WW23: The Heart of Gold

[novice]

Can you clarify this, Novice? Did he have one ability called "hack and slash", or two abilities called "hack" and "slash"?

Trillian had two abilities, named "Hack" and "Slash".

[pocketbeetle]

I do believe I promised a poem!

Ode 10101111000101010011001101011101010001 to pOTATO oF sNORK

Fnorkel purrs to thy gribbling wheezes,
Thy fervulent glorps, thy schmalcendent sneezes;
Fnorkel giggles at the gurpiest of fnorks,
Fnorkelish fnorks, and rapschilious sporks;
The purplified lost souls of poinks.

Thy peeling grawps offend my delicate xylophone of spam,
Yet I find my begurpled soul letting loose a barbaric YAWP
As Fnorkel continues to purr, and sneeze,
At thy defunkdified churgle.

Oh, blood-red eyes and tentacles!
Throbbing, pulsing ventricles!
Mucus-oozing pores, and frightful misquotes!
Pardon my infin/SPLIT/itive, while I recover
From glurfishly poor attempts to poke
Small, fninkel-wrought porks into Lewis Carroll poetry.

Like a summer throughout which all of my
Fninkle-flavored ice-cream-cones
Melt with a glurpssshhhhiiiiiiinkish sound.
While I snorfingly attempt to lick them!

[pocketbeetle]

I'll cut you a deal, Gaspar. If you admit that there might exist rational reasons to suspect you, I'll admit that there is a theoretical chance that you are innocent.

That is why I get personal, zak.

I think you two lovers need to get a room and put all that passion to work.

But I really think Uber is the scummiest player left. So looks like deaths coming for me this night.

"Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infra-red,
How I hate the night."

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night."

In the words of zakalwe, cheer up Marvin!
Who knows, an electric angel could save you while you're counting ram in your sleep.

Just rereading through the previous day also, some real gems in there:

This is because it doesn't bother you at all to mislynch, but it bothers the hell out of you if you feel like you were "tricked." Whatever, we all have our vices. I just legislate for it when I'm scum by killing you.

I know what Serdoa's "dog-with-a-bone" routine looks like and he wasn't on it.

Read any of my old scum quiktopics/email chains - pretty much the whole night 1 conversation is me stomping up and down that we need to kill zak.

I think you ended up giving away more meta tells than you meant to Gaspar.

As usual, whenever you have the balls to put something out there in these games, you just get lynched for it.

Know this feeling.

[uberfish]

Well I don't have an answer because Gaspar could still be tricking me, but I don't think he is at this point. I think if Gaspar was scum I would be dead already because that would mean I pegged both Bigger and Gaspar Day 1. Serdoa actually was pinned on Bigger and not Bigger and Gaspar. I spent the early part of Day 2 trying to figure between Uber and Gaspar as Bigger's partner and then I said to myself, lol, just lynch Bigger first. But I really think Uber is the scummiest player left. So looks like deaths coming for me this night.

Surely if I was scum you'd be already dead by that reasoning, since you suspected me on night 1 and it was clear that there would be an attempt to lynch me on day 2... You can't clear gaspar on this basis, at least not without also clearing me.

[pocketbeetle]

*Puffs out chest to orate, starts mouthing words, then seems to collapse in annoyance. Begins tapping on microphone.*

"canyouhearmenOW CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?" *Something approaching an oily smile crosses his face.*

"Ah, very good!"

Denizens, lower-life forms and general rabble on this ship.
I feel I must congratulate you on the events of yesterday, wherein you transcended your simian ancestry to something approaching the intelligence of a toilet bowl.
I was very impressed.
You wisely left the decision-making to your intellectual betters and were consequently rewarded with a rationalised and correct lynch on one of the fiendish murderers among us.
I strongly encourage you to stretch your little primitive minds around this complicated chain of events (putting me in charge -> correct decisions) and to do your utmost to learn from it.
Anyone wishing to transfer their voting privilege to me permanently may contact novice by shipboard pm.
Doing so will earn you a free food voucher for use in the ship canteen!

