Survivor SURVIVOR: ORRE (won by BLUEDOOM)

[JALMONT]

approved by nobody because fk the mods (jk mods i love u)

3 years later...I'm back hosting another Survivor. This will be a x player (where x is between 16-20 people) not anonymous game where the goal is to outwit, outplay, and outlast the rest to become the Sole Survivor and the winner of the game. See the previous Survivors for more info/a better indication on how these games go and are run.

This game will probably be more like the first and second Smogon Survivors (...because I hosted those). That means probably a little more Pokemon then you might be used to but it should still be a good mix of mons and non-mons. There might be twists or there might not be. You'll have to wait to find that out!

Rules

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1. Game Basics: During the Day phases of the game there will be immunity challenges. Immunity challenges decide who is safe and who has to go to tribal council. During the Tribal Stage of the game, challenges will be won and lost as a whole tribe. The tribe that loses in the immunity challenge will have to go to Tribal Council and vote someone out. During the Individual Stage of the game, challenges will be won and lost by a single person. The winner of the immunity challenge cannot be voted upon, but (s)he will be able to vote. There may be hidden immunity idols and other advantages in the game.

2. Challenges: Challenges are the tasks that players or tribes will compete in to win immunity and be safe from Tribal Council. The challenges themselves will vary including things like Pokemon battling, trivia, flash games, etc. -At the start of the Day phase, the details of the challenge will be posted. -During Tribal (Team) challenges, some players will have to sit out some of the challenges. Players cannot sit out during two consecutive challenges.

3. Tribal Council: -Tribal Council will occur at the Night phase after the Immunity Challenge. There will be a private Vote to see who is eliminated from the game. -The vote total will be revealed to the tribe at the end of the night, but you will not know who voted for who. -In case of an initial tie, there will be a re-vote where you can only vote for one of the people with the most votes. For example, if there are 3 votes for Player A, 3 votes for Player B, and 1 vote for Player C in a 7 man tribe, you may only vote for Player A or B during the re-vote. -In case of a second tie, the player who leaves will be determined by a random number generator. The players who tied for the most votes both times will be safe from this tiebreaker. In the previous example, players A and B would be safe. Players voted out (aka dead) cannot be communicated with following their removal from the game. There will be absolutely no communication between dead players and alive players. This will change when the game reaches its conclusion, but until then, this rule will be strictly enforced. At a certain point, those voted out will form the Jury. The Jury is special in that they follow the game in order to vote for a winner at the end of the game.

4. Winning the Game: -The goal of the game is to reach the Final Tribal Council, which typically occurs with just two or three people left in the game. You cannot win the game unless you make it to the Final Tribal Council. -At the Final Tribal Council, the remaining players in the game speak to the jury and try to convince the jury that they deserve to win the game. -Each finalist is allowed to make an opening statement on why they deserve to win the game. Following opening statements, each Jury member is allowed to make either a statement or ask the finalists a question if they choose to. They may say or ask whatever they want. -When everyone is done speaking, the jury will vote privately on who wins the game. Whoever gets the most votes wins.

5. General Mechanics: A typical phase will go like this. I post a challenge and the rules. The challenge will have a time limit, hopefully no longer than 48 hours. One tribe or person wins and the losing tribe or the merged tribe will go to tribal council to vote someone out. Absolutely no communication with players not on your tribe during the tribal stage. Obviously, this is partly on you the players to enforce but please please other than pleasantries do not talk strategy regarding the game with someone you shouldn't be. The only reason you should be talking to opposing tribe members is to schedule battles. Inactive players who fail to vote will vote for themselves, unless evidence can be provided otherwise as to that person voting for someone else, OR if I deem that self voting would negatively impact the strategy of the game, in which case I will randomize the vote. -No anonymous nicks will be allowed for the purposes of this game. No impersonating as well. The identities of those communicating about the game should be clear and obvious.

6. Unsporting Behavior Respect the players you are playing with, the hosts, and the game at all times. Survivor innately is a personal game so while it's understandable that things might get heated, please refrain from unsporting conduct. Extreme poor sportsmanship can possibly lead to in-game punishments, expulsion from the game, and/or Smogon-specific punishments. Don't cheat. Or I will ban you from Smogon. Hosts reserve the right to change rules and otherwise make subjective decisions when necessary to uphold the fairness and integrity of the game.

7. NEW AND UNORTHODOX RULE YOU SHOULD KNOW No copy/pasting discord logs related to the game. This means you can't copy logs from conversations you've had with other people.

Signup priority will be given to people who have played the fewest/less recent Survivor games on the smogon.com forums. Please signup by messaging me and/or shmegg via PM on the forums or discord. If you are not an active Smogon user, feel free to give me some background on yourself! I really want new faces to play and the more info you give me the more I can trust you not to flake. I reserve the right to make the final decision in selecting a playerlist.

The game will start when there's enough people and the server is ready to go. I will update this thread with the link when things are ready. Thanks for your patience. PM me/post here with any questions or concerns.

 

[JALMONT]

the rules are now posted. please make note of the NEW AND UNORTHODOX RULE.

thanks

 

[Da Letter El]

I approve this

Take that!!!!!

 

[HeaLnDeaL]

This thread was a lot cooler before DLE approved this

 

[JALMONT]

Still looking for 6-8 people! No experience required!

 

[JALMONT]

Hi we approximately have enough people if you would like to play still tell me in the next 24 hours or forever hold your peace

 

[JALMONT]

Here is the link to the server! Please join! shmegg (and I'll try and help too!) will set up the correct permissions and we will get started as soon as people are in the server and the perms are done. It would be great if that could happen tonight but I suspect more realistically it'll be tomorrow. The server should appear empty for the time being while we do all that. Thanks for your patience.

https://discord.gg/rE8msha

any questions concerns or issues let me know

 

[JALMONT]

I wanted to do a audio postgame but interest was meh and it's easier to just write anyways (well assuming i actually sit down and do it...) versus having to schedule and what not so my solution is i will just release this in segments. hopefully that'll keep me going in finishing. thanks again to everyone for playing and spectating and special thanks to shmegg for all of his diligent work in cohosting and helping me put together this idea of mine. it saddens me that i feel i have lost my desire to do game things but if this is it then i'm happy overall with how this went and finished.

i wanted to host this game partly because i was a tad frustrated how many survivor games were going and i wanted to take another crack at hosting after i first started hosting survivor to address the things i didn't like in recent survivor games. i am very traditional when it comes to survivor but i recognize that the online format requires certain changes to keep the game interesting. i had a couple ideas to do so while still keeping true to my survivor philosophies (minimal twists, player agency as much as possible, choices). i'm quite pleased with how my ideas played out and i felt most were utilized and added to the game.

moving to discord was kind of a mixed bag. on one hand, it's inevitable. but at the same time i miss the forum conversations and having everything saved in a thread. it's not too inconceivable to think that i'll just delete the server eventually. i feel like it's easier to see progression through a forum thread and ofc it's cool to read final tribal in a forum format. i remember much more from the games on the forums vs not on the forums. obviously i could've done that but laziness!!! the plus sides are good too (i mean discord was used for the first survivor game, i just made the players make it XD).

i thought the cast was good. i attach my precast analysis to this post (sorry shub for the wrong pronouns...) don't want to change anything to stay true to what i wrote at the time. in hindsight i think TBZ and jornsy flopped while cabbate and heury were big wins, heury especially (well because he survived longer but yea). i'll add that spiderz signed up to play but only told shmegg and not me and shmegg forgot to let him know. i 100% would;ve let him in because contrary to what u might think i'm actually not that vengeful (ok also we needed people so he'd have been doing me a favor anyways). but yeah i felt bad about that so sorry. also mr. toni was going to play but he took forever just to join the server when we were going to start the game so he got kicked in favor of DLE. sorry toni.

re: pregame alliances - people talk about this like it's such a big problem but the truth is that historically there have been plenty of successful games that have had "pregame alliances" which is more just like "i've known/played games with x user before". if it were really true that no one wants these things or that they ruin games then maybe people would be more interested in playing games that require you to work outside of people you know OR people would make more effort to not work with their obvious friends. why is EIMM popular? Oh yeah, because you can ally with the people you know. at the risk of sounding like old man yelling at clouds, it's definitely a cultural shift i've noticed where people have gone from wanting to beat their friends to doing nothing but winning together. actually i don't think there's anything wrong with this, it's probably natural. does it put certain people at disadvantages? i mean yeah. but that's just life on the internet. survivor isn't a fair game and there's so much luck involved anyways. most of the winners of the survivor games were benefited by being popular on the site or knowing the most people in the game. this did not make the games worse from a spectator or even player standpoint the majority of the time. even in a season like 2, i would by far point to something like the hosting as being to blame for not pushing the players outside of their comfort zone. and then you have all stars. the reason why all stars was ruined wasn't even because of pregame alliances necessarily, it was because there were people in the game who didn't give a shit and ruined the game for the people who did. what happened would've have happened if one player didn't go full retard (i mean this dude admitted he only joined for the EXACT PURPOSE to vote with his friends and then pulled the "don't care" card when he got stabbed lmfao. also there was that one twist that blew dick so maybe should've pulled that. anyways back to the point, yeah shit can be unfair but it isn't a death warrant. i will always contend that effort trumps all and the players who should've been eliminated did quite well.

and maybe for some people this isn't good enough. that's fine. there's ways to get around it, people host ORGs online all the time. I'm not opposed to that or anything. i just don't think it actually "ruins" games or that we should conclude it's futile to host "smogon survivor" because there's not enough of a playerbase. there's plenty of evidence that you can have interesting games drawing upon a relatively closed playerbase.

