yes, this is basically exactly how i feel

the only thing i disagree with you on here is that there are players that have, in the past, specifically use this gray area to their advantage - there are both situations where

-players make emotional appeals as villagers to clear themselves
-player make emotional appeals as wolves to get heat off themselves

and maybe when these situations arise, we should deal with them on a case by case basis. but it's definitely something that happens in almost every game and it can be frustrating to be a wolf in the first scenario and to be a villager in the second one

I feel like a lot of people think it wasn’t an issue because no one is bound to what crazy things they might say during the game.

Would people feel different in players occasionally did stick to what they said? What if people stated quitting POG because of posts they made during a game like that? what if people made wagers and money sometimes did change hands? or people agreed to post videos of them doing wilds things if they were wrong about something or lying and then it did happen?

of course anytime sometime might not follow through. But if there was even a small chance someone did follow through I think you set a pretty awful precedent and a situation where a player is changing how they play based on stuff like “xander may actually quit if xyz happens”. I don’t want to be playing games on here where i am making decisions based on stuff like that

when sun made his post and xander made his the first thing i thought to myself was that i am really excited about modding my game in two weeks and both of them are signed up for it.

and i have put a ton of work into preparing that game to the point where the idea of just forfeiting this game came into my head if it meant no one quitting ever playing and thus having to back out of playing in the time i have been working on

it felt very weird to be in that spot as a wolf

yeah i guess i just thought it was very clear that neither of them was being the least bit serious about quitting, and it was just for emphasis

but i guess the mere fact that your opinion is just as valid as mine, and you thought that one or both of them might not be joking, warrants consideration

I guess back in the day when POG was bustling and 5 turbos were getting played a night and there was a new vanilla game every week and mismashes that consistently got 50+ people I wouldn't have cared.

But ww on POG is in kind of a tenuous spot, and its understandable that many of us who used to play back when we were young, single, without kids etc wouldn't actually quit over something like this. But at least one player in this game actually took a break from playing and outted by mish mash because they felt like they weren't having fun and people were not being very nice to them.

Xander has already expressed some frustration over being called UTR when he is in a different time zone and has kids to worry about. I felt like he wasn't lying about actually having kids, lol, so I definitely thought "meh xander might actually just be getting frustrated and be ready to quit if things go south here"

Like I said maybe people have made posts like sun's and xander's 100 times before this and never followed through. But I think we can all agree that all it would take is one time someone going "If people vote me here I'm never playing ww again" and then actually quitting and disappearing from POG where that kind of thing would immediately start to get super uncomfortable, right? Like every time in the future someone made a post like that people would feel like it wasn't worth winning a ww game if it meant someone actually quitting POG.

yeah i don't really care if that is a standard we want to enforce my point is more that if we enforce that kind of...call it what it is - at some level - emotional blackmail, against the other players in the game

we have to enforce all kinds, to some extent. and it can't just be in cases as clear cut as this, it has to be in cases where appeal to out of game emotion occurs

I think this goes back to my point about the desire to eliminate a grey area in modding outweighing the desire to make the game as fun and skill testing as possible

like if you and i are in a game together

and i think you are a wolf, and i hound you for like an hour

and you make a post that says "you're really upsetting me with this line of questioning and i don't appreciate the things you're saying and are being condescending"

is that okay for you to say? assuming i might go "oh ****, i'm actually upsetting him. maybe i should ease up."

and if i don't ease up, and you turn out to be a villager, and are mad at me postgame, do i have the right to basically go "sorry not sorry, didn't know your role so i was just doing my best"

because if not it's a perfect play to do as a wolf

I was on the fence about the MK and if it had been solely up to me, I would likely have asked Dustin not to do it. I thought we were very close to having the lunch and that the comment might be glossed over or not taken seriously by the villagers.

I think it’s important to differentiate something though. When Sun made his comment, he was responding to someone asking him how certain he was about information he didn’t actually *know*. He was being asked about people who were not even up for lunch or close to it at the time.

When Xander made his comment, it was specifically to clear himself in the middle of an intense battle of gamesolving. Xander knew his role and made the statement out of the blue. Nobody asked him if he’d retire if he got ML’d. Nobody asked him if he was sure he wasn’t a bad guy. Everyone was in the middle of trying to find that out for themselves.

These comments don’t exist in a vacuum and happen in the specific context of the game they are being played with the players who are doing their best to achieve a wincon. I think it’s got to be up to mods to interpret whether a statement is worth the MK or not based on the game itself and what is happening at the moment. It is a wager when you are betting your retirement on information that you actually know for fact, which is what made this statement particularly harmful. Saying it isn’t a wager is a bit disingenuous.

We’d set up the Xander play way ahead of time and had been working toward it subtly and tirelessly. For him to say he’d “retire if he was a bad guy”, was pretty gutting for the wolves.

I don’t know if it would have cleared him or not, but it was a wager about his role and not an argument about his actual moves in the game. The thread was very intense at that particular moment and a delicate tug-a-war had been going on in which Sun had basically been grilling us wolves (who he had been certain were villagers the day before) suss out of Xander was clear, he was trying to catch us in a lie or a logical mistake and we were (mostly bird) working hard to evade his suspicion. From our perspective, Xander’s comment undid the work we were doing to ensure we were more clear than he was.

