ok wait I promise I’m almost done
Introduction
A couple disclaimers, before I get into the meat of the case:
- As much as possible, I’m trying to avoid relying on ‘I have a soulread, vote Vulgard’ and instead give actual reasons. I want you to vote him because the logic behind my read is sound, rather than because of the soulread thing.
- Relatedly, as much as possible, I’ve tried to rely on arguments that rely on the least amount of ‘trusting me’ as possible. For instance, I find his tone to be wolfy, but that’s extremely subjective and hard to prove, so I’m not bringing it up as an argument. There are a couple places where I talked about how he plays as town, with examples, that rely on some amount of trust that that’s how he plays town consistently rather than just in those games, but even if you completely ignore those examples the case still holds.
- Even if you think I’m a wolf, all the logic still holds. Tell yourself that I could just be bussing him if it’ll make you feel better about the read. If you really, really need to kill me to be confident that you can trust the read, then … I’ll be frustrated, because I think it’s pretty obvious that Vul’s a wolf, but what’s most important is that you listen to me, rather than going ‘oh, we voted out Arete and they were town, how sad, anyways Vul wrote a nice wallpost so let’s not kill him.’
- There are a couple minor edits to the portion of the case I posted a few hours ago, mostly for clarity but also I realized while finding quotes for some of the wolfy things he’s done that he’s actually done a bunch of other wolfy things that I hadn’t noticed.
1. How Vulgard forms his reads
A. Generic-ness
This is one of the first things I noticed about his slot, even before I subbed into the game. Imagine making a list of “common reasons to townread/scumread people.” Essentially all of Vulgard’s reads feel like he took the reasoning from that hypothetical list and stapled it onto the playerlist, like his reads are reads manufactured in the read factory rather than the result of a genuine, natural solving process.
This one is a little hard to provide examples for, because everyone makes reads like that sometimes, maybe even a lot of the time. But most villagers have some reads that don’t feel like that, and in particular Vul’s towngame tends to include more of those “creative” reads. (This sort of read is also much harder to fake as wolf than generic reads-factory reads, because to fake a generic read you have to be aware that something is widely considered a tell + find someone displaying that tell whereas it’s much harder to fake a weird/creative read because those tend to be the result of natural thoughts popping up in your head.)
Here are some examples from Morphogenetic Mafia (a game where he did a notably worse-than-usual-for-him job of explaining his reads, and got misexe’d day 1):
Morphogenetic Mafia posts
(not a read, but a serious question)
Here are some examples from Autumn Invitational:
Autumn Invitational posts
I could pull more examples from other villagegames (I chose those games because they were the two most recent villagegard games I could remember that happened on FoL, but this is something he consistently does as a villager and struggles a lot to do as a wolf.)
Meanwhile, in this game, literally all of his reads feel like they came directly from the reads factory, where reads are manufactured. This is, again, harder to “prove” because I’m trying to demonstrate the absence of something rather than the presence of something, but if you read through his Iso (which I did, overnight) he literally never has a read that couldn’t have come straight from a list of common tells. For instance, these are the first several posts in his Iso:
early explained Vulreads
this one doesn’t count because he literally just took Arctic’s point and signal-boosted it
B. Agenda-y inconsistencies
Vulgard’s reasoning behind his reads is inconsistent in a way that demonstrates agenda. For example, here are a couple of his reads on lol:
In the first post, he claims that lol’s early posts are wolfy because he’s not doing anything, just existing. In the second post, he claims that lol’s early posts are wolfy because they’re too solvy. These reasonings are both talking about the same general range of posts, but they use completely opposite reasonings. This makes no sense from the perspective of a villager who’s actually trying to solve his slot, there’s no reason why he’d come to a different conclusion about whether lol’s posts are solvy. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense from the perspective of a wolf trying to push agenda against lol, and just wants to make up points to support himself. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think he would have such an obviously contradictory take on purpose, I think it’s more likely that he just forgot he’d made the first comment.)
There’s also his case on Blizer, which (as Arctic previously pointed out) is based on multiple false claims about what Blizer was doing:
In particular, he used the fact that Blizer was supposedly pushing PKR as a reason to suspect him:
However, Blizer was in fact defending PKR.
Vul is not incompetent. He is perfectly capable of reading Blizer’s posts and noticing things like ‘he was defending PKR,’ rather than trying to push him for something that’s not true. Again, I think this probably wasn’t a deliberate attempt to openwolf by lying about Blizer’s posts, but rather not bothering to check what Blizer was actually doing. This makes sense from a wolf perspective of wanting to get Blizer executed, and doesn’t make sense from a town perspective of actually wanting to solve the game.
(As an aside – there are a couple times this game where I’ve gotten annoyed at Arctic for not reading my posts, but in both cases I can understand how a tunnelled villager misinterpreted them that way, whereas here there’s not a reasonable explanation for Vul looking at Blizer’s posts in the context of trying to write a wallpost on Blizer and concludes that he was trying to push PKR.)
