Liar Game Mini Mafia

On April 30 2012 15:36 EchelonTee wrote:
@Sandroba: Last time you were town in a PM game you broke the hell out of it; if I don't see similar efforts then it's tunnel city.

I love when people make these kinds of statements. It gives you something concrete to hold them accountable to. It doesn't matter that it's a bad idea to tunnel, but now if you don't see EchelonTee following up on this that is a huge hint. Looking through his filter, he doesn't really have any comments on this other than a wishy-washy statement about how he could be mafia but isn't apathetic. Classic mafia overreaction to trying to distance themselves from their team. Even though it isn't conclusive, its a good start. One method would be to push for a sandroba lynch and see if EchelonTee responds like he says he would.

In Day 1: Round A, the early main characters are gonzaw and Mr. Wiggles. Certainly makes them look active and interested to talk about voting plans, but the key for Round A isn't solidifying voting plans. All the centralized planning on votes is ridiculous because there are not enough ways to hold people accountable. If you wanted to go with a voting plan, it would be best done in secret with people who you trust to be town. Dictating everyone's moves is counterproductive and gives you too much information you can't handle.

Next is Palmar's plan, which is absolutely terrible. First, you don't know if the person organizing the votes is town, and second, you really have no way of holding people accountable, even Palmar. It doesn't matter if you can blame Palmar if a townie dies, as there is no real concrete evidence there for you to lynch him. By the time you figure out if he has evil motives or not, its too late. Given that this plan is discussed but not really implemented, it does no good whatsoever to actually listen to it. And if you look at all of Palmar's followup posts, they're all pretty bad. I'm not certain how much was going on in PMs, but from the thread, Palmar seems to project an image that he is in control of everything and that he is being a leader, but what content does he actually produce? Besides providing a (weak) plan, he has one post that throws out a bunch of incoherent reads (none of these reads are really well thought out, they're mostly just instinct/troll reads). Palmar seems aggressive without really doing any real work. What I don't understand is how people thought he was so confirmed town...

Foolishness and Meapak get the idea behind the game. Let round A go on without planning. The ideal situation for town is that there is a roughly even split between the minority and majority. This means that the town doesn't have to spread out all its votes among people they want to save, and have a bigger margin of error in Round B. If the majority is too big, mafia have a greater control over the lynch, as town has to be worried more about saving themselves than isolating someone they want to kill. The idea is that you don't really care if all the high profile townies are immune to lynch or not. If they are that obviously town, they aren't going to die in Round B period. So trying to separate the votes by putting all the strong townies on one side is just a terrible idea. Think about the actually strategy in the Liar Game. People formed groups and split their voters in half. That is the type of strategy you want in this game. If you have half the "pro-town" people on one side of the vote and half on the other, its relatively easy to save them all and then focus on gunning down the mafia. Trying to get them all in the minority is a disaster, as if you fail, you'll be in the majority and it becomes that much harder to save them all. Mafia of course, want that situation. So really the mafia want two things. One, is to have a large majority. And Two, is to be able to push pro-town people into the majority so that the town has to dilute its votes.

Palmar gives an ultimatum: "Not listening to me when I'm town is stupid. You either accuse me of being scum, or you listen the fuck to what I say.", which if you think about it is actually pretty ridiculous. Either he is town so everyone should listen to him, or he is mafia? Besides that this is a blatantly false fact (you can think he is town but that his plan is terrible), this is pretty much a power move. Palmar is basically attemping to funnel people into agreeing with his plan given that it is so early in the game and people are likely to be unsure of their reads. Looking at the rest of his posting, its pretty much aggressive attacks and otherwise apathy. Palmar never really gives any serious reads, and never really gets the town organized on who he wants to lynch. Should be red flags already. Palmar keeps talking about his townness, when he doesn't actually have any at all.

Day 1 just has an atrocious atmosphere. Pretty much you have some townies actually agreeing to Palmar's plan (gasp) and a few people opposing it but otherwise doing nothing. Then a few players going at each others throats because of some flimsy "evidence" from PMland. On one note, gonzaw/Cephiro have a massive spamfest where they fling mud at each other. Will be important for the future, but from any gut instinct reading, I would have just ignored them but considered them both town. Getting into such big heated debates isn't natural for mafia since it grabs so much attention in a thread that is already chaotic. gonzaw does a good job at keeping people talking about nothing while giving the impression that he is pro-town. Very easy to just skip reading his posts after the first few since they are so long.

wherebugsgo makes a good case on sandroba, which is exactly the case EchelonTee should have been pushing (Hint: if ET doesn't jump on to wbg's case something fishy is going on here). Turns out ET comes back to the thread with a massive post on VE, who is the other potential lynch candidate for the day. Fortunately for him, nobody catches this discrepancy, his post is ignored, and he survives until...the end game? This is one of the easiest mafia you will find.

Day 1 Round A had an attrocious atmosphere, and the orgainzation in Round B was pretty bad too. There was no consensus on who to lynch, and VE turned out to be the last minute lynch as Radfield came in at the last minute with enough votes on prplhz to change the lynch from prplhz to VE. Ironically, out of rage, VE actually killed himself because of his 5 votes for sandroba. If he didn't do that, sandroba would have died instead of VE and the game would have turned out a lot differently. Note that this isn't the only time sandroba is going to be saved by an enraged townie - Cephiro makes the same mistake announcing 5 votes for sandroba on day 5, which further helped the Harimoto cult and didn't force them to make a decision on whether to save sandroba or not.

VE's death also shows how you shouldn't be playing town. VE provoked wbg all game, but wasn't even wbg's prime target. I think it would be likely that sandroba would have been lynched day 1 if it weren't for VE's insistence that wbg was mafia, which pretty much turned the whole town against him. It didn't take much manipulation from the mafia to get him lynched instead of sandroba at this point. If you're going to antagonize people, you have to do it with a purpose. Just repeatedly saying "you're scum bro" isn't going to get you anywhere, even if he does turn out to be mafia. Even though VE eventually gives a reason why he thinks wbg is mafia, its hard to actually take his posts seriously as a whole. Credibility is important. You can't expect to go around flinging mud at people and not being held accountable for it.

