I believe the scumteam is Bell/Lukewarm
This post is mostly about Bell. It's long and I'm not really sure how coherent it is, but I did my insomnia-fueled best yesterday.
I'm about 99.9% sure of Bell. The probability of Ivy-scum with Bell is incredibly low. The anti-team feels I have about Lukewarm/Ivy aren't as strong, but my feelings about Ivy's play are that she just doesn't feel like someone who has a partner. She's been under suspicion by one player or another for a lot of the game and she just feels like she's facing that alone and somewhat bewildered. And that bewilderment has generated townreads of various strengths.
Bell/Saudade Case
- Saudade's scum-partner behaviors have been predictive for finding not-partners: Whemestar, Demainer, and I'm going to continue to put a whole lot of stock in the idea that it also predicts that Ivy is not a partner. He doesn't go after his partners.
I think Bell/my interactions should be obviously anti-partner regardless of how anyone reads me, but there is also some anti-partner interactions from Saudade toward Endless that I'll call out:
130 Saudade "uuuuhs" a post from Endless that interprets Ivy's early play as inexperienced town. Saudade was voting Ivy at that point.
131 he "good vote"'s Whemestar's Endless vote.
Saudade/Lukewarm interactions.
157 is a bit of a wtf because just 1 page earlier he
said "wtf u strong townreading someone on page 4 for"
162 look at all the known town in that post. Ordinarily I'd look at that and wonder which one of the 4 is scum, but given his tendency to mostly (but not completely) ignore scum partners, this doesn't raise an Ivy flag at all.
163 is the kind of mention I expect with most scum, though Saudade tends to minimize it from what I've seen.
Saudade also looks like a really good candidate for night killing Ahri.
I won't cite them all, but it's clear from his posts to her that he is familiar with her outside this game. He's a veteran of Epic Mafia. I'm not 100% certain that Ahri is (Maybe I'll look at her previous games and see if she mentions EM), but her playstyle certainly fits that mold. He may have been concerned that if Ahri got more engaged on day 2 (or if he thought she was a PR who was keeping a low profile on day 1), she'd figure out he's scum. Maybe that wasn't as much of a low-info kill as Demainer thought!
Moving on to Bell.
I like Bell as a person and as a player, and for that reason (along with my own very regrettable fatalism) I kept cutting him slack during my short sojourn in Day 2. PARTICULARLY in terms of his participation level because of his new job/newness at the job. Even without the level of involvement that I usually expect from town-Bell, there are other things that are missing in his play here. The things that I associate with town-Bell are
WIM (want it more) - he self-characterizes his town game this way. He has a drive to win as town that he lacks as scum and it shows in his curiosity, his digging, and his skepticism. Getting a townread from town-Bell isn't easy. Even though the percentage of scum in most games is going to be low, he may not townread even 50% of the players, and he may only have 2-3 strong townreads in a game with 14-20 players.
His scum game by comparison is lower-energy and kinda OMGUSY, though he also OMGUSes about suspicion as town, especially from someone he's not townreading.
When I voted him on Day 2, his next post was to vote me. It clanged, but not as hard as it probably should have because of his tendency to bite back as town, too.
The game I played with scum-Bell last year is here:
https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=84560. If you look at his iso, the content/non-content ratio is kinda heavy on the non-content. I have to say, this game is an improvement in the content area. In the Tenet game, I said that I thought he was due for a break-out scum game and I think this game may be it, though the circumstance: replace-in, only one player (who happened to want to die on day 2) who knows his play all that well. Even with the POE yesterday putting him in the frame, I was making excuses for him mentally, and really went out of my way to see the potential for him to be town, despite his extremely harsh approach to me. (from my perspective, having a great fondness for <adorable Bell is town Bell>)
I'm trying to think how to put this. Compared to the town-bell I know, who is quixotic and says things in a sort of backwards way sometimes to how I think about stuff, who's paranoid, who can get stuck in tunnels, and who tries really hard to town it up immediately so that he gets read as town and doesn't have to fight people about his alignment, this is different. It's pushier, but at the same time it's not as deep. And his focus has mostly been on me -- not to sort me -- to push me.
I feel kinda stupid for giving him so much slack. I did the same thing in the smokefilled antechanber game I linked, to the point where I was actively trying to prevent his elim until I felt like I had a better handle on his play because I thought real life was interfering with his time and his focus.
He hasn't jumped on stuff I've said and questioned me about it. He's mostly just characterized posts I made as scummy. Like saying that my first post was trying to manipulate egix.
