Thick As Thieves: Jan 26 - Feb 3

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Congratulations, Xenoberyll of Lost Ghosts. You win.
I can't keep up with someone who apparently has slept in two-hour-shifts for the last 5 days.

Enjoy your extra Starlord cover, while I sit at work, rested after a full night's sleep, earning money.

lololol

Unknown

Aaaaand....it's over, thank God. Somehow managed to snag ninth. Hardest I've ever worked for a t10 finish. And now I have 2 brand new shiny star - lord covers that over the course of the next year will be useful for one whole week. I think I must be a masochist.

But a masochist with 2 brand new shiny star - lord covers.

Unknown

The Meeting nodes are just as hard as I remember them. Woof.

mags1587

So, a little interesting (to me) aside -- the devs created a new sub (The Meeting) for all the nodes that used to be in main. They seem to have forgotten to set a flag somewhere, though, because I have an old Thick-as-Thieves specific retired boost (+50% damage to all enemies) and it's valid for the main node and all the other sub-events, but it's locked out in The Meeting.

Also, I have to go update my guide again. ::sigh:: At some point they will stop changing things.

Quebbster

mags1587 wrote:

So, a little interesting (to me) aside -- the devs created a new sub (The Meeting) for all the nodes that used to be in main. They seem to have forgotten to set a flag somewhere, though, because I have an old Thick-as-Thieves specific retired boost (+50% damage to all enemies) and it's valid for the main node and all the other sub-events, but it's locked out in The Meeting.

Also, I have to go update my guide again. ::sigh:: At some point they will stop changing things.

I'm guessing it is to counter rubberbanding. If they use main map nodes with no rubberbanding positions will pretty much be locked when the last sub ends. If they use main map nodes with rubberbanding the RB would likely be stretched to the max from the start. Put it in a separate sub and they get more rubberbanding flexibility.

Trisul

arktos1971 wrote:

It's time for us to find out who is :

This reference has never been cool.

Unknown

Left for work as #45 in the new slice 1 with 1 1/2 hours to go. I'm going to guess that I'm not getting a Starlord cover, but I'm fine. I didn't work very hard for it, and I think I still need the Mohawk cover. I probably would have sold Starlord after his essential event anyway.

Quebbster

Fievel wrote:

Left for work as #45 in the new slice 1 with 1 1/2 hours to go. I'm going to guess that I'm not getting a Starlord cover, but I'm fine. I didn't work very hard for it, and I think I still need the Mohawk cover. I probably would have sold Starlord after his essential event anyway.

I was 45 with 15 minutes left and ended up 53rd. One more game before my phone died and I would have been top 50. So yeah, you didn't get top 50 either.

Moon Roach

With 3 hours to go I went to bed at midnight with 133k at #16. When I woke up and checked, I was #45, less than 1000 off #49, which is as far down as the game lets me look. Staying up for a few more clears of goon essentials kept me top 50.

AxeVirtuoso

3 hours to go. I played this event more than any sane person should, missing next to no refresh of the beatable nodes, doing triple clears before sleep, for 5 days. And all this for a whopping...75th place. Yeah.

Sorry, but I can't keep up with vampires or zombies who need no sleep apparently and who DEFINITELY don't have to work. No way, not gonna happen.

I'll probably get the same results with 8hour refreshes, but at least it won't ruin my life.

squirrel1120

Spoit wrote:

squirrel1120 wrote:

I mentioned the information about tanking pve nodes a bit in our alliance's line chat, and its worked for some, and not at all for others. Some feel the can't handle the nodes at the level they have them, and I mentioned its likely just the community scale pushing them up at this point if trying to tank it down didn't help. Others tried to tank some nodes that were really not that bad imo for the rosters they had, and I was not surprised when it didn't work too well for them. These were already peeps that seem to have a decent grip on controlling character leveling, weren't using boosts much, etc., which told me their personal scaling was being kept pretty well in check with what they were doing. Kinda good news/bad news when it comes to a node you don't feel you can beat anymore.

