Mini 2230: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Game Over

[Lukewarm]

Sneaky

[unwnd]

I'm with it

VOTE: Titus

[unwnd]

Investigate Medea or Pooky thanks

[Annie Edison]

@fferys response to my last post about not being *actually* ready to end the day- it’s less a “I’m confident in my reads” and more a “I need some data to ground me” thing but like… I get it

@Lukes case on Titus- I actually really liked that. Like not even just the case like thinking about Luke alignment wise? Idk it was definitely hitting a lot of the right notes in my head

@Rhea- I’m sorry. I’m not sure if I’m part of the problem but I’ll try to be better about including you and being helpful. Please stay :/

[ArcAngel9]

Investigate Medea or Pooky thanks

Pooky and Dunn

[Annie Edison]

If we are going to elim Titus instead of activate her I would like to

HURT: annie

[Snarky Fishes]

I’m sad that as the game finally heats up and people are starting to communicate i have to go to work.
Really like the last few pages.

Ff, I’m good with handing a shard out to Annie.

-bell.

[Snarky Fishes]

HURT: annie

[Titus]

Need today off all games. Mental health.

[Medea the Alien]

Something I meant to go back and add, but that I forgot

Spoiler: Addendum for Bulge

I guess the real difference I'm trying to get at luke is that in the situations you referenced, you were pushing scum for misplays. that's what I mean by focused on the right things. i'm not saying "scum luke hones in and town luke doesn't". I just think you're focusing on pointless bull and coming off somewhat defensive in the process, and it's jarring to me.

I missed this the first time through the thread. I still don't think that I see the distinction that you are trying to draw.

In Newbie 2065, this is the post that resulted in me scum reading T3, and pushing him out

Bulge, what particularly stuck out to you about that? What stuck out to me was mostly that it was a brand newbie supposedly having read a bunch of games. This reads to me as if almost fake helpful and as if it was fed by a scumpartner.

Now, the post that stood out to me from Penguin

Talk to me about Lukewarm. Because, self-centered as it is, I didn't like his whole 'nice guy' approach to the idea of yeeting Cabd with a 'poor penguin doesn't play many games these days' sentiment. Maybe I'm just a bitch, but if you find scum you yeet scum and let them troll the dead thread instead. I realize Lukewarm has a persona of 'wouldn't have condoned the Marci quickelim, let everyone have a turn with the class teddy bear' but does he really think anyone who believes a slot that has both Cabd and a scum role PM should be giving it room out of pity?

I miss incisive Lukewarm that I've spectated elsewhere.

--PA

Penguins is much prettier, and nicely structured, but they are even structured the exact same way. "@TownieA. Tell me more about why you are suspicious of TownieB. Here is why I am suspicious to help prop that up." And in both situations I was 100% sure that TownieB was town (first game it was my mason partner, this game it was me) which I think helped me spot it.

So, you witnessed me catch a scum player for exactly this kind of post before, what makes you dismiss this one as "honing in on the wrong things"?

I have a lot of thoughts on what went down overnight, but most of them are mean and fight-picking. I'm more interested now in trying to reset on Lukewarm, as I already know I don't want him eliminated, and I do want to see where he's going with his Titus case.

First the addendum to Bulge that I didn't see in my previous thread reading. This actually makes a fuckton of sense as to why he jumped so heavily on my line of questioning if he's town here. I'm not thrilled that it took as long as it did for him to draw the connection, and I still don't like that he interrupted the process anyways from a grumpy old lady perspective. I don't like in this game overall where I feel like I'm chivvying people toward town-looking actions. This isn't the place for me to drop wisdom from on high, but if you're town here, I would suggest considering that different players can do the same thing for different reasons. If it was an auto-scum tell, absolutely no one would ever do it. I can't refute your played experience with T3, but I suppose after this game you'll have another data point that demonstrates it's not a reliable scum tell, so congrats to you. (I'm also lowkey amused that since you thought the post came from Cabd initially, you put his scum play on the same level as T3's.)

