The Case against Yunalesca

The first part of the case against Yunalesca is ironically the part that made investigating her not to0 arduous… she hasn't posted too many messages and those fairly short. 21 during the game thus far, 5 of which are NM, and more than half the remainder are either code/decodes or RBIRL and RBIRL like posts and the majority of the remainder are direct answers to questions or requests for clarification, with almost everyone being one or two lines of text. In fairness to her, however, 21 is by no means low at this time, with 260 odd posts and 10 players, 26 would be the average. Yet her main contribution to our development of a plan was to object to “Plan F” in both respects, even after the reasons why a coded RC was a no-lose strategy for us had been explained. There seems no valid reason for her to have objected at that point, little room for a misunderstanding of what the plan entailed and she showed no support for Ranagrande’s alternate plan. This made me a bit suspiscious even at the time, and reminded me of something I’d noted earlier but hadn’t wanted to raise at the time till I could ponder possible repercussions of laying it out.

The “yes, no, yes, no” answer
As you may recall, we opened the game with a quartet of questions. The third question was: Did you receive any non-poetry non-role/align data? Now except for Yuna, everyone who responded said ‘No’ without qualification to this question. Now, at the time we didn’t know we all had the same poem or any poem at all, and indeed question #1 was just that, Did you get any poetry in your RM? So I didn’t want to speak up to point out Yunalesca’s divergence form the answers since it might mean nothing significant and if it was significant it seemed just as plausible it would be harmful to the town to require an explanation or draw attention to it, as the such might have missed it. Then of course, out of sight out of mind, until I started wondering why Yuna might be particularly reluctant to do a coded claim.

What exactly would a “Yes” mean for such a question? Well, we can rule out the peom, and we can also rule out anything of the “You are the cop/doc/vanilla/etc, your power functions as X, you win with the town.” And while we all got the same poem, there’s no guarantee we all had the same post-poem format. Mine for instance is two lines of text, my role stuff, paragraph break, my victory condition. Hard to mistake that format for anything other than a ‘no’ response. What about a mason? A distinct possibility, mention of the other player(s) names could be interpreted as non RC/VC and be on a separate line, but that seems implausible, and were it the case it could be shown fairly easily, Yuna has coded her RC and exposing a mason is a minimal threat to the town or the player, we’ve had enough evil masons and pure good mason groups that we generally just assume a roughly 50/50 chance one of the masons might be bad, and for a twosome that would be considered 1 in 4 and a threesome 1 in 6, lower odds than our random of a player being a scummer at 2 in 10 or 3 in 10 so a claim of that variety would not expose her in of itself to heightened lynch risk and would probably lower her NK odds, masons are never high priorities for NK, either you’ve got them infiltrated and want to keep a scapegoat or you don’t and you’d rather leave the possibility intact to play mind games on the townies. So the mason option is one option and one easily and safely dealt with.

But is mason really plausible? Are any roles plausible? Surely not vanilla, I won’t confirm, deny, or imply if I’m one but I would speculate the RM for that would be pretty darn short and unambiguous, seeing as none of us have any character info or background stories. ?, who is either a vanilla or passive role from his prior comments, answered no, as did every other player who responded, which doubtless includes representative mixes of vanillas and roles.

So what could possibly be meant by that “Yes”? It hardly marks her out as scum, but I think it is something we need to have an answer for.