Right, uh, sorry for dropping off the face of the Earth like that, but the year ending kinda fucked me over school-wise, so I had to deal with that and then I was just altogether too tired to make an effort here. But I'm back now and I hope I can stay that way for now.
So, starting off with the thing I started this day off, I'll bring a close to the whole deal with Vatu's win condition on my end. I think he managed to sufficiently explain the whole win condition confusion, even if the explanation is somewhat peculiar. I can kind of see where he was coming from, although I still don't understand why he felt the need to consistently address himself as a potential zombie as well as a townie. It's true, of course, anyone could be a zombie, but personally I don't consider a possible win condition to be winning with the zombies. I'll think about that if I get zombiefied, so thinking about it now seems redundant and a little too considerate towards the possibility of being infected.
But that's just me. Different people have different ways of working things out for them, and if Vatu wants to think about every possibility, that's fine. Just based on this whole thing alone I don't think we can pass any judgement on him.
Another peculiar thing that caught my interest right at the beginning of the day was the Vatu-Ltin standoff, the one where Vatu kind of just dropped this:
Yes, from my inn conversation it got very clear to me that Ltin is not town. Notty was agreeing with me. Ltin had a slip where he said that he thinks Notty and I are both bad and if he's still good after the night he'll trust is more, which is a pointless statement meaning it was probably said just to look more innocent. After that I gave him the chance to prove to me he's town by asking him who he thinks the anti-town roles are. He refused to say anything about that but me for zombie, which is not helpful at all.
and then did nothing about it. The way I see it from this is that for whatever unknown reason, Ltin thought that both Vatu and Notty were in zombies with each other and figured he was going to be next, again for whatever unknown reason. This is supported in my opinion by this:
The fact that notty did not die a zombie kinda makes me believe vat isn't zombie leader anymore.
While I cannot begin to understand why Ltin thought those things, I also don't see how this proves Ltin to be anything other than just paranoid. One interesting thing I did note, however, was the fact that Vatu claimed Notty agreed with his accusations in the inn and dared Ltin to confirm that, since Notty is now a confirmed townie. Ltin never did, and the whole standoff situation just kind of died out when I started prodding Vatu about his win condition. It makes me wonder just a little bit why Ltin never confirmed that (if he did, then I'm just blind and you can call me stupid).
The third thing that I wanted to point at was Mars' "slip", the one where he said the other mafia members had been relatively quiet and under the radar up until him saying they'd been quiet. When I look at it right now, it does still look like a slip to me, but more in the sense of "I'm mafia, why would I not lurk the way so many other mafiosi in many other games have", so I'm not entirely sure if we can deduce the identity of the other mafiosi just by looking at who's been lurking. Still, it's not a completely baseless tactic to use right now, so we can't rule it out completely.
Regarding the inn theory, which Inffy so gloriously rushed forward and then retracted as soon as he figured out that not everything in this game was according to his own deductions, I can only repeat other players in saying that I don't see much merit in it. Relying on inns to make a lynch has been very unreliable in the past, except for (I think) the first game in Blocktopia where the inns were used, GmK's Doomed Cruise. I don't see any reason for Samlen to use a simple pattern in the inns, especially since such a pattern could easily be exploited by the zombies. But since we're not really talking about that any more anyhow, then that's just a late comment on my part.
Moving on to opinions about people. When I look at the list of living players, the ones that immediately stand out to me as lurkers or inactive players are Jk, Fali and Geek. I don't suspect Fali of anything, mostly because she has been acting exactly the way I figured she would. Roleplaying, friendlyness and undecidedness are kind of her thing and she's been doing the first, while the second hampers the ability to scumhunt and the third doesn't really translate well into activity in a mafia game. Plus, I still feel like Mars was trying to set her up for a possible lynch later in the game and considering Mars flipped mafia, I sincerely doubt she could be mafia, which kind of narrows the possibilities for being scum down a bit.
Geek has barely said anything and Rune said even less, so I have been unable to formulate an opinion on her. Rune stated pretty clearly that the reason for his inactivity was due to personal reasons, so I don't think we can read much into his inactivity and while I don't know the reasons why Geek is staying quiet, too, and would like for her to speak up more, then it mostly feels to me like she doesn't have anything to say, not that she doesn't want to.
Jk is an interesting case. Considering past games, one would think he would be more active, and I see that other players seem to think so too, but I'm not so sure if that translates into him being scum. In the past games, I sort of remember Jk as a fairly active player even if he was scum (I can't really be bothered to check right now if that really is the case, but I trust my memory enough right now). Jk is a player whose strongest weapon, regardless of role, is his ability to make a very convincing argument and he has used that ability to its full extent as both a townie and scum, as far as I know. Keeping that in mind, it seems somewhat off for him to just lurk as he has largely done in this game. He's not as inactive as Fali and Rune/Geek, perhaps, but he's not really active either.