Foolishness decides to attack chaoser day 1, but ends up giving him 3 votes in Round B...but he gets away with it. Good discussion point for mafia of either side, since at this point nobody seems to really know whats going on anyway. Combined with some heat on Foolishness Day 2 for some subpar posting, you could have really gotten the town into some chaotic discussion. But by this point in the game, most of the mafia except gonzaw are being complacent about the game.

Palmar's in thread posting has been atrocious and people are just letting him ride off of his flasy Day 1 King campaign. Besides the fact that sandroba's play is way different from his town play (which certainly is a big hint), his posts have no content or coherent thought behind them. He may be busy because of real life, but that doesn't excuse posts like this. And as I've said before, EchelonTee should be easily deduced from his bizzare connection with sandroba, as well as the fact that he manages to get everyone to ignore him. Common theme throughout the game, as literally nobody mentions EchelonTee either positively or negatively (at least in thread. He seems to have formed some circle with Meapak and gonzaw, but that turns out to hurt gonzaw eventually)

BC flinging mud everywhere while not producing any meaningful content should also be a red flag given that he never really pushes in any meaningful direction. Decent lynch on Day 2 but definitely not as obvious as someone like sandroba.

Ace - everyone talks as if he isn't doing anything, when it should be clear that he actually does hold opinions. In general, people are stuck too much in the moment and don't catch when he actually does make a contribution. Just because he looks like he has a lot of "I dont care" posts doesn't mean he should be ignored. Interestingly nobody does what they should be doing and analyze what exactly Ace is trying doing with his posts.

Day 2:

Round A was way too disorganized, with no coherent discussion or vote coordination. Except for the Foolishness group. Foolishness had a plan to have everyone in his group (Foolishness/gonzaw/ET/Katina/wbg) all vote one way so that if they ended up in the minority, they could control the lynch, and if they ended up in the majority, they could circle vote each other. Unfortunately this plan goes against the idea that town wants the minority voting round to be as close as possible. Even if you could find a group of townies to coordinate votes, you ideally want to be splitting votes so that you can ensure that you will always have extra votes to control the lynch. Yes, it means you will always end up with people in the majority, but since that's only half of you, you only have to worry about saving half your group, and can use the other votes to influence the lynch.

Day 3:

After BC's lynch and Foolishness's death, the thread goes downhill. Any hope of town organization is completely lost, as everyone at this point is following Palmar and gonzaw, who have pretty much taken control over the thread. From this point, the only active townies are ones who are under fire by gonzaw and Palmar, and the thread just becomes a spam fest of people trying to defend themselves against a tunneling attacker in front of a non-existent jury. Nobody is really trying to figure anything out, and the game is going as well as the mafia could possibly hope. prplhz and syllogism are basically in Palmar's back pocket, leaving only a handful of people who could possibly oppose their influence. Unfortunately, the game has already turned into a situation where its accusers vs. victims, with no 3rd party observer feedback. The victims aren't even trying to find out the truth for themselves. Of course the result will be obvious - townies will die as more people come under the seductive influence of the mafia. If anyone looks at Palmar's thread posting as a whole, its pretty obvious that he is mafia, but due to the fact that everyone is just paying attention to what is immediately in front of them, any attempts to discredit or attack Palmar in any way are just yelled at until they are silent.

The interesting thing about this lynch is that although the mafia had complete control over the thread, they made a mistake by attacking too many people at once. Fortunately for them however, the victims didn't take advantage of this fact. Up until the end of the day, there were 3 people who were all potential lynch candidates: Meapak, chaoser, and Sheth. Although they were all discredited because of the mafia's thread dominance, they could have easily played the backstabbing politician to make things turn out a bit uglier. Originally they all had 0 votes, a fact that could have been used as negotiating leverage. As it would be seriously disasterous for the town if 3 townies died that day, they could have easily made deals with each other to save themselves. For example, chaoser goes to Meapak and negotiates to trade votes in order to make Sheth take the fall, etc. Yet apparently nobody goes for this scheme.

Interestingly enough, Cephiro decides to give all his votes to chaoser, Sheth saves Meapak, and gonzaw splits between chaoser and Meapak. This ninja move by gonzaw was explained immediately following the Night post (it probably would have come before it given the timing), and would have been critical in catching gonzaw later in the game, as the votes eventually add up (surprisingly nobody ever went through and put together a list of all the previous voting rounds though...). gonzaw also makes a mistake by accusing Cephiro of trying to "determine the lynch by his own" when he himself was also instrumental in saving chaoser (it works both ways, not just one, but gonzaw wants to deflect the blame off of his own suspicious actions).

Cephiro is surely doomed at this point, but it is mostly his own fault. Ever since the beginning of the game where gonzaw pushed him for no real reasons, Cephiro has been on the back foot, and everyone has been leaning mafia on him. Cephiro's posts focus too much on himself, and given the short term nature of most people's thinking, the first thing hanging in their minds is how much Cephrio sticks out in the thread as a useless scummy poster.

chaoser does a good job picking on ET due to his changing stance on sandroba, which is spot on (see my first comment in this post). However, due to the terrible thread atmosphere and complacent townies, it is unfortunately overlooked.

As an interesting Day 3 development, the mafia were able to find each other and coordinate against the town, hence two kills on wbg and syllogism. With sandroba, syllogism, and perhaps Palmar already outed in the thread, they really needed to get the town numbers down given that the mafia only had 3 KP each in this whole game.

Day 4:
Not too much interesting goes on here, Wiggles nails Palmar as mafia with a pretty rational post (why does everyone think he is mafia? Especially after Palmar flips red the next day?). Unfortunately, due to gonzaw and slOosh covering for Palmar and prplhz sheepishly voting him, chaoser dies while Palmar gets to live another day.

