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It's definitely easy to imagine the season spiraling out of control with dumb advantages, twists, ands gimmicks but I actually really like the die twist! Everyone knows about it, everyone has access to it, it benefits the minority and not the majority, and it encourages blindsides. It also means even the most obvious seeming vote won't be 100% locked in (to the viewers or the players!) until the votes are read. The "giving up your vote" part makes it even more interesting. You could potentially have paranoid members of the majority ruining their own majority by each playing their own die. Also much harder to coordinate a successful vote split (especially on these small tribes) when you don't even know how many votes will be in the urn. I think it's such a good twist that I don't know why they're overcomplicating the season by adding all this other junk. We had to have the simple Prisoner's Dilemma explained to us 6 times in the span of 10 minutes, but Jeff just briefly yada-yada's the rules of the die twist and didn't even fully explain it (do the scrolls get replenished as people draw them? do you have to reveal the scroll publicly regardless of what it says? can you play the "Safe" scroll on someone else?). Why not keep it simple and just have one new well-explained twist that plays out the entire season? Having to account for potentially missing votes from just the die twist is interesting because everyone knows exactly how and why a vote may be missing. When you also have to factor in other extra/missing votes from other weird random twists that not everyone has full knowledge of then it starts getting harder to strategize around and follow the action. It's also gets unnecessarily confusing when it's not clear how the twists interact (if you play the die can you still cast your extra vote? what if you've already lost your vote from another twist?).
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Sep 23, 2021 16:00
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If I squint my eyes I sort of see where they were going this season: when tribes are small and the number of votes is constantly being messed with, it really does (or should) shift the meta from long-term alliance planning to short-term "just make sure my name is not in the urn." I don't know if the latter is a better game, but it's at least different and probably better than what they were doing in the 30s which was sporadically messing with the vote count with big tribes so that 90% of the time the advantages were useless and the other 10% it was a unsatisfying random silver bullet. The main issue is they're devoting way too much screen time to every new mechanic. Messing with the vote count could be good or bad, but it should at least be quick so we can get back to the core of the show. The other main issue is: if the new "point" of the show is shifting the strategy to short-term risk aversion over long-term alliance building it would be nice if any player on the show could articulate it. Instead, we're getting traditional alliances formed with no real explanation targeting someone not in the alliance also with no real explanation. It's even more jarring given how small the tribes. There's really no excuse for us to have no idea what's going on when only 5 people are attending Tribal Council (and only 4 of them can vote!). If I had to armchair produce, I think I'd suggest that there's a simpler way to get at what they may be going for here and it's basically make a brand new show. Make some sort of game where everyone votes and the elimination method is one vote is selected at random. Again, I don't know if that's a good show but it accomplishes the same goals of whatever they're trying to do here and is certainly much easier to explain. Of course, that's not really Survivor anymore but maybe if the Survivor producers are sick of making Survivor they should just make a new show and hand the reins of this show over to somebody else.
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Oct 9, 2021 19:31
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Looking forward to Survivor 45 when Player A find a Knowledge-is-Power advantage, uses it, plants the now powerless scroll for Player B to find who thinks it's real, then uses their (powerless) one question on Player C who lies about having the idol but B thinks it has to be the truth because they don't know the magic spell is used up or whatever. Maybe in Survivor 47 the same thing happens but C lies and says yes and gives B a fake idol. (I'm not actually looking forward to any of that by the way.) Anyway, besides the awful new super nullifier advantage I thought that episode was fun. Even if the boot circled back to the predictable choice, it was a pretty wild road to get there. Let's not forget: the episode opened with Genie finding an idol that would have saved her had she opened it! Someone on Reddit pointed out earlier this week that the dynamics of that vote could have been a genuine prisoner's dilemma if Shan/Ricard suspected that Genie was playing her Shot in the Dark. Essentially, it would have been a real prisoner's dilemma: if Genie plays the Shot in the Dark and Shan votes Genie, then Ricard benefits by voting Shan (if Genie is not immune it's a 1-1 tie and they vote Genie on the re-vote; if Genie is immune then Shan goes out 1-0). Similarly, if Shan thinks Ricard is voting for Genie then Shan would benefit by voting for Ricard. But if they both vote each other than Genie is safe (and, even better, if Genie somehow figures all of this out she doesn't need to waste the Shot in the Dark). It's a shame Richard/Shan are so good at blindsiding people that it never really got to that point!
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Oct 21, 2021 16:05
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Seasons 15-33 had basically no major twists besides idols and swaps and were a solid run of seasons with few completely straightforward Pagongings. It's not a coincidence that the only seasons in that run with a major twist (Redemption Island and One World) were the only awful seasons. I think, if anything, game mechanic-altering twists really just encourage conservative play since the players can't really plan out more than one vote ahead because they don't have enough information about the game. Here's a thought experiment: what would the pre-merge of this season have been like if it followed the season 15-33 format? Let's say the "beware" idols were just regular idols and there was no summit or shot-in-the-dark. The Yellow votes are probably identical (maybe Xander goes out instead of Voce?). The Green votes are trickier, but I think the boot order probably ends up the same with maybe Genie/JD swapped and/or Genie playing an idol at the last pre-merge vote. If the boot order is the same, how would the show have been different? We get back ~20 minutes each week that were formerly devoted to explaining new game mechanics and we can have a better sense of why the alliance structure shook out the way it did. The drama in a lot of the votes also changes. The Voce vote changes from "will the new majority decide to pick off Xander or Voce" to "will Xander pick up on the blindside and play his idol? will it get wasted if he plays it for the wrong person?" The Brad vote becomes a lot more exciting because he is almost certainly voted out with an idol in his pocket. And the possible dramatic irony of Genie finding Brad's idol and then also getting blindsided with the same idol in her pocket a few days later would be delicious (although I suspect in this alternate universe she would either play the idol or have either been picked off one round earlier).
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Oct 31, 2021 21:00
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blue squares posted:Which South African and New Zealand seasons are worth watching? All of them? I would skip NZ Season 1 and I think SA Seasons 1-5 are sort of a different show, but the rest are pretty good.
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Dec 29, 2021 03:48
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