Lurker > Panthera

Prone to getting hurt very badly if they switch with each other while there are rocks around?

I'm too busy hunting for bigfoot with my hot blonde neighbour who keeps alternating between flirting with me and calling me ugly

I remember when I did a randomized run of one of the gen 5 games (I think it was White 2) and on the first or second route I caught a Regigigas whose ability had conveniently been randomized away to something non-shit. That was rather fun.

Eelektross is great but man the wait for it is going to suck, Tynamo doesn't evolve until a level that is painfully high when it's your starter.

Harry Potter and the Final Fantasy

Did you know that SPOILER DIES is Sephiroth spelled backwards? Kind of an odd way to foreshadow it tbh

FFI isn't great but it's enjoyable enough, pretty good for its time. FFII is just not good, the level up system is pretty bad, the magic leveling is even worse, some of the dungeons are obsessed to unreal degrees with the "here are four doors, three are empty rooms with forced encounters as you exit" trap, the world map layout and the game's "directions" on where to go next are legendarily awful. It's not outright awful but it's definitely the worst of the series

Meow!
(Litten)

Huh, I too got phoenix. Didn't even pick any of the magic animal options or the phoenix wand. Was hoping for a kitty but oh well.

Grovyle is the best and also the only middle stage I like more than the final form

I wonder if mafia games will include such bizarre roles Morrik?

There's a big difference between seeing a dude get slapped, and seeing that an entire room full of people will allow someone to come up and hit you with no consequence

Remember vegy, if you worship her like a goddess she'll treat you like a sacrifice

gg town, the glory of your victory is matched only by the hilarity of our defeat

Also for everyone who thought I was mad at Chris faking a scan on me - I wrote up 95% of that huge wall before I even saw that. I wrote it up at night, decided I would post it a few hours before deadline so it would have time to be discussed but not too much, and then adjusted my phrasing to his claim without thinking much. I had already decided to claim poison doctor because doing so as poisoner seemed funny. Which was my entire reason for that whole play - I figured I was getting lynched no matter what so I decided to do something weird and insane that would entertain me. And it definitely did because apparently I enjoy mafia most when I'm wasting time on bizarre tangents no one cares about.

Huh, I expected Exeggcute to run away with it and for me to be one of few Cacnea voters. Pleasantly surprised to see how popular the little cactus is

The scariest film of the Halloween season - Mad Strippers

Mario 64 is a mediocre game whose good parts are just too few and far between amidst a sea of overly padded out levels that just ask you to run through the same mostly empty space repeatedly before getting to the parts that are interesting

Lost_All_Senses posted...

Somebody's daughter is somebody's daughter.

Every mother started her career as a daughter

Slayer_22 posted...

Is this the part where we bang and then Jason comes out and sticks a spear up my ass or something?

It's the part where the drug dealing moose catch you on their turf and kidnap the two of you to be sold into slavery in a distant land

It's fine because the bed will be even messier in two minutes once I'm finished disappointing her

Millions around the world were brought to tears Saturday evening as one man made a stunning and brave declaration that molesting children was bad

Welp time's running out and votes only seem to be coming in on me. I'm kicking myself pretty hard for not having a more motivated day 1 and beginning of day 2, I feel like if I played better prior to today you guys would be more willing to look at what I'm saying and see the sense in it, because I'm very much convinced I have this one right. Even with the probably botched handling of claiming I think we could have pulled this off, but I dug myself too deep a hole beforehand. I'm sorry for letting y'all down. Thanks for at least listening and thinking about it, and hopefully once I die and you can trust me to be coming from an honest place you'll go back and check my arguments more carefully. Good luck without me town (and Ben, haha third party joke)

DoomTheGyarados posted...

Like to me that reads scum Panth hoping that would be enough and buying time to come up with a fake claim. If I am wrong I am wrong, but I can't fathom a player who is as good as Panth claiming vanilla that way as actual protection.

I've literally never been good at fake claims, even when scum I just ask my team what the fuck to do lol. My power role experiences include zero protection that I can remember and my most memorable claims have been just claiming legit under pressure. I think you're defaulting to the "as good as Panth" thing for cover when you know that I seem to have fucked up, but in a way I would fuck up. We both know I am not known for my airtight logical approach to mafia, even when I'm on top of my game I am distinctly the type to just kind of throw my thoughts out there a lot and hope they lead somewhere good

DoomTheGyarados posted...

like when I claimed vanilla I fake claimed a flavor and everything and really sold it. and it worked so well I was lynched day 3 as doctor

You... did this

...what? You are faulting me for not trying to keep myself alive by employing a strategy that got you lynched?

Crescent I didn't fake a flavour because I have no idea what flavour is in the game or anything about Elden Ring. And vague flavours also mean that you have higher odds of stumbling across something vaguely similar to a flavour in the game and I've gotten burned in the distant past for claiming a safe listed flavour that had commonalities with a flavour someone living had and it pissed me off so I'm not taking chances on that shit again.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

panth please explain the text where I can divine that you are poison doctor

I claimed "boring vanilla", gave no flavour without acknowledging I was doing so (when I've not wanted to flavour claim properly for whatever reason I've always either made a joke about it or just said I'm not going to bother). I feel like someone could infer I'm not really vanilla from that. Poison doc specifically is a stretch yes but I did bring up Red right after when there was no reason and it was just reiterating what was known. At that point I was expecting today would play out somewhat like this and I expected I would need to full claim, which is why I did it and I assumed if I was doing it, someone could pick up on it. Maybe I am overestimating scum Chris' powers but I feel the test for vanilla part at least is not an overly tricky thing to figure out and doesn't require anything that can't be backed down from easily enough

Corrik7 posted...

