Smuggler's Port [Game Over]

[maxwell]

Because we can check a group of people today and get more info that way, spending an entire check on a single guy means we have much less to work with tomorrow.

[Radical Rat]

Also HARD disagree with NK15 and maxwell that having a claimed PA this early is good. Honestly, PA should probably have gone the whole game without claiming, instead gently guiding us away from investigating the TD, because guess what? EVEN IF Ico had claimed in Post #1, confirmed identity in the first report, and then the slot never made a single other post in the game... that's one less player for scum to potentially guess wrong about being TD.

This game should not have been turned into Follow The IC, and I'm really quite annoyed at this whole situation. Honestly, the more I think about it the more it seems likely to me that NK15 was scum sacrificing himself in the hopes of baiting out the real PA. I'm still not executing him today when we have the means to 100% confirm his alignment, but yeah.

[Moment]

It's such wishful thinking to me to think that NK15 is scum. Either wishful thinking or pure laziness.

People just see "Oh, looks like he got caught fakeclaiming" and their brains stop thinking past that point. There can't be any more nuance, anyone who did that must be scum. Yes SS, I've already heard and responded to you talking about the scum motivation, you don't need to say it again. I feel as though you're making a failure of theory of mind – I don't think you're properly trying to think from NK15's perspective. I think his posts from the rest of this day strongly evidence the fact that he has pretty strong convictions in the setup that you're not considering when you think about motivation.

To anyone who says anything along the line of "well he'll always be a question mark so we have to deal with him", your mindset is truly flawed. There is nothing forcing your hand. Any sort of "obligation" you feel is completely constructed. Obviously you feel as though he's scum for what he's done, but my main point here is that that's just an

element

of a

read

, not any sort of obligation that something "must" happen. I say this because I think thinking along the lines of how someone "has to die anyways" is poison to thought. I have experienced it before where someone

agreed with me

on reasons to townread someone they thought had to die before endgame, and yet

still

they said "It doesn't matter anyways if I townread her, because she can't live to lylo".

There, just as it is here, I feel that once people had constructed in their head that someone could not live to the endgame, the relevance of reads on that player was out. Death eventually had to come, and specific arguments didn't really matter because of course she has to die anyways. I don't feel as though that mindset is germane to having a discussion or to winning the game.

This upsets me even further because NK15 is already among the least eloquent, least charismatic, most mislynched players on the entire site. If you're wondering why I keep making comments about making the same mistakes over and over, it's because I see the same players get lynched over and over by the same other players. Adding the situation with the PA on top of that is just too much. I was in the same situation as NK15 once upon a time, and I got out of it only through a grueling few days of

constant

argumentation

and

pushing a wagon on scum over myself. Of course NK15 was never going to get out of it. It just feels so unjust.


I wonder if some people even believe in the scumread themselves – truly believe, rather than just belief in belief. You're calling him a "douche" and getting really angry at him. What's the point of that if it was just a scum ploy to do whatever?

the one thing i was unsure about was how to handle these douches who thought it was smart to fake claim PA and try to fake-lead on town

[notscience]

Okay so this dude is probably town

[Radical Rat]

Because we can check a group of people today and get more info that way, spending an entire check on a single guy means we have much less to work with tomorrow.

We have five days to catch two out of three scum. Four inspections to work with.
Normally, I'd agree that we should be checking more people. See my first plan for inspections, where I proposed doing half the game at once.

In this particular instance though, using the inspection as a public cop check seems smarter. Misclowns are much more dangerous than a sub-optimal inspection in this set up, and while I AM currently scumreading NK15, I'd like to be sure he's not just Town who made a giant mistake scum's taking advantage of. So I want him alive, and I want his ship inspected. If we do get other people on that ship, the only way we get substantially more information is if the result is clean, but then that also helps the scumteam just as much. Putting NK on alone gives us information that we can use to avoid killing a Merchant, and tells scum nothing that they don't already know. This is the correct play.

I know my mind's been a bit scattered this game, but this I am absolutely sure on.

[Menalque]

VOTE: norway

[Radical Rat]

It's such wishful thinking to me to think that NK15 is scum. Either wishful thinking or pure laziness.

People just see "Oh, looks like he got caught fakeclaiming" and their brains stop thinking past that point. There can't be any more nuance, anyone who did that must be scum. Yes SS, I've already heard and responded to you talking about the scum motivation, you don't need to say it again. I feel as though you're making a failure of theory of mind – I don't think you're properly trying to think from NK15's perspective. I think his posts from the rest of this day strongly evidence the fact that he has pretty strong convictions in the setup that you're not considering when you think about motivation.

