from your perspective, assuming you're resistance, a random non-you person not on mission one is more likely to be a spy (2/5, or 40%) than one who was. (1/3, or about 33%) granted, from that perspective a mission without you is more likely to have a spy on it, but that wasn't the point you raised.

actually, let's break it down totally. from a given resistance member not on mission 1's perspective, the optimal team in terms of avoiding spies is 1 guy from mission 1 (1/3), then one not (2/5), then you have a 50/50 shot either way, so one more from each. of course, that's setting aside the possibility that the observer can be on the team, which means that any given resistance member not on team 1's ideal team is themselves, one person each from on and not on, and then one person from either. (all assuming only one spy on mission 1.) for someone on mission 1, their ideal team is themselves, two people from off the mission, than one from anywhere. if you're not on the mission yourself, next best is described above for off mission 1, and for on it's one on, three off.

of course, that all ignores any sort of reads, correlations, or suspicions, and also ignores any non-spy-avoiding goals of team selection, such as information-gathering. but suffice to say that, no matter what your position, including a single member of mission 1's team does not, by itself, make you more likely to have a spy.

I have a list of all spy combinations, removed my name and removed all combinations that didn't include someone on the first mission.
Three people show up in more of those possible combinations than the others; its the three people from mission one.

Throwing somewhat calculated numbers at you...
A team that's:
10% / 10% / 10% / 10%
Is better than one thats:
15% / 10% / 10% / 10%
And that's not including that fact that I know my alignment such that:
0% / 10% / 10% / 10%

For me, the last one is most profitable, the middle one is least profitable from a risk viewpoint.
Again, I would prefer the mission we jsut shot down, over one that has a person from the previous mission on it. I'm sure that we will need to figure out which of you isn't a spy, BUT until we know that there is a spy that ISN'T part of you three, we have a greater chance at success excluding your three from this mission.
All we know for sure is that at least one spy went on that mission.
It could've been two, and it could've even been three. Thus, until we need to figure out who is who, I say we sample a different group, and my choice is to have myself on there if at all possible.

I'm sorry, but I don't follow what this means, could you explain?

~SE++

I believe it is percentage of spy team combinations each person appears in.

Also, I want to apologize to both Razor and squinty, simply because I have attacked you both slightly more than you might have deserved. I latched on to certain things you said and blew them out of proportion. This does not mean that I have stopped suspecting either of you, it just means I will be more careful with my accusations. Truth be told, I usually get to this game fairly late in the evening, and I guess I misread and/or overreact to certain things when I'm tired.

Now that Razor has explained his reasoning in more detail, and done that nice chunk of number crunching for us, I think I could be OK with the current team. I just really hate the idea of failing the first two missions, as it would put a lot of pressure on the resistance. But at least it would break Razor's theory. So I'll probably accept, and then hope either that Mown was the spy on mission 1, or that there are at least two spies on this team, so they'll have to risk revealing themselves.

Yes, what Aaarrrgh said.
Each XX% is the percentage that that person is a spy, and there are four becuse we're looking for a four person team.
When you add them together, the higher the number, the more likely the team is too fail.

Well, my thoughts are that razorborne has been scumhunting, so based on conversation, he's the best bet, so I'm okay with him on the team. Roaring Mouse is a bit more of an unknown, but so far hasn't set off any of my alarms. bentz is the wild card in my opinion, but both razorborne and Zherog (also have a Town / Resistance / White Hat read on him) suggested him, so I'm trying to take the wisdom of the other players into account. I know my alignment, so right there I know that increases the team's chance of passing. I'm fairly confident that the team passes and we're 1:1.

In the interest of being more open, I'm going to explain my hesitations now since we're closing in on the final vote time: bentz was suggested by both Zherog and razorborne. razorborne was on the first mission that failed. Now, since then, he's earned my trust, and Zherog's posts also ring Resistance for me. So I'm going with their suggestion, but if the mission fails, I'm going to be going back and seriously looking into a bentz / Zherog / razorborne triangle of Spies. Again, they have been very helpful to Resistance, so I think they're all White Hats for now, but bentz may just be their silent ringer. Maybe Mafia paranoia still lingering, but that's my gut instinct.

