Welcome to UAQ With HighCarry: carrying you so high, you reach the top! AKA
Unfrequently Asked Questions with HighSpace and HardCarry!
Emile and I love talking about Survivor gameplay and we also feel like a lot of you may have questions about how we approach different aspects of the game so we decided to create this thread where we answer any questions you may have.
Yeah, I agree with HighSpace, BLs are the reason. Unanimous votes were already rare to begin with.
Swaps, I think in EM games, you can actually plan for swaps since there's no separation between tribes for chats. I think it's a good idea to talk with people intermittently in other tribes to check up on them and so you can have a few allies coming into a swap or a merge. In ORGs, there's not much you can do. Just try to make yourself useful to other players. If you're swapped into a minority, try to be the last one standing by forging stronger social connections with the majority than your other allies and then go wreck shitt up at the merge.
Preparing for a merge, I think it could be beneficial to not make yourself like a huge threat by perhaps trying less in challenges or building up trust in the pre-merge stage with your allies so that they'll stick with you come merge. Having allies on the other side or in other tribes is huge and can be done in EM games.
I don't think you can prepare for double evictions.
Once I make the jury stage, I don't think I really change the way I play. I just try to think ahead. One good thing to ask yourself is what the optimal move is for EVERY other single player. Then, try to find a way to manipulate the game in a way where the best move for other players isn't going to be voting you out. You usually have to plan ahead by 2-3 votes to achieve this.
EMBB1 pre-jury was great... until we had a streak of cammy/cosmo HoHs... it was great for them strategically and they dominated, but it wasn't interesting.
As a whole, EMBB2 would be my favourite. The cast was exciting, wild plays happened almost every week, the drama was great to watch, and the gameplay was decent. There were 4 factions in the game as well which made it so much better than your usual 2-sided game
I would love to watch a game of BB where everyone has independent ideas and goals and where alliances are fluid. Everyone would need to be relatively equal in terms of challenge strength as well.
If your cast is mediocre/average, then survivor would be more interesting. The strategy of 'floating' and not making decisions isn't really available to you, so these average players will be forced to get involved with the decisions that impact the game.
If your cast is strong, then BB would be more interesting, because the idea of secret alliances, strategic HoH plays, veto plays, and the network of complicated alliances and the ability to work towards common goals for a week or two with ppl you don't usually work with, makes it for a much more interesting and dynamic battlefield.
That always depends on what happened at the final 3. The player with the best chances of winning doesn't always get cut at 3rd. But, a lot of the time, the final immunity winner makes the right choice and votes out the stronger player to take the weaker one, so a lot of the time, 3rd played better than 2nd.
deletedabout 7 years
which one is better: big brother or survivor?
deletedabout 7 years
Do you believe 3rd place played a better game than 2nd place? Why/why not?
To add on to Happy's question b/c I just thought about it reading HC's answer. The best approach, imo, is exactly as he said. If you see that no one has voted after 20-30 minutes, then clearly, give them more time. But when the vote seems to have reached an agreement, it's time to time limit.
deletedabout 7 years
Yeah! Thanks a lot, you guys. You two are very insightful people and I was glad I got almost immediate feedback. Your answers was very much appreciated. :)
My policy is that time speed ups should be lenient enough to not inhibit strategic discussion. However, if it's like 1 or 2 players trying to scramble to save themselves for 10 minutes and nobody is budging, a timer should be placed
Unanimous votes are less frequent because of blacklists. People tend to put their allies/the people they like the most at the top of their BL, and uhh, good luck being everyone's ally lol.
I don't think you can "plan" for these twists. They're twists because you don't predict them. Although, the merge is foreseeable, and you want an idea of what your want to pitch to the people you haven't met yet and how that fits with the current relationships you have.
To avoid getting swapf*cked, roll the dice again.
You shouldn't really change your game just because you "hit the jury stage". If anything, just don't do things that would lose people's respect for you, or anything similar. You still want people to consider you once you make it to the end.
As for your 2nd question, some players may have much less options available to them than other players. For example, if somebody was playing in a game where every other player knew each other, they would probably have to play more cutthroat to get to the end. In an ideal scenario, the jury should consider these circumstances when making their decision. However, one can always improve their game if they lost. For example, there's a way to blindside people without making them feel TOO shittyy about you. Some people will naturally have an easier path to victory than others and I think the jury should try to offset that by taking every person's starting spot into consideration.
