Next challenge was another simple one, playing tetris on tetris n-blox and trying to get the highest score. Simple flash game (throwback to my highschool calculus class where i played a lot), not a lot to say. The scores were as follows:
snype | 19362 |
paperblade | 45320 |
bluedoom | 9504 |
dle | 2873 |
heury | 51860 |
So heury won his first immunity.
Not really sure what to say about this vote, maybe DLE/Paper/Snype can chime in on anything interesting but I think DLE was always on the outs here and reliant on his relationship with Paper to try and save him. People identified him as probably the biggest threat remaining in the game (which I think was probably correct) and he didn't really have the social capital to get a vote off him. I think this is where someone like UTO would've been good to have around because he would've been the most likely to side with him here but yeah. Vote was unanimous while DLE voted snype.
DLE - 5th
DLE got off to a pretty rocky start this game but recovered well and did a good job of putting himself in a position to win. The latter isn't so much as surprising as the former as anyone who knows the guy would know that he's really good at every aspect of survivor. It's crazy that he was picked second-last and that he could've gone out on the first phenac vote (probably saved by being a "big name".) But I thought he recovered v well after that, with a particular highlight being his alliance with UTO. He ended up drifting more towards working with snype and shub at the merge and that didn't especially work out for him but you could point to the double vote advantage as being a factor in things not working out. By this point in the game, I think snype just had a stronger bond with the pyrites and he was just too visible as a threat. Maybe not working/talking to heury a lot hurt him (obviously not this vote but prior votes) too. I'm not really sure he has a lot of options at this exact vote - probably needed to have better relationships going into here.
It's been a while since I've written so hopefully I'm not repeating myself/saying debunked things but yeah I do wonder the last vote was really the turning point. I want to say DLE recognized he was in trouble here but there just wasn't a lot he could do or was busy. I think if it's UTO > paper/marth, there's a lot clearer path to the end for him although it's definitely tricky because there's a lot of guys who seem worthy and he'd probably have to bank on heury deciding to vote UTO out or an immunity run or something.
It's always a pleasure to have a legend like dle play in a game like this because he's an awesome player. Definitely not his greatest game but I'd take an average game from him any day. The fact that he was basically an underdog starting out was pretty amusing and made for a pretty decent arc lol. thx for joining since he was a very last minute add.
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The next challenge was supposed to be an endurance challenge at first. It was going to be more along the lines of the "repeatedly post lines in discord." Me and shmegg had talked about a couple different ideas and I thought shmegg was going to come up with something but I think there was some miscommunication and nothing ended up happening. As a result I had to scramble to put something together last second and came up with something that was close to what was used in the tiebreaker in the f14 challenge. I know that historically speaking endurance challenges aren't really people's favorites so I went for something that I personally have enjoyed doing while still having an endurance aspect, that being a race to get 100 wins, could be any tier as long as it showed up on the profile's record. I think randbats is what everyone ended up doing and I'm pretty sure it's the fastest since it's a popular ladder Maybe OU woud've been good to because it's easier to find teams you just sweep pretty easily against? But yeah not limiting it to a single tier opened up some potential strategies to what's typically pretty mechanical. At least people had to think about the tier(s) they wanted to spam, to give the challenge an element of learning/adapting.
Heury ended up not completing the challenge (sry heury for so much mons :/ ). Marth took 26 hours and 23 minutes (respect for persevering), paper took 2 hours and 47 minutes and snype won with a time of 1 hour and 57 minutes.
Overall actually pleased with how much this works as an endurance challenge. I think its' fun enough because you can just spam ff's and stay low ladder but it does require you to think and play the game and be able to sit there for a long but still reasonable amount of time. Definitely a good blueprint on how to do endurance; the boring activity should be fun in some way!
I think the players in this vote fell victim to the "surprise final 2" which is amusing in some ways. I think knowing it's a final 2 heury is probably not voted out here, or at least it goes to a tiebreak (which would have been a randbat battle, idk someone tell me how you're supposed to replicate fire online). I thought snype + the pyrites had identified heury as someone who probably wouldn't win although maybe they got spooked by his potential story. I guess a better way to put this is that I think snype probably makes more of an effort to keep heury around in the hopes that he has an easier final 2? Idk I personally would just be worried about a very tight alliance of 2 that is probably taking the other, but again, without knowing or guessing a final 2 that's a difficult decision to make. At this point I think ppl had guessed it might be a final 2 but I don't think people were deadset on that being the case (jury of 8 final 3 still makes sense). I wonder what happens if snype doesn't win immunity. I'd think in that case you'd probably easily just vote him out.
HEURY - 4th
I thought heury was a spam account when he PM'd me to join or someone who wanted to play but would just dip asap. Luckily, he was neither and he was a huge joy to have in this game. I like "characters" in survivor and while that sounds demeaning, I choose to think of it as something good - it means I want interesting people, people who aren't always trying to make the best "move" but are willing to try things and make mistakes and roll with the punches. I think heury really encapsulated this spirit, especially in terms of just doing stuff and making waves. He was a real person and came off that way while still trying to do things to win the game. He had a huge disadvantage in terms of not knowing the site or any of the people or much about pokemon which was doubly not good in the context of the challenges. He took all of these negatives and managed to place 4th, which is hugely impressive. I'm not quite sure he would've won but I think he would've been very competitive against most anyone. Who can hate against the narrative he had? Definitely at least worth a listen to at the end. Alas, he came up just short, maybe only going home because of snype winning immunity.
I feel his success speaks a lot to the effort he put into this game which I respect more than anything. He was a prime mover in the first impressions vote, which is why paper got voted on that. He cultivated a strong alliance with UTO and did well to survive on the phenacs. He was a great challenge performer at most non-pokemon things. I think post-merge play was a little questionable in terms of execution, as has already been discussed. I don't mind the flipping but the way he did it could've been better and more discrete. Maybe he could've been more in tune with UTO in terms of acting like a duo (but then again differentiating isn't a bad thought because I don't think he could've beat UTO). And I think he probably wasn't as great in keeping contact with fringe players that he was working with. Cutting off completely from the phenacs like snype/dle maybe didn't work out in the end game where it might've been in his favor to get them on his side and go after the pyrites. Definitely a lot of questionably decisions/improvement areas, but all in all I thought he played an impressive game, and more importantly, an exciting one. His actions definitely kept the game flowing and he was hugely important in a lot of the big votes. Yeah, I mean I once again go back to the f6 vote as being defining for his game. If UTO doesn't go home there, I think his paths to the end are a lot clearer. Whether he wins those, I'm not sure. But it would've been really cool to see how he approached FTC and I feel like he would've got a couple votes. I'm not sure he wins too many f2 combos but I wouldn't say that for sure.
Thanks for playing. I'm glad I took a risk in including you. One of my favorite players from this season.