I was still kind of surprised to gave you come our and say you were leaning towards voting me, even though I 100% should not have been based on your previous reads. I guess it was a combo of me knowing I'm outside my scum range, and me narrowing in on Cobalt last night and unconsciously expecting you to be on the same page.

Anyway.

Would it help you to have links to my most recent scum games?

 

I think on some level you're lying to yourself about how many people wanted to yeet Cobalt because you don't want to be wrong.

 

That wall was longer than I thought. Wow. It never ended.

Okay, so I will be blunt (strictly in a gameplay sense), this is a lot of points, and a large amount of that are not strong for me. On a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is totally NAI and 10 is a literal scumslip, a lot of these are like, a 3 or a 4. Various things where you say "oh this interaction looks good" "not w/w" and like, yeah, they kinda do, but almost none of them are unfakeable. I don't know if this is just your playstyle, how you do an ISO while stream-of-conscioussing your thoughts. Or if you're a wolf trying to go for "quantity > quality" and give me so many thoughts that I just assume you're town for the body of work and/or that you're right about Cobalt for how they all add up.

There's no way for me to respond to such a long post without making an equally long one so I apologize, here are all my notes on the things I felt were most relevant: (Please only respond to the most relevant ones, if you respond. If we talked in-depth about every one of these it'd fill up a novel)

• I agree with you that your early poke at Cuth is good for you. In retrospect, Cuth was making a pointless comment and you called him out on it. I don't see the lack of continued interaction between you two as town-indicative though. Sometimes a distance-y interaction gets played up more, sometimes it just gets dropped because it's two wolves who don't need to solve each other so they move on.

• Hm. You mention that you felt Cobalt was only focused on things related to him, but I do recall that early on day 1 I pinged Cobalt with a question about Rubi, and he never responded, I think I even had to ping him again. I'm not sure if it means anything but I feel this anecdote relates to you feeling Cobalt was self-centered, because he wasn't in that case, which maybe indicates he was just legit out of it. But also I dunno why he never responded to the ping, tbh.

• I agree that Cuth working off of you to go after Wisp is a good look, I think. Rare for partners to just work in lockstep like that. I know he also worked off you a lot day 2, and this is reminding me that when I ISO'd Cuth I noted that the person he had the most in-depth views on was you.

• I think you misinterpreted what I said about TerRaine in my day 1 catchup? You said I was "pushing Ter to not push Cuth", but I said I liked Ter having the same read as me on Cuth and that I didn't think it was scummy of her.

• I will say I still never got why you had such a strong desire to go after Cobalt day 1. If you just associate his scumgames with lurking and he hadn't done anything and you didn't wanna be on Wisp, then fair enough I guess. I didn't think he'd done anything scummy at the time and you didn't ever indicate anything he did was AI, because you said he'd be similar as both allignments at that point.

• Amy saying "Oh is Cobalt not posting? Sounds like a fun vote." and then never doing anything with it is noteworthy. (Edit: No, she clears him later with a pretty strong defense. Okay. That doesn't necessarily make it better.)

• The latter half of this contains a lot of you calling Cobalt's posts fluffy or scummy. It's not a bad case and I have no points to specifically comment on, quite frankly he does look "conventionally scummy" (you know my thoughts on if wolves look conventionally scummy though), can I ask you why you didn't have these thoughts yesterday? Like, had you forgotten this stuff because you hadn't re-read his ISO/day 1 in a while? Was it stuff you thought before but just was overridden by townfeelings / thinking the scum was Vaimes/Waco? I'm asking to try to understand your change of view on Cobalt between yesterday and now.

• So it sounds like a part of what you're saying is that Cobalt's reads were too good. It sounds like you're implying that me reading Cobalt's posts and thinking "Yeah I vibe with these, these all look good and match my own view" is something I'm more likely to think from Wolf!balt, whereas Town!balt would likely have me scratching my head more, or annoyed at him more? In other words, one of those players who is more reasonable (and therefore more townread) as a wolf? And/or that the reason I liked his reads was becuase he was just townreading townies for the right reasons due to TMI, which looked good?

• You having a mututally more in-depth read on Cuth is a thing as well, sure. Scum often don't work that closely together, but I'm not sure there's anything ruling out you two deciding to, y'know, just go for it.

• I definitely want to hear from Cobalt on why "I wanna kill Wisp with fire" turned into "Vote: Wisp. Whatever". I'll take a look myself but Cobalt let me know if you feel she left out any progression here, or if not, just clarify what you were thinking?

• I can see Amy coming in wanting to TMI!defend Wisp, then changing her mind when she realizes Cobalt is the next most likely wagon.

• Calling for Amy to commit to a vote is a good look, yeah.

