Very inconvenient that Vala should get herself replaced at a time like this. In any case, here's some analysis to mull over (I may be repeating myself at times from my preliminary analysis and from what others said):
Vala Mal Doran
:
As I previously said, I had a problem with her reaction to ButtonMen's potentially breaking strategy. The fact that she went as far as to call it
being against the spirit of the game gave me the feeling that this was her venting her annoyance at potentially losing the game because of a flawed set-up. This feeling was strenghtened with her
Post 88, in which she threatened to leave the game if the town wasn't going to "play fairly for the scum". Unlike farside22, I don't see her actual vote against ButtonMen as particularly damning (as in I don't see a scum
motivation
behind it), but in the context of her general reaction to his plan, it reads to me as possible scum
frustration
.
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Next up is her stance on self-imprints, which was based on a fair amount of crap-logic:
VMD in her post 170 wrote:I just think it looks too eager. I understand that it can be argued that one only knows one's own towniness, etc etc, but if people don't vote to imprint themselves it takes 7/11 people to imprint someone rather than 7/12 and I like that majority better. Then there's the fact that if all of the scumteam votes to imprint one of their own, that's four votes, which means it only takes three unwitting town to make a powered-up scum. I'd prefer to make that number four by keeping anyone from voting themselves, and give ourselves more of a margin of error. (And yes, I'm aware scum probably wouldn't be that stupid. If they thought they could get away with it though, I'm sure they'd jump at the chance.)
Not only is this argument steamed in unnecessary paranoia, it also doesn't make any sense. Not self-imprinting doesn't change the fact that (theoretically) it only takes three unwitting town to power-up a scum, as no one's stopping anyone from self-imprint-hammering. She later re-inforced that self-imprinting would
give scum an advantage, and only abandoned the notion once it became apparent that no one else had a problem with self-imprinting.
From a pro-town perspective, her stance on this makes zero sense to me. If you are pro-town, how can an imprint vote on yourself give an advantage to scum? From a scum-perspective on the other hand, I can follow her line of thinking. The way I see it, she was afraid that self-imprinting would draw attention to herself, therefore she saw it as something to avoid and to accuse others of. Once she was questioned on that, she had to come up with a BS excuse for why it's supposedly scummy. It's this kind of self-awareness that I find to be one of the most telling things when hunting for scum.
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Next up is a
big one:
First of all, there's the matter of her basically giving DN a pass under the Village Idiot Clause. She concedes that his play was "vehemently anti-town", and yet she ranks him as "neutral" in her scum-list. I seriously wonder why some people strung up Starbuck because she supposedly defended DN and yet pretty much ignored the fact that Vala
actually
defended DN, based on weak reasoning to boot.
It's the kind of reasoning I'd expect to see when a scumbag decides to lend a weak buddy a hand. Passing off his bad play as either inexperience or meta, so you can use the "well, I have trouble reading bad players" excuse should he be lynched regardless.
My other major problem with that post is her scumlist. The
only
two people she is suspicious of is the guy who never posted and the guy who had one post of substance. Now granted, she may really not like lurkers (notwithstanding that the game was only 4 days old at that point), and I'll get back to her stance on lurking later. But really? No suspicion of anyone who actually participated in a game with 4 scum on page 10? Scumhunting sure is hard when you're scum yourself.
Her case for calling lewarker "obvscum" is also fairly crap. The fact that she accuses him of using words like "vibes", "interesting", "as far as I can see", "seems" and "a little", and treats this as evidence that he doesn't want to commit to having strong opinions is actually quite ludicrous to me. Those are all words I use frequently when I make cases as town. Her other points (his voting/imprinting without providing solid reasoning) are actually fair, but enough to declare him "obvscum"? Hardly.
-----------
Speaking of lurking: In her
very next post (and the
one after that), she accuses non other than DN of lurking. At that point in time, the game was four days old and DN had posted 24 times, not missing a day. He very clearly was
not
"lazying" around. Why then does she perceive him as such? Because she wasn't happy with his scum-performance would be my guess.
Note also that in this post, she wants to allow for Starbuck to "become guilty by association" to DN and lewarcher. And she also re-states that she wants to keep around DN not because she doesn't find him scummy, but because she finds someone else
more
scummy. This is the kind of stuff that makes me
very
suspicious (note also that her behavior towards lewarcher at this stage made me lean towards town on him, this is for future reference once I analyze xRECKONERx).
-------
There's not much from her for a good 100 posts or so because she was preoccupied apparently (heh). She then comes back with
a post in which she shows support for SC's lynch plan, which I find dubious to say the least (I'll get back to this once I analyse SC). More importantly, she finally, reluctantly, turns around on DN, only his wagon is too far advanced to hop on to. I actually find her wording of this quite funny: if she was scum with him, surely she would be bussing him right now, but hey, she's not voting him because he's at L-1.
---------
Her
Post 410 is another juicy one for me. Here she backs off of her previous two top suspects for stated reasoning: "Lurkers are scum. Lurkers who get replaced by active people stop being scum." I'm paraphrasing, you get the gist.
That
is the kind of scum-hunting she's been doing on D1. It boggles my mind that she hasn't been scrutinized yet.
To end VMD's D1, here's another quote:
VMD in Post 465 wrote:Smart scum will bus their scumbuddies if they think the benefits will outweigh losing a member. Period. For a scum attacking a scum!DN, they would receive far more benefits from bussing him early and hard than they would from keeping him alive, assuming he's as useless in the QT as he is here. If DN is scum I expect to find at least two of the scumbags on his lynch trying to make themselves look good, if not all three. You're completely disregarding the fact that he is a blatantly anti-town player, and not someone scum would probably want to keep around if he's going to undermine their strategies.
Sounds exactly like the kind of thing a scum would say who failed to bus a flailing scumbuddy.
----------
Onwards to D2. VMD started it in a
peculiar fashion. Several things about this:
1. Considering a scum had just been lynched, the indignation sounds dishonest
2. Vala
never
made any kind of push to get anyone imprinted. Again, the indignation sounds dishonest.
3. Again, considering scum was lynched, SC's hammer cost town
nothing
at all. Her "you bussed him to cut off discussion" angle doesn't make any sense at all. Not in the slightest.
This whole post sounds terribly fake to me.
----------
At this point, my notes start to get thin, and quite frankly, I think I've written plenty. But in the name of dilligence, I've reread her posts in isolation just now. She spent the majority of D2 defending herself, defending Starbuck (not a point in her favor, for the record) and attacking SC for her bullshit "he bussed to cut off discussion" reasoning. Which, by the way, is part of the reason I have trouble seeing those two as scum together.
As for D3, she started it off by voting my predecessor, who was previously firmly in her pro-town list, because of his hammer vote. Lazy at best.
---------
To finish up this monster of a post, I feel the need to point out that she has hardly commented on anyone alive except for my predecessor, SC and Elvis. No word on xRECKONERx
at all
since he replaced in (used to be her top-suspect). Hardly any word on pug, Plum, Limerickx or farside (used to be her number two suspect before she replaced in).
She's scum and needs to die tomorrow, regardless of her being replaced.
[i]Mgm laughed nervously, his cheeks flushing in the faintest of blushes. "Patrick... I only wanted to be with you... that's why I put the game to night, so Glork would get killed."[/i] - the heartwarming conclusion of Face to Face Mafia
