XXXVII Boot Camp/Analysis thread.

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On March 15 2011 15:19 Incognito wrote:
This game shows us three things.

Town

1. It is possible to win games without blues. Yes, town barely pulled it off this game. But it was a mafia-favored game. Maybe it won't always be this easy, but with less modkills + a few more blues and a normal setup town shows that town can absolutely dominate without blue roles. Of course, you had help from a few guest players (including someone who hasn't played for a very, very long time), but some others were also on the right track.

Foolishness/Ver are probably going to have some writeups themselves so I'll refrain from saying too much, but the general gist of it is a) control your posting, and b) what you post and what you are thinking behind the scenes doesn't have to match up. Even with some of the best players in TL mafia, nobody is going to be right 100% of the time. And as time goes on, you learn more information that may change your view of things. There are two general trends that townies make where they don't see the complete picture.

The first is wishywashiness. This is generally seen as mafia behavior, but townies do it too (read: GMarshal). These types usually express a lot of thoughts in the thread (post a lot), even if they change. They announce that they're unsure of things, which isn't what town needs. Yes, you don't know everything all the time. But you don't want to express that and thus clog up thread space while having the potential to lead some innocent townie to misled conclusions.

The other extreme is where townies think they are so sure that player X is scum that they lock on and don't let go. This is an improvement over the wishy washiness, as mafia usually aren't this aggressive. Still, this isn't good. Usually it devolves into a flame war, wastes space etc. Unless you have some REALLY solid evidence on players, its not good to clog up the thread in your attempts to stomp your lynch target into oblivion.

You never need to convince your target that they are mafia. All you need to do is convince everyone else. And usually its easier to do that if you aren't yelling/screaming/taking up the whole thread communicating this feeling. Take a look at Foolishness/Ser Aspi. Their post count is not significantly high. In fact, i'd say its lower than the average. But if you follow each post and think about the context of when its happening, you'll realize that there's something going on behind the scenes. They are calm and collected, present their case firmly, but aren't overly aggressive about it. And sometimes, the next post is a complete 180 from the last post (although there is usually still a thematic element tying in their accusations). Yet unlike some other townies, they don't come out and point out their mistakes. They don't try to knock on their own credibility. Notice Ser Aspi's posts against JBright, Kevconsim, and LastArgument. Notice how he never apologizes or gives an excuse for why hes changed his mind. These posts mix a flexible and organic analysis (interpreting and assimilating all available information) while still keeping a strong in thread image and keeping a firm grip over the town agenda.

Oops noticed that this is too long. Oh well.

Mafia

2. Mafia cannot stand up to an organized town. I'd like to know about mafia's night kill strategy. It seems to me that the day 3/4/5 NKs were extremely weak. Major town analysts got away surviving in favor of killing a few no no names, some of who where suspicious. In this type of game, you do not let major town analysts get away with goading the town, even if they are momentarily incorrect about their suspects. The thing is, when a major town analyst is worng, mafia generally won't oppose them strongly. But its hard to pop up in strong opposition when that analyst suddenly changes his mind and votes for scum. Its really uncomfortable for mafia to pop their heads up to defend against a correct accusation when they haven't been doing so all along.

So if you aren't going to oppose a behavior analyst, you HAVE to shoot them. Don't give them the chance to be correct. You can't rely on the fact that they'll be wrong forever. Look at Salem and look here. In Salem mafia let DH/Pandain live too long. I think mafia knew that they were the only major capable town analysts out there, but they just didn't die. Mafia knew DH was suspicious and that he had never been correct on a lynch before. But once he did, it knocked out two mafia. This game, Mafia let Ser Aspi (and Foolishness to an extent), alive for too long. Ser Aspi was wrong on JBright, Kevconsim, and LastArgument. But once those options were gone he strafes down half the mafia team all in a row. Two of them were lynched after he died. That is just a huge blow as mafia. Mafia can't afford to take the risk of leaving a town leader alive. Especially in the game where the number of good analysts is small, like in this game and Salem. Unless the mafia has big thread presence, town leaders ensure that the power of the lynch remains under town's control and mafia have little influence. Its like playing Russian Roulette. Not something you want to do. Even if the town leaders aren't known for good behavior analysis, they could get lucky, make an accusation, and have it stick, in which case, bad things happen.

3. Bussing doesn't help. Notice the annul v. chaoser arguments day 1. They were both mafia. Did the fighting between annul and chaoser help save chaoser later on in the game? Nope. Did it save deconduo? Nope. If you're up against good town analysts, town credit usually doesn't count for much. Pointing to the fact that you were on Xs lynch doesn't do too much. It has much more to how you contributed to the lynch than the fact that you did. And its much harder to fabricate a convincing bus on someone. Usually isn't worth it.

It is generally accepted that the game gets much harder for mafia as the game goes on. Usually mafia need to have more than 1 person alive at lylo to safely grab the win. If you look at mini games and all games that get down to 3/4 players, youll notice that its incredibly difficult for mafia to pull off the last townie lynch. There is just way too much information out there to make everything congruent. PYP and this game are good examples. First thing is obviously post behavior (although at the endgame post evidence isn't as useful unless its overwhelmingly strong). Second is votes, but third and most difficult thing for mafia to do is justify the NK. Yes, to an extent the NK is WIFOM. But it takes serious guts to kill an undecided voter over someone who you know is going to vote for you 100% the next day. This trick has worked multiple times, even if its a town gambit. Generally, as a rule of thumb, mafia want to avoid a 3 way endgame as much as possible. So while bussing is potentially an option, it should be avoided as much as possible. This game, mafia was way too comfortable bussing their members and getting to this dangerous endgame. Perhaps they calculated that town only needed a 3rd mislynch the entire game for them to win, but I think mafia didn't put up enough of a fight. Deconduo's effort on the last day was too little, too late.

