Mini Normal #1838 - Game Over

[Zoronos]

Oh man my first game in like a year.
Now I have to remember how to play.

[Zoronos]

Effectively a miller with a twist. Interesting.

[Zoronos]

Not a miller. Millers return guilty results, ascetic gives nothing.

I am aware of the technical difference. That's the 'with a twist' part of the sentence. The idea is that it's a negative utility that causes a PR to return an ambiguous / unhelpful result.
Anyway, not really relevant.

[Zoronos]

Man, nobody posting.
Implosion, who do you think we should vote off the island?

[Zoronos]

Why are you asking Implosion?

Only person who has both posted in thread and does not have an RVS vote.
It seems stupid to ask someone who they want to vote off when they already have a vote registered. And I think it's a tad early for lurker call outs. So

[Zoronos]

I just got news that a good friend passed, so I might be afk a bit tonight. Sorry. Or maybe I'll be no filter posting we'll see.

Random non-game-related questions are an easy way to fake content. So, no, they're beyond useless and actively scummy. They should not be humoured, especially when they appear tangentially game related since that just makes it easier to disguise that they aren't a form of scum hunting.

[Zoronos]

I expect more from the ultimate scum lord!

I am out of the loop or maybe just missing an in joke. Mind explaining this?

[Zoronos]

If it's just an OOC joke then don't bother explaining I don't care about those.

[Zoronos]

Saying an ascetic claim is scummy is foolish; it is strictly non alignment determining. If you are town, you claim it to avoid wasting an NA. If you are scum, you claim it to avoid a cop hit.

[Zoronos]

Zoronos, you're implying a scumread on Grendel; why not follow it up with a vote?

Because I don't vote the instant I have an inkling of suspicion. Or moreover, because the simple act of asking the questions isn't necessarily scum play. Using the questions as a sole form of contribution on the other hand is (which doesn't necessarily mean Grendel, a townie putting down that kind of list gives the scum room to dwell on it to contribute, so it isn't even that Grendel is scum for doing it, it's just pro-scum to exist). So yes, I'd rather take the hard line early and nip camouflaging play in the bud.

Or maybe these boards don't have a conception of 'fake content' or maybe I'm using the wrong jargon to explain the idea. If I'm unclear, well.

[Zoronos]

Okay, gun to your head: Am I mislead town, or misleading mafia?

I disagree what you are saying about RQS, but I'll have to wait until I've gotten a decent sample size before I post full reasoning.

In the meantime it'd be super nice if you'd humor me and play along.

Well, given your insistence on continuing this line of questioning, I'll go with scum. But really the answer is 'bare scum off neutral and mostly just being annoying and probably bad'. Conveniently there is no gun to my head, so such a determination is massively early.

I will under no circumstance play along, and you should really stop asking non-alignment determining questions. Especially ones that open easy AtE avenues (the answer of 'Yes' to 'are you mislynched often' is an easy play for scum to make here. Opening it is short sighted, imo)

[Zoronos]

I'm interested why you find my entrance poitenally scummy when you feel Zoronos is legitimately scummy. If you thought that Zorones was implying I'm scum then why was your initial reaction to my post, "well that's kinda scummy"? Sorry, but its weird that you'd have me as a tertiary scum read while your top scum is, in your opinion, also scum reading me. If you think he is scum, why do you think I am scum too?

I am not seeing much town intent with these pushes of yours.

This is a decently analytical thought though for this point in the game. ++towniness.

[Zoronos]

Could be faux-analytical

True. But I don't hard-bucket anyone so. Everything is just a matter of probabilities. In weighs towny though, so it pushes the needle. He's at least thinking about the game as a whole rather than mono focusing on one or two targets.
I find town try to grab the whole game at once, whereas scum just find 'their target' for the day and tunnel in on it.
The least charitable explanation imo is that he's trying to undermine an accuser's confidence, but I think it more likely he's inspecting reasoning. I like inspection of reasoning so that's what I'm going with as most-likely-explanation-for-post.

[Zoronos]

I'm suspicious of this post. It's too early for you to be this defensive.

I'd cut him a little slack. I basically called his approach to the game bad and slightly scummy. No defensiveness would be really odd (and an indicator of a low-ego player, or someone artificially playing that way).

[Zoronos]

I don't understand this train at all.

[Zoronos]

VOTE: Implosion
Serious vote. He doesn't talk about LUV at all but then votes him. Trying to flashwagon are we?

I'm trying to figure out if I agree with you on this one or not.

Implosion's logic and stances seem, to me, to be very confused.
It seems like he's holding contradictory opinions and trying to justify them after the fact because he was playing off gut and didn't think through whether they made sense together (which leans towny).

My gut doesn't like his post, but I think that's because a lot of it is talking about himself. I want to call him scummy for that, but he's responding to a direct question about his behavior, so talking about himself makes sense. He's answering a direct question after all.

So basically my head and my gut disagree on that slot.

[Zoronos]

LUV is town.

Explain please?

[Zoronos]

Oh just the fact LUV did this last game I played with him.

Playing completely absent annoys me, but something being annoying doesn't make it scum. But it also doesn't make me really want to jump in front of a train and yell "No this is wrong don't lynch it" and I really love doing that, so give me something to work with if this is your sincerely held belief.

[Zoronos]

Looks like LUV has been advised to play dumb and play newb like.
Needs death.

Oh just the fact LUV did this last game I played with him.

Playing completely absent annoys me, but something being annoying doesn't make it scum. But it also doesn't make me really want to jump in front of a train and yell "No this is wrong don't lynch it" and I really love doing that, so give me something to work with if this is your sincerely held belief.

Why does it seem like you're implying I'm not paying attention to what's being said or done?

That's not what I said. I said you were absent. And I'd appreciate it if you'd stop; having no opinions or contributions of your own is frustrating.

[Zoronos]

That's exactly what absent means last time I checked. You seem upset. Are you having a bad day?

Yes. I am having a real bad day.

Also that's not what absent means; for all I know you're reading the thread, stroking a beard and saying "Hmmm... yes, insightful" to each post then taking a puff on your old english pipe and making notes in a leather bound journal. But that's not making its way into the thread, and you're getting a lot of votes lined up on you for what is essentially "I don't like this slot's RVS vote and continued absence".
So, while I find absence annoying (because it means I can't get a useful read on your slot) I am not a fan of simply lynching it down. But I can't make a cogent argument that "Hey, this seems like a not great plan" without some reasoning to back it up beyond simply "Lets not lynch lurkers" because that will convince exactly nobody.

[Zoronos]

Actually I wouldn't mind if everyone answers this ^

I personally think Eager could have waited a bit and tried ti develop some reads before outing that he is ascetic. More info to be gained from reactions after that.

a) Ascetic is functionally the same as Miller in terms of being a net negative utility role for town, so claiming it early, just like claiming miller early is important. (Yes I know they work differently, I'm making a broader point about negative town utility)
Waiting to claim it for 'reactions' just opens up an easy scum pushback line of "Why didn't you claim Miller [or whatever] in your first post?!". Not opening easy scum lines is good.
b) I don't see a reason to do anything about it other than nod and go "Yup, certainly a thing he claimed." It tells us very little about the slot. There is a pro-town reason to say it, and a pro-scum reason, and beyond that it's more instructive, imo, to just read the slot for its posts.
c) Fishing for strong reactions to it is a bad plan in my opinion, since the people most disposed to react to a PR-interacting claim are themselves the folks with PR's.

I have the slot leaning slight town, and that's enough for me to look elsewhere.

[Zoronos]

For me, it's not his RVS vote. It's his RQS answers.

Oh, and the continued absence thing - though that's really more of a continued non-contribution thing.

Tell me more about this, because I've ignored his RQS answers. (I've ignored basically everyone's). Why are they scummy?

My last? (maybe two games ago?) game on these boards, about a year ago, I got burned lynching down someone who was aggressively non-contributory. It felt good but they were town, which was less good. So I am a bit skeptical of running that same play back.

[Zoronos]

@Penguin
Ah, gotcha. I agree that his play is anti-town. I further agree that it's frustrating.
I'm just hesitant to immediately lynch it down without attempting to draw him into more normal play first.

And, it's offputting to me that GE is defending LUV as strongly as he is.

I have a lot of sympathy for GE's position on this one.
Maybe I am projecting here, but I read GE's argument as "Playing useless is not a tell either way for LUV". 2 of my last 3 games on these boards before I left had people that were aggressively useless (as town). I got burned by lynching them. I'm hesitant to run that play out again without at least attempting to cajole the slot into playing normally.

[Zoronos]

I'm uncomfortable with how comfortable he was with eagerSnake's [awful]decision.

Claiming early and clearly as negative utility roles is absolutely correct. It is the best line of play as town in that situation.
Throwing 'why did you not wait for reactions?!?!?' stuff, as ShadowStrike did, is not.
It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" setup. If a negative utility claims early, it opens "Why didn't you wait for reactions". If they claim late, it opens "He's faking a real [x] would have claimed immediately / claiming miller late is scummy because he was making sure there wasn't a counterclaim." There is no route that doesn't face critique, so you take the one that gives the most clarity.

So yes, I am totally okay with the manner in which EagerSnake claimed. Also, ascetic seems a really off the wall thing to fake claim, I'd expect a much simpler 'miller' or something if he was just scum faking.

[Zoronos]

attempting to cajole the slot into playing normally.

And how do you propose to do that?

I don't know.
I was hoping a momentary relief of lynch pressure would convince him to come and play seriously but idk.

[Zoronos]

I disagree with most of that in terms of 'how 2 PR properly', and as you note, you're making an assumption about what PR he may or may not have. He could just be vanilla ascetic. But having that argument isn't really game related, so we can discuss it in post or dead thread.

Suffice that I think EagerSnake's play was legit, and Shadowstrike's rejoinder is scummy.

[Zoronos]

Thank you.

And you're reading correctly; that's what I was hoping for. I appreciate it.

[Zoronos]

Shadowstep, sorry. My mistake.

What is your opinion on Grendel, since it sounds like you know him better?

[Zoronos]

He's probably town based on his current actions, but I want to see more.

As I noted previously, I'm pretty skeptical of him and how he's handling Question Time. I'm willing to give him a chance to synthesize something from his results but I think the chances of that actually happening in a non hand-wave fashion are low.
But what I'm looking for here is some context on his play style. If this is just A Thing He Does, I'm willing to write it off as a bad habit if he plays the game in front of us, and I'm getting false bad juju off his playstyle.

[Zoronos]

Or... he just posted and now I look like a dumb.
Time to read long wall post.

[Zoronos]

Dierfire posted once this game (before Grendel asked the questions), and Salandaar hasn't posted at all, but Grendel didn't seem to notice that / take that into account when assigning reads. Giving a light town read because they haven't posted at all is nonsense (He says probability of scum in main list, but that assumes a PoE that can't really exist yet unless he's Super Confident in his scum reads on there)

But initial suspicion confirmed, hand-wave or over-analysis of non-alignment-indicating details. Your biggest determiner of order of response is "Who was reading the thread when you posted the list", so treating that as alignment indicating will likely lead you down a hole, since 'people that post more' are correlated with 'people that answer soonest'. So using that as an alignment indicator is a bit specious.

If anything, the answer I'd have been looking most closely at would have been "Are you often mislynched". A Yes to that answer might lead me to believe scum opening an AtE avenue. But he ignores that line of play. <In case people misread since apparently my posts get misread, I'm not saying this makes him scum I'm saying it means I think he's just doing it wrong>

[Zoronos]

Penguin - Let's make the assumption of Bad Town for the moment, if only because I don't feel like digging into this more and would like to see what he contributes based on actual gameplay.
Who does that leave as your top scum read, other than LUV? (Again, putting LUV's unhelpfulness aside. Looking Actual scummy posting in thread)

[Zoronos]

VOTE: Zoronos
That response seems way too defensive.

He's not even voting me.
I'm mostly just calling him bad and sighing loudly.

[Zoronos]

Why are you implying that I couldn't possibly have caught scum?

