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It looks like the tokens are just another way to brand the Ghost Island / Island of the Idols stuff. Each week there's an advantage and you have to do a task to get the advantage, it's just that now the task is mostly on Edge with the potential for a second bonus task if the player in-game doesn't have enough tokens already and has to scrounge.
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Feb 14, 2020 03:58
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Zesty posted:If it wasn't them, it would be some other pairs. Or tribes would be imbalanced. Or whatever. I thought that at first too but it feels like swapping Natalie and Sarah helps break up those pre-game relationship knots substantially with very little change in tribe balance. They can't avoid everything but Natalie/Jeremy have probably the closest outside-the-game relationships besides Rob/Amber so they really should have done something to avoid those two ending up together.
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Feb 17, 2020 06:59
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Aerox posted:Does anyone know what the contingency plan in the rules are if, at vote time, everyone is either gone or has made themselves immune? Do they just cancel tribal? Jeff has said in interviews that they're always careful with putting advantages into the game to make sure this is impossible, but Jeff is also an idiot/liar and it's definitely possible. For instance, if the post-swap red tribe had gone to the green camp and Tony found the green idol it would have been possible this season. I guess they just wouldn't hide an idol on the green tribe in that scenario, but that assumes production cares enough about avoiding this scenario when clearly they would love it and Probst would hype it up as "wow! the winners came to play, they completely broke the game, this is unprecedented!!!" Anyway this season mostly rules, but the advantages and tokens and split idols and Edge stuff is all mostly convoluted garbage eating up screentime. This season has had a bunch of great moments and essentially zero of them have had anything to do with all the extra mechanics they're throwing in. The closest the extra mechanics have come to contributing to a good moment was Sandra's scheme this episode but if the tokens / her expiring idol didn't exist the outcome is ultimately still the same just with Denise sending Sandra out with Denise's own idol. That's one of the worst part of these extra bells and whistles: they barely affect the game and when they do it's usually in an abrupt and unsatisfying way. With all the time spent on Island of the Idols last season (about 25% of each episode), how many of those advantages even influenced the game? Elaine's block a vote (which abruptly turned a strategically tense 4-4 split into a 4-3 steamroll), Dean's nullifier (depriving us of a Janet win), and Kellee's idol on Dean (okay that one was kind of cool).
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Mar 19, 2020 19:23
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The sad part about Denise's plan is her going all in on protecting Jeremy to guarantee a 2-2 split next time will be irrelevant if Jeremy panics and uses his power and thus loses his vote.
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Mar 20, 2020 22:15
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STAC Goat posted:
Yeah the more I think about it, the more surprised I am that they're continuing to film BB Canada right now and I have to suspect they're going to come to their senses and cancel it soon. If we do get a flood of bonus seasons of BB and Survivor it wouldn't be during the outbreak, but in the early aftermath. If, say, the world is mostly back to normal by September but the Fall TV season can't properly kick off until November because of filming delays, maybe we get a bonus Big Brother season then or something.
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Mar 21, 2020 00:13
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In defense of the other Season 35 players, I think at the time it was assumed that idols wouldn't be re-hidden that late in the game (the only idol found at Final 5 before then was Adam in 33 which was an idol that had been re-hidden at Final 6 after being played at Final 7). I don't know why the show has tended towards the direction of obfuscating its rules over the years but it leads to really frustrating situations like this where players just have to read production's mind. The counterargument is always "well they should plan for every outcome!!!" but when modern Survivor has like 10 viable Advantages with all sorts of different rules, planning for all of these contingencies is basically impossible. I don't blame Chrissy/Devon/Ryan/Mike for saving their energy for Final 5 immunity because from their perspective the only way Ben can win the game that is *definitely* possible is winning F5/F4 Immunity challenges back to back. Any other way he wins (including the way he did win) involves speculating about multiple unprecedented Survivor twists and maybe some guesses are more educated guesses than others but they're still just guesses.
