Hello again, you might remember me from this post a little while ago and I wanted to chime in again because I’ve seen a lot of negative sentiment towards the latest season and since I am personally loving it I wanted to share that perspective. The big point of contention is about the meal alliance, with people calling it ‘unfair’ and ‘boring’ etc. Personally, I love the meal alliance. Not because I have any strong feelings about the members of it (although I am a Solo Mission stan don’t get me wrong) but because they’re the ones that are playing the strategic game the best. To me, the strategic game is the more interesting half of GG. The challenges are fun, but it’s the drama that arises from who people are targeting and why that makes a show like this so compelling. Watching players navigate both halves is what makes GG GG. Skill Specs and Torvesta have been SO impressive in how they have deftly maneuvered between the PK alliance and the Meal Alliance to ensure that they don’t get targeted. I love how hard they’ve been playing. I think their approach has been really clever. Boaty and Solo Mission have had a pretty blessed run as well, with overwhelmingly dominant performances in the challenges much like Settled last year. I don’t really see why people are upset at this when they praised Settled for the same thing. I was disappointed last season because winning challenges was really the only thing that mattered, and it made every other part of the game completely overshadowed. I think it’s impressive that Boaty/Solo have been able to insulate themselves such that even if they do end up not winning that they still have a strategic survival plan. And they even won a banning so it’s not like it’s been perfectly smooth sailing. For my 2c, I think the blame is being misplaced. And I have a few thoughts as to what people are actually upset about and how these aspects could be addressed.
- Not playing to win.
- Due to how the prize structure works, players are over-incentivized to make the finale episode and under-incentivized to play for a win. Torvesta mentions specifically how just making the finale impacted the scale of the prize. If players are mainly trying to make the finale, then they don’t necessarily care who they’re up against. They can ride to the end with the strongest competitors and call it a day. Aligning with Boaty/Solo (The two strongest all-rounders in the cast) has no real downside for them. I know that you need to reward players for participating in this since their time is their money, but you aren’t going to see betrayals unless you have more people who care about Winning, and you aren’t going to have more people care about winning unless there’s a bigger penalty for losing. The only people who I can confidently say are playing to win are Boaty and Solo Mission because they have positioned themselves into an end game that favours them. But 2/20 people is not enough.
- Passive play from underdogs
- Everyone loves underdogs, and this season has had some long-running underdogs in Mammal and Gnomonkey. Part of the issue has been that they’ve been not engaging with the social/strategic angle as much. There was the newbie alliance (Josh my beloved :'( ) but while they did look out for and protect each other… They didn’t try very hard to target specific people (and if/when they did, the hopper denied them). Now part of this is because of the Tribunal and how it’s formatted (I think the Tribunal is a big problem with the format in general). But it’s also passivity. Gnomonkey had a prime opportunity at the latest Tribunal to force the issue and say “Boaty, you can either join me in voting for Solo Mission or you can fight me in the banning”. Instead, they used the hopper/coin flip to cop out and it was incredibly disappointing. And again, part of this could be not playing to win (because survival is incentivized over maximizing win equity). A lot of tribunals discussions have had some pretty big red flags for why x person won’t target y player, and it’s on the players to notice that and work to undermine it. You can’t just let people get away with protecting their friends forever. Look what happens. The players need to learn to be more aggressive.
- The Pagonging
- This is a Survivor term, and it basically means one tribe/alliance is just systematically eliminating the opposing alliance. These are obviously not very dynamic or exciting to watch. It sucks to enter each episode feeling like you know the outcome, and that is true of all reality tv. But I think that that is partly The Hopper’s fault. The Hopper has unfortunately picked some pretty boring results given the options and that has led to the same group of people going in, and the same group of people winning out. That’s how randomness works, sometimes it’s great (the teams stage was amazing) and sometimes you get a bad run. Everything has been working out in The Meal Alliance’s favour and that has led to people disliking the Meal Alliance.
- “Skill”
- I see a lot of complaints talking about how alliances undermine “skill”, and how they’re unfair. Have you seen the results though? The Meal Alliance have been DOMINATING the challenges. It’s because of their skill that they’re doing so well? This argument makes no sense to me. People that are wanting Mammal and Gnomonkey to come out on top… If they aren’t winning Tribunals then they’re “Lower Skilled”… That’s why they’re losing. Not the alliance. More likely I think it’s a result of growing pains for the show. It’s incorporating more strategic elements into the show and a core handful of players are taking advantage of it, and those that aren’t are being left behind. In Survivor, everyone hated the “Unfair alliance making” of the Tagi tribe in the first season, but the show wouldn’t become the wonderfully complex game it is today if it weren’t for these things being allowed and encouraged. You end up with an incredibly static product if you don’t allow game mechanics that mean underdogs and low-skill players can succeed despite being worse at the ‘physical’ aspect. This isn’t Gielinor Olympics. It’s not a pure test of challenge ability and it shouldn’t be. Strategy is skill. Social game is skill. Just because the most physically strong are also dominating the other aspects doesn’t mean that there’s a problem.
- Chosen Duos
- I think that letting the players pick their own duos was a mistake tbh. For exactly the reasons that played out. The two best players teamed up and ran the table in challenges, you ended up with some teams that weren’t really that cohesive and it created this pretty clear skill disparity between the top and the bottom. Part of what made the teams section SO GOOD (and I want to re-iterate that I think the first four episode of GG S5 is the best that the show has ever been), is because you have these random teams of people that need to work together while competing against each other. There were so many incentives for how to vote and it made things exciting and dynamic and unsure. You didn’t know if a big player would go because their team couldn’t pull together a win. Everything got flattened out in the Duos section, and I think the season took a hit as a result. I think it would’ve been a lot more interesting if the teams were formed through some sort of challenge seeding. Whoever performed the best in previous challenges teamed up with who performed worst, and so on. It would’ve created more dynamic relationships across the cast and not let the alliance members just consolidate.
- The Tribunal
- Now I found the tribunal to be a bit suffocating in season 4, and while it’s certainly much better here due to the re-inclusion of public voting it still creates similar problems. It is simply overpowered. This is the main reason that the Meal Alliance has been able to succeed as easily as it has. The tribunal was at its most entertaining when a whole team was going in to decide on the outcome, and I think that is a pretty clear sign of the fact that more people voting is typically better in this context. I think the tribunal is doing far more damage than good, and I think there are more interesting ways to reward challenge strength than just “total power over the banning matchup”. In conclusion, I think that while this may be a disappointing end-game for some, I have found it to be entertaining through and through. I think that it’s healthy for the show to have a dominant alliance like this happen, because it means that future seasons will have players be more aware of that and be more reactive to that aspect of the game. Yes, it might be somewhat disappointing in the moment but also the format of the show is still very dynamic and that should be celebrated. Something like the meal alliance being possible is an incredibly exciting prospect to me and I’m looking forward to seeing how that aspect of the show develops moving forward. I’m excited to see if there can be an upset in the finale or if everyone has just played into a Boaty/Solo victory and they learn a lesson. Now for what it’s worth, I also don’t think that any of these things NEED to change, I’m loving the show as is! But wanted to put this out there given how intense the reactions have been. Once again, a huge thanks to Soup, Ally and the whole crew who make this thing possible. TL;DR - It’s not alliances fault, it’s that some players aren’t playing hard enough, some aren’t playing to win, and some format/game mechanics have encouraged passive gameplay while overvaluing challenge strength. submitted by /u/BloodChicken
Originally posted by u/BloodChicken on r/2007scape
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