Some observations about the people in this game that were sort of hard-towntreadable: I think it's somewhat telling that Greeting was complaining about not being townread for the selfhammering proposition in the dead thread in that me and catboi were the two people basically uninterested in touching a Greeting wagon at that point, and I think both of us were saying it was because of the selfhammering thing. I think this is the kind of thing that you need experience in forum mafia to recognize as what it is: a play that just has more negative utility for scum than positive utility, basically end of story. I felt similarly about a lot of Val's play. These kinds of things won't be as reliable outside of newbie games (especially if a player has meta of doing that kind of thing as scum before) but in general, the argument is even stronger in newbie games precisely because something like threatening a selfhammer is something that newer players might be less likely to recognize as townish; this in turn lowers its utility for scum even further, because in a newbie game they're unlikely to get much town cred for it.
For Val his resolute willingness to die for a Greeting lim, followed by his resolute willingness to die for a catboi lim, was similarly just way too negative-utility for scum. I think one thing that new scum can have trouble with (and that I've been bad at historically) is "changing your mind" in a way that looks convincing; e.g. this is one reason that catboi looked town because his reads were so fluid despite being so strong (going from tunneling me to tunneling val to not feeling good about anything). Val was sort of the opposite, in that the way in which he was not changing his mind looked very town because new scum in that situation will typically feel like they need to come up with some out for when catboi or Greeting ultimately flips town.
For catboi it was an extremely complicated story in terms of
my
reasons for my read changing. I saw igor's fake guilty and I was like hell yeah and then I started biking to campus being all happy with myself for blocking the scum who made the kill, and knowing we'd have an extra inno, and... yeah that didn't turn out that way. Like catboi said, the amount of effort that they put in while at death's door and the way they kept trying to work with people (in particular we worked together very well this game after we stopped tunneling each other), and the way their reads were in so much flux, it was all just way too much effort for what I knew had to be a goon to be putting in (I didn't realize that catboi had to be a goon if scum for a bit, that realization happened in tandem with my read on them softening). For igor iirc I had him as like, not locktown but really, really town before the claim. But it sort of is another case of, why the everloving heck would you do this as scum. The whole faking a pseudoguilty and then changing the story twice thing, while not good play as town, is buck-wild play as scum. Scum do not want to be that conspicuous, full stop.
I think all of this adds up to the second half of why this game is likely to be hard for scum (the first half being night play).