To anyone who says anything along the line of "well he'll always be a question mark so we have to deal with him", your mindset is truly flawed. There is nothing forcing your hand. Any sort of "obligation" you feel is completely constructed. Obviously you feel as though he's scum for what he's done, but my main point here is that that's just an

element

of a

read

, not any sort of obligation that something "must" happen. I say this because I think thinking along the lines of how someone "has to die anyways" is poison to thought. I have experienced it before where someone

agreed with me

on reasons to townread someone they thought had to die before endgame, and yet

still

they said "It doesn't matter anyways if I townread her, because she can't live to lylo".

There, just as it is here, I feel that once people had constructed in their head that someone could not live to the endgame, the relevance of reads on that player was out. Death eventually had to come, and specific arguments didn't really matter because of course she has to die anyways. I don't feel as though that mindset is germane to having a discussion or to winning the game.

This upsets me even further because NK15 is already among the least eloquent, least charismatic, most mislynched players on the entire site. If you're wondering why I keep making comments about making the same mistakes over and over, it's because I see the same players get lynched over and over by the same other players. Adding the situation with the PA on top of that is just too much. I was in the same situation as NK15 once upon a time, and I got out of it only through a grueling few days of

constant

argumentation

and

pushing a wagon on scum over myself. Of course NK15 was never going to get out of it. It just feels so unjust.


I wonder if some people even believe in the scumread themselves – truly believe, rather than just belief in belief. You're calling him a "douche" and getting really angry at him. What's the point of that if it was just a scum ploy to do whatever?

the one thing i was unsure about was how to handle these douches who thought it was smart to fake claim PA and try to fake-lead on town

This is a very good post.

[Radical Rat]

VOTE: norway

Talk me through this one? I'm thinking nulltown on him myself, he seems to be pretty genuine, and though some of his pushes have been for weak reasons, it IS D1.

[Not Known 15]

i would like to see people making their scummiest looking brackets of 3 that they wanna see investigated

i'll post my final 3 tomorrow and we simply execute NK

right?

As you wish...

My personal bracket of 3 to be investigated:
notscience,NorwegianboyEE,

Something_Smart

, in THIS order, from least scummy to most scummy.
Post 926 tells you why I picked Norwegian and notscience.
For SomethingSmart, look at their ENTIRE ISO until right now. It is not small yet... IT CONTAINS ALMOST NO READS, ONLY MECHANICS and fluff. It looks like the ISO of someone who does LAMIST mechanic posts and forgets to produce reads in the process. And that is something town simply doesn`t forget. Only scum does.

[Menalque]

I have a question about the mechanics, namely: is it actually net beneficial to have investigations or not?

As in, do we gain enough of a chance to catch scum vs accidentally outing the tomboy daughter or significantly reducing the pool has to hunt for her within that we shouldn’t just play this as a straight up white flag nightless?

[Menalque]

VOTE: norway

Talk me through this one? I'm thinking nulltown on him myself, he seems to be pretty genuine, and though some of his pushes have been for weak reasons, it IS D1.

I am, to a significant extent, sheeping moment

[Menalque]

Actually, I'm not going to go too in-depth into it. I'm just going to cite some posts with a little commentary.

His response to NK15 I think is fairly bad. I also think the tone / word choice in these posts is fairly scummy, although I am unsure exactly as to how having English as a second language would affect this.

Spoiler:

Once in my homesite i saw a VT claim vig after a vig shot. When the real vig counterclaimed them and they got inevitably lynched afterwards they said they did it to "protect the real vig and make scum waste a shot on VT" and that town was dumb for lynching him.
I believe NK15 is the lying one here, but i don’t know if he’s town or scum. If town i think he’s stupid as hell. But gotta consider the possibilities. After all, i’m curious what scum would have to gain from fake claiming here if they know they’ll be CC’ed.

@Not Known 15
You did it to "protect the PA" or did you fake claim to out the real PA?

Because there is a nonzero chance you did the second.

Eliminate Not Known 15

Keeping my vote here for a bit.

If NK15 is town then he’s misplayed hard. But i’m not really willing to take that chance.

Heading into radio silence anyway now. So might not change vote due to that reason.

I think short, low-justification high-confidence meta reads are an easy way for scum to justify answers that they already know.

Spoiler:

I think you both are quite easy to read for me at this point tbh, and i'm ready to just settle on both of you being town.
If C9++ and that newbie game i had with Mena are any indication then he is lazy as scum. Here he actually efforts.
Alisae mostly agenda posts as scum, not what they're doing here.

