Open 878: Scarfolk Council | The End

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why hello!

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invis & sheep somewhat town so far.

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I'm not willing to townlean anyone on the basis of "has reads" but I guess I won't complain about it too much.

What's this in response to?

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Well I mean, kind of but not really. sheep is town for 40 being the kind of thing town would try to do early and that I think would be a less natural remark for scum to make. Invis is town specifically for wagoning off "gut pingss" being a slightly brazen thing for scum to do. I also kind of want to call the "don't eat wagons" banter townish just for idk, natural banter in thread on page 2.

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VOTE: Cephrir

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If we have a serial killer, pretty sure it's implosion based on how he's playing, it reads to me as like "hey! tr me!!! look at my effort" and sk not knowing scum team? easy to do this

Actually, I drew SK last time I played C9++ - so by Gambler's Theorem, I can't have this time!

Well I mean, kind of but not really. sheep is town for 40 being the kind of thing town would try to do early and that I think would be a less natural remark for scum to make. Invis is town specifically for wagoning off "gut pingss" being a slightly brazen thing for scum to do. I also kind of want to call the "don't eat wagons" banter townish just for idk, natural banter in thread on page 2.

like, I saw something from sheep, went "sheep sus" but here imposion is all "TOWN" like, it's way too early to be declaring people town.. unless you're sk like "ok cool, not scum, I'm gonna win some town points" cause sk only really needs to read for scum, versus us town are like "uhhh sk and scum are something that exists"

I think this is simply what I do in like 95% of my games as any alignment.

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I'm not willing to townlean anyone on the basis of "has reads" but I guess I won't complain about it too much.

this stuff felt slightly wolf to me at surface level.

"I won't complain about it too much" just feels like a wolf perspective in a way that I could see alianna slipping up. either about some correct townreads or wanting to get townread herself for an active start

the idea of town complaining about some page 2 reads just doesnt make sense to me, even if u disagree with the reads. what I would expect town to do is like, evaluate implosion's alignment based on that, which doesn't happen; this post also assumes implosion town in a +0.05% wolf way


idk ive been back and forth on this

I like this post.

I think sheep is like, not-quite-locktown at this point.

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Andante is town because meta

I don't really have a marked opinion on Andante yet. Maybe like ever so slight lean town.

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Aisa maybe town

This is sort of an interesting pop-in. Have you looked at the other pages since your previous post and don't have much to say on them, or have you not looked at them yet, or comical third option?

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I can also see where Alianna-scum is coming from.

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VOTE: Doctor Drew

I think this vote is a bit +town for Andante.

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VOTE: Doctor Drew


A lot of one-off lines from him strike me a bit off (first line of 207 feels like something scum would say to diffuse, last line of 219 and 224 are just sort of needlessly vaguely noncommittal in phrasing). His recent posting is also just empty of meaningful stances for the number of posts he's made.

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Also, I forgot that Dunnstral was a player in this game.

Weirdly this is the first post that Alianna has made that maybe makes me think she's town :X

Not really something I think scum would be inclined to say with Dunn either as town or as scum.

Most of her posting recently makes me go "yeah, this is well and good but well scum definitely can make this post"

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I am not sure I understand why I am being wagoned, but hello o/ Lookin like wagons are forming and dissipating in the span of a handful of posts


Andante's assertion that Invis is tunneled on her and that she's obv town is still fairly inexplicable to me too. Why is she town "Because reasons"?

UNVOTE: literally no one is coming off scummy or townie at this point lol

Well, you have two votes on you which is nominally a wagon. Do either of the votes on you make you think anything about the people voting you?

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Aisa's catchup is alright.

What if they're scum looking for something to criticise?

That's always possible, but I didn't read it that way. I agreed with them, it was odd.

If that's the case, why were you so worked up that a wagon built on me?

I wasn't? Lol someone asked what I thought of the wagons. All I said is I don't know why you're being wagoned. This is coming off like you wanting me to address your wagon for you tbh.

There is a disconnect, you questioned why I was being wagoned just after Cat and I voted you. You then voice displeasure with my wagon, I ask what you think of the people on my wagon and do you think they scum read me, you deflected a bit until you said basically 'seems for pressure which is always good'.

Here's the thing, you don't seem scared about a couple votes on you, but I think you were trying to pocket me before your wagon really got going, especially since my wagon gained steam quickly, easy to be the white knight there.

This whole post kinda stinks to me. It feels like targeting something that, to me, has the aesthetics of a misunderstanding - GuerillaWoo clarifies that he wasn't worked up about the wagon, he was just responding because he was asked about it. And in response to that, Doctor Drew says in essence "no, you

were

worked up about it". I feel like the town response to this should acknowledge something like "okay, you're saying you didn't feel worked up about it, but I still think the way you responded is scummy because XYZ". But it feels like Doctor Drew has just found someone he wants to push on, and is just pushing on that person because he thinks he has an argument. It feels like he's not really reflecting on it. And beyond that GuerillaWoo's response is literally right below CSF's 253. He was responding to a question. Of course he's going to give some opinion when he's asked to give an opinion. He questioned why Doctor Drew was being wagoned literally in the next post after being asked what he thought of major wagons... and yet Drew is trying to ascribe it to the fact that it was after Cat and Drew voted him?

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Not interested in Andante wagon because I think she's town. The votes there are all meh for different reasons.
Drew wagon is somehow even more meh.
Cephrir and Invis are voting there because...why?
Woo wagon feels slightly better, at least on CSF's side. 250 raises some good points. Doc's 285 feels a little tinfoily though lol.

Why exactly are you characterizing the Drew wagon as "even more meh"?

Is it because you dislike the fact that Drew is the target of the wagon because you lean town on him? I assume it's not this since you're saying it's "even more meh" than the Andante wagon when you townread Andante more strongly.

So then I assume it's because you dislike the reasoning of the people on the wagon, or possibly you dislike the people themselves? Care to clarify? I'm particularly curious how it's 'even more meh' than the wagon that is literally on your now-proclaimed top townread in spite of me having given very specific reasoning for my scumread (that I've now elaborated on) and in spite of him making a post that you yourself call tinfoily in this post.

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Oh I literally didn't even read the third line of the quoted post >__>

Still, I have given specific reasoning; sheep has explained his thoughts; Invisibility also did give a (short) explanation with his vote.

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I like Dunnstral's entrance to the game quite a lot, actually.

I think woo posting is rife with more disconnects to accompany the one drew pointed out

I am not sure I understand why I am being wagoned, but hello o/ Lookin like wagons are forming and dissipating in the span of a handful of post

Well, you have two votes on you which is nominally a wagon. Do either of the votes on you make you think anything about the people voting you?

Nah, not really. They thought I was inactive and wanted to pressure. It's pretty NAI, scum could do it for the town vibes.

this just seems like a direct contradiction to me

I was also going to townread woo like, doubling down that he had no reads + nothing meaningful happened so far (last line of 247, 251). but then he talks about andante like a normal scum read. idk something feels fake

I don't really think this is scum-indicative (mind you I don't really have a direct read on GuerillaWoo, I think the slot is pretty unlikely to be scum if I'm right on Drew though).

This sort of "direct contradiction" isn't actually more likely to come from scum IMO. There are in a literal sense contradictions - Woo says he doesn't have thoughts and then gives some thoughts, says he doesn't undrestand why he's being wagoned but then gives some reasons it could happen, or says he doesn't have reads then explains what amounts to a read on Andante, or whatever. But like that's something town can easily do, town can feel like they don't have a good grasp on the game and then when forced to give explanations in response to a pointed question they think more specifically and realize they actually do have opinions.

And as I said a few posts above the disconnect that Drew pointed out is, I think, a literal direct misreading of the game.

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I don't really fault Alianna's reads list being that way necessarily, I think I've had more than my fair share of town games where I felt I couldn't get any traction and defaulted to "hrm maybe the lurkers are scum". I like Dunn's criticism of it though, even though I sort of half-agree with it.

Like, the way I'd phrase the part of the criticism that I agree with is that gosh, that reads list is the easiest reads list in the entire world to make as scum. Sure it might happen to also be your reads list as town but golly gosh is it an easy post to make as scum. Like, all of skitter/menalque/ceph have posted stuff that is, theoretically, fully readable. But no one else has given any reads on them (except skitter to some degree), so it's super easy as scum to be like "yeah i'll just nullbin them all". Whereas giving some creative opinion on some of those people would be more challenging to do, and might be more town-indicative.

Anyway. I'm caught up. I have like, an unusually strong scumread on Doctor Drew for this stage in the game. It's fairly rare for me to have a scumread this strong this early. It's still entirely possible for it to be defused, to be clear, but right now I very, very strongly want Drew wagoned.

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My townpile is also currently sheep, Invis, Andante, Dunn.


Aisa was kind of on the way there but I'm not a huge fan of her GuerillaWoo vote and follow-up in 333. It's very, non-olive-branch-y for no real reason I can see. Like, We've seen GuerillaWoo say he was having trouble getting into the game and following references here - I feel like if you're town trying to sort that slot through pressure, voting the slot and then actively refusing to explain it is Not the Play. If you're town and think the slot is just scum, 333 also kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it's just not the way I think town naturally talks about slots they're scumreading.

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Okay Aisa's vote is less sketchy lol.

I definitely also do at least lean town on Woo now.

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Hmm, maybe a readslist was not the best way of expressing my thoughts on this game. It seems to have created more confusion than it cleared up. I've tried to explain the thought process and it's a little more complicated than town/null/scum, so trying to put it in a list like that doesn't make much sense now that I think about it.
I'll address other stuff later in the day, I don't feel like playing mafia right now.

I think part of this scuffle is explainable as a difference in framing. You feel like you're giving a reads list in

absolute

terms; you find Woo scummier than the average person in the average game of mafia, and the people above your null line townier than the average person in the average game of mafia (or something like that). But practically, a reads list is sort of set dressing for some probability that each person in the game is scum. Dunn is pointing out that if you look at things in

relative

terms then really your nullread list must be scum >rand% of the time. This is the part of Dunn's post that I was referencing earlier when I said I didn't really agree with part of it, I think it's entirely reasonable as town to not really be interested in making the inference of "these nullreads must be inherently scummy" and rather view it as "I don't have enough info to feel like I have a good grasp on the game yet" like you were saying. All that said I have mixed feelings on the reads list as a whole.

Like fundamentally it should be possible for every person at any given time to give some percentage of every other player in the game flipping mafia, such that all the percentages add up to exactly 300% (because there are 3 mafia, ignoring the possible SK). But our brains don't work that way directly.

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I object to ostensibly literally nothing in skitter's reads list except Andante, which is nice because I definitely could be wrong on Andante and that gives a nice place to focus on next. That said I don't really have a read on skitter yet so if she's town I think game's in a pretty good spot, if she's scum probably somewhat less so.

