Dungeon 8 Turn 7
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Ricki, Cordy, and Kamau head to the left, where Kamau distracts the stump so Cordy can run past. This stump has yet another new inhabitant: an entire nest of bees! Kamau takes 1 unblockable damage from being stung, as well as another 2 unblockable damage from the two stirges that remain latched on to him. Ricki impales one of the stirges on her sword, but Daisy fails to kill the second one. It seems that it can recover health by draining blood.
Cordy sends two little mushrooms to attack the squirrels on top of the chest, which causes the two of them to be attacked by all the rest, destroying them. The two mushrooms explode, dissolving all of the squirrels into pure fungus dust. Only one little mushroom regrows out of the carnage, leaving Cordy with that one plus the original mushroom which didn’t attack. Cordy wades into the spore cloud and retrieves a potion of healing and a magic lens from the chest.
Also, while looking over the edge of the wagon, Ricki concludes that she could probably abandon the dungeon from up here. However, she’s not sure how much damage she would take from jumping overboard…
Meanwhile, after filling up her inventory with two shields and four unopened boxes, Lara explores the new room to the right. Looks like another huge battle is “ongoing” here.
That bottom half of the wagon is Ricki only and I don’t think we can do it without a Kamau getting remorsed.
I’m somewhat thankful, as we can just move on and not look back.
Given the prevalence of large groups, I do believe we’ll find something akin to a grenade. Gotta keep searching.
We will probably only find it on t20 and thereabouts, forcing us to split the party while wolves attack.
We’ve got a re-growable army of walking grenades 🙂 but even if Ricky didn’t have a pet already, she can take only 1 of them at time.
Fortunately they’re reuseable as long as they kill an enemy when they explode. Unfortunately, that’s not relevant this dungeon since we have Daisy.
Which is why LSN didn’t want to reveal mushy stats before this dungeon 😉
Three stirges = 3 unblockable damage, even if we had more small people in the group, and even if it spreads over several targets, it still counts as 3 towards remorse, in one turn. We’d need a way to kill them from afar, before full combat begins, like we did once with explosive holy ball.
The other only way to not get instant guaranteed remose from them is to use Lens and hope there’s something they are weak to, or something that can block/prevent/cancel their unblockable attack 🙁
EDIT: Ok, I see one more – pets. If any stirge targets a pet, it doesn’t count for remorse.. but it’s hardly a thing we can rely on IMO.
Also nothing forced us to take Kamau, other than the suggestion that a big inventory is a good thing. There are gonna be some dungeons he isn’t perfect for.
Case in point: the manor. The comic would likely have ended if he went in there.
We (Well, Meta) figured a no remorse plan to deal with Stirges. More or less revolves around having Daisy bait them all and get attached to by them, then running back out of the tunnel on the next turn for Stirge killin and dog healing.
But next is 2 eagles + 3 squirrels. That’s 15 damage if eagles do 6 and many people are apparently afraid they do 7.
Very doubt theyre 7 each. We tend to get a “just barely defended” comment. Instead Kamaus defense got boasted about. 4-5 seems a more reasonable range to me.
Context of that area look like Rats and Eagles are at odds. Like maybe the eagles are “preying” on them. If we fought the eagles, id expect the Squirrels to do nothing or even help us initially.
We were afraid about large potential damage from the eagles when we’d never fought them. Now that we’ve got some data rather than 0, I agree they likely do less than 7.
Ooh magic lens! What should we be using it for?
A caravan guard? We’d have to fight a lot of them so it would be nice to know exactly how much damage we’ll need.
The wolf? Would be useful to know how strong this dungeon’s timer enemies are. Plus, that lone one might be tameable, who knows?
Too bad we lost a shroom though. I thought that since both explosions killed “one or more” enemies, we’d get both back. 🙁
Still, wiping out 10 enemies without even spending a character action is truly a sight to behold. All hail Cordy!
Wolf definitely.
