Open 575: Friends & Enemies-Together At Last (OVER)

[acryon]

mathdino is scum?

Because I agree that it's best to not leave BMWS at L-1.

[borkjerfkin]

because I asked him to

[borkjerfkin]

looking through more D1 stuff:

Mathdino's push on Wgeurts for 'mason fishing' (as if that were easily discernable between looking for scumbuddy interactions, especially considering it was pretty obvious Wgeurts generally had no idea what the fuck he was doing regardless of alignment) on D1 was fucking awful

[borkjerfkin]

VOTE: Mathdino

There are just things that don't sit well to me in his ISO and interactions today with people have been weird. I don't care how much he posts or how wordy those posts are.
I have compelling reasons to think others are town. acryon's trajectory on BMWS is a bit weird with his interaction with me - although his confusion as to why I'm just not getting it points to it making sense to him - but his ISO just doesn't read scum. I'm not sure how to articulate it. I do think one of the people pushing Constantine is probably scum because he was just such an easy target.

I think a common theme for him is that his read on people is somewhat overly commensurate with how much other people's cases make logical sense, which is something I kinda associate with scum who have no true gut reads because they're scum. Stuff like 830. There's a weird seam there between 'Riddleton's case on Vic sucks so I still think Vic is town' and 'Riddleton is scum for his [dubious] freudian scumslip' that just doesn't seem organic to me.

Only thing I'm getting from people townreading Mathdino is 'lol effort'. I hate to burst your bubble, but effort posting isn't alignment indicative. You can write cases to make any point you want, as evidenced by the fact that all of the people he's pursued as such have flipped the wrong way.

No, that's not a scumtell. But it's also not a towntell - there is obvious potential for scum motivation to do what he's done this game: aggressively and exhaustively pursue town. It gets them lynched and gets him townread. I think he knows when to capitulate (note his absolute deference to me as soon as I became confirmed, and I don't just mean not suspecting me, I mean not ruffling my feathers at all) and when to fight for things.

I think there are hints of TTH being on to him too (604).

I don't get the "Newbie if you're scumreading BMWS for hopping on to X wagons you should also be scumreading me for it" angle because it's fucking weird to have come from town.
1) Town should realize that scum buddy/sheep/parrot/whatever town all the time
2) BMWS is tonally nothing like Mathdino this game (hell just look at the postcount) and you're not comparing apples to apples at all. Hell you bolded what the wagons were while glossing over the reasoning. You really want to argue that BMWS made the exact same arguments that you did for everything? No? Then your point is bad.
3) The whole 'write a better case on BMWS' (rather then 'you scum Newbie?') request after all that gives him an easy out to just hop on BMWS later if whatever Newbie writes passes the smell test for

the other townies

(or at least he can sell it to them later so they buy it). This point is important - it's less about whether or not Newbie is scum for making the argument and more about making sure that his sheeping that BMWS isn't going to turn town against him tomorrow, because that is ultimately the difference between a town win and scum win tomorrow if he's scum. His whole thing about 'not lynching BMWS right then plays against scum-Mathdino's wincon' is fucking bollocks.

[borkjerfkin]

sheeping that BMWS case

ebwop

[acryon]

There's few things worse than seeing a solid case on someone that you have been town-reading all game. I feel like Mathdino and I came to a lot of the same conclusions on various players and situations, which makes it even worse.

In 831 Constantine points out that Wisdom was making the same conclusion as Mathdino in 830. Do you think Mathdino would sheep his scumbuddy in that spot?

[borkjerfkin]

There are few things worse than being compelled to make such a case, but seriously no one else is fitting for me like he is. But I am glad it's out there and can be relied upon as something that is genuinely believed by a town player.

@re your question: I think that's a little WIFOMy, especially considering site meta here is so distance-y/bussy. I've certainly sheeped my buddies as scum before.

[acryon]

Yeah, looking into that interaction and what followed, this post from Mathdino is causing me some trouble:

Look guys, it really doesn't look like a Victor or Constantine lynch is happening. Everyone who's scumreading Victor is already voting him, and the same happened with Constantine.