~SE++

But the good thing about your team is that you would then have two spies, which is usually better for the resistance than a team with a single spy.

Absolutely, and as I said, my guess after that would be Zherog. But, that's only if the team fails. It also doesn't take into account myself or Roaring Mouse, but as I said, I'd have much stronger evidence on a triangle of suspects. My hope, though, is if we pass this one, we at least get to Mission 4, and there they'd have to completely show their hand because they need two Fail votes to get it.

~SE++

I have a real good feeling about this mission...I have the same instinct as squinty.

As a warning to Neo and a general note to everyone, I will be traveling from this Wednesday to Sunday. I will have limited access to a computer, but won't have much time to do my usual posting. I do apologize for the probable lack of communication during that time.

~SE++

That was like, probably the least relevant part of my post to respond to, but let's just end this. So, math isn't something you can say "this is how I look at things". When the math teachers gives me back the test and I say to him "But you see, in my mind, addition and subtraction is the same", he's not going to accept that. Likewise, statistics and probability are made to reflect the actual state of how things work, so I don't really care how you view them, and how you view them is pretty damn silly when you tell me you have a 50% chance of critting. With the same logic, I can say that "Either I critfail, or I don't", and then I suddenly have a 50% chance of getting 1 on the die. Do it with all the other faces as well. "Either I get a 3, or I don't." Hey, look, 50% chance to get a 3. I'm suddenly looking at a die that has a 20 different results, and each result will occur half the time. That's a total of 1000%, or my die would have to roll 10 different sides each roll. Do you not see how absurd this is?
I told you to go home and roll a die, and see if it crits roughly half the time. Does it? No, of course it doesn't. Which means that unless variance kicked in, then no, your die does not have a 50% chance of critting. It probably has a 1/20 = 5% chance, like every other face of the die does, because there are 20 different outcomes to rolling a die, not 2, no matter how you spin your words. This is all of course assuming d20 and a crit on 20.

And even if you don't think of them as superior, they lead to incorrect conclusions.


I'll be waiting then.


From my point of view, he has a base 50% chance of being a spy, which is uncomfortably high. If the mission fails, it provides me less information than a normal mission would, backed up by his high confidence that coordinating a 2-spy mission is a peace of cake. He's strangely oppressive towards how I rejected the first mission, something I almost see as second nature, and is drawing the wrong conclusions from it. He seems to be misleading the team into a point where if we lose mission 2, we have no chance to recover, and I don't like it.

@Mown: To be fair, as terrible as it is to be applying it to statistics, he does mention that he's looking at possibilities, not probabilities in which case he is technically correct (in this post).
It certainly isn't 50/50 chance of critting, but you either crit or you don't; there isn't a half crit or quarter crit; it's one thing or the other.

@squinty: Just don't call it statistics. It's strictly the number of general possibilities, not unique probabilities. And even that's a bit of a stretch. In short, I get where you are coming from, but that type of logic does not apply in this case.

Weekends are bad for me. I am on the PC all day every weekday, that I tend to stay off it on the weekend. I came on a few times and only had enough time to read this thread and the Mafia thread. I didn't have time to post anything.

I voted no, because I wanted to see if the team Squinty picked was the same as his mock team. If he did it would have been really easy to reject his team as well. Assuming only one spy on the first team, that would mean four out of six left would be town. Squinty's mock team without me would have guaranteed a spy on the team. He had to pick four out of the six, since I am resistance that meant one of the mock team members was a spy. If he had picked his mock team it would have given Squinty a more spy lean. However he did not pick his mock team, but now threw a new variable in by picking someone from team one.

~2 hours to go, I've gotten votes from 6 of the 9 players so far.

Thanks

So... just to be clear here, I guess.