Then, there’s his handling of BlueLance’s VT claim. He is initially insistent that the VT claim makes him town:
However, without anything relevant changing, he later uses the VT claim as a reason to suspect him, saying that he was ‘too excited’ and that in context it ‘looks like it was done for towncred,’ without ever even acknowledging that he had previously thought it was townie.
Importantly, nothing about the actual post or context had changed. The ‘excitement’ that Vul references was there when he made the initial townread. The context was there when he made the initial townread. If Vul is making real reads, based on his actual reaction to the post, there’s no reason for his initial read and his later read to be so different. On the other hand, if he’s Mafia coming up with fake reasons, and he forgot his reasoning, then it makes perfect sense.
C. Shallow reads
Throughout the game, even when he explains his reads and has basically consistent reasoning behind them, the reasoning is very shallow/surface level, and doesn’t actually delve into people’s motivations. This wouldn’t necessarily be wolfy for some players, but Vulgard is a good villager, as town he is capable of doing the most barebones, surface-level analysis.
Examples of this:
Here he uses ‘x has pushed a lot of villagers’ as a reason to scumread various players, with no evaluation of whether that’s actually wolfy. Like, yes, obviously there are players for whom ‘having a lot of incorrect scumreads’ is wolfy. ‘[in x world] Eli had two incorrect scumreads’ is … not wolfy, Eli isn’t the sort of player who can be expected to have good reads. (The first post I quoted was also partially supporting a different argument, so it’s not quite as bad, but the other two have much less depth.)
This is a trend throughout his Iso, even beyond just ‘pushing people for having wrong scumreads without considering why,’ e.g. when he shades Blizer for self-pres without actually considering or addressing at all whether self-pres is wolfy for Blizer:
Or when he shades Blue for not doing much/trying to make reads, without considering the context of him being a new player (many of whom struggle to socially solve) but instead jumping straight to ‘they could be doing it to avoid making content as wolf’:
None of these display actual consideration of the motivation behind their actions. In contrast, as town, he has a much more nuanced perspective on the game, rather than just stopping at ‘x did some things that can be argued on a surface level to be wolfy.’ Like, I was looking through the recent game he linked on the Syndicate, not even to check this point, and I found multiple examples of him being non-shallow in that respect even though I wasn’t even looking for that specifically.
Here and here are examples where he looks at people whose solving has been relatively weak and tries to understand why (coming to the ultimate conclusion that they’re town) rather than assuming they’re Mafia. Here is an example where he specifically looks at someone who’s had a lot of wrong pushes, and explains why that isn’t AI for him and why that doesn’t make him a wolf.
2. Not caring about his townreads when it starts being inconvenient
I was planning to write this section of the wall even before I found this quote but I think this quote is really emblematic of how he’s treated PoE villagers this game:
Obviously, villagers can reevaluate reads, or change their mind when someone changes their posting. However, Vulgard has changed his mind on players he previously townread specifically when the thread consensus shifted on their slot rather than because of any actual meaningful change. The clearest place this can be seen is with PKR. He spent a while shielding PKR:
He proceeds to walk this back for … a single post, as far as I can tell from his Iso?
and ultimately end up voting PKR:
If he actually believed his read on PKR, which he expressed at a high confidence, then PKR making one post (which already existed when Vul made the initial read, but Vul was a replacement, so maybe he hadn’t seen it) that looks vaguely like he’s pushing LHF wouldn’t be enough to change his mind from ‘PKR is super villagery’ to ‘actually let’s kill PKR.’ His read switch is super opportunistic and makes no sense from a village PoV. It makes way more sense from a wolf who decided they needed to get PKR misexe’d.
Some of his other read changes probably qualify as well but they’re mostly not as clear cut and/or on unflipped people.
3. Treatment of my slot
A. His read on my slot is basically entirely dependent on how I’m reading him.
Throughout the day, his read has had very little to do with my actual villageriness and a lot to do with my read on him. Technically it could be coincidence, but comparing the changes in my read on him to his changes in read on me:
To be totally fair to him, he does actually have posts where he explains the changes in reads, I just find it suspicious that they happen to perfectly coincide with whether I’m townreading or scumreading him, and that he never acknowledges that that’s what he’s doing. This is a relatively weak point but it sketches me out so I’m bringing it up anyway, I do think the other points in the case are stronger.
