I promised some feedback - here I go. This is actually abnormally difficult because you just played a really solid game.
You replaced into a TPR slot who was at risk of falling into the PoE pool and potentially being lynched, just by virtue of your predecessor's posts and lack of activity. The best thing to do in this situation is to post enough to be townread, but without either: 1) underselling it, being overconfident in your entitlement to survive, or focusing too much on your survival (these are town power role perspective slips); or 2) kicking down doors and painting a target on your back. I think you did this pretty much perfectly, whether incidentally or by design. your opening readlist was:
Some things I really liked about this post:
- your take on Mack was elegant and effective. One of the things that prompted me to heavily reevaluate my read on him was that other newer folks were just like "this dude is town". I kind of recognised that my initial read was equally attributable to newness and scumminess, and you should definitely feel that you played a big part in Mack being taken off the table as a lynch
- your reaction to Claim didn't look like you were scum. Robb tunnelled Claim for policy reasons (which is something that could come from either alignment, whether pushing a mislynch, earnestly pushing a lynch, or bussing). emps immediately flipped on Claim, as though he has prior knowledge that the posts came from the scum pt ("TMI" was the soft scumtell for emps here). In a world where either of these guys were scum, they were trying to dramatise the pt slip situation in order to look like they weren't scum with Claim. if you look at something and have a feeling like "this person wants to look like they aren't associated with this caught scum", I'd always encourage reevaluation. now we come to the inverse: you nullread Claim by his ingame content, and asked the mod a question to try and clarify whether or not it was a scumslip. In a world where you are scum with Claim, you have seen him hard scumslip, then tried to nullread him through the situation. This is like, the typical spot to look for scumbuddies in readlists. Which means you didn't try to capitalise on the scumflip to look towny. This is a pretty abstract tell, sorry for the long-winded explanation, but I think the considered approach you took to this was ironically anti-associative.
- within 4 hours, you reevaluated your read on Robb using both ingame reasoning and supporting meta. this was within 5 posts ingame, as well. I think scum in this situation let their readlists simmer a little longer before heavily reevaluating. your reevaluated read on Robb was also correct which is a huge bonus.
the main critique I'd make of the reads is the read on emps, obviously. you should take this as a feather in your cap though for a few reasons. firstly, you reevaluated this read and reached an entirely correct conclusion. but also the fact you were willing to talk to me (former scumread) about emps (former townread) in such good faith come d3 was really impressive. actually you handled my replace-in in incredibly good faith; paranoia is very easy to have, and very easy to fake as scum. what I liked about your paranoia is that you stated it, we had a quick chat about it, then you went back to reevaluating my slot's alignment at face value. this breaks down tunnels; it's really solid townplay.
ok back to the emps read.
you cited 152-159 as the main posts which you agreed with - I think he raised some points, but I think the way he conducted himself in them was pretty scum indicative.
152 is a good starting point; at a policy level he's not wrong about Cyrus. but when he talks about Cyrus pushing everyone, he is really conspicuously talking about Cyrus' towngame. emps continues to use townreading language around Cyrus' slot, despite having no stated stance on it and being comfortable with the lynch going through. this isn't immediately obvious from this post alone, but when sitting back and thinking about his ISO up to this point, I found his stance on Cyrus to be opportunistic.
after emps' vote on doc he also waits thru Cyrus posting then Mack posting once, until Mack posts a second time criticising emps' vote on doc. within 3 minutes, emps has reappeared to defend himself and his reasoning for the doc vote; this has signs of someone who is actively checking the thread, but not looking to actively engage others in solving discussions and advance the gamestate. I agree with Mack's take here that doc's posting was pretty transparently misguided, but I understand I was spoiled on Doc's alignment
; the most scum indicative part of emps case against doc is that he feels doc was trying to pocket Cyrus.
so from a cynical duck's pov this series of posts was:
> shading Cyrus without trying to sort his alignment
> voting doc for nulltells
> lurking until called out on the vote
> scrambling to find a reason to justify the vote afterwards
again this is from the deep dark recesses of my paranoia; the fact you checked yourself on emps and evaluated against my read in good faith is actually a huge pro.
I've talked at great length about this, so I'll keep the rest of my commentary brief (it's mostly just net positive): I got the feeling through the game that you really believed in your reads. the way you'd play devil's advocate when we were all dogpiling the scum!emps theory, the way you'd chime in to defend your Mack townread, etc.
you consistently engaged with other slots in good faith, and then reconsidered their alignment outside of real-time interactions. this makes you much less likely to fall for scum smooth talking, and much more likely to pick up on more nuanced alignment tells.
you were present in the game and kept the gamestate moving in the right direction, without explicitly being LOUD (a la myself, dongempire, Robb) and painting a target on your back as a town power role.
you should be very proud of this game. it wasn't exactly a super hard solve, but a win is a win: you were quite fundamental in keeping town cohesive and advancing the late gamestate into a town win.
hopefully the contrarian read helped put that in perspective a bit, though.
