I think this is the right current vote count, folks. We have a tie for the lead again, unless I’ve missed something.
Chronos (4): Red Skeezix 974, Drain Bead 984, Oredigger, Guiri
Tom Scud (4): Mahaloth 931, Zeriel 954, Chronos 971, ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies 986
Jimmy Chitwood (1): TexCat 941
TexCat (2): Tom Scud 969, Meeko 982
Oredigger(1) - special ed
Sorry, guys. I’m exhausted.
This is a pure self-defense vote: I know I’m town, and I don’t know that Chronos is. And I just got home after getting on the wrong frigging train, and I need to get supper put together, so I’m just going to make it:
unvote TexCat
vote Chronos.
So far it’s been a quiet Day, if not without a bit of interest.
On the two deaths.
I personally am working on the assumption that Storyteller was our Cop. Basically, given his expressed opinion of the damage lying Townies do to their own side, and taking into account his recent softening in the direction of “there may be the occasional good reason for a townie to lie,” I do not believe that Storyteller would lie about his rolename if he were vanilla Town. I can see him lying if he got a rolename that points straight to his in-game role, particularly if that game role is the number 1 target for the Infiltrators in the early game.
The two deaths last Night don’t reduce our available mislynches, as far as I can tell (as far as I know Sach has said that there are no third party players, but I couldn’t find the post.) Assuming for illustrative purposes that there are five Infiltrators, that means the Infiltrators need to force five more Town deaths; at this point that means three mislynches and two Nightkills. If there had been only one death last Night, they would need to force six deaths, which means three Nightkills in addition to the three lynches. Varying the number of Infiltrators only changes the number of Day/Night cycles needed for the Infiltrators to win.
On to more recent events; I did not like Oredigger’s post [post=12312779]990[/post]. It made my teeth itch. He seems to be saying that he’ll vote for Chronos despite finding nothing.
He explains in post [post=12313396]993[/post] that he meant he couldn’t find anything in the first two Days to support the pings he’d felt over the issues of Today. I think I want to review Chronos’s posts Today (and Yesterday) to judge that for myself before deciding if this is a bad vote, but I have to say first impressions are not favourable.
I’ll have to leave the Chronos review until tomorrow, when I’ll have a few hours to play in. (I had to spend most of today writing a job application instead, since the competition closes tomorrow.)
I guess I should get my vote in now rather than take a chance on being unavailable at crunch time.
I’m still not sure about Oredigger. It was a horrible play and he deserves to be heavily scrutinized, but I still can’t answer my own question, which is whether having made that decision makes him any more likely to be scum. I really think I made a mistake going after Wanderers and in retrospect I see a lot of wisdom in Chronos and storyteller having said that his were the responses of a frustrated any-kind-of-player. Obviously that doesn’t actually serve to inform me much about this case but I was hoping for some help on that point.
The only other meaningful places to put my vote would be Chronos or Scud, at this point. My thoughts: Chronos gives me vaguely suspicious vibes pretty regularly in every game, just because of the way I read him, I guess. He’s been no more or less like that in this game. storyteller was also suspicious and provided a few actual reasons, but not very compelling ones to my eye. All in all, I’m not into a Chronos lynch.
Tom Scud is kind of the opposite direction. I’ve generally felt pretty confident he was town in other games, but I’ve been lukewarm this time around (which is how I come to be making a post like this). I am one of those who thinks that the slip matters – I really think that it’s pretty inexplicable that a player’s mind would wander toward a phrase like “overnight thread” if he had no reason to think of this game in terms of multiple threads. So I’m a slip believer, generally speaking. I was still lukewarm, but upon rereading the previous Day’s interactions, I noticed this post, which I want to bring up for a couple of reasons:
First, he had already at this point voted Freudian. Yet as he says, he posted, reinventing the wheel, to bolster the case against Wanderers and lend his approval to that one as well. They were both strong lynch candidates. They were both town.
Now, if Tom is town, and he’s looking at the way the lynch is developing and his vote is already on the books, maybe he thinks it’s a good idea to give his thoughts on the candidate he isn’t voting for. Maybe that’s just a service he’s performing; after all, it’s nice to hear what others say and there’s a real benefit to getting a little bit of encouragement. Maybe he thinks everyone could benefit from a retelling of the thought process that has led others, but not him, to vote for Wanderers. That’s certainly possible, if unusual.
