Open 842: Diffusion of Power [Postgame]

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hello everyone! i have a fake scumread on tammy.

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i think Ceph's opening is mildly town.

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No rvs. Only Seriousness.

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i'm not sure if i've ever actually scumread tammy. On the other hand i'm not sure if she's ever been scum in a game i'm in >.>

Not 100% sure ofc since it's been like, what. Centuries since we've played a game. same with nsg and morph.

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Anyway. Ydrasse also kinda town i think.

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I can't read hydras if at least one of the heads doesn't sign

see this is me, except only the first four words

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I think we haven't! Though not 100% sure. Maybe in the olden times.

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And yeah that's also why I called Ceph's opening town. It didn't feel like it had a deep impending sense of dread that was being held behind a thin veneer.

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it's basically the one thing I know about ceph because he was scum in the TM large I ran and then town in the reroll.

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I have two recent games with GL, the first of which we were both town and he was very much the only person keeping me sane in the game and the second of which he was scum and absolutely snowed everyone especially me. So i certainly fear him but also will maybe know better this time.

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I want to townread Shirou with no reasoning behind it.

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implosion, any other scum reads besides Tammy with no reasoning behind them?

Don't be silly.

Oh also I think I just remembered we did play together in the olden days. Actually I'm fairly sure we were scum together once.

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Oh hell yeah, page 8 wagon on me? Let's do it.

Why do you say this in response to one serious vote?

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Therefore you may end up thinking "okay, but what is the difference between doing that and nothing?", and this is my reasoning:

Your reasoning fails to persuade me of this :p

Everything you're describing here can be achieved if people breadcrumb well. I already have, for one.

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I guess breadcrumbing is simply easier/safer than whatever I proposed...it's just not really "fun"/"novel" and those are the elements I'm focusing more than necessarily "optimal"

There's plenty of room for creativity in breadcrumbing.

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nQ townish imo.

I don’t think I like this interaction. You feel too overexplainy.

The phrasing of this post is weird. What do you hope to get from Ceph by telling him that he is too overexplainy?

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I also don't really think tejate raichu is scummy as of now and there's a couple things he's said that I think are at least a little towny.

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implosion and nQ get major towncred for mindmelds

and I kinda townread Ydrasse so far too

These stances seem really assured based on what is still pretty thin data on the ground, GL.

We're still stuck at 3 day-3 passes. :/

Perhaps the problem is you gave them to the wrong people, rather than the government not minting enough of them.

VOTE: fua

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fua have you ever seen someone vote or fos you and go “gosh, I’m town but their reasoning here sure is solid”?

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I can see implosion and GL as a scum pairing.

is this because of any specific interactions between us, or just because we are both voting you

It’s because you have no interactions with each other and yet pray to the reach gods to try to fabricate a reason to scumread me within less than a page of one another. But that’s just why I think you could be paired even outside of you both individually being scum.

This is also kind of weird. I feel like scum if anything will try to have

different

reads from each other. I feel like if I were scum and saw a scumbuddy fabricate a scumread on player X the last thing I would do is then go "hm, i should also fabricate a scumread on player X".

And there's plenty of players that I at least have not interacted with at all.

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fua have you ever seen someone vote or fos you and go “gosh, I’m town but their reasoning here sure is solid”?

I mean, several other people in this game have said that it’s understandable if people scumread them for (X) reason. So if your point is that town always thinks that reasoning against them is bad then that’s clearly not true and also a weak argument to begin with.

that's... not even close to what i'm saying? my point is you seem especially acerbic toward people that have expressed suspicion of you. I literally asked you one question and then emptyvoted you and you're calling me your tied biggest scumread and speculating about who I'm scum with. It seems like a bit of an overreaction.

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nQ townish imo.

I don’t think I like this interaction. You feel too overexplainy.

The phrasing of this post is weird. What do you hope to get from Ceph by telling him that he is too overexplainy?

I'm saying my thoughts and reads out loud. Why is that questionable?

And to answer the original thing: that's not what I was calling questionable, like I said, it's the phrasing that I found weird. The phrasing where you're talking

to

cephrir about how he's scummy.

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Anyway.

Unvote

VOTE: morph the cat

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I need to vote someone other than fua so I can eventually pocket them.

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I dislike opportunism more than I dislike people scumreading me. It’s also really the most notable thing that’s happened in this game considering how people can’t stop talking about me, so I figure it should factor into my reads a little.

I just flat disagree that opportunism is scummy on d1. My vote absolutely was like 80% opportunism. Wagons are Good For The Town on d1, actually.

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and nah i want to hang on to a morph vote, see how it feels, maybe juggle it a bit.

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Why is that weird? I’m already in a conversation with him.

It's specifically because you're addressing it to him, and not as a question. It's like if I said "fua, you're really scummy this game." More typical phrasings would be "fua seems really scummy this game" or "fua, why did you say this thing that is scummy?" Very minor thing, hence it being a one-off question with, again, a vote that was mostly opportunism.

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fwiw: i have ostensibly no opinion on GL's alignment as of now. And tbh I probably won't for a long time.

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I can agree with those points. I really don't have much of a read on fua at this point either.

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We're still stuck at 3 day-3 passes. :/

This emotion doesn't really jive. 3 day-3 passes... literally less than 12 hours after the game began. How does that merit a :/?

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Also I have absolutely no idea what "clang" is supposed to mean. My guess is it's negative because I think that one post of mine was pretty bad (it wasn't really intended to be good i was mostly annoyed for, really, similar reasons to what shirou just outlined)

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I very desperately want to call Shirou super town but I feel like he's the kind of slot that I incorrectly townread sometimes.

I like tejate/ceph/nQ/ydrasse for town so far.

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I very desperately want to call Shirou super town but I feel like he's the kind of slot that I incorrectly townread sometimes.

I like tejate/ceph/nQ/ydrasse for town so far.

And you're questioning us wanting more than 3 townreads atp?

There's very little intersection in our reads atm. Hmm.

This is not a direct comparison; I'm perfectly happy with the number of reads I have at this point. I'm specifically unhappy with not being able to trust myself on Shirou.

Regarding little intersection I assume part of that is because you're locktowning Amazons (and I'd imagine you probably are okay with other people not individually having the capacity to locktown them at this point) and at that point the expected amount of overlap between 2 people and 4 people is pretty low.

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fua have you ever seen someone vote or fos you and go “gosh, I’m town but their reasoning here sure is solid”?

I mean, several other people in this game have said that it’s understandable if people scumread them for (X) reason. So if your point is that town always thinks that reasoning against them is bad then that’s clearly not true and also a weak argument to begin with.

that's... not even close to what i'm saying? my point is you seem especially acerbic toward people that have expressed suspicion of you. I literally asked you one question and then emptyvoted you and you're calling me your tied biggest scumread and speculating about who I'm scum with. It seems like a bit of an overreaction.

do you think the "acerbic"ity is scummy? I'm townreading it, I don't know if scum!fua would be this aggressive if they knew they were full of shit, I am getting a vibe that they're just a defensive person

Missed this, I think it's entirely personality and not really strongly readable. If it does swing one way it's probably a little townish at this point but I don't think it's near enough to be confident.

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Mostly I was just getting annoyed for being like, seemingly lambasted as scum over what I could only really explain as some kind of omgus.

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I fully forgot about dedede. I also fully forgot that I'd even played with Ceph before. There is one thing that I had remembered about morph and I see looking at dedede that it was in that game, which is that I distinctly remembered me having played a scum game where I made some post, and morph absolutely shredded me over that single post and I remember feeling like, emotionally devastated over it lol. Part of why I voted morph is that they felt kind of on the sidelines of this game so far which to be fair might be totally normal for them but it was in somewhat contrast to that memory.

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That game actually had me, ceph, morph and GL. Little wild.

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Are you willing to share any of the early townreads you believe I should have but don't, morph?

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I very desperately want to call Shirou super town but I feel like he's the kind of slot that I incorrectly townread sometimes.

I like tejate/ceph/nQ/ydrasse for town so far.

Can you expand on your nq townread?

Part of it is he feels very similar to the game we just played where we were both town. The way he's engaging with the game/with people, I think 270 as a catch up followed by engaging with people and asking for a vote count and then voting before getting one is somewhat town.

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I also just want to say that I currently kind of feel like my d1 reads are like, absolutely doomed to be complete trash based on recent games so ultimately while I do currently think these things and can give reasons why I think them I really don't think it's especially likely I'm right :X

what do you think about the things he's actually saying beyond him just saying him? :<

tbh I haven't really been paying the closest of attention to the actual threads of this game compared to the aesthetics of it. But uh, idk. He's maybe a little focused on some specific people but that's normal on d1.

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547 is a townish question from Ydrasse, since it's indicating a consistent train of thought (of course these things can be faked but they take effort to fake).
552 also makes me feel better about calling Tejate town - this seems like a really likely way for relatively new town to feel about Shirou's play and it's something I think relatively new scum wouldn't think to say. I don't like 557 though, very sideline-y in a bad way.

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morph's read list mostly makes me go "meh". I think I am okay with calling fua tentatively town at this point though.

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There aren't a lot of mechanics in this setup that are really worth discussing; cops should claim guilties almost always and innos when relevant, we'll massclaim eventually, but for now there's not a whole lot that we can do for mech advantage.

Feel free to discuss if you have ideas, though.

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Like, this player list has enough highly experienced and mechanically inclined players that I wouldn't worry about giving scum ideas.

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Actually morph's reads list maybe goes so far as to sketch me out a bit? Idk it feels like... a really convenient list for scum to have. Ydrasse/nsg/redtea. Idk. The reason for scumreading nsg is so weird. Lurkiness sure, but the throwing-in-front-of-fua thing... I don't see how one finds scum-motivation in that move from nsg that she wouldn't have as town. nsg was mislimmed in my most recent game with here and I think she's the kind of player who would have a stereotypical reputation of being hard to mislim and iirc part of it was an inconsistent schedule of thread interaction though I could be misremembering, but either way I'm not really reading into her alignment from that right now. Especially when it's still <36 hours into the game, and it's been entirely during the weekend.

Both the nsg and Ydrasse reads relying on thread-avoidance is also a little wack to me because like, I personally have had a decent amount of trouble finding stuff to interact with for a good amount of this game. I think it's partially the nature of the game. Especially when like, morph themselves up until now has hidden their reads (which they normally do but it doesn't exactly facilitate thread interaction).

Like, two people they're accusing of thread avoidance and redtea who... is not exactly prolific, is all just underwhelming. And like I said I don't like the extra reason on nsg. Can't speak to the Ydrasse meta.

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And the reason I phrase that as "sketch me out a bit?" is because morph is not someone who I would ever expect myself to be able to actually get a solid scumread on or who I really expected to have much of a solid read on in general.

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innos when relevant

?

I think that cops should always claim results here, even if it's only an inno?

Everyone is 1-shot so we aren't losing anything other than "hiding them from scum kills", but like, I don't want to write a wallpost here but basically it's not really that much of an issue even if they kill the inno given it would likely be someone that is a former suspect?

Forcing an inno to get nightkilled sounds way better to me than risking someone been cleared before but no one knowing it because the cop died at a night later before saying it.

I guess we can "crumb results" but...I don't know. I think it's obvious by now but I'm not a fan of crumbing, to the point I don't bother looking for crumbs even when I'm scum.

Crumbing results is a bad idea unless the crumb is ridiculously obvious, because cops flip without their night so we'd have no way of knowing if a dead cop has a result.

I generally would have no issue with a cop claiming an inno in almost any situation. But if you're a cop and you have an inno, and that inno is under no pressure, and you're under little or no pressure, and you don't think you're likely to be NK'd, then it's not unreasonable to hold onto the info. Also not unreasonable to give it.

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I suppose that's probably true, I was just thinking about how roles are most likely to be distributed/how scum are most likely going to claim in this setup. Perhaps that's a waste of time, though.

And yeah this is something that looks appealing but scum know the distribution of roles, and so there's not a whole lot that can be done to gain advantage there.

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the reason we don't massclaim is that scum will shoot all the cops >__>

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as it turns out, one-shot cop is a drastically, drastically stronger role than one-shot doctor.

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The advantage from forcing scum to claim cop immediately isn't as high as I think you're making it out to be. They'll just... do it. I don't really object to it as a plan but it's not exactly game-breaking or close to it.

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eh yeah on reflection I don't think the two points in the "let them wait" list are THAT important. I'm for the plan I think.

Like yeah, they're not. Neither is the one point on the other side. Scum will have to make a choice and be accountable for it at some point. That is... how the game of mafia works.

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The advantage from forcing scum to claim cop immediately isn't as high as I think you're making it out to be. They'll just... do it. I don't really object to it as a plan but it's not exactly game-breaking or close to it.

Implosion do you consider yourself a mech person?

What do you mean scum risking their neck for their partners or giving us a free extra inno isn't important?

hello...?

There are tradeoffs to all of these situations.

Cops who claim with a useful inno will, inevitably, get towncred. Scum can claim cop with a useful inno for that reason; hell, they might want to even without any plan of any sort that we're implementing. They can also claim a result on someone who died that day, still. A cop claiming a long-dead inno is going to be viewed as scummy, and so scum would want to avoid that anyway.

I feel like the way you're viewing this is very extreme where we're "forcing" scum to do something they probably want to do some of anyway. And again I don't really object to it as a plan! I just don't think it really nets much if any real advantage.

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Fwiw: i've also played this setup before.

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So are you saying you don't think either plan gives us better chances?

Ostensibly yeah. I think the pros and cons are both very small.

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Low hanging fruit. I'm an easy target for a mislim.

Like 4 people have called you town already <,<

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Having one cop claimed is i mean, fine. it'll be ambiguous whether a doc will protect them so scum can't shoot them for free. Having all the everyone claim... no. bad.

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Implosion's interactions with us are giving me dedede vibes, but I haven't (yet) gone back to look at his iso in that game. Insomnia struck so it might be tomorrow before I do that review.

I'm quite confident that if I had drawn scum here, 2017 meta would be not among the best indicators of how I'd play.

Assuming a 5-5 split, we have on average 97% chance of at least one pair of Town cops (i.e. cops who have the same action on the same night), and 78% chance of two pairs (or one triplet). Even if it's a 4-6 split, the 4 town players have 81% chance of at least one pair.
The same analysis applies to docs, of course.
So objectively, for the town as a whole, we can't really tell a lot from the existence of any particular pair.

