M 90: Shootout at the Pretty Good Corral

[damo666]

Bozo kotp & someone unexpected

[damo666]

I shouldn't be doing this at 03:11!

Gn

[brainbomb]

Okay well bozo needs to be cleared then and I will make it my
Mission to see if theres any reason he could be town. Homework assignment accepted.

But later. My wifes now reading the game so she can see what im doing instead of enjoying the show the good wife with her instead. So break time

[brainbomb]

First random sample I reviewed m59 bozo scum game

http://mafia.peterlund.se/e/web/msgs?user=Bozotheclown&g=59

Vs

m64 towngame
http://mafia.peterlund.se/e/web/msgs?user=Bozotheclown&g=64

I do see that he lacks depth in his posts and tends to just lead questions as scum. Sometimes stringing three questions into a post and he doesnt do that as town in my first glances.

And hes doing scum sample A material in current game. So im not ready to rule anything out.

[brainbomb]

so far I like brain, Bunny, Chaqa, Jamie, sweetandcool for town.
…maybe foodcoats too?
I feel like I should like Flavius for town too, but he seems so over the top. It doesn’t feel real. But that would probably be NAI (he can do a bit as either alignment). not sure what to do with him yet

I think I like Chaqa too. We have two in common (brain, Chaqa)

I am surprised you like Jamiet, though I am feeling more comfortable with his effort-level and prob-y-ness after his first couple of hours in the game. Still think he has a higher chance than a random pick of flipping scum here.

With Flava Flav, I was thrown by the all caps usage in the first game I played with him. I think I was just reading that as over the top in a way he didn’t mean it. Now having that prior game as context, this game feels much more organic and sincere. Unfiltered. Town!Flav.

Balki starting to hedge his read of Jamie while still voting him could be an effort to get someone else to move off his wagon first.

Bozo; can you articulate for me what you think balki is doing here wrt to flavius?

[brainbomb]

Thats a bewildering thing for bozo to say to a scum partner.

If the answer is bozo and jamie are both scum hes accusing balki of hedging a read on his own scumbuddy

[brainbomb]

Bozo is suddenly casting a large number of votes in a condensed space of time.

Bozo is leaving a legacy of his preferred votes Jamie. Hes done this before and you didnt understand it last time either.

Not sure why hes leaving a legacy but hey cool. Legacy of de Bozoh

Oh God he's doing that again, yes, I see.

I hate it when he does that, the potato salad-avoiding oddball that he is.

And Jamie somehow forgets bozo does this. But Jamie wasnt scumreading bozo for doing it. In fact the way this observation was first produced it could be read as Jamie being happy bozo is suddenly doing this.

[bozotheclown]

It will be 7-3 D3. If one D2 shot was from town, the mafia potentially have 2 shots left, making it effectively 5-3 D3, which means we might have no mis-kills left. If Balki wasn't gunned yet, we would have 1 mis-kill in the case where 1 D2 shot was town, but that is a 50/50 chance.

[brainbomb]

Bozo pushes Jamie for threatening to sub out:
jamie responses there-after

I believe that is an inaccurate trope; I would also point out that, as you know, I have a preference for being scum. If anything I would be less likely to sub out as Mafia, than as Town.

As you have identified with the timestamps, I thought about it, for a few minutes, because I was upset, and then I calmed myself down and changed my mind.

I don't think it's a good idea for you to tunnel on this because the GM is not going to verify whether or not I made a sub request. You either have to accept my word on the matter, or call me a liar.

Bozo voting no kill and advocating it

If enough people do, nothing will happen.

Oh whoops my vote is still on Sweet, that wasn't my intention.

##Vote Bozotheclown for constant weird shenanigans and unwillingness to cast a proper vote.

jamie is very very worried about bozo.
Hes worried about bozo pushing him
Hes worried bozo might get modkilled
Hes worried about what others think of bozo
Hes worries about others VOTING bozo
And hes worried that bozo isnt voting enough

[brainbomb]

Jamie seems to be only willing to push bozo if chaqa was. During N1 jamie says vecna answers bozo and brains questions articulately. But never scumreads bozo until d2 after vecna dies.

[bozotheclown]

I think I like Chaqa too. We have two in common (brain, Chaqa)

I am surprised you like Jamiet, though I am feeling more comfortable with his effort-level and prob-y-ness after his first couple of hours in the game. Still think he has a higher chance than a random pick of flipping scum here.

With Flava Flav, I was thrown by the all caps usage in the first game I played with him. I think I was just reading that as over the top in a way he didn’t mean it. Now having that prior game as context, this game feels much more organic and sincere. Unfiltered. Town!Flav.

Balki starting to hedge his read of Jamie while still voting him could be an effort to get someone else to move off his wagon first.

Bozo; can you articulate for me what you think balki is doing here wrt to flavius?

I don't know what Balki was doing regarding Flavius, but if he was bussing/distancing Jamie he could have been trying to dissuade other Jamie votes and provide justification for moving his vote off of Jamie later.

[bozotheclown]

Apparently questioning Sweet, even in jest, makes Bunny and Worcej immediately chainsaw me.

