Part 1: Let the pairings begin!

First update! Beetlejuice is an actual player! No seriously, he doesn't actually suck, that was just an artifact of a bad initial PM, phone posting, and shipwreck phase. This means Ulysses is in a much better place than I thought, and that particular pair is someone I'd actively like to work with. Nice to start out with some good news.

Round 2 questions:

1. You are now part of a District! Your District's theme is specifically centered around a specific niche in The Hunger Games. Do you feel like a part of you fits the theme, or is it mostly just a silly gimmick you don't really care much for? Why do you feel this way?
2. As you are in a District, that means you have been paired up with someone. Is this an ideal person for you to be with or do you have reservations? What makes you feel this way?
3. Challenge scores & ratings were put up yesterday. Were there any surprises or did it all pretty much unsurprise you for the most part? What specifically seemed interesting about these ratings?
4. PM groups were decided yesterday, meaning you now have half the amount of people to talk to as you are used to. Is this a relief? Or are you finding some difficulties in trying to now navigate a less open social field? Have you been utilizing your District forum to exchange communication with your partner for the half you are no longer allowed to talk to? (We hope you might at some point so specs can see what sorts of info you are exchanging!)
5. The next challenge is up and it is your first District Challenge for Immunity? How do you feel about your chances? Do you feel your partner will help or hinder your ability to complete it? Elaborate.

May the odds be ever in your favor <3

Spectator questions!
Would love to hear from you guys about your pairings and how you're feeling
1) How much have you and your partner talked before?
2) What do you feel you bring to this partnership?
3) What should be your team name? The punnier the better
4) What twists would you like to see in this game?
5) What's 3 things you and your partner have in common?

Sorry this took so long to get to. There's so much to do!

First things first, the TC. That part isn't actually very interesting, as right now it looks to be purely along activity lines. Target #1 is Shadow/Montreal Impact, mostly because Zod suggested them first, and Target #2 is Tapu Lele/Wenya Zhu. In the end, the survivor advice of "You need to PM people!" still applies here, and those two pairs aren't doing so well at it.

Beyond that, let's take a look at how the alliance dynamics have worked out, shall we?

Well, actually, spoiler alert. Alliances are really hard in this format. Part of that's exasperated by just flat out bad timing; me being busy during workdays has not helped, and a lot of people were a bit burned out for the past couple days as they recovered from the shipwreck phase that was game start. However, the real problem here is the pairs. One pair is one vote, so majority means gathering six pairs (not counting the challenge winner), and that's all well and good except twelve people is way too many. So, I thought, let's try smaller alliances, maybe three or four pairs? Well, that's still six to eight people, which is still pretty ambitious (though not totally unreasonable), but you also can't talk to half of them directly, which leads to shenanigans like the following.

In a normal game, if I want to ally with people A and B, I sound them each out individually to check whether they like me and whether they like each other. Once I have a decent idea that A likes B, B likes A, and both of them like me, I sort of suggest to A that we pull in B, and to B that we pull in A, and try to time it all so this happens at roughly the same time. Done correctly, we get a tight three man alliance where everyone gets to feel like they had their say in picking their allies. This can be iterated/improved on as necessary for larger alliances.

Let's try that in this game! Alright, so I want to ally with pairs A and B. Except I only get to talk to A1 and B1. So first I need to make sure my partner likes pairs A and B, and once that's confirmed I can then try and check whether A1 likes B1 and B2, and whether B1 likes A1 and A2, but also I need to ask indireclty about whether A2 and B2 are onboard with all of this, oh, and I forgot that it's not just enough that they like me, they need to like my partner as well, except it turns out B1 also likes C1 and C2 quite a bit, and A's amenable, so let's talk to them, and C1 is a big fan of D1 and E1 as well and I don't know who's talked to who else and how far everyone is in their alliance conversations and I have no idea how my partner is managing this or how all the 2's are communicating and AGGHGHGAHGAHGHQAGHAGH!@!#$%@

Okay, I feel a bit better now.

