Thick as Thieves (1 Apr - 8 Apr 2015)

Scoregasms

Ugh, hope that isn't the case as it seems like a dirty move. I was only planning to hit top progression and enjoy Easter weekend since I'm not playing PVE optimally on purpose for a bit. Just seems wrong to artificially extend that grind for those just wanting top progression. You can usually hit it without the essential, but I don't know if that's possible now without a whole lot of hardcore grinding all the way to the end.

ojcAust

I have to agree with Scoregasms. I have been hitting the grind in this event. Finished the first stage in 1st by 160 points ahead of a Crewsader member and I only hit 13950. So unless they give some more points in later stages 65000 is going to be very hard to reach for most people. Keeping the reward points for top progression of an event at the same level as they were when we had a 3 hr refresh seems either 1) not well planned, 2) an oversight or 3) just plain cruel.

We are talking about a 7 day event with PVE players working hard to hit these targets and the reward is Kamala Khan 3* for top progression, and she may be out of reach for most players without the essential cover already. I see why people walk away from the PVE grindfest when you can hit a 3* in PVP in one or two shield hops. 4* covers come at a 1000 points and if you have an alliance helping you out this is very achievable each event with maybe a days worth of play.

Still seems unbalanced towards PVP, but that is just a personal opinion.

dkffiv

Scoregasms wrote:

Ugh, hope that isn't the case as it seems like a dirty move. I was only planning to hit top progression and enjoy Easter weekend since I'm not playing PVE optimally on purpose for a bit. Just seems wrong to artificially extend that grind for those just wanting top progression. You can usually hit it without the essential, but I don't know if that's possible now without a whole lot of hardcore grinding all the way to the end.

I normally hit top progression after this first sub, currently at almost 20k with perfect clears on the first sub and the first two passes of the second. I must've had around 14500 from first sub and you can expect about another 23k or so from a perfect second sub. ~40k from first 2 subs with perfect passes, if the numbers don't increase massively in the last 2 subs we're probably looking at a theoretical max of around 100k points, maybe less.

Scoregasms

Lol, I can confirm you are a damn near perfect grinder dkffiv as I've been in a couple brackets with you and never able to match your pace. You always seem to have that final grind to an exact science! I'm ok taking second to that level of effort though, you are a pve machine

Regarding this progression nonsense, I'm seeing around 30% of sub points from essentials so far in the first 2 subs, if that continues, that seems to indicate those without KK would need a near perfect grind down of all available nodes all the way to the end if 100k is the theoretical top with essentials.

Seems silly to force almost everyone to play through the entire event if you just want KK and not Kingpin as this event scales horribly in the last 2 subs with some nodes. I was finally going to take a pve easy for once and just get that top progression with my low level characters only throughout, I may be completely scaled out of some nodes from the beginning next sub if my scaling doesn't adjust (which I do not expect it to after just one event).

dkffiv

It also depends on how rubberbanding affects things. Rubberbanding is much weaker than it used to be (which I'm happy about) but maybe people without Kamala will end up receiving 50% of the points they missed out from the essentials through banding.

jackstar0

Since missing a couple hours means I'm out of a Kingpin, I have to turn to getting the progression... but if that's also out of reach, due to scaling and needing to play optimally from here on, then I'm questioning the wisdom of all the things that stacked against everyone in this event...

Unknown

I missed about 1 refresh (started 7 hours after event started) and ended with about 12K points and won my sub, so there's about 14K points in the 1st sub since I pretty much grinded every node down to 1 (left 60 points on the 2 hardest nodes) and that was 1.5 days. So far the second sub has 2371 points in one clear (and 1950 for first sub). In theory you can get 7 full clears plus everything down to 1 in 2 days so that's 9.5 times the base so that's 9.5 * 2371 = 22525 points. Assuming the trend continues of ~20% point increase per sub and that the third sub lasts 2 days we should have 9.5 * (1950*1.2*1.2) = 26676, and the last day has 6.5 * (1950*1.2^3) = 21902 points. So the total available points are 14K + 22525 + 26676 + 21902 = 85103 points.

Looks like a tough crowd this time for hitting the progression reward, though the increase in the later subs might be more than 20% (impossible to tell at this point). From a rough eyeball test it seems like 40% of the points come from the essentials so if you don't have KK you'd be nowhere close to hitting 65K based on this projection.

