Kasimir

Bro. Can you please not. Is this information anyone needs to know? Does this particularly help the Village? Look. We have three to four Elims in this game. Let's lean four, and be pessimistic. How many players right now? Twelve in total after last cycle. We're stipulating four Elims, so eight are Villagers. The Elims now know: -I had a TL but not anymore -You claim to have a TLL. So now they have a glorious six players within which to shoot or shatter to try to take out the TL (wherever my TL ended up, assuming they didn't already get it, and assuming there's no second TL), or useful lenses like the TFL or DL. Every unnecessary claim we make is a claim that allows the Elims to continue playing their PoE game to identify where good lenses are and shoot or shatter. This just decreases our target surface and that's a bad thing. I'm seriously questioning this move.

i s2g if this turns into the C1 lynch discussion on C2, I'm voting Araris. This Evil must be stopped.

So, two issues here: first, the redirection is my point, rather than the vote that never changed. None of the reasons to want him dead had really changed, but none of the reasons continue to be reasons for Ash as compared to functionally half our absentee set. The only reason I could see being persuasive is "he was a target of existing pressure" but that's a bad reason and more or less a sunk cost fallacy on stilts. The fact that the cycle was quiet despite our two votes being on Ash, and Ash was PMing me without much motivation to be in the thread clearly indicated that the status quo, or sinking more votes into Ash / redirecting people to Ash wasn't going to cut it. Most of the game was going to fold their hands for C1. It's kind of really kayana because if I think Luck is Village, and I know Ash is Village, then technically I should be leaning Village on you because E!Fifth has no reason to want to strongly redirect me to Did it spread existing votes out more? I don't see how you can make that judgement. From the time the vote was placed, to the time you made a post on it, there was no take-up, on Luck or on Ash or on Drought. Who, may I remind you, were the only trains existing, even through to EoD. Drought was never going to take off, simpliciter. I don't see how you believe that a world in which Ash was the only train or the only train likely to go through to endgame was in any way healthy for the Village. I could have played less provocative and baity, yeah, since I hate it when Illwei pulls that on me But I think the core is true - a one-train uncontested quiet lynch isn't a good C1 and I don't see why the charge of 'spreading existing votes out more' remotely makes sense. If you want to adopt the retroactive perspective, then with most of the game committed to folding their hands, how realistically was this supposed to work? The votes had been on Ash. Nothing happened. What did you realistically expect to happen, in your alternate universe where two votes remain on Ash? Like, maybe I'm tunnelling. It wouldn't be the first time I found my one (1) thing about a player and lost it (I think Aman thought I was faking it in LG84, but nope, 100% vintage Kas.) But I genuinely still do not understand where you come by the confidence that the Ash train makes more sense than the Luck train to the point of solicitation. Even though logic tells me this is so insane and risky I don't even know if Evil!Fifth would do this. Fundamentally, my claim is because I believe I have an action that makes Luck look more Village. It's not decisive the way catching a kill is, but I thought it was worth making the claim - a "I scanned Luck and Luck neither shattered nor killed" claim is not credible in a game where any tracker who sticks his head out is bound to be shot or shattered. It makes more sense when people understand that it comes from having lost the TL. It's dated information anyway, so why not just put it out there? Maybe someone can make some use out of it. And the Luck scan should definitely be mentioned, since I don't have anymore scans. Obviously if I still had scans, I'd shut up, stay put, and keep scanning until I found a kill or shatter - that's the correct play, but not given the fact I'm now my favourite SE role We can litigate whether or not this is true based on my personal credibility, but I'd rather not be spending half the cycle debating about whether claiming a track even makes sense. This cuts that detour short. I don't understand this vote, even though I agree with the sentiment/thought process, and it makes me uncomfortable to be voting alongside a player I'm wary of. If you're suspicious of me, why are you voting alongside me? Do you think I'm distancing here? Because why in the hells would you willingly go vote with someone whom you suspect? This doesn't make sense to me.

