Salmon Meerkat

Sigh. I was supposed to be kel this round :/ i was supposed to sit back and chill and troll and occasionally add sarkastic commentary & lie outrageously about my SE play history and keep on calling Fifth out i was supposed to be the god of trolling this game. i had it all worked out. nice chill personality, like wilson's mad watcher schtick but chaos god kel to let my troll streak out. it's done wonders for me when gaming. wyrm commented on how chill i was when we went ham against the ai. But y'all don't need kel right now, do you. You need the person kel is impersonating. So I guess I'm going to have to find him :/ even if i kind of really don't want to. Simplified Re-Look At Voting Redone Vote Movement Analysis -tbc another day because im tired & i need to clear work and stuff & recover & sleep -tired kel is tired I'm probably drunk and tripping because: Albatross Violet Axl i like ur style old friend & i like ur porch but u r doin' me a concern here edit: @Fifth Scholar @Elbereth retraction highlighted to save your eyes edited to add 2: *Maybe Axl Soothed But I think I'll go with Axl for now. - This should read as speculation that Axl is a Soother, but Soothers can't target themselves, so this requires Axl to be in cahoots with a Soother who also targeted Axl's vote, or targeted someone Smoked, in which case that just seems...overly elaborate in a number of cases. Yet the challenge is that if Hyena is correct and he drew Pewter N3, then Hyena's claims to have drawn Brass N3 could be a gamble - he'd have to remain alive for us to see him use it - but could also plausibly point to a Soother/Rioter teammate. With over 25% of the distro still unknown to us, I don't want us to rolelynch at this point.

think ur confusin 2 (or more) separate convos bro tho i admit i haven't made it easier 4 u =P penguin thinks there's e!Seeker - i disagree; no sign of Smokers & usually v has protection for power roles from e!Seekers a few people have pmed me asking about a leak and/or e!Coinshot & imo there's prima facie case 2 consider b/c 3 V!Thugs + 2V!Lurchers + 1 V!Coinshot can seem a bit much too much protective role padding if u know what i mean - gms have to build balance into the distro so the more we know about the distro the better + we have Word of El-Fifth that 2 V!Thugs are conf V!Thugs and 1 V!Lurcher is conf V!Lurcher so there's a prima facie discomfort there if we assume V!Coinshot it can be worked out imo (don't forget Lurchers are nerfed in this game - standard Tyrian Lurchers have no restrictions on protecting the same target multiple nights in a row so two Tyrian Lurchers would unbalance things immensely - i could see two AG8!Lurchers due to the nerf on V side with a potential third E!Lurcher who simply kept quiet like Kas did in LG5 b/c no incentive to reveal now) but i agree w/ your reasoning no E!Seeker needed to explain Swan kill & use that to talk about how imo, Coinshot has to be V b/c if we take it as true that Hyena wanted to go up against Vulture & only sent in the kill on the suspicion Vulture was V!Mistborn then Elims didn't know Vulture was regular & Swan Mistborn but on N3, I created a PM group to broker contact between Vulture, Swan, Coinshot, and myself so Elim team would not have made this mistake i.e. Coinshot v. unlikely to be E. so im agreeing w/ u abt E!Seeker but I think ur reasoning also separately allows us to infer that Coinshot is pretty solidly V so roleclearing CS is not too uncomfortable a move does this help >edit: to be clear, coinshot, swan, and vulture agreed to out themselves 2 each other so Spiked wld've known if coinshot (or fwiw, myself) were compromised

