Newbie 1806 - The Ffery Garden: GAME OVER!

[Miles Edgeworth]

Hey y'all.

Apparently, a few years ago, I played here before, using my current email address to register. This account was flagged as an alt, so please forgive my delayed introduction.

I briefly read up on this game when I saw it advertised in the Newbie Queue. My findings from that aren't alignment-indicative, but I was reading the game anticipating I would replace into a bored vanilla town slot (as my past experience has shown that replace-outs in newbie mafia games tend to be players without special roles or abilities who discover they don't actually enjoy the main educated guessing game).

I only made it through about three pages, but in that time, I noticed these things. My apologies if the material covered here is outdated -- I will try to finish catching up by the end of the evening.

[*] Fykus's reasoning for voting for WhyMafia didn't sit well with me. In post #26 he passes it off as the vote being "his shtick." This isn't a good reason in and of itself, but it's acceptable in this context because it's still during the early stage of the game when people are doing whatever they want to stir up conversation; but once the conversation begins to shift out of the "RVS" stage, Fykus finds a reason to stay on WhyMafia that doesn't logically follow. He disagrees with WhyMafia's contention in post #36 that the RVS stage favors mafia, and says, specifically:

I always thought that scum hated RVS because its hard for them to "act" RVS'y or something along those lines.

You just

get more suss

by the minute WM.

I've got my eyes on you.

Emphases mine. "Get more suss" means "get more suspicious," and implies that Fykus already found WhyMafia suspicious. In other words, Fykus is trying to pass off his initial "RVS" style vote on WM as a serious suspicion.
Furthermore, the reasoning Fykus supplies in voting for WM doesn't prove his premise. A person's belief on whether a certain stage of the game favors town or mafia isn't indicative of anything about that person's alignment in a particular game. It's not clear from context whether there's a consensus on this site about whether or not the claim "RVS favors town" or "RVS favors scum" is the correct claim, but it doesn't matter: the worst this can mean for WM is that his belief is

incorrect

. This does

not

make him suspicious in and of itself.

Fykus: Why did you really vote WhyMafia in post #26? ("shtick") Why do you claim that WM "got more suspicious" in post #36?

[*] I liked RadiantCowbells's post #58 entering into the thread, and I liked PersephoneSidekick's post #69. Both were strong entries that showed clarity of thought and touched on what I perceived to be the more important events that had occurred in the thread to that point, and notably both players were not skittish about challenging our IC's play. All three of those factors left me with a favorable impression of both players.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Your reference to the God-Emperor tells me we'll get along just fine.

Since you're here RC, I want to talk to you about your suspicion of WhyMafia, because the progression of events around your post #91, when you first expressed suspicion of Fykus, leads me to think that:
- Fykus may be scum
- Fykus and WhyMafia aren't on the same team

Which then makes me fail to understand your suspicion of WhyMafia (which, in fairness, isn't exactly well-explained in your ISO).

Fykus made his early comments about WhyMafia (which I mentioned a minute ago) and parked his vote on WM for a bit. He moved to King Cankles fairly abruptly right before you said you suspected him. I'm assuming that abrupt move was the reason you suspected him? (If it's not, why did you suspect him?)
It strikes me that this sequence does make Fykus suspicious, since he doesn't seem to care about his allegedly serious WM vote very much, but in a way that makes WhyMafia an unlikely partner. I don't see why Fykus would choose to park on a partner during the random voting stage when he could have gone anywhere else. It makes life more difficult for him if, for whatever reason, WM becomes a lead wagon.

I'll concede I'm missing some relevant thread information, and your suspicion of WM comes up after the point where I stopped reading, but from the sequence I

did

get to read, it seems like Fykus, not WM, is the suspicious party from that interaction. What am I missing?

[Miles Edgeworth]

I see. Care to fill me in on why WhyMafia is mafia?

[Miles Edgeworth]

Sure, sounds good to me.

Maybe while we have a half hour, you could go over why you disagree that Fykus and WhyMafia aren't aligned together. It's my premise that Fykus's behavior around WM is contrary to what we would expect one scum player to do with another scum player. Do you simply disagree with that premise, or are you making the stronger claim that their behavior indicates they

are

aligned together?

[Miles Edgeworth]

This wait on RC is giving me a fever. And the only prescription is...







...sleep.

Probably not gonna be back for ~16 hours.

I'll park on Fykus's yard until he gets back to me about his WhyMafia stuff. If he gets himself hammered in the interim that's on him.

VOTE: Fykus

[Miles Edgeworth]

Explain to me what component of RC's expert opinion convinced you to vote for WM.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Spoiler: Miles's opening post

Hey y'all.

Apparently, a few years ago, I played here before, using my current email address to register. This account was flagged as an alt, so please forgive my delayed introduction.

I briefly read up on this game when I saw it advertised in the Newbie Queue. My findings from that aren't alignment-indicative, but I was reading the game anticipating I would replace into a bored vanilla town slot (as my past experience has shown that replace-outs in newbie mafia games tend to be players without special roles or abilities who discover they don't actually enjoy the main educated guessing game).

I only made it through about three pages, but in that time, I noticed these things. My apologies if the material covered here is outdated -- I will try to finish catching up by the end of the evening.

[*] Fykus's reasoning for voting for WhyMafia didn't sit well with me. In post #26 he passes it off as the vote being "his shtick." This isn't a good reason in and of itself, but it's acceptable in this context because it's still during the early stage of the game when people are doing whatever they want to stir up conversation; but once the conversation begins to shift out of the "RVS" stage, Fykus finds a reason to stay on WhyMafia that doesn't logically follow. He disagrees with WhyMafia's contention in post #36 that the RVS stage favors mafia, and says, specifically:

I always thought that scum hated RVS because its hard for them to "act" RVS'y or something along those lines.

You just

get more suss

by the minute WM.

I've got my eyes on you.

