| FTC thoughtfulness space | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 27 2017, 08:16:30 PM (217 Views) | |
| Boudica | Aug 27 2017, 08:16:30 PM Post #1 |
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Setting aside a dedicated space here to flesh out stuff for FTC, make sure I'm happy with responses, etc. I have plenty of time to respond to things, no need for me to rush. |
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| Boudica | Aug 27 2017, 08:28:16 PM Post #2 |
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I think it comes down to the fact that my strategic game doesn't exist in a vacuum - it exists in coexistence with the agendas that everyone else was jockeying for, and in that moment the poor reads of others ended up putting me in a weak position. Alex should have been gone at 7. He was the biggest threat in the game to just about every person, between the relationships he had, his challenge prowess, and the items in his pocket, the vote really should have been a no brainer. But that didn't happen, and as a result I got put on the outs and left out of everyone's endgame plans, whereas a world that has Alex leaving both paves the way for me to win the next few challenges and opens up the game for me to work into other people's plans. |
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| Boudica | Aug 27 2017, 08:38:13 PM Post #3 |
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It was never an active decision to isolate myself, but you're right that my social game was weak relative to the other aspects of my game. For whatever reason, I found it hard this game to connect with people on a really personal level. I managed it with a few people pretty well - Theo and Hatty were perhaps the people I managed it best with, and I think earlier in the game I was better about it than later on. Still, it's definitely a space where I failed to truly excel, so I had to step up in other areas because I knew that I couldn't trust people to be bought into me on a personal level, so I had to get them bought into me based on their self-interest. If there's a perception that I only reached out when necessary, I'm sorry. I pmed about as much as I could given real life considerations. If that felt like not enough, there's not much more I could have done. |
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| Boudica | Aug 27 2017, 08:38:27 PM Post #4 |
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Okay, going to sleep. Going to edit and post these in the morning before work. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 03:31:13 AM Post #5 |
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Because, even though we're only talking about each aspect of our games individually here, everything exists in the context of each other. Yes, I failed to be as much of a social butterfly butterfly as Theodora, but I feel the aggregate of my social+strategic play still surpasses hers. It's not like my social game was actively terrible - it was good enough to have the requisite baseline for people to work with me. I also think that I showed an awareness that my social game wasn't my strong point in how I approached people in the game. I knew people weren't going to buy into me on a personal level, so I focused my arguments around why people should buy into me out of their own self interest. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 03:46:19 AM Post #6 |
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I guess the first thing I should say to you is that I'm sorry. It's tangential to this here, but I know after the F9 vote when we were talking, you said that you just wanted to chat more about stuff, and we did for a bit, but then I let the game get in the way again and dropped the non-game related content. For what it's worth, I enjoyed our conversation. That said, I think you know more about me than maybe you realize. We didn't talk about stuff that much, per se, but I think there's still a lot you know about me. You know that I'm a serious person. You know that I'm a workaholic. You know that I'm not super warm and bubbly and there to make you feel good. You know that I stay true to my word - I was the only person loyal to you, in the end, even though you'd almost stabbed me in the back a few rounds prior. Ultimately, how you weigh everything Theodora opened up to you about herself versus the actions I took in this game is your decision, but, as I said in response to Julius, the aggregate of my social + strategic surpasses hers. In focusing so much on the game and the strategy, I neglected the personal relationships, but I still had the requisite level to do what I needed to do to get here. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 03:59:55 AM Post #7 |
