The concept could be redeemed if they only let people back in midseason, and didn’t let anyone on the jury who was ever on EoE.
I’ve read this three times, and I’m just not following. What exactly are you proposing here?
The way things stand, I would be amazed if Natalie doesn’t win. She has three advantages, an immunity idol, and superior athletic ability. She probably has some support on the jury; we’ve repeatedly heard other players on EoE praising Natalie’s energy. I definitely agree that the jury would be inclined vote for one of their own—not only out of a sense of camaraderie, but as a way for the old-school players to give the finger to the younger ones. (Natalie arguably isn’t one of the old-schoolers—her previous win was in 2014—but as she’s been on EoE the longest she’s had plenty of time to bond with them.)
I like Natalie, but I think it’s nuts that the first person voted out could end up winning the game and becoming the second two-time winner. However, it would be marginally worse if Tyson wins after being voted out twice.
The players on the Edge have a major advantage toward winning the final jury vote. They get to bond with the jury members for weeks in an environment where they don’t have to worry about betraying or being betrayed. They effectively get to return to the game with the combined knowledge of every player voted out. They also have a clear view of who the Jury is favoring for the win, so they can easily shift the vote toward the biggest threat. The players left in the game can only guess at what the Jury is thinking.
Only one player is returning to the game, so there are only benefits to sharing every secret about the game with each other on Extinction. I’ve heard rumors that on S38 the players on Extinction came up with the winning strategy together, and then it was just up to the player returning to execute it. There are only benefits to the players on Extinction to co-operate as much as possible. The same is never true in the normal game, because every ally is also a competitor.
There was always an element of the Jury begrudgingly giving the million dollars to someone who voted you out when they obviously wanted to be in the final themselves. Sometimes the Jury is more or less bitter, but being able to vote for a returnee makes it easier to vote “one of us” over “one of them.” If the Jury didn’t think a returnee is deserving of winning, they’d have to admit that they themselves would also not have been deserving of winning after returning.
When they get down to 10 people, they would bring every week one player from eoe via a challenge.
And then tribal would vote out two people so that to continue reducing the main players until they are down to 6 or 5 like it is now.
This mix would bring enough disruption to the main game that tribal council would pretty much be a surprise every time.
So your idea to ‘fix’ the main game is to completely disrupt it?
Do you prefer to have week after week predictable vote outs by the dominating alliance?
Has that been a problem recently? I feel like the game has pretty much shifted away from the set-in-stone alliance meta to the ‘voting bloc’ meta (I don’t quite like the term but that’s what’s been used). Trustworthy alliances seem to be 2 or 3 players at most and you see those small groups shift around to reach a (different) majority each week. All they need to do to keep playing that up is doing more to make clear to people when they’re on the bottom (usually by way picking only a few people for rewards, but I’d like to see the return of stuff like the ‘three chops you’re out’ challenge).
Also probably not so many hidden immunity idols. They don’t show it much on TV, but players will often say they don’t target someone who is known to have one because they’re worried it’ll be played and they’ll be the one who gets targeted in response. Tony still has one, which may be why people aren’t going after him hard.
Word to all of that.
Those would both be bad outcomes. What would also seriously annoy me is if the incredibly overrated Boston Rob ended up winning.
One silver lining to all of this is that if we just get a winner, any winner, who never got voted out I will be very happy and not nitpick whether it was the most deserving of the never-voted-out finalists who won.
Indeed. As I like to point out, Rob has the worst non-zero winning percentage in Survivor history. And they literally designed a season whose entire purpose was to give him a win.
The original EoE season was filmed right before this season was filmed. There was lot of controversy about the concept
I wonder if any of the people currently on EoE spoke out against EoE twist. And if one of them did, it seems hypocritical for them to be on EoE, expecting a chance to win the season.
A lot of them, especially the old schoolers have said they don’t like returnee twists. But, that’s the game they’re playing. If I’m playing a game for 2 million dollars, I’m going to do my best to win within the rules, even if I don’t like those rules.
EoE aired right before Winners at War was filmed. It was filmed a year earlier.
And Probst and others have stated that a lot of the previous winners didn’t want to come back if they’d risk being voted out immediately and that was the last of them. So they used EoE to make sure that everyone has a chance at camera time the whole season.
Jeff just tweeted showing the setup for the final reveal. He will be in his garage, where they have setup the set and have three cameras(being controlled remotely) to film him as he shows the votes.
The Ringer is doing a bunch of articles on Survivor this week, including the Top 100 moments and a look behind the scenes of tribal council.
What a silly argument. For one, by limiting it to winners you’re already placing him in the top 6% of Survivor players. And winning percentage only makes sense as a metric if everyone has played the same amount of times - which they haven’t, and by my count Boston Rob’s the only person who’s played 5 times, so of course he’d have the worst winning % unless he managed to win more than once, which only one person (soon to be two) has done. The closest to Boston Rob are Tina, Parv, JT, and Tyson - are they overrated too just because they’ve played so many times?
While I agree that you can make a good argument that Rob’s winning season was seemingly designed for him to win, let’s not forget that he basically won All-Stars (losing a 4-3 vote to his soon-to-be-wife) and probably would’ve done a lot better on HvW if it hadn’t been for Tyson’s screwup and Hantz’s advantage of being an unknown. And was doing pretty well this season until the tribe split.
Even if he (likely) loses this season, I’d still say Boston Rob is probably a top-5 Survivor player of all time.
Maybe. Who else might be in the top 5? John Cochran? Parvati?
If we’re discussing numbers of unsuccessful bites at the apple, Ozzy needs to be in the conversation. At least Rob got one, and is responsible for Amber getting hers as well.
Rob was voted pre merge/jury three times out of five times.
Technically he is on the jury this season but he did not make the merge (unless he wins the EoE challenge)
and Technically he made the merge in his first season (Vanuatu) but was not on the Jury.
I think Amanda, Andrea, Aubrey, Jeremy, Sarah and “Joey Amazing” are the only player to play at least 3x times and make the merge/jury everytime.
You might say that Rupert made the merge/jury the 3x he actually played the game. He really never got to play Blood vs Water.
Ozzy was voted out pre merge, and returned to the game post merge in South Pacific.
Parvati, I think so. Cochran perhaps, I don’t remember his seasons as clearly.
If Tony wins tomorrow he shoots up there.
I suppose it’d be an interesting discussion…I can see it going a lot of different ways depending on how you weigh certain factors. Should people like Richard and Tina get a bump for setting up how the game is played? Does a top 5 player need to have won at least once (which would leave out someone like Cirie?) How much does number of times played matter (for people like Yul or Kim who dominated in their one season, though obviously by tomorrow they will likely be 1-1)? Does someone need to be well-rounded in all facets of the game or is it enough to be one of the best at one aspect, but terrible in another (Ozzy, Hantz?)
I like the idea of measuring merge percentage, the % of seasons you were on where you participated in the merge. (If on extinction at the time, you didn’t participate.) You can even include non-winners like Ozzy.
For players that played 4+ seasons, merge % seems like a reasonable way to rank them.
I remember many seasons ago, I think it was Blood vs Water, when Hayden Moss was on (Big Brother winner) his returning player girlfriend was so concerned about making the merge, how embarrassing it would be to go home before the merge, and I kind of thought she was a weirdo for it. But I get it now.
Well yeah, you have to limit it to winners to show he isn’t that great a player, because obviously he’s done better than anyone who hasn’t won. I’m not saying he’s one of the worst players, I was agreeing that he’s incredibly overrated.
And your arguments boil down to “He would have won or done much better except for the fact that he didn’t”. Top 5? Ridiculous.