Open 878: Scarfolk Council | The End

[sheepsaysmeep]

damn I did the no-actual-stance-despite-seemingly-contributing thing again oops

[sheepsaysmeep]

Merlyn can you throw out what a general readlist roughly looks like rn? or im sorta interested in who you think is most likely town. sorry if I missed it while skimming

[Aureal]

skitter ISO thoughts (in a list bulletpoint because I don't know why the hell the site keeps wanting to screw up line breaks and randomly put a full empty line between lines sometimes but not others)

• starts with a good bit about Invis being town
  pushes at Andante
  doesn't understand Drew wagon in 382, but he's in 2nd lowest tier in 389 and is cool with a wagon on bottom three, just a few minutes later?
  promptly gets asked about the read change by CSF and explains it's because of implosion's point (397) but this still seems really weird, literally all the posts from 382 to 389 were skitter, there was nothing in between to change her view of it
  votes CSF without reasoning after the Andante claim, only prior reasoning was in 384; CSF was on the same tier as Drew in the prior readlist
  asks sheep about CSF (536)
  "can vote Enchant" (549) shortly after asking implosion how confident he is there (537)
  thinks Menalque's Woo vote is strange (564) (and it was a ploy, lol, yeah I think she gets some townpoints there)
  willing to go Enchant, suspicion of Mena for diverting it
  trying to get Andante to explain why she thinks Enchant is town
  "should just be flipping Enchant here" (840)
  D2 skeptical of Ceph and implosion, votes Ceph (937), has no read there
  interesting theory about how the end of D1 went in 960, but the post 861 which supports that she felt the game was dead almost feels a bit planted, it'd only been a few hours since a post and it was a weekday morning for probably most people?
  I like the push against Ceph, seems she's feeling the same way I do about Ceph and implosion where implosion's push feels real and Ceph's more fakeable.
  At the same time though it's kind of strange to go in on Ceph because she doesn't feel his conviction and ignore that sheep literally never even bothered giving reasons to vote or push Enchant? Like she doesn't think scum particularly need to be pushing it and is overlooking the Alianna and sheep slots which were there just because??
  Debating the use of 'conviction' with Ceph is weird- does anyone think having conviction carries an emotional component? I don't understand what that's supposed to mean, really, other than the emotion of 'genuine belief' which is what Ceph said? I'm confused. She proceeds to continue to be skeptical that Ceph had genuine belief. (972) She comes back to it in response to implosion (998) and says she reassessed and I'm still just not really sure what this was all about.
  passing comments about being skeptical of Alianna/Dunn/sheep moving to kinda wanting to vote sheep (1091) into more in-depth talk of degrading tr of sheep (1107)
  goes for fire fairly soon after he replaces in and uuuuuuh do I really want to go through all this argument from yesterday again already not really

So yeah, there's some things I'm leery of here, if it really comes down to fire v. skitter I expect I'll go here, but there's more to like than with sheep as well so I'm really still feeling a good chance that this is TvT and don't really want to.

[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.

[fireisredsir]

ty implosion i needed that i am weak

will answer your q after i finish this other thing im looking into

[sheepsaysmeep]

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.

ok I was going to write a lottt but you've given me an out and now im just going to be very lazy lol

[sheepsaysmeep]

+1 sorry skitter about the timing of all this and I hope moving goes very well

[fireisredsir]

ok so aureal's two latest ISO dives on sheep and skitter both left me kinda... unsatisfied. they're both just i think way too much summary for my taste, and not enough analysis of what that means for the alignment, or sort of grasping onto overall meanings or motivations beyond just "i like this" and "i don't like this". with both i was kind of left thinking, whats your point?

but, i figured, ive never played with aureal before tho so maybe this is just her style. so i went and looked through a bunch of aureal isos from previous town games to see if this is just how she tries to sort people later in the game

and i really don't think it is

most games didn't have anything like this. the analysis was a lot more clear, most of her time was spent engaging with people and picking at specific points and explaining why she had a specific read on them, etc

there were a couple ISO dives that were explicitly summaries of interactions, but rarely were they done as like, a way to make content

the closest thing i found (across like 8 games) was this post:

Spoiler: from another game

Subject: Micro 1073: Purgatory - Game Over!

