TM 2021 Large Normal 2: Wikipedia Integer Facts (Over)

[mastina]

But the fact that you're fixed on this, on why LLD pushed you originally feels unproductive and like you should know it would be unproductive.

Is it tho?

Because part of my scumread on LLD comes from the original push--very much not unproductive.

Like, you haven't commented on much else in this game

hercule at that point in the game had 78 posts--448 was very much commenting on things, 451 if it was like yours meant as a readslist is inherently giving thoughts, 454 might not be scumhunting but it is engaging, 523 is a stated townread of Xtoxm, 524 is a valid thought, 525 explains his reads, 527/528 give elaboration, 735 was engaging on the subject further, 736 is a similar reachout from hercule that hercule did to LLD in that it can be an actual genuine question (if the answer is 'no', then nothing comes of it; if the answer isn't no, then the answer could inform hercule of their alignment, so yes this question counts as scumhunting), 740 is asking more from Almost50, 741 is another stance, you get a readslist in 743 which in the pedit gives a more nuanced thought, 746 is good analysis, 747 is an actual detailed thought, elaborated upon in 767 for explaining it; 757 gives an elaboration on his stances; that, before the LLD engagement.

That's plenty of commentary. Is it as much as it could be given 78 posts at that point? Why no, no it's not, but hercule was spending a significant amount of time shitposting and has a reasonable amount of fluff. But is that plenty of content for 78 posts? 17 posts plus the LLD engagement that counts as scumhunting as well which brings the total up to ~28? ~36% of hercule's posts contain content at that point in time. That's not a bad ratio; that's actually an amazingly GOOD ratio.

and as a townie I would expect you to while maybe devoting some attention to LLD, have more thoughts outside of that.

hercule's posts have done exactly this.

I'm suspect of you now not because of anything LLD said originally, but because I think your reaction to pressure here is bad.

And I am hard-townreading hercule because his reaction to pressure this game is night and day different to his reaction to pressure last game where he was scum.

Like why does it matter that you don't think LLD has good reasoning to be pushing you?

A better question would be why WOULDN'T it matter? I can think of literally dozens of reasons why LLD not having good reasoning would matter; I can think of no reason for why LLD not having good reasoning wouldn't matter.

[Dannflor]

VOTE: hopkirk

[Lady Lambdadelta]

Also we can't let Mastina be this wrong and live to lylo? Just FYI?

Like you guys do need to actually kill her at some point.

[mastina]

I don't think the actual position he's taking here is AI at all

I agree with this, but with a caveat: the position he's taking here is probably not AI.

The way he's handled it absolutely IS; it is a polar opposite of how he handled it when he was scum.

[Dannflor]

I don't especially want to kill one of my top town reads

although it's frustrating I have no way to engage with her

[Dannflor]

let's just not let the game get to lylo

[mastina]

does that make a difference? look how hercule came to vote me, and how when i refused to interact with him in the way he wanted he then decided his vote was really real only THEN.

So? hercule had you in his "not done anything townie" pile. DGB asked him to vote you; he obliged. He then, after voting, continued to try and sort you; he concluded scum.

There is nothing scum in that progression because if you say townies don't vote a nullread they've seen nothing town from when asked to by another player, and later sort the player they're voting as genuinely scum, you're a fucking liar; that behavior is incredibly common especially from players of your generation. Having a "nullread" that you're willing to vote and continue to sort after voting is not scum behavior.

If anything, it's a townie behavior, but even if you disagree, it's definitely null-at-worst. Which is definitely not scum.

Because I too believe his frustration here is completely real. He is GENUINELY upset and frustrated. That's not fake. But his frustration and upset here don't mean shit because the frustration is easily explained by him being upset at how I got to my read, likely because it was right.

This is a reasonable argument in isolation but falls apart when given the context of last game, which I have shown.

hercule, last game, was frustrated and upset at me--I was right on him, and he exploded.

hercule, this game, is frustrated and upset--but the frustration is nothing like the frustration he showed when I was right on him.

If hercule were scum this game, I would expect him to show similar behavior to last game, maybe even worse. (If he were scum twice in a row, and scumread by a player twice in a row for seemingly no reason, I'd expect his blowup to be WORSE the second time, due to the sheer implausibility of getting scum twice, being widely townread twice, only to have one player scumread him and be strong about it.)

Instead, hercule's reaction to the pressure this game is night and day different--the frustration and upsetness is present the same, but what he did is entirely different.

