Thoth

I don't know what to make of Mestari. Everything he's said has seemed to me like it came from a town perspective, but he's supposedly really good, so that's probably NAI. Same with Pie, to a slightly lesser extent.


I stand by my assessment that whiteflame death-tunneled the ever-living shit out of me in a completely uncharacteristic way. I can't see him doing that unless he knew I was innocent and wanted me dead.


Casey hasn't pushed town in a direction that I think shows bad intent, but their posts struck me as scum trying to make their contributions seem more meaningful than they were even before she joined whiteflame's assault on me.


I'd like to see more from rex.


I still suspect that Kohai bullshitted a claim and then improved it, possibly with help from his scummates.


I only put Banana and Wryly in solid town because they're the two players on my list other than Lunatic and wylted. I wouldn't be shocked if either flipped scum. Banana's reads have looked good, but her overall activity leaves something to be desired. Despite my temptation to OMGUS Wryly, I feel like all her contributions have been good, but her behavior as scum or 3P has fooled us before. She also was not railing against me nearly as hard as whiteflame and Casey were, although I suppose that could be a distancing act.


You would be my top townread just for insisting that I post reads, but I also think it's plausible, though not super likely, that you are Jinwoo. Rex is more likely Jinwoo, if you ask me.


I still don't know what to make of Alyssa's defense on me.

Thoth

From most to least townie:


Town-confirmed: Lunatic, wylted

Solid town: Banana, Wryly

Lean town: Mestari, Alyssa, Mag1c

Null: Vader

Lean scum: Pie, Kohai (I still don't buy his claim)

Strong scum: whiteflame, Casey

Likely 3P: Helz, Rex (if not 3P, then Rex is lean town and Helz is solid town)


Not included due to inactivity: Airmax and Shining

Thoth

whiteflame and Casey, although that's inspired by OMGUS. I'm not happy with what I've seen from Pie. I think Rex is likely Jinwoo, although what I recall Lunatic having said about his recruit makes me think Luna disagrees.

Thoth

Speaking of post-flip, roles usually don't flip immediately on here, and in Mikal's last game, Retro Mafia, he didn't even post the lynchee's alignment at end-of-day. I'll ask him what will flip upon lynch.

Thoth
Your suddenly able to identify flavor that may have any remotely AI stuff attached to it after people voice potential of 3p

Because I did not want scum to identify someone I thought was an important town power role.

Somehow you magically know between 3 specific people what a persons flavor is?

It's not magic. It's a role ability.

Flavor does not = AI

It took shockingly few words for you to go from, "flavor that may have any remotely AI stuff attached to it", to, "Flavor does not = AI".

That such a flavor mechanic is silly and unlikely

Where? On MafiaUniverse, where flavor analysis gets you modkilled? Unless you're familiar with a lot of setups on here, you don't know what we consider silly and unlikely. Check out Rex's character cop in Lunatic's Alien game.

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong

You are wrong. I am correcting you.

Thoth

Warning for everyone: I am now at L-1. Whether you like that or not, catch up on the thread before even thinking about reaching for the V key on your keyboard.

Thoth
I would disagree here. The textbook definition of WIFOM is breaking down known information for an individual. If you know that your opponent knows something you can react to the level of knowledge they have. Its basically counter intel. When applied to mafia its more about how deeply a player understands the game and how deeply you should consider their motives. There is a Stanford lecture on the subject if I can rewind my brain about 10 years and find it on the subject if you really want.

I don't know what textbook your professor assigned, but, as I have always understood it, WIFOM refers to any dilemma where (1) you can choose a seemingly weaker option over a seemingly stronger option, and (2) your opponent finds it harder to figure out which option you chose or plan to choose because they know about this choice. My alleyways example in #1220 was an extremely simple illustration of this idea. I'm absolutely willing to use WIFOM just like I'm willing to apply any other common concept or strategy to Mafia games. What I'm not willing to do is pour a glass of WIFOM for the sake of it. If I believe that one alleyway guarantees my escape, I'm not even going to consider going down the other.

Thoth

When I said that I had refuted every point against me, I meant that I thought I had shown why none of them were strong evidence of me being evil. If you argue that maybe the arguments that I'm lying could end up being true, then okay, I can't prove that anyone else should 100% deny that possibility for every point against me. If you want to argue that we should lynch me for information even if there's a high chance that I'm town, I will disagree, but I can't prove that it's not the right choice. That said:

Also is it even anti town to sheep a town confirmed player? lol I don't know what his point with that argument is

Not necessarily, but you have to look at whiteflame's intentions here. I've never thought of whiteflame as death-tunnelly or inclined to sheep. In #1337 (interesting number), whiteflame posted for the first time in nine hours to broadside me. Usually, whiteflame gives balanced analysis that weighs all sides of an argument, but here he rails against me without pointing out one redeeming quality of my claim. If Wryly can suggest in #1377 that she might be suffering from perspective distortion, then I think you can see how out of character it is for whiteflame to be as one-sided as a Möbius strip. This tells me that his analysis stems from an undisclosed conflict of interest.

