Ok, I suppose you're all owed some actual effort from me. I wanted to just vibe in this game and phaff around while other people actually did the solving, but events have taken their course and vibing ain't gonna cut it. So let's just do this, get it out of the way, and hope it's good enough for me to coast for the rest of the game until hopefully I get cleared through associatives or something so I don't have to do this again.
In this post I will discuss every player aside from
Murska and
Logic. This will be in no particular order.
Rask/ladd
Don't think I need to belabor the point here.
Town. Rask higher than ladd but it shouldn't matter.
Jan
I'll preface this by saying that I'm not the best Jan reader. He's a tricksy wolf who's fooled me at least once in the past (caveat: it was a mash, so transcribe it to this type of game at your peril) and I find myself naturally gravitating towards townreading his typical tone.
That said, we had two clear points of agreement on D1 that go beyond the typical "gud t0an" stuff that make me feel more confident about my Jan read at this point. The first was early in the game, re: Arctic's initial posting:
If you don't remember, Arctic had a corker of an entry D1 that kept oscillating between "plain old bad" and "self-aware about how bad it was but still persisting and still being bad". Back when I was still in my shitposting phase, I did spend some amount of thought on those posts and eventually decided it was a straight-up case of TWTBAW, and Jan came to the same conclusion as me without any sort of prompting from me (since, again, I was still in my shitposting phase).
The second was his mid-d1 post about Gemma:
I'm not going to pretend I had the same thought as Jan here independently, but I *did* read Gemma's initial entry into the thread and had just a minor tingle of "huh" about it, and Jan putting it into this context was both a) a coherent thought and b) showed good thoughts about the thread and game as a whole. Gemma, to my knowledge has still not really addressed the crux of this point but I'll talk more about that later. I'll finish the Jan section by saying that he was also reasonably early on Syn (made several comments mid d1 about Syn "conceding" after sustaining the first major push from Rask that I don't think a wolf would say about a wolfbro right off the bat) and while his posts so far on D2 haven't been anything a good wolf couldn't fake, he's also given me no reason to doubt my good feelings about him from D1.
Town.
Wisdom
Partly relying on old meta here, and this might out one of my old alts on MU but hell with it lol.
I played two games with Wisdom in 2021 (the year I stopped playing). The first was a team mafia game where we were both wolfbros and both in on the same day, d1. In that game, there were a lot of meandering observations, nothing questions, and a truly horrendous bus vote on me that even I, deep into my powerwolf meta, had a hard time with spinning even though I specifically made a post designed to clear all of my teammates currently bussing me (I deeply despise that game, in case you couldn't tell
).
The second was a game a couple months later when I was on an alt, and Wisdom was more to the point, happy to lucky, and while they were a bit off-kilter in their solving in terms of how she worked with the consensus, there was still, you know,
solving. I eventually helped mislunch her (I was town) later on in the game when she was ensconced in my POE, but even though her demise was telegraphed pretty early on in that day she was still cheerfully solving the entire time and I did have those niggling little vibes that I was going down the wrong path here, which I naturally ignored.
After a false start, Wisdom appears firmly in her
town meta to me here.
benneh (nebjiamn)
Was quick to point out on multiple occasions on D1 that he was still well within both his ranges, which I agreed with at the time. I still agree with it now, 8-9 hours into D2 tbh. Out of the people generally not coming under fire, I feel like benneh's been the most skate-y. He's been content to just be chill, not super rock the boat much, and vibe with whoever happens to be in the thread at the time. (in other words he's seized by force the niche I wanted to occupy, and I will forever hate him for it
) His biggest, most notable push on D2, has been Visor, which sure, Visor's a popular guy today, but I don't actually think he's
pushing the game forward much.
There's been some testing the waters on Arctic
here, Gemma
here but there's no followup with them and a bit later on he says his main disagreement with dya is that they put Arctic third from the bottom on a readslist. For the most part, he's been cool with just focusing in on the bottom group of the POE today.
Now, that's fine, considering I haven't done a damn thing today lol, and it could be benneh's just doing the standard villa thing of voicing some of his more outlier thoughts as he tries to focus on what's most likely going to be relevant at EOD, BUT! I also see a very possible explanation where he's seeding the thread and setting up for the future.
So I'll conclude this segment by saying that benneh's not out of either range by a longshot.
Tinfoil town.
Arctic
Horrendous gamestart, discussed in Jan's section. Felt like TWTBAW to me. Arctic is in a weird position because, unless the MU social dynamics have changed since I mostly left the scene, Arctic is probably one of the more isolated folks in this specific playerlist (going off joindate this is Arctic's first Org game, for example). That's always gonna bring some awkwardness when you're a guest at the established club, so to speak, and that does have to be taken into account when reading into things. So let's set tone to the side for this and talk about his actual content.