*Cue hopeful grin, that slowly fades as no-one seems to take up his generous offer.*

Very well then, I will now update you on the current shipboard situation, with regards to personnel, supplies and course navigation.

• Lewwyn: can be assigned a positive village lean currently.
  Avoided voting for Ryan, correctly voted Bigger when he absolutely didn't have to. Contributions have been helpful and reasonable. If he's a wolf then he's playing a very good game.
  
• Mattimeo: can be assigned a village lean also. Vote for Ryan is a negative, but voting for Bigger is a positive. The abrupt change and coming around to my pov raises a tick of interest, raising a hint of a Mattimeo-Bigger wolf pair bussing Bigger for deep cover. But ultimately Mattimeo didn't have to switch, in that situation the Gaspar vote was all but secured. Why switch from an almost guaranteed LYLO situation, to halving your voting power and needing to survive two more days? There were very few votes on Mattimeo, balance of probability assigns village positive lean here also.
  
• Gaspar: I have chosen to assign village lean also, however several others will disagree with this it seems.
  If so, these people are arguing for a Bigger-Gaspar wolf pair, which I just don't see. There have been comments about the Gaspar-Bigger interactions during this game:
  
  I also don't like the whole Bigger / Gaspar interaction, that reads faked on both ends. Really hard trying to act like villagers. As if Gaspar attacked Bigger and Bigger felt he had to retaliate, leading to Gaspar getting set up for a lynch which the two then tried to somehow get out of.
  Therefore I'll stay with my vote <<Bigger>>. Though if Ryan isn't showing up, I will switch to him.

  Gaspar voted for Uberfish and I think his reason is bad. He hopped off Bigger, but I don't know why. Bigger didn't really write anything convincing. And now Bigger has hopped off Gaspar in different direction.
  
  Computation says Gaspar and Bigger are both scum who distance in first half the day and moved on to other targets now. But nobody's gonna believe me anyway. Everyone's going to jump on mislynch bait Ryan...

  However these were opinions on Day 1, with the aired theory being early distancing followed by drifting apart to vote for others. On the contrary, the two pretty much went into a death spiral ending with both voting for the other.
  And despite this; doing so has not given massive village credit to Gaspar.
  Overall I find the argument unconvincing, and Gaspar's actions and character claim as consistent.
  I'm assigning village here for the time being.
  
• Zakalwe: hmmm, zak zak zak. Overall behaviour and posts have been extremely villagerish, almost too much so.
  He posted one small thing early on which gave me pause for concern when I spotted it, but it's an extremely minor thing that I'm going to keep quiet for now on.
  His contributions have been decent, indeed the Bigger-Gaspar quotes posted above were first highlighted by him.
  On the other hand however, zakalwe's votes have so far been mixed, moving off Ryan was good, but this tunnelling on Gaspar is starting to look mystifying. Gaspar says it is normal, but either way it's now reaching the stage where its hindering the village in my opinion, and nearly convinced me to stay on Gaspar yesterday. The Mattimeo-Gaspar wolf pair was a strong argument at the time, although now has been blown out of the water.
  
• Uberfish: Ahhhh, my favourite little fishy.
  He's still throwing dirt everywhere - even more so desperately since the Bigger lynch, and like dear departed Bigger, I'm left with the reasoning that either he's a wolf or the scummiest villager I've had the mispleasure to encounter (and yes, that is a [sic]).
  So where to start?
  Horrible voting record, ended up along with zakalwe as the only two survivors not voting for Bigger on Day 2, but unlike zakalwe doesn't have the mitigating factor of not voting for Ryan on Day 1.
  Playstyle has been confrontational, has openly admitted he is carefully playing exactly as he always plays as a villager:
  

  As for the wagon against me, I don't see anything to defend as the only explanation posted (by PB) is a description of my posts with no reason as to why they would be scummy or how I am deviating from my normal village day 1 (Hint: I'm not.)

