Okay, so. Off the top of my head and a relatively quick read of the topic, Andrew and Quietrain first catch my eye. QR first of all for this:
EDIT: And Smodge posts while I was typing that. I'll be honest, if you have so little faith in your abilities as scum that you feel the need to resort to a tactic like that, then you've no business signing up for this game in the first place. (And I'm using the generic 'you' there, not directed at anyone) The whole point is analysis and deductive reasoning. Hacking defeats the purpose.
Granted, I see any negative response to Smodge's idea of changing your account name to be indulging in a fairly big ol' smokescreen. Because seriously, that would never work and everybody knows it. QR also just happened to respond in a tone that got my hackles up for one reason or another.
Then there's this from Andrew:
I am surprised to see six pressure votes suddenly roll in while I actually can't respond. Three of them of them before Otter had a vote (who had, comparatively, no posts, excuses or not). So I'm outright going to theorize that there is scum in that train, plain and simple. As such...
##Vote: QuietRain
Third on the train, voted for me as a lurker, gave no particular reasoning (although one can make general assumptions about it), excuses Otter for not being here but doesn't consider I may well not have been active on the boards either. Also forgets to bold it, which is sneaky-sneaky :p.
This seems like a pretty darn big leap to make so early on. It takes
eleven to lynch, dude, and those were all pretty sensible votes on you to get you to stop lurking. Hell, I've got more votes sitting on me now and I'm not entirely convinced that there's scum in
that train. That being said I'm writing this part of my post only halfway through my scouring of the topic, so by the
end of my post his could be different. Point is, though, you've got an OMGUS* vote on QR here for some pretty weak reasoning, as far as I can tell. There's a lot of that flying around in this game, it seems.
*Did I use that term correctly? I've always been just a tad hazy on it.
Okay, as far as the Traditional Tom-related Day 1 Clusterfuck goes, maybe it's a result of entering near the end of it and not having had the (dis?)advantage of participating or even just observing it as it grew, but I come down more on Tom's side than most seem to do. He... seems to be
trying. Even though his targeting of Otter is pretty retaliatory, I agree with the sentiment that Tom's grammar comment wouldn't have amounted to a hill of beans if Otter hadn't come along and put pressure on it. And assuming they are both town, which is my gut response - as always - to these sorts of Day 1 things, then Otter's posts have accomplished exactly what he says he was trying to prevent. Which is to say, a huge rift between townies.
Around Page 11, people start leaping up to vote Tom, the mantra being "well even if he isn't scum, he's playing terribly!" Now I agree that this kind of albatross can be harmful to the town (see Super in FFTMafia for a shining example), but it also gives scum a beautiful and plausibly deniable excuse to vote for a townie. Of particular note here...
Chisa: Actually provides the best reasoning for (his? her? hir?) vote, so despite the timing it doesn't look too terrible to me.
Hal: Had been lurking quite a bit (pot kettle black, I know), then comes in and in a longish post says almost nothing new and ends with a vote for Tom for the sorts of reasons I've mentioned above. It's hardly damning, but I found myself raising an eyebrow so I thought I'd note it.
Yakumo: A brief and pretty dang inflammatory post ending with a vote against Tom.
This is the kind of stuff Otter is talking about, I believe. It's only Day 1, man. Let's try and keep a cool head (and rabbit ears!) on our collective shoulders, yeah?
And then we pretty much move on to the later votes against me, which... look relatively clean, I guess. Apart from Tom and the Anonymous, that's only four votes and they've all said little/nothing besides "lurker, speak!" And that makes sense. Not much else for me to go on, there. I notice that Andrew is on the list, which doesn't look great when I consider that I suspected him earlier in the topic as well. Not much else of note, though.
So I pretty much need to decide what it is I think of Tom, here. Sigh. The cop claim really does clinch it for me, I think, because it's so damn
easy for scum to fake, not to mention we just came off a large multi-Cop game, so even if Tom is a scum liar any
real Cop might not think it was necessarily a fake claim. Yeah, bugger all, I just don't know. This really could be a Superesque situation tomorrow, though, and that messed with FFTMafia so bad that I really don't want another taste of it. That and we've only got, what, 9.5 hours until deadline? With all our different schedules and timezones I'd be worries about trying to organize any other lynch that remotely made sense -- and I'm not going to be bashful about the fact that this is
especially true because I seem like a prime #2 target, with a bunch of votes already sitting on me. I see little sense in letting the only person I know is a townie get sent to the gibbet.
##VOTE: EvilTom
