The Simulator (PvE) - (May 30 - June4)

DirigiblePilot

Lyrian wrote:

Surprised no one has complained yet about Simulation 7 yet. Perhaps the levels aren't high enough yet on this one.

Beware the new Doombot Coordinator. Although it is only a 1* because it is a grunt, the opponent an equivalent of a "Gold" Doctor Doom, outside of its low health pool.

It can cast Summon Demons at the same potency as Doom, but at only 7 AP instead of Doom's 12 AP. Also, it has an altered Blue power to suit the fight on the node. For 6 Blue AP, Narcissism converts blue tiles on the board into yellow and not black, to feed Modern Thor. Plus, of course as a grunt, it can generate its own AP to fuel these abilities a 2 Blue + Black per round. Fortunately, both abilities requires 4 turn CD to activate as a grunt.

Still, avoid being caught off guard on this one.

Yeah, I went into it thinking I was fighting Doom, then saw that an ability was ready and it said Summon Demons for 7 AP and I thought wow now I really want to upgrade Doom's black. And then I realized what it was, and I realized that it had very little HP.

EDIT: One other thing: Am I the only one who's peeved that they gave us 50 and 70 points for the opening nodes, but the rest are multiples of 100? My individual event scores are nice and round, but my overall score always ends in 20! Grr!
Isn't it a good sign for the direction of the game that that's my biggest complaint about this event?

EDIT AGAIN: Oh wait never mind, as documented earlier points refresh slowly rather than jumping up, so now my score will be off.

Linkster79

A quick question for those who have a better idea than me. In normal I am 2nd and have 18119 points and 5th has 17572 points, should I be good for top 5 as I have to be at work in like 6 hours?

Same for Hard, I am 2nd with 29605 and 5th has 28943. I think top 5 will be a bit of a long shot on this one but 10th has 27347 so that may be more realistic.

morgh

I usually got about 10.000 points from a single hard+normal refresh - so this should answer your question...
IMO both top 5 and top 10 are out of the question unless you have some nice juicy points left and are planning to play in the last hour or 90 minutes...

Linkster79

morgh wrote:

I usually got about 10.000 points from a single hard+normal refresh - so this should answer your question...
IMO both top 5 and top 10 are out of the question unless you have some nice juicy points left and are planning to play in the last hour or 90 minutes...

It is nigh on midnight here and I have to be at work for 6am, which means I have to be up at 5am. Event ends at 5am so no way am I going to do a 13 hour work shift on 3.5 hours sleep. Especially as I have to drive a 2.5 tonne forklift.

Thanks for the reply though.

Unknown

Linkster79 wrote:

A quick question for those who have a better idea than me. In normal I am 2nd and have 18119 points and 5th has 17572 points, should I be good for top 5 as I have to be at work in like 6 hours?

Same for Hard, I am 2nd with 29605 and 5th has 28943. I think top 5 will be a bit of a long shot on this one but 10th has 27347 so that may be more realistic.

For the subs, I doubt you'll stay top 10 unless you can play in the last hour or so.

In my hard bracket I'm at 26k, which is 53rd right now. Top is 31k. My nodes haven't fully refreshed and I know that even with what's on the board I could overtake 1st place if I really wanted to grind.
Same sort of thing with easy mode. I'm 14.5k, 71st. 18k for 1st. Nodes that won't fully refresh for another 3 hours on a first clear alone would give me 3-4k.

So yeah, the rubber band is back, meaning if you're not playing in the last hour or so, you may stay top 50, but top 5-10 is highly unlikely.

Unknown

Something is very, very wrong with the refreshing of the nodes on this event....

Its been mentioned a bit on this thread, but I can pretty much verify this. The whole stack refreshing system has been completely rewritten. The old 8/12 hour system methodology likely does not apply anymore.

Update: Rubberbanding is confounding the data too much to be accurate to capture precise data. The point values are too high, and I'm not at the very top of the leaderboard to get rid of the rubberband completely.

What I can say for absolute certainty is that some percentage of the total points in a stack + rubberband multiplier are covered every 5 minutes on the dot. On the time remaining meter, its on the 4s and 9s. Ex: 3h24m, 3h19m, 3h14m, and so on.

