I was looking at an alternative where a potential guardian might get lynched. I couldn’t know if his claim was true or not. So yeah, it wouldn’t have worked, but it was a try at something!
With how the discussion went Day One, sharing that insight in such a way that to me looked more like a smudge attempt, was a lot more suspicious than what you shared with us Chronos. No one could be certain of anything, but the tie-breaking plan was pretty brilliant and you were the driving force behind it. I agree no one should be certain of anything, I also stated that later the same day when asked directly by Biotop. The insistence of you being scum because of previous play, was what threw me off. Just sharing the idea with the class, with a reminder to keep it in the back of your head, would have been kosher. But this was a little bit over the top, I felt so at least, and a little bit unnecessary that early in a newbie game.
If a Townie is going to lie, either the lie has to be completely undetectable or completely understandable without further explanation. Counterclaiming the real Doctor is neither undetectable nor understandable.
I think your suspicion on Prof P is legitimate. Replying to say that I always wrote my start-of-Day posts during the night and edited them to reflect new information from the nightkill before posting, so the Professor could easily have done the same thing. And therefore, since I spent hours and hours working on this and I can’t inflict it on the living players, here’s my Day Six opening post! No editing required, as I gained no new information from the nightkill.
Well, I feel like a right prick.:o This must be what it feels like to slink out of the other team’s arena with your face paint and giant foam rubber hand after your team lost the big game. Apologies again to everybody for leading us in the wrong direction.
So now I’m left not knowing what the fuck is going on, but at least now I know that I don’t know, which I guess is some improvement. Yesterday I figured the scum were likely among Plumpudding, Diggit, Precambrian, and Bravo. But based on yesterday’s voting, with Precambrian and Bravo putting their votes on Diggit early, it seems highly unlikely that all three are scum. I spent the night poring over voting patterns, trying to discern some sort of viewpoint from which everything would click into place, and not really finding anything.
One thing I have changed my mind about is that I am not going to let Sario convince me to move sangfroid into my presumed-town pool. Trying to think about what I would have done if I were Sario in the waning moments of Day Four: the choices are to force a tie with a townie and try to win the day for scum, or to force a tie with another wolf and win townie cred for the survivor. The simple, straightforward approach would be to gamble on the townie. However, assuming that all three of the Sario voters were town, Sario would have known there was a 3/8 chance that one of them was the First Mason, so his chances of winning a tiebreak were in fact significantly worse than 50%. That might tip the balance in favor of the bussing option; and of course we don’t know that Sario would have chosen the simple strategy in any case. Maybe he was bored with the game and looking for a way out that would to some degree help his team. So, sangfroid moves back into the unknown pool.
I considered how much we should really trust the law firm of Biotop, Cygnus, and Pepperwinkle; could it be that Sario’s death was an elaborate bussing scheme? I think it is highly unlikely that those three hatched a plot in their lair to bus Sario for town credit, mainly because of the timing of their votes, which all came relatively late in the Day. They couldn’t have expected that their three votes alone would be enough to hang him, so if they were planning to bus him they presumably would have started the campaign earlier in the Day. It is still possible that one of them (most likely Cygnus, who voted last) might be gutsy and opportunistic scum, but I think that likely all three and almost certainly at least two of them are town.
I still think that at least one of Precambrian, Bravo, and Diggit are probably scum, and it is plausible that both Bravo and Precambrian are scum; but if Diggit is scum, they are more likely town, and vice versa. Sangfroid I don’t know about. Nonsuch and Chitwood I am leaning town on, but keeping an open mind. Furthermore, if Diggit is scum, presumably the two other scum are to be found among the other Plumpudding voters: Me, Nonsuch, Prof P, Cygnus, Biotop, and Chitwood. That looks like a pretty townie group to me, so currently I am leaning toward the hypothesis that Diggit is town and the smart vote for today will be either Bravo or the Mollusc.
So those are my only real thoughts for this morning; the remainder of the post is a bunch of questionable hypotheses and random data points I’ve gathered that I put out in hopes someone else can make more sense of them than I can.