I think my playing with Andante is limited to like one newbie game a while ago where she replaced in to a maybe slightly doomed scum slot. I know she says she doesn't think meta is useful or that people use it properly to read her or whatever, I'm curious from people with more experience with her if they think meta is particularly useful for reading her. I think I can see the angle that Andante calling herself the towniest person in the thread is sort of a boisterous bluff, but it also just seems like she's the kind of person who could easily genuinely believe that (or even genuinely believe that she's obvious town in any game that she is town). I guess my townread stems from I don't see anything from her that I don't think could come from town, I kind of jive with sheep's description that it feels like she's vibing her own way and doesn't especially care about perceptions. Like yeah saying "i'm the towniest person in the thread" is outwardly caring about perceptions but it's also like, the way in which she's doing it is a little brusque for scum possibly.

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(also hbd skitter!)

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skitter saying she didn't understand the Drew wagon and then switching to putting Drew at the bottom of her reads list specifically without explaining it until asked is possibly a towntell? I feel like if skitter-scum is catching up and makes that comment about Drew she'd usually feel the need to justify herself when she then puts drew in the bottom of a reads list, just flipping on a dime with no explanation and no relevant intervening content is sort of an unintuitive thing for scum to do.

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I think @implosion it would be nice if you could explain your read on sheep

Lots of things. Many of his posts individually ping me as town. His overall vibe in the thread feels like town who is willing to put their mind out there and be judged. Just going through his ISO for some random examples:

241 is a great post with a townie mindset that's not really how scum would approach it if they were trying to like, slyly attack CSF because it's giving CSF an easy out and just trying to start conversation (I guess theoretically it could be scum/scum). The frequency/way in which he changes his mind is townie; he flipped to townreads on Alianna and Woo and yeah, it was at the same time as other people but... that's because those things did things that could be reasonably read as town. He doesn't read as having the impetus that scum have to Get Someone Else Limmed. He feels agendaless. He's given less original reasoning than I'd remembered but still some. There's little things, like 45 which just (i think authentically) screams "yeah I'm not afraid of interacting with people, I have nothing to hide"

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I feel like Enchant is the one player on this site that I can read with some degree of accuracy and replacing in and making two posts with nothing in them is not the best look. I'm biased of course but.

Andante claiming undisclosed PR is whatever. I'm happy to ignore her for today.

I'm kind of falling out of fervor this game a little bit. Like not seeing a whole lot of reason to rethink anything.

Menalque's posts don't really make me think anything in particular about him.

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Implo how confident are u on enchant rn? How much of that is meta and how much of it os based on doctor drew?

It's like 90% based on Drew, I'd need to play with Enchant for more to read

confidently

based only on Enchant's play but dislike what they have so far, in essence.

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and Woo vote

that's easy: was calling the Andy wagon good but not joining, unvoted enchant!slot because of the rep out/in when that doesn't have any effect on the alignment of the slot itself

I feel like unvoting when there's a replacement is a pretty normal thing to do? I mean I don't disagree that I'd rather the vote have stayed (though for me it's because it's the wagon I want to push) but like, people unvote to see what the replacement's gonna do like, all the time.

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Enchant has now been here 24 hours without giving a single statement of any import whatsoever.

This isn't what Enchant town rep-in looks like. Here is the canonical Enchant town rep-in. He immediately starts talking about the game, giving thoughts on game-relevant stuff, is easy to read almost immediately off this.

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Enchant has now been here 24 hours without giving a single statement of any import whatsoever.

This isn't what Enchant town rep-in looks like. Here is the canonical Enchant town rep-in. He immediately starts talking about the game, giving thoughts on game-relevant stuff, is easy to read almost immediately off this.

Compare this scum rep-in; he posts game-relevant stuff a bit under a day later rather than immediately.

Compare this scum game (not a replace-in) where I had Enchant dead to rights d1:

Enchant's 2 posts so far ring much truer to what I know of his scum game than his town game; at least, to my memory, I've seen him actually play the game as town and decidedly not play the game as scum (though I'm probably going to over-weight that scum game in my mind because I knew he was scum all game).

Wagon Enchant *at least* until they do something. Anything. Please.

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I GOT KILLED BECAUSE I PICKED BULLETPROOF WHICH WAS RIGHT CHOICE I WILL MAKE AS TOWN BECAUSE BEING IMMORTAL IS DOPE

i called you scum for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with your pick and i wanted to lim you on d1 in spite of you potentially being a cop

do things in this game please

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i very simply cannot make a case better than is being made in front of my eyes

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and to be clear i would not be tunneling here if not for drew's play but yeah this slot is scum, please just lim it

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god i always forget i need to type :X instead of : x

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why did yall push enchant? enchant literally claimed pr the second they repped in...
VOTE: Aisa

this vote is good

i do not care! what enchant is claiming! because enchant is scum.

what about pushing dunn or woo? if you need people to push "for doing nothing" I haven't seen anything substantial from either of them

These people do not have meta of doing nothing as scum, and they also did not replace into Doctor Drew's slot!

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And also they aren't doing nothing. Dunn had interesting comments on Alianna's reads list. Woo was doing nothing for a while, got prodded, and is now doing things. Not a ton of things, granted, but 407 is content, and many other posts are also game-relevant. Enchant's ISO has no actual content. Read it. It could have content if Enchant plays the game, but Not Playing the Game in the way Enchant is doing right now, is Enchant's scum meta.

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Andante invis posted at 3:17, you voted invis at 3:20 and then you said invis had disappeared at 3:26. have you considered that you aren't being reasonable

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do people actually tr invisibility? or like if I was a hypothetical vig… would people be mad if I shot invis tonight?

i'd actually be kinda furious tbh

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your vote has no power when no one agrees with you.

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and trying to convince you of anything with how you're playing right now seems like

way

more effort than it's worth.

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Enchant's slot has been scummy but I'm not totally convinced and only like one person being really against the lim makes me feel nervous

I don't think scum's inclination in this gamestate to the pressure on Enchant-scumbuddy would be to defend in particular.

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- So this is like Dunn’s first read? I’m not a fan of how earlier Dunn went after whoever for the activity reads list, but then left it at that, possibly makes Dunn and Alianna partners? Which is why Dunn seemed so passionate about that? Cause this would be Dunn’s 2nd read.. and there’s like no passion with it, but for Alianna, Dunn went as far as to screenshot the activity levels… and seemed confident in alianna scum, but then just dropped that thought? Cause the general Alianna SR was fading? Maybe…

Andante I have literally no idea what point you're trying to make here :/. This post was posted by Dunnstral *twelve minutes* after he voted Alianna. How is that "leaving it at that"? Should Dunn continue to case Alianna for an hour for it to be a real scumread? How can you possibly criticize someone for like, dropping a scumread they were passionate about... when they literally decide to mention any read on another person twelve minutes later. And why does it matter if someone is more passionate about one read than another? Like, it's more than normal to want to explain a scumread in depth but not care about explaining a townread. I honestly don't understand how you're interpreting this game, unless I'm wildly misinterpreting your points.

- Back to like throwing shade at Alianna? Without fully pushing alianna… like Dunn’s stance in regards to Alianna feels like partners, hesitant to just full on go after alianna, but still wants the town points for an alianna scum flip…

Similarly here, what does "full on go after alianna" even mean to you. Dunn explained a scumread on the slot and voted there. What do you want Dunn to do, tunnel???

I'm not convinced Dunn is town or anything but I just cannot follow any of the logic here.

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I really do hope there's no SK and Andante has to lose face over this implosion-is-the-SK bullshit because it's actually irking me.

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I don't think I've been guilt-tripped in a Mafia game before

underrated post.

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Here's a bonus game of Enchant meta. My "being able to read" Enchant in that game doesn't count for anything (because I was informed that they were scum) but I said the exact same thing in that game:

they've also literally done nothing before or after the quickhammer. Like their iso has strictly less content than progo's. when enchant replaced in to diffusion of power they got like, instantly locktowned by like 4 people, their town play is not hard to spot and this is not it

So Andante, when you make posts like this:

DUNN IS LITERALLY SCUM BY PLAY THIS GAME AND BY META. Scum!Dunn plays just like this.. ughh this is freaking annoying

...but you also ignore my Enchant read, which I could phrase the

exact same way

, I immediately feel like I have no reason to listen to anything you're saying because your response amounts to, more or less, "uhhh nah that slot is obviously town".

My thoughts on Dunn right now amount to this: I thought their entrance was townie. I think that significantly less so in the context of them not doing anything for days. I don't really feel the need to cement the read one way or another before getting more content because I want to flip Enchant today.

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Regarding Andante, I think my read on her is now in the vicinity of "town, but can still be persuaded otherwise by someone who knows more about her". I don't think her Dunn case is scummy by any means, I just don't understand it at all (except for activity points). It's entirely possible that it's actually a good case that I just cannot physically parse.

I think her trajectory through this game sort of makes sense with how she'd feel as town; I think going to read people and latching onto a Dunn scumread is something she could definitely do as town. I think I tend to read her general sense of being pissed at the game state, like her indignance at the Enchant wagon and at people refusing to join her on Dunn, as townish. I think in that context her being pissed at people for not townreading her and assuming that she is the shining beacon of towniness is consistent with her mindset, it's just such a foreign mindset to me.

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Here's a bonus game of Enchant meta. My "being able to read" Enchant in that game doesn't count for anything (because I was informed that they were scum) but I said the exact same thing in that game:

haha is that game where we tried to bus hell out of each other but town killed each other?

I have no idea what the game was like from scum's perspective, most of what I remember is really not being sure how to play the setup and stuff like that.

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i mean it feels like you aren't even pretending to be town in this game either >_>

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I really do hope there's no SK and Andante has to lose face over this implosion-is-the-SK bullshit because it's actually irking me.

She hasnt brought this up in a while so this comment feela fairly out of place

no, she brought it up this morning

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Menalque's i-have-the-solve-just-wait-and-see thing (679) is definitely peculiar. It's kind of coloring the rest of his play for me. If he's town it seems like he's keeping cards close to his chest and playing on the periphery, which is hard for me to read because I'm really not sure why he'd be acting that way as scum but I also find it hard to imagine why he'd feel the need to play this game in this way as town. I just find it peculiar. Maybe it does just make sense as scum, idk. The reason it kind of doesn't jive as just scummy is that I'm not sure why he wouldn't just be explaining things as scum, like the obvious scum motivation for being coy on the periphery is so that you can change your reads on the fly if needed but I don't really think this is a game state where scum would feel the need to do anything like that.

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Why the out-of-the-gate Aisa vote, sheep?

I think we need to pressure Dunn at this point. I also think skitter is a candidate for scum worth considering/looking closer at.

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Why is csf strong town?

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Really? I didn't cause us to eliminate town yesterday. Maybe we should re-examine our priorities? Implosion from what I can tell you were pushing Enchant's slot pretty hard yesterday. Any thoughts on the rest of the wagon?

This is a pretty weird take. Why would we

automatically

hunt on the wagon? You have among the lowest post count yesterday (only lower is ceph who I guess I'm sort of less certain how to interact with since he seems to be viscerally distant from the game). In particular you had about 4 days where you made a single post that was about Andante bogging the game down (fair, but not content). You were the closest thing to a counterwagon at the end. Me saying I think you're deserving of pressure

is

me re-examining my priorities..

