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Survivor SURVIVOR - Won by rssp1
- Thread starter JALMONT
- Start date
I guess I'll let the Jury share who they voted for for now, until I release the sheet. I plan on finishing postgame not tomorrow but the day after as I'm traveling all of tomorrow. It'll be a long one but should hopefully be pretty comprehensive. Obviously I don't have interactions between ppl on PS! or irc so if you have any insight into that at all feel free to post it. In any case I'm about to find out what the character limit for smogon posts are lol.
Feel free to share your thoughts on the game, what you liked/didn't like about it, potential improvements and if anyone would be interested in a second edition. rssp1 was a very worthy winner and I think Blazade was a tad unlucky to only get 1 vote. Otherwise, thanks for playing again guys and if you have any questions for me hmu!
Feel free to share your thoughts on the game, what you liked/didn't like about it, potential improvements and if anyone would be interested in a second edition. rssp1 was a very worthy winner and I think Blazade was a tad unlucky to only get 1 vote. Otherwise, thanks for playing again guys and if you have any questions for me hmu!
Survivor Postgame
Introduction – skip this if you don’t care about Survivor the TV show, how the game was made or how the tribes were set up.
Game Premise
I’m a huge fan of the Survivor television show (go check it out if you haven’t already!). I think the game of Survivor itself is very interesting and lends well to a competitive person such as myself. Both the physical challenges in combination with the survival element and of course, the social game create game that is multi-faceted and quite interesting as a result. The storylines and characters on the show are so memorable because they are real people, which makes the drama all the more exciting. In any case, I wanted to host this game because of how much I liked the show. Of course, the idea has been tried in the past. zorbees’s game a couple years back was basically an attempt at replicating the show in an online format. While I personally had fun while it lasted, it ended up breaking down and being abandoned at around the fourth or fifth tribal council. The concept was good, but I think it was held back by trying to be like a normal smogmaf game by including roles and things like that. The challenges also were pretty boring and probably led to people losing interest.
With that in mind, I worked on getting together a game that I thought would hold people’s interest long enough to reach the end. I think having Pokemon-based challenges was very important to ensure that people would be invested in the game. Everyone comes to Smogon presumably because they like(d) Pokemon to some degree, so everyone should have at least a little experience when it comes to mons. I thought I could put together a fun FFA-style game with an emphasis on Pokemon that people would enjoy. I do think that the battling aspect definitely made the game a lot more fun then say zorbees’s challenges, and got people engaged in the game beyond just voting people out!
One area where this game would be different from actual Survivor and even other online Survivor games was the fact that the playerlist would likely be filled with people who already knew each other fairly well – this was basically to be expected since the people most likely to join the game would be circus regulars / people who occasionally browse and pay attention to the subforum. Those users are usually the same, so there wouldn’t necessarily be the factor of having to get to know new players. Of course, certain users, like King, were essentially new and thus had the difficult proposition of “fitting in.” This was probably unavoidable, but at the very least, my hope was that people wouldn’t cling to users they already knew and would try to branch out. I think this did happen to some extent and it was nice to see more unknown users make it far!
As a final note, one interesting difference about online Survivor is the anonymity. You don’t truly live on a beach with other people all the time, so I was interested in seeing how this would play out. Online, it’s almost impossible to detect alliances because you don’t know when people are talking behind your back and it’s basically impossible to find out. That said, it does at the same time make it a little easier to backstab players, so I definitely wondered if the game would turn out a lot like other more mafia-like FFAs, or if people would stick with their alliances with people they knew (as stated above). With these thoughts in mind, there wasn’t anything I could really do but observe. And thus, I went to create the tribes!
The Playerlist
Picking out the playerlist was hard – and I think I only had a couple over the max player limit!
(aside: I really like 16 players even in real Survivor – you get more of a chance to get to know people. For this game, I didn’t want to go to 18 and definitely not 20 because I didn’t want the game to drag plus more players means a higher likelihood of idlers).
First off, I want to say sorry to all those I didn’t include – Flyhn, Nomark, Celever, and Tymano. The main priority I had in picking the playerlist was choosing players that I was confident would be active. My first choices were obviously the circus vets, who I felt I could count on to be active. From there, I chose other Smogoners that were regularly active, especially on other parts of the site. I knew Trace from Pokemon Online and knew him to be active, so I thought he would be a good choice. The last couple spots I gave to Maleovex, ButteredToast, and Ullar. From those I didn’t pick – namely Nomark and Tymano, I wasn’t sure about their activity and felt that I couldn’t pick them. In hindsight, both have remained active all throughout the time the game has ran, and it’s too bad they couldn’t have played instead of certain players who idled or quit (more on this later :) Maleovex was fairly new but I felt that he deserved a spot (and he wasn’t entirely new, having played in the previous mafia game). Ullar, Flyhn, and Celever were all circus regulars and it was very hard deciding to exclude. In the end I let Ullar in, although I think Flyhn probably would have been a better choice – but I was concerned about his activity, same with Celever (which was probably the right choice since he doesn’t seem to be very active on the site). Even though I didn’t get a ton of signups, it was still a hard to get a good playerlist imo. I think in the end I definitely got a good group of users, and I think the game reflects this as well.
If I decide to run another Survivor (likely!) those who didn’t game in will be guaranteed spots (and Memoric too who expressed interest a little too late :[
Setting Up the Tribes
Yeah, the tribes weren’t even. I’ll say that straight up. I do feel Moto was underrated at the start, but it soon became clear to me that Okata on the whole was stronger in terms of battling skill. I wanted the tribes to be even as possible, but I also wanted to be sure that both teams were fairly equal in terms of active participants. Plus I didn’t want to circus regulars to all be on the same team. I figured the three best battlers would be Haruno (badged), TraceofLife (he’s a tier leader on PO/tutor/on a WCoP team) and Mithril (won a WCoP lol). Unfortunately, I probably underrated zorbees and RODAN and overrated billy. Probably if I had to make one change, swapping zorbees for billy might’ve have been a good one. In the end, I think Okata underestimated Moto, but it didn’t really end up mattering given that they were overall were stronger. I had no idea how good Blazade was and I probably overrated Maleovex too much as well. Swapping rssp1 and Maleovex probably would have been a good choice too for the purpose of balancing. After Okata won the second challenge handedly, I just started hoping the tribe swap would balance things out a bit x_x (which it sort of did)
Balancing tribes was always going to be hard and it was never going to be perfect, but I just wanted to avoid one tribe completely dominating. Luckily, things did seem to turn out okay in that regard as you all know or will see later :]
So that’s basically the pre-game stuff out of the way. The tribe names were based off Japanese villages near the volcanoes that Cinnabar Island is based off of. Because Pokemon and all that. I like doing flavor but at the same time it takes time and I can be a little lazy so I didn’t really branch out to and try to make this an immersive experience or whatever.
Game Recap
The meat of this postgame. I’m basically going to go challenge by challenge, player by player. I’ll start with any important pre-challenge stuff, followed by covering the challenge, and then tribal council. Then I’ll do an overview of how each player did in my eyes.
The First Alliances are Formed
Right off the back, there were two attempts at making alliances, one for each tribe. For Okata, RODAN / Twin / rssp1 / Blazade / Haruno grouped up, with rssp1 and Blazade having a closer “side” alliance. On Moto, TIK / King_ / ButteredToast / Walrein got together, although this alliance was a little shakier given that Walrein had expressed doubts working with the aforementioned players. Otherwise, there wasn’t much wheeling and dealing going on, which I guess is to be expected given that it could potentially be a while before any of that stuff would become necessary (plus not really a need to get to know ppl due to most players knowing each other).
Challenge 1
The first challenge was a simple one, just to get the game going and people interested. It would have to be applicable to all, including those who weren’t necessarily “Pokemon masters.” Random battle was the obvious choice and there’s not much to say about the tiers themselves (although I do love me some triples nowadays, even if it’s very luck-based). This challenge was super close, and I thought Moto probably could’ve pulled out a win had TIK played Ullar. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, TIK decided that he wanted to pull out. I tried to initially find a sub for him instead of dooming Moto to the loss, but I realized that it would just be best if he was voted out (which seemed to be what most people on Moto felt).
So Moto lost and off to tribal they went. At this point, King_ was super active in talking to people, and setting up alliances on the side. The benefit on the game being online is that it’s hard to tell who is talking behind whose back and figuring out where the “majority” is. As a weaker battler, King_ did a really good job I think in being proactive and talking to people, which probably saved him after Moto lost the next challenge. It seemed like this would have been a good spot for TIK’s initial alliance to come into play and assert their power, but in the end with TIK wanting to pull out that “alliance” basically fizzled out. TIK not playing his battle (which I would’ve subbed him and allowed Flyhn to play if Moto wanted to) eventually led to his demise. Because of how important winning challenges were, TIK’s alliance fell to the wayside and he was gone.
TIK voted out 8-0
TIK disappeared for whatever reasons and it was too bad. He got together an early alliance of 4 albeit with a reluctant Walrein that could’ve really controlled the tribe. It didn’t happen and TIK went home. Would’ve loved to see what TIK had up his sleeve but sometimes things just don’t work out. This is definitely one of those situations where if TIK actually played the game, things would’ve been a lot spicier. Instead, I’m left with a sense that I should’ve picked someone like Nomark to include over him. Oh well. (Aside: I know technically you can’t vote for yourself, but I figured in cases where people just gave up, it was easier to just allow self-votes, instead of randing a vote/forcing them to pick someone. Either way it didn’t really change the game and was a more honest reflection of the vote so I ran with it).
Second challenge
Nothing happened gameplay-wise prior to this challenge so let’s skip that part. Okata won again, this time with a commanding lead. 4-1 and it probably wasn’t ever in doubt considering Twin likely would’ve won a tier he’s won a forum tourney in (Ubers). Maleovex actually did a good job at surprising rssp1 (a strong LCer) but he got unlucky with a Stone Edge miss (although a miss was probably inevitable). Nothing else really to say about this challenge, just your bread and butter ORAS tiers.
Maleovex voted out 3-2-1-1
While Maleovex ended up returning for the vote, being away clearly hurt him as he didn’t have a chance to talk to people in order to figure out what was going on. The vote seemed to show a Mithril + Walrein duo versus Trace + billy + king_, which was initially orchestrated by King_. BT had the odd man out vote on billy here, and Mal voted BT. Another vote for King_ would’ve tied things, but alas, Mal had no way of knowing to vote for King_ and paid the price as a result. I was going to rand his vote (which I would’ve felt really bad about, only 1/6 chance of voting “correctly”) but good thing for me in the end Mal voted BT sealing his fate. Pretty unlucky, I think. If he wins a single battle/can talk to people, he probably sticks around and King_ goes home. Was sad to see him go home because I think he had potential to fly under the radar if he could’ve made it to the merge (which admittedly would’ve been a hard task anyways).
Third challenge
Hey, Moto won a challenge! This was the weird other metas challenge. This was initially going to be the fourth challenge, but I swapped the two because all gens made more sense to do after this challenge (I did this before the second challenge’s outcome was known, since I was worried about having to have 2 ORAS OU slots which I felt would’ve been weird). This was also initially a different challenge, it was going to be a crew battle. I didn’t want to do that though because I feared that timezone differences would mean that it would take forever for the challenge to finish. Thus, the other metas challenge was born! This one came down to the wire, requiring a tie-breaker. billy won the rematch in Hackmons Cup and Trace clutched up in Balanced Hackmons. I was surprised that Okata chose Battle Factory or that they didn’t give Haruno BH, given that rssp1 didn’t seem super comfortable with the tier? It wasn’t really a huge mistake or anything though, Moto just performed better in the end.
Back at camp, there was nothing to talk about as Ullar asked to be voted out.
Ullar voted out 8-0
I don’t know if Ullar really talked to his teammates individually at all…probably not? In any case, I guess he was pretty much the obvious first boot since the beginning of the game. Didn’t put up any of a fight and that’s all I really have to say about him lol. Another player slot which would’ve been better had someone else taken it.
THE TWIST
This method of switching tribes was done so that there could be no claim that it was “rigged” or whatever. Since tribe swaps can be pretty contentious this is one area where I think it’s best to let the players choose their fortunes. rssp1 was really smart in telling his tribemates to pick all odd numbers, something I didn’t take into consideration at all. Fortunately for me, I didn’t look entirely silly in the end as there was some movement, with King_ and Mithril moving to Okata and zorbees and Twin moving in the other direction. While I don’t think anyone was outright screwed from the swap, King_ and Mithril were definitely given a raw deal in the sense that they switched to a tribe that had a clear, solid five (or four if you don’t count Yeti), even if they didn’t know it.
Fourth Challenge
This is probably my favorite team challenge if only because I find that all gens tournaments are a lot of fun. The different mechanics between each generation really play a part and I just enjoy how seeing how the game evolves from gen to gen. Unfortunately, this challenge was actually thrown by Okata (in order to both get King out and give Twin and zorbees some time to potentially assimilate with the other tribe). As a result, we basically missed out on any competition which was too bad. rssp’s game was pretty “bad” but I think Blazade took the cake in terms of throwing. He ran a really weird RBY team with fucking Kingler and switched in Gengar into a really obv Exeguttor psychic? I don’t think anyone on the other tribe picked up on the throw though, as otherwise I feared for Okata that in the future the Moto tribe might try to throw the next two challenges in order to even up the numbers. Luckily for them, that didn’t end up happening. In any case, Moto won this one real easily leaving Okata to go to tribal council.
King_ clearly knew he was on the chopping block, given his lackluster challenge performances. He tried PMing players individually, and attempted to play rssp1 and Blazade? I believe? against each other. Unluckily for him, he had no way of knowing both were part of a tight 4, and everyone knew what was happening behind the scenes. He tried to stir up as much of a ruckus as he could, but the vote was probably a foregone conclusion as soon as the twist had happened.
King_ voted out 6-1
King_ was honestly my favorite pre-merge player just for the fact that he was the player that did the most to make things happen. He was always on the outs I think just simply because he didn’t really have a circus reputation that allowed him to make those sort of connections easily. As a result he had to work harder to make those, and it worked out for him when he managed to get Maleovex over himself out. I felt that it was always going to be a tough ask for King to make even the merge, so I’m very happy that he prolonged his stay in the game as much as he could. Maybe even if doesn’t get put on Okata he gets a lot further. Someone who I would love to have play the game again :]
Fifth challenge
This challenge seemed really boring on paper so I tried to add a points system really quickly to spice things up a bit. That obviously didn’t work as Blazade and I think zorbees both quickly figured out the points didn’t matter. Clearly not well thought out by me, oops. Otherwise, I liked the premise of the challenge, but if I were to run it again, I would do something where the tribes could bet on each challenge, with the winner taking all of those points. IDK just something to make the battles more interesting. Randbats were randbats, and the only interesting battle to note was the VGC match where Blazade rekt Twin who was lazy and just used a big 6 team lol. Blazade’s team which was given to him by Haruno was really clever and I actually used a variant of it in a Survivor game I’m playing on a different site… but yeah anyways that’s about it for this challenge. Moto lost.
Back at camp, ButteredToast felt that he wasn’t pulling his weight and offered himself as sacrifice/asked to be voted out. So there no real strategizing that happened, which was sort of a shame, as I felt that the ambiguity of alliances within Moto meant that any tribal council would’ve been really interesting. As luck would have it, that didn’t happen and BT was voted out unanimously.
ButteredToast voted out 6-0
I had some decent expectations for BT, figuring he would be an interesting under the radar player that with some luck might get decently far. As things would happen, he decided to throw in the towel instead of fighting for his life. While I know that a lot of people aren’t super familiar with Survivor, I think BT is a good example of taking the challenges too seriously – it’s important to remember that this game isn’t about winning challenges, but about making alliances that will take you far in the game. He gets plus points from me for that funny David Ortiz gif he posted after winning in the first challenge though!
Sixth challenge
The final challenge before the merge (although this wasn’t yet known). This one was a little confusing, and I must admit I wish I thought up of a more interesting challenge, but it served its purpose well enough. Haruno ended up losing his first game in a rematch of ORAS RU to Trace. Surprisingly, the only Okata member that managed to win was Yeti, while everyone else was beaten pretty soundly.
At camp, this vote was probably really never in question. I’m not sure if Mithril tried talking to people or if Yeti was concerned about being voted out, but I believe the Okata 4 told Yeti what was going on. As a result Mithril ended up being voted out in another uncontroversial vote.
Mithril voted out 5-1
Mithril was a player who got screwed over by being swapped to the other tribe. His game was pretty unremarkable. He didn’t make any moves, unless you count his vote against King_ in the second tribal. I’m not sure if he really talked to anyone or got into any alliances with the exception of that second tribal where I believe he was working with Walrein. Overall, I think Mithril got a tad unlucky because I think he is definitely a player that is good enough to sneak by the early stages of the game and get to the merge. As things happened, the twist ensured that didn’t happen and he left just one spot shy of the Jury.