Going all the way back to the original “clusterfuck” post, when I posited that at least two of Sario/Dante/Diggit were scum – at that point, I still thought it was a strong possibility that TexCat was scum, and therefore that scum were overrepresented on the septimus wagon. Now, I would rephrase that to say that I think scum were probably overrepresented among those whose votes were crucial in moving JSexton from first to third place; the third through fifth voters on both the septimus and TexCat wagons. That group is Plum, septimus, Diggit, Sario, Dante, and the Professor. For scum to be overrepresented, at least two of them would have to be scum, and since I’m pretty sure that Prof P is town, that would leave Diggit as the other scum. A point against Diggit. We should also look at the first two voters on those wagons, who may have been scum who got lucky with their early Day votes and wound up being able to help their team without attracting attention by vote switching; those still alive are Bravo and sangfroid. Little pinkies of suspicion on them.
A thought experiment I came up with early on: on Day One, we divided into three approximately equal groups of 8 septimus, 5 TexCat, and 6 “other” voters. Now knowing that both septimus and TexCat were town, and therefore that no scum had any compelling reason to be in any particular one of those groups, and knowing further that scum tend to prefer not to clump together if they don’t have to, it seems likely that there were at least one scum in each of the following groups:
Septimus 8 (Cygnus, Diggit, Dante, Biotop, Prof P, TexCat, Bravo, Sario)
TexCat 5 (Chronos, Thing Fish, Plum, septimus, sangfroid)
Others 6 (Bayard, Mahaloth, JSexton, Chitwood, Nonsuch, precam)
The septimus and Other groups have already had wolves identified; but since I know I’m town, assuming that hypothesis is true, sangfroid must be scum. Not going to cast a vote based on this, but I will add it to the pile of thoughts swirling through my head.
Of the eleven players who self-voted on Day One, 6 are now confirmed town, 3 are presumed town by virtue of voting for Sario, one is me and the other is Diggit. A possible small point in favor of Diggit, although his vote post was rather weird in that he seemed to attack the self-voting idea just before voting for himself.
Here is a list of whom all the living players have voted for at some point during the game, with, just for fun, “batting averages” based on those of their votees who are now confirmed (not counting JSexton votes or self-votes):
Diggit: Dante G, septimus, Precambrian, Plum (.000)
Chitwood: Dante G, TexCat, septimus, Diggit, Plum (.000)
Nonsuch: Dante G, TexCat, Diggit, Plum (.000)
Precambrian: sangfroid, Thing Fish, Diggit (n/a)
Bravo: septimus, Dante G, Plum, Diggit (.000)
Biotop: Dante G, septimus, TexCat, sangfroid, Sario, Diggit, Plum (.200)
Pepperwinkle: JSexton, TexCat, septimus, Dante G, Sario, sangfroid, Plum (.333)
Cygnus42: JSexton, septimus, Dante G, Sario, sangfroid, Plum (.400)
Sangfroid: TexCat, Diggit (.000)
Thing Fish: Chronos, Sario, TexCat, Dante G, Plum (.200, though I really don’t want to take too much credit for my early Day One lurker vote on Sario)
Two things, possibly neither significant, pop out at me here: Pepperwinkle and Cygnus have really been singing from the same hymnal all game! Can’t see any possible scumminess there, but it is pretty weird. precambrian is the only living player who hasn’t voted for anyone who is now dead. If you squint you could maybe see that as a method of lurking, but two of his three candidates have seemed in serious danger of lynching at some point, so I doubt there’s anything to that. Sangfroid has also been remarkably focused in his voting, but then, he’s sangfroid, so who knows what to make of that?
Here, conversely, is a list of who has voted FOR all the living players:
Precambrian: Diggit, Plum, Nonsuch
Diggit: Chitwood, Precambrian, Bravo, Biotop, Plum, sangfroid
Sangfroid: Dante, Precambrian, TexCat, Biotop, Plum, Sario, Prof P, Cygnus
Thing Fish: Sario, Precambrian
Cygnus: Sario
Nonsuch, Bravo, Prof P, and Biotop have all somehow managed to skate through five days without attracting a single vote (not counting that Dante briefly voted for Prof P because he had him confused with Plumpudding).
I don’t see much here; players who I think or know are town are slightly overrepresented among sangfroid voters, but only slightly and the sample size is small.
