NETA: And for this game we are all at square one in my book. If someone has a good idea, in your mind, then endorse it regardless of the relative “experience” of the poster. Conversely if someone is full of it, in your opinion, feel free to express that opinion as well. You may catch a ration of crap either way but that is the baseline for forming further discussion and analysis points.
Once again my savvy one game two cents - Meh.
Cog888 BTW I am peekercpa not peekercepa.. Makes it sound like I’ve got some weird type of infection.
But the pills and ointment do seem to be having an effect, than og.
Vote Count, now with correct spelling!
**anyrose - 2 ** (twickster, Thing Fish)
**fluiddruid - 1 ** (peekercpa)
**Oredigger77 - 2 ** (cckerberos, Hoppy Frood)
**bufftabby - 1 ** (Zsofia)
**Thing Fish - 4 ** (anyrose, Blaster Master, RyJae, The Unkempt One)
Not Voting
Oredigger77, fluiddruid, Koldanar, bufftabby
[QUOTE=CoG888]
Vote Count, now with correct spelling!
[/quote]
Hah! Says you!
Now I know how Colddinner feels.
fluff fluff fluff
Just in case you all forgot, if I do not post today, it is not because I am lurking, it is because the firewall is up.
fluff fluff fluff
Have a nice day y’all. 
Hi folks,
The last few days for me have been nightmarish. My boss (the only one in my department) is out sick with strep, not sure if he’ll be in today, and was out of town for Mother’s Day. Got some other things going on too, so haven’t had much time for the boards and didn’t notice the game had already started until I got a PM.
Hopefully today is a bit slower, and if so, I’ll be in shortly. My apologies.
Ergh, it’s early, no edit… my boss is the only other person besides me in the department, that is. So busy Monday + no help = just taking a lunch causes stuff to pile up uncontrollably.
[QUOTE=peekercepa]
Cog888 BTW I am peekercpa not peekercepa.. Makes it sound like I’ve got some weird type of infection.
But the pills and ointment do seem to be having an effect, than og.
[/QUOTE]
Hah…you and Hoppy Frood misspelled…Sweet Justice!
Ok, on to stubstance. People keep bringing up the Thing Fish and anyrose situation (I’d say debaucle, but well it’s not there yet). I’m going to have to go back and reread this situation and see what motivations I can get out of it…day one is usually too early for a situation like this to be that cut and dry.
And before I forget, Mod, do the scum have any opportunity to talk and plot during the day as well?
It’s far enough in that I’ll remove my random vote:
[color=red]unvote bufftabby[color]
Arrrgh, almost accidentally edited.
unvote bufftabby
[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
It may be fair to say scum are more likely to vote for a townie, but even if that is true, it is an implication and not an equivalence, thus it is logically invalid to say that a vote on a townie is more likely to be made by scum, even if the first part is true.
The part that gets me is, you get an OMGUS vote from her, which is expected, and rather than explain that your vote is essentially random (which you now claim it is), you attempt to paint her defensiveness as scummy, and then smudge twickster in the process when she’d already justified her vote as random. You were attacking her as if your vote was based on information, which is was not, and then you act like it’s scummy that she doesn’t like you jumping on her. Then you tell her not to defend herself, but to find someone else she finds scummy, when few other people have posted anything of consequence, so there’s not really anything TO find scummy.
BlaM, it appears that you are not accepting my explanations; it actually appears as though you are not* reading* them, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that. I already clarified that I was not telling her not to defend herself, and that I should have stated this more clearly than I did. Frustrating how everyone always talks about wanting to lynch lurkers, but it seems to be the people who are posting who actually get votes.
I find this misleading as well. This sort of “tip to newbies” seems to imply that you have experience, but then you’ve also said in other posts that you’ve only followed along a few times, so you’re still a newbie. Which way is it?
I’m a newbie who has more experience reading and carefully analyzing games than it appears a lot of the other newbies here do. Sorry if I came off as egotistical, but I prefer that to sitting back and letting the “veterans” like yourself lead everyone around by the nose, because if you happen to be scum, we’re all screwed.
Only a minute to post, maybe I’ll have time to catch up with the various smudges against me later tonight. I would really warn everyone against putting too much trust in Blaster Master, he comes off as very knowledgable and convincing, but we don’t know that he’s not scum, and, more to the point, as anyone who read Simpletown knows, even when he is town, he is not infallible.
However, he is quite right that since anyrose is now actively participating and has not let any glaring scumtells drop, I am overdue for moving my vote off her.
unvote anyrose
vote RyJae
Because he’s among the lurkiest, and because he has already committed one act (voting for me) which I know to be anti-Town, even if nobody else is buying it.
[Quote=Koldanar]
And before I forget, Mod, do the scum have any opportunity to talk and plot during the day as well?
