Originally Posted by
Fielzanks
For the lazy people out there, NO TLDR.
So, here we are. I promised this and won't go back on my word, even though the work required to make this will be no fun. I do not think I will add quotes though, as it'll be too much of a strain for me. It's not even an iso but my point of view on the situation so isolating quotes from players could be useful for some pointers but I'm too lazy for that.
First of all, I will point an obvious thing that will be the basis of my train of thought, that should not be overlooked:
EoD1 was a clusterfuck of confusion. By throwing people's votes around by taking town lead, Distorted made EoD a chaotic mess.
Yeah, it's 100% his fault. But is he at fault? We know these two things :
a. We agreed on a D1 lynch to gain information.
b. When no powers are involved, voting patterns are the things that gives out the most informations.
By throwing confusion at EoD, even though we were otherwise going for a peaceful lynch of Marluxion, we gained these informations.
By throwing confusion, everybody could see that Distorted made it and make him answer for it.
But in reality, his actions gave us a LOT MORE infos than the death of Marluxion could.
If he was Mafia, there was no need to put himself in the spotlight like he did. Would he think about a triple-WIFOMing to assure his victory? Would be hazardous at best since there was no guarantee people would defend him, even though he kinda expected MM to do it (As seen in his frustration towards MM posts after EoD1).
Since voting patterns are important in day 1 and in general, what did that specific area told us?
Hybrid, Noz and Marl went really really easily into L-2. (Even L-1 for Marl, and thank god I could not hammer.)
Since bussing day 1 is a free pass to loose, we can guess that no mafia wanted them dead. So if one of them voted here, we could search for those who were against lynching them or pulled their votes out when things got out of hand. I went into the direction of sparing Hybrid myself, and you can see Distorted being responsible of the huge vote switch out of Noz and Marl.
Voting patterns told us that getting MM or SCV to L-2 and beyond was impossible. You can blame it on AFK, or you can blame it on one of them (or both) being scum. As for MM, as he was top town read for most, he has a better excuse than SCV for it.
Even though advocating for lynching Marluxion, Blink seemed to agree with Distorted but refused to coordinate his effort with Distorted. At the time, I think he thought Distorted to be scum so he intentionally disturbed his effort. Even I sensed something wrong at EoD, so can't blame him.
So, EoD1 comes, we lynch a poor Citizen named Marluxion. We now have a huge spotlight on Distorted, and three minor ones on MM, Blink, and SCV since two were the targets of Distorted and one was against his idea, basically. With this, we have put to the side the lesser active players. Which, statistically speaking could contain a portion of the Mafia.
Nevertheless, it is clear that between Distorted/MM/Blink/SCV there is a scum, simply because SCV and Distorted counterclaimed themselves.
As I've said in one of my first posts after Day 2, I've spent most of the 24 hours thinking about Distorted's playmaking at EoD. His manipulative behaviour that threw town into chaos bothered me, because of a simple rule : Mafia will throw confusion into town to win. It seems almost always true, but in this case, his actions were in fact good and beneficial for town, so we've found the exception.
From the facts stated above, and my own logic, I can extrapolate 3 different scenario, featuring 3 different teams. I will give a quick summary of the teams and my logic before going into details.
-Blink/SCV. Most obvious of them all, both pushed to kill Distorted ASAP in Day 2. Blink did all he could to seem scum to MM's eyes. Since the behaviour of the combo is so obvious, it's the less likely of the three options.
-SCV/MM. This is based on a strategy of fake arguing to make Distorted lynched while trying to win both sides of the coin. MM early reactions were inhabitual and I already stated in my last list of reads that I found him way less pushy this game. To the fact, MM reactions threw Distorted off, where it's clearly not in his meta as scum or town to be. That would allow MM to stay town-aligned after SCV lynch but by them damage would be already done, and with Distorted gone, a massive hurdle out of the way. Another thing to note : after this possibility being pointed out, MM tried hard to win over Distorted side, appearing town and voting SCV. May be bussing to save appearances.