I was pushing Enchant very hard. I'm fairly responsible for the lim, and I don't think it was an especially bad one practically since it landed on a VT who was doing nothing. But I was pushing Enchant because I thought there was a very good case for the slot being scum; because I think the case was convincing (after all, I was the one making it), I don't automatically think people on the wagon are scummy for being on the wagon. Scum shot on the wagon, after all.

I can give my opinion of the people on the wagon but I really see not much special about being on that wagon. I still think sheep is pretty hard town, as I would invis if he hadn't been shot. Alianna is potentially scum. skitter, like I said, is a candidate for scum who I need to look more critically at. Ceph is as I mentioned in this post already kind of detached from the game and I'm not sure what to do with him.

But like, going back to Dunn's post here, "I didn't cause us to eliminate town yesterday" is like, such a thought-terminating cliche. Yeah, I know I led a mislim. And?

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Why the out-of-the-gate Aisa vote, sheep?

I think we need to pressure Dunn at this point. I also think skitter is a candidate for scum worth considering/looking closer at.

Hmmm?

More or less a burden of I-should-think-you're-townier-by-now iirc is where the initial trepidation is coming from. I don't especially jibe with your Andante push yesterday (though of course, I still could be wrong) and (as I said above) while I don't think voting Enchant is a scummy action it certainly isn't something that gets free town points either. I'm not sure why you're leading the day the way you are either. Is your sketchiness on me coming from me saying I'm suspicious of you, or otherwise? If otherwise, where is it coming from? Why do you want to hunt on wagon specifically (which is how I'm interpreting 942 as justification for voting Ceph)?

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I think it's also worth considering Menalque to be on-wagon yesterday since Enchant self-hammered in response to Menalque threatening. That said, as I said, I don't see off/on wagon as an important distinguishing characteristic of the set of players.

I think Menalque's i-have-a-grand-vision-of-the-game spiel is the sort of thing that I personally have a tendency to erroneously townread sometimes, so I'm going to throw out why I think I do townread it to open it to criticism. I think to make that series of posts as scum, Menalque would have had to make a lot of effort to essentially role play as someone who feels like they have the game solved. Me personally, at least, that's not like the level of effort I'd put in as scum for something that isn't even really guaranteed to get a townread or an analysis like I'm giving here. It'd be almost theatrical as scum to the point where I have trouble imagining it coming from scum.

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Honestly, Ceph also gives me a gut town vibe with his entrance today, and the exact flavor of his apathy. I know pretty factually based on what I know of Ceph that this is almost certainly not proper justification for a townread and I imagine he'll say he's entirely within his scumrange so far.

I like vizzy, implo, and doctor drew so far

Amusingly I now know this is 3 for 3. I don't know if that says much about skitter's alignment though.

I guess in some way here's where my paranoia of skitter stems from. When she posted her reads list, my immediate thought was "dang, that's a pretty great reads list that I agree with on essentially everything but Andante" and it made me feel good about the state of the game as being good for town. But there's also a nagging feeling that that reads list could be constructed precisely to capitalize on the way the game was going and push exactly the wrong things for town. Like, if Andante-slot is town, then this reads list essentially sets up the first two mislims of Drew and Andante back-to-back without really being contentious because both of those are the people at the bottom of her reads list that had some broad support (maybe Andante didn't have

broad

support, idk, but I think she was clearly a viable wagon).

Essentially, while that reads list reflected how I feel about all but one player, it's a read list that could potentially have a lot of utility for scum to capitalize on popular wrong reads while also being able to like, gain some distancing cred from a potential CSF or Alianna scumbuddy who is much less likely to be a wagon in the near future. And right now I think both those people are also viably scum.

[implosion]

I think you are the one with the weird take. Why would you ignore day one and go after the lowest post counts instead?

Yes I was asking why I was getting voted yesterday, and in response one person said they were in full survival mode, another said they were big brain, and a third didn't respond to me and then rage quit when they didn't get their way

Yes I agree that Menalque is town. I also think Andante slot, now meg, is probably town.

I mean... "going after the lowest post counts" is in a very literal sense not ignoring day one. And also I'm not going after "the lowest post counts", I'm going after you. Ceph has a lower post count and I'm not going after him right now. As I described, I had liked your opening and it felt like you dropped off a cliff and unlike Ceph who it feels like has been always present but disconnected, you've been entirely-not-here for days at a time and it feels like there are vast swathes of the game that you never experienced. Ceph has given an aura of having a hard time getting into the game, and the automatic response to that on d1 was to give him space to do so; your entrance gave the impression that you felt engaged by the game given that you had a material read on Alianna but then you vanished into thin air.

Like, if Andante-slot is town, then this reads list essentially sets up the first two mislims of Drew and Andante back-to-back without really being contentious because both of those are the people at the bottom of her reads list that had some broad support (maybe Andante didn't have broad support, idk, but I think she was clearly a viable wagon).

But they opened today by voting Cephrir, so how are they trying to set up Andante?

First I want to emphasize: I am not saying skitter is doing this. My full read on skitter right now is "idk". I'm trying to explain why I think her play can be consistent with scum; essentially I think her reads list could come from town because I agreed with it broadly and it could come from scum because this sort of utility could come from it.

With that out of the way: 1, my point isn't about today. Scum don't need to follow through on a plan that they made in the middle of day 1 at the start of day 2. But 2, I think this question has a simple answer: Andante has been replaced overnight by someone who has yet to catch up, and claimed a PR between skitter's reads list (at least I think it was afterward, too lazy to check) and now. It'd be pretty wild for skitter to launch into today guns blazing for Andante with those factors in mind.

[implosion]

I think one thing I’m curious about,

@implosion

, is why you decided to make your case 24 hours after Enchant subbed in. Did you ever think about waiting a bit longer to see if Enchant would do something before accusing him? How certain were you that he was going to flip scum?

The thought didn't cross my mind. I had a pre-existing strong scumread on the slot and the rep-in gave no reads in 24 hours. Of course I was going to tunnel the slot and cement my read. I was about as certain as I can be in a scumread which, to be fair, I'm not really all that good at this game. But it's pretty rare for me to have that level of confidence on day 1. I don't think giving Enchant more than 24 hours would have magically changed anything in any meaningful way. Them being cased by me was in no way stopping them from giving any actual content.

@skitter's post to me, I don't really have any comment. That way of looking at the wagon is sensible enough. I don't think I'm like interested at all in pushing skitter today at this point.

@skitter vs ceph: I agree with skitter that Ceph calling her push a reach is... well, not great. I think her explanation of "this is how I'd expect scum to join this wagon" is eminently a sensible explanation even if Ceph is town. Like, she's not saying that town can't do those things, she's saying that the combination of all of them is what she thinks scum would look like. Ceph's response to this is essentially "no, I had reasons to interact with the wagon in all those ways" and like, sure, but there being explanatory reasons that you can give doesn't invalidate the point.

I think it's reasonable for him to be annoyed (as he viscerally seems to be) over the "real conviction" argument. It'd be a bit weird if he wasn't. If he's scum I'd expect him to do it anyway because he'd probably feel caught-for-the-wrong-reasons.

The point about an emotional component is interesting because my immediate thought on that was that you don't need an emotional component to push someone. I was definitely fairly emotional in my push on the slot, though I don't know how strongly it comes through in my posting because of my playstyle. I think it does sort of come through in Ceph's posts to a minor degree but if Ceph is town then Ceph is telling the truth about being super disengaged yesterday and if that's the case then it'd make sense for his posts on the wagon to not really have an invested emotional component.

(Still have more to comment on but posting now since discussion is active)

[implosion]

You can talk about replace-outs after they happen (I think, I could be forgetting something but don't think I am). I personally think it's a good idea to never ascribe meaning to them on principle. I think it makes the game less fun but also essentially the rules right now are designed so that it is minimally possible to learn anything about the replacee from their replacing out, since they aren't allowed to say anything about it, so it's fundamentally a hard place to learn anything concrete.

i think you're usually good at mafia and the fact you can't find me as town right now makes me think that you are scum, regardless of what words you want to attach to that. i just don't buy that that is where town you wants to vote right now end of sentence

This is, kind of bs tbh. I mean I did essentially burden-of skitter two pages ago but like... a direct burden of proficiency argument against someone on you, who as far as I'm aware have a reputation as pretty hard to read, when skitter has an

eminently

reasonable line of thought to voting you right now.

Do you disagree with her framing of the game as "I'd be surprised if there are 0 scum on the wagon" and looking at those slots? Do you disagree with her for wanting to look at you before Alianna, sheep, or me, given that sheep and I have been I think pretty broadly townread this game? You've been spending 3/4 of the game saying you've had a hard time getting into it and no one has really pressured you up to this point. How should skitter magically be finding you as town??? At least, how should she have already done it a page ago?

Like, I can understand being frustrated and having indignation. I'm not saying that this is scummy from you, just that it's a very bad reason to scumread skitter.

I am glad to see you going through other people methodically.

[implosion]

I'd wagon Alianna if you want to.

[implosion]

mhm. I don't think he's "bleeding green" but I also do think nothing about his reaction here particularly says scum to me. I am sort of a sucker for indignance to some degree (see also: Andante). And either way Ceph is eminently Doing Things moreso than he had been so I think this is a good result either way.

What are your feelings on Dunn right now?

[implosion]

Hooray, I get to do Math!

From skitter pov (or any on-wagon pov), there are 4 potential scum on wagon and 6 off wagon. Assume for simplicity (not safe to assume this, but whatever, it won't affect the takeaway) that there are exactly 3 scum.

The right question is emphatically not "is it likely that there are scum on the wagon". Obviously everyone agrees that's statistically likely. The question is, do you think it's likelier

than random chance would predict

that there is scum on the wagon. The raw probability from skitter's PoV of there being 0 scum on the wagon is 6 choose 3 (number of ways for all scum to be off wagon) over 10 choose 3 (number of ways for scum to be among the whole player list) which is exactly 1/6. So from a numbers standpoint, you should only be focusing on hunting on wagon based on the argument "it's likely some scum was on the wagon" if you think you can justify those odds being better than 5 in 6. Of course there's usually going to be scum on the wagon by raw numbers, but that is no justification for hunting on-wagon rather than off-wagon unless we're *more likely* to find scum on-wagon than off-wagon, i.e. if you think our odds are better than 5/6, which you'd need to justify.

Of course this is also ignoring

how many

scum are on-wagon and the numbers are different for someone off-wagon (from their perspective, it's 11/12 that there's at least one scum on the wagon, I believe). It's specifically responding to this phrasing of reasoning:

I think that there was at least one scum on wagon. It's possible that there were 0, for sure, but i think this universe is a lot less likely than the universe where there is at least one scum vote, so i'm concentrating here

Like, it's also

exceedingly

likely that there was at least one scum vote off the wagon, from skitter's point of view: in fact random chance would say that all 3 scum were on the wagon only 1 out of 30 times. So the same exact reasoning can be used to justify why we ought to look off the wagon. Of course the reason that the reasoning fails in both cases unless you think it's likelier than the baseline probability is that like, you might be 29/30 sure that there's at least one scum out of the 6 players off-wagon, but you might have to mislim 3 of them before figuring that out.

