That plus 2 posts by Klutz where he didn’t address the issue caused AZ to unvote. It just struck me as very strange.
I think what AZ is different than what Diggit did. I think that Diggits vote was akin to my FOS of Mad. Just a start of the game joke. It shouldn’t be ignored, but I don’t know how daming it is.
This will be my last post for a while because I am about to head into a meeting for a few hours, then lunch.
Might be a good thing though. It was nice to be able to sit back and read the thread in a single shot yesterday. It gives you a different perspective on the events.
I’m going to try to respond to this post, but I’m going to have to do it point by point. Let’ see how it goes:
Agreed.
Sure. But you have yet to present any indication that: (1) you are in possession of such an epistemology; or (2) that one is even remotely possible to develop in a game of this kind. How can we gain information with a better confidence level than that obtained through analysis of posts? I am willing to admit that just because I can’t see how it can be accomplished doesn’t mean it’s not possible to accomplish, but so far you haven’t given us anything that I see as having practical utility. Give me an example, just one, of how we’re going to obtain definitive information (beyond that supplied by deaths and/or power roles), and I’ll consider your point.
True.
Actually, in a situation like yours, the proper play for the Cultists wouldn’t be to buck the system. The proper play would be to play within the system. Look, again, the only thing the Cult has to do to win the game is be sure that just one of their players survives to the end. Just one. Again, I am trying to envision a system which, if every player followed it, would guarantee victory for the town. I can’t see one. Given that, if you establish some sort of hard system to which everyone agrees, the Cultists will follow loyally and pleasantly, even if a few of them die - even if all but one of them die.
You claim this, but how so? Near as I can tell, the discussion is this: if there is on kill, the Psychopath may have been awakened, the Crusader may have lost his/her nerve, one of the blocking roles may have blocked a kill by either the Crusader or the Cultists, the Crusader or the Cultists may have chosen not to kill, or the Cult may have recruited (or failed to recruit) a player. If there are two kills (tonight), both the Crusader and Cult successfully targeted and killed someone; if one of the kills happens to be a Cultist, we may assume that kill was effected by the Crusader. There will not be three kills toNight.
How does any of the above help narrow the avenues of investigation for tomorrow?
On the other hand, if we start speculating on what is most likely, or on what any particular outcome means, we are helping the Cultists, for two reasons: first, and most obviously, we’re giving them a chance to control our reaction by their choice of whether to kill and whom to kill. This is why I hate the whole “why wouldn’t the scum have killed so-and-so by now?” line of reasoning.
But second, and much more insidiously, knowing how the town as a whole is thinking gives each individual Cultist a chance to assimilate more effectively into the town. They can pick and choose when to agree and disagree with the conventional wisdom, they can plan their moves several Days ahead knowing in advance how the town will choose to interpret various outcomes. I know I used this to very good effect in M2.
Can’t see how.
Here’s the thing. The Beat Cop / Apprentice is dreadfully misunderstood. The role can be played well, if the town uses the results appropriately. I don’t understand what sort of “concrete methods” you are imagining for determining how reliable the Apprentice’s readings are. The difference between 50% reliable and 60% reliable is utterly irrelevant for our purposes, given the small sample size with which we’ll be working.
The answer to this seems to me to be intuitive, and difficult to put into words, but I’ll try: the scum have a very large number of strategies they could employ, and we have no way of knowing which one they will use. If we suggest strategies that they co-opt, so what? So before, we didn’t know which six (or five or seven or however many Cultists there are) out of 30 possible approaches the scum would use. Now we’ve given them another option. So now we don’t know which six out of 31 possible approaches they will use? So what?
On the other hand, discussing power role strategy entails giving the scum information they did not have before about how we will act. We want to be as mysterious to them as they are to us.
You mistake me. We’ll probably lynch an innocent today; I am under no illusions about that. But the way you want to play it, if we do lynch an innocent, tomorrow we’ll be right back where we started. If we spend the day discussing the lynch, tomorrow, when the identity of the lynch-ee is known, the storyline we establish today will be the evidence we use tomorrow.
I could not possible disagree more. Voting patterns and kill patterns are trivially easy to manipulate. It is much easier to make your voting pattern look “townie” then to make it through an entire game without screwing up.
