TL Mafia XXXVII - Page 2

On February 28 2011 09:10 Foolishness wrote:
The LSB - Barundar debate is living proof that there are some people in a mafia game who you try to ignore as much as possible. I am going to make a case right here that we choose to ignore these two buffoons and move on to more important matters.

At one point or another I caught both these players saying "lynch the other, then lynch me if they turn up green". DO NOT BE DISTRACTED BY ARGUMENTS SUCH AS THESE! Let's say we take their advice, and lynch one today. They flip green (which is most likely). What's going to happen is we spend the entire next day debating to lynch the other and some other random inactive (probably icemac, the poor guy). Most likely, the other of LSB/Barundar will get lynched.

End result of all this is probably we lynched two greens AND we wasted two days and nights analyzing at most 3 people. That time could have been spent taking a more thorough analysis of other players in the game. Not to mention by the time the next day roles around there will be about 4-5 more townies dead from night kills.

"But Foolishness, what if (insert LSB or Barundar) is actually mafia! Then we killed a mafia!" Cool, that's really wonderful, but we still wasted two days not analyzing anyone else. Not to mention the ONLY people that want to kill LSB or Barundar are: LSB and Barundar. A quick scan tells me anyone else voting for one or the other is doing it out of policy "Wow (insert LSB or Barundar), I never looked at it that way before! It's so obvious that (insert whoever you didn't insert above) is mafia!" Yeah great job thinking for yourself there; policy lynches are totally the way to play mafia.

Let's take a step back and analyze the situation as a whole. LSB and Barundar call each other, both are confident enough to say "if he flips green lynch me next". Nothing much to say here. What's interesting is we have people on both sides of the argument saying "LSB/Barundar is totally acting in their norm...remember this other game where they did exactly that as a town?" That strikes me as very interesting because it means someone actually did their homework and more obviously, they are probably both town.

The voting thread is even more proof that nobody really wants to kill them besides themselves, as we got people voting for gryffindor and icemac. This also seems more out of policy than actual analysis, as people are basically summing up their vote as "well, I'm not comfortable with killing LSB or Barundar, so I'll just vote this other guy who has been under suspicion all game". Also voting out of policy without providing credible evidence.

(Yes people, policy lynches are bad)

If LSB and Barundar are not acting out of their norm then who is? LunarDestiny and Seraph. I can easily show it just by looking at their number of posts.

LunarDestiny:
Number of posts before game starts: 12
Number of posts after game starts (up until now): 18

Seraph:
Number of posts before game starts: 10
Number of posts after game starts (up until now): 13

For this, I will focus on LunarDestiny, we can deal with Seraph later.

##Vote LunarDestiny

In Mafia XXXV LunarDestiny had 29 posts from start of the game until the end of day two. That's a 50% increase from this game. Sure numbers are kinda meaningless, but it's interesting how much posting he was doing pre game then as soon as the game starts he shuts up. There's definitely something going on with him.

Additional information, as it was brought up not too long ago, at one point yesterday the vote was Annul 6, icemac 5. It was here that I decided I wanted to vote for annul to pressure him more, because I thought he would easily crack and show himself as mafia (turns out he did right before day was over). It's usually my policy to lynch inactives first day, so I felt a bit awkward about voting for him because I hate voting active players the first day or two.

I sent a PM to LunarDestiny, explaining this and asking if he would vote annul. His response (I don't want to take up space posting the actual PMs, just PM me if you don't believe me):

"I spent more of my posts talking about how I hate bandwagon...

However, I can help call Annul out by posting how he is playing like he was in XXXV where his postings are similar since they are not logical."

That's a legitimate response upon first inspection. But here's a collection of posts LunarDestiny made that regards bandwagoning:


If I missed one let me know, but it's clear there's very little indication of "I hate bandwagons!" Of course there's a little indication of this as he says it's a mafia move to ignite a bandwagon, but that's it. Of course what I'm getting at is that LunarDestiny wanted to dodge voting annul. If he didn't want to help me why not just say "i don't believe annul is mafia, let's kill icemac"? Maybe he's intimidated by me, or maybe he's mafia. (He did vote for icemac yesterday, which is kinda a bandwagon in itself, just not as big as the annul one).

He tells me in the PM he will help me by calling him out in the thread. Let's look at some of his posts which are supposed to help me:

This was his post after he sent me the PM. As we can see, he did try to pressure annul, but not in the way he said he would. Take a look at some of his later posts:


Easily seen how he contradicts what he told me in PM. He wanted to "help" me so that I wouldn't become suspicious of him, yet he spends time half ass defending annul. I say half ass because of his reluctance to take an affirmative stance on the situation. He obviously voted for icemac, and made posts such as these:


These posts indicate him saying "hey annul you're going to die unless you do something" and above his posts are saying "guys, we don't have convincing evidence to kill annul, he's not acting that different from his past games". The most important thing to take away from this situation is his lack to take an affirmative stance. On one hand you read this and think, "nah he couldn't be mafia with annul look at him try to tell annul to change his attitude so he doesn't die", and on the other hand you read his above posts and say "he could be mafia with annul because he tried to defend him". LunarDestiny does not want to take sides so he cannot be held accountable later.


