I really have to put LOST on my queue after this. Everything appears to be so interconnected.
But, alas, I remain illiterate here.
Looking at the Lostpedia, I see that there are actually 7 factions. 
I’ve read that somehow, Sawyer gets caught up with DHARMA , and so Sawyer shows up twice.
That being said:
**
Who are the flashforward characters? Do we have them in this game?
Who are the flashback characters? Do we have them in this game?
Who or what is the Kahana?
**
Sorry I’ve been absent (apparently I’m not the only one). We hosted a cookout yesterday and I’ve got to travel to some Father’s Day festivities today. But I will be back later tonight, and I will devote a good chunk of time to the game at that point. I just skimmed quickly over the weekend posts so far, and I’m not immediately thrilled by the idea of lynching Imaginary Fiend due to the voting of others. I’ll look at the arguments more carefully, but if that’s all there is to it, I think it’s a bad idea. More later tonight…
I’ve only just started reading the thread. Player-wise, I have nothing yet.
I weakly oppose a name-claim, for the simple reason that it would provide me with no meaningful information.
Assuming the game setup of power and scum roles is reasonable, I doubt character names would automatically be associated with game roles. Once a Scum or two has been killed, I’m open to a re-evaluation by people who know Lost. I’m also open to a Scum volunteering to be lynched to test the name-role concept.
Now I’ll start reading all 643 posts.
It took me an hour and a half to read the whole thread. Here’s my sense of people:
I am suspicious of ShadowFacts and storyteller for voting for Ichini Sanshigo, moving him from 2nd place to 1st place in posts 485 and 490.
Meeko’s style annoys me. Based on my untrained Scumdar, I tentatively accept his Town claim. But this is me trying to second-guess myself.
Jimmy Chitwood and pedescribe sniping a lot gets my attention. In my last game, I brought up a similar situation between other people, someone else called that a general smudging and intended to make me their #1 target on Day 2, then I got killed on Night 1. So I’m not smudging them, just asking them to include a few more people to get some more useful data.
[del]BillMC[/del] USCDiver drew fire Yesterday for reasons previously raised. I’m not going to pursue that yet, due to USCDiver taking over.
My schedule is very iffy through mid-Wednesday. So for now:
Vote ShadowFacts for putting Ichini into a tie for 1st place for the lynch.
I also noted that paulwhoisaghost had negligible substance on Day 1. So as far as I’m concerned, I think I’m starting fresh from right here.
Two questions:
1.) Are you voting for shadow because you think that s/he was trying to protect IF? If so, why not vote IF?
2.) Why Shadow over one of the others?
As I said in my vote for Oredigger, I find the last minute vote switching to be suspicious independent of IF’s status, but i’m not sure which of that suspect pool is most suspicious. All of them were pinging me somewhat
I’m not sure yet of Imaginary Fiend, and have no idea whether protecting IF was pro- or anti-Town.
I’m going to have to double check everybody who voted for Ichini and for IF. Shadow pings me more than storyteller for now; being the final vote just seems “too obvious” for Scum. I’ll squeeze in more cross-checking this afternoon.
But for the most part, I just wanted to make sure I had some vote on record.
Could you tell me what you mean by sniping, exactly? Commenting only on certain subjects and ignoring others; is that the general idea?
Quoth Telcontar:
I don’t like where this argument leads. If someone is “safe” to vote for, that means that, to the best of Town’s knowledge, that person is likely Scum. Avoiding the safe vote means voting for someone other than who you think is scummiest. Information isn’t the only thing we get from a lynch; we also sometimes get a dead scum, which is even better. And even when we don’t get a dead scum, the information we get is only good insofar as we assume that Town was trying to get a dead scum.
I’m not so sure about that, either… Putting myself in scummy shoes, I’m having a hard time seeing a Scum motivation for last-minute shifting from one Townie to another. On Day 1, assuming Fiend is Town, they knew they had a Townie lynch no matter what they did. Were I a scum in such a situation, I wouldn’t want to touch either side of that debate. I’d probably take the opportunity to vote for someone else, either to lay the foundation for a future case against some other Townie, or to gain credibility by having voted for a Scum. In the case where both IF and IS were Town, what would Scum gain by switching? Yes, they’d make it slightly more likely that IF would get lynched Day 2, but they should have already been considering that fairly likely anyway, since the same cases that people were making Day 1 would still apply on Day 2. The cost is that by making the last-minute switch, they’re giving themselves more exposure, something which Scum are always loathe to do.
