Mafia: The Mob is Recruiting [Game Finished]

The Game Room
841

[QUOTE=Hal Briston]
Day…simple as that.Huh…besides that personal bit being a completely subjective load of crap, I wonder if anyone is thinking your analysis might be a hyper-townie scum move? I mean, it’s not offering anything helpful in the least, but it serves up a very nice illusion of being a helpful townie. (And as I go further, I see NAF finds fault here as well)…(and further still, that Millit bought into it…sorry, fellow former table-carver, he’s wrong! :))Huh…didn’t know I was becoming that transparent with my style. Well, obviously this post is a good start (or should I break it up into six or seven separate posts for those who are blindly obsessed with hard post count numbers?)
[/QUOTE]

This post is a good start Hal, and just so I am perfectly clear, it isn’t for fluffyness alone that you are getting a vote from me at the moment. It is that combined with my feeling that you are one of the players that was very likely recruited just because you are who you are.

Also subjective as hell, but I wanted to make sure my motives were clear.

Doing as fast a re read as I can right now and then I am going to post my list of people I think have not been recruited as of the start of the Day.

842

Menocchio (3) - dotchan, Drain Bead, chrisk
Drain Bead [sub for Idle Thoughts] (2) - Pleonast, Menocchio
Hal Briston (2) - Millit the Frail, NAF1138
NAF1138 (1) - Blaster Master
Hawkeyeop (0) - (Menocchio)
Pleonast (0) - (Darth Sensitive)
hotflungwok (0) - (Blaster Master)

Yet to cast a vote on Day 3:
Hockey Monkey
bufftabby
Diomedes
MHaye
Santo Rugger
Koldanar
Hawkeyeop
HazelNutCoffee
Hotflungwok
OneCentStamp
Freudian Slit
sinjin
Hal Briston

No current vote:
Darth Sensitive

843

The end of the Day is coming very soon and we have some players who have not made the requisite 3 posts. If you do not post 3 times, you will be modkilled during the Night, so please post.

844

[QUOTE=NAF1138]
Ok, quickly because I have 2 minutes and this post will only take that long to write.
NAF1138
Hockey Monkey
Drainbead
MHaye
Santo Rugger
Pleonast
Blaster Master
HazelNutCoffee
Freudian Slit
Hal Briston
This is the list of people I think it is most likely the mafia will try to recruit. They are all either vets, or town leader types, or have played scum succesfully in the past. Everyone on this list should be killed before endgame, myself included. This is less true if we catch the boss at some point, more true the longer we go without catching the boss. But I think letting any of these players survive until endgame would be a mistake.
[/QUOTE]

Here’s the problem with that. First off, you’ve just given the scum a big list of who they should recruit–just take everyone who ISN’T on NAF’s list, because they won’t be suspected as much! Second, you’re saying all this without any knowledge of who on this list might happen to be a useful town power role, and if someone who is a useful power role can manage to stay hidden, we shouldn’t off them just because they might have been recruited based solely on their past experiences. We should base our lynches on something a little less meta-gamey than “not a n00b,” which is what this boils down to in my eyes.

845

I have no idea whom to vote to lynch.

846

Apologies guys, busy weekend and today (Birthday and all :rolleyes: ), so I may not get fully caught up before the Day ends tomorrow morning…

[QUOTE=Drain Bead]
And as for the Vigilante? Under NO circumstances should a Vig claim unless facing certain death. This is because one of the Vig’s best traits is the fact that a recruitment attempt will give them the name of a random scum! Obviously a claimed Vig will never be recruited because of this, so it’s in our best interest for the Vig to remain silent.

Because of this, I’m going to Vote Menocchio. His suggestion that the Vig should claim is sheer madness. It’s two levels of scummy–one because it would be a huge mistake for the Town if that suggestion came to be, and two because it shows a player who isn’t fully paying attention to the rules, which is a very unTownie thing to do.
[/QUOTE]

I cannot agree with this reasoning. This is easily a mistake a townie could have made because I (and apparently at least one other) had forgotten about this extra ability of the Vigilante. This is easily a mistake that a townie could make simply because those who are less familiar with the powers of a specific role probably just don’t have it. So, basically, what we learn from his post is that he’s probably not the Vigilante, but that still leaves us with no reason to believe he’s necessarily scum based on that.

Further, he corrected his comment when called out on it, and I’m sure the Vig himself would be fully aware of that extra power and simply ignore the suggestion. Either way, this vote is essentially nothing more than an OMGUS vote.

