WW 31 Game Thread PARANOIA

[zakalwe]

Nice catch, Lewwyn. I also agree with your sentiment about not wasting the day, though, so I'll vote for Novice, since Merovech looks like he's offline, anyway. I thought Catwalk was a strange target yesterday, and he stayed on him for quite a while.

[zakalwe]

Ummm... wrong name. Novice

[Gazglum]

Nice catch.

Old Harry, I've been reading through your posts and not loving them. Your votes were:

Azarius (no strong reason)
Lewwyn (lack of content and 'too happy)

Azarius posted some more today - nothing groundbreaking, but nothing suspicious either, so since I'm not finding novice scummy or 3rd party (I think he just wasn't paying a lot of attention at the start) I'll go for Lewwyn, who is posting up a storm, but they mostly seem empty (pot meet kettle...) and is just a bit too happy, as if he's rolled scum and is really up for a game.

I don't like raising Lewwyn as a case late in the day, because there was no way it was suddenly going to start a dogpile on him at that hour. So it's avoiding a comment on the ones which have a real shot at hanging, though you did also say Bob deserves a bit of a scum tell.

And the reason for voting Lewwyn was weak - he's posting a lot, but not enough content, and too much happiness. Well, frankly Old Harry, I would like to think of myself as pretty darn happy, and you didn't jump on me! And I also accused Zak of lacking content, but Lewwyn had already voted Azza, Novice and you, and was commenting on other cases.

Then you jump to the Robot on post 221. That's another way of avoiding taking a stance on the lynch. It was an interesting idea, but several people pointed out that it seemed pretty clear the Robot was not a target for votes, and you kept your vote there even though you said,

I'm nearly convinced, I'll move my vote again when an official tally confirms your view.

But you didn't. At 3 minutes before deadline or so, you reiterate the robot vote.

I don't like the lynches on Catwalk or Azza and I'm sort-of stuck with my dumb robot-vote as that gives us information while the other candidates I like (Lewwyn, Sunrise) aren't going to hang.

That's the first time you mentioned Sunrise I think, and there's no mention of Q, though Q is suddenly in the running.

Then you vote Q.

Voting Azarius > Lewwyn > Robot, without strong reason, seems like a way to avoid doing real scumhunting. I can't fault you for your vote for Q, because I did the same, but the hesitant way you tried to push him over the line wasn't super inspiring.

What is it you don't like about SUnrise? And why did you wait so long to shift your vote from the robot?

[Lewwyn]

I'm going to vote novice as well.

I have two top suspects in OldHarry and novice. As long as both are being discussed and on the block I think we'll be good.

[Qgqqqqq]

Serdoa, read novice's posts and tell me what you think. He only has 16, 3 of which are post totals. Most of them are quotes with one-liners. Basically it should not take you long at all to read them. Tell me if you can tell who he suspects and if you can get a read on him.

Agree strongly with this, I've had a bad feeling on novice for a while.

I dislike our local tyrants latest post too much to move, however. While I accept that this is a bad time for posting for him, he spends a decent amount of text excusing his behaviour and with roleplay about his new position that the lack of content remains telling. What he did post of relevance is this:

If Serdoa tried to save Azza near the end of the day I'll buy that as a scum tell, given Azza's revealed faction.

Which is...really non-comittal really. I mean, four other people were also voting for the second to top candidate, and two others joined at a similar time, so why Serdoa? And the way you put it sounds a lot like you're trying to back out of making a stance, with the 'if' and so on. I understand you haven't had much time to catch up but still. And while you mention following Lewwyns lead, you still didn't give a vote, so I'm not sure if there's even any purpose to that. So yeah, I definitely think you deserve the pressure for now, until you present something better.

[zakalwe]

Lewwyn how do you feel about us both role revealing, we are dead either way.

Maybe it's too tinfoily, but I also can't help reading this and thinking that it's part of some gambit where Ryan first gets wounded and then takes that as an excuse to claim something that he's eager to claim. At any rate, I'd rather hear some current thoughts about the game than a claim.

[Lewwyn]

Gazglum you're hitting most of the right notes. I have also archived a post on OldHarry I'll post a bit later. But you did miss one thing:

Azarius posted some more today - nothing groundbreaking, but nothing suspicious either, so since I'm not finding novice scummy or 3rd party (I think he just wasn't paying a lot of attention at the start) I'll go for Lewwyn, who is posting up a storm, but they mostly seem empty (pot meet kettle...) and is just a bit too happy, as if he's rolled scum and is really up for a game.