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On March 16 2011 00:16 Qatol wrote:
I have a little bit to add to Incognito's writeup (which I agree with completely).It was a big mistake for the mafia to push Annul early for 2 major reasons, neither of which really involve thread presence:

1. The mafia KP. RoL and Meapak made a mistake in this department. We never ever try to have the first mafia death affect the mafia's KP. However, in this game, mafia had 4 kills when the game started, but lost one of them when Annul was lynched. Mafia is a stalling game for the mafia. They don't care if they get found out as long as they can take down the town faster than the town can kill them. This means it is especially important for mafia to keep their members alive early in the game. Don't go out and sacrifice your whole team to protect one member from getting lynched, but you basically donated that first KP to the town this game.

2. Later lynches matter more than early ones do. I assume that the reasoning behind the Annul lynch was so most of the scum could look "pro-town." The problem is that if you want to keep this pro-townieness, you have to turn yourself into a town leader and consistently lead the town to scum lynches! Otherwise, the town gets to thinking "if this person was such a good scum hunter, why haven't they been hit by the mafia yet?" Also, as other mafia get caught, it becomes easier for the town to figure out what you were doing, assuming they go back and read the early parts of the thread. Leading the town to scum in the mid-late game is a lot stronger because 1. people remember that better than trying to remember what happened in the early game, and 2. there are less nights where you have to make an excuse about why you weren't killed.

My only other comment for right now is about the night kill on the last night. I think deconduo really should have done one of two things, neither of which involved shooting why:

1. Shoot kevconsim. Before deconduo submitted the hit list, people were already starting to use the argument "annul wouldn't have allowed X to be godfather." This argument surely applied to kevconsim. You want viable lynch targets in LYLO. He wasn't one.

2. Consider not hitting anyone at all (role reverse yourself or something). Maybe even claim veteran to increase your townie cred if it isn't incompatible with what you have done earlier. It's LYLO whether you hit someone or not. Unless you are worried that 2 townies will be stubborn and vote for you no matter what, and the 3rd townie will vote for you just to make sure someone gets lynched, you get more lynch targets this way. Obviously a deadlock doesn't help you as much, but you get a better feel for your allies (which it looks like you needed because I don't think you realized kevconsim was going to come out against you like that).

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On March 18 2011 18:02 Ver wrote:
This was another attempt at a different style of coaching, this time by example and acting as the 'town guidance counselor.'

-I barely used pm's at all to keep maximum transparency for everyone to learn from. I planned some things with foolishness and then later jackal/lsb but that was it. It was a fun change for me as out of all of the veteran players, I probably use PM's the most.
-I was very limited on time (1-2 hrs a day at most). So rather than taking this as 'how to go all out' you should look at it more as 'how to make some impact on little time and figure out solid lynch choices without a large quantity of analysis.' The main result of this was I didn't really look at anyone too in depth until they were already 'pinned.'
-To emphasize how to make efficient decisions and refine other important skill sets, a lot of this recap will focus more on 'reading the game' rather than hardcore behavior analysis.
-My analysis will mostly be from my pov during the game rather than my typical 'overhead 3rd person style'
-I will be quoting my posts a bunch to save me time and because I doubt many people took them seriously or noticed them, especially early on, thinking I was just some random newbie. My goal is to show my own thought process as a learning example.
-Overall I felt the summary of this game for catching mafia was: the mafia are the ones who are trying to hide something.

Lastly, you will notice that almost every one of my posts was made with 100% conviction. That was a deliberate act. The only people I was absolutely 100% certain on were Chaoser, LD, and cubedin (lategame) and for each one I said that. The most dangerous person for the mafia to face (and the town as well actually) is the one who is absolutely convinced of themselves and will stop at nothing to get their target lynched. Mafia absolutely delight to see townies who aren't sure of themselves. First of all, someone who can't convince themselves can't convince others, and secondly, it's easier for the mafia to dissuade that person out of their attacks if they manage to hit mafia. I remember in Salem Doctor H had snagged Jimbosilvers and Radfield, but he made the fatal mistake of showing doubt of his own convictions, and the mafia whispered eagerly in glee and redoubled their efforts to save themselves. Had he showed complete belief in his targets, the mafia were much more inclined to simply give up. I think that happened in this game as well. LSB, Foolishness, and myself were all acting in such a certainty of our beliefs and the mafia simply never had the heart to take us on. So as soon as we hit red, that was one mafia down. Obviously that had an enormous effect on the game, because there was not one single lynch where the mafia team mobilized their forces to take us on in the thread and in the voting booth at once. Instead every single time they hurriedly stepped to the side and said 'please, go right ahead and kill my buddy good sir.' Pretty awesome right?

I imagine some observers must have found it hilarious how I would go right from "Jbright or LA is mafia" to a complete 180 and guning for Seraph or Chaoser with that same total conviction without ever pointing out how I was wrong or anything. A lot of people do that, but why is it necessary? Why weaken your argument or persuasion ability?

Do I recommend this for everyone, or almost anyone? No, absolutely not. Most people are simply not good enough for this playstyle to be worth it. If you are not good enough, you are screwing over your team badly. Mafia sure love those gungho townies who keep gunning for other townies. But if you have confidence in your ability to find mafia sometime in the future, why not give it a try? Why not act like you are completely right and give no doubt that you might be wrong?

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The most important thing I got from the setup was that KP was likely to be limited (I expected 2 vets though) and we had no double lynches. This meant that there was really no reward for finding more than one mafia at once.

In mafia 18 for example, with 2 families with 3 kp each the goal was to find 6 mafia per day so each family could shoot 3. In that game I pulled out all the stops from the start, setting up PM traps, baiting people in the thread, and grilling people behind the scenes to fulfill that quota and ended up bagging 9 or 10 mafia by day 3. Because of my haste however, I ended up getting a few important townies killed first night unnecessarily. In this game, there was no such hurry (which helped me when I wasn't going to use PM's). All we needed was to find 1 mafia per day to lynch. Remember, there's no real advantage for figuring out the whole team and posting it day 1 if you can't kill them; it's more likely to just get forgotten and you're apt to be wrong anyways when you attempt too much. Understanding the limitations of play from the game setup is important in determining the course of action. It let us pull all these stunts and traps in the thread because we were in no hurry to figure everything out right away. Remember, at the beginning of the day, what I was accusing innocents quite often. But when the votes were tallied, Foolishness and I had our votes on mafia every time except for Ohn and that was only because we were hoping LD would get modkilled.

