Suckers.
Alright, this is it. I am now going to lay out EXACTLY what my strategic game-plan was for this season, and how I used to to get me to the finals. Before I begin, I just want to make one thing absolutely clear...in spite of playing an aggressive tactical game this season (and that doesn't even get into the creative side of my gameplay) I absolutely respect and love and and EVERY one of you guys. So, You Want to be an Imagineer is such a success because of the sense of community it inspires, and you guys are to thank for that. Even though I might have creatively and strategically dominated this season, each and every one of the fifteen people that made it onto the standings in their own way was extremely memorable in their own right. Like I said, even though I played with aggressive strategy, never once did I play with any sort of malicious intent. I just want to make that point PERFECTLY clear before I move on.
So, I guess the place to begin is my motivation. It didn't matter what group of people I ended up being pitted up against, in my first time out playing So, You Want to be an Imagineer, this great game that I had the absolute pleasure to basically nurture into the thing it is now throughout its eight seasons, I had one goal and one goal only. Play the most strategically dominating game that I possibly could. Me and MEW have had a long-standing analogy since the early days of our partnership in running this game, and that's that the game needed its very own Richard Hatch. Basically, someone to take the core foundations of the game, grab them, and run with them. That's exactly what I've been doing this season. My overall goal was to basically play a hardcore strategic game and then lay it all at the final project, and that's just what I've done. I didn't really play strategically for myself, just because I knew that I'd probably make the finals either way, but rather, I played strategically so that I COULD lay out how a hardcore strategic game could be played. I believe the word "strategy" is kind of a taboo word when it comes to this game. I aim to change all that. After I've gotten my hands on this game...strategy should be an absolute necessity.
So, exactly what WAS my hardcore strategy you may ask? It's hard to know exactly where to begin in terms of this season. In the first project, I was sizing up EVERY opponent left and right. Of course, I already knew a GREAT deal of this cast due to the fact that this season was originally going to be an All Star season (which it STILL more-or-less ended up being in my opinion), but what I was looking for was exactly how much dedication the individual people were putting into this game. Jessie stood out to me right out the gate as someone who was playing under-the-radar intentionally. I was really impressed with Monkey's activity on the first project compared to the first season, Adv was just as good as he was last time around and I knew he'd probably be around a while. Basically, I knew where I stood when it got down to my "Team", it was the new "Wild Cards" that I was a bit more concerned about. This brings us to the most controversial of my strategic moves...Disneyson1.
In the first project, me and Disneyson worked together rather closely on the Tower project. I remember absolutely being blown away by Disneyson's amazing work ethic, but at the same time, this guy was going to be my MAIN competition. I knew unless I did something drastic, he'd make it to the finals almost guaranteed. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except since I WAS playing so strategically, I knew I'd have to deal with him in one way or another down the road. A key concept in my strategy from the get-go was going to be to strategically eliminate a major power player, and sadly, Disneyson just perfectly slid into that role. A little more on that later.
So in round two, when the teams split up into Wild Cards vs. All Stars, I knew I had a solid five in Team All Stars with myself, Trevor, Jessie, Monkey, and Adv. BigDisneyFan and OSU Phantom on the other hand, were more or less expendable. I enjoyed this because it basically gave my team plenty of breathing room to get rid of people in case we lost without it really hurting the core structure of the team, which was the five people I just mentioned. The thing was, I didn't plan on loosing...Ever. I quickly approached my assistant Team Leader Trevor about the idea of the two of us working together on a strategic level, and from then on, me and him established a very clear strategy to win every project. Basically, I wanted Team All Stars to be the most dominant team in So, You Want to be an Imagineer history. In spite of the Wild Cards being AWESOME in their own right, I'd have to say I think I succeeded in that goal.
It wasn't just about winning though, it was about sending a message to the Wild Cards that there was no way they COULD win. This is where my psychological warfare came into play. I used emotional manipulation A LOT during the course of the season. Basically, the message me and Trevor wanted to convey to the Wild Cards is that there was no WAY they could win. We were the All Stars, they were the left-overs. Of course, I didn't ACTUALLY feel this way about the Wild Card team, but like I said, the point was to manipulate. So yes, all the trash talking, all the egotistical "YEAH...WERE GONNA WIN THIS AGAAAAAINNN!!!" speeches in the All Star work threads, they were purely to get the message into the Wild Cards heads that they were somehow inferior. This was a MAJOR part of my strategy that played out throughout the entire season. My overall plan was to fracture the unity of the Wild Card team while at the same time establishing an UNSTOPPABLE core force within the All Star team. Again, judging by how the season played out, I'm pretty sure that goal was also met with a pretty good degree of success. After all, four of the "Core Five" that was established VERY early on out of the All Star team made it to the semi-finals.