Which is why I was fine lynching you based on the scum slip and odd behavior before you even claimed the rest. In my mind you were already doomed, there was just a small chance maybe you had a towny enough role and claim to excuse the rest. But that ended up not being the case.

I keep wondering what you people would consider a towny claim. With Mafia, and third-parties if there are any, confirmed to have fake-claims, the best claim in the world is doomed to suffer the slings and arrows of, "Mikal could have slid it to them under the table", unless it's completely confirmable like Innocent Child.

Yeah my sleep schedule is also super fucked because of this game. It doesn't help that I am supposed to go to sleep at like 8am my time, ya know right about the same time most people are getting on to play. Fuckin daylighters.

📠

The problem is, even giving you the benefit of the doubt, you are undeniably an outlier from my own pm, the publicly known guild recruit mechanic which doesn't play into your character well, and the roles make even less sense for your character.

Answer as best as you can without copy-pasting your role PM: Does it say that all players, except maybe guild leaders, are recruitable? If not, then I am an outlier regardless of your role PM, but only in that single sense.


It's beyond my comprehension how anyone can question that not being a Hunter makes her unrecruitable, wanting to learn how to heal people makes her the backup Doctor, and being close to Jinwoo gives her information about him. Just because you could imagine tighter justifications does not make these bad. Oh yeah, and if you think this is a fake-claim and the justifications are shitty, tell me why you think my teammates approved them. Unlike in Suikoden, I would have needed three people to sign off on it. Maybe only one or two given inactives, but I bet Alyssa would have pushed back on a claim she thought would go over like a lead balloon much harder than you did to the Leprechaun claim in Suikoden.


Let me leave an open question for when those daylighters return: Do you think your justification is watertight? That is, can you imagine that anyone would even slightly question that it's anything other than a perfect fit for your role?

Sure sometimes mods have questionable justifications for the roles they make, but without any flip to indicate that has happened, you at the bare minimum are a good science lynch to test that theory, even ignoring every other point about you. The draw backs to lynching you are not apparent in the slightest. You are a back up doctor, not even a main doctor, in a game where we don't even lose someone during night phase 1, and we would have to assume the mafia would kill the doctor night phase two for your role to even become useable all the way into night phase 3. So other than just letting you live to be merciful, what is the major drawback to lynching you as opposed to getting hoards of information about the set up and role justification from your flip even if you are town, and being able to use your wagon to read people? Lynching you is an optimal strategy even if we assume every best case scenario for you being town. If I was town in your situation I would not be mad about being lynched, in fact I would understand it and think that at the very least my lynch helps the town in the long run, and would be more than okay with it.
Sure, if you want to add that as a reason to lynch thoth to the million other reasons, you won't have any complaint from me lol. I feel like Thoth could have been reasonably lynched 500 posts ago though and we could have still defended that lynch based on where we were at with him then. The case for lynching him just gets stronger and stronger.

I can't fully disagree with all of those points, but I don't accept the conclusion. If you assume every best case scenario for me being town, what number would you put on it? One percent? Five? Twenty, fifty, eight-five? If it's high, are you going to risk lynching a likely townie in the hopes of confirming their PoE on a third-party? I would rather risk hitting Mafia or, better yet, if I were confident that I knew who Jinwoo was, lynch him. I understand that town sometimes has to make fellow townies take one for the team, but I know that I am town, so I have to self-preserve because, from my perspective, any lynch other than you or wylted has a higher chance of being a mislynch, and you two won't be lynched.

It amuses me that you are trying to hard to sell the fact that you are town here, but seem to be literally unable to accept the one person who seemed to buy your bs in any regard town telling you. Because at this point if you are scum buddies, you need to create as much distance as possible lol.

As with whiteflame, my objection was to the arguments and the manner in which they were presented, not to the conclusion. ThothScummate!Alyssa would have taken a risk even by defending me with a straightforward argument like, "Everyone makes mistakes. I totally buy that Thoth's explanation that he read something Helz said and mixed him up with Mestari." Instead, she contradicted the explanation I gave in a way that came off as the most blatant teammate-saving act imaginable. I double-dog dare you to come up with any scenario that explains this without invoking implausibly poor coordination in scumchat or WIFOM for the sake of WIFOM like I talked about in #1220. Also, my read on Alyssa has moved from scumlean to null because I can't hazard a guess at her motive for defending me like she did.

I am just going to say this outright, I think I know who Jin Woo is as well, though its mostly a theory based on context clues and a lot of theme knowledge. If you have someone halfway decent on the scum team there is a good chance they also came to the same conclusion as I did and fed you that info to earn you town cred for this exact argument.

