First of all, some of the paranoid bits against Benmage being more "protown" as scum is stupid and bullshit, but I like his response. He played around a bit promoting paranoia of his amazing scum game, but took careful means to shut down that angle and pointed out that he could roll as town just like he could roll as scum. The response to Vi avoiding his reach-out in post in #186 is genuine as hell and pretty would be my response to something like that happening, so that's a strong point for Benmage being town. He's also gone hard after not-easy targets (Empire early, Vi, Tierce), which, considering the wagon setup right now, reassures me a bit although scumBenmage could probably get away with attacking those targets in a way that no one else could.
CES seems fine so far although the penguin-N-Vi scumteam doesn't really feel like something that's anywhere close to valid to me, but that's fine for now. The exchanges with Vi (with Vi's response being "oh, CES isn't trolling right now!") feel doubleplusgood to me, so he's a townread for me at the moment.
As far as CTD goes, I really don't like how his votes seem to be the last thing he focuses on. Given his concern for forming strong wagons, he should be willing to put himself behind the N wagon, but it feels more like a policy lynch than an actual "strong wagon". His attack on Johhog makes me a bit uneasy, considering it's a chainsaw of the CES, who is reading him as strong town. His positions also feel fairly safe (I want a strong D1 wagon, that's why I'm going after an easy target, you're tunneling too hard for me to deal with you anymore, so that's why I'm not going to respond to you anymore), but the way that he responds to me as if he can't believe that I'm finding N as town read genuine, although the AtE at the end of the post (if I get apathy lynched again, I'm going to freak!) is stupid and is something I do off-site to get the most mileage out of stupid mislynches as scum. His reads outside of this are not so bad so I would like to see how he plays when he's not pushing a utility lynch, but still leaning scum for now.
I like DV's play so far, although I expect I'll have a more solid read on him after he posts his reads. I like his N read although that's probably biased from us having the same thought process, and I like the paranoid response to Empire/Tierce attacking him for RVS. I don't like later jump off N, but it comes at a time that doesn't really serve a purpose as scum unless N is scum and he's trying to distance, which I seriously doubt since he's still putting penguin as scum higher than N and he's handing the cred for the change in his read to Empire pretty easily.
A lot of Empire's play is really fucking convenient for scum which means that I'm going to keep a close watch on him despite this being a far cry from what his scumgame looked like in the Masquerade game and Rarefaction, which I glanced through but didn't read intensively because it's late as fuck. There's also the strong townreads from Tierce & Tammy, who make him uncomfortable and can catch him when he is off his scumgame, but probably won't when he breaks through the wall. Currently, he's pushing on someone who fooled him before and also someone who Tierce is pushing mightily hard, scum flips give more cred and townflips won't really hurt him that badly. Tierce and Tammy are both blatantly strong townreads for him, and CES is in the unreadable slot, as per the usual. Don't really think that he's scum with Vi thanks to Vi subtly discrediting him with the "Activity Overview" comment.
Johhog voting penguin because he doesn't want "lurking to be rewarding" is bullshit at its best, and him missing DV stating that he played with CTD before is actually horrible in retrospect. Note that in post #59 he states that he could vote for DV and in post #60 DV says that he has played with CTD before pretty clearly. Johhog missing that pretty much immediately shows that he didn't bother reading the thread after the setup of DV as his next vote. Him also withholding his DV reasoning until AFTER penguin posted seemed off to me; he's claiming that lurking takes away all of the fun, but he uses a lurker's absence as an excuse to fluff and post shit for as long as possible. There's all of the crap reasoning of "you feel different, scum." and "you feel different, town.", not to mention the "N being town, could vote penguin" read to "oh, penguin is just a tiny bit scummier than N" after being questioned by CTD to make him a slam-dunk sort of scumread at this point. AND THE PROMISE TO META TIERCE THAT NEVER FELL THROUGH.
Konowa's interactions with Tierce are townish, particularly the whole "I know how I am perceived, and so I exploited that to strengthen a read on someone" bit which is just genuine, just creative enough for it to be a hard-to-fake reason. I also like how his effort-post responses only come after he finds the validity of something: see "oh, i see where you're finding a problem with that, Empire" (#487). He hasn't posted enough for me to get a good read on him, but he's not in the purge area right now.
I hate how much Llamarble "towninating" has become such a point of discussion in reading him. The pressure to "towninate" early is more pressure on someone that allows them to actually "towninate" and I feel play suffers when you're expected to do something amazing and fantastic right the fuck out of the gate. I understand his frustration based on this, I like the promise that he's "getting closer", and the quick bounce from penguin-CTD-penguin felt genuine. My problem is that the activate: towninate in #194 was pretty underwhelming and seemed like an attempt to towninate early that fell flat on its head, and I don't like his recent backtracking on N thanks to the status of the people pushing on him, but #524 doesn't seem like a scum post at all if Llama still rereads whenever he says he does. There's something about him posting the results of two rereads in one go "since he was prodded", and switching the read on CTD based on something that he came up a little while earlier and let sit for a little while. It's transparent to the point that it makes me think that he might be faking it in an overboard "look at my thought process it is so town" sort of way, but this doesn't necessarily make sense with him continually saying that he isn't towninating, since it makes people disregard his now posts a little and instead focus on things he's making later. So town.