- to the game:
the beginning twist - yeah this ended up working out really well. i was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who thought this was serious...and i was happy to see that people didnt just go after the unknowns immediately. i (and i believe a lot of the spec chat???) figured it would be like cabbate and heury but it ended up being samoyed and paperblade getting voted out. snype put together a group to target samo while epicsnorlax and i want to say heury (or uto?) were instrumental in getting votes on paper. math was afk and randvoted rad while shub/inferno voted cabbate. laurel and cabbate and tbz voted for jornsy. overall im glad the twist's intentions weren't completely obvious and i'm happy that the votes were pretty varied and then there weren't any annoying tie situations that needed to be resolved. it seems weird to think that a beginning twist like this has never happened before. i think tribe pick at the start makes a lot of sense in non-anon and helps align new players to the sort of social dynamics that are at play before the game truly begins.

so samoyed and paperblade were captains. the start of the game was really good and part of that was the picks getting finished so quickly. i thought for sure this was going to take 1 day plus so getting it done in one evening was super cool.

the picks were: paperblade -> rad -> bluedoom -> inferno -> laurel -> tbz -> math -> cabbate
samoyed -> shub -> snype -> jornsy -> uto -> heury -> epic -> dle

i felt bad for accidentally telling tbz it was his turn when it wasn't, i dunno if that influenced heury to take epic but yea :x the funniest part of the draft was dle getting taken second last. i felt pyrite's relationships were pretty well defined given the picks whereas phenac was a lot more out there eg snype picking jornsy was something im sure not post would've predicted. i thought these tribes were pretty balanced but after learning more about the players phenac was clearly the stronger tribe. I don't even think there were any bad picks, it just so happened that UTO and epic managed to be steals.

as a result of their "vote out" paperblade and samo were given shards from the opposing tribe, intended to give them a headstart and a bargaining chip on the HII. I'll discuss the HII mechanic a little later.

The first challenge was randbat challenges (King of the hill/knockout style). I think this was a good variation beyond "first tribe to x wins." this challenge was meant to allow a player to "carry" if they could while still working within a team framework. i felt like people were having fun with the challenge and i liked how it allowed players to keep playing if they were active and winning. UTO and epic ended up smoking the pyrites with epic going 3-0 over superstar pokemon player laurel. paper and rad did their best to batten down the hatches but when you've got 3+ people going 0-3 there's not a lot that you can do. phenac won pretty handily

oh i guess i can discuss another twist, the "sit out." to me one of the issues with online is that it's advantages can be even more unfair because it's pretty much impossible to figure out who might have one beyond looking for one yourself and finding out someone else has gotten there before you. my solution was to try and provide advantages that were easily attainable (no puzzle) but you had to expose yourself to everyone else as going after that advantage. the difficultly then was i wanted it to be accessible to everyone but not too accessible so that everyone had an advantage. i trended on the less advantage side by having the sitout only gaining 1/3 of a HII and it being the same shard so there would be diminishing returns. the consequence was also pretty bad (costing your team an entire performer for a challenge). there was a fear about people throwing in the back of my end which is where the other "twist" came in...maybe the reward wasn't strong enough but again i wanted people to really have to go for the advantage given their general brokeness...

-pyrite tribal
This vote was pretty easy. MathTurtle I think was pretty unanimous given him being afk and barely showing up to the challenge. Don't think anything really interesting happened here. not sure if any alliances really began - i knowing luarel + inferno connected, rad + paper and marth sort of. but there wasn't really any movement on the vote going anywhere else.

MATHTURTLE 16th
Back when mathturtle joined his first game i dont quite remember but he finished 3rd? or 2nd? I get him mixed up with the other dude but i was really rooting for him to win. Idk he always kind of struck me as going with the flow so my expectations weren't high. and those expectations were right as he really didn't show much effort. maybe he was busy. in any case someone had to get voted out and it was him and probably deserved. i appreciate him joining my game at least.

to be continued...

 

[JALMONT]

oh i forgot about exile island: so yeah, exile island was my attempt to introduce cross tribal associations since there wasnt' going to be a tribe swap. it was also important to gain the shard to create the immunity idol. it's a pretty minor "twist" that for most players is negligible, but worked towards my philosophy of transparency regarding who might possibly have an advantage. it also gave ppl something to think about in terms of who they wanted to send to exile/how much info the exile person would share with everyone. idk i'm not sure if it really had a big impact this game but i thought it was ok. it didnt' negatively detract from the game and i would consider that a big W

i guess now's a good time to discuss the HII.

I think the HII has ruined Survivor. It's a success in that it unquestionably changed the game and created exciting new scenarios that force players to plan for and act in ways that are enjoyable to viewership. unfortunately, these contrived scenarios have very little to do with survivor ability and actively punish players for things that are mostly outside their control. players consistently get punished through no fault of their own by random idol plays and other advantages that bail out a player's poor social game. this problem is exacerbated in online survivor - since you do not spend 24/7 with the other players of the game, it's basically impossible to deduce who might have an idol or other sort of advantage. like i said before, usually the only way to tell an advantage would even exist is if you found the same clue and got to the stage where you would receive something but got nothing because someone got there first. it's especially poor design online because it doesn't give players a chance to respond or plan around something as game changing as an idol. yeah on the plus side you reward the player for putting in the work to gain the idol, but at the same time there's basically no wiggle room for other players to respond. and that's the most interesting part of the game! survivor and other information management games (think multifaction "mafia") "work" because it's fun and interesting and rewarding trying to work around perceived benefits and advantages that other players ("enemies" if you will) might have. one player having game changing information isn't interesting if no one else has the opportunity to sniff that out and play around that.

why not have no idols or advantages? well, i did it. there's nothing wrong with it. it's pure survivor. i feel it works fine and there's evidence it works fine. but, with online survivor pre-existing relationships exist and while i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that, i do think it requires these games to have twists like an HII to keep the game fresh. i think the randomness created by a HII and other advantages is acceptable to combat the monotony of "Get 5 buddies for an alliance and roll to the end." the tricky part then is balancing the need for these advantages to exist while still giving players a chance to know that they exist and that someone owns them (obviously everyone knowing isn't good either since it dilutes the whole point of these advantages).

so this is where my system came in of requiring the shards to create an idol. you needed an exile shard from exile island, and a shard from each tribe which could be gained by sitting out from challenges. to make things more difficult and prevent an excess of shards on the market, you had to get someone to give/trade you a shard from the other tribe. this is was partly why exile was in place, to give players opportunities to get a shard that way. to limit idol existence so they couldn't be stacked, i limited the exile shard to two. i think this was a good system in theory but likely hurt by the fact that most people just didn't know they could trade/give away a shard. also i think people didnt have the knowledge about how to create an idol. i also probably should've told the first voteout ppl (samo/paper) how to make an idol (im pretty sure I didn't, I thought I did initially but now I don't think so lol). i'm not sure if this was ideal for the game - would it have been more interesting if it had been known from the start? should the players have gotten a clue regarding being able to trade/give away shards? maybe. but i felt that erring on the side of not wanting a bazillion potential idols was better. maybe limiting the game to just two exile shards was good enough. that might've been a good option to get idols into the game which maybe would've made the game better. yeah i think doing it again i probably would've given more hints on idols existing and how to attain them. overall i was happy with how the shards worked (yes they did get useless late in the game, but that's fine because idols also get more powerful later in the game). an idol was created and it improved the game. people knew who potentially had the idol and planned around it. that's a success for me.

the main thing i was worried about was an alliance running a tribe and abusing the shard system and sitting out challenges. i'll get to this later but i really did want people to participate in the challenges. this is why i didnt' have a tribe swap. i didn't want a tribe to be rewarded by throwing challenges and relying on the HII/merge to come back. i thought no swap meant that eventually the alliance would have to start eating their own and put them in a terrible position come the merge. this i think did mainly work out. it does really suck to do challenges if you start out in a huge hole due to tribemates sitting out which sort of did end up happening for inferno and laurel. i felt this might happen and tried to make the later challenges more "carryable" although whether that was actually true i dunno. i do feel overall i put enough safeguards in with the shards/exile/no tribe swap to ensure that advantages were still in the game but were manageable and fair. and i think the system to keep things from becoming abused was fine as well. at the same time there were some instances where the system was semi-abused and there wasn't anything that the disadvantaged players could do which was disappointing but i didn't feel as if this was anything too extreme. but yeah, idk. maybe it would've been more fair to enforce a swap. i'm not sure. i'll talk more about not putting in a tribe swap l8r.

