Recency bias, tbh.
Rather, scum is targeting kills here in a way that speaks not only familiarity with the game, but familiarity with the players. This makes it likely (beyond any rerolling meta-theorizing) that scum isn't playing with all newbies. Someone's calling the shot from a place of a good deal of experience with the cast. IH and ondine were both very obvious marks (I was between IH and Tykan on my protect last night for just this reason) based mostly on past experience. Hitting IH N2 is a bit less out there, as they had outed themselves as a fairly dangerous role (while also making their death confirm ondine almost entirely and me partially, making it a little suboptimal), but hitting ondine D1 as a very towny active voice whose also a good player has a very 'textbook' feel to it, which makes me suspect at least one player with experience on SV helping scum decide.
So, let's temporarily cut out the new players, as well as the dead vets. That leaves 5 players:
- Shadell
- ondine
- Cyricubed (only D1, but sharing info would leave scum with pretty clear targeting instructions).
- Tykan
- mesonoxian
Now, I know ondine is town because ondine was attacked. I know I'm town because I can see my PM. Cyri's ragequit is inconsistent with Cyri being scum, since scum wouldn't really have any cause to get angry at being suspected for pushing against pro-town strategies, though it's not impossible as a matter of principle.
Ergo, if we assume that at least one more experienced player from SV is scum, which I think tracks with the public actions we've seen from scum, it's very likely that at least one of Tykan and Meso is scum. Both have, I think, made a number of towny gestures, however, let's look between them.
Tykan has 20 posts overall, and Meso 37. This is pretty consistent with my experience of both players, in the context of a game missing the kind of player that drives a ton of churn.
I think that the best scum tell is often a lack of commitment. No matter how you try to fake it or work through the process of scum-hunting, you already know the actual answer, Meso flip-flopped a fair bit on D1 as
@ondine caught, and, while Meso's generally felt towny in action, a lot of these are the kind of town commitments that really have no consequence, sharing things everyone should have already caught. Tykan made a pretty aggressive push against Cyri earlier on D2. OTOH, we know this is pretty far off from the truth, as that read hinged on QT being scum, and QT is confirmed town.
Meso, meanwhile, has mostly played the mechanics, which is traditionally fairly safe for scum to do, without jumping into a strong read. This isn't necessarily bad for town to do, but it often makes it easy to slip in some scummy information while also requiring relatively little commitment to generate content that looks pro-town. Starting a push against a player that turns out to be scum is, at least, a significant sacrifice for scum to make, but the mechanical information is public (Yes, I used it to start D1, but that was to give something with some edge to break out of meme-mode, and I was also aiming to look slightly shady to direct the night-kill in a predictable way). The wine around calling attention to the idea that I might have been lawyered last night strikes me as a bit suspect as well, plausibly serving to set up vindication for Meso if I was actually lawyered and voted today.
Ultimately though, I have a fair bit of gutread on both being scummy, and I think those two are a good place to start the day.