I'm going to edit my response because Emile pointed out something. I'm going to say you control 90% of the jury's perceptions of you.
I think that the vast majority of the time, you have control over how the jury perceives you through your actions and interactions with the jury members. For example, you may be perceived as a goat if you're repeatedly asked to flip on people playing a better game than you by members of the jury, but you don't. Similarly, if you were the one that led a blindside on the jury, you'll be seen as the ringleader of their vote out which may be beneficial or malevolent to your game. If you didn't talk at all with certain members of the jury, it's going to be hard for them to believe that you had a strong social game even if you or others believe that you did. Even if you messed up your interactions with one jury member, that jury member can alter the perceptions of you of every other jury member. If you played a cutthroat game, people are always going to not feel great about voting for you. If you were friends with jury members, they're going to feel good if they vote for you. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you almost always have control over how jury members FEEL about you. The 10% comes from preconceived notions - you might not really be able to control preexisting meta coming into a game or stereotypes that people may have of your game.
deletedabout 7 years
Why, in your opinion, do we not see unanimous jury votes happen more often on EpicMafia?
How do you appropriately plan for a swap? A merge? A double eviction?
How can you avoid getting swapf-----?
How should you approach a Survivor/BB game once you make it to the jury stage?
Sorry for all these questions :(
deletedabout 7 years
This question is for Rob. What are your top 10 rankings for Survivor Lobby Players? No you cannot come up with some bs meta speech to avoid the question.
I'm going to go with 100%. I think that the vast majority of the time, you have control over how the jury perceives you through your actions and interactions with the jury members. For example, you may be perceived as a goat if you're repeatedly asked to flip on people playing a better game than you by members of the jury, but you don't. Similarly, if you were the one that led a blindside on the jury, you'll be seen as the ringleader of their vote out which may be beneficial or malevolent to your game. If you didn't talk at all with certain members of the jury, it's going to be hard for them to believe that you had a strong social game even if you or others believe that you did. If you played a cutthroat game, people are always going to not feel great about voting for you. If you were friends with jury members, they're going to feel good if they vote for you. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you almost always have control over how jury members FEEL about you.
However, some players may have much less options available to them than other players. For example, if I knew everybody in the game, I can choose to play both a cutthroat or loyal game. In contrast, from my own experience, I played in an ORG where I knew little to nobody going into the game while everyone else knew each other so I had to play extremely cutthroat to break up friend groups and alliances to make it to the end. In an ideal scenario, the jury should consider these circumstances when making their decision.
However, I do think that I could have done better to make the jury want to vote for me more in terms of some of the lies I said or the way I voted out people or maybe in elucidating why I voted out people the way I did. I also believe that everyone has a winning path, it's just that some people may have a much smaller margin of error and I believe it's the jury's duty to account for that when making their decision.
Depends on how much time the host wants to invest in their game. I prefer no time limits, but I understand not wanting games to go till 6AM, so a compromise needs to be met. In my opinion, if you can't organize something under 20 minutes, then you didn't strategize well enough ahead of time. Only exceptions imo would be first day of game/merge/swap, where you still need time to assess your new situation
For your first question, it depends on factors such as how aware you are of how you portray yourself, jury poisoning, your social abilities, etc. If you are conscious of your behaviour and actions, I'd say you have 85% control. That number can go down to 0% if you don't think about jury management as you're playing. I can't really say that you controlled your self-perception if you weren't thinking about it.
The second question is a lot harder to answer... I think if you lose, you always have made errors in how you played. If you haven't made mistakes, you wouldn't have lost, because I do believe in a winning path for everyone. Now, with that said, some mistakes are unforeseeable and a lot of factors are uncontrollable, which could make your journey to winning easier or harder, through no fault of your own. A good example I'd like to bring up is a poker hand. You go all in with AA preflop, and you still lose. Going all in here was a mistake, but you made the best decision you knew to make. That's the luck factor of this game, and it's quite relevant to someone's odds of winning.
Finally, if you're forced in a situation where you have to play an unfavorable game to even make it to the end, I think you messed up earlier on, whether it is by having too many allies that will be bitter, making yourself out to be a goat, etc. The only time where I could say you didn't mess up is in situations where pre-existing relationships are relevant to the game being played
How much do you believe players control how juries perceive them, like as a percentage?
How often when players lose a jury vote do you believe they've made errors in how they've played, and how often do you think circumstances force them into situations where their only choice to get to the end is to play a game that's unpopular with the jury?