Do you want to address the point that Hercule is flailing about not for being misread but for being caught for the wrong reasons? Because that's become the most convincing point to me right now.

You may hate my posts, but I feel like I've done a VERY damn good job of explaining how hercule this game isn't "caught for the wrong reasons"--when I called hercule's posts slimey last game, his ballistic reaction is what "caught for the wrong reasons" would look like.

His reaction this game is night and day different.

And literally every player who was in last game who doesn't realize the difference was apparently not paying attention that game. Because the contrast between the two is very much evident to me. Did y'all not see the overreaction last game for context for this game? You were players in that game at that point so you SHOULD have read it, and knowing he was scum and having seen it there, know about how different his reaction is here.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

MASTINA

HE

HAS

3

COACHES

AND

3

SCUM

BUDDIES

WHO

ALL

KNOW

ABOUT

LAST

GAME

TOO.

THAT

META

IS

ABUSEABLE.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

like holy fuck your whole argument is literally "but last game" at literally every post and all you seem capable of dooing


ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

fuck this game i'm out for a while

[Cephrir]

just don't read her posts

they say nothing of value anyway

[Cephrir]

when you come back i'd love your opinion on or help murdering hopkirk

[mastina]

you gave off this impression that you understand the game of mafia on a deep level, and yet it blows your mind that someone uninformed of other's alignments could have contradictory thoughts and constantly be evaluating their reads on other players

if anything, scum trips over their feet trying to keep a consistent thought process, which is what makes them come across as stilted and forced.

This is indeed accurate.

i mean your behavior ain't exactly "let's try to solve the game" either, you're playing "let's get hercule elimmed"

So's this.

Do you honestly believe that this player as town asks their team about me, gets the answer "could be scum" and then while ALREADY VOTING ME both
1) attempts to interact with someone who is cross voting them about why they think they are scum
and 2) when told "fuck off you're scum" performatively throws their hands in the air goes woe is me and then reconfirms their vote as SUPER SERIOUS GUYS.

Yes.

That's an incredibly town thought process--it literally couldn't be more town of a progression. It's literally impossible to have a more town progression in thought.

Like I said, it feels like they are looking for permission to OMGUS

Did hercule ask for permission to OMGUS me last game?

Because I literally just checked last game when he voted me and it sure didn't seem that way.

hercule, last game, as scum, had no need to ask for permission to OMGUS.

I don't see why he'd need permission to OMGUS this game when he didn't need it last game.

That, aside from me hard-disagreeing with it looking like permission to OMGUS in the first place.

I see a player having seen nothing town from LLD, being asked to vote the player they've seen nothing town from, agreeing, then trying to sort the player they've seen nothing town from with a genuine reachout asking about them after getting feedback from their teammates. And then, after the reactions, concluding probably scum, but continuing to reach out to others for feedback, asking them to give alternative takes.

The handling of it may not be as town as it could be, the handling of it could've been better, but that can be explained by hercule being emotional (frustrated/upset), other people not helping this, hercule's relative lack of experience, and just general town imperfections. (Town players will never present arguments in the absolute most theoretically perfectly-town way possible; they will always have flaws in what they say.)

dannflor you said you wanted to see thoughts about the game outside LLD from me and yet you say Nothing when i ask what you want to know about

Also this is a valid point from hercule that I feel highlights why where he is coming from is town.

Speaking from experience, it can be hard to come up with thoughts on everyone all at once...but it is incredibly easy to, when asked, speak about thoughts on a player you're prompted to give thoughts on. If nobody gives you the prompt, or asks you the very unhelpful "do it for everyone", you can't actually do it, but if someone asks you the directed "okay, tell me about X", you can then talk about X.

It's very common for reactive-playstyle players. (I am myself a reactive-playstyle player.)

Again, if you're townie, you are meant to be doing townie things. But instead here you are complaining that people voting for you won't give you a layup so you can APPEAR townie.

A player being defensive and, when applied pressure, continuing to be defensive and using that defensiveness as an excuse for why they are not generating content is, indeed, a huge scumtell--
If that were what hercule was doing, I'd be right there with you in justifiably scumreading him for it. It's literally one of my favorite scumtells of all time; I use it in almost every game.