However, subjectively it's a little different. Subjectively, there's 1-80%^4 = 60% chance of you being paired with a town player if you're part of five town players with that role (and 50% if there are four of you, 70% if there are six of you). So someone claiming the same role and night as you gives you at least a slight reason to suspect them over baseline suspicion (3/12 = 25%).

Hello; it is Me, Math, here to say This Wrong. There are two ways to explain why it's wrong: one, each town player's night is independently chosen, so me being, say, night 4 doesn't make the existence of another night 4 player be any more or less likely. The more poignant way to explain it is that if you know that as soon as someone claims the same role and night as you, it increases the probability that someone has the exact same role as you above the 60% baseline because, well, they might be telling the truth. The 60% probability that someone shares a role with you is the probability before any claims happen - if nobody else claimed the same role as you, then that probability would drop to 0%. So it stands to reason that if someone *does* claim the same role as you, it'll increase *above* 60%. And because the nights are independently chosen that increase will be by exactly the right amount to cancel out this idea of thinking about who does or doesn't have the same night.

Spoiler: Much, much more detailed calculations that I'm not 100% sure are all correct but I dare you to find an issue

Let's say Veronica is a Night 4 Doctor and sees Guillermo claim Night 4 Doctor. What are her before and after probabilities of Guillermo being scum?

Before, Guillermo had a 25% chance of being scum; this is simple as there are 12 other players and 3 of them are scum. After, we can calculate with Bayes' rule. If G is the event that Guillermo is scum and D is the event that Guillermo will claim night 4 doctor, all the while assuming that Veronica knows her own role, we have:

P(G | D) = P(D | G) P(G) / P(D)

If we assume that scum will pick a roleclaim at random (which is safe to assume here, because the effect we're trying to isolate is that of Veronica knowing her own role, not that of scum being more likely to claim cop vs doctor or an early vs a late night), then P(D | G) = 0.1. That is, the probability that Guillermo will claim Night 4 Doctor if he is scum is exactly 0.1.

For P(D), we have P(D) = P(G) P(D | G) + P(-G) P(D | -G); the only term here we haven't calculated is P(D | -G), the probability that Guillermo will claim Night 4 Doctor given that he is town. This is the key term, because it's the only term that depends on Veronica's role, and is implicitly what you are claiming will be lower based on Veronica knowing that she's a Night 4 Doctor. Technically there is going to be a very slight effect here simply because Veronica and Guillermo both are claiming doctors of any kind that will make Guillermo slightly more likely to be scum. But that's not what you were talking about - you were talking specifically about them being doctors of the same night. And that has no effect here. Because the setup was determined with every doctor being given a night independently at random, Guillermo's night and Veronica's night are independent variables. Veronica's night therefore has no impact whatsoever on the analysis. We can finish the calculation just for the hell of it. If there were 5 cops and 5 doctors, if Guillermo is town, he's one of nine players, five cops and four doctors, meaning P(D | -G) = 0.2 * (4 / 9) (the 0.2 is his probability of being Night 4, the 4/9 is probability of being a Doctor). Likewise if the split were 4/6 or 6/4 then P(D | -G) would be 0.2 * (3/9) or 0.2 * (5/9). Now we actually have to make a sort of sub-call to Bayes rule, because Veronica knowing that she is a doctor makes it slightly more likely that there are more doctors in the setup. If (all with the underlying assumption that Veronica is town) V is the event that Veronica is a Night 4 Doctor and 4, 5 and 6 are the events that there are that many doctors, then for each n in {4, 5, 6}, we have:

P(n | V) = P(V | n) P(n) / P(V).

Each P(n) = 1/3. P(V) is fixed and we only care about how relatively likely they are; P(V | n) is either 4/10, 5/10 or 6/10 (it's n/10). So we can say that 4/15, 5/15 and 6/15 of the event space is taken up by there being 4, 5 or 6 doctors. So on the whole, we have

P(D | -G) = (4/15) * 0.2 * (3/9) + (5/15) * 0.2 * (4/9) + (6/15) * 0.2 * (5/9) = 0.0918518519. As expected, this is very slightly under 0.1, as a result of Veronica knowing that she's a doctor making another doctor claim slightly more likely to be scum.

Thus, P(D) = 0.25 * 0.1 + 0.75 * 0.0918518519 = 0.09388888892

so P(G | D) = 0.1 * 0.25 / 0.09388888892 = 0.26627218926. In other words, Guillermo's probability of being scum has gone up from 25% to about 26.6%. And again, to be clear, this analysis should apply completely regardless of whether Guillermo claimed night 4 doctor or night 2 doctor.

I hope this has been edifying.

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Also.

I think if anything fua's claim today is slightly +scum rather than +town as fua hinted it's a late-day action so it seems like it could be designed to encourage us to keep fua around, while also making docs likely to target fua which is fua is scum gives scum freer rein to kill whoever they like. Definitely feeling a bit wary about that.

Can we please not? This is like, the equivalent of rolefishing. And I think everyone or at least a lot of the people calling fua town are not calling fua town for the roleclaim (I'm not specifically, though I do think the roleclaim is +town).

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high quality ceph posting.

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I’m not actively suspicious of Amazons but I sure do remember townbinning Tammy very quickly in every game I played with her way back when.

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Though like ceph said memory might be lying. I am more concerned about morph rn of course.

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I'd be annoyed but it's not like there's a shortage of viable scum candidates atm.

Ceph, where's your GL scumlean coming from?

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here is a recent game I played with nsg-town that I mentioned earlier if you want an activity comparison. She did eat at least one prod during a weekend.

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She also had a wagon form on her and eventually kill her, and her last post before she didn't post for a few days and then got limmed there was also on a Friday.

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I'd be annoyed but it's not like there's a shortage of viable scum candidates atm.

Ceph, where's your GL scumlean coming from?

i'm expecting town-GL to produce compelling analysis and be a town leader, and i haven't seen that so far

I agree with this but my problem is I also felt this way about his scum game (also the game I just linked).

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I would like to wagon someone but the slots on which I would find a wagon useful are, generally, Not Here At This Moment.

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i almost just quoted their post of "i will read the first ten pages in the morning" and asked them how that was going and then decided that was just a little too smarmy.

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I'd join a wagon on any of redtea/GL/imaginality I think.

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please someone entertain me my flight takes off in 45 minutes

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redtea isn’t even here to vooooote

neither is anyone else worth voting!

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VOTE: GuiltyLion

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My take is that we shouldn't lim any of the active slots today. This isn't a game suffering for inactivity, so unless we think all 3 scum are active then I don't see an upside to basing wagons on inactivity.

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nQ my point is half that I think it’s silly to categorically not lim less active slots and half to be snarky.

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@penguin_alien: I found the game. Guess who modded it...

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I still quite think nQ is town.

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No need to apologize for any of that, I'm glad you're engaging in a healthier way.

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Arguments like "I think it's a good idea to direct eliminations in this general strategic way" (i.e. lim more active slots) imo are probably almost never alignment-indicative. Or at least, the validity of the logic itself will almost never be alignment-indicative because if scum are making an argument like that they sure aren't making it because they think the logic is invalid. Because if they thought the logic looked bad on its surface... they wouldn't make the argument because it'd make them look bad.

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That reads list is, generally fine. I actually have a pet theory on a deepscum but I certainly have no interest in pursuing it~

My reads are quite similar if you swap morph with nQ.

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Town: {fua, Shirou, Amazonian Legends, Tejate Raichu, Ydrasse}
Town Enough For Now: {Cephrir, implosion, morph}
Needs More Data: {NSG}
Would Lim: {numbersQ}
Would Lim With No Mercy: {redtea, imaginality}

does it bother you at all that this is also approximately what you'd get if you sorted the PL by charisma (tejate being the main exception)? This is something I've been thinking about a lot more lately.

This is interesting.

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I'm just really offput by implosion for some reason. Can't quite put my finger on it.

Mutual, except I can~

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I think it comes down to getting no sense he's actually trying to figure us out.

Does it matter if I figure you out right now? It's not like people would ever be on board limming you today. Can't I just be content with my vague suspicion that has a significant chance of being resolved via you being nightkilled?

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Genuinely I think I haven't been putting all that much effort into actually figuring things out in this game, I've mostly been just vibing. And part of the reason for that is that I am convinced that my reads are like, <=rand on d1.

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Or at least like, I don't want to rock any boats unless I feel like I have a read that

actually

has any substance to it and is not just some read I found on the ground somewhere, as my reads usually are.

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VOTE: nsg

Out of principle rather than really feeling like it's a good vote.

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I mean I'm down to wagon if there were critical mass but they're generally regarded as a power hitter who can be BoP'd later.

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I think it comes down to getting no sense he's actually trying to figure us out.

Does it matter if I figure you out right now? It's not like people would ever be on board limming you today. Can't I just be content with my vague suspicion that has a significant chance of being resolved via you being nightkilled?

What gives you the impression that no one would hop on a morph wagon today? I haven't gotten that impression from what I've read.

And I mean, also I sat on a morph vote for 24 hours

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I think there are probably a couple players at this table who could figure my alignment simply from the my vibe about carrying the hydra.

Do you consider yourself a good scum player?

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Or at least like, I don't want to rock any boats unless I feel like I have a read that

actually

has any substance to it and is not just some read I found on the ground somewhere, as my reads usually are.

do you consider voting me a boat-rock?

I consider it a desperate attempt to make someone have more than two simultaneous votes.

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Yes I meant that I found morph offputting and I know why because I've explained why.

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I'm quite confident that if I had drawn scum here, 2017 meta would be not among the best indicators of how I'd play.

I'm finding one scum game of yours since the dedede game. Is that right or am I overlooking some?

This

feels

extremely false but i have only found one (guns n roses) though i haven't looked very hard. To be frank I really can't accurately chronologize my recent games given, y'know, time is fake lately - it certainly doesn't

feel

like I've only played one scum game in the past 4+ years though.

I might just not really know how I'd play if I drew mafia at this point.

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oh yeah d'oy.

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Currently:

Would not lim: Shirou, Morph, Possibly Amazonians?
Ehh: Ydrasse, NSG, GL, NQ
Can be persuaded: redtea
Would lim: Ceph, Implosion, Tejate, Imaginality

Right now I would be surprised if there

weren’t

at least two scum in that bottom row.

What does "ehh" mean, then? Because you're saying you'd be surprised if you're wrong on more than one person in that tier. Or more than 0 if redtea is scum or one of your stronger reads is wrong.

[implosion]

[

numberQ's

] vote has been parked on Ceph but I don't see him engaging with any of Ceph's later content nor working to convince people to also vote there, instead his vote is just kinda languishing.

I also think this is one of the most indicative things I called out in my giant reads post and I want more people to think about / engage with this as well

numberQ is not behaving like someone who still thinks Ceph is the best vote for today

I don't feel much about this because I feel like my vote has been languishing all day, as a function of gamestate.

[implosion]

1045 is a good post and sums up a lot of my feelings of ennui toward this game at this moment.

[implosion]

I mostly just mean that the number of reads that you are calling "ehhh" is inconsistent with your saying you'd be surprised if there's less than 2 scum in the bottom tier.

[implosion]

VOTE: redtea

[implosion]

i'll make my first point the one that i care the most about people actually reading – i think that it's potentially a game losing mistake that everyone seems to have just casually written off shirou as town.

Ah now we're talking. This was my pet theory for deepscum I mentioned.

[implosion]

I'm here and happy to interact but you haven't really given me much to interact directly with :p

The point on 603 from Ydrasse is interesting and the meta-guiltylion thing is interesting. I'm not as sold on the first point.

[implosion]

I also think the AL/morph thing is maybe a little off - morph's stated strength in reading AL is drastically higher than the other way around and like, I imagine morph-scum with AL-town wouldn't really be able to get away with

not

making a statement like that, right? There was a lot of talk about specifically that pairing having high BoP to read quickly.

[implosion]

I suppose that is a fair point. I would still like to hear their answer, as well. No one else seems to have reservations about townreading me, or declaring their intent to throw me to the wolves.

I generally agree with nsg's stated ethos, and you're a relatively new player. Newer players are often easier to read through specific tells that new players are prone to committing, towntells that can be trusted more because a new player wouldn't be as likely to have learned them as scum, and scumtells that they don't know to avoid.

[implosion]

I'm here.

I'm absorbing atm.

My read of implosion is really frustrating. I feel strongly something's off with him, but it's so hard pinpoint/find words.

Do you think any of this has anything to do with me scumreading you, or is it 100% unrelated?

[implosion]

I suppose that is a fair point. I would still like to hear their answer, as well. No one else seems to have reservations about townreading me, or declaring their intent to throw me to the wolves.

I generally agree with nsg's stated ethos, and you're a relatively new player. Newer players are often easier to read through specific tells that new players are prone to committing, towntells that can be trusted more because a new player wouldn't be as likely to have learned them as scum, and scumtells that they don't know to avoid.

I'm not going to argue that point, but what do you think of Shirou's stated intent to not state the things he's considering about my slot?

I think it is what it is mostly. Some people play that way and it can be annoying to deal with but on its face it probably isn't alignment indicative.

[implosion]

nsg: how would you characterize your nullreads in terms of having seen things that sway you both ways on them, vs having read a lot of their posts and feeling like you haven't found anything concretely alignment indicative, vs not having enough material to sort through, etc?

[implosion]

i mean you said that shirou being deepscum was your pet theory so it just seems strange that after saying "now we're talking" when i bring it up you don't have anything more to say about it

I don't really have a ton more to say. Specifically his play was reminding me kind of of another specific scumgame I'll go find, though I really don't know if there's any actual reason my brain was making the connection to it other than it being a scumgame where I felt like I had very good reasons to townread someone and I was wrong. This is also related to how I was saying I wanted to townread Shirou earlier but felt like I couldn't, because I feel like his play is similar to some scumgames that have snowed me before.

[implosion]

It was Ame in this game I was thinking of. I think probably that game bears no real resemblance to this one other than there's some footnote in the back of my mind and tbh I'm not sure if I can logically justify why I feel reticent on Shirou specifically other than that I just don't feel like I have anything concrete to townread him on (I did think I had concrete things to townread Ame on in the linked game so really that game is probably 100% irrelevant)

[implosion]

I feel as though GL

has

to have said something really alignment indicative at some point by now based on the way in which he's interacted with the game but I really struggle to figure out what it'd be.

