I've been trying to catch up but this game is massive and several of the players have posting styles that make it very hard to read so i've been forced to speed-skim isos which isn't really preferable but time is very limited so I'm trying to make the best of what I have. Really this game is frightfully hard to read, theres so many spammy/oneliner posters that are very difficult to read divorced from context.
Auro:
Spammy and very fillery, but I liked the analysis he produced in
3317, no reason for scum to attempt to defuse Tchill's mastina suspicion when no one was voting on the wagon, the way he questions people seems to have a general thrust of trying poke people to get a response from them that helps with solving the game. I wish there was more clarity on what his reads are though.
Hoctac:
Has been playing trollish since day 1 and it feels like a gimmick to guise alignment, especially don't like how the only times they seems to post seriously is when they're under pressure. A friend of mine told me long ago that when trolls start getting serious and contributing when pressured, it means they're scum because otherwise they'd just keep joyfully fucking around as then town lynches them and they gett to laugh when everyone rages at them for not trying. Justification for voting ETL in
982 is especially not good and the push/reversal on aristophanes in
2444 and
2449 is lame as fuck. Again the continued trolling just makes it seem like they're trying to ead them as infected but since they've been doing it since day 1 that read hardly seems valid.
Aristophanes:
ISO is massively fluffy and full of apologies for being absent from day 1. A majority of the posts have basically no content at all, a lot of pleasantries and setup speculation which of course is easy for scum to fake. Response to the ETL wagon looks solidly like white knighting, its something Ive done myself before as scum, defend the overemotional town voter because no one listens and it gets you town equity the next day. His response to pressure in
2461 is very apologetic/conciliatory which i tend to find comes from scum as there's a little bit of unconscious guilt there. His vote in
2559 for someone having "rubbed him the wrong way" is pretty poor justification and it seems notable that it's essentially a vanity vote when he was a major wagon, I think he wanted to avoid being seen as simply voting on a counterwagon to his own. Again responds to pressure in
2695 with WIFOM-y self meta.
2764 is total filler.
3078 is useless setup spec over game analysis. His attack on Jake in
3090 rings hypocritical for that reason, he attacks him for setup talk and theorizing when thats what he himself was engaging in and in fact initiated before Jake. In
3233 he says saudade is one of his preferred lynches, but this is literally the first time he's ever mentioned them so it feels very opportunistic given Saudade was one of the significaant wagons at the time (also notable that Quick, a player he mostly avoided having commentary on, was one of the others). Again in
3359 he does this weird dance with mastina where he's simultaneously conciliatory toward her while she's pushing him yet still claims to scumread her (
3415) which doesn't make sense from a town perspective, I'd expect to push back more on her if he really did scumread her but it seemed like a strategy to avoid a direct confrontation which would make him look bad. The attempt to call for a NL in
3459 looks really bad/makes no sense from a town perspective without knowing what town power roles there are as this would presumably just give the infection a chance to spread?
A big thin for me is when he claims to be working on a "solve" in
3893 but then just never delivers and gives up in
3935 which is only a day later, it's really common for scum players to promise content as a means of stalling because people always want to give them a chance, then they have trouble faking it so they never deliver and make excuses instead. Vote on Quick in
4226 is really lame an claims to have had him as scum in his "solve" but his only justification in
4234 is a partner read with Tchill but without much independent reasoning for either being scum. Again he continues with a very weird approach to mastina in
4441 where he both simultaneously calls her scum while simultaneously trying to appeal to her. His whole approach toward jake was a sort of "nice guy" routine where again he tried to look supportive of the player that was the lynch target for the day, all looks like an attempt to gather towncred by once again appearing to be against a mislynch. I don't like how he just tosses out townreads with no context in
4515. Once again responds to pressure in
5137 with defensive posturing and apologetics. He takes a stance similar to the first 2 days with 5G in
5941, again with a very soft approach toward 5G who was that days mislynch wagon but then lets himself jump on just a few hours later ([urlhttps://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?p=11869954#p11869954]5965[/url] when it needed a hammer to get pushed through and I don't care for his justification in
6038 while also bragging about calling each days mislynch as town (this is what scum do when they want to be applauded for their voting record).
6555 is a really scummy looking vote. He again make a promise of more content in
viewtopic.php?p=11882590#p11882590 saying "Once the game has thinned I'll be way more of a player" but still hasn't delivered in any way.
6762 is more self-defense which again he seems more concerned with than having actual reads.
7772 is a push on LQ which he has persistently been doing but its never really been justified, the only reasoning I saw from him is associations with Jake which were obviously wrong so its a complete mystery why the read continued to persist.