I am saying that if you have caught scum, it is entirely RNG and has nothing to do with your analysis.
It did make me re-read Penguin to think about his actual content, so maybe you prompted something useful, since his questions have all been pokes without followup, and his vote on LUV was a lurker / Anti-town (rather than pro-scum) callout. So maybe something useful but we'll see.
I am going to inspect that, as you can infer from my question to him.

[Zoronos]

Also, implosion went dark after leaving his vote on luv. It's been ~18 hours since he last posted (compared to some pretty heavy activity on his part early on).

He could just be lurking for legit reasons.

Or he could have started lurking in response to getting some heat and just let the thread move past thinking about him.

Also, implosion went dark after leaving his vote on luv. It's been ~18 hours since he last posted (compared to some pretty heavy activity on his part early on).He could just be lurking for legit reasons.Or he could have started lurking in response to getting some heat and just let the thread move past thinking about him.

This is not a bad observation.
I am inclined to agree with it, forebearing that he might just not be in thread yet for w/e scheduling reason. But +1.

[Zoronos]

Ok. That makes sense. Thanks.

But, I'm scum reading LUV for his lack of answers to the RQS AND his lack of contribution since. So...yeah...not the same.

Ok. That makes sense. Thanks.But, I'm scum reading LUV for his lack of answers to the RQS AND his lack of contribution since. So...yeah...not the same.

Yeah, I know. Work with me here.

[Zoronos]

I really have no idea why you're calling my posting pattern scummy.

@town - can you follow my line of reasoning? I ask because I want to see if Implosion is the only one not understanding me.

What I get from what you're saying is he's only posting when it's convenient for him to post yes?

Yep.

Also that from 247 - 261 he addresses a significant number of issues, but ignores the ones I've raised with him. The most he responds to me is by giving an explanation for why he hasn't posted in a while.

Apologizing for not posting for a while would have been a fine explanation - had he directed it at me. Instead, to me, it feels like he tried to slip an explanation under the radar without having to directly confront me on anything. THAT felt more scummy than the post pattern itself.

I think you're looking into that a bit to much and overthinking I don't think that's what he was going for that seems way to smart

I do think you're town though for all this

Super busy day at work so I'm behind, but I agree with this sentiment.
NN30 sees himself as the focus of questioning / investigation and assumes that his target is considering his posts foremost when responding (assumes active neglect vs just not noticing / not caring). It reflects a stance wherein he believes everyone should be responding first and foremost to him; a responsibility seeking rather than a responsibility avoiding posture. He thinks his questions are super important and should always be answered, and that any avoidance of those questions is scum. Scum are happy to appear contributory, but this goes past simple appearance into active investigation attempt.

It's a 'Not considering equally plausible alternatives' fallacy, but this expression of the fallacy is much more likely to come from town than from scum, imo.

tl;dr active followup / active attempts to solve ergo leans towny.

I am reasonably pleased with what LUV posted over night and appreciate that he's taking a more active role in the game.
I need to find time to ponder Grendel more.
I still want a response from Penguin to my earlier question. Especially now that LUV made a big contribution post.

[Zoronos]

Penguin - Let's make the assumption of Bad Town for the moment, if only because I don't feel like digging into this more and would like to see what he contributes based on actual gameplay.
Who does that leave as your top scum read, other than LUV? (Again, putting LUV's unhelpfulness aside. Looking Actual scummy posting in thread)

I asked before LUV made his big post, but question remains relevant enough.

I guess with the secondary follow up - Your initial case on LUV was that he was non-contributory / not helping solve, do you feel that is still the case now that he wrote a [wall of words]? (Seems like your answer is Yes but I don't want to put words in your mouth)

[Zoronos]

Penguin - Let's make the assumption of Bad Town for the moment, if only because I don't feel like digging into this more and would like to see what he contributes based on actual gameplay.
Who does that leave as your top scum read, other than LUV? (Again, putting LUV's unhelpfulness aside. Looking Actual scummy posting in thread)

I asked before LUV made his big post, but question remains relevant enough.

I guess with the secondary follow up - Your initial case on LUV was that he was non-contributory / not helping solve, do you feel that is still the case now that he wrote a [wall of words]? (Seems like your answer is Yes but I don't want to put words in your mouth)

Original question: Gamma.

Follow up: I'd like to see LUV take a hard stance on something before I'm going to consider moving elsewhere.

I was going to write a whole bunch of :words: on my opinion on Gamma, but going to hit Save Draft on that one for the moment.
Why Gamma?

[Zoronos]

Translation - Nn30 is cute, he's trying, ++town points.

I'm still wary of implosion. Since I'm not getting any traction with him at the moment, I'll drop it and see if I have anything to contribute to the other wagons occurring right now.

Earnest effort to solve with evidence of a town mindset, sure. Reducing that to 'trying' is a bit reductive but w/e.

I also didn't say "you are wrong Implosion is town", I said your current case is not alignment indicating. Basically, you're hanging your hat on the rack for the wrong reason. Not necessarily that it's on the wrong rack. By all means, continue exploring and if I have something to contribute, I'll pipe up.

[Zoronos]

I get bad feels from him.

Time to hit that load button then. (I didn't want to pre-answer in the event that it prejudices your response)

Original question: Gamma.

Follow up: I'd like to see LUV take a hard stance on something before I'm going to consider moving elsewhere.

Gamma strikes me as the kind of person that likes to be 'technically correct'. As soon as he pounced on my 'Ascetic is like Miller' with a 'Well actually...', I figured that I was dealing with someone that placed a high value on conversational point scoring over communication of intent.
This kind of play annoys me, however, I feel that it is less likely to come from scum because it's an inherently antagonistic stance. He didn't call me scum for thinking about Ascetic in terms of being like Miller since they were both negative utility; he just called me wrong and insinuated that I was bad. That's a stance that engenders bad feelings from me towards him, and as scum that's not in favor of his win condition (since negative perception aka anti-charisma means I'm more likely to interpret other things he says negatively, and thus more likely to vote him). Basically, either his personality is so in favor of winning internet arguments that he's willing to lower his chances of winning for it, or he's town being contentious for the sake of being contentious.

Even though he's voting me now, he hasn't brought that up at any point in his reasoning (others have, but w/e). That suggests it's just a personality thing for him. Ergo, town mindset.

[Zoronos]

I think the reaction of calling you bad town or scum is relatively unlikely to come from the scumgame that I saw in that game. 3, those posts in addition to contempt show a certain level of him feeling like he's in-the-right (since he's talking about how he was just being honest with his answers) that I think is consistent with town who feels like they've been accused for bs reasons.

Do you feel it could be consistent with a scum who feels like they've been accused for bs reasons?

Ironic since I can think of at least three counts in this game where he has used terminology (omgus, tunneling, and even literally calling LUV town) to mean things that they don't mean at all.

Alas that hypocrisy is not alignment indicating. But actually being correct or incorrect is irrelevant to the point I was making; it was about personality and how he chose to engage with the thread / other players.

If anything this is scummier than if he had called you scum for his analysis; by taking the antagonistic stance towards you without actually giving any meaningful commentary on your alignment to go with it, he provides the illusion of content. And I don't think contentiousness is an aspect of personality that scum are likely to consciously mute to a large degree; maybe somewhat but *shrug*

I don't think arguing about what a Miller is is likely to trick anybody into thinking that's valid content. It's pointless quibbling. Also, scum in my experience definitely mute pointless quibbling. Why be hostile to the people on whose good side you need to rely. Some personality types will do it anyway, but most will tamp it down. Not a solid tell, but enough to move the needle slightly.

As to the scumminess thereof, other players in this thread certainly tried that line. He could have +1'ed it and doubled down at any time on those player's votes. He chose to not do so. He seemed content to assume I was town or neutral and moved on with the game. He seemed to basically ignore me until I picked a fight with Grendel over Random Questions. If any conclusions can be made here, it's that was willing to board mid way when others had already started up the train, and when I got aggressive against Grendel.

However! We know he's played with Grendel before and stated a belief that Grendel was town (not one that I necessarily share, but we're exploring mindset and intent here). There is a plausible line of play where town Gamma reads my post about Grendel's methods, assumes I'm running a discredit line, and reflex votes. Built into that is his prejudice to be friendly (and assume Town) for Grendel since they're from the same forum and he stated a town read on Grendel, and to be unfriendly to me (since we argued earlier), but those prejudices make sense based on how the thread has gone so far.

Basically what I am saying here is that his vote on me is a textbook case of a not alignment indicating behavior, since there are similarly plausible play patterns for either alignment to have taken the actions observed.

[Zoronos]

Oh and, I'm about to get really busy on something, and won't be on tonight.

See you all tomorrow... evening?

Putting the answers to the random questions completely aside, can you point to why Penguin is scum, based on things he's posted in game?

[Zoronos]

The rapid change between 221 (Grendel is either Town playing poorly or Mafia) and 242 (Grendel is Town) is also suspicious to me. While I agree that the last line of 241 sounds more like the kind of thing that Grendel would say as Town than as Mafia, the speed of reversal from the aggression in the earlier posts makes me believe that the aggression was feigned.

Why specifically is that change suspicious? He was clearly entertaining the possibility of town in 221 (you summarized it above, 'Town playing poorly or Mafia'), and Grendel posted a whole bunch in between those two posts. Explain your thinking to me.

[Zoronos]

Holy shit you people giving me a heart attack while I am trying to figure out how to sort this shit.
Don't lolhammer without claims baddies.

[Zoronos]

I was trying to put together a bucketization of the players, and couldn't decide how to bucket Implosion, then thought there was suddenly a hammer.

Here's what I had, but I'm a little less comfortable with my scum reads than normal. My enthusiasm for them is low, which suggests to me I'm missing a critical detail. So I've been trying to pick at my ???? tier of players. I don't like it when I'm not enthusiastic about my scum reads. Usually that correlates with lurking scum.

Spoiler: list time

Townish:
Gamma Emerald
eagerSnake
nn30
Lil Uzi Vert (watch for more lurking after initial contrib post)
Grendel

Scummish:
Shadow_step <Not scum with Implosion or Penguin>
implosion (or just bad)

????:
PenguinPower ( I thought he was scummy earlier but I am really conflicted about his case on Gamma)
Dierfire
boring
MariaR
Slandaar

[Zoronos]

@Maria
I find reasons for scum cases to be really instructive. To that end, I have no idea how to read you or engage with you because you just post a conclusion without explaining.
I get nothing from that, and am not even sure where to begin examining it. It leaves me a bit boggled.

[Zoronos]

Yeah, me too. I don't like 'passively observe stances, hope to glean insight'.
I'm just not sure how to handle it since it falls so far outside my normal experience.

[Zoronos]

@Zoronos

The rapid change between 221 (Grendel is either Town playing poorly or Mafia) and 242 (Grendel is Town) is also suspicious to me. While I agree that the last line of 241 sounds more like the kind of thing that Grendel would say as Town than as Mafia, the speed of reversal from the aggression in the earlier posts makes me believe that the aggression was feigned.

Why specifically is that change suspicious? He was clearly entertaining the possibility of town in 221 (you summarized it above, 'Town playing poorly or Mafia'), and Grendel posted a whole bunch in between those two posts. Explain your thinking to me.

In 221, PenguinPower is saying (as an immediate response to Grendel's post above) that the case that Grendel presents against PenguinPower is groundless, and that this makes Grendel either Town playing poorly or Mafia. The phrasing communicates a certain level of aggressive pushback. When I read 242, the aggressive pushback seems to have disappeared (while the essence of the argument that Grendel's suspicions are unfounded remains). To me, this suggests that 221 was intended to simulate an emotional reaction. I'm also not sure that I see anything from Grendel in the intervening posts that would persuasively point to Town alignment for someone who had such a strong feeling that Grendel was playing so poorly as to possibly be masking Mafia intent, but the tonal shift is the main point.

So, yes, tonal shift. But I feel you're explicitly missing the point of a post; look again at 232 and 241 and Penguin's reaction to it in 242. Penguin goes from aggressive to dismissive. I basically came to the same conclusion / point in 234. Grendel's posting is bad; not scummy bad, just dumb. The tone I get from Penguin is exasperation. He's moving from 'scum or bad town' to 'Oh gosh this is just earnest bad town', in my opinion.
The cause of the town shift is very simple; he is super fucking adamant that his method works. That's basically the most responsibility seeking behavior possible; in the face of multiple people telling him that his method won't catch scum and moving on, he chooses instead to double down on his poor method. He all but stamped his feet and crossed his arms in the thread. It's perhaps the least responsibility avoidant behavior I've seen this entire game.

