Okay, so I’ve been looking through bufftabby’s posts (more on that later, I’m not done yet) and stumbled across an exchange between Biotop and bufftabby in D5. Biotop had just done an in-depth analysis in which he found her mostly townie, but also found her case on me a little insincere.
In D5#328, Biotop wonders why bufftabby completely dropped her earlier case against me. This was the response:
This is a very reasonable answer. If your case doesn’t gain traction, file it away and keep watching the player so that you can add to it. Here’s the problem, though - when I pushed bufftabby for anything past D2, she has absolutely nothing. In fact, we get this.
Bufftabby, you said during D5 that you’d been keeping an eye on me. Presumably you continued to keep an eye on me after that, as well. But here’s the thing - every time you’ve brought the case up again has been at somebody else’s urging.
In D5, Biotop asked you about it.
Yesterday, Guiri asked you about it.
You think I’m Mafia, **but the only reason you’re back on this case is because the freakin’ godfather made a point of reminding you that you’re suspicious of me. ** How on earth does that track?
So either you’re scum engineering an insincere case against me or you’re town and you’ve been manipulated by at least one known mafioso into dredging up a case that was weak enough that you’d stopped tracking me as a suspect.
Oh, and in D6 it was Lightfoot who brought it back up again though you were not mentioned. In apparent contradiction to your earlier post about having no new ground to cover, you definitely covered it all again.
Alright. I know that I’ve been spamming the thread. This should be it for the time being.
(ed. note: After typing this up I realize that it’s super rambly. You’ve been warned.)
When I started talking about the mass claim yesterDay, I went back to the list of players and I was reminded of this:
30. LightFoot - [Not Mafia (Enderw24)]
Lightfoot is not Mafia. I made a mental note that it might be good to see if this information is useful now that we have several dead wolves, and then I made another mental note that Lightfoot has a shitload of posts and it would be a pain in the ass to go through them all.
Moving on.
When Guiri came up dead, I floated the possibility that the wolves had bounced off of him at some point and had decided to just leave him be while they searched for other targets. I said that it might be good to look back through Guiri’s interactions to see if anybody had tried to engineer a lynch against him.
This post really rubbed me the wrong way (and still does). I mentioned that it sounded like Lightfoot was doing a little JAQuing. If you want more than that, I don’t have it. It just pinged.
It didn’t matter much, though, because it wasn’t long after that bufftabby came back with her stuff from earlier in the game and that’s been distracting me. I have not gone back to look over Guiri yet. Sorry.
So anyway, I was feeling like Lightfoot and bufftabby have both been up my butt about trivial stuff. Bufftabby has been focusing on the night-talk stuff and Lightfoot has been on that, but has also decided that I’m scummy for a) pushing the claim, b) for saying that town did not need LUTHA to take part in the claim if they wanted to throw in with scum, and c) for wanting to help scum kill one another.
I figured that, while it would be a pain to go back through all of Lightfoot’s posts, it would be much more manageable to go back through bufftabby’s. I decided that I would specifically look at their interactions with one another.
Now this isn’t an exact science - I may have missed something. I basically skimmed the threads (protip for you ctrl+F enthusiasts: bufftabby is the only one here with a join date of Jan 2008) and tried to look at each of bufftabby’s posts to see what topic or which player she was addressing.
First, bufftabby has been posting pretty reliably with the exception of the last couple Days, so thanks for that.
Anyway, here’s what I got after looking through the threads.
Alright, nu?
Well, the first thing is that they’re both pushing this “Johnny Bravo wasn’t worried about day kills” line. This was what made me start thinking about them as a pair.
So when I went to look back at the interactions between them, I figured I’d find something. Lightfoot is an extremely prolific poster and bufftabby has been a relatively consistent poster. They’ve made similar cases to one another on at least one player (me). But what did I get?
Almost nothing. A single little poke in D1. Multiple days where with no results at all. A mild defense of Lightfoot in D5. An inconsequential conversation in D7.
Other things:
I think Guiri was poking at bufftabby because he was suspicious of her. Mafia are hunting wolves, after all.
Lightfoot came out hard against the mass claim. As suspicious as she says I am for being pro-claim, I am equally suspicious of her for being vehemently against it. Vehement enough to twist my opinion that it would be great if scum killed each other to repeatedly characterize the sentiment as me wanting to help them win. She also tried to short-circuit the mass claim with the idea that we shouldn’t do it unless LUTHA claimed first - putting the decision into their hands rather than town.
Bufftabby ignored the claim discussion altogether. Conclusions:
Bufftabby and Lightfoot have managed to avoid talking to one another even when making similar cases. I find the lack of interaction between the two of them to be a little too coincidental. Scum often make the mistake of avoiding one another to a fault, and Lightfoot talks to everyone.
Note: Lightfoot may have addressed bufftabby directly at some points, but I have not given her posts the same treatment. So should take the “no direct interaction” days as bufftabby -> Lightfoot. If Lightfoot ever addressed bufftabby on those days, she was ignored.
If Lightfoot is scum, she must be a wolf. If bufftabby is colluding with Lightfoot, then she is also a wolf.
Bufftabby and Lightfoot have **both **managed to find ways to accuse me not merely of being scum, but specifically of being Mafia. They did this very early. If they’re wolves, it makes natural sense that they’d accuse a player of being Mafia - all the better if it turns out to be true.
