Bland & Flavorless Mountainous 15er - Mafia Winnered

[Zorvo]

If Arete was town, I would have expected him to push someone that isn’t Magnus and an upgraded read on Arctic.

[Arctic]

why magnus is a wolf (repost but all of the parts are in one post now)

i know 90% of you won’t actually read this and i’m just wasting my time but i’m partly doing this for my own sanity and as a point of reference to compile all of my reasons for this read and ponder on it if magnus doesn’t die today

seth = zorvo

contents mainly being:

• backwards processes - e.g. townreading otter just because they are LHF, getting reactions by “not voting people”

• little attachment to individual stances, egging others (seth) on in place of this

• treatment of me

• treatment of arete/prisma

1. backwards processes

there are two main things that come to mind where i take issue with magnus’ process on a micro level to how he’s gotten reads, and i feel like they are warped to end on a specific conclusion for agenda-fueled purposes

magnus gave a post prior to this clearly hinting at a suspicion of jarek:

@Magnus

@Jarek

So first question there’s a post cap of 100/150 right that’s awesome just checking I can read up but I’m lazy and idle conversation is fun,

This comes across as sounding unnatural, ngl.

@Jarek

Think someone said No-Exe is a good idea and usually I’d agree however none of us have abilities so the only information we’re really going to get outside of social reads are executions and peoples reactions to them. Our goal should be to get as much information on as many people as possible before lylo and hopefully with the information we gather by the time we get to lylo the wolves are obvious

Given it’s Mountainous, it’s usually ideal to execute as often as possible, especially early on. Rather than targeting wolves, you want infoflips. Then again, talking about executing right now is a bit bleh, but…

No, I won’t vote. Nevermind.

and gave this post in response to jarek asking why he didn’t vote him

@Magnus

Who says I distrust you? Is there a reason to distrust you? You can read responses based on your lack of a vote just as much as, if not more than, your sole vote would actually garner.

and comes up with the reasoning that “you can read into a player’s lack of a vote” just as much, or even more than a vote, but he hasn’t utilised this once to make a read, nor has he analysed the reactions relating to his lack of a vote

in the early part of the game (which there are plenty of, by the way). the rest of the post just feels like playing dumb intentionally, because there is clearly an implication that magnus was pinged tonally by jarek so the first comment feels like a wolfy deflection.

@Magnus

I’m also inclined to make waves and townlean Otter because they seem like a plausible misexe.

the next issue is this post, which i feel like is not a thought a villager has… like, ever. a villager who does not have TMI on the alignment of players, sees an LHF and tries to evaluate their alignment. the consideration that they are a misexe comes after an evaluation of their posts and a lean on their alignment has been made one way or another. deciding to townread otter because you want to label them as a misexe just because they are LHF feels unnatural and indicative of TMI to me. and it’s also something a wolf would feel like they’d get townread for, hence the motivation in the first place and wolf perspective (remember this tomorrow if magnus flips wolf)

lastly for this category, magnus said he did not care much for early game wagons:

@Magnus

For context, since my recent games I’ve made a habit of voting on cases I don’t believe, and not voting on people I suspect, because I hold no attachment to early wagons.

which like. very clearly contradicts his reasoning for voting seth being to stop him being the leading wagon. even for purposes of analysis, if the vote was made for that reason then you do care about early wagons. so there you have magnus pretending that he doesn’t care about early game wagons to hide the fact that his vote on arete was misplaced, and ultimately comes from a place of agenda in conjunction with his egging on of seth in his arete scumread

2. this one is less of a quotes thing and more of an evaluation of magnus’s play as a whole. neon described it pretty well, and i more or less said what i want to say here earlier, so i’ll just quote those to save time

@Neon

Zorvo is probably just town “tunneled I’m always right no other world matters” Zorvo

Magnus however is planting the seeds in Zorvos mind, he’s on the sideline bouncing off Zorvos paranoia to get Zorvo to connect Prisma to Arete. He’s lightly fueling the fires of the tunnel but he’s struggling to put arguments together that make sense and people are picking up on it.

He was very reachy trying to tie Prisma into wolf Arete worlds early by biting Zorvos “oh coaching” argument. Which is an objectively bad take imo.

If Prisma is woof they ask most of these questions in woof chat. Sure it’s possible that their team told them to go play dumb in thread but i think its unlikely this is just a lost townie being lost and townie and Magnus is pushing the seeds of doubt right down Zorvos tunnel.

