It wasn’t my intent to get my start in this game so late, but I will say it’s given me a pretty unique place to start analyzing folks. For me, my Day 1 is now, and reading the entire thread from the beginning while knowing the roles of Krayz, Mahaloth, Guiri, and Silman has been helpful.
I’m going to spoiler my thoughts on two potential wolves to help make this post a little more manageable.
Giraffe:
[spoiler]Giraffe pegged me early with post 34, which defended Mykbot. He called out a fair number of people, but never mentioned specifics. No names, no specific actions, no direct accusations. It’s a particularly strong defense of Mykbot (he underlines the “at all” when saying he doesn’t get it), and concludes by saying he’s “a lot” more suspicious of people eager to jump on an easy vote. This pegged me early, and I’d like to suggest an interesting contrast to this claim: Giraffe ended the day having voted for Peeker, as easy a vote as someone could make.
The next post that caught my eye was the way Giraffe snuggled his way up to Idle Thoughts in 107. I don’t like this post. He agrees with Idle Thoughts, who said NAF’s concept was a misthought idea. He suggests wolves wouldn’t be bold enough to “stick their necks out with a proposal like that right off the bat” which is a fair enough idea, and then adds that part of NAF’s proposal pings him anyway. Talk about burying the lead. He concludes that he’s “giving it a null tell with just a whiff of town…” I’m giving this post a whiff of waffling plus some cuddling of Idle Thoughts. He goes from discussing town NAF’s idea, to proposing scum NAF’s plot, to concluding it’s town. That’s fine - he’s working it out in his head, and decided on a conclusion. If this was all I had, it wouldn’t be a case at all. But it strikes me as a bit off.
In post 250, Giraffe votes for Dancecat for fitting his pattern of typical scum on Day one. Dancebot is not one of the people who were “jumping on an easy vote” for Mykbot, so I’m forced to conclude that Giraffe has lost interest in something he described as “a lot more suspicious.”
272, he agrees that his reasoning for voting for Dancecat may have been flawed, but likes his vote anyway after rereading her posts. His vote is, as far as I can, for exactly the same reasons as he just agreed were bad. He says “if a brash player were to find themselves Wolf on an unfamiliar board, this is kind of the by-the-book style I’d expect.” He suggests Dancecat is posting a lot about strategy and other safe targets and voting early for spurious reasons. I can kind of see his reasoning, but there appears to be a bit of a disconnect between saying “you’re right, that case was wrong” and “I’m voting you for these reasons, which are very, very similar to the first reasons.” This is perhaps the weakest of the connections I’ve drawn, because I’ve seen town players do this just as often. Still a weird post to me.
296: This post was surprising, not least because I was surprised nobody else thought this was worth mentioning (unless I missed it… I read 1400 posts in a few hours). Giraffe says “It’s lazy to jump on me for my vote. Opportunistic.” Why? It’s day 1, and Giraffe has already admitted in 272 that he misspoke and that his original case might not be correct. How is it lazy or opportunistic to vote for someone because of this? Unless he straight up knows his vote for Dancecat was a bad vote, what exactly is opportunistic about this? If I had caught Dancecat in an apparent scum tell, I wouldn’t characterize someone’s attack on me as “opportunistic” unless I knew my case was dishonest. It seems off in so many ways. Do you get what I’m saying? I feel like I haven’t explained this as well as I could, even though it makes sense to me.
301: 9 minutes later, Giraffe decides Peeker’s vote was vote worthy itself. He describes Peeker’s actions as “jumping on an easy vote.” Again, WHY? What is so easy about Peeker’s vote?
824: More Idle Thoughts cuddling. “But Astral!” You’ll say. “Giraffe doesn’t even mention Idle Thoughts in this post!” How right you are, and that’s what’s so weird about it. In post 321, Idle Thoughts cheerleads the town and wants more conversation. Giraffe calls out crackedquads in 824, saying he has been “pinging the bejeezus” out of him, and derisively characterizes cracked’s words as “c’mon Town, let’s all pull together and choose one of these vote leaders!” Idle has struck me as a calm, well-reasoned poster thus far, and I’m positing that a scum Giraffe isn’t interested in crossing him. Hence the bizarre disconnect between calling out cracked’s “cheerleading” (which didn’t seem all that bad to me) and ignoring Idle’s far more egregious cheerleading earlier.
What’s more, Giraffe’s suggested scenario makes no sense to me. He says a scum cracked wants people to switch their votes from scum buddies peeker and maybe Krayz, so that cracked can… vote for peeker himself for town cred? Also, to finish out this post, he calls crackedquads “naive,” which is something I didn’t pull from his quoted post at all.
I’ll note that askthepizzaguy has also posted some suspicions of Giraffe in post 1341. I don’t agree with everything pizza posted, but as far as I can tell he hasn’t made any mistakes. I just don’t agree with him about the severity of some of his scum tells.[/spoiler]
Episkey
[spoiler]To start with, Episkey suggests that Krayz is town. I’ve noticed a pattern among POGers, where they’ll announce they’ve seen “one thing” about someone, and then suggest they’ll clear the person if they can say what it is. Episkey doesn’t do that here, he just idly mentions he’ll see if Krayz can figure it out, but this seems as good a place to ask why you guys do that as any. Anyway, to make a point, this could be a scum Episkey looking for town cred. Or not. Either side could have made this post.
617: Episkey drops a quote, says “me too!”, and adds that “the fact Jan ignores Peeker’s stated reasons for posting differently and then votes him isn’t good.” Silver Jan seems to be going with the flow, and her vote seemed weak to me, but Episkey’s vote here seems just as weak.
645: Drops a quote of lilflower, adds a single question, and calls out TexCat. Similar to 617, just kinda seems weak.
664: He wants to clear Dancecat for a post, and asks her if she knows why. Either do it or don’t, dude. I find this kind of thing frustrating, although I’m not gonna call it scummy. We as a town gain information from discussion, and we learn nothing from a stream of posts like this. I have yet to see anyone answer that question, regardless of who asks, so what is gained here?
689: Yet more defense of Krayz. I’m noticing a pattern here. He also defended Krayz in 638.
844: Suggests not discussing crackedquad’s “valid point” because EOD is in 40 mninutes. There’s no pro-town reason for shutting down conversation. However, as I’ve seen many times, anti-town is not necessarily scum, so this isn’t exactly the scum tell of the century.
1140: One of Episkey’s most decisive posts. Calls out Precambrianmollusc for voting Krayz, stating that Precam’s vote was “the worst of the worst imo.” He concludes, in all caps, that “HE KNOWS IT FOR HORRIBLE REASONS YET HE VOTES FOR HIM ANYWAYS.” He then votes Precambrian for it. Wait, no he doesn’t. No vote at all. Why not?
1150: He’s glad to see his read of Dancecat was correct. He’s basing this on Idle’s say-so. I currently have no reason beyond crazy speculation to suspect Idle is lying, and plenty of other people have gone over the various ifs and so on, but Episkey seems to be just blindly trusting Idle here. He has a good defense against lilflower’s question in 1174, and he explains why Idle would be honest either way. However, he’s missing a key point: Idle himself doesn’t actually know if it’s an honest result or not. Idle clearly believes it’s true, but Episkey seems to be accepting it far too easily.[/spoiler]
Ultimately, I find Giraffe far more scummy than Episkey.
Vote Giraffe.
That does it for now. I want to see this day play out a little more before I post some of my lesser cases.