How have you (and the other people) been trying to tank? I've been sacrificing hulk and CM and sentry to get my medpacks down to 0 each run (while winning) and losing with half my roster a couple times, and it doesn't seem do do anything. Hell half the time, it makes the levels tick up

The methods folks tried were varied, but the one thing that I got out of it was if someone tried tanking a node with several pretty decent sets of teams and it never went down, they seemed to be the people that had a really good handle on how to level their roster, not be addicted to boosts, and other things that help keep the scale down. At that point I made the fairly safe assumption that every ounce of scale their nodes were seeing was from the community. After reading the post on how damage taken is still the major factor in roster scaling, this has made SO much more sense. Kinda like a light-bulb going on. Anyway, anyone that just tried sacrificing sets of lowbie characters to a node to try had no effect, but actually noticed a change when they had several teams die to a node with normal play. I've been telling our alliance members that they should get used to trying if its at all an option, because trying is an avenue to surprising yourself when you succeed. If you give up and never try, the game simply doesn't understand that as part of its equations, and the overall becomes harder. If they just don't try (assuming its at least a viable option, I understand not cutting yourself short health packs for the next run under the 3hr refreshes), it becomes an even bigger loss than they realize.

When I neared a 20k lead in points, I probably could have slept in instead of grinding the nodes at the end, but I was up anyway having to drive my son to work in the snow. I think my play habits made anyone thinking about T1 give up on it as an idea fairly quickly. A very minor benefit of being out of work I guess.

As a point of interest to those that still have to hit nodes with the hood in them... He doesn't steal Team-up AP (tuap), so bringing a boost of tuap, and good teamups is at least as effective, if not moreso than boosting +% damage. First time I've tried bringing more than one Team-up to a node since they started the things, and it was pretty hilarious to me that I was taking out Hood in 6-7 turns with powers like unibeam, star spangled, and using m.bw's TU to stun someone and completely save your bacon... also the first time I'd ever requested TU's from the alliance. Doing the hood nodes actually became kinda fun after the Loki rewards from pvp rolled in. He stole back enough from that thieving Hood so my characters could actually use powers before he went down, even if I didn't get a TU off in time.

I hope Starlord isn't as meh as his starting abilities look, but unfortunately its one of those things where I'm just not really going to find out for a really long time, despite snagging the 4 covers.

Unknown

Is there anyone in the Slice 4 bracket with williamk99 and dkffiv leading it who can see where (or at least roughly where) #50 is right now? I'm 18k behind top ten, and not getting that, and I'm hoping I can just grind down the nodes a couple of hours before it ends and go to bed normally, but I need to know how much of a lead I have for that.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

Is there anyone in the Slice 4 bracket with williamk99 and dkffiv leading it who can see where (or at least roughly where) #50 is right now? I'm 18k behind top ten, and not getting that, and I'm hoping I can just grind down the nodes a couple of hours before it ends and go to bed normally, but I need to know how much of a lead I have for that.

Has anyone ever suggested adding an update that let's you scroll up or down the leaderboard? A whole lot more useful than the new banners on goon nodes that slow down play to a crawl. I'm pretty new to the game but I have to believe I'm not the first to come up with that.

FierceKiwi

dtrpath3 wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

Is there anyone in the Slice 4 bracket with williamk99 and dkffiv leading it who can see where (or at least roughly where) #50 is right now? I'm 18k behind top ten, and not getting that, and I'm hoping I can just grind down the nodes a couple of hours before it ends and go to bed normally, but I need to know how much of a lead I have for that.

Has anyone ever suggested adding an update that let's you scroll up or down the leaderboard? A whole lot more useful than the new banners on goon nodes that slow down play to a crawl. I'm pretty new to the game but I have to believe I'm not the first to come up with that.

