Well, I’ve heard “Scum,” and I’ve heard “gloating,” but I don’t believe I’ve heard the two together before. Wouldn’t gloating indicate, I dunno, saying that I’ve been right on everything and nyeah nyeah nyeah to all of you? All I’ve said is that I’m a better player than I used to be… in my first game… where I was dead awful for 2/3 of the game. It ain’t like I had a very high bar to get past.
Mahaloth’s been on my tuchas since Dawn today for no real reason aside for the rather nebulous “play style” and “change in play style” comments, which he has yet to quantify. I’m at a loss to know what he means. So I asked him if by “change in play style” he meant that during Day 2 I’d done some player analyses but hadn’t done as much of 'em on Day 3. If so, I explained that was due to being all too aware that I’d been wrong on Inner. Which seems like the opposite of gloating, unless we’re in the Mirror Universe and I didn’t realize it. (Do you have a goatee now, and am I wearing a leather catsuit as befitting my ST:DS9 namesake?)
Then when I decided to get past my bad judgment on b]Inner** and tried to do a little run-down of each player as I see 'em (amusingly, I forgot to include you), I came to Mahaloth and mentioned his strange “play style” comment again. I opined that at least I’m playing better than before.
Mahaloth specifically asked me how I was doing a better job at scumhunting, and so I told him: 'at least I’m participating more and thus being more useful to Town than in my very first game, where I spent most of my time foundering.
yes, but Scum can’t out and out gloat in the game thread, can they?
But it’s human nature to be pleased when your side is doing well.
So, what happens is that some Scum talk about how badly “we” (Town) are doing. Sometimes a player just can’t resist. So they talk about how they’ve been wrong about everything, and how sorry they are, and how awful they feel, etc.
…Right, but that’s WIFOM up the wazoo. This is also how a townperson who thinks we’re not doing so hot would behave*. It would be utterly crazy to claim otherwise. We have a batch of useless lurkers, a nearly impotent doc who’ll either keep protecting himself or be killed, a dead investigator, a couple of divas who seem about this close to flouncing every time someone says anything to them, and not a scum corpse to be found.
We need to get off our asses, and anyone who’s really Town would feel the same way.
(* Not to mention it’s exactly how I behave both in real life and in the last game, where I was also town. I am… not the most confident person in the world.)
you know, the more I play this game the more I suspect I might find it not only easier, but more fun, to play as scum. I’m going to request it next game I play.
to be fair, Ed, you say ‘Let me be explicit’, but what follows is hardly more explicit than what you said before. If you had in fact been explicit, you would have actually filled in the statement ‘Sometimes, the way a person reacts to accusations reveals hints as to their alignment’ with 1) what person you have in mind; 2) what exactly that ‘way’ is; 3) what the hints are.
It’s fine if you don’t but don’t preface that by saying you’ll be explicit.
Since I was suspicious of fubbleskag yesterDay, and he seems to be on several other player’s radar, I thought I would review his posting. As with Mahaloth, the primary thing that stood out to me was his vote record.
(all votes bleached)
The “Abstain” vote was his first. At the time, I did not really see it as something that scum would do. He did, though, seem genuinely surprised by how negative a reaction it got. If he was not thinking it would be seen in such a negative light, then it is possible that he would do this as scum.
He votes Precambrianmollusc, but doesn’t give any reason beyond what is in the list. The reasons in the list might be sufficient, but he listed others as “slight lean scum” also. Why did he vote Precambrian over the others?
These smilies are responses to other players’ cases or comments. He follows Guiri’s lead here and votes septimus but does not tell what parts of the case he agrees with or if there is anything he doesn’t.
Other than this post being an exact copy of someone elses, it is reasonable since septimus had claimed doc.
This is where it gets weird. He revotes septimus. Apparently the diffence in the role PM is what leads to it, but he never makes that clear. He also does not really explain in later posts, why he revoted septimus rather than one of the other lynch candidates.
Here he defends his revote of septimus, but does not mention the difference in role PM.
I obviously can’t argue against a vote for Mahaloth, but he again just piggybacks on someone else’s vote without any explanation of his own.
I am not sure what to think. For someone that has posted quite a bit, he has not given much explanation for why he has voted the way he has. I am keeping my vote on Mahaloth for now, but I can see why fubbleskag is attracting some suspicion.
oh, I see, I didn’t realize the misunderstanding was that deep.
I was explaining the reason for my asking choie about that.
Sometimes I jsut make a comment to see how a person reacts.
Here is my statement
To answer your questions:
This applies to all players
There are a large variety of ways a person may react which when coupled with other game factors, they might help to give an indication as to that person’s alignment
There are a large variety of hints a person may give (e.g., being overly defensive, being accusatory) which when coupled with other game factors, they might help to give an indication as to that person’s alignment
So, it was just a general statement referring to no one in particular.
Do you think fubble's curiosity is a little bit defensive?
~~~~
For the record, nothing in choie's response pinged me. The answer is something I would expect from a Tonie or a very calm Scum. The two are difficult to tell apart usually.
EarlierI asked you how you figure that a scenario in which I am scum is actually more likely than one in which I am town. Describing a possible scenario is easy enough, but a full case actually requires that you argue why it is more likely that I am scum than that someone else is scum, and probably also that it is more likely that I am scum than that I am town. You would have to stack up my explanation of what I did over against your own understanding of what a scum motivation might have been, and then argue convincingly why you feel that I am, in effect, lying. You claim:
Actually, you have not done that. I’ve gone back over your posts just now, and there’s nothing that constitutes an argument why it is more likely that I am scum, hoping to protect **Scathach **(even if I’m clearly going to draw a lot of criticism for it) than it is that I am town, switching to a stronger case while being apprehensive of the bandwagon that’s formed on Scathach.
