Mass Effect 17er [Game Thread]

[Maple]

talk about why?

It's a sunbae post that's sunbaeier than the last one I commented on

I don't feel like Isoing amy to verify but those sorts of "vast tonal gulf" reads are always hot

Seems a lot less fakable than the last one if true

[Maple]

You remembered within 1 minute and made a show of it

Fuck off bop stop baiting me

[dyachei]

Dyachei, can you explain where your at more specifically in regards to finding it hard to get into the game? Why is that?

I'm overcommitted with a busy work schedule and dealing with renovations (and coordinating them) at home. I can't be on when the game seems to be in full swing overnight and I usually do better with real timing. '

I'm exhausted and haven't gotten into the flow of this game

[dyachei]

I've also already said this once before

[Maple]

I'm guessing esoa is still 500 posts behind

[Maple]

I'm seeing people have more village reads than me

I don't believe yall, you're all so Wolfy

[dyachei]

I'm seeing people have more village reads than me

I don't believe yall, you're all so Wolfy

who do you think is the wolfiest?

[Esooa]

I'm guessing esoa is still 500 posts behind

I've read the whole game but I'm rereading it was what I meant lol. I stopped paying as much attention to every post cause it was taking way too much time tho

[Esooa]

I've also already said this once before

I was kinda expecting with more time you would have been able to integrate more but ig you still haven't been in thread much

[dyachei]

I was kinda expecting with more time you would have been able to integrate more but ig you still haven't been in thread much

thread got active as I needed to start wrapping up so I could get to work on time today

[Esooa]

alright where I'm getting really really tired (sorry Dya lmao I feel bad for leaving immediately after you say that) but here's where I'm at. Tiers not ordered

Town

Arapocalypse-I like some stuff from them, dislike some. I like their reads for the most part in p#501. Most specifically saying Amy's entry wasn't bad, contrary to a decent amount of others. Saying Visor was "hmm..." which I can see. I think he's town atp but the reads on him before here weren't warranted. Some things from my notes cause this is a slot I went back and forth on:

p#207 Ara claims masons with me quoting where I said I'd be pocketed by anyone who does. I feel like it could be a legitimate pocket attempt, especially because it wasn't done in real time but rather something Ara felt the need to comment on in catch up.

p#215/218 Ara first agrees with GH's Dolby thing but then reverses the read on 218. Feels real and I like the quick revaluation.

p#229 I dislike that Ara town read Sunbae for the specificity of his reads (being that something was 2/10 sketchy) because I just don't think that's very specific.

p#259 I liked Ara's point about GH; saying that he'd be more comfortable fluff posting before actually getting into it as town

Hally/Ephemeral-they've both had good tone and nice contributions, but their interactions feel very weirdly buddying to me. At the start of the game they basically agreed on every single read which just didn't feel natural to me. I am town reading them both otherwise though so maybe it's nothing
pzelda
Sunbae-the early town reads weren't warranted imo but I liked p#492 pretty decently

Null
Visor-I haven't given him enough attention. I read all the posts in this game but the past ~300 I've all read while playing league/watching anime with people so haven't given them the thought I need lol. Lightly towny from my catchup to ~post 500 but that's all.
Cuthillius
Csargo-Csargo does feel pretty awkard to me, but I've gotten very strong town pings from a few of his posts. Most specifically p#331. Just feels very naturally inquisitive and towny.
Ampharos-Disagree with the scum reads here. Specifically the thing about Hally saying it was weird they mentioned actively trying to not get pocketed. Town reading people I like without fairly evaluating them is something I always need to be weary of and I'm pretty sure they're just mentioning that too
GeneralHankerchief-Something that stood out to me a lot was not only that GH's aggressiveness towards Dolby was weird, but the fact that Visor v read Dolby before it, and Manti said my posts seem pretty good before it. I get why Dolby using meta in his post specifically makes it stand out as probably meaning more, but I dislike how GH pointed out very strongly that nothing I said had been particularly towny, when not commenting on things such as someone saying my posts seemed good at basically the same time. In regards to GH's original vote on Eph (p#297) I can understand where he's coming from with Eph being too "blendy," as I do see a lot of potential pocketing between him/Hally, but I don't like that GH says he trusts Eph the least out of widely town read players, putting Ara over him even when I think most reasons to TR Ara at this point would be good tone, which imo Eph also strongly has

GH says he'll reval it soon after, and later posts p#396 where he agrees with Hally that he has had some unique takes. He still says he doesn't find a reason to town read Eph, which is valid, but hasn't moved his vote since which meh.
Dolby-he's alright, but nothing so towny I'd like to move him up, especially with the lack of posting. He dropped a couple walls earlier I'll get to when I wake up later and I'll think about the read more. Reminded here that I really liked Csargo pointing out Dolby's town reads were probably too strong for what he had done.
Manasi-no content lol
ColonelLubriderm

Scummy

Montmorency
dyachei
Maple-I'm dying tired so this will be the only one I explain rn. Manti has said like 5 times this game now that everyone is wolfy which I'm just ??? at. I didn't like his sheeping of GH on p#116. I didn't like how he said “I have a hidden GH thought" in p#144 because it feels performative. I didn't like his Sunbae read in p#156 where he said Sunbae was making a lot of sense, partly because I don't agree at this point, partly because Sunbae had actually taken a lot of positions different from Manti, such as having scum read GH earlier while Manti just straight sheeped GH.

