so i didnt hard wolfside literally every EoD from D1-D3 lmao
Gorta is effect neutral/ability rebel (a.k.a. exactly where he should be, middle of the bottom row)
You should kill me today and Marshal tomorrow
So, Iām writing this overnight while in the unique position of being pretty confident in who the last wolf is, and also pretty confident that no one is going to believe me. Iām writing this wallpost for a couple reasons, first of all to explain why the last wolf is just her, and second of all to convince you to actually kill her, after killing me, which it is probably optimal to do first.
Iām going to divide this up into a few sections:
- why Marshal isnāt actually mechclear
- why Marshal is Just A Wolf
- why itās Optimal to kill me today/why Iām not fighting it
- why you should sheep my read on Marshal once I die, rather than just ignoring it
- FAQ (the questions arenāt actually frequently asked obviously, Iām just guessing at the questions that youāre going to ask and trying to answer them in advance)
Apologies in advance for how long this post is. You donāt have to read the whole thing if you donāt want to, as long as youāre willing to listen to the overall point that Iām making. (On the other hand, if you donāt read the post and then also donāt do what Iām asking, I will be annoyed.)
Marshal isnāt mechclear
Okay so, a thing that I noticed when I was looking through katās Iso is that Iām ā¦ pretty confident that she didnāt actually take an action N2. Like, I know that she, the flipped town parity cop, literally said āmarshal and chloe are the same alignment,ā but when I was looking through her D3 Iso I found a bunch of things that point to this not actually being true.
katās treatment of Marshal is not consistent with her having a ~greencheck on her
So, if we start from the assumption that kat had a parity check between Chloe and Marshal, there are some things we would expect to see. For instance, weād expect to see kat maintaining a townread on Marshal on D3, weād expect kat to not be questioning Marshalās alignment on D3, weād expect that when it comes up/is relevant kat would be pretty consistently defending her. There are also things we wouldnāt expect to see. For example, we wouldnāt expect to see kat questioning Marshal, or suggesting Marshal could be a wolf, or anything like that.
So how did kat interact with Marshal on D3?
a whole bunch of quotes
(the next several posts show up as sulit posts but theyāre actually sulit responding to a katze wallpost)
Disclaimer: these arenāt her only interactions with Marshal, she does also have other posts where she calls Marshal town or gives reasons to townread her. But overall, these arenāt posts you write if you have TMI that someone is V, she repeatedly points out wolfy things that Marshal is doing which doesnāt really make sense if she has a greencheck (or pseudogreen, but she doesnāt ever seem to entertain the idea that Chloe is a wolf, so if she really checked Marshal she wouldnāt be seeing it as a greencheck.
I think the clearest example of this is in the random JoaT claim, where she decided to CC a claim Marshal had made for no clear reason. This ā¦ isnāt a post she has any reason to make if she has TMI Marshal is V, like, reactiontesting your greencheck is a meme for a reason and even if we like to make jokes about sucky katze FPSes I donāt really see any reason for her to do that if she knows Marshal is town?
katās treatment of her own role suggests that she hadnāt used her check yet
If we look at how she described/talked about her role on D3:
kat talks about her role
So basically, kat implies repeatedly that she can check people N3, implies that she has a specific reason to not want the counterwagon poisoned (but is okay with them being vigged, itās not just a ānot wanting Marshal to dieā thing) which is consistent with her not wanting to get a check on someone who proceeds to be poisoned (but being okay with getting a straight-up alignment cop result on someone), and repeatedly asks who she should check. All of these make more sense from a perspective where she hasnāt used her check and wants to be sure nothing messes it up than from a perspective where she has used her check and ā¦ just decides to try to argue against poisoning the CW in a thunderdome situation for no reason?
possible objections (and why theyāre wrong)
ākat might just be Like That! One time she fakeclaimed a greencheck on someone she had a redcheck on!ā
In that game, she had a specific motivation for faking a greencheck (wanting to guarantee that she survived until LyLo in order to lock the game). Here, she was only a 1-shot parity cop, so the motivation for her to act like she doesnāt actually have the check doesnāt exist.
