Newbie Mini Mafia XLIX

While he was the first player to post following the start of the game, he's been a sparse participant since. His first post immediately drew suspicion for a number of reasons.

1. Despite its word count it's actually very light on content.
2. The actual suggestions contained within are highly questionable.

Observe:

SagaZ spends both the first and last paragraphs primarily rambling about how people shouldn't play the newbie card. If all he really wanted to do was encourage newbies to post, as he later claimed, he could easily have done so with a far more positive tone. He doesn't sound like he's encouraging newbies as much as discouraging them.

While he does make two seemingly reasonable suggestions, they are obvious and ultimately counter-productive. As the sole confirmed townie in the game, my lifespan is likely to be short. Rallying around me exclusively would simply set the town up for trouble upon my inevitable death. Similarly, lynching players who'll simply be modkilled does nothing for the town either.

So SagaZ' first post discouraged activity and made no useful suggestions. That's enough to arouse suspicion, but not to conclude he is mafia.

That brings us to his second post:

In this post he claims he meant "lurker" when he said "inactive". However, in his first post he clearly stated that his potential vote targets included those who posted "nothing at all". SagaZ is backpedaling here, and making it seem reasonable by repeating the reasoning that undermined his previous position. He also very carefully drops his excuse for the weird newbie-discouraging rambling at the end of an unrelated paragraph, burying it.

"Getting everyone active" is an important step for towns looking to win, but SagaZ doesn't actually have any suggestions on how to do that, and doesn't participate enough himself. He again says everyone should organize around me, also without suggesting how or acknowledging the obvious flaw in the strategy (e.g. I'm a dead man walking).

Finally, he ends the post promoting discord. While nyxnyxnyx' decision to trust Odin could have used some additional vetting, at that point Odin was at the nexus of a fairly chaotic argument, and rallying behind his "let's randomly pick someone and put them in the hotseat to get information flowing" idea would have killed a lot of the useless chatter while promoting helpful discussion. Questioning nyxnyxnyx at this point only served to perpetuate the pointless debate, and promote distrust.

SagaZ third post was entirely inconsequential, and above analysis. His fourth post at least pretended to have substance:

There are a lot of words in this post, but it essentially says nothing. The entire latter half is a rehash of what everyone else had already said about istandwithmitt. The former half mostly repeats his previous misgivings about nyxnyxnyx' decision, adding an extra touch of distrust of both nyx and Odin. No progress towards anything happens over the course of these paragraphs.

Finally, there's SagaZ latest post:


At this point debating with istandwithmitt was utterly pointless, whoever was doing it. I had said as much earlier. Promoting a useless discussion is never helpful to the town.

It is for these reasons that I believe SagaZ has a very high probability of being mafia, and is worthy of a lynching.

July has posted 6 times since the game began (I'm excluding his edit explanation and apology), and he's made a solid point once. Look for yourself:

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=430766&user=July617

The only useful contribution he's made was his response to Odin's confusing RNG plan. At the time Odin's confusing manner of communicating made it seem like the plan was to randomly select someone, lynch them, and call it a day. That ultimately wasn't what Odin was aiming for, but at the time it seemed that way and if July hadn't responded as he did someone else would have.

Which brings us to his other 5 posts. They all say essentially the same thing, "I don't want to lynch anyone yet, let's wait and talk more." If everyone was jumping to conclusions in the first four hours istandwithmitt style that might have been fine, but with practically half our time spent he's still waiting for a sign from God (or is it the Godfather?).

The only player who has contributed less is Balla24, who hasn't posted at all.

Keeping his head this low, and trying to keep people deferring the lynching decision as long as possible, makes it a high probability that July617 is mafia.