So, you're either missing an obvious cause for the tone shift, or not understanding the tone shift. There is a better case available against Penguin (in my mind), so I'm really curious why you chose this specific case.

[Zoronos]

UNVOTE:

I need to sort Gamma asap

Gamma is probably town. Also, the odds of Gamma and PP being scum together is very low. If they are, they've been working very hard to distance from each other all game. I think it's more likely at least one is town. They've been sniping at one another pretty consistently this game.
Unless PP has decided he's dead and Gamma is already on the bus and PP is just waving for the train to complete, I don't see them being a scum team pair. Likelyhood of both scum: Low.

[Zoronos]

I'm feeling like the most likely person to be scum on PP's wagon was Dierfire. Also, my SS read has shifted to the town side.
VOTE: Dierfire

I'm not convinced yet that PP is town, but I agree that amongst the cases on PP, I dislike Dierfire's case. (As can be surmised from my initial question, and response above this). So, I am vaguely in support of this sentiment.

[Zoronos]

Second question: That's a strange conclusion. I think there a some town on my wagon that seem to be doing worthwhile things, and if my lynch gets them moving on the right track, then...yeah. String me up.

In this theoretical world, who are the town on your wagon?

[Zoronos]

I suppose that the best explanation that I could give is this: I'm not seeing the tone shift from aggressive to dismissive, but more like aggressive/dismissive to avoidant.
If you see a better case (and if it doesn't look to be related to my existing line of questioning), I would like to hear it (particularly given your most recent posting).

I may be projecting, since I moved from aggressive/dismissive to straight up dismissive. But, I think that's the accurate read on Penguin's tone and that yours is wrong.

The case I would make, if I were doing one, would look about like this:
I'd be focusing on if I were looking at Penguin's interactions with Grendal was his pejorative "Are you a first year psych student or something?" -> It's an attack on credibility of the player, rather than the argument.

I think his original case (312) on Gamma was flawed. He cracks back at Gamma for Gamma's Implosion vote (Implosion talked about A, then voted B without any further mention of that player), which was an incongruence on the part of Implosion; I can see a town mindset where Gamma brings that up. So painting it as scummy is incorrect. Going after Gamma for it is not really reasonable; it's searching for something that can be painted as guilty but which has no real correlation with guilt.
Similarly, going after the wording 'serious vote' is silly; why is clarity suddenly a scumtell.
I attempted to engage him on Gamma, but he just waved it away without discussion (327) then voted 335. I can kinda see a world here were PP thinks I'm just a moron, and envisions an Implosion / Gamma scum team, but he already got on Gamma's case for voting Implosion, and now he's voting Gamma for thinking Implosion is town.
So, yeah, I think Penguin's case on Gamma was built on a heap of not alignment indicating factors, and that to me says it's a bad case and one worthy of attack.

He's also not spending any time working with other players or cooperatively developing reads. He's camped out in his own valley, where he mostly just squabbles with Gamma and Grendel; not very contributory towards the greater town objective.

However I am not really ready to make that case yet. There are some counter indicating factors I'd like to sort out first.
Reading the connecting theme of his posts, there is a strong tone of aggrieved frustration. Between asking for the lynch to complete, complaining at Grendal about his methodology (without calling Grendal scum, this is important), and generally just sniping at Gamma. When he noted that Salandar's slot was afk, that's could be a legitimate frustration. Having someone just not participate is shitty for town, so it's easy to envision a town getting annoyed at an obvious oversight. For scum it's much less of an issue (unless that slot is also scum) since it's one less person they have to trick.

I also think your commentary in 515 is off base. It's NAI (in my opinion) for him to note it. He responded to Grendel (in a frustrated fashion), posted about an AFK, and then went right back to talking to Grendel. It wasn't some epic deflection.

[Zoronos]

VI means?

Village Idiot.

[Zoronos]

Grendel, boring, nn30, maybe you. Of course, several have dropped off my wagon now.

I am (pointedly) not voting you. You're not my top suspect. Anyway.

I'm really not sure what to think about Boring at this point; what makes you think she's town? She's in the middle of my ???? bucket.
I may be giving her less credit than she deserves because of that 'small coat' metaphor.

[Zoronos]

NN / eager, I am going to be away from a computer until later tonight, so I cant really respond at proper length.
Have family in town at the moment and I want to respond more thoroughly than my phone will allow.

[Zoronos]

@Zoro - what are your thoughts on my 542?

I have mentioned this a couple times, but I am leaning town on Gamma.
I don't find the base act of inconsistency to be scummy. If his reasoning doesn't match his conclusion, that's scummy. If he's calling someone scum for things that aren't alignment indicating, that's scummy. But just changing his mind? not indicating, imo. I find that scum try a lot harder than town to be 'consistent' in their reads, whereas town just post whatever is on the top of their heads at the moment they thing it so just reversing course tells me little.

I also don't find 'outing' or declaring a town read to be scummy, *assuming that town read is supported by reasoning*. There's nothing wrong with bucketing a player into 'I don't want to lynch this slot'. I also put basically no stock in meta soo.....

I think his read on SS is wrong, so my question to Gamma here is "Why the heck is SS town?!?".
But basically I'm not super convinced by 542.

[Zoronos]

Zoronos what are your thoughts on:

MariaR
Grendel
boring

I believe that Grendel is town, and have said that a couple times now. I think most of his questions are bad and his lines of inquiry (prior to today. I really haven't taken the time yet to process the stuff that has happened today) betray a lack of knowledge about what behaviors are actually scummy. His beliefs, whoever wrong or poorly guided, seems sincerely held however. He's trying to solve the game, or at least giving a damn good impression that he's trying to do so. That says townish to me.
One thing that stands out to me is that he seems to think calling something wrong and calling something scummy are one and the same. Which is not true, but it is an indication that he very much wants to be taken seriously and have his views respected.

I threw together a bit of a reads list in 393 and my reads on Boring and Maria haven't really changed since that point. I find both have been content light, exempting Boring's last reads list which I haven't really internalized yet. Some of it I disagree with, some of it I agree with (I'll come back to this in a bit).

Maria explicitly mentioned that she doesn't want to share in the 405 through 408 sequence, and I really just don't know how to play through that. It's so off the wall I don't find myself able to shake my head and call it scummy. It just is so orthogonal to the way I analyze the game I don't know how to engage her. So, basically, bucket of ????.

Boring is in the ???? bucket as well. I really don't understand her 'strong town' reading on Shadow_Step. He's at the top of her town list and it makes no sense to me. She cites aggresiveness and grandiosity as town tells, and the former I don't find a town tell unless backed by reasoning and consensus building, and the later I don't think I see in ShadowStep's posting. I agree with her Implosion read at the time she made it, for basically the reason she listed in her list, so I'm wondering if I don't have that read wrong.
Basically, I feel like she's coasting in the middle of the pack, and that itself puts me on edge. I am not seeing effort to get out front and lead a case or do real deep scum hunting. But some of her opinions and thoughts are quite solid, so I am conflicted on her to sort her.

The dichotomy between Boring and Maria here is interesting; Maria is hard to sort because she is content light (apparently purposefully), and Boring is hard to sort because some of her content makes me go "Yup, that's scummy def" and some is "Well, that is pretty darn reasonable".

[Zoronos]

Zoronos, Slandaar, Lil Uzi Vert, Grendel, MariaR

Who do you think is suspicious and why (2 points)

I am catching back up, but here is what I had on Friday: 393[/[pst].
Dierfire's response to questioning his moved him towards the scummier side of my ???? bucket. I think his case on PP was hung on non alignment indicating behaviors; check [post]523 for reasoning.
Prism I am holding in abeyance until he catches up and am trying to ignore that his main read is that I am town, so as not to bias my judgement.

Implosion was in my scum pile in that list, but I find myself agreeing with a lot of the things he wrote in 562, specifically his thinking on PP and Boring. I disagree with what he wrote in 565; see below for commentary on 399, and I don't find sarcasm to be towny or scummy, so citing it for town points is out of step. I also maintain that his read on gamma is wrong. So, Implosion is moving in the right (townier) direction, but there are still some unresolved ???? there. At the very least, I find some of his reads questioning or not in agreement with my own.

I am still happy with leaving Shadow_step in my scum list for the moment. I don't feel like he's driving the game in a productive direction. I especially don't like 399; that seems to me like he's building a hedge into a town read in case he needs to turn it around later. Same in 397.

See my post above this one for commentary on Boring. That's a slot which my gut dislikes but I haven't gotten enough real data on to make a decision via logic.

I'm going to sleep, so let me know if you want me to expound on any of this and I can do so when it's not 6am.

[Zoronos]

Throw Grendel in there and lol

Eh, Grendel I feel like I understand. I think his posting is towny; he appears to be making an earnest attempt to solve the game. I think his methods are ineffective and it's taking him to conclusions I don't agree with, but that's not the same as scummy or content light.

(Is 'lol' supposed to be LUV there, or am I just misreading your post entirely?)

[Zoronos]

Well.
The fuck is all this.

Okay, going to try to unpack thoughts a bit:

I ISO'ed Shadow first because frankly he was in my scum list before. His behavior is roughly consistent with a CC, which pains me to say because that means my reads list from previous was super wrong. He does come back to Eager over and over as his touchstone, and frankly I do the same thing when I think I have a lock scum - Get everyone's reads on that player to look for partners. What I can't figure out in that context is he continue to whip votes for LUV after Eager's claim, and then moved on on PP. If he has a hard counter-claimed Eager, why LUV / PP? I get PP more in that context, based on him questioning PP for a read on Eager and PP ignoring it.

I like Maria's commentary on Implosion instantly calling Eager's claim scummy; that's a good analysis of hidden information. Of course it only works if Eager is actually scum, which I'm not frankly super convinced about yet, but +1 Insightful.

Eager:
Why did you vote Boring here:

My vote actually was on no one but I'm fine with it going back to boring

VOTE: boring

[Zoronos]

Because that's where my vote was before I fake hammered PP and unvoted, but the VC still showed my vote on boring so I just put it back there officially, I guess

No, I mean, At this juncture why did you feel Boring was scum?

[Zoronos]

Honestly just didn't think it would hurt to have my vote there the 2 wagons that were going on seemed to be getting enough votes as it was

That's not the question I asked grrr.
Why is she scum?

[Zoronos]

...

No, I mean, why did you think she's scum?
Like, provide some reasoning or something. Maybe a case? Or was it just a joke vote and pointless? Which is fine too I guess but fucking clarify that then.

[Zoronos]

Mainly wanted to see if anyone would react to my obviously parked vote or not
.. no one really did

Really? Ugh you're frustrating.

Okay, so, who do you think is scum and why? I'd appreciate some non-flippant thoughts.

[Zoronos]

Who do you think Snake should be voting for Zoro?

I don't know. Basically my reads list got turned on its head by this, and I'm trying to parse out what I think about it. Like I wrote above, I can see some common threads of SS actually doing what he claimed, which means he either planned a fake counterclaim well in advance (I guess ascetic mafia, but why out that on D1, that's a win-at-LYLO gamble play) or he's at least somewhat legit.

So, I'm weighing which of the following two statements is more likely:
1) We have two town Ascetics who are counterclaiming eachother D1, and I should be looking off the wagons to see who is whipping up FUD and / or for people that come down quickly on 'I believe X about Y' and are looking to them flip around on X after Y flips town for the double mislynch.
2) We have a legit scum vs town counterclaim, and I need to figure out which side has the town on it.
Like I said just above here, I can see the logical thread from SS being skeptical about Eager's claim and posting, so investigating Eager's thought processes and opinions is the order of the day.

[Zoronos]

Mainly wanted to see if anyone would react to my obviously parked vote or not
.. no one really did

Really? Ugh you're frustrating.

Okay, so, who do you think is scum and why? I'd appreciate some non-flippant thoughts.