[implosion]

I don't think so. Pretty sure I was bugged before you expressed that. I think it probably has more to do with having suspected and even voted you at times in the dedede game I just didn't have certainty and conviction, and I don't want to make that mistake again here.

In dedede you had very specific things you nailed me on, or at least one, if I remember. Like I mentioned there was a single post you shredded me over that I immediately regretted making.

[implosion]

And I wouldn't expect you to make that kind of misstep again, probably ever, but definitely not playing with us.

The specific reason that that moment left such an impression on me is that I remember thinking that that post was good. And then it got shredded. It's not like there is a specific type of mistake inherent to that post that I categorized and now am Always Sure to Avoid as scum :s. If anything, the easiest misstep to categorize from that that I would avoid committing as scum is... scumreading you, probably. And well.

In ctrl+f'ing my name in your iso in that game I did find one other interesting piece which was this (of course, old meta, not reliable):

I reread parts of the Swag mini normal which was the most recent game I've played with Implosion. He seems significantly different this game. Bigger posts here, and yet with somehow less assertiveness, humor, and interactiveness.

which I think very much was a bad habit of mine as scum back in the way-before. I guess I would need to look at the guardians of the fortress game I played recently to see the degree to which I have shaken it but I feel like this description very clearly separates my play here from my play in dedede, and so you saying my playstyle here feels similar in some ways makes me want to ask what those ways were because I feel my playstyle then and my playstyle now, at least the alignment-indicative parts of them, are miles apart. Or maybe I'm actually being humorless and unassertive this game, which is possible i suppose but ceph said I was charismatic and I'm still riding that high so you can't hurt me too much.

[implosion]

You're not going to convince me that this entirely an exercise of jumping at shadows. If I come to that conclusion it will on my own.

And as for this I still am going to make every attempt to do so, partially because I still need to continue sorting you as well and partially because of a very primal need to nag people who are scumreading me when I can.

[implosion]

implosion seems to be relying a bit on "well my D1 reads are junk" to justify not efforting hard today. I didn't like the sequence of posts from 906 to 908:

I'd say this is a mischaracterization - I'm putting in plenty of effort. I'm just not putting in effort to fully sort the game because I think my efforts are better spent on things like getting a set of townreads that I actually feel good about (which I have), inquiring on slots that are underinquired (which I have), and trying to push game dynamics that are beneficial for the town (i.e. having any fucking wagon ever, which, of course, I have).

Overall it seems to me like implosion is downplaying his ability to scumhunt D1 as a way of justifying why he's not tried hard to sort morph.

However at the same time implosion carries on stirring up concerns on morph:

My friend.

"carrying on stirring up concerns on morph"... is me trying hard to sort morph!!!!

This is part of why I'm focusing more on morph's suspicion of me than nsg's (at least for the time being), because I'm not as suspicious of nsg.

and criticising others' reasons for townreading them e.g. post 1076.

This was pretty much an objective observation. Would you rather I just not make an objective observation toward someone who is giving a partially incorrect reason to call a scumread of mine town??

Implosion is also more concerned with how morph is reading him than vice versa. He seemed to subtly fish for morph to townread him in post 325. And tries to dispel morph's doubts about him in the sequence from post 1083.

To elaborate on this I think this is probably actually a meta towntell for me. Take for instance this game where I basically spent the entire game yelling at RC (who had claimed a 100% meta scumtell on me) for making the game unplayable for me, or probably the best example (holy crap this took way longer to look for than I thought it would, older than I thought) is here, where I was limmed as town on d2 and spent the entire time going down screaming at people voting me for awful reasons and eventually gave dying reads that were 2/3 correct including calling most of my wagon town despite the screaming (that is to say, it's normal for me to use people pressuring me as an opportunity to sort them).

(sidenote @morph: found another scumgame while looking for the above that's still quite old but more recent than that other one and probably a little meta-relevant here)

But I don't see how getting morph to townread him helps him to sort morph?

See above.

Overall, if only one of these two is scum my money's still on implosion. He's a good player but I have more questions about his play here than in Guardians where he was town and pretty transparently so (albeit I was scum that game so had an informed perspective).

Everyone townread me early in that game based on my mech talk; to be completely honest I think a lot of those townreads were undeserved (VP townreading me for proactively bringing up my scum topic from the previous run of the game might have been right, I'm not sure, but definitely a lot of the stuff I was being called town for early was... not the most accurate). And I mean. You were calling me scum that game by the end, even though you were scum. It's not like I was so transparently town that I wasn't pushable. Hell, nQ and I were pretty close to misvoting each other.

[implosion]

Oh and one other point I forgot to mention is that imag, you're acting like this is not the "early game", whatever that means. It's 4 RL days in, as far as I'm concerned with respect to forming reads, it's very much the early game. Sure, a bunch of stuff has happened but there still hasn't been a wagon with more than 3 votes I think. I'm more than happy to not feel confident in most of my reads right now.

As for how this makes me feel about imaginality: I think a hard pivot on to me here is entirely consistent with him being scum. There's been a heck of a lot of vague suspicion on me from a variety of slots without any action, and I think scum-imag would potentially have motivation to try to coalesce that into action. His thread-engagement style so far of big post, a few small posts, big post, a few small posts is reminiscent of guardians though it could just be how he plays. Still need to think more on him though.

[implosion]

also I dislike that redtea wagon. They're more likely than not town to me and even if you can't see their slot that way, they've barely been here. You're mostly voting them for inactivity and not having much content to go off rather than because they've been really "scummy". It feels like almost a RVS wagon...except on page 40-ish.

It's fine I guess if it's just a "oh let's do a random wagon out of some gut suspicious" (literally like a RVS?), but a lurky slot that is a consensus scum read for almost everyone? yeah, doesn't feel a lot like scum to me either even outside of their content itself.

I am firmly in the camp that the fact there have been no real wagons is Bad For This Town and will make it harder to get better reads as this game moves forward, and will also likely contribute to decay of morale in the long term (and the short term potentially).

I personally still have redtea as null atm.

[implosion]

Oh and as I was catching up when I saw 1117 I audibly said "OOOhhh" because yeah, that game fits exactly what my subconscious was telling me to think about Shirou >_>. So I appreciate him linking it. That said,

Also implosion, I kinda knew your "deepscum" thing was probably me (and it makes sense from your pov as either alignment), but like...it's still underwhelming that it doesn't seem to be developing either way since early game.

If my one game with you was me misreading you

specifically on d1

badly enough that I, an SK thinking the game was going to go too townsided and trying to hurt town as much as possible, wound up shooting you, as a serial killer, despite you making such claims late in the game day as "If Implo is scum, it's fine I'm gonna go sit in the wall of shame"

Like, my one game with you I misread you

that

badly and you want my read to

develop

on you in the first four RL days of the game? It's evident from that game that it will probably take me more than one RL day to read you accurately.

[implosion]

Okay I guess in the dead PT in that game I said I was shooting you partially because you weren't suspicious of me but could become suspicious but I also did say I thought you would and was hoping you would flip town.

[implosion]

I don't mind if the best you've after thinking about them is "eh null", but I was perhaps just interested to see the thought process behind sorting it into null if you had any I guess?

I mean, I'd describe almost the entirety of your play so far as looking townish on the surface but being within your scumrange. Essentially exactly how Tejate Raichu described it but with the opposite inflection; you'd have to be very good to be scum here, but you are very good. I think you probably would agree (maybe not) that you haven't really posted much that you're not capable of faking as scum. Hence, I'm trying to make wagons happen, and move the game forward in ways that will allow me to perhaps read someone like you with accuracy - through how your stances evolve, how you use your vote and what wagons you push or defend or ignore, and so on, over a long span of time.

[implosion]

Looking a little more at imaginality's updated reads list.

Cephrir argued my suspicion of him is a playstyle thing. Well maybe but if so it's a convenient playstyle for scum to hide behind. Today's posts read a bit better maybe but I still have doubts whether Cephrir's really trying to solve.

This reminds me intensely of how he was giving his reads in the guardians game. Specifically this post; there was a ton of stuff in that post that was essentially a list of reasons to read a player in both directions without an actual commitment to a read. Here his take on Ceph is "he gave this argument, but the argument seems convenient, but he's better today, but i have my doubts". He does give an ordered reads list but the wishy-washiness of the rhetoric is still there and feels like scum who wants to call someone scum while giving themself a rhetorical out of sorts. It's sort of an IIoA thing to a degree as well, describing the things that Ceph has done and what he thinks of those things but not exactly why he comes to a particular conclusion based on those.

This game is drastically different from guardians as a setup which is important to keep in mind in this comparison though.

Also weird is he says that his Shirou read has been tempered a little, but then still lists Shirou as one of two people in his top tier of townreads?

[implosion]

A current reads list for me looks something like this.

Town: Tejate, numberQ, fua.

Town, with reservations: Ceph, AL. Reservations on Ceph are that his scumgame is supposed to be strong but I do feel like my read here isn't hollow. Reservations on AL are in the event of a morph scum flip.

Null, but I feel like I have the content that I need to figure them out: nsg, GL, Ydrasse (who is pending on me looking more closely in light of nsg's comments).

I don't think I could really figure them out based on the game so far meaningfully: redtea, morph, Shirou. morph

is

a scumread if I go purely by my opinion of their posts without the context that I don't think they're a person my reads are likely to be very accurate on at this stage; with that context it's basically a matter of I think more interaction over more time can be enlightening. redtea is redtea. Shirou is explained above.

Then imaginality. But this is a very recent conclusion and I still want to see more people's opinions on his new reads list and stuff toward me.

[implosion]

i see that this point was already made in a different way, but it surprises me that anyone could post right after nsg's posts without having anything to say about shirou. that was clearly the most interesting thing there, no? why is it not on the list of interesting things.

I mean, I did comment on it in saying that I'd also been uncertain about him. I'm not specifically sure why I didn't say more about it after but there are just so many individual posts from Shirou that give me the same feeling when reading them of "this is townish without the context of who posted it but null with that context" is so high that there really wasn't much else specific to say. Or at least I've said anything else specific I had to say now.

why did this theory need to be kept in your pocket?

Combination of I've had similar sort of scumreads on consensus townreads in the past that have been wrong (at least I feel like I have, this is also part of why I don't trust myself on morph) and I don't think I'm really capable of reading Shirou based on his content so far at a rate above random. It didn't really

need

to be kept in my pocket, I just didn't feel the need to elucidate it.

[implosion]

Another comment I think I just realized unrelated to anything recent - someone mentioned thinking my comment on my nsg wagon hop was performative. I think I've realized why I felt awkward making that jump (and probably why the post looks performative as a result) which is that I was under tension between wanting to wagon hop and not really wanting to hop onto nsg's wagon specifically because I didn't feel like pressure on nsg was going to make her more likely to do useful things, evidenced by the game I linked earlier with her.

[implosion]

(i realize i haven't actually moved my vote that much either, and i don't feel like explaining why i don't think that's contradictory)

what? you've made 7 votes.

[implosion]

Ydrasse, regarding this:

but I will say the difference I'm seeing is that Ydrasse seems genuinely a lot more invested in parsing out people's mindset behind their takes, I liked that she challenged me on the early conclusion I drew about your hydra having a townier opening than AL, I like that she's digging into numberQ's commentary on Shirou. It's not an ironclad reason to locktown Ydrasse, like she's certainly a capable scum player,

but overall the sense I get from her scum game - especially how she played Dance - is that she leans heavily on appearing tonally town, chill vibes, wanting to seem like she's not too survivalist or too tryhard, etc, whereas I get the sense the purpose of her posts so far here is less about being perceived any kind of way and more doing real digging into things she doesn't like or doesn't understand

. All this is D1 with no flips so heavy grain of salt, but that's the distinction I'm feeling

Would you say that this is an accurate characterization of the way that you think about playing scum, specifically that as scum you have a focus on appearing tonally chill/etc rather than focusing on looking like you're sorting?

[implosion]

VOTE: imaginality

[implosion]

Look at the speed of this wagon vs redtea though. I think the difference is potentially informative.

Informative of what - are you implying redtea is scum vs you being town with this, or something else?

Sue me for having a nuanced take. If someone was obvscum we wouldn't have waited 40 pages for our first wagon (and sorry to disappoint but we're going to have to wait even longer for our first wagon on scum).

There's a difference between nuance and what I'm describing; nuance is being able to point out different factors and then explain how they fit together. You're doing the first part but not the last - there's a missing step between "ceph is doing x things that are scummy, y things that are towny, i think he's better today but still suspicious because z" and him being in the bottom tier of your reads list despite thinking his recent posts are good.

Yep, I still see him as town but understand there is reason to be wary. So my confidence in my read being right has lessened a little.

So your confidence has waned, but he's still (roughly tied for) your most confident read in spite of that? Correct me if I'm misinterpreting.

[implosion]

Tejate, there's an anecdote from one of the first newbie games I played on this site about 10 years ago that I like to bring up when people talk (imo) overly much about limming for information. In that game, someone sorted the player list by the amount of info we'd get from their flip in an effort to get the most info-wise out of the d1 lim. It was, imo, not a coincidence that the two bottom players on that list were the scumteam. Scum are in many ways incentivized to play in such a way that their eliminations give little information. It's fine to think about what info you'll get out of a lim but it should not IMO be a chief factor in who you pick. Because, ultimately, town's goal

is

just "kill all scum".

[implosion]

are you intending to use morphism as a category theory joke :X

[implosion]

I've given a high-level overview of the numberQ read: his play, particularly his thread interaction motifs, feel identical to guardians. I generally don't feel much agenda from him. I liked his entrance to the game and 140 feels like a real effort to give opinions on the things he thinks he has opinions on rather than for show, or like scum would feel like giving only one actual read in an opening post like that is a bad idea. The fact that he's gotten caught up in the pace of the game but still made posts like 271 while catching up is a good sign imo, in that scum would feel more obligation to look like they're staying on top of things rather than being quippy. I actually liked the series of posts from 270-279 and specifically (don't hate me) remember liking that he asked for a vote count; it made it feel like his interest in being on top of what's happening in the game was genuine.

That's basically where my early read was coming from. Since then I think his arc on Cephrir looks fairly consistent with him as town; his wall looks like town who is becoming increasingly sure on a read more than scum who is trying to bs a case to me. His thread interactions feel generally very at ease to me e.g. 630 662. I don't think he looks like he cares especially much about perceptions. He's continued to sort of focus toward specific players/specific things despite being criticized for it and I think his play is consistent with town who is slightly bogged down by the pace of the game but doing his best to still figure out the things that he feels he has a foothold in.