We have a good gauge on guard stats
The stirges are a more immediate concern – we’ve got 13 more turns to find another lens in for the wolves – and potentially a more important one even without that.
We don’t know how many boxes there are, but we do know there are less than 20, and there are almost certainly at least 3 in the bottom half of this area. We only have one char who can reach them, and right now the stirge group is pretty much guaranteed to kill her. We have no idea how many more small-only areas there are with quest loot in them, but historically dungeons only get harder the further into them we go, so if there’s another small-only area it will likely be even less hospitable than this one is.
We also haven’t found the entrance to this section yet, so it’s possible that it is a “late” area itself and thus could be skipped in favor of an easier one. Even so, I think I’d be inclined to take knowledge of the creatures that do unblockable repeating damage over what’s likely to just be “bigger dogs”, even without the time aspect.
Stirges pretty definitely do 1 unblockable and have 3 or more hp/defense (assuming they only heal for the damage they do). I don’t see the utility in lensing them given they’re in a Ricki only area we’re unsure we can even beat if we got past the stirges given the action density required. On the other hand, guards, eagles, or wolves seem likely to be relevant in the rest of the dungeon.
[Plan retracted]
Kamau can’t interpose in both rooms – interposing would lock him to one room. Are you counting on the bees not switching targets?
He’s interposing room 2 only.
Bees are already attacking him. I admit I’m not 100% sure they won’t switch, but interposing the bees practically lose us an entire turn because stumps are “sturdy” and we need Kamau’s action for everything:
-Looting the pile
-Interposing the guards
-Starting the fight on the right
With how tight our schedule already is, I think this save us enough time to be worth risking a single remorse on.
Trust us Johnny, remorse is never worth deliberately risking, unless a party member is on the line, or a dungeon goal, or something of that magnitude. We lost two kamau levels already, and we lose all our profit if he leaves prematurely too.
And accidents ALWAYS happen. LSN did specify we are supposed to learn by taking damage and every time there is something new. This once there may be unavoidable remorse on stirges, for one.
And we don’t want Kamau to lose a level, additionally, because shield prof would be very useful against infectious zombies.
Also, we cant do things like having Lara “lay down and shoot someones foot”. We have tried cute stuff like that before, it gets ignored.
Consider joining the discord, there are a bunch of us that like to discuss plans of action and you seem excited to do the same.
Explicitly, we tried almost exactly this when trying to lure bats to attack other people in I believe the warrens. It didn’t work.
Double checked this – the winning comment on Turn 28 (giving the actions for turn 29) of the warrens was for Lara to do more or less what was originally here (crawling on the floor to stealthily venom sting the guards). Lara didn’t do any crawling, she just used the ladder and it didn’t do quite what we hoped.
https://dungeoneyes.com/dungeon-5-turn-28/#comment-4987
Is that so? I don’t have time to binge through the whole archive (y’all, please mention a dungeon and turn when referencing them) so I’ll just trust you.
Well, the core of this plan rely on it so I’m retracting the whole plan. Thanks for the information!
I’m not a fan of how everything wants us to make an account/get your information/harvest your data nowadays and I’m not about to do so for a web comic/game I check in as a pastime. Nothing against you or the other players, though, and I understand most people don’t care as much.
Super valid.
I already had a discord account for voice chat with friends when playing games, so it didn’t have quite the same cost for me as it seems it would for you. I get not wanting to have an account for everything though.
Kamau interpose.
Cordy spore touch stirge.
Pets and Ricki attack stump
Lara… Hmmm. Ignores the battles and goes down and right? To the next room.
1- The owlbear Is the risk. I really don’t think LSN meant for the battle to be triggerable by just going around it . The alternative is her turning back, but she really has no actions on the middle screen right now. Still, if you think that’s worth making an alternate plan, do it, no problem. 🙂
2-Does not include Molly, Molly has no atk. Her Kick is an ability which must be named to be used, and I do not believe there is need for such use right now.
