Mafia V: The Cult of Sekham

The Game Room
1061

[QUOTE=Scuba_Ben]
That’s four people with over 50 posts and 8 with under 20 posts, at least one of whom just subbed in, and one of whom may be subbed out. I’d like to see more activity from those lower 8. So for now I question Autolycus, MonkeyMensch, & Kyrie Eleison, pending a double-check of their statuses.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve never been convinced that post count is very useful as a determining factor in someone’s alignment, but if you want to go down that road, I’ll make two suggestions: First, you do have to take into account substitutions (you’ve tacitly admitted this by acknowledging that you haven’t done so.) Second, pure fluff posts, like those made during the night, probably ought to be eliminated from any analysis. In fact, if you accept that post counts are significant, those who have posted a lot at night might even be seen as suspicious, since it could be argued that these are folks who are deliberately inflating their counts.

Full disclosure: I am a sub-in, and I don’t usually post chit-chat during the night, so both these suggestions ought to be seen as self-interested. And, as I said, I don’t really credit post count as a terribly useful statistic – but if it’s to be used anyway, and it always seems to be, at least take steps to maximize its usefulness.

1062

Oh, crap, and I forgot to note, I’m male, but I acknowledge that by virtue of having chosen a username the form of which is analogous to a given name-surname pair in which the given name correspondent ends with “ie”, it is inevitable that I will occasionally be referenced using feminine personal pronouns, and I will, henceforth, make no objection to any incorrect usage.

1063

I’d never heard of Spivak pronouns before, but I think they’re a wonderful idea. I’ll be using them, because I hate typing “him/her” or “he/she”. They will be useful when referring to unclaimed roles.

And, as most of you know, I am MALE. If you think that the word “cow” refers exclusively to a female bovine animal, you are mistaken: it’s not the only definition

–FCOD

1064

[QUOTE=Malacandra]
[size]Shakespeare. Hamlet, I believe.[/size]
[/QUOTE]

Yup. I’m female, by the way.

I see what you’re saying, but I’m not so sure. ArizonaTeach was in the lead before the bandwagon got rolling, and if he’s scum, the rest of the Cultists would have an excellent reason to throw a few votes Mtgman’s way. And to me, AZTeach’s posts before he subbed out felt kind of off, a lot more touchy and combative than his persona in Mafia 2.

I’m going to throw out a tentative vote for Kat and a FoS at Hal Briston and DiggitCamera, whose votes pushed Mtgman into the lead.

1065

[QUOTE=Scuba_Ben]
The one person I’m most concerned about, though, is the one with 10% of the posts in the thread – as of my earlier count, about 105 posts out of 1035. I think Blaster Master is out to torment us all.
[/QUOTE]

Indeed, it takes a certain level of sadism to enjoy modding a game of this magnitude. :wink:

1066

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Indeed, it takes a certain level of sadism to enjoy modding a game of this magnitude. :wink:
[/QUOTE]

I don’t doubt it. I saw what happened in M3, I can’t imagine GMing a larger game with this many roles.

<out-of-game>I just noticed your location, Blaster Master. Care to stop by over in this thread?</oog>

Back in game: I’m more wary of Fretful Porpentine for saying, essentially, “Welcome to the game Kat, thanks for subbing in! I’m going to vote you out for the conduct of your predecessor.” I’m not up to FOSing her yet, but I may change my mind.

1067

A clarification to my previous post: I simply want to see Kat post enough for her to stand (or drown) on her own merits.

1068

[QUOTE=Fretful Porpentine]
…and a FoS at Hal Briston and DiggitCamera, whose votes pushed Mtgman into the lead.
[/QUOTE]
While I don’t mind the occasional FOS, I’d prefer it if the facts were straight. My vote for Mgtman pushed him into a three-way tie for second place:

ArizonaTeach (4) - NAF1138, Autolycus, Mtgman, Kyrie Eleison
Autolycus (3) - Fretful Porpentine, ArizonaTeach, DiggitCamara
Clockwork Jackal / Kyrie Eleison (3) - MadTheSwine, Zeriel, ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies
Mtgman (3) - Scuba_Ben, storyteller0910, Hal Briston

1069

[QUOTE=Scuba_Ben]
<out-of-game>I just noticed your location, Blaster Master. Care to stop by over in this thread?</oog>
[/QUOTE]

Is it my proximity to DC that piqued your interest related to that thread?

