like i really don’t think i’m ‘finessing’ anyone with my play this game being listless and then when it’s not listless it’s just... *waves hand at the mess it is*
In post 7142, the worst wrote:I'm also very wary of skitter's scum ability and deliberately spewing a lategame carry is a LOT more valuable than pocketing someone like ydrasse who is just a completely reasonable nightkill if town.
but the point in particular is that you could claim the skitter interactions might be trying to distance from ydrasse
but that doesn't really fit with how she was treated by the other flipped scum, at all
and if ydrasse is scum she has actively done almost
nothing
to further her endgame potential and i don't think you can write it off as laziness. she's said stuff that i don't believe comes from an informed perspective, because it was too subtle for most people to notice and wouldn't have been likely to be seen positively.
but i don't particularly care to impress that upon you at this point in time
i've put in the work and made my judgment, if you want to argue otherwise make a case but i have no need for idly trying to chip away at the read
see e.g. popcorn where (as vulture) she tried to distance herself from enchant/lukewarm to set herself up to endgame: viewtopic.php?f=51&t=87343
very standard stuff
here she didn't really claim any pelts and was just kind of weak toward skitter
and the whole dynamic between her and skitter was off, it was atypical or scum distancing. most scum play it very vanilla, you push me, i push you back type stuff, e.g. the skitter/dunn interactions, which i eventually realized weren't clearing. here ydrasse basically doesn't punch back at skitter at all. were it a different player doing it i wouldn't consider that clearing but i don't think they'd be likely to fabricate that particular interaction
skitter is very obviously a skilled scum player, although she's had a rough go of it as scum this year outside of Deja Vu. (one of those is my fault (sorry skitter)). but we can look into her past games to see if she has tendencies toward her teammates and preferences on how to play. i want to look at stuff that is relatively recent, because i don't think old wallposty semi-lurky skitter is that relevant to decoding 2021-skitter, but also want something where she had something of a gameplan going, no unusual setups where bussing was strongly discouraged if not outright forbidden (e.g. Silent Star, Deja Vu). Deja Vu didn't even have daytalk so it's not like there was a ton of gameplanning, anyway.
skitter30 wrote:my goal is to be the loudest voice around like day3 and to avoid bussing if i can do so, while makign sure i look good
if i had to pick between {bussing and looking good} or {keeping you lot alive but looking bad if you flip the next day} i think i'd rather the former because i can carry in that situation but would be under suspicion i'd rather avoid in the latter
In post 43, skitter30 wrote:if i had to pick between {bussing and looking good} or {keeping you lot alive but looking bad if you flip the next day} i think i'd rather the former because i can carry in that situation but would be under suspicion i'd rather avoid in the latter
you ok with bussing in this situation?
not gratuitous, but if i think i can read it?
skitter30 wrote:thanks, still kinda hate it in general, oddly enjoying it this game
just think it's kinda funny that i'm the current dc, have been dealing with insane paranoia for a year, and in the most competitive site event i have the best town players on site rn p much all pocketed and wanting to work with me and trying to get me to listen / support their reads etc
and all i really need to do rn is let rc 'talk' me into lynching ari for him or whatever
from my pov the rest of the day needs like maintenance but the hard work is p much done and i can coast a bit
i just work best as scum when i understand the gamestate and can control it into desirable outcomes
like as scum i can usually predict how the next two-three dayphases will play out at the very least in broad terms, barring something drastic like a hard guilty
In post 198, Xtoxm wrote:I'll think about this. The group hood thing changes a lot. I dont hate the gambit tying yourself to me, since i prefer doing something rather nothing , but it is high risk. Skitter has to solo endgame if it goes wrong.
fwiw i would much much much rather try to win this in 7way than 3way
my energy/motivation tends to flag as the game goes on as scum, especially if it's all on me
once i get a feel for the game i can usually tell how things are going to play out a day or two in advance and can predict how people will react to certain things
and what i can get away
and how town will think about x
In post 297, Xtoxm wrote:hm
i dont think about it in terms of length/end point
i always do because i need to be fake and it's demotivating
and i am usually endgame which means that i'm there Until The Game Finally Ends
usually in like 3way
skitter30 wrote:I'm a little nervous that if i join math will decide it's a good idea too ?