No actually. I'm thinking aloud about the Coinshot because we've been treating the Coinshot as a roleclear and with more info about the protective roles available in this game that are purportedly Village, I thought it was a good time to reassess because roleclearing is always inherently risky. See: Fifth the Seeker. Edited to add: @Fuchsia Ostrich Bro, should add you're expecting me to be a bit more organised than I am When I make arguments, I am. But I also have a habit of treating the thread and PMs as my personal thought scratch table. Meaning I will throw out anything that comes to my mind in the hopes of getting insights from the thread. These are all just thoughts that occur to me - IMO, Falcon's flip should be a clear sign to re-assess our view of the gamestate and to refresh our reads. I get the strong reaction to Swan's death and the impulse to consider if there are any leaks - Cham PMed me along those lines. I've said what I can about how we handled Swan's role, and the only thing I kept slipping was honestly Swan's identity which the PM people both found hilarious and Fifth threatened to use against me as ammunition I've nearly slipped Swan's name here a couple times too. My current view - after having explored further leak avenues - is that I don't think so. I think the groups as they stand are solid and I don't see a leak, so any call to revise trusts should not substantively affect my most robust reads. And as you point out and as I've flagged to Penguin, Swan's death is not in any way extraordinary, so I don't think there is a pro tanto call for radical revision either. But having done that anyway and not seeing leak avenues, I expect to focus and reconcile my revised reads from Falcon's flip with the structure of my reads from last night. After I've submitted my homework... As one last point: I deliberately lied and tried to pass Penguin off to the thread and to you guys as Mistborn. I felt that it was important to clear the air. If this had helped Swan live, we would not be having this discussion. But since Swan is dead, it's important everyone is on the same page, and to that extent, the fact I told different players different things needs to be laid out in case people accidentally draw the wrong conclusion from my lying spree. I know this lying spree is, again, not something in line with my usual player meta but having already pulled off a kasyana gambit this game, I feel like this is a lesser charge

If so, in my view, E!Coinshot likelihood drops very low. Only four people knew the Mistborn's identity N3—myself, Vulture, the Coinshot, and Swan. Swan claimed to me D3 because I discussed my worries about the Gorilla lynch and Falcon scan with him and as a V Mistborn, a second Mistborn claim alarmed him. This info sharing was after requesting their consent to broker contact between them. Vulture and Swan flipped V. If Elims really did not know Swan was Mistborn, then neither the Coinshot nor myself could have been leaks. I have been very careful to pass Swan off as a high level trust and I think it might be possible to work out that he's Rioter #2 from some of Vulture's arguments but in general, my strategy to conceal Swan was built off the fact that he was am obvious trust so no need to discuss or reference his role or treat him any different from a strong Village read.