This is going to be a small side trip. The reason I made that post to egix, pushing back at his scumread of my slot and challenging him to actually read my play, was because egix is the only player here besides Bell who has played with me, and
in that Newbie game I replaced into his scum-partner's slot. The difference in my approach here vs there is almost night and day and I thought egix would be able to see it if he reevaluated my slot. It was a very different gamestate in that game, too, but if anything my entry point into that game was much weaker. A strong, loud player had been calling my slot scum since the start of day 2 and didn't let up in the slightest when I replaced in.
egix should remember that in that newbie game, I really didn't want to state reads, and basically just proclaimed a few players town and refused to say which of the remainder I thought were scum. I "efforted" some replace-in catchup posts and "efforted" some meta towncases (they actually involved a lot of effort -- mostly to carefully pick and choose what to highlight and what to gloss over
And I actively saved the player who was pushing me the hardest from miselim who was pushing me the hardest. He had a semi-guilty jailkeeper result on my slot (which DAYUM I wish I'd realized), though. he would have outed his night action if he'd been around when the miselim happened which would have been disastrous, too. My slot basically wasn't salvagable, though I tried and I did my best to help set egix up for the late game win. I don't think he really needed my help, though!
Anyway, egix was my partner, and he was one of the players I did a full meta dive on and he knows that I'm fairly methodical as scum. I was anything but methodical here on day 2.
Writing this, I'm not even sure egix is still townreading me, and if he's not, or if he's dead, then this game is probably a scum win anyway but I WILL go down fighting.
I'll probably have a lot more to say about Bell as this day gets going, but this is a fairly decent explanation of why I'm scumreading him and won't be changing my mind barring something earthshattering on the PR front.
Here are a couple of Bell-town games for comparison purposes if you're interested and/or motivated enough to skim them. They are also me-town games.
FGO: Mafia in the Lostbelt Large Theme Game.
This was an anonymous game where every player was assigned a new account by the game mod. If you accidentally posted from your main account you were forced replaced. Fortunately that only happened to a couple players. Bell and I were both town.
Bell was Servant Avenger and I was Servant Alter Ego. This was my first game back on site after at ~2 year hiatus. It took a bit to settle in after being away, and I was also being careful not to post stuff that was recognizably me from two years ago. The game mod (and the game theme) pulled several players out of retirement, which was a lot of fun! I wound up townreading Bell/Avenger. He always maintained some suspicion of me. In this game you can see that in a 14 player game where it was known that there were 4 mafia players, he maintained suspicion of 6 (sometimes more?) throughout his time in the game. And you can see how he questioned me and scumhunted for evidence of lies or subterfuge rather than simply declaring the evidence was there without really engaging.
Bell's ISO:
https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.p ... #p12090080
My ISO
https://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.p ... #p12089984
Mini 2167: Illicit Substances Mafia
In this game, Bell and I were both town. I was playing in the hydra
morph the cat
(two players sharing a user account and both posting using it. We didn't sign our posts so it may be difficult to figure out which posts were mine. When I felt like it was important to know that I was making a post, I usually made it obvious by speaking about my partner ("Cabd", "neuter-half", usually). This game is a great example of how Bell has a really strong focus toward winning the game as town. He refers to it as "WIM" meaning want it more. We townread each other for most of the game. Another player, zMuffinman, came up with an autowin strategy for the game on Day 4. I was skeptical and reluctant to go along with the strategy, since it meant elimming some town reads (and my hydra) along the way. I was salty and paranoid that the assumptions of the autowin strategy might be wrong, but I trusted the plan and didn't fight the elim when it was my turn, the day before we thought it would be ELO (Miselim and Lose) with 2 town and 1 scum remaining.
If you're interested, you can read how I tend to behave in a situation where I, however reluctantly, believe town's chances of winning are better if I am elimmed.
But, more importantly, focus on how town-Bell scumhunts and how he treats fellow-players whose scum game he respects, and compare that to how he treated me on Day 2 here.
If you want to see my recent scum games, I'm happy to share them. let me know and I'll link them. But, Bell and Luke need to do their own legwork to scumcase me. I'll sit back and shoot down the stuff that is wrong or misleading, and there will be no questions in my mind today about whether town-Bell would actually believe the kinds of stuff he wrote about me on Day 2.
In another game where Bell and I were both town, I initially townread him, then scumread him and then eventually with a lot of difficulty came back to a townread. He mentioned that game in a post yesterday, comparing my play here to Cabd's scum play of going after Bell and trying to get him elimmed in that game. And I mentioned that I also scumread Bell in that game for a (long) while. I made a post in that game:
Subject: revO emaG - TENET
Deacon Blues wrote:I feel like Bell's due for a quantum jump. He's diligent and he has to be getting tired of getting rolled over as scum.
notsci's game has matured, but he's also shown tendencies to fall back into old habits.
It's the self-righteous anger (and paranoia!) that are striking me as town.
yeah, yeah, I know.
Deacon Blues is my hydra with another player, borkjerfkin.
This game we're playing doesn't look like as huge a jump as I've been fearing Bell's going to eventually make, but while I see some of his scum-markers here, I also see improvement from the Smokefilled game where he was scum. I'm really curious to see if he's able to keep it up today. It won't work on me. Demainer's flip and Ivy's steady candle of townieness mean there's no real chance that he's town here.
Next wall will be about Lukewarm.