By the way, Scuba Ben, I wanted to say how much I appreciate that you’re taking an active role in the game immediately upon subbing in, with analysis and even a vote. Last game, we had some people subbing in and then hardly posting more than the folks they were replacing, because they couldn’t keep up.
As I said, I’m not opposed to lynching IF, I just want to make sure we don’t do it without considering other options (when i cast my vote 3 of 3 had voted for IF). If you think he’s scummiest, then by all means vote for him.
Which is also true. Gives you a rather short suspect list though.
Ichini(6): Chronos, Zeriel, AllWalker, Oredigger, ShadowFacts, Storyteller
Imaginary Fiend(5): Tom Scud, Telcontar, Nanook, Pedescribe, CardinalFang
Tom Scud(1): Imaginary Fiend
BillMC(1): Meeko
Meeko(1): BillMC
Pedescribe(1): Jimmy Chitwood
Storyteller(1): Ichini
Meeko, seriously, no one can answer these questions. Don’t waste your time thinking about them. You can’t ‘figure out’ this game by reading a bunch of plot summaries of the TV show. Just play the game here.
Ok, got that off my chest. I had a little theory that didn’t pan out. My guess is that the scum were communicating with Mahaloth outside the main game thread regarding protecting them from mass name claim during Day 1. I went back and looked over the posts from the few hours prior to Mahaloth officially posting about giving the Scum character names; I was looking for any players who might have begun pushing for Name Claim during that time. The hypothesis was that Scum and Mahaloth may have come to some agreement regarding the Names and a Scum or two may have tried to get on the Name Claim bandwagon before the Announcement post to garner some Townie Cred. Unfortunately only a couple of things in those few hours jumped out at me and none are enough to make me suspicious.
In post #337 Allwalker asks for everyone to confirm their name and alignment match up. Is this an attempt to get fellow scum on the Name/Alignment bandwagon before the Announcement?
In #340, Tom Scud says “So it’s entirely possible he left a big hole there for Town to exploit.”, but we know he’s Town.
And finally Telcontor in #342 and pedescribe in #352 were the last to announce their name and alignment matched prior to Mahaloth’s announcement.
WIFOM :
But, don’t ALL mafia games have a scum board? Why would they risk this tell here?
OK, I see I have garnered a vote, but I am going to skip that for the time being to review the situation with Imaginary Fiend, as I said I would. I realize that arguing against voting for **Fiend **is likely to make it look even more like I’m scum who voted to save **Fiend **yesterDay, but oh well. Gotta call it like I see it.
And the way I see it is that I think voting for **Fiend **simply due to the way the votes fell yesterday is a mistake. Why? First, because it assumes ham-handed scum made an obvious, late push to save Fiend. Second, it’s simplistic, putting all the emphasis on the timing of the vote, and doesn’t look at the motivations/cases for the votes. Finally, because in general I think it’s a better idea to lynch people for what they say and do, not for what others say and do. (Which is not to say that looking for patterns in the voting is bad - it’s definitely not and I do it myself - but that should never be the sole basis for a vote, IMO).
**Chronos **said this to get the ball rolling:
(bolding mine)
I’ve read this reasoning 10x, and it makes no sense to me. The first part makes sense ("it doesn’t make sense for Scum to switch if IF is Town). But the second part (“but it might still make sense for Townies to switch if IF is Scum”). ??? Townies have no idea if Fiend is scum, so how could that possibly motivate them to switch or have any bearing on it? Can you explain this more clearly?
Finally, mostly on-topic, in review the posts/votes on Fiend, I re-read this:
FTR, this is a lazy vote - a bandwagon-hopping vote, if you will - and I don’t like it.
That’s a good point. But I think of it more as trying to seem more Townie at the same time getting his posts out there before Mahaloth makes his announcement.
Now I will address the vote I got, which is here in it’s entirety:
So, this is what I was talking about in my post above. This is an easy, lazy vote based *entirely *on timing, with an implicit assumption that **Fiend **is scum (and that I thus voted to save him).