SUMMARY:
LunarDestiny gave me an inaccurate PM, and then went back on his word on pressuring annul. He did not take an affirmative stance on what he thought about annul and voted for icemac.

On February 25 2011 06:34 LunarDestiny wrote:
I read about the last three pages and found not very strong reasons that Annul is scum.

I don't see much scum tell in his vote switch from Chaoser to Gmarshall. Annul did justify his vote on Gmarshall on why his plan is bad.

Another thing people keep mentioning is the aggressiveness how Annul is playing which looks like how he played in XXXV where he was scum. The difference is there he was accusing LSB being scum with flawed reasons. This game, he actually justified his vote and did provide reasons unlike the old "LSB postings are spams and have few contributions."

I played with Annul many times before and it seems that he is always aggressive on day1.
XXXV: Accused LSB mafia because he spams and don't contribute much.
Merc Mafia: Claimed medic to me (day vig) and planned to have 100% town victory.
Survivor Mafia (ongoing): After the quick 3 people alliance, he rallied and formed the counter 5 people alliance to take control of the game.

This game compared to other games I played with Annul, I consider that he is playing less aggressive.

On February 25 2011 10:25 LunarDestiny wrote:
Annul, if you don't do anything people will not switch vote. This play style of yours is getting you lynched. While I still believe your aggressiveness is lower compared to other games, what makes you an easy lynch is that you don't reply with logical responses. I hope that is not what mafia is going for.

Also, town players roleclaim regardless when they are getting lynched. That "you'll know soon after" is not general town play.

Can you at least tell us what you observed?

Well, time to vote...
Icemac, you took a huge dive. Care to explained your voting or what you see on the thread?

On February 25 2011 07:58 LunarDestiny wrote:


Looked over Annul's posts:
1) He posts are generally short and don't have much content to them. I do find Annul saying Gmarshall is mafia based only on his circle thing is not convincing.

2) This is the part I disagree. Annul did what most people will do in this situation. He attacked someone whom he believe is mafia and defended himself when he was in huge danger of being lynched. If he didn't go after someone, ok... since not everyone got a mafia read on day1. And his defense on himself is normal behavior.

To determine if he is really mafia, you have to look at the time when he felt pressured and tried to redirect the lynch to another person (Gmarshall in this case) and if there are any support from others. People did pointed out Gmarshall's circle thing is a horrible idea but no one voted for him after Annul's switch.

On March 02 2011 03:04 CubEdIn wrote:
I'm pretty ok with lynching LD, because of the way he played Mafia XXXVI.
I watched him from a scum perspective, and he was a bit of a thorn in our pawn.

This game, however, I barely noticed him.
Still, I expected that if he were scum, he would have become more active once the FoS was pointing at him, but he hasn't, so I'm not completely dismissing the possibility that he's simply being less active for this one.

But yeah I do agree with one thing wholeheartedly: get the lurkers to talk.
Someone in PM told me that people might be lurking due to the fact that they're medics or such and don't want to be sticking out, but mafia already knows who's mafia, so the green/blue lurkers WILL stick out like a sore thumb to them, especially if they don't start talking and town doesn't cast any blame on them. See Mafia XXXVI's Mr.Wiggles and BrownBear for example. At the end of the game I had to guess who medic was, and I picked one of these two. BB was medic and Wiggles was Mason. And it was obvious because town was protecting them. So, yeah, bottom line is, get everyone to talk.

Let's start with... ohN. Are you even part of this game?

On February 24 2011 19:14 CubEdIn wrote:
Ok ok.

I had a bit of time to go through the thread, and most likely I will be a bit more free at work today so hopefully I'll contribute more.
But this is what I got so far:

1. Icemac vs Gmarshall.
I don't think either of them is scum, and here is why:
Gmarshall did play a bit different in Mafia 36, but the reason for that was, he was picked Bodyguard on day one. Which means that his place was safe, at least for the first few days. Nobdy was going to lynch him, even if several people would FoS him, which gives one a nice, safe place in the game.
In this game, however, he does not have that advantage, so I think it's somewhat normal that he's a bit more touchy, a bit more aggressive, but at least he's trying to provide decent information and come up with a somewhat-well-though-out-plan.
Basically, the only problem with his plan is that a bunch of the cells could be mafia-infested, but that can also work to town's advantage if the greens in the circle can figure out that the red is trying to play them. As far as nobody claims early, it should be ok, IMO.
Besides, like LSB said, you can't really STOP any kind of town circle as long as PMs are allowed, so there's no reason I can think of to try to stop town this. At best, this is a more "imposed" cell that any player can embrace or ignore. I don't think it can be considered scummish.