Let's switch to Riddleton before the deadline; we have enough support from both wagons.
Particularly paging

Newbie, Not_Mafia, Constantine, acryon, BMWS

.

Looking at it now, it looks a whole lot like it could be from scum. Mentioning that a Victor/Constantine lynch can't happen (which wasn't true since it obviously got there), so discourages people from pursuing either. This gets the town off of scum-Victor, but doesn't draw suspicion as a real defense because he mentioned the Constantine wagon not happening as well. Then says "let's switch to Riddleton," and tries to get the town there. I agreed that the VDA wagon was bad and one of Constantine/Riddleton was far more likely, but this little piece is throwing me through a loop.

Not sure whether I actually hope Mathdino is scum or not. I'm leaning towards the latter, but I'm still not sure.

[acryon]

Actually I strongly prefer him as town, because then it means I haven't played this game as terribly as I did. So Mathdino, please come back and hopefully clear some of this stuff up, because this game makes a lot more sense when I'm not questioning your alignment

[borkjerfkin]

Not sure whether I actually hope Mathdino is scum or not. I'm leaning towards the latter, but I'm still not sure.

Can you explain what this means?

[acryon]

Not sure whether I actually hope Mathdino is scum or not. I'm leaning towards the latter, but I'm still not sure.

Can you explain what this means?

I think 1933 explains it better, which is why I tried to clarify. I have found myself agreeing with him on almost everything. If he is town, then me and another townie just came to the same wrong conclusions. If he is scum, then I got played.

[borkjerfkin]

I guess that's fair.

[borkjerfkin]

I was really hoping to get a Constantine lynch because he is my #1 by a good bit over Riddleton. Can we really not get a Constantine lynch going? Because I would much rather hear what Riddleton has to say tomorrow after we have a couple flips out of the way, and I'm skeptical of the traction existing at this point for it to get there.

This is a person who has a very strong opinion about the lynch between two people who both flipped town. ++townpoints here.

[borkjerfkin]

To reiterate, this is a dissent at Wisdom's hopping on Riddleton and shifting the momentum away from his preferred lynch.

[borkjerfkin]

Dammiiiiit. Riddleton's last post is convincing enough. I'm going to eat you for that post if you end up being scum, Riddleton.

UNVOTE: Riddleton
VOTE: Constantine

If Wisdom and wgeurts switch to Constantine we're at L-1. At which point it's going to be up to Victor, TTH, and Malakittens.

Meanwhile this, when it happened, is a

fucking Victor counterwagon.

Look at the VC before it.

[borkjerfkin]

Especially since 870 is a bunch of dumb WIFOM and shouldn't be giving anyone the 'oh shit I was wrong' vibe like it allegedly did Mathdino

[Mathdino]

In the house, gimme a sec. I can understand why you had issues with my questioning of Newbie, so I'll explain that with your case.

[borkjerfkin]

Like I told Wisdom: I'm not interested in a rebuttal. Your goal is to convince me you're town no matter what you actually are.

Do something else.

[Mathdino]

There are just things that don't sit well to me in his ISO and interactions today with people have been weird. I don't care how much he posts or how wordy those posts are.
I have compelling reasons to think others are town. acryon's trajectory on BMWS is a bit weird with his interaction with me - although his confusion as to why I'm just not getting it points to it making sense to him - but his ISO just doesn't read scum. I'm not sure how to articulate it. I do think one of the people pushing Constantine is probably scum because he was just such an easy target.

He was also the obvious one what with... everything we had to suspect him; I'm not sure anyone even disagreed with that lynch.

I think a common theme for him is that his read on people is somewhat overly commensurate with how much other people's cases make logical sense, which is something I kinda associate with scum who have no true gut reads because they're scum. Stuff like 830. There's a weird seam there between 'Riddleton's case on Vic sucks so I still think Vic is town' and 'Riddleton is scum for his [dubious] freudian scumslip' that just doesn't seem organic to me.

