EPTThe two things that have bothered me the most about Holyflare this game have been, in combination, what I've repeatedly referenced as the "Confidence-Accuracy Discrepancy." Holyflare has been, in my reading, absurdly confident in the cases he's pushed and arguments he's made, far beyond the actual strength of his arguments and accuracy of his cases. It's important to note the nuance of this read: confidence tends to be considered a townie trait, not a mafia trait, and accuracy (or lack thereof) as a null trait. On balance townies tend to push ideas more confidently than mafia, and on balance both tend to be wrong a lot. So it's not enough to summarize this as "he's confident and wrong, therefore he's mafia."
What we have to look at is why townies tend to be more confident in pushing their reads and why Holyflare's arguments were wrong. Townies tend to be more confident in pushing their reads because they're trying to find the answers. Their game is fundamentally on the offensive, not defensive: they don't have information, and they have to dig around, push people, and ask tough questions to get information and try to solve the puzzle. Thus a townie's aggression is rooted in a search for answers and has the motivation of advancing discussion. Mafia, on the other hand, are not only not trying to find the answers, they're actively trying to prevent the town from finding the answers. This typically manifests in a desire not to push cases and reads, for two reasons: (1) they already have the answers and so pushing cases and reads exposes them to the risk of slipping up and accidentally displaying their extra knowledge of the game state, and (2) since they're not actively looking for the answers, they have to fake looking for the answers to replicate town-motivated aggression, which requires you to fake an entire thought process, which is an exceedingly difficult task.
However, mafia can still benefit from pushing cases and reads! For one, they have to make at least a token effort to do so, lest they be caught by process of elimination. More importantly, if they can manage to make reads that are superficially sensible, and maybe even develop those reads into decent-sounding cases, not only can they look townie, they also distract and deflect the town away from the actual answers. The catch is that these pushes typically fall apart under intense scrutiny, because they still aren't coming from the same mindset. A mobster's aggression is rooted in a desire to distract from teammates and has the motivation of stifling discussion.
If we can show, then, that Holyflare's various pushes, reads and cases throughout the game are oriented predominantly toward stifling rather than advancing discussion, we can then convincingly argue that Holyflare's aggression is actually a mafia trait rather than a townie trait, and establish the grounds for lynching him tomorrow.
Going chronologically through his filter, here's what I've found.
1. This incident with Holyflare and Vivax. Holyflare makes the argument that Haru's meta read on Wave was somewhat weak, and calls Haru mafiaish for it. Vivax weighs in, saying that Haru's read is simply a matter of disagreement over interpretation, which Vivax doesn't consider a mafia trait necessarily. Holyflare immediately accuses Vivax of "trying to shut down discussion." No charitable reading of Vivax's comment can possibly lead to the conclusion that Vivax was doing anything other than weighing in. Yet Holyflare makes the accusation anyway. What's telling here is that after this brief exchange occurs, Haru does actually return and explain his metaread further. Holyflare proceeds to drop the line of discussion altogether. His next series of posts involves him making a case for Haru being scum, but at no point does he actually use this discussion line to advance his case. If Holyflare were really so interested in not having this line of discussion shut down, would he proceed to shrug the entire thing off once he got an answer? Of course not. Instead he just throws shade on Vivax and then lets it drop. This looks scummy to me because it clearly serves the purpose of shutting down discussion that might lead to Haru not being scumread; town!Holyflare, even if he were confident in Haru being scum, would at least entertain the discussion if only to rebut any arguments from it and to persuade the other players that he has the right idea.
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2. As the discussion moves on to Haru, Holyflare asks "who comments on game setup/mafia theory repeatedly with no other proper reads," in response to a comment kushm4sta made in a reply to Haru. Holyflare is clearly talking about Haru here, but his comment is inaccurate. kush already gives the proper explanation in the subsequent back-and-forth that you can read in the source link below. Holyflare again lets this drop once kush fires back with good arguments for the opposing point of view. But Holyflare doesn't drop the scumread he has on Haru, either. He just ignores kush's reasonable rebuttal. This isn't townie behavior, because again, townies will either accept the rebuttal if they believe they're mistaken or fight the rebuttal to convince the other person to vote with them.