Note my bold here. Why does OldHarry mention novice here? Why does he bring him up in a post where he's voting for me? I mean the explaining away his moving off of Azarius is a classic wolf move. But his connection to novice here is a bit weird and overreaching. Given that I suspect both of them independently of each other. This stands out to me.

Care to explain OldHarry?

[zakalwe]

Thanks for reminding me about Old Harry's robot vote, Gazglum. That really didn't sit well with me, either.

[Lewwyn]

Lewwyn how do you feel about us both role revealing, we are dead either way.

Maybe it's too tinfoily, but I also can't help reading this and thinking that it's part of some gambit where Ryan first gets wounded and then takes that as an excuse to claim something that he's eager to claim. At any rate, I'd rather hear some current thoughts about the game than a claim.

Also thought about that, but I have faith that it will resolve itself tonight. I'd be glad to hear what Ryan has to say, and not have him be a lynchbait distraction for the day. In other words I advocate not lynching him today.

[novice]

Serdoa, read novice's posts and tell me what you think. He only has 16, 3 of which are post totals. Most of them are quotes with one-liners. Basically it should not take you long at all to read them. Tell me if you can tell who he suspects and if you can get a read on him.

Well let's address that.

I agree with Rowain's point against Serdoa:

Please explain why they are the top suspects Rowain. It seems for me they are in your mind the top suspects because they

@Serdoa Those 3 are special because they made a run on Qg during the last 10 minutes which would have saved an important wolf.

And what has catwalk to do with that? I don't see anything that makes me believe that he is scum. So far he has played exactly as I'm used to from him. Why should I vote for him? And the same is btw true for Azza. I actually did believe that he was his normal self. So, I go for the one I believe is a wolf.

The bolded part is the strange thing: Because in one of your early posts you said:

@Azza

I don't think your assessment of MJW is correct. He does plays that I find insane quite often, but in the few last games we played on RB with him involved he did never come across as crazy imo - his ideas and plays yes, but not he himself. He seemed very aware of the situation and how to use it best. Imo he showed pretty good play - not insane ramblings. Therefore I don't think he needs to maintain some "insane persona".

And honestly, I think you should know that.

Here you tell Azza directly that his MJW--thing is weird. But at the end of the day without Azza changing a slight bit he suddenly playing as expected? The bolded sentence is one reason why I voted Azza.

Lewwyn characterized Serdoa's defense quite well, in typical fashion he accuses his accusers of misunderstanding.

However, I agree more with Catwalk and Zakalwe on Spacetyrantxenu:

I agree with zakalwe you're too eager to play the newbie card.

Asking whether you need to survive to the end to win feels fake. I think Spacetyrantxenu is more clued in than that.

Q defends with walls of text.

Your description matches how I often play as village, at least as soon as I find someone I find worthy to get hunted. Can't really agree that that should suddenly be something that just scum is doing. And if it is not, if it is really only something that might be applied by scum or village, depending on the person playing, than you using it to put suspicion on catwalk makes you yourself suspicious.

The two tactics are close, but I feel they are very different in terms of the degree involved. Examining someone's tone in how he approaches a player in great depth is very different from taking a players posts that have little relevance to the game and using them to essentially bulk out the case without contributing to it.

Together with your aggressive tone (which I really had more than enough in our last games) I feel quite compelled to vote for you.

More importantly, I would like to apologise if this is how I have come across in this game, or indeed previously. I'm aware that I can appear aggressive and have been trying to avoid it for the last few games (as an aside, could you point out to me when I have been trying to change for a while and didn't think I was bad in WW 27).

I agree with this; Q does indeed have that play style as scum, which is impressive, but he shouldn't automatically assume that other scum play like that. I think it is quite widely agreed that in general, they don't. We don't know what Catwalk's scum style is, but I would expect him to have a much harder time building cases than usual, and I can't say that I've seen that here.

I agree that this is a concern, but while I wasn't sure how Catwalk plays his game, I still see that particular post was an attempt to bolster his case, and his responses have not satisfied me (especially his attempt to persuade me not to go after him because he was investigating, which rang all sorts of alarm bells).