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Mar 29, 2020 20:13
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pokeyman posted:You're not wrong that there's a million twists now, but there's still one consistent way to get them while stuck at camp: find a lil package hidden nearby. Yeah but if you don't know the lil package is hidden but do know there is a necklace up for grabs tomorrow, it makes sense to save your energy for the thing you know exists. The idols had never been planted at Final 5 before but a necklace has always been up for grabs at Final 5. I'm not necessarily saying it was the *correct* decision, but I get why the non-Bens chose to sleep. Now if they actually knew the lil packages exist because production was transparent with the rules then there's actually some strategic decision-making to do and more fun backseat quarterbacking for us!
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Mar 29, 2020 20:49
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Fast Luck posted:I've heard a lot of the players say on podcasts that they had not been considering Devon as an option and were really surprised to see what he was up to in his edit. I feel like Chrissy/Ryan/Devon hypothetical FTC is one of the big question makes of modern Survivor. Every time you see a jury member from that season talk about it they give you a different answer about who they would have voted for. I personally feel like Chrissy would have pulled it off, but I think it really could have gone any of 3 ways. Instead we got Ben stumbling his way in and barely even giving a FTC performance and the jury having to force him to let him win.
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Mar 31, 2020 17:46
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EoE is "unfair" in the sense that the Final 6 returnee will always be the frontrunner to win the game because (1) by nature of their return they are good at challenges, (2) by precedent they may come back with some sort of advantage or idol, (3) they got to know and bond with the jury for potentially weeks on end over their shared misery, (4) the jury is predisposed to reject any FTC argument the EoE is "unfair" because otherwise that means they wasted their time out there. Even though the players know about EoE in advance this season there's not really much of a way to strategically counter-play EoE except pray you get a shot to vote them out at F6 or F5. Maybe if you could find an army of goats (unlikable yet loyal) who are also challenge beasts you can boost your odds of keeping Immunity out of the hands of the EoE returnee? Absent that, I've got nothing. It's not to say the last Edge returnee will always win, but they're going to be the de facto frontrunner to win the game despite not having done much to earn that status which feels unsatisfying if not unfair.
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Apr 4, 2020 20:28
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I don't think the budget for AU Survivor is actually any bigger. Some of the challenge builds are clearly bigger, but not by a huge factor (it's still just the usual obstacle course followed by puzzle or endurance challenge most of the time, just built to last a little longer to eat up a few extra minutes of the longer runtime). Almost everything else is noticably lower budget though: the prize money, sending pre-mergers home after being voted out, and the editing all jump to mind. I've heard Nick from the 2016 season talk a bit about production on podcasts and he's mentioned that he thinks there's a lot less camera coverage of camplife for budget reasons, for instance. The editing is really rough when you know to look for it; there's a lot of spliced and frankenbited confessionals compared to the US show and often a player will start a confessional in one location and then finish it in another location. I think there are a variety of reasons for this including: it's easier and cheaper to not worry about polishing that stuff, the editors have much less time to put the season together and have to pad longer runtimes, and making up for less camplife footage. It makes for a disjointed and hard-to-follow narrative which I felt like was at it's worst at the end of the 2019 season where I really had almost no idea what was happening or why people were alligning with or betraying each other and all the confessionals were just "I've got to.... do what's best for.... My game and that.... might mean voting out a... Big threat.... because he's a.... Big Threat." I do still think AU Survivor is an impressive production and I admire the epicness they convey which is definitely something that gets lost in some of the modern U.S. seasons. If nothing else, it is certainly nice to see a high quality English language Survivor which didn't really exist ~5 years ago. The modern South African version is pretty solid too; the short-lived NZ one was pretty low budget and janky though.
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Apr 6, 2020 22:20
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Is the coin played before or after the votes are cast? It sounds like before which makes it even less powerful (since even if she's safe the majority can still switch their votes and decide who goes home). It's also one of those twists that sounds exciting on paper could easily produce a real thud of a TV moment. If she plays it she probably knows she's about to get voted out, and if it comes up Not Safe then we still have to go through the boring formality of watching her get voted out when everyone knows what's about to happen. Why wouldn't they just make it a full idol? Why do they insist on creating these stupid needlessly convoluted advantages?