Again, I'm not saying this is impossible - I'm saying you're making that inference from a kill that isn't warranted. A kill on a mid-activity player who isn't standing out who happens to be Mistborn is something that cries out for explanation. A kill on a high-activity consensus Village read player also designated as a Village info node...isn't, because it's self-explanatory. It doesn't mean there can't really be a second Mistborn or an E!Seeker, I'm just saying it's not the natural inference to make. Swan being Swan obscures this for us. My main issue with repeated E!Seeker theories is: where are the Smokers? As I've told the thread and Elims must also be aware, I don't tell players what to do, and only offer tactical advice if requested - it would have been acceptable in my eyes if Village Lurcher #1 had Lurched you or Swan, and my views on rolelynching are very clear. I don't see this as extremely damning because it assumes that one Lurcher must be E and we don't have enough sight of the game distro landscape to know for sure. I also think that given I had emphasised in thread that Swan and you were strong V reads on my part, the Lurcher in this scenario has a simple response: "I Lurched Penguin because you told me she's a power role, and I'd hoped the bluff would be enough to deter the Elims but I guess not. Maybe they saw through it because you were planning too heavily for your death." I'm going to drop all known roles in thread now, anonymised. I want everyone to take a look at this and to think about these questions: where are the Smokers? Where are the protect roles distributed? Where are the Mistborn? Is there a chance of an E!Coinshot (which would entail high numbers of V protective roles?) Total List of Known Roles [N.B. 26 players in total] In other words, out of this game, we currently know 19 roles, or 73% of the distro. Some of these claims are stronger than others, e.g. the Village Thug flip from Toucan, versus players who make regular claim. But my point is that's still more than one quarter (25%) of the game we don't have sight of. I would be very, very hesitant about rolelynching at this juncture. My thoughts from this so far: I can't tell if this is an E Coinshot distro or not. Prior to N2, it seems like the whole Village (including Vulture) and myself excluded - were happy to assume V Coinshot. Ostrich convinced me D3 because of the curious Ocho doubletap. But it seems to me to be prima facie implausible that we have V Coinshot and a lot of V protective roles. But the issue is we really just need sight into the last 25% of the game - I feel like a second Spiked Mistborn is possible (Mistborn #3), or alternatively, that we really do have so many protective roles because of the Spiked Coinshot (?) But I still feel Spiked Coinshots are a nighmare to balance so I'm leaning V for the moment. Which means I'm committed to side-eying the number of protective roles we have - sort of. For the Thugs in particular, two of them have been confirmed Village by Word of El-and-Fifth. One Lurcher has also been confirmed Village by Word of El-and-Fifth. But this could easily be disrupted by a third Elim Lurcher who simply never claimed - I'm trying to consider how likely I find it that this is a Three V!Thug Two V!L one E!L game and I think that this still more or less commits us to the claim that on the face of it, that's a...lot of Village protective roles. On the possibility of an Elim Seeker. I don't rule it out but one thing this game has that I find striking is a decent number of regulars, and 3 vote manips. That's it. Vote manip has been low and I don't think anyone at all has hit a Smoker yet. So where are the Smokers? If there is an E!Seeker, I would expect one or two V!Smokers, just as protection from the E!Seeker. Similarly for the vote manip case. The lack of a sign of a Smoker (granted, a Regular could be fakeclaiming) actually makes me wonder if vote manip skews Village and maybe 2 Elim Smokers. But again, with the caveat we do not have sight of one quarter of this game. I have other reason to think that E!Coinshot doesn't obtain - namely, that if Vulture was really killed because he was thought to be Mistborn, then this isn't consistent with E!Coinshot, as the Coinshot and the Mistborn knew each other (and consented to.) N3 kill would have hit the Mistborn, and in my view, would have been a perfectly reasonable kill, because Swan was a very clear Village read for many, which obscures the reasons behind the kill. We only started to ask questions because Vulture was hit instead. Finally, I have a bit of a story to tell. As you all know, this is an anon game but El said something about players who scream their identity to the world with every post. So okay, I'm gonna do that - as I've been telling you all, I'm kel, and sometimes I do Kas impressions So, one bit of background here (and if Araris is in this game, he sighs because we have been in enough games that he has heard me tell this at least twenty times, and Fifth has heard this more than enough when I was PMing everyone in MR41 reminding them about the Spanreed Incident.) Long story short, I was a young naive lad playing my first SE game in LG5. I rand Elim. Oh, cripes. Things get better: I start as a Thug and a PM role combined. (To be clear, LG5 was items based.) The Village decided that the Elims must have a PM role (not wrong), because all PMs are closed unless a person with a PM role opens it, and there's only so many they can open a day (I think?) Anyway - PM role = spanreed. They weren't wrong. We had a spanreed holder. I was the spanreed holder =) "Should I use it?" I asked my team. Remember, I was young and naive and I didn't know the faintest thing about playing SE. So I crutched very hard on Awes and Alv. "I think you should hang on to it," they said. So here's what happened. I never admitted to having the spanreed, Awes' stoked everyone's paranoia, and the Village lynched every single player with a spanreed, all of whom were Villagers because, recall - I never admitted to having the spanreed, and I was the Elim PM role. There was a bloodbath. I threw the spanreed onto Joe as we killed him just to get rid of the incriminating evidence =) It was a good play =) And this is why I never like rolelynches. Can they be grounds for suspicion? Sort of. But that Village was rolelynching I think from D2 onwards, and in my view, you just don't have enough sight of the distro landscape. Even now at 73%, I feel there's too much room for error. Some of the Regular claimants could be lying. Similarly, the E!Lurcher could just be staying quiet. Which I suppose is a long way of me saying I will not be giving up Lurcher #1's identity or turning on the Coinshot on the basis of distro speculation at this juncture. Edited to add: And this puts me in the awkward position of voting for Albatross on the basis of his votes, though I may swap to Cham after further consideration, but I really just want to open up discussion more and add more lynch pressure. We're at D5, thread shouldn't be this dead.

I told Ostrich last Night that Penguin was Mistborn. If the theory is that Swan was killed because of a role kill which imo ignores the simplest explanation, then we should have seen an airstrike on Penguin as I have never indicated distrust of Ostrich. I also told Lurcher #1 that Penguin was a power role that skews Village when explaining why I wanted to pass Penguin off as the Lurch target N3. I was trying to generate some cover for Swan. The Elims may have felt this was too easy but take it as you will. With Flamingo being pushed so aggressively as the CW D3, and staying on Gorilla, I find it strange to argue for E Flamingo since Falcon/Gorilla V/E. Flamingo could have pushed Falcon instead. Too early for a bus. Edited to add: To my pre-reread brain, Ostrich was the first person to keep pushing the ISO inequality on D2 and to keep pushing Hyena to me D3. Hyena also tried to make him and Vulture the CW so I feel like that's another tendentious take.

tfw one of my suspicions votes the other....