Except that's not what hercule is doing. Asking for someone to give him direction to talk about is proof enough of that. If someone tells hercule to talk about X, and then he doesn't talk about X when under pressure? Valid scumtell. If someone tells hercule to talk about X, and then he talks about X? Not a valid scumtell; if someone tells hercule to talk about everyone, and he doesn't talk about everyone, not a valid scumtell.

[Titus]

I don't like the amount of sheeping LLD on the whole mastina is bad town argument.

[mastina]

My philosophy now is around just finding the easiest scum I can find on day 1

And what if the game has zero easy scum to find? What then?

I literally made posts detailing this problem.

ugh why is it so much harder to get reads this game than last game?

Well bluntly: because the people who rolled scum this game are better scum players.

You can't really say {Cephrir, hercule, Xtoxm, ABR} is a scumteam composed of the highest caliber scum players, now, can you? Most of the town caught Xtoxm and/or ABR, and while I failed on that front, I caught hercule and Cephrir when most of the town hadn't yet.

In this game if I am in any way remotely close to correct on {Dannflor, LLD, the worst, Titus}, if so much as 2 of those are correct as scum, instantly, the caliber of the scumteam this game is IMMEDIATELY an automatically-higher level than last game. In fact, "higher level" is a disservice.

Last game's scumteam in terms of strength in tiers would be solidly C-tier: not as bad as can be, but fairly bad.

In this game if so much as two of my scumreads are correct, that it automatically a MINIMUM of A-tier. The more I'm correct on, the closer it approaches to S-tier scumteam in caliber.

It is going to be harder to get reads in a game with an A-S-tier scumteam than in a game with a C-tier scumteam. Both because the scum are harder to identify, and because the scum are better at shading town players and making them appear scum. And to some extent, this effect is recursive. If town have a harder time finding scum and have an easier time suspecting town, the town look less town due to this. So it's a self-building cycle of difficulty: scum are harder to detect due to being better->scum are better at shading town->town struggle to identify scum and are more suspicious of town thanks to scum->town look less town due to scum being harder to detect and scum shading town->town continue to struggle to identify scum; etc.

You can instantly fix this by adjusting your perspective to account for this.

The moment you accept that the scum in this game have more top-tier players in them, the easier it is to identify the town in the weaker players and the easier it is to sort the top-tier players for who among them is well-performing scum.

[Dunnstral]

Dunn if you're around I want to dismantle my own wagon I think, but I need to talk to someone who I have the remotest sense of trust in to decide whether my paranoia is legitimate or not.

It also doesn't hurt my team is in my ear about all of this too so.

I'm around now

For what you're asking: if you and hercule are both town I don't know how people play it. The way things are playing out right now would have me guessing defense of hercule and pushing you, just based on my own reads

For my money, I think dgb has been playing the part where I'm reading them as either blatantly defending a buddy or defending a towny and pointing at you

[Cephrir]

I don't like the amount of sheeping LLD on the whole mastina is bad town argument.

not sure who you think is doing this, but i'm not

[mastina]

so Hercules opening to me is more often than not a slight +town. it feels sincere in the sense that there's a high chance he gets called out on it down the road and elimmed if he ends up playing similarly to the scum meta he laid out. Along with this, I do find it reasonable to assume hes being truthful that he's not the type of player comfortable with outing his meta and then being forced to change it drastically for an entire game.

if you want to ignore the opening and consider is NAI that's fine. But later on when we get to his engagement with LLD, I do see someone who is attempting a good faith engagement with a slot that seems tunnelled on them. Like he almost seems in disbelief that he's being approached in this way and that people are going along with the wagon.

he doesnt seem desperate to defend himself, but instead more just annoyed at the fact he's being engaged in a manner where he can't "get a word in" so to speak.

couple that with him having a lot of instances of what I'd classify as "stream of consciousness" posting and I'd say im relatively confident he's town this game

So much this.

I think it was pretty clear the motivation of hercule was to try and dismantle his wagon, but he was doing it while voting me, at me. He has me as scum, so why is he trying to convince me he's town? what is the point of that operation?

Instantly solved by the "he didn't" in answer--because he made it clear at the time he wasn't sure you were scum. Town players who're not convinced the player they are voting is scum can and will reach out to the player in question the way hercule did.

hercule at the time he voted LLD explicitly did not have LLD as scum. He has said that anyone who hasn't done something townie is a good vote, he was asked to vote LLD who was in that category, but he did not scumread LLD. He, after voting, reached out to LLD. The result of that rejected reachout was a, perhaps a bit emotional, doubling down on scumreading LLD.