All this is to say: numbers are a silly thing to point to. "There's probably scum on the wagon" needs to be justified by means of why you think scum would be incentivized to vote Enchant, not by raw numbers.

[implosion]

Catching up out of order.


I saw skitter say sheep is coasting. Strongly disagree that sheep is coasting off the townread. I feel like he keeps posting new ideas, like 1021 and 1038 on Aisa. He immediately responded to Aureal's reads post calling it towny. His thoughts are evolving with the game, he isn't coasting. I also think 1038's Aisa scum reasoning has merit.

Like i said before, i find it easier to look for 1 scum in 4 than 2 scum in 6 (b/c the pool is smaller and there's fewer slots to look at), so i'm approaching it this way, whether or not it's mathematically correct

Sure. It's fine to want a pool to focus on. Why pick the on-wagon votes instead of, say, your 4 biggest prior scumreads?

Also for the third paragraph, i don't get it. If there's 1/6 of a chance of 0 scum onwagon, there's 5/6 of not 0 scum on-wagon (i.e. that there is a scum on wagon), so this seems like a good place to look

Yes, the point is that there's 5/6 of not 0 scum in

any

randomly chosen pool of 4 people from any townie's point of view. Those are the baseline odds. So you should think that there's even *greater* odds than 5/6 before you're willing to say "this group of 4 people is a good one to narrow my search to", because otherwise you might as well pick the alphabetically earliest four non-confirmed players fypov and you'd have equal 5/6 odds of at least 1 scum.

I found this post really hard to parse, the way you wrote it.
To be clear, what is your read (including strength) on Mena? If it has changed since then, no biggie but if you could remember exactly what it was at that time that would be cool.

At that point I didn't know how to read him, at this point I'm inclined to call him somewhat town. Certainly not locktown.

[implosion]

I think I am actually now at Dunn as maybe strong town? His Andante spiel is more likely to come from town, his overall vibe over today at this point just doesn't fit right as scum, idk. He feels pretty agenda-free.

[implosion]

I am quite offput by skitter's saying that she wants to vote sheep because sheep is coasting. I feel like he is explicitly not coasting and I'd like to know her justification for why she thinks he is.

My reads amount to something like the following (partially making this so I have a reference to myself about who replaced who >.>)

sheep
Dunn, Meg
Menalque, Aureal
Ceph
skitter
Egix
Aisa
Delta

This is pretty strongly in flux and there's a lot of people I am tempted to swap but in particular need to decide how I feel about Aisa because I'm really going back and forth on her from moment to moment (it might be more accurate to just not put her in the list yet), need to look more closely at egix/csf.

I'm not voting Delta yet just because catchup and it'd be e-2. (There isn't really any particular reason I didn't vote the slot before now though and I could easily imagine a catchup changing my mind)

[implosion]

My conflict on Aisa right now is from a variety of things. In particular this intrigues me:

Egix can u describe ur strong Aisa townread

It's mainly because of the reaction test she performed on GWoo (331 to 347)

Plus I felt town vibes from 490 and 573.

This intrigues me on both Aisa's and Egix's alignments actually. I think the fact that Egix is willing to call the reaction test hard-town is interesting. Maybe not that interesting on second thought but maybe. I personally find myself trying to get into the mindset of in what circumstances scum might make that series of posts in the reaction test. I'm going back and forth in how I'm writing this post but I think maybe that scum would both have a hard time coming up with the reaction test and also would opt not to post it. They'd have a hard time coming up with it because they'd have to notice the weird detail about Woo thinking it's 5 votes to lim and then think "how can I use my noticing this detail to make myself look more town? Oh i'll fake a reaction test". But more relevantly I think if Aisa sees the opportunity to do this as scum, she probably wouldn't take it because as scum I think you'd feel like there's a big risk that you're going to like, nearly clear Woo's slot in everyone's eyes. Of course, that would be a good thing if Aisa + Woo were scum together but I feel like that level of theatrics are pretty unlikely.

So yeah I'm back to Aisa town I think. Idk.

[implosion]

That's fair enough with meta context.

[implosion]

@implo, is the Meg read based on meg or on andante? Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to look at your iso yet as part of catch up and don’t really now either so if it’s explained and im missing it just point me at where pls

Based on Andante entirely. It's been updated since last time I explained it, I agree with whoever said that her absolute indignation at the Enchant lim would be kind of wild coming from scum. The last I explained of it was here.

[implosion]

I'm getting very thrown off by the grinding wheel of replacements.

Regarding Menalque 1136 re: Andante, I don't think it's like "oh, Andante might have reacted badly to the pressure on her so we can't rule out her being town". It's more "Andante reacted to the pressure exactly how I'd expect her to react to the pressure as, well, either alignment". I don't think that it's really alignment-indicative and that's not really the main point I'm making in the post you quoted. Like, you give no reason why her being "overly sensitive" is scum-indicative. You just say "the fact she could have reacted this way as town isn't clearing" and yeah, it's not

clearing

, the slot isn't

clear

, but it is a reason to not call her scum for that. And after that you talk about her reads being bad but that also has no tie to alignment on d1 as far as I'm concerned. I think it's eminently possible for people to have townread Enchant yesterday as town, etc. I just feel like you're throwing out a lot of "this could come from Andante-scum, so it's not clearing" but I don't see anything that's more likely to come from scum and I do see things more likely to come from town, it's not just "Andy is indignant and irritated". Like the exact way and timing with which she pushed Enchant isn't coherent with her being scum IMO, it's just like some risk no reward. I kind of feel like you're talking past me and now I'm talking past you.

[implosion]

Yes, but also there are certain regions of my brain that are not very good at remembering that, so it all remains to be seen!

...town post?

Why does it matter for one slot but not the other?

Not to answer in Ceph's stead but as someone who would have given the same answers to those questions so far as Ceph, it matters for one slot but not the other because I townread the Andante slot and scumread the Alianna slot. If a slot I already townread gets replaced twice my gut reaction is "oh okay sure whatever". If a slot I scumread, and then got replaced and i scumread the replacement (note: i didn't have any read on deltabreedy's posting but it didn't assuage the alianna scumread), and then that slot gets replaced again, then well my gut emotional reaction would be "fuck that, this slot is scum, I'm not putting in the effort to read a

third

person when i already scumread the first two"

With all that said, I do have that reaction toward fire a bit. I'm happy to interact with fire directly at some point as they say they want, it's probably valuable to do so regardless of the slot's alignment. Right now my feelings are that I'm still okay just limming fire unless fire becomes like super ultra obvious town (and I nullread their play

so far

more or less, though with some bias toward reading it as scum because of the slot). But I'd also be quite happy to run up Egix right now.

[implosion]

But I'd also be quite happy to run up Egix right now.

Whatcha need?

Yeah as skitter said, content and involvement. You've thus far gone rep-in -> catchup post -> not much. You voted Delta based on a single post Alianna made, it was pointed out that that post wasn't actually as scummy as you might think and you rhetorically backed off from the read while keeping the vote for the time being, which now you've unvoted.

So as of now you have... 0 expressed scumreads?

[implosion]

I kind of see why Menalque immediately responds that way to fire's 1203 beyond just the post calling Menalque out. It feels like a very overwrought thought process. Like this assertion that Menalque must have had the whole spiel planned out from before the woo vote as town when like, part of what he was doing was asking questions.

like fire, you're saying "I don't find his reads progression believable, it doesn't seem like he genuinely had this planned since before the woo vote and all he does is ask a bunch of questions then give this big reveal" and like. yeah... the point of questions is to change your mind? I think at least part of this is me misinterpreting something but this whole post from fire just feels like either scum having a conclusion that they think they can justify and wanting to justify it, or possibly town who got a gut scumread on Menalque from reading and is now trying to back-justify why that scumread makes sense in the context of his progression without having really thought much about it before typing the words out because the read actually came from gut. And it doesn't sound like that's what fire

thinks

the read is. This probably doesn't make any sense though so alas

[implosion]

I dislike the replacements therefore scummy idea that's getting pushed.

I don't *think* anyone was actually pushing that idea? I'm certainly not.

I don't think fire is

obvscum

here and I won't be surprised if he flips town but I am definitely on board with flipping him.

[implosion]

I kind of see why Menalque immediately responds that way to fire's 1203 beyond just the post calling Menalque out. It feels like a very overwrought thought process. Like this assertion that Menalque must have had the whole spiel planned out from before the woo vote as town when like, part of what he was doing was asking questions.

like fire, you're saying "I don't find his reads progression believable, it doesn't seem like he genuinely had this planned since before the woo vote and all he does is ask a bunch of questions then give this big reveal" and like. yeah... the point of questions is to change your mind? I think at least part of this is me misinterpreting something but this whole post from fire just feels like either scum having a conclusion that they think they can justify and wanting to justify it, or possibly town who got a gut scumread on Menalque from reading and is now trying to back-justify why that scumread makes sense in the context of his progression without having really thought much about it before typing the words out because the read actually came from gut. And it doesn't sound like that's what fire

thinks

the read is. This probably doesn't make any sense though so alas

this seems to ignore menalque's multiple posts about having something cooking? or am i misunderstanding?

Eh I kind of got rambly in the post. Part of the point I was trying to make is Menalque talked about something cooking but also that doesn't mean that that thing that was cooking was some fixed immovable position, it could have changed in response to answers from questions

I dislike the replacements therefore scummy idea that's getting pushed.

I don't *think* anyone was actually pushing that idea? I'm certainly not.

I don't think fire is

obvscum

here and I won't be surprised if he flips town but I am definitely on board with flipping him.

No? Maybe I've misinterpreted you agreeing with Cephrir, who definitely was trying to add fuel to the wagon because of the replacement. I guess you did say earlier that you don't like to ascribe meaning to replacements, which is more aligned with my thinking, so I'm confused why you started answering for Cephrir about the subject.

I answered that question (not for him) because I figured my answer would be sufficient to dispel your confusion over it because I thought it was a fairly easy question to answer and that Ceph's answer was clear to me since I had roughly the same point of view.

[implosion]

I am a little curious about fire's list of leading voices too, I don't think I'm

exactly

a leading voice today though I definitely was yesterday. Also curious what specifically about the gamestate makes fire think that someone in the driver's seat is likely scum - just because the most likely lim today is a mislim from fire's pov?

[implosion]

Aisa is ostensibly locktown for like this entire page, IMO.

[implosion]

I am starting to buy that sheep could be scum. Feels like he's been left behind in the gamestate. I'm also open to hearing what Aisa has to say about Aureal.

I think the townreads I feel best about in this exact moment are Aisa, Menalque, then Dunnstral, followed by Ceph and Aureal and then probably still sheep. Leaving fire/skitter/egix (which is very much Not The Scumteam lol) and the vacant Andantemeg slot which I guess I still think is town but golly it'd be nice to have someone piloting the slot.