When he does say something, though, it's still as thought out and relevant as ever, not the kind of active lurking that I noticed in Mars. Of his nine posts in the game, four have moved the discussion forward, two were afterthoughts or corrections to posts he just made and three were joke posts at the beginning of the game. It feels like it's not that he wants to stay low, it's more like he just isn't that interested in how the game goes. If there's ever a role that makes experienced and typically active players feel like that, it's a role that puts much of the fate of the player into someone else's hands and doesn't really give any cool actions for them to play with, such as the villager. Now, we don't have a villager in the game right now, and even if we did and Jk was that, I'd still think that he would be more active. But we do have a Lone Survivor, a role that is quite literally dependent on someone else winning, a role that as far as we know doesn't have any interesting features to it (and if there are interesting features, they might be hidden from the player playing that role as well, as stated by Samlen). This is a role that I think would make Jk act the way he's been acting so far and when I did some digging, I found that Jk seems to subtly try and prevent the survivor from being attacked or perceived as a threat as well. Consider the following (interesting parts bolded):
And on top of that, it is interesting that the two third-party roles outside of the Zombie faction have win conditions relying on surviving until the end of the game, winning with whoever takes the thing.
Namely because I feel like, unless they had hidden abilities (if they even have abilities at all, I'm thinking of the survivor when I say that) that correlate with the Zombie faction, and they get infected and converted into said faction, then they couldn't really do anything to further their own ability to win.
And since we're just theorizing at this point, I feel like both Oracle and Lonely Survivor must have at least some kind of ability or modifier involving the zombies in some way, or at least can affect all factions.
Like the oracle can reveal the alignment of a person who visits them(+cant be infected), or the Lonely survivor can't be infected or killed at night, only lynched.
Something like that.
I don't know. I might be pushing on the "cant be infected" shtick too much but it would just feel off for there not to be some defensive modifier for such a weak position to win (town/mafia/zombies all at least can have other players pick up the slack if one person dies; those 2 third parties have only themselves).
He's making it sound like he's theorising about the third party roles, but he's being fairly friendly towards the survivor and putting forward a theory which would make the survivor honestly pretty useful for the town. The way he says "if they even have abilities at all, I'm thinking of the survivor when I say that", makes me think that he is the survivor and doesn't know if he has any particular abilities, which would imply that his abilities are hidden from himself as well, if he even has any.
All in all, I think Jk is the Lone Survivor who's trying to not make himself a threat. That would also mean that every other player is either a townie or a scum, since the Oracle is dead.
I personally trust Tim right now, and Inffy as well, to a degree. Tim has been nothing but his usual calm self and hasn't really given me any reason to suspect him and Inffy just feels like he's a hyperactive townie who wants to get the game going and is grasping at anything that comes to his mind. Which is not a bad thing in itself, it just leads to the weird stuff such as the inn theory he had.
I'm not sure about Vatumok. On one hand, he's been saying confusing stuff right from the beginning of the game and the way he started this game off just confused me even further. Then again, simply being confusing to me isn't really worth a suspicion, so there's not much I can say about him. Every suspicion I've had on him has been explained away by him and so I don't really have much to go on.
Ooglie and Ltin have also been their usual selves in my opinion, nothing really stands out about them to me at a first glance.
The person I have the most problem with right now is Dessern.
Dessern seems to favour the same kind of active lurking that Mars did. He also defended Mars at first, later blaming it on a misunderstanding about the core of our suspicions. When it was pretty clear Mars was going to get lynched, he switched his vote.
These three things are the reasons I'm suspicious of him. Firstly, the active lurking. I explained this enough when I made the case for Mars to be lynched, so I don't think I have to do it again. Secondly, the way he defended Mars at first. The fact that he did it in the first place is enough to make me a little less trusting of him, considering Mars flipped scum, but he also tried to do it by using a strawman to misrepresent Tim's little tidbit about the slip as the core of both of our arguments against Mars, while ignoring pretty much the entire actual discussion we had going on at the time. Now, I can understand that sometimes people misunderstand arguments and Tim pointed out that the slip was very much not the only reason we were lynching Mars, and Dess accepted that, but still tried to represent the slip as the "pushing factor", in order to better defend Mars. I don't know about you guys, but this has my scumradar pointing pretty heavily towards Dess. Add to that the fact that once Mars being lynched was inevitable, he gave in without much reasoning and switched his vote to Mars, which is something that scum tends to do when confronted with the reality of their teammate being the one that's being lynched.
As it is, I can't really find a more fitting person to drop my vote on than Dess, so I'll do just that.
vote Dessern5