There's no point of keep waiting for DragonEater 'cause it's pretty much obvious that he will be replaced, so this is what I was doing behind the scenes. The idea was to see how DragonEater reacted to someone blindly scumreading him since it was a nice contrast to the early townreads he got.
Me and DragonEater recently finished a large game together: Demon Slayer, modded by Frozen Angel. In that game, we were both town. Scum fucked us over by dominating the thread and making it insufferable to catch up and read, multiposting, being present, fluffing, shitposting, the works. When the game ended, the concensus was that playing like that is anti town at best and scummy as fuck at worst.
DragonEater's very first post in this game was voting Firebringer on the very begining of page 2, calling him out for being scummy because of roleplaying, saying
later that we needed to get out of RVS and it
reminded him of the Demon Slayer game, were Firebringer was part of the scumteam. DragonEater
then said that this game has similarities in both games on the playerlist, which is true: DragonEater, Pink Ball, Black, Firebringer, Frozen Angel (mod), BlueSnakelet and GiF (and Klick to some extent although I don't know how much they contributed to the Klickwork hydra), and some other players indirectly via teammates (like Ali who was scum that game too and DragonEater
acted like he didn't know that Ali could be reading this but the next post acknowledged that this is team mafia.
I think DragonEater saw a chance to get early townread by doing exactly what the concesus was on our last game: don't let scum to dominate the thread with excessive noise. LAMIST, as pro gamers call it. He then acted surprised for being townread, and based on what I've said, to me it looked like a fake reaction. He knew what he was doing, so he knew he would be townread for doing it, but had to act surprised to avoid being called out for being LAMIST.
But maybe I'm being paranoid, maybe DragonEater is used to being called scum early game and this was a genuine reaction,
as Shea pointed out.
I decided to metaread DragonEater to see what his town games look like, and use some data driven analysis to see how scummy he is in his towngames vs how scummy he could be being actual scum.
Let's see some similarities between every game:
1. Confidence in his reads/pushes:
I'll start with my own experience with DragonEater on our last game together: Demon Slayer. There are two things that exhude confidence, which is a synonym of actually believing what you're doing and not having to fake it because you know you're wrong: the first is not caring how you look like in the process, and the second is to actively push what you believe.
This post is a good example of both points: he actually used the word confident here, he doesn't care to say that it's just a gutread, but says that that's good enough for him. He backed off in the very next post of him and he got scumread for it because it was weird that he reevaluated so fast, but the reason why he got called out was because he looked like he tried to show confidence when he really wasn't, proving that confidence is a townie trait that good scumplayers know how to replicate (and why chosing to tunnel a random player is a common strategy). He then started pushing Blue, interacting with everyone who voted him, asking people why they didn't want to vote him, and even voting for him at the end of D2 even when he had a soft guilty on Klickwork.
In Weird Dreams Mafia v1, he approached his reads via ISOing players From post 430 onwards, but the most important read he has is explained on post 445:
In post 445, DragonEater70 wrote:
Top town read is you. While a lot of people feel townie here and like they are trying to solve, I can say with confidence that you are not TRYING. You are SOLVING. Your investigations are very on point and you have a keen perception of small details (but you don't latch into random NAI stuff)
Confidence is, once again, the key word here.
In Newbie 2114, we have an interesting post:
In post 275, DragonEater70 wrote:
On the same topic: I'm currently voting you because, whilst I still think it's within your meta to be hesitant, I really don't like that you don't have any scumreads or anyone you pushing (though tbh I also don't have very strong scumreads this game so IDK).
I would love to see you ISO me and others because I want to hear more from you regarding suspicions and so on.
We can see here that DragonEater actually agrees with my point, that the lack of confidence is something scummy to point out. And his own level of confidence is such that he even acknowledges that his being and hypocrite, but that doesn't mean he's not right.
Newbie 2112 is his first game here and I didn't find anything in particular to say about confidence, but his ISO is interesting enough to give it a read;
in this post, he describes his own playstyle, in which he says that he likes having strong reads on people which I agree, he does in every game I've read with him that's how he approach games.
Every game except this one. Look at post 243 for instance:
In post 243, DragonEater70 wrote:
For realz though, from this whole interaction I kinda townread Shea as well I think? Titus is null-town, I guess?
Like there hasn't been enough content from anyone for me to feel confident committing to a townread, but this is what I have so far.
Or this:
In post 248, DragonEater70 wrote:
I just read those posts, and I actually disagree, those questions are soooo meh it kinda feels like scum blending in.
Or this:
In post 480, DragonEater70 wrote:
It is kinda weird that Klick gave like 4 townreads with minimal explanation and no scumreads. It feels very easy to fake, I guess. And none of their posts really stood out for me at the start.
I found similarities in these three posts that I couldn't find in ANY of his posts of 4 other games:
I think?
,
I guess?
,
kinda feels
,
kinda weird
,
I guess
. The way this posts are composed, all exhude the opposite of confidence, from a player who not only usually exhudes confidence as town, but also townreads other players who are confident and scumreads players who are hesitating/fencesitting. It is fencesitting. And it's a case of someone who projects his own way of playing into others, calling scum whoever plays like he plays when he's scum.