-SCV/Distorted. Yeah, it's WIFOM right? You don't think Distorted could pull this off? He can. Proof? If this pairing is true, he's doing it right now and you're buying it. Since they go this violently at eachother throat and BOTH OF THEM agree that there cannot be another choice than either of them, that may be intentional bussing of SCV to win infinite town trust for Distorted and win the game without a doubt.
Quick stop here to remind you that while we poor townies were stranded for the night, the Mafia had a whole 24 hours to think about a plan to execute that would bring them victory. Since the first option (Blink/SCV) is the most obvious and basically bland, I'm pretty sure to void it.
Now, two things that might have happened : I'm pretty sure that if SCV was Mafia, and had access to a night chat, he would tell his comrades that he could buy Blink to his side. Both exposed similar thoughts and ambitions. I'm also pretty sure that if MM was Mafia with SCV, he then would tell him that he knew how to handle Distorted and that he would buy him off. Both are plausible, but seeing how late MM started to try to win Distorted to his side, that may not be it or a major fail since all he did at start was to frustrate him, and I don't think that frustrating him was a goal as Distorted's not the one to do slips and frustrations over petty things.
Many of you reading me are thinking that Blink is scum, or atleast scummy. He was one of the citizen roleclaimers, and acted like a citizen or mafia since as long as I can remember. That could have been a Mafia strategy to win items over. I don't remember his stance on items giveaway and calling, though. And by outing the Blink/SCV pairing of my list means that I THINK that Blink is town. We can not overlook the fact that he has a tendancy to lie. His vest claim could be a lie and he lied about not wanting to lynch Marluxion. I cannot give a reason right now why he would be acting like that, as I could not see enough of him (Blinkyann02 was a pain to read and the other Which Witch is Which is seemingly suspeded) so I cannot judge on meta. Even though I can not put a reasoning behind this, and even though he is acting scummy, I believe in my view of votings and players interactions more than lone tendancies - those are prone to be Town because they do NOT know their buddies and often only trusts themselves.
With Blink Town-aligned in my head now, I'll adress the Distorted/MM pairing : as the Blink/SCV one, their coordination was so poor and their interactions would be full of scum giveaway to be that. What kind of scum begs his scumbuddy for support after 24 hours of deliberation? I don't think even a beginner would do that.
We're down to 2 pairings now : SCV/MM and SCV/Distorted. From meta, we know that Distorted loves to fake arguments with his scum members to clear them if he's being lynched and vice-versa. With his intellect and manipulative behaviour, he could pull this off easily by making things look binary : "Now, I'm town and you lynch SCV, or I'm scum and SCV is town." This argument could steer town away from their lynches pre-Marluxion (Hybrid, Noz) to protect them if one of them was a scum too (Which Witch is Which throwback).
That is why I'm advocating against lynching before near EoD2 because I want to investigate other people too as there's a key I'm missing somewhere.
As I've explained before, MM seemed poorly organized coming out of the night, who could be a town tell if he didn't act out of character for too long - not pushing people, not organizing his train of thoughts unless challenged, not seeing obvious pairings and voting Distorted up - there was no point for all of that. MM almost alone caused as much confusion as Distorted at EoD1. That is a scum tell. I won't really go into details about SCV behaviour. He seems like way hard focused on lynching Distorted and nothing else. He's not searching for clues, he had clues about things that got verified later (hi thief?) and seems like he want himself killed. That's not how a townie play if he's trying to win.
As you can see, I can't really out one of these two, because I'm probably WIFOMing myself on the SCV/Distorted one. If it's the case, then Distorted is a fucking mastermind and maybe a psychopath too. But the probability exists and the threat it poses cannot get ignored by my paranoid mind. But as stated when I first started this post, Distorted actions were good for town because he allowed us to gather informations we would not have by simply lynching Marl calmly. He could have done that to throw this WIFOM right after, but at this moment we can't know that. So to ease my own mind, I'll see Distorted as town-aligned unless my theory confirms itself.
By elimination process, I think we can get a scum out of the SCV/MM pairing.
So a MM lynch would give us the most informations out of all, for the moment.