Woo, finally back from my vacation which means I have time to type a wall about the design choices of this game, and I guess twist philosophy in general. Some of this is pretty much paraphrased from things I said in the Spectator Station during the game, but hopefully there are new ideas here too.
First of all, there are two quotes that I want to bring up, one from me and one from Reck:
Haschel Cedricson wrote:Expect a fun game with a few twists but nothing completely out of left field.
xRECKONERx wrote:PSV would IMO be the best example of a "normal" game in our current site climate. Only twists were tribe swaps.
The former is something I believe to be true. If a gun was held to my head before the game I would have told you that on a twistiness scale of 1-5 this game was solidly a 3. And yet it's apparent that is not the consensus.
The latter, on the other hand, is something I disagree with entirely. As a player, I recall posting in my confessional that "vanilla" obviously only referred to the flavor because from a mechanics standpoint the game felt like anything but.
So why the disconnect?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think a large part of it is the fact that a moderator or reviewer sees the entire game at once, with each twist a small part of an overarching whole. Players, on the other hand, by definition encounter each twist doled out one at a time. It doesn't matter how the parts fit together when you have a 24 hour deadline and everything feels like it's just been switched up around you. And I think it's a fair point that right now we have this disconnect between players and moderators.
This game is a prime example of the whole-versus-parts dichotomy.
When this game was in the initial design stages, I wanted two Main Twists. First of all, I wanted to steal Death Row and bring it back because I thought it was a clever, newbie-friendly device that made the game more interesting. Secondly, I wanted challenge ability/performance to be important.
Now, if you are going to have Death Row/Terra Incognita, then a few things have to happen. You need people being eliminated two at a time for several rounds. You need a pregame talking period so people can start to form relationships with players who will later not be on their tribe for the main game. You need opportunities for crosstribe talk so that these relationships can continue. You need the main game to switch to single eliminations for enough rounds to whittle TI down to only two returners. Are these twists? Sure. But they aren't random; every one is in service to an overarching idea.
The same happens with the twist of rewarding challenge ability. The way techs were discovered not by the first person to find them but the person who did the best on the particular puzzle was part of that. And if you do that, you want multiple people to attempt the puzzles, which means announcing when something is able to be found. Challenge performance mattering also led to the gold/auction mechanic. And if winning challenges and doing well on them is supposed to be important, then that means gold has to be useful. And if gold is useful, that means there have to be items to buy.
A lot of people have expressed displeasure with 16 items being in the game. I understand that complaint. It was definitely something we talked about during the design phase, and something I specifically asked about during review. It certainly sounds wacky and unbalanced. However, here's the breakdown of items:
Florence, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janiero, Warsaw, Edinburgh, Capetown: These are the doublevotes/nullifiers. ALL these items do is either create ties or break ties. With six in the game the odds of multiple of these being played during the same TC were fairly likely, and indeed this is exactly what happened during TC 15. The general consensus around having an extra vote around these forums seems to be that it's an ability that feels important but isn't as useful as it feels it should be. Here multiple players, through their challenge performance earlier in the game, earned the ability to make/break ties. Is that
that
unbalanced? I don't think it is.
Kyzyl, Hong Kong: A challenge advantage. Again, these aren't super powerful rewards but as a player they feel really good to have.
Bucharest: The HII. Having an immunity idol in an auction is par for the course. You could probably bogey the course and still come up with an auction HII.
Sydney: The vacation. A powerful item with the drawback of not being able to influence the vote yourself. That's an interesting choice for me and I have no regrets about this item.
Vienna: Vote Revealer. Another standard low-power reward. Identifying Jules/Gilgs self-votes may literally be the most influential one of these items has ever been in MS history.
Algiers: Secret Subforum. This was supposed to be a top-tier reward. Obviously it wasn't used that way but it was supposed to be.
Singapore: The extra vote at FTC. Once again, looks nice but only breaks or creates ties. Also, you have to make FTC first.
Vatican City: A literal pizza. This was indeed a bit of a gag item, albeit one much nicer than "an empty box". This was borne from a conversation where I was lamenting that our MS auctions can't duplicate the ecstasy of seeing starving people bid hundreds of dollars for a burger and fries. I admit this doesn't really fit the challenge-are-important twist but this is one item out of sixteen and it was supposed to have no affect on the game at all.
Oslo, Jakarta: These items canceled out existing items. These reined in the power of a crop of mostly already relatively unpowerful items even more.
So yeah, sixteen items sounds like a lot. But they were all specifically designed to be mostly low-power minor boosts to reward people for premerge challenge ability, and they fulfilled that role perfectly.
In closing, I certainly understand why some parts of this game were less than enjoyable for some people. But hopefully everybody understands that this game wasn't designed by throwing darts at a dartboard; a lot of thought went into the goals for the game and how everything was supposed to fit together.