To be 100% clear, the risk of owlbear attack is negligible, as it isn’t aggroed. And previous warrens experience tells us we won’t aggro it.
Owlbear behavior is this: alerts to first target it sees first round. Next turn will charge and attack any char it sees from then on.
If Lara moves past it one turn it will attack her when she tries to rejoin the group. That said, it hits for 6 I think? Split if two targets
Hm, so we do have to kill the owlbear sooner rather than later. If a wolf pack joins it we are screwed, nevermind its chest
Can we have Cordy Spore Touch the Stump and the pets attack the Stirge? Just free extra damage on the stump.
I am worried that the stirge may be accumulating more health per turn than it appears. Spore touch is intentional overkill.
The text said it “heals by sucking blood”, not “grows”. I don’t think the stirge can exceed its initial HP, though, I’m not sure we have the data to calculate how much it recovers per sucking turn.
It could be gaining armor, too.
Cordy: Spore touch the stump. (9-10 dmg)
Kamau: Attack the stump with your hilt. (13-14 dmg). With cleave, you should hit the stirge on your body for 1 dmg.
Molly: Kick the stump. (16-17 dmg)
Mushrooms: Target the stirge.
Ricki: Move two screens right and then walk down to attack the owlbear with Lara. Gang up on it from behind so it feels surrounded.
Lara: Wait for Ricki then attack the owlbear.
Daisy: Join the owlbear attack.
Explanation: This gets 16 dmg on the stump, which should be enough to kill it. It also get another 3 dmg on the stirge if cleave works, and 2 if not. This clears the owlbear chest so anyone can loot it regardless of defense, and also potentially gets us another owlbear item. Next turn we can all meet up in the 2nd room to fight guards, then decide where to go next. I didn’t want us adventuring over to the left room, but now that we’re there I think Kamau needs to interpose or attack to keep the bees targeting him.
Only issue I see is that Cordy may get Bee’d, and therefore Kamau remorsed. Otherwise seems good.
Are you sure we have the time to spare 3 out of 4 actions this turn to get only a 20% roll at objective-irrelevant loot and a 1 hp heal on Kamau instead of using them to progress the objective? We’re already going into turn 8 out of 20 before the wolves come and only cleared 1.5 out of 5+ rooms.
We went left since there was a chest(they contain most of the Boxed Goods we seek for objective) and opened it. Now we don’t need to dawdle there anymore.
The owlbear can’t even hurt any of our party members. (except Lara if wandering by it alone, but that’s trivial to avoid).
Uhm. The owlbear is also guarding a chest.
He’s not sitting on it nor can damage anyone but a lone Lara so for all practical purposes, he is not. We can loot it with impunity, such as I’m doing in my plan.
Edit: Wait, wtf happenned to the votes? It went from +9 to +17 in the time it took to type this comment. I did take a few minutes to think about another comment I’m planning to type, but something weird seems to be going on here.
I think someone, not necessarily this plan’s author, is cheating and bot-ing.
Just some explanation: The displayed votes do not get updated instantly whenever somebody votes, but only if you vote for that comment yourself, or you reload the page (which may happen when you write a comment/reply). Thus the time is not just the one it took to write your comment, but the time between last page load or last voting of you on this comment. Additionally, 8 people voting for a comment is not much compared to the number of people using the internet. That said, at times it really looks as if someone(s) are mass-voting for/against some post(s) using more than one vote per person – at times two contradicting posts are pushed like this. Sometimes “voting by comment” has been done in such a situation, i.e. making a reply “I, <name>, support this plan.”. Of course I could claim that I would be “Johnny”, but then you could claim that my post was not from you, and such a situation did not happen yet. Sending an official certificate of identity to LSN via snail mail to create an account and use a multi-factor authentication could help, but who really wants to do that?
It usually take hours for a even a plan that is well agreed upon to get that many votes, and my new plan wasn’t trailing by far until the votebomb happened. I refresh after posting a comment to ensure it got saved so I can confirm it happened in mere minutes.
