Alicornutopia

Starts off arguing in favour of true randomisation instead of pseudo-random votes which I disagree with but he's correcting someone else and trying to get them to use a true random method that can't be predicted in advance, which is consistent with his own position.

He explains what's wrong BSS's "let's average some dates together" thing. I took a stab at that too.

He spends a few posts talking about randomisation and how to get random numbers.

He balks at voting for Aestrix though. In hindsight that's about suspicious. It's true that he didn't precommit to voting with the random number generator and it's also true that we can't do worse than random chance, but he didn't have any objections to the rng before it landed on Aestrix.

He did a listpost. Predicted the dragon thing correctly. Lots of roles that seemed plausible at the time, though if he'd been nightkilled it might have been hard to figure out what his role did since he listed a bunch of guesses for different things. I guess it doesn't matter if he's Saasnil.

He doesn't want to start an unnecessary bandwagon so he feels like his choices are Alpha or Aestrix and doesn't really like either one because he was scumreading Aestrix last game. He states intent to vote for Alpha. I think this is wrong here because if you're not sure it is better to vote for someone with less votes because you're less likely to get someone killed by mistake. I mean I guess if you're literally townreading everyone you should flip an 18 sided THE COIN (hopefully leaving off yourself), but ideally you should reread the thread to at least narrow it down some. Early game you're not going to have the correct number of scumreads and none of your reads are going to be very strong, but the categorisation I currently favour is five groups: townread, townlean, null, scumlean, scumread. With an optional extra two: conftown (confirmed by the mod as town, such as kuuskytkolme last game) and confscum (usually only the dead like pistachi0n and tulip but in my 3rd completed game on mafiascum the tracker tracked the third scum to the nightkill and that meant he had to have killed him so he was confscum).

Early game, put everyone into the middle three categories. no one expects confidence early on. then flip THE COIN amongst the scumlean category if you don't have a scumread category yet. if you don't have either of those then flip THE COIN amongst the nulls. but if you can decide which is scummiest without using THE COIN that is better. Still, at any point this is like on those multiple choice tests where if you can rule out answer B and D then instead of a 25% chance of getting it right you have a 50% chance. Just do as much ruling out as you can before flipping THE COIN.

He thinks about Alpha some more and ultimately decides (rightly) that he's innocent and votes for Aestrix instead. This was before Aestrix announced she was the mafia traitor so it seems weird that the mafia would turn on one they thought was her own.

He shared with us his methods for picking kills the previous game.

He recommends people reread Elcenia. He posts to say that he'll post later. So, about this. Doing this now and again is fine and normal but if someone does it a lot -- especially if that's almost entirely all they do, which is not the case here -- then I think it's scummy. In my 3rd game on mafiascum there were a few players who did that and while not literally all of them were scum (one of them was), they were universally scumread for it. I've also seen a few players in another game do it who flipped scum. in my 2nd game as I mentioned both scum were lurkers.

He admits to reading the spoilered posts before posting which I think was a mistake regardless of his alignment. As scum, that's not something you should say in your out loud voice. As town, it needlessly makes you look suspicious, providing a distraction from people who might be scum for reals. That said, I do think scum had every reason for reading suspicion posts and that as town if you're the suggestable type then you have every reason to not read them. I don't know whether jalapeno is particularly suggestible but I do know that all humans are susceptible to groupthink at least to some extent. But I think it was right for him to point out that no matter how much we try to keep our own thoughts separate, we can't trust everyone's thoughts to be pristine and not sheepy just because the thoughts happen to be posted inside a suspicions post. But as to the actual content it looks to be his own? I think he was the first to bring up the connection between wolffreak and MTC, which turned out to be a town connection but he didn't know that at the time.

Like Anthusiasm, he speculated that the Linnipese could be mafia. This is null because nobody was speculating about Rynganaav and probably the mafia weren't speculating on purpose and everyone else was not speculating because they weren't thinking of Ryganaav

After the day's discussion, Jalapeno no longer found MTC and wolffreak and modrony to be particularly suspicious, so he voted for tau partially based on other people's suspicions (bad!) but also based on tau's response to kappa and pistachi0n (fair enough). It is townie to take new information into account as the game progresses. It is scummy to make up your mind and then close it and lock it and throw away the key. (In light of this I still don't understand the hardon for precommitments^Wtying the hands of your future self, but I think we're going to have to agree to disagree.)

Complained about the prime numbers thing. He's right but he should have complained before the test was done. Speculated about demons but we were all speculating about demons at that point.

Considered people not having listposts to be antitown and wanted everyone to precommit to writing one. Thus begins the listpost saga. Explained when prom was. continued jumping on people about precommitments.

