I've heard this argument before.
"FL is a master scum player, he can coach his scumteam to subvert their meta, therefore, towntells on players are all invalid because they could've been coached by FL to mimic their townplay, so meta is invalid and therefore the reasons to townread the player are also invalid".
Suffice to say: it doesn't hold. It is, explicitly, an appeal to paranoia.
Literally every player this game, if they were scum, has the collective pool of resources of 16 total players who could, collectively, subvert typical scumplay and recreate their townplay as scum.
Your argument here is essentially, "hercule, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, is scum who managed to play in a way which looks town".
But using that same logic:
Why can't innocentvillager, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't I, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from myself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't Hopkirk, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't Xtoxm, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't Dannflor, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't Winter Flakes, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't DGB, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from itself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't Cephrir, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
Why can't Almost50, with the collective pool of 15 players aside from himself, be scum who managed to play in a way which looks town?
The simple fact of the matter is: sure, yes, that's
possible
.
It is explicitly improbable. It is explicitly an argument appealing to improbability, to throw out all past towntells, to throw out all past games, to throw out every reason you've ever had to townread a player in the game, off of the chance that they MIGHT be scum who managed to convincingly subvert their play to manage to look town when they aren't.
Meta can be abused to
some
extent, yes. You can manage to play in a different style than your previous scumgame even if your scumgame is literally back to back. But you cannot have a complete and total reversal of it on literally every level--and that's what it'd take for hercule to be scum in this game.
It's possible with the collective pool of scum players to shift play to cover past tells that would expose you, in theory.
But it requires, 1: the collective pool of 15 to put that effort in (hey, newsflash: in team mafia, the players who help their teammates' scumgames are the exception to the general rule of teammates not helping out at all; most teams don't really fully use their TEAM aspect), when they are incredibly unlikely to focus on it to such an extent, 2: for them to have, in practice, succeeded in covering up literally every previous weakness to completely and totally cover every aspect, and 3: after having come up with that, for hercule to perfectly execute on this hypothetical plan.
Let's occam's razor this shit.
Which is simpler?
hercule is town, whose difference from last game is due to hercule being town this game...
...Or that hercule is scum, whose collective group of 16 brainstormed how to make hercule not look like scum this game, who after having put this brainstorming in actually succeeded in covering every weakness even ones that weren't discussed publicly (e.g. covering things I never explained), and that hercule as scum then after this planning managed to actually perfectly execute on this plan to cover every past meta-tell that lead to him being scumread?
I think it's painfully obviously the former, that hercule is just town whose differences between this game and last game are due to being town.
