Quote Originally Posted by Marshmallow Marshall View Post
Alright, here we goooooooooOOOO!!!

Spoiler : The Greatest Wall of China (self-analysis post) :
(The "tradition" refers to the fact Varcron constantly gets lynched D1, to the point it became a running gag on the site; this is half a joke and half a way to draw potential reactions, either from Varcron himself or from people who would question my vote, but we ended up going entirely elsewhere)

First posts, trying to get the game going through RVS, which I believe is the best way to gather information early on; sometimes, you get immediate information, but basically all the time, you can come back to the early D1 interactions generated by RVS using the information from later flips and make a lot of sense from it. I know I've solved games that way before, even though I don't remember the games themselves lmao.

Unfortunately, basically noone wanted to get into RVS. Vittae seemed to say "we should make things progress" without actually doing anything to make things progress, which was striking me as performative/"look at me, I'm being proactive!", so basically suspicious. Hence the questions, which I actually expected to be poorly answered by Vittae at that point, so I was getting ready to charge and apply pressure:

Their reply was quite satisfactory, though (explaining their stance with the site, also explaining that they tend to be a high poster and that they're restraining themselves), and opened the way to meaningful discussion with a question about Mizery's opening post ("thank god I thought I was going to rand wolf again"). I liked where it was going and thought that if the "high poster" part were true, it would show soon enough, and that if it weren't, it would also be obvious and easy enough to realize.

Then came Deathworlds' setup speculation, which looked very big for very little actual content in the middle of page 1. I have historically had issues with reading people who make long, logical, analytic posts, because they tend to be coherent and I used to associate coherence/truth with town way too much, so I'm constantly wary of wall posters. I think I even vaguely remember getting fooled by Deathworlds himself that way, so I was pretty pinged by his speculation post; apart from the public service announcement of not using anti-town power abilities as town, it was more or less a "nothingburger", to use his own favorite expression. Hence I questioned him, got the not exactly satisfying answer "I like setup speculation, it's fun, and now is the time to get into it", so since I was getting nothing of note, I just put him in my scum lean mind category and went to question Ikarus, since he said he had enjoyed reading Deathworlds' post.

Ikarus' statement, now that I think about it, was pretty spontaneous and genuine-looking, and I quite like it now; but back then, I was mostly interested in a potential association with Deathworlds, so I was in a "is he scum" mindset rather than in an objective observation mindset, I guess. Then Loldebite posted a mech post themselves, but in a way that felt more useful (there was actual talk about what we should or shouldn't do regarding claims, it was more game-related rather than just "in the air"), so I asked Ikarus what he thought of it compared to Deathworlds', Here, it feels like the extent of your reads on both Death and Deb come down to how useful you found their initial mech post, then? What is the deeper logic here besides "town make useful posts, mafia make less useful posts"? Why wouldn't mafia want to make useful-looking posts to get townreads?and that's when it seems Loldebite began being suspected by many, including Ikarus of course, for reasons I frankly could not understand (hence my later questioning of PoD when he hard pushed him).

Ikarus' point itself was understandable and convincing at first, though: Loldebite's big post had indeed appeared 4 minutes after his last post, which was impossible to have thought and typed immediatly. It turned out Debbie had said he was working on a post, though, so there was in the end nothing suspicious, and I was left with pretty much nothing. I started feeling like Ikarus was town due to the way he seemed to be reading people (thinks people are wrong = thinks they're scum Why did you believe that this be >rand town and not just as likely mafia looking for a low effort way to make scumreads on villagers for making NAI mistakes?, which is what I believe he applied to scumread Loldebite, even though I'm actually still not sure), but waited on a reply from him about his reasons for scumreading Debbie before committing to my read. I think that reply never actually came, but other things (namely POD and Mizery) took my attention, so I kinda forgot about it and remained with my vaguely good impression of Ikarus (which, now that I re-read the situation, seems to make sense).

