Before Exile #6.5

[Judge Sam]

I am like... ugh. I need to describe this feeling. It's like.. well... sitting and watching for 30 straight days citizens target citizen after citizen and exiling them and never ever targetting one of 5 spies and never voting for spies and their top 13 suspects are all citizens and one by one by excruiatingly one I have to watch them squander chance after chance and opportunity after opportunity and watch them make the stupidest assumptions and theories and it is just exhausting.


I hate that they always, always target old people. It's obscenely stupid. Funny thing is when I first looked at the groups I was worried the new people would be tons more active than the old... haha.


Yeah so this whole time I have been hoping that they would just catch ONE Spy, that they would come up with ONE smart idea or just randomly luck into one correct thing. Nope. The only time they ever actually suspected a Spy was Bebe at that lasted less than 24 hours. What a colossal let down.


It might have been that the Spies were rather experienced and the Citizens just not... though there are some unexperienced Spies and some experienced Citizens... in fact there are a lot. So who knows. But by this point it's just all so helter-skelter and they are so manipulated...

How the hell, after 7 Exiles, can ALL OF THEIR top suspects still be Citizens? Here's who they suspect after getting rid of previous top suspects Carrie, Jennipher, Judith, and Miles: Arthur, Jack, Bruce.


I hate that they keep targetting old people, it is stupidity. I can't believe there is only going to be 7 Episodes. I kind of want to just give up and make the finale on Thursday and just put this behind me.

I know the Spies are like "oh we did so great, we fooled everybody, we're a great team, blah blah blah." Boring. You can not have a game that is not competitive. It is not a game. There is no tension. It is the least exciting thing of all. Games are only good when the outcome is uncertain.


I cannot believe they could not get even one of five Spies lol. And it's not like having four would have helped them any.


-.-

[Reicheru]

Question to the host: how would YOU have known?

I couldn't go on the voting figures etc, the data just wasn't there for five spies. It's rather too easy to do so with three spies (hence Gigi from Spies 1, although she and Julian played right into the citizens' hands in the first place by splitting votes between two citizens) and I'd like to see how it might pan out with four.


That leaves the evidence of actions within the game, and predicting how the spies would act. Also evidence of collusion (like that drawn by various people against Arthur and Bebe, Bruce and Bebe, Miles and Jessica, etc...) which just seemed to lead nowhere every time.


There's posts of mine both in this episode and episode eight in which I show how practically every piece of evidence can be both for and against someone. Case in point: Bebe and Bruce. Both were in the team that won the "investigation" challenge. I thought (correctly) that the spies would try to get the team with two spies in it to win that challenge. I also thought (correctly) that the investigation would go to a spy, aided (I thought incorrectly) by another spy.

That evidence points directly against both Bebe and Bruce fairly equally, yet one was a spy and one was a citizen. And since Bebe was a known challenge demon, she was the most likely potential CITIZEN to have actually won the challenge despite the efforts of the spies.


Another example: Tenchi. At the very beginning I said I was most worried about a super-aggressive spy. Despite this I never really connected this idea with Tenchi until VERY late on - I'm still defending him even in this episode - and yet his very aggressiveness points, to me, to either a strong citizen or a super-aggressive spy. How do you interprit it correctly? I obviously didn't...


Finally take Arthur. EVERYONE suspected him. To me this was evidence that he wasn't a spy. But I still had a theory that the spies would deliberately vote one of their own up to the top spot and suggest that he'd been "framed". (If anyone other than me - Bebe, Bruce, Raphael or Jessica say - had suggested this, I would have been far more suspicious of Arthur than I was.) It occurred to me that I was to some extent protecting Arthur myself, which might have been what the spies intended all along. After all, with me being the only one seriously suggesting he wasn't a spy, wouldn't I look that much more suspicious for defending him if he was ever exiled?


So here's my question: what clues do you think there were that pointed, definitely and immutably, against a spy? Were there any?

[Reicheru]

To partly answer my own question: Jessica and Tenchi implicating Jack, when they above all others would have known he wasn't a citizen, was strong evidence against them that I picked up on. There was only one reason that they'd do that. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do anything about it, and everyone else (bizarrely) picked Jack as the spy instead of them. That's still a big "WTF?!" moment for me. I think the citizens were so demoralized, they'd stopped thinking rationally at that point.

