GINDIN Tribe: JURY VOTE IS IN

[Autumn]

All right, well let's get to the vote. The six members of the jury have all voted, this time for the Survivor that they would like to see be the last one standing in this competition, and win the million dollars.

[Autumn]

I'll read the votes.

The first vote is for ... Maple Leafs.

[Autumn]

The second vote is for ...

Chesapeake.

that's 1 vote Maple Leafs, 1 vote Chesapeake

[Autumn]

The third vote is for ...

Thomkal

That's 1 vote Maple Leafs, 1 vote Chesapeake, 1 vote Thomkal

[Autumn]

The fourth vote is for ...

Chesapeake

that's 2 votes Chesapeake, 1 vote Maple Leafs, 1 vote Thomkal

[Autumn]

The fifth vote is for ...

Maple Leafs

That's 2 votes Chesapeake, 2 votes Maple Leafs, 1 vote Thomkal.

[Thomkal]

well at least we all got 1 vote

[Autumn]

We're down to one vote left here. Either Maple Leafs or Chesapeake could be the winner here, or could we have a 3 way tie?

The sixth vote is ...

[chesapeake]

Maybe I will get my boy scout-related challenge.

[Autumn]

Maple Leafs

MAPLE LEAFS IS THE SOLE SURVIVOR!

Congratulations Maple Leafs, you are the winner of Survivor: Islands of the FOFC

[Thomkal]

Congrats Maple!

[chesapeake]

Congratulations, Maple Leafs. Well done!

[Thomkal]

Thanks to whichever one of you voted for me, and thanks Autumn for a great game.

[Racer]

Well done ML!

My voting confessional for the final tribal:

“You're the only one who had me fooled about being in the power alliance and according your alliance you were actually responsible for a lot of their strategy. Good luck.”

[Autumn]

A very close finish to what has been a series of close finishes. That is the order I got the votes in, and I was biting my nails to the end.

[Maple Leafs]

Awesome. Thanks everyone, and especially to Autumn for running the show.

[Autumn]

Enjoy your million virtual dollars, Maple Leafs. Thanks for everybody for participating, I know this was a bit different, and had some kinks in it. It was fun watching you guys go at it.

[Thomkal]

I'd be curious to hear how each of you voted for and why if you care to spill the beans. That would have been wild if it were a three way tie

[Autumn]

Yeah, you guys were pushing your luck there, putting me on uncharted territory with a tie.

[Maple Leafs]

Wait, "virtual"?

[Autumn]

Yeah, I hope people will share about their vote if they want to. I'd be interested in processing some of the game as well.

[Danny]

I was the last vote in if that tells you anything of who I voted for. And my second choice was Chesepeake, so it was very close.

[Darth Vilus]

Congratualations Maple Leafs on winning Survivor-Werewolf style. Congrats and thanks to everyone else all around for a fun and well played game, I had a blast

Kudos to Autumn on setting this baby up and giving us an interesting couple of weeks, pretty awesome in my opinion.

And remember everyone, it's just a game Let's not all take this too seriously and get pissed off at each other, it's just a game.

In the sequel though, I'll be the one to watch

[Autumn]

Great game guys. Even seeing the mechanics under the hood there were some really surprising moments. Darth almost won that last immunity challenge, despite being way behind the rest on the necessary stats - he had some lucky die rolls. Racer did pull off that immunity win right when he needed it as well. I was determined not to fudge any of the results and was pleasantly surprised to see how often we had a close finish, and an interesting one, despite that.

Interestingly we had one alliance spring up on either side right away, and then a group of people on each tribe who didn't really think about alliances until much later. I felt really bad for the Werewolves who kept getting into a worse and worse situation. Part of that was just random - the Villagers had better Teamwork and Puzzle skills which were important early. A lot of it was their camp - since they were losing health every day they couldn't afford the extra effort that the Villagers put in. And then part was just some bad luck.