Yeah, I remember that. Basically, people default town to me. When I see cases written by strong players, I think "Oh, this is probably going to point out something I haven't seen before", hence the 'prepared to vote Victor'. Of course, then I realised the case sucked, so I was back to square one with Victor. The scumslip thing was more of a nail in the coffin of an already scummy slot; recall what I asked people that day or D2, can't remember, it was "Is what Riddleton's done enough to redeem him from all the scummy things SilverWolf's done?" I gave Riddle a free pass since he was a replacement and not playing terribly, but then came the mistake he made and I was ready to go after the slot again.

Only thing I'm getting from people townreading Mathdino is 'lol effort'. I hate to burst your bubble, but effort posting isn't alignment indicative. You can write cases to make any point you want, as evidenced by the fact that all of the people he's pursued as such have flipped the wrong way.

No, that's not a scumtell. But it's also not a towntell - there is obvious potential for scum motivation to do what he's done this game: aggressively and exhaustively pursue town. It gets them lynched and gets him townread. I think he knows when to capitulate (note his absolute deference to me as soon as I became confirmed, and I don't just mean not suspecting me, I mean not ruffling my feathers at all) and when to fight for things.

Again, I fully admit I'm not an amazing scumhunter. But being wrong is not a scumtell, you have to understand this. Your case reads to me like you can't make sense of this game otherwise and you're trying to show people that a townread on me isn't accurate, and if so, I get that. But none of this makes me scum. It just shows the game isn't completely inconsistent with me being scum.
On the capitulation, I work with my townreads. That's all I got, I don't see the issue with that.

I think there are hints of TTH being on to him too (604).

Yeah, I buddied Wisdom too much early on. He was my strongest townread and his playstyle really spoke to mine. I do hope you can see why I did do that, though, and how it makes sense from a town perspective.

I don't get the "Newbie if you're scumreading BMWS for hopping on to X wagons you should also be scumreading me for it" angle because it's fucking weird to have come from town.
1) Town should realize that scum buddy/sheep/parrot/whatever town all the time
2) BMWS is tonally nothing like Mathdino this game (hell just look at the postcount) and you're not comparing apples to apples at all. Hell you bolded what the wagons were while glossing over the reasoning. You really want to argue that BMWS made the exact same arguments that you did for everything? No? Then your point is bad.
3) The whole 'write a better case on BMWS' (rather then 'you scum Newbie?') request after all that gives him an easy out to just hop on BMWS later if whatever Newbie writes passes the smell test for

the other townies

(or at least he can sell it to them later so they buy it). This point is important - it's less about whether or not Newbie is scum for making the argument and more about making sure that his sheeping that BMWS isn't going to turn town against him tomorrow, because that is ultimately the difference between a town win and scum win tomorrow if he's scum. His whole thing about 'not lynching BMWS right then plays against scum-Mathdino's wincon' is fucking bollocks.

I understand your issue with this, it was a ballsy line of questioning. Here's what I was going for: I thought it might've been possible Newbie had been going after the low hanging fruit today, and wrote up a case on BMWS instead of acryon or me because BMWS is easier to lynch. What made me suspicious is the fact that while acryon's case on BMWS was in depth as to the interactions between him and Wisdom and Victor, or the style of his posts, Newbie's case outlined behaviours that were not exclusive to BMWS. I figured that if she was town, based on her case, she should also be scumreading me for the same behaviours. So I told her to differentiate us, and put it in her own words.

acryon already wrote the best case on BMWS that's going to come today, IMO. The only thing that'll convince me to vote him is a damn good reason that acryon and Newbie are both town; this will have to override my huge gutread on him along with the part where he could've asked Wisdom wtf people meant when it came to the mason thing if he was scum. That's not what I was going for, and again, I highly doubt I'll be voting BMWS today. The idea was to see Newbie's thought process, because I already know acryon's fairly well.