Kappa listed the non listposty people as futurevision, anthusiasm, michael, and alpha. Then futurevision posted a listpost, then jalapeno started advocating for us to vote for those four people and a lot of us included those four names in our statements of intent to vote, and at no time did jalapeno mention the listpost futurevision had posted and that we could cross them off our lists already, possibly because he'd also forgotten, but then when we went to vote futurevision as planned (and at the time i did find futurevision the most scummy on that list) he yelled at us which was annoying. Also he made kappa feel bad I think.

anyway then we bickered about precommitments for a while. on mafiascum the bickering stage tends to come a little earlier in the game I think, kind of one the way out of RVS people start bickering about what something means. in my last completed game someone joked that they were scumbuddies with someone else in RVS and it was obviously a joke but I thought it could be a ha ha just being serious wink wink kind of joke so I voted them and that led to bickering about people who can't take jokes and whether joking is scummy or not. We both happened to be town but I do think the "I could be scummy ;)" posts that sometimes happen at the start of the game are made by actual scum who are banking on people not thinking scum would do that because it's early on and people aren't taking the game seriously yet. Like, I saw scum hoping there would be a lot of nightkills on page 1 once.

so i don't think bickering is neccessarily alignment indicative. it's just a someone being wrong on the internet thing and jalapeno was being wrong on the internet but he thought I was the one being wrong so we bickered.

I am running out of steam for this exercise but we're in May already so we're almost there. His opening the day we had so many deaths (May 2nd) was kind of weird.

He didn't like modrony's roleclaim. I also think that modrony might have done better to continue to try to lead the town without roleclaiming but we'll see. I don't think it cost us the game anyway.

He admits to having some cached suspicions about futurevision and decides to go through the thread to see if they're warranted. this is good, but one pitfall to watch out for if you are town is confirmation bias. rereading is still good but if you're not careful you can easily mess up. I think one way to tell the difference is if you can change your mind going through someone's posts, or if you go in not knowing what you're going to find. it can be hard though.

I disagree about the political science reference (that you should vote for who you think will be a winning candidate). That's a sane response to a broken voting system but in a game like this where wagons can change and where all candidates do have an equal chance of winning because most of the time it just takes 1-2 people changing their minds to flip the wagon, it doesn't apply. Do your own homework; the wagon you're wanting hop onto may have been started by scum. you never know.

Clarified for Tamien why people (mostly modrony) were retracting their votes for futurevision. This is sometimes a good idea if two people don't seem to be understanding each other but it can be good sometimes to sit back and wait for someone else to explain their own actions. I am also often champing at the bit to explain why somebody is doing something when the truth is that I don't know their alignment and I don't know why they're doing something, all I know is why I might do the same thing or whether I have previously done something that looked similar. If the player you're defending turns out to be scum, you've given them an easy answer: "yeah, jalapeno had it right, that's why I did the thing". It is better sometimes to make people work for it. Afterwards you can try to help repair communication if it still seems to be broken.

Voted Paradox because he liked pistachi0n's reasoning and because he disliked Paradox's defence.

He says that voting without a reason is suspicious. I agree. It's way too easy for scum to just vote and not say why. it's lazy. Town do it too but it's antitown.

after pistachi0n died he asked for modrony's clarification if pistachi0n were the light in question. shared his own thoughts and speculation. speculated about demons some.

clarified what i was talking about for anthusiasm (with regard to being chelsead last game). same thing here but i was in the middle of writing a longer reply which I published.

defended himself against modrony's push. i don't really know what to think guys my attention is flagging. i've been here all day. took eating breaks at least.

voted paradox. had an interesting point that there could be fewer mafia left (1-3 now, it was 2-4 when he wrote it), because if a mafia was possessed by a demon would they be listed as demon or as mafia in their death scene? But the people who flipped Demon didnt have any ties to Rynagarraav so we probably are in LYLO now. I think it couldn't be known for sure until Tulip flipped Ryngallarranian.

was townreading Tulip and agreed that alpha would have been more blatant. wrote to anthusiasm that shared feelings about michael and that they should talk more if they both survived the night. Did that happen?

something about THE COIN. (sorry i'm really flagging here)

explained why the day started early (he has an exam. good luck on your exam!)

I think I disagree about the everyone has an incentive to vote last thing actually. If we penalise changing our mind then yeah, but if we don't, then town has an incentive to vote first, see how other people respond, and then change their mind based on how that went down. Mafia has an incentive to vote last because they want to sheep the town BUT mafia knows that town has the incentive to vote first and wants to vote first too to seem less suspicious. Anyway it's moot by now; town voted first.

yesssss i am vindicated jalapeno produces an example of why precommitting is bad. i won the internet argument yay. uh, not alignment indicative sorry.

explained the Hallai-Illen thing. You know, in keeping with modrony's "don't be 100% honest in listposts" thing, and in keeping with how badly honesty worked out for alpha and BSS, It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't futurevision who'd become antitown if michael died but visa versa. Of course we don't have time for that because there's a mafia to catch.

made fair and reasonable points about my being silent yesterday. really sorry for flaking but I do think that regardless of my alignment not talking is letting my team down. points out that paradox posted only once today.

went through the listposts trying to figure out who everyone was. I think there's value in doing this now because if we don't get this right today we lose anyway and if modrony's right then the mafia probably already figured things out so we might as well work together as town to have all the information.

I don't know whether jalapeno is telling the truth about being Saasnil but obviously either jalapeno or paradox is scum. If they're both scum then I don't know what's going on, but that's not new. I agree that the rest of us couldn't have worked that out without help though. But my money is on paradox being scum being that's where I'm voting and I'm voted first.