Furthermore, there actually was incentive for figuring out mafia then not saying anything. This was crucial when I figured out Chaoser's guilt but didn't announce it. It allowed me to discern the innocence of THREE players under huge scrutiny (jbright/BC/LSB) because I hid that knowledge until the last minute. In short, look at what you are playing to start off and formulate a rough plan of action from the beginning.

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Normally towns are bad at creating useful information day 1 so I was planning on just sitting back and advising against any bad moves, but GMarshal's plan ended up creating a lot of practical info. Not only did it make him extremely likely innocent, but annul and chaoser both messed up very badly. Also, Gmarshal's initial contribution, while not particularly profound nor useful, was excellent for establishing him as an innocent. Keep your head high man, you did the town a great service!



This is a huge mafia post because of those reasons. To elaborate, this is a classic case of someone making a post to try to blend in. A player with significant experience/intuition should be able to feel the lack of something from this post, an indicator that chaoser is hiding something. In addition, when one looks at the objective for making this post, I could only conclude that he is making it to look like hes helping out.

The distinction here between knowing that he has a role, and knowing that he is mafia, can be discerned from subtle details. A blue will make a real contribution in an attempt to help the town organize itself or find scum, but hold back overall. A mafia is more likely to make it look like they are making a real contribution while not actually doing so, which is the case here. These posts are likely to rehash things other people have already said or give advice which should be pretty obvious. However, the pressure on chaoser was ignored and even I would forget about this until day 3 in lieu of annul.

Annul's lambasting of gmarshal's plan was clearly something that favored mafia objectives. However, that did not make him mafia on its own. More information was needed. I tried to provoke it with this post, and voila, I got my answer.





Let's look carefully at this and see exactly how he MUST be mafia because of it. First of all, how can you determine when someone has to be mafia, when you have to be absolutely certain of the lynch? When they do or say something that only a mafia could possibly do in that situation. In other words, it comes down to motivations and way of thinking. A mafia knows they are guilty.

So what happens here? I bring up valid arguments against whatever nonsense annul was spewing and his response, judging from post times (just a minute or two later) an impulsive response, was to jump to the conclusion that I am a smurf. For annul's thought process to be this, some more things have to be going on. Firstly, he must realize that what I'm saying is valid. Secondly, smurfs are a better player posing as a newbie, which means what they are posting inherently has more merit. Finally, if all of the above is true, then there must be another layer to annul's thought process: that he knows better, and therefore he is hiding something. Thus, he must be mafia.

This is some weirdo logic not easily reproduced, but it held true here. Mafia slipups come in all shapes and forms, so you have to be on the lookout for oddities like this case. If the delay of his post was longer, I wouldn't feel confident in using the same logic. However, the fact that it came a minute after showed that it was an impulsive response which helped guarantee the validity of the logic.

On another note, annul dodges the real points against him and just argues against fluff or nitpicks. Some townies do this too, so it's not entirely indicative of guilt, but it certainly doesn't help his defense at all. However, townies who do this are more apt to ignore accusations entirely (I do this often. I don't recommend it, but it is possible as town). Annul doesn't ignore the accusations, he just ignores or diverts the good reasons, such as you saw up there by bringing up the smurf possibility while ignoring how anti-town he was being, while still defending himself against nonsense accusations.

If you want to look at it another, simpler, way, try this:

1) Annul is pushing a scum agenda (throwing doubt around, putting down contributions without contributing himself, making others look suspicious without getting any real reactions from them). That means he is either:

a) Scummy
OR
b) Dummmy

How do you tell between those? A scummy hides something, while a dummy is just....an open-faced dummy. Annul was most definitely not open-faced. The smurf comment conclusively proved that he was hiding something, and overall I felt from his posts that he was withholding part of himself. If you notice, his entire effort was put into defending himself. In particular as time went on, he didn't care about trying to make use of his time left to help the town at all, as he might after he died. There was no 'once i die check out these people for these reasons etc.'

A lot of people voted for annul because he was too aggressive or something, which is nonsense. Being aggressive does not make someone town or mafia (especially someone consistently aggressive like Annul).

Two more interesting things went on for me that day. Once annul and I had that exchange, I immediately went to BloodyC0bbler and Foolishness (both knew my real identity the whole game BTW) and told them to both press annul in the thread and vote for him. At this point, I was afraid that mafia would muck up the thread and vote as usual and we'd lose the chance of getting a mafia day 1 (I had no idea LSB would be able to wave a magic hand and have the town follow him to the moon). Their reactions were much less than I expected. BC laughed off the accusation entirely and helped why bandwagon icemac to get annul off the hook, while Foolishness was unconvinced but agreed to put his vote on annul at the least. Red alarms went off in my head, as I felt both players were good enough to recognize annul's mafianess. Turns out in the end foolishness simply didn't look closely or believe me and didn't want to put any effort at all into day 1. It's a good example of me making a simple misjudgment and that yes, ancient players who don't play often that have high reputations make dumb mistakes too. I still have no idea what on earth BC was thinking though. I thought he was mafia most of the game.

Anyways, I felt I could save BC for later, but I wanted to reveal Foolishness's alignment to myself quickly so I could work with him if possible. I started questioning him over IM and his answers did not give proper indication either way. So my solution was act like I knew he was mafia over IM and see how he responded. For example, when we were talking about BM, I would say "Well you aren't going to kill him because he screws over the town too much." I figured that he wouldn't be prepared for such a strategy and thus would give a genuine reaction. If he was town he would likely get annoyed quickly. If he was mafia he might overreact at first but wouldn't care as much in the long run since he'd know the accusations were true. In the end he didn't take it too seriously at first but got annoyed after I kept doing it. Hence, most likely town.

