That kill is somewhat surprising; Socrates had floated a case that an N_M town flip would look bad for Gin, so I would have expected him to be kept around as a suspect for today. I was actually a bit suspicious of Socrates based on that case, thinking he might be lining up a day 3 mislynch knowing N_M would flip town, but Gin's death pretty much dispels that suspicion.
(There is room to imagine that a scum!Socrates might decide the Gin case hadn't caught on it was simpler to just push on an easier target, but I don't have any pre-existing scumread on Socrates so I have no reason to think this.)
Now here's an interesting observation: both lynch wagons have had exactly the same set of living players thereon (Antihuman/Gamma, Socrates, and myself). Thus the living players are neatly bisected into two groups: {Gamma Emerald, Socrates, Umlaut} and {BlackVoid, Edosurist}.
The unfortunate thing is that it's hard to know what to do with these groups. ZZZX earned her lynch and so did N_M; in principle I'd have no problem believing these were both all-town mislynches -- though as you'll read below, I don't actually think that's the case.
What I find extremely suspicious is that Gamma Emerald replaced into Antihuman's slot, said N_M was town, and
never moved his vote
or made any serious effort to convince on that point despite having posts available to do so. Wtf? Note that Antihuman himself unambiguously stated d2 that he was actually scumreading N_M when he made that vote; however, Antihuman said d1 that N_M was town. Then in his followup he moved him to null (while simultaneously saying he had nothing new to say about this), and on d2 was the first to vote him.
His position on N_M is all over the map; it's different in every one of his posts. Why? Well, N_M was already looking like the most likely lynch by the time Antihuman made his first post. I can imagine scum feeling they have more to gain by opposing that lynch than by supporting it, given that it was going to hit town. And I can also imagine scum noticing they've gotten criticism for the townread, modulating it a bit, then voting him after that quickhammer when they feel no one can possibly blame them for it.
On additional inspection, Antihuman never really did any meaningful scumhunting in his time here. Take a look at his reads in
26.
- Gin is somewhat town
- Edosurist is null
- N_M is null
- I'm slightly town
- Smiggles is town
- Socrates is town
- ZZZX is null
- Lycan is null
There is not a single scumread in this list. It's like a weak, wishy-washy version of the consensus read of the game at the time the list was made. Antihuman townreads the people everyone townreads, and nullreads the people that not everyone townreads. His actual vote is for ZZZX, and he can't give a better explanation than "I feel like this is the best place for my vote for now." Not even the best person
to lynch,
but the best place
for his vote.
Likewise Gamma came in, said "N_M is town" without making any serious effort to dissuade his lynch and while in fact
continuing to vote for him,
and never gave any reads on anyone else.
Let me say that one more time. Gamma Emerald contributed to a lynch of
the only player he explicitly townread.
So, let's suppose Gamma is scum. Who would his partner be? Well, I know it's not me; and his critique in
74 of "the people making excuses to vote [Not_Mafia] based on policy or whatever," along with Antihuman's own statement in
51 that Lycanfire's death "could mean there's scum between widely townread players, in which case my gut says Socrates," should tell you that it's not Socrates either. This leaves BlackVoid or Edosurist, which is in keeping with the intuition that most mislynch wagons will contain some but not all of the scum.
Dr. Smiggles had Antihuman among her scumreads, along with Edosurist (whom she voted).
In post 28, Prof Hamm T Smiggles III wrote:I think the TR on NM was a reach and Anti's answer to why NM's behavior is towny isn't convincing. NM's play here is anti-town. That doesn't mean he's scum. But to TR him for it like scum!NM couldn't or wouldn't play like this is a huge stretch. That's why I asked if Anti had played with NM and to explain this further and I'm not enthused by the response.
...
So Edo says there is a 25% chance of NM being scum, but Edo thinks he is hiding behind his meta (ie scum). Which is it? Is he 25% scum or you think he's scum? I don't see how those two statements work together. Also Edo thinks NM is scum because if he was town more scum would be pushing his mislynch. I doubt scum would be hard-pushing a mislynch on town!NM this early, and I'd like to know why you think this would be the case.
Edo's next scumread is ZZZX. But again, his reason is superficial. Edo's game does not show much thought about the motivations behind people's play and looks like scum unable to fabricate convincing scum-reads.
BlackVoid's own reads were all based on the assumption N_M was scum, which I'm a bit paranoid of as it would be a good excuse to throw them all away the next day. At any rate it's hard to take much from this as far as associatives are concerned.
Edosurist never really committed to a read on Antihuman:
In post 16, Edosurist wrote:His post reads genuine to me. I just wish he'd at least acknowledge that NM's posts were anti-town. There's not a whole lot to say here other than I'm looking forward to more from him in his next post.
...and never said anything about Gamma, except to promise to respond to his post and then not do it.
Now, is there any independent reason to think Edosurist is scum? Well, Smiggles thought so. So did Lycanfire, who was shot night 1. He got a lot of heat early on for having shallow, superficial reads, but everyone sort of moved on to other things (and rightly so; ZZZX kind of deserved that rope even if he didn't deserve it quite that quickly).
Add to this that I was already townreading both Socrates and Smiggles, and the solution is clear to me.
I believe the scumteam consists of Gamma Emerald and Edosurist.
...which doesn't necessarily mean we should lynch one of them just yet, because it's possible I'm wrong about one of them and we should decide which one I'm more likely to be wrong about. I think I'm more likely wrong about Edosurist, but we have some room for discussion. This is why, once again, I'm asking people to
please critique this case.