[/quote]
Ok, so this is very strange to me, Koldy. I know you’re not like, a newb and stuff, and I’m pretty sure the standard setup is that scum can only communicate at Night. In fact, I pretty much took it for granted that this would be the case. This question seems to me like a scum trying to establish non-scum credibility. “Scum would never have to ask about that, they would already know, so Koldanar can’t be scum”. That question just rings false with me. Now, if I’m wrong that the standard setup is that scum can only communicate at Night, and this was actually a possibly-legitimate question, I’ll cheerfully rescind my suspicion, but that question really pinged me.
vote Koldanar
That, and I’m racist against dwarves.
[QUOTE=peekercpa]
I wouldn’t mind at least a recap of your Simpletown views regarding this subject. It kind of made sense but my brain was not easily able to get wrapped around it totally - I mean look at who I ultimately voted for. Maybe taking the class over would be helpful.
The math, on the other hand, don’t bother as far as I am concerned. When it comes to your approach it is as comprehensible to me as, say, Mandarin Chinese. I mean it’s kind of fascinating but I don’t understand a lick of it and heck I am a CPA so it’s not like numbers are foreign animals to me.
[/QUOTE]
I’ll try to give a brief recap, and if anyone is confused or whatever, I’ll do my best to explain. Either way, it’s still something that’s difficult to see until you’ve seen it in action.
The key point to mafia is determining a player’s motivation. It’s intuitive to look at specific actions as pro-town or anti-town, but this is a poor metric because scum want to appear to be pro-town, and townies can make mistakes. What differentiates these two players is their motivation, a pro-town player may utlimately make many anti-town moves, be he’s always motivated by what’s best for the town. Similarly, an experienced scum may make many pro-town moves, but he’s ultimately motivated by what is best for the scum.
So, what does this mean? This means something that’s anti-town isn’t necessarily a scum tell, in fact, in some bizarre cases it can actually be a town tell. So let’s look at some common scenarios. Let’s say a player proposes a strategy that is discovered to be flawed, does that make that player scummy? Well, it’s possible that a pro-town player made a strategic mistake, so no, it isn’t. Let’s say a player is the hammer on a scum, does that make that player townie? Well, it’s possible that a scummy player is hammering to gain townie cred, so no, it isn’t.
Bottom line, the question you’re asking shouldn’t be “Is this pro-town or anti-town?” Instead, you should ask yourself this pair of questions “Why would a pro-town player do this?” and “Why would a scum player do this?” If you come up with a simpler and/or more convincing answer to one question that the other, then you have a leaning toward that type of motivation. Once you have a sufficient number of these sorts of situations, you should start to see a pattern emerge. In general, there won’t be a huge difference between one motivation and the other, but multiple Days and multiple votes, it should start to stand out when re-evaluated.
The only real catch to this is, you have to consider potential power roles as well. Something may not seem like it has pro-town motivation, but when you also consider that it was possibly said by the doctor or the detective or a mason, it may change the light.
oh, I am so now, more than ever, convinced I voted correctly.
[QUOTE=Hoopy Frood]
I think I’m beginning to understand the rationale. I’ll have to mull it over to truly grasp the nuances of the various outcomes. Just two more questions (and understand, I’m not trying to be annoying or provocative or anything; I really do like to understand the various strategies so I can see how they work with my style of play and to see if I can maybe improve on them, point out their flaws, or use them to possibly pick up on something others have missed):
They experience a similar issue because they’re the only players, besides scum, who actually have special knowledge at the outset of the first Day. And yes, they will also follow the same sort of trend. The key point, of course, is that the masons are smaller and have less information, so it will have less of an impact. It’s usually not an issue though because by the time this sort of information becomes useful during the end-game, the masons are generally already known.
AFAIK, this is how most non-SDMB games start. In fact, I think many of them just random vote the first Day and then go from there. I DO still believe there would be potential for some useful information in this case, but that would require application of my pet PRH project.
[QUOTE=Koldanar]
I think you can look at RoOsh and storyteller for two very opposing viewpoints on townies hiding data and outright lying.
RoOsh, if I remember correctly, LOVES townies lying to ‘protect’ information, or a strategy, etc. On the other hand, I’ve seen story go absolutely nuts about lying. He’s fine with keeping information secret, but justifying that information (In the Batman game, for instance, he didn’t tell anyone he was a doc until day 7 or 8). Establishing trust between us is a good reason for not lying; however sometimes information getting out at the wrong time can definitely hurt the town.
[/quote]
FWIW, I agree with Story on this, with the exception of power roles (who I believe should generally self-protect at greater cost). Liars are all too often scum and if you take away the ‘lynch liars’ philosophy then it becomes quite unreasonably difficult to lynch scum even with very strong tells.