Emphases mine. "Get more suss" means "get more suspicious," and implies that Fykus already found WhyMafia suspicious. In other words, Fykus is trying to pass off his initial "RVS" style vote on WM as a serious suspicion.
Furthermore, the reasoning Fykus supplies in voting for WM doesn't prove his premise. A person's belief on whether a certain stage of the game favors town or mafia isn't indicative of anything about that person's alignment in a particular game. It's not clear from context whether there's a consensus on this site about whether or not the claim "RVS favors town" or "RVS favors scum" is the correct claim, but it doesn't matter: the worst this can mean for WM is that his belief is

incorrect

. This does

not

make him suspicious in and of itself.

Fykus: Why did you really vote WhyMafia in post #26? ("shtick") Why do you claim that WM "got more suspicious" in post #36?

[*] I liked RadiantCowbells's post #58 entering into the thread, and I liked PersephoneSidekick's post #69. Both were strong entries that showed clarity of thought and touched on what I perceived to be the more important events that had occurred in the thread to that point, and notably both players were not skittish about challenging our IC's play. All three of those factors left me with a favorable impression of both players.

Jumps in fast overinterpreting early posts before he's done reading. Exited town or nervous scum? I'd think that scum would tend to post more carefully and methodically but given he's a newbie in a slot I would already mildly suspicious of, I think we can't discount the "crap I need to contribute fast to be townread" interpretation. I'll put him somewhere in the middle of my reads for now.

Nonsense. What have I "overinterpreted"? (what does that even mean?)

Why did you feel the need to share your null read with the class?

[Miles Edgeworth]

I just trust RCs gut on this one. Wanna see where the rabbit hole goes as it were

yay

idk I can't relaly put words to it. this is gut.

It appears I owe Persephone an apology.

This

is nonsense.

Fykus, how did you know it was RC's gut, when RC had said nothing to that extent until

after

you posted?

[Miles Edgeworth]

Your reference to the God-Emperor tells me we'll get along just fine.

Since you're here RC, I want to talk to you about your suspicion of WhyMafia, because the progression of events around your post #91, when you first expressed suspicion of Fykus, leads me to think that:
- Fykus may be scum
- Fykus and WhyMafia aren't on the same team

Which then makes me fail to understand your suspicion of WhyMafia (which, in fairness, isn't exactly well-explained in your ISO).

Fykus made his early comments about WhyMafia (which I mentioned a minute ago) and parked his vote on WM for a bit. He moved to King Cankles fairly abruptly right before you said you suspected him. I'm assuming that abrupt move was the reason you suspected him? (If it's not, why did you suspect him?)
It strikes me that this sequence does make Fykus suspicious, since he doesn't seem to care about his allegedly serious WM vote very much, but in a way that makes WhyMafia an unlikely partner. I don't see why Fykus would choose to park on a partner during the random voting stage when he could have gone anywhere else. It makes life more difficult for him if, for whatever reason, WM becomes a lead wagon.

I'll concede I'm missing some relevant thread information, and your suspicion of WM comes up after the point where I stopped reading, but from the sequence I

did

get to read, it seems like Fykus, not WM, is the suspicious party from that interaction. What am I missing?

What do you think of the possibility that the two of them put on a preplanned show to "prove" they weren't linked, as a precaution for if one of them was caught? It's kind of extreme but maybe it got out of control? I don't want to lynch WhyMafia today but if we lynch Fykus and he flips scum, I wouldn't necessarily see him as confirmed town.

I can't discount the possibility. If you're asking me to do that, though, we won't get anywhere. Possibilities are numerous.

I consider it more likely that mafia!Fykus wouldn't pursue the voting strategy on mafia!WhyMafia that he did, because it increases the likelihood of mafia!Fykus getting stuck in undesirable voting patterns in the event of something unpredictable happening (like townies suddenly finding WhyMafia suspicious), without building town credit for mafia!Fykus in the event that mafia!WhyMafia is caught. There is no plausible reason to believe that Fykus is town if WhyMafia is mafia based off of Fykus's behavior under discussion here.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I mean it's not exactly difficult to figure out. this is sort of how I deal with gutreads

I guess not. Given what you've made available to us, there's not much left for it to be except a gut read.

It's just odd to me that Fykus was so willing to buy into an unexplained read on WhyMafia from someone that I don't believe he should be willing to trust at this stage of the game, given his previous comments about RC:

Im gonna cross my fingers and hope your not and i think if you are and im alive later on that i might catch one of your scum tells but i wont hold my breath. Ill post some proper content after work though and you can judge md for yourself

PersephoneSidekick
WhaleBarnicle
Miles

Cira24
RadiantCowbells
mhsmith0

WhyMafia
King Cankles

here you go, have an unordered read lis. please note rc and mhsmith0 are null because they're experienced and thus harder to read. though rc is probably a town lean atm

[Miles Edgeworth]

Spoiler: Miles's opening post

Hey y'all.

Apparently, a few years ago, I played here before, using my current email address to register. This account was flagged as an alt, so please forgive my delayed introduction.

I briefly read up on this game when I saw it advertised in the Newbie Queue. My findings from that aren't alignment-indicative, but I was reading the game anticipating I would replace into a bored vanilla town slot (as my past experience has shown that replace-outs in newbie mafia games tend to be players without special roles or abilities who discover they don't actually enjoy the main educated guessing game).

I only made it through about three pages, but in that time, I noticed these things. My apologies if the material covered here is outdated -- I will try to finish catching up by the end of the evening.

[*] Fykus's reasoning for voting for WhyMafia didn't sit well with me. In post #26 he passes it off as the vote being "his shtick." This isn't a good reason in and of itself, but it's acceptable in this context because it's still during the early stage of the game when people are doing whatever they want to stir up conversation; but once the conversation begins to shift out of the "RVS" stage, Fykus finds a reason to stay on WhyMafia that doesn't logically follow. He disagrees with WhyMafia's contention in post #36 that the RVS stage favors mafia, and says, specifically:

I always thought that scum hated RVS because its hard for them to "act" RVS'y or something along those lines.