THE MERGE
Pretty standard merge at 10 for a game with 16 players. The big question became whether or not the former Okata members would come back to their original tribe and end up Pagonging (survivor term for voting off the opposition tribe in succession) the Motos. I was really worried that this would happen and turn the game into a snooze-fest, at least until the Okatas would have to turn on each other. Even then, I feared that even that would be pretty predictable. But before that, we have a challenge!
Individual Immunity (II) Challenge 1
This challenge was a fun one I thought, and I like the premise a lot. I picked 1v1 challenge cup to keep the games short and sweet and to ensure maximum activity. As luck had it, Trace somehow dominated this challenge, getting some really good mons. As Trace was the biggest challenge threat from Moto, this was a pretty important challenge to win, as it prevented the Okatas from ganging up on him should they have decided to stick together.
Trouble in Paradise
The big question: would Twin return to his original alliance? And could they convince zorbees and Yeti to join in on the vote? Trace winning was bad for the second question at least, as other than Trace there wasn’t anyone I’m sure people would have considered a “challenge threat.” But Twin came back to haunt his alliance as he decided to flip which I think in general wasn’t a bad move from him. What failed him as we will see later was his inability to truly create an alliance with the Motos that would carry through to the later stages of the game, and not just come together for one vote.
Anyways, so Twin flipped but theoretically the Okata 4 still had the zorbees and more likely Yeti’s vote on the table. The fact that Twin knew all the inner workings of the alliance probably made it pretty easy to persuade zorbees, although Yeti really had to think things over to decide what to do. In the end, I think she made a smart move of flipping over, which broke up the foursome for the time being.
Haruno voted out 6-4
Haruno was one of the original alliance members, and being perceived as the strongest battler came back to bite him as he was voted out for his potential challenge prowess. I enjoyed Haruno’s presence in this game, he was a pretty funny guy and as a newer circus face I’m glad he made it to the Jury stage of the game! His play was good but nothing noteworthy. He was a part of the dominant Okata alliance that ran the pre-merge stage of the game. I think he had an interesting point of view of the game, believing that challenge prowess was the most important factor in winning. I’m not sure whether or not his final vote actually reflected that viewpoint in the end, or if he just randomized his vote, but in any case, he was a fun guy to have around and I’m glad he participated.
II Challenge 2 (Final 9)
This was the Randbat singles ladder challenge (idea stolen from the OLT). I liked this challenge a lot, with the only drawback being that I had to time it meaning there was no way it could end early. I chose randbats to give everyone a fighting chance, meaning that it was more about the time you dedicated to grinding the ladder instead of your skill in a certain tier. As things would happen, only two players really went for it, those two being Trace and zorbees. Walrein and billy came sort of close but I think plateaued around 1500 while Trace and zorbees went into the high 1700s iirc. On basically the last day zorbees overtook Trace who had built what seemed to be an insurmountable lead after the first two days, giving zorbees his first individual immunity win and keeping him safe.
After the challenge, Twin tried to rally everyone to vote off RODAN, another member of the original Okata alliance. However, rssp1, who was understandably pretty worried after his alliance had basically been dismantled, worked with zorbees and Trace to ensure that Twin would be voted off instead.
Twin voted off 6-3
I appreciated Twin’s play for the fact that he spiced the game up by alerting everyone to the presence of a strong Okata alliance at the final 10. Was this a good move for his game? It’s hard to say. Assuming all of the Motos were voted off leaving the six original Okata members, it seems quite plausible that they could have potentially decided to boot him early, especially because he was the only to swap tribes. Probably the real downside to flipping was losing the potential Jury votes of his former alliance members. In that sense, the move probably wasn’t the best for his game, but I do think there was a legitimate concern that maybe his alliance had moved on without him/replaced him for Yeti. If Twin felt he was at the bottom, then flipping makes total sense imo. As things happened, Twin’s downfall was that he failed to create any meaningful connections with the other Motos beyond the f10 vote. His betrayal of his former alliance was used by rssp1 to convince others that Twin couldn’t be trusted and that voting him off would be a worthwhile vote. In an alternate universe, it’s interesting to consider how this game might’ve turned out had RODAN been voted off here instead…
II Challenge 3 (Final 8)
I liked this challenge too although I do feel that it is very gameable if you know what is coming (where it’s actually better to be a lower seed). As it happened, Blazade the 7 seed ended up playing Yeti the 8 seed, with Blazade winning. Overall a fun challenge I think in that it allows players to showcase their strength in whatever tier they feel they happen to be good in.
Following this challenge, Walrein made a concerted effort to try and convince everyone to vote Trace out. Unfortunately for him, his plea fell on deaf ears and things turned on him and he was voted out. billy was completely out of the loop on this one, throwing away his vote on rssp1.
Walrein voted out 5-2-1
Walrein’s strategy of playing as a freelancer didn’t pan out for him, although I feel in different circumstances it probably would’ve worked out very well. His main downfall was the fact that he lacked a partner or someone who could give him information regarding what everyone else wanted to do and that there wasn’t really two sides he could play against each other. It was more like one small group and then a bunch of freelancers. By being the one trying to make a proactive move, I think he inadvertently put a spotlight upon himself. It would’ve been better I feel if he had maybe been more subtle about bringing Trace up. Other than that, I felt Walrein did okay this game. I feel like there wasn’t too many opportunities for him to try and make moves or shake the game up, except for the time he did and was voted out lol. He tried to vote King out and failed, but that failure didn’t really affect things for him. Overall, I think Walrein did okay this game. I probably expected him to make it to the merge, in complete honest. I liked his strategy that he attempted to run with and I think he probably is a very interesting character if things go more his way.
II Challenge 4 (Final 7)
Touchy subjects…this was a fun challenge to do and my only regret is I didn’t ask more questions! This challenge involved the contestants answering some questions about each other, and then having to pick who they thought the tribe thought was the most picked answer. The stages thing didn’t seem so well-thought out because I changed it at the last second. Originally it was going to be first person to get three questions right, but that was obviously going to get boring really fast and prevent me from revealing the majority of the questions. Some people thought it was going to be a coconut chop, which is a variant of the challenge in which every player gets three lives, and every question you get right, you “chop” one of the lives of your fellow competitors. That variant is also pretty interesting but it suffers in that it’s very easy to control who wins immunity. I wanted the challenge to be fair so that you could win of your own accord, instead of relying on the whims of other players. The first stage was too easy because I gave everyone a free point with the “who is the funniest player?” question. That one was legitimately impossible to miss unless you idled the entire game (even if you idled you should’ve gotten it right anyways lol). The second set of questions included some really tricky ones such as “Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game” which no one got correct. RODAN won this one, although rssp1 would’ve tied him (but still would’ve lost under the tiebreak rules) if he hadn’t picked some weird answers towards the end. I think he was sort of trying to throw to avoid getting on bad terms with anyone which was smart of him I think. In the end, I’m not sure how much this challenge affected the rest of the game, but it definitely revealed that people thought and knew that zorbees and rssp1 were big threats.
Before tribal, it seemed like most people were either for a Trace vote or a zorbees vote. This vote was probably the biggest “play” in the sense that rssp1 worked really hard to maneuver things. While his reasoning was maybe a tad shaky, his ultimate goal of removing Yeti was not a bad one. He managed to play two sides against each other very well, ensuring that neither side had a reason to talk to the other. I think if this vote turns out any differently we have a very different final 6. As things happened however, Yeti was blindsided, with Trace, rssp, and Blazade voting her, billy and Yeti voting zorbees, and RODAN and zorbees voting Trace.
Yeti voted out 3-2-2
Yeti might count herself a tad unlucky to be voted so “early.” I think as soon as she got past the pre-merge she was definitely going to be a threat to get close to the end. While I know a lot of people said that she had no chance of winning the game in the above challenge, I always felt that people would have to respect the game that she played to get to the end, assuming she got there. But as it happened, rssp viewed her as a threat and decided to vote her out. Obviously, it’s a mistake on her part not to talk to everyone else and see what they were up to. If she does that, Yeti probably sticks around a lot longer, given that everyone felt that she was poor in challenges and probably an easy opponent to go up against in the end. Was that necessarily true? It’s difficult to say. I’m surprised that trace and Blazade agreed to vote her out given that they probably had a good shot at winning against her, but that’s just how it happened and I think rssp can take a lot of credit for that. Strategically, I think she did alright, although she didn’t really look to make any early alliances. Perhaps if she had done that, she would’ve had an easier time to get to the merge (considering that a lot of the pre-merge votes were out of her control) and could’ve avoiding being blindsided. Overall, Yeti is always a fun person to have around in games for being pretty funny (and annoying!) and what not, so I was happy that she managed to avoid getting voted out early!
RODAN quits
Honestly, I understand when people have the desire to quit. The game is a long one, and even though I warned people about what they were getting into, I totally get when something unexpected comes up and you have to quit. I get that. So where does RODAN quitting fall under that spectrum? I’m not sure and really it’s not my place to delve into that. I understand there was some stuff going on in firebot or something but beyond that it’s not really necessary to delve into it. On the other hand, fuck quitters lol. It just really fucks up the game and isn’t fair not just to me, but to the other players in the game as well. RODAN quit in the middle of II Challenge 5 during a very crucial point in the game. Had RODAN not quit, I think him, zorbees, and billy’s chances of winning are much higher. Assuming one of those three wins (and billy ended up winning) they have a 3/5 chance of winning the rocks tiebreaker and possibly can win the vote outright if they can flip Trace. RODAN quitting prevented all that from happening and basically ensured that zorbees and billy most likely would have to rely on a challenge run to make it further.
RODAN’s play was decent I felt. I was looking forward to him playing given that he’s such a big fan of the game. While he didn’t make any necessarily big moves, I don’t blame him because he otherwise played a very smart game in terms of making an alliance, being solid with it, and generally staying low under the radar otherwise. I’m not sure how active he was in shaping votes but he did manage to escape the F9 when it seemed like his alliance might be getting picked off one by one. While I was excited to have RODAN in my game, him quitting turned what had been an overall decent performance into one that felt like it prevented this game from really being unpredictable.
II Challenge 5 (Final 5)
Since RODAN quit in the middle of a challenge what I did was make what was formerly to be the F6 challenge the F5 immunity challenge and just booted what was initially going to be that challenge (so II Challenge 5 becomes 6, 6 is removed completely). Honestly, challenge 6 was going to take a long time anyways (it was round robin with every player playing each other in 4 different tiers, with the tiers picked by each player), so not a huge loss there. This challenge was a seeded double elimination ORAS tournament. In the seeding stage, Blazade forfeited all his matches for whatever reason, while both Trace and zorbees quickly showed why they were considered challenge threats, wrapping up the 1 and 2 seed, ensuring they would receive byes. As a result of RODAN quitting, everyone agreed to dropping the double elimination part of the challenge. billy beat rssp and RODAN quit giving Blazade a bye. Then, two upsets occurred as Blazade and billy beat their opponents to advance to the finals. From there, billy secured a victory over Blazade, ensuring that the Immunity necklace would not be going back to Blazade for a second time.
With RODAN gone, the alliance of Trace, rssp, and Blazade had vote control and there wasn’t much to discuss.
zorbees voted out 3-1-1
billy voted for Blazade, zorbees voted for Trace. zorbees took a long time in sending in his vote and his lack of collaboration with billy stems from both of the two being in an insurmountable position. I don’t really see any world in which zorbees avoids a vote where billy has immunity. If he has immunity, then maybe rssp + Blazade entertain the idea of voting off Trace, but it’s not likely. zorbees played a good game in terms of keeping his head down. I was actually surprised people managed to identify him as the biggest threat to win the game, but I think that largely stems from his challenge prowess. He always performed well in challenges and tried his best in all of them, and I commend him for that. I think he got fucked big time by RODAN quitting and by the Yeti vote out. I think his one mistake was that f7 vote out, but otherwise, I thought he did a great job of really being in control (or at least in the loop) of a lot of votes while not necessarily being a part of the majority alliance.
II Challenge 6 (Final 4)
This was easily my favorite individual immunity challenge because I felt it both required a lot of thought, but was also quick enough so that we didn’t need to wait forever. The Battle Frontier has a lot of interesting ideas about Pokemon, even if those ideas aren’t easily replicated in a simulator. The Battle Arena has one of the most interesting concepts I’ve always felt, and so this was a challenge that attempted to replicate it. Each player had 3 dummy Pokemon that could be used in case theirs lost after the third turn. I think this challenge rewards the players who come up with interesting strategies to make use of the lack of switching and the three turn limit. billy came up with two very innovative teams I felt and he definitely deserved to win, although Blazade might have made it a little too easy for him by DD’ing on an Alakazam that might’ve had Trick. A very fun challenge, and I’d love to be able to include more Battle Frontier challenges in the future.
With billy winning again, it meant that the alliance of three would have to turn on each other. And this is where I really think Blazade missed a very good chance to put himself in a good light for the Jury. Trace was smart to recognize that rssp was by far the best vote, which billy joined in on. Blazade, being true to his day 1 alliance, and rssp both voted Trace. I don’t think rssp did much work in trying to convince either billy or Trace of anything until the revote.
In PM, I think billy laid out the situation smartly. He preferred a Trace vote out in case of a final 2, but preferred rssp for a final 3 (aside: it should’ve been really obvious that it was a final 3 as soon as Haruno joined the Jury. But then RODAN’s quit and him not becoming a Jury member meant that it had to be a final 2, since a six person Jury with a final 3 has the possibility of becoming an unbreakable tie. is no good). rssp1 pleaded with billy to change his vote and he did in the end, voting out Trace, which I do think was a good decision for billy’s game, which required him to win out to make the end. I think Blazade missed a huge opportunity to vote out what should’ve been the most obvious threat to win, but the way he read the game meant that wasn’t happening (more on that later).
The tiebreak would’ve been a bo3 rand bats, including singles, doubles, and triples. Trace probably would’ve had the advantage, but in randbats, anything is possible.
TraceofLife voted 2-2 (2-0 in the revote)
TraceofLife is basically an unknown quantity in the Circus community and it pleases me that at least someone not established managed to make it far in the game. Trace’s reputation as being a strong battler coming from Pokemon Online meant that he survived the early game with relative ease. The danger then became being voted out in the early stages of the merge. His prowess in immunity challenges; something that everyone seemed to worry about, never really seemed to come to fruition. While he never performed poorly, it didn’t really ever seem like he was ever in a position to actually win challenges, always falling short of the finals of challenges. As for his social game, he did a good job of maneuvering himself out of trouble, and in particular finding a solid alliance with Blazade and rssp. While I’m not sure if he approached them, or if it was more rssp1 bringing him in, in any case, that deal paid dividends for him. If billy doesn’t win the challenge, it’s very likely that Trace has a good shot of winning a final immunity and making it to the end. Does he beat rssp or Blazade? It’s hard to say: my feelings were that Blazade was always going to be a goat (never going to win) but based on how the Jury felt, it’s possible that it would have been close between the two. Trace had an underdog story going for him, but it’s hard to say if he really connected with the other Jury members, especially since he wasn’t on a super lot (although that’s maybe more the fault of timezones). In any case, a really strong performance by him overall, and I think he’s done really well to place top 4.
The Final Individual Immunity Challenge
I never wanted this challenge to have to take place – even though I like final 2s much more than final 3s, challenge-wise, it’s just very hard to come up with a fair challenge. The ones I like the best, endurance challenges, cannot be replicated in an online setting. Rotating randbats until a winner was the best compromise for such a challenge. This one was over a lot quicker than I thought. The rotation was first triples, then doubles, and then singles, with 48 hours to complete the battles. Maybe I should’ve gone with “skill-based” tiers, or perhaps started with randbat doubles. Even if triples is too random, these challenges are never meant to be fair necessarily, and I think that if you put yourself in a position where you need to win challenges to survive, that goes to show that you probably didn’t play a great social game. Sorry. In any case, the real controversy of this challenge was when rssp1 beat billy, meaning he only needed to win versus Blazade, and in a very anti-climatic twist, Blazade simply forfeited. Right there, I felt that was another mistake by Blazade – I thought this challenge was the perfect opportunity for him to throw. Had he even tried to attempt to beat rssp1, he could’ve placated billy and potentially had his vote up for grabs. By quitting immediately to allow rssp1 to win, he gave up billy’s vote. I would’ve been really salty if I was billy in that spot so I can’t blame him at all.