āwhy would kat say that she parity copped Marshal with Chloe if she didnāt actually do it?ā
I honestly am not totally sure, I think she probably didnāt realize people would take it seriously? I donāt have a good answer for why she did it, just the fact that she did it. We know that she claimed two parity checks and at least one is a lie, itās not like thereās an obvious explanation for that one either.
I do think that she wasnāt expecting to die overnight, and that thatās why she didnāt feel the need to clarify for sure whether or not she actually checked Marshal and Chloe.
why I didnāt bring this up yesterday
Well, first of all, I was doing a pretty bad job of pretending that I hadnāt realized that (thatās what the comment about Doubting Thomas was ā the cop in that game had softed a N0 on Thomas when they didnāt have a N0 at all, and Thomas, who was a wolf was miscleared).
But the other thing is ā it doesnāt actually matter if the check is real or not, it matters if the check is correct. If Marshalās a villager, and wolves think sheās confirmed, then theyāre forced to kill her. But that only works if sheās a villager, and I donāt think she is, and Iām probably dying tomorrow (well, today, by the time you read this) so I wonāt be able to say āwow, Marshal sure is non-mech-clearā later, and you all are unwilling to consider her even in final 3. So. I donāt really have a choice.
On that note, Iām going to talk about why I think sheās a wolf now.
Marshal is a wolf
1. Agenda-pushing
Throughout the game, Marshal has failed to treat various slots in good faith, instead attempting to make them look as bad as possible. This is more consistent with the PoV of a wolf trying to get villagers miseliminated rather than the perspective of a villager trying to actually solve the game.
Examples with how she treated my slot (this isnāt all of them, just a few examples that I thought did a good job of illustrating the general pattern):
she tried to argue that I was Mafia because my pushes were āunderwhelming,ā despite the fact that neither of our pushes had flipped at that point. I think this indicates that her reads came from a place of TMI in which she was able to anticipate that my pushes were largely incorrect (due to knowing I was pushing villagers e.g. katze) and use that to shade me.
she then proceeded to spam that I was a lost wolf, her entire reasoning for this being that I was defending people that she thought were wolfy. Lost wolf hunting is relatively easy for scum to do because they donāt have TMI on it (I actually think itās possible she legitimately believed the take) while simultaneously making it comparatively easy to push people who are villagery (since you can argue that e.g. them not having TMI is just because theyāre a lost wolf)
and here she explicitly says that my posting is explicitly not pack-wolf-y, but instead of considering the possibility that this was because I was a villager she continues to spam āooo Arete lost wolf!!!ā
here she tries to claim that TL was softing Lost Wolf, when I repeatedly asked her to justify this claim she couldnāt, eventually she claimed it had something to do with neighborhoods, but when I looked:
I literally have no idea how a villager concludes that these are lost wolf softs, let alone that TL softed lost wolf 40ish times (even accounting for that to be hyperbole). Marshal is more or less making things up so that she can push me on a flimsy case predicated on the assumption that Iām a lost wolf, which is, like, archetypical agenda, the sort you would use as an example when youāre trying to explain to someone in #feedback-discuss that itās possible to use social reads.
Here she tries to imply that I wrote a super long post that was devoted to defending Derps, when I call her out on the fact that most of the post wasnāt Derps-related at all she doubles down on it and is like āwell the post said he was town and the post was long,ā which is a blatant misrepresentation of what I was actually doing (like, the post was long, and one of the things it did was defend Derps, but most of it wasnāt defending him??) I think this looks especially bad if Derps is a wolf, because in that decision sheās trying to distort my actual posts to make me take the fall off of his flip.
