@Absol and others with votes on Veg - spend less time arguing with Veg directly. Spend more time trying to get others to see what you see. Winning an argument with him isn't the point, but it seems your spending a lot of time on it. Finding out whether he's actually scum and convincing others once you do is the point. Keep that goal in mind when you post.
Major QFT. This is exactly why I feel AT's huge firestorm with Vegitalian was a waste of our time.
I'm sorry that calling you a troll-child-on-playground didn't communicate exactly what I meant. I was very frustrated at that moment, and I liked the mixture of slang and metaphor, so I went for "You're being a childish troll who smugly tells people off for bad reasons on a playground at recess" which was shortened into... yes.
Regardless, you are behaving as I predicted: finding nitpicky reasons to belittle other peoples' criticisms of you as if you somehow being "right" improves your credibility. As I see it, you would improve your credibility by dropping Vegitalian for now and being a little more productive elsewhere. Alternatively, you can turn the discussion to us instead of him. Yelling matches teach us nothing.
Firstly, to
Eclipse. I'm less suspicious of Vegitalian now. He seems like a victim of poor early gameplay. He was really goaded into a lot of negative or subpar responses by AT, so I don't want to read too strongly into their exchange yet. (Also it's painful to read, as you noted.)
Sheepbro, sometimes I think that myself. Though, not because I a happen to share a username with a LoL character.
Next I want to briefly post all of the players I find suspicious, and try to figure out why. I have kept very quiet about it for now, but I am getting more and more sure that I'm on to something with every passing page.
Firstly,
jpulice still reads about medium scum to me.
This post is pretty strong, and one of the reasons I doubt myself, but he seems so determined to go after H_D for some reason while I am making some of the same errors and plays as H_D is and yet he doesn't seem to care. More relevantly, there's
this; I only quoted and responded directly to the portion addressed to me. The H_D portion is strangely hostile and doesn't seem to accomplish much except jabbing H_D for reasons I don't think deserve a jab. But the next paragraph - so provocative. There was nothing in that post that could have contributed to anything unless I bit the hook and got mad about it. Maybe I'm missing something, but why would a townie go for these sorts of tactics? We townies don't want to lynch someone by riling them up and making them make mistakes. That's a very wolfy tactic and not remotely a town-aligned one as I see it. Wolves also would have a good bit to fear from me, I think, but I don't want to inflate my own ego here. I GUESS he could be trying to rile out a scum read on me or something but that seems a little far-fetched, since I felt like I'd kind of established myself well as town-aligned early on?? My inexperience shows.
Assuming
jpulice IS scum, which I already know is a bad assumption to make, but ASSUMING that,
Absoltrainer reads strong scum to me, and otherwise reads low-medium scum. My reasoning is
here. The post itself isn't important -but scroll up. Immediately before this otherwise very abrupt subject change, jpulice was doing his acting-weird-and-trying-to-come-off-as-aggressive-townie thing.
IF jpulice is scum and
IF he was pressuring me because he felt threatened by me, then Absoltrainer might have tried to change the subject forcefully to defend a valuable ally, then gone on a massive two-page tirade against Vegitalian in order to try to drive the discussion out of our minds. This is an argument based on assumption, so I can't act on it, but it's one that I can't help but find very interesting. If it had just been the sudden "I'm going to vote Vegitalian" and then nothing else, I might not have been so intrigued. It's that, in combination with last night's argument, that has me worried.
If jpulice is
not scum, I still read moderate scum on Absoltrainer just because so far as I've been able to see his votes have all been "I'm late on the bandwagon guys!" except Vegitalian, and I had mentioned twice already that I found him suspicious (I don't think I'm the only one). Further, AT's posts are all combatative and are either directly responding to other members in a primarily defensive way, or trying to rile them up in a more hostile aggressive way. He posted
a fairly well-intentioned post that, taken alone, isn't fishy, but Vablakes is such an easy target and there were already FOUR other votes on him in that page. Similar logic followed for AT's vote on Human_Destroyer; it was one of the first major scumhunting posts we had, but think about where the discussion has taken us from there and how disorienting it must have been for the people H_D
might have intended to help (if he was town).
All in all AT's play is easy for me to place as strong wolf play, but harder for me to imagine as strong town play. I don't like anything about that.
Sandslash7 is on my suspect list. He, like vegitalian, is staying reserved in his posting, trying not to contribute to any controversial or high-profile discussions in favor of making small, pointed arguments that are difficult to refute and, perhaps, don't register as worth the effort. His attacks on people are very nitpicky, but this itself doesn't seem scummy to me - it actually strikes me as a good scumhunting strategy: nitpick on people for silly reasons and see if they get way too defensive. If so, pursue them further.
(He says about as much in this post.) I don't have as strong a read on him as I do AT and jpulice, but I'm wary of him nonetheless.
We have a large number of lurkers, but with a game as large as this one I fear that may be unavoidable. Still, I'm wondering where
StrongRhino went in particular. He sure seemed excited to be going after Human_Destroyer, and the fact that he's dead silent now that H_D isn't the top lynch pick anymore strikes me as odd.
Would finally like to add that all of Eclipse's questions are good because I'm kind of ignoring that crowd, but that's the power of the town: we've got a lot more eyes and ears to utilize (and typing fingers!) so we should make the most of that advantage!
