Ok, now to rundown a summary of my thoughts on living players.
PPE: This is a book, and I only have one done for now. Sorry. It's mostly for my benefit as a reference but I hope the rest of town reads these too.
Jotheonah:
First substantial contribution:
This has been quite a day 1. Some thoughts.
On the Grujah wagon: It kind of bothers me, because it's hard for me to get a read on someone who's already at L-2 when he makes his first post. I need to be able to compare someone's under-pressure posting to normal posting to get a good read, and the quickwagon deprived me of that. I'll get over it though. Not voting for him right now, anyway.
Town read: Capn' Frisk.
Scum reads: Insomniac and Eevee.
Eevee is being really critical of other people's reads and shooting them down in a way that gives me a bad vibe.
Expresses annoyance about the Grujah quickwagon, and then gives early town/scumreads; all happen to be on now-dead town. Gives reasons for the Eevee sumread, and on Insomniac he says later he was sheeping Frisk, but never gives much reason for thinking Frisk to be town.
Later:
I think a general note to be cautious of claiming in this game, even at L-1 is really good, and even maybe a tacit endorsement of town PRs lying in certain cases. Any more of a plan than that and we help scum too much.
Of course, being ok with town lying makes me super nervous.
I am not sure, if I get Chickenified, you should expect a great deal of contribution from me. If I'm a chicken at L-1, I just won't claim. I'll use my Chicken vote in a pro-town way. Other than that, I don't think it will be fun OR useful for me to try to continue being a productive town member while under those constraints.
This post I find very interesting. The position on claiming seems hedgy to me: "we should maybe be ok with town PRs lying, but this makes me nervous." Being outwardly wary of helping scum is an easy way for scum to buy cheap towncred. Then he maybe leaves room to go back on his "tacit endorsement" later. *This will be important below.*
The second half of this quote is interesting too. joth warns us that he will be not so helpful if he's a chicken. I'd assert that no one was all that helpful while chickened, possibly because people were too lazy to translate everything, but this statement came before anyone was chickened, and before we knew quite what an utter detriment to communication it would be. But here joth declares that he will not even try to help town while a chicken. Notably,
joth then spent much of the rest of the game as a chicken. In this quote, is he preparing an excuse for lurking, while planning that his scumbuddies will curse him often throughout the game? People seemed to assume that Volt was the scum target D1 but there's no possible way to know that for sure.
Joth then spends a while as a chicken. In the meantime, people bring up the fact that he has been much quieter then usual, even before the chickening. This exchange between Robz and Galz is notable here:
The problem is that scum Joth has only been seen once in a normal game (M-III), where he was SK. In that particular game, I had no problem spotting his scummy nature D1 because he sat there trying to stir up suspicions. Here, he's just been absent.
I don't know. Joth isn't the quiet type, but I've never seen him as Mafia. OTOH, he's often quite suspicious and an easy mislynch target. For my money... I don't think I would vote him. He's too smart to intentionally play his first "Mafia" game as a lurker when f.DS is at it's peak of railing against lurkers. I feel much more comfortable with my vote on Robz, who is a solid enough player to lead the field in posts WHILE being scum, and spend his time trying to mercilessly pursue a LaL policy without actually taking the time to differentiate scummy lurking and inadvertent town lurking. This particular game has a high skill average. I just don't think you'll see scum being lurky here just for the sake of being lurky.
Galzria hasn't played scum in the past 12 normal games, so can I forgive him for being misinformed on this.
Active play is actually very, very hard for scum, even for experienced players. Even I had a hard-ish time keeping my post count up in MVIII, and even moreso in MIX, when I was scum. It's not easy. That's why Insomniac's active scum play in MXII was so impressive.
Jotheonah is often suspicious and an easy mislynch target, I agree. He tends to get on a lot of wagons, and have a lot of strong opinions. From now on, I will take this to be town Jonah, and I wish I had realized it in MXII.
But this isn't that Jo. He's much quieter here, and I'm having a hard time understanding why, being that he's active in other places. I know he started a new job, sure. I don't think he's a slamdunk by any means. But I think Galzria is underestimating how consuming the tendency to lurk as scum is.
And I still don't see why any scum would actually be afraid of leaning toward the lurky side, since so seldom do we actually punish lurking. I think he could have bet that once again, there wouldn't be any actual lynching of lurkers, or that someone would come in and say, "No scum would lurk now that we are all anti-lurking!" Because someone always does. Blowback against policy lynches is much, much more popular than policy lynches themselves.
And I am distinguishing scummy lurking from town lurking, Galzria. Archetype, for instance, is huge lurking, but I expect Archetype to lurk no matter what his alignment is. And I already said that.
