Atak,

you have a lot of strong opinions when it comes to government, politics, ect. On any level, do you feel a responsibility (isn't exactly the word I was looking for, but close enough) to do something to improve the system, or do you feel as though it is beyond your power to do anything meaningful, or is it more of just an intellectual interest to you?

atak on seer play, chapter two.


So, how to leave hints?

There's the Nich method, of course. I understand the theory, but I still don't like it. I think a seer should use disparities to his advantage when possible, and there's a big one here: time. In practice wolves, or just some of them, spend a couple of hours per night pondering ten or twenty candidates. But when a seer comes up dead, the entire village can spend as long as it wants going through that single player's posts. There's the disparity; this is why I believe peeks should be hidden, and hidden well, because it really is possible to make them hard for wolves to find but possible for the village to decipher.

There are a lot of tricks that have been used. The basic rule, which a village will default to if it doesn't have good reason to do otherwise, is to take unambiguous language as being a peek, ambiguous language as not being. Another possibility is that adjectives and adverbs are not peeks, nouns are.

Suppose I am seer, and I leave this paragraph on d2 (when I would have two peeks):

Alpha is totally wolfy; Bravo never plays like this — something's off with him, and I'm worried; Charlie and Bravo always fight even when they're wolves; Delta is here, and I trust him; Echo won't live to end game; Foxtrot is a wolf for saying Charlie is lazy; Golf has been uber-villagery all game; either Hotel is a villager or everything I've said all game has been wrong; India is playing his villager game; Bravo's read [which was wolfy] on Foxtrot is backwards.

What were my peeks?

That single paragraph is easy, but if those were spread out over a hundred posts, then I would trust a good village to find them but think wolves might miss them, particularly if I were careful to make many other strong (but not absolute) reads.

There are other ways, but I think this is the best until people know you well. Just don't say anything that can be misconstrued as a peek by careful villagers, but isn't — a mistaken wolf peek loses a tempo almost always,a and a mistake village peek can easily lose the game. better to risk being night killed and err toward clear peeks.

It's beyond my power to help, or pretty close, with any issue that's large enough truly to matter. I am not rich, so my opinions don't matter very much to people who make decisions. I am not the type who could ever succeed in politics, because I don't lie and because I am too proud to sell out or trade on my principles. (I also don't think most issues are simple, so I could never convey my positions to a populace with the attention span of a mayfly without simplifying them to the point at which they were no longer correct.) I do not tend to make powerful friends because I despise networking for the sake of doing it, and I tend not to like rich and/or powerful people. I voted only to tell K that I had — I knew full well that the probability it would matter was zero. And nearly every election is thus.

And as for the system itself — that will not change in my lifetime, K's, or his children's. Oligarchy seems to be the natural state of human government, and oligarchies perpetuate themselves by satisficing, not optimizing. This seems inevitable.

atak on seer play, chapter three.

Whom to peek: This was alluded to in the first post, because the seer's own situation affects it, but in general the standard seer strat is correct: peek people who will live to at least mid-game (with lots of interactions) or to endgame.

Don't peek people you won't be able to defend if they're villagers and are getting wagoned, unless you are planning on coming out soon.

Don't peek someone you are pretty sure is a villager and who is not under pressure if you think he's a very strong villager, because doing so sentences him to death by night kill as soon as you're dead.

If there's a vigilante, don't ever peek the opposing wagon, because it's too likely your target will die that night.

In general, the ideal peek targets are people who are fairly villagery but not that great or not that much into this particular game, or who are fairly wolfy and have been talking a lot. But you do have to mix it up, too.

how much do you take into account who other seers will peek in a game with multiple seers?

atak on seer play, chapter four.


Don't come out too early. If you have a shot at a lock, go for the lock unless there's a danger you could find yourself at must-lynch (the latest you should claim is usually must lynch minus one).

To achieve a villager seer lock, you need to have half as many village peeks as there are players alive, rounded down. That's live villagers. And it doesn't include you (that's why we rounded down). That means if there are 15 players alive today, you need 7 village peeks to have a lock. Including very-villagery players in your count is extremely dangerous, though in practice necessary — just don't sound like an idiot by calling ita a lock.

To achieve a wolf seer lock, you need all the wolves. Period. If you are not at must lynch, you then offer to be lynched yourself, and the wolves concede. If it's at must lynch, good luck, but you'll still probably win if you've been villagery or one of your wolves is a consensus wolf (claim early).

What about a combined villager/wolf lock? There is no such thing. Having a lot of wolves and a lot of villagers is nice, but the interplay is probabilistic. If you have a lot of villager peeks, you hope your next peek is a villager too. If you have enough wolves that you might get them all, then that's what you shoot for.

As long as you are not in immediate danger of getting lynched, and your peeks are not known by you to be irredeemably messed up such that nothing short of a claim can clarify them, then you probably should not come out until must-lynch minus one or seer lock. Sometimes you'll come out to save a peeked villager, but only if it's getting late anyway. You would not come out to get a wolf lynched withoiut a particularly good reason.

This gets messed up in two-seer games, where each seer should consider coming out a bit early if the other one is still hidden, because clarifying the peeks can help the second seer choose his targets better. Still, the power of having a seer or seers alive cannot be overestimated. Wolves cannot safely kill strong villagers or those whose reads are sharp, and until they know who has been peeked they have to be extremely cautious about their interactions.

I guess if I had to sum it up, the rule if this: If you're not sure whether you should come out, you shouldn't.