And Bebe's lack of denial that she was the gift giver, when I genuinely thought that she was, pointed only one way to me, despite her claims that she was "protecting Taylor" (again, a moment's thought on that one shows how little sense it makes.) But again, although I picked up on it, I didn't use it.

Raphael... he was the strongest one to come out against Arthur, and the suspects that he gave me made NO sense whatsoever. That's all I can offer.

And Claire... I can't think of a single piece of concrete evidence against her. Not one. Considering how much she did behind the scenes, I'm inclined to retract my vote on Tenchi and call Claire the best spy of the lot... if only to annoy DC.

[Bebe]

LOL David, bite me.

What was wrong with telling Trina/Taylor I wasn't confirming/denying that I was the Gift Giver? The Spies were clearly on a witchhunt for the Gift Giver, and if I had been a citizen and someone thought it was me, I'd totally have played along.

1) The Spies would imprison me instead of the real Gift Giver, buying them another round in the game.

2) The Spies would stop their witchhunt for the real Gift Giver, thinking they already found out.

3) I get the benefit of being a "confirmed" citizen among the actual citizens. This means people will be more open with me and willing to discuss strategy.

4) I get brownie points with Trina and Taylor for being willing to take the heat off of them.


So, I would have reacted the same way whether I was a Citizen or a Spy. I wouldn't have confirmed or denied that I was the Gift Giver, but would've let people think I was. I'm 100% sure of this.

[Reicheru]

Maybe... but the reason you gave for it just didn't make sense to me. We think about the game in different ways, obviously. Personally there is no way in hell I'd let someone who might be a spy and clamouring to find out if I had a role or not, go on thinking that I was anything like as important as the GG. (If I had, I would've told a lot more people than Anneliese about my "seer" ability.) I'd also be very worried about exile when people found out, and you didn't seem to be. But that's me.

That said.. my conclusion was right, whether or not the reasoning was... but it didn't matter anyway, I couldn't get the votes. So peace!

[Claire]

oh i love you david <3

[Judge Sam]

I'm not sure. It's impossible I think for me to see things from your perspective because I have partially complete knowledge of all the roles and every conversation and also future events. Whereas you guys have knowledge of like 10% of the roles, 5% of the conversations, and 0% of future events lol. Which is partially why I'm glad so many people are sticking around to read everything after the game. I know it's a lot to read, plus it can be boring reading about things that don't involve you, plus no one wants to read about how other people think you're dumb or something.


But like while each person has their own unique experience and that is important and good, that's only like 5% of the actual entire experience. Playing the game without knowing for sure who any of the Spies are is a totally different experience than looking at the game knowing all the Spies, seeing all their actions, and knowing all the Citizens and seeing all their secret actions.


Yeah so I don't think I can answer that, but for signs to catch these Spies I'd check here: spies3.proboards81.com/index.cgi?board=reunion32948&action=display&thread=1181866861

[Judge Sam]

Oh also my confessionals are quite emotional and NOT indicative of my overall feelings toward the game. I can't talk to anyone else about the game so many times I write it's to get angsty feelings out. If I'm loving the game and just happy with everything sometimes I don't write that down. But people (including myself) do get into the game and when you're in the middle of the game things get different and that's where I (and everyone else) am writing from.

[Reicheru]

admin said:

Which is partially why I'm glad so many people are sticking around to read everything after the game. I know it's a lot to read, plus it can be boring reading about things that don't involve you, plus no one wants to read about how other people think you're dumb or something.

Yeah... I'm really sorry I don't do that at all, sometimes it's hard to find the time.

[Almost Formerly Reicheru]

bebe said:

LOL David, bite me.

What was wrong with telling Trina/Taylor I wasn't confirming/denying that I was the Gift Giver? The Spies were clearly on a witchhunt for the Gift Giver, and if I had been a citizen and someone thought it was me, I'd totally have played along.

I never got around to answering this... I think the best answer is that had Bebe's explanation been correct, it would have been altruistic. Bebe, although great fun, wasn't altruistic. She was in it to win and everyone knew it. (Sort of the anti-Adriana.) I'm doubtful whether a spy CAN appear to be be altruistic, just as I'm doubtful whether a spy can appear to be unperceptive (although Claire did a damn good job of pretending to be) or a bad actor (ditto Tyson). I don't know... it's such an intangible thing, but it looked somehow "out of character".

[Bebe]

I'm doubtful whether a spy CAN appear to be be altruistic

Ah, Freudian slips, gotta love 'em.