Boring seems happy with this conflict

Is she scum?
Basically - Who is your biggest scum read or two, and show me some thought process for why that's the case. Give me a window into your thinking.

[Zoronos]

investigating Eager's thought processes and opinions is the order of the day.

Sounds like fun. /s

Sounds like a huge waste of time

Maybe you could start by providing a read and a shred of reasoning instead of being lazy and flippant.

[Zoronos]

If we don't overcome this, we will almost certainly lose.

If you actually believe this, you should work to convince the undecided voters of the thread that it's true and you're town.
I am willing to entertain the position, but you have to work with me to do that. That means playing along with my question, even if you think it's stupid.
So how about it?

[Zoronos]

Holy fuck I don't care about site meta.
Or personal meta.
Just play the fucking game in front of us.

[Zoronos]

If we don't overcome this, we will almost certainly lose.

If you actually believe this, you should work to convince the undecided voters of the thread that it's true and you're town.
I am willing to entertain the position, but you have to work with me to do that. That means playing along with my question, even if you think it's stupid.
So how about it?

It's 3:30am and I haven't even begun to make any cases this game so I have literally nothing prepared at this time, unfortunately. Wish I could give you more than the fact I've been parked on boring all game and scum haven't even taken a nibble at it, so that also makes it more likely boring is scum

Well then maybe you should get off your ass and do some work to solve.
We can pick this up tomorrow (it's 3:30 here too, so)

[Zoronos]

And @zoronos, site meta is very important when shadow's primary line of thought is "X would be bastard on this site, and this is a normal game, therefore X cannot be happening in this game." The first premise is flawed because he doesn't understand site meta.

That would be my point, yes.
He's locked into a vision of appropriate meta; whether this site's or some other site's, I don't care.
Meta is irrelevant. You're fighting on an axis of "Well, you see, it actually is within this site meta because..." I am saying I don't care whether it's in meta or not and nobody else should either.

[Zoronos]

S_s don't replace out when I flip... I want you to feel what I feel rn... being indefensibly attacked because people want to OGTM

I am catching up from this morning, but holy shit I am frustrated at you for this shit.
You were never being 'indefensibly attacked'. You keep repeating 'lol 2 ascetics' instead of actually just trying to play towny. You've been a lazy shit all game instead of working on scum hunting which would show your towniness via your actions.

Stop fucking whining and show me a scum case. I want to believe you; my gut says this is a distraction, but you're not fucking helping yourself at all.

[Zoronos]

VOTE: Shadow

If both of you are town we are seriously fucked.

Based on his ISO, I feel that Shadow's actions comport with someone that was planning a counterclaim. Which means my prior scumreads were super wrong, but super wrong it is.

[Zoronos]

What if scum is playing so well that I don't have a good case and anything I tried to accuse would be a stretch and therefore make me look scummier lol

Then put the best case you have and explain it and your thought process.
It's D1, all cases are necessarily limited. Fucking try. Because anything is better than "Woe is me everyone hates me but actually trying is too hard whhhaaaaaa"

[Zoronos]

Does planning = scum?

No. I think it leans towny in this case. That's why I said my prior scum-read on Shadow was likely super wrong. I can see the connecting thread in his ISO of him suddenly being suspicious of Eager.

[Zoronos]

I mean I'd believe that scum is likely distributed: 1-2 scum on me, 0-1 scum on s_s, 0-2 scum off both

But that doesn't narrow anything down at this stage

Okay. Good start, let's keep going. Who are those scum?

[Zoronos]

Based on his ISO, I feel that Shadow's actions comport with someone that was planning a counterclaim. Which means my prior scumreads were super wrong, but super wrong it is.

He didn't actually press snake all that hard. He's stated in 869 that all he got out of it was that Boring is town.

Keep in mind the context of a town!Shadow_Step this game. Leading up to when Shadow CC'd, Eager is 100% scum in his mind. If the only information he manged to gather before the CC is that Boring is town, he didn't get enough information to make a CC worthwhile.

This feels all the more scummy since Shadow said in 693 the "This is standard play when you have a guilty on someone. You try to get reads out of them so that you can easily find out who is most likely their buddy."

He didn't do that at all.

His reasoning for this is that "I didn't want Eager to know I was onto him." Bah. I call BS on that one. He's giving scum way too much credit.

He kept touchstoning Eager. 122, 168, 279, 280, 296.

401, 413, 415, 418. I'm stopping at the point of the CC, for obvious reasons.
He tried to build a train on Penguin based on Penguin ignoring (343) a question about Eager, asked in 263.
In [post]169[/[post] he explicitly foreshadows a delayed counterclaim.

Town!SS didn't feel a need to bury Eager manually because he believed he had a CC for that.

This was either planned out from the very beginning of the game, or SS is legit.

[Zoronos]

1-2 Scum on me is in [boring, PenguinPower, Gamma Emerald] All 3 of these nearly equally likely.
0-1 Scum on s_s is in [nn30, LUV] More likely LUV than nn30 IMO, but I could be wrong here, or they both could be town.
0-2 Scum off wagons is in [MariaR, implosion, Dierfire, Grendel, Prism, Zoronos] These I'm at a loss for.

1-2 Scum on me is in [boring, PenguinPower, Gamma Emerald] All 3 of these nearly equally likely.0-1 Scum on s_s is in [nn30, LUV] More likely LUV than nn30 IMO, but I could be wrong here, or they both could be town.0-2 Scum off wagons is in [MariaR, implosion, Dierfire, Grendel, Prism, Zoronos] These I'm at a loss for.

Is that literally just a list of the entire game, excepting you and SS?
Come the heck on man.
Give me some sign of analysis work.

[Zoronos]

What do you want from me?

I had my vote on boring all day and nobody even nibbled at it, usually I would think scum would at least take a nibble at it. This makes it more likely boring is scum. Also boring seems happy with this conflict and jumped on me without any question, also used the gambler's fallacy to her own defense.

Okay, let's talk more about this. What other posts of Boring's make you think she's scum? Anything from before the counterclaim-athon?

[Zoronos]

I've got a few things I want to respond to later but for now why are people assuming nn30 is town again?

303 and 322 is where I laid out my reasoning for it. Can't speak for others.

[Zoronos]

What do you want from me?

I had my vote on boring all day and nobody even nibbled at it, usually I would think scum would at least take a nibble at it. This makes it more likely boring is scum. Also boring seems happy with this conflict and jumped on me without any question, also used the gambler's fallacy to her own defense.

Okay, let's talk more about this. What other posts of Boring's make you think she's scum? Anything from before the counterclaim-athon?

She seemed to be trying to buddy me at the start of the game, and when realized that wasn't going to work went the other route

Can you show me where that happened?

[Zoronos]

Dierfire, Grendel, Zoronos are the people who haven't really taken a firm stance on this

Pretty sure my stance on this should be obvious by now.
Curious what Grendel and Bored (specifically Bored) have to say.

You got any other thoughts on Bored? (There's something I saw when I was reviewing Bored that I'm surprised nobody else has brought up but w/e)

[Zoronos]

Shadow_step - Has an aggressive town persona. A hint of grandiosity. I haven't seen this behavior before with scum.
eagerSnake - He's got a most-likely-town claim. If he's still alive tomorrow, he'll probably be bumped way down because he's pretty useless

These were Boring's top two town reads at one point. She flipped on her second top town read as soon as her first CC'ed him on a modifier, without further investigation. I find that questionable.
I am further surprised that not a single person brought up that she was willing to trash her town reads that quickly. But w/e.

Anyway, I want to hear what Boring has to say once she comes back; my gut wants her to be scum (hello conf-bias) but I can't justify just throwing down the hammer without giving her a chance to say her piece.

[Zoronos]

Shadow_step - Has an aggressive town persona. A hint of grandiosity. I haven't seen this behavior before with scum.
eagerSnake - He's got a most-likely-town claim. If he's still alive tomorrow, he'll probably be bumped way down because he's pretty useless

These were Boring's top two town reads at one point. She flipped on her second top town read as soon as her first CC'ed him on a modifier, without further investigation. I find that questionable.
I am further surprised that not a single person brought up that she was willing to trash her town reads that quickly. But w/e.

Anyway, I want to hear what Boring has to say once she comes back; my gut wants her to be scum (hello conf-bias) but I can't justify just throwing down the hammer without giving her a chance to say her piece.

Good catch Zoro. I agree this looks fishy.

It alone isn't damning. If her only reason for town reading Eager was his claim, then it makes some sense to flip on him in that situation. I would have investigated further (and, well, did) but she's V/LA which could be introducing noise.
So, yeah, interested in what she has to say. We have a week to let her post her side of things.

I am skeptical of boxing my thought process in to "We have competing claims we must lynch one of them must must must" unless we are hitting the 'Two people claimed non-Normal roles in a normal game' situation.

[Zoronos]

Y'all a talkative bunch tonight I see.

Dierfire and Grendel, I'm curious what you guys think of these shenanigans?

[Zoronos]

Eager dude if you're town you aren't doing yourself any favors. That's like the least useful argument ever.
I AM TOWN BELIEVE ME is completely NAI. Do useful shit instead of quibbling if you want to convince people.

[Zoronos]

What do you expect me to do? Make wallposts and color-coded read lists?

That would be a start, yes. You can feel free to skip the color coding.

Really the answer is 'legwork'. Demonstrating that you are trying to solve the game and find scum, rather than faffing around, feeling sorry for yourself, and making stupid quips.
Basically, play mafia.

I am inherently disposed to believing you because I really would rather live in the world where Boring is scum. But you're making that really hard to accept, and that's probably an issue for you if you are town and want to win.

[Zoronos]

Your town reads on that list is literally just all the people voting Boring.
Do you have some other reason for these various players? Or how about this, talk to me about the Dierfire read. Why is he on the scummy end of your reads?

[Zoronos]

Sure, because "They are going for a double ML" asserts that you are town, which is not a fact currently in evidence.
It makes sense from your perspective perhaps, but not necessarily from mine.
Also, it ignores that perhaps a scum has decided to bus their partner at this point.

[Zoronos]

He's on the 'need to sort' pile because he never took a stance regarding current events

He's your number three scum read unless I'm reading this wrong.
Or you literally haven't sorted a single person because boring.

[Zoronos]

fake-edit: besides boring

[Zoronos]

Okay, how should I be reading the list?
Boring is number one scum, got that part. Who is number two scum?

[Zoronos]

No, I mean, give me a name and some reasons why they're scum, not including that they're part of the hullabaloo involving your claim.

[Zoronos]

...As scum. It's a great way to avoid getting trapped in a CC if it works. What I need to know is if this is something you agree is something scum would do. I'm feeling incredibly confused right now and this feedback will help.

Scum would do it. But so would town that believe it to be true. It's based on personalities involved, imo.

Personally, I just put it out of mind and am trying to evaluate all three lynch candidates individually. Of the three, SS's narrative seems to track most closely with how he acted in the thread (see my previous posts for explanation), so I'm not keen on lynching him over all of it. That leaves Eager and Boring at the moment.

[Zoronos]

I'm pretty sure I've made myself super clear on those points, maybe hit that ISO button.

[Zoronos]

I'm away from a computer so if you actually want that response in a non sarcastic fashion I suppose I could answer it but I don't really feel like typing redundant posts.

[Zoronos]

Is eager lynched yet?

No, and speed lynching him before Boring comes back and talks is a bad plan.
It would be cool if he'd get off his ass and do some work to validate my blind faith, but w/e.

So, other than Eager, who do you feel is scum? Still Gamma, or has that read changed?

[Zoronos]

The sheer absurdity of a day one CC is what boggles me about all this. If I were scum, I would never early claim ascetic in thread. I'd sit on that into end game and never ever mention it. Town can't cop me / roleblock me / track me? Awesome I'm the best scum.
I'd also never try to counter claim a town ascetic, since that's just a bad 1 for 1, which is not a winning play for scum.

Which means either Eager or SS don't play scum along the same axis that I do, or that they're not scum. Or are just crazy people who make bad choices.

[Zoronos]

Depends on eager's flip. But, no, Gamma hasn't done anything to change my mind right now.

So in your mind this is obvscum Eager?
Definitely no chance of two town ascetic?

