Best Of

Dont worry op. Ignore them.

You will get rank 1 with all selectors.

(That's what you wanted to hear, correct?)

It takes 30 minutes to get two podiums to lvl 2. You low key scammed yourself if you spent 600 units

If you had an answer in your mind already, then why ask? You had to know you were gonna get trolled with your recent posting history. You MIGHT get top 10% with that score, but I wouldn't be surprised if you don't.

Just to address a topic that came up earlier. How much stock should people place in my analyses? That's a bit of a tricky question, because there's a few different angles that question can be asked in the context of.

First: as I've stated many times, I am not a crystal ball. I cannot predict the future with precision. I would say my data is pretty reliable, as I collect it from the game and I take care to collect it carefully. So my past data is pretty solid.

How I project that into the future to make predictions/projections is not infallible, and I try to be transparent with that. I made an initial prediction of 6.3 billion points at the start of the event, but I revised that upward to 6.9 billion as I got more data, and in particular the very big jump in points starting with the start of sales compared to 2024. We could still end up at 7 billion or we could fall to 6.5 billion. Neither are impossible at the moment, but the most likely path lands somewhere around 6.9 or maybe 6.8 billion.

My estimates for bracket cutoffs is even more hazy. I'm analyzing the data to look for patterns in spending (units and cash) and exercising judgment. But those could be off by 20% or more if my guesses are wrong. Again: I try to show my work there so people know why I'm predicting what I'm predicting, and also to what degree I could miss by. But if you think I'm way off there, I could be.

But having said all of that, there are some things the data says that simply straight up contradict the more wild guesses some other people are making. For example, some people think that players could just stop spending today or tomorrow. It is possible but it ignores the fact that people aren't a hive mind. There is nothing short of a nuclear war that would cause everyone to simultaneously stop opening crystals. Half a million people do not all just turn on a dime like a flash mob. If we score 250 million today, we're not scoring 10 million tomorrow. We're not even scoring 100 million tomorrow. We might score 280 million, we might score 200 million. Scoring can change, but it won't change dramatically absent some big outside influence - like the sales, like the double track units. Scores change slowly as players individually run out of units at different times or decide to call it quits. Scores change dramatically when resources suddenly become available to players and they collectively take advantage of them.

When I say we're headed for 6.9 billion, that's a prediction. I could be wrong. But when I say we're going to hit milestone 48, that's less a prediction and more a recognition of reality. There is zero probability that we're going to score less than 270 million points in the next four days. That would require scoring to drop from about 250 million points a day to about 68 million points a day. The data says that's all but impossible. During last year's banquet when people were most pessimistic, our lowest day was 123 million. We averaged 165 million in the last four days. We're not going to suddenly drop to less than half of that this year.

People should not just trust me because I'm me. They should trust - or not trust - the analysis. And if someone else wants to do their own analysis that concludes different things, by all means. The more the merrier. But I would say that most of the pessimists aren't doing analysis. They aren't even just wildly guessing. They are pushing a narrative, and they don't really care what the data says. They don't care what people are doing. Which is their right, but comparing what I'm doing to what they are doing is comparing someone who writes cookbooks with someone who does competitive food fights. We're not really in the same business.

Kabam really saw all the complaints and decided to change nothing

Update for December 29:

Heh.

I have to be honest: I had a feeling. You could kinda see it from the way the rewards were structured, if you know how rewards are typically designed, but whatever. Judging the rewards is a Youtube click farming and Reddit - I was going to say lose-your-mind thing, but that ship sailed long ago. The question I can answer is: did those milestones dampen players enthusiasm in any noticeable fashion?

It is kinda hard to see what happened there, although if you squint you might see it. Here, let me zoom and enhance:

Yeah, I had to check twice on multiple devices to make sure it wasn't a glitch. I woke up and checked at 10am Pacific right on the dot and we were at 5.896 billion. I checked an hour later and we were at 5.943 billion. 47 million points in an hour.

That is not because everyone suddenly got thrilled about Titan shards of course. And it almost certainly wasn't people getting antsy to reach the Rank 4 gem either. That was almost certainly the result of something I was a bit skeptical would have a big impact: the double track 500 unit rewards. That almost certainly was responsible for the jump this morning. Now, I don't actually think that was everyone suddenly buying one SBC and opening it. That would require over a hundred thousand players all simultaneously deciding to buy and open one crystal with their 500 units all at the same time. More likely what we're seeing is a bunch of players realizing that they had 500 units coming, and holding off on opening crystals until they got that reward so they could do it all at once.

That's a measure of enthusiasm. A lot of players appear to have been waiting for those units so they could do a bigger bulk opening, which implies a lot of players were engaged enough with the event to actually want to do that. There was some slow down on Sunday (more on that in a bit) but now I'm wondering if Sunday was slow because they were waiting for the Monday units to come in. To really know I will have to see how Monday ultimately turns out. This big jump in points is most definitely unsustainable. We will probably drop off throughout the day, but where we drop off to will determine how good Monday is overall. It could be just one quick pulse of points, or it could lift the entire day up substantially if it trails off more slowly throughout the day.

We ended Sunday (technically the 24 hour period from 10am to 10am Pacific) lower than the previous two days. Friday and Saturday were both running about 60% higher than the same period last year while Sunday was only 42% higher than the same period last year. In one sense, its a slow down. However, that doesn't mean we're coming to a halt or even slowing to a crawl, as I've seen some people suggest. It was still about 240 million points. Monday will probably be higher, but how much higher we'll see.

Worth noting: milestones 47 and 48 are spaced only half the points apart as the previous milestones, making milestone 48 only 270 million points away from where we are now. That's probably about a day away, depending on how the points settle down from the big burst in the morning. But there's no question we're going to hit it, which means there's no question we're going to see at least the next set of milestones past 48. Milestone 48 is also coincidentally about where my day one prediction for how far we would get was, between 6.2 and 6.3 billion. So not only have we exceeded 2024 (by a mile) but we've also exceeded my early predictions with much better scoring in the middle of the event.

Probably the next set of milestones are going to be rank up materials or something else out of the ordinary. So I say relax, let the event cruise through the Titan shards and 5-way crystal, and keep in mind that while many of us think these are devalued, there are still tons of our fellow players who are going to be very happy to get them so let them have their fun and be happy for them, and probably some time on Tuesday we'll be congratulating Kabam for responding to criticism and improving the next set.

Even though all of these milestones were probably decided back in November, so that's kinda like screaming at the Last Girl in a horror movie to look behind them.

No one, especially DNA, is claiming passing these milestones are automatic. No one is guaranteeing that we're going to blast through these Titan shard milestones in 3 hours.

The only people making any absolute statements are the ones declaring the event "over" due to the current milestones. People are just pointing out that we very recently had a stretch of Titan milestones and some of you were just as definitively saying people would be done spending because of them, and that turned out not to be close to true, as spending actually increased.

Many summoners are going to be getting a fair number of units in the next couple of days. Not a massive amount, but enough for 2-4 SBCs each. And the unit deals are ending a day before the end of banquet, which makes it likely that the 10 SBC deal will be returning. There have been several posts asking if that would be happening. I see little reason to believe that cash/unit spending is going to just cease completely.

And as for DNA's predictions, he's not just some dude talking out of his ass. He is examining current spending, historical trends, and some inside info to come up with his projections. Again, no one is guaranteeing anything, but I would rather put my trust in data driven analysis then a few people saying "I am no longer excited, therefore it is impossible for anyone else to remain excited."