1070

[QUOTE=Hal Briston]
While I don’t mind the occasional FOS, I’d prefer it if the facts were straight. My vote for Mgtman pushed him into a three-way tie for second place:

ArizonaTeach (4) - NAF1138, Autolycus, Mtgman, Kyrie Eleison
Autolycus (3) - Fretful Porpentine, ArizonaTeach, DiggitCamara
Clockwork Jackal / Kyrie Eleison (3) - MadTheSwine, Zeriel, ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies
Mtgman (3) - Scuba_Ben, storyteller0910, Hal Briston
[/QUOTE]

I know; what I’m saying is that your vote and DiggitCamera’s pushed him from second place to first, not that either of them did this individually, since a single vote couldn’t have done that under the circumstances.

Um … why, exactly, shouldn’t I say that? Kat has the same role as her predecessor, after all, and I’m not asking her to defend any of his statements or actions, I’m just saying that the way people voted is consistent with his being scum.

1071

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Is it my proximity to DC that piqued your interest related to that thread?
[/QUOTE]
More than that - I live just around the corner from Fairfax.

Back to the game: Given Hal’s correction on when he voted for Mtgman, has anybody FOS’d DiggitCamera lately, or Zeriel for casting the 5th vote?

Added on preivew: Fretful Porpentine FOS’d DiggitCamera. But here’s where the bandwagon really took form:

DiggitCamara - Unvote - Autolycus - 866
DiggitCamara - Vote - MadTheSwine - 866
DiggitCamara - Unvote - MadTheSwine - 867
DiggitCamara - Vote - Mtgman - 867
Zeriel - Vote - Mtgman - 870
Pleonast - Unvote - Malacandra - 871
Pleonast - Vote - Mtgman - 871
Mhaye - Vote - Mtgman - 874
Hockey Monkey - Vote - Mtgman - 884

Look at the posting range there. Hockey Monkey was late to the party, so I’m inclined to let this simian off the hook for now. I suspect the other four though. (Pleonast, now do I have a good reason to FOS you? heh)

Fretful Porpentine, it’s the quick response that concerns me, something I hopefully will overcome in a few Days. I would like to see a few more posts from Kat toDay, though. (And Nava, fluiddruid, Autolycus, etc.)

1072

[QUOTE=Scuba_Ben]
Back in game: I’m more wary of Fretful Porpentine for saying, essentially, “Welcome to the game Kat, thanks for subbing in! I’m going to vote you out for the conduct of your predecessor.” I’m not up to FOSing her yet, but I may change my mind.
[/QUOTE]

Why do you feel this way? If ArizonaTeach had said, “Hi, I’ve had fun playing as scum, but I think I need to sub out now,” would you be holding off on voting for Kat now? Fretful Porpentine and others, including myself, think this is directly analogous to what happened, if to an obviously lesser degree. That is, she exhibited characteristics that we thought were scummy, and then subbed out to be replaced by Kat – why should she get a pass now?

I know there’s a tendency to give newcomers a break. I’ll even admit that one of the reasons I haven’t cast a vote yet today is that I’m waiting to hear more of what Kat has to say. But I’d never suggest that it’s scummy to hold evidence from a poster’s previous incarnation against them – it’s just difficult sometimes for them to explain it. And, yes, this applies equally to Clockwork Jackal/Kyrie Eleison.

As for, “I’m not up to FOSing her yet, but I may change my mind,” not to pick on you, as you’re certainly not alone in this, but I’m not going to be too sympathetic to folks who cast aspersions on others, and yet say, “but I didn’t FOS you.” If you smudge someone else, you’ve FOS’ed them, even if you don’t use those three letters.

1073

You make some good points, Kyrie. I need to go back and reread what ArizonaTeach said, and decide from there.

