ZackMacKenzie

A Second Chance, final results: Dark Lord (Pooky) Fights / Shard Drop / Cumulative Progress 58 / 5 / 5 12 / 7 / 12 2 / 12 / 24 9 / 6 / 30 14 / 11 / 41 13 / 6 / 47 3 / 12 / 59 6 / 9 / 68 9 / 6 / 74 7 / 6 / 80 1 / 4 / 84 1 / 5 / 89 14 / 3 / 92 7 / 2 / 94 2 / 3 / 97 4 / 11 / 108. Complete, 8 flowers, 162 battles, 9.9% hit rate, 66.7% return rate, 6.75 shards/drop Gruntt (Nicole) Fights / Shard Drop / Cumulative Progress 8 / 12 / 12 6 / 2 / 14 2 / 12 / 26 23 / 10 / 36 2 / 3 / 39 6 / 7 / 46 12 / 10 / 56 5 / 4 / 60 6 / 12 / 72 2 / 1 / 73 1 / 9 / 82 32 / — / 82. End of event. 82 shards, 105 fights, 9.5% hit rate, 78.1% return, 8.2 shards/drop. This was my best classic/revival event in the shard era, by a significant margin (1.82 girls, 1.59 girls, 1.55 girls) and yet none of them have lived up to Kinkoid's professed 'average' of both girls without refills. This is the only one that fits in @jelom's suggested typical variance / for the majority. I see wide variability between players as randomness would predict. I'm not seeing as much variance within players yet. Some people have managed both every time. Some have hit the 100-shard jackpot multiple times. Others, like me, haven't managed both yet. If they don't converge soon then there is a problem that I personally consider a deal-breaker. It's early yet, so I'll have to see how it shakes out... Interesting pattern of a prolonged (more than a full day + carry-over combativity) dry spell at the beginning and another at the end. Makes me wonder if there isn't some sort of self-correcting factor incorporated into the randomness. That type of mechanism is common for simulations, but not for open population games. The total of 190 shards came in the middle 176 battles = 14.8% hit rate, 108% return, 7.3 shards/drop. (The outer doldrums were 0-for-89 combined!) This post also celebrates my 1-millionth Experience Point.

Can someone post a link to where this was explicitly stated? As I've yet to come close to getting both girls in any of the classic & revival events, I'd like to know whether my luck is bad or epic fail bad.

I find this ironic, so I thought I'd share. On a fairly regular basis people complain about how the RNG sucks, and is especially bad to them. Here's my 'proof' that it screws Kinkoid over, too. Each time there has been an exceptionally good koban offer I've been quite tempted to fork over the money. Unfortunately for Kinkoid, each time the RNG has decided to snub me in the worst way, erasing any motivation I had to spend. This time it was ONE drop in SIXTY-NINE attempts for an event girl, for FIVE measly shards. That wasn't just a random dry spell cherry-picked from the middle of the event...it was how it STARTED. So, in a very real way the RNG has conspired to save me money and rob Kinkoid of some income. QED?

Second Chance Dark Lord / Pooky: 67 fights, 1 drop, 5 shards. The "lucky" battle was #58. If this continues, I'll probably give up. Revivals are supposed to be the easy events.

Is anyone collecting this data for aggregate analysis?

Thanks for the heads-up, George. I'll check it out ASAP.

