Composer Battle Is Go! THE TREBLE CLEF IS YOUR DOOM!

[Shale]

What I'm seeing is that Tom voted for Excal when his lynch looked like a fait accompli, what with the case on OK fading away once he started posting again, and moved to switch with rather unseemly speed as soon as another serious target presented herself. Moreover, he continued his pattern from day 1 of saying "Excal is suspicious" but never actually making an argument about why. He was more than willing to go into detail on Day 1 about your and Ryogo's posts, and on Day 2 he put together a relatively lengthy post about what Keeshi was doing wrong. By contrast, he makes no effort to convince anyone to vote for Excal; he just says "yeah, me too" and votes, and then risks looking bad by making to abandon that case and leap quickly onto Keeshi, who we know would have been a mislynch.

[Otter]

(Excal has plenty of pressure and watchful eyes on him)

Well, OK, this is true but the day is coming to a close.  If lynch doesn't happen sometime tonight, it'll happen sometime tomorrow afternoon when fewer people are likely to be around (including me, because I have class).  If that happens, the people who do happen to be around are going to be under pressure to figure out who else is around and therefore what lynch is even possible and try to make that happen regardless of which player they actually suspected more.  Or they won't even figure that much out and we'll end up with no lynch again, like the first day.  Neither possibility is good for us.

Again, I urge everyone to try and make lynch happen tonight.  It only gets worse for us if it doesn't -- people won't be around to make final roleclaims, we could easily get stuck with lynch by necessity or no lynch at all, and either way scum will benefit.  We don't really have the time to spread the pressure around evenly anymore.

[Shale]

Blargh, you're right, and there's no reasonable way that focus is going to shift from the Otter/Excal choice. So, time for me to review your posts. In progress now...

[Ranmilia]

Cid is in bed I think so votecount:

Excal (3): Otter, Corwin, Ryogo
Otter (3): Sir Alex, AndrewRogue, Excal
Sir Alex (0): Ryogo
Sopko (1): OK

With 9 alive it takes 5 to lynch.

[Hunter Sopko]

Corwin's rather intense reaction to my post is distressing. I could understand some reasonable discourse, but that was downright nasty. No need for that.

Indifferent to OK's theories. I knew that bringing those two up would be calling the kettle black, but I felt it needed to be done anyway.

If it's coming down to Excal and Otter, my vote has to be on Excal. Otter's been pretty consistant through this entire game, and I've been suspicious of Excal since his supposed trap on Day 1. His behavior Day 2 didn't help. He's been better today, but I think that he'll give us the most information as a lynch.

##Vote: Excal

[Ranmilia]

Otter's been pretty consistant through this entire game

You realize that this is the case against Otter, right?

I can't really argue that Excal provides the most information, if you don't believe Tom's behavior clears him.  However, as previously stated, I'm quite wary of anyone laying down a vote without taking Tom's flip into account.  Sopko, what do you get from it?  Why do you not think it clears Excal?

[Hunter Sopko]

I've always equated consistancy with town. Otter may be guilty of a bit of tunnel vision, but I don't think that makes him scum.

There's all sorts of things that scum could have planned/done. I really can't say that Tom's flip inherantly clears Excal. For all we know, it could have just been scum playing silly buggers with us. Therefore, I have to go with the one I feel most suspicious of.

Apart from possibly shedding some light on Otter, I also think Excal's flip will show us if we're even heading in the right direction. There are people who haven't even really been suspected of anything yet, and I tried bringing those people out into the open today, only to be suspected as scum. This has been the overwhelming discussion of most of the days barring Keeshi's claim, so it's about time we find the answer.

[Ranmilia]

Uh, really?  Consistency = town is a fallacy, and a rather bad one to fall into at that.  Scum can effortlessly be just as consistent as anyone else, and for town, consistency makes you predictable and has a marked tendency to screw you over if you're wrong. 