her trying to push me for my role was also super gross, Iād basically slipped X-shot and she was pushing me for ānot being X-shotā and furthermore she was trying to claim my role made no sense with the claimed powerlevels and completely ignoring the ā¦ odd poisoner even bodyguard who can also sometimes be a tracker ā¦ like to be clear Iām not saying Night is a wolf, I donāt think Night is a wolf, but thatās way stronger than my role and she just completely ignores that to push her narrative
It wasnāt just me, she was similarly agenda-y in her handling of Zone, that one is honestly hard to specifically show examples of because she didnāt really explain her Zone read ever beyond ignoring my attempts to demonstrate that he was in V-meta, but there were a few posts that were kind of weh:
such as actively avoiding giving Zone any credit for pointing out a thunderdome that caught a wolf
and attempting to discredit the meta argument for townreading him
I think the big thing thatās been preventing people from really acknowledging her agenda is her defense of LHF-y slots e.g. Eli, but thatās pretty easy to do from a perspective of TMI, and itās fairly common for wolves to defend LHFy players for cred. Her shielding also quite frankly kind of sucks, like EoD2 it basically boils down to ādonāt kill Eliā leaves thread āoh no you killed Eli, thatās so sadā rather than making a concerted effort to save PoE villagers.
1.5 Treatment of Derpsās slot
Iām splitting this up from the rest of the agenda system because a lot of it depends on Derpsās alignment but I actually think that her treatment of him has been really bad regardless of his alignment.
If Derps is villager then sheās basically spent the entire game pushing āZone and Derps are wolves, and Arete is a wolf for defending themā with basically no justification, ignoring anything that might possibly clear either of them, and generally going the entire game without pushing any wolves. Obviously villagers can be wrong, and I realize that Iām going to come across as hypocritical for saying this, but thatās a level of egregiously wrong that I think is unlikely to come from village!Marshal ā particularly the choice to completely ignore every reason that was presented to clear either slot.
If Derps is wolf then itās easy to say āoh she was pushing Derps all game,ā but I donāt actually think thatās ā¦ true? Like, in worlds where Derps is a wolf, we know that wolves were trying to bus him (Windward), so āMarshal also wanted to bus himā is super plausible. Also, the way sheās been pushing on Derps is really gross and TMI-y, like even though Derps hasnāt flipped, she keeps pushing or clearing people based on how theyāve been interacting with Derps, which is super TMI-y (in particular I kind of got the vibe, especially yesterday, that she was trying to make my posts look as bad as possible in light of a Derps W flip).
2. Lack of progression/justification
Throughout the game, sheās randomly changed her reads in short spans of time with no clear progression and no explanation for what caused them to change. While obviously some reevaluation is normal and good, the lack of explanation + the fact that the switches generally happened without a good reason makes me think itās just opportunism (and maybe in some cases forgetting what read she was publicly maintaining on a slot??)
Hereās an example with me:
In the span of about an hour, without anything really clearly changing that she explained, she goes from calling me ājust townā to calling me a wolf, at the same time as some people (e.g. Marl) started semi-doubting me in the thread. This perspective switch doesnāt make sense from a town PoV as nothing changed except that more people were really actively pushing me.
Hereās a similar example with sulit, this one is honestly really weird to the point that Iām not sure if itās wolfy but like, she puts litlit dead center in her PoE and then immediately starts defending her for no clear reason? so why was she in her initial immediate PoE in the first place?
she also goes from a 5-person PoE with no Marl toā¦
ā¦having Marl as the third kill in her PoE, in the span of a couple hundred posts, again for no clear reason? like itās not like anything really changed with Marl to prompt this
overall her progression doesnāt make sense from a PoV of actually trying to solve the game without TMI, her read changes arenāt prompted by anything natural and a lot of times she jumps on people for opportunistic reasons
3. Associatives
If we look at her interactions with the two dead wolves, thereās nothing clearing, and some things that are actively bad. First of all, with Wind:
Her interactions consist of light shade, refusing to give a read, and then calling her rand. I donāt think this by itself makes her lock wolf (although the refusal to give a read is pretty weh) but itās definitely not clearing, and the fact that as far as I can tell she literally did not mention Wind at all during EoD1 is pretty bad (I think a villager would have cared about the flashwagon, and Marshal was there for EoD). Windās posts interacting with or talking about Marshal are similarly sparse and not very interact-y.
