Pre-game relationships

[Mia]

I know they were brought up in the other topic, but I wanted to discuss here.

Pre-game relationships are why I hate open-ID so much because they are just a huge minefield that I know I'll always struggle to navigate, since I usually walk away from a game with at least one great ally.

This is what I had to deal with in this game:

Sean: we know each other in real life so that was probably one of my biggest relationships.
Ami: Bad bitches from Season 17.
John: We're really good friends after Costa Rica and through Australian Stranded
Patty: We've had a rocky relationship and I knew Jeff put us on the same tribe on purpose, so or only options were to either go after each other immediately or stick it to him by teaming up and becoming better friends (I'm glad we chose the second one!)
Ben: We're actually really really good pals from my series Crashcourse. He was gonna be a tough one to work into my plans so I guess it was a relief that he went inactive.

So when I end up on Degei with Sean, Ami, and Patty, I figured things would be golden.

Also, Jolanda and Holly and Penny were probably supposed to play so that would have complicated things more. I'm jealous of people who didn't have to deal with any of this.

[Christy]

My sweet angel Erinn and the exquisite Brenda were my strongest connections I'd say. I knew the usernames of others well, but no meaningful relationship.

Oh and Willard is interesting. I didn't know who he was, but I think he knew who I was from the get go? It legit took me three days to figure out hiss identitylol.

[John]

For me it would be Mia, Ami, Patty and Brenda.

I have played with three of them previously and I know three of them from AusStranded and I like all four of them.

[Patricia]

I'm really glad we bonded this game Mia it was a blast. But yeah the pre-game relationships is pretty much the entire point of having an Open ID game, it's to see how people traverse those.

This is just me, but I feel that a lot of people will drop in-game allies for out-of-game friends at the drop of a hat and that's just not me. I get the feeling that a lot of the people in these games tend to just fake it until they get with their real friends and that just bugs me to no end. When I play Open ID, I'll obviously have pre-game relationships affect my early decisions, but once i've set a strategy i'm much more inclined to stick with that instead of just flip to my friend.

I know we shouldn't talk about non-Stranded games but in another open Id I played I was literally living in the same room as someone for the entirety of the game and we never once allied despite being amazing friends simply because our strategies up to that point didn't allow it. We easily could've dropped everything to ultimately protect each other but we treated just like any other contestant and I wish more people would adopt that mentality of taking each game on it's own. Open Id or not.