Vote: Maple

[dyachei]

is lubriderm bop?

[GeneralHankerchief]

Aight I'm gonna dump all of my various concerns with Ephemeral into a single post.

Concern The First: SOD Posting. This is what initially twigged me here. The first few hours of the dayphase, you had a lot of the typical highposters doing their thing. Esooa, Eph, Hally, Ara to a lesser extent. Overall, I'd say it was a fairly townie time to be in the thread, at least from feel. Hally was being their usual town self (having rolled mafia against them 3 times since November, I am acutely aware of what this looks like), Ara had enough !!!! moments that I feel like she was genuinely giving takes and saying what she felt, and Esooa was managing to keep up quite well. I freely admit that I'm holding Esooa to a lower standard than the others here, but her first ever scum game was in something like November, she knows this playerlist is generally perceived to be of high quality and also Visor, and I didn't really detect any sort of fear or anything.

To circle back to the original point, all three of Hally/Ara/Esooa, all of whom were quite active at the start, towntold in their own separate ways. Eph, to me, did not. He was part of the flow, and that's certainly not a mark against him, but that's really all he had going for him. There weren't any real eureka moments for me, and when you're that in the flow with a bunch of people who are towntelling, and you're just... not doing it yourself, that in itself is telling to me. So that's the first thing I wasn't a fan of, and while I freely admit that it's influencing the rest of my read on him in terms of baseline, it's something that I believe in.

Concern the Second: Focuses and Reads. This section will be less feels-y and more concrete. I think it's fair to say that Eph's main focus has been on Manti (aka Maple) so far. I find this focus and push to be unrealistic. He first came out against Manti in post #165, a time in which I don't think anybody could realistically have gotten a confident read on that slot in either direction. Manti was correctly suspected early on in the invitational, to be sure, but for starters a) not this early on, and b) I think Manti's posted differently between the games anyway. Unless he's purposely running a play or something, I normally ascribe Manti's scum game as "trying to act too much like how a normal town player would play", and I think that's what he got caught on in the invitational. Here, I don't see the same thing - he's mostly just doing Manti things so far. Clearing? Hardly. Worthy of your main focus and effort? Also no. I think Eph should be aware of this and I'm just not really seeing what he's seeing. This has been enhanced by the fact that I think Manti has gotten more townie in the past few hours. Hard to say why exactly, just specifically how he's approached things seem like his town game. So I think Eph should know better here if he's town and is repping a read that he doesn't actually have.

Furthermore, Eph's other main pushes - myself and dyachei. dya is a kind of easy push to make as either alignment, so I won't spend too much time on it. As for me, his main concern seems to be with how I approached him and interacted with him, and how I didn't really seem to be legitimately figuring out his slot in our one dialogue yesterday (Monday). Fair enough, I certainly wasn't looking to explore the full game with him or anything, but I think his pushes overall have been, well, uninspired. There doesn't seem to be much deeper thought to his pushes, moreso he's going through the motions and looking for surface-level scummy things that he can push town players for. Manti's looking like Manti? Push. I didn't really put in a satisfactory effort? Push. This is doable as either alignment, but I'm not seeing it as part of a larger effort to solve the game. Eph is shading me for not really caring about trying to solve, but he's pointing out an interaction or two with him as evidence - I think this is actually the case for him and it's more of a result of his full posting than a single specific instance.

[GeneralHankerchief]

is lubriderm bop?

Yes.

[GeneralHankerchief]

There are two interesting pairs in this game that I've noticed:

Pair 1: The "lacking" duo of Ampharos/dyachei
Both have come under heavy scrutiny here and "lackingness" has been a big part of why. For dya especially, their posts haven't been actively bad, just Not Town Dya. This can be easily explained by their given excuse and I think I'd buy it regardless of their actual alignment, but that still leaves the problem of what to do with their actual posts. As for Amy, I think her posting has been outright scummier, for her early Visor take (which I and others picked up on), and for her supposed shift in thinking w/r/t basis for reading people (which Sunbae picked up on and I don't disagree with). There's nothing here that says the two of them, Amy and dya, can't be paired, and overall I'm mostly including them here to set up a contrast between the second pair I want to talk about. If we're going here today, I think I'd go with Amy over dya due to some outright problems as opposed to overall lacking-ness, but would probably not be surprised at either of them flipping as either alignment.