Having looked up your posts to find out who you were voting, I'm not very happy with your vote (for Catwalk), and by extension mine (for Catwalk). Once again I find Azarius has managed to point out something significant amongst all the noise in the thread.

My problem was with the MJW vote and then dismissal, I didn't see anything particularly wrong with your posts (although I would definitely disagree that most posts have been fluff).

I'm leaning Catwalk currently, as a read-through of the first half of the thread makes him sound very odd to me. For example, his case on Old Harry is extremely grasping at straws, including as it does a criticism of Harry's opening joke post, and his interplay with Lewwyn is also rather odd. I don't think I've played a game with Catwalk before, however, so I'm hesitant to jump to conclusions, especially given how lynchable he looks. Another that I can't help but find scummy is Spacetyrantxenu, but I'm not sure why that is, possibly his meandering writing style is reading like scum fluff. I dunno sorry.

Q, you yourself were voting for Old Harry shortly after Catwalk did, you even cited his reason in your post. Why is his case now grasping at straws when you agreed with him before? (Which as Ichabod said is half of the game, especially so early in it imo.)

I didn't say there wasn't any merit to the case on Old Harry, my problem was in his grasping at straws in order to embellish it into a case. Old Harry's made a couple of weird posts, one of which caused me to vote him for a while, but the case that Catwalk made takes those as a foundation to a full-out case. On review it struck me as very much like what I often do as scum - choose a target who has made a few suspicious moves and then spin everything they've done against them, thus providing a lot of content and reads which help blend you in on a lynch. In particular, as I said above, the part about Old Harry's opening post, which is just ridiculously over-interpreted.

I really don't like how Q stuck to his Old Harry vote but then did a 180 and sided with the Catwalk voters once Ichabod's theory had caught on. I find his explanation unsatisfactory.

Qgqqqqq

I don't see myself as 'siding with' anyone, or for that matter doing a 180 and switching sides, for the simple reason that I don't see there as being sides here. As I said above, I found something suspicious in one of Old Harry's posts (his non-committal stance on MJW), this was explained and I moved on. Later I re-read the start of the day in greater detail and found his case much more reach-y then my initial skim had noticed. (I will admit that Ichabods post contributed to my re-evaluating whether Old Harry would be an easy case for scum to make).

I'm not a fan of either leading .candidate atm, Qgqqqqq is more suspicious than either. More to follow, just want to get the vote in now.

I would like to hear more about why this is, as I don't remember seeing any posts explaining this, especially as you seem very ready to repeat it.

We find ourselvse in similar situations then Azarius! Looks like the Zak train has also stalled out at the station. Like Melbourne's public transport network this week.

Let's see what happens if i vote Qgqqqq

Would you care to elaborate on this now that the rush is gone?

I'm going to regret this aren't I: Qgqqqqq

Same as the above two. I'm not begging that people change their opinions, but I would like an explanation now that there's time, especially as Azza's alignment makes this run seem suspicious,

If you thought you were going to be lynched, why didn't you vote Azza in self defense?

I thought this when I came online for the first time since my last post before the lynch, which was between Bricks two posts. I most definitely would have voted Azza had it been online, I'm no martyr
Since this seems an obvious plug for me as scum not being willing to vote for one of my partners, I'll address that here. Azza is a valuable player to a scum faction, not just because of his vote but also his role, which is especially powerful in this setup. Because of that, I would expect some sort of run in the last hour to protect him by whatever players were online. Because I know my alignment, this leads me to suspect those who made a run on me in the last 10 minutes, especially Old Harry and Gazglum. But even if you're assuming that there were two scum on the block, why would scum not attempt to push a third candidate (Catwalk or MJW) up beyond us, especially as it would consolidate on my (scum) inactive vote. There is a possibility no scum were online at the lynchtime, but this is rather unlikely and I would expect to see at least some movement on the non-Azza/I train if you think there were two scum on the block. As no such thing happened, I feel this points towards my innocence. (As I write this another possibility occurs to me, that scum attempted to bus scum-me over Azza in an attempt to simultaneously gain cred and save a valuable role. I know this isn't the case, but I don't really have any defence against it, apart from that it predicates on knowing a high proportion of the scum at this point in the game, which is very very unlikely.)

I still think Q's 180 was the closest thing to a smoking gun on day one. (I don't like the taste of humble pie.)