And then you'll be lynched quite possibly, which i dont want to
Trajectory-wise i think i need to agree with rc and end up on you
skitter30 wrote:siding with rc over math might be a suboptimal move long-term
but i can wrangle math scumreading me in this gamestate a lot easier than i can against rc
like math is just being kinda silly and i can shut that down forever
if rc really gets going and was on the right track i would probably be unable to answer adequately and would freeze, which would in turn make him scumread me more and make it more obvious
like he was on target wrt me/sauade but i just kinda side-stepped it because i think addressing it would make things worse rather than better
also i don't thinks audade gets lynched rn, and i think math won't push saudade if i want it so
i feel like if i announce: saudade is the best wagon it's going to happen
i feel like if i try to backoff i don't have anyone else to go on and if you flip first it's going to come back to bite me
skitter30 wrote:yeah i'm trying to move there a bit but i think it's a little too late
bleh
i'm not super great at figuring out the line between distancing and bussing sometimes
well hey at least you're at of this shitshow of a game, right?
key takeaways:
- in this game she had to deal with two teammates who were both lurkerish and under heavy suspicion early. she urges them to not get themselves yeeted and displays a preference against bussing, but a willingness to do so as a last resort
- this is reflected in the game thread in this way: she defends tris against attacks early, says xtoxm's posts are bad and continually foses him but avoids actually voting him or even pushing him.
- asks her teammate if they'd be willing to surprise hammer on day 1
- tries to play by understanding the gamestate and controlling it, kind of a go with the flow mentality, take what town gives her, predict the opinions people will have
- although she's gotten good at, scum is still not skitter's preferred alignment. she prefers to keep her team with her rather than solo carry as she tends to lose energy in late game. "demotivated/not high energy is historically a scumtell for me" (i was aware of this)
([bane voice]
she merely adopted the dark, i was born in it
)
the sentiment about not wanting to solo carry is a consistent one she says in multiple games, she said the same in Deja Vu when i more or less predicted everything that would happen after night 1, i said she would always win in f4 but she preferred not to go there if possible
- feels like she gets stuck on Saudade and can't logically justify moving off him, is afraid the associatives will come back to bite her if she backs off him and he flips first, believes it's "inevitable" and so prefers to stay on for the credit
- after Saudade gets flipped, there's a lot of soft defending of Xtoxm, the things good scum players do, say his posts are bad but make excuses for him, lean on mechanics as a reason to clear him. does wagon him at one point but pulls off and finds an excuse to vote elsewhere while town talks themselves out of voting him
- tries to avoid answering things if someone is on the right track (this was similar to how she handled Morning Tweet in Deja Vu)
so this helps us build a general profile, will tend to distance from teammates but general preference is anti-bus, doesn't like having to solo carry, busses when she feels it's inevitable/can't justify not doing it. pretty standard play, really, not that there's anything wrong with that, standard scum play is good enough to win most games if you can post well.
i know i said this was going to be one post but i realize it's a bit long so i'll do a game by game breakdown in separate posts
you can see some similar patterns here, in that she'd call out dunn/saber here when they posted but not really push on them all that hard as compared to other targets
skitter30 wrote:gah you're actually like p scummy in your argument with luca and since it encompasses so much of what i missed i can't just pretend i didn't see it
idk how to give you a fake townread there, if i were town i'd be calling you out
i think i botched how i interacted with you in like multiple ways
you're probably going down today
i think I'm fine till at least day3 in that case, especially since i can ride the bus, bop, nobody expects me to die, but now i need to carry
In post 96, nomnomnom wrote:Oh well
Unlucky
But at least I learned plenty of things from this game that should become useful soon so not all's lost.
Last prayer that ali is actually gambitting and an actual protective claims here
I'm sorry this didn't go down better :/
i kinda backed myself into a corner and didn't have a good way to off-ramp so to speak
i wouldn't be surprised if Ali is lying or telling the truth so to speak, either way
key takeaways:
- skitter tried to distance from her teammate because she felt it was the most realistic view for her to have. ultimately this trapped her into bussing
- this wasn't a planned thing, it was a consequence of her teammate catching heat in the main thread and her reacting to it
- even so, she expressed regret and a desire to avoid flipping her teammate day 1, but was too nervous to back down
- the way their interactions ingame play out is like this:
skitter expresses disagreement with an early scumread nom pushes, calls it "bad"
says nom isnt out of scumrange when menalque expresses that nom's push might be too bad for him to make as scum
goes against nom in his arguments, accuses him of things like AtE, misrep, disagrees with the premises of his argument
hedges the read slightly by using meta as a crutch
skitter30 wrote:ok i don't think a post-by-post is going to happen and i want to get caught up, so just key thoughts as i read through.