Day 5:

By this point, gonzaw is in complete control of the game, and Meapak is in his back pocket.

As a bonus, everyone should read this thread. Its absolutely hilarious.

Unfortunately he couldn't write more, as he is out of town at the moment and had to rush this as is.

Ver's Analysis:

I apologize for the rather chaotic nature of this as I wrote it in certain areas over a long period. It is not comprehensive; I just try to cover some important points

Day 1:

I liked both Palmar's plan and the general reaction to it by many players. I've noticed that a lot of players have taken in knowledge from guides or postgame analysis and incorporating them as core pillars of their play. This is great! However, sometimes they end up taking heuristics (shortcuts, but not certainties, to be weighed in with the rest of their behavior) for an almost certainty (such as a mafia doesn't want to voluntarily place themselves in the spotlight). It is true that mafia don't want to do that, but it doesn't mean they won't ever do it. It is just much rarer, but while you can use it as a way to clear someone over a long period mixed in with other factors, you cannot simply write off someone as town for doing such a thing, especially in the short run. It is simply one factor among many.

Palmar's plan, to put himself in the spotlight and make him king and arbiter, played on this tendency quite effectively and he did it in a manner which is similar to his attitude as town. Good job! Naturally the plan was quite problematic and I was also pleased to see many people pointing this out and not getting fooled. Obviously if you can't determine Palmar's identity or motives, why give him such power, especially in day 1? Furthermore, while I think Ace takes it too far, it is difficult to be certain about things on day 1.
+ Show Spoiler [More indepth reasoning] +

My point is, trying to micromanage the minority based on town reads on the 24 hours of day 1 is simply absurd even if being done by a confirmed innocent, let alone a player of unknown alignment. This is because a) trying to force a minority lets mafia, who alone have knowledge, manipulate this to their advantage, and b) even if someone is town and has good sense and throws in say 8 people in the minority, it's quite likely mafia will be in there and then the town runs the risk of people thinking those group=confirmed town or some other silly idea. Feasible, but high risk, low reward.

Gonzaw did a good job clogging up the thread with his enormous spam and disrupting the ability for the town to start piecing things together. In particular, the argument with Cephiro hurt the town atmosphere and made Cephiro come off worse even though his position was more logical. I think that in general as town, or probably mafia too, you don't want to bother responding too much to accusations unless a) it's really gaining momentum with the town at large b) they are blatantly misrepresenting you (a mafia motive generally). However, it's more effective to simply point out their errors once instead of getting into a shouting match (trying to convince the person you are accusing to admit their guilt is usually a lost cause). In Cephiro's situation, it probably would've been better to just ignore Gonzaw, because the latter had nothing on the former and arguing about it only worsened the town atmosphere and focus. If Cephiro just ignores him with something like 'I'm not responding to someone that makes out something that isn't there' it's much harder for Gonzaw to keep posting his spam, which would achieve Cephiro's goal more quickly.

Mafia members inherently don't want to keep themselves in the spotlight. That doesn't mean they won't put themselves in the spotlight if they deem it the proper move. Palmar doing what he did day 1 does not mean anything. It's something you have to look at over a several day period. Contrast Cephiro and Palmar: both voluntarily put themselves out in the spotlight (in different ways, but same effect). However, Palmar's behavior radically changed over the course of the game. He became less and less involved,shrinking away from the attention of the town and happy to remain out of sight and mind. Cephiro, on the other hand, kept himself in the town's focus the entire game, perhaps even more so later on than initially. That's as good of a contrast between town and mafia behavior as you'll get. The extreme degree of deliberate suspicion of Cephiro is a good example of the paradox of mafia suspicion: it should have told everyone that he was likely innocent (the same cannot be said for Sandro though because he deliberately pulled himself out of the game while Cephiro kept involving himself).

2nd Phase-

A 10-8 split was the best town could've hoped for, and ironically, a pretty logical conclusion to Palmar's plan. Day 1 is the most dangerous day for the town: in balancing the game we felt a 2-3 townie death on day 1 was rather likely.

Naturally, as was pointed out by many players, the larger the minority, the better position the town is in. I really felt mafia got too complacent by town being chaotic and didn't try to fuel a larger minority/majority split. This could have been accomplished in several ways:

1) Purposely tricking people into voting a certain way. For example, what if they contacted people saying that they along with several others were going to vote No, and that the other person should vote yes. Then whoever is in the minority votes to save the other. If you do this to quite a few people, some will bite, some won't, but you have better odds. And frankly, townies have reason to do this too, considering on day 1 you have a very real chance of dying.

2) Casting doubt on whether Palmar's plan would actually be followed and suggesting that everyone was paying it lip service while voting against it (or for it, if you want to take the opposite angle). Essentially, trick people into misjudging the general voting sentiment into creating a much smaller minority.

A lot of people felt Gonzaw was innocent all game. While his posts did a good job of painting himself as a try-hard townie, he did have holes and inconsistencies if you looked closely (I bet nobody did). For example, Gonzaw actually did out himself and Chaoser indirectly by treating chaoser differently in his post than anyone else.On four other people he throws around a lot of doubt and suspicion on them. Then suddenly when addressing chaoser he switches to more of a pleading town, as if trying to 'give him a chance.' Why? Gee I wonder...Those contradictions exist! Look for them!

Judging from other's posts, Sheth had gonzaw figured out as mafia and cephiro town. However, this was apparently only advanced in pm's (which was then made public anyway). Why not push this in the thread too much earlier? I feel that if Sheth had just made a proper case, linking together Gonzaw quotes from his games as mafia/town and this game, he could've not only gotten him lynched early (once under more scrutiny, it would've been harder for Gonzaw to act as he did for so long. That type of style is much harder if you are under a lot of constant pressure), but also relieved suspicion on himself.