• Not really sure what to make of Cobalt wanting to actually yeet tom day 1. He doesn't need to if he's a wolf, he can just push Wisp through. If he's wolf he was just trying to look like had independant thoughts, really. But can just be town.

• I will say I don't hold Cobalt pushing Wisp against him. Like. We all did. You backed off eventually though, ish. This ties in to another annoying thing about this final 3 which is that we also all hated tom, all pushed Vaimes, basically all pushed Waco with again you being the only sort of hold out. No one looks good in this final 3. But you look the best because you did push Amy and were on and off with Cuth, I admit that. There's some counterintuitive stuff here though, like, is the person who showed doubts about Wisp town for it? Or are they a wolf because townie's natural instincts were to be so annoyed with Wisp's posts that they couldn't ever get there? It's hard to say.

• You voting Amy is a "good look" but I don't think she was ever going to be the yeet there and I think even as scum, you'd know that. People wanted Wisp dead.

• Yes, Amy was just OMGUSing after all, lol. FML. In my defense, I thought tom's case against her was bad and deserved the omgus.

• I like the point where Amy says "couple of people expressed skeeved-ness", she'd remember if it was her partner doing it and therefore might not generalize it to just "people".

 

I mean. I told you I wrote the post above specifically so that I can get past my own feelings and shit and just be objective. You're not telling me anything new here. I'm keeping this in mind.

 

Okay. I asked you about this in my points above but I think this covers it.

Quite frankly I am a sheep and susceptible to listening to the most recent person to talk to me. I am already strongly doubting my initial read coming into the day. But that might just be because you're here talking to me and Cobalt isn't. I need Cobalt to come in and tell me if I'm naive for falling for any of your stuff. The fact is it's not that hard for me to see you as town because I was already seeing you as town yesterday and those reasons haven't magically disappeared. The dumb thing is I felt that way about Cobalt too so it's like you said I need to figure out which read was wrong.

Yes, a lot of what I said earlier was sort of a "Here's why Fonti could be scum" rather than a "Here's why she must be". I doubt I'd find a "must be" case against you anyway. The scum agenda stuff is impossible for you to dispel, but there's also nothing else for me to say about it. Your progressions are the ones you'd make as scum. But also maybe the ones you'd make as a well-playing, correct townie. One could say the same about Cobalt, but Cobalt hasn't ever flipped his reads to get to the position that would best benefit him as scum, he's been consistent.

I will say there's also a little bit of what you described about me yesterday - You're a good scum. You could play a game that fools not only me, but Reg and Gemma and everyone else. Could Cobalt? It's not as simple as just townreading the person who puts in the most effort and looks the most towny, which is a shitty thing to say to the person who just wrote a novel about day 1, but I think you know where I'm coming from on this as I'm sure you've had to make a decision about a high-effort player vs a low-effort one before. That said if I townread you it won't be for effort, it'll be because that effort turns up valid points, which as you can see above you are already doing, so. Don't stop. If you're town, then there's no way in hell I want Cobalt to beat us.

 

If Cobalt is wolf the answer is just that starting, like, day 2, their whole scumteam was in a bad position and so they just, like, did fucking whatever, they just had to try and survive and get the yeet off each other because it's DLP and Reg was about to bulldoze Cuth, you/tom were (seemingly) about to bulldoze Amy, and Cobalt was never escaping the PoE if those things happened so what does he (or any of them) have to lose by trying to save each other and hope that if it goes wrong people think it was too blatant.

It'd have started day 1 a bit with the EoD interactions between Amy and Cobalt too I guess but I don't read too much into those, Amy could be defending a buddy there but could also have just been TMI'ing, that stuff was never part of my "why would they play like this as scum" because at that point they totally could defend each other. (But yes, Amy could've been ensuring the day 1 yeet didn't go onto Cobalt, which is a fine explanation either way)

 

I mean, I've played with town Cobalt. I think twice. The SpaceHunt, I don't really remember much but he was a suspect, we thought he was the 3rd scum and just barely diverted off him to get, uh, someone else. Mostly because... Reg? Newcomb? Voxx? Wanted to. Reg I think.

And then he was in the last game I played here, we basically butted heads a ton because I was in an even worse mental state than I was during days 2-3 of this game and he hated me for it. He. Faked a green peek on the last wolf in that game. I don't want to talk about it. It was rough. We moved past our differences.

Anyway. Link me to a game if you think there's a representative one, I'll go back and look at that one as well. I'm not a fan of doing meta dives though.

 

Also, if we're talking about emotional biases on things people don't want to lose to:

Letting a wolf say "I'm calling my shot today and if it's wrong I know I'll be yeeted tomorrow" and then them taking that shot and it flipping town and then not being yeeted the next day and winning is often one of the last things anyone wants to let happen. I'm not blaming you for saying it, I don't even think it was wolf perspective or whatever, it makes sense for you as town there. But I'm just saying.