[Zoronos]

I'm noticing a lot of people only answering for eager
What about Maria?

The maria half of the question is unenlightening. If she is town and thinks they're both town, she'll call them both town. If she thinks one is a scum, she'll call that one scum. If she's scum, either she is calling them both town and both are (right side of history play - avoid blowback from the mislynches), or one is a scum buddy and she's protecting them. But that doesn't look manifestly different from the outside without being able to peer into her reasoning.
So, basically the action itself is NAI, the reasoning is the only thing that matters. And that hinges on Boring.

If you're asking "Do you feel her reasoning for calling them both town is legit" I'd go with "Well, she thinks Boring is manipulating the situation, and that corresponds roughly with my gut reaction to events, so I don't see a problem, but I'd like to investigating Boring more first because I don't like to just YOLO based on what my gut thinks."
So, yeah. Crux of the matter is boring right now.

[Zoronos]

I can't even tell what you're agreeing with. Or whether gamma is yelling in agreement, disagreement, or just out of general frustration.

[Zoronos]

In the movie Beetlejuice if you said his name three times he'd show up.
They're making commentary that you don't post proactively, but rather reactively when your name comes up. And / or making a joke.

[Zoronos]

Depends on eager's flip. But, no, Gamma hasn't done anything to change my mind right now.

So in your mind this is obvscum Eager?
Definitely no chance of two town ascetic?

I'm confident enough to lynch Eager, but I can't say "no chance."

What makes you confident of that?

[Zoronos]

I'm frankly baffled by my wagon, or that it's lasted this long. I'd congratulate scum, but I don't think they've earned it. There's a weird social dynamic in this game that I can't seem to wrap my head around. How many more times, for example, is Zoro going to try to probe eager for a reason to have voted me in the first place without actually questioning his alignment?

Apparently this is unclear, so I will explain.
That is how I question someone's alignment. If I sit and demand scum reads from someone, it's probably because I am skeptical about the slot and want a window into their thinking. It's not because I'm your bestest buddy and want to work with you (well, sometimes it does, but usually not).
People with shitty reasons to vote someone or no reason at all, in my experience are scum. Because scum don't actually have real reasons behind their, they just make shit up or contrive cases and vote town.
So, all those times I was demanding Eager give me a read and some reasoning? That's because I am suspicious of Eager and am trying to align gut and logic about his slot. My questions to Penguin just above here, same deal. (Pssst surprise reveal I'm skeptical of Penguin's certainty on this one)

It is the same reason I posed questions to you. But I respect that you're V/LA so whenever you come back and get a chance, I'd like to have some discussion.

[Zoronos]

@boring
Anyway, here's my take on your play so far:
You've been in the middle of two trains - PP and Eager. Never the head of either - the player leading the charge for the lynch. While you were on PP, you didn't talk about him much at all or advocate for that train to move forwards. You mostly seemed to be talking to Grendel. (I kind of liked your evaluation of Grendel's conciliatory post to Gamma, actually 623).
However that suspicion also never seemed to get pushed based the suspicion phase.

At the time of the CC, you had Eager as your number 2 town read, after SS at number one. That suggests, to me, that you didn't have a lot of skepticism about his claim. Furthermore, I find "He survived the night, he must be scum" to be a really awful way to evaluate PR's (since it depends on the playstyle of the scum team on whether they are risk averse or not, which is hidden information). It makes it really easy for scum to try to lynch PR's by building up mistrust.

So, when you immediately flipped on him as soon as the CC happens, that seems scummy to me. You didn't take the time to re-evaluate the read or look for other indications on whether he was scummy. Just 'Oh counterclaim yup top scum' and a vote. There wasn't evidence of skepticism or evaluation. If someone counterclaims one of my top town reads, I am always going to try and think carefully about why my town read might have been wrong, or if something else is afoot.

So, I don't think you've done a lot of active scum hunting, haven't been an evangelist for the trains you've been on, and I question your sudden certainty on Eager-scum. Those things add up to my gut thinking you're playing a happy coincidence of two town having the same role modifier, and you get a free mislynch.
However, the logical case hasn't caught up to my gut and I am wary of just interpreting events into conf-bias land. So I'm not entirely convinced that you're the villain quite yet - at least not until we've had a chance to chat a bit more.

[Zoronos]

If the whole base of the argument against me is there's no way there's 2 town ascetics then by that reasoning when I flip town ascetic you have to lynch my cc.

This is equally stupid and we have to do no such thing. You might want to stop the petulance and just try to demonstrate towniness the normal way - by scum hunting.

[Zoronos]

623 does not involve me.

Yes, sorry, that was Eager, not you.
I am not sure why I typed Gamma there. My mistake.

[Zoronos]

Wait, so Grendel in that post was super sure Eager was town. He was reiterating that Eager's scum read on him made him sure Eager was town.
Grendel is voting Eager right now... time to go back and check that reasoning.
UGH SO MUCH ISO DIVING I JUST WANT TO DO OTHER THINGS NOT FORUM POST.

[Zoronos]

Fuck it I'll do it later. Too lazy.

[Zoronos]

Phone post @ Grendel
I give very little heed to setup meta except when two people claim literally the same role. And even then I'm still pretty skeptical.
So yeah. Counterclaims don't do much for me.

[Zoronos]

Well, Eager, you're at -1 and probably want to claim.

[Zoronos]

UNVOTE:

VOTE: EagerSnake

I was going to look more into boring since she is the leading wagon, but I feel like Snake is much scummier atm.

Hey. Grendel. I'm actually town but nice wallpost

Well, I'll look into Boring too, but many of your posts have been down right manipulative.

Playing into unknowing majority's fear is a really scum oriented strategy.

So, Grendel, you said you'd look into Boring. What did you come up with?

(I read back over the ISO like I said, I see the pivot point onto Eager from his previous Eager-Town, Boring-Suspicious stance. Not entirely convinced by it, but let's run this line of questioning and see where we go)

[Zoronos]

You claiming intent?

I am not yet claiming intent, I have more scum hunting to do.

However, in like 2/3 of the games I have played on this board people YOLO hammer without stating intent.

[Zoronos]

@Boring

I don't see 622 as evidence of pushing the PP lynch; indeed it struck me as quite scummy. You weren't making a case for PP to be scum; you were saying "Why me why not X?"
That's not attempting to push the PP lynch, that's contesting a vote on yourself, imo.

Anyway, I don't come from this forum and basically don't play here, so I have no involvement in this place's meta. All I look for is effort to solve. And I'm not seeing a lot of it.

[Zoronos]

I've never seen it like that. Not without softening the edges to avoid animosity and OMGUS.

I have absolutely seen it, but usually not with this level of premeditation for the counterclaim.

[Zoronos]

So, catching up a tad. That Dierfire interaction is really dense and I'll work on unpacking it in the morning. Some of the thoughts I liked, and some seem off track.
So, for the sake of clarity Dierfire, your scum reads are Eager, Gamma, and Penguin? You are further of the opinion that Gamma and Penguin's set of disagreements around the competing trains was theater / scum distancing and that they could be scum together?
Am I understanding this correctly?

[Zoronos]

No point asking Eager for a full claim, he will probably claim a strong pro town role to draw a CC, so that his buddies can kill that player. No thanks.

We should absolutely ask for a full claim; if a PR dies to kill a scum, yay we killed a scum. There's basically no PR I wouldn't trade for a dead scum, especially a D1 dead scum.
I'm not nearly as LOCK SOLID SCUM KILL KILL as you are, and I think you need to appreciate that a lot of other players in this game aren't either. Trying to ram the lynch through as fast as possible is a bad plan.

[Zoronos]

p-edit: @Zoro. I gave you what I have to give. I can't say where I was going next with my train of thought on PP because as I said, I was distracted by Grendel. I guess you're just going to have to be dissatisfied. Did you have any other questions that I can help you with, or is that the extent of your questioning?

So, are you still of the opinion that Penguin is scum?

Let's take it on faith that Eager is scum for the purpose of this exercise - We've had a couple trains at -1 at this point after the counterclaims (yours and Eagers). We didn't see any intent to hammer on either train. So, based on what you've seen so far, who do you feel is his most likely scumbuddy? (again, we're assuming that he's scum for the purpose of this exercise. Benefit of the doubt and all that). Are his partner's on you to counterwagon? Bussing him? Talk to me about the flow of events in the game and how that relates to the scum gameplan.

[Zoronos]

@Zoronos

So, for the sake of clarity Dierfire, your scum reads are Eager, Gamma, and Penguin? You are further of the opinion that Gamma and Penguin's set of disagreements around the competing trains was theater / scum distancing and that they could be scum together?
Am I understanding this correctly?

Yes, that's correct.
I'm not married to the idea that all three are Mafia together, but I have independent reasons to read each as Mafia, associative reasons to read PenguinPower and Gamma Emerald as partners, and no associative reasons to doubt either as partners for eagerSnake (in fact, perhaps some associative reasons to read Gamma Emerald as a likely partner for eagerSnake given the hops on and off the eagerSnake wagon).

So, in short, your theory is that Gamma is Eager's scum partner, and who jumped on the lynch train when he thought it was going to complete for the town cred, then jumped off again when he thought he might be able to save his scum buddy?

[Zoronos]

Your words say you agree, but your tone says you don't. Which is it?

I don't think my words say anything about whether I agree or not. I'm asking to make sure I understand his stance. And furthermore am pushing for details that show whether or not his thought process is actually consistent with events or is manufactured to simply appear so.

[Zoronos]

I absolutely hate Zoronos' indecisiveness.

You probably shouldn't. I was really close to posting intent to hammer you the other night out of raw frustration with your continual 'WOE IS ME I AM TOWN IT WOULD BE SO BAD TO LYNCH ME' and 'I guess you have to lynch SS after you lynch me because ~reasons~' posts.

[Zoronos]

When eager flips town I am power tunneling Dierfire into the ground

Why?

If Eager flips town my Dier suspicion will increase; not quite as far as 'tunnel into the ground' but it will certainly go up a tad. It was high initially, but some of his posting last night seemed pretty reasonable and caused me to lower my likelihood-of-scum evaluation on him. I'm trying to piece him together a bit better before I move forward, and think really hard about his actual assessment of Gamma's behavior.

[Zoronos]

But as LUV said, he could have claimed to make it look like one of us was one of his partners.

This is the craziest of possible theories. Why do complicated shit to throw shade when he could just do the simple thing and vote someone town?

(I am not caught up but holy shit this conspiracy rabbit hole stuff is crazy. Most scum play simple. They don't play unnecessarily complicated)

[Zoronos]

Okay I caught up these last few pages are a complete circular set of pre-flip associatives. C'mon people, waste of time. Focus on the scum in front of us.
Furthermore, Shadow_Step's behavior fits no scum pattern I know of. It would be worthlessly unnecessarily complicated of a plan. He could have just sat on all of this and voted one of all the other trains. He was in no danger and had nothing pressing to make him stick his neck out in this way. So, yeah.

@Boring - You didn't answer the question I posed last night. The short version was "Who is your best non-Eager scum read, if you want you can assume Eager is scum for the sake of this exercise."

[Zoronos]

Nobody else has any thoughts... 'k.

Here's what I'm pondering, maybe someone can weigh in.
It feels like our trains are relatively solidifying on Boring vs Eager. Neither of those trains seems very 'difficult' - There isn't a lot of flip flop other than by Gamma.
Does that mean Scum are fine with this (because two town?) and don't feel a need to push an alternative (or have already settled in to bus)? I feel like neither train has faced a ton of headwind - There hasn't really been a struggle to get either to complete. Normally that's a red flag for me - When I have a good read on a scum usually someone is around to throw water on it. Not necessarily a scum - usually a townie in fact will just yell at me that I'm wrong - Scum tend to bus where I'm from if I have a solid read on their partner(s).
But I'm not feeling that here. There is no huge headwind on either train - The only player I've felt that is off in Narnia is LUV. Grendel is afk so maybe that's the problem? I brought this up a little re: Gamma the other day, but I kinda buy Dier's explanation about Gamma's behavior / alignment. Which was unexpected since I was kinda suspicious of Dier and I'd expect scum-Dier to take the opportunity to either throw shade on Gamma (if Gamma town) or simply to ignore the point (if Gamma scum), rather than absolve him.