After a round came and went without so much as a peaking interest in this fabled "Stalfos Power", I figured that was basically mine for the taking. The only problem of course, was that as Team Leaders, neither me nor Trevor could actually obtain it. Instead, we decided to bring in a third person into the little "alliance" we had brewing. That person was Jessiestudio. Our reasoning for choosing Jessie was simply because we figured there MIGHT have been a loose alliance going on between Monkey and Adv considering they were on the same team throughout Season Seven and had that connection. Jessie, on the other hand, seemed like more of a free agent. I PMd Jessie, proposed our evil plan to oust Disneyson via the Stalfos Power, and basically told him he was guaranteed safety that round so he could do a Blue Sky write-up to win the thing in the first place. All went according to plan, and by the end of round three I had the Stalfos Power in my grubby hands, with a powerful alliance of three to go along with it.
Come round four, all hell broke loose. I must admit, on the day that we were set to blindside Disneyson, I wasn't really sure how I felt about it. Personally, it was kind of hard for me to do considering how much Disneyson obviously loved this game and how hard he was playing. I think the thing that made me morally accept what we were about to do was the fact that in spite of sending him home early, with this power move we were basically going to make Disneyson an unquestionable LEGEND in the fabric of the game. Well, the big move came and went, the Wild Cards were completely fractured, while I felt more secure about my alliance then ever. Going into the first of what was going to be a good many Team Swaps, I felt utterly confident about the events that had taken place and ready to further my strategy further.
Going into the Team Swap, I wanted to get rid of OSU Phantom as fast as I could because he hadn't posted ANYTHING at all since the Haunted Mansion Holiday project and was the biggest dead weight in the cast. BigDisneyFan, on the other hand, was really starting to grow into his own in spite of his rough start this season. Since the first project post-Disneyson was another "one big group" project, it was an easy consensus on all ends to send OSU home, leaving us with ten players still left in the game. By this point, another problem that was starting to develop was the fact that Trevor had been less and less active. I always thought of Trevor as more of a socially strong player and a rather mediocre "creative" player, in spite of his best efforts. Despite the fact that me and Trevor had been in an alliance since round two, I felt that he was starting to become a dead weight. BigDisneyFan, like I said, while probably not on a path to win or anything, was at least showing more effort than Trevor, which is why I felt a little odd at the fact that Jessie eliminated him over Trevor in tenth place. Jessie had kept our alliance in tact, the only question was, was it worth sacrificing better players now that Trevor had basically become the "dead weight" of the entire cast?
At the same time, the second "Team Outcasts" twist was announced. I knew I had Jessie and Trevor's votes to NOT bring Disneyson back, so right there that was a third of the entire voting block. I think our little alliance is really what kept Disneyson from coming back. Sorry DS, next season is your season, this season was PURELY the property of me and Jessie. Speaking of Jessie, the two of us had basically become full blown partners in crime while Trevor was basically our tag-along. We knew we couldn't keep tagging along Trevor forever. After Disneyrules was voted back over Disneyson, there was again ten people left and the project we were on was the one with the five teams of two. This whole time, there was ONE particular other player that, while I never did officially approach him with the idea of an alliance, I knew would be a really good person to have on my side. That person was CostaFreak, who is probably the most dedicated contestant in the HISTORY of the game, having competed more times than anyone, making the finals twice, and playing a great game this season. I knew CostaFreak was also playing with strategy, so I basically adopted the idea that me and him had an "unspoken agreement". Having said that, I got VERY concerned when Trevor and CF were paired up on the same team. I knew at this point Trevor was all but doomed, so I sent CF a vital PM that basically said he needed to pump out a high quality project on his own without trying to bother with brainstorming. I do kind of regret NEVER informing Trevor that I did this and ESSENTIALLY throwing him under the bus, but like I said, Trevor had just become TOO much of a dead weight. So come those results, CF did deliver a great project, but both him and Trevor were shockingly eliminated in spite of CF pulling out the second best project of the five SOLO. This entered into the most utterly MAD round in the entire history of the game. Season Eight, Project Eight.