I wasn't endorsing Bentz; nor was I saying he's a Black Hat. It's decidedly smack in the middle - I have no damn clue. When I put together my proposed team:



That's not me endorsing Bentz (or Mouse or Tiny). It's sort of me endorsing you and Alt, because up to that point you both seemed to be scum hunting to me. (And nothing has changed that, to be honest.) But I needed a fourth person on the team, and I didn't want to take anybody who was on the first team. So that means I had to select my final member from: Tiny, Bentz, or Mouse. All three, as I said, have been quiet and not saying much. Of the three, I was most comfortable with Tiny - not because of anything he's said or anything the other two have said; the only reason was that I'm familiar with him, having interacted with him quite a bit on the WotC forums in our roles as GM.

Maybe Bentz is a White Hat. (Probability suggests he is. There's a 3 / 9 chance of any given player wearing a Black Hat, so a 6 / 9 chance of a White Hat. However, since I know one player's alignment - my own - I know there's actually a 3 / 8 chance any given player is a Black Hat, or a 5 / 8 chance of any given player being a Black Hat.) But I just don't know and so I want to be clear about that, since you're attempting to spin your selection of him as being based on my endorsement. And I'm not the least bit comfortable with the potential ramifications of that.

*

I still haven't decided how I'm voting. Guess I have just under 2 hours to figure it out...

The next team automatically has the same problem I have with this team - it includes somebody from the failed first mission.

Pros of this team: I'm comfortable with Squinty, even if he's bad at math. Any team built to exclude Mission 1 people has to have a "silent" player on board, so having Mouse or Bentz is a given.

Cons of this team: Razor. Sorry, man. But On this mission, I'm not comfortable with somebody from Mission 1. The obvious reason, of course, is that at least one of those three wears a Black Hat. But there's another reason. Using Razor as way of example... if Razor wears a White Hat and this mission fails, there will be a whole lot of us assuming his hat is Black - and I think that's especially true if there is only one Fail vote. And that would be very bad, in my opinion. What we would have is at least 2 out of five (Aaargh, Mown, Squinty, Bentz, Mouse) wearing Black Hats, but sailing smooth while we had an actual good guy being shunned from future groups. To make it even worse, three of those five (Mown, Mouse, Bentz) get to form Mission Groups next, and then after the three of them make a group, if the game is still going Razor goes.

Basically, I think a failed Mission 2 that includes a player from Mission 1 muddies the water an awful lot. I certainly understand the need to sort out the data from Mission 1 and figure out who wears a Black Hat in that group. And it's very likely that a failed Mission 2 pretty much guarantees a Black Hat win regardless. But for me personally, I'd rather see the two groups be entirely different sets of people. That does make Mission 3 difficult, and it would have to include players from one or both of the first two sets. But I like to compartmentalize as much as possible

The other Con I have with Squinty's group is the inclusion of two of our "quiet" players. That's not as much of a deal-killer to me, though, as including Razor.

So, Squinty... just how confident - 0 to 100 - are you in Razor wearing a White Hat? When you put the group together, he was obviously your least-likely spy from among those on Mission 1. Is that still true?

I'm going to vote No unless Squinty can give me a good warm-fuzzy feeling about Razor being a White Hat. Barring his swaying my opinion, or time running out, assume I vote No.

I can totally make this happen - but it requires a weapon that threatens on a range of numbers, and then monkeying around with various rules to expand the range to get it to 11-20. (Or, if I can't get it to 11-20 [which I don't think is possible without including 3.0 rules] I can also fiddle around with my build to include various ways to get d20 rerolls, which also change the percent chance of a given outcome. The Luck domain is one such way; and I know there are ways in 3rd party supplements - I know because I wrote them. )

We now return you to your regularly scheduled scum-hunting play-by-post game...

EBWOP: Of course, you did say as much in your post that I quoted, and maybe if I had read the rest of it before replying I would've seen it and not wasted so many bits on being pedantic about it.

75

~SE++

Guys, what's wrong with Zherog? He didn't post his wall today, but three smaller posts?
I'm not doing my usual thing; squinty is taking my place?

This game is FULL of surprises.

I'm pretty sure Zherog's first post of the three counts as a wall of text. And I'm catching flack for a view on the world. And you're not doing your thing, which is the most alarming of all.

~SE++