I mean, that actually makes sense as a town play. You don't want to be roleblocked. What doesn't make sense is claiming it now before night phase.

Want to increase my chances of surviving as best as possible. Eating a roleblock (or kill) is not ideal but is still better than being lynched and having that block/kill go elsewhere while Red also dies. I came into this expecting failure to lynch Chris and subsequent being lynched as the likeliest outcome so I played every card I have to try to improve our odds.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

I don't think he expected me to kick off my boots and stab back as hard as I did.

I actually assumed you would just stick to the "can't wait to see you die" type posts and largely brush it off unless people started getting persuaded. But your pushback was more defensive than anything which wouldn't exist (at least not to the same degree) in the scenario where I was scum out to optimize survival chance and just needed to put similar effort into getting you to help nudge the lynch onto someone else.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

So uh, am I crazy or did Panthera not mention the poison at all right away <_<

I didn't mention it until after SBell was dead IIRC and I pointed out his post showing scum expects it can be cured tonight because I wanted it to look like I was bringing it to the attention of someone else. I'm obviously not going to make a big fuss of being interested in it when its relevance to me is that I know my target and don't want to draw attention to myself having anything to do with it.

I think Wash is my favourite but really the original set of Rotom appliances are all great, such a fun concept for a Pokemon. Fuck the Rotom Dex though for never shutting up

DoomTheGyarados posted...

I meant simply don't claim your protection role at all. I would expect town Panthera to offer some resistance if he genuinely thought I was so scummy to lynch a scanner lol

I mean if I'm wrong about you then yeah I goofed hard but I don't think I am and I think after making a point of addressing the Red poison discussion that wasn't substantial at all immediately after my vanilla claim it wasn't hard to see what I was. Besides, I knew my odds of success here were not great, you have enough people on your side and few truly hesitant about you, so I figured it's not going to hurt too much to be honest and hope that I at least eat a kill/block instead of a lynch.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

Like yeah, if he was so sure I was scum dude just calls me a liar so he might have some chance of doing good this game lol

Yeah this a big red flag here since this is what I did. I explicitly stated that my assumption is Chris realized (or at least strongly suspected) I wasn't honest about the vanilla claim (it wasn't super subtle really) and decided to just throw it out to see, knowing he can back off it without issue by saying it was just to try to test/trap me. I feel like Chris knows people are more inclined to read his posts than my walls and is misrepresenting me here to undermine what I said.

Oh, Crescent - I targeted you night 1 because you were my strongest town read, and I don't like to count on scum just deciding to keep you as a distraction when there's not a ton of upside to it. Confirmed town who hasn't confirmed yet feels like an ideal poison target to me so I went with you.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

Well isnt that an unfortunate coincidence if that turns out to be true. I suppose it is true a scum Chris could decide, after one of his members of scum is shot dead, to claim power just for the fun when you were probably already on your way. Of course the truth is that I was just being transparent with my night action.

No, like I said I assume you guessed something was up since it wasn't hard entirely subtle. Easy to spin it off as testing my reaction since it came after I promise to have effort today. Not like that gambit has never been seen before.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

You read what I wrote with Isquen and think to yourself he defended Isquen day 1, let me attack this but if you go back and read how I defended him precisely you would understand the tact I discussed with Crescent was one of prudence not me claiming to actually have any genuine concrete read.

Issue being that you defended the idea of defending Isquen with the prudence line, but your defense of him directly brought up the personal read side too much for that to be entirely true. You covered for and appealed to him personally a bit too much for it to have been purely about disdain for day 1 newbie lynches (especially since it continued to a fair extent into today)

DoomTheGyarados posted...

For example, the Scare lynch was indeed town but you didnt offer any defense of him at the time.

Wasn't here to do it. Like I know damn well you know better than to think this is meaningful, because while it's true that I could go silent on purpose as scum (I've never skipped a whole deadline as scum but I've peaced out at -15 minutes when town went full stupid) it's also true that I can just not be around and you have no way of knowing which is which to base an argument on.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

For one, there is nothing wrong with having people you were or are somewhat suspicious of voting with you to try to lynch people. You keep acting as if this is some weird thing but getting reactions out of people is pretty common Id say.

It's not damning but it is a bit weird to be on board with voting alongside people you think are scum. You can have your opinion change based on how they respond to you sure but the way you went through it and explained it does not add up. Again, I'm not saying you totally derped the game with huge glaring errors, I know you don't make those much if ever. Only that there's too many smaller issues for me to not see through you.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

As for why I voted for you Marth moe or less asked, so I decided to. Sometimes I am just nice like that. Not everything has to be a huge conspiracy, sometimes I am very earnest.