You just

get more suss

by the minute WM.

I've got my eyes on you.

Emphases mine. "Get more suss" means "get more suspicious," and implies that Fykus already found WhyMafia suspicious. In other words, Fykus is trying to pass off his initial "RVS" style vote on WM as a serious suspicion.
Furthermore, the reasoning Fykus supplies in voting for WM doesn't prove his premise. A person's belief on whether a certain stage of the game favors town or mafia isn't indicative of anything about that person's alignment in a particular game. It's not clear from context whether there's a consensus on this site about whether or not the claim "RVS favors town" or "RVS favors scum" is the correct claim, but it doesn't matter: the worst this can mean for WM is that his belief is

incorrect

. This does

not

make him suspicious in and of itself.

Fykus: Why did you really vote WhyMafia in post #26? ("shtick") Why do you claim that WM "got more suspicious" in post #36?

[*] I liked RadiantCowbells's post #58 entering into the thread, and I liked PersephoneSidekick's post #69. Both were strong entries that showed clarity of thought and touched on what I perceived to be the more important events that had occurred in the thread to that point, and notably both players were not skittish about challenging our IC's play. All three of those factors left me with a favorable impression of both players.

Jumps in fast overinterpreting early posts before he's done reading. Exited town or nervous scum? I'd think that scum would tend to post more carefully and methodically but given he's a newbie in a slot I would already mildly suspicious of, I think we can't discount the "crap I need to contribute fast to be townread" interpretation. I'll put him somewhere in the middle of my reads for now.

Nonsense. What have I "overinterpreted"? (what does that even mean?)

Why did you feel the need to share your null read with the class?

It's not a pure null; it has factors for and against. I shared because I was curious about other people's thoughts and I'm bored and want to analyze things. And to hear your response; your defensiveness has been noted, especially given that your most likely scum motivation for that post is defensive.

As for what I mean by "overinterpreted," Fykus was being loose with reasoning at a time when there was little information. I agree that Fykus is scummy and that the things you point out are part of my argument, but you're putting a lot of faith in your reads of the early game before even reading the (probably more useful) later stuff.

Null means nothing. Zero. There are no degrees of zero. If you do not conclude that I am town or that I am mafia, you have concluded nothing. To that extent all other words which contribute to this lack of conclusion have no meaning.

Look at your reasons for why I might not be town:
- You create a false dichotomy: "excited town, or nervous scum"? Why would I be either of these things? I don't have to be "excited" to decide to do some research on a game I intend to replace into, nor do I need to be "nervous" to push a case on someone from the other alignment. It's an empty question.
- You claim, in essence, that I'm being too loose with my reasoning on Fykus, by overly relying on early game posting (calling it "overinterpretation"). You then immediately claim to be using the same argument and rationale that I did as part of your own argument against Fykus. Which is it? Are the behaviors that I pointed out about Fykus insufficient reason to suspect him (and thus not reasonable for you to use in your own argument against Fykus), or are they sufficient (in which case I'm not "overinterpreting" anything)?
- You attribute my questioning of your post to "defensiveness" and say that my "most likely scum motivation is defensive." But how can I be defensive when I've been on

offense

the entire game? I've attacked Fykus's and RC's voting rationale, and I've also now attacked your stretching to a null read. I had no problem with you coming to a null conclusion on me - I had a problem with you

sharing

this without coming to a more definite conclusion.