I’d love to get some real data, too. I just don’t see how anything you’re suggesting will produce any.
No, the dust-up itself is giving me a vibe, but I’m not sure who it’s about. In fact, sachertorte and USCDiver are starting to give me a similar concern.
And I have a similar issue as you, ArizonaTeach; when I feel something intensely I incite strong antipathy and misunderstanding in everybody. That’s the other part of why I haven’t even placed suspicion, never mind a vote, in this matter yet.
I don’t understand your reasoning. Why would a dust-up be a bad thing? Don’t we want to confront each other? Or is USCDiver and my tiff ‘off’ to you because he has made it personal?
Partly because the confrontation is the only thing I have to go on at the moment (though I’m trying to learn useful ways to read people), partly because the two confrontations are becoming personal which confuses my already low ability to get a good read, and partly because I’m very susceptible to the same trap (which, unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve discussed on the boards until now).
As best as I understand good gameplay, we do want to confront each other. The problem is how to read the confrontations: Who’s drawing attention to whom, and why? And how valid is that estimate of “why”? My sense from following M3 was that many confrontations in that game turned out to be town vs. town, but I only found that out after the fact.
I’m going to have to agree with this. This isn’t a game of superior technology and algorithms, it’s a game of reading people and analyzing. While it would be neat (from an intellectual standpoint) to be passing encrypted messages, it defeats the whole point of the game, IMO.
If you can manage to pass a code in plain text ;), as is common practice for scum, and avoid getting caught, more power to you. But, regardless of whether there’s a policy against it on the SDMB, I think it would break the game, so I would not allow it.
Ok, got my computer back, and now it’s catch-up time.
Kyrie Eleison questioned Scuba_Ben about Ben’s contention that “if the masons / Non-believers think they have a shot at claiming their own win, they should try for it.”:
Having developed a reputation for being an expert on the topic, I’ll say this: Yes, I decided to try for the Mason-only win in M3. I probably could’ve locked up a town win earlier had I opted for that, but I looked at it this way – A “win” has a value of x. I’d rather share x with two people than fifteen people.
In short, I was being a very greedy bastard. Won’t try that one again, but if the non-believers look at that way, they may just decide to go for it.
And now that I get further down in Kyrie’s message, I find he lays out a vote for me. Well, while it doesn’t fall into the “calling non-scummy behavior scummy” that always sticks in my craw, it still should be knocked down. With regard to my posting of “So in a nutshell, the Apprentice needs to find an unobvious way to say “Yo, Oracle! Over here!” asap…”
The two things Kyrie fails to take into account: 1) The key word here is “unobvious”. If the Oracle is smart, and the Apprentice is clever, it can be pulled off without the cultists figuring it out. Hopefully, that has already happened.
And 2), of course, is that my post was just a one-sentence summation of what many players (too many, for all this Oracle talk, IMHO) had already said. I had hoped that it would be looked at as “Yeah, that’s pretty much all we can hope for from those two, so maybe we should all just STFU about it instead of creating a massive clusterfuck of useless posts that we’ll have to wade through”. Looks like I was wrong on that count…
Like I said, this isn’t the “calling non-scummy behavior scummy” that I always look at as a terrific scum tell. Truth be told, when I made that post I wondered if anyone would blindly latch on to it. Well, suffice it to say, it wasn’t a scum tell, since I’m not scum. It was simply a call to just drop the subject. Hopefully he’s already thought this out a little better and unvoted – I only have about another 100-150 messages to go through to find out…eesh!
As I go on further, I see the opposite is true. We’ve gone from one person with a bad idea to two. Sigh…
Oh, fuck it…the “improvements” that work made to my laptop are majorly pissing me off, so what I should probably look at as a non-issue is instead grating me as severely weak voting. I’ll come back later when I’m at a more even keel for this…My apologies if any of the above winds up coming off as jerkish.
I’m doing a re-read of the thread from the start of the game, and going to post my thoughts just as I come to them. Kind of stream of consciousness. These are posts that struck me as odd, and registered a twinge on the cult-o-mometer.
