Mini Normal 1963 - List Mod Mafia Game Over

[implosion]

VOTE: Wossi

[implosion]

It's possible I misunderstood, but even so, this is a game of mafia, and to beleive what someone says at face value during the RVS is a little ludicrous.

So why? Why would someone claim scum? Even in RVS, what might someone be thinking when they claim that?

Town should never lie

VOTE: Flubbernugget

Scum claiming scum is scum and should be lynched
Town claiming scum is lying and should be lynched

This is a drastically overly literal interpretation. Do you not understand that flubber was being very obviously sarcastic? Is there any actual, material problem with town lying in an explicitly sarcastic way, other than it being lying and you not liking people lying?

also I was still excited by the fact that I just happened to random vote for scum

I also somewhat dislike this line.

I'm trying to put my finger on exactly why. It just feels manufactured. I think this is the kind of line that comes more often from scum who are trying to look like they're thinking about the game than from town.

[implosion]

Also don't especially like 44 from chip.

skitter and serg are decent early candidates for town.

[implosion]

Ugh. Another miller game?

All right, I suppose

UNVOTE:

Why unvote here? Do you specifically buy the claim/think that serg is town for it? Do you think it's a bad idea to lynch a day one miller claim?

Implosion, I like your posting, and agree with most of it. Why the townlean on Tacos?

I agree that the miller claim isn't necessarily scummy even if it's fake, but I actually think the way he claimed it is somewhat townish even if he retracts it in his next post. I can imagine scum fakeclaiming miller fairly easily but I don't think it's likely for scum to do it in a way that is both so brazen and so ambiguous - I think scum would feel like they'd be drawing too much attention to themselves by claiming in the way that he did. 75 bolsters this feeling.

[implosion]

There is a

lot

of very scurrilous reasoning going around. I agree with Dany that Two's reasoning on flubber is just reading too far into how a particular sentence happened to be phrased. It might be alignment indicative that flubber felt the need to mention that he didn't want to feel bound to a certain activity level (I don't especially think it is but I could understand an argument for it) but I don't see the angle Two is pushing.

In general the people who are acting like "claiming scum" (which in and of itself is a really hyperbolic way to describe something that was incredibly obviously sarcastic) is more likely to come from scum need to just take a step back and think. Is there town motivation to post it? No, and there isn't scum motivation either. It's unmotivated. There's no particular reason to make a sarcastic statement that you're scum as either alignment. It's fine to think that's "icky" as lalendra put it... but you can't just jump from that to saying it's more likely to come from scum. "Town has no motivation to post this" is not an argument unless you can come up with motivation for scum to post it instead.

Looking at particular people:

I think town tend to avoid jokes like that because there's no upside and they don't need the aggravation. Scum, otoh, see an upside in getting pseudo towncred if they can get through the initial wave of suspicion.

On the contrary I'd argue aggravation is exactly what scum want to avoid, and something town don't generally care about as much. But I don't think a sarcastic "i'm not town" statement counts as having any potential to aggravate. Like it's kind of absurd that people are focusing so much on it.

Why do you think scum are okay with aggravation, and town want to avoid it? Me and basically every person I've ever seen talk about the general subject of willingness to agitate the gamestate/throw yourself out there would say that town are more willing to do so.

Those who joke about being scum are highly scummy for me.

Why?

I already addressed Wossi's argument and asked him some questions about hit which he has ignored. Serg's explicitly sheeping which is w/e.

I don't really have a read on flubber but this wagon is quite bad. But there's much better option in a competing Wossi wagon, with lots of Cool Interesting Great People on it and more to come?

[implosion]

Implosion,

I doubt the whole scum team is on my wagon. Where else is a good place to look for scum?

You, or wavemode, or lalendra, or wicked. I don't especially think your wagon is

scummy

in its own right, though it has people on it that I am scumreading for reasons other than simply voting you with poor reasons. You might be scum. I think the wagon itself is bad in the sense of being unconvincing. I do think it's a decent place to look at the motivations of people voting there, hence trying to drill deeper into it. Off the wagon I have inklings of town from sephiroph and dany, though neither is as strong as those on skitter and serg.

Flubber and Wossi both seeming like lynchbait at this point

Also, as I said, 1st and 2nd to claim town are probably town

I townread Wossi on meta

You know I want to give a sarcastic response to all of this but. All of these points are incredibly deeply unconvincing. Saying "I townread him on meta" with zero additional context is about the least useful sentence that can be said in a game of mafia. And you're saying it in response to wicked's point that your other reasoning wasn't strong, as though "I townread him on meta" is a strong point. Like. no. If you think you have good reasons for townreading Wossi, explain them.

[implosion]

Not entirely sure yet what to make of all of this from wavemode. His honing in on wicked's vote is interesting, and I can see the line of reasoning, but don't agree that it's especially strong. His stated reasons for Wossi being town are all garbage. There are two new ones: first is the speed of the wagon, and as others have mentioned wagon speed is not useful. In particular it is meaningless when taken out of the context of the actual specific votes on the wagon for purposes of trying to determine the alignment of the person being wagoned. The only reason to think that a wagon on scum would grow more slowly is because scum would be less likely to join it, but that's flawed both because scum do sometimes vote each other even early and because it's entirely possible to have a wagon on scum composed entirely of town. And if the wagon is all town, then the speed at which it forms is basically meaningless. I am also curious what wavemode means by "random chance" meaning wagons on town are likely to form more quickly.

Second is this:

All the nonsense Wossi is accused of, scum tend to specifically try to avoid doing, especially in the very early game... to avoid this exact situation he is in now

which is just like the most basic kind of too scummy to be scum argument. I can actually see this line coming very easily from wavemode-town who is confbiasing himself on wossi and just viewing everything he's saying in the light of him being town. But saying "scum try to avoid doing the things he's been accused of" without getting into the specifics of any of the actual substantive points that have been made against Wossi is not a rebuttal. Some of the points that have been made against Wossi are not generic points like wavemode is making them out to be (for instance, my 2nd point in 73).

I also quite dislike that Wossi's rate of posting started out solid and has steadily fallen as his wagon has gained steam. I feel like he's scum trying to lurk through the worst of the wagon and hoping wavemode's arguments will disperse it. Of course this may just be real life but he posted 9 times in the first 24 hours, then got the 4th and 5th votes on his wagon, made one post that did not address anything related to his wagon which was over a day ago, and hasn't posted since.

[implosion]

All I said was, no, town are technically more likely, all things being random, when scum are trying to blend in. So what I pointed out before about wagon speed is a valid consideration, even if, in and of itself, it is not definitive proof of anything.

What?

Okay. If I'm interpreting this correctly, why should we lynch at all? Any given wagon that reaches l-1 at ANY speed is more likely to be on town than on scum. How do you draw a correlation between specifically *wagon speed* and how likely the wagon is to be on town?

[implosion]

Any given wagon is more likely to be on Town than Scum, just given random chance. Is that inaccurate?

No, but it's misleading. When talking about random chance in a mafia game, the baseline for comparison shouldn't be 50/50. It should be the probability that a randomly selected person is mafia. Although looking back at the discussion you were never actually making this as a point in its own right so it's irrelevant.

[implosion]

I'm tempted to add wicked to the town pool because he's saying all of the things that should be said, but I don't know how wide his scum range is.

Meanwhile Serg got jealous of lalendra and wanted my vote back. Surprised only Dany and Skitter have mentioned that raw L-1 vote. I dunno to me it seems like a much better wagon might be Mr. Tacos over here.

I mean, the reasoning here is obvious but. Do you think serg-scum is likely to put himself out there with the naked L-1 vote? I don't think serg-scum would see the mixed reaction he got to the miller fiasco and decide "hm, what I need now is to enshrine myself as the center of attention."

Pool that I'm interested in looking for scum right now is {Wossi, Chip, Two, human, Lalendra}.

I think wave's responses to my questions were pretty town. I like the evolution of Seph's read on Two. skitter is still town, Serg is still town. Danny and Wicked both look somewhat generically town but could both easily be me misreading a playstyle. Flubber is probably the next person I'd add to the pool to look in but 4/5 people in my scum pool were on his wagon (which is weak and I don't like using associatives on d1, but it's something) and I get some degree of a gut feeling that he's annoyed town from his reaction to his wagon.

