First, I'm sorry for not posting this weekend -- I was out of town at my best friend's bachelor party and let's just say that you wouldn't have wanted me to post given my state of sobriety.
And wow -- I come back from the weekend and discover I'm being dragged toward the gallows. I was surprised to see that I was the top suspect -- I thought I had been one of the more active scum-hunters out there. But looking back over my posts I can see why you might find what I've been doing as trying to cast aspersions on people with flimsy evidence. I'll try to explain my thinking.
WARNING: LONG POST TO FOLLOW (proceed with caution)
The conversation in this game has been pretty slow, which is deadly since this is a speed game and we're really under the gun to gather information quickly. Waiting around hoping the scum would out themselves is not a good strategy, particularly in a speed game. We need to try and actively root out the scum, so that's what I've been trying to do. Since the in-game dialogue wasn't producing much of use, I went looking for any crumb of evidence that might help us out. Since it's my metagaming theories that are drawing me heat, I'll address each of them.
Theory 1: d3sisted respects =Confused='s play from an earlier game, and therefore could be the scum who targeted her for the N0 kill.
I followed Battle Mage's lead to do some metagaming regarding the N0 kill, which led to my finding on the =Confused= and d3sisted link. I knew it was weak and said so both at the time and since. But I think a weak bit of data is better than none.
Theory 2: Battle Mage is the most experienced player and his surviving the N0 kill is a little suspicious.
This is another case of me trying to unearth any potential clue about who could be scum. Arguing the reason for BM's N0 survival is very WIFOMish and I acknowledged this was a weak piece of evidence -- but it's better than nothing. I don't think it's wrong to try and uncover any piece of information that might point to scum as long as you don't overstate the importance of the finding. I specifically said this was only a "little suspicious" and I didn't use this evidence to vote BM or even to cast an FoS on him. I don't think it means much at the moment -- and it might never amount to anything. But there is a chance it could mean something later in the game, which is why I mentioned it.
Theory 3: Battle Mage is scum who NKed =Confused= and then guided me into a metagame analysis that revealed the d3sisted connection to =Confused=.
Definitely a far-fetched theory. In fact, the first line of my post was: "WARNING: Far-fetched hypothesis coming up." So why did I post this? Upon rereading, not only did BM initiate the N0 kill metagame discussion, but he also attached more importance to the results than I thought was reasonable. A few BM quotes: "i am very impressed with what you seem to found with regard to Desisted", "what we have found MIGHT be significant", "The meta-gaming with regard to Confused, was VERY useful" and "we have alot of potential to use this stuff later on". So, it seems to me that BM initiated the topic and then tried to give it more significance than it deserved. When trying to think about why he would do that, I came up with this theory. Do I think this is likely? No -- as I clearly stated. But again, any piece of potential evidence is worth noting no matter how weak it is -- as long as we don't read too much into it (which I clearly warned against doing).
I'll ask you to look at all this another way. If I were scum, why would I act this way? There's simply no reason for the scum to draw attention to themselves. In a speed game it is much easier for the scum to lay low, particularly on day 1. If I were scum, the only reason to be as aggressive as I have been would be to try and lead the town into a bad lynch today. But that's the most likely outcome anyway, since there are at most 8 townies left and 6 of us have to agree on a lynch today if we're going to get a mafioso. So being this aggressive would be a very high risk / low reward strategy for a scum to take.
If I were town, on the other hand, my play would make perfect sense. We're on a deadline and we can't wait for the scum to out themselves. We've got to aggressively dig them up, and that's what I've been trying to do.
To summarize my playstyle: I've been actively trying to unearth scum. If you look back over my posts, you'll find that my views have been consistent. I've warned against sitting back and being cautious and have advocated aggressively pushing to unearth scum. I've also been consistent in saying that my metagame findings are weak and that we shouldn't read too much into them. In my opinion, advocating a lynch with specious arguments is scummy, but trying to find possible leads without exaggerating their importance is pro-town. I've really been trying to do the latter, but of course you folks will have to be the judge.
There are two types of people in the world -- those who divide people into types and those who don't.
Note: I've got LA on weekends and in the evening.
