I've spent a lot of the past week chewing on this. I wanted to follow my more recent meta as of late, which skews a bit aggressive, and fully expected a split down the middle for people townreading it and people scumreading it. I thought that was about the best I could really do for an entrance, and thought that the real mistakes came later as I took shortcuts realizing the table would not punish them appropriately. To some extent you also don't want to be universally townread Day 1 as scum.In post 3992, Aristeia wrote:well for feedback, honestly when you joined the game I was kind of happy to see you and then from your posting I immediately felt a sense of dread and fear. It was like a violent reaction in my soul - it felt like something bad was coming. I can't really explain that feeling?
Usually when I read your posting I can feel the goodness and the light, here I just felt a weird sense of fear in my gut.
You've said many times before that you don't enjoy being a town dictator and it was almost jarring in a way how you entered the game - it didn't feel uninformed to me, and it could be true you're just a much better town player than I am so when you emulate your town game it looks informed to me when really it is just how you play?
Because of this, I initially put little weight into you scumreading me on that basis of "foreseen, but approximately the best available option" both during & after the game. I've put a lot of thought in this the last week, and I think this was wrong. Yesterday I realized there was a much, much stronger alternative entrance: One that kept all of the strengths of my approach but few of the downsides. I really appreciate you hammering in this tonal scumread and getting me to challenge this assumption.
This feeling of being on edge/scumreading me but not being able to pin down why beyond tone was intentional: see this post.In post 3992, Aristeia wrote:There were many times I wanted to vote you because I felt more sure you were bad then Meg was but I'm not sure why I didn't. Possibly laziness? Likely a fear in my conviction that I was just hopelessly off base. I just had a feeling that you were making the moves you needed to in order to control the game rather than joining as an uniformed fellow voyager on the quest with us.
I felt badly about your "rage" towards me but I didn't think it made sense? I wasn't sure what I had done to earn such a reaction and it felt performative to me but I did feel badly about making the game unenjoyable for you and everyone else - sometimes my paranoid fits do make games feel unplayably toxic.
It's easy to say you should have called the bluff, but I think this is impossible without stopping and realizing that the associative you were pushing was fatally flawed. Until you got the read on Meg correct, you were doomed to be put in a no-win scenario and exploited. This associative was also propped up by the wrong assumption that I would be worried for some reason given that I was the counterwagon, and that's just never going to be true. Don't put the cart before the horse: I don't trap you like that to begin with if you don't have those wrong foundations, and it's a lot easier to fix the problem working at the origin.