The vote was obvious and rssp didn’t need time to think about it. Maybe it would’ve been better to force him to wait 24 hours so billy would have a chance to plead his case, but I doubt it would’ve mattered.
billymills voted out 1-0
billy was a maverick this game, which I think is the best word to describe his play. At times, his activity was spotty and his awareness of the things going on in the game were not so good, but he managed to make it work well enough to achieve a third place finish. His teams for the Battle Arena challenge were super smart and definitely impressed me a lot and he definitely did do a good job at staying under the radar and keeping himself alive. Even though he may have made some weird votes (the rssp1 vote in the F8 comes to mind), I can’t really pinpoint a part of the game where he actually made something I would consider a mistake. Instead, he was another person that was essentially screwed by RODAN quitting, so he had to make it work from there and almost did. He was one Random Triples battle away from most likely winning, and I do have to give him a lot of credit for playing smart when he needed to be. I was rooting for him as the underdog by the end of the game, but sometimes those underdog stories just don’t work out :/
The Final Tribal Council
Finally, after a little over three months, we reached final tribal council. FTC went pretty well I would say, I thought both Blazade and rssp1 did a good job of defending their games (in fact I was surprised, but very happy as to the vigor of their posts).
The Jury was an interesting bunch. I was a little worried about how serious the earlier Jury members would take the vote, or if they had forgotten the game completely. I know rssp expressed doubts to me about people just voting randomly, but in the end I think for the most part people voted seriously? Twin said he would coin flip, IDK if he really did, and I think Haruno was always going to vote rssp. Haruno’s criteria for a winner was being the best battler, and I think rssp1 was definitely a better battler than Blazade, even if Blazade did win a couple immunities. Walrein and Yeti also voted rssp1, with Yeti’s vote technically not being about the game. Walrein felt that rssp1 played a more up-front game and respected his activity more than Blazade’s under the radar game. zorbees I think was always going to be voting rssp1 for essentially the same reasons as Walrein. Blazade blew any chance of winning billy’s vote by forfeiting the final immunity. His one vote came from, maybe surprisingly from TraceofLife. I don’t any insight on why Trace voted the way I did, but perhaps he respected Blazade’s game and his status as maybe being more on the outside of circus compared to rssp? IDK if that’s true or not so Trace would have to expand.
I knew people would be tempted not to take things seriously and mess around, but for the most part I was happy with the Jury’s activity and the discussion that took place between them and the finalists.
The Runner Up: Blazade
Honestly, at the beginning of this game I thought it would be really funny if Blazade managed to make it to the end and win, giving him two individual victories in “game-show” like games (the other being the Genius game). Blazade is clearly a very smart guy and I think he definitely has to be commended for finishing second as well. He played a pretty good game just to make it to the end, but there’s no question in my mind that he misread the Jury and made a couple of key mistakes that prevented him from (in my eyes) giving him any shot/a better shot at winning. Where I thought he misread the game was his belief that the Circus regulars would automatically give a win to anyone that was a circus regular over someone not as established as himself, which is why he felt that he had to go to end with rssp in order to stand any chance of winning. I think that sort of attitude held him back in terms of preventing him from making moves and proving to people he wasn’t being entirely passive. billy alluded to talking to him about “playing for second” and in all honesty while Blazade might disagree with that assessment, for me it felt like that’s what Blazade was doing. I’m not sure why he thought his best shot was with rssp, someone who he should’ve known was fairly popular / respected by most of the people on the Jury. I think it would’ve been much smarter for him to take a shot against billy or even Trace (especially considering that Trace isn’t really known in circus!).
The two mistakes he made came down in the lategame (I think he played the early game fairly flawlessly, forming a strong alliance that basically covered up his challenge weakness, which wasn’t even that bad imo – Pokemon is easy :]). The first mistake was the final four, where I feel it would’ve been really smart to vote out rssp1. And this just goes back to him failing to realize that rssp1 was by far the biggest threat to win once zorbees was voted out. The second mistake I think was how he dealt with the final immunity challenge. It should’ve been really obvious that just giving up would make billy extraordinarily unhappy. It would be very unsportsmanlike to not even attempt the challenge, and by doing that he threw away a vote that he could’ve used. Maybe billy was never going to vote for him anyways and it wouldn’t have mattered. That’s a possibility. But I think the smarter way for him to play that challenge out would’ve been to throw it in terms of losing to both billy and rssp and letting them play it out for immunity. At that point, there was no way billy or rssp were not voting each other out. By not screwing either party over, he gets a shot at winning billy’s vote, or if billy wins, he for sure gets rssp1’s vote without directly screwing him over. I think if he does that, he is better positioned to argue at final tribal that he wasn’t rssp’s passenger and that he was just looking for the right moment to make a move.
I wrote a lot of stuff that could be construed as criticism of Blazade’s game, but I’m not intending to be malicious. The part that is interesting to talk about in terms of his game is what I think he could’ve done to put himself in a position to win. Disregarding that, Blazade did extremely well to get to the finals I think, but it just wouldn’t be as interesting to talk about! Overall, I feel that Blazade has a lot to be happy about in getting so far and I really feel that he wasn’t a bad runner-up but that he had a very real chance to win if he had played just slightly differently.
The Winner: rssp1
rssp1 was one of the most motivated players in this game, always coming to me to talk about his thoughts, fears, etc. For that reason he was one of my most favorite players in the game. I think he is definitely a most deserving winner, even if he did get some luck to do so.
From the beginning, rssp made a game-winning move in forming an alliance with Blazade, an alliance that would last until the end of the game. Of course, you could say that rssp was lucky that Blazade never turned on him. While that is true to some extent, having such an early alliance I think made it harder for Blazade to backstab him, given that they had worked together for so long. After that, creating a strong Okata alliance was also instrumental in ensuring he made it to the merge. And if Twin hadn’t flipped, then it would’ve been very likely that he would have breezed through to the final 6 before he would really have to start playing.
As things would have it, Twin did flip, putting rssp in a pretty precarious position. I think if rssp was a little overconfident that Twin would stick with his alliance here, and it didn’t seem like he had any backup plans. But I think the strength of his alliance was that, even if inadvertently, his alliance contained other players that people would see as threats, in RODAN and Haruno. After being betrayed by Twin, he did a good job at stopping the bleeding and working with zorbees to get Twin out.
rssp executed the f7 vote very well, and perhaps the others are to blame for not discussing the vote with each other, but there’s no question he was responsible for orchestrating this vote. Was Yeti the right person to vote out here? I think there was a lot of risk inherent in this vote, and I’m not quite convinced that it was completely worthwhile to remove her at this point in the game. I feel that it would have been much safer to vote off zorbees and then attempt to try and win Yeti’s vote at the final six. Instead, voting off Yeti meant that rssp1 had to rely on a vote tiebreaker going his alliance’s way (assuming no flip by Trace). Instead, RODAN quit which gave his alliance the outright majority. I think it was a risky move to vote Yeti out, but things went his way and RODAN quitting meant that it all worked out.
From there, things were relatively smooth sailing. That is, until billy started to win immunity challenges. billy winning at the final 4 complicated things greatly, as for really the first time, he was in a lot of danger. But he managed to convince billy at the revote that Trace was the bigger threat in terms of battling (although I will say I think people underrated rssp’s battling ability, as he did go 3-0 to begin the game before he threw a couple challenges!). I think both parties made the right choice here: rssp1 did a good job at convincing billy, and billy did make the right choice as I do think Trace is a better battler than rssp1. After that, rssp1 won the final challenge and made a smart choice in taking Blazade to the end, who I never thought had much of a shot against him.
Overall, there is no doubt in my mind that rssp deserved to win the game. Even though he was perhaps gifted a path to the end by Blazade, he made a bunch of crucial moves and did well to recover from mishaps that weakened his position during the game. I think there’s something to be said that even though people recognized him as a threat during the touchy subjects challenge, he still managed to reach the end and deservedly win. Thanks for being an awesome player rssp1, and congratulations on achieving a well-deserved victory!
Closing Thoughts
This was a really fun game to host. I think everyone should be able to tell how I feel about this game given how much I wrote about it LOL. Survivor as a concept is probably the most interesting social game created ever in my eyes, in terms of looking at human behavior and what not. Online survivor presents a number of difficulties in running a game smoothly, but I think my design ended up working out for the most part, and I’m very happy that I wasn’t ever forced to sub people out or that a whole bunch of people lost interest in playing. Even though there were some people who did check out of the game, I would still consider the overall game to be a success.
I had a lot of fun hosting this game and I would love to be able to hold another installment in maybe 2 and a half months or no later than next summer, depending on people’s availabilities. I might put up a poll sooner or later to see how people feel about that. That’s all I have to say about Survivor and this game, but please feel free to give me feedback on how you thought my hosting was, things that could potentially be improved upon for a second installment, and just any random thoughts you have (this goes for both players and spectators). That about wraps things up, so for the final time, thanks for playing and thanks for reading any amount of this postgame!
Spreadsheet Link
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LolpedVKiQkMnifLfaZWz0bC2WXNxD66aasn9F1wGQ0/edit?usp=sharing
Introduction – skip this if you don’t care about Survivor the TV show, how the game was made or how the tribes were set up.
Game Premise
I’m a huge fan of the Survivor television show (go check it out if you haven’t already!). I think the game of Survivor itself is very interesting and lends well to a competitive person such as myself. Both the physical challenges in combination with the survival element and of course, the social game create game that is multi-faceted and quite interesting as a result. The storylines and characters on the show are so memorable because they are real people, which makes the drama all the more exciting. In any case, I wanted to host this game because of how much I liked the show. Of course, the idea has been tried in the past. zorbees’s game a couple years back was basically an attempt at replicating the show in an online format. While I personally had fun while it lasted, it ended up breaking down and being abandoned at around the fourth or fifth tribal council. The concept was good, but I think it was held back by trying to be like a normal smogmaf game by including roles and things like that. The challenges also were pretty boring and probably led to people losing interest.
With that in mind, I worked on getting together a game that I thought would hold people’s interest long enough to reach the end. I think having Pokemon-based challenges was very important to ensure that people would be invested in the game. Everyone comes to Smogon presumably because they like(d) Pokemon to some degree, so everyone should have at least a little experience when it comes to mons. I thought I could put together a fun FFA-style game with an emphasis on Pokemon that people would enjoy. I do think that the battling aspect definitely made the game a lot more fun then say zorbees’s challenges, and got people engaged in the game beyond just voting people out!
One area where this game would be different from actual Survivor and even other online Survivor games was the fact that the playerlist would likely be filled with people who already knew each other fairly well – this was basically to be expected since the people most likely to join the game would be circus regulars / people who occasionally browse and pay attention to the subforum. Those users are usually the same, so there wouldn’t necessarily be the factor of having to get to know new players. Of course, certain users, like King, were essentially new and thus had the difficult proposition of “fitting in.” This was probably unavoidable, but at the very least, my hope was that people wouldn’t cling to users they already knew and would try to branch out. I think this did happen to some extent and it was nice to see more unknown users make it far!
As a final note, one interesting difference about online Survivor is the anonymity. You don’t truly live on a beach with other people all the time, so I was interested in seeing how this would play out. Online, it’s almost impossible to detect alliances because you don’t know when people are talking behind your back and it’s basically impossible to find out. That said, it does at the same time make it a little easier to backstab players, so I definitely wondered if the game would turn out a lot like other more mafia-like FFAs, or if people would stick with their alliances with people they knew (as stated above). With these thoughts in mind, there wasn’t anything I could really do but observe. And thus, I went to create the tribes!
The Playerlist
Picking out the playerlist was hard – and I think I only had a couple over the max player limit!
(aside: I really like 16 players even in real Survivor – you get more of a chance to get to know people. For this game, I didn’t want to go to 18 and definitely not 20 because I didn’t want the game to drag plus more players means a higher likelihood of idlers).
First off, I want to say sorry to all those I didn’t include – Flyhn, Nomark, Celever, and Tymano. The main priority I had in picking the playerlist was choosing players that I was confident would be active. My first choices were obviously the circus vets, who I felt I could count on to be active. From there, I chose other Smogoners that were regularly active, especially on other parts of the site. I knew Trace from Pokemon Online and knew him to be active, so I thought he would be a good choice. The last couple spots I gave to Maleovex, ButteredToast, and Ullar. From those I didn’t pick – namely Nomark and Tymano, I wasn’t sure about their activity and felt that I couldn’t pick them. In hindsight, both have remained active all throughout the time the game has ran, and it’s too bad they couldn’t have played instead of certain players who idled or quit (more on this later :) Maleovex was fairly new but I felt that he deserved a spot (and he wasn’t entirely new, having played in the previous mafia game). Ullar, Flyhn, and Celever were all circus regulars and it was very hard deciding to exclude. In the end I let Ullar in, although I think Flyhn probably would have been a better choice – but I was concerned about his activity, same with Celever (which was probably the right choice since he doesn’t seem to be very active on the site). Even though I didn’t get a ton of signups, it was still a hard to get a good playerlist imo. I think in the end I definitely got a good group of users, and I think the game reflects this as well.
If I decide to run another Survivor (likely!) those who didn’t game in will be guaranteed spots (and Memoric too who expressed interest a little too late :[
Setting Up the Tribes
Yeah, the tribes weren’t even. I’ll say that straight up. I do feel Moto was underrated at the start, but it soon became clear to me that Okata on the whole was stronger in terms of battling skill. I wanted the tribes to be even as possible, but I also wanted to be sure that both teams were fairly equal in terms of active participants. Plus I didn’t want to circus regulars to all be on the same team. I figured the three best battlers would be Haruno (badged), TraceofLife (he’s a tier leader on PO/tutor/on a WCoP team) and Mithril (won a WCoP lol). Unfortunately, I probably underrated zorbees and RODAN and overrated billy. Probably if I had to make one change, swapping zorbees for billy might’ve have been a good one. In the end, I think Okata underestimated Moto, but it didn’t really end up mattering given that they were overall were stronger. I had no idea how good Blazade was and I probably overrated Maleovex too much as well. Swapping rssp1 and Maleovex probably would have been a good choice too for the purpose of balancing. After Okata won the second challenge handedly, I just started hoping the tribe swap would balance things out a bit x_x (which it sort of did)
Balancing tribes was always going to be hard and it was never going to be perfect, but I just wanted to avoid one tribe completely dominating. Luckily, things did seem to turn out okay in that regard as you all know or will see later :]
So that’s basically the pre-game stuff out of the way. The tribe names were based off Japanese villages near the volcanoes that Cinnabar Island is based off of. Because Pokemon and all that. I like doing flavor but at the same time it takes time and I can be a little lazy so I didn’t really branch out to and try to make this an immersive experience or whatever.
Game Recap
The meat of this postgame. I’m basically going to go challenge by challenge, player by player. I’ll start with any important pre-challenge stuff, followed by covering the challenge, and then tribal council. Then I’ll do an overview of how each player did in my eyes.
The First Alliances are Formed
Right off the back, there were two attempts at making alliances, one for each tribe. For Okata, RODAN / Twin / rssp1 / Blazade / Haruno grouped up, with rssp1 and Blazade having a closer “side” alliance. On Moto, TIK / King_ / ButteredToast / Walrein got together, although this alliance was a little shakier given that Walrein had expressed doubts working with the aforementioned players. Otherwise, there wasn’t much wheeling and dealing going on, which I guess is to be expected given that it could potentially be a while before any of that stuff would become necessary (plus not really a need to get to know ppl due to most players knowing each other).
Challenge 1
The first challenge was a simple one, just to get the game going and people interested. It would have to be applicable to all, including those who weren’t necessarily “Pokemon masters.” Random battle was the obvious choice and there’s not much to say about the tiers themselves (although I do love me some triples nowadays, even if it’s very luck-based). This challenge was super close, and I thought Moto probably could’ve pulled out a win had TIK played Ullar. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, TIK decided that he wanted to pull out. I tried to initially find a sub for him instead of dooming Moto to the loss, but I realized that it would just be best if he was voted out (which seemed to be what most people on Moto felt).
So Moto lost and off to tribal they went. At this point, King_ was super active in talking to people, and setting up alliances on the side. The benefit on the game being online is that it’s hard to tell who is talking behind whose back and figuring out where the “majority” is. As a weaker battler, King_ did a really good job I think in being proactive and talking to people, which probably saved him after Moto lost the next challenge. It seemed like this would have been a good spot for TIK’s initial alliance to come into play and assert their power, but in the end with TIK wanting to pull out that “alliance” basically fizzled out. TIK not playing his battle (which I would’ve subbed him and allowed Flyhn to play if Moto wanted to) eventually led to his demise. Because of how important winning challenges were, TIK’s alliance fell to the wayside and he was gone.
