Newbie Student Mafia XIX - Page 19

On January 27 2016 16:11 Eden1892 wrote:
I skimmed the early stuff. It's a bit late and I don't really feel like reading the thread in a lot of depth right now, but I got a few early reads worth sharing.


- Shapelog is obviously town, and the first thing I want to do when I get the motivation to read this game in detail (which will be tomorrow, hold me to this and don't let me be lazy) is to read the sequence of people scumreading him early while it was the "in" read to give, because I'm almost positive scum were involved in that.

If I actually have to explain this (and if you need it explained, that's okay; newbie game and all), Shapelog's posting was very spontaneous and "error-prone" in the right way. As Onegu put it, "talking about someone's meta before they even post" is in fact a poor use of a townie's time, because you don't need to call attention to the idea that you have a way to read somebody based on meta. Just make the read in either direction when the trigger behavior you're waiting on manifests itself (or doesn't manifest itself when it should).

But a post like that is never going to come from mafia. Mafia players don't think to themselves: "You know, I should post that I have a meta read on kush before he says anything. That will make me look more townie and advance my agenda." Because it doesn't. It's empty words.

An excited townie, however, who is trying to get discussion started and generate meaningful data for themselves and other players to read, might be overeager and start talking about this tell before it manifests, because it's meaningful to them (even if it doesn't do anything yet). And if you read the rest of Shapelog's posts, eagerness and excitement are pretty reasonable descriptors of his emotional state as he plays.

So we can either assume that Shapelog is a bad noob scum player, who also doesn't have anybody on his team to tell him that his early posting isn't doing anything to help, and who also doesn't have a scum coach telling him the same thing... or we can just assume that he is an eager townie, as his posts read.


- Onegu is my current top suspect for a few okay-ish reasons:

1. Not recognizing Shapelog as obvious town. He talks about Shapelog's posts being weird, his posting direction as not helping town, blabla... ignores all the evidence pointing to the conclusion I just gave you from only skimming the thread, but then avoids giving a concrete read on Shapelog when the action is all centered on Shapelog during that sequence I mentioned at the beginning of this post (p13-14 I think is the right section, where Pepperminttea posted). I expect better from "tryhard Onegu" since I genuinely view the Shapelog read as trivially simple for an experienced player to make.

2. Unusually rigid policies for what is okay to use/discuss. This one's a little convoluted, but hopefully I'll make it clear. At several points during Onegu's interaction with Shapelog, there's these posts that basically say "You're doing X thing. X thing is A Bad Thing. Don't do X thing." Referring to some aspects of scumhunting that are variably useful: metagame reading (sometimes great, sometimes bad), setup spec discussion (same), self-meta (granted, this one is pretty bad always). And he's not wrong when he says them. Shapelog's attempted use of metagame reading of kush was not very productive, and setup spec posting is pretty bad in this setup (which I'll explain in a bit). And there's even a conflating motivator here -- Onegu is an experienced player in a newbie game, so you could argue he feels an impetus to steer the newbies toward more "proper" scumhunting avenues.

But the lack of explanation bothers me a lot, especially given that the things he discusses are variably useful and not clearly always bad. Like he says to stop posting about blues, because it only helps mafia. In this case, it's true: since the mafia know the whole setup, the only thing that can really come from the town discussing the setup is blues accidentally slipping up and making clear that they have extra knowledge of the game state (and thus outing blues to mafia). (Mafia can slip in the same way, but it's hard for townies to distinguish whether the slip is blue or red in nature, and besides, mafia tend to be much more careful about their known information; so it's rare for mafia to slip and much more common for blues to do it, making it bad for town.)

^^ See how easy that explanation was? 3-4 lines. But Onegu doesn't even do that, he just says "this is bad don't do it." It belies the "Onegu is trying to help the newbies get better" explanation, since you would expect an explanation for why something is bad if you're trying to get better by having people tell you something is bad.

As such it reads less like "Onegu trying to help the townies" and more like "Onegu trying to jam up potentially useful (from the standpoint of getting town reads) discussion under the guise of being helpful to newbies."


- kush already seems several orders of magnitude more invested than he was in Unoriginal, where he was mafia. And he made the point I did about Shapelog, and made it first, while people were trying to twist it into a scummy thing for Shapelog to be eager and talking a lot. Early TR for him.


- darthfoley seems much more relaxed and spontaneous than he was in Unoriginal, where he was mafia. He also had a couple of salient points he made that I've forgotten and don't care to look up right now. Early TR here as well.




TL;DR:
- Shapelog solid town
- kush, darth early tr's
- Onegu scummy
- There's probably a mafia among the "Shapelog is scummy" crowd from p13-14

On January 27 2016 16:36 Shapelog wrote:

Oh yeah without a doubt the logic in those posts are great. Idk maybe it just boils down to a personal opinion.