SPY NUMBERS REVEAL poll

[Martha]

Speaking personally, I'm just p--sed off at having to throw all of my lovely deductions out the window AGAIN. For me it's the second time in a row... for a couple of people, it's the third time...

Do you share this opinion? Or do you think the rd. 3 reveal is a good thing?

[Kip]

I love the way it works. Everyone who has played in Spies before should know NOT to assume any number of Spies until Sam reveals it. Think logically as well, if this was real life, would you honestly know how many "Spies" we had to take out? Nope.

[Kip]

I also think that in the next game, the Spy number should be secret the ENTIRE game, until one side wins. Tells the Citizens if they got a Spy, but not how many remain. It throws a whole new level of strategy into the mix.

[Sherri]

What Matt-o said.

[Johan]

I think being unsure of the spy numbers makes it a lot more difficult, and thus a lot more fair early on because the spies have to have time to formulate a united front against the citizens and work together to keep each other hidden. Once the game gets going though I think ultimately it's good to know how many spies we're dealing with, because that can make a huge difference in catching a suspicious act and linking it together. I'm biased though, having been a citizen four times ;D

[Candy]

100% yes he should tell right away. Otherwise you have no idea what to look for. Are you looking for individual spies? A group of spies?

As a citizen you need to know what clues you're looking for or else the game is just 1 giant guessing game. No strategy. Just guesses.

[Summer]

I've always felt really bad for spies2Winston, spies2Tanner, spies2Roger, spies3Jakub, spies3Leena, spies4Martha, and spies4Lise because their eliminations were completely unnecessary. They were victims to "You don't know how many Spies there are, so everyone's going to have to vote based on assumptions and guesses" BULLSHIT.

Complete and total bullshit.

Not revealing the number of Spies isn't fun or cute. It's bullshit. Players should be eliminated for poor gameplay or smart Spy maneuvering, not because the citizens are forced to randomly shoot each other.

And when you don't know how many Spies there are and how they're grouped, that's what happens.

If it weren't for spies3Tyler and spies4Grace idling out and the psychic saving me in Spies 2, there would be another 3 victims to total, complete, unnecessary, stupid bullshit all for the sake of Sam's ego -

AKA "I can't wait to see everyone's reaction when I reveal the twist".

Fucking bullshit.

[Sherri]

Talk about menopause...

[Summer]

I feel very strongly about this issue

You don't talk about my ovaries and I won't talk about yours.

[Sherri]

Hey! There is no way that I have Andropause!!!

Going back though, looking at Martha's confessionals, usually she ASSUMED the number of Spies, or that the Spies are together in a group (not that there is generally anything wrong with it).

The flaw though is that, once they set into the paradigm that Spies are in a group, most people like to make connections to catch all three/four/five Spies at once, probably in one confessional post.

(Sorry for the Spies 3 reference, I don't have much here) I now see it as why Reicheru failed to catch any of the Spies the first few episodes. She was too busy trying to put one and two together to make five that she forgot about individual spyishness. When she got out of the group paradigm, lo and behold she caught Tenchi.

Now for a question: Am I the only one who FIRST thinks of who can be a spy individually. And Am I the only one who starts making solid connections of Spy activity once one Spy has been confirmed?

[Summer]

First off, I love that Ross said "paradigm". Someone's been trying to nail that word in my head for the last few months and this is the first time I've seen it come up in ordinary conversation.

I disagree that people tend to overlook individual spyishness in this game. I was constantly banging my head against a wall because no one was trying to make connections between Angelica and other players - they actually looked only at individual activity. Bunni's the best example of this way of thinking from this game: Read her confessionals - She never actually stopped to think of who was a Spy with whom - she just pointed out individuals she thought were shady. Candy's at the other end of the spectrum. Read her conversations - she spent a lot of time telling players to look at "the bigger picture" and find the connections. Some players, like Adelaide, have a good middle balance. Adelaide discussed her individual suspicions in her Walls of Suspicion thread and connections in her confessional.

But you simply have to know how many Spies there are. You can't get around this. What if Sam made a game where there were 5 individual Spies/assassins? What if there were teams of 2? What if the Spies were in 1 group of 5? You'd look for different things each time. Without this basic framework, Citizens are forced to, well, shoot people they find suspicious in general. That means voting for people for:

- Being loud
- Posting a lot
- Not posting enough
- Never signing online
- Contributing too much
- Rubbing people the wrong way
- Freudian slips
- Liking chat rooms too much
- Making alliances

... do you see where this is going?