TIK voted out 8-0
TIK disappeared for whatever reasons and it was too bad. He got together an early alliance of 4 albeit with a reluctant Walrein that could’ve really controlled the tribe. It didn’t happen and TIK went home. Would’ve loved to see what TIK had up his sleeve but sometimes things just don’t work out. This is definitely one of those situations where if TIK actually played the game, things would’ve been a lot spicier. Instead, I’m left with a sense that I should’ve picked someone like Nomark to include over him. Oh well. (Aside: I know technically you can’t vote for yourself, but I figured in cases where people just gave up, it was easier to just allow self-votes, instead of randing a vote/forcing them to pick someone. Either way it didn’t really change the game and was a more honest reflection of the vote so I ran with it).
Second challenge
Nothing happened gameplay-wise prior to this challenge so let’s skip that part. Okata won again, this time with a commanding lead. 4-1 and it probably wasn’t ever in doubt considering Twin likely would’ve won a tier he’s won a forum tourney in (Ubers). Maleovex actually did a good job at surprising rssp1 (a strong LCer) but he got unlucky with a Stone Edge miss (although a miss was probably inevitable). Nothing else really to say about this challenge, just your bread and butter ORAS tiers.
Maleovex voted out 3-2-1-1
While Maleovex ended up returning for the vote, being away clearly hurt him as he didn’t have a chance to talk to people in order to figure out what was going on. The vote seemed to show a Mithril + Walrein duo versus Trace + billy + king_, which was initially orchestrated by King_. BT had the odd man out vote on billy here, and Mal voted BT. Another vote for King_ would’ve tied things, but alas, Mal had no way of knowing to vote for King_ and paid the price as a result. I was going to rand his vote (which I would’ve felt really bad about, only 1/6 chance of voting “correctly”) but good thing for me in the end Mal voted BT sealing his fate. Pretty unlucky, I think. If he wins a single battle/can talk to people, he probably sticks around and King_ goes home. Was sad to see him go home because I think he had potential to fly under the radar if he could’ve made it to the merge (which admittedly would’ve been a hard task anyways).
Third challenge
Hey, Moto won a challenge! This was the weird other metas challenge. This was initially going to be the fourth challenge, but I swapped the two because all gens made more sense to do after this challenge (I did this before the second challenge’s outcome was known, since I was worried about having to have 2 ORAS OU slots which I felt would’ve been weird). This was also initially a different challenge, it was going to be a crew battle. I didn’t want to do that though because I feared that timezone differences would mean that it would take forever for the challenge to finish. Thus, the other metas challenge was born! This one came down to the wire, requiring a tie-breaker. billy won the rematch in Hackmons Cup and Trace clutched up in Balanced Hackmons. I was surprised that Okata chose Battle Factory or that they didn’t give Haruno BH, given that rssp1 didn’t seem super comfortable with the tier? It wasn’t really a huge mistake or anything though, Moto just performed better in the end.
Back at camp, there was nothing to talk about as Ullar asked to be voted out.
Ullar voted out 8-0
I don’t know if Ullar really talked to his teammates individually at all…probably not? In any case, I guess he was pretty much the obvious first boot since the beginning of the game. Didn’t put up any of a fight and that’s all I really have to say about him lol. Another player slot which would’ve been better had someone else taken it.
THE TWIST
This method of switching tribes was done so that there could be no claim that it was “rigged” or whatever. Since tribe swaps can be pretty contentious this is one area where I think it’s best to let the players choose their fortunes. rssp1 was really smart in telling his tribemates to pick all odd numbers, something I didn’t take into consideration at all. Fortunately for me, I didn’t look entirely silly in the end as there was some movement, with King_ and Mithril moving to Okata and zorbees and Twin moving in the other direction. While I don’t think anyone was outright screwed from the swap, King_ and Mithril were definitely given a raw deal in the sense that they switched to a tribe that had a clear, solid five (or four if you don’t count Yeti), even if they didn’t know it.
Fourth Challenge
This is probably my favorite team challenge if only because I find that all gens tournaments are a lot of fun. The different mechanics between each generation really play a part and I just enjoy how seeing how the game evolves from gen to gen. Unfortunately, this challenge was actually thrown by Okata (in order to both get King out and give Twin and zorbees some time to potentially assimilate with the other tribe). As a result, we basically missed out on any competition which was too bad. rssp’s game was pretty “bad” but I think Blazade took the cake in terms of throwing. He ran a really weird RBY team with fucking Kingler and switched in Gengar into a really obv Exeguttor psychic? I don’t think anyone on the other tribe picked up on the throw though, as otherwise I feared for Okata that in the future the Moto tribe might try to throw the next two challenges in order to even up the numbers. Luckily for them, that didn’t end up happening. In any case, Moto won this one real easily leaving Okata to go to tribal council.
King_ clearly knew he was on the chopping block, given his lackluster challenge performances. He tried PMing players individually, and attempted to play rssp1 and Blazade? I believe? against each other. Unluckily for him, he had no way of knowing both were part of a tight 4, and everyone knew what was happening behind the scenes. He tried to stir up as much of a ruckus as he could, but the vote was probably a foregone conclusion as soon as the twist had happened.
King_ voted out 6-1
King_ was honestly my favorite pre-merge player just for the fact that he was the player that did the most to make things happen. He was always on the outs I think just simply because he didn’t really have a circus reputation that allowed him to make those sort of connections easily. As a result he had to work harder to make those, and it worked out for him when he managed to get Maleovex over himself out. I felt that it was always going to be a tough ask for King to make even the merge, so I’m very happy that he prolonged his stay in the game as much as he could. Maybe even if doesn’t get put on Okata he gets a lot further. Someone who I would love to have play the game again :]
Fifth challenge
This challenge seemed really boring on paper so I tried to add a points system really quickly to spice things up a bit. That obviously didn’t work as Blazade and I think zorbees both quickly figured out the points didn’t matter. Clearly not well thought out by me, oops. Otherwise, I liked the premise of the challenge, but if I were to run it again, I would do something where the tribes could bet on each challenge, with the winner taking all of those points. IDK just something to make the battles more interesting. Randbats were randbats, and the only interesting battle to note was the VGC match where Blazade rekt Twin who was lazy and just used a big 6 team lol. Blazade’s team which was given to him by Haruno was really clever and I actually used a variant of it in a Survivor game I’m playing on a different site… but yeah anyways that’s about it for this challenge. Moto lost.
Back at camp, ButteredToast felt that he wasn’t pulling his weight and offered himself as sacrifice/asked to be voted out. So there no real strategizing that happened, which was sort of a shame, as I felt that the ambiguity of alliances within Moto meant that any tribal council would’ve been really interesting. As luck would have it, that didn’t happen and BT was voted out unanimously.
ButteredToast voted out 6-0
I had some decent expectations for BT, figuring he would be an interesting under the radar player that with some luck might get decently far. As things would happen, he decided to throw in the towel instead of fighting for his life. While I know that a lot of people aren’t super familiar with Survivor, I think BT is a good example of taking the challenges too seriously – it’s important to remember that this game isn’t about winning challenges, but about making alliances that will take you far in the game. He gets plus points from me for that funny David Ortiz gif he posted after winning in the first challenge though!
Sixth challenge
The final challenge before the merge (although this wasn’t yet known). This one was a little confusing, and I must admit I wish I thought up of a more interesting challenge, but it served its purpose well enough. Haruno ended up losing his first game in a rematch of ORAS RU to Trace. Surprisingly, the only Okata member that managed to win was Yeti, while everyone else was beaten pretty soundly.
At camp, this vote was probably really never in question. I’m not sure if Mithril tried talking to people or if Yeti was concerned about being voted out, but I believe the Okata 4 told Yeti what was going on. As a result Mithril ended up being voted out in another uncontroversial vote.
Mithril voted out 5-1
Mithril was a player who got screwed over by being swapped to the other tribe. His game was pretty unremarkable. He didn’t make any moves, unless you count his vote against King_ in the second tribal. I’m not sure if he really talked to anyone or got into any alliances with the exception of that second tribal where I believe he was working with Walrein. Overall, I think Mithril got a tad unlucky because I think he is definitely a player that is good enough to sneak by the early stages of the game and get to the merge. As things happened, the twist ensured that didn’t happen and he left just one spot shy of the Jury.
THE MERGE
Pretty standard merge at 10 for a game with 16 players. The big question became whether or not the former Okata members would come back to their original tribe and end up Pagonging (survivor term for voting off the opposition tribe in succession) the Motos. I was really worried that this would happen and turn the game into a snooze-fest, at least until the Okatas would have to turn on each other. Even then, I feared that even that would be pretty predictable. But before that, we have a challenge!
Individual Immunity (II) Challenge 1
This challenge was a fun one I thought, and I like the premise a lot. I picked 1v1 challenge cup to keep the games short and sweet and to ensure maximum activity. As luck had it, Trace somehow dominated this challenge, getting some really good mons. As Trace was the biggest challenge threat from Moto, this was a pretty important challenge to win, as it prevented the Okatas from ganging up on him should they have decided to stick together.
Trouble in Paradise
The big question: would Twin return to his original alliance? And could they convince zorbees and Yeti to join in on the vote? Trace winning was bad for the second question at least, as other than Trace there wasn’t anyone I’m sure people would have considered a “challenge threat.” But Twin came back to haunt his alliance as he decided to flip which I think in general wasn’t a bad move from him. What failed him as we will see later was his inability to truly create an alliance with the Motos that would carry through to the later stages of the game, and not just come together for one vote.
Anyways, so Twin flipped but theoretically the Okata 4 still had the zorbees and more likely Yeti’s vote on the table. The fact that Twin knew all the inner workings of the alliance probably made it pretty easy to persuade zorbees, although Yeti really had to think things over to decide what to do. In the end, I think she made a smart move of flipping over, which broke up the foursome for the time being.
Haruno voted out 6-4
Haruno was one of the original alliance members, and being perceived as the strongest battler came back to bite him as he was voted out for his potential challenge prowess. I enjoyed Haruno’s presence in this game, he was a pretty funny guy and as a newer circus face I’m glad he made it to the Jury stage of the game! His play was good but nothing noteworthy. He was a part of the dominant Okata alliance that ran the pre-merge stage of the game. I think he had an interesting point of view of the game, believing that challenge prowess was the most important factor in winning. I’m not sure whether or not his final vote actually reflected that viewpoint in the end, or if he just randomized his vote, but in any case, he was a fun guy to have around and I’m glad he participated.
II Challenge 2 (Final 9)
This was the Randbat singles ladder challenge (idea stolen from the OLT). I liked this challenge a lot, with the only drawback being that I had to time it meaning there was no way it could end early. I chose randbats to give everyone a fighting chance, meaning that it was more about the time you dedicated to grinding the ladder instead of your skill in a certain tier. As things would happen, only two players really went for it, those two being Trace and zorbees. Walrein and billy came sort of close but I think plateaued around 1500 while Trace and zorbees went into the high 1700s iirc. On basically the last day zorbees overtook Trace who had built what seemed to be an insurmountable lead after the first two days, giving zorbees his first individual immunity win and keeping him safe.
After the challenge, Twin tried to rally everyone to vote off RODAN, another member of the original Okata alliance. However, rssp1, who was understandably pretty worried after his alliance had basically been dismantled, worked with zorbees and Trace to ensure that Twin would be voted off instead.
Twin voted off 6-3
I appreciated Twin’s play for the fact that he spiced the game up by alerting everyone to the presence of a strong Okata alliance at the final 10. Was this a good move for his game? It’s hard to say. Assuming all of the Motos were voted off leaving the six original Okata members, it seems quite plausible that they could have potentially decided to boot him early, especially because he was the only to swap tribes. Probably the real downside to flipping was losing the potential Jury votes of his former alliance members. In that sense, the move probably wasn’t the best for his game, but I do think there was a legitimate concern that maybe his alliance had moved on without him/replaced him for Yeti. If Twin felt he was at the bottom, then flipping makes total sense imo. As things happened, Twin’s downfall was that he failed to create any meaningful connections with the other Motos beyond the f10 vote. His betrayal of his former alliance was used by rssp1 to convince others that Twin couldn’t be trusted and that voting him off would be a worthwhile vote. In an alternate universe, it’s interesting to consider how this game might’ve turned out had RODAN been voted off here instead…
II Challenge 3 (Final 8)
I liked this challenge too although I do feel that it is very gameable if you know what is coming (where it’s actually better to be a lower seed). As it happened, Blazade the 7 seed ended up playing Yeti the 8 seed, with Blazade winning. Overall a fun challenge I think in that it allows players to showcase their strength in whatever tier they feel they happen to be good in.
Following this challenge, Walrein made a concerted effort to try and convince everyone to vote Trace out. Unfortunately for him, his plea fell on deaf ears and things turned on him and he was voted out. billy was completely out of the loop on this one, throwing away his vote on rssp1.
Walrein voted out 5-2-1
Walrein’s strategy of playing as a freelancer didn’t pan out for him, although I feel in different circumstances it probably would’ve worked out very well. His main downfall was the fact that he lacked a partner or someone who could give him information regarding what everyone else wanted to do and that there wasn’t really two sides he could play against each other. It was more like one small group and then a bunch of freelancers. By being the one trying to make a proactive move, I think he inadvertently put a spotlight upon himself. It would’ve been better I feel if he had maybe been more subtle about bringing Trace up. Other than that, I felt Walrein did okay this game. I feel like there wasn’t too many opportunities for him to try and make moves or shake the game up, except for the time he did and was voted out lol. He tried to vote King out and failed, but that failure didn’t really affect things for him. Overall, I think Walrein did okay this game. I probably expected him to make it to the merge, in complete honest. I liked his strategy that he attempted to run with and I think he probably is a very interesting character if things go more his way.
II Challenge 4 (Final 7)
Touchy subjects…this was a fun challenge to do and my only regret is I didn’t ask more questions! This challenge involved the contestants answering some questions about each other, and then having to pick who they thought the tribe thought was the most picked answer. The stages thing didn’t seem so well-thought out because I changed it at the last second. Originally it was going to be first person to get three questions right, but that was obviously going to get boring really fast and prevent me from revealing the majority of the questions. Some people thought it was going to be a coconut chop, which is a variant of the challenge in which every player gets three lives, and every question you get right, you “chop” one of the lives of your fellow competitors. That variant is also pretty interesting but it suffers in that it’s very easy to control who wins immunity. I wanted the challenge to be fair so that you could win of your own accord, instead of relying on the whims of other players. The first stage was too easy because I gave everyone a free point with the “who is the funniest player?” question. That one was legitimately impossible to miss unless you idled the entire game (even if you idled you should’ve gotten it right anyways lol). The second set of questions included some really tricky ones such as “Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game” which no one got correct. RODAN won this one, although rssp1 would’ve tied him (but still would’ve lost under the tiebreak rules) if he hadn’t picked some weird answers towards the end. I think he was sort of trying to throw to avoid getting on bad terms with anyone which was smart of him I think. In the end, I’m not sure how much this challenge affected the rest of the game, but it definitely revealed that people thought and knew that zorbees and rssp1 were big threats.
Before tribal, it seemed like most people were either for a Trace vote or a zorbees vote. This vote was probably the biggest “play” in the sense that rssp1 worked really hard to maneuver things. While his reasoning was maybe a tad shaky, his ultimate goal of removing Yeti was not a bad one. He managed to play two sides against each other very well, ensuring that neither side had a reason to talk to the other. I think if this vote turns out any differently we have a very different final 6. As things happened however, Yeti was blindsided, with Trace, rssp, and Blazade voting her, billy and Yeti voting zorbees, and RODAN and zorbees voting Trace.
Yeti voted out 3-2-2
Yeti might count herself a tad unlucky to be voted so “early.” I think as soon as she got past the pre-merge she was definitely going to be a threat to get close to the end. While I know a lot of people said that she had no chance of winning the game in the above challenge, I always felt that people would have to respect the game that she played to get to the end, assuming she got there. But as it happened, rssp viewed her as a threat and decided to vote her out. Obviously, it’s a mistake on her part not to talk to everyone else and see what they were up to. If she does that, Yeti probably sticks around a lot longer, given that everyone felt that she was poor in challenges and probably an easy opponent to go up against in the end. Was that necessarily true? It’s difficult to say. I’m surprised that trace and Blazade agreed to vote her out given that they probably had a good shot at winning against her, but that’s just how it happened and I think rssp can take a lot of credit for that. Strategically, I think she did alright, although she didn’t really look to make any early alliances. Perhaps if she had done that, she would’ve had an easier time to get to the merge (considering that a lot of the pre-merge votes were out of her control) and could’ve avoiding being blindsided. Overall, Yeti is always a fun person to have around in games for being pretty funny (and annoying!) and what not, so I was happy that she managed to avoid getting voted out early!