Then in IM's he told me the following impulsively.

(3:52:02 PM) Foolishness: DUDE
(3:52:57 PM) Foolishness: last night while i was in canada
(3:53:01 PM) Foolishness: i had a dream that i came home today
(3:53:06 PM) Foolishness: and the mafia thread was 105 pages
(3:53:08 PM) Foolishness: @.@
(3:53:17 PM) Foolishness: that's probably the worst nightmare i've had in a long while

If he was mafia he would be delighted that the thread was 105 pages on day 2. Another clear indicator that he's town. Turns out I kinda went overboard (of acting like he was mafia) without realizing it and seriously annoyed him. It all turned out okay in the end, though, ja? Whether or not you should copy some of my solutions I cannot say, but mafia does offer a lot of room for creatively solving problems and I wanted to give an example of that.

Regardless, Foolishness displayed his innocence prominently day 2 when he tried to get everyone off of the main lynch targets and onto LunarDestiny with solid analysis. Mafia Foolishness would never try such a thing. That's simply a judgment I can make from knowing his overall game history.

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Lynching a mafia on day 1 is so extraordinarily rare (this is maybe the 3rd or 4th time it's ever happened) that it will inevitably give a lot of details about the mafia team itself. First, they could not push the lynch off annul.



At the time I did not word this quite properly. It would be more precise to say that the mafia did not have anyone who was capable of just straight up getting in the town's face and pushing mafia objectives without fear, someone like, say, L, Ace, or Pyrrhuloxia. If the mafia was capable of actually fighting strongly, they would never ever have let annul die. However, Annul died, thus mafia were not capable of overturning the lynch. That is some very valuable info towards their capabilities and characteristics. It meant that they were too scared of their own knowledge of who is mafia and who is innocent and too hesitant to act on it.

Secondly, the 'he bussed annul' logic is utterly absurd. Once RoL clarified the KP discrepancy day 3, we could discern that mafia started with 3.5 KP (rounded up to 4). That meant that if a mafia didn't die day 1, they started with a ridiculously broken FOUR KP. Yes, deconduo did start the annul lynch, but keep in mind he didn't push particularly hard and was still throwing doubt on gryffindor and icemac too while halfheartedly saying 'annul is my vote.' Regardless, mafia have no reason to die day 1. People give town cred way too much emphasis when it really doesn't mean much, if only because there are a ton of people who will get suspicious over anything.

In general the simplest solution is the truth. Stick with that and you'll go far.

Deconduo- Says annul is his best target but is halfhearted in his attack and frequently ignores the lynch while focusing on totally minor matters.
Seraph- Tried to downplay annul vs LSB as simply a grudge match and wanted to ignore the issue, putting doubt on other candidates.
LunarDestiny- Made a series of horrific posts openly yet halfheartedly defending annul. Voted for icemac.

Chaoser- Made possibly the most obvious mafia post in the game where he tries to hide how he's defending annul by putting suspicion on other candidates, downplaying annuls guilt and trying to place him as a backup lynch as a last resort, while trying to look clean by voting for him.
Cubedin- Ran around like a chicken with his head cut off screaming 'i dont know!!!' He voted for annul but very clearly wanted someone else to die.

Very revealing, neh? With some serious time and analysis, someone could've bagged the entire mafia team off that lynch, or at least 3-5 members.

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Day 2:

I was gone most of the day phase so I couldn't make a move until the end, which hampered us considerably. But anyways, the majority of the talk was on LSB vs Barundar, gryffindor, and Icemac. Those 4 occupied the town's attention til the very end. Of course, all four were innocent. Now I'm going to tell you a little secret. I didn't read any of the posts by those 4. It wasn't necessary. They, by virtue of the voting lists or their simple prominence in the thread, were not good targets. And frankly, who wants to read gryffindor's posts?

First of all, Icemac is extremely likely innocent solely for being the second highest person on the day 1 voting list. There simply is no way mafia is so incompetent that the two highest voters on day 1 are both mafia. The fact that very few people argued against a lynch of icemac was also a clue that something was up. Look at the debate surrounding annul! That's not a certain fact, just an extremely probable heuristic.

Secondly, gryffindor, LSB, and Barundar were both very prominent people who had no trouble being outspoken and decisive against each other. Remember what we surmised at the end of day 1, that mafia were not prominent and that they didn't have the ability to fight against the Annul lynch head on, and that they were not fearlessly outspoken? Well given our trio here has all of those qualities, it would be silly to think any of them could be mafia. Any other reasons don't matter. The above logic trumps all else in this situation because otherwise the Annul lynch could never have happened and day 1 mafia lynches do not happen without very good reasons. Now, I wasn't entirely certain all 4 were innocent without having read their posts, but I could be certain that they were very poor lynch targets and our odds were not good going for that group at all.

So, it was clear that the town was heading for disaster with all of their major suspects being obvious innocents. Foolishness and I both realized this, and so we had to figure out alternate candidates. We went for the pattern of probable lurking mafia here, and came up with Jbright, Seraph, and LD. The latter two 100% had roles solely judging by the disparity of their pregame posts with their ingame posts (about equal lol), so it was just a question of determining whether they were mafia or blue (the other person to fit this discrepancy was Mr Wiggles, who "coincidentally," was a detective). Jbright was caught being completely and utterly useless on purpose and obviously did not care about the town. Of these Jbright clearly had the weaker reasons (the latter 2 were caught hiding something, while Jbright might just be a terrible green), but I was a little hesitant about gunning for people who might end up just claiming blue and then we'd be sitting there saying 'oops' and lsb/barundar/icemac would get lynched. In the end, that's what happened anyway.

