Okay, all caught up. There are a lot of major topics to comment on, so some of these opinions will be brief, and can be expanded upon if there's people still wanting to discuss them. I realized I might have missed the boat on some parts.
Stoofer
: I remain convinced that the original attack on Stoof was meritless. He's lying, granted, but much in the same way that someone who claims to be voting randomly, but is actually making a joke vote, is lying. That he did it twice is certainly more damning, but there are no even mildly compelling (in fact, most were completely ridiculous) explanations for why he would do this as scum. (Emp's anecdote about his lurker vote being misconstrued by the town later is quite tangential -- people can make mountains out of molehills in any of a million different ways.) I find laziness, ego, flippancy all vastly more plausible explanations. And Emp, I think asking for evidence of pro-town actions is a hard question -- do you mean "helpful" instead of "pro-town"? I think Stoof's 317 seems pretty pro-town.
That said, there are several things that don't sit right with me about Stoof. While I initially understood Stoof's misread of mneme's "L-1 without comment" bit, that he continued to press this issue seemed a little scummy. Also, the repeated "lynch me now" in reference to the sloppiness accusations seemed a little over-the-top.
Primate
: I still don't have a strong feeling one way or the other on his initial offering of one vote to EmpTyger. I think I would characterize my current stance as that it was better for Primate to split the votes since we get more information that way - we get information when Emp tries to vote, when Primate tries to vote, and when Primate decides what to do with Emp's vote. That said, there were points made intelligently both ways. I still find Primate's characterization of his role as "doc-like" very suspect. While I can see applications that make him function as a doc, there are also many applications that don't. It sounds more to me like he was trying to oversell the townliness of his role -- to me, this is a much worse kind of lie than Stoof's, as there is a clear benefit to scum to doing so. There's also the possibilities that he was still in the progress of making up his role at the time, or of deciding how much his more scum-oriented role he could get away with claiming as pro-town, or of deliberately claiming a controversial role and target to satisfy Massive's cleverness condition. Finally, there's the possibility that he's completely telling the truth about his role but is still scum. This adds up to pretty decent odds in my book.
Massclaim
: I fully grant that power-roles have a diminished utility in this game. Emp would say useless, and I would put them distinctly higher than that. In addition, mafia may very well have roles that are indistinguishable from pro-town roles. That several people, myself included, have voiced the opinion that Primate may very well be telling the truth about his role and still be scum is evidence that I am not alone in this belief. Repeatedly calling my objections "blindly following a meta" is aggravatingly dismissive. The only remotely "blind" thing I've said is that mods typically make it disadvantageous for the town to massclaim, but even this is bolstered by the
fact
that TSS has a good deal of mafia experience.
Kingpin
: Kingpin stuck out on the re-read. His response to Stoof's vote was a little weird, and he suggested the existence of a role-blocker and a vote-doubler to explain the voting situation, when a vote-mover seems much more natural. In fact, he does it again later on page 13, after it's been pointed out that a vote-mover is the most likely explanation:
Kingpin wrote:The other troubling thing about all of this is the obvious coincidence that Emp lost a vote and Primate gained a vote. Primate targeted Emp. TSN targeted Primate. So someone took a vote away from someone. And then someone gave a vote to another. That is a whole lot of targeting around Emp and Primate. One to protect, one to vote block, one to vote give, one to power block or target switch. On two players N-1. I call BS.
In reagards to Primate's vote donation, he writes "Technically speaking, the game was set up this way for a reason. You have two votes and EmpTyger has none." This seems like a silly philosophy to me -- the game was set up with scum for a reason, too, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to remedy that situation. His attack on Primate in post 73 seemed backwards to me, as was pointed out later. Of Emp's 3 points against Kingpin, I'd evaluate the 1st as reasonably strong, the 2nd as invalid (debated at length since then), and the 3rd as too convoluted to really contain much critical information.
Random/Recent Stuff
: I'd like to re-iterate points of Stoof and DoTS agreeing thatt people have been way too quick to confuse misinterpretation with lying, and other such overreactions. In fact, I find myself agreeing with DoTS more recently, and after the re-read, with much of the stuff he said earlier too. I didn't even snag on the same line that earned DoTS my vote the first time around. In particular, DoTS makes a good point in post 101 about pandering, I think Massive is reading too much in to TSN reveal -- I think TSN thought he had information that was of importance to the town and decided to share it. This was probably born more out of an excitement at having relevant information to share and the desire to do good with it than a laid out plan of rescuing Primate. While mneme has some points against him, I thnk my initial vote on him wasn't as strong as I thought at the time.
I'd put my current list (of 4, I'm cheating, I know) at
Primate
Stoof/Kingpin
mneme.
Cam
p.s. Emp, chill out. This is one of the least lazy towns I've ever seen. Almost every single post in this game has some well-thought-out content in it, and it's been a fairly long and eventful first day. I've literally spent 5-6 hours trying to process everything carefully. I'm among the least active posters and even I've been averaging about one every two days. And there's a limit to what I can bring myself to be excited about processing -- when I get to the thread and there's gigantic posts where you attack mneme despite not being particularly suspicious of him, or go back and forth with Kingpin, or where we all accuse each other of being liars, or where we debate the definition of regardless, it's perhaps understandable that I choose to spend time with my 2-month-old daughter instead.
Man, is it that simple to earn almost most suspicious status in the house of Johoohno?