So, I've slept on it and finished my worst ladder games ever yesterday (hi future Kas, if you read this, please remember to go knight-pike against camels, not spam knights like a fool! ) Returning to the C1 lynch, I am more interested in <Fifth, Conq> if we work from the assumption that someone on the Ash train was Evil. To recap, this is the situation: suppose that we think the Ash train was instigated to save a teammate (as it does happen.) The people who were particularly endangered were Drought, Mat, and Luck. I don't find myself strongly convinced that Luck is Evil - I lean mild Village for reasons I've laid out. I accept these aren't infallible - in a world where other low profile players are Evil as well, I should go back to revise that line of thought. But this is currently where I am at. As mentioned previously, I think it is possible that E!Drought, but I don't think that E!Drought would require a dedicated effort to save him - he was always going to not be lynched, due to the amnesty. So regardless of what Drought's alignment is, I think it's fair to say that Elim involvement would not have been instigated to save Drought. I'm in an odd position where I don't really like Devo's vote, but I recognise I'm like that with late votes. Some of this feels dependent on Drought and Luckspren to me - if V!Luck, I'm leaning V on the late voters. We know that's true in Mat's case but it feels true in Devo's case too. Unless Devo is E-E with Mat (obviously false), I don't believe an Elim has much investment in the Ash train. (Theoretically true in the case of V!Drought but I feel also true in the case of E!Drought - late vote movements attract attention, and I'm not sure E!Devo would do this, especially in a game with players who aren't as familiar with the fact it's a Devo Thing.) If I work from this, I'm more or less committed in this world to at least (reasonably, just one) of <Fifth, Conq> being Evil. In the world where the Ash train is pure, the formal pool is <Joe, Luckspren, JNV, TUN, TGK, Wiz, Steel, Drought>. I'm reintroducing Drought - I think that "no Elim instigation to save Drought" doesn't say anything about Drought's actual alignment, and making that inference was pushing the logic too far. Still leaning no on Luck, potentially leaning Village on Joe which is a bit of an assumption that depends fairly heavily on Luck. (I think the better way to frame it is I don't really see an E!Joe world with V!Luck.) With that being said, been trying to consolidate my thoughts more: GOOD OL' TIERS: BALLISTA ELEPHANT FLOOD (STRONG VILLAGE): MAGYAR DEATHBALL (MEDIUM VILLAGE): AND THEN THE WINGED HUSSARS ARRIVED (LIGHT VILLAGE): SPAGHETTI DROP (NULL+): WHO NEEDS MILUNITS ANYWAY? (NULL): GOTH SPAM (NULL-): General Comments: JNV: You waffled, but you're more active than the thread, and still thinking/engaging, which is probably a bad sign of the state of the thread. And no, I don't like effort clears so I'm not going to but it's something I've had to keep in mind from LG84, so yeah. More a reminder to myself than anything because I have no issues with temporary effort clears then revising even if this is a risky tactic. (Hi Orlok, if you're reading this, I will be as risky as I want to be!) Well, first, I'm doing this by pathwalking - so the idea is I build in several (in this case, two) mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive worlds and then try to work out what they would say about player alignment. If I can't determine which world is more likely, then the goal is to use the info we have as the game goes along to try to work out which world we're in. The two mutually exclusive and collective exhaustive worlds are: <Ash train is pure, Ash train isn't pure.> (Part of this also is that if you pathwalk, you can end up in a proof by contradiction situation where you find it's contradictory, therefore that world is more unlikely.) There are I think two main things that could motivate the Ash train. Either to save teammates (which I think is unlikely - I still don't think Luckspren is Evil, and I recognise after more thought that 'It doesn't make sense for a teammate to save E!Drought' can't license an inference to whether Drought himself is or isn't Evil), or because they want to blend in - either with high activity play (keep in mind that Fifth has a standard of being very active as a Villager, so Fifth not going for activity play in thread would be striking), or just by trying to appear engaged. I think the point of it inviting more controversy and confusion isn't really true though - who exactly in thread is actively suspecting any of the Ash train voters beyond your question to Conq? Attention is on the C1 peripherals right now. I do agree with this, but I think that's more true of the late voters (so blatantly Devo and Mat, and Mat flipped Village) than it is for the rest of the train. Conq Greatly appreciate your responses! Two questions, I suppose. To echo JNV: Why not? And how do you make the determination that anyone else is going to be a Villager that will be more active? With so little that people were saying on C1? Why not 'an Elim that will be more active'? I am down for TLL. Consolidation is a concern insofar as this would allow the Elims to shatter more at once, but I don't see a straightforward solution other than a commitment to play this game like the most basic high-regular Tyrian game, and finding a decent chunk of the Elims to actions starve them. More a TGK fan - everytime I saw King, I kept thinking Joe was referring to Paranoid King, and this is even after I kept referring to Paranoid King as PK... Alright, so Fifth is mostly busy, and my vote has been functionally useless for most of this cycle. I'm going to shift to TGK, for the reasons mentioned. Bottom line being that a preoccupation with looking Village (or at least not accruing perceived guilt) as compared to actively engaging in discussion and the lynch however poorly-informed (most of the game is in the same plight - the regular crowd doesn't know the returning players, the returning players don't know each other necessarily...) feels more like paying more attention to and prioritising how players think of you than what the Village needs. To me, that's more of an Elim mindset than a Village one. *And yeah, I realise we're skirting the edges of the 'C1 lynch or no' discussion. May the gods grant that we not reopen it again, especially on C2.

