Survival Of The Fittest

@Jace I really appreciate the big ol' stack of reads. That's exactly what I wanted and does good stuff for town regardless of your alignment (so thumbs up, although if you're scum I imagine that's not a universal feeling. ).

And now, mine in turn (alphabetical by tier 'cause I'm too tired to rate within rankings):

Santa's Nice List:

-Blizzard: Blizzard's general tone feels very genuinely trying to figure stuff out and not being quite sure, and she actually sidesteps a couple opportunities to get free town cred to set the story straight, which has zero utility as scum and speaks to a generally truthful MO.

-Boogie: Boogie sometimes coasts under the cover of lower activity but has changed his style in recent times. I like that he seems to be legitimately trying to figure things out but isn't putting, like, loads of effort into it yet. That feels like a very town Boogie thing, as does waffling on the Dodd wagon... if Dodd's slot flips Town. If we do see a scum!Doddslot then suddenly Boogie looks a whole lot worse.

-Jack: I feel like Jack's doing a good job pushing against the general consensus in the name of seeking his own answers, while at the same time being willing enough to compromise but not so eager it feels like insincere sucking-up. Also his joking re: flavor is probably the single most convincing for me that he more or less understands the setup and is just having fun with it, in this way that could get way way way too WIFOM to be worth discussing for joking about flavor text but I still feel good about.

-Paige: Paige is dialed in from the start, chasing leads and taking names, and cracking jokes along the way, all of which are generally good indicators of engaged, legitimate scum-hunting. I like the push on Dodd's slot and the discouraging others from getting side-tracked, regardless of how the slot ultimately flips; it's what I expect from Paige sniffing for clues and I think it's a good vibe for town in the current circumstances overall

-Zetsu: The specifics of her poking, prodding, questioning and searching are all classic town Zetsu to me. She's a good player who likes to build cases based on connections and I see that going here--I at least think she's legitimately chasing connections but watch the game actually be multiball and all my reads fall to pieces.


/shrug:

-Fenris: A wee bit of coaching directed in Jace's direction specifically but most of it feels pretty genuine and is widely appreciated. Overall, Fenris has been quieter than last game and I wanna hear more from them when they get to it but they've been cooperative and are busy and what is there is solidly neutral for me.

-Goose: I like Goose's reads on Cactus and Jace, and I really especially like that he eases off the gas--it's a good look when we were hurtling towards premature mealtime. That said, there's not a ton here, which makes him hard to read. Goose is in general more of a lategame player in my (likely flawed) recollection which is fine but makes me want to avoid giving him credit for fairly low-hanging fruit early in case he's scummy scum and capitalizes on that to ruin everyone's day when he really activates in three phases.

-MS: Basically, MS came and poked at me for info (I like that!) but then jumped on the Dodd policy dinner date and appears to have decided to hold heavy analysis for tomorrow in light of the flip. On the one hand, I like the poking for info and what honestly feels like extremely minimal effort put towards trying to look even a little town--it's not that he's being scummy so much as that there's zero care about optics, with the scant reasoning and late bandwagoning. On the other hand, anyone counting on getting to post next phase is preemptively counting chickens and/or scum. But due to the overall lack of playing to the crowds I'm inclined to set him at a neutral and wait to see those involved posts and/or give my best "Warned you bro!"

-Ricky: He's not voting for me, so something's wrong. In seriousness Ricky reads as not all-in yet and he's giving good context but it's not a lot to pull reads from. It feels like he's sorta still coming off hosting which means he has a massively different view of half of this game and their most recent plays which makes his reads valuable but also makes him harder for me to parse.

Invited To Afternoon Meal:

-Irina: This is faint, and there's one thing that really makes me think Irina is town (which is that she randomly soft-claims for absolutely no reason--faking this sort of slip is a more advanced scum mind game move than what I have reason to expect right now from her. But... the soft-claim could be the only fake part, and the slip in sharing this info apropos of nothing genuine. I dunno. My big frowny moment though is the setting up Jace to be town regardless of what Dodd's slot flips, which is very suspicious when Jace is suspicious. If he flips town Irina moves upwards because while there is a decent play to make for scum going to bat hard for town I don't expect it from her phase 1 and I think the execution would be different.

-Jace: So I do like the effort from Jace but the thing that gets me is his claim is incredibly convenient and he's fighting tooth and nail to retain a slot that is fundamentally of low value. That could just be a function of relative inexperience with the mathy side of things but the concentrated focus coupled with the refrain of "Yet I know I'm dead regardless!" just doesn't feel right to me.

-Yugi: Quiet (not always bad), flavor speculation (not bad per se but a perennial way to scoop constructive townie points without actually hurting scum, and in this case also muddies the waters with third-party talk), and an admitted desire to lay low until Day Two (after scum have a whole night to shoot the breeze) all combine with this weird moment of quasi-coaching to have my eyebrow certainly raised in Yugi's direction.