Of the two of them, Robz of course was town, and Galz’s alignment is unknown. Galz defends joth’s lurking as something scum-joth would never do, despite not knowing what scum joth is like really. Robz asserts that lurking is a scumtell for everyone more or less, and not something that’s so easy to avoid as scum. They both make long well-reasoned points, and they both have far more experience than me to go off of, but knowing his alignment I tend to lean towards agreeing with Robz here. I’m of course still by no means certain that joth or anyone else is scum, but I just find Galz’s points here a bit more shaky (and of course it’s plausible that Galz could be scum actively defending a scumbuddy in this post).
Ok, later on (am I still only on D1? Ugh), we get to the lynch of town Explorer Robz. Robz’s wagon builds, gets to L-1, he claims VT and then recants and claims PR. Joth’s post below is typical of the several he made at this time:
Chicken vote: Robz
Recall the “tacit endorsement” of PRs lying in this game that joth gave earlier? Well Robz admits to having lied and claims PR and joth still desperately wants to lynch him here. Now look, I don’t mean to imply that anyone who lynched Robz post-claim was scum, since we know several of them weren’t. I myself was very confused and undecided around that time, and then I was unable to be around for the very end of the day, so I can’t honestly say what I would have done. But the fact that joth goes from being potentially ok with town PRs lying to this:
Chicken vote: Robz Chicken vote: Robz Chicken vote: Robz Chicken vote: Robz Chicken vote: Robz Chicken vote: Robz
seems suspicious. And all the while he’s chickened so he has a built-in excuse to not give a real case!
Ok, so Robz gets lynched, and we go to D2. This next quote speaks for itself, given what I’ve said above. Joth forgets his tacit endorsement.
So I really did think Robz was scum yesterday. At first because he was so set on lynching a person who couldn't defend himself, and second because he claimed like three times. I don't remember agreeing as a town that we would permit and expect that degree of lying from a town player, but I want to go on record and say that's a bad policy.
For context, this comes right out of the gate, second post of D2 before anyone has a chance to call him out for his role in the Robz lynch.
Summarizing a bit, joth then gives townreads on Galz and Frisk, and a scumread on ashersky, Perhaps tellingly, he calls for the cutpurse to kill ashersky while ashersky is a chicken:
Exactly. When is the next time we're going to have a top scumread who's also a chicken?
This here seems like something scum would be unlikely to do towards their own teammate. But I’m not sure, would an ashersky dayvig followed by a townie lynch have been a better outcome for scum? Actually it probably would, though of course you’d risk an ashersky dayvig followed by a
scum lynch. So maybe not inconceivable that scum might do this.
Joth spends the rest of the day as a chicken, and hammers ashersky.
Next two days were pretty short. Joth tunnels Insomniac D3, then switches to Archetype wagon, while still declaring Insomniac to be scum. Of course both of them were town. On D4, Joth begins by continuing to tunnel Insomniac, then declares that he thinks Insomniac is town, and explains why when I ask:
Oh, it's just I've been getting a town read from his annoyance at my tunneling.
It's like, when you're scum and town is tunneling on you against all reason, it's hard to get really upset with them because on some level you know they're right, and you're worried that if you blow up they'll look righter. When you're town and someone is tunneling on you though, it's just really annoying and you can be totally righteous with your anger. It's not foolproof by any means, but it feels townish.
Unfortunately, I don't know who else to look to. I haven't followed this game well because I've been a chicken so much.
But he never unvotes! This sets up Insomniac to self-vote and Galz to hammer.
Now D5, and I’ll sheep yuma a bit, where he mentions this:
...wherein jot basically says that he hasn't really been paying that much attention to it and isn't that invested in it. I find this to be a weird comment from someone who has voted on, as he said, "ALL THE WAGONS." For someone who has lurked and has had barely any reads, jot sure has expressed his votes. Joth are you saying that you shouldn't be accountable for your votes since you really didn't have accurate reads on the people that you voted for because you have lurked through the game? That is kinda what I am interpreting this as.
I think this is something of a good point. Joth has been saying all game that he doesn’t feel like he has strong reads, isn’t totally invested, etc. etc. but has managed to end up on
every wagon. This seems like a natural thing for scum. Don’t express too many opinions, don’t give strong reads you’ll have to back up later on, but still influence town with your vote.
That brings us up to the present. Joth looks far scummier upon rereading than I had thought for most of the game, which makes sense as I imagine he’d be a decent enough scum player to avoid major suspicion for a long time. During our D1 LaL phase I called him out for lurking, but he wasn’t ever my primary scum target, which if he is scum is exactly what he would be trying for. His voting positions, though, do look like potential mafia behavior.
Sorry for the novel. Other player summaries to come but can’t promise when.
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Topic: Mafia XIV: The Chicken Curse of the Sea Hags (Mafia Wins!) (Read 165749 times)