Board Thread:Current Episode Discussion/@comment-9890645-20140826230951/@comment-9890645-20140827085757

As usual, main left // alt right. A tale of two players that were both me.

Final Rank: 18 // 1071

Final Score:  203,897,583 // 17,410,318

Deck Power (Pre/Begining/End/Post): ~63k / up to 212855 / 66550 w/Megs and 3x OP // ~40k / up to 65191 / 41.4k (no prizes leveled lol like I can afford to)

Money Spent (and currency): ZERO. No need! It's Raiderpalooza!!!

Coins Spent: See previous entry.

Battle Cubes: -2161 (+98 full) // -88 (+10 full)

Energon Cubes: +979 // +332

Ruby Pulls: A ton, various and sundry // One Cheeto bot and three weapons.

Medals: 8 OP alts, 5 OP bots (had 5 MTM within 11 OP pieces), 3 OP weapons, and a ton of Cheetos - but no Cheeto weapons! Note that Day 1 I pulled NOTHING but Cheeto alts. // Day 1: 3x Cheeto alts. (Frankly, I was stunned at the Cheeto alt flow between the two accounts on Day 1 with so many others starting their R6 chases!) Day 6: Mix of Cheetos. No weapons and zero R6 pieces.

There is another aspect to medals to discuss here: the cost of MTMing the x16s (and the x10s initially) to my stockpile of banked medals. I spent ~6k gold, ~4.6k silver, and ~4.7k weapon medals on leveling all ep (including leveling Megs). While I still have a decent stockpile (~17k each of gold and silver and ~35k weapon), I have rarely had to access them so heavily. The lure of drawing raiders also meant I didn't recoup any extra. I also am -35M credits (now just under 40M).

Liked: Well, players were wistfully nostalgic for some old-school raid, and, by golly, did Mobage give it to us with a new spin (it's Raiderpalooza!) that made it worthwhile to play hard... if you got lucky Day 1 (if you had a T1 deck walking in, you could add a day or so to the period in which you needed to get lucky). Raising the payouts on banked medals is absolutely INCREDIBLE and is the only reason I have any banked medals left!

Disliked: Zero advance notice from Mobage on: R7, harder raid bosses, Raiderpalooza, increases to payouts of banked medals. No notice of the SAVAGE buff to Tankor 4-7 with the Day 2 update. R7 stats disappointing across the board (including weapon) and the "special ability" is probably not as good as it seems. Old-school raid was fun until it really became old-school raid and clog queue became a major factor. Bosses were generally way overpowered, and the % of OPness increased with increasing boss level to a brutally unfair ending with the 35B HP beast that was Megatron L9. In hindsight, it would have been completely appropriate, given how the episode turned out, had they given an Primal RAW set in points rewards.

Other: A tale of two players:

Day 1, I started playing both accounts hard. The bad luck on medal pulls both accounts suffered affected Swans greatly, as I couldn't 1-cube everything until I had an MTM x10 up and running, so I ultimately played it a little less. (Please note, if you haven't tried, it's very tiring to play two accounts hard on two devices simultaneously. I'm considering retiring/passing on Swans soon because it's a decent account, but not worth it to me as a human to run it and my main properly at once.) Like most T2 players, Swans is tapped on all resources needed to max cards out due to the necessity of maxing a max amount of raiders quickly, so getting stuck with Cheeto alts really hurt... but I slogged through and ended the day strong with one MTM x10 and 2 maxed alts waiting for bots (and one would be coming soon via chips or rubies, I forget which happened first for Swans). I think (don't hold me to this) I was ~80 on main and ~300 on alt at end of Day 1. I was majorly up on resources and feeling good about Day 2.

Now for Day 2... I have to start with Swans. Boy, was I absolutely STUNNED to find I was no longer able to 1-cube the Tankors. It pissed me off so ferociously, I practically tossed that iPad aside and gave up on trying. I knew that my main would be alright, but now I needed to plan out what to do about the rest of the episode. Saturday was my birthday, and I had plans to be out all day (caught a Yankees game, a Cyclones game, and the Doctor Who premiere), so I knew I couldn't just expect to T1 this, but I figured I'd try, as, at this point, it wasn't costing me much besides a few EC here and there due to the plentiful seeds showing up in my queue (thanks, ironically, to the buff that Swans got screwed by). I was MTMing Cheetos easy at this point and landed half an OP (finally).

Day 3 started with me quickly finishing an OP and being off to the races. If I was going to survive the coming outage, I had to score a ton now and see what happens. I went to bed in the 30s... played a quick bit in the morning, and left for the day. I think I was in the 90's when I got home 2h into Day 4 (I mistimed the Doctor Who start time, d'oh). I played for a short time, then headed out to my friend's house, where I played a little Hearthstone (needed to finish Naxxramas but was stuck on Patchwerk) and enough TFL to get me back into T1. From here on out, I never left T1. I was playing hard both to stay in T1 and to (hopefully) increase my OP count so I can stay in T1 without losing all my BC (I have ~2.9k left) or having to abandon the run because of it. This wasn't THAT important to me.

Well, the queue clog hit harder and harder as the last three days wore on as a lot of players seemed to have exhausted their BC supplies (or reached unacceptable levels) and were much more conservative... never mind that many of them had DPs that just didn't deal meaningful amounts of damage to the bosses (consider a full 1% of Megs 9's HP is 350M, and Swans with 1 raider wasn't doing that), and thus either caused bosses to decay and clog the queues or led players like me to expend more BCs than remotely desirable to keep the operation going. Anyway, upper T1 and the game in general had slowed down enough where I decided to see how much damage not playing for four days did to Swans - I was ~4500 there. Well, time to get to work... but the queue clog caused just enough drag on my ability to score points (despite a HUGE last minute fast revamp of my allies list) where 6.5h of hard playing left me just 1M or so short of T2... Disappointing, because what this means to me is that, if I had bothered to pick up the other iPad ONCE in the intervening days, I would have easily T2d there without the insane bum rush I was making at the end.

<p style="margin-bottom:0px!important;text-align:left;">Ultimately, the biggest problem with this episode is that not only your ability to place high but also YOUR ABILITY TO ENJOY THE EPISODE AT ALL became less a function of time or skill and more a function of luck (or the resources to give bad luck the finger AND the desire to expend such in the hopes that your luck will change with time and increased chances).

<p style="margin-bottom:0px!important;text-align:left;">In closing (finally, sorry, y'all know I get long winded here)... Congratulations to all the T1 finishers (including some first-timers here), and to all who got what they wanted... A huge thanks to all my allies for seeding me and hitting my seeds... and of course to WIKIA CHAT ROOM... You guys freaking rule, seriously. This was my 24th T1 (and likely my last for a good time to come), and you guys helped make it as enjoyable as my first, despite all the BS we endured this episode. Peace, folks. See you on the boards, in the chats and in the queues! :D