Not everything has to be but everything could be.

PunishedBen posted...

The offspring of death and panthera would be the perfect human as far as knowing when to hit the enter key is concerned

Worth it for this comment lmao

PunishedBen posted...

Also, what's this garbo? So confident I am third party. You even say "barring some scum gambit shit", so you leave it up in the air that I could still be scum, but you don't leave any kind of room that I could be town. It doesn't make sense to me from my actions that a genuine player would be that dialed into the Ben is not town narrative.

? The galaxy brain scum gambit is in reference to Chang who would have to be breadcrumbing a protection claim on a teammate his team is already planning to target with something else for WIFOM purposes in order to be scum. I've reiterated a few times throughout the day that you being scum is too implausible for me to consider. I said I'm glad I tried to bring attention to you and wish I had pushed it a bit more, and said "sort of" correct on you in reference to thinking you're likely third party. Which, yes, I believe. Possible you're town but you being indy is just a lot more believable to me than being town who gets told the existence of an independent and who gets at least one power to hand out to anyone who claims it, which feels like a super-indy gimmick.

Also Chris I see you responded in a lot more depth than I expected, I'll get to it in a bit (and will stick to the parts I find most relevant to address to avoid going into even more hardcore text dumps)

Sheep007 posted...

Okay, I've caught up on the walls of text and I have some thoughts, but first...

Panth, let's say I'm not lynching Chris today and you're not gonna be getting enough others onboard to take him down. I'm a nice guy, I like winning, I don't wanna lynch claimed protection nor a potentially game-winning town player. Who else would I be voting today?

I haven't put nearly as much thought into the non-Chris scum as I did into the Chris matter but I'll try to work through it here. I'm coming down to Ulti, Corrik, Sultan, IGCD, Marth and you. I think the others not in that group are for obvious reasons based on the game and the walls but I can clarify if need be. I'm okay with you living for a day to build a better read than I ever really had on Bat. My scenario for Ulti to be scum was based on a scum Isquen due to his defense of the latter, but now that I've moved off that position I don't have much problem with him. I think I saw you not being a fan so I would be open to hearing a case on this one if you have it, this is a "the one potentially scummy thing I saw now looks invalid" clear rather than a "this is clearly town to me" clear.

I'm going to go out on a limb now and guess I've missed the mark on Marth. Chris has made two references to going along with him on voting me and I think that's one more than there would be as teammates, especially when the latter was just kind of bringing it up out of nowhere as a sort of joke protesting that it led to wall mode. After a night's sleep to clear my head I can see his behaviour towards me fitting more into a town mindset, I do like that he was trying to coax Chris into following him on me even if I don't like the Chris actually doing it part.

So narrowing down to Corrik, Sultan and IGCD. Sultan has felt very on brand to himself and I don't mind his third party meta thing when Chang had already raised the matter. He's been pretty inconsequential though and while I agree with you on his SBell interaction (at least I think that was you) not being likely scum/scum I don't find it fully definitive. Corrik has been pretty weirdly muted this game and kind of content to coast on the early Crescent weirdness giving him something to dwell on endlessly. Originally I figured he was doing his common "This is confirmed, see you tomorrow, actually I'm back now and I'll start doing other stuff more and more" routine but it seems like he's not really moving on too strongly. I could definitely see him being scum having an off game here and going through the motions of replicating the town qualities that make people roll their eyes at him.

IGCD bugs me purely for the fact that the alleged clear people have on him is posting about Ulti, Chris and Crescent being scum supposedly is too much poking the bear for him to do as scum, but the thing is no one has cared about it at all so that doesn't hold water. I don't think it's unreasonable for him to just offer up a bold statement knowing no one will focus on it just to look like he was willing to go there. That said his claim is a bit weird and seems like it has a lot of potential to trip itself up so leaving him for now could be fine.

I guess Ben exists too but it seems like we're just kind of rolling with him as third party right now for whatever reason.

So I guess I'd say you should vote for Corrik, maybe IGCD. Could hear arguments on Ulti. But really you should be voting for Chris. I could be persuaded on those three but Chris is the one I already feel confident on.

Also part of my point here is that it's hard to summarize this because there isn't any one single thing I can point to that is the clear smoking gun and if you just glance through it it kind of feels like a bunch of minor shit, it's only when I really went digging through it more that it finally clicked for me

Leafeon13N posted...

Panth I'm going to choose to not read that and remind you walls like that are the least effective method of communication possible. Can we get a TLDR version?

The tl;dr version is that Chris is scum because his reasoning for various actions just doesn't add up to being from a genuine town perspective. He's explained away things retroactively with reasoning that makes sense but was not used in the moment despite being sensible to bring up, his defense of Isquen is a bit too going through the motions of being newbie protector Chris to be serious, his attitude in general has not been town and his suspect pool has been pretty shitty. I can't exactly sum up every individual point without just writing it all out again, sorry I really just don't know how to spell things out in a way that reflects my thoughts without being long winded.