<OOG>El told me to OOG this and I suppose I will. It's a coward's option but I just don't feel mentally ready to talk to Falcon so I'm not going to just yet and whenever I do it will be via mod mediation. But the strangest thing is what this write up just makes me feel is an overwhelming sense of relief. Because the alternative is that a friend of mine was down for a teammate dragging me through a very bad period of my life and opening scars. And I was pretty mad about that. I shouldn't feel relieved because this isn't a great Village result at all. But I am. Take that as you will. </OOG> -Swan was a top trust so if not me, they would likely hit him or Penguin. They may have distrusted going for Penguin. Nothing much I can do about that. -Agreement was to double tap Falcon. He wanted to shoot Cham but felt it was too risky. -Considering revealing Lurcher #1 but IMO, I am concerned about playing Lynch the Lurcher — second V Lurcher is not implausible, or an E Lurcher who simply hasn't been saying anything. Going to sleep on that one. -For everyone who kept asking about the D3 Riot, that was Swan. He Rioted Rhino from Falcon to Gorilla. I tried to pass him off as a Rioter but I guess that failed. So it wasn't that I had a lot of trust in the Rioter—it's that the Rioter was Swan who I had a lot of reason to trust. -IMO we want to decide the spread of known roles. 2 Lurchers and Three Thugs seem way too much for Village which means in my view either more Mistborn than we had expected or an Evil Coinshot. Paranoia says Evil Coinshot but the Ocho doubletap doesn't make sense to me. We know one of the Tin messages D1 was from Swan so this means two unaccounted for messages. I suppose it's possible still that Hyena sent one and there's an Evil Seeker, but why do we not see Smokers then? So on the assumption Ocho sent something — ah holy Wormmon of course, maybe Ocho sent the last message. But anyway, four messages, if one is from Ocho and one was from me and one from Swan, then we either have one Mistborn or two remaining. I'm too tired to work out the likelihood of five V protect roles right now. Going to think later. -I'm surprised I'm alive because I lied. Lurcher #1 Lurched me N3 so the Elims would have known if Lurcher #1 was Evil that I was vulnerable last Night. Hence the contingencies. But as a Tineye, guess I'm not a top kill target either. -I'm going to use the flips to rework my suspicions. Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum, Swan.

I don't take the vote manip argument. I never have. It looked plausible to me before the Rioter claimed but I always felt the action just made no sense. That any claimed Lurcher should have felt suspicion at an unknown alignment Mistborn scan and self-protected. Especially considering what Fifth did to Bard in LG74. You are a Village power role. It's strange they never sought to use your Lurches. Strange they didn't immediately kill you either. Hyena could always find another Villager to tie himself to. If you felt the kill was going to be low info, then why not get Hyena to Lurch another such player? Either way it makes no sense. The best explanation to me is that you're both Evil.

To say a bit more, it's not my problem if you guys haven't run a Tyrian game before and had to break your head over Emotional Allomancy. In fact, I recommend @ing @Fifth Scholar because he has the best reactions about Emotional Allomancy interactions

I have two individually plausible Riot claims that match with the tally. There is no contradiction, so no reason to doubt imo.

Last Stuff for the Night: - Remember to keep discussion broad ; pursue multiple lines of inquiry, don't just tunnel. In my view, the arguments for Hyena and Falcon are more clearcut. But narrow discussion and discussion bottlenecks are death for the Village. - Keep suspicions fluid; be ready to update your beliefs to include new info. This includes re-assessing previous days given Hyena's and Falcon's flips and whoever dies (presumably me.) -Don't get complacent. One of the previous Meerkats was a busser who managed to win as a lone Elim. Even with two Elims (hopefully three) down, we cannot afford to let our guard down. We have to play this right if we want to be the first generation to break the curse. This is worth one kel's life =) We all seek to change the future in some way. I think we might actually have a shot at doing so. O7

There must be, since it doesn't happen for me. RIP Axl, what did the Axl before you do?

i'm so happy to see someone talk about conditionals here u r my new favourite person of n4

this is an absolute disgrace u r best conversation partner i do not understand y they r like this