Also, thanks for the advice to clearly suspect someone when I do. I’ll work on reducing how many categories of “wary” I’ve been running.

1074

[QUOTE=Fretful Porpentine]
I know; what I’m saying is that your vote and DiggitCamera’s pushed him from second place to first, not that either of them did this individually, since a single vote couldn’t have done that under the circumstances.
[/QUOTE]

:smack: Oh, wait, upon reviewing the record, I didn’t see what you were saying at all. Sorry. FOS Zeriel, who together with DiggitCamera did put him in first place.

1075

About 4 days left in the Day. There’s a total of 4 votes thus far.

** Malacandra ** (2) - Pleonast, fluiddruid
** Kat (repl. ArizonaTeach) ** (1) - Fretful Porpentine
** Pleonast ** (1) - FlyingCowOfDoom

I’ll likely not be around much (if at all) the rest of tonight and tomorrow. I’ll make sure to clear my PMs, just in case.

1076

[QUOTE=Hal Briston]
While I don’t mind the occasional FOS, I’d prefer it if the facts were straight. My vote for Mgtman pushed him into a three-way tie for second place:

ArizonaTeach (4) - NAF1138, Autolycus, Mtgman, Kyrie Eleison
Autolycus (3) - Fretful Porpentine, ArizonaTeach, DiggitCamara
Clockwork Jackal / Kyrie Eleison (3) - MadTheSwine, Zeriel, ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies
Mtgman (3) - Scuba_Ben, storyteller0910, Hal Briston
[/QUOTE]

This is interesting. So when the vote rush for Mtgman came in, AZTeach was in the lead. However, there were two other players with very nearly the same number of votes as **AZTeach - ** those being (obviously) Autolycus and Clockwork Jackal / KE.

Now, there are two possibilities regarding the rush of votes for Mtgman:

(1) It was entirely composed of town players who all genuinely believed that they were voting for scum.

(2) One or more scum helped it along.

If #1 is the case, then this result doesn’t say anything in particular about the orientations of any of the other candidates.

In the case of #2, Fretful has suggested, it is possible that the rush of votes was designed to prevent AzTeach from being lynched (ie, that AzTeach is scum and the other scum, seeing him in the lead, piled on Mtgman or joined in the pile-on to save their fellow Cultist).

But ultimately, the one-vote difference between AzTeach and the other leading candidates at the time-point captured by Hal, above, is essentially meaningless. Any of those four candidates could easily have been the player lynched. So the scum pileon to Mtgman, if in fact it happened at all, could have been for the benefit of AzTeach, Autolycus, OR CJ / KE - so any (or, theoretically, all) of the three could be scum in this model.

This means a few things:

(1) It’s worth looking at all three surviving candidates from yesterday to see if there is additional evidence regarding them.

(2) I am suddenly a bit suspicious of Fretful Porpentine. She votes for AzTeach on the basis of the idea that scum might have piled on Mtgman to save him. Why single out AzTeach from the trio? He was in no more danger than Auto or Kyrie. It sounds superficially reasonable - “oh, AzTeach was in the lead,” but his lead was small and ephemeral; the same reasoning Fretful uses as the exclusive basis for her vote for AzTeach could be just as easily applied to Auto or KE.

Does this make sense?

1077

Hey folks, work is still crazy (I swear it is dead slow 90% of the time, it’s that other 10% that kills me.)

So, I am going to try an Idle Thoughts style mega stream-of-consciousness post.

Here goes, picking up with Hockey Monkey in post #1003 right after my last post. (That is on page 21 near the top).

[QUOTE=Hockey Monkey]
As I see it, here are all the possible scenarios from last night in a nutshell. If anyone else thinks of a possibility I missed, please let me know.