@Arctic

i think zorvo’s pushes on arete and prisma (while the reasoning is incredibly dubious) show a level of passable conviction and other posts he’s made bloating about his accuracy read as though he genuinely believes what he’s saying

magnus on the other hand has been, as neon put it, validating seth’s incoherent nonsense in a way that lands seth the blame for his antics. yes, may and magnus, it is incoherent. as someone without TMI, who does not know the alignment of players in this game, i cannot read seth’s posts and follow his reasoning nor be convinced on his reads - when they are clearly based entirely on mistruths, strawmans or misrepresentations. i don’t care what your experience with seth is. frankly, if you’ve found his reads to be accurate then you have not played enough games with him. the entire game is telling you it is incoherent because it is! and you pretending it’s not, and trying to enable him, and acting like his reasons are convincing, while letting him burn the house down, is why i think you two are likely to be mafia

i can buy that people are willing to entertain stuff they don’t necessarily believe in, both to test the validity of ideas and gauge reactions i cannot, however, buy that a villager plays the entire day phase in this way, without making their own stances clear and trying to co-operate with others on where they believe their reads to be wrong

@May

Pushing ungenuine narratives as town is awesome and owns. I have a neutral read on Magnus, but throwing around ideas and seeing what sticks and how people react is NAI.

but this is not what magnus has been doing, is it? where has he gauged arete’s (or anyone else’s) response to him jumping on their wagon with seth? where has he gauged anyone’s response to him entertaining seth’s prisma/arete w/w read? what he’s been doing has not been to gauge reactions, or investigate responses. it’s been to piggyback on the reads of others while taking very little responsibility for his own actions

the tl;dr is, I think magnus has been overly concerned with validating the reads of others and adding fuelling those pushes in a much less believable way than the originators of those reads, to test the waters with what he can feasibly push. this can be verified by the simple test of (before i asked him to do so, twice) trying to find out if it was clear who he actually wanted to kill at eod. and before he answered this, it was extremely ambiguous, because the majority of his play today has been reliant on validating seth’s (in my opinion, incorrect) reads. not being able to get a clear idea of who someone would actually want dead at eod from reading their posts is an extremely effective scum tell, because wolves are often less committed to their reads generally

3. treatment of me. i will spoiler the main rebuttal because i think people are less likely to care about this and i am obviously biased when it comes to this, so i don’t expect people to put much stock into my defence. nonetheless, there are some points where magnus demonstrably treats my slot disingenuously such as

@Arctic

@Magnus

Arctic came into the thread wallposting and wishing to skip RVS. Arctic’s posts are either questioning other people on their read or commentary outside of voting May (a read he doesn’t bring up much later), playing cautiously with his reads until he says Prisma’s self-contradiction is villagery (disputed), talks about the possibility of Otter being Mafia but doesn’t share his thoughts on whether he thinks so… the first thing that stands out is his analysis of Neon’s last wolfgame VC, which he uses to open a read on Neon (townlean) and comment how wolves can pile on one wagon or whatever.

can you explain what you found wolfy about Any of this

(i also don’t really feel like this is a genuine evaluation of my posts up to this point because you proceed to say my content is just questions/commentary except for x, y, z, and you proceed to list a bunch of non-commentary things so ??)

@Magnus

Any reads from Arctic come after I posted that readlist, if you want to check.

if your definition of a read is a clear cut “x is town” and “y is mafia” then maybe, but i’m not sure why you expect me to have clear cut reads less than 24 hours into day 1. before this point i had pointed out tells from one or two posts which is sufficient for that stage in the game, and yet you don’t want to acknowledge that these are still posts that contribute to solving, so why?