Housekeeping: This note has multiple sections, including information I've received and anonymised for passing on as I believe the Village benefits from more information shared responsibly. I also don't want the info to die with me. And I think Vulture was right to warn me of that trap. As a result: First, here are the anonymised action claims. We do have a successful Seek that took place N3 and sat on the results so as not to derail from Hyena's lynch. While it is theoretically possible to have multiple Mistborn on the Elim team (speculate two; then again, El and Fifth kind of made everyone Mistborn before, and AG3 had three on a team - mark as outside possibilities but not technically impossible!) - the player's behaviour, interaction with them in PMs, actions accountability, cooperativeness, and ability to identify a secret code in one of the Tineye messages of N1 all jointly point in one direction: I deem this sufficiently strong reason to consider them Village Mistborn, and they drew Bronze N3, and scanned a player. Unfortunately (though by no means shabby!) this was a Village scan - we continue to sit on the results for now as the scanned player has not indicated they are okay with the results going live, and of course we will withhold their role (note that I consider 'Regular' a role as well.) In any case, here are the anonymised action claims: The corollaries are: D1 & D3 Cham was not Smoked (for any Smoked Rioter theories and so on), D2 Azure Mouse was not Smoked. I suspect the fourth D1 Tineye message was sent by Hyena but cannot confirm this - just based off a bit of a signature RP similarity but could be wrong. If that's true, then we have one last Tineye message that's unaccounted for, which could definitely have been sent by someone who went inactive later on, or as Vulture reminded me, some people just don't get their jollies out of Tineye message trolling I caution that Lurcher #1 seems on the level to me so far but it's important not to fall into the trap that the Elim team could only have one Lurcher. This will depend on information about the distribution of Village and Evil Mistborn, and other protective roles, though two Lurchers does seem a bit much even with an active (presumably Village) Coinshot. New Village Info-Structures: As Vulture pointed out to me, succession planning is not something I do very often; I tend to prefer to just die with information rather than have it pass into the wrong hands. This, however, is not always the best approach. Last Night, I designated Vulture and Swan as the Village contact points, noting I've had strong reason by my lights to consider them Village. Action claims from players who don't wish to out themselves in thread and so on went to them, so I wouldn't die with the information. Swan continues to be one of my strongest Village reads, and I'm gratified that my read of Vulture was validated by his flip. Anything I know, they know, and I've alerted my contacts to make contact with whichever of the two they trust more. Tonight, since I've had to update the list, Swan and Penguin are now the two Village contact points, and I've formalised the move after Hyena's flip, as Hyena's flip validates in my view my trust and read of Penguin. Again, should for some reason PMs remain open after my death, you will want to approach whichever of the two of them most has your trust. I'm well aware of how much players love to abuse El's Confirmed Good =/= Confirmed Right, most often Elim Fifth when we're crossing blades I'm just going to say this: I do make mistakes. But I am also a very paranoid player and very, very careful with who I annoint into any position of informational trust and responsibility. In my view, the case for Swan and the case for Penguin are both very strong - some of which is due to information I can't share with the thread. Should I die, and should one of them die, I urge them to consider who their successor might be and to be really freakin' careful okay guys because I will get up from my grave to haunt you if after all my paranoid work of extreme vetting, you just up and hand over to a freakin' Spiked I MEAN IT I WILL HAUNT U FROM MY GRAVE >:( Ahem. Current Reads List: I want to briefly offer a picture of my current reads, which should be treated as a rough snapshot of things at the time of my death - well, N4, but I'm expecting the NK to come for me tonight, so As I'm taking time off the game to recover, a fair complaint is that my reads list has not been sufficiently updated to account for new information, especially with regard to Swan, Axl, and Heron (Heron's reads, for instance, seem a bit sketchy to me.) But that's okay. I'm recovering and chilling I don't know if I have the time, the mental space, and the bandwidth to do vote analysis and to update my reads list on that basis. If I can, I will, but if not, I flag these limitations to you RADIANT [=STRONG VILLAGE] SQUIRE [=MODERATE VILLAGE] BRIDGEMAN [=LIGHT VILLAGE READ] NULL+ CHULL [=NULL] NULL- VOIDBRINGER [=LIGHT ELIM] SPIKED For anything about CHULL/NULL, if I don't explicitly state re-assess, I believe the read is substantially robust for the moment. All the best, Team Village. See you on the other side. Edited to add: I often edit my reads list live because sometimes no matter how rationally I should put a player in a certain category, they just don't feel right there to me. I think the voting data implies I should rationally put Zebra into Bridgeman but I honestly don't feel that great about putting Zebra there all the same. I forgot to do the deletion - probably because I was hoping I'd find someone I'm happy to put into Bridgeman but I guess it's an unpopulated category today. Final decision: Null+ for Zebra, probably borderline with Bridgeman. Has that good vote, and while Hyena suggestion is too risk-taking for my heart to handle, I feel that it comes from a Villager mindset rather than an Evil mindset, but... Yeah, you can see why they're a null+ for me. I'd explicitly mark Albatross as worthy of a rethink, because they have two votes I continue to find puzzling, if not actively - eh. The D1 vote which diluted some of the lynch impact off Gorilla still sticks out to me, and there's the D3 vote which comes at a point where Gorilla might have already been bussed. Again - I'm not for rolelynching but especially with what we now know about the distro, Albatross comes back to mind as one of the players I don't feel comfortable promoting so high. I suppose I'd be happy to dump Albatross for the moment in Bridgeman, so the category at least exists for a reason, and mark Re-Assess once Falcon flips. Would also flag Albatross as a decent Coinshot target - two ? votes and getting a better D1 picture may not be too terrible a reason.

