Week 11 ends with a Mayan theme to kick off Book of Souls tour part II and a new 5* Eddie...
Congrats to Enti! A well deserved first place victory.
Two weeks in a row that we've had a different winner - though it looks like Jofer is not quite ready to give up his top 3 position yet...
And this week is already off to a bang with the return of ShaolinLondo, who has already taken a very early lead. If he has the "attack bug" he could be quite hard to catch. If matchmaking has normalized it could be a pretty exciting week at the top.
Which brings me to a topic I've been hammering into the ground - the point system...
This is a topic that was discussed at the end of the week 10 thread, but because it was buried at the end I thought I'd cut and paste snips of a a comment I had made to start this weeks thread
The greatest predictor of success in this game is how hard you're willing to work. Jofer has a determination like no other. No matter how things were set up, he'd be number one - I loved his analogy about giving his account to another player - wouldn't make a difference. They wouldn't duplicate what he's done.
But the SECOND biggest predictor is defensive losses. When you're at the top it's 20 points a loss. And even 12 points is a big deal if you're getting attacked 450 times and your competitor is attacked 300 times while making the same number of offensive attacks.
Kind of like going to work, and while you're making the same as the guy next to you, he's paying 25% in taxes but you're paying 45%. Suck it up? Guess you could do that - but I doubt you'd be happy about it.
So my point was we know matchmaking has been a work in progress and up to this point broken.
So my suggestion was to make point losses for breaks in defense minimal - ex 0-5 points - and continue to reward holds. Players will STILL have to buy Ironite to compete - but from a psychological perspective you will go forward much more proportionate to your effort, defense will STILL matter, and if the match lists are still broken it wouldn't matter nearly as much.
Until we have great confidence that matchmaking is "fair" - and to be honest, it has seemed glitchy from the beginning of beta - I'm going to continue to ask the developers to rethink this system and encourage defensive holds to be a carrot, without making defensive losses a stick. Even once it's fixed - a system that rewards instead of penalizes would be better from a psychological perspective.
Another topic of the day I hear being discussed a lot is Visions Eddie. It seems that if he's in your roster, he's on your team. He's populating PvP like rabbits on fertility drugs.
He DID need an update - no question there - but is he now a 10* Eddie instead of a 5* Eddie? I'm using him myself and wouldn't even consider another Eddie in this talisman-heavy environment. He's kept my Holds at a very respectable level - and when I lose it's usually due to a crash or a VE team. But is he too much? Or would Holds be too low if he wasn't there? The developers have said they'd like more diversity in PvP. I think it's pretty safe to say Visions Eddie is the "new Mummy" and working against that goal.
On to stats - very similar to what I saw before the last matchmaking update (which caused those of us near the top to become Invisible)
Attacks: 561
Times Attacked: 373
Ratio: 0.66
My ratio almost doubled because attacks on me soared in the last few days. We've been assured that this is normal - those who weren't getting attacked are now being attacked more, and those who were getting heavily attacked are being attacked less to even things out. I don't think it will ever be "1.0" for the really active players because we attack so much.
This weeks stats will be a matchmaking system in flux - next weeks should be more revealing.
Thanks for posting - it's really the only way we the players have of seeing how the fixes that are being applied are working!