 

As I said above, it's good. I just warn you though my mindset coming into this day was that I really didn't want it to become a huge deep dive of ISOs, I'm really not into that stuff. But it might just happen anyway. I'm reading everything you say either way.

The only thing I will say, because you asked, and again maybe I shouldn't but who knows:

It does not help me for you to bring up town points about yourself. When you yourself point out a thing that makes you town, unless it's a really rock solid point, it makes it really murky. In particular, the way you talked about Wifom-y stuff yesterday and said "Well if I was a wolf my plan right now would be this or that and I'm not doing it" is really hard to read objectively. I'm super in to figuring out what wolves would or would not do, but the point of it is that I read them based on things that I don't think they would be expecting to read into. And that gets thrown out the window if you bring it up yourself.

That said, I did like some of the points you showed from how Cuth/Amy treated you, so I won't tell you to stop, but those things do more for me than you quoting a time you were right and saying what your process was. Do whatever you like though.

 

Uh, I'm not really sure what to do then? Like, if you're not doing isos, then I need to bring up the things that make me unaligned with Cuth and Amy so you can see them, and if that makes you paranoid about it, well, at least you're paranoid and thinking about it as opposed to never seeing those things at all.

 

Oh, and

Shrug. Not really. I can tell you I wouldn't do more than give it a quick glance. I really don't like using past game ISOs.

 

...I didn't tell you to stop?

 

The thing I want to look at the most is the part where Cuth got himself involved between you and Reg on day 2. Reg felt that was very spew-y for you and I want to take a close look at it and decide if truly couldn't have been w/w.

I did also look through a decent amount of your ISO last night, though not in-depth. I had a few other posts bookmarked but I'm not sure I felt strong enough about any of them to be worth posting.

 

Yeah, I know. This is body of work stuff and that means a lot of little things that add up. I think if you look through my posts this game and my posts in previous ones, you'll see that I prefer those kinds of reads.

I mean, I think Cobalt was genuinely not feeling well for the first part of Day 1, and I think those kind of question are easy to miss when you're not feeling well regardless of alignment, no matter how self focused you are. But Cobalt was feeling better later in the Day and presumably was feeling fine Yesterday and Today, but the pattern of him being self focuses continued.

Yeah, ok. I don't think it really matters.

I think I said this at the time, but I didn't like his catch up wall. When I responded to Amy, I said that scum!Cobalt would could come out of the gate strong and then fall off, and I think that was a mistake, because I was reinforcing her narrative that Cobalt was being very excited and making strong posts when I did not feel that way at all, and by reinforcing that narrative I undermined my push on him and allowed her to successfully defend him that Day. Basically, I let her change the conversation from "Cobalt's posts suck, he's not trying, and I don't believe he believes what he's saying" to "Cobalt's opening was excited and towny, but that's not clearing for him" when all I wanted to say was "Cobalt being excited at first isn't clearing for him," and in doing so probably allowed Cobalt to get through that Day relatively unscathed. So, yeah, my bad, I got played.

This was somewhat answered already, but I'll elaborate on that Yesterday I felt like the points where Cobalt was talking to Amy and Cuth like he thought they were town so outweighed this that it shouldn't matter. And I was isoing more than reading everything through, so I didn't see the whole progression. And I fucking wasted time reading Waco's iso in his last scumgame to see if I could get something out of it, when I know I don't have a good read on him.

Yes, Cobalt tends to be more reasonable as a wolf, and that's part of why I thought he was more likely to be town. Like, he was pretty stubborn on killing Tom and Jari, and that's more likely to come from town!Cobalt. And Day 1, I saw all the townreads that were probably good and was like "I don't think Town!Cobalt correctly comes to this conclusion, I think he plants himself in opposition to where consensus reads are heading, somewhere." And this played into why I scumread Cobalt Day 1 and 2, and then came around on townreading him. I'll get into this more as I go through later Days, because I'm not really sure why his approach changed so much. My feeling is that he felt like he was cornered, or Amy talked him into it? I don't know. I do think once Amy and Cuth died, he went back to be more like, consensusy? Like he just kind of sat aside and let the Vaimes and Waco yeets happen while talking about how he hoped it would end the game without putting in any of the work to actually figure out if they would win the game. And his burying them was more just repeating that they're scum and clearing me and you. And it's weird that he never turned on the reads on you and me, and reg and Gemma, because town!Cobalt tends to be pretty paranoid and at least have moments of self doubt, where he likes "actually, no, x is the mafia" and then usually fall back into his original reads, but that never happened here. But that's all based on my recollection, not a recent read, so I could be getting this wrong. Anyway.