847

While I’m reading along…what players are under our 3 Post limit right now?

Other note…I’m glad to see that people have focused a little on Drain Bead…I had some suspicions but silly me forgot to note what post made me look twice. Blah…with out a quote I can’t even say FOS but glad to see others caught this.

Hal thanks for clearing up my newb thoughts…I looked at NAF’s list and thought hrm, ok, that seems pro town…I don’t see a Mafia angle. Maybe I need to think that one over more. Ugh, too much to do not enough time to do it. Back to work!

848

[QUOTE=Drain Bead]
Here’s the problem with that. First off, you’ve just given the scum a big list of who they should recruit–just take everyone who ISN’T on NAF’s list, because they won’t be suspected as much! Second, you’re saying all this without any knowledge of who on this list might happen to be a useful town power role, and if someone who is a useful power role can manage to stay hidden, we shouldn’t off them just because they might have been recruited based solely on their past experiences. We should base our lynches on something a little less meta-gamey than “not a n00b,” which is what this boils down to in my eyes.
[/QUOTE]

NAF, while I like the general gist of your list post, I’m gonna have to agree with Drain here on both of her points.

849

[Quote=Hal Briston]
Well, obviously this post is a good start (or should I break it up into six or seven separate posts for those who are blindly obsessed with hard post count numbers?)
[/quote]

I think that’s an oversimplification. Like I said, you’ve been fluffy. It’s not a simple case of post counts. It’s content, or lack therof. I think you’re obfuscating. Vote Hal Briston.

850

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Either way, this vote is essentially nothing more than an OMGUS vote.
[/QUOTE]

I thought an OMGUS vote was voting for someone because they voted for you? Last I checked, Menocchio unvoted someone to vote for me after I voted for him. You can disagree with my logic if you want–reasonable minds can, and have. But it was certainly logic with a pro-town basis–at the very least, someone should have pointed out the potential drawbacks of that plan.

For the record, I’d be very interested in hearing Pleonast’s thoughts about my response to his vote for me, rather than what Menocchio thought of it. Smudging is in the eye of the smudgee, if that makes any sense.

851

[QUOTE=Drain Bead]
Here’s the problem with that. First off, you’ve just given the scum a big list of who they should recruit–just take everyone who ISN’T on NAF’s list, because they won’t be suspected as much! Second, you’re saying all this without any knowledge of who on this list might happen to be a useful town power role, and if someone who is a useful power role can manage to stay hidden, we shouldn’t off them just because they might have been recruited based solely on their past experiences. We should base our lynches on something a little less meta-gamey than “not a n00b,” which is what this boils down to in my eyes.
[/QUOTE]

I posted it at the request of BlaM we had a whole long discussion about should I/should I not post it. In the end he convinced me that I should. (For the record I still think he is right, I am not trying to lay that decision on you BlaM, I am just pointing out where the conversation occured.)

You had your chance to say something about it then, where were you?

Here’s the thing, the vig will do what the vig wants to do. If I was the Vig, that is what I would do. But only on the Nights when I didn’t have a better idea.

Let the scum WIFOM all they what they want with what to do with that list.

Also, while I agree that we should base our lynches on more than “not a n00b”, you can’t deny that certain people are higher on the list of probably recruited than others.

If you were the boss Night 1 and you had this player list to choose from, who would you be more likely to recruit:

hotflungwok who has never played or BlaM one of the smarter and more skillful players in our group?

Darth Sensitive who has never played or Santo Rugger, who has been scum more than any other player here?

Really? You want to actually throw that information out the window?

Now I am not saying lynch these people out of hand, but we have to lynch someone. Who do you propose is the best candidate?

My feeling is that hotflungwok and BlaM have both not been recruited as of toDay.

Santo, I am less sure of, mostly because he has been sort of absent. Same with Darth Sensitive, but if push came to shove between the two of them I would lynch Santo first, all other things being equal.

All I am able to come up with at the moment is this probably not recruited yet, and unknown. I am guessing, based on the votes so far, that most other people feel the same way. All I am doing is puzzling out this game out loud on the boards so everyone knows where I stand. Too few people are doing that right now.

852

MHaye, thanks. I was just having a crybaby moment. I posted in another thread recently with a similar situation, in which I did some legwork to come up with a good and thorough response to an objective question, and the following response was along the line of “oh, thanks, notbufftabby and alsonotbufftabby”. Stuff like that just frustrates the hell outta me. I’m such a wiener. And I’m also really wondering where Santo Rugger is. He was plenty active the past two Days…

853

Yeah, this is a tough one. I think I’m going to have to go back and reread some stuff. Nothing’s jumping out at me.

