In post 2265, Seiko x Naomi wrote:I'm going to take this opportunity to list off some of the reads I haven't *really* discussed much over the course of the game. I think I have more than enough information from how this has played out to lay out cleanly. if I haven't elaborated on a read here, read the damn game.
TOWNTOWNTOWN
AERIS
PIRATE MOLLIE
THE ANTAGONIST
TOWN
SAINT:
877/
879 is a really weird thought process to have faked as scum and not something I think I've ever actually seen scum do before, and is something I think would be less likely to occur to most players in a bork setup where scum have mod-provided fake claims; it is possible he could have faked that but gut really doesn't think it's the case.
1378/
1383 makes me feel *really* warm and fuzzy; him asking for someone to help them make sense of what's going on in the game and then actually *listening* to it hits all sorts of good notes for me, and the fact that it's me and my push on Titus makes it feel that much better. another thing I liked about
1383 was him calling Psychlone as "scum/PR", which in terms of them being a PR is something I think you'd be more likely to out to your partners in your scum PT rather than in the game thread, as well as the "this day needs to end" attitude which in this case I think came before a majority of players had expressed the same sentiment (aka it's not scum going with the flow). the middle paragraph of that post also read like he was legitimately lost and picking up what he *could*, rather than having any kind of direction with reads, which in a multiball setup is something I think is a lot more natural coming from town than scum. the progression from thinking Aeris/Psychlone distancing - which, incidentally, was a not-poor tinfoil theory that would fit with him being somewhat lost in this game (I don't agree with the conclusion but RVS'ing your partner *is* a fairly common tactic and it *would* be one explanation for why Aeris' vote stayed on Psychlone the whole game) - and then
1460 was also pretty good.
SINGERSIGNER: on a vague gut level, this looks different from her scum game in Ori where she primarily relied on posting walls of analysis to look town. outside of that, I haven't had any problem with anything she did at all. as just the most recent example of a town thought process coming from her: the way she (correctly) noticed that Titus' response to my meta wall was actually nonsense and decided to vote her as a result. ika/mollie/Aeris all town reading her also makes me feel preeeeeetty fucking good about it
JAQEN HGHAR
MASTIN2*: the reasoning for my initial town read on her way back right at the start was
104. I remember ffery in S&V pointing out that mastin rarely, if ever, crumbed as scum. after that, I'm going to straight up admit she's almost entirely an honorary town read as opposed to me having any kind of solid reason for it. I will say that the way I would usually want to read her is based on how she is reading the game/how her reads are in comparison to my reads (whether the reads she's pushing are bullshit or not), and in that department I don't have any problem with what she's done so far; she isn't pushing any read I think comes off as faked and on a body of work level a lot of what she *has* posted has aligned with what I've thought pretty well. looking at her reads list (
1313), you will notice the bottom section shares a lot of similarities with mine and nothing feels ridiculously out of place. her attitude towards Aeris and The Antagonist (not being sure they were town but not giving a shit/wanting to work with them anyway or leave them up to get crosskilled by scum) is also something I don't think I've actually seen her do as scum and I wanna say it's in line with how I would usually expect her to play as town, although not sure how much of a tell that is bc lolmultiball and I've read her the exact opposite of her actual alignment in the past 7 games, but I don't have any problem whatsoever with it.
MAYBE TOWN
BULBAZAK: I don't have any problem with Bulba's posts. I thought his entrance looked town in that instead of showing off all the *scum hunting* he could do it felt like he was legitimately lost, which in a multiball setup is something I attribute more to town than scum bc scum are able to be a lot more well directed with reads. I thought his read trajectory on Titus was pretty good in that, rather than asking a bunch of questions and responding to stuff because he thought he would be expected to and so there it was, he visibly in-thread was refining the read and wanted to give her room to convince him he was wrong - and when (no surprise) she didn't, there the vote was again. I also liked his attitude re: Titus being a "big fish" bc I've felt the exact same way in games before, and, given how impossible it was to *get* the Titus wagon to this point in the first place, it makes perfect sense he'd worry about, for instance, someone like mollie or ika dying N1 and all the direction to lynch her being lost; it's also an attitude I think he would be less likely to take as multi-scum if he legitimately thought Titus was scum here.
CB: I was meh on his entrance, but I don't really think that's as big as a deal as I originally thought it was anymore.
1645 was #goodposting. outside of that, don't really have anything.
