Elcenia Mafia Game Thread

[modrony]

@ shoal
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't that a scenario where there that guy had a single vote on someone and mafia tried to quickhammer but failed?
Since there are no quickhammers here it doesn't really apply.

Can you come up with a scenario where changing the vote at last minute would be advantageous here, where it is unlikely that all the people in your previous wagon will have time to follow?

I am seriously considering making that precommit if I find a candidate I consider good.
I know it would be rude of me to force you all to my candidate, but I know I am town and I do not know that about you guys.

[Shoal]

Unofficial vote count:
not voting: 7 (anthusiasm, jalapeno_dude, michaelblume, modrony, paradox, shoal, tamien)

Navigation:
Morning 1
Evening 1/Morning 2
Evening 2/Morning 3
Evening 3/Morning 4
Evening 4/Morning 5
Evening 5/Morning 6

yeah, he voted, one of them voted, he realised what was happening and unvoted before the other could vote. since it was happening in real time, both mafia had their vote on the other townie and then he and the townie could pile on to the scum for the win. It could have been another townie voting with him but he figured out that it wasn't, maybe something the scum said or maybe just the timing of it told his intuition something was up.

We don't have quickhammer but we have a deadline that we all know about. we all know that any votes we cast now are safe: us town know that if we're wrong we have a little while to change our minds without fear, and the mafia know that they can vote each other now to change their minds later or they could start voting town and then switch around later or whatever it is they think is a priority because they can change their votes later too. I think that favours us. But like let's say we're voting someone and we're wrong. and at the end of the day something about how the votes were piled on into the arrangement they ended up in seems off. Some intuition tells us that things are going wrong. If you precommitted to not change your mind then you've tied your hands and essentially lost the game (which will be decided between the demon and the mafia probably, unless the demon targets mafia and gives us some extra time). Don't precommit. Just plan to not change your vote. Leave the door open to change your mind if neccessary.

Think of the monty hall problem actually. You start out picking door A. at some point door B is revealed to be a goat and now you have to choose to say with door A or to switch to door C. you switch. This applies both on a macro level (if you picked someone back on day 1 of the entire game, at the very end it makes sense to take everything that happened in the intervening 84 pages into account and change your mind about them) and on a microlevel (if you pick someone today and decide to not take into account any future information then you're probably tying your hands.)

The mafia know who the town are. They probably don't know who the demon is but they'd probably rather hunt for the demon amongst the town than amongst themselves when they don't know who it is so we can assume they prefer to lynch town than themselves. they don't have to take into account what happens over the next 3 days because it doesn't really matter. they know who town are, they have probably been paying enough attention to know who are good mislynch candidates. if we all precommit now we're just sealing somebody's fate.

I really feel that this precommitment stuff is like a "scientist" who generates a hypothesis and then refuses to take the outcome of his experiments into account.

My last lylo game on mafiascum, we tried to use all the town brains we had (knowing someone would be nightkilled that night) to work out the last two remaining scum as best we could. we failed at that but we tried really hard. anyway a townie voted, then I, another townie, voted the same person, because we were both sure and we both knew each other were town and we knew it would take 3 town votes because we didn't think mafia would help, and then the scum voted, saying "Otherperson tomorrow". and i knew. it was too late to unvote because he voted last and the game was now over but when he said that, I knew he was scum and we'd made the wrong choice.

And without the quickhammer mechanic, if we get that sinking feeling at the end of the day but before the countdown runs out, we can do something about it.

[modrony]

My point is that if we 'get that sinking feeling' it is very likely too late to do anything about it.
Not everyone will have time to switch votes and town loses.

I am not suggesting precommitting now.
We should give people time to present their case offer evidence etc.
If people have actual evidence of town alignment now really isn't the time to hold it back.

[modrony]

I would like to hear a concrete example of a situation where there are no votehammers and where votelocking would do more harm than good.
jalapeno_dude? You understand precommits. Any ideas?