Between that, lurking, and a position of "Eh we can't tell anything from Tom's behavior," Soppy's firmly joined Otter on the top tier of my suspicion list now.  Something to think about for tomorrow.

[Shale]

Okay, so! Otter on Day 1 starts out casting a reasonably broad net, addressing Tom, Ryogo, Andrew and Corwin for starters. Then the tunnel vision kicks in once Excal starts in on the whole "why weren't you suspicious of the vote I'm defending" thing. He starts focusing there, and directs a good bit of energy toward attacking Keeshi's anti-Andrew logic later on. From my point of view, those were the major issues of Day 1, and I can't fault him for prioritizing them. He also says he could support an OK lynch for general lurkerificness, but ranks him below Excal and Keeshi.

Day 2....hm. Now it gets interesting. His post frequency drops and he keeps hammering on Excal, with a side order of Keeshi, pretty much like Day 1 (not exactly shocking, since it was more or less Day 1'). After the cop claim, his lynch priorities still go (1) Excal; (2) Keeshi; (3) GOTO 1. Not even a mention of the possibility of a Tom lynch in his only post after Keeshi's claim. This is his only reference to the accused:

EDIT for Tom post:

Nothing really unexpected here.  "I'm town so nuh uh" and then a countervote is pretty much the basic reaction to a cop fingering in any case.

This is the first genuinely unsettling thing I see in Otter's record. I was all for giving the claim more time to play itself out, but if you're going to support lynching one side or the other of that duality, shouldn't you at least consider the possibility that it's going to kill the cop? This is something that should have jumped out at me earlier and didn't, because I waited too long to review Otter's posts. The optimum outcome for scum is for town to mislynch on its own while the scum maintain an innocuous paper trail. Here Otter keeps his vote out of the Keeshi/Tom question (which I can't really fault without bashing myself) while arguing for what would have been the worst possible outcome for town.

Also, this:

But I'd still vote for her, except that Excal has still done absolutely nothing to defend himself from any of my charges against him....

 Keeshi looks bad herself, and would be my second choice to lynch right now, but I can still sort of see how it could happen if she had good intentions; not so for Excal.  I'm leaving my vote on the player that seems most likely to turn up scum.

That's followed by this, early on Day 3:

Rather than gamble on there not being any paranoid or insane cops, and then make a difficult decision between the two of them, I thought it made more sense to stick with the player who seemed overwhelmingly scummier than either of them.  I still do.

When did it become a "difficult choice," exactly? When the choice was in front of you, you made it look pretty clear.

[Excal]

Sopko, given how little Otter's said about anyone that isn't me, I'm curious as to why you feel that my lynch would actually provide more info.  Sure, it's likely that we're not scumbuddies, as this is almost certainly too far to take a bus.  But...  that means that we're more likely to be a scum/town pairing one way or the other, or there's still a chance for town/town.

And it's not like there's been a whole lot of trails left by either of us for anyone to scrutinise after we're gone either.  So, I'm wondering why you think that I'd be more informative than our local sea mammal.

[AndrewRogue]

Soppy's comment about Corwin... really is bothersome, as is his position on Otter. It isn't much, but I really don't like that shift in position.

OK, while I'm necessarily against your most suspicious choices there... why did you actually choose to vote for Sopko at this juncture? We do have a deadline coming up. Do you think we ought move away from the Alex/Excal/Otter set and instead focus on Ryogo/Sopko?

[Otter]

This is the first genuinely unsettling thing I see in Otter's record. I was all for giving the claim more time to play itself out, but if you're going to support lynching one side or the other of that duality, shouldn't you at least consider the possibility that it's going to kill the cop? This is something that should have jumped out at me earlier and didn't, because I waited too long to review Otter's posts. The optimum outcome for scum is for town to mislynch on its own while the scum maintain an innocuous paper trail. Here Otter keeps his vote out of the Keeshi/Tom question (which I can't really fault without bashing myself) while arguing for what would have been the worst possible outcome for town.