-
the next challenge was semantris, a cool word association game found by shmegg. We did the block mode because I felt that was a tad more skill based than speed. this was a good challenge that people seemed to enjoy, as evidenced by a lot of players spending a lot of time playing! i'm not really sure how the pyrite tribe lost this one given that shubaka sat out for the temptation, giving them a player with a big score of 0. and yet somehow, they lost. i think on the whole they had more people unable to put a lot of time into the challenge. inferno and marth definitely did not score high enough (marth played the wrong mode apparently so he couldn't get a high score...LOL). UTO also posted an insane score, 2k higher than pblade's runner up score. but yeah, in general the phenacs scored around the 8k range while pyrite was around the 7k with two duds and only paper scoring super high. overall good challenge, a fun minigame that wasn't too complicated but still addicting (and rewarding to those with the perseverance).

exile island: DLE and bluedoom went. DLE was skiing up in tahoe and couldn't really talk. bluedoom asked DLE to give him the shard since he gave it up last time but DLE never responded so no one got it. gg

so pyrite lost again and we got the first exciting vote out. RAD actually initially wanted to target inferno...but then cabbate felt like RAD was being demanding and decided she wanted to try and turn the tables on him. cab and laurel got to talking and decided they wanted to try and get RAD especially considering inferno and laurel were working together. RAD got wind of this blindside when marth spilled the beans. I actually don't think this was that bad of a play. the problem was that laurel misjudged the situation which i guess you can't super blame him for not knowing marth and rad were tight. the part that never made sense to me was why laurel never went after TBZ's vote. I'm pretty sure laurel even said he thought he had a pretty good relationship with tbz previously and i vaguely remember TBZ even saying something like he'd be willing to sheep laurel. i can't remember if paper was approached either, i feel like he might've been. the important thing is that tbz was not approached and i always felt like that was a really easy avenue to pick up a vote. instead it felt like the laurel/cab/inferno trio was reliant on a marth vote that definitely wasn't coming...which is what ended up happening.

the spectator chat was complaining about "pre game relationships" ruining this vote but i'm sorry, my what i am sure is an unpopular opinion is that the trio did not play the vote well at all. i don't really see how you can say "there was nothing that could've be done"........when literally those 3 didn't even approach tbz to try and win his vote. how is that any different then relying on marth due to your relationship that exists with him based on past play as well? there's more reason to believe than not that tbz could've been convinced and that would've completely changed the dynamic of the tribe. objectively speaking, i don't really feel as if the argument presented to marth was that good...like RAD had been one of the better and more active challenge performers anyways which was probably important to consider starting out 0-2 (although in fairness tribe swaps pretty much always happen in some form). yeah i dunno. this was basically the defining vote for the pyrites to decide the fate of their tribe. honestly, it would've been more fun if RAD went home because I think the pyrites would've efforted for all the remaining challenges. as things happened though, i don't really blame anyone for the moves they made here.

CABBATE - 15th
Umbreon of CAP fame got his friend to sign up so we would have enough players and I'm thankful he did. Maybe he could've signed up too to make things easier for her lol. again, i think cabbate was in a tough position from the start. she was definitely playing from behind and the challenges didn't suit her strengths either. while i wouldn't go as far to say she was screwed from the start, her road was much harder than say idk TBZ? epicsnorlax? I'm a big proponent of seeing new people in games and I was happy to have a new face that gave it her all. You will never see me fault effort and she provided more than just minimum effort (and as a true beginner too). hey, she avoided the initial vote out. and if things shake out differently (aka 1 vote), she's probably at the merge (and maybe even further, a la heury).

you could make the argument that perhaps cab should've been willing to let inferno go and try and make a move later but that's difficult to see working out (at best you could tie a vote). i'm really not sure what i would even do in that situation - i'd probably be hyper aware of being perceived at the bottom; do you go w the flow and hope for the merge or make a power play and put yourself in a good spot for the pre-merge? both have good points (and ofc you hopefully win more challenges moving forward). i don't know what's the "right" move there. yea, i mean the big point that i've touched on already is going to TBZ - and even that was more laurel/inferno's fault because those two have way more knowledge of players than her. felt bad about her vote out but sometimes that's how survivor goes. i'm sure she'd find more success in a more traditional ORG. regardless, i'm glad she signed up and was invested in the game. sometimes, things just don't go your way. for someone voted out second, i actually think she played a fairly impressive game

 

[Lrr]

You definitely told us how to make the hidden immunity idol btw

From December 22nd in my confessional
[3:22 AM] jalmojt: For whatever reason, you didn't have a good first impression on everyone else. Now you have a chance to make amends. You've received a Phenac Shard. Should you gather a Pyrite, Phenac, and Exile shard, you'll be able to combine the three into a Hidden Immunity Idol. You are free to share or hide this information as you wish.

 

[JALMONT]

thanks always trusting my gut from now on

(or i guess i could always just look it up but i dont got time for that)

 

[JALMONT]

next challenge was a potpourri of stuff. look, i guess you could say this is was a pretty lazy challenge but i thought it was fine. at least this way people can decide what they want to do. no one sat out. 3 pkmn, 3 various games (koi koi, reversi, and my personal favorite backgammon). i dont really remember the intricacies here, looking at my sheet i think marth ff'd his game (although iirc he was down a lot) and jornsy didnt' show for his battle which gave a default win to tbz (probably the beginning of the jornsy downfall tbh). the tiebreaker was each tribe pick 1 of the previous "tiers" and only the ppl who won a matchup could compete. the tiebreak tiebreaker was a randbat race which I've always found fun to do.

results overview:
UTO def inferno @ koi koi
heury def paper @ reversi
laurel def epic @ ss ou
rad def samo @ randbat (i think this was bo3)
shub def marth @ backgammon
tbz win by ff vs jornsy

tiebreak:
rad def shub @ sm ou (pyrite pick)
laurel won randbat race vs rad
heury won reversi vs tbz (phenac pick).

randbat race times

Hide

8:58 PM] jalmojt:
Laurel finished his randbats in 28:03.11

[8:58 PM] jalmojt:
UTO finished his in

[8:58 PM] jalmojt:
39:09.94

pyrite ended up winning. didn't help the phenacs that they had a no show but overall this was a pretty close challenge. yeah pretty simple challenge, i don't have much to say other than that it worked.

Samoyed and bluedoom went to exile. Samo agreed to give bluedoom the exile shard. I didn't really understand why samo gave bd the shard. i suppose he was trying to generate good will for the merge - but at the same time he would literally have been 1 easily attainable shard away from an idol. i guess he didn't know how exactly he was going to get his tribe's shard but yeah. felt like this was the one situation in which he really should've tried to push for the exile shard. i also feel like samo didn't really leverage the info about jornsy having the other exile shard which could've been interesting but ya. maybe he was worried about bd telling the next exiled about him having the other shard.

so the phenacs went to their first tribal and i was excited to see what would happen. there were various different relationships and there didn't seem to me to be an "obvious vote." it seemed like it would boil down to something close, maybe jornsy would be thrown up there, samo was an option given the initial vote and dle was out there as well. what i think this vote came down to was that epic i think kind of took his position for granted. compared to someone like dle, who worked to get in with UTO, epic i felt largely rested on his laurels and assumed the same people who voted dle would do the same. i'll be honest, i don't quite remember a lot of the discussions but iirc most people settled on epic as a relatively safe vote. epic i think pushed dle due to his relative...inactivity? perceived challenge weakness? idk i forget think it was inactivity tho. but epic didn't really do a lot to stabilize his social position and everyone else largely decided they'd rather go the route of voting epic. i think there was some worriedness over his closeness to EIMM people? but mostly he was sunk by his lack of social bonds. samo was going to vote epic too but he threw his vote away on DLE (after a coinflip) to hopefully spread some paranoia (which i respect big time).

EPICSNORLAX - 14TH
I thought epic was a great addition to this game and I was saddened that he didn't make it farther. I thought he set himself up in a great position pre-tribal pick. He was working the convos and making sure he wasn't targeted. And then he was killing it at the challenges - he was a huge performer in the first two challenges. unfortunately, i think this early game success left him unprepared for the first vote. he didnt' really do a good job of maintaining relationships, he wasn't really talking to a lot of people. i'm not sure if he overrelied on his challenge performance (i mean in fairness, i thought he was definitely safe due to his challenge performance) or what, but definitely felt like he was blindslided. i would imagine had he known he was on the block he would've worked a lot harder to try and turn the vote. as things were, there was very little opposition to people throwing up epic's name and so he was basically voted out unanimously.