not u man im pursuing this line of inquiry under the assumption u r vil i get what u say about u being frustrated when vil if village doesn't take u srsly so im trying to open some discussion into cham even tho i do think the balance of evidence points to evil falcon (sorry) my point specifically: most of the falcon pushers i have good reason to believe are vil. vil falcon flip doesn't change that. but i know i have reports from some players that cham has been messaging a number of players telling them that u tried to rolephish from him so my qn is, if u flip vil, was cham trying to massage or shape public opinion about u? b/c we know if u flip vil that hyena was trying 2 tie himself 2 u to get u mislynched it seems consistent with that strategy that a teammate might try to stoke more fires by painting u as sus e.g. messaging certain active players specifically talking abt u trying to rolephish him does that make my line of thought clearer?

u r u r ty this is v helpful village pts 2 u for the record gaiz trying to get an indication of the spread of the falcon role phishing stories im convinced by the falcon args but on the offchance falcon flips vil, im satisfied with the alignment of most of the falcon pushers, so the next place i'd look is cham. i'm asking about the pms because i know cham has pms with many players & im trying to establish the extent of the message spread: the questions i want to answer - is it targeted? was cham trying to sow specific sorts of thoughts wrt falcon? etc. if there's a certain player pattern in message spread, this could be v indicative and worthy of pursuit/pressure on falcon's flip.

wow cham sending a message 2 u abt u phishing his role who'd have thunk

im just gonna come in again.... -.- this is so good bro i cried ;-; A+ writing makes me wanna rp more anyway i have anonymised info to work on, reveal to village, and then i need to convey current village trust structures for anyone who wants to claim on the assumption pms remain up on my death we have a second lurcher claim - or rather i should say a first lurcher claim which was what sparked ??? over falcon's claim b/c two V lurchers are not impossible and so no rolelynching, but either way, i agree with the arguments that falcon's reported actions show an obscene amount of trust for a village player in a player of unknown alignment n2 from a village power role i am going to commit to focusing on rping and trolling and turn down my village game abt 20 notches i need to recover and while i had a talk with el about how to play the situation given pinch-hitter & supply, im confident that for as long as im in the game, i can just have fun trolling players and do less....less extreme intensive puzzle-solving (no more d1/d2 madness) and just chime in now and then. qn to thread: Has anyone else received a PM from Cham about Falcon trying to phish his role? If so, can you please sound out in thread?