I see nothing in any of those points that should justify a null read. In fact, you are taking the effort to reach for things that are inconclusive or simply not true in order to maintain that null read. It frankly looks artificial. Why are you trying so hard to find a null read out of someone who suspects the same person you do for as much of the same reasons that you have as that person can, given his limited understanding of the game state?


~~~

Part of what I'm saying is that Fykus's voting pattern is already suspicious and it involved a quick switch away from WM. I think it's just an opportunistic switch between two different townies, but if RC has evidence against WM, I'm not comfortable using his association with Fykus as a disproof. I really wish mh or somebody would tell me if RC is as good as he thinks he is.

That I think is fair. I'm certainly not married to the idea that WhyMafia and Fykus are opposite alignments. It was just the baseline interpretation I had of the way that sequence of votes and posts played out. Certainly, should more evidence emerge implication WhyMafia, I wouldn't consider my observation to be a counterpoint of any serious weight.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I am as caught up on the events that occurred before my arrival as I care to be. Some thoughts:

How did King Cankles go three days at L-1 without being lynched?

Fykus was a constant counterwagon, thanks to PersephoneSidekick and King Cankles leaving their votes on him for the majority of day 1. Fykus, a townie, was the eventual lynch.

This information alone makes KC

unlikely to be mafia

in my view. Fykus was

constantly an option for the mafia to lynch

if KC were a mafia under attack. It took very little for Fykus to go: I didn't even make a formal case against him, just voted him because I found some of his early activity suspicious and had a couple of things I could cite to support it. I didn't pressure him to a meaningful extent or have to recruit anybody to vote for him; he just picked up two more votes relatively quickly and died.

Suppose KC were mafia. If that's really all it took to get the town to swing toward Fykus, why did KC sit for three days at L-1 and a week after that at L-2? That's a long time for the mafia to let one of their own dangle so close to death without doing anything to save him. More likely, to me, is that KC and Fykus were both town wagons. This would imply that the mafia didn't need to do anything, since the vast majority of the day had two town wagons and very little activity in the thread. The mafia had no incentive to hurry up and end the day, since there was so little activity in the thread; in fact, about the only thing they could mess up would involve hammering KC and looking shady in the process.

This means that the mafia are likely among the people who...
- Spent a lot of the day voting for one person: This game stalled out big-time. These environments are very pro-scum. As a result, we would expect townies to be the ones who switched votes multiple times through the day, after the random voting stage ended, as part of their investigating and attempts to break out of the stall. Conversely, scum would want to look interested in any breaking developments, but would not want to be too proactive in discovering anything, since the game state is good for them, and since the worst thing that could happen for them to effect that is to give the town a new perspective from which to consider things.
- Voted outside of the two wagons: The mafia's gameplan in a situation like I suspect we had day 1 (two town wagons in a stalled game) will be to lay low. They don't want to stir the pot and accidentally incite the town out of the stall. They want both wagons to get slowly and ineffectually lynched without significant involvement from either of them. Ideally, they wouldn't even be on the lynched wagons at all, since the default reaction in these situations is to go after the weakest votes on the lynched towns' wagons. Thus, we would expect them to find a reason to be off of the main wagons at the end of the day.

It's for these reasons that I call

WhaleBarnicle

to the stand.

WhaleBarnicle:
1. Now that KingCankles has had several days to ruminate over the results of day 1, has checked into the thread since day 2 started, but hasn't yet posted anything, how do you feel about his behavior? You did say here that you were going to watch him for how he chose to develop the game state in day 2.
2. Given my argument from voting behavior above, do you maintain your suspicion of KingCankles?
3. Given the late shift toward Fykus and away from KingCankles,

why did you pull your vote for him and vote yourself

, thereby ensuring your primary suspect had no way to get lynched?

[Miles Edgeworth]

If there's CC please do so now
UNVOTE: All
You're not infallible RC

you don't get to call me scum for scumreading you then turn around and cry that I'm not infallible

you are getting lynched today. bye.

That's MY shot you're callin there partner.

Why do you want this man dead so badly? You couldn't tell me anything meaningful yesterday. You got two weeks now, so I expect you'll have something good for me today.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I don't really care to do your dirty work of dragging testimony out of WM. Your alignment being virtually confirmed doesn't mean shit to me so far as WM is concerned, and I can't separate out how much of your fervor comes from your brain and how much comes from your pride.

I'll give you this much credit - that post does look pretty bad, and you are town. I'll make some time to go reread WM's shit and see if I have anything to ask him.

[Miles Edgeworth]

So what's your game plan then? Allow Whymafia to produce no content that's concrete enough to push on him for and ignore me when I call him scum because I can't give you concrete reasons? How's that gonna end?

Who said anything about allowing him to do nothing? Doing nothing is a confession of guilt.

I'm going to keep looking, and especially keep developing an understanding of how day 1 went down, in light of the voting trends. Not to belittle your experience, but I strongly prefer to use concrete information in the thread. Writing "tone," choice of words, and other aspects of the psychology of language can be very useful in the right hands - but those hands aren't mine, and I don't trust that normal people's hands are the right ones, either. I need data points.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Shameless prod dodge goes here

[Miles Edgeworth]

No time to really post now, but Cankles is still absent. Also I'm digging this WhyMafia wagon, but I'm not going to vote in case he is town and mafia pull a quick hammer to send us into the night again. Intent to put at L-2? Is that even a thing?

Peri is still looking town, RadCow is looking town too, Wheme and Cankles are pulling me in two directions for the other mafia though. Oh, and Miles seems good too. I thought that the Salami slot was towny before he even came in, and he's been pretty insistent on pushing leads which is good in my opionon. Obviously nobody is out of the question entirely (other than me, who is obv v scum guyz), but that's my quick gut check on reading through from the end of last night so far.

The only thing I can think that was directly addressed to me was why I voted for myself at the end of yesterday (I think Miles asked me?). I thought that was pretty clearly a joke? It was obvious that Cankles wasn't going to be a thing and I wasn't going to be able to add much to the discussion before the deadline so a nice silly self vote wouldn't hurt anyone. Does that clear anything up Miles? Also guys, feel free to shoot some questions my way during the day tomorrow, tomorrow night I'll read through them and say what I think.

