Also, I think we should wait a little bit longer to lynch. I haven’t really had the time to sit down and plot out my argument, although, mostly, I think I’d just be re-hashing what I’ve said in previous posts.
I can tell you that if I don’t have it up before tomorrow morning, it probably won’t get done. 
It’s been a hectic week.
Oh no! It’s all very exciting. There’s exhibits and courses (Tomorrow morning I’m attending a 3-hour course on insurance code billing. Thrilling!). There’s also sales booths where you can get deals on burs and handpieces (what you civilians think of as “drills”) and x-ray film and scalers and prophy paste and flavored latex gloves. Flavored!
Enough hijack. Since I’m here:
How are the other two weird? I’ll grant number two (Freudian lied about her occupation) is weak sauce, but I pointed that out. Number three (power role she doesn’t want to reveal) seems unlikely, but not beyond the pale, considering we have no idea what the power roles are , beyond pedescribe’s admonishment that they would be not very strong.
I thought of a fourth possibility this morning, but then I forgot it.
As I said, I’m voting for Freudian Slit because her test results don’t match her claim, and because we already agreed to pair testing and lynching, at least in the early days. I feel that the need to establish some sort of meaningful baseline on the testerizer (Is it consistent? Is it not? What does it all mean?!) outweighs the strength of my feelings about Seeker in this case. Not only that, but I’m willing to bet that if I had maintained my “Lynch Seeker” vote, I’d be marked as scummy for not sticking to the agreed test-lynch plan.
More to come.
I don’t believe it as much as I’m guessing it. But, I have to see for myself to see if Freudian is lying. If she is a wolf, the testerizer is back in the game in a serious way…or at least we are closer to finding out what it means.
:: checks watch and calendar ::
I wouldn’t object to moving up the lynching if lots o’ people are getting fidgety, but am in no particular hurry myself.
Sorry for the sequential posts, y’all, but I thought it would be better to break this down into chunks.
Looking back over the thread to build my case against Seeker of Truth & Beauty (or is it Seeker of Farmers & Ranchers?) has actually widened the scope of my suspicions. This is gonna be a long one folks.
Lemur866 was the first person to suggest lynching lurkers. Seems sensible right? As others have said, lurkers reveal the least information. But here’s the thing. The wolves know each other, and at least one of them has probably played before and knows of the common town inclination to lynch lurkers on the first day. Wouldn’t they make damn sure that none of them were on the bottom of the post count list?
Justin Credible was the first person to finger Daphne Black, right after she called rexnervous on his unseeming interest in power roles:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10836393&postcount=122
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10836402&postcount=123
Despite this, he votes for november anyway. Is DB really that scummy? Or were the lycanthropes trying to lay the groundwork for a future lynch mob against DB?
Justin Credible was also the 2nd person after rexnervous to finger Freudian Slit for “protecting” Daphne by voting for Seeker instead of Daphne.
Rex’s reasoning in that post was sound, but the main problem with it was that the reasons for lynching Daphne were weak and kinda scummy in the first place. Remember? She was talking too much? Being too helpful? Also, Freudian wasn’t actually defending Daphne, just asking for reasons why she was being targeted. If Daphne had been fingered for better reasons (e.g. suggesting suspect strategies), and if Freudian had actually been defending DB, I’d be behind rex’s reasoning. But she wasn’t, so I’m not.
I think Seeker and Telcontar are tag-teaming. I’m not sure if rex is involved. He’s all over the place on my scum-dar, one post I’m like, “he’s definitely a wolf”, and the next post I’m all, “Oh, he’s pro-town”.
Zeriel summed up my feelings about Seeker and Telcontar in this post about Telcontar:
My case:
I.
It starts with Telcontar’s idea to not lynch on the first day, and his idea of having a useless group of live tested people.
He even lays out how reasonable not-lynching is in this chart. He listed the number of players, but he needed to list numbers of townies vs. wolves to be comprehensive. You’d need about 4 columns:
All this is bearing in mind that the wolves get a definite kill every night. Simplified, the wolves get a max 2 kills per day/night round. The townies get max 1 kill, assuming the lynch is on target. In the beginning there’s a 50% chance for town to kill a wolf. No lynch means 0% chance of a kill for town, while wolves still get their 1 kill at night.
Were these columns honest omissions? Or was Telcontar just obfuscating the whole “my math is solid” thing to push a bad strategy?
