The Syndicate

You were on the top of my civ list for reasons I still do not understand.

Never again.

Well this time I avoided warning the players of this game about the dangers of letting Soneji live past day 1 because I wanted to give him a chance to shine, but next time expect me to bring the paranoia full-stop.

Relentless paranoia always pays off.

MovingPictures07 wrote:If you all still have questions, by the way, keep throwing them at us!]

Which kills did I stop with my role, assuming I stopped any?

Cool ending to this game. Nice to see Soneji urbstomping it, I've been hoping to see him being active in a Syndicate game for a long time. Hope you play more games here, I think you can add a lot to this site. And nice to see EPi as scum again, I guess I should have trusted that idea that he was being too pacific to be civ Epi.

This game was fun at start, but then it became ridiculously stressful. I was going through a taxing moment in real life (preparing for a very difficult exam which I'm still not sure whether I passed or not), and all that emotion combined to the regular stress from mafia games burned me out pretty quickly. It started with the CFD thing, and then when the prisoners came in and I started because accused by people I didn't even know, I blew up and let people lynch me with no defense. I'm still feeling burn out from mafia as a whole after this game.

I have to say, that Prisoner mechanic is really creative, but the whole "introduce 15 new players in the game and give them vote power" can be somewhat unfair to players who have spent 5 cycles trying to build trust and now suddenly lose it. Of course that could also happen to mafia but... I guess I'm not fond of the concept too much, it just feels cheap.

Thanks for the game though Daisy and MP, you guys did an outstanding job at designing game of this length and complexity, and dealing with all the people (like me) wanting to quit it. And I apologize for some of the rants and agressive posts I made, in case that bothered someone.

Prisoner 319159 wrote:To allude to DDL, if a player is acting too scummy to be scum, he is probably scum *cough ika*

The same thing applied to Sig though, and I think I used the same sentence while talking about him at some point. There is no easy way out for this.

I'm tired of this game. I have been feeling nothing but anger and frustration since Night 2. I don't think I've ever felt so bad about a mafia game before (sorry hosts, it's not your fault).

I'm gonna vote Sig and disappear until Night 6. Because I'll be travelling during this weekend. I'm about to do a very difficult exam and I want distance from the negativity this game brings.

Voting for Sig. We should have lynched him ages ago. If you want to know why, read all my posts about him. Or Epi's latest posts, since he pretty much summed what I think.

Bye.

Prisoner 509378 wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:
Prisoner 509378 wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:I still think it's a stupid plan, btw.
Why?
Maybe ISO my posts. I'm pretty sure I had a long debate with Golden on Night 2 about it.

I'm not gonna reproduce every response I made during this game because suddenly there are 15 new players who hadn't been playing with me before. It's not the idea I make of a fun game. If you guys want to lynch me for that, go ahead.
I'm not asking you to reproduce any responses. I honestly don't believe you. I think you're holding steadfast to a perspective you espoused prior to the CFD, and then you felt like you had to stick to your guns after the fact to alleviate the bad looks it'd produce. To think it was "a stupid plan" after the results it produced is frankly nonsense and I don't think you really believe that.

Yes I do. We lynched a baddie because of luck, and statistically that shouldn't happen often again.

It's a bad plan, just like lynching at random is a bad plan. The accuracy is not reliable, the reads by association are not reliable, everything is not realiable. One black swan does not mean you have a good chance of finding black swans in the wild.

Prisoner 740359 wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:
Prisoner 509378 wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:I still think it's a stupid plan, btw.
Why?
Maybe ISO my posts. I'm pretty sure I had a long debate with Golden on Night 2 about it.

I'm not gonna reproduce every response I made during this game because suddenly there are 15 new playerswho hadn't been playing with me before. It's not the idea I make of a fun game. If you guys want to lynch me for that, go ahead.
Technically, a few of them have played with you before.

I mean during the game. And also the whole game.

If you were lynched during day 1 and has no idea what has been happening since them, you have a more limited idea of me.

Sloonei wrote:Who or what changed your mind in those couple of minutes?

Understanding of what was going on. The people who were arguing with me warmed me up to the idea.