[implosion]

id prob hero solve it at skitter/aureal/sheep at this exact moment tbh

i would like to hear more abt how me/sheep make sense as a team, ty

I think you two make sense as teamed. Your push that sheep is coasting can make perfect sense from the perspective of scum who sees that their partner is starting to lose steam; either you spur them on to keep up their initial level of commitment or you get credit as one of the first people to point out that actually the consensus townread was perhaps misplaced if the town later turns on them. If you are both scum and you genuinely did believe that sheep was starting to coast, or if like sheep said in the scum PT that he wasn't gonna be able to keep up the same level of effort or something like that, then that trajectory would be a very sensible way to play.

i am not really caught up from my previous post, just skimmed, but glad to see that the empty slot is filled; should have more thoughts tomorrow.

[implosion]

Can you briefly explain why you scumread the Alianna / Delta slot before Delta replaced out?

It was only based on Alianna and I've semi-forgotten a lot of it at this point and it doesn't look like I ever really explained it. I think it was a combination of Dunn's initial post on her making me look critically at the slot and then like the way she interacted with the game was just never really especially substantive. At least it was probably something like that, alas.


I kind of like sheep's 1366; in particular I feel like my reads have been all over the place this game and I feel like it's been a pretty hard game to lock down concrete reads in. skitter did reconsider on sheep obviously but it feels like the framing of focusing on looking for scum on the wagon has sort of led to not really having much evolution on her takes on other people. If skitter is town then it's just a consequence of the way she's thinking about the game I guess.

skitter's description of me as town that she has found raises a question for her: why am I not dubious for the same reason as sheep? Obviously our ISOs are different and sheep is probably a better scum player than i am based on the meta that was said earlier (i don't actually know this but etc) but I was definitely drastically more engaged and active yesterday and today I've kind of fallen into a pattern of coasting.


fire's 1395 is an interesting point.

For sheep, here is possibly my most recent scum game. I haven't played much mafia recently so it's 2 years old.


I don't really like skitter's explanation of the origin of her Andante suspicion. Yeah, "implosion is the SK" isn't a typical thought you'd expect town to have, but like, that's not a reason to scumread it. Like, scum know that town doesn't typically think someone is an SK on page 3. What would scum's motivation be for faking that read on page 3? I'm sure that some motivation could be given but it just feels like a very weird take to me and I don't know if I buy the immediate reaction to the super weird take being that it's an atypical thing for town to think therefore it's scummy; Andante isn't exactly the platonic ideal archetypical canonical mafia player. It's pretty unsurprising for her to have a weird take on page 3 as either alignment.

Well, it's quite hard to get you above four votes (you've been sitting there for several irl days), a whole lot of people seem interested in voting me

I think this is meaningless, I was planning on voting the slot while waiting for replacements for a long time and so was at least one other person IIRC.

Reminder to self to read merlyn's 1469 later at some point

[implosion]

i am more or less caught up. I am inclined right now to back the skitter wagon. I think my next task is to take another closer look at Menalque's fireisredsir case and see how much of it I buy; I think their recent posting is consistently nudging me toward thinking that they're town. Somewhat I think skitter should be having somewhat more second thoughts about fire somewhere in her ISO if she's town. I don't know how much I buy that fire's recent posting is actually town vs it just feeling town on a gut level but I think that fire's arc of reasoning on Menalque and now skitter makes a lot of sense coming from town, I think the sort of barely-earned townread on me is also kind of unlikely to come from fire-scum? Like I haven't really done jack shit in my mind since fire was sussing me so I think fire-scum would probably want to keep the avenue open, though it's entirely possible that fire is scum and just thinks I'm not a viable lim candidate so it's not worth it?

[implosion]

Starting at the point in Menalque's ISO where he calls fire scum and seeing how I feel about all his fire=scum takes. Doing this as an ISO so I won't see any fire responses but also I don't really want to, I want to evaluate the points on their own merits.

1223: this feels like heavily misinterpreting what fire is saying, in a way that feels motivated by not liking the push because it's on Menalque himself. fire is pretty clearly saying "this thing from Menalque isn't as townish as people are saying it is, and I think other scummy things he's done outweigh it" and fire is being pretty explicitly clear about that. The "wowww" is like, rhetorical, and explaining why that thing

could

come from Menalque scum and not why it is

most likely

coming from Menalque scum. Like it's entirely possible for a person to think that player X has done x thing that is slightly +town and y thing that is majorly -town and therefore that player X is scum; that's essentially what fire is saying here and it feels like a lot of Menalque's points are just misinterpreting this.

Honestly looking at this and other posts is making me feel bad about Menalque >_> in a vacuum away from the rest of his play this whole push looks really like scum who feels like they earned the mislim on fire and wants to shove it through. I guess it maybe makes more sense in the context of his talking about how he's playing in a way influenced by Koba, but it still doesn't sit right and it feels like Menalque is looking at every post from fire with heavily tinted glasses. If I'm being honest I haven't actually read the post from Menalque (or at least not the whole thing) that everyone else is townreading him for yet. Maybe I'll read it myself later but for now I don't feel the need to actually look closer at my read on him because he's a consensus townread and I think this is definitely explainable as town who is pissed at someone for what he perceived as a really shitty push on him. Actually as I read more I'm maybe convincing myself back out of this that it's scummy at all for Menalque but I really do think if he's town he's taking this philosophy of Koba's too far (though of course if Menalque is town and fire is just scum then well, I guess I can't complain?)

1243: I don't understand why "terrible play" means scummy. Like, Menalque says this:

is just such a bad decision given that when I'm town if I actually try I can retrace what I was thinking at almost any point in the game provided I have like a bare modicum of notes and the sufficient time to do so

Like. The point Menalque is making here is that fire trying to push Menalque with this rhetorical point is bad scum play because Menalque will be able to deftly parry the point. Like, why does that have anything at all to do with fire's alignment. I could argue that this is a point in favor of fire's argument as being good town play - if he makes a point that's easy for Menalque to parry and respond to and prove that he's town, then, well, he just helped everyone find a townie. And I think fire would say that's exactly what he did... and like... it kind of looks like that's what happened. Like yeah, you're right here in that fire making this easy-to-deflect point

was

a big mistake if you're town and fire is scum, because fire needlessly brought you up to consensus townread. But like... that's great if fire is town. Idk. This feels like extremely aggressively blinders-on tunnelly to me.

1255: I think this is again misinterpreting fire. fire's 1203 that is linked here is definitively

not

"fire's logic behind (Menalque) being joint bottom of his readslist". It is fire responding to skitter's question about why a certain thing is not clearing. Really I don't think fire had given a clear explanation of it at this point. Which is fair enough 12 hours after replacing in imo. He'd given bits and pieces of it but that's not even like whate 1203 was. This whole post from Menalque looks to me like a criticism that fire's thought process behind his reads isn't transparent enough, which I could *very easily* be wildly misinterpreting from Menalque (and in my defense, Menalque is not very explicit in why he finds this scummy in that post). But like, I don't really care about that because fire has been quite open about his reasoning since then.

Gonna stop here for now but Menalque can point me to any other specific posts he thinks are strong.

tl;dr is this: I don't buy any of these as reasons to scumread fire. I think fire's posts on Menalque are things that town could reasonably have thought about Menalque, and I think Menalque's intensity of conviction that fire is flipping scum looks very unwarranted even though I know that a lot of it is explicitly bluster because he essentially said it is bluster when talking about what he's learned from Koba.

[implosion]

Actually I do want to ask fire explicitly: can you outline more specifically including specific posts what it was about Menalque that you initially found scummy and why (or point to where you've done this)?

With all of this said: my read on fire in isolation is ultimately pretty conflicted. I think there is a very real chance that I, as a mafia player, would almost never successfully manage to scumread fire. I think fire's posting style is something that my lizard brain is biased to view as town. Attempting to account for that bias, I think my read on the slot is somewhere in the vicinity of null.


I think fire's points about skitter, on the whole, feel cogent to me. I don't think skitter has given a good response to 1425. I understand that she's busy with moving but the defeatism in 1438 just doesn't sit that right with me. I feel like the instinct should be to solidify around the red wagon, or try to convince Aisa why she's wrong given that skitter agreed that Aisa is town. Partially I just think like, if I were town and someone made post 1425 at me it would really get under my skin and I would be pretty indignant about that.

[implosion]

Interestingly it looks like at this point my vote doesn't swing things; nominally the fire voters are dunn/ceph/skitter/menalque and the skitter voters are egix/fire/sheep/aisa/merlyn/reluctant-aureal, assuming some new candidate doesn't come along.

I think skitter should claim at her next opportunity.

[implosion]

for some reason my eyes glaze over when i try to read aureal's posts :X. I don't think this is her fault but I haven't really been able to analyze them effectively

[implosion]

This game is so hard D:

yeah.

[implosion]

Also @implo: it's not defeatist and i really, really don't like you saying that like on a personal level.

That's fair. I don't mean to say that if you're town you're giving up on the game (and I do recognize the factors of both RL business and the deadline), and I'm sorry for implying that. If you're town I can understand thinking that this course of action is pragmatic, I just disagree that it should immediately seem to be the most pragmatic option fypov when at that point the numbers would have said that fire would die if you could just flip one person.

Fwiw I'm like, semi-open to looking at third party alternatives *in principle* but I don't really want to because I still think there's alright odds skitter flips scum. I am hopeful that massclaiming tomorrow will be illustrative to what's going on in the game and limming a VT claim is obviously conducive to that being productive.

[implosion]

This game right now makes me feel a hearty mixture of despair and curiosity.

I am... softly on board with Just Limming Fire. I think the alternative is massclaim.

[implosion]

implosion being softly down to "Just Lim fire" is like 0.01% weird to me meh

like I get it but switched sides a bit easily

skitter wanted fire gone and like I said yesterday my overall read on fire accounting for me being bad at reading fire was more-or-less-null.

I am at Aisa-fully-locktown right now. I think I am never re-evaluating on her, and if she is scum I'm willing to tank the loss. I think she has played a

ridiculously

good game if she is scum.

The point of Just Lim Fire is that if we are planning to lim fire, we might as well delay massclaim by one extra day so a VT might die when they wouldn't have. If we are massclaiming then fire would be up first so it might be okay for fire to just claim.

[implosion]

I think delaying massclaim by a day can be useful in this setup. It seems like we don't have an SK unless we have a prolific doctor or blocker or scum roleblocker, and if we're able to assume that there's potential to get some confirmations on the number of town roles based on letters so delaying massclaim could let us have some relatively confirmed players tomorrow. Of course if we mislim today and end up in 7p 3:4 tomorrow then sifting through those claims will be a chore and every townie will have to agree to get it right.