There is also a component of sort of anti-Shirouism here; I don't actually know nQ's scumgame and don't think/know if it's particularly weak, but I do feel like his ISO contains a lot of things that are easy to scumread but aren't really actually alignment-indicative, and I think the same was probably true in guardians.

[implosion]

Shirou it's very rude of you to have so many of your stances be the same as mine.

[implosion]

I have many morph queries to answer, I know, I will answer them.

To answer out of order this page: hypoclaiming doesn't work because town players don't flip with their night, just as "cop" or "doctor". I was willing to vote GL partially because I felt like he's the type of player for whom coordinated pressure might help sort, along with him being null (this is e.g. why I didn't list nsg because I didn't think coordinated pressure on her would be as useful).

[implosion]

I havent really thought about whether this would be worth it, but you could hypoclaim a night and then give your hypo result on the day after. Or you could hypoclaim every day from 2 on (if I'm a cop I wasnt a night 1 cop, etc)

Hypoclaiming nights is likely a bad idea because scum can shoot the earlier night cops.

The second thing sounds like everyone simply claiming their results when they get them with the added step of people explicitly claiming when they don't have results, which seems unnecessary.

[implosion]

@Implosion I'm probably rehashing shit, but I'm curious what about Ydra's 2 post have you a page 2 townlean on her. (I see that by page 10, only one player commented on this)

This is an interesting one because half of my answer is I have no real idea why I thought it based on those two posts, and the other half is that I strongly suspect I just felt the need to say

something

of content in that post. The reason for this is that that post marked the end of my breadcrumb (hence it starting with "Anyway.") and I think I just wanted to say something else in it and I probably thought either her quick read on Amazons or her first post were townish. I feel comfortable saying this because my breadcrumb is so obscured that I don't think it's possible to figure out even knowing where it is.

Noting this because I'm curious how this caution/fear has manifested since then.

This was referring to my caution/fear toward GL - it's interesting that you were curious how this had manifested since then, and then you later on were surprised that I was willing to wagon GL. I feel like you should be able to draw that connection if you were specifically looking for it.

I'm several pages past this post, and I didn't see anyone ask about this, and I'd like to know what the things he'd said at that point seemed a little towny too you.

This referring to Tejate Raichu and my 299. I think as a rule for me (this applies to the Ydrasse thing too) it's probably kind of a hopeless effort to ask me why I had specific early townreads because I have a habit as town of stating early townreads and then later literally being unable to justify why I had them - answering your question here involves me ISOing Tejate Raichu and trying to piece together what I was thinking, rather than going off of memory.

Probably it was to do with the aesthetics of his Amazons vote and Ydrasse interactions and of the aesthetics of his early thread interaction - like I had said early in this game I wasn't really looking very much at specific interactions or threads of thought and trying to analyze those things individually.

I hate the hedginess of this statement given there's like zero posts in your iso that suggest you're all that undecided about us.

I don't think that's true? I mean the post you quoted for one is me indicating that I'm partially undecided about you <_<

Like I've tried to communicate, my read on you amounts to "scummy but I don't trust myself to read you accurately".

Where is the sorting? There are 54 mentions of "morph" in your ISO and none of them strike me as particularly sort-y. What posts am I misreading?

And worse, there are 54 mentions of "morph" in your iso, and not one of them is actually geared at sorting us. Maybe I'm missing something?

Partially this is fair criticism and I'd chalk it down to me just playing this game in a way that isn't particularly focused, in general.

But also partially... this is

incredibly

uncharitable. My empty vote on you was the start of an attempt to sort. 462 is to sort you. 520 is to try to get a baseline of how to think about your play. 530 is trying to interact with you and you (temporarily) refusing. 632 is me floating something of yours I thought was scummy to see what others think. This is all literally in the first 1/3 of those 54 mentions.

"Not one of them is geared toward sorting you" is, tbh, insulting in its hyperbolicity.

[implosion]

I don't really buy that redtea-scum post, GL. The perspective slip thing doesn't really jive to me (I don't see why redtea-scum would lie about having read less of the thread than they have, that doesn't exactly make them look good). I kind of see how a lot of that play can be described as bad but I don't really see the scum motivation as clearly as you're outlining it.

[implosion]

My opinion on redtea right now is annoyingly similar to Shirou's: they have the aesthetics in my mind of a slot that could easily be either alignment but is prone to being misread as scum if town. I feel like imaginality is a better shot for actual scum - to compare the two, they both have been on the sidelines of the day, but whenever imaginality comes into the thread it feels to me like he's coming in for the sake of giving stances or looking like he has them, and not figuring out stances. Whereas from redtea I don't even get the vibe that they care about appearing to have stances. Basically I don't get the vibe of caring about appearances from redtea. To be fair if they are scum this is probably the point of why they've been playing this way. I think it's the way imaginality's wallish posts have worked that gives me this impression, whereas yeah you point out redtea's wallreadpost is sort of all over the place/weird and it's like, idk, I feel like they'd want to flesh it out a bit more as scum. Kind of like what Shirou was saying of people maybe underestimating redtea's scumgame, I feel like redtea's game as scum here would have to be essentially very lazy/sloppy because of the pressure they've been under whereas as town I think it's easier to see their posting as like, someone just not all that invested/engaged in the game yet.

Okay maybe I actually do townlean them now that I write this out.

[implosion]

I really do hope Shirou is town here because if so I feel like we are vibing just like incredibly hard in the past chunk of this day and if not then idk if he's just intentionally focusing on pocketing me, which would be really weird for multiple reasons, but gosh.

[implosion]

oops this entire day went by >.>

i also had some hesitancy on the thing Shirou mentioned re:imaginality for similar reasons but I haven't yet figured out if I put stock in it (I see Shirou figured out he doesn't but I'm not sure atm). Not really caught up proper though.

[implosion]

I am running low on motivation for the game rn. I think even if I do put stock in that one thing from imag being townish he's still on net scummy. The argument he's making right now is mostly just weird for reasons people like fua have outlined already. There's a lot of time in the day left but I don't think using it for the sake of using it is correct when the game is seemingly running out of steam (3 days ago was 6 pages back, another 3 days ago takes us back about another 20 pages, though part of that is probably the weekend but etc).

If anyone has anything in particular they want me to respond to I'm happy to but I mostly feel blah for partially in-game (wanting a flip) and partially out-of-game reasons.

[implosion]

I think imag + redtea are both scum is sure, possible but there's no way the game's that easy in practice most of the time.

I think the most interesting thing in MegAzumarill's catchup posting is the annoyance at people townbinning fua, which in context I can see as a scum-going-against-the-grain-to-go-against-the-grain kind of thing. I'm interested to know if there's more to why Meg thinks fua is scummy beyond the self-awareness thing.

[implosion]

Somewhat but I think it's a believable conclusion for someone to come to upon a quick read of the thread.

[implosion]

I agree the meg point on fua isn't

good

but also I don't think "hypocrisy is scummy" is all that uncommon of a take. It was mostly interesting to me just from the angle of fua being the person that Meg chose to go after. I can see side-eyeing nQ for it but I think 1699 looks, like, fine. What I'd expect town with this take to say. I don't think it really makes sense as nQ-scum angling to shade fua really because I don't think scum in the current atmosphere would have much motivation to actively shade fua and even if that's what he's doing 1699 is a pretty awful job at shading someone given that he explicitly said he's not shading.

[implosion]

i for one would be interested in the advent of a hammer.

[implosion]

i am not a night one doctor and i still think fua is town.

[implosion]

The dynamics of whether scum are likely to have been on the imag wagon depend a lot on redtea's alignment; if redtea is town then it's not like scum were at any real risk yesterday and they probably would have voted more for looking town than for caring who got elimmed.

[implosion]

At the same time this makes your claim a bit more believable, it also kinda reeks of TMI by how much you trust that Ydrasse was telling the truth there, which may be a sign you knew she was town, because as scum it's easier to believe what comes from townies is just the truth.

why does scum!imaginality decide to stick with the whole "I'm a night 2 doc" pseudo-counterclaim as an argument to push/suspect Ydrasse anyway?

It's the main thing that makes me think he might be town, I don't think scum would decide in advance to fakeclaim that particular night/role and use it as a reason to push someone who isn't at all likely to get limmed here, just doesn't feel like a natural play for scum

I'm also wary of Tejate proclaiming he was reconsidering me not for the reasons whoever said earlier about Tej being my scumbuddy, but rather with me being town, I see it as a way where Tej can look like he's unsure about my flip without doing anything to push another wagon and giving himself room to rejoin my wagon.

That said, I don't think the timing of Tej's reconsidering post is as suspicious as people are making out though (Shirou in #1494 and maybe someone else earlier?). Like Tej said it's not unreasonable to want to reread someone even in the absence of new content, considering it felt like the game was taking a breather at that moment.

Also, Shirou's argument that Tejate is trying to divert from me falls apart when I flip town. So to my mind there are three possibilities here about why Shirou is pushing this point:

1. Shirou is town and believes he's making a good point against Tejate.
2. Shirou is scum and thinks making it look like Tejate is a plausible buddy for me will help get my mislim over the line
3. Shirou is scumbuddies with Tejate and knows this attack on Tejate will be invalidated once I flip, making Tejate look better than if Shirou hadn't called him scummy over this, while helping them with distancing

(2 and 3 could both be true.)

this whole post kinda vibes town to me

I'll vote redtea if it does come down to redtea or me, of course, but currently I would rather see implosion or numberQ limmed and I think there's time for that to happen.

numberQ's iso has a lot of caveats, to-dos and minor questions. He backed off his early suspicion of Cephrir. I'm not seeing anything strikingly towny in his posts.

He can prove himself town by voting implosion with me though - how about it, numberQ?

eh but then I do not like this post

VOTE: imaginality

yeah, I don't like the bargaining for numberQ's vote and I don't really buy the level of projected confidence in his implosion scumread, I think implosion's later play has felt quite townie and earlier whenever imaginality was casing implosion he sounded a lot more doubtful/uncertain than he is acting now

This seems in retrospect like a really strangely fast turnaround. The only reason I don't immediately want to call it super scummy is that I'm not entirely sure what GL-scum's motivation would be to make such an awkward turnaround onto imaginality.

[implosion]

Specifically the reason that fast turnaround strikes me is that GL was

so

gung-ho on redtea-scum for so long, so what's the impetus for a vote swap at that point? His swap changed wagons from 4-3 to 5-2 and basically solidified the imag elim in a world where a redtea elim was still perfectly possible and he seemed so invested in his redtea scum read that it's pretty surprising he'd give it up on someone that he had just indicated multiple reasons to townread, even if he also then found some reasons to scumread them.

[implosion]

The obvious breakdown of the ~flow of votes~ on the imag wagon is the immediate glut of fua-cephrir-ydrasse-me and then the stragglers of Shirou-GL-ceph-morph (Ceph counting in both bc he unvoted and revoted). At least in terms of wagon dynamics. Shirou made the show of wanting to be the one who started the wagon so maybe he counts as more of the former group, morph's was just a vote-to-end-the-day afaict.

I don't really think there's much that can be analyzed deeply there that isn't just my biases of who I already think is scummy/townish? Maybe there is idk.

[implosion]

Right now my inclination is to scum-case GL. I don't know if I actually think he's scummy but I kind of want to ISO him while biasing myself toward thinking that he's scum, and see what i come up with. I also want to dig more into Ydrasse at some point today, ideally once the sickness leaves her alone.

[implosion]

That's useful.

VOTE: GuiltyLion for now. I'll ISO him today/soon.

nQ is basically saying a more elaborated version of what I was. Yesterday in general I think GL maybe felt too agreeable - like his reads list in 892 is going to ruffle basically no feathers from active players. Ceph's comment of it basically being the player list sorted by charisma is poignant.

[implosion]

Spoiler: Intentionally biased GL iso, part 1

also morph when have you (collectively) ever liked my early game posts

last time we played in that Dedede fusion game I remember us arguing for the vast majority of it, D1 for sure at least

it's prob gonna be the same thing again here

double-triple-super-bias: this feels like it could be scum->scum.

aaaaahhh Fumuki eh, if you are scum you definitely shouldn't have told me that

This is a little bit of an odd reaction given nsg said she'd be able to tell who Shirou is before Shirou said who he was. I searched for mentions of Shirou in his ISO and it's pretty much entirely being entirely convinced that Shirou is town. This is a little bit incongruous with this post in my mind because other people have been describing Shirou as having a very strong scumgame, which GL should know if he's town, and so in principle he should be slow to townread Shirou, but he isn't. Sure that might not be how GL's thinking about the slot but I don't really get the sense that GL was ever using meta to read Shirou which this post from him implies he should be doing. Which makes this post feel performative.

The interaction between Tejate and Ceph from 238 on is pinging me. 238 itself does strike me as a lot of nothing that

could

be scum indicative. Ceph calling him out on it though, for some reason I didn't like it even though I generally agreed with the sentiment. And overall I feel like Tejate is coming out of that back and forth looking towny, and Ceph null-scum.

This was my impression too. Ceph is giving me major "SE pushing on a mislimmable Newbie in the Newbie Queue" vibes

I townread Tejate

so 238 essentially just says "hey look everyone i have handwritten notes" since there is no actual reason for it to exist.

this post in particular

I could definitely imagine it being town in Ceph's spot trying to pressure a questionable slot, but it's just ever so slightly too aggressive for me. like I can see where Ceph is coming from calling out that the "notes" comment is a bit LAMISTy, but it's not too hard for me to imagine a town!Tejate writing the post and thinking it might be useful, he feels genuine to me

actually though I am thinking fua's jump in is worse than Ceph's push

I townread Tejate, but I can imagine Ceph being town misfiring on him. I think if that was a T-T spat, fua's play vibes like scum looking for a distraction outside the scrutiny their own slot is receiving, and leveraging Tejate/Ceph to do it

VOTE: fua

implosion and nQ get major towncred for mindmelds

and I kinda townread Ydrasse so far too

[/quote]
A few comments on this sequence of 4 posts.

First, the suspicion toward Ceph feels very only-poke-the-warthog-from-a-distance. Like he doesn't want to incur wrath too badly. Specifically the couched language in 310 - "ever so slightly too aggressive" and "can see where he's coming from" but still wants to explore the scumread. Compare, say, even the way that nsg talked about the Shirou slot - it did not feel like she was trying to stay on his good side even though she wasn't really calling him scum when she gave her tirade of "can we please not all locktown shirou".