That's another reason I'm skeptical about CFDs. The premise is that players who are bad tend to react badly to it. Well, I'll go ahead and say that everybody who has never heard of them before has a good chance of reacting badly to it. So it might work on a heavily method-based community like RYM where people use those things on a regular basis, but here those things scare people off.

I saw a flash counter-wagon happening and my first reaction was to yell at people to stop.

Prisoner 509378 wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:I still think it's a stupid plan, btw.
Why?

Maybe ISO my posts. I'm pretty sure I had a long debate with Golden on Night 2 about it.

I'm not gonna reproduce every response I made during this game because suddenly there are 15 new players who hadn't been playing with me before. It's not the idea I make of a fun game. If you guys want to lynch me for that, go ahead.

I'd also like to state that from now on, I'll oppose every CFD in every game I play, regardless of alignment.

Just the fact that thing managed to make me so angry during the past week is already bad enough.

I can't believe there are 8 pages to catch up. I think I hate this prisoner mechanic. Ugh.

Prisoner 509378 wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:Point is: I'm more worried about the people currently on the wagons wanting a way out, than the ones outside of them who are not satisfied wanting to create a new one.
This is a direct contradiction of DDL's prior stated beef with a CFD. He said it was a "perfect time" for baddies to save their team mates, which is obviously a reference to players voting on the bandwagons and not the players being bandwagoned. I read this as an uneasy step-back from his staunch resistance to a CFD, particularly as the votes for Fuzz started to pile in. DDL is my top suspect.

Dude when I wrote that post, it has been 30 seconds since I had first heard of the idea of CFD.

My immediate reaction was to think of it as some slimy attempt at redirecting the lynch.

Then people started arguing with me and I understood where they were coming from, so I became a little more neutral on the idea. Yes I stepped back, because my idea of it went from "scummy counter-wagon" to "stupid plan".

I still think it's a stupid plan, btw.

Also, did you read my response to your ISO?

Oh nvm I didn't read the posts above. Give me some time. Sorry.

Prisoner 509378 wrote:Voting for Dragon D. Luffy now. His CFD behavior was really bad, and his interactions with Fuzz are also less than inspiring. This will make me the only vote on DDL right now, despite numerous people suspecting him to some degree. Why?

It's fair for you to believe that, but did you read my response to your points?

Epignosis wrote:
indiglo wrote:Also, EBWOP -

I would be interested in hearing other's thoughts about Epi as well. My paranoia is taking over again, in regards to sig.

What strikes me as odd is that Epi seems to not have any of that paranoia. Which I don't understand. Of course, I'm talking off the top of my head and haven't done an ISO yet... so maybe I'm remembering wrong.
If I end up today's LC / gleam, I'm going to flip a table.

Did anyone say... CFD?

Prisoner 509378 wrote:DDL softened his abrupt grip on Fuzz just as abruptly, and I'm not quite sure why. I could be missing something in this exchange where quotes weren't included, since Fuzz is not one to quote very often. Talk about this DDL -- why exactly did you change your tune here?

Since the start of the game, I've been trying to distinguish malice from what is just weird posting behavior. I didn't manage to convince myself that Fuzz was clearly the former instead of the later. besides, no one listened to my Fuzz wagon so I might as well abort, go back to the wagon that actually had a chance to lynch someone, and wait for Fuzz to give me more evidence.

Also this:

Dragon D. Luffy wrote:
Metalmarsh89 wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:I mentioned Fuzz at least once before that, marmot.
I did a search on your posts with Fuzz as a parameter.

I forgot that it doesn't check for quote names.
If you want an explanation on how I read him:

- I read Fuzz as bad for his unwillingness to scumhunt.
- I pointed that out and voted for him.
- He asked me to ask him questions.
- I asked him to post his reads.
- He posted a wall of reads. It didn't convince me, but didn't make me suspect him more.
- We got close to EoD and nobody had followed me on my Fuzz wagon. I switched back to gleam not to waste my vote.
- The CFD started. I opposed it because I didn't like the concept.
- Almost all the gleam voters siwtched to Fuzz. I siwtched along because Fuzz had always been one of my suspects.

