LogFAQs > #979304231

Okay, 5 vs 2 on 7.

For starters I don't think there's ever an "always true" situation for dealing with 7 players in this format. So I don't think you can say it's ALWAYS better to kill 3.

You have to consider that your triple kill options are going to be limited to:

-One of the 3 pairs that paired up on 9 (excluding the 4th pair from 9 who lost a partner)
AND
-A willing sacrifice who feels strongly enough about at least one of the paired players that they will sacrifice themselves to take both out.

The "sacrifice" can never be scum, because scum will never volunteer in that spot. If the sacrifice is scum then BOTH players in the pair either have to feel strongly that their date from the night before is scum to be unwilling to pair with the sacrifice.

If BOTH of the previously-paired players are scum, that it doesn't matter if you only kill them 1 at a time, because you still hit scum and are presumed to hit the next one the following day. Especially in a situation like this game where the pair in question had an incredibly sus end of day on 9. If there was a scum/scum pair on 9 then it could only have been ulti/isquen. So with that being assumed the only way you kill 3 that day is if MZero, Dumey or JC was going to volunteer to kill them both.

Now if we run this format more times in the future then this information means future scum will want to appear to be willing to die, since that willingness seems to buy a lot of town credit.

The mistake wasn't failing to kill 3, because if a triple kill was forced then I would have just allowed myself to be paired with Sultan for the claimed purpose of preventing a triple kill and we still just win immediately going from 7 players to 4.

The mistake town made was not trying a little harder to make everyone uncomfortable about who they had to pair up with. Ulti was insistent that my being scum would put me with MZero. That was very helpful to me and allowed me to make it seem like I didn't want to pair with MZero and was only doing it because he was the only pair I would be allowed to take. But swap MZero's name with Sultan, and I probably end up paired with sultan and we'd be forced to play out a day of 5 after pairing. I probably would have responded differently and would have tried to appear only too eager to pair with Sultan to try and trigger alarm bells and get someone to veto that pairing, but let's say for the sake of argument both Ulti insisted and Dumey backed him up? Then yeah, I'm stuck with sultan and the day of 5 becomes an actual contest. Most likely with us killing Dumey and trying to convince JC that MZero and Isquen must be the scum?

But killing 3 doesn't solve anything, it ends the game UNLESS you identify a scum/scum pair from 9, and if you've done that then you might as well just kill 1 of them and try to more intelligently hedge your bets. I think JC/Dumey was a good hedge, for example. I think I would have strongly argued against either of them being allowed to pair with anyone else. It was a long shot, but there was an actual argument to be made for them as a scum pair, and if you're town in that spot then that's the pairing you want to force. I think there was probably a stronger argument to either link myself and Sultan or to link Isquen and MZero, and in either case those pairs could have been forced as well and more strongly insisted upop. And in that spot scum has to go along with it. Otherwise what happens? It's me + sultan + ulti without pairs? And we BOTH suicide? Or one of us pairs Ulti and the other dies? Much better to just agree with the town-decided pairing and save the argument for day of 5.

So to recap:

The only way you're hitting scum on 7 is if they PAIRED on 9. And if they paired on 9 there is no need to risk a triple town death by killing both at once. Just kill 1 and take that knowledge into the following day where you can kill the other safely and still be guaranteed a day of 3 if you are wrong. The chance of forcing scum to pair on 7 is above 0% so that's a hedge worth taking.

I'm fairly confident in this.