Board Thread:Season 42/@comment-1775521-20170905193703



Wow, it has really been a long two months, hasn’t it? Well, hello everyone! I’d first like to thank the hosts for putting together the most fun ORG season that I have ever experienced. I also would like to say hello again to all the members of the jury. To begin my journey this season, I will start with an explanation of my premerge game so that the people I didn’t really get to play with during that time can get a feel for what I was doing and thinking in the moment.

So to begin with, I made SURE to focus on getting myself in a good social standing with my tribe, and showing my dedication to this game. I did this by quickly getting in good with Rhi, Taylor, Maya, and Julez. There was a bit of a predicament because none of them were actually aligned to each other, but they were aligned to me. I decided that I needed to synthesize these relationships to form a majority alliance on Talap called the “Iconic Alliance.” Though I really liked him, I purposely did not include Nathan in on the alliance because I knew he would be a massive threat moving forward. I did not want him to establish himself in the majority alliance and then never get turned on later. Anna was simply voted out due to inactivity, but I worked hard to keep the tribe unified and calm about the vote. This way, moving forward the tribe would continue this tranquility. On original Talap is when I found the idol, and I made sure not to tell anyone in the event that anyone wanted to use that against me. The day before the swap, Kostas (who had promised protection to me in this game) decided to try to make a majority alliance with himself, Taylor, Julez, and Nathan behind my back. Julez quickly ratted this plan out to me, and it got my gears spinning on a move.

Immediately once we swapped I began making my rounds and trying to get in socially with people. I bonded with Priscilla and Yannick closely, and wanted to form an alliance with those two + the members of the Iconic Alliance that was on the tribe. Clifford initially was threatening to me, but Yannick trusted him and decided to bring him into the alliance as well. This became the Sugar & Spice majority alliance. I also decided that I needed to be on solid standings with more people on tribe, and worked on forming bonds with Chris and Julia. This eventually became the Phalap alliance consisting of those two, myself, and Maya. Even before we lost immunity, I decided to start planting seeds of mistrust about Kostas to the other tribe members. I figured that if he lied to me about protection in this game, he couldn’t be kept around. The things that I told people were also entirely truthful, I simply exposed the fact that he would promise safety to you, and then try to make alliances without you in them. These seeds of mistrust and doubt seemed to have worked out nicely as people were so turned off to Kostas after we lost immunity that they weren’t even taking anything he said seriously. Kostas goes home unanimously. Annabelle was the final person left on the tribe that I did not see myself as aligned with, so I knew that I needed to get her out after that. Even though she was closely aligned with Clifford, my ability to maintain tribe unity and tranquility allowed yet another unanimous vote to occur.

At the combined tribal, I worked with the NuSamsao tribe, along with mostly Jake and Rhi to put a move together. It was Yannick and Rhi, from what I saw, that put together a plan to vote for Miguel. In the insanity that ensued once the plan to vote Miguel was leaked, I decided to try putting together the blindside of Nathan. This was because I felt like Nathan would have a much easier time re-assimilating into the tribe and moving past this vote. It was initially supposed to simply be myself and Hannah flipping from voting Miguel to voting Nathan, but apparently other people had the same idea and decided to vote for Nathan anyway. Regardless, Nathan leaves. Also during this vote, in the midst of the chaos where Julez had been pegged as the person that exposed the plan, I put in effort to try to comfort Julez about the situation because I felt bad that she was being so demonized and wanted to make sure that her and I would be in good standings with each other moving forward.