Matt wrote:
Prisoner 740359 wrote:
Quin wrote:Should I be under the impression that Matt 1.0 is a prisoner? hyuckhyuckhyuck
Is this a joke?
Lol. Like, MP and Daisy let me post in this thread and your prisoner thread too? That would be the shiz, I'd have so much knowledge. Muhahahaha. And then probably ignore it all and tunnel ika.

Maybe they don't need to let you post in the prisoner thread, just give you a sockpuppet account after the break and let you play here.

Golden wrote:I wonder what would happen if we lynched the warden...

There's only one way to find out:

Warden

Except that is the Daisy Don, not the Sockface Don.

Fyi, Epignosis and Sloonei also voted for gleam, but changed their mind later on.

indiglo wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:
Epignosis wrote:In full games to date, civilians have won 19% of the time to mafia's 46%. Independents are 54%.

Civilians have fared better in speed setups, with a 30% win rate to mafia's 48%. Independents are 39%.
That is pathetic. Assuming games are balanced, the civ and bad win rates should be equal.
See, I was going to mention that a good portion of those stats may be chalked up to game balance. It's not easy to balance a game. I can't say for sure, because I haven't played all those games, but I wouldn't just look at the stats and assume they were all balanced games, so it just proves civs suck. I have played a good many games here that have seemed both balanced and imbalanced to my limited knowledge/experience/perspective.

What I have noticed is that as long as civs can last the game out longer and longer, we stand a much better chance of finding those scum. It gets harder to hide as the game goes on. Maybe that's a duh, I don't know.

I think it's a little of both factors. There's no way of calculating that though. But I've said some angry things about game balance in this site before too.

It's still wrong, and I wish we did something to repair that. But this is moving away from the subject of the game, so i'll try to stop talking about it for now.

Epignosis wrote:In full games to date, civilians have won 19% of the time to mafia's 46%. Independents are 54%.

Civilians have fared better in speed setups, with a 30% win rate to mafia's 48%. Independents are 39%.

That is pathetic. Assuming games are balanced, the civ and bad win rates should be equal.

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to call anyone stupid or insult anyone. But criticizing the way people are playing is basically how the game is played. Sorry about that.

I just feel like this town needs some kind of shock because it's like it's going off the rails, and the way that is happening is way too similar to the other times I've seen it happening.

Inb4 Matt or llama points out the "slip".

EBWOP:

As for those people I'm playing

I meant "those people I mentioned"

Scotty wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:I've been having a gut feeling Quin looks bad lately, but I haven't bothered to ISO him or rationalize why I think that. Im not voting for him without doing that though, don't worry about it.
Do you think Quin slipped in llama's sarcasm exercise?
And I know you're not gonna vote him yet. You haven't looked like you were. He either hasn't been on your "priority list" or just looks a little shady. He's been that smudge on the corner of your glasses that you refuse to clean because it's not worth the time. That's what it feels like anyway

Linki: see above

I think it's possible he slipped, but I'm trying not to use that as evidence because I mistrust llama (not really his alignment, but his ability to find baddies in this game).

I'll well aware of the smudge in my glasses, I'm just too lazy to clean it.

Ok, that was probably a half-assed explanation. let me elaborate.

I think llama's methods have some validity. But I don't trust llama's ability to use them (whoever guesses why wins an internet cookie) so I'm approaching them with a 10 feet pole.

As for the llama thing, it makes more sense if you read the posts from llama I'm quoting. The first post was stupid, but in the next post he revealed he was just joking.

I've been having a gut feeling Quin looks bad lately, but I haven't bothered to ISO him or rationalize why I think that. Im not voting for him without doing that though, don't worry about it.

And don't ask me what are viable scumhunting methods. I don't know. I've hit a point where I'm just hopeless about my (and this site's) ability to win games as civ.

Or maybe Sig IS bad, and this continous delaying of his lynch I keep seeing (and foolishly contributing to) is intentional. If you guys can make town take 3 or 4 days to lynch a single baddie, then reap the benefits of town cred when you do, it's a very successful play.

Golden wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:I am open to a Sig lynch but I want to think hard about it. No more foregone conclusions. We have 72 hours to work on this shit, let's use the most of them we can, not just the first and the last hour.
I mean, look at this...