RODAN quits
Honestly, I understand when people have the desire to quit. The game is a long one, and even though I warned people about what they were getting into, I totally get when something unexpected comes up and you have to quit. I get that. So where does RODAN quitting fall under that spectrum? I’m not sure and really it’s not my place to delve into that. I understand there was some stuff going on in firebot or something but beyond that it’s not really necessary to delve into it. On the other hand, fuck quitters lol. It just really fucks up the game and isn’t fair not just to me, but to the other players in the game as well. RODAN quit in the middle of II Challenge 5 during a very crucial point in the game. Had RODAN not quit, I think him, zorbees, and billy’s chances of winning are much higher. Assuming one of those three wins (and billy ended up winning) they have a 3/5 chance of winning the rocks tiebreaker and possibly can win the vote outright if they can flip Trace. RODAN quitting prevented all that from happening and basically ensured that zorbees and billy most likely would have to rely on a challenge run to make it further.
RODAN’s play was decent I felt. I was looking forward to him playing given that he’s such a big fan of the game. While he didn’t make any necessarily big moves, I don’t blame him because he otherwise played a very smart game in terms of making an alliance, being solid with it, and generally staying low under the radar otherwise. I’m not sure how active he was in shaping votes but he did manage to escape the F9 when it seemed like his alliance might be getting picked off one by one. While I was excited to have RODAN in my game, him quitting turned what had been an overall decent performance into one that felt like it prevented this game from really being unpredictable.
II Challenge 5 (Final 5)
Since RODAN quit in the middle of a challenge what I did was make what was formerly to be the F6 challenge the F5 immunity challenge and just booted what was initially going to be that challenge (so II Challenge 5 becomes 6, 6 is removed completely). Honestly, challenge 6 was going to take a long time anyways (it was round robin with every player playing each other in 4 different tiers, with the tiers picked by each player), so not a huge loss there. This challenge was a seeded double elimination ORAS tournament. In the seeding stage, Blazade forfeited all his matches for whatever reason, while both Trace and zorbees quickly showed why they were considered challenge threats, wrapping up the 1 and 2 seed, ensuring they would receive byes. As a result of RODAN quitting, everyone agreed to dropping the double elimination part of the challenge. billy beat rssp and RODAN quit giving Blazade a bye. Then, two upsets occurred as Blazade and billy beat their opponents to advance to the finals. From there, billy secured a victory over Blazade, ensuring that the Immunity necklace would not be going back to Blazade for a second time.
With RODAN gone, the alliance of Trace, rssp, and Blazade had vote control and there wasn’t much to discuss.
zorbees voted out 3-1-1
billy voted for Blazade, zorbees voted for Trace. zorbees took a long time in sending in his vote and his lack of collaboration with billy stems from both of the two being in an insurmountable position. I don’t really see any world in which zorbees avoids a vote where billy has immunity. If he has immunity, then maybe rssp + Blazade entertain the idea of voting off Trace, but it’s not likely. zorbees played a good game in terms of keeping his head down. I was actually surprised people managed to identify him as the biggest threat to win the game, but I think that largely stems from his challenge prowess. He always performed well in challenges and tried his best in all of them, and I commend him for that. I think he got fucked big time by RODAN quitting and by the Yeti vote out. I think his one mistake was that f7 vote out, but otherwise, I thought he did a great job of really being in control (or at least in the loop) of a lot of votes while not necessarily being a part of the majority alliance.
II Challenge 6 (Final 4)
This was easily my favorite individual immunity challenge because I felt it both required a lot of thought, but was also quick enough so that we didn’t need to wait forever. The Battle Frontier has a lot of interesting ideas about Pokemon, even if those ideas aren’t easily replicated in a simulator. The Battle Arena has one of the most interesting concepts I’ve always felt, and so this was a challenge that attempted to replicate it. Each player had 3 dummy Pokemon that could be used in case theirs lost after the third turn. I think this challenge rewards the players who come up with interesting strategies to make use of the lack of switching and the three turn limit. billy came up with two very innovative teams I felt and he definitely deserved to win, although Blazade might have made it a little too easy for him by DD’ing on an Alakazam that might’ve had Trick. A very fun challenge, and I’d love to be able to include more Battle Frontier challenges in the future.
With billy winning again, it meant that the alliance of three would have to turn on each other. And this is where I really think Blazade missed a very good chance to put himself in a good light for the Jury. Trace was smart to recognize that rssp was by far the best vote, which billy joined in on. Blazade, being true to his day 1 alliance, and rssp both voted Trace. I don’t think rssp did much work in trying to convince either billy or Trace of anything until the revote.
In PM, I think billy laid out the situation smartly. He preferred a Trace vote out in case of a final 2, but preferred rssp for a final 3 (aside: it should’ve been really obvious that it was a final 3 as soon as Haruno joined the Jury. But then RODAN’s quit and him not becoming a Jury member meant that it had to be a final 2, since a six person Jury with a final 3 has the possibility of becoming an unbreakable tie. is no good). rssp1 pleaded with billy to change his vote and he did in the end, voting out Trace, which I do think was a good decision for billy’s game, which required him to win out to make the end. I think Blazade missed a huge opportunity to vote out what should’ve been the most obvious threat to win, but the way he read the game meant that wasn’t happening (more on that later).
The tiebreak would’ve been a bo3 rand bats, including singles, doubles, and triples. Trace probably would’ve had the advantage, but in randbats, anything is possible.
TraceofLife voted 2-2 (2-0 in the revote)
TraceofLife is basically an unknown quantity in the Circus community and it pleases me that at least someone not established managed to make it far in the game. Trace’s reputation as being a strong battler coming from Pokemon Online meant that he survived the early game with relative ease. The danger then became being voted out in the early stages of the merge. His prowess in immunity challenges; something that everyone seemed to worry about, never really seemed to come to fruition. While he never performed poorly, it didn’t really ever seem like he was ever in a position to actually win challenges, always falling short of the finals of challenges. As for his social game, he did a good job of maneuvering himself out of trouble, and in particular finding a solid alliance with Blazade and rssp. While I’m not sure if he approached them, or if it was more rssp1 bringing him in, in any case, that deal paid dividends for him. If billy doesn’t win the challenge, it’s very likely that Trace has a good shot of winning a final immunity and making it to the end. Does he beat rssp or Blazade? It’s hard to say: my feelings were that Blazade was always going to be a goat (never going to win) but based on how the Jury felt, it’s possible that it would have been close between the two. Trace had an underdog story going for him, but it’s hard to say if he really connected with the other Jury members, especially since he wasn’t on a super lot (although that’s maybe more the fault of timezones). In any case, a really strong performance by him overall, and I think he’s done really well to place top 4.
The Final Individual Immunity Challenge
I never wanted this challenge to have to take place – even though I like final 2s much more than final 3s, challenge-wise, it’s just very hard to come up with a fair challenge. The ones I like the best, endurance challenges, cannot be replicated in an online setting. Rotating randbats until a winner was the best compromise for such a challenge. This one was over a lot quicker than I thought. The rotation was first triples, then doubles, and then singles, with 48 hours to complete the battles. Maybe I should’ve gone with “skill-based” tiers, or perhaps started with randbat doubles. Even if triples is too random, these challenges are never meant to be fair necessarily, and I think that if you put yourself in a position where you need to win challenges to survive, that goes to show that you probably didn’t play a great social game. Sorry. In any case, the real controversy of this challenge was when rssp1 beat billy, meaning he only needed to win versus Blazade, and in a very anti-climatic twist, Blazade simply forfeited. Right there, I felt that was another mistake by Blazade – I thought this challenge was the perfect opportunity for him to throw. Had he even tried to attempt to beat rssp1, he could’ve placated billy and potentially had his vote up for grabs. By quitting immediately to allow rssp1 to win, he gave up billy’s vote. I would’ve been really salty if I was billy in that spot so I can’t blame him at all.
The vote was obvious and rssp didn’t need time to think about it. Maybe it would’ve been better to force him to wait 24 hours so billy would have a chance to plead his case, but I doubt it would’ve mattered.
billymills voted out 1-0
billy was a maverick this game, which I think is the best word to describe his play. At times, his activity was spotty and his awareness of the things going on in the game were not so good, but he managed to make it work well enough to achieve a third place finish. His teams for the Battle Arena challenge were super smart and definitely impressed me a lot and he definitely did do a good job at staying under the radar and keeping himself alive. Even though he may have made some weird votes (the rssp1 vote in the F8 comes to mind), I can’t really pinpoint a part of the game where he actually made something I would consider a mistake. Instead, he was another person that was essentially screwed by RODAN quitting, so he had to make it work from there and almost did. He was one Random Triples battle away from most likely winning, and I do have to give him a lot of credit for playing smart when he needed to be. I was rooting for him as the underdog by the end of the game, but sometimes those underdog stories just don’t work out :/
The Final Tribal Council
Finally, after a little over three months, we reached final tribal council. FTC went pretty well I would say, I thought both Blazade and rssp1 did a good job of defending their games (in fact I was surprised, but very happy as to the vigor of their posts).
The Jury was an interesting bunch. I was a little worried about how serious the earlier Jury members would take the vote, or if they had forgotten the game completely. I know rssp expressed doubts to me about people just voting randomly, but in the end I think for the most part people voted seriously? Twin said he would coin flip, IDK if he really did, and I think Haruno was always going to vote rssp. Haruno’s criteria for a winner was being the best battler, and I think rssp1 was definitely a better battler than Blazade, even if Blazade did win a couple immunities. Walrein and Yeti also voted rssp1, with Yeti’s vote technically not being about the game. Walrein felt that rssp1 played a more up-front game and respected his activity more than Blazade’s under the radar game. zorbees I think was always going to be voting rssp1 for essentially the same reasons as Walrein. Blazade blew any chance of winning billy’s vote by forfeiting the final immunity. His one vote came from, maybe surprisingly from TraceofLife. I don’t any insight on why Trace voted the way I did, but perhaps he respected Blazade’s game and his status as maybe being more on the outside of circus compared to rssp? IDK if that’s true or not so Trace would have to expand.
I knew people would be tempted not to take things seriously and mess around, but for the most part I was happy with the Jury’s activity and the discussion that took place between them and the finalists.
The Runner Up: Blazade
Honestly, at the beginning of this game I thought it would be really funny if Blazade managed to make it to the end and win, giving him two individual victories in “game-show” like games (the other being the Genius game). Blazade is clearly a very smart guy and I think he definitely has to be commended for finishing second as well. He played a pretty good game just to make it to the end, but there’s no question in my mind that he misread the Jury and made a couple of key mistakes that prevented him from (in my eyes) giving him any shot/a better shot at winning. Where I thought he misread the game was his belief that the Circus regulars would automatically give a win to anyone that was a circus regular over someone not as established as himself, which is why he felt that he had to go to end with rssp in order to stand any chance of winning. I think that sort of attitude held him back in terms of preventing him from making moves and proving to people he wasn’t being entirely passive. billy alluded to talking to him about “playing for second” and in all honesty while Blazade might disagree with that assessment, for me it felt like that’s what Blazade was doing. I’m not sure why he thought his best shot was with rssp, someone who he should’ve known was fairly popular / respected by most of the people on the Jury. I think it would’ve been much smarter for him to take a shot against billy or even Trace (especially considering that Trace isn’t really known in circus!).
The two mistakes he made came down in the lategame (I think he played the early game fairly flawlessly, forming a strong alliance that basically covered up his challenge weakness, which wasn’t even that bad imo – Pokemon is easy :]). The first mistake was the final four, where I feel it would’ve been really smart to vote out rssp1. And this just goes back to him failing to realize that rssp1 was by far the biggest threat to win once zorbees was voted out. The second mistake I think was how he dealt with the final immunity challenge. It should’ve been really obvious that just giving up would make billy extraordinarily unhappy. It would be very unsportsmanlike to not even attempt the challenge, and by doing that he threw away a vote that he could’ve used. Maybe billy was never going to vote for him anyways and it wouldn’t have mattered. That’s a possibility. But I think the smarter way for him to play that challenge out would’ve been to throw it in terms of losing to both billy and rssp and letting them play it out for immunity. At that point, there was no way billy or rssp were not voting each other out. By not screwing either party over, he gets a shot at winning billy’s vote, or if billy wins, he for sure gets rssp1’s vote without directly screwing him over. I think if he does that, he is better positioned to argue at final tribal that he wasn’t rssp’s passenger and that he was just looking for the right moment to make a move.
I wrote a lot of stuff that could be construed as criticism of Blazade’s game, but I’m not intending to be malicious. The part that is interesting to talk about in terms of his game is what I think he could’ve done to put himself in a position to win. Disregarding that, Blazade did extremely well to get to the finals I think, but it just wouldn’t be as interesting to talk about! Overall, I feel that Blazade has a lot to be happy about in getting so far and I really feel that he wasn’t a bad runner-up but that he had a very real chance to win if he had played just slightly differently.
The Winner: rssp1
rssp1 was one of the most motivated players in this game, always coming to me to talk about his thoughts, fears, etc. For that reason he was one of my most favorite players in the game. I think he is definitely a most deserving winner, even if he did get some luck to do so.
From the beginning, rssp made a game-winning move in forming an alliance with Blazade, an alliance that would last until the end of the game. Of course, you could say that rssp was lucky that Blazade never turned on him. While that is true to some extent, having such an early alliance I think made it harder for Blazade to backstab him, given that they had worked together for so long. After that, creating a strong Okata alliance was also instrumental in ensuring he made it to the merge. And if Twin hadn’t flipped, then it would’ve been very likely that he would have breezed through to the final 6 before he would really have to start playing.
As things would have it, Twin did flip, putting rssp in a pretty precarious position. I think if rssp was a little overconfident that Twin would stick with his alliance here, and it didn’t seem like he had any backup plans. But I think the strength of his alliance was that, even if inadvertently, his alliance contained other players that people would see as threats, in RODAN and Haruno. After being betrayed by Twin, he did a good job at stopping the bleeding and working with zorbees to get Twin out.
rssp executed the f7 vote very well, and perhaps the others are to blame for not discussing the vote with each other, but there’s no question he was responsible for orchestrating this vote. Was Yeti the right person to vote out here? I think there was a lot of risk inherent in this vote, and I’m not quite convinced that it was completely worthwhile to remove her at this point in the game. I feel that it would have been much safer to vote off zorbees and then attempt to try and win Yeti’s vote at the final six. Instead, voting off Yeti meant that rssp1 had to rely on a vote tiebreaker going his alliance’s way (assuming no flip by Trace). Instead, RODAN quit which gave his alliance the outright majority. I think it was a risky move to vote Yeti out, but things went his way and RODAN quitting meant that it all worked out.
From there, things were relatively smooth sailing. That is, until billy started to win immunity challenges. billy winning at the final 4 complicated things greatly, as for really the first time, he was in a lot of danger. But he managed to convince billy at the revote that Trace was the bigger threat in terms of battling (although I will say I think people underrated rssp’s battling ability, as he did go 3-0 to begin the game before he threw a couple challenges!). I think both parties made the right choice here: rssp1 did a good job at convincing billy, and billy did make the right choice as I do think Trace is a better battler than rssp1. After that, rssp1 won the final challenge and made a smart choice in taking Blazade to the end, who I never thought had much of a shot against him.
Overall, there is no doubt in my mind that rssp deserved to win the game. Even though he was perhaps gifted a path to the end by Blazade, he made a bunch of crucial moves and did well to recover from mishaps that weakened his position during the game. I think there’s something to be said that even though people recognized him as a threat during the touchy subjects challenge, he still managed to reach the end and deservedly win. Thanks for being an awesome player rssp1, and congratulations on achieving a well-deserved victory!
Closing Thoughts
This was a really fun game to host. I think everyone should be able to tell how I feel about this game given how much I wrote about it LOL. Survivor as a concept is probably the most interesting social game created ever in my eyes, in terms of looking at human behavior and what not. Online survivor presents a number of difficulties in running a game smoothly, but I think my design ended up working out for the most part, and I’m very happy that I wasn’t ever forced to sub people out or that a whole bunch of people lost interest in playing. Even though there were some people who did check out of the game, I would still consider the overall game to be a success.
I had a lot of fun hosting this game and I would love to be able to hold another installment in maybe 2 and a half months or no later than next summer, depending on people’s availabilities. I might put up a poll sooner or later to see how people feel about that. That’s all I have to say about Survivor and this game, but please feel free to give me feedback on how you thought my hosting was, things that could potentially be improved upon for a second installment, and just any random thoughts you have (this goes for both players and spectators). That about wraps things up, so for the final time, thanks for playing and thanks for reading any amount of this postgame!
Spreadsheet Link
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LolpedVKiQkMnifLfaZWz0bC2WXNxD66aasn9F1wGQ0/edit?usp=sharing
Yo confession: I didn't intentionally throw that RBY game I tried as hard as I could.