The problem with everyone being so open about their votes is that there is no uncertainty for mafia. If you look at the day 1 mafia votes Sandroba had no mafia voting for him, Chaoser had 1 mafia (on his team) vote for him (BC), and ET had 2 votes from his team on him (1 Palmar, 1 Sandroba). This is a game based around the vote mechanics: thus, if the town wants to gain information, it has to be through analyzing vote lists. On day 1 when it's tough to gain reliable information AND convince everyone of it, it's rather tricky to just get a mafia lynched.

If VE never blabbed about giving his votes to Sandro, then the harimoto group would've had an extremely difficult decision to make. Do they give votes to Sandro? Do they fabricate pm conversations which make him appear legit? Do they try to set up another counter target who nobody can vote? Letting him die on day 1 is almost not an option, so they have to stick their necks out. Instead VE dies, saves Sandro, and mafia don't reveal themselves. Oops.

Another note: 11 players claimed to Syllo/Palmar day 1. ????????

Obviously everyone probably didn't feel much threat in doing so because everyone was vanilla, but still! What had they done to demonstrate their innocence or worthiness of having such information? This gave the mafia crucial information, because they (along with syllo and wbg I believe), were able to deduce that there were few to no blue roles. That meant that they could fire with impunity and not fear vigilante shots, while town gained little with the knowledge. People need to be more reserved claiming: it often does a lot more harm then good. Don't play your trump card so soon.

The Ace kill was quite good, even though some people seemed mystified by it. He wasn't going to troll forever (maybe), but he actually was making a lot of sense. He wasn't finding mafia, but he was pointing out bad approaches and leading people on the right track in that regard. It's always important to nip such influences early, before they can bear fruit. That's also why killing Foolishness the next night was also an excellent move.

Biggest problem of days 2/3 is that Palmar is getting out of everything scot free. What has he done to help the town? Almost nothing! But almost nobody is even looking at him or even attempting to judge what he has been doing. He is already out of their field of vision.

Of course this is not a knock on Palmar; to the contrary, it's a praise to his maneuvering to get himself in such a position. Furthermore, not only does he coast by, he also manages to paint those who speak out against him as mafia AND gets others to go along with it. Playing as mafia is all about subtlety; being too direct as mafia tends to lead towards others to look back at you eventually. The other mafia team did not see Palmar as a huge threat, and he was completely off most townies radars. The few people who did push him were either squelched by counteraccusations (Chaoser, BC, Katina, Cephiro) or persuaded to doubt themselves or not push as hard (Foolishness). THAT, is how you play mafia. Get others to do your work for you, so when the inevitable backlash comes, they get blamed and you run off scot free because there is no obvious link. Palmar's only flaw is that he didn't keep up the act for long and once Syllo/WBG died, he was right out in the open again.

Another problem I saw a lot was people not putting enough effort into pushing suspicions:

For example, Chaoser had a very good find with ET's incongruence on Sandroba: Instant lynch, bam. Yet he didn't press it at all!? And nobody else seemed to notice it either. If he's afraid of the Harimoto backlash from such pressure, he can easily have others present it to the thread while pushing it privately. That way, he wouldn't seem so dangerous to the Harimoto's, while those with influence still know that he did it and thus is more worthwhile for the town.

Both days mafia votes were very poor: they let too many townies live. In such a format, it's not usually worth making the town suspicious over someone because there's no guarantee that the town can even kill them for awhile. Instead, it's just better to let townies drop dead, instead of giving them votes like BC and others did when they died.

It also looks like I need to cover meta because as usual it is misconstrued due to misuse.

Proper use of 'meta' (ugh what an ugly term) would show that Ace and Sheth were both town and Gonzaw mafia, among other things. However, meta is easily misused, which leads to it getting a really bad (and undeserved) rap.

When Ace is mafia (just look at Wheel of Fortune), he is much more manipulative and subtle. This game he was anything but, just simple and direct. He was inviting attention on himself, not posting in such a way to deflect it away. That makes him town.

Similarly, when Sheth is mafia his history shows he takes a more active measure in misleading people. This game he was, like Ace, more simple and direct. It's when someone is NOT immediately suspicious that you should be wary of them. Mafia is a game of paradoxes: the more innocent someone appears at first glance, not in a 'hes so townie' way but 'hes probably not mafia,' that's a good indication they are mafia. Similarly, in most cases someone who appears so unbelievably guilty yet isn't giving up is almost always going to be a townie.

Sheth posted good reasons for Gonzaw being mafia due to past game influence (his demeanor and tone). Yet he was ignored all too easily, because he was already ostracized.

Some other quick notes:

-In double mafia games, listen to people you think are mafia. They still want to kill the other family and thus have useful information to give. This also doubles as being able to make use of townies who are under suspicion. Too many people this game contributed good ideas but were ignored because they were seen as guilty (Cephiro, Sheth, Katina, and Chaoser being prime examples).

-Too much effort was spent posting general suspicions instead of concrete cases. Concrete analysis is harder to fake because it requires greater accuracy and it promotes more useful discussion. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing, naturally, but in this case there was far too little of it. Instead, most lynches seemed to be decided upon with little more than "Player X is suspicious for reasons X or Y,' which a) makes it easy for mafia to blend in and b) makes it harder to actually find mafia because discussion is worse and the reasoning is not so clear. For example, had Katina actually bothered to make a full analysis post on Palmar or Gonzaw, she could have totally reversed the town's fortunes. Simple statements alone are usually not enough unless it is really blatant like with Sandroba.

-Mafia players should take risks. This game showed that they really can pay off. Those who took risks succeeded, while those who tried to play it safe (or didn't try at all *cough* ) got burned early.

The one exception to this was Cephiro saving Sandro. This was bad because a) he had no concrete reasoning for Sandro being Yokoya, just logical assumptions possibly stemming from an idea placed by Palmar or ET earlier on (which weren't true due to mafia miscommunications unfortunately) b) had no idea of the mafia KP, which was clearly not a normal 1 kp per night syndrome. In general, it's simply not worth it to leave mafia alive if you have hte chance to kill them. If you can kill a player of a strong family, or a player of the weak family, then kill the strong family member, but if you can kill 1 mafia or none at all, just chop his head off and save yourself the trouble. Low reward, high risk.