A more thorough look at the end of the Day would show that I had been voting for **Telcontar **for a while, but nobody seemed interested in that case. So on the final day, I looked at the 3 top vote getters and evaluated those cases. I thought that case against **Fiend **was fairly weak (I had explained why earlier) and the “case” against **Tom Scud **was just OMGUS nonsense. So **Ichini **looked the most suspicious of the three - and certainly at least as suspicious as **telcontar **- so I laid out a detailed explanation of why I was voting for him and voted.
If you look beyond easy accusations based on timing, there is very little motivation for a scummy ShadowFacts to make that late vote:
[ul]
[li]If **Fiend **is scum, then I’ve just put a spotlight on both of us for end-of-Day vote swinging (cf. most of toDay’s discussion and this vote that I’m responding to). All of that just to *tie *the votes with an hour left and another player (storyteller) explicitly saying he was around and planning to vote to break the tie.[/li][li]If **Fiend **is town, scummy **ShadowFacts **just needed to sit back and let the chips fall where they may. There was no reason to jump in and a huge reason not to.[/li][/ul]
Sorry, it just doesn’t hold up.
I agree with your defense against my vote, ShadowFacts – my suspicion would have to rest on Fiend being scum. Or at least IF being someone the Scum want to protect, which is too hard to determine on Day 1. And both you and storyteller make yourselves too prominent for doing so.
Now that I think about it some more, it’s not likely you would stick your neck out that far that early if you were Scum. storyteller, on the other hand, has played enough Mafia that such prominence is best analyzed over two glasses of red zinfandel.
Back to check on Telcontar and the other four who voted for Ichini.
Quoth ShadowFacts
The fact that Townies have no idea is precisely why it makes sense. Of course, no Townie would knowingly vote to save Scum, but a Townie who didn’t know (as, presumably, is the case for all of us) might. And in fact the list of people involved in the last-minute voting almost certainly includes one or more Townies, just based on the numbers. My net point there is that, even if we knew the voting yesterDay included Scum voting to save a Scum, that would definitely imply that Fiend was Scum, but it would not definitely imply anything about all the late voters.
As my evenings are full for the rest of the Day and my day job actually wants me to work, I’ll post my latest analysis and simply hope I can check in each of the next three days. It sucks when RL interferes with proper game playing, don’t it?
In #401, Zeriel says that Ichini and Telcontar seem to be better prospects for Scum than the at-that-time vote leaders Meeko and pedescribe, “simply because they’ve done something tangible.” Doing nothing tangible is anti-Town, but not automatically pro-Scum, as there can be a number of good and bad reasons for doing nothing tangible. So for what it’s worth, Zeriel is my current best-guess. (And I openly admit that my best guesses historically turn out to be plain Town.)
Unvote ShadowFacts
Vote Zeriel
Telconcar cast the oh-so-red-herring 3rd vote on IF, “in part to force a reply to Tom’s case.” Tom has since been night-killed and turned up plain Town. So I would appreciate veteran guidance on assessing IF in the light of this information. As well as assessing Telcontar, of course. And assessing the people who help me assess – in my first game, I trusted Idle Thoughts for his detailed analysis, and he turned out to be one of the most clever Cultists.
On page 10, Jimmy Chitwood and storyteller0910 made some errors in vote counting. Was this a simple mistake or a fatal slip? I smell more herring.
And in reply to Jimmy:
It seems to me that Jimmy and pedescribe spent much of the end of Yesterday arguing with each other. I would appreciate it if you two also put other people under the spotlight; the more people who face pressure, the better the likelihood that someone will burst. (See: Me going silent in my first game and coming up Town; zuma freaking out in the same game and coming up Avatar; and someone else false-confessing as Scum in my second game a few months ago. Oh well, bursting doesn’t always help.)
I’m having trouble parsing this. Zeriel is suspicious of Ichini and Telcontar because they had ‘done something tangible’, but then the rest of your vote is based on the fact that it’s essentially a null tell for a player to do ‘nothing tangible’. Where’s the connection?
You’re right, the connection’s weak. It’s the best case I’ve got on anybody at the moment, and I’m aware that that’s not saying much. But it’s all I’ve got for now.