This post is a little long, and probably kind of rambly because I'm not very good at articulating myself, so apologies in advance. I think it's worth reading in it's entirety, though.
In all seriousness though.
Matt Attack is my top scum right now.
Funny, you're my top scum right now too. Just about everything you've done this game has set off alarm bells in my mind. They're subtle alarm bells, but they bug me nontheless. Let's start at the beginning of the game. First, the first few pages of Day 1 make one thing abundantly clear: your thoughts on how our discussion should have gone were blatantly, and I mean completely blatantly anti-town. Let's take a peek at the following post:
It's not that it is, but I don't understand why you would start a day off immediately voting for people lol. Wait a bit for things to settle, for people to arrive, and then use as much as you have to try and get something going.
Here, we have you claiming that we should not be placing votes on people too early on in the day. Still, I think thay by this point, starting off with a couple votes is standard for GAFia. It's a solid way to breed discussion, and can sometimes even yield surprising results down the line. There is actually precedent for scum players to caution aggressive voting early on in the day (presumably to try to appear as a concerned town member.) To anybody who followed or participated in Launchpad's GAFia mafia, I'd like to call attention to one example- in that game, on the very first page of the very first day, Terrabyte20xx expressed concern over players' voting practices early on. He turned out to be scum. His situation and TWE's are not 1:1, but they are similar enough that I think it is worth keeping in mind. Let's look at another post that followed soon after the previous one.
How is commenting on fluff useless?
I'm looking @ the theme of the game and trying to understand what power roles there can be. lol. If you think that's useless, trying to find out power roles, then I suspect you have a power role of your own. Interesting stuff we have here. Trying to find and figure out potential roles has ever been useless, especially on the first day when we don;t have anything to go off of.
Different people have different thoughts about fluff, but generally (and I know that I personally fall in this camp) I think that most players feel that fluff speculation brings incredibly little to the table, especially when we haven't even seen any flips/claims etc (well, Scrafty had flipped by that point but I don't think that has much bearing here, as she doesn't actually have a power.) When we consider this peerspective, it is not hard to imagine why scum would want to keep discussion directed towards fluff. It's a solid way to appear both be active and appear useful, without actually being the latter.
Taken alone? The posts are weird. Together though, it's a different story. You are literally advocating here for town to waste its time speculating about fluff rather than voting. I can understand if you personally didn't want to cast a vote. I didn't cast one for a little bit myself. But to advocate against others using their votes (keep in mind that for ordinary roles, of which there are assuredly quite a few, voting is the
only power available to them)? I don't think that's such a good idea.
While we're looking at the previous post I quoted, I'd like to call attention to another aspect that rubs me the wrong way: specifically, the part where he accusses Crimson of having a power role because of his feelings on fluff speculation. We can read this a number of ways. On one hand, if we assume that TWE is speaking about power roles in general, then voicing your speculations about another player having one is absurdly anti-town, especially this early on in the game; the last thing town should want is their power roles outed. However, taken in context, it's more likely that TWE is referring to scum/neutral power roles, considering the discussion at the time. In this situation, I read the post as just a really sloppy way of casting suspicion on Crimson. This post seems to have been mostly ignored, but it does stand out to me.
Now, let's move on to Day 2. Things get a little weird here because, like Drago above me has said, a lot of what TWE says today doesn't make a lot of sense, especially from somebody who is no stranger to GAFia games. First, it's worth mentioning that TWE engages in his fair share of fluff speculation today. I am a little more forgiving of it here, however, due to Roy's claim of being blackmailed. Okay, let's check out this post.
Really? And you feel like this contributes more to the conversation?
CB made a perfectly reasonable comment (I know that I agree with it) about how RIP posts and the like, that contain nothing else, aren't that useful. It's good advice, but TWE doesn't think that trying to steer town back in a productive direction is very worthwhile, which is kind of weird?
Who do I think is scum?
Well, I did think QBro could be a scum but now we don't really no because he got a replacement. I do feel it is interesting that the mafia didn't kill his replacement, but maybe someone protected him. I do think in all honesty you could possibly be a Mafia member. I don't really care for your super upfront attitude about everything trying to be so much of a town. If you are a town, then good, but the aggressive style of play is something I feel suits a Scum looking to be in good standing with town.
Two weird things here. First, this marks the beginning of a series of posts from TWE that display a really weird logic for who he thinks scum should have targeted (see
this post for another example.) I mean, he seems surprised that scum didn't kill QB/Drago or CB- two people that most of us can agree would have been awful scum targets. This is super weird. The second weird thing is that he's again advocating against aggressive playstyles. I don't entirely disagree that it can be an interesting cover for scum, but I can't help but look at this post differently when I consider his other posts from before.
Onto more recent subjects is TWE's opinion on the prod votes on Hipster Cthulhu. I actually don't mind if you have a different opinion on prod votes, I can sort of understand that where that sentiment comes from.
If it's earlier on in the day I don't mind as much, but as we get closer to the end of the day....I don't think it's the smartest of strategies. Also, I know, again this isn't the best of remarks, but wouldn't you think that Sorian would be prodding and PMing hipster to say something if he was scum or a bigger role? I know that's not valid discussion but something I've been thinking about over the course of the day.
This post is weiiiiiiird. Like
squidy said, if you know it's not valid, why would you discuss it? Feels like a really strange way to dissuade people from prodding. For the record, I don't think the prod votes on Cthulhu are entirely misplaced. His presence is very notably lacking, even amongst the rest of us inactive players.
I think you know more about this whole blackmail thing more than you're letting on.
This post bugs me too. I don't know how TWE was able to jump to this conclusion from Xam's opinion on the blackmailing, but it's weird. Hypothetically, if TWE is scum, I could see this as an attempt to discredit Xam's cop claim. If we assume that any protector roles will do everything they can to keep Xam alive, then it would be advantaegous to scum to try to discedit Xam so he gets lynched- and making him seem like the blackmailer would be one way to do it. This post could be seen as TWE testing the waters for this sort of move.
This next post is actually from squidy, but I think it's an interesting point so I'll let him make it for me.
You were the only active poster who voted for neither zeke nor kalor in the last day phase. It was something I looked at at the start of today for scumhunting but it didn't ring any bells for me until your more recent behavior. now looking back it feels like you wanted to avoid voting in either bandwagon because you knew they were both town.
Now, we get to TWE's vote on me.
Yep. I'm voting for who I think is scum.
VOTE: MattAttack
You come in here only when mentioned. I do not like that. Screams scum.
I do what comes to my mind immediately no matter if it benefits me or doesn't. The first thing that pops into my head is what I say. I don't care if it makes me look like a Mafia or not.
I mean, this argument against me is true if you ignore my two posts today, considering neither had anything whatsoever to do with people mentioning me. This vote screams of TWE parroting Crimson's argument against me (an argument that I still don't think is very good) in an attempt to get it to stick. Looking at this post next:
I'm going to role claim in 15 minutes. I do not want to do this because it's sort of a detriment but I will if I have to.
We've already had a cop roleclaim. Sooo....I don't want to do this.
Apparently it's supposed to be a joke? I mean,
like others said, it really doesn't sound like one. Yet another weird post.
So, where does this all leave us? I think there's a pretty decent case to be made for TWE being scum. He's consistently displayed baffling behavior that, in many cases, veers pretty closely to the blatantly anti-town side of the spectrum. I've held my suspicions pretty close to my chest thus far because I'm not a very confident player, but what the heck, might as well get them out now. Being as quiet as I have been certainly hasn't helped town, but maybe this will.
VOTE: TheWorthyEdge