[implosion]

To further enunciate why Wossi is likely scum.

The way he describes the claiming scum = you are scum line of thought in 34 and 37 is a bit disingenuous, I think. In particular, he goes from "if you say you're scum you're scum" in 34 to "Town claiming scum is lying and should be lynched" in 37 which is a bit of a different position even if it's related. The position that lying town should be lynched without any further consideration as to the content of the lie is frankly just flatly wrong. It looks like Wossi took that position in response to Two calling out his obvious logical misstep. It doesn't look like a position that he held all along. It looks like he just said that lying town should be lynched so that he could justify keeping his vote on Flubber after Two's comment. There is also a small part of me that just wants to say that such a rigid lynch all liars stance is somewhat less likely to be genuine but I've seen it so /shrug.

41 still makes me twinge a bit and I've explained why. It also feeds further into it feeling like Wossi is just trying to back-justify his vote. As in, it looks like Wossi cares a lot that his vote looks like it has a justification, i.e. he cares a lot about the way his vote is being perceived, which is more likely to come from scum than town. This isn't as big of a point as the one I made about post 41 earlier though.

70 is just so blah. It just very flatly looks like scum trying to look like they're scumhunting.

Finally, this line from 117 feels very, very off:

to anyone asking why I'm voting flubber and not skitter: there's power in wagons and there's more then one scum.

In particular, there was (unless I missed something) exactly one person who asked this, namely Wicked. And Wossi reacts to it as if there are a lot of people asking the question. It looks like an indication that Wossi is feeling pressure, in a way. Yet he does nothing to address his forming wagon. The answer itself just feels appeasing. Like, the actual content of the answer is fine, but the way it's phrased just feels like Wossi just wants the people asking him questions off his back. Idk, I might not be phrasing that super well.

[implosion]

How is this at all different than your defense of serg above? Bonus points: You use a similar line of reasoning in defense of serg way back in 83 as well. Its funny how this argument seems to consistently apply to taco but but if wavemode uses it to defend wossi its a 'basic too scummy to be scum' argument.

Because I'm being specific, and because their play has been very different. wave's criticism of the Wossi wagon was that "All the nonsense" he'd been accused of was the kind of stuff scum try to avoid. It's very unspecific, and I've since clarified the reasons that I think Wossi is scum and I don't think that argument applies accurately to them because I don't think he's doing them in a way that scum are unlikely to do. Whereas I think serg is, because he's done different things in a different way at different times and with different consequent actions (i.e. the way he interacted with people that were questioning the miller claim).

Yes, it's all wifom, but wifom isn't this inscrutable, undecidable thing. You can make a guess at which direction is more likely. I don't think Wossi's play of stating a lynch all liars position, for instance, is something scum are especially likely to actively avoid. I do think that serg's miller claim and l-1 vote are things scum will be more likely to actively avoid. It is possible, as you say, that serg is scum who doesn't really care that much about consequences, but I don't think his miller claim is the kind of thing that specifically comes from uninvested scum. If that miller claim comes from scum I think that it's because, like someone mentioned, he might have been trying to gauge the town's reactions to it and possibly keep it.

[implosion]

Two's and human's play in the past couple of pages both feel very blah.

Okay. Is there a scum day chat yes or no? Someone should answer this with subtlety.

This honestly just straight looks like a faked townslip. I've gotten extremely solid townreads off of the "do scum have day chat" townslip before but this just doesn't look genuine. Unless he was like trying to fish for scum with this? Which is weird but not scummy I guess.

I agree with Wicked that I can see where Two is coming from (I also thought human was being serious at first, and was still offput by the fact that he only said he was partly joking even after he said it). But Two's reasoning is also... very one-dimensional. Similar in a way to a lynch all liars argument he's just giving the scum interpretation of what human did as though it's obvious that it makes more sense than the town interpretation.

Actually now that I look at human's posting on page 12 again I want to call him town. The flip on wicked and the flip on Two both look moderately genuine.

[implosion]

I think I can read lalendra's vote either way. In a sense it's similar to serg's in that I'm not sure scum makes that move but I can imagine it coming from either alignment from someone who's somewhat disconnected from the game state as she's said she is. Her read progression on Flubber is really weird. She says she can't see where his motivation lies, but implies that she's townreading him for the sole reason of being too scummy to be scummy despite not understanding his motivations, then says that she wants to look at the Flubber wagon for scum (which to me implies at least a moderately strong townread) yet at the end of the post she also mentions she doesn't like Flubber's last post. Not sure what to make of that.

[implosion]

I dont think there was a significant shift in rhetoric between 34 and 37, since it all falls under the umbrella of lynch all liars which is not a novel belief

See, I feel like it's exactly that. A shift in rhetoric, as in, a shift in the way he's arguing rather than the actual meaning of the content. I think he shifts from saying "he says he's scum, he must be scum, lynch" to "if he's town, he's lying and should be lynched" because he sees it as the more convenient rhetorical tact to take, and not because he actually has the genuine underlying thought that town who is lying should be lynched. Psychologically it's sort of the natural thing to argue when the original point is challenged - I think town who makes post 34 and then sees post 36 would stop and take a step back and think rather than doubling down and voting. It just reads to me as scum who sees "ooh, free mislynch" and almost is acting entitled to the mislynch like it's just the obvious thing that should happen next.

Idk, I might be reading too much into this but I still have yet to see any reason to call him town and my first resort is usually to hunt by PoE and there's like nothing in any of his posts that makes me want to unvote him. Him being afk until tomorrow isn't scummy per se but people are acting like the Wossi wagon ought to be a thing of the past despite the fact that we haven't even seen him acknowledge it, let alone react to it, let alone analyze it.

[implosion]

I have various things to say about Wossi's recent posting, but am at work, so I just want to point out one thing.

point still stands, implosion looks towny most of the time until suddenly he pushes me, and then there's red flags everywhere.

In what way, shape or form is my push against Wossi "sudden?" What exactly was Wossi townreading about me before that push?

My first post was voting Wossi. This was RVS.

My *second* post was directly criticizing Wossi for his posting since RVS. A post which Wossi very explicitly said he didn't like.

This just reads so strongly like Wossi is caught scum who is trying to still be able to call me town or at least not just call me scum so that I won't full-on tunnel him in response. Like he is literally lying about the game state if he's saying I looked townish until I suddenly pushed him. I literally did not do anything before pushing him. I cannot believe that he actually had the state of thought that he's claiming to have had, where he thought I was town at one point based on my posting and then changed his mind when I started pushing him. He's making things up, and he's scum.

[implosion]

It's more than a little frustrating seeing the only reason given for Wossi being town still be invisible meta. Meta's a fine tool but I put 0 weight in meta arguments that can't be explained.

That said, I'm trying to take a step back on Wossi because I am starting to read what he's saying in a biased light. I can see potentially a bit of townpoints for him for the way he's reacting to his wagon as time goes on given his apparent willingness to lash out at every direction on his wagon. It's not good scum play to throw shade at everyone who's voted you (me, lalendra, idany, wicked, maybe others i've missed). It's not good town play either per se (it sort of reeks of OMGUS with the frequency with which he's doing it, which is not really a scumtell but is not good town play) but it's more understandable from town who's just mad at their wagon. I don't think this outweighs the reasons I've seen for him to be scum though.

[implosion]

I don't really have a strong read on Mulch's play. I have a moderate residual townread on him from HEM's play but I don't feel like his play has been especially telling. I haven't played with him before but from the interactions I've had with him I'd expect things like his lolmeta reads (as skitter so eloquently puts it) and his opening post mentioning the scum pt, and even a lot of his policy-esque arguments to come from him as both town and scum. I imagine it's his town playstyle and if he's scum he's likely doing those things in order to emulate that style. Which honestly sounds kind of defeatist in that I'm not really sure how to read him. I'm open to being convinced. The one point that I'm the least sure what to make of is Wossi's claim that his meta is imaginary.

skitter & seph & serg continue to be very town. I somewhat like Flubber's Mulch vote. Wossi's jump on the Mulch wagon is really interesting and I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. It's another thing that doesn't really make sense from him as scum because he'd probably want to avoid alienating the big voice calling him town. I guess it is possible that they're both scum which would nullify that but I don't really want to put much thought into pairings on d1. It could make sense from him as scum with Mulch town if his intent is just to try to swing a different wagon's momentum higher than his own.