I loved how some people got into the fun of it - I got some great quotes for the camera as you guys submitted votes. If I had this kind of time it would have been fun to have a separate thread for the TV viewing audience to use this kind of stuff, open only to people not playing.

One thing that struck me from behind the scenes was a lot of incorrect assumptions. One of them was that each tribe assumed that Hoopsguy or Danny was running things on the other tribe. This was natural, but in reality they were not among the first to jump into the social game. It was fun to watch each tribe make the same mistake.

[Racer]

Thanks again to Autumn for a really fun game.

I ended up voting for ML but I really wasn't far off from voting for Ches or Thomkal.

[Racer]

I'd be curious to know if anyone who was originally leaning towards one player also ended up voting for someone else.

[Maple Leafs]

It will be fun to go back and read the other tribe's thread.

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by Racer

Thanks again to Autumn for a really fun game.

I ended up voting for ML but I really wasn't far off from voting for Ches or Thomkal.

And here I thought I got your vote after your comments earlier yesterday. So who voted for me then?

[SnDvls]

Originally Posted by Thomkal

And here I thought I got your vote after your comments earlier yesterday. So who voted for me then?

I did

[SnDvls]

Originally Posted by Autumn

Great game guys. Even seeing the mechanics under the hood there were some really surprising moments. Darth almost won that last immunity challenge, despite being way behind the rest on the necessary stats - he had some lucky die rolls. Racer did pull off that immunity win right when he needed it as well. I was determined not to fudge any of the results and was pleasantly surprised to see how often we had a close finish, and an interesting one, despite that.

Interestingly we had one alliance spring up on either side right away, and then a group of people on each tribe who didn't really think about alliances until much later. I felt really bad for the Werewolves who kept getting into a worse and worse situation. Part of that was just random - the Villagers had better Teamwork and Puzzle skills which were important early. A lot of it was their camp - since they were losing health every day they couldn't afford the extra effort that the Villagers put in. And then part was just some bad luck.

I loved how some people got into the fun of it - I got some great quotes for the camera as you guys submitted votes. If I had this kind of time it would have been fun to have a separate thread for the TV viewing audience to use this kind of stuff, open only to people not playing.

One thing that struck me from behind the scenes was a lot of incorrect assumptions. One of them was that each tribe assumed that Hoopsguy or Danny was running things on the other tribe. This was natural, but in reality they were not among the first to jump into the social game. It was fun to watch each tribe make the same mistake.

I really feel the mechanics of this game were flawed.
The basic outline didn't even give us a clue as to what was good for what in challenges. To put luck and randomness into it really screwed up the game for me. It seems that it really didn't matter how we turned in actions for challenges as it was still just a "roll of the dice" to see who won, but none of our "actions" were put into play.

The endurance challenge where I won my "bracket" I sent in to slack off and not try hard and yet I still won and lost even more health because of it . The rules and outline really needed to be cleaned up for this to run smooth IMO. After that I really just kinda did what needed to be done in the game, but knew I didn't have a chance to win immunity at all in this game which really takes away from the game. I mean I was a frickin' brain surgeon yet I sucked at puzzles and teamwork? I know it sounds like sour grapes and it's not, but it really did take away from the game for me at least.

my 2 cents

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by SnDvls

I did

well thanks then

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by SnDvls

I really feel the mechanics of this game were flawed.
The basic outline didn't even give us a clue as to what was good for what in challenges. To put luck and randomness into it really screwed up the game for me. It seems that it really didn't matter how we turned in actions for challenges as it was still just a "roll of the dice" to see who won, but none of our "actions" were put into play.

The endurance challenge where I won my "bracket" I sent in to slack off and not try hard and yet I still won and lost even more health because of it . The rules and outline really needed to be cleaned up for this to run smooth IMO. After that I really just kinda did what needed to be done in the game, but knew I didn't have a chance to win immunity at all in this game which really takes away from the game. I mean I was a frickin' brain surgeon yet I sucked at puzzles and teamwork? I know it sounds like sour grapes and it's not, but it really did take away from the game for me at least.

my 2 cents

Respect your opinion on the first part, but have to disagree with it somewhat. If you read through the Villagers thread we debated what skills were needed for each challenge based on that outline and I think we got them mostly right leading to our early victories over your tribe.