The next swap I wasn’t too worried as I felt I had a majority with the Sugar & Spice alliance members, and I had also bonded quite a bit with Jake at the combined tribal and felt comfortable working with him. This left Sim on the outside in my opinion, and I still did try to be kind to him. Once the vote came around, though, things really went to shit. I thought it was going to be a clean and simple vote for Sim, but things just felt off. Taylor randomly decided to start asking about if I had the idol, and was sharing his guesses with me (mind you, we all thought we were merging the next vote, so why is he just doing this now?). I easily saw through this and knew that he had just accurately guessed the Talap idol, saw that it was already found, and figured I had it. He wanted me to list my guesses so he could see if I listed the correct guess. Luckily I caught this and didn’t get tricked by it. Then a few hours before the votes were due, I have Jake and Pris talking to me about how Taylor is targeting me and I am in trouble. The thing is, Jake told me that Priscilla told HIM to vote for Taylor this round. It didn’t make sense to me why Priscilla would tell Jake to vote for Taylor, if she was just going to vote for me and leave Jake in the dark, fracturing that alliance moving forward. Priscilla was being very secretive about how she was voting, and I figured that she was trying to get me to waste my idol. I decided to stand firm and act as though I didn’t have it, which eventually made the two believe that it was actually in Maya’s possession. Taylor ended up leaving 4-1, and I still had my idol.

Since this is where the jury begins, I will just start to go through my thought process for each vote. Obviously I was not involved in the Eva vote, but I was definitely expecting it to be a 4-1 with Maya leaving as I thought that Yannick and Clifford would work with Eva and Rhi to take her out. I was honestly so surprised that Eva went out right then, but I knew that she would have been a massive threat to my game once the merge hit, so I was a bit thankful that I did not have to go against her during the merge.

Once at the merge, Maya and I decided to focus on our relationship with the Phalap alliance. The main group I was working with during that time was the remaining NuSamsao people. If Maya and I established ourselves with Chris and Julia, we would have majority within the group, and also simply trusted them more than Clifford and Yannick. Hannah was initially someone that I thought I was going to be able to work with moving forward, and was someone that I really did get along with in the brief time that we were able to interact. Once my alliance (mostly Yannick) decided that she needed to leave because she was taking a leadership role in the vote, I felt that it was in my best interest to stick to that. I was completely shocked when Pris and Jenna flipped to vote against Yannick. Once again, I decided to focus on consoling Pris because I could tell that she was severely shaken up by the reaction of the vote. I made sure to be as kind as possible to her, and made her realize that she has no reason to feel bad about making that move as this is a game and she made a game move. At the same time, I was trying to convince her to come back and vote with us. To do this, I went into my alliance and explicitly told them that they needed to treat her with kindness and care, and to apologize for the way they reacted to the vote. Priscilla personally thanked me for doing this, and stated that she was going to come back and vote with that side EXPLICITLY because of the way that I treated her after the vote results.