1. I mean, when you think about it, Gilly's a small, woods-ish girl who was the final survivor of a vicious social game. She's practically a born hunger games character. As for water specifically, I don't know. Maybe she can swim?
2. Kirby is great. He's good to talk to, I think his caution actually helps me out quite a bit, and maybe he'll stop me overplaying so much. (As if.)
3. Grading from 1-12 means you're a horrible person and you should feel bad. Use a maximum of 13 like a normal person. Seriously though, I'm a bit surprised Shadow didn't try more. I would have thought being a replacement means you give the pairing challenge your all so as to not end up with Montreal Impact, but oh well.
4. It's a relief and a difficulty at the same time. It cuts PM's to a more manageable load, but at the same time I still need to worry about whether everyone is actually onboard any plans made or not. See my previous posts for how that can mess with alliance stuff. Kirby and I have sort of split our discussions half between the board and half in PM's. Honestly, I'm more likely to keep a lot of it in PM's unless there's a guarantee that we'll have access to the district board (and nobody else will) for the rest of the game. 
5. I'm going to retroactively declare we have a 0% chance of winning and strut about boasting about my predictive accuracy.

1) Probably around arccos^2(-1) on a scale from one to ten. Believe it or not, that's actually a descriptive answer.
2) I'd boot Tapu Lele/Wenya Zhu. I'm not getting anything from that district PM-wise, and thus I have no qualms about seeing them gone.
3) I'm going to focus on not getting eliminated, and setting myself up for a long term run. Anything else is secondary.
4) Meh. Depends on the challenge. I don't like 50-50 odds, but I don't think Kirby would destroy me outright.
5) Badly.

So, I asked Shuichi who he wanted to bring in to that side alliance, and he said Fenrir. Since I'd like to go at least one day before people realize I'm playing all the sides forever, I decided to ask Shuichi to be my top secret ace in the hole ally for me to deploy when backstabbery happens later on.

The sad thing is, I'm not sure there was a better option to shoot for. Any route I take to try and integrate Shuichi into the main alliance feels bad. And keeping it as two different alliances is hard because I'm not sure who I actually want to be my #1 here! (Well, after Kirby). This is mostly a way to delay that decision for a bit longer. Ideally I can get Fenrir to pull Shuichi into the main alliance a bit later, making him publicly (well, within the alliance) an ally, but at the same time me having given Shuichi prior knowledge of stuff would mean he's still mostly loyal to me, but my allies don't realize that and think he's more loyal to them instead of me, thus keeping me safe in the event of random late game backstabbery.

I really hope you spectators are enjoying the show. This is either going to be spectacular, or it's going to blow up in my face so hard.

1) I knew very well that Districts 2 and 11 were the ones being chosen/voted out. Everyone was talking about it, and I also knew the immune pair was onboard. That said, I had no idea about the reward items, or even that they were in the game.
2) I warned Shadow a few hours before, though it had sort of been understood for a while that he and Montreal were an obvious target for arriving late and inactivity. Tapu Lele I didn't bother with, in part because they were the immune choice anyway.
3) Wenya and Tetra. Tapu Lele I find irritating and unhelpful to communicate with, she's the type that responds in one-liners. Wenya's a complete unknown, but Kirby likes him, and I doubt it'd really be any worse. As for the other pair, Harbinger is (to the best of my knowledge), one of the least active players in this game, and Tetra's someone I can talk to. She's not the second coming of Snakes or anything, but she's at least average.


4) Presenting, Half Survivor, Full Survivor CONSEQUENCES! Free Reward Items

Montreal Impact backflipped out of the sky, and landed besides Shadow. Shadow looked at Montreal Impact in the eyes and cry fell out and said, "Montreal! WE HAVE VOTES!" Montreal looked sad at the ground then moved head real fast up.

"GAME! YOU VOTED US?!?", Montreal Impact said with growl.