I'm sort of neutral on whether we do it today all things considered

[implosion]

As I mentioned, Aisa is town for this page: viewtopic.php?p=13806176#p13806176

To be more specific: the biggest thing is her Aureal trajectory. She changed her mind on her Aureal read unprompted twice in a row without anyone doing anything to cause it then told people to nag her to explain it later. That would require like, so much work to come up with doing as scum. The rest of that page also just screams to me town who is genuinely lost. Her play since then also just keeps looking town to me, plus there's the reaction test thing earlier which I think I landed at "eh this is not locktownable but is significant townpoints" on so yeah, I am close to absolutely unwilling to consider Aisa scum

[implosion]

if there isn't consensus then i sort of think we should massclaim. i disagree with dunn that it's unlikely to help. like, we 100% massclaim tomorrow if we don't today, even if we lim scum today, imo, and i feel a little lost.

That said there might just be consensus to lim fire. I think after

ignoring this game pretty heavily

mulling it over I do want to just lim fire and it seems like it's semi-likely to simply be enough votes.

VOTE: fireisredsir

i'm kind of apathetic about a lot of this game right now but could theoretically be spurred away from apathy

[implosion]

implosion why would we mass claim if there is a consensus elimination like you say?

please reread the following sentences:

if there isn't consensus then i sort of think we should massclaim.

That said there might just be consensus to lim fire.

[implosion]

The fact that there is absolutely no impetus toward limming fire today after what happened yesterday makes me want to revise my stance and agree with skitter/menalque that there is some weird unnatural resistance to limming fire right now. fire is the natural lim; there's been like semi-consensus on fire's slot being scum like twice and nothing happened either time + skitter as she was dying kept saying we need to look at fire (she also said she thought sheep looked even worse than fire but still).

Like dunn/ceph, why are you not voting fire now given you were on the wagon yesterday and it's the leading wagon here? Has something meaningfully changed?

[implosion]

Honestly I don't really know if we need a massclaim right now or not, this gamestate just feels so agonizingly hard to do anything in and massclaim feels like a bandaid to fix that.

[implosion]

Aisa, what's your reasoning on ceph-town? I still do think he's town but still feel the need to second-guess on him.

[implosion]

Someone please reassure me I’m not crazy and I’ve definitely got the game completely solved :3

Someone? Anyone. Cmon. How is this not an attractive proposition?

I think for a while I was at
{implosion, Cephrir, Aureal}
{Menalque, sheep, Egix, fireisredsir, Dunn}

but Egixslot is actually definitely a townslot at least until I change my mind again and it's a stronger read than Ceph. If I swap those I get
{implosion, Egix, Aureal}
{Cephrir, Menalque, sheep, fireisredsir, Dunn}

and I think this also gives me more scumteam options I find compelling to play with

I'll need to mull on Egix.

Why is Menalque in your PoE? I think that he can be scum here but I think it's pretty rare.

If you have convincing reasons on Aureal and Egix then I'm definitely interested in hearing them. Is Egix based primarily on CSF?

Unrelatedly, there's a part of sheep's posting right now that kind of just makes me want to lim him today. 1761/1762 just feel very... exactly-the-thing-scum-has-to-post-here to me. Like it's just the only place he can naturally go now that Aisa is off the table. It feels kinda trite.

[implosion]

So my feelings right now, overall:

I trust Aisa.
I mostly-trust Menalque. Like I mentioned, I think his fire case wasn't convincing and at first blush it felt potentially scummy but as I read it more that feeling didn't stick. I think he's played a very peculiar game if he's scum. He can potentially be re-evaluated after flipping fire but I don't really know if a fire town or fire scum flip would look better or worse for him. Either way, I think he is clearly off the table today.

Aisa trusts Aureal and I lean that way, though I really,

really

should put more effort in than I have to getting a more pinned-down read there.
Aisa trusts Egix. Here I'm shakier, but I am more than happy to have the excuse to take someone out of the lim pool at least for now. I do want to hear what Aisa has to say though.

That leaves fire, Dunn, sheep, and Ceph. I have zero interest in limming Ceph today personally; I think he's most likely town based on various, but it's absolutely a read that can be wrong. So I guess right now I land on fire, Dunn, or sheep as the lim for today. That seems to be not overly controversial (except that Dunn wants Egix and, again, I'm open to hearing stuff about Egix).

Fire is the more-or-less natural lim. His wagon comp seems overall good right now at Menalque + me + Aureal with more people relatively reluctant to join on; this is especially true with me, universally townread, just lazily leading on him very loudly today. With 3 scum in the game out of 9 players, it kind of feels like a fire mislim should be just an easy homerun for them to bring it down to 3:4 (could be an SK, could be only 2 scum, but etc). I think sheep can be partnered to fire pretty easily; the dynamic is potentially there with sheep's turn to fire (which I'll address a bit more in another post shortly).

I guess what I'm saying is that I Want fire To Claim. I either want a fire lim or I want a massclaim. And in either case, I want fire to claim.

[implosion]

So sheep. Honestly, something about the way in which sheep is indecisive right now is really offputting to me. I generally tend to think changing your mind is more often than not something town do more compared to scum. But that's not really exactly what sheep is doing, sheep had this feeling Aisa might be scum but then abandoned that feeling when, tbh, nothing really changed. Yeah Aisa townposted more but it's not like Aisa townposted in a way that she wasn't already doing. It kind of feels like if sheep is town who thinks Aisa is town then he should have figured that out a long time ago, or at least like, I'm not sure why he changed his mind now except that he's scum who just realizes she's never a viable push.

Another thing is these posts from the past couple pages.

whatever maybe I'll just vote fire here

I feel myself caving

I very much feel dunn/fire right now but maybe that's just optimism speaking rather than good reason

the game is screaming to me rn that it's just dunn/fire or egix/aureal

and the third is probably just ceph?? but that is less confident and another week's problem

These feel tonally jarring. I feel like sheep, as a townie, is probably pretty confident broadly. He certainly exuded that early on; I can link posts but early on he gave a lot of reads, analysis, and direction he wanted to go in. Now it's day 3 and he's saying maybe he'll vote fire, but actually maybe dunn, but actually it's dunn/fire or egix/aureal, all this after wanting to go after Aisa for a while and Idk. It just doesn't feel like he's looking at the game through the same pair of eyes he was on day 1. It feels like he should have more opinions on d3 than he had on d1, not fewer. It feels like he's scum who, on d1, had a lot of energy to put into this sort of thing, but that it naturally petered out on d2 and now he kind of doesn't know what he wants to do? I guess that sort of analysis can describe town in principle. I guess for whatever reason I just don't really buy his current set of opinions, how flexible they are, and how he came to them.

[implosion]

The fact that there is absolutely no impetus toward limming fire today after what happened yesterday makes me want to revise my stance and agree with skitter/menalque that there is some weird unnatural resistance to limming fire right now. fire is the natural lim; there's been like semi-consensus on fire's slot being scum like twice and nothing happened either time + skitter as she was dying kept saying we need to look at fire (she also said she thought sheep looked even worse than fire but still).

imagine the world where i am town

what do you think scum does in that world?

especially if you, aisa, and mena are town, which i think you all are

scum is playing to ensure they win the game here, town will push me for them, their goal here is to make sure town doesn't find each other and come up with a correct solve, and to appear distanced from each other

if im scum i don't really think its worth it for them to try to stay off me. idk maybe they would, but i think it's at least pretty equal to what they will do with me being town

I really don't think scum would feel like they have to withhold from the wagon if you're town. They're probably not getting a ton of scum cred for joining it, I think, especially people who were voting you yesterday...

I'm not fully trusting Aureal right now; i just like Aureal more than Egix of the people Aisa has declared townreads on and I do need to do more work on both of them but am, for today, uninterested in limming them more or less

[implosion]

fire, you can case Aureal if you want. If you're town and flip town and I'm alive tomorrow then I'll listen to it, certainly. But I think there's very little argumentation that you can do personally to convince me that you're not scum right now, and it's through no fault of your own if you're town, it's just that, like I said, I think I am predisposed to view your rhetorical style as town and I know you're capable of a lot of heavy lifting as scum so it's hard to give any actual >rand town weight to things you do that naturally ping me as town.

[implosion]

I know you're capable of a lot of heavy lifting as scum

at least I think I know this, i don't actually remember where I know it from though.

[implosion]

(lol @convincing reasons)

i sort of meant this in a way of like, reasons that you find convincing to yourself :X

that reasoning on Aureal is, I think pretty decent, though obviously I don't have the same direct access to knowledge of vibes. It does kind of remind me of some correct meta townread that I was able to give on someone a long time ago (penguin specifically, in a game I just randomly nostaliga-reread recently). In that I think that sort of meta playstyle-townread on specifically a relatively new player (is Aureal relatively new? uhhh lmao 2005 join date nope oh well, maybe she just came back from a hiatus?) is pretty good, combined with playstyle being hard to fake is probably a solid foundation for a town case. But maybe if Aureal is really experienced it's less solid.

[implosion]

honestly if aisa is scum it'd make me feel a lot better about this whole ordeal. i'd just be getting severely outplayed and that'd be okay

@ceph who was somewhat dubious on me somewhat endorsing aisa's 1-game meta homebrew, i have a soft spot for 1-game meta cases tbh. like i mentioned i think I've used them to some success in the past. I think in certain situations one can kind of extrapolate a lot about the way that a player plays from a single game.

[implosion]

I see no reason to massclaim if we lim fire. Locking people in to claims is barely a real benefit in this setup and any cop with important results can either claim anyway or have already breadcrumbed and there’s no one else really whose claim is crucial I think

[implosion]

What Dunn said.

The dichotomy is not "claim today and get a direct contradiction we can resolve vs claim tomorrow and have to resolve it in ElO". We're not guaranteed to get a direct contradiction

especially

if we claim today when scum have less incentive to make a last minute fakeclaim and doubly especially in this setup.

It's somewhat the nature of this setup that massclaim today is more likely to tell us who not to lim than it is to tell us who to lim; ergo, it's not worth the cost of letting scum kill our best consensus-townread PR or whatever.

[implosion]

This is why the whole time I've been saying lim fire or massclaim. massclaim might have made more sense if fire claimed a PR but 95% of the time, a massclaim today will lead us to the conclusion "eh, i guess we lim in the VTs today"

[implosion]

Ugh, I think I need to look even closer at the setup. I don't think the Mafia is going to know whether any further power roles are in the cop branch or other PR branches? But they should know whether there are other PRs or if the oneshot cop was it?

Also I totally didn't realize that it's possible to have only two Mafia? You're not just making that up, right? I guess that would happen if a SK was rolled, but I never saw anything saying that it would replace a Mafia member so I was thinking it'd be in addition to three Mafia.

It's possible in this setup to have 2 mafia or 3 mafia, both with or without SK. It's roughly 22% to have 2 mafia. If there are exactly 2 mafia then it's roughly 76% to also have an SK.

Mafia know whether there were 0-2, 3-4, or 5-7 'T' letters rolled, and thus whether there were 0-2, 3-4, or 5-7 power role letters rolled. If there are 2 mafia, then either 1-shot cop was our only power role (and no SK) or there is one of a doc/roleblocker/1-shot vig out there (and an SK). If there are 3 mafia then there's more room for a lot more possibilities.

