The Syndicate

GG. Well played Hally.

wavering yet again, i really don't know, recency bias is def a thing

didn't like sabie's return popin

didn't like mist's questions, here or the previous time, feels like odd things to focus on and kinda like a setup

paranoia runs high

i haven't been told i'm dead yet though

No one's even here. Rip rip rip.

GL be gay do crimes

Ugh DOES Mist do that as partner knowing cayvie is gone though

That's the scummy part of what Sabie did

idk idk idk

Of course if that is wrong then Mist was just right about Sabie so call it 50/50

Or it's Hally lol

#331

Post by cayvie » Thu Sep 24, 2020 8:10 pm

Cayvie's last post ever

#625

Post by Mistyx » Sat Sep 26, 2020 5:42 pm

Mist still names her #2 town two entire IRL days of not posting later

G2H Mist Mist too good to be this wrong, if I'm wrong, feel honored

for a chill dyke bar

Let's start a war
Start a nuclear war
At the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar
Waoow!

what would you do-o-o

for a klondike bar

if you knew you only had ten minutes left to live what would you do

Eyyyy champs finale ended, we can talk about that for like 30 minutes

So Hally was a very convincing wolf in that but still always hovered around the outskirts. Not feeling that here. A bit wary but not really. At least relative to the rest of the game.
Mist on the other hand is in the opposite spot of her usual, chopped in that game for saying (correctly) that it was too easy.

(Congrats to both of you)

Ah you're still concerned about Hally? Neh, yeah, Hally is town. If that was a bus it was pulled off invisibly from both sides. Cayvie for all appearances to me was pushing Hyena/Hally as a town/town rift opener.

<3 It is all good. We are chill. I am not angry at anyone either.

What do these things say to you, though? I feel like these are leading questions?

Not particularly. I think Hyena was attempting to express "It is sus that Cayvie called out Hally and myself as scumreads" (which was quite true) and stretching for content looking to tie it into Cayvie's readlist somehow. But the list part is not a thing, IMO. I would not find it notable of any player to call out two specific people as scumreads from a large lower tier in their readlist. That level of meticulous nitpicking about readlist orders is, imo, more often a scum tactic, and I would bonk Hyena with a newspaper if he was alive and actually pushing that as a major point.

I have read over every post in this game, multiple times. The latter post is a two-degrees-separated analysis of cayvie's readlist. Here is the list again, for reference:

cayvie wrote: ↑Thu Sep 24, 2020 12:41 pm cayvie

tony
misty

sabie
hally
scirry
hyenie

(mp)

I believe the core issue you are getting at here is that Cayvie placed you in an upper tier with TSP instead of the middle tier?
"Did Cayvie put her partner in the upper or middle tier" is pure WIFOM to me, I think both positions are possible and the separation is because Mist was more of a visible and active poster at SOD1, regardless of alignment. The list was posted the morning after the game started, so only that first evening of interaction was in play.

Mainly I'm back to where I was before Sabie paranoia yesterday, it's probably Mist :/ (And the urge to joke that it's Hally is back but. It's not Hally and if it is, take it.)

It's easy and I hate it because there are so many things to scumread and multiple people ghosting and misyeeting Mist is such a meme but

This isn't a "Tunnel Mist for bad reasons" situation, this is a "Mist called the central d1 debate T/T when it was T/W, put the scum as her #2 town, then we wagoned the scum and she stopped posting or caring about the game through EoD1 and all of day 2."

And then there's MP7

MP7's play was extremely similar to Mist's, which is a contributor to "it could be town bleehhh", we have there a town who hard townread cayvie.
MP7 on Sabie: "Feels genuine"
MP7 on Mist: "The ultimate easy button solution, but can it be that easy, maybe it's Hally"
(but it was, in fact, Cayvie...)

Dead townie opinions check:
TSP - not much here, expressed a townread on Sabie saying W!Sabie would spend more time on her hedgy posts, "maybe it's Mist but ehhh"
Hyena - townread Mist pretty strongly, "I don't want to yeet Mist"
"Sabie just seems really confused to me, and while I'm hesitant to call it towny, I feel it in my gut that it is."
"We should've had a wagon on Sabie for pressure"
Last strongly expressed belief was a mafia was within MP7/Ran/Hally. But Hyena never got a chance to reevaluate this after Cayvie's scum flip, so... pretty sure this is not correct.