2. Analysis over stating facts:
In this part, instead of just quoting every single post that express analysis from his other games, let's just see what's going on in here and how many times he has given legit analysis out of the 51 posts he has. While he has given analysis in posts like
here,
here and
here it feels more like justifying his scumreads to not look scummy rather than actually contributing to solve this slots, while his townreads (stated in
here,
here and
here) have no analysis whatsoever which gives him the space needed to retarget, like when he voted Titus, an alleged null-town (
I think?
)
here based ond Dunn's analysis, not his. The rest of his posts? Talking about himself on how he's being townread, how he is usually limbait on D1 (
here and
here), being 483 particularly good to understand what DragonEater is doing here: making the statement "DragonEater is being townread" on the top of mind of everyone, and shutting down whoever is scumreading him by calling himself "limbait".
DragonEater knows that he's limbaity, that's a fact. So now that he's actually scum, he needed to get rid of that image ASAP so he didn't get wagoned in early game. So instead of actually doing what makes him townie when he's town, that is, acknowledging that he's scummy as town but providing analysis and taking effort on solving the game, he focused on maintaining his townread status and left any analysis out. He's not solving the game as he usually does; he's worried on how he looks and how he's positioned in the game. I think the only post that replicates his town games is
this one, but the analysis is poor enough to disregard it and, again, the "I guess" kills the confident vibe.
Is this common behaviour from DragonEater? Not at all. He talks about himself here and there, but much less in proportion. 15 out of 51 posts in this game are about himself and how everyone perceives him, town or scum. Using just the 50 first posts in his towngames to make it a fair comparison:
Demon Slayer: 5 out of 50 posts talking about how he's being perceived
Dreams v1: 2 out of 50
Newbie 2114: 4 out of 50
Newbie 2112: 8 out of 50
For a player who says sees his own playstyle like "liking to attract attention early", the way he does it as town is by interacting with people who start engaging with him, but actually talk about other reads and trying to sort out what's going on through the other player's mind, while in here the way he has attracted attention is by being weird about being townread in early game and not actually questioning why (only once, I believe, when he asked GiF why he was townreading him).
3. Fluff/comfortability:
Kinda overlaps a little with the two previous points because being confident and giving analysis even when you're being called scum is being comfortable too, but there are a few things that have enough merit to make it a category of its own. First off, about fluff itself, in every single game from DragonEater I've seen at least one interaction that has nothing to do with solving the game. Leaving RVS posts out of the analysis, In Weird Dreams,
we have this example; in Newbie 2114,
this three posts talking about writing; in newbie 2112,
this post talking about being obsessed with mafia which by the way DragonEater, if you ever read this: same; and in Demon Slayer,
this post. In this game, the lack of this kind of posts/interactions pings hard, because, as I said earlier in this post, seems like DragonEater's posts are calculated rather than going with the flow of the game. The obsession of getting out of RVS and shutting down FB because of "PTSD from Dragon Slayer" contradicts his own way of playing and approaching games. Second point and much more important was brought by Feysal
here.
DragonEater's answer is fairly damning towards this point on how NOT comfortable he looks in this game, since he agrees that his playstyle in this game is particularly different. "I really don't know how you percieve me as being nervous, but I agree that I'm not playing like I usually do" is saying he disagrees first and then unintentionally validates the point.
Miscellaneous things that caught my attention while metadiving DragonEater:
1. In Weird Dreams Mafia v1, he said that
it's easier for him to townhunt on early game than to scumhunt, and that makes sense from his town games where he starts throwing a bunch of townreads before really pushing his scumreads. In this game, however, he threw two early scumreads and not a single townread.
2. In both Dragon Slayer and Weird Dreams DragonEater talked or used RVS as a positive thing to start the game; in Dragon Slayer,
he actually meta cased Furtive for how he was RVSing compared to other games, and in Weird Dreams, well,
he explicitly talked about how he sees RVS as tool that he uses to get things going. He also gave and exhaustive explanation of how he understands RVS, how it has different phases and how it should be used and seen as town
in this post. In this game, however, tried to move out of RVS as fast as he could when he got what he wanted. His vote on FB would qualify as, in his own words, a RVS Phase II vote, and the way he dealed with RVS this game looks like he didn't want this game to have an organical way to develop this 3 states, not letting the rest of the playerlist to actually develop valuable reads.
This game has nothing similar with his town games, and even DragonEater is justifying this by calling himself more relaxed than usual and not tryharding. I disagree, I feel like trying to look relaxed is how he decided to approach the game to avoid being scumread early game, which happens often, but this time it would be right. Using his own meta to validate this feeling, the lack of confidence and solveyness, the non existent analysis and excess self awareness, and the feeling that he's not comfortable in this game compared to other games, all points out that we're dealing with scum!DragonEater.
PS: Black, the reason why I wanted to shut you down was because I wanted to see how DragonEater interacted with what was being said about him, not you. Sorry for coming too harsh on you, I had a bad day and I saw your post as an impediment on getting more information out of DragonEater. It happened
here, where Shea answered a question that was directed at DragonEater, and
pinged me for interfering with my objective. The difference is that I wasn't an asshole to Shea and I was to you, so sorry again.