[modrony]

Making the suspicions is really taking time. It's kind of important to do it correctly and it's stressful.
Here is a partial list. Since there is now an almost equal number of mafia now I am starting from who I consider innocent.

I agree that we have probably passed the last expiration date of spoilers, but I will put in a box just in case someone would like to not be influenced while making their own.

Current strong townreads

---

michealblume:
- connection to and vouched by a confirmed town player. I consider this very strong evidence.
- if he is mafia anyway we actually aren't in LYLO and will get a second chance tomorrow.

anthusiasum:
main reason: http://alicorn.elcenia.com/board/viewto ... 730#p12648
She is right there. Her core reasoning for voting for me hadn't changed. But she changed her mind for feelings reasons.
Feelings don't need to be explained.
She chose to change her vote when she could have possibly killed me without arousing suspicion.

That leaves me with 4 candidates 3 of whom are probably correct.
If any of these would like to offer actual evidence of being town that would make my life a lot easier.

[Shoal]

i think we agree that it's best to be as sure as we can be long before the deadline hits. the only disagreement is whether we should go the extra step to penalise changing ones mind. I can see it going either way, really. maybe when the game is over we can go back and look at how often the last minute mind changers were town. it's true that I haven't seen a LYLO situation without quickhammers so I can only speak in hypotheticals but I think I'm right anyway. it's also true that i still think precommitments are detrimental in general not just in mafia but especially in mafia.

day 1 people who changed their mind in the last half hour: tamien, kappa (town), me, aestrixkinda (she changed her strategy not her vote by coming out as the traitor), tau (town), modrony. that's 3 town and 3 unknown.
day 2 modrony, futurevision (town), modrony again, me, pistachi0n (scum), kappa (town), bss (town), tau (town), modrony again, futurevision again (town): 4 town 1 scum 2 unknown
day 3 nobody!
day 4: nobody!
day 5: nobody again!

so uh i guess i misremembered. or i remembered the scramble on day 1 and 2 a lot more vividly than the calm and orderly day 3-5.

I think calm and orderly is better than mad scramble but one of the scum never took part in it and one did.

can't we have the best of both worlds, though? calmly and orderly deciding how it's going to be and then trying to do it but listening to intuition at the end just in case the intuition comes in time?

preview-edit will respond in a bit, need to make some dinner

[Tamien]

If people have actual evidence of town alignment now really isn't the time to hold it back.

does this apply to the person who targeted BSS on night 2? i notice you don't have them on your townread list, but maybe you're trying to avoid identifying them?

[Shoal]

so i think asking people to make cases about themselves isn't the best tactic because I think it's lazy. If I'm scum, why take my word for what I say? If I'm town, why should i spend time investigating myself when I could be investigating the rest of you? but it's LYLO and I'll honour your request.

But here's where my posts start (ordered by author so you can see them all at once)
http://alicorn.elcenia.com/board/viewto ... &start=620

I am using boxes because believe it or not I am trying to summarise my play and I think my summary is longer than my actual play history. I think it would have been better to read stuff yourself and then ask me to clarify the parts that you didn't understand. I'm not good at summarising so I ended up explaining everything. Hope it helps.

Day 1

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I start out by encouraging semirandom voting. This is the game introduction favoured on mafiascum because it generates something to talk about. They used to do random question start instead where they asked everyone kind of role they liked playing best but it turned out that random question start favoured the scum more because people would sometimes say things that made it easier for scum to hunt for powerroles instead of saying things that made it easier for town to hunt for non town.With random voting start you have something to talk about right away. The idea isn't that the lynch should be random, but just the first few votes are random and then people start commenting on other people's votes and then they go on from there. Usually nobody gets more than 2 votes on them in RVS and then everyone moves on. It's usually *not* everyone piles on one person and then we wash our hands of the day and go home!

I'm not very good at reading people's behaviours in (semi)random vote start yet, and I think it's one of the things that will be different on each site because we have our own culture here and the things that scum are more likely to do are going to change over time: as certain behaviours come to be publically considered scummy, scum will intentionally try to do them less and less, until eventually the only people doing them are newbie town, and then after a while the behaviour is considered a town tell. But if we play a lot of games together and we all get to know each other pretty well and stay current with our own site meta, we probably will be able to read people based on their entrances.

