WW 46: Wolves Return to Realms Beyond

[AdrienIer]

Few notes :

Cyneheard gives himself a good reason not to vote for GKC and naufragar in #146
His attack on SD in #246 makes me like SD more. At that moment SD is under pressure and an additionnal vote is not good news for him. If they're together I don't think SD would give him the greenlight on additionnal pressure when he's in the process of understanding what RB WW demands.
While reading cyneheard I find Gaspar's #348 post that I find interesting : he's onto Cyneheard and Pindi, with Scooter as third. Makes me wonder if Pindi's innocent (which explains why Meiz wasn't killed last night) but Scooter's guilty. Will have to reread Scooter sooner than I thought.

[AdrienIer]

Edit : should read "At the moment SD was under pressure"

[Meiz]

Serdoa, how do you feel about naufragars vote on Cyneheard? https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid745032

[AdrienIer]

Adrien is putting all the signs of a scum Adrien game. He's smooth and he skates through and he puts just enough effort in for SOMEONE ELSE to be justa  bit scummier. It's classic scum Adrien.

I admit that my style when I'm wolf is similar in some ways to this game where I simply don't have the time or energy to be super active. I'm finding out that I can't play right if I can't have my mind 100% on this.

[Meiz]

Did you re-read Serdoa's day 1 before making the accusation?

Nevermind about this question, clearly you did. I should clearly focus more on the back&forth with these two 

[Meiz]

I find myself distrusting Charriu's list https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid745514

Did you re-read the day 1 events (considering Cyneheard was a wolf) before making the list? I would assuem so as there were random mentions about some connections. To me it doesn't seem like the thread was genuinely viewed with a mind to look who looks good/bad with Cyneheard's reveal.

Examples:

Pindicator town despite not voting going after cyneheard.
Naufragar suspicious, despite being one of the cyneheard voters.
superdeath suspicious, despite being Cyneheard's main target. Notice that Cyneheard had pressure to make a concrete vote and read, and I think he chose superdewth for the kill.
Lewwyn undecided, despite being the main accuser of cyneheard.
me, Pindicator attack comes of a surprise(?) despite me trying to start the push on him near deadline and making a concrete accusation after that. I don't think you've read my posts.

This list looks very fishy to me, crafted without the real sense on what happened yesterday.

[Meiz]

In comparsion, I like the list made by CMF, https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid745597
Feels much more genuine in his thoughts.

[Lewwyn]

Hey GKC, This post is one I've been holding in my mind:

Lewwyn, I don’t want to blow the you-Rowain molehill into a mountain, but honestly, I feel like venting. As far as I can tell, the RB meta is about past history and “tone,” which is completely crazy to me. My argument, although that’s even too strong a word, was this:

Rowain, after a series of questions that I thought were good and based on good reads, makes a pretty glaring misread. He does this after, as I said in my post where I voted for Cyneheard, I was hoping to see what happened to the bus on Bob. He moves away from Cyne to you, which puts Bob back in the lead.

All that is eyebrow raising, but you don’t call him out, so Serdoa and I, and maybe others, find that strange. You claim that you laugh at him instead of calling him out, but when questioned by Serdoa, you don’t call it a misread. You explain that it was a misread, but the aggression you’ve displayed this game is absent. I was surprised by Rowain, confused by you.

Nothing in the above is based on nebulous tone or past history.

You come back at me with 1) some unverifiable stories about the good old days and how you can read people that way and 2) you wonder if I’m trying to buddy up with Serdoa and swing on you and Rowain, despite me saying the exact opposite. “Yes you "hated" doing it. That makes it feel more "genuine" and more impactful because you're stressing that you are going against your early reads.” This is tone BS. I laid out what I thought was weird. You don’t like that I didn’t do it in an appropriate voice.

This is a pretty good comeback but its funny because this RB meta attacking RB meta. This feels like a vet wolf told nauf how to respond to me. I didn't respond to it at the time because I just couldn't spare the tiime during that hectic end of the day, but this smells like wolf coaching to me.

Why would you accuse Nauf of buddying up with Serdoa?

Serdoa's comment on this is interesting and specif and I will also add to it with a more general understanding and aspect of what I meant.

