Newer Players Quick and Dirty Guide
Guide written by Zoraster, then edited by Silverclaw with permission for general use.
So you’re new to Survivor. Or Online Reality Games. Or Mafiascum. This is for you.
First, this is not intended to be the be-all and end-all guide to playing Online Survivor. The game changes with the players too much to be able to confidently say with any certainty that if you do X then Y will happen. People are unpredictable, and ultimately that’s what you’re playing against. However, hopefully, I can set a baseline that might help avoid some common problems. BUT this is just one guy's musings on Survivor here. If you disagree with any of the advice, reject it!
New to Survivor
Start binging! This guide’s purpose is not to familiarize you with Survivor as a process. As someone who played his first game without having watched any Survivor, I can tell you that it’s extremely difficult without some basics from the show, and really only watching the show can teach you that.
New to Online Reality Games
If you haven’t played online reality games, this guide is really for you.
- Activity. Activity. Activity. You joined the game thinking you’d kind of step into it and say hello and it’d just sort of fall into place. No. Your goal is to talk to people and talk to them a LOT. If you’ve only had a brief conversation with everyone in your tribe once before your first Tribal, you’re likely to be the first boot. Inactivity stops being a reason to get rid of people later, but the first boot is often about the easy vote because no one wants to risk anything Day 1.
- This activity starts BEFORE tribal council. If you’re ever talking to someone once Tribal Council started, you’re behind the ball. It doesn’t even mean you need to talk game (different people will want to talk more or less about personal life stuff). People are naturally less trustful of someone that just shows up when they’re at risk.
- If this isn’t natural for you, use Improv’s “Yes, and…” approach to conversations. Never answer a question with “yeah” or “nope” and let it drop. Your goal is to say something that makes them respond with something. That can be a question or just something interesting enough you expect they’ll follow up.
- Err on the side of aggression. Overplaying can be a real thing in Survivor, but typically I see new players fail because they played passively for too long. Get involved. Ask people to ally with you. Make final 3s. Worry about consequences later. If you go out because you overplayed, you’re going to find your experience with the game much more enriching than if you go out because you did nothing the whole game. Plus, it’s going to give you far more experience for your next game than if you did nothing.
- You can avoid a lot of trouble if you say who you LIKE rather than who you DISLIKE. There can be reasons to pick fights with other people, but that can be a complicated play.
- Be as effusive as you think you can be while still being genuine. You like someone? This isn’t the time to be squirrely about it. Tell them! Tell them you want to work with them! Even if they don’t really reciprocate, they are now WAY less likely to want to put you up.
- There’s a tendency with new players to focus on challenge results. Yes, having a good challenge player can be good for your tribe. And even more so having a bad challenge player can result in going to Tribal Council a whole bunch. You can use that as something to spur conversation, but if you ever find yourself arguing ad nauseum about how bad a player is at a challenge, reel yourself back and start to use different tactics to target them.
- This may be more geared toward more “strategic” players, but use your confessional as much as you can to think things through, talk about things that happened, etc. It can be clarifying, it can make you a more purposeful player, it can help you see relationships that you would have missed before, and it can help you review what’s happened in the game. It also tends to be helpful in making the game entertaining for spectators!
- This game is ultimately about individualrelationships. Alliances can be valuable tools, but if you don’t put in the individual relationship work on a daily basis, you’re going to have trouble.
- With that in mind, remember that someone is likely on the bottom of every alliance. That becomes more true the more people are in the alliance. Maybe it’s you and you need to shake things up. Maybe it’s someone else and you need to work hard to make them feel like they aren’t or else theyare going to shake things up. But always look around and think about who is on the bottom or feels they are on the bottom.
- Assume anyone but your absolute closest ally is going to tell other people what you said. They need to bond with other people too, and giving information is one way to get information. So while gossiping can be a good way to bond, be careful!
New to Mafiascum
This portion is really more about the differences you might expect in a game on this site.
- Players on mafiascum often know each other very well. This cancolor their interactions with those players, but typically friends on this site are fairly competitive and often are just as likely to gun for each other as they are to automatically ally with each other.
- Mafiascum games tend (though you’re free to do differently!) be more text based. Sending messages via text DMs, for example, rather than engaging in long video calls.
- Players are often a wide age group. Game occasionally have players that are in their 40s or above!
- Most games on Mafiascum are played anonymously(aka “alias” games) where players play on a forum with a hidden identity.
- Survivormeets: There have been several semi-official real-world games where people from Mafiascum have played survivor over the course of a long weekend. Depending on the players in this game there may be those who have played in these games. These may or may not end up being relevant, but just so you know the lingo.
General Information for Players
Every Survivor game that is hosted on Mafiascum comes with a rating, which is scored directly by the List Mod. The categories, and how they are rated, are as such:
Spoiler: Categorization Information
Advice for Challenges
- For challenges that require a google document, open and fill out the form for both the Start AND Finish before starting.
- Get comfortable with an image sharing site like imgur and figure out how to post from it as quickly as possible. Make sure the site is working before starting your challenge as technical difficulties will not be taken into consideration.
- Ask questions before you begin the challenge. The game’s moderators will always be willing to answer any questions you have.
Resources
New Player’s Guide. This is a more robust guide to playing as a new player. It focuses a little more on forum-based anonymous games and is a little dated, but many of the suggestions still hold true. Particularly helpful is the second post.
Mafiascum Survivor Wiki. This is a wiki of all the survivor games that have played on Mafiascum.
Other Social Games. While these aren’t survivor games, they often have major elements of survivor.
Survivor Elo Rating. These are the mafiascum ratings for
anonymous
games. But that can still be helpful in figuring out whether a person has been successful or not. Remember that in Survivor people who are threats are often taken out and those that are perceived as easy to beat can make it far. Character Database. If you want to actually read games of a player you’re playing with, you’ll need to know who they were as an anonymous player. This link shows who was who.
Survivor: Know Your Enemies. This is the game link to the last non-anonymous game that was played on site. This link directs you to the MS forum where the challenges were posted and Final Tribal Council took place. If you wish to see the Discord the game was played on, this is where you can go to see it.
