We've kind of been out of the game for a few days now and floating along. Our reads were in serious need of refreshment and we did it this morning. Anti and I had a great conversation about this at breakfast and we later co-wrote this post. I edited it to make it flow as best I could and make the writing styles mesh into one, but if there are point-of-view shifts know that we both wrote this. These aren't all-encompassing, but these are the most important reads.
How Our Reads Stand
Top Tier Townreads
: RedCoyote, Wanderer-nl, CB, FeireiRedCoyote got off to a slow start which I took as a red flag, but his play improved significantly as the game went on. There are little points in his favor, like him telling Victor what he didn't want to hear (Post 601), but overall his reads look legit. For a perfect example of what I'm talking about, look no further than the read on Jeanne (Post 718). There's really no reason for him to defend her regardless of her actual alignment. It's a town read on an unpopular slot, but he doesn't lean on it too hard to where it comes off as white-knight-ish or over-the-top. The fact that Nacho town read him and apparently has a rapport with RedCoyote doesn't hurt either.
I town read Wanderer very early on and while I can understand what TTH's causes for concern were, I have no reason to look back. Going through the ISO, there's disturbances in continuity which I think flow pretty well and don't seem to be helpful in pushing a pro-scum agenda (i.e. the change of attitude on shooting lurkers and the change of heart on enomis). None of what she says seems cookie-cutter and just what everyone wants to hear. That, by itself, is pretty good evidence for a town mindset.
What TTH and Suzune have had to say about CB has shaken my faith a little in the CB townread, which I haven't touched in a while. Now that I've thought about it, CB is a tough case but I'm going to trust my gut here and keep him as town for a few reasons. It's true that he does speak in generalities and theory a lot, but that's a pretty common strategy newbs employ since that's really the only handle they have to grab onto to get them into the game. There's just the right about of cheekiness mixed in there and the reads flow pretty appropriately (the julien read in Post 695 is a good example of what I'm talking about).
Feirei's a bit of a leap of faith since Feirei himself didn't really do much, but I think my gut's good on this one and I really don't see the early game play from deep-city-lights coming from scum. The abrasiveness in Post 665 is appropriate, not over-the-top, and comes off as townish and the scum read on vonflare is pretty good.
People I would nominate for shooting:
vonflare, MaxwellPuckett, Flubbernuggetvonflare is a universal scumread for very good reason. He caught a lot of heat in the early game, the heat died down, and he subsequently went on to... start active lurking and doing fuck all to actually advance the game or develop his reads. We were promised a case on West9 which, shockingly, we never got (Post 635). The reason he gave for scumreading West9 is kind of strawmanny and awkward in the first place. Not following through on what's reportedly a big scum read shows that he doesn't really give a shit who gets shot and is just kind of floating along with mushy reads.
Now, let's revisit our favorite old friend, Flubbernugget.
Let me just start off this rant by calling all sorts of bullshit all over the "this is townFlubber meta" crowd. Bullshit. You want a game where Flubber gets caught with his pants down and then starts blustering about misrep and how it's oh-so-scummy to push him? Here's Drawn on Arrival again. If you're short on time, just go to Flubber's ISO and then search for "Marquis," who (correctly) called him as scum and was subsequently engaged in bluster-filled 1v1 similar to the one we're having now. How do I know the push on us right now is bullshit? Because, at it's core, it's founded on nothing other than "they're scumreading me" and instead of proving why the push is scum-motivated, he chooses to pick stupid side battles on petty bullshit and hammer away on those. The crap about pablito at the beginning of the day is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Instead of just head-on confronting our accusation of him kissing pablito's ass with a "no I wasn't" he takes everyone down a rabbit hole of semantics and some horse shit about how he was just speculating on behalf of Victor and some generalities about the merits of Nacho's posting.
It's all noise.
Why?
So that he can get this:
In post 775, Flubbernugget wrote:In post 773, Feirei wrote:I think the Heartless vs Flubber is Town vs Town
I was hoping to never end up being named in a post like this
Excuse me while I cry myself to sleep
Oh bullshit. This is exactly what he wanted. To make enough noise to where people would just go "fuck it. it's TvT." He doesn't give a shit about the read on us. If he actually did, it would actually exist for the whole game to see and judge. He would actually be
pushing a read
instead of just screaming and putting us on "shoot" lists, which he knows damn good and well pablito has no intention of following. He knows the push doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell. But instead of doing what town would do, shove it down everyone else's throats, he's riding the shouting match to townreads via the lazy "Town v Town" that's so fucking typical on this site.Super fun bonus
: If vonflare ends up being a scum goon, you can add "turbobussed a useless scumbuddy for towncred" to the similarities between DoA and here.Maxwell is a scumread of ours that seems to be in the collective blind spot because he's "active." Not so. Actual "activity" in the ISO is a lot lower than his post count would suggest. The reads he actually conform pretty well to the consensus. The notable exception is the objection to Nacho's strategy (Post 701), which I think is crappy, cookie-cutter, and not really appropriate for the situation anyway. The thing that bugs me the most about it is the really elliptical way he goes about the read on us. What "flips and information" is he waiting on that's going to shore up the read? We don't know and he never tells us. It's just kind of a generic thing to say that doesn't really address anything and isn't really appropriate to the conversation.
![:]](./images/smilies/icon_smiling.png "Cheerful Smile"){kind=icon}
