I had a bad gut feeling about username since D4 start, and over time I’ve kind of gradually come to the gut conclusion that VP Baltar isn’t interacting with me in good faith. Everything’s a bit muddled in my head and coming up with like, real reasons for gut reads is definitely hard? So I guess I’ll just try to present some things that have stuck out to me, and why I think they’re wolf!indicative. I could be losing the game here with my paranoia if we were actually on track to winning it, and sorry if I am. I don’t really like, “case” or “push” people often, so bear with me here.
I think the direction that I want to be going while thinking about this was actually clarified for me by The Bulge. Specifically, the part where he says:
In post 1650, The Bulge wrote:I mean you yourself just laid out a plan for catching wolves lmao, why haven't you looked into that at all? like cool I see you talking a loooot about what mafia would do here and what wolves would do there but WHERE IS ANY OF IT HAPPENING? there are many other instances of this kind of thing in your iso. show us wolves focusing on getting rid of mafia, or at least tell me you looked and didn't find anything, because your iso is all just pep talk shit with zero scumhunting. (hint: if you don't have an answer, I have one for you)
And when I agonized about how this contradicts what I told VP Baltar about “proactiveness in eliminating mafia being NAI”, I think I realized that, actually, proactiveness in eliminating mafia maybe should (or maybe it is NAI, but maybe it’s not) be at least SLIGHTLY wolf!indicative because like, literally that is what wolves NEED to do to win this game; town at least has other vectors, whether it be more passively looking for elimination options, or prioritizing wolf hunting, etc.
This actually might be the least wolf!indicative thing these two have done (not that the others are super damning, more-so I get that this one might be too weak), but it got me thinking about other scumtells: “what do wolves want to do in this gamestate” and “who is doing that”. Does someone doing what wolves would very likely do in a gamestate mean they’re wolf? No, but it certainly makes it more likely so yeah, it’s still wolf!indicative, aka a scumtell. And scumtells combined with narrative reconstruction are all we really have as the uninformed majority.
So I’ve been jotting down notes periodically in the past day or so building this case, and am trying to kind of organize them in a way that makes sense? There’s bound to be overlap between categories and omissions. And I would love to have a lot more time to comb over the ISOs and everything more carefully, but life is getting busy and deadline yeah. So here’s me giving it a shot.
• VP Baltar:
o Firstly, going off my point early about proactiveness in eliminating mafia, I don’t like how VP Baltar’s response to that was trying to frame the issue as we either “eliminate in the people who were driving the mafia elims” or “eliminate outside the people who were driving the mafia elims” to show that eliminating in the people who were driving mafia elims is better.
Classic false dichotomy that I almost got tricked by. The fact that he’s fallacying isn’t necessarily a scumtell on its own, but to me it was a red flag that he was at least subconsciously trying to plant the idea in town’s mind that we should be looking in field away from him/username. I didn’t mention a single time in my ISO that we should go full tinfoil and look exclusively in that pool, yet that is how he initially tried to frame the issue.
o I don’t think VP Baltar’s genuinely solving the game.
I think VP Baltar’s attitude towards what we should do today is contradictory: In
1730 he says we should “solve the game not individual slots”, but he can’t stop talking about Klyne in a vacuum and how he feels good about him being a wolf. He talks about some other potential slots like Bulge and username but he doesn’t really engage with me when I keep suggesting that he is down to one pairing: Bulge/Klyne wolf team. There’s no attempt from him to show town that “Klyne/Bulge” is the team and “here’s why if you look at the agendas they’ve been pushing”, yet in spite of all his he maintains his view that he is almost certainly right and we should all just trust each other.
• VP Baltar doesn’t genuinely seem like he’s trying to “solve the team” rather than just power through a Klyne elimination
o Klyne was quite towny near beginning of game
• Wolves have all the incentive to just take it to final 5 and power through.
• I don’t like how he’s handling my ruling out of the username/Klyne team, with “nothing is 100%, and I’d have to re-evaluate everything if Klyne flips wolf”. There’s so much hedging in that statement it’s gross and it’s none of it giving him real pause. He’s in response mode rather than critical thinking mode which is obviously scum!indicative.
I think, there’s a lot of reason to be paranoid of what’s going on, yet VP Baltar has seemed oddly confident in general at this stage in the game with like, little change throughout this day phase (where, for the first time, wolves can’t really hunt genuinely!)