Sometimes votes get swingy – this usually tends to get corrected later on. If not, we can do comment voting. Commenting: hey, I am such and such and I support this plan. We brought this to LSN’s attention before, and he suggested the comment voting thing.
About the owlbear, it was clarified that they charge after being aggroed, so it’s bad news to have a main corridor blocked by it if roving enemies join it.
Votes getting swingy is normal, but I do agree it’s kinda sus if what Johnny says is true. Normally a top voted weekend post will get maybe 20 or so votes at best, so 8 is ~1/3 of that. For all 8 to happen to have occurred in <1 hour more than a day after the post was initiated (and therefore not just be the discord crowd all voting together, since they have probably mostly voted already), and all happen to have been for the same post? Really weird coincidence.
Unlike the tame owlbear that was friendly to other animals in the gang from the warrens, this one is found alone and therefore hostile to ALL npcs per it’s lens description so it’ll attack wolves too.
But if we still haven’t finished the areas before it that’d we need to come back by turn 20, we’d have bigger problems anyway.
My concern is mostly that the owlbear will attack as soon as it spots someone, so we’d either need to send someone ahead to scout, and then just let the others get attacked on their way to the next screen, or have to plan actions so that everybody can move right at the same time while still using actions on this screen. I could be wrong, but my recollection of wild owlbear behavior is that they alert when they see someone, then charge if targets are available after that. We’ve never really tested it I suppose, since Macadamia ran away from the manor owlbear and Lara attacked it on the next opportunity. I think killing it with Ricki and Lara now is still pretty efficient, since we can’t actually tackle either guard group safely on this turn anyway.
Are we sure that the owlbear does not attack Daisy? Because, on the one hand, Ricki and Lara attack first and thus will be targetted, but on the other hand everything (Ricki, Lara, Daisy attacking) happens at the same time.
Daisy could get targeted, but the owlbear also splits attacks. At worst she’d suffer 2 dmg, which should be fine.
OK, makes sense!
Plan for Kamau keeping bees busy while we get things done instead of spending our time fighting stuff we don’t need to fight.
Ricki: Move 2 rooms right. In that room, go down the ladder and stand on the right end of the floor so see if that cause the Owlbear to attack you. Then, move left to loot Owlbear chest as your action then move a room right to get eyes on next room.
Cordy: Move 1 room right. Then using your bandit token, convince the assassin to get off the chest so Lara can loot it and complete our mission ASAP.
Lara: Move 1 room left. Drop 1 shield and 1 loot box on our pile to make space then loot the bandits’ chest.
Kamau: Kill the stirge with hilt, also attacking the bee/stump with your cleave.
Explanation:
Everyone else progress our mission objective while Kamau cover their exit from left.
We shouldn’t be fighting everything. If something isn’t a guard or standing on a chest(aka quest objectives), we don’t have time to kill it. This isn’t some JRPG where you can take your time grinding down every enemy. We’re on a very short timer this dungeon. In fact, I’d say we’re late.
If we keep delaying ourselves, we’ll end up in a scramble at the end and that’s when accidents (and remorse) happens.
As for the details of this specific execution:
-Ricki’s exact movement is to test if Owlbear will attack for simply moving through the ladder. I don’t think it will, but some people seem to think so might as well know for sure.
-Using the token on assassin group. We will need that chest for quest since there are already 3 chests we can’t go for in rat hole. Plus, there’s likely another token waiting for us in the big battle to the right.
-Our whole party is free to beat up the naked guard next turn.
-(New/edit) We just learned dumb animals prioritize any attackers in the group over passerbys so there definitely is no remorse here.
This will cause Kamau to be stuck with beeeeees for another turn, and HP is also not to be squandered
Think of it this way:
Every (part of a) turn we spend that isn’t needed for the objective(loot/guards) is added to the turns we’ll have to spend while sieged by the dungeon time limit in unknown quantity and spawn location who seek to murder and eat our new friends.