Chip's Mulch vote is pretty bad. The claim of a meta read of hyperaggressive Mulch = scum Mulch is sort of very 1-dimensional for a meta read, sort of on the level of saying "X player makes longer posts as scum" that is probably something that most players will have broken in both directions just for the sake of not having a consistent meta. And I wouldn't even characterize Mulch's play as hyperaggressive, hyperactive sure but he's not like aggressively casing chip to get people to vote him, he's mostly just complaining that people aren't blindly sheeping his lolmeta read of Wossi. Chip's mention that a Mulch flip would be informative on taco feels thrown in there and like not actually even vaguely a good reason to lynch someone. Just sounds like he's trying to make his vote look justified with it.

I like really feel kind of shitty about unvoting Wossi. I still feel like his early game was really bad but I feel some trepidation based on his play around Mulch. But I think Chip is now in the position Wossi was in where I don't remember anything he's said at any point ever feeling especially genuine. That sentence is kind of still true of Wossi but he's made moves that I don't think are especially wise as scum, and that I don't think scum playing badly are necessarily likely to make. And it's a bit odd that Chip's wagon is stuck at two votes despite Mulch pushing it a little when I can't remember ever hearing any sentiment that he's town.

Unvote

VOTE: Chip Butty

[implosion]

@skitter:

What is your opinion on Chip right now, in the absence of your Mulch read? You mentioned disliking some of his posting earlier but also disliking my vote on him, and the only reason I can see for this is you explicitly thinking any wagon Mulch has touched is poison despite you also acknowledging that preflip associatives ought to be avoided.

Do you have a specific reason to think that Mulch is highly unlikely to have bussed at all, or do you just think that any given person he's pushed is less likely to be scum by virtue of busses being more generally less likely than pushes from scum on town?

re: Mulch meta. I sort of see what you're getting at but I'm not convinced that those differences are alignment-indicative, especially when Mulch explicitly said he's being lower effort this game and that game (at least the first link, didn't look at the second) does not look low-effort. His reads here were changing with the wind for a bit but they seem to have settled at this point and I don't think that having a period where they were in flux is particularly scummy even if he doesn't usually have that kind of thing as town unless he does specifically exhibit that behavior a lot as scum.

Seph's points in 606 are fair though. He's done a lot of things that are very convenient to do as scum.

[implosion]

319 points out problems with implosion read, which wasn't as godawful as implosion's reads of me and Mulch. FoS at implosion.

I'd love some elaboration on why exactly you find those reads godawful. Particularly the Mulch read given that obviously you're going to call me scumreading you a bad read. Your only stated reason for calling Mulch scum unless I've missed something was a meta read on his alignment being related to his aggression, which seems like a rather thin case to be calling my read, which is uncertain, "godawful".

[implosion]

@skitter: the points you make in 641 are pretty much all good points. I just feel this fundamental hesitance about Mulch. I don't think Mulch-scum necessarily implies Chip-town either; he was pushing Chip for a while but pushing really means just whining at people to vote for him, and now he's moved on to Lalendra with the wind. I also agree with this:

Tbh I'm not super feeling a lalendra lynch right now. She feels more disengaged/out-of-it then scummy to me.

A lot of Lalendra's posting gives me a quick visceral reaction of "this is really scummy" that I strongly suspect is due to playstyle and is not actually very telling and is coloring the way I'm looking at the actual content, or more importantly the motivations, of her posts. Like for instance Seph's criticism here:

Why does me scumreading the three of you necessitate that all three of you are scum together? I'm not going to delude myself into thinking everyone I have a scum read on D1 = the scum team. That would be silly. It just means I independently find each of you to be the scummiest in the game.

Is a totally logically valid thing to say. And I can see why Seph finds it scummy. But I don't think it's really a particularly likely argument for scum to make straightforwardly, or at least not something scum are more likely to make than town, because it is a fairly obvious misrepresentation on the face of it. It feels more like an argument that comes from disengaged town who thinks they saw something really scummy but is actually just misinterpreting things. For that matter I'm not sure why scum-Lalendra goes after Sephiroth here in the first place.

I digress though. I can see why you find Mulch scummy and I can agree with the points that you're making about him so meh. My trepidation comes from him being stereotypically frequently mislynched but you're right about his read progression in particular. It and the way he's been vote hopping are both really convenient plays for scum to make and doesn't make as much sense from pressured town.

I'll mull it over a bit more and probably join the wagon tonight. I don't think this day really needs to be drawn out much more (that said, I was pretty much ready to lynch Wossi a couple days ago but -shrug-). I actually get some decent townvibes from Chip's posting on page 27 as well, in particular the nuance of him pulling back from the meta read on Mulch but not the scumread feels genuine enough. Still want a direct response from him though.

[implosion]

Seph is also right that I need to be a bit more active. I still feel engaged with the game but I can be doing more. I've been really lazy this past week especially over the weekend.

[implosion]

The reason I don't call those posts as a whole hyperaggressive is because they aren't generally aggressively pushing an agenda. Hyperconfident, definitely. And he's pushing you, but mostly he's just generically whining about people not hopping on board and other people being wrong (i.e. 462, 604, 621). He only really directly reaches out within those posts to me to try to get me to vote you, and he does very little to actually try to convince people to vote you. He does no casework, he does very few direct appeals. He just tells people that you're scum. But yeah I can see what you mean given that it's directed at you, also partially a difference in what we mean by the word hyperaggressive.

Your first point was that my mulch read was 1 dimensional, and there is something in that, which i have since addressed. But until you've done your own mulch metadive i can't see how you could vote me because of mine. If you think my meta on mulch is actually misleading, based on your own, then fine.

The point there, apart from the hyperaggressiveness thing, was just that it was only meta, which as you say you've since rectified. The one-dimensionality of the read at that time didn't really depend on the actual content of the meta dive. I looked at one of the games skitter posted but not massively in depth and don't really intend to do a full meta-dive because I don't think it's especially valuable to.

And there were other reasons I was voting you based on early posting as well, but your recent posts are townish enough to trump that.

Unvote

[implosion]

I disagree that PoE is a form of policy lynching. I often hunt by PoE because I often get confident townreads more easily than confident scumreads. I'd say modern site meta has a fair amount of what I'd call soft PoE, which basically amounts to PoEing the game down to maybe 2ish more players than there are scum and then focusing down on those players but generally being okay with any of them dying.

That said the point that's swaying me on Mulch isn't the PoE stuff, it's that his read progression is scummy. I think Mulch is scum who has decided that he can't work his way out of a lynch today, and has reduced activity/stopped giving confident reads as a result. I don't see how else 687 makes sense, and it makes his potential read progression as town make even less sense. He'd have had to go from being so confident in his reads so as to be calling everyone else and their reads terrible, to now not feeling confident enough to vote for anyone, despite the wagon on him building and him having a wealth of information to work from if he's town here.

VOTE: Mulch

(L-1)

[implosion]

Mulch is very probably scum who has accepted the lynch. Someone please just threaten a hammer so that we can see him probably refuse to claim so we can get on with it. I understand townreading his early play from certain angles but I don't understand how you can still townread him after the marked shift in his play in the past few pages.

Multiball (as in multiple multi-person scumteams) is technically allowed in mini normals but is extremely exceedingly rare, as in I cannot remember a single game of it. Serial killers exist but are pretty rare these days. It's not worth really considering until there's evidence of it.

I don't really buy the points toward Serg-scum. The point that he's acting more erratic in response to people saying he's erratic as town ignores that (1) he was acting erratic before people were saying that he is erratic as town, and (2) that it basically puts him in a double-bind: if he acts less erratic, he's scum because that's how he plays as scum. If he acts erratic, he's scum because he's just doing that to play to the meta people are calling him out for. I don't buy that he specifically got actively more erratic when people called it his town meta.

[implosion]

2 days left until deadline.

oh good its time to hammer mulch now

[implosion]

Why? I'm town. Better to vote someone that was actually on the Mulch lynch.

