Only supposed to play this game at certain times?

So, apparently I failed to play this game properly last night. Meaning, I didn't wait for the last hour or two to do The Hunt: Alaska or The Hunt: Florida. The leaders of the brackets in both of those now seem to have 1000s of points more than me, there literally aren't that many points remaining in either bracket for me to catch up. I tried to figure out why, and this is a line I found about the Hulk event (which I believe uses the same system):
Points per mission have a rubber banding effect depending on your overall placement (ignoring brackets). This means that if your score is lower than the average for the position that you're in, your missions will be worth more compared to others in that same position. IE, if Bracket Alpha's 1st place has 750 points and Bracket Zeta has 500, Zeta's 1st will gain more points from missions to equalize brackets. This will filter down to lower ratings as well, since naturally in that case, 50th would necessarily be lower in Zeta compared to Alpha. This has the effect of allowing brackets to push higher as a group to achieve the further out rewards.

Basically, this means if I play at the very last second I will get far more points then playing early, because the average will automatically be far higher. Since missions are locked once completed, there is no way to catch up if you did them early. So, if you want to do well in these quest events, just don't play them until they are about to end. In my opinion this is a horrible design flaw. For quest based events each missions should be a set amount of points, and what rewards you get at the end are simply an indication of how far you were able to complete in the event tree.

Comments

  • You only have to play your last set of missions after whoever is in the lead overall. Of course the later you wait the better off you'll be, but generally speaking the guy who is in the lead overall has no reason to wait until the last minute to play his mission (because he's still #1 no matter when he finished them, assuming nobody was able to beat more missions than he).

    The only thing playing early is getting you the illusion that you're placing well. That is, if you play say 7 hours before it ends, after you're done you'd be like #10 and you think that's pretty good, and by the time the tournament ends you'd drop to about 100. But, if you waited until the very end, you'd still only finish around that range, though you wouldn't see your rank drop for obvious reasons.
  • I think you're agreeing with me? Are you saying you're fine with how it is, and the playing later is better, or would you prefer they changed it?
  • Dragon_Nexus
    Dragon_Nexus Posts: 3,701 Chairperson of the Boards
    The repeatable missions will give deminishing return rank points.
    However, after a certain amount of time passes, the rank points reset. so often it's worth farming them until you get only 1 per fight completion, then coming back later and farming again when they've gone back up to the hundreds.
  • Phantron wrote:
    You only have to play your last set of missions after whoever is in the lead overall. Of course the later you wait the better off you'll be, but generally speaking the guy who is in the lead overall has no reason to wait until the last minute to play his mission (because he's still #1 no matter when he finished them, assuming nobody was able to beat more missions than he).

    The only thing playing early is getting you the illusion that you're placing well. That is, if you play say 7 hours before it ends, after you're done you'd be like #10 and you think that's pretty good, and by the time the tournament ends you'd drop to about 100. But, if you waited until the very end, you'd still only finish around that range, though you wouldn't see your rank drop for obvious reasons.

    Actually the person who does it first is worst off because if you can only do each mission once, essentially everyone will have the same points, but the guy that did it last will place higher than the guy who finished the event when it came out! This happened to me before and further encourages waiting until the end (which is what I do now).