• He repeatedly refers to my paranoia as “tinfoil”, as if somehow it’s like, too crazy and conspiracy-theorist to suggest that the people proactively eliminating mafia could be wolves in a multiball game?
• He has kept username in some of his solves lately but like, only as a very passing note.
o I think VP Baltar’s attempts to pocket me feel more like scum!pocketing rather than town!synergy.
Bulge mentioned that one thing he’s looking out for in the late stages of a MB game are is who is appealing to the “strong townies”. I’m obviously not exactly a “strong townie”, but I was certainly posting a lot for how little of a solve I had. I am potentially pretty pocketable, especially back on D2 when I would’ve gotten eliminated. I think that made me a good target for VP Baltar even continuing into today, trying to make me work for his townread. Since D4 it’s become more and more obvious that I’m town who wasn’t really sure what was going to happen, VP Baltar has been trying to flip the strategy to “working with me”.
I think, for a while, VP Baltar has been talking a lot about “trusting each other” and “townblocking”. He says to win this setup, townies have to trust each other, let’s just trust people who were working hard to eliminate mafia earlier in the game, and all will be well. Actually, username says this too multiple times, even with this bizarre melodramatic humor thrown in there to make us laugh off the absurdity of what he’s saying:
In post 1810, iamausername wrote:nooooo. no? no. don't let paranoia get the best of you. embrace the townblock. the townblock is love. the townblock is life.
As an example, look at
1622, which I respond to in
1624 (also the post about the dichotomy thing I mentioned above). Yes this could be stubborn townie!VP Baltar simply disagreeing on the approach with stubborn townie!innocentvillager, but
The whole
“aligning” thing doesn’t really make sense, every other time he has used the word “align” it has meant that we “agree on the solve”, and I get the sense that he’s backpedaling from his pocketing attempt.
It’s weird how he keeps doing solves assuming others are town and just presenting them as such. He’s done this at least 3 times, the weirdest of which was
1821 especially since it was unprompted. I never asked him to assume I was town in his long ass solve, why isn’t he bringing that up as a possibility?
o I think VP Baltar is AT LEAST CAPABLE of this kind of play as scum
This is just me giving credit to his scumgame. Clearly, if VP Baltar is wolf, he has been doing a very good job. The question is just, “is it outside of his scumrange?” and the only point of this bullet point is, “no, I don’t think so”. Also Ahsoka mentioned in
1589-1590 that this was pretty different from his town game and since I don’t think Ahsoka is wolf I’m consider this meta take a little bit at least.
Again multiball is different etc. etc. and it’s not too difficult to look town as a wolf especially in the earlier stages without any mafia flips, I’d imagine, because you can scumhunt for realz, this has been mentioned a million times.
I didn’t read Mini Normal 2157 closely but scum!VP Baltar seemed fairly convincing for a while.
o ORAM was scummy and postury, I got gut scumvibes from there on tone
• Iamausername
o I don’t like how iamausername isn’t addressing my push like, at all. His only interaction like, with me specifically, long after I’ve been voting him, is to expand my possible pool of mafia
1867. Like, I could have the whole solve wrong by just continuing to vote iamausername but that’s the only time he felt compelled to interact with me. Imo this is wolf!indicative behavior.
o The tempo and lack of aggression overall that I saw in Open 786 is not at all present, yet it still feels like he feels confident on his solve
o Posting frequency, thread presence feels decreased. But it feels like he is “around” rather than actually just completely gone like The Bulge. It’s late and I wrote this bullet point earlier and I can’t remember what exactly I was trying to get at but there is something about the way that the timing of his posting that just gut pings me, like he just selectively chooses to post at a particular time, a vibe that I didn’t get at all when he was town in Open 786 and just took on every motherfucker that came at him
• VP Baltar/iamausername associatives
o D1 iamusername distancing from VP Baltar
iamausername parked passively on ORAM, where there were two major “not!partner” wagons (Klyne and Titus) rising up, is not only plausibly partnery, but I’m getting more convinced that, if I was iamausername in that position, I would absolutely have tried to get on my partner!ORAM. This is because:
• It’s possible that in multiball games, you can make the argument that “bussing is not really a thing you do, especially early” (they haven’t needed to make this argument yet really, but maybe it’s because I a) haven’t really cased them yet and b) already called it out as meh plausible distancing)
• If my partner is being even kind of scummy (didn’t get great vibes from ORAM), but there are other wagons that would make the ORAM wagon not super likely to actually go through, I would very likely try to get on them for a few votecounts for like, super easy distancing with not a ton of risk.
