Incidentally, I've been checking SJReaver/Looker and RCEnigma in double ISO, looking for how plausible the slots are as a team.
(Note that this post is "tunnelled reads", starting by assuming that they're a team and trying to determine how consistent the theory is, i.e. the same thing I've been accusing Frogster of doing. So even though the post looks overwhelmingly bad for them, it should be taken with a pinch of salt.)
It starts very early on, with #
95 and #
99. I've picked up weak scumtells from SJReaver, and acknowledged that they're weak. RCEnigma defends him just a little harder than would seem warranted in the situation. Incidentally, I expressed scumreads on all of SJReaver, RCEnigma and Banana(=shelly) in #
119. If those reads turn out to be correct, no wonder I got attacked early (e.g. #
216, #215/#216 being SJReaver's next posts after I posted it)!
#
118 also looks bad in this situation, an "obviously nonserious vote" that nonetheless shows up on the vote count. In the past, scum used to use these really frequently when distancing. Then towns caught on, and scum generally stopped doing it, but maybe it's making a revival now that fewer people are aware of it?
#
225/#
231 looks quite a bit like a scum/scum interaction in retrospect. It's the sort of "safe banter" that lets you fill out your post count while looking like you're scumhunting, whilst simultaneously not doing much to give players a scumread on you or really progressing the gamestate.
(#
232 seems like a relevant post. But I'm not sure what conclusions to draw for it, so I'm just going to note it for now.)
#
272 looks like it's setting up for a scumread on me at a later date. It expresses "retractable townreads" on RCE and Banana, which look a little different from the read on Walter, and diverting suspicion elsewhere without any actual scumreads. If the scumteam really is SJReaver/RCEnigma/Banana, they would badly need to be ready to cause a distraction in the gamestate at the time.
In the late 300s, the wagon on me starts developing. I read #
379 as townish at the time (seeing it as a pressure vote as the gamestate was stalling out). In retrospect, though, assuming RCEnigma is scum means that it could easily come from a scum SJReaver; scum needed a change to the gamestate, and would be especially interested in discrediting me.
#
525 is RCEnigma's towniest post of the game (even if scum does manage to reason that scum Tayl0r likely implies town me, why mention that to the thread?), and it doesn't look any less town in this hypothetical. This is one of the reasons I'm a little torn about voting for RCEnigma. That said, RCEnigma would know that Tayl0r
wouldn't
flip scum, so the relational townread on me would be safe for scum to make, and RCEnigma immediately backpedals a little in #
526.
#
641 starts to retreat from the wagon on me. My reads are much worse at this point than they were at the start of the game (I now have SJReaver as town and am retreating from my RCEnigma scumread, and scumread Tayl0r and Italiano who are both now confirmed town). I am moderately easy to pocket as players go, and retreating from a scumread on me not that long after my reads get a lot worse seems like the sort of thing that scum would be likely to do.
Not only that, but #
641 and #
642 are a wagon out of nowhere immediately after shelly replaces in. #642 is a wagoning vote from a now-confirmed scum slot. How come #641 turns up just a few minutes before that, for shelly to wagon? This is a daytalk game, these posts look a lot in retrospect like scum decided on an Italiano wagon in their PT and then decided to make it happen in a reasonably convincing-looking way. (Soon afterwards, shelly calls Looker's #
648 scummy, when most players agree that it isn't; overblowing a scumtell on your partner, so that nobody follows you, is a classic method of distancing.)
#
661 is weird. I totally agree with the content of the post. But what's up with the
timing
? RCEnigma could have noted how weird #
381 was at the time, but didn't. Instead, he went for a random reaction test in #
397. Why do something like that to mark time if you've spotted someone do something alarmingly scummy, rather than pointing out your feelings? (Note that RCEnigma uses the past tense "sent" in #661, implying that he noticed the issue at the time, it wasn't the consequence of a reread or anything like that.) Well, an obvious scum motivation would be that they really wanted to avoid derailing the wagon on me (who was, in this hypothetical, accurately scumreading them at the time), and were happy to accept any help they could get, planning to make use of the scummy-post-from-town later on if they needed a new wagon to push. (This is especially the case as "I'm reading CFJ's posts as being constructed to look town, thus they're artificial and from scum" was a reasonable reason to scumread me, even if the way Italiano expressed that was bad.)