Foolishness and I screwed up here pretty badly, we should've bandwagoned one person rather than putting forward two candidates. In my usual absentmindedness I simply thought we had another 30 hours for the lynch instead of just 6. Fortunately this was alleviated as everyone ignored my post on jbright anyway. However, the vote ended up getting slightly diverted and people jumped ship at the last moment. Lunardestiny obviously had a role and was a solid lynch regardless considering he had been caught trying to defend annul the way he did. Overall, day 2 was not a very useful day for the town because we failed to and in the end an obvious green got lynched. That kinda deflated our awesome day 1 lynch, but we had a plan to make up ground on day 3.

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The key thing to learn from this day is how to make the most of opportunities. We had 3 good targets, and not enough kp. So we set up a couple of traps to gain a lot of information. It started with my day post:

Our Axis of Evil:

LunarDestiny
Seraph
Jbright

+ Show Spoiler [My Long pre-day post on the axis of evil] +

Now, let's take a look at the tools we have. The key here is that we present the lynch as a choice between two people. After the day 2 debacle Foolishness had enough town presence to basically choose anyone and say 'die' and that's what would happen. So he and I could simply have done serious analysis, gotten 1 person narrowed down, and killed them. However, we tried to split the vote between two people in an ambitious attempt to learn more than just one identity.

Now, which two people? Foolishness here devised a clever trap for LD, guessing that if LD was mafia, he would go inactive the moment attention went off him. If he was active still, we couldn't be certain either way. As we were uncertain on LD at this point (his defense was bad but not criminal), it would be smartest to leave him on the side and focus on the other two. For the results of this trap to be valid, we could not give any idea of what we were really planning. In other words, we just had to make it look like we disagreed on who was the better lynch. Foolishness helped portray this image a bit in this post My original pre-day 3 post of the 'axis of evil' was designed to plant the possibility of going for any of those people in the lynch. Then afterwards we each put forth a case on Jbright and Seraph individually. As long as the mafia didn't realize what we were doing, then we could possibly get some valid data.

+ Show Spoiler [Trap Posts] +

Take a look at the Jbright post. Notice how I stack all these points against him, but keep in mind nothing in there makes him absolutely be mafia. I am more attacking his poor quality posts, then trying to analyze how he might be mafia. Note that I do think he is mafia, but I am not sure. The reason I made this post like this is to reinforce the case against him. There's a difference between doing analysis to prove someone is mafia and trying to push for their lynch: here, I am doing the latter, which makes this more of a sensationalist post than analysis. The reason I think he is mafia is because he actively doesn't care about the town at all, but there is always that nagging possibility that he might be an utterly useless townie. However, if I want there to be the possibility of him getting lynched, I need to make a case that people will believe and give the mafia someone to vote for if necessary. Hence this type of sensationalist accusation where I just dissect his posts and take everything I can get and throw it at him like a cafeteria food fight. Foolishness's post is more on the analysis side, which is not surprising as he has a stronger case. The reason I do a sensationalist post is because the goal here is to simply make lynching him possible for both town and mafia to jump on. I don't actually need to convince anyone of his guilt in the way an analysis would as we are using the day's proceedings to really figure out what happens.

Remember, at this point for us, it's highly likely that at least 1 of Jbright/Seraph/LD is mafia, likely 2, possibly 3, but not too likely. I am well aware of my own shortcomings and realize that I hit the target somewhere between 65-90% of the time, almost never 100% because I actively use heuristics (such as how I leapt to the conclusion that LSB/Barundar/Icemac/Gryff were all bad lynches without reading their posts) and make educated guesses instead of patiently waiting for 100% confirmation like some players such as Mrbabyhands. The real indicator of who is mafia will depend on how the lynch unfolds.

So how does the lynch unfold? Well, with 6 hours remaining, Seraph and LSB were tied at 3 votes, Jbright had 2, one of them being myself. Then within a 3 hour period, the voting suddenly jumps to: Jbright 7: Seraph 4, LSB 2. An interesting point is that the two LSB votes jumped to Jbright, while LSB is voting for Seraph. Whoa wait what? Votes aren't enough on their own, let's look at the reasons.

+ Show Spoiler [Mid voting List] +

My thoughts in paranthesis

Gmarshal: Wants to kill an inactive player with garbage reasoning (I think he's townie from day 1 plan and overall reactions)

Chaoser: Wants to vote for LSB. Likes Foolishness's points but just votes Jbright because he's inactive (I know he's mafia from day 1 analysis)

Cubedin: Extremely indecisive, keeps wavering between both without pressing too hard. Likes Jbright more because he's inactive (I think he's mafia from day 1 analysis)

Kevconsim: Sheep Vote (Who is this guy!?)

BC: Sheep Vote (I think he's mafia from overall play)

Such compelling reasons huh? 5 brand smacking new voters who's best argument is "hes inactive." Even moreso, they are hopping on the bandwagon at the very end of the vote. Makes you want to jump off the cliff right with them yeah? After seeing all this, I'm thinking, 'whoa Batman, the Joker just played his ace here. I do not want to vote for this guy.' Fortunately, a lot of the town also smelled the same thing and we managed to get the right guy dead.

+ Show Spoiler [End Voting List] +

Now we can tell many things from this lynch because of the way it happened. The first is that Jbright was green. This is because of how close it was. Right until the last minute, it was competitive, and Seraph only died because he hit 7 votes first (partially due to Jbright being a moron trying to lynch himself lol?). The only reason Seraph won is because a number of people freaked out at the Jbright voters (and LD voted Seraph surprisingly). Maybe foolishness helped convince people in private, I'm not too sure. If this was a voting contest between two reds, then a) there would've been a 3rd target heavily pressed and b) it wouldn't have been so competitive between these two. The shady voter jump onto Jbright only helped reinforce this idea.

So now, with 1 lynch, we figured out 2 alignments of inactives. Seraph and Jbright. LunarDestiny's alignment would get revealed the next day, when pressure would be off him.

Now because my narrative presented Seraph as a lynch solely off of judging the voting results, let's actually read his posts and do an analysis of why he's mafia. First of all, look at Foolishness's post on him above to see our thoughts from in the game. This will be a postgame analysis.