  1. Cult - Kills zuma, Crusader - chooses no kill
  2. Cult - Kills zuma, Crusader - gets blocked
  3. Cult - Kills zuma, Crusader - hits psychopath
  4. Cult - chooses no kill, Crusader - kills zuma
  5. Cult - gets blocked, Crusader - kills zuma
  6. Cult - hits psychopath, Crusader - kills zuma
  7. Cult - kills zuma, Crusader - kills zuma

It seems to me that option 4 is unlikely, as the cult will want to kill as much as they can. It also seems to me that option 7 is unlikely, although nothing in this game I have learned is impossible.
[/QUOTE]

I agree with you about option 4 being unlikely, I wonder how unlikely 7 really is. I know it happened a few times when I was modding. Although I am not certain how fruitful a discussion about who killed zuma will be in the end. Looking back at his posts he didn’t say much, and I am not sure what we can really learn from his death.

[QUOTE=Pleonast (in response to Malacandra)]

To my mind, the fact that you’ve linked yourself to another player looks very suspicious to me. Regardless of what zuma turned out to be.

And now you’re trying to play “heads I win, tails you lose”. More scumminess.
Vote Malacandra
[/QUOTE]

(Color removed)

Interesting. I still think that Mal’s initial statement linking him to zuma was way to obvious to be scummy. But…I don’t know, there is something wrong with the whole situation. Maybe the scum are trying to be so obvious we overlook them.

I need to think about Mal a bit more

[QUOTE=SnakesCatLady]
So Malacandra is trying to hitch his wagon to a dead citizen. Interesting. I am going to go back and read over the last Day’s posts and see what jumps out at me - in between finishing up my beading.
[/QUOTE]

This jumped out at me as just being strange. Mal tried to hitch his wagon to zuma before he died. Between the mountains of fluff posts and this…interesting interpretation of this mornings events, I am looking at you a bit sideways cat lady. No FOS yet, but I am right on the edge.

[QUOTE=Fretful Porpentine]

OK, after reviewing zuma’s posts, I have a hypothesis about why heesh was killed, although unfortunately it doesn’t tell us much about who did the killing. zuma posted a ton of informal vote counts and not much else; in this case, it just indicates that heesh was a citizen who didn’t want to go out on a limb, but this is a decent working strategy for either a Cultist or a power role who’s trying to avoid drawing too much attention – it looks vaguely helpful and commits the poster to nothing. My guess is the Cultists thought heesh was a town-aligned power role, or the Crusader mistook himmer for a Cultist, or both.
[/QUOTE]

This is the theory that makes the most sense to me so far. But again, I am not sure what good it does us.

[QUOTE=Scuba_Ben]
Pleonast jumping on Malacandra right off the bat – albeit for good reasons – doesn’t seem kosher to me. I agree that Malacandra trying to validate eir position over zuma’s dead body, since proven to be a Citizen, is suspicious. But Pleonast hitting on it immediately should draw analysts’ attention. To aid in that, I suspect Pleonast.

On the other hand, that’s so obvious that I doubt they’re both scum. On the third hand, Pleonast has a very good point. So suspect Malacandra too for good measure.

Lesser suspicions go to the top five vote-getters yesterDay and the bottom five posters. And of course the 18 people inbetween. (Yes, that includes me. I’m being paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?)
[/QUOTE]

Huh…you aren’t really saying anything here are ya Ben? You do throw out 2 FOS’s but they hit both sides of the issue. The rest of the post is clearly a joke, but this whole thing is pinging me hard. Seems like it is a nice way too look like you are posting something of value while not really saying anything. I need to go back and look at some of the other things you have said.

[QUOTE=SnakesCatLady]
I don’t understand why you are getting on Pleonast

snip

…seemed to be the kind of “I’m from the government you can trust me” stuff I distrust. Even if he did turn out to be giving the advice to the wrong player, it was the tone of it that bothered me.
[/QUOTE]

Again a strange post from SCL. Not actually internally contradictory, but she manages to cancel out all the content of the first half, with the content of the second. Seeming to post analysis, without actually saying anything.

[QUOTE=Nava]

Just getting caught up, will try to make a coherent post later. For now let me just say that several people seem to be way too fast on the draw - what’s this, the Far West?