That's interesting.

what do you mean by chainsaw? worcej hasn't elaborated at all on the vote, for all we know it could be just as your questioning is; a jest. Bunny has said some rather cryptic things that I don't quite understand, probably playing into the Ronin gimmick.

Pure towny K-POP vibes. Not trying to jump on anyone or anything. You can be Town.

This was early D1, it seems more likely to be pocketing than trying to protect a teammate, but with the mafia guns, Balki could have been trying to prevent kingofthepirates from becoming a wagon.

[brainbomb]

And the grand finale:

Jamie produces a case on bozo and presents it to Balki

Bozo, I am not scumreading you as a result of you voting me today. You know that because you have seen me present multiple reasons for scumreading you, and you have replied to them.

That being the case it is very, very insincere of you to claim I am scumreading you, because you voted for me.

This earns you a ##Vote Bozotheclown

One hour later Jamie tries to generate a damo wagon.

Damo is doing very little D2 after doing a LOT on D1 to bury Foodcoats and support SweetandLiar.

Why is he town actually?

Current townreads:

Chaqa
Eden
Balki
Flavius
​ Probably BunnyGo

Current Scumreads:

Sweetandcool
Bozotheclown
Damo
​ Still maybe Worcej

Current nulls:

Brainbomb
DemonRHK
KOTP (although I do not like his lack of participation)
Rdr
Lfishl

Balki is a townread now
Formatting on bunny and worcej seem odd.
King of pirates is moved out of scumreads to make room for damo now

##Vote Balki

I was already townreading Eden and I believe his claim.

And Jamie goes for Balki and joins with an end


Conclusion: Jamie pushes at bozo seem fueled by annoyance and not by suspicion. jamie uses words that imply bozo is behaving in an annoying way but after putting tons of effort into writing a case to show balki homework he then drops the case after only letting it air for one hour. Only to move to damo randomly for no reason other than I think jamie is trying to mess with chaqa and get chaqa to vote a town.

This makes bozo town imo; and a miskill target of Jamie. At worst this is strategic bussing (case your own guy) which could just mean the scumteam opted to case their own guys for amusement. Meaning sweet is scum, jamie is scum, and kotp is also scum because jamie selectively softened kotp out of his reads for no reason other than to prop damo into that empty spot

[brainbomb]

I suppose it could be bussing on bozo instead of sweet being scum. Casing their own guys would mean kotp cant be scum and itd be bozo jamie sweet and balki.

Im Thinking jamie is scum here so lets start there

[bozotheclown]

You guys still want to kill food after that assless chaps quip? I don't.

I am feeling ambivalent.

##vote rdrivera. I have him at Null. But I feel like I will have him at Null seven days from now as well. Let's do a solid for future Balki, and maybe he is scum.

This would be a dangerous bus at a time when 2 town were the top wagons with less than 2 hours in D1. I don't see why Balki would risk getting rdrivera DKed here.

[bozotheclown]

I don't think we kill food here with his claim. We'll learn more about that claim as time progresses.

Let's kill rdrivera or Jamiet.

This could easily be continued distancing from Jamie.

[sweetandcool]

OK, my thoughts on games.

Games like tic-tac-toe are not that interesting. This is because it's always possible to (fairly easily) know you're making a move that is guaranteed to not make your position worse. (But I find opening on a corner a nice counter to this when playing children or people who just think "always take center and corners")

Games like chess and go are similar to tic-tac-toe in the sense that it's theoretically possible to do know you're making a move that is guaranteed to not make your position worse, except that they are too complex for humans to solve. So they're interesting again.

Games like basketball are interesting not just for the incorporation of physical skills that most do not possess, but because they incorporate teammates; teams that coordinate better will almost always win. But coordinating is worth more than doing "good plays" that have no support. This is why there's playbooks and the idea that people should be "team players".

But now we take a diversion into "meta games" and "good plays". In chess and go and tic-tac-toe, there are definite "good plays" (whether we know them or not), and there are definite "bad plays" (usually easier to identify) that are just going to make you lose.

In games of non-total information (or some sports where information is total, but hard to react to as a team in the moment) there are plays that are good "in context". Like in MtG a deck that is not great objectively, might be very strong if you know what deck it's facing. This is what is often called part of the "meta game"; moves that are strong in context if you know what others are doing.

In Poker, there's a mix of both "good solid plays" and "meta context" plays. Most players will tell you that you should aim to avoid "obvious error plays" and do your best to make "good solid plays" and just do reads and meta plays as you have them. But this is a game where nobody is on your team.

Now, up till here, I expect most of you are saying "yes Bunny, stop explaining what we all know" but Bridge is different (and mafia different still, but similar to bridge).

In bridge, you have several differences:
1) you have a partner that you've (hopefully, but not always) prepared with, but once the game starts you're no longer allowed to communicate.
2) there is an amount of luck and randomness (less than you might think, but more than nothing) so just because a play failed doesn't mean it was "bad" it just happened to be "wrong" that time
3) Being clever is valued and good, but if your teammate is lost then it will cost you more often than not.