I want to be safe from the incoming hell of HP loss and remorse as we frantically scramble around trying to finish up the objective while defending bandits.
Let’s not fall for seeking immediate gratification in saving a single hp now while endangering our future. Efficiency is safety.
Also, now that we have 2 healing potions, we can use one on Kamau at some point.
Unfortunately, remorse cannot be healed.
Remorse is the one resource we cannot manage. It cannot be avoided completely, cannot be reduced, cannot be healed, and is available to us in a very low quantity.
In the case of remorse, Safety is Safety.
Once we fell for the schmuck bait that is this area, our optimal actions became locked in – it’s the price we paid for falling for the bait – and we couldn’t have known about it, save for Case.
Oh, and to be clear, I am talking about remorse because relying on cleave secondary attack rather than primary may free the bees to target others
Hey, I’ve noticed you tend to reply to yourself to add to your comments. There is an “edit comment” button when hovering over the bottom right of your comments you might find helpful.
About cleave, I found out something new ensuring no remorse, check out the comment I left as a reply to TNIM below. Also, this comment “thread” is about the 1hp cost. TNIM’s is about the cleave working or not. It gets confusing if we spread the subjects all over the place.
Edit comment only works if you’re still on the same internet connection and it’s relatively recent, so far as I can tell. I frequently post on mobile and lose access to edit permissions when I go to a new location.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Siv edit in the past, so probably the same for him(or her?)
It’s all about having the same IP so far as I can tell. Recency doesn’t matter in my experience.
It’s unclear to me that cleave will actually occupy the bee and keep it from fighting Cordy. With simultaneous actions, the bee doesn’t get hit until Kamau kills the stirge, and 1 dmg might not penetrate the defense of the stump anyway (which would leave it free to attack someone else).
Wouldn’t simultaneity means both bee and stirge get hit at the same time?
Like I said in the note, I can have him interpose instead if you prefer, I’ll defer to your expertise.
Also, penetrating defense is irrelevant, we had Kamau attack(without damage) to distract a rat king in the farm twice.
Edit: Cleave attacks are simultaneous per D7T9 so this works as is.
Simultaneity isn’t an exact concept. It’s kinda fuzzy. Meaning some things are up to DM discretion and we shouldn’t try to game them. I can easily see Kamau not directly attacking the stump as freeing it from attacking kamau.
I don’t think that’s strong evidence of the kind of simultaneity we’d need to be sure the stump won’t try to fight anyone else because it’s being targeted by Kamau. Mechanically the stirge has to die first for the stump to be targeted, so they don’t get hit the same time logically.
Fluff-wise, a “cleave” attack is usually treated as your attack being done in such a way that it carries on and hits a second target (Imagine a sword cleaving an enemy in twain and the momentum carrying it into the chest of the next enemy). At least in my experience. That would mean the two attacks are always functionally simultaneous – no time for something to take an action in between.
If it turns out we are not correct, it costs 1 remorse. I don’t want to waste remorse on dumb stuff, but this is a pretty reasonable assumption and we can’t be hypercautious in all scenarios forever, or we won’t get things done.
Uhm. This seems like the definition of non-optimal remorse expenditure. 1 or 2 actions for 1 remorse is a bad trade.
About hypercaution. Just wait until you get a mechanic wrong for 1 turn and something goes wrong, and you have a lot of people jeering at you as “greedy”, including some of the very same people who upvoted your plan – you will understand then, I think, the reason why we are cautious.
This game rewards experimentation with info and at same time punishes it harshly with loss.
Last time we dropped the ball once and it was a 25% chance of game over, worse than we could have predicted.
Point is, the moment we got diverted to chasing this non-guard chest, we took on the risk it would be schmuck bait. We fell into the bait, and now we gotta be very careful at extricating ourselves from it, otherwise we’ll be worse off.