Do you specifically think that the wagon was scum-driven? If so, why? Do you just specifically dislike dany's vote?

The votes near the end of the day are either very meaningful if Lalendra is scum or mostly meaningless if she's town, since she was nominally the counterwagon to mulch. The final vote count is sort of interesting in that a bunch of people (tiam, wave, lalendra, and of course mulch ~_~) are vanity voting. The lalendra wagon had more than two at its peak so I'm not really counting those votes but serg and seph were never really on the table and the wossi wagon mostly fell apart. I can easily see scum on the wagon, or scum off the wagon using vanity votes to hide from having to commit to stances/being on a mislynch. I don't really think the wagon is helpful to analyze right now from the angle of just what people were on it.

Dany's hammer certainly merits some scrutiny. In particular: Dany, when you made your hammer, did you realize the sort of overt scumminess of it, particularly the tone of naked hammering Mulch 20 minutes after he called you scum? Did you realize what you were doing and just didn't care? I'm sort of confused by 789 because I feel like it's obvious what serg is getting at (although of course he can correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not entirely sure what to make of the vote.

I think the people I'm most inclined to look at right now are dany, tiam, flubber and wicked. I feel like all four of them vaguely lurked as the Mulch shenanigans were going down and my reads on them all sort of eroded. I'm open to arguments on wave, serg, and chip but I think there are pretty good reasons to think they're town. Lalendra idk I still think she's townish but can be persuaded on as well. I'm not really sure if the reasons I have for thinking she's town are actually good reasons. skitter and Seph are very town.

[implosion]

implosion correct me if I'm wrong but is this not a pretty open and shut case? I understand investigating the wagon but I guess I'm not understanding where your head is at with respect to the hammer itself, and why you consider it "overtly scummy"?

I think I was somewhat unclear on what I meant. When I called it "overtly scummy" I was referring to the fact that it was sort of the kind of thing that I wouldn't expect anyone to do as town or scum, because it, at a glance, looked bad. It looked at a glance like dany saw mulch scumreading him and said Nope Not Having Any Of That and hammered. It's almost like selfvoting, in that it's the kind of thing that draws attention to yourself. This is why I said I wasn't entirely sure what to make of the vote. I'm not sure if it is scummy. Dany's response makes me lean town, weakly. I don't think he'd specifically manufacture the argument that he thought Mulch was trying to scare him away as scum.

Implosion's most recent post is bad. He is questioning a hammer on the player he agreed was to be yesterday's lynch

Am I not allowed to question a vote on someone just because I also suspected them?

I was pretty clear that the part of what I found questionable wasn't just the brute fact of him voting Mulch. It was the fact that it didn't even acknowledge the fact that Mulch had just called him scum.

, and is now open to considering the majority of the game to be scum.

Are you not open to considering the majority of the game to be scum? Do you have locktown reads on literally the majority of the game????

Also I gave a pool of four names, which is decidedly *not* the majority, that I wanted to look primarily at, and literally called everyone else in the game town.

So.

What???

This is good. It needs to be emphasised that implosion first calls for someone to threaten hammer ie declare intent, then casts shade on idanyboy when he does just that, and then follows through.

I'll ask the same question to you.

Just because I asked someone to hammer, does that mean I'm not allowed to find a post where someone hammers scummy? To be clear I don't especially find it scummy at this point. But me asking for a hammer doesn't mean that I can't judge the hammer post for things other than just being a hammer.

[implosion]

Serg, mind justifying your reads in a bit more depth?

[implosion]

Wicked doesn't raise too many flags on the white knighting front and I disagree with Implosion's assessment that they lurked their way through the Mulch shenanigans. Wicked posted that he had a slight town lean on Mulch but would vote that way to prevent NL, and continued to push their scum reads. He engages and refutes almost all of the major points against mulch and while I disagree with him the interaction reads genuine to me. Seems like a pretty reasonable stance. I also disagree that TIAM was lurking through the end of the day. Their behavior seemed consistent with how they played most of the day to me, which tells me pretty much nothing.

Yeah, consistent with the rest of the day is accurate and maybe lurking doesn't quite describe what I meant. Basically those slots I listed are those that I don't really remember exerting a lot of pressure one way or the other WRT the end of day shenanigans and so I sort of don't feel like I have as solid of a grasp on their recent play.

This is a good point:

How could she completely forget me from her reads? I thought I was quickly rising to be one of her top scum candidates, and Mulch's town flip if anything should be reinvigorating her crusade against me but instead I suddenly don't exist. This to me is a post made by someone who's reads are not genuine. Town doesn't just forget to mention one of their top scum reads entirely on their first post of D2.

and I am curious what Lalendra has to say about it. It's an interesting point because obviously forgetting to put someone in a reads list is most likely an unmotivated move, i.e. it's not something that was directly

motivated

by Lalendra's alignment, but rather should fairly accurately reflect the way she was viewing the game at that point irrespective of her alignment, and like you say it's inconsistent with her play at the end of yesterday that she wouldn't have you near top of mind.

[implosion]

Wicked is an interesting case and I'm curious about peoples' reasons for calling him town. I sort of can't remember anything of his sticking out strongly as town but I remember his day 1 being mostly full of Generically Sensible Material. There's a big part of me that says that that's mostly meaningless because logicality isn't a tell. Nothing stuck out as strongly scummy either. His exit from the Wossi wagon is a little odd; timing-wise he jumped from Wossi to Lalendra at a time when each had two votes, changing the votes to 5-3-1 mulch-lalendra-Wossi, which could have a lot of utility as a scum vote hop (either distancing from Lalendra-scum or ensuring that there's dueling wagons on Mulch-town and Lalendra-town) and his reasoning feels a little meh. It just looks like him going "well other people are doing this and yeah I generally agree with them" which I guess isn't scummy per se but feels questionable just for it being such an easy post to make as scum.

TIAM I'm also curious to hear other peoples' reasons for reading him either way, particularly as town, because I keep hearing people give meta townreads on him and similar to the early Mulch meta reads I'm really unsure how to evaluate them. I remember slightly disliking his interactions with HEM who has now flipped town and I don't remember thinking anything of his was really townish.

Dany I'm willing to put back in the town pile for now.

Flubber I just really don't remember much from other than him leading off the Mulch wagon in fairly reasonable fashion. He needs to rebut my response to him.

[implosion]

iDanny is scummish. He was super active day 1 when he thought he was being townread, and now that some are scumreading him he's lurking.

His activity fell off mid-d1 pretty hard. He was very active early d1 but was never really under pressure d1 at all that I can remember until his hammer.

[implosion]

I mentioned why earlier:

Dany's response makes me lean town, weakly. I don't think he'd specifically manufacture the argument that he thought Mulch was trying to scare him away as scum.

His activity may have fell off but its not just quanity I look at its the firmness of your language in your posts.

Any examples?

[implosion]

After rereading your point is taken. He pretty much fell of the map after mulch replaced in.

The question is if that is opportunistic or not.

Yes. It's similar to the situation of Wossi yesterday actually. I think at a certain point you have to give benefit of the doubt; Wossi I was a bit hesitant to just because it seemed to me like there was a really strong correlation between the pressure on him and his absence but I don't

think

there is such a correlation for Dany (and I was wrong about Wossi and he was just tied up with RL so :shrug:).

Mulling over Lalendra's reply. I think it just makes her omission of Seph even stranger, given (1) that her opening post today was explicitly the results of her rereading d1 and so should include re-evaluation of things that she thought on d1, and so should naturally include her re-evaluation of Seph, and (2) her opening post today includes an explicit nullread on skitter and no given read on Flub, which makes the explanation that she didn't include Seph because she wasn't sure how to sort him beg the question of why she did include skitter (and possibly Flub) when she seems unsure how to sort them.

I really don't buy that justification but can easily see it as manufactured.

VOTE: Lalendra

[implosion]

I don't think TIAM's hammer actually sold me that strongly on his being scum but I flat don't buy his explanation that he was afraid of being lynched. I think he's just scum who's assuming he's going down and is trying to do so fighting. That said I did think a similar thing about Mulch >.>. But still. There's no rush.

@skitter: do you specifically think TIAM is town? Or do you just not want to take things quickly?

