I think that it was a mistake for **LightFoot **to claim so early in the game, but what’s done is done…and I don’t think it’s anything we can’t recover from. Assuming there is a Doc (which, although it is just an assumption, is a pretty good one), then it becomes just another game of WIFOM with the Scum.
So if the person I happen to think is most Scummy just happens to also be the vote leader, I should *not *vote so that we don’t form a bandwagon? Or am I then supposed to vote for someone else instead?Either way, the voting record then becomes less reliable. I think this is a very bad idea.
I don’t like this vote at all. What **ShadowFacts **is saying is essentially true. We have no more useful information now than we did after **Kelly’s **death. We have one more dead person. That person is most likely not Scum, but b) we don’t ‘know’ that, and b) ‘knowing’ **Scathach **was Town/3rd-Party without knowing anything else about his role is essentially useless to Town at this point. Perhaps ShadowFacts’ statement was not strictly, 100% accurate, but there was nothing ‘untrue’ about it.
If you are Town, then it stands to reason that you would serve ‘the greater good’.
If you are Scum pretending to be Town, then again it would be a given that you would take such a position (or claim to).
The only reason anyone would have to explicitly state such a position is if they are a 3rd-Party, and are trying to ‘make a deal’ with the town for their continued survival.
And assuming there’s a scum roleblocker, we are not very likely to ever see a (second) result from her. We’d pretty much need a town watcher (or fear of one), or to get lucky with a lynch quite soon. It’s not just WIFOM.
We can still win even with an outed cop; it happened last game. But it’s harder.
It’s not. Pizza is right. What he describes is a very efficient way to find scum. But it requires people be willing to vote early and potentially move their votes frequently. I would love to see it happen. I don’t think it much will, except by chance; the culture here argues against it. “Votign for who you find most scummy” is a sensible guideline for town, but it’s not the only legitimate way to play, especially early in a game. There are, after all, lots of scum out there. And scum can use “but I had to vote him, he was the most scummy” as an excuse to place a single cheap vote on a townie quite easily – arguably more easily than they can make themselves move their votes around as situations change.
But to put it very simply: more scum wondering which way to jump, more often = better chances for the town down the line. Best way to put scum in that position: put them within a vote or so of the vote lead in either direction. Bandwagons don’t do that, even when they’re right.
I actually mis-stated my argument, but not that way. ShadowFacts WAS perfectly, 100% accurate (OK we know scathach is dead, but that’s a freebie) that we know no more than we did. What he did that looks non-townie to me is stop there, as if “we know nothing” were all that could be said. It’s too casual, it’s too lacking in curiosity or real reasoning. There are assumptions that can be made, relatively safely at that, but he didn’t try to make them.
I did not read much of the initial debate about what to do about double-voting.
I think people are deliberately misinterpreting me about forming large wagons, and I think I’ve said all I need to say about it. Do as you will. I put forth an idea that I’ve found to work very well, against an idea I’ve found to work very poorly. If the obvious logic involved doesn’t convince you, and you’re not willing to try it, then experience won’t be able to convince you either, and nothing I say could either.
As for Septimus, the case on him is simply that his post where he voted me seemed to be far too much for a day one vote. It was overkill IMO. I could quote that post again, but I’m not really in the mood, and if it didn’t convince you the first time, it won’t the second time. If that costs me your vote, shrug
I was reacting to complaints from my previous game, where my vote explanations were considered underkill. Perhaps for my pizza vote, “voting for obvious reasons” would have sufficed.
And BTW, I am somewhat annoyed that your recent suggestion (“Effectively, we decide who dies before the round is over, and spend the last 12-24 hours or so locking in nearly unanimous votes.”) is almost exactly what I proposed yesterDay, and which you argued against at length. (I even expressed the same exact uncertainty whether 12 or 24 hours was better for the end period; see #188)
I’ve mixed feelings about whether to renew my vote against you. I have no other strong scum candidates, but some of your zaniness and reversals do not seem like what Scum would do. I’m sure you’re capable of a deep double-think “wifom” game as Scum, but would you attempt that in your first game as a relative newcomer to SDMB? (Where do you usually play?)
BTW, it occurs to me that Lightfoot’s claim might be a beautiful ploy if she were Scum. I guess she’s almost certainly legit however, for fear that the real Investigator might counterclaim. (But I’m not even sure another Cop should hurry to conterclaim; what if there are two Investigator roles?)