- while i think nom's part of the argument was p bad,
i think that at least some of the things luca is scumreading her for is nai
; the 1v1 i can see her doing as either alignment, and unfortunately some of the ate too
the stuff she brought up about me was weird tho
this is positioning herself to distance with a "nuanced" sort of read, sides against nom but tempers it by saying some of the points against him are NAI
- puts nom 1 slot above the bottom in her reads list (lol, lmao)
- continues to call out his posts
- preflip associates him with a townie
- tries to subtly make an excuse to not flip nom that day:
In post 714, Luca Blight wrote:I feel Nom/Quags could be S/S, but I also feel Nom could be white-knighting.
I’d feel happier with a Nom lynch today.
i guess i'm not sure why scum!nom decides to just make a thing about not voting the popular town!quag mislynch rn
in the current gamestate it's fairly popular and people are starting to want eod so i don't think it would be questioned that much
whereas by taking this route she's making a big stink that is getting pushback
and i don't know why she picks the harder route as scum here
- nom swings back and accuses skitter of being manipulative
- doesn't actually throw a vote on nom until significantly later in the day when she finds there's no good way to deescalate
- keeps arguing with nom, again and again, constant taking swipes at each other
- when the main driver of the nom wagon unvotes she tries to de-escalate, but gets stuck there when there's no alternate wagon and the player nom was pushing on claims bodyguard
so there's a willingness to bus day 1, but a reluctance at the same time. the bus happened because skitter's partner came under fire early and she felt obligated to join the wagon to save face, she wasn't the initiator of it
skitter30 wrote:meh i think i'm just going to leave it as-is and when someone informs me i'm being off and that i ought to be voting complain that i can't get into the game and ask them to real-time with me to help or something
skitter30 wrote:yeah
i was thinking that if i voted there eve probably would actually hammer
but i'm pretty sure just leads to me getting pushed tomorrow so i didn't
skitter30 wrote:i think i might try to start to pick a fight with you
because i think that one of us *is* going to get lynched if we don't find the traffic analyst, and i think it would be better to start laying in those seeds of not svs now
skitter30 wrote:I think i kinda bungled this and i'm kinda expecting to get lynched at some point
I think what i ought to prioritize is leaving a bunch of messy associatives behind for people to dig through after the fact
skitter30 wrote:Actually i think we're good
If you guys drop it in a huff and say that i'm being unreasonable but that this isnt going anywhere and throw ur vote on eve or allo i think whichever one you pick will start feeling inevitable and that people like nom will just start calling for everyone to vote there just to end the day
(I think allo would be slightly better, eve is going yo be perpetual lynchbait)
Also kinda happy that i've dropped nom's interest in the game as a whole by picking inane fights and relitigating them ad nauseum at length, i think it's making the thread harder to read thru and that people like gl and acryo are also starting to feel this way and are instead pushing for 'easy' options instead of reading/responding yo all the walls we're generating
skitter30 wrote:yeah i didn't want to do this (sorry nom!)
but she started off on a bad foot, continued on bad footing, and she knows she's going to lose so uh i think this ends in her getting lynched at the end of the day
skitter30 wrote:i can locktown titus and just try to make us look super partner-y but i'm not sure if that will be counter-productive to tyring to lynch her
skitter30 wrote:i kinda think i'll have a hard time coming up with reasons to townread titus because ngl the way she's interacting with gl rn is kinda scummy
like right now if i obstinatnely tr her for meh reasons we'll look partnered
but afterwards i think it'll look wk'y
skitter30 wrote:feel free to point out that i'm just hard-defending rex, that i'm treating Titus with kid-gloves and not really pushing her, just trying to be more skeptical at a distance, and that I'm trying to lay on the wifom
skitter30 wrote:i'm going to see if i can get like eve lynched
but if, say, gl starts turning on me (i.e. he's inclined to vote me over Titus), just bus me hard
or if it looks like i'm inevitably going to get lynched
skitter30 wrote:ok, i think that if gl wants me lynched i probably get lynched today, so i would imagine that you lot probably just want to go hard on it
skitter30 wrote:basically you win lylos by knowing exactly who's likely to vote for who and knowing where that mislynch vote is , and making sure it's more likely to happen than a townie placing a vote on you
titus will vote gl because she's been tunneled on him for three dayphases, he isn't dead yet, and nothing has happened throughout that whole time to make her think she's wrong.