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I don't like to make excuses, but that first Thursday of the game, I was completely without access for work reasons. That put me at a disadvantage that I would have had to have overcome in that tribe. That said, I would have taken the following two measures: 1) Zara Yaqob was going to be the first boot of that tribe unless some weird shit happened. The guy was very weird, and his ouster would have bought me time to start building relationships. That was time that I, more than other people on the tribe, was going to have to make very good use of. In the first few votes of the game, personal relationships matter much more than strategic interests. 2) Identify who I needed to endear myself to to put myself into a 4 or 5 person majority. Given the MS meta of swap-heavy games, it wouldn't have been worthwhile to jockey for control of the tribe, since that would have risked the power players taking me out. Instead, it would have been better to identify who was going to control the majority, and hustle my ass off to make myself a part of it. Should that fail, then gunning for the power players would have been a last-ditch effort. Obviously, #2 ran the risk of failing, but so does everything in this game. That said, I think the fact that I survived an America that lost 1/2 its members, and the fact that I survived those F6 and F5 votes is a testament to the fact that I could survive. I tied for the most pre-merge TCs attended with Nap and Hatshepsut (excluding the Terra Incognita TCs), and I survived the losingest tribe during the longest tribal phase of the pre-merge. I think that demonstrates the skill set that I would have made it work. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 04:00:32 AM Post #8 |
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God this is such a hard question why did you ask this??? |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 07:11:26 AM Post #9 |
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Ugh Gilgamesh making me answer hard questions. He also apparently doesn't understand that everyone is always held to the whims of others in this game. Like, I used a strategy that required people not to vote me out. That's literally what everyone does. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 03:33:25 PM Post #10 |
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I have a lot of shit to respond to when I get home. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 03:34:15 PM Post #11 |
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An interesting point, though, is Augustus pointing out that I'm universally loved by the jury while the jury is broadly slamming me for my relatively weak social game. I can use that. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 05:08:16 PM Post #12 |
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Regarding your first point, there is literally no way to play this game that doesn't put you up to the whims of others short of winning literally every challenge. You are always one vote (Alex's cache of items notwithstanding). And there are a multitude of ways to try to keep yourself safe. Instead of gunning for overt control, where I would be the queen waiting to be usurped, I instead chose to sit back and wait to usurp the throne myself. In a world where I control the F8 vote and get Julius booted, and then I manage to take Alex out at 7, is the rest of the game really easier for me? I still would have had to work as hard in those final rounds to secure my spot in FTC, except instead of being the scrappy underdog, I'm the person in a position of power trying to hold everything together so that nobody usurps the throne from me. The arguments change, but the threat stays the same, and I'd still have to argue how I managed to survive by "the mistakes of others." |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 05:19:30 PM Post #13 |
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You're right, I did lie to you there. And you're right that my approach to jury management in that moment wasn't good. I considered telling you multiple times, but I didn't. I was concerned that you would take the information and try to shake things up, and I didn't want things shaken up there. I may have been immune that round, but what if you managed to flip it against Theodora? Against Pocatello? It would have weakened my positioning going forward. Maybe that was projection, though. Because I understood how far I would go to save my ass when I knew it was on the line, maybe I felt like you would betray me if I tried to do you a solid there. Because that's what I would have done. So, at the end of the day, I valued maintaining the status quo and coasting forward over keeping you in the game in that moment, and I took that to the point of lying to you. Given my position now, I don't think I made the wrong choice in voting you out. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 05:32:00 PM Post #14 |
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My PMs with you were short. My pms with a lot of people in this game ended up being very short, especially in the early merge. I was always responsive, and I was always giving something, but I was definitely holding back. Like I said, I was coasting, and I was choosing to withhold information as to not give people things to use against me (remember my PM about buying a girl a drink first after you said I was being tight lipped?). In the process, though, I definitely erred on being curt over just, like, talking about nothing, and in retrospect that may have been a mistake. And I was very much aware that my position in the game was contingent on relationships more cultivated by Theodora than myself. Like you said, I was executing on a meat shield strategy. I wanted people's eyes on Theodora, not me, so that I could coast just well enough to get to where I needed to to start showing my strategic chops. And I was very much aware that my position as Theo's sidekick was enough to keep me in the game until shit got real cray. Edited by Boudica, Aug 28 2017, 05:57:57 PM.