I understand that bandwagons make things easy for scum - I think the most successful Days for town are the ones that end with a Scum and a Townie in close contention for the lynch lead, precisely for the reasons you give. But I don’t know how plausible it is to engineer that kind of close contention among candidates. If people announce that they really suspect A but will vote elsewhere to keep things tight, then it will be pretty obvious that this is a manufactured situation and that ultimately A is going to be lynched. The alternative is that people keep schtum about their suspicions of A in the hope of tricking the scum into thinking A is savable - but then you have a lot of people hiding their thoughts and maybe even voting for a second preference, which seems to create plenty of hiding places for scum.
I think the best way to generate the kind of situation we want (i.e. close contention between suspects, at least one of which is actually Scum) is to put more effort into making cases on more people. We’ve a tendency to let one or two cases develop and then coast. We need to all contribute a bit more to the creation of suspects - if we can get three or four plausible cases going, then the problem of bandwagoning should solve itself. And of course we’ll have a better chance of bringing scum under scrutiny.
Yes, exactly. If someone makes a case on A and you agree that it is a good one, you don’t HAVE TO vote that person, particularly right away. You can look for other candidates, to see if they tempt you to more or less the same extent. And if you find a candidate B who does, then you have the option of voting that person instead, so potentially you have pressure on two suspicious people, instead of just one. It’s not a question of being dishonest; it’s a question of playing smart, really. Of acknowledging that you don’t know everything, you might be wrong, and of making your vote work for you EVEN IF YOU ARE.
And I love the level of analysis around here, and all the questions that are asked of people, but I hate constantly being one of maybe three votes placed, 3 days into the Day. Votes are the town’s weapon, don’t be afraid of them. That’s the scum’s problem.
Huh? I guess all of these words were just a bunch of hooey. Seems to me that you have pretty severely limited your options now, PizzaGuy. Willing to to consider other alternatives? Uh, huh. Need time? Four days left in Today, but I guess you chose not to use that time. Care to tell us why exactly were you in such a hurry to lock in your vote?
With that [my last post] in mind, here’s a quick [it wasn’t quick] look at special ed:
First game post:
I’m not sure what to make of this. At first reading, it seems pretty vacuous. Looking closer, the first “Bah” can be interpreted as a criticisim of Koldanar for making a wishy-washy post that is itself pretty meaningless, but that’s leaving the reader to do a lot of work. The second part is of course explicitly making the “scum-slip” case against choie that got me voting for pedescribe and later was part of my reasons for voting Kelly. Really, consistency demands that I vote for ed right now, because it’s exactly the same logic. And in fact, calling choie out as Scum to her face and then not voting for her does look a lot like setting other people up to do ed’s dirty work. But it’s worth noting that I was wrong about Kelly, so I’ll hold fire right now. Also, it’s only fair to quote this later post when he was called on Bah-ing:
Next we have this, in reaction to the debate on multi-voting:
In some ways, this is a heroic attempt to stop us going round in circles and to get us to focus on scum instead. However, it only goes part of the way, ending with an appeal for someone else to do the work (due to busy-ness, to be fair) and a wishy-washy comment on Normal that could mean anything.
Then there’s a series of posts (Here, here, hereand here) on handshaking and how it works with Kelly. This is interesting stuff, but it’s not all that different from discussing how to use multi-vote, in terms of catching scum.
Then we actually get into some cut and thrust, when ed challenges Pizza’s reasoning on Skeezix and Koldanar:
…which quickly seems to fade away…
…only for ed to keep up the questions here:
However, that ultimately goes nowhere. In fact, ed goes on to vote septimus, following Pizza’s lead.
The next discussion of note regards PMs, handshaking and the fall out from Kelly’s and Silver Jan’s claims. In brief, because this is getting far too long already:
Ed challenges Kelly over knowledge of handshakes and then backs up Normalover the idea that Kelly could be anything other than vanilla after the handshake attempt.
Then ed realises the truth about multi-votes. This was clever, but doesn’t imply anything one way or another, obviously. It does involve taking his vote off septimus.
Then, after questioning Silver Jan about her reaction to Kelly’s role PM, ed votes Suburban Plankton, on the (poorly elucidated) grounds that SP’s questioning of Jan seems to show he’s not vanilla. He also makes the point that the discussion of vanilla PMs is potentially dangerous to power roles and should be stopped, pronto. This is after he’s spent quite some time discussing vanilla PMs.
Day Two - so far, discussion of Lightfoot’s claim and the implications thereof. All of which seem perfectly fair at this stage in the Day.
So what do I make of that? A lot of what ed does seems Town. He’s very quick on the implications of power role discussions, for example. However, he hasn’t done a lot of scum-hunting; he’ll vote with a gnomic comment (e.g. for Suburban) but doesn’t make much effort to get people to go along with him, or explain his reasoning. Other than that, his votes have followed others’ leads, be it for septimus or Kelly. And reading over what I’ve just written, I realise that ed actually had quite a lot of posts in the middle of the vanilla PM discussion before he finally came out and told people to be quiet. He could have made that point earlier.