I went through Lukewarm's ISO and cherry-picked out everything he's posted that doesn't stem from his pursuit of my question to Dunn and leaving out the opening posts that I thought were useless. I'm reading that to see what I see about his thought process once there's meat in the game that isn't penguin-flesh. Also reading this from a 'I want Lukewarm to be town here' perspective as a change of framing. Thoughts:

I don't hate his mechanics posts early on as much as I did. Some of this is hindsight that the changed wincon makes them less damaging, and it mirrors internal discussions from our hydra in places, plus as he pointed out earlier, yeah, his 'self-hammer' idea is in line with my ultimate conclusion when I was considering shard use post-wincon change.

Question for Lukewarm: Do you have a completed game here where you've seen bad use/reveal of mechanics stuff or overclaiming town torpedo the game for the town side?

More on the mechanics side, I tend to think that Lukewarm wouldn't post all of this about mechanics as scum while

pretending

not to know that scum can distribute shards. Someone(s?) said earlier than his scum game is clean and polished, and I find it unlikely he'd pretend not to know a singular mechanic. For Dunnstral, not knowing multiple mechanics felt shady. Here, for Lukewarm overlooking one thing seems more likely, and assuming it's genuine, I can't come up with a three-player scum team on this list where the alternate factional action wouldn't have come up in the PT pre-game/very early game.

I do like that he doesn't jump on AA9's mechanical misunderstanding in his 469. Given he doesn't have experience with her play, it would be easy for him to convincingly set her up as a scum read.

His talk with ManateeGal about his vote on us is interesting. Something else I'll note, tangential to my Lukewarm read, is that I pushed ManateeGirl into the idea that scumreading us was the only logical townie position. What's notable about her eventual agreement is that in that entire posting area between her first reads list and her long-awaited vote on us, she only ever goes down the path where our reads are. Lukewarm's vote is scummy, but the rest of the wagon is town. There's no real rethinking of whether there was more scum on our wagon instead.

[This is a divergence from reading Lukewarm here, but this is what I think I'm seeing from ManateeGirl all day, as a holdover from NQN and such. Looking back, her very first reaction to Dunnstral scumreading her was scummy as fuck. A lot of 'SHOW ME THE CASE' and then she switched tactics entirely. It was like she reset from her scum instincts and remembered back to what advice she'd been given for how to play when accused of being scum in the NQN dead thread, or like she consulted with a Mafia PT about how to proceed. And since then it's been a lot of 'wanting to make people like her reads, be polished, do whatever will make her come off as town' in contrast to...actually being town. It's my problem with unwnd's townread on her, that initial fireback at Dunnstral being disregarded and him going along with her very deliberate posting since. But I digress]

Then there's stuff on his reads on SF and AE. He talks about ffery not trying to pocket him.

Question for Lukewarm: do you think anyone this game

has

tried to pocket you?

His take on Sleez works for me. I remember feeling generally similarly about Sleez posting from outside the 'popular/what people want to hear' perspective and liking it even when I thought Sleez was wrong.

I'm breaking my framing a bit to comment on 790. I hate self-hypotheticals a bit because if you can think of a plan, you can think of another plan. So I don't entirely buy that if he was scum in this game he'd be pinning his hopes on a townread from Cabd. I think it's a possibility, but I also think he'd ditch it quickly if other opportunities showed up. Like...finding a reason to scumread the Cabd-slot. I think Lukewarm is a better player than that.

I like some of his take on Rhea. I don't think he's thinking about her posting style correctly, in that he seems to think that it's a playstyle choice whereas it's really a communication mode. I'm not liking his town read on Pooky in 910; I think Pooky's post there is very much incorrect and leaves himself a lot of wiggle room to ignore Rhea and then policy her. I do feel like he's being upfront about his ability or lack thereof to townbin her, and I think the paranoia is healthy. It's a far less placating approach than a lot of what I've seen, and I don't think Lukewarm is as upfront as scum.

The discussion of Lukewarm's surprise at not being immediately townread feels honest, but it doesn't persuade me. Looking back, I'm not seeing why he'd think his content up to the point where what he thought was Cabd jumping on him happened would merit a snap town read. After that things went off the rails regardless, but I can't tell if he thought he would be townread because he's town or because he thought he was putting on a gamefront that would fool ffery/Cabd. Doesn't move my read.

1300 pings. Lukewarm says he was trying to solve me in his initial exchange, but later on in the Bulge note he basically says he considered my initial question to Dunn a scumtell.

What do you mean by solve, figure me out or solidify your tell-based read?

