Newbie Mini Mafia LV - Page 66

On May 05 2014 03:23 dravernor wrote:
I think my top scumreads at the moment are Epishade and sqrt. I am on the fence with bunnies (and Yell0w -still) at the moment, her coming out and claiming she has a role all of a sudden and that she was blocked doesn't sound quite right to me. I already expressed suspicion of her in the beginning, withdrew it, and now it is building again. Is it possible she is mafia and shot to kill one of us, but someone roleblocked her? And if there is a sk (who isn't tamb), they were the one who possibly killed Amiko? I don't really know if that can happen in this game. If so, whoever roleblocked bunnies would surely have presented a case against her as to why she is mafia, and surely would have voted to lynch her? Thus far there has not been any substantial case claiming her to be mafia. So I guess by that reasoning, it makes sense that bunnies is town. It also doesn't make sense that a sk would kill Amiko on N1 since he was providing the most information. Unless the sk knew he was onto something and had something to hide? Is it possible that tamb IS infact sk and shot Amiko, then claimed to be gunning for Yell0w? A pretty clever ploy if you ask me.

My 'most likely' scum list right now, as I said above : Epishade and/or sqrt.
On the fence : bunnies, tamb, Yell0w, maaaaybe Eden
Don't have much of an opinion on yet, but probably town: ritoky, Meat, dfs, ahswtini

On May 07 2014 02:42 dravernor wrote:
I actually agree. I think Meat is town.
I think dfs is town.
I think bunnies might be town.
I think tamb is town.

I think Epishade is scum.
I think Eden might be scum.
I think ahs might be scum.
I think Yell0w might be scum.

If there are 4 mafia and 9 of us, then one more mislynch means GG?
I'm going to have to post my expansion on these points after dinner (family birthday so helping cook etc), and had a super long day. I'm scared of losing bunnies because she has shown she can be useful. Same with Eden, but I am hesitant of him because I also think he might be dangerous. Eh. Be back just now.

On May 07 2014 02:21 dfs wrote:
mtamburini - wasn't roleblocked, which is interesting, because when it was clear that he's going to shoot Yell0w he was blocked, but when he expressed his thoughts on being paranoic and wanting to shoot Bunny he wasn't blocked (instead it looks like the block was used blindly in the hopes to hit another power role, because no one else called their roles).

Simple conclusion from that alone:
Yell0w - mafia.
Bunny - town.
Meat - can be either.

On April 30 2014 05:23 Eden1892 wrote:
##UNVOTE
##VOTE Yell0w

I reread his filter and I don't like it at all. I put my vote down while I was writing this. Here's what I've got.

N.B.: I've only thoroughly read his filter so far, haven't fully caught up in the thread proper. I've read a few things here and there to get context on his posts, but that's about it.

- Initial interactions with bunnies: Upon rereading his filter, I don't like the tone of this post:

bunnies certainly didn't seem to think the issue was resolved, for one. Seems like he's a little eager to sweep aside bunnies's initial prodding. His reaction also doesn't line up with his words before. He called bunnies "insane" for her line of questioning, then is immediately okay with her 20 minutes later.

There's some other stuff that's wrong too, namely...

Please. "I think X is more likely than Y, X clears me, therefore I'm statistically innocent" is a self-evidently terrible argument.


This an agonizing 30 minutes before townclearing her, and 10 minutes before telling Amiko that he thinks she's town. This guy is way too defensive in the face of a bad initial argument from bunnies.

- Worrying Way Too Much About Being Suspicious: I'm of course referring to this post. Who cares? What good does it do to know what rikory wanted to hear? If you're town you shouldn't care. It gets worse in his next post:

So for one, straw men like "didn't know asking questions was frowned upon" raise my red flags immediately. This isn't a genuine question or remark at all. Secondly, again, why is he so worried about what ritoky thinks? This is silly if he's town (as it's distracting from scumhunting with useless conversation) and sensible if he's scum (as it's attempting to gauge why ritoky finds it suspicious in order to change behavior and become less suspicious).

It gets better, believe it or not...

Now he's whining about how bunnies isn't getting asked about the same thing, as though (a) both questions are the same in the first place and (b) in all other respects their play has been identical. I think the questions are similar but coming from different places -- bunnies is wanting to know why I'm not getting negative attention for my votes when people are calling pressure voting suspicious (town-motivated), Yell0w is just whining about how people are paying attention to him (scum-motivated or at best not-pro-town). bunnies has also separately been very proactive, Yell0w isn't (see next point).

