Admin Thread for WWLXX: At the Prison of Ice

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Mnemosyne

And Legate, thank you for outing this miscreant, as going over to Europe to hunt you down and kill you would have been much, much more expensive...

You are welcome

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

All in all, kudos for creative and sovereign modding! As for the narrations, that story rocked - especially the final revelation. If not for fear of spoiling the end, you might as well have called this "At the Mountains of Thangorodrim" - a nice literary crossover!

Actually, my initial idea for the name of the game - when I have first thought of that, which was, like, well about an year ago already (although back then the idea of the game was far different, but at least plot-wise the basic idea was the same), I have thought of naming the game "At the Mountains of Angband". Nonetheless, later I decided otherwise. Partially it was possibly sort of to "liberate" people from thinking in the terms of where they are and to allow it to be also a bit about the arctic atmosphere itself, and also to liberate myself from sort of being pressed by the subconscious expectation of "so shouldn't we already see some real Angbandish stuff?", and partially it was just my incureable over-cryptical (and possibly annoying) thinking (known well from the Quiz Room) which makes me think the way "everybody must get the chance to figure out things by themselves, because if they do, they are happier that way as they can feel proud that they have figured it out by themselves". That is, not that it would be usually like that - but still I keep doing it, and I think it may be a sort of self-reflection, as myself, I prefer following things step-by-step and not being outright told the answer.

Now for all you poor innocents - you started off fairly well, getting rid of Mnemo and me within four Days, but then you just had a sore run of bad luck. I found it quite educational to watch, from a double outside perspective (dead, i.e. uninvolved, and wolf, i.e. knowing exactly who was innocent and who wasn't), how you went on suspecting and lynching each other for all the wrong reasons, while sporadic flares of suspicion towards the real wolves were for some reason never followed up.
Nog's Birthday Dreamer theory was a real chestnut (do I have to say I cheered at my screen when I read it?) - but the funny thing is, it might have been true! (and by Draugluin's molars, wouldn't that have been cool for us?) And once the theory was out there, it's quite logical you had to test it some way. Best intentions and logical choices furthering the triumph of evil - there's something bordering on the tragical in all this.

Oh yes, I really pitied especially Nog at that time - because it would have been such a great discovery, if only it was true. And I must second what you said about innocents: very often it just went so that the village turned to some direction, which all too often meant lynching an innocent. The worst thing about that is (at least I got that impression from reading people's posts, but maybe some innocents can give a different opinion) that people still were not completely happy with what they were doing, but they did it nonetheless - with the kind of thinking "maybe my doubts are betraying me and he/she is indeed a Wolf", where in the end it turned out that the person they lynched was innocent anyway.

[Roa_Aoife]

See, that's why I only ever vote for the person I find most suspicious, regardless of their chances of getting lynched.

[Bes]

Roa: By that token, shouldn't you have waited a little longer to vote on day 1? Just sayyin...

[Roa_Aoife]

Nope, with the knowledge that Nogrod was lying with his seer hints and knowing for certain that I was a wolf, I was convinced of his guilt, because I couldn't see why an innocent would lie about that. I knew it was most likely that no one else would vote for him, but I voted him anyways.

[Eomer of the Rohirrim]

Good game all! My hunches were usually way off but nothing new there. Congratulations to the victors!

A general point: I found that there were too many chatty posts, and to a slightly lesser degree, too many long posts. It makes participation a bit trying at times, wading through so much.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Eomer of the Rohirrim

A general point: I found that there were too many chatty posts, and to a slightly lesser degree, too many long posts. It makes participation a bit trying at times, wading through so much.

Well, I feel like I should oppose at least the former statement (not sure about the latter, as I am myself known to write long posts - although I also dislike reading overlong posts, yet this time it didn't seem too out of hand to me). Personally I was very pleased with the "level of chattiness" in the game, as I believe it was almost nonexistant. It has been a (bad, in my opinion) habit in some of the latter games I have been playing that the chatty-level was sometimes excessive (and it is indeed annoying to have to read through a page of nothing if you return to the computer half an hour before DL and need to read the whole day and you cannot sort out what is important and what not - that is why I mentioned it also in the rules), but here, with the exception of perhaps the last days (where there haven't been too many posts, anyway), I think it was pretty reasonable.