Obviously I considered the fact that Keeshi could be telling the truth.  In fact, it seemed plausible enough to me in spite of her many scumtells; as I noted, her cop claim did explain (in a way) her biggest tell thusfar, which was her failure to make any solid accusations on any other players (apparently she was reasoning that she had no need for that kind of blind firing and preferred to wait for results instead).  By contrast, I couldn't think of a real explanation for Excal's behavior if he weren't scum, and apparently neither could Excal ("if I didn't have my PM as proof that you were wrong, I'd likely agree with you").

When did it become a "difficult choice," exactly? When the choice was in front of you, you made it look pretty clear.

While I was wavering on Keeshi between "Well, yeah, I can see what her thought process could have been..." and "Stop overthinking it, her scumtells shouldn't be handwaved that easily and Alex's points make sense," I had a completely neutral read from Tom; nothing he'd said stood out to me much.  In retrospect, that probably should have raised a red flag for low-content lurking, since a completely neutral read usually indicates a lack of content on the table, but I didn't notice at the time.  That's what made it a hard decision compared to Excal, who seemed (and continues to seem) much more scummy by comparison.  I did lean Keeshi, and I acknowledge that it doesn't do me any favors to have come down on that side of the argument in retrospect, but I'm going to stand my ground and say Keeshi looked worse at the time and desperate scum cop claims are a dime a dozen.  I felt obliged to chip my opinion in rather than ignore Keeshi/Tom completely, and since the only hard info we had at the time was Rat's (not particularly helpful) flip, I had nothing to judge by except scumtells, which Keeshi had made plenty of.  Nor did Tom's reaction tell me anything, because counter-voting in that case would have been a genuine townie's reaction to being fingered as guilty by a claimed cop, too.

[Corwin]

Really busy morning at work, can't comment as much as I want to.

The only reasons I haven't voted Sopko when I responded to his bizarre post and am not doing this now are that I don't want a repeat of day 1 where trying to depart from the candidates actually gave us no lynch, and that I'm wary of OMGUS votes on my part. Needless to say, if enough people are both present and agree with me that he's the scummiest person in the game due to his continuous lurking and the attack on me where he had to resort to lies (not to mention him attacking the people who were on his case consistently even if he had to rape logic to group Ryogo and myself together), I'd prefer that lynch over any other.

Again, I urge everyone to try and make lynch happen tonight.  It only gets worse for us if it doesn't -- people won't be around to make final roleclaims, we could easily get stuck with lynch by necessity or no lynch at all, and either way scum will benefit.

Otter is right, and whether we believe he's scum or not has no bearing on that, here. I'll try to be around to change my vote if people could be rallied to support the Sopko lynch, and if there hasn't still been a decision by lunch break, I'll comment more fully on the recent posts.

[Ranmilia]

So, 4-3-1, Shale still not voting, and I see in IRC that he's asleep.  And OK's not voting on either currently lynchable candidate.  Giant FoS on both of them for not voting tonight, not that that helps much.

This needs to not be a repeat of day 1.  I can't guarantee that I'll be back before deadline, though.  :V

Edit - Cor posts.  I'd be moderately okay with a Sopko lynch but I don't think it's gonna happen today.  It's 3 AM here in the US, Shale's gone, OK's almost certainly gone, and other people don't seem inclined to move.  I know I'm really not. 

[Excal]

I'm also not really inclined to move, for obvious reasons.  However, I know I am going to be here when deadline hits tomorrow.  And, unless someone presently voting for me can be persuaded to switch their vote, I'm willing to drop the hammer.  That said, I still really want to ensure that, one way or the other, we don't need to rely on that in order to get our lynch for the day.

[Excal]

Oh, and odd little thing I just noticed.  Otter, your second quote is also by Shale, not from me like you attributed it.