II.
On the top of page 8, both rexnervous and Seeker advocate leaving off further discussion until the next day (this was just after the first day Testerizer results). Namely because, as rex says, “The more info we provide them [meaning wolves] now, the more they have to influence their vote (and throw us off).”.
But time is not on the town’s side. The wolves already have more information than us (they know who they are and who they want to kill), and since they’re masquerading as town, they will always have the same info town has. Postponing or reducing the information we get in any way is NOT pro-town.
III.
On Page 11 rexnervous, and especially Seeker came down strongly against the possibility that wolves could pose as farmers/ranchers. It was never clearly stated, and I have to wonder why Seeker would discard the possibility when it could possibly strongly affect the results from the testerizer, and therefore, the town lynchings?
But wait, there’s more!
IV.
Seeker said
and in general kept harping on the whole “inexperienced” thing. It’s already been addressed, but I’ll say it again: “Inexperienced” doesn’t mean “clumsy” or “unclever”. Just ignorant, but given that this is the SDMB 
, he’s probably the type of person for whom even steep learning curves aren’t much of a problem. The whole experienced/inexperienced issue seems like misdirection to me.
V.
When DaphneBlack commented that lynching november was the “easy option”, Seeker said:
(post 218).
Daphne wasn’t actually defending november, just calling for more consideration in the rush to vote for the lurker.
VI.
The idea of wolves defending their own was reinforced when Telcontar said “It is always a little worrisome if no one is defending the intended target (especially including the intended target). Wolves would care more.” This was reinforced by Justin Credible and Mahaloth (p.5).
But I don’t think the wolves would defend that person. They’d just make sure none of them were in that low post-count position. They would also simply try to sway opinion to another target. I don’t think it’s likely they’d risk outing themselves by defending another wolf.
VII.
In post 269 Telcontar continued the campaign when he asserts that Daphne is being “high strung” in her reaction towards Seeker’s smudging.
In Post 280, Telcontar says that we should go after Daphne because she’s generating the most conflict. The thing is, she really wasn’t. At least not until rexnervous said she was.
Note that up until that point, Daphne had only voted to test Telcontar due to his “poor” math skills and no-lynch suggestion. Both Seeker and Telcontar had fingered her for talking too much. Telcontar said
I know I’m repeating myself, but I believe the exact opposite: that is, post count is one of the easiest ways for the wolves to blend.
In post 172, fluiddruid suggests that in these early stages, we stick to our test-lynch decision, and use the remainder of the day to discuss the nest day’s test-lynch. I’m still leery of Freudian Slit, and I’m unwilling to lose the information we could gain from her lynch. But I think we should seriously look into Seeker and/or Telcontar tomorrow.
My vote stands.
What, Ichini, is that all? 
I agree that Telcontar and Seeker seem to trust each other too much, given at how vocal they both are. Maybe they like each other because of their similar trains of thought, but that is highly stupid. If you are town, and somebody else agrees with you, it is dumb to automatically trust them. So there may be some wolfishness there.
But, I think the whole “are wolves just wolves, or can they farm/ranch?” issue is nonsense. I myself assumed three distinct teams with no overlap. I now realise that there is the possibility that there are wolf farmers and wolf ranchers, the only difference between the two of them being testeriser results, so I don’t see that as necessarily a scum tell. Who knows.
I think any group of players who are consistantly on the same side opinion-wise should be suspect. The most glaring example in my mind is Seeker and Telcontar, but if there are any others I’d like to hear it.
On the subject of the lack of discussion after the Testerizer results, this is an artefact of the results themselves. Under different circumstances we might be glad of more time to discuss who to lynch.
Let’s take a simple hypothesis. FS turns out not to be a Rancher, but a Wolf.
Then, tomorrow, we lynch (random player) and get a result of Green Red. We are quite likely to conclude that (Random Player) may be a Rancher. At that point there will be a debate about whether to lynch (Random Player) to verify that hypothesis, or lynch someone else, and if so who.
We’re going to want more than 24 hours for that.
Pede, as an alternative; how about adding a rule that if 75% of the living players have voted for the lynch of a player tested by the Testerizer this turn, the Day ends early.
We then have a 48 hour Night.
The next Day will then start early. The deadline for Dusk, however, will remain Noon EST on the following Friday, and the Testerizer deadline 48 hours before that.