It is still too early for any single person to evaluate the shard system accurately, and it will still be too early for quite a while. We could shorten that time significantly if we pooled results but I don't see much, if any, motivation within the community to do this. Still, reporting results has some (limited) value so I'll go ahead and share them. (No one made a thread for the event, and since it is already over, I don't see the point in starting one now.) Welp, I guess I can't exactly complain about the shard system as a whole — I managed to get 4 girls, plus one extra shard, and 3 bonus flowers. It only cost me a smidgen under 10k kobans for about 950 extra attempts. Any time I can earn more girls than were debuted I consider it an excellent result. I went in hoping that I'd be able to snag all 5 of the girls I could get without pachinko. Early on, it looked like this was indeed possible. Unfortunately, results steadily declined over the course of the 4 days. That was just one of the annoying patterns that may have emerged. Ninja Spy - Windia: 214 fights; 30 hits; 102 shards; 14.0% hit rate; 47.7% rate of return; 3.4 avg / hit. Gruntt - Evelyn: 251 fights; 29 hits; 100 shards; 11.6% hit rate; 398.8% rate of return; 3.4 avg / hit. (1) Dark Lord - Kyoto:394 fights; 37 hits; 101 shards; 9.4% hit rate; 25.6% rate of return; 2.7 avg / hit. (2) Edwarda - Trinket: 293 fights; 32 hits; 100 shards; 10.9% hit rate; 34.1 % rate of return; 3.1 avg / hit. (3) Donatien - Barell 56 fights; 1 hit; 1 shard; 1.8% hit rate; 1.8% rate of return; 1 avg / hit (4) (1) Evelyn would have been better, except that it took 53 fights to get a single hit once I reached 98 shards. Fortunately, it wasn't a singleton, it provided exactly the 2 shards needed for completion. (2) Started off like gangbusters but steadily declined thereafter. It got bleak once Kyoto was 50% complete. (3) Slow start, slow finish, fantastic in between. (4) Donatien was the only boss who still had (and still has) world girls to release. I did manage to get 2 hits on world girls in those 56 fights, but who cares? I could have gotten those any time I wanted, which cannot be said for the event girl! I think this is proof that world girls DO interfere with event girls, and that the interference effects ARE significant. I had posted about this under Feedback", hoping to get clarification from the devs, but none of them have bothered responding in the 3+ weeks. To me it feels like they don't want to own or acknowledge this player-hostile choice. FWIW, these attempts were NOT technically last overall. I actually went to Donatien FIRST but gave up after 33 tries with 2 world girl hits but no event girl hits, fearing that the interference would be too great to allow for completion before time expired. Given that I had multiple other bosses available, I moved on to them. The last 23 fights were at the end of the event since I had no access to fight Karole and all the other bosses had given up the ghost already. Those 23 fights produced a grand total of 1 shard, but at least it was for the event girl. The three patterns I see are: (A) a general decline in returns the closer you get to completion; (B) the world/event girl interference IS significant AND works AGAINST the player; and... one that is less obvious. Edwarda: 293 fights for completion, CASH on misses = 10,500 ymen Gruntt: 251 fights for completion, CASH on misses = 7,500 ymen Ninja Spy: 214 fights for completion, CASH on misses = 5,500 ymen Dark Lord: 394 fights for completion, CASH on misses = 3,500 ymen Between this event and the previous ones, it does appear that I'm being forced to fight longest against the cheapest bosses more than the more lucrative bosses. I don't include Donatien here because the fact that he still has all three of his story girls and the obvious destructive interference they cause spoils his results. And since I'm already posting, here's my early returns for Second Chances... 55 fights Vs. Dark Lord, ZERO SHARDS! If the system hasn't been rigged to force us to slog against the mook bosses for forever less a day, then the game absolutely HATES me!

The core group of girls seems to be intended to be the main source of income, with all other girls providing relatively less, regardless of rarity. Also, the raw amount of ymens given isn't enough to know whether it's gypping you. You also need to know how long it takes between payouts. 1567 every 15 minutes would be awesome. 1567 every 3 hours is quite ho hum.

Yep. 8 of them, actually. Could climb to 9 before we hit April.

I'm curious, but don't call me George. I'm sitting on 11 partial girls at the moment. Anyone else have that many or more?