Between the questions to Ikarus, I had been checking POD's ISO, Why was PoD your choice of player to ISO at this point on time, or were you doing several? since I felt like he had said basically nothing noteworthy in spite of him having like 4x my post count at the time (I remember checking postcounts and seeing me having 13 posts when he had 50 or so). Reading his ISO more closely, I found his posts were basically all either useless or entirely self-related (as in, they were all pertaining to someone who had said something about him, in a very defensive manner), so I decided to pressure him and basically try to lead town!him to becoming useful or to lead scum!him to outing himself by being unable to generate anything genuine-looking. It was especially useful in my mind since he was pretty much unattacked (not seriously, at least) at that point in the game, so there was new info to get here. Since he was hellbent on remaining hyperdefensive and strictly refused to address things that weren't just about immediatly defending himself (I had asked him about his read on Mizery, both in order to get him to speak up on something that wasn't directly related to himself and to evaluate the possibility of a POD/Mizery scum pairing, since I was also scumreading Mizery), I concluded he was absolutely not trying to "unrust" himself and his scumdar like a rusty townie would, and that he rather was just an awkward wolf who didn't know how to interact and thus froze on anything that wasn't strictly about himself. (I also remember Vittae expressed a very similar reasoning at some point in D1Yep, very similar thought process to what you described here., and I had a big mindmeld feeling that made me quite significantly townread them, whereas I had been careful not to townread them too quickly for being logical/useful before.) The fact I scumread Mizery at that time also boosted my confidence in my POD scumread, since it REALLY seemed (and honestly still seems when I reread it) that he was purely and simply refusing to interact with her in any way, as if he were afraid of outing her:

From that point onwards (or rather, from the point where POD failed to answer the question that was colored in red), I was pretty much sold on a scum!POD, and was confident in my POD/Mizery theory. There were times during D1 where you were using the argument that PoD shouldn't be left alive until LYLO. How much of your push on him was due to wanting him resolved regardless of his alignment? Did this change at all over time since your initial vote?

[Going back in time a bit] About Mizery herself, nothing had really caught my attention, since she was just acting like her own relatively lighthearted NAI self, until this:

It starkly contrasted with 1) Mizery's own previous posts, which didn't contain any magic super confident solves that could explain this level of confidence and 2) my own feeling about the gamestate, considering I definetly hadn't anything confident yet (this was before I heavily scumread POD, I was just beginning to pressure him at the time and didn't know it would lead where it did), at least not enough to be anywhere close to saying we were winning. I then thought Mizery had TMI (and upon reread, I have the exact same feeling, and the knowledge of how EOD went only amplifies it tbh), and sensed a dissonance between the level of confidence in her previous posts Any specific ones? and the level of confidence this post showed. This snowballed with Mizery's "all your reads are pending" post in which she basically discredited me without drawing any conclusions, which was really just throwing shade; plus, the confidence level it implied once again felt really weird. She never really addressed this, so this feeling basically continued until the mess that was EOD, POD's flip and then Varcron's death threw me into a bit of a confusion Were you not expecting the Varcron death? - and rereading D1 rekindled my suspicions against her about the confidence level dissonance, btw, although it's weaker than it used to be due to POD's flip. Might be worth looking into further, but I digress. At the time, my suspicions on Mizery and POD were intertwined, mostly due to POD's behavior and especially to his complete refusal to address Mizery.


OKAY that was longer than I expected lol, and I should eat now. Going back to D1 made me draw two conclusions:
- I still suspect Mizery, and shouldn't forget about her What is your primary theory as to why Mizery as scum would unvote Death at EoD1? Especially if you think that Mizery can be scum in worlds where Death is town. What benefit could she have seen in those worlds to not commit to flipping town-invest-Death after already saying that I should have the final vote and laying accountability firmly on me for choosing who died,
meaning she could have almost completely gotten away with her vote on Death? And if she's mafia do you, as somebody who has been her mafia partner before, believe that she places a bus vote on a potential wolf-Death that tips them over into being a competitive wagon (Death was getting no traction and I was about to switch away) but then for some reason unvote at the last minute as Death's partner to let it rand and get no bus cred instead of just swapping to PoD or sticking to the push on Death? I think this is a case of the principle "if a player does one thing, just one single thing that shows they cannot ever reasonably be mafia then that player is town even if the rest of their posts are the scummiest posts you have ever seen" and I'm interested in your take on why that one thing doesn't, in fact, make it extremely unlikely for Mizery to be mafia (assuming she didn't gamethrow which I am taking as a given as I know Miz well enough to be confident she wouldn't).
- POD's lynch was basically inevitable and "deserved", without wanting to be rude; knowing he was town, reading his posts feels really weird, because that means he was misplaying so hard as a non-noob

You better actually read it lmao
Responses in purple!