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Apr 11, 2020 19:40
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Surprised Kim didn't just play the idol on herself. Once Jeremy is gone and Sarah steals the vote it's (at best) 6-3 which means the majority can split. Also Sophie knows Kim has an idol, so they almost certainly would split if they could. At that point the only use of the idol is as individual immunity, so if you're going to play it may as well save yourself and live to see another day. On the other hand, there was a mysterious extra Tyson vote and the split was a weird 5-2 rather than the 4-3 you would expect, so who the hell knows what happened there. And, of course, it didn't matter anyway since Kim received no votes.
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Apr 16, 2020 06:31
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Tellah posted:Jeremy's "I'm out of here" power would be a lot more useful if tribal council wasn't extended to allow a literal HUDDLE to determine who next to throw votes to afterward. Would be cool to force the dominant alliance to have a predetermined contingency or to fail by excessively splitting votes. I don't why Kim's group let the other group run away like that. If that alliance wants to strategize at Tribal I think that's fine, but the price they pay for that is they can't physically get away from others who want to eavesdrop. But then Kim and crew just let them go away and have a moment??
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Apr 16, 2020 08:43
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The Know It Alls talked through an interesting theory that the vote WAS 3-3-3 and they just edited the revote together with the first vote to save time. Given how rushed the rest of the episode was and how they did this once before (in some Micronesia pre-merge episode), it would make a lot of sense. Also I agree that if it was 5-2-2, Michele was probably the other majority vote. Perhaps it was an unintentional vote split though: maybe her and Nick were fed a fake Denise plan? Another possibility is Tyson feared a double idol play and threw a vote on Denise just in case there was a 0-vote revote that would land on him, although I don’t know why he’d pick Denise and not, say, Sarah in that scenario. And while we’re speculating, here’s another scenario: Tyson predicts 3-3-3 where he is one of the 3s. He knows he won’t survive the revote, so he knows his only hope is to vote for the other 3 to make it 4-3-2, so makes the guess between a Denise and Kim. But then what was the other Denise vote??
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Apr 16, 2020 16:40
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Pinterest Mom posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ueHJQ4wr4 That’s wild! Not only was Michele in on the vote, they trusted her enough to build the split vote around her. (If Michele voted Sophie and Kim played the idol on Tyson then Sophie would have been our 0-3-2). I half-suspect the video was cobbled together as a mix between an original vote and a revote to preserve the canon of one 5-2-2 vote but that’s probably needlessly conspiratorial.
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Apr 16, 2020 16:49
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I'm actually kind of amazed Ben has survived this long. Not because he is a particularly weak or strong winner but because I assumed going in the one thing the winners would fear the most are frequent Immunity challenge winners / Idol finders. The winner that won through social manipulation (like Parvati or Yul) shouldn't be as "scary" to the others because all the winners have a big ego and think they can't be fooled by their charming ways. The winners that won through idols or challenges, however, are much scarier because if they get on a run again there's nothing you can do to stop them. Ben is probably the scariest one in that sense because the idols he found were all on these exact beaches just two years ago. I guess there was that brief bit in the first or second episode where Ben was trying to avoid being the Idol Finder and helping Denise find an idol instead, and I guess that worked?? If so, good on Ben!