Is this actually wolf/wolf!indicative? Maybe not, and you might say something in response to this like, “if scum knew about this scumtell, they would just never bus, why would they ever bus in this scenario if it’s scummy to do so”. But I don’t think this is a strong argument; it’s assuming “scum knew that people would find this behavior scummy”, which is actually wrong; if that’s the case people would just do the opposite of every scumtell, it’s not that hard for most of them out there
o I think VP Baltar had a weird read evolution on username
I’d ideally do a full ISO dive on these two at some point if I find any of this worth pursuing, but for now just skimming, this quote felt kind of partnery
In post 625, VP Baltar wrote: In post 624, Datisi wrote:a purely theoretical question, would you be willing to help with the yeet of the username?
Thought you found him town?
I probably would need to see a good case on IAUN. I can't really follow whatever he was trying to say about me, and I wished I was scum when I read his point about tricking me or whatever because I would have gone wild on that as scum to run him up.
He made some bad points like that as town in Revelations though (which I exploited as scum), so idk if he is town or scum here. Pretty null to me
Textbook good scumplay about something like this is to turn the question around with an accusation/question (Thought you found him town?) to distract from the non-commital dead null answer he gives, despite all that bunch of back and forth he did with iamausername earlier.
The main reason given for username being town aside from the townblocking thing is just that he helped case MURDERCAT. He’s brought up at twice about how he worked together with Datisi despite being paranoid of him and how great that turned out as a seeming justification for why I should just work with him and why he trusts username. We’ve established that the gamestate has changed and that kind of approach doesn’t work well/doesn’t need to continue.
In post 1550, VP Baltar wrote: He is putting in real work trying to sort everyone. There isn't fakeness to his scumhunting. I can see clearly how his reads are evolving, so I feel pretty comfortable with him. If he lived to Xylo, I'd probably question that, but I don't think I need to be paranoid right now.
Personally, the way I’ve seen scum talk about their partners when they are winning tends to be predominantly:
• They are town for (insert generic/unconvincing reason here), with not a ton of paranoia (or maybe a little, just to say that they are)
o I think, they are doing the things that wolves need/should do today to win
Wolves are looking to wrap this shit up with how close they are to winning, and I would absolutely expect them to buddy-buddy here in a state of mass confusion for town and power it through. Every now and then they throw in a little bit of “side doubt” on each other for the fake theatre, but don’t end up actually doing anything about it. There’s been real suspicion on Klyne and Bulge in previous days and it makes a lot of sense as an agenda that they discussed overnight to push those two slots.
Both VP Baltar and iamausername are saying the exact same narrative about “townblocking” with each other in it, and that doesn’t sit well with me.
• Klyne
o So I’ve already talked about how VP Baltar’s push on Klyne isn’t super convincing.
o It is very difficult for me to see Klyne as a wolf from tone for a lot of posts.
As an example, ben dover123 pointed out a string of Klyne posts that felt really town tonally that I agreed with, specifically
418-429 I think
o Simply like, where is the agenda? This game honestly feels a lot like Klyne vs. the world at times. I don’t get the sense at all that he is planning to set this game up for a miselimination, or working with anyone whatsoever. There’s no powerwolfing that he’s been doing as the game is getting closer to a wolf win, instead, we’re seeing him with less rhetoric and more of “you wanna fucking go, wolves??” mentality.
o Then you might ask “how do you reconcile this behavior with like, town!Klyne?” Again, I am a strong believer that town can like, do just about anything, whereas scum have a much more limited range overall. When the two most scumread slots in the game go into Day 4 almost about to win but just need a little more effort (especially when town was so spread out and in disagreement lately) to spread the hysteria/confusion, what does Klyne decide to do? Like, nothing
• The Bulge
o It’s hard to like, towncase The Bulge because he’s been so out of it D4 from RL. Tonally I think I’m coming around on Bulge as town? Maybe largely because of his weird OMGUS on me that I don’t think he needs to do as scum? Like, I guess he could still be mafia but I’m not really feeling the wolf vibe from him
• Last Mafia?
o I’m actually not sure; I still think it’s something like The Bulge/Ahsoka > clidd in terms of likeliness.