Yeah, Lamy's very hit and miss these days. Terracotta is a nice colour though, 100% get why you went for it We are converting others/drawing others to the circle slowly? I've finally been converted to the Pro Gear club. Picked up a Pro Gear Medium, and it feels so good I don't know why I used to love Pro Gear Slims. Maybe I just got used to bigger pens, not sure.

Because you should vote where your suspicions are first, and then for information. I don't see why it's a contradiction - I've said as much in my response to you that you shouldn't be creating ties between two players you think likely to be Village just for information. That's just bad Village play. But if you are indifferent between two players, or do not significantly suspect one over the other, why would you discount the possibility of generating more information from player response and vote progression analysis? Joe's vote was framed as "I want to kill you for information." I accept some players are just going to be like this, and my question is meant to determine if Joe is simply pushing for Luckspren's death (ulterior motives?) or at least has a clear idea of how he expects a flip to be helpful.

It was a mildly fun PM, if not terribly game relevant, and I can't discount that I was a little biased because of it. But pragmatically, a collection of factors: low temperature suggested that no one was particularly engaged or under threat, and combined with the fact it was still not too late in the cycle (NA hadn't gotten online), my judgement is that I was better off expanding the slate of trains rather than consolidating, and seeing how people reacted to it. Luckspren also had a fairly non-committal opening post that fit the profile of someone wanting to play under the radar, so I decided to apply some pressure and see what happened. I also disliked (in the in-game sense) being pushed about why Luck rather than Ash, and so dug my heels in a lot more obviously than I was really committed to, because I feel the same question could be reversed: why Ash rather than Luck? Intuitively, both votes more or less seem to share similar motivations. If you (general) can't offer a reason to go Ash over Luck, then you are just as susceptible to complaints that there is no 'particular' reason contrastively for the Ash vote either. The charge of arbitrariness or agenda goes both ways, in my view. Intuitively, the fact that two players were pressing the Ash over Luck angle on me made me think that it mattered, and so I wanted to draw more out of them by being blatantly stubborn. So if you saw no particular reason for Ash to live compared to Luck and Drought, then you're saying you basically voted Ash because you saw two players have an interest in Ash surviving? Ok, fair enough. On one hand, I'm tempted to dismiss this as C1 syndrome, but on the other hand, that's not especially helpful either.

So my initial take was that you were trying to kill Luckspren because you thought Luckspren had a TL and wanted to know her alignment (i.e. rolelynching, something like AG2 Tyrian Eight which startled me since we both survived that), but I see you mean that you want to know her action if she did in fact have a TL, which is considerably less alarming Thanks for clearing that up. Why vote for information rather than where your suspicions are? And what info do you expect to receive depending on Luckspren's flip? If you did know them all, we'd have the game solved C2 gg ez

Effort yes, but also: Are you legit trying to rolelynch Luckspren.