Disneyrules dropped out shortly after the project was announced, ensuing a SLEW of angry posts mostly due to the fact that he "stole" the returning contestant slot from Disneyson, in spite of the fact that it was my alliance that voted back Disneyrules to begin with. In addition to this, I was having problems of my own. With Trevor gone, Jessie and I decided we needed to rope in one more official alliance member. We decided on Monkey, and he quietly became the third person in our evil trio. In addition to this, I also had a HUGE tactical mission lined up, which I liked to call "Operation Fight Club". While Operation Fight Club was one of my only tactical ideas that never fully saw fruition, the point of it was for me and Jessie to basically infiltrate the remaining cast and manipulate them into actually playing for US to win. It was aggressive, ambitious, and ultimately didn't really go anywhere. The key was inner-personal relationships, we figured. The trouble I ran into was the fact that now that the teams had been split four/four and me and Jessie had an established alliance of three with Monkey as well as CF as our unofficial "Fourth Beatle", the teams basically put me, Monkey, and CF, read...three fourths of the ENTIRE alliance on one team with Imagineer2017, the person that probably took Disneyson's elimination the hardest out of anyone as our Team Leader, with Jessie as the sole Team Leader of the other team with three people who weren't in our alliance. (Though technically, me and Jessie always thought Adv was basically the second "unofficial" member of the alliance seeing as though he DID start out with the All Stars and had been playing hard all season) the cold hard fact was that if the team I was on lost, we would loose one of our alliance members, no matter what. It was then that I pitched the idea to Jessie to actually throw a project. In all honest, THIS, right here, was the lowest I ever got in terms of my gameplay. Honestly, I had bad feelings about it from the start, and ironically, the judges hated my team's Personal Spaces idea so much that Jessie's team ended up winning anyways, in spite of him actually trying to throw the project. Ethically, I have decided that throwing projects is kind of wrong and should really NOT be a part of any overall strategy. While strategy in itself is never a bad thing, you should never INTENTIONALLY play to NOT have a good project. That's the point of the game to begin with. Of course, all hell freaking broke loose with Project Eight and that round became a non-elimination. In the midst of all this crap hitting the fan, I made my single most effective strategic move I made all season...calling off the strategy.
Yep, at that point in the Final Seven, I felt that me and Jessie had already played such dominating games that to CONTINUE to play so aggressively tactical would only put targets on our backs. We got overly cocky with the whole "throwing a project" thing, and after all the chaos that had ensued, PROBABLY to some degree based on my aggressive attempts to fracture the Wild Cards in the first place and create an air of animosity, I decided to just call the whole thing with me, Jessie, Monkey, and whoever the hell else, off. No more "Operation Fight Club", we were going to have a nice, clean fight to the finish. I believe that this move essentially, like I said, removed the target from both our backs and gave us the "public support" needed to continue in the game without looking like total diabolic ****-disturbers.
There are a couple other aspects of my strategy that I want to touch on briefly. One was my ever-changing avatar/signature combination. This season, I really wanted my avatars and signatures to REALLY play into the idea of getting into all your heads. Rather it be Russell Hantz's face informing you that I was NOT to be messed with or Fabio's face giving you the false allusion that I was just "playing cool", or Pecos Bill's mouth hanging open last project taunting at the fact that I was REALLY confident about my Blue Sky Project, each and every one of my avatar/signature combinations was carefully chosen to relay a VERY specific message to the rest of the players. And lets face it, avatars and sigs are something you see EVERY time you log onto this board. There was no way my messages were going to go unnoticed. In fact, over the course of the projects, I really tried to make the messages sink into your guys' heads. The last tactic I used, while this is on a more subtle level, was strategically "liking" posts. Now let me clear, every time I "liked" a post this season, I did legitimately like what that person had to say, but there were a couple times were I specifically chose to "like" posts in an attempt to get people in question over to my side. A good example of this is when Disneyrules came back into the game and I "liked" his official announcement that he had decided to return. In my mind, though this obviously never played out, I figured if I could get Disneyrules on my side right off the bat, that would just go to further fracture the Wild Cards.
And now...here we are. If you were a Wild Card this season...I'm sorry. Haha, that's about all I can say, really. Coming into this game, I really had it in my head that I wanted to cause freaking CHAOS from the inside, and I think the fact that the core All Stars stuck together so well while the Wild Cards really were a rag tag dysfunctional family was proof in the pudding that my mind games worked. Again, even though you guys kind of fell victim to my strategy in a pretty major way, keep in mind that I absolutely respected each and every one of you, including the much-criticized Disneyrules. So now I have made the finals. And you guys ALL helped me get there. Well done guys, well done
In all seriousness though, I have to say this Final Three is pretty much perfect. Jessie had a similar but more subtle strategic gameplan himself that I'm hoping he'll lay out in a serious fashion, while Monkey is essentially the "underdog" of this final three. Ironically enough though, this Final Three is the EXACT core alliance that was established immediately following Trevor's ouster, though that was kind of an accident. So there you go. I hope nobody takes all this strategy with ill-feelings. Like I said, my hope for playing such a strategic game is to simply inspire others to follow in me and Jessie's footsteps. While each and every person was great in their own right, you guys have to admit that me and Jessie RAN this game in a way that has never been seen before now. I think that while the creative side of this game is important, inner-personal relationships and strategy is equally important, especially in the early rounds when people are still getting to know each other. I have no idea if you guys are going to want to shake my hand or crucify me, but all I can say is I went into this game with VERY specific strategic goals and I achieved all of them. This is just the START of the Final Project though. I always had it in my head that I'd pull the rug out from you guys when I got into the Finals, and here I am in the finals. I really don't know what else there is to say. You guys are all amazing...I'm just evil. Truth be told, this is just the result of a Survivor nerd looking into strategy WAAAY too much, but whatever. I am extremely proud of the way I played this game both on the strategic end and on the creative end, and I like I said, I can only hope that I'll inspire more people to play with similar aggressive tactical games in the future...
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