And this comes to a final pair of points, which is that besides my very first game of mafia ever, town Chris simply doesn't read town Panthera wrong for any meaningful length of time. He has only one time ever had a serious interest in lynching me, and it was because I showed up soon before deadline asking for a summary and admitting I had barely read anything because of how little time I had to catch up. He took that as a sign I wasn't putting in enough effort. But then I claimed a joke version of my flavour and showed how frustrated it was to get shit on literally for actually trying to play without being a perfect mafia god who can read multiple topics in ten minutes and it clicked for him and he never seriously doubted me again. We also b8 special'd onto town and bickered a bunch and he died and Corrik recovered from a bad day 1 to carry scum to victory, but that's neither here nor there. Point is, when I'm scum it's a bit of a mixed bag where I can usually be on his town list for a time before he figures it out and it comes down to whether he dies before he does, but when I'm town he straight up isn't wrong about me. I've only played with scum Chris once before that I recall so I can't compare directly (it was an eternity ago, I think he led a push to make me claim Mayor on day 1 or 2, that was Violin mafia which was like, Best Scum Game Ever for him so obviously I did not catch him there), but that does bring up one other point - I've never been wrong about town Chris either. The limited sample size of scum Chris means it could easily be a false positive where he just naturally comes across towny to me, but in practice I've consistently gotten town vibes from him and at most needed to go back and forth with him a bit. The most I ever went against that was FF7 Mafia where I ended the day somewhat neutral on him but still trying to push a lynch that wasn't his.

That was a long aside onto personal matters that probably don't hold a ton of weight if you're not in my head remembering everything, but it's a big part of my thought process and why I kept getting odd vibes from Chris that eventually led me to looking at him a bit closer and figuring this out. So I wanted to write it all out just to be absolutely totally clear on exactly what I'm thinking and why. I imagine a fair number of you won't read it or will only read part of it, but hopefully enough of you look into it to see why Chris is scum. I know it can sometimes take a lot to get Chris lynched on b8, so I'm willing to put in the work. His perspective just hasn't fully added up on several players. His suspect list has been distinctly sketchy. His arguments for a few players either don't fit together with his actions or just feel a bit rushed through to uphold the image you expect of town Chris. Nothing on its own is damning but when you look at it all together you start to see that there's just too much smoke for there to not be fire.

Oh, and as for Marth, I'm still leaning scum on him but going through things again this morning has me a bit less certain of it. Namely the fact that Chris didn't vote me until Marth kind of asked him to. Chris doesn't need an excuse to vote someone but if one comes up that gets him what he wants he might take it, but I doubt they coordinate it as scum. That doesn't rule out that Marth would simply post that on his own and Chris would think it was good timing for him, but it does make me less confident in that one. Still find his responses to me last night kind of reek of scum taunting town they plan on lynching for having played poorly but my grasp on that tone might be off. That said Sheep I will note that I've covered the issue with Marth and it's more than just that one post at me, he passes "the vibe check" but his actions don't click nearly as well.

I don't want to dwell nearly as long on self-defense, but I'll just point that as Sheep (hi Sheep) notes, catch up walls are what I do. I have literally always made lengthy posts when I return to the game after sleep or work or family or whatever and a lot has happened, and I always put effort into trying to explain my thoughts clearly. It's who I am. Notions of catch up walls meaning scum Panth are incorrect, they just mean I'm on the player list. As for votes, this frustrates me because the truth inevitably feels like bullshit, but the reality is that two things are true about me. First, I'm not known for good reads. Even when I'm playing at my best (which this game hasn't been, because my old best efforts all involve a level of activity that gets me too stressed out and I've never quite found the balance to be both effective and having fun) I've never had a good track record on finding scum, good town Panth generates content and engages a lot but doesn't actually produce strong results. Second, I've learned from experience that pushing on a lead I find does nothing for me. If I vote someone and people look into it and agree relatively quickly, great, but when that doesn't happen I don't change people's minds. Back in the day I would routinely spend days arguing the same splinter and if they ever got lynched it usually had little to do with me. I've never had success actually pushing a case on the same person repeatedly and it's never done more than annoy people that I keep harping on something no one cares about so I've cut back to just making the case once and not following up too much.

Maybe I've overdone that a bit and just need to find a better balance but frankly I don't think it would have changed much here, and I think my Chang, Isquen and Ben votes were all reasonable at the time. Chang was still fairly early and drew a response about his general posting style that helped give me a better idea of how to look at his posts, Isquen was kind of necessary in that you don't exactly have credibility in your game if you tell someone to do something or die and they don't do it and you just ignore them completely instead of trying to lynch them. I don't make that vote and next time I need to force a claim from someone with incomplete info on them, they ignore it and no one questions it because everyone knows I just say dumb shit without following up. And Ben was a guy who went very under the radar despite being fairly active and we know have pretty good reason to say he was deliberately aiming to achieve that, trying to drag attention onto him was a good idea. I may not have been correct (well, sort of on Ben) barring some galaxy brain scum gambit shit with Chang but I don't think any of these were bad ideas. In hindsight I wish I had pushed on Ben a bit more even though I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have done anything.

Lynching Chris is the way to go today. And if you choose to lynch me or someone else anyway, take another look tomorrow and recognize it will remain the way to go.

