I want to talk to you about my read on podoboq.
podoboq
arrives on page 19, and it takes him a little bit of time to get his footing. This is his first large, and most of prior experience is offsite in a different environment. He's played a newbie game with Cakes and Marquis that lasted 58 pages and a micro that was over in 22 pages. I remember it took me about a month to figure out how to participate in my first large, and after that I had to spend a while defending myself for all the things I did wrong in that first month and ultimately was mislynched.
Even early on, podoboq's opinions of other slots show nuance. He doesn't like that Amihan hadn't followed up with miller counterclaim yet, but he couldn't see scum motivation for it, so he reasoned it was a gambit that he might try himself and therefore not scummy. He takes a stance against Mirhawk and votes
Seniors in his next post. He calls out
beeboy for behaviour that he sees is antitown, but doesn't scumread him for it.
He's just getting his head into the game but his reads have a bit of depth to them. It's easier to push cases like "he's antitown and therefore he is scum" or "he made a logic error and therefore he is scum" or "I don't like how he's playing so he's scummy". He's making an effort to solve the game and sort the players who are merely antitown from the players who are scum, instead of just looking for stuff to push on. He doesn't grab at things that are easy to push just because they're there to be pushed on. If he thinks something is antitown, he could think that regardless of his alignment and could push on it. Instead he is trying to figure out if scum motivation exists for the antitown behaviour he perceives. That's a good sign.
He does ask
dramonic about his Axel read and asks dramonic to provide analysis instead of just naked voting. I guess this could be a partner tell but he'd have to be disproportionately interested in people's reads on axel/skybird/dwlee for me to worry about it. An ISO map would clear that up but I want to see if I can do without one because they take a while to make.
In post 477, podoboq wrote:I also think beeboy is town. I don't
like
how he's playing, but I doubt scum would act like he's acting.
I really think that scumPodoboq would have an easier time just saying "I think beeboy is scum because I don't like how he's playing." And this isn't just him playing a "whiteknight everybody" sort of scumgame because he does have scumreads too and he has no problem pushing them.
In post 576, podoboq wrote:In my skim, I was very confident in my reads on beeboy and Cakez as town. Both of them reading FS as scum makes me question FS pretty strongly.
I think their opinion on Cakez is kind of just bullshit, and I think "ignoring" beeboy is mindless. I'll be re-reading the thread after I get my classwork done this weekend, but in the meantime, based on my skim, I'm pretty comfortable pushing the wagon along.
But yeah, honestly, I think most of my read is coming from town reading Cakez and beeboy. Maybe part of it comes from the skimming. Maybe part of it is something subliminal coming from the Trump icon. I'll be reviewing this weekend, and I don't expect a lynch to happen before then.
His reasons for being on the Seniors wagon aren't very good, but they're very honest. I think newer scum tend to be afraid of this sort of honesty: admitting that they're skimming the thread, admitting that their reads are being influenced by the reads of the players they're townreading, in other words: sheeping.
I liked his responses to me in
728 because I had been wondering whether some of the things that had been bothering me about his play were due to inexperience or not. He had never seen town apathy before, so when Seniors got discouraged by being tunnelled, he found it suspicious. If he had seen town apathy already then I wouldn't have liked him assuming that giving up = scum because a lot of the time giving up is just giving up.
I'm also wondering if he's seen two town players have an argument before where they were both sure that the other was scum, because if he hasn't that would explain why he tends to think arguments have a right side and that if he's townreading one side then the other side is probably scum. I think he hasn't learned yet that in a TvT there are no winners, only survivors.
834 is podoboq's first reads list and he only includes the players that he has a reads on, leaving off the nulls. All of the flipped scum are off the readslist, which is mildly interesting.
I liked his reaction to Ranger's reads lists in
1279. I've noticed that scum in their first game against Ranger tend to react to her readslists by discrediting them, by complaining that she's not giving reasoning, by asking what the fuck is that (when it's obviously a readslist. what else would a list of player's names be?), by pushing her as scum for not explaining her thought process in detail. It happened to her in the blitz I played in and the blitz that I modded, and the games of hers that I've spectated as well and I think it's an overarching scumtell that only applies to someone's first experience with her playstyle. It's an example of town trying to figure shit out and scum just looking for stuff to push on and Ranger's playstyle
looks
pushable to players who think that when she displays in the thread is the sum total of her thoughts.