That got a bit ramble-tastic. Not having anyone posting is boring lol.

[Zoronos]

Not scared. More ruminating on possibilities.
The other explanation is that the scum have already decided on a bus and have written things off. Or are just sitting it out on secondary targets.

The useful take aways are that I liked Dier's explanation and it slightly reduced my impression that he was scummy, and my town read on LUV has degraded slightly.

[Zoronos]

I want to finish talking to Boring before contemplating flash wagons.

I am mentally weighing the Prism vs Implosion axis, because I am having a hard time making up my mind on Implosion. So, Prism's posting in terms of 'Here is how to play mafia effectively' goes along a lot of the same lines as my thinking about how you play the game (not necessarily same conclusions, but very similar mental rules for what to look for and what is meaningful). I want to say this is towny, but bias is so easy in that type of system. However, he is persecuting his reads pretty unerringly, so that is towny.
Now, on Implosion. He's been thin all game; that is, my general impression is that he doesn't do a lot to try and steer the conversation. He comments on this, but doesn't push. I am suspicious of anyone willing to just float along. However, he has had a few posts (I'm playing off the top of my head here rather than from notes / ISO, so if you want research it will have to be a follow up post later) that made me nod and decreased my suspicion. However, a body of work and a few posts aren't the same thing - It does mean he's not my top scum read, but I remain skeptical. When I last compiled a reads list, I had a note in there that said he couldn't be scum with SS (and I think one other player, but I forget who at this point), who was my other main read, and I think that's borne out at this point because I doubt SS is scum running the play he's running.

[Zoronos]

What about nolynch?

Aggghhhhh
Come the fuck on. This is like newbie scum 101. It's like someone shouting I AM THE SCUM, which nobody sane would do.

[Zoronos]

@Boring - You didn't answer the question I posed last night. The short version was "Who is your best non-Eager scum read, if you want you can assume Eager is scum for the sake of this exercise."

Hm I see your point but I don't see any other better lynches then LUV and that clearly isn't happening

I would like to lynch eager today, but if it's absolutely not going to happen, I'd be willing to settle for LUV. He's the most probable scum when I look outside the CC-related wagons. By that, I mean it seems like regardless of eager's flip, LUV could be scum. I admit that part of my reasoning is that he keeps trying to push S_s, which is making zero sense to me. That, and his eagerness to accept bizarre theories just to keep the S_s suspicions going.

This is kinda reasonable...
Talk to me some more about his contributions. I am going to ignore last night's "wtf is this" bullshit-a-thon for this purpose. Those posts were bad and dumb we both agree, talk to me about his posts from before then.

Also, which alignment do you think is more likely to go off on crazy conspiracy theories, town or scum?

[Zoronos]

If I hammer, and you're wrong, can I have your word that you'll hop on the Boring train tomorrow?

Reasons to do this:

If Eager turns out to be town, and you're town (by your own knowledge at least), then Boring's play has to feel super hinky. She dropped Snake from her 2nd to top town read on a whim. She believed your CC with no questions asked. Seems like she took the opportunity to get a D1 ML and ran with it.

This is bad play. Even as someone suspicious of Boring, lining up lynches is bad.

[Zoronos]

Yes, I'm debating whether I want to hammer Eager or not, thanks for asking. I am trying to make up my mind. His play doesn't comport with rational scum strategy, but he's useless and I wouldn't mind him gone soooo.... deciding.

[Zoronos]

Now, on Implosion. He's been thin all game; that is, my general impression is that he doesn't do a lot to try and steer the conversation. He comments on this, but doesn't push. I am suspicious of anyone willing to just float along.

I think this is fair, but is typical of me on d1. It's relatively rare for me to get a scumread on d1 that I'm confident enough on to want to try to steer the conversation. Much more common is for me to get a townread that I'm confident enough to try to steer the conversation on, which you can probably see is the case with eager and to some extent shadow.

I have a similar opinion wrt eager's mention of nolynching as a possibility as those who have weighed in, it really just doesn't make any sense at all. It could be a scum ploy but why the hell would he do it as scum, but also why the hell would he say it as town, etc. Not ultimately super meaningful I think.

On the other hand, I hate to beat a dead horse of almost-everything-boring-says-sounds-scummy but I really dislike boring's reaction... again.

So, rather than lynching scum (or at the very least learning from a town flip), you're suggesting we give them a free night kill, and start this mess up again tomorrow? We're better off lynching today. Even if it turns out to be me (though I'd hardly call that "plan A").

This is such an incredibly tepid response for someone who has been pushing eager so consistently since shadow claimed. Compare penguin's reaction, and Zoronos's reaction, and even nn who remarks that it's worth looking at his old games based on this. boring's reaction just reeks of scum who doesn't know how people are going to react and wants to test the waters before committing to saying something like "oh my god, only scum would possibly suggest a no lynch, can we please lynch him already." Which I would expect from town-boring here (obviously not in those words but etc).

That paragraph from boring does not read like town talking to their top scumread. It does not read like town with a strong investment in lynching the person they are talking to. I could buy it as town talking to someone that they're trying to make up their mind on. But I can't buy it as town talking to their top scumread. It just sounds like detached, rehearsed advice.

Agreed on the Boring thoughts. My vote stays where it is rn.

See... I think this reaction is really overwrought tbh. It's mountains out of mole hills.
Everyone is going to react to stupid play (which is what advocating no-lynch is) differently. Yes, for newbies advocating no lynch is a clear scumtell, but that's a newbie specific thing. For everyone else it's just a bad-tell. In this case, it's easy to see this as a manifestion of frustration from Boring - I know my rule of thumb is 'talk to people like they're town, talk about people like they're scum'. It doesn't say much about Boring that she doesn't specifically belabor the 'lol you'll flip scum lol' line; it's annoying enough dealing with it from ShadowStep (and the converse from Eager).

Hell, I know my tone frequently will go to 'Advise people when bad play is occurring, ignore alignment'.
Also, "I agree with everyone else" -> Thanks for that incredible out-front stance.
Implosions post there struck me as conciliatory and no-risk, and he based scum reads on NAI factors. aka a bad post.

[Zoronos]

Do you agree with my hypothesis that if Eager is scum than Gamma is likely one as well?

I think their alignments are unconnected, however Gamma's behavior is really "weird" for lack of a better term and I don't understand it. It bears scrutiny certainly, but I'm not in the 'lock partners' stage of thinking yet. He might just be super indecisive and prone to trigger happy voting.

[Zoronos]

Do you have any final thoughts, reads, or reflections?

Using your presumably last two posts on reminders that you will flip town isn't helping your case.

I ain't done writin' yet, so I'd appreciate if you didn't swing the hammer just yet. Trying to figure out how precisely to respond to Boring's LUV post.

[Zoronos]

I think LUV has been lurky, beetlegeuse-ish, and unoriginal throughout the game. It's really easy to float to day 1 or day 2 in order to give your teammates something to bus, and that matches his behavior. When he was getting heat, he basically disappeared until people moved onto someone else.

As far as who is more likely to come up with (and follow) crazy theories, I think it's pretty individual. Some people have wild imaginations and are prone to conspiracy. Some people aren't. I can see such a person coming up with something crazy as town or scum (perhaps more likely as town, but how would they know it's crazy as scum if they think it's perfectly sane when they're town). I think scum (or insanely conf.biased town) is more likely to pretend to buy into someone else's crazy theory hoping it'll stick.

So, basically, I agree with your conclusions, but disagree heavily with how you got there. I agree he's been lurky and low content, just pops in, doesn't push things hard, then pops back out. Very coasting.

However, I find that Town is much more likely to concoct crazy theories. The paranoia of "Am I being manipulated" leads people into strange places; not everyone is susceptible to it, but I find the indicator is more towny than scummy, unless they're using it for a purpose.

Anyway, scum LUV would further imply town Penguin, Implosion, and SS. I think we generally agree on SS being likely-town, but does that inference chain mesh with events for the other two? (They were the three votes on LUV when got heat originally for his lurking)

[Zoronos]

My post was directed at Snake, not you. Incentives to get Snake to out his thoughts are obvious regardless of what he flips, though I suspect I know the answer.

Ah, sorry.
I haven't played on this site in about a year, but last time I was here there was a lot of 'lol hammer' afoot. I may be a little reticent about -1's as a result.

[Zoronos]

Don't have a lot of time today but here's my current scum suspicions / thoughts:
Boring, PenguinPower, Implosion, Dierfire.

It's unlikely that Boring and Penguin are scum together.
LUV might deserve a place on the list but I'm not sure yet.

Obviously this list is bigger than it should be but w/e, I'll get to that when I have more time.

Shadow_step, you probably want to dial back the up-to-11 aggression.

[Zoronos]

Because he primarily avoided making waves, imo, and my impression of his posting is that it's primarily defensive rather than offensive.
A lot of his reasoning makes sense, so I'm a bit torn, but I don't feel like he's doing the legwork to solve.

[Zoronos]

Town doesn't react the way he did to my claim. I think the site meta and all was BS.
It was implied knowledge. He knew both of us were town.

Town doesn't react the way he did to my claim. I think the site meta and all was BS.It was implied knowledge. He knew both of us were town.

Except he was town, ergo town does react the way he did to your claim. You can't just claim that which is provably true isn't true.
If you *think* town doesn't react that way, your impression of how town plays is wrong and you're conflating scum reaction with NAI reaction.

[Zoronos]

Don't have a lot of time today but here's my current scum suspicions / thoughts:
Boring, PenguinPower, Implosion, Dierfire.

I can understand being wary of me, PP, and implosion, but why Dierfire? He's been pretty darned towny since he started contributing.

I'm not sure. A combination of gut and looking at the VC's. I can probably give you a better answer given time to read ISO's, but that likely won't happen until tonight or tomorrow.

[Zoronos]

Wait. who are you talking about?

Eager.
It's fundamentally a useless argument since I don't think SS is scum, but I want him to get his head past his ego and reorient so he's useful to work with.

[Zoronos]

That's a weird kill.
Definitely made to frame boring.

I'm so glad to see that you being wrong about something that you were literally 100% sure of has so caused you to even take one second to reconsider any of your thoughts on the game

Yes. But I haven't seen anything scummy from her to make me think she is scum. She believed my claim holy hell she must be mafia. No, it doesn't work like that.

This is not reason to townread her... nor is it reason to attribute the Maria kill to "definitely a frame on boring." It's a reason to have boring as null.

I caused the day 1 mislynch?
Only scum should be disappointed after the day 1 lynch. If that had happened today or tomorrow. It would have been horrible for us.
Don't you dare tell me that you would have believed Eager's claim in my position.

I absolutely fucking would have for all of the goddamn reasons I said yesterday... I was very confident you were town so it's not like you had access to any information that I wasn't at least pretty confident of that had any implication on eager's alignment. And we could have just not mislynched him at all... which would have been my preferred world.

I'm legitimately going to stop interacting with shadow unless he can tone down his ego because it just feels entirely unproductive like i'm beating my head against a brick wall. And it's also making me kind of angry.

So, other than pointless arguing with SS, who is scum and why?

[Zoronos]

For fuck's sake.
I figure I just post after my questions get answered.

Implosion - Why?

[Zoronos]

LUV

LUV was voting you until the very end and thought you were lying about being ascetic. You probably want to re-read.

[Zoronos]

So other than Eager, Maria and implosion, who believed there could be 2 town ascetics?

LUV

Thank you, that leads into my plan for today. I think the scum team spread out amongst the three wagons/opinions. And I still feel implosion is town, so I'm going to
VOTE: LUV

...

Seriously, go read the game. LUV was on Shadow_step because he thought Shadow was fake claiming. He did *not* believe there could be two ascetics, SS is wrong.
Ugh, w/e. I have some latent suspicion of LUV so I don't really care that much about derailing a train on him, but at least vote for smart reasons and not trivially falsifiable ones.

[Zoronos]

@Zoronos Is going the entire D1 without putting a vote on anybody normal play for you?

No. I vote slow and seldom, but that was a very... unusual D1.