<span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">The Chris vote was pretty messy. To begin with, Clifford was set on voting for Priscilla and I immediately tried to shut that down as I did not think it was fair to her after just coming back and voting with us to avoid rocks, to be voted out. This changed the conversation to splitting between Jake and Rhi, the people deemed more threatening from the remnants of that alliance. This is the vote where I really began to mistrust Clifford immensely and led me to trying to take him out in the next vote. He took control of the alliance (named the 10/10 Alliance) and acted like a informational hub where everyone would come to him, and he would tell us what they said. This made me skeptical as he could easily make up anything when giving us the information, along with him telling us to keep the information solely in the alliance chat. Members of the alliance did not trust Jenna and Priscilla after the flip and return at the merge vote, so they planned to tell them the plan was Jake, and then actually vote for Rhi. I decided that I wanted to at least try to get those two in on the know, and told them that we should “try to split votes on Rhi” implying that those two also vote for Rhi so they are also in the majority. They both thought that I was just speaking nonsense and was trying to screw them both, but in reality I just wanted them to not be completely isolated. I was considering just voting for Jake with Pris and Jenna, but Clifford telling me that “Jake and his alliance were torn between voting for me or Chris” made me fearful of getting taken out if I scattered my vote by throwing it on Jake. In the end, Jake played the idol on Rhi, sending Chris out of this game. This was really hard for me because Chris and I had JUST locked down a solid alliance together where we would speak to each other with complete honesty and trust. I felt that he left far too early in this game.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Now the Sim vote was one that really made me step back and reassess my game. Feeling that Clifford was untrustworthy after the last vote where, in my opinion, he was blatantly playing all sides, while asserting himself to the dominant position in the majority alliance. I tried to use my move of trying to involve Pris and Jenna in the previous vote to my advantage by showing that I was there for them, whereas Clifford was intentionally excluding them from the vote. I also went to members of the 10/10 alliance and began showing them how Clifford was turning tyrannical in this game. I honestly believed that the work I had put in to get Clifford out was working, especially after it seemed there was a negative majority opinion against him based on the Touchy Subjects answers. This challenge is also where I realized just how threatening people saw me, after voting me as actually in control, and will win this game if not stopped. It was here that I decided that I could NOT allow myself to be stopped. I was tipped off to something strange happening with the vote, firstly, when Rhi told me out of the blue that she “would be okay with votes being split on Sim, or anyone, as long as it wasn’t her.” When just the night before she was extremely against the idea of throwing votes on Sim. Also, I discussed the split vote with Jake and he explicitly told me to ignore what Rhi said and to just throw some votes on Sim anyway. I reported this to my alliance, and stated that Jake told me to do it anyway. Julia was a part of this chat, and now Julia knew that Jake was aware. This comes into play when the second odd occurrence happened that tipped me off that maybe I wasn’t so safe. Jake, literally 10 minutes before I was about to lock in, decided to tell me that he spoke to Julia about her voting Sim, and she acted very unsure about her vote and wouldn’t give him a straight answer. This raised a red flag for me because if Julia wasn’t voting for Sim, then Sim wouldn’t have enough votes against him to keep me in this game if an idol was played. I decided then to play my idol. I was completely floored when results came out and it turns out that I was almost voted out in a 7-2-1 when I thought that I was good enough socially with everyone to stay in this game. It appeared that Jake and Rhi got to work trying to blindside me, but in the end they were the direct cause of it failing.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:11pt;margin-bottom:11pt;text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;"> <p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">At this point in the game, I went into defense mode and decided that I desperately needed immunities. People obviously did not believe moves I wanted to make as people were extremely skeptical of me wanting to take out Clifford when I was completely genuine, and the bonds I made were obviously not enough to keep me in. During the premerge, my challenge prowess was no secret. I would stay up for long hours doing posting challenges, take breaks at work to attempt to do live challenges, and consistently submitted fairly high scores. No one decided to target me for my challenge skills, however, which surprised me. I decided to kick it into high gear and literally work as hard as I could to win immunities before they could take me out. The thing is, I didn’t just win these challenges, in most cases I literally blew the entire competition out of the water to the point of over doubling scores even in second place. I figured that I was already seen as the biggest target, so why not just increase my already massive target, while keeping myself safe at the same time? People may like to think that winning immunities is just a crutch to fall back on. In my case, however, I disagree. Even though I did win immunities, I never once stopped playing this game. I continued to try to make connections, to try to make moves. The only difference was that I knew I wasn’t going home at the tribal council I was trying to finesse. If that takes away from my game, then so be it, but I feel that me being immune should just showcase my well-roundedness as a player, rather than hinder me.