---

And, the one I left off the tiers (besides myself, obviously unimpeachable! ):

Honestly, it's really hard to get a read on Dodd's actions/slot especially knowing stuff's been rough OOC, but if I had to speculate based on where he sat in the web of the game I'd say I expect him to flip Town. Not incredibly strongly, not enough to tilt at the lynch in favor of who-knows-what with who-knows-if? as replacement, but I get the thought processes at play and agree with them more or less. At the same time, the flip gets me info on just about everyone I have my eye on so I'm down to make it happen.

Emprexx Plush wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 3:06 am

Yugikun wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 2:59 am Sorry. I've been frazzled here as well. Was mostly just planning on staying silent because I don't really understand what's going on anymore and was waiting for day 2 to start so I could get my head in again. My take may be 'maybe just let Dodd's slot be modkilled if we are intent on lynching him,' but I'm willing to have people tell me who to vote for.

Whether Dodd is town or scum a modkill is basically a free night kill for the opposing faction which I'm opposed to for the sake of balance in a game this small.

Also if we roll through on no-votes and let it be a modkill that's throwing it to fate for no reason. If we want the slot gone we can vote it out and avoid, say, some random member taking it after all and doing this whole thing again tomorrow.

As I've said my piece I'm down to thrown my vote down (IIRC we need two more?) but I'm gonna cook dinner and stuff in case somebody objects to my doing so at this juncture for whatever reason.

i am vaguely reading as we go but my brain is firmly in the off position. ill reread stuff over the night phase so i have actual takes for day 2.

is time low enough that i should vote again or should i wait

Can you explain your logic behind why you think cactus is town, toben? I got a touch lost reading your explanation.

You know just as well as I that I'm basically impossible to read because I don't operate on the same logic, reasoning, and thought processes that you filthy normies do.

EBWOP: Though you are certainly welcome to try. And I don't want to use it as an excuse, the whole coming off of modding thing, but I'm not fully engaged in this yet, though I'd like to think I"m going to warm up to fuller participation tomorrow. If I don't ever hit that full stride though, I definitely see the point in not keeping me around; folks that don't contribute don't have much value.

The issue I've found myself in right now is if I keep my vote where it is or move it, since chances are good we're going to have a modkill on Dodd's seat but like... I hadn't really looking far enough ahead yet to figure out who should be my backup? How this generally works is we use the flip from day 1 headed into day 2 to draw beads on people with their ISOs and work on coming to conclusions that way. This leaves me in the... interesting... position of having to come up with step two without completing step one (because that's how I'd determine a follow-up read). Is any of this making sense? I fucking hope so.

I'll have to look through somebody's reads that aren't Toben's because as I've stated before, I don't trust that guy any farther than I can throw him (but no, you're not my vote. YET.). That said... I AM going to take a read through yours now, because I really just skimmed 'til getting to me because I'm curious before writing a post. ... Like, an SotF post.

Quick defense post y'all. I'd just like to explain some of my actions that keep coming up in reads. My thesis is that I am offended you all think I'm so dumb (not really but you know what I mean) that my scum playstyle would be to overplay my hand as early as possible, draw suspicion to myself by letting myself mistake species/roles, roleclaim as VT (I would've just not roleclaimed lmao), the one role that would get lynched even if the consensus was I'm probably town, push a train onto Dodd based on a pretty miniscule amount of evidence when nobody really had any spotlights on them, get caught in what looks like a lie (by paige, the part with yugi "coaching") instead of just checking if I was accurate on the timeline first, play a style of 'fuck it, lynch me' as a claimed VT, etc.

First of all, I shouldn't have roleclaimed so early. I regret that lmao bc regardless of how Dodd flips, I'm next. I'd like to point out though that the reason I am so 'desperate' to not get killed is because I enjoy this game and want to stay in it as long as possible. That's pretty much it. I have no galaxy brained strategy or fake bombshells I think is gonna win scum the game, I just feel energized by my ability to participate and don't want to stop.

In light of that, I'm trying to just get as much out of this as I can until I'm done. If I was scum my play wouldn't be to just resign to my death and keep playing, it'd be to try and change course. And desperate as it would look and futile as it would be, it's better than trying to dig myself out of the mile-deep hole I'm already in.

In terms of my roleclaim though, I saw a humanoid with an assault rifle in armor, and I thought it was a human bc it looks like a human. and because I've never played Xcom, I thought the good guys were the humans. I just saw the picture and the green text and went on my way to the thread.

A mistake I made in the previous game was taking a backseat to watch you guys play so I could figure out what I was supposed to do, which worked but I ended up being inactive as a result bc I had no idea how to insert myself into the conversation because I was overwhelmed with the sheer amount of posts I didn't have the energy to read through. I was in danger of the same thing happening in this game, and people were starting to ask what I thought iirc (or maybe I just felt the same was as I did last game, idr) so I just found the only thing I had any evidence for, i.e. Dodd. It wasn't his vote for me that convinced me, it was his reactions and everyone else's votes/explanations. I was just trying to get involved asap lol. I didn't intend for it to blow up, that kinda just happened when Paige started getting involved.

