Best Of

The Stark Foundation was a tool the devs used in the early days while they were collecting data and getting a feel of how to design and balance realm events. I do not speak for Kabam here, but I would say we should not expect Tony to bail us out of future realm events. The realm events are meant to be us earning rewards for us. If we do better this year than last year, that's meant to be 100% because we scored more points. We were more enthusiastic. We decided to push the milestones higher.

Banquet is a spending event. It is one of those things Kabam puts into the game because they need money and we need spenders to want to spend if we want to keep playing the game. But most of these points do not come from spenders and spending. 7 billion points would be over a hundred million dollars of spending, and MCOC has never generated that much revenue in a single month in the history of the game. I don't think it has had that much revenue in a single quarter. Kabam would be overjoyed if players spend $50 million on the banquet, and that would be about two billion points even spent in the most efficient way possible.

Something on the order of five billion points will come from source other than direct spending. Some of it will come from indirect spending, or units from spenders who spend earlier in the year. But that still leaves billions of points coming from either very low spenders or the free to play players. This is a spending event, but it is the non-spenders just as much as the spenders that are powering us to these (mostly) good rewards. It is we the community as a whole.

It is, and should be, what we the players decide we're going to get. Individually, none of our crystals matter much, not even the biggest spenders. But collectively, well, we blew the top off the event. Some of our rosters are completely unrecognizable from just two weeks ago. Half my BG deck was R4s before the banquet, and now practically all of it is. (Please resign in fear when you see it: I could use the break after this week).

The Stark Foundation was a crutch. We don't need crutches anymore.

Watching everyone think one single SBC was the final milestone

Update for yada yada yada I know what you all want.

You know I had things to do today. I expect this nonsense from Mike-o-saurus, but after all I did for Pyrite…

Anyway, the only question on anyone's mind: can we reach it? Well, here's where we stand:

The trend says maybe, but it look more interesting up close:

We got Yet Another Scoring Bounce this morning. We have the special arenas, we have Radiance roll over, and it seems whenever the players get more ways to buy crystals, they take 'um. That bounce is not as big as the one on Monday or Tuesday, but it is there. How long it persists is important, and there's also the possibility for a last day bounce as well, as something similar happened last year as players did their last minute crystal spins.

We need to average 310 million points per day in the last two days to reach milestone 63. That's doable: we averaged 350 million in the previous two days. But it will be a stretch: this is not a gimme. It may end up being close enough that we won't know if we will hit it until we actually hit it.

Full disclosure: I'm going to do my part and open another 50 or 60 crystals, depending on my luck at the arena crystal wheel. Look guys: if you're not financially stable, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, if you're a starving college student, sit this one out. But if you're a person of means, and you maybe have a little more means left, maybe this is the time to drop some means. And for those keeping score, the target is now 45600 solo points. That's the qualifying score for the selector, if we get there.

Good luck to us all.

They sold Starkey earlier this year, July 4th I think. So the CCP gatekeeping was already thrown out the window this year.

I'm currently asking the devs to buff them.

By adding 6 gold to milestone 54 and 7 gold to milestone 55.

You think I'm kidding, don't you?

mas·och·ism (noun):  the enjoyment of what appears to be painful or tiresome.

All I can say is thanks @DNA3000 and I'm enjoying the ride 😆

Kabam delivered a Temu milestone

Because we spent our freaking butts off.

What we're seeing now was pre-programmed for the event well in advance. We had the selector in a spot where the devs felt comfortable we'd reach it, because they didn't want us to fail to get it. Then there were a bunch of stretch goals that were also most likely going to be reached that were visible to us, up to 4.5 billion.

Then there were batches of stretch goals higher up that the devs were reasonably sure we'd get to, but they were not sure how many we'd reach, which they decided to unveil in batches of five.

We've blown past all of that and are now into what the designers probably felt was improbable territory. To be safe, they created super-stretchy milestones way out there that we were most likely not going to reach, but just in case they made them, and set them to be unveiled one at a time. We are basically in Undiscovered Country territory.

There are discussions going on about what, if anything, to do about it. We are in the Here Be Dragons part of the roadmap. For some perspective, we did 5.2 billion last year. I was predicting 6.2 billion after day one. I revised upward to 6.8 billion as we got rolling and we were sustaining a far higher pace than last year without slowing down. And then I had to revise upward again to 7 billion when the sales opened up. And now we might still reach 7.2 billion. We had a legitimate shot at 7.4 billion. Enthusiasm for the banquet is not just higher than last year, it has actually grown over time. Even with the Titan shards in the milestones. Even with people saying it should have been even more than that. The nay-sayers are such a tiny minority this year almost no one is even paying them any attention at all. They just keep buying and opening crystals.

We're doing so much this year the whales are getting nervous about their rank scores. So many players have opened so many millions of crystals this year it makes them wonder what their fellow whales are doing, if the players with only $20 to their names are opening their wallets.

Now that's something.

I hope the last milestone is a slap in the face profile pic and a mandatory 6 month "HOW CAN SHE SLAP, SIR?" title for everybody.