we don't want to mess that dynamic up (i.e. by titus or gl getting lynched or dying) because we don't know how the survivor person will react once the other person is dead. titus will be forced to rethink the game if gl is dead and that may involve rethinking her townread on me. gl will push me upon a titus townflip
if they're both alive titus will ultimately vote gl in lylo so that's what we want to try to facilitate
key takeaways:
- again reiterates, would much rather have a 5 way than a 3 way
- cautious with who she votes/pushes for fear of reprisal
- says she's struggling to come up with things to say, offers to be bussed if she has an off game
- decides to pick a fight with TLDNE in order to distance. this manifests itself in-thread in a pretty typical way:
accuses Limit of strawmanning people
says they're shading a group of people you'd expect to be town based on setup mechanics
says they're following a double standard by jumping to conclusions when they're accusing someone else of doing so
says they're being disingenuous "and ate-y"
limit responds to this with classic aggression, dumps on her repeatedly with quote walls, really tries to bury skitter, the whole nine yards. skitter never actually votes limit but, limit drops a vote on skitter, only to back down when the town decides it does not want to kill skitter, does so by lilith saying she let the anger get the best of her
- says she's trying to build associatives between her and sausasaurusrex/titus in the event she does flip, again this is in a pretty basic fashion, she hard defends rex/titus and continually makes excuses for them
(probably should have read this game before i let cakez die)
- says to bus her hard if it looks like things are starting to turn against her
- starts planning and setting up for lylo in advance looking for who will vote who
so, again, this is the basic sort of expected play from scum who think they might go down and want to protect their partner. they pull back on the read town shows no interest in killing skitter and most people rule them out as being SvS, limit continually leaves themselves open to skitter being scum, expresses skepticism of her, but doesn't actually vote her. skitter questions limit back and expresses uncertainty on them, but waffles back and forth on the read and ends up back at town for a while, finally hedges on their alignment in ELO and expresses skepticism again
so, hypothetically, there's a world where skitter, feeling the heat in the Pink Room, starts to feel her enthusiasm for the game dropping and tells her teammate to bus her so they can endgame. it's not an implausible narrative at all. so, gammagooey's immediate case on skitter isn't really as clearing as i thought.
but is that the most likely scenario? i'm still not sure about that. there are other factors that have to be considered.
realizes that I have a fucking third eye and sees shit none of you commoners can
"Taly is going to be a hot mess all game and I am entertained" ~ Gammagooey
"The human race is bad at reading Taly." ~the worst
"Taly I knew your slot was scum and I still struggled to find arguments to SR your play lol" ~Infinity 324
"Taly wins for the most fence-sitty reads in a game ever" ~Battle Mage
In post 7052, Taly wrote:Wow I actually am a pretty aggressive player
"Taly is going to be a hot mess all game and I am entertained" ~ Gammagooey
"The human race is bad at reading Taly." ~the worst
"Taly I knew your slot was scum and I still struggled to find arguments to SR your play lol" ~Infinity 324
"Taly wins for the most fence-sitty reads in a game ever" ~Battle Mage
I'm honestly posting for comical relief purposes at this point.
"Taly is going to be a hot mess all game and I am entertained" ~ Gammagooey
"The human race is bad at reading Taly." ~the worst
"Taly I knew your slot was scum and I still struggled to find arguments to SR your play lol" ~Infinity 324
"Taly wins for the most fence-sitty reads in a game ever" ~Battle Mage
now, clearly, out of everyone alive, i would quite obviously be the best suited to endgame as last scum! however, there's a couple good reasons why it's not me:
- i could easily have avoided dunnstral being in the duel if i wanted to yet got him put there anyway with the last second hop; at any rate my progression on him was too messy for me to be scum, if i was aware of his alignment i'd start pushing against him sooner because he'd have no endgame potential
- skitter was very obviously struggling to come up with arguments against me when she had nominated me, this is because she knows i'm town and couldn't find real reasons to attack me. as her teammate i'd be more cognizant of giving her something to work with so we could actually have a strong 1v1, and i think she'd probably have an easier time finding something
real
to respond to me with
- saber/HQ blew it by spewing me town, scum don't get
there's a couple older games i want to dig into when i get the chance, for some supporting data, but i think we have enough of a portrait to interpret skitter's actions in this game
"Taly is going to be a hot mess all game and I am entertained" ~ Gammagooey
"The human race is bad at reading Taly." ~the worst
"Taly I knew your slot was scum and I still struggled to find arguments to SR your play lol" ~Infinity 324
"Taly wins for the most fence-sitty reads in a game ever" ~Battle Mage
gonna push you a bit and loudly complain i think you're scum but when your wagon fails to materialize i'm gonna hop onto emmi while complaining about how you lot are getting away with it
"Taly is going to be a hot mess all game and I am entertained" ~ Gammagooey
"The human race is bad at reading Taly." ~the worst
"Taly I knew your slot was scum and I still struggled to find arguments to SR your play lol" ~Infinity 324
"Taly wins for the most fence-sitty reads in a game ever" ~Battle Mage