Second, the reasoning given for the fua vote in 311 is awkward; he thinks Ceph is scummy but can imagine him being town misfiring. But

if

he's town misfiring then fua looks bad. It's like, "I have this scumread. But if I'm wrong on it then this other player is scummy, so vote: other player". And this the first mention of fua in his ISO. Further, at this point Ceph has 2 votes on him and fua has 0. I feel like town-GL votes Ceph here - it's a wagon, he's suspicious of him, it could help sort. But scum-GL is afraid of being the third vote on the wagon of a strong town player who is often (at least iirc) pretty skeptical of pressure on him. And so instead he decides to come up with some reason to not have to join that wagon, and vanity votes fua who, at this point in the game, is not widely townread.

Third, the last post just feels, idk, like it fits this pattern of trying to get on people's good sides/stay off people's bad sides. Just the phrasing of "major towncred for mindmelds". More minor than the other things.

actually though I am thinking fua's jump in is worse than Ceph's push

I townread Tejate, but I can imagine Ceph being town misfiring on him. I think if that was a T-T spat, fua's play vibes like scum looking for a distraction outside the scrutiny their own slot is receiving, and leveraging Tejate/Ceph to do it

VOTE: fua

Yes, I want a distraction from my own slot, so instead of enlisting my buddies to do something or waiting my turn, I just hop in balls-out into a pre-existing feud right after people express suspicion of me, because I'm eager to get away from the pressure of zero votes. You have solved the case very early into day 1. I'm not sure what you think my level of experience is or how well-versed I am in how to play this game, but this isn't it chief.

this post is not a good look, my vote stays

you feel extremely defensive, leans on sarcasm extra thick to try to imply that voting/scumreading you is dumb, and is the implication here supposed to be that scum you would never hop into any feud? How else would scum find things to push on or reasons to scumread people?

Where did the "solved the case" nonsense come from? Did my post give you the impression I felt I had "already solved"? Why?

This is just a bit strong of a response imo. The way the post is written kind of feels like he decided that his opinion of the post was that it's scummy, and then came up with a reason for each part of it to be scummy, when really a lot of it is just harping on sarcasm.

What do you make of Tejate’s point that people are trying to tie him and Ceph together? Because you certainly pushed that note when you voted for me. Why can’t you be trying to pocket Tejate by going against popular opinion and TRing him?

I do think anyone claiming to tie Cephrir and Tejate together would be making a mistake, yeah.

You're not wrong that I made some assumptions and suggested a narrative. I don't have any hard data so I offered a hypothetical that made sense to me and pushed it to see what would happen

I'm not trying to pocket to Tejate cause I'm town, but it's certainly not unreasonable for someone to suspect me of doing that, and if that's what you believe you should argue for it

I don't really understand why town chooses to "make some assumptions and suggest a narrative" (assuming this is referring to the thing about fua-maybe-scum-if-ceph-and-tejate-town). Again, the more productive thing for GL-town to do in that situation seems to be to vote Ceph, a player who he was calling scummy and who already had two votes on him. He later says he likes big wagons. This whole thing just makes it seem like he was lying about the Ceph scumread. I don't see any reason for GL-town to do this weird, circuitous "suggesting a narrative" thing instead of just voting the person who he just called scum and who has votes on him already.

[implosion]

In the same post you say that Ceph is misguided in his targeting of Tejate and simultaneously saying that I’m leveraging the two of them to escape pressure. How is it wrong to categorize this as tying them together and why do you say that I was trying to start dueling wagons with a single naked vote? You still haven’t addressed my point that my SR of Ceph was completely unrelated to the Tejate interaction and that I responded to him because I was being explicitly mentioned and misrepresented.

dude are you understanding the conditional/hypothetical nature of that post or not

I said "I can

IMAGINE

Ceph being town misfiring on him"

because I had just said I was pinged a bit by Ceph's aggression, but then I thought about it more, thinking about how the last time I saw Ceph as scum he was laid back and not this aggressive, and thought "you know it's totally possible Ceph is just wrongTown here"

and then I said, "suppose Tejate/Ceph is T-T, what would scum!fua do", and I thought finding a reason to vote Ceph would be a perfectly logical play from you there, so I wanted to pressure you on it

none of this is me asserting like 'yeah, definitely this is

exactly

what's happening', it's me thinking about a possible framework for the game and trying to fit it onto you and see what you do.

I know you have ~ reasons ~ for SRing Ceph, but frankly I think it's easy to fake a reason to scumread Ceph, that doesn't matter as much to me right now. I can imagine town!you or scum!you having that reason to vote him.

This post needs to be addressed now given what I just wrote:

I'm skeptical about him having been pinged by Ceph's aggression, then having thought about it more and thinking about Ceph being laid back last time he played with him, and going through this whole line of thought and this hypothetical and deciding that this was the best use of his vote. I'm skeptical because the time between GL's "ceph gives SE-scum pushing a newbie vibes" post and his voting fua instead, was 7 minutes. This post also feels like GL trying to retcon his read on Ceph - at no point in the actual exchange did he mention having changed his mind because he was thinking about Ceph meta. In fact the opposite, he voted fua because he described fua as "worse" - implying he still thought Ceph was scummy for that push, rather than, as he's implying here, townie for playing differently from his scum meta. So that's somewhat inconsistent.

[implosion]

Spoiler: Intentionally biased GL ISO, part 2

fua have you ever seen someone vote or fos you and go “gosh, I’m town but their reasoning here sure is solid”?

I mean, several other people in this game have said that it’s understandable if people scumread them for (X) reason. So if your point is that town always thinks that reasoning against them is bad then that’s clearly not true and also a weak argument to begin with.

that's... not even close to what i'm saying? my point is you seem especially acerbic toward people that have expressed suspicion of you. I literally asked you one question and then emptyvoted you and you're calling me your tied biggest scumread and speculating about who I'm scum with. It seems like a bit of an overreaction.

do you think the "acerbic"ity is scummy? I'm townreading it, I don't know if scum!fua would be this aggressive if they knew they were full of shit, I am getting a vibe that they're just a defensive person

This is a weird take in comparison to 394, where GL was describing fua as scummy for being overdefensive. Yeah, he might have come around, but this sure does also make a ton of sense from the perspective of GL being scum who was trying to extricate him from what would have been quickly becoming a quagmire of a fua-scumread. I get that kind of vibe from a lot of the exchange, really.

If you think it’s equally likely for town me and scum me to have that reason to vote for him then why assume it’s alignment-indicative and cast your vote for me in the first place?

to create content and pressure you

and AGAIN, the REASONING is not why I voted you so much as just the fact that you chose that point in time to vote Ceph at all

God fua made a lot of really good points in this spat that I wasn't giving them credit for at the time lol.

I'll reiterate: I don't see why town-GL would rather "create content and pressure fua" than creating content and pressuring Cephrir, who would have been a real wagon (i.e., real pressure) rather than a vanity vote.

Unrelated to this post: it's worth noting that at this point he was remarkably gung-ho about a redtea scumread off of what would have been just the first four posts redtea made. I don't really see any really explicit reasoning laid out anywhere. The redtea push also kind of fits in with this notion of GL potentially being scum who is trying not to ruffle feathers. I also just don't see why he's so excited about the push; an absent player is not a player on whom pressure is especially useful, and I think being sold on redtea-scum from those four posts is a little wild. I don't hate him trying to build a redtea wagon in isolation but it does feel like something scum-him could easily want to do. Put succinctly,

At a stage where people are starting to put out reads and leans, even tentative ones, here Ceph is giving a reason why he might not be able to. And then of course, he does not for the rest of his ISO. This is also +scum - he's been in several interactions and debates, but his only takeaway is that "everyone is scum"?

Do you think scum is more likely to go for an "everyone is scum" approach? I think scum are more likely to hand out some early townreads to try to get towncred in return. Ceph certainly doesn't seem interested in making allies this game

GL sure feels interested in making allies this game. Which is fine, town does that, but town also doesn't worry about ruffling feathers, and the people GL is choosing to push and not push, the way he detached from the fua argument, the fact that his top two scumreads in his reads post were redtea+imaginality followed by numberQ, yeah. I think I remember GL-town in coalition being kind of unafraid to deal with pretty bloody fights, whereas here I don't get that impression as much.

From here he has a lot of posting up until his reads list, the only really interesting thing there is idk if I buy 874/877 as reasons to scumread nQ (which I believe he's saying they are). It's like, idk if nQ would be so blatant if he was scum with redtea lol. Just being like "hey lets not lim lurkers" as scum with redtea. This is another sort of maybe broader vibe I get from GL, which is that he has ultimately very little paranoia. Sort of unhealthily little for a mafia game. He's happy to take the easy lims on imag/redtea and then go from there. All the consensus townreads are town. Etc. I don't really get the sense that he's afraid of being wrong all that much from his posting.

Anyway. Let's look closely at his reads list.

aight, reads time

Town: {fua, Shirou, Amazonian Legends, Tejate Raichu, Ydrasse}
Town Enough For Now: {Cephrir, implosion, morph}
Needs More Data: {NSG}
Would Lim: {numbersQ}
Would Lim With No Mercy: {redtea, imaginality}

I don't feel like I need to walk through reasoning on fua/Shirou, seems they're kinda universally townread by this point

Ydrasse I've kinda covered already in my back and forth with morph and my catch up, I don't think she's playing with an agenda, I was on the same page with her numbersQ suspicion, and I also kinda buy her lack of willingness to vote redtea as genuine, I think scum is a lil less likely to find reasons to not vote an inactive slot they claim to be scumreading/wanting to vote on the whole. that last point is the weakest, the bigger point in my mind is my sense of agreement with the times she really has dug into somebody in the game so far

Tejate, like I said earlier, bleeds earnest sincerity in his posts. I was maybe verryyyy slightly pinged by a bit of overexplainy selfconsciousness in 827, but then 830 and 836 immediately put that doubt to rest again

Amazonian was in the slightly more paranoid town tier until 846, I struggle to see that as a post that is likely to come from scum. I'm on board with the angles they've been taking this game by and large and the reads post in 821 is fairly consistent with my own view of the game and doesn't appear to be agenda-driven. I also place some weight on morph locktowning them, I think regardless of morph's alignment a locktown read there is generally ++townpoints for AL

the next tier I think it's entirely possible, if not likely, that there's a deep scum in there, but I don't have enough data to feel I have a good grip on who it would be, and I generally respect all three of their scumgames enough to not townread them as strongly as the first tier given their content so far. both morph and implosion have had a couple instances where I feel in sync with them and a couple instances where I'm a lil concerned they might be playing to an agenda or emulating what they think they'd do as town. Ceph does feel quite different to me than Shakespeare, a recent game I played with him as scum, here he's a lot more, grumpy, hostile, confrontational, I don't see him trying in any way to be townread and I feel he's got real stakes in the game this time. The only reason he's not a stonger TR is cause it's BadMeta to do a singular vibe comparison between Shakespeare and here - he might just have more time and WIM to effort better now - and I feel his suspicion has been not directed at the slots I'd actually want him to direct it at. Expecting me to be town leader is fine, but it's also kind of a weak reason to be voting me in particular at this stage when there's people posting posts like 713

NSG the main thing I want to say is I can understand where AL is coming from with the "let's stop posting so much" being a bit LAMISTy and inconsistent with her subsequent thread disappearance, but it's easy for me to imagine town!NSG doing that and I kinda liked the defense of fua in 266 so altogether just not enough for me to feel the needle has moved in either direction.

neither redtea nor imaginality have posted a single thought I think is more likely to come from town or something that feels like it's meant to do any real solving, and I definitely didn't like that massive imaginality reads wall, feels very much like a scum who missed the start of the game, doesn't have a footing, and trying to do one big reads post to keep scrutiny at bay. There's no vote, there's no pressure or serious attempt to open a dialogue with anybody, and the bit about "not remembering the case against GL" felt like it was meant to buddy me and it's decidedly not inquisitive in a Bad Way - town should be going back and trying to see who is voting me and why, if that's how they feel.

With respect to numbersQ, I have a few moments of doubt given his sustained presence in the main threads of the game and that his thought process seems to evolve fairly organically in response to people's pushes on him, or the mech discussion, but it's not especially hard for me to imagine it coming from a capable wolf. The thing that's been tanking him in my reads is kind of exactly what AL called out in 821 - feels like he's there to make comments or ~solve~ in the thread but none of it feels like it's actually amounting to a useful goal or moving the gamestate in a direction that numbersQ feels is protown. The inconsistency with his Shirou questioning that Ydrasse called out is a good example of this. His vote has been parked on Ceph but I don't see him engaging with any of Ceph's later content nor working to convince people to also vote there, instead his vote is just kinda languishing. And the whole "we shouldn't lim inactive slots" thing just feels like something scum decided they would say as town and came up with the justifications second, and I'd be especially suspicious of it if one of redtea or imaginality

were

to flip scum.

Like, his reasoning in general is fine. I guess my main issue here is just the lack of paranoia thing. Like, if the scumteam were imaginality/redtea/numberQ with the gamestate how it was then, I have a really hard time imagining town

ever

losing. I'd feel better about this if say, his reads on me or ceph were lower, or he elaborated on the instances he described as making him "a lil concerned they might be playing to an agenda or emulating what they think they'd do as town". I feel like if I, as town, had come to the conclusion that these were my reads on day one, I would be assuming I have to be wrong in some places because it can't be that simple (and because if it is that simple, town has probably won anyway) and I'd be trying to engage with my medium townreads more and more directly to sort them better, etc. I'd just not feel good about those being my reads. Maybe he did this after this post but idk. I think my issue with this can be summed up by the charisma thing, and his response to it doesn't really inspire confidence:

Town: {fua, Shirou, Amazonian Legends, Tejate Raichu, Ydrasse}
Town Enough For Now: {Cephrir, implosion, morph}
Needs More Data: {NSG}
Would Lim: {numbersQ}
Would Lim With No Mercy: {redtea, imaginality}

does it bother you at all that this is also approximately what you'd get if you sorted the PL by charisma (tejate being the main exception)? This is something I've been thinking about a lot more lately.

it does kinda, like I'm pretty much certain that the scumteam isn't exactly nQ/redtea/imaginality, but at the end of the day I'm looking for people D1 I don't feel like are solving and it's hard for me to have any town-feelings about the solving coming out of the bottom two slots. it's why I have the secondary town tier where they are, I could see them being scum doing enough to fool me at the moment. but I do feel pretty good about the top townreads

Like, the statement "it's why i have the secondary town tier where they are" is kind of incredible, because who the hell would have 8 super-strong townreads on d1. Of course some of your stated townreads are going to be less strong than others. He does already have 5/12 of the player list other than him listed effectively as strongly town and another 3 as more weakly town. Like I mean yeah there's some stated paranoia here but it's still just such a flat view of the game, like he was building up to this big deep wall post and the wallpost is ultimately just kinda shallow.