An example timeline applying these rules to Today.26/2 Noon : Day 2 lynch. Alignment revealed. Night falls.
28/2 Noon : Dawn of Day 3. Wolf kill result announced.
4/3 Noon : Testerizer use.
6/3 Noon : Dusk Day 3.(All times converted to EST).
I’m in favour of lynching FS today to develop more information about the Testerizer. If FS turns out to be something other than Rancher, the hypothesis that the two-colour report is consistent for each role is still viable; if she is a rancher it is disproved. I suggest that that is valuable information.
Vote Freudian Slit. (Sorry FS, but we need to know).
If FS does turn out to be a rancher, we’ll either have to have a lot more data to work out the meaning, or even if it’s meaningless. If that is the case I’d be treating the Testerizer as a Day 1 conversation piece with no long-term meaning, until evidence emerges otherwise.
Yes, this is exactly what I was saying up above. We will definitely need the days(small d) between the test and the lynch in the future. I just assume that the testerizer is complicated and we don’t have it figured out at all, which is making it a poor way to choose a lynch(unless Freud is a wolf, of course).
Wow, you’re really bad at this game.
That’s really all there is to it. Given an even number of players, the possibility of one lynch per day, and the possibility of one kill per night, the town should sleep without killing once. They just should. The thing that counts in this game is permissible mistakes. Given an even number, you can sleep without losing a mistake. Doesn’t anyone know basic game theory? If four people are alive at the end of the game and one is a wolf then the villagers should sleep; your odds of killing the wolf are higher the next day. It’s up for debate whether this should happen early or late in the game, but it really should at some point. There’s a strong case for doing it right now, actually, but for some reason people are desperately impatient and it’s not worth arguing the point.
As for the rest…this reads like a paranoid rant. for one thing, I don’t trust seeker, I just think that the case against him is crap. I’m quite open to him being a wolf, I just don’t think anyone has given me any special reason to think that he is. Your cases against the other players are very random. You could easily have made equally strong cases against every player in the game. Only thing I’d like ot point out is that you and AllWalker seem to be going together a lot.
Telcontar, that’s just silly. The odds of killing a wolf get of course higher the more villagers are killed, but they are cumulative!
Treating every decision as random chance, if there were 4 townies and one wolf, you can lynch someone (20% chance at getting the wolf), let the wolf kill one if you didn’t get him and then get one more lynch opportunity at 33%. That means .2 + .33*.8 = 46.4 % chance.
If you do nothing at this round, you lose one more townie and have only one lynch opportunity at 25% chance.
So your (carefully picked?) example of 4 players alive is the only time waiting might make sense, because it’s over if you don’t get the wolf and you go from 25% to 33% if you wait. But that really is a special case because only then do you not lose a lynch opportunity if you wait.
At all other times waiting means one less opportunity to get a wolf.
Doing nothing only makes sure that only villagers die.
Sorry, but that is a really crummy strategy, a bad idea and makes you suspicious.
OK, I just finally really got what you meant. I thought you meant waiting was a good idea in general and not that you spoke about that one specific case at the end of the game (3-1 split) and worked your way backwards.
But it’s still a bad idea. How do you figure that it will be a 3-1 split? We could be better or worse at figuring out the scum.
And, most importantly, waiting now means less opportunity to figure out the machine from our color-crazy scientist friend. There actually might be a reason for not lynching anyone later, but certainly not before we figure the code out; we gain nothing from a pool of tested live people until then.
Telcontar, you are either deliberately being obtuse or missing the core of the argument which is that voting is not random in Mafia. It certainly is not random for scum, who know each other and know who the townspeople are; scum votes are obviously motivated by keeping as many scum players in the game as possible. For town, people are voting on the information they have available. Lack of lynches/votes (or ‘random’ votes for that matter) are not helpful as they continue to provide no information for the late game.
Furthermore, how can you guarantee a set number of players will be in the game at any point? For all we know, there could be someone with a power for a one-off night kill or a block.
I am against shortening the game for two reasons. Firstly we do need the time to talk about results of the testerizer or if we ignore the testerizer time to discuss the lynch. Secondly I like not having to post from my phone on weekends to stay in the game, my spelling is atrocious and my grammar is worse.
