Mafiascum.net

Order of business number one: Michael Scott. The biggest thing that feels off is the way he's responded to pressure. His responses remind me sort of distinctly of how I probably used to respond to pressure most of the times in games where I was moderately engaged as scum. His refutations are *purely* in the realm of logic. And that's kind of the problem; they feel disengaged from actually refuting the actual things people are seeing in him. In general his posting is almost obsessed with casing. He seems to categorically refuse to acknowledge as valid any reads that are not backed up by casework; see 691, 693, to lesser degrees 730, 766. I think that's a scum-ish pattern (unless he acts this way d1 in town games consistently) bc... not quite sure honestly. It's hard to explain exactly why I think that pattern is off.

I'm confident he's going to absolutely hate this case on him if he's town.

There's other things I don't like. GL mentioned 688 and I'd add the post after it. As town I don't think it's *actually* especially natural to have the progression of "I ISO'd X and have a strong townread" -> "I'm going to ask everyone that voted them about reasons as a first priority". I think this is because town will only really have this type of reaction if the person in question is being wagoned, or is a centralizing figure in the game; Fractured isn't really either of these, there were just a couple stray votes (iirc). The same thing applies to 693 because I think town's first reaction to getting a townread on someone is usually not *actually* to actively search for reasons they're wrong. It's to either call them town and then ignore them for a bit (because they don't need to focus on them), or to explain why they're town to people who they want to change the mind of... essentially for some reason this just feels like a disingenuous attempt to look like he's solving with people.

The activity point is actually really funny, because he admits his activity pattern has been bad (despite me not having explained why I thought it was bad) and then proceeds to do exactly the thing that I think is bad. I don't think low activity is scummy; the pattern I'm actually criticizing is that of popping into the thread for a period of time (maybe a few minutes, maybe a couple hours) and then disappearing for a longer stretch. I think someone recently (maybe it was rc?) mentioned that this kind of pattern is scummy, and I immediately realized "shit, i do this as scum a lot". It demonstrates very directly that someone wants to appear engaged in a game, but it is a lot more psychologically demanding as scum to muster up engagement throughout a day than it is to muster up engagement for a short burst of activity and then just let what happens happen. It's entirely possible that this isn't a real point but after responding to my activity point, he popped into the thread and posted very actively for like 3 hours, then didn't post for 12 hours, made one post, then didn't post for 24ish hours, then here we are now. The big thing here is having now had multiple days of sort of near-complete disengagement with the thread, despite being very engaged on certain other days. That to me doesn't jive as likely with "i'm town but am busy on some days" as it does with "i'm scum and am giving bursts of activity when I feel like I need to to be townread".

Actually typing this I'm curious if standard deviation of number of posts each day correlates with alignment well. Obviously there can be real life explanations (I for instance have one that I've given several times).

As for his other reaction to (GL's) pressure, we see 861:

In post 861, Michael Scott wrote:

In post 811, GuiltyLion wrote:this is a tremendously bad post, for the record

1 - everybody knows faking townreads as scum is easy. It also feels like unnatural/forced reasoning - "they're not playing how in this specific manner I would expect scum to play, therefore they're town"
2 - there was definite need to, because several people were scumreading them and voting them. like you're giving them town credit for doing something that either alignment would want to do to look town.

I have to think a townie - especially players of Auro/volxen caliber - would see that a scum!Fractured could fake this level of content so far and would have more paranoia than a "strong townread" after an ISO skim. this feels like a fabricated townread because they already decided previously that they didn't want to scumread Fractured slot

"They *could* do this as scum, hence you can't townread them for it!"

You ignore that:
1. It's an early AF townread which is obviously subject to re-evaluation.
2. Picking stances in this way is how I begin the game usually.
3. They townread virtually everyone in that RVS interaction IIRC and not just me, saying I townread them just for townreading me is disingenuous.

GL already gave a response to this but I have more to say.

First, tonally, this feels meh.

Second, like GL said, it's a strawman in a scummy way. It's ignoring the actual brunt of GL's read, which is a bad thing to pair with him constantly asking people for their reasons for reads. GL's point 1 was that it's forced reasoning that is easy to give as scum; michael scott saying "it's subject to re-evaluation" is not only a non-sequitur to GL's point here, but it's an extremely scummily defensive non-sequitur. He's accused of making up reasoning, and says "well, i might reconsider it later". I think it's clear why that just feels bad.

Point 2 I find less interesting.

Point 3, again as GL has already pointed out, MS's answer here is entirely non-sequitur. I actually have no clue whatsoever where MS got the idea that GL had been saying that he was townreading Fractured for townreading him (hoo boy that sure is a grammatical sentence i just typed out). Making something like that up out of thin air, I think, betrays a mindset.


I want to be clear about one thing though: all of this is sort of just back-justification for all of his posts just feeling really bad at first glance.