I've already written on this, but I really don't see what I did as as big as you're presuming, even if you don't accept my explanation. Certainly not enough to warrant being a 'smoking gun.' (I initially went to check post 180 to see what I had written that was so bad )

Good job guys. I'm really surprised it went down like this, I was sure that we'd go back to lynching newbies and lynch baits in a bigger game.

Some other things we seem to have forgotten Already a few people saying that the ones who voted for Azza are now cleared. I used to be naive like that, then I played mafia. I've been playing since WW25, and scum have sacrificed scum in the following games since I started playing: WW26, WW27, WW28, WW29. It'd surprise me more if there actually weren't any scum on Azza.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some bussing going on in there, but I'd say those players jumping on Azza near the end receive a lot of cred, especially Lewwyn and Mr. Bot. You're also misrepresenting what happened in WW26.

Jowy, did the scum faction make a sacrifice on day 1 in either of those?

Two on D1, one on D2, one on D5. And that's just the scum who died Anyway it's just to illustrate the point that we shouldn't clear anyone just off the back of this. It's really no big deal for scum to sacrifice one of their own if one of their own gets in trouble. They're not worth saving, and in fact the scum could actually gain more than they lose if they get a good cover out of it. We've seen scum here in RB voting for each other and sacrificing each other nearly every game, if not in all of them. It'd simply be wrong to clear them. That said, we do have plenty of other targets so we can and likely will lynch non-Azza voters next, but I'd rather speak up now and correct the errors we're making than stay silent and get killed before I have a chance. I'm sure many of you agree with this thinking.

Indeed. I have to say though that the biggest thing is to never (or all but) clear players, but that doesn't mean not acknowledging that they have received some credit for the lynch. And as Rowain said, the strongman is a powerful role for them to lose, so I doubt they let him go with ease.

If you read between the lines, you noticed that I don't believe the bandwagon on Q was an attempt to save Azza. It's just too obvious and risky. There could be scum in there, or there might be none, but there's no way they just put all their eggs in that basket on D1.

I agree its doubtful that the entire jump on me was scum, but I wouldn't be surprised to see 2 in that number, and would be surprised if there wasn't at least one. Especially Old Harry (look he's switching sides again! ) as his vote seemed a lot like panicking scum pulling the trigger.

@Lewwyn and MJW

I'll I want to point out before the start of the next day is that I really don't like the following post:

I'm going to regret this aren't I: Qgqqqqq

It's also strange that novice didn't vote the same way as zak.

I agree about OldHarry.

Is the think you don't like the vote without justification, the last minute jump onto a bandwagon or the "I'm going to regret this"?

For the former I didn't really have time to get my thoughts together, but they were that I don't think Catwalk is scum and I thought Azza had just got caught up with the normal MJW-argument and was a null tell. Q was more suspicious than either and I'll probably vote him again if he's on the block tomorrow. The "I'm going to regret this" was because I've really got no idea if Q is scum or not and if he isn't and I jumped on at the last moment I'd spend even more time having to defend myself tomorrow...

Can you point me back to what made you vote Azza? I still can't really see it.

Again, why was I more suspicious?
Personally I find the last minute vote without any previous inclination towards suspecting me suspicious, especially as it helped to support a scum.

Sorry for the wall of text here.

Preview: Spacetyrant, while some consider it a goal to live to the end, the only goal required to 'win' is for your faction to achieve victory. Indeed, being nightkilled is often a victory in and of itself, as it shows the scum are scared enough of you to want you dead.

One thing about Q that gives me pause though is this questionable vote from MJW:

Qgqqqqq I really don't like that megapost because it was obviously made someonewhere other than the main thread at a different time. He did not response to he latest posts at all. The other candidates, catwalk and myself, were already pushed so the wolfs had no choice but to push Qgqqqq to try and save azza.

MJW, how are you supposed to write a wall of text without doing some preparation? This reeks of scum piling onto an easy target with a supplementary reason.

How about this:

I still find Sunrise suspicious for the reasons I mentioned earlier, though not nearly as much as the following people, who have shot up in scumminess: Q, , Catwalk, and Ryan.

Bold is mine. But notice the extra comma? Like he edited out a suspect from his list?

I noticed this too.

Finally, Gazglum summarizes nicely why Old Harry is a good lynch.

In summary, I guess I vote MJW so I'm not accused of sheeping. But I basically agree with all the loud voices right now. It feels like we have the chess problem of having too many good moves to choose from.