Something about the assumptions being made in forming potential scum teams struck me as off, so I asked Varsoon whether someone who was able to double vote could have doubled their point contribution to our Beach-a-palooza event. His answer was slightly less useless than what he said in thread. He said it would depend on the role.
It is therefore
possible
that the missing half point is already accounted for. The possibilities that I can think of are:
- 1.) Skybird was able to count as 1 point towards the event and scum used that to set up false PoE pools. If we weren't steamrolling them, that could actually have been a really strong play as it's really late in the game and it's still not clear. Imagine if DGB didn't put her head in the noose or if Skybird didn't get killed by a gem event after Yume got zapped. Skybird being able to count as a point does make sense as a way to blunt the power of our event, given that we were able to do it so early and given how much PoE power it had. And we didn't even really get the maximum out of it due to the Not Chara getting 5 points thing.
- 2.) Farside could account for the point disparity, but it would require 6 groupscum and the traitor voting to help her ... OR she would have to be a leftover who joined the scum team after the event, much like the gems got a leftover after the event. I personally would discount this possibility mostly for gut reaction reasons. When we were allied with Farside I laid out my issues with her play, explained why I felt it couldn't have come from any town mindset and then asked her to explain her thinking behind each of the things she did in that stretch of really anti-town play. Instead of trying to justify herself or make a defense (as I predicted a scum or 3P solo winning Farside would), she simply said (paraphrased) "I got a really fun and cool role and I just wanted to have fun with it". So ... put together the number of things that have to be true for Farside to be the answer (starts as a leftover, votes for mastin, then joins scum after OR a very large scum team) plus the way she interacted with us in alliance ... this is a paranoia possibility to me.
- 3.) We are the third possibility. This would require us to be scum and have the beach-a-palooza event and, instead of waiting awhile to use it or just never mentioning it, going and actively engaging with someone who knows us really well and ALWAYS suspects us (Titus) and getting them to help us talk through it and what to say in thread and how to use it to try and maximize catching scum, and then pop the event as soon as possibly could, creating PoE pools super early in the game. I'm obviously biased because I know for sure that we're town, but I think objectively this just isn't a play that Cerb or I would ever make. There's no amount of town credibility (especially in a game where the mod warns the game that scum had their town claims and events/abilities made before the town roles so that they would have very believable fake claims) that is worth giving town that much PoE power, objectively speaking.
If you add some other things to why #3 doesn't make sense, I think that we're OTAF at this point. Since we are showing up in potential scum pools, I'm going to outline why that's illogical (read: dumb):
1.) We knew that Xykfu was a leftover who could choose to join the Crystal gems, via Almost50, early the day Xykfu used his event to kill skybird. We knew that his plan was to ally with scumspects and tell them he was a 3p who could join either side and try to get them to admit to being scum so he could kill them with his event. We knew his event had a stress requirement of +2. A50 told us like 11 and 1/2 real time days before Yume was killed.
1a.) Why is that important? Xykfu was only able to kill Skybird with his event because the scum team killed Yume out of the blue and that enabled Xykfu to use the Trap for Clods event to take out skybird. Now ... given that we knew what his plan was and the stress requirement, in what universe would a scum us have done (or not prevented team doing) the kill on Yume and raised stress enabling Xykfu to kill one of the scum team's super powerful roles (Go look at skybird's role card again if you don't remember). We would have to have been holding a planet sized idiot ball to do that, if we were scum.
This is why we kept information compartmentalized and only relayed to people were were conftown, by the way. If scum had known about Xykfu, the game state would likely be WAY different right now, if not already game over we lose
2.) Despite the fact that she always suspects us in every game ever, we earned Titus' trust before she died (Shiro can confirm if he ever gets around to being willing to read that chat). Further, we had an ability we haven't talked about. I emphasize
had
because Titus stole it from us after we told her about it and asked how we could use it with her help and misdirection. That ability could have provided conditional clears or near certain guilties, if used properly. There was a possibilty of getting that same ability given to a 2nd person and we asked Titus to help co-ordinate using it to get through the PoE pools faster and find scum using us as bait while the other person with the ability would not be outed. Shiro can, again, confirm this. Ask him about my initial reaction to Titus stealing our role (or make a note to read yourself post game) if you want a laugh.