(in this next sequence magnus tries to make a push on me for “not talking about my May scumread” again

@Arctic

@Magnus

This is a misrepresentation. After your vote on May you never really returned to the case.

i did, in fact, talk about may again. multiple times, even! here are my posts talking about may: [3 quotes of me talking about May]

and if you are going to argue that you were talking about posts before these ones, then you are quite literally scumreading me for not talking about someone within 1-2 hours of me last mentioning them (because before today i was only in the thread for a few hours after the game started), which is like. laughably bad, for obvious reasons!

you can read this whole section around post 458 if you are interested in getting the entire picture, but this is supposed to be a case, not an iso so i don’t want to bloat this. the jist of it is that magnus was reaching for reasons to justify a scumread on me, by his own admission in this post:

@Magnus

I saw Arctic as someone I wanted to scrutinise, so I made a case on him. It didn’t hold water, so I tried justifying it until I was out of material and couldn’t be bothered.

which like. is not how a villager plays? it’s almost TWTBAW, and i can understand wanting to townread the transparency he has in this post about literally just making stuff up. but when it comes to it, the amount of back and forths magnus had with me and arete clearly indicate that he was more invested in the read than just “seeing what sticks” because his reasons for scumreading me were disputed several times, and he only came out with this post after his reasons had been demonstrably disproven (see this post where magnus was very blatantly ascribing motivations to my post to justify a scumread). he had an agenda to scumread me, and it very clearly went much further than just seeing what sticks

4. treatment of arete/prisma

Read the quotes around this part of the thread

@Magnus

…Okay, that looks suspicious. I already said w!Prisma wouldn’t want to vote their partners early on, and here Prisma goes out of their way to avoid acknowledging your case on Arete, voting Otter for an unrelated reason.

@Zorvo

Prisma and Arete may try voting each other later for distancing or even bussing, don’t not expect it, it can definitely happen and doesn’t clear either of the two upon a wolf flip.

@Magnus

Through an unbiased lens, it could indicate Prisma doesn’t want to interact with you for whatever reason as well. So there’s a potential partnership there, or wolves telling them not to go up against Zorvo, or just not wanting to read your wallposts.

@Zorvo

@Magnus

Prisma goes out of their way to avoid acknowledging your case on Arete, voting Otter for an unrelated reason.

Vote Arete.

@Magnus

Question: does my tendency to not vote early-game on people I find suspicious, and only for pressure cases I don’t believe in bother you, the way it does a few other players?

For the record, that was me typing up a refusal before looking at the vc. I’ll bite so you aren’t the leading wagon. We’re already partnered, there’s no point distancing publicly.

VOTE: Arete

the vote on arete makes no sense here given that magnus had given reasons to townread arete and no reasons to scumread prisma up to this point. they later gave the justification that villagers can test the waters of reads they don’t believe in, which i think is fine, except when you consider that magnus has not made any reads from this. he hasn’t tried to evaluate either of mine or arete’s response to him voting on a wagon he didn’t believe in, not once. therefore i think it’s pretty clear that this was a poor excuse given in order to justify a bad vote on arete for the purposes of his agenda: spurring on (a very incorrect) seth

another point is that the justification he gives in the same post as the vote post (“to make seth not the leading wagon”) contradicts both the idea that he was just voting arete to entertain seth’s reads AND his claim that he “cares little for early game wagons”

it feels obvious to me that his vote on arete had an agenda here

---

lastly, treatment of prisma. this has mostly been encompassed in the treatment of arete section, because the whole point is that the preflip read was ultimately pushed way further than it should have ever gone. the premise for his read was that because prisma refused to vote arete after seth showed his case to them, prisma and arete are w/w.

@Magnus

…Okay, that looks suspicious. I already said w!Prisma wouldn’t want to vote their partners early on, and here Prisma goes out of their way to avoid acknowledging your case on Arete, voting Otter for an unrelated reason.

this is such a very clear reach, when several players also ignored seth’s case for the simple fact that most people find it to be unconvincing, so saying this implicates prisma specifically does not make any sense. and it’s once again arisen due to seth’s initial read based on the same thing. that makes it worse. it doesn’t even have an original basis - it’s a second-hand take and it’s designed to spur on seth rather than move the game forward

the reason he gives later to suspect prisma is, while this time at least original, equally as bad:

@Magnus

@Prisma101

anyway what do you think i am

I can’t answer that question in good faith. The fact you bothered to ask this question suggests you care about my opinion on your slot, which isn’t great. It also outs me as Town if you’re Mafia . I can say there’s not much of a reason to suspect you in these early stages of the game, but your defence on those few reasons against your person aren’t… fantastic. Not voting Arete because they were nice to you, and because you don’t have a reason to vote, but you also voted Otter earlier for a non-alignment indicative reason, right after Zorvo wrote a case on Arete and drew your attention to it. If you’re willing to disagree on voting Arete, that would imply you’re willing to make reads, so… find out who you scumread and vote them.