- Reactive Behavior: Yell0w hasn't done anything to be proactive this game. Part of it is being on the defensive early, but he's had plenty of time since then to build his own cases or even question people without being questioned first. This hasn't happened as an overall trend. He's hopped on the "Eden is weird" bandwagon, conveniently mentioning that he thought me "most suspicious" last night without doing any questioning either to develop his suspicions into a coherent case or to dispel them. Just like his "suspicion" of bunnies which was dropped in about a half hour (see above), he goes from "Eden was my top suspect last night" to "His behavior was really... weird [...] but it doesn't necessarily strike me as being mafia plays, so I don't know" in about an hour.

Then immediately afterwards he jumps on "Sweetfrost is weird" when Epishade said it. This post is terrible:

He "wanted to add" this factoid about Sweetfrost not reading the thread, but at the same time he doesn't actually do it until someone else expresses suspicion of Sweetfrost. OK. And then this passage at the end is just full of applause lights.

tl;dr:
- interaction with bunnies isn't good at all
- way too defensive
- not proactive or scumhunting at all

Vote Yell0w.

On May 01 2014 09:16 Eden1892 wrote:
Why mtamburini Is Serial Killer

Serial Killer vs Mafia

Specifically reading someone as a serial killer as opposed to mafia on the first day is typically pretty difficult. The main long-run pattern that distinguishes the serial killer from a mafioso is that the serial killer doesn't coordinate with a team; you're only going to catch them purely by scumhunting in their actions specifically, as opposed to teasing them out as hypothetical teammates. On the first day, however, you can't really tease out mafia teammates definitively because you don't have any flips yet. All this to say that on the first day, behavioral analysis can tell us if someone is not town, but not if they are mafia or serial killer, because on the first day their behavioral incentives are largely the same.

Usually, on the first day, that's enough of an obstacle to prevent being able to zero in on the serial killer. However, if the person in question talks enough about mechanical factors -- like roles -- as opposed to behavioral reads, certain divergent incentives can be parsed out which allow us to make the distinction between serial killer and mafia successfully.

I intend first to prove that mtamburini's behavior is misaligned with town incentives and aligned with scum incentives (whether mafia or serial killer) and second to prove that mtamburini's role discussion doesn't align with mafia incentives but with serial killer incentives. This in turn will demonstrate that mtamburini is the serial killer.

Why mtamburini Isn't Town

Buddying
mtamburini has been buddying 27ninjabunnies a lot throughout the game. It started during the joke phase, which is fine enough, but it continued on after bunnies started serious talk in this post -- directed, no less, at him. She calls him scum for trying to establish himself as town leader, which to me indicates drawing a clear line in the dirt saying "the game starts now." Here's a list of his posts buddying bunnies:
- Here he says he REALLY hopes they're both town, invites her to rewatch an epicmafia game. The latter game is completely off-topic and we've moved on from the joke phase. The phrasing of that post is also bothering me.
- Here is some completely useless filler cheerleading bunnies's pressure on Yell0w. Well, not totally useless. He's communicating to us that he saw this going down and didn't feel like commenting on it or developing it in any way.
- Here, my god, what? His point on Yell0w is decent, but why the hell does he need bunnies to hold his hand while he votes for Yell0w? Is bunnies his seeing-eye dog, guiding him to the polling booth so that he can fulfill his civic duty to vote?
- Here he takes up for bunnies in response to Yell0w's question. This isn't too bad and in isolation I wouldn't bother pointing it out. I made the same point. But in combination with these other examples it's clearly revealing a trend.
- Free prize inside, he's buddying dfs here instead.

Talking About Irrelevant Shit
The title says it all, a good quarter of this guy's filter has nothing to do with the game.
- No one cares about his past games.
- No, really, no one gives a shit about his past games.
- I can't tell what's worse, his ability to stay on-task or his music taste.
- Is moose in this game?
- Is moose a codename? Your favorite animal? What does this have to do with the game???
I was fair about this assessment and only took the posts from after the point I previously determined to be the beginning of "serious mode." You can see from the timestamps that this wasn't some isolated event, the guy went on like this for quite some time.

