I think I might be the Goblin - (7/9) - Day 2

[Ash]

Back to the calculation mines.
This is what I get for backhanding Carbon.

[BetterMittens]

The probability has to have a lower bound and an upper bound because story tellers can choose to tell the truth or lie

[BetterMittens]

I was telling this to him in DMs. I don’t think this holds up, both b/c there’s only one Drunk VI in a 3-VI game, bringing it down to 38.9%, and I don’t think “being checked as Good increases your odds to be mafia” is a conclusion that you should raise your eyebrows about, I think something’s wrong either in your assupmtions or calculations. In isolation I also think your initial assumptions are bad, I think hosts are willing to give redchecks on town D1 if Drunk

–May

[Ash]

I don’t think they’d give a redcheck on you specifically.

[BetterMittens]

@Ash

I don’t think they’d give a redcheck on you specifically.

What. No they’d redcheck us >rand IMO, using a Drunk player to diminish the credibility of a strong player is exactly what that’s for?

–May

[BetterMittens]

You’re claiming they’re gonna use Drunkenness to avoid hurting town? No shot
–May

[BetterMittens]

Villageidor is my new favorite role where we talk about upper and lower bounds for the probability someone is good

[BetterMittens]

You guys should have multiple bounds. Like Xann 1 bound. xann 2 bound. Bound where they tell the truth always bound where they tell lies always

[Ash]

Assuming you’re town, that makes perfect sense.
I’m not necessarily making that assumption.

This isn’t an indictment or full-throated accusation.
I just think that a bluecheck on you makes significant sense from both a “Chomps is sober and got that info” sense and a “the GMs want to protect w!you from suspicion this early in”.

[Ash]

Regardless, it’s a flaw in my assumptions.

@Ash

Given our numerous assumptions, there is a 48.32% chance that BetterMittens is mafia given that you got a bluecheck.

Corrected result is a quarter of what I got - divide by 1 and not 25%, so you get 12.08% and not 48.32% - but I’m gonna mess with that Major Assumption from a more theoretical perspective and see where that takes me.

[BetterMittens]

I feel like we’re having a statistical argument and not a Blood on the Clocktower one

–May

[BetterMittens]

I feel like neither of us are getting any closer to the solve off of this

–May

[Ash]

This is fair.
On a more social level, I feel like you’ve been weirdly confrontational about this?
Like, I get the idea that someone using bad math to push you right off the bat sucks, but it feels a bit harder of a shove than I’d have expected.

[BetterMittens]

What topics are there to discuss that will actually let me find your alignment. That works, what you think of the way I’ve reacted, also what you think about Chomps’ alignment relating to this

–May

[BetterMittens]

[Ash]

I mention this in the assumptions section, but I think Chomps is town and not mad.
A lot of my thoughts on the Xaan are also characterized in those assumptions, which is more mechanical, but I’m of the opinion that within BotC, reading the Storyteller is an important a thing as reading other players.

[BetterMittens]

@Ash

On a more social level, I feel like you’ve been weirdly confrontational about this?

Chomps pushing hydras is a personal point of frustration for me, it’s made a bunch of games emotionally tense for the hydra involved and difficult to play even when I’m a third party to it, I think it’s bad for the game and I think it makes it really unpleasant for people [one person] who can’t play outside hydras for disability-related reasons. It’s like, straight-up being cruel to somebdoy about an accessibility tool. That’s not the case here, Litten and I are hydraing for fun, but the strong feelings remain

…and I really really really hate misuse of statistics. And people being confidently wrong when common sense should really indicate their math has a bad result (e.g. “being greenchecked makes you >rand wolf”)

–May

[Ash]

Gotcha.

[BetterMittens]

and a probability of 48 or whatever percent is even worse, because it indicates that being greenchecked is like half right or half wrong, which doesn’t mesh he cause then it should apply to every single person in the game, which means everyone has a 48 chance to be mafia

[BetterMittens]

Works Cited:

April Showers Reconstructed signups

@May

You know if you hate playing with hydras you can simply not join the game with hydras in it

@May

Instead of joining with publicly stated intent to immediately policy a given slot which seems mildly pregamey

@May

And also it sounds miserable for me. I won’t downplay that I oppose this because it sounds miserable for me and everyone involved. I don’t like playing mafia with people who don’t want to play mafia with me

Queue Discussion Thread

@May

I am going to push back on things here and emphasise that, like, the way hydras in non-hydra games are generally being used on this site by everyone except me and Zug, i.e. specifically lilith is specifically as a disability accessibility tool - if you have a health condition where you are frequently struck from the sky for a couple days at unpredictable intervals, it is hard to sign up for mafia games alone because you risk having a flare-up and ending up lowpostig for a few days, which is no fun for anybody involved.

Hydras are a genuine accessibility tool here - if you pair up with somebody who also tends to have similar issues, then you can both actually play mafia when you couldn’t otherwise. I think it’s disconnected from the reality of the situation to talk about the hydras currently being utilised in non-hydra games on FoL as 1. taking up spots on slow-filling signups when these hydras are composed of people who wouldn’t be playing alone, and 2. being impossible to argue with and having too much threadpull when, like, Eve, lilith and pandora’s hydra, has played 3 games, in which they lost as wolf in 2 and got misexecuted as town in the latter.

This is not a situation where an unfair advantage is being created! An unfair disadvantage is created by “having certain chronic illnesses in a mafia game” and the hydras in question are rectifying it. They’re not super high-activity slots, they’re not impossible to read, they’re not consistently able to out-argue everybody in the thread, they are just, for the most part, a normal damn player .

Obviously, there are exceptions here - it’s perfectly fine to not want to play with hydras, there are some messy angleshooting scenarios that can be unfun to play against, and the solution to that problem is to not play games with hydras in them ,. It’s perfectly fine to not want hydras in your game you’re hosting, the solution to that problem is to ban hydras on your own hosting level .

But I don’t think it’s fair to spread, like, false information about how hydras are being utilised on this site, I think it’s rude to somebody who couldn’t play mafia without them, and I think it’s rude to sign up for a mafia game with somebody you don’t want to play with and then insist on using game mechanics to push them out of the game solely because you don’t want to play with them. Don’t sign up. It’d be rude to do that to an individual person, it’s rude to do that to somebody who can’t play without hydras.

(Obviously, @YBW I know you don’t play mafia much here anymore and maybe did not know this. This is why I have written a post clarifying it.)

@May

Basically it’s fine to complain about wrongboy or whatever and it’s fine to not want to play with hydras but please don’t pretend the majority of hydras on this site are two active players teaming up to dunk on everybody else.

Most of the time it’s lilith using them to play games that it wouldn’t otherwise and for this reason its hydras are no more active and have no more threadpull than normal players, that just comes across as harassment for an accessibility tool

(Obviously this is excessive and I understand if you end up reading it as overly defensive but I don’t want to be misunderstood on a thing that’s a legitimate out-of-game frustration for me.)

–May