Why I never liked Val89 in this game?
It's obviously nothing personal, I've never had anything to do with this player whatsoever. This refers purely to their presence in N2082.
Ever since they entered the game in
132, they've been obnoxiously opinionated and despotic. It's almost as if there is no other way to play mafia than what they imagined inside of their head. Regardless of the content of his posts, this type of mindset is definitely anti-town in my opinion. It is a team game, not a single-player game and town needs to work with one another or die. I might have not been the easiest to cooperate with in this game, I admit. However, I have found myself unable to cooperate with this player in any way, even though I did try to make some concessions while tunnelling them later on. It seems to me that we both have irreconcilable differences.
That doesn't, however, answer the question of why I think he's scum.
It seems to me that in his early posts of
135 and
143 he was looking for an easy target to strike, first with implosion and then with myself. This isn't necessarily very telling of either alignment, I've played with players who start with a bang and go fishing for scumtells.
Then he goes with his stupid theory, which I understand, boils down to:
1) town (in this case, me) using information provided to figure out the setup of the game;
2) scum using these conclusions to go PR hunting.
I've already said what I think of this and it's not necessary for me to repeat myself. Nonetheless, this type of attitude, as exemplified in
156 is a despotic attempt to set the tone to the entire game. That's what started to alarm me about this slot first. My view on this differs very strongly, and I see the rejection of any potential conclusions as at least an oddity. This is partly explained by him later on.
187 is something that, if I were the devil's advocate, I would say somewhat justifies their actions. But it's too weak and this could very easily be spun in the opposite way. I hold Newbies and S-E's to different standards. Val may act in an obnoxious way, but he definitely knows how to play the game and learn from past games. So it is an act I think I can expect from a non-newbie player.
In
196, amongst others, intentionally or not, Val is being manipulative. I did notice the change in his gameplay and made a comment about how it sounds as if two different players are using one account. Here, he presents it as a fact and makes it into a dichotomy with the alternative of being scum. While it is true that I've mentioned both notions, I've never been very convinced of either and I put them out as ideas. Val89 is great at manipulating stuff people said into directions they see fit and I've been a victim of that.
Another anti-town act by them was heavily insinuating that I claimed VT early in the game, which was entirely his projection. With subsequent posts like
205 they basically forced me to explicitly do it.
It was entirely possible for me to speculate on the gameplay being a town PR.
Val apparently had a different idea about this and made this into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it did, in fact narrow the pool of potential town PRs for the mafia with my hard claim.
In conclusion, Val89 looks like he's playing a game of his own.
His later posts clearly show him doing
something
but whatever it is that he's doing remains a mystery. There is a viable explanation as to what he's doing if he's scum - either he knows that his act in this game is up, and is trying to intimidate players into not voting him (which seems to have worked on implosion and even on catboi) or trying to clear his scumbuddy - who is probably frogsfrogs.
If Val89 flips scum, I will be willing to vote out frogsfrogs in the following day. Likewise, although there is no wagon on them, if frogsfrogs were to be eliminated and flip scum, I think Val89 would be the best way to go. Their dynamics clearly look like an alliance with one defending (
220,
681) (or supporting
546) the other (
248,
796 - read identical to that of Val,
828 - yes, this is a vote, but clearly requested by Val89).