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 05:38:26 PM Post #15 |
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That relationship wasn't obviously fake. I was invested in that until you backstabbed me in that round. We hadn't talked much on Indus Valley, but there was that first couple hours of the Dido TC where I was talking only with you and Hannibal, and I felt like we connected well there. I was shocked when you didn't tell me that Asia was voting for me, even after I explicitly asked you to tell me if you caught wind of anything. I ended up venting a bit in my confessional, and here's what I wrote about you:
I was hurt and angry in this moment, and I was hurt because I legitimately thought we had connected. So, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that your question is built on a false premise. I wasn't trying to fake a relationship with you. As for the strategic reason, I was trying to build as many 1-1 connections as I could during the joint TCs in order to put myself in a more advantageous position going into the swaps. As Theodora has already discussed, she and I connected initially during the joint TCs she had with America. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 05:50:34 PM Post #16 |
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I would say there were two aspects to my jury management strategy: 1) Manage expectations with people. Demonstrate that I was willing to work with people on a round-by-round basis, but don't commit to a series of promises that I can't ultimately follow through on. 2) Take actions in public fora to bolster my own case at the end. Regarding number one, I had this sort of relationship with a number of people. I avoided promising F3s until the end of the game so as to mitigate the number of people on the jury who would be actively upset at me and rooting against me. While I wasn't fully successful in this regard, for the most part I didn't put people on the jury who were rooting against me. Number two was a bonus to making the public posts that I made. All those posts, in that moment, primarily served to keep me in the game, but even as I was writing them I was aware of their secondary use of being things I could point to to bolster my case at the end of the game. This was important especially in the context of people in the early merge not really seeing me show off strategic chops because I was choosing to bite my tongue. Hell, Willem made jury having barely interacted with me at all in this game. I had to show the jury that I was here to play, and doing something super fucking ostentatious was a pretty good way of doing that. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 06:03:38 PM Post #17 |
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1) I think it ended up helping me slightly with who came home. Hannibal coming back into the game and immediately gunning for Harald broke down the potential 5v5 at merge and ended up pushing it to a 4v4. If things had been a straight 5v5 without the returners, the first few votes become a lot harder instead of me being able to coast fairly comfortably to F8. 2) The auction was bad for me. I literally won nothing. Alex ended up with a mountain of items to bolster his strong play and position in the game. I still made it work. 3) I would have made more of an effort reaching out to people during the first joint TC. That was the one of the three where I put in the least hustle, since the Saladin boot was a foregone conclusion, and building a relationship at that point in time with more people could have served me positively going forward. Specifically, I very much neglected Willem and Montezuma during that TC, and that Montezuma relationship could have been helpful in New World to make that phase of the game a lot less stressful. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 06:14:26 PM Post #18 |
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I feel they definitely helped me. The first didn't help me directly in the context of the game (and arguably was detrimental in the sense that it caused people to peg me as a challenge threat), but it did help my confidence. Prior to that point, I had been absolutely awful in challenges. Like, you can go back and look at my pre-merge challenge performance and it's, uh, really bad. Other than Match Game and Codenames to an extent, I sucked in all the pre-merge challenges. However, winning Borobudur so dominantly made me stop and think, wait a minute, maybe I actually win these challenges. The second and third wins both guaranteed my safety right as the game started getting hectic. There's a very real possibility of either of those votes turning against me, and having that necklace around my neck was the only way to guarantee safety. The three wins in aggregate were also important in me bolstering my case for people to keep me in the game. Specifically at F5, I stayed in this game partially because I was viewed as more beatable than Alex while more likely than anyone else to beat him in the FIC. My challenge prowess turned me into a necessary evil to stop Alex from steamrolling the game. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 06:47:36 PM Post #19 |
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Working on my responses to Alex's question. Thanks, bro. It's a good one for me to reframe a lot of arguments. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 07:04:29 PM Post #20 |