I'm just having such a hard time getting over sabie being here and not posting though

and feeling bad for repeating negatives about these players over and over, please don't take it personally, it's mafia

just post. posting anything is better than posting nothing.

Sabie: "Cayvie seems too easy, does she really dip like this as mafia? IDK where to go though *remains parked on Hally*"

Mist: "Cayvie #2 town, Sabie scummy, but I didn't notice my #2 town was vote leader"

Pretty clear good take/bad take

Hally wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 3:50 pm like the reality is that both of them have made it incredibly hard to find them if they’re town, but one of them is

we both tr mist D1. why did we do that? why did we stop doing that? i feel like mist has been a nonentity in this game especially after cayvie got eliminated

sabie has kinda always been fairly absent but again, even more so lately. but she has also had moments where i thought she was the most likely villager of the bunch, whereas mist has kinda just... not had towny moments since D1 afaic

so like. idk

Yeaaah generally agree with this.
Why did we do that - because Mist started strong with conversation prods
Why did we stop townreading Mist - because she posted "Hyena/Cayvie T/T, Cayvie #2 town" and dipped on eod

Reasons to townread Mist:
- AtE depression zoning is believable and could be done as town, see MP7
- Good callout on Sabie being overly focused on mechanics, *before* Sabie went into a period of being even more focused on mechanics

Reasons to scumread Mist:
- Dropped off hard after early d1, earlygame participation then falling off hard when Cayvie got nailed fits mafia profile
- Self admitted scum meta fits mafia profile
- Meta mismatch (is usually a very strong independent player with good reads)
- https://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/th ... ost4209902

Mist is disengaged from EoDs in a wolfy way and had a wolfy approach to Hyena/Cayvie

lettuce kill the slot

---
Reasons to townread Sabie:
- Good response to being called on defending Cayvie
- Pointed out Mist specifically having a weird conversation w/Cayvie
- viewtopic.php?f=246&t=1943&p=668694#p668694
viewtopic.php?f=246&t=1943&p=668771#p668771 Good posts
- Meta match: Independent player who isn't heavily plugged into mafia norms of focus, gets frustrated when not listened to

Reasons to scumread Sabie:
- Overly focused on roles rather than finding alignments of living players
- Dropped off hard after d1
- What there is of her posting on d2 is all self defense and a tiny bit of shade on Ran and MP7
- Was confirmed to be reading the thread at eod2 and did not post, vanished when called out on it


Adding these up has me leaning Mist again but... mwargh

Hally wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 7:43 am

Ranmilia wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 3:34 am (Mist vs Sabie I am significantly less convinced on. Currently leaning Sabie wolf. Sabie's ISO contains what I would characterize as only role talk and WIFOM talk and no solving player alignments. But Mist's ISO contains very little. It would be just like this game for some fluke to have happened for that EOD threadview. Good luck Hally. Good luck other town.)

(If it is Mist though she's just telegraphed the A-plan is to try and get Sabie to vote me, which is distressingly possible, but that will be my problem to deal with if I am somehow not dead.)

in case you’re the one who dies, can you just like... write as many words as you can think about mist and sabie? any positives, negatives, concerns, reservations, etc? if im the one to make the call id like to have as much from you to look back on as possible. and i promise to heed your legacy as best i can

All right. These are probably my final hours so the gloves have to come off a little bit.

The big concern about both of these players is that... they're not playing. Both of them are just like... choosing not to post or read or participate. They both show up like once every two days to post "I dunno what's going on, nobody was here in the five minute period in 72 hours I was in the thread so I didn't say anything" and then disappear again.

One of them is mafia doing this, one of them is town doing this. The mafia one could be lying about their disconnection from the game, or telling the truth.

Do you want to kill sabie for this post:

sabie12 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 5:01 pm

Hally wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:43 pm

sabie12 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 7:31 am I am always a low poster in the beginning of games I am slow to start as I get a feel for things sorry that's just me. Also as I've said this week didnt go as planned for me but oh well.