3.) Both we and MoI possess a similar ability which implies that scum has a trick up their sleeves. We claimed this ability before we were informed of MoI's abilities, so we legitimately have it, and I believe it's not at all a co-incidence that the CGs and Earth both have the ability.
4.) We knew the details of how MoI's protection worked (again, Shiro can confirm if he ever sees this and goes and checks...) and yet the scum team shot at MoI. Obviously this could be WiFoM, but in the context of this game, I think it's silly to dismiss it as evidence because "WiFoM". Specifically I'm talking about the fact that the scum team had already had a failed kill, lost a member to a Crystal Gem event, and if they were paying attention should have realized there was a lot of protection in the game. Intentionally giving up a night kill just makes no sense. It makes much more sense to believe scum didn't know about MoI's protection (and given how much other protection had been claimed prior, it would make sense for them to assume the shot would work).
I'm sure there's more, but I think that should suffice to demonstrate that we're not scum. A scum team with our knowledge simply wouldn't have done a lot of what the scum team has done this game. We were informed of so many things that hurt the scum team's chances that it borders on literally not sane to have us as anything other than "As town as one can be without being investigative/mod confirmed".
So I'm going to assume that the remaining scum are in the didn't vote for Mastin or Titus or claimed no vote pool, with Farside as a paranoia suspect. I think if you all objectively evaluate the information, you'll come to the same conclusion. Given our position, I'm pretty sure we're literally in 100% win probability territory now as long as we make no catastrophic mistakes. Presuming Fuzzy is town, I don't even think fuzzy shooting town pushes us out of 100% win probability at this point.
That said, can we please avoid squandering this? SU1 still bothers me and I don't want a repeat.
I know this is a long post, but I'd appreciate you reading it. Thanks.
Now as I see it, the scum pool is (most to least likely in my view): (Creature, TFL, Shiro, Grapes, S_S with Farside as a paranoia prospect).
- Ummm... really obvious.
- This should also be obvious I think.
- Obviously skimming the game. Given that he missed us citing things Titus said and asking for him to confirm (and then bizarrely asked us to confirm something that isn't there), he's not really plugged in. That feels like demoralized scum (and could explain the MoI shot if Shiro is scum: if he missed the post outlining MoI's abilities or just skimmed it and missed the protection). It's also possible that it could just be lazy town assuming a win given our strong position.
- I am tempted to put Grapes before Shiro. There's no real reason to read him either way, except for the Historical Fiction event which indicated he was targeted night one; however, there are two glaring failure points with that being used as a clear. Firstly, the event was from TWIE and TWIE chose which submitted actions to turn into truth, so it's possible that TWIE simply lied so it would look like Grapes was targeted by the scum team as an attempt to get him "cleared". The second failure point is that DGB had the ability to re-direct the scum kill. Then there's the fact that Grapes is literally coasting along at this point on this "clear" and my "gut" is bothering me a bit. (As a note, I'm not a "gut" person as I believe "gut" is just your brain telling you something is wrong but ... you get the point).
- I have a really hard time believing that the scum team were given a goon in this game. That seems absurd. Almost certainly he got stuck with the token vanilla townie slot in a role madness game. To be fair, though, that's literally the only reason to posit him as town.
Now we have 11 people alive and 1 or 2 scum seems likely. 3 is in the possibility space but that would mean SEVEN scum in a 25 person game. That means they need at least 2 mislynches and 2 successful night kills to get to MYLO (if 3 scum) but more likely they need 3 mislynches and 3 kills to get to MYLO (positing 2 remaining scum) and then they would need to get a 4th mislynch to win.
In other words ... this is probably in the bag but let's be careful just in case.
~Drixx
P.S. - Sorry for the Great Wall of Drixx here. I started putting my thoughts down and sort of got carried away.
P-Edit: A50 knew about Xykfu's ability and plan a day earlier than we did and therefore it seems super unlikely that a scum team with him on it would have allowed any of their members to ally with Xykfu. That's our biggest reason for viewing him as likely town.