I'm late on your offer at the end here, but I figure you'll have plenty of time to indulge me before the phase ends.

Obviously your self-vote wasn't a serious declaration of guilt. That's not what I'm getting at.

You say "it's obvious Cankles wasn't going to be a thing," but Cankles was sitting at L-1 for three days and always had some number of people willing to kill him. The shift toward Fykus at the end of day 1 was very plodding and reluctant on the part of the town. Nothing about this situation strikes me as being obvious that Cankles would get off the hook. If you really suspected him to be mafia, then the shift toward Fykus should have motivated you to push

harder

in the thread to get Cankles killed instead, since it represented a real danger of losing the lynch you wanted. Why did you not only do this, but also pull your own support?

Allow me to remind you of your own prior statements near the end of day 1:

Concerning Fykus, I don't see him as scum still

, though the read certainly has gone more towards null hearing the thoughts of others. If he flips scum, I'm sure I'll catch flack for thinking he was town for a bit but such is life.

You had two wagons near the end of the day phase: Cankles, who you said you suspected, and Fykus, who you said you "don't see as scum still." Cankles's wagon was losing traction to Fykus's wagon. Why did you give up on this?


I'd also like for you to explain to me your shift in suspects priority from day 1 to day 2. You have consistently had Cankles and WhyMafia as your top two suspects. For day 1, you had Cankles above WhyMafia. For day 2, WhyMafia was a higher priority for you. Yet, your description of Cankles's play in day 2 has been as such:

So yeah...If Cankles could post more tham hmm that would be nice.

Alright, I wanted to wait a little bit before I posted to see if he would produce anything substantial, and he didn't. So....
Cankles: Still just no content...makes me very sad.

In other words, nothing about Cankles has changed. This I agree with. Tell me then, why did your priority change, if your primary suspect did nothing to become less suspicious since yesterday?

[Miles Edgeworth]

While you're here, Persephone: what do I need to do to convince you to vote WhaleBarnicle with me?

[Miles Edgeworth]

I guess I should start by actually voting for WhaleBarnicle.

VOTE: WhaleBarnicle

[Miles Edgeworth]

Why whalebarnicle

Also whalebarnicle is there a way to spoiler your posts or make more posts but not as big. I hate wall posts

I don't believe that a townie would back off of his wagon like WB backed off of Cankles in day 1. At no point in day 1 was Cankles safe from being lynched, yet WB wants us to believe that he couldn't get a Cankles lynch?

Look at the Fykus lynch. Look how little effort it took our two known non-Fykus townies (mhsmith and RadiantCowbells) to get on board. Knowing how easily the town piled up on Fykus late, it's not true that WB couldn't have pushed his desired lynch.

Then we get to day 2, and WB has decided to push on the confirmed townie's punching bag of choice, WhyMafia, and dropped his Cankles case completely. It doesn't make any sense as town. It makes

great

sense as mafia though: scum!WB wouldn't want to be tied to hypothetical town!Cankles's lynch and obviously wouldn't want to lynch scum!Cankles, and this low-profile drift toward another popular wagon is an excellent way for scum!WB to slide into LYLO with very little negative attention to his name.


The other reason isn't as concrete, but it resonates with me, so maybe it will with y'all as well. The two wagons that have emerged so far today are WM and you, Whemestar, and I quite frankly haven't seen any significant pushing from anyone outside of RC pushing WM. Several posters have expressed their opinions, forcefully even, but there's been very little in the way of meaningful argument and dialogue. It's been a lot of tilting at windmills, with no real cases making any traction -- just a lot of gut reads and muh feels and shit. This is the kind of environment scum loves and the kind of wagons that they thrive on: inert, apathetic voting pile-ups driven by one outspoken townie giving a shit.

Even if you aren't necessarily convinced by my argument enough to believe WB is scum, you should at least see the value in forcing the mafia to react to a new perspective on the game. This inertia favors them, so forcing them to take a stand on WB will draw more potentially incriminating posts out of them and break us out of this game stall.

[Miles Edgeworth]

The game is only stalled in the sense that I'm letting you get your thoughts out before I slit Whymafia's throat and tie him up with bricks and throw him into the river.

It's far more than that, although I appreciate you waiting for my direction.

You know where you're going, so of course you feel like the game isn't stalled. But there's so little investigative work being done right now, and the initial flurry of vote pile-ups on WhyMafia and then Whemestar subsided without a lot of dialogue to show for it. How many people have expressed uncertainty about where they want to go with the lynch? It's a recurring sentiment today.

What issue do you take with my case on WhaleBarnicle, RC?

[Miles Edgeworth]

It's predicated on the assumption that you know what people could/would do in certain situations. Something I feel important to understand in terms of mafia play is that most of the time you don't know why people do things.
Most of what people do is not done for any obvious scum/town motivation or often any motivation at all, it's just what they happened to do at the time. Even players like me who rigorously plan out (moreso as scum but) games from top to bottom.

You have created one narrative by which Barnicle is scum who did certain things. There are also plenty of narratives by which he is town and did the same thing.

Not "knowing." Predicting what they should do, if they are rational actors who have a certain set of objectives in mind to win the game.

Obviously people are imperfectly rational and simply have an x% fail rate at doing the rational thing. All that means is that sometimes you will make a logical read by correctly following the rules of logic and applying them to your suspect's behavior and nonetheless be incorrect. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't pursue aforesaid logical reads.

Tell me then, if you don't practice a method like mine, what method

do

you practice? Because with all due respect to Your Towniness, that method has been very opaque this game, at least from my seat.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Of course my positions look arrogant, hah. I'm not offended in the slightest. If I'm not highly confident in my own reads, why the hell should anybody listen to me?
I figure you should understand that extremely well, given your own pushes. Salesmanship is a part of the game no matter who you are. Maybe it looks dirtier when you see cases purporting to be entirely from logic, and salesmanship, in the same post, but if I believe logic leads to the truth, and salesmanship is the key to persuasion, what choice do I have?

I could have enumerated the countless "buts" for WB's post. "But maybe WB is new and didn't know how to press his case." "But maybe WB just couldn't get online and push his case in the critical window where he had a chance." So on and so forth. You know what that does? It creates a waffling wall of crap nobody reads or pays any heed to.

Fact is, that all could be true. I don't care. If WB did act optimally then there's a great chance he is scum. I'm going to respect that he acted optimally, or at least force an explanation out of him for why not.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Tell me then, if you don't practice a method like mine, what method do you practice? Because with all due respect to Your Towniness, that method has been very opaque this game, at least from my seat.