-----------------

I'll also note that Chris posted about how he wanted to put in a good show because he knows Plum well enough to expect a strongman and would die 100% night 1. Obviously did not happen, but remember that probably the biggest weakness scum Chris has is "why is Chris alive". Getting out in front of it by acknowledging he should die is a way to address it by giving him reason to look into why he was "wrong" about expecting his death. His explanation on day 2 is that scum had little fear of him if they killed Death and poisoned Red and that to him means he was too nice to some people. Now, does that add up to you with how the day played out? Chris expects to die for sure. Chris doesn't die. Chris assumes scum was unconcerned and he is thus wrong about something. And so he...follows MZero, half heartedly ISOs SBell to weak conclusions and goes back to wanting to lynch yours truly, the one person from his previous days suspect list he hadn't found reason to move away from. If he's thinking he lived because scum wasn't worried about him I am literally the last person that would qualify as not having reason to worry about him after day 1 ended.

I'm jumping ahead a bit but the vote freeze announcement is what finally helped things click for me. Chris jumped out to the strongman theory, then explained away his survival, but that alone doesn't guarantee he avoids rule 1. Being on a second mislynch, one that he led even if he wasn't the first vote on it (Marth suspected me earlier in the game but the overall mood on me never shifted to its current state until Chris listed me as one of his big three suspects), and then having the vote freeze? That works out. The vote freeze is too obviously "town clearing" to actually clear anything, but still feels kind of like it should. The game will naturally split on whether scum (even without SBell's flip I think we can agree we'd agree it was a scum power) would use it against town or to fake confirm themselves, and that split makes it cover. Put it all together and Chris has both provided himself a reason to be alive and something he can use as an excuse for why scum is supposedly leaving him alive to WIFOM the freeze issue. He even points out as soon as it happens that it was boring and he was expecting it would be on scum. Basically calling it out to make it look like it's not actually true. Plus, for all the time that Chris spent talking about lynching me, it's noticeable that he didn't vote for me until a few hours before he was going to have his vote frozen. Enough leeway to not look like he was squeezing it in but it ends up where he wants it. Was also around right when it happened, in case you think Plum being late (SBell's role states 24 hours is when the freeze happens, but Plum didn't confirm it until an hour and a half later than that) was the result of being pinged on the scum board to remind him.

And I want to note here that Chris made a big deal of wanting claims from the people in his PoE and voted Corrik for saying he wouldn't claim, but with no sign of me being online he just kind of sat his vote there for hours and joined up with Marth who was also in his PoE rather than turn his attention there at all. Even said at one point that he wanted to see the vote freezing thing tested before really going on further. Despite expecting it would be on scum, not him. There wasn't some need to rush on me - I haven't been super active, but I've been around consistently for a while each day and would obviously show up eventually. I've only gone significantly idle on purpose in one game ever, which Chris wasn't in and it was because I had my entire game picked apart to prove I was scum and I went quiet to avoid any risk of hurting my last scummate, whose position was already precarious (hi Corrik, you may remember I didn't show up upon being called for lurking, I actually lurked harder by disappearing forever, stop building your entire profile of me off imaginary strong town late games that never happened and one single scum game where I was active early and went silent when I realized I'd dug myself too deep a hole to escape). The games I've been scum with Chris in I've been high activity and have never hid from confrontation. As usual this is something that isn't damning on its own, could be a coincidence that he decided to wait on me when the freeze was coming, but the non-damning-on-their-own things aren't exactly on their own at this point, are they?

Now I'm coming to my final point, elements of which have been touched on before hand. And this gets into territory that relates to me and is thus not going to be as clear to anyone else, so I understand if people struggle to take it on faith, but it's important to my thought process and I think there is definite truth here. Chris' behaviour towards me simply hasn't added up as coming from a genuine town perspective. There's several things at play here. First off back when I first asked him for thoughts on Ben he replied by saying it was a bad question because he had just said he wanted to lynch Ben. The thing here is that Chris knows full well what kind of player I am - I don't value "vibe check" type comments highly, I try to analyze even the more gut/feel based reads I get ("calculated" is the word, been used as a negative lately but it's how I approach the game in general) and I like to have more substantial explanations to dig into.

At that stage in the game Chris seemed to be still doing that routine where he says the people he wants to lynch, but he actually means he wouldn't necessarily mind but he's really looking A) for how they respond to it and B) who, if anyone, follows his lead and how/why. This seems to fit with Ben, but it fails with me. He just knows better than to think that I wouldn't be looking for how he reached his conclusion on Ben, both to try to confirm my own read on Ben and to help my read on Chris himself. This extends to a few other comments - like him trying to tell me to unvote Isquen or die. I'll follow the lead of my town reads on certain things, but I *never* follow the lead of a player based purely on reputation when it's something I do not agree with them on, and threats and bravado don't matter to me. A similar comment was made yesterday about eagerly waiting to lynch me (said while not voting me, again he put that off a strangely long time, though I'll admit I'm not entirely sure what the purpose on that is. I would guess to give himself freedom to vote swap around before eventually settling where he wanted to be frozen?) which again, isn't going to achieve anything and he knows it, it's just theater for an empty arena so the people outside think there must be an audience inside getting something out of it.

continued

Turns out I don't have much time, so I'm going to have to keep it brief...just kidding, I had supper for breakfast and ice for lunch, it was 20 degrees Celsius a few days ago and I shoveled several inches of wet snow today, I've had enough time to get my thoughts straightened out.

