Y'know, that was probably one of the dozens of small things that clicked far too late. Along with Alex's statement that anyone who gets hung up on post count as opposed to post content is probably scum, and then using that exact same fallacy when he was playing scum.
So, at the very least, not only did Touhou give us a neat little lecture on the merits of looking for scum tells, as well as a debate on the philosophy of which ones to look for, but it also gave us some excellent examples of scum tricks as used in play by experienced players.
Somewhat true, but not quite. Everything that I did say in this game was something I would have said as a townie. My tells (at least the ones I'm conscious of) were in what I *didn't* say, the biggest ones being my lack of stubborn opposition to vigging the cop and my letting scumbuddies off the hook for general scumminess and me-tooism.
Hal's play in this game... really was pretty scummy, I think it bears saying. He was silent at a lot of critical junctures and while he did have long content posts, they were often not *relevant* content for the day. He took no stance on Patchcloud, little or no on QR/Tai and stopped posting entirely for the whole duration of Corwin vs Nitori. Avoiding all those debates entirely and giving town no indication of where you stand is a perfect setup for scum, textbook scumlurk really, we'd have done it if we'd thought town would seriously just let someone off for not posting for days. The only positions I can remember him really taking at all are me = scum (which was right, but for the wrong reasons, and we were using this to set up the following) and Tonfa = scum (dead wrong and cinched us the game). You gotta give town some information on yourself and discuss the issues at hand, even if they're sidetracky from what you think is a better case. Had I been town, I'd have been on Hal even harder than I was (but then he'd OMGUS me to death even faster), or not at all (because of the aformentioned problem and I'd be on him at endgame anyhow.)
Who played well... with this setup, it's really hard to say. Lots of people had weird goals. Me, for instance. Scum actually benefited if I died, so I really had no self-preservation goal at all. Much easier to point out mistakes, which might make me sound like Mr. Negative. Ah well. Tom! Don't fakeclaim cop! Town will kill you before scum does. Patchcloud! Don't wall of text and chuck the towel. Andrew! Don't lie to town and vig the cop claimant. Otter! Stop lurking till day 3 every game. Scumbuddies, including myself! Stop groupthinking!!! Town in general! Don't let people hide behind "post count=/= content" as an excuse to lurk, presence IS important too, notice how scum often have long rambly 'analysis' posts that are few in number and take no risks.
Good play... Well, there's some.
Props to Smodge, for all that we tried to press a case on you, the case itself kind of sprung out of nowhere, you really weren't very scummy at all and supported your claim well. You done good.
Props to Yakumo for being spot-on with both his copping and his doccing.... even though actually using his protown powers to get a scum lynched resulted in an alignment flip for him, in one of the most glaring WTF parts of the setup. Courageous man.
Props to Shale, you kept us guessing at who the extra killer was up till the bitter end.
Props to Excal for being willing to replace in, always a daunting task.
Props to Gate for blending in and making a nice claim call. Excellent scum play. Despite fretting about not having time to play, he was actually the one of us in best position all game, even excluding role screwery.