Have to say I'm surprised hearing you won a challenge slacking off and your poor scores at puzzles and teamwork. I too would have thought a brain surgeon would have better ratings there.

[Autumn]

Originally Posted by SnDvls

I really feel the mechanics of this game were flawed.
The basic outline didn't even give us a clue as to what was good for what in challenges. To put luck and randomness into it really screwed up the game for me. It seems that it really didn't matter how we turned in actions for challenges as it was still just a "roll of the dice" to see who won, but none of our "actions" were put into play.

The endurance challenge where I won my "bracket" I sent in to slack off and not try hard and yet I still won and lost even more health because of it . The rules and outline really needed to be cleaned up for this to run smooth IMO. After that I really just kinda did what needed to be done in the game, but knew I didn't have a chance to win immunity at all in this game which really takes away from the game. I mean I was a frickin' brain surgeon yet I sucked at puzzles and teamwork? I know it sounds like sour grapes and it's not, but it really did take away from the game for me at least.

my 2 cents

I'm not remembering right now what happened with the endurance challenge - do you remember what day that was? It sounds like maybe there was a miscommunication between us there, but I'd have to look back.

Most of the challenges were not random - ones that included something like aim, or finding something, used a combination of a random roll and different chances of success depending on your rating. The luck certainly had an impact at times, but that was on purpose. I did not want a game that mechanically produced a certain result that the contestants could be sure of, I didn't feel like that simulated the real game well, where the contestants are often surprised by who wins.

How you described your actions and made your strategy had a *huge* impact on how it went. I think perhaps it was hard for you to see that, SnDvls, on the Werewolf side because you guys often got the short end of the stick. The Villagers often had a strategy that worked better, or they had more of their members correctly send in their actions, just picked better people for the roles or just happened to have better ratings in that area. The Wolves started doing a good job figuring out a strategy for each challenge, but somebody had to lose anyway, and it often turned out to be you guys. I think that left you feeling like your strategy wasn't any good.

I designed the team challenges to depend a lot on real life teamwork, by which I mean if somebody didn't send in their challenge action, or if what they sent in conflicted with what the others sent in that hurt your results. That was the best I could do to come up with something to simulate the real challenges in Survivor of working together.

I felt bad for the Werewolves because I knew it must be frustrating. But I didn't want to fudge the results just to make for a more satisfying game. I'd be glad to talk over some of the particular challenges so you could see how I did it - I don't feel like it was random but it was certainly designed to make it not perfectly clear how to win.

[Autumn]

I found the challenge you were talking about SnDvls. Looking back at your PMs I see you said you were "taking it easy" but I didn't make any note of that in the challenge details. I think I didn't realize that you meant that mechanically - no one had yet slacked off in a challenge in the game that far, and I think I just figured you meant you weren't taking extra effort. I'm sorry about that - if you had pointed it out to me, I would have rectified the health at least.

[SnDvls]

Originally Posted by Autumn

I'm not remembering right now what happened with the endurance challenge - do you remember what day that was? It sounds like maybe there was a miscommunication between us there, but I'd have to look back.

Most of the challenges were not random - ones that included something like aim, or finding something, used a combination of a random roll and different chances of success depending on your rating. The luck certainly had an impact at times, but that was on purpose. I did not want a game that mechanically produced a certain result that the contestants could be sure of, I didn't feel like that simulated the real game well, where the contestants are often surprised by who wins.