But saying "hercule scumread LLD, reached out to her, then from the rejected reachout invented a justification for the scumread" is, simply put: not an accurate reflection of how things went.

now i dont want to come off as complaining~ there are many benefits to a game being played like this which is why im voting with LLD

(I'm trying real hard to not cave into peer pressure and reduce the strength of townread on Oka. But he's making it rather hard.)

[mastina]

If it looks Town, why are you shading it on D1?

Because there is a difference between looking town and being town.

If something looks town but isn't actually town, what does that make it?

Scum.

In this game, literally every scum player is going to make posts which

look

town--literally every. single. one. of them. Every single scum is going to make posts that look town. But the scum making those posts aren't going to magically become town due to making a post which looks town, are they? They're not town so a post they make which looks town yet isn't actually town, is exactly that: a post which looks town, yet actually isn't town.

And that's what I mean.

Dannflor's post looks town--LOOKS.
Dannflor's post isn't actually town.

This is not news, Almost50--I use this terminology literally every game. You've literally seen me use "looks town, but isn't actually town" before. Why the sudden confusion over terminology I've used in games for literal years?

I am saying posts which look town are posts that were designed to LOOK town, without actually BEING town, that they are scum fabrications meant to look good without actually being town in mindset. Or to use the buzzword of the game: that the posts are "performative".
A performative post is a post meant to look good, without actually being good.
A performative post is a post meant to look town, without actually being town.

I've got a convenient buzzword to refer to the concept this game, a performative post, but I've used "looks town without actually being town" for literally YEARS.

I need to go compare his posting tone from this game to last to see if I just think his post style in general reads as townie to me to see if im just biasing myself into a townlean

I can tell you as the person who identified his tone as scum last game:
It isn't scum this game.

[mastina]

How hard is it to blend in with .. #shitposting?

Incredibly hard--hercule last game tried and failed. I caught hercule last game in part due to hercule attempting to blend in with shitposting. Except he failed; I caught him when he tried it.

hercule this game was not sticking out like a sore thumb. So either he literally learned how to blend into shitposting literally overnight, or he's not scum trying to blend in.

And what happened to you theory of "1 Scum is hyper active, 1 mildly active and 1 a lurker" in mini setups? (If I'm confused I am sorry, but I think it was you who proposed that theory in a game we played together where I was Scum and you were Town)

I am not going to say I've never advocated that theory; it's fully possible I have. I will say I've zero memory of advocating that theory, which means there's a fairly high chance you've got me confused with someone else, but even if it WAS me...meta has shifted and for the last 2-3 years or so, my theory has been, predominantly: "in the vast majority of games, scum are almost or entirely among the lurkers".

A better question you could ask me is why I am not advocating that in this game, to which I can say that while it's true in most games, in this game I am townreading all of the lurkers unless you count the worst or Titus as lurkers. And scumreading players that're among the more active players (unless you count tw/Titus as among the inactives in which case it's split 50/50). But also townreading most of the active players.

There's literally 4 active players (2 if you count tw/Titus as inactive) that I'm not townreading; the rest of the active town players, I am: I'm townreading you, DGB, Cephrir, IV, AGar (ehhh not sure if he qualifies as active tho), Hopkirk, Winter Flakes, hercule, OkaPoka (albeit strained), and Dunnstral (tho his activity is in flux).

I think he seems tonally scummy here.

And I think that hercule looks tonally town here in this game.
And given that I correctly identified hercule as tonally scum last game, I put more faith in my ability to have an accurate toneread on him than I do yours.

[DrippingGoofball]

Surely, some of bickering players are scum.

But I keep coming back to all the resistance for a rainbow road, sparkling blue sky LLD wagon.

LLD is an extremely valuable scumpal. No scum in their right mind would sacrifice such a blessed partner to bulldoze a town.

And theres a handful of players that are against it in a stubborn way saying she'd too difficult to put on the saddle to ride the elimination mule out of town to the dead thread. Much like ABR was against the xtoxm wagon.

Hey DGB are you willing to bet your life I'm scum?

Are you claiming vengeful?

[Dannflor]

lmao what

[DrippingGoofball]

LLD is

scumploding

[Dannflor]

I'm not exactly vibing with that

[DrippingGoofball]

I'm not exactly vibing with that

Because I TR you, I'll take it into consideration.

[Dannflor]

although to be fair I’m not sure she’s right on Hercule