I have a post that I was working on overnight and I will post it now.
Sully post draft:
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I spent about ten minutes last night refreshing the page and yelling at Iris about death godfathers before she told me this wasn't a bastard game. GG Weapons, may you never play again.
About an hour has passed since phase end for me and I am calming down and going to actually consider a world where Sully's waffling and generally sheeping of the entire town is not a scum tell. I also actually read his late phase defenses. Towards the end of his defenses he reads way more genuine, like how despite me thinking that his constant P5 meta shit is scummy, his final appeal to it reads good tonally. I think I can understand where people are coming from saying he's just bad, and I don't see any reason not to engage him.
I am now reading P5 Mafia.
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I've read his ISO. I do not like his play there either, because he is jumpy and opportunistic in his cases and it is harder to follow his reasoning than if he had a clear logic. If there is any difference between P5 Mafia and now, it's that he has some buffers between his cases, and always questions the people he is voting.
I don't think I can criticize him on his style of vote swapping as alignment indicative. However, I think that his reads in this game were not based on pushes to gain information like in P5, because they did not come with questions. Simply put, he followed the town here, and in P5, he was doing his own thing, within reason.
Some points against him on meta are that he also talked more to his scum suspects directly, and I definitely did not see the kind of room reading and waters testing behavior he has had this game in P5 mafia. In this game he has not expressed anywhere near the same level of personal thoughts on players. In particular, he has soft shaded many people but has not followed up on a lot of the things he said he would. In P5 Mafia he actually did address many people multiple times and seemed to be working multiple cases at once. Compared to P5 Sully seems to be one track minded in this game and only passingly comments on the flow of the game instead of showing the flow of his own mind.
I think there is a world where he intentionally decided to sheep this time instead of push every thought he has because of bad reads in P5, but his play in P5 was townier for the same reason: it was obvious he was actually trying to come up with ideas and bring out new information that the town didn't already have.
Compared to then, he has barely questioned anyone this game. That's the definitive difference I've seen because while most of the other elements are in this game, he hasn't explicitly tried to get information from anyone. He has seemed content to get a read of how others will take his push, assess the game state, and sheep consensus, and oddly, the only things he disagrees with in that consensus are scumreads on confirmed scum. In a world where he is town, this meta change and the sheer ridiculousness of the cases seems bad.
JB is one contradiction to this argument, but he did defend JB at one point and then went back on it. Instead of just defending him like he did Junko and Shinori, he sheeped both the initial vote on JB and the unvote with some form of "I agree with what someone else said against them/in their favor". This is not alignment indicative and reads the most genuine of their flipped scum interactions, but the completely lack of personal thoughts still doesn't help matters. Questions on this later.
There are definitive differences in his play between these games, and I think the changes are scummy with regard to: how much he interacts with people he is casing; how many questions he asks to confirm his suspicions; how much independent reading he follows up on compared to what he says he needs to; and how accurate his reads have been in general. As generating new content for town goes, he has not contributed at all compared to P5.
Back to the topic at hand: I think that his defenses at the end of the day read genuine, even if his logic on Arc is ridiculous, and I cannot see a world where this makes sense as any alignment, so the tone is really all I have to go on. I initially took it for granted that they would be terrible because he self-voted and went into AtE land, but actually reading them, he is seriously trying to convince me and the way he is insisting doesn't seem faked.
I cannot begin to express how mad I am about the Weapons slot.
I am willing to give him a chance to answer my concerns and show his mind.
@SullyMcGully What I'd like is for you to explain your progression in the quotes below. I will be specific about what bothers me and I want you to explain why you voted that way and why you unvoted later, to make it make sense.
What were your personal thoughts on JB at this time? What made you want to sheep this read instead of another one?
What did you think of Shinori when you wrote this? What were your suspicions with Kirsche's intentions/associations?
Noting you towncleared Kirsche here. You also claimed to have been scumreading Shinori the whole time, along with BBM. At what point did you start to suspect Shinori, and how did it fit in with your Kirsche read? Citing the post where it changed is a plus.
What were you thinking when you made this vote? How does it relate to eclipse?
What scenario are you imagining happening here? Walk me through your reasoning behind this question/argument.
Note: I think this spec rules out any world where Sully is an SK, just by sheer thought process.
I also have a second post where I did rereads and I will post that after Sully responds.