That’s all I have, except that if you have actually read to the end of this post, you are probably town.
I think the danger is that if you make yourself post when you really don’t have time just for the sake of posting, you run the risk of saying stupid shit and getting lynched.
Probably a good thing that you didn’t quote that particular saying in the game!
OK, now that Night-kill, I don’t understand. Yeah, Thing Fish was a pretty active player, and that makes him a decent target… but they had a short-list for Mason, the last remaining Town power, and Thing Fish isn’t on it.
Can’t figure out why they would kill me. I thought sure it would be one of the Sario voters, probably Biotop, as he is active and thought by most to be near-confirmed Town. This makes me wonder if something was fishy about the Sario lynch; I would hope that if those players don’t start getting nightkilled soon, Town will start asking why. But maybe that is just what the wolves want them to be asking…
Come to think of it: Biotop probably realized the above, too, and just decided against mentioning it just in case some Wolf was foolish enough to counter-claim.
And with both of the other two potential First Masons having now accepted Biotop’s claim, I think that cat is officially out of the bag. Whew! Now I can stop playing dumb! Except that all of my genuine opinions about the game are now hopelessly out of date, since I haven’t been playing close attention since Day 1.
I will say, though, that Biotop has been playing extremely well, for a first-timer. Way back when, one of the other newbies actually used as a reason for a vote that he was following the veterans, one of which “veterans” was Biotop.
And the new and shiny aspect of the game gets me again. Looking back, I probably would have composed a skeleton post during the Night when I was new to the game. Now, not so much, or at all. No point in wasting the time if I wind up dead, and I know that there is plenty of time during the day to write many, many posts. But when new to the game, I can see a greater earnestness to play the game being likely.
Prof P is driving me crazy. Most everything he posts is screaming scum to me. His lack of paranoia regarding biotop is just icing on the cake. Prof P seems to know that biotop is Town. Not even a teeny tiny bit of paranoia.
If it weren’t for that earlier spoiler, I’d want Prof P even deader than before.
Yeah. Maybe there should be a preparatory thread, maybe in MPSIMS, where posters activity could be measured. Post there for two or three weeks beforehand if you wanna get in!
Yeah, I realised! At certain points in the game, I considered posting a link to a youtube video, asking you to watch it and imagine all my posts as spoken in norwenglish.
Anyway, this is really interesting. A lot of what you guys have written have made a lot of sense. It’s a bit difficult adjusting to standing on the outside, but very interesting. I’m reading the thread through a bit more thorough than last time, as I wanted to skim to the end.
I don’t get it either. I’d certainly have killed him last Night, if I were Scum: Of the three possible Masons, he was by far the most active, and was also generally recognized as likely Town even before he claimed. My best guess is that the active remainder of the Scum team is inexperienced, and thought they could pull off some sort of bluff to build suspicion on someone.
So, for my career, I have now played ten Days over three games as Town (not counting Days in which there was a Cop-identified scum to vote for), and have not yet succeeded in ending even one day with my vote on scum! I love the game, but clearly there’s something I’m just not getting. I try to vote for lurkers and people who vote without reasons or with clearly flawed reasons, but it doesn’t seem that scum are actually any more likely to do these things than town. I was SO sure that I was right about Plumpudding, but nooo… Maybe next game I should try to go more with my gut. I imagine if I ever get to play deep into a game as scum it would give me some insight into how scum think. Any suggestions (other than “find another hobby”)?
Hey, my first game, every single Day my #2 suspect was a Scum. It got to the point where the Scum were convinced I had a secret information-gaining power that I was using to figure them out, and they eventually killed me for it. And yet, I never once actually voted for any of them, because I kept on finding Townies that I suspected even more.
I love the game, but clearly there’s something I’m just not getting. I try to vote for lurkers and people who vote without reasons or with clearly flawed reasons, but it doesn’t seem that scum are actually any more likely to do these things than town. I was SO sure that I was right about Plumpudding, but nooo… Maybe next game I should try to go more with my gut. I imagine if I ever get to play deep into a game as scum it would give me some insight into how scum think. Any suggestions (other than “find another hobby”)?