My alliance with rssp1 wasn't just out of a belief that circus oldboys would vote for each other, but also out of a strong intuition that rssp1 and I would be tight from the way we've interacted in past games. We could trust each other from the beginning, and that was an incredibly strong motivator in getting both of us to the end. I was literally going to PM for an alliance but he sent his faster lmao.
I knew from the beginning no one would meme that hard and give me back to back wins in Survivor-like games so I knew I had my work cut out for me, but I also knew the bigger plays might draw more attention to that so there was always a strong conflict there.
I think you're right in that I could have potentially considered different F2 partners, and that since this crowd is different from the normal crop you get on Survivor respect for a good play might overshadow the emotional wound from a voteout. I think I can learn from this experience and play it a bit less safe next time, but who's to say what would have happened.
Overall this was a fantastic game and I'm gonna read the postgame over again later because it's definitely got a lot in there. Thanks for the hard work and great hosting, Jalmont!
My alliance with rssp1 wasn't just out of a belief that circus oldboys would vote for each other, but also out of a strong intuition that rssp1 and I would be tight from the way we've interacted in past games. We could trust each other from the beginning, and that was an incredibly strong motivator in getting both of us to the end. I was literally going to PM for an alliance but he sent his faster lmao.
I knew from the beginning no one would meme that hard and give me back to back wins in Survivor-like games so I knew I had my work cut out for me, but I also knew the bigger plays might draw more attention to that so there was always a strong conflict there.
I think you're right in that I could have potentially considered different F2 partners, and that since this crowd is different from the normal crop you get on Survivor respect for a good play might overshadow the emotional wound from a voteout. I think I can learn from this experience and play it a bit less safe next time, but who's to say what would have happened.
Overall this was a fantastic game and I'm gonna read the postgame over again later because it's definitely got a lot in there. Thanks for the hard work and great hosting, Jalmont!
id post more but ive got a midterm i should be studying for
i think king definitely played the best game for a pre-merger, and he wasnt too well known in the circus community (although I knew him very well, since he was actually a PS mafia player)
I knew that I could 100% trust blazade (and that he could 100% trust me) based on how well we had worked together in previous games (so i got lucky there), and that helped me out a ton in this game
I had an insanely fun time so thank you a bunch for hosting this Jalmont, it was really well done!
(i'll probably post a little bit more later)
Hey! It's later :)
Circus Maximus was, at the time, effectively a forum for mafia games (with other types of games occasionally tried out). Jalmont, who is a pretty big fan of Survivor, decided to try creating a version of it that was adapted to a forum environment. This was the origin of SmORGon, although it certainly wasn't called that at the time and I doubt anyone involved would think that we'd be up to 20 or so seasons (including spinoffs). It's definitely pretty awesome to see how far the community has come.
The game itself was incredibly exciting all the way until the end. With a cast of players who mostly knew very little about the show, there were plenty of strange votes like a 3-2-1-1, a 3-2-2, and a 6-3-1. There were no idols, and the game was completely unaffected by any sort of advantages. The cast itself was also very small - with only 16 players total, and an eventual final 2 (although this wasn't intended.)
The major story of the season would mainly follow outspoken people from the dominant tribe - rssp, Blazade, and zorbees - and their interactions / battle for power in the merge. There were also two compelling underdogs in TraceofLife and billymills - both of whom made it to the final 4, before being voted off back to back. In the end, rssp and Blazade were able to survive being flipped on and put in the minority in the early merge to make it to the final 2 together, where rssp was crowned the first ever winner of circus survivor in a 6-1 vote.
For your next idol clue, go to "Here we go again... AGAIN - POSTGAME"
i think king definitely played the best game for a pre-merger, and he wasnt too well known in the circus community (although I knew him very well, since he was actually a PS mafia player)
I knew that I could 100% trust blazade (and that he could 100% trust me) based on how well we had worked together in previous games (so i got lucky there), and that helped me out a ton in this game
I had an insanely fun time so thank you a bunch for hosting this Jalmont, it was really well done!
(i'll probably post a little bit more later)
Hey! It's later :)
Circus Maximus was, at the time, effectively a forum for mafia games (with other types of games occasionally tried out). Jalmont, who is a pretty big fan of Survivor, decided to try creating a version of it that was adapted to a forum environment. This was the origin of SmORGon, although it certainly wasn't called that at the time and I doubt anyone involved would think that we'd be up to 20 or so seasons (including spinoffs). It's definitely pretty awesome to see how far the community has come.
The game itself was incredibly exciting all the way until the end. With a cast of players who mostly knew very little about the show, there were plenty of strange votes like a 3-2-1-1, a 3-2-2, and a 6-3-1. There were no idols, and the game was completely unaffected by any sort of advantages. The cast itself was also very small - with only 16 players total, and an eventual final 2 (although this wasn't intended.)
The major story of the season would mainly follow outspoken people from the dominant tribe - rssp, Blazade, and zorbees - and their interactions / battle for power in the merge. There were also two compelling underdogs in TraceofLife and billymills - both of whom made it to the final 4, before being voted off back to back. In the end, rssp and Blazade were able to survive being flipped on and put in the minority in the early merge to make it to the final 2 together, where rssp was crowned the first ever winner of circus survivor in a 6-1 vote.
For your next idol clue, go to "Here we go again... AGAIN - POSTGAME"
Last edited:
Wayan Vistar
formerly Flyhn
/me silently waits 2 and a half months or no later than next summer
Fun read, even though I didn't keep track of things after merge since it moved to pms. Can't wait until next time ^w^
Fun read, even though I didn't keep track of things after merge since it moved to pms. Can't wait until next time ^w^
haha could've fooled me :D
That's fair, I really hope I didn't come off as ragging on you, as like I said you did extraordinarily well. I just wanted to point out some areas that I felt if you improved upon, you would've won or at least had a better shot at winning.
yeah ill scrounge around and look for them
yeah i know that not showcasing the challenges meant following the game was a lot harder. in the actual game, the jurors dont see the challenges, so i put them all in PMs to emulate that. not sure if i want to do that for next time though
And then I just want to say that this postgame is not meant to be taken as the authoritative version of what happened. I didn't have access to all info and I didn't really push to get people's thoughts: the reason for this was that I wanted to avoid potentially interfering with any decisions that people wanted to make. The problem with asking certain questions is that it could potentially alert ppl to a way of thinking and then the question their plans and what not. For that reason, I tried to avoid actively interfering with people. That means I may be missing certain information as to why people did what they did. Just a heads up, and if people want to fill in the blanks that would be cool!
A couple of things I wanted to put out there that I think I forgot before:
I really wanted to go to the end with rssp1 and Blazade, for a couple of reasons. 1, I thought they would probably be willing to go with me (turns out they chose Trace instead; they figured I would probably try to make a move with RODAN but I never had any intention of doing so until the Yeti vote; i probably should have been able to get this across better to them but it was probably an uphill battle because my relationship with RODAN outside of the game was probably well known). 2, I was pretty sure I could beat them (I thought I would probably do well against anyone to be honest, but I figured that they were a clear duo and wouldn't really stand out from each other. Unfortunately I didn't realize that others wouldn't see them this way, which led to the Yeti voteout.)
Additionally, as the game was winding down, I was pretty sure I was going to vote for TraceofLife over anyone if he made it to the end. I felt that Trace was a target for some people at almost every round after the merge, so making it out of that and all the way to the end would have been a strong resume. Additionally, I felt that rssp1 and Blazade owed a lot of their game to my decision to go with them at f9 and vote off Twin, when it seemed to me that the post-swap Moto, Twin, and Yeti could have stuck together and gotten out rssp1, Blazade, and RODAN, and maybe Trace, in order at that point. (I believe that billy also threw a vote on Twin, I can't speak for him but I feel like that if I had been on board with that side, billy probably could have been too).
I felt that the Yeti vote was poorly handled as well; I think if they really wanted to secure an endgame with Trace, they should have probably split me and RODAN up. I believe rssp1 said that he was afraid of me making a move with RODAN, so why not split us up if you are afraid of that? I think the problem for them was that they never were coming out of that vote with more than 3/6 remaining players unless they either convince me and RODAN to vote Yeti, or if they go with us and vote out Trace. Additionally, it really bugged me because I had pretty much told rssp1 my whole gameplan for the endgame, which was to have a group of 4 that would be able to take it down once we got to 7. I mean I understand that they probably didn't want to go to the end with me after the f7 challenge that said I was the biggest threat to win the game, but I think they handled it poorly.
TLDR rock drawing is almost always the right play, unfortunately RODAN quit
I really wanted to go to the end with rssp1 and Blazade, for a couple of reasons. 1, I thought they would probably be willing to go with me (turns out they chose Trace instead; they figured I would probably try to make a move with RODAN but I never had any intention of doing so until the Yeti vote; i probably should have been able to get this across better to them but it was probably an uphill battle because my relationship with RODAN outside of the game was probably well known). 2, I was pretty sure I could beat them (I thought I would probably do well against anyone to be honest, but I figured that they were a clear duo and wouldn't really stand out from each other. Unfortunately I didn't realize that others wouldn't see them this way, which led to the Yeti voteout.)
Additionally, as the game was winding down, I was pretty sure I was going to vote for TraceofLife over anyone if he made it to the end. I felt that Trace was a target for some people at almost every round after the merge, so making it out of that and all the way to the end would have been a strong resume. Additionally, I felt that rssp1 and Blazade owed a lot of their game to my decision to go with them at f9 and vote off Twin, when it seemed to me that the post-swap Moto, Twin, and Yeti could have stuck together and gotten out rssp1, Blazade, and RODAN, and maybe Trace, in order at that point. (I believe that billy also threw a vote on Twin, I can't speak for him but I feel like that if I had been on board with that side, billy probably could have been too).
I felt that the Yeti vote was poorly handled as well; I think if they really wanted to secure an endgame with Trace, they should have probably split me and RODAN up. I believe rssp1 said that he was afraid of me making a move with RODAN, so why not split us up if you are afraid of that? I think the problem for them was that they never were coming out of that vote with more than 3/6 remaining players unless they either convince me and RODAN to vote Yeti, or if they go with us and vote out Trace. Additionally, it really bugged me because I had pretty much told rssp1 my whole gameplan for the endgame, which was to have a group of 4 that would be able to take it down once we got to 7. I mean I understand that they probably didn't want to go to the end with me after the f7 challenge that said I was the biggest threat to win the game, but I think they handled it poorly.
TLDR rock drawing is almost always the right play, unfortunately RODAN quit
Yeah premerge I really fucked up by not preparing for shell smashers at all although chou would have been able to ohko binacle unless he got like a 6% roll
king was pretty swap screwed and probably does a bit better or a lot better if he doesnt get stuck on okata since there was zero way we were keeping him since we had another two buffer votes in mithril and if all else fails, yeti
I think I really ought to have tried harder to convince Yeti twin and zorbees to not flip at the merge vote and my laziness nearly cost me my life in the game there, a mistake which I repeated again at f4 before bombarding billy with arguments
The yeti voteout was entirely me being too idealistic and wanting to not directly stab my alliance for as long as possible - yeti was the only one who I thought I couldnt work with, so I swung the votes her way once I realized it was possible. Overall, that was 100% a mistake and if I was playing without emotion I and my alliance members jump ship and stab zorbees/RODAN there
There was zero way I would let zorbees get to the endgame unless he went on an immunity run a la billy because I knew that if he wasnt garbage at arguing (which he isnt) that he annihilated everyone else at FTC.
I think that in the end, the strength of my game wasnt necessarily dictating how every vote went down, but convincing the people I needed to convince to vote the way that I needed them to, which helped me get to the end with the one person I planned on going to f2 with (if it existed) on d1.
the f8 vote would probably be where zorbees flipping matters the most, but he had no real reason to go to rocks at f8 (unlike at f6 where it probably would have happened), since im very sure billy votes twin out regardless because he also didnt trust twin and he was somewhat confident that his alliance was in the majority.
I really dont know how other people were communicating at the f9 vote but I know that I was going everywhere and trying to get everyone who I logically thought could vote for twin to vote for him. Not sure whether any single person dropping out changed things bc they were voting together or smth.
in terms of ftc im actually pretty surprised that I didnt get trace's vote, I thought that because we were decent friends throughout the game that id be getting his vote in the end but I was clearly wrong about that (my perceptions about others in the game were really idealistic and not necessarily accurate, in case you couldnt tell lol)
I think blazade actually may have beaten billy since he gets my vote if billy votes me or if he has a good reason for voting me out, zorbees, trace (probably), and haruno (probably). Would have been an interesting scenario to see, actually.
There definitely were places where I could have done better but overall I think I played a decent game and had a ton of fun playing with everyone. I'm probably not going to participate in the next survivor just because ill get voted off v quickly I assume, but I may find other ways to participate...
king was pretty swap screwed and probably does a bit better or a lot better if he doesnt get stuck on okata since there was zero way we were keeping him since we had another two buffer votes in mithril and if all else fails, yeti
I think I really ought to have tried harder to convince Yeti twin and zorbees to not flip at the merge vote and my laziness nearly cost me my life in the game there, a mistake which I repeated again at f4 before bombarding billy with arguments
The yeti voteout was entirely me being too idealistic and wanting to not directly stab my alliance for as long as possible - yeti was the only one who I thought I couldnt work with, so I swung the votes her way once I realized it was possible. Overall, that was 100% a mistake and if I was playing without emotion I and my alliance members jump ship and stab zorbees/RODAN there
There was zero way I would let zorbees get to the endgame unless he went on an immunity run a la billy because I knew that if he wasnt garbage at arguing (which he isnt) that he annihilated everyone else at FTC.
I think that in the end, the strength of my game wasnt necessarily dictating how every vote went down, but convincing the people I needed to convince to vote the way that I needed them to, which helped me get to the end with the one person I planned on going to f2 with (if it existed) on d1.
the f8 vote would probably be where zorbees flipping matters the most, but he had no real reason to go to rocks at f8 (unlike at f6 where it probably would have happened), since im very sure billy votes twin out regardless because he also didnt trust twin and he was somewhat confident that his alliance was in the majority.
I really dont know how other people were communicating at the f9 vote but I know that I was going everywhere and trying to get everyone who I logically thought could vote for twin to vote for him. Not sure whether any single person dropping out changed things bc they were voting together or smth.
in terms of ftc im actually pretty surprised that I didnt get trace's vote, I thought that because we were decent friends throughout the game that id be getting his vote in the end but I was clearly wrong about that (my perceptions about others in the game were really idealistic and not necessarily accurate, in case you couldnt tell lol)
I think blazade actually may have beaten billy since he gets my vote if billy votes me or if he has a good reason for voting me out, zorbees, trace (probably), and haruno (probably). Would have been an interesting scenario to see, actually.
There definitely were places where I could have done better but overall I think I played a decent game and had a ton of fun playing with everyone. I'm probably not going to participate in the next survivor just because ill get voted off v quickly I assume, but I may find other ways to participate...
i knew i had to win the last 3-4 immunity challenges to stand a chance.
The tie vote not immediately going to tiebreaker (instead a 24 hour extension, that was extended indefinitely until I changed my vote) I thought was unfair to trace. I don't really regret changing the vote, as I probably had a better chance beating rssp1 than trace, but I got the worst possible match up in one of my worst tiers in the end.
Blazade played like shit the whole game, rssp1 made a really good effort, so I'm content.
Rand votes were to get people thinking about breaking up alliances. I don't think they ever had a positive or negative impact though.
The tie vote not immediately going to tiebreaker (instead a 24 hour extension, that was extended indefinitely until I changed my vote) I thought was unfair to trace. I don't really regret changing the vote, as I probably had a better chance beating rssp1 than trace, but I got the worst possible match up in one of my worst tiers in the end.
Blazade played like shit the whole game, rssp1 made a really good effort, so I'm content.
Rand votes were to get people thinking about breaking up alliances. I don't think they ever had a positive or negative impact though.
Sorry to bump but here are the replays/pertinent info for the rest of the challenges for those who are interested. I know this is late but I forgot and now I don't want to study so I figured I would do this instead :x
Sorry, Trace but I'm going to have to take immunity back from you. That means that individual immunity is once again up for grabs.
Today's challenge is a little different from anything that's been done previously. It's called the Random Battle Laddering Challenge.
In this challenge, you will not be battling your peers. Instead, you'll be fighting the ladder, in an attempt to attain the highest position you can before time runs out.
To do this, I need everyone to send in to me the name/alt whatever that you will be using. There must be 0 games on your alt (if you have games played I will not accept your name). You will have a total of 72 hours to ladder. The player with the highest rank wins.