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Apr 19, 2020 08:26
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While I hate Edge, if they really do insist on it then I actually like that the early boots have an advantage by having more time/opportunity to win the fire tokens to spend on advantages. Whenever Big Brother does battlebacks it's always pretty boring when the most recent person comes back, it just feels like a big waste of time with everything just reset to the previous round or whatever. When it's someone who's been out for a while it has a more exciting "wild card" feel. Regarding tokens, I don't hate them but their implementation this season was really poor. Opportunities to spend them in the game were so rare that everyone just bought everything they got offered. There was never any interesting bidding or anything since only one player got the offer each week. And the prices were generally so low most people could buy them without even trying to get money from others (in the only two cases people had to borrow from others it was completely trivial because there was no point in saying no since opportunities to spend them were so rare). Fire tokens were really not functionally different from the Island of the Idols games except the receiver of the advantage only sometimes had to do a little activity first instead of all the time. I think a bartering system in the longterm could be kind of fun but also kind of hokey. I guess it was vaguely interesting when Parvati and Wendell danced around selling their vote for tokens, but it also made the game feel kind of petty and small and gamey, especially since it never even amounted to anything. They were mostly just quibbling over trinkets without even knowing why, just a vague sense it was a thing they should be quibbling about. There's no real reason to cut deals with the tokens if there isn't ample opportunity to spend them, and there's not really any way to incorporate ways to regularly spend them without breaking the game wide open with multiple advantages and idols every single week. Here's my attempt of an idea to fix the tokens: The only way to spend fire tokens is through a menu that is publicly available from day one with all prices and items/advantages listed on Day 1. The catch is there's only one of each, the prices are escalating, and only the currently lowest priced item is buyable. So maybe there's a small bag of rice for 2 tokens, a big bag of rice for 4 tokens, an idol good for 2 Tribals at 6 tokens, and so on. You can't buy the idol until the rice and the beans are both purchased first. You then have to try to simultaneously have to save up tokens to get the "good" item but also have to get people to spend their tokens on the "bad" items first. It also creates paranoia if everyone knows the idol will be on sale soon, worrying about who might get enough tokens to buy it first. They could even anonymize it so once the idol is bought no one knows who bought it. It also solves one of my biggest pet peeves with the modern show: no one knows what advantages are in play at any moment so no one can effectively strategize around them. But if all advantages are publically listed on day one and you know when they're purchased, you actually have a shot of strategizing appropriately.
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May 9, 2020 08:13
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The saddest thing about Wanda is they removed all her songs from most (all?) legal copies of the episode. I know the songs were cut from the CBS All Access version (maybe they put them back at some point?) and I think the episode is completely missing from Hulu.
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May 25, 2020 05:50
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clown shoes posted:Once I finish Panama tomorrow, I'll have these 11 seasons left. Of these, Guatemala and Nicaragua are the best "regular" seasons on that list and probably your safest bets, even though neither would win any awards. Edge of Extinction is actually pretty solid too (albeit controsversial), especially after the first few episodes, but if you hate the Edge twist in general you may not like it very much. The rest all have either gross sexist casts (Amazon, Vanuatu, Worlds Apart) or really stupid casts (Fii, Gabon, Redemption Island, South Pacific) or both (One World). I don't really think there are any completely irredeemable seasons of the show though, even the worst of those listed ones have some funny and exciting moments.
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May 26, 2020 23:04
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I thought the post-merge of AU 2018 was solid and worth watching but I don't blame anyone for jumping off at the pre-merge. Honestly, I think you could just skip any remaining pre-merge episodes left and you'd be able to follow everything. The episodes are long enough that I'm sure they fit in a re-exposition of everything important when it comes up anyway.
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May 31, 2020 00:44
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JOHN CENA posted:the 2016 season. there is a facebook group The Tribe Has Spoken that has all the nz/aus/south africa seasons. it's surprisingly high level survivor play every season out Would strongly disagree unless it's someone who's firmly committed to watching all of the modern AU seasons. 2016 is the first modern one (there was a weird low-budget version from the early/mid 00s that no one recommends*), and it can be a bit of a slog at times and might turn you off to the series. 2017 is generally considered the best and it will certainly hook anyone on the fence (the downside is none of the other seasons are even half as good). I don't *think* 2017 has any explicit spoilers about 2016 (someone can correct me if I'm wrong), so you can always do 2017 and then if you like it go back to 2016 and run the series from there. *(The reason the seasons are often referred to by year is because of those weird older seasons... some consider them seasons 1 and 2 and 2016 to be season 3, but others refer to 2016 as season 1, so it can cause some confusion if you try to track down a certain season by number)
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Aug 28, 2020 02:36
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Bemused Observer posted:If that happens, I hope Probst gets to Final 4 and loses the firemaking Honestly, the storyteller in him would probably love that.
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Mar 24, 2021 19:15
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