H'okay. Let's do this the old-fashioned way. Elim involvement in the Ash train This world is basically one in which at least one Elim pushed the Ash train. This could be to blend in and try to appear helpful, or to try to save a teammate. I am leaning a bit against that as in my view, the easiest way for Elims to save teammates is to simply get the teammate to self-pres, but nevertheless. The main suspect pools: <Fifth, Conq, Devo, Mat>, with subsidiary pools (on the hypothesis that they were trying to save a teammate) <Drought, Luckspren.> I lean against E!Luckspren - I am not going to voice the results of her scan in thread, but I can say that she neither killed nor used a shatter. Intuitively, it feels to me that a low profile Elim is precisely the person to be submitting kills or shatters, so I am leaning mild V on Luckspren. This is fallible obviously, since other teammates can put in kills or shatters, I just think that Luckspren was well-placed to do so. With Drought, it feels a bit counterintuitive, but Drought would not have been present in the thread to defend. But I don't see substantive pressure coming from defending Drought, since fundamentally, Drought was never going to be lynched anyway as a returning player. So lean against the subsidiary pools in general. No Elim involvement in the Ash train; Elims were hiding elsewhere in the thread This world is somewhat unhelpful in that everyone and their dog basically did not want to get involved in the lynch yesterday, which I get, but also makes it hard to have a strong view about the candidates in this world. We're looking at a formal main pool of: <Joe, Luckspren, JNV, TUN, TGK, Wiz, Steel, Drought>. Drought and Luckspren are removed; Drought for inactivity, and Luckspren for reasons I've mentioned previously. My current/main thoughts: no strong read on most players. Steel's raw dgaf continues to stand out to me. It's a bit of an apathy clear, which I dislike, but let's call it an apathy-not-my-immediate-problem-for-C2. I have seen low activity E!Steel before, and I am not sure E!Steel just acts this disinterested or disengaged, but at the same time...Dingogate was real. I am tempted to effort read Joe for that post RIP, but I really shouldn't. Same deal with regard to effort reading JNV. Some of it is going to depend a little on the results of something else. Drought vote is eh in my eyes, but Joe also mentioned just rushing it, which I have some sympathy for, so I'm leaving that off. TUN, TGK, Wiz more or less in the same ballpark for me. Fifth - I will always, always be wary of thread!Fifth, am aware that it's his MO whether Village or Evil, but all the same. I've stated my reservations with the Luckspren/Ash push, and that's about where I'm at. @Fifth Scholar Devo - Gut eh. I know it's a classic Devo late vote, I just don't always feel good about late trains, especially since Mat flipped Village. Does your reasoning for Ash boil down to your theorised Elim team? @Devotary of Spontaneity Conq - Feels like an inactivity pressure vote on Ash. He feels engaged with the game in our PM, which is a good sign for me, but I suppose I'd like to ask more about why Ash pivot - you said you'd rather kill someone not participating, and I assume Drought was out because returnee, and Luckspren had those two posts. Is that the correct way to read your vote? @Conquestor

In the world where an Elim has a VS, I don't think they'd just use it to fish since it's a oneshot - I think they'd try to use it for a lens that's problematic for them, e.g. TL, TFL, assuming they don't start with it in the first place. So if we assume it's a blind fishing shot, then it's not likely to be the case in this world. In the world where an Elim doesn't have a VS, then ex hypothesi, it's a blind Village shot. So this leans me towards thinking that whoever did it was much more likely Village. The comment about Elims killing me or shattering if they suspected I had a TL is partly because I'm not sure I didn't give myself away when I asked the question about whom everyone would scan if they had a TL. It felt like a rookie mistake after I posted, but I should have been more careful - the spirit of my question was more or less, "Who would you look to, if you were trying to catch an Elim kill?" and that's true of TFL as well as TL. (My thought is that framing it in a concrete way makes it easier for players to address rather than asking them to come up with a reads list.) In retrospect, it feels like one of those cases where the player asks a question about their role but no other roles, which can be taken as a hint that you do in fact have the role in question - it's why it's on your mind in the first place. Once I'd posted, I basically had to resign myself to seeing if anyone wanted to just take the shot/risk. I'm usually better at this, but we can't unpost once we posted so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Alright. Time to go look at/analyse the voting patterns. I feel like there was a sudden end cycle push towards Ash, but that's more my impressions of EoD. I didn't like the way I kept getting @ about Luckspren too - it felt like I was being redirected to Ash, and I didn't see a particular reason to favour Ash in the circumstances. (Probably biased because I did have a PM with Ash, even if it wasn't the most productive one.) Since Mat flipped Village, we know that part of the push is pure, but I'm going to put a vote for now on Fifth. Also, to whoever who stole my Tracker's Lens, the one time I rand an actual scanner since the disaster that was MR1 and you do this? Weighing whether I think it was Mat. It feels more Village because I'd expect to get Shattered or just outright killed if an Elim believed I had a TL. If there's a second TL out there and you did catch someone VSing me, I'd say you can probably lean Village on them. But that's off the top of my head.

Why should I answer the question? His question is a weak defense of Luckspren - it presumes that there's something wrong with a vote with Luckspren. As do you. Is there a difference? You tell me. Did I do this?