foul lies u shld ask fifth about the tragedy of LG19 when the Cellar(THE CELLAR REIGNS!) was opened so mashadar-infused koloss rampaged in luthadel :eyes: freakin' kel edit: <OOG> I don't want to inflame the thread further, but it's really been grinding my gears so I'm just going to say what I have to say and bow out of the thread for the rest of the Day. Some of this is really better addressed in a meta thread but I'm done enough that I'm just going to out and say this here: if there's anything, I beg the mods actually take seriously the notion of coming up with stricter ethical guidelines around emotional manipulation tactics. I don't care what the norms are in MU, and I'm not afraid to say it. MU is MU. SE is SE. We are a different community - as @Orlok Tsubodai said during the disaster that was AG7 - we had the gentleman killer rep. I don't know what to say anymore. I don't claim to have the answer as to how to do this significant task, but I'm going to say upfront one of the reasons Wyrm stopped playing was because he was done with seeing that in games (not all games, yes, but if the community doesn't care...), and I got sick to the fecking gills of being gaslit (THANK YOU LEN). You know my principles on blue texting. I am considering whether or not to do this, because I think it will add a bit more heat than I am comfortable with, but I think it will also spell out some of why I have been so bloody done with the last Night and Day. I've not made any secret on the SE Discord that I have been freshly recovering or dealing with the after effects of an abusive intimate relationship. Certain events on N3 gouged open those scars again, and I've noticed myself falling back into behaviour patterns that existed during the relationship, mostly shutting down/shutting out/nonengagement - if you're aware of the term, 'grey rock.' For these reasons, I am withdrawing for the rest of the Day. I need some time to recover and to regain my balance and to decide if I can continue or need a pinch-hitter. This game is not worth that. This means I acknowledge I am biased because I have a particular history with these techniques. I don't care for them ethically and for reasons of personal history. When used without caution, they can drag me back mentally to one of the worse periods in my life. I'm also uncomfortable with how this causes me to reflexively shut down, and thereby hurt people who might not have expected a sudden icing out. I also acknowledge I operate in a grey area, because El has theorised I am by nature a very open and honest player. Being Evil is hard for me because one of my biggest Evil tells is that I become very guarded, emotionless, and shut people out. (I say this independent of what my current, actual alignment is, and this should not be taken as OOG confirmation or denial of what my actual alignment is. I don't want to play this way.) Part of this is my discomfort at the thought of unduly deceiving people with that honesty. But it is also very difficult to live and play that way, which is why yes, I hate being Evil. I acknowledge that being a player who generally just wears his emotions on his sleeve, it's hard for me to avoid influencing players by that. I think the emotions we have all been feeling are real. God only knows mine are. I don't for one second think anyone is faking emotion. I certainly haven't been, barring the D3 gambit. But I believe in this: that I choose how much of my pain and my emotions to reveal, and how to reveal them, and when and where to reveal them. I believe that even in that pain, I have a choice as to how much to reveal, and how to reveal them. I could go further into detail - when writing up this post, about how bad the past few days were for me. But I don't see a point in doing that. That choice would dredge up more pain in thread, and cause perhaps more unhappiness, more hurt, and basically be nothing but performative. I just think it's important to remember that the framing of the emotion, how you choose to reveal it to others, is often at least in part a deliberate choice. I can't help replying to players in terms of my emotions because I'm a heart before head kind of guy. But I can choose to be careful about what I let them see, because of the effect it has on them. If there is a good way to frame my belief, it is this: we have a duty to others, even in our pain. I shouldn't have slipped up with Beagle. I think it was a mistake, not because of emotional manipulation, but because Beagle knew my views on emotional manipulation. In other words, Beagle knew I would cut off my own right hand before I willingly manipulated her, meaning it was not an Elim tactic to gain trust, and thereby adduced a strong belief I had to be Village on account of my distress. There were unfortunate reasons for the slip, which I've already said a bit about. But I think it was a mistake, and should probably have asked to be modkilled on the spot. Let's take a brief aside to talk about rep. I think some of this game blurs the line between rep issues where Wilson was automatically distrusted just because she was Wilson, because people felt she had magical powers to the point she could make them think she was Village while Evil just by opening a PM with them, or existing in thread. That was the extreme of the rep end, and I'm extremely sympathetic to how players like Orlok, Wilson, and Aman will struggle with reps. I believe this was part of the reason the threat tiers ('Holy Batman', 'Crouching Badchull' and so on disappeared.) But rep is also what we earn. I work with Orlok because he has a reputation for honour, because I know he can be relied on, and I know that if I can make a logical case to him, he will accept it on its merits. This was one of the many reasons I went directly to him, because I knew he could bracket paranoia of my gambit (again, this should not be taken as OOG confirmation or denial of what my actual alignment is) if I gave him a case with a cost-benefit analysis laid out. I work with Wilson because I know if she gives me her word, she is good for it. In a past life, before this generation of SE players, players