[/QUOTE]

I don’t know. If it is possible to be fast on the draw at this point. That may have been the longest Day 1 in SDMB history (all 5 games :stuck_out_tongue: ). But zuma’s death didn’t really give us much new info, so really toDay is just a continuation of yesterDay in many respects.

[QUOTE=Nava]

Some people that I’ve noticed
USCDiver - I see mucho fluff but not much analysis. Please correct me if I’m wrong, ok? I can sympathize with the “mixing people up.”
NAF1138 - cut the coffee, man. The bar has a wide selection of herbals.
sachertorte - well, I think we’ve all noticed him by now :). I’m assuming newbie enthusiasm rather than ill-intent, but that assumption may change.
Nava - your friendly neighborhood bartender. Hi!
Autolycus - ok, so he’s playing an irritating I’m-so-pious character. But he’s also dropping the RP when keeping in char would delay things, which I think is good.
HazelNutCoffee - short and to the point posts. Thanks!
fluiddruid - is posting less than in other threads but has explained it.
MadTheSwine - anybody home?

[/QUOTE]

Is it literally just a list of people you noticed? Why? The observations are nice I guess, if a little…unhelpful. (and the advice to cut down on the coffee is appreicated. That was a very strange day for me) This whole thing strikes me wrong.

I will say that I too am wondering what the hell happened to Mad.
Ok this is getting to be fairly long and they are forcing us to leave out desks for at least 30 minutes after 5 hours. I will be back in a bit with more and finish catching up.

1078

[QUOTE=Fretful Porpentine]
I see what you’re saying, but I’m not so sure. ArizonaTeach was in the lead before the bandwagon got rolling, and if he’s scum, the rest of the Cultists would have an excellent reason to throw a few votes Mtgman’s way.
[/QUOTE]
I think we’d be very fortunate if that were the case, but I doubt it. The Cultists would absolutely want to minimize their involvement with a non-Cultist vote - and they have the benefit of knowing who’s who.

Just seems too neat and simple, and frankly assumes that Cultists are rather dull. If that’s the case we haven’t much to worry about.

1079

[QUOTE=fluiddruid]
I think we’d be very fortunate if that were the case, but I doubt it. The Cultists would absolutely want to minimize their involvement with a non-Cultist vote - and they have the benefit of knowing who’s who.

Just seems too neat and simple, and frankly assumes that Cultists are rather dull. If that’s the case we haven’t much to worry about.
[/QUOTE]

Well… to an extent. You certainly don’t want to fall into the trap of assuming that Cultists are going to vote for town and not for one another; they most assuredly will vote for one another.

On the other hand, it would take a pretty stupid Cult indeed to only vote for one another. First of all, this would make for a pretty easily unraveled web once a Cultist does go home to Mola Ram. Second, by mid-to-late game, anyone who has voted exclusively for Cultists is going to look awfully fishy in my book; the only way to avoid being in on any town lynches is to know in advance who is town and who is not. And third, if you keep voting for your fellow Cultists, you’re going to have to give reasons. And if the reasons are good, townies might pick up on them, and actually lynch that fellow Cultist. Which works as a scum strategy if done once or twice, but can start to become detrimental if you do it more than that.

Which is to say, it is likely that the Cultists were spread all over yesterday’s vote - but it’s not unlikely that at least one, and possibly as many as two, voted for Mtgman.

1080

[QUOTE=fluiddruid]
I think we’d be very fortunate if that were the case, but I doubt it. The Cultists would absolutely want to minimize their involvement with a non-Cultist vote - and they have the benefit of knowing who’s who.

Just seems too neat and simple, and frankly assumes that Cultists are rather dull. If that’s the case we haven’t much to worry about.
[/QUOTE]

I am also going to assume that the Mtgman bandwagon was not of the cultists’ making. It would be rather silly of them to be so obvious; and since it was the first day they would have had a chance to come up with any kind of group strategy, so it seems most likely that they would have tried to lie low and not associate themselves with a townie kill. Someone has already mentioned the scattered votes as being more suspicious - I am inclined to agree. Still haven’t had the time to go back and look through everything again, but I would be interested in making a voting timeline for the last three days of the Day.