The Death of the Survivor Auction

Maybe you noticed its absence at first or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you care or maybe you don’t. One thing is for sure: the Survivor auction is gone and doesn’t appear to be coming back. It had only showed up in about half of the seasons anyways. But then it stopped showing up for good. Why is it gone? Well, we might as well delve into that here.

Sometimes we just have to deal with the fact that old Survivor elements will go away over time. We saw that with the rites of passage, which never seemed to work when they arrived at contestants that they didn’t know. Still, it was a nice way of us remembering the players from before the finale.

One may wonder if something stopped working right with the whole process of the Survivor auction that caused them to get rid of it. Let’s go back to the last time that it was used. The season was Worlds Apart. There was an opening twist at the auction where a person got bought out and then got a secret award back at camp. But this leads to problems later. So did more of the auction, but less so. The main thing that could be received from the auction was that too many people wanted a secret advantage in the game. Now you’d think that they could just do an auction without one. But why do one at all?

I don’t know if I can make a case for why the auction should return. It lead to a lot of weird things in past seasons and could even make things lopsided at times in ways of some sort. I don’t like how people could just sent others to Exile Island and get all of their money. I do wonder very briefly why that rule didn’t appear with Ghost Island, but they realize that the auction doesn’t work anymore.

Why doesn’t it work? And did it ever work? There would be a lot of bidding on items that people did not know what they really were. Thus, they could wind up with trap items that they wouldn’t really want. People could mess up the letters to home bit for the other players. This could lead to a rigged system that the players would know and then exploit instead.

The biggest problem was that people would just save all of their money until the end when the biggest item of the night was up for sale. The producers decided to make it more interesting the last two times the auction appeared. Of course, it made sense to get rid of the rule where contestants could pool money as soon as advantages like in the next challenge or secrets to idols were available. Still, one person just buying whatever they wanted, immediately if they wanted to, seemed like a bad idea.

Now why couldn’t they change the rules? I’m not sure. Maybe it would have gotten too complicated and made it too hard to keep track of everything. It would have been too hard or taken out all of the fun that it is supposed to be. If there are too many flaws with something, it might be better to just start over from scratch. Remember the Articles of Confederation?

Well, that’s about it for this blog post. The auction on Survivor was a good thing at one point. But then it really stopped working well. Rather than try to fix it or get rid of what broke it, the producers must have thought it would just be better to go without it for future seasons. I doubt that we will see it again. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.