In post 770, Nero Cain wrote:I just don't really get the hutmeil case. Like I could maybe buy into
he's not being as active as normal
but beyond that its ????
Part of me just feels like voting out MND or Gandhi would be fairly constructive b/c I don't trust Gandhi's
leave me until day 3
and I think MND's plodding catchup is fake.
Ok, I'm going to lay out the case for Hutmeil in this post all together. If it still doesn't go through at least I tried
So, the #1 thing for me is how reactive Hutmeil has been. Almost everything he's done has been *in response* to the actions of someone else, and he's shown very little that looks like genuine scumhunting. In fact, I think unvoting furtive after RVS is one of the only things he's really done proactively and even then you could argue it's just convenient for scum Hutmeil to not be voting anyone.
I'll give examples to demonstrate this point. In
243 Hutmeil begins his push on Juice after being promoted by Frog and encouraged in that direction. Later, in
345 hoppip encourages Hutmeil to place a vote - he quickly responds that he will do so later, and is indeed willing to place an E-1 vote on Juice. I think it's fairly shady how the development of this read was influenced so heavily by others - and it'd be one thing if this was an one time thing, but it's a consistent pattern. He only gives a readlist once I press him for one. He becomes more active after being pressured, and most of this is just responding to people talking to or about him. For example in
525 he's responding to Frog and me, and suggests Frog is scum for pushing him, but in response to Frog changing his read, Hutmeil changes his in turn. I challenge him on it -
613 - in a way that suggests he should still be scumreading Frog . And in reaction to this, hutmeil goes back to scumleaning Frog, and waffles that the action was "townie and scummy at the same time" - given he explicitly made a post calling Frog's change of mind townie, I have a very difficult time buying this. I think again, he is very reactive to the other players of this game, and it does not look like he's making an effort to find scum independently, but rather to avoid making any obvious mistakes and skating by.
Hutmeil displays a lot of conventionally scummy behaviour which I believe is in fact actually scummy. This is definitely similar to the previous point, but there's not much content in his ISO and there's nothing that makes me feel like he's genuinely uninformed and trying to find scum. I believe his readslist post -
408 is a shining example of this. His reads don't have any serious level of thought or depth - players who are active and would make for difficult pushes like me are town, Juice who he has been encouraged to scumread and has been blatantly scummy is his only scumread, and everyone else 'gets a pass' with no real intent to dig into any of their posts or sort them.
There's also some behaviour which I think is waffly in a scummy way.
243 is an early example of this. He calls the post 'interesting', and scumreads it while making sure to emphasise repeatedly how uncertain he is - it feels stilted to me. A much better example comes later in
730 specifically his response to me. There are two things I want to highlight - firstly, he flips on Frog when Frog townreads him (of course this is convenient for scum Hutmeil to do) and when I push him on it he argues it's simeltaneously townie and scummy, and then repeats that line in this post. Frankly I think this is nonsense - if you're conflicted about a post made by someone you scumlean, it doesn't make sense to call that post 'townie' and not elaborate until pressed on it. I think the most simple explanation is that Hutmeil wanted to reconcile with Frog, an active player, to increase his odds of survival, but later believed he couldn't successfully justified this and tried to backtrack a little. It's not a great scum strategy but it makes more sense than any other town explanation.
Some people will probably respond to this by calling a lot of my concerns playstyle. I encourage them to look at hutmeil's completed games as town; they show a lot more independence, genuine scumhunting and overall vigour than he's shown here.
Finally, I want to point out his opportunism. He pushes on Juice when that's the done thing, and seems to move on when it's not. When scum Gandhi is being pushed by a lot of people due to his frustrating playstyle Hutmeil is happy to pile on the pressure. And more recently he's decided to voice a suspicion of Greeting, presumably in preparation to join the wagon. This isn't a massively strong point and I acknowledge all of these players have been scumread fairly widely - but it is convenient for scum Hutmeil that he's always willing and able to jump on the most viable miseliminations.