If town, Luke's 1301 kind of scans assuming that we're treating our scum reads as linked. Which generally speaking I don't, and Cabd doesn't on a regular basis this early. It's a good point for not linking them. At this point I'm still not convinced that there aren't places where bussing wouldn't be useful to scum, even given the gamestate after the rules change, but it's less likely. This and subsequent posts discussing the issue with Spiffeh and ffery charitably feel like Lukewarm is making assumptions about good game play that are just wrong. Linking reads and locking in those links before a flip is a waste of effort and foolish regardless. Even if you think people look like partners, you can't wagon both at the same time, and how one wagon goes down has to influence your thinking. Plus there's generally a night's worth of actions in between to consider. I don't expect any two scum here to be that tightly linked in a playerlist of this caliber.

I begrudgingly get it though, having seen Cabd-solves where he has more scum reads ready to kill than he has bullets/elims/what have you for. I don't like it, but I can see the annoyed-town perspective.

Getting into the Titus material now.

I think 2343 is the most complete breakdown of it. And damned if I don't agree. Cabd is out on site visits today, but I know he thought your case was laid out well but hadn't read it (we had a fun night where I woke up screaming in pain in the middle of the night, it's a thing, and he said you'd posted about Titus). I think I see what you're seeing, and it reminds me of the same potential feelings of shame I have for a very old game, NY161, where someone claimed a cop guilty result, we eliminated the result for a town flip, and then somehow got talked into giving him another chance with ANOTHER claimed guilty the next day to the same town flip result. No, we didn't do it a third time, but it was too little too late for the town. I feel like the way this Titus timeline goes down, we're looking at having to use the shards town does control Day One and Day Two to power her up, all for the chance we get a confirmed town on her slot. Assuming scum doesn't block her, kill her target (by Night Two with three players out and up to three scum alive, they might be looking at only a six player pool for killing her purported target. And if she crumbs, that helps them too. What happens when Day Three hits and we don't have that promised confirmed-town-Titus? Do we give her another chance? Or do we eliminate her, knowing that we gave her the two shards it takes for her to count as a demon regardless of alignment?

This is probably very out of date with current game content at this point since it's taken me most of the morning in between work to type it up, but I'll put it out there. My conclusions, there are three:

1) I didn't want to eliminate Lukewarm today, and that holds true. Putting aside my own irritation, and coupling it with Cabd's lack of a strong read, his ISO outside of our dynamic is in a town range.

2) ManateeGirl looks worse than ever to me. I need to figure out whether there's a narrative there that's just in my head or if it's real based on game stances/posting.

3) The Titus case is persuasive. The big question I have is why she actually cut off her 'gambit' where she did with her wagon. We're dismissed as a justified vote on her, but Pooky is the one and only fish she thinks she caught before pulling in her bait. I realize that people scum reading us can easily dismiss it as a partner interaction, but it doesn't track from my knowledge, so what's her motivation?

--PA

P-edit: looks like there's time to consider the Titus case anyways. Sharding should be decided before anyone gets to L-2, I would say.

[ArcAngel9]

If we are going to elim Titus instead of activate her I would like to

HURT: annie

Quick question

what do shards does? I couldn't find this on the main page or I may have misunderstood it.

[ArcAngel9]

I mean what does a shard do!

Sorry about that!

[Annie Edison]

Sharding is how we go from human to demon.

[ArcAngel9]

Sharding is how we go from human to demon.

that i understood. Is there an advantage for the town for being a demon? because it looks like if we have more demons it can help mafia win by their win conditino.

[Snarky Fishes]

Lunch.
Gunna ask one last time and then leave it alone.
Is everyone absolutely sure ArkAngel is not scum.
It stretches the very credulity of the universe that they didn't know what shards did on page 96 in addition to presumably receiving a role PM.

Also, in regards to Titus. good case. I'm a little nervous because their reactions lately are very town for them. But copying tone is within the realm of reason. While the case against them is much better.
Not that cases can't be wrong.

-Bell.

[Annie Edison]

Did you do your homework like PA told you Bell?

@AA9- I feel like you should understand why this can’t be a prolonged discussion. I’m not getting into it more, but as is scum need like 75% of the setup to be demons to win?

So given we’re at like, 18 max, I think we’re okay. (Please note all math is in guesstimates)

[ArcAngel9]

Lunch.
Gunna ask one last time and then leave it alone.
Is everyone absolutely sure ArkAngel is not scum.
It stretches the very credulity of the universe that they didn't know what shards did on page 96 in addition to presumably receiving a role PM.