But the vote at this point is tied. If Tom isn’t town, and he’s looking at a tie between two townies with several votes still to come, the benefit is much clearer. If Tom can keep two pots bubbling at once, the chances are that much better than no suspicion gets cast on any scum at all, and everybody can hide in the ensuing dead heat between town and town. Read from this perspective, it’s a hell of a time to suggest that gosh, both of these are really strong cases, I could go either way! It’s also relatively safe to do so, since there are already reasons being given for each candidate, and after all, all Tom really did was explain what my reasoning was in the first place. Given the outcome, and given the fact that I really do think you can get something from a slip, I think I’m going to take my chances.
Vote Tom Scud
The other thing that I want to point out about the above post is that, if I’m reading all of this correctly (by some god damned miracle), and Tom is scum, I’m going to want to take a look at Mahaloth based on the old “make a list and throw a fellow scum on there just in case” rule.
This case against Tom Scud is garbage.
First of all, Tom was hardly the only person to drop a tidbit or two about his name before claiming. From memory, Freudian and Meeko both did it. Why are you after Tom but not Meeko for this? Second of all, not only have you failed to demonstrate scum motivation for this(and I’m basically despairing of getting people to see the light on this one), you haven’t even explained why it’s a pro-scum move in this case. How did this “soft claim” help a scummy Tom in a way that wouldn’t have helped a townie Tom?
[/quote]
[Exhibit B] A bit of a smear on my former incarnation here
[/quote]
Ah, “smear”. That was one of my favourite words in Cecil Pond, where I was scum. The thing is, this is such an old scum tell that I bet that few players can even tell you why it was a scum tell back when it was first brought up. I think that it dates back to M3 or M4. Accusing somebody of smearing another player is a great way for a scum player to bolster a case by pointing at something that everybody does. Seriously, if you’re Town and you’re not pointing out things that make you suspicious, you’re not playing this game properly. Smudges are a problem when a player is consistently smudging players who are under lynch pressure but they never back up their opinions with a vote. Merely stating an opinion isn’t scummy. In fact, I’d say that it’s the opposite. One of the things that I did in Cecil Pond was to be sure to avoid commenting on as many of the important storylines as I could. This gave me the flexibility to vote as would best benefit my team later on.
Really? It strikes me as intellectual honesty. Chronos at least gave a rational explanation of why a scummy peeker could stand to gain by his claim-via-youtube, and Tom acknowledged the fact.
It’s Day One, and you want certainty out of a player. Why is it more likely that Tom is scum looking to give himself flexibility in his vote than Tom is a townie who has no reason to be sure of anything? And what is so interesting about the contrast between Tom’s opinion on TexCat and Tom’s opinion on peeker? You keep pointing out things like this and implying that they’re scummy, but you’re never explaining why they’re scummy. Why are these things more indicative of Tom being scum than Tom being Town? Even better, what’s the scum motivation, and why is there no town motivation for these things?
We could go on and on about the optimal voting strategy for townies, and I doubt that we’d ever come to a consensus, so outright stating that one way is best is pretty dubious to me. But I have to ask, does anybody really think that if I went through every game that Cookies has played as Town, that she has never once voted for somebody who had a chance of being lynched over her personal #1 suspect?
Freudian wasn’t lynched; OAOW was. And frankly, pointing out on Day 3 that a player voted for a single known Town player is really off. Vote analysis is once of the best tools we have – but you have to demonstrate that a player is consistently voting in an anti-Town fashion, not that they voted for a townie once.
I have two take-aways from this post. The first is that Cookies has pointed to several things that Tom has done and either implied or outright stated that they are scummy. However, her case lacks any kind of analysis as to why the behavior is scummy. This gives the impression that her case is stronger than it really is, because she can put together a nice long post with a vote at the end and everybody things that her vote is well supported if they don’t try and do the analysis that her case is lacking.