[Ranmilia]

will hammer self for food

This is a terrible idea and you should not do it or say you will do it.  On the list of Things That Are Bad, No Lynch is pretty high up there.  Random Lynch is even higher.  But "Lynching a 100% Known Townie (yourself) Because The Rest Of Town Can't Get Their Act Together In Time" is higher still.   If we are really threatened with No Lynch (I don't think we seriously are, despite lynch not happening tonight) and it falls to your own hands to hammer yourself or not, DON'T. 

Saying you will do it like this does nothing but create a storm of will he, won't he WIFOM and encourages people (possibly scum!) to stay off and not hammer you themselves; if you disagree that it's a terrible idea and are bound and determined to do it, then you should just sit tight and *do* it if and when it's necessary.

[Shale]

Okay, I'm here and will continue to be at least semipresent for the rest of the day; I will not allow us to hit deadline without a hammer, you've got my word on that.

I didn't hammer last night/this morning because I can see some validity to the case on Otter, and while I've been suspicious of Excal much more and for much longer, I can't shake the feeling that it'll turn out like all the other times I've been at the front of a lynch mob - Sopko and Excal last time, Fnorder in Discworld, Smodge in Touhou...I'm not exactly batting a thousand by following my take on what is and isn't scummy behavior, is what I'm saying. Drawing on the hard evidence we've got doesn't lead me in either direction - I've already said why I don't think Tom's flip clears Excal, and the only way it does anything one way or the other for Otter is indirectly through the Excal case.

[Shale]

And now, looking over the other fence-straddler's posts, I see this:

So, scum from this, from my analysis, seem to be somewhere within the possibilities of Cor, Shale, Otter and Ryogo.  Preliminary, mind you - this is just an analysis of Tom's stuff, and I need to take a better look at the interactions to be sure.

...and realize that it's not paired with an analysis of Otter. Anywhere.

OK: You've said you don't think Excal's likely to be scum. Otter, the only non-Excal person likely to get lynched today, is one of the people you name as possible horrific evil postmodern types. Why have you not said anything about the case on him?

[Sierra]

Current votecount:

Excal (4): Otter, Corwin, Ryogo, Hunter Sopko
Hunter Sopko (1): OblivionKnight
Otter (3): Sir Alex, AndrewRogue, Excal
Sir Alex (0): Ryogo

With 9 alive it takes 5 to lynch.

There are 10.75 hours remaining.

[Ryogo]

Quick post in-between classes

I don't know why, but I keep geting the feeling we're heading down the wrong pathway here... I know there's very little chance of changing the vote train now, last 8 or so hours, but I honestly think Excal's going to flip town if we pick him... But I feel the same with Otter... But the logic against Excal is good, so my vote will stay there for now.

Who hasn't drawn any/very little suspicion? There's AndrewRogue, who I made an extremely stretched theory about. However, he seems very lurker-ish as of late, and hasn't posted much these last few days. Posts seem very short too. Is he avoiding it on purpose? Or could he be scum?
Same logic goes for Sopko. People say his posts are concise... I don't know. I feel they're just short for the sake of being short. but that's just me. Looking at the restriction game, it looks like thats just the way his posts are, but I still feel it suspicious.

Anyways, gotta jet to class, just wanted to get my thoughts out there.

[AndrewRogue]

Okay. Of everything that can make me uncomfortable in a game of mafia, there is one thing that stands out to me as particularly guilty looking. That thing? An unwillingness to fight tooth and nail to survive and avoid a lynch on themselves. I realize I've caught flack for playing with a survivalist attitude, and I realize that sometimes, you as a townie are gonna get lynched. However, lynching townies will never win the game and doing something like saying you'll hammer yourself to make sure a lynch happens... that isn't kosher to me.

If you are town, then lynching ANYBODY but you has a significantly higher chance of hitting scum. You, in effect, are the only constant that you are aware of. This screams "pity grab" or "look how good a townie I must be wanting a lynch, even at the cost of my own life." I consider this enough reason to be incredibly suspicious of you. Honestly, it occurs to me that, for a "townie" one vote away from the noose, you... aren't trying really hard to survive.