Clockwork Jackal post 217 When I initially read this post, it bothered me because we were only 20 posts into the game, and I found it odd that she would explicitly state that no one really seemed scummy yet (except for one little thing).
Pleonast post 221 Brings up the subject of dunking/not dunking for discussion. Even though he says he’s for dunking someone today, I found it a little scummy to mention it. If we don’t dunk someone today, it will only benefit scum.
sachertorte post 241 “so why waste discussion on something that isn’t helpful today and distracts from our real and more immediate goal.” Then he goes on to provide page after page of distraction from our real and immediate goal of finding Cultists.
NAF1138 post 276 On re-read, this strikes me as wrong, wrong, wrong. NAF, you seriously didn’t see anything wrong with the strategy of dividing up the players for the investigations? I can’t see someone with your experience not thinking it through.
sachertorte post 354 FOS on **SnakesCatLady ** for making a fluffy post, but the way I see it, sachertorte has been filling up the thread just saying the same thing over and over. Paraphrasing: Here’s my idea, do what you like, if you think it’s a bad idea I’ll drop it. Repeat ad nauseum.
Pleonast post 392 I dunno, this post just twinged my cult-o-mometer for some reason. Seems that squishing discussion is a bad thing. I don’t agree with the discussion, and quite frankly my eyes are glazing over and I am starting to skip over the Oracle/Apprentice posts altogether, but appointing yourself Captain of Discussion is scummy in my eyes.
Malacandra post 546 This is the scummiest post I have read as of yet. You are voting for someone based on the logic that if they turn up scum, YOU will look better? Fact: Scum vote for scum. If **Zuma ** turns up scum, then I am coming straight back here to you Mal.
NAF1138 post 585 Huh? Wha? You wanna bop **Mal ** on the nose for that scum tell, but vote for **ArizonaTeach ** for making one? I don’t even see what you are seeing there as far as scum tell goes.
That’s all I have right now. One thing I know for sure is the people who look scummy this early in the game are usually townies. **Sachertorte ** especially reminds me of **capybara ** in the Pirates game. I’m going to go with **storyteller’s ** very sage advice of voting who you think is most scummy and right now that is Pleonast.
First of all, I never said you insulted anyone or called anyone stupid. I said ‘vague disparagements’ and you even did the same thing in the above post calling my argument flawed when you never even addressed the point of my posts. I understand your math. I’m not talking numbers with you, I’m talking about perceived risk. My perception of the risks of your plan outweight my perception of the benefits.
And you still haven’t made a post that indicates you’re playing the game. Frankly this is getting out of hand and I’d like to call a truce. I concede that you are better at making mathematical analysis of gameplay if you’ll concede that I’m entitled to disagree with your analysis of risk vs benefit.
On Preview, I see that our conversation is raising eyebrows. My beef is the tone of your posts towards me, which is probably more related to personality than heretic-ness. I still would like to see you turn those superior analytical abilities toward finding scum instead of organizing a strategy.
Okey-dokey.
From my point of view, I don’t feel that I confronted or attacked USCDiver; nor do I feel I’m the one to make ‘it’ personal. If you disagree or if there’s something you want me to address, just ask.
Okay. I think I get it. To me, numbers tell the whole tale – if two things are equal, they are equal (at least in my mind). Just please understand, that if you say you understand the math, but then post conflicting math in response, I’m going to assume you misunderstood me (even if you didn’t). But I will accept that your utility function is different than mine so that for you two times fifteen does not equal one times thirty. (and I don’t say that to be glib or insulting or condescending. Sometimes (from a practical point of view, not mathematical) 1x100 does not equal 100x1.)
You seem to agree with my conclusions (dunking someone, not discussing Town roles), and only disagree with how I said it. I guess I’m playing too aggressively.
From my point of view, I felt that the idea was helpful today. In other words, coordination needs to happen today to be most effective.
Should I have given up earlier? Maybe. But I feel strongly that the idea is a good one (and so elegant too) so I kept with it. I still do think it’s a good idea, but this is a democracy and majority rules. After that, I felt I needed to explain misconceptions about it. If someone says, “oh that’s a bad idea because of X.” To me, I think, if I can explain how X isn’t a problem, then that person will see that coordination is a good idea. For example, the original idea was seriously flawed, but I found a way to address those flaws. This is how I solve problems.