Please send in the name that you will be using to ladder. The challenge begins once everyone sends in a name OR 24 hours have elapsed from midnight PST. You may begin laddering at that time. Note that I will be alt-checking and if I find you to have games on an alt prior to the challenge officially beginning, I will DQ that name and you must submit a new name to me. Only once I approve it can you then start battling (and you won't get a full 72 hours as a result).
any concerns let me know etc.
please send in the name of the alt you will be laddering on as soon as you can please!
Deadline in 4.5 hours!
Rankings:
billymills - 1504 | 39-18
Walrein - 1463 | 29-9
Thetwinmasters - No games played
rssp1 - 1134 | 5-1
RODAN - 1190 | 12-6
Yeti - 1100 | 8-6
TraceofLife - 1784 | 73-33
zorbees - 1793 | 68-33
Blazade - No games played
Today's challenge is a little different from anything that's been done previously. It's called the Random Battle Laddering Challenge.
In this challenge, you will not be battling your peers. Instead, you'll be fighting the ladder, in an attempt to attain the highest position you can before time runs out.
To do this, I need everyone to send in to me the name/alt whatever that you will be using. There must be 0 games on your alt (if you have games played I will not accept your name). You will have a total of 72 hours to ladder. The player with the highest rank wins.
Please send in the name that you will be using to ladder. The challenge begins once everyone sends in a name OR 24 hours have elapsed from midnight PST. You may begin laddering at that time. Note that I will be alt-checking and if I find you to have games on an alt prior to the challenge officially beginning, I will DQ that name and you must submit a new name to me. Only once I approve it can you then start battling (and you won't get a full 72 hours as a result).
any concerns let me know etc.
please send in the name of the alt you will be laddering on as soon as you can please!
Deadline in 4.5 hours!
Rankings:
billymills - 1504 | 39-18
Walrein - 1463 | 29-9
Thetwinmasters - No games played
rssp1 - 1134 | 5-1
RODAN - 1190 | 12-6
Yeti - 1100 | 8-6
TraceofLife - 1784 | 73-33
zorbees - 1793 | 68-33
Blazade - No games played
Sorry zorbees, but I'm taking back immunity. Once again, we're having immunity up for grabs. Winner is guaranteed a place in the final 7.
However, before I reveal what the challenge is, I have a quick survey that I need everyone to do.
What I want is for each player to PM me with a ranking from 1 to 8 of the best Pokemon battlers from those still left in the game, with one being the highest and lowest being 8. Submit your ranking to me privately in PM. Don't post it in this chat.
Please do this individually. Do not talk to anybody even people outside of the game. Do not collaborate under any circumstances. Do not publicly post your ranking.
The votes are in and here's how you guys ranked yourself.
1 Trace
2 zorbees
3 RODAN
4 rssp1
5 billymills
6 Walrein
7 Blazade
8 Yeti
How you guys ranked each other is very important in terms of how this next challenge will play out. To win immunity this time around, everyone will be competing in a single elimination seeded tournament (based on these rankings). 1 will play 8, 2 plays 7 and so on. To win immunity, you need to win 3 games without dropping a single one. I made a handy-dandy bracket in case anyone is confused: http://challonge.com/smogonsurvivorchallenge
You might be wondering at this point what tiers we will be playing. This is the big "twist" of the challenge. The tier that will be played for each individual battle will be decided by the lower seed. So for the first round, billy, Walrein, Blazade, and Yeti all get to decide what tier that they want to play. After that, whoever the lower seed is will get to decide the tier. For instance, Yeti will always get to choose what tier she wants to play, since she has the lowest tier. You may choose any ORAS Singles/Doubles/Triples, BW2 Singles, DPP Singles, Past Generations tier, and any Other Metagame that has been used so far in this game (by this game I mean this Survivor game). Please decide what tier you want to play as soon as possible so we can keep this moving!
Any questions let me know
billy v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/randombattle-406758584
zorbees v blazade http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen5doublesou-407667994
yeti v traceoflife http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/challengecup1v1-407877450
yeti v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/nu-410649382
yeti v blazade no log
However, before I reveal what the challenge is, I have a quick survey that I need everyone to do.
What I want is for each player to PM me with a ranking from 1 to 8 of the best Pokemon battlers from those still left in the game, with one being the highest and lowest being 8. Submit your ranking to me privately in PM. Don't post it in this chat.
Please do this individually. Do not talk to anybody even people outside of the game. Do not collaborate under any circumstances. Do not publicly post your ranking.
The votes are in and here's how you guys ranked yourself.
1 Trace
2 zorbees
3 RODAN
4 rssp1
5 billymills
6 Walrein
7 Blazade
8 Yeti
How you guys ranked each other is very important in terms of how this next challenge will play out. To win immunity this time around, everyone will be competing in a single elimination seeded tournament (based on these rankings). 1 will play 8, 2 plays 7 and so on. To win immunity, you need to win 3 games without dropping a single one. I made a handy-dandy bracket in case anyone is confused: http://challonge.com/smogonsurvivorchallenge
You might be wondering at this point what tiers we will be playing. This is the big "twist" of the challenge. The tier that will be played for each individual battle will be decided by the lower seed. So for the first round, billy, Walrein, Blazade, and Yeti all get to decide what tier that they want to play. After that, whoever the lower seed is will get to decide the tier. For instance, Yeti will always get to choose what tier she wants to play, since she has the lowest tier. You may choose any ORAS Singles/Doubles/Triples, BW2 Singles, DPP Singles, Past Generations tier, and any Other Metagame that has been used so far in this game (by this game I mean this Survivor game). Please decide what tier you want to play as soon as possible so we can keep this moving!
Any questions let me know
billy v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/randombattle-406758584
zorbees v blazade http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen5doublesou-407667994
yeti v traceoflife http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/challengecup1v1-407877450
yeti v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/nu-410649382
yeti v blazade no log
Sorry Blazade, but immunity is no longer yours and is back up for grabs. This week's challenge is similar to last week in that before I reveal the challenge I'm going to need everyone to complete a quick survey. Like last week's survey, you cannot collaborate whatsoever on your answers. In fact, don't even talk about the survey. As before, please send your answers privately to me in PM (vote PMs are fine).
Please do this individually. Do not talk to anybody even people outside of the game. Do not collaborate under any circumstances. Do not publicly post your ranking. Any form of collaboration will be seen as cheating and will result in a minimum of getting kicked out of the challenge with possible more serious punishments a possibility. Just don't do it please!
Anyways, warnings aside, here's the survey - please respond to each question with one (1) tribemate currently in the game. Not on the jury. Not UncleSam. But in this game. If you need help figuring out who is in the game, take a look at who is in this PM. Remember don't talk to ppl about the questions or your answers. Put down your honest thoughts.
Who is the best battler remaining in the game?
Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game?
Who is the weakest link?
Who is lucky to still be here?
Who is the most trustworthy?
Who is the least trustworthy?
Who is on the chopping block?
Who is flying under the radar?
Who is the funniest person in the tribe?
Who would you never want to meet in real life?
Who has no chance of winning the game?
Who is the most likely to win the game?
Who is the most likeable member of the tribe?
Who is the most annoying?
Who is the worst battler remaining in the game?
Thanks guys. This shouldn't be too hard so 24 hours if you can, 48 hours at the max. If something comes up, let me know.
Thanks guys for the timely responses. It's now time to reveal what exactly this immunity challenge entails. For this challenge, there won't be any battling. Instead, everyone will be answering the same survey questions, only this time, you want to pick the answer that you think your tribemates picked the most. Your answers may end up being the same or vary, depending on whether or not you believe your tribemates felt differently about each question.
For the first round, there will be 5 questions. You need to get correct 3 out of 5 to advance to the next round. If you fail to get 3 correct, you lose the challenge and no longer have a chance of winning immunity for this challenge. If no one gets 3 correct, then no one wins immunity. The details of the next round will be revealed after this first round.
PM me your answers and when I receive everyone's I'll reveal the results. Don't collaborate or talk privately about your answers etc etc
Here are the questions - remember that this time around, you need to submit who you think was the most common answer. A little different from last time around, so consider your answers wisely!
Who has no chance of winning the game?
Who is the funniest person in the tribe?
Who is on the chopping block?
Who is the most trustworthy?
Who is the most likely to win the game?
Send in your responses ASAP please! any ?s let me know as well
Results:
Who has no chance of winning this game?
zorbees, Trace, rssp, Yeti, and RODAN all responded with "Yeti", billy said "RODAN" and Blazade answered himself. The correct answer was "Yeti."
1 - zorbees, Trace, rssp, Yeti, RODAN
0 - billy, Blazade
Who is the funniest person in the tribe?
OK so this one was a free point. You're welcome. Trace, rssp, Blazade, Yeti answered "Yeti", while billy, RODAN, and zorbees answered "RODAN." Both Yeti and RODAN tied, so everyone gets a point.
2 - zorbees, Trace, rssp, Yeti, RODAN
1 - billy, Blazade
Who is on the chopping block?
RODAN answered "Trace", rssp answered "Yeti", Blazade, Yeti, and zorbees answered "billy" and Trace and billy answered themselves. The correct response was "billy".
3 - zorbees, Yeti
2 - Blazade, billy, Trace, RODAN, rssp
Who is the most trustworthy?
Trace, billy, RODAN, and zorbees answered "rssp", rssp and Yeti answered "RODAN", Blazade answered himself. The most trustworthy player in the game according to you guys was rssp1.
4 - zorbees
3 - Yeti, Trace, billy, RODAN
2 - rssp1, Blazade
Who is the most likely to win the game? Another easy question. Oops!
Everyone except for TraceofLife voted zorbees, and Trace voted himself. "zorbees" was the correct answer.
That means that no one failed stage 1! Congrats!
Final score tally:
5 - zorbees
4 - Yeti, billy, RODAN
3 - rssp1, Blazade, Trace
For the next round, your scores only carry over in case of a tiebreaker. The winner of the challenge will be the one who answers the most questions out of the next 6. If there is a tie, the player who answered the most questions in total correctly will be awarded immunity. If there is still a tie, then we move on to a random battle tiebreaker.
As usual, send me your answers privately. Remember that you are answering with who you think the tribe picked as the overall answer. You are now allowed to discuss the questions whose answers have been revealed.
Here are the 6 ?s
Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game?
Who is flying under the radar?
Who is lucky to still be here?
Who is the least trustworthy?
Who is the most likeable member of the tribe?
Who would you never want to meet in real life?
I didn't mention this as an option, but if you don't feel comfortable answering these questions and having your answer revealed, you may drop out of the challenge at any time. Just send me a PM. Note that those who are knocked out of the challenge (i.e. those who no longer have a chance of winning) will not have their answers revealed. So if you miss the first 4 and someone gets 4 right, I won't reveal your answers after that.
Good luck and any questions/problems let me know! 48 hrs.
All results are in, let's see who our winner is!
Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game?
Blazade and Yeti answered "Trace", billy thought it was "rssp1", rssp1 picked "billy", zorbees thought it was "Blazade" and RODAN thought it was "zorbees" while Trace voted himself. A lot of variation in answers for this question, however, the correct response was actually "RODAN". Nobody got the question right so no points awarded.
0 - everyone
Who is flying under the radar?
Blazade, zorbees, and Trace answered "RODAN" while RODAN, rssp1, and billy picked "Blazade". Yeti answered "rssp1". The correct response was "Blazade".
1 - RODAN, rssp1, billy
0 - Blazade, zorbees, Trace, Yeti
Who is lucky to still be here?
RODAN, zorbees, Yeti all said "Yeti", while Blazade, rssp1, and Trace all answered themselves. billy answered with "Trace". The correct answer was "Yeti".
2 - RODAN
1 - rssp1, billy, zorbees, Yeti
0 - Blazade, Trace
Who is the least trustworthy?
Blazade, Yeti, and zorbees answered "billy", while billy and RODAN answered "zorbees". Trace selected himself and rssp1 was the only person to answer with "Yeti". Luckily for rssp1, "Yeti" was the correct response.
2 - RODAN, rssp1
1 - billy, zorbees, Yeti
0 - Blazade, Trace
Who is the most likeable member of the tribe?
Blazade, Yeti, billy, zorbees, and RODAN all responded with "RODAN". rssp1 responded with "zorbees" and Trace picked "rssp1". The correct answer was RODAN.
3 - RODAN
2 - rssp1, billy, zorbees, Yeti
1 - Blazade [eliminated]
0 - Trace [eliminated]
Who would you never want to meet in real life?
Yeti, billy, and RODAN picked "zorbees", rssp1 picked himself, and zorbees picked "Yeti".
If RODAN selects correctly, then he wins immunity...otherwise if zorbees gets it correct then he wins.
The correct response was "zorbees".
Congrats to RODAN for winning immunity!
Final scores:
4 - RODAN
3 - billy, Yeti
2 - zorbees, rssp1
1 - Blazade
Tribal Council will be up in a bit.
Please do this individually. Do not talk to anybody even people outside of the game. Do not collaborate under any circumstances. Do not publicly post your ranking. Any form of collaboration will be seen as cheating and will result in a minimum of getting kicked out of the challenge with possible more serious punishments a possibility. Just don't do it please!
Anyways, warnings aside, here's the survey - please respond to each question with one (1) tribemate currently in the game. Not on the jury. Not UncleSam. But in this game. If you need help figuring out who is in the game, take a look at who is in this PM. Remember don't talk to ppl about the questions or your answers. Put down your honest thoughts.
Who is the best battler remaining in the game?
Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game?
Who is the weakest link?
Who is lucky to still be here?
Who is the most trustworthy?
Who is the least trustworthy?
Who is on the chopping block?
Who is flying under the radar?
Who is the funniest person in the tribe?
Who would you never want to meet in real life?
Who has no chance of winning the game?
Who is the most likely to win the game?
Who is the most likeable member of the tribe?
Who is the most annoying?
Who is the worst battler remaining in the game?
Thanks guys. This shouldn't be too hard so 24 hours if you can, 48 hours at the max. If something comes up, let me know.
Thanks guys for the timely responses. It's now time to reveal what exactly this immunity challenge entails. For this challenge, there won't be any battling. Instead, everyone will be answering the same survey questions, only this time, you want to pick the answer that you think your tribemates picked the most. Your answers may end up being the same or vary, depending on whether or not you believe your tribemates felt differently about each question.
For the first round, there will be 5 questions. You need to get correct 3 out of 5 to advance to the next round. If you fail to get 3 correct, you lose the challenge and no longer have a chance of winning immunity for this challenge. If no one gets 3 correct, then no one wins immunity. The details of the next round will be revealed after this first round.
PM me your answers and when I receive everyone's I'll reveal the results. Don't collaborate or talk privately about your answers etc etc
Here are the questions - remember that this time around, you need to submit who you think was the most common answer. A little different from last time around, so consider your answers wisely!
Who has no chance of winning the game?
Who is the funniest person in the tribe?
Who is on the chopping block?
Who is the most trustworthy?
Who is the most likely to win the game?
Send in your responses ASAP please! any ?s let me know as well
Results:
Who has no chance of winning this game?
zorbees, Trace, rssp, Yeti, and RODAN all responded with "Yeti", billy said "RODAN" and Blazade answered himself. The correct answer was "Yeti."
1 - zorbees, Trace, rssp, Yeti, RODAN
0 - billy, Blazade
Who is the funniest person in the tribe?
OK so this one was a free point. You're welcome. Trace, rssp, Blazade, Yeti answered "Yeti", while billy, RODAN, and zorbees answered "RODAN." Both Yeti and RODAN tied, so everyone gets a point.
2 - zorbees, Trace, rssp, Yeti, RODAN
1 - billy, Blazade
Who is on the chopping block?
RODAN answered "Trace", rssp answered "Yeti", Blazade, Yeti, and zorbees answered "billy" and Trace and billy answered themselves. The correct response was "billy".
3 - zorbees, Yeti
2 - Blazade, billy, Trace, RODAN, rssp
Who is the most trustworthy?
Trace, billy, RODAN, and zorbees answered "rssp", rssp and Yeti answered "RODAN", Blazade answered himself. The most trustworthy player in the game according to you guys was rssp1.
4 - zorbees
3 - Yeti, Trace, billy, RODAN
2 - rssp1, Blazade
Who is the most likely to win the game? Another easy question. Oops!
Everyone except for TraceofLife voted zorbees, and Trace voted himself. "zorbees" was the correct answer.
That means that no one failed stage 1! Congrats!
Final score tally:
5 - zorbees
4 - Yeti, billy, RODAN
3 - rssp1, Blazade, Trace
For the next round, your scores only carry over in case of a tiebreaker. The winner of the challenge will be the one who answers the most questions out of the next 6. If there is a tie, the player who answered the most questions in total correctly will be awarded immunity. If there is still a tie, then we move on to a random battle tiebreaker.
As usual, send me your answers privately. Remember that you are answering with who you think the tribe picked as the overall answer. You are now allowed to discuss the questions whose answers have been revealed.
