I have moderate to strong townreads on Antihero and Red Coyote.
In terms of Antihero, I like his fluidity and swagger and just generally have good vibes from his posting. There's a good amount of town motive and not really much scum motive to getting a wagon up on Mala D2, then derailing it right at the last minute; if he's scum pushing town, the mislynch was likely to go through so why ditch it, if he's scum pushing a buddy, it seems inexpedient to even bother going down this route to begin with. His reasons for doing so i.e. In the moment based on Egg's wallpost seem uncontrived and uncalculated, and I liked the intent behind trying to bring up a Mala flashwagon (or reaction fishing, if it was that) at the end of Day 1, even if it never really coalesced (generally I don't see scum do this sort of last minute move).
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I think RC and the way he went around claiming was very town. He did so extremely early into the day; were he scum I think he would have at least waited a little later to hear from everyone else and minimise risk of being caught in a lie. Also, mod meta suggests that Commuter is a plausible role to be in the setup, since penguin alien used a commuter role (for town) in the short-lived Normal Formal micro. I guess that doesn't necessarily guarantee alignment (...I have something to add here, but later in the game), but I think the potential risk to fake claiming that way would probably outweigh the benefits to him at the time since he was already in good status in the game.
I also liked his Wolfy case/thoughts in
126; I liked that the vibe wasn't to push an agenda down Egg/other peoples' throats, but to just explain what he thought was scummy and to try and contextualise it in an accurate manner. I liked how he tried to gain support for the lynch and how he eventually re-evaluated his read (e.g. reasoning gave in
337).
I have a weak to moderate townread on both Wolfy and insanity.
With Wolfy, I liked that he had the confidence to call himself obvious town in the face of adversity (even if it wasn't a sentiment shared by many) and I liked his later fatalism and claim that he would likely selfvote if necessary. I know some people think that sort of thing is WIFOM, but I've really only ever seen town threaten to selfvote, let alone actually do it - and I don't know how well I could see a newer player pull this off -and- not look too manipulative in doing so.
I also liked that when called out on his jklash vote he expanded on his thought process, stood up for himself and didn't try to diffuse responsibility for the vote. The only twinges I had were that he seemed to have dropped his RedCoyote suspicion out of the blue, and I didn't like that he termed himself as an 'easy mislynch' although in the context of how he said it I'm not sure it's actually scummy. I didn't love the interpretation of Mala's survival
253 as 'lying about having a PR' because it's a bit of a leap but I think he believes in what he's saying in regards to that push, which I interpret as townish.
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Insanity-wise, what I've liked that she's generally given tractable stances and I can see a reasonable attempt at scumhunting. I liked that when voting Mala she made the little comment that she liked everyone on the wagon, as it felt organic and lined up with the stances she had posted earlier in the game. I don't think this play is unfakable, so it wouldn't be a major shock to find her scum, but there aren't really any alarm bells ringing having read her posts.
That leaves Lucky, Mala, and Egg as weak, moderate and stronger scumleans respectively.
Lucky is... eh. My main issue here is that his play feels a bit shallow and fluffy. insanity and Malakittens are his top townreads, but I can't really tell why, and there hasn't really seemed to be a visible or even extrapolatable effort to try and gauge slots like mine, RC and Antihero (he terms enomis and Antihero as PoE scumread partners with Wolfy, but that's pretty meh and lacking in depth). Although, I do think
343 is one of his better posts at explaining himself, it's a slight glimmer in the sea of meh. I'm not strongly confident he'll flip scum, because playstyle and because I don't have to squint too hard to see lazy town, but the odds are a decent amount above chance.
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Mala's earlier posts felt a bit lacking in impetus, which concerned me a little. In post
147 - after every post of content AA had made - she said that ArcAngel was leaning town (and had RC as a 'town' read, so assuming that was stronger). Later in
312 and
379 she exclaims with far more confidence that AA's slot is town based on her actions alone, even when essentially all AA's content had been prior to
147, and that degree of confidence wasn't listed there, which seems a notable discrepancy and may have actuated for manipulative purposes.
Whilst I'm on the topic of
147 I also don't see the point in posting a reads list at that point; most of the opinions stated were of fairly mild strength which is fine for that point of the game but also not necessary to tabulate in a list. It feels like a fairly arbitrary and mechanical way to get opinions on the cast out. Also, whilst looking at it again I noticed the comment that she wanted to work with her townreads, but has actually not clearly done much if any working with her townreads at all - and I don't really buy that the fact they wouldn't be receptive due to scumreading her is all that good a reason.
The only real problem I have with the fakecrumb-not-fakecrumb or whatever it's meant to be is that she admitted in
300 it was essentially done for survival purposes and for no other clear reason – this -is- more likely to be scum motivated than town motivated simply by way of win conditions. But it's not that exciting on its own.
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My general issue with Egg is opacity, lack of scumhunting and generally stagnant play. I didn't much like posts like
103 and
111 because they added nothing to the gamestate, and there were other things to talk about to progress the game rather than just prod dodging and saying things were boring. This type of posting occurs again in
181 where he states he 'hasn't seen anything ridiculously scummy to jump on yet' and usually does on Page 1 - essentially he'd made this type of statement repeatedly and did absolutely nothing about it, which is mildly scummy (although not conclusively damning).
286 had an unnecessarily defensive tone and was kind of a roundabout way to explain what he didn't like about Antihero's unvote - given the talk of thinking Mala was townish for questioning 'a player like Antihero' (
64) there's a vibe here that Egg himself doesn't want to go toe to toe with Antihero; rather he's throwing something out and seeing if anyone bites.
He also didn't engage at all with the Wolfy case he asked for and simply voted that way in a fairly meh L-1 vote on Wolfy. There's very little insight and original scumhunting in his ISO and the scumhunting that is there is fairly fakable and a little one-dimensional and bland. In his reads list there's a lot of room left for manoeuvrability – I don't like that his second top townread, Mala, is basically there just because he disagrees with the case and doesn't actually ascribe even potential town motivation to some of her actions, and also I don't like it for the fact it evidences just how his reads have been incredibly static all game. In fairness, he did say that Mala's not following up on her fakecrumb-not-fakecrumb is a towntell for him, but even she's admitted she wasn't fakecrumbing to begin with, so that reasoning doesn't hold and it also isn't represented in the wall reads for some reason.
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tl;dr version:
[TOWN] Antihero, RC > Insanity, Wolfy > Lucky > Mala > Egg [SCUM]
Egg is personally my strongest scumread, and I would prefer to lynch him first. I am amenable to Mala or Lucky lynches, but Egg is my preferred option.
So I shall:
Vote: Egg
...and that's L-2.