Not sure if we massclaim here. Probably not just because of the likelihood that TIAM is scum.

More later tonight and please hold me to that

[implosion]

Still don't see seph or skitter scum right now. I feel like both of them have been pretty transparently town since d1 and they've both consistently reinforced that with their posting. Still don't see serg scum either. I can potentially buy that he's somewhat self-aware with regards to his meta. But his play still doesn't generally make sense to me as scum. I don't see his motivation for posting the way he has. I don't see why he pushes skitter as scum who's defending TIAM right now, for instance. In general the way he's playing has fairly low utility as scum and the main way I can see him as scum is if basically his main game plan is just to constantly directly try to emulate his town meta and focus on nothing else, and that seems somewhat unlikely I think?

That leaves flubber, wave, chip and TIAM. If we are dealing with 4 scum then my best guess is that's the pool. I doubt TIAM is sk, given that he'd have zero incentive to quickhammer as a serial killer. Unless he actually did think he was going to be lynched and was going for wifom value. But that seems unlikely. Flubber's reason for voting serg is really one-dimensional.

I can't remember seeing any insight into the way flubber or wave have been thinking about the game for a while now. Granted there was a quickhammer yesterday but the day wasn't

that

short. wave has been sort of hanging around the fringes of discourse for a while now. His reasoning for serg is pretty reasonable though. 707 was a pretty good post but since then basically all of his posts have been barely really engaging with the game and have mostly been either questioning very offhanded things. It's a bit odd that he made post 810 and then never followed up with anything pertaining to it, which just makes that post look like an attempt to look like he's putting in effort. I don't like the question in 933 in a similar vein, though we'll see if he actually has anything he specifically wants to learn from it, but it just looks like a "look at me i'm doing things" kind of question and I can't really imagine what useful information you get out of the answer.

Chip is probably the most likely of that group for me to be wrong about right now. Particularly if TIAM flips scum. Actually he might be town over serg possibly.

[implosion]

Like, I guess I'm not seeing what is AI about the perceived negatives you've written above

It feels like since d1 you haven't contributed substantively in the game and have been sitting on the sidelines commenting on irrelevant things to look active, not really committing to anything and not really directly engaging in the meaningful arguments that have been taking place. None of the questions you've asked people since then have any clear reason behind them other than you just trying to look like you're asking questions. Which has obvious scum motivations compared to town motivations but i can spell it out more explicitly if you want.

[implosion]

The argument between seph and wave is mostly uninteresting. It's a perfectly reasonable stance to take going into the day that TIAM is scum who quickhammered. Like, I agree seph doesn't seem like an impulsive player, but I think there's a set of people who from a meta perspective will see the quickhammer as literally a scumclaim, and I can see Sephiroth and Flubber both being in that set. I don't think their votes are especially meaningful in and of themselves. wave's perspective to have on the quickhammer is also reasonable, but I don't understand how he goes from that to calling TIAM town. Like I said, I don't find the quickhammer in and of itself as an especially strong indication of alignment in the first place, and that's basically all the purchase that wave's meta read on TIAM should have. Him having quickhammered in a single game when he was town is a shitty reason to call him strongly town. That's an egregious misuse of meta, though I'm not sure if that's all wave's TIAM case is resting on. Wave is ignoring a lot of the nuance in Seph's points. But I'm not sure if that's really alignment indicative on wave's part. I'm not really sure if wave takes this tact so strongly as scum here. It obviously can make sense for direct utility if he's scum with TIAM but that's a very bold move to make as scum, and I don't think he'd make a sudden bold move like that given his play in previous days. And if TIAM is town I think he just sits back and lets the mislynch burn or at least gives himself some wiggle room.

I still don't buy Seph-scum. I don't think Seph makes that vote today as scum. If TIAM is town then I don't really buy that Seph would be the kind of player to make an all-out push here as scum. If TIAM is scum then I don't think Seph makes the bus so quickly, though he might. I also still think Seph's been consistently town, looking back again. The way he's applied pressure throughout the game and in particular his Lalendra push just look really genuine. The more I look at this argument the more I feel like it's tvt and both of them are getting self-righteous as they think the other person is misinterpreting their points when really they just both think each other are scum and so they aren't reading each others' points closely.

All that said I feel pretty shitty about my reads right now. I feel like I have decent reasons to townread everyone but TIAM and flubber which is obviously bad.

[implosion]

Seph/Serg/Implosion/Chip/Flubber have all expressed an interest, to some extent or another, in lynching Two today and/or have stated they believe Two to be scum (although, tbf, Flubber has unvoted and Chip has stated that the push for Two is sketchy). Unless you want to posit that the groupscum team is me/wave/Two, groupscum is promoting a Two lynch, which is unsettling and I don't like it. I can't tell right now if this is a Two bus or a Two mislynch.

I mean, if Two is scum I'd imagine there's at least one partner who is or was bussing. That isn't really especially surprising and I don't think it's a great reason to think he's town.

I think I'm falling on the side of massclaiming. I don't think I can sort things out effectively right now without more information. It also might help us figure out if we're dealing with 3:1:9 or 2:1:10 which could actually be quite useful information.

[implosion]

a massclaim with 3 scums alive? wtf are yall doing

You do realize the whole "it might be mylo" thing, right?

I don't really care about ordering here since my reads aren't very confident.

[implosion]

I'm really not feeling the SK angle, I just can't see how it would balance as either 9-3-1 or 10-2-1, unless there are some facy PRs on one side or the other, and there has been no evidence o that.

Wow, it's almost like we'd be able to figure out what we're dealing with more easily if we knew what power roles we had in the town, and what we're dealing with heavily informs the way we should be playing this day!

I just wish there was some way, some mechanism, some process by which we could get a better idea of what those roles are

[implosion]

To put this in concrete terms.

It is potentially MYLO. 2:1:10, 3:1:9, and 3:10 are all completely possible right now. We have no good information that allows us to discern between those. All we know is that there's some killing role out there, and that it's likely-but-not-definitely an SK based on the FBI agent flip. If we lynch without massclaiming, we risk either lynching a confirmable or pseudoconfirmable power role (i.e. something that can be determined to be likely real based on setup speculation) or we risk letting scum claim something under pressure, rather than locking them down into a claim now, without us having the ability to resolve their claim because there might not be any more day phases if we mislynch.

If we massclaim, we can potentially just figure out full-stop if there's an SK or a vig (if there's no vig claim, there's an SK, if there is, then there's a player who is almost certainly either vig or SK which is useful information). We might even be able to pseudoconfirm TIAM as town if, for instance, there is very little or no town power claimed (2:1:10 with the three PRs flipped+claimed so far might be considered balanced, i think, but probably not with less). Basically, we can avoid a ton of different potential mistakes that we can make if we don't massclaim.

If we don't massclaim then we are basically lynching in likely MYLO blind. Yes, it's versus 3-4 scum. That does not make massclaim bad and I don't understand why people have said that's a reason not to massclaim. It's all the more reason to, because today's lynch is basically the potential tipping point where we can turn things around, and we can do that much more easily with concrete information. We are working off of like one piece of concrete information right now, which is TIAM's claim. That is jack shit to be working off of in potential MYLO where we can lose if we're wrong.

I'm really interested why Chip in particular is so staunchly opposed to it.

[implosion]

I'm VT.

Inclined to believe Chip's claim. We in fact do not lynch him either way today assuming he's uncounterclaimed.

Serg, there is literally zero rush right now as we are in the middle of a massclaim.

I still want to lynch TIAM though.

[implosion]

Alright. So claimed PRs are roleblocker, vig, gunsmith, FBI agent, backup roleblocker. If Chip is sk, then the setup could make sense at this point but only if it's 2:1:10, and we have quite a bit more leeway to work with here in that case since the antitown factions will have incentive to kill each other, so it's not even worth thinking too much about, especially since I really doubt it's the case.

Assuming Chip is town, the stated plan sounds good to me. I'd be pretty damn surprised if TIAM flipped town especially given Serg would have very little motivation to claim as he did, since TIAM was likely to be lynched anyway. If he does, then obviously chip can shoot serg and he'll probably also die and we'll have to figure things out from there. But assuming TIAM flips scum, this leaves us with three people pseudocleared from claims:

Chip: Vig (possibly SK, but not really worth considering until like the last possible moment we have to and I would be quite surprised based on his play today)
Serg: Gunsmith, basically confirmed town from balance + guiltying TIAM
skitter: cleared by gunsmith. Could still be scum doctor, but doctor + roleblocker would be quite a lot of power for scum to have here, and I still think she's town a priori anyway.