First, it's human psychology. We see this in things like mirroring where by positioning ourselves to being similar to someone else, agreeing with them or prasing them we make people like us better. In this game, whenever someone agrees with you, says they think you are leaning villager or voting with you on someone you suspect it is likely you will be more inclined to think favorably of them and to be less critical. You will also be less likely to read their posts with suspicion. It's a form of tribalism as well. Even the best WW players suffer from it, but if you can pull yourself away and make yourself more objective you can see through that fog.

My point here is that I think nauf was attempting to make a favorable impression on Serdoa by agreeing with him and by grudgingly doing so he can make Serdoa feel that the respect is more earned and feel a bit more convivial towards nauf and possibly get him to soften his stance towards him. We often use buddying as the term for this. A wolf agreeing or saying someone is likely innocent in order to garner more positive feels from that person toward them. I am not suggesting, as Serdoa mentioned, that Serdoa and nauf are working together.

[Serdoa]

I'm re-reading currently from the start (at page 22 now) and had actually thought I go through all of it first, but I stumbled upon several posts I think paint an interesting picture. I've looked at all posts, but with a closer look at Cyneheards. With him being a wolf, his posts become more relevant I believe, because he of course knew who the other wolves are.

(Also, I have shortened some quoted posts when the shortened part is clearly about something unrelated to the point I'm making, like talking about time-constraints or similar things)

Cyneheard, you've been quiet since your random vote on scooter at the beginning. What do you think about the interactions between naufragar/Serdoa/Lewwyn, and on the reasoning of pindicator and Commodore starting a second wagon on GKC?

I picked scooter because he's someone I know better, so I figured I'd have a chance to get a little more information out of him than someone else initially, but then wagons went off in other directions because GKC and naufragar are absolutely all over the place. The wagons on them almost make too much sense - that they're obviously being careless so let's get them because it's too easy! I want to hear more from Rowain and pindicator about why they went for their wagons.

Lewwyn's point was that Serdoa is just being Serdoa, which I know isn't all that helpful for people who don't remember him that well. Especially since the self-vote was the first post, I think starting the day with obvious nonsense to get a reaction makes sense. That's not my style but I get it - and I WANT my reunion game to start with some silliness in the first few minutes. It's not like we had anything more to go on.

Re-reading, this post seems interesting. In my first analysis of his posts (#309) I just listed the facts of this post, as I read it as "just contributing". At the end of my analysis I requested him to make his thoughts known on naufragar, Lewwyn and me. He never did. In hindsight, that seems like a deliberate decision on his part as my question was early enough in the day that he could have easily answered it. He could have even gotten me off him and I think he must have at least expected that that is the case, as I had shown that I believed he had more content than Bob. So why did he not do that? 

I had a hard time parsing that post before, but basically Cyneheard is giving some light reads on me (and Lewwyn) without actually really putting an opinion forward that one could nail him onto. But he does put his opinion forward on GKC and nauf, defending them, because "it [the wagon on them] makes too much sense".

AdrienIer is pointing out in #524 (crossposting kinda, as I had lunch in between writing all of this...) that Cyneheard does defend those two (or his stance on not voting them rather) in post #146 again.

With the way I view naufragar (wolf) I think it could be that Cyneheard tried to deliberately save naufragar from being lynched. That's why he took a clear stance on him (and GKC as another newbie to make it not obvious) while being wishy-washy on everyone else, that's why he defended him and that is also why he did never answer me at the end. Because that might have gotten me off him, but maybe back onto naufragar. And with 6 hours to go, nauf being already under scrutiny, he might have expected that I start a landslide that they can't control. Not answering, keeping Bob leading was maybe seen as more save; or maybe Cyneheards time-constraints led them to conclude that it is better to risk it getting him lynched. That would further explain naufs jump to him, hoping to get brownie points... wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what he was accusing me of.

And reading naufs post in which he votes Cyneheard (with 4 hours left) here with these thoughts in mind does read a little bit forced to come up with reasons to vote Cyneheard. Like I said at the start, it often is hard for new wolves to come up with reasons to vote / not-vote someone, as they already know the alignments. 

