EPTI thought I did a decent job of being townie after the first day - even before the cop claim it didn't seem like anyone was seriously proposing me as "scum" at the end of D2/start of D3.
I know that a large part of what this town lacked was leadership and motivation, and I didn't try to step in; I felt kind of blockaded on that front by the fact that other people were posting so much more than me, and that I couldn't really post any more than I did due to the fact that I can't reliably find time to post from work, and am usually tired as fuck when I get home.
I'm unsure what to think about my scum hunting.
I feel pretty good about my read and case on dropbear - he was off my radar until someone (Milton I think) asked offhand what I thought about him, but when I read his filter carefully I noticed the huge contradiction. I also think I was right in the way I interpreted the fact of that contradiction, and didn't just get lucky - when someone gives one big piece of advice on "how to make a good town atmosphere" at the start of the game, and then doesn't follow it, it either means "they didn't believe their own advice and just posted it for something to say so they could look like they're interacting with the thread," or it means "they don't care about creating a good town atmosphere." Either way, they're probably scum.
On the other hand, I didn't continue to push that case and make a strong attempt to get dropbear lynched that same day. This was for three reasons - the less important one was that I didn't have time to post enough to really push a town with Gonzaw in it.
The second reason was, I wasn't as confident in that case as I should have been because in past games when I was correct about identifying scum, it was usually because of overall impressions of their play (for example, I figured out Mattchew was scum in Holy Roman mafia because "he was posting a lot and aggressively but wasn't actually doing anything that would help town," or I figured out Forumite in Wheel of Fortune mafia because "other than Ace (who I already was pretty sure was scum) he was one of the most veteran players left but he wasn't doing anything to lead town out of the directionless morass Ace had maneuvered it into." Both of those are more impressions or generalized interpretations of their filters rather than large cases which make several points and connections between specific posts and the overall theme - I think the last time I had a correct "big case" was also in Wheel of Fortune, where I tried to make the case against Ace that both his overall play and some of his specific posts corresponded to different elements of his "ideal scum play" from guides and past comments he had written. On the other hand, the list of incorrect "big cases" I've made is much longer - eg, against Mattchew in TL LV, against Zealos in MTG mafia, and more I'm sure. I think it's good to be aware of my limitations but the fact that I've made so many incorrect cases in the past has led me to judge the cases I make by how people react to them, and I need to figure out a way to decide how confident I should be in my own cases.
The third reason that I didn't push really hard to get dropbear lynched right away was that I recognized that sciberbia had a good case against Talismania. I think that being able to evaluate other people's cases as town is also an important skill and that I did a pretty good job here; ofc all the credit goes to Sciberbia for making that case in the first place.
So other than dropbear, however, I had a huge failing in my bad read on Mattchew. I had "gut-read" him correctly in like three games in a row where he was scum, plus I had a scum gut-read on him in LV which was the only game we were both town; so I thought that "if usually I think he's scum when he's scum, and scum when he's town, then if I think he's town he must be extra town." Bayesian statistics supports that interpretation, but maybe I should treat town gut-reads different from scum gut-reads.
So overall I would rate my scum-hunting "better than I have done in the past but still unsatisfactory." Needed to push my scum read better (gets to the leadership point) and there's also the Mattchew thing.