Alright. I've been going over this in my head a fair bit but needed time to analyze it and make sure I was getting it right because it was a lot of little things that just kind of stuck out oddly, nothing major. But first off I need to address something else, which is my actual role. Hoped I wouldn't have to claim for real but not surprised, would have taken someone having an oopsie. And I see Chris is saying I moved, which is neat. Assuming he's picked up on this and figured it was easy to back down on and call a fun gambit to pass the time if needed. I'm actually poison doctor. Flavour is something called a preserving bolus. I ignored Crescent asking me for flavour last night because fuck if I know how to fake flavour claim from a game I've never played without a safelist to guide me. I brought up SBell's comment about saving Red in the hopes it would look like I was signalling to whoever the (poison) doctor was and thus it wasn't me. I didn't actually know for sure if I can heal on the night it's applied, night after or both because the wording is ambiguous but SBell kind of confirmed I can heal after the fact. My ability is infinite use which is a bit odd but I guess it's to guard against a crazy scum team that holds onto their poison for later in the game. Oh, and I targeted Crescent night 1 because I figured with how accepted as town she was that scum might pay her a visit and I didn't fully trust Chris and if he was poisoned I could potentially cure it night 2 anyway and get a confirm out of it (I was guessing on targets being notified, but that's how it worked when I was town poisoner in Godzilla mafia) assuming it works that way, which is a nice back up. Anyway, on to the meat of this. Speaking of not fully trusting Chris...

##Unvote
##Vote: Chris

I'm going to be covering a lot of ground here so buckle up. First I'm going to look at his defense of Isquen. I already cited how this didn't add up, namely that he was treating it as plausible for someone to go into four day tilt mode over a pair of posts mildly questioning a check in post, one from a person he views as certain scum. The case for town Isquen is for this to just be his personality as it pertains to scrutiny coming his way that he feels is unfounded, thus explaining that he was not tilted but simply getting angry at every individual post sent his way that did not show perfect faith in him. This is a plausible explanation (and at this point I think he is almost certainly town), "he got tilted by barely anything and it shut him out of playing for days on end" is not. Chris is known for his "newbie protector" tendency, where he defends less experienced players and deems himself very good at reading them. I think this is a sign he was emulating that persona to defend newish town Isquen like town Chris would, but he botched the approach to it just a little. It's essentially there, angrer at criticism leads to uncooperative player, but the exact reasoning isn't right and this isn't something Chris often gets wrong.

Continuing on this point is another thing he raised in defense of Isquen, which was a post from the latter about finding abrasive players like Ulti and Corrik distasteful. This was used to explain why he felt Isquen wasn't giving much content, he was just turned off from the game. And yet Isquen himself has been one of the most abrasive players in the game, arguably the most. Not someone who shies away from heated conversations, clearly. Once again this is Chris looking for the plausible reasons he'd defend the newbie town, but just not quite hitting the mark. Being turned off by some of the more aggressive parts of the game is a thing that could happen to a newbie for sure, it just doesn't work for this particular one (I also note Chris not really acknowledging Isquen is relatively new but not entirely new, which exacerbates things a bit). I don't think Chris responds so patiently to a scummate of his that is actively choosing to play spitefully so this points to Isquen being very likely town.

Now I'm going to move on to his actions towards the end of day 1. Chris heads into the final few hours of the day with his top suspects as myself, Ben and MZero. I'll come back to his behaviour directed my way but for now I just want to point out how sketchy a suspect list this is. MZero is confirmed town now. I'm town. And while Ben likely isn't town, we can be pretty sure he isn't on the scum team and thus would look town to scum. Of course Chris would end up jumping onto the Scare train and driving it home, which was of course a town lynch. This is a lot of not-scum Chris is looking to lynch day 1, which is not damning on its own (Chris likes his day 1 adventures) but is yet another small thing going against him because while day 1 is not his strongest point as town, he still usually has a better record than that.

As for the way it actually played out, I already covered the Ben progression before but I'll refresh you. Chris went from voting Ben to asking Ben to help him lynch Scare. Chris had maintained that Ben and I were both scum, then shifted over to wanting Ben to vote with him abruptly, but to vote someone who wasn't me even though I was part of his original targets and viewing Ben as town should have made me look worse for having been the first person to bring any suspicion onto Ben. His justification has changed a bit - the day of he said after he started appealing to Ben that he was leaning scum on him due to not liking his town reads but then started considering he might just be having a bad game, originally day 2 he brought up that he started trusting Ben when he realized Ben wasn't vanilla, then he remembered I had asked him and gave yet another explanation, that being that asking Ben to follow him was a test because he knew how scum Ben would respond. In theory all of these can co-exist but the way they were presented was off. In retrospect the shift between how he explained it on his own and how he answered me directly isn't as bad as I originally thought, the real problem is that his view on Ben shifting with the realization he was now claiming something other than vanilla makes perfect sense in the moment, makes perfect sense to acknowledge in the moment, and yet was not mentioned at the time. Chris' perspective on Ben at the end of day 1 just doesn't quite flow properly and his comments on it afterwards don't suggest it was coming from a totally genuine place.

continued

UnderUrMattress posted...