Yes they even addressed it in the latest Q&A. Short answer is it won't happen since it'll kill your battery/dataplan and would tax their servers.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22902

Unknown

I think the simple solution (which a bunch of people have proposed) is to add a handful of cutoff placements, like (depending on prize structure) 25, 50, 100, etc. in addition to the top 10. It wouldn't strain things much if they kept it limited.

Unknown

Rubberband wouldn't matter on the main if they put the 'you might have 2X points if you're more than 100K points behind the overall leader' rubberband, though it's cleaner to put it on another sub anyway (and more rewards).

Cortez

That businesspartner node is borderline unplayable. CPU keeps getting favourable boards with cascades of blue and red tiles. CMags kills my buffed lthor with almost 12k HP easily.
It's like the game is saying: "You played your **** of for 5 day and now I'll screw you, because I can." F*** this.

MojoWild

I finished Thick as Thieves in 11th place, 3300 points behind 6th and 1100 behind 10th. As much as I tried to remain competitive, I could not catch up to people ahead of me that may have had extra points from the early Scotland Yard clear before it was taken down. A clear of Scotland Yard is at least 3000 points and could have been the difference for me getting into the top ten.
CS says people should be able to catch up, but not if we're running at the same speed...!

Unknown

AxeVirtuoso wrote:

3 hours to go. I played this event more than any sane person should, missing next to no refresh of the beatable nodes, doing triple clears before sleep, for 5 days. And all this for a whopping...75th place. Yeah.

Sorry, but I can't keep up with vampires or zombies who need no sleep apparently and who DEFINITELY don't have to work. No way, not gonna happen.

I'll probably get the same results with 8hour refreshes, but at least it won't ruin my life.

To quote a concept from the movie Tropic Thunder I went full **** on this one. Thankfully it was on a weekend. I just stayed up irresponsibly late grinding. My kids love Guardians of the Galaxy ( my 4 year old daughter calls it alex and the guardians ) and I have Rockt & Groot and Gamora so I wasn't going to end up empty handed.

dtrpath3 wrote:

Aaaaand....it's over, thank God. Somehow managed to snag ninth. Hardest I've ever worked for a t10 finish. And now I have 2 brand new shiny star - lord covers that over the course of the next year will be useful for one whole week. I think I must be a masochist.

But a masochist with 2 brand new shiny star - lord covers.

Amen Dude. It was a fist fight the whole way. I was fifth when I went to bed so I figured that SHOULD be enough to keep me in the top 10. I hadn't noticed that our boy Mr. Quill was a 4 star character so that was a pleasant surprise.

I agree he'll be as useless as a football bat long terms, but hey, my kids will think it's cool.

russreid91

russreid91 wrote:

fmftint wrote:

Wobby wrote:

I have no clue how you two jumped 9-10,000 points on this. As long as I keep top 5 it's cool but I'm floored.
Good luck gentlemen,

Additionally, we have an update we can share regarding this issue. It has been determined that the players who had access to the event during the short time it was active had very little impact on the overall rankings and we believe there is a more than fair chance for other users to catch/pass these users on the leader boards. As such, we will not be taking any additional actions regarding this issue.

Are you kidding me I am currently in 6th, one of the guys in front of me gained over 8k in points from SY. If you took those off I would be in 5th. Unless he messes up there is no way I can make that up.

I am in no way upset at the guys that have those points. The sub was open and they cleared it. The responsibility is completely on D3 and that is a terrible response. I was planning on waiting until after the event to give them a chance to do the right thing, but bid they are already wiping there hands of it then I guess it is time to try and get IceIX or Will or Dave to help out.

So I didn't need to go and bug anybody as the person in 5th missed the sub roll over and I was able to pass them. Then it was just a matter of hitting the refreshes, didn't even need to hit the final grind all that hard just put in some extra points for the alliance.

Now it is all over and I am free, free, free at last from the tyranny of the 3 hour refresh, may we never see it again.

Congratulation to you as well Sumilea for over coming the SY handicap and taking first convincingly.