How you described your actions and made your strategy had a *huge* impact on how it went. I think perhaps it was hard for you to see that, SnDvls, on the Werewolf side because you guys often got the short end of the stick. The Villagers often had a strategy that worked better, or they had more of their members correctly send in their actions, just picked better people for the roles or just happened to have better ratings in that area. The Wolves started doing a good job figuring out a strategy for each challenge, but somebody had to lose anyway, and it often turned out to be you guys. I think that left you feeling like your strategy wasn't any good.

I designed the team challenges to depend a lot on real life teamwork, by which I mean if somebody didn't send in their challenge action, or if what they sent in conflicted with what the others sent in that hurt your results. That was the best I could do to come up with something to simulate the real challenges in Survivor of working together.

I felt bad for the Werewolves because I knew it must be frustrating. But I didn't want to fudge the results just to make for a more satisfying game. I'd be glad to talk over some of the particular challenges so you could see how I did it - I don't feel like it was random but it was certainly designed to make it not perfectly clear how to win.

not sure of the day it was the reward day the villagers won the hamburgers.

I consider dice rolls & "luck" to be random as neither were a skill set

here's my skill set

You are ...

THE SURGEON

SnDvls may not be a rocket scientist, but he is a brain surgeon. Here's a guy who doesn't need the money, but knows what it's like to be on top. We know he has the wits to play the game, but here on Survivor he'll be dealing with more than a scalpel.

Your Survivor ratings are:

Aim
AVERAGE
Camp
AVERAGE
Calm
EXCELLENT
Find
GOOD
Food
AVERAGE
Puzzles
AVERAGE
Running
AVERAGE
Scrappy
GOOD
Stamina
EXCELLENT
Strength
POOR
Swimming
AVERAGE
Teamwork
AVERAGE

HEALTH POINTS 10


I major improvement to this game is 1) tell everyone what the skills are and do before the game 2) allow us "X" number of points to assign our skills ourselves then we would feel like we had a hand in our own victory or demise.

It was great I had Excellent stamina, but with Poor strenght it was pretty useless. Also I had a hard time explaining to anyone how Heybrad could outrun me in the bag challenge when he clearly couldn't catch me in the 1st part of the challenge. Some things in your "story telling" didn't translate at all to what was being said/told to us initinally. This is how I felt after that challenge after reading the results. It just didn't jive with me at all.

[SnDvls]

dola - I guess you are also saying that we got screwed because we had multiple people sign up to play a game that didn't give a crap and didn't participate....if that's the case I guess I'm pissed at them too for spoiling a game I signed up for and participated in. I don't get a whole lot of chances to play WW and this was my 1st game back in a long time and for that to happen sucks.

[Maple Leafs]

See, I thought the challenges were fine. There should be luck involved. And the strategy needs to come into play too, to some extent, if only to give everyone a feeling of some control.

Personally, I wouldn't have wanted to have a detailed breakdown of what all my skills meant. It would have made the game feel to technical.

The one improvement I'd suggest for future seasons: allow everyone more than one PM per round. The fun of Survivor is all the behind-the-scenes negotiating and backroom politics, and everyone should get to be involved in that as much as possible. I'd allow three as a minumum (with people still able to spend a point to get more).

[Maple Leafs]

Oh, one other possible flaw: the daily camp updates didn't go into much detail about who was doing what. People only seemed to get mentioned if they were really outstanding in a certain category.

In my case, I was "good" at camp and helped out there everyday during the first half, but I was never mentioned. So I largely stopped helping towards the end, choosing to rest instead. Being lazy like that should have hurt my socially, but nobody had any way of knowing about it.

[Autumn]

Originally Posted by Maple Leafs

Oh, one other possible flaw: the daily camp updates didn't go into much detail about who was doing what. People only seemed to get mentioned if they were really outstanding in a certain category.

In my case, I was "good" at camp and helped out there everyday during the first half, but I was never mentioned. So I largely stopped helping towards the end, choosing to rest instead. Being lazy like that should have hurt my socially, but nobody had any way of knowing about it.

