Effulgence Mafia Game Thread

[Tamien]

Huh! I'm surprised to seem myself on a suspicious person list. I didn't think I was being suspicious. I guess I'll have to try harder to make my alignment more obvious?

I didn't vote yesterday because I had been going to vote for Ozy, but became less suspicious of them when they roleclaimed Darcy. I didn't vote michaelblume because it was very close to the day ending and I was busy, and I was worried that he might come in and defend himself and I wouldn't get back to unvote in time. Since there were already enough votes in his favor to put him in the line of fire, I figured it was safer to not vote in that circumstance (so that if he did defend himself in time, it would be easier for the collective to backpedal). Maybe this was the wrong choice - I hadn't considered that low voter turnout leads to mafia voting blocs. I plan to vote today but I'm not sure who to vote *for* yet - I was most suspicious of Alphabeta yesterday, but I believe them about their Addy roleclaim and now I'm trying to decide who I think is next most suspicious. I'm still pretty suspicious of michaelblume, since he never actually defended himself. I think Alphabeta defending him means he is likely to have a neat power, not necessarily that he is innocent.

In the interests of using our Addy most optimally, I would like her to reveal what powers she has available to her. (On an unrelated note, genders get kindof weird when referring to people by their template and their template has a gender inconsistent with theirs.)

My current trust ordering (least-to-most): michaelblume, jalapeno_dude, no.head.chicken, futurevision, tau, DanielH, thatwasademo, Paradox, pistachi0n, Shoal, BlueSkySprite, Ozymandias, Alphabeta, Aestrix, kuuskytkolme, Tamien. (I think that accounts for all current players?)

[Thatwasademo]

Using crypto for anything other than objective intel is basically useless, as far as I can tell. If you have an unfounded opinion, you should be sharing it with the town immediately, since it will tell us more both about you and whoever you formed said opinion about.

That said, I personally can't make heads or tails of this mess.

It is interesting that I don't appear on no.head.chicken's list at all, but perhaps that's simply an artifact of being inactive yesterday.

[Paradox]

In the meantime: would those who didn't vote last night (Tamien, michaelblume, BlueSkySprite, no.head.chicken, ozymandias, thatwasademo, futurevision, and Paradox) care to explain why they didn't vote?

I thought we should kill someone because of the arguments presented earlier in the thread but didn't know who so refrained from voting. I hadn't considered the point about people not voting allowing the mafia to dominate the vote or I would have voted for someone. I'm planning on voting in the future.

ugh, fine. unvote for now. I will keep trying to form an impression of you, mister.

vote Paradox. come help us make an impression of you

Ooh. In that case, I'll wait for a better reason than my own curiosity.

And also, since I guess I do want to participate in the voting I'll vote for Paradox to perhaps elicit some sort of communication from them.

I've been inactive recently because I've been really busy with assignments/tests for college and helping with marriage equality campaign things and so I haven't had time to post. I should (hopefully) be less busy from tomorrow on though. I thought michaelblume was probably a judas (http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Judas) but it seems I was wrong about that. Alphabeta's statement of their powers has shown that most of what I thought was true was incorrect so I'm not sure who to vote for. I am tempted to vote for Shoal until they withdraw their vote because that seems the quickest way to get them to withdraw it but I'll hold off for now.

[Shoal]

Shoal, why is it that you don't seem to stick to any sort of opinion besides people should talk more?

Because I can't get a read on half the players, and I feel like if people talked more then I could get a read on them, or at least try to. Or that even if I couldn't, maybe some others could.

Also I have noticed that I tend to be swayed by others arguments but voting for whoever anyone else seems to be voting for isn't a great strategy (in fact, it plays right into the mafia's hands), and we haven't killed any mafia guys yet. It hasn't escaped my notice that when I've thought someone was suspicious (modrony, andais, alphabeta), I was wrong. So, for now, I would prefer to try to get the quieter people to talk more. I think that we're not going to get a town win if we don't talk to each other.

So, I definitely want to vote for someone, so that the mafia doesn't control the vote by default. I don't want to just vote for whoever everyone else seems to be voting for because as far as I can tell that's the same thing as not voting, but worse. I seem to be bad at telling the guilty from the innocent, but I think the mafia are the ones flying under the radar because we haven't found any yet.

I don't think it's suspicious to be busy offline or to have a life, but if we don't hear much from a person, the result is that we don't have much to go on about whether they might be guilty or innocent.

Anyway, if everyone is talking more then people who are better at this than I am might pick up on things.

[jalapeno_dude]

I thought we should kill someone because of the arguments presented earlier in the thread but didn't know who so refrained from voting.

People (including me, earlier) have made this argument several times. I'm now convinced that, if this situation applies to you, the correct thing to do is to explicitly abstain. That way we can explicitly separate people who are actively following but have decided to be quiet (who are fine) from people who have dropped out (who are a detriment to the entire game).

[pistachi0n]

Explicitly abstaining is a good way to signal town alliance, but it also gives more control of the vote to the mafia.

[Paradox]

I don't think it gives them more control than just not voting which was what it was being suggested as an alternative to.

[pistachi0n]

No, it doesn't give more control than if someone just didn't vote at all. I mean it gives the mafia more control than they would have if the townies voted to kill someone. We are not going to defeat the mafia if we don't vote, whether or not it's explicit abstention.

[jalapeno_dude]

No, it doesn't give more control than if someone just didn't vote at all. I mean it gives the mafia more control than they would have if the townies voted to kill someone. We are not going to defeat the mafia if we don't vote, whether or not it's explicit abstention.

I agree with this--but I still think abstaining is better than not voting at all, for the reasons I gave above.

[Aestrix]

I agree that abstaining is better than not voting at all, but I also think it's important for us to pay attention to the tactics used when people vote. That is, when they post their argument for killing someone.

I mean in particular, when someone votes to kill someone when there isn't a lot of time to argue or for the person to realize they're being voted against to defend themselves. That actually happened with michaelblume on the last day, the majority of voters abstained, and with little time to spare a vote started to kill him. The way this tends to work with us is - someone picks a person, many people vote to kill them, the person shows up eventually, and then we decide the vote from there. When we cut it close to the end of the day, we cut out the ability for the person to defend themselves. So I'm of the opinion that we should jump aboard the vote to kill train earlier in the day instead of waiting trying to wait for everything to be revealed, strange as it sounds.