Anime U-Pick: King Size [SEASON FINALE...?]

[Dunnstral]

Almost50 either can see into all neighborhoods, is hiding in my neighborhood but won't reveal, or had his scum mates in my hood relay my thoughts to him

Let's start with #3. Now that you know/suspect there's scum in there you need to decide whom it is. THAT is a good starting point.

First step is to lynch you

[Joan of Arc]

I demand a public apology from all of you for being wrong if he flips town.

[Dunnstral]

nope

[Dunnstral]

I said that in reaction but I don't want FL lynched either

[Near x Mello]

so who are ooba's buddies dunn?

~Near

[Joan of Arc]

nope

I am not asking. I am demanding. If you wanna be idiots, at least accept responsibility for it. >.>

[Joan of Arc]

But if you wanna remain idiots, then you go ahead. But don't you dare blame me or shrug it off constantly.

You seem happy in your niches and so you don't bother reflecting on what you've done wrong and thus you don't learn or try to improve. Worse, you keep telling me I'm the one who refuses to learn. Well, maybe you should try looking in the mirror rather than flinging accusations left and right.

[Chito and Yuuri]

Chito: Joan can you hit us with a full reads list?

[Spike and Jet]

FL, RP, A50 are all plausible ooba buddies
probably some more options among my trs

[Near x Mello]

almost is pretty town

the other two, yes

~Near

[Ankamius]

Joan talk to me please

Do it in the PT if you'd rather do that but I want to know where your head is at atm

[mastina]

I don't have a while lot of time currently so I won't comment on most of it, but if your PoE is accurate, I believe you have the exact team nailed since I'm currently townreading both Almost50 and Gamma Emerald.

Which is a fine way of creating a strong cognitive dissonance within me--
I NEVER have the exact scumteam pegged.
I do well.
I get in the right zone.
But I always make mistakes.
I always make oversights.
I always have a flaw in my process.

So if you're saying, "if my POE pool is accurate, I have the scumteam pegged" translates to "there's a scum I'm townreading".

The dissonance comes in, though...in that I really don't know who it'd be.

Honestly at this stage I think the right play is to lynch both the Flavor Leaf and Robert/ooba slots, with Toogeloo set to die tonight, and then off of a combination of roles and flips, figure out where the poe went wrong, where the poe was imperfect, with that extra info unavailable on D2.
Or I guess get a perfect town win, if I really did nail the team, but the chances of that are, statistically speaking, so astronomically low that realistically speaking, we should prepare for the assumption that 1-2 of those three flip town.

In other words:
Work under the assumption those three are the scum, but

plan

for them not all being scum; continue working on trying to get a more perfect solve, but work under the solve we currently have until such a time as we have a better one.
The best solve I've got is ooba-Toogeloo-FLslot; I'll be working with that until I have a better one.

[Near x Mello]

Toog is the wrong one

~Near

[Almost50]

Almost50 either can see into all neighborhoods, is hiding in my neighborhood but won't reveal, or had his scum mates in my hood relay my thoughts to him

Let's start with #3. Now that you know/suspect there's scum in there you need to decide whom it is. THAT is a good starting point.

First step is to lynch you

Now THAT is what drives me nuts about you. You wanna lynch me? DO IT! NOW ANSWER MY BLOODY QUESTION! WHO IS BLOODY SCUM IN YOUR CHANNEL?

[Ankamius]

Let me talk to the FL replacement in the PT when they arrive, I'm still conflicted about that slot and want another brain to pick

[mastina]

I feel like the game is less solved than everybody thinks it is.

I know that, but I also can't figure out where I would be wrong.

Players who have been scumread outside of my poe pool most strongly are Near x Mello (who was a former scumread of mine), Reasonably Psychotic (ditto), and Elena Fisher; those three run into the same problems that ooba, Flavor Leaf, and Toogeloo do; the solve is "too easy".

But I don't want to get paranoid for no reason. Yeah, there's justifiable paranoia in me knowing I'm not

that

competent...
...Yet at the same time. I don't want us to have had locked in the scum, only to go off on a tangent and lynch town because we second-guessed the solve that was mostly right in favor of a solve that is mostly-or-entirely wrong.

Which is why I want to hold course today; even if our solve isn't right, I feel it is at least MOSTLY right--I feel we are mostly looking in the right places, and with the benefit of roles, flip, and time, we can figure out the small details we initially/currently got wrong to hone in, refine, and perfect the solve.

In other words--I feel we should stay to our current course, "it's too easy" be damned; it may feel easy, but it also feels like it's in the right direction, and changing directions would thus lead to a direction more likely to be mostly-or-entirely wrong.

Or, to put it in a common phrase:
"Perfection is the enemy of good".
I think we have a GOOD solve--not a

perfect

solve, but a GOOD one.
If we try to search for the perfect solve, we're likely to throw away the good one and end up with a shitty, entirely wrong one.

Make sense?

[Joan of Arc]

Chito: Joan can you hit us with a full reads list?

Read list

Town: Pink Ball, Morality, mastina, Clemency
Scum: Near x Mello, Reasonably Rational

Null: Everyone else

[Chito and Yuuri]

Chito: So you have no reads on Elena, ooba/rob, Gamma, Dunn, or STK?

I mean I guess I get it if everyone else is in like some shade of grey but you seem to be complaining a lot about the propose FL lynch without really evaluating Rob/Ooba, Gamma, Elena, or anyone else under consideration?