Then with Min/Centuries/PKR you get this post:
Which, like, thereās no reason to make this post as town, even if youāre really confident in the read. The explanation I can think of that makes the most sense is that she was trying to make it look like she didnāt have TMI that Min was scum because āwhy would scum say thatā
4. EoD1 in particular
Alright, Iām going to go back to talking about Marshalās Zone push for a bit. So, Marshal did obviously have her Derps push, which she was going on hard for most of the day, but at the end of the day she suddenly switches to try and get voters on Zone, for some reason?
Like, this is her only post prior to trying to CFD Zone that mentions him at all, in the middle of a readlist:
Then suddenly, 21 minutes before EoD, she starts trying to CFD Zone with no explanation and calling him basically lock Mafia.
Unfortunately we didnāt really have a lot of VCs at the time so I canāt say for sure who the top wagon was at this point, but after going hard on Derps for almost the entire day, she suddenly shifts to āactually kill Zoneā despite her LITERAL ONLY MENTION of Zone prior to this point being a single post where she nullreads him. This makes no sense from a village perspective.
As I mentioned before, she also literally doesnāt mention Wind at all during the entire EoD as far as I can tell. I think a villager would care at all if a wolf is being wagoned, whereas a wolf might freeze if they arenāt sure how hard to try and powerwolf/save their partner (normally I wouldnāt expect Marshal to do that, but everyone has days when they play less-than-perfectly).
5. Mechanics/Claim
So, I do think this is the weakest point, but I think the way she handled her roleclaim was not great + some of the other things surrounding it were also not great. Like, she initially roleclaims on mid-D3 after softing it earlier:
Now, I do actually think there could be village motivation for fakeclaiming here. For instance, a villager with a weak role might want to claim a powerful role in order to try and draw the nightkill.
So ā¦ she then proceeds to rescind that same day, without an obvious really good reason. Which kind of undermines any benefit from the fakeclaim.
Iām not going to say thereās 100 percent no reason, since it was in response to discussion of whether or not Jane was town, but it wasnāt like Jane was really in any danger, so she could pretty easily have just maintained the claim and rescinded the next day if it didnāt work. But there are also a couple other potential factors:
First, sulit pointed out that Marshalās roleclaim is way more powerful than most roles (which is true). Rescinding the claim makes sense here from the PoV of a wolf who accidentally claimed a role that was way too strong, since otherwise she would have been kind of boxed in.
I outed as Chronocop. If her role canāt heal/kill, this would have forced her to rescind the claim, since otherwise I could have redchecked her.
Also, on D2, she publicly declared she was healing Chloe in a super obvious say. On N2, all evidence suggests that wolves attacked Chloe. This means one of three things:
- wolves are paying literally zero attention to the thread
- wolves didnāt believe the claim
- wolves had TMI the claim is fake
The first one could really only apply to Derps, maybe a little bit to some of the other people in the thread, and even if Derps is wolf he would have a partner who could notice these things. The second one is ā¦ ehhh, maybe, given that Marshal is a known FPSer, but I donāt think itās really likely? like even if they thought it was probably false I donāt think they would want to risk it. The last one is I think the most likely, obviously there are a handful of other ways it could happen (e.g. a rolecop) but the simplest explanation is the one where sheās Mafia. Itās honestly a bit of a weird play to make for scum as well, since it would implicate her a lot, but she mightāve been planning to use that as an argument (āwhy would I kill Chloe after saying I would heal herā).
Anyways this is the weakest point but I think the other ones are sufficient on their own.