I had an earlier townread on penguin_alien, but it's not really holding up now. I don't really like how she pushed a scumread on N for claiming to change up his style and not even noticing that no, he wasn't really succumbing to people's demand, and no, he wasn't even being a little bit reasonable. And if we want to talk about "having trouble faking reasons" meta, penguin's fitting pretty fucking cleanly into that sort of meta. She's usually very thorough as both alignments and ends up posting walls like candy and very rarely succumbs to non-walls, but her latest posting amounts to nothing more than "hi, let's lynch N!". It doesn't feel like she's adding anything new to the thread, and her tendency as scum to attack easy targets aligns with her not finding much to attack here. There's also the problem of her finding N's scum read on me serious, considering the reasoning he's given so far is "Nacho is
always
scum", which seems obviously incorrect to me and came before #504. So, she's actually a better lynch than I thought she was!
Shadoweh seems pretty fucking town so far to me. Her first couple of posts made me uncomfortable, but I found her push on Empire for being less-than-confident about reading people this game genuine, I dig the "everyone is ignoring me" vibe in #200, I like the way she treats the Vi/Tierce interaction, and the CTD attack was sexy and the way he handled her afterwards and her reaction look pretty good for her. She feels like she is trying to get a nice towncrew together and keeping people up on their shit without actually trying to squirm her way inside, which is pretty cool. There's also a small thing in her reference to ADWD that I liked (she gets lazy when the people she likes dies/when people stop watching her), which is a genuine thing to say as town, but one of those things that make people who have not played with her more paranoid of her when she survives past the people she buddies up to, and the people she is buddying up to become more paranoid even if they like her posting. Plus #431 is probably the best post of the game because it's hilarious.
I liked that Tammy defended herself against overreacting, although many players in the game consider that to be typical town tammy. I liked her double-downing extra sure to reassure me that her arrogance wasn't misplaced. The "what the fuck, I already towninated?" bit against Empire was genuine as hell and ballsy and unecessary as scum and works well with empire-scum possibility. The "I'm uncomfortable reading you, gonna read you anyways" is also shutting down an avenue she could've easily taken as scum for no reason, the YOU AIN'T GOT SHIT AGAINST ME is strong as fuck and a challenge to make as scum and suddenly makes it seem strange that Empire didn't pick that up later. The "I want to vote for her, but it feels unfair" is not something I think scum would use to distance from a scumbuddy or a town lynch. There's a lot of gut in here and not as much reasoning, but the fact that doing an ISO on her strengthened an Empire scumread and didn't really produce anything that stands out for her being scum makes her look pretty good.
Tierce looks town. The attack on Konowa mid-voting DV is the puzzle piece that the Johhog town puzzle was missing, the whole "I've seen scumDV fight against me lynching the fuck out of him before" was pretty good, and the constant, constant, constant aggression is something that I've often wanted to emulate as scum but never really managed to get the hang of before. The flagrant refusal to read Vi is also not something I think Tierce would want to flaunt about as scum since it's something that's going to draw her a lot of unnecessary attention, and the whole push of N is sticking her neck too far out for not a good enough lynch. I don't see why she would push a mislynch this hard, and I don't see why she would bus N this hard, considering it won't be enough in the way of cred for her to avoid all of the townies in this game that can read her. In short, I feel what Tierce said in #381 is fairly accurate and that her breakthrough game wouldn't be played like this.
Vi's play is interesting and I have called him a her for so long that I refuse to use the proper(?) pronoun ever, but I will say that she has recently thrown me for a bit of a loop. Play in regards to CES was making sense for a scumVi, with subtle discrediting here and there, small potshots that never really mattered, but her cryptic response to me is something that I didn't really expect and is something that I might be creating town motivation for, but also something that's going to get tabled for tomorrow because tomorrow will bring good things on that front based on who dies.
Wicked's play so far has been a big bag of "eh". There's a lot of promises, "sorry I'm not playing good enough", "I'm so busy" that I would expect from scum returning to a playerlist like this. I mean, every post he makes comes with the caveat of "I don't know enough people here, I'm behind" and it wears me down. Post #484 doesn't make sense for Wicked if he was lost, and letting a lot of those reads drop to the wayside doesn't make sense, and his reasoning for the townreads he has are shit. Not arguing with Vi-scum cases and instead pulling the whole "oh, what's the chance Vi gets lynched today?" card is bad, the "I'm unvoting but he's STILL MY TOP SUSPECT" is framed like a defense as opposed to "I'm unvoting because NO ONE WILL LYNCH HIM (shadoweh)", the "every vote is opportunistic" attack on penguin is stupid considering she's made 2 votes so far, and wanting his townread N to claim as opposed to the person he's trying to lynch penguin to claim is similarly bad. So there's a whole lot of
and not a lot of
![:]](./images/smilies/icon_smiling.png "Cheerful Smile")
.
"Playing with Nacho is like playing with a religious conservative." ~UncertainKitten
-- Fate, Vanilla Townie, was brutally stabbed by a throwing sword in endgame.