I was wrong to think I could change people’s minds, but I didn’t know that at the time.
It’s not that I didn’t notice the “unobvious” bit – it’s that I don’t think unobvious is strong enough. Any such communication needs to be completely undetectable, not merely unobvious, even with knowledge regarding the identity of the Oracle, or else the Apprentice will be at risk should the Oracle perish. Similarly, it can’t contain any sort of clue as to the identify of the Oracle, or he’ll be in danger if the Apprentice is taken out. I don’t see any way of communicating that message undetectably over a public channel, short of some sort of cryptographic protocol.
Regarding #2, you’re right, I didn’t read it as a summation, but, rather, as a suggestion for the Apprentice, and a dangerous one, at that.
I have received some queries about the Alchemist Role.
If the Alchemist block succeeds, it will stop Night kills (from the Psychopath and Crusader), Blessings (from the Priest and Disciple), Rituals (from the Oracle and Apprentice), and potentially the Cultist sacrifice (at a rate of the inverse of the number of cultistists entering the night). It cannot block the Avatar’s revenge kill (since it is a Day kill), and it cannot prevent the Psychopath’s activation (if he is blocked, and then targetted for a Night kill).
If the Oracle or Apprentice is blocked, the reading will come back as a No Reading (indistinguishable from the Apprentice after the death of the Oracle). IOW, if the Oracle is alive, they can infer that the Alchemist blocked them.
The Alchemist is NOT required to use his ability on any given night (he’ll be just as happy trying to figure out how to make gold ), but he will need to let me know if he’s opting out of using it prior to the Night ending.
Just popping in to say that I’m getting increasingly suspicious of Autolycus. He’s posted a bunch of times today (6 since his last post in this thread) and yet he still has nothing to say. How about some thoughts, Auto? We don’t need them to be encased in any accent…
My thoughts on Malacandra and the zuma vote:
I realize now that I’ve got quite a ways to go to be able to objectively read posts. I think I let my warm feelings towards Malacandra color my reading of Mal’s vote for zuma:
(color removed)
Instead of just parroting what others have said before I’ll try and state something new. On one side the statement looks selfish and scummy. On the other we have the opinion that such a statement is ‘so scummy that no scum would even try it so it must just be a silly slip.’
I think Mafia games on SDMB are an evolving set of logics and playstyles. In early games, I can see now (only with hindsight) that such statements were invariably made by innocent townie who didn’t know better. But as more games are played: 1) we should know better and 2) scum could employ such a statement to look like a careless townie. We must be measured in how we employ lessons learned from past games and be mindful that scum has learned those lessons too.
Several people have expressed suspicion of me. Several others have dismissed, or at least set aside their suspicions of me because ‘scum wouldn’t be so bold to draw so much attention to themselves.’ Well, maybe, but maybe not. I would like those who are suspicious of me to consider that I could be scum making a ruckus just to buck the trend from previous games. Furthermore, I’d like to employ that same scrutiny to everyone. I would much rather allay people’s suspicions by addressing those suspicions directly and demonstrating that all my chatter has been motivated by ideas that I truly believe to be pro-town, and an unhealthy character flaw that drives me to need to be ‘right.’ This is much better for me and for you than just taking on faith that ‘scum wouldn’t be so stupid.’
I still don’t see Malacandra’s post as scummy, but that’s my read on it. If you think it’s scummy then pursue it, and don’t dismiss it just because scum wouldn’t be so bold.
If I save my notes and observations until I’m caught up it’ll be an uber-post that’ll gloss everyone’s eyes over. So i’m just gonna make a few remarks as I read knowing full well that most of them will be well-addressed in the next few pages. Please don’t jump on these pro tem observations too hard.
#316.
I brought up this stratagem in M2 and still think it’s a good idea early on. The priest themself (ecch, non-gender) is the only person they currently know of worth saving. Later on, of course, the protection must be spread around, but for now Father: Save thyself.
I thought I would have enough time to check this thread, but what with moving and all, I don’t. Sorry to my fellow players, but I have to bow out of this one.
), but he will need to let me know if he’s opting out of using it prior to the Night ending.