*puts on official!Koopa hat*
Consulting my slightly out-of-date list of Survivor games, I'd like to cite some statistics at you all. First of all, we are currently in the best period for Survivor games in site history from a moderation standpoint (if you wanna talk player standpoint I'm gonna have to take off my official hat because HOO BOY WORDS). We have not had an abandoned game since mastermind's Survivor: Two Worlds in summer of 2012, which means we're nearly or almost at a year and a half with no abandonment. We're also at probably the highest rate of new moderation; of the first five completed games, four were Blackberry, and while our repeat rate is not that high (off the top of my head, currently active users who have run multiple games are myself, Nicholas1024, animorpherv1 and Snakes), we're still getting fresh blood at a great rate--provided that new things keep happening in games.
Now let's look at game quality (again, moderation only). I'm going to ignore Greece simply because I can't evaluate that objectively, and for historical sake I'm ignoring this too for the most part. I believe that there's only one past game that people truly say was awful, and I'll let Nick tell you which it is. That's one awful game, one iffy one if we want to talk about Bahamas already, and one abandoned game since early 2011 (Botswana), nearly three years ago. I'm going to officially go on record here:
I don't think bad games are enough of a problem as of yet to warrant drastic action in the form of an official review committee.
Now that I've said that, let me add a caveat:
if you're going to run any large game, not just Survivor, it never ever hurts to get it reviewed.
A fresh set of eyes does so much for games. Send it to me1, hit someone else up, whatever.Now, in terms of advice that I'll give anybody who wants to run anything ever, I personally feel that the Survivor market is very stale. One of the reasons I did Redemption Island in Greece was so that there would be something new in the game, and I think that when you're designing any game, one of the first things you should ask is "What am I bringing to the table that's new?" (tooting my own horn for a moment) Kingdom Clash was conceived because kloud and I wanted a format that was new. It went over pretty well; a KC2 may happen someday. Amazing Race happened because I wanted something fast-paced and a Race had never finished before. Greece had Redemption and the tribe breakdown from 2 to 4 simply because they'd never been done before. These kinds of things are what we need here. I'm not saying don't do Survivors, I'm saying that at this point if you're gonna do them, you need to do them good and you need to do something new.
Well that got away from where I meant it to but that's okay.
1(I'm an especially good choice; the most I'm going to do until the fall player-side is small games)