We'll start with the negatives. These posts on Syn isn't great:
There's been some talk about the "Syn skeptics", I'll call it, and I'll talk more about that later on in this post, but I think Arctic's stance on Syn has gone under the radar a bit and it's not great. We have a couple posts of the classic "wolf in a tough spot when dealing with a bro getting heat" where Arctic acknowledges the wagon because they
have to, but then just kind of waves it off and goes about their business. They may have gotten taken by surprise by the Syn wagon in general because they expressed skepticism about both Rask and more notably ladd on d1, but otoh a wolf might be more in tune with threadflow stuff and try to work around it?
I have liked a number of Arctic's contributions. I feel like there's a real effort to get complete or near-complete stances on everyone in the game, and Arctic has also been one of the people beating the drum on Gemma, who I feel like has gotten lost in the shuffle and could very well be a wolf here. But the associatives toward Syn aren't great and bear monitoring for the future.
Mixed, GTH town.
Hally
First, the overarching impression I get in this game is that hally is quite comfortable ITT. Hally's "peak" so to speak on MU coincided with the terminal stages of my decline so I never quite got the full decoder on their playstyle, but from what I can remember they were considerably more awkward in the thread when wolfing and I'm not really seeing much evidence of that here.
In terms of content, hally gets a minor point for being in agreement with myself and Jan
over Arctic's entry posts (and was even more on the nose with me in terms of it than Jan, fwiw), but later this translates to getting into it with Arctic a bit over Rask of all people, that's aged somewhat well.
There's actually not a lot in hally's reads beyond their chats with Arctic (they have since switched up to Arctic looking better from EOD1) and then their big push on Logic, which I won't be discussing here for raisins. There's not a lot of moving the game forward really, just chilling in the thread similar to benneh. No reason to dislike their posts but hally is definitely going with the flow for the most part.
Tinfoil town, would probably rank a tick higher than benneh for nebulous + tonal reasons.
EnderWiggin
Ok, let's talk about the Syn vote. Rask was first on, in
post #365, after making a series of posts where he really honed in on his target. Syn's response, a single word, "mean", was post 366. Ender's vote came in at
367, nakedly a pile-on, and remained there for the rest of d1. Syn picked up another vote from Murska an hour or two later and was tied for the lead (with Ender himself) as of
Taffy's 24hr vote count.
This was ender's rationale for doing so, as a tack-on to post 380:
He had some suspicion about Jan later on in d1, which I suppose could be read as testing the waters to see if he could get off, but Jan was pretty consensus town at that point. If he wanted off Syn, why not go to, like, [literally anyone in the me/Logic/dya/Gemma/etc general POE who was town]? This isn't a hypothetical w!benneh situation where he's setting stuff up for down the road, this would be a world where he just wants to get off a wagon that got too hot and not look terrible in the process, and this isn't what it looks like imo.
A little iconoclastic with a townread on dya with very little actual explanation
here, and that's about it for d1. He notably was around for EOD1 and could switch off Syn, but chose not too. Not sure how much I should read into this.
Has, in general, given off the impression that he's having a good time ITT, which I should probably be placing less emphasis on than I am. I
am aware that he's come back in the thread D2 since I started writing this up, but I'm not gonna go over it with a fine toothed comb. Yet.
Bottom line, I don't think the Syn vote was a bus, seems fine for now.
Gemma
Really need some new posts from them, feels like the fourth time I've gone over their exact same posts in the past few days with very little additional context.
Gemma is part of that group in general who have actually not said very much about the game as a whole. Others in it are Visor, Syn, and, I suppose, myself to some extent. They started off hot with a vote against me and giving off the impression it was serious with the following sequence:
but as Jan mentioned, I had not actually started playing the game at that point so that sequence was very much out of place as a whole. What was there to shade me about?
There's a number of reads sprinkled through Gemma's iso but they're all sporadic, mostly one-liners, and pretty disconnected from each other. Very doable for a wolf to fake, basically. There's some questioning, asking to elaborate on reads and the like, but there's not much if any actual
follow-up. I'm trying to get a picture of Gemma's overall view of the gamestate from their iso and out of everybody I've looked at so far I'm just not seeing it really. It's all disjointed. Like I want to write more here because this is a slot of particular interest to me, but I just can't.
POE, in danger of slipping beneath notice.
Vanta Black:
This one's an annoying one to pin down for me, because it's felt like Vanta's on the cusp of actually putting together a sustained sequence of thoughts that will help me get to where they're at with stuff... and then they dip. So let's work with what I can.
Post 342, about 18 hours into the game. Not the worst look imo.
Post 516, something like 30 hours in. This is also pretty decent, correctly honing in on Syn but not looking especially bussy while doing so. Just a straight up "yeah Syn's voters seem cool, let's roll with this for now".
Post 662, a bit under 3 hours before EOD. This is... less good, mainly because it deviates from the flipped wolf (Syn), doesn't mention Syn at all when Vanta had previously been open to voting Syn, and there was also a promise to read Syn and ladd that was never followed up on. Now, obviously Logic is unflipped so we don't know if Vanta was going from a wolf to a different wolf, but Syn was very much in contention and Vanta did go elsewhere, specifically the counter.