In other words, you believe that one of Alyssa, Helz, and Rex is probably Jinwoo. If your Jinwoo suspect weren't in my list, you would call that evidence against me. Since they are in my list, you also call that evidence against me. Between this and laughing at my claim, it's clear that your hateboner for me is too rock-solid to let you consider any point in my favor. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Also, being town-confirmed puts your motives above suspicion, but I'm curious why you aren't pushing whoever you think is Jinwoo. Do you not think they are a winsteal 3P? Are you just that confident that I am scum? If you knew that I were scum and a scummate told me the same Jinwoo suspect that you have, who would you think fed it to me?

Thoth

Let me make post #1444 an open question. If you thought the chance of me flipping town or scum was roughly 50/50, including the probability of me being Jinwoo in the probability of me being scum, were roughly 50-50, would you be willing to burn me at the stake to either kill a baddie or confirm my PoE on Jinwoo? I admit that I don't have a clear-cut refutation there other than saying that, even in y'all's shoes, I think I would rather wait for inactives to get on and, depending on what they say, possibly take the risk of a mislynch to kill scum or Jinwoo.

Thoth

Looking at the like counts on posts since I full-claimed in #1316, it's clear where y'all's pitchforks are pointed. If I get lynched, I hope that everyone who has been trying to toss me into the lake and see if I float or not, especially whiteflame, gets death-tunneled so intensely that it will make the Tunnel of Prejudice seem like the tunnel of love at an old-timey amusement park.

Thoth
What a lame response! You'll respond to an argument that you're scum, but not a strategic argument for lynching you regardless of alignment?

What is there for me to respond to? If town is going to lynch me and say we got information out of it either way, and not even pressure an inactive for a claim first, no defense I can offer for my claim will stop them. I was going to address that suggestion later once other people had chimed in, but it didn't fall into the category of direct argument that I'm scum, which is what I meant when I said when I had countered every point that anyone had made against me. I'm sorry if I did not word that clearly enough, but I get the impression that people already think I sound enough like a thesaurus without me writing out every possible caveat and misinterpretation like it's an end-user license agreement.

What difference does it make? You get lynched either way.

Maybe, but are you people so impatient that you won't even give Airmax time to chime in with this much time left in the day phase?

And you say we should pressure an inactive first? Motherfucker, what do you think we've been doing over the past I-don't-even-know-how-many pages? Largely waiting on inactives to activate! I even just said the only reason I haven't put you at L-1 is because I want Shining to respond to the wagon on him. Have you even been paying attention? It feels the real reason you avoided responding is that you realized you didn't actually have a counter to offer.

I've been paying attention to this day phase for almost every second since I woke up six hours except when doing house chores. And, yes, by pressure an inactive, I mean pressure them and then wait for them to respond to the pressure, because, y'know, the deadline for this day phase is not 3 seconds away.

Thoth
I literally just provided a new argument in #1418 that you pointedly ignored after I said you weren't countering it.

An argument that I did not feel was actually an argument against me because it doesn't accuse me of being scum. If you want to lynch me per consequentia mirabilis, do it, but ask yourself first if you are willing to accept that I could flip town just to confirm a PoE on a third-party. In your shoes, I'd consider it but would rather pressure an inactive for a scumslip first.

Thoth
Literally an OMGUS as you VTL'd me right after this, but call it whatever you want.

OMGUS is when you vote someone just because they voted for you. I'm voting you because your reasoning is so uncharacteristically bad and death-tunnelly that it could only be coming from Scum!whiteflame.

So you never questioned why you would have received a list of players who could be Jin-woo if he "was town's Big Good"? You'd think you would have considered alternative explanations for why you received that information.

You are walking down the street and you find a $20 bill on the ground. Do you pick it up, or do you wonder if the bill has been coated with poison as an assassination attempt? If I considered every imaginable alternative explanation for everything, I would never get anything done.

Doesn't seem like a workable strategy when you're already the center of attention and asking for some rather specific eliminations under the pretense that one of them could be Jin-woo. Especially odd since the one who you scumread most is chiefly being sussed over statements you've made.

Name one role that could never be part of a workable strategy no matter how the game plays out.


I scumread Alyssa because her defense of me seemed so desperate and reachy that I figured that she probably was not Jinwoo. Now that I've reconsidered her likely motives and am no longer operating under the assumption, which I held when I said I scumread Alyssa, that Jinwoo is the towniest town who ever did town, anything I said about Alyssa back then should be discarded.

Again, not responsive to my point, but I've repeated it twice already and I'm not expecting a response.