I thought his behaviour around the day 1 scramble, starting in
2002 I guess, was ridiculously town. I don't see scumPodoboq campaigning to avoid a no lynch with ever increasing urgency, begging people on the vanity wagons to reconsider, calling for them to be vigged if they let a no lynch go through, doing everything he can to get a lynch through. If our reads are right, all 3 major day 1 wagons were on town, so scumPodoboq has little reason to care which wagon goes through or whether a wagon goes through at all, but he does.
He
calls out the people who aren't voting the major wagons by name, asks them to take a stance.
Seniors gets to L-2 and they ask "okay what's the case on us" and podoboq tries to help, he
goes and finds cases in various people's ISOs for Seniors to respond to so that if town they can defend themselves and if scum they can dig their grave. I really like that he goes and looks things up like this.
I don't mind his
switch on to Ranger either. Yeah he was townreading her but it was only about 5 hours until the deadline at this point.
In post 2334, podoboq wrote:Axel, you town read me, right? Please read up and strongly consider hammering ranger. The alternative is no lynch.
I don't think scumpodoboq calls out his buddy and begs him to hammer a mislynch in public.
I think by
2824 it's pretty obvious that he's not going to get support for the dramonic lynch because nobody is really interested in dramonic but he pushes it anyway. I like it.
He's on the Skybird wagon very early.
I don't like that there's one flipped scum in each of his tiers in
3045.
I do like that he looks up Skybird's flavour in
3533 to try to help him make a decision. I feel like if he were scum with Skybird, he would either come to a different conclusion (that her flavour does make sense for the claimed role because she claimed her true role and so
presumably he would've seen her role PM and seen what the mod wrote about her flavour.
I've never played a theme where the mod didn't paste the scum role PMs into the scum PT but Rob didn't in
A Midsummer Night's Dream and what's weirder is that the scumteam didn't say what roles they had either so that's weird. Retracting this point I guess.
I don't know; I just don't think he was bussing here.
In post 4039, podoboq wrote:Still not suspecting Cakez. Pushing me so I give content is totally understandable, and I think it's towny. Do wagon me
This refrain is repeated throughout the game and I just don't see him being that cheeky.
In post 4065, podoboq wrote:Also, thought: The vast majority of players seems to be townreading me very highly. That majority has to include scum somewhere. What are the chances that scum are treating me like town because they assume the new guy isn't smart enough to figure out they're scum, so I'm a town liability going forward?
This is healthy paranoia. And it's smart too because in my first large I was kept around to be mislynched in LYLO.
I really think scum would prefer not to rock the boat and just accept townreads on them graciously in this situation.
In post 5231, podoboq wrote:How do we ever lynch scum!TPP when THIS kind of content is the wagon against them?
Does this sound like podoboq is mad that his buddy isn't trying to mislynch us hard enough? No? It's because podoboq is town.
In post 5269, podoboq wrote:Please do. I feel like people are just treating me like a dumb new player the whole game, and writing me off as obv town because of it. I haven't really gotten to play much because I have no information, and nobody suspects me for....reasons. And town should be better than that. Somebody please ISO me so we have stuff to talk about tomorrow.
I'm sorry if you feel that my townread on you is an insult to your intelligence. I encounter that a bit offline and I don't want to do it to you. I think you will be able to do well as scum someday, I just don't think that's this game.
In post 6084, podoboq wrote:Wow, a lot just happened. I basically have no idea what the hell dwlee's role is or why it's still day. I'll look into it once I've responded to some in thread stuff. Nine hours to cobble together a lynch after this is kind of terrible, though.
This is really creative if it's fake. I don't think it's fake.
As expected, I don't think the "scumslip" of calling Mirhawk a mislynch is that exciting. I guess if podoboq flipped scum it would make Mirhawk more likely to be town but it's just such a small thing compared to this large body of work he has that is towntowntown and I don't think there's a case on him aside from "was a bit sloppy here and there especially early on"? He's a little bit easily swayed by other people's opinions, or he doesn't feel comfortable voicing certain opinions until someone else has done so, but I think that's more of a humantell than anything, more of a personality thing. I think it's a sign that he feels like he's still a little bit out of his depth than anything. I know that's traditionally considered more scummy than not but it's just not enough to offset the parts of his ISO that feel town to me. The part that I care about the most is his behaviour around deadline scrambles.
I know Cakes and Marquis were in his newbie game so I'd listen to their opinions on him too if they think I'm underestimating him or if they don't think these things are towntells for him in particular.
My girlfriend has arrived so I've run out of time for trying to condense this into something more readable and it keeps getting longer when I try anyway.