[Zoronos]

Okay, now that I have a bit more time, I want to expand on something I was talking about at the end of the day yesterday with Maria. Basically, the lynch train was 'too easy'. In the presence of an easy town lynch, I want to go back and look at the players who 'did work' to suss out alignments and understand the situation, and who coasted.

Spoiler: buckets

So, in short -
People that did work up until the end:
Prism
GammaEmerald
Shadow_step
Dierfire
nn30
Zoronos

People that were lazy:
LUV
Penguin
Boring
Grendel

???????:
Implosion

That's what drove my suspicion list earlier (with the exception of Dierfire) - Basically, the people that either went 'welp guess lynching this' or sat out entirely are more likely to be scum, imo
To go over that list:
Boring - Her posting was mostly defensive, we went over this in detail yesterday about why he read flipped. She didn't seem to do any work to suss out which of Eager and SS were the correct lynch, she just followed her top read SS to turn on her second to top read. I was in the middle of inquisiting this a bit when the hammer came down, but there we are.
PenguinPower - He put his vote on Eager quite promptly after the claim, then did nothing to try and figure out which side was telling the truth. He responded to some questions about himself (his secondary read being Gamma) and otherwise reiterated over and over to lynch Snake. Of particular note - I don't feel Penguin can be scum with either Grendel or Boring.
Grendel - Primarily he was afk but his posting before he left was largely off topic. He kept promising to look into Boring but that never materialized. So we'll see what he does with that today. I'm giving him a bit of a break since I assume he's not lying about IRL obligations in order to dodge mafia / excuse lurking.

The other two players here specifically that weren't explicitly on my earlier lists are Implosion and LUV.
LUV - In short, LUV's posting at the end of the day was nonsense. He posted a bit about SS, but frankly most of it was crazy. But he at least was kinda trying to prosecute a case on SS, so he gets some semblance of respect for that, however misguided I feel he was.
Implosion - He wasn't on the Eagersnake wagon. He engaged with Boring, Prism, SS. With Boring and Prism, but he primarily was prosecuting a case on either of those players; he was responding to them going after him. However, for SS he was primarily trying to argue SS out of the tunnel on Eager. This is a key part of my conflicted opinion on Implosion. I don't think scum Implosion would spend so many words arguing with SS, trying to convince him that there is a possibility of a town Eager. However, he doesn't spend a lot of time actually prosecuting his scum read on Boring (that's where his vote was), so I can see a world where he is simply wasting time on purpose with SS.

So, that's where my head is. I feel like I should re-read and rethink on Prism, but I was thinking towny at the end of the day yesterday so I keep shuffling that to low priority work.

[Zoronos]

Grendel, I feel like you're just retreading well-covered ground.
I am uninterested in your town cases - show me scum cases.

[Zoronos]

Partially I'm annoyed at your reliance on meta, but at the moment I don't think anyone was actively casing any of those players other than Dier, so taking the time to town-case them is not a great use of :words:

[Zoronos]

Why Dierfire? To me, he's trying really hard to sort out who he feels is suspicious and none of the cases he presented so far have read like scum trying to push a mislynch.

On looking back over the end of the day, listing Dierfire may have been a mistake.
Maria really wanted to kill him, and my gut dislikes him, but it certainly looks like he was trying to do work. *shrug*

PP is probably my top suspect atm.

[Zoronos]

???

[Zoronos]

Not an alt.

[Zoronos]

for something that's clearly personality based.

Can you point out where / what this was?

Since by definition something personality-based is NAI, seeing where someone is casing off NAI behavior is instructive.

[Zoronos]

I'm bored and I feel like I'm primarily talking to myself.
Let's talk about this then: VOTE: PenguinPower

[Zoronos]

Looking at the lynch yesterday, he provided no arguments for why Eager specifically was scum in the pair, didn't make any strong efforts to decide between the two competing claims, and didn't seem to examine the alternative trains. He just parked and went effectively afk other than an occasional 'this needs rope' style comment.

That to me suggests scum happy to take an easy lynch. He doesn't make an effort to sort out the alignments of all three players being discussed (boring, Eager, SS) because he doesn't care.

[Zoronos]

On phone so don't have time to log dive. I am skeptical of a pre flip associative either way.

[Zoronos]

Hm. Zoronos presents an interesting case. Want to see PP's response as soon as possible.

What do you think about it? Agree / Disagree? Why am I wrong / why am I right?

(I assume PP's response is going to be that he's not the scum, so is probably not super interesting. Moreover, the way out of it isn't to talk to me about it, it's to demonstrate scum hunting / attempts to sort. So him addressing it directly isn't super worthwhile, nor is you asking him to.)

[Zoronos]

Both have been projecting their own thought processes onto others without considering that it's merely a matter of personality/personal preference. Shadow is doing it too, which is why I argued his vote on Gamma. I'm not saying it automatically makes them scum or town, seeing as it's some people's default mode for relating to others. It's just that it leads down NAI paths.

Ah. That's different.
I find projection to be NAI or very slightly towny (though quite poor play, and don't tell anyone I said this or I'll have to deal with more of it because it's annoying as hell)

I was hoping to see that you had a case where they were upselling a NAI behavior on your part as a scummy behavior from a bad rationale.

[Zoronos]

Well boring kinda did the same thing, though I feel she did more to explain it. I do agree it is odd PP decided to cut and run.
Actually that's pretty telling.
VOTE: PenguinPower
This is better than my LUV vote for now, but I am still down for an LUV lynch.

I agree that Boring kinda did the same thing. That's why she was on the same list as Penguin that I posted earlier.
But I figured it was time for some left turn to shake up the thread so here we are discussing something new.

So, do you have anything else to add or just "+1 Zoronos is the best great case" ?

[Zoronos]

Actually nah looking at PP's ISO he looks pretty town in his reaction to my theory.
VOTE: LUV

How so? - What drives you to conclude that.

[Zoronos]

I.. what? How does Shadow fit into the puzzle?
I feel like you just brought him up out of nowhere.

[Zoronos]

Sure... but why Shadowed? Do you think he's scum?
I have been reasonably confident in my town read there...
I'm trying to figure out what you're saying and I'm clearly missing a beat somewhere.

[Zoronos]

If one flips scum, the other is likely town.

I don't see how they're related.
SS is likely town, regardless of what Penguin flips. What is prompting you to say they're tied together? I guess I'm just not seeing some critical thing in your reasoning.

[Zoronos]

Nah I think Prism is solid town. PP is a townread but if you can point out how his reaction to my idea was not genuine I'll definitely join you there.

Why is PP town?!?
Explain this to me like I'm five, because if you are super sure, then I am maybe missing something.

[Zoronos]

How does that make him town in any way?
He took no position on your theory and he didn't alter his position any discernible way. It's strictly non indicating; he basically ignored you.
Calling something interesting without explaining why or what about it is interesting says nothing.

[Zoronos]

Whatever you're obviously not going to get it.

VOTE: Gamma Emerald

[Zoronos]

I agree that PP's end of the day yesterday is bad but I don't think it's all that scummy, maybe a bit. He mostly just looks disengaged to me, and that's null. I still think his early game was very townish.

@Grendel, I can somewhat see boring's read change as being not cautious enough for scum. I don't think that's nearly enough of a point in her favor to balance out all of the things that I've found scummy from her, a couple of which you paraphrased quite nicely.

However, he doesn't spend a lot of time actually prosecuting his scum read on Boring (that's where his vote was),

I question this characterization of my play yesterday. I felt like I was beating a dead horse essentially writing essays on how every post she made scummy.

Your definition of bad and my definition of scummy seem to overlap. Was my case wrong? Where was he scum hunting? Where was he making effort to solve the game rather than just parking his vote? Where did he explore Eager's alignment?

If he had a towny early game, point those out.

--------------------------

The first post was largely projection, NAI, and tone.
The second and third posts were largely defensive, in my estimation. You were justifying your own play, not trying to either explore Boring, or convince other people to vote boring. Your third post is also more tone / playstyle stuff.
Personally, my rule is 'talk to people like they're town, talk about them like they're [alignment]', so attacking Boring on the basis of "Your tone doesn't match your read" when she's interacting with the person she has a read on is classic NAI, and is either bad play or outright scummy. Frankly, I think almost all 'tone' argument are scummy, so your reliance on them is disturbing.

A towny line of play would have been to explore borings alignment, then to talk to the rest of the game about how they should be voting boring. You didn't do that.
You mostly argued with boring that yes she totally was scummy and defended yourself from the rest of the folks.

However, I think she's scummier than you are and I doubt you two are scum together, so I am granting you reprieve until such juncture as I change my mind.

[Zoronos]

You never explained that Penguin town read.

[Zoronos]

I agree these things are bad (they don't exemplify good play). I think he did explore eager's alignment in a few ways, not with as much depth as I'd have liked. But lack of effort isn't necessarily a scumtell. And his end of day to me just read as him being disengaged with the game. I could see it as scum just not wanting to commit to reads or do things, but I can also see it as town who thought there wasn't really much point in doing things until seeing eager's likely-scum flip.

I spent a decent bit yesterday elaborating on PP being town; I first explain it here, here I elaborate a bit, and there are some other sprinkles here and there. tl;dr his attitude in the early part of this game felt antithetical to how he felt in the newbie game I just completed with him where I was town and he was scum. He feels more aggressive, more willing to throw himself out there, and less concerned about himself than he did in that game, and I think all of those are telling.

Show me where he explored Eager's alignment.
I already explained what the first link (219) is explicitly a scumtell. He's not attacking Grendel's method, he's attacking Grendel. It is an attack on credibility "First year pysch student" is how you set up the rest of the thread to ignore Grendel regardless of what Grendel says. That's very scummy. Your second reference (221) is strictly NAI. He's pointing out that his own meta has changed which... says nothing since it's an empty statement. Scum say it to avoid getting meta'ed (and because it's usually true) and town say it because it's true.
At the time those interactions happened, PP was not under pressure. Grendel's vote was the first one on him. Discrediting an accuser who had just voted him would be pretty relevant to a scum game plan. The rest of your clear distills to 'meta', which I put no stock in. Show me why he's town in this game.

The first post was largely projection, NAI, and tone.
The second and third posts were largely defensive, in my estimation. You were justifying your own play, not trying to either explore Boring, or convince other people to vote boring. Your third post is also more tone / playstyle stuff.

I just straight disagree with this. The second post and second half of the third post were not defensive at all, they were both directly talking about boring's play and why it was scummy to me. I have no idea what you're getting that from.

Of course you're disagree with it because I'm using it to call you scummy. The first half of 1463 was a justification of your playstyle before you wandered into a tone argument.
Reading 1295 again I think I was mistaken to call it defensive. It's just poor casing. You're quibbling about phrasing instead of exploring mindset, motivation, or intent.

Personally, my rule is 'talk to people like they're town, talk about them like they're [alignment]', so attacking Boring on the basis of "Your tone doesn't match your read" when she's interacting with the person she has a read on is classic NAI, and is either bad play or outright scummy. Frankly, I think almost all 'tone' argument are scummy, so your reliance on them is disturbing.

Well my personal rule, like I answered Grendel's rqs with, is that I basically just do what I feel like doing. I often will talk to people as if they're town but I'll often do other things. And empirically I do make tone arguments as town so... yeah. Feel free to meta me. Nothing specific comes to mind but.

And that's my point - your personal rule and mine are different. However, you're hanging a case on it; you are using tone and manner-of-engagement as alignment indicating pillars. They're not, they vary depending on the style and mood of any given poster. That's why your case is bad. And bad cases built on NAI factors are scummy.
Also, I don't meta anyone - Meta is a waste of time and a one way trip to conf bias land.

So, if you want to help me lynch boring, cool, but I'd rather you do it with a case that isn't poop.

[Zoronos]

I don't actually really want to lynch Gamma for being the top scum (despite my vote being there), I was mostly frustrated and exasperated with his persistent uncooperative anti-team-play bullshit.

[Zoronos]

I don't actually really want to lynch Gamma for being the top scum (despite my vote being there), I was mostly frustrated and exasperated with his persistent uncooperative anti-team-play bullshit.