I'm declaring intent to hammer Excal. If anyone has objections, speak now or forever hold your peace. I'll hammer in about two hours unless I'm given a very convincing reason not to.

[Corwin]

No one really wants to hear about my horrible day, so let's skip that. I can only echo Andrew's last two posts, on Sopko being suspicious, on OK voting Sopko where there wasn't any reasonable chance to get him lynched, and on Excal's appropriately-named 'pity grab'. That made me more convinced of this lynch.

This in no way turns me blind to Andrew's low presence, but he's nowhere near a target for me, with Excal prime in the leading two candidates, and Sopko strongest overall for his consistent lurking and strange recent posts. Ryogo needs to have more content out there and to commit himself more; he comes off a bit wishy-washy sometimes, like the recent post. Otter feels scummy as well, as I've noted before, but I doubt he and Excal are bussing each other, so hitting scum should clear him in my eyes. Dunno on Alex, he always looks scummy to me. Every single mafia game. Dunno on Shale, either, since I have reasons to believe he's town, and reasons to doubt it and it all comes to an inconclusive mess.

[OblivionKnight]

Can't sleep with mafia going crazy. 

Ok, new developments:


http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=673.msg14311#msg14311

1) Yes, I really don't want to have the same issue that happened on day 1 happen again.  However, I fully agree with LaL, and I feel Sopko has been the biggest offender at that.  The purpose of the vote I made is not to draw people in to the web of day 1, but to put my vote on someone who has been a lurker with suspect content (many of his posts have been, "calm down!" and very general with little newer content and hard feelings - his Excal vote was an echo of generalizations).  I do not feel as strongly about Excal as I did before - yes, I am still suspicious of him for his logic and (most recently) awful mentioning of nuking himself to end the day.  This has turned me towards him more, but I still feel a little unknown about him, while I feel stronger on Sopko.  It doesn't look like we'll have time to get a rally against him today, though.     

http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=673.msg14332#msg14332

2) Andrew, I assume you mean, "...not necessarily against..."?  I voted for him for the reasons above, because I feel we should move to LaL when we have at least 1 with valid points to nukage.  I suppose this will have to be for tomorrow, at this rate.  I guess I'll generalize this to everyone who has questioned me, but...I feel strongest about going for Sopko, not Excal.  That would be why I am not focusing on Excal for a vote.  I do feel we should move to LaL in this case, and others have noted the same things I have.   However, this isn't going to work, apparently, today.  Damnit.

http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=673.msg14345#msg14345

3) Shale, I'll comment on this a bit more later, when we're not at deadline.  Suffice to say I haven't gotten a negative read on Otter so far.  Perhaps this has been clouded by everything else that has happened, but I feel he's not shown anti-town sentiments.  He has responded well to everything posed against him, and I see good support and content in what he's posted. 

Ok, so the way we are, the only possible hammer is on Excal at the moment.  Andrew already announced intent to hammer, but...well, that should be around 2:30pm EST.  If Andrew has not done it by then, I will.  As I have said, Excal is scummy-looking - I will not deny this.  Today he's dug himself in a bit deeper with the suicide note.  While I would prefer to go after Sopko, that can wait for tomorrow - at least there are people noting he's a good candidate.  I have some doubts about Excal, but after seeing the posts today, he's...gotten a bit worse.  And I'd rather not have the day 1 problem again.  Of the two candidates, I see Excal as worse than Otter, so he is the better candidate for a lynch, to me. 

Anyway, intent to hammer is on in 30 minutes.     

[Shale]

Reading over the topic again, I don't have any more compelling argument to make about Otter than I already have, and that's not going to shift anybody from voting for someone who's acted scummier for longer. If there weren't already two people who've declared intent to hammer Excal in the immediate future, I'd do it myself.