Not cop.
I buy LaLight's claim. ScumLight gains nothing from sticking his neck out like that just to town confirm marshy. There isn't even anything approaching serious momentum for a marshy wagon today, nor should there be. Why blow a big fakeclaim when under barely any pressure to clear a slot that frankly no one has strong opinions about? The whole having to wait until N3 for another investigation being motivation for claiming now makes perfect sense to me given LaLight's articulated fear that he may not live that long. Plenty of folks, myself included, have been tossing around LaLight as a preferred play so I think his claim comes from a place of town motivation i.e. he wants to reduce confusion and allow people to focus their attention more fruitfully, and of course provide the town with a nice clear on a hard to read slot.
I think the arguments re: whether a cop ought investigate null slots or top scum slots is debateable and kind of a wash. Investigate nulls and you get info on slots that will be the hardest to read later due to lack of associations with the people who flip early, at the risk of missing important early game clears/guilties to secure early game scum lynches/avoid early town mislynches. Investigate top scum reads early to avoid early mislynches and correct poor groupthinky scumreads, or confirm them for easy early game town advantage and of course the ever crucial scum flip, at the risk that you let those null reads remain null and become nasty question marks in the late game.
Either way, whether or not I think LaLight was strategically optimal in choosing marshy is kind of irrelevant. Point is it makes sense given his order of operations in sheeping marshy and then basically saying lol fuck it and just spilling the beans.
In post 1822, Ranmaru wrote:Lalight, here is the thing. You played a suspicious and weird game. You haven't been as proactive as I would expect from a cop. Compare that to Mulch's play.
Uhhhhh what? Why in the world would a cop want to be a huge obnoxious presence like mulch was early on? If you draw that much attention to yourself you're likely to be either heavily scum read or heavily town read by a decent chunk of the game. Lots of townreads gets a bullet which is horrible cop play. Lots of scumreads puts you on lynch lineup which might force you to claim early which is horrible cop play. Being questionable enough to not eat an NK but also townie enough to avoid lynch pressure is the sweetspot big PRs really ought to shoot for. Im not saying that LaLight hit that sweetspot, but how the fuck do you think mulch is emblematic of "expected" cop play? I couldn't disagree more here. Drawing attention to oneself like mulch did so early in the game is antithetical to the play a strong town PR should exhibit IMO.
Transcend has been on an upward trend IMO all game and him sticking his neck out to confirm a slot like LaLight only continues that. Ignoring the actual circumstances of how this claim played out, I think anyone would recognize that LaLight's slot wouldn't necessarily be believe at face value. For example, if we were wagonning LaLight right now and then he made this claim to save his ass, I doubt it would be received all that well. LaLight & Transcend being scum together doing a joint claim and support gambit is outrageously risky and doesn't make any sense for them to try to pull at this point in the game. And frankly, if Transcend and Lalight are scum pulling this stunt, why would Transcend offer such a vague confirmation? "I have reason to believe that he's actually an Odd night X" really to me makes a pretty clear suggestion about what's in Transcend's role PM, but it's still not offering much. Whereas had transcend really wanted to, he could have claimed something more powerful along the lines of tracker/reporter to say "Hey, LaLight actually did a thing last night, can confirm." I mean by claiming he has indicative info in his role PM, he's already claiming to be non VT, so why not go all the way if you're trying to pull a mega gambit?
Point is, I don't see scumTranscend and scumLaLight working together here. Willing to trust both of their claims. And I just really like Transcends lynch pool. Firescreamer can go for having obvious D1 interaction derivative motive to kill adum, Agent Sparkles for having a massively sketchy wagon stall followed by an almost effortless stampeding of Zulfy, and Gamma just because my gut hasn't like that slot all game and his play hasn't really done anything to assuage it. Down to start with FireScreamer though, as I agree with Transcend that he and FireScreamer were to two grossest votes on Zulfy. Speaking of which, I respect transcend's self awareness on that front but am also sympathetic to his impatience and wanting to end the day for some flips. Frankly I was feeling the same itch D1 which is why I was so irked by the fact that the AS wagon was going no where, a wagon which I felt actually had some merit and would have produced a much more useful flip.
Also Firescreamer and AS posting "I'll post something meaningful later" posts and not even reacting to Lalight's claim and Transcend's support of it is mind boggling to me. I have plenty of re-reading to do, namely going through adum's post and all of my top scum reads to crystallize those, but none of that is necessary to interact with recent developments meaningfully. Just feels stally, like they're taking their time to deliberate how to interact with such a potent claim.
VOTE: FireScreamer
That's L-2 as a heads up. Going to try to do some of my re-reading today, particularly re: FireScreamer and adum's observations and I'll comment on what I find to be illustrative
FACT: Rapid chain teleportation is like having all of your matter instantaneously squeezed through a hole the size of a photon uphill both ways simultaneously.
). AS, Zulfy and Gamma are all fine plays IMO so I'll give him some cred. Also was expecting him to try to take more advantage of my early game laziness after he went and took my initial "big" post so seriously. When he dropped it after my response it made him seem slightly less opportunistic but he also seems good enough to realize pushing that too hard would've looked really bad and didn't want to catch full heat for pushing a lynch on such a shaky basis. Not quite a townread but not a top end play today IMO.