This is a hard question to answer.

Well I doubt you're one to naysay without a reason. We've got ample time, so take it, and answer when you know how to put it. This conversation's probably as important as the actual game, even though it's not directly relevant since your alignment is no longer in doubt. And it's not like this gaggle of ducklings has been lighting up the thread anyway...

[Miles Edgeworth]

So I'd say it's interplay between 3 things.

1) Experience. Despite my (relatively) short 5 year stint compared to many of the other 'scummers, I have played a shitload of games. On top of that I have a very long and reasonably precise memory and I can remember stuff from games years ago fairly well. There's a lot of times where I have certain 'objective' reads but I'm like 'yeah I have this read but I also have the feeling I've seen this player [not the player specifically but you understand] before and they've been town/scum instead' and I very often put those reads ahead of whatever the rest of my reads say and it's almost universally right. An example of this sort of read was on Fykus in 1770: Water where I said regarding him:

I'd hate to lose to Fykus because like fuck he's so obvscum at first glance but I remember mislynching a LOT of town who played like he is.

Purely a case where experience told me that he was going to be town despite every reason to scumread him, and he ended up being town.

2) Role Reversal / Empathy: The big thing that's mostly unique to me is that when I go along I try to put myself in the position of the people posting, especially when it comes to any AtE stuff, and try to empathize with them and see if it's genuine. I'm good at forcing myself to feel feelings and I can almost universally find the ability to find some common ground with people even when we have very different feelings regarding things when their emotions are genuine. It's been the source of a lot of unpopular correct townreads where I'm like yeah this guy is probably town even when a ton of other people refuse to see it.

An example of this sort of read was in the recently finished 722 modded by Aristophanes, where I instantly caught JasonWazza because of the way he turned back on us when we pushed him:

It is a paraphrase on account of the fact that I cannot directly quote from the hood. I did not change the meaning nor would anyone introduced to the hood disagree. For my part I am near 100% certain that the slot flips scum.
His pushback on us feels incredibly disingenuous, the way he responded in hood felt really disingenuous, it feels like he's just ramping up the aggression to towntell.

No, your opening isn't just forced it's forced in a bad way. Your pushback doesn't feel like someone who legitimately feels we're scum, it feels like someone who is trying to get townread. It feels like a show.

That slot flips scum.

3) Hunting for scumtells: Now, for the record, this means something totally different to me than it does to other people. If you go through the wiki's tells none of them mean shit to me. On the other hand, my tells mean very little to other people. I do sort of play on my own wavelength and there's often a level of disconnect between me and other players as a result. Idk.

First off, this is awesome content. When we're not in a game together, I'll PM you to develop this conversation further. I doubt I could replicate your methods effectively, but learning how other people tick is the whole point of this game. Getting it spelled out succinctly like this is excellent.

Instead, I want to focus this process toward my suspect, because the circumstances in this game make a clean application of your process more difficult. Let's see if I can't show you where I'm coming from in your own terms, since mine are not sufficing.

You have three criteria that dance together to put on a bandwagon stage show:
- Past experience with the person in question
- Role reversal with the person
- Finding scumtells or not

Scumtells are neither here nor there. I think you can agree that scum don't always proc your scumtells. After all, if they did, the game would be mighty easy, no?
And I wonder... this is WhaleBarnicle's first game on this website, no? Of course that would rule out prior experience between the two of you.

I'm going to need some elaboration on your process of role reversal. If you believe WB is town and find my position thoroughly unconvincing, then you must be leaning on something in your role reversal process to get to that point, since the other two criteria don't apply. Is there something you can point to that WB said which led you to believe he wouldn't say as mafia?

Also, and forgive the implication, but how frequently do you get false positives through your role reversal process? At a glance, it seems like if your primary method of evaluating people you haven't played with before is to, for lack of a better term, project your emotional reaction "in their shoes" so to speak onto their reaction in the thread, that you could easily end up giving them the benefit of the doubt, out of an unconscious desire to be fair to the person with whom you're empathizing.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Spoiler: Miles's accusation of Whale

Why whalebarnicle

Also whalebarnicle is there a way to spoiler your posts or make more posts but not as big. I hate wall posts

I don't believe that a townie would back off of his wagon like WB backed off of Cankles in day 1. At no point in day 1 was Cankles safe from being lynched, yet WB wants us to believe that he couldn't get a Cankles lynch?

Look at the Fykus lynch. Look how little effort it took our two known non-Fykus townies (mhsmith and RadiantCowbells) to get on board. Knowing how easily the town piled up on Fykus late, it's not true that WB couldn't have pushed his desired lynch.

Then we get to day 2, and WB has decided to push on the confirmed townie's punching bag of choice, WhyMafia, and dropped his Cankles case completely. It doesn't make any sense as town. It makes

great

sense as mafia though: scum!WB wouldn't want to be tied to hypothetical town!Cankles's lynch and obviously wouldn't want to lynch scum!Cankles, and this low-profile drift toward another popular wagon is an excellent way for scum!WB to slide into LYLO with very little negative attention to his name.


The other reason isn't as concrete, but it resonates with me, so maybe it will with y'all as well. The two wagons that have emerged so far today are WM and you, Whemestar, and I quite frankly haven't seen any significant pushing from anyone outside of RC pushing WM. Several posters have expressed their opinions, forcefully even, but there's been very little in the way of meaningful argument and dialogue. It's been a lot of tilting at windmills, with no real cases making any traction -- just a lot of gut reads and muh feels and shit. This is the kind of environment scum loves and the kind of wagons that they thrive on: inert, apathetic voting pile-ups driven by one outspoken townie giving a shit.

Even if you aren't necessarily convinced by my argument enough to believe WB is scum, you should at least see the value in forcing the mafia to react to a new perspective on the game. This inertia favors them, so forcing them to take a stand on WB will draw more potentially incriminating posts out of them and break us out of this game stall.

Ugh, why did you have to make things so complicated when I thought I was figuring stuff out.

Okay, so I count this as legit evidence but I need more to overcome my strong impression of town motivation for his posts in general. I agree that I'd very much like to hear his explanation of those decisions, and will consider voting for him if I sufficiently dislike his answer or especially if he refuses to answer.