What I meant back there was I came out of the gate with a case on BMWS after reading his ISO. You're correct in one thing: it IS easy to force a case to swing a certain way. My point is, with acryon and Newbie both suspecting him, why would I not write up a scumcase on BMWS, show everyone my 'thought process' as I usually do, and then enter LyLo with acryon and Newbie both townreading me?
Do you really think I would've gotten any flak for voting BMWS after writing a case on him? Would that be a sensible prediction given the position I was in?

Edit: Uh, shit. Sorry.

[borkjerfkin]

I'm not moved by any of this.

Like I said: do something else.

[Newbie]

I would like to hear bmws' thoughts on all of this.

mathdino, I feel like all you've done this game is call all my reads crap because of the fact that I'm fairly new at MS (I actually think my Wisdom and bmws cases were solid).

Also, since it's between me and acryon for you, which one are you going for?

[Mathdino]

If you're town, then I apologise for that. I don't recall calling your reads crap, but rather suspicious. Your Wisdom case read bussing at the time, and your BMWS case read like going after low-hanging fruit. Your reads list was extremely fencesitty.

Honestly, before wgeurts/Constantine got offed, I'd have gone with acryon, but as it is, his behaviour is starting to make me lean to you. I agree that BMWS's input is going to be important here.

[Mathdino]

looking through more D1 stuff:

Mathdino's push on Wgeurts for 'mason fishing' (as if that were easily discernable between looking for scumbuddy interactions, especially considering it was pretty obvious Wgeurts generally had no idea what the fuck he was doing regardless of alignment) on D1 was fucking awful

Forgot to respond to this. What threw me for a loop was that wgeurts entered the game with a Slayer Gambit and generally showed himself capable of

pretending

he had no idea what the fuck he was doing (and has shown himself to be capable of that in other games), so I figured he was mason-fishing using the mask of a newbtown. I realised the error when NM (in one of his actual useful posts) pointed out that if wgeurts is pretending to be newbtown, that extends to his games sitewide, which doesn't seem sensible.
Everything there hinged on the idea that wgeurts DID know what he was doing and was pretending not to. He's rolefished before as scum.

[borkjerfkin]

What threw me for a loop was that wgeurts entered the game with a Slayer Gambit and generally showed himself capable of pretending he had no idea what the fuck he was doing (and has shown himself to be capable of that in other games) so I figured he was mason-fishing using the mask of a newbtown.

lol no you didn't

you arbitrarily decided he was mason fishing because "interactive tells are different in a mason game" which is a silly argument in and of itself - just because masons will act a certain way doesn't mean that scum will necessarily act differently than normal to compensate, nor should you be holding anyone to that arbitrary standard you just created. But I think you know that.

Even if you hadn't said that, I can't get from "wgeurts is capable of playing dumb as scum" to "wgeurts is necessarily mason fishing right now and could not possibly be pre-flip associative scumhunting and is therefore scum", because legitimately dumb town would obviously be genuinely trying to hunt via associative tells, considering that's exactly what he said he was doing. The slayer's gambit or whatever the fuck doesn't even apply here; he's just scumhunting, which is the obvious way to interpret Wgeurts' play that you somehow missed.

Not buying it.

[Mathdino]

Alright, let's look at Newbie.

16 by Wisdom was an initial interaction, literally "Hi Newbie, how do you feel about voting Mathdino with us". Bit weird, nothing Wisdom hasn't done to town. Here you can see the resulting conversation, where they discuss the merits of RVS and Newbie seems to miss that Wisdom's vote was a serious one. Now then, the initial reason we all suspected Victor was for being semi-suspicious of me for asking for Newbie's meta. In 80 he says it's 'premature'. It's unquestionable this was out of place as any alignment, so the question is whether he did that in the hopes of getting suspicion going on me, or to defend Newbie. The latter scenario isn't inconsistent; his early weirdness might've been a result of premature panicking, resulting in soft-defence. Moving on from that,

Newbie's vote on wgeurts was sketchy, let's be honest. It's a soft-defence of Wisdom combined with a conspiracy theory on wgeurts. Here she discusses Victor claiming she voted wgeurts because he stood out to her (not bad) and then claims she was suspicious of Victor for the same reasons everyone was, but that his responses satisfied her. Except... she never stated suspicion on Victor. I said this before I think.