Why itās optimal to kill me today
So this is a situation where I feel like I need to explain what Iām doing. Because ā I spend a lot of time arguing that itās never optimal to die as town, that itās mechanically optimal to self-pres on anyone whoās not a mechanically confirmed villager. But I also think this situation is a little different?
Like, I am fully aware that Iām in the middle of the PoE, trying to explain why someone widely believed to be mechanically confirmed is a wolf. And ā¦ this is a situation where I understand that you would be suspicious of me, I canāt say that thatās totally unreasonable. So instead of spending the next 48 hours attempting to argue why Iām town, Iām going to make my case for why Marshal is a wolf (well, I just did), and I want you to vote me out, and once youāve seen my flip I want you to kill her. Obviously I would rather you just kill her now but I donāt think itās reasonable to ask you to trust me that much, if that makes sense.
Iām not going to, like, totally disappear after this post or anything ā Iāve made my case, but Iām not going to just ghost the thread, Iāll stick around to talk about it or whatever. Iām not going to try to towncase myself, I donāt care if you think Iām town, I care about what you do tomorrow.
If itāll make you feel better about killing me, I can post cat pictures or something, but only if you donāt then turn around tomorrow and say āwell Arete was posting cat pictures, they clearly werenāt taking the game seriously! letās ignore all their reads!ā
Anyways. You should kill me, so that you know that my read is genuine, and so that we donāt have to go through the whole ābut what if Arete is pushing Marshal in bad faith because theyāre a wolf??ā thing.
Why you should listen to me after I die
Iām going to keep this section short, because itās more-or-less going to be me arguing that my reads are good and you should sheep them, and thatās easy to be really arrogant with. But yeah, realistically, some of you are probably thinking āArete has been wolfsiding all game, why should we trust them?ā
The easiest reason I can give is that you can just ā¦ read the post, all 5000+ words of it (ā¦I swear I didnāt mean it to be that long), and think about the arguments for yourself. But if that doesnāt convince you, well, Iām not a bad player, I might have been playing badly this game but if you look at my other recentish villa games on this site, like Shortnite or that weird BotF or Clown Fiesta II if you ignore Luna, my reads were pretty on point. Two of my top three scumreads in Shortnite were scum when I died on N3, two of my top three scumreads in Clown Fiesta II were scum on D1, in BotF I subbed in and had the flagbearer wolf PoEād to a single person in about two hours. I really believe Iām trustable here. (And even in games where my reads are bad at first, like Zelda mash, they tend to get better over the course of the game).
Also, if you kill Marshal and itās wrong, you get to blame me, whereas if you donāt kill Marshal and itās correct I get to blame you.
Frequently Asked Questions
āWhy are you just self-voting and asking to be killed? Isnāt that anti-town?ā
Normally yes, but in this case Iām confident in Marshal being the last wolf, and I do not think I can get her killed while Iām alive, and maybe I can get her killed from beyond the grave.
āI think youāre a wolf, and youāre doing this for [insert your reason here].ā
Cool. You know what you should do if you think Iām a wolf? kill me. You know what I want you to do? Kill me (and then Marshal). Funny how that works out.
āThis post reminds me of a post you wrote in a wolfgame once.ā
You know what you should do if you think Iām a wolf? kill me. You know what I want you to do? Kill me! Wow!
āIām Marshal, and I think your case on me is wolfy.ā
Have fun tomorrow 
āWhy are you trying to thunderdome? Thunderdomes are bad.ā
Usually yes, but in this case after examining the body of evidence I think this one is justified.
2 Likes
me when I need to write my BA thesis: no thoughts. head empty.
me when I decide to case someone: word count: 5,659
some of that is quotes but
yeah
Iām sorry
1 Like
itās 7v1
so like
we have leeway to do stuff
derps flip should prove I wasnāt hard-wolfsiding every EoD
| Voted | Voters | Number of Votes |
|---|---|---|
| Arete | Arete | 1/5 |
| Not Voting | Marl, Sulit, Mist, Marshal, Gorta, Nightingale, Chloe | 7 |