I think his trajectory on username is scummy, especially 561. Just search for "username" in his ISO and read all of the instances.

I think that he has multiple instances of deflecting when people scumread him. Not just obviously towards me, but towards others as well.

Spoiler:

ok lets kill umlaut
VOTE: umlaut

Why Umlaut?

notty vote bad
titus vote bad

Looks like the start of a decent wagon.
VOTE: Umlaut

norwee what the fuck are you doing?

Sheeping u.

do u even have reads

Damn, you giving me an existential crisis with that tone. What the FUCK am i doing? With my life?

I have reads but they are mostly gut. I think u are town tho.

Specifically based on the reasons given here

[maxwell]

Also HARD disagree with NK15 and maxwell that having a claimed PA this early is good. Honestly, PA should probably have gone the whole game without claiming, instead gently guiding us away from investigating the TD, because guess what? EVEN IF Ico had claimed in Post #1, confirmed identity in the first report, and then the slot never made a single other post in the game... that's one less player for scum to potentially guess wrong about being TD.

One less player is not a particularly big deal, we need to pick through players to sort anyway and having conftown direct it is the best possible approach as it avoids any chance of accidentally outing the TD. Agree that follow the clear isn't fun but that's the nature of the beast when they have critical info that we don't. The fear of outing info the scum needs to be balanced with the necessary reality of town gathering info for itself.

Anyway NK15 has outed as not TD and so there is no benefit to not sorting him at some point in the game. Even if we decide he's town for sure, we keep him to endgame and eliminate 2 scum anyway, they know not to pick him. So I don't see a real point in preserving him no matter what. Having an unknown merchant claim means you should resolve their alignment in some way. We either eliminate him now or put him in a check to get a result, and he'd be the first to go on any positive result in a group anyway (also if he's actually town I'm fucking pissed at him and he can sit in the dead thread and meditate on what he's done).

Basically what I'm saying is I'm not reading a single word Moment posts for the rest of the day. He can bloviate all he wants, I don't give a shit.

[Radical Rat]

Except that having the PA a known force in the game driving all the executions has a significantly higher chance of outing the TD than a carefully playing hidden PA, as now scum will be scrutinizing every single read or post or suggestion Ico makes to try to figure it out.

Also, literally no one is suggesting we just DON'T SORT NK15...

In fact, let's get you "sorted," shall we?
VOTE: Execute maxwell

[maxwell]

In this particular instance though, using the inspection as a public cop check seems smarter. Misclowns are much more dangerous than a sub-optimal inspection in this set up, and while I AM currently scumreading NK15, I'd like to be sure he's not just Town who made a giant mistake scum's taking advantage of. So I want him alive, and I want his ship inspected. If we do get other people on that ship, the only way we get substantially more information is if the result is clean, but then that also helps the scumteam just as much. Putting NK on alone gives us information that we can use to avoid killing a Merchant, and tells scum nothing that they don't already know. This is the correct play.

I know my mind's been a bit scattered this game, but this I am absolutely sure on.

No, this is fucking terrible. I want to lay it out in the simplest terms:

Your plan: elim one player today, investigate NK 15. We enter day 2 with information on 2 players. If NK15 is scum, we have to spend tomorrow's elimination on him by default, and pick a new inspection from there. If he's town, we have to pick new targets anyway.

My plan: We get rid of him today, and investigate a group of people as directed by the PA. We get alignment info on multiple people at the same time. This is far preferable to doing things one at a time: If they're all town, we save time we would have wasted eliminating/inspecting them on day 2/3. If at least one of them is scum, we are guaranteed to eliminate them before day 4, which is necessary for town's win condition, and we get to hunt among those players. This lets us learn much more than we would with a single inspection.

Bolded for emphasis:

Inspecting only one player today is a terrible idea. It deprives town of information we are going to have to obtain anyway.

[Moment]

I have a question about the mechanics, namely: is it actually net beneficial to have investigations or not?

As in, do we gain enough of a chance to catch scum vs accidentally outing the tomboy daughter or significantly reducing the pool has to hunt for her within that we shouldn’t just play this as a straight up white flag nightless?

It seems to me that if the PA were to just give a single player whom we investigated, that would be—if not strictly better—at least somewhat better than entirely ignoring the mechanic. That being said, I'm not completely against ignoring the tea mechanic, although I think it would mean that Iconeum would have to prod dodge for the rest of the game.

Assuming that we lynch town today, we'd actually need to hit tea in a group of no more than five people to at least give us better odds of hitting scum in that group than just any three out of sixteen. Of course, that assumes only one scum in the group rather than multiple, but we can't know that anyways.