So anyway I started off the game by trying to get people to interact enough so that we could start scumhunting in earnest. I spent a few posts explaining my thinking and my reasons were for my suggestions and trying to interact with people and then I started scumhunting myself, for example asking PDV why he seemed certain about the 3 deaths per night thing, and I think I actually was onto something there because despite what he said I think he was counting the demon deaths and the lynches as well. He said something about last game with 3 scum but last game we had a mechanic that let only one of the kill each night.

I also started out advocating for people to get avatars and insisting that people distinguish themselves in someway so that we could tell them apart. It's easy for scum to fade into the background and I was having trouble Tamien and Paradox apart because at least one of them didn't have an avatar at the time. I knew that if I was having trouble then at least some other people would be having trouble too, so I spoke up. I made an avatar for anthusiasm and as a direct result of that I was able to remember all game that she wasn't futurevision, a concept I was a bit fuzzy on last game I think.

When BSS argued for a flawed algorithm for randomisation, I called her on that.

I went along with the RNG thing even though I would have preferred RVS because it didn't seem worth fighting over and I didn't think it worth fighting over. I think in hindsight this is going to be the last game we do it, though. It doesn't add anything to day 1 and I think it takes some things away from it. Using true randomness actually defeats the purpose because the motivation is "because the RNG told me to". How do you scumhunt when everyone has identical motivations? You can't. Semi random is better: some of the reasons will be light hearted and fun, some may seem forced, maybe that means something, maybe it doesn't but we can talk about it anyway, maybe after that we can talk some more!

I engaged in setup speculation like others did.

I voted the person I was suspicious of. As a townie, my powers are my voice and my vote and my vote is my main tool for pressuring people and letting them know I'm serious about my concerns about them.

I made a listpost. I think next game I'll argue against them but I did think that if we included enough entries it would be ok. I was wrong about that. I did include 17 roles in my list all of them with plausible roles that I really thought had potential to be in the game. Some of my guesses were close, though I thought shrens would have the dragon mechanic. I noticed a few people in later listposts copied some of my ideas, and I was flattered by that but now I think it was a mistake because it degraded the quality of future list posts: if someone wrote the exact same thing I did that meant it probably wasn't their role.

When I claimed something was true, I usually quoted what I was talking about to make it easy to follow my line of thought, and when I didn't remember where it was exactly I went back later and dug it up.

I suggested the "people might have requested the specific roles/alignments they got from the mod" line of attack but nobody really went with it and it seemed that most people actually didn't say to the mod "hey i want to be [town/scum/chelsea/a demon/a fluffy kitten] this game" so that was a dead end, but I took initiative along that path anyway.

When someone I was questioning replied to me, I considered their information and was willing to change my mind and pursue other targets. I tried throughout the game to keep my mind open and to consider everybody.

I argued for having discussion and reaching decisions well before the deadline to make sure everyone had time to defend themselves on day 1, because I remembered last game how europe would go vote and then go to bed and then america would get online and defend themselves but europe was asleep and then the day ended and europe would wake up and think "oh i would have changed my vote if the person hadn't defended themselves at 4am when the day ends at 5am". It's better this game with the days ending while we're still awake but the principle of "vote early so there's time to change your mind" is one I advocated.

I participated in the suspicion boxes thing, which may seem like it's not in alignment with my previous paragraph but a big part of who I am is that I often ask myself if this is the hill I want to die on and I think a town that bickers over every little thing is an unpleasant town to be in, so sometimes even when I think I'm right, if I don't think there's active harm in what the other person is suggesting then I'm willing to do things there way once. After we've seen how that went, if I still think my way would have been better I can try to speak up later.