Things went a bit better for me this time around. I thought that a pattern was forming after the previous events ended with similar results. Lovely Moments: 1.55 girls. Loving Lupa took about as long as expected (12.3% rate, 5.94 shards/drop), and I could only manage about half a Bunny (10%, 5 per). Definitely poorer final results than many have predicted as the norm and it didn't help that the event ended with an 0-22 run. The hit rates were OK, but the hits weren't as sizable as expected (6.5 per). Easter Feast: 1.59 girls. Carine took seemingly forever (8.29%, 2.94 per). Progress with Alex was reasonable, but there simply wasn't enough time left in the event to get close to a girl drop (11.7%, 2.81 per). It didn't help that the event ended on an 0-15 run. Overall, both the rate and the size were below expectation (10%, 3.5 per). So, I expected another 1.5 - 1.6 girls this time around, again ending with a long-ish dry spell. Spring Break: 2 girls. Spring Lola took about a day and a half! I was a bit shocked at how night and day things were here. (17.6%, 7.1 per, which worked out to 1.25 shards per battle!) I had oodles of time to earn Virginia, most of which I ended up needing (13.2%, 6.4 per, 0.84 shards/fight). Still, there was some time left to pump Finalmecia and/or save for the start of the next event. The hit rates were higher to DOUBLE what I'd experienced previously, and the size was slightly higher than expected (6.7 actual vs 6.5 expected). Easter Feast was the only Classic Event among these examples, so maybe the hit rate is different between the various types of events? This wasn't advertised the way that shards/hit varying by event type was, but that doesn't mean it isn't a thing. Going into this Epic event expecting a disaster since that's what I got last time around. At least this time I'll walk away with some shards instead of nothing.

Personally, I expected better. Delivering the rewards 2 weeks after the fact is better than just ignoring the problem but doesn't take into account the costs people may have experienced as a result of the delay. There has been compensation for smaller problems than this one in the past, but none this time. IMHO, this is not a good look.

If ALL the games caused errors or server time-outs, the problems was/is almost certainly at your end, be it the browser code, your time-out setting, your ISP or some other unique-to-you problem. No one else has the issue to the degree you do, another clue that it is an issue at your end. Also, @Daniele provided you a perfectly usable workaround which you ignored. Plus, you characterize the problem as a "crash" which grossly exaggerates the problem and makes you sound even more like a whiny troll. Finally, what exactly about your screenshots do you believe "proves" that the problems aren't derivative (or massively worsened) by things at your end? Given the fact that you call these blips "crashes" you undermine your own technical credibility for making that assessment. Frankly, @Kinkoid has been extremely tolerant of your behavior. I for one wish they'd just banned you and spared the rest of us your continuous, entitled and pointless ranting.

Programs like this game often don't have a reason to store or back-up the kind of data that is relevant to the weekly ToF tallies. They're designed to count until the critical time, assign rewards, and reset for the next cycle. It's more likely that on the test server this information is dumped for debugging purposes, but it would be surprising to me if it was regularly saved for the main/nutaku servers. As such, I believe we'll be getting across-the-board apologetic compensation rather than the rewards we were expecting. If I'm right, the people who busted their hump to achieve something special will get the same compensation as a person who did nothing for 2 weeks. It sucks, but that's the just how things go with errors of this type. (In systems that handle critical information reconstructing the past is much easier because data dumps are done frequently, or every data transaction is stored with redundancy. The information we're dealing with here doesn't generally meet that standard. It's a trade-off with speed, memory usage, performance, and complexity, i.e. more code means more opportunity to introduce errors, and greater effort to find and fix errors when they occur. Given how the users — meaning us — already complain about the 'dead' period at the end of and beginning of each weekly ToF cycle, imagine how much worse it would be if the data went through even more manipulation, storage and retrieval.) Why am I sharing this? To help manage people's expectations. If we get vanilla rewards instead of what was earned it won't be a sudden shock. If the software designers took the time and effort to build in the data fail-safes and we get our rewards plus a small token for inconvenience then we'll all be pleasantly surprised and grateful. YMMV.

D'oh! France/Bulgaria don't follow Daylight Savings Time! The date/event turnover time just got a little worse. (Which I'm sure is better for some people, somewhere.)