Yeah, I think this is a big one, and I think he probably came in to push tom there because he didn't just want to sheep the wagon on town when Cuth was already on it, but I digress.

The independent thoughts thing, yes. I think the way he neither stuck with the push on tom nor really went all in on Wisp (it took me just pinging him once to get him to change his vote) looks good? And he was already under some pressure from tom, Sloth and fluff, so I think he'd feel like he can't just sheep the Wisp wagon and do nothing else, because people would jump on him for it the next Day.

Oh yeah, sure. I don't really blame anyone for pushing Wisp and I know a bunch of town did. I blame people a heck of a lot more for voting Jari over Cuth, and way too many fucking town did that.

Yeah, I think that could reasonably be a point where wolf me would try to distance, because it's likely to be forgotten in the chaos of the eod until I can pull it out later (though as a wolf, I generally prefer to let other people bring it up, for precisely the wifom things you were talking about. Like, I'll deliberately set clues for deep reading town to find and bring up to clear me, and try to make them think it was their idea). I think the fact that I brought up the push on Amy again the next Day and kept going speaks better for me, but we can get into that later.

 

Please do, thanks.

I'll uh, keep doing what I'm doing then.

 

I know. Also, like, I literally just decided to townread the high-effort player here.

I don't think consistent should be a point in Cobalt's favor? Like town!Cobalt is stubborn yes, but he's not consistent. Like, he changes reads and experiences doubts, and goes off on tangents, like I think we all do, and I don't think that's happened this game, and I think this is something I should have focused on much, much earlier.

 

To be clear: One of the reasons I don't like doing ISO dives is because, like. My memory's good. It's not perfect, it doesn't remember everything. But you say "I need to find the things that show why I'm not with Cuth/Amy", and it's like. Yeah. Gemma and Reg already did that and found a lot of them two days ago and they posted them and I responded and said they were good points. So I already know a lot of stuff. And I also feel I remember Cobalt's body of work pretty well too. But you did bring up things in that day 1 I didn't remember, little things that wouldn't have been noticed at the time. So maybe I'm just being lazy and I should be ISO diving. But it feels like homework and it takes a mental toll and I can't exactly spend the rest of my day on just this game. Sorry if that's disrespectful.

But again, I didn't say stop. I appreciate what you're doing. My post wasn't meant as a "stop" it was just letting you know where I'm coming from.

 

I didn't mean consistency in the sense that "a town player has consistent reads", I meant it in the context of wolf agenda, i.e. if Cobalt reaching this final 3 with a pocketed me is wolf agenda, there are no signs he strongly manufactured the scenario, because the reads/votes he needed to do so were always in line with his stated views, whereas if you're wolf you had to flip your reads overnight (and/or tried to flip them yesterday if Waco returned) to reach the position that is best to win as wolf.

But we've talked about this a ton and there's nowhere else to go with it so I don't need to continue it, especially since you've basically told me you agree with why I see it that way and were aware of it yourself.

 

Tbh, I didn't think Cobalt had the ... balls to do this, but here we are. I think his instinct as scum is to townside, and he was forced away from those instincts here. That's either down to personal growth or Amy and Cuth's influence or it's just a sign that I'm horrible wrong again and talking to a wolf, heh.

I agree that Amy could have been tmiing on Cobalt, and I initially read it that way, and it's why I dismissed my point about her changing her wisp read to defend Cobalt. Knowing what I know now that, I think she was fully aware people like me would see it that way and that's why she went for it.

I think Amy made a post somewhere in Day 2 or 3 about expecting people on dlp like me to defend their partners, and I've been thinking about that a lot, because I think it was representative about how she wants to wolf, by keeping her partners alive.

Unrelated, but something about me is that I do not ever want to be in final 3 as a wolf on dlp, because it leads to losses way more often than not. I always want to win with as much of my team alive as possible. I'm willing to sacrificing one wolfmate, preferably as close to lylo as possible, to put town on the wrong track, but. Winning with a team is my goal. It's more fun, it's less stressful, it's more likely to result in a win. And I am willing to hard defend a teammate and undermine town to do that. I've talked about this a lot outside of here, and Cobalt can back this up because he's wolfed with me and I did everything I could to keep him alive, including riding his ass in our qt, so this isn't me wifoming. When I say I don't treat Cuth and Amy like I did and help force them down, it comes from knowledge about me that you can confirm outside of this game. Like, I'm playing mafia to have fun and it's so much more fun to play with a team, and have a good time, and manipulate town than it is to try to fucking 1v9.

 

I, uh, don't actually remember what points Reg and Gemma brought up in my favor, and I think going back to look would be a waste of time at this point, so I can't filter those points out, sorry.