The problem is such speculation will not expose scum, but it could expose town power roles.
Reasoning:
Under the assumption that scum do not know what the town powerrole designations are (which I think is a reasonable assumption), Town collectively already can deduce what Special Ed is and/or is not. The problem is this information is secret NOT PUBLIC. In other words, the people with the most information about Special Ed are town power roles. By opening “speculation” about Special Ed you put the town power roles in a problematic position. Should they be honest about what they know? Should they LIE to better conceal their identity? I don’t know. And I don’t want to force power roles into that position.
For example, let’s say Ed is a Mason. What should the other masons say on this point? Should they speculate that Ed is a mason? deny that Ed might be a mason? ignore the subject entirely? Isn’t it possible that speculating about Ed could expose those who know more about Ed than the public domain?
What benefit does Town gain from speculating about Ed? I say very little. We know Ed is TOWN, that is the most important point to Town. I acknowledge that knowing Ed’s role affects strategic calculus, BUT each power role will need to do that calculus individually anyway.
I’m content knowing that the bits and pieces of clues regarding Ed’s role are in the hands of TOWN. This information does not need to be public yet.
The point of the comparison is to say that a random sample of five has a high probability of containing scum already, so isolating a set of five based on some in-game criterion doesn’t do much to boost what was already a high probability.
What?! MonkGate was awesome! It contributed to the Town win. You know, we’re all in this game (and still alive). We should get the band back together.
Oh, that game, in which I tried to be all clever and pretend to fight with sachertorte to throw people off our Mason scent, except I forgot who the other Masons were and somehow transferred the fake fight to someone else, who did not know what I was and responded forcefully enough that it got me killed by a suspicious Vigilante.
Short version – MonkGate happened in my first mafia game online. Briefly, due to the way the various players interacted, we ended up with masons who couldn’t mutually confirm because two of us were dead without doing so, and one was not playing for reasons I don’t recall and on the verge of asking to be modkilled. So we almost lost all usefulness of the masons because they didn’t speak up soon enough. The caveat is that speaking up on Day Five or Six, iirc, would have been “soon enough” in that situation.
…what, you mean you DON’T obsessively vanity-search yourself on the mafia wiki that FlyingCowOfDoom runs to track our games here/giraffeboards/idlemafia/etc?
Looking over last summer’s votes, I see that ScubaBen and** Natlaw ** each only had 1 vote down. I’d like to hear explanations. Regardless of the single/double lyse arguments, I think everyone should have 2 votes on record.
Seems Scuba Ben was also getting a lot of suspicion, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t see too much of that myself. I didn’t see him as really all that scummy so wouldn’t be terribly surprised if there were scum on that bandwagon. Can anyone give a really good explanation for why they wanted him gone?
I also agree that we should hold off on too much mason/organism discussion. As has been said, better to keep them around till later in the game–we don’t want sitting ducks for town. I remember when I was scum in the last game, we wanted to get as many confirmed town as possible down, because we wanted to keep around the people who could take the fall as scum.
Like with the rest of their roles, I am relying on the Pond’s power roles to navigate as they see fit and as best they can with respect participating in the game without calling undue attention to themselves. Imho, your perspective places too much emphasis on those roles while neutering the potential of most of the (vanilla) Pond players.
I’ll clarify what I said earlier. I think discussion is one thing, but I don’t think that other masons or orgs or whatever should come forward at this point because it’s just too risky.
Lest we forget that yesterDay was Day 1 where good justifications are rare and consensus on how good they are even rarer… and the majority of the ‘really good’ reasons presented led to a mislynch, I think my case against Scuba has been stated as clearly as I can make it, and it could very well be suspicion falling on a townie who is just behaving in an anit-town manner, but he needs to start engaging and playing the game to start making that clear one way or another.
As I said Yesterday the Spawn had a gigantic lead so one vote more or less didn’t matter. I was thinking to place it on another player but couldn’t find a reasonable place. I could have placed it on the Spawn but didn’t bother.
I think the people who didn’t have a vote for either peeker or Scuba_Ben also might be worth looking at as the didn’t commit one way or the other for the to players with a chance to be lynched.
Well, that really depends. If Scuba is scum, then the bandwagons on Scuba and peeker are very, very interesting to us. Who got on Scuba early? Who got on peeker after Scuba was in trouble? What about the voters who got off the Scuba train late? There’s a lot of information to be had in that kind of vote. This is why story said that one of the most important moments for the Town is the first death of scum. I’d amend this a bit to say it’s the first death of scum in the mid-game, because if a scum is lynched Day One there often isn’t enough information for the Town to make good use of it(for example, see Apocalypse, where Town lynched scum Day One but was completely lost until Hockey Monkey died Day Five.
If Scuba is Town then the vote record isn’t as interesting, but there’s still information to be had. Most of that information comes from comparing player’s actions in their Day One votes with other Days. For example. if a player stated reasons for a vote one Day contradict their reasons for a vote another Day, that’s suspicious.
I would add that I think voting late (story and rysto) is often suspicious. The scum do not want to commit to a vote until they see how things lay, and where they can place their votes to both avoid suspicions and avoid lysing a scum. Additionally, I don’t think changing your vote late is necessarily as scummy. amrussel changed from scuba to diver late, but I think that actually gave us more info, rather than less.
I think it would be extremely foolish to entirely ignore Kelly’s vote on Scuba yesterday. I have no idea whether Scuba is scum or not(I have no vibe on him either way yet), but his/her vote on Scuba was flat out pointless and was claimed so.
I let it go last Summer, which was probably a mistake. I mean, he/she is new, but I don’t think I should have let it go. And neither should any of us.
It’s early still, so my vote may change, but I think town should have no problem getting early votes out there. I’m town, so here is my vote, at least for now.
Lyse KellyCriterion
for flat out voting with no rationale or even attempt a reasoning. Very anti-town behavior.
I take it that you are subscribing to either the “I don’t believe that she is an innocent Pondie n00b full of questions” or the “I don’t care if she is a n00b or not” schools of thought then?
I myself am not sure yet on which side I am likely to fall on the matter yet, but it seems odd to not even acknowledge that she has asked some very basic questions even if you are choosing not to give her the benefit of the doubt.
I guess it would seem odd if I did not acknowledge it, except I did mention it yesterDay, when I held off on my vote. Peeker was my top suspect and received my vote. I did not buy the Scuba vibe, so I kept my vote on him.
I’m not certain my vote will remain on Kelly, but it’s there for now. I like the idea of “voting early, voting often”.