That leaves, from my point of view, Flubber, wave and Sephiroth for the last two scum. I'd guess Flubber+wave off the top of my head but Flubber+seph wouldn't surprise me. wave+Seph would surprise me a bit. I guess their interactions in the past few pages could be scum theater.

[implosion]

I do think it's flubber/wave right now. I don't think that especially strongly. If Serg decides to check me tonight and I'm cleared (or at least, cleared to the same degree as skitter is) tomorrow then I'll probably do a full reread of the game. If he gets an inno on someone else or a guilty then things simplify. I've been kind of lazy partially because I got a Switch earlier this week. But alas.

I don't see anything from flubber that's been especially town and his play today and in general has been generically sketchy, in that he's basically said nothing of import. He's been lurking, sure, but when he has been here he's talked literally only about TIAM. I don't think the him being drunk posts are towntells. I don't see why he can't make those posts as scum.

wave/serg contains one scum who has played very well. I still like wave's early interactions and Seph's play throughout. Flubber's interactions toward them actually point a bit more toward Seph. Flubber has only mentioned Seph three times and they're all very... token mentions. Two's interactions assuming he flips scum I think moderately point toward Seph-town and wave-scum. Most of his interactions toward Seph are answering Seph's questions, with the exception of [post=164]voting him[/vote] and I think he's somewhat less likely to confuse Serg and Seph if both are town. His only real mentions of wave are in the first two pages and his RVS could make sense with wave as scum. But I also am probably reading too much in there. None of these associatives are really especially strong except for maybe Two confusing serg and seph but it's probably still fairly minor.

But yeah. I still put Flubber/wave > Flubber/Seph >>> wave/Seph in terms of likeliness.

I'd be interested to hear justifications for Flubber town. He'd be my check if I were gunsmith but I don't think the specific target of the check matters too much.

[implosion]

VOTE: Two
(L-1 but etc.)

Why does scum!Flubber get so annoyed with Two for that quickhammer that he wants to say bannable things to him? Like . . . scum!Flubber should be pretty happy with the gamestate there, especially if Two is town, as he appeared to be thinking at the time.

I can easily see it as scum!Flubber being genuinely angry at his scumbuddy for quickhammering, and just taking a piece of that anger out in the thread while still playing the game.

980 kinda bleeds town. If Two is town, yeah he fucked over the gamestate, and that reaction makes a lot of sense from town!flubber who's incredibly annoyed about how the game unfolded. Like, for him to be scum making that post, he'd have to fake despondency and demotivation? Like it seems so much more genuine from a town mindset. I think it would be a lot easier to fake anger at the quickhammer than demotivation tbh. And he'd have to fake that over several real-life days.

Demotivation doesn't have to be faked as scum. It can be for a variety of reasons. It could be because he was legitimately demotivated from his scumbuddy quickhammering, or because he's not enjoying the game as either alignment, or because he has other RL things on his mind, etc. These are largely valid reasons as either alignment.

This line, in conjunction with the fact that implosion never really talks about the possibility of two fake-claiming, kinda implies that he *knows* that Two isn't fake-claiming (at least the roleblocker bit).

Yeah honestly not sure why I was assuming this. I guess I was just thinking about the setups that we could be under under the assumption that's what he is. Shrug. I can see what you mean, but I think it's just an artifact of the way I was thinking about the game at that moment. If TIAM is fakeclaiming then I wouldn't be surprised if scum have a doctor (either if he's fakeclaiming as a doctor or as a goon, or maybe as some other minor scum role but probably not).

[implosion]

Actually

Unvote

if skitter is still waiting for chip to answer something and TIAM might selfhammer.

I can revote tonight.

[implosion]

Yep. I'm at implosion > wave =Seph right now.

\:

I still harbor some suspicion that Flubber could be scum doc. We certainly don't lynch him today, in case someone else is a scum doc which would basically completely clear him and skitter. But I am skeptical. With Two and Chip's flips, I think it's fairly likely scum have some power role, and a doctor (possibly limited) is the most automatic/natural thing to throw into a setup that has a gunsmith and a vigilante. I doubt scum have a full doctor but something like a 1-shot doctor would make sense for balance here I think. Of course this is all moot if I can't convince skitter to look again at Flubber but I digress.

I'm not convinced Flubber is town which means fmpov today isn't as simple as just blindly lynching either wave or seph. I'm going to do significant re-reads on both of them most likely tomorrow. I sort of completely forgot about this game today in favor of playing like 8 hours of breath of the wild >_>

Please hold me to at least starting the process of ISOing them tomorrow. If I don't say this I'm probably going to just forget again.

Skitter, is your read on me at this point mostly PoE? The main thing that you've repeatedly mentioned is that you just don't think I've strongly towntold. If so, can you list your reasons for seph-town and wave-town that you think are stronger reasons than you have for me being town? Partially because I know at least one of them has to be scum but also partially because I do think it might be only one of them and I need to reassess the things from each of them that I think have been significant towntells.

[implosion]

Spoiler: Responses to skitter

Are you still harboring some suspicion that I could be a scum doc?

You being town is an assumption that I'm willing to make at this point, essentially. It's MYLO today, and assuming Serg is dying tonight we can test that if we want to tomorrow by no-lynching and seeing if scum kills you. They can no-kill if they want to but etc. Even if there's a no-kill at that point I would be pretty astonished if you're scum here. You mentioned being better as town than as scum earlier and if you're scum you've been playing a really damn good game since you got gunsmith cleared, along with having been town in general before then. I can justify it more specifically if you want. With Flubber it's entirely possible that I'm just falling into confirmation bias. But I just feel like the game makes more sense if Flubber is scum.

Tbh this feels like you're trying to widen the lynchpool to include probable clears - like we aren't lynching flubber today.

Correct, we aren't lynching him today and I was very explicit in my agreement with not lynching him today. Flubber-scum is something I want to think about more deeply tomorrow in the event that we get a second goon flip today, essentially. If we get a scum power role flip, then I much more strongly doubt Flubber being scum.

Basically though there's no real need to put in more strong effort to sorting Flub unless we make it to tomorrow.

Implosion, do you prefer playing town or scum more? Can you link me to a recent town/scum game? Your wiki's out of date by several years lol.

ahaha i do have a wiki page don't i

I generally fairly strongly prefer town. this is almost certainly my best (most recent) scum meta although I have a couple other games in the past year (I didn't draw scum apart from a single traitor game for a period of about two years which ended like a year ago). this is a somewhat recent mini normal where I'm town, where I had a very good game, although the game was very toxic. this is another recentishish towngame that might be a bit more similar to this game in that I don't think I ever had any scumreads that I was sold on for long periods of time, but I was shot n1 so. I don't really have a ton of recent meta, and how much I enjoy a game is usually a function of how into a game I manage to get, and this is probably slightly based on alignment but is more based on random variables that I really haven't quite figured out yet. I sort of dread getting scum role PMs but I still enjoy the games. For instance in this scum game (also slightly relevant bc Nexus mod) I managed to get pretty into the game and do some really cheeky shit like claiming some weird joat though the cop actually misread his result on me and thought it was an inno so shrug.

I like to talk about my meta for no particular reason so I'm happy to discuss it more.

Given the possibility of a scum doc, is asking to get investigated sketchy?

I don't think it's especially sketchy per se in that it's something that I can still see town doing. I can also see a scum doc doing it for obvious reasons or a goon doing it just for the sake of facadery.

Spoiler: Some ISOing of Seph

Posts 62-65 are really interesting. I can fairly easily see it as distancing; Seph and TIAM are sort of making a moderately big fuss about RVS-ish things, without either actually committing to reading or pressuring the other. If Seph is town then it still makes sense from Seph's side; I guess the telling here thing should be TIAM's interactions, which look vaguely... annoyed. Meh. Probably nothing strong here.