I think you needed to @ Devo here

Gods were kind and I woke up despite setting no alarms, so you can always pursue this line of questioning in red if it makes you feel better. Why should I go onto Ash? Why are you interested in defending Luckspren? Is Luckspren particularly under significant threat at the moment? I've flagged this before, but you go walking back into it again. I've pointed this out in games this year, consistently, including in the LG that just happened (yes, I still have the PM, do you?), and still you continue to assume that naked vote = CC. At some point, I am really going to have to suspect you are doing this deliberately and that there is agenda behind this I wouldn't disagree with that tie feeling rather toothless regardless of alignment due to the easy availability of a tie-breaking self-pres vote, which is far less informative than practically any other vote. Which is incidentally why I may ask questions with my votes but don't always immediately remove the vote I do think Araris was on to something with stab voting. Fairly certain I've said this during the clash with Bort in LG84, and it's going to become part of my response to you very shortly. And FWIW, I think Fifth was doing stab voting wrong in LG87, but he also had agenda, so I'm going to sort of let him off on that front. I believe he's making a statement that he'd rather set his epistemic standards high, and by doing so, discount a lot of info but ensure that what he does keep is very high accuracy, rather than lower his standards, and accept more info, but by necessity, of lower accuracy, so fundamentally, yes. It's an approach, let's put it that way. Interesting. So, the Contribution Crusade was born during a period of low activity in SE. My memory says AG1 or AG2, but a quick check shows other things happened there, and STINK and I argue about the CC in AG2 so it's already a thing by then. Either way, in which Hreo decided he would essentially vote to kill inactives as a way of: A. actually getting rid of inactives, and B. incentivising activity. Part of the reason was the suspicion that Elims were lurking in low activity brackets, and also just a significant amount of frustration that low activity players were costing the Village badly in games. (Part of this is a simple playbook - Elims kill most of the high activity players, and then the low activity + inactive brackets just can't solve the game and die in turn.) It's important to keep in mind inactivity filters weren't so much of a thing back then, although there were pinch-hitters. To me, there are two types of CC programmes. Strong CC is that we should lynch inactives and get rid of them. Weak CC is the poke voting meta that (in my view) got strengthened by CC, where players could poke vote - leave a vote on an inactive and peace out, or simply swap their vote to another inactive the second the person they voted on posted. There are a lot of problems with the strong CC model: A. Genuine inactives don't care B. This doesn't generate very much information C. It allows the Elims to blend in by appearing 'helpful' (if CC is defined as pro-Village) without putting them under substantive pressure - basically it greatly lowers the bar for what it takes for anyone to count as Village D. It doesn't really encourage quality activity or engagement with the game, just the semblance of it I wouldn't say CC is almost always bad. If it's clear you're dealing with a passive or low activity Elim team, then you do have to take shots in the dark, so as to speak. (Sart's LG71 comes to mind, when we were dealing with an exceptionally quiet Elim team.) The point of criticising CC isn't to say killing inactives or borderline inactives never works, because that's a really bad argument since sometimes that's where the Elims are. The point of criticising CC is to say that CC doesn't actually fulfill its stated goals - if it did, inactivity filters would mean we have highly active games, and that's really obviously false! Moreover, CC basically makes the game landscape worse for the Village. So an actual lynch on an inactive and strong CC shouldn't be conflated. (I would also argue that's not really strong CC anymore since you come to it by having ruled out all/most other possibilities - it's just bad practice to start a game by going there, since Village already starts with an informational disadvantage. Refusing to lynch low activity players when you've cleared pretty much everyone high-activity results in Village self-cannibalism, and a potential loss.) The problem with the weak CC model, or the diluted poke vote model, is essentially why I'm an advocate of Araris's stab voting and have been since...oh, I think that game where he told Ventyl he wasn't trying to get Ventyl to post, just to kill him. A. It creates a very clear contract - post anything and I will remove my vote. This doesn't incentive players to post anything alignment indicative and greatly lowers the bar for what it takes for any player to feel safe from the lynch. B. It allows the Elims to blend in by appearing 'helpful' (if CC is defined as pro-Village) without putting them under substantive pressure - basically it greatly lowers the bar for what it takes for anyone to count as Village. C. It doesn't really encourage quality activity or engagement with the game, just the semblance of it. This happened when Bort just poke voted Tani, Tani showed up, and no one got anything much out of that in LG84. D. It doesn't generate very much information - if I poke-vote Lopen, and Lopen posts "hi, sorry I can't get into the game," and maybe adds a single comment on the gamestate and I unvote him and move to the next inactive, that's extremely poor contribution and the Village doesn't benefit from it. Note that if I were actually doing a CC vote, I wouldn't have voted Luckspren or Mat to begin with since they had posts, and there are genuine inactives (well, now just one I think) in this game. This is why it really frustrates me every single time Mat sees a naked vote, and decides it has to be a CC vote, as sure as Vegemite goes with bread To rehash my views on stab voting as opposed to poke voting, though Araris and I both said a substantial amount of it in thread and I did in my faction doc that game (LG84) - I strongly feel that stab voting breaks the expectancy trap, and that's what Fifth was doing wrong in LG87. The point of stab voting is that the other player can't reliably predict what is going to make you take your vote off. This is why stab voting encourages pressure. If there's the implicit understanding that addressing your question or answering your argument is going to immediately make you move off, then the player (especially if Evil) knows that all they've got to do is to immediately answer, and the vote goes off. They don't feel any psychological pressure. Conversely (as Fifth was signalling in that LG), if your vote is explicitly signalled as staying put for the entire cycle anyway, then there's no pressure either (probably a bit more than poke-voting, since someone can double up), since the player already knows that nothing is going to get that vote to come off anyway. The point of voting is to apply pressure via threat of death. Votes that go on players who are not functionally excluded from death for that cycle exert more pressure if they're on substantial trains, less pressure but still pressure if they're train starters. If I could summarise stab voting in a single line, which Araris is probably better at, it's this: "Unvote because your vote is better off elsewhere." Predictably leaving your vote on a player to the end of the cycle, especially when you have better places to apply pressure violates this rule. So does immediately unvoting just because the player you voted dropped a thin post. The trick, of course, is determining where your vote is better off, if at all, but that's a player judgement call. So this is a lot of random voting theory but I guess that's good SE tradition.

