CuddlyCaucasian wrote:The only real thing that bothers me about it is that everyone was referring to RC's best move as her getting Zingbot voted out, even though that didn't actually happen and shouldn't have even happened because of the cheating (whether it was intentional or not). I just wish the decision to modkill those two would have been made sooner, because instead, a very important vote happened that we basically knew the results of, but the vote never should have happened in the first place.
Yeah, that was unfortunate, although at the time there wasn't a way around it. We wanted Spencer and Derrick to confess without knowing about any risk of modkill, and we wanted to give Derrick at least 24 hours to reply to us. Also, it wasn't readily apparent to me that outside sources were used. I was pretty naive about the whole deal; Monty did an exceptional amount of sleuthing work and was able to trace basically every answer that was Googleable to a Google result. We also took the time to contact a couple independent sources before we made a huge decision. Ideally, the whole situation would have been resolved immediately, and Jessie's replacement nominee of Zingbot would have never been revealed. It was unfortunate that the situation affected the game at all. Even though Zingbot left the next round, anyway, having that vote at F15 really drew the line in the sand and stuck the Casaya members on the wrong side of it.
That was really when the game started going downhill for me. After modding Season Finale, I never wanted another game that would be seen as "predictable," although fortunately, I feel like this game was at least slightly more interesting. The game actually began in a huge way, especially on Casaya and Timbira - look at who the first two boots are! I think some of that was the format, which worked wonderfully in the pre-merge, while a lot of it was just due to a strong and active group of players. There really were no obvious choices to eliminate, which forced everyone to start playing.
After the fake merge, though, for some reason or another, there was really nobody that was willing or trying to work with Nicole, Keith, Sindy, or Elissa. I can't explain how that happened, although being divided into tribes right after an important vote probably didn't help matters. Eventually, the trio of RC, Kat, and Jessie were just dominating. I give credit to Joe and J'Tia for noticing the power structure and trying to go against their majority, although it unfortunately wasn't quite enough. That said, I can't blame anything on any of the players; I can only ask that everyone tries to play in their own best interest, and for the most part, I believe everybody did that. I believe RC, Kat, and Jessie played very well, and any one of them could have taken the title in the end. (I was rooting for Kat, although I believe that whoever ends up winning automatically earns their victory.)
So thanks, everyone! You were an extremely delightful group of players, with what felt like a record low amount of complaints against us, despite us not being perfect, and the game not being perfect. I certainly had fun modding this the whole way through.
Monty was an amazing co-mod; he wrote every single challenge post except maybe one or two. He helped immensely with everything, and we never had an argument about anything, which I can't say regarding my previous modding adventures. I certainly couldn't have done this without him!