"YES MONTREAL IMPACT", River Song said after "District 11 has 11 votes!"

"I loved playing survivor like sun raise. DISTRICT 1, YOU WILL SUFFAR!", Montreal Impact pointed and yelled!

Montreal Impact jumped into the sky with reward items, and picked River Song, and River Song's mask ripped off, and Montreal seed ugly District 12 face, but it looked like Tetra too! Tetra scrambled back to the eliminator, and Harbinger scrambled to shoot Tapu Lele, but Wenya Zhu threw a granaid, while Tapu Lele shot them in faces!

"Wenya take Tetra and leave the city its time I have to kill the Harbingers and make evil go away from here forrest of time!", Tapu Lele said to Wenya Zhu and spectators

"Districts 2 and 12 fight!" the spectators said, and didn't go nowhere!





5) The best bit has to be Pikachu and Donald's dysfunctional relationship. Hearing from Kirby that Donald that Donald literally trusts Pikachu the least out of the rest of the game, that he hates Pikachu and even wanted to go to the eliminator to get rid of him? That's pretty over the top for pre-TC 1 drama. 

Spectator questions!
2 Players down already, sponsors being thrown around and that was only round 1
1) Do you know where the sponsorships came from?
2) Are you happy with the players who came out of the eliminator and how are you now are going to deal with them?
3) If a twist allowed you to swap partners would you and if yes, who would you want as a new partner and why?
4) Looking ahead, the overall winners of this game will be determined by challenges, would you/have you thrown any challenges to reduce your threat level?
5) In the spectator area we have a thread specifically for the best and funniest quotes of the game, are there any quotes from your PMs that you feel deserve a place in this thread?

4b) Gonna take a stand here, is Peeta Mellark the best spec for giving the true hard hitting but also entertaining questions, not just every round but every stage of every round?
4c) Who would come out of the eliminator alive, me or Effie Trinket?

1) The challenge quality has been pretty solid so far. I have no complaints about it.
2) I have a casual contempt for the way sponsors have been implemented, and I suspect that will upgrade to a seething hatred before the game is done. They destroy any attempt at strategy, as those who hold a sponsor can instantly nope any particular elimination, while at the same time eliminating anyone they wish. I have nothing positive to say about them, and I dread the fact that there will almost certainly be more of those abominations coming later on.
3) I have a four pair alliance with districts 3, 7, and 9, along with a side alliance with district 1. Beyond that, I'm also interested in working with district 8 and the new district 12. All that said... there's too many good players right now. I have no idea who's most loyal to who. Can't keep up with it all, and it'll be interesting to see which of these pairs are on my side, versus working with others.
4) Don't be ridiculous. The worst spectator from all time is clearly from Survivor Nexus, where the spectator forums could be most easily compared to twitch chat, in both tone and quality of content. I'm not sure which spectator is most to blame for that debacle, but this clearly rules out Peeta as the worst spec.
5) Honestly? There's Kirby, and then there's everyone else. With so many good players, figuring out the real alliance structure is a good guess at best. I've got a couple of officially agreed-to alliances, but the more I think about it, the more I realize there's no damn way we don't have everyone allied with everyone else, Equestria style. The fact that the first vote was literally 11-1 doesn't help in figuring out who's actually working with whom. I guess we'll find out eventually.

Spectator Questions!
It appears that District 8 won that challenge, they must've really trained for it.
1) If a twist allowed you to send 2 individual players rather than a whole district to the eliminator, who would you send?
2) Do sponsors change how you talk to players before potentially voting for them? and is there anyone you suspect might have a sponsor?
3) Should there be a punishment for players who repeatedly ignore my questions and if so, what should it be?
4) Which District do you really want sent in this round, and which District (other than your own) would you want to protect this round?
5) In theory there's only 10 rounds in this game (2 players eliminated each round and final round being 4 players), which round of the game do you think is the right time to turn from quiet players to players who are threats to your game (either socially or challenge wise)
5b) Who are those threats to you?