Not Scumhunting
This one might be a little bit of a surprise. He's pushing hard on Yell0w, right? So how can we write him up for scumhunting? Except that if we understand "scumhunting" to mean "an individual questioning or engaging suspects on a substantial level in order to develop his or her own case for killing a certain player," mtamburini hasn't really done anything like that. Let's look at his posts on Yell0w and see whether he qualifies or not...
- Here he makes a good start, buddying of bunnies aside. Yell0w is indeed suspicious for worrying as much as he is about being townie. But he literally doesn't do anything to develop this point any further. Yell0w and I, for example, talked for a few posts back-and-forth about this point and what it means. mtamburini doesn't engage Yell0w on this at all: he never asks Yell0w why he was so worried about looking townie, nor does he respond to anything Yell0w said to me or to others about this same point when we did press Yell0w on it.
- Here he adds "sarcasm" as a reason to lynch Yell0w. Not only is this point independently terrible, he does nothing to develop it further, and he commits the same behavior he says is indicative of scum, then when Yell0w calls him out on it, he doesn't even bother to handwave it, he just ignores Yell0w's point completely.
- Here he says that Yell0w's defense has been "WIFOM" and not-game-related. Please. This coming from the king of off-topic nonsense. And simply handwaving everything someone says as "WIFOM" is utterly unconvincing.
- Here in his role claim he says "I like tunneling its fun." At this point he's openly admitting that he's not trying to find mafia. Tunneling isn't trying to find mafia.

mtamburini is scum because he's been buddying heavily, he's posted a lot of contentless trash and he's not actually scumhunting, just finding an excuse to park his vote on someone and ride out the phase.

Why mtamburini Isn't Mafia

mtamburini says that he claimed in order to dispel any confusion about there being multiple kills tonight, arguing that it's common practice in video mafia. For there to be any confusion about kills tonight, the number of kills in the night would have to subvert our expectations regarding the number of deaths. That means there would need to be more or fewer kills. mtamburini is telling us there will be more (he specifies two kills instead of one). If he were mafia, then he would have no way of assuring us that there's an extra kill, and he would have needlessly put himself in the line of fire on day two because he would have had to argue that the person he shot was separately shot by the mafia. This only works if he's the vigilante or the serial killer.

The second thing pointing to him being the serial killer is his argument about the parity cop. He says that the parity cop should check him first then someone else n2, so that the parity can have perfect information about his scans. This would effectively turn the parity cop into a normal cop, which substantially increases the power of the cop. Doing this as mafia doesn't make sense; as soon as someone flips the wrong way, he's caught. This only works if he would actually scan as an innocent. He would scan as an innocent if he were the vigilante, the godfather, or the serial killer. Even if he's the godfather, though, this is a very bad strategy because the parity cop scanning the godfather as innocent still gives perfect information to the town; if the parity cop happened to scan his scumbuddy next, the scumbuddy would be lynched and flip guilty. This makes a lot of sense if he's a serial killer planning to take investigation immunity, however. In that case, anyone who scanned opposite to him would get lynched, which advances his agenda of killing off the mafia. Furthermore the mafia can't afford to nightkill him n1 because if he does take investigation immunity, he's effectively "upgraded" the parity cop to a normal cop. And if the mafia aren't going to nightkill him, and he's the serial killer, he doesn't have to worry about being nightkilled, so nightkill immunity isn't helpful anyway. He has no reason not to take investigation immunity here.

mtamburini is the serial killer because his proposed strategy regarding his role and the parity cop doesn't make sense unless he's either the serial killer or the vigilante, and he's not town (see first half of case).

mtamburini is the serial killer.

##UNVOTE
##VOTE mtamburini

On May 03 2014 06:51 Eden1892 wrote:
Vote Count

Sweetfrost (4): 27ninjabunnies, Epishade, Amiko, sqrtofneg1
mtamburini (3): MysteryMeat1, Eden1892, Yell0w
Epishade (1): dravernor
Yell0w (1): mtamburini
sqrtofneg1 (2): Sweetfrost, dfs
MysteryMeat1 (1): ahswtini
ahswtini (1): ritoky