A few thoughts from some browsing of AV's ISO.

Pretty sure AV is NOT scum with Ranger because of 239 and is probably just town (the opening about Aisa reads pretty towny, are scum going to talk about how they want to read someone, doesn't seem so likely). I just can't see any reason why scum would make an argument directed to their scumbuddy only to have the scumbuddy misintepret it, forcing the original questioner to have to clarify and ask again. Ranger does not look as good for the misinterpretation, though. The original question in 181 and called out to Ranger again in 209 seems pretty clear and yet Ranger somehow digs up 45 and uses it in her response which clearly is not what AV is talking about- he literally quotes the 'freaking out' in 181; and if Ranger only saw 209's question it says Arko putting Oc at e-2 was "earlier in the thread" than the freaking out and 45 clearly is not earlier than the vote in 54.

It's also seeming less likely from this that Oc/Enchant is scum with Arko/Drew, as Oc was the one who triggered Arko's e-2 shenanigans. I could see this sequence as Arko starting to break down under early pressure, then coming back the next day to see feedback in the scum PT that his OMGUS stuff was bad and he unvotes.

I'm thinking Bella is town, though I haven't dug deeper on her yet. Vander/Ranger/Arko makes sense as a team to me. Arko gets pressured early but also seems to have decent support so Ranger defends in over-the-top fashion, trying to get Vander towncred for a heaven vote by bussing Ranger and then hopefully people think Ranger was white-knighting townArko so he has a heaven shot later? The heaven voting is maybe a little weird if so but I think makes enough sense... Drew puts Vander at h-1 and Ranger doesn't hammer, but that could be because obviously Ranger shouldn't want Vander there and maybe Ranger's slot is salvageable once we see Vander was scum, but not if Ranger hammers. It seemed reasonable to wait and figure Bella or I would be amenable to voting Vander. But AV switches to Aisa, Drew votes Aisa to see if that'll get AV back, Ranger obviously can't do anything but vote Aisa, then Bella brings out her Aisa read and Enchant loves hammers.

I'm moving towards voting Ranger but we've got time and she's got stuff to deal with. And I'll keep doing more poking around.

but even this i think has a ton more analysis to it than the two we've seen this game. it references specific posts to make the points, but it's explaining an overall narrative and overall conclusions

i kinda think that stuff like aureal has done here comes when scum aren't really sure how to produce meaningful content and so they just pull up an iso and start summarizing what they see, because it looks long and has lots of links and people think "oh they efforted they're probably town"

maybe i missed a time when this was done? aureal if you have any in mind feel free to point me to them

[fireisredsir]

anyway im kinda actually more suspicious of aureal than skitter rn but i also think it could very easily be both of them

[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

[fireisredsir]

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)?

i haven't done this very much and i didn't take notes lol but i will try my best

im actually gonna put this in a spoiler just so mena doesn't see it and think that im casing him or something

Spoiler: why i originally scumread mena

early there was some popping in and out, chilling just for a little bit in order to vibe w people, and then leaving again. i know he's a busy boy and thats just kinda his playstyle nowadays but i do think it plays to his strengths as scum so it caught my eye

the early push on andante i also didn't really like bc i thought andante was just being andante. 171, acknowledging that town andante believes she's obvtown, into 190, which just felt kinda awkward and forced to me in general, especially stood out

those were pretty minor things tho, the thing that i think made me start suspecting more was in 551, that interaction with skitter just felt really forced to me for some reason, like he felt like he needed to do some content. it's the kind of post i would make as scum in order to look insightful and show off that im paying attention