B. Him calling me 100 percent wolf and trying to avoid killing me makes no sense from a town PoV.
Vul claims to be 100 percent confident that I’m Mafia:
But also has me last in his execution order, because of worldbuilding logic:
This makes no sense if he’s a villager. If he actually thinks that I’m 100 percent wolf, it shouldn’t matter that I don’t work in very many worlds, because all the other worlds without me have a zero percent chance of being true. Like, maybe if he were just very confident that I was wolf, his logic would make sense, but he’s claiming to be 100 percent certain (and didn’t back down when I pressed him on it – sometimes people do use ‘100 percent’ to mean ‘pretty sure but have some doubt,’ but I tried to make sure that he wasn’t using it that way.)
This is how he explained it when pressed:
This isn’t an explanation that makes sense either with his behavior in previous village games or with his stated read on me. Again, he is claiming to be 100 percent confident I’m Mafia, with no doubt whatsoever. In previous games as village, he has been willing to aggressively push his reads even with less confidence than that – e.g. here where he pushed widely-townread Chloe. Him avoiding pushing me because of worldbuilding, and specifically putting me (his “100 percent confident wolfread”) behind Derps (who he has as possible-but-unlikely W/W with me). None of this makes sense with his supposed read on me.
There’s a couple ways this can make sense from him as a wolf:
- He wants to make us look aligned. By calling me a wolf but not trying to actually kill me, he could be trying to look like a wolf doing a bad job of distancing. This is the first thought I had but I don’t actually think it’s super likely now that I’ve thought about it (since enough people V-read him, prior to this case, that he probably wasn’t going over soon).
- He knows that me going over makes him look bad. Since he said that me being town means he’s wolfclaiming, he probably expects to look bad when I die and flip town. I think this basically makes sense as an explanation.
4. Trying to chain misexes
Throughout his Iso, he has a lot of posts where he tries to set up a villager to take the fall if another villager flips, usually for thin reasons.
Here’s him trying to chain CRich → Nightingale:
If Blizer is V he also does that here:
I was going to pull up more examples but I want Marshal to be able to see my wall before she goes to bed, basically he’s using a common wolf tactic of setting people up so that when one of them flips town, the other one gets suspected. Unfortunately a lot of people have been doing that this game, but Vulgard is a better player than that (especially since his reasons have ranged from thin to nonexistent).
Postscript: Refutation to arguments in his favor
- “some of his analysis is good”
Look at literally any wolfgame of his except Clown Fiesta 2. He’s capable of writing minimally acceptable posts as W.
- “he did that one thing with Blizer where he pointed out a contradiction but didn’t really push him on it”
Wolves are capable of noticing contradictions if they’re looking for them, it’s not actually super hard. Also, he literally shaded him for that in that same posts and his later posts, so the point about him not trying to push Blizer for it doesn’t apply.
- “I think you’re a wolf so I’m not going to listen to you”
Stop being bad at the game. Even if you think I’m a wolf, you can read and consider my points.
Conclusion
Vul is Mafia and should die.
@Mistyx
@SirDerpsAlot
@EliThePsycho
@Marshal
@Arctic
@Hippolytus
@Atlas
@Blizer
please read my Vul case
do i get to spite say “no we didnt kill bliz off of my case we’re not killing vul off of yours”
(also its midnight and i cant read ill do that tomorrow)
1 Like
if no one is going to engage with my case I’m going to post varyingly legible memes
actually I’m doing that anyway because I spent multiple minutes on them and I want to share them
I would say I have him as like 98 percent wolf
I’m aware that in the remaining 2 percent of worlds where he’s town we probably just lose because the two of us get yeeted in some order, but I’m willing to risk that
i think arete and marshal are both just villagers at this point
higher confidence than atlas or hippo
shrug
in Upick I was a probably-doomed wolf so I deliberately picked a consensus “mechanical clear” to case to try to get towncred because “why would a wolf be casing the greencheck rather than going after anyone else in the PoE”
here
- I’m not a wolf
- my points are better – if you read the UPick wall, some of my points were decent, but there were several places where I was misrepresenting Marshal to make her look worse, or taking things that weren’t that wolfy and acting like they made her lockscum. Here I am not doing that.
- More generally it involved a lot of things that were maybe wolfy but could go either way, whereas here several of my points on Vul are things where I legitimately have no idea how they would happen in a world where he’s a villager. (there was actually one of those in my Marshal wall in Upick but it was about something where, even though I knew she was a villager, I still had no idea how she thought the thing she thought)
- my UPick wall had a bunch of parts that basically only existed to be a bid for towncred, like the entire part where I was like ‘you should kill me first and then kill Marshal’ which only existed to WifoM people into being like ‘why would the last wolf ask to die.’ This wall is instead 99 percent just an explanation of why Vul is a wolf.
like I don’t think you should clear me for writing a case, because I can do that as any alignment
but I think if someone without TMI looks at the points I raised against Marshal in UPick, they’re going to come away thinking ‘hmm, Marshal is kind of sus but could still be a villager’
and I think if you look at the points I raised against Vul here you’re going to come away thinking ‘yeah, Vul is just a wolf’