I try to consider it. I will guess that the other seer will make more straightforward peeks than I, just because I'm the one who plays a little fancier with seering. But for most people, I'm not sure what you can really do because it's a pretty symmetrical problem. Also, the issue is not enormous because these games tend to be big so overlap is not much of a problem. Having a shared peek is much less bad than having a dead one, anyway, so that's the primary consideration always.

If you have peeked the other seer, then you use that, of course. I've done that to good effect when I peeked subandi seer — I not only could work out some of his peeks, but I could also tell to some extent whom he was likely to peek down the road.

I guess the short answer here is that most seers should just try to make good peeks themselves, until they have at least a good idea who the other seer is.

On the subject of modding WW games. Describe in your opinion, the keys to a successful non-vanilla WW game. And I am talking mainly about the set-up as opposed to things like regular vote-counts, end of day write-ups, ect.

Why do you not want to give credit to Scott Howard, who was the first one to bring it up?

Not so much a matter of giving credit — it's more about the nature of the rule. If we really believe, as I have said, that the rule applies, i.e., that a certain kind of mistake in a post is wolf sign, and if broad consensus supports that view, then we treat it as being well-established. I'm glad that he figured it out, but it is no longer his, it is part of the body of POG knowledge.

Contrast SHEOD, which is arguably a good idea (I disagree, but that's not relevant here) but which is not so generally accepted that it can be considered a standard part of POG thinking.

Essentially, I'm saying it's no longer Scott Howard's because it accepted as true (in appropriate circumstances). We don't routinely say "Einstein's theory of relativity" or "Watson and Crick's double helix model" or "Darwin's theory of evolution" (which was much more Wallace's than Darwin's anyway, but I digress). These now-standard theories are credited to their developers when the subject comes up, but the appellations have been simplified. It's not an insult, but a reflection of the theories' strengths.

1) SHROOP sounds better than ROOP.
2) SH is gone, we need something to know him by
3) We DO say dawrinian evolution, Darwinism, etc.

oh, and 4), it's complete hokum anyway.

A game mod signs an implicit contract to do what he can to make the game fun and fair. Fairness actually isn't specifically guaranteed, but for most people it's part of fun.

I think that to satisfy these criteria, a good non-vanilla game needs these characteristics:

• Every player, even vanillas, has to feel he has some effect over what happens. This is tricky when a high percentage of kills are made by NKs or in-thread attacks available to only a few players, and/or when various seers, masonries, and claiming mechanisms render lynches less important; I think this is where some recent games have fallen flat. In-thread mini-games or events that are affected by vanilla actions (such as votes on how to proceed — see CYOA III for good examples).
• Relatedly, every player has to believe that his and his team's choices are moderately likely to affect the final outcome. the more andomness in a game, the trickier this requirement gets.
• Every player has to feel his team has a chance to win, so there really is a duty to balance to balance the game as well as the moderator can, or at least closely. It gets tough when the game starts getting out of hand in that regard before end game — should the mod rebalance? The answer, I think, is generally to rebalance if the "error" was the moderator's fault, but to leave it alone if poor choices by one or more teams led to things getting out of whack. (Another issue is that a team may have a great chance to win, but feel otherwise — see the neutrals in OTI's invitational game for an example. There's not much that can be done about this.)
• Complexity should be justified. Adding lots of fun things to watch the chosen theme is great - until it gets to be too much. Complexity has a cost to players, particularly in large games that are hard enough to keep up with as it is.

The first point, that vanillas can't feel too left out, is neglected way too often. If the lynch doesn't really matter, then participation drops; if participation drops the lynch matters even less because it tells us less about people's roles... Double lynch days help some, but it's really not enough; I prefer some in-thread events plus moderation in the inclusion and empowerment of special roles. In other words, cut it out with the vigs already. (Vigilantes are grossly overrated in other ways, too: they dramatically increase the games' variance by putting so much killing power in the hands of one or a few players. When the vigilante is a skilled player and/or is really paying attention, his team has a huge asset, but a vigilante can also be a game-losing liability. I don't like when the initial rand in effect determines who wins a two-week game.)

What is the Nich method?

People say "evolution" about ten times as often as "Darwinian evolution".

I also hope, fervently, that SH will come back. (If calling it SHROOP will help, fine by me; I think this really not important.) I think he'd have trouble playing under the current name-calling rules, but hope springs eternal.

Until recently, at least, he has advocated absolutely unambiguous peeks/hints, as seer and when faking, and that's what I was referring to. Recently I believe he has started to mix the presentation up more. Ask him for details.

what is SHEOD?

Related to this, what are your favorite/least favorite non-standard roles to see in a WW game?

Scott Howard End of Day

Theory: there's a bunch of posts at the actual end of day. So he proposed that everyone stop making posts one hour before the end of the day, with the only posts after then being votes.

I believe that he means stop voting 1 hour before nightfall and then discuss the lynch, or allow the lynched one to say whatever he wants to say.

This was my understanding of the term as well.

How the hell do you find the time to play werewolf? I enjoyed the one game I played, but it seemed to about take up a whole week of my life, reading and re-reading all those dam posts.

Yer right. I got voting and posting mixed up.

That's a good question, fatjaz ... I played more than once, but it is such a HUGE time commitment (the way it's played at POG - not all other sites are so post-intensive), and as you've seen in this thread there is a lot of analyzing players' past games that goes on here.

I am gonna guess that atak, like several others of us, has more time to play werewolf the weeks and months he isn't working.

Eagerly awaiting atak's reply to #851, too. I have a feeling the answer will spawn a whole new conversation.

Still hoping for resolution to the TPR story at some point. Hopefully I haven't been careless and missed it.