Still hoping that someone will share their experience of the new equipment distribution from GPx10. One of the things that had annoyed me before the latest was how rarely I saw any Legendary Equipment in the Market. One Rainbow in 2 months was less than I'd hope to see once Commons went away. In the 10-or so Market refreshes (8-hr and level-up) I've already seen 2 pieces of Legendary Equipment, 1 Harmony and 1 Rainbow. The rainbow didn't address my greatest need, but it was worth buying, for sure. I suspect that this rate of appearance is sheer luck and happenstance, but I still hope this is a sign of things to come. I haven't seen any of the new books or boosters yet, so I'm guessing they are going to be super rare in the market.

Earlier in this event I managed 5 shard winners in a row, but it was "due" given how poorly the week overall was. Today has been a better day. For the 1st time it looks like I might finish Carine with a day or two left in the event to work on Alex. That's because I managed a flurry that provided 18 shards today. The weekly poll gave me a 5 shard head-start on Alex. Huzzah! Maybe 2 days will be enough to snag 95 shards, or at least enough to match @jelom's estimated prediction above...?

Doesn't the system augment the pool with imaginary players? Or is that only when there aren't any peers because your Mojo is so high or so low?

Hmm. It seems likely that I foolishly 'gave up' on the last day when it was abundantly clear that I wouldn't be bottom 15, and fought a few battles to time a level up to happen right after a Market refresh. The above would be a better reason than RL issues for why so many people were taking a zero even beyond the bottom 15. FWIW, I don't recall that being the rule when a number of us did some modeling to estimate future events like when D3 would open up, and when the entire league structure would become 'stable'. With the zero rule in play it wouldn't really have been possible to predict when new Leagues would open or even future stability, because it wasn't a sure thing that they would be stable. Under this system, never achieving D3 would be possible, as would seeing D3 last only one week at a time due to overwhelming desire to demote back to D2. This makes tanking even more destructive. Mind. Blown.