553 is a lil weird when there were earlier opportunities for that

and then the main thing was not believing his progression into his solve. the timing didn't feel right. he's historically very loathe to flip enchant when he's town bc he thinks enchant is hilarious, so it felt wrong that he would be convinced enchant was lockscum and needed to die (enough to start partner solving) just off your case. the timing of andante pushing to save enchant also came, i thought, after the time when he later said he locked on to the solve, but the big post helped clarify how his thought process progressed through there and it made more sense to me. but yeah, at the time overall it just happened too fast and seemed unsupported

and as i was reading further and he just kept asking what felt like performative questions that he didn't really care about the answers to, and telegraphing his reaction test way too much, by the time it got to the reveal it felt more and more to me like it could easily just be something he was doing in order to fake some content and look good while leaning on what he's good at as scum

the fake confident energy (which i later learned was apparently town bluster) also felt similar to how he is as scum, which was a big part of my read

but yeah i still think that it's pretty unlikely he responds the way he did with his big post if he's scum. there's other more useful things he could have done to bury me there and it just reads like the town mena energy to me that i remember waiting for it to show up when i played against him when he was scum

[Aisa]

I love it when implosion posts because he often hits points I’ve also been thinking about. I’ve just read his posts
and cool
look like I don’t need to talk about skitter’s Andante read, why fire is hard to scumread, or Mena’s reasons for scum reading fire anymore because implosion has done all that work for me

[Aisa]

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.

I think skitter’s “defeatism” comes after pretty extensive discussions with fire (which should double as a scum case of fire + defense of herself) and after engaging with me when I was looking undecided. I think it’s completely believable that’s a reaction from town who doesn’t think there’s anything more they can do.

This game is so hard D:

[implosion]

This game is so hard D:

yeah.

[skitter30]

Vt
I'm not going to be around today
Please focus on fire and sheep tomorrow

Also @implo: it's not defeatist and i really, really don't like you saying that like on a personal level.
It's making a calculation of: how much time do i have for this in the immediate future , and how much time would i need to talk people out of it, and recognizing that the latter outweighs the former by quite a bit, so moving my energy to trying to make what my reads are *very* clear for after. I am *not* being defeatist. I'm being realistic with what i can do right now

I really, really hope that people listen to my reads

[skitter30]

Also fwiw merlyn is town despite andante

[skitter30]

Also i actually think sheep looks worse here than fire

[skitter30]

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.

I think skitter’s “defeatism” comes after pretty extensive discussions with fire (which should double as a scum case of fire + defense of herself) and after engaging with me when I was looking undecided. I think it’s completely believable that’s a reaction from town who doesn’t think there’s anything more they can do.

This game is so hard D:

Also, like, yeah
Implo quite a lot of what fire's said to me has annoyed me quite a bit, but i didn't think it was fair to take that out on him b/c he's just playing the game no matter his alignment

I've had a lot of back and forths with him explaining my pov (i.e. both defending myself, and explaining why i think he's scum), and the support for me has creeped up and up and up. I am fully capable of reading the writing on the wall and recognizing where this is going despite the amt of effort i put in (and can put in right now). That isnt defeatist, it's recognizing reality, and it's annoying me *a lot* that you're calling it that

[Menalque]

@implo if it looks like I’m tunnelling it’s because I partially am

I do not think, actually, that fire has done nothing that is town or that could be town

Do I think fire’s entrance and takes coming into the game we’re both (1) bad and (2) potentially scum motivated if the game was going in the right direction? Yes on both

Has he been consistently active since then and have there been moments where I’ve thought “hmm that could be town”? Also yes on both

Because of the combination of the two, plus the general wagon build up in both directions, I prefer fire because I’m not sure I’m ever getting to a point where I feel comfortable on that slot whereas with skitter I think if she’s scum I do trust myself more to successfully re-evaluate

[Menalque]

I think a lot of why fire is looking town is because he’s just been active since joining and I think that’s a very bad metric for solving him

I don’t think he’s done anything really clearing and I think that his entrance was concerning enough to be killable + somehow everyone is forgetting that neither delta nor alianna did a good job of showing the slot was town

[Umlaut]

...