-
it's very difficult to do trivia in a non-live setting because you can just look stuff up lol. the Pokemon online server had a trivia bot which gave points for speed but even that i could google and put the answer in and still get max points. so the key to this challenge was that i had to create the questions myself which is still quite difficult to do. as a result, a lot of the stuff drew upon my general knowledge and whatever stuff i had lying around that inspired me. i added the "betting" part of it to make the challenge more interactive and let the tribes decide on what they wanted to risk. idk if it was worth it, considering the pyrites took the route of "bet the max on everything". in hindsight maybe not a good strat for them lol. yeah idk if that really added anything to the challenge but at least it made it more difficult for the tribes to tie.

at this point i think the majority pyrite alliance realized they should just sit out because they were safe. this was what i was worried about with my HII system - a dominant alliance just being able to gather advantages while not worrying about losing because they control the vote. it's definitely a shitty situation for the minority but i don't think there's anything inherently unfair about this situation; sometimes shitty things happen and while i tried to limit the likelihood of it happening it, i don't think there was a lot i could have done without putting a tribe swap which i didn't want to do. in any case, the trivia challenge was a challenge i would consider "carryable" although it's definitely harder w/o others. so at least for the most part it wasn't as if taking temptation was the exact same as throwing the challenge since everyone else definitely had the opportunity to win the challenge.

thought this was a fun challenge. i enjoyed it a lot. it was quite satisfying to see tribes work on the questions. i felt there was a good balance between difficult but doable. i threw out the smogon question because i'm fairly sure that posho was a correct answer but i couldn't actually find direct forum evidence (no namechange post for instance). i was very impressed that DLE (or his dad more accurately LOL) got the new order question. im a big NO fan and even I didn't know that song existed until like 7 years into my fandom (ok maybe that begs the question of how much of a fan i actually am but whatever dude). I thought the before and after/rhyme time questions were v good too and am proud of myself for creating those (i'm ass at those cats when they're on jeopardy too incidentally). the pyrites just weren't able to get very many questions right and lost the challenge. their go big or go home strat backfired as well, so one of them was to go home.

heury and paper went to exile. since 2 exile shards had been taken, there was only a clue on how to create a HII. i think this was a reasonable change but per my discussion on the idol above, maybe information gleaned too late. heury got the clue. heury gave paper a lot of info on the workings of the phenacs according to him (although he was wrong to say there was a 5 person alliance - things were fluctuating a lot more than just a hard alliance). they had a good convo which i think gave heury more confidence to want to work w the pyrites at the merge.

the pyrites just went for inferno since he was a weaker challenge performer vs laurel. he gave it a shot to save himself but i dont think pushed that hard and probably wasn't convincing anybody other than laurel (tbz outside chance? probably not though). the vote was unanimous for him.

INFERNO - 13th
I think inferno is a good guy, just got unlucky this game. he seemed to have the same feeling upon getting voted out, sometimes things don't go your way and you lose. i didn't feel like he was uber dedicated and his lacking activity at times showed. but he gave it an effort even when things were bleak upon being voted out. i wonder if he could've tried to push a laurel vote although it seems doubtful that changes his fate in the game. maybe they just lose more challenges faster lul (since laurel was definitely more committed to winning challenge, not meant as a slight). i think it could've worked with the right argument but whether that truly would've helped his game seems doubtful. oh well. i appreciated his effort regardless.

-
this challenge was balls. like it sucked. i'll be honest, i got cold feet on the original challenge which was supposed to be haxball, 1v1, 2v2 as many people as could schedule to be on for the same time. i was just really worried the people with out there timezones would make it v difficult with lag and i didn't want to deal with having to put up with that. in hindsight, with the time spent on this challenge we should've just gone with that because i think at least people would've had more fun with it and maybe put in more effort to get stuff done lul.

idk team hearts isn't a terrible idea - at least it's a novel idea. but i mean idc how novel something is if it takes forever like this challenge. oh it would've been fun to play with the jack of diamonds rule too but bga doesn't have that and that's where everyone wanted to play because laurel was lagging on playok and i think other people didn't want to use it which i didnt care about because that's just my hosting philosopy (get things done over being stringent on rules).

there was no temptation this round. i forget why i did this. im pretty sure i planned for there to be a round w/o temptation. i'm guessing i retconned on because i changed the challenge because if multiple people sat out you literally could not do the challenge. i thought that was bad design to lose a set just because 1 partner sat out so to avoid complications i removed it (also it didn't add anything to the game really, a lot of tribe shards were out there).

laurel and rad lost to snype and shub. i gave an activity win to pyrite because they were on one night the phenacs said they could play but didn't. i'm surprised this wasn't a more contentious decision since marth timed out of a game (wasn't his fault though). then laurel and pblade beat dle and heury and won the challenge. yeah lol idk what to say - everything about this was a mess. not enough incentives for people to get stuff done, no punishment for not participating. ugh. should've just done haxball. i'm grateful no one complained on phenac though since that activity call was arguably bogus. but i think at the end of the day everyone just wanted to be done with it.

snype and rad went to exile. snype got the clue and they didn't talk about much except snype discussing his tribe's dynamics. no mention of a future alliance or anything like that. in hindsight giving snype the clue wasn't a great idea because it clued him in on the HII's existence and how to acquire it which i think might've affected the first merge vote in that it revealed paper/1 of the pyrites most likely had an idol.

ok i'll be honest...wtf happened this tribal??? i'm not really sure. i'll be honest this one slips my mind. dle/uto had a pretty tight alliance at this point and i think uto/heury were tight too so that's why they voted together. honestly i dont know why jornsy voted samo, i think someone just told him to do that and did. shub/snype were tight and i think were worried about UTO being so strong in challenges and didn't feel they could work with him as much as they could Samoyed or DLE for instance. i think snype/shub/samo were overreliant on DLE thinking that he would vote with them and so i dont think they reached out to jornsy for this vote? i dont quite remember, but that seems weird to me because i thought shub/jornsy were close. but yeah, in another very close vote, where all the marbles were on DLE to come thru, he voted for Samo, eliminating him in another extremely close 4-3 vote.

SAMOYED - 12th
samoyed used to go afk all the time in games and now he actually does stuff so that's big W. he himself admitted to struggling to connect to people in this game and fsr people eg snype at the beginning kept targeting him for some reason. i dont know if it was a personality thing, reputation or what, but i would agree, he just didn't really connect with people for some reason. it's not even a case of everyone else wasn't as active as him or anything like that, but just something didnt' click when he talked with people. samo wasn't the greatest challenge performer but he for the most part didn't need to be. i thought he didn't leverage his info advantage and shards very well, i was surprised he wasn't more aggressive with them or used that knowledge to try and create a solid alliance. possibly was worried about that stuff being used against them which is quite legitimate. but still, i would've thought he would've tried harder to get the HII or at least figure out who potentially had shards. maybe a victim of not knowing about trading :/ man, it just felt like samo was pretty unlucky in that everyone was going for him. for whatever reason he just didn't gel. that said, he was an intriguing character and he didn't go down w/o a fight. wish he would've made it to the merge where i think he would've contributed to the fireworks.

 

[Andy Snype]

me/shub thought that DLE was idling. We didn't know at this point there was a conversation between dle/heury/uto. Thought it was more likely for jornsy to be working with uto, who shub wanted out. That's why we went to DLE for voting out UTO. DLE hid this part that he was with UTO from us and said because of how last-minute things felt that there was a strong 3-man alliance between me/shub/samoyed that he felt disrespected as a last-minute thought after talking with samo but idk

 

[Da Letter El]

me/shub thought that DLE was idling. We didn't know at this point there was a conversation between dle/heury/uto. Thought it was more likely for jornsy to be working with uto, who shub wanted out. That's why we went to DLE for voting out UTO. DLE hid this part that he was with UTO from us and said because of how last-minute things felt that there was a strong 3-man alliance between me/shub/samoyed that he felt disrespected as a last-minute thought after talking with samo but idk

there was never anything between me/heury/uto. there were two separate things:

I was in a 3 man group with me/uto/jornsy. Uto was in an f2 alliance with heury.

Otherwise this is about right.

 

[JALMONT]

i guess now is as good of a time as any to discuss why no tribe swap...i think most online smogon survivors there has been a tribe swap (or 2? actually i can't think of many >1 tribe swap games. i don't think that's super plausible with 16 but perhaps games should look i+nto that. sounds appealing to me now tbh). but yeah, i figured people would consider it a given that a tribe swap would happen and i wanted to punish tribes for "throwing" on the assumption that they would be bailed by a tribe swap. basically swaps are so expected that it would be unexpected not to have one. and i think people "know" each other outside the game so the chances of a pagoging (the reason why you have a tribe swap) are probably pretty low anyways. idk yeah it's a minor thing but i thought it was a good change of pace not to have a tribe swap - alternatively it might've been interesting to have a tribe swap and see how tribal dynamics would have played out. i probably would've had one at f12 were i to do one and obviously depending on the new tribes it would've changed the game.

ok time for the big controversy...i 100% believe that i made the right decision with this challenge and that the only mistake i made was having this challenge give off the illusion that it could be an individual challenge. yes it's shitty what happened but unfortunately we're still in a team stage so ultimately everything that happens is the responsibility of the tribe. if someone wants to make a sub-par decision then that's something the players will have to deal with and respond to. it's not my job to micro manage the decisions the tribe makes insofar as those decisions regard how the tribe chooses to approach something. it's not the hosts job to force players to play a certain way (and this is true for all games i think). yes, i could've been tighter with the rules but that would defeat the point of this being a team challenge. it wouldn't be right for me to take away the tribe decision to perform sub optimally if that's what they want to do. all i should've done was be more clear that an individual decision would hold for the tribe. don't be mad at me for something your tribe did, be mad at bluedoom. that's what survivor should come down to - people make decisions and it's up to everyone else to hold them accountable. maybe that's cruel, but that is what the essence of survivor is.

fwiw i thought this was a cool challenge. i think the draft was interesting and added an intriguing element beyond a simple tribe v tribe battle. i copied the draft format from lcs (league of legends) with a minor addition to account for the sixth pokemon. the pokemon experts said that pyrite's had a better draft, idk anything about pokemon to agree/disagree. the controversy arose because laurel (who had done virtually all the drafting and scheduling) couldn't play at the times the phenacs were proposing and i think the phenacs wanted UTO to fight who was in asia and couldn't agree to laurel's times. eventually bluedoom said he got impatient and just did the battle and apparently played it terribly (again idk anything about pokemon). tbh, this was a brilliant move by bluedoom in hindsight (and quite villainous!). taking laurel into the merge was probably Not a Good Idea and would make it impossible to get phenacs to swap. that was probably a burnt bridge regardless. might as well cut someone who probably wasn't going to be too keen on working with you moving forward. alternatively, from a personal standpoint, yeah it's pretty sucky to take the place of someone who had devoted a lot of time to completing the challenge and who clearly wanted to stay in the game and was putting in the work and time to do so.