854

[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
I have no idea whom to vote to lynch.
[/QUOTE]

If you’re not sure, that’s fine, but simply stating it doesn’t help anyone and just makes it look like you’re posting fluff. When you’re not sure, try looking at the vote leaders, the reasons people are voting for them, and then decide if you agree or disagree with their reasoning. If you agree, explain why, and vote. If you disagree, explain why, and look else where.

Worse comes to worse, if you can’t agree with any of the reasoning put forth, look at someone else, particularly one that has twinged your suspicion, and go back and see if you can’t pick things out that do, even if you can’t really explain it, quote the things that rub you the wrong way, maybe someone else can either confirm or explain why you shouldn’t be suspicious of those things.

Either way, you can’t be serious that you’re not suspicious of anyone. Surely, you don’t know because you’re teetering between a few different people, right? Maybe you can say who they are and explain your feelings. If you’re a townie, even if you’re vanilla, the best thing you can do is give your thoughts and reactions, and they’ll be confirmed if/when you are confirmed/die.

855

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Either way, you can’t be serious that you’re not suspicious of anyone. Surely, you don’t know because you’re teetering between a few different people, right? Maybe you can say who they are and explain your feelings. If you’re a townie, even if you’re vanilla, the best thing you can do is give your thoughts and reactions, and they’ll be confirmed if/when you are confirmed/die.
[/QUOTE]

For the record, this is where I am. I’m really suspicious of the non-posters, and the mainly fluffy posters, but I can’t decide who to settle on.

856

[QUOTE=NAF1138]
I posted it at the request of BlaM we had a whole long discussion about should I/should I not post it. In the end he convinced me that I should. (For the record I still think he is right, I am not trying to lay that decision on you BlaM, I am just pointing out where the conversation occured.)

You had your chance to say something about it then, where were you?
[/quote]

Waiting to see what you did. BlaM’s reasoning for wanting you to give your list was to see if he agreed with it or not, and whether or not he should vote for you based upon it. At the time, I didn’t think you should make your list, but I didn’t want to come out and say that, because I wanted to see your motivations. A pro-town response might have been something like “I’ll keep that to myself in order to not give the scum ideas, at least for now. Perhaps later my list will be more pertinent, but now it’s just too early for it.”

And if the vig takes out a power role because they followed that list when they had no better idea, rather than just…not killing? The Vig will do what the Vig wants to do, that’s for sure. I just hope the Vig doesn’t want to kill people just because they happen to be folks that NAF thinks should be recruited at some point, whether or not they already have been.

Night One, I’d choose an experienced player, sure. Every following Night, I’d be trying to sniff out useful power roles, regardless of who they are and how experienced they are. But that’s just me.

Um…the person I’m voting for? Who, incidentally, didn’t make your list, not that it means anything one way or the other.

Not that I agree or disagree with you, but what gives you this feeling? I have an idea, but I’m curious as to what you think.

But are all things equal? Has Santo said or done something that makes you think he’s scummy, or are you just playing some sort of elaborate guessing game? Sure, I know in the end this is all an elaborate guessing game, but usually we have something other than that to go on, kwim? Are you saying that you’ve read through this whole day and not found a single person to be suspicious? Hell, I’m finding almost everyone suspicious at this point.

I’m having trouble parsing that first sentence there, and I see no problem with puzzling the game out loud–that tends to be my playstyle as well. And I totally agree with you that more people need to be doing this–I agree with your general idea that the more people post analysis, the more we’ll be able to see later if they’ve been recruited.

857

Another thing, NAF, that I just thought of while re-reading my post…you mention how you think that hotflungwok and BlaM haven’t been recruited yet, while Santo Rugger and Darth Sensitive might have been. I know I already asked you how you got that feeling…but maybe a better question to ask is how do you know that none of them were the Boss and therefore the ones doing the recruiting?