Thanks, but what aspects of the case did you find persuasive, and why do you have such a strong town-motivated impression of WB for me to fight against?

[Miles Edgeworth]

I'd ask for a reason but 506 was just so terrible that vote doesn't even need justification

Explain.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Y'all better not touch that hammer until I get my answers from WhaleBarnicle.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Thanks RC.

Whale, we're waiting. I asked you some questions and even made a case against you for your perusal. Mind answering those questions?

[Miles Edgeworth]

VOTE: Unabombah

sorta think Cankles was scum now

This is interesting. Knowing his alignment would be useful for more accurate analysis of the wagons on day 1, since Cankles was on L-1 for three days and lived. It just strikes me as so unlikely that the mafia let things get to that point.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I flagrantly disagree with your conjecture that inexperienced scum would have the know-how or the ability to derail the wagon.

When you put it that way, I'm a little disappointed I didn't discover the point in the first place.

You have a point. When I get time later on today, I'll dig into the implications of your idea here and see where I stand on it.

[Miles Edgeworth]

When do the mafia first get to talk to one another in a game on here?

[Miles Edgeworth]

So in other words, if Cankles were scum with someone who replaced in, those two would have had no prior planning to lean on in order to try to save him from the noose in day 1?

[Miles Edgeworth]

RC. What do you think about a KingCankles/Unabombah + GinsengTea/WhaleBarnicle team? I recognize pre-flips aren't really useful, but I've been suspicious of WB this whole day cycle, and I couldn't help but notice that

WB replaced in for GT during the height of pressure on KC during day 1.

He still has yet to answer my questions about why he didn't push KC harder when he started "losing his lynch"... and of course it stands to reason that scum bussing a teammate would not object to that teammate's wagon losing traction in the later stages of the day.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Lol nvm you already said you liked that team. Dope.

So can we kill WB now?

[Miles Edgeworth]

Let's do this: I've brought my case for WhaleBarnicle already. I'll even repost it for reference. You bring your argument for Unabombah/Cankles being scum (in whatever form you like, doesn't have to be a long post if that's not your thing, just summarize what you see), and let's force people to give their opinions about both of them and either vote for one or the other or make a seriously good justification for neither being a good lynch.

I think one struggle we've had this game is that a lot of people aren't really committing to specific evidence supporting one position or another. I don't necessarily mean logical argumentation like I've done, but even so much as "does post X ever come from town/mafia" type of comments. Most of the posters here have been allowed to drift from position to position without having their feet be put to the fire over it, so let's give 'em two good choices and make 'em decide.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I don't believe that a townie would back off of his wagon like WB backed off of Cankles in day 1. At no point in day 1 was Cankles safe from being lynched, yet WB wants us to believe that he couldn't get a Cankles lynch?

Look at the Fykus lynch. Look how little effort it took our two known non-Fykus townies (mhsmith and RadiantCowbells) to get on board. Knowing how easily the town piled up on Fykus late, it's not true that WB couldn't have pushed his desired lynch.

Then we get to day 2, and WB has decided to push on the confirmed townie's punching bag of choice, WhyMafia, and dropped his Cankles case completely. It doesn't make any sense as town. It makes

great

sense as mafia though: scum!WB wouldn't want to be tied to hypothetical town!Cankles's lynch and obviously wouldn't want to lynch scum!Cankles, and this low-profile drift toward another popular wagon is an excellent way for scum!WB to slide into LYLO with very little negative attention to his name.


The other reason isn't as concrete, but it resonates with me, so maybe it will with y'all as well. The two wagons that have emerged so far today are WM and you, Whemestar, and I quite frankly haven't seen any significant pushing from anyone outside of RC pushing WM. Several posters have expressed their opinions, forcefully even, but there's been very little in the way of meaningful argument and dialogue. It's been a lot of tilting at windmills, with no real cases making any traction -- just a lot of gut reads and muh feels and shit. This is the kind of environment scum loves and the kind of wagons that they thrive on: inert, apathetic voting pile-ups driven by one outspoken townie giving a shit.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Jesus, who invited all the scared teenagers to the dance?

If you don't trust your own votes then line up and follow mine. I've got a plan, I know what I want, and that's more than any of y'all can say right now.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Hey, I know exactly what the fuck I want and I don't trust you worth shit.

Yeah? What happened to wanting Cankles's slot lynched then? If you know what you want, you should say it, since it changes so damn much.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Jesus, who invited all the scared teenagers to the dance?

If you don't trust your own votes then line up and follow mine. I've got a plan, I know what I want, and that's more than any of y'all can say right now.

Whale promised a post tonight and I'm waiting for it. I will follow yours or not contingent on what he says. How is that not a plan? Have you given up on getting a response already or do you truly feel that nothing can dissuade you from lynching him?

How many times has this guy told us he'll get to it later?

If he does finally deliver then I'll obviously have to take whatever he says into account. But my case is great and he's had several days to do anything to make me wrong, and he hasn't yet. How much longer am I gonna have to wait on y'all to see where I'm coming from?

[Miles Edgeworth]

Should I never update my reads, never change my reads, deathtunnel whoever my first scumread is until they get lynched?

Hell no you shouldn't.

You just went from apparently not caring anymore about WhyMafia and wanting to lynch Cankles's slot, to wanting to kill WhyMafia today.

And look, in fairness to you, it's not

just

you. Peri over there is waffling like moss in a breeze. The rest of the town isn't saying anything, whether they're posting or not. It's just frustrating that nobody seems to know what they want to do, but nobody is also willing to take me up on my vote.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Should I never update my reads, never change my reads, deathtunnel whoever my first scumread is until they get lynched?

Hell no you shouldn't.

You just went from apparently not caring anymore about WhyMafia and wanting to lynch Cankles's slot, to wanting to kill WhyMafia today.

And look, in fairness to you, it's not

just

you. Peri over there is waffling like moss in a breeze. The rest of the town isn't saying anything, whether they're posting or not. It's just frustrating that nobody seems to know what they want to do, but nobody is also willing to take me up on my vote.

I thought that WhyMafia's 2 posts a few pages ago were outside of his scum range. I reevaluated and found out they weren't so went back onto the scumread.