Seph actually does commit to pressuring TIAM in 105, which I think doesn't look like a bus. If it's a bus it's a very good bus; Seph started fighting with TIAM earlier and here he would have had to make the decision to commit harder to a bus, which seems moderately unlikely on page 5. I also tend to think scum tend not to bus a ton early/aggressively in the meta but I don't know Seph's meta in particular. It'll be particularly telling that Seph is town if he keeps this pressure up, I think. This is annoyingly hard to easily check via ctrl f because tiam is alternately referred to as two and tiam. but alas.

175 hrrrrrm. Seph continues with the anti-TIAM rhetoric but winds up voting lalendra. This kind of looks like the most basic form of fos-a-buddy-vote-a-townie. And his next post he jumps ship to Serg? And then in the next post jumps back to Lalendra. 175 is really strange if Seph is town; he describes it as "hard to imagine 68 as coming from town" where 68 is the TIAM post he fossed, and all he talks about WRT lalendra is that she was coasting, yet he votes Lalendra over TIAM. He sort of backs off a little from the TIAM scumread for meta reasons when he jumps from Lalendra to Serg, but the Lalendra vote is really sketchy. It just screams scum trying to distance without potentially starting a wagon on a buddy.

He eventually jumps to Mulch which I can't really blame him for and his reasoning and train of thought still make sense. The way he handles mulch as a whole just reads town still. 763 for instance and the couple of posts before it looks like pissed off town.

Start of d2 TIAM is suddenly null-town... unless I missed something in there which I very well could have because I'm skimming pretty hard but eugh. The progression of this read from TIAM is scum to TIAM is still scum to TIAM is scum but meta makes the read weird to TIAM is null-town makes like no sense. And is super duper convenient if Seph is scum. The only real reason I can think of for this is basically PoE (ie maybe town-seph just had too many stronger scumreads at that point) but Seph also called PoE a form of policy and so that doesn't really seem likely?

He doesn't mention anything else until post-quickhammer when he instavotes which I can see from either side.

tl;dr though I skimmed quite a bit:

I still get a general vibe of town in a lot of places (some of which I didn't mention explicitly) but in general, Seph's thoughts on the game often mirror mine and I think his train of thought looks genuine. With a big exception of his TIAM read which really makes no sense. And which I think might be enough for me to just say I think Seph is scum. Most of his townish things are probably fakeable.

I'd like to hear from Seph about why his TIAM read took the course that it did with regards to both it softening seemingly so much after reading that meta, and with it eventually becoming null-town at the start of d2.

[implosion]

I saw wave's claim at work and I've tossed it around and I think I have an idea of the setup. I still think the setup without wave's role and with scum having a limited doctor would be likely fairly balanced. I think I believe wave's claim, on the premise that I'm not entirely sure what it buys him as scum. I feel like if wave is scum here he's perfectly happy to sit back and push me since I'm at the top of skitter's list. If he's scum with Seph then I see no reason to make such a bold play here, and honestly I'd just be impressed that it was made at all. If he's scum with Flub here, then I mean I guess that's possible but again I don't see why he goes out of his way to make such a risky move.

The way this makes the most sense by far is if scum is Seph+Flub. This implies Seph is a scum PR and Flub is a scum doctor of some sort; this makes a ton of sense if you think about the setup implications behind it. If wave's claim is real, then it's actually a fairly strong role for the reason he stated: it can completely clear vanilla townies in conjunction with the gunsmith, in addition to just having utility on its own. At that point, it makes sense to give the scumteam roles that would be immune from each investigative: TIAM was essentially immune to the vanilla cop, and Flubber is essentially immune to the gunsmith, while Seph is vulnerable to both. I'd guess Seph is something like a scum rolecop (maybe limited? maybe even-night? maybe some other role entirely, just likely something that adds some power and scum wouldn't want to claim) and Flubber is a limited doctor of some kind (likely 1-shot). There's quite a good chance I'm entirely wrong about the details here but the setup makes a ton of sense from this angle, with two roles that can work in conjunction to clear people, but separately each have a false negative.

So we should lynch Seph today. And then if he flips scum I'll case Flubber tomorrow. I can put effort into casing Flub today as well. But I really do not see wave's claim coming from scum. I just don't see scum making a play of changing their claim in a game where we lynched scum for quickhammering.

[implosion]

If you're scum, that's pretty much where you have to go though, since neither me nor Serg are getting lynched anytime soon, and you're pushing Seph. Assuming a 3-man scum team, your only two other options are wave and flubber.

How do you now feel about Flubber/seph?

I mean, I'm town and it's pretty much where I have to go because I know that I'm town and I now strongly suspect wave is.

How does theory hold up given wave's claim? Namely, if we flip Seph and he's a scum PR, what does this say about Flubber and wave and yourself, given that Serg is gunsmith and I'm townread?

I think I just answered this.

That theory was based on the assumption that no town players were lying. With an additional town PR i'd fully expect an additional scum PR. The setup can also make sense in a vacuum if wave is fakeclaiming scum and flubber is a limited doctor, or if wave + seph are scum and one of them is a power role (wave telling the truth about his role for instance) but I heavily doubt both of those scenarios.

What do you think about this? What do you think the significance of Two calling Flubber town is here?

My first impression is that it actually might be evidence in favor of Flubber-town. But not strongly so. I can see Two doing this to scum-Flubber just for the sake of doing something different. Two strikes me as the kind of player who would sort of take arbitrary stances as scum early on for the sake of them being arbitrary and hard to read.

It's also odd that the two of you have mutually had strong townreads on each other throughout the game. I'm not sure why he has you as strong-town here tbh.

I think he was pocketing both of us, actually. I might look at his ISO with that possibility in mind a bit more later.

[implosion]

The game if Seph is town?

I guess I'm sort of speaking from my point of view here. If wave is scum it seems like a much safer tactic to just try to lynch me than it would be to make this claim which would be very hard to predict the reception towards.

Tbh I'm slightly confused why we didn't go through this song-and-dance yesterday with Serg. Like why weren't people worrying about him lying about the guilty in order to win the game?

I mean. One, I at least wasn't especially scared because I was pretty confident Chip was town and if we were wrong he'd have just shot serg. And two, I did go through pretty much the exact same song and dance actually:

Assuming Chip is town, the stated plan sounds good to me. I'd be pretty damn surprised if TIAM flipped town especially given Serg would have very little motivation to claim as he did, since TIAM was likely to be lynched anyway. If he does, then obviously chip can shoot serg and he'll probably also die and we'll have to figure things out from there. But assuming TIAM flips scum, this leaves us with three people pseudocleared from claims:

I'll try to case flub RL-tomorrow. I'm going to be biased because I'm basically going to be ISOing him while already very strongly thinking he's scum but I'll do my best to look at things somewhat neutrally/be convincing to someone who isn't looking at the game the same way. Or maybe I'll find something really townish but I don't remember ever seeing anything from him that strongly pinged town to me so I doubt it.

[implosion]

The way you're trying to case me reeks of desperate to not be lynched.

Wow, it’s almost like I’ll lose if I’m lynched and need to convince skitter that I am in fact town for the town to have any chance of winning!!

[implosion]

Deadline extension is yes please.

I unfortunately was+am lazy today alas. I am kind of slogging a bit tbh (not for reasons related to this game) and don't have the most motivation to think hard about this game. I will still try to find motivation to iso flub as soon as I can; I *certainly* will have the energy on Saturday if not before then but really should at some point before then.

[implosion]

Spoiler: Flub case

Flubber's posting day one pre-Mulch is very... boring. He takes a lot of stances, but very few of them feel like they can be read in to. He eventually settles on three scumreads of Wossi, Chip, Lalendra, though he briefly was suspicious of wave. 131 is somewhat interesting; it's in response to my 127, and could be scum-Flub trying to throw me off from looking more closely at his wagon that had TIAM on it.

