I agree with the analysis that we are probably now split 5-3, which puts us at LyLo. With that in mind, I am officially abandoning any preconceptions I might have had about people, and looking at them again from scratch.
Rysto and sach were our runners-up yesterDay, which is as good a place to start as any. sach’s got the most posts, so I’ll start with him:
Day One:
sach actually has a lot of pure strategy posts pre-Day One, analysing the spawn mechanic. The only thing we can deduce from this is that he’s highly interested in game mechanics. Once we start the Day, we continue in the same vein: his first post is on the same topic. As are the next half-dozen or so. During this time, he picks up votes from Zeriel and Freudian, basically because they disagree with him on strategy/tactics.
His response to this is basically to shrug it off, saying that a) he’s got used to picking up votes for having unpopular ideas and b) such votes are stupid. He considers some kind of OMGUS vote, particularly on Freudian for following in Zeriel’s footsteps.
Up until this point, sach had been open to the criticism that he’s just talking strategy and not hunting scum. Now however, he gets involved in the case against peeker: first, correcting the timeline after a re-read; thenaccusing Zeriel of putting words into peeker’s mouth and saying that most of the case against peeker is crap - except special ed’s.
After another post on double-lysing and a clarification on his criticisms of the peeker case, we get something interesting:
Storyhas gone through the early votes for peeker and sach on the hypothesis that they’re both magnets for early votes, and may thus be seen by scum as a soft target. sach quotes this approvingly (in what in retrospect seems to be something of an “Ebony and Ivory” moment) and votes Freudian - as he had hinted he might earlier.
At this point it’s clearly time for more discussion on double-lysing, which is the subject of 4 of the next 5 posts (The fifth is a C&P of the post-count by player). It’s probably a good time to address what is going to be a theme for sach for quite a while:
At some point, and your opinion may vary on when, the discussion on whether or not to double-lyse ceased to be useful strategy discussion and became noise. This is even more evident when you re-read and see that Alka Seltzer was a secondary participant - maybe not as vociferous as sach and story, but doing enough to keep the discussion simmering away. However, the fact that we’ve identified one known scum involved in the decision seems to me to make it highly unlikely that sach (on whose side Alka was broadly arguing) is also scum. We know that story was town, so for two scum to get involved in an attention drawing dispute on the same side seems pretty unlikely. So, for all that it became anti-town, I don’t think his focus on this discussion is a mark against sach.
So leaving that aside, the next substantive post is on the Day One vote leaderboard. Sach doesn’t see the Scuba case as any less substantive than the peeker case, although he’s still most suspicious of Freudian. He says he’s happy to have a two-horse race.
This is interesting because he’s already said he doesn’t really rate the peeker case, which implies he thinks that both case are unsupported. This turns out to be true, of course, but it’s a very understated way of putting the fact that a) he thinks we’re going to mislynch and b) he can’t get support for his candidate. It’s a very fatalistic attitude.
We then get a post looking at Zeriel, Freudian and story. sach is leaning scum on the latter two - on story because of bleed-over from the double-lyse discussion. This bleed-over is going to continue over the next few Days.
That more or less brings us to the end of Day One. Things of note:
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Having hinted that he might vote for Freudian, sach waits for someone else (story) to do an analysis before actually placing a vote. He says that “he can’t believe he didn’t read [Freudian’s quote regarding me] before.” Well, yeah. Given that quote was her **vote **on sach, it’s pretty difficult to believe. It looks like he was waiting for back-up before making his vote (perversely, the very thing he accused Freudian of doing).
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Criticism of the case against peeker - accurate enough, but could be defense of known townie.
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The “both Scuba and peeker cases are weak” post - like I said there’s a fatalistic, “Well, we’re going to mislynch anyhow” aspect to it that I don’t like. Obviously, scum would be happy with a mislynch, and wouldn’t want to rock the boat by pushing people to look elsewhere. On the other hand, the chances of both wagons coming apart by Day’s end were small, so it might just be realism.
Day Two:
special ed has died, which spares us a math rant. sach also doesn’t think we should speculate openly about Communal Organism. This position leads to a) reminiscing about Monkgate and b) a discussion with Cookies about how this speculation will expose power-roles.
sach then goes on to defend his vote for Freudian and challenge both Mahaloth’s case against KellyC and Drain Bead’s case against Rysto. While he drops his opposition to the Rysto case (persuaded that voting for PIS is plausibly something scum would do) he pushes Maha both for his original vote against Kelly and for his comment about the lameness or otherwise of peeker votes. This leads to a vote on Maha.
There’s a fairly obvious scum motivation for this - defending Kelly by attacking the person voting for her. However, although Maha clearly was right, the hole he dug for himself with the “lame/not-lame” line and the distinction he tried to draw between “voting with bandwagon” and “joining a bandwagon” was sufficiently deep to draw legitimate suspicion (Full disclosure - I also voted Maha that day, so I would think that.)
Glossing over some further discussion with story (who has claimed at this point) the next event is a discussionwith Orediggerabout Digger’s vote for Fluid. Yet again, sach is criticising someone else’s case. This may seem like a negative thing to do, but I actually think it’s a pro-Town move. Letting bad cases stand encourages a mislynch; moreover all cases made by scum against town will by definition be bad (because they haven’t identified scummy motivations/behaviour) so those challenges may flush out scum. With this as a pattern of behaviour, the defense of Maha looks a little less likely to be scum motivated.
In fact, sach defendsfluiddruid(rightly!) against various people inc. story and Cookies at this point.
He then unvotesfrom Maha to story. (This is post story’s claim). The grounds for the unvote are that he doesn’t think Maha will get lysed today and that story will.
I don’t like this opportunistic reasoning. I can see that if you suspect two people equally then you could vote for the one most likely to get lynched, but the general rule is to vote for whoever you think is most scummy, and I think it’s a good one. Certainly sach doesn’t explain why he’s choosing not to follow this rule.
The next thing that happens is a series of challenges to Meeko over his apparent acceptance of story’s claim, and his voting and unvoting at the end of the day. It’s fair enough to be concerned at what seemed like a somewhat scattergun approach, but there’s always the caveat that pushing Meeko is a possible scum tactic for creating noise.
To sum up Day Two, sach played a solid pro-Town game (if you ignore, for these purposes, his continued argument with story). His posts on other subjects generally appear to have a pro-Town motivation, with the possible exception of his attack on Maha which could have been a defence of Kelly. However, as mentioned, it does fit with his general pattern of play today.
I’m going to post this now because it’s getting too long…
Is this a coincidence or are the scum giving me a one-two punch?