Survivor: Civilization - Congratulations Boudica!!!


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Post Post #75 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:58 am

Post by hiplop »

Yes
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Post Post #76 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 7:00 am

Post by D3f3nd3r »

Borobudur or however that's spelled was a pretty good idea, I wish there was a little bit more clarity, but I did fairly quickly get to the point of "find the dude who can do the thing, he will only do it if you get to him from somebody else in particular". My problem was just that it took me too long to figure out who "the dude" and "somebody else in particular" were, that took me about 45 minutes to do.
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Post Post #77 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 7:22 am

Post by bippy »

tracking down my password and making my first(? ever post to say borobudur was excellent and by winning borobudur, boudica deserved to win the game
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Post Post #78 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:45 am

Post by Aronis »

In post 74, Iprobablysuck wrote:Yo i'm still pretty peeved that people got items and shit and I gotta Pizza giftcard X_X

Hope you enjoyed that Pizza Reck

Aren't hiplop and CC running a low twist game soon?
the pizza gift card was awesome, why would you be upset w/ that????
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Post Post #79 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:56 am

Post by Mina »

In post 71, DrumBeats wrote:Yes Alex had a ton of money, but he also got lucky that people didn't bid heavy on the mystery prizes he was going for. When you have 8 mystery boxes that contain such drastically different rewards (pizza vs an idol), it's a crapshoot. At 8 items, every item is likely to be bid somewhat heavily on, so it stops one person from sweeping them.
Yeah, I didn't mind this with the techs, because I thought the flavour clued you into which ones were good. But when it's completely random, it feels like bidding on the right one is a crap shoot. Eight probably would have been the perfect number.
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Post Post #80 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 9:46 am

Post by Mina »

Btw, I would be up for playing a Civ 5 reunion game with you guys if anyone is interested.
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Post Post #81 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:24 pm

Post by BROseidon »

In post 70, hiplop wrote:
In post 69, DrumBeats wrote:I thought Borobudur was a frustrating but very interesting challenge. I definitely enjoy the idea of it but my biggest issue with it was that it wasn't clear how we were being judged. As I was playing I had to angleshoot about what would make more sense for the mods to judge it by, number of moves or time. That definitely had an impact on how I played it because I spent extra time trying to optimize my paths with the map that I had of it. I think it was fine for us to go in not knowing it was a maze, but I think we should've known how it was being judged.
yeah, this was bullshit. challenge was weird but fine, lack of judging criteria is a major no-no
We were told time.
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Post Post #82 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:24 pm

Post by BROseidon »

Like it was literally the criterion we were given. "Person to get enlightenment fastest wins immunity"
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Post Post #83 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:24 pm

Post by hiplop »

but does that mean most steps or time?
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Post Post #84 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:26 pm

Post by BROseidon »

Fastest != fewest steps
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Post Post #85 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:27 pm

Post by BROseidon »

I guess your unit of "time" could be a step but it was also pretty easy for those to mean the same thing in the challenge.
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Post Post #86 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:28 pm

Post by BROseidon »

idk maybe I just "figured it out" really fast but basically once I started writing shit down I basically was on autopilot for the rest of the challenge.
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Post Post #87 (ISO) » Sun Sep 03, 2017 9:55 pm

Post by Shadoweh »

I still say the pizza giftcard should have been an announced item just to see who would bid on a real world gain versus a random box >.>

Most auctions have random boxes and the MS expectation is that they have varying results, usually a few empty/bad boxes and one idol somewhere. Civ at least guaranteed no one got literally nothing for their dollar. So that's more of an MS problem. The items didn't end up mechanically affecting the game other then Alex's, and Alex told quite a few people about his stash. It's kudos to him that no one targetted him before it was too late.

In my opinion more weaker items is still better then less stronger items ie the idol brigades that happened in Eon and Nexus.
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Post Post #88 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 12:27 am

Post by BROseidon »

I thought the pizza thing was trolling.
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Post Post #89 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 1:53 am

Post by grumpy »

Congrats Bro!!
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Post Post #90 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 5:14 am

Post by hiplop »

In post 87, Shadoweh wrote:The items didn't end up mechanically affecting the game other then Alex'
i mean when youre talking about design what ends up happening isnt that relevant?

things like super unclear "item stoppers" are extremely problematic. Poor definitions of interactions, etc
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Post Post #91 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 5:50 am

Post by Cephrir »

In post 39, xRECKONERx wrote:#1- I don't think we need the 24 hour starter-but-just-kidding period in games anymore. If we're gonna set a start time for games, then start the game at those times, I think. It has gotten to the point where I think it has lost its "surprise" factor and the issue it was trying to correct isn't really prevalent anymore
I think this is meaningful enough to do sometimes, because of the way it sets up a 2v2v2 dynamic in the real starting tribes. I think that's something interesting that it can add.
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Post Post #92 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 5:53 am

Post by D3f3nd3r »

Two days was a bit long but you need to have more than a day, that's for sure. If you're risking throwing a tribe into TC less than 36 hours in that's bad.
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Post Post #93 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 5:56 am

Post by BROseidon »

I was thankful for it because I was busy that Thursday the game started with work-related shit and literally could not be online.
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Post Post #94 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 5:53 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

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.
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Post Post #95 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 6:05 pm

Post by hiplop »

a lot of mystery items even if low powered (and many of these i *disagree are low powered)+ 2 returnees at the start of merge is massive.

so like

there are twists where it surprises the players, but they have power over the situation. Its a "twist" in a situation, but they have the knowledge of what consequences will happen if they do x thing. "You can not attend this tribal" "you are on exile for the night, you replace whoever gets voted out".

problem with death row/outcasts/etc is like...you make players pull a lever that looks normal and then surprise them with a result. That to me is a twist where the players have no autonomy. That, to me, is a bad twist.
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Post Post #96 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 6:34 pm

Post by Cheery Dog »

I think just having returning players sort of puts the twist level up a notch.

While it's completely fine most of the time for the people with those second chances, it's the people still in the game and working hard to remain there that will have it feel it's that level of difficulty.

Spoiler: Australian Survivor Season 2 spoiler
This happens on actual survivor as well with the same sort of twists
If we look at AKs reaction when he is voted out in episode 12, he is firmly putting the blame on Tara, as she was the lucky person that survived through a twist that didn't eliminate someone after being voted out at tribal council, and the two of them hated each other guts.


So it's not just that they lived through whatever twist, it's that they now have a chance of doing better than you, even after worked on having them eliminated in the first place.
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Post Post #97 (ISO) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 7:15 pm

Post by hiplop »

More than that it gives salty people control. In your example that person probably doesnt leave if their reputation doesnt supercede them
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Post Post #98 (ISO) » Tue Sep 05, 2017 1:10 am

Post by BROseidon »

Tbh returning players is fine.

Returning players that we aren't told about is kind of bastard. Yeah, some people managed to guess it, but like when Monty was like "I think there are returning players" we were all like "oh no there definitely won't be he's crazy"
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Post Post #99 (ISO) » Tue Sep 05, 2017 1:45 am

Post by BROseidon »

Also this game mostly just suffered from lack of editing.

Did the opposing tribe in the TCs need a vote, versus being available to PM?

Did we need 16 city-states instead of 10 or 8?

Did we need technologies at all, or did gold/auction by itself emphasize challenge performance enough (beyond what is important by default)?

Like just taking some stuff out would have gone a long way towards streamlining the game and making it feel a bit lighter/less twisty.
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