Pair 2: The late wallers/pzelda haters of Montmorency/Dolby
This is the much more interesting pair to me. I didn't think to connect the two of them initially (initially as in, like, "yesterday") but they've kind of undergone a similar arc in which they're both in the outer level of the POE and threatening to fall further into contention for the chop. Then, both of them made long walls overnight where their primary pushes were pzelda. This suddenly became a topic of interest to me. pzelda is a fascinating figure in this game in general, he's not part of the typical "invitational" crowd so to speak, but a good number of us know him and have played multiple games with him in the past, myself included. Speaking personally, I have pzelda as high town, and he's generally been townshielded/"threadspewed" by a number of other players here. And yet both Monty and Dolby, both of whom also know pzelda, went after him in their overnight walls. Hmm.

For starters, this is light, but I think this soft-unaligns Monty and Dolby. I don't think I see the two of them taking this exact same approach with somebody in the consensus town. I don't have much of a history/baseline on Dolby, but Monty likes to bus as scum - or at least, he did back in the day. He likes to distance himself from his partners and take a different "lane", so to speak, and has done this to success in the past. He has also done this unilaterally and without coordination/approval from his teammates. So him taking the exact same approach as Dolby w/r/t top pushes is something that I do not think is in Monty's wheelhouse. I don't think this is on the level of "clearing for the rest of the game", but if Dolby does end up flipping red, I'm probably not reexamining Monty until, say, LYLO-1.

As for the content of both their walls, I like Monty's better. His thoughts just feel more natural and Monty-esque, whereas Dolby's strikes me as performative. Playing up the "man I'm tired and still have a lot of posts to get through" just a little too much, in addition to the overall timewarp-y nature of them and including things in there that I don't think need to be included in.

Despite this, it doesn't change my opinion on pzelda. Dude's still town.

[GeneralHankerchief]

I guess overall, and barring further developments, I'd like to chop within Eph/Dolby/[Amy if it comes to it] today as per my above walls. Amy and dya both get a courtesy of giving them time to get into things, but Amy less so because I feel like she's been somewhat actively wolfy as opposed to dya, who just hasn't really done much. I'm not interested in chopping Monty today, though I reserve the right to put him back on the table D2 depending on how things go. Neither am I interested in chopping Maple today, I feel like that would be stupid and feel like people are just kind of baseline scumreading him due to seeing him a LOT as mafia recently. I'm not seeing what they're seeing here.

Notably, Csargo is not in any of the above category. I recognize Colonel's concerns there and am not sure of where I stand on Csargo myself beyond "thinly town, probably for bad reasons". Depending on how work goes, I'm going to see about isoing a couple of games I played with Csargo in the past year or two (he was town in both of them, as was I) and see if I can't get a firmer opinion on him one way or the other. This is not a lock commitment to me doing this, but we'll see how things go.

[ColonelLubriderm]

Fuck off bop stop baiting me

when i read this in bed earlier i wiggled my bum

[GeneralHankerchief]

Aside from Manasi, who is actively not here (I have a really dumb read that she would be more present and involved as mafia, and may have just actively forgotten about the game as town - do not put any stock into this whatsoever), and dya, who I've already discussed, the two people I'm least solid on (in either direction) are Cuth and Csargo. Cuth I might just straight-up punt on until tomorrow. Csargo, will try, but I actually need to Do Things At Work for the next while.

[ColonelLubriderm]

In a 48 hour phase, I don't think any more courtesy time is needed.

I'd chop in amy/dya/csargo

i suppose i'd settle for maple but that seems just as rand as manasi.

I wouldn't fight against montecorenot/dolby/ephemeral, i'd just push someone else i'd want instead

I would protest anyone else.

[ColonelLubriderm]

I also believe manasi ahas forgotten about the game but i don't think that says anything about her alignment.

I also don't think GH should get villa cred for forgetting Dyachei, because it's alignment non indicative

[GeneralHankerchief]

If we're going between Amy and dya, I'd much rather it be Amy, simply because I think there are more active negatives for Amy than there are with dya.

[ColonelLubriderm]

If we're going between Amy and dya, I'd much rather it be Amy, simply because I think there are more active negatives for Amy than there are with dya.

i am good with this

[Maple]

We're decorating cakes today, im excited to do the carrot cake since we'll be modeling marzipan carrots

[Maple]

No cap I forgot to put both gh and Newcomb into a reads list in the rocks game d1

It happens sometimes

[Cuthillius]

manti

what's up

[pzelda]

A question for the thread at large: If dya ends up being chopped today and flips red, can I be treated as spewed town for forgetting to include them in my reads list from last night?

A follow-up question: If the answer is "you could have been until you directly pointed this out", can I be treated as spewed town anyway?

what is this even supposed to be? No and no.