yeah i dunno what else to say. i'm confident i made the right call. maybe i should've been clearer that an individual decision would hold for the rest of the tribe. that's really the only thing i think i'm at fault for. if a tribe wants to throw a challenge they are free to do so. replace this challenge with any other format and if everyone else wants to throw it, most of the time there's nothing that an individual could do. so i dunno man, maybe ban throwing challenges (lol...). no one would be mad at me if the challenge was different and thrown otherwise.

there was no exile because the merge was about to happen so the discussion seemed fairly pointless to me. also i couldn't think of a good way to send people to exile so i figured might as well just not have it. maybe it would've been good to have another hint out there, idk. don't think it really affected anything.

this vote was pretty cut and dry. TBZ offered himself to be voted out (although later he said it was to keep laurel's emotional state level which was a genius move lol). laurel tried to convince paper to keep him around but i don't think there really was a world in which that made sense. so laurel was voted out semi-unanimously with tbz voting himself. laurel become the first person of the jury, which, as some people guessed, was so we could have a final 2 that made sense (without excluding the f10 player which i think is dumb, also people know each other going in so i think it's fine to have a jury member that hasn't been on a tribe with a finalist which normally i think is really stupid).

LAUREL - 11th
I like Laurel, he's a smart guy and an interesting player. He's prone to getting over-emotional (why play Pokemon :thinking:) but i mean i get it, it happens. I understand why people might not like that sort of person but maybe i am a bit more weathered as to dealing with people on the internet. I expected him to be a fiery personality and that's what I got, I knew there would be risks but I thought he would add a lot to the game. And i think he did. i think part of the pre-merge narrative is the disastrous pyrite tribe and laurel is kind of a tragic hero in he tried really hard to get himself out of a hole and was close but just didn't quite make it. it's a compelling narrative if you're into that sort of thing like i am. i rooted for him to get out, i really did (and that's not to say I didn't like the rest of the pyrites, I do as I'll discuss someday). I was disappointed he came up short especially given that I think he was more deserving than some people who did make the merge, but obviously, survivor is never about who is the most deserving of anything.

i'll take some time to respond to some complaints about my hosting - laurel also bitched a lot about bluedoom/rad/paper being in a "pre-game alliance" and was i guess blaming that on me??? ok first off how the fuck should i have known that was the case. lol. maybe there's a host out there that keeps track of that sort of stuff or is really interested in hosting games where no one has ever played with each other. go join that game. i don't think it's the hosts and it's definitely not my responsibility to keep track of that. and second off, it's not really my job to bail you out because 4 people decided to make an alliance that didnt' include you. i am not quite sure why that should be an expectation. i didn't fuckin pick the tribes. and i think most importantly there's no reason to believe this paper/tbz/rad/bd alliance was absolutely set in stone and things were going to play out this way for the rest of the game. i simply don't believe that for a second. sorry.

yeah this is quite negative. sorry. i'll end this by saying i genuinely liked laurel in this game, i appreciated him a lot that he joined, and i v much appreciated him not quitting completely. i'm sorry the game sucked for you. i didn't want anyone to be unhappy or upset especially at something that was potentially in my control. i hope enough time has passed that things are all good. i know i repeat myself x1000 but seriously, thanks for playing and being on the jury. good luck in the money game.

THE MERGE
So phenac came in with a 6-4 numbers lead. a pagonging is unlikely due to the nature of online survivor but it was definitely on the table. at this point i would've put ok money on a phenac to win. i thought this reflected challenge performance and to be honest im surprised phenac didn't win more lol. they definitely never felt like a "stacked" tribe but for whatever reason they performed like one. i guess the pyrites started to give less effort challenge 4 and beyond but still, it always felt like the phenacs had an edge in each challenge.

The first individual challenge was meant to be fun and non-competitive which i think was a success! Yeah, it's arbitrary but I don't think it really matters or mattered. the judges were me, shmegg, and bloody. thanks again to bloody for working with me to put together the categories and work out the details on the challenge. bloody was judge 3, i was judge 2 and shmegg was judge 1 (although note on the sheet for results i'm judge 1 and shmegg is 2 for whatever reason). there were various people who offered to judge but the only one who actually did was cabbate who was the other mystery judge.

results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...ADq53YNsZWPu6-p8yKf30m9BxKo/edit#gid=14625825
scoring was done like this: jalmojt: so the way i scored real quick is the judges ranked favorite to least favorite and i assigned a score, 7 for 1st place, 6 for second etc. the judge's category was weighted double so 1st got 14 points from the judge. then i found the avg score for the cat. repeat x2, final scores were the sum from all 3 categories. congrats to DLE and UTO

the 1 controversial thing was that UTO told me he wanted to swap his categories which was Bad because I was a judge and so obviously was able to deduce what UTO submitted. I decided not to throw out his submissions because I thought that was overly cruel and decided that I could trust myself to not show bias (which I did so fuck off if you think differently. ok yeah, UTO did win but he won fairly handily and i didn't inflate his scores or anything (gave his last cat song a big fat 1 [wtf is jpn rap anyways LOL]). but yeah all in all cool challenge, kind of refreshing from the normal stuff and mostly enjoyed although two people didn't submit and heury didn't understand the challenge and submitted his own original song which was pretty fire for what it was but given the constraints of the challenge i had to fail him. i think that's more my fault since i just expected everyone to understand what was happening so def could've made it more clear. my b. also RAD and jornsy just didn't submit anything which in this case is kind of sad because it takes like 2 mins to come up with 3 songs??? unless you are a caveman and don't listen to music but even then u could've submitted white noise or something. idk i'm pretty sure even the neanderthals banged on rocks for "music."

'this tribal was fantastic and probably the most compelling of the game. it's honestly a bit of a shame that game kinda never took off like i thought it might after this vote. maybe it's just the rush from being merged but the paranoia and confusion and strategic planning of this tribal was awesome to follow. i definitely won't do it justice in this recap especilly since i'm forgetting the smaller details but i'll try.

the key points were that the phenacs did want to stick together for at least the one vote...except for one man, heury. to be honest, i really don't know why heury wanted to go rogue at this vote. i didn't expect this, i thought he was in a relatively ok position on his tribe but i think didn't trust snype/shub at all (which was ? because i thought they worked together on the last vote. idgi) or otherwise felt he was on the bottom and so immediately made it clear to the pyrites he was looking to jump ship. i don't think heury was very hush-hush on this, he made it very clear that's what his plan was. i think he tried to convince jornsy and uto to join him and jornsy told the rest of the phenacs? memory is shaky on this one but yeah i think telling UTO was ok because they were talking a lot but spilling the beans to jornsy was a little more suspect. the pyrites did try and get break up the phenacs but most phenacs figured out the pyrites were a pretty solid 4 and i think paper revealed that to be the case to snype anyways. they did also have an idol in paper's hands to try and break up this vote as well..

snype, dle, and shub were the prime thinkers for the phenacs on this one. uto was in a pretty awkward spot because his close ally was heury who was openly trying to work with the pyrites. i think snype made a really smart play initially by "leaking" a vote on paperblade to heury in an attempt to flush a potential idol which the phenacs had correctly guessed the pyrites had (i think paper revealed to snype which i'm not quite sure why but it was fairly easy deduction to make). so at this point the phenacs were poised to vote for RAD while paper and co thought they were going to vote paperblade (and paper was going to idol himself). I think the pyrites were thinking of voting jornsy - heury tried to push a vote on snype which the pyrites said "ok" to but then didn't pursue after snype decided he wanted to really make a big balls play by offering a heury vote to paper.

personally at the time i thought snype was overplaying his hand - they had setup solid bait already w heury and no real reason to believe that anyone would figure out that the real vote was on RAD. and obviously, it would've been ideal because they would've gotten the vote and burned an idol. but i think the thinking here is actually not terrible - there's no guarantee paper wouldn't just play it for RAD and there's a higher chance of avoiding rocks with a 5-4-1 vote if paper "agrees." and maybe paper and heury are working together and he decides to play his idol.

paper decides that this sounds ok and gets the pyrites to vote heury and not play the idol, trusting snype over heury. i think the heury-paper relationship was key here in the sense that it wasn't really developed. this isn't to say there wasn't one but i feel like heury and paper didn't really click immediately or have the sort of conversations that would have paper fullly trust heury. i think part of this was on heury to who i felt kind of just expected paper to trust him. in the end, this is what happens with the vote only being tied because jornsy didn't get online to change his vote. so in the end its a 4-4-1-1 RAD/heury/snype/paper with heury voting snype and jornsy still on the old vote.

don't think the tie really changed things, it didn't matter at all but paper did swap his vote to RAD which i think optics-wise was a good although it didn't really change relationships or anything moving forward (i think RAD was slightly disappointed that someone had swapped). jornsy swapped to RAD obviously and marth/tbz stayed on heury leaving RAD going home 6-2.