Verdict here is mixed. I did like their earlier posts on Syn that I quoted, but at a certain point, vibes can only take you so far.
Priority slot if Logic is town. Probably ok if Logic is mafia.
dyachei/Visor
I feel like, holistically, there has to be exactly one in these two. Along with Arctic (and myself, but I'm town), they were probably the two most notable "Syn skeptics" who basically said some variant of "meh Syn is rand, I don't care". I'm gonna make an assumption here that the D1 elimination was not a major inflection point of the game. Regardless of whether Syn actively gave the green light to bus or not, the wolves had to know that Syn was not long for the world, even if they survived D1. Could be D2, could be D3, could be a vig shot, but Syn was always going down at some point. This was not a slot you stick your neck out for, basically.
Since this was not a slot you stick your neck out for, I'm going to make a second assumption: that the wolves did their traditional strategy when dealing with a drawing-dead partner: spread out and hide in the numbers rather than put all your eggs in once basket. Take differing, if not opposing, viewpoints about major stuff. Considering Syn's standing in the thread, I think Visor's and dya's stances on Syn are too similar for them to both be on the same team. They both exerted roughly equivalent efforts to save Syn: dya by shopping around for a counterwagon at EOD, Visor by trying to
create one a few hours prior. I don't see 75% of this mafia team (counting Syn) to be this invested in keeping Syn alive, and I don't think they're both town either just from vague gamestate feels, so we're left with one in two.
Each has problems. Visor has been generally underwhelming, lacking that joie de vivre as a number of people have mentioned. I wish he had some D2 posts to his name so I can better get a handle on him, because I think that will help me, but what's down so far can charitably described as "incomplete", I think. His most recent outright stance on Logic was here:
But later he
pooh pooh'd a Gemma readslist that effectively had Logic as null (frustrating for me looking back) and then pivoted to going after Murska in his final sequence of posts on D1, without much elaboration, ending in directly appealing to Zack and myself for wagon support.
All of this is in his wheelhouse as either alignment, as I've already discussed. The main issue is that there's just more
fire, more followable a-to-b-to-c progression when he's done it as town. Could this be because he's got other stuff going on? Certainly. But it could also be because he's got other stuff going on
while having randed wolf. I don't want to get this read wrong because I've already pissed off Zack itg and don't want to do it to the other person I chat the most with, but realistically speaking I can't point to anything concrete Visor has done in the game and say with a straight face, "this is villagery".
As for dya, it's very simple: dya took an approach to me that was extremely similar to one they took to me as w/v (they were the w) in an Org game from a few years back. ladd pointed this out already on d1 I believe, but I'll go and grab the posts for comparison:
Previous game (from 2019):
This game:
This on its own isn't the full picture, largely because the read is correct and for the right reasons, but I will specifically note that by the time I stopped playing in 2021, dya was typically gaining early accurate reads on me NOT from my investment/seriousness level or lack thereof, but from my early tone. They were really good at pummeling me for awkward openings as a wolf and did not hesitate to tell me as such to the point where I was seriously strategizing about entering the thread late as all alignments just to dodge that read (until I stopped playing, of course). So dya reading me for this reason, here, and not mentioning the other aspect, does stick out to me.
As for the aspects of their posting beyond me, it's mixed. I already talked about the Syn stuff, it's no better or worse than Visor's imo, so that's a wash. In terms of the Arctic thing, dya is capable of pulling that off (both the read and the argument) as either alignment and I'm not able to get a lean on that either way in isolation. The turnaround on Logic on D2 to me is a bit awkward. I can sort of see the argument dya makes but it's causing me to make one too many jumps in progression to get there and that's not great. Like it went from "I think GH is town > GH says Logic is town > Zack I know you say Logic's a wolf but I'm aware of GH's history with Logic and not yours so I'm placing higher emphasis on that" to "if Logic was villaging, the wolves would have been able to push him over Syn at EOD > so GH is a wolf with him huh" and I feel like there are a number of perfectly plausible explanations for why Syn went over D1 that went unaddressed and I have a hard time with dya not really paying lip service to those, it feels like they ran the numbers overnight and realized that I had to be a miselim if they wanted to win the game and acted accordingly (Logic's alignment still pending ofc).
Final verdict,
one in dya/Visor, leaning dya right now.
---
Overall readslist, excepting Logic and myself, look something like this:
Claimed PR:
Murska
Town:
Rask
ladd
Wisdom
Jan
Tinfoil town:
Hally
benneh
On the right side of the POE:
Arctic
Ender
Dependent on Logic's flip:
Vanta Black
POE:
Gemma
POE, exactly 1 of the two:
Visor
dyachei
I'm going to eat dinner and play video games now.
Originally Posted by Logic
Re: 17er Saints and Martyrs
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks