Thick as Thieves

Badgerheart

The Ladder wrote:

Fangel wrote:

Did you finish 1st Fangel? Noticed you jumped into the lead in the last 10 minutes.

Felt like I was cruising, then the rubberbanding kicked in and I had to scramble for points at the death. Was good enough for top 2 finish in the end, thought I might have been pipped at the post. Sleep deprivation, suppose it is worth it lol. Not sure I'm keen on beating 500 odd Lv230 missions (rough estimate) over the space of 6 days again in a hurry...

If you didn't get first Fangel did. You guys chased me out of first and I had a solid third. So close! Now to pay with Daredevil!

Unknown

pandaberry6 wrote:

What is the modifier and how is it affected? Is that the reason the mission point rewards kept fluctuating? Is it better to do the missions in order (or backwards in order)? Because I just randomly jump from mission to mission based on which is worth the most points that I think I can win.

Is there a general post on this in the Tips subforum? Ima go write one if there isn't. You get a multiplier applied to points from missions based on the difference between your score and the leader's. Usually seems to cap at 10, and reduces as you get closer. The idea is to keep the events competitive, let people skip some points refreshes without being left too far behind to recover, and make people think they're in with a shot at high placement when they're really not so that they stay invested.

Who "the leader" is has varied, but lately it's generally been the player out of the whole 60k with the highest score, nothing to do with your bracket, so even if you do know exactly what the difference has to be there's little you can do to game it fully because the score that's dragging you up is hidden from you. Can confirm that or something like it was in effect this time, because I had a severely reduced multiplier but not none when I was leading my bracket.

Got up with 30 minutes to close in 11th and managed to snatch first back with some increasingly sloppy Berserker Rage spam. Praise be to strong coffee. Even bought some +3all to hurry the last 10 minutes along, but I figure under the circumstances 100HP for a green X-Force is a fair price. I'm sorry. I'll try to crack Demiurge's server and delete the logs so they don't go thinking I'm happy about it, or anything.

Unknown

Thanos wrote:

Thought i had a shot at top 2, but in the last hours everyone came out of the wood work and i was lucky to finish in 8th. I'm burnt out after a million 230 matches. However now all the PvP fights seem a lot easier now. On another note, somebody seriously miscalculated the progression rewards. Guess they should have left them the way they were from the start, or added more over 20k points.

Well, I was wondering if they put those main missions up because they knew their code was a little screwy and people weren't completing other missions. But if they didn't, then ya, someone severely underestimated the progressions rewards.

Eddiemon

So Much Raaaaaage!!!!!

I think I ended up #3, and by like 60 points.

I waited till the end and stalked the top rangins, dong **** little Maggia mission for 120 points.

Then about 90 minutes out Hood respawned and I pounced. Went from #13 to #1 in 3 missions. It was on.

ANd I haven't tanked at all this tourney, so these were level 2000+ Dark Avengers masquerading as 230s.

6 minutes to go I was still up 300. Wandered into a Maggia mission and things went South. These guys were co-ordinated and there weren't enough blue tiles for Spider or Hood to do their thing. Spidey took two rounds to the chest and went down like a 2 dollar hooker. Wolverine scrfeamed a prolonged Noooooooo as Spidey fell in slow motion. Then he hulked out and went berserk. Sooo many entrails. Finally the last Maggia thig went down moaning 'not my spleen'.

And with >1 minute left I was at #3.

I jumped into another Maggia mission and did it wrong. I had Wolvie, Spidey and C Storm. Went for broke. 2 green matches and berserk. Matching as quickly as possible and trying to keep their attacks off teh board. I failed and spidey got shot (again). And Storm went ballistic with all them attack tiles on the board.

So then I just matched at random and let them shoot themselves to death on wolvie. If I had started with that strategy I might have managed a 20 second clear. It was UGLY. But I failed.

On the up side I got an extra 200 ISO because the event had expired.
On the down side when I checked my reward I was annoyed because I only got heroic tokens.
On the up side I am an idiot and that was the sub event reward
On the down side I now need to buy a new character slot
On the up side it is 3 colour Daredevil
On the down side it means that the next PvE event will be made harder if their scaling algorithm is to be believed.

Congrats those who beat me. I hate you.

Dayv

jozier wrote:

Anyway my X-Force was already 3/5/2. Now he can 4/5/2 but I might wait a bit.

I would definitely wait. Until the devs announce the changes, all we know is green will place strike tiles, red will hit hard, and yellow will heal.

If they don't announce details before the cover expires, I would apply it. They've committed to respec, eventually, from the sound of it.

Dayv

GEFPenst wrote:

Grats to Phantron - he got first in "Hell bracket". I wish my work and slow netbook didn't obstruct me from fighting for 1 place. Well, 8th is not to bad too. On one hand, it was very intense and challenging event, on other - this was one of, if not THE worst event for me, pushing my whole roster through grinder was not very entertaining task.

That's the bracket I was in as well, which may have fueled some of my frustration for this event.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I was keeping track of mission points and the scaling is always proportional. For example if one mission is base 100 and another is base 200, at max modifier you'd have 1000/2000. Now say you gained some points and the modifier becomes less, if you see the 100 base mission worth 570, then the 200 base mission is going to be worth 1140. Any discrepency is rounding issue or server lag. Since it's all proportional I'm pretty sure this implies the order does not matter. So, now that I have more time to think, this means you need to do the most time-consuming/difficult mission first when choosing which one to do at the 10X modifier. That is, say you noticed all your missions are worth 10X with 6 hours to go. You know they won't refresh again so you might as well use some of those points up. In this event, assuming you're not stuck with 'everyone is level 230', the most difficult main mission is likely Magneto + The Hood, followed by The Hood. So in retrospect I should have depleted the stacks for Business Partners first (this one almost caused a wipeout toward the end when I tried to do it in a hurry). Since Patch pretty much eats goons for breakfirst (they can't take advantage of Berserker Rage), you probably want to focus on all the villian battles first. In retrospect I also should've done the mandatory Storm team up battles, since she's definitely not as strong as your normal 3rd person and she's not even boosted.

No, the order can still matter.

Consider just those two missions - suppose they're the only ones and that you can only play them once. Suppose the rubber-banding works like this: If you are the leader, missions are worth 1x their base value. If you are up to 2700 points behind the leader, missions are worth (D+300)/300 times their base value, where D is the gap between you and the leader. If you are over 2700 points behind the leader the missions are worth 10x their base value. Maybe this is too simple but this captures the interesting features of the system in place, I think.

So then let's look at our two options in a few different situations:

Case 1: You are 6000 points behind the leader. Order doesn't matter because you'll get 10x value on both missions regardless. Neither one, even with max rubber-banding, pushes you within 3000 points of the leader. Order doesn't matter.

Case 2: You are 4000 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first nets 2000 points. But then you're only 2000 points behind the leader and will only get 767 points from the other mission, so you total 2767. Doing the 100 point mission first gives you 1000 points and puts you 3000 behind the leader, so you still get 2000 from the other mission and you total 3000 points. Should do the 100 point mission first.

Case 3: You are 1500 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first gives you 1200 points, leaving you 300 points behind the leader so that the 100 point mission gets you 200 points, for 1400 total. Doing the 100 point mission first gets you 600 points, leaving you 1100 points behind the leader so that the 200 point mission gets you 733 points, for 1333 total. Should do the 200 point mission first.

Case 4: You are 100 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first gets you 267 points, and the 100 point mission is just worth its base value, for 367 total. Doing the 100 point mission first gets you 133 points and then 200 for the other, for 333 total. Should do the 200 point mission first.

And obviously order doesn't matter if you are the leader because it's basically the same as Case 1.

So which one you ought to do first depends on how far behind you are, because of the way the rubber-banding switches from constant to varying to constant as you cross certain thresholds.

ClydeFrog76

Man, that last half hour was painful. Got booted out of the top ten after riding it all week and my high point missions refreshed a little too late to get back in. Managed 12 thanks to The Who times two. Sad Panda.

Oh well, still got a DD r/p. Think I need a break for a while, this event felt like a second job!

Not sure I like getting punished for having a large roster either tbh. Mine is 27 covers but hardly any of them are that high of a level, I'm just a collector thanks to my 30+ year love of comics!

Really want some non-competitive PVE but it's sounding like the next one is still versus other players? At least rubber banding will be toned down I guess, that really irks me.

Well done to all the top ten finishers!

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I was keeping track of mission points and the scaling is always proportional. For example if one mission is base 100 and another is base 200, at max modifier you'd have 1000/2000. Now say you gained some points and the modifier becomes less, if you see the 100 base mission worth 570, then the 200 base mission is going to be worth 1140. Any discrepency is rounding issue or server lag. Since it's all proportional I'm pretty sure this implies the order does not matter. So, now that I have more time to think, this means you need to do the most time-consuming/difficult mission first when choosing which one to do at the 10X modifier. That is, say you noticed all your missions are worth 10X with 6 hours to go. You know they won't refresh again so you might as well use some of those points up. In this event, assuming you're not stuck with 'everyone is level 230', the most difficult main mission is likely Magneto + The Hood, followed by The Hood. So in retrospect I should have depleted the stacks for Business Partners first (this one almost caused a wipeout toward the end when I tried to do it in a hurry). Since Patch pretty much eats goons for breakfirst (they can't take advantage of Berserker Rage), you probably want to focus on all the villian battles first. In retrospect I also should've done the mandatory Storm team up battles earlier too, since she's definitely not as strong as your normal 3rd person and she's not even boosted.

This is really helpful to me. I was really confused why my points were jumping around so much. But this makes perfect sense now. Thank you for explaining it to me so clearly. It will definitely help me In future events.

Unknown

Gotchaye wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I was keeping track of mission points and the scaling is always proportional. For example if one mission is base 100 and another is base 200, at max modifier you'd have 1000/2000. Now say you gained some points and the modifier becomes less, if you see the 100 base mission worth 570, then the 200 base mission is going to be worth 1140. Any discrepency is rounding issue or server lag. Since it's all proportional I'm pretty sure this implies the order does not matter. So, now that I have more time to think, this means you need to do the most time-consuming/difficult mission first when choosing which one to do at the 10X modifier. That is, say you noticed all your missions are worth 10X with 6 hours to go. You know they won't refresh again so you might as well use some of those points up. In this event, assuming you're not stuck with 'everyone is level 230', the most difficult main mission is likely Magneto + The Hood, followed by The Hood. So in retrospect I should have depleted the stacks for Business Partners first (this one almost caused a wipeout toward the end when I tried to do it in a hurry). Since Patch pretty much eats goons for breakfirst (they can't take advantage of Berserker Rage), you probably want to focus on all the villian battles first. In retrospect I also should've done the mandatory Storm team up battles, since she's definitely not as strong as your normal 3rd person and she's not even boosted.

No, the order can still matter.

Consider just those two missions - suppose they're the only ones and that you can only play them once. Suppose the rubber-banding works like this: If you are the leader, missions are worth 1x their base value. If you are up to 2700 points behind the leader, missions are worth (D+300)/300 times their base value, where D is the gap between you and the leader. If you are over 2700 points behind the leader the missions are worth 10x their base value. Maybe this is too simple but this captures the interesting features of the system in place, I think.

So then let's look at our two options in a few different situations:

Case 1: You are 6000 points behind the leader. Order doesn't matter because you'll get 10x value on both missions regardless. Neither one, even with max rubber-banding, pushes you within 3000 points of the leader. Order doesn't matter.

Case 2: You are 4000 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first nets 2000 points. But then you're only 2000 points behind the leader and will only get 767 points from the other mission, so you total 2767. Doing the 100 point mission first gives you 1000 points and puts you 3000 behind the leader, so you still get 2000 from the other mission and you total 3000 points. Should do the 100 point mission first.

Case 3: You are 1500 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first gives you 1200 points, leaving you 300 points behind the leader so that the 100 point mission gets you 200 points, for 1400 total. Doing the 100 point mission first gets you 600 points, leaving you 1100 points behind the leader so that the 200 point mission gets you 733 points, for 1333 total. Should do the 200 point mission first.

Case 4: You are 100 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first gets you 267 points, and the 100 point mission is just worth its base value, for 367 total. Doing the 100 point mission first gets you 133 points and then 200 for the other, for 333 total. Should do the 200 point mission first.

And obviously order doesn't matter if you are the leader because it's basically the same as Case 1.

So which one you ought to do first depends on how far behind you are, because of the way the rubber-banding switches from constant to varying to constant as you cross certain thresholds.

There's other things to note as well. In this one, if you weren't going for maximum refresh (doing everything on an 8 hour cycle), you could spread your mission clears out over 2-4 hours. Since there's always people playing the game, you can get maximum points for each mission up until the last refresh. And then, depending on when the max multiplier kicks in, you start to slowly do the missions over the last 3-4 hours. Do missions until you drop from max multiplier, wait, do some more, rinse, repeat.

In theory this works for 24 hour subs as well, but with the 26 hour ones you were on a strict 8 hour schedule if you wanted to stay on top.

Unknown

Derethus wrote:

There's other things to note as well. In this one, if you weren't going for maximum refresh (doing everything on an 8 hour cycle), you could spread your mission clears out over 2-4 hours. Since there's always people playing the game, you can get maximum points for each mission up until the last refresh. And then, depending on when the max multiplier kicks in, you start to slowly do the missions over the last 3-4 hours. Do missions until you drop from max multiplier, wait, do some more, rinse, repeat.

In theory this works for 24 hour subs as well, but with the 26 hour ones you were on a strict 8 hour schedule if you wanted to stay on top.

Yeah, that sort of thing came up a bit earlier. There's a lot more to strategy than what i just laid out, which only yields an optimal play order if you can do missions instantly, in which case you would wait until the last minute and then do them in the order I described. In the actual event I got first in my bracket by sitting on the 5 most valuable missions until the last 20 minutes, and until then I was just waiting until I fell to ~2500 behind and then doing another mission in order to maximize my gains from rubber-banding (for the last refresh, I mean).

Unknown

Gotchaye wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I was keeping track of mission points and the scaling is always proportional. For example if one mission is base 100 and another is base 200, at max modifier you'd have 1000/2000. Now say you gained some points and the modifier becomes less, if you see the 100 base mission worth 570, then the 200 base mission is going to be worth 1140. Any discrepency is rounding issue or server lag. Since it's all proportional I'm pretty sure this implies the order does not matter. So, now that I have more time to think, this means you need to do the most time-consuming/difficult mission first when choosing which one to do at the 10X modifier. That is, say you noticed all your missions are worth 10X with 6 hours to go. You know they won't refresh again so you might as well use some of those points up. In this event, assuming you're not stuck with 'everyone is level 230', the most difficult main mission is likely Magneto + The Hood, followed by The Hood. So in retrospect I should have depleted the stacks for Business Partners first (this one almost caused a wipeout toward the end when I tried to do it in a hurry). Since Patch pretty much eats goons for breakfirst (they can't take advantage of Berserker Rage), you probably want to focus on all the villian battles first. In retrospect I also should've done the mandatory Storm team up battles, since she's definitely not as strong as your normal 3rd person and she's not even boosted.

No, the order can still matter.