Why should we care about unreasonable people jeering? How should that matter at all? They’re free to downvote and post their own plans next time if they want to.
Is the 25% referring to the manor? I only came by weekly to read in burst back then, but it looked perfectly predictable that sending in Ricki was a bad idea? Low hp Ricki and explicitly intelligent boss and all.
The way to manage risk is not to avoid it at all costs, but to analyze their probability and impact to make better decisions. Real-world businesses do it, and if you can trust them for one thing, it’s that they seek what’s best for themselves.
For example, here is the risk I’m most worried about right now:
Risk: Being overwhelmed by the timer mechanic(wolves)
Impact: The worst possible(mission abandon/game over)
Probability: High since we’re kind of behind schedule and rising every time we don’t prioritize efficiency.
Now, running out of hp or remorse has practically the same impact, yet the probability is a lot lower since Kamau is still very tanky and has no remorse yet.
So my point is, being hypercautious about hp/remorse is actually more dangerous right now due to it increasing our most critical risk. It would be the other way around were we ahead of schedule or had already accumulated some remorse, but that’s not the case right now. Taking time is its own risk, its own thing to be cautious off, lest we’ll be worse off.
Of course, I’m not saying we should take remorse nilly-willy. But a low probablity of cleaving not working taking no more than 1 remorse is less risk than losing 3 actions while already being late.
This is purely academic for the sake of future discussions, though, because we wouldn’t take remorse right now for sure with the new information I noticed (refer to my 2nd reply to TNIM below). Also because our votes don’t matter anyway with a cheater/botter running around.
Oh, it was actually the farm instead of the manor.
Why do you suspect a cheater/botter?
I was doing my last round of replies for the night yesterday, and both plans swung by +8/-8 in the few minutes between loading the page and me reloading after finishing my first reply. See my first reply to Siv under TNIM’s plan.
Holy crap, I’ve noticed a new detail that makes cleaving(and its debate) superfluous:
Cordy, despite being a valid target and right there with his little shrooms, did not get targeted by any of the 8 squirrels we didn’t attack. They all targeted the attacking shrooms!
Meaning, we just uncovered a new detail of the “dumb animal” targeting priority:
-Attackers targeting them
-Other attackers in the battle area
-Anyone else in reach
Also meaning this plan is safe no matter if cleaving works properly or not!
Well, not that any of our opinion matters. Per my reply to siv under your plan, I’m pretty sure there’s a cheater/botter.
Interesting point about the targeting! It does seem valid! It looks like both plans are safer than we thought then. Relief!
I’m skeptical that the bees count as the same group as the stirges we dragged over. It’s way less plausible that they’re allied and will work together than that 10 squirrels would prioritize defending each other imo.
I guess we’ll be gaining new information at worst then. It seems like there’s several reasons this should work*, and the attack hitting Cordy anyway would mean we were wrong about several mechanics and can factor that in on decisions in the future.
*Reasons it should work:
-Cleave should be two functionally simultaneous hits, with no room for another attack in between. Animals/simple creatures should prioritize attacking the thing attacking them, as shown this turn. If the bees attack Cordy, we’ll know that cleave doesn’t count as two functionally simultaneous attacks.
-Animals/simple creatures should prioritize someone attacking their combat-group over someone walking by, as seen with the Rat King and its spawn last dungeon. You argue that the Stirge doesn’t count as being part of the group despite being part of the combat – if the bees attack Cordy that’d be pretty good evidence that you are correct, and very useful information. We’ll know in the future that attacking one member of a non-homogenous group (or of a group brought together involuntarily) does not attract the attention of the others.
So we’d be confirming two mechanics at once if Cordy got attacked.
However, I think the odds are pretty low that he’ll be attacked. If nothing else, and we’re absolutely wrong about both mechanics, animals/simple creatures should attack randomly. That would mean at worst this is a 50% risk, unless we’re somehow wrong not only about the two mechanics listed above, but also about the basics of how animals/simple creatures decide on their targets.