This will be a long post. Headings will be provided for efficient skimming. Abstract: Free player tries to see if it's possible for a competent free player to WIN a weekly Tower of Fame competition. Mojo was selected as the easiest to control in the short term, after having tried and abandoned winning Stat Upgrades. . Backstory: Failed at wining Stat Upgrades. Aftermath led to trying the same with Mojo. As a free player I have to work very hard to find ways to get kobans in order to get satisfactory results in collecting girls. I decided that a reasonable way to snag a large number of kobans for free would be to forego buying Stat Upgrades for a long, long time. After 30-something levels I saw that I still wasn't remotely close to winning. That wasn't even long enough to make the top 100 category. At the same time, I unexpectedly found myself in position to finish 1st to 4th in League play. So, I did the math. The difference between 5th-15th and either of the top two tiers was more than the difference between the default weekly Stat Upgrades reward and the top 100. So, it was time to give up on that dream and go for it in the Leagues. Buying 30+ levels of Stat Upgrades for all 3 stats temporarily got me into the top 100, but more importantly it was such a massive boost to Ego, Attack and Defense that I finished in the top 50 for Mojo that week! That spurred me to try it with Mojo instead of Stat Upgrades even though it doesn't pay out in kobans. It was still worthwhile as an experiment. Preparation: To maximize the chance of gaining Mojo fast, I went about LOSING Mojo as much as possible. To that point I had been all about maximizing my XP and girl XP/Affection in the Arena, and completely ignored Mojo. As such, I never declined any match-up no matter how risky or rewarding it was. That kept my career Mojo fairly low compared to most of my peers. That's why a large and sudden boost to my stats made such a big difference without even trying. If I was really going to try to beat out every other player in the weekly Mojo race, including the whales, it only made sense to try and stack the deck a little. Since Arena opponents are drawn from the pool of players with similar level and similar Mojo I figured that I should reverse the effects of that previous week by LOSING as much Mojo as I had won, and if possible, even more. So, for that week I fought all my Arena battles with 3 off-class L1 girls. This turned out to not be enough to ensure losing every match, and soon those L1 girls were L2. At this point, I switched out my equipment from my best set to my best set for my 3rd class (for Know-How that means Hardcore) so I was running with a bunch of harmony and no endurance. I soon learned that when fighting against Hardcore players it was better to switch to my Charm set to minimize my defense and avoid triggering the KH healing power with all that harmony. I still played things normally for 16 wins a day to not lose out on the daily Arena challenge rewards. In the end, I was able to roll back the 4k or so that I had won the week before and another 1k-2k more. I manage a final tally of -5500 to -6000 mojo for the week, less than double the next closest competitor for the toilet bowl. FWIW, that got me a position beyond 87,000th. The Challenge: Avoid sleep, avoid skipping fights, avoid losing fights and GAIN MOJO! If I was serious about beating the whales I was going to have to be DEDICATED. Each time I leveled I used books to instantly max-up my main combat girls. I wasn't taking any chances there. I even sped up my plans to upgrade Fabienne and used items to get her to 4 stars. (Wow was that expensive!) I had an alarm set to go off every hour overnight to try to avoid losing ANY opportunities to win Mojo. I made sure that I had the game with me when I went out for the same reason. (I work from home, so that wasn't all that often.) In spite of this insanity, I still manage to miss a lot of opportunities, but far fewer than any normal (sane?) person would. (Not?) Surprisingly, beyond a certain fatigue level an alarm stops waking you, or at least it does for me. A series of 50-minute naps simply doesn't compare to a proper night's sleep, no matter how long it is. Over the course of the week I only skipped 7 fights, and nearly all were high risk low reward fights. I only outright lost 4 battles, again, 3/4 of which were high reward, low risk - I just thought the risk was acceptable and was proven wrong. Every other battle I saw I fought and won. The last update before the ToF glitch had me significantly behind 1st place but significantly ahead of 3rd place. I don't think it was mathematically possible for me to overtake 1st place without the leading player taking significant steps backwards, which he could have easily avoided by not fighting at all. The Result & Analysis: No, winning is not for free players, it never was, so don't bother. In one way, the war was lost a couple of days earlier when one player managed to surge by about 2000 mojo in 4 to 8 hours. That's 2000 vs me if I had been standing still, which of course I wasn't. I can't explain that kind of a surge without spending kobans, or ToF reporting issues. So, in that respect, the answer to the question does seem to be, NO, a free player cannot win against the whales, at the very least in the Mojo competition. In another way, the war was lost all week long. With the minimum award for winning 3 matches being +3 (3x +1) and the maximum being +96 (3x +32) one would expect that a typical Arena session would be worth +49.5 Mojo. If you go by the +16 definition of an opponent with nearly equivalent Mojo, that would come out to +48. Having deflated my Mojo going into the competition, one might argue that I should have faced more opponents with MORE mojo than I had than less, so the expectation would be even higher. But that was far from my experience. The longest streak of Arena sessions that produced average or better matches was THREE. The longest streak of subpar sessions was NINE, and there were lots of others of EIGHT and SEVEN. There were about 10 sessions that were worth only +3 or +4 with a sweep and dozens more that were larger single-digit values. I had only 4 sessions worth more than +80 with a sweep, and none above +92. (The opposite of +3/+4 would be +96/+95.) So, all told, over the course of the week the offered Arena sessions didn't average 50+, 49.5, or even 48. In fact, it ended just a smidgen above +38 (e.g. +13, +13, +12, or +32, +1, +5, or +16, +16, +6). Over the course of the week that cost me between 2000 and 3000 Mojo. That was FAR less than the margin of victory for the eventual winner (500-700 was the last reported gap). So, by this analysis it is technically POSSIBLE for a free player to win a ToF 1st place reward! Of course, had I scored +8000 instead of roughly +5,750 that's a completely different space-time continuum! Would the winner have simply upped the ante to beat me regardless of the insane number I racked up? I'll never know because it didn't happen, and because I'll never try again. It wasn't worth the effort. I don't even think it would have been even if it had been a koban-rewarded metric instead of a ymen-rewarded metric. The Future: The new booster values change the game completely. With the new boosters in play, I seriously doubt that I'd have been able to get as far as I did, yet another reason for me not to try it again. Also, when I joked about not being allowed nice things, and my efforts therefore being 'responsible' (in a Murphy's Law kind of way) for the Tower of Fame rewards glitch, this is what I was talking about. Insane effort, zero reward, because all too often no good deed, or effort, goes unpunished.