-In this vein, the mafia partial alliance was an excellent risk undertaken. For those who don't know, Chaoser contacted Sandroba on day 3 I believe in a subtle way. Hopefully he'll post the pm's, but basically he speculated that the mafia might have 3 kp to spend. If Sandro was somehow a townie, Chaoser's statement could simply be taken as speculation. It would only be seen as an alliance to a member of the other mafia team; a very clever move, and exactly how it should be approached! I remember back in PYP Interesting many mafia members felt it too hard to forge alliances with other teams: this proved an excellent way to do so. The tiny bit of information of mafia possessing 3 kp overall was the one advantage we gave the mafia, and I was very happy to see it actually being used properly for once.

It was simply a partial alliance, as in only one person would be known of each mafia team. They would simply use their kp at the right moment to eviscerate the town leadership while keeping them unawares. It was properly timed, for Palmar was at last under suspicion by the members of his inner circle, and they were suddenly removed before they could really take action. It prevented any accidental stacking of kp (worst possible scenario for mafia) and created a power vacuum in the center of the town at a ripe moment. This made it possible for both sides to infiltrate Gonzaw and ET into Meapak's new group, which put the game in full control of the mafia. The progression of the game in the later stages could really be traced back to this move. Kudos!

-Read what Incog said on ET vacillating with Sandroba. In an ideal world, your intuition should be good enough that you can just briefly glance at his filter and *know* that both are mafia. Go back and reread it now.

-I was also very happy to see the plan to lull everyone into a false sense of security with a Sandro lynch and instead try for a triple lynch which the mafia couldn't react to. It nearly failed due to it being spread to ET and wasn't fully successful because Sandro accidentally made illegal votes. However, it still netted Palmar dead very suddenly, with ET not able to save him, and got rid of the troublesome prplhz, who clearly was not playing up to his potential. Plans like this are really interesting and a great use of your time. More people could do with spending time devoted to creating plans. Even if they don't always work properly, they make you a much more dangerous and multidimensional player to contend with.

-Lastly, I hope this game will be a lesson in cockiness. People clearly trusted too easily and never really reread the game because they were too confident in their ability to judge the situation. Three mafia members, or half the total, were very well spoken of for the majority of the game. That's fine for a few days, but for how long they lasted, it was clear that people were simply not rereading, and instead just crossing them off their lists mentally. Being confident is fine, but you need to be able to double check yourself when things aren't going according to plan. That means rereading the game and your pm's. If the game is not clearly going in favor of the town, you probably are making some mistakes, and you should reevaluate exactly why you trust or suspect certain people. Oftentimes you may find that you had the flimsiest reasons for doing so in the beginning and they eventually stuck.

Overall, the game was filled with some poor plays, some decency, and some really high level moves (Also, boy am I glad we took Gonzaw as the lone player not invited, same with ET in jubjub ^_^). Thanks everyone for making it a fun game to observe!

Please give all feedback. I know it was long and not as active at certain points. If you have ideas on how to improve that, please share. We hope to run more of these kinds of games in the future.

Twitter- @VerInspired

EchelonTee United States. May 25 2012 13:53. Posts 3403

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? Game over? I'm on phone

learn lots. dont judge. laugh for no reason. be nice. seek happiness. -D[9] || Na`Vi - LGD - Dignitas - Liquid - Fnatic

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 14:02. Posts 3087

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Analysis
Round A was way too disorganized, with no coherent discussion or vote coordination. Except for the Foolishness group. Foolishness had a plan to have everyone in his group (Foolishness/gonzaw/ET/Katina/wbg) all vote one way so that if they ended up in the minority, they could control the lynch, and if they ended up in the majority, they could circle vote each other.

Hehe that was actually me

My PM to Foo'
Hey dude, I have a new plan for this Round A of voting, I think it may work better than the other one:

We pick a small group (4-5 players) of people we think are town.
We tell each of them this plan
The plan consists of all 4-5 of us voting the same answer, YES or NO
If we all end up in the minority, then great we'll try and get scum from the majority lynched
If we end up in the majority, then we swap votes between us (not all 5 though, in case we need to vote for someone else) so we are not in danger of getting lynched, and of course try to coordinate other people's votes to lynch scum

What do you think? I was planning on telling ET too, I've been PMing him and I'm fairly sure he's town.
After that I thought about wbg too perhaps, I think he's town too, but we can decide that later.

The other option is doing a half YES half NO vote so some of us are guaranteed to be in the minority, while the others that are in the majority will receive votes from those in the minority, etc.

Having everybody RNG votes this Round A will be a chaos, I'm sure of it

BC had already voted NO by that point, so I desperately wanted everybody to vote YES so I made that plan (well, maybe you mention this in the next part of that analysis, but I've not read all of it yet >_> )

EDIT: Silly me you guys already have seen the scum QT so you already know about that >_>

Last edit: 2012-05-25 14:06:37

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 14:28. Posts 3087

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I feel that if Sheth had just made a proper case, linking together Gonzaw quotes from his games as mafia/town and this game, he could've not only gotten him lynched early (once under more scrutiny, it would've been harder for Gonzaw to act as he did for so long. That type of style is much harder if you are under a lot of constant pressure), but also relieved suspicion on himself.

I don't know what type of "proper case" you are referring to here, but I doubt Sheth could have gotten enough dirt on me, even if he posted "quotes" from other games.
I had Foolishness' and wbg's almost 100% support by that point (well, except when Foo' was dead), and syllo's support for a time, at least until he suspected me being Yokoya (and I'm glad we killed him that night

).