In this case, however, I did think the suspicion boxes were a decent compromise for those of us who have trouble having our own opinions and who tend to have other people's opinions by mistake. I know on mafiascum in my first game another player had to ask me 3 times what I thought because I kept saying what everyone else was thinking instead. The idea behind the suspicion boxes was that we'd essentially give up the first day of the each gameday to try to do our own work by ourselves and then we'd spend the next day discussing our thoughts and voting early so that the final 24 hours could be less frantic.

In hindsight, I think it would have been better if we'd each agreed to spend the /night/ phase doing our own homework. 48 hours to reread the thread, write suspicions lists, updated thoughts, write down questions we wanted to ask people and then right out of the gate on the first day each phase we could start voting and talking and posting our suspicions lists (without the boxes) and discussing in real time. It's only now in hindsight that I'm thinking the suspicion boxes were handicapping us and I don't think it cost us the game or anything but I do think the more discussion the better and we DID each have 48 hours to spend thinking for ourselves. So that is something I'd suggest for next game.

I joined in with the speculation after BSS defended alpha and maybe I should have filtered some of those thoughts and not posted them but I have trouble sometimes telling whether I'm stating the obvious or not (in both directions: I'll explain something that everybody knows because I don't realise it's obvious, or I'll blurt something out that I shouldn't have because I thought it was self apparent and I'm arguing from first principles.)

I thought it was important to evaluate whether BSS was telling the truth about her claim about alpha or not. Last game we took everything people said at face value and we didn't consider safe claims or anything like that. I did decide pretty quickly that BSS was telling the truth but it was important not to be too credulous.

I was hoping a light might be the solution to the demon problem but i was wrong I think.

I found Aestrix' self defense to be weird and that's why I voted her. It was really wishywashy and that didn't seem like Aestrix so I was suspicious. And then I did have to wander off and didn't get another chance to post that day.

Day 2

---

I started day 2 being just as confused as everyone else but I channelled that into action and started asking the previous game's killers what method they'd used last game for night kills. I thought maybe it would shed some light onto why Daniel in particular was targetted. But it seemed like everyone last game just tried to find someone who wasn't connected to them and Daniel hadn't really interacted much day 1 so that was a dead end.

I speculated about Aestrix like everyone else did. I thought she might have been a commuter but I don't think that anymore.

I posted my suspicions in my suspicion box. They were genuine.

I was the one to propose the unofficial votecounts be included on every page and I participated in quoting them whenever I got there first. This was protown because it made it easier for everyone to know what was going on and it also provided a history of voting patterns which can be a snapshot of the game if you know how to read it (some people swear by it.)

I engaged in both townhunting and scumhunting. Townhunting is an important thing that scum find hard to do well because they know who town are already but it's important because if you can get enough people together that you are pretty sure they're town you can openly vote as block together. Of course, if you try to create a "town voting block" artificially you can get into trouble because scum would love to insert themselves into a town voting block but if it happens naturally it can be a good thing. Like: modrony has someone that they're pretty sure is the doctor. The doctor in turn is probably also fairly sure modrony is Leekath. The two of you know each other's identities even though the rest of us doesn't. But you two can subtley work together in public, trusting each other to some degree. Not trusting to never be wrong because we're all going to be wrong from time to time, but trusting to have town motivations behind the things that you say.

I tried Tamien's list thing for a while but it ended up not being my thing. I'm still working out what my thing is.

I advocated poking futurevision so that she would know she was being wagonned the first time. Mafia would have preferred she not have time to defend herself.

I always explained why I was doing the things that I was doing, for example I was voting futurevision on day 2 because I thought she might be the demon.

I switched my vote to PDV after futurevision defended herself and this was right because PDV actually was a demon.

I missed one of the day changes in going through these and i'm not quite sure where but everything is in order anyway.

Day 3 and 4

---

I spent the night phase working on my suspicions list so I was able to post it right away in the morning. I remarked that the hasty scrambling was doing us more harm than good. It seems that it did subside after the first couple days which I didn't notice until now, so I'm feeling more confident about our ability to work together this LYLO and not hasty scramble at the end; it seems less inevitable now than it did earlier in the day.