Scooter is doing a good job of flying under the radar so far, not kicking up much but only focusing on the low hanging fruit after his back and forth with Cyneheard. I guess I understand encouraging people to post, so I'll do the same: share your thoughts on some meatier targets scooter.

So, in general I think the naufragar stuff is just day 1 silliness. I would bet he’s a villager. If I had to bet my whole game right now on one player read, that would be mine. He dove in enthusiastically, and then got really defensive when some trivial accusations came his way. Generally speaking, playing this game as wolf is way harder for a newbie than village, so I would expect a newbie wolf to be pretty reserved and cautious because they have to think about strategy day 1 more than regular townsfolk do. The fact that he was just willing to dive in and then be naively shocked that he got some attention just adds up to a super obvious read to me. I think if he was a wolf, one of his fellow wolves would have been yelling for him to chill privately.

I think I overlooked this post before. It is quite long and I think I got lost in the noise. But just looking at that first part I have to ask: We are on Day 1, halfway through maybe, and nauf gets basically a "he is a villager"-card handed? Really scooter?

We had other players defend him (and GKC and SD) as new to the game, but none has gone as far as scooter did here.

As a result, it makes me a touch skeptical of the players who most enthusiastically piled on him, and more importantly those who have kept the conversation on him. Some of that is obviously just smart people trying to get more information though, so I’m not in a rush to over-conclude. A few of Lewwyn's posts raised my eyebrows for example, but he's since dragged so much info out of people that I've come around on him.

Anyway, I think what’s most important here is to expand the board. Let’s say we lynch one of the names associated with this stuff. Statistically speaking, we're unlikely to hit on a wolf day 1 without a major blunder, so what I want is for our vote to extract as much information as possible. So, what do we learn if we lynch, say, GKC who piled onto Nauf and he turns out to be village? I don't think very much at all, even though I'm a bit suspicious of him. Lynching Nauf provides the most info right now, so I could definitely be talked into it purely on those grounds, but my read of him makes that feel weird and inefficient.

And here, after basically saying with many words nothing ("I'm a bit skeptical, but not really.") he opens himself the opportunity to jump on nauf anyway ("provides the most info right now") but not even having started the next sentence retracting that again.

For me that reads like two wolves in scooter and naufragar, and scooter is trying to help his wolf-buddy out, while still leaving himself the chance to jump on his buddy if necessary to not appear to obvious. Together with the Cyneheard bit, this would also explain the whole end-of-day-situation as any movement of those 3 (nauf, scooter, Cyneheard), might have pushed others uncontrollably around, so they thought it better to stay put and hope Bob gets lynched.

Btw as I've got already the "Serdoa is at it again, being crazily concentrated on one player": I actually wanted to read the whole thread without concentrating on nauf, but it seems to me that I am not forcing it and it still comes back to him all the time. Even if I ignore Cyneheard and scooter bits, there is other stuff... basically many players taking a stance on him, most likely because I was going at nauf so most felt the need to chime in at some point or another. I do believe lynching him would

a) catch us a wolf and
b) give us more information to work with about other players

[Serdoa]

Serdoa, how do you feel about naufragars vote on Cyneheard? https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid745032

I've written in my long post now about it, but as that might get lost in all the discussion, so in short: I think the wolves accepted that Cyneheard might get lynched and naufragar jumped on him in case it happened.

Also at that point, Bob was still leading and nauf was still on SD, he had to go somewhere else, having stayed on SD for quite long already without getting anything out of it. So that basically forced him to switch, else he would get questioned why he didn't switch. With 4 hours left and as a new player and being scrutinized already, I think he believed he can't get away with a throw-away vote, but had to vote someone in the running. That pretty much at that point in time left only Cyneheard.

As I wrote in the long post to me the vote from naufragar reads forced. He isn't really giving much opinion on why Cyneheard is his vote of choice, just reiterates what others said. He uses much more time to explain why Bob is innocent, which is a good thing to argue if you already know to be right.

The other thing that stands out is that he quotes Cyneheards post that I also talk about in my long post. I explain that I see it as Cyneheard trying to defend naufragar. And now naufragar states Cyneheards argument (about pindicator in the same posts) raised his eyebrows when he read it first - but he only brings it up late in the day when he votes Cyneheard and tries to distance from him and from Cyneheards defense.