I feel like you're trying to go after me because everyone else you've tried to go after, you've failed to get.

Scum taunting.

Crescent-Moon posted...

Is Isquen is aiming for the record for most votes on a single person who isn't voted for anyone else?

##Unvote
##Vote: Crescent
##Unvote
##Vote: Marth

Good evening (or bad evening I guess since y'all want to kill me). I'm just a boring old vanilla. My attention is split with other stuff tonight so I just don't have the mental energy for more than a few thoughts and maybe answering a few short questions tonight, but there's something I've been thinking on that I want to actually go into proper detail about and I'm going to be sure to do it tomorrow. This time I will be certain I'm here with plenty of time to go before deadline I promise and I have nothing else scheduled so you can get full effort Panthera for a few hours.

While I'm here why is anyone even bringing up Red again, SBell clearly slipped that they poisoned him. With Ben basically confirmed third party Red is as close to confirmed town as you get without being confirmed. You'd have to assume him as an additional independent to get any other conclusion.

And one more thing since I want to at least get this out in case you guys lynch me while I'm asleep or busy.

UnderUrMattress posted...

Yeah I've convinced myself that Panth is scum and want them to claim asap pronto.

##Vote: Marth

As said before his actions tend to underwhelm, but this really seals it to me. Marth voted me seven hours prior to this. Was coaxing at Chris to try to join him on it. Now says he's finally convinced himself I'm scum. Maybe he wanted the claim earlier moreso than being sure of my alignment, but then if he's convinced now, why ask for the claim? You don't need a claim from someone you're convinced is scum, you need claims from people you're still not fully sure about. He's not truly thinking about this from a scum hunting perspective, just emulating it with scum hunting phrases that don't quite add up.

I'll try to pop in a bit more tonight, if not hope to chat with you folks tomorrow.

DoomTheGyarados posted...

I will say

Why you ever think scum chris would be confused about anything, especially when I regularly play with communities where sub 25% is the norm is...?

Who is this in response to?

IfGodCouldDie posted...

Ok but do you think I was buddying up to her? If so, how does our interaction come across as buddying up? If not, why is it apart of your reasoning as to why I could be scum?

You dedicated multiple posts to talking about how you could generate content from her to try to help her. So yes, that is absolutely buddying up (buddying is not strictly a scum thing so this is not me saying you are absolutely scum, to be clear) in my eyes. As for why it would be part of my reasoning even if I didn't think it were true, bit irrelevant since I think it is but the point is that if you get attacked for buddying up to someone as scum, even if you weren't actually doing it at all it still incentivizes you to distance from them a bit. Perception of what you're doing is what determines whether people will lynch you, not what you were actually thinking when you did it.

IfGodCouldDie posted...

So does this whole thing fall apart based on the fact that I did follow Chris on to Scare and the fact that even Crescent agreed that I wasn't buddying up to her?

Okay checking back I see the issue, you voted for "Scurred". I took this as a joke rather than a real vote. If that was meant to be real (Plum did count it as such I see) that addresses that part, yes. The latter no, I'm not obligated to agree with Crescent, and even if I did not believe you were buddying up to her it wouldn't change that others had suggested you were.

Corrik7 posted...

I do not believe that Chris would so easily dismiss the merits of testing the unlynchable claim day 1 when it was most likely to lead to a mislynch, which it did. I believe he would have understood very well the merits and reasoning that such an idea would have strong appeal to town day 1.

Pretty sure Chris has always been open about preferring more chaotic day 1 endings for more info unless there's an absolute slam dunk on scum.

Corrik7 posted...

I'd appreciate it, if you are by the slightest chance town, that you just let me do my own thing this game. Thank you.

I do like you Corrik but I'll admit I'm a bit unclear on what your own thing is this game. You were big on some confirm yourself meta via Crescent being scum and since I feel like you've had shade for Chang and Chris but haven't had a lot of force behind it. Where's the "I claim every role, my target is confirmed scum" energy?

...I guess that took too long to type for it to still be morning.

*ahem*

Good afternoon

Good morning (barely)

I see SBell got the dead and MZero got the good. Since I see discussion of the poison I want to point out something that stuck out as soon as I saw it

Obellisk posted...

literally not possible, but let's see where this goes.

Just reading up before bed. One thing that I will note is that Ben said he should be saved tonight over Red who is clearly in need of medical attention and could be saved confirmed town.

He's taking for granted that people should know that Red can be cured because he knows it's true in this case and didn't consider it's not universally true.

Now, over to Isquen, you asked me about IGCD. Only a couple of things really stood out to me with him, notably that for all his talk of sheeping Chris he followed onto Ben but then didn't follow onto Scare despite being around to do so. Scare then flipped town so it's obviously not save-a-scummate but it does call his end of day 1 reasoning into question a bit since he wasn't actually following what he said he was. He also called Crescent criticizing he and Ben for following her onto you weird since she should believe her case had reason to be believed, which is a good point except that he had been taking some flack for buddying up to her too much prior to that so it might have been a response. I don't really rate his shade of big name players today, it doesn't actually draw attention when it's so soft and empty (if everyone's response is to brush it off and at best say "well scum IGCD doesn't want that attention", it's clearly not provoking a level of attention scum IGCD would care about). He's in the scum pool I think.