FEYSAL: I fucking hate Feysal. very few players can possess his unique brand of arrogance, where someone says someone is scum and cites a fuckton of games to back it up, and their reaction is "nup, they're doing what you said they do as town" despite having no experience with their play whatsoever and not seeing it for themselves. the obvious conclusion there, which in his mind is apparently completely impossible, is not that the person he's disagreeing with has gone insane and decided today was Opposite's Day, it's that he's either wrong or misinterpreting it. he's probably town.
HIPLOP: despite being a lurksack player, hiplop has actually been here commenting on a lot of stuff and most of the observations he's made have been pretty fucking relevant. I liked just about everything in
698. as one example, the observation about Varsoon shows pretty good depth/thought: he thinks that Varsoon is acting "awkward", but points out that rather than having anything to do with his alignment it likely is due to an aspect of his meta he noticed; follow-through in
760 was also pretty good. on a general level I didn't mind his attempts to interact with players while he *was* here - he is pretty transparently trying to question people about reads that disagree with his. none of these interactions continued for more than a few posts, but I think this is just as easily due to him not having any time to play the game as opposed to being scum coasting off it; none of it came off disingenuous to me, ex.
1103 where he mentions policy lynching ZZZX felt like a reasonable thought process for someone to have,
1119 where Titus claimed her wagon "jumped up just as fast" and he correctly pointed out that, no, this was not in, in fact, the case, etc.
1307 was a good observation in that, while I disagree with the conclusion, I can see why he would have picked up on it and why he would have thought it was wrong, and it fits with his mindset of not seeing why Titus wasn't lynched already; it, again, shows internal consistency in that he was scum reading mastin previously and it had a pretty okay level of depth/thought as opposed to scum making shit up.
2069 is actually a pretty fucking accurate summation of what, exactly, is wrong with Titus' play here. none of these are particularly strong points due to lolmultiball, but they are things that I think are slightly more likely to come from scum than town here.
NULL
FREE STOOL SAMPLE: a lot of mixed feelings here. the last sentence of
167 was a really bad reason to vote someone (as Feysal pointed out in one of his first posts).
368 was also a bad post, in part due to him writing the Focus Beam wagon off as "policy" when it was really obviously not, in part due to the reasoning for scum reading Varsoon looking more like stretching evidence to fit a premeditated read. in hindsight I like
463 for him calling Varsoon out for what appeared to be BS'ing votes, but not sure how strong a point that is. I didn't like the mastin vote in
2144 bc there was a lot of shit going on and mastin had ... nothing to do with any of it. it read more as him not being sure what he could post in order to look town and commenting on something entirely irrelevant as a result, rather than him trying to actually sort through the situation here.
THEIRISHPOPE: it makes me sad to say that, although it makes me feel extremely warm and fuzzy that he is voting Titus with me, I don't *actually* have much of an idea at all of his alignment except he can't be scum with Titus. sorry! :<
ZZZX: has done absolutely fucking nothing. I'm offering a free promotion to the null-town pile if he votes Titus with me, though!
FLUBBER
PROHAWK
SCUM (W->S)
VARSOON: I actually really hate his progression on me. he went from thinking Titus is scum, to deciding I was a better vote than her out of self-preservation (despite the fact that if this is what he was going for, a Titus vote would have worked better given she was still the larger wagon), to then apparently seeing the case on me? that just feels like he's voting out of convenience and then coming up with bullshit to justify it, rather than actually believing what he's saying.
PSYCHLONE: my take on Nacho's posts is that it's a scum-Nacho trying to keep Titus, of any alignment, alive for strategic reasons. I think this is an important manoeuvre for scum-Nacho to pull given Titus is a very loud/active poster alignment regardless; it allows him to keep the thread cluttered with noise allowing him to more easily coast, and if she's town reading him, it works all the better bc at least part of aforementioned noise will be about how he is town. it also provides a huge distraction for the majority of players, some of whom would likely be onto him otherwise (see: F-16 defending Chandra Nalaar in S&S2 bc he was worried after Chandra flipped town I'd reevaluate and catch him). outside of that, I refuse to believe town-Nacho would have approached the read on me in the way that he did.