Do you think Dunn's push on Ooba/Rob is good and town-motivated or a scummy push on a lurker slot?
Do you think Gamma really liked FL's case on N&M and has a town retraction when she was pushed on her 180 there, or that she is scum who can't remember where she's pushing?
Given you have Clemency/Ankamius as one of your own townreads, do you feel like Elena's push on that slot had merit?

I guess I'm a little surprised you're at 6 reads out of 100 pages tbh, particularly given the vocal enthusiasm you put behind mastina's reads earlier in the game and the relatively high dissonance you have with them now.

[Ankamius]

Which is why I want to hold course today; even if our solve isn't right, I feel it is at least MOSTLY right--I feel we are mostly looking in the right places, and with the benefit of roles, flip, and time, we can figure out the small details we initially/currently got wrong to hone in, refine, and perfect the solve.

I can't shake the feeling that town is being shepherded, though. And with a playerlist like this, I think there's a pretty short timer for scum to kill off all the players that are most likely to catch on to what's happening before they get enough of an advantage to take over the game.

The way the game is set up right now feels like a trap.

[mastina]

Like... if this is as dire a situation as it seems and FL is scum, wouldn't he have seen this kind of thing coming and made steps to prevent it?

To the limits of his ability, he did--by the time people were pushing him on D2, he was already SOLIDLY entrenched. Not partially, he was ENTIRELY entrenched, ready for anything and everything thrown his way.

It seems unlikely to me that he suddenly realized he needed to pocket the entire neighborhood because his entire team got PoEd out after the fact

The team wasn't poed until after the neighborhood was pocketed. The neighborhood pocket came WELL prior to the proposed game solves we have.

Unless of course you're suggesting that Reasonably Psychotic and Near x Mello and Dunnstral (the names I dropped out of the initial poe pool) contain scum for this hypothetical scenario--THAT 'solve' may come prior to the neighborhood pocket since it happened N1, so THAT scenario is in fact unlikely, where he suddenly realized he needed to pocket the entire neighborhood because the team got POEd.

Okay I'm probably wording that poorly.
Basically, there's a conflicting timescale with that.

The scenario of "realizing he needed to pocket the neighborhood to avoid the team POE" only works with RP/NM/Dunn included as the scumteam, making it as you said not very likely...
...BUT, that's not what actually happened. He pocketed the neighborhood before the POE pool existed. Robert didn't enter it until well after D2 had started; he wasn't in it by and large until after D2 had started; the pocketing of the neighborhood happened well before the current solves were even remotely formed.

Because at the start of D2, there were a lot more people pushing players like Elena, Near/Mello, Reasonably Psychotic, etc. The first wagon of D2 WAS Reasonably Psychotic, in fact; half way to a lynch. You have the timestamps so you'd know for sure, but wasn't the neighborhood already pocketed by that point?

Which means that if the neighborhood was pocketed by that point, then it wasn't in fact "needing to pocket the neighborhood to avoid the team POE", it was more "having already pocketed the neighborhood as part of a prior plan, he utilized it to its full extent when the team poe became actually threatening", more or less.

Plus with all the different wagons D1...

Context makes a difference, there. Near the end of D1, there were a bunch of different wagons--but literally none of them held any lasting momentum. Vedith's wagon remained strong throughout the day, and his play only made him look worse. His stances looked like scum, his flavor claim was impossible, and his role claim was counterclaimed.

ONE of those would be enough to earn him a lynch--maybe not inevitable, maybe something that could be fought, but something still likely to go through even if rallied against.
TWO were enough to seal his fate, condemning him for good--there was nothing which could be done to save him at that point.
ALL THREE just sealed the deal beyond any doubt. Vedith couldn't escape the noose--and the scum knew it.

The different wagons on D1 are telling, sure, but they don't tell the story of "scum could've counterwagoned Vedith but chose not to"; they tell the story of "scum tried to counterwagon Vedith but literally

couldn't

".

[Ankamius]

Are you certain the vedith lynch wasn't pushed through by scum because it would solidify the rest of their positions?

I'll have to look into how those wagons shifted around to have a better theory about it but I'm not sure how that wagon goes through without scum support based on the wagon sizes and speed?

[mastina]

There was something else I read from you mastina, that I wanted to reply to, but I don't recall what it was.

Probably me commenting on Drixx's read of me, where I said that while my word couldn't be trusted on the subject, your would and you'd vouch for what I said RE: him.

[Joan of Arc]

No. If I see Near x Mello lynched, I might develop those, but you're refusing to do that.

[mastina]

I feel like he's better than this push and I didn't like how he worded the PT point for FL-scum.

He's better than this as scum, too--much, much, MUCH better than this as scum.

[mastina]

I can't shake the feeling that town is being shepherded, though.

Who's the shepherd, though?

The main leaders of the town right now are myself and Near x Mello--I suppose you could give arguments about others (e.g. Torque, Chito/Yuuri), but gamesolvey as they may be, they don't have the force of personality I'd imagine a shepherd to have.

Is the shepherding being done behind the scenes?

It takes a scum player of VERY high caliber to pull that off--who in this list can do that besides myself, maybe-Almost50, Morality/Flavor Leaf, or Reasonably Psychotic. And in the case of Reasonably Psychotic, I already laid out why I don't feel this is Cerb's scum manipulation; there isn't so much as a single trace of it as far as I can see.

There's no shepherding being done publicly aside from myself/Near x Mello.
There's no shepherding being done behind the scenes as far as I can tell, aside from that which Morality/Flavor Leaf did.
So who's the scum shepherd? I don't see it if it's not Morality/Flavor Leaf.