Alright, hello friends! I hope you're all having an excellent day.
I've been watching survivor since I was a young child, and I always had wanted to apply and go out there to see how well I could do. However, I never got around to that because of several reasons which are completely unrelated to this game. Anyways, the reason I say this is because I saw this game, and it was essentially the next best thing, so I immediately signed up!
From Day 1, my strategy was to hold a place in the majority and see how to play out each individual tribal council. I could have planned for the future, but ironically every time that happened, my luck went to shit (more on that later). I'd lie if I say I didnt get lucky with my original tribe - we had an overall strong team, and winning a majority of the challenges gave us a massive numbers advantage at the merge. My original tribe also had a ton of people i'd worked with before (I had quite literally teamed up with half of the tribe members in previous mafia games). I used this to my advantage and approached both Blazade and Haruno day 1 to start creating a 5-man alliance that could hold a majority in the tribe. After talking to both of them, RODAN and twin came up as the two that both of them wanted to align with. With everyone agreeing on that (ironically Blazade didnt want to work with Haruno at first because of bad experiences in metagame mafia but tbh I don't blame him), twin made the original groupchat that we used to converse in.
Even though we had a majority alliance, in the only voteout we went to, I made sure to talk to each of the other Okatas and create a connection with them. 2 out of these three connections didnt actually end up helping me out at all (Ullar because he got voted out and Yeti because she was such a wild card), but talking to zorbees and establishing a rapport with him became key to both my and Blazade's survival in the game.
After the third voteout, Jalmont caused a tribe swap. I was the person who quickly recognized that there was a tribe swap and told each and every member of the tribe to pick an odd number (I think one of our team members had to pick an even because King_ picked an odd number before he got on). Due to this, we were able to hold a massive majority over the Moto members on our tribe after the swap, and thus had two safe votes (King_ and Mithril) to sack if we lost challenges. Since the remaining members of our alliance (everyone but twin) wanted to keep Okata numbers strong, we threw the first challenge to get rid of King_ and hopefully give twin and zorbees time to make an alliance and survive on new Moto. I'd take credit for that idea, but RODAN thought that up so it'd be unfair to say I did that.
Finally, we hit the merge. This is where planning for the future screwed me up. I was overconfident in thinking that all the Okatas would stay strong and that we could pick off the Motos one by one. As such, I began to start planning what we would do after we voted out all the Motos. I started talking to zorbees about creating a 4 man alliance at 7, upon which he mentioned that he was worried that twin and yeti would be a strong pairing that would stick together (this becomes important later). Zorbees also approached me to say he was voting haruno, but I thought there was no way either twin or yeti would flip, so I just said "that's alright, but I can't betray one of my allies for no reason" and stupidly did nothing. As a result, I lost one of my day 1 allies and almost got knocked out of the game. I wont lie and say that I didnt feel extremely defeated, but after figuring out who exactly it was that didnt flip (Blazade and RODAN), I talked to them and began to scramble to stay in the game.
Taking advantage of zorbees' distrust of twin, I convinced him to vote twin out at the next tribal council. However, that wouldnt be enough votes. I knew we needed at least 5 votes to get twin out, so I created an alliance with Trace because I knew he was on the bottom of the group that voted out Haruno (this assumption was validated when Walrein tried to blindside him at the next tribal). Just in case either trace or zorbees didnt vote for twin, I also contacted billy and used the same arguments I used to convince zorbees to get billy to also vote twin. After I succeeded in orchestrating the twin voteout, my alliance was back in control of the game. I voted out walrein since he was a jury threat, I was unable to work with him due to him not wanting to be a part of alliances, and because I thought he had a good connection with billy (who I wanted to work with down the road). When he tried to make a move against Trace, that became the nail in his grave because he was clearly playing strategically as well. Next, by far the most interesting vote of the game, was the Yeti voteout. Through trace and my conversations with RODAN and zorbees, I realized that there would be a 2-2 vote with billy and yeti voting for one person and zorbees and RODAN voting for trace. Knowing that Blazade would stay loyal, I was able to cause a 3-2-2 voteout where Trace, blazade, and I voted for Yeti. The reasoning behind this was really just that Trace getting voted out benefited me in no way whatsoever and I personally WANTED to keep trace in. Between billy and Yeti, I literally just picked Yeti to go because I had worked with billy and thought I could prevent him from flipping at f6 if RODAN/zorbees tried to flip.
At f6, I once again got overconfident and began planning for the endgame before everything went wrong. RODAN quit and billy won immunity twice, forcing me to cut members of my alliance who I didnt want to cut or only wanted to cut in the endgame. Billy's clutch immunity wins caused us to vote massive threat zorbees (you were voted most likely to win for a reason) out at f5 and trace out at f4. The trace vote is actually interesting since, as you all saw, it was originally a tie vote before trace got voted out by both billy and blazade. The reason for this is because I had a massive pm conversation with billy convincing him that it was in his best interests to vote out Trace (in the end it actually was because this became a f2, which I correctly predicted). He was going for me because he thought I was a bigger jury threat, which may have been true (i'm not sure, I thought trace would have done really well in f3/f2). This allowed me to survive since there was 0 way I would win a tiebreaker vs trace. Then, in the final immunity challenge, Blazade and I knew that we NEEDED to vote out billy and thus when one of us beat him, the other would throw. I defeated billy first so Blazade threw to me and we voted him out.
Overall, my gameplay was nowhere near perfect. Yeah, I made mistakes and got overconfident at times. However, I feel that both the way I strategically played the game and the way I managed to always recover from my mistakes make me deserving of the title of Sole Survivor.
I still don't know why I got voted off
I got you voted out because I didnt think i'd be able to work with you and I thought you'd be a massive threat down the line.
question for both of you: How do you think the game would have played out differently if RODAN didn't quit? (I'm under the impression that this also would've meant a final 3)
This is honestly a big question because RODAN quitting massively impacted the game. My ideal f3 was me/blazade/trace while blazade's ideal f3 was him/me/RODAN. The third here was pretty much just who each of us was closer to since both trace and RODAN were massive threats. Assuming billy still wins immunity at f6, we vote you out there since everyone knew that we lost to you and thus we couldnt let you get to FTC. Assuming billy wins immunity again, I would have argued with Blazade to keep trace while he would have argued to keep RODAN. I'm not sure who wins the argument there, but i'd like to think we'd succeed in voting out RODAN. After that, you have the f4 that was already there. If billy doesnt win immunity he goes. Otherwise, trace does (which is what happened in that actual f4). Finale is me/blazade/trace or me/blazade/billy if billy wins immunity.
Which 1 of u dirt rat cucks decided to vote me out
Me. I thought I could work better with billy then I could with you. Sorry!