[Csargo]

alright where I'm getting really really tired (sorry Dya lmao I feel bad for leaving immediately after you say that) but here's where I'm at. Tiers not ordered

Town

Arapocalypse-I like some stuff from them, dislike some. I like their reads for the most part in p#501. Most specifically saying Amy's entry wasn't bad, contrary to a decent amount of others. Saying Visor was "hmm..." which I can see. I think he's town atp but the reads on him before here weren't warranted. Some things from my notes cause this is a slot I went back and forth on:

p#207 Ara claims masons with me quoting where I said I'd be pocketed by anyone who does. I feel like it could be a legitimate pocket attempt, especially because it wasn't done in real time but rather something Ara felt the need to comment on in catch up.

p#215/218 Ara first agrees with GH's Dolby thing but then reverses the read on 218. Feels real and I like the quick revaluation.

p#229 I dislike that Ara town read Sunbae for the specificity of his reads (being that something was 2/10 sketchy) because I just don't think that's very specific.

p#259 I liked Ara's point about GH; saying that he'd be more comfortable fluff posting before actually getting into it as town

Hally/Ephemeral-they've both had good tone and nice contributions, but their interactions feel very weirdly buddying to me. At the start of the game they basically agreed on every single read which just didn't feel natural to me. I am town reading them both otherwise though so maybe it's nothing
pzelda
Sunbae-the early town reads weren't warranted imo but I liked p#492 pretty decently

Null
Visor-I haven't given him enough attention. I read all the posts in this game but the past ~300 I've all read while playing league/watching anime with people so haven't given them the thought I need lol. Lightly towny from my catchup to ~post 500 but that's all.
Cuthillius
Csargo-Csargo does feel pretty awkard to me, but I've gotten very strong town pings from a few of his posts. Most specifically p#331. Just feels very naturally inquisitive and towny.
Ampharos-Disagree with the scum reads here. Specifically the thing about Hally saying it was weird they mentioned actively trying to not get pocketed. Town reading people I like without fairly evaluating them is something I always need to be weary of and I'm pretty sure they're just mentioning that too
GeneralHankerchief-Something that stood out to me a lot was not only that GH's aggressiveness towards Dolby was weird, but the fact that Visor v read Dolby before it, and Manti said my posts seem pretty good before it. I get why Dolby using meta in his post specifically makes it stand out as probably meaning more, but I dislike how GH pointed out very strongly that nothing I said had been particularly towny, when not commenting on things such as someone saying my posts seemed good at basically the same time. In regards to GH's original vote on Eph (p#297) I can understand where he's coming from with Eph being too "blendy," as I do see a lot of potential pocketing between him/Hally, but I don't like that GH says he trusts Eph the least out of widely town read players, putting Ara over him even when I think most reasons to TR Ara at this point would be good tone, which imo Eph also strongly has

GH says he'll reval it soon after, and later posts p#396 where he agrees with Hally that he has had some unique takes. He still says he doesn't find a reason to town read Eph, which is valid, but hasn't moved his vote since which meh.
Dolby-he's alright, but nothing so towny I'd like to move him up, especially with the lack of posting. He dropped a couple walls earlier I'll get to when I wake up later and I'll think about the read more. Reminded here that I really liked Csargo pointing out Dolby's town reads were probably too strong for what he had done.
Manasi-no content lol
ColonelLubriderm

Scummy

Montmorency
dyachei
Maple-I'm dying tired so this will be the only one I explain rn. Manti has said like 5 times this game now that everyone is wolfy which I'm just ??? at. I didn't like his sheeping of GH on p#116. I didn't like how he said “I have a hidden GH thought" in p#144 because it feels performative. I didn't like his Sunbae read in p#156 where he said Sunbae was making a lot of sense, partly because I don't agree at this point, partly because Sunbae had actually taken a lot of positions different from Manti, such as having scum read GH earlier while Manti just straight sheeped GH.

Vote: Maple

Is there any reason you don't have thoughts on ColonelL or Cuth at this point?

[pzelda]

Nice walls, GH. I have another video call ahead of me, but I get around to them after that.
I'm sure Dya is busy and tired. Unfortunately, complaining about IRL circumstances doesn't make her town (also, it used to be Dya's mafia meta, when I started playing at MU. That said She's a way better player now than she was three years ago).

[dyachei]

i complain about rl as both alignments just fyi.

I'm just super busy and it makes being in the thread here a challenge

[Arapocalypse]

Two things: I feel like the threadstate feels more comfortable than it should be? By this, I mean confidence level in particular when considering that post a while ago where someone had an "all mafia are within these group of people" which felt rather pre-emptive simply due to the amount of stuff we've had so far this game!!!

Quick question to everyone in the thread: if you were wrong about a read, which read do you think you have wrong? One of your more confident reads, not your nulls!!