7785 is more excuses for not delivering content. Vote on cheeky in
7804 is really bad and never moves to gobble despite being adamant he slipped an calling him scum. By keeping his vote parked he enables the end of the day to get hammered. The emotional appeal in
8310. His posts today have seemed less unmotivated and more someone in cruise control, content they can drive the game home without saying much, him continuing to filler post looks like someone at ease with how things are going. Overall this ISO was by far the worst out of any slot and I had to restrain myself from just coming in and dropping a case right away becaue I wanted to at least survey the rest of the game
Quick/LicketyQuickety:
Really hard to read because his posts are so terse and his reads are mostly unjustified so it's incredibly hard to follow where any of them are coming from. The way they talk about Aristophanes also pings me in a bad way -
2021 reads like a soft defense of a teammate, also notable he went after Alchemist who was pushing Aristophanes at the time. Reads list in
is pretty shitty, none of it makes much sense. Response to pressure in
3786 doesn't look very good. Logic on voting okapoka in
3964 is also very poor. A big thing for me is that he claimed to strongly scumread Nahdia in
4051, maintained that read in
4149, but then came back in
4196 and called them town with the justification being "pressure on that slot (
4202), but in between him scumreading them and townreading them they posted 0 times and no one else voted them. It just doesn't look like a believable read progression from a town player. The claim to read 3 players as scum teammates in
5427 due to a lack of "Non-associatives" is basically nonsense and I can't see where it's coming from, it looks like it was pulled out of his ass. He keeps doing this dance where he calls aristophanes scum like in
8159 but never pressures there and instead leaves his vote on Cheekytown so the lynch can happen. Then he calls out Aristophanes today in
8544 but then backs down, claiming he's started to town tell in
8558 seemingly based only on
8545 which doesn't seem to contain any sort of towntell at all? Just a wimpy self-defense of "I've been trying but no one gives me credit and I'm not influential, I'm not scum". His attack on me in
8642 was pretty much nonsensical, I think he just wanted to push my slot as scum and didn't bother reading what I'd actually wrote so he made a straight-up inaccurate claim about my stance on the gobbledygook wagon.
TrueSoulEnery/Radical Rat:
Clearly town from TSE iso, the way he reacted to pressure and claimed was town and Rat appears to at least be doing a decent job of trying to put the game together and figure things out.
Miss Lynch/Okapoka:
The way Miss Lynch pressured and attacked players looked like genuine scumhunting, even though their tunnel on ETL was pretty bad, over the years I've found it's town who tend to overreact and pressure emotional selfvoters while scum prefer to sit back and wash their hands. Also liked the fact that they bothered to call out Quick. The way okapoka started the game asking for infected to out/his claim now is highly plausible to me, he'd have to be setting up for the long con as scum but then why make the survivor claim? Provides much less town equity than simply claiming to be townsided. Overall approach looks like legitimate scumhunting.
Nero Cain:
Its hard for me to point to things here, however something just feels off and I'm having a hard time putting it into words. He's taking stances and appears to be trying to scumhunt but I'm not really seeing any towntells. The way he justified voting for cheeky while calling gobble out on a contradiction with "they're both scum" doesn't sit right with me. His theory about scum being inactive in
7902 cuts right against my own, town is losing this game and losing badly so I'd expect most town players who have been in this game to become demotivated. Defense of Hoctac as "infected" rubs me the wrong way since he's been here since the start and should have seen the way Hoctac was playing, but keeps trying to handwave him away despite stating in
8009 "I think we don't stress about scum flavor that much and just lynch".
Tchill13/Firebringer:
Was somewhat ambivalent on tchill's play because I didn't agree with a lot of his reads, but it did come across as someone legitimately trying to sort the game, can appreciate them looking at mastina for driving the ETL mislynch even if it ultimately ended up being an incorrect read. The way he talks in
5392 looks townish, I think as scum a less influential player avoids expressing suspicion of those they view as stronger players because they don't want to get pushed back on. The way Firebringer backed down from Nahdia in
6734 looks town when that was a post he easily could have kept pushing on. General apathy and lack of motivation from him now also fits with my theory about town being demoralized.
I haven't bothered reading in the plausible claims pile yet because there's just not enough time and I felt this was a better use of my time. It seems somewhat likely that there may be a hidden infected outside that group
Reads (T -> S):
Radical Rat, Firebringer, Okapoka(I guess? not sure how to slot a survivor claim in here), Auro, Nero Cain, Hoctac, LicketyQuickety, Aristophanes
VOTE: Aristophanes
Station 13, is now taking pre-ins! Coming June 2020
Also this game is unique in that scum actually can and will just troll around and that's pro win-con.