--

Anyway NK15 has outed as not TD and so there is no benefit to not sorting him at some point in the game. Even if we decide he's town for sure, we keep him to endgame and eliminate 2 scum anyway, they know not to pick him. So I don't see a real point in preserving him no matter what. Having an unknown merchant claim means you should resolve their alignment in some way. We either eliminate him now or put him in a check to get a result, and he'd be the first to go on any positive result in a group anyway (also if he's actually town I'm fucking pissed at him and he can sit in the dead thread and meditate on what he's done).

The point in "preserving him" is to not lynch town. I'd say that's a pretty important aspect of this game.

I forget who it was that made this point, but it was a good one – we only have five chances to lynch scum in this entire game. It just doesn't make sense to give one of those lynches up just because you "don't see the point in preserving someone". You're displaying the exact mindset that I talked about – you say "we either eliminate him not or put him in a check", when the reality is that nobody is forcing anything. There is no

need

to lynch him, and while I wouldn't be opposed to it, there's also no

need

to check him. You're not talking about reads here, you're just talking about some invisible obligation that you've constructed in your mind.

Your line about being angry at him is completely indicative of everything that I talked about earlier. You're not properly putting yourself in someone else's mindset. You're so caught up in something being terrible play coming from town that you think it

must

be something coming from scum – but have you not experienced this before? Have you not been in this exact same situation, claiming that if someone really is town they're unbelievably terrible and they must be scum, and yet they flip town anyways? The question I'm really trying to ask is this: have you not noticed by now that town does outrageous things game after game after game?

Basically what I'm saying is I'm not reading a single word Moment posts for the rest of the day. He can bloviate all he wants, I don't give a shit.

Mature.

[maxwell]

Except that having the PA a known force in the game driving all the executions has a significantly higher chance of outing the TD than a carefully playing hidden PA, as now scum will be scrutinizing every single read or post or suggestion Ico makes to try to figure it out.

Also, literally no one is suggesting we just DON'T SORT NK15...

In fact, let's get you "sorted," shall we?
VOTE: Execute maxwell

No, it doesn't. That's so goddamn stupid. There's a significantly higher chance a pool of players decided by group opinion stumbles on the TD by sheer blind chance. You have to investigate people anyway, which outs them. I've said this over and over and I don't know how to make it any clearer.

[Radical Rat]

I'm not saying that we all blindfold ourselves and stumble mindlessly through the game. I'm also not saying that the PA shouldn't work to protect the TD. I'm saying that the PA does this from the shadows, without claiming that's who they are or what they're doing. Think of it like defending your mason buddy before you're ready or able to claim being masons.

This also ignores the fact that the TD is an active player in the game with (presumably) a brain. She'd be trying to avoid being on the inspected ship, while otherwise playing the game normally, hunting scum, making reads, the usual.

Now that the PA is outed, it has two options. Refrain from posting as much as possible, or drop scum tons of clues about who the TD is. That's bad for us as a Town.

[Radical Rat]

Sure, we won't execute the TD by accident. But if we ever try to and PA has to block it? We lose anyway, because now scum knows who she is.

[maxwell]

That's exactly my point and why the PA outing day 1 is the best possible thing to happen. This is all theoretical at this point anyway; I'd be perfectly willing to continue with this discussion in postgame but for now we have to work with the hand we've been dealt. And to that extent I will say for the nth time: the inspection check today needs to be on a small (3 or 5 player) group of people that is suspected to contain scum. This gives us the most possible information to work with on day 2.

[Radical Rat]

Okay, what if they're all scum? We execute one, and then what? We check the same people again?

[Something_Smart]

I was in the same situation as NK15 once upon a time, and I got out of it only through a grueling few days of constant argumentation and pushing a wagon on scum over myself.

Link?

[maxwell]

Okay, what if they're all scum? We execute one, and then what? We check the same people again?

That is extremely unlikely, but: tomorrow, if we find tea in that group, we eliminate one, and re-inspect half of the remaining players in our day 1 inspection, no matter what. If we eliminate scum AND catch them with the second inspection, great! We literally win the game because we had a good pool and PoE'd scum early.

[Something_Smart]

Misclowns are much more dangerous than a sub-optimal inspection in this set up

Say what? Inspection is the only advantage we have, otherwise the game is the scumsided hellscape that Moment described. Most games have town executions because no town has perfect read accuracy, especially on D1 when we have no information from the mechanics yet (aside from Icon coming out).

[Something_Smart]

And that is something town simply doesn`t forget.

Of course it's not! I would never fail to share reads by ACCIDENT