Luckspren Mat Feeling unwell, so going to call it a day. I don't anticipate being able to be on again before rollover. If I can, then that's a future me issue. Glhf!

Too late, that one game has permanently defined how everyone thinks you play now :eyes: Wouldn't be the first time /shrug No - but I generally think you get more useful reactions when there's some kind of actual threat of death, diluted or otherwise, otherwise it's just performative, which is mainly why I haven't at all bothered voting on anyone in that range, but as you said, could be differing approaches. This is why y'all need to get on board with Araris's stab voting :eyes: Edited to add: One more question - based on your current state of credences, if you all had an action scan, who would you scan? Currently, I would look for the <Luckspren, Wiz, TUN, Ash, JNV, Devo> set, probably add Drought or TGK but that's a bit too large, and Drought has last logged in on Tuesday, therefore if this continues, I would not expect to catch a kill coming from Drought. Iffy on Steel - I feel Steel could still put in a kill but also IDK, that's a lot of raw dgaf energy from Steel. @Fifth Scholar He's your bro, what are your thoughts?

Different Elim profiles do different things. The first was you and Araris telling me about it in AG8 actually , but I recall us seeing that in the AG as well - as TJ noted that game, the Elims played in a fiercely protective way, with Striker and Aman consistently showing up to interfere mid-cycle or so when Szeth came under fire, rather than waiting for the last minute tiebreak. Araris very happily left a Sart-Mage tie in place in LG80, which is what caused me to initially dismiss Araris as likely Village, and later made me read Mage as Village, though I adjusted my views later with more evidence, as we all do. Little concerted effort in LG84 to break the Elim-village tie, with the only one who did so being Archer himself - that's more a case of being risk-friendly, and willing to accept ties. LG84 is actually just a hot mess other than my paranoiding endlessly about your entire doc, because we did a lot of last minute blitz trains and found Elims every time. Elims in LG83 went explicitly for a divide and conquer strat when we infamously had that three way tie all on Elims when we couldn't decide who to vote on. No comment on my Kandra LG and LG86 - I feel 86 had a passive style team, and them losing their active thread control player N1 (thanks Alv!) didn't particularly help matters, and Drake is gonna Drake. I think my ultimate point is that when you try to do vote pattern analysis, you have to be careful with your assumptions about how the Elim team plays and flag them. If you're assuming a team with low risk appetite, then discovering your reads are incorrect should lead you to redo it with the assumption of a higher risk appetite instead.