Consider just those two missions - suppose they're the only ones and that you can only play them once. Suppose the rubber-banding works like this: If you are the leader, missions are worth 1x their base value. If you are up to 2700 points behind the leader, missions are worth (D+300)/300 times their base value, where D is the gap between you and the leader. If you are over 2700 points behind the leader the missions are worth 10x their base value. Maybe this is too simple but this captures the interesting features of the system in place, I think.

So then let's look at our two options in a few different situations:

Case 1: You are 6000 points behind the leader. Order doesn't matter because you'll get 10x value on both missions regardless. Neither one, even with max rubber-banding, pushes you within 3000 points of the leader. Order doesn't matter.

Case 2: You are 4000 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first nets 2000 points. But then you're only 2000 points behind the leader and will only get 767 points from the other mission, so you total 2767. Doing the 100 point mission first gives you 1000 points and puts you 3000 behind the leader, so you still get 2000 from the other mission and you total 3000 points. Should do the 100 point mission first.

Case 3: You are 1500 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first gives you 1200 points, leaving you 300 points behind the leader so that the 100 point mission gets you 200 points, for 1400 total. Doing the 100 point mission first gets you 600 points, leaving you 1100 points behind the leader so that the 200 point mission gets you 733 points, for 1333 total. Should do the 200 point mission first.

Case 4: You are 100 points behind the leader. Doing the 200 point mission first gets you 267 points, and the 100 point mission is just worth its base value, for 367 total. Doing the 100 point mission first gets you 133 points and then 200 for the other, for 333 total. Should do the 200 point mission first.

And obviously order doesn't matter if you are the leader because it's basically the same as Case 1.

So which one you ought to do first depends on how far behind you are, because of the way the rubber-banding switches from constant to varying to constant as you cross certain thresholds.

Whoa. That was amazing. So, to maximize points: if you are far away from the leader then you do low payout missions first. But when you are closer to the leader then you do high point missions first.

NorthernPolarity

Super secret tech worked like a charm. Grinded main event to 1st place with 10 minutes left, then grinded my completely untouched subevent for maximum rubberbanding. Ended up ahead from second by 1k points.

Unknown

ClydeFrog76 wrote:

Really want some non-competitive PVE but it's sounding like the next one is still versus other players? At least rubber banding will be toned down I guess, that really irks me.

As far as I know they haven't said they intend to reduce the rubber band effect, though I might've missed it. They seem pretty married to the idea. What they acknowledged didn't work in the wild the way it did during in-house testing was the difficulty scaling; my guess is we'll be seeing that again but with hard caps, or something. If, as appears to have been the case if 60% of players weren't cheating, the scaling made this event much easier for players with weak rosters, that'll probably be the next forum kittystorm Demiurge needs to address.

I know where you're coming from regarding the stress, but Demiurge just doesn't do non-competitive. It doesn't seem to be in their mission statement for the game. For all its casual exterior, they're determined to build something brutally competitive around Bejeweled. There's always Puzzle Quest and it's many spin-offs and sequel, if you don't need men in tights and growly failed lab experiments with claws to keep you interested. Perverse as it might seem, I'd also suggest trying the PvP more. PvE is just a misnomer in this game - it's only another kind of tournament, and actually much more demanding, even if you ride the rubber band to the top. I swore I wouldn't try for high placement in another of these after Hulk 2. Well: never again. Until there's something shiny and I've forgotten how draining it is grinding for a week.

I do hope the new, communicative Demiurge posts some kind of post-mortem for this event in the news section. We don't know what their participation data tells them and it's hard to identify what's behind the amount of bad feeling floating around this past week, what with the cornucopia of reasons for it, but it'd be nice to hear their take on what worked, what went wrong, and what happens next.

Mawtful

ClydeFrog76 wrote:

Man, that last half hour was painful. Got booted out of the top ten after riding it all week and my high point missions refreshed a little too late to get back in. Managed 12 thanks to The Who times two. Sad Panda.