Current running theory before my data got rubberbanded out of whack is 2/3 of 1% of the total node points are recovered every 5 minutes + relevant rubberbanding value. At 12 server ticks (at 5m per) each hour, that is about 8% recovery per hour. Times a 12 hour refresh, that is 96%, which is probably 100% and my data is a bit flawed. (Would be 0.694%/tick to be precisely 100%).

If the stacks on nodes have truly become evenly regenerating over time (instead of at fixed intervals from the last played stack on a pin), then this changes the methodology for clearing pins for maximum points considerably.

TazFTW

I know that when I did my last pass a fully refreshed Sim 8, 9, & 10 were all the same starting value. So, maybe there's a rubberband/refresh cap?


[edit] Just looked at my nodes:

Normal
Sims 8, 9, & 10: 991
Sims 3, 4, & 7 : 661
Sims 1, 5, 6: 330

Hard
Sims 8, 9, & 10: 1452
Sims 3, 4, & 7 : 968
Sims 1, 5, 6: 484

They're multiples.

Unknown

TazFTW wrote:

I know that when I did my last pass a fully refreshed Sim 8, 9, & 10 were all the same starting value. So, maybe there's a rubberband/refresh cap?


[edit] Just looked at my nodes:

Normal
Sims 8, 9, & 10: 991
Sims 3, 4, & 7 : 661
Sims 1, 5, 6: 330

Hard
Sims 8, 9, & 10: 1452
Sims 3, 4, & 7 : 968
Sims 1, 5, 6: 484

They're multiples.

Hrmm.... I just noticed that on my side as well. Cleared two non-essentials, Simulation 3 and 4 twice on Hard, and all of the nodes have suddenly jumped to multiples of each other. Waited two 5 minute refresh ticks, none of the nodes are gaining points anymore. Looked at Normal, where I have not played for about 6-7 hours, and the nodes are still gaining points on 5 minute intervals.

This would seem that there seems to be some kind of normalization wall/penalty being enforced for clearing the high point nodes in a sub. Very strange that all of the essential nodes have zeroed in on the exact same point value, despite possessing different base pin values.

simonsez

This is making my head hurt. So how would one maximize their points if this is the norm going forward?

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

This is making my head hurt. So how would one maximize their points if this is the norm going forward?

Hard to say for sure, without knowing all of the variables being tossed at us. For now, clearing at the end of the event is still a sound course of action.

In theory, if points regenerated universally at a flat rate, irregardless of the numbers of stacks cleared on a pin, then the optimum answer would be to clear every pin once as soon as it hits max value and wait for each pin to regenerate back from 80% to full. However, this is extremely time consuming, and there appear to be countermeasures in place to prevent this course of action from occurring.

So, until the full scope of the changes is understood, the answer is simply "We don't know".

Unknown

Were these always ending 15 minutes after the hour?

Unknown

Might as well have aimed for ending on the hour. Servers going to be dead or unstable for the last 15 minutes

Bacon Pants

Perfect time for Comm Link Disrupted messages...Not cool.

EDIT: Gobstopper, sorry for hitting you twice in the Sentry PVP...you were worth 39 and I just wanted to get the 300 point token...which was useless.

Deimos12

Can't play at all, comm link disrupted every time I try to start a match

Unknown

Hah. Of course. Making a rush to make Top 50 in Hard Mode, had a shot at it, and Comm Links Disrupted. Wow...

Unknown

Servers are pretty toast for me too.
It's going to be ironic if this is because, after moving the event end time back, it now has to content with the reward processing because of the 2 PVP events that finished.

Unknown

Anyone have the refresh time for the servers to be back working?

kensterr

Compensation server can't cope with the giving out of the ISO and HP awards, bringing down other servers...

Seriously with so many server issues it is high time they take servers offline for a maintenance or just skip some PVP tourneys until they can come up with a patch to balance the server load.

Unknown

The Punisher required in Essentials. Niceeeee

SolidQ

M.Storm + Bp + LT good