The amnesty doesn't last too long, but it's generally considered discourteous to exe/lynch a returning or new player in their first cycle, maybe first two. The idea is to let them get their feet back in the game - we've had returning players semi-permanently stop playing as a result of being frustrated with getting exed (especially if they returned to a vastly different meta) on C1, and I think that's about the time the amnesty policy came into play. How people consider players returning players is a bit of a wash - general consensus is that you, Joe, and TGK are fairly clear-cut as returnees, I'd argue Fifth and Drought basically count, Fifth by the skin of his teeth as he just played one game and has been present as a GM (though his last major activity tranche as a player was last year.) I recall Drought last played either in AG8 or LG83, so again, not as clear-cut, but good enough for me to lay off. Hard to go too much into the current meta because a lot of it is taken for granted, but if you have a specific point/question, most of us should know. (I say most but Mat and Devo are probably most up to date, JNV might be as they've been fairly active since they started in AG8 thereabouts, same for TUN, Ash and I play intermittently but more regularly than most, and Wiz and Luckspren are technically fairly new.) NAI means 'Non-Alignment Indicative.' Illwei (another player who isn't in this game) has a whole rant about it that I sort of agree with and sort of don't - NAI are stuff like self-pres votes, i.e. stuff you'd reasonably expect a player to produce regardless of their alignment. What counts as NAI and what isn't is kind of subjective - I think Mat is really the best example because a number of players do have an asymmetry between their willingness to stay alive as Villagers and when Evil. With Mat, it's more or less symmetrical, so Mat's willingness to stay alive when subjected to pressure is a good example of something that's NAI Edited to add: Perhaps, but the point is to gain more information. You seem to have an implicit standard where it has to be absolutely correct, or it isn't worth it, and by that definition, no lynch is worth it, simpliciter. Discovering you're mistaken about a relationship narrows down your suspect pool. That's a deeply flawed assumption and selective goal-keeping. No? Causing the tie can flush out Elims too, e.g. if you see low investment or recognise there's no Elim investment in the tie, then you vote off-train. We certainly don't just cause ties between people we think are Villagers, but especially early in the game, believing that we realistically have got an Elim in our sights is more likely to be mere delusion than actually true.

Wait what why would I refer to my own vote :joy: Because Conq is not in danger of death. You are. Conq can safely ignore the vote, knowing that no one will ever consent to killing him C1, and answer out of the goodness of his heart alone. Or blackness, I guess, if he's Evil. You could argue there's some infinitesimally small pressure to seeing your name in red, which I won't deny with, but he's nowhere near to becoming a realistic endgame lead train, which means that there is no world in which he is going to die C1, and so the vote doesn't do much for him. Like - what's the point of a vote? Willingness to kill, right? It's a threat and a promise of death. (Hi Araris ) Your vote is your voice and your chief weapon as a Villager and that's always been my take on it. If we are starting this game knowing there is no realistic way most of us will consent to kill Conq D1, where is that pressure coming from? You could argue that as a returning player, Conq might predate that meta, and that might be true, but if Conq is Evil, then unless Conq is on an all-returnee team (IDK, do you think so? Where does your confidence in that come from? - feels like the only team that might not be aware would have to be a Conq-Joe team, since TGK and Drought should be up to date on it) I fully expect Conq's teammates to chill knowing that he isn't under threat anyway, and to communicate that to Conq himself. I don't think that Conq should get a free pass C1, I just think that vote is performative as all hell because it in essence does nothing, and adds nothing to your issues with Conq. And the performativity just seems suspect to me. And FWIW, I agree with you it's doing more on Conq than Drought insofar as at least I now know what you think about Conq I feel like we are all missing Archer terribly right now So, question for you ( ) - how do you expect Elims to approach this game? Do you expect them to play more aggressively to lens denial, or to trying to pocket and claim lenses? And for the floor/everyone: Do you think there are any circumstances under which it makes sense to claim/counterclaim, or no? (Instinctive opsec in me says no, but knowing there's two of each lens and a roleblock and action scan out there makes me think that this might not be true. I will also blame the number of extreme Elim liars we've since seen in SE this year, hi Drake ) I expect claiming to expose people to shatters, so I would say do not at all do it lightly, especially because passing is last on OoA. If there is a good lens claim (unless it's Elim bait - best judgement), anyone with a VS should try to grab it to keep it from being hit by a shatter. (But really can we just not claim.)

I've been consistent about why I think the CC is bad, all the way through AG8 (I'm pretty sure I said that even in AG7, but that's further back than I can remember), and my voting style hasn't shifted. You're welcome to check how often I have a trend of naked votes early on. You're the one who insists on casting my votes as CC votes, not me On the one hand, you always insist naked votes have to be CC votes, so that's on you and normal for you. On the other hand, you're still not addressing the point, I see :eyes: The point is to gain information and to gain reads. Talking about it ending in a false positive is the assumption that it's meant to lynch an Elim - which no, we don't always LG84 a game, unfortunately. No disagreement on not explicitly verbalising the intent to form a tie, but that's really the result of Joe asking the question rather than an issue with the strategy. Honestly that is really what is pinging me about you so far, next to the pointless Conq vote. It feels very performative - there are ways to keep a thread alive beyond low-stakes ways of just asking people to post. You've seen them in action via El - it's true they're tiring to do, but that's the entire point of it. Pointing out people should contribute more is making a low-stakes observation and feels more like accumulating credit than a commitment to actually brokering and sustaining discussion. Edited to add: I'd further point out the reason I powerfully dislike talk of reasons being the most important is that yes, Villagers have reasons, and so do Elims. That's precisely the point why evaluating the reasons alone won't get you where you need either! You have to look at the gamestate, and that involves applying pressure, and that involves looking at what people do when their tactical objectives are under threat!