1) Leagues have been in place for longer than you think. Inactive for 2+ months is essentially dead/comatose, not merely inactive, and that's plenty long enough to have risen and then sifted back down the ladder. (See below.) 2) Not true. I think you're underestimating the number people who go at least 1 week without using a single league token. For example, I can ignore leagues for a month and I won't drop below W3. There are more than enough players with less tenure than I have looking to demote (or are inactive for RL reasons) to keep me out of the bottom 15. Tried it. At least for the time being W3 is as low as i can demote based on my start date and overwhelming demand to demote. In the future that could change if the game's entry rate were to seriously decline. 3) It is conceivable but unlikely that player loss would lead to a 100-player league where someone could promote with 0 points due to massive inactivity. If this were to occur I strongly suspect that action would be taken to fix this problem. 4) This cannot happen under the current system. League levels, once formed, are self-sustaining. The only way leagues could collapse/fail is if they are changed so that long-term inactive accounts are blocked from league eligibility. Things would have to be pretty terrible for the devs to consider doing that, and the cure is almost as bad as the disease. (A purge like that could make the top league revert to the previous level for lack of players (because demotions exceeded promotions long enough to bring its population down below 100.)

Yeah, booster are so OP that Mojo almost ceases to have meaning. The Arena can offer you an "easy" battle against someone with MUCH less Mojo (+1 if you win, -31 if you lose) and they can be running an Ego 40% higher than you because of boosters. It's even more insidious when they leave their Ego alone and trap you with hyper-boosted Harmony or Attack. On the other side of the coin, you can decide to go for the weekly Mojo title by blowing 28 boosters and taking out +32 challenges without batting an eye. It'll eventually settle down somewhat into a new normal...but rest assured there will be a new change to the system just before that happens.

Possibly. Or they do it to limit our ability to pad our ymen income. Actually, AFAIK there's very little need for the casual/free player in most of those areas, Clubs being the possible exception. And since Clubs still haven't been fleshed out with any of the planned/proposed functionality, they don't matter much either. If every free/casual player quit today, would it make a whit of difference? All our accounts remain in play forever whether we're active, have quit playing the game or literally dropped dead. I already encounter TONS of players who are dormant in Contests and have since I started playing. I doubt I'd be able to win anywhere near as often as I do if the entire group of 50 was semi-active or better. Currently, dead and comatose accounts help keep the full-time players from dropping below Wanker 3 at the very least, and probably keep them from demoting to Sexpert leagues as well (once they are sufficiently tenured). The only problem I can foresee at the present regarding the need for free/casual players padding numbers is the ongoing start rate. If HH gets the reputation that it isn't worth dabbling in unless your pockets are open and preferably deep, then the casual/free accounts will 'age out' of being able to prevent league demotion (remember the upward tiebreaker is first-come-first-place but the downward tiebreaker is game tenure). So, for those free players who think that their voice matters and can influence things by threatening, striking or quitting, I'm afraid you may be gravely disappointed. This is coming from someone who is themselves on the edge of walking away (in part because of the ToF glitch that in all likelihood cannot be reversed after-the-fact. (I doubt that there is any digital record/trail from which to reconstruct the rewards that were due!) I put in WAY too much time to finish 2nd (trying for 1st, explanation coming in an upcoming post) to see that effort go completely unrewarded. Coupled with the rapid-fire updates that keep skewing the game farther into the realms of p2w, I may not be able to justify staying.

I wish! I'm getting shards from Carine on less than 7% of my fights with Donatien, for slightly less than 2.5 shards per hit. The exact opposite experience.

Seriously? 168 shards so far? Honestly, I'm tracking to finish Carine with 2 hrs left in the event, and I haven't even started on Alex yet. All it'll take is one dry spell and I won't get a girl for the first time. Conspicuous or coincidence that this is also the 1st classic event in the shard era?