[Eomer of the Rohirrim]

In that case, Legate, some of these last few games may have turned players insane. I have not played in a while so I wouldn't know.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Roa_Aoife

Nope, with the knowledge that Nogrod was lying with his seer hints and knowing for certain that I was a wolf, I was convinced of his guilt, because I couldn't see why an innocent would lie about that.

Time for revelations... *tat-ta-dat-taa!*

The PM that Legate sent to us innocents read something like "you will have to get rid of the four wolves". Anyway, it stated clearly the number of wolves = four.

So every innocent knew exactly how many wolves there were as it was so clearly stated in the PM where one learned one's role of being innocent.

Every innocent knew exactly the number of wolves. So no seer hints there but reasons beoynd any reasonable doubt that you Roa were a wolf!

I was more astonished on why you weren't lynched like on votes 20-1.

How was it you missed it?

So what "seer-hints"?

[Loslote]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Time for revelations... *tat-ta-dat-taa!*

The PM that Legate sent to us innocents read something like "you will have to get rid of the four wolves". Anyway, it stated clearly the number of wolves = four.

So every innocent knew exactly how many wolves there were as it was so clearly stated in the PM where one learned one's role of being innocent.

Every innocent knew exactly the number of wolves. So no seer hints there but reasons beoynd any reasonable doubt that you Roa were a wolf!

So what "seer-hints"?

Ohhh...

I didn't get that pm, either. So I thought that post of yours was really weird. The 'seer-hints' that I saw were where you said that every innocent could see it...and I didn't think of the pm.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Loslote

Ohhh...

I didn't get that pm, either. So I thought that post of yours was really weird. The 'seer-hints' that I saw were where you said that every innocent could see it...and I didn't think of the pm.

Well I worked it out– I hoped we'd be able to pick a gifted or two from their failure to understand what the heck Nogrod was talking about. Unfortunately for us, Shasta, it seems, also guessed correctly!

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

The PM that Legate sent to us innocents read something like "you will have to get rid of the four wolves". Anyway, it stated clearly the number of wolves = four.

Indeed. After the fuss around it started to happen, I saw that I made a mistake - I should not have sent any PMs like that, I should have probably just sent "you are an innocent" and that's it.

Nevertheless, maybe this is a good time to further discourage people from using meta-game reasoning (including PMs) from their suspicions, as due to this experience I have just realised how serious problem it can become in certain circumstances. You can be wrong with in-game suspicion, but with meta-game stuff it tends to be a lot trickier as you feel a lot more "sure". As one can see, it really does not work that way and the possibilities are endless. (In this case, Roa, as she told me, simply was too busy that she read just the first words and did not pay attention to the rest of the PM, as she learned everything she wanted to know from the "You are an ordinary innocent" first sentence. Also, there was no telling whether I did not send different PMs to some ordos - which actually happened too, in this case, even though quite randomly.)

So I further discourage people from using meta-game reasoning. It can awfully backfire. I have experience with using such reasoning, like, twice or thrice for myself, I saw/read/thought something which seemed to point to some directions, I tried to ignore it, but then, you who have ever been in such a situation probably know that it just can't be totally ignored - so I sort of used it to back my thoughts, and lo, what happened? I was wrong in all cases.

I think the best way to approach such things (at least how I tend to do it) is a) do not use it as grounds for suspicion, b) IF you use it, then use it as support for your already existing suspicion of somebody (e.g. okay, I was suspecting Roa, and now this is one more reason for it, but not starting suspecting her out of the blue because of it) - that's just a sensible approach, c) and mainly, IF you use it, keep it to yourself and do not post it on the thread. It should not be brought into the game itself. Nobody can prevent you from using it as reasoning for yourself, but it's your business and you will also suffer the consequences yourself if you are wrong. But dragging it into the open is not good - and if you have to explain your suspicion of somebody to others, you should have other reasons which you could mention instead of mentioning the meta-game stuff (see b) ). And anyway, of course in general, it is simply not really how WW should be played - the game's about something different.