Hmm… I guess it doesn’t move me, but that is for other people to decide, as is where an observation ends and an accusation begins. And which is worse - outright saying that someone is acting suspiciously, or disguising your own opinions behind double-talk?
I have been looking at what people say about others, and giving that almost the same weight as their voting records. It is my hope that, over a few Days, something resembling an incriminating pattern emerges.
And I’m clever enough to spot it.
Hmm, let’s see…
rexnervous had kept pretty quiet when it comes to commenting on other people’s behaviour… I’d say Type 3, but without much conviction.
fluiddruid found Lemur suspicious, hence the vote for testing, but hasn’t driven home the point, or looked for other targets. A mix of 2 and 3, I suppose.
Justin’s votes jumped from player to player during Day 1, so I’d say Type 1.
It is hard to classify all but the obvious and extreme examples among us, and it is simplistic to classify people like this. (Justin, for example, voted in manners which back up his accusations (or observations), which is not necessarily scummy. Someone who threw accusations (or observations) around without voting the same way, though, might be considered suspicious).
Whether such classifications are useful, relevant or accurate come down to four simple letters: YMMV.
Oh hell, I was going to wait but under the “vote early, vote often” philosophy…
Test Telcontar
I have already given my reasons for why I find him suspicious, but I’ve been giving it some more thought.
I believe Telcontar is a wolf, but there is the possibility that I am wrong. If he is not a wolf, at the very least he is a rapid dog. I find nothing suspicious about Daphne’s posting, no more than anyone else’s, but he has hounded her right from the early days (lower d) of the game. So there are two possibilities: One, you are a wolf trying to stir up the town, or Two, you are a lunatic townie who can’t let go of a grudge. Either way you are dangerous to the town.
No don’t get me wrong - if the testeriser shows the same colours as november, I will vote to lynch someone else. However, I believe you are either a wolf, or a townie who I will not miss after death. Nothing personal, but your attitude reeks of irrational fixation.
You can change my vote, Telcontar, if you can adequately explain the following:
Why you found Daphne suspicious
Why you still findDaphne suspicious (a gut feeling might explain (1), but it is not enough for (2) as well
Why, with your initial and continuing mistrust for her, you did not vote to have her lynched.
Thanks, AllWalker, for the thoughtful response. A few comments below, as I think this is an interesting and important discussion.
I’m not sure those are the only two possibilities. Commenting on a person’s post, asking for clarification on why someone said something, that sort of thing does not (to me) carry the weight of, for example, accusing two people of ‘working together’ or ‘being connected’ or flat-out saying that someone is scummy, or did something scummy. ‘Double-talk’ is of course an area of YMMV. Have you seen any ‘doubletalk’ today?
I think this is a very good idea. We should all be keeping track of, formally or informally, how people are ‘engaging’ with each other, positively or negatively, or neutrally. These things can be difficult to interpret, but in some games I’ve read, they’ve been much more helpful at finding scum than voting records. Your classification into ‘types’ is one way to do it, and quite an interesting one; I get the impression you are assigning ‘values’ to the types, which I’m not sure I understand.
Thanks for answering my questions! I agree with you that patterns are already starting to emerge. Only one more question: do you think that any of the ‘types’ is necessarily more scummy than the others? My opinion, FWIW, is that all of the sort of patterns you’ve noticed can be effective strategy for scum, and they’ve all been used before. Type 1 and especially 2 will get the most suspicion, though. I don’t think that reluctance to engage or even to accuse is a good thing. If townies are passive this way, any potential loud scum won’t have opposition.
No one’s seemed super scummy of late, but I did think that earlier, Seeker of Truth and Beauty was acting super paranoid about Daphne. Since I don’t think I have anything better to go on, vote Seeker of Truth and Beauty
So, instead of voting for Daphne, someone who already had one other vote and who could more easily surpass you, you chose to throw a vote at someone new? It really seems like you’re protecting her.
One person I thought was being very sly… pointing the finger without using names, saying things like we should watch out for the experienced players, pointing out that the sum’s job is to create dissent when a crisis arose…
But the he had the nerve to be eaten by a pack of wolves :mad:
Even if I don’t post that much, I get the feeling I’m more invisible to the lot of you than I thought.
I did make but one accusation but it was quite serious, about the strange implications fluiddruid made about lemur, and her later explanation which was in part simply untrue.
