In post 622, mhsmith0 wrote:Incidentally, I'll flesh out my $0.02 in mastina a bit (noting that I've been avoiding reading some of her stuff lately):
1) Her overall playstyle of being super opaque, while anti-town, is not necessarily scum. Here's why: what is the gain? What she's been doing has been super frustrating for me to deal with, but it's also had the fairly predictable result of making her a big center of attention, and not the positive kind.
Excerpting from my standard IC post again:
SECONDARY SPOILER TAG: Bad Posting vs Scum Posting
In a lot of games you can see people posting badly, whether it means lurking, saying really stupid things, being intellectually lazy about their engagement, or all sorts of other pretty transparently anti-town behaviors.
And, unfortunately, a lot of the time (though NOT always) really bad posting is done by townies instead of mafia. Sorting between “bad” and “scum” is one of the hardest things to do in the game, but it’s a tremendously important part of your development if you want to get good at scum-hunting.
Consider a few examples:
Example #1
http://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/thr ... post722301
Sociopath wrote:I'm back on but won't be very active until up to 3 hours before EoD because I'm going to an early fireworks event for Bonfire Night.
http://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/thr ... post722309
lulz wrote:Sociopath wrote:I'm showcasing my lynchbait status the way a peacock showcases their feathers. I make awful posts day after day, daring you to lynch me.
I fixed your typos.
http://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/thr ... post722312
lulz wrote:Scum is not as demonstratably awful as sociopath.
In that game, both lulz and sociopath were town. Sociopath got mislynched essentially for making a parade of terrible posts (the cited post was just one of many), which is a fairly predictable outcome of that behavior. But it’s notable that she wasn’t actually mafia.
END SECONDARY SPOILER TAG
Here, it's mastina taking the sociopath role, making posts that are practically designed to get her wagoned and lynched, and the point of it all is... what? To run a scam where she makes herself look fake lynchbaity, just to hope she eventually gets off and people townread her for it? I won't deny that it's theoretically possible, but it seems too clever by half to acutally be a likely plan, and that ignores the fact that she's an IC, which means that if she's scum intentionally playing badly just to create a town read from bad play... I just really struggle to see someone who's IC'ing try THAT kind of stunt intentionally.
More credible, I think, is that either she thinks that she's been much more helpful than she's actually been, or that she believes as an IC, that it's correct to put more energy into teaching (including the "figure it out yourselves guys" attitude) than playing, and that kind of attitude is much more natural as a town IC (if I get lynched, there are still two mislynches to go, and maybe my lynch becomes useful) than a scum IC (if I'm mislynched, we're kind of screwed).
So to my mind, the underlying mindset *fits* better as a town IC mindset who either thinks better of her communication and participation than she should, or who simply doesn't care how she's perceived (this was explicit in
249, but I think that there's attitude along those lines underlying her overall approach, as opposed to it just being there in that post), compared to a scum IC who'd presumably WANT to not get lynched.
2) Who would reasonably fit as her buddy? I don't think I ever really got the sense that the board was nervous about her being a potential wagon (need to verify this but that's my thought on the gamestate), which means that I'd consider it unlikely that she'd have a newbie partner (unless this was all a really weird and really specific strategy), I've already talked about why i don't think it's grey, and that would leave an RC-mastina pairing, which while I guess conceptually possible (RC going after mastina and then backing off would be like an inverse of open 635 when Ranger went after RC and then backed off), is the sort of super-specific thing that I wouldn't want to go nuts worrying about at this point of the game.
So I'm not going to hard town clear her or the like, but I'm having a hard time making any of it really fit under a "she's scum" model, so she's probably just town instead.
)