So here's the thing. I generally find that move pretty informative, but as the popular AoE2 response goes - it depends. I think TUN and Mat are both missing the point: forcing a tie isn't about expecting the tie to actually kill an Elim, this early on. It's about trying to get information from who is invested in breaking the tie, and who isn't. A high temperature/activity tie is highly indicative of high investment, which in turn, could be indicative of Elim activity. It also minimally lets us identify potential teamings, and draw connections between players. This is helpful, especially when we do get a flip, or are trying to narrow down our suspect pool of Elims. But—as with most strategies, it has certain assumptions baked into it to be effective. I think we've tacitly been leaving it at a tie. Unless you're Evil (not enough info to tell, not really interested in chasing that line right now), the fact that no one particularly cared and that the cycle has been so low temperature so far is suggestive of low investment. This could be for several reasons: A. Elims aren't interested, because one of their own isn't endangered B. Elims have high risk threshold, therefore are okay with a several-way tie C. Too early in the cycle D. Two or more of the above Against C, I would say the latest trend has been for Elims to push earlier with regard to breaking ties that are bad for them. Fifth's tie-breaking vote would fit that profile, but my question would be how well-versed Fifth would be with that meta. Maybe, he sure heard us yelling about it in AG8, but he's still a returning player, this being his second game back, so that much is unclear to me. I lean towards no - on reflection, a one-vote deep tie isn't a serious threat to the Elims, just get the threatened member on to self-pres. Self-pres votes aren't very alignment-indicative (I don't really want to say NAI because we can insert Illwei's rant here), but also because there are players like Mat who simply don't care to die no matter their alignment. For B, I'll note this has been true in many recent games, including cases of three-vote deep ties. Sure, Araris isn't playing, and this game has a vastly different playerbase, so maybe, but I'm not certain we have a good estimation of Elim risk appetite right now. Long story short, the circumstances seem to indicate this just isn't a promising tack right now. But I never want to FAFO with ties when we're playing closer to the wire—the time for that has long passed. The caveat here you might need to be aware of is I primarily do vote analysis these days so I stop feeling guilt about MLing Orlok and Creccio on the basis of bad post reads, so this sort of thing really helps me out in terms of analysis. El isn't here to say this, so I'll say this for her: the contribution crusade died for a reason. Let it stay dead. 1. You should know better >:( 2. Is he even a member of the crusade anymore? 3. He is on this website (I think?), just not on this sub. He GMed a TDP game, it was wild, but anyway it sort of fizzled out D: (Sorry Hreo...) Ash Mat - that vote never had teeth anyway, so what was the point of it?

IDK, like why even claim in a PM, period Regardless of whether you've left obvious personal identifiers or not, you simply don't know the counterparty's alignment. Just don't, damnit >> This message is brought to you by your duly appointed representative of the 'I Was Betrayed By Wyrm' opsec support group...

There was something to be said, mused Kazed, about not knowing exactly what for the love of Alhazen was going on. A lot of strange people in the building that insisted very stridently it was an ARCHIVE and NOT A LIBRARY, and Kazed had quietly asked someone why it was not a library, only to get a horrified glance and a stern talking-to, the result of which was that Kazed didn't really understand any better, only that talk of libraries and Librarians (and you could just sense the capital 'L' rolling off the tongue of his interlocuters!) was strictly verboten and somewhat of a sensitive spot. What he did know was that the Archive, most decidedly Not A Library, was reputed to have one of the few remaining copies of the original manuscript of the Kitab al-Manazir, which meant that if he ever wanted to puzzle out what Alhazen had meant on that fifth page in that enigmatic seventh paragraph that his supervisor had written his own doctoral thesis on, Kazed was going to have to find himself a manuscript. There were other copies, of course. Locked away in university and museum collections. But this one supposedly had marginalia that helped elucidate what Alhazen had meant, and so he had come here. Kazed was somewhat starting to regret it.

I'll work with this, thank you!