I still thought we might have had it so I wanted the votes to play out. Wasn’t up to me and ultimately I didn’t ask for Dustin not to MK. At that same time, there was an intense discussion happening between Sun/Bird/CC that led to CC self-voting. Suddenly, the landscape we’d been building was being destroyed by things that were not gamesolving and not logical arguments. Things were so emotional and heated, it seemed like the game was at risk of ending from people just throwing in their hats. I wanted to throw in my hat. I think closing the thread was the right thing to do and the MK helped maintain the game state. I don’t think there needs to be a universal rule created from this situation. Mods should be able to make the choices they see as necessary to protect the game state.

Just my opinion.


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Yeah I think getting rid of gray area is impossible and still worth having for all the points that Birdman is making. And certainly the example you gave in your follow up to him would be acceptable.
Ultimately it is a game where emotions run high and people put a lot of effort into it. Flying off is to be expected. Not everyone who plays is cool analytic types and that's for the better. A decent amount of the game is about reading emotion and determining if it's real or not.
I guess I just don't understand why certain posts ever need to be made. If you're not a wolf just say you're not a wolf. Make your arguments for why you aren't or for who is. But threatening things crosses a line.

I think the key distinction to make is that real emotions and fake emotions are the soul of the game, whereas things related to anything outside of the game can taint the game.

So what I said was problematic because although it was clearly coming from an emotional space and that could be faked, it puts the other players in a weird position where how they feel about something unrelated to the game (me quitting or not) can affect how they play in the game.

So what I said isn't a problem because of anything it says about my role but what it does to other players.

That's why I took it back and why I won't say things like that in the future.

Hey @confirmedtroll

thoughts? gotta be cheating right?

Don't worry UD, this is just an inside joke about a previous game

People are saying Sun's comment was problematic but not a MK because it's just a read and mine was a MK because it was known by me to be true.

Do I still get MKd if I'm a wolf and I know it to be not true?
Does Sun get MKd if he's a wolf and what he says he knows not to be true?

Or is it just that everyone knows that I know my role and it's up for debate whether Sun knows the identity of the last wolves?

GG wolves

Also birdman was my top wolf lean on D1 :-D

Thanks for modding Dustin.

This is super well put imo and really gets at the heart of the issue.
You have people here saying things like "well just don't clear them for it". But it doesn't work that way. Some people are going to clear them and it makes the focus on a single post.
Although thing that VR said that is absolutely true is that we can't ban villagers from being able to clear themselves. Even sometimes for single posts. In the game recently where I was tunneling her she "triple dog dared me" to lynch her and say if I was wrong to kill me next (as I said with aao). It's emotionally manipulative but perfectly legal. Self-voting is emotionally manipulative and perfectly legal. It's the bringing in of non-game related things that's the issue

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

I think the only reason this is even a subject of debate is that most players are villagers more than they are wolves and are used to thinking like villagers. But think like wolves for a moment.

If a villager says any of the above you can either: join in, in which case, you risk being thought of as a pretty shitty human being in a forum where your reputation is probably of at least minimal importance to you, or just let people draw their own conclusions, which is MOST of the time going to be, well I know xander is a good guy and enjoys POG and is not likely to lie about this in this spot.

ROCK=HARD PLACE
-----^
WOLF TEAM

If you play in one of my games and you do this, you will be modkilled. I didn't modkill Mac when he angleshot himself clear by swearing on his friend's dead wife and that was a mistake. I won't make that mistake again.

I think that the grey areas need to exist because context matters in these situations

But it's on players to try to stay away from the lines as much as possible, for both game integrity and game enjoyment

If you don't and are MK'd at the hands of mod discretion, then that's on you

I think the MK was reasonable and I don't think Xander and any ill intent behind his statement

Yeah obviously context matters a lot here. Like I said on discord-- I've come up with some great ways to claim wolf now like "if I'm a villager this game I'll fly to the center of the sun and come back and tell you how hot it is".
Sun Tzu retorted with "If I'm a wolf this game I'll eat a bagel with too much cream cheese". That's great.
VR (a vegan) had: "if I'm a wolf this game I'll eat a steak". I'd want to modkill her for it if were said in a game-- but even then context matters. Is it her opening post or is she being wagoned and saying it to someone who knows her well? Ultimately there just isn't a reason to ever make posts like these unless you're clearly joking and being facetious.

I think it is as simple as identifying if something goes against the spirit of the game, which doesn't really factor in intent (as I don't think xander intended to 'break' the game), but he put other players in a state where they needed to leverage out of game factors into his statements (ie wagering or semi-wagering against their role)

Sun's statement doesn't go that far IMO. I think you get a lot more rope when its your reads (whether fake or real) vs you betting on something that has a tangible truth.


i have always been a big fan of "Spirit of the game" rule-- it gets rid of lots of angleshooting bullshit that is not always covered letter to the law in our default rules (Like deciding not to read your role PM) but is certainly an expectation in games that I run.

Yes
No

It is not really that you know your role, it is that you have 'wagered' out-of-game factors (your stance that you'd quit ww forever) in order to bolster your credibility for a factor that you absolutely know to be either true or false.

Sun, whether wolf or villager, is presenting that 'wager' against his own reads. That he is attempting to leverage that out of game factor carries far less weight since we don't have to decide whether or not he'd do such a thing when he already knows he is right or wrong. It's based on reads, and we can always just lolreads because they are a part of the game, whether fabricated or not.


Emphasis on italics being that, as a mod, i don't want my players to have to decide if they think you are the type of person who would make bets off things he knows to be true since that is now leaving the spirit of the game realm. Sun's comments stay within that threshold

Nice one heh

Though I’m still 101% positive about the cheating, and I’d rather forget about it