The discrepancy in his posting activity from pregame to ingame showed that he had a role. That much is obviously surmised. So then, how do we determine between blue and red? First of all, let's look at his objectives for posting. There were two important ones:

+ Show Spoiler [Seraph Posts] +

Two main aspects stand out to me. First of all, lots of words, little impact. Secondly, he refuses to take sides or have a decisive opinion. Thirdly, he puts out a lot of doubt on people and berates plans, most notably he tries to get the town to not trust Foolishness. The third part is a clear pushing of mafia objectives. The mafia does not want foolishness to be listened to given his threat and accuracy (he's obviously innocent after day 2 when he tries to take control and push LD off of heavy analysis; mafia foolishness would never do that). The first two points show that he is hiding something quite clearly and doesn't want to have to commit to anything or take fire.

When you combine withholding himself + refusing to take sides + pushing blatant mafia objectives + has a role, you end up with....Mafia!

To be continued tomorrow...

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On March 28 2011 12:47 Ser Aspi wrote:
That comment was a joke because everyone kept talking about searching their name . I do appreciate the support though!



Warning: Do not try what happened in day 4 at home folks.

The Day 3 lynch was huge. I wouldn't call it the turning point, but it finally gave us some crucial information to base the rest of the game off of: the jbright train, of which, 2-3 voters were mafia.

gmarshal
chaoser
cubedin
kevconsim
lastargument

Judging from how the Seraph lynch went down, at least two and at most 3 of these 5 voters were mafia. But who is what? I didn't have the time to do a full scale analysis So Foolishness and I decided to do the same trick we pulled the previous day: set some of them up for lynch, and see how everyone reacted. There were strong reasons for all of them being mafia, but they could not all be mafia, and the only way we could ascertain effectively (without pm's or indepth analysis) would be to bait them into a thread response. The reasoning for each person in my eyes was:

Chaoser- Sticks to the background despite being active, throws around a lot of doubt and pushes mafia objectives.

Cubedin- Somehow cannot form an opinion or be decisive whatsoever. Avoids fights or attention. The poster boy of WishyWashy Inc.

Kevconsim- Acts like a newbie but blue fishes in pm's like a much more experienced player (I still don't get this incongruency even after the game)

Lastargument/BloodyC0bbler- Somehow is on all the townie bandwagons, is totally failing his job as coach (if he's coaching the town), mocked my annul suggestion and pushed icemac, and is simply doing so poorly it would only make sense that he was mafia.

Gmarshal seemed highly unlikely as mafia given his day 1 play. Foolishness felt the same due to congruent PM's from him.

All the reasons seem good, don't they? But they weren't all right. When I read through day 1 again, I saw chaoser's blatant errors that made him mafia. That clue enough would be key to sort through the following day. I will cover that later. But the important thing was to not spill that information right away, but hide it and milk it to gain the most amount of knowledge on the rest of the Jbright list. This came in the form of watching Chaoser gun for LastArgument and LSB without any restraint, showing that they were clearly on opposite alignments. Had I blundered by posting analysis on Chaoser instead of Kevconsim or LastArgument right before the day started, that would never have been possible because Chaoser would've been on his guard and might try to make misdirecting plays to confuse me. I was hoping for Chaoser to comment on Kevconsim as well, but that did not happen due to the LSB/LA shenanigans. My own interpretations were only reinforced when Jackal gave me the info of exactly how LSB was innocent with a lot of pieces that fit together, like coag being a medic that saved LSB and LSB shooting bum. Either way, that was the most information that could be obtained and the more important point was to save an obvious innocent and lynch the best mafia guess we had.

How the day goes down:

1) Foolishness and I accuse Kev and LA. Foolishness dies.

2) Chaoser lambasts LA more heavily than he's done on anyone. Red alarm bells start flying off in my head. These two were not on the same alignment. Quote the post please

3) LSB claims he vigi'ed LA.

4) I pm Jackal asking to work together because Foolishness is dead and he's showed good sense on day 3. He replies by spilling the beans of everything that happened on day 4. Lucky!

5) We talk over suspects (cube kev chaoser), he originally trusted chaoser but took a look at the analysis on him. He doesn't want to stick his neck out to rescue LSB from his own lies, which is understandable. But the situation was pretty desperate.

6) After some more talking he decides that he needs to save LSB. Now I tell him to push one of them , but the initiative really rested on him because he was in the LSB group. Here's the key part: Jackal decides to gun for chaoser off of seeing a short analysis on his one bad post. That is the key decision of the game and Jackal deserves massive credit for orchestrating day 4.

+ Show Spoiler [PMs with Jackal] +

A note on the 'bait and switch:'

If LA is actually veteran then town cannot tell if LSB is mafia or vigi because mafia could've doublestacked foolishness or shot LA and we cannot tell the difference. If LSB is mafia, we cannot tell if LA is veteran or mafia, but it still makes more sense to kill LSB first because it is the only way the remaining player can be confirmed innocent. Regardless, fitting Chaoser's day 1 guilt and Jackal's information together meant that Chaoser + cubed/kev (1 or both) were mafia, and LA/LSB were innocent. But we had a dual problem here. First, Chaoser is not under any scrutiny. Jackal, to his immense credit, pushed Chaoser instead of kev.

This lynch so easily could've went down as LSB vs some other townie (kev for example). Then we would've had to deal with massive problems on day 5 and likely would have lost the game. It was likely that we could get enough support to ricochet the vote off of LSB, but it would all be in vain if we didn't lynch a mafia. Only lynching a mafia would clear the town group and myself, make the atmosphere town favored (i.e. reduce mafia interference), and give us solid direction to go on in the future.


Another way to look at it:

Think of how utterly absurd all this is. We have LSB being outted as a total liar by someone who 100% believes him because another person claims he medic protected him and they all knew about LSB's pre-called hit. Note that LSB was lying about his hit too. Now ask yourself the question, would the mafia voluntarily do this, particularly in such a haphazard fashion? The very same mafia, whose goal is to blend in and not attract attention? No, of course not! What purpose would pulling a grandstand stunt serve for them? Who is more likely to do something like that? A crazed townie, or mafia? The former of course.