Which lynch so far was a 'foregone conclusion'? In what way can the townie effort in this game possibly be described as an effort derailed by foregone conclusions?

The fact there seems to be an agreement Sig is going down at some point of the game.

That's a foregone conclusion.

And that idea sucks. Not only it makes it easier to lynch him, but also gives us an excuse NOT to lynch him now and yet keep him on a "checklist" so we can lynch him at lylo. If I were a baddie I'd love that.

@Golden

Okay I'm not gonna answer every paragraph becase it will take forever. I'll just focus on what seem like the main points and you tell me if I missed anytthing important.

lol where did I say i'm good at reading baddies? My track score in this site is complete turd. Maybe I'm above average at reading baddies at NF, where the average baddie thinks posting once a day and sheeping the nearest bandwagon is a viable strategy, but not here. It's one of the main reasons I keep coming back: this site challenges me to improve my scumhunting.

But I'm not the only one. Because if I were the only one, I would have seen at least one civ win in the 5 games I've played. Civilians don't win games in the Syndicate. I actually wonder if I should calculate the actual rate, it would be an interesting project, and I suspect it would be something like less than 20% of the games won by civs.

As for those people I'm playing, I don't care if they are good civ players or not. That's unrelated to the point I was making. Those are simply the people I've been listing since I joined the site, because they played a game where they looked very civ, except they were bad and kicked my ass in the game. I like to list people like that for posterity, so I don't ever trust them again. Those games looked very much like this one: a couple lynches of unusual players (G-Man and aether in Economics; Lorab and Metalmarsh in Watchmen; Sig, gleam and Scotty in Pikmin) while the "supatown" baddie coasted all game long, because they managed to place themselves about a "supatown line" that makes them unlynchable for Syndicate standards.

While I still don't know how bad the civilians are in this game, the scenario I'm seeing is very similar to what I usually see. Of course we all think we are lynching people for all the rational reasons. But for some reason that doesn't work. Maybe our rational reasons include certain tells that simply don't work, because they assume townies will play in a certain way they usually don't. Or maybe we inconsciently gravitate towards the people who piss us off the most. I'll admit I was much more willing to put a vote on gleam after he called me a hack, for that matter. And that Sig's continuous use of OMGUS is not doing him any favors. But what if it's just the way he thinks is good town play?

What I'm saying is that we should stop and evaluate the players in the game again. Analyse the tells we have again. Ask ourselves why we suspect the people we do. Because the way this is going, I suspect another full cycle talking about Sig, then another "last 2 hours" change to a player everybody has been thinking is scummy for ages (Quin, Ika or Soneji, for example), an inevitable civ lynch, and we keep repeating that over and over until we eventually lynch Sig... and he flips civ too. Then the baddies eventually get majority and win. Another game, another banner for the baddie team, another one or two names I add to my "never trust again" list, and we move on.

I'm trying to stop that cycle. Whatever this site thinks are viable scumhunting methods, they don't work.

2 walls of texts. Danmit, Golden. This will take time.

Golden wrote:Know why you're really bitching, epi?

Because you didn't agree, and wanted sig gone. It's as simple as that really. You don't like that sig survived another day.

It's not because the gleam votes weren't well reasoned.

We lynched gleam because he is bad at the game. By bad I mean, he plays in a way that seems not optimal most of the time. It is possible he may not actually be that bad.

We lynch Sig every time for the same reason. We have also lynched people like Metalmarsh, Scotty, Vompatti and many others.

We look for a standard in towniness and lynch anyone who doesn't follow them. Then after we lynch the same player as a civ over ane over, we finally learn they work that way and move on to the next new player with a weird playstyle that shows up. So we can lynch them over and over.

Meanwhile, scum players who are skilled at following the standard and looking town, like Golden, Ricochet and FZ, own this site and contribute for it to have what might be the highest scum/town win rate of the internet.

That has to stop. We need to stop lynching weird players for being weird, anf learn to read them more. I am guilty of that toi, but I am not the only one.

I have to say I agree wih eveything Epi is saying, except for the "lynch DDL" stuff.