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3. Another episode with Vivax, this time over Haru's -1+1 argument. The stifling-discussion angle becomes pretty apparent here. Holyflare again accuses Vivax of "shut[ting] down" his "other post," but as we've already seen, that didn't happen. Holyflare dropped it of his own volition after Haru replied to Holyflare's questions. So that's a lie. Holyflare also misinterprets Vivax's post here: Vivax says that it's his opinion that Holyflare's argument "rode excessively on the - 1 + 1" (emphasis mine). He didn't say that it wasn't a reason to scumread Haru, necessarily, only that Holyflare overutilized it relative to its value as an argument. If you go back and read the source post Holyflare is quoting (appended as SOURCE 2), you'll see this. Vivax says that Holyflare's posts could come from a town perspective and that Haru's arguments had holes, just not holes that were necessarily scummy. Vivax was very charitable and fair in assessing Holyflare; in fact Vivax makes a theme of this almost in his posts, as he goes on to criticize a couple of other posts for not being sufficiently charitable. One thing Vivax definitely cannot be accused of in this game is being unfair to the people he's questioning, and yet Holyflare does exactly that. His representation is incredibly dishonest, and Vivax calls him out for it in their subsequent exchange.
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4. The first episode involving me! How about that? You can see my argument for Haru being town in the source post, Holyflare replies to it right away so it's an easy exchange. Holyflare misrepresents me here pretty egregiously - saying that I thought Haru was only being scumread for the -1+1 comment, when if you read my post, I very clearly use it as an example of something Haru said that sounded weird but (imo) came from a townie POV. Holyflare also just insists that Haru's reads were wholly superficial in response to my post without developing it further. I didn't very strongly address this at the time because I didn't want to pre-empt Haru's defense of himself (which I said at the time!), but I still gave cursory responses that, had Holyflare cared enough about them, he could have developed further. It's just another misrepresentation of what I said followed by an unexplained drop in discussion. He moves onto ObiWanShinobi, placing his first vote of the day, incidentally.
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5. An episode involving Haru. Pretty blatant spin on display here. Holyflare claims that Haru spent 25 minutes finding quotes from another game to defend himself, in order to make the argument that Haru cared more about trying to look good than scumhunt. (SOURCE below.) However if you actually look at the quote he got his figure from, it's obvious why it took Haru so long: he was on mobile and struggling to c/p posts. (SOURCE 2 below.) Haru said this at the time and again, it takes a willfully uncharitable interpretation of Haru's post to come to the conclusion Holyflare took away from it. Again Holyflare pushes another argument for Haru being scum and then (?)doesn't vote for him and lets it drop(?).
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6. Interesting side note about the Poofter lynch, Holyflare claims that the "shitty catchup posts" heuristic is a good one for catching mafia with. Poofter obviously flipped town. I'd never heard this heuristic before Holyflare said it this game and I don't really get it. Anybody want to explain this for me? In retrospect it looks pretty shady since, y'know, Poofter flipped town and this heuristic got asserted without any real backing or justification. Wave even calls it out at the time as being BS... and then Holyflare gives some weird excuse about being "too tunneled on Haru to comment." Let me remind you that at the time, Holyflare's vote was on Poofter and he wasn't talking about Haru at all. Wtf? Holyflare eventually responds to arguments against Poofter being scum for his catchup posts by asserting that Poofter must be "shitty scum" instead of simply town. This qualifies to me as an example of the confidence-accuracy discrepancy, because Holyflare is absolutely sure from this that Poofter is scum (which we now know is false). There was no reason to be absolutely sure Poofter was scum.
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I'm only like one-fifth of the way through Holyflare's filter, too. I'm probably just going to post piecemeal because I don't know that I have the time today to finish his filter before deadline. If anybody needs more examples I'll be happy to go through them, but I think you guys get the point well enough.
Next is a filter dive on jat and goodkarma.
I can already tell you I found jat subtly supporting Holyflare on a few of these. The most memorable is the "ancient philosophers" quote during #3, when Holyflare and Vivax are arguing; JAT adds to the comments about this being a "pointless discussion" at a point that was fairly good for scum (Vivax was pretty clearly handling Holyflare's arguments and it helped Holyflare disengage). There's been a couple of other occasions where he outright sheeped something Holyflare said too. The thing that's holding me back is that I know I was duped for a while, or at least convinced not to listen to my reservations about Holyflare, so maybe JAT was too. On its own it's admittedly not a great scumread and I'll see how I feel about them post-filters.
Work in an hour so Adkins for a bit.
![[image loading]](http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121009000433/pffanon/images/7/77/Porque_no_los_dos.gif)