I feel like this game is better for the scum team because they can kill us all easily and we won't even know for sure they're doing it.
Now that I can read ISOs I could maybe vote hally as they seem to have been perpetuating the random pokemon discussion and just seem different than the town game I saw before. Now that I read cayvie I feel her thought about hyena and hally may have been genuine but then she disappeared after Wednesday. I think tony is his usual town self. I could see maybe a vote for mist I don't feel like they're towny though I guess others do. I think MP seems like her town game before. I'm just not sure.

For now I will [VOTE: hally] aubergine I'm sure I'll get grilled about that but that's what I feel right now. In the other town game Hally was so unsure and thought everyone was town and didn't want to vote people and this game seems different to me.

hi sabie, i’ve been feeling pretty unsure this game so i don’t get what you’re saying re: me. what game are you talking about? and i just wanted to talk about pokemon. why is that scummy?

re: mp, do you remember what her scum game is like at all?

I'm sorry yes I should have specified. I was referring to the jack attack game. I felt you were more hesitant to vote in that game than here. just trying to work out my thoughts.


I see the thread is now leaning towards cayvie. I'm wondering does cayvie up and disappear as scum being accused or as town unsure of what to do? I've only played one game with cayvie and that was Upick. I'm not opposed to a cayvie vote I thought maybe her theory on hally and hyena was a genuine thought but then she hasn't come back and further discussed so ehhhh.

Or do you want to kill Mist for this post:

Mistyx wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 6:42 pm

M Plus 7 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 6:33 pm Hey Mist, are you still around? What are your reads right now?

sabie is the only read that could be considered a wolfread i think

hyena is my top town, cayvie #2

That's what this game boils down to.

Is it worse to call cayvie #2 town outright, or to have an attitude of "I'm not townreading her but I think her thoughts are town and we shouldn't vote her because she's town"?

I wish it was easier to quote things from ISOs, clicking through to manually quote each post is a pain. Just. Open the ISOs for yourself, you can see them, they're one page each.

Sabie talks about role mechanics a lot. That's generally scummy. She brings up cayvie talking about the vengeful role and spends a lot of her posts talking about that.

sabie12 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 10:26 pm

cayvie wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:44 pm

Hally wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:40 pm

cayvie wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:39 pm

Hally wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:38 pm

cayvie wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:37 pm

Hally wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:36 pm i mean, my reason for voting hyena was that he didn’t have eevee in his top ten pokemon. so yea, i would say i don’t expect that to be taken very seriously

exactly: not actually bussing.

....okay, but why do we have to be teamed as opposed to like, not teamed

you don't have to be teamed. im just saying you're compatible.

you said we were the mafia team. what caused you to have that thought?

i feel like you're taking me in circles.

i saw you and hyena vote each other for what looked like silly-ish reasons. i thought, hmm this looks like it could be distancing. is there a reason for mafia to distance/bus in a flipless setting? yes, potentially, if they want to use the vengekill.

and here we are

So cayvie said this about bussing and now we know she was the vengeful one. I don't know if that means it happened for sure just figured that might be relevant

Like... how is this relevant to figuring out who is mafia? It's not relevant, it's all WIFOM at best, it's fluff, spending so much of her few posts on this is scummy. I was trying to coax out more content and feel bad for going "the things Sabie has concentrated on are not useful to town at all" if she is town, but well. :\ 50/50 she's mafia fluffing this to look like content.

And then after Monday morning she stopped posting relevant content entirely. Some of her posts looked okay before that, like I was saying earlier, she didn't explicitly townread cayvie, responded okay to my poking there, but... all that's still well within mafia range, it's just self defense.

sabie12 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2020 7:27 am

Ranmilia wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2020 7:12 am Ok, thanks.

So to answer MP7 now: my take on Sabie's defensiveness is that it is a good look. Her statements re: her stance on cayvie are true and consistent with frustration at being lumped in as "defending cayvie," which from her perspective is an inaccurate characterization that she is fighting back at being pinned with. I was aware of this at the time I initially put forth that characterization, as a hypothesis test to see how Sabie would respond to it.

I think she responded in a consistent and towny fashion. Currently I believe Sabie the most out of the three non-cayvie-voters, making her the one that I do NOT wish to yeet. There is some chance that she is playing this off to deflect and hedge, but it is exactly what I would expect from town in her spot.

