Effulgence Mafia Game Thread

[pistachi0n]

I would like to change my vote to Lynch AndaisQ. I am suspicious of anyone who says they are "totally not the killer" so flippantly.

[Aestrix]

Of course for reading people's alliances and such non-random lynch is better than either of those. That said I'm going to vote for the third person who voted no lynch, because from my experience the third person in any given wagon wants it the most. Vote: Aestrix

You know, silently I figured I'd be the first that people would attempt to lynch, or at the very least a major target for murder during the night. I feel kind of vindicated. And vaguely unsettled.

[Tamien]

Going to sleep now. What I've read of mafia strategy in the past few hours does seem to indicate that the the killer's winning strategy is to stall, sow indecision, avoid naming names, not suggest any decisive action, and generally try to prevent lynchings, since lynching is the only means we have for stopping them. I don't know how many of the players may be on which side, so our odds are probably not good if we simply pick at random, but I am now somewhat convinced that we should not shrink from lynching simply because it's the first day. At the same time, I have not yet been convinced by any of the accusations so far. So, I will level my own. I vote we lynch tau, on the grounds that they have not yet shown up to defend themselves.

[tau]

Hey, I hadn't realized the game had started yet! That's hardly fair. I just got here. Also, hello everyone, I'm tau. And I really don't think lynching someone just to lynch them is a good idea. If we start killing people at random here then we're actually doing the killer's job ourselves. So far as I can tell we don't have any good information to go on, yet. It's far more likely that we're going to kill an innocent and make our game one turn shorter, giving the killer once less chance to be lynched than if we wait for them to reveal themselves. So far as I can tell (and I should probably go re-read the thread) no one has done anything suspicious enough yet for us to think it that they're any more likely to be the killer than any other. I also say we go no lynch for just this first turn.

[kuuskytkolme]

You know, silently I figured I'd be the first that people would attempt to lynch, or at the very least a major target for murder during the night. I feel kind of vindicated. And vaguely unsettled.

Oh hey, we have our first appeal to emotion in this game! But it's the first day and there's much you can say about my vote, so I'll let it slide.

giving the killer once less chance to be lynched than if we wait for them to reveal themselves.

How are we supposed to catch them if everyone just introduces themselves and votes for no lynch?

(I'm sorry, I have an aggressive play style and first language that's much less polite than English is, I'm trying to tone it down.)

[Shoal]

If tau didn't realise the game had started yet, how did tau happen to reply less than a half hour after someone wondered where tau was?

[tau]

Because luck (good or bad?). Because I woke up at 8ish and Alicorn sent me a message at 1:20 AM last night to tell me that the game existed and I was asleep then and did not see it until I awoke.

And of course we can't catch the killer if everyone just introduces themselves and votes no lynch -- but if we kill someone that isn't a killer the first round, then we will have one less chance after the killer has made a move (therby revealing information about themselves) to vote based on information we have on the killer. The choice is: vote now and kill someone at random, or: vote later once we have information so that we can have a greater chance of killing the killer. If we lynch someone now, we lose a day, which means a wasted vote. It's much better to save this death-of-a-person for when we can make it count.

...but actually what we should be doing is continuing to talk and not ending the day early, since talking will get people to reveal more information about themselves, and thereby the killer will reveal more information about themselves. So I take back my vote to keep the day from ending early.

[Tulip]

I also withdraw my vote.

That pro-lynching argument is pretty convincing, yup. I'm not convinced of the value of day-one chats as a source of evidence on who's the killer—in my experience, it has worse-than-random chances of actually landing on the right one, since they have the the greatest motive to blend in with the crowd—but I do agree that not lynching would have been a tactical mistake, even given the current absence of evidence.

[DanielH]

@AdaisQ I note that you didn't make your vote bold. Are you attmpti g to trick us somehow, make us think you're voting differently than the mods do?

@Everybody
Of course Mafia opening theory exists. Why did I not consider this possibility? I'm going to look it up.

@Pro-lynchers:
I'm not convinced by your arguments. They seem valid, but I was previously convinced by the no-lynching arguments, so all that tells me is I need to do more research and thinking. In any case, you won't succeed in lynching anybody if you all vote for different people.

@Deities
Is this going to be plurality voting, or can we have a better voting scheme? I support approval voting (select one or more options) because it's just as easy to understand, about as easy to work with, and gives the lynchers here the ability to avoid splitting the vote. In any case, how will ties be handled?

[Nemo]

It is plurality voting.

Ties will be decided randomly from among the tied candidates. "No Lynch" counts as a candidate for this purpose.