On the whole, I’m leaning towards the idea that ed is doing a good job of appearing town, but his me-too voting, reaction to Choie, gnomic comments in lieu of explaining his thoughts and his stirring of the vanilla PM pot before announcing how anti-Town that discussion was are scumminess showing through.
While I understand the desire to keep the voting close because it causes more pressure to be applied to more people. I completely disagree on it allowing Scum to escape accountability in their voting.
Yes, Scum can easily join a runaway bandwagon with little accountability. But doesn’t restricting them from doing so also allow them to escape accountability? Somewhere along the lines of, “Well, I’d vote for Player A for such and such reasons, only I don’t want to bandwagon to get carried away, so I’ll vote for Player B for these other reasons.”
Is that really any better? No, it only adds confusion when looking at voting patterns.
@ Stanislaus, without a major quote. In regards to the discussions about the Vanilla PM. There are ways to discuss a PM **without **indicating if it is similar to your own or not. I’ve learned this lesson through experience. Some players were unable to do so. Some players clearly, through their comments, indicated that their PM was either similar to Silver Jan’s (or KellyCriterion’s) or different.
If the format of the PM is useful to the Scum in figuring out who is a power role or not, then that type of discussion can be hurtful to Town.
As I pointed out, I directed my questions directly at Silver Jan and Normal in regards to how they felt about the differences in their PMs and KellyCriterion’s because those 2 had claimed Vanilla with a different format to their PMs.
as to the rest of your comments: bah!
It’s an interesting twist you’ve taken on my conversation with AskThePizzaGuy.
I initially questioned him on his voting strategy.
I later stated that I understood his approach, and sometimes even use it under different circumstances (one of which Normal later poitned out)
I then asked his opinion on the vote leader at the time.
And this is somehow wishy-washy?
And also, somehow you characterize my answering questions abot handshaking that KellyCriterion asked as somewhat sinister as well. And even related a discussion about the sue of a term in general with the talk of the Vanilla PM.Ignoring the fact that discussion the Vanilla PM could potentially give useful information the the Scum, while discussing handshaking in the abstract could not.
Or maybe you still fail to see why discussing the Vanilla PM in such a way that you give away details of your own PM is bad.
No, I think that would be pretty horrible under the conditions of these games. But it’s rarely that cut and dried that a person (who is actually looking at multiple suspects) suspects exactly one of them hugely above all others. There is scope for some strategic consideration without compromising accountability.
I’m obviously not as good a player as you think I am so allow me to explain my thoughts. The following assumes LightFoot is legit. Scum already know who is Town (or Not Scum), so revealing the Good alignment that she discovered give Scum little to no useful information, and gives Town a big whopping confirmed player we can trust. The downside, as you’ve explained, is that it paints a target on that person, who might be an important power role. I admit that I had not thought that through fully (see my first sentence).
Despite that, I still think it’s more of a benefit to reveal. Scum will have to choose who to try to kill: “confirmed” Townie who may or may not be a power role? LightFoot, who may or may not be protected by a Doc? Tough WIFOM.
The downside to not revealing, of course, is that if LightFoot is killed, we get nothing. Absolutely nada. We’ve handed our Seer over to the Scum for no benefit. That’s a pretty big downside, IMO.
And all that said, I’ve long been an advocate of “trust your power roles.” They presumably have more info. So, I’ve made my opinion known, but LightFoot should play it how she sees fit.
But we’re still applying a system of some sort in deciding how we vote instead of making a case and backing it up with an easily identifiable vote.
If my list of probability of Scumhhod goes:
Player A 70%
Player B 50%
Player C 40%
If player A already has a 2 vote lead, I’m hesitant to vote for him. So I’m stuck voting for Player B Or maybe even Player C if Player C is 3 votes behind. with very little support for my vote.
So I’ve created a system, albeit a complicated one, which dictates my voting.
And, of course, I can still express my high suspicion of Player A, but then, doesn’t everyone know I’ll just switch my vote to Player A later in the Day, and as such, I’ve really applied very little pressure to Player C, as well as provided Scum with ample opportunity to switch votes late in the Day to their ‘real suspect’
so allow me to explain my thoughts. The following assumes LightFoot is legit. Scum already know who is Town (or Not Scum), so revealing the Good alignment that she discovered give Scum little to no useful information, and gives Town a big whopping confirmed player we can trust. The downside, as you’ve explained, is that it paints a target on that person, who might be an important power role. I admit that I had not thought that through fully (see my first sentence).