There were a lot of moves from me that in hindsight (after BC and chaoser died) should have been suspicious as fuck, because I was basically saying "Fuck it I'll even out myself a little bit if it means saving BC/chaoser, I can always shrug the suspicions off later" and trying to make risky wild plans and shit to get them saved (because of Cephiro and other people some of them utterly failed though

)

I'll just post all my meaningful PM convos with people instead (in the next post)

A lot of people felt Gonzaw was innocent all game. While his posts did a good job of painting himself as a try-hard townie, he did have holes and inconsistencies if you looked closely (I bet nobody did). For example, Gonzaw actually did out himself and Chaoser indirectly by treating chaoser differently in his post than anyone else.On four other people he throws around a lot of doubt and suspicion on them. Then suddenly when addressing chaoser he switches to more of a pleading town, as if trying to 'give him a chance.' Why? Gee I wonder...Those contradictions exist! Look for them!

Wow, I never actually considered I did that!

Last edit: 2012-05-25 14:28:31

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 14:35. Posts 3087

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Oh yeah, Ver/Incog maybe you can put this in the OP? It has all votes and shit:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlDOJgSVEnnPdE1yVVlDa1l5Yjk0M3lRbmpLQ1RoOFE#gid=0

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 14:46. Posts 3087

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Last edit: 2012-05-26 01:36:29

Meapak_Ziphh United States. May 25 2012 15:13. Posts 4147

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gonzaw you and I exchanged like 180 PMs this game :/

In other news, failing in LoL did nothing to help my mood

Forti et Fideli ~ TL Mafia Forum: Come play with us! ~ Go Samsung KHAN, Stork, JangBi , Shine, Grape, and TurN Fighting!~ wat

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 15:18. Posts 3087

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To anyone not knowing:
On Day 4 Round B, chaoser PMed sandro to get sandro to give chaoser some votes to get him saved.
sandro said he'd give him 4 votes because he needed to give 1 vote to Palmar, and he told chaoser to give 5 votes to Palmar.
chaoser told him that Palmar was town so his votes didn't matter, and asked him for more votes.
sandro then told him that he should ask his scumbuddy to give him 5 votes (chaoser initially said that his buddy could give him 5 votes.... >_>).
chaoser told him that his buddy could not give him any more votes, and that he needed 6 or so votes to survive the lynch today.
sandro kept insisting on only giving him 4 votes and putting the rest on Palmar
chaoser still insisted in asking him why giving votes on Palmar, if Palmar was town
sandro told chaoser Palmar was his scumbuddy
sandro then basically said that he'd give chaoser 4 votes and nothing else

After that, sandro did indeed give 4 votes to chaoser and 1 to Palmar, and chaoser gave 5 votes to Palmar on request of me.

We didn't buy that Palmar scum claim at all because it was absolutely innecessary basically, since I think chaoser told sandro that someone else had given Palmar votes.
Since chaoser's votes were basically useless, I told him to follow through and give Palmar 5 votes so the other team "thought" we were cooperating and shit

[/quote][/quote]

Was that intentional or not? Really, I thought ET was basically confirmed town because of that.
Also...Palmar was killed on Day 6 because of an "accident" with Harimoto's votes? >_>
I almost thought ET was town because of that as well, but I instantly thought "No, if ET was scum then he would tell Palmar to follow the plan, if not we would instantly know there is a leak in our circle".

Last edit: 2012-05-26 01:59:46

Meapak_Ziphh United States. May 25 2012 15:30. Posts 4147

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From the QT

Anyways, okay I'm gonna buddy up with Meapak through PMs. If everything goes right then perhaps our last KP should go to him, I think we can get all other townies lynched as well. Hopefully the other scum team kill Katina/ET since I think those will be harder to lynch (or at least harder to FoS and get a wagon on).

fml lol... btw gonzaw you post a metric fuckton in there.

Edit: I can't wait to be on a scum team with you gonzaw, your QT is full of gems like this

+ Show Spoiler +
lolol

Double edit: gonzaw you're as bad as I am at scum hunting lolol.

Last edit: 2012-05-25 15:42:42

Forti et Fideli ~ TL Mafia Forum: Come play with us! ~ Go Samsung KHAN, Stork, JangBi , Shine, Grape, and TurN Fighting!~ wat

EchelonTee United States. May 25 2012 15:37. Posts 3403

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I'll read through the stuff later, still out. But yes, I slipped hard concerning sandroba, but only chaoser really noticed.

About the d2 plan; gonzaw you may have come up with it but I was the one who said we should all vote to be in the ]majority, then telling sandroba to vote opposite. I worked my balls off to protect my team, which may have been dangerous, but scum is all about risk and reward, eh?

Also, we should make a TL mafia games thread; I want to lol/dota with you guys more xpp

I'll make the thread when I get back, if you guys are down; I already have a couple of your that's info :D

Last edit: 2012-05-25 15:50:54

learn lots. dont judge. laugh for no reason. be nice. seek happiness. -D[9] || Na`Vi - LGD - Dignitas - Liquid - Fnatic

Ver United States. May 25 2012 15:44. Posts 1881

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Updated the QT links in the endgame post. Will respond more in morning

Last edit: 2012-05-25 15:44:53

Twitter- @VerInspired

Meapak_Ziphh United States. May 25 2012 15:54. Posts 4147

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ET check this thread out: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=272667

Also I feel kinda bad for gonzaw. I read their QT from beginning to end and once it was only gonzaw and he was so happy and having fun and enjoying the game all I could think of was the fact that he was gonna get shot :/

Forti et Fideli ~ TL Mafia Forum: Come play with us! ~ Go Samsung KHAN, Stork, JangBi , Shine, Grape, and TurN Fighting!~ wat

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 16:12. Posts 3087

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Okay people, this will be the tale of 4 "complex", "foolproof" Yokoya plans that because of COMPLETE lack of luck, or Cephiro and other people fucking up, were a complete and utter fail.Every.Single.One.Of.Them

EPIC MAFIA FAILS:

1)On Day 2 Round A to try and get BC into the minority

For some reason I still don't get (I think it was because he would be at work near the deadline or something), BC had already voted NO, like as soon as Day 2 Round A started.
Everybody wanted to kill him, so absolutely nobody would give him votes on Round B; I tried to make a plan to get him into the minority. I planned on getting my "trusted townies" into a voting block, so all voted YES. Because of that there would be a higher chance BC would be in the minority.

