In post 134, Solar Wind wrote:For Xombie, my feeling is that he was resisting rather than facilitating progress of the game. People can get reads in confirmation stage and his Post 38 felt like he didn't like that there was a lot of content rather than seizing the opportunity to get reads. Now this can be a playstyle tell and a lot of people did similar things to that later and some people are not as aggressive as others in developing reads. But combine that with Post 41 which I really, really hated. While I liked FT's attack on Bitmap, Xombie's "One too many towns for that song, I think. Overcompensating?" felt fake on a gut level. I especially didn't like the "overcompensating" as it a) felt like a stretch to make Bitmap look scummy, and b) like he was looking for validation of that read by asking it as a question rather than directly attacking Bitmap. Plus the reasoning was super weak in a scummy way even for page 2. FT's attack on Bitmap made much more sense. Xombie's attack boiled down to having too many towns in his post. Then he joking read on T S O for saying "hi" and the "town would add punctuation" in Post 45 and Post 54 felt pretty weak. If he was town stretching for content early game, he'd have commented on something that was actually substantial.
What's your read on him?
I have him as leaning town at the moment, I think. For me, not actively seeking reads is scummy if you show that you have that ability in the first place: Xombie's opening posts (particularly the head spin line you refer to) suggest he's getting overwhelmed by a game he wawasn't expecting, which explains why his read forming methods weren't fleshed out or on point early game. I fully believe the overcompensating thing was a joke (he understood the reference hence the whole calling it a song thing) so I disagree with you there. Read on TSO followed general trend of fake scumreading someone for a stupid reason, so not really all too concerned by what lacks scum motivation and just seems like a normal opening to me.