If this was a straight 50% risk of remorse, I’d say don’t do it, but it isn’t. It’s 50% * (the odds that we’re wrong about cleave) * (the odds that we’re wrong about how attacking a combat group works). I think that brings the risk of remorse lower than the risk of running out of turns before we get nearly as far as we need to in the dungeon.
In case of vote weirdness, posting to note that I support this plan.
Johny – re: voting and bots – last time you wrote:
While I can’t shed any light on whever we have cheaters/bots, or not, I think the case is not as bad as you think.
It did not change +8/-8 (which looks awfully significant), it changed from 9 to 17. That’s +8. That doesn’t have to mean that 8 people suddenly voted. That could also be 4 people who initially downvoted the idea (giving -1) and then changed their mind and upvoted instead (giving +1). This gives a delta of +2 per person. Yeah, it’s a stretch, claiming that in that very few minutes FOUR readers showed up and they all happened to be downvoters that changed their minds. But that is possible. It’s also possible that the votes aren’t added up immediately like someone else said, and those 4 people did that flip over last hour or two. And if we consider it could be 3 flippers and 2 upvoters. That becames much more likely. Not super very likely happening 5 times a day, but still far less impossible than it might seem at first glance.
Also, in the beginning, I mostly saw people upvoting, and only a few people downvoting. Later, I think I were seeing more and more people using their downvotes as time passed. The “burned” posts end up having noticeably higher negative score than in the early dungeons. Add this trend (of using both up, and down votes too) to a heated discussion and some new observations and finding 3 people who changed their mind from initial downvoting isn’t really surprising I think.
I’m not 100% sure the votes are “summed up/refreshed with a delay”. I’m sure what I just wrote still is not a very likely event (3 people changing their mind, etc). But bots dedicated to screwing up this voting.. it’s not like there’s some money or prize to get here. Bots need to be set up. This means some investment, even if that’s just someone’s time (and skill/expertise) spent to do that. It’s not huge, but still it is nonzero. Bots can get exposed and blocked/burned/banned/etc. So you can lose that investment. The stake here seems to me too small to invest/spend a resource like that. I’m not saying bots are impossible. I just think of them as unlikely as 3 people flipping their votes backed with 2 upvoters over 1-2hrs.
Let’s not assume, and observe. See if things like that happen rarely or often.
I will also note that the voting is basically tied right now. This doesn’t support the bot theory.
He said bots or cheaters. Maybe something as low effort as a VPN would work? I haven’t tried.
And almost tied but barely in favor of the one a cheater likes could still be a cheater, just a subtler over. Not saying it is or isn’t, just could be
For what it’s worth, my psychology on this is that I generally won’t downvote a plan I like slightly less than my preferred plan, until/unless the two plans are close and there isn’t a competing spoiler plan I dislike way more. I have to really hate a plan to downvote it out right from the start.
I’m not sure how common that sort of behavior is with other people, but if it is, it’s actually pretty reasonable to see adjustments happening more frequently as two plans get closer (at least until everybody has used up all their up and downvotes).
Oh aye, just saying it doesn’t look like a bot per se.
This started around the beginning of the manor I think, when someone was apparently dead-set on manipulating votes for Kamau to enter the manor. Since that was not an opinion shared by anyone we could find, we proposed some solutions and brought the matter to LSN who recommended the comment voting system, which ended up saving us, because we would have been dead dead dead if Kamau had gone in the manor.
The Sue and Cordy voting was actually amusing because if was very much low-stakes and yet Cordy and Sue randomly seesawed over the course of ten minutes many times.
LSN’s words on the matter were: Welcome to every internet poll ever, IIRC.
Could even not be a dedicated guy this time and just a friend group looking over the comic, really. There was just one major shift, AFAIK.
And for the record, both plans look safe to me, which is what matters, so I’m kinda neutral on this one.