Yeah, the camp thing was on purpose. Partly to give a reason to "follow someone". Unless you did that it was supposed to be unclear what someone was doing. Unless they did exceptionally well or exceptionally poor. Perhaps I should have been stricter there and made it clear every time someone spent 0 points on camp or food. Or just listed everyone that worked on something, even if they weren't helping much.

[Autumn]

Originally Posted by Maple Leafs

In my case, I was "good" at camp and helped out there everyday during the first half, but I was never mentioned.

Yeah generally I didn't mention someone unless they accumulated a really high total, either by being excellent at it, or by just putting a lot of points in (and all in comparison to what everyone was doing). If you had put in two or three points you probably would have been mentioned. But that's something maybe I should work on if I ever do it again.

[Racer]

The wolves entered the merge down 6-3, but I feel if we handled things differently, there is a chance things could have turned out differently. I myself feel like I made three mistakes:

1. I think our only real chance to take control at the merge was to somehow split the vote 4-3-3. However, I suspected that that someone in an alliance on the villagers might PM us to intercept/block whatever plan we had. I should have made my reservations known to SnDvls and Danny rather then just PMing the person who PMd one of us. The original suggestion was DV and then Heybrad (or I'm guessing so based on when Danny repeated the word Coconuts about 5 times when we first merged) before we went with Chesapeake.

2. I should have tried to turn around the game at seven. When Brad said that Hoops had never exchanged PMs with him I got the sense he wasn't really running the show on the villager side. Instead of just suggesting we think about voting out Thomkal instead to Brad, I should have probably PMd Brad, Hoops, and maybe DV urging them to vote for Thomkal instead. It probably would have blown up in my face. However, I've always thought that PG and Erik in Survivor China made a mistake in not warning James that he was going to get blindsided by his alliance and I see a very similar situation here. Also, Hoops and I were the biggest jury threats left in the game at that point so it would have made sense for us to keep each other around.

3. When neither ML nor Darth responded to my PM to split our votes, I should have taken the initiative to send Darth another PM urging him to switch his vote to Ches rather then just assuming neither was on board and that I was going to get voted out. I had previously talked to Darth about aligning with each other to counter Brad's "secret" partner so I would have contacted Darth and not ML.

[Autumn]

Originally Posted by SnDvls

not sure of the day it was the reward day the villagers won the hamburgers.

I consider dice rolls & "luck" to be random as neither were a skill set

I major improvement to this game is 1) tell everyone what the skills are and do before the game 2) allow us "X" number of points to assign our skills ourselves then we would feel like we had a hand in our own victory or demise.

It was great I had Excellent stamina, but with Poor strenght it was pretty useless. Also I had a hard time explaining to anyone how Heybrad could outrun me in the bag challenge when he clearly couldn't catch me in the 1st part of the challenge. Some things in your "story telling" didn't translate at all to what was being said/told to us initinally. This is how I felt after that challenge after reading the results. It just didn't jive with me at all.

The bag challenge is one I can illustrate maybe. If you had the bag you had a chance to just run away, if your run was far better than the people chasing you. If it wasn't (and in the case of your group no one much of a run rating), then it was a combination of Scrappy and Run that determined if you could get away from the others. Thus while Heybrad couldn't run for crap he had a good Scrappy and could keep you from getting away.

in particular that was one challenge hwere it was basically a deadlock. Everybody's ratings, once extra effort was accounted for, were almost all tied and so it took a while to figure out who would win. In the future I would introduce a finer grained scale on the ratings. I also in that case took everybody's strategy into play, so at times someone was getting blocked by someone else, while someone ran or passed.

There were challenges where Stamina came into play, even without strength, but it was often a blend of ratings so it may not have been obvious. Sometimes it also controlled how many times you could use another rating before it started deteriorating.

Sorry it didn't work for you, SnDvls. I wish it had worked out more even between the tribes, I think that was frustrating. If I did it again I would work harder to make sure the tribes were balanced for initial play.