So I PMed Foo', wbg and ET about it (and Foo' PMed Katina). 4 YES would be enough I think, would greatly increase BC's chances of being in the minority.

When I PMed them, I slightly suggested to Foo' to vote YES. I was planning on continue that trail of thought and convince him to vote YES, at least when he responded back to me.

Why it absolutely failed:

However, before he responded back to me about deciding what exactly to vote, ET had already PMed me the above PM:
He had already voted NO because of WIFOM, and PMed Foolishness about it as well.
Near that time, wbg told me that he voted NO as well.
At that point everything was fucked, and I couldn't tell Foo' anything else than just follow the plan and vote NO as well.

2)On Day 2 Round B to try and save BC:

Well, Round B came and BC was on it. Nobody planned on giving him votes, except one person: Cephiro.
We were thinking that Cephiro would just rebel against the system and give him votes.
I thought that Cephiro would not receive any votes as well (nobody thought he was town, and the ones that hinted that didn't mind him dying). So if Ceph gave BC votes, and Ceph didn't receive any votes we would be saved.

I also wanted chaoser to give at least 1 vote to BC just in case (perhaps 2). I mean, he was considered scum by many, and people subtly linking him as BC's buddy wouldn't be that bad, specially if it mean BC would still be alive

Also, this was the time that wbg panicked and wanted me to give votes to ET because ET only had 3 votes or something, and Meapak had 0.
I had previously told him I would give Katina 3 votes, so I told him "I already sent my votes to Katina" (an absolute lie I didn't send any vote), because I thought that perhaps if ET or Meapak had 3 or 4 votes, then he could have less votes than BC (if Cephiro gave BC some votes) and thus BC would be safe. Yeah we went quite along with this and I agreed to give ET 2 votes, and wbg would give ET 1 and Meapak 4. BC had already given MZ 2 votes (*sigh*), but I think ET would have gotten 6 votes along MZ, so maybe BC could get there as well if chaoser+Cephiro gave him votes.

Why it absolutely failed:

Wow where do I start:
-chaoser didn't give any vote to BC because of some reasons I forgot
-BC ACTUALLY GAVE VOTES TO CEPHIRO. Again, he did this like halfway through Round B when we were still trying to figure out how to get him saved
-Cephiro "overslept" and didn't actually give him any votes.

Yeah, FML moment there.

3)On Day 3 to try and save chaoser:

Okay, everybody started to want to kill chaoser, and he got into the majority. Do you see a pattern here?
It was here that prplhz made his "plan to kill chaoser/MZ/Sheth". Again, I knew chaoser would get almost 0 votes, so I started rambling about how it was dangerous that all 3 would be at 0 votes because Cephiro would decide the lynch by himself (and some other bullshit). I tried to get people to get Sheth lynched alone, which would require giving chaoser votes.

So I got into some arguments with wbg, where he agreed that Sheth needed to die but wanted chaoser to die as well. He said MZ was more likely townie out of those so he wanted me to save him or something.
He wanted me to give MZ 5 votes in the case that chaoser/Sheth got 5 votes or something (I think), but he also told me that MZ was more likely townie than Sheth/chaoser, and that he didn't want me voting chaoser because chaoser dying alone wouldn't be bad either.
So I tried my hardest to appear "offended" or something about letting Sheth have a chance to survive, and decided to give chaoser 2 votes and MZ 3 to "lynch Sheth alone". I made quite an argument with wbg and somehow "convinced" him about it (he wasn't quite sure, but he gave me his consent), because I knew this was a VERY risky choice and people would instantly find it suspicious (like syllo did).
But well, I had the PM logs with wbg in case somebody asked (like sloosh), but well they weren't really needed since wbg came to back me up after it happened

Why it absolutely failed:

Because Cephiro gave chaoser 5 votes, making my whole plan useless which only served to make me more suspicious. Basically I did it all for nothing.

4)On Day 4 to try and save chaoser:

So, everybody wanted to kill chaoser and he ended up being in the majority again. This seems like the punchline to some joke, right? Haha you so funny

So, again I wanted to desperately save chaoser. Chaoser had already contacted sandro, so they started talking.
The whole convo from above took place.

I knew someone could fuck up the votes by giving Wiggles 5 votes or something, so I planned for Katina/sloosh/MZ/ET to PM their first 3 votes to Protact already so MZ, ET and sloosh had some votes on them each so we would "get them to safety the fastest" while "having our 2 other votes to spare".
So yeah, now at most 1 player alone had 2 votes to spare, not 5, so someone alone couldn't fuck up the votes.

ET went nuts and wanted to give Wiggles 6 votes. MZ and ET thought that chaoser would get 5 votes from Cephiro or something, which is why they wanted to give others 5 votes as well.
After that prplhz claimed he'd give 5 votes to Palmar. After that ET wanted chaoser to die alone and give Wiggles 6 votes.

Some time passed, and I reminded ET that all 5 of us (ET, MZ, Katina, sloosh, me) had 2 votes to spare, meaning 10 votes in total. We still needed sloosh/MZ/ET to arrive at the "safe" amount of votes, and that would have needed 6 or 5 votes or something, so it would be impossible to give Wiggles 6 or 5 votes like he wanted
Then I convinced ET to just give Wiggles 2-3 votes because I thought that maybe Cephiro would give chaoser 1-3 votes at all, that way we could have gotten Wiggles lynched as well. Also, ET couldn't give 5 votes to WIggles by himself because he only had 2 to spare (he already claimed he made his 1st 3 votes, had he lied about that and gave 5 to Wiggles it would have exposed his lie and would out him as scum, so no matter what he HAD to put his 1st 3 votes wherever we said so before).
So I told ET to give Wiggles his 2 spare votes, and that I would give him 1 vote, and told MZ to give his remaining votes to ET/sloosh (also I told ET that I would never convince MZ to give votes to Wiggles or something).

sandro claimed to give 4 votes to chaoser, and we had 3 claimed votes on Wiggles. We thought that if Cephiro voted, then he would surely vote chaoser.