Icemac, on the other hand, is a smurf, so I can't know what he's usually like, but I'm guessing that he played with us before, and that's why he's being overly aggressive in some instances. I don't think that makes him scum though, especially if he played in Mafia 36 and he's got an idea about what GM "should play like", and isn't.
If he didn't play with us before, he might just be a tad on the aggressive side by nature. I don't see why this is considered a bad thing, and I don't see why it's a reason to vote for him. To me, most of the things he said come out as being townish.
Either way, it's not really a reason go wagon him no matter how you look at it, and I'm quite suspicious of the players that ganged him so fast.

2. LSB vs. Annul
These are both quite experienced players, so I don't think you could get a "read" out of either of them. But it is reminiscent of the way LSB started out Harry Potter Mafia (when we were mafia together), and he was attacking RoL all over. Which lead to both of them being lynched and clearing up DrH of accusation for quite some time.
Now I'm not saying LSB is doing this, I'm saying that EITHER of them could be doing this. Or they can both be town or both mafias.
I know this is inconclusive, but my "bottom line" would be... don't go for either of them until there's further proof. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read through the first two days of HP mafia.

3. Ser Aspi
This is the most suspicious player to me so far, mostly based on one post:


This is weird, really weird. Mostly because it came RIGHT after LSB made some decent points against Annul. If he wanted to vote for Annul he'd have had a lot of damn good reasons by just "believing" LSB's analysis. But instead he goes and basically OMGUS-votes Annul. Why on earth would you do something like that?
Now, I'm not saying he's not right about the smurf/experienced thing on Annul, but he basically voted for him because Annul pointed him out for being a smurf, and he openly admitted that.
That's most fishy to me, out of everything I read so far.

The second suspect would be Jackal, but I doubt it's a good idea to lynch him over just two posts (like Ser Aspi too, actually). I don't find it odd that he's not being overly aggressive as usual, because it's very early in the game, but I do find it odd that he made the remark about the PM. That does seem a bit off-character.

That being said, I don't have any idea of who to vote for actually, at least not yet. But I do know one thing: If Annul and/or LSB are not scum, they'll probably be taken out pretty early in the game, so I don't think it's smart for town to lynch either of them (especially not LSB, since he seems to be a target for Mafia early on when he's red, and if he IS mafia, then he has a pretty pro-town way of playing it, so I think it's safe either way).

On February 25 2011 06:33 CubEdIn wrote:
I find it very scummy that someone gets to tell me that I have to change my vote to one of the two (Granted, I didn't vote yet, but let's assume I had my vote on Ser Aspi).

Who are you (Gryff) to tell me I have to change my vote? It's a game. It's definitely not LYLO. I can vote whoeverthehell I want. You disagree? Then try to get my lynch afterwards, but don't try and influence the vote while it's going on without any serious reason.

You think it's scummy that some people can have their own opinion that's not similar to what everyone else says? How so? Is it not scummier to band wagon someone?


That being said, I am going to bandwagon! But not because I don't have the balls to stick to my own choice, but because I found annul's downward spiral to be quite scummy. He seemed OK at first but then started to respond aggressively to the posts, which is exactly what I do when I'm scum.
I still think that it's a bad idea overall to lynch someone with decent experience on day 1. I would much rather have annul as a day 2 lynch or so, but I already explained why I really doubt Icemac is town, and his posts made me think so even more.
Also, RoL's intervention made me think that gryff (my 2nd in line choice, after S.A.) is town, because if he'd be mafia, the mod-intervention would be imba. And I know from when I was mafia in 36 that the mods posting in the thread is 90% to stop the town from taking the fast train to nowhere.

That being said, I sure hope LSB is not wrong about this
##Vote Annul

On February 28 2011 04:46 CubEdIn wrote:
Hi again peoples.

Here's a crappy cell-phone pic of yesterday!
+ Show Spoiler +

Now, to the issues at hand.
Obviously, the most pressing issue is LSB vs Barundar.
LSB:
Mostly, the most trouble I have with this is that, if Barundar is right, we have to kill someone who really pushed a red on day 1. That's all.
We shouldn't really do this. Here is why:
- If LSB is town, and he's as good as people say he is, then he will be targeted by mafia, sooner or later.
- If LSB is red, he already outed a team-mate. If mafia is as ballsy as Barundar says, then they might do something equally strange in order to clear LSB. In which case, it spells good for town.