I'd also wish really hard you guys would build a shelter ;-) You should have seen what the Villagers had put together. You guys would have performed much better if you had worked together to keep your health up. That was another reason your ratings didn't seem to match up perhaps, the Villagers often had extra effort to spare, while sometimes the Wolves efforts were limited by your health.

[Autumn]

Racer, the assumption that Chesapeake had an immunity idol really changed the game. Both in that you split the votes instead of going for a tie, and in that nobody in his alliance dared try to pull anything on him. I was pleased to see, I must say, that just like in real Survivor even a hint someone had an idol could change the game.

[Autumn]

one thing that did throw me off was how eager people were to use extra effort. I had envisioned it as a real last ditch thing. But people were rather cavalier with their health points. I felt it was too often people verged on the brink of getting knocked out of the game. I would probably do something different with that next time, maybe just only allowing extra effort a limited amount of time, or when I felt like the person could reasonably afford it.

[Autumn]

Originally Posted by Maple Leafs

See, I thought the challenges were fine. There should be luck involved. And the strategy needs to come into play too, to some extent, if only to give everyone a feeling of some control.

Personally, I wouldn't have wanted to have a detailed breakdown of what all my skills meant. It would have made the game feel to technical.

The one improvement I'd suggest for future seasons: allow everyone more than one PM per round. The fun of Survivor is all the behind-the-scenes negotiating and backroom politics, and everyone should get to be involved in that as much as possible. I'd allow three as a minumum (with people still able to spend a point to get more).

The private messaging is one thing I wondered about. I had a hard time guessing what a good amount was. I wanted it to be limited enough that there was tension between messaging and working on camp. I'd be interested in feedback on what people thought would work better.

And yes, in true FOF fashion I was trying to keep the stats under the hood enough that it wasn't obvious you were playing a text sim, and kept a bit in the dark about how the challenge would work. Yet at the same time, if everybody put their stats out there and coordinated well that you would do better.

I also tried to make some tension there - so that people who weren't good at challenges, for instance, might not want to reveal all their stats and be an easy target. Did anybody think that way? Or worry about revealing how good they were at things?

[heybrad]

My one suggested tweak would be on the PMing as well. I found it tough near the end as I was getting multiple messages as far as who I could and couldn't talk to. If you compare it to real life, we were put in the position where somebody would speak with us and we had to stand there mute. Maybe a response shouldn't count as a PM used. You should only get dinged when you're reaching out. Another option would be to give the same restriction as far as number of PM's used, but allow us to have the option to go over the number. When we go over the number you can openly mention it on our camp update. It would simulate the idea that you're trying to be too sneaky and you're making it obvious.

[Maple Leafs]

Originally Posted by Autumn

I also tried to make some tension there - so that people who weren't good at challenges, for instance, might not want to reveal all their stats and be an easy target. Did anybody think that way? Or worry about revealing how good they were at things?

I was pretty open pre-merge, but afterwards I kept quiet and I pretty much outright lied about my abilities in front of the jury.

[Maple Leafs]

Another suggestion for future games: At tribal council, rather than throwing out questions to anyone who happened to be there, maybe send a few questions out earlier in the day via PM so people can send back an answer. That way you could do the "pre-vote conversation" portion (which is often the most revealing part of the the game) even if nobody was around.

[Autumn]

Those are all good ideas, guys, thanks.

I can't even imagine running this thing again, it was a bear. But it's just ripe for replay value. I tried to keep most things vanilla so that there could be surprises in future iterations.

[Poli]

Originally Posted by Autumn

Those are all good ideas, guys, thanks.

I can't even imagine running this thing again, it was a bear. But it's just ripe for replay value. I tried to keep most things vanilla so that there could be surprises in future iterations.

I'd do it. I really enjoyed following along. Racer, despite knowing I was following/rooting for the villagers, gave me some awesome insight from the wolf side and what was going on there. I wasn't privy to the anything on my favored village side.

Racer is now one of my favorites.