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Thanks stud ![]() I think a lot of it comes down to how how we define what is "social," what is "strategic," and where the lines blur. This FTC format encourages us to think about each of these as individual aspects of our games, not aspects that informed one another and were implicitly tied together into a whole. I'm trying to bridge that together in some of my answers, but I think this is a good place to do it more explicitly. A lot of what I did very successfully that I defined as "tactics" in my opening speech were things that demonstrated a strong social game. In particular, I'm going to loop back to "the right arguments to the right people at the right times." During the final rounds of the game, I was able to go to people with the arguments I needed to in order to get them to work with me, even when I had been against them, or them against me, just a round prior. And that wasn't only a thing that I did at the end of the game. From the moment I flipped Liz to my side, I was doing something right to get people to be willing to work with me. And that's an implicitly social thing! That requires being able to look at someone and say "what are this person's motivations in this moment. What are the types of things I can say to compel them to my side, even if it's not necessarily in their best interests." Because, at the end of the day, we each had our own objectives in every round, and I focused on trying to identify whose motivations at a given moment were aligned with mine, and present the argument to them in a way that it all made sense. Even though I wasn't being the most bubbly person in the world, and I wasn't convincing other people to do what I wanted because I wanted it. I was convincing them to do what I wanted because I got them to want it. And I think this contrasts strongly with Theo's social game. Theo was more of a social butterfly than I was, and she got people more invested in working with her on a personal level than I did. But she ultimately let people come to her with why she should do what they wanted. She let other people build the cases, and then agonized over what was the correct choice. She didn't say "this is what I want, who do I need to talk to to make this happen," and I think it ultimately comes down to a lack of a complete sense of how to influence people. She could charm people into wanting to work with her, but she couldn't persuade them to do what she wanted. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 07:05:27 PM Post #21 |
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Man the great part about this deluging strategy is great for putting my best foot forward. Lets me build some pretty cogent stuff informed by what other people are saying. |
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| Boudica | Aug 28 2017, 07:15:19 PM Post #22 |
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I feel mean going in on Stalin on that one but at the same time like dude made 0 fucking sense. |
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 05:08:09 AM Post #23 |
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I had fun. I like pushing myself, and Survivor is a fast-paced game for me to do that in. There is so much that goes into this game - strategy, tactics, challenges, interpersonal relationships, debate, etc. It's constantly changing and dynamic, and so it's a constant series of challenges to try to tackle. Plus, it's stressful, which leads to crazy adrenaline highs. After F6, F5, and F4, I was physically shaking from how excited I was. That kind of shit is really fun for me. I love the intensity. Even in times where I was ostensibly coasting, I was active in my confessional trying to think about my best options, what I should do down the road, etc. I think I made the game more fun for others as well. Most people prefer to go up against someone who doesn't give up and makes things challenging as dynamic, and I gave that in spades. I also feel that how I presented my arguments mitigated toxicity, since I was limiting emotional manipulation and trying to push my cases through the lens of people's self-interests. Edited by Boudica, Aug 29 2017, 07:27:01 PM.
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 05:35:55 AM Post #24 |
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I think it comes down to the relative positions we had in the game. Alex was to dog for most of the post-merge. He had a ton of social and strategic connections. He had a million items. He was strong in challenges, boasting the strongest pre-merge challenge record of everyone to make merge. And so every time Alex got his way, which happened every round until F5, it was the big bad of the game getting his way. And that's boring. I'm sure the specs did their edgic and had Alex as the favorite to win for a very long time. Nobody likes a steamroll, except for the dude executing it. I was the scrappy underdog. Each thing I did moved me one step forward, giving me another chance to fight to usurp the king. Every immunity I won was another chance for me to try to disrupt the flow. Flipping the vote at the very end of F6 gave me a fighting chance to disrupt Alex down the road, and then me flipping it at 5 again gave me the final chance I needed. People like to root for underdogs, at the end of the day
Edited by Boudica, Aug 29 2017, 07:32:43 PM.