To this end, being a good teammate is harder than in basketball. In basketball you can (and should!) continue to communicate during the game. Same with most other team games. But in bridge, you have to make inferences about what your partner is thinking, what they know, and how they'll react, and do your best to protect them from themselves. There's a number of times it's very correct to make prima face absurd plays (like throwing away an ace, or intentionally playing the king of trump under the ace of trump) to help you partner wake up to a danger.

Bridge is also complicated. My partnership's code and strategy guide and mutual understandings was 60 typed pages. But it was always more important to make sure the benefit of adding to the code outweighed the mental costs and possible errors and strategic costs of doing so. Just because we'd hit an issue where having a different code would have helped didn't necessarily mean it was the right modification for us.

Now to mafia: here we don't know our teammates and that makes it harder still. But we do know that a big part of this game is to try and make it easy for them to find us (while we're trying to find them). One good way to do this is to be yourself; being yourself is easy for you and hard to fake. And in a vanilla game, there's basically nothing else to do.

With mechanics, there adds some extra stuff on top of it. And here's where we end up combining all the previous things. There are some times that there's an "obvious bad" or "obvious good" play (don't vote off an "innocent child" whom the GM has publicly announced is town). But then there are some meta plays (how long to hold information, how to claim, whether to crumb, whether to shoot, whether to role block), where town has been reluctant to fake claim a power because it muddies the water. Brainbomb has claimed in the past (I still remember when he fakeclaimed MY power day 1 when he was on the block and got me speed wagoned. My power was "when you die, you have the option of shooting someone". I decided not to shoot brainbomb because just because your teammate screws up doesn't mean you should compound the error, and I believed he was town).

Having this meta agreement has some costs and benefits:
1) It makes it harder for scum to muddy the waters by fake claiming and get away with it
2) It makes it harder for town to protect a power by fake claiming
3) It makes it harder for some players where being themselves would involve claiming like this

But once the community has this idea, trying to fight it ends up causing troubles in its own right. And it's not obviously a "bad play" to have this agreement, but rather a "meta play", and changing it is not obvious good or bad, but changing it without agreement is obviously bad for the chaos it causes.

Now a big caveat there: if the chaos it causes ends up helping town reveal themselves...well...mafia is a bit unique in that we don't know our teammates and getting them to reveal themselves somehow *is* the game.


OK...that's probably both a bit wordy, a bit too vague at times and had too many digressions. But hopefully something made sense about how I think about all this.

I appreciate the effort you took to write this up, and as a lover of incomplete information games I know what you mean.

I have never come up with a communication guidebook with a partner. I actually enjoy playing with strangers and learning how each one thinks.

I think the big difference is that we are all playing Mafia for fun and we are not professionals. Ideally, there would be no "lurkers" and players would stick to an established meta.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Town players tend to flout the meta or say/do things that APPEAR anti-town or scummy. Of course, ideally players should strive to play as well as possible.

Sometimes, in order to accurately read your teammates you need to look past mistakes they make and assess their motivation. Skipping this step of critical thinking and just applying a meta rule is what I've essentially been protesting this game.

In the future, I will just focus mostly on solve accuracy. If I get reamed D1 or D2 every game then I can only leave a legacy of accurately solving. This game and last, however, I have played purely from my phone and have not had time or opportunity to focus (my big research cases are mostly formed on my computer), and consequently I have attempted to make myself useful in ways other than presenting rigorous cases.

[brainbomb]

Meanwhile in deadwood QT south dakota

Al Swearengen: tell these cock suckers if they dont have my money HERE soon I will burn this fucking town to the ground.

Jamiet99uk: Im sorry werent you banned from the forum in like 2014 for being a sexist

Al Swearengen: Yea and I started my own forum. Cocksuckers.net

Sweet: yea… okay this interview is over. (Throws Al Out of the bar) Sorry but were only gonna let people into our crew who we can control. friends allow me to introduce our new crew.

(Jugglers, spades players, go players, and Alexander Alekhine enter)

Sweet: holy shit its Alekhine!

Alekhine: get me my vodka you fool. And ill play you in one blitz game

Sweet: Okay sure. Um all we have left is this bottle of motor oil for greasing up all the guns were gonna be shooting soon.

King of the Pirates: Hey now my musket does not require any grease.

Sweet: yes but I dont know how to tell you this; we probably will have to kill you tomorrow to have any chance of looking like town, is that okay

Alekhine: I moved e4, now make a move you wimp

Sweet: that is not Alekhine. Seriously thats just Capablanca. You fools let in an ametuer GM. Get out of my bar.

[brainbomb]

Good night all. Keep researching. Keep fighting. Never give up

[FlaviusAetius]

Sorry, I am extremely embarrassed for posting early. I forgot there was several deaths and just reacted without thinking about it.

You still CCing?

I was trying to protect Eden, obviously.

I was not going to derail his scan, and that is pretty evident given it wasn't much of a struggle to vote out Balki.

I dont understand this >at all< you were just making a fool of yourself and made >several< people vote you