#
666 is a pretty scattered post from Looker (and his first substantive post). It votes me, for unexplained reasons (maybe with a small hint, below the Raya quote, that Looker is concerned about how the collapse of the wagon on me looks, without clarifying whether it's my alignment or the wagon's he's interested in). The choice of me to vote for seemed strange even at the time (given that pressure had mostly moved elsewhere); I wasn't sure what to make of it, and I still am not
sorry, despite really wanting a contraction there, I refuse to use "ain't".
#
697 is pretty much I'd expect when I asked one scum to explain a (non-bus) scumread on another scum.
As previously mentioned, #
802 is bad because it's asking Tayl0r to unvote shelly (there is, however, no particular link to RCEnigma here).
#
826 is bad (and #
825 was recognised by Tayl0r as scummy, although I thought it was more null), but #
825/#
826 are even worse as a pair. This looks a lot like RCEnigma is setting up to a) force a claim from Walter, and/or b) quickhammer Walter with Looker being the second-last vote. There's a 1 hour 50 minute time gap; Looker probably went offline at some point during that (especially given the gaps between his posts), and I think the plan was for Looker to change vote to Walter (as a "deadline vote") and have RCEnigma hammer. geraint was a spanner in the works, though, moving to shelly, at which point scum were pretty much screwed (with #
858 being RCEnigma getting onto the wagon so that he could push the "look offwagon" narrative the next Day). #
894 fits that; I was wondering why RCEnigma would explicitly mention that the N_M kill is not a reason not to look offwagon (why would a townie even think that that kill had anything to do with whether to look offwagon or not?).
Oh, #
956 probably explaines #
232. It's quite possible that one of the scum came up with an "I want to do this bit of theatre" and RCEnigma approved it in the PT, or indeed that this is the sort of thing that new scum come up with anyway and RCEnigma just wanted to paint it as "not possibly SvS". Generally speaking, towntells are only reliable if they aren't being pointed out by scum (if scum points them out, that increases the chance that they were planted).
#
993 is a little strange. I can understand why someone would have second thoughts about me (it's quite common for people to gain an increasing townread on me as the game goes on, when I'm town). But even given the explanation in #
984, I'm not convinced that it makes sense to read Raya as scummier than me at the time of #993. Posts like #
977 are very common from players who have just been fakeclaimed to.
After that, there are no real connections until #
1119. Why would a hypothetically town Looker vote
RCEnigma
in that context? Looker isn't Nosferatu, he tends to park his vote on himself rather than on a random null-read. This looks a lot more like it's intended to look good on a votecount, rather than having any real scumhunting reasoning behind it.
#
1303 is an interesting soft-push on Raya by Looker. It's also surprisingly RCEnigma-focused, with a lot of "personality shade" (i.e. shading RCEnigma as a person, not RCEnigma's alignment) without actually stating any sort of scumread on here. (It also incidentally tries to shut down RCEnigma arguing for geraint as town, when the reasoning for geraint as town is basically watertight at this point.)
Why does Looker not vote RCEnigma in #
1332?
#
1416 / #
1417 – wow, Looker really seems to have an RCEnigma fixation (and yet is pushing Raya despite that).
And that's about it. I note that RCEnigma quickhammered (after claim, but still) at the end of D2; this looked bad, was widely acknowledged to look bad, and could have been predicted to look bad. I'm not sure why a hypothetically town RCEnigma wouldn't be looking to gain more information before hammer; we weren't near deadline, after all. On the other hand, assuming a shelly/Looker/RCEnigma scumteam, there was a failed attempt to quickhammer D1, so it would make a lot of sense if RCEnigma were jumpier about the quickhammer D2.
The main conclusion I drew during the above exercise is that there's a lot more evidence for RCEnigma as scum than there is for Looker as scum, but the whole team hangs together pretty well. RCEnigma isn't lockscum in my view, but an RCEnigma townflip would surprise me. It does feel quite plausible that the above solve is right on RCEnigma but wrong on Looker (the RCEnigma/shelly associatives feel stronger than the RCEnigma/Looker or shelly/Looker associatives). That said, the PoE is getting pretty small at this point, so the number of plausible scumteams is dwindling