It's grasping at straws because the Citizens have no idea what they're looking for. And that's why I think spies2Winston, spies3Jakub, spies4Martha, etc. were unfair victims to Sam's pride.

[Martha]

To Ross - of course I assumed the spies would be together in a group. I've never played or heard of a "duelling packs" game so the notion of two groups of spies was completely and utterly alien to me until now. I couldn't see how it would work. (I'm still not convinced that it did work completely, given the cries of "unfair" after the game, but that's another issue.) How was I supposed to anticipate anything of the kind? It's always been one group of spies, one group of citizens. That's the game. Should I be looking for three groups of Spies in S5 if Sam chooses not to reveal the numbers?

You're right about the case against Tenchi, but that was an extreme case - the Spies in Spies 3 were frankly so good that my attempts to link them just failed. They left me no clues to go on. That wasn't the case in either Spies 1 or Spies 4, where I felt that Julian and Gigi or Faizah and Angelica (for example) were obvious likely spy partners. I'm not going to say whether it's better to look for individual spyishness or connections between multiple spies - obviously some people have had success using both methods - but at least give us the information to make an informed decision.

Oh, and while I agree with DC in general, I think Martha and Tanner in particular were eliminated due to bad game play. That's definitely not the case with Winston in particular though, and if Jenna had known that there was only one spy at that point, she probably wouldn't have targeted him. (I rather wish, with hindsight, that some of the Winston detractors like Karl, Adriana and Tyson had got together early and been a lot more vocal in his defence. The trouble is that in Spies 1, I'd been imprisoned for exactly that...)

Oh, on a lighter note: if anybody got eliminated for "liking chat rooms too much", I'm surprised I survived to the first exile in ANY of the games I played...

[Kate (Damon)]

On the other site where I play they don't announce the number of scum or what not. So you have to learn as you play along. There's also sometimes Serial Killers or other nocturn people. As well as that works for the other board I don't know if it would work here. The introduction of the non-mafia players combined with the need for alliances combined with the introduction of private things (journal, AIM, etc) makes for a very odd dynamic.

[Judge Sam]

I think that Day One votes are going to be suboptimally played no matter what. Knowing the # of Spies in the game would not magically transform the beginning eliminations (which will always have an element of randomness) to some supreme logical gameplay.


Question: If I had announced the # of Spies as 7 at the start of the game, would that satisfy the people who want to know the # of Spies immediately? Or would you still be just as angry at that misdirection because it may have mislead you and caused you not to play optimally (since you didn't know the arrangement of Spies and might have been looking for something that didn't exist - a group of 7 Spies working together.)

[Kate (Damon)]

I don't think anyone has tried this yet (Correct me if I'm wrong) but is there a no-lynch option for Spies? Because if you don't vote you get a self vote?

[Judge Sam]

Nope, there isn't a no-lynch option.

[Kate (Damon)]

Is that something you would consider allowing?

[Sherri]

I doubt it. It's just like making the first Imprisonment real. I think its a vital and unique rule to Sam's games.

Not to mention no-lynch is advantageous only for Spies. Martha's and Jakub's exile was partially useful in finding Spies in the past few games.

[Martha]

sherri said:

I doubt it. It's just like making the first Imprisonment real. I think its a vital and unique rule to Sam's games.

Not to mention no-lynch is advantageous only for Spies. Martha's and Jakub's exile was partially useful in finding Spies in the past few games.

Jakub's exile was useful for finding spies? You mean in the sense that we got taken on three enormous wild goose chases (Judith, Carrie, Miles) on no evidence whatsoever? Riiiiiight...

And what were the citizens supposed to have learnt from my exile? I seem to remember that in a poll of ten people - ONE of whom was an actual spy, and that spy received one vote out of something like eighteen (I'd like to know who threw that vote at Emma BTW, I'm guessing a fellow traditionalist since they seemed to spend more time accusing each other than the citizens) - Kip and Grace came out on top by a HUGE margin. It was like everybody was publicly trying to avoid accusing any active player (possibly because they'd taken out a very active citizen and didn't want to run the risk of repeating that mistake) even though it was blatantly obvious that the spies were among the most active players there.

[Kate (Damon)]

While you might find them useful I've found no-lynches useful in the past too.