The second point is that there are many instances where Cookies construes actions on Tom’s part as being definitely scummy. However, I think that I’ve demonstrated that in many of these instances, the actions only look scummy because of the spin Cookies has put into her case. It’s just as easy to demonstrate town motivation for Tom’s actions as scum motivations, but Cookies doesn’t seem to be seeing that. She’s clearly gone through her read of Tom with the assumption that Tom is scum, and is seeing all of his actions in that light. Now, I’d love to say that this is definitely indicative of scum. In a perfect world, townies would always be free of preconceived notions and would be able to see all possible motivations for all actions. Unfortunately that’s just not the case. fluiddruid, who was town, fell into the trap of confirmation bias in Cecil Pond when she tried to build a case against story. However, I find this last bit extremely interesting:
The word “potential” is just screaming out at me. Cookies has clearly seen all of Tom’s posts through the filter that he is scum, and that’s come out in the case she’s tried to build. However, the word “potential” here indicates a very interesting perspective here. I would expect any townie who has convinced themselves that Tom must be scum and reads through his posts looking for things that confirm that to flip out over this kind of “slip”. The last thing I’d expect them to do is say that it’s potentially a slip. This indicates to me that the “Tom must be scum” filter that Cookies is seeing his posts through is not a result of confirmation bias. It tells me that she’s conscientiously applying that filter, and slipped here with the caveat.
On preview, I see that Jimmy has put me in a bind. I’ve built this case against Cookies, but it’s really too late for it to go anywhere and Cookies’ votee is tied for the lead. I will be revisiting this toMorrow, but I believe that the best move at this point is to vote Chronos.
I will definitely check the case out more thoroughly, Rysto. Kelly raised my hackles before departing so I’m not averse to looking into Cookies.
NETA: although I will note that not liking a case against Tom doesn’t mean Tom isn’t scum, of course, nor does it mean that Cookies is scum even assuming that her case is garbage.
Fair point Tom’s peeker flip-flopping being on Day 1.
When/how Freudian died doesn’t make that vote switch any less “townie-lynching” in the meaning I intended when using that term.
I said potential slip because a scum player could have said such a thing while honestly and truthfully referring to the Night portion of the discussion in the game thread. I said potential because I wanted to underscore that it was but a small part of my case, whereas there are others who seem willing to lynch him just based on that statement alone.
It may not be the best case I’ve ever put together, but I’m happy with it and my vote stays, and it is the best you’re going to get toDay out of this particular sub.
Chronos (6): [del]special ed 924 995[/del], Red Skeezix 974, Drain Bead 984, Oredigger77 990, GuiriEnEspaña 1000, Tom Scud 1002, Rysto 1005
Tom Scud (5): Mahaloth 931, Zeriel 954, Chronos 971, ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies 986, Jimmy Chitwood 1004
Jimmy Chitwood (1): TexCat 941
TexCat (1): [del]Tom Scud 969 1002[/del], Meeko 982
Oredigger77 (1): special ed 995
Still don’t have much time; a quick response to Jimmy: my thinking in that post was (1) I figured that given that the Day was turning into a two-horse race I needed to take a look at the other case and (2) up to then, my impression was that the case against One was pretty baseless, and I was preparing to denounce it as the same; as I came to the opposite conclusion I felt I ought to report it and my reasoning. On rereading, I realized that I’d pretty much recreated your argument (I didn’t have your post up in front of me to read them side-by-side), so I added the “reinventing the wheel” - probably I should have just deleted and said “what Jimmy said”, but vanity demanded I not delete 4 paragraphs of typing.
Elsewhere, Digger’s vote looks pretty weird; could be a bussing, though the timing is odd; could be an attempt to bid up two Townies into a two-horse race to set up a future mislynch or misvig. (Could of course also be a clumsy scum attempt to save a fellow scum, if I were scum, which I’m not.) I remember he made a weird post about how he was supicious that no one else was suspicious of Meeko on day 1; not sure what else he did. I’m going to go back and review his posts overNight and see what turns up, if I’m not lynched.
FWIW I’ve done my own analysis of his posts and while I’m happy with my vote toDay, OreDigger doesn’t come out too well:
47, 52, 78 Pre and early game fluff, may be inactive for first few days
105 In favor of name claim to “lock in” potential roles although risks giving scum easy targets
117 Agrees with Chronos on need to do name claim early as this will hurt scum and prevent later role claims as town roles will have been “outed”
139 Suggests using Sach’s list for claim order
156 Claims Washington
308 Curious why OaOW picked up “so many” (3) votes for voting NAF but Meeko’s PIS was ignored. Suspects Special Ed for calling out a PIS slip - but not Meeko for making it?