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">The Jenna vote was interesting for me because at first it was honestly difficult for me to trust people after I was almost completely wiped out the vote prior. I decided to reconcile with the 10/10 Alliance because I felt like I had a better chance with them moving forward, along with my sub-alliance of Julia and Maya. At first, I was planning on sitting back and allowing someone else to take charge for this vote, but of course Clifford also decided that he needed to lay low after receiving so many negative responses in the Touchy Subjects challenge. This made me just decide to go full force for trying to get a move in place. In the beginning I was genuinely trying to pull Priscilla and Jenna into the fold, but a misunderstanding occurred where I added them to an alliance that involved Yannick and Clifford who, unbeknownst to me, were not trusted by Jenna. The original plan was to split the votes 4-3-2 between Jake-Rhi-(Whoever Jake/Rhi voted). Issues arose, however, when Clifford alleged that Jenna claimed I was untrustworthy because I wanted to take Jake out after she believed that Jake intentionally told me to play the idol. Along with this, she explicitly told me that she did not trust Clifford and would not work with him in the following vote. This did not make sense to me as I was confused why she would want to vote out Jake or Rhi this vote, and then flip back to whichever was left and try to make a move against Clifford. This made me skeptical of Jenna’s true allegiances and intentions with this vote, so I decided to go back into the alliance and change the plan to a smooth Jenna blindside. I did feel badly doing this as I tried and tried to really bond with Jenna (Queen Taco Bell), but I just felt like our games really just never were going to line up.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">The Yannick elimination is definitely the most insane tribals of this game, and possibly even in ORG history. The initial plan was to split the votes between Jake and Rhi. At this time, as we were nearing the final 7, I wanted to make a majority alliance of 4 that would make moving forward easier. This alliance was Phalap + Priscilla, and was named The Plastics. I believed that the strong relationship Priscilla and I had, that persisted even through betrayals would be strong enough to have this alliance work. Now this alliance worked with Clifford and Yannick to allow us to split votes between Jake and Rhi. When Jake began saying he had a special idol, I immediately knew that it was going to be a reset idol and had Julia throw a vote on Maya to keep her safe on the revote. The revote is when things got extremely messy. Only Clifford, Yannick, Julia, and Priscilla were vulnerable. Two people from 10/10, and two people from The Plastics. Julia, Clifford, and Yannick immediately locked in for Priscilla as they believed it was going to be a forgone conclusion and a simple vote. I was already beginning to grow wary of Yannick and Clifford as they were a tight duo that could swing to the other side if Priscilla was to be taken out. Even if they wanted to continue working with the 10/10 alliance, I assumed they would at least flip for one vote to take out one of the Phalap trio as we had the majority within our alliance. I decided to wait to vote until discussing it with Priscilla. Priscilla told me that Yannick said he was thinking about turning on the Phalap alliance next vote, so they had to get rid of Priscilla now to keep the Phalap people unsuspecting. I believed this because I knew that Priscilla and Yannick had a close bond. I told her that she needed to try talking to Jake and Rhi because I figured if I did it myself, what would have happened was Jake would have went and told Yannick and Clifford, voted out Priscilla, and then worked as a foursome to take out myself, Maya, and Julia (who was being perceived as a tight trio at this point). Priscilla decided that the best way to save herself was with a rock draw, and at that point Jake also messaged me. I decided to just lay it out to him since he said he was willing to make a move here. I wanted to play to his love for game chaos and instead of pitching a simple vote against Clifford, I decided to say that we need to go to rocks between Clifford and Yannick. The two of them were so strong as a pair and at least one of them needed to be taken out before they snuck to the end together. I hyped the move up as being one of the most iconic in ORG history to make Jake more interested in it. In the end, he agreed on the plan, got Rhi involved, and we all voted accordingly to force rocks between Clifford and Yannick. In all honesty, I was hoping that Clifford went out here as I had a better relationship with Yannick, but the pair needed to be split up regardless.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">In the end, I was happy with how the move turned out. A pair had been split up, and the Plastics alliance didn’t lose a member. The joy of this move was quickly ripped out during the next vote, however. I wanted a simple 4-2-1 vote with 4 votes on Jake, and to keep it locked into the Plastics alliance because I knew that any slip up was detrimental. Jake and I agreed to work together as targets in this game, however I wanted to take advantage of this to take him out when he thought I was working with him. I incorrectly believed that the Plastics were sticking together, but it turned out that Priscilla saw me as a bigger threat and wanted to weaken my core group, so she flipped to Jake and Rhi, and the trio pulled in Clifford. I was completely unaware of this until Priscilla was giving me a strange vibe to how she was voting. Since I was vulnerable for the first time since playing my idol, strange vibes were terrifying to me. I was waiting for her to vote so I could see how she acted after voting. This led her and her group to believe I had a vote reveal that I was going to use on her, so she voted for me to trick me into playing my idol. Unluckily for me, the paranoia I was already experiencing caused me to play the idol, regardless of how she voted. In the end, they decided to target Julia over Maya or myself, and Julia went out in the revote which I stayed strong in voting for Jake in, even though I figured it was Julia going out.