flip red. I don't think I have been manipulated. They literally spent pages bickering at me

This was a really good post in isolation. It was still a bit confusing when compared to you not being convinced that I was town; I think town!shelly in this situation might have had a stronger *feeling* that I was town. Even if there was a chance that the read might be wrong, you might have been more confident about me being town in this moment.

Maybe, maybe not - but confidence in reads (even if they're incorrect or short term) is something I look for in town.

First post; it's LimLo. How PlusJoy flipped town is still a mystery to me.

RIP Bell so we know now the setup is rolecop + goon and tracker + doctor

I stand by my TR on NS. I still TR the worst slightly for that town mindset from that readthrough.

My most likely solve here is the bulge / andres.

This was actually probably what threw my d3 solve off. I was fully expecting you to come into d3 and push me as a bulge or andres partner. I had hoped Bell would be alive for the free clear, but I didn't think he would be. After the way your day two ended with a "the worst posted with a strong townie mindset but I'm not sure", I was fully expecting you to reverse that read coming into d3. as soon as you doubled down on it instead, I actually paused because it looked like you were seriously trying to read me.

Just tying back into a comment I made at the start -- because I was the mis-elim, and we were in "opposing solves", there was a very high chance that I'd successfully scumread you. I have a slightly higher chance to read Andres correctly, because I have experience with his towngame. notscience made sense as a bulge partner, but the way he evaluated d3 made it pretty unlikely that he was working an agenda. (On the contrary, the way you & I worked around him made it seem like one of us was pocketing him ) because of this, I was very likely to read you correctly on d3 and I don't think there's a lot you can do to improve that -- after all, I'm your mis-elim, so it's not all that important if I read you correctly as long as townies don't read me correctly



I hope this makes sense.
Giving advice on scumgames is harder because there are so many tiny decisions which add up to how you're viewed at endgame

But these are the things that I thought of

[innocentvillager]

how do you do it worsty

[the worst]

Do what exactly?

[innocentvillager]

How do you write like you're running out of time?
Write day and night like you're running out of time?
How do you write like tomorrow won't arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write every second you're alive?

[the worst]

oh, I did those ones while I needed to wind down for bed last night. I can't explain the rest though. Do I even exist while I'm not writing?