With Z not posting this week I think her replacement is will probably be safe until a Day has passed, which means that we will have 13 players in the running tomorrow. I think its interesting that Ichini and I have a very similar list of suspects. I also haven’t seen anyone else publish a list of suspects. I think that part of the reason is that people don’t what to let on what they are thinking out of fear of exposing themselves. I’m against this play because one of will die to night and any thoughts or suspicions they hade will help us find their killer. I think that it would be best if everyone let on who they think is most suspicious before the day ends so we can use that toMorrow and gain an extra townie.
Sigh. I’m getting really tired of this argument. If you don’t understand it, then fine, but stop pretending it’s a good reason to be suspicious.
Basic form (AGAIN):
18 players with 4 wolves = 4 mistakes
17 players with 4 wolves = 4 mistakes
4 = 4
Additional night kill and testerizer result = more information.
4 mistakes + more information > 4 mistakes and less information.
Also:
In four person mafia with one wolf you need the votes of all the remaining townspeople to kill the wolf. In three person mafia with one wolf you need the votes of all the remaining townspeople to kill the wolf. It is a lot easier to get 2/2 than 3/3. This generalizes to all situations in which there is no longer a free mistake.
Look, it may be that we win this game early and it doesn’t matter (though that would probably be a sign of crappy game balance). But, in the event that it is a close game smart play might actually matter.
Just FYI - totally swamped at work right now so not sure how much I’ll contribute between now and lynch. Vote stands.
This is a touch ironic.
The player of this role has completely reversed their position on this issue. Lynching lurkers is A Bad Idea in the early game, not least because we haven’t actually discussed what “lurker” means.
A player with a low or nonexistent postcount isn’t necessarily a lurker. They might have had a sudden change in circumstances that renders them unable to post for a week, or even forget about the game for a few days. I’ve seen both happen.
Such a player isn’t lurking; they’re not playing at all. Lynching them is almost always a mistake on Day 1, because you learn nothing and deprive yourself of the chance of learning something when they do eventually turn up. The death of November actually provides an example of why it can be better to kill a more active player on Day 1. We learned nothing from November;s death except that Green Red is associated with a Rancher.
A lurker is someone who is reading the game but not posting, or not posting much, or who is posting much but most of their posts are fluff and/or non-game related. making a policy of killing players with a ;low postcount isn’t a good plan, because all you have to do to not have a postcount is post lots of content-light posts. That makes it harder for everyone to play the game.
Lastly, my playing style is that I post infrequently in the early Days. I don’t like “me too” posting in most circumstances; it’s one of those ways of increasing one’s postcount without saying much. There can be justifications for it, but in general I avoid “me too” unless I want to stress some part that deserves more attention.
I also don’t subscribe to “vote early, vote often.” Votes are significant things; you shouldn’t let them be tossed around by passing winds of suspicion. Settle on voting for a reason, and evaluate new cases as they come up, that’s me.
Thanks for pointing this out - it is what I suggested people do, to spot the pairings - but you seem to have misunderstood. “Going together a lot” suggests that we, you know, agree on more than one thing. So we both find you and Seeker suspicious for similar reasons - oh noes, the furriness! :rolleyes:
You and Seeker though, it’s like you are married. Well, not quite but you do follow each other’s less than rational leads with alarming eagerness.
J’accuse, pendo.
Many apologies. I was on a vacation from Saturday until today, which shouldn’t have been a problem… until my USB cell modem decided to up and fail to work at all with my wife’s laptop.
So that’s why I’ve been completely gone. Reading to catch up, but I can’t see any reason to NOT vote Freudian Slit–but his alignment will tell us a lot about how far to trust the testerizer.
By the by, folks, I think I have an important bit of information I want to throw out there–I’m a pseudo-useless power role. Namely, I’m a town alignment investigator–I can submit a name nightly and find out ONLY whether they’re farmer or rancher. Needless to say, to preserve my own longevity I’m not revealing which of the two I am.
The reason I’m coming out with this? It’s expressly stated in my PM that the werewolves DO have farmer/rancher identities. Firstly, this prevents me from investigating to find them. Secondly, it colors our interpretation of the testerizer results.
Given the way discussion has gone today, I figured that was worth throwing out a claim–especially since as far as I’m concerned, I’m a vanilla for the purposes of the main town vs. scum game–it’s only the farmer vs. rancher game my power can affect.