OK, I reread everything. I was paying particular attention to ICT, NQT, Toony, and Juicebox/Caz.
The core of my opinion on NQT was as follows:
- NQT doing mechanical analysis does not mean that NQT is town. It just means that NQT is NQT.
- NQT's forms of mechanical analysis from this game are time-consuming but are not particularly yielding major insights.
--- For example: we can all figure out who has been most and least active. Claiming that those who bounce around are town while those who focus down are scum misses the strong tell of "active-lurking without making a case/looking for easy pickings."
- As a further point, if NQT had started the game as solo converter, they would have a very strong incentive to: put in a
lot of effort to "generate information" (it's exciting to have that solo scum responsibility! go go go scumteam!!) while not actually producing anything.
- HOWEVER, when I looked back at the game, NQT had a lot of side points that were not mechanically oriented. They were not his biggest posts, but they were active and entailed normal scumhunting.
- NQT also had a strong towntell: responding actively in thread as players post and regularly adjusting reads.
- NQT has also been a lot more interested in clearing a broad spread of players as town than I would expect to fit within a scum!NQT wincon.
==== With that said, there were still a few things that stood out to me:
---- defensiveness
---- a lot of, not just mechanical focus, but scumteam composition focus. This stood out to me in Skynet. However, if cult, the ongoing monitoring of the scum composition possibilities early D1 would be a lot of effort for a fundamentally anti-wincon outcome. Via Occam's razor, I'm not seeing it.
---- If NQT were scum, we should expect to see: 1. fakeclaim breadcrumbing 2. data analysis with "bent" outcomes: looking into the method shows clear bias in its application. 3. virtually no behavioral analysis. I haven't seen any of that so far.
---- I believe I could be being snowed, but I'm inclined to look here Tomorrow at earliest without strong further evidence.
I was checking Toony for consistency:
- The claim that LO is scum being coached starts D1.
- Toony's initial claim was that NQT was coaching the owl.
- Today, Toony's claim is that I have been coaching the owl.
- This shift appears to happen organically in a way that I think would be difficult to fake. They have been reactionary and driven some really bad cases on D2, but after D1 I can see things from their perspective.
- I would expect some kind of shift if Toony had been converted, whether in opinions or targets or "energy," and I'm not seeing it. I think scum!Toony would be more careful about logical consistency.
ICT has a lot of interesting posts that don't necessarily go anywhere, but are heavily invested in getting information in unorthodox behavioral ways. I don't like how much they've been on the sidelines this game, but I felt like they were advancing the gamestate, as it were, both Yesterday and Today.
Regarding Caz/Juicebox:
- Juicebox -- lurking, but more importantly suddenly showed up at the EOD CFD to defend self. NQT notices that no one moved to protect Juicebox during the CFD.
- This is our second dreamwalker claim.
- Caz is mostly being reactive in-thread and had the world's sloppiest readslist, which was nothing but hot air, despite having watched the game since D1.
- I still feel iffy on this. I think this target is a bit too easy.
Persus13:
I'm certain its not NQT
Wait, why's that?
Final thoughts:
- Not to outguess the mod, but for balance, if Tric is a Knight it would make sense for us to have something on hand with an NK.
- I think that: people are spinning up a bunch of WIFOM about the vets right now because 1. we really don't want to have a cult, especially 2. we don't want the cult to have converted one of the "confirmed" vets, and additionally 3. the newer crew has been asking for replaces and self-voting right and left.
- If Toaster rolled conventional scum, I could see him not NKing in order to push the cult narrative. See his start-of-day post; and he has, I feel, the most experience with this setup. It's a very viable strategy for him.
- Also, Toaster was the one who started the push to focus on the worst-case vampire lord scenario, which has left people looking for a converter from D1 (i.e. not interacting much with Today) and additionally running our pool of strongest vets ragged as a group of possible conversion targets.
- Toaster has been on the side for most of today. I know that he's busy. So am I. But the point is more: I'm not seeing the gamestate advancing much from their hunting today.
- I'm feeling Jim as the best conversion target from our pool of strong players at this point, if we do have a converter. Third on the bandwagon, as others have noted, is not a good look. I also trust Jim to try to change up his playstyle since BYOR15.
- I'm feeling Webadict as the Devil. Web's "NQT has massive scum equity" without much backing it up pings me wrong and I still don't like the early D1 play. I could also see Web going for Lucky's soul. Feels very Web.
Anyway, my probably-final vote for Today is on
Toaster. I've been having trouble sleeping lately and have a lot of HW to catch up on. Sorry I couldn't get the big post out sooner.
PS: To those who think LuckyOwl was converted, I'm going to ask you to think again about which player would go for the BK-LO double-convert possibility. What would their mindset be? What would they be expecting to gain? This isn't just a self-defense: I don't think we should chop LO today. This fundamentally doesn't make sense (to me) as a scum strat.
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Topic: Supernatural 10 - Game Over! (Read 88534 times)