Mafiascum.net

MUSHSHAGANA wrote:My assumption regarding the votecount is it's purely a visual reference to where the general consensus is; a decision-making aid for the gunbearer and a source of information on town opinions for the scum. I doubt Syryana would give us secret vote mechanics.

Thank you for the clarification, benevolent overlord.

Woohoo!

VOTE: RLotus

Why is hardly anyone putting out an RVS vote *Thinking Emoji* even if we can't vote someone out? It's never really the point of RVS to vote someone out anyway, so we can look at where people put their votes just like any other game and hopefully get some information out of that. Right now we know one person is town, but I don't think we can ever have two people alive at the same time who we know are both town. There is only one mafia kill for the whole game. We should take advantage of any sources of information we can find because there aren't a lot of the usual ones for us to use.

WhemeStar. I am curious about if you have a plan for how to decide who to shoot. I would also like to know if you are serious about wanting to get shot at this early in the day.

Duchess town

I had a thought, maybe it could be smart to do a democracy system on the first shot? Like, have the votes actually matter so that we can gather information. Otherwise, we are really relying on people to keep giving their thoughts in order to make any association reads, and even then it's not that dangerous for mafia to "bus" their partners because they don't have to substantiate their reads.

On the other hand, maybe that is dangerous since the mafia have a significant portion of votes to begin with.

I think as long as people are using their votes, we will be able to tell who is thinking what without designing a big official system around it. That might just give the mafia something even more to hide behind, or like you said, an opportunity to take advantage of whatever system we lay out together, since there are so many of them and they will have a significant input. In my opinion, we should pretend like the votes work as normal, just remembering that hammers don't do anything, and it is up to the gunbearer to decide whose opinions and votes to trust and take into consideration. However I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel on this one.

RLotus. Do you have any thoughts on any other players so far?

In post 34, Duchess wrote:RLotus. Do you have any thoughts on any other players so far?

Norfolk was a bit strange as others seemed to picked up on. I think in general having resistance to being shot is scummy. Well town shouldn't be trying to be shot, but like I'm not worried about getting shot at this point if you get what I mean. If that is a strong scum indicator for him in particular idk.

A side note, I think town lurkers are going to be a detriment to us in this set up. I mean they already are in normal games, but at least in normal games lurkers' votes tell a story. But in this the votes don't really matter. Same thing with NM really.

Norfolk's posting just seemed excessively LAMIST to me

In post 36, SirCakez wrote:Norfolk's posting just seemed excessively LAMIST to me

Really? I think saying that you don't want the gun is scummy as opposed to towny, on the surface.

Whemstar who is asking to be shot is LAMIST in my mind.

The concern with voting in this setup is that the town has very little agency to begin with. Only one person has /any/ power, and we know they are town, so we should trust them to have town's back. Now, leashing shots to votes sounds great in theory. After all, it just puts us roughly at "ordinary mafia game", with a final adjudicator. In practice, however, it gives the scum team agency they shouldn't have, and takes away one major town-sided element the gunbearer gives us.

The exclusive advantage that the town has in a setup like this over an ordinary Mafia game is that it avoids the ironclad law of committees being absolute hot fucking garbage at actually performing tasks well. (This law is so ironclad that it's a major component of managerial level sabotage: you load important committees with more than IIRC 8 people, and ensure that at least one of them is dead weight, and nothing will ever get done, ever ever ever.)

Instead of /everyone/ simultaneously trying to herd cats in totally different directions oh and by the way some of the cats have rabies, you have a single point of control. No need to get everyone on the same page at all -- in fact, depending on the gunbearer, having literally no agreement could be a net benefit for sorting. (Just by way of example, I would be quite effective in a situation where every single player in the list was arguing with every single other player here.) No Abilene paradox scenarios come up here, because the gunbearer has no incentive to compromise to try and make the other players happy: if they miss their shot they're out, and if they hit then clearly they were right and it's hard to complain. They can use the rest of the town as essentially independent investigators to help them make their decisions, but they are not required to do what everyone else wants them to do.

I think we should lean into the advantage we have of a single guaranteed pro-town controller of the gamestate, even if it means the normal townies have less agency and control. In the process, we deny scum a large part (obviously not /all/, but I think /any/ advantage is important) of the only agency that they have in the setup while a gunbearer is alive: misdirecting the shot.

In post 29, Duchess wrote:WhemeStar. I am curious about if you have a plan for how to decide who to shoot. I would also like to know if you are serious about wanting to get shot at this early in the day.

Whoever I scumread.

I don't care when I get shot I just want the gun.

I don't think we should use a voting system.

In post 30, RLotus wrote:Duchess town

Why do you townread #28? I am getting scum vibes from it.

With regards to the LAMIST/scumminess of wanting to be shot or not, I feel like the specific vibe I'm getting from Wheme is less "LAMIST" and more "I am the bestest scumhunter ever!" Wanting to be the hero figure. Gloria Cleary did something similar in Death Curse, and the mistake definitely damaged town's chances at the end. People forget that there's a reason there aren't very many hero figures... Obviously there's some overlap in the general themes between "let me drive!" and "look how townie I am!", but Wheme's minimal responses and general attitude here do strongly give me the former impression. PEDIT: My opinion is not changed after the past two Wheme posts.

On the other hand, Norfolk does give me an offputting feeling, to be sure, but I can't place if it's AI or something else. Need more data.

I agree that lurkers are going to be a serious problem. I don't know if we can count on lurking being even a little bit scummy, either, because scum benefits from putting themselves in the front of the gamestate in this setup. (Yes, I'm taking into account that I'm potentially telling the scumteam how to be effective here.) It may be valuable to lean heavy on lurkers as a group effort to forcibly squeeze content out of them.

In post 42, MUSHSHAGANA wrote:"I am the bestest scumhunter ever!"

I don't have a lot of confidence in my reads.

I just will have to hope you never get to take a shot then. Eagerness to shoot plus low confidence makes for a very bad combination here.

Boop.

In post 44, MUSHSHAGANA wrote:I just will have to hope you never get to take a shot then. Eagerness to shoot plus low confidence makes for a very bad combination here.

Shooting and being correct will give me confidence!

Hi Imperium.

In post 41, WhemeStar wrote:

In post 30, RLotus wrote:Duchess town

Why do you townread #28? I am getting scum vibes from it.

They seem to have town's interest in mind

Hi Wheme!