The way we are approaching this game is not working. The Fuzz lynch was cool but catching one baddie in four days is not statistically unlikely. We are doing a bad job at scumhunting, and I feel like scum is manipulating us big time.

I am open to a Sig lynch but I want to think hard about it. No more foregone conclusions. We have 72 hours to work on this shit, let's use the most of them we can, not just the first and the last hour.

Black Rock wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:
Quin wrote:
Scotty wrote:What do we think would be an ideal role the undercover cop would choose? I mean, it wouldn't be the traitor, surely?
Someone with BTSC. Maybe a lover.
Why? The BTSC partner would point the possibility out immediately.

Weren't you one of the people who played around with the idea LC might be a seemer?

No.

I've been playing around the idea that Sig could.

I'm not sure if me and SVS were the only ones to vote for gleam on d1. Temporary votes count too.

Live*

I wish I could leave close to llama just so I could take a photo of his face when he notices he spent one RL month tunneling on a civ.

(on a second thought, the consigliere could also be alive. Ugh, never mind)

I know the answer. I'd pick the Consigliere.

Let's see if the Don has the balls to oppose that.

Problem too is that if the person doesn't have BTSC, then there is only one player who could possibly have that role, so they would also suspect the person.

I can't see how this wouldn't be a risk.

Quin wrote:
Scotty wrote:What do we think would be an ideal role the undercover cop would choose? I mean, it wouldn't be the traitor, surely?
Someone with BTSC. Maybe a lover.

Why? The BTSC partner would point the possibility out immediately.

Epignosis wrote:
Dragon D. Luffy wrote:
Silverwolf wrote:I like to leave inactives around as scum if possible. I will even defend an easy mislynch if I think I need the person around as a distraction-this is why I don't mind lynching these people as town. If it's not possible, they are low-hanging fruit and easy targets and I will go after them if that's my only option.
Interesting. In the one game I won here as scum, my team (me, Epi, Golden and Daisy) repeately pushed for lynches of inactives, and eventually won the game for that. It was a small game so town couldn't afford to make many mistakes.

linki: godanmit

If Sig flips civ too I'm gonna flip.
So the Day 5 lynch is already decided, is it?

Not necessarily. I predict myself full of self-doubt for the next 72 hours after lynching yet another "uber scum" player who flipped town.

Silverwolf wrote:I like to leave inactives around as scum if possible. I will even defend an easy mislynch if I think I need the person around as a distraction-this is why I don't mind lynching these people as town. If it's not possible, they are low-hanging fruit and easy targets and I will go after them if that's my only option.

Interesting. In the one game I won here as scum, my team (me, Epi, Golden and Daisy) repeately pushed for lynches of inactives, and eventually won the game for that. It was a small game so town couldn't afford to make many mistakes.

linki: godanmit

If Sig flips civ too I'm gonna flip.

Epignosis wrote:
Golden wrote:
Epignosis wrote:Golden, I've read the thread, but I'm reading so many threads these days that I'm having trouble keeping things straight. Can you summarize why gleam is a cop?
The theory is thus:

Fuzz vote was to save Gleam. He had expressed suspicion of gleam but then voted ika to tie things up.
Can't keep his ides straigh, as per this post from indi. Although I agree with TH that the scotty bit is weak, the rest is still pretty indicative of someone who is all over the place, in terms of their reads and having consistent thoughts.

That's basically it, in terms of my vote. Well that and what I said about not really feeling like gleam is trying to find baddies, despite a reasonable number of posts. Reminds me of how I felt about Star Wars Zebra.

That doesn't make a shred of sense. Why would the cops vote out one of their own people to save another?

If TH is one of the cops it makes sense, since he didn't push for the Fuzz lynch initially.

Otherwise that argument is moot.

I'm not voting gleam for that though. I'm voting him for his continous refusal to play the game and overuse of OMGUS arguments.

Epi, you don't need meta knowledge to be able to read someone.

Golden wrote:@silverwolf - that post is insanification, and its a punishment for self-voting. Those familiar with Long Con's insanifier know what it looks like you'll get used to it around here soon enough lol.

Wait, we have an insanifier?

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