I’m not any more convinced by the Silver Jan case than I was yesterDay. I said in reference to pedescribe on Day One that unvoting when called on bad votes is a null tell. Silver Jan does have a tendency to make bad votes and retract them but I’m having difficulty seeing what the scum motivation behind her overall behaviour is. The impression I get is of someone who was confused about the gaming terms “level cap” and “NPC” and who hasn’t developed a scum-finding toolkit yet so tends to vote for inconsistencies rather than scum behaviours. (I wouldn’t worry about the latter - those of us with lovingly developed theories about what scum do and don’t do and don’t don’t do tend not to boast a 100% success rate, to put it mildly).
Pizza is next on the chopping block. This is more complex so I’m going to try to break it down for myself:
Against Pizza:
Essentially, the whole “I look like scum, but if you vote for me you’re the real scum” schtick. Hypothetically, a scum Pizza who adopted this pose would have a) given himself licence to be as inconsistent and hypocritical as he wanted and b) pre-emptively deterred anybody who considered voting for him with the threat of an aggressive OMGUS campaign. By contrast, if your whole plan is to look scummy in an attempt to lure scum votes, it would be best not to loudly announce this plan to all and sundry. At this point, I’m wondering if there’s a super secret real plan which is to lynch people that don’t vote for him on the grounds that scum would be afraid of drawing his fire.
There are other inconsistencies which have been pointed out by others (e.g. over double voting) but inconsistency isn’t necessarily scummy. (Although at root, all scum are forced to be inconsistent - to pretend they want what Town wants when they don’t.) It’s the overarching justification for any and all vote-drawing behaviour, coupled with the pre-emptive UberOMGUS that really give me pause.
For Pizza:
His analysis of Silver Jan. It’s long and detailed. It concludes that she’s likely Town. Given that she’s his close rival for the lynch, it would have been more self-interested to do a long analysis that concluded she was scum, or if he wanted to conclude she was town in order to look selfless and noble, to do so without putting all of her posts in one place to be read and going through them in detail to make his case. He wouldn’t, after all, want to be too convincing. Reading back, he did something similar with Kelly when he was close to him for the lead.
His self-confidence. He comes across as a player who’s backing his own play pretty heavily, and who isn’t going to modify that to keep people sweet. Scum tend naturally to be circumspect and avoid tall poppy syndrome. The attitude could be an elaborate bluff, as I discussed above, but I doubt that anyone could keep it up too long. We’d start to see some self-preservation behaviour at some point with the vote pressure, and there doesn’t seem to be any. (I don’t mean the “ok, lynch me if you have to” stuff, I mean a genuine change of pace or tone.)
On balance, I’m leaning slightly town on Pizza. It’s tough, because not having played with him I have that itchy feeling that I might be being suckered, but I think that most of what he’s done to raise my hackles has been due to play-style rather than any pro-Scum behaviour.
So who does that leave?
I didn’t like USCDivers’ votes before, and I don’t love his fairly unreasoned, non-scum-hunting vote for pizza now. But I really don’t like Mental Guy’s case on gnarlycharlie. Gnarly did a good job of refuting it, and the fact that Mental’s case can be so easily reflected back on him makes me wonder if there’s an element of transference:
vote Mental Guy