Denouement:
vote bufftabby
I think they’re both wolves, but I for some reason feel like bufftabby flipping wolf will implicate Lightfoot more strongly than the other way around. Lightfoot is also definitely not Mafia, but bufftabby could be either. So if I’m 100% off base and this ends up being a shot in the dark, there’s a 6 in 11 chance of her being scum instead of the 3 in 11 chance that Lightfoot would have. But I don’t think that will matter.
I really didn’t (and still sort of don’t) believe that Koldanar is LUTHA, both because of the weird (and apparently useless to LUTHA power) and because I thought the way he used said power wasn’t consistent with being LUTHA.
That said, I think you’re right that without a counterclaim, I have to believe he’s at least telling the truth about being LUTHA.
I’m also surprised Lightfoot was against the mass claim (or at least she wanted LUTHA to claim first for reasons I still don’t entirely follow)
In fairness you can’t really say that Lightfoot not talking to buftabby is a scumtell because Lightfoot talks to everyone and then immediately afterwards say that you didn’t look at whether Lightfoot addressed buftabby?
I feel like you made a big long post about how Lightfoot is likely a wolf (a view I’m not wholly unsympathetic to) and then somehow used it to vote buftabby?
I didn’t see Lightfoot addressing bufftabby, but I wanted to make clear that I hadn’t mined her posts in the same way I mined bufftabby’s. That’s just full disclosure. If somebody would like to do the work to go through all of her posts as well, that would be cool. If not, then they’ll have to wait to see if I have time tomorrow.
I feel like I spent quite a bit of time talking about bufftabby - both in that big long post and in the two above it. I’d be happy to clarify or expand on anything you like.
However, I would be more than happy to switch my vote to Lightfoot. I think they’re wolves together.
I’m happy with a bufftabby lynch. The most telling thing, supporting that she is as wolf, was on Day 4, when she was the last vote on DiggitCamara:
That was actually the 15th vote. To get maximum information, the vote would have been better on Boozy.
A few minutes later, Johnny Bravo invites her to switch:
But this switch does not happen.
A bit later, Johnny Bravo switches from diggit to Boozy to get the double lynch.
Bufftabby stated that she was not voting for her main suspect but was instead voting to maximise information. But this did not extend to voting for wolf Boozy.
So here’s some stuff that happened in the middle of bufftabby railing at me about that whole night-talking thing, so I hadn’t put much thought into it until now.
On Day 6, bufftabby expresses suspicion that Hal Briston (Mafia) is scum. Turns out she was right! She says that she is expecting him to be modkilled, but that doesn’t happen. So… on Night 6, Hal Briston is killed. If bufftabby is a wolf, it tracks that they would have gone ahead and used their kill to take out Hal Briston, since he wasn’t taken out by the mods.
But wait, there’s more. Here’s the full paragraph.
I had been going pretty (okay, very) hard at Inner Stickler, so this piqued my interest.
Does anybody want to guess whether bufftabby ever bothered to go about clarifying what she’d found so agreeable about him? Nope. Her vote remained on Hal Briston and she was content to let Inner Stickler get lynched.
This, again, is in the middle of the night-talking argument. As I pointed out a few posts up, bufftabby had claimed the previous Day to be keeping an eye on me.
Now, friends, if I’m a Person of Interest to you, and I’m going after a player who you’ve caught no whiff of scum from and have found yourself “agreeing with… at multiple points throughout this game,” wouldn’t you take the opportunity to at least look into it? If not right then, then certainly after the guy I’ve been going after flips town, right?
This seems pretty solid at this stage in the game. And coming from a Mason, I’m willing to go along with it. JB is hitting some good points too, even if he seems a bit overly paranoid about Lutha still.
Bufftabby
I’ll put my vote here for now because I’m getting ready to start my weekend and I don’t want to accidentally miss the vote again. But like Raventhief, I want to hear what Mhaye has to say.
I’ve been very scattered and work-overwhelmed for the majority of this game, and I fully recognize I’m doing the minimum to not get modkilled most of the time. BioTop apparently thinks this is suspicious, but as I’ve already adequately explained it in my mind (that I’ve not got a lot of skull sweat to contribute), I’m mostly ignoring his case, which boils down to me making a half-assed post in the middle of a busy week that he’s decided is all-fired important for some reason.
In looking at the pattern of votes yesterday, we had what seems to me to be an interesting pattern:
After people started voting for Cygnus, the voting was mostly on him–notable exceptions were his self-preservation vote on Bravo, and Klutz voting for me for light participation. HOWEVER, there was a kinda weird late run on Koldanar by TexCat, Hawkeye, and Sinjin that dropped Bravo out of second place but wasn’t quite enough to save Cygnus. I’m not sure I feel like that’s enough to actually smudge anyone yet, but I am not sure I understand it fully. Just an odd pattern.
While this is normally true, I think the evidence is good enough that this defense of buff really looks bad on you if she flips scum.
I note **MHaye **still in theory has something he wants to share with the class but hasn’t got to yet.
I feel like a bufftabby vote is lazy, but I also feel like Klutz’s case is basically as airtight as we are likely to get at this stage of the game.
vote bufftabby
What I really need to do is find time to organize my thoughts on everyone still alive and pick one or two to deep dive on. I’d be provisionally willing to take an assignment to do that as well, if anyone has any suggestions.