[implosion]

i think the game makes a lot more sense if there's only 2 so ima just decide to believe in that world now

I think this is almost always the wrong way to think about this situation. Or at least I feel like I've gotten burned by it before in this setup but I have no specific memories therein. I think that it's always better to assume there's 3 scum until we know there's only 2. Not that that's what you're saying, but yeah, the thought crossed my mind of "ugh it's annoying to find scum in this game" but i'll be damned if that thought hasn't crossed my mind in plenty of games where there were 3 scum.

Also at this point I do actually feel like there are plenty of slots that can be scum (even if you are town). Of course only 2 wouldn't surprise me at all.

[implosion]

This also

very softly

implies there are 3 scum if fire is scum, though obviously he could just be faking that

[implosion]

I don't think we need to know if there's 2 scum or 3 today in order to lim fire

I don't really want to comment on scum claiming strategy in the event that there's only 2 scum at this stage because they could easily make a mistake when massclaim comes, be it today or tomorrow

[implosion]

Going to go out on a limb here and say that while I really like the mech arguments and analysis that implosion has put forward today, I'm not liking how stubborn they are with "lim fire" and repeating that over and over without seeming to put in effort to look and see whether fire is mafia.

Not a fan of what Mena has been doing (or not doing) today either in regards to fire and also mech stuff but I am pretty sure they are town for their wall posting towards fire way back when.

I don't want to eliminate fire anymore but it feels really difficult if neither implosion or mena are willing to consider other options

Honestly, I think this looks not-partnered toward fire. Maybe semi-strongly. I feel like a somewhat-suspected slot in Dunn, seeing a scumbuddy go down in this situation, would be pretty highly unlikely to make this sort of frustrated appeal.

I do think I'm willing to consider sheep actually. Maybe I even prefer sheep? Though no one's voting sheep atm. Part of the reason I'm stuck on fire is because I value skitter's reads, but she did say she was more suspicious of sheep than fire at the end. Another part of the reason is that I essentially can't see anything he's posted as anything other than null, just because of the afforementioned playstyle thing.

[implosion]

The Aureal/fire conversation is sort of meaningless to me. fire isn't the kind of player who's going to actually make the sort of logical inconsistency that Aureal is pointing out IMO (either as scum or as town), but also I really don't think Aureal is

willfully

misinterpreting fire.

[implosion]

Aureal, what do you like about sheep's recent posting?

[implosion]

implosion how is this not willful

i feel like maybe 1% of mafia games have actual instances of mafia intentionally misinterpreting something to gain a rhetorical advantage. it's just so easy to refute by saying "no, i meant z, not y". As such I think it's an extremely high burden to show that someone is actually willfully misrepresenting something, at least that they're doing so in a way that is specifically as mafia trying to lie to gain rhetorical advantage in an argument. Maybe you're using the word willful differently from me.

I tend to think that this sort of thing is more often someone who misread something or misinterpreted some phrasing (because we're on the internet, and we don't have body language cues or tone of voice or anything that would make it easy to actually interpret what anyone is saying) and then got stubborn about it.

[implosion]

Probably I'm just splitting hairs over the word "willful" though.

[implosion]

@Ydrasse: the game state is heavily tainted by the history of how we got here. Right now I think me, Aisa, and Menalque are somewhat consensus townreads; I'm happy to justify the ones on Aisa and Menalque (no one has really questioned me being town meaningfully all game so I haven't had to argue why I'm town at any point lol but I think most people's reasoning goes back to how I pushed Enchant on d1). If (maybe a big if but whatever) all those names are town then that leaves a pool of 6.

Yesterday had competing fire/skitter wagons; fire was being suspected partially because of their predecessors' play but also Menalque heavily suspected their play as well. This is why fire is the vaguely-default lim for today (also bc skitter flipped town and was suspicious of fire).

There hasn't really been a whole lot of consensus on anything whatsoever today, be it who to lim or whether to massclaim or etc.

[implosion]

here is my most recent explanation of Aisa-town. Everything about her play just looks like a townie who is lost and swept up in the maelstrom that is this game. I think that page that I reference in that post is nearly clearing on its own.

For Menalque, there are 2 main things to look at: the (i think somewhat more minor?) one is this post and its context; on d1 Menalque would have had to go through quite a bit of effort to fake his play as scum. The (maybe more major) one is this post and its context; on d2 fire started pushing Menalque and Menalque absolutely went ham on fire. I think consensus is that he comes off as a pissed self-justified townie in the exchange. I'm definitely less confident in him than I am in Aisa but I am confident enough that I think energy is better spent elsewhere.

[implosion]

And as someone who grew up in EM and who also thinks that on average on MS people massclaim later than they should: i've come around to massclaim today being a bad choice, even if we swing on to someone other than fire. I think it's a little complicated and I absolutely might change my mind but, as I mentioned earlier, massclaim in this setup is more likely to tell us who not to lim than it is to tell us who to lim, and so unless we get a non-VT claim there's not much reason to do it (and if scum do claim not-VT then they might be setting themselves up for doom later on so they can't do it to weasel out of a lim for free; again I'm not going to talk in detail about scum claiming strategy but yeah).

Actually there is a middleground option if we like, are collectively willing to bet the game on the towncore being town, which would be to massclaim minus the towncore and then have the towncore claim tomorrow. But I don't think that really achieves much.

[implosion]

i’m going to tap into the knowledge i got playing against you on mu now

I am also definitely interested in wherever this winds up going.

[implosion]

If he's scum it seems like his only strategy has been to talk expend effort talking about how towny certain people are and how hard this game is to solve. This... just doesn't seem like scum behaviour.

I think this is pretty reasonable. It's entirely possible that I'm being too obstinate. But I do still hold reservations; I think if fire got to today as scum, this is how fire would play today as scum. My impression of fire is biased in many ways, part of which is because I perceive fire as approaching the game of mafia in some ways similar to how I do, in that fire if scum is sort of trying to make the locally next best move without needing to think about the bigger picture necessarily because the bigger picture for fire is that fire needs to get townread and the way to do that is to act, in each moment, how fire would act as town. And I think fire, if scum, thinks that fire, as town, would just be going along like they've been doing in this day.

I do sort of wonder what they'd say about their own meta in this regard/if they think this is how they'd be playing today as scum.

The bolded is false, hopefully this should be clear with the quote surgery I've done. I don't think I need to explain why someone forgetting what they've said is a little worrying.

It's a little worrying but I think there is also possibly some +town justification in it; in particular I think carelessness is townish as scum probably on average tend to be more careful to not say something factually wrong because it's their entire job. I guess this case is sort of a strange thing to forget that she had written. Idk, I don't put a ton of stock into this bit.

These are (IMO) some key moments in her trajectory today. 1. "let's talk not auto-elim fire", 2. pushes Ceph, 3. when I tell her that Ceph seems town she seems very happy to change back onto fire again. I'm specifically worried by the "I don't see how it's compatible but if you do I'll let it go"; this isn't how I would react I think. Usually when a player I respect disagrees with me I consider the merits of what they said to determine what to do. Sometimes there's some angst because I might find it hard to go against them. Here we have the opposite: she seems quite confident in disagreeing with me, but still lets it go and is quite happy to switch onto fire.

This... strikes me as how I'd instinctively play today if I were scum and fire was town. And also very much not how I'd want to play if I were scum with fire.

(Which brings up an interesting point: maybe if we eliminate Aureal today and she is scum, then her interactions with fire can help take the sting out of our collective paranoia of fire.)

Feedback please

I think this point has merit. I do think it's possible for Aureal to be doing this with both her and fire as scum; I think if fire is scum then scum will feel like they need at least one person bussing, because there'd probably be a bit of doom in the air around fire's slot and someone would need to capitalize on that. Like Menalque, one of the townbloc, was talking about how if we don't lim fire today we ought to be autolimming fire tomorrow or whatever (don't quote me on this, idr the exact phrasing)

[implosion]

Unvote

[implosion]

Definitely Mena is townier if fire is scum and scummier if fire is town, if for no other reason than I think Mena's defensive wallpost would be a fair bit more impressive if it came from a world where both of them are scum.

[implosion]

That said I still think he's town either way. Like if we limmed fire today and fire flipped town and we got to tomorrow, I would probably want to re-evaluate Menalque somewhat

I think either Aisa or I dies tonight 90% of the time (unless like we lim fire and get a scumflip) so I definitely do what to hash out what we can today

[implosion]

I do like Ydrasse's entrance. It's not like, clearing by any means obviously but I think I do like it a little bit as towny

[implosion]

VOTE: sheepsaysmeep

[implosion]

fire you should join the aureal wagon tho

I remember reading your post about how you weren't voting cuz the towncore should decide or something and thinking it was kinda goofy. wagons are still fun and important. even If I think u should die today a counterwagon existing on aureal is very nice and productive and feels good

This is kind of a weird attitude to have when there's momentum toward you. It's like weirdly nonchalant - like, a fire lim or even wagon is definitely not inevitable right now. Idk if I think it's meaningful I'm just not really sure what the point of this post is.

I think aureal is wolfier but I am aboard the train that everyone else left that was fire lim feels more right here

aureal vote was a) I didnt want to put fire at e-1, b) symbolic vote / pressure for being wolfy (reason I think fire/aureal felt w/w is cuz I dont get why fire still refuses to vote aureal lol. I think village!fire would have a bit more eagerness at the possibility aureal somehow gets limmed over him today. or, eagerness to pressure aureal. but instead he's just compounding on condemning himself to death today, doing basically nothing with aureal, feels like he actively wants aureal not to die before him)

This is also an odd post. I'm definitely starting to confbias into seeing things sheep is saying as being scummy but like, why the explanation? I might have missed someone asking but if not then like it's pretty obvious why he switched from Aureal to fire now. I also just, don't really buy this fire/Auriel w/w spiel. It feels kind of not fully thought out - like I feel like fire-scum w/ Aureal would be plenty happy to have a chance to distance from Aureal in this gamestate if it seems like fire's going down? I don't really have a strong take on whether or not they're w/w but Idk this reasoning just feels like throwing something out there and hoping it sticks.

Still going over past couple pages.

[implosion]

All caught up.

All I want is a clever SE to solve the game and tell me who to eliminate today, but I guess that's not happening
This game makes me tingly like acupuncture rn

I think I have made up my mind that I want a sheep lim today now fwiw. It's <48 hours to deadline and I think sheep feels like the most sensible place for the lim to land to me, right now. Limming sheep ticks a lot of boxes to me. he's one of skitter's scumreads; I don't think I've seen anyone else talk about this as a box to tick but I think it has value and she has experience with him. She called him out on d2 for starting to coast, I didn't agree with her at the time, but he never really stopped doing that. I feel like this trajectory over time of having lots of interactive and original takes d1 and getting highly townread and coasting is frankly pretty +scum on its own. He's never really faced serious pressure all game, in spite of this. We talk a lot about how fire keeps not actually getting limmed... but like, there's a lot of goddamn slots in this game that we could say that about. sheep also lived n1 despite being pretty widely townread (i think? maybe i'm just projecting how I felt but I am town so at least some town were super-townreading him), which is not a

major

reason but is still circumstantial. His posting today, on the whole, doesn't paint a picture in my head of someone who's really feeling invested in figuring out the game and trying to fit different theories together. It feels like he makes a lot of posts where he wants to look like he's doing that but it often doesn't feel like there's a genuine consideration behind that, it feels like it's just a constructed narrative.