trusted me because they knew I kept trusts, and because I refused point-blank to betray no matter what. I'm not saying this was right. I'm saying this was my reputation. And I'm saying I built this reputation through consistent behaviour across games. I think it's disingenuous to say that the events of N3 to D4 were purely about rep. There was, as I kept pointing out, a basic prima facie case for a lynch, one that should have been true, should have been damning and acceptable grounds for a lynch in any other cycle, in any other game, with any other player. If Aman's rep fed into this, it was as a player who will aggressively defend and erode normal and reasonable grounds for a lynch using a variety of strong tactics. The rep was not the basis for the lynch. The rep was the basis for how events played out. To put it bluntly, if you have a strong reputation for being able to convince players there are five lights through a combination of argumentative erosion tactics, and emotional punches, and you continue to play into that earned reputation, I think it is fairly disingenuous to claim this cycle was just about rep. No. No it was not. It was, and it was also about players actively continuing to play into that rep, both defending the lynch, and trying to pressure against it. As I told Axl in a PM, I was more than happy to have this be a proper debate in thread, like Orlok would have wanted. It was also fairly obvious this was not going to be happening. In my view - and this is where it goes back to my concerns about emotional manipulation - I've said this before about bluetext. If you require bluetext for basic interactions, you create a situation where SE players feel that anything not in bluetext cannot be trusted. You effectively create a norm where suspicion of basic human emotions is fair game. In my view, emotional manipulation poisons that well. Players either decide they are better off not playing in a community that can't be bothered to think through the lines on what is acceptable and what is not (Wyrm), or players end up prepared to use any tactics possible to blunt the force of such tactics. To put it more bluntly, Falcon and Axl doesn't like that they're not being heard out. Ok. And in any other cycle, with any other player, I would give you this. There's no reason not to hear the player out. Swan heard me out. What just happened last two Turns? In my view, the aggressiveness of what we just saw creates an arms race and a zero-sum game. Players either decide they need to adopt unorthodox tactics to not have to lose, to not be taken advantage of, or players, again, make the Wyrm move and leave. And in the process, players who genuinely may or may not be expressing frustration get lost in the noise. Flamingo was extremely distraught in my DMs. That alone in my view made this entire mess of the last two Turns not worth it. To anyone who says these unorthodox tactics are unacceptable, I challenge you to explain why you immediately presume the other set of tactics are fundamentally acceptable, thereby privileging them. You can't have it both ways. I actually wrote a post as a counterpress, as I expected a strong series of pushes from Hyena. This post weaponises a significant amount of my pain and my personal demons. I didn't feel good about it, and I still don't. I requested that El, Fifth, and Wilson read it. [Edited to add: For the record, they approved it.] I was not comfortable with the extent to which I was pushing. El felt it was powerful, and I agree. But I also clarified I didn't feel okay using it, and really felt a bit filthy as a result. And I was never, ever going to drag things to that level, unless it was already dragged there. And that, too, felt like a lot of retroactive justification for unacceptable tactics. I've destroyed it. I don't want to go there. Again, this creates an arms race. The well has been thoroughly poisoned, and I'm past the point of being done with this. The last AG I outlined some stuff we needed to have a conversation about, and nothing happened either. I don't know if I'm expecting the horrors of the past cycle to matter, but whatever. I really hope it does. Make that shite worth something. I'm withdrawing for the Day. You all have fun and do whatever you want. Will be reachable by PMs if necessary but I'm going to unplug from this and try to regain some of the progress and recovery I've made. At the end of the Day, or by the Night, I will be requesting a pinch-hitter or a modkill if I do not feel myself able to continue, in which case I thank you all for the amount of fun I had D1-D3 as I embarked on my trolling rampage. There's a separate debate to be had about a lot of the disingenuous argumentative moves made but I don't feel like getting into it and I feel it's rather pointless at this point in time. I said what I said, and I think that this at least should be acceptable Spiked tactics.</OOG>

first that was a really poor wyrm impression the real one is more bloodthirsty like when he went on a rampage in MR27 and lynched Fifth & murdered me ... but i still think the war pandas were a bit much but no im kel =)

Side-eying.

I believe he regrets that too. He was very much looking forward towards crossing blades with you. I'm more saddened that an Ada-Orlok-kel Village team was not obtaining, though I guess LG15b was a one-off. I'm well aware of that. I have never not been, since I nearly got Wilson killed in MR4, and lost us our Surgeon in the same cycle. I am of the Wyrm Inquisition, and the last son of House Urbain, and paranoia is my lineage. I have never pretended to be more than I am, and am often quite less. And so it begins. You did mention this was your favourite part.

Sitting on a bunch of role and action claims that need to be properly anonymised & shared with the thread so everyone is not ootl and everyone knows what is going on. Probably not roleclaims, need to find a way to satisfactorily anonymise action claims but should be done, don't want another AG7. Just too tired to figure that out now so it's a later problem, but D1 claim doesn't cause additional problems with what is known.