Nevertheless, nobody at all picked up on that, strangely enough not even lemur himself, which is also very odd.
So they’re now both somewhat suspicious to me, but fluiddruid still a bit more.
I would be interested in more comments about this, especially from lemur, because I find it the most interesting data point so far. Relevant posts are on pages 4 and 6.
But if I really am alone in my opinion here I will probably have to drop it for now.
My general opinion about the test and lynch votes:
In general, testing the most suspicious person and then lynching them is still the best idea.
However, I don’t think it is likely that an identical color code can signify different alignments; so when an identical code comes up, we should discuss whether a suitable alternative target exists so we have another shot at getting a wolf.
I didn’t want to freak out just because fluiddruid accused me. I know my own role, but no one else does. I can expect to be thumped a few times like an underripe cantelope. Suspecting someone merely because they suspected you is a low percentage move.
When it gets suspicious is when one person has a couple of votes and out of the blue someone starts trying to build a case against the second place player. That seems an awful lot like trying to protect the first place player without overtly defending them.
However, since we know november was a townie there was no need for the wolves to try to shift public opinion away from him. And once the momentum built for poor comatose **november **it pretty quickly turned unanimous. One thing we might look at is that wolves don’t want to be the last person to pile on…they don’t like to be outliers. So people who voted for november in the middle period are more likely to be wolves than people who voted early or very late.
I still think we should test Freudian: she’s claimed rancher, so she shouldn’t be too afraid of the test. If it’s the same, I doubt we’ll lynch her (and I certainly don’t think we should in that case – if she’s scum and gets the same result as a townie the testeriser is worthless). If it’s different, either she’s lying or there’s more going on with the test than we thought. Either way, it’s a high percentage move in terms of potential information gained.
An interesting difference of opinion here. Justin, if Freudian had done that, wouldn’t you/someone else have accused her of OMGUS?
Aren’t we supposed to be looking for scum?** Freudian**'s been on the record as not suspecting me, even though I’m suspicious of her. If she were to suddenly change that, wouldn’t that be even more suspicious? The fact that she hasn’t done that has actually somewhat lessened my suspicion of her (although she’s still pinging me more strongly than anyone else right now – most recently her ‘no one is seeming that scummy right now’ remark). The fact that you (Justin) seem to be encouraging not actively looking for scum is worrying me.
This whole concept of ‘protection’ seems to be getting wildly different interpretations here. I think I agree with Lemur that it seems more scummy to me to try to ‘defend’ someone without openly doing so – Freudian has been, especially toDay, pretty openly not suspicious of me. But her not practicing ‘defensive voting’ seems like relatively good practice at this stage of the game.
I don’t think this is a good idea. We need to ignore the testerizer for a couple more days. I think going back and looking at people records and what they’ve said is the best way to go and then test and lynch the scummiest. If we rely on the testerizer to eventually solve this for us we will lose.
I think a mass claim might be a good idea. We don’t need to claim power roles just farmer or rancher. If one group ends up larger then the other we know there is an extra wolf in that group. While the wolfs will probably split at least there will be a chance for them to screw up. The other way that a mass claim could help is that we can pull people from a group to get an expected result from the tezterizer.
If we are evenly split then we pick a group, say farmers, to hunt for the scummiest in that group. Each group will have an equal chance of containing a wolf so it won’t matter which group. With a smaller group to look through we can put each member under more intense scrutiny. We then vote for the scummiest in the group the testerizer should give us the same result as the rest of the farmers which after a bit will start clearing farmers then we can lynch the number two test candidate.
I would suggest that we alternate between the two groups so that neither group is hurt too bad on their win condition.
But remember that we don’t have an instance of this occuring yet. November was the early front runner and everyone joined in, and november turned up rancher. No wolf tried to deflect attention away from november because they knew november wasn’t a wolf. So players who went after other people than november weren’t giving scum-tells, rather the opposite. The scum-tell in this case is behavior like “Oh, it seems like lots of people hate november. Me too!”
Oredigger, that’s a bad idea.
The wolves can easily coordinate themselves so they get two to declare for each group(*) so we don’t gain information, they might even have assigned decoy roles for testerizer purposes.
Then because we turn up the heat for only one of the groups, there will be a competition for everybody to select the other - even if for me the town vs. wolf distinction is much more important, technically you only win the game if your group wins.