Whoa. That switch from reluctant voter to impulsive voter... Either way, I found your case on PP pretty compelling. Are you abandoning it?

UNVOTE: Gamma Emerald

My patience is not an unlimited well. There's a lot of poor play going on, and frankly I've seem scum hide behind feigned incompetence before.
I'll rethink some later today.

[Zoronos]

I'm frankly kinda surprised that Boring is springing to my defense and am not sure how to square that with my other scum reads.

[Zoronos]

Looking at the lynch yesterday, he provided no arguments for why Eager specifically was scum in the pair, didn't make any strong efforts to decide between the two competing claims, and didn't seem to examine the alternative trains. He just parked and went effectively afk other than an occasional 'this needs rope' style comment.

That to me suggests scum happy to take an easy lynch. He doesn't make an effort to sort out the alignments of all three players being discussed (boring, Eager, SS) because he doesn't care.

No, I cared. I just legit thought that Eager was scum. You should probably put your vote back on me with how strongly you think I'm scum.

VOTE: Gamma

Unlike you, this vote is because I think he's scum.

What is Gamma scum?

[Zoronos]

Moved on from that for now.

So you have decided instead that he is town?

[Zoronos]

Oh, I see I was beaten. So now he's a leanscum read. Justify your lean scum read. "Moved on from that" isn't an answer to 'Why is he scum'. Perhaps an answer to 'is he your top scum' but that wasn't the question asked.

[Zoronos]

Wait, Zornos never even revoted Penguin...

VOTE: Penguin

For now.

As I said, I'd like to do some rethink. When my scum reads are attacking each other either I have some wrong reads or the buses are lining up early and I need to figure out which are legit attacks, which are busses, and where I'm going wrong if anywhere.

[Zoronos]

VOTE: PenguinPower
k then.

[Zoronos]

Good for you. Care to answer my question and answer why it took you this long to take a hard stance on anything?

Stances and votes are not the same thing; if you are curious as to any of the various stances I took, check all the various scum reads I've posted throughout the game along with the reasoning for them.
Your statement's premise is false, so the question is irrelevant. Unless you mean "Why do you vote seldom but post a lot" then answer is playstyle.

[Zoronos]

VOTE: PenguinPower
k then.

I should clarify that my stance on Penguin is that he is a lazy player whose play style I dislike, but the scum read on him is light enough that I ordinarily wouldn't have voted him in this situation.

I mainly wanted to obligate Zoronos into making a real vote. So mission accomplished.

Though I guess Penguin did a decent job of that himself.

Ummmm... what?
I am not really sure how you thought you were obligating me to do things, mind explaining your thought process there?

[Zoronos]

I changed my mind on PP:
1) The "Shadow intended to frame me and PP" idea is pretty illogical
2) This dude just said he's on my wagon pretty much but he'll be pushing someone else. Sounds scum motivated to me.

Gamma, where was this - "The "Shadow intended to frame me and PP" idea is pretty illogical" ?
I'd like to read the post in context, and I'm not sure what post you were referring to.

[Zoronos]

That's what did it for you? I thought you vote slow and seldom. It doesn't feel like you to post a vote without much thought.

My vote was already on him before I mad-voted Gamma.
I wanted to take the opportunity to rethink and evaluate my read. I asked him a pretty reasonable question so that I could inspect his reasoning - I wanted to see if I my read was incorrect or if I could learn something useful.
Instead of engaging, he refused to answer (a pretty reasonable) question on the grounds that he scum read me ergo he didn't need to respond.

If he is going to actively thwart my attempts to develop my read, yeah I'm just going to vote.

[Zoronos]

1769
That's a pretty cogent case. Not what I was expecting to see. I give no credence to meta, but you're clearly making conclusions that fit the facts *as you see them* (which when determining the towniness of a case is what matters more than the facts-as-they-are).

[Zoronos]

Implosion - You just wrote a whole lot of words, and I'm having trouble understanding whether you're just arguing with folks (maybe you see it as defending yourself, but w/e I'm less interested in that), or developing scum reads on them.

Are you scum reading Boring / Dier here?

[Zoronos]

Why is Boring scum?
Your post above read like a defense of boring calling you scum, not an offensive action to either get a read on her / clarify your read on her, or an attempt to convince the rest of us that your read is the right one.

[Zoronos]

"Post above" -> 1789.
Sorry, that was ambiguous since you wrote a whole bunch of :words: and it wasn't clear which post I was referring to.

[Zoronos]

zzz

Nobody posting such boring.
The condition not the player.

Actually, hey Boring who do you think is the scum and why?

[Zoronos]

Seriously, I swear you people post just to make me look like an idiot. At least it wasn't boring post the answer to a question right before I asked it.

[Zoronos]

re: Boring
A few thoughts:
- I agree PP + Gamma both being scum is unlikely. I see PP as the much more likely scum though, since his efforts to scum hunt this game have basically been zilch. He's parked on a couple fucks and then wandered off. No effort shown to acquire or develop reads. But anyway.
- My problem with Implosion is that he seems focused on arguing about things, rather than hunting scum. His posts from last night were lots of theory, and argumentation with other players, but none of those arguments were part of offensive scum cases. There was some defensive arguments, and some "You're playing bad" but no focus on finding scum. That's what bothers me about Implosion.
You say "On the other hand, he might not be scum" which is kinda true for every player in this game. Which side do you think is more likely? My apologies, but having an on-the-other-hand makes this read seem a bit wishy-washy.
- I think Shadowed Scum is unlikely just based on his D1 play. I am putting the setup meta out of mind as much as I can on that point.

[Zoronos]

Could the people who scum read Implosion tell me why?

- My problem with Implosion is that he seems focused on arguing about things, rather than hunting scum. His posts from last night were lots of theory, and argumentation with other players, but none of those arguments were part of offensive scum cases. There was some defensive arguments, and some "You're playing bad" but no focus on finding scum. That's what bothers me about Implosion.

[Zoronos]

Grendel, you probably want to stop relying on trivial 'x clears me' . It convinces nobody and replaces useful content. And is annoying.
Helpful hint.

[Zoronos]

And by Grendel I mean gamma because my brain is offline today.

[Zoronos]

You say "On the other hand, he might not be scum" which is kinda true for every player in this game. Which side do you think is more likely? My apologies, but having an on-the-other-hand makes this read seem a bit wishy-washy.

That's because it is wishy-washy. I'm afraid to risk another TvT day when there are 2-3 other scum running around. His posts feel scummy. His big-picture is scummy. When it comes to inferring motivation, I'm falling a little short. He could be trying to stir up trouble and get some easy mislynches. I'm pretty low-hanging fruit right now, and everyone knows it. But, I have to ask myself whether I'd still see him in a scummy light if he was tunneling someone else instead of me? Am I having a knee-jerk reaction?

Your partial validation of my observations helps. I know Prism was after him a while back, and I'd like to see an update on implosion from him. Dierfire also appears to have a problem at least with this approach, but I'm not sure if he's inferring alignment with it. His perspective could also help. I think the three of you are town. I also think nn30 and Grendel are town. So their views won't hurt either.

I feel like you didn't really answer my question.
When you say you're afraid you don't want to risk another TvT day is that because your read on Implosion is just a slight lean versus a full blown This Is The Scum Vote It Now? Or something else?

[Zoronos]

Literally nobody likes my case on Penguin? He has done absolutely fucking nothing all day D2, and basically did nothing D1, but "Nah, that's cool, let's just ignore him"?

You people.

[Zoronos]

Also, Grendel, your notes need some work or you actually need to read my posts since:
a) I have been pretty clear I think Implosion is likely-scum. I just can't seem to get anyone else to agree with that point, or if they do they hand wring about it.
b) I said back on D1 that I thought Gamma was lean town. Also, the word is 'cogent' not 'cognizant'.
You probably want to read closer if you think I have had remarkably little to say about Gamma.
c) Why the heck do you think Boring is town?

[Zoronos]

I'd vote him again if the wagon had one more person. He's a stronger scumread than LUV but I'm doing what I can to avoid being forced to claim under an intent statement.

And that fills me with fucking confidence.
</sarc>

[Zoronos]

B.
If you had Gamma as a town lean D1, why would you ever vote him?
When you talked about how scum are hiding behind bad play, were you not referring to Gamma?

Because I was annoyed at his persistent uselessness. Useless town reads are the fucking worst because lynching them is against win con, but you can't actually get them to help kill scum.

[Zoronos]

Also, Grendel, your notes need some work or you actually need to read my posts since:
a) I have been pretty clear I think Implosion is likely-scum. I just can't seem to get anyone else to agree with that point, or if they do they hand wring about it.
b) I said back on D1 that I thought Gamma was lean town. Also, the word is 'cogent' not 'cognizant'.
You probably want to read closer if you think I have had remarkably little to say about Gamma.
c) Why the heck do you think Boring is town?

C.
Something i was thinking about earlier was, “why would boring night kill Maria in the first place?” It looks like one of the worst possible kills for boring!scum. Doing so would box her in and defeat her, “scum on my wagon” theory. She had herself set up today to scum hunt off the wagon that formed on her yesterday. By killing off that wagon she reduces her mislynch options, and she is forced to back track at the start of the day. I don’t see why boring would intentionally botch her plans for day play, and create more work for herself. AS scum she’d want as few contradictions in her play as she could get, the kill last night would not help this. It doesn’t get me as much as the previous point, but were i come from many scum are scared to strike down one of their most vocal attackers N1. Not saying that scum don’t here, but it still takes a ballzy scum player to pull a kill like that because it _will_ draw attention to them.

If she were scum last night’s kill must have been with another players benefit in mind. What I’m thinking is that if boring were scum she isn’t getting set up to go deep, which means at least one of these three things. 1) That she isn’t a scum PR 2) She is the least town read member of her team 3) She is not the leader of the scum lords. (2) has scary implications i don’t feel like considering right now. (3) points to Zoronos as scum since Implosion makes no sense with Boring.

A.
You lack of a vote or memorable aggression on Implosion's slot makes the back and forth between your interactions look like two dudes just having a regular debate that isn't furthering a read for you. The only reason that comes to my mind as to why this could be so it that it is meant to be conflict taken at face value. That the two of you are just distancing. Also, if an Implosion wagon comes up in future and you aren't on it you'd better believe I'm going to make this an issue.

B.
If you had Gamma as a town lean D1, why would you ever vote him?
When you talked about how scum are hiding behind bad play, were you not referring to Gamma?

c) NK spec is awful play. Do you have a non NK-speculation based reason? Because I haven't seen Boring doing much of any scum hunting today. So, maybe that's exactly what happened. She left herself no where to scum hunt, so she just hasn't and we're all kinda excusing that.
But I'll indulge you for just a monent - because it's one less person voting Boring. That's pro-scum if Boring is scum. Town has an amazing capacity to WIFOM themselves out of obvious explanations.
NK's are a place where town fundamentally don't have enough information to figure out the answer, so it's best, imo, ignored. It's playing a card game without knowing which cards are in the deck.

a) Seriously? Stop being dumb. How many times do you want me to repeat that I think he's scum. If I thought I could get a train, I'd move my vote right this moment. Penguin is a stronger read but I can't get a train going on him either because you guys are busy voting my town reads but oh well.

b) Yup - But I was also referring to you, LUV, Implosion, and Penguin. (Obviously that list is massively too large to be scum). We have a lot of folks playing badly or lurky, and generically non-contributory.

[Zoronos]

I've said that i like your argument on PP. I like Grendel's argument on Gamma. But unless the scum team is LUV+Gamma+PP, the situation bears some further scrutiny. (if the scum team is them, and we lose, we should all permaban ourselves in shame).

I don't think I believe there can be a Gamma+PP scum team. Based on their D1 arguments I just can't bring myself to countenance that being the case.

re: Grendel's arguemt: I think Grendel's conclusions follow from his premise, and he presented it quite well. However, it's fundamentally a meta argument, and I give no shits about meta. So it tells me that Grendel is probably town because it looks like genuine scum hunting. But in terms of "Meta says X!" I just kinda shrug and move on.

[Zoronos]

I wonder if the possibility of an LUV / Implosion / PP team exists... idk.
Have I just been completely wrong about Boring this entire time?