In essence, you could discredit the "LSB is mafia" case solely due to how utterly bad his behavior and defense was. Beyond a certain level of suspicion, you can actually clear people because they are "too suspicious." This is of course a heuristic, and thus won't be 100% correct, but its held true an astonishing amount of the time, and is one of Qatol's favorite analysis techniques.




Now, why Chaoser must be mafia. I cut out all the fluff out of my accusation post.


I think I adequately explained this ingame but if you have any questions about why this makes a certain lynch, feel free to ask. Regardless, this is something that when you see, you should be thinking "DIE!!" without any hesitation.

After looking at his posting history postgame, Chaoser had a pretty clear agenda of pushing suspicion and doubt everywhere, particularly with a giant post on the roleblock claims day 3. That was just more fuel to the fire, but really irrelevant with the above post. And keep in mind the original post I jumped at day 1 was almost enough of an error to lynch him then and there:



The doublestack 'premonition' was simply to mess with the mafia and make them a little more apprehensive about hitting me or even doublestack me. Such moves need to be timed well but can offer some nice bonuses (i think it made them nervous about it judging from their QT) for no harm.

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The problems of day 5 all rested on the Gryff/BM bandwagon getting started way too fast. One of the difficulties of controlling the town is that it has a lot of inertia, so once the mood started going down the 'gryffindor is mafia' track, it was divert it. This limited our counterlynch possibilities drastically. Had I been able to act from the start when the town had a clean slate of mind, it would've been possible to pursue other objectives, ala LD or Cubedin. Thus, the only choices were kevconsim and ohn, two suspicious but not certain people who might be the last mafia. They weren't ideal, because we wanted to nail the godfather or hit more likely mafia and drop KP, but they were the best of the uncertains.


By this point, LD was clearly mafia given him drifting off into the abyss and not posting or helping at all now that suspicion was off him. Jackal and I discussed this, but as Jackal was very angry at BM and wanted him dead, and BM was already near death anyways, he decided to hope LD would get modkilled which looked like it might happen. In retrospect, we should have just ignored modkill possibilities and killed LD. We got greedy trying to do a 2 for 1 and I didn't feel I could force a cubedin lynch through because I needed the town circle's support to do so. At the time, LSB either supported cubedin or was trying to mess with the mafia, and I thought it was the former. Ultimately, it was a choice of going with the lesser of two evils. Gryff was clearly innocent due to a simple analysis of Bill Murray's posting history, so that was a dead lynch. It was only further confirmed by how easily BM was getting bandwagoned, which had never happened with any other mafia. There was a lot of struggling whenever a mafia was lynched.

In addition, I screwed up here and forgot the reasoning I used to clear Barundar on Day 1/2, but thankfully due to the modkill, that was one less questionable character to worry about. It's really easy to forget observations you notice early on, which is why it's so important to carefully write down your noteworthy ideas as soon as they happen. I forgot to do so this game and could've paid a far worse price. With BM and ohn out of the way, the path to the rest of the mafia was laid clear. So even though the day didn't go so well, there was nowhere the mafia had left to hide.

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I don't have too much to add here onto my analyses so I'll just copy paste and make a few quick remarks. Ask questions if there's something you don't quite get though.












One way of looking at the endgame and seeing why it must be deconduo is analyzing the mafia's votes when chaoser, ld, and cube were lynched 100% bandwagons on all of them, no debate on the last two. That meant a few things.

1) Mafia were playing for the endgame
2) Mafia were so confident in winning in the endgame that they didn't even bother struggling earlier in fear of giving away their godfather

Now who was alive at that point:

Deconduo
Gmarshal
Kevconsim

The only person on this list who over the game, has not been suspected, was deconduo. He even had multiple greens attesting to how innocent he was. At the 3 man lynch, he would have by far the best chance of living. The mafia absolutely would not have went into this endgame if kevconsim was their godfather, nor gmarshal given how scummy he looked when defending chaoser. Only deconduo was in that 'safe zone' prior to the last day, thus making him automatically mafia based on the mafia willingness to go turncoat on Lunar and Cube.

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Overall, I want to give hats off to Jackal for his endgame play. The PM/thread discrepancy was brilliant in luring Deconduo into a position which totally violated his expectations and gave him no cards left to play. Endgames don't happen too often, and this is the first time I've seen them go down so superbly. It also shows a great way of using PM's and the thread in combination to push one agenda to mislead the mafia while pulling the strings behind the scene. The mafia use the thread for information too, so if you stop that, they lose a significant asset in their own planning. Had Jackal not made these moves the way he did (in private with public deception), the mafia might have struggled much more in lynching cubedin because they would not have thought Deconduo's position was completely safe in the final vote.

LSB also did a great job at persuading people (an underrated yet important skill that I was not in a position to teach this game) even if his reasoning was screwy at times. Definitely go check out his posts if you want to see how to help win people over to your lynch/cause.

I was guilty of not communicating with them nearly as much as I should have.

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Annul - The smurf slipup shows he was withholding knowledge.

Seraph - Pregame/Ingame activity comparison shows he has a role. His few posts all push mafia objectives with heat. Simple lynch.

Chaoser - Made two horrific day 1 posts that screamed mafia. On the Jbright lynch.

LunarDestiny - Pregame/Ingame activity comparison shows he has a role. Ingame posts are vague, noncommittal, and . When left off the hook, disappears and doesn't even try to hide himself.

Cubedin - Made exceptionally indecisive posts disguised as trying to be helpful. Refused to take any stances or make any enemies. On the Jbright lynch.