Therefore this move will only create tensions within the townies, even when with everbyody declaring it would be quite transparent, but the important point is even after culling one group there will still be wolves left over in the other…
(*) I think a 7-7-4 split is by far the most likely
I don’t think a mass claim is a good idea at this point. If people start playing for the more exclusive win condition already, that will allow the wolves excellent opportunity to foment what would be a good result for them. I think we are most likely at 6-6-4 at the moment - this is far too close for comfort. And it seems like even with a random order reveal wolves screwing up on dividing by two is pretty unlikely.
I do think we are probably spending too much time worrying about the testeriser, but if we want it to be useful at all, we’ve gotta deal with it. I agree that it might be useful for confirming townies after a few days.
Lemur, I agree we haven’t seen that kind of ‘protection’ yet. But it is worth talking about now so that we are on the look-out for it.
I don’t understand this strategy at all. Alternate, like, day by day? Doesn’t that just give the wolves a more precise result to manipulate? I would think that if we say, OK, everybody knows who the farmers are, let’s pick through that group and find the scum, that’s an easier situation for a wolf who has claimed rancher to maneuver in, because you’ve manufactured a plausible excuse for his inevitably false suspicion. And then what, we go and test the most wrong person from the other side? Maybe you can explain it differently to me, but I’m hard pressed to imagine that this strategy would in any way put any extra heat on the wolves.
I don’t really see how this division does anything but, frankly, enable the farmers to conspire against the ranchers and vice versa. I don’t like the implications of that at this point even a little bit. Making this a 1 vs. 1 vs. 1 battle right now reeks of wolfy conquest.
(On preview I see I’m not being terribly original).
I think I was unclear. I only meant select which group went first. After one Day looking at one group the next Day would be spent checking out the other group. That way neither group hurts their win condition too bad.
We would be able to speed up the testerizer results by having an idea coming in what the result should be and while I do think its remote we have a chance of the wolves screwing up. Something else I just though of, with two groups we can ensure that we aren’t accidentally picking on one group as it is there is nothing to prevent us from accidentally lynching from the same group over and over. At least this way as a town we can keep it fair.
Let me see if I can explain the idea a bit further. Right now we have 16 people of which presumably 12 are looking for scum. With 12 people to check out 16 it is hard to give everyone the attention they deserve. if we split into two groups and the wolves split equally then we would have a group of 8 with the same odds of catching scum as the original 16 but now we would have 12 people checking out 8 so it will be easier to find slips. The next Day we would look at the other group.
I don’t see how scum could manipulate this any more then they are doing now and while the wolves in the unchecked group would have a free Day they would be checked the next Day so they still couldn’t do anything overt.
I think you are underestimating how much easier it would be for the wolves in this scenario. As townies, we have a more exclusive win condition that we have to get to, and the wolves know this. If they find out who everyone is (since they will know who is lying), they will have a huge information advantage, even bigger than now. They will be playing 4 against 6 against 6, rather than 4 against 12.
There’s no opportunities for townies to ‘work together’ in this scenario – we don’t have an overall town win condition. If the wolves can get us to mislynch just once from both groups, they can get us down to 4-4-4 in two Days (4-5-5 from the mislynches, and then nightkills also being targeted). Is that something we want to risk?
There’s also no reason to think ‘slips’ are more likely just because we are looking at fewer players.
I understand your point about the testeriser results, but I think that is a small positive in a sea of negative here.
Sorry for my lack of posts in the last 12 hours; I’m swamped at work and am trying to read everything and process it.
I really am against a mass “reveal” of everyone’s rancher and farmer status. I thing this reveals too much to the wolves and will not be productive in the long run.
Having said this, I want to do something I meant to do back in post 453. I know people will say I’m trying to join AllWalker, but I really was having similar thoughts as him/her and simply failed to write them in post 453. Almost as soon as I posted, I regreted it and then when I saw AllWalker’s post, I didn’t post my similar thoughts. Anyway, AllWalker’s points are highly valid and I don’t think **Telcontar ** has refuted them at all. Test Telcontar
This is not a vote to lynch and it should not be assumed I will lynch him/her. I’m still undecided about the test/lynch thing and if he/she comes up Red/Green, I would not lynch him/her(even if I’m a farmer). Wolves are the priority to me.