I think he's the best lim and I don't think I'm likely to change my mind on it before deadline.

[implosion]

If sheep flips town, I think Ydrasse-scum stock possibly goes up

[implosion]

and I think generally like, not responding to micro-level things has come back to bite me, if that makes sense? like ive felt miffed by the push on me because it feels like theres nothing to respond to because rather than being about my overall approach to the game, it's more like people were like this post and that post were wolfy and I hadn't felt a need to address those things and now I think we'll lose via my lim. so im probably sort of overcompensating

Most of the actual reason I'm scumreading you isn't the individual posts I'm quoting. They're just bits and bobs.

Spoiler: slightly meandering sheep response, not actually important

I dont really get what youre saying about fire/aureal w/w? I think theyre doing exactly what youre describing, taking the chance to distance from Aureal in this gamestate. fire thinks he's guaranteed to die, so he wants to do something useful with his day, so he decides to distance from aureal. so he talks about how aureal is so wolfy but does everything EXCEPT something actually consequential, which is vote and potentially start a wagon; this is what distancing looks like. idk like fire/aureal has felt intuitive to me throughout the day, the post ur quoting isnt a fundamental basis of that view or something I was just adding on

I mean, this isn't what you'd said in your post that I'm responding to. I get what you're saying here, but there you said:

reason I think fire/aureal felt w/w is cuz I dont get why fire still refuses to vote aureal lol.

I.e. the reason fire/aureal felt w/w is because fire isn't voting Aureal and is instead just tanking the lim. In other more suggestive words, because there's an additional opportunity for fire to distance from Aureal by voting her, that fire is refusing to take.... like your logic here just feels constructed in order to get to a conclusion, idk. Shouldn't doomed scum fire probably want to vote for Aureal rather than doing this half-hearted pushing but refusing to vote that will look goddamn terrible on flip (or at least probably would feel that way)? I feel like fire is a better player than that and yeah you can invoke wifom or whatever but like idk I don't see how your motivating reason for your read can be "they're scum bc fire is distancing" and also say the sentence "reason I think it's w/w is bc fire refuses to vote aureal".

Like I understand the idea of fos a buddy vote a townie that it seems like you're invoking here but that idea is absolutely inapplicable to fire in this gamestate, who has been teetering on death row all day. the scum utility of fos a buddy vote a townie is that they get to both stay alive for longer and also get some distancing cred; if the person doing that is immediately flipped, then well, they just get that interaction instantly analyzed.

u could have put these thoughts about me out there for discussion earlier lol

I could have, had I only had them as coherently earlier. Alas

-I dont think skitter, nor anyone, can be considered a more credible reader of me than average. I stopped playing for a couple years and then was no longer prepubescent age and then I suddenly came back now and was playing mafia fairly differently.

It's not about you, it's about skitter being considered a generally competent town player with generally good reads

-"never really stopped coasting" is untrue that's the one that bothers me. I think I have been like, superbly pro-town in terms of activity throughout the last two day phases. like beyond I think ive been here constantly reading everything and giving fresh decent thoughts about it in contradiction to what u say, ive often been like bruh this is dead that's bad and poked around with questions and posts to try to change that. in a way that I think is pro-town. like im active enough that I can be frustrated with people who are less active; like ive done the best I can with what I have and I wont get more accurate by further reading and engaging until the people who actually dropped off after being townread do stuff. which is something ive been bugged by all day

This is fair enough; coasting is probably not the best way to describe how I feel. I feel like there were certain ~things~ you did on d1 that I felt like I could townread you for, and I feel like you haven't been able to replicate those ~things~. Contrast Aisa who has consistently reaffirmed my read through continuing to make posts that affirm the reason I townread her. I think when I describe you as coasting, it's in some sense only applicable if you're scum - like, the fact that you've been unable to replicate whatever content on d1 was causing me to hard townread you makes me feel like you're scum who put in a ton of effort on d1 and then has been coasting since then in the sense that you haven't been able to put in whatever type of effort you'd need to replicate that content. The way you formed or changed reads, the way you reacted to things in the moment, the way you were playing together with people in the moment. That feels like it's been relatively lacking since d1 and today you've been more analyzing from a step away from the action. If you're town then maybe it's just inaccurate to call you coasting because you have been putting in effort today.

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I think if I die today we 90% lose because this game is in a shitstate where we would have to not lim people I think could be wolf and you wouldnt be surprised at all. and those people are not going to exit that state

The problem is that I sort of agree with Aisa that we're moderately doomed if we lim any townie.

Also to be clear I don't mean to disrespect your game in any way when I call it coasting (even if you are scum), I think you've played a perfectly good game as town or as scum. It feels like in this game no matter who I vote for it's going to be a person who has genuinely good reasons why they shouldn't be limmed. It's a tight game and a hard call. And obviously my reads up to today haven't exactly been stellar but well, the world is what it is.

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We have 1 day and 6 hours. We need to start coalescing.

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Haven’t read past few pages closely but should be online well before deadline

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i'm also genuinely just very baffled at whatever the heck is going on right now

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like if you've given up and just want to antispew at least stop being mean lol

ive been through 4 games where town aureal got elimmed so far and none of them are remotely like this, she continues trying to solve to the end

I'm confused by these posts. Aureal isn't being elimmed right now, most likely, based on the numbers? sheep's still at e-1, aisa unvoted, dunn said they're more likely to vote sheep over Aureal before...?

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i think these last couple pages are some of the better posting sheep has done in a while (as either alignment tbh, but i think it's generally towny and it a higher bar of scumposting than he's had if scum)

so i would encourage people not to just skip past them

I think this is maybe somewhat true but it's very focused on Aureal. Like it seems fairly straightforward for scum-sheep to go "i'm in a 1v1 with Aureal now, so I'm just going to focus analysis on Aureal and what an Aureal flip would mean".

This is so clearly a scum meltdown I don't know how to help anyone who can't tell

damn. guess i'm just trash at this game bc it looks slightly +town to me for Aureal

Still reading up but

i do not know how to explain her behavior besides that she thinks she's getting limmed

very easy possibility: she is town who is pissed off at people not seeing that she's town and feeling like she's not being listened to/understood? I don't think it's automatically what's happening here but it's definitely an explanation?

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Unvote

for the time being just because I don't want like, Dunn hammering this second

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idk. I don't see how this is a super duper obvious scum meltdown from Aureal. She's not like, constantly re-evaluating because if she's town she feels like she has scum pushing her and she's just trying to fight back against that? I feel like that's pretty straightforward. She's directly appealing to Aisa to unvote over and over and basically yelling at the rest of her wagon. That seems consistent with town who feels they're being pushed by scum

I don't even understand why scum Aureal would be melting down at that stage. or why she'd be afraid of being limmed as scum. sheep's wagon consists of me (who has been pretty adamant on sheep), Menalque (who is literally afk), ydrasse (who has townread Aureal and scumread sheep) and herself. And so she literally only needs to be afraid of a hammer by Dunn and I have no idea why people (fire) seem to think she'd be afraid of a hammer specifically by Dunn in that moment as scum.

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also fwiw sheeping dead town can be good to an extent but dead town don't always agree with their past selves

if skitter were still in the game she may have a different opinion based on new information

i don't really think the level of content with which to sort sheep off was sufficient as of day 2

I also just think this is frankly a terrible take.

why should sheep's day 3 content be more especially readable than sheep's day 1 or day 2 content? Just because you personally think sheep is town and hasn't adequately shown it until now? Sure, sheep hasn't really been under pressure until now so we get to see that the first time. That much is fair but I think it's eminently silly to say that sheep definitely couldn't have been read based on d1/2 material.

Sure, dead townies shouldn't be blindly listened to but I am definitely not doing that and I don't think anyone else is. Should they be completely ignored? I don't think the content in page 80 of a game is intrinsically more alignment-revealing than that on page 8. It situationally can be, and probably situationally often is, but the tells people saw on early days still have meaning even if recency bias makes us forget about those tells.

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it wasn't really ever clear to me that she thought she had scum pushing her until pretty recently

when asked to clarify about that she dodged the question

she was asked to clarify about it in a way that I can see her thinking was weirdly leading (with sheep saying "ceph?"). I don't personally think it was leading but I can see how she might have thought of it as being so

much more importantly though I don't see what scum-Aureal's special motivation over town-Aureal would be to dodge a question that she can give a pretty fucking straightforward answer to of "you/fire" and it would be consistent with her play

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it's genuinely cruel of Umlaut to not be here at deadline by the way >_> i crave flips so badly

i didn't say that he couldn't have been read

but skitter's scumread was mostly bc he started out towny and then fell off and started coasting

i don't think thats applicable at all anymore

It is applicable. sheep did start out towny and then fell off and started coasting. Sure, sheep has done things since then but sheep still went into coasting on d2; the fact that sheep then started doing stuff d3 doesn't change that and it still has potential meaning

to the point, in what you just quoted, skitter says "i feel like he should have gotten back into it by now if he's town tbh". the fact that he got into it by d3 doesn't mitigate that point.

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honestly, at this exact moment in time, i want to go back to fire lmao.
i don't actually want to do that. i think. but.

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well no i definitely don't since menalque is gone but

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idk, it's straightforward to town!me too because aureal has just been the likely next non-me flip here. whether we flip aureal today before me, or I flip v and then we kill aureal. so it was then intuitive for me to do a lot of "what does it mean if aureal flips v vs if aureal flips w"

yeah i wasn't trying to say this is a reason to scumread you, just that I don't see it as an especially solid reason to townread (I do see it as probably a bit +town, but not enough in the current balance in my mind)

2311 is like, fair. idk, it's a hard game.

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sheep, what do you think the implications of an Aureal townflip would be?

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I would have said fire wolf a day ago but honestly fmpov his EoD just feels town so I would reflect on that overnight

The reason I asked was, is this true if Aureal and you are both town?

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well then Aisa gets to come back from her movie and get the miserable realization that she holds the hammer lol

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VOTE: sheep
Tis up to Aisa.

Sorry if you're town and Aureal is scum, sheep. If you're both town then I'm barely sorry because this game is just an incredibly hot mess in that case.

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Just so it's on this page:

Deadline:

(expired on 2023-06-24 17:55:00)

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Hoorah. I probably wouldn't have been pushing Ydrasse first here so glad I died

Thanks for the game, Umlaut. Both the flavor and it just generally being well-run, especially given how much of a replacement mill it was.

I think it's pretty wild that fire never actually got eliminated in this game. I also want to shout out Aisa because the fact that I had

a

strong townread to fall back on was really valuable in holding my sanity in the later stages of the game. I enjoyed trying to piece together the game with the essentially no hard info we had to go on (given the setup roll). It was definitely instrumental that we were able to identify a towncore that was actually accurate.