[Penner]

- Sun Oct 23, 2016 9:49:21 pm #6931 Hi folks, I'm going to ask some very short but specific questions in my jury speech tonight. I'm not going to use it as an opportunity to soapbox my opinions on each of the players or to try get the final word. I'm gonna explain here why I ask the questions I ask though. For most players, the I really don't value:

Challenge strength (congratulations at your ability to download images from brantsteele)
Idol/advantage hunting (wew lad you have enough time in your day to smash ten wikipedia pages into a password box)

What I do value is:

Adaptability (sometimes you'll have the numbers, sometimes you won't, you have to be a strong player in BOTH these scenarios)
Social game (Regardless of how you played, I have to want you to be the winner)

Strategic game (You don't have to be in control all the time but you do have to stand up and make some decisions for yourself)

Self-awareness (I came into my FTC in Faroe thinking I needed to prove how I was in control of everything, and I ended up pissing off jurors because I was claiming credit for things when I was completely unaware of what was actually happening)

For Heidi, she showed an amazing lack of self-awareness. When Nate was voted out, she sent me this awfully arrogant PM telling me how I was lucky she decided to save me and that she convinced everyone to vote Nate because she suspected he had the idol. She didn't realise that Nate had told me he had the idol, I already told Ozzy/Sierra/Hayden/Sugar by that stage, we had already decided to vote Nate, and Ozzy and I had gotten Nate to use his idol on me when Heidi and Tammy both cheesed their way through with more immunity necklaces.

For Tammy, I question her strategic game. She was socially ten times better than Heidi, who was an asshole whenever she didn't get her way, and Tammy is someone who I feel could still have made it to the end without having the game so stacked in her favour (two immunity necklaces PLUS immunity when your partner gets voted out PLUS and extra vote) whereas Heidi was fucked without them. But it's hard for me to see where Tammy really made any decisions of her own. In reality, I was in an alliance with Heidi for most of the game and I didn't see her making a whole load of fascinating game moves either.

For Hayden I'm not sure about his adaptability. He seemed to be perennially on the bottom, and he deserves kudos for surviving that for so long. But I don't know how much he really had to do with his survival other than being super UTR and very meh as a player for much of the game.

When it came down to voting between Hayden/Rocky/Sugar/Sierra, nobody wanted to stick their neck out and vote Sierra because her social game is so strong, you never knew who she was secretly aligned with. With Sugar, her disdain for Heidi was so clear, you could trust her with any plan that was anti-Heidi. Rocky and Hayden were really invisible at that point and it was completely 50/50 who went home that night. Hayden didn't seem to do anything other than accept his fate until people came along and scooped him up with Sierra and Sugar.

I haven't really read over this so apologies if it's just a random vomit of words.

[Sierra]

- Sun Oct 23, 2016 9:51:46 pm #6933 Dude. Me and you are so identical in terms of what we value. FUCK idol/extra vote hunting. FUCK challenge winning. Borderline meaningless to me in terms of jury voting. Probst hates us for that I'm pretty sure lmao.

[Penner]

- Sun Oct 23, 2016 10:01:48 pm #6937

Dude. Me and you are so identical in terms of what we value. FUCK idol/extra vote hunting. FUCK challenge winning. Borderline meaningless to me in terms of jury voting. Probst hates us for that I'm pretty sure lmao.

I always consider them to be a way to make up for when you've fucked up your social/startegic game.

In real life survivor I value challenges a little more because it's kinda aligned to the whole "surviving as a shipwrecked castaway" element of Survivor. Being awesome at forums isn't a skill I value in anyone.

[Val]

- Sun Oct 23, 2016 10:23:04 pm #6940 I really love the three points you bring up Penner, but there's so much more depth to challenge wins and Idol hunting even with the words you used to describe them. It's quite literally a microgram within the whole thing that affects the momentum of the game and preparing yourself for each challenge like downloading images from Brantsteele or just knowing the pace and the placement of everyone in the game like in the case of the Survey shows a lot more than just lucky catches. These and things like advantages are even more important and compound the miraculousness of a game when you're a gigantic target of a pair where you have to wiggle your way through to a point wherein you are no longer the most obvious threat. And keeping that person who will always have your back is something that was rarely practiced in this season of allies and it was THE strategic move that many people obviously didn't appreciate (me).

Anyway, just to pinpoint a thought, preparing for challenges takes a lot of strategy and that strategy exists in so many of them that bleed into the meta-game in regards to awareness, whether that be in the sense of self or others.

[Dan]

- Mon Oct 24, 2016 12:19:00 am #6953 I was actually pissed a lot of the challenge were basically a lucky dip at the merge. It sucks when you're on the block and you know you can dominate a challenge, only for the challenge to be something completely random