@Prisma101

but anyway i would like a better reason im a wolf than just “they ignored my post” or “they arent voting a wolf so they are protecting them” because both reasons arent backed up by anything else

I’m also inclined to pick on your choice of wording here, saying “why am I a wolf” instead of going “here’s why I’m Town”, which comes across as passive and defensive, putting pressure onto your voters to build a case against you.

Conclusion: you could go either way. I’m thinking you’re just lost in the thread atm, but at least the postcount’s hopefully making it bearable.

he implies that prisma asking for his opinion on them means they are implying he is town, which would contradict prisma’s wolfread on them. but this ignores the very likely possibility that prisma asked this to get a read on magnus from his response, which is once again ascribing motivations on someone to present their posts as wolfy when they really aren’t, in a similar way he did to me.

@Magnus

I’m also inclined to pick on your choice of wording here, saying “why am I a wolf” instead of going “here’s why I’m Town”, which comes across as passive and defensive, putting pressure onto your voters to build a case against you.

(this part also just feels blatantly fake and something that wolves would think sounds intelligent/specific enough to point out but ultimately means nothing)

the tl;dr - magnus has been playing the game by relying on the reads of other players, egging them on in place of playing his own game, while pushing others for disingenuous reasons and preflips, ascribing motivations to justify agenda’d pushes, and has demonstrated a wolf perspective on numerous occasions

[Arogame123]

fair, but if he flips town, you know how demoralizing that is esp on day 1 lol. I feel like I have a decent grasp on Arete but I also want to further discuss with him on Magnus.

[Arctic]

@Arogame123 lettuce read each other’s posts (i’ve put my reasons in one post now lol)

[Arctic]

oh god why is arete a wagon

ok i need to catch up first

[Lemonfairy]

thnx
I want to say I’ll look more into these but chances are, I probably won’t

I will just kind of note that Magnus has been scumread before for having (correct) scum pushes that didn’t make a lot of sense and a widely townread scum pushed them for it but they flipped town

[Zorvo]

Will you take up the offer Neon refused?

I vote Magnus.
If they flip town you vote Arete with me tomorrow.
If they flip wolf I’ll vote whoever you want tomorrow.

[Lemonfairy]

oh I see

[Arogame123]

yea, Imma read your full case. Mine was more of a summary with some commentary on some of his posts that I noted in ISO catchup.

[Zorvo]

@Arctic

oh god why is arete a wagon

ok i need to catch up first

Why should he not be?
Lmao.

[Arete]

with Arctic he was pushing Arctic for reasons that made no sense and when I questioned him on it he repeatedly doubled down until finally (after several layers of questioning) saying that he had just been doing it for reactions, I think if he had actually just been doing it for reactions he would have said so earlier

with Prisma there were some posts where it felt like he was just nitpicking to try to make them look bad without actually trying to solve their slot

I don’t really have thoughts about his approach to Neon

[May]

You all can’t provide this much content. It’ll make me think this game is currently solvable, which it very well might be, which is worse for my decision paralysis. D1 reads are easier when you know they’re bullshit.

[Lemonfairy]

still leaning town rn

[Arctic]

if voting arete with you tomorrow means voting them once and then being able to move my vote sure

[ElizaThePsycho (Willow)]

among us

[Arogame123]

this is just not a good way to do this esp if Arete is town tbh. It would be potentially back to back ml for no real reason esp when I have a v read on Magnus and a lighter one on Arete.

[ElizaThePsycho (Willow)]

one second will find the posts

[Zorvo]

@Arete

with Arctic he was pushing Arctic for reasons that made no sense and when I questioned him on it he repeatedly doubled down until finally (after several layers of questioning) saying that he had just been doing it for reactions, I think if he had actually just been doing it for reactions he would have said so earlier

with Prisma there were some posts where it felt like he was just nitpicking to try to make them look bad without actually trying to solve their slot

You know what’s funny though.
Your votes still on Eliza.

If I didn’t know any better I’d say you could be wolf with Eliza and doing distancing.

Vote Magnus if your intent on that.

[Arete]

really enjoying all the Zorvo reads that are like “if Arete was town, I would expect them to [thing I am literally doing]”

[Zorvo]

@Arctic

if voting arete with you tomorrow means voting them once and then being able to move my vote sure

It’s more like this.
If you don’t vote Arete tomorrow and vote them later I’ll just spite you and vote you.