(Additionally I do not buy the argument brought against Sabie by Mist yesterday, regarding confusion over IC claims being "the most suspicious thing in the thread." I find that also believable for town and not very scummy if at all. That argument being weak is another part of why my current suspicious lie on Mist and MP7.)

So there's a hot take for y'all. Bedtime for me now.

The thing about mist is they came in said I was weird for not understanding the IC thing and then drive by voted me and left. Mists post after cayvie was yeeted was "weh". ...? Is that like sadface? After catching a mafia? So mist and cayvie have that interaction regarding the vengeful thing and then cayvie disappeared and mist was left alone and had to randomly try to come up with some other idea of where to vote and just picked me. Could be that I mean it seems like the most obvious answer but we do have time discuss further if that's not what happened.

If Sabie is town then this is true.

-----

Mist...

"i think the weirdest thing in-thread rn is sabie’s handling of tan’s IC claim vs tony’s"

"sabie is the only read that could be considered a wolfread i think

hyena is my top town, cayvie #2"

"I’m playing mario party

[VOTE: sabie] aubergine

will check in later"

"weh"

" tbh my reasoning for pushing sabie doesn't really hold up but i haven't done an actual reevaluation yet"

Mistyx wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2020 11:52 am

Hyena wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 7:26 pm I don't think I want to yeet Mist. After Mist, I'd probably pick Cayvie to be safe.

Ugh, I'm scared that there's at least one mafia between MP, Ran, and Hally.

Sabie just seems really confused to me, and while I'm hesitant to call it towny, I feel it in my gut that it is.

Tony, where are you?

Hyena wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 7:27 pm So, here's a game. Pick three people that you think will contain at least one mafia. Mine is probably MP, Ran, and Hally.

ok like

this is really interesting to me

because i feel like this could almost clear sabie? not clear but i think it's a good look at least

- this one I'll quote in full

Mistyx wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:01 pm for what it's worth and i'm only posting this because y'all deserve an explanation, not because it'll make me feel better at all

i'm not posting much today because i'm overcommitted again and thinking about how little i'm doing is making me spiral more instead of motivating me, because my brain hates me or something like that

...interestingly enough, that's way more common in my wolf games, but i guess this is an exception to the rule

"full disclosure

i literally did not notice that cayvie was in the lead"

Flipflops back and forth on both sabie and mp7, claims to townread cayvie but not notice their #2 town was vote leader, naked unvote d1, didn't vote yesterday, didn't care about eod either day, directly claimed being in her scum meta...

This could be done as demotivated town or it could be done as scum. Depression zone is a place I'm very familiar with, personally (big sympathies and hugs to Mist) but it's ultimately NAI.

This is a game I personally worked on localization for, in a small way, some years ago. The process of updating and bringing it to Steam took something like 9 or 12 years? It's been a while, I left the team a while back, not much of my personal work survives in the Steam version, and the original game is entirely the work of one person, who goes by Tonnor, or hiranyon, depending.

The other media I've posted about so far have been general recommendations.



Hellsinker, not so much. Probably most or all of you will not be interested in playing this for yourselves. It is a very niche, very weird and difficult to describe video game-ish art piece shaped thing.

As you may or may not be able to see, it is a scrolling psychedelic cyberfantasythemed (sometimes) shootemup. It is not, technically speaking, a "bullet hell" shooter (Tonnor insists!), but it's pretty close in the neighborhood. It's also a rhythm game, puzzle game, there's a card game at one point, some ARG elements in the manual, and there's a secret poetry collection.

More than anything, it exists in the conceptual space of "multilayered interface confusion->secrets discovery puzzle game," vaguely similar to titles like Baba is You, Fez, and Cultist Simulator, where figuring out how to play and exploring what you can do among its vast array of systems can be called the real meat of the game. First time players spend an average of 10-15 minutes staring at the psychedelic cyberinterface menus before figuring out how to even boot into an actual gameplay level.

Hellsinker is a game for people who enjoy that experience and layers upon layers of "what is even going on" and "what does any of this mean" slowly transforming to "oh... I wonder if I do this here..."

The actual execution of the shootemup part is quite easy (for the genre), once you understand your five buttons and 30+ UI elements. But don't play this game unless you enjoy complex shooters and... complex everything. I mean, once you understand the controls you can start finding the secrets in the actual levels, and the secret levels, and then the secret menu screens to access the real levels and... you get the idea.

Hit up Youtube and watch videos instead, if you're intrigued. The music is excellent, the visual experience is great, the atmosphere is very good (albeit impossible to capture), you won't get the poems in context but that's all right.

Oh, and of course, it's pretty gay. Nonbinary protagonist Minogame has excellent fashion sense, and strong homing lasers.



We've got life, death, gender, agender, theology, the nature of humanity, theological partical synthesis via mechanical karmic compression, five different conflicting apocalypses, trans cybermagical fairies rebelling against their creators in 7 minute fully psytrance-choreographed mindscape battles, all that good stuff. The queer themes are not often terribly upfront, but, well, that just makes them better, very little is upfront in Hellsinker. (I have some regrets here about the localization, being ~10 years old it is not as good as it could be, we didn't use singular they consistently, but all things considered I daresay it ain't bad.)

Anyway it is pretty cool and probably the most largescale In An Actual Official Thing I've been a part of. I guess it is more a glimpse into Stuff Ran Likes than anything else here, Mist was asking for more of that at some point and I thought hey let's show this off a little. Also trying to show a range of things and it's one of the earlier nonbinary reps I've got in the stable. None of this has anything to do with mafia, neither does any of the Good Queer Stuff I've been linking, but ehn, morale.

(Mist vs Sabie I am significantly less convinced on. Currently leaning Sabie wolf. Sabie's ISO contains what I would characterize as only role talk and WIFOM talk and no solving player alignments. But Mist's ISO contains very little. It would be just like this game for some fluke to have happened for that EOD threadview. Good luck Hally. Good luck other town.)

(If it is Mist though she's just telegraphed the A-plan is to try and get Sabie to vote me, which is distressingly possible, but that will be my problem to deal with if I am somehow not dead.)

(I was, in fact, entertaining significant Hally tinfoil throughout most of the day. I have now discarded it. Hally's play on the catchup read and EOD was sufficiently convincing that I believe they are town and not pulling a sketchy bus and pocket. The strength of this read has increased to Wholehearted rather than Meh Could Be But If Wolf They Deserve It I Guess.)

[mention]Mistyx[/mention] I would like to reiterate that when I am dead tomorrow, you are not allowed to vote for Hally. Do not do it. Hally is town. You and Sabie cross vote and Hally makes the call.

(You are your own person and make your own choices. But don't choose to vote Hally.)

Who is mafia? Why did you not vote during the entire day phase?

I mean if I'm wrong about what's going on with Sabie, she's more than welcome to come in and tell us. It's not too late to play some mafia in this mafia game.

(mist who is mafia)

yes. unfortunately. apologies to hally and others.

so that's how it is

oh i see

who claimed doctor, on first tonight

friendly reminder to everyone that mafia is a dumb internet game and please do not hurt yourselves or beat yourselves up mentally over it

we covered tonight already, hally's killing me, what's your point

mist who is mafia

at least she wasn't able to actually snipe a vote.

you didn't want to throw your reads out the window at the last minute. it's understandable.

It's unreliable to an extent but so's everything apparently.

Ok, Sabie tomorrow, GG.

Town don't ghost for 36 hours, then suddenly show up in the reading list at eod for 30 minutes, post nothing, fail to vote, and IMMEDIATELY vanish again from the list when called out on it. I'm sorry, I can't ignore that. No way.

Also her ISO is pretty scummy and does nothing but talk about roles. I lowered my standards and handed out that clear WAY too easily and she just took it and vanished.

maybe this is pointless and the game's just over here

sabie is literally here in the "viewing this forum" bar at the bottom of the page and has been there for the last 15 minutes silently watching the thread.

MU might consider this ~angle shooting~ but its literally there in bold blue text at the bottom of the screen.

what are the rules here even
i don't know what i'm allowed to say

i've gone back to mp

hally i think you should really vote sabie

ugh fine ##vote mp7

nothing?

i'm going to answer my own question and say that it is bad because this play sucks and people shouldn't do it.