u/True-Pen-3612

there's no way to make it not an awkward conversation but it's not worth losing a friendship over. i believe people can be better

I've played Devils on the Moon Pinball a ton, absolutely love it, but I haven't heard much about any other great Playdate games that came out this year? Anything else a must play from the past ~8 months?

I've seen a lot of people say in the last week that a public vote loss + vote against you is an instant death sentence for anyone. I disagree, and I think it should be pretty obvious this is not the case- if Joe had this disadvantage he'd likely still be in (sans immunity), same for Stephanie, Rizo, Jonathan, and possibly Aubry and Cirie. The half of cast this affects the most are those already in a precarious position- Emily, Ozzy, Tiffany, Rick, and Christian. It magnifies the target on someone who already has one and leaves them with very low maneuverability, while someone with little to no active target is hardly affected. The way that Christian, or any other player already in choppy waters, outplays this twist, is by not being in that position to begin with, Christian was poorly positioned to begin with and this just sealed his fate.

The problem, from an entertainment standpoint, is precariously positioned players are fun to watch. Even if they go home, you want to see people squirm and try to escape death, and every time they do it makes for good TV. But these twists completely hamper their ability to do that. The Blood Moon twist, or any twist that reorganizes players into very small groups, does this even moreso, especially on returnee seasons. 5 players and 6 hours is not enough time for anything to happen, so the tallest grass, or the innately worst positioned grass, gets cut, and we move on without 3 players that would've made for the best TV in the merge because their gameplay is threatening to other players, and they go home with no fanfare.

It's why even though the duos twist was kind of bullshit for the players- picking pairs without knowing why is pretty ludicrous and punishing for no reason- it worked for a lot of viewers because it didn't only affect poorly positioned players, and it at least created conversations that considered multiple factors (ie different threat levels/relationships of people in each pair). I still don't think this is a great twist given it often will simply go as it did here, voting out 2 people who are publicly aligned, but because it leaves a degree of maneuverability and doesn't overtly punish 'rat' players, it's better than most.

In general, I feel like production does not consider if twists lead to good TV. Ultimately that should be the goal, but it seems like there's no playtesting of game elements at all, and possibly no real game designer on the Survivor team? The show is so well made and considered in a lot of ways, but there's this giant gap where they seem to have no rhyme or reason as to how they pick what twists to implement.