  As such (and as Gaspar has correctly identified), uberfish is my bete noire at the moment and the one I'm most likely to vote for.

The above is listed in descending order of least wolflike -> most.



Running back to earlier Day 1 analysis, Bigger was in the Group A voters, so my assumption of at least one wolf there was correct. Day 2 voting has few clues, merely supports my scum grade list above.
Because of the positive lean being assigned to Lewwyn, this means the possible distributions can now reasonably be narrowed down to 2A or 1A1B.

• 2A would imply a Bigger-uberfish wolf pair.
  
• 1A1B would imply a Bigger-zakalwe wolf pair.
  
• With Bigger-Mattimeo (2A) and Bigger-Gaspar (1A1B) being minor outliers.

Which is more likely? Well according to the scum grade list above, 2A is, but that could be me tunnelling on uberfish.
There is no denying that Bigger has been buddying up to uberfish most of the game, almost unseemly so. However as uberfish himself was happy to tell me:

You haven't played for a while, but there's a lot more bussing/distancing and general scum vs scum action taking place in recent RB WW games than there used to be in the early days.

And while we're on this train of thought, here's an interesting tidbit:
With Mattimeo coming around to my pov on Day 2, there are only two current players who absolutely have disagreed and thrown dirt on my referenced above posts. One is uberfish:

Really not liking PB's information lynch angle here, it's making too many assumptions about scum behaviour, but at least he's posting some actual content. I'll have more time to look into it tomorrow.

And the other is...

3. your formula's.. good grief.. you seem to completely overlook the possibility that ryan AND uber are innocent, and the wolves didn't really care who was lynched?

Besides that.. it is a whole bunch of words without saying much. I think you've gone from a ww playing role playing the bureaucrat to a bureaucrat role-playing a ww player. I consider myself a pretty sharp guy, but I've reread post 108 several times and it just makes my head hurt. why ruin a perfectly good game by bring algebra into it?

109 was better, but not much. that said, I'm not getting any traction, maybe I can find your packmate.

Hmmm.
It may be arrogance on my part, but I'm honestly wondering if I hit a nerve.

• Two wolf votes on Ryan.
  Yes both wolves ending up on Ryan would be pretty dumb of them, but the possibility is there mainly because of uberfish's presence as second lead candidate. There is a possibility that due to the voting, both wolves ended up locked on Ryan and one of them is uberfish. I cannot envisage a situation where on Day 1, a wolf would swap a village lynch for bussing his companion wolf (ie move off Ryan), simply to avoid being together on the same lynch candidate.

Aaaanyway.



tl:dr (otherwise known as "why the hell did we encourage this boring bastard to post?")

I'm concluding that a Bigger-uberfish and a Bigger-zakalwe wolf pair are the most likely (in that order), and should they flip innocent we need to ask questions in the direction of Mattimeo and Gaspar, again in that order.
I'm happy to see that Lewwyn and Gaspar have reached the same conclusion independently.

[zakalwe]

First of all, while your post is inexpressibly entertaining, it makes little sense to talk about who to lynch after Uberfish and me. We have at most two lynches left before the game is over one way or the other.

Secondly, what do you mean by this?

"However these were opinions on Day 1, with the aired theory being early distancing followed by drifting apart to vote for others. On the contrary, the two pretty much went into a death spiral ending with both voting for the other."

The death spiral you're talking about certainly didn't happen on day 1. If you're talking about day 2, considering the following timeline:

Post #124: Lewwyn votes for Bigger.
Post #125: Uberfish votes for Gaspar.
Post #126: Uberfish names Bigger as a second suspect.
Post #127: Mattimeo reaffirms his suspicion on Gaspar.
Post #128: Zakalwe reaffirms his suspicion on Gaspar, and also names Bigger as a potential scumbuddy.
Post #129, #130: Lewwyn asks about a tally, PB responds.