[implosion]

I like the aesthetics of having 12 GL posts sandwiched between two anti-GL walls and am irritated that ceph ruined it. I will respond to all of this but not gonna wallpost it. I do want to ask, I can't remember - did we have some major spat in the coalition game? I'll go check but I don't remember if I read you in that game off of a spat with me or a spat with someone else.

This is a little bit of an odd reaction given nsg said she'd be able to tell who Shirou is before Shirou said who he was. I searched for mentions of Shirou in his ISO and it's pretty much entirely being entirely convinced that Shirou is town. This is a little bit incongruous with this post in my mind because other people have been describing Shirou as having a very strong scumgame, which GL should know if he's town, and so in principle he should be slow to townread Shirou, but he isn't. Sure that might not be how GL's thinking about the slot but I don't really get the sense that GL was ever using meta to read Shirou which this post from him implies he should be doing. Which makes this post feel performative.

implosion are you scum?

I only played one game with Fumuki where I caught him early and town stomped the scumteam, which was what prompted that comment. and I explicitly already referenced this

that post you quoted, that was mostly a small joke to see if you'd react at all, the last game I remember playing with you you were scum and I feel like I remember tunneling you correctly when you were the last scum alive at like 7p or 5p. I think if this here is your scum game it's taken a giant leap, but I haven't played with you in years so I wouldn't say I have an up to date understanding of how you play scum and what you're capable of

it was not my opinion that Fumuki had a strong scum game until NSG said so

Sure, I missed this at the time or forgot it since and haven't gotten this far in the ISO. Discount this point.

his is a little bit incongruous with this post in my mind because other people have been describing Shirou as having a very strong scumgame, which GL should know if he's town

like, this is frankly extreme bullshit

I hadn't played with Fumuki-Shirou in YEARS

and also, why would me knowing the depth of Shirou's scum capabilities depend on my alignment in

this

game? Like your argument is based on this idea that I should have known Shirou could be good at scum, but scum!me should have known that as well, so, this thought process feels like a giant reach

Again, discount the point; I'd assumed from that post of yours that you had significant experience with Shirou.

[implosion]

the fact that it is 7 minutes should make you think it's not a planned agenda, instead you try to frame it as if scum!me would make up a read and then yolo 180 on it 7 minutes later for ??? reasons. why would scum!me do that? just to get townread?

I think a lot of the remaining stuff especially around the Ceph read can be answered by this:

did you miss the words "intentionally biased"? I'm basically trying to frame everything you've done as scummy and seeing how congruous of a worldview I can get from that. I mean I get it can be frustrating to have someone lambast you but you absolutely snowed me in white flag so I don't think you should be surprised that I'm trying to look at you with a lot of scrutiny now that we're past day one.

what do you think about hall the actual arguments I'm making

This is part of the problem - I tried reading you on the veracity of the actual arguments you were making in white flag, and that turned out very poorly. So I need to try something else. I'm not committed to keeping this vote permanently, depending on how your reaction is/what other people think. But so far many (not all) of the points against what I'm saying that you're making are of the form "no, I'm town and this is why I did/said this" - which, I mean, sure. But as far as I can tell you could also be scum who made the posts for the reasons I've described.

[implosion]

Actually I guess maybe it's more fair to make that kind of rebuttal since a lot of my points were phrased like "i don't know why town-GL does X".

[implosion]

like basically the whole way you went about framing my read dynamic with Ceph/Tejate/fua is just terribly disingenous

I didn't like Ceph's push on Tejate, it felt aggressive and I

was

townreading Tejate
I think about it like, fractionally more, and decide it's not especially unusual for town!Ceph to treat Tejate that way
I then think about how fua was pushing Ceph and decided to pressure fua in case they were trying to jump ahead of a Ceph-Tejate TvT

At no point was I really scumreading Ceph. at no point did I retcon my read into a townread. I was pinged, then decided it was not indicative, then came around to more confidently townreading Ceph over time

But you're playing up the magnitude of the suspicion I initially had on Ceph explicitly for the purpose of making it look like I was lying about how much I scumread him

which is ?? both because - that's not what I did, and also why the hell would scum!GL do that to begin with? There's no critical thinking in any of your case on me of what scum!GL gains or is trying to do with my posts, it's all just fear mongering about inconsistency in how I present my reads. I'm far more inconsistent as town than scum

I mean this is sort of the point. You never "scumread" him formally but you did unambiguously say you were getting scummy vibes from something of his, and then you quickly turned around on that. Hence my saying that you as town would want to push on that more. It's just weird to go so quickly from saying something Ceph did is suspicious (which you did do, even if you didn't formally scumread him) immediately to voting someone else specifically because of reasoning that assumes Ceph is town. Like I think it's pretty weird that early in the game to vote for a reason based on two specific people being town in the first place.

[implosion]

I am probably playing up the magnitude of your ceph read there. But you're also playing it down. Maybe you are town and it's smaller than it looked but you said something of his was suspicious, then said maybe it's not as bad as you thought, and then described fua as "worse", implying you still thought Ceph's posts were bad. In particular,

was I claiming to scumread Cephrir, or was I being couched and not very sure of the read

you can't have it both ways

Yes, I can have it both ways; you were claiming you found Ceph suspicious (I should have said this rather than "were scumreading ceph", but it was shorthand/imprecise, I guess - but it is splitting hairs to a degree). You also were couching and not very sure of the read. Like, you were saying you thought something he did was scummy and also saying you weren't very sure of the read, yes, that is literally exactly what I'm saying.

[implosion]

And I do want to emphasize that for the crowd that I don't immediately know how much my "case" convinces me myself because, like I said, I was specifically trying to look for scum motivation in things. I'm hoping that it + looking at GL's reaction will help sort him better but I don't really have a strong opinion on his reaction so far.

There are two reasons that I decided to do this for GL in particular: one, as mentioned, I think I need to come up with some novel way to read him. Two, I have a sort of vague wishy-washy gamestate feeling that he makes sense as scum. Basically exactly the paranoia that I described him as lacking: I feel like the sort of status quo of reads is not good enough with imaginality flipping town. The nQ claim alleviates that feeling a fair amount but it's still there.

[implosion]

To be clear, nQ isn't confirmed town in any way, though I (still) don't think he's scum. There's technically an off chance of every "confirmed" player being scum but I have no interest in looking at any of them closely until at least like, day 5 if any are still alive.

And yeah fua and ceph are the more valuable ones because they're the ones being vouched for, and also because they still have their power role shots. fua moreso because they claimed cop but a theoretical n2 doc (i can't imagine who would be such a role) should be open to some wifom on who they target in theory. Another option is that we could leash ydrasse onto fua, and then a potential other n2 doc if they exist could target ceph, which could be nice.

Tbh, with ydrasse's claim, *another* way we could play is that if fua is a n2 cop they could say so explicitly in which case we'd

definitely

leash Ydrasse to them. fua shouldn't claim as much until/unless we decide they should, but if so then we can get a guaranteed reliable cop shot (or ydrasse-scum would kill them and out herself). On second thought though probably it's best to have fua not claim and just have Ydrasse on fua either way.

[implosion]

The fua claiming stuff was train of thought that ended with me deciding that it's best not to have them claim, and that ydrasse should probably go on fua.

The post started as the point being to point out that you're not clear, and that the others aren't 100% clear, which is an important distinction.

[implosion]

I don't think anyone should want to vote nQ or Ceph today... particularly Ceph. Why do you list them in that way?

[implosion]

i'm sorry that you're disappointed.

[implosion]

so while you're here, how are you feeling about this game and the people in it?

[implosion]

Important things you may have missed that you should take note of are claims by Amazons and numberQ.

[implosion]

It's not that I don't have an opinion, on the whole I think he's a pretty good candidate for scum. I don't know

how much

I'm convinced i.e. I know I was trying to bias myself and so obviously I need to undo that process/account for it. I think I've laid the groundwork for the kind of interaction between us that I'll need to continue sorting him and part of it is also just that I want to sit on his immediate reaction for a bit.

If I have a reads list right now, it's something like this:

Town: Ceph, Amazons, fua
Also town: nQ
Town, I think: Shirou, tejate raichu, redtea, and ugh I don't actually feel good about literally anyone in this tier really all for different reasons, when I really try to look inside myself. I have a lot of work to do. Honestly maybe the person here I feel best about is redtea????
Conflicted/haven't put in enough work to feel good about saying anything yet: Meg, Ydrasse
Scummy: morph, GL

To

explain some of

briefly elaborate on all of these:

I vibe with whoever (i think tejate) was saying they just haven't seen as much townish from morph as they expect. I've described that and also some specific maybe-scummy things from morph and I could honestly imagine this read potentially 180ing under certain conditions (nothing specific, but generally I could imagine it happening). One specific thing I guess that could partially 180 it is if Amazons has a towncase on them that is more than just something vague (though iirc they hadn't really fully committed to morph-town as a read though they were leaning that way? i could be wrong). For now I think they're one of the best candidates for scum.

GL like I said just kind of makes sense to me as an active slot that could be scum. The people he's wound up pushing and the things he's wound up doing are just not really as aggressive or, like, interesting as I think I should be seeing from him-town.

Meg I have a lingering very weak gut townread on nsg and I don't know how to read any of Meg's play so far.

Ydrasse like I've said I need to dive more into but she's absent from the game essentially so the read's basically on hold until later. Her clarifying an n2 doctor claim is, in terms of her alignment, null imo.

Shirou like I said is literally just playing this game with the sole intent of pocketing me if he's scum, but if so then at some point it worked because I just vibe with his views on the game most of the time.

tejate I still don't really see ill intent in his posting in general. I need to review a case against him if anyone who's been pushing him has like, done anything resembling casework or just if anyone has what they think are solid reasons to scumread him. But until/unless someone else convinces me I still feel like townish is the right category for him.

redtea is a lingering of me thinking their approach to the game is more sensible as detached town than detached scum. Like look at this page, I just don't think detached scum would typically have this little care about how they're perceived.

nQ claiming n1 cop is +townpoints though it doesn't confirm him as town; I described why I'd thought he was town before the claim yesterday.

[implosion]

A mechanical thought: I think no-limming today may actually be the best move, but not sure. The advantage to continuing to lim every day is that a doc save earns us an extra mislim; I believe this is literally the only mechanical advantage. No-limming in this setup is actually pretty nice, because it basically "improves" every remaining cop by one night. If there are any n2 cops, we'll be able to use their info for the next elimination rather than the following one, etc etc. We lower the risk of eliminating any cops before they're able to use their shots, and if there

is

a doc save tonight then we can just do it again.

The other downside is there's a good chance we'd lose probably ceph (assuming that we leash Ydrasse to fua). But scum couldn't just safely kill him either, because we could easily have another n2 doctor.

[implosion]

eh implo

even if we miselim someone that would be cop checked at night, it just means there's one less target for the cops though? I also do kinda think we can likely get an extra save until the end of this game perhaps, which would give us an extra elimination yeah.

The unique scenario I see a no-lim strategy being better than just limming everyday is if...welp, don't want to give scum ideas actually kkkk, but yeah it's only in a specific scenario so I'm kinda against this.

This is the...weirdest post from you for me to be honest...didn't expect you to think no limming may be a good idea given the counterpoints I said above (maybe I'm missing something though? dunno).

If we miselim someone who

is

a cop then that's one less cop check on an ambiguous slot. Part of the idea of this is that like, n4/n5 cops are pretty close to worthless on average because they'll usually be dead by the time their night rolls around. And n2/n3 cops will usually be useful but this makes it strictly more likely that they'll be alive for their nights. And yeah it's not

un

likely that we get an extra save but it's hard to quantify. This idea is basically trading that potential big gain for a guaranteed smaller but still significant one.

[implosion]

I'm not like, wed to the idea, to be clear.

I did see implosion saying his point was to try to evaluate me from a biased view because he's afraid of my scum game after White Flag, and while I can understand that idea I don't know if I'm sold that it really takes away the issues I had with what he posted because it basically excuses him from having to account for/address town explanations for my play.

It's not hard to find the town explanations... hence me hard townreading you when you were town and then hard townreading you when you were scum >.>

[implosion]

What about this post in particular gives you that impression? I don't really feel like it's that dissimilar from this.

I literally explain what I think town!you would do in this situation rather than posting that...like, this question also feels unnecessary Tejate. As if you're asking just to ask, post just to post. I felt some...fire and greater purpose from your posts on the newbie game and I don't here.

Also that vote Meg...kinda

hilarious

to hear you saying I'm not interested in solving. Have you ever looked at your own ISO...?

I don't recall myself trying to force a 50/50 between two players that I haven't interacted with.

Solving doesn't actually require much vocalization but pushing an agenda does. Activity isn't AI.

Would love to hear more of what you think of ceph/ ydrasse at this point

I also agree with Shirou that this post is... a bit of a mess. Why is ceph on the top of your mind? Did you actually just not read the game and miss the nQ inno?

"Activity isn't AI" is extremely black-and-white both in itself (I strongly suspect I used to, and maybe still do, have a clear correlation between post count/certain activity patterns and alignment) and in how it's painting Shirou's point. His point isn't just that you don't have much activity, it's that the activity you do have is incredibly opaque and does not look like solving. It just looks like saying a collection of opinions. Whether those opinions were found through reading the thread or by plucking them off of a vine, who's to say... but it sure doesn't look like it's from reading the thread if you're asking about Ceph as a primary person of interest.

[implosion]

nQ, that post isn't a caveat. It's an explanation that it's easy for me to townread GL in practice because I did it in the other two games I played with him recently, hence, I can't just townread him in this game for things that I "typically" would. I have been hedgy on it but I've also clearly listed him as a top scumread atm; it's just that I don't feel like my reads are the most solid in the world.

I've also explicitly said this game that I think opportunism is a good thing, generally. Why wouldn't I want to take an opportunity to pressure someone?