RAD - 10th
I was pleasantly surprised RAD wanted to play because he kind of idled in the last survivor but hey i am not one to complain. i think he did decently overall, i mean you could say that he had a leg up being well connected in his tribe but he did make an effort to work with others and only voted out cabbate after she went after him. i was disappointed to see him idle the f10 challenge when it was so easy but oh well. he was in a tough spot at the merge and honestly after how the pre-merge played out there was no real reason for the phenacs not to team up on the pyrties. could RAD have done more to try and get the target off himself? yeah, probably. but i think it's a testament to people's perception of RAD and how he is as a player that caused people to want to target him here. not much else to say - he dominated pre-merge and then didn't really have a chance to strategize and do survivor things once the merge hit. honestly though, i think everyone made a good decision because RAD's an excellent player. sucks to break your "make it to the f4" or w/e streak but this vote out again i feel is a compliment to RAD's ability.

 

[Lrr]

(and paper was going to idol himself).

I was never going to do this*, I leaked the idol to Snype for the purpose of avoiding the vote

*ignore if I actually sent this in at any point

 

[Andy Snype]

I was never going to do this*, I leaked the idol to Snype for the purpose of avoiding the vote

*ignore if I actually sent this in at any point

i'm bad at reading comprehension and literally did not read you told me the idol was yours at this point. I did not realize you told me you had the idol at f10 until like FTC. oops. sorry!

At merge, I knew I wanted to play lone-wolf because the best chance was to practically coast below the radar. Reason behind this is that it decreases the likelihood of me getting voted out and is less effort than having to remember, maintain, and read into people's social intricacy and how they feel about things or want things to spread. Also, people tend to be opportunistic and a game like survivor really isolates you and amplifies the paranoia you feel, so alliances get less secure and vulnerable for a reason the more you stay in them. I figured as an outsider that can be malleable, I'd actually make it far and within the nature of survivor and felt this would be how I'd argue for FTC. I committed to FTC or BUST but had to take it one step at a time. I was not going to pagong here because I needed strong and influential tribes on both sides to whittle each other down, stepping in only to guide it when I needed to. Maybe I get offered up for a vote a couple of times but by opting to stay out, I don't become a real vote target because I have minimal influence, and as long as I don't try to exercise it most of the time, I won't get voted out because other people's influential positions get recognized as the threats they are. Example: Marth knew at f6 that UTO was in a good spot and wanted him gone. Shubaka was very skeptical of UTO and Paper as well. I don't know who anyone else thought would be their perceived threats, but I thought that playing this way kept me below the radar and still gave me a good narrative to play. To keep me motivated playing like this, the mindset was to make the case for winning FTC or bust. If I didn't make it to FTC, it's a L.

I knew at this point, I had to play for best shot at FTC. I never wanted to pagong it because it made for very boring play and didn't showcase anything. I was not anticipating someone to fail going on with the real vote because at this point, people were still going to go with the motions of playing along with tribal majority narrative, especially from talking to DLE and Shubaka. My motivation for the stealth vote was because I could not afford all of: DLE/Paper/Marth/RAD/Shubaka at f7 or f8, and usually to avoid these situations, I'd have to plan like 2 votes in advance. I don't make it to FTC in there because enough of those people think I'm a conniving enough threat to keep me around for 5 or 6 of those rounds and also I wanted heavily to give the new blood a good shot to keep the game fresh. They would most likely end up dominating since they all have skill at being close to at least one of the newer people to heavily influence votes. I did not want to be a part of this group but I also did not want to be a real vote target in a few cycles. DLE and Shub had told me at this point that they were interested in voting along tribal lines, and since Phenac had the #s majority, it had to be one of the 3 pyrites. Of the 3, I wasn't sure between marth or rad, and I know Paper to be an ethical player (you scratch his back, he'll scratch yours) and I felt I had good odds of working with him, and he gave me information later that honestly was my only useful info I was getting fed. I didn't expect him to have as good social game with the newer people as he did this game though. From talking to RAD on exile, I don't remember whaat was said, I just remember feeling he was the one responsible for the other 3 getting voted off and also likelier to stab me even though we had connections because the way he talked about acting in self-interest. It was also the easier sell because UTO also requested not to vote out Marth.

I kept it a secret because I believed DLE and Shub when they told me that this vote could be very much among tribal lines. If so, F10 was so influential for numbers going into the rest of it that if there was going to be an idol play for alliances, here would have flipped the table substantially from 6-4 to 5-4 tribe-wise with a Heury already indicating that he was willing to break from Phenacs to decide the next few immediate votes until he felt comfortable enough, and with an idol played, there's less of a reason to go after a player that made an idol if there isn't the threat of one to be used. Maybe one of the phenacs gets immunity, but you can still weaken the other phenacs by voting for one that didn't get immunity. Had the pyrites played an idol, they could have voted with the Phenac willing to break suit to take out a threatening Phenac (me, dle, or shub) and that temporary vote assurance advantage sounds well worth it imo than banking on more people deciding not to vote you. I also knew I wanted to do what I could to break up Phenac. Samoyed vote had me thinking that had it been all Phenacs, I'd be voted out pretty quickly and that puts DLE in a prime position for FTC since he'd balance Uto/Heury and me/shub well. Me voting out Heury made no sense to me because I wanted to follow the plan of isolated lone-wolf and another chaotic, independent player in the mix seemed good. I also wanted a break from the people I normally work with, which I got between working closely with Shubaka & Marth, and good exposure to Heury & RAD.

 

[JALMONT]

I was never going to do this*, I leaked the idol to Snype for the purpose of avoiding the vote

*ignore if I actually sent this in at any point

you actually did tentatively play it on yourself but when you changed your vote to heury you decided not to play the idol. i'm not sure when this was in relation to changing your vote so it's possible that you leaked it after you decided to not play it which makes sense and is actually a pretty interesting move (LOL at snype not realizing). i guess him not realizing it makes more sense given the surprising lack of target on you after that (i never understood why more people weren't trying to target you for that/why people thought there was no idol).

 

[Andy Snype]

you actually did tentatively play it on yourself but when you changed your vote to heury you decided not to play the idol. i'm not sure when this was in relation to changing your vote so it's possible that you leaked it after you decided to not play it which makes sense and is actually a pretty interesting move (LOL at snype not realizing). i guess him not realizing it makes more sense given the surprising lack of target on you after that (i never understood why more people weren't trying to target you for that/why people thought there was no idol).

This also explains why I was pushing so hard on Bluedoom: I legit thought he had the phenac shard for the idol from interacting w/UTO.

 

[JALMONT]

So with no exile in play, are idols dead? Nope, shards could still be used to create 1 and this semi- comes into play with the auction challenge. beyond that though i did add another way to get an idol. We hid a pastebin with a sort of scavenger hunt which if completed would grant the completer an idol.

https://pastebin.com/72a0y9bf

In the last survivor game i played getting people to say certain words was part of a series of stuff that needed to be done for an idol and i really loved it. like it's pretty genius in the sense that it sort of solves the problem of others being unaware of an idol existing because well if you say the word and help someone out then that's an opportunity for you to know who might have it (i still remember being duped into saying a word "solve" and thinking 'man this convo is so weird' and then when the clue was revealed i was like 'holy shit'). I made the words difficult because I didn't want it to be easy and again, was worried about some form of collusion. I think a couple people tried to help out their buds by giving them a word but no one truly went for it in terms of trying to get someone to say the word. Too bad since that would've been pretty funny but with that word list it makes sense lol.

The next challenge was jar guessing which I think works a lot better in theory than practice, at least if you're the one setting it up. I was going to do sunflower seeds at first but then I lost count and a ton of seed were falling apart so I was like fuck that. My plan was to have three different "jars" but given how long it took to count I gave up on that lmao. At least it's easy for people to guess. Probably better IRL where people can actually look and study but again with my challenge philosophy I wanted to do something that was easy for ppl to participate with. Some people actually took this very seriously and tried to emulate counting out the grains which I commend. I know UTO did it and I think bluedoom did it too? Not sure about the latter but I thought UTO was going to get it but then bluedoom came in with a guess 3 away. for the table below the first column is their guess and the second is how much they were off the actual by (which was 498). jornsy didn't submit (...)

Tbz	376	116
andrew	626	134
Uto	512	20
paperblade	322	170
Shub	208	284
heury	475	17
Bluedoom	495	3
dle	331	161
jornsy

So marth won immunity. Pretty important one to win as a pyrite worried about potentially getting picked off.

After a spicy tribal, were things going to go the same way and continue to heat up? Was Phenac going to pagong the pyrites? No to both of those! In a very admirable but possibly questionable move, snype/shub felt that they wanted to continue the game without the AFKs, which meant jornsy was on the hot seat having pretty much gone AWOL since the entirety of the challenge. Others readily agreed, with people like heury and to some extent UTO worried about jornsy being in the pocket of snype. I found this quite amusing, the thought of people super worried about a big trio of snype/shub/jornsy when that literally did not exist. I wish it had, and maybe the two should've pushed harder for that. It's an interesting decision to go for the inactives, reminiscent of the "meatshield" strategy where you keep all the big threats in the game, and pretty admirable in terms of keeping the game interesting. But I feel it would've been better for shub/snype's games and maybe even DLE to some extent to keep jornsy around for at least 1 more vote. And I think voting out jornsy here probably really bit the two for the next vote where the heury/UTO alliance made their play to shake things up because snype and shub didn't have the relationship to bring in someone like TBZ (or at least didn't trust him enough to bring him in since i know shub and tbz were somewhat talking at this point i believe). Important to note that I'm not sure people realized how close heury and UTO were? Idk. Maybe knowing that this vote goes a little differently. But then again, this could all just be hindsight speaking. And I wouldn't have wanted to rely on someone who I wasn't sure could be active.