I don't wanna stop playing, but I enjoy digging into your guys' iso's and coming up with theories and I know whether you guys agree i'm scum or town I'm doomed regardless, I'd rather just keep going. I'd like to think if I was scum I wouldn't completely break off from my fellow scumbags. Frankly I'd like to think if I was scum I wouldn't have done so much to throw attention right onto me when I very clearly was working off breadcrumbs to begin with, with no real reason to think Dodd would actually end up getting piled on.

I have more I'd say if this wasn't too long already but there ya go.

EDIT: My intention in the roleclaim bit was to reiterate that if I knew claiming even convincingly VT would've guaranteed my death, I wouldn't have done it, and if I was scum I wouldn't have been so careless to make ALL of these mistakes.

I'm starting to forget why I wanted to vote Dodd in the first place, idk, I've been super tired and unmotivated to play (But of course, getting modkilled would hurt town) But from what I can see, Jace is starting to give me weird vibes for me, like, I get not wanting to die while you still have so much fuel, but you've been making a lot of defense posts and from what Zetsu said quite a few pages back: Wayyyy too much focus on what you'll read as once Dodd flips. This could be new Jace, this could be new scum Jace. Especially since losing a VT at this point isn't much of a loss anyways. Also, that defense post DOES sound like trying to dig yourself out.

Despite that I still am getting a towny vibe on Jace on basis that scum on day 1 from what I've seen, generally prefer to stay quiet and let the crapposts roll on a day being quiet wouldn't matter.

Irina Ivanov wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:14 am Jace is starting to give me weird vibes for me, like, I get not wanting to die while you still have so much fuel, but you've been making a lot of defense posts and from what Zetsu said quite a few pages back: Wayyyy too much focus on what you'll read as once Dodd flips.

Fair but I'm not gonna dig for other ways to defend myself against that claim. As I explained already, I am worried about Dodd flipping town because I don't want to get lynched. VT or not, I don't want to stop playing. That literally is all it is. I'd like to think if I was scum, I would've recognized the futility in being open about this 6 or 7 repeats ago but bc I'm not, playing my entire hand is the only route I see for myself to take.

The previous post was more just intended to explain my behavior, but I get reading it differently than I intended it. That's all I got tho. I'm down to keep answering specific insinuations or questions, but I've got nothing else to say about it on the whole.

Zetsu wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 3:59 am Can you explain your logic behind why you think cactus is town, toben? I got a touch lost reading your explanation.

Yeah I'm kinda zonked out and sorta put him in as an afterthought.

It's absolutely not a strong read on my end given the truncation of discourse, but the way he honed in on Jace and Blizzard over the flavor stuff, and the way he actually went down what was IMO pretty clearly the wrong track re: Blizzard's side of it, felt very natural to me. It's the sort of process that makes a lot of sense (granted, bias at play here since it was mostly my pet theory too ) and one that doesn't to me make a lot of sense coming from scum--there are so many easier things to jump on, or even just stay quiet.

Also, scum!Dodd tends to pretty reliably go "So I don't know what I'm doing, but here are my wild flailings..." yet here he came in strong and focused and with a clear perspective. His mask tends to be uncertainty and joking, and while there was a lot of that across his assorted posts before, the actual case was clearly stated and reasonably confident and that's not his early game scum MO at all.

MK Kilmarnock wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 4:19 amThe issue I've found myself in right now is if I keep my vote where it is or move it, since chances are good we're going to have a modkill on Dodd's seat but like... I hadn't really looking far enough ahead yet to figure out who should be my backup? How this generally works is we use the flip from day 1 headed into day 2 to draw beads on people with their ISOs and work on coming to conclusions that way. This leaves me in the... interesting... position of having to come up with step two without completing step one (because that's how I'd determine a follow-up read). Is any of this making sense? I fucking hope so.

It does make sense, though my stance is at this point we've got ~12 hours or something left in the phase, half the game may not even show up, and we'll learn something that reflects on most if not all of my favorite picks from the shot anyways, so may as well take it.

Also I'm 100% putting my vote on Dodd's slot at like 11:55 or something (roughly an hour from now) because it's been a long day and I make no promises I wake up before whenever phase ends tomorrow.

Irina Ivanov wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:14 am I'm starting to forget why I wanted to vote Dodd in the first place, idk, I've been super tired and unmotivated to play (But of course, getting modkilled would hurt town)

You getting modkilled, or Dodd getting modkilled? I don't quite follow the phrasing here.

Wotcha make of Paige catching him out lying, though

Sorry, meant myself although obviously ideally no one gets modkilled : P Been super unmotivated since isolation

Irina Ivanov wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:14 am (But of course, getting modkilled would hurt town)

I get the RL stuff, I just want to point out it's small things like this that give me vague amounts of suspicion towards you, because even tho that was clearly an offhanded remark about why you would rather participate despite not feeling like it than get modkilled for inactivity, you claimed town and doing so in such a subtle way gives me some kinda vibes. Idk I can't help it. I appreciate you sticking with the participation tho