[implosion]

When I say "It's not hard to find the town explanations", I'm referring to the last two games I played with GL where I easily found town explanations for his play as both alignments. I'm certain I could do the same here easily, hence me saying that I also was easily able to do so when he was scum because it isn't really alignment-indicative for him for me to be able to come up with reasons to townread him.

[implosion]

nQ, that post isn't a caveat. It's an explanation that it's easy for me to townread GL in practice because I did it in the other two games I played with him recently, hence, I can't just townread him in this game for things that I "typically" would. I have been hedgy on it but I've also clearly listed him as a top scumread atm; it's just that I don't feel like my reads are the most solid in the world.

I've also explicitly said this game that I think opportunism is a good thing, generally. Why wouldn't I want to take an opportunity to pressure someone?

Oh, maybe I did misunderstand. When you said "hard townreading you [GL] when you were scum" I guess you were referring to that other game?

Yeah, I'm referring to a coalition game and a white flag game, both of which I was town and GL was town and then scum, and I hard townread him correctly in the coalition game and hard townread him incorrectly in the white flag game.

[implosion]

Alright well, the point remains. I misinterpreted one part of your posts but I don't feel that negates my arguments. You're leaning into them by straight up admitting it was opportunistic and hedgy, instead of trying to rationalize it away like I think I was expecting. So I'm not sure how to feel about that.

What do you make of GL voting you while you were casing him? Does that point towards one alignment over the other?

Granted the context of opportunism was bigger yesterday because the gamestate was stagnant and wagons needed to form but if it weren't for "opportunism" i'd want to pressure e.g. Ydrasse much more. But I have to wait for an opportunity to do so. And hedging, well, I don't think I'm especially confident in my reads as a player. I certainly was hedgy on a lot of my reads in guardians, and the one read that I ultimately was never hedgey on (luke) was wrong, so :shrug:

GL voting me while I was casing him is not an unreasonable tact as either alignment; actually having sat on it more it's maybe more unexpected if he's town, just since he'd said nothing negative about me before it. I think if he's town the reaction I'd

want

to see is like, a very aggressive "are you sure you're not misunderstanding something here", given the dynamics I think I'd expect from him. It's a little surprising he'd find this immediately voteworthy if he's town, it makes sense as an emotional reaction to having someone drop two walls of case on you but I don't remember GL being in-the-moment in that way. Also, it's possible that I'm unfairly BoPing here (especially since GL hasn't seen my scumgame since dedede) but I don't really think that a wall-case like this is the kind of thing that I'd really be catchable on as scum. I'm perfectly capable of making rational/logical arguments as scum just as much as I am as town, and I feel like he should be able to discern that about me; I think probably his insistence that my case was bad (which is fine) should not have led to an immediate insistence that I am scummy to the contrary of his previous stated town lean on me.

If he's scum then that kind of reaction I'm describing would be pretty difficult to fake probably because, at least at first, I didn't really give the impression that I was gonna budge any time soon. Which would make the easier thing to do as scum to just go after me. And yeah, I think there are sort-of logical flaws in my case that are easy to attack, and I think scum-GL would certainly have reason to go after them and call me scummy for them.

[implosion]

meg, did you see nQ's claim?

[implosion]

I'm looking at my other games with him and I actually forgot this/might have been conflating some specific things from the games at one point, but I did attack GL pretty strongly in the game where he was scum before flipping on him. Unfortunately not as useful as if I'd attacked him in the game we were both town, but in that one I called him town from the start.

There are also some big differences in context that make them hard to compare (in that game, GL was being attacked by both me and a scumbuddy of his pretty strongly, as well as some other people, and he was bussing back in return, and it happened earlyish d1). He initially acted frustrated and claimed he was very riled up, and he eventually called me townish for giving an olive branch. But I think the focus of the dynamic there was the crossbussing so decidedly less useful.

(yes this post is saying essentially nothing but i'm still choosing to make it)

[implosion]

I am patiently awaiting this explanation.

[implosion]

Actually am going to do other things now so will respond to above later but I want to mention while still here:

morph, any opinion on the me and GL thing? You've been quite aggressively quiet on us both despite us both being in your PoE and, well, this happening.

[implosion]

I think copping Shirou would be a slightly odd thing for scum-tejate to come up with the idea to suggest.

I do think it's a bad idea to hard direct cops just because if there's multiple cops with the same night we don't want duplicate results.

Meg's line of play here is... something.

[implosion]

re: GL 2013: a couple things. One, I feel like this is turning a little bit into the debate trope of the single point where contention was able to be found and I want to de-emphasize it a little as such because it's not like everything or even that much in general rests on the point to me.

Two, I think the core of my issue with that exchange at this point isn't about you scumreading or not scumreading ceph or whatever per se but about you specifically voting someone based on an assumption that Ceph is town, immediately after stating your suspicion (and like I briefly mentioned, I also think it's strange at that point in the game to make a vote specifically based on reasoning that assumes multiple people are town in the first place). Like sure, maybe your opinions change faster than mine but I just feel like the thought process that goes into voting someone specifically under the assumption that they'd make sense as scum if Ceph is town, would not come that quickly after you felt suspicion on Ceph.

I could maybe wax more about this but meh. The point kind of bores me a little at this point.

Regarding redtea and 2018, hell no i wouldn't bet the game on them being town. You should clearly be able to see that I'm more confident in you being scum than redtea from my recent reads list. I wouldn't call my read on redtea an assumption that they're town and I certainly don't consider my read on you contingent on them being town in any way; you'd make perfectly fine sense as a partner.

[implosion]

Good afternoon, I've thought about it a bit and I have come to a conclusion.

VOTE: implosion

Explanation coming whenever I'm done writing it, have some patience.

You have implosion as a null-town read in your last reads list, which was about 2 calendar days ago, I think.

Did I not also state that he would probably be the first person I'd bump down given some re-thinking?

It's a rather significant bump. I look forward to the explanation!

You ignoring me? Or just not active in thread atm?

[implosion]

I think copping Shirou would be a slightly odd thing for scum-tejate to come up with the idea to suggest.

eh really? I kinda think trying to make me people cop me for ~paranoia~ is kinda very pro-scum because it wouldn't really clear anyone from the miselimination pool so...it's kinda a solid thing for scum to recommend/suggest/think about?

Maybe you're talking about how Tejate wouldn't come up with this idea because of his personality or experience, but I would kinda disagree anyway, he was already on the trajectory of reconsidering me.

I don't think he's likely to come up with the idea as scum, yeah, feels like the kind of thing relatively new scum would have to think fairly out of the box to say.

Also notably if relevant for later, this is probably a really strong anti partner tell (if you're both scum it'd be quite wild for tejate to suggest this)

[implosion]

Meg I'm having a lot of trouble following your logic. You asked Shirou to condense their case, which they did, and then you basically objected to the condensed case on the grounds that it was only based on one thing. Which it was, because it was condensed.

[implosion]

(not on the grounds that it was only based on one thing, on the grounds that it was only based on a thing that you disagreed with, specifically meta of a new player comparing between some of their first games on site)

[implosion]

I can grok like, GL could be scum, I have [x] or [y] reason to TR redtea, but when it comes to read confidence, how on earth do you compare our ISOs and our play and say mine comes from scum more often than theirs?

I am pretty sure I'm misunderstanding you here? Or you're misunderstanding me? I find you a little scummy on net and redtea a little townie on net. And you're saying you can find those two things individually reasonable, but together they're not? I don't understand how you're using the word "confidence" here. I'm just ordering slots from T->S and saying you're further on that list than redtea.

[implosion]

Your approach of taking GLs posts in the worst possible light was offputting to read. I'm curious how you go about reeling that back in and trying to look more objectively. You've said you are doing that (or something like that -- maybe my interpretation isn't great) or are going to do that, but if it's happening, it wasn't evident to me in your posts this afternoon.

I feel like GL is taking a wider view of the game than you are, and I tend to townread a wider view in isolation, though town tunneling is a thing and keeping the elim-pool wide has value to scum.

I think in terms of my attempting-to-be-unbiased feelings on GL right now, they're something like this.

I don't think I've seen him do anything that he couldn't or wouldn't be likely to do as scum; I don't like the way he's been broadly approaching the game. This is the point I made a while ago that I think got lost in the weird ceph point thing but the way he talks about redtea and talked about imaginality still bugs me a bit in that it feels like he had been taking a sort of lazy/unparanoid tact. I am curious what you mean by his view of the game being wider; right now I have strictly listed only 4 slots that I don't townread to some extent but I've also said my confidence in my reads in general isn't great (I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's 1 scum in my townlean tier, probably wouldn't be that surprised if there were 2 even). But also that list is changing actively (eg I agree with the sentiment that meg's posting as of late is hard to pin a scum motivation to). I've been like "tunneling" on you since d1 in that I haven't seen anything from you that I think is town indicative really yet, but I haven't been like, pushing you.

This has gotten very train of thought but going back to GL I have like, a lot of little worries combined with this weird gamestate read where the game makes more sense as a whole with him as scum. The worries are a combination of things from the biased case (which if I'm unbiasing them are something like "things that seem perfectly sensible as a line of play from GL-scum" rather than "things that are clearly indicative of GL-scum" or whatever), some skepticism of his immediate strong reaction against me, skepticism about his view of the game seeming to be sort of "happy with the status quo" in a way on d1 around redtea/imaginality, the way he's been treating the redtea slot in general having very little nuance seemingly, maybe some more things.

[implosion]

I solidly believe "TvT vibes" are a myth. Just post your reasons post and call me scum explicitly

[implosion]

If you're willing to call a dispute TvT, that's ultimately necessarily because you're willing to call each of the individual reactions T->?.

There's no distinction between a T->T interaction and a T->S interaction from the perspective of evaluating the alignment of the person doing the interaction; both of them look like someone convinced that the person they're arguing about is scum.

Ergo there's no actual meaningfulness to "I get TvT vibes" other than "I think both of the individual interactors look like town, and I don't buy either of their arguments".

[implosion]

GL, I wouldn't be

surprised

by you flipping town or by redtea flipping scum like, at all. I haven't gotten to that point of confidence in either read. What gave you the impression I would be?

If it's between redtea and tejate for whatever reason I'd prefer redtea as a lim by a decent margin mostly on readability/contribution grounds.

[implosion]

redtea is a lingering of me thinking their approach to the game is more sensible as detached town than detached scum. Like look at this page, I just don't think detached scum would typically have this little care about how they're perceived.

on the whole, how much do you really believe this? Like would you bet the game on redtea being town? Would you say you're more confident in me being scum than redtea?

I can vibe/understand your gamestate points about me feeling like I could be the active scum, but I think it's really dangerous/bad to be making gamestate views as the foundation for your sort on a hard-to-sort player (me) when you're simultaneously making base assumptions like town!redtea for

really

spurious reasoning. I don't see anything at all that makes me think redtea's play isn't just lazy scum faking apathy for townpoints.

It might be partially unfair to accuse you of lacking nuance on redtea but posts like this make me feel like it. Who the heck "fakes apathy for townpoints"??? Like I could see redtea being scum who is apathetic about the game, but what kind of scum who is genuinely engaged in the game will then fake apathy because they think apathy will look townier than them engaging with people. That just sounds absurd to me, apathy is usually not viewed as townish.

[implosion]

as another thing, redtea literally hasn't voted all game. Everything else aside, how on earth can you look at that and say that "yeah, that's a town player"?? town's only weapon to kill scum is the vote, here we have a player halfway through D2 who hasn't tried to use it even once. call me "lacking nuance" all you want but I don't see why the hell I'm supposed to just assume they're town and I don't see why the hell you're forming gamestate POE scumread views off a key assumption that redtea isn't scum

1) my gamestate read of you is 100% disjoint from my redtea read; i think you could potentially both be scum. I've said this.

2) not using your vote ever is terrible play as town. It's also terrible play as scum. I'm not saying you're supposed to assume they'll flip town, nor am I saying I'm making that as an assumption, nor have I ever said that afaik. I'm just saying I feel the slot is more likely to flip town than scum.

[implosion]

I mean maybe there's something subconscious with me assuming redtea is town but I'm not exactly in tune with my subconscious. I don't feel like it's informing the way I'm thinking about you; the concern with your redtea push is with the push itself and the fact that it's on essentially lhf. I disagree that no one is forcing them to go outside their apathetic lane. Sure they haven't been wagoned yet today but you've been harping them forever and most of the player list is listing them in their bottom 2-3 reads. If they're scum they basically know they're not living forever. I'm not worried about me pressuring them per se. I did try to interact with them in real time this game day and, well, they disappeared despite me posting two minutes after them. How the hell am I supposed to "pressure" them? It's the same problem as yesterday. In my mind they're kind of like Ydrasse, they're just not a slot I can do anything with and so I might as well focus my effort on other slots right now. I really would love to make them do shit. I don't think them not doing shit is meaningfully scum indicative though. Even though I think they'd flip town, like I just said I wouldn't really shed much of a tear if they were limmed because, well, the slot is empty and half the player list thinks it's scum. I'd just either feel slightly smug or have egg on my face depending on the flip.

[implosion]

And regarding me opening the day with 1789, that was just a general purpose response to people talking about wagon analysis; it was not me giving my Central Point of Focus for the day.

[implosion]

PA, are you able to elaborate on the current state of your morph read, in terms of confidence and any reasons you think might be compelling?

[implosion]

@Implosion

Was that it re your interest in my take on you vs GL?

This is not going to actually be an answer to what you're asking here but what I think you're getting at. Tbh i spent like several minutes trying to figure out something else to ask you about earlier and I just couldn't. I've just felt like you've been very sidelined today and you saying you felt incredibly meh about the game just made me not really sure what to say. I guess it's consistent with you feeling like you had nothing on either of us and then townreading something GL said but like, idk, to a degree I'm starting to feel like my opinions in this game are just an enormous ball of mess. There's a part of me that is okay with being copped since I'm fairly contentious but also I don't really want to be because I really don't trust myself right now. There's a part of me that just wants to throw out all my reads and start over, and there's a part of me that is annoyed at certain slots not reading me correctly but really I just haven't played that much mafia as of late so that annoyance isn't really justified (and some of those slots may be scum, etc).

I asked you about me/GL because I thought it was weird you hadn't commented on it, and because I still feel this weird sense of obligation to try to interact directly with your slot to sort it, but maybe that's not the best way to go about things. I feel like if you don't have more to say on the interaction then I don't really have more to ask you about it.