213 has Victor stating he likes "both the vote and point from Newbie in 124." Nothing standing out. Then here in 228 Newbie almost preempts her suspicion of wgeurts, saying that as town, she often jumps on extremely scummy players and they end up flipping town. Reads like preparation for possibly being wrong about wgeurts.

237, her Wisdom case. Now, let's be clear, Wisdom was not scummy D1. It was D2 where he stood out, but not early D1. See, Newbie was the first one to write up a case on Wisdom, stretching his actions a bit to look scummy, followed by going back to wgeurts. Scum tends to be hyperaware of their partners' shady behaviour because they know each other to be scum. wgeurts going after Wisdom, that makes sense from his perspective since he knew himself to be town and he was half OMGUSing. But Newbie- there wasn't really much to be suspicious of Wisdom for at that stage. Wisdom did not respond to said case.

Then right after I asked Newbie what her thoughts were on Wisdom's wgeurts votepost, Newbie votes Wisdom here with the validation of wgeurts's case. Then in 313 she arbitrarily townreads Silver for agreeing with her, and states that a Silver/Wisdom pair is unlikely for no discernible reason. But 324 is what I had an issue with back then. Newbie goes out on a limb and states that if Wisdom flips town, she's probably going to be a top scum candidate. This shows awareness of other's perception of her, and the fact that she was willing to gamble that made me think she might've been bussing Wisdom. I actually forgot about that until I think acryon brought it up. Well, Wisdom flipped scum and Newbie got her towncred.

341 shows a conversation between Wisdom and Newbie, where he repeats that one of {SilverWolf, Newbie} is scum, but that he's leaning toward SW. Newbie responds saying it can't be helped if multiple people find an action scummy. But here's the thing I don't like: Wisdom asks Newbie directly, " How do you think your and SW's votes look". He's asking her about how others would perceive her behaviour. This very strongly suggests coaching to me. Then in 389 she responds to my bussing accusation, along with echoing the statement that Silver/Wisdom aren't scum together with the statement that wgeurts is not bussing Wisdom. Doesn't state reasons for coming to this conclusion. Also I don't know about acryon, but I found her response to my thoughts on her/Wisdom rather scummy with the knowledge now that Wisdom is town.

681 is why we townread Newbie. This, I'm still having an issue with reconciling. I suppose scum-her could be just going along with TTH, but I don't know. I want to note to acryon, however, that BMWS had a very similar interaction, except he just didn't realise what we were talking about. So I guess the only person clearable from that is TTH?
I don't know. Moving on. Directly afterwards she states intent to go back to look at Victor because "a lot of people seem suspicious of him." Hm.

I believe I already commented on the fencesittiness of her reads lists, I'm not going to go back to that.

Reaction to the Victor lynch: Here she states that she wants more from Victor, saying there's more time for that, but then states that Victor was probably willing to run up the time in 925.

Here, here, and here Wisdom defends Newbie pretty hard. And then here Newbie agrees with Wisdom on the entire Mala argument but keeps her vote on Wisdom.
I didn't really feel like goign through and analysing the majority of the Newbie/Wisdom interaction, because it's back-and-forth and tiresome and could go either way.

But I do want to note one thing last. Newbie's cases on Victor and Wisdom were well thought out, somewhat in depth (her case on Victor was her reads list). However, her votes for Riddleton, Constantine, and acryon had literally nothing attached to them, they were bandwagoning (her wgeurts reasoning was pretty short). Her case on BMWS was the first case and vote she's made that wasn't on a scumpartner. I think this game she's been hyperaware of what her scumbuddies have been doing, and thus was able to gather up more info on them as opposed to the other wagons.

Edit: Responding to the above in a sec. Sorry for the length, I sometimes treat the thread as my personal notes.
tl;dr: The only thing stopping me from voting Newbie is the TTH interaction.