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 10:12:51 AM Post #25 |
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Man I'm reading some of my old confessionals while on the toilet at work. Remember that time I agonized over a Liz vs Stalin vote and it ended up not mattering at all? Fun times |
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| Sappho | Aug 29 2017, 01:13:38 PM Post #26 |
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is that going to be the stage for your next video confessional? |
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 01:59:48 PM Post #27 |
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No |
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 02:00:05 PM Post #28 |
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Also man Maria WENT IN |
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 02:49:02 PM Post #29 |
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Okay cool internet is fixed time to edit those shitty phoneposted responses and put them in threads. |
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 03:01:09 PM Post #30 |
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Jk time to go play soccer in a dress. My drag name is Booty Ka |
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 07:32:53 PM Post #31 |
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Man Kilby really likes comparing things to MvGX endgame. |
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| Boudica | Aug 29 2017, 08:06:50 PM Post #32 |
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I think there are definitely valid aspects to your comparison. Nothing is ever going to be a truly perfect comparison, but I think there's a lot of aspects of Adam's game that I reflected in my own. Adam and I both were willing to try shit; we weren't afraid of making mistakes and having to get back up. I showed a lot of the same fight that Adam did in terms of just never giving up (even though he was doing it for much better reasons than I was in this game, lol). Adam was able to build up the narrative about David and ultimately let him take the fall to go to an FTC where the jury would walk in favoring him, much like I did to you. I think there are elements of the game that are different, though. Obviously our lens on Adam's game is limited based on what was shown to us, but one difference is I think that Adam panicked a lot more easily than I did (the merge episode of MvGX was probably the biggest example of where he freaked out). Even when I was being directly pressured and under attack, I feel I did a good job keeping things calm enough to triage the situation and figure out what I needed to do. I obviously was still stressed that I could very well go home, but I kept it under wraps. Similarly, I think the comparison of you to David falls short in the sense that you were a favorite basically from the moment this game began. David was interesting and compelling because he started out so out of his element, but he built some relationships with a few people and started really figuring out the game while he was out there. You came in with a strong toolkit, David developed his toolkit while he was out there. As far as which Survivor I would compare myself to, across all seasons, I don't think any single Survivor perfectly, or even near-perfectly reflects the game I played. Maybe Adam's constant willingness to push forward after things didn't fall his way puts him closest to me. Maybe how I handled toppling the majority, using the person at the top instead of the people at the bottom, makes me closer to Danni Boatwright. Maybe my ostentatious displays of #bigmoves and my ability to constantly dodge bullets makes me like Wentworth or Ciera. Maybe my transactional nature, my ability to work with anyone in any moment, makes me like Sandra (lol jk I'm not nearly as good as her). I don't think there's a clean parallel to any one person, but I think I pulled inspiration from a range of real Survivors to try to stitch together the game that worked best for me. |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 03:57:27 AM Post #33 |
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Need to edit the above and post it. I have Julius, Alex, and Maria, and it sounds like the jury was broadly rooting for me going in, so I think I'm in a pretty good spot? |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 05:38:43 AM Post #34 |
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Man I want to tell Gilgamesh to fuck off. The guy has such a fucking narrow lens. This is why this thread exists |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 05:39:17 AM Post #35 |
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Like I want to say, "Gilgamesh, you're a fucking idiot." But I won't, because I'm showing restraint or something. |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 05:47:52 AM Post #36 |
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Gilg is pretty obviously looking for a way to talk himself out of voting for me. 3-1 so far, I guess. |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 07:28:43 AM Post #37 |
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This jury is a lot harder to read than I expected. I think I'm doing okay here. Theo is as well. If it's a push, I think I win, so that's the objective. |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 03:20:46 PM Post #38 |
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I think I'm getting a little bit sassy with Gilgamesh but I also kind of feel I need to here to highlight broadly that the points he's making are bad. I don't have his vote, probably, because he doesn't respect the game I played. He wanted to play for inevitability, and I played to smash inevitability. He literally just can't understand that playing from behind is a thing that you're allowed to do and that it can still be a "valid strategy" or whatever. |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 04:25:42 PM Post #39 |
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Wonder if I'll get any other questions lol. |
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| Sappho | Aug 30 2017, 04:42:59 PM Post #40 |
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Are you going to post one last video confessional when your speech is done for the road? |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 04:44:58 PM Post #41 |
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Probably. After speeches are due I'll do one. |
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| Boudica | Aug 30 2017, 05:01:02 PM Post #42 |
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Okay so Harald is voting for me. That's good to hear. |
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