the two people who i want to focus the absolute most on right now are {dwlee, Varsoon}
a lot of dwlee's reads don't feel naturally formed; they feel like they're designating scum reads and coming up with reasons to push them afterward. the read on drealz is one example of this: it amounted to drealz being scum for "noise", which is a kind of push i hate because it's entirely to do with policy and nothing to do with his actual play; there's nothing in there that suggests dwlee is actually attempting to sort and think critically about drealz, it's the kind of thing scum focuses on when they want to give the impression that someone needs to die because they're not playing optimally. arguments like that are usually really safe arguments to push because it's really easy for town players to get pissed off and say "fuck it, i agree" instead of thinking too hard about it - and even if they don't, people usually don't fault the aggressor for pushing them because what they're saying is (objectively) true
the read on Cakez-kun i don't take quite as much issue with, but i still don't think his interpretation of the post (second quote in
240) is all that great. lining up lynches is definitely a thing scum does, but it isn't what Cakez-kun was doing - what Cakez-kun was doing was seeing a notable momentum shift onto someone he thought was town and making the assumption there had to be a scum on it. i don't think there's anything unreasonable there and i don't see why that would catch anyone's attention to that extent unless they had a previous scum read on the slot, which i don't think dwlee did
a lot of this also has to do with timing: all of their scum reads/pushes (drealz, Gamma, Cakez-kun) have mostly appeared along with these people becoming leading/viable wagons. i think they're also being not very proactive in terms of explaining their reads in general, their reaction to Gamma (
172) and their Cakez-kun read being two examples of this - that was pretty much all of the effort they put into explaining either of those reads, and in particular, for Cakez-kun being a strong enough read to vote, there was... like... no effort beyond the one post they called out to actually push or question or refine the read on him. i don't get the impression they're interested in pushing anything besides targets they know they can safely push
Varsoon's play has just been shit and i have a scum read on him purely based on the fact that i don't think he would be this shit-awful at the game as town. a lot of the time he tends to make crazy-sounding posts as either alignment, but what i really hate about him here is the fact that there is absolutely no breadth to his play. pretty much all he's done has been sitting there and hard pushing drealz and Aero for pretty awful reasons. i've seen him be stubborn about reads before, but there is absolutely no depth of thought to either of these reads: drealz is scum for "noise" and for "dodging a direct question about his alignment" (what???), Aero is scum because "his claim" and that's basically the extent of all of his pushes this game. having a strong scum read that you want to push more than other people is one thing, this is another... there's no critical thinking here and no unilateral questioning that suggests he's even trying to pay attention to anything else in the game outside of the two pushes he wants to make: it isn't someone scum hunting, it's someone finding things to latch onto and nitpick over in order to generate content. i've seen and been town who has had strong scum reads and while yes, you want to make sure there is absolutely no way anyone else gets lynched, you don't just fucking ignore everything else in the game, you at least attempt to form reads outside of your strong scum read.
i had doubts about this, but then when i asked for people to give me time to post content, he responded with
1039... you just do not end the day phase in less than 4 RL days when there's someone who has done nothing who is explicitly saying that they want to be given a chance to do things before the day ends, that's just common fucking sense, and i am sure that Varsoon is not so completely dense that he would ignore this. more than anything, i really just don't see him being this awful here... i know Varsoon can be can kind of crazy sometimes, but he's not completely fucking dense like he is here.
i think probably the third scum is somewhere in {pisskop, drealmz, mhsmith0}, mostly just because i have way too many town reads elsewhere - and if i had to commit i would say mhsmith is the most town out of this group, but i wouldn't bet on it
tl;dr Varsoon is a much better lynch than drealz, and *if* drealz is lynched and flips town, i want at the very *least* both dwlee and Varsoon to die in the fires of hell. if he's lynched and flips scum, honestly i still think we'd have a pretty good shot at hitting scum there anyway since he seems like a rather obvious bus target and i still just have too many town reads elsewhere
i suppose this means i don't have much of a reason to stop a drealz lynch, but... /shrug