Obviously the pyrites were cool were the plan to vote jornsy and so that's what they and near everyone else did. I don't know why heury voted tbz, in case of an idol or as a throwaway vote? Idk. Can't really see why looking at the logs either. I let DLE self-vote to honor the mamba. RIP.

JORNSY - 9th
Honestly, jornsy was a big disappointment. I worked with him in the Survivor before this and was impressed by him. tbh, he disappointed me in that game too. There's a world out there where he's less AFK for his vote out and I get to throw shade onto him and potentially get to play him up as a huge threat with an idol (which I couldn't because he went AFK and was unable to leverage his relationships). Anyways, for this game I had moderate expectations and I felt like he did ok to start and generally had moments where I felt he could do something and was doing stuff. Unfortunately for whatever reason things just kind of fell through with him. I hope nothing bad happened IRL. I think he easily could've been saved from this vote had he been a little more active. He definitely had the relationships. It just was a matter of disappearing at the wrong moments - which cultivated an image of him being inactive which led to his name being pushed. It was also kind of weird he just left the server randomly without saying anything when he was on the jury. I'm glad at least they came back to vote lol! Yeah not sure what else to say. I felt jornsy was in position to do a lot (I mean he had an exile shard !) but nothing game changing ever really happened nor did it seem like he tried to pursue that (ig he did tell snype and shub about heury stabbing). Alas, sometimes that's how things go. I appreciate him giving survivor another shot and joining my game.

 

[Da Letter El]

rip kobe

___

Season 10 was the last smORGon game before we started making a push to advertize on showdown and cast a wider net beyond our very small bubble in Circus Maximus. As a result, the game was a smaller one -- 16 players, and we were just able to find 2 new players, only one of whom made merge. After a run of a few anonymous games, Jalmont as host wanted to have a low-power game with an emphasis put on just pure survivor gameplay. There existed a publicly known idol that could be constructed by various pieces and another that would be obvious if attempted, which no one made a serious push to claim, but beyond that, hardly any items or powers were in play.

Coming into merge, there were largely two "factions" from the two separate tribes before merge; the tribe of realiti, jornsy, Andy Snype, HeuryAlone, shubaka and yours truly holding a 7-4 majority and forcing a vote out on RAD to begin merge. Shubaka proceeded to get bored and vote out jornsy because they thought they were too idle and that majority would hold anyway, but this put me at an impasse. I refused to vote out the homie, no matter how idle. I put in a protest vote for Kobe.

RIP KOBE

Shub failed to realize that realiti and heury were more than willing to be a swing vote to spell shub's fate a vote later -- hurt as well by ally Andy losing a fairly critical +1 vote advantage in the auction challenge that would have dissuaded realiti from making this play in the first place.

Realiti played the best game of anyone here, making separate finals pacts with HeuryAlone and I (and being fairly close to Andy) while still being willing to work with the minority tribe to try to get as close to finals as they could -- despite having a huge target on their back that most players were aware of. But after a "safe idler vote" on TBZ, the one idol that did exist in the game came into play -- a complicated 2-2-2 vote with one player protected forcing a revote between Realiti and Liridium. Snype and I weren't willing to go to rocks, and realiti was done.

The rest of the votes were pretty standard -- no one willing to fall victim to drama or lies, no one with anything to try to hold hostage over others. But in the background, bluedoom started making some moves -- getting closer to Andy Snype and getting him to commit to a final 3 deal, only for Andy to be SoL at this being one of the only F2 games in smORGon history.

Despite Liridium winning some fans over with an incredible FTC that going into it many thought he was dead on arrival for in making the case for simply doing what's necessary instead of dramatic for the sake of drama, the vote ended in a 5-4 win for bluedoom. But that very pitch Liridium made seemed to sort of illustrate the issues of the game itself: this cast has been through most of the bluffs. We knew who we could trust and who we probably couldn't. We knew who was in the lead at about every stage of the game and who would be a presumptive favorite at FTC. As much as there's merit to seeing people with history go at it, this game -- while competently played by most of the major stars, was also quite boring in many ways. It was a competently hosted game with competent players who made sane and reasoned plays.

Things needed to change. We needed fresh blood. We needed bamboozles and bamboozlers. Cue season 11, and cue the smORGon we know today

For your next idol clue, go to #health-and-wellness of the Season 14 server

 

[bluedoom]

Late but I just divided the glass (view from top) into quadrants, found the number in two quadrants to check if it was uniform, then multiplied by 4.

Actually counting every grain would be fuckin awful.

 

[JALMONT]

The next challenge was a super fun one and definitely one of the better ones. Auctions have been done in the past but I think the tier I picked simplified things greatly and I got to add in advantages which were fun. I added in the mysteries to emulate the real survivor auction where occasionally the items are covered and can be bad items which I think is funny. I guess it's a little more unfair to have things covered because it's not food that's being played for but immunity but it's hardly the most unfair thing about Survivor plus this is online w more of a focus on the voting out so I think it's reasonable to have more "bad" twists (also the stakes are absurdly low since anyone can make a survivor game and what not but I digress). Choosing 1v1 was good because I think the barrier to entry was pretty low for a pokemon tier (easy to research, know what's good etc). At the same time it's a lot easier to "counterpick" too because you vaguely know what people are picking. So it's not just pkmn, but having an auction strategy and then some teambuilding (but not that much) and then thinking about counter-strats and so on. Really good challenge I'd say especially for Pokemon which is hard to get into it and can usually just be bypassed by asking for teams. This definitely forced people to think about how they wanted to approach the challenge (e.g. alternatively 1 could've just bid on the mysteries and pseudo-give possibly winning immunity.

Auction page: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pnX6niCjO_wUAIBVevlaTQrPiqbjAnXEqsdyMPimeuc/edit#gid=0

mystery 1 was Magikarp, 2 was sableye, 3 was focus sash, 4 was an amorphous shard (can take the form of pyrite/phenac/exile shard). the advantage was an extra/double vote. Apparently sableye and focus sash are banned in 1v1 and i threw in magikarp to make one of the advantages bad. The advantage here is very strong in terms of the actual game - I wondered if it would have been better to reveal it but I hate in the show when that happens how everyone saves their money just for the advatage - didn't want people to bid everything for it. The fact that it only went for 4 was a huge steal. Ultimately it didn't really affect the game but it would've been crazy if it decided a vote. I probably would've felt bad about it if that was the case lol.

if someone else won the amorphous shard then we probably would've seen another immunity idol. I forget the exact shard breakdown (it'll be on the sheet when I reveal that) but I think there wasn't a configuration of shard owners that made sense for another II to be made. I don't remember the specifics on this but I think it was something like heury would've had to give it to paper/bluedoom which it wouldn't make sense

UTO vs. heury - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen8customgame-1054447043
dle vs bleudoom - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen81v1-1054652613
shub vs paper - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen81v1-1054904672
tbz vs snype - https://play.pokemonshowdown.com/battle-gen8ou-1054932808

shub vs. uto - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen8customgame-1054961446
tbz vs. dle - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen81v1-1055297951

dle vs . shub - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen81v1-1055780919

So DLE won immunity. Yeah battle-wise I have no commentary since I don't play. I think people mostly enjoyed this challenge and I felt pretty good about it.

ok to be honest this is about when I started to check out of the game so I can't exactly provide detailed commentary on why people did what they did. sorry! yeah idk why i guess the game just felt more like a chore at this point even though there wasn't as if there was anything wrong. I think i was getting a little busier irl which probably contributed to my sense of apathy too.

anyways this was probably the last great vote of the game where there were clearly two competing factions (f6 maybe but this was a better "blindside" I feel). Snype and shubaka wanted to continue voting out the afks which meant TBZ was in the firing line. DLE was ok with this (I think he wanted to vote off another pyrite I can't really remember). Yeah idk I do feel like aiming for tbz was a misplay especially for shub who actually had a pretty good relationship with tbz. Like I'm pretty sure tbz was just flat out listening to who/what shub said to vote for. but yeah that to me was another player that shub/snype probably could've taken advantage of. i feel like it was pretty known that bluedoom/paper were tight and it would've made more sense to break that up and keep around tbz who probably would've been close to shub. of course even then with the extra vote they would've needed UTO and UTO probably would've gone with his close alliance partner in heury anyways. so yeah i guess there probably wasn't a lot that shub could've done to avoid the vote here other than like be closer to UTO which isn't really something you can knock him for.

i think this was a really smart vote for UTO/heury. good play on their part. i don't know if they knew about the tbz/shub connection but that was definitely an added plus to take out. for marth/paper pretty much most phenac votes were good for them, and I think they were still reeling from snype playing them at 10 so good move for them. I think paper felt he could maybe work with snype over shub down the road although i know the two were still kind of reeling from snype playing them at 10. yeah it is kind of curious that snype wasn't targeted here but maybe people felt they were more likely to work with him in the future then shub? not sure.

so yeah bluedoom used his extra vote to vote shub x2, tbz voted for UTO because i think that's what shub told him to do lol. dle joined shub/snype as the third vote.

