I just want to clear up a misconception. There have been a lot of complaints over the past few weeks from Survivor fans about tribe swaps. Specifically, there have been a lot of complaints about how multiple fun, high-upside players have gone home because of tribe swaps. There was a similar refrain during Survivor 50, and to some extent, there was that same refrain during the entire New Era. The thing is, though, I want to say loudly and aggressively that many fans, myself included, are not against tribe swaps. We’re just against Survivor doing tribe swaps in the worst, most boring way possible.
Let me explain. When Survivor reconfigures its players into new tribes, it needs a method to do it. Producers aren’t just going to assign the players to the tribes they think would make for the best storylines, as they do at the beginning of the game. Instead, they need a way for the castaways to sort themselves. In theory, there are an infinite number of ways they could do that, but for whatever reason, Survivor has fallen in love with players randomly drawing buffs, which is a bottom-tier option.
Longtime host and showrunner Jeff Probst always likes to say he wants to create a game for the players that they can actually play. That means creating an unstable environment with advantages and other developments the players must respond to, but when tribe swaps happen using random buff draws, those same players have no agency whatsoever. They don’t have any say in their fate, and more often than not, it leads to a few of them getting randomly swap-screwed when they draw the wrong color and end up on a tribe with a bunch of other people already in an established alliance.
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There are literally so many other ways to shuffle people around. You can randomly draw for captains and let them pick their teams. You can play a game to determine two captains and let them pick their teams. You can have one player pick a player and then let the player they picked pick the next player. You can have everyone compete in an endurance challenge and say the first certain number of people to fall are going to be one tribe and those left are going to be the other tribe. You can let tribes trade players or pick who they don’t want on their tribes.
Any of those options would be preferable to random because the relationships you’ve made and the influence you have in the game would have some say in the outcome. That doesn’t mean people wouldn’t still get swap screwed. Players absolutely would be disadvantaged and go home after any of those tribe swaps, but it would at least feel like they did something that directly or indirectly led to their ultimate fate.
But even if you ignore all of that and don’t care about the inherent fairness of Survivor, the random buff draw also isn’t a very good production decision because it’s not good television. The castaways doing something, anything, to reconfigure themselves is way more interesting than just randomly being assigned, and giving them some level of agency creates a real fallout. Imagine a player gets picked and then gets to pick the next player. Imagine they have two different allies, both of whom are expecting to be picked. That creates compelling television and potentially has long-term ramifications in the game.
To be clear, I’m enjoying the Open Era. I love the casting. I love most of the wrinkles that have been added to the game. I think the show is on the right track, but if I never saw another random buff draw for new tribes, I would be happy. Literally anything else is better. The players deserve it. The fans deserve it. Let’s start getting creative.