Also, in regards to Titus. good case. I'm a little nervous because their reactions lately are very town for them. But copying tone is within the realm of reason. While the case against them is much better.
Not that cases can't be wrong.

-Bell.

Would prefer Mantee over Titus? I scum read them.

Did you do your homework like PA told you Bell?

@AA9- I feel like you should understand why this can’t be a prolonged discussion. I’m not getting into it more, but as is scum need like 75% of the setup to be demons to win?

So given we’re at like, 18 max, I think we’re okay. (Please note all math is in guesstimates)

I am sorry if i am coming back on this again and again. Its because i am still confused. I read the setup on main page and read my role pm twice.

it still doesn't confirm to me if a demon has any special abilities. if there are no special abilities what is the use of becoming a demon?

Please note that English is not my first language. sometimes i struggle to understand when a message is not direct.

[ArcAngel9]

FYI. My first language is Telugu (Mother Tongue), Second Language is Hindi (National Language), My third language was English and Fourth language is Sanskrit (which i don't choose to communicate)

[Here There Be Dragons]

aa9 what's your read on us

~std

[Snarky Fishes]

Ffery, two options forward. Separation and keeping me in stasis, or four person hydra thread-PT. Your call. My hand is extended. I'm gonna be digging in regardless.

I didn't see this last night.

please hold.

[Lukewarm]

First the addendum to Bulge that I didn't see in my previous thread reading. This actually makes a fuckton of sense as to why he jumped so heavily on my line of questioning if he's town here. I'm not thrilled that it took as long as it did for him to draw the connection, and I still don't like that he interrupted the process anyways from a grumpy old lady perspective. I don't like in this game overall where I feel like I'm chivvying people toward town-looking actions. This isn't the place for me to drop wisdom from on high, but if you're town here, I would suggest considering that different players can do the same thing for different reasons. If it was an auto-scum tell, absolutely no one would ever do it. I can't refute your played experience with T3, but I suppose after this game you'll have another data point that demonstrates it's not a reliable scum tell, so congrats to you. (I'm also lowkey amused that since you thought the post came from Cabd initially, you put his scum play on the same level as T3's.)

I saw a post that from my pov makes more sense to be written the way that it was written if it had scum motivation behind it then town motivation. I started pushing you for it. Thats how the game works. Looking back, I think that I let other people influence me in ways that had me put thoughts into the thread before I should have. I saw it, thought it was weird, and planned on letting your interaction with dunn play out before I pushed you on it. But then Annie asked me for my thoughts on you in 274, and I put my concern out there, no filter. And once it was out there, we were going back and forth over it. A similar thing happened later with Spiffeh actually.

I don't think that I put Cabd and T3's scum game any where close to the same level. In the game that I linked to bulge, I pushed him for his post and he basically scum claimed in response... on page 2 of the thread... so there is that. But even if you and cabd have a higher skill level (and don't automatically scum claim under pressure lmao) that does not change the fact that when I look at those posts, I see the scum motivation behind writing them.

I don't hate his mechanics posts early on as much as I did. Some of this is hindsight that the changed wincon makes them less damaging, and it mirrors internal discussions from our hydra in places, plus as he pointed out earlier, yeah, his 'self-hammer' idea is in line with my ultimate conclusion when I was considering shard use post-wincon change.

Question for Lukewarm: Do you have a completed game here where you've seen bad use/reveal of mechanics stuff or overclaiming town torpedo the game for the town side?

I don't think that I have played any games where mechanics had a major role in either side winning. About half of my games are newbie games, and about half of the others are open.

That being said, if you look at my posts, they were made when other people were already talking about the mechanic, and I actually tried to come up with the best plan that I could that would reveal as little information as possible.

Then there's stuff on his reads on SF and AE. He talks about ffery not trying to pocket him.

Question for Lukewarm: do you think anyone this game

has

tried to pocket you?

No? I think that the only people this game that have town read me at any point were the dragons and dunn. And while both of those slots have expressed varying degrees of town reading on me, there has been very little inteaction with me, which I would expect in a pocket attempts.