858

[QUOTE=Drain Bead]
Obviously, any recruitable power role should not roleclaim unless their lives depend upon it. I’d like to see BlaM crunch the numbers about when it might be worth it for Masons to claim, provided he gives us Cliff Notes for the English majors. Priests are an easy place for scum to hide, and I think that provided our Detective is alive, it might be a good idea for the Detective to investigate any claimed Priest that Night, and the Beat Cops to look elsewhere.
[/QUOTE]

Oops… I missed another point in the same post. FTR, I will NOT be crunching numbers with regard to when the Masons should or should not claim. Sure, I can model it, but when it’s worth it is HIGHLY situational. How much it’s worth it depends entirely on how much each is suspected, and how much the people they suspect are suspected. I can model this based on a random distribution, but chances are it will drastically over-estimate or under-estimate when they should do it because, just how randomness works, it’s impossible to determine if they’ll fall under lots of suspicion or little suspicion, but either is much more likely than “average” suspicion.

I’d expect that it would be an extraordinarily complex model that would ultimately be useless to anyone other than the masons, and it wouldn’t really tell them anything they don’t already know. That is, it’s generally best for them to wait as long as possible to claim because they become extraordinarily useful in end-game, but they have to balance that with ensuring they can confirm eachother. IOW, if there’s more than two, they shouldn’t mass claim; if there’s 2, they should consider it unless they strongly feel they’re unlikely to be targetted. Would you expect. Even worse, since they’re partially recruitable, an outed mason could potentially end up being MORE recruitable in the next few Days because we’re more likely to lynch recruitable roles than non-recruitable ones… refer to the math I did sometime on Friday, I think.

859

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Oops… I missed another point in the same post. FTR, I will NOT be crunching numbers with regard to when the Masons should or should not claim. Sure, I can model it, but when it’s worth it is HIGHLY situational. How much it’s worth it depends entirely on how much each is suspected, and how much the people they suspect are suspected. I can model this based on a random distribution, but chances are it will drastically over-estimate or under-estimate when they should do it because, just how randomness works, it’s impossible to determine if they’ll fall under lots of suspicion or little suspicion, but either is much more likely than “average” suspicion.

I’d expect that it would be an extraordinarily complex model that would ultimately be useless to anyone other than the masons, and it wouldn’t really tell them anything they don’t already know. That is, it’s generally best for them to wait as long as possible to claim because they become extraordinarily useful in end-game, but they have to balance that with ensuring they can confirm eachother. IOW, if there’s more than two, they shouldn’t mass claim; if there’s 2, they should consider it unless they strongly feel they’re unlikely to be targetted. Would you expect. Even worse, since they’re partially recruitable, an outed mason could potentially end up being MORE recruitable in the next few Days because we’re more likely to lynch recruitable roles than non-recruitable ones… refer to the math I did sometime on Friday, I think.
[/QUOTE]

Thanks. I wasn’t sure if it would even be possible or worthwhile for you to do something like that, and your explanation of why it’s not didn’t whoosh over my head at Mach 5 like the maths usually do, so that’s good. :wink:

860

[QUOTE=NAF1138]
If you were the boss Night 1 and you had this player list to choose from, who would you be more likely to recruit:

hotflungwok who has never played or BlaM one of the smarter and more skillful players in our group?

Darth Sensitive who has never played or Santo Rugger, who has been scum more than any other player here?
[/QUOTE]

Here’s my issue with this perspective, which I think I’ve somewhat laid out before. Surely, a more experienced or skilled player would likely be more valuable to scum. But surely they know that we know this, and so they’ll also realize that we may be more likely to realize they’re scum (since they have certain patterns we may recognize) or simply because we’re aware that they’re more valuable to scum. Similarly, if we’re aware of that, we may rightfully be more suspicious of those individuals, but the cost is greater if we’re incorrect because a more experienced player is probably more of an asset to the town than a less experienced player.

So in essence, you end up with a greater risk / greater reward scenario versus a lesser risk / lesser reward scenario which, ultimately, will tend to balance out to be about equal. OTOH, this information may be useful later on when we’ve caught the boss and can make judgments about his play style and possibly infer his recruiting strategy, then we may be able to decide which strategy he favors.

Still, if you’ll recall my pseudo-random thesis from previous games (I’ll re-explain upon request), I seriously doubt the Boss will pick a single strategy for his recruitment patterns. Obviously, if we establish that he’s following an experienced player priority strategy, we can effectively eliminate half of the town population as suspects. I’d tend to expect the Boss will try to pick people from various discernable perspectives to maintain a diversity. That is, he’ll want to pick some who fit in various obvious posting patterns (some high, some medium, some low). Similarly, he’ll want to pick a variation on experience (some with lots, some with a little, and some with none). Bottom line, intuitively speaking, it’s clear that recruiting 3 experienced players or 3 inexperienced players would be sub-optimal, particularly in the vein of conversation that’s been occuring that he would necessarily follow a particular pattern.