Toaster: I thought I was pretty transparent yesterday on the fact that I was stalling on Jim until I saw more of him, but I guess not. It’s a moot point anyway because we’ve got less than 12 hours left in the day and I have zero confidence Jim will decide to engage with the game.
The grand total of the initial 4maskwolf scumread on Jim Groovester: I didn’t like that he came to my defense at the start of the game. Yup, that’s it, the sum total of that guy read.
Okay, not quite the sum total. I’ve had a policy for at least the last year (since “I Need a Doctor” on MU) that any veteran player who excuses or defends objectively bad play on my behalf gets a scum point and extra scrutiny. It’s not a hard scum read, but I’ve seen enough scum “help out” a poorly playing townie veteran that I don’t trust it when veteran players do it.
Specifically, what Jim Groovester did was get on both Dolores and Vector for getting on my case for my entry into the thread. Which, yes, was deliberately bad and unhelpful, largely as a quick reaction test for dolores who I expected it would draw a response from. It also gave me an excuse not to engage with the early D1 period which I find abjectly miserable to play so y’know, two birds one stone.
The thing is, as you’re probably already rolling your eyes and saying, isn’t this the weakest case in the history of cases? And yes, it basically was. It’s a personal gut/policy read based on a single post and, when juxtaposed against his general hatred of basically everything to do with this game, it gets even weaker because “bitching about people being super serious hours into a Christmas Eve D1” is relatively in line with the rest of his attitude. But, it’s what I had to go on on him, so I tentatively put him on my scum list while waiting for him to post more content that would help nail down a read.
And in short, he really hasn’t. I’ve ISO’d him a couple times over the past few days, and I believe it was Fallacy who basically summed it up a couple days ago with something like “he does nothing but respond to questions and go after low-hanging fruit.” Nothing special, but there’s literally nothing in his posts that strikes me as especially town mindset. So I was, and still am, content to leave him on much scum list until he actually does something to convince me he cares about a town victory, or even, for that matter, the game itself.
And there’s one more red flag, something I only caught when reviewing this post in my head. Back when Fallacy pseudo-cased Jim and FoS’d him, Jim responded almost immediately after by basically saying “if you think I’m scum, why are you not using your vote?” I’m paraphrasing because I’m PFP and don’t trust this tab not to refresh and delete my post if I go try to get the exact quote. But on to the point, that’s actually a pretty big red flag for me: I challenge townies like that a _lot_ as scum because if they bite and commit to a case on me it gives me something to fight. There’s uncomfortably little you can do as scum about townies vaguely casting aspersions in your direction and putting the idea out there that you’re untrustworthy, but if you can get them to commit to a big case on you it gives you something that you can tear down and fight against. Even if you don’t convince that one specific townie, being able to build a solid defense against a fully articulated case can help diffuse the cases’s power among the rest of the town.
tl;dr: my initial scumread on Jim was super weak and based on a very personal gut read. He hasn’t done anything to make me think he’s town since then, and a mental review this morning turned up a red flag that makes me comfortable leaving him firmly in my scumpile.
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Topic: BYOR 15: Game Over - Mafia Win (Kinda?) (Read 115191 times)