You come closest to addressing this issue when Choie points this out to you here:
[QUOTE=choie]
So special ed said he didn’t think there were equal chances of these scenarios being true, but I don’t think he elaborated on which he felt was most likely/unlikely. Could you do so now? Ditto anyone else who either a) has corrections to my suppositions or b) wants to offer ideas on these cases.
[/QUOTE]
Your response:
When choie prods you on this again (post #746), you don’t respond. That’s pretty weak, and your insistence that you’ve presented what makes you more suspicious of me than of anyone else when you’ve done nothing of the sort seems pretty evasive.
As an aside, I’ll note that you are pretty casual in your treatment of the evidence in favor of and against me. In post #602, at about 5PM on Saturday you lay out a number of different scenarios involving my vote switch and what might have motivated it. You mess up scenario 4, in which both I am scum and Scathach is town, in which I’d have been knowingly switching from one town train to another. Scathach points that out, and then you come out with this post #608:
[QUOTE=Special Ed]
[QUOTE=Scathach]
That doesn’t make sense. Scum Svejk would know that Inner was town too. Why jump from one town bandwagon to another?
[/QUOTE]
I don’t recall what the vote count was. When you switched to Inner, wasn’t it still looking like Scathach would be lynched?
[/QUOTE]
This post is really weird. For one thing, you mix up me and Scathach, the key protagonists in this entire drama. Can’t tell two people apart? Secondly, you don’t recall the vote count? :dubious: The entire crux of this drama is that my vote switch changed the vote Scathach-Stickler from 4-3 to 3-4. How can you forget that? Later on, post #613, you claim that you “hadn’t looked back to see the vote counts.” How can this be true, when the vote count is the basis of your case? This to me is evidence that you are just making an easy case against me and are doggedly refusing to consider any evidence that is in my favor. Scathach pursues the issue, essentially saying that her turning up town would provide as much evidence about me as my turning up scum would about her. You concede this in post #617 but ask ’ why wouldn’t he present this in his defense now?'. For one thing, I was not really presenting anything in my defense at all at that point, but for another more important point, if it’s true, it’s true, even if for some reason I overlook it and don’t include in my defense even if I did write a defense, why would you not entertain that as evidence in my favor and adjust your vote calculus accordingly? Of course, it was still N2 and you were not to vote for me for another 30 or so posts (#646), but when you do, all you offer as reasoning is that “Astral was obviously going to do this…”. A missed opportunity. Again, it appears to me that you are making an easy and unbalanced case against me.
Then in post #757 you feel the need to smear me for leaving my options open when lots and lots of players (choie, in post #736, for instance, says “For now, I’ll… vote Scathach. But don’t be surprised if this vote switches as the Day goes on.”) including yourself (“Now is it an iron-clad case? Of course not” - here are doing just that, and when in fact it is something that every good townie should be doing given that we all have very little information to go on. When I point this out to you, and ask you how what you are doing is essentially different, what you say is that there are
[QUOTE=special ed]
2 major differences:
I’m expressing suspicion of 2 players to your 4
but more importantly,
I’m expressing suspicion based on things I see. You listed the 5 players that were receiving votes and proclaimed support for 4 of the cases.
[/QUOTE]
First of all let me note that the case you are making here is based entirely on evidence that I provided when **Guiri ** asked me about how convinced I was by his case contra Septimus. Secondly, so I said I supported those 4 cases - they were against you and Stickler, who I had been suspicious of before, against Septimus, who had some votes against him on the basis of cases made by **Guiri **which I had already called convincing, and Scathach, which was my own vote. Clearly there are plenty of things that I had happened up until that point in the thread that indicate that I am not just giving blanket support to anyone who votes (what kind of dumb-ass strategy would that be anyway? If I were scum I’d be much more precise in what votes I’d support than that). Thirdly, you act as if what you are doing is somehow completely different, but I have yet to understand what the essential difference between 2 and 4 players is in this case. Now if you had actually pointed out back when I made those statements on D2, that would have seemed genuine, but now it just seems as though you are purposefully out to paint me in as dark a daylight as is possible even when there’s perfectly reasonable explanations that are for what I am doing that are compatible with me being town.
Of course, I should offer some argument as to why I think that Ed is more scummy than others in the game. In fact, there are a couple of pings out there but nothing that is quite as substantial to me as what Ed is doing. Others have pointed most of these things out as well - but in many cases I feel that what is being pointed out is just too obvious to be scum.
**Fubbleskag’s **weird unvote-revote for **Septimus **on D2, for instance, just mostly seems to me to be a play by someone who is not investing a lot of time in the game; **Mahaloth **has gotten a number of votes and has placed what I think is a really weird vote on **Choie **(on whom I have a town lean), but again the vote is so weird that I don’t think it’s scummy. Most others have done things that I have thought were scummy (from weird posts to failing to vote to poor justifications for votes) but they have often offset those later on in the game, giving me a reading of on them. Other than choie, I think **Septimus **and **Guiri **are town, and maybe Hirka. I thought **PCM **was town after being in a three-way tie for the lynch on D1 that he could have voted himself out of - but he’s been gone for so long that I don’t know what to think about him, so he is back to too.
on them. Other than choie, I think **Septimus **and **Guiri **are town, and maybe Hirka. I thought **PCM **was town after being in a three-way tie for the lynch on D1 that he could have voted himself out of - but he’s been gone for so long that I don’t know what to think about him, so he is back to