SnagglePuss

Phantron wrote:

I missed about 1 refresh (started 7 hours after event started) and ended with about 12K points and won my sub,

GG, I was chasing the top 5 in this slice then saw your name.. cheque please!

Missed the opening refresh and didn't play that optimumly but already 1k off the top 10. As it's only top 10 with 2 covers may ease my foot off if i slip further behind. In terms of other PVE is it usually 20% increase per sub?

Bowgentle

SnagglePuss wrote:

In terms of other PVE is it usually 20% increase per sub?

33% increase usually.

Unknown

SnagglePuss wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I missed about 1 refresh (started 7 hours after event started) and ended with about 12K points and won my sub,

GG, I was chasing the top 5 in this slice then saw your name.. cheque please!

Missed the opening refresh and didn't play that optimumly but already 1k off the top 10. As it's only top 10 with 2 covers may ease my foot off if i slip further behind. In terms of other PVE is it usually 20% increase per sub?

As pointed out this is a lot less than the normal (33%). Sometimes it's +50% per sub like Simulator Basic. Whether that means this event is just unusually tight or that they're planning a bigger increase at the end is anyone's guess at this point.

Scoregasms

Well, it's a holiday weekend and the Reds do enjoy their weekends and don't do anything with regards to MPQ, beginning to think I should do the same, lol.

Hopefully someone will respond on Monday and confirm whether or not this was intended. Anderson V is already 140 levels above my selected characters (lol), but I can manage the other ones I think. Just worried leaving the hard node during the final grind will have me fall short of the top progression.

Unknown

How come there's only 1 token for this dealie?

Cmon D3

Unknown

I didn't have Kamala covers until a few minutes ago so I can only hope for t50. Currently at #40 with 14600 in main. What bothers me is the crazy community scaling. I left the game with the Anderson Bio-Technic V being 250-260lv. I return after 6-7 hours and the levels are 305. **** happened? Ares deals 700+ damage for each green once Onslaught goes off. I managed to beat it with Patch/Hulk/2*Storm, but I'm not going to try it again if I can stay in t50 just by playing the other nodes.

Unknown

That node is so **** dumb.

Free Onslaught every few turns and thanks to the goon's overpowered tile strength, basic match-3s do 400 damage and match-4s do more than 1000 damage.

Unknown

Great equivalent of a digital pants ****. Couple days left.. deep inside top 50.. nowhere near the top progression prize.

Kudos though for screwing up the game in new ways ( same overpowered foes, escalating number of increasingly useless characters, long duration levels which require increasingly low points).

*bends over*
*voids bowels*

optimus2861

I haven't quite hit 20K yet and I'm just outside the top 100. I'm not feeling good about hitting that last progression, which frankly was the only thing I was interested in during this event. I think it was set too darn high. And I have Kamala from the last event, so I can clear the essential nodes.

Unknown

Someone should have Scotland Yards opened by now I'd think. Does anyone know what's the base points for clearing every node once in Scotland yard? Looking at the alliance top scores prove to be fairly indecisive, as I see a couple of 40Ks which is likely on path to hit 65K just fine but it was always the case the top players was going to hit 65K just fine, so it's impossible for me to speculate how it looks like for everyone else.

Scoregasms

It's about 4180 ish for 48 hours.

Unknown

Scoregasms wrote:

It's about 4180 ish for 48 hours.

That'd put Scotland yard at 4180 * 9.5 = 39710 points for theoreical maximum so it'd be more than enough to hit 65K but is still not very useful for most people. If you do 7 full clears that's about 29K points (don't miss a single refresh for the first 40 hours plus ~1.5 clears at the last 8 hours).

Scoregasms

Phantron wrote:

Scoregasms wrote:

It's about 4180 ish for 48 hours.

That'd put Scotland yard at 4180 * 9.5 = 39710 points for theoreical maximum so it'd be more than enough to hit 65K but is still not very useful for most people. If you do 7 full clears that's about 29K points (don't miss a single refresh for the first 40 hours plus ~1.5 clears at the last 8 hours).

Yeah, optimal clear was around 40k based on guesstimating, I'll probably clear about 30k worth based on past subs so far, which would mean I hit the top progression in the last sub, top clearers will def get it before the end of the final grind of sub 3.

There are a good amount of all goon nodes and there are 3 essentials for KK, I've never seen progression rewards this high, even with 3 hour refreshes, hope this isn't a trend they want to continue.