Oh well, still got a DD r/p. Think I need a break for a while, this event felt like a second job!

Not sure I like getting punished for having a large roster either tbh. Mine is 27 covers but hardly any of them are that high of a level, I'm just a collector thanks to my 30+ year love of comics!

Really want some non-competitive PVE but it's sounding like the next one is still versus other players? At least rubber banding will be toned down I guess, that really irks me.

Well done to all the top ten finishers!

You got dropped from the top 10? I was neck and neck with you all week, I think.

Mawtful

Veracity wrote:

ClydeFrog76 wrote:

Really want some non-competitive PVE but it's sounding like the next one is still versus other players? At least rubber banding will be toned down I guess, that really irks me.

As far as I know they haven't said they intend to reduce the rubber band effect, though I might've missed it. They seem pretty married to the idea. What they acknowledged didn't work in the wild the way it did during in-house testing was the difficulty scaling; my guess is we'll be seeing that again but with hard caps, or something. If, as appears to have been the case if 60% of players weren't cheating, the scaling made this event much easier for players with weak rosters, that'll probably be the next forum kittystorm Demiurge needs to address.

I know where you're coming from regarding the stress, but Demiurge just doesn't do non-competitive. It doesn't seem to be in their missions statement for the game. For all its casual exterior, they're determined to build something brutally competitive around Bejeweled. There's always Puzzle Quest and it's many spin-offs and sequel, if you don't need men in tights and growly failed lab experiments with claws to keep you interested. Perverse as it might seem, I'd also suggest trying the PvP more. PvE is just a misnomer in this game - it's only another kind of tournament, and actually much more demanding, even if you ride the rubber band to the top. I swore I wouldn't try for high placement in another of these after Hulk 2. Well: never again. Until there's something shiny and I've forgotten how draining it is grinding for a week.

The PvE events are really just PvP where nobody actually gets to attack the other competitors. This one in particular. So often I wanted to be able to throw down a shield on poor Hood so he would stop giving up points to everyone else.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Super secret tech worked like a charm. Grinded main event to 1st place with 10 minutes left, then grinded my completely untouched subevent for maximum rubberbanding. Ended up ahead from second by 1k points.

This strat worked for me too though there was no forethought involved...well, I didn't touch the last refresh of the last sub because I was worried about rubber banding, but then it turned out when I finished the main with like ten minutes left there was a ton of activity in the top ten so I jumped in and scored another 500 or so points which totally helped me keep the lead.

Unknown

pandaberry6 wrote:

Whoa. That was amazing. So, to maximize points: if you are far away from the leader then you do low payout missions first. But when you are closer to the leader then you do high point missions first.

Pretty much. The practical issue, aside from issues of difficulty, completion time, and other players gaining points over time, is that it's hard to be sure exactly where the rubber-banding thresholds are. I never really figured them out for the sub-events. But the main event had such extreme rubber-banding that you could find the threshold by trial and error as people bounced up and down around you.

Spider_Man

How did you finish Oversoul? I was rooting for you and Chin2taberu.


Deer717 owes me a flipped table.

Unknown

Deer717 wrote:

champion9782 wrote:

Unrealistic. 1st place has a high of level 50 im35. NOT TO BE OUT DONE by 2nd place 5th behind. A love player with 9 total characters and a high level of 30..... why Do we bother

If this isn't fixed by the next PVE, I'm done with this game. Now that we can see rosters it'll be easy enough to tell. Oni Neko and Chin2Taberu, I'm rooting for you guys. If Aceduece, BigCman, Rendar69, La Fiera, Mini9tailedFox, or Spider_Man win this bracket, I might flip a table.

Edit: And BBBomber is back. He's been way ahead all event, and his roster blows. Sigh.

Ugh, I was in that same bracket as well. I was at #1-2 as well until those players with **** rosters came out of nowhere. D3 owes me a damn 4* cover for their incompetence.