SHUBAKA - 8th
I'm not sure if I've ever seen shub go far in a survivor even though I feel like they have got the skills to do very well. Probably just bad luck in terms of me not seeing them do well tbh because I think they made it far in games I haven't followed. Anyways I was excited for them in this game and I feel like they delivered. They was definitely playing the game hard and played the challenges and was overall active. It was funny how they asked the typical "host questions" during tribal council (which I'm not a fan of) and people actually answered LOL. lowkey kind of a finesse in terms of gaining info on the game but mostly just for fun and it was certainly amusing. I do think they made some mistakes in not leveraging the relationships they did create such as with jornsy and tbz. In that sense they were much more of a powerful social player than I'd have imagined. Honestly, I wonder if the Samoyed vote kind of screwed their game. I think having samo around vs uto would've been much better for their chances had that vote gone their way (and it really could've!) because i don't think samo was really close with heury and probably wouldn't have been looking to team up with the pyrites at this point in the game (so the phenacs minus heury would've probably gotten their vote here). I mean yeah it kinda sucks to think about their game as one of missed opportunities but I also think that's not the worst thing in the world either. partly just bad luck too, i mean if things swing their way on a couple of key votes then shub is probably more in the driver seat in terms of directing where the vote is going. Overall though I'd have been happy playing the game shub play and I'm happy with their performance and disappointed that they didn't have the opportunity to make it a little farther.

 

[Da Letter El]

advantage went for 4 because snype forgot it was his job to bid on it and didnt notice bluedoom upbid him lol

if snype gets the +vote then shub probably isnt the vote there

 

[JALMONT]

The next challenge was budget geoguesser similar to the one done in hal's s4 survivor game. Basically I took photos from a location (on a computer obviously i did not fly out to russia and scandinavia). I thought that challenge was really fun then and figured it would be the same this time around. The challenge was fun to grind back then and put in effort in trying to solve the context clues to get the location, or so I thought. Wrong. I don't think anyone really took the challenge seriously other than DLE and maybe snype? two of the locations had enough text to get the location exactly and then dle got the one in south america by spending the time to search the limited highways in bolivia (having tracked down the country by context clues) to get the exact place. So DLE very deservedly won immunity again. I won't lie, it was a tad disappointing no one really tried this challenge but I guess it was a lot of effort. Probably better to have a challenge like this in the tribal stage where it's ok if some people can't be bothered as it's a lot more of a "carryable" challenge.

I think snype/dle were obviously blindsided by the vote but both had fairly decent relationships with everyone else so I don't think they were in a huge panic. And this time around people were willing to vote out tbz who had been idling. Yeah I don't really remember anything super significant about this vote out. I can't even remember if tbz tried to reason with the old pyrites to get snype or not (who tbz ended up voting). I don't think he tried super hard iirc.

marth voted heury here. I think marth was a little uncomfortable voting for tbz who had been an alliance mate? He knew his vote didn't matter anyways too so I guess decided to just throw it away. I'm a fan of throwaway votes even though most of the times like this time it didn't matter. I think it was to kind of unnerve heury? not sure.

TBZ - 7th
I was kind of disappointed with tbz this game. He';s definitely gained the reputation of a slacker which is too bad because he's got a pretty good showdown reputation?? Or at least that was the case a year ago when I was following that sort of thing. I respect the fact that he's kind of a troll, he's pretty funny when he wants to be (or at least I don't really see that side very often on the forums/just don't interact with him a lot). My hope going into this game would be that he would be a lowkey threat that might be able to get inside an alliance or two and make a play here and there and get to the end and win. I think he was actually ok placed to do that but just didn't put the effort in. he had a decent relationship with shub and was willing to jump ship from the pyrites after the vote @ 10 but just never really followed up after that to actually do something. I know this makes it sound easy and I don't think it would've been; it's not exactly clear to me what his route to the end would've been after stabbing the pyrites and obviously not being as close to the phenacs as they would be to each other. Could've maybe tried to play between snype/shub/dle and heury/uto but yeah I don't think that was ever happening since he didn't really have a relationship with the latter 2 afaik. All things considered, at least he didn't quit and put in the effort when necessary. It was also a good play to offer himself as sacrifice to laurel trying to keep laurel's mental too (that's probably a vote for him in the world he makes it to the end! which I would consider good social gameplay). And I guess it's nice he didn't just blindly stick with marth/paper since it would've been really boring if they just rolled to the final 3 from there. Guess I'll have to keep waiting for the day u dominate a game that I'm following hehe.
-

The next challenge was more pokemon. Each player would ladder for 36 hours in SS OU to create a rankings list. The top 4 would play a single elim tournament with the winner getting immunity. I think the idea of a ladder tournament, which I did in s1, works well in theory but not necessarily in practice. It's probably a little too much work, especially if you aren't very Pokemon oriented in the first place. Sure the playing field is relatively level but if you have no knowledge whatsoever it's not exactly appealing to do. Creating the single elim tournament was my way of trying to level things out so laddering didn't encompass all of the challenge (you could put min effort to get into the top 4 and then tryhard from there).

heury ended up passing on the challenge as he didn't have the time (or the experience to really make a go at it). The rankings were:

jalmojt:
Bluedoom - 1215

[10:02 AM] jalmojt:
Uto - 1556

[10:03 AM] jalmojt:
Snype - 1359

[10:03 AM] jalmojt:
Paperblade - 1381

[10:04 AM] jalmojt:
Dle - 1483

Actually pretty respectable ELOs all things considered. Battles went down as follows.

paper vs dle - paper forfeited for a non-game related reason.
uto vs snype - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen8ou-1059707169

dle vs snype - https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen8ou-1060284816

So Snype won immunity. Overall an OK challenge. I'd probably replace it if I had any better ideas honestly. Probably a bit too Pokemon and not diverse enough when it comes to adding some form of complexity to the challenge.

This vote was the last chaotic one and unfortunately again my memory is foggy so can't really do it justice. At this point in the game everyone left was active and gunning for the W. No easy targets, unless you considered the ex-pyrites to be easy targets. The original plan I believe was to go after the pyrites again and try and avoid an idol? I felt bad about this vote because UTO wanted/needed an extension to talk to DLE as the vote had changed last second and that didn't get to happen. I feel like DLE said he wouldn't have changed his vote but I don't remember. But yeah had DLE been there to discuss the last second vote change by heury/uto to paper then paperblade would've gone home. As things stood though, paper and bluedoom targeted UTO and dle/snype voting marth. I think the pyrites thought heury was with them on this one but heury stuck with his original phenac alliance with UTO. Paper ended up using his idol on marth here (too bad, a three way tie would be much more fun heh!). Paper preferred to save marth mainly because he was feeling ok with going home (i'm pretty sure that was still the case at this stage). Heury did relay this info to everyone else which is why UTo wanted DLE to change his vote (and that would've been successful). I think the original plan was 2-2-2 to avoid the idol but UTO was right to be wary of that situation.

yeah sorry i feel like i'm missing a lot. anyways marth's vote were negated and the re-vote came down to paper and UTO.

the re-vote i think wasn't ever going to go in UTO's favor. both DLE and snype were strongly averse to going to rocks and there wasn't a real reason to risk that for them. UTO was a bigger winning threat vs marth. I dunno, thinking about it, I wonder if marth would've been better for the 2. I guess either way you have a strong two-some and the way things panned out snype played for an endgame with the two pyrites which i think was better for his game had it been a f3. So can't really blame the decisions there because I do think that f3 is better vs a heury/uto or dle/snype f3. Same goes with DLE although I do think he had a stronger relationship with UTO than the pyrites so maybe would've been better to stick with UTO for at least 1-2 more votes. But it's a very difficult situation and pretty unclear if that was actually better, and even then, I'm pretty sure it was snype who was set on UTO so DLE honestly doesn't have a ton of options anyways (Because rocks obv doesn't make sense). so dle/snype voted uto, heury stuck with his alliance mate but it was no good as UTO was voted out 3-1.

UTO - 6th
UTO was an awesome player. In terms of playing and providing confessional-wise, he was super in the game. It's kind of hard to believe he first played a game like 4 years ago as a random in a big. I probably wouldn't have predicted that 4 years later here he would be, playing in a Survivor. Honestly, it's too bad he came around now because he's definitely a fun player to watch and would've thrived in the games that we had going on couple years ago. For this game, he easily was a huge threat for how under the radar he came into the game being. And maybe if his challenge game wasn't so strong, people wouldn't have picked up on that until it was too late. It's very impressive to think that in a game with a ton of conventional "big threats" UTO was identified as the biggest one at this stage of the game. In general, I thought he played really well. His secret alliance with heury was good and nobody expected it for the longest time, if ever. He built up a good rapport with DLE too. He was on top of every vote in the game and was I feel generally leading or pushing for all of those votes. Survivor is a cruel game in the sense that all you need is 1 unlucky/bad vote and boom, your game is over. And that's pretty much what happened. even then, he had a really good read on the situation and was very close to saving himself. I want to say that DLE wasn't changing his vote but maybe if I give the extension (and I did feel very bad about it) then who knows what happens?

one of my favorite players in game, appreciated his effort in playing the game and providing great confessionals. definitely would've been a deserving winner. strong candidate for best player of the season.