Post #131: Official tally:
Gaspar (3) - Mattimeo, Uberfish, Zakalwe
Uberfish (2) - Gaspar, PocketBeetle
Bigger (1) - Lewwyn
Lewwyn (1) - Bigger

Post #132: Generic defense post by Gaspar.
Post #133, #134: PB says he'll switch to Bigger to save Gaspar.
Post #135: Gaspar rereads and suddenly decides to vote for Bigger. Up until this, he had been set on lynching Uberfish.
Post #136-#141: No movement.
Post #142: Bigger returns and moves his vote from Lewwyn to Gaspar.

Maybe that constitutes a death spiral in your mind, but it certainly does nothing to clear Gaspar. The writing was clearly on the wall here. Three of us were dead set on lynching Gaspar at this point, and you were only willing to save him by voting for Bigger. Lewwyn was off-line with his vote locked in on Bigger. If Gaspar is scum, the best he could possibly hope for in this situation would be to pool his vote with you and Bigger on Uberfish, and try to win the coinflip. Without knowing if there is a town tiebreaker role in play, and while knowing that his buddy would also be fatally exposed if he lost the flip. Of course, there is the alternative of just busing Bigger instead, grabbing a nice chunk of towncred and leaving half the village looking bad no matter which one is lynched. Which is exactly what happened.

Minus the towncred, hopefully.

[pocketbeetle]

Just going to slip this in before the end of the current night.

I performed an ability/action targetted on uberfish tonight.
If someone dies from a night kill, even if it's me, you may assume it a divine commandment that uberfish is 100% villager.
And yes a small part of me will die inside if that is the case.

Cue segue into a quiet night, crickets chirping...?

[uberfish]

LOL. Let me show you how to do analysis properly.

Day 1:

We have a ryan bandwagon forming with Bigger/Matt voting him early for not having turned up and myself and Serdoa joining after he shows up with 1 bad post.

I think Bigger being scum is a pretty strong indication that Matt is town. It's very counterintuitive as scum to do exactly the same thing as their partner on day 1, especially not when there's likely to be a mislynch of this sort (As there's always a reactionary tendency to lynch someone on a day 1 mislynch wagon.)

Now if I was scum, I literally had no reason to join the Ryan wagon at the time I did, knowing that I'd lose town cred for being on a policy mislynch. Bigger wasn't picking up voting momentum. I wasn't suspicious.

It's much more likely that the 2nd scum wanted to keep his hands clean of the lynch in this situation. Especially since bigger certainly doesn't have much town cred at this point.

Then bandwagon forms on me. Very easy for a scum to hop on this since no one's giving much reasoning. And very attractive for a scum to try and appear "pro-town" by doing something to try and "prevent" a Ryan lynch which they knew to be a mislynch.

Don't have time to finish this before deadline. Lewwyn and Zak are scumhunting. PB and Gaspar are trying to force evidence to fit their theory. Serdoa was killed because scum wanted to keep an anti-Uberfish voting block intact and Mattimeo appeared unthreatening.

If I die to scum or an incompetent vig, lynch Gaspar, then PB.

Also: I prevented any electrical actions performed to or by Lewwyn on night 1.
Fake edit: You posted that 5 minutes early, PB

[novice]

The atmosphere on board the Heart of Gold improved significantly after the crew vented their anger by venting Trillian out the airlock. Everybody went to bed with a feeling of accomplishment and a job well done. Admittedly, the starship was now drifting helplessly through space, captainless, pilotless, and running a backup shipboard computer. But at least the killer had been caught and peace had been restored.

The night was tranquil, only occasionally interrupted by distant muffled sounds.

As the new day arrived it became increasingly difficult to find an interesting angle for continuing the narration, but BBC had commissioned another two radio episodes, so the story must go on.

It is now day 3. There are still 6 players left alive. Day 3 ends at 2100 GMT, Friday 3rd May.

[zakalwe]

What... no deaths? That must be remedied.

Any more information forthcoming from you, PB? Or from you, Uberfish?

How exhilarating!