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">I was crushed after this vote as I believed it was all over for Maya and I. I knew at this point I still needed to focus on self-preservation by winning immunities. My hopes were brought back up, however, when Clifford extended an olive branch to Maya and I. He was willing to risk his game to work with us, and I appreciated that immensely. Clifford suggested Priscilla as the best option because if it were to be a 3-3, he assumed that Jake and Rhi would not risk drawing rocks to keep her in this game. Maya also decided to try and fake a girls alliance to scatter the other sides voting. This worked in our favor as it made the girls seem like they were putting together a move against the guys, and allowed me to get into Jake’s head by acting like Maya wasn’t telling me what she was doing, and that we should just vote Priscilla to stop any potential girls alliance from forming and getting rid of us one by one. Jake agreed with this plan, and the 4 of us voted for Priscilla, sending her out.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">The final 5 vote should have been simple, however there were issues within the new alliance of myself, Maya, and Clifford as we could not agree on who to target, Jake or Rhi. This caused Clifford and I to argue our points, and caused Maya to accidentally message Clifford privately, thinking it was me, saying that “we should vote however Clifford wants to make sure he doesn’t flip.” This angered Clifford as it made it seem like we only saw him as a number. This caused an argument within the alliance that caused Clifford to flip to Jake and Rhi to vote for Maya. Along with this, Maya had fallen asleep before voting (as her timezone is 12 hours different from EST) and ended up self voting.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Once again in this game, I was crushed. Thankfully, I won immunity once again and ensured that I was making it to the final 3 of this game. People voted sooo quickly after immunity results were posted and I was forced to basically pick between voting for Rhi with Clifford and Jake (Jake ended up not actually voting for Rhi), or forcing a tie by voting for Jake with Rhi (Rhi also wasn’t being truthful to me, and her pitch to me kinda confused me on where she wanted to vote). In the end I decided to vote for Rhi with only Clifford because I saw her and Jake as equally threatening, but I knew that votes were already on Rhi. This forced a tie between Clifford and Rhi. After seeing the results, I encouraged Clifford to win because I really wanted to see the duo of Rhi and Jake split up because I felt in a final 3 situation if I lost final immunity there would be no way in hell either would turn on each other to keep me in. With Clifford I felt that I had some extra padding if I were to lose the challenge. Clifford ended up winning the tiebreaker, and just like I had thought since like the final 9, a final 2 occurring this season was confirmed.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Final three immunity was an interesting experience because before a winner was announced, the vote seemed to be decided. Had I won, I was personally planning to take Clifford to the end as I felt I had a better shot at going against him, but real life complications caused Clifford to not want to go to FTC and be derided. This made me makeup my mind even before I knew if I won or not. I had to make the humane decision here, and even though it may not have been my preferred choice at first, I planned to respect his personal situation. As someone that is studying neuroscience with the goal to eventually research and help treat mental illnesses, it would’ve just been against my morals to drag him along just so I had an easier time winning this game. I needed to be confident with my own game, and I wanted to respect Clifford’s wishes. I ended up losing the final immunity after the tiebreaker, but I was not worried about going home as it was formally agreed upon in the tribe chat that Jake and I would be moving on to the final two, allowing Clifford his wish. It was a bit disheartening for me as it prevented me from breaking the record for most immunities post-merge, but at least I tied the record!

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">In the end, I entered this game with the goal to prove to myself that I can truly play this game. I wanted to break out of my shell and show that I actually can be a social threat. In real life I’m literally shy to the point of making like 3 friends in all my time at college so far, all of which I met through being introduced as I was too shy to approach. I personally am proud of the way that I played this game and really am proud of the way that I didn’t just sit around and wait for people to come to me due to fear of rejection like I would do in my real life. In the end, this was a great experience for me, and if I do not win this season, I am still content with my gameplay, and the growth that I have shown within myself. I tied an immunity record, made moves, made friends, maintained my morals, and displayed my good instincts. I never gave up and always fought as hard as I could. In a season that is called “Last Stand: Do or Die,” I believe that I did all I could possibly do to not die. Thank you for reading this long spiel, and for considering voting for me tonight. It has been an honor to play with you all. <ac_metadata title="Vote For Jace!"> </ac_metadata>