In 476 he appears after three days and votes for Mulch without mentioning anything else he found notable that had happened (iirc this was the first Mulch vote). In 504 he criticizes Wicked for having the "best that he can come up with" being to vote Wossi, despite Flubber having had a scumread on Wossi that continued up until his 3 day absence, and eventually retracts that scumread in 644 for no real reason other than being vaguely suspicious of the pushes on Wossi and the fact that they were heavily based on Wossi's early play. This doesn't make sense to me from someone who agreed with that reasoning at the time; he ignored Wicked's reply in 511 which I feel is pretty relevant. He essentially used the Wossi stuff as a way to pivot into casting vague, unsubstantiated aspersions toward the wagon without really naming anyone on it. It's a wonderful way to make it look like he's doing work in the game without pissing off any particular person; in particular he has a tendency to call people scummy and then completely ignore them afterward. This can be seen in him accusing Wicked, then ignoring Wicked's reply. He did something similar with me later after the Mulch hammer, though he did respond to me when I responded to him. Basically all of these pushes - on me, on wicked, on wossi, on wavemode, on lalendra and on chip - on literally half of the player list - all amount to nothing. He never pressures ANYONE on this list. He votes Wossi early on, says he's still scummy a couple times, then decries the Wossi wagon. He never commits to ANY stances. He votes SERG of all people first thing on day two. Serg, who he literally mentions for the first time in post *814*!!

To summarize all of this, his progression of reads makes no sense - he never follows through on any of his questions, on any of his interactions with people, on any of his middling scumreads or even his stronger scumreads! I can understand being disengaged town. But disengaged town still has persistent thoughts on the game. Disengaged town has an internal state of what they think the game looks like, who they think is scum, etc. Flubber's reads flicker with the breeze. He's scum who doesn't want to aggravate any townies, and so doesn't ever push on anyone; the only people he really pressured were Mulch (who he pressured to lynch which seemed likely to happen) and TIAM.

Which of course brings me to the Flub->TIAM interactions. I don't think these are really scummy but I do not read town into them, at least not to a degree that isn't fakeable. I think his sequence of posts on page 37 (starting with 908 is totally reasonable from flub-scum who was pissed off at TIAM for quickhammering. He figured TIAM was going down, and wanted to get towncred from it. He was pissed at his scumbuddy for doing something that ostensibly outed himself, but wanted to try to make the most of it, but didn't feel the need to withhold that anger inthread because it made sense to be angry or annoyed as town as well. Like iirc skitter you townread him mostly for 980 but that post comes only after a couple more pages of discussion and it's not like he's contributing anything new. I don't see why apathy doesn't make sense there as scum. It makes complete sense if he had an initial reaction as scum of being angry at what his scumbuddy did, thought that the town was going to go after TIAM instantly, and the rage faded over the course of seeing the town not do that and settled into apathy either because the game didn't go in the direction he thought it was going to or because he didn't expect to have to actually do anything during the day and expected TIAM to be quicklynched, or just like I mentioned for any of the reasons that any person can become apathetic about a thing at any point that have nothing to do with alignment.

The only way think he can be town is if he's been so disengaged with the game as to not actually have any real persistent opinions on anything. It's like he doesn't remember what his opinion on anything is when he posts except for the identity of the person he's pushing (Wossi, then Mulch, then TIAM then wavemode), which to me just reeks of scum making opinions up as they go to fit the situation. Town will normally have some degree of investment in their reads. The intellectual investment of the thoughts that went into their reads. The emotional investment of wanting to be right. Flubber shows no evidence of having the investment in his reads that would be characteristic of town.

[implosion]

I don't really read into the no-lynch thing from wave. I tend to err on the side of believing people when they say they were misinterpreted just because text-only not-real-time media are really prone to misinterpretation.

I can see this sentence:

Well then that's a 3/3 split, so no lynch

being read as either "there's a 3/3 split, so we aren't coming to a consensus and should no-lynch" or "there's a 3/3 split, which would lead to no lynch." I guess the first does make more sense at a glance but like I said, miscommunication etc.

[implosion]

I feel like wave/seph's arguments at this point are almost entirely meaningless. I think speculation of the form "if wavemode is really a vanilla cop, why didn't he X" is also inherently not going to be that useful because it presumes that he'll have the thought process in question, and different people will view the same game differently from the same role.

Flubber responding to me by drawing a comparison with something he did once and then claiming that I'm doing the same thing is just asinine. Calling my case on him a collection of a lot of granular points is just an excuse to not respond to the very coarse main focus of why I think he's scum, which is his reads having no cohesion from moment to moment. 1388 is also asinine; "I would have phrased it this way" is completely meaningless. I do, in fact, need to convince skitter that Flubber is scum to win this game (assuming I'm correct).

[implosion]

I am sick. But alas.

I dunno who Seph's partner is if he's scum. Like I kinda think Wave is town but I can't really make the gamestate make sense to me cohesively if Seph is scum, especially not with Flubber. Like scum!Seph gets out of RVS by seriously wagoning his partner and grilling him for that joke in the beginning, all while arguing with Two about it?

Lots of factors go in to what scum do in RVS. And I see what you're getting at here, but I think scum with a particular mindset is entirely capable of doing that kind of distancing early on. It's not something I'd expect the average game to contain, but it's definitely something that I'd expect some games to contain.

And we started day 3 by *both* of them quickvoting TIAM in possible MYLO?

I *think* I mentioned why this isn't even that weird. But it isn't weird at all if they were both going into the day with the mindset of assuming TIAM was going down, which is an entirely sensible mindset to have as scum whose scumbuddy just quickhammered. I imagine they probably discussed it in their PT and came to that conclusion.

And the other points you're making about that team are just like, idk. I don't know why you're putting so much weight into them.

I haven't had the focus to read the game very closely; skitter, I remember you asking flub what he thought of my case on him but don't remember you talking about it. What do you think of the case?

[implosion]

VOTE: wavemode

[implosion]

skitter, your reads and your reasons for them after you re-evaluated were really, really solid. You just needed to trust yourself more; distancing was the only move I had left, essentially.

That said hats off to Seph for basically carrying it in the last stretch by just having had a good game.

I did have RL reasons for not posting (read: sickness/tiredness/what have you) but I also felt like I couldn't post almost anything that would help me to win the game in the last ~3-4 RL days. I felt like all I could possibly do was convince skitter to lynch seph over wave >_>

I did plan to (at least try to) step up strongly if seph was lynched to try to swing Flub.

[implosion]

As for shooting chip: that was actually exploiting a town tactical mistake. If town had been willing to trust Chip (granted, they didn't necessarily, but I think it was a pretty solid move to trust him) they could have ordered him to shoot last night, and town would have been in a better position and we would have been forced to shoot Serg.

The math is a little weird but it plays out to a 33% EV for town this way vs a 50% EV the other way i think. But that was all thrown for a loop with the wave claim anyway.

[implosion]

seph was a ninja, actually.

[implosion]

(Part of my plan for post seph-lynch was to argue that scum MUST have some kind of actual power, that a doctor made the most sense, and that i should therefore be seen as town for having the vanilla check on me)

[implosion]

The whole pocketing thing isn't a bad tact per se. It can work really well on a player who doesn't thoroughly reread like skitter did.

And yeah the cards sort of got laid out on the last day in a way that was coincidentally pretty good for scum, what with me being the preferred lynch but not part of the 1v1; it made hard distancing the most appealing ploy.

[implosion]

Why did you guys kill Wossi n1?

Didn't think he was mislynchable anymore, and (correctly!!) called him as a power role

[implosion]

I do focus on setup spec as town a lot in endgame. And I've had good success with it. The problem with it here is that there were too many variables (unknown scum roles, unknown whether wave is fakeclaiming). I really am not sure how I would have played this game as town. I probably wouldn't have done as much setup spec just bc of the kind of game it was.

[implosion]

Also, obligatory thank you to Nexus for another lovely game (and apologies for mucking up the postgame pre-flip). I was like. Super, super confused when I saw the FBI agent because for some reason at first I thought it *actually* meant there was an SK, and that they also shot Wossi because they caught some crumb, and I was about 99% sure you wouldn't put an SK in the game

[implosion]

Yeah, he was a vanilla cop and I was a goon.

[implosion]

I have a hunch wave is fakeclaiming. Or someone else, idk who. This is a very low amount of town power. There might be a doc.

eheh.

This was before serg claimed gunsmith though.

[implosion]

Reading back the scumchat, implosion and I had some very good synergy. Our playstyles lined up really well to be scum together.

Also true.

And yeah we underestimated (in a sense) a lot of the town just for having had bad reads at the time.