Chasing my tail

Snickity wrote:

Skip is your friend! Attacking someone for less than 25 pts means you just invited someone to take more points from you then you just got from them. If you defeat someone for 10 pts, they get to retaliate and will take 20+ pts from you if they defeat you on the first attempt. If you need a spike in points to hit a certain prize level, ok, but you'll be going backwards in the long run.

That's great, except that once you get to a certain point the matchmaking system won't give you anyone worth 25 points or more, either because there is nobody or because the people who do have it aren't in your matchmaking group.

It's completely and utterly broken.

I spent 15-20 minutes last night hitting the "Skip" button because every single match presented wasn't worth 25 points. The vast, vast majority were worth under 10 points including a large number worth 0 points.

I've fought my way up to near 1200 twice now (and, in fact, had one of the screens display 1200... only to get back to the lobby and discover I'm now at 1150. The attack message came through a minute later) only to find nobody worth more than 15 points to attack, no matter how much I skip. And then the retaliations start coming in and people I did beat for 25 points now hit me for 25-40 points back.

Thing is, it's not this way at all point levels. It's intentionally scaled to make breaking 1000 points difficult and staying above that near impossible. If you have 100 points and attack someone worth 100 points then you gain 25 and they lose about 10. At 500 points you gain 25, they lose about 15. At 800 it's even though -- gain 25, lose 25. So once you get beyond that it's increasingly unlikely that you'll keep your points. Add that to an utterly broken matchmaking system that doesn't display a majority of matches around your own point value and you wind up with the **** we have.

Saint Matthew wrote:

playing at weird hours in the night helps cuz less people are on. not the best advice but really the only one i can give that's helped. good luck!

Ditto this. I've suffered the same frustrations as you, more in the Iron Man tourny last week than in this Thor one. I found that if you play around dinner time (6-9 pacific time) you have a greater chance of not getting batted back down every time you make the tiniest progress. The wee hours of the night/morning are also decent, 2-5am.

Another reason I think I'm not hating life so much this Thor tourney is because I hopped in as soon as it started and pounded my way up to 500. It seemed less of a free-for-all once I reached that number. I'd get beat back down, but I found I was easily able to gain that back in 2-3 battles through retaliation and usually ended up higher than I was. I was more steadily making progress upward. (That's stagnated at this point. I can't seem to reach 1000 but that's maybe my fault, for other reasons, aka playing poorly/indifferently?) The higher I climb, the less frequently I seem to get attacked. This seems opposite to the Iron Man tourney where I felt like a huge target and was constantly attacked the higher I climbed. Maybe because my Thor team doesn't seem as easy to chew on as my Iron Man team?

One thing I notice is that in Iron Man, I was getting attacked constantly by lower rated people trying to get points. At my rating in Thor tourny, I seem to get attacked more frequently by players equal to or higher than me, probably because the pickings are slimmer. Those I can retaliate and make up the loss.

Other things I've been doing are skipping, skipping, skipping (I didn't even realize I could skip until near the end of the Iron Man tourney... Don't ask). I don't set the threshold as high as 25. If it's ~17+ I'll consider it. Any fight that I think will be too tough and give my team too much dmg, therefore putting me out of the game to heal for too long, I skip those too. Basically, if I see a Thor higher than lvl 65 or so, I automatically skip it. Juggernaut above 40 combined with Thor above 40? I hesitate. Rag above 25, I skip it lol. And I try not to go into a fight with my C. Storm matched against another C. Storm. I've learned the hard way that Raging Storm vs. Raging Storm = my team always ends up the loser.

As I said, though, some of these things wouldn't have worked in the last tourney, so they probably will prove ineffective in the next one. It is incredibly frustrating to be beat down as quickly as you move up. I've made my own thread complaining about it before.