So I have no idea why so many people are going along with this.
At least give LSB one-two more days and see how the game goes. You can't possibly want one of the more experienced players to die, after pushing a red, based entirely on "he could have played this exactly the same if he was red". True, but that's not a convincing argument. Not for me anyway.

There are just two things that make me not dismiss this completely:
1. Harry Potter Mafia, when LSB seemed very, very pro-town in the thread, and he was scum. It can be said that he was Snape so he might have known he was ultimately town-aligned, but at the time he was in our scum team, yet he played very pro-town in the thread (or at least make it seem that way). This could be a more advanced version of that.
2. The "once he flips red" made it seem extremely confident. Which is a bit weird since it was day one. I don't think it's healthy for anyone to be that confident in day 1.

Barundar:
I don't know if Barundar is red or town, but I honestly don't think it is something that mafia would do.
Let's think for a second here, take what Barundar said:
The thing is, when someone plays as mafia, it’s hard to do analysis because you know that the person who you are doing analysis is town, so you have to make up stuff.
It's kinda hard to make up so much stuff just to try and sink LSB, and even if you do (say, Barundar is red and LSB is town), then it doesn't make any sense because Barundar would die next night for sure, so it would basically be two mafia down just to kill LSB.

So if he is red (and they want LSB dead), it's just a really bad move, because once LSB flips town, he's dead.
If he's town, it's an even worse move, because if LSB is town, then Barundar will most likely get lynched as well, and you will have wasted two lynches, and two of the better players and get absolutely nowhere.

So here's what I'm saying:
1. Think really well about who to vote for.
2. FoS on those who voted on LSB with saying "oh wow that was a good analysis" but didn't really bother to THINK about it and the other possiblities and the outcomes. I'm sure there's at least a few mafia among them who were oh-so-glad an experienced townie is being targeted.
Here are a few examples:

Yeah, that's a good freaking reason. Why would you bother thinking for yourself when someone posted a 3-part-post? No mafia writes that much!


This seems scummiest to me:
"mafia probably just got some lucky snipes" - something of a 'reverse-gloating', being happy with the kills but trying to look very pro-town by saying almost nothing.
"Probably has one experience player and a load of non-experienced players" - umm, yeah, we can tell that based on... ummm.... ?! slip?!
"I like risks however so I think the Bus is definitly plausible" - i like the risk of killing one of the best town players on the 50-50% he's red.
(I'm saying 50-50 because he said it's "plausible", not likely or anything else)

Of course, my whole theory tumbles if LSB is indeed red. But we are basing this solely on the idea that the mafia team pushed Annul to a lynch on day one, which is a massively ballsy thing to do.
I'm not saying LSB is town, but at least give it more time to develop, just don't claim to him or whatever if you don't trust him.

---

As for Jackal, I didn't think he was scum, and I wanted to post a few bits based on Mafia 36 that made me think it was unlikely that he is red, but then he gave up on Gryph and voted LSB based on the fact that it's either him or Barundar, again, being certain that one of them is red, which no player should do so early in the game.

That's about enough for now, as I still want to look over the posts and see if I can find someone worthy of my vote.
But unless something really scummy pops up, it's definitely not gonna be LSB or Barundar. Not this time band-wagon-man!

On February 28 2011 08:02 CubEdIn wrote:


Oh, no, you understood me wrong.
I was going to say that you had some moments in Mafia 36 where you were very pro-town. I found similarities here as well, and I was thinking about writing those in order to back you up as being town.
BUT, your vote towards LSB made me think twice.
I'm not saying it makes you scummy, I'm just saying that I'm not very keen into backing you up anymore, because I very much disagreed with your move.

Also, I was going to post this sooner, but now I'm even more annoyed.
What the fk Kenpachi?
You always make me go WTF when I play with you.
Can you please explain, how did your vote on Barundar make sense? If he was red, would it make sense that two reds die to kill LSB? Wouldn't it be easier to just triple-stack him and get it over with?

And now you're saying "well it could be this or that, we should think about it!".
I don't think you're putting too much into this game, as you only seem to be posting controversial things. I know that sometimes your approach works (like say, voting for a bunch of people to get them to talk), but you also do a lot of things that make no sense whatsoever to me, like voting for Barundar.

The only way that Barundar is scum is if he devised a way to lynch LSB and then come out as town (like hope that a DT checks him and he is Godfather), otherwise, it's a 1-1 trade for mafia which just doesn't make sense, because if LSB flipped green, then the town would 90% sure turn on Barundar.

---

That being said, still have no idea who to vote for.
I would vote for OriginalName because of the reasons mentioned in my previous post (bussing LSB with no explanation), but I was thinking of voting for icemac in day 1 as well, and I think LSB is right about not splitting votes.