By now I believe most of you have either made it home or at least to your next destination. First off, this meet was so goddamn amazing. Every single one of you was such a delight to see in person, and the positive energy everybody had throughout the meet made everything feel smooth. During the first night I was a little on-edge because there is a bit of a gap between "in theory I could host a Survivormeet" and "oh god I am hosting a Survivormeet". But as I watched you all play the hell out of Survivor, I noticed that everybody was having
fun
and once I noticed that I felt extremely good for the rest of the meet.
Our finalists were all incredibly solid. I made it a point to intentionally not know a lot of what was going on strategywise, but I'm not at all surprised that 1) Radja won, and 2) all three finalists received multiple votes. Radja presented his game extremely well and had quite possibly my favorite mic drop moment of FTC. Vash started out with a weak opener but when he launched into that monologue about his personality and perceptions and chopping wood on Exile Island he turned into a snowball rolling down the hill getting bigger and bigger. Fenrir managed to play a solid UTR game despite his public idol find putting him on the radar, and I thought he did a very solid job of defending it. I thought Radja would win when votes were cast, but any of you three could have won and been a deserving winner.
Mitch, I'm sure by now you're sick of people telling you play an online game now, but
play an online game now!
You mentioned using your time at Redemple Temple to reflect on what went wrong and what you could have done better, and it showed when you demolished the slinky challenge, rejoined the game, and stomped all the way to F4. I also loved listening to Linguisticschat.
Monty was coming off a first-night-boot 13th-place finish at Lake Gaston, but he showed up in Oregon to play. He's a very likable, fun, ball of positivity of a person, and they needed an idol to get him out.
DV was a target for almost all of the merge, but he was so charming his allies had a lot of trouble turning on him; his reputation for being a strong social threat is well-earned.
Skelda was another player who I kept thinking was on the ropes and then kept surviving. He went from being targeted at the very first TC to joining the jury on the last day of the meet. Despite being a regular target he did great at finding allies willing to stick by his side.
Xof came into this game with several subgoals besides winning the whole thing, and she achieved all of them. She survived a TC, won a challenge, made merge, and survived until the final day. And Ms. I'm-Not-Good-At-Challenges surprised us all. She was probably the most effective person in the Bucket Brigade, anchored her team in College Bowl, and was just a few inches of thread away from winning the needle challenge. I've talked with her before about how non-anonymous games always have her fighting uphill because she starts the game with the burden of "everybody knows she's xof", but she rocked this game and I'm incredibly proud of her. <3
Entreri surprised me the most out of anybody on the playerlist. Prior to Survivormeet I hadn't really interacted directly with him a ton; all I knew was that he was a Diplomacy player who had been the early boot in several Survivor games and he also put a crazy amount of effort into studying Hive. As soon as I picked him up from the airport I could tell he was charismatic as hell; combined with his smarts I'm not surprised at all he seems to have been running the Clackamas Tribe.
Pants was a great player, a great juror, and a great person; I don't think anybody told me unprompted about how much fun they were having more than he did. I definitely want to hang out with him and Mitch in the future.
Lexi is an amazing person. During the spectator drafts everybody was worried that she would overplay too hard at the beginning, but she jumped in the driver's seat for the first four TCs of the game and stayed there comfortably for the entire pre-merge. On a non-game level she was a FANTASTIC cook, preparing fajitas the last night and what was without hyperbole the best Indian-style curry I have had in my life. Our grocery run was also a fun experience. Thank you again for everything.
Cody barely missed the merge, which made me sad, but when his tribe voted him out they unanimously told him they wanted him to win Redemption. He's a very introverted person, but he also has an innate ability to make people like him. I'm very sad we will never get to know what could have happened if a slinky had retracted just a liiiiiittle more stable manner.
Piggy, on the other hand, had everyone who voted her out hoping that she wouldn't win Redemption because they knew she'd be back for revenge. It was a great dynamic to watch, made all the better when she made a great comeback at the tangram challenge where she was the second-to-last player to find her pieces but put together the puzzle really fast.
Menno was a surprise boot for me; I still have no idea what happened that TC. This guy was a challenge beast. While we are all going to remember the sheer creativity of the slinky challenge, for me the defining Menno challenge performance will be the slide puzzle at the end of the relay; my comment about Gen Z texting was a joke but he seriously buzzsawed through that slide puzzle like it was nothing.
Meme was our last boot of the first night, and although I was sad to see somebody who flew all the way from Europe go home on night 1, the way it happened was so amazing that I think there was no better way you could have left the game. The man with the custom title "Banana Split" found himself in yet
another
ridiculous vote split, orchestrating a 2-2-2 vote. If he hadn't voted for his own ally he would have stayed in the game, but in the end his boot was extremely on-brand. He also caused the modteam a bit of anxiety by being so bad at finding tangram pieces we started to worry that we forgot to put one in his bucket, so that was fun. Thanks for being a good sport about those jokes.
PEG was our first person voted out of the game, and I suspect he knew going into this that he would be a target at his first TC. He didn't go home lying down, though, and his words about people making a mistake turned out to be true. After being voted out, though, he kept a positive attitude and never stopped having fun which is the most important thing at an event like this. PEG is one of the most chill people I've ever met and I am so glad that he came. He also gave us some footage that I won't spoil for those who weren't at the meet, but will definitely be going into the introduction when I edit the footage.
That's all of the players, but our crew made this such a great game as well. Ceph and Mina were beasts on the camera, following the players everywhere and pulling people aside to get confessionals. Tanis and Malkon were always running behind the scenes, helping set of challenges or make sure that we were ready to run TC. Malkon and Tanis also did a fantastic job during the design phase of this game; all three "primary" mods contributed to the challenge design and part of the reason we had the (IMHO) great balance we did was because of their ideas. I will admit to being skeptical about the puzzle balls at FIC, but not only did it run smoothly I think at least one puzzle ball was actively being played at all times on Monday.
You will note I didn't mention Ariel in that last paragraph, and that's because she deserves her own. She signed up originally just planning to do camerawork but she did SO FREAKING MUCH in just about every aspect of the meet. She made supply runs, she organized the props, she converted our planned schedule from being a photograph of a whiteboard to an actual usable spreadsheet, she bought the immunity idols and made the instructions for them, she did FAR more than her fair share of keeping the house clean... this woman did everything. Take away one of me, Malkon, Tanis, Ceph, or Mina, and the meet isn't nearly as good but we still get through it. Take away Ariel, and I'm skeptical the meet functions at all. Ariel is an amazing top-tier scummer and human being.
Quick shoutout to my wife Anastasia for helping with the pizza on the first night, transporting people to the Airbnb or to/from the airport, hosting a bunch of people at our house for several days, and giving me permission to host a meet at all what with the baby being born at the end of June. I love her and I personally couldn't have done any of this without her love and support.
I think that's pretty much it? I miss all of you already (except for Xof/Meme/Skelda who are still here) but I want to thank all of you again for making this such an incredibly positive experience.
And to my knowledge the carpets remained un-peed-on!