I guess I can't really begrudge you that. I just wish we could get WB to L-1 at least to see what people do with it. I think there was something instructive in putting WM to L-1, but I don't know what it really means without putting some other people there too.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Jesus, who invited all the scared teenagers to the dance?

If you don't trust your own votes then line up and follow mine. I've got a plan, I know what I want, and that's more than any of y'all can say right now.

Whale promised a post tonight and I'm waiting for it. I will follow yours or not contingent on what he says. How is that not a plan? Have you given up on getting a response already or do you truly feel that nothing can dissuade you from lynching him?

How many times has this guy told us he'll get to it later?

If he does finally deliver then I'll obviously have to take whatever he says into account. But my case is great and he's had several days to do anything to make me wrong, and he hasn't yet. How much longer am I gonna have to wait on y'all to see where I'm coming from?

I'm giving him the rest of today. If nothing has changed when I check the thread for the first time tomorrow, I'm voting him. Satisfied?

Maybe.

Suppose something does change and gives you an out to vote for someone besides WB. Who is it and why?

[Miles Edgeworth]

Okay, you're going to hate me for this Miles but I think the burden of proof is back on you. It's plausible that he took that long to answer, and the responses don't seem unreasonable. I look forward to watching your argument :p

Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not sure I have much of one. His defense is pretty impressive and I especially like that he immediately had a coherent direction to go after responding to my concerns.

UNVOTE: WhaleBarnicle

[Miles Edgeworth]

I almost feel like I can PoE the game into WM/Wheme/Una but that seems ungodly premature.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I don't think I can solve this game if WhemeStar is town.

Removing myself and RadiantCowbells from the equation, the last two mafia are among the other four players. UnaBombaH, WhaleBarnicle and PersephoneSidekick all have a reasonable amount of "game solving" types of posts. One of them has to be faking it, of course, and for scum to get this far unscathed that's not even particularly surprising.
I suppose there's no reason there can't be

two

scum doing reasonable game-solving things, but when I look at WhemeStar's ISO compared to them, it's extremely lacking. He's coasted really hard through his time in this game, and the only clear position he took on anybody this game (WhyMafia is scum) turned out to be incorrect. Outside of getting WhyMafia lynched, he hasn't been invested in any outcomes this game, and on rereading his ISO I don't actually see any reason given by him to think WhyMafia was scum in the first place.

[Miles Edgeworth]

The only conclusion I can make about the nightkill is that scum felt the risk of keeping a fresh set of eyes in the game was worth leaving us with an additional suspect to consider. I don't think we can make realistic guesses about why that's the case without knowing who the scumteam is, so we shouldn't waste time on that line of questioning.

[Miles Edgeworth]

Good question. I think I lean marginally toward Una over Perse for the 2nd if Wheme is scum. Both of them dance around a lot with "wanting to vote Wheme" or even voting Wheme throughout day 2, but both end up on WhyMafia in the end, which is pretty suspicious. Perse interacted directly and naturally-sounding with Wheme more just from reading their ISOs, which I think all else equal makes her the less likely partner, since mafia (especially newer ones, which we can expect people in newbie queues to be?) tend to have trouble interacting with each other genuinely. Una did more talking about Wheme being suspicious and wanting to kill him than talking directly to him.

Whale seems substantially less likely than either. Whale is the one I think is most town of that bunch anyway, but Wheme flipping scum would practically lock Whale as town.

[Miles Edgeworth]

It does bother me how fervently Persephone wanted to kill Wheme to start day 2, that Wheme did nothing to make her change her mind, but that she nonetheless ended up voting with Wheme on somebody else, though.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I take it back, I think Persephone is a more reasonable partner than Una for Wheme. I think it's still pretty close, but rereading her progression on Wheme, something isn't right.

[Miles Edgeworth]

I take it back, I think Persephone is a more reasonable partner than Una for Wheme. I think it's still pretty close, but rereading her progression on Wheme, something isn't right.

I realize my 180 on him looked pretty weird but it was more an epiphany than that anything had changed. I had been suspicious of Wheme for unmotivated vote changes, but then I suddenly understood the intuition of one of his votes and that made me realize he was being opaque rather than arbitrary.

So you say that you were suspicious of him solely because of him changing his votes without explaining his motivation?

[Miles Edgeworth]

I take it back, I think Persephone is a more reasonable partner than Una for Wheme. I think it's still pretty close, but rereading her progression on Wheme, something isn't right.

I realize my 180 on him looked pretty weird but it was more an epiphany than that anything had changed. I had been suspicious of Wheme for unmotivated vote changes, but then I suddenly understood the intuition of one of his votes and that made me realize he was being opaque rather than arbitrary.

So you say that you were suspicious of him solely because of him changing his votes without explaining his motivation?

More that, in the absence of him explaining his motivations, I could think of scum motivations but not couldn't think of town ones. But then I could.

And that was sufficient for you to move off of him? Nothing else he did was sufficiently suspicious for you to keep your vote on him?

[Miles Edgeworth]

in hindsight lynching fykus was a brutal mistake.

It was fine. Obviously wrong in hindsight, but besides being wrong I'm not bothered by it, since so many people replaced during day 1. It got people to put their money where their mouths were, which is the main thing you want in a d1 lynch anyway (aside from hitting scum obviously).

[Miles Edgeworth]

Peri, who do you suspect right now?

[Miles Edgeworth]

VOTE: UnaBombaH

[Miles Edgeworth]

*highfive*

Thank's for the quick check in, I was so nervous because your profile said V/LA.

I'd never ditch such a wonderful partner like that, hah. I realized I forgot to mention that we needed a way to check in before we went for it, but we figured it out. Thanks for the dance.


Good God scum is hard even in games that are favorable. Lol

[Miles Edgeworth]

Thanks guys. Was definitely a fun challenge over here. Peri was a wonderful partner and y'all were a great set of opponents

[Miles Edgeworth]

Also sorry for cheesy looking VLA. I wasn't gonna say anything and just play but since the game is over, no need. Would have ended Monday.

[Miles Edgeworth]

For the record, I have no doubt that we were in big trouble if we didn't get the hammer there. I'm not sure if RC would come out of his funk or the rest of y'all would turn on us. The game felt runaway for scum but we were too clean for too long - Peri even noted that in our chat (shouts to us pulling off the clean slate btw!!!)

[Miles Edgeworth]

Peri, you're ready if you want to make the jump.



Whale, I never answered your question. I took the MBTI test at 16Personalities and received this result:

Extraverted 64 / 36 Introverted
iNtuitive 54 / 46 Sensing
Thinking 87 / 13 Feeling
Prospecting 81 / 19 Judging
Assertive 75 / 25 Turbulent

Type: ENTP-A