Question for you - you were around between MZero demanding a claim from SBell and MZero shooting SBell. He hinted at having a scan of some kind of scum. You've claimed to gain powers from being on a scum lynch. You didn't vote for SBell, but after the fact bemoaned "missing your chance" (also, what chance did you miss when that wasn't a lynch). Why did you not just vote him instead of making a show of how you wished you had afterwards?

Now, to Chris. I see your explanation of asking Ben to follow you as an in the moment test to clear him, and I raise you the question of why you had previously brought up Ben revealing he wasn't vanilla as the thing that actually changed his mind. It looks an awful lot like when Ben was the topic of conversation you wanted to explain when you started viewing him town but when you remembered my question you didn't realize you'd given that explanation before and came up with a new one.

Also your defense of Isquen is getting weird to me, especially because (drum roll) I'm getting a bit more open to him being town. But the problem is the logic for him being town is really simple and is not what you are pushing. Isquen being town essentially just requires "take my ball and go home, also use said ball to smash every window I see on the way" to be how he handles scrutiny he feels is unfounded. Which is not impossible. But you've focused entirely on him being new and getting tilted by the early pressure. Which I'm going to blunt about - is absurd. He had two people say they disliked a check in post in the first few hours of the game. One of those people he says he is mortally convinced he is scum and is thus naturally going to be shading things without good justification. There is no way someone spends four days of real life absolutely blown up over very mild scrutiny and some standard follow ups where they are 100% certain the person who is most aggressive about it has faking aggression about things like that as a central part of their gameplan.

On to Chang he's rubbed me the wrong way at several points but I want to let him live for now because his way of breadcrumbing reminds me of a much less stupid version of my old infinite spaghetti scanner gag and I like that. More seriously I don't think that's an impossible thing to fake as scum if you know you will target Chris or target no one or be ninja or whatever but I don't think he looks bad enough to lynch with a protection claim. Although he's not the only one since Isquen claimed 1 shot bulletproof (actually I think he's waffled on whether that's what he is by default or if that's what he gets for lynching scum but I don't really want him to clarify that).

I think Marth "passes the vibe check" on feel but in practice I think his actions don't tend to look good. He had an abrupt vote on Crescent and kind of laughed off the explanation after, was around at deadline but didn't do much, and he had a weird comment about his vote being on SBell in spirit but didn't want to actually vote him which is a bit ugly. He has a lot of stretches where his posts feel fine but the things that stick out don't tend to be good.

So right now my mindset is something like this.

Town Cat Tier
Panthera

Very Town Tier
Crescent
MZero
Red

Lean Town Tier
Corrik
Ulti*

Ben Tier
Ben

Suspect Tier
Chris
Marth
Sultan
Bat
IGCD
Chang
Isquen

*Ulti looks noticeably worse if Isquen is indeed scum due to his actions towards him day 1

Of the suspect tier I think Sultan looks best because that "rule of 3" thing Chris found via SBell is weak and their argument to me looked like personal bickering too mild to be forced scum theater (not impossible to be teammates of course but my point is it didn't look like intentional "let's fight it out to look unaligned" content). I don't really have any specific scum points on him besides talking about third party day 1 (but Chang had done it first so that's muted), it's just PoE. Chang looks the worst, Bat looks pretty bad with how lurky he's been but it bugs me a bit that he's so universally considered a good lynch with only Ben really pushing back on it, and Ben is extremely unlikely to be on the scum team.

Actually something does come to mind. Bat, what got you so convinced about Ben being town yesterday? You said were voting Crescent over him because you thought you were picking town who wouldn't die over town who would die. Where did you such confidence from?

Crescent-Moon posted...

Meow

Meow!

Wait so Ben you're saying you didn't know that the rating thing would actually produce anything specific until after day 1 ended?

Crescent-Moon posted...

You want to know why it doesn't motivate scum very often?

Because credibility as a player matters to most of us. Here's how a lot of people generally think about claiming very specific or very powerful roles:

"If I lie about a role like this, then what happens if I actually AM a role like this?"

Yes I thought of this too, you can win with the lie once but then your future claims are much less trusted. Case in point no one believes Corrik claims.

Also someone who knows Elden Ring flavour should make a new topic with an appropriate title.

Corrik7 posted...

Sure you can. And claiming it day 1 as town doesn't make logical sense as it removes a town weapon against scum. Scum can wifom it though as why would scum do it. It has zero drawback to lynch it as town day 1 so why would scum do it? You literally just saw the payoff before your eyes, whether she is town or scum.

In practice I just don't find that "why would scum do it" actually motivates scum very often unless they're already desperate or it's someone like you, maybe Ulti, who loves mind games and trying to be cute. The lack of drawback for town to lynch it just makes it too risky to fake when town will default to it if nothing better comes along.