So, I was playing around with this today and noticed that new battles that spawn with the same name as previous battles advance in level based on previous ones cleared, but current ones don’t refresh. Occasionally, some or all of the battles currently loaded will refresh on the screen and you’ll get the new ones. Unsure if this is a bug or not, because when the battles reappear, they’ll be higher than the last one completed of the same name… the actual composition of the battle itself doesn’t matter. So they don’t have different groups with the same name that level independently, the level of any duplicate named fight just gets “stuck” until the battle goes away on its own.
For example, this:
Clear one and you’ll get this:
(the one uncleared is the variant with Orc Veteran, Vor’Karn, and Dark Song)
I took other battles to let it disappear without clearing it. A few battles later it appears, this time at level 210:
Multiple battles later, the Sol’Zara’s Shamans that spawned as a double and lasted through two respawns finally cleared and came back as 20 levels higher, as expected:
I decided to take the level 90 then the level 85 brawlmaster fight here, knowing it has only advanced 5 levels every other time it reappeared. The last level 90 one stayed again, so I took it again, for a total of 3 brawlmaster fights - a 90, an 85, and another 90, clearing them all out to see if next time they would appear at level 105 or level 95.
Answer: level 105:
So at least you appear to get credit to “level up” a given encounter if you clear duplicate lower leveled versions of it.
I’m only bothering to post because while I know scoring is reportedly going to change in different versions of this event, the way battles pattern out is likely to remain the same with certain rarities of battles being offered, 1 or 2 fights in each rarity, and have them level up each time you clear them.
Because this particular event’s scoring lacks granularity (no half-skulls, quarter skulls, etc, even though each skull is worth 10 points) theres likely a breakpoint in levels at which a higher score (in this case, number of skulls) is possible. Unfortunately, none of this information helps in the current iteration of the event where there is a massive RNG component. Avoiding higher rarity fights that spawned in pairs to allow them to “level up” when they reappear didn’t seem like a particularly good strategy in this instance, since it had me leaving legendary fights to “rot” at least three times in favor of epic fights, but I had a long chain of battles where it wasn’t necessary to pick an Epic fight at all, but I suspect having this opportunity was also RNG. It might be if there is no RNG and a better degree of granularity to the score, so taking any fight that is “lower level than it is supposed to be” would negatively impact your score. Aside from the experimental “try not to take dupes except to test” routing, I took the highest rarity battle offered then the highest level at all times. Legendary fights usually gave the most skulls (even above mythics, which leveled too slowly, but still generally gave more than epics). Sometimes a not picked fight would go away after 1-2 battles, sometimes it lasted 10+. Its possible that the appearance rates of the higher rarity battles are clamped to a certain range, but otherwise no discernible pattern. Didn’t really feel like I was making relevant choices here.
So far, its possible that not only is the scoring random, but what battles you can unlock are random, and how long they stick around is also random. It was stated at some point in the other thread that “some people figuring out how these things work and optimizing them fun”. I happen to usually consider myself one of these people… usually. This fails at even being something that is fun to pick apart and see how it works because not only can I not use a lot of the information the next time it comes around, theres multiple layers of random stacked on top of each other likely put in there exclusively to prevent people from figuring out how it works - and not in the fun, puzzley way, but the “we don’t want you making informed decision in the gem shop” kind of way that makes me feel icky. As pointed out, everything here just seemed like the illusion of choice, and theres nothing more frustrating than digging into a system that looks like you have a complex series of choices only to find out that you are on a set of rails, worse yet when the rails use RNG to ensure that not only can’t you make any relevant choices, but you can’t even formulate a plan for the event. Even without RNG, if you have no idea how to optimize your score until after you have played it and that doesn’t carry to next week, then why go through all the trouble of gathering all that information?
My final score for the event was 4170 with a reported 92 battles at a t4 buy-in, no ravens or battles lost. Raven appearance rate was closer to 27.5% than 25% in this instance. This is higher than Monday sigils estimates, but still not good in terms of reward tiers for buy-in. Expanding this to a whole guild would have us just short of reward 11 for perfect runs at a t4 buy-in. The whole ordeal took about 2 and a half hours and stopped being fun at roughly… immediately, since even the extreme low level fights I had to use weak or single target damage or continue to fish for skulls to clear out where I normally have fun with these and try out a new speed build (usually one of the few times I break out the non-doomed weapon AoEs anymore). The t6 buyers in my guild are currently sub 6k score, but the day is not over yet, and they might have all gotten bored and tapped out (don’t blame them), and for some asinine reason, I can’t see their battles on the guild menu, so I’ll ask and see what they got out of it. I’ll try to remember to come back and document this. Depending on the outcome with slightly higher seals that estimated and score variance, we might be “just” t6, completely perfect throughout in scaling fights with limited weaponry at the cost of extreme amount of time to be “expected” to hit the final reward tier, rather than t6 and a bunch of t7s.
So, I gave it a fair shake. I’m sad to say I was disappointed not only at the baseline buy in increase expectations (even just moving the weapon to t4 is a price hike, even if reward tier milestones get fixed), but at the staunch refusal to explain even pieces of how the system works (to the point where I can’t tell if certain interactions are bugs or not), to the restrictiveness in the team building and forced slow pace of the battle (even the super low level ones).
I’m not saying this to be mean, I’m saying this because there is still a chance to improve it in there. Its been recommended multiple times that everything should be possible inside of a t4 buy in for every member - never any higher than this. And obviously if given choices we need to have a general idea of which is the better - or a way to glean this information through playing - which is intentionally thwarted by the addition of RNG and changing up the scoring every week. Any given event needs to provide enough information to optimize within a few battles for those willing to do all the math, otherwise “figuring it out” doesn’t help you at all. Some form of relaxed team building restrictions would go a long way to increasing both the fun factor and pacing, one of the best ideas I saw in another thread was to allow using off-restriction team components for a slight score hit (while still, obviously, balancing the event around the restriction).
Despite repeated promises of “collating feedback” and “things will be tweaked for future events until we reach a point we are happy of”, the refusal to acknowledge parts of the way this event played out as problems or even defending the implementation of universally panned mechanics does not give me hope. It has potential to make some good content, but this wasn’t it. I don’t think I’ll be playing another world event unless I happen to have a lot of time, and I highly doubt any amount of tweaks would make me buy in above just getting the weapon (if I don’t just forge it instead), but I want there to be content I at least want to play and can see others wanting to play. I can easily say “its not for me” and skip it like I do with a lot of things, but right now it looks more like “its not for people that play Gems of War”.