Outliers from Group II:
- dravernor
- mtamburini
- Sweetfrost
- dfs
- ahswtini
- ritoky

dravernor didn't do anything to try to get people to vote for Epishade, but I understand he's having internet access and time issues. He literally didn't post for 48 hours after he voted Epishade. I'm not taking him off the list of suspects here but it's too hard to tell right now whether or not he's mafia parking on an outlier or whether he's just being strangled by internet access problems.

mtamburini, as I previously observed a full two days ago now, hasn't been scumhunting and didn't develop a real case against Yell0w. I could maybe find it in my heart to look at him less negatively if he had, after being called out for not scumhunting or making a case, cleaned up his act and worked harder on making his case. Reading through his filter since he acknowledged my post against him, he made exactly one reference to Yell0w since, and that was only to declare him as the target he would shoot tonight. I don't see him being town-motivated here; even if you want to shoot Yell0w tonight, why aren't you making your vote count, and why aren't you trying to find other scum? I think his focus is obvious, he's the serial killer and he's preoccupied with keeping his story straight instead of scumhunting.

Sweetfrost flipped town.

dfs doesn't post much at all, but his style is reminding me of RolandJarvis's from Newbie LIV. It's significantly less thorough, but it's also nothing that I find particularly suspicious right now. And to be fair, sqrt *might* have been a viable wagon if the votes were even a little different. But I don't really see where dfs did much at the end to create that wagon. (cf. me trying to recruit people to kill mtamburini) I need to see more from him because what he HAS said is fine, but he hasn't said enough and I don't feel he tried hard enough to get his preferred candidate lynched.

ahswtini voted MysteryMeat1 because his posts didn't have a lot of content to them, which he felt was scummy. I kinda see the logic to it, but I'm a little confused why he said he "has no scumreads" literally the post before he declares Meat scummy. My main problem is that he says he "can see the case for Sweetfrost [...] and so [he doesn't] want to just jump onto that vote." He then says, next sentence, that the "votes ARE dangerously spread out." He says this while actively contributing to the spread. I'm sure someone's going to say that's too dummy to be scummy / mafia would never be this blatant / etc. but I'm going with the straightforward answer here, he's mafia.

ritoky fits as a possible partner of ahswtini despite voting for him. Why? Because he didn't make any effort to get ahswtini lynched. But his other posts seem to be trying to figure things out, and don't seem to be especially scum-motivated. I'd like ritoky to explain why he didn't work very hard to get people to kill ahswtini if he thought ahswtini is scum, and we'll go from there. This action moves him back to null because while everything he posted before then sounds good, his actions wrt voting don't look good, and I think that in the end you're going to catch scum not by whether their words seem townie or scummy but rather by how well their actions line up with what they're saying. ritoky did argue against both lynches, but he didn't argue in favor of his. If he's mafia, then knowing neither lynch candidate is mafia, he looks good objecting to both while parking his vote on a suspicious teammate.

===

I'm running out of time with this post, but there's two suspects (ahswtini and ritoky) if I die tonight. Tomorrow I'll work on cutting into the people on the major wagons and teasing out more possible suspects and interactions.

On May 13 2014 08:03 Eden1892 wrote:
Some more thoughts:

- I went back and looked at the dfs lynch. The only outlier at day's end aside from dfs himself was ahswtini voting for 27ninjabunnies. Check the votes today, and ahswtini, with a far better chance of getting bunnies lynched... is voting for me, and not commenting on bunnies at all. Please.

- Aside from that, and assuming there is another mafia teammate out there, we know dfs's teammates bailed on him. Thus, what we should not be looking at is when people voted for dfs, but why. People who either built a decent case on dfs, or voted dfs after asking him some questions and trying to discern his alignment, or otherwise showed clear deliberation about the dfs lynch, are town. People who just parked a vote on dfs and peaced out are scum selling out their teammates. Here's a breakdown of everyone's thoughts on dfs last turn correlating to their vote:

Yell0w: Parks vote on dfs, only posts one more time in the thread to whine at me for finding him suspicious. He claims to have "already made a case on dfs," but I can only find posts here and here that even approach the level of "making a case," and in neither instance do they satisfy my understanding of what a case should be. The first post is "well no one will go on my REAL scumread, and I really don't want to lynch dravernor [editor's note: who was scum], so I'll vote for dfs instead." That's not a case. The second post is a decent point about the shady interactions between dravernor and dfs, but not exactly what I'd call a "case." Recall that at the time we only knew dravernor was scum, and dravernor didn't have significant interactions with anyone. If I were in Yell0w's shoes looking at the same data, I would be asking more questions or at least listening to others' posts on the matter; hell, Yell0w himself is incriminated by the same logic, since dravernor didn't significantly interact with anybody and Yell0w didn't significantly interact with dravernor except to do anything in his power not to vote for dravernor the day she was lynched. There's a pretty good case for Yell0w busing dfs for credit here, because he made an appeal to a by-no-means conclusive case against dfs and bailed on the thread for the day after that.

bunnies: More or less just followed Epishade's case onto dfs here. Also fits the bill for "busing teammate," though she stuck around afterward to talk to people and further develop her reads. Of the two I think it's obvious that Yell0w is the more likely scum candidate.

Epishade: Makes his case here. Self-explanatory, this is clearly the result of reasoned, deliberate detective work, not a bus.

Eden: Finally votes for dfs here after looking for reasons not to vote dfs here. If dfs was deliberately bused for town credit, this ain't it. Eden has no reason to do this, having already spearheaded the dravernor lynch, and being on the tail end of a scum lynch doesn't get you town credit anyway. I don't think this makes Eden more town, just that it makes him an invalid candidate for the whole "dfs's teammates sold him downriver" idea.

So the plausible candidates for a fourth mafia, to ahs's third, based on last turn are Yell0w or, less likely but still possible, bunnies. I think it's obviously Yell0w of those two.

- Yell0w's arguments against me are manipulative and wrong:

1) He says he wants to kill me because meat said so. He's ignoring -- and hoping you'll all ignore with him -- the fact that meat said to kill ahswtini first, and that ahswtini is voting for me and was voting for me when Yell0w put his vote down. This is the main thing that's driving me to think that Yell0w and ahswtini are partners and that we have four mafia. If Yell0w were really following meat's reads like he's insinuating he is, why isn't he going in the order that meat said? The obvious answer is that it's LYLO, he and ahs are teammates and he knows that he can win it this turn by getting me killed instead of his teammate. And if he's really town following meat's reads, why isn't he really skeptical about the fact that meat's top scumread is voting for me?

2) He says I'm "not even trying anymore to give reasons to lynching [him]" and then goes on to name the reason I voted to lynch him. Please. He's acting like "not trying to find the mafia" isn't a valid reason to kill someone at LYLO. It's completely valid, I've made the case nearly a week ago now for that and he still hasn't found the time to rebut it satisfactorily. He says he's not mafia because he lead the vote on dfs, when that's demonstrably not true; I've covered this earlier in this post. Most damning to me is the line after that: "I know I didn't post much yesterday, but dfs was mafia and he was getting killed, there was nothing else to say." You're kidding me, right? There's at least one mafia and very likely two mafia still out there, and this guy says there was nothing else to say. This proves to me that Yell0w was just busing dfs for credit. If he were actually town and sure about dfs getting lynched, he would spend the remaining time trying to find the other teammate(s) hiding out.

3) He says I just voted dfs because I didn't have a better target. Yup, after a lot of thinking about the game and finding myself unable to convince people to vote for my main suspects -- and I certainly tried; I thought the fact that the people everyone was scumreading just piled onto dfs was sketch and I pointed it out, no one responded to it -- I went on dfs over bunnies. I think that was an obvious choice regardless of my alignment. I'm not going to argue this makes me more townie, only that it's manipulative to say it makes me scummy. It's null. The choice was too clear no matter what.

4) He says I bused dravernor for town credit. Again, please. Where's the proof of this? Epishade's already addressed this point pretty well I think, you'd have to argue that dravernor was playing her entire game from D1 just to set herself up for me to bus her on D3 because we were scumreading each other the whole game. That argument that can only come from trying to make a retroactive justification for a conclusion you've already adopted. Any honest assessment of my interactions with dravernor and dfs has to conclude I'm obviously town.

tl;dr: read it

If I move off Yell0w, I'm only moving off of Yell0w to prevent vote-splitting. I'm the current lynch target which means all three of Epishade/bunnies/me need to unite our votes. If bunnies and Epishade won't vote Yell0w but will vote ahswtini, I'll move to ahswtini, because I think Yell0w and ahswtini are scum. If they won't vote either, we lose anyway. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.