Here are the 6 ?s
Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game?
Who is flying under the radar?
Who is lucky to still be here?
Who is the least trustworthy?
Who is the most likeable member of the tribe?
Who would you never want to meet in real life?
I didn't mention this as an option, but if you don't feel comfortable answering these questions and having your answer revealed, you may drop out of the challenge at any time. Just send me a PM. Note that those who are knocked out of the challenge (i.e. those who no longer have a chance of winning) will not have their answers revealed. So if you miss the first 4 and someone gets 4 right, I won't reveal your answers after that.
Good luck and any questions/problems let me know! 48 hrs.
All results are in, let's see who our winner is!
Who mistakenly believes they are in control of the game?
Blazade and Yeti answered "Trace", billy thought it was "rssp1", rssp1 picked "billy", zorbees thought it was "Blazade" and RODAN thought it was "zorbees" while Trace voted himself. A lot of variation in answers for this question, however, the correct response was actually "RODAN". Nobody got the question right so no points awarded.
0 - everyone
Who is flying under the radar?
Blazade, zorbees, and Trace answered "RODAN" while RODAN, rssp1, and billy picked "Blazade". Yeti answered "rssp1". The correct response was "Blazade".
1 - RODAN, rssp1, billy
0 - Blazade, zorbees, Trace, Yeti
Who is lucky to still be here?
RODAN, zorbees, Yeti all said "Yeti", while Blazade, rssp1, and Trace all answered themselves. billy answered with "Trace". The correct answer was "Yeti".
2 - RODAN
1 - rssp1, billy, zorbees, Yeti
0 - Blazade, Trace
Who is the least trustworthy?
Blazade, Yeti, and zorbees answered "billy", while billy and RODAN answered "zorbees". Trace selected himself and rssp1 was the only person to answer with "Yeti". Luckily for rssp1, "Yeti" was the correct response.
2 - RODAN, rssp1
1 - billy, zorbees, Yeti
0 - Blazade, Trace
Who is the most likeable member of the tribe?
Blazade, Yeti, billy, zorbees, and RODAN all responded with "RODAN". rssp1 responded with "zorbees" and Trace picked "rssp1". The correct answer was RODAN.
3 - RODAN
2 - rssp1, billy, zorbees, Yeti
1 - Blazade [eliminated]
0 - Trace [eliminated]
Who would you never want to meet in real life?
Yeti, billy, and RODAN picked "zorbees", rssp1 picked himself, and zorbees picked "Yeti".
If RODAN selects correctly, then he wins immunity...otherwise if zorbees gets it correct then he wins.
The correct response was "zorbees".
Congrats to RODAN for winning immunity!
Final scores:
4 - RODAN
3 - billy, Yeti
2 - zorbees, rssp1
1 - Blazade
Tribal Council will be up in a bit.
Immunity is back up for grabs! This week's challenge is pretty straightforward. It's going to be an ORAS OU seeded tournament.
Here's how it's going to work. Everyone will play each other once in ORAS OU to determine seeding. (bo1) Top 2 records will get byes in the next stage of the competition. From there, it'll be a double-elimination tournament with the winner of the tournament getting immunity!
For the first stage, you guys have the next 5 days to finish all your games. This will be a strict deadline, and any games not played will be considered dead / activity wins may be given depending on levels of inactivity. This stage is round-robin - you will play everyone else once. The top two records will be given byes in the Winners' Bracket Semi-finals. In order to seed, I will look at people's records holistically in terms of the battles they've played. All this means is that I will consider records such that if I feel like you dodged games/only played games you knew you would win to preserve a 2-0 record, I may deem that the person who went 2-4 but played all there matches to have earned the higher seed.
Ties will be coin-flipped unless players agree to play a tiebreaker match (and I won't give a lot of time for this).
The second stage is a double elimination tournament (ORAS OU). I'll explain this part more in-depth when we get to this part if there's any confusion.
Let me know if there's any questions. Play your games as soon as you can and report them either to me in PM or in this thread. The standings will be kept in this post. Good luck!
Standings
1. TraceofLife 4-0
2. zorbees 4-1
3. RODAN 1-2
4. rssp1 1-2
5. billymills 1-1
6. Blazade 0-5
Trace v zorbees http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-417545496
zorbees v RODAN http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-417557375
Trace v RODAN http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-417562714
zorbees v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-418476989
zorbees v billy http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-419140616
rssp1 v Trace http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-419161044
Deadline
Here are the seeds:
1. TraceofLife
2. zorbees
3. RODAN
4. rssp1
5. billymills
6. Blazade
TraceofLife and zorbees get byes into the winners bracket semi-finals. Matchups now are
3. RODAN vs. 6. Blazade
4. rssp1 vs. 5. billymills
Trace plays the winner of 4 v 5 while zorbees gets the winner of 3 v 6.
Please schedule your game within the next 24 hours and play within 72 hours. If you see this being a problem let me know so I can accommodate/help get your games now. Good luck!
billy v Trace https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-421814183
Blazade v rssp1? http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-425602354
billy v Trace https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-426590823
Blazade v billy http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-426627561
Here's how it's going to work. Everyone will play each other once in ORAS OU to determine seeding. (bo1) Top 2 records will get byes in the next stage of the competition. From there, it'll be a double-elimination tournament with the winner of the tournament getting immunity!
For the first stage, you guys have the next 5 days to finish all your games. This will be a strict deadline, and any games not played will be considered dead / activity wins may be given depending on levels of inactivity. This stage is round-robin - you will play everyone else once. The top two records will be given byes in the Winners' Bracket Semi-finals. In order to seed, I will look at people's records holistically in terms of the battles they've played. All this means is that I will consider records such that if I feel like you dodged games/only played games you knew you would win to preserve a 2-0 record, I may deem that the person who went 2-4 but played all there matches to have earned the higher seed.
Ties will be coin-flipped unless players agree to play a tiebreaker match (and I won't give a lot of time for this).
The second stage is a double elimination tournament (ORAS OU). I'll explain this part more in-depth when we get to this part if there's any confusion.
Let me know if there's any questions. Play your games as soon as you can and report them either to me in PM or in this thread. The standings will be kept in this post. Good luck!
Standings
1. TraceofLife 4-0
2. zorbees 4-1
3. RODAN 1-2
4. rssp1 1-2
5. billymills 1-1
6. Blazade 0-5
Trace v zorbees http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-417545496
zorbees v RODAN http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-417557375
Trace v RODAN http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-417562714
zorbees v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-418476989
zorbees v billy http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-419140616
rssp1 v Trace http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-419161044
Deadline
Here are the seeds:
1. TraceofLife
2. zorbees
3. RODAN
4. rssp1
5. billymills
6. Blazade
TraceofLife and zorbees get byes into the winners bracket semi-finals. Matchups now are
3. RODAN vs. 6. Blazade
4. rssp1 vs. 5. billymills
Trace plays the winner of 4 v 5 while zorbees gets the winner of 3 v 6.
Please schedule your game within the next 24 hours and play within 72 hours. If you see this being a problem let me know so I can accommodate/help get your games now. Good luck!
billy v Trace https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-421814183
Blazade v rssp1? http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-425602354
billy v Trace https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-426590823
Blazade v billy http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-426627561
Individual immunity is once again back up for grabs. Today's challenge is modeled off an area in the Emerald Battle Frontier. That area is the Battle Arena!
The rules for this challenge are as follows.
-Single elimination 4 player tournament (so two wins = win immunity, lose and you're out)
-ADV OU banlist
-3v3
-You cannot switch Pokemon at any point. You cannot use moves that force Pokemon to switch such as Whirlwind and Baton Pass.
-After 3 turns, assuming neither Pokemon has fainted, each Pokemon will be judged on three categories: Mind (did the Pokemon use attacking moves), Skill (accuracy), and Body (health remaining). Whichever Pokemon wins the most categories stays on, while the losing Pokemon is switched out (and is considered eliminated, but not fainted).
-If for some reason there is a tie in the judging, both Pokemon are considered eliminated.
This challenge technically requires use of a judge. However, since I can't be online all the time, I give everyone permission to either 1. Use a neutral third party or 2. Judge together, using a third person arbiter if necessary when there are disagreements.
I'll post an expanded list of the rules of the Battle Arena in a second. Please battle within 4 days.
Expanded Battle Arena explanation.
A Pokémon can’t switch out, and Baton Pass, Roar, and Whirlwind will always fail. After a new set of two Pokémon is in battle as a turn begins, the Mind and Skill ratings are set to 0, then the result is judged if both Pokémon remain in battle at the end of the third turn (after end-of-turn effects). For each category, the Pokémon with the higher rating earns two judging points; in case of a tie, each Pokémon earns 1 judging point.
Because of the nature of judging, battles in the Battle Arena are Single Battles only.
Mind
To determine the Mind rating, certain moves chosen for use by Pokémon are given points, as shown here.
To determine the Skill rating, points are added and subtracted as follows:
The Body rating for a Pokémon is (((HP remaining at end)*100)/(starting HP)), rounded down. A Pokémon’s starting HP is set to its current HP as soon as a Pokémon on either side enters the battle.
Results
The Pokémon with fewer judging points than the other Pokémon is eliminated. In a tie, both Pokémon are eliminated. A Pokémon eliminated this way doesn’t faint and retains its current HP and whether it’s poisoned, burned, paralyzed, frozen, or asleep, but can’t be in battle again for the rest of the battle. This is important for the purposes of Beat Up and Assist, which depend on which Pokémon are unfainted.
As soon as a Pokémon faints or is eliminated, the next Pokémon in order is sent out.
Blazade v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-430759226
Trace v billy http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-431174902
billy v Blazade https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-432027910
The rules for this challenge are as follows.
-Single elimination 4 player tournament (so two wins = win immunity, lose and you're out)
-ADV OU banlist
-3v3
-You cannot switch Pokemon at any point. You cannot use moves that force Pokemon to switch such as Whirlwind and Baton Pass.
-After 3 turns, assuming neither Pokemon has fainted, each Pokemon will be judged on three categories: Mind (did the Pokemon use attacking moves), Skill (accuracy), and Body (health remaining). Whichever Pokemon wins the most categories stays on, while the losing Pokemon is switched out (and is considered eliminated, but not fainted).
-If for some reason there is a tie in the judging, both Pokemon are considered eliminated.
This challenge technically requires use of a judge. However, since I can't be online all the time, I give everyone permission to either 1. Use a neutral third party or 2. Judge together, using a third person arbiter if necessary when there are disagreements.
I'll post an expanded list of the rules of the Battle Arena in a second. Please battle within 4 days.
Expanded Battle Arena explanation.
A Pokémon can’t switch out, and Baton Pass, Roar, and Whirlwind will always fail. After a new set of two Pokémon is in battle as a turn begins, the Mind and Skill ratings are set to 0, then the result is judged if both Pokémon remain in battle at the end of the third turn (after end-of-turn effects). For each category, the Pokémon with the higher rating earns two judging points; in case of a tie, each Pokémon earns 1 judging point.
Because of the nature of judging, battles in the Battle Arena are Single Battles only.
Mind
To determine the Mind rating, certain moves chosen for use by Pokémon are given points, as shown here.
- If the move is Detect, Endure, Fake Out, or Protect, subtract 1 point.
- If the move is Bide, Counter, or Mirror Coat, add 0 points.
- For all other moves:
- If the move has a power of 0, add 0 points.
- If the move has a power of 1 or more, add 1 point.
To determine the Skill rating, points are added and subtracted as follows:
- If the attack is Future Sight, Doom Desire, Struggle, Beat Up, or a non-damaging attack:
- Add 1 point if the attack was successful.
- Subtract 3 points if the attack’s effect was prevented because of an ability the target has.
- Subtract 2 points if the attack missed or failed in other ways, except if the attack was avoided because of Protect and Detect.
- Otherwise, if the attack is a damaging attack:
- If the attack was successful:
- Add 1 point if its type is normally effective against the target’s types.
- Add 2 points if its type is "super effective" against the target’s types.
- Subtract 1 point if its type is "not very effective" against the target’s types.
- Subtract 3 points if the attack was prevented because of an ability the target has (other than Wonder Guard or Levitate).
- Subtract 2 points if the attack missed, failed, or became ineffective, except if the attack was avoided because of Protect and Detect. (Cumulative with the previous step.)
- If the attack was successful:
- When a move is prevented from being used or when it can’t be used because it has 0 PP.
- When an attack is returned with Future Sight and Doom Desire (not when they’re used).
- If the Pokémon is "storing energy" with Bide.
- If the Pokémon couldn’t use Focus Punch because it "lost its focus", this is treated as a success.
- Triple Kick is considered successful if at least one hit of the attack was done, even if the second or third hits cause a miss.
- An attack that changes stat stages without necessarily lowering or raising them, such as Psych Up and Haze, is considered successful even if the change results in the same stat stages as before.
- If the attack’s description says that it "does nothing" as part of its effect (Splash, for example), this is treated as a success.
- A non-damaging attack that raises or lowers stat stages, but fails to do so, is considered to fail even if the rest of its effect is successful.
- For other moves, a move "fails" if it does none of its effect when used, unless the attack description states that it "does nothing" as its effect.
- Moves used by other moves are taken into account.
- If Snatch or Magic Coat is used, the ultimate user of the attack being snatched or bounced back is the Pokémon that receives the Skill rating change.
- For multi-hit attacks, only the last hit of the attack is counted for the purposes of the Skill rating change.
The Body rating for a Pokémon is (((HP remaining at end)*100)/(starting HP)), rounded down. A Pokémon’s starting HP is set to its current HP as soon as a Pokémon on either side enters the battle.
Results
The Pokémon with fewer judging points than the other Pokémon is eliminated. In a tie, both Pokémon are eliminated. A Pokémon eliminated this way doesn’t faint and retains its current HP and whether it’s poisoned, burned, paralyzed, frozen, or asleep, but can’t be in battle again for the rest of the battle. This is important for the purposes of Beat Up and Assist, which depend on which Pokémon are unfainted.
As soon as a Pokémon faints or is eliminated, the next Pokémon in order is sent out.
Blazade v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-430759226
Trace v billy http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-431174902
billy v Blazade https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-432027910
It's almost the end of the journey for you three. There is only thing separating all of you from reaching the end: one final immunity challenge and one final tribal council. The winner of this challenge is guaranteed a spot in the final 2 and a chance to plead their case in front of the Jury as to why they deserve the title of Sole Survivor - they will also have the ability to choose who to take into the final 2, and thus also choosing who will become the final member of the Jury.
Here's how the final challenge is going to work:
The game began with a random battle challenge - and that's how it's going to end. This final challenge is just like any other tournament final with 3 players in it - you need to win 2 games against both your other opponents to win the challenge. If everyone goes 1-1 then the bracket is reset and we start again except with a different tier.
The tiers will go as follows:
ORAS Random Battle Triples ---> ORAS Random Battle Doubles (if no Triples winner) ---> ORAS Random Battle Singles (if no triples or doubles winner) ---> back to triples.
This will also be an endurance challenge of some sort. You must play both battles within a 48 hour timeframe beginning at midnight tonight PST. If there is no winner after we run through triples/doubles/singles, then we start again from triples, except with a 24 hour deadline. Failure to show for a battle or make minimal activity effort will lead to a disqualification from the challenge.
Example - Player A wins triples against player B, but loses to C. B defeats C, but loses to A. Since everyone has gone 1-1, W/L is reset and A plays B again, except this time in doubles.
Any questions or concerns let me know. Even though the official clock won't start until midnight tonight, feel free to begin your battles beforehand.
billy v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/randomtriplesbattle-433785859
Here's how the final challenge is going to work:
The game began with a random battle challenge - and that's how it's going to end. This final challenge is just like any other tournament final with 3 players in it - you need to win 2 games against both your other opponents to win the challenge. If everyone goes 1-1 then the bracket is reset and we start again except with a different tier.
The tiers will go as follows:
ORAS Random Battle Triples ---> ORAS Random Battle Doubles (if no Triples winner) ---> ORAS Random Battle Singles (if no triples or doubles winner) ---> back to triples.
This will also be an endurance challenge of some sort. You must play both battles within a 48 hour timeframe beginning at midnight tonight PST. If there is no winner after we run through triples/doubles/singles, then we start again from triples, except with a 24 hour deadline. Failure to show for a battle or make minimal activity effort will lead to a disqualification from the challenge.
Example - Player A wins triples against player B, but loses to C. B defeats C, but loses to A. Since everyone has gone 1-1, W/L is reset and A plays B again, except this time in doubles.
Any questions or concerns let me know. Even though the official clock won't start until midnight tonight, feel free to begin your battles beforehand.
billy v rssp1 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/randomtriplesbattle-433785859