What response were you expecting? That Mikal has been watching some Youtube videos where Sung Jin-ah has an unusually intimate relationship with her onii-chan and also sleeps around with two other guys? I responded to you saying that it doesn't make sense for Sung Jin-ah to not know exactly who her brother is by pointing out that:

  1. This is overpowered assuming that Jinwoo is a winsteal 3P.
  2. It probably would have been overpowered if Jinwoo were a really powerful townie.
  3. Not every role has to match the justification that you think sounds coolest.
Unlike Mikal, I'm not calling out a single role that seems off from what I would expect. I'm pointing to multiple points that don't make sense with your character thematically or logically, several of which you still haven't addressed. I just don't see a world in which Mikal included this character and attached these roles to her.

Name one single point you've made that I haven't addressed completely (and wasn't made after I started writing this post). If you can do that, I will address it in all the detail needed to refute it. Not in all the detail you want because you are insatiable and not in a good way.

Thoth
I'm not hearing a counter-argument.

I've countered every argument that everyone has thrown at me, and nobody is listening to reason. Unless you can come up with a fresh point against me, I've got nothing to do but tell jokes and die. Alas, poor Thoth! I knew him, Casey: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent Mafia playing: he hath borne town on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in their process of elimination it is!

Thoth
If not, we know his list and know SJW must be on there.

And other water-cooler chatter in the FBI branch office while hunting for the Charlie Kirk shooter

Thoth
Gonna repeat the points made in #1363 and #1381

Could it possibly be that I am defensive because town is testing if my claim is made of wood by seeing if it weighs the same as a duck?

Thoth
You held off on providing this information for a good long while, even when the wagon on you got precariously close to a lynch.

Yeah, I held off on it because I wasn't sure that I was going to be lynched (I'm still not) and, thinking Jinwoo was town's Big Good, I would have considered taking my list to the grave anyway.

You then reveal it and point in three different directions all at once, claiming that one of them has to be Jin-woo.

Guilty as charged.

Given that there is no scum NK tonight, that means you're relying on a lynch or other NK to flip them. Who are you sussing in this pool?

Alyssa for her absurd defense of me, which was possibly because she has an ability that told me who I am, which would make even more sense if she's a 3P and needed to get rid of me than it would if she were town and her information made us like paired Emissaries. Why would she defend me? Because she wanted to look extra good and buddy-buddy knowing she was in my PoE after she flipped 3P. That's a possibility, anyway. I don't know whether or not she has information about my role or what information she has if so. Helz seems behaviorally town but could be 3P. I'm confident he's not scum. There's too little information from Rex for me to say how much I sus him.

And are you honestly expecting us to eliminate all of them to vindicate you?

No, of course not. Hence why I never hard-claimed my role as confirmable. But it very much could have ended up confirming me if I claimed my PoE and then one of them flipped Jinwoo. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not an Oracle.

This just straight up doesn't respond to my point. You are his sister. You know his identity in the show, and while others might be uncertain, you of all people would not be. Why would you, who lives with Jin-woo, have a list of three names that could each potentially be Jin-woo?

Jinwoo is an S-rank Hunter, why wouldn't he have an ability that kills all the Mafia and makes Town win instantly? You're not letting anything past the checkpoint of, "it's not the role I would come up with for this character".

Thoth

You know what? As much as I just want Shining BTFO'd for easy self-pres and to inactivate an inactive, whiteflame's hardon for pushing my claim as though it's on par with Leprechaun from Suikoden shows mala fide. This is not OMGUS.


Unvote


VTL whiteflame

Thoth

We don't have any full-claims on the table except mine and Kohai's. How do you know that there aren't several other roles at least as complicated as mine?

Thoth

Sorry, I thought you were asking why I wasn't just told who Jinwoo was. Maybe that's not what you meant. My point stands that telling me, "Jinwoo is in the game", isn't exactly much of a role.

Thoth
Normally when an informative is given a POE like that, it contains scum. If it's a town role, like an Emissary is informed of, it's normally just given -- "there is an Innocent Child, there is a Doctor", etc. No POE. Did it strike you as odd that you were given a POE for Jin-woo?

No, because I figured that Jinwoo, on top of being town, was probably the most powerful townie and just telling me who he was would be too much protection against a mislynch.

Thoth
Well, this one just doesn't help your case at all. Informed is unconfirmable, the list could be drawn randomly, and it doesn't make sense for your character.

It's confirmable if one of Helz, Alyssa, and Rex flip Jinwoo while I'm alive, but your hardon for mislynching me is clearly not interested in that.

Why would you be unsure who Jin-woo is? You're his sister. It's not like he has any history of hiding from his sister in the show.

Isn't he the protagonist? So I'm guessing he doesn't have any history of working against town either, or at least not to the extent that the town characters in this game would want to kill him in the show. This re-proves my point about how your lorehammer is making you see everything as a justification-shaped nail.

Thoth
I mean when you say it like this it almost sounds not janky. Shit, is my perspective just sus-skewed on this?

You're listening too hard to Pie and whiteflame and it's making you see me as the scientific name of a pig