I think the Meg/Tejate/Redtea trio are really important to solve this game perhaps

if all of the above are town, gun to my head it would be GL/Morph/Ydra, but...I do think that there's at least one scum in the above, and understanding who that scum is, may be the most important thing to solve the rest of the PL?

I know you didn't want to reiterate your case for meg but I'd appreciate if you could try specifically to convince me tejate is scum, from the perspective where I currently feel like his play is pretty consistent with newbie town. I've felt like he has taken the reins here to some degree, and that it's unfair to compare his ability to take the reins in a newbie game whose four days spanned 59 pages and this game whose 1.5 days have spanned 87 and with 13 (really 15) players to 9.

I think this framing of the game as "we should think about these three slots first" is useful to me, and I want to focus on them for a bit and step away from thinking much about GL.

[implosion]

Of course in ISOing redtea I got to the part where they reply to GL's wallpost and now i'm thinking about GL again ._. I want to make one amendment which is that I think my read on GL does depend on redtea's alignment, it's just that I think his play is scummy in different ways depending on what redtea is. If redtea is town then I default to the argument of "GL has spent the game happily pushing multiple LHF town players". If redtea is scum then well GL's play makes plenty of sense as a bus where redtea is kind of dead weight to the scumteam, yada yada. This is like obviously very logically unsatisfying because it's a sort of damned if you do damned if you don't but idk. i just still don't like his push toward redtea and I like it less now that I'm reviewing his wallish post (1470) and redtea's responses to it. It all just looks like either scum who decided they saw something they thought they could push from redtea and then let that color their reading of all of redtea's posts or, if GL is town, confirmation bias; I think a lot of the reasons in that post to scumread redtea are just flatly bad reasons that won't indicate scum more often than town. And ISOing redtea has also made me feel like redtea is town so I think I'll just try to loosely towncase them, though I am confirmation biased as well certainly.

i suppose i would be interested in why he chose redtea specifically.

right so I finally have the time/energy to specifically go into what I didn't like in redtea's ISO

let me break it down:

330 - it seems a little odd to me to open by saying that 328 made you laugh while also claiming to have not read the game fully yet. There'd be missing context for what I was pushing fua for, no reads on fua/myself to interpret our interaction - like is that post still as funny if fua is scum trying to discredit me? just seemed to me like an odd entry in the game and something that's more likely to come from an informed perspective re:fua and I's alignments, rather than town who hasn't read up

331 is a bad post. redtea doesn't give any indication of whether they are townreading fua, all they do is strawman the reason for suspecting fua and push against that strawman, while joking about themselves. Vibes exactly to me like scum who want to make a buddy in fua and also get a joking foothold into the game. The "conversationalist" remark feels like fake analysis, again there's no evidence of a thought process regarding whether town or scum is more likely to be "conversationalist", no evidence of trying to reason about fua's alignment.

332 is also inconsistent with 331 - if redtea only read between posts 248 and 330, and didn't read the beginning of the game, how are they making comments about fua's entry or their ISO? Did redtea read fua in ISO but not the game? why?

879-882 reminds me of stuff I do as scum to try to make it seem like I don't have an agenda, giving one opinion then immediately reversing it. it was also just an immediate hasty misrepresentation of my position, redtea acted like I was demanding a lim immediately ("we have 12 days left") when I wasn't.

as for a general pattern of play remark, a lot of redtea's content is in response to stuff happening in the thread when they are here, which indicates that they're at least reading along at some points in the game, but redtea doesn't give any indication whatsoever of their reads or how they see the game until 1209. I don't see proactive effort to engage with people or an obvious direction redtea wants to go for lim or pressure. Very much gives me scum coasting and not giving information vibes

And then 1209 is a janky post in that the questions/thoughts section doesn't correlate to the reads at all, as far as I can tell. It's also weird to have a "can go" category (which presumably means scumreads), but then a "flip would help" category for Tejate/Cephrir - what's the difference between "can go" and "flip would help", like is "flip would help" null? Why is that different than the "???" tier? I don't think that part of their post is inherently scum indicative but it sure doesn't show me a solvey/uninformed mindset, it's missing indicators of a town mindset that show me how the reads relate to each other or how they were arrived at.

I never got to this post when I was ISOing GL and I did respond to it a while ago saying I didn't buy it but I think it merits a longer form response both for the sake of sorting GL and of sorting redtea.

330 is kind of a wild claim; the claim is that redtea-town wouldn't have been likely to find 328 as funny without context. First of all I personally think that post is funny in isolation and I think it's kind of unreasonable to think that someone wouldn't be able to find it funny in isolation with phrases like "hop in balls-out into a pre-existing feud" and "because I'm eager to get away from the pressure of zero votes". But like, the fact that I have to say this is just absurd. Litigating whether the humor of a post is intrinsic or extrinsic and whether someone's finding humor in that post must necessitate them having read more than they claimed or be informed of alignments. It's just like, so far removed from how I think about games, to the point where I feel like I have to be misinterpreting GL's point somehow but I literally cannot see what else the point means.

331 is fine and I probably agree with GL's analysis of redtea here and that post is a little scummy.

332 is like a "gotcha" moment that is meaningless. Like, so what if redtea saying they only read between two posts is inconsistent with them saying they saw fua's entry. They did also say that they ISO'd fua. I think it's obvious to interpret 331-332 as redtea saying they only read those posts + fua's iso. But instead GL is calling this out as an inconsistency, and, in context of the whole post, implying that inconsistency is scummy. Again, I feel like I have to be misinterpreting GL's point somehow because it seems really weird to me. Either he's implying that redtea is lying about what they've read and is therefore scummy for lying, or he's saying that... idk what else. And there's no reason for scum to lie about what they've read. The asking why redtea specifically read those posts + fua's iso is fine but like, also not an implicitly scummy thing. I've certainly read random ISOs as I catch up if someone catches my eye.

I just remembered GL did clarify this point so ignore the piece about lying (I'm not deleting it because I'm lazy):

I don't think I said redtea was lying about how much they've read of the thread? The point was more I don't understand how they could genuinely engage with things in the way that they did, if they hadn't read the thread.

Well, they said they read fua's ISO. Seems like perfectly enough to make that comment.

No major comments on the rest of the post, these are the two points that just feel really weird to me. I'll say more about redtea later

[implosion]

I feel like there's absolutely no spiciness to my current reads. more or less agreeing with some reads lists while snorting at where we're placed. Maybe that's a sign of town converging, but I don't really trust that's what's going on.

I think part of my problem with the status quo of the world is that the people at the "bottom" being meg/redtea/tejate feels a lot like the Charisma Fallacy. Maybe not tejate per se but it really feels to me like there's some amount of conflation at large between play that is some combination of poor/hard to follow the logic of/erratic and play that is scum-indicative.

[implosion]

why would you claim now?

[implosion]

Spoiler: Response to parts of Tejate's wall

And yet you somewhat townread me when I was actually entertaining the idea of voting and pressuring fua there for almost the exact same reason? Maybe I didn't outright state it, sure, but fua's vote looked pretty terrible in my eyes and I was quick to express this. And as I stated before, there is something that really bothers me about this being called a vanity vote when it is not really possible to say at that particular point whether or not a fua wagon has potential. Hell, if a wagon had started at this point, I would have probably been on it. Why do you think it took me so long to come around to the idea of fua being locktown? This very play along with many other factors sowed more doubts about fua for me than anything GL could have said.

First off I haven't read you nearly as closely as GL; it's entirely possible I'd think that vote is bad on closer inspection. I was calling it a vanity vote specifically in comparison to a Ceph vote which would have been a third vote on a wagon.

As Amazonian once said to Ceph earlier in the game, is it like looking in a mirror? You make essentially the exact same gesture towards Shirou here, worded slightly differently. I don't really feel the need to say much more about this, it kinda speaks for itself.

I mean yeah I'm maybe being hypocritical. It happens. There's an old maxim that hypocrisy isn't scummy. To some degree my point was based on specific phrasing. Would I have scumread the phrasing that I used in describing my Shirou read? Idk, I'm not good at objectively evaluating my own posting like that.

Once again, is it like looking in a mirror? Not to mention that this sort of response to posts is not only not really AI, but extremely common. I also though that this post, while funny, was a pretty terrible post. There is no real rebuttal against GL's argument here, there's nothing much for him to really dive into. Why shouldn't he see this post as scummy exactly? GL even responds to the content related parts of the post, so I don't think you can even get him on that. It's not as if he's using fua's sarcasm an excuse.

This (and really most of this post) sounds like you're saying "I disagree with your reasoning, implosion" rather than "I find this scummy, implosion". And I'm not sure how you're getting from A to B.

But he explicitly stated multiple times, including during this argument, that fua's jump-in was more blatantly scummy than Ceph's barely audible push. Doesn't this align more closely with the idea of "voting the person he just called scum" than voting Ceph? I really, really want to like your arguments for this post because I think it's a novel idea. But if this is the best you can come up with for a case against GL you may as well have him be locktown.

You seem to be (so far) also quite focused on the ceph stuff which, like I've said, I want to de-emphasize relative to most of my other points both because I think GL rebutted it well enough and because I think the other points are more important/stronger anyway. So, sure, this point is weak. Again, not sure how this wall is an argument that I'm scum.

[implosion]

I want to point out that Tejate's eagerness to claim is also something that I feel like is drastically more typical of newbie town than of newbie scum. There are exceptions of course but as a rule, I feel like newbie town is more likely to earnestly feel like a claim will make a difference than newbie scum who would rather hold their cards to their chest.

It's honestly at the point where even if redtea is town, the reactions from implo and Shirou are outright bizzare. Shirou has listed them in their "options for who to vote today" list along with myself and Meg, yet has not so much as even hinted at voting or even pressuring the slot.

If anything, implosion has handled it

less

strangely than Shirou has, since implo seems to have some degree of intent to actually properly case redtea.

I smell blood in the water. I'm not that good at getting all of my thoughts out in large blocks, so hopefully this smaller post helps you guys understand better why exactly I want Shirou copped beyond him simply being the obvious wagon leader.

Do you vaguely think that me and/or Shirou are like, trying to keep the limbait around for later or something like that?

[implosion]

(in the event that redtea is town that is)

[implosion]

So let's talk about why I'm actually increasingly feeling like redtea is town <_<

Point one is motivation, or well, rehashing what's been said so far. What's redtea's motivation for the way they're playing if they're town vs if they're scum. Well clearly they have low motivation/time either way. If a player is town and has low motivation/time to put into a thread, I could imagine this general player doing all sorts of different things. I could imagine them focusing on one or two slots, or generally finding a few people they trust and following them, or trying to play in the moment when they are available, or etc. If a player is scum and knows they have low motivation I still feel like they will feel the need to try to blend in; this is just the basic motivating factor for posting as scum, is that you need to blend in. Not a single one of redtea's posts looks like it's crafted to get people to townread them. I've mentioned the original reads wall in 1209 as something that I think is town-indicative for exactly the reasons GL called it scum-indicative (or parts of it just weird): that it's a disjointed mess. I have

definitely

had games as scum before where I'm lurking and kind of feel like shit about my play in the game and I know I have to post a reads wall, and when I do post that reads wall my mindset is something like "I need to make up for lost time". Like it's gotta look good, it's not good enough to just throw some stuff together, I need to show that I have some kind of narrative arc. This is exactly what 1209 does not do. Apart from fua it's got 3 reads in what is basically the tentative townreads category and all 3 of them are reads that they say they expect to maybe change after reading more. It's a post that gets on nobody's good side. It's a post that makes it look like they really have no clue what's going on. And I think that is because they are town, who does not have any clue what's going on, who felt like they needed to put reads out there and this is the most confident set of reads they could come up with. I think if redtea is scum, this list should look more solid, more like what a reads list is "supposed" to look like because if redtea is scum then the whole reason they made that post was to get towncred for it. I don't really buy that they're faking being apathetic town - I still think the sort of primal need to look town at that point in the game should cause redtea to put more sort of "hard effort" into that post to make it look like, as "presentable" as possible, if they are scum, whereas if they are town they probably don't have "I need this to look townish" as their primary motivation as they're writing that reads wall.

Further points (all of these are probably significantly weaker than the above, and I don't really expect anyone to be persuaded at all by them if they don't jive with what's written above at all):

1348 feels like something I personally would have a pretty time writing either as scum with Shirou as town, or as scum with Shirou as scum.

Their response to GL in 1512 feels like the mix of realizing they've been a problem and not really caring that I think is consistent more with redtea being town than scum; some of the responses I think in particular are somewhat town indicative:

I did.
Because I was trying to keep ontop of the game while simultaneously catching up, and wanted to comment that.

Furthermore, I think my thoughts WERE useful- maybe only to me, but they are. I'm making an extra effort this game to understand the personalities and styles of the players to reduce my biases. That way I can "cut away the fat" so to speak. Of course those things are influenced by alignment, but I'm trying to find the sweet spot of what is probably just how they are regardless of alignment. Or at least regardless of alignment as far as I know, because I'm barely keeping up with this game god forbid I get into meta reading.

The very specific description of how they're approaching the game is something I think they're less likely to come up with as apathetic scum (minorly though). The "useful, maybe only to me" bit is I think also the kind of detail I as low-effort scum would have a hard time coming up with.

I can't deny this. It's been a while since I played with a significant amount of wall-posters; with that kind of density i'm kind of in a weird loop of starting replies/not finalizing them because im not done reading/running out of time, trying to figure out something out of all that that I don't feel awkward putting out there, and then otherwise trying to make up for it by following along live-ish when I can. I realize I'm kind of a hot mess rn. Im still figuring it out.

Specifically the last two sentences, combined with the tone of the whole post (in particular the last response saying "I can categorize my tiers however I want, thanks"), feels kind of disjointed; I think a disjointed tone is, again, the kind of thing that scum would have a tricky time replicating in this situation. I think redtea-scum would approach responding to this GL post with a mindset of something like defensiveness, or counteragression, or deflection or something. But this feels more like genuine responses to individual points that are based on actually just not really being able to get into a good groove and being maybe a little annoyed but understanding that others are also annoyed.

1676 is interesting in conjunction with redtea's entrance today (as in RL today) in 2184; I just feel like scum-redtea has little reason not to just vote tejate by now given that they've already indicated suspicion and that people are yelling at them for never using their vote. Whereas again, town has less imperative to be survivalistic.

[implosion]

The condensed version has already been said, hence wanting to elaborate.

redtea is town because their approach to the game lacks any coherent scum motivation, whereas town struggling to keep up could reasonably play in this way.