+ Show Spoiler [About Cephiro] +

So, we thought Cephiro was scum, so he'd give chaoser votes to save him and let Wiggles die. Even if he didn't give chaoser any votes, well he would give them to MZ or sloosh or something, and Wiggles would die with 3 votes and chaoser would live with 4 votes.

Everything seemed to be fine. Except...

Why it absolutely failed:

Fucking Cephiro gave 2 votes to Wiggles.
Wiggles ended up with 5 votes, chaoser with 4 and chaoser was lynched.
Since we thought Cephiro was scum, we thought scum were trying to fuck up with us so I raged and stuff

So people, that was the tale of the 4 most EPIC FAIL scum agendas in the history of TL Mafia.
Thank you for your attention

syllogism Finland. May 25 2012 16:13. Posts 5335

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No one was, at any point of the game when me and WBG were alive, following Palmar. One of the reasons we thought he was town was because he put himself into a position where he could only vote and do what me and wbg were telling him to do. His day 1 plan was a typical palmar plan and not a plan that "should have raised red flags". I also disagree that it was bad, because, again, it wouldn't have been him deciding how to vote, but several players together and he couldn't really manipulate that at all. He didn't even participate in organizing the votes, me and WBG did that and we didn't even ask him to. With only 24 hours to organize round A every day, we basically either had to RNG votes or have a few players decide how to vote. Later on when there were fewer players left things obviously changed a bit.

Feel free to ask Palmar if the above is correct. I had pretty dumb reasons for thinking Palmar is town, but I don't think he actually had a plan to win and I let a dumb meta reason to mislead me. We didn't reassess as much as we should have because we were incredibly frustrated by the fact the setup wasn't letting us kill the players we wanted and actually see the flips. Cephiro should have let himself die much earlier, but he was clearly not playing to win after BC's flip.

Otherwise good analysis as always, but you are making some assumptions that you shouldn't in a PM game.

Last edit: 2012-05-25 16:44:40

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 16:24. Posts 3087

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LOL Cephiro:

-My team all thought you were Harimoto
-Harimoto all thought you were Yokoya
-Town all thought you were scum

lol

Hey ET, when did you figure out or had thoughts that I was scum? Before Day 8? After the plan from Day 8? Or just after we were 2-1-1?

sandro, why did you out Palmar to us?

Did you already do that KNOWING that I or MZ were scum, and we knew ET planned on getting Wiggles to 6 votes or so and we knew prplhz gave Palmar votes, and that way if me or MZ were scum, we would think "If ET was scum, then he'd know Palmar would get 5 votes from prplhz, so they'd know Palmar wouldn't need any votes to be saved (or at least not too many), so they wouldn't need to out Palmar to us to get us to save him", and then think ET would be basically confirmed town because of that?

Because that's certainly what I thought, which is why I took ET as "confirmed town" basically and didn't even bother to read his filter/PMs and figure out if he was Harimoto

Last edit: 2012-05-25 16:28:47

syllogism Finland. May 25 2012 16:28. Posts 5335

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Also gonzaw not shooting when you should have just because town might win is really bad and I hope your team disapproves. In a game with two mafia factions you aren't playing against the town and it doesn't matter whether the other team or town wins if you lose.

Last edit: 2012-05-25 16:29:24

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 16:30. Posts 3087

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On May 25 2012 16:28 syllogism wrote:
Also gonzaw not shooting when you should have just because town might win is really bad and I hope your team disapproves.

If I don't shoot and the other guy doesn't shoot, I can still win, the same as if I shoot and the other guy doesn't shoot.
So shooting didn't really make much difference to me, so why would I shoot?

Also, add that to the fact that I had severe paranoia and actually thought sloosh was scum (so I would have ended up shooting him, netting Harimoto an automatic win).

EDIT: if Harimoto shot me then I lose whether I use my KP or not

If I had used my KP on Harimoto then I would have lost and town won, but I would have lost
If I didn't use my KP on Harimoto, then Harimoto/Town would be in 2-1 LYLO, but I would have lost

Same outcome no matter if I use my KP or not. I was planning for a 2-1-1 scenario (PMing Meapak to make a plan to get sloosh+ET lynched), so that was the one that benefited me the most. That one included not shooting, so I decided not to shoot.

Last edit: 2012-05-25 16:32:03

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 16:33. Posts 3087

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I should have just shot ET for being a bastard and shooting me behind my back

Hey ET, you could have still won in a 2-1-1 scenario, why make me lose so horribly instead of giving me a chance of making the game more interesting? >_>

Last edit: 2012-05-25 16:33:43

syllogism Finland. May 25 2012 16:35. Posts 5335

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But if you hit harimoto and they don't hit you, you win right there. I don't think it is a reasonable assumption that the other team wouldn't shoot when there were only 4 players alive (I assume that was the case, I wasn't following closely), but if that's what you assumed that's fine then.

gonzaw Uruguay. May 25 2012 16:35. Posts 3087

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On May 25 2012 15:37 EchelonTee wrote:
I'll read through the stuff later, still out. But yes, I slipped hard concerning sandroba, but only chaoser really noticed.

About the d2 plan; gonzaw you may have come up with it but I was the one who said we should all vote to be in the ]majority, then telling sandroba to vote opposite. I worked my balls off to protect my team, which may have been dangerous, but scum is all about risk and reward, eh?

Also, we should make a TL mafia games thread; I want to lol/dota with you guys more xpp

I'll make the thread when I get back, if you guys are down; I already have a couple of your that's info :D

If I told people that we should vote to be in the majority, then I doubt most people would have followed it.
I tried to convince them that we could be in the minority and it would be sweet, so people were more motivated to follow it.

Of course I wanted us to be in the majority, but in a YES majority not a NO one >_>