Everyone else had me in Null to Scum, so hard to picture any of them trying to pocket me x.x

So all in all, I think that the scum team saw my thread position slipping, and decided to either help push that along or just let it happen. I don't think I was seen as a good pocket target

1300 pings. Lukewarm says he was trying to solve me in his initial exchange, but later on in the Bulge note he basically says he considered my initial question to Dunn a scumtell.

What do you mean by solve, figure me out or solidify your tell-based read?

I looked at the post, and I saw scum motivation behind them. Specifically, the scum motivation seemed to be behind not saying "Hey dunn, can you talk to me about your lukewarm read?" And that be it. All of the parts around it are what looked scum motivated. I had 2 explanations in my head for

the stuff around

the question. You wanted Dunn to validate your read on me OR you were trying to sway Dunn.

So I started asking questions about it. Engaging with you. I wanted to see if you could make it make sense to me from a town perspective. You didn't. At best you explained why a townie would ask the question, but never addressed my actually concern, which was

the stuff around

the question. I did not like your responses. So I voted you.

No one else seems to see it. But even right now, looking back at our exchange it gives me the heebie-jeebies. At this point I don't think that it is worth re-debating it. If I am right, and you are scum this game, then after this game I will never doubt it again, if it correctly identified newbie scum and pro scum.

But right now, I am more certain on Titus then I am on you guys.

If town, Luke's 1301 kind of scans assuming that we're treating our scum reads as linked. Which generally speaking I don't, and Cabd doesn't on a regular basis this early. It's a good point for not linking them. At this point I'm still not convinced that there aren't places where bussing wouldn't be useful to scum, even given the gamestate after the rules change, but it's less likely. This and subsequent posts discussing the issue with Spiffeh and ffery charitably feel like Lukewarm is making assumptions about good game play that are just wrong.

This is the other time I mentioned where I think I let other people influence me into putting thoughts into the thread before it was actually the right time to do so. I put 1301 out there, and wanted you to respond to it.

But then spiffeh asked me a direct question, and I answered with no filter on my thoughts. Looking back, I wish I had said something more like "I am still suspicious of them, but right now I just want to talk to them about this" Instead of 1309 (which by the way, I never thought that that made you guys scum. I was trying to engage you, and see if your reads were genuine. Even when Spiffeh asks me, I respond that it is all of the other reasons that I am worried about you guys. I only thought it might be partner equity between the two of you.

[Lukewarm]

Getting into the Titus material now.

The Titus case is persuasive. The big question I have is why she actually cut off her 'gambit' where she did with her wagon. We're dismissed as a justified vote on her, but Pooky is the one and only fish she thinks she caught before pulling in her bait. I realize that people scum reading us can easily dismiss it as a partner interaction, but it doesn't track from my knowledge, so what's her motivation?

In my break down, my guess is that pooky started pushing her for something very accurate, and she felt like she needed to respond to him, but did not have a reasonable response. So, tried to turn it around on pooky.

Looking at your case on her, I can see her thinking that this is a case that she can brush off.
Then looking at pooky's case on her, and if he is 100% right on her, then she did not have a good way to move past it. Especially given her initial attempt to just brush him off in 1965 did not work. And since pooky did not accept that answer, she needed a new on. See 1970, the start of the "gambits"

[Lukewarm]

Lunch.
Gunna ask one last time and then leave it alone.
Is everyone absolutely sure ArkAngel is not scum.
It stretches the very credulity of the universe that they didn't know what shards did on page 96 in addition to presumably receiving a role PM.

Also, in regards to Titus. good case. I'm a little nervous because their reactions lately are very town for them. But copying tone is within the realm of reason. While the case against them is much better.
Not that cases can't be wrong.

-Bell.

Would prefer Mantee over Titus? I scum read them.

Are you town reading Titus? Or just scum reading manatee more?

Have you read my case on Titus? What do you think?

[Annie Edison]

@AA9- it’s not that I’m trying to be rude it’s just very anti town (particularly in this group) to discuss this much. Some of us have roles that change based on shards. That’s the bottom line, iirc it was in the setup description.

Note: it is

Straightforward Central Mechanic - Players can accumulate "shards" to become demonic, and potentially alter what powers they have access to - at a cost

[Here There Be Dragons]

No one else seems to see it.

I haven't been over it carefully. Maybe I should, although I already think medea is scum so there wouldn't be much point except to potentially validate your thoughts.