This discussion seems to come up every Day. In short, you should never consider a vote truly random. Scum tells are never random. I would think most scum players would avoid random voting for another scum player; while I could see more experienced scum players doing it, it’s a risky move. Votes tend to stick when you least expect them to.
Townies can random vote at least to prod people but midway into Day 1 they should be discarded. It shouldn’t be permissible for players to vote randomly because it gives scum an out for not justifying their votes. I’ll tell you right now I’ll consider it scummy if people leave random votes on at the end of the day.
Now for some more substantial stuff: who to vote for…
After reading the thread over once, I’d like to get something down, though I do plan to revisit it. My biggest impression is: peekercpa, yeesh, who peed in your cornflakes? While I’ll admit you seem to be sticking your neck out pretty far for scum, you also seem a lot different from the last game - very irritable and a bit bossy, frankly.
Further, because of this, I doubt strongly you’re a power role of any significance, as I bet you’d be playing the cards closer to the vest if you were. As such, you’re a safe opening vote.
vote peekercpa
Also, could we please get who votes for who when we get vote counts? Straight up counts are useful only to a point and it’ll come in particularly handy when we start getting a lot more voting/unvoting to see where votes actually lie.
[QUOTE=fluiddruid]
Also, could we please get who votes for who when we get vote counts? Straight up counts are useful only to a point and it’ll come in particularly handy when we start getting a lot more voting/unvoting to see where votes actually lie.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=peekercpa]
This one is solely from my limited knowlege so I’ll muck it up then someone smarter than me can feel free to correct or fill in. And although I don’t want to get deep down in the calculations BlasterMaster’s PRH statement is very valid at a layperson’s level.
One would think that for a population of fourteen that if everything was totally equal and truly random that each of us would end up with one vote. At least that is the mind set that I come from. However, truly random is going to be more bell shaped with a couple of unfortunates getting multiple votes while some get none. Therefore, take what would be predicted and see where that “bell” gets flattened or spiked. Figure out why and who and you have a scum manipulating the results.
It’s kind of like those poor souls at the casinos tracking red versus black and betting on what is perceived is a trend. You don’t get to stay in a penthouse and have your own private Lear doing that long term. Well you may get to stay in the penthouse depending on how much you lose. 
And if I totally mutilated this discussion/point I am willing to be educated. I got a 26 on my first college stat class test and promptly dropped.
[/QUOTE]
Fairly close, the only part I’d take issue with is the mention of a “bell curve”, as that would imply a normal distribution. Instead, we’d assume that everyone who isn’t scum (or mason) has no additional knowledge, then we can expect that those votes can be modeled with a uniform distribution. We can also expect that those WITH knowledge will attempt to look like they’re voting like the rest, and those attempt to vote from the same uniform distribution.
But, as you correctly say, we have a strong intuitive sense that unformly random means evenly spaced out. In practice, this is not true, there will be clusters. Thus, we can expect that those voting with no additional information will be truly random (from a uniform distribution), and those with special information will be pseudo-random (evenly spaced out).
What does this mean Today? Not a whole lot, because we will only know the identity of whomever we lynch and whichever role claims occur and we believe. However, after several Days, patterns WILL emerge. I encourage you to go back and look at my analysis of MindWanderer in Simpletown for a good example of the type of pattern this will generate.
[QUOTE=cckerberos]
Not really. What you’d expect is that over the long-term each person should get roughly the same number of votes if voting was truly random. Over the short-term you’d expect to get all kind of aberrations. That’s the thing about BM’s Pseudo-Random Strategy that I don’t quite get. I understand his logic concerning the difference between truly random and pseudo-random votes being significant. I mean, it’s why in cryptography only the one-time pad is truly unbreakable. But I’m not convinced that there are enough “random” votes cast by any given player in a given Mafia game to provide a broad enough data set to provide good analysis.
[/QUOTE]
Okay, well, there’s a point in there that I didn’t make explicitly and that might be where you’re getting stuck. You’re right that if Day One went for ever, we would expect about the same number for votes for everyone, and the pattern for the sucm would emerge, but this isn’t the case. Townie votes are only truly uniformly distributed on the first Day. Each Day, the votes of the townies moves somewhat from a uniform distribution to some other distribution determined by the available information. Also, I treat each Day as an independent event, because there is a decided break in the amount of information available between each Day.
However, the point remains valid. On Day One, the scum will attempt to emulate a uniform distribution because it’s obvious. On future Days, they’ll attempt to emulate whatever the new distribution is. What you’ll still notice is that scum will still tend not to cluster, even in a new distribution.
The other point is, this idea won’t catch ALL scum, because some scum, but I’m confident that it can be used successfully on at least some scum in every game.