1939 was reminiscent of Newbie 1570 in that it made actually no sense (I told him in the game thread I'd respond to his post directed to me when I was back at a PC) and read like he was just coming up with bullshit to push to look like he had a point (parallel: him saying in aforementioned newbie game I was pushing him over dodging my points because "I literally couldn't come up with anything else" when I had posted what, specifically, I had a problem with in his posts 3 posts above said post). I also don't think Nacho thinks attempting to "bait me into a push on him" is a good tactic and his reasoning for it is inconsistent given part of his initial push on me was me wanting to "chain lynch" him, which happened before he pushed me in the first place. this is even more so the case when he *knows* that I tend to snap-push people pushing me when I'm town if I have reason to think their push is bullshit: he's doing something that, in theory, he should know I'd be likely to react to alignment regardless. GIF's reaction to Titus's response to my
1650 (starting from
2036) was a huge off note in that Titus was really obviously just making shit up there and anyone who is reading critically should have been able to notice that, and then when Titus gave a half-assed response that didn't actually adequately address anything, we got ... nothing.
I'd also like to point out that, if I get lynched here and they *don't* open with a Titus push D2, flashlynch them into the fucking ground. I can, 100%, guarantee there is no way a town-Nacho here wouldn't see my flip and at the very least stop and realize he was in the wrong here.
FRESH: I actually have a pretty huge problem with Fresh's posts now that I looked at it from the top.
277 is something I saw initially; him going out of his way to justify his vote as a "joke vote" read as overly self-conscious. after that, I at first liked his "don't give a fuck" attitude, but I have the opposite impression of it after reading it again: I don't get the impression he's actually trying to find scum here. outside of the Jaqen push we have
1166, which is a lot of disconnected observations with no *real* critical thinking.
after that, the major issue I have is that there is no direct engagement with the Titus shitstorm that's been going on whatsoever - you know, the thing that's basically dominated this entire game day. there's a recurring pattern here that whenever he says anything about it, it's always something that doesn't have anything to do with what me or Titus have actually done in the game.
1166 had a softball question to Focus Beam about flavor spec (nothing to do with the pushes they've made) and then him saying he didn't like the two back-to-back votes on them (nothing to do with play again). I didn't make anything of
2079/
2081 when I first read it in that it's the exact opposite of the truth (he's saying Titus' wagon is on town because it's been stuck at 7 votes all day. DERP) but it didn't come off disingenuous, but after reading it again I think he was just BS'ing there because it really makes no sense - and, surprise, it is another thing that has nothing to do with their actual play and is entirely about outside factors. I don't get the impression he's actually trying to sort out the situation here, I think he's determining what conclusion he wants to push and fitting evidence accordingly and he doesn't want to engage with their actual play because it's a lot easier to BS arguments about outside factors than it is play and a lot harder to attack someone over something they actually did.
2257 is an awful post (and is the first time he actually attacked my play, which, surprise, came *after* the majority of the wagon formed on me already) - the first sentence is actually nonsense, and the third sentence, in addition to reading tonally like scum trying to discredit someone, entirely comes down to him saying something that's objectively wrong and me correcting him on it.
KABOOSE: anyone who looks at this slot and doesn't think "obvious scum" is, put bluntly, bad at this game. he has done, almost literally, no scum hunting whatsoever. the majority of his posts are coming from a "what can I post here to look OK mindset", rather than actually attempting to game solve - the questions he *has* asked have been for the most part entirely random and there's no internal consistency anywhere.
2150/
2153 is the most apparent example of this - I would absolutely love for someone to tell me what the town thought process behind this line of thought actually was - but there are others and I really don't see it necessary to elaborate on this bc it's fucking obvious if you read the man's ISO. I will also say that I am almost positive that his reads on Titus/my slot were premeditated, rather than him forming reads naturally. there was, quite literally, no reason for the Titus read given anywhere at all (starting from
1628; and the first mention of me (right after in
1630) is that a post I made was a "scum post" (again with no reasoning given). now, I could potentially see this as him thinking my aggressive play style was scummy, although anyone who thinks that way is bad at this game, but the thing is, I was pushing really really hard for a long time *before* that post. it looks like these reads, rather than being formed naturally, were done explicitly in response to the situation: he saw Titus continue to be in trouble (or, IF I'm wrong about Titus here, he otherwise decided to push me over for her for a different strategic reason I'm not thinking of at this point) and decided as a result to push me as scum/her as town. then he continued pushing Titus as town harder and harder the more trouble she was in (see:
2147).
TITUS: I would just like to reiterate that Titus is practically confirmed scum, for a variety of reasons. if I actually get lynched here and you *still* don't acknowlede it, you are legitimately fucking awful at this game.