330 Still wonders how Meeko got away with the PIS slip, with “only 6” players commenting on it. Now realizes that for 40% of players to comment on an issue is pretty good. Re: OaOW’s “so many” votes, 3 of 8 is quite a lot.
387 More about Meeko’s PIS, questions Drain about her vote on him for his stance on Meeko when in fact both of them agree that the person calling out PIS is often scum
439 Thinks the whole Peeker thing was blown out of proportion, thinks whoever was driving the case is likely scum and will reread to see who it was (he doesn’t)
625 Fluff, couldn’t vote due to paperwork
717 Suggests that maybe scum’s roles are tied to their names so killing NAF as a suspected Doc makes sense. Doesn’t think OaOW was trying to divert attention and votes Jimmy
734 Mis-read OaOW’s post, thought he’d offered more than one reason for NAF’s death, unvotes Jimmy
760 Votes OaOW for single theory on NAF and omgus vote on Jimmy, realizes he’s flip-flopping
811 To Ed about why OaOW would suggest a single data point, explains possible motivations and smudge of Meeko
816 Explains what he thought OaOW was hiding - OMGUS, smudge of Meeko, divert town’s attention
935 Comment on Vig and Story’s death, going to reread to see if he can find any scum manipulation
983 Chronos is looking bad, will reread to find something else. Doesn’t buy Tom’s slip but will review
990 Found nothing else on Chronos, votes him but unhappy to create a tie. Suspects scum is manipulating the votes
993 Explains why ties are bad, Chronos is pretty clean but scummier than Tom, doesn’t find any other cases as solid, will review TexCat case
994 Corrects previous attribution of case against Tom to Zeriel when it was actually Cookies
Posts 105 and 117 are weird, basically he’s seems to be suggesting that all the town powers should claim early as, if their name matches their role, scum will have a hard time creating a fake claim which will enable them to claim that same role at a later stage in the game. He acknowledges that this will put an easy target on the back of certain town power roles but will prevent scum claiming Doc or Cop at a later stage. He returns to this argument in #717 (that players have names linked to their roles) and thought that scum killed NAF thinking he was a Doc.
Post 308 in interesting: first he asks why OaOW has gathered so many votes for his vote on NAF (actually just 1 vote), then wonders why everyone ignored Meeko’s PIS slip and then comments that people who pick up on PIS slips tend to be scum so he’s suspicious of Ed. In post 330 he considers 3 of 8 votes to be “so many”, although only 1 was for the vote on NAF and then admits that 6 players commenting on the slip is pretty acceptable. Post 387 is a defense of a vote received from Drain where he tells her that she should be suspicious of Ed for calling out the slip, not of him. Although he then adds that he’d have called out the slip if he’d been online…
Between 717, 734 and 760 he admittedly flip-flops over OaOW and goes from defending him to voting him. He defends this vote in 811 and 816, mainly to Ed who called him out on it.
He promises to reread on a number of occasions (#439 to see who was driving the Peeker bandwagon, #935 to see if he can find any scum manipulation of the Day2 lynch, #983 going to reread to see if he can find anything scummy about **Chronos[/B+], #993 going to reread the case against TexCat. He only ever got back to us about one of his rereads and that was to tell us he found nothing scummy about Chronos.
Due to my own low post-count, I can’t comment on the quantity of his participation, but in terms of quality: suicidal suggestions, flip-flopping, hedged comments, “broken” promises, misreading/skimming, etc. FOS OreDigger.
Day ends in about 80 minutes by my calculation
Huh. Well, upon revisiting the respective cases, Oredigger didn’t exactly come out of nowhere with his unhelpful vote today, but I still don’t see the distinction that makes his bad play into scum play. And it’s too early for me to start playing the well, he’s voting for him, so since I think he’s kind of scummy, I can’t vote for the person he’s voting for game.
Upon a complete reread of not Tom’s posts, but the posts of those voting for him, I have to say… kind of garbage almost all the way down.
Mahaloth started the party with a continuation of the criticism for Tom’s vote on Freudian. Tom had already addressed it and I won’t get into it now except to say it isn’t entirely specious, but it’s not very good.
Then Zeriel:
Which is fair enough, but does reference a coin flip, after all. That isn’t terribly inspiring. Also, in the (I think kind of rare) case where a townie made a slip for whatever reason that looked really bad, this is the kind of vote you’d expect 100% of the time.