I suggested that we look at who wasn't voting PDV the previous day because I thought at the time that the mafia might be in league with the demons. I no longer think this but it is interesting to note that pistachi0n wasn't voting PDV, and neither was tulip. Neither were modrony or anthusiasm but modrony's probably town, and 4 of the non PDV voters did flip town, so that was a dead end.

I still thought listposts were a good idea if they were done right because I thought if we'd known more about PDV's powers after his death it might have helped us. I now think that was a dead end.

I took a stance against precommitments and instead wrote that I intended to vote in a certain way instead of precommitting. I didn't understand that precommittment meant you'd not be able to change your mind because that'd be tying your hands. But I wrote:

" I currently intend to vote for futurevision, michaelblume, anthusiasm, and/or Alphabeta, sequentially, removing those that have since composed listposts from the pool, switching to somebody from an entirely different pool of suspects if they should seem more scummy, and if one of them composes a listpost I'll vote the next in line. But I am hoping I won't have to vote for anthusiasm, who I'm townreading on her own merits."

and then people still jumped on me for changing my mind despite the "switching to somebody from an entirely different pool of suspects if they should seem more scummy". Anyway then I did vote futurevision who I'd forgotten had posted a listpost before I even wrote my statement of intent and nobody had pointed it at out at the time.

I had a disagreement with jalapeno but I think we came away from it understanding each other better.

I continued voting sensibly and giving good mafia playing advice.

Day 5

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I continued posting my suspicions and talking to people throughout the day.

I took up advocating for voting earlier in the day again.

I admired BTC for figuring out the MTC-is-a-demon thing and spent time trying to figure out who the demon jumped to. My efforts weren't successful in finding the demon but they were successful in getting people to talk and interact more.

I posted my suspicions. I asked other people questions about their lists so that I could understand where they're coming from. I think almost everyone has made lists almost everyday so clearly the mafia can make lists too and it's important to ask people questions to find out whether the names on the list are just names they stuck on for no reason or not.

I shared my experiences from previous game what it was like to have my alignment change to show what signs people should look for in the demons. Yes we need to focus on the mafia too and that is the most important focus but if we happen to find the demon instead that's good. and some of the things i said about how the demon might behave is true of how mafia might behave: in my last newbie game both mafia were lurksacks.

I was voting paradox all of yesterday but then I liked their post and I could see townmotivation in what they wrote so i switched my vote to my next biggest scum read. I was wrong about futurevision though.

I was wrong about Tulip too; modrony thought alpha might have been suspicious of Tulip and I mentioned that last game he had been really obvious about the Chelsea thing. I am now not sure what to make of alpha -- I guess we'll find out post game if he had a guilty on Tulip or an innocent on michael.

I continued to advocate against mad scrambles.

toDay

---

I asked modrony for clarification on something she said so that I could understand her better.

I talked about what LYLO was like in my previous games.

I continued to compare and contrast these things for some time.

I made a countdown thing.

I checked up on my work and realised that we only had 2 mad scrambles and things were orderly after that. I realised I was wrong and admitted it publically.

I wrote this big long thing summarising my contributions to the game.

tl;dr: I have contributed a lot to this game. I have posted everyday. I have not been a town leader (we had two townleaders and I felt that was enough. Too many cooks spoils the broth.), but I was a town mediator. I sought to understand every person in this thread and figure out where they were coming from. I scumhunted. I speculated about the setup. I provided citations for stuff I was arguing. I explained my positions. Sometimes I stuck my neck out and argued for my own positions. I haven't played perfectly and I have learned a lot both from this game and from other games I was playing simultaneously to this one so I feel I'm a better player now than I was on day 1. I had fun. I hope you guys are having fun too.

I have been wrong about people periodically but not as often as last game and I think I've been right about theory stuff.

[modrony]

Whoa shoal.
What I meant was 'I am iron man' or providing verifiable info and such things.
It's going to take a while to really read that but I will.

[Shoal]

ohhhh, sorry I misunderstood. Anyway, I'm not iron man but I have been paying attention and contributing in my own way.