Deconduo - Started the annul lynch yet disappeared afterwards. Had many posts but no presence and didn't really try to change that after day 2. Was too content to sit in the background and yet was capable of being helpful. He just didn't seem to care too much, an incongruency which shows something more must be there. Eventually he could be figured out due to process of elimination at the end. The "kevconsim can't be the godfather" argument was quite helpful for that. Also, other than the annul lynch, he never voted for a major candidate, always preferring to hang out on the side in any competitive lynch, again showing a desire to hide from view. Note that I did not read deconduo's post history, so this is not real "analysis," just some thoughts on overall trends.

I think the conclusion you need to draw from this game is that you absolutely do not need to be right when the day starts, just when it ends. Keep in mind I was rarely doing real analysis, I was just going on probable suspects and strong but not perfect moves, some of which were definitely red herrings. Thus, my information needed to come from somewhere else, and that somewhere else was the progress of each day. If I had voted for who I thought was mafia at the beginning of each day instead of the end, my track record would have looked considerably worse. As it stood, my vote ended on a mafia every day but day 5 when the BM lynch forced a weaker but easier lynch.

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What the mafia did well:

You guys did a great job of infiltrating townie groups and hitting some key blues early on, something that I don't think any mafia group without an older top player leading them has done in years, so congratulations.

Chaoser in particular swindled Barundar and Gmarshal superbly. In particular, on the day Chaoser was getting lynched, Barundar sent me a conversation of those 3 hoping to dissuade me from lynching Chaoser. I looked at it and I saw that Chaoser was saying the exact opposite in private messages to them of what he was doing in the thread (like 'LSB is innocent' when he's trying to get him lynched hahaha). I pointed this out and Barundar was still completely sold on Chaoser's innocence. Well done man, I love seeing the mafia using pm's correctly like that.


Errors

The biggest error by far was day 4. You guys absolutely should have pushed LSB dead instead of jumping ship. Let's look objectively at the situation.


-Coagulation and Jackal know LSB is innocent. Jackal in particular was in the incredibly awkward situation of having to defend LSB when he knew LSB was lying.

-I know LSB is innocent because I know Chaoser is guilty. I also don't think jackal would make up what he told me out of the blue like that.

-That's 4 votes for chaoser.

-Even if LSB is innocent, why should anyone else believe chaoser is guilty if they didn't listen to what I said? My thread presence was so minimal it was easy to (and you guys successfully did) discredit or spam away my analysis. The lynch can be easily redirected elsewhere. Jackal basically just jumped on Chaoser out of the blue and anyone with a figment of logic ccould see that the "bait and switch" argument was nonsense.

With the level of play everyone else in the town was at as well as having two voracious greens in your pocket spamming your agenda for you, it would have been so easy to get LSB lynched. Remember that even when LSB popped vigi, that did not clear LA, nor did it mean Chaoser was mafia. The mafia could easily have just been sitting in the shadows laughing, for all the average townie knew. You guys were thinking too much like mafia when Chaoser was accused. You knew he was mafia, but most of the town did not. Unfortunately, you saw it only from your knowledge, and not from theirs.

Other problems:

-Not shooting me. I honestly expected to die every single day of the game. Day 1 and 2 I can kinda understand as everyone ignored what I busted annul on and I wasn't a presence and day 2 I didn't do too much. Should have definitely been killed night 3 though after posting that axis of evil post and having voted for mafia every day. After day 4 when I pushed chaoser that absolutely 100% should have been a kill.

-Not shooting Foolishness day 1. Foolishness has been shot night 1 3 or 4 games now and he was never protected because medics are stupid. In every single game he has lived past day 1 as town he has won the game for his side or put his team in a great position. Leaving him alive is like playing with fire, and you guys got burnt badly day 2 and 3. Things would have looked very different with him dead.

-Shooting LA and Jbright over any of the four town group (coag lsb jackal me) night 4. Made absolutely no sense.

-Passive play. Deconduo, Chaoser, Annul, and Cubedin were all very active, while LD and Seraph could have been judging from their pregame activity. Yet none of you bothered much to establish a serious thread presence besides annul. I don't know for sure but my guess is you guys did the numbers partway through and figured you pretty much had the game in the game unless the town got essentially perfect lynches so you didn't try to extend the net beyond gmarshal and barundar or get anyone to push mafia objectives in the thread. The former three posted quite a bunch, but were content to simply remain in the background out of suspicion and focus, which is great in games like mafia xxxv when nobody in the town can analyze mafia, but in this game when several people could, you are asking trouble. Bottom line when you are up against top players mafia cannot sit back or they lose.

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From: RebirthOfLeGenD [ 3205 posts | Profile | Buddy | Report ]
Subject: Re: hey
Date: 2/23/11 12:56
I want to see if you know and fully understand einstein's explanation of insanity.

Original Message From Coagulation:
make me mafia.
i demand it.

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On March 15 2011 12:20 chaoser wrote:
oh man, I'm looking forward to this

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On March 15 2011 14:33 BrownBear wrote:
Hey, just a minute. Town won in XXXVI too!

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. Mafia cannot stand up to an organized town. I'd like to know about mafia's night kill strategy. It seems to me that the day 3/4/5 NKs were extremely weak. Major town analysts got away surviving in favor of killing a few no no names, some of who where suspicious. In this type of game, you do not let major town analysts get away with goading the town, even if they are momentarily incorrect about their suspects. The thing is, when a major town analyst is worng, mafia generally won't oppose them strongly. But its hard to pop up in strong opposition when that analyst suddenly changes his mind and votes for scum. Its really uncomfortable for mafia to pop their heads up to defend against a correct accusation when they haven't been doing so all along.

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On March 15 2011 15:45 Ace wrote:
Bussing your teammates when you don't have a strong presence on the town usually means you will lose as Mafia. If you are bussing your teammates because they are screwing up that hard you are better off making sure the rest of you don't screw up later. If you are bussing them just because you feel it's easy and can coast then you better have a player or two that can derail any discussion involving you.

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On March 15 2011 15:53 chaoser wrote:
I couldn't raise activity within my team and made bad night kills, trying to find the last medic and being scared of taking a risk to hit good townies.

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