Next up is Chronos.
More words, same vote. Nothing that’s actually a reason that can be personally chalked up to Chronos taking a stance, just the fact that Tom voted first on a known townie. I can personally attest to the inaccuracy of such an approach.
Fourth was Cookies, addressed in Rysto’s post. My vote was based on the slip and me going back through Tom’s post and finding something else I didn’t like, but you know, that isn’t good enough, I was grasping at that point. I’m going to feel like a serious jackass if it turns out that slip was a real slip, but there’s nothing new there.
unvote Tom Scud
I don’t see anywhere else to put my vote that’s going to matter other than backing up my feeling that the case on Tom is trumped up. So if I’m right now, might as well be doubly right.
Vote Chronos
For the record, it wasn’t just that Tom was the first vote; it’s that he was driving the case pretty hard.
But I’m not sure it matters much what I say in my defense now, since it looks pretty unlikely that enough votes will swing in the next hour to spare me. Ah, well, you’ll know the truth about me soon enough.
Evening all.
The results of my review of the posts of Oredigger and Chronos, promised above.
Chronos.
Post [post=12287766]820[/post] – Wanderer’s “lynch me” gambit was a frustration tell. Post [post=12291716]882[/post] has a vote to lynch Wanderers. In Chronos’s favour, he’s focusing on which of the two lead was a better choice, and he doesn’t mention the “lynch me” gambit as a frustration tell.
I don’t see anything other than that on Day 2, and that doesn’t support an accusation of being an infiltrator.
On Day 3, he pushed his case against Guiri in post [post=12307235]971[/post], then withdrew it in post [post=12307565]975
[/quote]
, after Red Skeezix pointed out that it was based on a misreading of Guiri’s posts (missing “non” form “non-third-party” in the text he quoted from Guiri.)
I mention this because it’s one of the two planks that Oredigger stands his vote for Chronos on. This is one of the two things that pinged Oredigger so heavily that he voted someone who’s first two Days play he categorised as “clean.”
I don’t think that it’s up to supporting the case.
I voted Chronos on Day 1, so I’ve obviously been suspicious of him. His activity over the last two Days has seen my suspicion of him drop noticeably – other than his strange Day 1 vote, I see nothing against him, and what is good enough to back a Day 1 vote isn’t good enough as we near the midgame.
Oredigger
On the other hand, we have in post [post=12312779]990[/post] what looks like a clear reach to find a reason – any reason – to vote for Chronos. During my review of Oredigger’s posts last night, I did come across post [post=12252209]308[/post]. In this post, Oredigger asked why OAOW drew votes for picking up a spelling error but Meeko “dropped what appeared to be PIS and got a pass.” This ignored approximately 50 or so posts in which Special Ed called Meeko out over the apparent PIS, only to reach an amicable conclusion in post [post=12250457]282[/post], when Special Ed realised he had misinterpreted something Meeko said.
That looks to me like trying to restart a case against an easily-misunderstood target after the initiator had realised his error and walked away.
Vote Oredigger77
Chronos (7): [del]special ed 924 995[/del], Red Skeezix 974, Drain Bead 984, Oredigger77 990, GuiriEnEspaña 1000, Tom Scud 1002, Rysto 1005, Jimmy Chitwood 1004
Tom Scud (4): Mahaloth 931, Zeriel 954, Chronos 971, ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies 986, [del]Jimmy Chitwood 1004 1013[/del]
Jimmy Chitwood (1): TexCat 941
TexCat (1): [del]Tom Scud 969 1002[/del], Meeko 982
Oredigger77 (2): special ed 995, MHaye 1015
Not Voting (0):
Well, at least you are consistent.
Chronos (Reverend) is dead.
All Night Actions are due by 2:00PM EDT 10 April 2010 via SDMB PM. The timestamp must read 1:59PM or earlier to be valid. I will consider the action request with the latest, valid time-stamp to be the final decision for each actor. Failure to submit an action will result in no action.
Vaya con dios, Chronos. 
Am I still allowed to tend bar, even being as dead as I am?
Of course, why do you think they call them spirits?
Wow. With a pun like that, you get to be my assistant. Wanna help me whip up a quick batch of golden showers?